12 research outputs found
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Colonial Violence and the Gendering of Post-War Terrain in Southern New England: Native Women and Rights to Reservation Land in Eighteenth-Century Connecticut
This essay examines the significance of reservations in southern New England as indigenous places-in-the-making in the aftermath of King Philipâs War. It highlights crucial moments in the early eighteenth-century history of reservation communities in Connecticut that were engaged in struggles to defend their lands against the imposition of private property and the violence of dispossession that targeted Native women, who were purveyors of communal land rights. These post-war histories reveal that reservations were not localities of âpacified Indiansâ, but rather sites of new conflicts over the rights and futures of Native peoples within which gendered forms of dissent confronted the gendered violence of colonial law
Mycorrhizal feedbacks influence global forest structure and diversity
One mechanism proposed to explain high species diversity in tropical systems is strong negative conspecific density dependence (CDD), which reduces recruitment of juveniles in proximity to conspecific adult plants. Although evidence shows that plant-specific soil pathogens can drive negative CDD, trees also form key mutualisms with mycorrhizal fungi, which may counteract these effects. Across 43 large-scale forest plots worldwide, we tested whether ectomycorrhizal tree species exhibit weaker negative CDD than arbuscular mycorrhizal tree species. We further tested for conmycorrhizal density dependence (CMDD) to test for benefit from shared mutualists. We found that the strength of CDD varies systematically with mycorrhizal type, with ectomycorrhizal tree species exhibiting higher sapling densities with increasing adult densities than arbuscular mycorrhizal tree species. Moreover, we found evidence of positive CMDD for tree species of both mycorrhizal types. Collectively, these findings indicate that mycorrhizal interactions likely play a foundational role in global forest diversity patterns and structure
Mycorrhizal feedbacks influence global forest structure and diversity
One mechanism proposed to explain high species diversity in tropical systems is strong negative conspecific density dependence (CDD), which reduces recruitment of juveniles in proximity to conspecific adult plants. Although evidence shows that plant-specific soil pathogens can drive negative CDD, trees also form key mutualisms with mycorrhizal fungi, which may counteract these effects. Across 43 large-scale forest plots worldwide, we tested whether ectomycorrhizal tree species exhibit weaker negative CDD than arbuscular mycorrhizal tree species. We further tested for conmycorrhizal density dependence (CMDD) to test for benefit from shared mutualists. We found that the strength of CDD varies systematically with mycorrhizal type, with ectomycorrhizal tree species exhibiting higher sapling densities with increasing adult densities than arbuscular mycorrhizal tree species. Moreover, we found evidence of positive CMDD for tree species of both mycorrhizal types. Collectively, these findings indicate that mycorrhizal interactions likely play a foundational role in global forest diversity patterns and structure
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Unearthing Indian Land: Living with the Legacies of Allotment. By Kristin T. Ruppel.
Against conquest: Land, culture, and power in the eighteenth-century histories of the Native peoples of Connecticut
Studies of Native-Euroamerican relations in colonial New England have tended to emphasize the military conflicts of the seventeenth century, casting them as the definitive events of conquest. Focusing on the land struggles of reservation communities in Connecticut throughout the first half of the eighteenth century, a period of intensified colonial land hunger, this study is concerned with understanding how Native women and men continued as agents in, and interpretors of, their own histories beyond the period of military conquest. Despite the provisions of the colony\u27s 1680 reservation lawâwhich stated that reservation lands were to be preserved in perpetuityâreservations in eighteenth-century Connecticut were perpetually threatened by colonial encroachment; thus reservation boundaries became important battlegrounds, engaging reservation communities, encroachers, and government officials in contests over Native land rights, the legitimacy of colonial claims to land, and the future of reservation populations. ^ Building from the contributions of the anthropology of colonialism, this study examines the forms of domination that structured the lives of reservation communities in the eighteenth century, and investigates the relationship between resistance and cultural production in the context of Mohegans\u27 and Mashantucket Pequots\u27 legal disputes with colonists over rights to reservation land. A critical analysis of the colonial records indicates that these disputes were also cultural struggles, entailing debates over history and emergent colonial notions about the cultural âillegitimacyâ of reservation populations. Colonial discourse on Indianness, particularly narrations of âPequot conquest,â played a powerful role in legislative responses to Natives\u27 complaints against encroachment, and were deployed to deny Natives\u27 land rights and obscure Natives\u27 articulations of their own histories. But colonial tactics of control did not go unanswered by Native people, whose acts of resistance revealed that they were possessed of a political, and historical, consciousness which was rooted in enduring cultural ties to their homelands, and to each other. Thus while investigating the limits imposed upon reservation communities by colonial law and âIndian policy,â this study illuminates the indigenous knowledges, and local histories, that posed an important challenge to ongoing processes of conquest.