The Ecology of Land Disputes in the Colonial Mid-Atlantic

In colonial North America, the plants, animals, and environmental features central to both Native and settler lifeways became rife with political and intellectual tension. My research investigates those tensions in the context of disputes over land deeds and placemaking. Using the seventeenth-century mid-Atlantic as a case-study, I explore hyperlocal epistemological contexts, centering the role of ecological knowledge in land disputes. As Dutch, English, and Lenape inhabitants physically traversed the boundaries of settlement, non-human actors—and the divergent human interpretations of them—became fraught and politicized, resulting in conflict that underpinned disputes over territorial occupation, property, and sovereignty in colonial North America.