Addressing the Settler Public: Jane Johnston Schoolcraft's Politics of Refusal

• In Event: Theorizing Resistance, Rebellion, and Refusal

Abstract

Bamewawagezhikaquay, also known as Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, an early nineteenth-century Ojibway author and translator, is often hailed as the first “Native American” woman writer (who wrote in English) that has been recovered. She is also sometimes mentioned as the first Indian agent in Michigan, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s “Indian wife.” Schoolcraft wrote romantic poems in English, but she also wrote extensively in Anishinaabemowin, and transcribed and translated many Ojibway myths and tales into English. Many of her translations were used by HRS without proper attribution of authorship. She collected and translated Ojibway tales and myths, some of which were published by HRS.
I engage with an explicit decolonial feminist framework to attend to Schoolcraft’s writings in both English and Anishinaabemowin, and more importantly her literary practices. I argue that Schoolcraft’s literary practices and writings are best understood as putting forward a politics of address and therefore refusal: writing and assuming authority over her people’s stories also afford Schoolcraft a unique opportunity of addressing the settler public in her voice (though it was often mediated through HRS). It is by addressing the settler readers that she stages her refusal: refusing to vanish, refusing to be absorbed into the settler public. Comparing to many other well-known Indigenous authors and activists of her time, Schoolcraft’s address is indirect, and does not appear to be evidently political upon first glance. Rather than making appeals of any particular political causes, like Apess and Boudinot did, Schoolcraft mostly talks about traditions and stories. Her voice is also transmitted, mediated, and often muted, by HRS. But nevertheless, I show that her writings enact a politics of address through the only means available to her to make a political impact: writing. As an Indigenous woman, the options available to her were even more circumscribed. Schoolcraft also could not control how and whether her writings could reach the outside world, as it was HRS who had the sole say in deciding what pieces by Schoolcraft to publish. Her address, in other words, is gendered. This joins her with many other women writers from different periods and different locations, who engage with writing to make political appeals and demands. Yet what sets her apart is that she repurposes writing itself by transforming it from a civilizing tool to a political means.
Unlike HRS, Schoolcraft did not believe nor wish that her people would ‘vanish,’ so her literary practices were enkindled by a very different form of desire and were meant to fulfill a very different goal than preserving a culture before its imminent demise. Through writing—and addressing the white settler public, Schoolcraft stages a politics of refusal through her literary practices and writings: refusing to vanish, refusing to be absorbed into the ascending settler-colonial state. Her literary agency and refusal express her desire as attachment to land and kin, and resistance to the ascending settler-colonial US state.

Author

• Janice Feng, Trent University