SOURCE: Fast, Robin Riley. “Resistant History: Revising the Captivity Narrative in ‘Captivity’ and Blackrobe: Isaac Jogues.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 23, no. 1 (1999): 69-86.

In the following essay, Fast compares literary treatments of colonial Indian captivity stories, as represented in selected works of Erdrich and Maurice Kenny.

Many contemporary American Indian writers are engaged in the shared project of complicating and revising the received history of the Americas. Kimberly Blaeser reminds us that survival is at stake here when she says that “the creation and interpretations of histories have … functioned directly as the justifications for possession or dispossession.” In “Captivity” and Blackrobe: Isaac Jogues respectively, Louise Erdrich and Maurice Kenny reread histories of captivity among the Indians recorded by the colonizers. Their revisionary agendas necessarily foreground interpretive conflicts and draw attention to cultural and linguistic dialogism. As Blaeser observes regarding Gerald Vizenor's writings about history, these poems “force...