My project examines how diplomatic languages of power were made, transmitted, and interpreted across the spaces of eighteenth-century North America. Responding to Ned Blackhawk’s call for “new themes, new geographies, new chronologies, and new ideas that better explain the course of American history,” this project experiments with several new terms and spatial framings (Blackhawk, 2023). “Languages of power” is used not to describe the Iroquoian, Algonquian, Germanic, and Romantic languages spoken and (occasionally) written around the region in this period, but the forms of political fluency grounded in cultural knowledge, historical consciousness, and embodied practice that one needed to most effectively negotiate power in early America. Crucially, they were fluid, rooted in place, and expressed both through speech and in material forms. 

Treaties between Native Nations and British colonial governments in eighteenth-century North America were created and sustained through renewals of ongoing relationships like the Covenant Chain and Chain of Friendship alliances. These negotiations produced speech acts and material artefacts that affirmed and embodied the agreements and alliances binding nations together. Scholars now understand recitals of these alliances as mechanisms that defined and asserted Indigenous sovereignty. Focusing on materials like manuscripts, print, and wampum that embodied languages of power, this research considers if, in their congealing of speech, these materials preserved Indigenous sovereignty, and how this could reshape our understanding of where to locate sovereignty in early America. 

This research focuses broadly upon diplomacy conducted between Indigenous nations and the British in the western borderlands of North America, and the flow of information through and out of these sites. This novel spatial framing challenges the assumption that spaces of contestation were located solely in rural areas and the western reaches of the colonies, and that eastern, urban sites were “tidy forms of settler colonialism,” (Gitlin et al., 2013). Instead, North America was, and continues to be, a borderland across these spatial distinctions, where “boundaries and authority are still up for grabs,” (Ablavsky, 2021). “Western borderlands” thus refers to the westernmost reaches of mid-Atlantic colonies, sites that, most often, Indigenous negotiating parties brought the British to treat with them. Focusing upon how and on whose terms that languages of power traversed pathways, waterways, mountains, and oceans, this work charts how they were pushed, pulled, and reconstructed from, for example, the council fire in Albany to the pages of the London Gazette and the streets of Philadelphia.