This chapter locates a throughline of Indigenous resistance to settler dominance that stretches from the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth to the 2016 NoDAPL movement on the Standing Rock Sioux reservation. It is a throughline marked not by warfare and violence, but by diplomacy and strategic action founded in traditional Indigenous responses to the irresponsible use of power. Recognizing how Native peoples, across many cultures and regions, were philosophically aligned toward hospitality and peaceful conflict resolution, disrupts racist notions of savagery, and age-old assumptions of Indigenous peoples as strictly “warrior societies.” By highlighting a number of diplomatic practices and actions occurring between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, this chapter suggests the type of movement that took place at Standing Rock, founded in respect for the environment and peaceful resistance to uncivil government, was not a modern-day innovation, but a series of responses in keeping with the long-standing praxis of Indigenous communities.

This essay places the life and writings of Catharine Maria Sedgwick beside those of her contemporary, the Pequot preacher and author William Apess. Sedgwick’s novel Hope Leslie, or Early Times in the Massachusetts and many of her other writings reinforced the myth of the “vanishing Indian,” and yet native communities persisted in New England in Sedgwick’s own time. By reading Sedgwick and Apess alongside one another, this essay explores white historical fiction’s role in perpetuating settler colonial ideology and highlights Apess’s strategies of rhetorical and literary resistance. In his autobiography, his collection of native conversion narratives, his published sermons, and his political writings, Apess consistently recognized, embraced, and proclaimed not only his own worth as a native man but the survival and sovereignty of native New England communities both past and present.

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.”

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.

Subjected to violence, disease, and dislocation, indigenous cultures and individuals have found ways to voice both mourning for losses and strategies for resistance, survival, and joy. War for Indian peoples moves beyond the hostilities perpetrated on them by the dominant culture. War is also a response away from victimry and towards resistance and resilience, becoming an active presence, a staking of a place, a demand for recognition – literal and figurative acts of what Gerald Vizenor calls “survivance.” This essay focuses on representations of violent conflicts between Europeans and Native Americans by historical and contemporary Indian voices, such as Hendrick Aupaumut, Black Hawk, William Apess, N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Sherman Alexie.

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.