Pictograph as Epitaph: Reading Algonquian Pictography in the Removal Period

This article assembles a genealogy of Algonquian pictographs as they appear in settler texts alongside Indigenous explications and uses of pictographic writing during the removal period. While Euro-American ethnographers, poets, and novelists participated in mythmaking around Native American literacies to justify their tenuous moral authority and land claims, Indigenous writers were drawing on their own textual traditions to maintain intellectual and national sovereignty in the face of colonial power. Both of these impulses within early American literature demonstrate how the pictographic writing of Algonquian-speaking peoples became a key site through which settler and Indigenous Americans negotiated territorial sovereignty in the 1830s.