Reassessing the archive of the Black Hawk War, The Corpse in the
Kitchen explores relationships between the enclosure of
Indigenous land, histories of resource extraction, and the literary
culture of settler colonialism. While conventional histories of the
Black Hawk War have long treated the conflict as gratuitous, Adam
John Waterman argues that the war part of a struggle over the
dispensation of mineral resources specifically, mineral lead—and
the emergence of new cultures of killing and composition. The
elemental basis for the fabrication of bullets, lead drawn from the
mines of the upper Mississippi, contributed to the dispossession of
Indigenous peoples through the consolidation of U.S. control over a
vital military resource. Rendered as metallic type, Mississippian
lead contributed to the expansion of print culture, providing the
occasion for literary justifications of settler violence, and
promulgating the fiction of Indigenous disappearance.
Treating the theft and excarnation of Black Hawk’s corpse as
coextensive with processes of mineral extraction, Waterman explores
ecologies of racial capitalism as forms of inscription, documentary
traces written into the land. Reading the terrestrial in relation to
more conventional literary forms, he explores the settler
fetishization of Black Hawk’s body, drawing out homoerotic longings
that suffuse representations of the man and his comrades. Moving from
print to agriculture as modes of inscription, Waterman looks to the
role of commodity agriculture in composing a history of settler
rapine, including literal and metaphoric legacies of anthropophagy.
Traversing mouth and stomach, he concludes by contrasting forms of
settler medicine with Black Hawk’s account of medicine as an
embodied practice, understood in relation to accounts of dreaming and
mourning, processes that are unforgivably slow and that allow time
for the imagination of other futures, other ways of being.