Sentimental Literacies: Grief, Writing, and American Indigenous Rights, 1820-1920

Sarah Klotz
English
UC Davis

As an English Ph.D. candidate with an emphasis in Writing, Rhetoric, and Composition Studies, Klotz has embarked on a dissertation project that traces how nineteenth-century Americans depicted, understood, and engaged Native American literacies. She examines texts by James Fenimore Cooper, Catharine Sedgwick, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Apess, Zitkala-Ša and others in addition to didactic texts and pedagogical strategies at work at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. She argues that literacy became one of the primary criteria for determining who qualified for representation (in both the political and literary sense) during the period when policies of removal and assimilation depleted the sovereignty of Native American peoples.

 The question of Indian/White relations often hinged on whether Native Americans and European Americans could inhabit the same national identity and geographical space.  Proponents of removal used the fact that indigenous Americans did not always communicate, historicize, or write in ways that were fully legible as literate to insist that Native/white coexistence was impossible. But even as Andrew Jackson and his supporters used literacy to disenfranchise Native Americans and further colonize their land, many nineteenth-century writers resisted these policies by contextualizing, historicizing and generating new literacies to support the sovereignty of indigenous groups.  To better understand the context of Indian Removal and assimilationist policies between 1820 and 1920, Klotz’s dissertation constructs an account of nineteenth-century literacy practices and their political impacts.