This course will offer a comprehensive history of Native American engagement with books as authors, editors, printers, publishers, and consumers with reference to developments in U.S. and Canadian history, and to the history of the book in general. This course takes an interdisciplinary approach to studying Native American and Indigenous peoples’ histories, cultures, literatures, and political movements by exposing students to several critical fields of inquiry. These include: Native American History, Public History, American History, Book History, Settler Colonial Theory, and Literary Studies. These are the many lenses through which we will investigate the history of the book in Indian Country and beyond. Although we will touch on Indigenous communications technologies prior to European contact, our focus will be on the introduction of printing technologies as they developed in North America from the seventeenth century to the present, including new forays into emerging digital platforms.
The Archives & Special Collections at Amherst College holds perhaps the largest collection of Native-authored books in the United States. After purchasing the private collection of 1,400 Native-authored books assembled by Pablo Eisenberg, Amherst has added more than 1,000 additional items, and continues to acquire very actively in this field. The collection includes nearly 150 items published before 1900, including extremely scarce books from the close of the eighteenth century. Recently published works include children’s books, comic books, card games, and artists’ books. For example, the collection includes five different printings of Samson Occom’s (Mohegan) A Sermon, Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul, An Indian (1772–1827); the only surviving copy of Gertrude Bonnin’s (Lakota) The Constitution and Bylaws of the National Council of American Indians (1926); extremely scarce poetry chapbooks by Gerald Vizenor (Anishinaabeg), Joy Harjo (Creek), Maurice Kenney (Mohawk), Cheryl Savageau (Abenaki), and many dictionaries and indigenous-language resources. The focus of the collection is Native authorship regardless of topic, format, or intended audience. The goals of this course are to foreground Native presence in the printed record of North America and to expose the wide range of approaches indigenous people have taken to this colonial technology.
There are no prerequisites for the class outside of an interest in the history of the Americas, Native American and Indigenous studies, and book history and bibliography. In their personal statements, applicants should describe the nature of their interest in the history of the book, Native American and Indigenous Studies, their expectations of the course, and the purposes to which they propose to put the knowledge gained from their participation.