Wintercounts and Websites: Early Native American Literature in the Digital Age

• In Event: Native Studies in the Digital Age

Abstract

The digital age has revolutionized the ways we can study and teach the non-alphabetic indigenous literatures of early America. Until recently, scholars looking to study extant texts often had to travel to archives and museums. Few were published and in print, while materials kept in private collections were not accessible at all. In the past decade, such documents have increasingly been digitized and are now accessible to scholars, students, tribal communities, and the public. This development has the potential to recast the study of early American literatures by native peoples like the Dakota who kept pictographic records as early as 901 A.D. While Maya and Aztec texts have garnered extensive scholarly attention, North American pictography remains poorly understood. My research over the past several years has focused on reconstructing the literary antecedents of pictographic manuscripts produced by plains peoples in the nineteenth century. This paper sketches a new American literary history that begins with the earliest pages of Dakota Knowledge Keeper Battiste Good’s Wintercount hailing from 901 A.D. It offers a brief literary theory of pictography that traces the intertextual relationship between Ojibwe, Dakota, and Lenape pictographic literary cultures through the eighteenth century. Such work is important not only in relation to early American studies but also to the present because indigenous literacies remain important to contemporary native writers like N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, and Leslie Silko. Furthermore, native peoples in the digital age are reclaiming indigenous American literacies and explicating them from inside tribal epistemologies on public websites that link pictography with language and culture in new and revolutionary ways.

Author

• Birgit Brander Rasmussen, Binghamton University (SUNY)