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...

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