T'teetsa: A California Native American Slave Narrative
Jean Pfaelzer
University of Delaware
Jean Pfaelzer (presenter) is a Professor of English, Women and Gender Studies, and Asian Studies at the University of Delaware. She is the author of California Bound: The History of Slavery in the American West (forthcoming Yale, 2018), Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans, Parlor Radical: Rebecca Harding Davis & the Origins of American Social Realism, The Utopian Novel in America, and The Rebecca Harding Davis Reader. She has held the Senior Fulbright Fellowship in American Studies (Utrecht), the A. Giamatti Fellowship in Western Americana (Yale), several Library of Congress fellowships, and the Vielberth Fellowship (Regensburg, Germany).
Abstract
Jean Pfaelzer’s paper entitled, “T’teetsa: A California Native American Slave Narrative” turns its gaze from the Black Atlantic to the Pacific to investigate a lesser studied site of slavery. T’teetsa’s is a Native... [ view full abstract ]
Jean Pfaelzer’s paper entitled, “T’teetsa: A California Native American Slave Narrative” turns its gaze from the Black Atlantic to the Pacific to investigate a lesser studied site of slavery. T’teetsa’s is a Native American slave narrative marked by the 1850 California Act for the Protection of the Indian, which legalized the kidnap, captivity, and enslavement of California tribes. T’teetsa’s narrative of enslavement is punctuated by the genocides, rape, and escape she witnessed and endured as a child and young woman, her knowledge of the Eel River and the Redwood forests, her re-definitions of freedom and womanhood. She builds a unique narrative shaped by California’s Constitution, written for statehood and ratified in 1850 which abolished slavery, and the Indian Protection Act of the same year that legalized it. Pfaelzer’s paper situates this unique narrative in the climate of Pacific Slaveries of captive Alaska Native otter hunters, enslaved Chinese prostitutes, enslaved African Americans brought to California for the Gold Rush that converged along the California coast in the 1850s. It explores how the particular history of California tribes intersected with commonalities of slavery to produce this Indian slave narrative of competing representations—Indian and White—of the Pacific.
Authors
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Jean Pfaelzer
(University of Delaware)
Topic Area
Panel
Session
P61 » Re-Orienting Pacific Literary Histories (08:30 - Saturday, 24th March, Enchantment A)
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