Assembled for use : Indigenous compilation and the archives of early Native American literatures

Book

Assembled for use : Indigenous compilation and the archives of early Native American literatures / Kelly Wisecup.

Wisecup, Kelly, 1981- (author.).

Summary:

Kelly Wisecup offers a sweeping account of early Native American literatures by examining Indigenous compilations: intentionally assembled texts that Native people made by juxtaposing and recontextualizing textual excerpts into new relations and meanings. Experiments in reading and recirculation, Indigenous compilations include Mohegan minister Samson Occom’s medicinal recipes, the Ojibwe woman Charlotte Johnston’s poetry scrapbooks, and Abenaki leader Joseph Laurent’s vocabulary lists. Indigenous compilations proliferated in a period of colonial archive making, and Native writers used compilations to remake the very forms that defined their bodies, belongings, and words as ethnographic evidence. This study enables new understandings of canonical Native writers like William Apess, prominent settler collectors like Thomas Jefferson and Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, and Native people who contributed to compilations but remain absent from literary histories. Long before current conversations about decolonizing archives and museums, Native writers made and circulated compilations to critique colonial archives and foster relations within Indigenous communities. wide-ranging, multidisciplinary look at Native American literature through non-narrative texts like lists, albums, recipes, and scrapbooks.

Record details

ISBN: 9780300243284
ISBN: 0300243286
Physical Description: xviii, 309 pages : illustrations, map ; 24 cm.
Publisher: New Haven : Yale University Press, [2021]
Copyright: ©2021

Content descriptions

Bibliography, etc. Note:: Includes bibliographical references (pages 269-294) and index.
Formatted Contents Note:: Introduction -- Chapter one. Recipe: plant vocabularies, Indigenous bodies, and antiquarian reprinting -- Interlude. William Apess's Bright gleams -- Chapter two. Extract: Cherokee nationhood and Indigenous archives of diplomacy -- Interlude. E. Pauline Johnson's Wild flowers -- Chapter three. Album: reading and recirculating poetry in Anishinaabe networks -- Interlude. Jane Johnston Schoolcraft's Unfinished scraps -- Chapter four. List: Abenaki histories and linguistic exchange -- Interlude. Carlos Montezuma's famous Indians -- Chapter five. Account: reading colonialism at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition -- Epilogue: Compilation's afterlives.