This week the DS interns met with five of the AAS (that’s American Antiquarian Society) Fellows, who are here to dip into the Kim-Wait Eisenberg collection. Each fellow’s focus ranges from more recent books in the collection to works from the 1820s by William Apess (who changed the spelling of his surname from “Apes”). Their consensus on the KWE collection is that the KWE is one of the largest collections of its kind, and as some of the first eyes looking it over for potential scholarship, we should feel free to use its size (approximately 1,300 volumes) to talk about Native American literature as a whole.
Our project might begin with the literature that escapes simplified timelines of Native literature. While some scholars stillpoint to the watershed in Native literature following House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday (1968), the AAS fellows pointed to other turning points in Native authorship and Native involvement in printed material, both in the 1800s and the 1920s. Written works by Native writers stand for a history that predates the admittedly Pulitzer-Prize-winning House Made of Dawn, something that the modern-day community can use to situate narratives of Native literature. While we begin to focus our internship on project proposals, one of our goals will be to represent the breadth and variety of works by Native writers since our two-hundred-and-forty-three year old printing of a speech by Samson Occom.
