The 2018 Richard Beale Davis Prize: Philip H. Round

The prize committee is pleased to name Philip H. Round’s “Mississippian Contexts for Early American Studies” as the winner of the 2018 Richard Beale Davis prize for the best essay published in Early American Literature. Among the many worthy essays selected for publication in the journal this year, Round’s distinguished itself for its far-reaching implications for the field in general.

“Mississippian Contexts” shares with other contributions to this issue’s Forum on Methods and Materials in Native American and Indigenous Studies an investment in undoing a “lexicon crafted by the victors” that minimizes the significance of Native cultural production through binaries like textuality/orality, literature/folklore, rationality/mythology, and prehistory/history. Round’s essay engages with the legacy of each of these misleading distinctions in a particularly arresting challenge to received ideas about periodization. He begins by contemplating a twelfth-century copper repoussé plate representing Bird Man or Red Horn, a mythic figure whose iconography appears on material objects across the Mississippian world—which between 800 and 1600 AD extended from the Ohio River Valley south to present-day Georgia, and west to the Mississippi River and what is now Oklahoma. But Bird Man shows up in other places as well, notably in the narrative that Sam Blowsnake (Ho-Chunk) dictated in the 1980s. Considering these two distant citations of the same story, Round proposes that “the persistence of the Red Horn story and its use by a twentieth-century member of the Ho-Chunk nation offers us a window into a new methodology for understanding colonial America and the Indigenous textual sinews that knit together so many of its critical social and political relations.” The work of the essay is to substantiate that methodology by “reintroducing the Mississippian past as a viable, living historical context for studying the people and events that shaped early America.”

Because the Mississippian societies had dispersed from their urban centers prior to European contact, the Red Horn stories seem at first to lie outside the temporal scope of the field. And yet, as Forum editors Alyssa Mt. Pleasant, Caroline Wigginton, and Kelly Wisecup put it, “Round does not simply propose an earlier ‘early’ for early Americanists.” Drawing on archaeological evidence and “media-based historiography,” he observes how cosmologically significant concepts were embedded in spatial practices that persisted from the Mississippian period in the built environments of different Native nations in North America. Spaces such as the Creek chunky-yard reveal how, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, “Indigenous space not only shaped the flow of colonial power but also colored it with narrative meaning.” Such spatial and material practices can be read even through the distorting language of European observers like William Bartram. A “text-artifact” like the copperplates that feature Red Horn, he suggests, invited performative, adaptive storytelling—a “form of narrativity”—among later Native communities. Returning in conclusion to Blowsnake’s twentieth-century narrative, Round shows how its awkward transcription into a nineteenth-century writing system developed for a different language, the Great Lakes syllabary, makes it impossible to categorize as either oral or written. Instead, as with the Mississippian art, “the narrative is a highly crafted object whose mode of production and circulation are part and parcel of its meaning.”

While admirable for its detailed readings that weave together seemingly disparate objects in novel ways, Round’s essay reaches furthest at the level of its methodological and ethical implications: scholars of early America must help “restore Indigenous textual traditions like the Red Horn saga to their rightful place in the lived experiences of native peoples in America.” He argues persuasively that it is essential for scholars of early American literature to continue the hard work of formulating ways to “read” oral traditions, for doing so would allow us to better understand networks of textual transmission and citation that exist, and in some cases persist, beyond the confines of the alphabetic systems we call writing. Just as early American-ists have come to see the value in expanding our archives and our literacies in order to work...