Introduction
I argue that in many cases when Indigenous writers lacked proprietary authorship, editors and publishers structured paratextual materials to decenter Indigenous authorial presence over time and center white settler narratives of Christianizing and civilizing the “Indian.” One important way in which publishers sidelined Indigenous authors was through transforming Indigenous-authored works into paratexts. While publishers, editors, and audiences continued to hold sway over the production of Native-authored texts even in cases when the writers owned their work, Indigenous people who made their way into print through the linked genres of sermon and confession in the years before copyright possessed little to no control over the various editions of their work.
As the exhibit shows, Indigenous authorship of this period was not monolithic: a celebrity Indigenous minister such as Samson Occom held greater authorial agency and leverage in navigating settler-colonial print culture than did condemned Indigenous figures such as Katherine Garret and Moses Paul. Nonetheless, the liminal position of each of these individuals between Anglo-American Christian and Indigenous communities meant that the texts published in their names held power both to support and resist settler-colonial narratives. The mediation and/or paratextual sidelining of their words, especially of Garret’s and Paul’s, operate to attach their accounts to dominant colonial narratives. Yet by heeding, among other scholarly methodologies, Alice Te Punga Somerville’s call to “assum[e] Indigenous presence”[2] and Karen Weyler’s expansive framework for “outsider authorship,”[3] we can recognize Indigenous authorial presence and potential sites of resistance in these works. I respond to calls to assume and “critical[ly] imagin[e]”[4] Indigenous presence with an eye specifically to the limitations and possibilities of Indigenous authorial presence in the settler-dominated archive of 18th- and 19th-century print culture.
Weyler’s discussion of “outsider authorship” in her book Empowering Words broadens the definition of authorship to be “collaborative, sponsored, and even collective.”[5] Phillip Round similarly argues that “all texts are produced in a composite way, and that all texts, Euro-American and Native American alike, are the products of complex networks of publishers, printers, editors, audiences, and authors.”[6] Adopting Weyler’s and Round’s expansive notions of collaborative authorship allows for a recuperation of Indigenous authorial presence in highly mediated and paratextually coded works. Yet it is also essential to consider that when settlers held disproportionate power in the production of composite texts, Indigenous voices were often sidelined and appropriated. Indigenous authors who owned their own work, such as William Apess, were able to model more truly collective and collaborative approaches to authorship while centering Native authorial presence.
This exhibit takes as its central text Katherine Garret’s 1738 “dying warning and exhortation,” as published by T. Green and later included in an 1892 collection of Eliphalet Adams’ sermons, now housed at the Newberry Library. The second section of the exhibit places Garret’s text in conversation with a “Sketch” of Moses Paul’s “Life and Character,” as it was printed as an appendix to the 1772 and 1773 editions of Samson Occom’s “Sermon preached at the execution of Moses Paul.” Garret and Paul were both Native Americans condemned to die for murder, who came into print through heavily mediated accounts of their descent into sin and coming to Christianity.
In the third section of the exhibit, I conduct a comparative analysis of the paratexts of several editions (from 1772, 1773, and 1789) of Samson Occom’s execution sermon. The latter edition places Occom’s sermon alongside an account written by Reverend Jonathan Edwards entitled “Observations on the Language of the Muhhekaneew Indians,” which figures as a precursor for the ethnographic accounts of Indigenous life that became prominent in the 19th century. I also include the title page of a 1766 collection of sermons by Occom and Reverend Nathaniel Whitaker.
Finally, I turn to two 19th-century works: Pequot writer William Apess’ autobiography, A Son of the Forest, and Canadian settler John Reade’s ethnographic text, I. Some Wabanaki Songs [and] II. Aboriginal American Poetry. Through these texts I consider how proprietary authorship and the advent of ethnography changed the ways in which Indigenous people came into print in the 1800’s.
[1] Phillip H. Round, “Proprietary Authorship,” in Removable Type: Histories of the Book in Indian Country, 1663-1880 (University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 163. https://doi.org/10.5149/9780807899472_round.11.
[2] Alice Te Punga Somerville, “13: ‘I do still have a letter’: Our sea of archives,” in Sources and Methods in Indigenous Studies, ed. Chris Anderson, Jean M O’Brien (Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2016), 121.
[3] Karen Weyler, “Introduction: Outsider Authorship in Early America,” in Empowering Words: Outsiders and Authorship in Early America (University of Georgia Press, 2013), 1.
[4] Robert Warrior, “Introduction: Reading Experience in Native Nonfiction,” in The People and the Word: Reading Native Nonfiction (University of Minnesota Press, 2005), xv.
[5] Karen Weyler, “Introduction: Outsider Authorship in Early America,” 23.
[6] Phillip Round, “Toward an Indian Bibliography,” 16.