Indian Nation

"Indian Nation" documents the contributions of Native Americans to the notion of American nationhood and to concepts of American identity at a crucial, defining time in U.S. history. Departing from previous scholarship, Cheryl Walker turns the usual questions on their heads, asking not how whites experienced indigenous peoples, but how Native Americans envisioned the United States as a nation. This project unfolds a narrative of participatory resistance in which Indians themselves sought to transform the discourse of nationhood. Walker examines the rhetoric and writings of nineteenth-century Native Americans, including William Apess, Black Hawk, George Copway, John Rollin Ridge, and Sarah Winnemucca.Demonstrating with unique detail how these authors worked to transform venerable myths and icons of American identity, Indian Nation chronicles Native American participation in the forming of an American nationalism in both published texts and in speeches that were delivered throughout the United States. Pottawattomie Chief Simon Pokagon's "The Red Mans Rebuke", an important document of Indian oratory, is published here in its entirety for the first time since 1893.By looking at this writing through the lens of the best theoretical work on nationality, postcoloniality, and the subaltern, Walker creates a new and encompassing picture of the relationship between Native Americans and whites. She shows that, contrary to previous studies, America in the nineteenth century was intercultural in significant ways. A groundbreaking contribution to American studies, "Indian Nation" will be welcomed by Native American and American literature scholars as well as by specialists across a range of disciplines interested in questions of nationalism and postcolonialism.

ISBN 0822319446   Pages 280 ISBN13 9780822319443 (What's this?)   Volumes 1 Publisher Duke University Press   Weight (grammes) 463 Imprint Duke University Press   Published in North Carolina Format Paperback   Series title New Americanists Publication date 01 Jun 1997   Height (mm) 152 Library of Congress PS153.I52W   Width (mm) 229 DEWEY 897   Spine width (mm) 23 DEWEY edition DC21   Academic level Professional / Scholarly

		Preface and Acknowledgments
1		The Subject of America: The Outsider Inside		1
2		Writing Indians		25
3		The Irony and Mimicry of William Apess		41
4		Black Hawk and the Moral Force of Transposition		60
5		The Terms of George Copway's Surrender		84
6		John Rollin Ridge and the Law		111
7		Sarah Winnemucca's Mediations: Gender, Race, and Nation		139
8		Personifying America: Apess's "Eulogy on King Philip"		164
9		Native American Literature and Nineteenth-Century Nationalisms		185
Appendix		"The Red Man's Rebuke"		209
		Notes		221
		Works Cited		239
		Index		249

"Cheryl Walker demonstrates the integral parts played by native Americans in the development of the nineteenth-century American discourse about nationality. Not only does this important scholarly work remind us how fundamentally democratic institutions are indebted to native American cultures, it also teaches us that native Americans have been actively and complexly involved in the crucial political debates of our modernity. Indian Nation helps dismantle the odious but persistent myth of the 'Vanishing American.'" - John Carlos Rowe, University of California, Irvine "Indian Nation offers thorough scholarship, good sense, and a clear style. The insightful overviews and fine brief accounts of Pearce, Slotkin, and Rogin are particularly valuable." - Arnold Krupat, Sarah Lawrence College

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