Frank Kelderman
University of Louisville
Frank Kelderman is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Louisville. His book manuscript examines nineteenth-century Native American writing and oratory, and his scholarship has appeared in American Studies and American Literature, and is forthcoming in J19
The papers on this panel seek to extend work that situates itself at the intersections of indigenous studies, book and literary history, and media studies. Scholars such as Phillip Round, Hilary Wyss, Birgit Brander Rasmussen,... [ view full abstract ]
The papers on this panel seek to extend work that situates itself at the intersections of indigenous studies, book and literary history, and media studies. Scholars such as Phillip Round, Hilary Wyss, Birgit Brander Rasmussen, and Caroline Wigginton have drawn our attention to histories and objects that track the aesthetic and material traffic between Native American media and Euro-American print histories. Exploring the complex relationships among Native Americans and settler colonial knowledge regimes that include the archive and the book, these papers ask: What is the connection between settler colonialism, deterritorialization, and the history of the book in North America? In turn, what objects, media, and genres did indigenous people use to represent themselves and their claims to territorial sovereignty within an expanding United States? Examining indigenous-authored manuscripts and literacies, settler colonial archival practices, and the material culture and politics of representing indigeneity, this panel considers the material practices that characterize how and where Native Americans enter—as well as challenge the primacy of—Euro-American print within their respective media ecologies. In doing so, these papers also seek to extend the critical questions raised in Hilary Wyss’ seminar, “Indigenous Textualities: Native Americans, Writing, and Representation.” The papers described below broaden our understanding of indigenous expressive forms, attend to where they overlap with Euro-American print technologies, and explore where they challenge a Eurocentric understanding of text, author, and writing.
Frank Kelderman, in “Reprimanding the Bully Party,” examines an unpublished manuscript poem written in the aftermath of the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek (1830), which led to Choctaw removal in 1832. Located in the papers of the Choctaw diplomat and tribal leader Peter Pitchlynn, the anonymous poem was ostensibly written by a member of his removal party, and possibly by Pitchlynn himself. The paper explores how the satirical poem combines conventions of wit and rhetorics of physical violence to critique the injustice of Choctaw dispossession, and inscribes a climate of suspicion, accusation, and threatened violence, both toward US treaty commissioners and among Choctaw citizens. Identifying Indian agents, treaty commissioners, and signatories by name—characterizing them as a “bully party”—the manuscript poem addresses an intimate public of landowning Choctaw elites who critiqued the signing of the treaty, but simultaneously endorsed its translation of Choctaws lands into private property. Disaggregating its performance of class and masculinity, this paper argues that this satirical poem registers a broader literary engagement with Indian removal within Native associational spheres, outside the purview of US-Indian diplomacy.
