David Cusick

David Cusick (Template:CircaTemplate:Spnd1840) was a Tuscarora artist and the author of David Cusick's Sketches of Ancient History of the Six Nations (1827). This is an early (if not the first) account of Native American history and myth, written and published in English by a Native American.

Biography

Cusick was born between 1780 and 1785, probably on Oneida land in upstate New York.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn He was Tuscarora.Template:Sfn His father, Nicholas Cusick (1756–1840), was a Revolutionary War veteran and an interpreter for the Congregationalist mission to the Seneca.Template:RpTemplate:Sfn He most likely attended a mission school where he learned to read and write English. David's younger brother, Dennis Cusick, was a watercolor painter, and together the two brothers help establish what the critic William C. Sturvetant has called the Iroquois realist school of painting.Template:Sfn David served in the War of 1812,Template:Sfn during which his village was burned by the British.

He was a physician,Template:Sfn painter, and student of Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) oral tradition. He is thought to have died around 1840.Template:Sfn

Book

File:Stonish giants - David Cusick.jpg

Stonish Giants, engraving by David Cusick from Sketches of the Ancient History of the Six Nations

Sketches of Ancient History of the Six Nations "was the first Native-authored, Native-printed, and Native-copyrighted text" in what is now the United States;Template:Sfn Cusick published the first edition of Sketches as a 28-page pamphlet at Lewiston, New York, in 1825Template:Sfn or 1827.Template:Sfn He re-issued it the following year with additional text and four of his own engravings.Template:Sfn The Sketches was republished in 1848Template:Sfn and again in 1892. Cusick printed at least some editions with his own money.Template:Sfn Sketches was a source for several 19th-century works on Iroquois oral tradition.Template:Sfn

Sketches describes about 2,800 years of history.Template:Sfn It is divided into three parts. The first part describes Good Mind, who created people called Eagwehoewe. The second describes the Eagwehoewe's experiences with malevolent beings called the Stonish Giants and Flying Heads, among others. Part three is about the Eagwehoewe's creation of a "chain of alliance" with one another.Template:Sfn

The narrative begins by describing "two worlds" in existence among the "ancients": a dark "lower world" and an "upper world" inhabited by humans.Template:Sfn The narrative describes the twin brothers Enigorio and Enigonhahetgea (the good spirit and evil spirit) and their creatures, the Eagwehoewe (the people) and their enemies the Ronnongwetowanca (giants).Template:Sfn The earliest people were championed by the hero Donhtonha and the less heroic Yatatonwatea and plagued by the mischievous Shotyeronsgwea. Other characters include Big Quisquiss, the Big Elk, and the Lake Serpent.Template:Sfn

Villains include Konearaunehneh (Flying Heads), the Lake Serpent, the Otneyarheh (Stonish Giants), the snake with the human head, the Oyalkquoher or Oyalquarkeror (the Big Bear), the great musqueto, Kaistowanea (the serpent with two heads), the great Lizard, and the witches introduced by the Skaunyatohatihawk or Nanticokes.Template:Sfn

Early critics of Sketches, including Henry David Thoreau, Henry Schoolcraft, and Francis Parkman, dismissed the text. Critic Joshua David Bellin notes that, "considering how rare Sketches was—rare both in numbers and, as the first self-proclaimed history in English by a North American Indian, in kind—the attention, and hostility, it drew are little short of remarkable".Template:Sfn

See also

• List of Native American artists
• Visual arts by indigenous peoples of the Americas

External links

• David Cusick’s Sketches of Ancient History of the Six Nations, 1827 first edition, from Internet Archive.
• David Cusick’s Sketches of Ancient History of the Six Nations, 2006 PDF edition, transposed from the 1828 second edition with modern typography.
• David Cusick’s Sketches of Ancient History of the Six Nations, 1848 edition, from Internet Archive.
• A brief biography by Charles Boewe
• Images of the Library of Congress's copy of the 1828 edition of Sketches