Red Ink: Native Americans Picking up the Pen in the Colonial Period

Notes

Notes Introduction. Survival Writing: Contesting the Pen and Ink Work of Colonialism 1. William Apess, “A Son of the Forest,” On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, A Pequot, ed. Barry O’Connell (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, [1829] 1992), 60. Undoubtedly Apess became aware of the Cherokee Phoenix, as he toured on the lecture circuit with Elias Boudinot in 1832 as part of an effort to fortify public opinion against the impending Cherokee removal. But at the time of his writing his autobiography (1829), Apess may not yet have known of the Cherokee press and syllabary. The Phoenix, founded in 1828, had only been in existence for about a year at this time. See also Elias Boudinot, Cherokee Editor: The Writings of Elias Boudinot, ed. Theda Perdue (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983). 2. In his autobiography Apess writes of being abused by his Pequot grandmother who had fallen prey to alcoholism. After having several of his bones broken when he was roughly four years old, Apess was bound out to white families in the area of Colchester, Connecticut until he ran away at the age of fifteen and ended up enlisting in the army to fight the War of 1812. See Apess, “Son of the Forest.” 3. Samson Occom, The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan: Leadership and Literature in Eighteenth-Century Native America, ed. Joanna Brooks (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 52. 4. Anonymous, “New England’s First Fruits,” ET, 58. 5. News, Opinion, “The Barnstable Patriot Says that Mr. Apes Was Arrested at Marshpee Plantation on the 4th,” Portsmouth Journal of Literature and Politics, July 7, 1833, Issue 28. 6. Vizenor’s “Manifest Manners” are the historical and rhetorical strategies adopted by a dominant colonial culture through which the indigenous population is misrepresented and delegitimized as a civilization. See Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1994). 7. William Apess, “Eulogy on King Philip,” On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, A Pequot, ed. Barry O’Connell (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, [1836] 1992), 278. 8. Such was the projected fate of Apess’ fellow Pequot who were brutally massacred in the 1636–1637 engagement known as the Pequot War. See Alfred A. Cave, The Pequot War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996). 9. Vizenor, Manifest Manners, 11–12. 323 10. Ibid., 18. 11. Ibid., 45. 12. Douglas Edward Leach, Flintlock and Tomahawk: New England in King Philip’s War (Hyannis, MA: Parnassus Imprints, 1958), 6. 13. Ibid., 4. 14. Christopher Columbus, The Four Voyages, ed. and trans. J. M. Cohen (New York: Penguin Books, 1969), 56. 15. Amerigo Vespucci, “Letter to Pier Soerini, Confalonier of the Republic of Florence,” The English Literatures of America 1500–1800, ed. Myra Jehlen and Michael Warner (New York: Routledge, 1997), 22. 16. Edward Winslow, A Relation or Journall of the Beginning and Proceeding of the English Plantation Setled at Plimoth (London: John Bellamie, 1622), 68. This text is often referred to as Mourt’s Relation. 17. See Columbus, The Four Voyages, 192–193. Cemies were described by Columbus as “wooden images carved in relief” (192). 18. Ibid., 192. 19. Fray Ramone Pané, An Account of the Antiquities of the Indians, ed. Jose Juan Arrom, trans. Susan C. Griswold (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 20. 20. Edward Winslow, Good Newes from New England: A True Relation of Things Very Remarkable at the Plantation of Plimoth in New England (Bedford, MA: Applewood Books, 1624), 22–23. 21. Bartolomé de las Casas, In Defense of the Indians, trans. Stafford Poole (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1992), 30. 22. As Winslow notes in A Relation, the presumed failure of Natives to improve upon the land made it not only imperative, but legal, for Europeans to take ownership . He writes, “As the ancient Patriarkes therefore removed from straiter places into more roomthy, where the Land lay idle and waste, and none used it, though there dwelt inhabitants by them . . . So it is lawful now to take a land which none useth, and make use of it” (Relation, 68). 23. Winslow, Good Newes, 3. 24. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). 25. Thomas King, The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 2. 26. Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 37. 27. Robert Allen...