Indian Captivity Research Articles

Weak Planet: Literature and Assisted Survival

Weak Planet: Literature and Assisted Survival

Native Bondage, Narrative Mobility: African American Accounts of Indian Captivity

The article studies African American narratives of indigenous captivity from its emergence in the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth. Taking accounts by Briton Hammon, John Marrant, Henry Bibb, and James Beckwourth as examples, the essay charts the development of this body of writings, its distinction from white-authored narratives, and its contribution to North American autobiography. In so doing, the article argues that the black-authored texts strategically employed only certain elements of the Indian captivity narrative and that they blended these with aspects of other types of Western autobiography to claim black people's agency and discursive authority in white-dominated print culture.

Allegories of Encounter: Colonial Literacy and Indian Captivities by Andrew Newman (review)

Reviewed by: Allegories of Encounter: Colonial Literacy and Indian Captivities by Andrew Newman Steffi Dippold Allegories of Encounter: Colonial Literacy and Indian Captivities. By Andrew Newman. Williamsburg, Va., and Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. 236 pages. Cloth, paper, ebook. What was a book? What was the role of reading in colonial America? In his absorbing Allegories of Encounter: Colonial Literacy and Indian Captivities, Andrew Newman reconsiders these important questions by looking at the physicality of printed texts and the reception and circulation of books within seventeenth- and eighteenth-century captivity narratives. Newman challenges conventional approaches to early modern literacy and intertextual allusion by drawing attention to scenes in which captives engage with a spectrum of print practices and books as material objects—both their own and those of their Indigenous captors. His focus is on nonfictional stories of captives because he recognizes this genre—gestated from harrowing conditions of isolation, violence, and trauma—as a rare archive not only of Indigenous behavior and belief systems but also of colonial hermeneutic strategies that, because of their unfamiliarity and historical distance, require reconstruction. Breathing new life into American book studies and histories of reading, Newman’s ambitious work issues a riposte to the understanding of literacy and print culture as exclusively imperial. Its revelation of arresting and untracked colonial and Native uses of books joins exciting new scholarship by Lindsay DiCuirci, Phillip H. Round, Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein, and Kristina Bross and Hilary E. Wyss that complicate assumptions of how texts and literacy mattered across cultures in early America.1 As Newman’s title stresses, his work is both a study in allegory and an appeal for a better understanding of the complex lives of print and writing in the colonies. Many stories of captivity, he shows, brim with teasing metareflections about books (often gifted by Native captors), scattered material cultures of letters and notes, and scenes of reading and remembering other texts. To do justice to this rich spectrum of activities, Newman deliberately broadens the narrow concept of literacy defined as “the ability to read and write” and explores instead what he open-endedly calls “literacy events” (3). This shift is significant. It creates critical awareness for a [End Page 774] network of undertheorized practical, embodied, and imagined practices and anxieties of the period related but not limited to print. A case in point is the paranoid fantasy of the kidnapped James Smith, who panicked out of fear that “reading my books” might push his Iroquois captors into “puting [sic] me to death” (1).2 Why do captives imagine death by reading, Newman asks? What can such literacy events tell us about the understanding of books, self, community, and American cultures of reading at large? Much like a captivity narrative, Allegories of Encounter moves from familiar canonic materials to the increasingly unfamiliar and underexplored. The first four chapters discuss symbolic reading and consumption of texts, or how captives attributed “another sense” (13)—typically a secondary allegorical spiritual meaning—to their literal descriptions of capture and exile. Here Newman’s primary target of analysis is Christian typology, the hermeneutic heart of Puritan practical piety, as he shows how ordinary people recycled biblical scripts to articulate a sense of self in extraordinary circumstances. Guiding readers from Mary Rowlandson’s canonical The Soveraignty and Goodness of God in the first chapter, to captivity’s model master narrative Psalm 137 in the second, to accounts of capture by the Jesuit missionary Isaac Jogues and the Puritan minister John Williams in the third, and to the narratives of the converted Mohawk saint Kateri Tekakwitha and the Puritan-abductee-turned-Native Marguerite Kanenstenhawi (also known as Eunice Williams) in the fourth, Newman’s detailed close-readings unpack messy multilayered textual cultures that linger in-between the spoken, the embodied, the handwritten, and the printed.3 Refusing to distinguish theory from practice or the symbolic from the experiential, Newman recovers how, not only in retrospective scribal practices but in their actual lives, captives lived allegory “like lucid dreamers, aware and motivated by the significance of the stories they were...

The Storied Landscape of Iroquoia: History, Conquest, and Memory in the Native Northeast

The Storied Landscape of Iroquoia: History, Conquest, and Memory in the Native Northeast

Two Barbary Captives: Allegiance Through Self-Interest and International Networks, 1785–1796

The correspondence and diaries of two American merchant sailors, James Cathcart and Captain Richard O'Brien, who were held captive in Algiers from 1785 to 1795–96, bridge and complicate the two literatures of commercial-diplomatic and informal networks. During this period, the nascent American government and over one hundred of its citizens were held hostage by the North African "Barbary States" of Algiers, Morocco, Tripoli, and Tunis. Using the letters and diaries of the two most prolific captives, Cathcart and O'Brien, this article shows that the captives successfully penetrated diplomatic networks and the minds of sympathetic diplomats such as David Humphreys, who exploited the captives' plight to help his own longstanding campaign of fostering national identity. The captives similarly deployed the pragmatic skills and style of correspondence they learned as merchant sailors to self-interestedly weave their cause for liberty into the emerging national narrative. These interventions echoed the sentiments and rhetoric of participants in Shays's Rebellion (Massachusetts, 1786–87) and the Whiskey Rebellion (western Pennsylvania, 1791–94). Yet perhaps because of the very different (and, in fact, conflicting) goals of American captives in Algiers and rebels in rural Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, the ever-increasing scholarship on American captives in Barbary has overlooked how these nonelite citizens' campaigns were intertwined. Their shared political rhetoric and notions of national identity were developed and deployed thousands of miles apart, likely thanks to their shared backgrounds in self-interested participation in the revolution and the captives' ready access to newspapers and personal correspondence that kept them informed of domestic crises on the American frontier. Literary analysis of American captives in Barbary is typically juxtaposed with Indian captivity narratives, which is especially applicable to fictional Barbary narratives, and a much smaller number of published nonfictional accounts. The comparison does not hold for the more abundant short-form correspondence, which represents a more significant and untapped opportunity for scholarly analysis of the epistolary styles of the two most prominent American captives in Algiers, who echoed and engaged with the rhetoric and ideas of rebels on the young nation's terrestrial frontier as they were being held captive on the maritime frontier. This article argues that, through the captives' political rhetoric and canny exploitation of their positions in informal transnational networks, we can gain new insights into how nonelite citizens, whether in rural Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, or Algiers, drew on a shared language of liberty and expectations of popular participation in policy development to simultaneously influence the terms of national identity and reinvent themselves.

Allegories of Encounter: Colonial Literacy and Indian Captivities. By Andrew Newman. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Pp. 236. $90.00 cloth; $24.95 paper.)

March 01 2020 Allegories of Encounter: Colonial Literacy and Indian Captivities Allegories of Encounter: Colonial Literacy and Indian Captivities. By AndrewNewman. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Pp. 236. $90.00 cloth; $24.95 paper.) Lorrayne Carroll Lorrayne Carroll Lorrayne Carroll is associate professor of English and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Southern Maine. Her book Rhetorical Drag: Gender Impersonation, Captivity, and the Writing of History (2007) is a study of male authors’ use of female voices in women's captivity narratives from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Lorrayne Carroll Lorrayne Carroll is associate professor of English and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Southern Maine. Her book Rhetorical Drag: Gender Impersonation, Captivity, and the Writing of History (2007) is a study of male authors’ use of female voices in women's captivity narratives from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. Online Issn: 1937-2213 Print Issn: 0028-4866 © 2020 by The New England Quarterly2020The New England Quarterly The New England Quarterly (2020) 93 (1): 116–119. https://doi.org/10.1162/tneq_r_00797 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Search Site Citation Lorrayne Carroll; Allegories of Encounter: Colonial Literacy and Indian Captivities. The New England Quarterly 2020; 93 (1): 116–119. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/tneq_r_00797 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentAll JournalsThe New England Quarterly Search Advanced Search This content is only available as a PDF. © 2020 by The New England Quarterly2020The New England Quarterly Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Allegories of Encounter: Colonial Literacy and Indian Captivities

Allegories of Encounter: Colonial Literacy and Indian Captivities

Allegories of Encounter: Colonial Literacy and Indian Captivity by Andrew Newman

Reviewed by: Allegories of Encounter: Colonial Literacy and Indian Captivity by Andrew Newman Yael Ben-Zvi (bio) Allegories of Encounter: Colonial Literacy and Indian Captivity andrew newman Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and University of North Carolina Press, 2019 236 pp. Many former captives wrote Indian captivity narratives to assert their belonging to the settler societies into which they were trying to re-integrate themselves. Andrew Newman’s Allegories of Encounter shows that reading played a similar social role during captivity, allowing captives to reconstruct discursive communal ties that approximated those their captors had severed. By reading books and other texts in captivity, captives could anticipate the reunification that writing would eventually confirm. [End Page 227] Newman analyzes a broad range of “literacy practices” in numerous captivity narratives, extending literacy’s centrality to settler colonialism beyond its familiar uses in land acquisition and the civilizing mission. If settler colonialism reproduces metropolitan sociopolitical settings, literacy bolstered captives’ faith in this reproduction as captivity threatened to frustrate it. Captors unversed in alphabetic literacy recognized and often respected its significance for captive settlers to whom they gave books and whose engagements in literacy practices they often accepted. By contrast, captives utilized literacy as the major means for distinguishing their historical positions and sociopolitical affiliations from those into which captivity had forced them. The book revises conventional treatments of literary allusions and intertextual references in Indian captivity narratives as extradiegetic afterthoughts or merely decorative tropes. It develops an intertextual history in which reading and the meanings with which readers invest texts become constitutive elements of captivity narratives’ plots rather than sources of stylistic rhetorical effects. Drawing on sociolinguistics and academic literacy studies, Allegories of Encounter explores various “literacy events” that enabled captives to perform “their participation in [the] discourse communities” from which their captors had separated them (3). The book’s “mode of inquiry” is deliberately “inductive, speculative, associative, [and] slow” as Newman traces what literacy might have meant for captives, its significance within its various discursive, cultural, and historical contexts, and its functions in shaping captivity experiences (194, original emphasis). The book expands the range of activities and capabilities included under the term literacy as well as Indian captivity narratives’ social investments and functions. This book history study reconstructs the discursive communities that settlers have created with literacy’s aid, analyzing the texts they read and sometimes wrote in captivity, and imaginatively re-creating the worlds that literacy brought into being. The first chapter, “Rowlandson’s Captivity, Interpreted by God,” analyzes the Bible’s role in the genre’s hypercanonized text, Mary Rowland-son’s The Soveraignty and Goodness of God (1682). Scholars have distinguished Rowlandson’s narrated experiences from the numerous biblical citations in her book, at times crediting Increase Mather’s editorial intervention for these allusions. Newman argues that multiple intimacies and [End Page 228] dependencies tie these biblical allusions inextricably to Rowlandson’s experiences. In “Rowlandson’s rendering,” he states, “the provision of a Bible” by one of her captors “was an experience” that “enabled” a “series of literacy events” that were as experiential even though they were anchored in specific biblical verses rather than in the particular geographic places she traveled (20–21). The dynamic interactions that settlers created to link textual passages to captivity’s locales subordinated the latter to the former. Chapter 2, “Psalm 137 as a Site of Encounter,” extends this analysis to various authors who used this seminal representation of the Israelites’ Babylonian exile as the definitive experiential axis of their own captivities. Newman argues that “[h]istorically, culturally, geographically, the circumstances of Christian captives in the Eastern Woodlands correspond to the language of the psalm so closely as to entail a partial collapse in the structure of the allegory between the biblical narrative and their own experience” (51). Rather than keeping those levels distinct, Newman suggests that Christian captives had to collapse them because the “first three verses of Psalm 137 conformed so closely to the circumstances of American captivity narratives” (60). The recurring adverbial phrase “so closely” emphasizes literacy’s potent ability to blur these boundaries. Newman subtly critiques settlers’ typological identification with biblical Israelites by acknowledging that “perhaps no...

Who Narrates Captivity?

Who Narrates Captivity? Rebecca Anne Goetz (bio) Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Pocahontas and the English Boys: Caught between Cultures in Early Virginia. New York: New York University Press, 2019. xi + 233 pp. Figures, notes, and index. $75.00. Andrew Newman, Allegories of Encounter: Colonial Literacies and Indian Captivities. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2019. xi + 211 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $24.95. About sixty years before Mary Rowlandson wrote her famous book The Sovereignty and Goodness of God: Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs Mary Rowlandson (1682), Sarah Boyse also wrote a captivity narrative. Captured by Pamunkeys in March 1622, Boyse was sent home from captivity in 1623 "appareled like one of theire Quenes, wch they [the Pamunkeys] desired wee should take notice of." She observed her captors well: she "reporteth of a great deale of miserie that o[u]r People endure and not least Hunger in wch th'Indians also suffer extreame."1 The Pamunkeys held Sarah and eighteen other English women as captives, but the English were aware they were all alive because her husband John received "a letter from Boyse his wife."2 What information did she include in her letter? We do not know, because her letter does not survive. All that remains is a description of her clothing and her observations on the difficulties of life among the Pamunkeys. But I can begin to imagine what Sarah Boyse's letter might have told us. In addition to her descriptions of hardship and dearth, perhaps like Mary Rowlandson's narrative, Sarah Boyse might have told present-day historians much about Pamunkey politics, about Opechancanough's struggles to hold his confederacy together in the face of unceasing English violence, and the threat of starvation. We might have glimpsed Boyse's piety too, but perhaps without the puritan overtones of Rowlandson's later narrative. The possibility of Sarah Boyse's narrative is one we can imprint with all the things we wish we knew about Indigenous and settler lives in the wake of Opechancanough's devastating attack on English settlements in 1622. [End Page 488] I am able to subject Sarah Boyse to such conjecture because she left only the barest trace in the archive of early Virginia. The Virginia Company did not deem her literacy and her ability to describe her captivity worthy of extensive record. No one archived her (probably handwritten) letter. The men of the Virginia Company happily ignored Boyse's literacy, and thus her narrative. If a woman writes a letter, and no one saves it, does its once-upon-a-time existence matter? Was Sarah Boyse's unloved and unarchived letter a literacy event? Andrew Newman describes literacy events as "the particular activities where reading and writing have a role" (p. 3). In his new book Allegories of Encounter, Andrew Newman delves into one of the most commonly taught and commonly read genres in early American literature: the captivity narrative. In his close reading of the writings of several well-known captives such as Mary Rowlandson, Reverend John Williams, and John Marrant, among others, Newman explores these tales as literacy events, arguing that "captives read and wrote with the presumption that their captors did not—or should not" (p. 7). He describes his approach as "admittedly Eurocentric," and primarily about the "subjective experience of the colonists" who found themselves in captivity, able to return to their colonial homes, and likewise, able to communicate their experience in writing (p. 7). This framing suggests a more limited analysis than the book generally employs, and perhaps does a disservice to Newman's many insightful readings. His focus on settler captives aptly reveals how they used literacy, books, and the written word to distinguish themselves from their Indigenous captors. Newman asks historians and literary scholars to think about the nature of captivity narratives as both primary sources (history) and as texts (literature). The result is a thoughtful meditation on the role of allegory in how settler captives understood their captivity, but also how their captivity narratives expose the "ethnohistorical basis for representations of cultural contact" (p. 16). Newman is...

Allegories of Encounter: Colonial Literacy and Indian Captivities by Andrew Newman

Allegories of Encounter: Colonial Literacy and Indian Captivities by Andrew Newman

Civilization and sexual abuse: selected Indian captivity narratives and the Native American boarding-school experience

Ewa Skał is a PhD student at the Institute of English, Opole University, Poland. Her current research interests include Native American Literature as well as British and American Culture. She received an MA in English Philology (Literary Studies) in 2018, and a BA in English Philology (Business English) in 2016. Her other academic interests include feminist literature and psychological novels.

The Action-Adventure Heroine: Rediscovering an American Literary Character, 1697–1895 by Sandra Wilson Smith

Reviewed by: The Action-Adventure Heroine: Rediscovering an American Literary Character, 1697–1895 by Sandra Wilson Smith Ashley Reed SMITH, SANDRA WILSON. The Action-Adventure Heroine: Rediscovering an American Literary Character, 1697–1895. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2018. 280 pp. $55.00 hardcover; $55.00 e-book. It is perhaps fitting that Sandra Wilson Smith’s The Action-Adventure Heroine: Rediscovering an American Literary Character, 1697–1895 should have appeared in the same year that saw the death of the groundbreaking literary historian Nina Baym. The Action-Adventure Heroine is clearly inspired by Baym’s crucial works of literary recovery, including Woman’s Fiction (1978) and Women Writers of the American West (2011). Like Baym, Smith seeks to reshape our understanding of American literary history, and particularly of the role of women in that history, by unearthing a forgotten female archetype. Smith’s work traces a character she calls “the action-adventure heroine” from the captivity narratives of Puritan New England to the detective stories of Gilded Age dime novels. “This bold heroine,” Smith asserts, “tramps alone through the forests, demonstrates tremendous physical strength, braves dangers without hesitation, enters the public realm to earn money, and even kills her enemy when necessary” (1). While other critics have discussed gender-bending female archetypes such as the tomboy and the masculine girl, the figure Smith examines is characterized by her participation in an “extended, physically rigorous journey” (5) and, in many cases, by her willingness to use physical violence in defense of herself or others. To recover this forgotten figure, Smith arranges her text chronologically, with the first three chapters exploring the role of the frontier heroine in the colonial and early national eras. Chapter 1 unearths the action-adventure heroine as she appears in Indian captivity narratives, whether factual (the Puritan goodwife Hannah Dustan), fictional (the unnamed protagonist of the Panther captivity), or somewhere in between (the “fierce woman of Crab Orchard” [43] in early histories of Daniel Boone). In addition to tending her home, the woman in each of these narratives is also called upon to violently defend it, usually from marauding (and ambiguously motivated) Indians. Just as the dangers of the frontier extenuated female violence in the captivity narrative, America’s wars of national independence provided a fictional warrant for female adventure. In her second chapter, Smith locates the action-adventure heroine in tales of female soldiers and sailors, including Mercy Otis Warren’s The Ladies of Castile (1790), Herman [End Page 324] Mann’s The Female Review (1797), and the anonymously authored The Female Marine (1815). In these texts, the female heroine who fights in the Revolution or the War of 1812 “suggests metaphorically that Americans—men and women together—were building a powerful, model nation” (55). Smith’s third chapter addresses one of the most popular literary forms of the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries: the seduction novel. In discussions of The History of Constantius and Pulchera (1789–90) and The Female Wanderer (1824), Smith highlights how wandering heroines of the early national period repudiated the figure of the cast-off victim of seduction by leaving home to pursue their true (and unfailingly faithful) loves. “In these anti-seduction tales,” Smith asserts, “women have the strength, intellect, and moral fiber to protect and promote bourgeois values, which contribute to the development of a strong nation” (87). The next three chapters of The Action-Adventure Heroine address antebellum texts, where the presence of this archetypal figure, Smith suggests, has been obscured by a longstanding critical focus on sentimental domesticity. Smith devotes her fourth chapter to the early novels of Catharine Maria Sedgwick, A New-England Tale (1822), Redwood (1824), Hope Leslie (1827), and The Linwoods (1835). While Sedgwick’s action-adventure heroines (including A New-England Tale’s Jane Elton, Redwood’s Deborah Lenox and Ellen Bruce, Hope Leslie’s Magawisca and eponymous heroine, and The Linwoods’s Isabella Linwood, Rose, and Mrs. Bengin) are rarely physically violent, they do participate in extended journeys that take them “beyond the boundaries of the home [to] perform active feats of heroism in public spaces” (102). Chapter 5 turns to western frontier novels of the 1840s and 1850s which...

A Companion to American GothicCharles L.Crow, Editor. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, 2014.

A Companion to Gothic Charles L. Crow, Editor. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, 2014.Gothic studies has been booming since the turn of the twenty-first century. In 2013 alone, over fifteen academic studies were published with the word in the title. The University of Chicago Press, in collaboration with the University of Wales Press, began releasing books in a Gothic Literary Series in 2009; the series already boasts over twenty volumes. The market also offers books devoted to Gothic subtypes, including Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper's essay collections Undead in the West: Vampires, Zombies, Mummies, and Ghosts on the Cinematic Frontier (2012), Undead in the West II: They Just Keep Coming Back (2013), Bernice M. Murphy's The Suburban Gothic in Popular Culture (2009), and The Rural Gothic in Popular Culture (2013). In addition, texts have emerged that focus on nations with plentiful gothic production which have been largely ignored-such as Michael J. Blouin's Japan and the Cosmopolitan Gothic: Specters of Modernity (2013), Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver's 2007 Anthology of Australian Gothic Fiction, and Justin D. Edwards's Gothic Canada: Reading the Spectre of a National Literature (2005). America's gothic tradition has offered especially fertile scholarly ground.Even within such a crowded market, Charles L. Crow's edited collection, A Companion to the stands out for both its expansive ness as well as its impressive gathering of contributors. Not only are the individual authors notable experts, but Crow himself is an important figure in the field of the having published both Gothic: An Anthology 1787-1916 (1999) and History of the Gothic: Gothic (2009). Each author provides a roughly ten-page introduction (several penned two) on an aspect of the and each of these includes a considerable bibliography, cross-references to other essays in the book, and suggestions for further reading. At almost 600 pages long and comprising forty-two chapters, Crow's text will be a staple of gothic studies.The book is divided into seven parts, the first three investigating foundational concepts. In Theorizing Gothic, scholars focus on theoretical frameworks: Jerrold E. Hogle, for example, examines how the study of Gothic has progressed in tandem with literary criticism, while Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock catalogues prominent American Monsters. The second section, Origins of Gothic, contains essays on slave narratives (written by Teresa Goddu, whose Gothic American: Narrative, History, Nation is a foundational text in the field), Indian captivity narratives, and the urban gothic of the nineteenth century. Carol Margaret Davison, author of two recent gothic studies, provides an introduction to Charles Brockden Brown-often considered America's first gothic writer-while Benjamin F. …

Transforming Captivity Narratives in Kevin Willmott’s The Only Good Indian (2009)

Indian captivity narrative genre, or of non-Indians held by Indians, has long been described establishing both a triumphalist narrative of national progress and a template for American identity, in contrast with American Indian identity.1 As often noted, the Indian captivity narrative is marked by its perpetual metamorphosis, well its status as the archetype of American culture, or its foundation text.2 Richard Slotkin, in his trilogy on the myth of the American frontier, traces the critical function of the captivity narrative, alongside the story of the Indian fighter, in the development of the colonial project and then national ideology beginning in the seventeenth century. two figures of the frontier myth that Slotkin identifies-the captive and the Indian fighter-were codified and systematized in James Fenimore Cooper's nineteenth-century frontier romances and have persisted in various permutations through popular literature, theater, art, and film to the present day.3 While political exigencies informed those permutations, so did cultural confrontation. Focusing in particular on the key roles of gender and familial relations in the genre, June Namias concludes, The popularity of the captive story came from a fascination with both the other and the self. One's own culture, one's own family, one's own gender, that whole complex of Anglo-American culture one inherited by being raised on the American continent, was brought into relief.4 captivity narrative prompted such reflection, argues Joshua David Bellin, and exhibited in a multiplicity of ways the intercultural exchanges that pro- duced the narrative in the first place.5 Its descendants in literature and in film, for all of their revisions to the historical antecedents, nonetheless carry forward the record of exchange between American Indians and white captives and combatants.Running parallel yet counter to the Indian captivity narrative tradition are accounts of American Indians held captive, or what have been termed captivity narratives.6 In the context of colonial negotiations, warfare, Christian evangelism, and educational institutions, American Indians were repeatedly interned by Euro-Americans determined to exert political-geographical control and to expunge Native culture, particularly through forced English literacy. resulting as-told-to and autobiographical narratives in English stand echoes, revisions, and even inversions of the Indian captivity narrative. Alumni of the federal boarding school system, such Francis La Fleshe (Omaha), Zitkala-Sa (Dakota), Charles Eastman (Santee Sioux), and Luther Standing Bear (Lakota), recount with deep emotion and sharp irony the physical and psychological pain they suffered in the process of acculturation. They also celebrate Native students' strategies to assert independence, express individuality, develop leadership, use Native languages, and undermine federal goals of homogenization and assimilation.7 Thus, the reverse captivity narrative, like its foil, takes up questions of individual survival, cultural identity, and national membership.What happens when the reverse captivity narrative, like the Indian captivity narrative before it, makes its way into other genres, especially film? Does the filmic adaptation of the boarding school narrative echo or depart from the adaptation of the captivity narrative? More specifically, how does the reverse captivity narrative brought to film animate the genre's central concern with linguistic colonialism? And how does the Western-a genre grounded in archetypal struggle between savagery and civilization but perpetually revised since the mid-twentieth century to reflect the violence of US settler colonialism and imperialism8-continue to evolve in the context of American Indians' experience in captivity? In this essay, I begin to answer these questions by focusing on a recent independent film that productively, provocatively embraces the intertextuality of both the Indian captivity and the reverse captivity narratives and their role in the construction-and deconstruction-of a mythic West. …

Americans Recaptured: Progressive Era Memory of Frontier Captivity

It was on the frontier, where civilized men and women confronted the wilderness, that Europeans first became Americans - or so authorities from Frederick Jackson Turner to Theodore Roosevelt claimed. But as the frontier disappeared, Americans believed they needed a new mechanism for fixing their collective identity; and they found it, historian Molly K. Varley suggests, in tales of white Americans held captive by Indians. For Americans in the Progressive Era (1890-1916) these stories of Indian captivity seemed to prove that the violence of national expansion had been justified, that citizens' individual suffering had been heroic, and that settlers' contact with Indians and wilderness still characterized the nation's soul. Furthermore, in the act of memorializing white Indian captives - through statues, parks, and reissued narratives - small towns found a way of inscribing themselves into the national story. By drawing out the connections between actual captivity, captivity narratives, and the memorializing of white captives, Varley shows how Indian captivity became a means for Progressive Era Americans to look forward by looking back. Local boosters and cultural commentators used Indian captivity to define Americanism and to renew those frontier qualities deemed vital to the survival of the nation in the post-frontier world, such as individualism, bravery, ingenuity, enthusiasm, manliness, and patriotism. In Varley's analysis of the Progressive Era mentality, contact between white captives and Indians represented a stage in the evolution of a new American people and affirmed the contemporary notion of America as a melting pot. Revealing how the recitation and interpretation of these captivity narratives changed over time - with shifting emphasis on brutality, gender, and ethnographic and historical accuracy - Americans Recaptured shows that tales of Indian captivity were no more fixed than American identity, but were consistently used to give that identity its own useful, ever-evolving shape.

Billy J. Stratton, Buried in Shades of Night: Contested Voices, Indian Captivity, and the Legacy of King Philip’s War. With a Foreword by Frances Washburn and an Afterward by George E. Tinker.

The Lord hath showed me the vanity of these outward things....that they are but a shadow, a blast, a bubble, and things of no continuance. That we must rely on God Himself, and our whole dependence must be upon Him. Mary Rowlandson, Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson The above words, spoken at the close of the Twentieth Remove as a form of conclusion to the whole narrative, contain an unintended irony: as it is made clear by the Narrative itself, but mostly by ...

Buried in Shades of Night: Contested Voices, Indian Captivity, and the Legacy of King Philip’s War by Billy J. Stratton (review)

Buried in Shades of Night: Contested Voices, Indian Captivity, and the Legacy of King Philip’s War by Billy J. Stratton (review)

Stratton, Billy J. Buried in Shades of Night: Contested Voices, Indian Captivity, and the Legacy of King Philip’s War. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013. 203 pp.

Stratton, Billy J. Buried in Shades of Night: Contested Voices, Indian Captivity, and the Legacy of King Philip’s War. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013. 203 pp.

THE DEVIL IN DISGUISE

AbstractFor generations, Mexican and American Indian populations reciprocally and ritualistically took captives from one another’s societies in what are today the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. These captive-taking wars breached the expansion of the American state into the west (1850s) and tested the ability of the American state to enforce law and policy in a frontier environment. This intriguing history, however, has yet to be addressed in legal and social science research on race. Our goal in this article is two-fold: (1) to determine whether the captive status of individuals taken in these endemic borderland wars is visible within surviving U.S. administrative materials (e.g., census); and (2) to determine whether close analysis of census materials can be used to ascertain whether federal liberators were able to abolish the captive-taking trade relative to their official mandate. The authors analyze a core sample of 1860s-era census materials from the City of Santa Fe, New Mexico—which has a documented history of Indian captivity and enslavement—as well as church records to determine whether these materials indicate the continuance of captivity even after federal liberators had the opportunity to abolish the trade.

Buried in shades of night: contested voices, Indian captivity, and the legacy of King Philip's war

The captivity narrative of Mary Rowlandson, The Soveraignty and Goodness of God, published in 1682, is often considered the first best seller to be published in North America. Since then, it has long been read as a first-person account of the trials of Indian captivity. After an attack on the Puritan town of Lancaster, Massachusetts, in February 1676, Rowlandson was held prisoner for more than eleven weeks before eventually being ransomed. The account of her experiences, published six years later, soon took its place as an exemplar of the captivity narrative genre and a popular focal point of scholarly attention in the three hundred years since. In this groundbreaking new book, Billy J. Stratton offers a critical examination of the narrative of Mary Rowlandson. Although it has long been thought that the book's preface was written by the influential Puritan minister Increase Mather, Stratton's research suggests that Mather was also deeply involved in the production of the narrative itself, which bears strong traces of a literary form that was already well established in Europe. As Stratton notes, the portrayal of Indian people as animalistic savages and of Rowlandson's solace in Biblical exegesis served as a convenient alibi for the colonial aspirations of the Puritan leadership. Stratton calls into question much that has been accepted as fact by scholars and historians over the last century, and re-centres the focus on the marginalised perspective of Native American people, including those whose land had been occupied by the Puritan settlers. In doing so, Stratton demands a careful reconsideration of the role that the captivity narrative--which was instrumental in shaping conceptions of frontier warfare--has played in the development of both American literary history and national identity.