Nancy Shoemaker
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195167924
- eISBN:
- 9780199788996
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195167924.003.0004
- Subject:
- History, American History: early to 18th Century
American Indians and Europeans kept records of their international agreements in tangible form: wampum belts, calumet pipes, or eagle feathers among eastern Indians, and among Europeans, written ...
More
American Indians and Europeans kept records of their international agreements in tangible form: wampum belts, calumet pipes, or eagle feathers among eastern Indians, and among Europeans, written accounts of what was said ending with signatures and wax seals. In meeting each other at diplomatic councils, they recognized how the other culture's contractual objects served the same purposes in that these objects stored the memory of the event in tangible form, were surrounded with ceremony to endow transient words with permanent significance, and, as mere distant facsimiles of oral conversations, were vulnerable to fraud and deceit. Benjamin West's painting Penn's Treaty with the Indians, commissioned by the Penn family to create a visual memory of fair purchase of Indian lands in place of missing written documentation, and the manipulation of words in the negotiations of the Delaware Walking Purchase, illustrate how writing was not a superior instrument for making Indian treaties than the Indian devices. Still, the illusion that European writing somehow assisted in the conquest of America has endured into the present.Less
American Indians and Europeans kept records of their international agreements in tangible form: wampum belts, calumet pipes, or eagle feathers among eastern Indians, and among Europeans, written accounts of what was said ending with signatures and wax seals. In meeting each other at diplomatic councils, they recognized how the other culture's contractual objects served the same purposes in that these objects stored the memory of the event in tangible form, were surrounded with ceremony to endow transient words with permanent significance, and, as mere distant facsimiles of oral conversations, were vulnerable to fraud and deceit. Benjamin West's painting Penn's Treaty with the Indians, commissioned by the Penn family to create a visual memory of fair purchase of Indian lands in place of missing written documentation, and the manipulation of words in the negotiations of the Delaware Walking Purchase, illustrate how writing was not a superior instrument for making Indian treaties than the Indian devices. Still, the illusion that European writing somehow assisted in the conquest of America has endured into the present.
Chad Luck
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780823263004
- eISBN:
- 9780823266340
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823263004.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
This chapter uncovers in Charles Brockden Brown’s gothic frontier novel a sophisticated engagement with eighteenth-century sensational psychologists, including Locke, Hume, and Condillac. The ...
More
This chapter uncovers in Charles Brockden Brown’s gothic frontier novel a sophisticated engagement with eighteenth-century sensational psychologists, including Locke, Hume, and Condillac. The chapter argues that in the novel’s famous cave sequence, Brown ingeniously narrativizes Condillac’s dictum that “touch teaches vision” and in so doing enacts a subterranean model of spatial orientation that directly evokes the “plenum versus vacuum” debates of Locke and Hume. The novel then links this spatio-sensory exploration to an array of eighteenth-century property laws that focus on the creation of boundary lines. It becomes clear that Brown’s fictional account of settler-Indian violence on the Pennsylvania frontier is designed to imaginatively re-walk the infamous “Walking Purchase” treaty of 1737 in which the Delaware tribe was defrauded of 750,000 acres. In doing so, the novel calls attention to the Native American bodies conveniently erased from the legal and historical record.Less
This chapter uncovers in Charles Brockden Brown’s gothic frontier novel a sophisticated engagement with eighteenth-century sensational psychologists, including Locke, Hume, and Condillac. The chapter argues that in the novel’s famous cave sequence, Brown ingeniously narrativizes Condillac’s dictum that “touch teaches vision” and in so doing enacts a subterranean model of spatial orientation that directly evokes the “plenum versus vacuum” debates of Locke and Hume. The novel then links this spatio-sensory exploration to an array of eighteenth-century property laws that focus on the creation of boundary lines. It becomes clear that Brown’s fictional account of settler-Indian violence on the Pennsylvania frontier is designed to imaginatively re-walk the infamous “Walking Purchase” treaty of 1737 in which the Delaware tribe was defrauded of 750,000 acres. In doing so, the novel calls attention to the Native American bodies conveniently erased from the legal and historical record.
