American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Many contemporary American Indian writers are engaged in the shared project of complicating and revising the received history of the Americas. Kimberly Blaeser reminds us that survival is at stake here when she says that “the creation and interpretations of histories have . . . functioned directly as the justifications for possession or dispossession.”In “Captivity”and Blackrobe: Isaac Jogues respectively, Louise Erdrich and Maurice Kenny reread histories of captivity among the Indians recorded by the colonizers. Their revisionary agendas necessarily foreground interpretive conflicts and draw attention to cultural and linguistic dialogism. As Blaeser observes regarding Gerald Vizenor’s writings about history, these poems “force recognition of the already embattled visions all readers bring to the text[s].”l In doing so, the poems become implicitly ironic, as their Native authors turn to colonizers’ writings about Indians as sources of inspiration for their own work. As they imagine alternative readings of the European-written accounts, they both highlight the fact that written American history still belongs almost entirely to non-Natives and resist that domination. Erdrich begins with a story that is virtually a cornerstone of popular American history. Mary Rowlandson, a Puritan minister’s wife, was captured in the Narragansett attack on Lancaster, Massachusetts, on February 1, 1675-76, in what became known as King Philip’s War, after the English name of its Wampanoag leader, Metacomet. She traveled with her captors for almost twelve weeks, until she was ransomed and returned to Boston. Her account of her ordeal, first published in 1682, went through numerous editions into the middle of the nineteenth century (and has been republished several times in the twentieth). Its full title conveys Rowlandson’s intent and some of the impact her story must have had on early readers: The Sovereignty and Goodness of God Together with the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed; Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson.