Black Republicans, Natives, and Anti-colonial Resistance in James Fenimore Cooper's The Oak Openings and Andrew J. Blackbird's The History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 22008241 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Joel Wendland-Liu (0000-0002-0240-8515, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 23 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 267-288 |
| Publication date | 2021-06-15 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Interdisciplinary Literary Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2161-427X • E-ISSN: 1524-8429 |
| Publisher | The Pennsylvania State University Press (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.5325/intelitestud.23.2.0267 |
| OpenAlex | W3170183932 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 15 |
What historian Tiya Miles calls the “settler colonial slavery complex” mediated knotty and contradictory relations among Native peoples and Africans living in the U.S. James Fenimore Cooper's The Oak Openings, a novel about white settler colonialism set in West Michigan, sought to represent a white supremacist-controlling mediation of those relations. The Oak Openings works to project dominant white/U.S. values, ideologies, and cultural constructions of race and appropriate relations of racialized groups onto imagined literary Indians. While evidence for organized links between the Odawa and African-descended people is scant in Blackbird's History, his and his people's political commitments during the Civil War signaled alliance with the hundreds of thousands of self-liberating Black people who fought to destroy slavery and white supremacy. Blackbird's support for the “Black Republican” ticket in 1856 combined with his active opposition to “copperhead” Democrats registers a meaningful struggle against white supremacy. Like Cooper, the copperheads deployed a racial hierarchy that aimed to disrupt potential alliances among Native and African-descended peoples. Blackbird's History is simultaneously a “lamentation” of the failures of the anti-white supremacy struggle, but also, given the future-orientated aims of the text, a preservation of the embers of that alignment of the oppressed for future use
Alliance · Archaeology · Colonialism · Ideology · Political science · Politics · Racism · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · White supremacy · American History and Culture · American Literature and Humor Studies · Gender Studies · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society
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| Highly cited | No |
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