ABSTRACT
This chapter examines some questions raised by these considerations in the context of a large complex society that has changed through human movement on an enormous scale in a very short period of time: the movement of peoples to North America from Europe and Africa between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. The cultural values of the settler majority may predominate, but we can appeal to Thoreau’s own practices, in particular as a collector and as a manipulator of material things, including his own cabin at Walden Pond, to evoke an alternative view of immigration in Musketaquid-Concord and beyond. Migration in the Musketaquid-Concord area and beyond on which Thoreau reflected clearly has ethical implications. The chapter looks at some ethical ramifications of the cases of Indigenous peoples, Americans of African ancestry, and Americans of Irish ancestry in turn.
