What is the literature of the Indigenous colonial Americas? Because Indigenous peoples remain under colonization and literary genres like the novel and poetry are settler colonial categories, answering this question is fraught. In response, this chapter considers Indigenous concepts of kinship and peoplehood as doing rather than being, and surveys Native literatures through genres of doing. Ranging across the American hemisphere from the sixteenth through early nineteenth centuries, it surveys textual examples that record, narrate, map, teach, express, and survive. These genres of doing are not comprehensive nor should texts be taken to be unifunctional. Instead, genres of doing may aid readers in identifying and exploring cross-form, cross-temporal, and cross-cultural resonances while also attending to cultural and textual specificities. This holds true for considering Native texts from multiple traditions alongside each other but also in the case of Native and non-Native texts.

Subjected to violence, disease, and dislocation, indigenous cultures and individuals have found ways to voice both mourning for losses and strategies for resistance, survival, and joy. War for Indian peoples moves beyond the hostilities perpetrated on them by the dominant culture. War is also a response away from victimry and towards resistance and resilience, becoming an active presence, a staking of a place, a demand for recognition – literal and figurative acts of what Gerald Vizenor calls “survivance.” This essay focuses on representations of violent conflicts between Europeans and Native Americans by historical and contemporary Indian voices, such as Hendrick Aupaumut, Black Hawk, William Apess, N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Sherman Alexie.