Native Americans through 19th century eyes

History’s Shadow

Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century

Steven Conn

University of Chicago Press: 276 pp., $35

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Shades of Hiawatha

Staging Indians, Making Americans, 1880-1930

Alan Trachtenberg

Hill & Wang: 370 pp., $30

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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. *