The Collected Speeches of Sagoyewatha, or Red Jacket

Cloth $39.95s    |    0-8156-3096-4    |    2006

The first comprehensive collection of the Native American orator’s speeches, this volume contains more than fifty speeches by one of the most celebrated Native American diplomats of the nineteenth century.

Reviews
"Featuring essays that offer detailed historical reference framework, archival research about the interpreters, and the immediate circumstances of each speech, The Collected Speeches of Sagoyewatha, or Red Jacket is enthusiastically recommended for library and personal Native American studies shelves."
—The Bookwatch

"Red Jacket was an important figure in his own time and his legacy, through the vehicles of his major speeches, continues to figure into discussions of native sovereignty and cultural indentity to this day. The speeches cover forty years, and I can think of no other Native American figure and few Euro-Americans, with a longer tenure as a major figure in American politics."
—Christopher Densmore, author of Red jacket: Iroquois Diplomat and Orator

Description
In the first complete collection of a Native American orator’s speeches, Granville Ganter presents the speeches of Red Jacket or Sagoyewatha (Shay-gó-ye-wátha), a formidable diplomat and one of the most famous Native American orators of the nineteenth century. As a representative of the Seneca and the Six Nations, Red Jacket negotiated with American presidents from George Washington to Andrew Jackson, establishing a legacy that continues to influence discussions of native sovereignty and cultural identity. In speeches spanning over forty years, he eloquently voiced the rights of Native Americans, opposing the encroachment of white man’s religion and culture and the sale of native lands.

Presenting more than fifty speeches of Red Jacket, some previously unpublished and others revised using modern standards of textual editing, this volume encourages a wider readership of Red Jacket’s work. Ganter’s accompanying essays offer a detailed historical framework, presenting archival research about the interpreters and the circumstances of each speech. The great majority of Red Jacket’s speeches were interpreted by reliable translators who were often chosen by the Senecas for their accuracy.

This edition spans Red Jacket’s political career from 1790 to 1830 and includes major addresses to Presidents Washington, Adams, and Monroe. Additionally, it contains original versions of his speeches to evangelical missionaries and land speculators, which circulated for nearly 150 years after Red Jacket’s death. This book will stand as the definitive critical edition of Red Jacket’s speeches and as a remarkable record of Native American political history. It will be of crucial interest to historians and literary scholars of Native American studies.

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Editor
Granville Ganter is an associate professor of English at St. John’s University in Queens, New York. He has written numerous articles on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature and oratory.

6 x 9, 296 pages, notes, bibliography, 6 maps, index