Caroline Wigginton

Dissertation: "Imagined Intimacies: Women’s Writing, Community, and Affiliation in Eighteenth-Century North America"

“Indigenuity” traces how early American books appropriate and propagate Native knowledge about indigenous natural resources. Analyzing Native and Euro-American artifacts alongside travel narratives and decorative arts manuals, it argues that Native knowledge persists in the material of early American books. Here, the material of books is taken to be both imaginative and physical. In other words, books are both repositories of instruction and also—in their incorporation of natural dyes, plant fibers, and bespoke bindings—examples of that instruction being put to use. Still connected in their materiality to their Native roots, early American books retain indigeneity and are coextensive with a Native archive of texts and artifacts.