Kelly Wisecup
At the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, Pottawatomi leader Simon Pokagon sold copies of his book The Red Man’s Greeting to fairgoers. Printed on white birch bark, the small book critiques the fair’s celebration of Columbus, for Pokagon notes that, “On behalf of my people, the American Indians, I hereby declare to you, the pale faced race that has usurped our lands and homes, that we have no spirit to celebrate with you the great Columbian Fair now being held in this Chicago city, the wonder of the world.” Pokagon goes on to characterize Columbus’s arrival as merely the first manifestation of the violence, slavery, and greed that Europeans brought to the Americas, and he asks attendees to remember that the “success” they celebrated “has been at the sacrifice of our homes and a once happy race” (Pokagon 1893: 1). His appeal elicited attention from Chicago’s mayor, Carter Harrison, Sr., and “some ladies friendly to his race,” and he attended the fair “as a guest of the city” (Pokagon 2001: 79).
Plans for the next centennial celebration of Columbus’s voyage to the Americas were likewise met with protests and denunciations from Hispanic, Latina/o, and Native American and Indigenous groups. While the 1992 Columbian Quincentenary spawned commemorative coins, papal visits, and plans for reenacted “discoveries,” it also saw failed proposals for world’s fairs and a renewed public and scholarly debate about Columbus and his legacy as a “genocidal invader of the Americas” (Summerhill and Williams 2000: 2). The terms of this debate about imperial explorers and the ongoing repercussions of their actions for Indigenous peoples likewise characterized 1990s scholarship on the literatures of exploration and encounter. The year 1992 and subsequent few years saw the publication of scholarly works devoted to reconsidering the so‐called discovery of what Europeans denominated the “New World,” while recent scholarship has paid more attention to Native American responses to European explorers and settlers. The field is poised to expand these investigations in productive ways. If in the 1890s US Americans monumentalized Columbus as the figurehead of a uniquely American identity, scholars of early American literatures have worked to restore Columbus to a context that includes transatlantic colonialism, genocide, and imperial relations with Indigenous peoples.
The 1992 scholarly turn rethought not only Columbus but also the literatures of exploration and encounter and their accompanying modes of analysis. Scholars increasingly placed their studies in the context of European imperialism and its representational technologies, and if they did not shift the focus away from Columbus, they did reconfigure the methods with which scholars read his accounts. Most importantly, they departed from positivist readings of colonial texts as transparent accounts of conquests that could be analyzed to answer questions about the relative strength and weakness of European and Native American peoples. Scholars embraced a methodological skepticism, viewing colonial writers as “liars” and resisting the urge to view their writings as “an accurate and reliable account of the nature of the New World lands and its peoples” (Greenblatt 1991: 7). European writing was a technology not of truth but of power, a representational system that colonists employed as they grappled with the significance of people whose presence threatened to shatter the biblical histories that structured medieval and early modern geographies. The conquest of the Americas was less an event whose causes needed to be understood than a series of imaginative claims, rooted in Europeans’ confidence in their rhetorical strategies and in the printed media with which they circulated reports. Explorers from Columbus to Cortes employed existing generic and epistemological categories – from wonder, to the marvelous, to “autopsy” (the appeal to eyewitness authority) – to manage their emotional and intellectual responses to the challenges the Americas posed (Pagden 1993: 51).
In these studies, America is the “other,” an utterly strange, utterly incommensurable entity that Europeans must try to incorporate into their systems of understanding. The process of assimilation produced the literatures of exploration and encounter, and these texts chart not external or material realities but colonists’ attempts to convince themselves that they understand an unusual object or Native speech. Columbus and John de Léry, key figures who appear in several studies of this decade, are ideal candidates for these studies: they position themselves as distant non‐participants who reported on the events and actions they observed. Explorers presented America to patrons, potential explorers, and curious audiences back in Europe in ways that were useful to goals of conquest. As Peter Hulme (1986) put it, colonists “produced [the Americas] for Europe through a discourse that imbricated sets of questions and assumptions, methods of procedure and analysis, and kinds of writing and imagery, normally separated out into the discrete areas” (2). Explorers created what Hulme calls “colonial discourse” by replicating and adapting existing strategies for describing and categorizing unfamiliar peoples and their practices, strategies that also allowed colonists to manage colonial relationships and to justify imperialism. This “colonial discourse” could be analyzed for what it revealed not about Native people but about European desires or anxieties. Adopting this position ideally allowed scholars to avoid glossing over the violence of encounter while also avoiding having to speculate about what Native people felt about that violence.
While incommensurability governed colonial encounters in these studies, some scholars argued for alternative readings of those encounters and their literatures. In a well‐known debate published in Critical Inquiry, Myra Jehlen and Peter Hulme defended contrasting views of what colonial literatures can illuminate about cross‐cultural encounters generally and about Native people particularly. Hulme’s analysis of the discourse of cannibalism in Colonial Encounters (1986) showed that Europeans had largely invented the idea that the Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean ate human flesh. Failing to locate convincing signs that he had sailed to the East Indies, Columbus inserted a discourse of savagery that had been, since the classical period, associated with the presence of gold. His descriptions of Indigenous peoples as eaters of human flesh thus implicitly provided evidence that he would find the precious metal. Jehlen (1993) argues that Hulme is too certain of colonial texts’ unreliability, and she proposes an alternative reading in which these literatures can tell readers something about the “agency of the colonized.” Analyzing John Smith’s account of the Native leader colonists called Powhatan and of his coronation by English colonists, Jehlen points to cracks and lapses in Smith’s text as evidence of “other possibilities” than the interpretation Smith sought to produce, possibilities that derive from Powhatan’s actions (685). If we cannot fully uncover these Indigenous movements, Jehlen suggests, we can at least acknowledge their material existence and effect on colonial texts.
The difference between these two scholars’ methodologies seems to lie not in the question of whether colonial texts are unreliable, whether they seek to justify colonial power, or whether Native people had their own interpretations of colonists. Rather, the difference lies in their respective views of what colonial literatures can illuminate about cross‐cultural encounters generally and about Native people particularly and thus about the accompanying methodologies scholars should embrace. Hulme (1986) argues that he is investigating the conditions that made scholars want to ask certain questions about Native peoples – whether they were really cannibals, for example. For him, the literatures of encounter are assembled out of familiar representations and remade to fit new contexts, and there may be little correspondence between those literatures and the material realities colonists faced. Jehlen (1993) calls for a consideration of this “material reality” and its effect on colonial texts’ structure, and she suggests that scholars can pry open a window on material conditions and Native actions by looking through textual discontinuities (688).
While Jehlen did not develop her argument in Critical Inquiry into a longer work, her reading of Smith’s Generall History has remained influential, and it stands as an early example of the methodologies that were soon to characterize the field. Key to this shift, which experimented with ways to engage with Native American contexts, was the 1997 publication of anthropologist Neil Whitehead’s edition of Walter Ralegh’s The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana by Sir Walter Ralegh. In two extensive prefaces, Whitehead (1997) employed textual analysis alongside anthropological and ethnohistorical research to argue for the “symbiotic nature of cultural construction, and the two‐way mutual character of cultural transmission” (107). In his formulation, literatures of encounter are both highly rhetorical texts that aim to exert power over Native peoples and texts that can tell scholars something about the events that shaped them. Whitehead analyzes Ralegh’s statement that he observed men whose heads were in their chests, a claim that scholars had long interpreted as an imaginative application of medieval representations of marvels in the Americas. As Whitehead showed, Discoverie relied upon this tradition even as it also responded to Native practices. Whitehead points out that Indigenous men often wore gorgets carved with faces, meaning that Ralegh’s seemingly fantastic account actually had a basis in Native material culture and practices. Such descriptions “appear only as fictions while they are abstracted from the native practices from which they were derived” (98). Whitehead’s interdisciplinary methodology positioned the literatures of encounter as texts that aimed to defend and perpetuate colonialism and that were shaped by two‐way exchanges. This move, Whitehead was careful to say, did not mean that Native “voices” could be read transparently in colonial texts, but it did mean that some elements of an Indigenous past could be heard (60).
Similarly, in an article that offers the most theoretically sophisticated response to Greenblatt and New Historicist modes of analyzing early American literatures to date, Ed White (2005) employs ethnohistorical research on Cherokee beliefs about supernatural beings called “Little People” to reread Thomas Harriot’s account of Roanoke Algonquian descriptions of disease as caused by “invisible bullets.” While Greenblatt (1991) reads Harriot’s odd description of disease (unusual because early modern medical philosophies held that disease was caused by internal humoral imbalances rather than external entities) as part of the colonist’s attempt to justify his heterodox religious beliefs by placing them in Native mouths, White shows that Harriot’s description had a possible counterpart in southeastern Native theories of disease. Finally, such interdisciplinary scholarship has likewise allowed scholars to see anew the role of Native women in cross‐cultural encounters. Rather than analyzing colonial representations of Indigenous women as symbolic of European desires for conquest – of the land and of women’s bodies – scholars have increasingly focused on Native women such as Matoaka (or Pocahontas) and the Creek trader Coosaponakeesa (Mary Musgrove) as diplomats whose negotiating skills and presence influenced the outcome of colonial encounters.
Following Whitehead’s lead, scholars have recently developed methodologies with which to recover some part of Native actions and perspectives. This endeavor reconceptualizes the relationship between colonial and Native American modes of representation and contextualizes colonial reports of Native actions in research on Native American and Indigenous cultural practices. Among other books, Matt Cohen’s The Networked Wilderness: Communicating in Early New England (2009) questioned the cultural hierarchies attached to terms like “orality” and “literacy” and the degree to which Natives and colonists could be said to be wholly oral or literate cultures. As Cohen shows, colonists and Natives alike drew on various modes of communication, including not only print, writing, and speech but also performance, ritual, and non‐alphabetic forms like wampum and needlepoint. As a result, he argues, Native and English people “constituted each other’s audiences” (2). For example, Cohen rereads Thomas Morton’s debate with the Plymouth Separatists as one that centered around cross‐cultural communication: Cohen analyzes Morton’s Maypole as a “publishing venue” (33) on which Morton posted allegorical poems and likely read them aloud to an audience that included New England Algonquians. It was this multilingual communicative sphere that posed such a threat to the Separatists, who sought to control how information moved in New England and across the Atlantic.
Cohen’s argument constitutes an important move away from earlier views of encounter as the meeting of two incommensurable cultures and instead posits cross‐cultural contact as moments of contest over communications that were at least partially intelligible to Native and colonial interlocutors. At the same time, Cohen’s book continued existing calls to expand definitions of writing and to reorient scholarly attention away from alphabetic writing and print. In their 1994 collection Writing Without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica & the Andes, co‐editors Elizabeth Hill Boone and Walter Mignolo argue that linking writing to representations of the voice limit its definition in ways that cannot encompass Indigenous communication systems. In her introduction to the collection, Boone (1994) argues for a new conceptualization of writing as “the communication of relatively specific ideas in a conventional manner by means of permanent, visible marks” (15, emphasis in original), a definition capacious enough to include alphabetic literacy alongside systems not oriented around the letter or the voice, such as Incan quipu and Mayan hieroglyphic texts. While it was also published in the wake of 1992, Writing Without Words offers a scholarly trajectory that departs from the New Historicist focus on European representations, for the collection explicitly decenters European categories in order to historicize and analyze Native textual and literary systems.
Following the lead of Boone and Mignolo, scholars have begun to expand the objects of their study, by including readings of embodied acts as well as representations of wampum and ornamentation among their analysis of alphabetic texts. Scholars such as Drew Lopenzina (2012), Birgit Brander Rasmussen (2012), Lisa Brooks (2008), and Hilary Wyss (2000), to name a few, have positioned Native textual systems as writing rather than as a more primitive form of communication, and they show how Native forms of writing continued to circulate after colonialism, sometimes becoming interwoven in what we might see as textual encounters, yet also maintaining separate literary histories. For example, Rasmussen argues that colonists in Spanish and British America recognized that the Indigenous peoples they met had sophisticated writing systems, and they took actions to destroy or hide evidence of those practices. Native writing practices persisted anyway, sometimes in the use of European writing systems to accomplish Indigenous purposes, as Wyss and Lopenzina show, and sometimes in the ongoing use of materials such as wampum and birch bark. As this scholarship demonstrates, a fuller understanding of colonial and Native responses to cross‐cultural encounters also illuminates the multiple levels at which colonial violence operated.
These scholars have radically reconfigured how the literatures of encounter were constituted and what those literatures include. History of the book methodologies – which position texts as the outcome of multiple contributors and contexts – have aided in tracing how colonial literatures were shaped in their content and form by cross‐cultural encounters. This mode of reading likewise requires drawing upon ethnohistorical and anthropological studies, to illuminate the significance of the materials and performances Natives employed to communicate with explorers and settlers. Power is still at stake in colonial encounters, but in contrast to scholarship of the 1990s, scholars have more recently focused on how both Natives and colonists sought to influence the outcome of encounters to their own benefit. As Cohen (2009) points out, one of the challenges of this methodology is that the colonial‐authored texts on which scholars rely to illuminate Native practices are often the same texts that they skeptically analyze as reflecting colonial power dynamics. He explores this point further in a collection (co‐edited with Jeffrey Glover) titled Colonial Mediascapes: Sensory Worlds of the Early Americas, in which the editors analyze how Indigenous “media” (a term they use by way of redefining writing yet again, while also remaining conscious of colonial power relations) were “remediated” by Europeans, who represented Indigenous languages, codices, tattoos and other forms in books, illustrations, and museums (Cohen and Glover 2014: 5). Europeans employed these remediations to develop their trading interests, establish missions, and make sweeping claims about human history, all projects that insisted that Native people and their cultural practices belonged in separate, usually inferior, categories from European ones.
Cohen and Glover unpack the “archival history of indigenous representation,” or the ways that colonial texts represented Native American communications and presented those communication practices as evidence for various European theories about historical progress and culture (4). The introduction offers a very useful reminder that scholars usually access Indigenous responses to encounter through colonial texts, or through texts collected and “remediated” by colonists. Native responses were preserved and refracted through administrative demands and colonial desires and theories. Knowledge of Native languages and literatures – and thus scholars’ knowledge of these areas – rested on colonists’ need to fulfill financial demands back in Europe, or to establish themselves as traders. Cohen’s and Glover’s focus on European remediations of Native American textual systems provides a useful reminder that literatures of encounter also functioned as representations of Native American communications systems that likewise support studies of early Native American histories and cultural practices. Indeed, Cohen and Glover’s introduction seems to mark a return to Peter Hulme’s focus on the ways that European texts condition what scholars can know about Native histories and, in this case, media.
Yet, in Networked Wilderness, Cohen (2009) offers one answer to this methodological quandary by suggesting that scholars might consider both Native peoples and English settlers as possessing systematic communication cultures. Accordingly, they might work to account for how each of those audiences shaped encounters and their textual outcomes. As he cautions:
To say that communication happens on a spectrum of media modes is not to say that we are all one people or that we can all understand each other. It is to say that we need to be able to think about representation in ways that acknowledge difference and its effects without insisting that there must be a knowable single source or origin of that difference, and that such knowledge can ground law. (10)
Another answer might come from the work of Abenaki scholar Lisa Brooks (2008), who grounds her study of early New England Native literatures in the Abenaki root word awigha‐, which, she explains, “denotes ‘to draw,’ ‘to write,’ to map. The word awikhigan, which originally described birchbark messages, maps, and scrolls, came to encompass books and letters” (xxi). Brooks examines the encounter between European and Native awikhigan from the perspective of the Abenaki and other New England Native peoples who met Europeans and who incorporated print, alphabetic writing, and the book into their existing textual systems. Studying such records, as Whitehead’s analysis of Indigenous gorgets also reminds us, tests the disciplinary bounds and skills of literary studies but also centers analyses of Native inscriptions in tribally specific languages and practices. Perhaps, then, studies of Native modes of representation and inscription should narrow rather than expand their terms: rather than broadening writing to include a large array of texts, perhaps scholars should instead employ terms like awikhigan to speak about particular Indigenous communities’ modes of describing material forms of communication.
These new readings of literatures of encounter and exploration also developed out of shifting views of the effects of exploration on colonial identities. When the scholarship of the 1990s emphasized that colonists employed descriptions of the Americas to manage colonization, it presumed that European intellectual frameworks could be reproduced in the Americas. The difficulty, for colonists, lay in shaping existing rhetorical strategies to account for unfamiliar events and experiences. Indeed, scholars like William Spengemann (1994) argued that the experience of travel to the Americas made colonial literatures distinctively American. The resistant unfamiliarity of experience differentiated colonists from their counterparts in Europe and created an American literary tradition.
Yet, as Ralph Bauer (2003) and Jim Egan (1999) point out, these previous scholars failed to explain why American experience was so powerful and why experience suddenly became a category that made Americans distinctive. Both Bauer and Egan placed colonial descriptions of experience in transatlantic and hemispheric histories of science in which experience became a new means of claiming authority in writing. Experience was not suddenly valuable because it was American; instead, colonists drew on emerging scientific discourses to claim an authority for “specifically colonial setting[s]” that they otherwise lacked (Egan 1999: 8). In this new view, colonists feared that they would lose the corporeal and intellectual qualities that made them European, and colonial literatures of encounter and exploration were less experiments at representing what colonists saw as a New World in familiar categories than desperate attempts to assure readers that they had not changed in the Americas. If colonists like Christopher Columbus and Jean de Léry were the key figures for new historicist scholars of the 1990s, then Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and George Percy, who experienced failed settlements, physical deprivation and transformation, and intra‐ and intercultural violence, were central to the new focus on colonial literatures as defenses of experience. For example, Cabeza de Vaca’s Relación documents the slow, painful dismantling of his identity as the treasurer on a Spanish voyage of conquest, as he is literally stripped naked, is taken captive, assumes the role of a healer, and appears unrecognizable to Spanish soldiers when he finally returns.
Authorities in European metropoles often saw such experiences as remaking imperial subjects into hybrid figures with potentially suspicious alliances. Yet captives presented their eyewitness accounts of unfamiliar peoples as beneficial to imperial interests and desirable to audiences fascinated by the Americas. They even claimed that their participation in some Indigenous practices had value: captives could present the “transformation that results from contact with native cultures, not as detrimental, but as beneficial, allowing the captive – and, by extension, the writer – to speak from a position of authority and knowledge” (Voigt 2009: 23). Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative offers a well‐known example: while Rowlandson is careful to write a story that tracks her successful return from captivity, she also frames her knowledge of Native movements, subsistence practices, and military actions as useful to a faltering English army. Such experiences rhetorically position information about Native practices as useful (and, in some cases, as titillating) for readers, while consequently blurring the boundaries between English or Spanish and Native American identities. The distinctiveness of American literature and culture emerged from these attempts to authorize colonial experience, not from those experiences themselves.
Sometimes, however, colonists’ experiences were so traumatic that they failed to represent them in writing, with the result that their literatures did not so much reflect a critique of metropolitan biases as the “deep estrangement” that misery “effects” (Donegan 2013: 3). As Kathleen Donegan (2013) shows, “misery” and “catastrophe,” not imagination or the marvelous, were crucial facets of exploration and encounter, and colonial texts register a deep sense of loss, abjection, and trauma that defers closure and interpretation, leaving colonists groping at answers to the question of whom they had become in the Americas. Encounters played a significant role in shaping this misery, for violent interactions in which colonists and Natives were alternately victims and aggressors threatened colonists’ sense of themselves as English men and women. In some cases, Natives used violence to send messages to colonists, identifying colonial greed by killing Englishmen at Jamestown and then stuffing their mouths with bread, for example. Natives are decidedly agents in these texts and in scholars’ readings of them: people who maintain control of geographic space, political diplomacy, and the meanings of encounters in spite of colonists’ prior assumptions of superiority. Native and Indigenous responses to encounters thus operated not only at the level of representation and writing but also in the realm of political negotiations and resistance.
The new focus on colonists’ unstable identities and on Natives’ increased agency has generated debates about theories of race and their origins. Historians Joyce E. Chaplin (2003) and Jorge Cañizares‐Esguerra (1999) offered still influential accounts of the rise of racial science in the British and Spanish Americas, respectively. Both scholars argue that, in the seventeenth century, colonists developed theories of difference rooted in the body in order to defend themselves against accusations of degeneration and to argue that their bodies had maintained their European qualities in America. By contrast, colonists attributed Natives’ refusal to embrace the teachings of the Catholic Church in New Spain and their susceptibility to disease in the British Americas to inherent bodily deficiencies. By reading colonial commentary on Native, African, and European bodies in the Americas in the context of early modern science, these two scholars argue for quite early origins of biological theories of race, dating them to seventeenth‐century encounters and colonists’ attempts to claim a “corporeal affinity” for the climate in the British Americas and a hospitable climate in New Spain (Chaplin 2003: 157).
By contrast, several literary scholars have shown that, if colonists did sometimes articulate theories of Native and African inferiority in order to defend their own physical and intellectual qualities, they did not always describe identity as rooted in the body. As Donegan’s work shows, scholars have yet to fully account for the unsettling effects of exploration and encounter, and the field seems poised to reconsider colonial articulations of identity in light of the trauma that reshaped European identities. Moreover, as Lisa Voigt (2009) shows, European captives argued for the value of unstable identities, describing their participation in Native customs and the adoption of identities that were not quite European yet not fully Indigenous as a valuable source of knowledge about the Americas. As she notes,
Such strategies of self‐authorization, and the fluidity and permeability of cultural and ethnic categories that they entail, have perhaps been more “invisible in European consciousness” than the notion of “sharp racial typologies” that Cañizares‐Esguerra identifies as an overlooked sign of colonial Spanish America’s precocious modernity.
(Voigt 2009: 24)
As my own work has shown, colonists remarked upon the flexibility of English bodily identity in the Americas, especially the Caribbean, well into the eighteenth century, and this fluidity kept open channels in which colonists engaged with Native and African knowledges. Colonists did seek to mark Native and African practices as dangerous and as undesirable, but these claims of non‐European inferiority did not accompany notions of a stable European body in which identity inhered firmly in physical features. Instead, modern theories of race emerged slowly, out of colonists’ comments on other peoples in the Americas and their environments (Wisecup 2013).
Looking forward, it is likely that scholars will continue to interrogate and revise the terms literature and encounter, as well as related terms such as identity, writing, and power. The Networked Wilderness (Cohen 2009), Queequeg’s Coffin (Rasmussen 2012), and Medical Encounters (Wisecup 2013) placed the literatures of encounter in conversation with Native American studies, and that field is poised to help scholars of the early Americas continue this mode of analysis by further reimagining European and Indigenous textual systems. Placing materials like wampum strings and belts (made of shells and serving diplomatic and other uses), quipu (Incan information storage devices), and baskets into conversation with alphabetic writing in manuscript and print presents opportunities to consider how Natives engaged with European representational technologies by bringing their own textual strategies to bear on encounters. In doing so, such scholarship follows Scott Lyons’s (2010) call to “move away from conceptions of Indians as ‘things’ and toward a deeper analysis of Indians as human beings who do things – things like asserting identity, defining identity, contesting identity, and so forth – under given historical conditions” (59). No longer simply objects of European observation and imagination or people whose material realities exist just off the page, Native Americans were key shapers of colonial American literatures and people who maintained alternative literary and historical traditions.
Such shifting methodologies are at work in studies of Matoaka, or Pocahontas, the daughter of Powhatan whose alleged rescue of John Smith scholars have read as a symbol for imperial narratives of Native American desire and welcome. Pocahontas’s story as Smith tells it is certainly blatantly imaginative, her rescue likely invented by Smith to defend his status and adopted by English colonial promoters to imagine a New World into which the English were welcomed by Native people. Yet, research by Paula Gunn Allen (2003) and other scholars illuminates the historical experiences of Matoaka by drawing on tribal histories as well as European archives. Accounting for these contexts suggests that Matoaka served as an ambassador for her people, one who was highly aware of her responsibilities and their significance and who drew on European textual systems to make her perspectives known or to critique Europeans’ actions. Moreover, as Caroline Wigginton (2016) shows, Matoaka and other Indigenous women likely also exerted some influence over the ways in which European artists and writers represented them. Wigginton reads Simon van de Passe’s engraving of Matoaka, one that Matoaka herself may have shaped by insisting that her Powhatan name be inscribed next to her English one and by presenting herself as a royal diplomat. Such research has sought to remove Matoaka’s story from the romanticized, English contexts in which her story usually circulates and to restore it to Algonquian contexts.
Importantly, this focus on Natives as agents and active shapers of encounters and their representations has not shifted the focus away from the violence of encounter. Indeed, the time is ripe for scholars of exploration and encounter literatures to engage more closely with the interdisciplinary scholarship on settler colonialism, a context in which power is structured in ways that predict and enable the dispossession of Native and Indigenous peoples of their land and sovereignty. Doing so can illuminate the ways in which encounters were not only complex textual moments but also events that perpetuated European claims to land and resources, events with present consequences for Indigenous communities. As Simon Pokagon pointed out in 1893, US achievements were built on top of “the red man’s wigwam” (2). Contextualizing studies of encounter in scholarship on settler colonialism – and on colonialisms’ diverse forms – could not only provide additional insight into the power structures that shaped those encounters but could also help scholars to connect studies of early modern encounters to the long history of dispossession that has characterized (and still characterizes) European and US relations with Native peoples. A recognition of the ways that literatures of encounter participated in and justified settler colonialism can help to exemplify these texts’ ongoing significance while maintaining the historical specificity that has characterized the best new work in the field.
Settler colonialism also raises questions about the temporality of the term “encounter,” which is traditionally associated with so‐called first contacts, with the wonder and, more recently, the confusion and uncertainty that accompanied early settlers to the Americas. Later, around the end of the eighteenth century, “encounter” gives way to key terms and categories such as “expansion,” “removal,” or “revolution.” Moreover, encounters between Anglo‐American settlers and Native Americans in the Ohio River Valley and the American West, which occurred several hundred years after colonialism began, are typically not included in studies of the literatures of encounter. Yet taking settler colonialism as the operative structure in fifteenth‐, sixteenth‐, and seventeenth‐century encounters also exposes links with later encounters driven by a similar structure and could usefully expand studies of encounter to later centuries. On the other hand, it may be useful for scholars of earlier periods to draw from historian Nancy Shoemaker’s (2015b) “typology of colonialism,” which attends to the different forms of colonialism in the Atlantic and Pacific worlds, and to conceptualize the term “encounter” accordingly. What distinguishes the literatures of encounter before 1820 from those that came after that date, and how might the field be revised to account for those differences? On the other hand, what similarities do those literatures have, and how might the field need to shift accordingly? What might scholars gain by considering early colonial encounters alongside later ones? How did encounter differ, if at all, between an imperial context, in which colonists traveled overseas to establish settlements and extract resources, and a US national context, in which colonists traveled for hundreds of miles on land, also to establish settlements and extract resources? How might the terms “encounter” and “colonialism” be redefined to attend more specifically to the different effects they had on Indigenous peoples?
Moreover, some scholars have begun to reconfigure encounter and its literatures by expanding their geographic scope. While earlier versions of the field drew on and contributed to Atlantic studies, the field of American literary studies has recently seen greater engagement with Africa and with the Pacific. Exciting work is emerging on European encounters with Africa and African peoples, as scholars have begun to examine narratives of voyages to Africa and to connect these accounts to American encounter literatures. These studies reconceptualize the literatures of exploration and encounter by developing methodologies with which to read colonial descriptions of Africans as reflecting something of the actions and lives of those African interlocutors. Here, James Sweet’s (2011) groundbreaking history of the African medical practitioner Domingos Álvares and Cassander Smith’s (2016) study of Africans in early modern literatures stand as models for future studies: both scholars tease surprisingly specific information about Álvares and, in Smith’s case, a number of African people, from kings to enslaved women, out of colonial records and literary texts. Both scholars show that careful archival and ethnohistorical research, when paired with historical and literary scholarship, has the capacity to radically revise the archive of the literatures of encounter and of early African (and African American) literatures.
Moreover, Shoemaker has recently redefined encounter by uncovering “indigenous encounters” between Native American whalemen and Indigenous peoples throughout the globe, moments in which there were “‘Indians’ on ships and on shore” (Shoemaker 2015a: 7). These moments promise to stretch multiple categories of encounter and their literatures, shifting them away from their association with Columbus, first contact, and the Atlantic, and toward later centuries and the Pacific. Similarly, Jace Weaver (2014), Coll Thrush (2016), and David Chang (2016) trace the travels of Indigenous peoples throughout the Atlantic and Pacific, noting that such mobility requires scholars to shift the timeline of encounters much earlier than 1492. These studies also require a rethinking of conceptions of encounter as moments of incommensurable wonder, in which two peoples met one another with surprise and struggled to make sense of the event. Encounters are negotiations over meaning and power, events to which African, Native American, Indigenous, and European peoples came with preexisting tactics for meeting with unfamiliar peoples. As Michelle Burnham (2011) has pointed out in her study of Pacific travel literatures, the area was characterized by a “complex internationalism,” and future studies of encounter will no doubt find it productive to decenter the Atlantic context that privileged Europe and the Americans to take up these multinational exchanges (427).
As they examine how the literatures of encounter represent colonial anxieties about their European identities and cross‐cultural conflicts over communication, scholars might turn again to Pokagon’s Red Man’s Greeting, which discussed these themes over a century ago. Pokagon highlights the pre‐contact existence of Native textual practices by drawing attention to his book’s birch bark pages and noting that the Pottawatomi people used bark “instead of paper, being of greater value to us as it could not be injured by sun or water” (Pokagon 1893: preface). The material on which the book is printed likewise points to the interrelationship of land, inscription, and resistance to colonialism: Pokagon’s birch bark pages remind readers that land is the basis of the Pottawatomi history told in the book, while also standing as a critique of US policies of expansion and their destruction of natural resources. Moreover, Pokagon details the values that grounded Native responses to Europeans: they treated settlers with kindness and generosity, in contrast to the greed for gold that characterized colonists. These values, for Pokagon, mark a long, hemispheric history of Native resistance to the practices of colonialism.
Pokagon’s book and the history it tells pose a final question for scholars of the literatures of encounter. As both the content and the form of Red Man’s Greeting indicate, Native histories of colonialism circulated in printed and non‐print forms, and they did so long before and after the 1893 World’s Fair. Red Man’s Greeting thus also raises the question of what place Native American literatures, histories, and textual practices might occupy in future studies of literatures of encounter. The debates about writing and its definitions outlined above suggest that the category “literatures of encounter” might be expanded to include Native American representations of encounter – those transcribed not only in colonial remediations but also in materials created by Native individuals.
The rapidly growing field of Native American and Indigenous studies focuses primarily on post‐1900 literatures, but an increasing number of scholars are putting the methodologies and questions of Native studies to work in earlier periods (Mt. Pleasant, Wigginton, and Wisecup 2018). Moreover, as Whitehead’s (1997) work suggests, interdisciplinary exchanges among literary scholars, anthropologists, and archaeologists may prove fruitful collaborations for scholars who wish to develop methodological tools for examining non‐alphabetic and non‐print representations of encounter. Finally, scholars might follow Christine DeLucia’s (2015) call for consultative and collaborative research, in which scholars work with and alongside tribal communities, many of whom have their own archives and maintain records and memories of encounter. Thus, as scholars attend in increasingly specific ways to the different versions of colonialism and communication at stake in the literatures of encounter, opportunities exist for them to consider as well Native American and Indigenous studies methodologies for examining these questions and for attending responsibly to parallel traditions of Native American representations of encounter. As Pokagon’s Red Man’s Greeting reminds us, these representations both drew on and contested European and US literatures of encounter, by taking them as a basis for resistance. In doing so, Pokagon reminded his audience that, while the historical record might try to silence Native people, they cultivated and maintained their own practices for responding to colonialism.
See also: chapter 1 (the storyteller’s universe); chapter 3 (settlement literatures before and beyond the stories of nations); chapter 6 (captivity); chapter 7 (africans in early america); chapter 11 (travel writings in early america, 1680–1820); chapter 12 (early native american literacies to 1820); chapter 20 (the first black atlantic).