Early Indigenous Literatures

Adams Title Page Annotation 3

Finally, Garret is granted a moment of authorship through “with her dying warning and exhortation left under her own Hand.” Garret’s agency is left to the end of the paragraph, perhaps signaling its lack of importance to the publishers. Yet, they do make it recognizable that this is something that Garret wrote on her own and left behind for others, offering her some power in sharing her own story through Euro-American print culture. As Schorb elaborates, this moment gives us “access to her consciousness,”[1] as the addition is an instance of Garret’s authorial voice and perspective in the paratexts. The word hand is also interestingly capitalized in the paratext, as the capitalization helps us pay attention to Garret’s body part that conducted the writing, and this body part belonged to an Indigenous woman who was capable of writing in English.
 
[1] Jodi Schorb, “Seeing Other Wise: Reading a Pequot Execution Narrative,” in Early Native Literacies in New England: A Documentary and Critical Anthology, (2008), 151.

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