“The Finest Men We Have Ever Seen”: Reading Jefferson’s Osage Encounters through Orientalism

In 1804, a delegation of Osages traveled to Washington, DC to meet with President Thomas Jefferson. After their meeting, Jefferson remarked in a letter that Osages were “the finest men we have ever seen.” Using Jefferson’s comment as a starting point, this essay engages Edward Said’s Orientalism as a way of reconsidering how to account for the colonial context in interpreting a moment like this one. Rather than pointing to anything intrinsic about the Osages that might have prompted Jefferson’s remarks, the analysis here focuses on the tri-racial history of Virginia, the home state of not just Jefferson, but of his cousins Lewis and Clark, as well. Far from paying tribute to Osage greatness, Jefferson’s comment sets the stage for Osage dispossession and the importation into the Mississippi West of slavery and the racial capitalist system that made it possible, linking Jefferson’s comment to contemporary manifestations of resistance against this Jeffersonian inheritance, including the Movement for Black Lives, the movement to defend the Missouri River against the Dakota Access Pipeline, those who organized against the Unite the Right white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in August, 2017, and others

Native American Scholarship and the Transnational Turn

The term transnational has had a strong impact in various corners of literary and cultural studies over the past decade, but is only now emerging as a significant category of analysis among Native American writers and critics and in Native American Studies. This essay grew out of a specific attempt to make some sense of why so many Native scholars in literary studies have steered clear of discourse on the transnational. It aims to provide a deeper understanding of how criticism fits into larger constellations of ethnic studies, politics, and culture