"Meteors, Ships, Etc.": Native American Histories of Colonialism and Early American Archives

In his 1893 book Life and Traditions of the Red Man, the Penobscot Abenaki man Joseph Nicolar offers an account of Penobscot encounters with colonists in the seventeenth century. In the book, the Penobscots confront a mystifying fog that covers the earth and creates a famine, during which time the people suffer poor health and altered access to resources, becoming increasingly "desperate" and "disheartened" in their attempts to find food (99). They discover with the help of their "spiritual men" and an elderly woman who temporarily takes the form of a loon that the fog is caused by the "spiritual power" of unfamiliar men traveling west across the ocean (99, 101). The loon woman advises the Penobscots in their knowledge of and preparations for these travelers' appearance. Shortly before the Penobscots sight the Europeans traveling on the ocean, the loon woman transforms into a ball of fire that appears in the sky and falls into the water, a sign, Nicolar writes, that the Europeans are on their way to Wabanaki lands.¹ Yet as the ball of fire falls into the water, it stands in the text as a phenomenon that changes the Penobscots' material world by providing new "implements" or tools for obtaining sustenance and ending the famine (105).

Nicolar's book has some parallels with the stories of colonization told by Europeans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in which a ball of fire or comet precedes the colonists' appearance. Colonists writing decades apart and from various places described what they insisted were causal relations among comets, colonization, and often the outbreak of disease in Native communities, alternately attributing these interpretations to Native people and offering their own analyses.² These colonial texts and their literary progeny established longstanding literary and historical narratives: their descriptions of dying or absent people offer one origin for Euro- and US Americans' obsession with describing Native disappearance and loss, a practice that continued in nineteenth-century "Vanishing Indian" novels and is still present in contemporary debates about mascots and appropriation.³ Furthermore, the colonial texts commenting on Native peoples' experiences of colonization formed archival foundations for American literary studies: they were among the first documents collected in nineteenth-century US archives and histories, standing for over a century as the field's originary texts.⁴

These literary genealogies and archival arrangements established aesthetic and historical categories that privileged genres like the novel and narratives of Native diminishment. As a result, American literary studies has been "bounded" by the documents and policies of colonialism, what Robert Warrior (Osage) limns as "treaties, federal recognition, and government-to-government relations" ("Organizing" 1685–1986). In addition to foregrounding the colony and nation, these boundaries, as Mark Rifkin argues, obstruct the "literary inclusion" of Native American literatures, because those texts often do not align with American literary studies' generic and aesthetic norms (133) and are instead defined as "foreign" and unknowable (Brooks, "Turning").

I build on these calls for new configurations of the field from scholars like Brooks, Rifkin, and Warrior by investigating the literary genealogies in which Life and Traditions participates. In particular, Life and Traditions urges a reorientation of the generic, temporal, and archival boundaries that define American literary studies. While Nicolar's book shares thematic and narrative threads with the colonial texts describing comets and colonization, it introduces very different methods for representing and interpreting these phenomena. Nicolar adopts an alternative timeline for colonization, and he represents disease in ways that resist colonial descriptions, choosing to focus on climatic changes and threats to community resources. By examining Nicolar's text as a key history of early North America, in this essay I relocate some of the archival authority bestowed on colonial literatures, even as I hope to avoid simply merging Native literatures into existing US archival, historical, or literary configurations. Instead, I ask how the boundaries and methodologies of American literary studies might need to shift if scholars take Native historical representations and archival practices as critical frameworks for the literary history of North America.

Nicolar's book and related Wabanaki writings challenge...