Table of Contents
After addressing this issue, the second section dives into the Life’s cartographic language— its vivid depictions of the natural landscape and of Sauk home- and “memory lands”[1]—and situates the text as a project of Indigenous counter-mapping in the face of US settler colonial pressures. Joining the text’s portrayal of Sauk place-making and its depictions of how the settler-state disrupted intra- and inter-tribal spatial-political arrangements, this section seeks to highlight the persistence of Indigenous epistemologies and relations that resist the imposition of settler colonial ways of “knowing” the land and its Indigenous inhabitants, both in the contemporary moment of Black Hawk’s text and in its subsequent reprintings. This section also calls upon additional sources to enrich the discussion of the Life. Using oratory from Keokuk, the Sauk’s Civil Chief, and Black Hawk’s counterpart, the section adds additional Sauk voices to supplement Black Hawk’s own description of Sauk lifeways. But, in a delicate balancing act, this section also uses primary sources from the settler-state and from white settlers intruding into Sauk lands in the 1830s to demonstrate both the discursive and physical violence of settler epistemologies in the early nineteenth century.
A reintroduction would not be complete without looking at Black Hawk’s early interlocuters’ depictions of him, the Life, and Indigenous peoples, which is what the third section examines. Here, the reader encounters devastating parallels between the physical violence described in the Life and enacted, in their own words, by 1830s settlers and the discursive violence in subsequent editorial renderings of the Life.
The last section returns to the notion of “space” and examines the geographic afterlives of Sauk dispossession—how, beyond rhetorical strategies, settler epistemologies and practices seek to erase Natives from the physical landscape and to absent them from its histories. It concludes by examining a new digital humanities project of Indigenous (re)mapping, in addition to looking at its mapping of Sauk homelands and at its promise for future research.
[1] On this term, I am indebted to the work of Christine M. DeLucia, Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast (New Haven, Conn., 2018); see also, Black Hawk, The Life (2008), 46, 87.