‘To the Indian Names are Subjoined a Mark and Seal’: Tracing the Terrain of Ojibwe Literature

Abstract

In Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, the Ojibwe boast the first Native American literary writer in print circulation – through her husband Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s The Literary Voyager (1826–1827). While the Tsalagi (Cherokee) probably boast more individual writers in the 19th-century with the prevalence of journalism from the late 1820s onwards; and while numerous epistolary and conversion narratives, not to mention the transcriptions of traditional songs and stories, precede Schoolcraft’s publication, Ojibwe writing in all forms has proliferated. Gerald Vizenor, among others, has claimed that by the late 20th-century the Ojibwe ‘claim more published writers than any other tribe on [the North American] continent’. This essay summarises the growth of that literary archive, considering a variety of relationships to two kinds of ‘text’, the pictographic legacy of rock art and birchbark scrolls, and the littoral legacy of treaties and federal documentation, that leave their mark across a range of Ojibwe writing. It seeks to briefly outline the changing nature of Literary Criticism as it pertains to Native American literatures, while considering claims to continuity between literary culture and earlier forms of ‘textual’ record common to the Ojibwe. Looking, ultimately, at some of the ways in which the thematisation of resistance and endurance, and the prevalence of the image of the document, and the self-conscious reflection on text and textuality, characterise aesthetic and formal choices in a number of Ojibwe texts, the essay proposes several points of contact between the historical, political, and literary claims of contemporary Native American Literary studies.