I want to extend my discussion of fossils, and the fossil whale, or the whale as an artifact and history, through an essay. To do this I wanted to incorporate other mentions of the whale as an archeological site, besides my original focus on ch104: The fossil whale. I want to emphasize the conversations on history that are had in this book, which requires some deep diving and recalling throughout the scope of this book. The reason I wanted to focus on this topic is because,, as a lover of history, I was drawn to the deconstruction of what counts as history, what gets told and what gets tossed under the rug of time. 

Thesis under construction: Ishmael discusses the validity of the ‘american’ historical canon through the body of the whale, or “the fossil whale”. Whales have a deeper connection to the scope of American history as a continent, especially to the original hunters before colonization (the spear found in a whale). As a fossil, the whale is borderless, traversing the watery world, and leaving it’s print among the land, part of a momentary recession of the waterline. The whale, in this sense, dismantles the American canon of permanence and ownership over a continent during an age of border expansion.

This is a very early version of my thesis, as you can see, I’m still very caught between the fossil v history, and the fossil v borders/maps.