“Woven alike with meaning” : sovereignty and form in Native North American poetry, 1800-1910

The story of American poetry has developed alongside the idea of America itself, becoming almost synonymous with national sovereignty projects in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During this time the figure of the Indian was, in poetry, customarily depicted as melancholy and moribund, a noble savage making way for a supposedly superior civilization and race. Yet indigenous North American poets also composed and published poetry and participated in reading communities during this time. Examining this poetry reveals how indigenous writers manipulated poetic genres to contest U.S. hegemony and assert sovereignties from the sexual to the tribal to the national. Indeed, understanding early indigenous poets’ formal choices and poetic communities challenges critical narratives of American poetry’s history as having been linear and progressive, demanding a new way of organizing the study of American poetry. In this dissertation, I argue that early Native North American poets chose to write in specific poetic genres in response to local, national, and international publishing worlds. Each chapter examines how indigenous poets comment on the practice and form of poetry, thus speaking to a diverse community of poets and readers through a variety of verse traditions. Jane Johnston Schoolcraft draws from multiple cultural traditions as she manipulates time and genre through her mourning poems, ballads, and lyrics in the Anishinaabe world of the Great Lakes. In the Chicago area, Simon Pokagon uses insurgent practices of appropriation to criticize and revise colonialist American poetry through cross-racial citations and borrowings in his birchbark pamphlets and novel. As public literary tastes shift from poems to legends at the turn of the twentieth century, E. Pauline Johnson helps invent a different kind of modernist poetry that challenges representations of indigenous peoples as pre-modern. Alex Posey composes skeptical elegies, dialect poems, and political newspaper verse from western and Creek literary forms in Indian Territory to heal a divided Creek Nation, practicing poetic appropriations that offered ways of relating to genre that remain powerful for Native American poets today.Englis

E. Pauline Johnson and Walt Whitman rebury Red Jacket

textSide-by-side, surprisingly, in the appendix of the Buffalo Historical Society’s publication Obsequies of Red Jacket at Buffalo, E. Pauline Johnson and Walt Whitman memorialize Red Jacket’s reburial on October 9, 1884, with their respective poems, “The Re-interment of Red Jacket” and “Red Jacket, (From Aloft.).” Through this textual showdown, this report interrogates the usefulness of the vanishing Indians narrative, instead interpreting the event as the locus of a heterogeneous, spiritual contest over bodies and their potential significations. Although orchestrated by Buffalo’s European American elites, the reburial also included representatives from the Six Nations tribes, among them Mohawk Ely S. Parker as well as Johnson. Paying attention to heterogeneity, whether differences in religion, tribal affiliation or class, at the event allows us to understand the varying stakes of the conflict, from debates over Christianity to immigration to the establishment of literary and social relations. While Whitman, nearing the end of his life, contemplates proper memorialization in “Red Jacket, (From Aloft.),” Johnson deploys the elegy to lay claim to her Native ancestry and burgeoning literary career. Monumentalizations often attempt to conceal such heterogeneity by creating the illusion of a dominant, national narrative. Alive within these events, nevertheless, a different image persists, one that preserves the messy debates over religion, land settlement, immigration, citizenship and transforming Native governments that actual memorialization ceremonies create.Englis