Speaking for the People

In Speaking for the People Mark Rifkin examines nineteenth-century Native writings to reframe contemporary debates around Indigenous recognition, refusal, and resurgence. Rifkin shows how works by Native authors (William Apess, Elias Boudinot, Sarah Winnemucca, and Zitkala-Ša) illustrate the intellectual labor involved in representing modes of Indigenous political identity and placemaking. These writers highlight the complex processes involved in negotiating the character, contours, and scope of Indigenous sovereignties under ongoing colonial occupation. Rifkin argues that attending to these writers' engagements with non-native publics helps provide further analytical tools for addressing the complexities of Indigenous governance on the ground—both then and now. Thinking about Native peoplehood and politics as a matter of form opens possibilities for addressing the difficult work involved in navigating among varied possibilities for conceptualizing and enacting peoplehood in the context of continuing settler intervention. As Rifkin demonstrates, attending to writings by these Indigenous intellectuals provides ways of understanding Native governance as a matter of deliberation, discussion, and debate, emphasizing the open-ended unfinishedness of self-determination.

Epilogue

This chapter looks beyond the American Civil War to consider the ways evangelical space continued to shape how Americans saw the landscape and themselves in literary realism to the conservation movement. It mentions how Mark Twain became a representative figure of how a secularizing America remained haunted by a sense of sacred presence rooted in the soil itself. It reviews the story about the rise of white Protestant evangelicals within U.S. national culture and how their form of evangelical space became American space by the eve of the Civil War. The chapter explores the ironic story about how evangelical space escaped control as writers and artists from other traditions reconfigured the relationship between landscape representation, media, and the sacred to produce their own apocalyptic geographies. It recounts how William Apess, Frederick Douglass, Phillis Wheatley, Robert S. Duncanson, and Henry Obookiah appropriated and adapted evangelical space.