Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword
- Preface
- List of Contributors
- 1 “Honoratissimi benefactores” Native American students and two seventeenth-century texts in the university tradition
- 2 “Pray Sir, consider a little”: Rituals of subordination and strategies of resistance in the letters of Hezekiah Calvin and David Fowler to Eleazar Wheelock
- 3 “(I speak like a fool but I am constrained)”: Samson Occom's Short Narrative and economies of the racial self
- 4 “Where, then, shall we place the hero of the wilderness?”: William Apess's Eulogy on King Philip and doctrines of racial destiny
- 5 “They ought to enjoy the home of their fathers”: The treaty of 1838, Seneca intellectuals, and literary genesis
- 6 “I am Joaquin!”: Space and freedom in Yellow Bird's The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit
- 7 “This voluminous unwritten book of ours”: Early Native American writers and the oral tradition
- 8 “A terrible sickness among them”: Smallpox and stories of the frontier
- 9 “A desirable citizen, a practical business man”: G. W. Grayson – Creek mixed blood, nationalist, and autobiographer
- 10 “An Indian … An American”: Ethnicity, assimilation, and balance in Charles Eastman's From the Deep Woods to Civilization
- 11 “Overcoming all obstacles”: The assimilation debate in Native American women's journalism of the Dawes era
- 12 “My people … my kind”: Mourning Dove's Cogewea, The Half-Blood as a narrative of mixed descent
- 13 “Because I understand the storytelling art”: The evolution of D'Arcy McNickle's The Surrounded
Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 February 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword
- Preface
- List of Contributors
- 1 “Honoratissimi benefactores” Native American students and two seventeenth-century texts in the university tradition
- 2 “Pray Sir, consider a little”: Rituals of subordination and strategies of resistance in the letters of Hezekiah Calvin and David Fowler to Eleazar Wheelock
- 3 “(I speak like a fool but I am constrained)”: Samson Occom's Short Narrative and economies of the racial self
- 4 “Where, then, shall we place the hero of the wilderness?”: William Apess's Eulogy on King Philip and doctrines of racial destiny
- 5 “They ought to enjoy the home of their fathers”: The treaty of 1838, Seneca intellectuals, and literary genesis
- 6 “I am Joaquin!”: Space and freedom in Yellow Bird's The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit
- 7 “This voluminous unwritten book of ours”: Early Native American writers and the oral tradition
- 8 “A terrible sickness among them”: Smallpox and stories of the frontier
- 9 “A desirable citizen, a practical business man”: G. W. Grayson – Creek mixed blood, nationalist, and autobiographer
- 10 “An Indian … An American”: Ethnicity, assimilation, and balance in Charles Eastman's From the Deep Woods to Civilization
- 11 “Overcoming all obstacles”: The assimilation debate in Native American women's journalism of the Dawes era
- 12 “My people … my kind”: Mourning Dove's Cogewea, The Half-Blood as a narrative of mixed descent
- 13 “Because I understand the storytelling art”: The evolution of D'Arcy McNickle's The Surrounded
Summary
I may surprise you yet, James LaGrinder! even if I am a “squaw” as you call me … I may use the pen!
Mourning Dove, CogeweaThis declaration by the protagonist early in Cogewea follows on her resolve to record “the woof of her people's philosophy,” the traditional wisdom that she sees passing away with the loss of elders like her grandmother. Such in fact was the work that Cogewea's creator, Mourning Dove, herself undertook, later publishing a collection of traditional Okanogan stories. Cogewea might be a fictional model as well for many of the writers whose works are examined in this volume, as they also frequently expressed the intention of preserving a wisdom that they saw as dying away. The passage also reflects the adversity under which so many of these writers labored. Addressing an audience at best insensitive and all too often hostile, they undertook a labor that enjoyed little support from any source and was generally unrewarded. Against such odds, these authors made a unique contribution to American culture.
There is a theory that considers American Indian literature to be only those texts (oral and written) produced by Native people and addressed primarily to a Native audience; it is a comparative theory, and it offers a rewarding basis for studying those texts that it canonizes. Such a formulation, however, excludes the authors considered in this volume, for all of them wrote in European languages, and most of them directed their words to an audience of non-Native people. The works examined in the essays collected here must be seen, rather, as always involved in a dynamic negotiation across many boundaries, barriers, gaps, and silences characterizing the discourseof the emergent nation.
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- Information
- Early Native American WritingNew Critical Essays, pp. xi - xiiPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996