Reckoning with Lenape sovereignty: settler memory and Lenape representation in American literature (1750 to 2019)

This dissertation establishes the first comprehensive literary history of American-settler representations of the indigenous Lenape (a.k.a. Delaware) people, tracing their depictions in colonial era captivity narratives through early twenty-first century fiction. Settler appropriations of Native American histories and cultures have long been understood as formative in the creation of American literature and American nationalist identity writ large. I demonstrate how Lenape history, homelands, and culture specifically played a crucial role in this process. My chapters reveal how American authors reconstituted aspects of Lenape history in frameworks which disavowed Lenape sovereignty, thereby exemplifying settler memory—a concept advanced by Kevin Bruyneel in his ground-breaking 2021 book Settler Memory. Grounded in Native American and Indigenous Studies as well as settler colonial theory, my work prioritizes consideration of tribal specificity and sovereignty in literary analysis—a paradigm shift from prior scholarship, which has tended to homogenize or gloss over Lenape references across American literature. I make critical new interventions into works from well-known American authors like Charles Brockden Brown and James Fenimore Cooper, as well as never-before studied texts. I also elevate the poetry of Richard C. Adams—Delaware Tribe of Indians citizen, historian, author, and lobbyist—as a revolutionary counternarrative to settler memory of the Lenape. Ultimately, I argue that the American canon perpetuated an increasingly biased settler memory of the Lenape which effaced their sovereignty and distorted their history—a legacy which has enduring consequences for Lenape people, governance, and representation today.