This essay proposes that politics, diplomacy, and a desire for peace were defining markers of Indigenous cultural and literary engagements. European settlers arriving on this continent with an eye toward possessing it wrote off Native peoples as savage and unqualified stakeholders in the “New World” they were forging. The colonial archive, however, almost in spite of itself, turns up repeated instances of Indigenous overtures of peace, presented in traditional frameworks, which can be effectively traced in recognizable patterns from the earliest recorded encounters through to the first major indigenous literary productions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. A mindful reading of this archive yields aspects of tradition that inform the outlines of an indigenous literary aesthetic. When indigenous authors such as Samson Occom and William Apess began appearing in print, they carried forward these traditions, confounding settler notions of what it means to be a “politick salvage.”

This essay ponders how scholars can both pay attention to the specificities of racial formation in any period of what is sometimes called “American” history and also think about race at any time of that history as of our own contemporary moment. It begins by analyzing how the idea of transformable race informs late eighteenth-century American literature and how scholars have expanded our study of natural historical discourses in early America. After outlining drawbacks to this kind of tight historical focus, the essay engages how we might think about race in the antebellum United States more diachronically, as more of a piece with our own present moment. Highlighting the work of writers, artists, and scholars who are thinking about the moment of slavery and settler colonialism as our own moment, the essay turns to considering the work of William Apess alongside contemporary work of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe to enact sovereignty and to protect their land and, thus, to conjecture about what we might learn when we read what we generally call “early American literature” as literature both of its own time and our own.

What is the literature of the Indigenous colonial Americas? Because Indigenous peoples remain under colonization and literary genres like the novel and poetry are settler colonial categories, answering this question is fraught. In response, this chapter considers Indigenous concepts of kinship and peoplehood as doing rather than being, and surveys Native literatures through genres of doing. Ranging across the American hemisphere from the sixteenth through early nineteenth centuries, it surveys textual examples that record, narrate, map, teach, express, and survive. These genres of doing are not comprehensive nor should texts be taken to be unifunctional. Instead, genres of doing may aid readers in identifying and exploring cross-form, cross-temporal, and cross-cultural resonances while also attending to cultural and textual specificities. This holds true for considering Native texts from multiple traditions alongside each other but also in the case of Native and non-Native texts.

This essay explores the multiple literacies of Indigenous writers from the earliest moments of American settlement, with a particular focus on early New England. The chapter sketches out the contours of early New England Native writing: its principal figures; its plural etiologies and intent; and its contested emergence at the fractious join of Native and settler spaces, institutions, and worldviews. Moving from John Eliot and his earliest missionary attempts to produce a new kind of alphabetic literacy for Indigenous converts, the essay documents the tensions between missionary-driven literacy projects and Indigenous uses of such literacy for specific political and cultural reasons. From 18th century figures like Samson Occom, Joseph Johnson to the 19th century writer and activist William Apess, Native writers produced rhetorically sophisticated texts that expressed a deep commitment to the continuity of Native peoples.