SOURCE: “‘A Terrible Sickness Among Them’: Smallpox and Stories of the Frontier,” in Early Native American Writing: New Critical Essays, Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 136-57.

In the following essay, Jaskoski compares Native American accounts of the smallpox epidemic in the Great Lakes region to Francis Parkman's version of events.

I

Histories of North America have largely ignored, marginalized, or discounted the contributions of Native North American historians. As a result, the official story has been, as Annette Kolodny says, “univocal and monolingual, defining origins by what later became the tropes of the dominant or conquering language” (12). Kolodny calls for a reopening of the frontier, a reassessment “thematizing frontier as a multiplicity of ongoing first encounters over time and land, rather than as a linear chronology of successive discoveries and discrete settlements. … There can be no paradigmatic first contact because there are so many first encounters. And there can...