From captors to captives: American Indian responses to popular American narrative forms

From Captors to Captives: American Indian Responses to Popular American Narrative Forms examines the metamorphosis of the American Indian captivity narrative, its evolution in the American western and its function as a common trope in the American/Indian romance, as well as the genre's most recent appearance and function in American/Indian poetry, prose, and film. Throughout my explication of the history, evolution, and current production of the genre, I interrogate the representational constraints of and the possibilities to transform American/Indian subjectivity while carefully taking into account the actual affect such representations have on the daily life of Native American peoples and cultures.;The American captivity narrative occupies a contested space in American literature. On the one hand, many American Studies scholars believe that the production of the captivity narrative marked the beginning of a new "American" literary tradition. The unique genre eventually evolved to encompass a wide range of fiction and auto/biography. In each of these distinct, yet related forms the captivity plot revolves around a familiar power dynamic: a member of a majority group dominates a member of a minority group; the members of the majority group are the indigenous people and the members of the minority group are white Euro-Americans. Historically, the Indian captivity plot resolves with the ransom, escape, or transculturation of the captive. If we re-map the borders of the captivity narrative genre to include narratives of Indian captives, such as the experiences of countless natives forced to attend American/Indian boarding schools and the hundreds of thousands of aboriginal peoples relocated to and surviving on federal Indian reservations, then we open up a discursive field in which to address the complex parameters surrounding Indian subject formation and its subsequent representations in American culture.