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
English Letters and Indian Literacies: Reading, Writing, and New England Missionary Schools, 1750-1830
Preface Introduction: Technologies of Literacy Chapter 1. Narratives and Counternarratives: Producing Readerly Indians in Eighteenth-Century New England Chapter 2. The Writerly Worlds of Joseph Johnson Chapter 3. Brainerd's Missionary Legacy: Death and the Writing of Cherokee Salvation Chapter 4. The Foreign Mission School and the Writerly Indian After Words: Native Literacy and Autonomy Notes Works Cited Index Acknowledgments
Northeastern Indian lives, 1632-1816
A collection of 15 essays examines the lives of important but relatively unknown Native Americans. Each study draws on research in local records, oral traditions, and new models of cultural interaction. The chapters explore the complexities of Indian-colonial relations from the seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries from Maine to the Ohio Valley. These works are directed on the attention of Skickellamy, an Oneida diplomat, The Mohawk sachehm Theyanoguin; Aswashunkes, a Saconett sunksquaw; or Molly Ockett, a Pigwacket doctor.Some essays provide fascinating details of Indian-white relations. Others exhibit the strengths of new paradigms for expanding understanding of Native American Responses.