Tag Archives: Haudenosaunee Confederacy

Reading John Norton: The Past, Present, and Future of a Troublesome Archive

A portrait of John Norton, painted by Mary Ann Knight in 1805 while Norton was on a visit to Great Britain.

Rather than accept John Norton’s self-fashioning at face value, I explore the incongruities, counterclaims, and complexities that make it appear much more likely that Norton was an early-modern trans-Atlantic shapeshifter, stretching the truth at best, and completely fabricating his own reality at worst.