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.