Joseph Mizhakiiyaasige Zordan

Organized around three works commemorating experiences of loss from three different communities, my dissertation aims to understand how the violence and instability of colonialism was made comprehensible through objects and sites of grieving for African, European, and Indigenous peoples alike in colonial New York. Based within the late-seventeenth to mid-eighteenth centuries, this project is concerned with a period of great instability as European American colonial projects, Indigenous nations, and African peoples struggled to flourish amidst military conflict, unstable territorial claims, disease, and state-sanctioned slavery. While there have been significant studies around deathways in the Atlantic world with particular emphasis on burial and funerary practices, I am instead concerned with recovering the world of feeling (both emotional and material) and its familial legacies that emerged within colonial North America in response to the harsh environments of imperialism. Employing an analytic lens guided by the affectual, political, and material entanglements and enactments of architecture, decorative arts, and painting made in such circumstances, I will reveal how the violence of colonialism and its afterlife became embedded and moved through families and communities in objects of loss—taking on different forms and meanings as generations passed and conditions changed. In turn, rather than looking solely toward works associated with funerary contexts, this dissertation brings together a range of objects within an expansive sense of mourning, ranging from mundane objects of family remembrance to Indigenous diplomatic gifts in the wake of dispossession. In turn, my project seeks to demonstrate how the experience of mourning, and the objects that accompanied and reproduced such feeling, influenced the continuance and disruption of the colonial project in North America for African, European, and Indigenous peoples alike across generations