Writing History in the Nineteenth-Century Great Lakes
Date of Award
Spring 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
English Language and Literature
First Advisor
Smith, Caleb
Abstract
Writing History in the Nineteenth-Century Great Lakes takes as its central question what it meant to try and record the history of Indigenous people in nineteenth-century America. Nineteenth-century historical writing has often been described as an instrument of Native dispossession, a tool for “writing Indians out of existence”, as Jean M. O’Brien argues. But my project shows that Native authors not only penned histories themselves but played a constitutive role in the creation of new forms of representing the past. By analyzing three emergent genres of historical writing in the nineteenth century—the “traditional history,” the “textual memorial,” and the souvenir—I argue that we can see the influence Native people have always had in crafting their own histories. The Native past takes on particular force in the Great Lakes, where Indigenous people could not easily be dismissed as vanishing: the Anishinaabeg, who had lived there for generations, had been enmeshed in colonial economic networks since the seventeenth century, networks that persisted throughout the 1800s. In this region of active entanglement between white settlers and the Anishinaabeg, history was a key site of struggle. This project tracks the contours of these debates over what constituted the history of Indigenous people, what form and genre it should take. My first chapter examines the “traditional history,” writing purportedly based on the oral tradition, for how Anishinaabe writers like Peter Jones, George Copway, William Whipple Warren, and Francis Assikinack used it to consider their place within the antebellum media landscape. The next chapter interrogates what I call the “textual memorial,” settler texts that built themselves out the mass media to try and commemorate all Native people. Looking at George Copway’s newspaper and Ely S. Parker’s scrapbooks, we can see how these authors question the very terms of memorialization. My final chapter investigates Simon Pokagon’s The Red Man’s Rebuke as a souvenir, considering how Pokagon both makes use of and subverts the souvenir’s unusual investment in time. As historical writing professionalized with increasingly strict document-based evidentiary practices over the nineteenth century, my project details the contentious thinking about history occurring at its margins. Out of these arguments arose new ways of writing about the past, whether through seemingly ephemeral souvenirs or by invoking stories supposed to have been told since time immemorial. Writing History in the Nineteenth-Century Great Lakes changes what we think history looks like, revealing the media experimentation of Native people as they found new ways to document the past.
Recommended Citation
Pokross, Benjamin, "Writing History in the Nineteenth-Century Great Lakes" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1038.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1038
