The first book to chart autonomy’s conceptual growth in Native American literature from the late eighteenth to the early twenty-first century, A New Continent of Liberty examines, against the backdrop of Euro-American Literature, how Native American authors have sought to reclaim and redefine distinctive versions of an ideal of self-rule grounded in the natural world.
Beginning with the writings of Samson Occom, and extending through a range of fiction and nonfiction works by William Apess, Sarah Winnemucca, Zitkala-Ša, N. Scott Momaday, Gerald Vizenor, and Louise Erdrich, Geoff Hamilton sketches a movement of gradual, tragically-belated, but resolute ascent, from often desperate early efforts to preserve any sense of self and community, toward expressions of a resurgent autonomy that affirm new, Indigenous models of eunomia, a fertile blending of human and natural orders.
