Early Native American Writing

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.

• Features essays by the foremost scholars in the field • The first collection of essays by different authors which focuses on writings by American Indian authors in this time period • Highlights works which have only recently been brought back into print or published for the first time, such as the writings of William Apess, Samuel Occom, and William Grayson

1. ‘Honoratissimi Benefactores’: Native American students and two seventeenth-century texts in the university tradition Wolfgang Hochbruck and Beatrix Dudensing Reichel; 2. ‘Pray, Sir, consider a little’: rituals of subordination and strategies of resistance in the letters of Hezekiah Calvin and David Fowler to Eleazer Wheelock Laura J. Murray; 3. ‘(I speak like a fool but I am constrained): Samson Occom’s Short Narrative and economies of the racial self Dana D. Nelson; 4. Where, Then, Shall We Place the Hero of the Wilderness?: William Apess’s Eulogy on King Philip and doctrines of racial destiny Anne Marie Dannenberg; 5. ‘They ought to enjoy the home of their fathers’: the Treaty of 1838, Seneca Intellectualism, and Literary Genesis Daniel F. Littlefield, Jr; 6.‘ I am Joaquin!’: Space and freedom in Yellow Bird’s The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit John Lowe; 7. This Voluminous Unwritten Book of Ours: early Native American writers and oral tradition William M. Clements; 8. ‘A terrible sickness among them’: Smallpox and stories of the Frontier Helen Jaskoski; 9. ‘A desirable citizen, a practical business man’: G. W. Grayson – Creek mixed blood, nationalist, and autobiographer Robert F. Sayre; 10. An Indian … an American: ethnicity, assimilation and balance in Charles Eastman’s From the Deep Woods to Civilization Eric Peterson; 11. ‘Overcoming all obstacles’: the assimilation debate in Native American women’s journalism of the Dawes era Carol Batker; 12. ‘My people … my kind’: Mourning Dove’s Cogewa, the Half-Blood as a narrative of mixed descent Martha L. Viehmann; 13. ‘Because I understand the storytelling art’: the evolution of D’Arcy McNicle’s The Surrounded Birgit Hans.