About
"Swamp Land: A Personal History"
In 1868, shortly after my ancestors arrived in what is now Huron County, Michigan, a local priest visiting the settlement wrote to Rome that they were surrounded by “centuries old forest, here and there thinned out by the axes of our Polish brethren." The views, he wrote, “are most wild. I was born among the huge woods of northern Lithuania, but I have never seen anything like it.” Echoing historical documents of the era, including Polish-language guides for emigrants and legal documents like the Swamp Land Act of 1850, the Northwest Territory that appears in these letters is a vast wilderness in need of taming. “Trees surround us,” another priest complained. At the same time settlers began logging this vast wilderness and draining the area’s wetlands, the region's Anishinaabeg were driven further from their traditional hunting and fishing grounds through both environmental change and federal policies of removal: this “political economy of plunder,” in the words of Michael Witgen, makes my existence possible. In my narrative, I aim to show how these environmental, personal, and political histories intertwine. Drawing from historical documents, textual study, and interviews, my project develops a qualitative analysis that seeks to understand the history of a former wetland in order to present place-based storytelling in a way that is accessible to an audience outside academia.
Lauren Gwin is Lecturer II in the English Department Writing Program.
