A collection of essays discussing early American Indian authors.

Although cross-cultural encounter is often considered an economic or political matter, beauty, taste, and artistry were central to cultural exchange and political negotiation in early and nineteenth-century America. Part of a new wave of scholarship in early American studies that contextualizes American writing in Indigenous space, Literary Indians highlights the significance of Indigenous aesthetic practices to American literary production. Countering the prevailing notion of the "literary Indian" as a construct of the white American literary imagination, Angela Calcaterra reveals how Native people's pre-existing and evolving aesthetic practices influenced Anglo-American writing in precise ways. Indigenous aesthetics helped to establish borders and foster alliances that pushed against Anglo-American settlement practices and contributed to the discursive, divided, unfinished aspects of American letters. Focusing on tribal histories and Indigenous artistry, Calcaterra locates surprising connections and important distinctions between Native and Anglo-American literary aesthetics in a new history of early American encounter, identity, literature, and culture.

Native American literature has always been uniquely embattled. It is marked by divergent opinions about what constitutes authenticity, sovereignty, and even literature. It announces a culture beset by paradox: simultaneously primordial and postmodern; oral and inscribed; outmoded and novel. Its texts are a site of political struggle, shifting to meet external and internal expectations. This Cambridge History endeavors to capture and question the contested character of Indigenous texts and the way they are evaluated. It delineates significant periods of literary and cultural development in four sections: “Traces & Removals” (pre-1870s); “Assimilation and Modernity” (1879-1967); “Native American Renaissance” (post-1960s); and “Visions & Revisions” (21st century). These rubrics highlight how Native literatures have evolved alongside major transitions in federal policy toward the Indian, and via contact with broader cultural phenomena such, as the American Civil Rights movement. There is a balance between a history of canonical authors and traditions, introducing less-studied works and themes, and foregrounding critical discussions, approaches, and controversies.

"Wishart and the staff of the Center for Great Plains Studies have compiled a wide-ranging (pun intended) encyclopedia of this important region. Their objective was to 'give definition to a region that has traditionally been poorly defined,' and they have

This history of Native Americans, from the period of first contactto the present day, offers an important variation to existingstudies by placing the lives and experiences of Native Americancommunities at the center of the narrative. Presents an innovative approach to Native American history byplacing individual native communities and their experiences at thecenter of the study Following a first chapter that deals with creation myths, theremainder of the narrative is structured chronologically, coveringover 600 years from the point of first contact to the presentday Illustrates the great diversity in American Indian culture andemphasizes the importance of Native Americans in the history ofNorth America Provides an excellent survey for courses in Native Americanhistory Includes maps, photographs, a timeline, questions fordiscussion, and “A Closer Focus” textboxes that providebiographies of individuals and that elaborate on the text, exposing students to issues of race, class, and gender

A study of cultural encounter, this book takes a fresh look at the much ignored and often misunderstood experience of Christian Indians in early America. Focusing on New England missionary settlements from the mid-seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries, Hilary E. Wyss examines the ways in which Native American converts to Christianity developed their own distinct identity within the context of a colonial culture. With an approach that weaves together literature, religious studies, and ethno-history, Wyss grounds her work in the analysis of a rarely read body of "autobiographical" writings by Christian Indians, including letters, journal entries, and religious confessions. She then juxtaposes these documents to the writings of better known Native Americans like Samson Occom as well as to the published works of Anglo-Americans, such as Mary Rowlandson's famous captivity narrative and Eleazor Wheelock's accounts of his charity schools. In their search for ostensibly "authentic" Native voices, scholars have tended to overlook the writings of Christian Indians. Yet, Wyss argues, these texts reveal the emergence of a dynamic Native American identity through Christianity. More specifically, they show how the active appropriation of New England Protestantism contributed to the formation of a particular Indian identity that resisted colonialism by using its language against itself.

In 1664, French Jesuit Louis Nicolas arrived in Quebec. Upon first hearing Ojibwe, Nicolas observed that he had encountered the most barbaric language in the world--but after listening to and studying approximately fifteen Algonquian languages over a ten-year period, he wrote that he had "discovered all of the secrets of the most beautiful languages in the universe." Unscripted America is a study of how colonists in North America struggled to understand, translate, and interpret Native American languages, and the significance of these languages for theological and cosmological issues such as the origins of Amerindian populations, their relationship to Eurasian and Biblical peoples, and the origins of language itself. Through a close analysis of previously overlooked texts, Unscripted America places American Indian languages within transatlantic intellectual history, while also demonstrating how American letters emerged in the 1810s through 1830s via a complex and hitherto unexplored engagement with the legacies and aesthetic possibilities of indigenous words. Unscripted America contends that what scholars have more traditionally understood through the Romantic ideology of the noble savage, a vessel of antiquity among dying populations, was in fact a palimpsest of still-living indigenous populations whose presence in American literature remains traceable through words. By examining the foundation of the literary nation through language, writing, and literacy, Unscripted America revisits common conceptions regarding "early america" and its origins to demonstrate how the understanding of America developed out of a steadfast connection to American Indians, both past and present.