Early Native American Writing

by Jaskoski, Helen

• ISBN13: 9780521555098
• ISBN10: 0521555094
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1996-10-01
• Publisher: Cambridge Univ Pr

Summary

This collection of critical essays discusses the works of American Indian authors who wrote between 1630 and 1940 and produced some of the earliest literature in North American history. The first collection of critical essays to concentrate on this body of writing, the book highlights the writings of the American Indian authors considered, many of whom only recently rediscovered, as important contributions to American letters. American Indians writing in English offer a permanent record of the dramatic and often tragic confrontation between native culture and the communities of settlers arriving in the New World over four centuries. As white settlers arrived, bringing with them disease, technology, and Christianity, they also brought the English language - a tool which native Americans, accustomed to an oral tradition, would adopt in an effort to cross the barriers of cultural difference. Serving in their own time as a means of addressing a heedless oppressor, native American writings have since become a vital record of an experience whose history, as written by the mainstream, is incomplete. The essays collected here seek to recuperate that history, while bringing new attention to the texts themselves.

Table of Contents

'Honoratissimi Benefactores': Native American students and two seventeenth-century texts in the university tradition

'Pray, Sir, consider a little': rituals of subordination and strategies of resistance in the letters of Hezekiah Calvin and David Fowler to Eleazer Wheelock

'(I speak like a fool but I am constrained): Samson Occom's Short Narrative and economies of the racial self

Where, Then, Shall We Place the Hero of the Wilderness?: William Apess's Eulogy on King Philip and doctrines of racial destiny

'They ought to enjoy the home of their fathers': the Treaty of 1838, Seneca Intellectualism, and Literary Genesis

'I am Joaquin!': Space and freedom in Yellow Bird's The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, the Celebrated California

This Voluminous Unwritten Book of Ours: early Native American writers and oral tradition

'A terrible sickness among them': Smallpox and stories of the

'A desirable citizen, a practical business man': G. W. Grayson - Creek mixed blood, nationalist, and autobiographer

An Indian ... an American: ethnicity, assimilation and balance in Charles Eastman's From the Deep Woods to Civilization

'Overcoming all obstacles': the assimilation debate in Native American women's journalism of the Dawes era

'My people ... my kind': Mourning Dove's Cogewa, the Half-Blood as a narrative of mixed descent

'Because I understand the storytelling art': the evolution of D'Arcy McNicle's The Surrounded

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