Belated Foundations

Abstract

The ethnoecocidal eradication of indigenous bodies, cultures, and cartographies in the United States, although not without resistance and remainder, gradually transformed densely textured networks of peoples and places into a cleared and open space upon which a nation could be imaginatively and materially composed. However, securing these lands as unambiguously “American” required an elaborate extension of these violent and amnesic cartographic practices. A reading of the US Declaration of Independence and discourses surrounding the US Constitution is used to demonstrate this, with the point of documenting the incessant forgetting requisite for contemporary American self-representations to hold sway and the violent ramifications that are thereby enabled.