Native Americans through 19th century eyes

Los Angeles Times (CA)
December 26, 2004

Author: Joy S. Kasson; Joy S. Kasson is Bowman and Gordon Gray professor of
American studies and English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill and the author of "Buffalo Bill's Wild West: Celebrity, Memory,and
Popular History.

History's Shadow
Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century
Steven Conn
University of Chicago Press: 276 pp., $35

*

Shades of Hiawatha
Staging Indians, Making Americans, 1880-1930
Alan Trachtenberg
Hill & Wang: 370 pp., $30

*

Since their arrival on this continent, Euro-Americans have searched for
ways to understand the native inhabitants whose lands they appropriated and
cultures they often denigrated. Even while engaging in brutal military
conflicts with Indian tribes, 19th century Americans devoured the
Leatherstocking tales of James Fenimore Cooper, wept over sentimental
Indian novels and plays, flocked to see Wild West shows and populated
anthropology displays at world's fairs and museums. In literature, art,
popular culture and science, Americans told stories about Indians to
satisfy their own longings for adventure and rewrite an uncomfortable
history.

Over the course of the last century, much has changed in our understanding
of the encounter between peoples on the North American continent. Scholars
in Native American studies have brought new perspectives on American Indian
history, biography and culture; American Indian voices are heard in books
by writers like N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko and Louise Erdrich.
Most dramatic was the opening this year of the National Museum of the
American Indian, in Washington, D.C. -- an institution developed with the
collaboration of native communities throughout the hemisphere that presents
Indian cultures as living entities and offers an opportunity to reflect on
the complexities of Euro-Americans' thinking about native peoples.

Two timely and illuminating new books help us with this endeavor. Both
focus on the 19th century, the period in which American Indians lost
political and military independence under the curious eye of American
artists, writers and social scientists. Steven Conn's "History's Shadow" is
an intelligent and comprehensive look at the place of Native Americans in
Euro-Americans' intellectual history during the period bracketed by the
Lewis and Clark expedition at the beginning of the 19th century and the
Wounded Knee massacre at its close. Examining literature, painting,
photography, ethnology and anthropology, Conn mines the written record to
discover how non-Native Americans thought about Indians and what influence
these ideas had upon the development of American science, social science
and history.

As Euro-Americans searched for a framework through which to understand the
native inhabitants of the continent, they imposed their own paradigms --
"noble" and "savage," for example -- on the cultures they encountered.
Scientists tried to develop classification systems that would place Indians
into groups defined by language or physical appearance; religious thinkers
tried to determine whether the Indian peoples could be the remnants of the
10 lost tribes of Israel or the descendants of Noah's son Ham. Historians
wondered whether the apparent "savagery" of the natives represented the
degeneration of a once-civilized people, confirming a cyclical view of
history, or an early stage in their development, supporting a progressive
historical model. And through all the discussions ran the ominous thread of
racialized thinking, the assumption that the native peoples were inferior
to the Europeans, and the dominant metaphor of "the vanishing race."

The most fascinating aspect of Conn's book is his account of the rise of
anthropology and the ways in which the "scientific" study of culture erased
the history of the native peoples as well as the story of Euro-American
responsibility for their condition. Additionally, the new field of
ethnology achieved wide public acceptance in displays at world's fairs
(such as the Chicago Columbian Exposition of 1893) and museums (such as the
American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Field Museum in
Chicago). The perspective that the National Museum of the American Indian
intends to counter was solidified at the turn of the 20th century by
anthropological "authorities" who used glass cases to reinforce racial
hierarchy and inevitable extinction. The author of a previous book on
museums and intellectual life in America, Conn is well placed to help us
understand the significance of the new museum. Its insistence on the
speaking voices of living people is a direct challenge to the stories told
by the previous century's museums.

In contrast with Conn's summary of the intellectual strands that made up
the story of "the vanishing race" as understood by Euro-Americans is Alan
Trachtenberg's "Shades of Hiawatha," a splendid study of literary and
cultural responses to the American Indian that plunges deeply into the
complexities of the interactions between Indians and Euro-Americans.

The book examines a variety of ways in which Indian characters were
"staged," or represented, in literature, photography and performance and
places this effort in an illuminating historical context: the rising tide
of anxiety about national identity that accompanied the flood of immigrants
at the turn of the 20th century and the refiguring of "American identity"
that resulted. Trachtenberg shows how the fear of immigrant aliens
expressed in politics and literature led to the reinvention of Indians as
"first Americans" whose "disappearance" in the face of Anglo-Saxon power
comforted those who feared America's increasing diversity. From
congressional committee reports to citizenship pageants staged by
Wanamaker's department store, Trachtenberg uncovers fresh material to shed
new light on the role of Indians in America's imaginative life.

The starting point for this story is the famous narrative poem by Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow, "The Song of Hiawatha." Published in 1855, the same
year as Walt Whitman's path-breaking "Leaves of Grass," "Hiawatha" created
a faux epic, inspired by Finnish poetry that Longfellow read in
translation. For Indian lore, Longfellow relied on the research of Henry
Schoolcraft, a geologist who married an Ojibway woman and transmuted her
accounts of traditional tales into folkloric fantasies.

In his eagerness to create an Indian epic that glorified a folk hero but
concluded that Indians must give way to white "progress," Longfellow
transposed the name of an Iroquois historical figure onto a collection of
Ojibway myths. No wonder Emerson described the popular poem as "wholesome,"
for, as Trachtenberg comments, Longfellow succeeded in creating a generic
"Indian" who quietly faded away with the approach of "the white-man's foot"
at the poem's end.

Yet "The Song of Hiawatha" had a life of its own, embodied in paintings,
performances and operas, and recited by innumerable schoolchildren, even
those at Indian schools. Longfellow's justification of amalgamation became
an instrument for asserting cultural identity. One of Trachtenberg's most
fascinating discoveries is the Yiddish "Hiawatha," a 1910 translation of
the poem into that language by a writer steeped in Jewish immigrants'
search for an American identity at the turn of the century. Although it may
seem to anticipate Mel Brooks' humorous conflation of American mythologies
in "Blazing Saddles" (a point the author deftly makes), the translation of
"Hiawatha" by Yehoash (the pen name of Solomon Bloomgarten) and the other
Yiddish poetry quoted here drive home Trachtenberg's point that the
"staging" of Indian identity was part of the broader search for the meaning
of "Americanness" at the turn of the century.

"Shades of Hiawatha" also offers striking analysis of works by Robert
Frost, Hart Crane and Henry James, as well as a particularly complex and
satisfying discussion of the photographs of Edward Curtis. But most
impressive, Trachtenberg's book brings the story to a conclusion with an
account of a very real hero, Luther Standing Bear -- born Ota K'te, or
Plenty Kill -- who attended Carlisle Indian School, became a performer in
Buffalo Bill's Wild West show and an advisor to western movies and
succeeded his father as a Lakota chief.

Late in life, Standing Bear wrote four books that serve as a bridge between
the Lakota culture into which he was born and the Euro-American culture he
came to negotiate so successfully. Trachtenberg shows how, like W.E.B. Du
Bois, Standing Bear envisioned a realm of culture in which different groups
could teach each other in service of a more just society.

Unlike many other fine books that keep their focus on "The White Man's
Indian" (to quote an important early study by Robert Berkhofer),
Trachtenberg invites Standing Bear to have the last word. "Luther Standing
Bear imagined a humane nation as a great bridge woven of diverse tribal
stories," he writes at the end of "Shades of Hiawatha." "His challenging
vision deserves to be honored in the ongoing drama of the making of
Americans." Perhaps that wish, fulfilled eloquently in this book, is also
being addressed in the new museum on the National Mall.

Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times