Ahkonachimu

The cento is a form of poetic collage, in which poems are built out of lines from other texts reconfigured into new patterns of meaning. Here, the source materials are not other poems but the journals of John Prince (1796-1870), the controversial Upper Canadian military leader and politician famous - if not infamous - for his oratory. Lockhart re-envisions Prince through a Lenape lens as Ahkonachimu, or the Maker of Long Speeches, a man who uses his legendary rhetorical skills in the service of a very personal colonialism.

How, asks Lockhart, would the Lenape construct Prince, given their different understandings? Using Prince's own words, Lockhart allows his subject to reveal himself as a paragon of the 19th-century settler enterprise, a self-made individualist and skilled demagogue, whose acts and words break hard against Lenape ideas of governance, leadership, and the use of language. And yet Prince is also a rebel, at odds with authority and in his liquor-fueled dynamism as likely to make enemies and alienate the Crown as make friends and advance it.

The ensuing portrait is complex and nuanced, and provides new and unexpected insights into a transformative period in Turtle Island's history. Ahkonachimu is also entertaining. It paints a raucous picture of a world in transformation, a world rife with conflict both physical and ideological, internal and external, domestic and foreign, settler and Indigenous.