UC Berkeley

In this dissertation, I argue that the economic knowledge adapted from the early American credit economy influenced Native American authors’ literary and rhetorical compositions. By applying a political-economic lens to the works of Samson Occom, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, and Elias Boudinot, I argue that debt and indebtedness offered these Native authors a means of interrogating the dynamics of settler-colonialism and Indigenous sovereignty in the years between 1760 and 1836. Debt and economic principles allowed Native authors to secure the means of Native advancement, critique the program of removal, and reassign dependency and obligation within the rapidly changing milieu of Native-settler relations.