Toni Morrison’s A Mercy: Settler Colonialism and Native Survival in Seventeenth-Century America

This article analyzes Toni Morrison’s A Mercy in the context of seventeenth-century North American settler colonialism and indigenous survival. While earlier studies on Morrison’s works emphasize African American experiences and the African diaspora, surely leading to a wealth of meaningful perspectives, the ones on Morrison’s concerns for and critical awareness of Native Americans in the United States remain limited. With reference to Lorenzo Veracini’s theories of settler colonialism and focusing on Lina in A Mercy, this article explores how European settlers displace indigenous peoples from their spaces, erase their cultures, and force assimilation into white cultural norms, producing the ‘vanishing Indian’ trope. This article also highlights Lina’s survival strategies. Lina restores her reciprocal relationships with nature, cultivates a hybrid self-invention, and develops cultural abilities within the in-between spaces of Native and white cultures. As choosing this praxis of crafting a new way of life, Lina resists settler colonialism. A Mercy, therefore, reveals Morrison’s critical attention to the historical realities of Native Americans and settler colonialism in the early United States.