Early Indigenous Literatures

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The homepage of this exhibit is an aerial view of the Mississippi River. From this view, the branches of the river, the way they break apart and come back together, become legible. In this image, water is central; water is the actor that shapes the landscape and water is the focus, rather than land. These waterways demonstrate the productivity and necessity of branching outwards and coming together, over and over again. Although repetition can mean repeated without change, the river tells us how change is possible through repetition. Similarly, this exhibit moves in a recursive manner, thinking through texts, leaving them, and coming back to them from new angles and with new questions. 

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 homelands. For the Potawatomi, Sauk, and Ojibwe peoples, this space is inherently and intimately 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 the entity that makes place-making possible for his peoples.

To think through the different aspects water provides and 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 make possible. 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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