Q&A: Assembled for Use: Indigenous Compilation and the Archives of Early Native American Literatures--A Virtual Discussion with Kelly Wisecup

Select answers from Kelly Wisecup, author of Assembled for Use Indigenous Compilation and the Archives of Early Native American Literatures

Q: I love the image on the cover of your book. Could you share who is the creator and what it means to you? More broadly are there ways in which textual assemblage relations to other modes of material culture assemblage?

A: Thanks for this question! The cover is a piece by the Seneca artist Marie Watt, entitled "Generous Ones (Blue Sky"). You can see the piece and more about Marie here: https://www.mariewattstudio.com/work/project/generous-ones-blue-sky-2014. I was so delighted when Marie agreed for the image to appear on the book cover, as back in 2016, when I was still in the midst of figuring the book out, Marie visited Northwestern's Block Museum to install an exhibition. As part of that, she and the Block hosted a community sewing circle--the idea was that people would participate in embroidering words onto pieces of felt that Marie would later stitch together into a piece. (She often works with community sewing circles to make her larger pieces.) Hundreds of people ended up sewing together in a campus gym, and that experience was one where I felt how stitching and sewing materials together could make relations. You can see more about the event and see a video with the final piece here: https://blockmuseum.northwestern.edu/projects/marie-watt.html.

Q: Can you please transcribe one of the recipe pages? Thank-you.

A: See the great work that Ivy Schweitzer and her team of collaborators have done with the Occom Circle, a database of Occom's writings held at Dartmouth. The recipe pages are transcribed here: https://collections.dartmouth.edu/occom/html/diplomatic/754900-2-diplomatic.html.

Q: Hi Kelly! I use Joseph Laurent’s Abenaki Dialogues in my research as well, can’t wait to read your book. I am wondering if Laurent saw his dialogues as part of a much older genre of Indian-settler language dictionaries, especially in New England, and how you see them in this older genre as a 19th century text. Also, have you found anything by Laurent or anyone from Odanak writing in French during this era? Why English do you think? Thank you! Julia

A: Julia, your work on Odanak was so helpful to my thinking about Laurent--thanks for your article on Native property in British Canada. And thanks for this question--in the chapter, I think about Laurent's Dialogues in relation to the Jesuit priest Sebastian Rasles' French-Abenaki dictionary, and Pierre Paul Wzokhilain's Wobanaki kimzowi awighigan--I think Laurent is certainly aware of these prior texts and building on them. A visit to the Musée des Abénakis at Odanak was also helpful--there are copies of dictionaries in the collections there (including Aubery's Abenaki-French dictionary) that had been in the possession of families for generations. So, why English? The Dialogues are published in 1884, the same year the camp at Pequaket is established, and I speculate in the book that part of Laurent's goal was for Abenaki children to learn English (along with their own language and French)--I think the transnational travel may have been one rationale for the choice to translate into English. Stephen carries on this work in the 1970-80s--he's working across French, English, and Abenaki to bring the various dictionaries together.

Q: I know you’ve done a lot of Native map work, and considering how maps have erased or speak over a lot of indigenous existences. Watching you constellate the movements and pathways of these texts and the pathways the text also traveled, I’m wondering if you can speak a little bit toward some of the subversive and private ways these texts were used by the Native persons and communities they were created from—and how those ways might be a new map for the ways we continue “making” texts and reorganizing the archive.

A: This is a fantastic question--thank you, Natalie! Your query about subversive and private uses makes me think about Charlotte Johnston's albums--her work in Anishinaabemowin with her family members other Ojibwe people is one example of this, I think. The books are facilitating acts of singing together, and these bind Charlotte to other people in ways that mean they ask for her help when they are ill or when they've experienced the loss of a family member. She is enmeshed in these relationships in ways that are both visible to ministers and others and very much private, in spaces of grief and illness. I also think about Octavie Laurent's copy of the Dialogues--the Abenaki woman, Rhonda Besaw, who sold it to Amherst College, told me that she wanted the book to go somewhere where it would be loved. I think about that a lot--about what it means to make texts and reorganize the archive through acts of love, and how Amherst College's collection of texts by Native writers means that Octavie's copy is among other books loved by their makers and users. And thinking about maps and love--talking with my students about your poem, "They Don't Love You Like I Love You" and its conception of maps is in this thinking --if readers want to find this poem, you can read it here: https://poets.org/poem/they-dont-love-you-i-love-you.

Q: This is a really wonderful project, thank you. As an historian I’m used to thinking about change over time—do you see strategies changing as fields like anthropology and history are professionalizing? Or are they staying the same? And I’m also curious if gender plays into the story - in some ways these kinds of literature (scrapbooks and recipes) reflects non-Indigenous forms that are coded female. I don’t know if these questions are clear, but your work is making me think.

A: Thanks for the question, Cathleen! I thought (worried) a lot :) ) about change over time as I wrote. I think it's both there and not there--I do see a centralization of archiving and collecting--the Bureau of American Ethnology is one example of this. In the 1870s-1880s, it's seeking to centralize the materials that Indian agents are collecting and increasingly to make it those agents who are doing the collecting, rather than amateur collectors. This is quite different from the situation in the late 18th century, when local historical societies are calling on citizens to send in stories and objects (though of course amateur collecting continues). But in chapter 5 on the Chicago World's Fair, I describe how the Fair was seen by its curators and by scholars today as a real shift in ethnographic practice--toward Franz Boas's contextual approach and toward the professionalization that the departments of anthropology (at Columbia for instance) that Boas led. But for many Indigenous people who were at the fair, the ethnographic squabbles over how to display Indigenous peoples and locate them in time and place looked quite familiar and quite similar effects to those Indigenous people were observing decades earlier. So I try to balance the "change over time" narrative of ethnography with its recurrent themes and familiar consequences for Indigenous peoples. In terms of Indigenous compilations, I do see a narrative that moves toward printed compilations (which means that more copies can circulate, both in colonial archives and among Indigenous communities)--so this is a narrative that moves toward proliferation. And, toward the end of the 19th century, I see a thematization of compilation--by this, I mean that writers start to use compilation as a narrative theme or perspective--we can think about Simon Pokagon imagining an account book kept by a supreme being who will judge settlers for their actions; or we can think about the scenes in Gertrude Bonnin's work where bureaucratic documents and books are sources of deceit and trauma for Indigenous people.

Q: Is there evidence that this process of Indigenous assembling, compiling, textual experimentation, and archival interventions also emerged in Western North America?

A: I think about Indigenous compilation as a textual relative to ledger art, which as I'm sure you know is an artistic practice that emerged on the western plains (and also in prisons in the southeast--thinking here of Richard Henry Pratt's work with Kiowa men incarcerated at Fort Marion in Florida). The ways that ledger art takes the page as a space for figurative illustration (rather than any lines on the page, or even its orientation within a ledger) is parallel to the ways that Indigenous compilers worked with textual materials --assembling materials into spatial proximity was just as (and sometimes more) important than the unit of the sentence or paragraph. And, my thinking about contemporary Indigenous interventions into museums was hugely influenced by the Kaw/Osage artist Chris Pappan's exhibition at the Field Museum in 2018-2019 (you can read about it here: https://wsimag.com/art/43537-drawing-on-tradition-kanza-artist-chris-pappan)--Pappan uses ledger art to change the relationship between Indigenous peoples and museum display cases.