¹ This article is not intended to be a comprehensive overview of the literature but merely looks at those contributions that I found most valuable in my own work.

² Toorn, Penny van, Writing Never Arrives Naked: Early Aboriginal Cultures of Writing in Australia (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

³ Ibid., 21.

⁴ Ibid., 54. See also Thomas, Nicholas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1991)Google Scholar.

⁵ Van Toorn, 55.

⁶ Ibid., 5.

⁷ See Brooks, Lisa, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

⁸ See, for instance, Teuton, Christopher B., Deep Waters (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010)Google Scholar; Shoemaker, Nancy, A Strange Likeness: Becoming Red and White in Eighteenth-Century North America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Martinez, David, ed., The American Indian Intellectual Tradition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011)Google Scholar.

⁹ See Brooks, 225.

¹⁰ See Haake, Claudia B., “Appeals to Civilization and Lost Middle Grounds: Iroquois Letters Written during the Removal Crisis,” Wicazo Sa Review, 30, 2 (2015), 100–28Google Scholar; Haake, , “‘In the same predicament as heretofore’: Pro-removal Arguments in Iroquois Letters in the 1830s and 40s”, Ethnohistory, 61, 1 (2014), 57–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Haake, , “Iroquois Use of Customary and United States Law in Opposition to Removal, 1830–1860,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 36, 4 (2012), 29–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹¹ I define oral writing as a process where more tribal members than just the scribe were able to contribute to the argument, sentiment, and form of the letters sent to members of the federal government. Through this process, which took the form of deliberations in meetings and councils, members of the two tribes made alphabetic writing quite literally their own. This process of oral writing determined the content and at times the form of the letters. The illiterate people who contributed in such a way recognized the power of writing and the need of their tribe to use it as a tool or a weapon, be it to shape removal or to try and avert it.

¹² Brooks, xxxi, 13; Martinez; Warrior, Robert, The People and the Word: Reading Native Nonfiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

¹³ One might also mention Eve Tavor Bannet's chapter on Samson Occom in her Transatlantic Stories and the History of Reading, 1720–1810: Migrant Fictions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)Google Scholar, as well as the work of Christoper Teuton, Daniel Heath Justice, and Joshua Nelson.

¹⁴ See, for instance, Wyss, Hilary E., Writing Indians: Literacy, Christianity, and Native Community in Early America (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Wyss, , English Letters and Indian Literacies: Reading, Writing, and New England Missionary Schools, 1750–1830 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Peyer, Bernd C., ed., The Elders Wrote: An Anthology of Early Prose by North American Indians 1768–1931 (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1982)Google Scholar; Peyer, , The Thinking Indian: Native American Writers, 1850s–1920s (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2007)Google Scholar; Philips, Lisa, “Unexpected Languages: Multilingualism and Contact in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century North America,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 35, 2 (2011), 19–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁵ Brooks, xxxi; Wyss, Writing Indians, 3; Martinez, xxii.

¹⁶ See, among others, Brooks, xxxi, Wyss, Writing Indians, 3, Martinez, xii; Teuton, 10.

¹⁷ Inga Clendinnen, “Reading Mr Robinson,” Australian Book Review, May 1995, 39. Clendinnen, of course, was someone who read even more widely than many, if not indeed most, other scholars of her generation. Starting out as a Latinamericanist working on Indigenous peoples in Mexico, following a grave illness she turned to Australian Aboriginal history as well as to the Holocaust. At least for the study of the former but likely also the latter, she was able to turn necessity into a virtue, managing to make highly original contributions informed, to a greater or lesser degree, by her former work.

¹⁸ Wyss, Writing Indians, 7.

¹⁹ Paterson, Lachy, Colonial Discourses: Niupepa Maori 1855–1863 (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

²⁰ Ibid., 31.

²¹ Ibid., 44.

²² Joshua Turkey and others to Commissioner of Indian Affairs George W. Manypenny, 19 Feb. 1855, M234/588, National Archives and Record Administration (USA).

²³ Haake, Claudia B., “Civilization or Savagery in the West? The West in Native American Letters Written during the Removal Era,” Amerikastudien/American Studies, 62, 1 (2017), 51–66Google Scholar; and Haake, Claudia B., “Civilization, Law, and Customary Diplomacy: Arguments against Removal in Cherokee and Seneca Communications to the Federal Government in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century,” Native American and Indigenous Studies, 4, 2 (Fall 2017), 31–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁴ Round, Phillip H., Removable Type: Histories of the Book in Indian Country, 1663–1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁵ Ibid., 11.

²⁶ Ibid., 16.

²⁷ Ibid., 140.

²⁸ See also Williams, Robert A. Jr., Linking Arms Together: American Indian Treaty Visions of Law and Peace, 1600–1800 (New York and London: Routledge, 1999)Google Scholar.

²⁹ Ibid., 143. See also Haake, “In the Same Predicament as Heretofore.”

³⁰ Lyndsay Head, “Wiremu Tamihana and the Mana of Christianity,” in John Stenhouse, ed., Christianity, Modernity and Culture: New Perspectives on New Zealand History (Hindmarsh, South Australia: ATF), 58–84, 69.

³¹ See Haake, “Iroquois Use of Customary and United States Law”; Haake, “In the Same Predicament as Heretofore”; Haake, “Appeals to Civilization and Lost Middle Grounds”; Haake, “Civilization or Savagery in the West?”; Claudia B. Haake, “Civilization, Law, and Customary Diplomacy: Arguments against Removal in Cherokee and Seneca Communications to the Federal Government in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century,” forthcoming in Native American and Indigenous Studies, 4, 2 (Fall 2017).

³² Tony Ballantyne, “Talking, Listening, Writing, Reading: Communication and Colonialism,” the Allan Martin Lecture 2009, Australian National University, 26.

³³ Ibid., 11.

³⁴ Haake, “Appeals to Civilization and Lost Middle Grounds.” See also Foster, Michael K., From the Earth to Beyond the Sky: An Ethnographic Approach to Four Longhouse Iroquois Speech Events (Ottawa: National Museum of Canada, 1974)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁵ George Lowery, Thomas Foreman and others to Major General Winfield Scott, 9 June 1838, NARA, HR26A-G7.1.

³⁶ Ibid.

³⁷ Scholarship on indigenous nonfiction writing has increased in the last 20 or so years, but is still largely dominated by literary scholars. For North America, these include Brooks, The Common Pot; Wyss, Writing Indians, Martinez, The American Indian Intellectual Tradition; Konkle, Maureen, Writing Indian Nations: Native Intellectuals and the Politics of Historiography, 1827–1863 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Schuetz, Janice, Episodes in the Rhetoric of Government–Indian Relations (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002)Google Scholar; Murray, David, Forked Tongues: Speech, Writing and Representations in North American Indian Texts (London: Pinter, 1991)Google Scholar; Murray, Laura J. and Rice, Keren, eds., Talking on the Page: Editing Aboriginal Oral Texts (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Murray, Laura J., To Do Good to My Indian Brethren: The Writings of Joseph Johnson, 1751–1776 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Lopenzina, Drew, Red Ink: Native Americans Picking Up the Pen in the Colonial Period (Albany: SUNY, 2012)Google Scholar; Phillips, Lisa, “Unexpected Languages: Multilingualism and Contact in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century North America,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 35, 2 (2011), 19–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Peyer, The Elders Wrote; and Peyer, The Thinking Indian. Scholars who have made important contributions to other types of Native American writing include Robert Warrior, Philip Round, and many others.

³⁸ See, for instance, the special issue of Ethnohistory, 62, 3 (July 2015).

³⁹ See, for instance, Frank Salomon and Sabine Patricia Hyland, guest eds., Graphic Pluralism: Native American Systems of Inscription and the Colonial Situation, special issue of Ethnohistory, 57, 1 (2010).

⁴⁰ Murray, Forked Tongues; Murray, David, Indian Giving: Economies of Power in Indian–White Exchanges (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

⁴¹ Head, “Wiremu Tamihana”, 83.

⁴² See Scott, James C., Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1985)Google Scholar.