It is my great pleasure to warmly invite you to a guest lecture to be given by Professor Keith Carlson, on “Politics of Remembering & Forgetting: 19th century Indigenous-Settler “Smallpox Bioterrorism” on the Pacific Northwest Coast of North America.”
Tuesday, 4 June 2024
Janskerkhof 2-3, Room 0.19
Utrecht
1500-1700hrs
Professor Keith Carlson’s guest lecture explores the concept of ‘bio-terrorism threats’ during the early to mid-19th century, focusing on the history of smallpox in the Pacific Northwest. One significant finding highlights how traders of that era utilised the threat of releasing smallpox into Indigenous communities as a coercive tactic. Despite lacking the means to carry out these threats, traders employed what could be termed as ‘bluff threat’ to manipulate and control Indigenous behaviour. This manipulation effectively weakened resistance and facilitated settler colonialism in the region. Although these threats lacked credibility, Indigenous peoples nevertheless perceived them as real, attributing subsequent epidemics to the actions of white settlers. Overlooked by earlier scholars, bluff-threat bio-terrorism was an important component of the broader colonial process of myth-making and unmaking, and the politics of remembering and forgetting, that were central to the displacing and replacing of Indigenous people from their lands. Epistemic differences between settler and Indigenous historical consciousness continue to influence Indigenous-settler relations today.
Professor Keith Thor Carlson is an ethnohistorian, Professor of History, and Director of the Peace and Reconciliation Centre at the University of the Fraser Valley, British Columbia, where he holds a Tier One Canada Research Chair in Indigenous and Community-Engaged History. His research focus in on the history of the Coast Salish of British Columbia and Washington.