Virtual Commons - Bridgewater State University

Counter Captivity Narratives: How Native and African American Writers Debunked the Myth of the Menaced White Child

Hart 116

In the early decades of the nineteenth century, white authors of captivity narratives repeatedly depicted white children menaced by violent Native Americans. Simultaneously, they provided justification for Indian removal by suggesting that the young nation’s racial purity, symbolized by the vulnerable white child, was at risk. In my presentation, I will show how Native and African American authors of the period, including William Apess and Frederick Douglass, recognized the insidious implications of this discourse and sought to counter it with stories of their own childhood bondage at the hands of whites. This argument fills a literary historical gap that has silenced Native Americans in discussions of captivity literature and that has overlooked the canny resistance by writers of color to the racial import of discourses about childhood.