Reenactment and the Natural History of Settlement

Abstract

Henry Thoreau, digging one day for fish-worms, happened to uproot a groundnut. This small edible tuber had been a staple in pre-contact times but had long since dwindled into obscurity, becoming unnoticeable among the sundry vines and creepers of the forest. Unearthing “the potato of the aborigines” seemed to Thoreau “like a faint promise of Nature to rear her own children and feed them simply here at some future period”. He seems to have found this abstemious prospect so cheering that it prompted the following vision of abundance:

Let wild Nature reign here once more, and … the now almost exterminated ground-nut will perhaps revive and flourish in spite of frosts and wildness, prove itself indigenous, and resume its ancient importance and dignity as the diet of the hunter tribe. Some Indian Ceres or Minerva must have been the inventor and bestower of it; and when the reign of poetry commences here, its leaves and string of nuts may be represented on our works of art (Thoreau 1997: 215).