Red Ink

Drew Lopenzina

Description

The Native peoples of colonial New England were quick to grasp the practical functions of Western literacy. Their written literary output was composed to suit their own needs and expressed views often in resistance to the agendas of the European colonists they were confronted with. Red Ink is an engaging retelling of American colonial history, one that draws on documents that have received scant critical and scholarly attention to offer an important new interpretation grounded in indigenous contexts and perspectives. Author Drew Lopenzina reexamines a literature that has been compulsively "corrected" and overinscribed with the norms and expectations of the dominant culture, while simultaneously invoking the often violent tensions of "contact" and the processes of unwitnessing by which Native histories and accomplishments were effectively erased from the colonial record. In a compelling narrative arc, Lopenzina enables the reader to travel through a history that, however familiar, has never been fully appreciated or understood from a Native-centered perspective.
List of Illustrations

Preface and Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction
Survival Writing: Contesting the “Pen and Ink Work” of Colonialism

1. Wussuckwheke, or the Painted Letter: Glimpses of Native Signification Acknowledged and Unwitnessed (1492-1643)

2. Praying Indians, Printing Devils: Centers of Indigeneity within Colonial Containments (1643-1665)

3. King Philip’s Signature: Ascribing Philip’s Name to Land, War, and History in Native New England (1660-1709)

4. Beneath the Wave: The Maintenance of Native Tradition in Hidden Transcripts (1709-1768)

5. A Tale of Two Settlements: Mohican, Mohegan, and the Road to Brotherton (1724-1785)

Afterword
O’ Brotherton, Where Art Though

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• USA
• United States of America
• Local history
• History of the Americas
• États-Unis

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 mars 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438439808
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

A volume in the SUNY series, Native Traces

Gerald Vizenor and Deborah L. Madsen, editors

Red Ink
Native Americans Picking Up the Pen in the Colonial Period
Drew Lopenzina

Certain portions of chapter five appeared in a slightly altered form in The American Quarterly , vol. 58, num. 4, Dec. 2006 issue.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2012 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
Production by Diane Ganeles Marketing by Anne M.Valentine
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lopenzina, Drew.
Red ink : native Americans picking up the pen in the colonial period / Drew Lopenzina.
p. cm. — (Native traces)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-3979-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. American literature—Indian authors—History and criticism. 2. American literature—Colonial period, ca. 1600–1775—History and criticism. 3. Indians in literature. 4. Indians of North America—Intellectual life. I. Title.
PS153.I52L67 2012
810.9'897—dc22                                                                                                                                                 2011009763
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Illustrations Figure I.1 Seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Courtesy of Massachusetts Archives . Figure 1.1 Aztec tribute roll . Figure 1.2 Passamaquoddy awikhigan found in Garrick Mallory's 1893 Picture Writing of the American Indians . Figure 1.3 Naskapi caribou coat. Courtesy of Royal Ontario Museum . Figure 1.4 Detail from caribou coat . Figure 1.5 Map of New England from Hubbard's 1677 Narrative of the Indian Wars in New England . Courtesy of American Antiquarian Society . Figure 1.6 Mystic fort massacre from John Underhill's 1638 Newes of America . Courtesy of the Mashantucket Pequot Musem and Research Center . Figure 2.1 F. O. C. Darley sketch of John Eliot preaching to Waban and the Massachusett Natives at Cohannet . Figure 2.2 Tomah Josephs' (Passamaquoddy) birch bark “scrapings” found in Charles Leland's 1884 Algonquian Legends . Figure 2.3 Indian College building as imagined by H. R. Shurtleff found in Samuel Eliot Morison's Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century . Figure 2.4 Frontispiece to 1685 edition of Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe Up-Biblium God attributed to the labors of John Eliot, translator, and Samuel Green, printer. Courtesy of American Antiquarian Society . Figure 3.1 Photograph of Dighton Rock with Henry Rowe Schoolcraft on top. Photo taken by Seth Eastman . Figure 3.2 Seal of the New England Company, 1661 . Figure 3.3 Paul Revere's engraving of King Philip as seen in the 1772 edition of Benjamin Church's The Entertaining History of King Philip's War . Courtesy of American Antiquarian Society . Figure 3.4 Mark of Wamsutta or Alexander and signature of John Sassamon. Courtesy of Massachusetts Archives . Figure 3.5 Mark of King Philip or Metacom on 1666 land transaction. Courtesy of Plymouth Registry of Deeds . Figure 3.6 Map of New England and native settlements, 1675. Map design by Terry Stigers . Figure 3.7 Frontispiece to 1709 Massachusetts Psalter , printed by B. Green and J. Printer. Courtesy of American Antiquarian Society . Figure 4.1 1768 portrait of Samson Occom by Moses Chamberlain . Figure 4.2 Dartmouth College seal. Courtesy of Rauner Special Collections at Dartmouth College . Figure 4.3 Occom's sketch of alphabet blocks from his unpublished 1768 autobiographical narrative. Courtesy of Rauner Special Collections at Dartmouth College . Figure 4.4 Mohegan Church, Uncasville, Connecticut. Photograph by author . Figure 5.1 Map of New Stockbridge and Mohican Territory, 1730s. Map design by Terry Stigers . Figure 5.2 1829 Surveyor's map of Oneida County, New York with Brothertown and New Stockbridge in lower left-hand corner .
Preface
This work takes for its title Red Ink , which implies not only the written literary output of Native Americans in the colonial period, but the great difficulties of accessing a literature so over-inscribed by colonial norms and expectations—a literature that has been compulsively “corrected” with the red ink of the colonial educator, novelist, historian, moviemaker—in short, the ubiquitous productions of a dominant culture. Red Ink also invokes the bloody backdrop upon which such a literature came into being, the often violent tensions of “contact” and the processes of cultural containment that are endlessly reinforced, resisted, internalized, and contested in the archival remnants of such encounters. This is a work that centers upon the nature of power, how it constructs its own provisional realities through the superstructure of master narratives, and how Native American writers have historically endeavored to reassert their own identities in the face of such power, maintaining ligaments of cultural narratives and belief systems that work to subtly subvert or defy imposed narratives of dominance.
My focus here is on the period known as “colonial,” a time when Native peoples are not presumed to be engaging in literary endeavors. Part of what I want to delineate is how those early Native writers whose works do, in fact, appear in the colonial archive are not tacitly turning their backs on traditional lifeways, as might often appear to be the case, but are actually negotiating a crucial set of tools and circumstances upon which survival and cultural continuance hinges. In most cases, however, their stories and the historical possibilities made available through their lives and works have remained untold or inadequately examined by the forces that cobble together the dominant narratives of history and literature in this country. If we begin to create a narrative space for these stories to breathe and grow, however, it also becomes possible to imagine new possibilities branching out from such roots, different understandings and modes of interacting with the past and the present that begin to form the materials for a narrative of what Anishinaabe poet and critic Gerald Vizenor refers to as survivance .
One realization I carry away from this effort is just how powerful a role narrative plays in our lives. That may appear to be an overly generalized statement, and yet it seems we are held in near absolute thrall by the cultural narratives to which we come of age, regardless of whether these narratives support and strengthen us as a people, or ruthlessly knock us down and fragment us. When events do not conform to the master narratives informing our lives, we are psychologically skilled at collectively ignoring or devaluing the resistant elements. I imagine that all cultures are equally susceptible to the sort of suggestibility of which I speak. But the disadvantage colonized cultures face in a world that strains under a largely white hegemonic power structure is that a significant number of peoples have found their own cultural narratives devalued, ignored, or systematically repressed. Often they are forced to live in the shadows of master narratives that brutally denigrate their own lives and identities. Few suspect how difficult it is to push against such narrative currents or how dangerous it is to switch horses in midstream, so to speak.
The point here is not necessarily to affix blame, but ultimately it is the regime in power that must answer for its policies, mistakes, ideologies, and abuses. If I find myself being somewhat more reflexively critical of Euro-American epistemologies than of Native epistemologies in this work, this results from the fact that I live in a moment largely constructed by the force and will of long-maintained Western values, and I feel the world would benefit from a healthy reexamination of how those values have become locked in place and where they have ultimately failed us. So much of Native tradition has been held in a colonial lockbox, unable to breathe or fully express itself on a world stage because of the illusion of totality that is conjured up in written histories. One small way that I can contribute to breaking down the psychological hegemony of white Euro-American-Western culture is to bear witness to what emerges when we begin to carefully disentangle Native voices of the past from the sophisticated historical containments in which they have been held right through to the present.
This has proven an exciting project for me, and one that has kept me riding a fast-moving and ever-expanding learning curve throu