In placing Joy Harjo and Natasha Trethewey in conversation with each other, my dissertation analyzes - alongside their poetry and prose - monuments, paintings, television, film, photographs, and performance as connected to understanding the impact of historical legacies on lived experiences within the empire of U.S. America. Toni Morrison's concept of recovering the "unwritten interior life" of the slave experience - a life hidden within slave narratives - assists in understanding the historical poetics of Joy Harjo and Natasha Trethewey as artists engaged in similar projects of reclamation. For Harjo this entails shedding a light on the weight of Native American histories for the descendants of survivors while contesting the myths that abound within popular culture regarding Native peoples. Trethewey's work intervenes within the public memory of the nation by centering on the inner-lives of African Americans as well as other people of color, stressing their various gendered and racialized experiences. The gaps within the records that each poet illuminates do not constitute a failure of history, per se, but rather emphasize limitations concerning traditional methodologies of history-writing. In order to further expand on this argument, throughout my work I rely upon certain ideas from 20th century ethical philosopher Emmanuel Levinas regarding our obligations to the past of the Other as well as the potential violence inherent within Western philosophical rhetoric regarding the Other. "Tending to the Past" argues that due to the gaps within the archival records we need multiple ways of approaching our history. The absence within the archives of the "emotional truths" or "interior lives" of historical subjects proves to emphasize the necessity for the poetic interventions of Joy Harjo and Natasha Trethewey.

abstract: This research explores the various and often conflicting interpretations of the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, an event seemingly lost in the public mind of twenty-first century America. The conflict, which pitted United States forces under the command of Major General Andrew Jackson against a militant offshoot of the Creek Confederacy, known as the Redsticks, ranks as the single most staggering loss of life in annals of American Indian warfare. Today, exactly 200 years after the conflict, the legacy of Horseshoe Bend stands as an obscure and often unheard of event. Drawing upon over two centuries of unpublished archival data, newspapers, and political propaganda this research argues that the dominate narrative of Northern history, the shadowy details of the War of 1812, and the erasure of shameful events from the legacy of westward expansion have all contributed to transform what once was a battle of epic proportions, described by Jackson himself as an "extermination," into a seemingly forgotten affair. Ultimately, the Battle of Horseshoe Bend's elusiveness has allowed for the production of various historical myths and political messages, critiques and hyperboles, facts and theories. Hailed as a triumph during the War of 1812, and a high-water mark by the proponents of Manifest Destiny, Jackson's victory has also experienced its fair share of American derision and disregard. Whereas some have criticized the battle as a "cold blooded massacre," others have glorified it as a touchstone of American masculinity, and excused it as a natural event in the unfolding of human evolution. Despite the battle's controversial nature, on 3 August 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a strong supporter of the National Park Service, approved act HR 11766 establishing Horseshoe Bend National Military Park, the very first national park in the state of Alabama. Hailed and forgotten, silenced and celebrated, exploited and yet largely unknown. This research explores what happened after the smoke cleared at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. It is a story about the production of history, the power of the past, and the malleability of the American mind. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. History 2014

Resistance to oppression is a globally recognized cultural phenomenon that displays a remarkable amount of variation in its manifestations over both time and space. This cultural phenomenon is particularly evident among the Native American cultural groups of the Southeastern United States. Throughout the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries the European and American states employed tactics and implemented laws aimed at expanding the geographic boundaries of their respective states into the Tribal Zone of the Southeast. None of these groups, however, sat passively during this process; they employed resistive tactics and strategies aimed at maintaining their freedoms, their lives, and their traditional sociocultural structures. However, the resistive tactics and strategies, primarily manifested in the medium of warfare, have gone relatively unnoticed by scholars of the disciplines of history and anthropology, typically regarded simply as guerrilla in nature. This research presents a new analytical model that is useful in qualitatively and quantitatively analyzing the behaviors employed in combat scenarios. Using the combat behaviors of Muskhogean speaking cultural groups as a case study, such as the Creeks and Seminoles and their Protohistoric predecessors, this model has shown that indigenous warfare in this region was complex, dynamic, and adaptive. This research has further implications in that it has documented the evolution of Seminole combat behaviors into the complex and dynamic behaviors that were displayed during the infamous Second iv Seminole War. Furthermore, the model used in this research provides a fluid and adaptive base for the analysis of the combat behaviors of other cultural groups worldwide.