Pluralizing Early America: History Across Disciplines

As a first-time, international attendee of the Society for Early Americanists, I was struck by the conference's outward-facing engagement. I traveled to Tulsa early to visit the Helmerich Center for American Research at the Gilcrease Museum's small, yet stunning collection of French, Native American, and First Nations manuscripts. To my surprise, I found reproductions from the Codex Canadensis, which had lured me to Tulsa, throughout the SEA program. These reproductions of drawings (c. 1700)—of animals, plants, persons, and practices from what is today north of the Canada-US border—underscored the salience of place making and (de)colonization addressed throughout the conference. Indeed, intercultural and new forms of public address were welcome refrains throughout the gathering. This motif began promisingly with outreach activities with the Kendall-Whittier School, a majority Latinx primary school in Tulsa, an initiative combining academic conference-going with curricular interventions in public schools, offering a timely model deserving of wider consideration by scholarly bodies in an era anticipating public education budget cuts.

Given this strong start, the conference unfolded with many fine interventions. An excellent two-part session, organized by Drew Lopenzina on the indigenous archive, invited conversations between historians and archivists from the Chickasaw and Cherokee nations, as well as of the American Indian Movement, with speakers including Jerry "Catcher" Thompson, Katie Chiles, Kelly Wisecup, and Christopher Zellner interrogating the positionality of the researcher as well as the histories and protocols of collections. Addressing the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act and sharing bibliographies on decolonial approaches (Chiles), these interrogations unleashed frank considerations of best practices informed by decolonial and sovereignty movements, homing in upon considerations of the sacred, of place, of ceremony, of political resistance, of allegiance, and of genealogy. In this spirit, the SEA made the conference a unique space of unlearning as well as skills development, from paleography to protocols and artifacts, aimed at diverse and pluralist approaches to historiography.

An excellent keynote address by Chadwick Allen, surveying young adult literatures, examined works in which tropes of time travel exposed racialized imaginaries of "pre-Columbian" Turtle Island penned by settler authors. Allen's careful tracing of discourse making the building of mounds in the Americas the background of adventure stories shaped a potent historiographical intervention into the doing of narrative repetition, as well as the cultural work of indigenous artists pressing against the agglomeration of settler story cycles. Another effective intervention, the panel "Anti-racist Early American Studies," coordinated by Brigitte Fielder, shared potent insights into conventional institutional and structural racisms, as well as preoccupations with whiteness, across historical institutions, research, and pedagogy. As formulated by participants' examinations, interventions raised pointed questions about diversity in research groups and on faculties as well as calls for pluralizing areas of research, drawing particular attention to the vote to shift the SEA's periodicity to pre-1830 (in lieu of pre-1800). As a scholar grounded in performance studies, I was especially appreciative of SEA contributors' engagements with embodied practices, notably where these pluralize research methods, as with Elizabeth Maddock Dillon's presentation on dances, set girls, and the "performative commons" (New World Drama, 2014). Such scholarship addresses a gap in performance studies of contexts before 1800–50, while bringing performance studies into historiographical engagements with the evidentiary—notably where performance studies, running the risk of perpetuating a form of presentism, misses performativity's at times elusive historicization. Kathleen Donegan, pushing insightfully upon method, beautifully observed the aperture of empirical frameworks, theorizing an ethics of speculative research in sites where secrecy, subjection, and silence have long shaped practices of historiography.

Again potently revealing histories' political significance as cultural discourse, the extraordinary panel "Early American Studies as Public and Political Intervention" offered a vivid skein of politically engaged approaches to history. Roy Boney, Jr., and Jeff Edwards, of the Cherokee Language Program and Cherokee Nation Education Services Group respectively, spoke about the history of the Cherokee syllabary, inaugurated by Sequoyah's innovations in early nineteenth-century Native American movable type and printing presses. Then, recounting initiatives led by the speakers to design fonts and...