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Early Indigenous Literatures Main Menu The Child Who Would be Sovereign: Settler Colonial Frustrations and the Figure of the Child in Gertrude Simmons Bonnin's American Indian Stories By: Kai Chase Illicit Relations: The Challenges and Possibilities of Black and Indigenous Relations soumya rachel shailendra Legibility and Ambivalence in 19th Century Indigenous Women's Writing An exhibit on E. Pauline Johnson and Sarah Winnemucca by Emma Cohen Lyric Histories: An Investigation of Early Black (and) Native America through Poetic Vignettes by Kira Tucker Marriage and Empire in 19th Century Native American Women's Literature by Angad Singh Not-not blood quantum: the Dawes Act and ambivalent Indigeneity by Yasmin Yoon Reading Indigenous Authorial Presence in 18th- and 19th-century Paratexts Title Page for Isabel Griffith-Gorgati's Exhibit Resistance on and off the Page: A Collaborative Conversation between Black and Indigenous Literary Contributors Featuring James Printer, Katherine Garret, Phillis Wheatley, and John Marrant (17th-18th Century Early Print Culture Participants)- By Lauren Johnson Spiritual Armies, Resurrected Bones, and “Boundless” Continents: How Indigenous Activists in Early New England Reconfigured Puritan Millennialist Narratives Featuring texts of Samson Occom, William Apess, and the Wampanoag Bible. By Surya Milner Sovereignty or Removal: The Conflicting Indigenous Policies of 1835 in the Continental United States Julia Gilman (Re)introducing Black Hawk and The Life (1833) BHR 1-Intro

What Does Water Do For Indigenous Peoples of the Great Lakes Region?

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The geographic focus of this exhibit is the Great Lakes region and the Mississippi River, with an attention to Indigenous peoples who call these spaces their homes. For the Potawatomi, Sauk, and Ojibwe peoples, this space is inherently infused not just with the land but with the water. While water and waterways are significant actors (in the sense that water is an agentic force that requires relational care) for all three tribal nations, the specifics of water is not the same across each: For Heid E. Erdrich (Turtle Mountain Ojibwe), invoking the river grounds the temporal simultaneity that guides her poemeo; for Simon Pokagon (Potawatomi) water is a method of place-making and water terminology shapes his articulation of dispossession; for Black Hawk (Sauk) water is a location itself and a place-making entity.

To think through the different aspects water allows for, I invoke Christopher Pexa’s term “critical relationality” which he explains as doing three things: “(1) as temporality for linking to the past and moving toward the future, (2) as a mode of place making, and (3) as expressing an ontological relationship to ancestral lands and their human and other-than-human occupants” (22). In this exhibit, Potawatomi, Sauk, and Ojibwe authors invoke the river as an entity, in watery terminology, and as locations themselves in complementary and practical manifestations of “critical relationality.”

As an exhibit that exists on a digital platform, this project also focuses on the possibilities that technologies through time allow for. Beginning with a birch-bark text from Simon Pokagon in 1893 and spanning into the present moment with the announcement of Tuvalu’s migration to the metaverse, this exhibit examines the role of technology in making “critical relationality” enlivened for Indigenous authors and communities.

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