Common-place asks Sophie White about her 2012 book Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians: Material Culture and Race in Colonial Louisiana and what it tells us about the role of material culture—especially dress—in the elaboration of discourses about race.

Some important concepts that frame your study are “Frenchification” and “racialization.” How did these function in colonial Louisiana and what was the relationship between them?

This book argues that material culture, especially dress, informed French views of Indians and influenced the development of racial thought in Louisiana. French colonial Louisiana, technically a province of New France, was a vast colony, sparsely populated by colonists and encompassing the central two-thirds of the present-day United States. As a focus of study, it has the advantage of lying at the intersection of two distinct models of French imperialism that were in tension with each other in this period. Upper Louisiana (or Illinois Country) grew out of colonization oriented by missionary activity and the fur trade as first developed in New France. Lower Louisiana would be influenced by the development of slave plantation societies in the Caribbean and was structured by slave codes aimed at Africans. Settlement practices in Upper or Lower Louisiana corresponded to their respective models but with the additional factor that African slavery would be established in Upper Louisiana on a scale never found in New France. Each model determined how the French interacted with indigenous populations, with implications for our interpretation of the trajectory of French racial thinking toward Indians in the two areas, and beyond.

What is particularly intriguing in French America is that the process of racialization needs to be contextualized in terms of an official policy known as “la françisation,” or Frenchification. First promoted in New France in the second quarter of the seventeenth century, this policy was intended to turn Indian converts into Frenchified convert subjects of the king—not only Catholic but also linguistically, culturally, and legally French. Based on the principle of Indians’ potential for transmutation, Frenchification theories were clearly premised on the malleability rather than the fixedness of Indians’ identity. By the latter years of the seventeenth century, having failed to achieve substantial or lasting conversion and assimilation of Indians in New France, the Crown virtually admitted defeat in its Frenchification project, one that had become almost exclusively centered on the promotion of legally binding Catholic marriages between French men and Indian women (for example, through the provision of dowries for Frenchified Indian women converts to marry French men).

Yet, it was at this precise point that missionaries and officials working “on the ground” in the Illinois Country finally claimed some success in actually turning Indians into French by virtue of conversion and, beginning in 1694, Catholic intermarriage. The women who entered into these marriages were described as “whiter” than the Indian women of Lower Louisiana, as well as “more hardworking, more adroit, better suited to housekeeping, and sweeter.” In 1699 one missionary would write about such women, “married to some of our Frenchmen, who would be a good example to the best regulated households in France.” Twenty years later attention was drawn to “many French inhabitants who are married to Indian women, even the most important [French] inhabitants, and they live very well together,” while as late as 1732, another missionary claimed that “there was no difference between a Christian Indian and a White,” and that legitimate children born to intermarried parents in the Illinois Country “behave like true Frenchmen.” These Catholic intermarriages were legally binding. I argue that this is why the way that Indian and half-Indian women were perceived became a key factor in debates about the merits of sanctioning intermarriage and métissage, and ultimately, in discourses about identity and race that transcended the Illinois Country.

The Illinois Country was clearly deemed relevant to broader questions about colonization, intermarriage, and the social order in French America as a whole. But were comments in support of intermarriage merely rhetorical or did some colonists in fact come to believe that the manner of living of Frenchified Indiansdid determine whether or not they were “true Frenchmen”? It is really only when we turn to the material culture evidence from these intermarried households that we can understand local colonists’ claims that Indian women in the Illinois Country had achieved Frenchness. Probate records of French-Indian households reveal that lodgings and outbuildings were built colonial-style, especially after 1719 when the French segregated their settlements from Indian ones. In these colonial villages, wheat cultivation began to overtake fur trading activities, and farming was done according to French methods using French equipment and tools. The dwellings were furnished with French-style furniture, textiles, cookware, and household goods, some of which, like armchairs, coffee pots and crystal glassware, hinted at a degree of refinement. As for the appearance of Indian wives and daughters of Frenchmen, extant records show that there was no visual differentiation between their wardrobe contents and those of French women settled in the Illinois Country: they all wore gowns or jackets and petticoats, over shifts and jumps/corsets, their hair invariably covered. I propose that the manner of living of these Frenchified Indian wives is important, for it allows us to resolve thorny questions about the chronology of racialization in French America; namely, that their material culture affected whether colonists hung on to older views (crystallized in the policy of Frenchification) of identity as mutable and of Indians as being capable of becoming French, or whether they subscribed to new models that defined a fixed and inborn racial identity for Indians.

In other words, my book necessarily recognizes the complex geopolitical factors that paved the way for racialism. But it introduces another influence, and one that is particularly relevant to understanding the shifting contours of racialization at the local and colonial levels: that of material culture. While bodily markers such as skin color were seen as permanent and binding for Africans from the onset of colonization in Louisiana, other official and religious authorities in the colony—those with first-hand exposure to “Frenchified” Indians in the Illinois Country—continued to assert the potential for the identity of Indian converts to be manipulated. My analysis shows that Indians’ external manifestations of religion and culture were central to this debate. Material culture interfered with the seemingly inexorable rise of racialism in Louisiana, creating its own chronology, and highlighting the uneven development and fractured character of the process of racialization in North America.

Would you talk a little about your approach to material culture generally (and cross-cultural dressing in particular) as well as the function of it in Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians? Why do you consider it an essential source relative to (or in relationship with) more conventional “textual” or documentary evidence?

This project began as a material culture study centered on dress, an approach that is especially valuable in illuminating the lives of the non-literate. Material culture is in many ways democratic since it is deployed by everyone using the objects available to them. And as I deepened my engagement with the sources, I realized that material culture was in fact key to understanding patterns of conversion and intermarriage in Louisiana, and that it was central to the way that French and Indians conceived of each other, including, for the French, how they explained skin color.

As a subgenre of material culture, cloth, clothing, and items of adornment had economic value: they were the major categories of commodities imported into the American colonies from Europe and Asia, and far outnumbered metal implements, tools, and guns in French-Indian trade. But beyond this real economic value, dress has the potential to help unpack the meanings and significance of cross-cultural exchanges and encounters.

My book uses an interdisciplinary approach and deploys archaeological and visual evidence, but my study rests in particular on archival sources including legal records, probate documents, court records, and criminal investigations; religious correspondence, parish registers, missionary and monastic records; official and personal correspondence, published and unpublished travel and missionary accounts; mercantile papers and informal records of business activities. My approach to this archival material is indebted to the existing literature on dress in cross-cultural contexts. It is also a qualitative approach that recognizes the variability of connotations (symbolic, aesthetic, economic, spiritual) attached to the same material objects by diverse individuals or groups of individuals. And in order to grasp these meanings, we need to keep in mind that there is more to textiles and adornment than generic categories of goods. I am therefore particularly interested in attending to the actual objects adopted in the course of cultural cross-dressing.

The problem that we are faced with is the fact that organic materials such as those used in dress, furnishings, and furniture deteriorate fast and rarely survive. But even where material culture evidence is not available, we can draw on knowledge of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century dress to interpret the physical characteristics of clothing and textiles referenced in written sources. Whether their tactile and visual qualities, their three-dimensional embodiment based on weave, cut, and construction methods, their cost and quality based on workmanship and materials—all of these nitty-gritty details mattered in face-to-face encounters, and we need to pay attention to them. My emphasis on the materiality of clothing also requires due regard for temporal and spatial factors. I think it is essential to pay close attention to the environment in which specific items of dress were worn precisely because of the protean nature of dress and the varied meanings that the same object can have for different users. For example, for a member of the French nobility, wearing Indian garb while traversing the hinterlands had a functional justification that did not carry over to an urbanized colonial space like New Orleans. For an Indian woman, wearing a French-style gown was a defining act when the woman in question was an Illinois convert to Catholicism, sacramentally married to a French husband and living within a French colonial village on a French-built property complete with a mulberry picket fence.

But this kind of evidence seems to get us into some difficulty when dealing with the impact of colonization on indigenous populations, because the trend among historians has been to be wary of evidence of assimilation, focusing instead on recovering instances of cultural retention. One of my interventions is to probe our rather fixed views of what constitutes cultural retention. So, rather than interpreting the Illinois convert’s Frenchified appearance as an example of assimilation into the hegemonic colonial and religious order, I argue that it should be seen as a sophisticated response to the arrival of the French, one that in fact demonstrates thepersistence of Illinois belief systems. First because Illinois Indians had a history of openness to new cross-cultural exchanges and alliances that did not begin with the incursion of the French in North America, and because marital alliances between Illinois women and French men were extensions of pre-existing practices. Second, we need to explore what it meant for Indian women to marry out and live with Frenchmen, and how that experience might resonate with indigenous rituals (for example captive adoption rituals) that deployed material culture, especially dress, to achieve metamorphosis into a new identity. By showing how Indian women in the Illinois Country lived with French possessions, inhabited them, and used them as a part of their daily activities, we can grasp the nonverbal ways in which these women channeled objects to convey their identity and to define community. So, my analysis seeks to reveal less obvious ways of using objects to retain aspects of tribal culture, complicating the debate about assimilation and persistence, change and continuity.

What difference does attention to gender make in your analysis, particularly with respect to religion and marriage practices?

Colonization itself was gendered, so it was inevitable that gender would be absolutely critical to my analysis, as it has proven to be in other scholars’ work on race, religion, métissageand the fur trade in French America. Where my study differs from those is in emphasizing that the French-Indian marriages typical of the Illinois Country were Catholic marriages. The distinctiveness and uniqueness of these marriages impelled me to re-examine the evidence about the first Catholic intermarriage in the Illinois Country, in 1694, that united one Kaskaskia Indian convert, Marie Rouensa, and a French fur trader and landowner. Doing so led me to unravel the fact that it was Marie Rouensa herself (not the Jesuit missionary who is usually credited with this step and who in fact promoted a celibate marriage that would bear no issue) who insisted that this marriage be a Catholic union and not an Illinois Indian one. Indian women’s agency in establishing this pattern of intermarriage led me to reinterpret how they understood Frenchification, not as the loss of their Kaskaskia identity, but as an extension of indigenous motivations and strategies that were themselves gendered.

The pattern of Catholic intermarriages was itself fundamentally gendered, for it united French males with Indian women. In turn, the daughters born to these unions (beginning with Marie Rouensa’s daughter) became desirable marriage partners for new generations of Frenchmen in the Illinois Country, especially since girls were entitled to a share equal to that of their brothers’ from their parents’ estate according to French customary law, and could therefore provide a valuable entrée into colonial society for newly arrived French bachelors. As I have discussed above, the women’s manner of living was central to the arguments made by proponents of Frenchification and intermarriage, drawing on discourses that hinged on culturally defined gender roles. In Louisiana, questions about the premise of Frenchification coalesced in the experience of one French-Indian girl from the Illinois Country, Marie Turpin, who in 1747 began a journey that would culminate four years later in her becoming an Ursuline nun in New Orleans. Her story crystallizes the tension between the two peripheries of Upper and Lower Louisiana with respect to intermarriage and how the identity of Frenchified Indians was interpreted. One model, bolstered by experiential knowledge of Indian wives and daughters of Frenchmen in the Illinois Country, allowed for the possibility of Frenchification. The other increasingly dominant model was premised on the rigidity and fixedness of racial categories, and imposed limitations on those considered inferior. Marie Turpin’s experience embodied this tension and her story further offers us the opportunity to recover the words and actions of French women in New Orleans—notably nuns—as they responded to her. Brought face to face with evidence of religious, linguistic and cultural Frenchification in the person of Turpin, the nuns chose to see racial difference. They limited this bride of Christ to the lesser rank of a converse (domestic) nun, thus inscribing her status on her clothed body and effectively racializing what were otherwise “appropriate” French performances of femininity.

Marie Turpin’s progression toward becoming a nun took place within the female space of the convent. But her story also brings to light gender dynamics pertaining to masculinity and sexuality. During her weeks-long trip downriver to New Orleans, Marie Turpin was placed in the care of a female chaperone. But the convoy was a predominantly male space, and it was French soldiers and voyageurs who spoke with authority, upon arrival in New Orleans, of the piety and modesty of the “sainted girl who kept her eyes downcast throughout the trip” (thus avoiding the sight of the voyageurs’ semi-clad bodies, dressed in Indian-style travel garb) “and never said an unnecessary word, being always at prayer.” It was the judgment of these male intermediaries between Upper and Lower Louisiana, not that of the female chaperone, that counted when the topic concerned their world. In traveling the Mississippi River and tributaries, or moving across the hinterlands beyond colonial outposts, they, like Marie Turpin, also navigated a shifting panorama of practices and beliefs about identity, and about masculinity. In particular, that these men dressed in Indian garb raised the question of how colonists justified and managed the transgressions implicit in cultural cross-dressing. For there was a corollary to lingering French beliefs in the mutability of identity as epitomized by Frenchification policies. The premise that Indians’ identity was mutable carried the distinct possibility and risk of the reverse: a descent from a cultured to a wild (“sauvage”) state. Where Indians had the potential to be converted and “civilized,” the French could themselves be transformed as a result of their physical presence in the territory they sought to colonize. Though ostensibly gender-neutral, this risk (one that could be managed through dress, as my analysis shows) was seen in practice as pertaining only to French men, reiterating the need to keep gender at the forefront of analyses of colonization and race.

You write that “enslaved Africans serve as a foil in this study.” Can you explain a little what you mean by that?

Wild Frenchmen is centered on French and Indian encounters, but French views of Africans serve as a foil for understanding how Indians were racialized in Louisiana. The presence of Africans inflected every aspect of society. The first slave trade ships arrived from Africa in 1719, the year after New Orleans’s founding. Within twelve years, all but one of the twenty-three slave ships from Africa destined for French colonial Louisiana had arrived. Some Africans were present in Louisiana beginning in 1709, prior to the slave trade to that colony, but only ten were present in 1712, for example (none of them in the Illinois Country, which had not yet been transferred to Louisiana). After 1719, enslaved Africans would quickly become a majority of the colonial population of Lower Louisiana, outnumbering Europeans by four to one in 1731 and by two to one in 1760, and a significant segment of the population of the Illinois Country (25.2 percent in 1726 and 32.2 percent in 1752).

It is when we address the policies of Frenchification that we find the greatest disparities in French views of Indians and Africans. But here too there was a distinction between Upper and Lower Louisiana. In New France, Frenchification policies ebbed and flowed without reference to Africans, since that colony did not develop a significant population of enslaved (or free) Africans. In the Illinois Country, the unique pattern of intermarriage and métissage that evolved there was established without reference to Africans, since it predated their arrival in the area by at least fifteen years. At the same time, the very same missionaries who celebrated French-Indian intermarriages would become some of the largest holders of African slaves; Indian wives and daughters of Frenchmen in the Illinois Country also owned enslaved Africans, who labored alongside enslaved Indians according to French norms regulating the gender division of labor. Conversely, in New Orleans, slave-holding Ursuline nuns formed distinct views of Indian and African girls. Given greater exposure to Africans than Indians, they determined early on that their greatest missionizing zeal would be reserved for Africans, whom they deemed more amenable to conversion, a preference that formed one backdrop for their evaluation of the half-Indian Marie Turpin.

And, where Frenchification policies sought to elevate the status of Indians, the premise underlying the 1685 and 1724 codes noirs (slave codes) was the opposite, seeking to fix the identity and condition of Africans as permanent chattel. Even when freed African slaves were extended the same right as Indians to become “natural subjects,” this right remained legally revocable, so that Africans could never really shed their association with slavery. Yet, the French did plan for Africans in Louisiana to be converted to Catholicism, and they subjected them to degrees of acculturation that in some ways echoes the treatment of Indians. My current book project, Stolen from Africa:Voices of the African Diaspora Within and Beyond the Atlantic World, picks up this thread, placing Africans at the heart of a narrative about verbal and non-verbal expressions within the globalizing world of French colonization.

What do you think are the larger implications of either your approach or your findings, especially as they pertain to scholars’ conception of borderlands?

My approach highlights the importance of non-verbal expressions as a source for writing history, not least in proposing a methodology for re-thinking the history of the non-literate. I hope in particular to show how paying attention to objects complicates our often inflexible views of acculturation and persistence. Adopting another group’s material culture, and learning how to use and display it, was not only reactive or even emulative. It was also often proactive, confounding binary assumptions that reduce cross-cultural exchanges to questions of tradition or change, appropriation or persistence, authenticity or corruption. This point is especially important in terms of borderlands scholarship that rests on the analysis of subtle interactions and negotiations over people, places, and things. My hope is that this volume opens up new avenues for the interpretation of colonial projects, and the cultural and material exchanges that were fundamental to the establishment of these. So, while the book is the study of one region, its broader aim is to suggest that objects can profitably take center stage in the investigation of colonial societies and borderlands.

Sophie White is associate professor of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame. The author of Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians: Material Culture and Race in Colonial Louisiana (2012), for which she was awarded an NEH fellowship, she has also published numerous articles on slavery, gender, violence, dress, and culture. Her current book project engages with the global dimensions of slavery, probing the interplay of enslaved Africans’ verbal and non-verbal expressions in Atlantic and Indian Ocean colonies.

Before delving into the rediscovery of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s long-lost first collection of published poetry, Forest Leaves, my contribution to this roundtable comes with a disclaimer: I’ve had the pleasure of working with Johanna Ortner as a graduate student in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and I’ve had some difficulty parsing my enthusiasm about this discovery from the excitement that comes from seeing students making real and valuable discoveries in the archives through the process of primary research. That said, the rediscovery of Forest Leaves is surely an important one all on its own, one that will draw attention to Harper’s early life in Baltimore, to her craft and meticulous revision process across her career, and to the contours of African American women’s authorship in the nineteenth century. In what follows, I want to explore Harper’s striking resistance to nostalgia in Forest Leaves, especially exemplified by her refusal to endow her meditations on childhood and youth with sentiments of reverie or innocence. At the root of Harper’s anti-nostalgia is an understanding that any look to the past in the antebellum United States is simultaneously a look to the slave past. I go on to think about what lessons Forest Leaves might offer to scholars, especially given the recent turn, or more properly, return to the archive in African American literary studies.  Forest Leaves—a text that contains both tantalizing glimpses of origin stories and past recoveries—is also precisely the text that can warns us about the dangers of nostalgia for particular origins, or clear genealogies, in recovery work around early African American literature.

Schoolwork, Aesthetic Work, Public Work

How do we begin to understand Harper’s “leap” into print in the late 1840s or possibly, as Carla Peterson indicates, in the early 1850s, when the poet was in her twenties? The intertextuality of the poems as well as their careful curation within the volume points to a young Harper’s interest in addressing a public, or possibly multiple publics. And while the poems do traverse a range of themes and disciplinary subjects, they do not seem beholden to the demonstration of knowledge that marks nineteenth-century schoolwork productions. In other words, these are not schoolhouse verses: they display a poet who has already established a strong poetic voice and a set of clear aesthetic and political commitments that continue to be reflected in subsequent published works, especially in her other antebellum pamphlet collections that Meredith McGill calls Harper’s chapbook poetry.

At the same time, Forest Leaves does bear some of the traces of Harper’s schooling, her religious education, and her experiences as a young, nominally free woman of color growing up in Baltimore. Harper’s uncle, the preacher, activist and educator William Watkins, looms large in the story of the poet’s upbringing since he served as both an adopted father and schoolmaster. Melba Boyd notes that Watkins was largely an autodidact who taught himself English language and literature, Greek, Latin, and even medicine. At the Watkins Academy for Negro Youth, Harper was immersed in a curriculum that focused on the study of the Bible, but also history, geography, mathematics, English, rhetoric, and oratory, among other fields. Boyd notes that at Watkins’s school, composition was an almost daily activity, and it is likely that this intensive practice of writing and rhetoric shaped the precision and control displayed in her poetry. The woods and nature also served as a type of classroom for the burgeoning poet, who, according to Theodora Williams Daniel, “frequently visit[ed] the woods where she listened to the birds and gathered leaves tinted by the sun in order to stimulate her imagination.” In addition to spending time in nature, Harper also learned natural history and natural philosophy at her uncle’s school. Harper’s poetry was thus shaped by the disciplinary and learning structures of formal schooling, but also by forms of learning and auto-didacticism in the parlor as well as “in the field.” We might also think about the city of Baltimore as an important laboratory space for the development of Harper’s thinking about the complexities of race, gender, slavery, and the precariousness of freedom for African Americans in the antebellum period.

For my own research on African American engagements and experiments with natural science in the antebellum period, I am interested in thinking more about Forest Leaves’s relationship to black women’s manuscript cultures and compositional practice in the antebellum period, especially as they reflect the study of natural history among free African American women. Just as the title of Forest Leaves plays with the connection between “leaves” in the forest and the leaves of her book, black women’s friendship albums from the period connected “poesy” to “poesies.” These sentimental albums paired floral-themed verse with paintings of flowers, included natural history lessons on flora, and also served as part-herbariums, offering up a number of floral specimens in painted form. Looking ahead to 1855, Walt Whitman would also reflect on the intertwined materiality of writing, print, and nature in Leaves of Grass, a title that resonates with that of Forest Leaves.

Harper All Grown-Up

At least at this preliminary stage, I’m thinking about Forest Leaves as a transitional volume: a collection that reflects Harper’s youth and schooling, but that is also already attuned to the fleeting nature of life, to the moral stain of slavery on the nation, and to many other “grown-up” topics. This is a youthful production, to be sure, especially reflected, as Ortner points out, in the poems that address romance and budding sexuality. But as much as Forest Leaves reflects the sentiments of the young, it also feels like the writing, please excuse the cliché, of an old soul. The pamphlet is filled with poems about illness, death, and looking for peace granted by Christ at the end of one’s life. This is not a collection that looks back lovingly to the days of childhood, and the poet does not seem to have any particular attachment to the past. This striking lack of nostalgia for the days of “childhood innocence” recurs across Harper’s subsequent poetry. For example, in “Days of My Childhood,” printed in the Anti-Slavery Bugle in 1860, the desire to return to the joys and carefree nature of childhood are replaced with “holier hopes” of meeting Christ in death:

Days of my childhood I woo you not back,
With sunshine and shadow upon your track,
Far holier hopes in my soul have birth,
Than I learned in the days of my childish mirth.

Of course, Harper’s biography suggests concrete reasons for not wanting to return to the “days of my childhood.” The poet was orphaned at the age of two and her early letters frequently convey a deep sense of isolation and loneliness. But beyond these biographical details, Harper’s resistance to sentimental reveries about childhood also connects to her political vision: sentimentalism may be mobilized for abolition, but for her, its attendant nostalgia just isn’t productive for the antislavery cause.

Already here in Forest Leaves, we can see something deliberately anti-nostalgic at work in Harper’s poetry. The poet regularly looks back to the past, but she never desires a return to it. As the previously unknown poem, “The Presentiment,” opens:Foley

There’s something strangely thrills my breast,
And fills it with a deep unrest,
It is not grief, it is not pain,
Nor wish to live the past again.

Harper’s disinterest in returning to the past is clearly part of her belief in Christian redemption and the resurrection. It is possibly also a meditation on what Robin Bernstein has identified as the construction of “racial innocence” around white children simultaneous with the exclusion of black children from the category of childhood itself in the nineteenth century. But I want to suggest that Harper’s anti-nostalgia is also about what it means to look to the past in a slave-holding nation. For Harper (as for all antebellum Americans), to look to the past, to look to the “days of my childhood,” is also to look to the time of slavery. “Yearnings of Home,” another previously unknown poem in Forest Leaves, bears a title that promises to indulge in reveries about the past. Sure enough, “Yearnings for Home” voices a wish to return home once more to feel the “native air” and to die in the presence of family. But crucially, the poem expresses a yearning to return only to the place and geography of childhood, not to the time of it. Here, in the years before she joined the Abolitionist movement, a young Harper is already suggesting that black people only have one option: to keep moving forward, even if the prospects for freedom seem dim. The (slave) past is not a place to which to return or retreat.

Harper’s Lessons

I wonder if Forest Leaves’s unsettling of convenient origin narratives might also pose a challenge to scholars of African American literature, especially those engaged in recovery projects. In light of recent scholarly conversations and publications, I have been wondering about the limits of scholarly narratives produced around recovery, especially in the archives of slavery and nominal freedom. More specifically, I have been thinking about how the editorial imperative to introduce and promote newly recovered texts at times produces critical narratives that may not enable the most generative or even accurate scholarship on such texts. For example, the claiming of “firstness” for the African American novel has produced all kinds of confusions, errors, and obfuscations (of, for example, the literary productions of black women writers). Might recovery narratives begin to tell different stories, beyond problematic origin narratives, and beyond presumptions that the significance of recovered works is always transparent, obvious, unquestionable? For example, in the case of Forest Leaves, is there a way to capture the significance of Harper’s first book of poems without relying on the supposedly inherent importance of firstness, or following Kinohi Nishikawa’s recent essay, without relying on the tautological assumption that a recovered work of literature is important because it was recovered? Moreover, how do we read an object of the early black print sphere that was published, but did not circulate widely, if at all? How should scholars talk about published works that were not circulated? Like manuscripts? In the terms of counter-publics? Nishikawa suggests that we should be also thinking about the condition of “lostness” of recovered texts, rather than seeking recognition for such works by immediately incorporating (re)discovered works into a pre-determined canon, and its associated scholarly narratives. In the words of Leif Eckstrom, how do we know that we even know how to read a work like Forest Leaves?

Despite these qualifications and provocations, the recovery of Forest Leaves points to the ways that recovered works can fundamentally transform our understanding of an author’s known oeuvre. As Ortner mentions, because Forest Leaves contains early versions of well-known poems, we must now understood those poems as revisions of earlier works. This is really a modest understatement by Ortner since her rediscovery of Forest Leaves means that future readings and analyses of these poems will now have to account for the changes made between their appearance in Forest Leaves and in subsequent publications. In this way, we see that origins do matter. At the same time, the embeddedness of Harper’s poetry in schoolwork and composition, the discovery of Forest Leaves in print rather than manuscript form, and the importance of revision for Harper, all unsettle Forest Leaves as the origin of Harper’s poetry. The primacy of revision in Harper’s poetic practice further relates back to Harper’s own refusal of nostalgic origin stories, and to her understanding that a backward-looking poetry—or even a look back to one’s own poetry—is only as good as what it might enable in and for the future.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Carla Peterson, Eric Gardner, Kinohi Nishikawa, Leif Eckstrom, Anna Mae Duane, and Paul Erickson for valuable feedback and assistance with this response piece, as well as to Johanna Ortner for her discovery and work on this project.

Further Reading

My thoughts on Harper’s early life and relationship to childhood have been largely inspired by Frances Smith Foster and Melba Boyd’s foundational studies. See Foster, A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader (New York, 1990) and Boyd, Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics in the Life of Frances E.W. Harper, 1825-1911 (Detroit, 1994). Rather than viewing her writing as “all of a piece,” Meredith McGill focuses on the important discontinuities of Harper’s poetry over time, especially between the earlier volumes of poetry that were printed as pamphlets or “chapbooks,” and the poet’s late nineteenth-century volumes that appeared as handsome, cloth-bound books. Forest Leaves certainly does not suggest an aesthetic sensibility that can be traced continuously across all of her poetry, but it does reflect important connections between her first book of poems and her other pamphlet-printed collections, especially Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects, which was first published in 1854. On the importance of the pamphlet format in the study of Harper and nineteenth-century poetry more generally, see McGill, “Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and the Circuits of Abolitionist Poetry,” Early African American Print Culture, ed. Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein (Philadelphia, 2012). On the schooling of American women, including some African American women, in the post-Revolutionary and antebellum U.S., see Mary Kelley’s Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic (Chapel Hill, 2006). Kim Tolley’s The Science Education of American Girls: A Historical Perspective (New York, 2002) is also an excellent resource on the place of natural science and natural history in the classrooms of nineteenth-century girls and young women. For more on antebellum black women’s friendship albums, see Erica Armstrong Dunbar, A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City (New Haven, 2008) and Jasmine Nichole Cobb, Picture Freedom: Remaking Black Visuality in the Early Nineteenth Century (New York, 2015). The friendship albums of Amy Matilda Cassey, Mary Anne Dickerson and Martina Dickerson are available in the holdings of the Library Company of Philadelphia and digitally at the Cassey & Dickerson Friendship Album Project. On the pitfalls of common recovery narratives surrounding twentieth-century African American literature, see Kinohi Nishikawa, “The Archive on Its Own: Black Politics, Independent Publishing, and The Negotiations,” MELUS 40:3 (Fall 2015): 76-201. My citation of Leif Eckstrom comes from personal correspondence. On the politics of recovery in the study of slavery and freedom, see the forthcoming special issue of Social Text, “The Question of Recovery: Slavery, Freedom, and the Archive” 33:4 (2015).

This article originally appeared in issue 16.2 (Winter, 2016).

Britt Rusert is assistant professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and visiting assistant professor of English at Princeton University. Her book, Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture, is forthcoming from New York University Press.

Art historians are fond of saying that early American landscape paintings are primarily topographical, while the Hudson River School landscapes that followed in the antebellum period rise to the status of painted poetry. However, just as colonial and early national portraits have proven to reveal more about the culture than the appearance of a select group of individuals, landscapes from the same period can tell us about the aspirations and values of early Americans. For example, the artist Ralph Earl (1751-1801), who was primarily a portraitist, painted a small group of landscapes at the end of his career that are not only descriptive views but that also tell stories. As a case study, I invite you to share in the stories, both personal and cultural, that are told in Earl’s Looking East from Denny Hill (fig. 1).

At first glance, Looking East from Denny Hill is merely a topographical landscape. Like a surveyor, the painting’s viewer stands at a particular vantage and takes measure of the land: the Denny farm in Leicester, Massachusetts, in the foreground; the towns of Worcester and Shrewsbury along the left side; and the farms of southern Worcester County at the right. More than fifty houses, barns, churches, and other buildings are depicted in the painting, with enough specificity to suggest that Earl was intent upon cataloguing exactly what he saw from the top of the 950-foot-high Denny Hill.

Upon further examination, however, one finds in the composition explicitly artificial elements that Earl introduced to signal his intention of moving beyond a literal record of what lay before him. Two symmetrically placed tall trees frame the scene and offer a stage-like setting upon which to depict stories about the role of the land in the lives of the people who shaped it. This pair of trees is echoed by another pair in the near distance; by making the one on the left lower than the one on the right, Earl opens up the left side of the composition and directs the viewer’s attention there.

But stage directions alone do not make a story. In order to lend a narrative quality to the Denny Hill landscape, Earl also needed to invoke time. He accomplished this by painting the sky in a range of pinks and blues that imply a rising or setting sun. The edges of the trees are tipped with orange and red, invoking not only a time of day but also a time of year: late August or early September. The vivid colors of the sky and foliage also set an optimistic tone of peace and prosperity for both the personal and national stories that unfold in the land. Earl populated the foreground with a group of farmers harvesting the hay and a pair of fashionably dressed women strolling across the farm. These figures become characters in stories of cultivation and prosperity, both individual and collective.

Before exploring the specific stories embedded in the painting, it is important to note that Earl also manipulated the scene through the vantage point that he selected for the composition and the way that he chose to frame the image. Anna Henshaw (1778-1854), a resident of Leicester at the time the painting was done, recorded the view from Denny Hill: “There is a most splendid panorama view from Denny Hill, which embraces the surrounding country, dotted with the white houses of the inhabitants and a dozen or more churches. At the north west is seen Leicester village situated on a hill equal, if not superior in height, about two miles travelling distance . . . In the north east in a valley are Worcester and New Worcester villages. All around below are hills and dales, woodlands, plots of grass, and arable fields, delightfully diversified.” Henshaw’s description demonstrates that there was nothing inevitable about the view represented in Looking East from Denny Hill, since she described a different view from the very same spot where Earl painted his panoramic view of farms, towns, and woods. Most notably, Earl pointed his easel to the east, leaving out the village of Leicester. Thus Earl’s landscape reflects a set of choices made by the artist, probably in consultation with his patron, Thomas Denny Jr. (1757-1814).

Earl’s choices concerning viewpoint and composition helped to set the stage for the stories he would paint inLooking East from Denny Hill, stories that range from the individual to the national. On the personal level, we can read Looking East from Denny Hill in relation to the lives of the artist and his patron. Both Earl and Denny grew up in this landscape and were the grandsons of some its original white settlers. In relation to the artist’s life story, Looking East from Denny Hill expresses Earl’s reconciliation with the town from which he was alienated as a young man. In 1778, Earl was a loyalist who was driven from New Haven (where he had gone to advance his career as an artist) by town leaders and fled to England, leaving behind a wife and two children. In remaining a loyalist, Earl was also estranged from his father who fought as a captain in the militia company led by Thomas Denny’s uncle, Samuel Denny. Upon Earl’s return to Massachusetts in 1785, he brought a second wife from England, even though his first marriage had never been legally terminated. That there are no paintings known by Ralph Earl of Leicester subjects until 1800, the last full year of his life, suggests that he remained dissociated from his kinsmen and townsmen until then. Besides Looking East from Denny Hill, Earl painted a portrait in 1800 of his cousin, Thomas Earle (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), a gunsmith who supplied weapons to local Revolutionary War hero Colonel William Henshaw, among others. While the painting commissions themselves signify Earl’s reconciliation with the people of Leicester, the orderly character of the landscape that he painted for Thomas Denny imparts the personal narrative of Earl’s return to the fold.

For the patron Denny, the painting tells a very different story, one of his and his forebears’ role in transforming the land from a wilderness to an orderly and prosperous community. The original Denny farm, established by his grandfather Daniel Denny, consisted of 70 acres. By 1784, Thomas Denny owned 431 acres (an area about two-thirds of a mile in each direction), the land that occupies the lower half of the green area of the painting. Denny’s property holdings in 1784 encompassed 4 unimproveable acres, 5 acres of tillage, 8 acres of fresh meadow, 40 unimproved acres, 50 acres of upland mowing, 118 acres of pasturage, and 206 acres of woodland. What may appear to the modern viewer as a uniformly rural landscape was understood to eighteenth-century landowners and landscape viewers in more diverse terms that were defined by function and the level of the owner’s success in improving the land. By employing the laws of linear perspective and a vantage point from the Denny farm, Ralph Earl gave equal weight to Denny’s 431 acres and the 11 or so miles of land that recede into the distance. Through this choice, Earl established Denny as the main protagonist of any stories inscribed in the land.

Moreover, the structure established by Earl with the symmetrically framing trees in the foreground complements the structure that Denny wrought in the land. The farm is partitioned into neat fields by fences and stone walls. Different shades of green imply a variety of grasses and staple crops to feed the livestock that is penned at left and grazing in the middle distance. A team of nine hired men reap the hay in the foreground and load it into an ox-drawn cart, demonstrating that Denny had graduated from the hard work of the fields to the role of gentleman-farmer. In this way, Earl represented Denny as a model citizen whose leadership demonstrates to fellow farmers that clearing, planting, and partitioning the land results in order, beauty, and wealth. Indeed, Denny’s example is followed throughout the expanse of the valley below.

Earl’s painting was not just a biography; it was a local history as well. In the painting, as in life itself, we sense that Denny was active not only in shaping his own farm, but also in defining the contours of the community. Town records reveal that Denny served Leicester as town clerk, selectman, moderator, representative to the General Court, and justice of the peace. He was also Leicester’s tax assessor, an office that required him to enumerate his neighbor’s property in a manner that Earl echoes in his descriptive approach to the landscape. Denny was active in Leicester as a fence viewer, hog constable, and surveyor of the highways, lesser offices that entailed maintaining order among his townsmen. He also participated in the annual “perambulations” in which selectmen of abutting towns met to affirm the boundaries. Denny’s contributions in these ways are also reflected in Earl’s painting: fences are in repair, livestock is enclosed, roads are in good order, and towns flow into one another without signs of dispute.

Denny was not content to see himself merely as a local leader, and so Earl positioned him in relation to changes in land use that were afoot nationally.Looking East from Denny Hill was commissioned at a critical juncture in Thomas Denny’s life–the time of his move from the family homestead to his newly built Federal mansion in the center of Leicester. Denny’s move coincided with the shift from his life as a farmer to that as a storekeeper and manufacturer of card clothing. While Earl’s painting does not explicitly tell that story, it provides a narrative structure that mirrors the changes taking place in Denny’s life.

The axis from foreground to background relates the Denny farm to two key elements in the transformation taking place in Thomas Denny’s lands and work at the end of the eighteenth century. Just to the right of the tall tree, in the near distance, there is a field of sheep. These are clearly Denny’s animals, as in 1784 he is documented to have owned a pair of horses, six swine, six oxen, eleven cows, and twenty-three sheep and goats. These numbers are themselves significant, as historian John Brooke has shown in his history of Worcester County that farmers who owned more sheep than cows were more likely than other farmers to be entrepreneurs in Worcester’s first experiments in textile-related industries.

The road winding through the left half of the painting offers a second hint of the relationship between the agrarian world and the emerging industrial economy. The road connects the rural part of Leicester with the county seat of Worcester in the valley below. At a key intermediate point–the bend in the road that serves as the turning point of Earl’s painted story–there stands a mill with a bell tower, a concrete sign of the industrial transition that is underway and which Thomas Denny was intent upon helping to usher in. Thus, Ralph Earl used both time and space to impart stories about Denny and his role in the communities depicted in this landscape.

To demonstrate that contemporary viewers would have understood Earl’s painted stories of Denny Hill both in personal and communal terms, we need only turn the pages of the popular illustrated magazines of the day. For instance, when the nearby estate of Moses Gill (fig. 2) was engraved by Samuel Hill forMassachusetts Magazine, it was accompanied by a brief text that framed Gill’s success as an emblem of national importance: “Foreigners must have an high idea of the rapid progress of improvement in America, when they are told that the ground which these buildings now cover, and a farm of many hundred acres around it, now under high and profitable cultivation were, in the year 1766, as perfectly wild as the deepest forest of our country. The honourable proprietor must have great satisfaction in seeing Improvements so extensive, made under his own eye, under his own direction, and by his own active industry.” That landscape, like the Denny Hill painting, includes a harvest scene in the foreground. The Gill estate view was published in 1792, eight years before Earl’s painting was done. Moreover, Gill was related to Denny by marriage. It seems likely, therefore, that Earl and Denny would have been conscious of Hill’s engraving and its implied narrative of personal and collective productivity. In this way,Looking East from Denny Hill uses established visual and verbal conventions for representing individual wealth as a common good.

Earl also included two tiny female figures that inform the viewer that this landscape is a civilized place. Just left of center, a pair of women stroll across the field in white dresses decorated with blue sashes and large hats embellished with coral-colored ribbons. Perhaps meant to suggest members of the Denny family, these figures also relate to the larger story of republican community. A contemporary print of Dartmouth College (fig. 3) depicts a woman and a girl walking together under a parasol, while a group of boys play ball nearby. An accompanying text explains that a few years earlier this was a frontier that was heavily battered during the Revolution, but now 160 students attend the college, fifty or sixty more attend the grammar school, and “about fifty dwellings, beside five or six stores and other buildings” now grace the town. Children and women at leisure marked the development of stable communities, a story common to the Dartmouth and Denny Hill landscapes.

In the juxtaposition of agrarian Leicester and the commercial center of Worcester, with a mill standing for the dawn of industry between the two, Looking East from Denny Hill also provides a narrative of the national interest in developing a balanced economy to ensure lasting political independence. The road that connects Leicester to Worcester reemerges just below the horizon as it enters the town of Shrewsbury. As every resident of central Massachusetts would have understood, that road continued to Boston, the capital city and principal port of the state. Denny’s move from the family farm to his store and card clothing manufactory echoed the national drive to balance agriculture, commerce, and manufacturing.

In short, visitors to Denny’s home in Leicester would have encountered a fashionably appointed Federal mansion and a genial host who was one the wealthiest men in town. The landscape painting that he commissioned Ralph Earl to paint in 1800 suggests the manner in which he wanted to be perceived by his neighbors. The Denny farm scene represents him as a third-generation resident of Leicester, whose own fortunes helped to fuel the general prosperity. He contributed to the growth of the town through his own enterprise as a farmer, a storekeeper, and a manufacturer as well as through his diligent service as a public official. Although a man of means, in the end, his heart belonged to the commonwealth.

Further Reading:

The most complete study to date of early American landscape paintings is found in Edward J. Nygren, et al., Views and Visions: American Landscapes before 1830 (Washington, D.C., 1986). Thomas Denny’s neighbor Anna Henshaw kept a diary that is currently unlocated. The fragment of her diary containing her description of the view from Denny Hill was transcribed by a descendant of the Denny family, Mary D. Thurston, and is preserved in the painting files at the Worcester Art Museum. A monograph on Earl is Elizabeth Kornhauser, Ralph Earl: The Face of the Young Republic (New Haven, Conn. and London, 1991), an exhibition and catalogue organized by the Wadsworth Atheneum, which traveled to the National Portrait Gallery and the Amon Carter Museum.

The best source for learning more about the early settlers of Leicester, Massachusetts, especially the Denny and Earl families, is Emory Washburn,Historical Sketches of the Town of Leicester, Massachusetts, during the First Century from Its Settlement (Boston, 1860). Earl is branded a Tory in the Connecticut Journal, New Haven, April 2, 1777. He told his version of the story and pled for financial relief in his loyalist petition to the Lords Commissioners of the Treasury, with a supporting letter from John Money, January 28, 1779, Public Record Office, ref. no. AO 13/4. Earl’s father’s military service is recorded in Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors of the Revolutionary War, 17 vols. (Boston, 1896-1908), 5: 150.

Thomas Denny’s tax assessment was discovered by Laura K. Mills in “A list of the Polls and of the Estates, Real and Personal, of the several Proprietors and Inhabitants of the Town of Leicester . . . ,” Massachusetts General Court, Valuation Lists, Leicester, 1784, Box 380, State Library of Massachusetts, Boston. Denny’s activity in local government is recorded in two manuscript volumes entitled the General Records of the Town of Leicester, covering the dates 1745-1787 and 1787-1829.

For an excellent study of the evolution of Worcester and the surrounding towns of central Massachusetts, see John L. Brooke, The Heart of the Commonwealth: Society and Political Culture in Worcester County, Massachusetts, 1713-1861 (Amherst, Mass., 1992). Robert Blair St. George was the first scholar to identify the building at the bend in the road as a mill, in his book, Conversing by Signs: Poetics of Implication in Colonial New England Culture (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998), 342.

For the image of Moses Gill’s house and the accompanying text, see “Description of the Plate,”Massachusetts Magazine 4: 11 (November 1792): [651] and opp. [651]. Moses Gill married Sarah Prince, whose mother was the sister of Daniel Denny, Thomas’s grandfather. For the view of Dartmouth and its description, see Massachusetts Magazine 5: 2 (February 1793): [67]-68 and opp. [67].

This article originally appeared in issue 1.3 (March, 2001).

Since 1996 David Brigham has been the curator of American art at the Worcester Art Museum in Worcester, Massachusetts. He is the author of Public Culture in the Early Republic: Peale’s Museum and Its Audience (Washington, D.C., 1995), and co-author of an Online book entitled Early American Paintings in the Worcester Art Museum.

Statement of Poetic Research

On the cold morning of November 29, 1864, a force of U.S. soldiers under the command of the minister/Colonel John Chivington carried out a brutal and unprovoked attack on a peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho encampment at Sand Creek in southeast Colorado Territory. In the resulting carnage that spread over forty square miles and into the next day, at least 200 Cheyenne and Arapaho were killed, with many scalped and mutilated, including a large number of women, children, infants, and elderly. Determined by the U.S. military and government in the ensuing months to be a massacre, this event forms one of the most infamous chapters in Colorado history and the annals of the American west. For Cheyenne and Arapaho people, whose legal right to Colorado lands were denominated in treaty covenants with the U.S. government, the massacre served to drive them from their ancestral homelands and reduce them to the status of exiles. 

The far-reaching impacts of this massacre of Cheyenne and Arapaho people, as well as its broader effects on Native peoples of North America, was the concern addressed by Acoma poet Simon J. Ortiz in his seminal poetic work, From Sand Creek (1981).  “How to deal with history,” our collective American past that so often excludes Native people? This question forms the central organizing concern of the work as a whole, and operates as a provocation to see the world from a different perspective. And not just to do so passively, but also to interrogate a largely one-sided conception of the past that has been reinforced in the dominant culture’s narrative of Sand Creek, which is still referred to by some as a “battle,” rendering Native people “invisible.” The maintenance of this other posture is what tolerates the perpetuation by so many Americans of “an amnesia that doesn’t acknowledge that kind of history.” This sort of response, however, is not available to all, for as Ortiz perceptively asks, “but Indians? What choice do we have?”

These simple but vital questions are ones that the Native writers and artists included in this issue of Common-place also seek to address through their own words and art. The positioning of the poetry, prose and art around the specificity of Sand Creek on its 151^st anniversary is not done due to it’s “uniqueness” within frontier history, for the event itself is not unique, but because of the place that Sand Creek holds within a broader context of systematic oppression and violence, spanning several centuries from Mystic River, Block Island, Fort Neoheroka and Gnadenhutten to Clear Lake, Bear River, Sand Creek, the Marias River and Wounded Knee . . .

It is hoped that the creative insights presented by such a rich diversity of Native voices can serve as a basis for a more comprehensive conception of what such traumatic events mean in their historical relativity, while also demonstrating the capacity of Native people and cultures to resist, persist and survive. The joining of these words as a means of repudiating narratives of victimry and tragedy in favor of an active presence is what Gerald Vizenor defines as “survivance.”

The legacy of the Sand Creek Massacre has been brought into sharp focus over the last several years at the University of Denver where I teach, which just last year celebrated its 150^th anniversary. The intertwining of DU’s anniversary with the horror of Sand Creek is no mere coincidence in time or place within the mythologized history of the American West and its “civilizing” and “winning” that Ortiz deconstructs through his poetry. It is the direct result of the intentional actions and inactions of settlers, soldiers and government officials, including DU’s founder, John Evans who was Governor of Colorado Territory at the time and also Superintendent of Indian Affairs. The massacre that precipitated the wholesale removal of two distinct Native societies from Colorado, whose rightful claims to the land had been validated by the U.S. federal government through the ratification of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851, and was of such devastating consequences to the Arapaho and Cheyenne people that they continue to live with the effects of the trauma inflicted upon them. And always to remember. It is a regrettable truth that the legacy of Sand Creek seems to have laid buried for so long within DU’s institutional memory, perhaps reduced to that shadowy absence “within” what Ortiz calls “the socio-cultural-historical schematic of ‘victors and victims’” that naturalize such events while simultaneously erasing them from our collective cultural memory. As we lament and even condemn such a process, we must also cultivate and maintain an awareness of the direct intentionality that leads so many to unknowing, along with the failures of those who led us to this place and continue to work to make people forget.

While the effort to confront the pervasive nature of the historical amnesia Ortiz speaks of is one of the goals of the selection of work presented here, we know that it can only have a limited value if operating in isolation and must be part of a broader network of creative labors to be truly successful. Hence, this issue of Common-place is joined to previous collaborations including a special feature on Native writing and art in commemoration of the Sand Creek Massacre included in the Fall 2014 issue of Denver Quarterly. As editors of the feature, Eleni Sikelianos and I addressed the tangled interconnections of these events at DU with an awareness that “history is not something of or in the past, but the very field we walk upon.” Indeed, the Native writers who contributed work to this previous project, many of which are also included in Common-place, highlighted the myriad ways that the Sand Creek Massacre and related events impact Native people and communities, while continuing to weigh on the contemporary lives of Native people. Together, both selections are intended to offer a means to create a more complete and multivocal understanding of our collective pasts and to confront the distressing truths that lie hidden in a way that eschews the debilitating narratives of tragedy and victimry. In an essay published at Salon.com on the day of the anniversary, November 29th, I further explored the ways in which memory, trauma and place are inextricably connected through historical events and the process by which particular narratives gain legitimacy by the creation of historical monuments, but also how the creation of respectful and honest memorials can contribute to healing and peace.

During this same time and growing out of some ongoing discussions about the place of Sand Creek in Colorado history and John Evans’ role as territorial governor, I, along with a small group of other concerned faculty, formed a scholarly research group to formally address these issues. As our work marked the first time that members of DU’s academic community had confronted this question, and the difficult truths to which it is inextricably connected, in a direct and comprehensive way, our task often seemed overwhelming. It was the unanimous belief of our committee members, however, that after so many years such an effort was long past due, regardless of the challenges and internal tensions our research brought to the surface. At Northwestern University, which was also founded by Evans, the administration formed an official committee to conduct their own examination of Evans’ actions as a response to protests from their Native students and concerned community members. The independent efforts of the two groups of scholars promised an unprecedented consideration of our shared institutional heritage, while marking an extraordinary opportunity to engage with Cheyenne and Arapaho communities to promote healing and peace, as well as renewed friendship and collaboration.

From the onset, we at DU recognized the critical importance of engaging with the Cheyenne and Arapaho communities as a fundamental component of our efforts to understand the complexity and multilayered narratives that make up the history of the University of Denver, the state of Colorado and the frontier West. Accordingly, we reached out to representatives of survivor descendants from Cheyenne and Arapaho communities residing in Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and Oklahoma and invited their participation in the project. Through our meetings and ongoing communications with Native community members including, Gail Ridgely (Northern Arapaho), Otto Braided Hair (Northern Cheyenne), Karen Little Coyote and Joe Big Medicine (Southern Cheyenne), and Henry Littlebird and Chief Willey (Southern Arapaho), among others, as well as consultations with respected scholars and historians who are widely recognized as the leading experts on Sand Creek, such as Gary Roberts, David Halaas, and Tom Meier, our study group generated a scholarly report that we hoped would offer a more inclusive and nuanced conception of this traumatic period of Colorado and Western American history. It was an effort that was guided by a search for truth and shaped by a mindful independence from the artificial partitions imposed largely by arbitrary disciplinary categories endemic to historical methodologies that tend to assign ultimate authority to colonial documents and testimony.

In addition to the literary projects and the sharing of stories with the tribal representatives noted above, the University of Denver also hosted numerous lectures to give members of our community the opportunity to attend readings and exhibits featuring Native scholars, writers and artists who so generously shared stories of Native cultural survivance. Among these we were honored to host the renowned Cheyenne-Arapaho scholar and educator Henrietta Mann, who shared White Buffalo Woman’s (her great grandmother) harrowing account of traumatic experience and survival at Sand Creek, as well as Cheyenne artists George Levi and Brent Learned, Merlin Little Thunder, B.J. Stepp and Nathan Hart, whose drawings and paintings on the theme of the massacre function to reclaim the narrative of these events from the inflexible apparatus of colonial historiography that tends to consign Native people and cultures to a static and doomed past.

Through these participants’ memories of their ancestors and their enduring active presence in stories passed forth from one generation to the next, such accounts live on and demand to be told, but also listened to. We took it as our obligation and responsibility as scholars and educators, but also as occupiers of a land so violently appropriated from its rightful Native owners, to listen to the Native peoples who generously shared their stories and memories with us. And it was the insights gained from these encounters that allowed us to offer a fuller accounting of the historical, political and social contexts out of which the Sand Creek Massacre emerged. For reasons that remain unclear, the scholars involved in the production of the Northwestern report decided to take a different approach without the active participation of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribal communities who were the very people most affected by the truly horrific events that both study groups worked to understand. This crucial distinction, perhaps, best typifies the contrasting methodologies that each group employed in their research and seems to reflect strongly in the apparent divergences in our findings, which again recall Ortiz’ questions about the systemic and consistent exclusion of Native voices and perspectives in American history.

While both reports severely criticize the actions John Evans took as Governor of Colorado Territory, and his failures in his duties as Superintendent of Indian Affairs, the DU report found him to bear culpability for the Sand Creek Massacre due to his position as the highest political authority and his significant role in stoking the violent anti-Indian sentiment and dangerous hostility in the months leading up to the massacre. This finding was echoed and specifically cited in the official apology conveyed to the Arapaho and Cheyenne people by Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper on the steps of the Capitol building in Denver on December 3, 2014. The Northwestern committee came to a different conclusion which was viewed by many, including their own Native students, as ultimately absolving John Evans of responsibility for the massacre using the relativist claim that he was a “representative figure who believed in and lived out the dominant ideas” of his time. But as Ortiz illustrates, there was another way, there was always another way: “pain and death did not have to be propagated as darkness and wrong and coldness; they could have listened and listened and learned to sing in Arapaho.” Despite the differing conclusions of our committees, both universities are moving forward with efforts to acknowledge historic wrongs and repair the damages of the past to create a more welcoming and inclusive environment for Native students on their respective campuses.

It is a regrettable truth that the founder of Northwestern and the University of Denver, John Evans, forever binds our institutions to the Sand Creek Massacre. This past, our past, however, does not have to define our futures, nor the relationships we have forged with Cheyenne and Arapaho communities. As members of the DU community we have chosen to no longer hide from the reality of the past and to underscore the belief that true healing can only take place when the legacy of history is reckoned with in an honest and open way. Not through obfuscation, neglect, equivocation and silences. We owe it to ourselves, and the students we are dedicated to serving, to resist this easier path at every turn. To stand against the implacable attitudes of tradition and nostalgia that all too often renders necessary change inordinately slow or worse yet, ineffective. And we also owe it to the memory of courageous leaders such as Lean Bear, White Antelope, Big Man, Left Hand and Black Kettle who represented their people with honor and dignity in the face of violence and hatred and greed, as well as men like the U.S Cavalry officers Silas Soule and Joseph Cramer, men that refused to be driven by the dominant ideas of the time and instead understood the injustice that is driven by hatred and greed, and who stood up against it. Men who give Ortiz reason, perhaps, to turn away from the incapacitating power of hopelessness and despair: “I know/ there is a world/ peopled with love./ I know/ there are people/ who speak/ not in undertones/ but gallantly and joyously,/ who are valorous/ with simple courage.” Such are the people who truly deserve to be remembered and honored in history and in monuments over those who perpetuated a shameless legacy of violence and oppression.

Most importantly, we maintain our most hallowed responsibility to the original owners of the land on which the University of Denver stands, the Arapaho and Cheyenne people who were driven from their homes, from their bountiful landscape, from their places of tranquility and their holy places and sacred sites . . . We owe it to the land itself. Likewise, for Indigenous peoples of the Americas, this history, and the struggle against greed, hatred, oppression, deracination . . . extermination . . . a seemingly unending series of catastrophic events that continue to hold power and affect their lives and communities, must be remembered. Throughout North America, as the writers and artists included here in Common-place bear witness, the wreckage of this history has now been accumulating for over 500 years . . . And Native people continue to respond in their own creative ways to the results of this enormity.

Despite this history and the traumatic events it set into motion, however, the people have persisted. Native peoples of North America have persevered and the people have continued to live, to love, and to flourish—to sing and tell stories, their stories. For as Ortiz writes, “I have always loved America; it is something precious in my memory in blood and cells which insists on story, poetry, song, life, life.” This selection of creative work in Common-place offers simply one small contribution to the ongoing endeavor to open up new spaces for Native writers and artists to share their own stories, memories and histories within a context where such perspectives are so often denied a presence, intentionally or not. So while this latest journal selection includes new work by several of the writers from the Denver Quarterly feature, such as George Levi, Kimberly Blaeser, Frances Washburn, Toni Jensen, Crisosto Apache, Byron Aspaas, and Sara Ortiz, it also includes the deeply affecting voices of Simon Ortiz, Lance Henson, Margaret Noodin, Michael Wasson, and Brent Learned.

This collective work is offered as a virtual gathering of Native voices and a diverse yet unified testament to the power of memory in giving substance to the ideas I have attempted to convey through these admittedly insufficient words. In spite of its inherent limitations, my hope is that this feature can offer renewed testimony to the resiliency of Native people; that combination of persistence, resistance, and survival that Gerald Vizenor has championed in his work, to create within the ether of these virtual pages a sense of Native presence and actuality over absence, nihility, and victimry . . . Survivance, in all of its forms, is the renunciation of dominance and oppression in “the continuation of stories.”

Billy J. Stratton
University of Denver

Further Reading:

Ortiz, Simon. From Sand Creek: Rising in this Heart which is Our America. 1981. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000.

“Report of the John Evans Study Committee,” Northwestern University, May 2014.

“Report of the John Evans Study Committee,” University of Denver, November 2014.

Stratton, Billy J. and Sikelianos, Eleni. “In the Shadow of Mt. Evans,” Denver Quarterly 49:1 (2014), 2-3.

Vizenor, Gerald. “The Aesthetics of Survivance: Literary Theory and Practice.” Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence. Ed. Gerald Vizenor. Lincoln: U Nebraska Press, 2008: 1-24.

Crisosto Apache

Of Thunderous Blood Storm

The rain fell upon the earth for forty days and forty nights. [Genesis 7:12]

dawn bleeds through biosphere, back to a beginning—

clouds gather from onyx and water falls, always—

in a beginning, as (s)he / our hands caress,

in a beginning as (s)he / we are meant to exist,

in a beginning (s)he /our voice heaves

immemorially—

blood shot eyes clamp down around all fingers—

seam of sideways light filters through glass caps—

tireless legs climb up our white mountainside—

wet clay debris mesh between toes and dermal ridges—

water slab backs hinder an exertion to higher ground—

russet liquid skirts channel continuously through embankments—

sheaves slide underfoot, coursing always before and now—

top center veins mend through reformation of red skin—

memories of mankind work in this same way,

memory is the skin that is all our body,

memory is the milk that is our feminine,

memory is the fist that is our masculine,

memory is the cradle that is our born,

memory is the heap that is our stolen,

memory is the council that is our dead and massacred,

memory is our placental land, our Americas—

will our memories eventually reach our mountain top—

baptismal levels rise rapidly, as the always have—

clad bones and flesh pour from the mouth of basalt cliffs—

dense clusters of by-the-wind sailor jelly fish engorge with algae—

a hollow tree trunk hastily purges somnolent vessel—

thunderous static charge trade a task of inert limbs—

flouting blood sputters inward, coating whiting eyelids—

lightening surges through a course edge of tangled fingers—

swollen arms grapple alongside a timber raft—

a stutter set afloat a mucus current, rowing slowly away—

whitewash membrane collides into a small piece of island womb—

inflamed curtains suspend inside a buoyant flux of cavity—

reddish tight skin ewers stay bobbing, adjacent to crossing legs—

stagnant waves balance through droplets, as it always has—

this beginning, undulates toward an abyss that is whirling—

a grand empty opulent complex bulges painfully from the navel—

an ubiquitous scar imprints at the base of all abdomen—

umbilical pulls us closer to disintegration—

our sacral bone cleaves us apart, toward a state of decay—

tiny blood bulbs echo from fused linings—

centrifuge plunges us into an umbral slant of shadow—

our pelvic descent carries through a breakage of plasma—

broken shell and stone carry refrains of lanterns and litany—

inside an elongate throw we stretch our grip on each another—

we tether toward the outer ends of a black plastic lining—

an imminent sieve lost in a slog of a murky epithelium—

a gild silence hovers over whispery monuments—

twinkling ghost cut intermittent signals of encumbering monsoon—

a marching sound of water droplets reveal a sulfurous match—

epidural drape shapes a drain that corrode arroyos—

cross currents liquid ages fruit blood casks for infallible lips—

northern hemisphere air is a heavy static—

droplets stains of ancient liquid fall onto face—

fire ants and pinacate beetles scurry into burrows—

coves corrode in a bath of matching pelvic flaps—

barn swallows take no flight today—

small hairs on our forearm sway by the unseen—

loose air confines the expansion of deep clouds—

dził gais’ání / sacred mountain is still visible in our approach—

an infant wails for first breath at Mt Sinai Medical Center—

in the thickest part of the Congo, leaves thrive—

plankton multiplies inside the north Atlantic currents—

magma toils as afterbirth beneath the earth’s crust—

tectonic plates ease with lenient fractures—

basalt plummets off a western sea cliff into the colliding waves—

accruing globule course down the right side of nostril—

oceanic spay, dusts the coast line—

placental fluid washes the floor in a prenatal unit—

the last remaining white rhino falls to its knees—

we pull the noose tighter before finally dangling on a closet rack—

a sapphire colored car abruptly stops as an ambulance darts by—

a murder of crows gather outside a window planning their demise—

ceiling fans rotate with the concave of last breath—

the sun unleashes a powerful solar flare on March 11, 2015—

fires extinguish in the arctic circle as the sun rises—

tears of red wine saturates our face as we emerge—

our limbs convulse a blurry apparition in the world—

our pelvic muscles contract and constrict uncontrollably—

losing sounds to letters as fluid rushes from our skull causing syncope—

training wheels detach from a child’s bicycle in Florida—

somatic cells begin their splinter—

coccinella magnifica separates her elytra and takes flight—

the same fleet of fire ants dismantles and consumes a mouse carcass—

tumble weeds herd the highways and are shepherd by gale forces—

blood passes from one vacuum to another—

x will always remain as anomalous blood in our identity—

at the collapsing center of a desert universe, dawn arrives—

Byron Aspaas

Candy Land Has A Front Range

To escape, I started to run again. I started to run along the paths of Colorado Springs which was flavored much different than the taste I was used to. I say flavored because the recipe of the landscape is measured differently and calls for different types of spices and ingredients which created a different delicacy with a different visual flavor. If I could describe Colorado to my family, to my friends, to you. I would say Colorado has a front range frosted with different layers of green: forest green, emerald green, marijuana green. I would say the land is cemented and massacred with decorations of foreign flowers from different lands placed strategically to detour your eyes from the blemishes of its history which is now laced with red white and blue ribbons edged in a signia of calligraphy, America the Beautiful.

Kimberly Blaeser

Mochi, Prisoner of War

Remember her in winter. Picture her as she was then in Black Kettle’s camp. A young woman of 24. Southern Cheyenne, of the Tse Tse Stus band. In the tipi of her parents.

Remember her at Fort Marion. Imprisoned with her warrior husband Chief Medicine Water. The infamous Captain Richard Pratt her warden.

Try to imagine the slow-motion-minutes that changed her life: Dawn. November 29, 1864. You are Mochi—Buffalo Calf. Your band is camped at Big Sandy Creek. Your leader Black Kettle flies America’s stars and stripes above his lodge. Flies the white flag of truce. You are safe here and Black Kettle has sent the warriors to hunt buffalo.

This is United States History 101. Fact: Black Kettle’s peaceful camp is not safe. Mochi is not safe. Indians in colonial America cannot be safe. Fact: U.S. Army Colonel John Chivington was a Methodist preacher. He was a freemason and opponent of slavery. Chivington, however, was not an opponent of murdering Indians.

You are Mochi in winter camp with your mother. It is dawn when your life explodes around you. The first explosion is the bullet entering your mother’s forehead. The second explosion comes as you fight off the soldier attempting to rape you. You have made that explosion with your grandfather’s rifle and the soldier falls. You run then into the chaos and through the cannon fire and the screaming and the slashed and disemboweled bodies.

Imagine your life now as a long series of explosions and escapes. You are Mochi the warrior, the raider. Imagine you are remembering the explosions when you sleep. Imagine you are imaging the soldiers each time you raise your rifle. Killing the memories over and over for eleven long years. Exploding them and running from them, until finally you surrender at Fort Leavenworth.

Remember her in winter. Picture her as she was then in Black Kettle’s camp. Remember her at Fort Marion. Imprisoned with her warrior husband Chief Medicine Water.

Text books call it Chivington’s massacre; but Sand Creek was also Mochi’s spiritual transformation. Let us call her Mochi the witness, the survivor. Prisoner of War.

↔↔↔↔

            In taking account of Sand Creek, the Wounded Knee massacre, the Trail of Tears, the Sandy Lake tragedy, the Long Walk, or any of the other long list of atrocities inflicted upon Indigenous Peoples of the Americas, the cold facts still stun. But among the sad litany of military barbarisms—Jewish Holocaust, Pol Pot, My Lai, Abu Ghraib—they remain among the least known. The historic campaign to displace or eliminate Native tribes has been trivialized beyond recognition into some Western fantasy of American frontier justice.

            What is survivance in the face of denial? In recent news, the picture of a drowned three-year-old boy, a Syrian refugee, has put a human face on the ongoing refugee crisis. “We are human beings, just like Westerners,” said his father. To survive, to resist, as Native nations we too reject the comb-over caricature of simply tragedy. Real people like Mochi saw the brutal slaughter of family and community they loved. They were changed by it. Their lives and the lives of each succeeding generation have been irrevocably altered. With real fingers on this keyboard, I write to recall and to repair.

            Chivington’s triumphant army of Sand Creek decorated their uniforms, their saddle horns, their bars and barracks with the body parts of Cheyenne and Arapaho men, women, and babies. Such was their celebratory memorial.

            The Cheyenne warriors imprisoned at Fort Marion, many of whom saw their band decimated at Sand Creek, chose another path of remembrance. Moving beyond despair, they depicted in Ledger Art images of their old life, of spiritual connection, their memories of battle—each powerful expression drawn over the colonial accounting, symbolically reclaiming a kind of tribal autonomy.    

            And what of America’s memorializing 150 years after the Sand Creek Massacre? In a country that celebrates “Columbus Day” and a cardboard-cut-out pilgrim and Indian “Thanksgiving Day,” how do we make space for historic truth? Native lives are not merely mile markers on a tourist highway. This new nation should acknowledge the history and continuing existence of each Native Nation within its bounds. Imagine with me “Indigenous Survivance Day.” 

“That we may not be mistaken by them for enemies.”                                    Motavato (Black Kettle), autumn, 1864          

 Estate of Chief Black Kettle (1813-1868)

Peace medal from Abraham Lincoln

34-star American flag presented by Colonel Greenwood—flown over his tipi to stave off attack

White flag of truce

Appointment as Chief in the Cheyenne Council of Forty-four

Official papers declaring him a “good friend” of the United States

Treaty at Fort Laramie.

Treaty at Fort Wise.

Peace settlement at Fort Weld.

Livestock: 21 horses and 6 mules—valued by U.S. at $1,425.00 after their destruction at Sand Creek

Nine bullets removed from his wife Medicine Woman Later after the Sand Creek Massacre

“Perpetual Peace” in the Treaty of Little Arkansas River

Medicine Lodge Treaty.

Title of “Peace Chief”

A rally of bullets to the back while retreating at Washita River

Portrayed as “good Indian” in television’s Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman

Memorial at Black Kettle National Grassland

Lance Henson

Just after midnight in the denver bus station
I ask a shoeshine black man where the indian bars are

We walk outside and he points toward the rounded moon
Soule street he whispers

Three blocks away i find soule street
And a red neon bar sign with the r shot out
Inside merle haggard sings mama tried

I settle in and order a 25 cent beer lighting a toscanello
an old man behind the bar watching
Im sitting next to a midget
His legs dangling beneath him
Wearing little boy tennis shoes
He asks me for a cigar

They call me the prophet he says
I didnt think they called you slim i said
People keep buying him beers and he slides
a few my way

a mexican and an indian start a fight over a toothless
babe with nice legs
guns and knives everywhere

the barman shouts a beer for everyone
the fight stops
i see him staring at the whirling ceiling fan

i have owned this bar for 56 years he says to me

i smile and descend into a dark winged price
already paid
drinking warm beer with these bruised eyes and souls

entering the backside of a song
another beer sliding in front of me

denver
jan10.04

soule street,name for the army capt silas soule who testified against col.

chivington,the officer who ordered the massacre of cheyennes at sand creek,1864

merle haggard..country music singer

At the military cemetery hamm
   In luxembourg

For jack whiteshield and roy larney

In a slow snow storm last december
I found your graves

The white landscape
Undulating in breaking sunlight

The crunching snow beneath our footsteps
The sloping shadows of headstones weaving a
Breathless pattern of goodbye

In beauty i pray for you
In peace i place this cigarette
my relations

In a circling sage wind

I speak your names….

January05

jack whiteshield,my uncle, and roy larney,arapaho
served and died in general george patton’ tank corps,1944

Toni Jensen

Fracture and Song

Of the nearly 200 Arapaho and Cheyenne killed at the Sand Creek Massacre, two-thirds were women and children. I use the preposition “at,” not “in” because those women and children were not “in” battle—they were at home; they were invaded at home. I say “at,” not “in” because location matters. This location—Sand Creek—has become a contested space. Its history is as contested as it is important. To memorialize correctly, language matters. To remember the place of lineage, both of people and of place, language and image matter. To place Sand Creek in a line of people and space that connects to today’s people, today’s spaces, language and image together must matter for us to work toward survivance.

The Sand Creek massacre occurred at the edge of the geologic formation now best known as the Niobrara Shale Play. At the time of the massacre, November 29, 1864, the Niobrara Shale was laid down between 82 and 87 million years past. The formation sometimes also is called the Niobrara Chalk.

The image most associated with the Sand Creek Massacre, most familiar is not chalk but is oil on canvas, Robert Lindneaux’s 1936 “History Colorado #46619.” The image is displayed in the Wall Street Journal’s article on Sand Creek and on the National Park Service website, for example, which is the where the New York Times article leads readers for more information on the massacre and the 150^th anniversary.

Lindneaux’s painting offers a landscape that stuns: panoramic, row on row of teepee in taupe and tan against the brown of the ground, with the light blue water of the creek winding through the scene like ribbons, the clouding sky above a mix of both palettes. The details, though, the people. Soldiers in blue ride roans and chestnuts. The soldiers have their guns drawn, long, thin barrels out front—this seems like it might have been. But they’re shooting, most often, at men. At Arapaho and Cheyenne men. Some hold guns back to the soldiers, some lay fallen to the ground by the teepees or in the creek, face down. Image and language—they matter.

Two-thirds of the Arapaho and Cheyenne killed that day were women and children. In the painting, the women and children are few, not many, and they are standing or walking. They hold their children’s hands or carry them on their backs. It is easy to find them; they wear green and so are bright among the tans and blues.

Green is the color of growth, of spring, of hope. Two-thirds of the Arapaho and Cheyenne killed that day were women and children. Words matter. Images matter.

The women and children that day—wearing green, wearing brown, wearing blue, wearing all the colors—were not left to stand, were not left to play or work or see the beauty of their homes, their panoramic vistas, their land.

A “shale play” is a formation of similar geologic and geographic properties that also contains a notable amount of natural gas. In oil and gas terms, the Niobrara Shale Play is most often called “an emerging play” or “an exciting, new play” or “a young play.” It is an active play, producing natural gas through hydraulic fracturing or fracking. Water and sand and chemicals, millions of gallons, are forced down into the shale, the rock, to break it apart, to release the gas, which is then taken.

In October 1865, the Treaty of the Little Arkansas acknowledged the government’s blame for the Sand Creek Massacre. But the treaty also took Cheyenne and Arapaho rights to land titles in the state of Colorado. The language matters, and the actions do not speak, they shout.

What has happened since fracking began in June 1998 in the Barnett Shale of Texas, what is happening today across the country is this continued shouting. The degradation and exploitation of Indigenous women and children continue through the force and power of history, through the force and power of this fracking industry.

Indigenous women and children are sold for sex to fracking camp workers; they are exchanged, they are bartered, they are trafficked; they are supply meeting demand. They are made to be goods on the land their families once inhabited, their own lands.

The taking by force of our land always has been twinned with the taking by force of our bodies, of our most vulnerable bodies—our women, our children.

In the Bakken Shale Play in the Dakotas, there has been a 30 percent increase of sex trafficking cases filed in the last three years. In April 2015, a coalition of Indigenous women filed a formal request for the United Nations to intercede on behalf of Indigenous women who are being sex trafficked near fracking sites across the Great Plains.

The taking by force of our land always has been twinned with the taking by force of our bodies.

In rural, northern Pennsylvania, along the New York State border, sex trafficking around Marcellus Shale sites has grown so great, a local YWCA received a $500,000 federal grant to provide help to trafficked women and children, many of whom come from nearby reservations in New York. The organization Sing Our Rivers Red has taken its art exhibit to New York and to North Dakota and to most states across the country. They collect single earrings and display them on red backdrops to memorialize the missing and murdered Indigenous women.

The taking by force of our land always has been twinned with the taking by force of our bodies.

History is lived, in our lands and in our bodies. In this country, we bear the repetition of the words—the times “battle” is chosen over “massacre”—and the images, those women in green still whole, still standing. We repeat them whether they are true or false. We spin them until we are dizzy, until we fall to the ground.

But the ground receives us. Always. We practice survivance through language and image and memory. We protest, we draft petitions, we make art, we memorialize.

The taking by force of our land always has been twinned with the taking by force of our bodies. Images matter. Words matter. These lives matter. We understand that alongside every creek, every rock formation, every piece of land that was once and still is ours, there is crying, yes, there is blood on the bright green of the women’s dresses, but there also are our images, our words, ringing out like song.

Brent Learned