For one of the events we were encouraged to attend, I went to America Transformed: Mapping the 19th Century with the rest of the class. I count this as an event mostly because I had to pay for transportation, and I usually only try and use the CharlieCard for when I have to go to work near North Station. This exhibit was held at the Boston Public Library, and this was actually my first time going there, despite having lived in Boston for over a year. The exhibit featured maps documenting US and settler expansion during the 19th century, and the impact that it had on Native American territories that existed at the time. Spoiler alert, it was not a positive impact. As you walk through the exhibit, you can see the inverse effect that settlers had on Native American territories. As settler territory expanded, native territory diminished. This is obviously because it was the same land. In the settlers mind, there was not enough land to share; they had to have all of America, with no exceptions. And they would even take more land as a result of the Mexican-American war, where America, as the victor, seized modern day Texas, California, and the area in between. The maps in the exhibit document this change in US territory, and emphasize that the land was not ājust thereā; settlers murdered hundreds of Mexicans to gain that land, when they already had miles upon miles of territory. This goes back to Manifest Destiny, and the idea that white men were all entitled to their own plot of land. When the government encouraged western expansion by giving away a plot of land to any willing white man, they were giving away Indian territory. Years later, writers would lament the fact that the US frontier had disappeared, and there was no more land left to explore or claim. Yet this mindset ignores the fact that it was never their land to begin with. Through murder, kidnapping, forced slavery, forced marriage, genocide via illness and disease, rape, allotment, etc. settlers stole that land, and then lamented that there was no more land left to steal. This exhibit was painful, as it presented such a gross injustice using only maps and descriptions of said maps. It also shows the very narrow mindset in which settlers view land. At this time, Native Americans believe in sharing the land, that there is never one owner because the land belongs to the Earth, to nature. Yet settlers only view land as something to be purchased, owned, and sold. Their biased point of view makes it impossible to ever have a fair purchase of Native land. Often times these āpurchasesā involved paying one Native American a small sum of money, without consulting all the people that actually lived on and shared that land. Overall, Iām happy I attended class this day and paid to attend this event, as it was a very in depth visual representation of all the harm that settlers have done to Native Americans by way of land acquisition.Ā
