The nineteenth century saw a proliferation of English language, Native American texts that accommodated and challenged non-Native perceptions of Indigenous people. Interpretations of Native American writing has swung in recent years between the view of the texts as containers through which information about Indigenous cultures can be extracted by non-Native readers to claims of the works as resistance and assertions of sovereignty in the face of ongoing settler colonialism. Either use alone, Mark Rifkin suggests in his new book Speaking for the People: Native Writing and the Question of Political Form, ignores the intellectual labor Native writers have done to mediate both settler expectations and Indigenous forms, a process itself that is worth examining.
In Speaking for the People, Mark Rifkin, professor of English and Gender Studies, explores how Indigenous authors in the nineteenth century claimed to represent Indigenous peoplehood and political formation while mediating settler colonial constructions. Rather than...