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54 books match the query 'Indians in literature' and 2 start with u

cover of Unconventional Politics: Nineteenth-Century Women Writers and U.S. Indian Policy

Unconventional Politics

Nineteenth-Century Women Writers and U.S. Indian Policy

Janet Dean

University of Massachusetts Press, 2016

Throughout the nineteenth century, Native and non-Native women writers protested U.S. government actions that threatened indigenous people's existence. The conventional genres they sometimes adopted—the sensationalistic captivity narrative, sentimental Indian lament poetry, didactic assimilation fiction, and the mass-circulated commercial magazine—typically had been used to reinforce the oppressive policies of removal, war, and allotment. But in Unconventional Politics Janet Dean explores how four authors, Sarah Wakefield, Lydia Huntley Sigourney, the Muscogee/Creek S. Alice Callahan, and the Cherokee Ora V. Eddleman, converted these frameworks to serve a politics of dissent. Intervening in current debates in feminist and Native American literary criticism, Dean shows how these women advocated for Native Americans by both politicizing conventional literature and employing literary skill to respond to national policy.

Dean argues that in protesting U.S. Indian policy through popular genres, Wakefield, Sigourney, Callahan, and Eddleman also critiqued cultural protocols and stretched the contours of accepted modes of feminine discourse. Their acts of improvisation and reinvention tell a new story about the development of American women's writing and political expression.
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cover of Unsettling Thoreau: Native Americans, Settler Colonialism, and the Power of Place

Unsettling Thoreau

Native Americans, Settler Colonialism, and the Power of Place

John J. Kucich

University of Massachusetts Press, 2024

A CHOICE 2025 Outstanding Academic Title

Finalist for the 2025 New England Society Book Awards

Henry David Thoreau’s life-long fascination with Native Americans is widely known and a recurring topic of interest, and it is also a source of modern debate. This is a figure who both had a deep interest in Native American history and culture and was seen by many of his contemporaries, including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne, as “more like an Indian” than his white neighbors. At the same time, Thoreau did little to protest the systematic dispossession of Indigenous people across the country in his lifetime. John J. Kucich charges into this contradiction, considering how Thoreau could demonstrate deep respect for Native American beliefs on one hand and remain largely silent about their genocide, actively happening throughout his life, on the other. Thoreau’s long study of Native peoples, as reflected in so much of his writing, allowed him to glimpse an Indigenous worldview, but it never fully freed him from the blind spots of settler colonialism.

Drawing on Indigenous studies and critiques of settler colonialism, as well as new materialist approaches that illustrate Thoreau’s radical reimagining of the relationship between humans and the natural world, Unsettling Thoreau explores the stakes of Thoreau’s effort to live mindfully and ethically in place when living alongside, or replacing marginalized peoples. By examining the whole scope of his writings, including the unpublished Indian Notebooks, and placing them alongside Native writers and communities in and beyond New England, this book gauges Thoreau’s effort to use Indigenous knowledge to reimagine a settler colonial world, without removing him from its trappings.

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