In Repair: Black Hawk's Graves and Native Reparative Reading

abstract: This article considers what a Native version of a "reparative reading" might look like by analyzing the recurrent images of graves in the Life of Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak or Black Hawk (1833). Departing from prevailing critical scholarship concerned with the "authentic voice" in Black Hawk or proving that it cannot exist, I ask what happens when we read the Life positively, using as a model Black Hawk's own description of Sauk peoples approaching the grave sites of their loved ones. I draw parallels between Eve Sedgwick's notion of a "reparative reading" and Black Hawk's own description of Sauk mourners who attend to the grave sites of their dead and keep those sites "in repair." While such reparative practices are impossible by the time of the publication of the Life of Black Hawk —the Sauk having been removed from their land by settler colonialism—they may yet inform how we approach and analyze the nineteenth-century Native text. By reading such texts as the Sauk tend to their graves, we might arrive at fruitful analyses of texts which are by nature fragmented, uncertain, or else created out of decrepit conditions. Abstract: This article considers what a Native version of a "reparative reading" might look like by analyzing the recurrent images of graves in the Life of Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak or Black Hawk (1833). Departing from prevailing critical scholarship concerned with the "authentic voice" in Black Hawk or proving that it cannot exist, I ask what happens when we read the Life positively, using as a model Black Hawk's own description of Sauk peoples approaching the grave sites of their loved ones. I draw parallels between Eve Sedgwick's notion of a "reparative reading" and Black Hawk's own description of Sauk mourners who attend to the grave sites of their dead and keep those sites "in repair." While such reparative practices are impossible by the time of the publication of the Life of Black Hawk —the Sauk having been removed from their land by settler colonialism—they may yet inform how we approach and analyze the nineteenth-century Native text. By reading such texts as the Sauk tend to their graves, we might arrive at fruitful analyses of texts which are by nature fragmented, uncertain, or else created out of decrepit conditions.