09/22 Craig Williams (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) “'Not a Song of Golden Greek': Laura Cornelius Kellogg and Native North American Writing on Greco-Roman Antiquity"

In a little known history, over eighty Native writers of North America from the seventeenth century to today have made various uses of ancient Greece and Rome, the antiquity brought across the Atlantic by settler-colonists and not infrequently held up as a paragon of civilization, in implicit or explicit contrast with the “primitive” or “savage” cultures indigenous to this continent. I open with a sampling of contemporary Native writers who engage with Greco-Roman antiquity in order to talk back to such views and to make their own contributions to the survivance of the ancient peoples of this continent. In the second part of my paper, I consider the roles of Greco-Roman antiquity in the writings of Laura Cornelius Kellogg (1880-1947), Oneida educator, activist, and author of "Our Democracy and the American Indian."