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
Religion and the Creation of Race and Ethnicity
Introduction: Craig R. Prentiss1 "A Servant of Servants Shall He Be": The Construction of Race in American Religious Mythologies: Paul Harvey2 Myth and African American Self-Identity: Eddie S. Glaude, Jr.3 Almost White: The Ambivalent Promise of Christian Missions among the Cherokees: Joel Martin4 Indigenous Identity and Story: The Telling of Our Part in the Sacred Homeland: Nimachia Hernandez5 Jew and Judaist, Ethnic and Religious: How They Mix in America: Jacob Neusner6 Blackness in the Nation of Islam: Aminah McCloud7 Theologizing Race: The Construction of "Christian Identity": Douglas Cowan8 "Loathsome unto Thy People": The Latter-day Saints and Racial Categorization: Craig Prentiss9 Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Heart of Mexican Identity: Roberto Goizueta10 Myths, Shinto, and Matsuri in the Shaping of Japanese Cultural Identity: John Nelson11 Islam, Arabs, and Ethnicity: Azzam Tamimi12 Cosmic Men and Fluid Exchanges: Myths of A-rya,Varn* a, and Ja-ti in the Hindu Tradition: Laurie Patton13 Religious Myth and the Construction of Shona Identity: Chirevo Kwenda14 Sacral Ruins in Bosnia-Herzegovina: Mapping Ethnoreligious Nationalism: Michael Sells
The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America
Colonial North America was not only a battleground for furs and land, but also for allegiances and even souls. In the three-sided struggle for empire, the English and French colonists were locked in heated competition for native allies and religious converts. Axtell sharply contrasts the English efforts to "civilize" the Indians with the French willingness to accept native lifestyles, and reveals why the struggle for control over the continent became a fascinating contest of cultures between shrewd opponents lasting nearly 150 years.