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Early Indigenous Literatures

pokagon portrait

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1. "The Red Man's Greeting" "By the Author" Printing on birch bark is a technical challenge, since it had the potential to damage the printing press. Despite this potential damage to the printing press, hundreds of these booklets were produced for the Chicago World’s Fair with an awareness that Pokagon’s white settler audience was enamored with Indigenous birch bark objects at this time (Berliner). Perhaps more overt evidence of Pokagon’s catering to his audience is his departure from the traditional scroll format of Algonquian writing to a booklet. Berliner explains that “this choice may have been made partly because it was easier to print multiple small pages than a long scroll” but notes that “additionally, the booklet format would have been more widely recognizable to his readers as a text” (82). Despite the way that the introductory materials “By the Author” connects this booklet to “untold generations… [for whom] this most remarkable tree with manifold bark used by us instead of paper” Pokagon actually departs from a more traditional manifestation of birch bark writing to make his product more legible as a piece of written text for his white audience. Although the materiality of the birch bark booklet strays from more traditional formats of birch bark scrolls, Pokagon uses the technology of birch bark and the printing press to make his claim on temporal continuity legible to his white audience. What he potentially compromises in form is recapitulated in content: the disappearance of his people, the ecological violence of colonialism, and transformation as a method of endurance in the wake of colonialism.
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