Notes
( 231 ) Notes Prologue 1. In the following discussion, I use the English translation of this manuscript, as it appears in Tac, “Indian Life and Customs,” 94. 2. Ibid. 3. In Kiowa Humanity, Jacki Rand discusses Pratt’s assimilation plans for the Fort Marion prisoners and how one Kiowa artist he enlisted to produce ledger drawings, Wo-haw, probably employed the art form to “express experiences and observations that radically challenged the discussions and patterns of the colonizers” (102). Introduction 1. Apess, On Our Own Ground, 120. Barry O’Connell argues that even though Experiences was not published until 1835, this passage “seems unambiguously a reference to A Son of the Forest, not an entirely new second autobiography, and thus suggests that some, if not most of Experiences was drafted before the writing of A Son of the Forest in 1828/29”(120n1). If O’Connell is right, then Apess had conceived of his entire career as a writer (and perhaps his whole public self-presentation) in terms of a broader culture of the book. 2. In 1653, Eliot had produced a combined primer and catechism in the Algonquian language. Between 1653 and 1663, he released portions of the Bible as they became available in translation. His efforts culminated in the 1663 Bible, with its complete Old and New Testaments all in one volume. See Eliot, Eliot Tracts (13–14), for more detail on the chronology of these texts. 3. Rice, Transformation of Authorship, 3. 4. Crain, Story of A, 4. 5. Gilmore, Reading Becomes a Necessity, title page. 6. Hall, Cultures of Print, 43, 51. 7. See also Willard B. Walker, “Native Writing Systems,” 158–86; and Warkentin, “In Search of ‘the Word,’” 16. 8. DeMallie and Parks,“Plains Indian Native Literatures,”126. Discussing the Lakota language manuscripts of George Sword (1847–1910),DeMallie has argued that such texts “are not . . . simply written versions of oral narratives but are instead a new type of written narrative” (126). 9. 18 U.S. Code, Section 1151. 10. My point here is not that oral traditions reached their perfection in printed versions , but merely that they entered into printed texts at this time, at the instigation of both Native and non-Native writers.This book will explore the vexed relationships that ( 232 ) Notes to Pages 9–14 obtained among the printed, oral, and semasiographic sign systems throughout Indian Country in the nineteenth century. 11. Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 3, 11. 12. Elmer,“Black Atlantic Archive,”161. In a similar way, historian Richard White has described a specific geographical location, the Pays d’en Haut (the Great Lakes region), during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as having given rise to an analogous field of cultural production he calls the “middle ground,” “the place in between: in between cultures, peoples, and in between empires and the nonstate world of villages” (Middle Ground, x). Philip Deloria’s recent reappraisal of White’s work focuses on “new cultural production within the frame of encounter”(“What Is the Middle Ground?”23). Only by underscoring the new cultural productions of Native peoples as they appear within the frame of encounters with Europeans, Deloria argues, can we move beyond failed narratives of the American Indian colonial experience that ignore “critical points of relation between Indians and non-Indians that lie outside military conflict, political negotiation, and economic exchange” (23). 13. Young Bear, Black Eagle Child, 78. 14. Womack, Red on Red, 60. 15. Cheyfitz, “(Post)Colonial Construction of Indian Country,” 55. 16. Womack, Red on Red, 11, 76. Alyssa Mt. Pleasant has articulated the situation that scholars now face: “How do historians understand alternating periods of plenty and times of deprivation; the regular, disruptive role alcohol played in American Indian lives; the impact of colonial encroachment, manifest in religious, economic, and territorial challenges? Do we see devastation and decline, adaptation and persistence, some combination of the two?” (“After the Whirlwind,” 52). 17. Donaldson, “Writing the Talking Stick,” 47, 2. 18. Axtell, “Power of Print,” 304. 19. Wogan, “Perceptions of European Literacy,” 408. 20.On the many “literacies”present in early New England,for example,see Wyss and Bross, introduction, Early Native Literacies: “Recent scholarship has worked to complicate [a] neat division between oral and literate culture. . . . Material objects played—and continue to play a significant role in Algonquian communicative practices. Burial goods, basket patterns, pictographs, mats that line the interiors of wigwams, and even utensils reinforce oral exchanges with physical inscriptions” (4). 21. Harriot, Brief and...
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