Misattribution, Collaborative Authorship, and Recovery: The Legacies of Sarah Rogers (Mohegan), Phoebe Hinsdale Brown, and Elias Boudinot (Cherokee)

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Notes

¹ I owe thanks to many interlocutors over the years I have been thinking about this narrative, but I would especially like to single out the participants on the Legacy-sponsored panel, “Recovery without the Author: Alternative Approaches to the Recovery of Women’s Writing,” at the 2018 Society for the Study of American Women Writers (SSAWW) Conference in Denver, CO: Faith Barrett, Jennifer Putzi, Alex Socarides, and Claudia Stokes.

² Although the narrative has come to be known most frequently as “Poor Sarah,” I refer to it in this essay as “Religion Exemplified” to avoid conflating the text with its titular subject and to respect the dignity of Sarah Rogers. See Stevens 17–22 for discussion of the missionary discourse’s use of the word “poor” as an adjective to describe Native peoples.

³ Nord, for example, traces the origins of mass media in the US back to these evangelical societies in this precise historical moment. See Candy Gunther Brown for the best discussion of evangelical print culture, one that has informed my argument in this essay.

⁴ See Rubin 303 for an example of both incorrect dating and misattribution to the elder statesman Elias Boudinot.

⁵ The misattribution, while repeated even in recent scholarship, is not all-encompassing. Some scholars question or note inconsistencies in the misattribution, and some correctly designate Boudinot as the translator. The misattribution proliferates on non-academic websites and encyclopedias and coexists alongside correct attributions to Brown in databases like Worldcat.

⁶ For fuller elucidation of these arguments about Boudinot’s career and legacy, see Gaul, To Marry An Indian; “Editing” 286–87; “The Great, Radical Political Mistake” 27–28.

⁷ The important work of Jace Weaver also displays the consequences the misattribution can have for interpretations of Boudinot’s larger oeuvre. Although he speculates that Boudinot did not write “Religion Exemplified” and only translated and printed it, Weaver nonetheless relies heavily on a source that perpetuates the misattribution and interprets the content of the narrative as in line with Boudinot’s politics, which Weaver sees as in opposition to his own formulation of “communitism” (72).

⁸ Roberts discusses secularization theory in relation to evangelical print culture (“Early American” 314–15).

⁹ Roberts, in contrast, emphasizes the distinction between poetry and hymns while expanding our sense of how both operated as useful tools for evangelical writers (Awakening 4–5).

¹⁰ This aspect of this essay’s argument responds to calls like the one Weyler issued for “comprehensive study of collaborative authorship in all its facets, ranging from actual coauthorship to editorial relationships to ghostwriting” in early American studies (419).

¹¹ Scholarship on Black women’s authorship of nineteenth-century texts has also shaped my thinking in this essay; see, for example, Moody 7–22.

¹² Variant spellings for this body of water variously called a pond or lake are Shenipsic, Shenipset, and Shenipsit, the spelling by which it goes today.

¹³ People used sand to scour household floorboards, hearthstones, and cooking pans during this period.

¹⁴ The Cherokee cover page includes the English title “Poor Sarah; or The Indian Woman” at the top and identifies E. Boudinot as the translator. Carlson attributes the Mvskoke translation to Robertson. Pilling describes the Choctaw translation as collected with other tracts in Chahta i kana, or the Choctaw Friend (100). See Rand xxii for the attribution of Rand as the translator into Mi’kmaq and Williams 28 for the attribution of Riggs as the translator of the Dakota version.

¹⁵ See Carolyn Foreman for a comprehensive listing of all Park Hill Cherokee-language publications.

¹⁶ See Bender, for evidence of how these early Bible and hymn translations perpetuate the use of the Cherokee syllabary today (52).