Winner, The Early American Literature Book PrizeEthnology and Empire tells stories about words and ideas, and ideas aboutwords that developed in concert with shifting conceptions about Native peoplesand western spaces in the nineteenth-century United States. Contextualizing theemergence of Native American linguistics as both a professionalized researchdiscipline and as popular literary concern of American culture prior to theU.S.-Mexico War, Robert Lawrence Gunn reveals the manner inwhich relays between the developing research practices of ethnology, works offiction, autobiography, travel narratives, Native oratory, and sign languagesgave imaginative shape to imperial activity in the western borderlands. In literary andperformative settings that range from the U.S./Mexico borderlands to the GreatLakes region of Tecumseh's Pan-Indian Confederacy and the hallowed halls oflearned societies in New York and Philadelphia, Ethnology and Empire modelsan interdisciplinary approach to networks of peoples, spaces, and communicationpractices that transformed the boundaries of U.S. empire through atransnational and scientific archive. Emphasizing the culturally transformativeimpacts western expansionism and Indian Removal, Ethnology and Empire reimaginesU.S. literary and cultural production for future conceptions of hemisphericAmerican literatures.

ContentsAcknowledgments ixIntroduction 11 Philologies of Race: Ethnological Linguistics and Novelistic Representation 172 Empire, Sign Languages, and the Long Expedition, 1819-1821 523 John Dunn Hunter, Tecumseh, and the Linguistic Politics of Pan-Indianism 834 Connecting Borderlands: Native Networks and the Fredonian Rebellion 1145 John Russell Bartlett's Literary Borderlands: Ethnology, the U.S-Mexico War, and the United States Boundary Survey 145Indian Passports 177Notes 187Index 229About the Author 242