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Edgar Huntly's Gun Violence and Indigenous Mechanisms of Peace

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2021

Angela Calcaterra
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Abstract

This essay analyzes American gun culture, past and present, through two lenses: a set of early Euro-American writings on weapons and defense, including Charles Brockden Brown's well-known novel Edgar Huntly, and a little-known but capacious archive of Native American materials, philosophy, and story. While the Euro-American writings and the Indigenous archive both raise crucial questions about the relation between weapons and human subjectivity, only the Indigenous archive presents vital alternative object orientations that promote peace. Considering wampum belts in particular as an Indigenous mechanism of peace, this essay argues that to understand American gun violence we must pay attention to Indigenous efforts to cultivate relationships by putting forth healing objects and burying the weapons of war, efforts that are largely erased from the colonial records and from the contemporary imagination of the past. Ultimately, Native American theorizations of object orientation and human subjectivity challenge both our understanding of the colonial past and our current conversation surrounding gun violence.

Type
Essays
Information
PMLA , Volume 136 , Issue 1 , January 2021 , pp. 55 - 71
Copyright
Copyright © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Modern Language Association of America

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