Toward a Bibliography of Birch bark: The 2023 Annual Meeting Keynote

This talk asks what a bibliography of birch bark books might entail and how such research might challenge understandings of paper, print production and circulation, and readership. I take up these questions by examining an array of birch bark books and objects that informed the making and circulation of the Potawatomi writer Simon Pokagon’s birch bark booklet titled The Red Man’s Rebuke (alternately titled The Red Man’s Greeting). Although they are thought by many scholars to have been printed for the Columbian Exposition and World’s Fair in 1893, I illuminate a longer history of the booklets’ printing and circulation, including multiple editions and evidence of several readers. I ask what methods a bibliography of birch bark requires by reflecting on recent collaborative research with Pokagon Band of Potawatomi archivists and linguists. Attempting a bibliography of the birch bark booklets offers new insights on how Indigenous people acted as readers of periodicals and other printed objects as well as evidence of strategic circulation and archiving, from the nineteenth century to the present.