Copyright by Lauren Marie Grewe 2017 The Dissertation Committee for Lauren Marie Grewe Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: “Woven Alike with Meaning”: Sovereignty and Form in Native North American Poetry, 1800-1910 Committee: Matt Cohen, Co-Supervisor James H. Cox, Co-Supervisor Michael Winship Chad Bennett Stephanie Fitzgerald “Woven Alike with Meaning”: Sovereignty and Form in Native North American Poetry, 1800-1910 by Lauren Marie Grewe Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin August 2017 Dedication For my family. Acknowledgements I am grateful for the support of family, friends, and mentors during my time as a graduate student at the University of Texas. My sincere thanks to my co-director and mentor Matt Cohen whose kindness, humor, and intellect made this dissertation possible. Thanks also to my co-director Jim Cox whose measured wisdom and support improved this project at all stages. Michael Winship offered impeccable guidance on book history throughout this dissertation’s evolution, and I remain grateful for his generosity. Chad Bennett gave advice on poetry and poetics, for which I am thankful. Thanks also to Stephanie Fitzgerald who lent her expertise in Native American women’s poetry to the project. The Department of English and the Graduate School have consistently offered travel fellowships for conferences, workshops, and archival research. My thanks to Wayne Lesser, Coleman Hutchison, Liz Cullingford, and Martin Kevorkian. I am grateful to the English Department and Graduate School for the year of fellowship during which I wrote much of this dissertation. Dissertation research took me to archives across the United States and Canada. For their guidance, I thank the librarians at the William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, especially Bridget Whittle and Renu Barrett, and Professor Daniel Coleman for his hospitality. Thanks also to Saman Jafarian who gave me the best brewery walking tour of Toronto and offered guidance on the public libraries. My thanks also to the librarians at the Helmerich Center for American History at Gilcrease Museum in my hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma for their help and patience during my research for my chapter on Alex Posey, especially Renee Harvey. Thanks as well to the librarians at Amherst College, especially Mike Kelly and Christina Barber, the American Antiquarian Society for their hospitality v and fellowship, especially Molly O’Hagan Hardy, and the New York Public Library. My thanks as well to the librarians at Bacone College whose collection of Alex Posey’s books began this project, especially Frances Donelson. I have learned much from the teaching and scholarship of the excellent English faculty at Texas including Gretchen Murphy, Evan Carton, Phil Barrish, Neville Hoad, and the late Barbara Harlow, among many others. Patricia Schaub’s excellent work as Graduate Program Coordinator made my life as a graduate student much easier. Matt Cohen’s decision to hire me as a research assistant and later project manager for the Whitman Archive shaped my graduate career and provided a lifelong model for collaboration. Thanks to friends and colleagues Susan Zakaib, Courtney Massie, Brianna Hyslop, Allison Haas, Meredith Coffey, Juandrea Bates, Laura K. Wallace, Alejandro Omidsalar, Emily Lederman, Nikki Gray, Robin Riehl, Rachel Wise, Ty Alyea, Colleen Eils, Erin Cotter, Thomas Lindsay, Sara Saylor, Kirby Brown, Regina Mills, Lauren Gantz, and Meg Vail for helping me remember the important things in life. Thanks to my lifelong friend Lauren Smith for her unflagging support and my new friends Brittany Shane and Chelseaia Charran for providing humor and gossip during many swim workouts and happy hours. My family has been my most important and amazing support system over the course of graduate school. My parents Jill and Terry Grewe have stuck with me through difficult times, and I thank them for their love and support. My grandmother Barbara Tenney encouraged my love of reading from an early age, and I was happy she attended my defense. My aunt Sue Tenney helped me out of many tight spots during my Canadian research trips with uncommon generosity and talked me through writing problems as only a fellow writer can. My siblings, Emily, Kristen, and Jack, continue to be an inspiration to me as we make our ways in the world. Thanks to my kittens Priya and Patrick for the vi happiness they bring. Thanks also to Chris Marshall who makes me smile and laugh every day with his wit and kindness. vii “Woven Alike with Meaning”: Sovereignty and Form in Native North American Poetry, 1800-1910 Lauren Marie Grewe, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2017 Co-Supervisors: Matt Cohen and James H. Cox The story of American poetry has developed alongside the idea of America itself, becoming almost synonymous with national sovereignty projects in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During this time the figure of the Indian was, in poetry, customarily depicted as melancholy and moribund, a noble savage making way for a supposedly superior civilization and race. Yet indigenous North American poets also composed and published poetry and participated in reading communities during this time. Examining this poetry reveals how indigenous writers manipulated poetic genres to contest U.S. hegemony and assert sovereignties from the sexual to the tribal to the national. Indeed, understanding early indigenous poets’ formal choices and poetic communities challenges critical narratives of American poetry’s history as having been linear and progressive, demanding a new way of organizing the study of American poetry. In this dissertation, I argue that early Native North American poets chose to write in specific poetic genres in response to local, national, and international publishing worlds. Each chapter examines how indigenous poets comment on the practice and form viii of poetry, thus speaking to a diverse community of poets and readers through a variety of verse traditions. Jane Johnston Schoolcraft draws from multiple cultural traditions as she manipulates time and genre through her mourning poems, ballads, and lyrics in the Anishinaabe world of the Great Lakes. In the Chicago area, Simon Pokagon uses insurgent practices of appropriation to criticize and revise colonialist American poetry through cross-racial citations and borrowings in his birchbark pamphlets and novel. As public literary tastes shift from poems to legends at the turn of the twentieth century, E. Pauline Johnson helps invent a different kind of modernist poetry that challenges representations of indigenous peoples as pre-modern. Alex Posey composes skeptical elegies, dialect poems, and political newspaper verse from western and Creek literary forms in Indian Territory to heal a divided Creek Nation, practicing poetic appropriations that offered ways of relating to genre that remain powerful for Native American poets today. ix Table of Contents List of Figures ....................................................................................................... xii Introduction ..............................................................................................................1 American Historical Poetics and Genre Theory .............................................6 “Unreal and Ahistorical”: Poetry and Indigenous Historicity ......................10 Chapter Outline .............................................................................................15 Chapter 1: “Too violent an application”: Genre, Gender, and Power in the Poetry of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft .............................................................................18 Introduction ...................................................................................................18 A Miscodeed Methodology: Reading Schoolcraft’s Poetry through Anishinaabe Stories ..................................................................................................26 Reading and Writing Practices at Sault Ste. Marie .......................................31 The Muzzeniegun or Literary Voyager: Social Effects of Schoolcraft’s Poetic Publications in a Manuscript Magazine ...............................................40 Schoolcraft’s Formal Adaptations of the Elegy, Sonnet, and Ballad ...........53 The Kinship Demands of Schoolcraft’s Letter-Poems .................................69 Conclusion ....................................................................................................76 Chapter 2: The Birchbark Print Archive: Simon Pokagon’s Poetic Adaptations ..80 Introduction ...................................................................................................80 Archival Loss and Reconstructive Desire: Recovering Pokagon’s Collaborative Authorship and Multi-Generic Compositional Practices through Digitization ..........................................................................................84 Potawatomi History and Removal by the United States Government ..........89 Stolen Poetry in Simon Pokagon’s Birchbark Pamphlets .............................95 Copyright and Poetic Excerpts in Queen of the Woods, a Potawatomi Romance and Temperance Novel ......................................................................109 Conclusion ..................................................................................................119