This article was originally published in the 2018-2019 edition of Primary Source the Department of History's annual newsletter. You can find the 2018-2019 edition as well as all previous editions of Primary Source here.

By Katrina Jagodinsky, 2018-2019 Farley Visiting Scholar

The gift of time is a luxury few of us have in our academic careers, and my term as the inaugural Jack & Nancy Farley Distinguished Visiting Scholar in History has been a truly indulgent eight months. My days have been gloriously spent in archives and writing workshops, reading new books and revisiting classic works, and listening to what my sources and peers are saying.

Before coming to the SFU History Department, I had not found such peace. I was struggling to tackle my second book project: running through a series of conference presentations to discuss my evidence, drafting grant proposals to fund my archival work and secure time away from the classroom, and looking to new scholarship. In my haste to commit to a project, I had settled on the remarkable tale of Aboriginal woman Fannie Fowle, who was abducted in New South Wales, Australia; trafficked and stowed in a British ship captain’s cabin through Hong Kong and Victoria, British Columbia; and finally redeemed in Seattle, Washington, in 1885 when an investigation of the crew’s charges against the captain led to Fannie’s discovery by port officials. Through the experiences of those who suffered on board the Hattie Tapley, I hoped to chronicle the relationship between the exploitation of Indigenous women and industrial laborers at the core of settler-colonial expansion and Pacific world capitalism.

Early on, archival silences dashed my hopes. However, knowing what the archives do not hold is as important as knowing what they do hold for us. Likely because he held captives and contentious cargo, the British captain who had abducted Fannie Fowle traded with elites and immigrants in Victoria and Seattle, but also hovered just beyond documentation. His cargo came in and out of port before bureaucratic record-keeping practices became consistent, and although the Hattie Tapley can be traced here and there throughout the Salish Sea and Pacific Ocean, a booklength study proved impossible to achieve.

Fannie Fowle and the Hattie Tapley through British Columbia and Washington archives, I had been working on a few article drafts based on other leads I had found. These leads stemmed from my interest in nineteenth-century habeas corpus petitioners using the writ to challenge child removal, deportation, enslavement, and reservation internment throughout the North American West. In workshopping these drafts, colleagues asked why I was abbreviating the stories of more than a dozen petitioners. They highlighted additional points of comparison and analysis that would intrigue readers and encouraged me to consider these petitioners together rather than separately. I explained that it would require a booklength study to do. But wasn’t I looking for a book-length project? How had I not realized that I already had one in hand?

Such encouragement, and the time away from daily commitments on my home campus, allowed me to consider how I would reframe these myriad petitioners excised into separate essays into a contemporaneous, and possibly collaborative, group of freedom-seekers. It soon became clear to me that I had the raw material for a comparative and gendered analysis of black petitioners using habeas to challenge enslavement in free territories, of Chinese petitioners using habeas to challenge deportation under the Chinese Exclusion Act, of Indigenous petitioners seeking custody of children seized by Indian agents and wouldbe guardians or challenging their own confinement on reservations, and of parents using the writ to claim child custody. Together, these petitioners engaged in a unique form of freedom-making as they challenged the racial, national, and gendered hierarchies that convinced others they had the authority to confine them. As individual petitioners, their stories are poignant; as collective wielders of the great writ, their histories are powerful.

counsel with other scholars at SFU, I have also benefited from the training and support in digital humanities provided by staff in the Digital Humanities Innovation Lab, who taught me new ways to organize my current research, and helped me to develop a scholarly website to showcase my previous work and enhance my public outreach. Meeting with undergraduates in the Honors Seminar and sharing conference proposal strategies with graduate students also proved to be rewarding exchanges. It was a treat to be pushed to summarize historians’ essential skills and traits by Dr. Spear’s students and to share vital networking strategies with the graduate students working with Dr. Kelm and other faculty. I also enjoyed sharing from my first book, Legal Codes & Talking Trees (Yale University Press, 2016), at the inaugural Farley Scholar Lecture and with audiences throughout the Salish Sea and Puget Sound region.

I came here in January with a bold vision of a faintly-traced book project and a handful of ideas jammed into article drafts, and I will leave in August with a book proposal drawn from those article drafts, while those faint traces will resurface as an article in the next year. Only by quieting the many demands on our time can such transitions occur, and I am so grateful for the colleagues who have offered useful suggestions and shared valuable sources while I determine what is next in my analysis of the past. The Farley position has been a fruitful and rewarding period for me, and I will never forget the beauty of this opportunity. Thank you to all of those who have made these past eight months a pinnacle of my academic career.