Indigenous People and Stories of Gun Violence in Early America and Today

FAIN: FEL-282383-22

Angela Calcaterra
University of North Texas (Denton, TX 76203-5017)

Writing a book that traces the record of Native American perception of human-weapons relations through material and literary culture.

This book project is a literary and cultural archaeology of American gun violence that examines the significance of guns in a vast archive of literature, materials, and political documents centered on Indigenous-European relations. Focused on connections between early and nineteenth-century America and today, it argues that Native American story, political theory, and cultural practice have long confronted an issue at the core of gun violence: the relationship between humans and the objects they bear. The legislative and judicial documents scholars study to understand past and present American gun usage erase these Indigenous perspectives. By recovering Native approaches to weapons that predate and challenge American legal frameworks for gun ownership, and by considering literary and cultural representations that offer granular illuminations of human-gun interactions, the book sheds important new light on the vital yet deadlocked conversation about American gun violence.

Associated Products

“Corn, Guns, and Settler Orientations.” (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: “Corn, Guns, and Settler Orientations.”
Author: Angela Calcaterra
Abstract: Angela Calcaterra, in “Corn, Guns, and Settler Orientations,” focuses on two key materials that shape John Smith’s relations with the Powhatan people: corn and guns. Her talk will analyze how and why Smith’s revisions around corn and guns from earlier accounts to the Generall Historie (1624) rebalance the weight of these materials in the text. Smith’s varying emphasis on corn and guns speaks to colonial narratives’ preoccupation with settler orientations in volatile situations. For instance, Smith removes from the Generall Historie many details of his forced laying down of arms and forced receptivity to Powhatan hospitality when he is taken captive; he adds to the Generall Historie a scene which the Powhatan people take a bag of gunpowder during a ceremony and preserve it “till the next Spring, to plant as they did their corne; because they would be acquainted with the nature of that seede.” Across the development of Smith’s narrative of colonial settlement, guns come to carry heavier weight as both literal objects and figures of colonial force and help us see anew the significance of Smith’s textual revisions and additions. Building on recent readings of Smith by Anna Brickhouse and Jeff Glover, Calcaterra explores how attention to materials that build or intervene in diplomatic relationships help us track settler-Indigenous relations and their representation in colonial texts.
Date: 6/6/2023
Conference Name: Society of Early Americanists Biennial Conference

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