Ethnography and the Production of Foreignness in Indian Captivity Narratives

Since studies of Native American cultures have long been entangled in ethnographic discourse, it's not surprising that ethnography has entered literary and historical discussions of Indian captivity narratives. Ethnography has been perceived as a discursive bridge between different cultures, and captivity narratives' settings—despite their wide geographic distribution—have almost invariably been imagined as contact zones that forced hitherto foreigners into uneasy familiarity.¹ In the case of Indian captivity narratives, this motif of encounter or "middle ground" was coupled with claims for the texts' "ethnographic" components, suggesting that these accounts could be read as sources of information on Native American cultures.² The claim has seldom been supported by interdisciplinary engagement with anthropology, and in many readings any depiction of things Native American seems to qualify as "ethnographic." In her fascinating discussion of authorship in Susanna Johnson's captivity narrative, for example, Lorrayne Carroll writes that the text "interpolates footnotes, letters from colonial authorities, and ethnographic details."³ While footnotes and letters are distinguished from the rest of the narrative's prose, "ethnographic details" are not marked as such.

I problematize such claims through two eighteenth-century narratives: Memoirs of Odd Adventures, Strange Deliverances, etc., in the Captivity of John Gyles (1736) and A Narrative of the Captivity of Mrs. Johnson (1796). "Ethnography" disguises a complex set of assumptions regarding Native American cultures, portraying them tacitly as both foreign to and objects of U.S. culture.⁴ I argue that, rather than reflecting essential foreignness, these texts produce it. By bringing critical anthropology to bear on captivity narratives, I depart from the familiar focus on captives' identification with their captors because putative "ethnographic" descriptions often highlight a different dynamic: the construction of foreignness between Native Americans and colonial settlers.⁵ Through elaborate strategies of separation, captives and captors are represented as mutually foreign.

The differences and similarities between Gyles's and Johnson's narratives make these texts useful for examining cultural boundaries and foreignness. John Gyles was captured in Pemaquid, Maine, in 1689, at about the age of ten and spent nine years in captivity, six with Maliseets and three with a French Canadian fur trader. Upon returning to New England, he developed a military career. Susanna Johnson endured shorter captivity later in life: in 1754, expecting the birth of her fourth child, she had been captured in Charlestown, New Hampshire, had been carried to Canada, gave birth on the trail, and, after two and a half months in the Abenaki village St. Francis, spent almost three years in French jails before going home. Both texts were first published almost forty years after their protagonists returned from captivity; Gyles's title page declares that the narrative was "written by himself," but this may not be entirely true, and Johnson's text was composed by lawyer John C. Chamberlain.⁶ Although both texts have been found at least partially "ethnographic," more detailed attention has been given to Gyles's narrative in this regard, most prominently by anthropologist Pauline Turner Strong, who argues that "Gyles demonstrated considerable initiative in ethnographic exploration."⁷ As I will show, these narratives employ elaborate strategies of separation and resist potential erosions of cultural boundaries in order to construct the foreignness of Native Americans for an implied Anglo-American readership. This foreignness has long been a problematic, unacknowledged foundation of claims for the "ethnographic" components of captivity narratives.

I begin by historicizing the term "ethnography" and analyzing passages in Gyles's and Johnson's narratives for their possible relations to ethnographic discourse. Next, I problematize the application of "ethnography" to captivity narratives. By reviewing anthropological critiques of ethnography, I demonstrate that understanding foreignness as the result of strategies of separation is a more productive way of reading representations of Native Americans in captivity narratives. I then analyze separation strategies in Gyles's and Johnson's narratives, juxtaposing them with instances where potential challenges to separations are manipulated to enhance the representation of Native Americans as essentially foreign to both writers and implied readers. I conclude by contextualizing this discussion in relation to cultural boundaries and...