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p r e f a c e ∂ This interdisciplinary edition of the Pennsylvania treaties that Benjamin Franklin printed is the first since Julian Boyd’s limited-issue printing of five hundred librarybound copies in 1938. A new edition to update his work could not realistically have been accomplished any sooner. Since the late thirties, a sea change in the approach to tribal-colonial relations and the interpretation of written records of Native American speech has begun to occur. Significant theoretical and applied advances in established fields like colonial American history and the history of linguistics, and newly emerged fields such as Native American Studies and literary theory,make possible a complete reconsideration of the place of the treaties in both general and intellectual history. Some of this sea change arises directly from the intervention of twentiethcentury Native intellectuals and activists in reclaiming their intellectual heritage and its treatment in our social institutions. Without the emergence of a Native American Studies field increasingly influenced and directed by Native Americans, it would be difficult to imagine an American Studies field that in the past decade has destabilized the idea of natural borders for the United States. Native American Studies has restored to our imaginary about the North American continent the realization that its early colonial-age international borders were constituted mainly by tribal Indian nations and that many of these nations still form the geopolitical terrain of the continent’s historical development. Historical actors like Franklin lived within this terrain, not beyond it. The conceptual perspectives of Native Americans and the work of Native American Studies in recovering Native American intellectual history are also beginning to have an impact on other arenas like natural resource management, the U.S. federal court system, and segments of the film industry such as historical documentary. This revolution in thought has allowed us to see that these treaties are not merely concrete artifacts bearing witness to historical events. It has allowed us to recognize that they are not uncomplicated vehicles for the rhetorical eloquence of x preface Native American leaders. It has allowed us to understand Franklin’s role in their printing as interconnected with his other roles as a legislative leader in Pennsylvania ’s young government. The treaties are complex, intercultural instruments that demand recognition of how both colonial politics and Native American politics shaped them. In addition, as readers approaching the treaties from historical, literary ,biographical,or legal angles,we begin to recognize how our own contexts shape our interpretations of them. Understanding the treaties is an exercise not only in historical self-awareness but also in looking from a number of different contemporary angles. A reader feels compelled now to step across national, social, and vocational boundaries to ask persons in different positions to describe what they see. A short history of interpretation from just one angle—­that of my own field, literary studies—­helps us understand the changing event that the reading of a treaty through history has been. When Benjamin Franklin first printed the treaties, he considered them one of the first native American literary forms.1 He justified his printing of them in part on the basis of their uniqueness in comparison to European literary forms. He promoted their sale with a kind of self-evident acceptance of their status and reception as literature.By 1928,when a literature professor named Lawrence C.Wroth rediscovered the treaties,he faced the neglect of this literary type “as literature” among the sea of genres like narrative prose, nonfiction prose, poetry , and drama, which seemed to his contemporaries more obviously literary.2 Subsequent renditions tended to collapse these distinctions.The spate of interest in Indian oratory and Indian eloquence,especially from around 1930 until about 1979, was characterized by the extraction of particular speeches and passages from larger records such as complete treaties. Through this movement, the utterances of Native American leaders were wrested from their original contexts and political particularities, with a resulting abstraction of their protests and of their societal critiques. The focus on mere oratorical eloquence not only tore fragments of utterances out of the social space of the treaty, assigning them to the realm of nonfiction prose as essay, sermon, and the like, but it also cast those fragments in a melancholic or tragic mode which, Ojibwa scholar Gerald Vizenor has observed, relegated both U.S. injustice toward Native Americans and their resistance against that injustice to the irrecoverable past.3 Treatments of this specific series of treaties by...

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