Landscapes of removal and renewal: Cross -cultural resistance in nineteenth-century American captivity narrative

My dissertation examines a series of captivity narratives written before, concurrently with, and immediately after President Andrew Jackson's Indian Relocation Act (1830). By focusing on the stories of people who identified as Native American, but relied upon white editors for publication, I show the varied ways in which Indian relocation was textually resisted through cross-cultural collaboration. I begin by examining how moccasin flowers---now popularly known as lady's slipper orchids--- served as a synecdoche for Indian removal in the nineteenth century. After an introductory chapter surveying the environmental aspects of captivity narratives, two chapters look at so-called "White Indians"---Mary Jemison (Seneca) and John Tanner (Ojibwe/Ottawa)---and the nature of their extra-textual legacies in preserving both ancestral lands and cultural heritage. My final chapter turns to Life of Black Hawk (Sauk). My dissertation argues that the popular genre of the captivity narrative is the most accurate label for these texts. Furthermore, these captivity narratives have influenced land use policy and environmental attitudes while revealing the complex relationship between ethnicity, landscape, and authorship. The authors and editors of the captivity narratives I examine did often see their stories as a plea for environmental and social justice, though their lives sometimes ended before they could see the importance their words would have in preserving land and native lifeways for later generations. The legacy of these texts is not tragedy, but renewal.