The Return of the Native: Recent Scholarship in the Literature of Christianization and Contact

Attention to native people has ebbed and flowed among students of early American literature, as trends in the broader scholarship emphasized by turns the frontier, the "national character," and American imperialism. But the present interest in Native American culture may be traced to the 1970s, when parallels between America in Southeast Asia and America in Indian Country became nearly inescapable, and—as Gerald Vizenor recalls—the Vietnam War "aroused the nation to remember the inseparable massacres at My Lai, Sand Creek, and Wounded Knee" (149).

The same period that sawan incredible resurgence in early American literary studies (led by Sacvan Bercovitch's The Puritan Origins of the American Self) also witnessed a reexamination of the "Indian question." While Bercovitch tacitly condemned conformism in American culture by tracing its roots to the hegemonic symbolic and ritual structures of seventeenth-century Puritan New England, Richard Slotkin, in Regeneration Through Violence (1973), drew direct attention to indigenous peoples' role in American cultural development. Unlike Bercovitch (and Perry Miller before him), Slotkin saw American Indian people as central to "the fatal opposition" that lay at the center of the nation's psyche. "The story of the evolution of an American mythology is," Slotkin wrote, "the story of our too-slow awakening to the significance of the American Indian in the universal scheme of things generally and in our (or his) American world in particular" (17).

Over the ensuing thirty years, scholars have awakened. Ethnohistorians like James Axtell set to work examining the reciprocal cultural relations entailed in Native and Euro-American contact, underscoring "the impact the major competing cultures of eastern North America had upon each other" (ix). This trend in the historiography reached its height in 1990, when Richard White published The Middle Ground, a work that forever changed the way American scholars viewed "Indian/White relations." Other historians, like Neal Salisbury and William Simmons, have written sensitive and native-centered accounts of life in the eastern woodlands in both precontact and postcontact times. Literary scholars, influenced by Mary Louise Pratt's Imperial Eyes (Routledge, 1992) and Eric Cheyfitz's The Poetics of Imperialism (Oxford, 1991), began to explore the political dimensions of the narrative constructions from which the previous generation had parsed their "information" about native people in early America. Many found Pratt's description of the discourse of "anticonquest"—the ideological mystification of invasion as disinterested observation—particularly potent. Seeing such texts as Mary Rowlandson's Captivity and Restauration or New Englands First Fruits through "imperial eyes" meant not only re-envisioning colonialism as a discursive practice central to what is known as "early American literature" but also tracing the nuances, the critical political and mercantile purposes for which writing about native peoples was deployed in the early modern period.

Viewing contact texts through imperial eyes in turn fostered a fruitful inquiry into the cultural investments of native people who performed in these texts and in texts of their own making. These performances, however filtered by European editors and writers, became recoverable and legible as parts of an emerging set of discourses surrounding colonial resistance. Many of the classic works of early American literary study have now been read to reveal their "point[s] of revolution," where (in Cheyfitz's words) "the colonized began...