A narrative of the life of Mary Jemison

white woman of the Genesee

20th ed. --
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Last edited by MARC Bot
September 6, 2024 | History

A narrative of the life of Mary Jemison

white woman of the Genesee

20th ed. --
  • 3.0 (1 rating) ·
  • 3 Want to read
  • 1 Have read

The film Dance with Wolves shows how some whites, at the time of the first European contacts with American Indians, chose not to return to their own culture. Mary Jemison was perhaps the most famous white captive who stayed to live among the Indians.

Her account of her life with the Senecas--as told to upstate New York doctor James Everett Seaver in 1824--has gone through countless editions, reprints, and retellings before the creation of this definitive edition by the feminist scholar of ethnicity June Namias.

In 1758, at about the age of fifteen, Mary Jemison was captured with her Scotch-Irish family in western Pennsylvania by a party of six Shawnees and four French in the Seven Years' War. Her captors traded her to two Seneca sisters, who adopted her to replace a slain brother. Jemison knew that her family had been killed when she saw her mother's red-haired scalp drying over a campfire along with the scalps of her father and brothers.

She herself would survive two Indian husbands (a Delaware and a Seneca), the births of eight children, the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and the development of the canals in western New York, to die in 1833 at about age ninety. Mary Jemison's vivid personal account of her life is full of insights into Iroquois culture. It is also a major document of acculturation and survival. Mrs. Jemison stayed with the Senecas mainly because of family ties, but she also became part of Seneca society.

A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison is an example of an original American literary genre, the captivity narrative. Such wild and woolly accounts were the first westerns of the American frontier and the first national best-sellers. But Jemison's story is also about the conflicts, complexities, and relationships among white and native cultures in early America.

Her Iroquois woman's perspective on the American Revolution, and on New York in the eighteenth and the early nineteenth century, is unique among the primary sources that we have from the period.

The present edition, stripped of later additions and alterations, is as close to Jemison's original as possible. The extensive introduction and the bibliography put Jemison and Seaver's Narrative in its ethnographic, historical, and literary contexts, and offer new interpretations of the many earlier editions and of Jemison as a woman both white and American Indian.

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Edition Availability
Cover of: A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison
A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison
March 1995, University of Oklahoma Press
Paperback in English - New Ed edition
Cover of: A narrative of the life of Mrs. Mary Jemison
A narrative of the life of Mrs. Mary Jemison
1963, American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society
in English
Cover of: A narrative of the life of Mary Jemison
A narrative of the life of Mary Jemison: white woman of the Genesee
1918, American Scenic & Historic Preservation Society
- 20th ed. --
Cover of: A narrative of the life of Mrs. Mary Jemison
Cover of: A narrative of the life of Mrs. Mary Jemison

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Book Details


Edition Notes

Published in
New York
Other Titles
Life of Mary Jemison.

Classifications

Dewey Decimal Class
973/.04/97 s, 970/.004/97, B
Library of Congress
E85 .G2 vol. 41, E99.s3 .G2 vol. 41, E99S3 S4 1918

The Physical Object

Pagination
xv, 453 p. :

ID Numbers

Open Library
OL7228732M
Internet Archive
narrativeoflifeo00seavuoft
ISBN 10
0824016653
Goodreads
1224066

Source records

Internet Archive item record

First Sentence

"ALTHOUGH I may have frequently heard the history of my ancestry, my recollection is too imperfect to enable me to trace it further back than to my father and mother, whom I have often heard mention the families from whence they originated, as having possessed wealth and honorable stations under the government of the country in which they resided."

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History

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