This article closely examines two literary works written by Circassian authors – one is a nineteenth-century short story Scarecrow [Chuchelo] published in Russian in 1860 by Adil-Girey Keshev (1837-1872), and the second work is Zarina Kanukova’s play L’emizh (The Bridge), an adaptation of Keshev’s story, published in 2006 in Circassian language. The article aims to demonstrate how these authors, in their attempts to challenge the colonial representations of Circassians, introduce a new subjectivity, a new interpretation of self as they see it through their own eyes and self-representations. The article attempts to answer the following questions: How do both indigenous authors frame and articulate their relationship to the gendered and racialized histories of Circassian men and women in the colonial and in the post-Soviet context respectively? How do they address colonial experience and representation? What are the modes of self-representation and how are colonial language and imagery are being (re)appropriated, or not, by the Circassian writers? To what extent do indigenous writers resist, revise, or transgress colonial ideologies and representations, and in what ways do they reinforce such discursive constructs? To the extent that they revise or rebel against colonial representations, what new models do they offer, and how do these new models, tied to current Circassian political and cultural projects, raise problems and contradictions of their own?