Rewriting the Captivity Narrative for Contemporary Children: Speare, Bruchac, and the French and Indian War

sara l. schwebel

MONG the first literary genres to be published in the A English New World, the captivity narrative holds a special place in the American canon. Its central themes— identity and belonging, civilization and savagery, “purity” and miscegenation—weave their way through the origin stories of the United States. Because questions of possession and nativity animate tales of both captivity and the nation’s birth, captivity narratives perform the cultural work of nation building particu- larly well. Who rightfully owns the land, they ask? Holds the key to “correct” living? Commands the moral high ground? It is to be expected, then, that captivity narratives proliferated during the early republic, gained new life as western adventure stories during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and continue to be produced and circulated in children’s literature today, even 1 as the United States embraces a multicultural ideal. Captivity narratives have continually evolved to meet the needs of readers. Although James Fenimore Cooper’s master work The Last of the Mohicans has lost favor among twentieth- and twenty-first-century Americans, in part because of its

1 Historical novels centered on captivity and its aftermath have long been popular in children’s literature. Well-known examples include French and Indian War stories— Lois Lenski’s Indian Captive: The Story of Mary Jemison (1941), Conrad Richter’s The Light in the Forest (1953), Sally M. Keehn’s IAmRegina(1991), and Scholastic’s Dear America title, Standing in the Light: The Captive Diary of Catherine Carey Logan (1998), and Deerfield stories—Mary P. Wells Smith, The Boy Captive of Deerfield (1904) and Caroline B. Cooney’s The Ransom of Mercy Carter (2001). A number of children’s books have also featured captivities in the nineteenth-century west.

The New England Quarterly,vol.84,no.2 (June 2011). C 2011 by The New England Quarterly. All rights reserved.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00091 by guest on 03 October 2021 REWRITING THE CAPTIVITY NARRATIVE 319 long-winded, passive-voice prose style, children’s books bor- rowing from Cooper’s themes, transforming his characters, and offering decidedly new messages about gender, culture, and 2 race are still widely read. The endurance of such stories in children’s fiction is not surprising. From their inception, cap- tivity narratives have served a didactic purpose. The genre ap- peals to adults today for much the same reason it did in the past, because the books contain messages about staying true to parental and church teachings while at the same time clarify- ing those values traditionally deemed “American.” Another key to the genre’s success, however, is the fact that captivity nar- ratives fascinate young readers. Since at least the eighteenth century, children have found the stories’ awful violence and terrifying suspense titillating. For twentieth- and twenty-first- century readers, moreover, captivity narratives present resilient young protagonists who model competencies long lost but still 3 much desired. Finally, the genre’s malleability for address- ing issues of identity makes it attractive for authors seeking to engage questions about national character and “American”—or “American Indian”—identities. The novels of Elizabeth George Speare (1908–94) and Joseph Bruchac (1942–) are illustrative. Falling within a web of texts linked by a common cast of char- acters (Abenaki, British, and French), geographic setting (the Woodlands region stretching between the Connecticut and St. Lawrence Rivers), and historical backdrop (the French and Indian War, 1754–63), Speare’s Calico Captive (1957)and Bruchac’s The Winter People (2002) rethink and recast their

2 See, e.g., Richter’s The Light in the Forest (1953), which echoes Cooper’s argu- ment that blood determines destiny, meaning that a white man can never become an Indian, even through adoption, and Elizabeth George Speare’s The Sign of the Beaver (1983), in which a thieving white trapper appears as a foil to friendly In- dians. For a more extensive discussion of this topic, see my Child-Sized History: Fictions of the Past in U.S. Classrooms (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, in press). 3 On the history of captivity narratives’ appeal to—and marketing toward—the young, see Alexander Medlicott Jr., “‘For the Instruction of the Young’: The Deer- field Captivity Narratives,” Children’s Literature 12 (1984): 25–46; Paul Neubauer, “Indian Captivity in American Children’s Literature: A Pre–Civil War Set of Stereo- types,” Lion and the Unicorn 25.1 (2001): 70–80; and Lorrayne Carroll, Novel Guides: Captivity Narratives (Detroit: Thomas Gale, 2006).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00091 by guest on 03 October 2021 320 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY literary models to ask new and interesting questions about na- tionhood, heroism, and personal choice.

The Eighteenth-Century Captivity Narrative as Source Text The historical taking of Anglo-American captives to the mis- sion town of St. Francis (in modern-day Quebec) and the retaliatory burning of that Indian village in 1759 serves as the point of departure for both Elizabeth George Speare’s and Joseph Bruchac’s novels. The 1796 account attributed to Susanna Johnson, A Narrative of the Captivity of Mrs. Johnson, containing an account of her sufferings, during four years, with the Indians and French, structures Speare’s narra- tive and informs Bruchac’s revisionist interpretation. Kenneth Roberts’s Northwest Passage (1936), a bestselling novel and later Hollywood film based on the same historical event, serves as an additional model, particularly for Bruchac, who incor- porates (and revises) plot details of Roberts’s novel in much the same way that Speare incorporates (and rarely revises) plot 4 details of Johnson’s. Like Roberts, Bruchac places the conflict between Anglo and Indian at the center of his tale. But whereas Roberts’s novel, a blending of the adventure western and cap- tivity narrative, traces the making of an Anglo soldier, Bruchac’s traces the remaking of Native community in the midst of violent conflict and attempted genocide. North American captivity narratives—stories of white peo- ple taken captive by Indians—date to the seventeenth century. The earliest among them were shaped by the Puritan ministry, who sought to exploit white New Englanders’ fears of scalp- ing, torture, and forced captivity to address wider social issues. For leaders such as Increase and Cotton Mather, the threat of captivity helped draw congregants back from sprawling settle- ments whose distance from the disciplining arm of the church,

4 A Narrative of the Captivity of Mrs. Johnson, containing an account of her suf- ferings, during four years, with the Indians and French (1796; New York: n.p., 1841) is the work of multiple authors, but I use the shorthand “Johnson’s Narrative”in subsequent discussions for ease of reference.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00091 by guest on 03 October 2021 REWRITING THE CAPTIVITY NARRATIVE 321 the pastors believed, put them in spiritual as well as physical danger. At the same time, ministers turned survivors’ tales of their experience in captivity to good effect as they both admon- ished parishioners for their lack of faith and comforted them that in providing such tests of endurance, God demonstrated 5 the community’s election as a body. In the eighteenth century, as agricultural settlements dispersed, captive taking intensified. Indian tribes, their populations devastated by warfare and disease, saw in the nearly ongoing warfare between the English and French opportunities to leverage power in European political al- liances. Captive taking enabled them both to replenish their numbers by assimilating Anglo settlers and to increase their 6 financial security by collecting bounties on those “redeemed.” In each succeeding European confrontation in North Amer- 7 ica, then, the number of captives multiplied. As political realities shifted, so did ministers’ interpretations of captiv- ity. Outlying settlements, which functioned as strategic mili- tary buffers, were essential to the preservation of the colony, so ministers began interpreting the trials of captivity not as

5 There is a vast literature on both the historical experience of colonial cap- tivity and the literary form of captivity narratives. See, e.g., Tara Fitzpatrick, “The Figure of Captivity: The Cultural Work of the Puritan Captivity Narrative,” American Literary History 3.1 (1991): 1–26; Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola, “The Indian Captivity Narratives of Mary Rowlandson and Olive Oatman: Case Studies in the Continuity, Evolution, and Exploitation of Literary Discourse,” Studies in Literary Imagination 27.1 (1994): 33–46; John Demos, The Unre- deemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America (New York: Vintage Books, 1994); Gordon M. Sayre, Les Sauvages Americains:´ Representations of Native Americans in French and English Colonial Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); and Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Vintage Books, 1998). 6 On scalp bounties, see James Axtell and William C. Sturtevant, “The Unkindest Cut, or Who Invented Scalping,” William and Mary Quarterly 37.3 (1980): 451–72. On the French market for British captives, see Stephen Brunwell, White Devil: A True Story of War, Savagery, and Vengeance in Colonial America (Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2004). The French encouraged captive taking because English citizens and provincial governments paid to redeem captives, a practice that simultaneously depleted British coffers and replenished French ones. 7 Alden T. Vaughan and Daniel K. Richter, “Crossing the Cultural Divide: Indians and New Englanders, 1605–1763,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 90.1 (1980): 23–99.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00091 by guest on 03 October 2021 322 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY cautionary tales of spiritual weakness but rather as heroic celebrations of survival—a victory that ultimately proved the 8 righteousness and steadfastness of the Puritan errand. It was during this period, just before the French and Indian War, that Susanna Johnson, along with her husband, sister, and children, was taken captive from Charlestown, New Hampshire, then the northernmost English settlement on the Connecticut River. More than forty years after Johnson returned home, she dic- tated a “true account” of her ordeal to a group of men who published it in 1796. Although they composed the narrative in the first person—in Johnson’s voice—the ghost writers actually fashioned the text from a range of sources, only one of which 9 was the story dictated by the aged former captive. Like the ministers before them, who had shaped captivity narratives for their theological ends, the gentlemen who sponsored Johnson’s narrative used it to further their Federalist political agenda. The finished text bears the mark of its authors’ multiple aims. As literary scholar Lorrayne Carroll explains, “in the compo- sition of visual and vocal display, in sounding like a woman, this text both constructs the conditions for its credibility as a historically accurate text based on the experiences of Susan- nah Johnson and threatens to dissolve into a novel, a genre it 10 explicitly demurs in its opening pages.” Readers did not regis- ter or object to the inconsistencies, however, and the narrative became a bestseller. Popular through the first part of the nineteenth century, Johnson’s Narrative of the Captivity influenced later retellings of events at St. Francis, a crucial episode in the French and Indian War. That Johnson’s tale is a complex amalgam of fact, fiction, and myth is illuminating: captivity narratives always

8 Fitzpatrick, “The Figure of Captivity,” p. 18. See also Greg Sieminski, “The Puritan Captivity Narrative and the Politics of the American Revolution,” American Quarterly 42.1 (1990): 35–56. The term “errand” is borrowed from Perry Miller, whose book Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956) takes its title from Samuel Danforth’s 1670 election sermon. 9 Lorrayne Carroll, Rhetorical Drag: Gender Impersonation, Captivity, and the Writ- ing of History (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2007), pp. 135–84. 10 Carroll, Rhetorical Drag, p. 142. The spelling of Susanna Johnson’s first name varies in early American sources.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00091 by guest on 03 October 2021 REWRITING THE CAPTIVITY NARRATIVE 323 convey fears, ideals, and desires more than they record ac- tual historical experiences. By their very nature, they grap- ple with the messiness of identity and cultural values. European captives, torn from home and all things familiar, were forced to question who they were and what they be- lieved. In close contact with an alien culture, they asked themselves what it meant to be “English” or “American” and what behaviors—including those in which they forcibly or voluntarily engaged on the march and in captivity— constituted “savagery” and rendered them “impure.” Their experience of boundary crossing also compelled captives to ponder claims of nativity to—and possession of—the American landscape. During the French and Indian War, a struggle that stimulated captive taking, such questions grew even more pressing. Although it was just one in a series of military conflicts involving American settlers, European troops, and Native peoples, the French and Indian War has been seen as a critical step in moving Anglo-American colonists toward na- tionhood and redrawing the balance of power between set- tlers and tribes. As historian Fred Anderson has argued, the French and Indian War helped forge a distinctive American identity among provincials and provided a training ground 11 for General George Washington and his contemporaries. It is during this critical, tumultuous period that Johnson’s Narrative of the Captivity, Roberts’s Northwest Passage, Speare’s Calico Captive, and Bruchac’s The Winter People are set.

Speare, Postwar Feminism, and the Captivity Narrative as Children’s Literature A lifelong New Englander with family roots extending back to the colonial period, Elizabeth George Speare published Cal- ico Captive, the first of her four historical novels for children, in

11 Fred Anderson, A People’s Army: Massachusetts Soldiers and Society in the Seven Years’ War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00091 by guest on 03 October 2021 324 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY 1957. Like the rural New Englanders who populate her books, Speare led a quiet life, and in interviews she revealed little about herself beyond the basic facts. She was born in Melrose, Massachusetts, in 1908, graduated with a B.A. in English from Boston University, and taught elementary school prior to mar- rying and raising children. To the public, Speare was presented as a 1950s housewife who occupied her days with Brownies and Cub Scouts, chauffeuring her children to activities, and arranging picnics. As her son and daughter grew and she acquired more free time, Speare began channeling her lifelong fascination with the past into historical research and fiction 12 writing. In the process, she mined local archives, colonial narratives, nineteenth-century histories, and antiquarian ac- counts such as Alice Morse Earle’s Child Life in Colonial Days (1899). Although Speare was circumspect about her private life, her educational, genealogical, and socioeconomic background, as well as her writing, suggest a great deal about her worldview. Both the maternal and paternal sides of her family had ar- rived in North America before the Revolution. Speare’s fa- ther’s family, the Georges, relocated from New England to Nova Scotia in the eighteenth century, perhaps because they chose to remain loyal to the king in the War of Indepen- dence. Some among this branch of the family left Canada for a time to serve as Baptist missionaries overseas. On the maternal side, Speare’s grandmother, Mary Elizabeth White, met her future husband, Washington Lafayette Simmons, a southern gentleman who was born and raised on a planta- tion, when she traveled south from New England just before the Civil War to teach at a female academy. When the war ended, the married couple returned to New England. Their daughter, Demetria, who grew up in Massachusetts, married Harry Alan George, a Canadian-born engineer who immi- grated to the United States in 1887. Their daughter, Eliz- abeth George, married Alden Speare in 1936,amanwho

12 Helen Reeder Cross, “Biographical Note,” in Newbery and Caldecott Medal Books: 1956–1965, ed. Lee Kingman (Boston: Horn Book, 1965), p. 79.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00091 by guest on 03 October 2021 REWRITING THE CAPTIVITY NARRATIVE 325 traced his heritage to the earliest days of Massachusetts Bay 13 Colony. As white New Englanders whose families had made their home in British North America for generations, the Speares were members of a select group that had long claimed a spe- cial status but that also struggled to define itself as “native” to American soil. By means of a complex political and cultural process, nineteenth-century white New Englanders, in partic- ular, re-created themselves as “native” Americans by removing indigenous peoples—both physically, through Indian Removal, 14 and metaphorically, by declaring that they had “vanished.” Anglo-Americans then commemorated the nobility and bravery of the local Indians they had “replaced” in a host of ways: they erected statues of Indians in town squares, romanticized them through poetry and prose, collected Indian artifacts in muse- ums, and established “playing Indian” as an activity appropriate 15 for children. Born in the early years of the twentieth century, Elizabeth George Speare was immersed in this cultural ethos,

13 Author interview with Mary Carey, daughter of Elizabeth George Speare, Mystic, Conn., 9 July 2008. The George and Simmons genealogies are not published. The genealogy of Elizabeth George Speare’s husband, Alden Speare (b. 1910, Brookline, Mass.), is published in Charles Leon Speare and Sceva Speare, The Speare Family from 1642: Genealogical Record of Certain Branches (Rutland, Vt.: Tuttle Publishing Co., 1938). Alden Speare’s great-grandfather, Alden A. Speare, made a fortune in oil manufacturing and railroads; he and his sons established Alden Speare Sons Co., a business that prospered from investments in whaling and the transport of slaves. He was a trustee of Boston University and second mayor of Newton, Massachusetts; the town of Spearville, Kansas, is named in honor of his son Alden H. Speare, who was director of the Atchinson, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad and of the company organized to sell lots and promote the newly organized town. See Samuel Francis Smith, History of Newton, Massachusetts: Town and City from Its Earliest Settlement to the Present Time, 1680–1880 (Boston: American Logotype Co., 1880); “Alden Speare” (obituary), New York Times, 24 March 1902; Thomas C. Quinn, ed., Massachusetts of To-Day: A Memorial of the State, Historical and Biographical (Boston: Columbia Publishing Co., 1892); and Eleanor Fry, Spearville: City of Windmills (Spearville, Kans.: Spearville News, 1975). 14 Judy Kertesz,´ “Excavating the Nineteenth-Century New England Attic: History, Memory, and the Appropriation of the American Indian Past,” paper presented at the Eleventh Annual Omohondro Institute Meeting, University of California, Santa Bar- bara, 25 June 2005. See also Jean M. O’Brien, Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650–1790 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003). 15 Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). For New England Natives’ persistence, see, e.g., Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, The Age of

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00091 by guest on 03 October 2021 326 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY and even as an octogenarian, she betrayed its unrelenting in- fluence. In an audio interview with the Trumpet Club in 1989, Speare professed, “I’ve always been interested in Indians, all my life. Somehow [Indian stories] always fascinated me. . . . I think I would have liked to be an Indian.” The nervous laugh- ter of a clearly discomfited interviewer can be heard in the 16 background. Speare began publishing historical novels for children during the 1950s, a time when the United States was confident in itself, its values, and its postwar power. The country that in the previous century had pushed its boundaries west to the Pacific now confronted new challenges in Europe, in Asia, and in outer space. Committed to their responsibility as the champions of the Free World, Americans looked to their past and found in the bygone era of Manifest Destiny a renewed sense of purpose. Westerns, in literature and on movie and television screens, were immensely popular, and with them, Americans collectively celebrated their frontier heroes and longed for the decisive 17 victories of a “simpler” age. It is within this contemporary cultural milieu that Speare chose the topic for her first historical novel. In an interview, Speare described how she happened upon Susanna Johnson’s eighteenth-century captivity narrative in the 18 rare books collection of the Trinity College library. Johnson’s Narrative is attention grabbing in its own right, but Speare was well primed to engage with it. In 1940, King Vidor had

Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth (New York: Knopf, 2001). 16 “Interview with Elizabeth George Speare,” The Trumpet Club Authors on Tape (Holmes, Pa.: Trumpet Club, 1990). 17 Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth- Century America (New York: Atheneum, 1992); Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988); Lynn Spigel, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 18 A Visit with Elizabeth George Speare, videocassette (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986). In a 1989 interview with Marilyn Fain Apseloff, Speare reported that she actually learned about the narrative from reading Walter Hard’s The Connecticut (New York: Rinehart, 1947). See Apseloff, Elizabeth George Speare (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1991), pp. 23–24.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00091 by guest on 03 October 2021 REWRITING THE CAPTIVITY NARRATIVE 327 directed Northwest Passage, an Academy Award–winning adap- tation of Kenneth Roberts’s novel of the same title. Starring Spencer Tracy and Robert Young, the wildly popular film traced the journey of Captain Robert Rogers and his “indomitable” Rangers from Fort 4 (the starting point of Johnson’s Narrative and the site from which she was taken captive), to St. Francis (the site at which Johnson lived in captivity before the Rangers’ 19 arrival), and back again. But whereas Roberts’s novel and its spinoffs, like Westerns in general, vaunted the frontiersman— the self-sufficient, male hero—Speare was interested in ex- amining the experience from a female perspective. Johnson’s Narrative provided just the model she needed. Johnson’s Narrative vividly describes Susanna Johnson’s forty-eight-month ordeal—the terror of being taken captive, childbirth during the forced march, prolonged separation from her three young children, degradation and neglect in a French prison, the loss of a newborn, a battle with smallpox, separa- tion from her husband, and finally, widowhood as her spouse fell in yet another battle in the years-long French and Indian War. Speare borrowed heavily from Johnson’s text, lifting both details and dialogue to construct her story. In pitching her tale to young readers, however, she focused not on the Narrative’s tale of misfortune and suffering but on the youthful optimism of Susanna Johnson’s largely imagined younger sister, Miriam. In doing so, Speare evokes the spirit of adventure that animates Roberts’s Northwest Passage rather than the doom that domi- 20 nates Johnson’s Narrative. In Speare’s retelling, then, the cap- tivity genre becomes a vehicle for conveying and commending

19 Kenneth Roberts, Northwest Passage (1936; reprinted, Camden, Me.: Down East Books, 2001). Like Speare, Roberts was a New Englander (Maine). For a brief biog- raphy, see Jack Bales, “At the nadir of ‘discouragement’: The Story of Dartmouth’s Kenneth Roberts Collection,” Dartmouth College Library Bulletin 30 (1990): 45–53. Northwest Passage was produced by Hunt Stromber and directed by King Vidor, MGM, 1940. Almost two decades after its release, the film (and its literary prede- cessor) inspired a short-lived television series, which aired from 1958, the year after Calico Captive went to press, until 1959. The film later developed a reputation as one of the best westerns of all time. 20 The one-hundred-page Narrative concludes, “And now reader, after sincerely wishing that your days may be as happy as mine have been unfortunate, I bid you adieu.”

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00091 by guest on 03 October 2021 328 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY the American characteristics of resourcefulness, hopefulness, pluck, and purity. Speare’s novel, like Johnson’s Narrative, opens at Fort 4. Speare describes the fort as a “struggling little community [that] was almost unprotected” (p. 10). Small in size and unassuming in name, Fort 4 nonetheless played a pivotal role in American 21 history. During the eighteenth century, the fort lay on the edge of territory claimed by both the English and the French, and it sat near Abenaki burial grounds (and hence on Native land). Historian Stephen Brumwell dubbed this coveted area 22 “a veritable backwoods Gibraltar.” The action of Calico Captive begins as the men of Fort 4 return from a successful trading expedition (presumably with Indians), and everyone prepares to celebrate. During the evening’s festivities, which follow a long, dull summer, Miriam captures the attention of Phineas Whitney, a divin- ity student from Boston who happens to be visiting the fort. It is with great difficulty that Miriam falls asleep after the party, preoccupied as she is with the next evening’s sup- per, when Phineas has promised to call. But she is startled awake just hours later when Indians enter the house. In the pages that follow, Miriam and her sister’s family are marched through the wilderness. Hunger, exhaustion, and exposure take their toll, but for Miriam, the Indians’ relentless proximity— “They were so close that every breath she drew was filled 23 with the heavy bear-grease odor of their bodies” —is most troubling. While her pregnant sister staggers through the forest with her husband’s aid, Miriam feels alone and unprotected. By night,

21 Today its importance is marked by the existence of a museum and reconstructed fort on a site near Fort 4’s original fortifications. Each year, staff and volunteers stage Rogers’s return from destroying St. Francis. Not surprisingly, many of the museum’s founders are descendants of original settlers. In the summer of 2007, however, the museum had on staff two Native interpreters who engaged visitors in conversations about Abenaki history. See the museum’s website: http://www.fortat4.com/. 22 Brumwell, White Devil, p. 39. 23 Elizabeth George Speare, Calico Captive (1957; reprinted, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), p. 25. Subsequent page references will be to this edition and will be cited in the text.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00091 by guest on 03 October 2021 REWRITING THE CAPTIVITY NARRATIVE 329 she is “forced to lie down between two Indians, a heavy cord 24 thrown over her body and held securely under theirs” (p. 24). By day, she is tormented by Mehkoa, a teenager who delights in pulling her hair and stepping on her skirts, attention that fills her with foreboding. When they arrive at St. Francis, Mehkoa declares his intention to make Miriam “Squaw of Mehkoa” (p. 70). After hearing his pronouncement, Miriam bolts from the council house, dashing his gift of wampum on the floor. Although details of the Fort 4 revelries and march are bor- rowed from Johnson’s Narrative, the Leatherstocking-esque marriage proposal is Speare’s invention. Mehkoa is simply a foil to Phineas; in Speare’s reading of the past, the thought that Miriam could actually marry, let alone fall in love with, an Indian is absurd. Told in Miriam Willard’s imagined voice, the Johnson fam- ily’s punishing journey through the wilderness and frightening stay in St. Francis are but precursors to the extravagant oppor- tunities waiting in cosmopolitan Montreal. Once transformed from an Indian captive into a French prisoner of war, Miriam quickly sheds the “impurities” of the woods and acquires French. With her homegrown beauty and expert dressmaking skills, she turns the head of Pierre Laroche, the most eligible bachelor in New France. While Mr. Johnson returns to New England to raise his family’s ransom, his pretty young sister-in-law is remanded to an elite French household. “Surely it was treacherous of her,” Miriam mused, “but she had to admit that she found every feature of this new experience exciting” (p. 101). Many of her real-world contemporaries apparently agreed, for Englishwomen of marriageable age who found themselves captives in New France frequently took a spouse rather than holding out for an uncertain return to New England. But because Speare’s protagonist is on a journey to discover what it means to be American, she ultimately rejects

24 These details, like many in the opening section of the novel, are taken directly—nearly word for word—from Johnson’s Narrative. For example, John- son’s Narrative reads: “My sister, much to her mortification, must lie between two Indians, with a cord thrown over her, and passing under each of them” (p. 30).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00091 by guest on 03 October 2021 330 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY as excessive the luxury of “Popish” New France, boards a ship back to England, and thence to New Hampshire, where she 25 marries her erstwhile suitor Phineas Whitney. Calico Captive is, in essence, the story of Miriam’s “regen- eration.” At the beginning of the novel, she is a selfish child in the thrall of luxury and romance; by novel’s end, she is a mature adult who values human relationships and true love over flirtation and material goods. Both her trial in the wilder- ness and her exile in Catholic, cosmopolitan New France are intermediate steps along this path to transformation. Laroche, the Montreal fur trader who pursues her, likens her wild spirit and unshakeable dignity to an Indian’s. With the goal of em- barrassing another woman, he drags a calico-clad Miriam to a fancy-dress ball. “It was like that moment on the shore at St. Francis, when she had known that she must run the gantlet,” the narrator, with her privileged insight into Miriam’s thoughts, comments. “A pathway cleared in the room, and they waited to see what she would do” (p. 247). Proud and defiant, Miriam embraces the challenge: she steps onto the emptied dance floor, takes the coureur’s outstretched hand, and proceeds to awe on- lookers with her magnificently executed minuet. The next day, the charmed fur trader, whom Miriam considers the “hand- somest man” (p. 109) she has ever met, calls on her to propose marriage. Miriam considers the offer—how could she not?— but she is shaken by her realization that beneath the coureur’s beautiful features, he bears an eerie likeness to an earlier ad- 26 mirer.

[T]his man was unlike anyone she had ever known before—except Mehkoa! No, she was not fooled by his uniform, nor by his manner of a nobleman. Behind them Miriam could sense the same barely tamed

25 Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650–1750 (New York: Vintage Books, 1982). Johnson’s Narrative reports that Miriam Willard returned to New England with the Johnsons and married a Rev. Mr. Whitney, of Shirley, a man she had met prior to her captivity (p. 99). The attentive New French bachelor is Speare’s fictional creation. 26 With the literary device of the “double,” Speare replicates Cooper’s practice. In The Last of the Mohicans, for example, the Native Uncas and Anglo Duncan are paired as warriors, Magua and Montcalm as orators.

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savagery that had never let her relax when Mehkoa was near. Pierre was as unpredictable as an Indian. [P. 202]

With this scene, Speare invokes a literary trope present in American writing since King Philip’s War. As cultural histo- rian Richard Slotkin explains the phenomenon he has termed “regeneration through violence,” Europeans viewed Indians as savages who impeded their ability to form a perfect Christian republic in the New World. According to the myth, Europeans could purge themselves of false values by regressing to Indi- ans’ primitivism. Thus empowered, they could defeat Indians 27 on their own turf. In this regard, Miriam’s contact with in- digenous peoples renders her both stronger and purer—as a white Christian. When she tries to dismiss Pierre, the self- confident coureur laughs, “[Y]ou and I, we are more alike than you think. You will see me again” (p. 205). Yet in the end, it is Pierre who must concede. Despite the wealth and status he offers her, Miriam will not accept a husband whose “true heart is always in the forest” (p. 258). She may resemble an In- dian in some ways, but the “savagery” Pierre detects in her has been incorporated into a body and tamed by a soul that remain firmly English. Pierre must content himself with insults. “What a stuffy little Puritan you are, anyway,” he retorts (p. 220). The flirtation Speare invents for Miriam develops anti- 28 French themes latent in Johnson’s Narrative. In both texts, English contact with Native peoples is fortifying, while for the French it is enervating. To pursue their lucrative alliance with the Indians, the French have shed their fear of racial and cultural amalgamation; Anglo settlers, by contrast, never forget that Indians are a distinct—and savage—race. Read- ing Calico Captive and Johnson’s Narrative side by side, major

27 Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, pp. 10–16. 28 In the Narrative, Johnson indignantly states, “All my fears and affliction did not prevent my feeling some little joy at being released from the jurisdiction of Frenchmen. I could pardon the Indians, for their vindictive spirit, because they had no claim to the benefits of civilization. But the French, who give lessons of politeness, to the rest of the world, can derive no advantage from the plea of ignorance” (p. 91). For a discussion of the way Johnson’s Narrative reflects the anti-French sentiments of its Federalist editors, see Carroll, Rhetorical Drag, esp. pp. 153–59.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00091 by guest on 03 October 2021 332 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY elements of plot and dialogue emerge as identical, a correspon- dence that prompted Speare’s reviewers to praise the novel’s 29 verisimilitude. However, in hewing so closely to her histori- cal source, Speare shows herself to be uncritical. She does not question the accuracy of the Narrative’s account of historical events; moreover, she adopts a narrative perspective shaped by the eighteenth-century assessment that the Indians were 30 savages and French officials ignoble puppeteers. What hap- pens when a story with the same cast of characters—English, French, Abenaki—and geographical markers—St. Francis, Fort 4, Quebec—unfolds from an Abenaki perspective?

Bruchac, Native Sovereignty, and the Captivity Narrative in Twenty-First-Century Children’s Literature Joseph Bruchac was born in 1942, in the midst of the Sec- ond World War. Growing up in Saratoga Springs, New York, in the home of his maternal grandparents, Bruchac was un- aware of his complex racial and ethnic heritage—Abenaki as well as English and Slovak—until he was in his teens. Long “hidden in plain sight,” the New England Abenaki lacked a visi- ble community—and its accompanying homecomings and com- 31 munal gatherings—during Bruchac’s youth. His dark-skinned,

29 See, e.g., Teacher 91.8 (1974): 88. The judgment has held for all of Speare’s novels. 30 Speare does diverge sharply from her historical source in one aspect. In Johnson’s Narrative, Susanna’s son Sylvanus is a pitiable little boy who barely survives the march into Canada (“my little son, who had performed the whole journey on foot, was almost lifeless” [p. 43]), but Speare portrays him as an eager Indian-in-training (“of the whole wretched party, Sylvanus alone was thoroughly enjoying himself” [p. 38]). The historical Sylvanus was, in fact, not redeemed until after he had lived three years with the Indians and one with the French; he had completely lost his ability to speak English and had adopted Indian ways. In depicting Sylvanus as a willing “victim,” Speare was likely influenced by the 1950s popularity of boys “playing Indian” (see Deloria, Playing Indian). 31 The widely used phrase “hidden in plain sight” is attributed to Marge Bruchac, Joseph’s sister. See Siobhan Senier, “‘All This / Is Abenaki Country’: Cheryl Savageau’s Poetic Awikhiganak,” Studies in American Indian Literatures 22.3 (2010): 1–25.Be- cause he was raised in New York, Bruchac was not in a geographical area populated by other hidden Abenakis.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00091 by guest on 03 October 2021 REWRITING THE CAPTIVITY NARRATIVE 333 Abenaki grandfather described himself as French Canadian, a strategy common among East Coast Indians who for genera- 32 tions feared removal and discrimination. The history behind this choice is complex. In contrast to the Abenaki who live in Canada, the New England–based Abenaki are not recognized as a tribe by either the U.S. or Canadian 33 governments. Federally recognized American Indian tribes engage with the United States as sovereign nations, and their citizens have different rights than do American citizens. At the time government-to-government relationships were being forged between the U.S. and some Indian groups, tribal entities established criteria, often borrowed from the federal govern- ment and tied to blood quanta, for enrollment. Many mem- bers of the Native community disdained these U.S.-sanctioned measures, and so they refused to register with their tribe. As a result, their descendants, however “pure blood” or immersed in cultural traditions they might be, were subsequently denied membership in the tribal nation and, thus, official identity as Indians. In other words, there was no way for an individual who reached majority after the time in which nation-to-nation rela- tionships were established to “undo” the past and gain federal recognition as an American Indian. Meanwhile, as the federal government proceeded to rec- ognize a number of Indian tribes in the western half of the United States, Natives on the eastern seaboard were largely denied federal status as Indians in any capacity. Many Indian nations whose homelands lie east of the Mississippi never ne- gotiated treaties with the United States, and these documents frequently became a political prerequisite for establishing both reservations and government-to-government relations with the 34 federal government. The discrepancy has caused a great deal

32 Joseph Bruchac, Bowman’s Store: A Journey to Myself (New York: Lee & Low, 1997). 33 “State of Vermont’s Response to Petition for Federal Acknowledgment of the St. Francis/Sokoki Band of the Abenaki Nation of Vermont,” December 2003, General Assembly of the State of Vermont, bill S.117,sec.853(c), 3 May 2006. 34 See Vine Deloria Jr. and David E. Wilkins, Tribes, Treaties, and Constitution Tribulations (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999), and Vine Deloria Jr. and Clifford

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00091 by guest on 03 October 2021 334 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY of dissension both among and between Native peoples. “As one reads through the Indian affairs literature and speaks with na- tive people,” sociologist Joane Nagel writes in her book Amer- ican Indian Ethnic Renewal, “the question of who is ‘really’ an Indian comes up again and again. The query is often made in an atmosphere of skepticism and, sometimes, bitter con- 35 tention.” For members of federally recognized tribes, “new” Indians pose a threat to limited financial resources and hard- won political rights. In 1960, Bruchac entered Cornell, where he studied zool- ogy and English in the classroom and, outside of it, was swept up in the social and political activism of his day. The Ameri- can Indian Movement was still in its incubation, but Bruchac acquired a language of identity politics and skills of political or- ganization as he marched for black civil rights in Mississippi and protested American involvement in Vietnam at home in New York. Along with other East Coast Indians of his generation, Bruchac would transform the survival strategy practiced by his parents and grandparents. After college, he pursued a master’s degree in literature and creative writing at Syracuse, spending a considerable amount of time on the Onondaga Reservation listening to elders’ stories. His degree completed, he rounded out his political education in Ghana, where for three years he taught rural children—and listened to elders—as a Peace Corps 36 volunteer. Bruchac united these disparate educative experiences as he completed his doctoral work in comparative literature at the

M. Lytle, The Nations Within: The Past and Future of American Indian Sovereignty (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984). 35 Joane Nagel, American Indian Ethnic Renewal: Red Power and the Resurgence of Identity and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 237. 36 “Storyteller,” Cornell Alumni Magazine, September/October 2005; “Storyteller Joseph Bruchac Discusses American Indian History,” USINFO webchat, 20 Novem- ber 2006, http://www.america.gov/st/washfile-english/2006/November/20061110135223 zjsredna0.6902887.html (accessed 29 June 2010); Susan Gardner, “The Education of Joseph Bruchac: Conversations, 1995–1997,” Paintbrush 24 (1997): 16–44;Joseph Bruchac, “Notes of a Translator’s Son,” in I Tell You Now: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers, ed. Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), pp. 195–205.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00091 by guest on 03 October 2021 REWRITING THE CAPTIVITY NARRATIVE 335 Union Institute of Ohio. He wrote his creative thesis, “Border Crossings,” under the direction of the celebrated Nigerian au- 37 thor Chinua Achebe. Just as his academic advisor revised the imperial narratives of his people in his novel Things Fall Apart (1958)—a book that became a staple of high school and college reading lists—Bruchac sought, in his post-doctoral writings, to correct distorted European images of indigenous Americans in books for school-aged children. Among children’s authors who identify as Native, Bruchac is the most prolific. Having produced more than one hundred texts, including fiction and nonfiction, picture books, chapter books, and collections of tra- ditional tales, he has become the indigenous voice of American 38 children’s literature. Bruchac has expressed some discomfort with that reputation, given both his own mixed heritage and the great diversity of Na- tive American voices and experiences. “My identity,” Bruchac wrote in the late 1980s, “has been affected less by middle European ancestry and Christian teachings (good as they are in their seldom-seen practice) than by that small part of my 39 blood which is American Indian.” Still, Bruchac explained, “I’ve avoided calling myself ‘Indian’ most of my life, even when I have felt that identification most strongly, even when people have called me an ‘Indian.’ . . . [T]here is another term I like to use. I heard it first in Lakota and it refers to a person of mixed blood, a metis. In English it becomes ‘Translator’s Son.’ It is not an insult, like half-breed. It means that you are able to un- derstand the language of both sides, to help them understand 40 each other.” Bruchac’s self-reflexivity in relation to identity

37 Joseph Bruchac, “Border Crossings: Poems and Translations” (Ph.D. diss., Union Institute of Ohio, 1975). 38 As a publisher at Greenfield Review Press and founder of the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers, Bruchac has mentored other Native writers and encouraged them to publish for mainstream audiences, as he has done. 39 Bruchac, “Notes of a Translator’s Son,” p. 197. 40 Bruchac, “Notes of a Translator’s Son,” p. 203. Bruchac raised this point during his 2007 address to the Children’s Literature Association, “How Stories Remember: On the Use of History and Oral Tradition in the Writing for the Young Reader,” plenary session at the Children’s Literature Association conference, Newport News, Va., 16 June 2007.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00091 by guest on 03 October 2021 336 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY is rooted in the complexity of his historical experience—and that of his people—and he brings his understanding of culture blurring and political rights to his tale of the historical events that occurred in the aftermath of Susanna Johnson’s abduction. Whereas Elizabeth George Speare relied on Johnson’s Nar- rative in composing Calico Captive, Bruchac consulted not only written historical sources but also the oral histories that tribal elders had passed down through the generations. The sad, courageous song of a young Abenaki girl mistakenly left behind during Rogers’s Raid was Bruchac’s initial inspiration for The Winter People, his literary response to Calico Captive, North- 41 west Passage, and Johnson’s Narrative. Like Speare’s novel and Johnson’s Narrative, The Winter People tells the story of English captives who journeyed from New Hampshire to the mission village of St. Francis on the eve of the French and Indian War. Its geographic focus, however, is confined to the vicinity of St. Francis; it does not stray to New Hampshire or Montreal. The Winter People commences with a celebration, festivi- ties designed to strengthen familial and neighborly relations. In doing so, it echoes the opening scene of Calico Captive. And just as the Abenaki break in upon Miriam’s household, the Bostoniak (English Rangers) murderously intrude on the Abenaki council hall. Saxso, a fictional adolescent male, narrates Bruchac’s tale. Having lost his father in an earlier European skirmish, the fourteen-year-old feels responsible for his family, and he silently leads his mother and two sisters to safety in the woods. In a moment he later deeply regrets, however, Saxso leaves his post to help Great Simon rescue Malian, a child

41 Bruchac identifies the song’s influence in “How Stories Remember.” Subse- quently, his sister, Marge Bruchac, published a picture book focused on the young girl’s song: see Malian’s Song (Middlebury: Vermont Folklife Center, 2006). Bruchac specifically mentions Johnson’s Narrative among his sources for The Winter People (p. 165), but he does not list Calico Captive. When questioned about his practice of of- fering counter-narratives to classic works of children’s literature in particular, Bruchac acknowledged that Calico Captive was a motivation for writing The Winter People but stated that Northwest Passage was his primary target for revision (personal conversa- tion with author, Children’s Literature Association conference, Newport News, Va., 16 June 2007).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00091 by guest on 03 October 2021 REWRITING THE CAPTIVITY NARRATIVE 337 mistakenly left behind in the escape. They find her bravely comforting herself with a self-invented song rather than calling for help, which would attract the enemy. Meanwhile, Major Rogers’s men discover Saxso’s womenfolk and take them cap- tive. Saxso, who is injured by a Bostoniak bullet, turns to the healer for nurture. Once his strength and spirits are restored, he sets out on a solitary mission to free his family. Saxso’s trip up the St. Francis River in pursuit of Rogers’s Rangers presents Bruchac the opportunity to critique Kenneth Roberts’s heroic account of the soldiers’ retreat from the mis- sion village. In Northwest Passage, hunger and exposure are dominant motifs. Having discovered their food supply stolen by their enemies, the soldiers confront an unyielding landscape: “There are spells, as every hunter knows, when game vanishes from where it ought to be. At such times a hunter, no mat- ter how skillful, is helpless. The forest seems stripped of birds 42 and animals.” In desperation, at least one soldier resorts to 43 cannibalism, although others recoil in disgust. For Roberts, the hardship of the Rangers’ grueling trek lends epic stature to their military victory. But in describing Saxso’s journey across the same landscape, Bruchac calls the Rangers’ claims—and thus their heroism—into question. In Bruchac’s telling, the land freely yields its abundance. “I had only to drop in a hook and line to bring out a fat bass or trout, meat I could eat without cooking,” Saxso reports. “Our northern land may seem barren to those whose eyes are only used to the sight of villages, but there is food to be found ev- erywhere” (p. 107). And unlike the Rangers, who in Northwest

42 Roberts, Northwest Passage, pp. 238–39. My discussion of Northwest Passage refers to book 1, the portion of the novel that focuses on St. Francis and was the subject of the movie adaptation. 43 Despite Roberts’s suggestion, documentary evidence regarding the Rangers’ os- tensible cannibalism is inconclusive. Bruchac treats the matter differently. Chief Gill tells Saxso that his wife and children were killed and eaten, which is later refuted, and Saxso chastises himself for having even temporarily believed the chief: “[P]erhaps I should have remembered that our enemies sometimes said that we Abenakis were cannibals. It is easy to imagine that those who go to war against you are the worst sort of monster” (Joseph Bruchac, The Winter People [New York: Dial Books, 2002], p. 124). Further references to The Winter People will appear in the text.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00091 by guest on 03 October 2021 338 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Passage find the route to be arduous and their feet always wet, Saxso “knew the firm ground to follow” (p. 117). The landscape, blight to the Rangers and bounty for Saxso, also triggers conflicting memories. In Northwest Passage, Rogers urges his men forward by reminding them of the atrocities the St. Francis Indians had committed in the Battle on Snow- shoes the previous year: “Lieutenant Phillips had a strip of skin ripped upward from his stomach. They hung him in a tree by it while he was still alive” (p. 141). In The Winter People, Saxso recalls the same battle from a different point of view. The “screaming green-jacketed Rangers,” who wielded “toma- hawks and knives,” had ambushed an Abenaki party and killed a great many men (p. 122). As the survivors fled, the Rangers proceeded to scalp the fallen. Enraged, the retreating Abenaki returned to avenge their dishonored dead, scalping the more than 140 Rangers who in their bloodthirst had left themselves unprotected. Whereas Roberts’s Rangers stoke their anger with the memory of the battle, Saxso reflects on the incident to calm himself. The Bostoniaks, he recognizes, had invaded Abenaki territory and acted both shamefully and foolishly; they had reaped their just reward. Bruchac’s narration once again pro- vides a reversal. European-authored accounts of colonial war- fare often characterized Native violence as irrational in contrast to European violence, which is understood to be motivated by political ends. By establishing this dichotomy, Europeans de- nied that Natives had legitimate interests and rights to protect. In The Winter People, Bruchac challenges that imperialist nar- rative by demonstrating the similarities between European and Native actions: both may act out of anger, but both are ulti- 44 mately fighting for political reasons, for land. Rendered in the first person, The Winter People is pre- sumably Saxso’s coming-of-age story, just as Calico Captive is Miriam Willard’s and Northwest Passage is soldier Langdon Towne’s; however, Bruchac challenges the Anglo-American lit- erary norm of a heroic journey toward adulthood. In fact, The Winter People is only partially Saxso’s story, for in the process

44 Sayre, Les Sauvages Americains,´ p. 251.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00091 by guest on 03 October 2021 REWRITING THE CAPTIVITY NARRATIVE 339 of relating it, Saxso incorporates numerous other tales conveyed to him by elders. Readers hear about the family’s move to St. Francis as told by Saxso’s great-grandfather, stories of legendary battles with the English as told by Saxso’s uncle, and numer- ous traditional tales—that of “the winter people,” the rivers, the raccoon, and the tamarack tree—as told by Saxso’s mother. Each of the stories contains a lesson, and in rehearsing them, Saxso both soothes himself and reviews the instructions of his elders. At a textual level, Saxso’s reiteration of Abenaki tales transforms The Winter People from a story about Saxso into a story about the entire Abenaki community, past and present. Thus, although The Winter People introduces readers to the same historical moment and the same cast of characters as does Calico Captive, Bruchac shifts the focus from the English world view to the Abenaki way of knowing. Readers are immersed in Abenaki thought through Bruchac’s choice of words, metaphor, and symbolism. As a young boy who finds himself alone in multiple life-and-death situations, Saxso struggles to render the unfamiliar familiar by tapping into his knowledge of the animal kingdom and his people’s spiritual tra- ditions. When a Bostoniak shoots Great Simon, Saxso watches his body become “limp as a deer when an arrow has cut its breath”; thus Saxso wills himself to comprehend the unthink- able: Great Simon has died (pp. 47–48). Moments later, he too is hit, and in his daze, Saxso registers that his enemy has “a face as hairy as that of a bear” and that he and his men scream in voices “angry, wild and raucous as a flock of crows” (p. 48). Comparisons to the natural world—and to the spiri- tual elements with which it is endowed—not only help Saxso prevail over his frightening circumstances but also help him retain faith that his mission to rescue his mother and sisters will succeed. On Saxso’s journey upriver, he appeals to the “little ones” who dwell underwater. “As I sang, I felt the river listening to me. I began to move more swiftly” (p. 99). Seeing hopeful signs in the movement of water and flight of animals, Saxso fortifies himself against despair. Before setting out on his journey, a large bird flies toward him and his spiritual mentor, the Worrier. The

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00091 by guest on 03 October 2021 340 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Worrier thanks this “brother loon” for “reminding us we may rise to fly again” (p. 51). Throughout the narrative, the collective pronouns “we” and “us” dominate. As the Worrier emphasizes, Saxso is never alone: he travels with his history and is guided not only by the past but also by his animal siblings and guardian spirits, who operate in the present. The expansive concept of community at St. Francis is an- other expression of The Winter People’s collective impulse. Whereas Speare’s Calico Captive and Roberts’s Northwest Pas- sage explore how the individual is regenerated and strength- ened through his or her encounter with Indians, Bruchac’s novel contends that a community is strengthened when it in- tegrates new members and acts as one body. Speare’s and Roberts’s texts, guided by the frontier myth, exemplify the con- viction that Europeans and indigenous Americans are engaged in an all-out fight for survival; only one group can lay claim to the land. The impossibility of coexistence helps explain why the very idea of Miriam Willard marrying Mehkoa is prepos- terous: it would defy the natural order. In The Winter People, by contrast, Bruchac argues that ritually adopting whites as full Abenaki is desirable, for the presence of Indianized Europeans serves to fortify, indeed to ensure the very survival of, the community at St. Francis. A number of “white” characters, including Mrs. Susanna Johnson and Chief Joseph-Louis Gill, populate Bruchac’s nar- rative. In Bruchac’s telling, Mrs. Johnson is a kind English captive who befriends many but never becomes a member of St. Francis; she neither converts to Catholicism nor un- dergoes adoption. Joseph-Louis Gill is the St. Francis–born child of two white people who had been taken captive as children and adopted by the Abenaki. Despite his skin color and bloodline, Joseph-Louis is considered thoroughly Abenaki. He marries the daughter of a prominent chief and is later elected chief himself. In Saxso’s St. Francis, the only dif- ference between community members born to Europeans and those born to Abenakis is their physical coloring. When captives are taken from the village, Saxso worries for his blue- and green-eyed friends. “The people who seemed most

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00091 by guest on 03 October 2021 REWRITING THE CAPTIVITY NARRATIVE 341 afraid,” he observes, “were those who had once been En- glish. Though their skin was still white, they no longer thought themselves Bostoniak. More than death, they feared being taken by force back to the heartless towns of the Bostoniak” (pp. 31–32). The Winter People, which argues that physical appear- ance and blood are inadequate bases for forming community, grounds the debate about who is Indian in notions of kinship, 45 knowledge, and practice. Throughout the course of Saxso’s solo journey to rescue his mother and sisters, Bruchac stresses that his success depends upon the help he receives from ani- mals, elders, and especially his mother. It is a community, not an individual, who plays the hero’s part. For days Saxso care- fully tracks the captors’ every move from behind the cover of forest. By taking longer, parallel paths, he runs ahead of the Ranger party, then slowly backtracks to leave a trail of signs for his family. When he sees his mother silently signal back to him, Saxso springs into action. He positions heavy logs and stones to set off a small avalanche that will block the trail after his family passes over it. But at the moment when Saxso should have made his dramatic escape, retrieved captives in tow, a log cracks, alerting the Rangers’ Indian allies to his plan. Saxso is once again wounded, but his mother grabs his gun and points it at the enemy who, admiring the family’s bravery, allows them to proceed. Saxso’s mother and sisters carry him most of the way home. While Miriam is every bit the hero of Calico Captive and Mrs. Johnson of the narrative that bears her name, Saxso remains a part of the larger glory of his family, community, and people. As he explains in the novel’s final chapter, “So it was that I brought my family home. I saved them and they saved

45 Not all indigenous communities share this expansive view. Bruchac has Saxso explain how “white Indians” were made: “when they truly saw who we were and how our lives were lived, the hearts of some of those white captives melted. A few even chose to remain with us, learn our language, and become real human beings” (p. 16). Blood, in other words, played no part in becoming Indian. Individual choices, including commitment to a community, did. Detribalized Indians make this argument today; a “real” Indian is determined not by blood quantum laws but by dedication to learning about, maintaining, and passing on his or her people’s knowledge and traditions.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00091 by guest on 03 October 2021 342 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY me. Nothing that I did was done alone. I was helped by so manyalongtheway....Iwashelpedbythislandthatloves us because we keep the summer in our hearts” (p. 157). Land is personified in The Winter People, and it clearly prefers the Abenaki, who treat it as kin, to the English, who view it as a commodity. The rightful owner of land, Bruchac argues, is the people whom the land loves—the Native inhabi- tants who imbue it with their peoplehood. The descendants of the St. Francis Abenaki who remained at the mission after the conclusion of the French and Indian War continue to live there today, recognized by Canada as a First Nation. Descendants of eighteenth-century Abenaki who remained on ancestral lands in New England, however, lost their public, collective identity during the nineteenth century. The St. Francis/Sokoki Band of Abenaki succeeded in gaining tribal recognition from the state of Vermont in 2006, but the law stipulates that it “shall not be construed to recognize, create, extend, or form the basis of 46 any right or claim to land.” Multiple bands of New England Abenaki continue to press for federal recognition.

Conclusion In her lifetime Speare, who died in 1994, was awarded two Newbery Medals and a Newbery Honor for her children’s fic- tion. Today, two of her middle-grade historical novels rank in the top 101 all-time bestselling children’s paperbacks and 47 frequently appear in school curricula. Bruchac has yet to win a major prize for his middle-grade historical fiction, but thanks to his picture books and traditional tales, he is the most widely taught Native author in today’s elementary and middle

46 General Assembly of the State of Vermont, bill S.117; “State of Ver- mont’s Response to Petition,” http://www.atg.state.vt.us/assets/files/RESPONSE% 20to%20Abenaki%20Petition-an2003v.pdf. 47 Granted by the American Library Association, the Newbery Medal has since its 1922 inception been considered the top prize in American children’s literature. Books appearing on the list of 101 bestselling children’s books include the Newbery- winning The Witch of Blackbird Pond (1958) and Newbery Honor–winning The Sign of the Beaver (1983); Speare’s other Newbery Medal was awarded to TheBronzeBow (1961). “All-Time Bestselling Children’s Books,” comp. Debbie Hochman Turvey; ed. Diane Roback and Jason Britton, Publishers Weekly, 248.51 (2001): 24–32.

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48 schools. Frustrated by the persistent power Speare’s middle- grade New England narratives wield in the classroom, Bruchac wrote a contemporary realistic novel, The Heart of a Chief, in which his adolescent protagonist confronts his teacher about the misrepresentation of Native history in an assigned book, Speare’s The Sign of the Beaver. The non-Native teacher dis- 49 misses the boy’s concerns. Speare and Bruchac shared certain goals in revising the cap- tivity narrative for young readers, but shaped as they were by different social and political agendas and different historical contexts, their understandings of the past—and thus the press- ing concerns of the present—also diverge sharply. Researching and writing in the mid–twentieth century as a New Englander and inheritor of lands once Indian, Speare set out to trans- form the English colonial woman as victim into the English colonial woman as hero. Insofar as she is successful, Calico Captive begins, however tentatively, to break down the logic upon which captivity narratives are based. In presenting a (de- cidedly modern) girl heroine, Speare challenges the female victimhood that enabled vilification of the racial other. Miriam Willard withstands both the trials of the forest and the tempta- tions of cosmopolitan Montreal; neither physical weakness nor French pampering prevent her from embracing the hard work of transforming the American frontier into a future republic. If Miriam can endure hunger, exposure, and the close presence of male Indian bodies, she can survive equally well in other domains traditionally understood as the province of white men. If she can resist the decadent luxury of Montreal—the warm chocolate, silk dresses, and admiring male gazes—she can ele- vate reason over fancy. In Calico Captive, Speare thus makes

48 Few states require or recommend that classroom teachers assign particular trade books or children’s authors, but of the six that do, Indiana, Massachusetts, New York, and California all recommend Bruchac. See Indiana Reading List (Indianapolis: Indi- ana Department of Education, 2008); English Language Arts Curriculum Framework (Malden: Massachusetts Department of Education, 2001); Recommended Readings in Literature: Kindergarten through Grade Eight (Sacramento: California State Depart- ment of Education, 2009); Language Arts Resource Guide: Instructional Materials (Albany: New York State Education Department, 1996). 49 Joseph Bruchac, The Heart of a Chief (New York: Puffin, 1998), pp. 19–21.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00091 by guest on 03 October 2021 344 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY a case for women’s crucial role in the making of America and the American. If Speare’s novel is ultimately about the making of the United States and its citizens, Bruchac’s novel is about the (re)making of the Abenaki Nation and the endurance of its people. His- torians have long known that the number of Europeans taken captive by Indians paled in comparison to the number of in- digenous people enslaved and taken captive by Europeans; but novelists have not contested the captivity narrative’s European 50 frame. In the best tradition of the genre, Bruchac puts his story of captivity to political ends by positioning indigenous women as the captives and American soldiers as the captors. In doing so, he not only challenges generations of published Anglo-American accounts about St. Francis but also inverts centuries of tradition about who can be “captives” and who “captors”—categories that dictate who rightly claims American 51 land. Moreover, while children’s captivity narratives typically emphasize an Anglo-American protagonist’s heroism, patrio- tism, and political growth, Bruchac calls the very notion of a “hero” into question. He disrupts the link between individ- ualism, masculinity, and heroism so prominent in nationalist, adventure westerns. In The Winter People, redemption follows from the collective resistance of a mixed-gender group of cap- 52 tives, a crucial point that reviews of the novel have missed.

50 See Karen Ordahl Kupperman, The Jamestown Project (Cambridge: Harvard Uni- versity Press, 2007). 51 As critics have documented, twentieth-century children’s captivity narratives present stereotyped and distorted images of indigenous peoples. See, e.g., Paulette F. Molin, American Indian Themes in Young Adult Literature (Lanham, Md.: Scare- crow Press, 2005); Beverly Slapin and Doris Seale, eds., Through Indian Eyes: The Native Experience in Books for Children (Los Angeles: UCLA American Indian Stud- ies Center, 1998); and Council on Interracial Books for Children, Unlearning “Indian” Stereotypes: A Teaching Unit for Elementary Teachers and Children’s Librarians (New York: Council on Interracial Books for Children, 1977). 52 In asserting that Saxso “rescues” his family, book reviews fold Bruchac’s narrative into familiar literary tropes and fail to note The Winter People’s project of connecting colonial narratives of war to rightful ownership of land. See, e.g., “The Winter People,” Kirkus Reviews 70.14 (2002): 1028. See also Rob Reid, “Reid-Aloud Alert,” Booklinks 18.5 (2009): 21–22; Reid recommends both The Winter People and Conrad Richter’s The Light in the Forest as read-alouds but does not discuss the profoundly different interpretations of captivity the two novels present.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00091 by guest on 03 October 2021 REWRITING THE CAPTIVITY NARRATIVE 345 In recent years, Native scholars have seen indigenous litera- ture and literary criticism as powerful tools in asserting Native rights to tribal land and political sovereignty. As Jace Weaver, Craig S. Womack, and Robert Warrior write in American Indian Literary Nationalism, “we believe that being a nation- alist is a legitimate perspective from which to approach Na- tive American literature and criticism . . . [and] that such a methodology is not only defensible but . . . also crucial to sup- 53 porting Native national sovereignty and self-determination.” Bruchac’s children’s books counter assumptions of Indian dis- appearance and strive to cultivate in non-Native readers an understanding of contemporary Indians’ history, peoplehood, and rights to land, resources, and federal recognition. Children’s literature is a significant component of American letters, one that has only grown in influence and importance since the nineteenth century. During the 1990s, in fact, chil- dren’s books were the fastest-growing segment of the American 54 publishing industry. The recent success of crossover fiction— for example, J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series—hearkens back to an earlier period when authors wrote books for “chil- dren of all ages.” But there is an important difference between that period and our own. During the so-called golden age of Anglo-American children’s literature, which bridged the transi- tion from the nineteenth into the twentieth century, children’s books were taken seriously as art. Not until the 1920s, with the rise of literary critics within the academy, was children’s literature clearly separated out from that for adults—and at the 55 same time devalued.

53 Jace Weaver, Craig S. Womack, and Robert Warrior, American Literary Nation- alism (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006), p. xxi. 54 On early American children’s literature, see Virginia Haviland and Margaret N. Couglan, eds., Yankee Doodle’s Literary Sampler of Prose, Poetry and Pictures: Being an Anthology of Diverse Works Published for the Edification and/or Entertainment of Young Readers in America before 1900 (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1974). For re- cent trends, see Leonard S. Marcus, Minders of Make-Believe: Idealists, Entrepreneurs, and the Shaping of American Children’s Literature (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008), chap. 9. 55 Beverly Lyon Clark, Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children’s Litera- ture in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). See also Kimberly

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00091 by guest on 03 October 2021 346 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY As a consequence, critics not only neglected children’s liter- ature for much of the twentieth century but remained oblivi- 56 ous to key trends within literary and book publishing history. While the development of American children’s literature fre- quently parallels that of adult fiction, it can also be a site for literary innovation. Joseph Bruchac’s The Winter People is a case in point. Today, adults rarely read colonial captivity nar- ratives or adventure westerns; thanks to social studies stan- dards and multicultural initiatives, however, stories of Indians and Anglo-American settlers continue to be common fare in elementary schools. Children’s literature has thus become an ideal forum for the continued adaptation of captivity narratives, a defining American literary genre. Because he writes primarily for children—an audience whose literature has been underval- ued by the academy—the radical nature of Joseph Bruchac’s achievement may be overlooked. It should not be.

Reynolds, Radical Children’s Literature: Future Visions and Aesthetic Transformations in Juvenile Fiction (New York: Palgrave, 2007), pp. 1–23. 56 Historian Julia Mickenberg, for example, has shown how progressive writers who were pushed out of mainstream publishing during the McCarthy period found safe haven in the children’s book world, in Learning from the Left: Children’s Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). See also Kiera Vaclavik, “Goodbye, Ghetto: Further Comparative Approaches to Children’s Literature,” PMLA 126.1 (2011): 203–8.

Sara L. Schwebel is Assistant Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of South Carolina. Her book Child-Sized History: Fictions of the Past in U.S. Classrooms will be published by Vanderbilt University Press in fall 2011.

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