Appreciations

As a scholar based in early American studies, I would like to honor the impact of LaVonne Ruoff's work on my home field. Her scholarship has made it possible to think about early American literature in entirely new ways. Her recovery and republication of the Mohegan writer Samson Occom's Sermon at the Execution of Moses Paul served as a clarion call to early Americanists to begin thinking about Native Americans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as sophisticated and authoritative readers and writers, not just objects of literary representation. Now, a rising generation of early Americanists is trying to continue her work by recovering more texts and more textual traces of Native American authority from the colonial-era archives so that we can all better appreciate the longevity and power of American Indian intellectual traditions.