Authorized Agents

the long version

"In nineteenth-century North America, the literature of Indian nations extended a long tradition of diplomacy between indigenous people and settler states. While the crisis of removal profoundly reshaped Indian country between 1820 and 1860, indigenous intellectuals and tribal leaders often worked with various collaborators--translators, editors, and amanuenses--to address the tensions between American empire and Indian nations. Drawing on established conventions of Indian diplomacy, these collaborative writings were bound up with the life of colonial institutions but they intervened in them as well. Using multimedia forms of publication, Native authors contested colonial ideas about empire, the frontier, and nationalism, all the while insisting on an indigenous futures in regions where settler expansion caused profound historical change. Authorized Agents examines the writings and speeches of authors such as Black Hawk, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, and George Copway, as well as more overlooked writers and orators including Sharitarish, Ongpatonga, Keokuk, Hardfish, and Peter Pitchlynn. The fact that their writings were often edited or published by colonial institutions has often left many Native writers to be misread, discredited, or simply ignored. How can we begin to understand these texts as the work of indigenous authors who generated critiques of colonial ideas and policies? Through analysis of a range of texts--from oratory, newspapers, and autobiographies to petitions, council meetings, and manuscript poems--Authorized Agents offers an interdisciplinary method for understanding how Native authors claimed a place in public discourse, and how the cross-cultural conventions of Indian diplomacy shaped their texts"--