Before the Nation: What the First Texts Establish

The idea

The exam's first period opens before there is a nation to write about, and the writing it collects comes from three directions that never quite meet. The oldest layer is oral and Native, and it survives only because outsiders wrote it down: the Iroquois woman falling into a world of water, caught by ducks and carried on a turtle's back that grows into an island; the Cherokee earth hung from a sky of rock by four cords, with mud fetched from the bottom by a diving beetle; the Pima world rubbed from the body of a person floating in the dark. These are not myths in the loose sense of being untrue stories; they are accounts of how a present arrangement came to be, which is why they end by explaining maize and weeds, illness and its cures, or the existence of stories themselves. The second layer is European and written to be read in Europe: Columbus reporting a paradise and noticing gold, Cabeza de Vaca writing the only Spanish account composed on foot among the people he describes, John Smith defending and enlarging himself in print, and the promotional tracts that sold a continent by listing its harbours and forgetting its winters. The third layer is the collision, and it is where the period's best-known forms come from: the captivity narrative, which turned seizure and return into the colonies' first bestseller and into a spiritual argument about providence; the Pueblo documents in which a successful rising is recorded by the people it defeated; Pontiac's vision-speech surviving in a Frenchman's journal; and Samson Occom writing his own life in the missionaries' vocabulary. The argument this course makes about the period is not that one layer is truer than another but that the reader must always ask who is holding the pen. Native accounts reach us mediated and incomplete, on the witness's own caution, and colonial accounts reach us intact and interested. The exam's questions about this period are therefore usually about viewpoint: what a passage assumes, who it was written for, and what it wants its reader to do.