With today’s global media attention on climate crises and resource-centered violence, scholars are keenly invested in understanding how we have reached such a dire situation and what it is that has kept us from acting effectively to improve it. With Britain one of the first among the most powerful, assertive, and technologically advanced nations to develop a culture relying on self-worth defined by bourgeois affluence, the Victorian era marks the crucial historical period from which arose our current inability to act decisively as a collective in the face of global environmental destruction. But it also began the first local environmentalist groups, offered literature directly contesting environmental degradation, and created legal legislation regarding the rights of nonhuman animals. Meanwhile, as demonstrated by Indigenous author Kahgegagahbowh (aka George Copway), from the colony of Upper Canada, many who did not identify as British contributed to the shaping of the Victorian Age and its ecological zeitgeist.

The chapter points to the textual plurality of early Native newspapers, and particularly how their dense texture simultaneously conserves traditions and adapts to the new circumstances of modernization. The close readings in this chapter discuss two Indigenous periodicals: The Cherokee Phoenix and Copway’s American Indian, as well as related nonfiction texts. The chapter argues that antebellum Native publications are complex media artifacts whose relation to the construction of sovereignty is articulated through seriality; the circulation and reprinting of particular types of texts for particular readers; and material properties like the nonlinear and multisensory dynamics of the periodical’s page arrangements. It shows that the papers’ somewhat chaotic mixture of clippings, texts, and images constitutes a powerful discursive construct and, as a distinct media form, places Native writing at the vanguard of a transnational and transindigenous criticism of imperialism in the tumultuous decades of the early nineteenth century.