Introduction

The introduction argues for recognition of specific Native American aesthetic and literary cultures prior to European arrival and highlights their ongoing influence and significance during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. During a period of American literary development known for white appropriation of Native American content, Native resistance to Euro-American settler colonialism involved aesthetic practices such as narrative mapping, visual art, storytelling, figurative representation, and adornment. These practices contributed to both Native and non-Native literary production, despite Euro-American authors’ assertions that sophisticated artistic traditions were a European import to the North American continent. Bringing the concepts “literary,” “aesthetic” and “representation” to bear on analysis of cross-cultural encounter, the introduction posits new modes of understanding points of connection or distance between Native and non-Native aesthetic practice.

Afterword

With a brief discussion of contemporary Indigenous dancing, the afterword reiterates that Native aesthetic practices have long been and remain a means of fostering tribal, national, and trans-Indigenous consciousness, as well as making purposeful connections with and distinctions from outsiders.

Trails

Chapter 4 argues that Indigenous story traditions are a crucial, overlooked context for understanding nineteenth-century American literature about “the West.” This chapter analyzes Pawnee and Osage narratives alongside Washington Irving’s Tour on the Prairies (1835) to demonstrate white authorial disorientation in the face of Indigenous storied space. Pawnee and Osage representations of journeys, crossings, and encounters along the network of trails that crossed the great plains guided these communities throughout the trying periods of US invasion and removal during the nineteenth century. The bodily discomfort and aesthetic disorientation depicted in Irving’s Tour on the Prairies is a result of his inability to connect with long-standing Indigenous movements and temporalities in this space. Similarly, scholarly misreading and neglect of this text is a product of a limited critical approach restricted to a singular authorial aesthetic. James Fenimore Cooper’s and Edwin James’s accounts of unsettling proximity to Native aesthetics close this chapter to suggest broader patterns of authorial disorientation.

Generational Objects

This chapter situates popular poet Lydia Huntley Sigourney’s writings not in the national literary marketplace she is known for mastering but among Mohegan tribal nationhood and its locally grounded forms. During the early nineteenth century, US authors turned to Indian subjects to cultivate a literary aesthetic that relied upon exclusive notions of national identity and sentiment. Encounter brought Sigourney into relation with other forms of fellow feeling than US nationalism, the philosophical discourse of sympathy, and the Christian rhetoric of forgiveness. Mohegan, Cherokee, and Choctaw modes of cultivating fellow feeling contributed to an uncommon aesthetic in Sigourney’s writings that unsettles our understanding of American literary nationalism. Sigourney’s work also serves as a point of connection between Mohegan, Cherokee, and Choctaw nationhood, as Cherokee and Choctaw mission students wrote directly to Sigourney to articulate the necessary ties between land and feeling for their Native communities.

Fire and Chain

Chapter 2 analyzes competing aesthetic traditions in the copious letters, journals, and tracts produced by missionaries to the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois; Six Nations) Confederacy in the second half of the eighteenth century. In their interactions with missionaries, Haudenosaunee nations adhered powerfully to aesthetic conventions developed over centuries. A Haudenosaunee-specific understanding of form and eloquence determined how missionaries who worked among them circulated and produced texts and shaped the outcomes of their work. Congregationalist minister and founder of Moor’s Indian Charity School Eleazar Wheelock refused to engage the ethical imperatives of Haudenosaunee eloquence and eventually gave up on his design to convert the Six Nations, despite the insistence of his missionaries Samuel Kirkland and Joseph Johnson on keeping with Haudenosaunee conventions. Meanwhile, Mohegan minister Samson Occom incorporated into English letters Haudenosaunee imagery designed to clarify relations and bring people together, in a remarkable layering of literary traditions.

Perspectives

This chapter considers the aesthetics of western reservations and the so-called “Indian Wars” of the later nineteenth century. In the post-Civil War decades of US national expansion, print media promulgated a range of damaging narratives about savage, vengeful Indian warriors from a distant perspective. Meanwhile, Native artists and authors including Amos Bad Heart Bull (Oglala Lakota) and Charles Alexander Eastman (Mdewakanton Dakota) experimented with perspective and perception in image and text to make visible the many, diverse Native sites and forms of creative knowledge production inaccessible in print media. Their texts call for a model of reading that links the sensational battles of this period with histories of Indigenous representational practice well versed in stories and images of battle. Their works draw surprising connections between a variety of events, spaces, communities, and forms in a period known for the compartmentalization of Indian nations and lands, demonstrating that locally grounded aesthetic analysis remains important to understanding networks of Indian representation in more modern periods.

Boundaries and Paths

Chapter 1 traces intersections between Indigenous maps in the early eighteenth-century colonial southeast and William Byrd II’s History of the Dividing Line betwixt Virginia and North Carolina (written in the years following the 1728 boundary-line survey). It shows that the creation of an Anglo-American colonial border and a text considered highly literary cannot be separated from the real and figurative lines Catawba, Cherokee, Weyanoke, and other Native people drew to distinguish polities in the region. Native peoples’ maps, narratives, and political assertions of space and relations shaped the Virginia-North Carolina boundary dispute and survey at every turn, contributing to the meandering form of Byrd’s History, a text he never completed to his satisfaction. Native creative practices were central to colonial American literatures of space and place.