History 3010 MacKay
Week 4 The People of the Northern Woods
Academic Journal due: 28 September
Tour of Ft. Buenaventura with Brock Cheney: 23 September 10:30
Readings:
Calloway: pgs: 44-58, 144-171
Joan Jensen, "Native American
Women and Agriculture: A Seneca Case Study"
Peruse the discussion of Captivity Narratives, the earliest published literature in the English colonies: http://guweb2.gonzaga.edu/faculty/campbell/enl310/captive.htm
From the Modern History Sourcebook, an article and summary of the Iroquois Constitution: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/iroquois.html
Consider the comments posted on the Madison Archives site: http://www.jmu.edu/madison/center/main_pages/madison_archives/era/native/iroquois/politic.htm
Academic Journal Topics:
The Captivity Narrative
Additional Information about Mary Jemison, with links: http://womenshistory.about.com/library/bio/blbio_mary_jemison.htm
A genre of American literature has been the Indian captivity narrative. In these stories, it's usually women who are kidnapped and held captive by American Indians. And the women who are taken captive are white women -- women of European descent.
These captivity narratives are part of the culture's definition of what a "proper woman" should be and do. Women in these narratives are not treated as women "should" be -- they often see the violent deaths of husbands, brothers and children. The women also are unable to fulfill "normal" women's roles: unable to protect their own children, unable to dress neatly and cleanly or in the "proper" garments, unable to restrict their sexual activity to marriage to the "appropriate" kind of man. They are forced into roles unusual for women, including violence in their own defense or that of children, physical challenges such as long journeys by foot, or trickery of their captors. Even the fact that they publish stories of their lives is stepping outside "normal" women's behavior!
The captivity stories also perpetuate stereotypes of Indians and settlers, and were part of the on-going conflict between these groups as the settlers moved westward. In a society in which men are expected to be the protectors of women, the kidnapping of women is viewed as an attack on and affront of the males in the society, as well. The stories serve thus as a call for retaliation as well as for caution in relating to these "dangerous" natives. Sometimes the narratives also challenge some of the racial stereotypes. By depicting the captors as individuals, often as people who also face troubles and challenges, the captors are also made more human. In either case, these Indian captive narratives serve a directly political purpose, and can be seen as a kind of political propaganda.
The captivity narratives also usually refer to the religious contrast between the Christian captive and the pagan Indians. Mary Rowlandson's captivity story, for instance, was published in 1682 with a subtitle that included her name as "Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, a Minister's Wife in New England." That edition also included "A Sermon on the Possibility of God's Forsaking a People that have been near and dear to him, Preached by Mr. Joseph Rowlandson, Husband to the said Mrs. Rowlandson, It being his Last Sermon." The captivity narratives served to define piety and women's proper devotion to their religion, and to give a religious message about the value of faith in times of adversity. (After all, if these women could maintain their faith in such extreme circumstances, shouldn't the reader maintain her or his faith in less challenging times?)
Indian captivity narratives can also be seen as part of a long history of sensational literature. Women are depicted outside their normal roles, creating surprise and even shock. There are hints or more of improper sexual treatment -- forced marriage or rape. Violence and sex -- then and now, a combination that sells books. Many novelists took up these themes of "life among the heathens. -- http://womenshistory.about.com/library/weekly/aa020920a.htm
American studies scholars such as Annette Kolodny and Lauren Berlant have noted the way that, in U.S. literature, the at-risk female body has traditionally functioned as a means to both articulate and undermine nationalistic discourses of racial, sexual, and gendered belonging. This is particularly true of early captivity narratives, such as the puritan "bestsellers" produced by Mary Rowlandson and Hannah Dustin, which, as Michelle Burnham points out, confronted readers "with a series of new and radical possibilities" for imagining female subjects. Although these narratives were always presented as religious testimony, they could not be easily contained as examples of (as Rowlandson titles her narrative) The Sovereignity and Goodness of God. In order to survive the violent raid on her village and the death of several of her children, Rowlandson must sacrifice ideal standards of feminine behavior and barter relentlessly (perhaps even sexually) with her captors. Hannah Dustin's popular account of a similar situation, in which she escapes by killing and scalping her kidnappers, exemplifies this point. According to Christopher Castiglia, the genre of the captivity narrative has thus afforded white women a "symbolic economy" with which to express dissatisfaction with gender roles, to re-imagine those roles and the narratives that normalize them, and to transform boundaries of genre. Departing from the standard reading of puritan captivity narratives as "predictable and artless . . .expressions of voluntary social conformity" (23-24), Castiglia shows that stories of captivity have allowed white women to document agency and write about culturally unnamable forms of imprisonment, such as heteronormativity.
Michelle Burnham agrees that captivity narratives, and the sentimental novels that grew from them, "function as escape literature because their heroines so often indulge in transgressive behavior or enact forms of resistant agency, not in spite of their captivity but precisely as a result of it". However, she goes on to argue that "like novelistic discourse, nationalist discourse relies on the profoundly affective experience of sympathy" (43), and the sentimental response that captivity narratives evoke is one of the deepest and most structuring of any narrative in U.S. nationhood. Burnham describes this sentimental response as dependent on an ambivalent struggle between identification with home cultures and with the Other. As she explains: "the captive professes an identity whose fixity is belied by the unstable and mobile processes of identification that supports that identity" and "what is sentimental about the imagined communities novels create is that they are not based on likeness." In other words, it is the close contact with Otherness, and indeed the very slippery boundary between the Other (captor) and the supposed same (captive, reader) that creates the affective experience of novel reading (and eventually, of nation-imagining). The heroine of the captivity narrative holds an ambivalent liminal position between two or more cultures that undermines her identification with the "home" culture and, simultaneously, reinforces that identification. In short, we identify with the heroine's rebellious boundary crossing but also read her stubbornly back into the "home" culture where she belongs. -- http://www.thirdspace.ca/articles/3_2_hogan.htm
Addition Links to Information about the Iroquois
A more extensive version of the Iroquois Constitution is from the University of Oklahoma Law Center: http://www.law.ou.edu/hist/iroquois.html
There is an Iroquois Net: http://www.iroquois.net/
The Iroquois Indian Museum: http://www.iroquoismuseum.org/
From Portland State University is a curriculum on the Iroquois Confederation and the U.S. Constitution: http://www.iroquoisdemocracy.pdx.edu/
From the Carnegie Museum is an exhibit on the Iroquois from 1600 to present-day: http://www.carnegiemuseums.org/cmnh/exhibits/north-south-east-west/iroquois/sovereign_people.html
An annotated bibliography from a 1988 conference "Native American Political Systems and the Evolution of Democracy": http://www.ratical.org/many_worlds/6Nations/NAPSnEoD88.html