The Influences Of Ableism in Veganism: A Disabled Vegan Perspective

Image description: a collage. background is a field with a blue sky and white clouds and a field of rows of flowers of various colors. standing in the field is a silhouette of a pig that takes up most of the art. their shape is filled with a photo of from the universe (space) there is a human eye on them that slightly blends in with the space pattern. lastly behind them but towards the right is a pink cosmo flower with an orange center. as if the pig is smelling the flower.

by Michele Sommerstein


I don’t know about you, but for me between the multiple genocides, the rise in COVID cases, the massive COVID denial, the related rise in mask bans, the elections, police violence, the rising threat of fascism, climate change, and so many other issues – for fuck’s sake! it’s a lot.

And so lately, I’ve been feeling like while I am doing what I can to be part of the collective effort for justice, (for another world is possible), I can’t only make protest art. My heart also needs lighter projects.

And so recently I’ve returned to making vegan content. But not some call for intersectionality, articles discussing inner-movement issues, kill counter references, and environmental stats, as I had done in the past. Just lighter. And perhaps because it has been a while since I have made vegan content, I found myself unexpectedly reflecting on the intersections of my disability and vegan identity.

Before my disability identity-themed YouTube show (Rebelwheels NYC), I had a short-lived vegan cooking show called My Easily Amused Kitchen.

[image description: video thumbnail. a screenshot from the video taken in my apartment. a white wall and a purple couch behind me. text reads MEAK ep 1 creamy pea soup of vast fantasticness! my easily amused kitchen. there is olive oil being poured onto a bowl of peas. and I am pointing with my finger up sitting next to a penguin stuffed animal. I have glasses, a black shirt, and longer hair with bangs]

And looking back on that time, I realize that I really wasn’t being fully authentic in the videos. Of course, it was done in my motorized wheelchair and there was some of my quirky humor, but I remember I often downplayed any kind of physical fatigue even though that is part of my disability.

You see, between my animal rights activism at the time and the vegan content that I watched on YouTube, I was very much familiar with the protein myth. The false idea that if you go vegan, that you will by default, be physically weak due to not being able to get enough protein on a vegan diet.

Often I saw other (physically able-bodied) vegans whether in person or via YouTube videos who were very intentional about presenting veganism as part of an energetic lifestyle in an attempt to counteract said misinformation.

And there are many professional athletes who are vegan. I personally knew a guy (not professional) who was vegan, who lifted weights and ran marathons with ease.

[image description: The background is a colorful collage of blue, yellow, and pink. The main text reads pity is not compassion! The vibe is artsy and punk. There is smaller text on top that reads spare us your pity we want our rights! And then towards the lower left-hand corner, it reads intersectional disability solidarity. Lastly underneath the word compassion is the phrase unlearn ableism.]

And then there was me, a disabled vegan, and not Paralympic disabled, disabled with low spoons (slang term for energy), disabled with health problems, disabled where muscle weakness is literally part of my disability. And now I can type that and say “represent” with a sense of disability pride, but back then it almost felt like it was a hindrance to the cause.

And to be clear, no one ever said to me “hide parts of your disability for the movement.” It was just the way it was presented that made me feel like I should.

And it wasn’t just the impression I got from a lot of people in the vegan community. I could sneeze and an omnivore would say “Is that because you’re vegan?” (as if they themselves never sneezed?)

As a result, I was very aware of how my disability was somewhat being linked to the protein myth. As if I wouldn’t be disabled if I wasn’t vegan. As if people aren’t born with disabilities. As if disability and veganism were somehow incompatible.

Image description: white background. black typewriter font. “Ableism is… (a form of) discrimination. The false idea that disabled people are by default, inferior. When in truth disability is just another way for a mind and/or body to be.

And so part of me felt that to show my truth was feeding into that weakened stereotype, thus hurting the movement and thus hurting the animals, which obviously as a vegan and animal rights activist, you don’t want to do.

Looking back, it was also a lot of internalized ableism on my part, for I had yet to be aware that ableism was even a word, let alone working to unlearn it, and certainly had not yet found my groove and voice in my disability identity.

That said, I now see how essential it is to have a variety of vegan representation in all areas but in this case, ability and health.

And so, in the name of creating something lighter, and because it just so happened that I needed a new vegan cheese (long story), I filmed a taste test where I was un-apologetically me. Full throttle neurodivergent, processing delays, immensely honest, not downplaying when I was physically fatigued or in pain nor the fact that while there are many vegan cheeses out there, I could not try a lot of them, due to dietary intolerances and ingredient sensitivities.

[image description: tumblr has cropped the video thumbnail. the full thumbnail is as follows. Background gold glitter. Over that rainbow stripes. Purple blue green yellow orange red and dark red. To the left a photo of myself wearing a silence equals death with a watermelon pink triangle symbol on it holding up a piece of vegan cheese. I have oversized black cat eye eyeglasses and my rainbow flower crown hair band is pushing back my dark hair. Next to me is a collage of various vegan cheeses. And over that is the text in a bold black font “disabled and neurodivergent vegan taste test vegan cheese.” Every line has a white rectangle behind it and behind that is a black rectangle shadow. In white text with a black rectangle behind it. “Not sponsored. Very honest.”]

And as a result of being authentic and sharing my truth, I’m starting to come across other disabled vegans like me, chronically ill vegans, neurodivergent vegans, etc. and it’s lovely.

Many years ago, I wrote an article entitled Is Veganism Ableist? A Disabled Vegan Perspective. And in regard to the ideas of veganism, the answer remains no.

However, I do think in the wanting and sometimes desperation to do all we can to save the animals (and to a certain degree, the planet as animal agriculture is one of the larger contributors to climate change), a lot of us took action to dispel the protein myth, and while in ways it was good, some of our actions had consequences that also caused harm.

It is a reminder that when we take action to fight misinformation, we must make sure that we are also not punching down in the process (whether intentionally or not.) This is something that goes far beyond veganism.

In the end, us vegans from marginalized communities must represent with as much realness as possible, not only so people know that vegans vary, but so other marginalized people who are perhaps ‘vegan-curious’, will know that they too are welcomed in the movement. After all, the animals need as many allies as they can get.

   

Author’s Note: In the past, I have written articles using my birth name Michele Kaplan. However, in the past year, I have decided to use my mother’s maiden name, and thus why this article is by Michele Sommerstein, while past articles are by Michele Kaplan. Same person. I didn’t get married. This just felt right to me for personal reasons.

This essay originally appeared on Rebelwheels’ Soapbox in 2024.


me in wheelchairMichele Sommerstein is a queer (read: bisexual), geek-proud, intersectional activist on wheels (read: motorized wheelchair), who tries to strike a balance between activism, creativity and self care, while trying to change the world.

Witches for Animal Rights

In my forthcoming book, Vegan Witchcraft, I explore the history of feminist witchcraft in the US and UK, arguing that, despite many key parallels, feminist witches have failed their commitments to other animals (often referred to as familiars) in either ignoring or outright rejecting veganism and total liberation.

That said, I have found evidence that some witches are making this connection. In the early 1990s, for instance, the Feminists for Animal Rights Newsletter announced the formation of a new sister group in New York, Witches for Animal Rights. Witches for Animal Rights rallied fellow witches by imploring them to “save the world with your fork.” Feminists for Animal Rights (1994) explains that “members worship the Goddess by promoting the wellbeing of her nonhuman animals” (16), suggesting that interested readers contact the Morningstar Coven in McDonough, New York. Witches for Animal Rights also surfaces in the record as a performing group in “No RIO,” an anti-gentrification guerrilla project in New York City that provided space and platform for radical artists and activists (Forte 1989). This organization was likely shortlived as I was unable to find futher reference.

In the 2010s, a the Protego Foundation formed from a group of Harry Potter fans who contextualize their anti-speciesist activism in the magical creations of J. K. Rowling. A registered nonprofit, the Protego Foundation “fights to end the abuse of the animals in the Muggle world through our inspiration from the magical creatures in the wizarding world […] empowering all magical persons to get active for animals.”

Gregory Maguire’s (1995) retelling of the “Wicked” witch of Oz sees her (Elphaba Thropp) as a social justice activist, advocating for Nonhuman Animals and the environment. Indeed, vegan scholar Christopher Sebastian (2020) suggests that her skin is green as a symbolic reference to her advocacy for nature and other animals, but also to mark her as a monstrous other in protesting the violent social stratification of Oz where the oppression of humans and other animals are explicitly entangled.

Witches for Animal Rights, Wicked, and the Protego Foundation are interesting examples of witchcraft engaged in the service of other animals, but they are exceptions, not the norm. Many feminists have embraced spirituality, paganism, and witchcraft as an important thealogical, philosophical, psychological, and even strategic means of resilience and resistence, but few extend this nature-based practice to include veganism and species-inclusiveness. It remains to be seen if modern witchcraft will, on a whole, begin to incorporate these values. To date, it is not sufficiently distinct from mainstream speciesist feminism and anthropocentric institutionalized religions.

References

Feminists for Animal Rights. 1994. “Resources.” Feminists for Animal Rights Newsletter 8 (1-2): 16.

Forte, S. 1989. “Guerilla Space: A Few Many Things about ABC No Rio.” X-posure Summer: no page.

Protego Foundation. No date. Who We Are. Retrieved April 15, 2024, from: https://www.protegofoundation.org/who-we-are.html.

Maguire, G. 1995. Wicked. New York: HarperCollins.

Sebastian, C. 2020. “Adaptation: No One Mourns the Wicked, But We Should.” Pp. 212-221, in The Edinburgh Companion to Vegan Literary Studies, L. Wright and E. Quinn (Eds.). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Witches for Animal Rights. 1994. “Save the World with Your Fork!” Feminists for Animal Rights Newsletter 8 (1-2): 15.


Corey Lee Wrenn

Dr. Wrenn is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Kent. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology with Colorado State University in 2016. She was awarded Exemplary Diversity Scholar, 2016 by the University of Michigan’s National Center for Institutional Diversity. She served as council member with the American Sociological Association’s Animals & Society section (2013-2016) and was elected Chair in 2018. She is the co-founder of the International Association of Vegan Sociologists. She serves as Book Review Editor to Society & Animals and is a member of the Research Advisory Council of The Vegan Society. She has contributed to the Human-Animal Studies Images and Cinema blogs for the Animals and Society Institute and has been published in several peer-reviewed academic journals including the Journal of Gender Studies, Environmental Values, Feminist Media Studies, Disability & Society, Food, Culture & Society, and Society & Animals. In July 2013, she founded the Vegan Feminist Network, an academic-activist project engaging intersectional social justice praxis.

Britain’s First Female Qualified Medical Doctor…and Vegetarian Witch?

Anna Kingsford, Britain’s first qualified female medical doctor, was especially horrified by the burgeoning vivisection industry in the 19th century. Women were disadvantaged by their societal exclusion when protesting men’s scientific violence against other animals, but Kingsford’s medical training granted her access, insider knowledge, and proof that a degree could be earned without harming other animals. She also used her medical training to produce research that supported the suitability of plant-based eating, information that was largely absent in a society that was only just coming to discover and understand the science of nutrition.

When science and medicine proved ineffectual in her liberation campaign, she turned to the psychic realm. She levied psychic attacks on European vivisectionists, aiming not just to disrupt their work but reportedly to end their lives.

In the history of Nonhuman Animal rights, Kingsford is remembered as one of the first vegetarian feminists, bravely resisting anthroparchal violence in an era that offered little platform to women. But I would suggest that Kingsford should also be remembered as one of the first vegetarian witches. She certainly believed male vivisectionists were such—for Kingsford, these were not objective, calm, scientists; they were instead sorcerers engaged in black magic, fiendish for the blood, gore, and suffering associated with their laboratory torture.

Like the 20th century feminist witches that would follow her, she believed in reincarnation. Nonhuman Animals, she warned, were due considerable karmic compensation. Vivisectionists, then, if not to meet any justice in this life, would surely meet it in the next. Her belief in the afterlife of Nonhuman Animals perhaps offered some sort of solace. In her metaphysical work, these victims finally had voices, speaking to her in seances.

Although Kingsford may not have identified as a witch (while she was influenced by a variety of world religions, she was an avid Christian), the same concentrated intention for ending patriarchal violence and enacting justice through metaphysical means would be taken up by second-wave feminists in California a century later.

Work Cited

Budapest, Z. 1986. The Holy Book of Women’s Mysteries: Feminist Witchcraft, Goddess Rituals, Spellcasting, and Other Womanly Arts. Oakland: Consolidated Printers.

Ferguson, C. 2022. “Anna Kingsford and the Intuitive Science of Occultism.” Aries—Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 22: 114-135.


Corey Lee Wrenn

Dr. Wrenn is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Kent. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology with Colorado State University in 2016. She was awarded Exemplary Diversity Scholar, 2016 by the University of Michigan’s National Center for Institutional Diversity. She served as council member with the American Sociological Association’s Animals & Society section (2013-2016) and was elected Chair in 2018. She is the co-founder of the International Association of Vegan Sociologists. She serves as Book Review Editor to Society & Animals and is a member of the Research Advisory Council of The Vegan Society. She has contributed to the Human-Animal Studies Images and Cinema blogs for the Animals and Society Institute and has been published in several peer-reviewed academic journals including the Journal of Gender Studies, Environmental Values, Feminist Media Studies, Disability & Society, Food, Culture & Society, and Society & Animals. In July 2013, she founded the Vegan Feminist Network, an academic-activist project engaging intersectional social justice praxis.

The Nation-State and Animal Emancipation*

Marv Wheale                                  

One of the main functions of the nation-state and its layers of government is to protect private property rights, at least for those with adequate income to afford property.  Nonhuman animals are embedded in the private property regime.  The state treats them as somewhat dissimilar to owning inanimate assets through the exercise of anti-cruelty laws.

The animal rights movement attempts to change the property status of animals to those of persons. The trouble with this line of activism is that even if animal property law could be undone most animals would still have lower-class status. The state would continue to allow these inferior animals as food while maintaining humane treatment stewardship laws. No laws would be enacted to prevent human animals from utilizing such animals because of the state’s obligations to cultural speciesism and capitalism’s animal agriculture and processing industries.   

By comparison, state-legislated eradication of capitalism’s labor exploitation would not end the subordination of labor to capital in the workplace.  Adequate pay and working conditions would put some limits on employers but not permit full democracy on the job.  The class structure of capital – the owners of production – which makes labor produce surplus profit for bosses, holds fast.  Capitalist-state altruism to other animals discloses a similar inequality.

This doesn’t mean ending the private property position of animals is unimportant. It indicates we are prone to distorting what can be done by state reforms (one step at a time ideology) in the liberation of animals.

For at least several reasons, the state by its very creation is not a neutral mediator that can be swung in any direction.  For one thing, it has often formed from the theft of Indigenous peoples’ land subordinating their authority in political decision-making. Second, the state is integral to reproducing capitalism and with it, the cultural customs of meat, dairy, eggs, and other animal uses no matter which political party is elected. More, the state is a male fabrication that depends on controlling women’s bodies to populate the nation and sustain capitalism by giving birth and providing childcare to prepare future workers for the citizenry and economy.  

Thus the state can’t be carried over to an equality-based society.  We have to conceive of abolishing the state – similar to what was done to feudalism and monarchical rule in many parts of the world – not making it nicer while leaving the underlying burdensome structures intact.

On the other hand, we can’t simply theorize to replace the state with organized free associations.  Human-animal dominance, male authority, white primacy, colonization, economic classes and ableism could easily be carried over from the former system by habitual conscious and unconscious attitudes/ways when organizing new paradigms.  A vegan feminist democratic framework for leveling hierarchies is essential to overcoming these injustices because it openly rejects them as nonstarters in the design process. Vegan feminism always cautions against working to halt human-animal imperialism in isolation of class, male, white, abled, gender binary, and heteronormative dominance. Many other social movements don’t have this expansive grasp of reality.  

Vegan feminism also sees the various structures of inequality within any given nation-state as connected to the multi-state apparatus.  States are not self-sufficient.  They depend on other states to cooperate, have a rule of law and advance trade in the global market.  Though some states have more power, they all mediate nationalism, internationalism, war/imperialism and capitalist accumulation across the earth.  They provide the official legal framework for organized violence against animals and human animals. 

Since state power operates internationally, worldwide solidarity must be imperative to our politics of total liberation, with special attentiveness to major state powers.  The cessation of animal subjugation, oppression among human animals, wars and ecological collapse depends on it.  

Clearly, the end of states is unattainable at present.  It requires long-term and complex collective work.  For the short term, the best that we might be able to accomplish is to simply raise awareness through the channels available to us learning praxis as we go.    


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 A Guaranteed Livable Income for Fostering Social-Ecological Justice

Marv Wheale

Climate upheaval, environmental devastation, poverty, male preeminence, white primacy, normative gender identity dominance, abled superiority and human supremacy all coexist with the prevailing mode of production and life – capitalism.  This system, invented by rich white men, categorically undermines animals’ and human animals’ lives through class divisions and interactions with the other stated hierarchies.  A revolutionary societal remaking is thereby required to end these oppressions and abolish the current top-down market economy.  

Economic inequality has denied people – particularly black, brown, queer and disabled  – a healthy ecosphere and an equitable share of global wealth.  These people live mainly in the global south (many in the northern countries too). They along with resource extraction have made enormous profits for foreign capital while receiving meager financial returns. The poor have contributed little on a per-capita and lower-class basis to climate disruption yet suffer most of the consequences.  

The upper classes consume and invest in the economy, the most, causing high carbon emissions. The cost of justice therefore should be borne by them, the primary polluters and beneficiaries, who lead the profit and growth-oriented hierarchical system.

Social-ecological restitution must also be directed at nonhuman animals used as commodified goods in the structure of production and consumption.  Their rights have been systemically violated and the crimes have added to biosphereic degradation.  

To realistically accomplish the purpose of system change we have to first take non-reform reform steps that don’t re-legitimize these overbearing institutions, like bland reforms do.

A Guaranteed Livable Income, regardless of employment or unemployment status, (also known as Universal Basic Income) is rapidly gaining social approval in dozens of countries. It could be a way of allocating the redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor, through taxation.  And it has the potential to reduce harm to nature.  There is already enough wealth in the world economy to meet everyone’s needs without more earth-damaging growth in economic output. 

A GLI would afford employees to work less, translating into lower emissions and pollution from decreased production.  Moreover, let’s not forget that numerous workers are being dislodged by capital’s use of robotic technology, especially artificial intelligence, making GLI adoption extra urgent.

To ensure the globalization of a GLI there would have to be a transference of wealth within and from affluent nations to poorer ones by way of tax justice and tax havens to advance the sustainability and equity goals of the impoverished.

Initially, to achieve major social-ecological improvement a GLI has to secure the basic needs of every person to fully participate in society.  Only then will people have the choice to reduce or withdraw from working in the disastrous compulsory capitalist model of production and its animal reproductive/slaughtering industries.  Our fear of financial insecurity and radical social change would be minimized, opening up time and creative energy for pursuing socially and ecologically sound production and lifestyles.  

If other than human animal liberation, grounded in veganism, is not included in the transformation then the democratic process is an exclusionary facade and environmental goals will be thwarted.

All the above is an impetus for the GLI movement, the animal rights movement, the ecology movement, the feminist movement, the LGBTQI+ movement, the antiracist/colonialist/capitalist movement and the disability movement to join forces to construct a world of equality for life’s beings.

Women and Vegan Civil Resistance


Although vegan feminism is a relatively new theory of social change in the West, it has had a rich background with a variety of innovative tactics, developed by innovative women in the resistance. In “Vegan Feminism Then and Now: Women’s Resistance to Legalised Speciesism across Three Waves of Activism” published in Gendering Green Criminology (Bristol University Press 2023), Lynda Korimboccus joins me in exploring this history through the efforts of three outstanding activists we take to represent feminist approaches to anti-speciesism across three primary waves of collective effort.

Charlotte Despard and First-Wave Intersectionality

The first, Charlotte Despard, was a British woman of Irish birth who was heavily active in Irish independence efforts, feminism, vegetarianism, and anti-vivisection campaigning. She is perhaps best remembered in the anti-speciesist movement for her protests involving the contentious Brown Dog statue in Battersea, London. The statue, meant as an homage to a canine who languished in the vivisection industry. This little dog represented thousands of others who were victimized by the increasingly powerful and entrenched medical science.

The statue was a direct challenge to patriarchal institutions and their systemic violence against Nonhuman Animals…and others. Despard chose Battersea for a reason: it was also a hotbed of Irish nationalism, feminism, and socialism. Despard’s protest tactics were intersectionally aware and explicitly engaged coordination across movements. In the late 19th and early 20th century, the belief in social progress was not isolated by cause. Many women activists were actively engaged in a variety of campaigns simultaneously, sometimes in overlapping ways.

Patty Mark and Second-Wave Open Rescue

By the mid-20th century, women had become the dominant group in activist ranks. And, although men’s philosophical contributions tended to take precedence, women activists were busy developing novel tactics for dismantling a now entrenched speciesist economics order. Patty Mark, for instance, had innovated a new strategy in Australia that both challenged the mundane normalcy of speciesism and physically intervened in Nonhuman Animal suffering. Her “open rescue” approach intentionally and strategically broke the law, the law being deemed illegitimate due to the horrific harms it protected. This tactic encouraged activists to peacefully enter industrial spaces to remove some victims to safety and disrupt industrial processes. Activists often chained themselves to facility infrastructure as well.

The aim was to attract media attention through illegality and disruption, bringing attention to the cause and allowing the public a rare opportunity to see within hidden speciesist spaces. Arrest was not only risked but even encouraged as it added to the spectacle and disruption. This tactic was innovative in introducing feminist ideals of nonviolence and active compassion.

Sarah Kistle and Third-Wave Vegan Intersectionality

Finally, we explored the tactical developments of Sarah Kistle. As the movement entered the 21st century, a return to intersectionality seemed ever more necessary. The late 20th century had witnessed a considerable neoliberalization that introduced and reified individualist approaches to social change. Indeed, the rational ideology that underpinned this shift made feminist approaches appear marginal, deluded, and unfocused. This new era of “rational” activism had also normalized welfare reform and animals’ flesh “reductionism.”

Sarah Kistle became a prominent figure in the debates that would arise between these two positions by the 2010s. Kistle advocated for a radical, intersectional approach to advocacy, insisting that veganism was the least humans could do to alleviate speciesism, and the movement had a duty to promote it as such. Importantly, she argued that this vegan message should not be restricted only to “animal lovers,” but should be actively put into conversation with other social justice causes. As a Korean American, she recognized that the unjust experiences of Nonhuman Animals heavily entangle with that of marginalized human groups. With the outbreak of Black Lives Matter protests later that decade, she realized this vegan intersectional theory by opening a vegan restaurant in Minneapolis, employing Black Lives Matter activists who had been harassed and arrested by the police.

Across all waves, we can find so many inspiring stories of innovative women who fought a speciesist legal system to advance the radical idea that animals (and the humans whose experiences intertwine with that of other animals) matter. Indeed, Despard, Mark, and Kistle took on the police themselves, using state repression as a means to shine light on the personhood of the oppressed. It is a vegan feminist criminology that should inspire another generation of women to critically examine a criminal justice system that has historically relied on violence, control, incarceration, and the stripping of rights to maintain not only speciesism but many other systems of oppression. Future tactics might continue to test the limits of what is legal and what is legitimate, devising new modes of resistance to unjust state institutions of “justice.”

Read the full article here.


Corey Lee Wrenn

Dr. Wrenn is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Kent. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology with Colorado State University in 2016. She was awarded Exemplary Diversity Scholar, 2016 by the University of Michigan’s National Center for Institutional Diversity. She served as council member with the American Sociological Association’s Animals & Society section (2013-2016) and was elected Chair in 2018. She is the co-founder of the International Association of Vegan Sociologists. She serves as Book Review Editor to Society & Animals and is a member of the Research Advisory Council of The Vegan Society. She has contributed to the Human-Animal Studies Images and Cinema blogs for the Animals and Society Institute and has been published in several peer-reviewed academic journals including the Journal of Gender Studies, Environmental Values, Feminist Media Studies, Disability & Society, Food, Culture & Society, and Society & Animals. In July 2013, she founded the Vegan Feminist Network, an academic-activist project engaging intersectional social justice praxis.

She is the author of A Rational Approach to Animal Rights: Extensions in Abolitionist Theory (Palgrave MacMillan 2016), Piecemeal Protest: Animal Rights in the Age of Nonprofits (University of Michigan Press 2019), and Animals in Irish Society: Interspecies Oppression and Vegan Liberation in Britain’s First Colony (State University of New York Press 2021).

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