Assembled for Use: Indigenous Compilation and the Archives of Early Native American Literatures

FAIN: FT-228749-15

Kelly Wisecup
University of North Texas (Denton, TX 76203-5017)

Summer research and writing in American Literature and Native American Studies.

Objects of Encounter investigates how Native Americans appropriated the form of the list between 1600 and 1840. Natives compiled lists of words, numbers, plants, and trade goods, in order to circulate tribal histories, to repair social and spiritual relationships disrupted by colonialism, and to maintain sovereignty over their languages and epistemologies. While scholars have overlooked lists to focus on narratives, this book shows that lists were a key part of early American cross-cultural exchanges. Natives shaped colonists' lists by controlling their access to objects; they composed their own lists in order to recirculate their peoples' histories. The book offers a new literary history of pre-1900 Native writing, and my proposed research will intervene in the history of science and museum studies by showing that Natives not only worked as assistants for men of science but also appropriated collecting and its textual practices for their own ends.

Associated Products

“Practicing Sovereignty: Colonial Temporalities, Cherokee Justice, and the “Socrates” Writings of John Ridge.” (Article)
Title: “Practicing Sovereignty: Colonial Temporalities, Cherokee Justice, and the “Socrates” Writings of John Ridge.”
Author: Kelly Wisecup
Abstract: This article shows that Ridge’s Socrates articles provided a public venue in which to define relationships among the Cherokees, the states, and the federal government. Ridge’s pseudonym facilitated a rhetorical structure that created not only a public persona recognizable to the Phoenix’s multiple readerships but also a public character who argued forcefully that white readers should respect Cherokee rights and claims. These personae allowed Socrates to experiment with how to represent sovereignty in a period that fell after the 1823 Supreme Court decision Johnson v. M’Intosh defined Native rights to land as that of “occupancy” but before the Court’s 1831 decision in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, which defined the Cherokees—and, by extension, Native political entities—as domestic dependent nations.
Year: 2017
Access Model: subscription
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: NAIS: Journal of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press

“Assembling Indigenous Archives: Indian Removal, Unruly Writing, and the Place of Cherokee Histories.” (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: “Assembling Indigenous Archives: Indian Removal, Unruly Writing, and the Place of Cherokee Histories.”
Abstract: This was a public talk delivered at San Jose State U.
Author: Kelly Wisecup
Date: 02/07/2017
Location: San Jose, CA

“Nineteenth-Century Facebook: John Ridge and the Archives of Cherokee Resistance.” (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: “Nineteenth-Century Facebook: John Ridge and the Archives of Cherokee Resistance.”
Abstract: This was a public talk given for the annual Baine lecture at the University of Mississippi.
Author: Kelly Wisecup
Date: 10/20/2016
Location: Oxford, MI

“Transforming Linguistic Collection: Word Lists, Blanks, and Circulation In Native Space,” (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: “Transforming Linguistic Collection: Word Lists, Blanks, and Circulation In Native Space,”
Author: Kelly Wisecup
Abstract: This paper examines Native American word lists and their circulation in Native space, which created opportunities for recontextualization and re-evaluation. It focuses in particular on eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Anglo-American projects to collect and arrange indigenous words, which were inspired by Thomas Jefferson’s comments in Notes on the State of Virginia that it was “very much to be lamented” that colonists had “suffered so many of the Indian tribes already to extinguish” before men of science had “collected” the “rudiments” of their languages. Attempting to make up for lost opportunities, in Notes Jefferson compiled word lists from multiple sources to create a table that linked Natives’ languages with their geographic location. He continued this project in the 1790s, when he created a word list after meeting Unquachog people on Long Island and when he had printed blanks published and distributed to Indian agents, missionaries, government officials, and soldiers. The lists’ material form was designed to elicit particular results: the printed lists of English words and blanks were to be filled in with corresponding Native words. The lists aimed to ensure that collectors would obtain the same set of words, thus making comparison across multiple languages and conclusions about the relations of those languages and the origins of the people who spoke them.
Date: 06/23/2016

Assembled for Use: Indigenous Compilation and the Archives of Early Native American Literatures (Book)
Title: Assembled for Use: Indigenous Compilation and the Archives of Early Native American Literatures
Author: Kelly Wisecup
Abstract: Kelly Wisecup offers a sweeping account of early Native American literatures by examining Indigenous compilations: intentionally assembled texts that Native people made by juxtaposing and recontextualizing textual excerpts into new relations and meanings. Experiments in reading and recirculation, Indigenous compilations include Mohegan minister Samson Occom’s medicinal recipes, the Ojibwe woman Charlotte Johnston’s poetry scrapbooks, and Abenaki leader Joseph Laurent’s vocabulary lists. Indigenous compilations proliferated in a period of colonial archive making, and Native writers used compilations to remake the very forms that defined their bodies, belongings, and words as ethnographic evidence. This study enables new understandings of canonical Native writers like William Apess, prominent settler collectors like Thomas Jefferson and Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, and Native people who contributed to compilations but remain absent from literary histories. Long before current conversations about decolonizing archives and museums, Native writers made and circulated compilations to critique colonial archives and foster relations within Indigenous communities.
Year: 2021
Primary URL: http:/https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300243284/assembled-use
Publisher: Yale University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780300243284
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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