Beyond States of Mind: Denaturalizing the Nation-State in Memory Studies

This paper will examine the memory captured by Hubert Howe Bancroft’s History Company in his attempt to write the first comprehensive history of the Pacific Coast. It will assert the problems and potential of describing cultural memories beyond the nation-state, taking as a case study the diverse contributors who told their stories to Bancroft’s History Company. They had lived lives at the edge of several empires and nations from Alaska to Panama, a diverse region remapped several times over their lifetimes. When they told their stories in the 1870s and 1880s, they resisted characterization as exiles, treating their most recent transition to a new national context as differing only in degree rather than in type from previous fictive claims over their lives and homes.

While modern historians increasingly tell transnational stories reminiscent of these narrators’ own life stories, scholars of memory continue to examine these narrators and narratives as bounded by the identities of modern nation-states. It is difficult to examine collective memories without shorthand for the collective, and the nation-state— with its associated ethnic identities and national symbols—offers particularly useful shorthand. This corpus offers few easy substitutes since their uncoordinated efforts spanned the entire coast of North America, crossing ethnic, linguistic, racial, class, religious, and gender lines. While many histories of community memory have simply miniaturized national memories, this essay will experiment with ways to upscale local place-based memories by asking how the striking shared experience of having outlived empires together shaped the stories Pacific peoples could tell.