From Native Ground to Underground: Political & Rival Cultural Landscapes at the Arkansas Post, 1686-1850

This dissertation is an historical landscape study of the Arkansas Post, which is located in southeastern Arkansas at the confluence of the Arkansas and Mississippi rivers. I look at how diverse groups of people—including Native Americans, Europeans, and people of African descent—created radical counter-geographies in a small, highly disputed part of early America, from its colonial inception in 1686 until 1850. I analyze how people with archival power (Europeans and slaveholders, for instance) endeavored to create political landscapes at the Arkansas Post, and how those without the power to influence the historical narrative (enslaved people, free people of African descent, and Native Americans) reacted to these articulations of power. I argue that these people manipulated the same physical landscape to create rival cultural landscapes, which not only pushed back against these iterations of political landscapes, but in some cases, curtailed them or rendered them obsolete. I theorize how diverse people interacted with and shaped the political and cultural landscapes in Arkansas by looking at traditional primary sources to see how individuals navigated various historical transformation on the ground—including European colonization, Atlantic revolutions and the expansion of slavery— over two centuries. In doing so, I am able to recover voices of people whose stories have previously been unheard or erased during the construction of the modern political archive. This project aims to reinterpret the history of the Arkansas Post in a new way to bridge Atlantic, Native American, and African American history in a thoughtful, creative manner.