Colonial Mediascapes: Sensory Worlds of the Early Americas

3. Indigenous Histories and ArchivalMedia in the Early Modern Great Lakes

3 Indigenous Histories and Archival Media in the Early Modern Great Lakes Heidi Bohaker For historians seeking to understand indigenous responses to colonialism in early America, or indigenous histories more broadly, the necessity of relying exclusively on sources authored by colonists has proved a frustrating limitation. In recent decades, scholars have thought carefully about the reliability of European-authored sources for the writing of indigenous histories. These researchers have integrated methodologies from comparative literature and history to understand their sources as constructions of European imaginations and discursive practices.¹ Few have arrived at so extreme a conclusion as literary critic Stephen Greenblatt, who argues in his study of the Columbian voyages that the lens through which readers attempt to view “the natives”in European writing is entirely opaque.² But Greenblatt and others have done such a thorough job analyzing the many problems of these European-authored sources that the utility of the sources for understanding indigenous histories has been called into question. For the earliest periods of encounter, where such sources are thinnest, the problem is magnified. As Richard White plainly put it in The Middle Ground, what historians have been able to reconstuct of 100 Heidi Bohaker the mid-seventeenth-century conflicts in the Great Lakes region is about people who “either had Jesuit missionaries among them or lived beside neighbours that did.”³ This raises a question: Are people who did not create archives of alphabetic writing inherently less knowable than those who did? If so, what is the historian to do? The reality is that indigenous peoples of the Great Lakes region did not produce such documentary records of alphabetic texts written in their own language in any significant quantity until the nineteenth century.4 Are we therefore left, as Richard White claims, to write about “a historical landscape that consists largely of dim shadows”?5 I argue instead that we should move beyond European and colonistauthored print and manuscript sources to study those that indigenous cultures created themselves. We can locate an indigenous-authored archive and use it productively in historical writing if we can redefine our concept of what an archive might be and what sources it might contain.To do so we must consider the worldview behind the sources, make room for culturally distinct ways of recording and communicating information about the past, and consider how such sources are understood within the society that created them.This includes allowing for the possibility that in some worldviews some sources are understood as having agency, and indeed might even be considered persons, as is the case of the aadizookaanag (sacred stories) of the Algonquianspeaking Anishinaabeg in the Great Lakes region.The aadizookaanag, or grandfathers, are both narratives and a class of persons. Such narratives carry knowledge, as do grandparents, and they are recognized as having power and life of their own. Such an archive would therefore include all the ways in which people recorded information and communicated with one another and, by extension, with other-than-human persons.6 This kind of archive would go far beyond collecting written or print sources, or even looking for their analogues. Instead, it would consider the capacities for recording and transmitting information (and to whom, and for whom) from within the cultural tradition. It is in this imagining of an expanded archive that the concept of an early American “mediascape”can be a useful theoretical tool. Arjun Indigenous Histories and Archival Media 101 Appadurai developed the concept as part of a larger explanatory framework to theorize the movements of peoples (ethnoscapes), ideas (ideoscapes), technologies (technoscapes), and wealth (financescapes) in the twenty-first-century “global cultural economy.”Appadurai chose the suffix “-scape” to explain abstract concepts and relationships between these concepts as a kind of topography in the physical world: real, and yet irregular, loosely bounded areas in contrast with the precision of geometric forms. For Appadurai, the common suffix -scape serves the inclusive purpose of indicating “that these are not objectively given relations which look the same from every angle of vision, but rather that they are deeply perspectival constructs, inflected by the historical, linguistic and political situatedness of different sorts of actors : nation-states, multinationals, diasporic communities, as well as sub-national groupings and movements (whether religious, political or economic), and even intimate face-to-face groups, such as villages, neighbourhoods and families.”7 While Appadurai envisions mediascapes as consisting primarily of electronic communications and “the images of...