{
  "$type": "site.standard.document",
  "canonicalUrl": "https://jcrt.org/archives/24.2/barry/",
  "path": "/archives/24.2/barry/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-03-03T00:00:00.000Z",
  "site": "at://did:plc:e24okfpxr7ctcbmruijop5gp/site.standard.publication/jcrt",
  "tags": [
    "haudenosaunee-confederacy",
    "unceded-lands",
    "colonization",
    "genocide",
    "ecosystem",
    "industrialization",
    "european-expansion",
    "sacred-sites",
    "indigenous-sovereignty",
    "christian-dominance",
    "religious-revivalism",
    "doctrine-of-discovery"
  ],
  "textContent": "In its bicentennial year, the Erie Canal is widely celebrated as a triumph of American\ningenuity, economic growth, and national identity. This essay interrogates how that identity is\nconstructed, what it obscures, and what possibilities for repair might emerge through\ndeconstruction. Drawing on my work as the 2021–2023 Erie Canal Research Fellow, I analyze\nheritage tourism sites, archival materials, historical narratives, and contemporary state and\nmuseum publications to examine how the Canal is represented in public memory.\n\nWriting as a European American settler living on unceded Onondaga land, I argue that\ndominant interpretations of the Erie Canal reproduce ideological structures rooted in settler\ncolonialism, Christian dominance, patriarchy, and white supremacy. Through close readings of\ninterpretive language and commemorative rituals—especially the Canal’s 1825 opening\nceremony, the “Wedding of the Waters”—I show how metaphors of birth, marriage,\ncivilization, and progress legitimize environmental harm and erase Indigenous sovereignty.\nThe figure of DeWitt Clinton as the Canal’s “father,” for example, obscures the genocidal\nviolence against the Haudenosaunee that preceded and enabled the Canal’s construction.\nThe essay situates the Erie Canal within a longer genealogy of Christian European thought,\ntracing its ideological roots to the Doctrines of Discovery and their incorporation into U.S. law.\nIt further examines how religious imaginaries of perfection and utopia shaped social\nmovements along the Canal corridor, including the Oneida Community, revealing how\nreformist projects often reproduced older hierarchies of power.\n\nBy integrating historical analysis with personal narrative, this essay emphasizes the ethical\nnecessity of confronting complicity in systems of harm. It argues that contemporary efforts to\n“reimagine” the Erie Canal risk repeating historical patterns unless Indigenous leadership,\necological kinship, and erased histories are centered.",
  "title": "Deconstructing the Erie Canal: Three Lessons for its Next Century"
}