Indian Captivity Narratives

7. Auflage mit neuem Vorwort von Franz Obermeier und Wolfgang Schiffner.

Stadens Werk war nicht nur wegen des Berichts über ein in Europa weitgehend unbekanntes Land von großem Einfluss. Denn abgesehen von wenigen Nachrichten in den Briefberichten von Amerigo Vespucci und anderen ephemeren Texten war damals nichts über Brasilien bekannt. Seine Bedeutung liegt auch darin, dass er durch eine geschickte literarische Strategie eines Authentizitätsdiskurses den zu der Zeit noch unpersönlichen Reisebericht auf die Ebene einer persönlichen Erzählung (Narrratio) hebt, auch wenn diese noch stark von erbaulichen Texten geprägt ist. Er verbindet damit religiöse Elemente als Rechtfertigung dafür, überhaupt einen solchen Bericht geschrieben zu haben,  mit der zeitgenössischen Realität des von ihm erlebten Landes. Dies war ein in der Geschichte der Reiseliteratur zentraler Schritt. Es genügt einen der mittelalterlichen Pilgerberichte nach Jerusalem zu lesen, oder selbst Marco Polos Chinabericht (Il Milione, entstanden um 1298/99), um den Unterschied zu solchen unpersönlichen Texten zu verstehen. Dabei ist Staden als Erzähler und in den beigegebenen Texten wie der Widmung an Landgraf Philipp auch als Autor in seiner Jetztzeit der Reformation und damit seiner eigenen Realität und der seiner Leser präsent. Seinen moralischen Anspruch untermauert der Protestant Staden durch einen starken Bezug auf lutherische Elemente und seine des Öfteren thematisierte Zeugenschaft für den Glauben. Es gelingt ihm, sein doch recht großes Verständnis für die Fremdkultur, der er mit einem offenen Blick begegnet ist, mit dem christlich-moralischen Urteil so zu verbinden, so dass sich in seiner Darstellung beide Elemente der Angst vor der Fremdheit des ihn bedrohlichen Kannibalismus und der für das Fremde offenen Wahrnehmung nach seinen eigenen Wertmaßstäben einander die Waage halten. Das geschilderte Erleben wird damit für seine ersten Leser wie für den Erzähler des Texts erlebbar, was allerdings diskursiv durch Wahrheitsbeteuerungen erarbeitet werden muss. Diese erfolgen auf der Text- und Bildebene. Die Trennung von seiner persönlichen Erzählung im ersten Teil und dem ethnographischen Bericht im zweiten untermauert diesen Wahrheitsanspruch, sachlich objektiv zu berichten. Der im Text erhobene Anspruch auf Augenzeugenschaft verleiht dem Referierten damit einen neuen Status, den in diversen Berichten erwähnten Kannibalismus dieser Indianer selbst erlebt zu haben. Er schildert ihn in einer nie gekannten Ausführlichkeit, der Vergleich mit zeitgenössischen französischen und portugiesischen Quellen erweist diese genauen Schilderungen als wahrheitsgetreu. Verschiedene Versuche, dies unter diversen Promissen als fake news zu erweisen, müssen heute als methodisch überholt gelten, auch wenn das Thema in der Populärpresse immer wieder auftaucht.

Auch die Ebene der sehr einfachen, nach Stadens Vorgaben von unbekannten Künstlern erstellten Bebilderung dient dieser bewundernswert ausgeklügelten Struktur. Diese einfachen, aber in der Rezeption außergewöhnlich einflussreichen Holzschnitte zeigen nicht nur das indigene Leben, real nachweisbare Küstenlinien und Elemente der indigenen Kultur, sondern auch den Zeugen Staden mit moralisch-verurteilenden Gesten oder als Gefangenen in einem Tupinamba-Dorf, wo er kannibalistische Szenen abbildet. Vor allem durch diese Bebilderung wurde das Buch zu einem Markstein der Reiseliteratur und  ist in Brasilien durch zahlreiche Bearbeitungen als Kinder – und Jugendliteratur sowie durch zwei Filme im kulturellen Imaginarium des Landes als erstes Brasilienbuch und Gründungstext präsent.

In my Masters thesis of 2011 I compare two works of captivity literature that emerged from the detention of Lincolnshire ship's blacksmith John R. Jewitt by the Nuu-Chah-Nulth First Nation of Vancouver Island for two years in the early 19th Century, after a standard fur trading visit devolved into diplomatic disaster and the slaughter of nearly all hands. The first text is the 1807 'Diary,' a brief work consisting of short, dated entries. The second is the 1815 'Narrative,' a more elaborate and largely falsified reworking by Connecticut ghostwriter Richard Alsop. In chapters 1 and 2 I consider each text in its generic context, arguing that Jewitt, in his diary, drew on the triumphalist imperialism of eighteenth-century literature of exploration to rewrite his calamity as enduring achievement; while Alsop, an American by birth and familiar with the long tradition of 'Indian captivity narratives' for which the American public showed a voracious interest, reworked the story to conform to the expectations of 'captivity narrative' readers.  Chapter three focuses in on a series of moments of heightened sentiment in Alsop’s Narrative which place the text’s representational apparatus under strain, thus opening up for critique aspects of the text’s usually naturalised, and thus occluded, discursive work. The incidents under examination are compared against their representation in Jewitt’s Journal, revealing in that text also troubling incommensurabilities in the construction of the European protagonist and the foreign Others among whom he is forced to make his home. In chapter four I consider the ways in which the conflicting desires and motivations of Jewitt and his captor-hosts register as a struggle for status, both in the historical context of Jewitt’s actual captivity, and in the literary representations this historical event engendered.

I submitted this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements of an M.A. Research in the Department of English, University of Sydney, 2011.

This book is a collection of the known primary source documents relating to the Jacob Hochstetler family during the French and Indian War years, 1757-1765. This span of years begins with the year of the attack on the Hochstetler family (1757) and ends with the year of Christian Hochstetler's probable return (1765). Additional primary sources place the story in the historical context. Available 10 dollars to JHFA, Inc. P.O. Box 154, Goshen, IN 46526-0154.

This dissertation investigates the multiple contexts and processes that shape the phenomenon of European Indianism, with particular attention to Eastern Europe and Russia. It critically reexamines several areas of scholarship that have shaped our understanding of Euro-American reenactment of Native American cultures in the light of ethnographic and historical research. The research for this dissertation was conducted from 2000 to 2002 and in brief periods in 1998 and 1999. I engaged in participant observation at Indianist gatherings in Russia, Poland, Bulgaria, Lithuania and Belgium as well as in local libraries and archives. I was also a member of the Russian Indianist community in the late 1980s, and hence I have incorporated self-reflection and memory into my theory and methodology. My analysis expands the discussion of European Indianism to recast Euro-American performance of North American tribal cultures more broadly as a general social, political and philosophical system grounded in researches and observations over Native American societies conducted by both non-natives and natives since the discovery of America. I identified several core thinkers in the Occidentalist (Indianist) tradition, namely

Référence électronique Giovanna Fiume, « Lettres de Barbarie : esclavage et rachat de captifs siciliens (xvie-xviiie siècle) », Cahiers de la Méditerranée [En ligne], 87 | 2013, mis en ligne le 15 juin 2014, consulté le 30 septembre 2016. URL : http://cdlm.revues.org/7255 Ce document a été généré automatiquement le 30 septembre 2016.

Gothic horror arrived in America in the latter half of the eighteenth century as one of many imports – literary and cultural – from England during this period of intense transatlantic circulation. As an experimental and often transgressive genre, the Gothic novel found a congenial home in the fiercely independent new nation. By the 1790s the American Gothic was well on its way to establishing a set of themes and concerns that would become uniquely its own. These included the frontier and its native inhabitants, Puritanism and its tendency towards religious excess and the individual in relation to the larger body politic. Aesthetically the Gothic novel embraced several different modes; of these, horror was the most significant and the most deeply rooted in American rhetorical and literary traditions. Present already in the uniquely American form of writing known as the captivity narrative, horror writing emerged in full force in the late eighteenth century as a modern reaction-formation to shifts in the political and religious landscape. As historian Karen Halttunen (2000) has shown, modern American horror was born at the moment when religious narratives had lost their purchase on explaining crime and, especially, murder. While Protestant religious narratives about evil had regarded it as a natural and inevitable fact of fallen existence on earth, the new, secular paradigms of the Romantic movement and the Enlightenment could only consider violent crimes as mysterious aberrations. The result of this epistemological gap was a fascination with the details of bodily mutilation and the life history of killers that has persisted until today. The moment of horror's arrival in the fledgling United States also corresponded with a time of intense social transition as the new nation struggled to define itself and decide upon the precise character of its political institutions. For example, there was the public debate about federalism against republicanism, with its choice between centralised authority as opposed to greater states' rights. The country had committed itself to a democratic government, but many practical and philosophical questions about what this meant and how to implement it remained. Novelists took up the challenge of thinking through some of the dilemmas raised by the curious phenomenon of a disparate set of colonies banding together to cast off the trappings of empire and now facing the task of inventing themselves as a coherent political unity. Inherently engaged with questions of ethics and moral judgement, the horror mode lent itself to such experiments in political thought, as did the specific historical circumstances and background of the young republic. These included the popular genre of captivity

Alexis de Tocqueville was critical of the destructive implications of American expansion and this sentiment is articulated most forcefully in his essay “A Fortnight in the Wilderness” written in 1831 during his American travels to Saginaw, Michigan. “Fortnight” is a biographical adventure story and an ethnography of the western-moving American frontier. Because “Fortnight” deals with the themes of the “wilderness” and the “vanishing Indian” of the American and Canadian frontiers, an instructive comparison can be made between “Fortnight” and a text narrated by John Tanner, someone Tocqueville met and interviewed during his travels in 1831 and who became a key source of Tocqueville’s knowledge about the North American Indians. Tanner’s “A Narrative of the Captivity and Adventures of John Tanner (US Interpreter at Sault de Ste. Marie) during thirty years of residence among the Indians in the Interior of North America” (1830) is both adventure literature and an ethnography of native life. Tocqueville used Tanner’s “Narrative,” in his work “Democracy in America,”to illustrate what white Indian experts of the time called the “miseries” of “savage” life, or what later commentators would patronizingly call the “pathologies”-alcoholism,internal warfare, disease,loss of territory - that would eventually doom Indians in North America to extinction. Yet there is more to Tanner’s text than this dispiriting message. One of the appeals of Tanner’s narrative today, and one of the reasons why there has been a reassessment of his text, is that it details the survival of native people as they move further westward and adapt to new geographies. Tocqueville is now a canonical  figure in the American political imagination, a “prophet” of American democracy. Tanner, if we bother to think of him at all, is remembered as a lost soul, a marginal figure who no longer belongs either to the native or the white culture he sought to rejoin. But when we read their texts together we can, as I have tried to do in my research, see them as documents that belong both to their time and to ours. They make statements, albeit in strikingly different ways, about geographic landscapes and colonial identities, about European imperial fantasies and native struggles for survival, about Canadian and American nation building, and they tell us much about the uses of ethnography, language, and interpretation.

We thank the Population Association of America for providing funding to attend the PAA 2010 annual meeting where an early version of this paper was presented. We also thank Sunita Kishor, ICF International, for her valuable suggestions and the anonymous reviewers for their excellent feedback, which helped to improve this paper. However, none of them are responsible for any errors or for the opinions expressed in this paper.

Este texto presenta y compara diferentes relatos sobre blancos “hechos indios” en el Chaco boliviano de la segunda mitad del siglo XIX. Algunos son casos históricos, otros provienen de la ficción. Los diversos autores censuran los casos reales, mientras alaban a los personajes de ficción. Sin embargo, el artículo muestra que en ambos casos los autores actúan movidos por los mismos criterios y prejuicios que postulan una inferioridad irremediable del indígena.

Page 1. Captivating Eunice Membership, Colonialism, and Gendered Citizenships of Grief Au ara Simpson My youngest Daughter, aged Seven years, was carryed all the journey, & look'd after with a great deal of Tenderness. - John Williams, 1707^ WHITHER EUNICE? ...

The literature of captivity, slavery and imprisonment is central to early American literature.  Puritans and Africans, revolutionaries and seamen, women and men – all wrote narratives of their capture and the duress of life without freedom.  These are narratives of trauma, resistance, hope, and survival.  Once treated as minor or peripheral to the literary canon, contemporary scholarship understands such narratives to embody themes of religious redemption, freedom, indigenous identity, and social transformation that dominate early American literature.

The Rural Gothic in American Popular Culture: Backwoods Horror and Terror in the Wilderness argues that the complex and often negative initial responses which early European settlers expressed towards the North American wilderness exerted a lasting influence upon American gothic and horror narratives, and discusses key literary and filmic texts in light of specific historical, cultural, and  ecological contexts, bringing to light illuminating and unexpected connections between popular and canonical texts.

Goodness of God..., [6] has been viewed by critics and historians as the model and archetypal example of the Indian captivity narrative. Kathyrn Derounian-Stoloda characterizes the Indian captivity narrative as "a discrete American literary form," [7] while Rafia Zafar claims that through the Indian captivity narrartive, "the British colonies had given birth to a 'simple indigenous American prose' form." [8] In Jill Lepore's award winning, The Name of War, the Rowlandson narrative is elevated to the rather dubious, if not meaningless, status of "America's first bestseller ," and cited as "a foundational work in American literature." [9] As these writers attest, accounts of captivity among the Indigenous peoples of North America have held a prominent place in American historiography, national literature, and popular culture, maintaining an enduring influence on the American psyche. True, indeed, but through the exigencies of canonization that these authors participate in Rowlandson's narrative is granted an elevated literary status that acts to dissimulate it from the deeply problematic historical and literary context from which it was produced. The detachment and distance produced in this literary process, intentionally or not, works to obscure Native American subjectivities and historical experiences through the privileging and consolidation of the colonial gaze and the tropes of pure war. Conventional reading practices such as these reinforce the all-too-common association of the frontier with dreadful images of animalistic, bloodthirsty savages descending upon isolated settlements, forming a line of discursive referentiality from the colonial period to the present that American writers have repeatedly returned to in times of national crisis. The adoption of a rhizomatic literary praxis challenges colonial simulations and repressive cultural, historical, and fictive constructs of captivity, which ultimately seeks to circumscribe the interpretive horizon and vitiate Native subjectivities in a system of disavowing characterization. [4] Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative was first printed by Samuel Green in Boston in 1682, and quickly reprinted twice in Cambridge, as well as in London during the same year. After this initial flurry of activity, Rowlandson's narrative was not reprinted until 1720. This date is suggestive because it follows the close of the Rhizomes: Issue 24: Billy J Stratton

Early American captivity narratives were popular reading throughout the latter 17th through early 19th centuries.  This course ranges from the 18th to 20th centuries.  Our readings include a late 17th-century narrative of a Massachusetts Puritan woman’s capture by Narragansett Indians.  In the following weeks of this course we will engage with African American slave narratives, the largest sub-genre of American captivity narratives.  Readings include the transatlantic story of Olaudah Equiano and his religious conversion; Josiah Henson’s influential antebellum autobiography; and Harriet Jacobs’ account of servitude, motherhood, self-concealment, and escape from slavery.  We will then read Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s semi-autobiographical account and consider how the captivity tradition informs American literature.  Finally, we will consider a neo-slave novel by Octavia Butler as a contemporary descendent of captivity narratives in order to ask how we witness these histories.

This essay argues that mainstream, familiar concepts of a bordered South and a recognizable southernness, however permeable and flexible, are mostly dysfunctional when it comes to American Indian literatures. "Native southern ground" can nevertheless be located and described. For example, captivity narratives written before and during Indian removal, though narrated by Europeans or Euro-Americans, reveal non-utopian ways in which "the South" works as Native ground. From a pointedly sovereign Native perspective, contemporary Native texts such as Shell Shaker (2001) by LeAnne Howe (Choctaw) reaffirm what various Indians in early captivity narratives say and "say" and do as they work against the impositions of a proto-regional colonial demarcation. In radically repossessing the very experience and practice of captivity, removing it from its western generic place and casting it as primarily a tribal affair conducted on Native ground, Howe stands with various other contemporary southeastern Native writers in working to repossess homelands that they rearticulate not as "the South" but as Native ground.

While working on texts that relate to the so-called Frog Lake Massacre in 1885 in what is now Alberta, I was struck by similarities with acccounts of the Minnesota Massacres during the Dakota Wars, especially a text by Sarah Wakefiled in 1863, "Six Weeks in the Sioux Tepees".

Graduate Student Textual Studies Symposium. Chicago, IL. September 2011
Victoria Bolf

"You Are What You Read? Editing A Narrative of the Life of Mary Jemison"

Americans have a long and enduring fascination with captivity narratives. Beginning with Mary Rowlandson in 1682, the American captivity narrative is almost always written in a woman’s voice by a third party, either a husband, pastor, or friend. The woman is captured, usually by “Indians,” but sometimes by French trappers or other groups; endures some hardships, and then returns to white society, with an edifying tale of hardships endured under her belt and possessing insider knowledge about the ways of the “savages” who captured her. Immensely popular at the time of their publication, these narratives, with the exception perhaps of Mary Rowlandson’s, were often forgotten by critics by the mid-twentieth century. Captivity narratives, along with other "forgotten" literature, enjoyed a revival of sorts in the academy in the late twentieth century. Emphases on readers’ reactions to captivity narratives in these studies tended to take precedence, sometimes at the expense of other kinds of emphases, like textual scholarship. June Namias’ edition of A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison comes out of this moment of scholarship and has much in common with it. But there is more to this work than Namias lets on.

(preview; open access full text on journal website) "Gender Iconoclasm and Aesthetics in Esteban Echeverría’s La cautiva and the Captivity Paintings of Juan Manuel Blanes."[Excerpt: article available on Decimonónica website.] Decimonónica, Vol. 12, No. 1, Winter 2015. Abstract: A study about the representation of captivity in nineteenth-century Argentine literature and Argentine and Uruguayan art history.