Dreaming Data: Locating Early Nineteenth-Century Weather Data

Chapter 1 explores an early nineteenth-century regional network of newly named “weather observers” across the northeastern United States and the ways in which this network utilized weather measurement to uphold settler claims to territory and build archives of settler environmental knowledge across the homelands of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and Lenape. This chapter shows how data collection in this period was deeply tied to land surveying and Indigenous land theft: collecting “national” data meant extending and occupying unceded territories. By examining this work, the chapter charts the rise of data practices and data language within settler meteorological communities of the early nineteenth century.