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Reviewed by:
  • Literary Indians: Aesthetics and Encounter in American Literature to 1920 by Angela Calcaterra
  • Joshua David Bellin (bio)
Literary Indians: Aesthetics and Encounter in American Literature to 1920
angela calcaterra
University of North Carolina Press, 2018 246 pp.

Angela Calcaterra’s Literary Indians makes a significant contribution to the ongoing reevaluation of American literary history using the tools of Indigenous Studies. Focusing on Native texts, material culture, and aesthetic practices from the early eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries, Calcaterra rejects the conventional understanding of the “literary Indian” as a “construct of Euro-American literary imagination or national feeling” (2); instead, she models a literary history that takes into account “actual Indigenous people whose preexisting and evolving aesthetic practices contributed to American literary production and influenced Euro-American writing in precise ways” (2–3). In her pursuit of this project, Calcaterra looks to diverse forms of Indigenous aesthetics— as embodied in Chickasaw deerskin maps, Iroquois ceremonials, Mohegan woodsplint baskets, and more—to propose “new methods of reading the Indigenous content in American literature, methods attuned to Indigenous perspectives and the forms and sensibilities they enabled or disrupted” (7). The result is a suggestive and largely convincing alternative poetics of American literature that offers promising new directions for future research in the field.

In each of her book’s five chapters, Calcaterra proposes an Indigenous aesthetic context for rereading the literature, Native and non-Native, of its time and place. Thus her first chapter pairs the deerskin maps of southeastern Indian peoples with William Byrd’s History of the Dividing Line to demonstrate how “Indigenous representational conventions intersected those of the colonists” in the early eighteenth century (18); she suggests [End Page 223] that the often-remarked incoherence of Byrd’s text can be traced to the complex and contested history of physical and aesthetic space in the colonial era, as “Byrd’s literary representation of place is pulled in many different directions by the Native narratives and spaces he encounters or describes” (18–19). For Calcaterra, the Byrd text offers a salient example of the ways in which the “place-based identities and authority” (28) of Indian peoples are encoded in American literary productions, which emerge from an array of local histories and geographies that belie any singular understanding of land, settlement, or story. As she sums up: “Indians were part of a dynamic process of history making, cartographic delineation, and literary formation on the North American landscape” (46).

Calcaterra’s second chapter pursues this insight via an examination of the letters and other writings of Samson Occom and Joseph Johnson, the two best-known Mohegan Christian missionaries of the late eighteenth century. Here, Calcaterra situates missionary writing within the context of Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) “expressive practice” (51–52), in particular the Condolence Ceremony so central to the Confederacy’s founding narratives and to ongoing intertribal as well as intercultural diplomacy. Perhaps because of the familiarity of the Condolence Ceremony and its associated materials, such as wampum belts, I find this chapter the least revelatory in the book; though Calcaterra claims that the significance of Haudenosaunee ritual to missionary activity and writing has been “largely overlooked” (50), such a claim itself overlooks a good quarter century of scholarship on just this connection (particularly in respect to the Jesuit missions to New France). Thus, though I find no fault with Calcaterra’s conclusion that Mohegan missionary writings “unite English letters and Haudenosaunee eloquence” to “create a literature grounded in Indigenous sacred, political, metaphorical, and material conventions” (75), I cannot help feeling that this claim does not significantly advance or complicate our understanding of an already well-documented material and aesthetic exchange.

Much more illuminating are the three chapters that follow, each of which focuses on the continuing relevance of Indigenous aesthetics to the literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As Calcaterra points out, the preponderance of literary scholarship on this period focuses on how “stereotypes and figures of Indians became detached from the particularities of . . . Indigenous aesthetic practice” (82); and, important though such scholarship remains, it runs the risk of validating Euro-American [End Page 224] discourse on Indian evanescence if it is not counterbalanced by an examination of...

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