Assembled for Use: Indigenous Compilation and the Archives of Early Native American Literatures

A wide-ranging, multidisciplinary look at Native American literature through non-narrative texts like lists, albums, recipes, and scrapbooks “An intricate history of Native textual production, use, and circulation that reshapes how we think about relationships between Native materials and settler-colonial collections.”—Rose Miron, D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies at the Newberry Library Kelly Wisecup offers a sweeping account of early Native American literatures by examining Indigenous compilations: intentionally assembled texts that Native people made by juxtaposing and recontextualizing textual excerpts into new relations and meanings. Experiments in reading and recirculation, Indigenous compilations include Mohegan minister Samson Occom’s medicinal recipes, the Ojibwe woman Charlotte Johnston’s poetry scrapbooks, and Abenaki leader Joseph Laurent’s vocabulary lists. Indigenous compilations proliferated in a period of colonial archive making, and Nat