LITR 4232 American Renaissance 2008
Text-Objective Presentation

Tuesday, 30 September: Emergence & repression of minority voices. William Apess (Pequot) 1051-58.  The Cherokee Memorials 1263-1268; Sojourner Truth, "Speech to the Women's Rights Convention . . . " 1695-6

Text-Objective Discussion: Karina Ramos

Sojourner Truth, "Ain't I a Woman?"

 For William Apess's An Indian's Looking Glass for the White Man and The Cherokee Memorials the main subject seems to be the displacement of the Indians; the Cherokee seemed to be the main subject. The last piece, "Aren’t I a Woman?," also related to injustice but more the injustice to women than anything else.

Course Objective 3

3. To use literature as a basis for discussing representative problems and subjects of American culture (Historicism), such as equality (race, gender, class); modernization and tradition; the individual, family; and community; nature; the role of writers in an anti-intellectual society.

Injustice seems to be the main theme in these writings. The Indians, despite the number of treaties they had signed, were made to give up their land and relocated to lesser lands.

From The Cherokee Memorials

• The jurisdiction then of our Nation over its soil is settled by the laws, Treaties, and Constitution of the United States, and has been exercised from time out of memory 
• To the land of which we are now in possession we are attached—it is our father’s gift—it contains their ashes—it is the land of our nativity, and the land of our intellectual birth. We cannot consent to abandon it, for another far inferior, and which holds out to us no inducements

Does it look to anyone like America is doing the same thing it did to other nations as it did to the Indians?

The first right (the right of inheritance) is mentions often in the Cherokee Memorials; do we (as a nation) still believe in it or has it become obsolete in our modern world?

From Ain't I A Woman

• If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back , and get it right side up again!

These reading seemed to come mostly from official documents. God is mentioned constantly though out all three of them without fear of being politically correct.

Does the nature of these documents lend themselves more towards religion than the other texts we’ve read? How so?