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P r e f a c e Early Native American studies have blossomed in recent decades, and it has been a privilege to engage with this field at such an exciting moment. Ten or fifteen years ago extraordinary work on Native Americans in colonial New England was emerging from history and anthropology departments, including Jean O’Brien’s Dispossession by Degrees (1998), Daniel Mandell’s Behind the Frontier (1996), Colin Calloway’s The American Revolution in Indian Country (1995), Karen Ordhal Kupperman’s Indians and English (2000), Gregory Dowd’s A Spirited Resistance (1992), and of course Jill Lepore’s The Name of War (1998). Kevin McBride, Kathleen Bragdon, and William Simmons, all in anthropology departments, were also doing exciting work on early Native materials.1 However, with the exception of critical work on Native American autobiography by Arnold Krupat, David Brumble, David Murray, and Hertha Wong, work in English departments was focused almost exclusively on Native novels and poetry and translations of Native oratory, all in the context of twentieth-century literary production.2 As scholar Craig Womack has recently pointed out, this was a literary and cultural moment in which it seemed that nobody was interested in discussing the writing of Native Americans from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century.3 My own book, Writing Indians (2000), was an attempt to integrate what I came to understand as a rich and extraordinarily underappreciated body of material into a cultural-studies model in which scholars in English departments all over the country turned their attention to material culture or nontraditional, extraliterary texts, using the tools and strategies of English departments—close reading, theoretical modes of analysis, and attention to linguistic and structural features of expression . My goal in Writing Indians was to maintain a sense of what I as a literary scholar and close analytic reader of texts had to offer works that had already received significant attention from history and anthropology departments but that were largely unknown in English departments. Today the terrain of English studies has changed dramatically, and Native x Preface American texts that were once only available in archives are now widely reprinted and essential reading in American literature anthologies. Furthermore, the ever-increasing importance of the intertwined fields of composition and rhetoric has paved the way for a more nuanced examination of literacy and its practices. Deborah Brandt, Harvey Graff, and others have developed a rich theoretical background for the study of literacy and its acquisition, in both a historical and a contemporary perspective.4 Scott Lyons has shaped that general context in terms of Native writing experiences, coining the term rhetorical sovereignty as a way of thinking through Native self-determination—both political and cultural—and written discourse. Through the work of these scholars it has become increasingly clear that literacy is a vexed terrain in which conflicting intentions and values attach to a set of skills loaded with moral, political, and economic freight; texts that help us recover some of those conflicts have become increasingly valued as objects of study. Meanwhile, the field of literary studies has once and for all exploded the traditional canon, engaging enthusiastically with a wide array of extraliterary texts such as letters, diaries, and petitions while also engaging, with everincreasing sophistication, the words and expressions of those previously passed over, such as men and women of color and the marginally literate. Scholarship in the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of History of the Book reminds us that as scholars we lack a full sense of the complex rituals of power and exchange that form the base from which Native Americans participated in the colonial American world of New England, even as it uncovers the material and cultural nuances of books, readers, and literate practice more generally. Recent works by Eve Tavor Bannet, Phillip Round, Matthew Brown, Matt Cohen, and others have supplemented the more general resources in colonial American book history, such as Hugh Amory and David Hall’s first volume of The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, Patricia Cohen’s The Story of A, and E. Jennifer Monaghan’s Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America, all of which situate the materiality of textual production in terms of the ideological basis of reading, writing, and culture.5 This engagement has taken place with a heretofore unimaginable intensity in the field of early American studies , with scholars like Joanna Brooks, Kristina Bross, Laura Stevens, Laura Murray, David Murray, Sandra Gustafson, Josh Bellin, Bernd Peyer, Gordon Sayre...

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