I found this article while browsing a special issue of American Quarterly from 2008 that had several essays on Indigenous feminism (downloaded from Project Muse). I recently was thinking about captivity narratives because I felt a connection between the recent release “The Witch” and captivity narratives written in America and Canada from the 17-19th centuries. This essay helped me clarify what the nature of those connections could be: an intersection of the technologies of gender and colonial violence in the building of the national projects of Canada and the United States. Audra Simpson analyzes in particular here the narrative of Eunice Williams and how her story was received and then mobilized by settlers for whom becoming Indian was part of the process of manufacturing legitimacy as land takers. Simpson connects the story of Williams to more contemporary instances of Mohawk women being disenfranchised from their communities for marrying non-Native men. It is a brief and introductory look into how law and literature can both be forms of a kind of alchemy, as Simpson puts it, creating citizens and disappearing others with a stroke of the pen.