This is the last presentation in a series of gallery talks that highlight a collage in its current exhibition, Artists in the Archives: Unseen Neighbors that explores themes with which members of our community have grappled historically, including race, difference, sexuality, and gender.

This talk is a study in contrast between two early 19th century Middlebury College students: Henry Rowe Schoolcraft and Edwin James. Both were students of natural philosophy professor Frederick Hall.  Each, separately, would go on to participate in expeditions West and write empirically informed accounts of the Native Americans they encountered. One of them: Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, rose to prominence in his own time as the first scholar to establish the existence of extensive folklore and mythic sagas for a Native American people, indeed the first to do so for any indigenous people. His Ojibwe materials would be picked up by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and recast as a national epic in the Song of Hiawatha.  The other early Middlebury College student, Edwin James, whose family still runs Monument Farms Dairy, is now the focus of latter-day recognition as an environmental and social justice writer and a fine scholar of Algonquian languages. Himself an advocate of political reform, James’ writings about Ojibwe leadership show them to be engaged in moral debate about reformer of their community’s social practices. So, it is true that both Schoolcraft and James helped extend the United States colonial regime westward. But there is a difference in the terms each established for recognizing Native American voices.  Whereas Schoolcraft established a documentary storehouse of folklore and ritual practices; James showed Ojibwe leadership to be active political citizens using eloquence and moral appeal to direct change in their own jurisdictions. Schoolcraft prepares a national resource of traditional Indian stories, James presents Native Americans as prospective citizens using their voices to shape the future.

Marybeth Eleanor Nevins is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Middlebury College. A writer in the Americanist tradition of Anthropology and Linguistics, she looks for new ways to understand and repurpose our history of ethnological and linguistic documentation. To learn more, check out Lessons from Fort Apache: Beyond Language Endangerment and Maintenance (new 2023 edition) and Worldmaking Stories: Maidu Language, Land and Community Renewal on a Shared California Landscape (2017), both with University of Nebraska Press.