A Group of Nations Claiming Unity of Purpose

or Common Interests 

Todd Bartel | Watertown, Massachusetts, USA 

Todd Bartel questions Eurocentric notions of community using an 1859 history of Addison County. In doing this, Bartel asks us to consider how a spirit of Manifest Destiny renders invisible those whose land Europeans “settled”. Their collage combines a page from the book with Merriam-Webster’s definition of community, an engraving of Middlebury Falls, a photograph a burl in a tree, and a transfer of “The Hiawatha Wampum Belt” that “records when five warring nations; the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, and Mohawk, buried their weapons of war to live in peace.” Together these elements invite us to consider what a more fully realized community would feel like. The artist writes, “The definition of the word community may be more philosophical and spiritual than the collective North-Western peoples have yet actualized. It has, of course, been white supremacist design to erect structures, laws, and attitudes that prevent the harmonizing of disparate attitudes toward land and political equality for all who dwell upon these ‘United’ lands.

I see collage as embodying political potential; collage is a means for ‘studying contrast and balancing differences.’ As a white, male-presenting, colonial settler descendent, an ally to BIPOC, and an Eco artist concerned with the histories of collage and landscape, I embraced the opportunity to work with the Henry Sheldon Museum’s collection. I was particularly interested in locating evidence of Manifest Destiny as a ‘single sto - ry’. What galvanized my inquiry was reading Samuel Swift’s 1859 Statistical and Historical Account of the County of Addison, Vermont, and noticing that the word ‘Iroquois’ does not appear until page 29. The Haudenosaunee or Ongweh’onweh (‘real human beings’) are reduced to ‘it is not our purpose to enter into any learned dissertation on their character, customs or history.’ A Group of Nations Claiming Unity of Purpose or Common Interests juxtaposes selective settler historicism with unrealized potential for cohabitation.