Skip to content

Native Literature from before America

Friday from the Archives: “She Said That Saint Augustine is Worth Nothing Compared to Her Homeland: Teresa Martín and the Méndez Cancio Account of La Tama (1600)” an essay by Melissa D. Birkhofer and Paul M. Worley from NCLR 32 (2023)

Celebrating Native American Heritage Month? Make sure to include all of our 2023 Feature “Native American Literature of North Carolina”! From contemporary Lumbee poets to Cherokee novelists to Native American picture book authors working in classrooms to raise Native visibility, the 2023 feature showcases Native writing across the state.

In Birkhofer and Worley’s essay, they write about one of if not the first Native American writing in the Southeast portion of the land (prior to the US). “Martín’s voice challenges us to rethink our conceptualizations about how we study literature in this land, whether we are thinking in terms of language, region, or nation-state. She would be an Indigenous woman from North Carolina save for the fact there was no such place when she was alive.”

Heritage months continue to give us opportunities to further expand the literature we study and the writers we seek to learn from. Birkhofer and Worley remind us: “The predominantly Anglophone trajectory of US Literature as a field has meant that Indigenous languages and other colonial languages such as Spanish have largely been set aside in the imagining of a US cultural and literary heritage with roots in English and the UK. This monolingualism of course means that a text like the relación, in which Martín’s testimony appears, falls, almost by definition, outside of US, Southern, or North Carolina literatures.”

“We ultimately argue that, despite superficial appearances, we can read Martín as creating a counter-narrative of Spanish-Indigenous relations and pushing back against Spanish expansion within the relación itself. Beyond the text’s value as a historical document, Martín’s testimony thus marks an important moment in not just North Carolina or US literature, but in hemispheric Indigenous struggles for voice and representation under colonial conditions,” Birkhofer and Worley write. We look forward to more literature from underrepresented voices.

Read the entire essay on ProQuest or purchase a copy of the 2023 issue.