The Role of Native American Voices in Rethinking Early American Literary Studies

In his study of Native American autobiography and law, David Carlson seeks to take part in "critical conversations" about the generic definition of autobiography, methodology in scholarship on law and literature, and "the viability of 'authenticity' as a critical term in the study of Native American literatures" (2). Gordon Sayre's book, which seeks an answer to his question as to how Native American military leaders sometimes became beloved heroes within early American literary texts, is similarly ambitious. Sayre focuses on "the entire phenomenon of North American native resistance struggles and the leaders who organized them as represented not only in dramas, epic poems, and historical novels but also in popular histories such as Francis Parkman's The Conspiracy of Pontiac (1851), in the transcribed speeches by these native leaders, and in the documents created by soldiers, traders, and missionaries directly involved in these conflicts from the conquest of New Spain through the War of 1812" (3).

Both of these books are meticulously researched, clearly written, and deeply engaged in the currents of American literary studies. As I will detail, each provokes different questions as to where early Americanists might seem to be headed vis à vis the role of Indigenous voices in future reconceptualizations of basic issues of their field. Before discussing some of those issues, though, I want to say clearly that both books share an importance to the field that makes them deserving of wide readership.

Carlson organizes his study primarily around a discussion of Pequot writer William Apess and Dakota author Charles Alexander Eastman. These important figures are treated in two chapters each of Sovereign Selves, and Carlson also includes two introductory chapters that discuss the importance of legal discourse to Native American literature and history and an analysis of the ways in which one specific treaty, the 1784 Treaty of Fort Stanwix between the United States and the Senecas, provides an important basis for Seneca rhetorical responses to American colonialism.

Through all of these chapters, Carlson both advances a set of ideas that have been expressed in Native American literary studies and makes a provocative and persuasive point about the legal basis of identity formation for American Indians. That is, Carlson extends a discussion that runs through the work of various scholars, including Jace Weaver, Maureen Konkle, and others, about the centrality of legal and policy issues to Native American literary and rhetorical production. In focusing on autobiography, though, Carlson pursues these ideas to the point of making a case that the formation of ideas of the self that occurs among Native Americans in various eras also derives from legal discourse. In other words, legal ideas constitute the parameters in which the new sorts of Native identity play out in the unfolding of colonialism among American Indian nations.

In a previous generation of scholarship, as most of those with even a nodding acquaintance I hope will agree, deployments of new ways of being Native American have been seen as coming from much more vaguely rendered notions of acculturation or assimilation. Some of the more interesting work in recent years has specified these processes to a greater extent, but has looked to educational and religious institutions for the locations from which these new ideas regarding identity have derived.

Carlson's argument has the benefit not only of holding up across a wide swath of time (the distance, after all, between Apess in New England and New York in the 1820s and 1830s to Charles Eastman across the twists and turns of the Progressive era is vast) but also of locating the shifting geography of Native ways of self-understanding in the middle of processes of colonial domination rather than in secondary or tertiary places. Apess, as a figure responding as someone whose history is deeply marked by near-annihilation during...