Reading John Dunn Hunter from Indian Country

My paper examines a historical figure entangled in the contested spaces of the western borderlands. Taken captive by the Kickapoo as a child around 1800, John Dunn Hunter returned to the United States sixteen years later and... [ view full abstract ]

My paper examines a historical figure entangled in the contested spaces of the western borderlands. Taken captive by the Kickapoo as a child around 1800, John Dunn Hunter returned to the United States sixteen years later and soon published, in 1824, a deeply polarizing account of his Native childhood. US officials accused him of being an imposter; ever since, Hunter’s true identity has remained a mystery, leaving critics unsure of how to read his Memoirs of a Captivity among the Indians of North America, from Childhood to the Age of Nineteen.

How do we simultaneously resist the residual power of settler discourse, which has marked Hunter as a fraud, a “pretend Indian,” and envision a fresh approach to both Hunter’s controversial career? In 1826, Hunter reappeared in Mexican Texas as one of the leaders of a pan-Indian resistance movement; he died later that year in a doomed struggle for Native self-determination. The reading strategy that I propose grounds Hunter’s career within the conceptual and geographical space of Indian Country. His book was part of the print revolution sweeping Indian Country during the early nineteenth-century. Following Philip Round’s formulation in Removable Type, the term Indian Country refers simultaneously to specific Native homelands and their respective spheres of cultural production. My specific aim in this paper is to connect Hunter’s autobiography to the subsequent mobilization for Native self-determination in Mexican Texas. His political commitment, I contend, challenges canonical conceptions of the genre of autobiography.

I welcome the opportunity to participate in such a valuable seminar!