Please join us for Katelyn Lucas's Doctoral Defense titled Reckoning with Lenape Sovereignty: Settler Memory & Lenape Representation in American Literature (1750 To 2019).

Committee: 

- James Salazar (chair) 

- Priya Joshi 

- Natalie Leger 

- Nicky Michael (Delaware Tribe of Indians)  

- Elizabeth Ellis (outside reader) 

Abstract: 

This dissertation establishes the first literary history of American representations of the indigenous Lenape (a.k.a. Delaware) people, tracing their presence in colonial era captivity narratives of settlers taken by the Lenape through early twenty-first century American fiction. My chapters reveal how American authors over time appropriated aspects of Lenape history and reconstituted them in frameworks which disavowed Lenape sovereignty, thereby exemplifying settler memory—a concept advanced by Kevin Bruyneel in his ground-breaking 2021 book Settler Memory. Delving deep into American literature and its historical contexts, 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 and understudied counternarrative to settler memory of the Lenape. By aligning literary analysis with Native American and Indigenous Studies as well as settler colonial theory, my work prioritizes tribal specificity and sovereignty—a paradigm shift from prior scholarship, which has tended to homogenize or gloss over Lenape references across American literature. 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. 

Please contact the Department Coordinator, James O'Brien ([click-for-email]), for the meeting link.