Assembled for Use: Indigenous Compilation and the Archives of Early Native American Literatures

Indigenous compilations are central to early Native American literary history in Kelly Wisecup's study of how Native people assembled and repurposed texts in new relations and meanings. The book focuses on non-narrative materials such as lists, albums, recipes, scrapbooks, and other curated collections, using examples like Mohegan minister Samson Occom's medicinal recipes, Ojibwe writer Charlotte Johnston's poetry scrapbooks, and Abenaki leader Joseph Laurent's vocabulary lists. Wisecup argues that these compilations grew alongside colonial archive making and were used to remake forms that settlers treated as ethnographic evidence, challenging canonical literary histories while foregrounding Indigenous agency and voice and critiquing settler-colonial archival practices long before modern decolonization debates.