Becoming America - An Exploration of American Literature from Precolonial to Post-Revolution, 2018a

BECOMING AMERICA
PRE- AND EARLY COLONIAL LITERATURE
1.3 NATIVE AMERICAN
The selections of this section
come from six tribes whose homelands
cover the majority of the
United States’ eastern seaboard as
well as regions in the midwest and
southwest. The Micmac or Mi’kmaq
tribe belonged to the Wabanaki
Confederacy and occupied a region
in southeastern Canada’s maritime
provinces as well as parts of New
Image 1.1 | Flag of the Wabanaki Confederacy
York and New Jersey. One of the Artist | User “GrahamSlam”
Source | Wikimedia Commons
oldest political entities in the
License | CC BY-SA 4.0
new world, the Haudenosaunee
Confederacy were called the Iroquois by the French and the Five Nations by the
English. The latter refers to the ve tribes that made up the confederacy: the
Cayuga, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, and Seneca tribes. The name was changed
to Six Nations when the Tuscarora tribe joined in the eighteenth century. Their
territory covered the majority of New York with some inroads in southern Canada
and northern Pennsylvania. Called the Delaware by Europeans, the Lenape tribe’s
territory included what became New Jersey, eastern Pennsylvania, southeastern
New York, northern Delaware, and a bit of southern Connecticut. The Cherokee
tribe occupied the southeastern United States as far north as Kentucky and Virginia
and as far south as Georgia and Alabama. The Winnebago, or the Ho-chunks, lived
in Wisconsin. Finally, the uni or the A:shimi were descendants of the ancient
Anasazi and Mogollon cultures of the southwestern United States and occupied the
area called New Mexico.
Missionaries and ethnologists were some of the rst collectors of Native American
tales. The missionaries often learned Native American languages and customs as a
way to better proselytize the tribes, and some became at least as interested in these
studies as in their religious missions. Moravian missionary John Heckewelder
recorded the Lenape account of rst contact before the American Revolution and
published it early in the next century as part of the transactions of the American
Philosophical Society, an outgrowth of the Federal era’s zeal for knowledge and
scientic study. Baptist missionary Silas Rand ministered to the Micmac tribe and
recorded the rst contact story told to him by Micmac man Josiah Jeremy. A
self-taught linguist, Rand also published a Micmac dictionary. Toward the latter half
of the nineteenth century, the developing eld of ethnology—the analytic study of a
culture’s customs, religious practices, and social structures—fueled the study of
Native American culture. The Cherokee accounts recorded by James Mooney and
the uni accounts recorded by Ruth Bunzel were rst published as part of the annual
reports produced by the Bureau of American Ethnology, a federal oce in existence
from 1879 to 1965 that authorized ethnological studies of tribes throughout America.
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