Removable Type: Histories of the Book in Indian Country, 1663-1880

6. Proprietary Authorship

( 150 ) chapter Six proprietary authorship “proprietary authorship” is a term that describes a special, social category of writing in which the creator has secured copyright, becoming “visible ” in the public sphere as a political entity given legal rights by statute law.¹ Such authorship emerged in America in the 1820s to offer “a radical redefinition of what it meant to communicate to a reading public.”² In Indian Country, Tuscarora writer David Cusick was the first proprietary author of record. His book, David Cusick’s Sketches of Ancient History of the Six Nations (1828), was the first Native-authored, Native-printed, and Native-copyrighted text. Its title page explicitly points out that this work is “owned”by its author. This is “David Cusick’s History,” no one else’s. On the verso is the requisite paragraph from the New York district court that officially acknowledges Cusick’s copyright. This declaration of legal identity and ownership and the title’s forceful use of the possessive are counterpoised against Cusick’s selfdeprecatory introductory comments: I have long been waiting in hope that some of my people who have received an English education, would have undertaken a work as to give a Sketch of the Ancient History of the Six Nations; but found no one seemed to concur in the matter, after some hesitation I determined to commence the work; but found the history involved with fables, and besides, examining myself, finding so small educated that it was impossible for me to compose the work without much difficulty. . . . I, however, took up a resolution to continue the work, which I have taken much pains procuring the materials, and translating it into English language. I have endeavored to throw some light on the history of the Proprietary Authorship ( 151 ) original population of the country, which I believe have never been recorded. I hope this little work will be acceptable to the public.³ The preface is signed—in capital letters—david cusick. It also significantly locates its production site, date, and year as “Tuscarora Village, June 10th, 1825.” The first edition of the work also notes that it was printed at “Lewiston, at the Tuscarora Village.” Within the context of this book, these introductory authorizing gestures may be construed to suggest the nation-centeredness of Cusick’s work. It was not only copyrighted by a Tuscarora intellectual, but its type was set and its pages were printed by Tuscarora community members.The gestures may also reflect Cusick’s wish for his book to be read as a local (and Indian) work. If this is indeed the case, then Cusick’s preface, title, and decision to copyright his material all point toward what Robert Warrior has termed “intellectual sovereignty”—a form of “cultural criticism that is grounded in American Indian experiences” and is akin to the tribal sovereignty that Native peoples in the United States struggle to maintain each and every day.⁴ Whatever the case, Cusick’s preface speaks of the painstaking process of cultural preservation involved in this English translation of Haudenosaunee stories,which was compounded by struggles with assimilated intellectual categories like “fables.” Yet the Six Nations remain Cusick’s “people,”and the second half of the preface emphasizes Cusick’s search for sovereignty in print. Evidence from later editions of Cusick’s work points even more firmly toward sovereignty as the central issue in the book’s production.In the second edition (which claimed a print run of 7,000 copies), Cusick added illustrations (“rude woodcuts,” Francis Parkman later called them), which he probably carved himself. By including these illustrations, Cusick simultaneously engages more Native paratextual material than was available in the printed text and demonstrates his authorial prerogative by choosing for illustration those narrative moments he considered pivotal in the stories he gathered together as the precontact history of the Six Nations. Other evidence, drawn from outside the physical properties of the two editions, suggests the broader American cultural context that may have influenced Cusick’s decision to seek copyright and become a proprietary author.In The Conspiracy of Pontiac (1870), Francis Parkman digressed in a footnote on the physical properties of David Cusick’s History to offer a revealing glimpse into Anglo-Americans’ attitudes toward American Indian authors’ efforts ( 152 ) Proprietary Authorship to master print culture. “Cusick,” Parkman relates with typical anti-Indian condescension, was an old Tuscarora Indian, who, being disabled...