This session revisits John Rollin Ridge's life, writings, and critical scholarship in light of emerging methodologies anchored in indigenous studies, decolonial environmentalism, and indigenous book history. A Cherokee "mixed-blood," as indigenous scholar Louis Owens characterized him, Rollin Ridge (aka Yellowbird) is most known for his sensationalized, often plagiarized, and subsequently popularized 1854 narrative, The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, which Owens and others have dubbed the first Native American novel, even though the narrative proper focuses on the adventures and folklore of Joaquin Murieta, a celebrated Mexican bandit. However, Rollin Ridge (1827-1867) was also an accomplished poet and newspaper man, editing the Sacramento Bee and contributing pro-assimilation pieces to the San Francisco Herald. He was a central, though often-overlooked newspaper writer in mid-nineteenth-century California and often wrote about or commented on California politics, history, and the fast, uneven, and racially charged changes the state underwent during the mid-nineteenth-century gold rush.

This session takes up the topic of Rollin Ridge's life and works and proposes to revisit them and their continued relevance for critical indigenous, Latinx, C19 American, and print cultural histories. While Rollin Ridge's novel is a mainstay in C19 American and Native American literature classes, Hsuan L. Hsu's 2018 republication of Murieta (Penguin Press) invites further consideration of Rollin Ridge and the novel's place in indigenous and Latinx literary studies in particular. Existing scholarship tends toward early biographical criticism of Rollin Ridge and the novel, considering especially Rollin Ridge's "mixed-blood" Cherokee identity (Owens), class and empire (Streeby, Rifkin, Drysdale), the Ridge family's role in the Trail of Tears (Owens, Alemán, Parins, and Walker), and the long, folkloric afterlife of Murieta in plagiarized editions (Streeby), transnational bandit narratives (Irwin), and early inspiration for Zorro and Batman.

The session relates to the existing body of scholarship by drawing on it and also emerging from some of the more recent scholarship on Rollin Ridge's environmental poetics, his vexed belonging in indigenous literary culture (considering he was an advocate for assimilation and hails from a family line that brokered with the US to displace and dispossess Cherokee peoples), and recent work on print culture and influences in Rollin Ridge's writings.

The session will run as a standard one, with a brief introduction by the presider, followed by presentations that will span 17-20 minutes each, with at least 15 minutes for conversation and discussion. Marissa K. López will begin with a paper on Rollin Ridge's indigenous poetics, beginning with an analysis of his "Mt Shasta" poem, as it originally appeared and subsequently appeared embedded in his Joaquin Murieta. Often viewed as a clumsy attempt at high romantic poetry, the poem can also be more adequately understood within and against Rollin Ridge's corpus of poetic production and viewed more in line as an emerging form of indigenous poetics rather than a form of mimicry of dominant poetics. Carlos Alonso Nugent takes up what he calls "imagined environments" to re-situate an understanding of the relationship between indigeneity and latinidad rooted in shared lived and cultural environments that help to explain why a native writer would take up a narrative about a Mexican bandit and how that story gained such subsequent transnational traction. Finally, Amy Gore brings bibliographic and textual studies to bear to unpack the way copyright laws--their absence, use, abuse, and loopholes--served as the primary colonial tool for the dispossession of Rollin Ridge's rights to his own narrative. Hers is a critical intervention on the often celebrated afterlife of Ridge's novel by noting how Ridge himself received no royalty or payment for the many (and continued) uses of his fictionalization of a folk figure.

The session brings together two established scholars (Alemán and López) in C19 American and Latinx literary and cultural histories, especially Californio writings, with two emerging scholars in borderlands environmental studies (Alonso Nugent) and critical indigenous book history (Gore). Session participants also represent a cross-section of institutions (UNM, UCLA, Vanderbilt, and North Dakota State University), and attention to representative scholarly diversity to this area of interest.