A Storied Place: Jonathan Carver’s Travel Narrative and the Indigenous Map of the Upper Mississippi River Valley

Abstract

AbstractThis essay recognizes the totality of practices by which Native peoples of the upper Mississippi River valley for centuries oriented themselves to place as an Indigenous map. After limning the map and its material and nonmaterial components, I then place it at the center of a comparative Indigenous-colonizer literary analysis and argue that the manuscript of Euro-American Jonathan Carver’s 1760s travel narrative written in the region is in constitutive relationship to the map. I conclude by turning to printed versions of his narrative to consider how they extend and shape colonialist orientations to the Indigenous map. Attending to how the land has been shaped in partnership with Indigenous text making transforms American literary studies by demonstrating one way that Euro-American texts always were, are, and will be in relation to Native genres.