SEA Featured Scholar, June 2024: Angela Calcaterra 
How did you become interested in studying early American literature?
My interest in early America has always intersected with my interest in Indigenous literary histories. My undergraduate program was heavily focused on canonical British and American Literature, but I took a contemporary Native American literature class with Lucy Maddox that turned my eye to the ways Indigenous authors center tribal-national histories and literary practices that challenge Eurocentric narratives of American literary history. Then I took two graduate courses during my MA at the University of Virginia, one with Marion Rust and one with Deborah McDowell, that introduced me to a range of Indigenous and Black writers working in the early Americas. I was blown away by the forms of critique and refusal in their work.
Who is your favorite early American writer, or what is your favorite early American text, and why?
Partly because it challenges the term “early American,” my favorite early American text to think with and teach is the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) peacemaker epic and Great Binding Law. The epic tells the story of the foundation of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy before European arrival in the Americas, and the Great Binding Law puts in legislative form the principles laid out in the epic (it’s great to teach alongside the US Constitution). The story and laws so powerfully counter the notion (laid out in the Doctrine of Discovery and countless early Euro-American texts) that Indigenous peoples are lawless, and they demonstrate the Haudenosaunee nations’ keen insight into human frailty and the need for regulation through carefully maintained relationships. Another favorite is William Apess’s “An Indian’s Looking Glass for the White Man,” a scathing indictment of white American settler colonialism and Christian hypocrisy that comes at the end of his book The Experiences of Five Christian Indians of New England (1833).
What are you currently working on?
I’m working on a book tentatively titled Bearing Arms: US Gun Violence and Indigenous Relationality, which analyzes American gun violence in context of centuries of Indigenous perspectives on weapons technologies, human relationships, and the equipment of settler colonial violence.
What is something you are reading right now (EAL related or otherwise) that inspires you, either personally or professionally?
I just finished Choctaw author Tim Tingle’s When a Ghost Talks, Listen, the sequel to his acclaimed young adult novel How I Became a Ghost. These are excellent young-adult novels focused on a Choctaw boy who dies during the US Army’s violent removal of Choctaw people from their homes in the early nineteenth century; he becomes a ghost who helps his people and learns from his ancestors. I ordered the books for an Indigenous YA class I plan to teach, and my 8-year-old daughter read both of the books before I could get my hands on them! It was so wonderful to read them and then talk about them with her. When you read When a Ghost Talks, Listen, pay special attention to Stella, my daughter’s favorite character! I also recently read Percival Everett’s James—an amazing novel, a perfect companion to Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Is there a scholar in the field who inspires you, and why?
It’s impossible to pick just one! I’m most inspired by Indigenous Studies scholars who reframe early American literature geographically, formally, and temporally. Chad Allen’s recent book Earthworks Rising: Mound Building in Native Literature and Arts inspires me with its attention to both ancient Indigenous knowledge literally inscribed on American land and contemporary literary and artistic engagements with Indigenous earthworks. I’m recently inspired by Indigenous legal scholars such as Robert A. Williams Jr., Heidi Stark, and John Borrows, whose work draws attention to the sophisticated forms of regulatory guidance laid out in very old Indigenous stories. Other scholars who inspire me: Lisa Brooks, Jean M. O’Brien, Kelly Wisecup, Joe Rezek, Cassie Smith, and so many others!
Angela Calcaterra is Associate Professor of of Native American and Indigenous Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.