A Hieroglyphic of Feathers': Genealogies of the Quill in Indian Country

Danielle Skeehan, in “A Hieroglyphic of Feathers,” brings together indigenous studies, Black Atlantic studies, and material culture studies, to consider the material practices at the heart of representing indigeneity.... [ view full abstract ]

Danielle Skeehan, in “A Hieroglyphic of Feathers,” brings together indigenous studies, Black Atlantic studies, and material culture studies, to consider the material practices at the heart of representing indigeneity. Examining the relationship between feathers and quills in colonial and nineteenth-century North America, she begins with the deceptively simple question: why and how did feathers become the means of marking or representing indigeneity in this period? And why do quills represent one’s place within a wider Atlantic Republic of Letters? While feathers seem to be the primary means of identifying the Indian from the settler colonist or Black captive, non-indigenous people ranging from Benjamin Franklin to Olaudah Equiano and Phillis Wheatley, are regularly represented with quills in hand. The quill itself is essential to drawing this line: before manuscript becomes printed text or drawing becomes engraving or woodblock, goose feather quills record feathered Indians. This paper explores how an emergent grammar—or hieroglyphics—of feathers informs one’s relationship to print, to land, and to power in nineteenth-century North America.