Locating Women in Male-Authored Archives: Catharine Brown, Cherokee Women, and the ABCFM Papers
As a scholar whose passion is women's writing, I find that working with Native writings in early America can seem a rather relentlessly masculinist enterprise. In my research into Cherokee materials of the 1810s through 1830s, I sometimes feel, frankly, put off by the cacophony of male voices echoing through the pages of the archives. This masculine dominance in the written materials should not surprise me, since we know that women had less access to literacy and publication during this period and that women's written texts, often labeled private, were frequently not perceived as significant enough to deposit or maintain in archives. Factors surrounding the documentary record of Native peoples compound these problems. Usually penned by Euro-American men, written materials reflect their authors' often inaccurate understandings of Native cultures and gender roles. Many scholars lack the deep knowledge of Native social, cultural, and political histories to make meaning of the traces Native people—especially women—have left in written archives. They also lack the training to engage with Native-produced "texts," broadly defined. Although current scholars are rapidly verifying the existence of a long and rich tradition of Native writing, they have so far uncovered only a few Native women who wrote in English in the colonial or early republican periods. 1 Yet I am still somehow surprised that even with my abiding devotion to women's writing, I find myself working with the writings of so many men. I have spoken with other early Americanists who voiced similar feelings: they began their graduate studies interested in working with women's writings, but as their research trajectories developed and they pursued Native studies, they found themselves working more and more with male- authored texts. In my case, I was initially led to Cherokee materials by women's writings: the letters of Harriett Gold and her four sisters, which form a substantial portion of my first book, an edition of manuscript mate- rials entitled To Marry An Indian: The Marriage of Harriett Gold and Elias Boudinot in Letters, 1823-1839 (2005). The Gold sisters debated Harriett's
Medicine Bundle: Indian Sacred Performance and American Literature, 1824-1932
Introduction Chapter 1. George Catlin, Te-ho-pe-nee Wash-ee Chapter 2. Being and Becoming "Indian" Chapter 3. The Acts of the Prophets Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments
Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650-1790
Despite popular belief, Native peoples did not simply disappear from colonial New England as the English extended their domination in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Rather, the Native peoples in such places as Natick, Massachusetts, creatively resisted colonialism, defended their lands, and rebuilt kin networks and community through the strategic use of English cultural practices and institutions. So why did New England settlers believe that the Native peoples had vanished?In this thoroughly researched and astutely argued study, historian Jean M. O'Brien reveals that, in the late eighteenth century, the Natick tribe experienced a process of "dispossession by degrees" that rendered them invisible within the larger context of the colonial social order, thus enabling the construction of the myth of Indian extinction. Jean M. O'Brien is an associate professor of history at the University of Minnesota, where she is also affiliated with American studies, American Indian studies, and the Center for Advanced Feminist Studies.