Colonial Period to 1700
Native American Oral Literatures
The texts in this section can be viewed from the
perspective of first contacts--not just the historical
contact between the indigenous peoples of the Americas and
European explorers and colonists in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries, but for many students, their own first
contact with Native American cultures.
In the classroom, the idea of "first contact" can become
a point of departure for analysis and discussion, as
students examine their own reading experiences as examples
of cultures in contact. Those aspects of the texts that
students may find difficult or strange can lead to
discussions of how culture shapes our understanding of the
terms "strange" and "familiar," the "same" and the "other,"
along with attitudes toward oral cultures. As a result, the
examination of the students' reading experiences of Native
American literatures always involves as much analysis of the
cultural perspective of the readers as of the texts
involved.
Cultures in Contact: Voices from the Imperial
Frontier
The texts in this section give students the opportunity
to look at how various European writers made sense of,
explained, and justified the results of their encounters
with Native American cultures; and to re-examine the various
cultural myths of "discovery," "exploration," and
"colonization" that students bring to class. To what extent,
for example, does the Columbus of his journals match the
Columbus of history books, movies, and even cartoons?
Students can use their experiences reading Native American
texts to discuss questions of what the Europeans could and
could not see in indigenous cultures (for example, the
belief expressed in Columbus's journals that the natives he
met had no religion), of what they found "strange," of how
they fit native peoples into their own stories about a "new
world" of "noble savages" and "blood-thirsty heathens."
The diversity of texts in this section also allows for
the consideration of the diversity of European responses,
from Columbus's cultural blindness and assumption of
superiority to Samuel Purchas's legalistic justification of
colonization, to Cabeza de Vaca's growing awareness (as a
captive) of the complexity of Indian life and the tragic
consequences of European conquest.
Cultures in Contact: Voices from the Anglo-American's
"New" World
This section again allows the class to examine some
powerful cultural myths: the arrival of the Pilgrims and the
English colonial experience. The selections included here
underline the complexity and diversity of that experience:
from the views of colonial leaders like William Bradford and
John Winthrop to those of the indentured servant Richard
Frethorne; from colonists concerned with building a "new
Jerusalem" to those intent on creating a "new" England; from
men and women; from the perspectives of poets, diarists,
government officials, ministers, and housewives. The wide
variety of styles, forms, and rhetorical situations allows
for discussions about the social construction of our
literary expectations--what we expect a poem or a journal to
be. An examination of what seems "timeless" or "dated" in
terms of style and theme can lead to an understanding of the
contingency of our own cultural tastes.
In addition "captivity narratives," as exemplified by
Mary Rowlandson's famous seventeenth-century best-seller,
provide a useful analytical model for considering the
question of cultural contact. The physical captivity that is
experienced and then shaped into narrative by Rowlandson (or
John Williams or Cabeza de Vaca) marks the beginning of an
important genre in the literature of the Americas, a genre
dealing with what Gloria Anzaldúa calls the
"borderlands"--the marginal area where culture meets
culture, a place of transformation, of impermanence, of both
possibility and danger. As a teaching strategy, this idea of
"captivity" can be extended to a variety of cultural
borderlands, whether between native and European cultures
(Rowlandson, Cabeza de Vaca), between English Protestants
and French Catholics (Williams), or later between Africans
and Europeans (Olaudah Equiano),
slaves
and masters (Frederick Douglass).
Tales of Incorporation, Resistance, and Reconquest in
New Spain
Finally, not only do the texts from the Spanish colonies
offer a contrast to the traditional Anglocentric model of
colonial history, but the Hopi story of the Pueblo revolt
also gives an example of history from the "other"--or
perhaps another--side. The Virgin of Guadalupe serves as a
fitting conclusion to these first sections of "cultures in
contact" by returning us to the tricky question of
"assimilation," of how the forcible entrance of Catholicism
into native cultures resulted not in the erasure of native
religious traditions but in the creation of a hybrid used by
both conquered and conquerors in a continuing process of
negotiation and resistance. Such a complicated cultural
revolution prepares students for a consideration of the "age
of revolution" in the eighteenth century.
