American Indian Nonfiction: An Anthology of Writings, 1760s-1930s

Bernd Peyer. American Indian Nonfiction: An Anthology of Writings, 1760s-1930s. Norman: U of Oklahoma P. 2007. ISBN: 978-0-8061-3798-8. 401 pp.

Although earlier scholars of Native American culture often defined Indians as essentially "oral" and Native culture as antithetical to literacy, much current scholarship has turned its attention to the long history of Indian literary production. Bernd Peyer's new anthology, American Indian Nonfiction: An Anthology of Writings, 1760S-1930S, makes pointedly clear just how long-standing was Native Americans' sustained engagement with the written word. Peyer purposefully chose not to make this anthology an encyclo- pedic collection of texts. Rather, his selections reveal a number of Native North Americans "for whom writing was a major occupation and who produced a substantial body of writings . . . that reflect in some way upon the development of Indian-white relations in the United States" (ix).

Quite a few of the included authors were so prolific that scholarly editions of their collected works have arrived on the academic scene in the past two decades. Peyer's anthology comes on the heels of On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot, edited by Barry O'Connell and published in 1992; Alexander Posey's The Fus Fixico Letters, edited by Daniel F. Littlefield and Carol A. Hunter and published in 1993; To Do Good to My Indian Brethren: The Writings of Joseph Johnson 1751-1776, edited by Laura J. Murray and published in 1998; and The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan: Leadership and Literature in Eighteenth-Century Native America, edited by Joanna Brooks and published in 2006.

The anthology's introductory chapter provides a solid historical background to these texts. At the end of each author's section, Peyer includes a brief biography of the author. The introduction and biographies contextualize the selections with discussions of important events in the development...