Settler Trees: Rooted Entanglements in the Wabanaki Forest

Settler society maintains a deep, yet often unacknowledged, reliance on storytelling. These stories conscript colonial narratives that shape understandings of the more-than-human world and mythologize settler figures. As such, stories about Johnny Appleseed and The Giving Tree have concealed the destruction and extraction embedded within settler-environment relationships and force the land and more-than human beings into colonial narratives. While settler figures like Johnny Appleseed are romanticized, John Chapman’s role in seeding the new frontier with apple orchards served to facilitate colonial settlement and Indigenous land dispossession. In turn, this process has implicated more-than-human apple trees into colonial settlement. This paper draws from the work of Indigenous scholars and post-colonial theory to unpack the complex agential capacity of more-than-humans and offers an intervention into who and how settler colonialism is performed. In doing so, the paper explores the role non-native species, like apple trees, in the settlement of the Wabanaki forest, wherein trees are conceptualized as active witnesses to ongoing colonial violence and ecological destruction.