In the past several decades, research on early Native American literature has blossomed in monographs, scholarly and teaching editions of primary texts, archival seminars, and conference panel series. These initiatives and the ensuing scholarship have created an expansive subfield of “early Native studies” that is in conversation with both early American studies and Native American and Indigenous studies. Building on the work of formative texts, including Hilary E. Wyss’s Writing Indians: Literacy, Christianity, and Native Community in Early America (2000), Robert Warrior’s The People and the Word: Reading Native Nonfiction (2005), and Lisa Brooks’s The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (2008), scholars have established interpretive methods for reading texts authored by Native people and for illuminating Native narratives embedded in colonial archives. Wyss, for example, emphasized how Native men and women used Christianity and English literacy not merely for missionaries’ aims but to support tribal...
Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War
Literary Indians: Aesthetics and Encounter in American Literature to 1920
Unscripted America: Indigenous Languages and the Origins of a Literary Nation
Modernity and Its Other: The Encounter with North American Indians in the Eighteenth Century
Kelly Wisecup is an associate professor of English at Northwestern University, where she is also a codirector of the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research. She is a coeditor (with Alyssa Mt. Pleasant and Caroline Wigginton) of a special issue on the relations between Native American and Indigenous studies and early American studies, published jointly in Early American Literature and the William and Mary Quarterly in 2018.
Kelly Wisecup; Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War
Literary Indians: Aesthetics and Encounter in American Literature to 1920
Unscripted America: Indigenous Languages and the Origins of a Literary Nation
Modernity and Its Other: The Encounter with North American Indians in the Eighteenth Century. American Literature 1 September 2020; 92 (3): 585–588. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-8616211
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