The Corpse in the Kitchen: Enclosure, Extraction, and the Afterlives of the Black Hawk War by Adam John Waterman (review)

Reviewed by: The Corpse in the Kitchen: Enclosure, Extraction, and the Afterlives of the Black Hawk War by Adam John Waterman Patrick J. Jung The Corpse in the Kitchen: Enclosure, Extraction, and the Afterlives of the Black Hawk War By Adam John Waterman (New York: Fordham University Press, 2021. Pp. 288. Notes, bibliography, index. Clothbound, 105. 00; paperbound, 30. 00. ) By the author's own admission, the title of this book is "misleading. The book is not about a corpse. There are no kitchens" (p. 8). Instead, the title reminds the reader that a White settler ransacked the grave of the Sauk leader Black Hawk in 1839 and stole the head with the intention of transforming his grisly and ill-gained prize into a money-making attraction. Adam John Waterman has not written a conventional history of Black Hawk or the war that bears his name. Instead, Waterman investigates the various texts that elucidate "the entanglement of settler communities and Indigenous nations" and "the actual history of our plural existence" (p. 5). His book is informed by the tools of the literary scholar, especially post-structuralism. The chapters consider a variety of narratives. The first chapter examines the social and ecological implications of White settlers enclosing the land of the upper Mississippi Valley to extract the lead ore needed for ammunition used in the war against the Sauk. In chapter 2, Waterman demonstrates how the same lead was End Page 77 used to manufacture the type used by printers to mass produce narratives of Black Hawk's eastern tour in 1833. Chapter 3 examines how narratives of the war facilitated settler colonialism. These narratives produced a "false intimacy of the nation" by "mobilizing images of injury, pain, and blood" that allowed White settlers to justify the enclosure and conquest of Native homelands (p. 90). Waterman interrogates food, food production, and even food digestion in chapters 4 and 5 to further explore how enclosed Native lands and the settler food they produced were integrated into the expanding global market through commodity capitalism. Literary scholars will find much that is new in Waterman's work. His greatest contribution is the exploration of texts beyond those of Black Hawk's autobiography, a narrative that has garnered a great deal of academic attention. Historians—whose principal task is reconstructing the past from such narratives—will also find much that will qualify their understanding of Black Hawk and the Black Hawk War. Waterman's examination of Black Hawk's tour of the East is particularly trenchant. Black Hawk's 1833 tour has received far less scholarly attention than the 1832 war, and historians who examine Black Hawk's eastern sojourn will find Waterman's analysis useful. A few errors blemish an otherwise excellent work. Inexplicably, Waterman twice mentions that Black Hawk's autobiography was first published in 1834 when, in fact, it was first published in 1833 (pp. 21, 44). He corrects this error on page 192, but he cites neither the 1833 edition published in Cincinnati, nor the identical 1834 Boston edition. Instead, he relies on a 1994 reprint, despite the original editions being readily available online. He says that in 1833 Fort Crawford was in Wisconsin Territory, when the territory did not exist until 1836. Waterman repeats an error found in one of his sources and asserts that Napope, a Sauk civil chief, was the brother of Wabokieshiek (the Winnebago Prophet), but the two men were not siblings (p. 78). The Ho-Chunk warrior who captured Black Hawk was called "Chaetar" in the source Waterman cites, not "Cheator" (pp. 64-65). Nancy Oestreich Lurie determined in 1988 that Chaetar's proper name in the Ho-Chunk language was Chaashjan-ga. The author could have avoided such errors had he consulted and cited the substantial body of secondary works on Black Hawk and the Black Hawk War. The book's index comprises about a single printed page of double-columned text, which is of little use in navigating a book of this length. Black Hawk never lived within the boundaries of present-day Indiana, and the Black Hawk War occurred far outside the state's contemporary borders. Nevertheless, students of the Midwest who investigate. . .