(Re)introducing Black Hawk and The Life (1833)
Chief Black Hawk’s primary text Life of Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak, or Black Hawk defies easy genre classification. It shifts between subjects as part personal narrative of a chief determinedly defending his people and their homelands; part cultural history of his fellow Sac people and their relationship with the natural landscape, other Indigenous nations, and Anglo colonial powers; and part searing critique of U.S. Indian policy, settler morality, and settler epistemology. It blends a tone of melancholy for the collective losses of his people with an attitude of radical hope, “survivance,” “continuance,” and (re)assertion of Sac lifeways.[1] The multiple grounds—literal and metaphorical—covered in the text are complicated further by the multiple voices within the text: Black Hawk’s words have never been permitted to stand on their own. Throughout numerous editions, from original publication (1833) to the most recent edition (2021),[2] Black Hawk’s text has been translated, edited, and introduced by interlocuters who have tended to overwrite his nuanced text with their own “settlerscapes”[3]—overwritten in that they romanticize, disavow, or erase the very settler colonial violence that Black Hawk’s text inveighs and actively resists. Participating in a settler colonial reiteration of rhetorical and spatialized violence, Black Hawk’s unseeing interlocuters have participated in a vicious continuity of the violence of the early nineteenth century that bleeds into our contemporary moment.[4] Black Hawk and his text need a reintroduction to American readers.
[1] For melancholy and parallels with the genre of elegy, see Arnold Krupat, “That the People Might Live:” Loss and Renewal in Native American Elegy (Ithaca, N.Y., 2012); for survivance and continuance, see Gerald Vizenor, ed., Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence (Lincoln, Neb., 2008), esp. chap. 1.
[2] Following the original publication are numerous renditions: Richard James Kennett’s edition (1836), Patterson’s revised edition (1882), James D. Rishell’s edition (1912) Milo Milton Quaife’s edition (1916), Roger L. Nichols edition (1999), J. Gerald Kennedy’s edition (2008), and most recently Michael A. Lofaro’s edition (2021).
[3] For “settlerscapes,” see Ezra D. Miller, “‘But It Is Nothing Except Woods’: Anabaptists, Ambitions, and a Northern Indiana Settlerscape, 1830-1841,” in Ryan D. Harker and Janeen Bertische Johnson, eds., Rooted and Grounded: Essays on Land and Christian Discipleship (New York, 2016).
[4] As scholar Patrick Wolfe argues: settler colonialism “is a structure, not an event.” Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research, 8, no. 4 (December 2006): 387-409, quotation at 388. See also, J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, “‘A Structure, Not an Event’: Settler Colonialism and Enduring Indigeneity,” Lateral 5, no. 1 (Spring 2016): n.p. For “vicious,” I follow Kyle Whyte’s terminology of “vicious sedimentation” and “insidious loops,” see Whyte, “Settler Colonialism, Ecology, and Environmental Injustice,” Environment and Society 9 (2018): 125-144.