Anishnabeg Writers Reading Settler History (And Fixing It)

C19 Anishnabeg writers William Warren, George Copway, Andrew Blackbird, and Simon Pokagon all make repeated reference to how settler-authored texts either badly misrepresent tribal history or, worse yet, believed the fables... [ view full abstract ]

C19 Anishnabeg writers William Warren, George Copway, Andrew Blackbird, and Simon Pokagon all make repeated reference to how settler-authored texts either badly misrepresent tribal history or, worse yet, believed the fables their ancestors had crafted to throw them off the scent. By the time Anglo-Americans reached them, the Anishnabeg (Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi) of the northern Great Lakes had long interacted with French colonizers, and so were long accustomed to intercultural contact. Nonetheless, Anglo-Americans—many of them agents, traders, officers, or Henry Rowe Schoolcraft—described them as in their “natural condition,” reshaping tribal traditions to articulate the settler colonialist cultural goals with simplistic noble/ignoble savagery binaries that deny both the particularities of indigenous experience and the possibility that Anishnabeg legends were more than preludes to white arrival. Such texts reflect Alyosha Goldstein’s holding that settlers share a “logic of possession and inevitability by disavowing the ongoing contestation with which it is confronted and the violent displacement it demands” (3). This paper addresses how Anishnabeg writers were already aware of these paradoxes and crafted their own history books to expose settler culture’s the willful ignorance upon which settler culture depends. By simultaneously authoring counter-histories that recreate the complexity of indigenous communities, they deny the “logic” of settler self-justification as deeply flawed. As accomplished intertextual interventions, their books demonstrate literacies that reflect the heterogeneity of tribal experience. As he is the least known, in the seminar, I will discuss Andrew Blackbird’s 1887 History.