Finding a Place for David Cusick in Native American Literary History

Abstract

Though David Cusick was one of the first Iroquois to record the oral literature of his nation in the alphabetic writing of Western civilization, contemporary Iroquois do not necessarily receive his work with praise. For instance, Seneca-Wyandot scholar Barbara A. Mann points out that Cusick inserted missionary interpretations of Iroquois creation stories into the text of his Sketches of Ancient History of the Six Nations (Lynx 427). Yet in a climate where Native American issues continue to receive scant attention, despite their fundamental importance to our understanding of the development of United States cultures, Cusick's work deserves critical investigation. It also deserves consideration as a component of our pedagogy, both as an example of how Iroquois writers attempted to combat a false savagism and as an example of the fissures of subjectivity that US foreign policy and missionary activity created within Iroquois nations. It is because Cusick does not necessarily represent the quintessential Tuscarora that we should study him. Too often, we expect to view entire nations of Native Americans through their most prominent writers. Cusick's ambiguous and perhaps liminal status within his nation, his difference from his peers and from contemporary Iroquois, challenges our expectations of homogeneity and unity in Native America. In writing Sketches, David Cusick denied the validity of both the extinction paradigm of post-Removal era savagism1 and the Hobson's choice of civilization-or-extinction that a slightly earlier version of savagism proffered Indian nations and individuals. As Roy Harvey Pearce established in 1953, savagism was the dominant discourse around Native Americans in Amer-European com