Early Indigenous Literatures

"trackless deep"

Pokagon discerns Potawatomi peoples’ relation to water and settlers’ by establishing water as something his people intimately know. He explains how “they [settlers] showed us [Potawatomi peoples] the compass that guided them across the trackless deep, and as it swung to and fro only resting to the north, we looked upon it as a thing of life from the eternal world” (10). In using the phrase “trackless deep” to describe settlers’ journey across the Atlantic Ocean, Pokagon differentiates this ignorance of place, the unknowability of the ocean to settlers, to the knowability, the “trackfulness” that is a hallmark of Potawatomi peoples’ relationship to their waterways.

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