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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 What Does Water Do For Indigenous Peoples of the Great Lakes Region? Featuring Heid E. Erdrich, Simon Pokagon, Black Hawk, and Simon Kofe by Sarah Nisenson (Re)introducing Black Hawk and The Life (1833) BHR 1-Intro

"The Red Man's Greeting" Production and Technology

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On this page, I discuss the paratextual materials included with the birch bark text "The Red Man's Greeting" for their sociocultural implications as authenticating documents. I also discuss the technological and ecological considerations of printing upon birch bark.

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"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.
"Brief History of Simon Pokagon"
pokagon portrait
pokagon cover

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