Early Indigenous Literatures

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In 1897, Simon Pokagon wrote that it “afforded [him] much pleasure in life to know that the rivers, lakes and nearly all the waterways of America retain the names our fathers gave [them]” (Berliner 83). While naming conventions are one way Pokagon asserts Indigenous situatedness to place as something that survives settler colonialism, the language in “The Red Man’s Greeting” emphasizes the temporal continuity between precontact America and settler colonialism in the same geographic space. Using what I refer to as watery terminology, Pokagon likens settler colonialism to water-based weather systems such as cyclones and storms in contrast to his use of “sea” which refers to Indigenous existence and persistence in place. By using watery terminology as the basis for comparison, Pokagon invokes Pexa’s first claim about what “critical relationality” offers, specifically its function as “temporality for linking to the past and moving toward the future” (22). 

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