Abstract

Genocide studies has increasingly been willing to explore genocide as a phenomenon that took place not only in distant locales like Poland, Cambodia, or Rwanda, but also here in the United States. This new scholarship, however, exists in an a somewhat uneasy relationship with recent trends in Native American history that emphasize the role of Indigenous agency, perspectives, and epistemologies in understanding the past. My paper attempts to use this tension between focusing on either perpetrators or victims to think through the challenges of narrating episodes of extreme violence more generally.

Part of the conference Comparative Memory and Justice: The Holocaust and Racial Violence in America.

Biography

Karl Jacoby is the Allan Nevins Professor of American History at Columbia University and a specialist in environmental, borderlands, and Native American history. His books include Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves and the Hidden History of American Conservation (University of California Press, 2001), Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History (Penguin, 2009), and The Strange Career of William Ellis: The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire (Norton, 2016). He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Ray Allen Billington Prize of the Organization of American Historians and the Phillis Wheatley Book Prize of the Harlem Book Fair.