In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • “Make Your Minds Perfectly Easy”Sagoyewatha and the Great Law of the Haudenosaunee
  • Granville Ganter (bio)

Of all the Native orators of the early nineteenth century, Sagoyewatha (pronounced Shay-gó-ye-wátha or Sa-go-ye-wat-ha) was one of the most famous in Angloamerica. Better known as Red Jacket, for the red coat given to him by the British for his services as a message runner in the Revolution, Sagoyewatha’s defiant opposition to missionary presence on Seneca reservations and his resistance to land sales earned him the title the “last of the Senecas” in his obituary in the Niles Weekly Register (13 February 1830: 411). His speeches appeared in broadsides, pamphlets, and even in schoolbooks during the early national period (Densmore 69). Although these records are subject to a variety of editing and transcription problems, a large number were translated by experienced interpreters, and many evoke the figurative language and irony for which Sagoyewatha became known (Taylor 23).1 And in contrast to many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century publications where Natives took no part in the print circulation of their words, toward the end of his career, Sagoyewatha had his speeches published in newspapers and handbills as part of a deliberate publicity campaign that the Senecas undertook after the War of 1812 to protect their lands.

Given that the Senecas often intended to enter the Euroamerican sphere of printed discourse after the Revolution, this essay interprets the archive of Red Jacket speeches (as well as those of a few other politically active Senecas of the early national period) from an Indigenous cultural framework. It foregrounds Seneca traditions and thoughtways that have received only token acknowledgment from literary scholars over the past two hundred years, drawing on historical and anthropological work (both Native and non-Native authored) that has not yet moved significantly into English literature studies. Most of all, it looks to Red Jacket’s own words for the [End Page 121] principles to guide the interpretation of this literature. In short, this essay is a preliminary attempt to develop a literary criticism of Red Jacket based on the practices and stylistics of Haudenosaunee (People of the Longhouse, Five Nations, Six Nations, or Iroquois) culture.

The idea that the literary traditions of the Haudenosaunee could include a distinctive hermeneutics is controversial, and it is connected to an ongoing debate about the possibility—or existence—of Native American literary theory. Taking their cue from Simon Ortiz’s 1981 essay “Towards a National Indian Literature,” in their collection American Indian Literary Nationalism, Robert Warrior, Jace Weaver, and Craig Womack lament that Native American literary criticism has been too long out of the hands of Native American leadership, and they argue that the interpretation of literature by Indigenous people needs to be guided by Native authority more than it currently is (that is, by consulting Indian informants of the past and present, and by paying respect to the sovereignty of the First Nations). In agreement with Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, they complain that just at the moment when Native scholars are beginning to take a tenured foothold in the academy, a fashionable skepticism about the authenticity of Indian identity threatens to undermine the political future of Native America (Cook-Lynn 12–15). Although most Native American scholars would agree that the continuing marginalization of Native America demands remedy, not all feel that re-assertions of aesthetic identity would be much help: the year after American Indian Literary Nationalism appeared, the talented Ojibwe novelist and academic David Treuer published a manifesto asking if Native American literature “exists” at all (3–4). Louis Owens expressed similar doubts in the late 1990s with his collection of essays Mixedblood Messages. In contrast to those who believe that Native literature is a theoretically untenable concept, the co-authors of American Indian Literary Nationalism argue that Indigenous literary scholarship has only just begun in earnest and would benefit from more research about different Native nations (what Weaver calls “pluralist separatism”) as well as a frank recognition of the role of religion in shaping distinctive Native literatures and culture (Warrior’s thesis).

Probably the most influential recent work for re-imagining Native literary criticism on the national...

pdf