American Indian Nonfiction: An Anthology of Writings, 1760s–1930s (review)

Although earlier scholars of Native American culture often defined Indians as essentially "oral" and Native culture as antithetical to literacy, much current scholarship has turned its attention to the long history of Indian literary production. Bernd Peyer's new anthology, American Indian Nonfiction: An Anthology of Writings, 1760s–1930s , makes pointedly clear just how long-standing was Native Americans' sustained engagement with the written word. Peyer purposefully chose not to make this anthology an encyclopedic collection of texts. Rather, his selections reveal a number of Native North Americans "for whom writing was a major occupation and who produced a substantial body of writings . . . that reflect in some way upon the development of Indian-white relations in the United States" (ix).

Quite a few of the included authors were so prolific that scholarly editions of their collected works have arrived on the academic scene in the past two decades. Peyer's anthology comes on the heels of On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot, edited by Barry O'Connell and published in 1992; Alexander Posey's The Fus Fixico Letters, edited by Daniel F. Littlefield and Carol A. Hunter and published in 1993; To Do Good to My Indian Brethren: The Writings of Joseph Johnson 1751–1776, edited by Laura J. Murray and published in 1998; and The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan: Leadership and Literature in Eighteenth-Century Native America, edited by Joanna Brooks and published in 2006.

The anthology's introductory chapter provides a solid historical background to these texts. At the end of each author's section, Peyer includes a brief biography of the author. The introduction and biographies contextualize the selections with discussions of important events in the development and use of writing and printed text by Indigenous North Americans. Peyer charts missionary activities and religious revivals of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, changes to educational structures within tribal communities, the antiremoval campaigns (victorious or otherwise) undertaken by different tribes, and historical shifts in the policies of the U.S. government and Euroamerican sociocultural attitudes toward tribal nations in the post–Civil War era.

In organizing the first half of the anthology, which is composed mainly of pre-twentieth-century texts (with notable exceptions like Will Rogers and Alexander Posey), Peyer takes a regionalist perspective. The first two sections include works by Mohegans, Mohicans, Pequots, and Senecas; the third section contains works by Cherokees and Creeks; and the fourth section includes works by Ojibwes, Potawatomis, and Odawas. This approach acknowledges the regional networks between Native intellectuals that formed, partially facilitated through the use of writing. Furthermore, it underscores the fact that that the threats that North American tribes faced were often local, the results of an inconsistently applied, but consistently violent, colonialist policy. Many of the texts focus on similar themes: the struggle to maintain ancestral landholdings, the hypocrisy of so-called Christian Euroamericans, and the public debates over fraudulent treaties.

The last half of the anthology focuses on post–Civil War and early-twentieth-century authors "who wrote on national issues, most of whom were members of the Society of American Indians [SAI], the first national Indian intellectual network" (ix). This section makes apparent both the ways in which these later intellectuals built on the work of their ancestors and the constellations of intellectual and political connections created by the SAI. Peyer explains a shift in the way Native Americans during the postbellum era engaged in public discourse: to confront an increasing racist colonizer, the authors "had to operate within the extremely narrow margin of racial tolerance" (27). Thus, the politics represented in some of these texts makes some modern scholars uneasy. Regardless of whether or not scholars can sympathize with the authors' politics, they can sympathize with their reasons: these intellectuals worked constantly to benefit their communities.

Although the last section includes quite a few Native women writers, the anthology is thin...