Honey from the Rock: John Gyles and the Northeastern North American Search for Anglo Indigeneity

Abstract

The same systemic issues that thwart effective communication between Anglo-Protestant settlers and Indigenous peoples in Atlantic Canada today are replicated in the form of early New England captivity narratives. The scholarly tradition to which these narratives are conventionally relegated, that of “early American literature,” is a shared northeastern North American cultural and epistemological foundation. Introducing an idea of “Anglo indigeneity” to encapsulate the presumptions of knowledge, origin, and/or belonging that have suppressed or displaced true Indigenous knowledge throughout the Atlantic region, the article makes a case for reading John Gyles's eighteenth-century account of captivity among the Maliseet as a formative if previously unaccepted piece of Atlantic Canadian writing – a classification that undermines efforts to insulate Canadians against complicity in “American” colonial violence and war.