Early Indigenous Literatures

Quote from The Life

On this mural, the selected quote from The Life is "With us it is a custom to visit the graves of our friends and keep them in repair for many years. There is no place like that where the bones of forefathers lie to go to when in grief."

Omitted from the whole context of The Life , however, this quotation serves a universalizing, almost fetishizing function: anyone might agree in the need for mortuary rituals like those illustrated in this quote, but it gains particular valence due to its "mystic" Indigenous speaker." The selection of this quotation (and indeed, the selective trimming of this quotation), disavows the violence that transformed this very location from an Indigenous to a settler "place," despite Black Hawk and his text's active resistance to this romanticism. For examples of this, see the other images in this gallery.

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