"The Waste and Wear We Are Powerless to Combat": Willa Cather and the Settler Colonial Politics of Place-Making

Willa Cather is often called a writer of place.While her attention to environmental and ecological issues in the Great Plains has been productively explored, there is still significant work to be done in accounting for how her literary output participates in the broader cultural and political processes of place-making on the North American continent.At the turn of the twentieth century Cather did not simply represent an established place imbued with uncontested, already-existing meaning.Instead, Cather's literary work (following in the path of her Nebraska relations' homesteading work) actively participated in an ongoing struggle of shaping, and re-shaping, the region.In her work on regional identity, Molly Rozum argues for the importance of recognizing the role of storytelling in settler colonial strategies as much as acknowledging the physical and violent removal of Indigenous populations.In the period immediately after settlers had "used legal methods through homestead and purchase laws to create private property" out of the vast plains from which Indigenous inhabitants had been displaced, a second, cultural and aesthetic, phase of place-making began (Rozum 18).Following Rozum's example, this essay reconsiders Cather's prairie fiction and early career as part of a strategy I call "narrative removal," which effectively displaces Native peoples and culture from settler society's understanding of a place's cultural identity and perceived history (18).This is not merely a way of rewriting the past but also a way of shaping attitudes and practices toward the future, since the continued circulation of settler accounts of places like the Great Plains through storytelling, education, and other cultural practices create what Eve Tuck and Rubn Gaztambide-Fernndez call a sense of [191.