Sovereign Selves

American Indian Autobiography and the Law

AvDavid J. Carlson

E-bok

Engelska, 2024

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Beskrivning

This book is an exploration of how American Indian autobiographers'' approaches to writing about their own lives have been impacted by American legal systems from the Revolutionary War until the 1920s. Historically, Native American autobiographers have written in the shadow of "Indian law," a nuanced form of natural law discourse with its own set of related institutions and forms (the reservation, the treaty, etc.). In Sovereign Selves, David J. Carlson develops a rigorously historicized argument about the relationship between the specific colonial model of "Indian" identity that was developed and disseminated through U.S. legal institutions, and the acts of autobiographical self-definition by the "colonized" Indians expected to fit that model.

Carlson argues that by drawing on the conventions of early colonial treaty-making, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Indian autobiographers sought to adapt and redefine the terms of Indian law as a way to assert specific property-based and civil rights. Focusing primarily on the autobiographical careers of two major writers (William Apess and Charles Eastman), Sovereign Selves traces the way that their sustained engagement with colonial legal institutions gradually enabled them to produce a new rhetoric of "Indianness."

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum:2024-03-18
Språk:Engelska
Antal sidor:232
Filformat:EPUB
Kopieringsskydd:LCP
ISBN:9780252055485
Förlag:University of Illinois Press

Utforska kategorier

Etnicitet inom Samhälle och politik
Amerikas historia inom Historia och arkeologi

Mer om författaren

David Carlson is an assistant professor of English at California State University, San Bernardino.

Recensioner i media

"The book is most engaging. . . . One of the strengths of Sovereign Selves is its commitment to a complex reading of the history of engagement between colonial power and Native Americans. . . . Because Carlson shows a clear trend toward the kind of rights talk being used by American Indians today, his book has the potential to help Native Americanist scholars rethink the ways in which literary and legal histories intersect."--Western Historical Quarterly"In this superbly clear-minded and judicious study, Carlson lays out the various networks of historical and legal processes that shape and articulate Indian identities and that resonate today in ongoing struggles for Native sovereignty."--Great Plains Quarterly"David Carlson's examination of 'sovereign selves' moves examination of the Native-white encounter from the ethnohistoric to the literary, from cultural entity to individual agency. . . . Necessary to understand what has brought us to the contemporary realities of Indian land claims and other persistent conflicts."--Journal of the Early Republic

Innehållsförteckning

CoverTitleCopyrightContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. The Discourse of Indian Law2. Seneca Politics and the Rhetoric of Engagement3. William Apess and the Constraints of Conversion4. William Apess and Indian Liberalism5. Charles Eastman and the Discourse of Allotment6. Charles Eastman and the Rights of CharacterConclusion: Toward Self-SovereigntyNotesWorks CitedIndexBack cover