From "Wild Beast" to "True Born Prince": Native Resistance in Native and Anglo-American…

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How does Wampanoag war leader, Metacom, go from “a Salvage and a wild Beast” in 1677 to a “true born prince” in 1814? Coaxing Anglo-America’s violent Native history into a positive national epic has made this collective amnesia an American commonplace. In this course, we first concentrate on contemporary accounts of three early conflicts between Native peoples and settlers: the second Anglo-Powhatan War (1622-’32), “King Philip’s War” (1675-’76), and Tecumseh’s War (1810-’13). The second half of the course will turn to the Removal Era, a high point in American literature’s obsession with the “fate” of indigenous peoples. This is also the time of James Fenimore Cooper’s and Washington Irving’s contributions to that narrative, both of whom we will read. Accompanying them, however, will be Native retellings of those same conflicts (e.g. William Apess, George Stiggins, E. Pauline Johnson, and others’).