Indigenuity: Native Craftwork and the Art of American Literatures

By Caroline Wigginton

For hundreds of years, American artisanship and American authorship were entangled practices rather than distinct disciplines. Books, like other objects, were multisensory items all North American communities and cultures, including Native and settler colonial ones, regularly made and used. All cultures and communities narrated and documented their histories and imaginations through a variety of media. All created objects for domestic, sacred, curative, and collective purposes.

In this innovative work at the intersection of Indigenous studies, literary studies, book history, and material culture studies, Caroline Wigginton tells a story of the interweavings of Native craftwork and American literatures from their ancient roots to the present. Focused primarily on North America, especially the colonized lands and waters now claimed by the United States, this book argues for the foundational but often-hidden aesthetic orientation of American literary history toward Native craftwork. Wigginton knits this narrative to another of Indigenous aesthetic repatriation through the making and using of books and works of material expression. Ultimately, she reveals that Native craftwork is by turns the warp and weft of American literature, interwoven throughout its long history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Oct 6, 2022
• ISBN: 9781469670386

Caroline Wigginton

Caroline Wigginton is associate professor of English at the University of Mississippi.

Book preview

INDIGENUITY

Critical Indigeneities

J. Kēhaulani Kauanui and Jean M. O’Brien, series editors

SERIES ADVISORY BOARD

Chris Andersen, University of Alberta

Irene Watson, University of South Australia

Emil’ Keme, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Kim TallBear, University of Alberta

.....

Critical Indigeneities publishes pathbreaking scholarly books that center Indigeneity as a category of critical analysis, understand Indigenous sovereignty as ongoing and historically grounded, and attend to diverse forms of Indigenous cultural and political agency and expression. The series builds on the conceptual rigor, methodological innovation, and deep relevance that characterize the best work in the growing field of critical Indigenous studies.

INDIGENUITY

Native Craftwork & the Art of American Literatures

CAROLINE WIGGINTON

The University of North Carolina Press

CHAPEL HILL

This book was published with financial support from the University of Mississippi College of Liberal Arts.

© 2022 Caroline Wigginton

All rights reserved

Designed by Lindsay Starr

Set in Dante by Copperline Book Services

Manufactured in the United States of America

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Cover illustration: Weaving by Sarah Sense for Mississippi and Meshaseppi, summer 2021. Used by permission.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Wigginton, Caroline, author.

Title: Indigenuity : Native craftwork and the art of American literatures / Caroline Wigginton.

Other titles: Critical indigeneities.

Description: Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, [2022] | Series: Critical indigeneities | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022016223 | ISBN 9781469670362 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469670379 (paperback ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469670386 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Indians of North America—Material culture—History. | Indian art—North America—History. | American literature—Indian influences. | Handicraft—United States—History. | Indian aesthetics. | Indians of North America—Colonization. | United States—Literatures—History.

Classification: LCC E98.M34 W54 2022 | DDC 973.04/97—dc23/eng/20220609

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022016223)

For Luke, Georgia, and Aubrey

the loosening

in the knit of me, the mixed-fruit

marmalade in the kitchen of me.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

who brings the joy.

— IDRA NOVEY, The Visitor

Contents

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY AND AFFILIATIONS

Introduction

Chapter 1. Orientation

A Storied Place: Indigenous Cartography and Craftwork in the Upper Mississippi River Valley

Jonathan Carver’s Travel Narrative and the Indigenous Map of the Upper Mississippi River Valley

Reorienting American Literary Histories, Reorienting Indigenous Places

Chapter 2. Perception

A Kanien:keha’ka Mohawk Education in Craftwork and Perception

Crafting Kateri: Envisionings from Seventeenth-Century Print to Contemporary Native Women’s Art

Chapter 3. Translation

Placing Color in the Indigenous North American Southeast

Translating Choctaw Color to Okla Humma and Beyond

Chapter 4. Composition

Making Music and Community in the Native North American Northeast

Mohegan Joseph Johnson’s Hymncraft

Thomas Commuck’s Indian Harmonies for Brothertown

Brent Michael Davids and Composing a Trans-Indigenous Score in the Wisconsin Woods

Chapter 5. Decoration

Angel de Cora, Ho-Chunk Ecologies, and the Design of Native Aesthetics

A Modern Pattern for Native Print

Coda

APPENDIX A

To My Ever Beloved and Lamented Son William Henry (1827) by Jane Johnston Schoolcraft (1800–1842)

APPENDIX B

My Mother (1804) by Ann Taylor (1782–1866)

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

Illustrations

Figures

0.1a–b. Odawa basket (ca. 1820s or 1830s)

0.2. Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, To My Ever Beloved and Lamented Son William Henry (1827)

1.1. Dylan AT Miner, No Pipelines on Indigenous Land (2016)

1.2. Detail of Map of the State of Wisconsin, from Increase Lapham, The Antiquities of Wisconsin (1855)

1.3. Ho-Chunk effigy mound illustration from Increase Lapham, The Antiquities of Wisconsin (1855)

1.4. Beneath World spirit drawing from Alfred Kiyana, Fox Story (1880)

1.5. Buffeloe Snake from Jonathan Carver’s journals (ca. 1760s)

1.6. Detail from Jonathan Carver’s hand-drawn map of the Upper Mississippi River Valley (ca. 1760s)

1.7. Drawing and explanation of Dakota and Anishinaabe tree hieroglyphicks from Jonathan Carver’s journal (ca. 1760s)

2.1. Haudenosaunee moosehair burden strap (ca. 1760–1800)

2.2a–b. Kateri portrait and detail from Lettres édifiantes (1717)

2.3a–c. Kateri portrait and details from La gracia triunfante (1724)

2.4. Painting of Kateri (ca. 1700s)

2.5. French plan of Kahnawà:ke (1752)

2.6. Tania Willard’s The Most Gentle Agony (2011)

2.7. Sweet grass basket woven by Mary Kawennatakie Adams (1985)

3.1. Sauvages Tchaktas matachez en Guerriers qui portent des Chevelures (Choctaw Wild Persons painted on their skin as Warriors, carrying Scalps) by Alexandre de Batz (1732)

3.2. Sauvage En habit d’hiver (Wild person in winter dress) by Alexandre de Batz (1732)

3.3. Sauvage a la chasse (Wild person hunting) by Jean-François-Benjamin Dumont de Montigny (ca. 1740s)

3.4. Sauvage avec ses anciennes Armes (Wild person with his ancient or past weapons) by Jean-François-Benjamin Dumont de Montigny (ca. 1740s)

3.5. Carte du Fort Rozalie des Natchez François (Map of Fort Rozalie at French Natchez) by Jean-François-Benjamin Dumont de Montigny (ca. 1740s)

3.6. Concession des chaoüachas (Chaouacha Concession) by Jean-François-Benjamin Dumont de Montigny (ca. 1740s)

3.7a–b. Names of Colors from Cyrus Byington’s Holisso Anumpa Tosholi: An English and Choctaw Definer (1852)

3.8. Ball Players from Catlin’s North American Indian Portfolio (1845)

3.9. Installation view, Jeffrey Gibson: When Fire Is Applied to a Stone It Cracks, Brooklyn Museum, February 2020 through January 2021

4.1. Manuscript page explaining how to use a musical gamut (ca. 1760s)

4.2. Mohegan elm bark story box (ca. 1785)

4.3. Moccasins of Tecomwas (Lucy Occom Tantaquidgeon) (ca. 1764)

4.4. Detail of fourteen-diamond alliance wampum belt (ca. 1760)

4.5. Farmington from Andrew Law’s Select Harmony (1779)

4.6. Frontispiece to The New-England Psalm-Singer (1770)

4.7. Chiefs of the Six Nations at Grand River Reserve, explaining their wampum belts (1871)

4.8a–b. Selections from François Picquet’s collection of hymns and prayers in the Kanien:keha’ka language (ca. 1750)

4.9. Alphabetical Index from Thomas Commuck’s Indian Melodies (1845)

4.10. Brothertown from Thomas Commuck’s Indian Melodies (1845)

4.11. Brent Michael Davids’s Mohican Friends (1993)

4.12a–d. Season title pages from Brent Michael Davids’s Mtukwekok Naxkomao (The Singing Woods) (1994)

5.1. Beaded Ho-Chunk sash (ca. 1890)

5.2. Ho-Chunk woven utility bag with Thunderbird design, late nineteenth century

5.3a–f. Historiated initials from Wigwam Stories (1901) and Red Man (1910, 1911)

5.4. Se-quoyah, the Indian Scholar by Angel de Cora (1901)

5.5a–c. Lake Indians Winnebago chapter title page by Angel de Cora for The Indians’ Book (1907)

5.6a–d. Sampling of Angel de Cora’s chapter title pages for The Indians’ Book (1907)

5.7. Kiowa chapter title page by Angel de Cora for The Indians’ Book (1907)

5.8. Native Indian Art from Arts and Handicraft of the Indian (1913)

5.9a–d. Sampling of student print ornaments from The Indian Craftsman (1909)

5.10a–b. Arapaho toilet pouch illustration from Alfred L. Kroeber’s The Arapaho (1902) and Carlisle-created initial following same design (1911)

5.11. Book cover designed by Mary Sully for Ella Deloria’s Speaking of Indians (1944)

5.12. Duane Slick’s The Meaning of Art (2002)

6.1. Weaving in progress by Sarah Sense (summer 2021)

Tables

2.1. Printed Kateri portraits through 1922

3.1. Translations of Choctaw color terms okchakko and okchamali

Acknowledgments

THIS BOOK IS itself the result of a kind of craftwork, woven from the old and new relationships that sustained and guided me as I researched and wrote. There are too many to thank, but let me start with my wonderful writing group — Angie Calcaterra, Travis Foster, Greta LaFleur, Michele Navakas, Kacy Tillman, Wendy Roberts, and Abram Van Engen. Their feedback and brilliant scholarship made this book possible; it is a delight to feel their presence on every page.

UNC Press Critical Indigeneities series editors Kēhaulani Kauanui and Jeani O’Brien provided warm encouragement and incisive feedback for the manuscript, as did the press’s anonymous readers. A number of scholars — Chad Allen, Katy Chiles, Christian Crouch, Phil Deloria, Mishuana Goeman, Hi’i Hobart, Daniel Heath Justice, Drew Lopenzina, Patricia Marroquin Norby, Alyssa Mt. Pleasant, Josh Piker, Dan Radus, Phil Round, Coll Thrush, Anthony Trujillo, Rachel Wheeler — asked me crucial questions or gave formative feedback at just the right time. Lisa Brooks showed me the view of the valley she calls home from Ktsi Amiskw, the Great Beaver, and then gave me a place at her kitchen table to complete my book proposal.

My colleagues and friends at the University of Mississippi — including but not limited to Sarah Baechle, Erin Drew, Cristie Ellis, Rachel Johnson, Deanna Kreisel, Kiese Laymon, Kate Lechler, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Dan Stout, Jay Watson, and Ian Whittington — have also welcomed me to a shared community. Karen Raber provided her horse sense. Thank you to my former department chair, Ivo Kamps, and to the College of Liberal Arts for their support, including through research funding; to my graduate student, Anthony Gottlich, for assisting with citations and research; and to Jennifer Ford, head of the Department of Archives & Special Collections, University of Mississippi Libraries, for helping with book images from UM’s and my own collections.

Members of the Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography helped me with often esoteric questions about book printing, illustration, and binding, as well as musicology, art history, and anthropology. Fellow fellows Sonja Drimmer and Megan Cook were my proxies at the British Library, inspecting and taking up-close photographs of manuscripts.

Participants in the multi-institution Indigenous Art and Activism in Changing Climates grant — Sara Černe, Agléška Cohen-Rencountre, Vince Diaz, Bonnie Etherington, Andrew Freiman, Doug Kiel, Samantha Majhor, Chris Pexa, Jacki Rand, Phil Round — showed me just how transformative collaborative and embodied scholarship can be. The grant was focused on the Mississippi River Valley and sponsored by the Humanities Without Walls Consortium, the University of Mississippi College of Liberal Arts, and the Mellon Foundation. Thank you to Kelly Wisecup for being our wise and thoughtful grant co-designer and de facto leader, and for being my steadfast friend.

Throughout, contemporary Indigenous artists have been generous, sharing images and details of their artistic practices with me or the aforementioned Indigenous Art and Activism research group. Thank you to Andrea Carlson, Brent Michael Davids, Linda Hogan, Dylan AT Miner, Margaret Pearce, Duane Slick, Monique Verdin, Dyani White Hawk, Tania Willard, and Santiago X. Works by most but not all of these artists appear in the book’s pages. I am especially grateful to Sarah Sense, whose artistry and enthusiasm have been an inspiration. My gratitude as well to Megan Baker and Jennifer Byram; Darren Bonaparte; Orenda Boucher and Tia Canadian; Courtney Cottrell; and Rachel Sayet, who all offered wisdom and perspectives on my project from their communities and tribal nations in Choctaw, Akwesasne, Kahnawà:ke, Brothertown, and Mohegan. Ms. Lillie Ott was my forbearing Choctaw teacher. Gabriel Berberian and Tom Dearhouse offered feedback on behalf of the Kateri Center in Kahnawà:ke. Views and mistakes remain mine.

Librarians, curators, and archivists were of immense assistance, and I recognize the important ways that many of them are confronting the histories and ongoing structures of settler colonial institutions and implementing ethical collections practices. I am especially grateful to Mike Kelly at Amherst College’s Special Collections and Lina Ortega of the University of Oklahoma’s Western History Collections, who assisted me with images and ideas while their institutions were closed to the public in 2020 due to the pandemic.

Indigenuity was supported by an ACLS / Carl and Betty Pforzheimer Fellowship in 2017–18, as well as short-term research and travel grants from the SEC; Bibliographical Society of America; Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library; and the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. I was also the recipient of a 2015–17 Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in Critical Bibliography from the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, which afforded me access to additional archives and learning opportunities. Portions of chapters were published as Hymncraft: Joseph Johnson, Thomas Commuck, and the Composition of Song and Community from the Native Northeast to Brothertown in Native American and Indigenous Studies 8, no. 1 (2021): 19–55 and A Storied Place: Jonathan Carver’s Travel Narrative and the Indigenous Map of the Upper Mississippi River Valley in American Literature 92, no. 1 (2020): 1–31.

Of greatest importance are my wise, funny, beautiful, imaginative, and ever unimpressed children. Luke, Georgia, and Aubrey: you are my most marvelous creations.

I conclude by acknowledging that I have researched and written this book while living in the ancestral and spiritual homelands of the Chickasaw and near the neighboring homelands of Choctaw peoples in present-day Mississippi. Yakoke.

A Note on Terminology and Affiliations

I USE NATIVE AND INDIGENOUS throughout as adjectives, except when quoting. The first is generally common — though not in every field — in Native American and Indigenous studies in the United States. The second, Indigenous, often invokes a more global context and is now preferred in Canada, along with First Nations, Inuit, and Métis.¹ The capitalization of both terms is important, as Daniel Heath Justice (Colorado-born citizen of the Cherokee Nation / ᏣᎳᎩᎯ ᎠᏰᎵ) explains, because it affirms a distinctive political status of peoplehood rather than describing an exploitable commodity.²

Upon first mention in the body and substantive notes of Native American and Indigenous authors and artists, I acknowledge textually or parenthetically their public national and cultural affiliations. As a white settler colonist, I seek to witness and respect Indigenous sovereignty and autonomy even as I recognize that statements regarding affiliation are themselves evolving negotiations of personal and communal principles and histories. These affiliations express complex and at times contested genealogies of belonging woven through centuries of colonization, violence, enslavement, and removal, as well as survival, resistance, confederation, migration, intermarriage, adoption, love, and bondedness. Through these affiliations, Native individuals, communities, and tribal nations avow person- and peoplehood.

Certain scholars and figures are broadly considered by the field and their professed tribal nations to have neither legitimate citizenship nor valid familial claims to Indigenous affiliation, and those scholars are not cited. In the absence of such consensus, I follow self-identification as best as possible. Some choose to declare citizenship or reservation. Others choose also or instead to name other ancestral and contemporary identities. For contemporary figures, I have sought current and public affiliations, though it is an imperfect process, especially given that some vary how they name their affiliation according to context and audience. Any errors are mine.

INDIGENUITY

INTRODUCTION

HERE IS A STORY of the interweavings of Native craftwork and American literatures from their ancient roots to the present. Focused primarily on North America, especially the colonized lands and waters now claimed by the United States, Indigenuity argues for the foundational but often hidden aesthetic orientation of American literary history to Native craftwork, or the functional and beautiful material objects made by Indigenous peoples for personal and collective use. For hundreds of years — until the late nineteenth-century advent of pulp-to-binding print mechanization — American artisanship and American authorship were entangled practices rather than distinct disciplines. Objects, including books, were multisensory things all North American communities and cultures, including Native and settler colonial ones, regularly made and used, frequently the productions of household and local economies. All cultures and communities narrated and documented their histories and imaginations through a variety of media. All created items for domestic, sacred, curative, and collective purposes. Moreover, the natural environment served simultaneously as imaginative and material fodder for expressive practices as the same ingredient might give color to both ink and dye, the same botanical shape might inspire both pattern and poem. The making and using of craftwork and literature buttressed and adorned daily lives and seasonal rituals. Craftwork and literature were necessities rather than luxuries, so much so that the entire hemisphere was a tapestry of trade networks and artisanal exchanges well before the arrival of the first Europeans, who themselves came seeking new resources and goods and new habits of making and using, and who wrote new literatures in response to their experiences.

Americans have long formed and expressed relationships to place and one another through craftwork and literature, relationships that are embodied as much as they are spiritual and intellectual. Indeed, for settler colonists, becoming American meant learning about Indigenous practices and adapting their own. As Europeans observed Indigenous practices, they incorporated Native ways of seeing and sensing into their own creations. They recorded their observations in travel narratives and ethnographies, further binding literature and craftwork. They sought to supplant Native practices and peoples through appropriation, denigration, and obsolescence while also propagating Indigenous aesthetics, often unwittingly, as they wove them into colonialist archives.¹ Native peoples likewise bound craftwork and literature. They borrowed European technologies and ingredients to extend and adapt customary modes, and to extend and adapt and build anew their relationships to place and one another. As authors and artisans seeking to revivify peoplehood, Native peoples plumbed the colonialist archive, restoring and supplementing ancestral knowledge and their own founts of innovation. Thus Indigenuity knits a narrative of settler colonial textual orientation toward Native craftwork to another narrative of Indigenous aesthetic repatriation through the making and using of books and other works of material expression.

Indigenuity — the book’s title and my portmanteau term combining Indigeneity and ingenuity— evokes the dynamic creativity, abundant skill, intentional design, and multisensory materiality of Native making and using that underpins its story. The term craftwork similarly retains the labor and materiality persistent in making and using — including literary forms and written texts, as amply demonstrated by book history and Native studies — while acknowledging that pre-1900 Native-made objects have historically been viewed by settler colonists as artifacts rather than art, housed in anthropological collections rather than libraries and art museums.

In telling a story of Native craftwork and the art of American literatures, Indigenuity honors the artistry and agency of Native making and using, and attends to the embodied sensations inspiring and resulting from books’ and other objects’ craftedness. It considers how an array of often-unremarked sensations — texture, spectacle, pattern, tone, heft, balance, intensity, dimensionality — embrace yet exceed the verbal, informational, chronological, and narratological. It asks how feeling connects and evolves across objects and practices, places and times. This book examines how Indigenous and newcomer practices both have shaped and continue to shape the hemisphere’s literary history. Whereas most of the texts and communities considered in its pages come from territories now claimed by the United States — and therefore the resulting narrative is necessarily emblematic rather than exhaustive — I use American to signal that, like Indigeneity itself, the history Indigenuity tells about American literatures is neither coterminous with nor bounded by U.S. borders and histories. Instead, American literatures are always of and in relationship to the geographic and Indigenous lands and waters constituting the Americas. Ultimately, it concludes that Native craftwork is by turns the warp and weft of American literatures, interwoven throughout its long history.

TO TELL THIS STORY, let us begin with a pairing of objects: a poem and a basket. Both are literature, and both are craftwork. Each braids scriptive and physical components to express beauty, memory, and meaning. Each is the handiwork of a nineteenth-century Anishinaabe creator living by the waters of the Great Lakes, immersed in a network of relationships between peoples, objects, and places. Both objects reside now, just as they did then, in settler colonial collections, continuing to structure relationships, including with non-Native literatures and material craft. Together, they emblematize the enduring orientation of American literatures to Native ways of making and being on Indigenous lands. It is that enduring orientation that Indigenuity seeks to discern.

Let us take, for example, the basket (figure 0.1a–b). Made by an Odawa woman, it is small, only about four inches tall and six inches wide at its top, resembling a flowerpot or vase. The sloping sides are decorated with red-and-blue quillwork in bilaterally symmetrical botanical patterns composed of vines and various leaves, including those of the oak tree, and other shapes that suggest acorns and flowers, perhaps roses, a common Odawa motif.² The basket’s style and purpose suggest that it was stitched for Euro American consumers who associated botanical design with refine[ment], as does its acquisition in the early decades of the nineteenth century by a white collector in Michilimackinac, an island at the juncture of Lakes Huron and Michigan and a diplomatic and trade crossroads.³ Though the popularity of botanical design coincided with colonization, all three of the Anishinaabe Council Fires — the Odawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi peoples — respected plants’ many purposes, all of them good: Some sustain men in their growth and existence; some heal; others give beauty and inner strength.⁴ The basket’s motives emphasize this botanical respect. Oak trees were a source of dye, medicine, and wood, and their acorns were an important food source.⁵ An Ojibwe story about roses teaches that plants can exist alone; but neither animals nor men can exist without plants. Without plants, or when their balance is disturbed, the quality of life and existence declines.⁶ The basket’s structure also embodies botanical respect. Not only is the pattern on each side symmetrical, but each side’s pattern mirrors its opposite. Holding the basket, one feels the balanced texture of the first pattern in each hand while gazing on the vibrant design of the second. Thus this basket’s quillworked designs and form materialize and gift the lessons of botanical balance, including a balance between functionality and pleasure.

FIGURE 0.1A–B. Side and bottom views of an Odawa basket (ca. 1820s or 1830s) woven from birchbark, stitched with what appears to be basswood, and decorated with porcupine quills; the bottom is papered with pages from a printed French-language book. 4 1/3 × 6 in. Image courtesy of Department of Anthropology, Smithsonian Institution, Vase of Birch and Porcupine Quills, catalog no. E5438-0.

The basket contributes to artistic and literary Odawa histories that span centuries and media — histories about expressions of artistic taste and creativity, and ones about Native appropriation and adaptation of floral patterns found on European trade goods like printed calico, painted ceramics, and scored metalware.⁷ Yet this Odawa basket also materializes the entwined and evolving relationship of literature and craftwork.⁸ The craftswoman has papered the bottom with printed French pages, cutting at least four of the five collaged pieces from a miraculous history of a Marian shrine in Loreto, Italy.⁹ At the very center are two stanzas in verse, and more of the poem appears on another piece. When reunited, they become a cantique, or religious song popular with the French colonial laity and Native Catholic converts. This one warns against the countless sorrows and unceasing sufferings of hell; to avoid them, the lyrics advise, send sighs and desires to heaven. A basswood thread creates the seam wedding paper bottom to birchbark sides and also frames the upper lip. The resulting square top and bottom evoke the four sacred directions, which contemporary Anishinaabe makers continue to honor as they construct baskets: The intersection [of two pieces] … is right where we stand as humans, trying to find balance among them.¹⁰

Christian tenets and settler colonial media are repurposed in the Odawa basket to bolster unobtrusively Native craftwork and economies. Printed pages are cut, arranged, pasted, and sewn in ways that imitate the designs of the quillwork. Printed book and sacred music locate the basket as well as its maker and users in colonial space, and then reorient and rebalance them toward Odawa materials and artistry. What was once foreign is grafted to Native place through Native forms and materials. The paper sheets lining the inside, in contrast, are blank. The unmarked lining invites human hands to position the vase, settle a plant inside, and overwrite that blankness with an act of reciprocity that venerates plants’ caretaking of human life, the ways they sustain, heal, and beautify. The basket entwines old and new expressive modes, binding them together, interlacing visions of sacred transcendence and natural interdependence with mundane utility and beauty.

The Odawa basket is both craftwork and literature, and so, too, is the poem (figure 0.2). To My Ever Beloved and Lamented Son William Henry is an elegy by the prolific bilingual Ojibwe author Jane Johnston Schoolcraft (Bamewawagezhikaquay). She lived most of her life in Bawaating, or Sault Ste. Marie, near the juncture of Lakes Superior and Huron, about fifty miles north of Michilimackinac, where the basket was collected, and on the opposite side of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.¹¹ Written in English, each of the eleven stanzas begins with a rhymed triplet and concludes with a refrain that names her young son, Willy, who died suddenly from croup (for the complete poem, see appendix A).¹² Schoolcraft’s elegy mourns the loss of an affectionate relationship between mother and son, and remarks on the physical changes wrought by death: lilly’s whiteness has supplanted rose’s hue in his cheek, his coral lips have become pale. Reunion in the Christian afterlife is the grieving mother’s sole consolation. Lines of verse rather than quills stack and layer to make images, botanical and beyond. Form punctuates elegiac content at the end of each stanza, cascading visually and sonically down the right margin:

FIGURE 0.2. To My Ever Beloved and Lamented Son William Henry (1827) by Jane Johnston Schoolcraft. Henry Rowe Schoolcraft and Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, eds., Muzzinyegun, or Literary Voyager manuscript magazine (Sault Ste. Marie, Mich., no. 14 [March 28, 1827]), 310. Image courtesy of the Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft Papers, container 66.

Sweet Willy

My Willy

Sweet Willy

My Willy

Sweet Willy

My Willy

Sweet Willy

For Willy

My Willy

Sweet Willy

My Willy

With this spiraling refrain, Schoolcraft persistently seeks to reclaim a departed Sweet Willy as a bound My Willy and then releases him again. Like two threads, the refrain twists a reciprocal pattern of past and present — alive and dead, joy and grief, rose and lily — and denies the finality of loss. Even the pattern itself is not final, as Schoolcraft briefly departs from the design —For Willy— before returning, thereby gesturing to the possibility for an alternative future, another consolation.¹³

Threads on threads, or perhaps quills on quills — just as past and present are stitched together, so, too, is this poem with other works of written literature and with the creations of kin. To express her still fresh sorrow, Schoolcraft has mimicked another poem, white Englishwoman Ann Taylor’s immensely popular My Mother, originally published in 1804, which opens with the question

Who fed me from her gentle breast,

And hush’d me in her arms to rest,

And on my cheeks sweet kisses prest?¹⁴

The answer to this question is the same phrase that concludes all of Taylor’s four-line stanzas: My Mother (for the complete poem, see appendix B). Schoolcraft adopts the same stanza form, but she reverses perspective from adulatory child to grieving mother and varies the original’s static refrain. Moreover, Schoolcraft’s poem was published in March 1827 in her white husband Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s manuscript magazine, Muzzinyegun, or Literary Voyager, part of a special issue dedicated to their son just weeks after his death. The handwriting throughout is neither Schoolcraft’s nor her husband’s, but it may be that of her sister Charlotte or another member of their mostly Ojibwe household. Other special issue pieces include Henry’s remembrances of their son and other poems written for Willy, both prior to and upon his death. All these Native and non-Native expressions of love and loss are plaited together through the multihanded material practices of constructing the magazine: gathering the paper, transcribing the texts, stabbing and stitching the binding, perhaps with a pink ribbon, as suggested by a stain visible on the first page of an extant copy. These in turn link to other transcriptions of the elegy written by other hands on other pages, including by Johnston herself in a notebook of her sister’s.¹⁵

Implicitly, then, Schoolcraft’s poem is a multitextual and multimedia weaving that revels in sentimental verse’s affective, figurative, and sonic abundance while denying that settler colonial feeling and form have replaced or overwritten their Ojibwe counterparts. Its use of floral imagery recalls the botanical designs found on birchbark baskets like the Odawa one shown here and also made by Ojibwe women kin in their shared home.¹⁶ Her poem plaits with book and basket crafts, lines of verse stacking like quills, stitched and folded into a pattern replicated across texts. Schoolcraft’s Ojibwe home is not a barren place of fixed emotion and vanishing authenticity. Instead, it is a place of creativity and generative of relationships.

Ojibwe poem. Odawa basket. Both transpire from an enduring and dynamic partnership between craft and literature, one that predates and persists beyond colonization. These two objects suggest that to survive, recover, flourish, and return to joy under settler colonialism often compelled Anishinaabe and other Native creators to combine Indigenous expressive customs with Euro American languages and genres. Understanding both objects requires attentiveness to the braiding of custom and innovation.

Basket and poem help us observe not only the long and entwined history of Native craftwork and literature and its relationship to settler colonial practices, but also the broad but often unremarked presence of Indigenous ingenuity throughout the archives of American literature and art. In an introduction to a forum for early Americanist scholars on materials and methods in Native American and Indigenous studies, Alyssa Mt. Pleasant (Tuscarora), Kelly Wisecup, and I coin the term salvage bibliography to describe settler colonial effort[s] to gather Indigenous poetry, narratives, and oratory before Native peoples allegedly vanished. For this and other reasons, we state, Native materials that are now archival objects and texts were frequently obtained in contexts of duress or without permission; they were nearly always enfolded into colonialist narratives that aimed to determine the meaning of Indigenous writing and actions.¹⁷ These salvaged items are the foundation for much scholarship about American literary, cultural, and artistic histories.

Salvage bibliography and its cognate, salvage ethnography, motivated the collection of both objects. As already noted, Schoolcraft’s poem is in her husband Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s manuscript magazine, Muzzinyegun, or Literary Voyager. He published almost twenty issues in the 1820s. He circulated the magazine to friends and colleagues near and far, and filled its pages with stories, history, tidbits, reports, correspondence, and poems about Ojibwe and Native cultures. He selected, shaped, and organized texts to amuse his mostly white readers and to fit his salvage bibliographical vision, career ambitions, and settler colonial motivations. Henry Rowe Schoolcraft also reused items in other ethnographic print publications that further established his ethnographic bona fides.¹⁸ Many of the articles in Literary Voyager were obtained from his wife, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft; members of her family; and various knowledge keepers he had met through his spousal connections. Henry Rowe Schoolcraft staked his career and made his reputation on being a salvage bibliographer and ethnographer, collecting stories and cultural knowledge about Native peoples before their communities ostensibly vanished.

Similarly, the Odawa basket was collected first by theatrical showman and museum entrepreneur John Varden. He opened his one-room Washington Museum in a D.C. home in 1836. Within five years, he had moved and greatly expanded his museum and collection, which he then sold to the National Institute at the U.S. Patent Office. From 1841 to 1858, he maintained, cataloged, and exhibited the National Institute’s artifacts. When those artifacts moved in 1858 to the newly launched Smithsonian Institution, he moved with them, continuing his previous duties with the new organization.¹⁹ Therefore, the Odawa basket is a founding, if mostly unremarked, object in the United States’ foremost archive of historical and anthropological artifacts. Its collection abets a settler colonial practice of self-indigenization that minimizes while also preserving its vital, material fodder.²⁰

Both basket and poem were acquired and collected to serve settler colonial narratives of nationhood and Indigenous displacement. Poem and basket help persistently orient colonialist archives and artistry to Indigenous aesthetics and Indigenous places. Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s crafted literary magazine adopts, amplifies, and preserves Ojibwe principles of symmetry, balance, and abundance accrued through layering. The Smithsonian accession book page that catalogs the Odawa basket as No. 5439, Vase of Birch and Porcupine Quills, nestles its penciled entry alongside entries for other objects, mostly from other Native North American nations near to and far from Michilimackinac. In 1977, the institution’s Anthropology Department transferred the information to typed catalog cards. Rather than a penciled and numbered list, the catalog entries became index cards sequentially ordered according to the same numbers found in the printed book. Accession book and index cards as well as the information these cataloging tools contain are now available online. Varden’s journeys between sites of Indigenous craft and trade map first onto