ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines how Edward Said developed Foucault's work in the colonial context and provides the literary archive as it stood at the time that Chief Justice Marshall pronounced upon the capacity of the Native American Indian. The chapter consists of readings of captive narratives, poems, histories, public speeches and landscape paintings in ways that are largely faithful to Said's reading methodology. It demonstrates how Said's theory of literary discourses accounts for the hegemonic imperial representations of the other and reviews that discursive representations were similarly constituted about the American Indian. It describes the legal capacity of the American Indians observed by the literary archive. The literary images and cultural signs of the Indians provide the findings of fact in the Trilogy that led to the legal dispossession of Indians from their land. The absence of men in Indian agricultural practices either reinforced the image of the lazy Indian male or supported the notion that men subsisted upon hunting.
