Life of Black Hawk

Life of Black Hawk (1833) is the autobiography of Sauk leader Black Hawk. It was dictated by Black Hawk himself to US army interpreter Antoine Le Claire. Black Hawk relates the story of his life and of his tribe during the early 19th-century conflicts between the Indigenous nations and the white settlers. He details his tribe’s involvement in the War of 1812 between the United States and Great Britain, his active resistance against his people’s removal from their homeland that led to the Black Hawk War, and his eventual surrender. Black Hawk’s account is the first published memoir by an Indigenous American that illuminates Indigenous people’s experiences during colonial expansion, and it remains a seminal text in Indigenous literature and studies. Black Hawk was a war leader of the Sauk tribe, an Indigenous nation originally inhabiting the land in what is now Green Bay, Wisconsin. By the 19th century, the tribe had settled along the Mississippi River, now between Rock Island, Illinois, and St. Louis, Missouri. After the enforcement of racist removal policies by the United States government, the tribe moved west of the Mississippi and ultimately settled in Oklahoma.