Our faculty engage in cutting-edge research and produce innovative creative works every day as they bring new ideas to our students and our communities locally and globally. We’re pleased to share new monthly spotlights featuring our faculty’s work through a question-and-answer style series published on the first Friday of every month during the academic year.
Featured book: Native American Roots: Relationality and Indigenous Regeneration Under Empire, 1770-1859 (Routledge, August 2020) by Professor Christian Gonzales, URI History Department
Q: Can you give us a brief synopsis of your book?
A: The book is about the reproduction of Indigenous life and identity within the colonial environment of the early United States. It asks “How did Natives live as Indigenous people in a world dominated by a colonialism that sought the erasure of Indigeneity?” In answer to this query, the book argues that Natives “rooted” or embedded foundational elements of Native ways of being into cultural institutions – like formal education systems, black slaveholding, racial ideologies, and Christianity – that they had adopted from the dominant society. This process represented one key way that Natives reproduced themselves as Indigenous people despite colonialism’s rupturing of connections between Natives and their lands. Overall, the book is an intellectual history that traces how the core ways of being and seeing the world that Natives had developed through systems of connection and belonging to land, were regenerated inside “spaces” created by fundamental cultural change. Thus, by co-opting processes of cultural change that the dominant society envisioned as destroying Indigeneity, Native peoples in fact reproduced themselves and the very Indigeneity that was targeted for eradication.
Q: How does the topic of Indigenous identities fit in with your research interests and/or passions?
A: A lot of my passion for researching history derives from history’s relationship to the present. History gives us context for the present and helps explain why our current moment is the way it is. I think this not only gives us deep connection to our ancestors, but also enhances our ability to make decisions in the present that will be beneficial both to ourselves and to those who come after us. The elements that helped build the identities of the Indigenous historical actors I research come from cultural and ideological matrices that differ markedly from those that applied/apply to the majority of American society. In other words, Indigenous identities generally derive from sources of meaning that are different from individualism and consumption for instance. I think that understanding these other matrices of meaning are vital to our collective ability to address the crises – social division, economic inequality, ecological collapse, the pandemic – that our world currently faces.
Q: Was there anything that surprised you while conducting research for this book?
A: There were many things that surprised me. Some of them I think are quite common, like how through the process I came to better understand the historical actors and the time period I was researching, and how I refined my argument over time. But most importantly, I was struck by the indomitable resilience of Indigeneity itself. Native ways of being not only persisted, but in many ways flourished, in the face of genocidal forces designed to obliterate them. There was this kind of irony in this observation. At first glance, the persistence of Indigeneity might seem gratuitous in that Indigenous values and ideals that were antithetical to those of the dominant society appeared to be overwhelmed by the ubiquity and profundity of American civilization and its core ideals. Yet, the ongoing presence of Indigeneity represented a sanity in contradistinction to the insanity and self-destruction of colonialism. This of course was essential for Indigenous people, but really was important to all Americans.
Q: For the those reading your book who might be new to Indigenous history: what do you hope is the main takeaway?
A: I want them to know that Native peoples are not gone and that their unique identities were not destroyed. Despite the horrors of colonialism, dispossession, and cultural change, Native understandings of the world persisted and continue to persist. It’s really a story of humanity and enduring humaneness in the face of colonialism’s powerfully self-destructive force.
Q: How did you go about the writing process, and how did you deal with writer’s block?
A: There is nothing worse than staring at a blinking cursor on the blank page of a computer screen! To avoid this, and other writing problems, I use a pretty straightforward writing routine. I generally outline what I am going to write before I start. So I plan out my arguments, what evidence and primary sources I’ll use to support those arguments, and how I will structure or build upon my argument as I move throughout a chapter. I then just write with as much flow as I can. I don’t worry about typos, sentence structure, syntax, etc. and then just fix these issues later. Key though to my writing process is that I write most days, but not for very long periods. When I’m working on a project, I will write five days a week for two hours at a time. I find that this allows me to produce a lot rather quickly, but in a way that maintains the quality of my writing.
Christian Gonzales is an assistant professor in our Department of History. His research interests lie in Native American cultural and intellectual histories, settler colonialism, race relations, and early American slave systems. He lives in Connecticut with his wife and two sons.