Captivity Literature and the Environment: Nineteenth-Century American Cross-Cultural Collaborations

Kyhl Lyndgaard argues that captivity narratives have influenced land-use policy and environmental attitudes at the same time that they reveal the complex relationship between ethnicity, landscape, and authorship. He examines three captivity narratives written in the 1820s and 1830s, all of which engage with the Jacksonian policy of Indian removal and resist tropes of the so-called Vanishing Indian. The authors and the editors with whom they collaborated often saw their stories as a plea for environmental and social justice. Audiences have embraced them for their vision of a more inclusive and less exploitative American society.