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Designed as a corrective to colonial literary histories that have excluded Native voices, this anthology brings together a variety of primary texts produced by the Algonquian peoples of New England during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and very early nineteenth centuries. Included among these written materials and objects are letters, signatures, journals, baskets, pictographs, confessions, wills, and petitions, each of which represents a form of authorship. Together they demonstrate the continuing use of traditional forms of memory and communication and the lively engagement of Native peoples with alphabetic literacy during the colonial period. Each primary text is accompanied by an essay that places it in context and explores its significance. 

Written by leading scholars in the field, these readings draw on recent trends in literary analysis, history, and anthropology to provide an excellent overview of the field of early Native studies. They are also intended to provoke discussion and open avenues for further exploration by students and other interested readers. Above all, the texts and commentaries gathered in this volume provide an opportunity to see Native American literature as a continuity of expression that reflects choices made long before contact and colonization, rather than as a nineteenth—or even twentieth-century invention.

Contributors include Heidi Bohaker, Heather Bouwman, Joanna Brooks, Kristina Bross, Stephanie Fitzgerald, Sandra Gustafson, Laura Arnold Leibman, Kevin McBride, David Murray, Laura Murray, Jean O'Brien, Ann Marie Plane, Philip Round, Jodi Schorb, David Silverman, and Hilary E. Wyss.

In 1925, Pius XI staged the Vatican Missionary Exposition in Rome’s Vatican City. Offering a narrative of the Catholic Church’s beneficence to a global congregation, the exposition displayed thousands of cultural belongings stolen from Indigenous communities, which were seen by one million pilgrims. Gloria Jane Bell’s Eternal Sovereigns offers critical revision to that story. Bell reveals the tenacity, mobility, and reception of Indigenous artists, travelers, and activists in 1920s Rome. Animating these conjunctures, the book foregrounds competing claims to sovereignty from Indigenous and papal perspectives. Bell deftly juxtaposes the “Indian Museum” of nineteenth-century sculptor Ferdinand Pettrich, acquired by the Vatican, with the oeuvre of Indigenous artist Edmonia Lewis. Focusing on Turtle Island, Bell analyzes Indigenous cultural belongings made by artists from nations including Cree, Lakota, Anishinaabe, Nipissing, Kanien’kehá:ka, Wolastoqiyik, and Kwakwaka’wakw. Drawing on years of archival research and field interviews, Bell provides insight into the Catholic Church’s colonial collecting and its ongoing ethnological display practices. Written in a voice that questions the academy’s staid conventions, the book reclaims Indigenous belongings and other stolen treasures that remain imprisoned in the stronghold of the Vatican Museums.