Christopher Columbus was not the first European to set foot in the Americas, but he was the most consequential. Sanctioned by God and hungry for gold, conquistadors ransacked the Americas’ Indigenous populations. In 1607, England established its first permanent American colony at Jamestown. England’s relationship with the local tribes ultimately devolved into war. Both Spain and England devised legal theories to justify their acquisitions of Indian land.

This essay proposes that politics, diplomacy, and a desire for peace were defining markers of Indigenous cultural and literary engagements. European settlers arriving on this continent with an eye toward possessing it wrote off Native peoples as savage and unqualified stakeholders in the “New World” they were forging. The colonial archive, however, almost in spite of itself, turns up repeated instances of Indigenous overtures of peace, presented in traditional frameworks, which can be effectively traced in recognizable patterns from the earliest recorded encounters through to the first major indigenous literary productions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. A mindful reading of this archive yields aspects of tradition that inform the outlines of an indigenous literary aesthetic. When indigenous authors such as Samson Occom and William Apess began appearing in print, they carried forward these traditions, confounding settler notions of what it means to be a “politick salvage.”