Ron Welburn – författare

Roanoke and Wampum: Topics in Native American Heritage and Literatures focuses on the discourses about selected legacies and writings predominantly of eastern Native North America. Ron Welburn skillfully approaches diverse subjects through scholarly and personal modes. More specifically, the book begins with the author reflecting on the sign talk of fifties television’s Pahoo-Ka-Ta-Wah, and it concludes with a discussion of a narrative by thirties Chippewa author Thomas Whitecloud. Other essays inquire about the southeastern Blackfoot, Jeffrey Amherst, and literary theories. Still others discuss Indian slaves, the Great Seal of the United States, Mildred Haun’s Melungeon novel, and nineteenth-century Indian interviewers. A section on William Apess features poetry and a scholarly essay.

Upholds Ann Plato as a noteworthy nineteenth-century writer, while reexamining her life and writing from an American Indian perspective.Who was Ann Plato? Apart from circumstantial evidence, there's little information about the author of Essays; Including Biographies and Miscellaneous Pieces, in Prose and Poetry, published in 1841. Plato lived in a milieu of colored Hartford, Connecticut, in the early nineteenth century. Although long believed to have been African American herself, she may also, Ron Welburn argues, have been American Indian, like the father in her poem "The Natives of America." Combining literary criticism, ethnohistory, and social history, Welburn uses Plato as an example of how Indians in the Long Island Sound region adapted and prevailed despite the contemporary rhetoric of Indian disappearance. This study seeks to raise Plato's profile as an author as well as to highlight the dynamics of Indian resistance and isolation that have contributed to her enigmatic status as a literary figure.