North American Indigenous People Research Articles

The Textual Construction of North American Indigenous Peoples in the Account of Cook's Third Voyage

AbstractBy foregrounding the stratification of cultural agencies underlying the text, this article analyses the conceptualization of human otherness in the official account of James Cook's third voyage, published in 1784. The close reading focuses on the case study of indigenous people encountered during Cook's journey up the west coast of North America. A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean is an excellent vantage point from which to examine the intimate connections between time, power, and knowledge, which characterized eighteenth‐century European culture. Drawing on existing scholarship, this study takes a closer look at John Douglas's hitherto neglected introduction to the first edition of the account, treating it as a conceptual threshold to the text and addressing the relationship between it and the main body of the account.

Naturally acquired antibodies against 7 Streptococcus pneumoniae serotypes in Indigenous and non-Indigenous adults.

Despite the use of pneumococcal conjugate vaccines for pediatric immunization, North American Indigenous populations continue to experience high burden of pneumococcal infections. Naturally acquired antibodies, which can protect unvaccinated adults against pneumococcal infections, have not previously been studied in Canadian Indigenous people. We analysed concentrations of natural serum IgG, IgM and IgA antibodies specific to 7 serotype-specific capsular polysaccharides (3, 6B, 9V, 14, 19A, 19F and 23F) in 141 healthy individuals (age between 18 and 80 years), including Indigenous adults living in 2 geographical different areas of Ontario, Canada, and non-Indigenous residing in northwestern Ontario. Regardless of the geographical area, concentrations of IgG specific to serotypes 6B, 9V, and 14, IgM specific to 9V, and all serotype-specific IgA were significantly higher in Indigenous study participants as compared to non-Indigenous. The differences are likely attributed to an increased exposure of Indigenous individuals to Streptococcus pneumoniae and/or cross-reactive antigens of other microorganisms or plants present in the environment. Although in non-Indigenous adults concentrations of IgM specific to 9V, 19A, 19F, and 23F significantly decreased with age, this was not observed in Indigenous individuals suggesting that Indigenous people may experience continuous exposure to pneumococci and cross-reactive antigens over the life span. Women had generally higher concentrations of natural IgG and IgM concentrations than men, with more striking differences found in Indigenous adults, potentially associated with larger exposure of women to young children, the major reservoir of pneumococci in communities. Our data suggest that increased rates of pneumococcal infections among Indigenous people are unlikely related to deficiency of naturally acquired antibodies, at least those specific to 7 common serotypes. Determining serological correlates of protection for adults will be essential to identify the groups in need of adult pneumococcal immunizations that may prevent excessive burden of the disease among North American Indigenous people.

Improving Subject Headings for Iowa Indigenous Peoples

By authorizing outdated terms for North American Indigenous peoples, the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) vocabulary deprioritizes or ignores the preferred names of the peoples being described. As a result, cataloging and metadata professionals constrained by LCSH often must apply names imposed during colonization. For example, in many library catalogs, works about people of the Meskwaki Nation in Iowa are labeled with “Fox Indians--Iowa” and “Sauk Indians--Iowa,” and Ioway peoples are described as “Iowa Indians.” As part of a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiative at Iowa State University Library, a working group in the Metadata Services department undertook a project to build, publish, and use a controlled vocabulary of preferred terms for Indigenous communities with ties to land that is now part of the state of Iowa. This paper describes the working group’s research, outreach efforts, published vocabulary, and process for adding the preferred subject headings to library metadata.

“Indigenous” Nature Connection? A Response to Kurth, Narvaez, Kohn, and Bae (2020)

“Indigenous” Nature Connection? A Response to Kurth, Narvaez, Kohn, and Bae (2020)

Landscape bundling of ceremonial Earthworks: Incorporating ethnohistoric and contemporary Indigenous ontologies to revive Great Lakes archaeological legacy datasets

The thousands of ancestral Indigenous mounds and earthworks of Eastern North America have long been a source of intrigue for diverse audiences. And although explanations have come a long way from the days of the Mound Builder Myth, there are avenues of inquiry that remain under-investigated. Here, we seek to let Indigenous ontologies lead the way by employing an interpretive lens based on bundling, a significant practice across many North American Indigenous peoples. We expand the notion of bundling to the landscape scale and, drawing on ethnohistoric and contemporary understandings of Anishinaabeg and Ho-Chunk ontologies, suggest that Great Lakes earthworks were brought into being for/through the bundling together of relationships between humans, other-than-human persons, and the land. This lens sets the scene for novel geospatial and statistical analyses of a legacy archaeological dataset of Late Precontact (ca. CE 1200–1600) earthworks in the Great Lakes, most of which have been destroyed. This study reinvigorates a fragmentary legacy data set, a practice that – during a time of pandemic-related restrictions on travel and field work – should become more prominent in archaeological investigations. This study illustrates the value of blending quantitative approaches and Indigenous ontologies to studies of landscape-scale processes and meanings.

Conjoint adolescent developmental trajectories of alcohol and marijuana use and early adult outcomes among North American Indigenous people

ObjectiveThe current study examined the developmental interrelationships between alcohol and marijuana use trajectories from ages 10 to 18 years in a sample of North American Indigenous adolescents. Distinct co-use groups were formed to create profiles of young adult outcomes. MethodDual group-based trajectory models of marijuana and alcohol frequency were estimated using data from a longitudinal community-based participatory study of Indigenous adolescents from the upper Midwest and Canada. Joint probabilities were used to create co-use groups, and profiles were created using early adult (Mean Age – 26.28 years) outcomes. ResultsFour joint trajectory groups were identified: 1) no marijuana and no/low alcohol use (34.4%), 2) mid-onset alcohol only (14%), 3) mid-onset co-use starting at age 13 (24%), and 4) early-onset co-use starting at age 11 (22%). High probabilities existed that adolescents would use marijuana early if they began drinking alcohol at the youngest ages, and that adolescents would not use marijuana if they drank infrequently or delayed drinking until mid-adolescence. Adult outcomes were poorer for the early- and mid-onset co-use groups, but there were few differences between the no/low use and alcohol-only groups. ConclusionCo-use of marijuana and alcohol was associated with poorer outcomes in early adulthood, particularly for the group with an earlier age of onset. Abstaining from either substance in adolescence was associated with better outcomes.

A Question of Identity in the Life and Works of Sat-Okh (Long Feather)

Sat-Okh (Stanisław Supłatowicz) was an Indian-Polish writer who popularised the culture of North American Indigenous People in Poland during the Cold War and afterwards. His incredible biography evokes questions about the nature of his identity. Born of an Indian chief and a Polish mother around 1922 in the territory of Alberta, Sat-Okh grew up as a Shawnee. When his mother decided to return to Poland, he followed, but until his death in Gdańsk in 2003, Sat-Okh consistently identified with his Indigenous heritage. During WWII he escaped from a train to Auschwitz and joined the AK (The Home Army). He became famous for numerous books and short stories about his life with the Indians, which were translated into many languages. He was also strongly involved in the Polish-Indian Movement and promoted the culture of his native ancestors. This paper aims to present the life and work of Sat-Okh with regard to his mysterious identity. Recently, there has been some doubt whether Sat-Okh's biography is genuine. However, I would like to argue that Long Feather's phenomenon proves the fact that regardless of whether he was a true Shawnee or not, Sat-Okh chose to identify himself as Indian and consistently presented himself as one. He taught Poles about Indian traditions and gained a tremendous respect which has lasted until today.

Latent Trajectories and Profiles of Commercial Cigarette Smoking Frequency From Adolescence to Young Adulthood Among North American Indigenous People.

North American Indigenous people (ie, American Indian/Alaska Native and Canadian First Nations) have the highest rates of commercial cigarette smoking, yet little is known about long-term trajectories of use among this population. The purpose of this study is to examine heterogeneous trajectories and profiles of Indigenous cigarette use frequency from early adolescence (mean age: 11.1 years) to young adulthood (mean age: 26.3 years). Data come from a nine-wave prospective longitudinal study spanning early adolescence through young adulthood among Indigenous people in the Upper Midwest of the United States and Canada (N = 706). Smoking frequency was examined at each wave, and latent class growth analysis was used to examine heterogeneous patterns. Early adolescent and young adult demographics and smoking-related characteristics were examined across these latent trajectory groups. In young adulthood, 52% of participants smoked daily/near-daily, and an additional 10% smoked weekly or monthly. Four latent trajectory groups emerged: low/non-smokers (35.2%) who had low probabilities of smoking across the study; occasional smokers (17.2%) who had moderate probabilities of smoking throughout adolescence and declining probabilities of smoking into young adulthood; mid-adolescent onset smokers (21.6%) who showed patterns of smoking onset around mid-adolescence and escalated to daily use in young adulthood; and early-adolescent onset smokers (25.9%) who showed patterns of onset in early adolescence and escalated to stable daily use by late adolescence. The findings suggest multiple critical periods of smoking risk, as well as a general profile of diverse smoking frequency patterns, which can inform targeted intervention and treatment programming. Nearly two-thirds (62%) of this sample of Indigenous people were current smokers by early adulthood (mean age = 26.3 years), which is substantially higher than national rates in the United States and Canada. Moreover, in all but one trajectory group, smoking prevalence consistently increased over time, suggesting these rates may continue to rise into adulthood. The longitudinal mixture modeling approach used in this study shows that smoking patterns are heterogeneous, and implications for public health policy likely vary across these diverse patterns characterized by timing of onset of use, escalation in frequency of use, and stability/change over time.

The Recovery of John Francis Rigaud's Portrait of Joseph Brant

The Recovery of John Francis Rigaud's Portrait of Joseph Brant Gilbert L. Gignac (bio) The many portraits of Mohawk leader Thayendanegea (also known as Joseph Brant (1743–1807)) demonstrate how Brant used portraiture as a tool for public purposes and how portraiture acted as a virtual avatar for this important figure.1 These portraits constitute his personal portrait gallery and continue to captivate our imagination due to the robust character of their sitter and to the significant and controversial role that he undertook on behalf of both Indigenous and colonial settler loyalists before, during, and after the American War of Independence (1775–83).2 This article will reexamine the known existing portraits of Joseph Brant painted in oil on canvas and present new information that led to the recovery of the lost oil portrait of Brant painted by the Royal Academician, John Francis Rigaud (1742–1810), for public [End Page 239] display in London at the annual Royal Academy of Arts Exhibition in 1786.3 A succinct overview of the various known oil portraits of Brant lets us discern three distinct phases of Brant's portraiture: (a) works painted in England between 1776 and 1786 as tributes honoring his military exploits during his lifetime; (b) portraits produced as historical chronicles during his lifetime after the American War, in both Canada and the United States, from 1786 until his death in 1807; and (c) works painted as commemorations contrived after his death and based on earlier lifetime portraits. These three distinct phases define the order and transformative evolution of Brant's portraiture over time, and also provide a precise framework to better reference and articulate their function, intent, and purposes, the circumstances of their conception and creation, and the structure of their form, which together reveal their underlying meanings and historical influences and uses. The first oil portraits of Joseph Brant were painted during his two short visits to London, England: first in 1776, to assess the benefits and to negotiate the engagement of North American Indigenous peoples as allies of Great Britain at the beginning of the American War, and second in 1786, to seek compensations for the human, material, and territorial losses, and to seek redress for the exile that his people had incurred at the conclusion of the war. Though the human and territorial rights of North American Indigenous peoples were totally ignored in the Treaty of Paris of 1783, Brant arrived in London not only as a peacemaker, but also as a founding member of a new Indian Confederacy that was ready to confront the new U.S. government's further territorial encroachment on unceded Indigenous lands.4 The only tribute portrait of Brant painted in oil during his first visit to London in 1776 was a life-size, three-quarter length composition by George Romney (1734–1802). It was commissioned by and for the private use of George Greville, second Earl of Warwick (1746–1816). This portrait has hung in the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa since 1922, and was the first English portrait of Brant to be publicly displayed in North America.5 During Brant's second sojourn in London in 1786, Brant sat again for three additional tribute portraits. The first was commissioned and painted by John Francis Rigaud, which became the first oil portrait of Brant to be publicly exhibited in Britain, but it vanished after the artist's death in 1811 and has never been traced since. That spring, Brant also sat for two privately commissioned, smaller, half-length oil portraits, both painted by Gilbert Stuart (1755–1828).6 The first (figure 9) was done at the behest of Francis Rawdon, second [End Page 240] Earl of Moira (1754–1826), and is now in the Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, New York,7 of which two anonymous early copies are known to exist: one at the British Museum, London (figure 10) since ca. 1896,8 and another in the Olive Blake-Lloyd collection in England, about which little is known.9 The second (figure 8), commissioned by Sir Hugh Percy (1742–1817), the future second Duke of Northumberland, remained in his family until it was sold to an anonymous private collector...

ЭТНИЧЕСКАЯ САМООРГАНИЗАЦИЯ АБОРИГЕННЫХ СООБЩЕСТВ АРКТИКИ: ОПЫТ РОССИИ И КАНАДЫ

Relying on domestic studies on history of the North American indigenous peoples, the paper briefly describes the basic stages of the formation and development of social and political institutions of the Canadian and Russian Arctic aborigines. The author traces the historical evolution of the ethnic communities, describes their activity to protect the aborigines’ rights. It is shown that the Canadian and Russian aboriginal communities function under cardinally different political and socio-economic conditions. Nevertheless, they face similar challenges and develop almost identical strategies. The conclusion is made that the rich experience of the Canadian aboriginal movements can be shared by their Russian counterparts.

Narrative Approaches to North American Indigenous People Who Attempt Suicide.

Suicide is a major problem within North America's indigenous communities. There is debate about the best way to approach indigenous people who have attempted suicide. Conventional methods of cognitive behavior therapy have been criticized for not being indigenous friendly. Case files from an academically affiliated, rural psychiatric practice focused primarily on indigenous patients were reviewed for 54 indigenous patients who attempted suicide. Grounded theory methods were used to identify common strategies for approaching those patients who were able to stop attempting suicide. A comparison population had a greater than 90% incidence of a second attempt. Nine major strategies within a narrative approach that appeared to be successful with this population were identified. Introducing novel contradictory ideas to the beliefs people held about suicide appeared helpful. Using stories to introduce the idea that the desired effects of suicide might not be forthcoming seemed beneficial, including the use of story to find means other than attempting suicide to reach the same ends. Creating stories of a positive future appeared helpful. Finding ways to bring humor into the discussion and to refer to and involve traditional culture in which suicide was rare aided in changing perspective. Of 29 patients engaged in this narrative approach, 26 had no further suicide attempt. Retention in counseling was high, and patients reported enjoying the process. A narrative approach to indigenous people who attempt suicide is compatible with indigenous culture and appears to be successful.

Prawa mniejszości etnicznych w nauczaniu papieży. Zarys problemu prawnego

W historii walki ludności etnicznej Ameryki Północnej o poszanowanie praw Kościół katolicki był zawsze przestawiany jako ten podmiot, który najbardziej przyczynił się do naruszenia podstawowych praw tej ludności, w tym prawa do godności i samostanowienia. Niemal całkowicie pomija się postawę rządów państw kolonialnych czy nowo powstałego państwa kanadyjskiego, Stanów Zjednoczonych, a także innych wyznań chrześcijańskich, które wspierały politykę asymilacji, wysiedlenia i marginalizacji ludności etnicznej. W szeroko prowadzonej dyskusji w Kanadzie i Stanach Zjednoczonych głos Kościoła katolickiego, który stanął w obronie rdzennych mieszkańców kontynentu amerykańskiego, jest całkowicie zapomniany. Słowa kolejnych papieży upominających się o poszanowanie praw ludności etnicznej, odcinających się od polityki dehumanizacji są ignorowane, a wręcz negowane. Dlatego warto przypomnieć, że od samego początku Kościół katolicki poprzez swojego zwierzchnika, jakim jest papież, protestował przeciwko naruszeniu praw rdzennej ludności Ameryki Północnej i stanowczo odcinał się od wszelkich działań władzy państwowej zmierzającej do asymilacji tej ludności. W rzeczywistości to dzięki pracy misjonarzy, mających poparcie Stolicy Apostolskiej, zachowała się kultura, język czy tradycja ludności indiańskiej na tym kontynencie. Niniejszy artykuł przypomina zapomniany głos papieży w obronie praw ludności etnicznej Ameryki Północnej.

Verwobenin “Indianthusiasm”: A Uniquely German Entanglement

AbstractThe German fascination with North American Indigenous peoples is extensive. Primarily based on the writings of the nineteenth-century German author Karl May, the Indianer permeates German culture, and yet it is little known outside Central Europe. Many North American Indigenous artists, writers, filmmakers, and performance artists are aware of this phenomenon and are often met with resistance from a German perspective when they intervene and assert their voices into the conversation. This article examines the German fascination with North American Indigenous peoples and contemporary Indigenous responses. Kent Monkman and Drew Hayden Taylor challenge the constructed German images of Indigeneity by practicing what Gerald Vizenor has termed “Native survivance.” Ideas of colonialism, sexuality, and contemporaneity are challenged and expose deep-rooted cultural and societal truths regarding Indigenous peoples in North America and their Indianer counterparts.

Indigenous Rights and the Undoomed Indian

ABSTRACT This essay examines the rise of human rights discourses in the Romantic period as they are deployed in relation to colonial violence against North American Indigenous people in the same era. While Indigenous people become associated with freedom, human rights and liberal politics in much Romantic literature and philosophy, they are also at the same time portrayed as inevitably doomed to become extinct in the face of a putatively superior Western culture. I argue that this stereotype of the “doomed Indian” is not merely a discursive formation, but a reflection of the genocidal intent and actions of colonization. Through detailed examination of the genocide perpetrated against the Beothuk people of Newfoundland from the 1780s until 1827, this essay reveals how colonial culture utilizes the rhetoric of human rights as a way of performing what Daniel Coleman calls “White Civility,” thereby attempting to retain the moral authority to exert power throughout the colonies. Key in this rhetoric is the use of the Romantic-era museum as a venue to capture and preserve the culture of a disappearing people. Drawing on the work of Glen Coulthard, I argue that the discourse of human rights is thus of questionable value in struggles for Indigenous sovereignty.

Relationships Between Indigenous American Peoples and Wolves 1: Wolves as Teachers and Guides

We examine the historical relationship between humans and wolves as illustrated through stories of North American Indigenous Peoples, especially the Great Plains and Intermountain West, exemplified by Cheyenne, Lakota, Blackfoot, Pawnee, and Shoshone peoples. Indigenous stories have not been employed in scholarly examinations of the origins of ‘dogs’. These tribal peoples were tough and resilient and wanted companion animals as tough and resilient as themselves. All Plains tribes examined closely have stories that describe wolves as guides, protectors, or entities that directly taught or showed humans how to hunt after humans arrived in the Americas. Indigenous stories provide insights into the process of domestication of wolves, and such stories may indicate at what stage different peoples were in their relationship with wolves. There appears to have existed a reciprocal relationship in which both species provided food for each other or shared food. This is important because it is often assumed by scholars from the Eurocentric tradition that the first wolves associated with humans scavenged or hung around camps waiting for scraps; thus, from this perspective, the process of domestication began with wolves being dominated by humans. In contrast, we argue for a coevolutionary reciprocal relationship between Homo sapiens and Canis lupus that existed from the early days of tribes until at least the nineteenth century. Our results do not mean that many tribes lacked fully domesticated dogs that were not wolflike in phenotype, but that the process of domestication may have taken a different path than is generally assumed.

THU0024 High Mortality in North American Indigenous People with Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (SLE):

BackgroundLupus outcomes including mortality have been found to be worse in most ethnic minorities, including African Americans, Asians, and Hispanics, but little is known about North American Indigenous people (NAI).ObjectivesTo...

Variation in Lycopene and Lycopenoates, Antioxidant Capacity, and Fruit Quality of Buffaloberry (Shepherdia argentea[Pursh]Nutt.)

Buffaloberry (Shepherdia argentea [Pursh] Nutt.) has historically been used as an important food source by North American indigenous peoples, but its commercial production has been limited. These plants produce fruits rich in carotenoid and phenolic antioxidants, which may have health benefits that may make buffaloberry commercially valuable. Here, we examined these constituents in the fruit of 7 Dakota-grown buffaloberry selections. Primary carotenoids were determined by liquid chromatography-mass spectral analysis and by nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy to be lycopene (0.27 ± 0.02 g/kg FW) and methyl apo-6'-lycopenoate (MA6L; 0.32 ± 0.03/kg FW). MA6L comprised the greatest proportion (55%) of carotenoid antioxidants, but its role in human nutrition is still to be evaluated. The fruit contained high total phenolics concentrations (9.06 ± 0.71 g gallic acid equivalents/kg FW). Hydrophilic antioxidant capacity among the 7 selections averaged 49.0 ± 6.6 mmol trolox equivalents/kg FW, respectively, as measured by ferric reducing ability of plasma assay. The soluble solids and titratable acids concentrations were 21% and 2.2%, respectively. This species is adapted to poor soils and can tolerate drier climates. In the Dakotas, buffaloberry flourishes on the American Indian Tribal Reservations, yielding copious amounts of health-beneficial fruit for fresh and processing markets, making it a potentially valuable new crop for marginal lands.

Transparency, Spectatorship, Accountability: Indigenous Families in Settler-State “Postdemocracies”

Transparency, Spectatorship, Accountability: Indigenous Families in Settler-State “Postdemocracies” Jennifer Henderson (bio) Transparency “Take the picture! Take the picture if vanishing is so beautiful!” These words are spoken by a Métis journalist toward the end of Marie Clements’s new play, The Edward Curtis Project. She is looking up from her prone position at a distressed Edward S. Curtis, the nineteenth-century photographer of North American Indigenous peoples who saw himself as a documentarian capturing images of waning peoples for posterity. His appearance in Angeline’s present-day world is in the form of a living trace. He is the ghostly originator of a vein of representations that exerts power through its claims to transparency and that continues to do its work in Angeline’s twenty-first-century world where the effects of her intimate experience of the ongoing production of spectacles of Indigenous waning is diagnosed as clinical depression.1 Clements’s play stages a complex unraveling of that ahistorical diagnosis through encounters with Curtis in which Angeline and other Indigenous characters speak back to the photographer and speak out from his fatalistic frames, which are themselves reframed by projections [End Page 299] from the contemporary Indigenous characters’ family photograph albums, asserting another conception of the beautiful. The event that is the ostensible catalyst for Angeline’s descent into depression is the freezing death of three Indigenous children, which she has dutifully reported in her job as an Aboriginal affairs reporter, providing the facts that—she realizes too late—do not so much speak for themselves as trigger a set of narrative codes and discursive positions. These produce a socially distanciated but empathetic spectatorship of Indigenous tragedy read as pathology: an alcoholic father has neglected his children. Never mind the father’s having to struggle to raise children under conditions rendered unviable. Angeline knows these preconditions for tragedy, but up to this point she has not really noticed that her métier does not render them speakable. Nor has she noticed in herself the accumulated somatic strain of continually being a spectator to such freeze-frames of tragedy or the violence that their conception of a beautiful “vanishing” does to her. These journalistic freeze-frames, like Curtis’s photographs, never imagine the Indigenous witness who, living on, may struggle to identify somehow, across the objectification, a subject position beyond the representation’s ordering of “the perceptible” (Rancière 55). In Clements’s play, this strain accumulates and settles in as a feeling of being cold and tired, a feeling that links Angeline metonymically to the frozen children. Clements’s play draws a parallel between the violence of decontextualized fact in journalistic coverage and the “notion of indexicality” from which Curtis’s nineteenth-century photographs derived their power: as Wanda Nanibush has put it, this indexical code seems to assert that “because the camera was really there recording ‘reality,’ its products point to reality” (np). When the twenty-first-century Angeline challenges Curtis to capture her own suffering for the sake of its beauty—“Take the picture if vanishing is so beautiful!”—the audience of Clements’s play is invited to consider what it means to be moved by a genre that requires some actual person’s suffering. If Curtis’s photographs, as Nanibush argues, offer a kind of aesthetically orchestrated affective relief through their transformation of settler-colonial guilt into nostalgia, what kind of affect, and what kind of spectator, is involved in the contemporary circulation of spectacles of broken Indigenous families? The play’s densely textured reflection on modes of making Indigenous lives visible condenses the issues that concern me in this article: interrelated technologies of transparency, renderings of spectacle and spectatorship around Indigenous families, “moral-affective publicness” (Berlant, “Epistemology” 49) and its place in contexts of impoverished [End Page 300] political engagement. In Canada in 2013, a play about the history and politics of claiming to represent Indigenous lives transparently resonates with a peculiar charge, especially (but certainly not exclusively) in the wake of media coverage of the 2011 crisis in living conditions in the northern Ontario community of Attawapiskat. That coverage included the attempt by national newspaper columnist, Jeffrey Simpson, to dismiss the “rhetoric surrounding...

Tsonnonthouan, Colonialism, and the Commodification of Culture

During and following the Seven Years War, North American Indigenous people began to occupy a unique position in the British imaginary as compelling yet contradictory subjects, existing outside the culture of consumerism that was rapidly rising in Britain. The satirical novel Memoirs of the Life and Adventures of Tsonnonthouan (1763) mimicked both the ethnographic works that British people read in increasing numbers and the body of Grub Street texts imitating Tristram Shandy. The novel, which depicts “Indians” as consumers and worshippers of European commodities, negotiates the entanglement of culture and consumerism in both Britain and the colonies.

Consuming Indians: Tsonnonthouan , Colonialism, and the Commodification of Culture

During and following the Seven Years War, North American Indigenous people began to occupy a unique position in the British imaginary as compelling yet contradictory subjects, existing outside the culture of consumerism that was rapidly rising in Britain. The satirical novel Memoirs of the Life and Adventures of Tsonnonthouan (1763) mimicked both the ethnographic works that British people read in increasing numbers and the body of Grub Street texts imitating Tristram Shandy . The novel, which depicts "Indians" as consumers and worshippers of European commodities, negotiates the entanglement of culture and consumerism in both Britain and the colonies.