"Manifest Destinies": Indigenous Nations, Settler Colonialism, and Comparative Borderlands in the Americas
"Manifest Destiny" as an ideology has a long tradition among elites in the Americas. The US, Argentina, all Chile all developed settler colonial policies against Indigenous Peoples after their revolutions for Independence. This joint ILAS-CSER event will focus on the comparative discussion of borderlands—their 19th-century visions and their enduring consequences for the Mapuche peoples of southern Argentina and Chile and the Apache peoples of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.
SPEAKERS:
Julio Esteban Vezub is the director of the Instituto Patagónico de Ciencias Sociales y Humanas (IPCSH-CONICET) in Puerto Madryn, Chubut, and a Full Professor of the History Department of the National University of Patagonia (UNPSJB). He is currently the Tinker Visiting Professor in the Department of History at Columbia University. His main fields of research are the Native People and Patagonian History, the wars of expansion, and the process of the national states making in southern Argentina and Chile during the 19th century. He participates in initiatives to enhance documentary funds with Patagonian, Argentine, Latin American, and European universities, archives, and museums, as well as restitution processes of anthropological collections, that originated in colonial contexts. In collaboration with archaeologists and geographers, he traveled by the antique Patagonian routes through the Andes, interpreting the landscapes as a historical source. He participates in current discussions about the conflicts between Mapuche organizations, landowners, and the national states. In the last years, he opened his research interests to Environmental History, including the study of extractive practices and the maritime networks that connected Patagonia with Europe and North America. He has published Valentín Saygüeque y la “Gobernación Indígena de las Manzanas. Poder y etnicidad en la Patagonia septentrional (1860-1881) (Prometeo, 2009). He is director of the collection of History books “Tanteando al elefante”, and he is coauthor with Inés Yujnovsky of La conquista ilustrada: exploraciones de Francisco Host en Salta, Mendoza, Neuquén y Chaco (1870-1887) (Editorial Sb, March 2023). Further information: https://ipcsh.conicet.gov.ar/
Karl Jacoby is the Allan Nevins Professor of American History in the Department of History. He has devoted his career to understanding the ways in which the making of the United States intertwined with the unmaking of a variety of other societies—from Native American nations to the communities of northern Mexico—and the ecologies upon which they rested. His scholarship is distinguished by its close attention to questions of narrative and storytelling, in-depth micro-historical approach, and border-crossing nature. Jacoby’s published work straddles multiple boundaries—not only the geographic divisions between East and West, and Mexico and the United States, but also the methodological divides between labor history and environmental history, genocide studies and Native American history, and borderlands history and African-American history.
