"This project of normalizing Indigenous people's crucial place in negotiation with the US settler government is ongoing, and this is a study we need right now." — American Literary History"Authorized Agents makes a significant contribution to critical debates in Native American and Indigenous studies regarding the relationships among Native people's agency, Indigenous sovereignty, and literary representation." — Transmotion"…each chapter offers a critical perspective that pushes readers to think differently about how to understand and work with the writings of Native peoples in the nineteenth century." — Annals of Iowa"Frank Kelderman finds indigenous agency in 'unexpected places,' to use Phil Deloria's term, even as he reveals the ways in which the newly formed United States' political and publication systems increasingly narrowed the routes through which indigenous people could act and speak, as authorized and authorial agents, on behalf of communal bodies. Authorized Agents suggests that the fetishization of the singular, romanticized 'Indian chief' in American literature and culture becomes so imbricated in diplomatic structures, in the era of removal, that some Native leaders' rhetoric came to reflect the masculinist, fatalist discourse of savagery and vanishing, even as those leaders were advocating for tribal sovereignty and critiquing colonialism. An unsettling, provocative analysis of diplomacy, literature, and the insidious patterns of colonial structures." — Lisa Brooks, author of Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip's War
