“Frightful Stories”: Captivity, Conquest, and Justice in Lydia Maria Child’s Native Narratives

Abstract

Lydia Maria Child’s Native American children’s stories comprehend the interconnections among racial justice, environmental agency, sovereignty, and human rights. To engender readers’ awareness Child transformed the well-established genres of captivity narratives and histories of settlement and Indian wars, in the process promulgating several ideas that now feature among the concepts that define environmental justice. By apprehending her First Settlers of New England within a matrix of Indian tales, we can appreciate how this volume deserves particular attention not only as children’s literature or environmental literature, but as a foundational early national and antebellum text for both children and adults.