Employing the Local : A Penobscot Modern in the Federal Writers' Project

Senier, Siobhan

Essay exploring the 1930s Federal Writers' Project interview of Indian Island, Maine, resident and canoe maker, Henry Mitchell, transcribed by Old Town native, Robert Grady. Arguments favoring the particularly modern quality of the dually-authored interview, as compared to outside depictions of Native Americans in the local Maine literatures of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. How early 20th-century Old Town business and local government perpetuated the construction of stereotyped and antiquated Penobscot cultural categories and descriptions - aesthetically, linguistically, or in terms of work and leisure. How the literary output of the Federal Writers' Project played into this sort of identity construction on a more diverse, national scale, and in what ways singular FWP interactions like those between Grady and Mitchell challenged both the national project and the local cultural categories it sometimes reinforced. What the Mitchell/Grady interview owes to the relationship out of which it was born, Grady's other interviews mostly conducted with Franco Americans in Old Town.

2002

en

Journal Article

480610151;1759778;50709799;11168654

1930s; Indian Island, Maine; Old Town, Maine; New England

3

The New England Quarterly

0028-4866

75