"Mary Jemison: Unconditionally Tragic or Agent of Native Feminine Strength?"

Native American definitions of race lean more on the cultural than the biological. For example, individuals who participate fully in a particular Native society’s cultural practices could become accepted members of a tribe. As a consequence of social constructs, the acceptable roles and behavior of men and women in white society are circumscribed by a patriarchal principle which considered women as lesser beings than men and therefore needed to be subordinated. White men in Colonial America were the keepers of authority in family networks and a significant factor of patriarchal control was the established idea of honor. James E. Seaver in A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison attempts to uphold this notion of patriarchal control through constructing Jemison’s narrative to fit into the social construct of the dominant hegemony. Mary Jemison, a young white girl taken captive by the Shawnees and later adopted by the Seneca, illustrates how one Euro-American can challenge patriarchy by choosing not only to remain with the Indians, but to become one. As an Indian woman, Jemison has more agency than she would as a white woman who returns to white society. Stefanie Wickstrom asserts that Seaver: “did not simply publish her verbatim descriptions of her Indian husband or their relationships. Seaver constructed a portrayal of her forbidden liaisons with Indian men that reflected existing norms about miscegenation” (177). Rather than focusing on Jemison’s whiteness, as many readers and scholars do, I will focus on her Indianness as the source of her strength and determination. Seaver attempts to position Jemison as a white woman in need of rescue as opposed to a woman who has chosen to become part of a culture she has come to honor and respect. He ventures to create Jemison through her white womanhood and as a “tragic victim” (Wyss 4). Mary Jemison’s self-definition as an Iroquois woman and her choice to remain with the Seneca heightens her agency and challenges the dominant hegemonic thinking.

Jemison’s narrative moves outside the traditional captivity narrative and avoids “any resolution other than the safe return of the mother to Anglo-American society” (Wyss 3). In Jemison’s choice to remain with the Seneca and live as a Native American, she is granted additional agency as an Indian woman. This essay challenges claims against Jemison’s agency while showing how Seaver’s influence on the text paints a portrait of Jemison as a white damsel in distress. I will do this by showing how Jemison, as an active participant in tribal ceremonies, a landowner and as a familial decision-maker, acquires more rights as an Indian woman amongst the Seneca than as a white woman in Euro-American culture. Hilary E. Wyss points out how Seaver uses Jemison’s story to show the “cruelty and savagery of those who abducted an innocent girl-child rather than the adaptability and strength of the woman” (3) as opposed to demonstrating the strength and determination of a white captive woman who chooses to remain with the Seneca. Arguing against this is Ezra F. Tawil in his essay “Domestic Frontier Romance, or, How the Sentimental Heroine Became White.” Tawil suggests that “Jemison retained the signs of her white subjectivity in spite of her marriages to Indians and her adoption of Indian ways of life. Yet her racial difference from her own children ultimately obstructs the formation of an Anglo-American household. The story of Jemison’s family thus becomes an object lesson in the incommensurability of whiteness and Indianness defined as two essentially different forms of subjectivity” (Tawil 107). Textual evidence from Jemison’s narrative demonstrates the dedication, not only to her Indian family, but to her adopted people.

A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison is an compelling text from the standpoint of it being the story of a woman as written by a man and no matter how many times Seaver attempts to construct Jemison as a tragic victim, there are examples of Jemison’s strength and determination on how she chose to live her life. In early American captivity narratives, “a single individual, usually a woman, stands passively under the strokes of evil, awaiting rescue by the grace of God…To partake of the Indian's love or of his equivalent of bread and wine was to debase, to un-English the very soul...through the captive's proxy, the promise of a similar salvation could be offered to the faithful among the reading public, while the captive's torments remained to harrow the hearts of those not yet awakened to their fallen nature” (Campbell, “Early”). The reading public was fascinated by captivity narratives because this type of literature illustrated the brutality and savagery employed against innocent white settlers by Indians and were a source history. What Jemison’s narrative proves is that despite being taken against her will, Jemison concedes to her fate and embraces it by becoming an active participant in Native culture. Through her agency, she is afforded a place in her new society that is based on respect. Wickstrom asserts that a certain dictaticism comes into play in regards to captivity narratives: “Men were much more capable of resuming life among the civilized than were tainted women, who were considered damaged goods” (174). Seaver uses this growing fear of cultural contamination in constructing his text and recreates Jemison, after her capture, as a tragic victim in need of rescue as he reveals her remembrance of viewing the scalps of her family: “Those scalps I knew at the time must have been taken from our family by the color of the hair. My mother’s hair was red; and I could easily distinguish my father’s and the children’s from each other” (Seaver 71). Later in the text Jemison reveals her elation at being acknowledged and wanted by the Seneca: “It was my happy lot to be accepted for adoption” (Seaver 78). She did not view herself as a victim in need of rescuing, but one who accepted her fate and became a Seneca woman, proving to the reading public that she was viewed by her adopted culture as neither tainted nor damaged.

Michelle Burnham in “However Extravagant the Pretension: Bivocalism and US Nation Building in A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison” observes how Seaver contends he is the author of the text, but insists that the narrative is in her own words: “without the aid of fiction, what was received as matter of fact, only has been recorded” (Seaver 51). According to Burnham, Seaver “bestows authorship” to Jemison while at the same time “disavowing” her. This coincides with her Indianness. Seaver illustrates Jemison’s Indianness in his introduction: “her countenance is very expressive; but from her long residence with the Indians, she has acquired the habit of peeping from under her eye-brows as they do with the head inclined downwards” (Seaver 55-56), while continuing to construct her as a white damsel in distress. Burnham emphasizes that this back and forth between disavowel and bestowal “represents an ambivalence founded on the practice of internal colonialism” (328). Burnham asserts that Seaver was not interested in Jemison as a Seneca woman but in the using her narrative in the construction of a new nation’s history: “What she might tell him about American national history, and about the military acts of conquest on which the nation was secured” (329). Seaver states in his introduction that what interests him is to “preserve some historical facts” (Seaver 54) and Jemison was his vehicle to this record.

Why would a white woman taken captive by the Shawnee and then given to Seneca choose to remain with them despite being given numerous chances to leave? The Seneca are one of the six tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy and occupy native lands in upstate New York which were set aside by the Treaty of Canandaigua of 1794.

In “First among Equals? The Changing Status of Seneca Women,” Joy Bilharz provides insight on the status of Iroquois women and how the “claims of relatively high status for Iroquois women are usually based on such economic and/or political roles as female ownership of land, control over horticultural production, and nomination of Confederacy chiefs” (102). Iroquois women were the ones who worked the land, so that gave them the rights to it. Female communal work parties cultivated crops and livestock. Men simply cleared the land initially and the women became the horticulturists and rightful owners. Iroquois women were also influential in the political nuances of tribal leadership. Nancy Shoemaker, in “The Rise Or Fall Of Iroquois Women,” acknowledges “Iroquois women acquired their reputation for great political influence partly because clan mothers, the eldest women of certain lineages, had the right to choose successors to office among eligible men in their clans” (Shoemaker 40). The strength, power and determination of the Iroquois women creates a place of acceptance for Jemison and this strong, matrilineal culture allows Jemison to become a revered Seneca woman in her own right.
For Jemison, the Seneca became her family and her identification with the Seneca people is evident throughout the text. Seaver tells us in his introduction that Jemison's “ideas of religion, correspond in every respect to those of the great mass of the Senecas” (Seaver 58). From the narrative, one gains insight into Jemison’s “spiritual connection to the land, to agriculture, and especially to corn reveals important elements of Seneca belief in her life” (Wyss 70). The Seneca origin story is grounded in the land, coming from the inside of the Great Hill known as Ge-nun-de-wah-ga “located at the head of Canandaigua Lake in central New York” (Abrams 6). Being adopted into a tribe holds specific significance in Iroquois culture. The motive behind adoption was “to defeat the evil intention of death by replacing the lost or dead member. In native culture, birth and death are the results of magic power; birth increases and death decreases the orenda (sacred power) of the clan or family of the group affected” (accessgenealogy). Adoption allows for the resuscitation of the dead in the person of another in whom is embodied the blood and person of the deceased. Jemison embodies the dead brother of the two Seneca sisters who adopted her: “it is a custom of the Indians, when one of their number is slain or – taken prisoner in battle, to give to the nearest relative to the dead or absent, a prisoner, if they have chanced to take one, and if not, to give him the scalp of an enemy” (Seaver 77). Jemison becomes a fully-accepted member of the Seneca tribe when, during the adoption ceremony, she is given an Indian name: “his spirit has seen our distress, and sent us a helper whom with pleasure we greet. Dickewamis has come: then let us receive her with joy…we welcome her here. In the place of our brother she stands in our tribe” (Seaver 77). This native ceremony was the first that Jemison was granted access to. As her commitment to the tribe increased, her access to other tribal ceremonies also expanded.

It was Jemison’s choice to remain with the tribe: “with them was my home; my family was there, and there I had many friends to whom I was warmly attached” (Seaver 83) and her place among the tribe is elevated when she marries Sheninjee. She describes him in the narrative: “Sheninjee was a noble man; large in stature; elegant in his appearance; generous in his conduct; courageous in war; a friend to peace, and a great lover of justice” (Seaver 82). At first she was hesitant, yet Jemison made the decision to accept her marriage: “yet, Sheninjee was an Indian. The idea of spending my days with him, at first seems perfectly irreconcilable to my feelings: but his good nature, generosity, tenderness, and friendship towards me, soon gained my affection; and, strange as it may seem, I loved him!” (Seaver 82). Together they had a son and they “lived happily together till the time of our final separation” (Seaver 82). Through her marriage, her position in the tribe changed and she was afforded more power. Jemison was allowed audience with the tribal chiefs when after the death of her husband, it was thought she should be returned to white society. She refuses and recounts: “I got home without difficulty; and soon after, the chiefs in council having learned the cause of my elopement, gave orders that I should not be taken to any military post without my consent; and that as it was my choice to stay, I should live amongst them quietly and undisturbed” (Seaver 93). Some outside the tribe believed, as a widow, her place was with white society, but for Jemison, her place was to remain with the Seneca and her Indian children.

Jemison’s second marriage to Hiokatoo increased her power. She reaffirms her desire to remain with the tribe, who are now considered her family: “I told my brother that it was my choice to stay and spend the remainder of my days with my Indian friends, and live with my family as I heretofore done” (Seaver 120). She is given property: “I should have a piece of land that I could call my own, where I could live unmolested, and have something at my decease to leave for the benefit of my children” (Seaver 120) and was allowed to choose which land she would call her own: “He requested that I would choose for myself and describe the bounds of a piece that would suit me” (Seaver 120). This was all done formally: “The deed was made and signed, securing to me the title to all the land I had described; under the same restrictions and regulations that other Indian lands are subject to” (Seaver 121). This power not only afforded Jemison increased agency as an Indian woman, but created a stable future for her children by providing them with a legacy of land and money. With Hiokatoo, she had two more sons and four daughters. Jemison is granted audience once again before the tribal chiefs to insist on justice after her son John kills his half brother Thomas and requests “the Chiefs to hold a Council, and dispose of John as they should think proper” (Seaver 125). They comply, but find John justified for his conduct and he was acquitted. Ezra F. Tawil claims that Jemison has diminished agency, especially with her marriage to second husband Hiokatoo: “the marriage is described in terms entirely devoid of not only conjugal affect, but also of Jemison’s agency” (Tawil 105). As Seaver’s text shows, Jemison is actually afforded additional agency through this marriage. Her Indian children forever tie her to the Seneca people and her acquisition of thousands of acres of land grants her additional agency as a property owner and landlord. After Hiokatoo, a respected veteran warrior dies, Jemison receives “according to Indian customs, all the kindness and attention that was my due as his wife” (Seaver 129). The only reason for any lack of “conjugal affect” is due to his position as a decorated veteran warrior who was away from his family for long periods engaged in battle.
When Jemison’s cousin George Jemison arrives and is shown as destitute, it is through her position in the tribe that Mary is able to help provide for her cousin: “I paid his debts to the amount of seventy-two dollars, and bought him a cow, for which I paid twenty dollars, and a sow and a pigs, that I paid eight dollars for. I also paid sixteen dollars for pork that I gave him, and furnished him with other provisions and furniture; so that his family was comfortable” (Seaver 144). Due to her kindness and sense of family, she agrees to give her cousin forty acres of her land, but the “deed instead of containing only forty acres, contained four hundred, and that one half of it actually belonged to my friend, as it had been given to him by Jemison as a reward for his trouble” (Seaver 145). At this point, Jemison’s agency fails, but it was as a result of her generosity towards a family member, not her position in the tribe or her identity as a Seneca woman that was the cause. It is from a point of empathy that Jemison is taken advantage of and this is the only place in Seaver’s text that demonstrates where her agency falters.

Aside from the business mishap with her cousin George, Jemison ends up owning over 18,000 acres that cover “the center of the Great Slide and running west one mile, thence north two miles, thence east about one mile to the Genessee river, thence south on the west bank of the Genessee river to the place of beginning” (Seaver 156). She arranges for the sale of some of her land and thereby creates a lifetime income: “whenever the land which I have reserved, shall be sold, the income of it is to be equally divided amongst the members of the Seneca nation, without any reference to tribes or families” (Seaver 156). This, I believe, is her grandest act as agent of her own Indian destiny. She has the power to provide for the people for whom she considered her home.

As Seaver attempts to sustain the view of patriarchal control through constructing Jemison’s story to correspond with the social construct of the prevailing hegemony, Jemison herself presents her life as a Seneca woman in direct rejection of this notion. Susan Walsh illustrates how Seaver attempts to dismantle Jemison’s agency by leaving out of his Introduction “this Seneca woman’s self sufficiency” (Walsh 52), but as Jemison’s story unfolds, her agency as an Indian woman becomes apparent. Jemison’s place among the Seneca as part of their tribe and culture reinforces her power. The more committed to the tribe she becomes, the more her agency increases. Tawil claims “her narrative could do something that that narratives such as Rowlandson’s could not: it defined the captive’s race as something that could not be lost or taken away” (Tawil 102). What Jemison did was transform from her Englishness into a fully accepted member of the Iroquois Nation. Instead of viewing her through her whiteness, one can see her as an Indian woman who gave birth to Indian children and performed all the duties and tasks required of Seneca women. As a result of her Indianness, one sees how her agency increased, allowing her the capacity to become familial decision maker, tribal ceremony participant and businesswoman/landowner and her Indianness becomes the source of her strength and determination.

Works Cited

Abrams, George H. J. The Seneca People. Phoenix: Indian Tribal Series, 1976.

Bilharz, Joy. "First among Equals? The Changing Status of Seneca Women." Women and
Power in Native North America. 101-112. Norman, OK: U of Oklahoma P, 1995.

Burnham, Michelle. “However Extravagant the Pretension: Bivocalism and US Nation
Building in A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison.” Nineteenth Century
Contexts 23 (2001): 325-347.

Campbell, Donna M. "Early American Captivity Narratives." Literary Movements. 13,
March 2008. .

Hughes, James. “Those Who Passed Through: Unusual Visits to Unlikely Places.” New
York History 87.1 (2006): 145-148.

“Indian Adoption.” AccessGeneology: Indian Tribal Records.


Seaver, James E. A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison. Norman: U of Oklahoma
P, 1992.

Shoemaker, Nancy. "The Rise Or Fall Of Iroquois Women." Journal of Women's
History 2.3 (1991): 39-57.

Tawil, Ezra F. "Domestic Frontier Romance, or, How the Sentimental Heroine Became
White." Novel: A Forum on Fiction 32.1 (Fall 1998): 99-124.

Walsh, Susan. “With Them Was My Home.” American Literature: A Journal of Literary
History, Criticism, and Bibliography 64.1 (Mar. 1992): 49-70.

Wickstrom, Stefanie. “The Politics of Forbidden Liaisons: Civilization, Miscegenation,
and Other Perversions.” Frontiers 26.3 (2005): 168-198.

Wyss, Hilary E. “Captivity and Conversion: William Apess, Mary Jemison, and
Narratives of Racial Identity.” American Indian Quarterly 23 (3-4) 1999: 63-82.

the end is in sight...for now

The semester is drawing to a close and I'm sad/glad this project is getting closer to being done. Are we ever done? Are we ever satisfied with the final product? I know I'm not and I have a feeling, this project will be one I continue to work on through the years. Unless I end up in jail for copyright infringement for the photo illustration above. It's been fun y'all!
:)

Jemison: Annotated Bibliography

Annotated Bibliography

Abrams, George H. J. The Seneca People. Phoenix: Indian Tribal Series, 1976.

This book is a basic introduction to the Seneca Tribe and includes the origin, history and background of the Seneca people as well as photographs, maps and illustrations. It was very helpful in understanding the tribe and giving me a basic education on tribal customs.

Bilharz, Joy. "First among Equals? The Changing Status of Seneca Women." Women and
Power in Native North America. 101-112. Norman, OK: U of Oklahoma P, 1995.

Bilharz’s chapter provides insight on the status of Iroquois women and how the “claims of relatively high status for Iroquois women are usually based on such economic and/or political roles as female ownership of land, control over horticultural production, and nomination of Confederacy chiefs” (102). Iroquois women were the ones who worked the land so that gave them the rights to it. Female communal work parties cultivated crops and livestock. Men simply cleared the land initially and the women became the horticulturists and rightful owners. Jemison becomes of owner of hundreds of acres of land as a member of the Seneca tribe. This scholarly essay offers awareness on the position of female Indians within the hierarchy of the Iroquois tribe and this is especially helpful in understanding the life Mary Jemison decided to have among the Seneca.

Burnham, Michelle. “However Extravagant the Pretension: Bivocalism and US Nation
Building in A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison.” Nineteenth Century
Contexts 23 (2001): 325-347.

This essay demonstrates how Seaver contends he is the author of the text, but insists that the narrative is in Jemison’s words: “without the aid of fiction, what was received as matter of fact, only has been recorded” (Seaver 51). According to Burnahm, Seaver “bestows authorship” to Jemison while at the same time “disavowing” her. This coincides with her Indianness. Seaver shows Jemison’s Indianness in his introduction while continuing to construct her as a white damsel in distress. Burnham emphasizes that this back and forth between disavowel and bestowal represents an ambivalence with roots in colonialism. This essay proves extremely beneficial to my thesis of showing how Seaver does this back and forth between Jemison as Indian and Jemison a white damsel.

Campbell, Donna M. "Early American Captivity Narratives." Literary Movements. 13,
March 2008. .

This Web site provides general information on captivity narratives including definitions, conventions, and background. The timeline takes you through the captivity narrative from the Seventeenth, Eighteenth and Nineteenth century by listing the most popular captivity narratives of each period.

This site is helpful with generic information on captivity narratives and is a good place to start, but does not contain a vast amount of information.

Hughes, James. “Those Who Passed Through: Unusual Visits to Unlikely Places.” New
York History 87.1 (2006): 145-148.

James Hughes describes how Jemison, through an arrange marriage comes to accept Delaware chief Sheninjee as her husband. With him, she gave birth to two children: a girl who dies shortly after birth and a son she named Thomas after her father. Having fully accepted her marriage to an Indian who she grew to love and given birth to Indian children, Jemison is a fully-accepted member of the Seneca people. Hughes describes how the couple journeyed to New York State: “Escorted by a small party of Senecas, her child strapped on her back, the young woman sets out through the uncharted wilderness. Hundreds of miles they trek, facing hunger and fatigue along the way. Sheninjee, separately gone on the necessary winter hunt, plans to join them later in the rich Genesee country” (Hughes 146). By the following spring, word has reached the tribe that Sheninjee succumbed to illness and Jemison is now a widow. When Jemison is twenty five, she remarries a distinguished Seneca warrior. With Hiokatoo she has four daughters and two sons. Jemison gains agency through her marriage to this prominent leader and as Hughes contends, Jemison was now afforded entry “in tribal councils, exhibiting both the strengths of her own race and those acquired from her adopted people” (Hughes 147). Most of my information on Jemison’s two Indian husbands comes from Hughes’s research.

“Indian Adoption.” AccessGeneology: Indian Tribal Records.

Included on this Web site is information regarding the intra-tribal workings of many tribes along with their relationship with other tribes and tribal members, and tribal structures. This site also provides source materials and references along with links to other Web sites. The information on these pages gives me the foundational information on tribal adoption ceremonies which was key to Jemison’s initial acceptance into the Seneca Tribe.

Namias, June. White Captives: Gender and Ethnicity in the American Frontier. Chapel
Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1993.

To understand Mary Jemison and her Indianness, one must understand both her history and the history of the tribe she chose to remain with. In order to understand how her Indianness is the source of her strength and determination, the reader should know the people and landscapes that Jemison chose to call home. To gain understanding, I will examine four chapters from White Captives: Gender and Ethnicity in the American Frontier by June Namias. From her book I’ve gathered information on the history of the Indian practice of taking captives, how Anglo-American culture along with ideas of gender constructed the writings about the new American frontiers and how the white female captive in particular became the subject of a new literature. Namias states: “rather than being marginalized, subordinated, or totally missing, white woman captives are the subject of a vast array of materials. In this literature, white women participate fully in the so-called rise of civilization” (Namias 23). This participation, and Jemison’s in particular, demonstrates how white female captives were not always the victims as some authors would portray them. Seaver, for example, repeatedly sets up Jemison as a damsel in distress, yet I have found examples in the text where Jemison’s agency is apparent from her decision to remain with the Seneca to her eventual ownership of acres upon acres of land.

Namias’s book also presented some background material on the man who Jemison told her life story to. James Everett Seaver was a physician and “pioneer of sorts” (Namias 151). Knowing about the man who constructed Jemison’s narrative is helpful. The chapter on Jemison’s narrative gives insight into the reason why some white women chose to remain with their captors. Namias cites the work of James Axtell which might prove interesting upon further investigation.

Shoemaker, Nancy. "The Rise Or Fall Of Iroquois Women." Journal of Women's
History 2.3 (1991): 39-57.

This essay is where I found the most thorough research on the place of Iroquois women in the tribe and how they acquired their reputation for great political influence as clan mothers since the eldest women of specific lineages chose the successors to office among eligible men from their clans. In Iroquois society, the roles of wife and mother may have had a “political significance not accorded women’s roles in other cultures” (Shoemaker 40). It was from Shoemaker’s essay that I gained insight into what may have led Jemison to remain with the Seneca. I believe it was the strength and power afforded Iroquois women that made Jemison realize her position with the Seneca would be greater than that of tainted woman back in white society.

Tawil, Ezra F. "Domestic Frontier Romance, or, How the Sentimental Heroine Became
White." Novel: A Forum on Fiction 32.1 (Fall 1998): 99-124.

Tawil’s essay gave me the place to start my argument because he asserts that Jemison could not get away from her whiteness and that she retained a barrier between her white subjectivity in spite of her marriages to Indians and her adoption of Indian ways of life were. “Yet her racial difference from her own children ultimately obstructs the formation of an Anglo-American household (Tawil 107). He expresses that Jemison created a distinction between cultural identity, or her Englishness, from natural identity or race.
Tawil claims that Jemison’s narrative is one that focuses on “the experience of an English captive who assimilated to Indian culture, this later captivity narrative represented race as an unbridgeable natural difference” and I believe that Jemison was able to bridge the racial gap and become Indian.

Walsh, Susan. “With Them Was My Home.” American Literature: A Journal of Literary
History, Criticism, and Bibliography 64.1 (Mar. 1992): 49-70.

Susan Walsh examines the influences that may or may to have contributed to the A Narrative of the Life of Mary Jemison. Many scholars demonstrate how this narrative can be approached from various directions and how readers might first get involved in the text by focusing on Jemison’s whiteness. Walsh is looking for those places in Jemison’s narrative where Native American facets intersect or clash with the editors: “no interpretation can determine once and for all who…is speaking in Anglo-Indian bicultural productions, just as no approach to the Narrative can recuperate a sense of Indian culture as lived experience” (51). Walsh wants to examine where the subject and editor collide: where does the Jemison’s story stop and where does Seaver’s influence begin? Walsh uses many examples of how Seaver could have influenced Jemison’s text and how none of the interpretations she mentions are mutually exclusive, yet Walsh concludes that meaning is left to the reader. For my research, this essay laid the groundwork of breaking apart Jemison’s text and questioning what may have come from Jemison and where Seaver may have been an influence. The narrative can be viewed as the binary between the noble, faithful Indian and the sneaky, feckless white people and what Walsh is suggesting is that the narrative is more than colonial stereotypes.

Wickstrom, Stefanie. “The Politics of Forbidden Liaisons: Civilization, Miscegenation,
and Other Perversions.” Frontiers 26.3 (2005): 168-198.

Wickstrom’s article goes in depth on the subject of miscegenetic relationships between savages and white women. She researches and gives insight into how, in captivity narratives, men who escaped captivity could assimilate back into white society, but white women could not. Captive white women who return to white society were considered tainted and damaged goods. Many whites and especially children had successfully “acculturated to life in Native American communities to raise doubts about the inherent superiority of civilization and the power of god to deliver Christians from the clutches of savagery” (173). This essay iss invaluable in understanding what happens to Anglos captives when they return to white culture and may have been the reason Jemison decided to remain with the Seneca since her children were Indian.

Wyss, Hilary E. “Captivity and Conversion: William Apess, Mary Jemison, and
Narratives of Racial Identity.” American Indian Quarterly 23 (3-4) 1999: 63-82.

This essay examines how James E. Seaver reveals in his introduction that Jemison's "ideas of religion, correspond in every respect to those of the great mass of the Senecas" (xxiii). Her spiritual connection to the land exposes important elements of Seneca belief in her life. Wyss examines Jemison’s hybridity as a fully acculturated Seneca woman and shows how she was cautious when it came to understanding the ways of her new people and being understood by them. This essay is extremely valuable in understanding Jemison’s hybridity and commitment to her adopted culture. For me, Wyss’s essay is a foundational text in creating my thesis.

revisions

I'm up to my eyeballs in revising my paper. I hate doing revisions. Maybe it's Allen Ginsberg's influence on me ("first thought, best thought") or maybe I'm just lazy and just want to check it off on my To Do list. Mostly, I'm afraid I'm going to make more of a mess than I originally thought. Luckily, I was blessed with two great readers and Nina and Jess did some effective pigeon wrangling and made some great recommendations.

I still don't like making revisions, but I'm sucking it up and getting it done. Ugh.

Works Cited

Works Cited

Bilharz, Joy. "First among Equals? The Changing Status of Seneca Women." Women and
Power in Native North America. 101-112. Norman, OK: U of Oklahoma P, 1995.

Burnham, Michelle. “However Extravagant the Pretension: Bivocalism and US Nation
Building in A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison.” Nineteenth Century
Contexts 23 (2001): 325-347.

Campbell, Donna M. "Early American Captivity Narratives." Literary Movements. 13,
March 2008.

Hughes, James. “Those Who Passed Through: Unusual Visits to Unlikely Places.” New
York History 87.1 (2006): 145-148.

Seaver, James E. A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison. Norman: U of Oklahoma
P, 1992.

Shoemaker, Nancy. "The Rise Or Fall Of Iroquois Women." Journal of Women's
History 2.3 (1991): 39-57.

Tawil, Ezra F. "Domestic Frontier Romance, or, How the Sentimental Heroine Became
White." Novel: A Forum on Fiction 32.1 (Fall 1998): 99-124.

Walsh, Susan. “With Them Was My Home.” American Literature: A Journal of Literary
History, Criticism, and Bibliography 64.1 (Mar. 1992): 49-70.

Wickstrom, Stefanie. “The Politics of Forbidden Liaisons: Civilization, Miscegenation,
and Other Perversions.” Frontiers 26.3 (2005): 168-198.

Wyss, Hilary E. “Captivity and Conversion: William Apess, Mary Jemison, and
Narratives of Racial Identity.” American Indian Quarterly 23 (3-4) 1999: 63-82.

Final Paper Draft

Here is the first draft of my Jemison paper. It's a bit pigeony (re: scattered, not flying in formation), so any help in wrangling said pigeons would be greatly appreciated! Thanks! :)

Mary Jemison: Unconditionally Tragic or Agent of Native Feminine Strength?

Native American definitions of race tend to lean more on the cultural than biological. For example, individuals who participate fully in a particular Native society’s cultural practices could become accepted members of a tribe. As a consequence of social constructs, the acceptable roles and behavior of men and women in society are circumscribed by a patriarchal principle which considered women as lesser beings than men and therefore needed to be subordinated. White men in Colonial America were the keepers of authority in family networks and a significant factor of patriarchal control was the established idea of honor. James E. Seaver in The Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison attempts to uphold this notion of patriarchal control through constructing Jemison’s narrative to fit into the social construct of the dominant hegemony. In “The Politics of Forbidden Liaisons: Civilization, Miscegenation, and Other Perversions, ” Stefanie Wickstrom states: “Jemison agreed to share her story with Seaver, but he did not simply publish her verbatim descriptions of her Indian husband or their relationships. Seaver constructed a portrayal of her forbidden liaisons with Indian men that reflected existing norms about miscegenation” (177).

Mary Jemison, a young white girl taken captive by the Shawnees and later adopted by the Seneca, demonstrates in Seaver’s text how one Euro-American can challenge patriarchy by choosing not only to remain with the Indians, but to become one. As an Indian woman, Jemison has more agency than she would as a white woman who returns to white society. Wickstrom contends: “Men were much more capable of resuming life among the civilized than were tainted women, who were considered damaged goods. This is explained in part by a norm that held that ‘sexual reputation comprised only an aspect of a man’s character, while a woman’s identity was wholly defined in terms of her sexual integrity” (174). Rather than focusing on Jemison’s whiteness, as many readers and scholars do, this essay will focus on her Indianness as the source of her strength and determination. Seaver attempts to position Jemison as a white woman in need of rescue as opposed to a woman who has chosen to adopt and become part of a culture she has come to honor and respect. When she is first taken captive and given to the Seneca, her fear is constructed through the removal of her whiteness:

The squaws left me in the canoe while they went to their wigwam or house in the town, and returned with a suit of Indian clothing, all new, and very clean and nice. My clothes, though whole and good when I was taken, were now torn in pieces, so that I was almost naked. They first undressed me and threw my rags into the river; then washed me clean and dressed me in the new suit they had just brought, in complete Indian style; and the led me home and seated me in the middle of their wigwam (76).

Seaver ventures to create Jemison through her white womanhood and as a “tragic victim” (Wyss 4). In this essay, I will demonstrate how Mary Jemison’s self-definition as an Iroquois woman and choice to remain with the Seneca heighten her agency and challenge the dominant hegemonic thinking. Jemison’s narrative moves outside the traditional captivity narrative and avoids “any resolution other than the safe return of the mother to Anglo-American society” (Wyss 3). In Jemison’s choice to remain with the Seneca and live as a Native American, she is granted additional agency as an Indian woman. Agency is the capacity of a woman to make choices and compel those choices on those around her. This essay challenge claims against Jemison’s agency while showing how Seaver’s influence on the text paints a portrait of Jemison as a white damsel in distress. I will do this by showing how Jemison, as an active participant in tribal ceremonies, a landowner and as a familial decision-maker acquires more rights as an Indian woman amongst the Seneca than as a white woman in Euro-American culture. Hilary E. Wyss points out how Seaver uses Jemison’s story to show the “cruelty and savagery of those who abducted an innocent girl-child rather than the adaptability and strength of the woman” (3) as opposed to demonstrating the strength and determination of a white captive woman who chooses to remain with the Seneca. Arguing against this is Ezra F. Tawil in his essay “Domestic Frontier Romance, or, How the Sentimental Heroine Became White.” Tawil suggests that “Jemison retained the signs of her white subjectivity in spite of her marriages to Indians and her adoption of Indian ways of life. Yet her racial difference from her own children ultimately obstructs the formation of an Anglo-American household. The story of Jemison’s family thus becomes an object lesson in the incommensurability of whiteness and Indianness defined as two essentially different forms of subjectivity” (Tawil 107). Textual evidence from Jemison’s narrative demonstrates the dedication, not only to her family, but to her adopted people.

A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison is an interesting text from the standpoint of it being the story of a woman as written by a man and no matter how many times Seaver attempts to construct Jemison as a tragic victim, there are examples of Jemison’s strength and determination on how she chose to live her life. In early American captivity narratives, “a single individual, usually a woman, stands passively under the strokes of evil, awaiting rescue by the grace of God…To partake of the Indian's love or of his equivalent of bread and wine was to debase, to un-English the very soul...through the captive's proxy, the promise of a similar salvation could be offered to the faithful among the reading public, while the captive's torments remained to harrow the hearts of those not yet awakened to their fallen nature” (Campbell, “Early”). The reading public was fascinated by captivity narratives because this type of literature illustrated the brutality and savagery employed against innocent white settlers by Indians and were a source history. Wickstrom asserts a dictaticism in regards to captivity narratives: “Until the early to mid-1800s, a prominent message conveyed by captivity narratives was that miscegenetic relationships between savages and white women, however tantalizing, were harmful to those involved and problematic for Euroamerican society” (176). Seaver uses this growing fear of cultural contamination in constructing his text and recreates Jemison, after her capture, as a tragic victim in need of rescue as he reveals her remembrance of viewing the scalps of her family: “Those scalps I knew at the time must have been taken from our family by the color of the hair. My mother’s hair was red; and I could easily distinguish my father’s and the children’s from each other” (Seaver 71). Later in the text Jemison reveals: “It was my happy lot to be accepted for adoption” (Seaver 78). She did not view herself as a victim in need of rescuing, but one who accepted her fate and became Seneca.

Michelle Burnham in “However Extravagant the Pretension: Bivocalism and US Nation Building in A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison” observes how Seaver contends he is the author of the text, but insists that the narrative is in her own words: “without the aid of fiction, what was received as matter of fact, only has been recorded” (Seaver 51). According to Burnham, Seaver “bestows authorship” to Jemison while at the same time “disavowing” her. This coincides with her Indianness. Seaver illustrates Jemison’s Indianness in his introduction: “her countenance is very expressive; but from her long residence with the Indians, she has acquired the habit of peeping from under her eye-brows as they do with the head inclined downwards” (Seaver 55-56) while continuing to construct her as a white damsel in distress. Burnham emphasizes that this back and forth between disavowel and bestowal “represents an ambivalence founded on the practice of internal colonialism” (328). Burnham asserts that Seaver was not interested in Jemison as a Seneca woman but in the using her narrative in the construction of a new nation’s history: “What she might tell him about American national history, and about the military acts of conquest on which the nation was secured” (329). Seaver states in his introduction that what interests him is to “preserve some historical facts” (Seaver 54) and Jemison was his vehicle to this record. Jemison was sought out to tell her story and instead of the editors getting a story of Indian rage and mayhem, they received a narrative “extolling Indian virtue and denouncing the genocidal introduction of alcohol into the Iroquois nations” (Walsh 49).

Why would a white woman taken captive by the Shawnee and then given to Seneca choose to remain with them despite being given numerous chances to leave? The Seneca are one of the six tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy and occupy native lands in upstate New York which were set aside by the Treaty of Canandaigua of 1794.In “First among Equals? The Changing Status of Seneca Women,” Joy Bilharz provides insight on the status of Iroquois women and how the “claims of relatively high status for Iroquois women are usually based on such economic and/or political roles as female ownership of land, control over horticultural production, and nomination of Confederacy chiefs” (102). Iroquois women were the ones who worked the land so that gave them the rights to it. Female communal work parties cultivated crops and livestock. Men simply cleared the land initially and the women became the horticulturists and rightful owners. Iroquois women were also influential in the political nuances of tribal leadership. Nancy Shoemaker, in “The Rise Or Fall Of Iroquois Women,” acknowledges “Iroquois women acquired their reputation for great political influence partly because clan mothers, the eldest women of certain lineages, had the right to choose successors to office among eligible men in their clans” (Shoemaker 40).

For Jemison, the Seneca became her family and her identification with the Seneca people is evident throughout the text. Seaver tells us in his introduction that Jemison's “ideas of religion, correspond in every respect to those of the great mass of the Senecas” (Seaver 58). From the narrative one gains insight into Jemison’s “spiritual connection to the land, to agriculture, and especially to corn reveals important elements of Seneca belief in her life (Wyss 70). The Seneca origin story is grounded in the land, coming from the inside of the Great Hill known as Ge-nun-de-wah-ga “located at the head of Canandaigua Lake in central New York” (Abrams 6). Being adopted into a tribe holds specific significance. The motive behind adoption was “to defeat the evil intention of death by replacing the lost or dead member. In native culture, birth and death are the results of magic power; birth increases and death decreases the orenda (sacred power) of the clan or family of the group affected” (accessgenealogy.com/native/tribes/history /indianadoption.htm). Adoption allows for the resuscitation of the dead in the person of another in whom is embodied the blood and person of the deceased. Jemison embodies the dead brother of the two Seneca sisters who adopted her: “it is a custom of the Indians, when one of their number is slain or – taken prisoner in battle, to give to the nearest relative to the dead or absent, a prisoner, if they have chanced to take one, and if not, to give him the scalp of an enemy” (Seaver 77). Jemison becomes a fully-accepted member of the Seneca tribe when, during the adoption ceremony, she is given an Indian name: “his spirit has seen our distress, and sent us a helper whom with pleasure we greet. Dickewamis has come: then let us receive her with joy…we welcome her here. In the place of our brother she stands in our tribe” (Seaver 77). This native ceremony was the first that Jemison was granted access to. As her commitment to the tribe increased, her access to other tribal ceremonies also expanded.

It was Jemison’s choice to remain with the tribe: “with them was my home; my family was there, and there I had many friends to whom I was warmly attached” (Seaver 83) and her place among the tribe and her agency as an Indian woman increased when she married Sheninjee. She describes him in her narrative: “Sheninjee was a noble man; large in stature; elegant in his appearance; generous in his conduct; courageous in war; a friend to peace, and a great lover of justice” (Seaver 82). At first she was hesitant, yet Jemison made the decision to accept her marriage: “Yet, Sheninjee was an Indian. The idea of spending my days with him, at first seems perfectly irreconcilable to my feelings: but his good nature, generosity, tenderness, and friendship towards me, soon gained my affection; and, strange as it may seem, I loved him!” (Seaver 82). Together they had a son and they “lived happily together till the time of our final separation” (Seaver 82). Through her marriage her position in the tribe changed and she was afforded more power. Jemison was allowed audience with the tribal chiefs when after the death of her husband, it was thought she should be returned to white society. She refuses and recounts: “I got home without difficulty; and soon after, the chiefs in council having learned the cause of my elopement, gave orders that I should not be taken to any military post without my consent; and that as it was my choice to stay, I should live amongst them quietly and undisturbed” (Seaver 93). Some outside the tribe believed, as a widow, her place was with white society, but for Jemison, her place remained with the Seneca and her Indian children.

Jemison’s second marriage to Hiokatoo increased her power. She reaffirms her desire to remain with the tribe, who are now considered her family: “I told my brother that it was my choice to stay and spend the remainder of my days with my Indian friends, and live with my family as I heretofore done” (Seaver 120) She is given property: “I should have a piece of land that I could call my own, where I could live unmolested, and have something at my decease to leave for the benefit of my children” (Seaver 120) and was allowed to choose which land she would call her own: “He requested that I would choose for myself and describe the bounds of a piece that would suit me” (Seaver 120). This was all done formally: “The deed was made and signed, securing to me the title to all the land I had described; under the same restrictions and regulations that other Indian lands are subject to” (Seaver 121). This power not only afforded Jemison increased agency as an Indian woman, but created a future for her children. With Hiokatoo she had two more sons and four daughters. Jemison is granted audience once again before the tribal chiefs to insist on justice after her son John kills his half brother Thomas and requests “the Chiefs to hold a Council, and dispose of John as they should think proper” (Seaver 125). They comply, but find John justified for his conduct and he was acquitted. Ezra F. Tawil claims that Jemison has diminished agency, especially with her marriage to second husband Hiokatoo: “the marriage is described in terms entirely devoid of not only conjugal affect, but also of Jemison’s agency” (Tawil 105). As Seaver’s text shows, Jemison is actually afforded additional agency through this marriage. After Hiokatoo, a respected veteran warrior dies, Jemison receives “according to Indian customs, all the kindness and attention that was my due as his wife” (Seaver 129). The only reason for any lack of “conjugal affect” is due to his position as a decorated veteran warrior who was away from his family for long periods engaged in battle.

Jemison’s cousin George Jemison arrives and is destitute. It is through her position in the tribe that Mary is able to help provide for her cousin: “I paid his debts to the amount of seventy-two dollars, and bought him a cow, for which I paid twenty dollars, and a sow and a pigs, that I paid eight dollars for. I also paid sixteen dollars for pork that I gave him, and furnished him with other provisions and furniture; so that his family was comfortable” (Seaver 144). Due to her kindness and sense of family, she agrees to give her cousin forty acres of her land, but the “deed instead of containing only forty acres, contained four hundred, and that one half of it actually belonged to my friend, as it had been given to him by Jemison as a reward for his trouble” (Seaver 145). At this point, Jemison’s agency fails, but it was as a result of her generosity towards a family member, not her position in the tribe or her identity as a Seneca woman that was the cause.

Aside from the business mishap with her cousin George, Jemison ends up owning thousands of acres that cover “the center of the Great Slide and running west one mile, thence north two miles, thence east about one mile to the Genessee river, thence south on the west bank of the Genessee river to the place of beginning” (Seaver 156). She arranges for the sale of her land and thereby creates a lifetime income: “whenever the land which I have reserved, shall be sold, the income of it is to be equally divided amongst the members of the Seneca nation, without any reference to tribes or families” (Seaver 156). This, I believe, is her grandest act as agent of her own Indian destiny. She has the power to provide for the people for whom she considered her home.

As Seaver attempts to sustain the view of patriarchal control through constructing Jemison’s story to correspond with the social construct of the prevailing hegemony, Jemison herself presents her life as a Seneca woman in direct rejection of this notion. Susan Walsh illustrates how Seaver attempts to dismantle Jemison’s agency by leaving out of his Introduction “this Seneca woman’s self sufficiency” (Walsh 52), but as Jemison’s story unfolds, her agency as a Indian woman becomes apparent. Jemison’s place among the Seneca as part of their tribe and culture reinforces her power. The more committed to the tribe she becomes, the more her agency increases. Tawil claims “her narrative could do something that that narratives such as Rowlandson’s could not: it defined the captive’s race as something that could not be lost or taken away” (Tawil 102). What Jemison did was transform from her Englishness into a fully accepted member of the Seneca nation. Instead of viewing her through her whiteness, one can see her as an Indian woman who gave birth to Indian children and performed all the duties and tasks required of Seneca women. As a result of her Indianness, one sees how her agency increased allowing her the capacity to become familial decision maker, tribal ceremony participant and businesswoman/landowner and her Indianness becomes the source of her strength and determination.

What Jack Michael does when I spend endless hours researching and writing about Mary Jemison...

More Contextual Documentation

I filled in the blanks from my previous post and have added a couple more things. I am including two maps and one painting (above that I thought just looked cool).

New Entries

Two books that give insight into the Seneca Indians are:

Abrams, George H.J. The Seneca People. Phoenix: Indian Tribal Series, 1976.

This book is a primer in the Seneca people, from their origin and history to illustrations, maps and twentieth century photographs.

Porter, Joy. To Be Indian: The Life of Iroquois-Seneca Arthur Caswell Parker. Norman:
U of Oklahoma P, 1967.

This book has a section on Parker’s adoption ceremony and gave detailed descriptions of it. Since Jemison was adopted by the Seneca during a tribal ceremony, I believe looking at other such adoptions ceremonies would be helpful.

The role of Native women in a tribe is key to understanding Jemison’s agency as an Indian woman:

Shoemaker, Nancy. "The Rise Or Fall Of Iroquois Women." Journal of Women's
History 2.3 (1991): 39-57.

From this essay I learned the term “declension narrative” which means a narrative history which demonstrates a change cast in terms of decline. Shoemaker says this is “prominent in t he history of Iroquois women” (39). In this essay, Shoemaker reveals how the political, economic and individual freedoms of Iroquois women have changed during colonization.
Pre-Revolutionary War, Iroquois women controlled the means of production and their “power came from the group’s matrilineal, not matriarchal, social organization” (40). As clan mothers, women had political influence since the oldest women of specific lineages chose successors to office from men in their clans.

Here is information on Sheninjee and Hiokatoo that I hope will help:

Hughes, James. "Those Who Passed Through: Unusual Visits To Unlikely Places. Mary
Jemison." New York History 87.1 (2006): 144-148.

James Hughes, a retired teacher and historian from Syracuse, New York writes about Mary Jemison in this issue of New York History produced by the New York State Historical Society. He gives detailed information on both of Mary Jemison’s Indian husbands: Sheninjee and Hiokatoo. It is through her marriages to powerful Indian men that Jemison gains some of her agency. From her marriage to second husband Hiokatoo, Jemison, “as the wife of a powerful leader of the Seneca Nation…becomes prominent in tribal councils, exhibiting both the strengths of her own race and those acquired from her adopted people” (147).



This is a map of the "Iroquois Land Cessions during colonial times, and early United States changes in Iroquois and Seneca land control" (Abrams 28-29).



This map shows the Seneca Indian Reservations from the Treaty of 1797 (Abrams 49).

Contextual Documents

In between bouts of dizziness, etc., I'm trying to keep up with everything (okay...I'm about to give up on my ecofeminism independent study). Hopefully these new meds will stop my world from spinning (at least I spin with the Earth...that's a little ecofem, isn't it?). Here's some early work on a couple of contextual documents. Like I tell my students: in order to understand what's going on in front of you, you need to be aware of what's going on around you.

To understand Mary Jemison and her Indianness, one must understand both her history and the history of the tribe she chose to remain with. In order to understand how her Indianness is the source of her strength and determination, the reader should know the people and landscapes that Jemison chose to call home. To gain understanding, I will examine four chapters from White Captives: Gender and Ethnicity in the American Frontier by June Namias. From her book I’ve gathered information on the history of the Indian practice of taking captives, how Anglo-American culture along with ideas of gender constructed the writings about the new American frontiers and how the white female captive in particular became the subject of a new literature. Namias states: “rather than being marginalized, subordinated, or totally missing, white woman captives are the subject of a vast array of materials. In this literature, white women participate fully in the so-called rise of civilization” (Namias 23). This participation, and Jemison’s in particular, demonstrates how white female captives were not always the victims as some authors would portray them. Seaver, for example, repeatedly sets up Jemison as a damsel in distress, yet I have found examples in the text where Jemison’s agency is apparent from her decision to remain with the Seneca to her eventual ownership of acres upon acres of land.

Namias’s book also presented some background material on the man who Jemison told her life story to. James Everett Seaver was a physician and “pioneer of sorts” (Namias 151). Knowing about the man who constructed Jemison’s narrative is helpful.

The chapter on Jemison’s narrative gives insight into the reason why some white women chose to remain with their captors. Namias cites the work of James Axtell which might prove interesting upon further investigation.

Namias, June. White Captives: Gender and Ethnicity in the American Frontier. Chapel
Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1993.


To understand Mary Jemison, you need to know about the Seneca people. One of the six tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy, the Seneca occupy native lands in upstate New York which were set aside by the Treaty of Canandaigua of 1794. I found a good starting point at:
http://www.senecaindian.com
which led me to:
http://www.sni.org.
Both of these Web sites give a good overview of the Six Nations of the Iroquois and provide additional resources that I will be investigating. Turns out I lived just a few miles away from one of the six nations, the Onondaga Nation, when I attended SUNY Cortland.


The role of Native women in a tribe is key to understanding Jemison’s agency as an Indian woman. Two texts that I believe are important are:

Bilharz, Joy. "First among Equals? The Changing Status of Seneca Women." Women and
Power in Native North America. 101-112. Norman, OK: U of Oklahoma P, 1995.

Bilharz’s chapter provides insight on the status of Iroquois women and how the “claims of relatively high status for Iroquois women are usually based on such economic and/or political roles as female ownership of land, control over horticultural production, and nomination of Confederacy chiefs” (102). Iroquois women were the ones who worked the land so that gave them the rights to it. Female communal work parties cultivated crops and livestock. Men simply cleared the land initially and the women became the horticulturists and rightful owners. Jemison becomes of owner of hundreds of acres of land as a member of the Seneca tribe.

Shoemaker, Nancy. "The Rise Or Fall Of Iroquois Women." Journal of Women's
History 2.3 (1991): 39-57.
(I am waiting on this article from interlibrary loan.)


Mary Jemison was married to two Native American men: Sheninjee and Hiokatoo. Jemison was forced to marry Sheninjee, but she grew to love him and when he died a few years after they were married, she mourned her loss. She later married Hiokatoo and stayed married to him until his death decades later. I am currently looking for more information on Sheninjee and Hiokatoo and hope the following will help:

Hughes, James. "Those Who Passed Through: Unusual Visits To Unlikely Places. Mary
Jemison." New York History 87.1 (2006): 144-148.
(I am waiting on this article from interlibrary loan.)

Okay, I need to go lay down now. :)

Doomed!

While trying to find biographical info on Seaver, I discovered that in 2002 a writer named Deborah Larson took "The Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison" and turned it into a novel. Publisher's Weekly said: "Larsen's lyricism and imagery are haunting, and her poet's sensibility is omnipresent, especially in her descriptions of the natural world. Yet the first-person reflections that Larsen intersperses throughout somehow don't quite live up to the sensational story. Mary's voice is likable but not fully developed, and not nearly as compelling as Larsen's more straightforward descriptions of Seneca life and the encounters between Native American and white society. After the real-life Jemison told her story to a physician and local historian, James Seaver, she reportedly said, "I did not tell them who wrote it down half of what it was." Larsen's tale soars with poetic language, but does not quite succeed in filling in the missing half."

You're not kidding! As if I'm not having enough trouble figuring out which part of Jemison's story is hers and which part was "enhanced" by Seaver, now I have to trip over this mess. After reading Seaver's account, Larson's fictionalization seems a bit to flowery to me. Here's an excerpt:

Mary had loved the family axe as a glittering extension of her own arm. Her father had sharpened it the morning they were taken, and she had been splitting wood, cutting the thick white oak with ease, cleaving filamented piece from piece for the sake of chilly evenings and for cooking. She imagined the flames tentative at first and then thrusting up, spending themselves in the foreign air for the comfort of her family.

And then for what seemed like no reason at all (because her father had said they could make it on their own until late spring, when the closest fort would send a militia to fend off Indian raiding parties), she saw feet in moccasins not far from the woodpile at the base of a shagbark hickory. She lifted her eyes to the impassive eyes and sculpted planes of what she would later learn was not an "Indian's" face but that of a Shawnee.

She spoke no word at this time, though a rage started up within her. So. Feet in moccasins.

So, feet in moccasins were now pressing into the very ground that belonged to her family, and she wondered how Father would explain them away.

How could he, how could he have left them as prey to what after all had hurtled across the horizon, to what with sureness had crept through their fields? No, he had actually led his family. How could he? How could he have led them, as it is written in Scripture, like "sheep to the slaughter"?

Was it for this that she had been conceived?

And born Mary, for so she had been born and named in the yellow air below-decks of the ship Mary William, out of Ireland, bound for Philadelphia. Thomas Jemison and the pregnant Jane Erwin Jemison had sailed out onto the loose, flecked fields of the Atlantic, preferring the clear American wilderness to the Irish civilization of the day. Away from Ireland, they would feel free to want something that was actually obtainable. They wanted a farm.

They landed; they moved straight on out of Philadelphia to a tract of land not far from what would become the town of Gettysburg. What they marked out as their farm lay on the tangled banks of a creek named Marsh. Later they moved to larger fields, on one of which stood a good house and a log barn, and it was here now where Thomas had let them all fall into the hands of six Shawnee and four Frenchmen and where his mouth had been suddenly stopped of his stories, of his resonant Irish jests.

This is how in April of 1758 a Shawnee came to be wearing her mother's indigo shawl; this is why Mary found herself watching a Frenchman pocket the family coins; why another Shawnee packed with great precision yesterday's corn cakes into a sling-like bag which he hoisted to his shoulder as they all took off across her beloved fields.

They just left, then, for somewhere that must have been north and west.

Mary was in the grip of a Shawnee. She was not dead yet, but she knew that if she didn't move fast enough he could simply cut her down and away. His companions would understand what he meant them to know by means of a mere flashing of his eyes in her direction: too much trouble, those eyes would signal; too much trouble, the white girl, too slow.

She closed her own eyes then and stumbled along, deciding to give her captor that trouble. He felt it; he jerked her and then jerked her hard again, as if she were a snag on his fishing line. She didn't care.

Let him jerk her, let him jerk her arm until it hung loose at her shoulder, and then dressed as he was in her mother's shawl he could shoot her or split her skull with his hatchet.

She heard her father's voice: "Mary."

"Mary," he said. "Open your eyes. Watch where you are being led."

Then the young Irishwoman opened her eyes and saw them all–her parents; her brothers, Robert and Matthew; her sister, Betsey; the neighbor and her three children. Then it was not so easy for her to be stubborn, to ask for death; to see them moving far off ahead of her now into the woods she had named for her cow: Boss's Wood.

Besides, if she was to die she didn't want Father's back to her, she wanted him to see her die, to see: let him see and behold where all his good cheer, where his cracked optimism had got them.

Captured by the Shawnee raiding party and headed out across her family's fields.

The fields stood in the mild April sun looking just as they did before her capture.

Mary stared: how could they look as they did? And she answered her own thought: because, the fields are just themselves.

At the time of the French and Indian War the south-central Pennsylvania fields sometimes curved halfway up hillsides. With the unseen roots of a thousand things–Queen Anne's lace, wild garlic, common grass, the corn and flaxseed her father had sown–the soil was held close to the gray shale that made up the sweepings of land. From beneath the rock, the earth's pull kept the heavy red clay from flying up into a sky marked by scuddings of clouds.

Before her capture, Mary had begun to think that although some things of fields–lilies, vines, choking patches of weeds–are mentioned in Scripture, yet they are not Scripture. The things of the fields are themselves. As Scripture is itself and holds only a partial account of the murderous, of good will, and of their frequent twinings.

God, she had ventured to think, may have given her the New World fields to balance the Scriptures and as a perfect refuge from the Presbyterian catechism.

"Consider the lilies how they grow": the Scripture said, "they toil not, they spin not; and yet I say unto you, that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these." And the lily lives just as it did in Israel, even though it has never brushed up against so much as one page of Scripture. That alone could keep her from going mad.

The lily in a field was a fact. For, she had thought, not even Scripture–in all its glory–was arrayed as one of those.

Excerpted from The White © Copyright 2003 by Deborah Larsen. Reprinted with permission by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.

Yikes! :)

Mary Jemison: Unconditionally Tragic or Agent of Native Feminine Strength

As I do more research, I realize how problematic Jemison's narrative can be. Where is it Jemison's story and where is Seaver influencing the text? I had to keep reminding myself that it's a woman's story told through the pen of a man. There are places where you hear Seaver's voice screaming through the text, but I also hear Jemison's voice loud and clear.

Here's my idea for my paper proposal:
Native American definitions of race tend to lean more on the cultural rather than biological aspects. Individuals who participate fully in a particular Native society’s cultural practices could become accepted members of a tribe. Mary Jemison, a young white girl taken captive by the Shawnees and later adopted by the Seneca, demonstrates in James E. Seaver’s A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison, how one Euro-American can challenge patriarchy by choosing not only to remain with the Indians, but become one. As a female Indian, Jemison has more agency than she would as a white woman who returns to white society. Ezra F. Tawil claims Jemison has diminished agency, especially with her marriage to second husband Hiokatoo: “the marriage is described in terms entirely devoid of not only conjugal affect, but also of Jemison’s agency” (Tawil 105). As Seaver’s text shows, Jemison is actually afforded additional agency through this marriage. After Hiokatoo, a respected veteran warrior dies, Jemison receives all the “kindness and attention” (Seaver 129) as his wife. Seaver attempts to position Jemison as a white woman in need of rescue as opposed to a woman who has chosen to adopt and become part of a culture she has come to honor and respect. Seaver ventures to construct Jemison through her white womanhood and as a “tragic victim” (Wyss 4). In this essay, I will demonstrate how Mary Jemison is an Iroquois woman and how her agency is heightened by her choice to remain with the Seneca and how this challenges the dominant hegemonic thinking by going outside the traditional captivity narrative by having “any resolution other than the safe return of the mother to Anglo-American society” (Wyss 3). In Jemison choosing to remain with the Seneca and live as a Native American, she is granted additional agency as an Indian woman.

In this essay I will challenge Tawil’s claims against Jemison’s agency while showing how Seaver’s influence on the text paints a portrait of a white damsel in distress. I will do this by showing how Jemison, as an active participant in tribal ceremonies, through her land ownership and her familial decision-making, is afforded more rights as an Indian woman amongst the Native peoples than as a white woman in Euro-American culture. Susan Walsh illustrates how Seaver attempts to dismantle Jemison’s agency by leaving out of his Introduction “this Seneca woman’s self sufficiency” (Walsh 52). Hilary E. Wyss points out how Seaver uses Jemison’s story to show the “cruelty and savagery of those who abducted an innocent girl-child rather than the adaptability and strength of the woman” (Wyss 3). I will also use as evidence Michelle Burnham’s essay, “However Extravagant the Pretension: Bivocalism and U.S. Nation-Building in A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison” to show how Jemison’s story “indicates the extent of her transculturation” (Burnham 325).

A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison is an interesting text from the standpoint of it being the story of a woman as written by a man and no matter how many times Seaver attempts to construct Jemison as a tragic victim, there are examples of Jemison’s strength and determination on how she chose to live her life. Rather than focusing on Jemison’s whiteness, as many readers and scholars do, this essay will focus on her Indianness as the source of her strength and determination.

I had a couple of moments where I was able to wrangle the pigeons, but I fear the chaos of confused pigeons is about to reappear. :)

Now I Must Go Home and Plant a Tree...

I’m at the UCF library working on my paper proposal on “The Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison” and I just printed out so many PDFs, that I must go home and plant a tree!

After abstracting Susan Walsh’s essay “With Them Was My Home: Native American Autobiography and A Narrative of the life of Mrs. Mary Jemison,” I am looking at a new direction to take my research. Susan Walsh reveals in her essay the influences that may or may to have contributed to the "A Narrative of the Life of Mary Jemison." Jemison was sought out to tell her story and instead of the editors getting a story of Indian rage and mayhem, they got a narrative “extolling Indian virtue and denouncing the genocidal introduction of alcohol into the Iroquois nations” (49). Walsh documents four ways in which four scholars have examined Jemison’s text with Richard Slotkin coming from a place of racial degradation to Annette Kolodny showing how the narrative demonstrates to white female readers an example of “willing wilderness accommodations” (50) to Elisabeth Tooker and Anthony Wallace showing how the narrative reconstructs Seneca life despite Seaver’s interference and finally how Richard Vanderbeets’s theory of the narrative being a marketing ploy and an “opportunistic embellishment” of Jemison’s words. All of these scholars demonstrate how this narrative can be approached from various directions and how readers might first get involved in the text by focusing on Jemison’s whiteness. Walsh is looking for those places in Jemison’s narrative where Native American facets intersect or clash with the editors: “no interpretation can determine once and for all who…is speaking in Anglo-Indian bicultural productions, just as no approach to the Narrative can recuperate a sense of Indian culture as lived experience” (51). Walsh wants to examine where the subject and editor collide: where does the narrator stop and the editor begin?

What really struck me is how Seaver’s own ideas of how women operate in Native cultures skewed his view because of his being influenced by patriarchal ideology and he could not comprehend how a white woman was able to fully participate in a tribe’s oral traditions. Much of the research I have read tends to focus on Jemison’s whiteness in Native culture, but I’m seeing her as immersed in and becoming part of the culture. How else could she participate in cultural customs and ceremonies?

Seaver came to the table with a mistrust saying Jemison edited herself in their sessions. We are never truly sure whose point of view is coming through. For example, Walsh claims that Jemison’s first marriage was “deeply satisfying to both husband and wife” (54) and she points out how there is an initial reluctance to the union. What we don’t know is whether the prejudice against miscegenation comes from the writer or the orator. Walsh also shows that we don’t know if Seaver’s language influenced the way readers interpret the way Jemison presents this scene. Is Jemison hesitant because this marriage will forever tie her to the Senecas or is she voicing hesitation at becoming part of the “mother-daughter connection at the very core of Iroquois culture” (54)? Was it even her hesitation we get from the text? Reiterating how Jemison embraced her life among the Indians, Walsh claims that Jemison “most assuredly” told Seaver that the Indians, before being introduced to alcohol, were a happy people and with them Jemison was at home.

For my research, this essay laid the groundwork of breaking apart Jemison’s text and questioning what may have come from Jemison and where Seaver may have been an influence. The narrative can be viewed as the binary between the noble, faithful Indian and the sneaky, feckless white people and what Walsh is suggesting is that the narrative is more than colonial stereotypes. I’m thinking I want to examine Jemison’s Indian-ness and how it operates in the text, hence all the PDFs I just printed. Time to start reading and planting.

:)

Walsh, Susan. “With Them Was My Home.” American Literature: A Journal of Literary
History, Criticism, and Bibliography 64.1 (Mar. 1992): 49-70.

Pigeons make good eatin'

too many directions, too many pigeons

As I'm starting to delve deeper into what other people are writing about my chosen text, I find myself getting more intrigued, more confused and now the pigeons are flying all over the freakin' place. I wish I could win the lottery so I could just work on this project. If I could only focus on one thing and not be pulled in so many directions (my Ecofeminism independent study is suffering and I'm so in the weeds with that one. BTW...there's no pigeons "waiting in the weeds," to quote Don Henley).

Somehow I'll manage. I want to do more but I can't get the freakin' pigeons to calm down (sorry, I'm really frustrated).

I'm going to take Jack to the squirrel park now to hike ( and maybe kick some pigeons). Maybe that will help!
:)

Preliminary Bibliography

I'm not sure if I'm excited or overwhelmed or over-medicated (thanks UCF Health Center), but my search for my preliminary bibliography has been truly successful. I think I was most excited when searching keyword "American Captivity Narrative" in the America: History and Life database, I came across an entry by our very own Dr. Logan! I found out that I had to generate tighter keywords otherwise I'd still be searching through too many entries (ex. "American capitivity narrative" and not just "captivity narrative"). During my brief tenure at UCF TV I was responsible for creating the keywords for our program database. Every UCF TV program I previewed and wrote program descriptions for, I also had to create the keywords. I'm not sure if they've implemented them yet...maybe on YouTube, but it was an invaluable skill for me to acquire.

Anyway...I can see how these research projects can become so involved and intense. I feel what I have here is a good start. :)

Preliminary Bibliography

keywords from Namias edition 1992 : Chronology p. xiii:
Mary Jemison, American captivity narrative, Seven Years War, Shawnees, Senecas, Sheninjee, Hiokatoo, Sullivan Expedition, James E. Seaver

MLA Bibliography

KEYWORD: MARY JEMISON
Adams, Melissa. "Transporting Possibilities: Reading Cultural Difference in Captivity
Narratives." Transport(s) in the British Empire and the Commonwealth/Transport(s) dans l'Empire britannique et le Commonwealth. 421-441. Montpellier, France: Université Paul Valéry, 2006.

Burnham, Michelle. "'However Extravagant the Pretension': Bivocalism and US Nation-Building
in A Narrative of the Life of Mrs Mary Jemison." Nineteenth-Century Contexts 23.3 (2001): 325-347.

Dickinson, Philip A. "The Captivated Self: Hybridity, the Carnivalesque, and the Cultural Labor
of Subject Formation in Three American Captivities." Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A: The Humanities and Social Sciences 61.7 (Jan. 2001): 2773-2773.

Griffin, Edward M. "Women in Trouble: The Predicament of Captivity and the Narratives of
Mary Rowlandson, Mary Jemison, and Hannah Dustan." Für eine offene Literaturwissenschaft: Erkundungen und Eroprobungen am Beispiel US-amerikanischer Texte/Opening Up Literary Criticism: Essays on American Prose and Poetry. 41-51. Salzburg: Neugebauer, 1986.

Keitel, Evelyne. "Captivity Narratives and the Power of Horror: Eunice Williams and Mary
Jemison, Captives Unredeemed." 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era 5 (2000): 275-297.

Oakes, Karen. "We Planted, Tended and Harvested Our Corn: Gender, Ethnicity, and
Transculturation in A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison." Women and Language 18.1 (Spring 1995): 45-51.

Scheckel, Susan Elizabeth. "Shifting Boundaries: The Poetics and Politics of the American
Frontier, 1820-1850." Dissertation Abstracts International 53.10 (Apr. 1993): 3531A-3531A.

Scheckel, Susan. "Mary Jemison and the Domestication of the American Frontier." Desert,
Garden, Margin, Range: Literature on the American Frontier. 93-109. New York: Twayne, 1992.

Walsh, Susan. "'With Them Was My Home': Native American Autobiography and A Narrative of
the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison." American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography 64.1 (Mar. 1992): 49-70.

KEYWORD: AMERICAN CAPTIVITY NARRATIVE
Finnegan, Jordana. "Refiguring Legacies of Personal and Cultural Dysfunction in Janet Campbell Hale's Bloodlines: Odyssey of a Native Daughter." Studies in American Indian Literatures: The Journal of the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures 19.3 (Fall 2007): 68-86.

Harrison, Rebecca L. "Captive Women, Cunning Texts: Confederate Daughters and the 'Trick-
Tongue' of Captivity." Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A: The Humanities and Social Sciences 68.4 (Oct. 2007): 1459-1459.

Simpson, Audra. "From White into Red: Captivity Narratives as Alchemies of Race and
Citizenship." American Quarterly 60.2 (June 2008): 251-257.

KEYWORD: SHAWNEE TRIBE
Howard, James H. Shawnee! The Ceremonialism of a Native Indian Tribe and Its Cultural
Background Athens: Ohio UP, 1981.

KEYWORD: SENECA INDIAN
Bilharz, Joy. "First among Equals? The Changing Status of Seneca Women." Women and Power
in Native North America. 101-112. Norman, OK: U of Oklahoma P, 1995.

Carlson, David J. Sovereign Selves: American Indian Autobiography and the Law Urbana, IL: U
of Illinois P, 2006.

Dennis, Matthew. "Red Jacket's Rhetoric: Postcolonial Persuasions on the Native Frontiers of the Early American Republic." American Indian Rhetorics of Survivance: Word Medicine, Word Magic. 15-33. Pittsburgh, PA: U of Pittsburgh P, 2006.

Green, Debra Kathryn. "The Hymnody of the Seneca Native Americans of Western New York."
Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A: The Humanities and Social Sciences 58.6 (Dec. 1997): 1977-1977.


America: History and Life

KEYWORD: MARY JEMISON
Brown, Harry. "'The Horrid Alternative': Miscegenation And Madness In The Frontier
Romance." Journal of American & Comparative Cultures 24.3 (2001): 137-151.

Hughes, James. "Those Who Passed Through: Unusual Visits To Unlikely Places. Mary Jemison." New York History 87.1 (2006): 144-148.

Rosenberg-Naparsteck, Ruth. "THE LEGACY OF MARY JEMISON." Rochester History 68.1
(2006): 1-32.

Wyss, Hilary E. "Captivity And Conversion: William Apess, Mary Jemison, And Narratives Of
Racial Identity." American Indian Quarterly 23.3 (1999): 63-82.

KEYWORD: AMERICAN CAPTIVITY NARRATIVE
Barbeito, Patricia Felisa. "'Captivity as Consciousness: The Literary and Cultural Imagination of
the American Self'." (1998).

Ben-Zvi, Yael. "Ethnography And The Production Of Foreignness In Indian Captivity
Narratives." American Indian Quarterly 32.1 (2008): ix-xxxii.

Castro, Wendy Lucas. "Stripped: Clothing and Identity in Colonial Captivity Narratives." Early
American Studies, An Interdisciplinary Journal 6.1 (2008): 104-136.

Castiglia, Christopher Dean. "'Captive Subject: The Captivity Narrative and American Women's
Writing'." (1992).

Ebersole, Gary L. "The Captors' Narrative: Catholic Women and Their Puritan Men on the Early
American Frontier." Catholic Historical Review 93.3 (2007): 704-706.

Fast, Robin Riley. "Resistant History: Revising The Captivity Narrative In 'Captivity' And
'Blackrobe: Isaac Jogues'." American Indian Culture & Research Journal 23.1 (1999): 69-86.
Furbeck, Lee Foard. "'Captured by Indians: Manifestations of the Indian Captivity Narrative in
the Early American Novel'." (1999).

George, Susanne. "Nineteenth Century Native American Autobiography As Captivity Narrative."
Heritage of the Great Plains 30.1 (1997): 33-48.

Green, Keith Michael. "'Master Narratives: Captivity and Nineteenth-Century American
Autobiographical Writing, 1816-1861'." (2008).

Hartman, James D. "Providence Tales And The Indian Captivity Narrative: Some Transatlantic
Influences On Colonial Puritan Discourse."

Logan, Lisa Marie. "'Captivity and the Subject of American Women's Popular Narrative, 1676-
1865'." (1994).

Mackenthun, Gesa. "Captives And Sleepwalkers: The Ideological Revolutions Of Post-
Revolutionary Colonial Discourse." European Review of Native American Studies 11.1 (1997): 19-26.

KEYWORD: SEVEN YEARS WAR

Crouch, Christian Ayne. "'Imperfect Reflections: New France's Use of Indigenous Violence and
the Crisis of French Empire during the Seven Years' War, 1754-1760'." (2008).

Farry, Andrew Stephen. "'`The Peculiar Circumstances of This Army': An Archaeological Study
of Anglo-American Cultural Variability along the Seven Years' War Frontier'." (2007).

Furstenberg, François. "The Significance Of The Trans-Appalachian Frontier In Atlantic
History." American Historical Review 113.3 (2008): 647-677

KEYWORD: SHAWNEE

Scott, Gregory K. "'A People of Consequence: The Shawnee, 1662-1789'." (2007).
Steele, Ian. "Shawnee Origins of Their Seven Years' War." Ethnohistory 53.4 (2006): 657-687.
Rosenberg-Naparsteck, Ruth. "The Legacy Of Mary Jemison." Rochester History 68.1 (2006): 1-
32.

KEYWORD: SENECA TRIBE

Niemczycki, Mary Ann Palmer. "'The Origin and Development of the Seneca and Cayuga Tribes
of New York State'." (1984).

Shoemaker, Nancy. "THE RISE OR FALL OF IROQUOIS WOMEN." Journal of Women's
History 2.3 (1991): 39-57.

KEYWORD: SHENINJEE

Hughes, James. "Those Who Passed Through: Unusual Visits To Unlikely Places. Mary
Jemison." New York History 87.1 (2006): 144-148.

KEYWORD: HIOKATOO

Hughes, James. "Those Who Passed Through: Unusual Visits To Unlikely Places. Mary Jemison." New York History 87.1 (2006): 144-148.

KEYWORD: SULLIVAN EXPEDITION

Butterfield, L. H. "History At Its Headwaters." New York History 51.2 (1970): 127-146.

McAdams, Donald R. "The Sullivan Expedition Success Or Failure." New York Historical
Society Quarterly 54.1 (1970): 53-81.

KEYWORD: JAMES E. SEAVER

Wyss, Hilary E. "Captivity And Conversion: William Apess, Mary Jemison, And Narratives Of

Biography as the "telescope of life..."

As I am investigating my text, I am amazed how the deeper I dig, the more questions I come up with and how each new piece to the puzzle is sending me in a new direction. In the Preface to "The Narrative of the Life of Mary Jemison," James E. Seaver claims biography is the “best field in which to study mankind” (iii) and he places the written words of a person’s life above any other form of monument.

In the introduction, Seaver sets the scene for the narrative and describes the “Peace of 1783” (vii). Using the foundation of the history of post-Revolutionary War upstate New York, he introduces how the story of Mary Jemison, “The White Woman” became part of that history. He positions Mary as a kind, giving woman with a “natural goodness of heart” (viii), despite her years of association with an Indian companion and “notwithstanding her children and associates were all Indians” (viii). Realizing that her story was important from a historical standpoint, some prominent gentlemen from the area, especially Daniel W. Banister, Esq., decided to collect her stories. In 1823, Banister hired Seaver to “collect the materials, and prepare the work for press” (ix).

Seaver continues in his introduction by describing Mary and even admits: “[h]er appearance was well calculated to excite a great degree of sympathy” (x). Mary Jemison is depicted in the introduction in a compassionate light in order to create a sense of identification with the white audience. Her “whiteness” is shown in the introduction as her kind, giving qualities and this creates a believability for the audience while constructing a character that is sympathetic. As Seaver recounts her personal history in the narrative form, he displays the duality of Mary’s existence. He demonstrates how her whiteness creates sympathy which brings the audience into the story, while simultaneously reminding the audience that because she remained amongst the Indians, she became Indian: “when she looks up and is engaged in conversation her countenance is very expressive; but from her long residence with the Indians, she has acquired the habit of peeping from under eye-brows as they do with the head inclined downwards” (xi). This back and forth between cultures is explicitly addressed throughout the author’s introduction. I believe this cross-cultural exchange is the focus of the book. How does an individual from one culture be taken from that culture and forced into another only to stay part of that new culture by choice?

:)

Who invented the Micro Fiche?

I've been really sick all week but have been trying to keep up with all the work for my two graduate seminars and teaching my 3 sections of 1102. The UCF library tells me I the micro fiches I ordered through ILL were in, so I went to pick them up between classes on Tuesday.

Yesterday, in between my 12:00 and 4:00 class, I went up to the third floor to see if I could quickly print out a copy. What was I thinking? I didn't mind paying the 10 cents per copy but that micro fiche machine almost killed me! LOL. The guy who was helping me barely knew how to work it, then you have to slide the thing around, everything is backwards, going from page to page was frustrating. It hit that part of my brain where sense of direction is stored and that must have been the part of the brain that I smashed when I fell out of a car at age three. Or maybe it was all the cold medicine I was on, but at one point I was weeping over the archaic machinery.

I finally got the silly thing to print out what I needed for the next assignment, but it wasn't pretty. I wish there was a service where you could hand the paid staff at the library what you need copied and/or scanned. I would pay 20 cents a page for a service like that!

Okay...I still can't breathe and I'm really dizzy so I'm going back to bed and taking Charles Brockden Brown with me! Sorry I missed class last night. BTW...I've really enjoyed getting to see everyone's blogs. I love how I can "follow" all of them. Wish more people were following mine (thanks, Jay Jay).

:)

I have in my hand my own copy of "The Narrative of the Life of Mary Jemison" on microfiche and FTU says I can keep it! I've never owned a microfiche before. I'm kind of excited in a weird way. I also got the FSU copy, but they want it back.

I know nothing about microfiche except the pages on it are really tiny. I think the last time I dealt with anything like this, it was microfilm and you had to use the giant machine with the crank you turned to go to the next page! So I sat in my office at UCF yesterday between classes and had an e-chat with a librarian. She was wonderful and told me where to go and how much it would cost to print things out. She wasn't sure about creating a PDF so she gave me the name of Ven Basco, the coordinator of InfoSource/Research Consultation. He was very helpful. I think if it wasn't for the people at the UCF library, I'd still be floundering with my research project. Thanks library people!

:)

Wooo.hooooo.

The microfiche of the book you requested

Title: A narrative of the life of Mrs. Mary Jemison who was taken by the Indians, in the year 1755 ... : containing an account of the murder of her father and his family, her sufferings, her marriage to two Indians ... carefully taken from her own words, Nov. 29
Author: Seaver, James E. (James Everett), 1787-1827.

is ready to pickup at the circulation desk.

The lending library made the microfiche for you, so they are for you to keep. You do not need to return them.

How cool is that! Now I guess I need to see if one of those old micr fiche machines with the crank handle is available on eBay.
:)