Reading Territory: Indigenous and Black Freedom, Removal, and the Nineteenth-Century State by Kathryn Walkiewicz (review)

Reviewed by: Reading Territory: Indigenous and Black Freedom, Removal, and the Nineteenth-Century State by Kathryn Walkiewicz Janne Lahti (bio) Reading Territory: Indigenous and Black Freedom, Removal, and the Nineteenth-Century State. By Kathryn Walkiewicz. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023. Pp. 314. Cloth, 99. 00; paper, 32. 95. ) "No human utterance is innocent" is one of the premises of postcolonial thinking. This notion frequently comes to mind when reading Kathryn Walkiewicz's interesting book that looks at state power in the nineteenth-century United States' colonization of Indigenous and Black peoples. Opting not to focus on the federal government, and its power projections and shortcomings, which is something most historians working on these topics commonly do, is, however, just one aspect in Walkiewicz's approach. Walkiewicz sees the state as an artificial formulation, imagined into being and working in opposition to Indigenous and Black relational forms of territoriality and belonging. Indeed, state, Blackness, and Indigeneity—enslavement, dispossession, freedom, and removal (here defined as violence across space and time) —intersect, or are even coconstitutive, at the heart of U. S. empire. And this book sets out to track how these forces are made visible and gain meaning in print cultures, or "printscapes. " The author applies a literary approach to nineteenth-century print and visual culture, arguing that state newspapers and surveys served a regime aimed at eradicating other forms of belonging and stood in opposition to Indigenous and Black territorialities. Marking this conflict, the author employs the notion of "sovereign printscapes" (3), denoting Black and End Page 277 Indigenous assertions of placemaking, relationality, and freedom. These printscapes operated regardless of and in opposition to U. S. settler colonialism and its "colonial printscapes" (33). Thus, as states taught people how to read a particular story by asserting white belonging and naturalizing the U. S. map, Black and Indigenous peoples tried to disrupt the dominant narrative through their own printscapes. The first chapter focuses on the disputes between the Cherokee Nation and Georgia approaching the mid-1800s, situating the Cherokee newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, in conversation with state newspapers. Cherokees used their paper to combat removal and assert their sovereignty, while white Georgian papers epitomized structures of colonialism. The author even goes as far as to argue that development of Georgia states' rights rhetoric "established a template for all future states' rights claims that followed" (33). On the same page, Walkiewicz adds that the "very forms of print reinforced racialization and racial difference. " This reader felt a bit uncomfortable with these sweeping claims. They signal an understanding of historical processes that is overtly mechanical, without sufficiently arguing why Georgia would have held such a wide influence in U. S. continental colonization. These claims seem out of place here also because this book's actual analysis of historical processes shows how messy, complicated, and multivocal history actually is. Chapter 2 turns the reader's attention to Florida and the U. S. -Seminole conflicts. Walkiewicz discusses how printscapes influenced U. S. colonization that was marred by difficulties, prolonged conflict, and embarrassing failures. Surveys and newspapers had limited success in denoting settler belonging and failed, for example, in containing Seminole leader Osceola's legacies. Continuing to untangle the grimmer sides of a settler colonial takeover that was testing its limits, chapter 3 moves the discussion to a pairing of Kansas and Cuba in U. S. -expansionist imagination. This very interesting combination works nicely to demonstrate how questions of Black and Indigenous exclusion and freedom overlapped. In chapter 4, the 1905 State of Sequoyah movement and a Black state movement act as windows into a thriving print culture in the Indian Territory. Both Indigenous and Black leaders pressed for statehood to safeguard their communities. The author puts together a vivid discursive patchwork to show how Oklahoma statehood was not a natural conclusion, but a construction designed to serve white settler state interests and to reveal the fallacy of notions of Indigenous and Black freedom within the U. S. empire. The whole book reads against simplistic and triumphant U. S. origin story narratives. There is nothing straightforward or romantic in these cases of state production and battles over exclusion versus the right to [End Page. . .