Guest speaker Dr. Hayley Negrin, University of Illinois-Chicago

In 1677, an Algonquian Weroansqua named Cockacoeske put quill to paper and signed the Treaty of Middle Plantation in a swirling line to represent the river of her birth. The treaty was negotiated by Cockacoeske and representatives of the Crown to reestablish English-recognized sovereignty for Powhatan people in the uncertain aftermath of Bacon’s Rebellion, with multiple meanings for Indigenous signatories. After surviving Bacon’s attempt to enslave her by hiding in the swampy upper reaches of the Piankatank River, Cockacoeske’s signature was a reminder to the English of the kinship and environmental relationships at stake as the plantation complex expanded in Virginia.

While scholars have long interpreted the treaty as a sign of the loss of Powhatan power, exploring Cockacoeske’s “signature” and the environmental history behind the treaty in collaboration with contemporary tribal historians helps tell a story of Indigenous resilience and kinship with the environment. The concept of “environmental treatymaking” is deployed to capture the previously underappreciated role that Indigenous women like Cockacoeske, as well as elders and children, played in protecting the environment under the stressors of colonialism.

Hayley Negrin is an assistant professor of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago specializing in Native American history. She is a non-Native researcher who works with contemporary Native people to teach, research, and write Indigenous history. Her book manuscript in progress Fugitive Lands: Sovereignty and Slavery in the Early American South charts the relationship between Indigenous sovereignty and racial slavery in American History. She has served as a researcher on a federal Indian law case and has published several pieces in the Washington Post on Indigenous childhood, racial representations of Native people, and federal Indian law. Her recent William and Mary Quarterly article “Cockacoeske’s Rebellion: Nathaniel Bacon, Indigenous Sovereignty and Slavery in Early Virginia” reinterprets the rise of racial slavery in the American South through the lens of Indigenous women and is based off her work with members of the Pamunkey Tribe in Virginia. She is the developer of a service-learning class at UIC on the Indigenous history of Chicago that was created in coordination with UIC's Native American Support Program. She received her PhD at NYU in 2018. While in New York she was a member of the NYC Stands With Standing Rock collective, developers of the Standing Rock Syllabus.