Red Ink

Native Americans Picking Up the Pen in the Colonial Period

Drew Lopenzina

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781438439785, 9781438439792
• eBook ISBN: 9781438439808
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: Literature

The Native peoples of colonial New England were quick to grasp the practical functions of Western literacy. Their written literary output was composed to suit their own needs and expressed views often in resistance to the agendas of the European colonists they were confronted with. Red Ink is an engaging retelling of American colonial history, one that draws on documents that have received scant critical and scholarly attention to offer an important new interpretation grounded in indigenous contexts and perspectives. Author Drew Lopenzina reexamines a literature that has been compulsively "corrected" and overinscribed with the norms and expectations of the dominant culture, while simultaneously invoking the often violent tensions of "contact" and the processes of unwitnessing by which Native histories and accomplishments were effectively erased from the colonial record. In a compelling narrative arc, Lopenzina enables the reader to travel through a history that, however familiar, has never been fully appreciated or understood from a Native-centered perspective.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Survival Writing: Contesting the “Pen and Ink Work” of Colonialism
• Chapter 1: Wussuckwheke, or the Painted Letter: Glimpses of Native Signification Acknowledged and Unwitnessed (1492–1643)
• Chapter 2: Praying Indians, Printing Devils: Centers of Indigeneity within Colonial Containments (1643–1665)
• Chapter 3: King Philip's Signature: Ascribing Philip's Name to Land, War, and History in Native New England (1660–1709)
• Chapter 4: Beneath the Wave: The Maintenance of Native Tradition in Hidden Transcripts (1709–1768)
• Chapter 5: A Tale of Two Settlements: Mohican, Mohegan, and the Road to Brothertown (1724–1785)
• Afterword O' Brothertown, Where Art Thou?
• Notes
• Bibliography