The Buffalo, the Chickadee, and the Eagle: A Multispecies Textual History of Plenty Coups’s Multivocal Autobiography

Abstract

Plenty Coups’s autobiography comes from a time of intensive genocidal warfare both military and legal in scope, yet his account is mediated not so much by significant events in human history as by several significant dreams of animals. I want to consider some of the ways that this narrative is a multispecies, multivocal text composed of many viewpoints, human and more-than-human. Thus my analysis integrates some of the paradoxical disjunctures between the archival records with the book itself by following the animals, the eagle and the chickadee, two birds who serve as guides to Plenty Coups in dreams he has early in life. My thesis is that Plenty Coups shares some of his animal dreams— and does not share other animal dreams— to serve as interpretive cues to future readers.