Early American Literature

How we tell the stories of Indigenous material objects, both functional and decorative, is a matter that has long concerned Native artists, writers, and scholars as well as the interdisciplinary field of Indigenous studies. In Indigenuity, Caroline Wigginton takes up the study of Native craftwork alongside the early literatures of North America, analyzing how American literary archives are oriented to Native material expression. Wigginton's book seeks to understand how the "aesthetic and sensory knowledge about North America as Indigenous place [is] present in the practices and objects of Native craftwork" (13). This interrelation has also shaped colonial writing and those writers' "efforts to construct their own relationships to Indigenous place," but Wigginton's study is more than an analysis of colonial overwriting in settler literatures. Indigenuity reveals an archive—material, visual, textual, and sonic—that displays how Indigenous makers "continue to use and adapt that knowledge in order to survive and resist colonial displacement," creating craftwork that "melds utility and information with feeling, beauty, form, and creativity" (13).

Indigenuity makes a crucial statement about the need for early American literary studies to attend to the material practices, aesthetic choices, and sensory dimensions of Indigenous craftwork. Interpreting a multimedia archive that extends from seventeenth-century North America to contemporary art and media, Wigginton shifts American literary history away from "the importation and development of European traditions" to explore how alphabetic writing and bookmaking relate to a range of "artistic modes for sensing, understanding, expressing, and imagining our relationships to [End Page 764] American places, places that were originally and remain Indigenous" (14). Demonstrating the centrality of Indigenous materials and labor to the archives of early American literature, Indigenuity makes an essential case for early American and Indigenous studies to remain oriented to the making, use, and experience of Native craftwork.

Some of these orientations are cartographic, as in Wigginton's reading of Jonathan Carver's Travels through the Interior Parts of North-America (1778), which places his travel narrative in relation to an Indigenous map of the Upper Mississippi River Valley. Here Indigenuity demonstrates how European maps and travel narratives are not "primordial genres" but stand in relationship to Indigenous cartography as a form of multimedia craft-work (43). Even when European travel writers sought to contain and "discipline" Indigenous understandings of space, they responded to Native genres and landmarks, and as such their works were shaped by Indigenous people's material, visual, and cartographic records. Wigginton recognizes in these records an "ancient, ongoing, multifaceted, and dynamic" framework that oriented Indigenous nations of the Upper Mississippi River Valley "within and to place" (24). Here Indigenuity develops an intricate method for reading settler representations of space in relation to the materials and sensations of Native craftwork, thereby centering Indigenous notions of space and story.

Indigenuity demonstrates an impressive range by integrating the study of Indigenous craftwork across different regions and nations, making connections between Haudenesaunee, Choctaw, Ho-Chunk, and Mohegan practices, among many others. Yet Wigginton's analyses are carefully rooted in place and linguistic and cultural context. One chapter considers settler narratives of the seventeenth-century Kanien:keha'ka woman Kateri Tekakwitha (1656–80)—canonized as a Catholic saint in 2012—to trace the "multisensory observation of story, image, object, ceremony, or practice" that emerged around her representation in art and literature (48). Here Wigginton carefully considers Haudenosaunee perspectives on Kateri's "devotional craft," which included moosehair embroidery, quillwork, beadwork, and false embroidery, the incorporation of designs into the weaving process. In the historical narratives and images of Kateri, Wigginton discerns a method of observation that is based in Haudenosaunee practices of examining craftwork, in which the labor, materials, and seams are hidden from sight while the embellishments display women's dexterity. [End Page 765] This tension between "hidden work and displayed skill" (52), Wigginton argues, also marks Claude Chauchetière's account of Kateri's penitence, in which he describes her "craftwork of bodily mortification" according to this "twofold aesthetic of concealment and...