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• 1 2022-12-01T11:41:09-08:00 Life of Black Hawk Production and Publication 10 plain 1316882 2022-12-06T09:52:34-08:00 The introductory materials to Life of Black Hawk immediately details the production and publication history of this text: “translated by Antoine LeClaire, an interpreter of French Canadian and Potawatomi descent, and transcribed by a shrewd but sympathetic newspaper editor named John B. Patterson” (vii). Immediately, authorship and production become a layered process, including a person framed as both a translator and interpreter, and another person as an editor. However, as the introduction explains, LeClaire was not an unknown interpreter tasked with Black Hawk’s work, but rather someone Black Hawk had known for quite some time due to LeClaire’s position as a government interpreter since 1818 (xvi). Despite this acquaintance, it remains impossible to know if Black Hawk approached LeClaire about this project, or vice versa. Either way, “LeClaire and Patterson produced a written narrative that, despite their best efforts, inevitably altered Black Hawk’s story” (xvii). Whether through ignorance of language, the incommensurability of translated phrases, or as a result of more insidious motives that potentially “suppressed other, more inflammatory remarks” Life of Black Hawk became a best-seller (xxiii, xxv). 
  
  
  
  Importantly, the fame from Life of Black Hawk extended beyond the text itself and Black Hawk became a celebrity in American culture. Prior to dictating this text, Black Hawk was already a quasi-celebrity from the forced circuit he was led on during his time as a prisoner of war during which he was “subjected to public exhibition during a tour of the eastern cities” (xiv). As was typical during the time, so typical in fact that the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair had multiple ‘human zoos’ for white audiences to see Indigenous peoples from across the world, Black Hawk was similarly subjected to this kind of performance and exhibition (Shahriari). After the production and sale of his text though, his fame transformed into something contained by print culture. He was a frequent subject of portraits, prints, and engravings though it remains unknown if he ever received any material compensation for his published works or his proliferated visual cultural markers (xxv).