“Almost Beaver’s Brothers”: Reason and Reciprocity in Castor Territory. A Job Talk

This paper close reads seventeenth-century European and Wabanaki stories about human-beaver relations in order to revise our understanding of the confrontation of cultures that colonization comprised. This paper responds to recent work in early American studies at the intersection of the history of science and reason on one hand, and, on the other, research on the cultures of affection or “emotional communities” of English planters and creoles.