Native American Testimony (18th & 19th Centuries)

Introduction

[Micmac Indians], Artist unknown, (c. 1850) © National Gallery of Canada

Written records of early encounters between Native Americans and European explorers, missionaries, and traders are most often found in the records and archives of European institutions and individuals, but in Native American Testimony, anthropologist Peter Nabokov collects written accounts from the perspective of Native Americans. The two accounts we are reading are quite different: one is a story of a relatively recent event, while the other is a tale that rewrites history spanning 200 years; one takes place in France, while the other takes place in Wisconsin. On the other hand, both were told to European observers (the first to a missionary in 1870, the second to an anthropologist in 1910), and both deal with the complexities of relations between Native Americans and Europeans.

 

Questions to guide your reading...

"Silmoodawa Gives a Complete Performance"

- Under what circumstances does Silmoodawa "perform" for the French? Who is his audience? What is his performance supposed to show, for his French audience?

- What kind of space is the enclosure where Silmoodawa performs? Is Silmoodawa on French turf, or in a designated Native American space? Who determines whose space it is, and how?

- Why does Silmoodawa "complete his performance," according to the narrator? How might the audience's interpretation of that final act differ from his own? What meaning can we attribute to his final act?

- How might the relationship between an Native American and Europeans depicted in the story compare to the relationship between a Native American and a European in the telling of the story to the missionary? How is the narrator's storytelling performance like or unlike Silmoodawa's performance?

 

"The Frenchman Dreams Himself Home"

- What are the first, most obvious differences between the Winnebago and the French? What examples of misunderstanding and incomprehension does the narrator give to describe their meeting?

- Why does the Frenchman take his son back to a French settlement? Why does he eventually return him to the Winnebago?

- The narrator of this story talks a lot about "home"--what place is home for the sons of the Frenchman and Winnebago woman in the tale?

- What tensions or questions are brought up by the narrator's final declaration that "The ways of the white man are best"?

- This tale combines two stories--one of the first encounter with the French and another of the arrival of a particular Frenchman in Wisconsin. Why might the narrator have combined them? Do they tell the same story? Are they complementary? Does one help explain the other?

 

 

Winnebago family, Seth Eastman (1852)