Indian Work: Language and Livelihood in Native American History

Indian Work

Indian Work Language and Livelihood in Native American History

DANIEL H. USNER, JR.

Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2009

Copyright © 2009 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Usner, Daniel H. Indian work : language and livelihood in Native American history / Daniel H. Usner, Jr. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-674-03349-8 (alk. paper) 1. Indians of North America—Economic conditions. 2. Indians of North America—Employment. 3. Indians of North America—Public opinion. 4. Whites—Relations with Indians. 5. Public opinion—United States. 6. United States—Race relations. 7. United States—Social policy. 8. United States—Economic policy. I. Title. E98.E2U85 2009 330.9730089'97—dc22 2008042981

dedicated to cornell university’s american indian program

—all of the students, colleagues, and friends there who have worked so resourcefully to change the meaning of Indian work in the academy

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

ix

Introduction: The Pursuit of Livelihood and the Production of Language

1

1 Inventing the Hunter State: Iroquois Livelihood in Jeffersonian America

18

2 Narratives of Decline and Disappearance: The Changing Presence of American Indians in Early Natchez

42

3 The Discourse over Poverty: Indian Treaty Rights and Welfare Policy

69

4 Perceptions of Authenticity and Passivity: Indian Basket Making in Post–Civil War Louisiana

93

5 Primitivism and Tourism: Indian Livelihood in D. H. Lawrence’s New Mexico

117

Conclusion

141

Notes

149

Acknowledgments

189

Index

193

ILLUSTRATIONS

1 An Indian family on a hunting trip, 1807

38

2 Indian chief, possibly Red Jacket, 1807

39

3 Eugène Delacroix, The Natchez, 1835

60

4 Karl Bodmer, Choctaws at Natchez

64

5 Karl Bodmer, Choctaw Camp on the Mississippi, 1833

65

6 Karl Bodmer, Tshanny, a Choctaw Man

66

7 “A Losing Business,” Puck, 1882

85

8 Léon J. Fremaux, “Choctaw Indian Squaws”

98

9 “Sunday in New Orleans—The French Market,” Harper’s Weekly, 1866

100

10 Photograph of Clara Darden

108

11 Walter Ufer, Jim and His Daughter, 1923

134

12 Photograph of D. H. Lawrence, Frieda, and the Taos Indians who helped them, Kiowa Ranch, 1924

137

Not long since, a strolling Indian went to sell baskets at the house of a well-known lawyer in my neighborhood. “Do you wish to buy any baskets?” he asked. “No, we do not want any,” was the reply. “What!” exclaimed the Indian as he went out the gate, “do you mean to starve us?” Having seen his industrious white neighbors so well off,—that the lawyer had only to weave arguments, and, by some magic, wealth and standing followed,—he had said to himself: I will go into business; I will weave baskets; it is a thing which I can do. Thinking that when he had made the baskets he would have done his part, and then it would be the white man’s to buy them. He had not discovered that it was necessary for him to make it worth the other’s while to buy them, or at least make him think that it was so, or to make something else which it would be worth his while to buy. I too had woven a kind of basket of a delicate texture, but I had not made it worth any one’s while to buy them. Yet not the less, in my case, did I think it worth my while to weave them, and instead of studying how to make it worth men’s while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them. The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others? —Henry David Thoreau, Walden

INTRODUCTION

The Pursuit of Livelihood and the Production of Language

“In respect of us they are a people poore,” Thomas Harriot wrote about American Indians whom he met on Roanoke Island in 1585, “and for want of skill and judgement in the knowledge and use of our things, doe esteeme our trifles before things of greater value.” “Notwithstanding,” this English promoter of colonization had to admit, “in their proper maner (considering the want of such meanes as we have), they seeme very ingenious. For although they have no such tooles, nor any such crafts, Sciences and Artes as wee, yet in those things they doe, they shew excellence of wit.” Harriot assumed that these Indians found the English “maner of knowledge and crafts to exceede theirs in perfection, and speede,” so he eagerly expected them to “desire our friendship and love, and have the greater respect for pleasing and obeying us.”1 Beginning in the sixteenth century and continuing into the twenty-first, non-Indian representations of American Indians such as Thomas Harriot’s report on Virginia have relentlessly emphasized weaknesses and shortcomings in their livelihood. Language about indigenous production and trade operated immediately as a major instrument of colonization, with conquest and control justified by fantasies about a poor people easily becoming dependent upon superior Europeans. But the gradual evolution of economic thought itself was also influenced by assessments of American Indian life, and these ideas and images endured long enough to affect how historians came to understand Indian livelihood. In the meantime, Indian people from generation to generation had to face colonialist practices and policies bolstered by this ideology.

2

Introduction

Indian Work explores the complicated dialectic between ideological representation and economic interaction in various settings and times across American Indian history. My objective is to capture both the pursuit of livelihood and the production of language as they intersected in a multitude of ways. The dual nature of this undertaking involves two separate lines of inquiry that are seldom found in each other’s company. The social history of American Indian livelihood comprises one historiography and the cultural history of non-Indian ideas and images comprises another, but here I try to interweave the two in hope of shedding light on how livelihood and language have actually influenced each other. Ultimately, I want to recover the lived experience of American Indians working before the watchful eyes of non-Indians. But the intricacy and dignity of their economic adaptations to difficult conditions and threatening forces have been obscured from our view by willful misrepresentation. To sort out Indian livelihood from non-Indian language, I strategically use the phrase Indian work in reference to two different dimensions. At one level of analysis, Indian work refers to image making of various kinds. Since the earliest accounts of America produced by Europeans, there has been no shortage of imagining, speculating, theorizing, and forecasting about the economic life of American Indians. Virtually all aspects of Native American life, of course, have been subjected to such representation. But there is extra value in focusing attention on how people who worked at representing Indians wrote in particular about subsistence, exchange, and material life. Philanthropists, government officials, and social reformers who scrutinized United States Indian policy over the second half of the nineteenth century commonly referred to their activity as Indian work. Many of them worked for and with Indian people in a campaign of assimilationism, and they were generally more activist and interventionist than earlier generations of writers and artists who took an interest in Indian livelihood.2 This book explores a diverse sample of writings created by such “Indian workers” as propagandists and officials in North American colonies, intellectual and political leaders of the early United States, travelers and public officials over the nineteenth century, and artists and anthropologists in the early twentieth century. All of this written work had some kind of intrusive effect on the lives of Indian people. Imagine needing to confront governmental policy steered by a commissioner of Indian Affairs who wrote in his annual report for 1881 that “to domesticate and

Introduction

civilize wild Indians is a noble work, the accomplishment of which should be a crown of glory to any nation. But to allow them to drag along year after year, and generation after generation, in their old superstitions, laziness, and filth, when we have the power to elevate them in the scale of humanity, would be a lasting disgrace.”3 Whether analyzing government work, missionary work, educational work, philanthropic work, reform work, social work, fieldwork, or artwork, altogether these “Indian workers” produced a plethora of language about Indian livelihood— constituting a mighty force in itself against which Indian people had to work.4 The phrase Indian work is also used to capture various activities pursued by American Indians for subsistence, commerce, and income. The economic history of American Indians is still a relatively neglected area of study, and this project touches lightly on only a few features of this complicated and compelling story. Experiences that appear in one place and another in this book include traditional means of production and exchange, adaptive and creative responses to commercial trade, displacement from homelands and loss of resources, employment off reservations and impoverishment on reservations, and preservation of old skills and development of new enterprises. The persistent theme running across the chapters, however, is how Indians sought work in and brought goods to spaces that were vulnerable to disapproval or reproach, especially under circumstances of economic transition or crisis. In more ways than one, Indians working on the edges of non-Indian society were risk takers who ventured, for some portion of their livelihood, away from the safety of home communities and toward the danger of alien ones. To lose control over one’s labor in familiar fields and forests was bad enough, but to suffer denigration for seeking work in new places only made it worse. The economic uncertainty and vulnerability faced by these working-class Indians were exacerbated, as this book intends to show, by ideological responses from non-Indians whose work usually expressed pity and contempt in a variable mix.

After long neglect, the role of labor in American Indian history and culture is finally being studied in the detail that it deserves. Scholars have revealed the importance of Indian workers in different regions of North America and in various sectors of the economy, from crewmen on New England whaling ships to uranium miners in New Mexico. Particular

3

4

Introduction

obstacles as well as opportunities encountered by Indian workers are coming to light. The influence of cultural values upon choices made by Indian people to enter wage markets and the impact of wage labor upon community life are receiving closer and closer attention.5 The popular notion that American Indians have not participated in the economy as wage laborers is deeply embedded in American consciousness. To provide evidence for the long and rich history of Indians in the workforce, therefore, is not sufficient. “The entire ideological system within which the stereotypes are nested,” Patricia Albers exhorts, “must be dismantled.”6 Dismantling this ideological system poses some special challenges. The first challenge is to bring the observers of Indian livelihood into the open. Lucy R. Lippard achieves this focus when looking at photographs in which “Native people are falsely ‘foregrounded,’ pushed up to the front row, to the photographic firing line. The backgrounds, however, pierce the surface, inhabited as they often are by whites— onlookers, bypassers, voyeurs.” What she calls the “watchfulness” or “wariness” of white witnesses that we see “through a screen of Indian images, the powers behind their backs,” is a subject of this book. And as acknowledged by Lippard, we students of the imagery also become “accomplices in the manipulations.”7 Beliefs and ideas that empower representation often operate in the background, and they can be most political when appearing to be nonpolitical. Inclusion of certain groups in a public discourse without their participation is perhaps more disabling than exclusion. To pursue their own interests, whether pertaining to public policy or to personal opportunity, the disadvantaged must confront what is imagined about them as well as what materially stands in their way. American Indian counternarratives, as all of the cases explored in this book intend to show, are difficult to discern without interrogating the non-Indian narratives about them.8 The difficulty that physical work in general poses for literary representation and analysis constitutes another challenge in this endeavor. Passing descriptions of commonplace activities are too easily overlooked, passed over for longer scenes of what observers consider extraordinary or exotic behavior.9 But the problem is further complicated whenever intercultural interpretation is involved. Readers are taken in this book to various sites of representation and resistance, where dominant language manipulates the meaning of American Indians’ presence but where their resilient livelihood also defies that meaning. The intricacies of this

Introduction

engagement, as will be seen, operate at different levels across time and space. A continuum of economic and imaginative exchange becomes evident when both dimensions of Indian work—the ideological work produced about Indians and the physical work produced by Indians—are explored together. Imagining American Indians as savage hunters in Jeffersonian New York or primitive shamans in Jazz-Age New Mexico, as pathetic peddlers in antebellum marketplaces or welfare dependents on Great Society reservations had real-life consequences for interactions between Indians and non-Indians as well as for public policies. Livelihood can be interculturally “entangled,” in the way that anthropologist Nicholas Thomas has characterized material objects.10 There is a hybridity in economic activities—whether looking at the fur trade, transient labor, annuity receipts, or casino operations—that both mediated intercultural relations and contained different meanings for Indians and non-Indians. During the early years of the American republic, hunting and farming were interdependent activities for the Iroquois although white authorities polarized them into incompatible ways of life. Peddling goods on town squares and country roads in the early nineteenth-century South helped many Choctaws meet their needs, but signified to white observers nothing but desperation and deterioration. Receiving goods and services from the U.S. government was, for American Indians across the nation, an expectation that originated in treaty agreements and sovereign rights. For critics of Indian affairs and other public policies, on the other hand, this relationship represented abject dependency. In post–Civil War Louisiana, selling baskets to neighbors, tourists, and anthropologists became a valuable means of expressing identity and earning income. NonIndian perceptions of this exchange, however, tended to exaggerate the decline of culture. Working for wages on ranches and entertaining tourists allowed Indians in the American Southwest to bridge community customs with commercial opportunities, but to many visitors such employment reflected their spiritual decay. By examining economic interaction in relationship to literary images, I hope to shed additional light on the discursive elements of American Indian social and economic life. Or to put it another way, I join a current effort to restore the representation of American Indians to a social and economic context. Philip Deloria has demonstrated explicitly how “to put the making of non-Indian expectations into a dialogue with the lived experience of certain Native people, those whose actions were, at that very moment, being defined as unexpected.” Indian actors, singers,

5

6

Introduction

athletes, entrepreneurs, and warriors, in his study, “moved within white expectations, usually challenging and reaffirming those expectations at the same time.”11 American Indian uses of national parks during the National Park System’s formative years, whether to hunt and gather for themselves or to perform and work for outsiders, contributed both to their livelihood in and around tourist areas and to their idealized association with the natural world.12 During the early 1890s, Lakota men participating first in Ghost Dance ceremonies and then in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows unwittingly helped create a long-held notion that their people’s version of the millenarian movement had been exceptionally violent. But more important from their own point of view, they were adeptly supporting their families in the face of adverse governmental policies while creatively mitigating the effects of military imprisonment.13 Subsequent participation by American Indian performers and actors in the making of Hollywood films, of course, perpetuated and deepened the age-old challenge: how to take advantage of economic niches and opportunities that thrived on misrepresentation and exploitation, while protecting cultural integrity and personal dignity.14 Performance of Indian identity was an expanding sphere of wageearning work for American Indians. Playing to white expectations became a primary source of income, even a profession, for many. Whether looking at the Adirondack Mountains and Niagara Falls in the Northeast, at the Florida Everglades and Smoky Mountains in the Southeast, or at the forested shores of the western Great Lakes, we can observe many Indian families on a common path to performative work for travelers eager to observe, even to consume, Indian culture. In response to declining opportunity in commercial fur trade systems, many Indian men became guides for sports hunters and fishermen. Local knowledge and specialized skills were thereby adapted to changing economic circumstances. As tourism developed in select regions, men and women from Native American communities also went to work as groundskeepers, housekeepers, and cooks at nearby resorts and hotels. Tourist seasons, fairs and festivals, and other special events offered new marketing opportunities for the production of crafts and the performance of dances. With some degree of ambivalence, Indian families improvised a livelihood around the sale of products and services that narrowly and sometimes problematically represented their heritage.15 To show how complicated the relationship between culture and work could get, consider how other kinds of off-reservation employ-

Introduction

ment inadvertently created spheres of public performance. When construction of dams on the Salt River began in 1903, Apache men from San Carlos Reservation found valuable jobs. As many as 1,500 Apache laborers and their families occupied several different camps in the Roosevelt area. Working in crews of twelve to fourteen men, some supervised by bosses who were also clan leaders, closely resembled Apache hunting and gathering camps of earlier times. As was the case across the American West at that time, seasonal or periodic work at farms and ranches, mines and railroads, and reclamation projects not only brought additional income to Indian families but allowed them to carry on familiar cycles of movement and production. Living at such scattered work sites, however, Indians now practiced ceremonies and socialized in the presence of outsiders. So when San Carlos Apaches performed ceremonial sings at construction camps in central Arizona in the early twentieth century, they found non-Indians in attendance as spectators.16 Efforts to hold on to economic activity that supports tradition but becomes difficult to sustain can be loaded with risk. But from the perspective of Indian groups weighing choices available at a given time, the risk is worth taking. Naskapis in Labrador managed to alternate between two economic spheres in order to remain close to caribou herds hunted during the winter. Rather than move permanently to the coast and detach themselves completely from this hunting activity, they chose to inhabit the outskirts of Davis Inlet seasonally. This choice gave them proximity to interior hunting grounds, where traditional values and rituals could be sustained, but also exposed them to periodic dependency upon wage earning and even begging in a space highly visible to white observers. This strategy was pursued by Naskapis as their fur trade diminished in commercial importance to outside merchants. Adaptation to economic forces beyond their control, however, could appear to be defective or even dysfunctional in the eyes of others. Not only were months on the coast their hardest and poorest, with part-time work providing only minimal sustenance, but heavy drinking and frequent quarreling became characteristics of life at Davis Inlet. The disruptive influence of town commerce, especially alcohol, combined with a temporary breakdown of cohesive values to expose Naskapis at Davis Inlet to harsh judgment. But many Naskapis refused to accept the option of moving farther south once and for all and thereby abandoning access to the caribou forever. Not only would this option have required a radical change in their

7

8

Introduction

livelihood, something few people in history have ever actually desired, but it would have extinguished the core of Naskapi culture. The less drastic alternative of supplementing the interior hunt with coastal work, however, exposed their livelihood to the harsh language of patronizing whites.17

Neglect of this relationship between livelihood and language by historians is especially ironic, considering how deeply economic premises about Indians contributed to fundamental narratives of American identity. Since the formative years of liberal economic thought in the seventeenth century, the notion that Indians underused their land has been a maxim in the study of American economic development. Representations of their precontact livelihood as either primitive or idyllic served the interests of European ideologues from the beginnings of contact. John Locke deployed the imagery of Native Americans as hunters and gatherers to illustrate his theory of property in the Second Treatise. “The Fruit, or Venison, which nourishes the wild Indian” becomes his exclusive property because he exerted labor to extract such goods from their natural state. But in the same philosophical work, Locke denies that American Indians have any property right to the “Earth it self.” “God gave the World to Men in Common,” but only the “Industrious and Rational” can claim ownership of land. Because Indians supposedly failed to increase the productivity of the land, they could rightfully be dispossessed of it. So in Locke’s rhetoric, the very principle demonstrated by Indian foraging of wild plants and animals—rights of property—was turned against Indian possession of homelands.18 Portrayal of American Indians as inferior users of the natural world rationalized centuries of conquest and dispossession, and the ideological effects of this representation continued to operate even under less destructive circumstances. Adam Smith declared in 1776 that “the colony of a civilized nation which takes possession, either of waste country, or of one so thinly inhabited, that the natives easily give place to the new settlers, advances more rapidly to wealth and greatness than any other human society.” A century later Frederick Jackson Turner based his explanation of the role of “free land” in American history upon economists’ and anthropologists’ use of stages in social evolution. And throughout the twentieth century, social evolutionism would serve anti-Indian interests and shape government programs. To justify the 1950s policy of

Introduction

termination, which was dissolving several tribal governments and relocating Indian families from reservations, President Dwight Eisenhower’s executive assistant, John Hamlin, wrote these words in a weekly report to staff members: Either these two societies must be able to coexist or one must drive out the other. We Americans tend to assume that our way is so much more productive and so much better, that everyone will wish to emulate it. Under this circumstance, the only problem is how can they? But the Indians do not clearly want to change. What is to happen when the “backward” society actively resists integration? Well, it seems to be probable that the two kinds of culture cannot coexist intimately indefinitely. The less competitive culture would have to adapt or die out, if it could not be effectively insulated geographically or otherwise. This may seem a harsh conclusion, but it is probably a manifestation of that harsh law of nature, the survival of the fittest. Subsidizing of the backward group by the productive one is a possible temporary palliative and it is temporarily acceptable if the surplus of the productive group is considerable. But it is costly; it seems unfair to the productive people; and it aggravates the problem and postpones a solution. The backward population becomes constantly larger and poorer as it relies on primitive means of production, and hence more reliant, more costly, and more frustrated.19

Even in discourses about non-Indian economy and society, images of American Indian livelihood as backward and counterproductive can be seen at work. Charles Woodmason, an Anglican minister who traveled across the Carolina backcountry in the 1760s, deployed the Indian analogy to condemn “indolence and Laziness” among settlers. Describing the open and exposed cabins inhabited by whites at Beaver Creek, where he preached on March 8, 1768, as well as the inhabitants’ paltry clothing and lack of shoes, Woodmason concluded, “The Indians are better cloathed and Lodged.” Settlers at Flat Creek, visited by the minister five months later, “were as rude in their Manners as the Common Savages, and hardly a degree removed from them, their Dresses almost as loose and Naked as the Indians, and differing in Nothing save Complexion— I could not conceive from whence this vast body could swarm—But this Country contains ten times the Number of Persons beyond my Apprehension.”20 Zoom forward two hundred years to a meeting at the White House in Washington, D.C., in which automobile manufacturing

9

10

Introduction

executives Henry Ford II and Lee Iacocca were visiting Richard Nixon to protest the airbag order issued by Secretary of Transportation John Volpe. (This thirty-five minute meeting, by the way, marked the beginning of twenty years of stalling by the auto industry over the use of airbags.) President Nixon sympathized with his guests’ complaints against safety and environmental regulations and delivered a diatribe against Ralph Nader and other reformers. He accused them of being hostile to industrial progress and of wanting to go back and live like Indians. “You know how the Indians lived?” as his voice was recorded on tape, “Dirty, filthy, horrible.”21 Once these deeply embedded images and ideas are exposed, comparable and connected experiences in the real economic life of Indians and non-Indians become more apparent. A glimpse of what might result from this kind of analysis can be found in Rebecca Solnit’s highly acclaimed book about photographer Eadweard Muybridge and post–Civil War California. “The whites who administered Native American subjugation claimed to be recruiting the Indians to join them in a truer, more coherent world-view,” but as Solnit points out, “these white Victorians were in a world topsy-turvy with change, uncertainty, and controversy.” Wanting to transform Indians of the American West into Christian agriculturalists, while so many whites were feeling self-doubt about Christianity and trying to escape from agricultural toil, “was akin to those contemporary efforts whereby charities send cast-off clothing to impoverished regions: the Indians were being handed a system that was worn out, and it is no surprise that they had trouble wearing this cultural certainty so full of holes.” Solnit sees Indian conflicts and labor strikes in 1877 as inexorably bound together in a struggle against industrial control over time and space. “Urban workers and Native Americans are separate subjects on bookshelves and in universities, but it seemed that summer as though they were engaged in the same war, a war against the central institutions that were taking away their power, their freedom, even their ability to feed themselves, to survive.” While railroad workers were confronting the twelve-hour shift, reservation Indians were facing the loss of familiar resources.22

The one line of discourse that we might expect to be the least manipulative, anthropology, was actually instrumental in this ongoing entanglement of livelihood and language. Representations of how American

Introduction

Indians supported themselves through production and exchange profoundly shaped the origins of ethnological theory and the direction of ethnographic study. A seminal anthropological work on Indians, Albert Gallatin’s Synopsis of the Indian Tribes, contributed to the rhetoric of conquest and removal by articulating a selective critique of American Indian agriculture. The prominent role of women in the cultivation of the soil, Gallatin claimed, limited the impact of agriculture upon population growth. “A portion of their time is necessarily employed in the other domestic occupations which must always fall to their share; and the residue is unequal to the task of raising food adequate to the whole consumption of the nation.” All efforts to alter the habits of Indians in regard to farming were rejected, so they never reduced the amount of land needed for hunting although the loss of territory to whites never decelerated. “The Indian disappears before the white man, simply because he will not work. The struggle was between inveterate indolence and the most active and energetic industry; and the result could not be doubtful.” This theory of conquest was obviously the latest application of John Locke’s colonial sanction: God created the world in common for mankind, but intended it for “the industrious and rational—and labour was to be his title to it.” Lands inhabited by people who did not adhere to this principle were wasted and, therefore, open to people who would make better use of them. So means of production determined American history, as summarized by Gallatin in 1836: “The four millions of industrious inhabitants, who, within less than forty years, have peopled our western States, and derive more than ample means of subsistence from the soil, offer the most striking contrast, when compared with perhaps one hundred thousand Indians whose place they occupy. Not only was the hunter unable to procure food for an increased population, but he had generally to provide daily for the wants of the day, and never could accumulate the product of his labor in the shape of capital.”23 Making this ideological adversity even more vexing, labor actually performed by American Indians, as much as labor supposedly not performed by them, became a rhetorical instrument in the hands of later ethnologists. Franz Boas, in one of his earliest trips to the Pacific Northwest, wrote on June 1, 1889, about American Indians at Victoria on Vancouver Island: The stranger coming for the first time to Victoria is startled by the great number of Indians living in this town. We meet them everywhere. They

11

12

Introduction dress mostly in European fashion. The men are dock workers, craftsmen, or fish vendors; the women are washerwomen or working women. Some just hang around on the street. These are squat figures whom we meet here; the color of their skin is very light; they have prominent cheekbones, straight, shortcut hair, and dark eyes. They remind us so strongly of the east Asiatic peoples that throughout British Columbia there is the indisputable opinion that they are descendants of Japanese sailors. Walking around the suburbs of Victoria, we come to that part of the town exclusively inhabited by Indians. They live in miserable, dirty wooden shacks or even in light tents. Visiting the Indian suburb in the evening, we find the inhabitants in gay, sociable gatherings. Friends are treated, the happenings of the day discussed, memories of the faraway native country exchanged, and gay songs can be heard everywhere. The Indians who live close together here belong to the various language groups of the coast. And since they do not speak any English, they used a mixed language, the Chinook [Jargon], in which the conversation goes along easily. The visitor who leaves the much-traveled tourist roads in British Columbia has to depend completely on this means of intercourse. Victoria, however, is not the place to learn about the Indian. We have to seek him out in his own country where he lives according to his old customs, not influenced by European civilization. There are only a few trading posts, missions, and fisheries along the northern parts of the coast, and they do not exercise any great influence on the Indians. The fisheries on the coast are operated chiefly with Indian help. The owner is at the same time the trader from whom the Indians buy the European goods they need. The salmon fisheries and the canning plants are all situated in the larger Indian villages because the Indians do the fishing. They are paid in script with which they pay the trader for their necessities. This makes it possible to operate the fisheries with a minimum amount of capital. These centers of civilization exercise a much greater influence on the Indians than the missionaries do. A number of tribes, however, have even escaped this influence, as for example, the Kwakiutl of northern Vancouver Island.24

If labor performed by American Indians in the present disqualified them from anthropological interest, labor performed in the past could just as easily be dismissed or forgotten by historians. Dismissing their economic role in the past was another way for language to efface their presence. When whaling faded in importance for New England and Long Island towns, Indians with a long tradition of work as commercial whalemen not only faced the typical challenge of finding new means of employment but moreover were subjected to a judgment of their behavior that stood

Introduction

in their way. Observing signs of poverty and uncertainty among Montauk Indians around East Hampton at the end of the eighteenth century, town historian John Lyon Gardiner simply overlooked earlier forms of their adaptive participation in the economy and resorted to a cultural and racial explanation of current conditions. “Idle dispositions and savage manners prevent the most of them from living comfortable, altho’ the soil is easily tilled & good. Rum has reduced them from a very powerful tribe to a few persons; they are continually disappearing. As they say, the pure old Indian blood does not run in all their veins; it is corrupted by the black and white men.”25 Notions of legitimate subsistence activity—as defined by social scientists and government officials—have circumscribed Indian people’s opportunities and choices in a multitude of ways. Inuit from the St. Lawrence Island of Gambell (Bering Sea), for example, have faced opposition from some whites who seem to know better than they do what is “authentic” about their livelihood. Selling carved ivory was acceptable by the late 1970s as long as whites considered the “carvers’ raw material,” in the words of David Boeri, “to come from walrus that they killed for food and fully consumed in the traditional manner.” But selling raw ivory to white men was prohibited, the rationale being that this activity was not really “native.” Inuit hunters, therefore, had to play to the representational language imposed by whites. With cash needed as much as food to support their families, more walrus would be hunted just for their tusks than for their meat. But to avoid the law, hunters concealed the excess carcasses and claimed that “they were simply hungrier now.”26 Class and ethnicity became inextricably bound together in influencing the behavior of American Indians on the margins of capitalist society, to the extent that perceptions and explanations of economic decision making all too easily conflated one with the other. American Indians themselves could be selective in attributing certain preferences and choices to a primal Indianness. Molly Spotted Elk, Penobscot dancer and actress who traveled around the world to perform a celebrated and entertaining form of Indianness, judged her own father’s livelihood back home in Old Town, Maine, as a manifestation of Indian habits and ways. A politically savvy and well-informed community leader in his own right, Horace Nelson refused to work full-time at a timber mill, canoe factory, or railroad line. He managed to secure flexibility and independence in his economic life by working part-time and seasonally at various jobs. His

13

14

Introduction

intentional underemployment for wages from the 1890s through the 1930s allowed him to hunt and fish, to plant vegetables and pick wild plants, to gather sweet grass and brown ash for his wife’s basketry, and to operate the ferry between Indian Island and the mainland. Molly’s own chosen path through the global economy of the early twentieth century caused some ambivalence toward her father’s more local strategy. Believing that he possessed the intelligence and industry to have become financially well-off, she saw his refusal to become “an independent man” as an Indian characteristic. “I can understand him and his submission to things,” Molly wrote, “it’s so injun in a way. And he is injun to the core of his pagan heart and I love him all the more for it.” What Molly viewed as submission, Horace understood to be independence. The independence that she tentatively wished for him was nothing other than confinement from his point of view.27 The narrative of Indian societies declining because of decisions made to participate in external economies is perhaps the most ubiquitous form of linguistic manipulation of livelihood. Historians, anthropologists, and other writers over the years have lamented how production of furs for commercial trade and consumption of goods received in exchange set in motion a loss of independence and even identity. Basic choices became monumental decisions as apparently sympathetic observers looked back to explain whatever contemporary plight Indians might be facing. This impulse, however, warrants the kind of criticism made by David Boeri in the case of Eskimo ivory trade: What I decided in the end was that we white people did more thinking about what it meant to be Eskimo than most Eskimos, and that selling artifacts was a choice rather than a decision. Like most of us, the Eskimos followed rather than charted a path through life. When our grandfathers chose automobiles over horses, they were not making a decision to turn fertile farmland into asphalt parks. Similarly, the Eskimos never decided to get addicted to a cash economy, although that was the result of making choices such as snowgoes over dog teams. The Eskimos made practical choices based on what was at the time self-evident. And the choices seemed obviously right to all but the white men, who looked at them in retrospect and wanted to think they were tragic.28

By tracing commentary about American Indian livelihood across an array of exchange and work settings, I hope this book will contribute additional cases to Boeri’s line of criticism. The need to read decline,

Introduction

backwardness, marginality, or deviation into Indian economic life tells us a great deal about a shifting and self-serving motivation among non-Indians. But hidden behind this language are lessons about Indian adaptability and resilience worth seeking.

To the extent that Indian Work sheds any light on the integral role of economic language about American Indians within wider American culture and history, it finds company in a wider current of new studies. Scholars are beginning to demonstrate how representations of Indians, including images of their resistance and conquest, have influenced and infiltrated other aspects of American society. Connections with the women’s rights and antislavery movements have been particularly fruitful.29 Ideas about the racial and cultural superiority of white colonizers over people of color also shaped U.S. policy, and Indians always lay at the core of this ideology. As historians finally trace continuities in military personnel and strategy between Indian wars and overseas wars, the centrality of Indian imagery also becomes more and more evident.30 Some scholarship on inventing and imagining Indians also takes into account the participation of American Indians themselves in discourses fundamental to the formation and evolution of American identity. Indian intellectuals, artists, and leaders who talked back to outside observers are coming to the forefront of cultural studies. William Apess, Black Hawk, John Ridge, Elias Boudinot, Pauline Johnson, George Copway, Simon Pokagon, and Sarah Winnemucca are among nineteenth-century Indian personalities who have entered the canon in this way. Their contributions to dialogues of various kinds—political, religious, environmental, and more—can no longer be ignored.31 The same is true for Indian engagement with twentieth-century policies at home and abroad. Experiences of American Indians as well as ideas about them, as Paul C. Rosier has recently demonstrated, “can broaden our understanding of how domestic and international Cold War politics evolved.” In defense of their sovereignty and territory against termination by the U.S. government, Indian leaders effectively deployed their own language about indigenous patriotism and third world nationalism.32 The particular challenge taken up in this book is to include the role played by ordinary Indian people in shaping public perception and policy, sometimes inadvertently collaborating with the production of images and ideas that reinforce stereotypes. Instead of having oratory and

15

16

Introduction

literature directly created by American Indians, in this project we turn to conversations and interactions that largely went unrecorded. Description of social and economic exchanges must be read for both intended and unintended messages. Indian Work directly takes up this challenge, featuring case studies that address distinct historiographical questions while forming a consistent inquiry into the dynamic interface of language and livelihood. Perceptions and motivations behind the agricultural interventionism committed by Jeffersonian policy makers have been debated by historians for a long time. So in Chapter 1, I explore how Iroquois diplomacy and oratory during the years of the early republic facilitated to some extent the construction of a mythology about nomadic hunting. The centrality and versatility of colonial discourse about Indian livelihood in the development of economic thought is demonstrated along the way. A questionable imagery of vanishing noble savages in public spaces was instrumental in Jacksonian America’s removal of Indian nations from eastern states. Chapter 2, therefore, explains how the survival strategies and marketing activities of southern Indians, as seen around the river town of Natchez over the early nineteenth century, inadvertently contributed to a multifaceted narrative of decline and disappearance. Representations of Indian poverty and dependency, across a long span of time, have profoundly shaped public opinion about American Indians and their relationship with the federal government. Chapter 3 investigates an array of writings about welfare policy—historical, sociological, journalistic, and official—to disclose how images of American Indians have been implicated in the nation’s wider discourse over poverty and welfare. Their ongoing pursuit of treaty rights is consequently confused with general struggles for economic security. Although Chapter 3 carries the narrative to the present, Chapters 4 and 5 return to the early twentieth century in order to examine more closely some important shifts in thought and action. American Indian arts and crafts played a pivotal role in altering ideas about the economic future of Indian people. Basket making by Indian women in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Louisiana, the subject of Chapter 4, allows us to explore the complicated interactions and perceptions that took shape around the production of crafts for new consumers. While the sale of basketry actively contributed to the identity and economy of these women’s communities, it facilitated white notions of Indian passivity and decline. Like the arts and crafts movement, tourism in

Introduction

Indian country created an innovative sphere of economic and ideological exchange. With the American Southwest becoming a mecca for all kinds of travelers, many artists and intellectuals found fertile ground for creative and promotional image making. Chapter 5 uses English writer D. H. Lawrence’s representation of New Mexico Indians during the 1920s— from his travel writings to his short stories—to reach more closely the hidden relationship between work about Indians and work by Indians. Like many tourists and transplants to the “Land of Enchantment,” Lawrence’s primitivist deployment of Indian images significantly veiled his personal employment of Indian people. The slightest shift in focus away from the observer onto the people being observed can help us understand how even the most lavish admirer of American Indians could devalue their livelihood. The reclamation of Native American livelihood from these various layers of colonial language is my ultimate objective. Economic theory and history were deeply complicit in the subjugation and displacement of Indian people, so exposing their influence on perceptions and interactions across the centuries is a necessary step. My intention, however, is neither to isolate nor idealize American Indian experience. I simply wish to observe more directly the hardships and hazards as well as the chances and challenges that American Indians have faced on a daily basis. Clearing the path for new histories of Indian trade, Indian labor, and Indian enterprise—the work actually accomplished by Indian people—requires tireless demolition of many different images—the work ideologically constructed about them.

17

1 INVENTING THE HUNTER STATE

Iroquois Livelihood in Jeffersonian America

In a letter addressed to Handsome Lake on November 3, 1802, President Thomas Jefferson defended recent cessions of some Onondaga, Cayuga, and Oneida land by invoking the authority of natural law. For a society “going into a state of agriculture,” the Virginia sage informed the Seneca prophet, it might be advantageous, “as it is to an individual, who has more land than he can improve, to sell a part, and lay out the money in stocks and implements of agriculture, for the better improvement of the residue.” Congratulating Handsome Lake for “the great reformation you have undertaken” and offering “the aid and protection of the United States,” Jefferson urged that he “persuade our red brethren then to be sober, and to cultivate their lands; and their women to spin and weave for their families.”1 Time and time again, Jefferson exhorted American Indian leaders to abandon a life of hunting for one of farming, thereby setting their people on a path toward peace and prosperity. This prescription for economic change became known as the “civilization program” of Jeffersonian Indian policy makers. The early national period of U.S. Indian policy making bequeathed an abundance of confusing and controversial language. Among the most disturbing legacies from that era is the idea disseminated by intellectual and political leaders that Indian societies of the eastern woodlands, such as the Iroquois, needed to become agricultural despite abundant evidence that agriculture had long been an integral part of their economic life. To anyone familiar with the importance of Indian farming, not only within their own societies but also for the survival of early colonists, descriptions of Indian livelihood from the early national period are especially

Inventing the Hunter State

perplexing.2 How could a generation of men who had witnessed, even contributed to, the destruction of bountiful Iroquois and Cherokee fields and orchards during the American Revolution fail to recognize the agricultural tradition of eastern North American Indians? Were Jeffersonian Americans inadequately informed about Indian livelihood, or did their definition of agriculture exclude the kinds of farming practiced by Indian societies? Not too long ago, historians of Indian policy during the early national period continued to accept at face value the language used by Jeffersonians to characterize Indian livelihood. Without any quotation marks, Francis Paul Prucha summarized Jefferson’s program as follows: “The process of civilization was to be marked by—indeed it was to be brought about by—transition from the nomadic life of the hunter, who depended on the chase, to the settled life of the farmer, who depended on the surer sustenance provided by agriculture.” Readers unfamiliar with the actual nature of Indian livelihood might assume that this point of view is accurate. “By any civilized criteria,” Bernard W. Sheehan stated, “the woman was the drudge of native society. She performed all the menial functions that kept ordinary existence intact, and by cultivating the soil, she compensated for the sparse return from her husband’s hunting.”3 Such generalizations made by scholars simply reiterate earlier misrepresentations of American Indian economies. Indian work left by highly subjective observers obscures our view of Indians at work. The more general literature on economic life in early America is also implicated in this historiographical hall of mirrors. From the progressive school of Charles A. Beard and Carl L. Becker through the debates over rural capitalism to more recent concern with consumption, historians have consistently excluded American Indians from their analyses of social and economic change. In the early scholarship, an assumption about the “backwardness” of Indians determined that they would only serve as a contrasting backdrop to discussions of white industry and toil. In Stuart Bruchey’s widely read economic history of the United States, representative of most surveys, there is no sustained discussion of American Indians. That they taught the colonists to cultivate corn is briefly mentioned, and references to Indians as obstacles to growth and settlement are sprinkled across the narrative. But even their role in the fur trade is somehow ignored.4 Over the years scholarly attention devoted to Indian societies focused mainly on cultural and political dimensions of their relations with colonial societies. The more widely

19

20

Inventing the Hunter State

noticed inquiry into socioeconomic changes and their ideological ramifications among England’s North American colonies, meanwhile, ignore connections and comparisons with American Indian experiences.5 Consequently, the everyday forms of economic adaptation and resistance practiced by Indian people in and around the colonies went unnoticed. American Indians’ own ideological concerns and the ideological uses Euro-Americans made of their lives are both neglected in the wider histories. A prominent example of continuing neglect is T. H. Breen’s important recent study of how consumption of English goods in the North American colonies shaped their political revolution. Although specialists in American Indian history have paid plenty of attention to the impact of European trade goods on Indian societies, Breen does not even mention the fact that Indian communities participated in the Atlantic market in ways that connect to and resemble consumption by the colonial population. When discussing the rising challenge for parents over the eighteenth century to teach their children how to be “successful consumers,” the use of imported goods by slaves—but not by Indians—is mentioned. Attention to the cultural burden of interpreting imported goods might seem a likely place at least to mention Indians, but they still do not appear in Breen’s narrative. And the silence about Indians even endures when he considers change in gender roles. The pretend Indians of the Boston Tea Party, of course, show up in Breen’s analysis, but without any hint about how real Indians had been dealing with adverse conditions in their own marketplaces of revolution.6

To begin restoring American Indians to their integral place at the intersection of ideological and socioeconomic developments during the early national period, we must ask why citizens of the formative United States insisted on characterizing Indian people as nomadic hunters and not sedentary farmers even though a substantial portion of their sustenance came from corn, beans, and other food crops. Perhaps they were just ignorant of the full range of activities employed by Indians to procure food. Most Americans who wrote about Indians, including Thomas Jefferson, had minimal or no exposure to the seasonal cycle of farming, gathering, and hunting that constituted village life. Even close-up observers of Indian livelihood during the colonial period lacked the conceptual framework for seeing either the efficiency in Native American

Inventing the Hunter State

methods of cultivation or the energy spent by men in hunting important food sources. They were better equipped to notice what was missing from the picture—plows and fences, livestock and manure, and familiar crops like wheat and barley.7 Ethnocentric myopia, however, had not prevented colonial American leaders like John Smith and Miles Standish from seeing the surpluses of food crops produced by Indian villagers and from acquiring them by trade or plunder.8 And certainly by the late eighteenth century, cosmopolitan thinkers such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were capable of appreciating the successful applicability of Indian subsistence patterns to their natural environments. The minimization of Indian agricultural practices might have been nothing other than a well-tested means of justifying the expropriation of land from Indians.9 God intended Virginia to be cultivated, argued Samuel Purchas in the early seventeenth century, and not left to “that unmanned wild Countrey, which they range rather than inhabite.” Europeans wrote profusely about nomadic people living off the forest, contrary to the evidence of sedentary Indian farming, in order to rationalize conquest and colonization. John Winthrop declared that New England Indians “inclose noe Land, neither have any setled habytation, nor any tame Cattle to improve the Land by, and soe have noe other but a Naturall Right to those Countries.”10 The legal principle of vacuum domicilium, as Francis Jennings observed, “held the magic of a strong incantation and the utility of a magician’s smokescreen.” In the mideighteenth century, Swiss jurist and diplomat Emmerich de Vattel formulated the illusion of Indians underusing their land into a principle of international law: “It is asked if a nation may lawfully take possession of a part of a vast country, in which there are found none but erratic nations, incapable by the smallness of their numbers, to people the whole? We have already observed in establishing the obligation to cultivate the earth, that these nations cannot exclusively appropriate to themselves more land than they have occasion for, and which they are unable to settle and cultivate.”11 As president of the United States at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Thomas Jefferson seemed ready to perfect the practice of misrepresenting and manipulating American Indian livelihood. The promotion of agriculture and household manufacture among Indians, he confided to Benjamin Hawkins in 1803, “will enable them to live on much smaller portions of land, and indeed will render their vast forest useless but for the range of cattle; for which purpose, also, as they become

21

22

Inventing the Hunter State

better farmers, they will be found useless, and even disadvantageous. While they are learning to do better on less land, our increasing numbers will be calling for more land.” In an ironic metaphor of hunting with traps, Jefferson declared that “the wisdom of the animal which amputates & abandons to the hunter the parts for which he is pursued should be theirs.”12 Although the ultimate goal was to assimilate American Indians through this process of social reform and land transfer, government agents in the Jeffersonian era mobilized language about Indian livelihood to serve immediate and sometimes incongruent objectives. At the beginning of his commission in the Cherokee nation, Return J. Meigs enthusiastically promoted plow agriculture as a means of reducing Indian landholdings. But when urging the migration of lower Cherokee towns from the Tennessee Valley in 1808, he highlighted their preference for hunting and advocated removal across the Mississippi to preserve the hunt. Meigs changed his tune again in 1811, when he sought the extension of state jurisdiction over the Cherokees. Now in his opinion they were promising farmers and competent citizens. In 1816 he returned to a portrait of sluggish agricultural improvement in order to rationalize removal one more time.13 Without downplaying the role of naïveté and duplicity, I want to reach behind the Jeffersonian characterization of Indian economic life by deconstructing the constellation of ideas that went into the making of this Indian work. The great divide between a hunting society and a farming society that dominated official language during the formative years of U.S. Indian policy was much more than a propaganda campaign to erase Indian agriculture from the national consciousness, although it unfortunately had such an effect. If this generation of American intellectuals really believed that Indians lived in a hunter state, we must turn anthropological analysis loose on them—an exercise that should delight American Indians who have received exorbitant attention from anthropologists. A deeper textual analysis of Enlightenment language about Indian livelihood discloses the making of a theory of social change that became so pervasive and predominant that we still have difficulty seeing through it. Here lies at least part of the explanation for historians’ unquestioning acceptance of Jeffersonian description, because the intellectual apparatus of social science as well as the dogma of popular myth have important origins in the theoretical models constructed during the early national period.14 And American Indians

Inventing the Hunter State

found themselves caught in the thick of this intellectual construction, being convenient guinea pigs for testing hypotheses about human behavior and social development. Thanks to studies by Karen Kupperman, William Cronon, and Michael Oberg, we now have a better understanding of how ambivalent, how tentative, and even how divided Europeans had been in their earliest interactions with American Indians.15 Ideas from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries can no longer be conflated with those from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Instead, there was a gradual and complicated evolution in European thought about Native American societies. And when it came to forms of livelihood, as Jess Edwards has recently explained, early observations and interpretations of American Indian practices reflected a discourse about European economic life that was undergoing great tension and stress. By no means a fixed concept being applied to non-European peoples, capitalist notions of land use that later became hegemonic did not easily dismiss customary and common practices that were still widespread in Europe. Edwards significantly advances our understanding of this process by showing that representations of American Indian land use as wasteful actually contributed to the legitimization and eventual dominance of the newer values most notably associated with the writings of John Locke. Attacking peasant use of European land with disparaging images of Indian use of American land proved to be an effective line of comparative discourse.16 With this kind of linguistic manipulation over time, what J. H. Elliott aptly called the “faint outlines of a theory of social development,” which America provided Europe by the mid-seventeenth century, would inexorably become a fully formed model of economic life.17

By the late eighteenth century, European and American philosophers were reaching a new consensus about how to explain differences and similarities among human societies. Believing in a uniformity of human behavior, they traced cultural variation to different modes of subsistence. Means of livelihood were treated as responses to environmental stimuli and as causes of social development. How a society utilized natural resources determined the rates of growth in population and of movement up a ladder of evolution. In his Spirit of Laws, Charles Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, relied upon a theory of natural abundance to explain everything from demographic to political conditions among

23

24

Inventing the Hunter State

American Indians. They cultivated small plots of land and supplemented farming with hunting and fishing, argued the French philosopher, because the earth spontaneously produced “many fruits capable of affording them nourishment.” Most of the land in America remained uncultivated, and therefore Native Americans occupied the continent in low numbers and formed small nations.18 This law of environmental determinism, we now realize, defied the fact that the indigenous population of the western hemisphere had been reduced by epidemic viruses carried by Europeans and Africans across the Atlantic Ocean. It cannot also withstand current anthropological knowledge that hunting-gathering activities involve conscious and creative decision making about how, when, and where to procure resources.19 But there was a highly specific empirical background behind the confidence with which theoreticians associated modes of subsistence with sizes of population. During the early colonial period, it was common for writers to explain Indian depopulation and European colonization as a manifestation of divine will. In the aftermath of the Pequot War, Philip Vincent predicted that the small population in New England would increase by immigration, but more by “a faculty that God hath given the British . . . to beget and bring forth more children than any other nation of the world.”20 With great pride in the fecundity of English colonists, eighteenth-century American authors proffered what they considered to be a more scientific explanation for rapid growth in the colonial population—an explanation that relegated Indians to an inferior hunter state and elevated whites to an ideal agrarian state. In a 1755 essay entitled “Observations concerning the Increase of Mankind,” Benjamin Franklin rewrote history to account for the unprecedented rate of procreation occurring among English Americans. Because “America is chiefly occupied by Indians, who subsist mostly by Hunting” and “Europeans found America as fully settled as it well could be by Hunters,” he argued that there was plenty of room for an “increase in People.” American Indians “were easily prevail’d on to part with Portions of Territory to the new Comers, who did not much interfere with the Natives in Hunting, and furnish’d them with many Things they wanted.” Land in America was consequently “so cheap as that a labouring Man, that understands Husbandry, can in a short Time save Money enough to purchase a Piece of new Land sufficient for a Plantation.” Children born to husbandmen so able to raise large families then grew up to “see that more Land is to be had at Rates equally easy.”21

Inventing the Hunter State

Franklin somehow failed to recognize that American Indian agricultural methods, especially their success with corn, helped make the rapid growth of the colonial population possible.22 Instead, a demographic imperialism rested on the syllogism that “husbandmen” use land more productively, as evidenced by their increasing numbers, and that additional land would be needed to support the growing population of “husbandmen.” From Paris in 1786 Thomas Jefferson wrote to Archibald Stuart, “Our confederacy must be viewed as the nest from which all America, North and South is to be peopled.” He considered the Spaniards to be good temporary possessors of the southern countries, fearing only “that they are too feeble to hold them till our population can be sufficiently advanced to gain it from them piece by piece.”23 But before the United States would “advance” upon Latin American countries, there was the matter of North American Indians. In his Inaugural Address of 1805, Jefferson commiserated how “the stream of overflowing population from other regions” overwhelmed “the aboriginal inhabitants.” “Now reduced within limits too narrow for the hunter’s state,” the president declared, “humanity enjoins us to teach them agriculture and the domestic arts; to encourage them to that industry which alone can enable them to maintain their place in existence, and to prepare them in time for that state of society, which to bodily comforts adds the improvement of the mind and morals.”24 Humanitarian wishes to avert the fate predicted by environmental and demographic determinism, however, did not inhibit the U.S. government from pushing American Indians westward. Urging a group of Delawares in 1808 to abandon hunting, Jefferson instructed them that “whites, on the other hand, are in the habit of cultivating the earth, or raising stocks of cattle, hogs, and other domestic animals, in much greater numbers than they could kill of deer and buffalo. Having always a plenty of food and clothing they raise abundance of children, they double their numbers every twenty years, the new swarms are continually advancing upon the country like flocks of pigeons, and so they will continue to do.” Before the New-York Historical Society in 1811, Governor DeWitt Clinton declared, “A nation that derives its subsistence, principally, from the forest, cannot live in the vicinity of one that relies upon the products of the field. The clearing of the country drives off the wild beasts; and when the game fails, the hunter must starve, change his occupation, or retire from the approach of cultivation.” President James Monroe reported to Congress in 1817, “The hunter state can exist only in the vast uncultivated desert. It

25

26

Inventing the Hunter State

yields to the more dense and compact form and greater force of civilized population; and, or fight, it ought to yield, for the earth was given to mankind to support the greater number of which it is capable.”25 Such ultimatums delivered to Indian hunters went even deeper than a hunger for the land that they supposedly underused. Many Enlightenment thinkers believed that the very forests containing wild animals were detrimental to people’s health and that the consumption of wild meat deteriorated social behavior. In the 1789 American Philosophical Society Transactions, Hugh Williamson wrote that “while the face of this country was clad with woods, and every valley afforded a swamp or stagnant marsh, by a copious perspiration through the leaves of trees or plants, and a general exhalation from the surface of ponds and marshes, the air was constantly charged with a gross putrescent fluid.” Clearing forests for cultivation, therefore, would “increase circulation of air and raise the temperature.” The Massachusetts Centinel celebrated the rapid settlement of Vermont by reporting, “Large tracts of land which two or three years past were nothing more than an uncultivated wilderness now teem with vegetation, nurtured by the industrious hand of agriculture. The axe of the husbandmen has made bare the forest, and fields of grain supply the place of lofty trees. In short the face of nature throughout every part of that district has a much more pleasant appearance, and gives us an idea of the future greatness of this young but rising empire.”26 To this way of thinking, the coexistence of fields and forests was unacceptable. The only good vegetation was a crop like wheat, and the only attractive landscape was one of rectangular-shaped farmsteads. Dread of the “wilderness” has been traced far back to its Judeo-Christian roots.27 But throughout the colonial period and well into the nineteenth century, it also reflected the immediate concern among elites that proximity to Indians and their environment would make American settlers uncontrollable and rebellious. Behind the nascent model of economic development lay fears of underdevelopment, captured repeatedly in such phrases as “to live like Indians” and “want in the midst of abundance.”28 Groups with an interest in commercial production and land speculation in backcountry regions worried that settlers would prefer the economic independence permitted by hunting, fishing, and other subsistence activities. As Alan Taylor and Rachel N. Klein demonstrated for two different late eighteenth-century frontier regions, promoters of hierarchy and control condemned those frontiersmen who resisted commercial agriculture for succumbing to the temptations of savagery.29 More recently, Timothy

Inventing the Hunter State

Sweet has demonstrated how promotion of agricultural intensification and condemnation of backwoods farming served particular class interests in the construction of a “discourse of rural virtue.” Woody Holton also highlights how the debate over debt and tax relief in the early republic included psychological explanations. Opponents of state governments’ protective legislation, including framers of the U.S. Constitution, argued that it took away from farmers the incentive to work, believing that only necessity drove productivity. Prorelief writers, on the other hand, asserted that excessive debt and tax collection disabled and dispirited producers, causing a decline in exertion.30 J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur clearly expressed anxiety over the deleterious effects of hunting when he described life “near the great woods” in his Letters from an American Farmer: It is with men as it is with the plants and animals that grow and live in the forests. . . . By living in or near the woods, their actions are regulated by the wildness of the neighborhood. The deer often come to eat their grain, the wolves to destroy their sheep, the bears to kill their hogs, the foxes to catch their poultry. This surrounding hostility immediately puts the gun into their hands; they watch these animals, they kill some; and thus by defending their property, they soon become professed hunters; this is the progress; once hunters, farewell to the plough. The chase renders them ferocious, gloomy, and unsocial.

Adhering strongly to the maxim “You are what you eat,” Crèvecoeur stated that “eating of wild meat, whatever you may think, tends to alter their temper.” “As long as we keep ourselves busy in tilling the earth,” he insisted, “there is not fear of any of us becoming wild; it is the chase and food it procures that have this strange effect.”31 From the backwoods of Enlightenment thought, so to speak, we now reach the more familiar terrain of what is called Jeffersonian agrarianism. Like so much of American history, this important ideological development has been studied with very little attention to its relationship to American Indians. And this is no less true for the latest debate over the meaning of Jefferson’s agrarian ideal.32 Some historians emphasize its continuity from the classical conceptualization of agriculture as the best means to prosperity, freedom, and morality. “Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God,” wrote Jefferson in Notes on Virginia. “Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phenomenon

27

28

Inventing the Hunter State

of which no age nor nation has furnished an example.” In postRevolutionary America this faith in the virtue of agriculture took an added urgency as early national leaders sought to avoid problems that were arising in Europe, such as poverty, class conflict, industrialization, and urbanization. A citizenry of independent farmers was the best prevention, according to Jefferson. “While we have land to labor then, let us never wish to see our citizens occupied at a workbench, or twirling a distaff. Carpenters, masons, smiths, are wanting in husbandry; but, for the general operations of manufacture, let our workshops remain in Europe.”33 In the Jeffersonian mind, then, agriculture constituted a safe middle ground, protecting American citizens from the dangers of both European and American Indian societies. And spinning, although promoted as a suitable activity for Indian women, was not considered appropriate for a white male citizenry.34 But far from being nostalgic or anticommercial, Jeffersonian agrarianism was animated by an immediately promising economic development that had profound ramifications for eastern North American Indians. As Joyce Appleby has emphasized, Jefferson’s commitment to an agrarian society rested on Europe’s growing demand for American food crops after the 1780s. An exploding population and a series of wars in Europe created the opportunity for American farmers to produce more crops on more land for a growing food market. “It is better to carry provisions and materials to workmen there,” Jefferson urged in his Notes, “than bring them to the provisions and materials, and with them their manners and principles.”35 European agrarian reformers were already attempting to accelerate the enclosure of common land and to increase productivity to meet the continent’s needs. Their counterparts in the United States, meanwhile, worked to expand agricultural production over additional acreage. With their economies and territories threatened by this expansion of commercial agriculture, American Indians faced nothing less than the “agricultural revolution” that was melting, in the words of Eric Hobsbawm, “the great frozen icecap of the world’s traditional agrarian systems and rural social relations.”36 Ideology played an important role in this material process, as images of savagery and backwardness were deployed even against Europeans who practiced traditional farming. Agrarian reformer Arthur Young conveyed his dismay over supposedly wasteful practices in Brittany by writing in September 1788, “The country has a savage aspect; husbandry not much further advanced, at least in skill, than among the Hurons, which

Inventing the Hunter State

appears incredible amidst inclosures; the people almost as wild as their country.” Young considered the town of Combourg “one of the most brutal filthy places that can be seen; mud houses, no windows, and a pavement so broken as to impede all passengers, but ease none.” He also wondered how Monsieur de Chateaubriand, who occupied the Château de Combourg (and, by the way, fathered the famous writer who appears briefly in the next chapter), “has nerves strung for a residence amidst such filth and poverty?”37 Traveling through the Champagne country of France a year and a half earlier, none other than Thomas Jefferson had noticed “women and children carrying heavy burthens, and labouring with the hough” and interpreted this as “an unequivocal indication of extreme poverty.” “Men, in a civilized country,” he wrote, “never expose their wives and children to labour above their force or sex, as long as their own labour can protect them from it.”38 American Indian communities in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, therefore, had to contend with a language about agricultural development that affected them adversely in several ways. The rapid commercialization of farming, in response to foreign demand, made Indian methods of farming seem more anachronistic than ever before. The agrarian escape valve, which was supposed to ameliorate social problems in the United States, depended upon the acquisition of more and more Indian land for redistribution to new generations of white farmers.39 The livelihood of American Indians came under closer scrutiny just when pressures on their territory made life notably more difficult. Agricultural reform thus constituted a double-edged sword, compelling Indians to participate in the commercial market while severing more land from tribal control. Their resistance to this process was perceived in terms similar to those held by advocates of agricultural change toward European peasants, as wasteful and irrational behavior that needed to be liberated from traditional obligations and constraints.40 Jefferson summarized in 1805 what he considered “powerful obstacles” to teaching agriculture to Indians: “The habits of their bodies, prejudice of their minds, ignorance, pride, and the influence of interested and crafty individuals among them, who feel themselves something in the present order of things, and fear to become nothing in any other.”41 No group of American Indians was more involved in the struggle against Jeffersonian agrarian ambitions than the nations of Iroquoia. By the time President Jefferson addressed Handsome Lake about “going into a state of agriculture,” twenty years had passed since the American

29

30

Inventing the Hunter State

Revolutionary War. Following their painful dislocation caused by that conflict, the Iroquois faced relentless pressures from state and federal governments, from speculators and settlers, for most of the territory west of Oneida Lake.42 Through it all, the polarized imagery of farming and hunting pervaded the rhetoric of diplomacy. As early as 1785 George Clinton, the governor of New York, advised Oneida and Tuscarora chiefs that they should sell that part of their land bordering the state of Pennsylvania, “which being contiguous to the Settlements of the White People, will soon be of little Value for Hunting, and the Price of it would enable You to purchase Cattle and Utensils of Husbandry and improve your Lands at Home to greater Advantage.” Both New York state and the United States tried to buy Iroquois hunting grounds by offering to compensate for the lost resources with cash annuities and technical assistance.43 Iroquois spokesmen were highly defensive about the preservation of hunting grounds, apparently emphasizing their importance over farmland. If read uncritically, the rhetorical responses of Indian leaders seem to reinforce Jeffersonian perceptions of Indians dependence upon forest animals. Petrus of the Oneidas told Clinton in 1785 that “we cannot part with so much of our Hunting Lands, which are very dear to Us; as from thence We derive the Rags which cover our Bodies.”44 In 1800 Red Jacket played up the difference between societies in a speech to the Reverend Elkanah Holmes: “Probably the Great Spirit has given to you white people the ways that you follow to serve him, and to get your living; and probably he has given to us Indians the customs that we follow to serve him (handed down to us by our forefathers) and our ways to get our living by hunting, and the Great Spirit is still good to us, to preserve game for us.”45 But the following year this same spokesman for the Buffalo Creek Senecas admitted that it was necessary “for us to quit the mode of Indian living and learn the manner of white peoples.” “Instead of finding our game at our doors,” he exclaimed, “we were obliged to go to a great distance for it, and their finde it but scarce compared to what it us’d to be.” Consequently, the Senecas “are determined in all our villages to take to husbandry, and for this purpose we want to be helped to a number of pair of cattle.”46 What meanings lay behind this council language used by Indian speakers? This is an especially difficult question since the records contain only English versions of Iroquois thoughts, which were not easily or accurately interpreted. But the vocabulary of Indian leaders, like that of U.S.

Inventing the Hunter State

officials, might warrant some decoding. The diplomatic voice of Iroquois orators played as active a role in the struggle to shape events as did that of Jeffersonian discourse. Gender roles in Iroquois society were integrally tied to subsistence activities, with women assuming ownership of the land as its principal cultivators. “Our Ancestors considered it a great Transgression to reject the Council of their Women,” Oneida chief Domine Peter warned in 1789, because “who bring us forth, who cultivate our Lands, who kindles our Fires and boil our Pots, but the Women.” He further reported that women of the Cayuga nation “think their Uncles had of late lost the Power of Thinking, and were about sinking their Territory.”47 But hunting was the men’s sphere, so male diplomats might predictably underscore its importance—sometimes annoying their female relatives. Between formal speeches delivered at Buffalo Creek in April 1791, a group of women elders hastened to inform Colonel Proctor that “you ought to hear and listen to what we, women, shall speak, as well as to the sachems; for we are the owners of this land—and it is our’s [sic]. It is we that plant it for our and their use.”48 Hunting grounds might have demanded special attention because they were also the most vulnerable kind of Indian land at the end of the eighteenth century, as game became harder to find and hunters encountered hostile settlers. “Turn our faces which way we will,” Cornplanter complained to Washington in 1797, “we find the white people cultivating the ground which our forefathers hunter over, and the forests which furnish’d them with plenty now afford but a scanty subsistence for us, and our young men are not safe in pursuing it. If a few years have made such a change, what will be the situation of our children when those calamities increase?”49 “The white people are scattered so thick over the Country,” Red Jacket complained in 1801, “that the deer have almost fled from us.” Nearly two decades later he cited a longer list of common threats: “Our venison is stolen from the trees where we have hung it to be reclaimed after the chase. Our hunting camps have been fired into, and we have been warned that we shall no longer be permitted to pursue the deer in those forests which were so lately all our own.”50 These concerns were expressed through metaphors that reflected an understanding of livelihood sharply different from the Jeffersonian model of economic life. European physiocrats and their counterparts in America expected conformity to what they observed as the mechanistic laws of nature. They talked about increasing the productivity of the land, converting products into property, and moving society through material

31

32

Inventing the Hunter State

states. Iroquois and other Indian voices defended a social order in which the natural world mirrored social relationships between people. The Great Spirit spread animals over the land and caused the earth to produce corn, in the form of a gift, while humans provided each other with material goods. Reciprocal relations between men and women depended upon the ability of men to exchange products of the hunt for those of the harvest. Work in both fields and forests involved plenty more than technical tasks. Interaction between social groups was as much at stake as were their respective interactions with the natural world. To intensify production in the fields at the expense of production in the forests threatened both society and nature with disorder by potentially undermining interdependency.51 The categorical language used by Indian leaders to lament the decline of hunting in the late eighteenth century, therefore, was directed inward as much as outward. Although Iroquois communities were already adapting livestock to their way of life, cattle, hogs, and sheep did not easily assimilate into their belief system. More time was needed to replace culturally the products of hunting with the products of herding. As in other eastern woodlands societies, women seemed to be more eager than men to incorporate domestic animals into village husbandry—adding stress to the division of labor between the sexes.52 The polarization between nomadism and sedentism that was under way in European thought did not match the intellectual process taking place in Iroquois society, and there is reason to question whether it applied to European and EuroAmerican experience. “Hunter-gatherers are not exclusively nomadic,” as anthropologist Susan Kent states, “any more than horticulturalists are exclusively sedentary.” And as she further explains, hunting meat is valued more than gathering or farming plants even among the most sedentary horticulturalists, largely because of a shared belief in the sentience, sociability, and intelligence of nonhuman animals. The crucial difference is that among peoples who have not domesticated animals, there is less ambiguity in categorization or less fuzziness in boundaries. Societies that hunt and do not have domestic animals include all humans and animals in a single category, whereas those that have domestic animals and do not hunt situate wild and domestic animals in separate categories both different from humans. Societies that hunt and have domestic animals relegate the latter to a separate category yet keep wild animals and humans within the same category.53 This type of categorization seems to be the case for most Iroquois communities by the end of

Inventing the Hunter State

the eighteenth century. They drew more and more livestock into their economy as the decades passed, disproving the timelessness represented by others, but minimized the impact of these additional animals on their worldview.

To understand the hazards and dilemmas facing the Iroquois at the dawn of the nineteenth century, we must break through theoretical and metaphorical utterances to reach social and economic circumstances. What Bryan Palmer called the “linguistic turn in social history” does not necessarily abandon close scrutiny of the conditions of day-to-day life. Greater appreciation for the autonomy of language from social relations and structure should, in the end, enlighten us about how people interpret and shape their experience through symbolic action.54 Veiled behind the linguistic Indian work produced by Jeffersonian observers was a more complicated Indian work practiced by Iroquois men and women. Western New York in the years of the early republic, especially the Genesee River Valley, was a chaotic frontier of commercial agricultural expansion. The 1797 Treaty of Big Tree, by which the Senecas lost most of their territory west of the Genesee, was signed in the midst of rampant land speculation and political corruption characteristic of rapid economic development. The Holland Land Company and other speculators attempted to accelerate migration into the region to boost the value of their holdings and launch production of staple crops. Families of little means were offered land on credit, and, when unable to meet their debts, moved out of the area.55 Frequent turnover of settlers, speculation and indebtedness, and even tenancy made many early white pioneers— in the words of Anthony F. C. Wallace—“ragged conquerors” whose standard of living was no better than that of the Iroquois on reservations. On the most fertile bottomlands around the lakes and along the rivers, meanwhile, successful farmers began to grow wheat and corn and to raise livestock and cut timber for the expanding commercial market. Much of this production, it must be noted, took place on the abandoned fields of former Iroquois towns. By the 1810s the Genesee Valley was fast becoming a leading grain-export region of the United States, the city of Rochester shipping some 26,000 barrels of flour in 1818.56 In this general setting Iroquois leaders had to respond to the agricultural reform offered them by the U.S. government. In May 1798 representatives from the Philadelphia Society of Friends began to implement

33

34

Inventing the Hunter State

the agrarian component of Indian policy among the Allegany Senecas, having already met some success with the Oneidas. The Quakers brought plows, hoes, spades, and shovels; paid half the costs for constructing a gristmill; and offered cash incentives for the production of wheat, rye, corn, potatoes, hay, and cloth. They never missed an occasion to preach the Jeffersonian dogma about different modes of subsistence, calling it “unreasonable” to “suffer their women to work all day in the fields & woods with the hoes & axes, whilst the Men & Boys were at the same time playing with their bows & arrows.”57 To some extent the Iroquois took the advice of these outside reformers, intensifying agricultural production with new technology and dispersing settlement into nuclear farmsteads. Cornplanter and his brother Handsome Lake even incorporated elements of agrarian reform into his gospel for cultural revitalization. Gerald Hopkins observed among Buffalo Creek Senecas in 1804 “a large plough at work drawn by three yoke of oxen, and attended by three Indians. They all appeared to be very merry, and to be pleased with our visit.” By 1820 the agricultural revolution seems to have taken hold in some of the Iroquois communities. One Quaker estimated that the average Indian family around the Allegany mission had ten acres of corn, oats, potatoes, vegetables, and meadow fenced in and owned a plow, a yoke of oxen or pair of horses, five cows, and eleven pigs.58 But before we too quickly conclude that the Iroquois conformed to the Jeffersonian model of economic life, a closer look at changes in livelihood is in order. Indian initiatives and responses during the early nineteenth century, in fact, prove how dubious the Enlightenment’s theoretical opposition between farming and hunting actually was. They reveal, moreover, an American Indian resilience and resourcefulness in adjusting to adverse economic conditions that defied the agrarian prescription for social change. The Iroquois remained skeptical toward agricultural reform, viewing acceptance of new farming technology in return for cessions of hunting territory as no guarantee against continuing land grabs. In 1790 Cornplanter had issued a very mixed signal to President George Washington about the prospects for Iroquois livelihood under increasingly precarious conditions: “The Game which the Great Spirit sent into our Country for us to eat is going from among us. We thought that he intended that we should till the Ground with the Plow, as the White People do.” But before committing themselves to such a change, Cornplanter and his people wanted to know “whether

Inventing the Hunter State

you mean to leave us and our Children any Land to generations had to be taken into account.59 Acceptance of new agricultural methods hardly encouraged adoption of private property, as Iroquois leaders relentlessly defended their communities’ collective ownership of the land. “Dividing lands into farms, and holding them as individual property,” Captain Pollard of the Senecas told Jedidiah Morse in 1820, “will not do for us. Holding our lands in common, as we now do, keeps us together.” Pollard discerned all too well the consequences of allotting tribal lands among individuals: “As Indians want goods of white people and buy them on credit, we fear difficulties would arise in collecting these debts, according to your laws, and our lands would be taken to pay them.”60 The Senecas accepted Quaker instructors not without division and suspicion among themselves, but association with the Society of Friends was seen by many as a potential buffer against the pressures of speculators and settlers. And the Quakers often defended the land rights of Iroquois communities. Nevertheless, there was reason to take precautions against becoming too dependent upon the advice and assistance of any outside group. Halliday Jackson recalled the “very cautious method” employed by the Allegany Senecas when they first began to use plows in the spring of 1801: “Several parts of a large field were ploughed, and the intermediate spaces prepared by their women with the hoe, according to former custom.”61 As the “mistresses of the earth,” Iroquois women had an important stake in the effects of plow agriculture. For this period Diane Rothenberg has ably chronicled and explained the selective responses of Seneca women to Quaker efforts at teaching them spinning and weaving. While seeing gains in the knowledge of new household skills, they also resisted displacement from their traditional place in the fields by limiting the extent to which new agricultural methods were adopted.62 Adoption of new agricultural methods was by no means a panacea for the problems faced by Iroquois communities during the Jeffersonian era. More intensive production of one or two crops and greater reliance upon livestock for food and energy occasioned some unfortunate incidents. Tuscaroras who had been promised implements of husbandry by the federal government found themselves at the mercy of the Chapin brothers, who charged them dearly for everything, including items that were expected as gifts.63 The federal government’s practice of rewarding selected individuals and communities for adopting its plan more rapidly than others threatened to divide Iroquois people with inequality

35

36

Inventing the Hunter State

and jealousy. “If you do right,” advised Red Jacket early in the process, “you will give to all something to work with as fast as they learn, so that all may be supplied; otherwise a strife will arise.”64 Ownership of livestock exposed Indians to frequent acts of theft, as indicated in the many reports of horses and cattle lost to white poachers. Periodic setbacks in farm production, like damage to crops from frost or drought, painfully alerted the Iroquois to the risks involved in letting agriculture supersede other means of procuring food.65 Contrary to impressions left by national leaders, hunting in western New York remained a viable economic activity in the early nineteenth century because of the commercial market in Europe and the United States. As Red Jacket remarked in October 1800, “You white people are very fond of our skins.”66 Traders at Pittsburgh, Niagara, and Syracuse continued to buy skins, bear oil, and other products from Iroquois hunters. Summertime hunting by men and wintertime expeditions by family groups were still part of the seasonal cycle of subsistence and trade. When the Reverend Roswell Burrows visited Cattaraugus in late October 1806, most of the villagers were away hunting. In 1809 John Norton was told by his host at Allegany “that the Friends had taught several of their people to plow, and to do Blacksmith work, and some of their women to spin, so that the people of the Village had made some advances in industry; but that many found it more their interest to hunt than to work; that for his part, he had acquired all his property by hunting, and that with the produce of the Chace, he had hired people to build and to work for him.”67 Describing the Tonawanda Senecas in 1818, Estwick Evans reported: “They employ the principal part of the summer in the chase. In autumn they again engage in the business. This is their most important season, on account of the greater relative value of furs. During the winter they return home, laden with peltry, smoaked flesh of various kinds, and the fat of bears. Last season they were very successful.”68 For as long as possible, many Iroquois families tried to preserve hunting as one of their sources of income in an annual round of farming, gathering, and fishing. But there is also plenty of evidence that Indians in western New York sought to incorporate new economic activities into their traditional pattern of livelihood in order to maximize flexibility. Herding livestock and timbering, even plowing and harvesting for wages, allowed men to tap into the encroaching commercial economy without sacrificing the physical mobility already maintained through hunting for

Inventing the Hunter State

commerce. New activities also resembled and augmented long-standing service to colonial travelers as guides, canoemen, and porters. Allegany Senecas cut timber at their own sawmill and floated the boards down to Pittsburgh during high-water season. On rafts formed from cut boards, as merchant John Wrenshall noted in 1816, “they bring their peltry, furrs, and good canoes, to push up their return cargoes . . . and sometimes shingls, the latter of which I have bought for one dollar and fifty cents per thousand and paid for them in merchandise.” Quaker reformers inquired the following year whether the Indians “would not have been in a better situation generally if you had employed the same time which you have spent in cutting and rafting timber in cultivating your good land.” They concluded, as we might expect, that such activity “has much retarded their progress in agriculture.”69 Into western New York Indian communities undertaking these challenges came two Indian workers who for a passing moment created images on paper that reflect the problematic relationship between language and livelihood at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In 1802 Gabrielle Du Pont joined her husband, a French diplomat, in the United States. Victor Du Pont acquired land in the Genesee River Valley, after other business ventures had failed, so between 1806 and 1809 he, his wife, and their children lived in the frontier town of Angelica. Victor operated a farm, tannery, and country store there until moving to Brandywine, New Jersey, where his brother Eleuthere Irene Du Pont was having greater success with his gunpowder works. For an enlightened Parisian woman interested in the study of societies, neighboring Iroquois communities were a compelling subject. When Baroness Anne-MargueritteHenriette Hyde de Neuville visited her friend in Angelica in 1807–1808, Gabrielle made sure that she saw Indian people on and off their reservations. Consequently, drawings and paintings produced by the baroness include images of Iroquois people (see Figures 1 and 2). Years later Gabrielle would write a novel, still unpublished, loosely based on experiences of the Senecas, especially Handsome Lake’s revitalization movement. Passages in this manuscript, “La reserve Indienne,” capture with some ethnographic flair the changes occurring in Iroquois livelihood, while watercolors painted by the Baroness Hyde de Neuville convey creative adaptations in clothing and domestic life. But the overwhelming literary and pictorial interpretations offered by both women emphasize marginality and decline. White settlers surrounding the Senecas and Oneidas whom they observed would inevitably, as Madame Du Pont wrote, “banish the

37

38

Inventing the Hunter State

[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]

Figure 1. Baroness Anne-Marguerite-Henriette Hyde de Neuville, An Indian family on a hunting trip, probably near Utica, New York, circa 1807. Watercolor and graphite on paper. Collection of The New-York Historical Society, 1953.206.

poor loitering savages in spite of the humane measures adopted by the government to protect their waning independence.”70 The forms of economic adaptation actually being improvised by the Iroquois in the face of Jeffersonian agrarianism would contribute in the long run to their endurance throughout the nineteenth century and to the present. In his census of the New York Iroquois communities published in 1847, Henry Schoolcraft described a livelihood that mixed a diversity of activities: the cultivation of various crops, hunting and gathering, the raising of livestock, and harvest work on neighboring white farms.71 This and other evidence, nevertheless, did not stop American intellectuals and politicians from continuing to portray Indian economies as fundamentally in a hunter state. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg has explained how intertwined such a construction of negative others was with the definition of citizenship during the early national period of the United States. Like the white middle-class woman and the African

Inventing the Hunter State

[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]

Figure 2. Baroness Hyde de Neuville, Indian chief, possibly Red Jacket, 1807. Watercolor and graphite on paper. Collection of The New-York Historical Society, 1953.215.

American slave, the American Indian warrior was represented in contrast to the idealized male, middle-class citizen—veiling contradictions in the new nation’s political ideology and rhetoric.72

The increasing drive for more Indian lands helped popularize the Jeffersonian model, with both friends and foes of American Indians invoking the image of nomadic hunters. In proposing his Indian removal bill before

39

40

Inventing the Hunter State

Congress in 1830, Andrew Jackson declared that “philanthropy could not wish to see this continent restored to the condition in which it was found by our forefathers. What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic.”73 Henry Thoreau, whose romantic sympathy for Indians clashed with Jackson’s policy, accepted that for survival the Indian “must seize hold of a plow-tail and let go his bow and arrow.” But he confessed remorse over this choice: “They seem to me a distinct and equally respectable people, born to wander and to hunt, and not to be inoculated with the twilight civilization of the white man.”74 In the first ethnographic study of the Iroquois, Lewis Henry Morgan concluded that “the passion of the red man for the hunter life has proved to be a principle too deeply inwrought, to be controlled by efforts of legislation.”75 From this kind of language, historians must now rescue the more complex means of livelihood and forms of socioeconomic change that were invented by American Indians. During the early national period of U.S. history, when Jeffersonian Americans imposed a very narrow definition of agriculture on the scene, the Iroquois nations had to make some difficult adjustments. While government agents and religious emissaries promoted agricultural reform, land speculators and land-hungry settlers demanded further cessions. But while the Iroquois people struggled to adapt their livelihood to a shrinking land base, no amount of accommodation to the federal government’s prescriptions seemed to deflect pressures for more Indian territory. When Red Jacket learned in 1819 that President James Monroe was recommending removal from Buffalo Creek, the Seneca leader angrily pointed to the plows, fences, and livestock successfully adopted by his people over the years. The Iroquois clearly demonstrated their ability and willingness to utilize additional technologies, but they had no intention to scrap an autonomous vision of their future. “We were placed here by the Great Spirit for purposes known to him,” Red Jacket quipped. “You can have no right to interfere.” Challenging the assertion that the Senecas still possessed “large and many unproductive tracts of land,” he articulated a counternarrative that predicted further economic resourcefulness. “Our seats we consider small; and if left here long by the Great Spirit we shall stand in need of them. We shall want timber. Land after the improvements of many years wears out. We shall want to renew our fields; and we do not think that there is any land in any of our reservations, but what is useful.”76

Inventing the Hunter State

The Iroquois struggle to protect their rights to govern and utilize remaining lands would, of course, continue to the present day. Not long after Red Jacket delivered this verbal counterattack against the Indian work of Jeffersonian administrations, another imagery of American Indians in upstate New York arose to overshadow the ongoing difficulty and intricacy of Iroquois adaptation. In the novels of James Fenimore Cooper and the paintings of Thomas Cole, Americans found Indian people on the margins of a romantic landscape. Whether headed to extinction or confined to the past, the northeastern Indian played the role of passive onlooker, commonly represented in Hudson River School paintings by the tiny Indian figure standing on a forest edge or mountain precipice. The actual presence of contemporary Indians in New York, around white towns and farms as well as in their own communities, was seldom captured in popular art and literature. Iroquois and Mohicans who periodically visited Otsego to peddle handicrafts and foodstuffs, while fishing and hunting in the area, were usually seen as impoverished and forlorn remnants of once nobler people. And although Cooper’s Chingachgook might have been modeled after a basket maker named Captain John, the creator of ferocious and courageous Indian characters considered New York’s surviving Indian population to be “all alike, a stunted, dirty and degraded race.”77 Across the United States, many American Indians had made itinerant activity along travel routes and on urban streets a valuable part of their livelihood. A close look westward at one such place along the Mississippi River will allow us to consider the kinds of Indian work that this improvisational presence generated.

41

2 NARRATIVES OF DECLINE AND DISAPPEARANCE

The Changing Presence of American Indians in Early Natchez

The strategies of economic adaptation pursued by Iroquois men and women in western New York during the Jeffersonian era were not unique by any means. Their response to accelerating pressure on homelands and intensifying intrusion into daily life resembled that of many other eastern woodlands peoples over the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. And the effort to blend familiar subsistence practices with new market and wage opportunities, in the hostile or patronizing gaze of whites, would be replicated among western Indians in later times. Frontier towns of various kinds, from Syracuse, New York, to Taos, New Mexico, were desirable sites for American Indians to engage in informal exchange and day labor. Concomitantly, they were also prime sites for the production of language—another kind of Indian work— that interpreted the condition of American Indians for a wider audience and a greater purpose.1 In November 1834, one hundred and five years after the Natchez Indians had waged war against French colonists, John H. B. Latrobe was visiting the plantation of John Hutchins eighteen miles below Natchez, Mississippi. While the steamboat carrying Latrobe down the Mississippi River to New Orleans stopped to pick up bales of cotton produced by Hutchins’s slaves, Latrobe was able to pick up some tales about an Indian past from the planter who happened to be his wife’s maternal uncle. Hutchins claimed, falsely, that his father had witnessed the Natchez War. So it was supposedly Anthony Hutchins’s version of events that was

Narratives of Decline and Disappearance

now being retold by his son. The influential and friendly chief of White Apple village “had a daughter, a warm hearted and beautiful girl who became attached to a French officer who was stationed at the Cliffs.” Following a period of harmony between the French and Indians at Natchez, White Apple villagers were driven from a bountiful patch of their farmland by greedy Frenchmen wanting to raise corn there for themselves. At an intertribal gathering of Natchez, Cherokee, Choctaw, and Chickasaw delegates, a plan to destroy the French was arranged. With a day set for the attack, each chief left with a bundle of rods from which one was to be drawn every evening until the war would begin. The daughter of White Apple’s chief, at great personal risk, “hurried to her lover, and told him of the conspiracy.” But this Frenchman “treated the information carelessly,” and his fellow officers “laughed at and disregarded it.” Determined nonetheless to save the French by preempting the deadly convergence of Indian forces, she drew two rods from the Natchez bundle that her father had trusted her to handle. The Natchez consequently struck a day too soon, still managing to massacre the French by themselves. The other Indian nations, jealous over the exultant and boastful Natchez, decided to destroy them for revenge. The love of a young and beautiful Natchez woman for a French military officer, therefore, tragically caused the destruction of her people. “Their identity as a nation was forever destroyed, and while the Cherokee and Choctaw & the Chickasaw still elect their chiefs and number their warriors and sit around their council fire, the Natchez live only in the history of their destruction and in the name of the City which has arisen on the spot where their nationality was forever extinguished.” The main elements of this inaccurate story, as told by a planter whose father had not arrived in Mississippi until 1772, are all too familiar to students of American culture. The Pocahontas-like behavior of this Natchez princess had become a pervasive and powerful theme in nineteenth-century storytelling about early America. The self-destructive quarreling between Indian tribes was another common story line, and the mournful remembrance of an extinct people whose name survives on the American landscape completed this standardized narrative. John Hutchins’s version of the Natchez revolt also seems to have been partly influenced by the novellas of François-René de Chateaubriand, who had already imaginatively adapted eighteenth-century accounts into a widely read romantic epic. Immediately following John Latrobe’s specious description of the Natchez War, however, there is a paragraph

43

44

Narratives of Decline and Disappearance

too easily overshadowed by his tale of passion, intrigue, betrayal, and extinction: I have seen many Choctaw Indians on this journey prowling about New Orleans and Natchez. Two years since I saw the tribe on its way to Mississippi’s other side. The individuals, I now meet with are those who have been to their new home and returned. They are generally displeased with it, and are wandering off in various directions. Many persons think that in a few years the tribe will be extinct, and its members dispersed among other tribes or living about the settlements of the whites, finding an early death, the result of intemperance & misconduct.2

The juxtaposition in Latrobe’s journal of a romantic rendering of Natchez’s Indian past with a pitiful report of its current Indian occupation invites further scrutiny into another place for the multidimensional study of Indian work. The Native American presence in this Mississippi River town following the Natchez War of 1729 remains obscure and episodic, with occasional references in history and literature to Choctaw raiding and vagrancy.3 And of course, the passage of Choctaw and Chickasaw refugees across the river during their removal in the 1830s was unavoidably reported by visitors such as Latrobe and Alexis de Tocqueville. Scattered but recurrent depictions of Indians in and around Natchez, however, suggest that the changing roles and experiences of American Indians warrant additional consideration. Sometime during the 1830s John Hutchins wrote reminiscences for his family. Here the aging planter recorded for posterity a detail that he apparently kept from his guest. When his father, Anthony, had reached the Mississippi River back in 1772, he befriended “a young Indian of the Natchez Tribe” and hired him to help start his plantation. “Indian Tom” actually advised Anthony to locate his plantation at the fruitful site that once was White Apple Village and was also responsible for saving from “Indian pillagers and wild animals” enough corn seeds for future planting. As John described that seminal moment, this young Natchez Indian dug a hole atop a ridge, lined it with tree bark, dropped in the corn, and covered it with earth and leaves. The economic presence of American Indians like Tom has for too long been buried by their imagined place in American narratives.4 Narratives of decline and disappearance written in the early nineteenth century depended significantly upon a distorted view of American Indians

Narratives of Decline and Disappearance

occupying the outskirts and streets of growing towns. Although scholarship on Indians in modern cities has grown rapidly, the caricature of an earlier presence of Native Americans in colonial and nineteenth-century towns has perpetuated neglect and simplification. Closer attention now reveals that Indians participated in the formative development of American towns in very active and intricate ways. As evidenced in such an array of places as seventeenth-century New York City and St. Augustine, eighteenth-century Charleston and Philadelphia, and nineteenth-century Buffalo and Los Angeles, many American Indians integrated towns and cities into their networks of migration and exchange and incorporated them into their strategies of resistance and adaptation.5 Unfortunately, observers such as John Latrobe were simultaneously reworking these strategies into a language of nostalgia and conquest.

Natchez is best known in American Indian history as the home of the highly centralized Natchez chiefdom and the site of a tragic conflict between French colonists and native villagers. Like many other groups along the Mississippi River, the densely populated Natchez villages suffered heavily from the spread of disease over the seventeenth century. René Robert Cavelier, sieur de La Salle’s initial encounter in 1682 occurred amid widespread depopulation. By the time the LeMoyne brothers launched the French colony of Louisiana, traders and missionaries were making frequent visits to Natchez country, where some 3,500 people inhabited nine or ten different villages. This population included some Tioux and Grigra Indians, who in keeping with a Natchez pattern of assimilating adjacent groups had recently left their backcountry villages to join the highly centralized tribe.6 Over the first three decades of the eighteenth century, the Natchez area attracted much French interest as a busy center of trade, a promising site for agricultural development, and the home of one of North America’s few remaining Mississippian chiefdoms. The Natchez Indians were closely observed by missionaries and other visitors, whose detailed accounts left a lasting imprint on American history and ethnography. Meanwhile, they forged a strong trade and alliance relationship with the formative colony of Louisiana. But this relationship, as most students of the Lower Mississippi Valley know, suddenly broke down in the late 1720s when some colonial officials began pressuring Natchez villages to make land available for tobacco plantations.7

45

46

Narratives of Decline and Disappearance

Three decades of French-Natchez interaction generated a literature with enduring value. Antoine Le Page du Pratz was a soldier turned plantation manager who lived in Louisiana from 1718 to 1734. His threevolume History of Louisiana was published in 1758 and described Natchez society in great detail, accompanied by illustrations of ceremonies and other activities. Circulation of Le Page du Pratz’s history widened in 1763, with publication of an English translation, a copy of which was acquired by Thomas Jefferson.8 Amid the natural history of flora and fauna and the narrative of major events spanning three volumes, du Pratz offered critical commentary on colonial Louisiana and sympathetic treatment of Indian society. “With the most idealistic humanism of the Enlightenment,” in the words of Shannon Dawdy, he depicted the Natchez as “peers of the French”—a decent people struggling under despotic rulers.9 Although the particular complexity of eighteenthcentury reports on Indian culture at Natchez all too quickly fell to the wayside, a stream of print and art about the Natchez Indians would flow endlessly as nineteenth-century romantic writers and painters as well as twentieth-century anthropologists and historians borrowed freely from earlier writers such as Le Page du Pratz. Although the Natchez War resulted in the destruction of a powerful chiefdom and the dispersal of its people, the area continued to be the locus of American Indian activity over the rest of the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth century. Economic engagement and political entanglement by Indian nations with European empires never did wane at this place, although it would become an allegorical stage for dramatizing decline and disappearance in the non-Indian imagination. Guerrilla warfare waged by the Chickasaws, along with surviving Natchez accomplices, made the banks up and down the Mississippi River an unstable place for French colonization, but other Indians managed to benefit from the colonial need for their services. A small group of Ofogoulas, refugees from the Yazoo River, moved just outside the French fort at Natchez. This small Indian community, numbering eight to ten armed men at mid-century, regularly provisioned the garrison with game and assisted in defense against marauding Chickasaws and Natchez.10 The military post at Natchez was commanded during these years by Henri le Grand d’Orgon, who won this assignment because of his role in the 1738 campaign against the Chickasaws. Probably captured into slavery by d’Orgon in that war, a Natchez named Marie Therese was sold by him to a planter family downriver in 1745.11 The Choctaw

Narratives of Decline and Disappearance

War against the French escalated conflict at Natchez, where at least two French soldiers were killed in the fall of 1747. As allies of the French, Quapaw Indians from the lower Arkansas Valley offered the Natchez garrison some protection against Choctaw rebels. But when a small party of Chakchiumas attacked in October 1748, another soldier was killed.12 Two years later, a group of twenty to thirty Natchez people living at the Upper Creek town of Abikudshis requested permission from the governor of Louisiana to return to “their former abode.” Governor Pierre François Rigault de Vaudreuil had “no objection to granting it to them,” but their Creek hosts somehow prohibited these Natchez from leaving. Thus a chance for some Natchez Indians to return home was lost.13 At the end of July 1754, Chickasaws in three or four war parties attacked Natchez and captured four Ofogoula women and one Tunica man who was married to an Ofogoula woman. A detachment sent quickly by Commandant d’Orgon failed to retrieve these captives. Five Ofogoula warriors accompanied fifteen Frenchmen in this pursuit, but Lieutenant La Morlière’s refusal to take their advice and fall back apparently resulted in his own death and that of two other soldiers at the hands of Chickasaw snipers. Governor Louis Billourt de Kerlérec blamed Chickasaw aggressiveness on British influence through their Cherokee allies, although the Chickasaws had enough of their own grievances against the French and their Choctaw allies to warrant harassment of the Natchez garrison. Under the governor’s orders, two military officers and twenty Tunica warriors traveled upriver to Natchez and were joined there by some Ofogoulas and French soldiers on a larger campaign against the Chickasaws. Combat resulted in recovery of all captives and death of a Chickasaw chief and three of his principal warriors.14 Service rendered colonial authorities at Natchez even entitled Indian neighbors to impose their own demands on the relationship. Gifts and payments were ordinarily received for specific deeds, but special requests once in a while deployed a formal language laced with references to sacrifice and loss incurred because of allegiance to Europeans. In June 1756 the chief of the Ofogoulas, Toubamingo, accompanied the Great Chief of the Quapaws, Guedelonguay, on a delegation to New Orleans. Their main objective was to demand pardons for French soldiers found in their respective territories and accused of desertion. On a hunting trip with his son and two other Ofogoulas, Toubamingo had met two exhausted and hungry soldiers near Grand Gulf and brought them to Commandant d’Orgon at Natchez. Both soldiers claimed that they had

47

48

Narratives of Decline and Disappearance

lost their way and were unable to return to their post in Illinois. Appealing for the deserters’ pardon at their request, the Ofogoula chief reminded Governor Kerlérec that “if his nation was small in number today it was only for having fought for the French and together with the French . . . and it is no less constant to them than it is very useful today at the Natchez post.” In exchange for pardoning these two soldiers, Guedelonguay promised in the future to return all deserting soldiers and other malefactors without any conditions.15 When Great Britain assumed control of the Natchez area, Scots Fusiliers were stationed at Fort Panmure in 1766 and Henry Le Fleur was appointed Choctaw interpreter. The post was closed two years later to save expenses, but English settlers began to occupy this and other parts of West Florida.16 The 1770s and 1780s were especially volatile years for Indian-colonial relations at Natchez. Choctaw discontent over British changes in trade and diplomacy motivated periodic raiding against English persons and property. During the American Revolution, Indian groups participated on different sides of the struggle. In 1779 Franchimastabé, rising chief of the western district of the Choctaw nation, contributed warriors first to Great Britain’s defense of Natchez against the Spanish military siege and then to subsequent attempts to retake Fort Panmure. The Spanish army sent upriver from New Orleans to put down Loyalist rebellion at Natchez included forty-three Indians from Louisiana, but many English refugees found asylum in Choctaw and Chickasaw villages.17

A changing appearance of American Indians in Natchez from the Spanish colonial period through Mississippi’s early statehood reflected difficult and intricate efforts of the Choctaws in particular to cope with a powerful transformation of the Lower Mississippi Valley after 1783.18 Choctaw leaders expressed their reaction to shifting international relations through diplomatic gestures at Natchez, in face of government officials’ wishes to minimize their presence in the busy river town. Indian protest against the new order took additional shape in frequent acts of banditry committed by Choctaw parties in the Natchez area. American Indians also used Natchez as a marketplace in their early adjustment to the emerging cotton economy, making the town an opportune place for historians to observe Indian strategies of adaptation as well as of resistance. The ubiquitous presence of Choctaws in Natchez severely tested

Narratives of Decline and Disappearance

the intercultural borderland of crime and punishment, where occasional violence between Indians and non-Indians was handled during the territorial period of Mississippi history. Contemporary descriptions of Indian people on the streets and along the riverbank of Natchez, usually expressing scorn and pity, reflected popular ideas about the fate of Indian nations in the early United States. The challenge for historians, however, is to rescue evidence of Indian motivation and agency from the very documents that tend to devalue or even erase their presence. During the 1780s and 1790s Choctaw delegations continued to visit Natchez for gifts and talks from Spanish officials, despite Spanish insistence that they confine their diplomatic journeys to Mobile. In January 1790 Franchimastabé complained to Carlos de Grand-Pré at Natchez that although land along Big Black River had been ceded to the English, “they have not received any money for it.” The commandant claimed that he had no gifts at Natchez and advised the chief to go to Mobile, stating that his “impertinences merely spring from a desire to receive more presents.”19 On September 30, 1790, five Choctaw chiefs summoned settlers along Coles Creek to the house of a Choctaw who had been living there for some eighteen years. Although the settlers asserted that they lived under Spanish rule, the principal Choctaw spokesman called them “Americans and usurpers of these lands” and warned them to leave the area within two weeks. Commandant Carlos de Grand-Pré sent a subaltern to catch up with this Choctaw delegation on its way to Bayou Pierre and was able to convince them that indeed the settlers were Spaniards, not Americans.20 Like their Spanish predecessors, American officials in Natchez after 1797 complained about frequent visits by Choctaw delegations. From the Choctaw perspective, these new authorities were committing infractions of Indian diplomatic protocol. Greeting a large party at the Concord mansion on October 19, 1798, the newly arrived Mississippi territorial governor—Winthrop Sargent—pleaded that he was not yet prepared to satisfy the wants of Indian guests. In time he hoped to “shew my Charity for your Wives and Children, and to afford you some Ammunition for the purpose of hunting.” But Sargent asked the Choctaws to visit in small delegations with a letter of introduction from their agent, Samuel Mitchell, because “your large parties distress the White people who are not able to furnish them with provisions.”21 Later that year the governor recommended to Secretary of State Timothy Pickering that they “submit to make the Choctaw Indians Annual Present, or be at War

49

50

Narratives of Decline and Disappearance

with them.” But the regular distribution of gifts, he emphasized, “should be made at a distance from our settlements, for but to preserve amity with the White and red people, is to keep them far apart.”22 Three years later, Governor William Claiborne reported, “I have no Presents to make, and very seldom supply them with provisions, but they notwithstanding, will, & cannot be persuaded to remain in their own lands.”23 On their periodic visits to Natchez, Choctaw delegates often had to tolerate patronizing lectures from government officials annoyed by Indian adaptation to economic conditions—another face-to-face clash between language and livelihood. Before an estimated one thousand Choctaws in 1793, Manuel Gayoso rejected their claim that game was becoming scarce and accused them of simply being lazy. “Without going to hunt,” as he recounted his speech, “they can acquire what they need by going to our posts with false talks in order to obtain gifts.” He chastised them for exchanging any presents acquired this way for alcohol and thereby returning home with nothing for their families. “In order to avoid this,” Gayoso announced, “we have decided to give you the usual presents once a year in your own nations, or near by at a place we will now select.”24 In November 1799 Governor Sargent sent a message to Franchimastabé, along with a personal gift of some cloth and liquor, postponing an invitation for the chief to visit Natchez because “you must be attended by many of your people who would expect presents, and I have not the means to make them.” Sargent tried hard to welcome the many Choctaws who visited him but confessed that “some leave me dissatisfied, because I do not take my Coat off my back and give it to them.” Then the governor slipped into sermonizing about how the Choctaws needed to adopt plough agriculture and household weaving in order to enjoy better times, “with Independence as the Whites.” “If you and I could be the happy Instruments of making it General amongst the Choctaws,” Sargent told Franchimastabé, “it would gladden our hearts in our declining years, as insuring the Welfare of their Children after them.”25

Faced with denial of gifts, changes in trade, and encroachment on tribal land, Choctaw Indians resorted to acts of banditry as a form of protest outside the diplomatic channel. The historian faces some difficulty of his or her own, however, in sorting out deliberate protest from some

Narratives of Decline and Disappearance

overlapping factors that also contributed to Indian robbery and violence. Open interaction and movement between Indians and non-Indians had become a customary part of livelihood for many inhabitants of the Lower Mississippi Valley during the French and Spanish colonial periods. Through the deerskin trade and other forms of frontier exchange, people freely crossed cultural and ethnic boundaries in ways that seemed increasingly threatening to new political and economic interests by the end of the eighteenth century.26 Informal relations between Indians and non-Indians now became suspect, treated generally by government officials as subversive and unlawful. This more vigilant effort to outlaw such activity and regulate Indian contact was also connected to mounting concern about the influence of alcohol consumption. Conduct influenced by inebriation—from begging for money to fighting while drunk—contributed to a fear of disorder. For the historian, this entanglement of issues makes it impossible to precisely distinguish symbolic acts of protest from prosaic kinds of disruptive activity.27 From the beginning of Spain’s administration of West Florida, colonial officials worried about too much movement between Indian villages and Natchez settlements, involving at the time a six- to twelve-day journey. The Indian work that they produced consequently veiled from our view the Indian work being performed by Mississippi Indians. Describing farms and plantations situated around the town in 1785, Francisco Bouligny directed Governor Miró’s attention to the “unsettled lands at their rear,” which made it easy for people to come and go without notice. “Many vagabonds and villains who inhabit the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations,” he feared, “may enter into the district, and gather in the homes of the friends and companions whom they may have among the inhabitants.” “Dregs of Europe and America,” according to Bouligny, “they are the ones who have devastated this district with their continual thefts of horses, mules and Negroes.” Attributing them with “a humane spirit common in almost all the Indians,” the Natchez commandant reported that the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations “receive and shelter these vagabonds, sharing with them the little they have to eat, and thereby give them the means and facilities to come and steal.” Choctaws sometimes accompanied and assisted these white bandits, “either induced by the bad example or perhaps by their native and natural inclinations, for the consideration of the sacredness of possession is unknown to them.”28 There is no question that Mississippi Indians both inadvertently and intentionally facilitated crimes against property in the Natchez area. But

51

52

Narratives of Decline and Disappearance

tribal leaders also complained about people called vagabonds, mostly Americans, who threatened the economic security of their villages and jeopardized peaceful relations with the Spanish government. Colonial and later territorial officials were unable to keep “Stragglin People” from Natchez, as trader Benjamin James called them, away from the Choctaw nation.29 In addition to the unregulated infiltration by American traders, Choctaws were especially concerned during the 1790s about the impact of John Turnbull’s trade company, whose rapidly expanding operations drew deerskins away from traders with closer ties to Indian families. Panton, Leslie and Company, an older firm in Florida, worried about losing clients, complaining that Indians “are Naturally but too apt to fly from one to another when in debt.”30 But Franchimastabé voiced his own objection against a new trading post along the Yazoo River: “The store which Turnbull has established in the hunting grounds of my people is causing them the greatest harm because of the large quantity of tafia [a cheap rum] which is sold there. By this means he is able to take from the savages the skins which they owe to the traders in the villages, and as a result these traders are unable to pay their debts.”31 This encroachment by the Turnbull Company strongly influenced Choctaw opposition to the establishment of a new fort at Walnut Hills. The Spanish had constructed Fort Nogales to bolster defense against the claims of American land companies. The Choctaws objected to the lack of compensation for the land at Walnut Hills but were primarily concerned about new traders at Nogales competing with traders who were married to Indian women. Richard King and Benjamin James notified Adjutant Major Stephen Minor that if he did not stop trade in Nogales, the Choctaws would rob from the inhabitants of Natchez to compensate their own traders for loss caused by the competition.32 In the treaty signed at Natchez in 1792, the Choctaws consented to Fort Nogales, but the disruptive influence of aggressive traders continued to strain Indian relations. Many Choctaws expressed their grievances through their own acts of banditry. From the beginnings of colonial settlement under British rule, Choctaw raiders targeted fields and livestock around Natchez for plunder. On January 21, 1770, about thirty Choctaws entered the Natchez fort, broke into the storehouse, and took all the goods and horses away. They locked a trader named John Bradley in a room and threatened to return the next day to kill him. Informed of the whereabouts of the bandits’ camp by two other Choctaws and a Quapaw Indian, a party of

Narratives of Decline and Disappearance

whites went out that night, “expecting to find them drunk to Retake the goods without doing Mischief.” The camp was alarmed at the approach of the whites and fired thirteen or fourteen shots. The three friendly Indians led the return firing into the camp, drove the bandits away, and retrieved the goods. Two or three Choctaws were killed in the skirmish and two or three wounded. The Quapaw was wounded, along with four white servants of Bradley and Fergy. Natchez settlers took refuge downriver at the Tunica village. Fergy attributed this raid to the Choctaws’ dissatisfaction with Bradley’s unfulfilled promises to give them presents and to the large quantity of rum being sold to the Indians at Natchez. Fifty to sixty kegs were retaken from the bandits’ camp.33 The Choctaws themselves often made it impossible to ascertain specific motivations behind acts of banditry. Many expressed opposition against white settlement by treating livestock and other property as an entitlement. John Hutchins recalled how Indians, “though not hostile in the beginning, were a nuisance because they felt free to raid the corn patches and even to take food from the settlers’ tables.” Horses were frequently stolen by Indians, “who always returned them by the offer of large reward,” but Hutchins remembered a violent episode when “they demanded a price so high that our people refused to submit to such piracy.” Five young settlers recaptured some horses through armed combat with a large party of Choctaws, which cost the lives of one white and three Indians. The Choctaws avenged their loss by attacking Natchez in full force, driving settlers into the fort and destroying livestock, buildings, and crops.34 Governor Sargent reported to Pickering on May 26, 1799, that the Choctaws bitterly resented the inattention of the United States. When some horses were demanded from them, Choctaws declared that they would sooner shoot and eat the horses than return them. “Their Country once affording abundance,” they complained, “had become desolate by the hands of a People who knew them not but to increase their Wretchedness.” They would consequently treat the Natchez district’s “Domestic Animals as fit objects for the Chase,” which Sargent indicated was already under way because planters “have been loud and Constant in their Complaints to me.”35 In some other cases, Choctaw pilferage reflected immediate scarcity caused by either a natural shortage of food sources or a neglect of subsistence activities. Begging Natchez residents for food was then inseparable from robbing their households. In the spring of 1802, more than two hundred Choctaw men, women, and children were encamped within

53

54

Narratives of Decline and Disappearance

six miles of town. “They almost entirely depend upon begging and stealing,” according to Governor Claiborne, who feared that it would be “difficult to shield the Indians from much violence” that might be committed by citizens angry about losing their livestock.36 Under these circumstances, the threat of further violence moved both ways. When later in 1802 about eight Indians from a camp near Daniel Grafton’s cornfield killed a steer and wounded another on his plantation, they defiantly threatened to cause further damage.37 A large proportion of violence and pilferage revolved around the abuse of alcohol in Natchez, which in turn provoked official rhetoric about weakness and vulnerability. William Claiborne reported to Secretary of State Madison in December 1801 that Choctaw Indians “receive spirits from the Citizens, become intoxicated and are abusive and viciously inclined; from these sources disputes arise, and I am looked up to, as the Arbitrator.” Twelve days before the territorial governor wrote this letter, a Choctaw who “drank too freely of Spirits” in town “became insolent, and was chastised with some severity by an unknown citizen.” Missing since the evening he was whipped, this Choctaw man was suspected of being dead.38 Claiborne advised Choctaws in Natchez “to quit drinking Whiskey, for it will make you Fools & Old Women; return to your own Land & make bread for your families.” But he also confessed to Choctaw agent John McKee that “the people of Natchez are themselves much in fault” for the trouble with visiting Indians.39 In 1800 the territorial assembly had imposed a penalty on taverns and stores for selling liquor to Indians as well as slaves, but this and subsequent laws proved ineffective in preventing townspeople from exchanging alcohol with Indians.40 In a May 17, 1803, letter to Ochchummey, a chief of the eastern Choctaw district, Claiborne pleaded helplessness: “Brothers! When the Choctaws come to Natchez I do everything I can to keep whiskey from them, but some of my bad men will sell liquor to the Indians.” Back in April a drunken brawl between some Choctaws and river boatmen at the Natchez landing resulted in several Indian men being wounded, one mortally.41

The striking effects of banditry and intoxication among American Indians received significant attention in the reports of colonial and territorial officials, but this language should not be allowed to overshadow important features of Indian livelihood in towns such as Natchez. The

Narratives of Decline and Disappearance

rapidly emerging cotton economy in the Lower Mississippi Valley posed severe problems for Indian people at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and Natchez was the site of some resourceful strategies of economic adaptation pursued by Choctaws and other Mississippi Indians. Indian inhabitants of the Mississippi Territory responded to their deteriorating economic position in a variety of ways, evincing a dynamic adaptability that historians are just beginning to reveal about American Indians in general. While some of the most important responses occurred in and around native villages, Indian activities away from their own communities also constituted forms of economic adjustment. Many Choctaws and Chickasaws became seasonal laborers on nonIndian farms and plantations, comprising the cotton economy’s first migrant workforce. “The pine woods . . . between the Choctaw nation and the inhabitants of the Mississippi territory,” Fortescue Cuming observed in 1808, “does not prevent the Indians from bringing their squaws every fall and winter to aid in gathering in the cotton crop, for which they are paid in blankets, stroud (a blue cloth used by them for clothing), handkerchiefs, and worsted binding of various colours besides other articles of manufactured goods, which are charged to them at most exorbitant prices.”42 John A. Watkins recalled his first acquaintance with the Choctaws in 1813–1814, “as they came into Jefferson Co. in the fall and winter in large numbers, the women to pick cotton, the men to hunt in the Louisiana Swamps.” From bark-covered huts that were always left open on the south side, hunters pursued deer and bear across the Mississippi while women worked in cotton fields east of the river. When John McKee arrived at the Choctaw agency in November 1814 to recruit warriors, he “found the towns abandoned, the people had either gone hunting or into the settlements to pick cotton.”43 Englishman Henry Bradshaw Fearon, visiting Natchez in the winter of 1817–18, observed “that there are a few native Indians who raise cotton, and hold slaves; others (but only women) are hired to pick the cotton, their fathers or husbands receiving their wages. No male Indian would submit to the supposed degradation of being in the employ of any one.”44 When Horace Fulkerson moved from Kentucky to Rodney, Mississippi, in 1836, he considered the “frequent sight in the streets of small bands of Indians” to be one of the novelties of his new home. Preconceived notions about what distinguished American Indians from African Americans, however, influenced his observation. “These Indians came in towards the river from their settlements in the

55

56

Narratives of Decline and Disappearance

eastern part of the state to hunt, and some of them to pick cotton,” he wrote years later, “but the old lords of the forest scorned the latter base employment, and had a great repugnance to association with negroes.”45 No matter what passing observers thought about these itinerant Indian workers, local planters had come to depend upon them for extra help. Eliza Nutt wrote to her husband in December 1817 from their plantation outside Natchez, reporting that all of the cotton could not be picked in time with their current force of slaves. “I have been making some attempts lately to hire hands, but I believe they cannot be gotten” because, as she casually mentioned, “the indians have been very backward coming in this fall.” Rush Nutt was away in northern Virginia at the time, purchasing additional slaves for his Mississippi operation.46 At Clermont Plantation near Natchez, John Nevitt regularly hired American Indians as well as free blacks to work with his slaves at harvest time. “Paid off the Indians for picking cotton” appears in several diary entries between 1826 and 1832. On November 22, 1828, Nevitt “hired Dozen Indians to pick cotton @6/-pr Hd.”47 Choctaws also used the bustling river town of Natchez as a marketplace for the produce of their own villages and camps. Throughout the eighteenth century the Gulf port of Mobile had been a very familiar place for Choctaw trade, and many families continued to market foodstuffs, pelts, horses, baskets, and firewood there well into the nineteenth century.48 Over the territorial years of Mississippi history, however, Choctaws made their most prominent urban presence felt at Natchez. They peddled goods on the streets, worked for wages at the dock, and played ball on the outskirts of town.49 In 1808 boats were being greeted at the Natchez landing by a musical band of about forty Indian men, women, and children. Some played wind, percussive, and string instruments made from cane, while a drummer struck a two-gallon tin kettle covered with a buckskin. Their solemn march to the arriving boat, climaxed in dance and song, was reminiscent of the calumet ceremonies that had greeted travelers in previous centuries. Only now, these Indian musicians expected “a little money, whiskey, or provisions” from passengers either stopping or disembarking at the busy docks.50 “Indians are Daily seen here with different sorts of Game,” John James Audubon noted at Natchez as late as 1820, “for which they receive high Prices.” On one occasion, he saw a small wild turkey sold for one dollar and mallard ducks sold for fifty cents a piece.51

Narratives of Decline and Disappearance

Choctaw economic activity at Natchez was part of a wider strategy of adaptation that involved providing goods and services all along the Mississippi River. Highly mobile camps of Indian families from several different nations engaged in ubiquitous exchange with river travelers and resident slaves and settlers. When in January 1793 the crew of a Spanish military ship went ashore on the west bank of the Mississippi for dinner, a party of about twenty-five Choctaw men with their families stopped with fifteen horses and two pirogues loaded with deerskins. When asked to trade for their pelts, the commanding officer replied that “my boat was a royal vessel and that I traded with no one.”52 A traveler descending the Mississippi from New Madrid to Walnut Hills in November 1808 traded gunpowder, lead, and cornmeal for some turkeys, persimmons, and deerskins brought to him in pirogues by a small group of Quapaw Indians. John Watkins described how Choctaw families camping in Louisiana in the 1810s dressed deerskins, dried venison, and made bear oil to sell at “the small shipping points on the Mispi side of the river.” They brought whatever was not sold during their travels into Natchez, where according to Watkins, “they were usually exchanged for blankets, stroud & calico supplemented by a Jug of whiskey.”53

With such a variety of Indian enterprise occurring in and around Natchez during this period, plenty of public language was directed at testing the jurisdictional boundary between Indian country and U.S. territory. Choctaw law mandated that injury and murder be compensated by taking revenge or accepting payment for losses suffered, a system that differed drastically from the European system of crime and punishment. In February 1793 “a Hunting Indian going to sell his oil to the whites” was shot at while landing his canoe. He escaped injury by diving into the water, but his boat and cargo of oil, bear skins, and deerskins were taken. “He wanted to take revenge,” but Lieutenant Colonel Juan de la Villebeuvre talked him out of it. The Indian expected compensation for his losses and “a gratuity for having been shot at,” but Villebeuvre lacked the means and sent him to Governor Carondelet in New Orleans.54 On two separate days in late March 1799, unknown persons assaulted some Choctaws in Natchez, “Beating, Maiming, and Wounding them, in so cruel and Barbarous a manner, that death will probably ensue.” Winthrop Sargent issued a proclamation on March 30 calling upon citizens and officials to apprehend the culprits. But fearing that the innocent

57

58

Narratives of Decline and Disappearance

might suffer with the guilty, the governor also directed public attention to “that Spirit of Retaliation so strongly marking the Character of the red people.”55 Indians in Mississippi Territory reserved the right to practice their own system of jurisprudence among themselves within their own lands. Even when a Choctaw killed another Choctaw in or near non-Indian communities, local officials tended to permit tribal law to be practiced on the spot. In 1818 Estwick Evans learned that an Indian, “in a moment of passion,” had recently murdered another from his group while visiting Natchez. Observing that Choctaw law “declared the act worthy of death,” Evans recounted how the criminal never attempted to escape, in keeping with tribal custom, and instead bravely accepted his fate. “With a fearless and composed aspect, he marched off, faced his executioners, and opened his arms to receive their fire.” Such stories about Choctaws ceremoniously and courageously surrendering themselves for execution are ubiquitous in oral and written accounts of early nineteenth-century life along the Mississippi River.56 Whenever non-Indians were involved in criminal activity by or against Indians, reciprocity and sympathy across the jurisdictional boundary fell into murkier water. Indians accused of injuring or killing non-Indians were often threatened with prosecution in U.S. courts but were mostly handled inside tribal jurisdiction. Indians were expected to turn citizens and slaves accused of committing crimes on Indian land over to American officials. Like colonial administrators in earlier times, territorial authorities usually offered merchandise to the relatives of an Indian victim killed by a non-Indian, fearing the effects of reprisal.57 But this practice did not guarantee that a bereaved Indian would not take the law into his own hands. In June 1803 “half-breed” Lewis Vaun shot and wounded a traveler on the road to Nashville “to avenge the Loss of his Brother,” Samuel, who had been reportedly killed while intoxicated in Natchez by a slave two years earlier. Another traveler was wounded on the same road by some Choctaws who, according to Claiborne, “had set out to take a life as compensation for an Indian who was killed in Natchez about two Months ago.”58 Acquittal by the territorial court of most persons responsible for Indian fatalities only deepened Indian resentment and suspicion toward the U.S. justice system, making other means of satisfying relatives of victims even more essential. In November 1812 a man named Lewis accused an Indian of stealing his gun “and by way of satisfaction tied him to a tree and gave him about thirty lashes.” Lewis released his victim from the tree

Narratives of Decline and Disappearance

but left his hands tied. The Indian apparently fell to his death from the Natchez bluff. When the perpetrator of this deed was acquitted of murder, Governor David Holmes anticipated “that the friends of the Indian will not be satisfied with this verdict.”59

In addition to judgmental language already seen embedded in official correspondence, travelers and other passing observers often described Indians at Natchez with disappointment and even disgust. For people who idealized “noble savages” living in a remote past or in the distant west, American Indians occupying the margins of white society—such as the Choctaws in and around Natchez—were too easily perceived as pathetic remnants of a once nobler race. The enduring effect of this narrative of decline and disappearance was virtually to erase a sizable number of Indian people from history as they are contrasted with romanticized images of Indians once living, or still living elsewhere, in temporary isolation from “civilization.” After all, the word Natchez during the Romantic period would most likely conjure up images from Chateaubriand’s fantastically romantic stories of Atala and René. Impressed by eighteenth-century depictions of North American Indians, writers and artists in the Romantic era eagerly tapped into historical events for tragic scenes and settings. Famous tales about the Natchez Indians, it just so happens, rose to prominence in this early nineteenthcentury genre. In writing the wildly popular stories of Atala and René at the beginning of the century, François René de Chateaubriand was deeply influenced by Le Page du Pratz’s Histoire de la Louisiane, published in 1758. In his hands, however, criticism of French policy in early Louisiana was transformed into nostalgia over France’s eventual loss of the colony.60 “Among the founding works of French Romanticism,” in the words of Harry Liebersohn, Chateaubriand’s tales set in colonial Louisiana “united the highbrow René, a runaway from civilization, to the high-minded savage patriarch, Chactas, as son to father.” In an age when European nobility was under siege, uneasy aristocrats such as Chateaubriand found honor and dignity in vanishing tribal societies. Natchez nobility and French nobility were fused into allegorical oneness.61 Although never getting close to the Mississippi Valley, Chateaubriand had briefly traveled in the northeastern United States in 1791. The forest west of Albany enchanted him, but the Iroquois Indians whom he encountered in western New York were notably disappointing. Ironically,

59

60

Narratives of Decline and Disappearance

this advocate of the noble savage expressed chagrin when he observed a small group of Oneida men and women learning European dance from a French instructor!62 Important European paintings of note were directly influenced by Chateaubriand’s novels, as were chinaware, clocks, and other furnishings. In 1808 pioneer French romanticist Anne-Louis Girodet de RoussyTrioson completed “Burial of Atala,” which won the Légion d’Honneur. “The Rousseauian sentiment of innocent virtue couched in classical terms,” as art historian Rena Coen describes it, “is placed in an atmosphere that is gloomy, Catholic and romantic.” In the Salon of 1835, Eugène Delacroix exhibited The Natchez (Figure 3). Delacroix began this work probably in the early 1820s, but like Girodet he had never traveled to North America. Taken from the epilogue of Chateaubriand’s Atala, the action of this painting was described by the artist in a January 18, 1836, letter to Théophile Thoré: “Two young savages, fleeing from their

[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]

Figure 3. Eugène Delacroix, The Natchez, 1835. Oil on canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Gifts of George N. and Helen M. Richard and Mr. and Mrs. Charles S. McVeigh and Bequest of Emma A. Sheafer, by exchange, 1989 (1989.328). Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Narratives of Decline and Disappearance

persecutors, travel down the Mississippi. The young woman, seized with labour pains, has just given birth on the shore.”63 Chateaubriand was not the only creative person producing Indian work about Natchez’s Native American legacy in the early nineteenth century. A musician known as Okah Tubbee performed on stages across the United States during the 1830s, playing flute and telling tales in the guise of being Indian. Okah Tubbee was born in Natchez in 1810 or 1811, with the name of Warner, to an enslaved woman named Franky. A few years later Franky and her two older children were manumitted by their owner James McCarty, in accordance with his will. McCarty was a cabinetmaker from Pennsylvania and probably was the father of Robert and Kitty, who inherited his property. Three- or four-year-old Warner remained a slave and was supposed to serve his older brother and sister. His father might very well have been a Choctaw who frequented Natchez during those years. But Warner claimed to be a son of Choctaw chief Moshulatubbee who had supposedly been taken to Natchez by a white man whose home was managed by a slave woman with two children. According to Okah Tubbee’s staged story about himself, this woman insisted that he call her mother, treated him badly, and sometimes in anger called him “an outlandish savage.” Warner managed somehow to slip into freedom with this pretend story and spent several months living with Indians near Alexandria, Louisiana. He returned to Natchez and apprenticed as a blacksmith, and by 1830 or so he was fife major for the Natchez Cadets. As a talented itinerant musician supposedly playing Indian music, Okah Tubbee met a Mohawk woman who became his stage partner, promoter, and biographer. Audiences in major American cities were learning about Choctaws at Natchez from the son of an African American woman who was successfully performing as the son of a famous Indian chief. Far more numerous on American stages at the time, of course, were white men blackfacing in minstrel shows.64 Meanwhile, images of pitiful Indians loitering around Natchez—vividly demonstrating the destructive effects of close contact—contributed to a rationale for the removal of American Indians from Mississippi. To a great extent, this was an already well-worked form of displacement through misrepresentation. Disparagement of New England Indians during the eighteenth century, as explained by Amy Den Ouden, had served continuing encroachment on Indian land. When a Connecticut official called the Mohegans “inconsiderable Indians” in 1769, he was purposefully raising doubt about their cultural and political legitimacy.65 In Jacksonian America, this kind of linguistic manipulation played right into the hands of

61

62

Narratives of Decline and Disappearance

removal advocates. When Estwick Evans met a group of Choctaws in Natchez, he claimed that “most of them were intoxicated, and all highly painted.” Thomas Nuttall visited the town in early February 1820. “Considerable numbers of Choctaw appeared at this season,” he noted, “straggling through the streets of Natchez, either begging or carrying on some paltry traffic, but chiefly for the sake of liquor.”66 Descriptions like these resonated in many readers’ minds when President Andrew Jackson declared, in his first annual message to Congress, that the “present condition” of American Indians, “contrasted with what they once were,” demands the ameliorative action of removal. “Surrounded by the whites with their arts of civilization, which by destroying the resources of the savage doom him to weakness and decay, the fate of the Mohegan, the Narragansett, and the Delaware is fast overtaking the Choctaw, the Cherokee, and the Creek.”67 Echoing eighteenth-century myths about coastal peoples conveniently helped to promote nineteenth-century policies toward interior peoples. One of the most vituperative descriptions of Indians in Natchez came from the pen of a New Englander, soon after the Choctaw Nation had sold all of its remaining land in Mississippi. Joseph Ingraham moved to Mississippi from Maine to teach languages at Jefferson College and eventually became an Episcopal clergymen and novelist. Ingraham expressed disdain toward quite a few characteristics on the cultural landscape of the Lower Mississippi Valley, but aimed some of his most robust prejudice at one group of Choctaws in Natchez: As I was crossing from the bluff to the entrance of one of the principal streets . . . my attention was arrested by an extraordinary group, reclining in various attitudes under the grateful shade of the ornamental trees which line the way. With his back firmly planted against a tree, as though there existed a sympathetic affinity between the two, sat an athletic Indian with the neck of a black bottle thrust down his throat, while the opposite extremity pointed to the heavens. . . . By his side, his blanket hanging in easy folds from his shoulders, stood a tall, fine-looking youth, probably his son, his raven hair falling masses over his back, with his black eyes fixed upon the elder Indians, as a faithful dog will watch each movement of his intemperate master. One hand supported a rifle, while another was carelessly suspended over his shoulder. There was no change in this group while I remained in sight; they were as immoveable as statues. A little in the rear, lay several “warriors” fast locked in the arms of Bacchus or Somnus, (probably both,) their rifles lying beside them. . . . At a little distance, half

Narratives of Decline and Disappearance concealed by huge baskets apparently just unstrapped from their backs, filled with the motley paraphernalia of an Indian lady’s wardrobe, sat, cross-legged, a score of dark-eyed, brown-skinned girls and women, laughing and talking in their soft, childish language. . . . Half a score of miserable, starved wretches, “mongrel, whelp and hound,” which it were an insult to the noble species to term dogs, wandering about like unburied ghosts “seeking what they might devour,” completed the novel and picturesque ensemble of the scene.68

A derisive attitude is profusely expressed in Ingraham’s words. The Indian’s son resembles a “faithful dog,” a rifle is “carelessly” hanging over his shoulder, Indian women and girls show “dark eyes and brown skins,” their baskets contain “motley” possessions, the language is “childish,” and—in what the author perhaps considered his most stinging insult— their dogs are “mongrels.” This contemptuous image of Choctaws in Natchez reflected a widespread opinion of American Indian communities situated in close proximity to much larger non-Indian populations across the eastern United States.69 Pictorial representations of American Indians working and trading in the Natchez area were more mixed in judgment, depicting an ordinariness in their presence while also expressing a sense of their marginality. Charles Lesueur, a French naturalist and artist who traveled along the Mississippi River at least six times during the 1820s and 1830s, sketched several portraits and scenes of Indians. One drawing of a makeshift cabin built by Indian campers outside Memphis closely matches an earlier description, written by Fortescue Cuming, of a transient Indian camp along the Mississippi just above that same city. Itinerant camps around Natchez no doubt resembled this one: Near the landing was a newly abandoned Indian camp, the trees having been barked only within a day or two. To explain this it may be proper to observe, that the Indians, who are wanderers, continually shifting their hunting ground, form their temporary huts with two forked stakes, stuck in the ground, at from six to twelve feet apart, and from four to six feet high. A ridge pole is laid from fork to fork, and long pieces of bark striped from the neighboring trees, are placed on their ends at a sufficient distance below, while the other ends overlap each other where they meet at the ridge pole, the whole forming a hut shaped like the roof of a common house, in which they make a fire, and the men, when not hunting, lounge at full length wrapped in their blankets, or sit cross legged, while the women do the

63

64

Narratives of Decline and Disappearance domestick drudgery, or make baskets of various shapes with split cane, which they do with great neatness, and a certain degree of ingenuity.70

Swiss painter Karl Bodmer also captured the seasonal presence of Indians around Natchez in 1833, spending a week there on a return trip from New Orleans to New Harmony, Indiana, the base for his and Prince Maximilian’s travels in the United States. Images such as “Choctaws at Natchez,” “Choctaw Camp on the Mississippi,” and “Tshanny, a Choctaw Man,” all watercolors over pencil on paper (Figures 4–6), have been easily overshadowed in art history by Bodmer’s more sensationalized

[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]

Figure 4. Karl Bodmer, Choctaws at Natchez. Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska, gift of Enron Art Foundation.

Narratives of Decline and Disappearance

[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]

Figure 5. Karl Bodmer, Choctaw Camp on the Mississippi, 1833. Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska, gift of Enron Art Foundation.

Indian work on the Great Plains. But these and other images painted by the Swiss artist along the lower Mississippi River comprise valuable visual representation of the region’s Indian workers and peddlers, with whom he had some interaction. One Indian at Natchez wanted to sell Bodmer a wild turkey for a dollar, he later told Maximilian, while another offered him a couple of shabby beaver pelts.71 Like the Baroness Hyde de Neuville’s earlier sketches of Iroquois Indians in New York, Bodmer’s paintings of Mississippi Choctaws selectively convey a sense of idleness and forlornness on the margins of society. Perhaps the epitomizing narrative of decline and disappearance set in Natchez during the Romantic era was William Gilmore Simms’s “Oakatibbe, or the Choctaw Sampson.” First published in 1841, this short story centers around a group of Indians who were seasonally employed by a planter near Natchez to help pick cotton. Simms had traveled across Mississippi with his father and uncle in 1824, when he was eighteen years old, so he was familiar with this form of Indian-white interaction. He also remembered from his childhood in South Carolina

65

66

Narratives of Decline and Disappearance

[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]

Figure 6. Karl Bodmer, Tshanny, a Choctaw Man. Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska, gift of Enron Art Foundation.

the seasonal travels of Catawba Indians who sold pottery and other goods in Charleston. In what became one of Simms’s most popular stories, Oakatibbe kills Loblolly Jack in a drunken fight and is sentenced to death by his chief for murdering another Choctaw. The planter who hires these Choctaws, Colonel Harris, views his employment of Indian workers as an experiment in “civilization.” Rather than purchase additional

Narratives of Decline and Disappearance

slaves for his expansive plantation, Harris decides to save “the lazy Choctaws by whom he was surrounded” from “the humiliating moral and social deterioration which has marked this fast decaying people.” Skeptical of this Natchez planter’s plan, the author-narrator wonders, “Could a race, proud, sullen, incommunicative, wandering, be persuaded, even by gradual steps, and with the hope of certain compensation, to renounce the wild satisfaction afforded by their desultory and unconstrained modes of life?” Simms answers his own question—fatalistically and romantically— through the unfolding story. Loblolly Jack, representing the typical Choctaw, attempts to cheat the planter by pressing down on the scales that weighed his wife’s basket of cotton. The Choctaw man named Oakatibbe, however, stands above the rest and reports this cheating to Colonel Harris. Simms separates Oakatibbe from the group by physical appearance as well as moral action. “He was fully six feet three inches in height, slender but muscular in the extreme” and “possessed a clear, upright, open generous cast of countenance, as utterly unlike that sullen, suspicious expression of the ordinary Indian face, as you can possibly imagine.” Oakatibbe’s “good nature and good sense,” according to the narrator, is “unusual with Indians when in the presence of strangers.” And his laughter and humor resemble, incidentally, the “merry, unrestrainable vivacity of a youth of Anglo-Saxon breed.” In a drunken fight at a grogshop that evening, the honest Oakatibbe kills the vengeful Loblolly Jack. Although Colonel Harris urges Oakatibbe to flee, he courageously and stoically faces execution by Loblolly Jack’s relatives in accordance with Choctaw law. “Never did man carry with himself more simple nobleness,” Simms writes in homage to some higher standing of Indian culture before its destructive encounter with Europeans.72 This Indian work of William Gilmore Simms transformed the intricate efforts of real Indian workers to pursue both tradition and innovation into a romantic narrative of white nostalgia and conquest. Given the ideological framework for early nineteenth-century depictions of American Indians in and around Natchez, it is no wonder that their changing presence from the colonial to the early statehood periods has remained obscure for so long. As Mississippi Indians struggled to maintain political autonomy in a rapidly changing international setting, Spanish and American officials tried to steer Indian delegations away from Natchez. The growing river town nonetheless became an important nexus for Choctaw activity, as rebellious groups targeted it for symbolic

67

68

Narratives of Decline and Disappearance

protest, indigent groups begged and robbed for sustenance, and entrepreneurial groups sold goods and services. Visiting Indians were often in jeopardy of personal conflict with Natchez residents and sometimes tested the fragile relationship between the United States and tribal governments. As itinerancy became an integral part of the livelihood and culture of many Choctaws who ventured away from their villages, their marginal and shadowy appearance in town only reinforced the rising notion that Indians inevitably succumbed to the corrosive effects of European contact. The intricacy of Indian adaptation and resistance in places like early nineteenth-century Natchez inadvertently contributed to this common impression. Piecing different means of livelihood together and moving seasonally between village and town constituted a resourcefulness in daily life that was mistakenly construed as disintegration and desperation by many observers. To understand work done by Indians on their own terms, we must unravel them from the Indian work written around them. But by the second half of the nineteenth century, narratives of decline and disappearance all too easily folded into a protracted discourse over poverty.

3 THE DISCOURSE OVER POVERTY

Indian Treaty Rights and Welfare Policy

In December 2005 it was revealed that a syndicated columnist affiliated with the Cato Institute and writing for the Copley News Service had been receiving payment from the notorious lobbyist Jack Abramoff for writing columns supporting his clients’ interests. Abramoff was already known to have taken tens of millions of dollars from American Indian nations to advocate for their casino rights, while expressing racial contempt toward these same clients and even working for their opponents. In one column favoring Abramoff’s lobbying efforts, Doug Bandow featured the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians in June 1997. Clients of Abramoff’s firm at the time, these descendants of Choctaws who never left Mississippi were well known for their economic success even before they added a casino to tribal enterprises. “This century has showcased two widely divergent strategies to alleviate poverty,” Bandow wrote, and the contrast was “evident among Native Americans.” The strategy that defined poverty as a lack of money had government pay benefits to the poor, allegedly causing “dependency, family and community collapse, and more poverty.” The other strategy, which viewed poverty as a failure to generate wealth, supposedly encouraged people to become “self-supporting.” Bandow proved this antithesis by reducing American Indian history to a simple story: “Dispossessed of their land and restricted to reservations by the expanding American nation last century,” he wrote, “Indians have ended up among the poorest residents of the U.S. One-third are in poverty; most rely, either as individuals or communities, on federal hand-outs.” The Mississippi Choctaws, however, were among numerous tribes now choosing “entrepreneurship” and thereby pulling their members out of

70

The Discourse over Poverty

poverty. Bandow backed up his celebration of the Choctaws’ corrected path with figures about income, employment, and sales. Such an ideological use of both the poverty and prosperity of Indian people, mobilized in this particular case to benefit the non-Indian intellectual as well as the non-Indian lobbyist, has a long history in American public discourse and policy pertaining to social welfare.1 Indian work about the complicated relationship between American Indians and the evolution of a welfare state in the United States, such as nineteenth-century representations of Choctaws at Natchez, has played an instrumental role in shaping popular perception about Indian livelihood. The actual experiences of Indian people as objects of governmental social policy mark them as perhaps the first distinct group of Americans to be systematically targeted for entitlements and programs that foreshadow or resemble a modern welfare system. Historical treatment of the American Indian experience along this line of thinking, however, has been mostly speculative and even naïve. Students of social welfare in the United States demonstrate little understanding of the unique relationship between American Indians and the federal government—a relationship based on treaties and laws that distinguish payments and services to Indian people from those granted to other Americans. But as citizens of the United States under the 1924 American Indian Citizenship Act, Indians living in poverty did become a significant group of participants in the nation’s general welfare system. Any serious study of how American Indians have experienced social programs administered by the United States must carefully separate policies applicable only to Indians since the earliest years of the nation’s existence from general policies happening to include Indians among the nation’s poor since the New Deal. Interrogation of how American Indians have appeared in widespread language about economic conditions, of course, will expand our understanding of their particular relationship to welfare policy. But we will also realize that imagery of American Indian livelihood across the centuries actually played an instrumental role in the evolution of American ideology regarding poverty and reform. Discourses about the cause of poverty and debates over welfare implicated Indian people in ways that were remote from their own experiences but integral in shaping popular thought about poor people in general. Misrepresentation of Indian livelihood as backward or Indian work habits as lazy not only influenced Indian policymaking but infiltrated wider discussions about economic

The Discourse over Poverty

life in America by associating undesirable and dangerous behavior with Indian people. Paradoxically, this pervasiveness of images and ideas regarding American Indians within the ideological construction of the United States’ peculiar welfare system contributed to their marginalization in studies of social reform and public policy. By exaggerating the otherness of American Indian experiences, the deployment of Indian stereotypes to mobilize sentiment against the undeserving poor, or underclass, has effectively blinded us from Indian people’s long-standing involvement in central economic processes. Lingering problems in the historical literature on charity and welfare continue to hinder our understanding of the multiple aspects of the American Indian relationship to the welfare system in the United States. In this regard, twentieth-century historians and political scientists helped perpetuate an imaginary process that originated with European colonialism centuries earlier. Recent approaches to sensibility and benevolence, however, offer promising solutions. Laura M. Stevens’s study of missionary writings in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Anglo-America situates the representation of American Indians at the very center of the creation of an imperial self-image. Generating pity for Native Americans in need of Christianity was not only a means of raising financial support for missions but a source of emotional connectedness among British people across the Atlantic Ocean. The image of “poor Indians” was used to set a British way of colonization apart from Spanish or French practices and to weld economic with religious interests. This discourse produced ethical dilemmas and conflicted feelings over the pain of others that had widespread influence. And as Stevens also shows, it contributed deeply to the notion of the “vanishing Indian,” which played such a prominent role in subsequent conquest and domination by the United States. In a cultural study of benevolence in antebellum America, Susan M. Ryan focuses mainly on attitudes toward African Americans but also explores how central the discourse over Indian removal was in shaping white identity and power. The image of desperately dependent Indians in need of protection and salvation—no matter how distorted it was—served the interests of both proremoval and antiremoval advocates.2 Exploring wider and more complex linkages between the construction of attitudes toward Indian people and the formation of social policies affecting all citizens of the United States should produce valuable results. Recent attention to medical discourse over American Indian

71

72

The Discourse over Poverty

health has been especially informative in demonstrating how much can be learned through this kind of analysis.3 Students of the nation-state’s various instruments of control and reform are finally discovering how information about American Indians influenced the political development of the United States.4 To trace the variety of shifting connections to Indian experience and policy over time, in the case of social welfare, will begin to reveal the complicated significance of American Indians in both the ideological formation and material implementation of social programs across the nation. Moreover, new light might also be shed on the entanglement of culture and class that still confounds American thinking about poverty and welfare. The role played by racism in the formation, implementation, and alteration of American welfare policy has become essential for understanding fundamental flaws in the system. The role played by welfare policy in perpetuating racism, however, warrants greater attention. White political backlash leading to the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 made this painfully obvious. Recent policy analysis is finally including more details about the system’s impact upon American Indians. Some western states systematically tried to exclude their Indian populations from ADC support during the early years of the Social Security Act, and the poorest Indian reservations have been especially hard hit by recent reforms.5 Yet much more needs to be learned about American Indians’ unique relationship with what sociologists Kenneth J. Neubeck and Noel A. Cazenave conceptualize as “welfare racism.”6

Whether making trivial remarks in quick passage or committing serious errors in interpretation, references to American Indians in general discussions of poverty and welfare are consistent with their overall treatment in economic studies. Indian assistance to early settlers in the form of provisions and information led Robert H. Bremner to call American Indians the “earliest American philanthropists.” For witty and ironic effect, he portrays Squanto as our first social worker teaching Plymouth colonists how to plant corn and to procure other foods.7 Bremner and other historians of welfare also mention the role of Indian warfare in the origins of social policy. Indian conflicts created refugees, orphans, and disabled soldiers who needed poor relief from local communities in the colonies and eventually the states of North America. This kind of reference reflects an

The Discourse over Poverty

age-old approach to American Indians in history texts whereby their contribution is usually relegated to the impact of military resistance upon national institutions and character. The impoverishing effects that colonial intrusion and dispossession actually had upon native life are seldom mentioned.8 Perhaps a truly valuable episode from early American history for demonstrating formative impressions of Indian welfare was a “Manifesto” issued by Nathaniel Bacon in 1676. In defense of his violent rebellion against Virginia’s colonial authorities, Bacon accused the governor and council of defending local Indians who were “Robbers and Theeves and Invaders of his Majesties’ Right and our interest and Estates.” Behind this complaint about “protected and Darling Indians,” not without significance, was Bacon’s own desire to grab a share of the Indian trade already monopolized by Governor William Berkeley.9 Anxieties and conflicts among whites over the economy would implicate American Indians as ideological targets—sometimes of nostalgia, sometimes of scorn, sometimes of pity, and sometimes of resentment. Explaining why Quakers who worked in the Ohio Valley during the early nineteenth century were blind to both the agricultural and commercial practices of Indians, for example, Daniel Richter emphasizes the unease that they felt toward transitions and tensions occurring within their own society.10 General histories of social welfare in the United States tend to ignore American Indians, except for passing inclusion—along with African Americans, Latinos, and rural whites—in the standard list of groups that are most deeply impoverished and dependent. Some scholars, however, do observe that Indians were the earliest recipients of assistance from the federal government. With Indians treated as “wards” of the nationstate, the Bureau of Indian Affairs is characterized as the oldest welfare agency in the United States. In one of the more cautiously worded statements to this effect, Edward Berkowitz and Kim McQuaid claim that American Indians “were also among the first groups in America to trade in their traditional independence for the benefits of a loosely organized and indifferently administered welfare state. This welfare state, if such it was, came complete with cash payments, the provision of education at federal expense, and even federally subsidized health care.”11 Such a summary hardly reflects any knowledge about the actual workings of Indian sovereignty and Indian policy. The rhetorical association of gifts and annuities with Indian dependency actually has a lineage that dates at least to mid-eighteenth-century

73

74

The Discourse over Poverty

language. Following Great Britain’s conquest of North American regions formerly held by France during the Seven Years’ War, some imperial authorities tried to reduce the amount of presents regularly offered Indian leaders. This change in policy was not only a cost-saving measure, but also a means of reducing the political autonomy of Indian nations and of optimizing profitability of Indian trade for Europeans. In the early 1760s Sir Jeffery Amherst waged a stubborn campaign against the practice of providing gifts to Indian leaders, claiming that it made their people less industrious and productive. “I am hopefull they will be very well able to provide for their Families by Hunting,” he wrote to William Johnson on January 16, 1762, “and that there can be no occasion for Distributing presents at any of the Posts, Since the Dependence thereon can only Serve to render the Indians Slothfull & Indolent, and burthen the Crown with a Needless Expence.”12 Of course, Indian people understood the custom of gift exchange quite differently, demanding expressions of generosity and reciprocity that were essential in maintaining alliances between nations. Partly in response to Amherst’s draconian policy, Indian nations across the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes launched powerful military resistance against English forts and posts.13 Important contemporary studies demonstrate the importance of historical analysis for understanding poverty and welfare policies but continue to ignore or minimize the American Indian experience. In her study of social science and social policy regarding the poor over the twentieth century, Alice O’Connor explains how exclusion of W. E. B. Du Bois’s Philadelphia Negro from “the contemporary mainstream of social science and reform” kept “race submerged as a category separable from class or ethnicity in poverty knowledge.” Consideration of contemporary literature pertaining to Indians in the United States would have strengthened her case. Instead, Native Americans are mentioned only in passing when she discusses recent debates over the “underclass.” She writes, “In 1969, the editors of the journal Trans-action devoted a special issue to the ‘American underclass,’ applying the term broadly to sub-working-class people ‘at the very bottom,’ and focusing heavily on racially segregated black, Latins, and Native Americans.” Valuable new studies of reform movements and social policies are likewise negligent. Shelton Stromquist, in a study of the progressive movement, explores how perception of racial and ethnic boundaries inhibited reform. “African Americans and poor immigrants posed a fundamental challenge to the reformers’ ideal of a democratic society,” so these groups were further

The Discourse over Poverty

marginalized and excluded from definitions of citizenship. One can only wonder how Stromquist’s argument might be augmented or modified if American Indians had been included in this discussion.14 The temptation to treat American Indians either as quaint background to the welfare state or as only a small group among more numerous others targeted by antipoverty programs seriously misrepresents their political status in the United States. Over the past two centuries, five hundred Indian nations have forged a unique relationship with the U.S. government. While the power and territory of these different tribes diminished under various circumstances, a degree of sovereignty was preserved through treaties, legislation, and litigation. The federal agency responsible for relations with Indian nations, eventually called the Bureau of Indian Affairs, was originally located in the Department of War and then transferred to the newly created Department of the Interior in 1849. Treaty annuities, goods and services, and medical care and education provided to American Indians by the Bureau of Indian Affairs constitute obligations agreed upon between federal officials and tribal leaders for the transfer of Indian lands to the national government. The Bureau of Indian Affairs has also administered the payment of rents and royalties owed Indian people by lessees of Indian resources and the settlement of tribal claims won against the United States. The notion that this distribution of money and services constitutes a welfarelike dependency is a distortion of the formal government-to-government relationship that operates in Indian country.15 The misrepresentation has often contributed, as we will see, to the ideological manipulation of Indian history and culture for the sake of non-Indian arguments about poverty and welfare. There is no question that American Indian participation in general assistance and entitlement programs increased significantly over the second half of the twentieth century. This process happened largely outside the Bureau of Indian Affairs, providing impoverished Indian people with services to which they are entitled as individual citizens of the United States who contribute income and sales taxes. This assistance, however, should not be confused with the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ specific obligations and responsibilities to Indian people as members of sovereign nations who have some noncitizenship ties to the federal government. Confusion and obfuscation nonetheless recur for ideological reasons, making welfare among American Indians both a vexing experience for participants and a perplexing topic for historians.

75

76

The Discourse over Poverty

State governments had generally ignored the needs of Indian people within their borders well into the twentieth century, excluding them from their own welfare programs on the assertion that the federal government was solely responsible. When the Great Depression struck, relief and reform under various New Deal programs marked the first extension of welfare to Indian communities. In the 1940s a Division of Welfare was established in the Bureau of Indian Affairs to facilitate the flow of money and services. Some of the Great Society programs launched during the 1960s included “Indian Desks” within their offices to ensure that the particular needs of Indian people were addressed. The American Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975 created a new framework for what had become a paternalistic and wasteful distribution of assistance by multiple agencies. Under this law tribal governments have been assuming greater administrative and selfgoverning responsibility over welfare, education, and other programs through direct contracts with the federal government.16 There is growing evidence, furthermore, that Indian nations able to administer their own Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) programs, under the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, are benefiting from the improvisation and experimentation allowed in meeting the particular needs of clients.17

Given this complicated history of assistance and entitlement, it is surprising how little attention is devoted to American Indian poverty in the field of welfare history as well as in the field of American Indian history. A disproportionate number of the two and a half million American Indians and Alaska Natives counted in the 2000 U.S. census were impoverished. Nearly 26 percent of this population live below the poverty line (with the poverty line set at $17,463 for a family of four), compared with a rate of 12.4 percent for the nation’s total population. Unemployment rates on many reservations still exceed 40 percent. Twelve of the 45 poorest counties in the United States are within the boundaries of Indian reservations. Under these circumstances, public assistance remains essential to many American Indian families.18 The overall invisibility of rural poverty in the United States partly explains scholarly negligence toward American Indians. Indians are a relatively small population group, scattered across a large land area in some of the nation’s most remote places. Although more than 50 per-

The Discourse over Poverty

cent of American Indians now live in major metropolitan areas, a significant number of Indian people inhabit some of the poorest rural counties in the United States.19 Even the discovery of rural poverty during the 1960s seemed to ignore the condition of Indians. In the 1971 edition of The Other America, Michael Harrington apologized for omitting American Indians from his original 1962 publication that proved to be an important call for a war on poverty. Harrington’s omission is especially puzzling because when he was fourteen years old, as more recently revealed in The New American Poverty, he had spent two months on South Dakota’s Rosebud Indian Reservation at a summer camp for middle-class youth held in the Jesuit mission school. “I did not see what I saw,” Harrington confessed.20 A division of labor that developed between the social sciences of anthropology and sociology also contributed to long-lasting neglect of American Indian poverty and welfare. In what we now recognize as an arbitrary separation of subjects and methods, sociology became the main approach to immigration, urbanization, and other dimensions of modernization. Sociological studies of class and poverty seldom included Indians, who were left almost exclusively to the domain of anthropologists concentrating their attention on primitive or traditional cultures. Slippage of American Indians into this interdisciplinary gap is somewhat ironic because pioneers in urban sociology such as Robert Park borrowed their fieldwork method directly from early twentieth-century anthropologists studying Indians. “The same patient methods of observation which anthropologists like Boas and Lowie have expended on the study of the life and manners of the North American Indian,” Park reported in 1915, “might be even more fruitfully employed in the investigation of the customs, beliefs, social practices, and general conceptions of life prevalent in Little Italy on the lower North Side of Chicago, or in recording the more sophisticated folkways of the inhabitants of Greenwich Village.”21 The multidisciplinary field of American Indian studies also lagged in its attention to Indian poverty and welfare. The disciplines of economics and economic history, as Ron Trosper pointed out some time ago, were slow to join this expanding area of scholarship.22 Broad generalizations about American Indian dispossession and deprivation, therefore, sufficed as long as scholars failed to examine Indian livelihood in specific periods and places. This flaw in the historical literature, however, is rapidly being fixed as more and more studies turn to economic conditions at regional, reservation, and community levels of analysis.23 In a masterful

77

78

The Discourse over Poverty

analysis of the appropriations record for the Kiowa Reservation from 1860 to 1910, Jacki Thompson Rand has recently demonstrated how a decline in the government’s issuance of goods contributed to a methodological attack on American Indians’ well-being and independence, constituting an intentional follow-up to its assault on Native territories and exchange relations. And as she so effectively concludes, “if the Kiowas possessed nothing more than the government goods they actually received, Kiowas would no longer be in existence today. Kiowas found ways to respond to their dire circumstances, but their capacity to adapt does not make the appropriation system of the late nineteenth century any less disgraceful.”24 There is even some recent advancement in the close-up analysis of welfare policy among American Indians. Hugh Shewell explains Indian welfare in Canada from the 1870s to the 1960s as a systematic process of subjugation. Making Native Americans “beggars of their own monies,” the government manipulated trust accounts that had been created in treaties in exchange for transfers of land. Officials feared that “relief” among Indians would inhibit their assimilation into mainstream society as well as their participation in the labor market. Annuity payments owed annually, considered by Indian recipients to be part of their livelihood, were confused with occasional relief funds, provided sometimes because of natural emergencies and at other times because of chronic poverty. Shewell also shows that Canadian authorities were anxious about the emblematic impact of Indian dependence, worrying that other Canadians susceptible to economic hardship would expect similar support. In a sharply different approach, Tressa Berman explores how women on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota integrate welfare programs into their household and community activities. She shows how ceremonial relations of production and kinship networks of interaction culturally mediate between outside economic forces and household subsistence needs. Like periodic stints at wage work and sales of handcrafts, supplemental treaty annuities and welfare payments are interwoven into a blend of formal and informal economic strategies.25 Overcoming so much neglect toward poverty among American Indians requires a disentanglement of real hardship from perceived hardship. Representation of Indian people as living on the edge of starvation or descending into a state of desperation has a long and complicated record. Much like the Choctaws around Natchez in later years, Natick Indians in the seventeenth century began selling game, fish, fruits, and

The Discourse over Poverty

baskets in Boston to complement seasonal hunting and gathering activities. But their economic improvisation was perceived as idle and disorderly behavior, provoking a law in 1677 that targeted “ye Indians Coming Dayly to Boston upon the occasions of Market & otherwise.” When Delawares in eighteenth-century Pennsylvania began to blend wage work and market exchange into their traditional routine, they clashed with the expectations of Moravian missionaries. These Christian Indians were actually attempting to meet kinship obligations to non-Christian Indian communities through these new activities, but the missionaries reacted by criticizing them for being wasteful and poor.26 Cultural and class biases in how outsiders viewed Indian livelihood, when mixed with Indian forms of speech and display, often produced distorted images of impoverishment and dependency long before real poverty was ever suffered by particular American Indian communities. To make matters worse, Indian character and behavior were commonly emphasized as the cause of deprivation as stereotypes of laziness and backwardness infiltrated many different forms of American culture— from folklore to advertising.27 Scholars who seriously study the experiences of American Indians with poverty and welfare must inevitably ask, How did specific government policies regarding territorial and commercial expansion or agricultural and mineral development undermine Indian livelihood, expropriate Indian land, and marginalize Indian people? Perhaps the most compelling example of this process is the systematic destruction of buffalo on the Great Plains during the late nineteenth century. Many officers in the western army candidly admitted to seeking the extinction of this animal in order to make Plains Indians dependent upon the United States. “The best way for the government,” General Philip Sheridan wrote to General William Sherman in 1869, “is to now make them poor by the destruction of their stock, and then settle them on the lands allotted to them.”28 The economic consequences of this and other policies were often clearly understood by Indian leaders who demanded that the United States compensate their people adequately for the perpetual value of lands and resources lost. In 1876 a young Shoshone chief, Tsa-wie, instructed an agency employee in western Nevada about how degradation of various resources by whites, including trees bearing pine nuts that “were all cut down and burned in the quartz mills and other places,” would compel his people “to work for the ranchers for two bits (twentyfive cents) per day or starve.” A spokesman for Anishinabeg in Minnesota

79

80

The Discourse over Poverty

warned a federal official in 1889 that his people might be driven to breaking dams for their own survival. “If it had not been for the action of the whites in stopping up the rivers with the reservoirs,” they would not have been forced to dig snake-root for subsistence. “A settlement for those reservoirs should be made,” as Mah-ge-gah-bow explained, “something of a sufficiency to support us; that is the idea we still entertain.”29 In negotiations with U.S. commissioners over the sale of the Black Hills in the 1870s, Red Cloud of the Oglala Sioux demanded that the government provide new forms of security in return for jeopardizing old means of livelihood: My intention was that my children should depend on these hills for the future. I hoped that we should live that way always hereafter. . . . I want to put the money that we get for the Black Hills at interest among the whites, to buy with the interest wagons and cattle. . . . For seven generations to come I want our Great Father to give us Texas steers for our meat. I want the Government to issue for me hereafter, flour and coffee, and sugar and tea, and bacon, the very best kind, and cracked corn and beans, and rice and dried apples, and saleratus and tobacco, and soap and salt, and pepper, for the old people. . . . I am an Indian but you try to make a white man out of me. I want some white men’s houses to be built for the Indians. . . . I want the great Father to furnish me a saw-mill which I may call by own. I want a mower and scythe for my people. Maybe you white people think that I ask too much from the Government, but I think those hills extend clear to the sky—maybe they go above the sky, and that is the reason I ask for so much. I think the Black Hills are worth more than all the wild beasts and all the tame beasts in the possession of the white people. I know it well, and you can see it plain enough that God Almighty placed those hills there for my wealth, but now you want to take them from me and make me poor, so I ask so much so that I won’t be poor.30

Even when it comes to explaining how Indian policy itself caused or exacerbated poverty among American Indians, historians have been remiss. One hundred years after Red Cloud’s succinct assessment of U.S. expansion and its impact on Plains Indian livelihood, D’Arcy McNickle matched his directness in summarizing the ripple effects of the 1887 Indian Allotment Act: For the most part, the alienated lands were the best lands: the river bottoms, rich grass lands, prime forests. But land losses tell only part of the

The Discourse over Poverty story. The allotment process, the individualizing of community-owned assets, created forces which had never before operated in Indian society. Families and individuals competed for choice lands, for water or other advantages. Outsiders intruded as homesteaders on so-called surplus lands, and inevitably meddled in the internal affairs of the tribe. Social structure was disoriented in many ways, as non-Indians married into a group, and kin groups were scattered throughout the reservation area. In each allotted reservation a class of landless, homeless individuals came into existence and, having no resources of their own, doubled up with relatives and intensified the poverty of all.31

During the height of dependency-theory analysis of third world nations and world systems, a few anthropologists and historians turned to American Indian nations for examples of internal colonialism and underdevelopment. Systematic analysis along these lines took hold mostly in Canadian Indian scholarship.32 In addition to the various causes of Indian impoverishment over time, several welfare-related topics warrant deeper investigation. The struggles waged by American Indian communities for health and educational assistance from eastern states, where the federal government neglected the Indian populace through much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, deserve historical study.33 Exploration into philanthropy practiced by religious and other organizations needs to pay more attention to how Indian people themselves viewed and used such intervention.34 The construction of reservation facilities by Indian workers and employment of Indian artists and craftspeople under New Deal programs also constitute an interesting story.35 The administration of Indian health services, first by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and after 1955 by the U.S. Public Health Service, is a promising case study in both the strengths and weaknesses of public health care. The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, particularly its implementation of Community Action programs, had a profound impact upon a new generation of Indian leaders whose experiences with the War on Poverty offer important lessons for welfare history.36 The efforts by tribal governments to provide their own social services under the Self-Determination Act, recently in face of severe budgetary constraints and reductions, also demand greater attention.37 Closer examination of these and other subjects will undoubtedly produce a better understanding of how American Indians, over many generations, have resourcefully attempted to blend old with new means of livelihood in order to support an autonomous cultural life.

81

82

The Discourse over Poverty

Historians have become increasingly aware that U.S. Indian policy can no longer be studied in a vacuum, which was the case for many years. Instead, we are examining the wider cultural and political contexts in which Indian policy was formulated and implemented.38 General ideas and programs that contributed to the formation of an American welfare system have interacted with Indian policy in some significant ways. Investigation into these ideological and institutional connections will not only help restore the American Indian experience to its integral position in American history, but will shed new light on already familiar aspects of U.S. welfare and antipoverty programs. The sharp distinction between social insurance and public assistance and harsh stigma attached to government aid, in what Michael Katz calls the “semi-welfare state” of the United States, evolved from behaviorist explanations of poverty closely related to attitudes toward American Indians. Emphasis on moral and intellectual weakness among the poor was frequently bolstered by images of American Indian life. Movements to reform the poor occasionally intersected with measures to assimilate Indians. Characterization of welfare programs as wasteful and counterproductive was also reinforced by widely publicized evidence of corruption and incompetence in the administration of Indian affairs.39 As demonstrated in Chapter 1, the formative years of U.S. Indian policy coincided with the ascendancy of a theory of social change that relied heavily upon the bifurcation of societies into hunting and farming categories, with agriculture representing the more advanced stage of development. Ignoring how many American Indians actually mixed farming with foraging activities, this artificial categorization relegated them to a backward “hunter state” that would naturally be supplanted by agrarian citizens of the United States. This nascent model of economic development deeply influenced government policy toward Indians and conveniently rationalized U.S. expansion into their territory. “Now reduced within limits too narrow for the hunter’s state,” Thomas Jefferson proclaimed in his 1805 inaugural address, “humanity enjoins us to teach them agriculture and the domestic arts; to encourage them to that industry which alone can enable them to maintain their place in existence, and prepare them in time for that state of society, which to bodily comforts adds the improvement of the mind and morals.” This view of Indian life, moreover, served the interests of commercialization within American society. Political and intellectual leaders in the early republic repeatedly invoked images of wild and wasteful savages, precariously

The Discourse over Poverty

feeding off forest animals, to warn frontier settlers against seeking economic independence through Indian-like activities. Backcountry and subsistence farmers who resisted greater participation in commercial markets were condemned for succumbing to the temptations of savagery. Indian livelihood in this discourse represented a form of poverty that white Americans could and should avoid.40 Throughout the nineteenth century, the U.S. government sought to direct Indian societies from this imaginary state of the hunter into an idealized state of the yeoman. This undertaking involved unparalleled federal promotion of social reform, not to mention the use of extreme coercion at times. But it did not occur in isolation from other organized reform efforts in American society. While the Office of Indian Affairs (official name of the Bureau of Indian Affairs before 1947) employed its own agents and teachers to change Indian beliefs and behavior, missionary associations and independent churches were encouraged and even subsidized to provide moral instruction along with material assistance to Indian communities. This extensive infiltration into Indian people’s lives for the sake of social transformation intersected with reform movements aimed at non-Indian groups within the United States. Many middle-class members of temperance, antislavery, and women’s rights organizations also contributed time and money to institutions devoted to changing American Indians. Urban immigrants, freed slaves, and reservation Indians were subjected to common evangelical and bourgeois messages prescribing personal morality and industry as the necessary means of economic improvement. The proliferation of asylums, workhouses, and prisons also resembled the federal government’s conception of reservations as institutions designed to control and discipline a disorderly population.41 Thanks to the innovative work of sociologist Theda Skocpol, we better understand how party patronage, as the nation’s principal means of providing benefits to many citizens during the late nineteenth century, deeply influenced social policy in the United States.42 Like machine politics in local government and army veterans’ benefits from the federal government, patronage in the administration of Indian affairs also played a visible role in shaping general opinion about public assistance. Federal agents and other Indian Office employees were political appointees, usually party loyalists with no experience in Indian affairs, who were rewarded for their contribution to elections. Officials responsible for managing relations with Indian nations changed frequently and suddenly

83

84

The Discourse over Poverty

as the political party that won the White House replaced staff with its own stalwarts. The spoils system extended beyond government jobs, however, as contracts for delivering goods and services to Indian reservations were awarded to friends and family of officials. Patronage helped drive the government’s acquisition of Indian lands, with bribes and kickbacks often motivating Indian and non-Indian negotiators alike. But it also inflated the costs of administering Indian policy and cheated Indian people of their treaty rights and annuities.43 Organized reformers of American Indian policy attacked the corrupt and costly effects of patronage throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. President Ulysses S. Grant assigned the management of many Indian reservations to Protestant denominations in a largely unsuccessful experiment to clean up the Indian Office, while increasingly strident critics targeted the entire treaty and reservation system for dismantling. Under this kind of pressure, Congress in 1871 stopped making treaties with American Indian nations and in 1887 set in motion the allotment of reservation lands into individual landholdings. In their ideological campaign for more effective assimilation of Indian people, reformers implicated Indian sovereignty with government corruption and attributed Indian poverty to self-serving bureaucracy. With opportunities for patronage so pervasive, a Chicago Tribune editor declared in January 1880 that “the only remedy for abuses in the management of Indian affairs is to abandon the present system of supporting and coddling the Indians.”44 And some high-ranking government officials eagerly contributed to this perception. “We are expending annually over one million dollars in feeding and clothing Indians where no treaty obligations exist for so doing,” Commissioner of Indian Affairs Hiram Price wrote the next year. “This is simply a gratuity,” the Iowa banker and railroad businessman declared, “and it is presumed no one will question the expediency or the right of the government, if it bestows gratuities upon Indians, to make labor of some useful sort a condition precedent to such gift, especially when all of the products of such labor go to the Indian.”45 Political cartoons contributed to this new line of Indian work with images of government officials foolishly supporting bloodthirsty savages. The back-cover cartoon of an 1882 issue of Puck, drawn by Frederick Opper and titled “A Losing Business” (Figure 7), depicted Uncle Sam as a beleaguered headwaiter serving motley Indian diners from a menu that included “no-work pie,” “idleness soup,” “loafing chowder,” and “nothingto-do fritters.” Inside this magazine, the editor sarcastically lamented an

The Discourse over Poverty

[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]

Figure 7. Frederick Opper, “A Losing Business,” Puck, August 30, 1882, p. 406.

apparent lapse in “accounts of scalping, slaughter and outrages in our morning newspapers” and speculated that “perhaps we are feeding the redskins too well.” If the staff of Puck were running the Department of Interior, “no able-bodied male Indian should get a bite until he had given the equivalent for it in work—scalping not to be considered as labor.”46 The front cover of an 1883 issue of Judge featured “Teller’s Indian Grocery” by Grant Hamilton. The caption beneath a shopkeeper image of the Secretary of Interior Henry Teller read, “If we don’t nourish these Indians well through the Winter, they won’t be able to make war on us in the Spring.” This cartoon was accompanied by an essay claiming that after committing “rapine, murder, robbery, and crime of various kinds” every summer, “the cheerful Indians, warned by the approach of winter, return to their reservations, take a long and strong pull at the government rations, and then subside into tranquil, but by no means inexpensive quietude, till the lengthening days send them on the war path again.”47

85

86

The Discourse over Poverty

Rhetoric about economic dependency became more and more instrumental in Indian workers’ attack against Indian sovereignty. Indian Office special agent Alice Fletcher argued that too much land retarded the Indian “by isolating him from the industries that teem throughout the length and breadth of our land.” This isolation, she further explained, “tends to increase his dependence upon the government, to keep him in ignorance of his short-comings, to leave him without ambition or any stimulus to action, and to make him the victim of conceit and pauperism.”48 In a November 15, 1900, editorial, the New York Times applauded the commissioner of Indian Affairs for emphasizing in his annual report that treaty annuities, as much as food rations, encouraged idleness and poverty among Indians. “Commissioner [William] Jones says that the larger the annuity the greater the resulting demoralization. Instead of helping the Indian up, as intended and expected, the annuities are degrading the Indians who receive them and corrupting the whites who help them to spend them.” Issuing food, blankets, and clothes to Indians able to work— particularly to anyone educated in government schools—should be stopped immediately, but the Times editors did recognize that eliminating annuity payments must be done gradually.49 “If there are treaties with Indian tribes which are standing absolutely in the way of the interests of the Indian,” James M. Taylor, president of Vassar College, asked his audience at the 1901 Lake Mohonk Conference, “then is it fair, because of the mere abstract love of truth, that we continue to pauperize the Indian, to make less and less of a man of him, to threaten him, indeed, with effacement, simply that we may keep a treaty that our fathers made with him?”50 Self-governance on reservations, like treaty obligations, was repeatedly targeted as the source of Indian poverty. In 1921 Representative Melville C. Kelly of Pennsylvania called for the abandonment of “the whole tribal system and reservation policy.” Conceding that reservations once served a good purpose “in compelling the Indians of other days to forsake their wild, nomadic ways,” Kelly said that “it is today a breeding place of idleness, beggars, gamblers and paupers.”51 A multifaceted characterization of American Indians, ranging from depraved indigents to pampered wards, carried resonance far beyond Indian policy reform in the United States. In rhetoric warning all groups against depravity and dependence, politicians, journalists, ministers, and even some early ethnographers casually compared American Indians with the nation’s working-class and urban poor. In an 1818 sermon to his congregation in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, Heman Humphrey (future president

The Discourse over Poverty

of Amherst College from 1823 to 1845) argued that necessity alone is responsible for industriousness and frugality. Believing that indolence and vice are natural characteristics of human behavior ever since “Man, by the fall, lost the image of his Maker,” Humphrey deemed charity a waste of money and effort and sought to replace it with discipline and control. “Take any number of human beings you please, in a state of nature,” he asserted, “and not one of them will betake himself to any regular and laborious employment, so long as he can subsist without it. Who ever heard of an industrious savage?”52 American Indians continued to be a convenient analogy for reformers confronting idleness and crime in rapidly growing cities. In The Dangerous Classes of New York, published in 1872, Charles Loring Brace introduced the subject of homeless boys this way: There seemed to be a very considerable class of lads in New York who bore to the busy, wealthy world about them something of the same relation which Indians bear to the civilized Western settlers. They had no settled home, and lived on the outskirts of society, their hand against every man’s pocket, and every man looking on them as natural enemies; their wits sharpened like those of a savage, and their principles often no better. Christianity reared its temples over them, and Civilization was carrying on its great work, while they—a happy race of little heathens and barbarians—plundered, or frolicked, or led their roving life, far beneath.53

As the struggle between labor and capital escalated along with war between the U.S. Army and Indians during the 1870s, the American Indian served as a symbol of the dangerous and expensive consequences of dependency.54 Opposition to labor militancy deployed Indian warfare as a metaphor for the disorder threatened by striking workers. The pauperizing influence of government programs upon Indian people was often invoked in late nineteenth-century criticism of efforts to provide assistance to urban poor. “If we are going to appropriate every year millions of money for the support of an idle, vagrant, malevolent, malicious race,” Colorado Congressman James Belford warned in 1885, “then let us go to work and take on our hands all the paupers of the United States.”55 The reservation Indian and the city pauper alike could only improve their circumstances through work and discipline. Rural workers were by no means spared this ideological association. In the early twentieth century, mine owners on Minnesota’s Mesabi Iron Range waged a propaganda campaign against striking Finnish miners that compared

87

88

The Discourse over Poverty

both their social life and radical action with earlier threats to order and progress supposedly posed by Dakota and Anishinabe Indians. These immigrant workers, however, managed to twist this rhetorical attack against their foreignness into their own assertion of Americanness. Taking pride in their supposedly Indian-like forest skills and in their real-life interactions with American Indian neighbors, Finnish Americans in northern Minnesota turned the hostile label Jackpine Savages into an honorable badge of independence and resistance.56 Rhetorical use of the Indian as analogy could just as easily echo back into a direct attack on the Indian as subject. Late nineteenth-century liberal reformers who abandoned reconstruction plans to create opportunity for African Americans in the South, because of their ambivalence toward strong federal agency, also rejected the government’s active role in protecting and advancing Indian interests in the West.57 “We should deal with Indians as we do with the whites and the blacks,” the New York Herald prescribed in February 1876, by teaching them “that the way to find bread is to work for it.”58 During the Progressive Era, governmental activism was revitalized in response to rapidly changing social and economic conditions. More active public agencies attempted to mitigate the effects of industrialization and to assimilate masses of urban immigrants, while an emerging profession of social workers began to formulate new antipoverty and assistance programs.59 These developments in the wider world of social work had a counterpart in Indian policy. The Office of Indian Affairs intensified its control over Indian people during the first two decades of the twentieth century, seeking to accelerate the destruction of tribal governments and to expand commercial access to natural resources, all in the name of assimilation. Indian children were separated from their families and concentrated in government boarding schools. Reservation lands, minerals, and water were transferred, through leases or sales arranged by the government, to non-Indian users.60 Indians and immigrants alike were subjected to a new belief among social reformers that poverty could be overcome through efficient management of domestic and public life. As Alan Trachtenberg has recently shown, images and performances of Indian life were instrumental in the response of American intellectuals to new immigrants, as well as in the effort by these new immigrants themselves to acculturate.61 Reformist impulses weakened somewhat after World War I, but more important for American Indians, they converged to form a new movement

The Discourse over Poverty

in Indian policy. Many middle-class men and women who had worked with immigrants and workers before the war began to rediscover American Indians. Their appreciation for ethnic cultures gained in urban settlement houses or community centers found a new cause in the Indian struggle for survival. As the federal government’s abuses against Indian culture and livelihood seemed to worsen in the early 1920s, the welfare of Indian people became a public issue. A small national group of vocal Indian leaders, who had attained success in a number of professions, were now joined by newcomers in their criticism of the Office of Indian Affairs. The General Federation of Women’s Clubs mounted an effective campaign against the bureau, hiring in 1922 a social worker–sociologist named John Collier and other observers to call for a drastic change in Indian relations with the United States. Collier was granted the opportunity to direct such reform in 1933 when Franklin Delano Roosevelt appointed him commissioner of Indian Affairs.62 Like other Americans afflicted by the Great Depression, American Indian communities received immediate assistance from the New Deal’s general relief programs. But the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, with its commitment to preserving tribal land and facilitating self-government, created a new framework for long-term recovery among Indian nations. The “Indian New Deal” had many shortcomings and was undermined by post–World War II reaction. The 1950s were even marked by a return to assimilationism, as the federal government terminated several Indian tribes and relocated thousands of Indian families to large cities. A resurgence of Indian activism and self-determination since the 1960s, however, has strengthened the government-to-government relationship between Indian nations and the United States. Tribal governments are now working hard to build reservation economies that will provide meaningful employment and lasting security to Indian people.63

While American Indians have been strongly asserting their political autonomy and actively pursuing their treaty rights in recent years, misrepresentation of Indian poverty and welfare nonetheless has continued. Indian work hostile to tribal sovereignty, in the ongoing tradition, distorts public opinion about even the latest efforts of Indian people to find and create means of employment. Court victories by Indian tribes in the Great Lakes region and the Pacific Northwest have evoked vituperative, and oftentimes violent, reaction from angry sportsmen and other citizen

89

90

The Discourse over Poverty

groups who felt threatened by Indian fishing rights. Resentment against special rights protected under federal law runs deep in the American middle class, especially when it is apprehensive over its own wellbeing in a weakening national economy. In some areas of the United States, Indian people have become scapegoats for frustrated whites who protest against Indian sovereignty through organizations such as Protect America’s Rights and Resources (PARR) and Citizens Equal Rights Alliance (CERA). The rhetoric of this anti-Indian campaign is loaded with familiar assertions that American Indians are a privileged group, undeservedly and unfairly living on welfare paid for by non-Indian taxpayers. Rights reserved by Indian nations in their treaties with the United States, while becoming increasingly instrumental in their economic development strategies, are being implicated in wider antiwelfare and antigovernment movements. Across the United States, successful Indian casinos and bingo halls are condemned for having unfair advantage over nonIndian gambling enterprises.64 High-ranking federal officials helped sanction these feelings during the 1980s through their own ideological campaign against big government and welfare dependency. Although an official statement on Indian policy issued by President Ronald Reagan’s administration in January 1983 acknowledged the unique government-to-government relationship between tribes and the United States, it could not resist taking aim at its favorite target: “Instead of fostering and encouraging self-government, Federal policies have by and large inhibited the political and economic development of the tribes. Excessive regulation and self-perpetuating bureaucracy have stifled local decisionmaking, thwarted Indian control of Indian resources, and promoted dependency rather than selfsufficiency.”65 Unofficial remarks made by Secretary of the Interior James Watt that same month were more blunt. “If you want an example of the failures of socialism,” he told a television audience, “don’t go to Russia—come to America and go to the Indian reservations.” Watt blamed Indian unemployment, alcoholism, drug abuse, and other social problems on the tribal leader who kept his people on the reservation for otherwise “they’d go out and get a job and that guy wouldn’t have his handout as a paid government official.” Reagan himself wondered out loud before a group of Moscow students in the Soviet Union in 1988, “maybe we should not have humored them in that, wanting to stay in that kind of primitive lifestyle. Maybe we should have said, ‘No, come join us. Be citizens along with the rest of us.’ ”66

The Discourse over Poverty

Scrambling Indian political status with the welfare system, meanwhile, continued to occur in the intellectual debate over welfare. In his seminal contribution to conservative policy making, Losing Ground, Charles Murray’s only reference to American Indians is a curious passage within his discussion of something he calls “latent poverty.” “Imagine that the United States had decided to eliminate poverty among, say Native Americans, and to that end it has put them all on reservations where there are no jobs to be had and has given everyone an income level just above the poverty level. Can we claim to have eliminated poverty?”67 As demonstrated already for past literature and politics, the poverty of American Indians is a convenient metaphor for the failure of social policy. This misrepresentation still works largely because too few Americans understand both the real status of Indian people and the real causes of economic hardship. John Tierney, a columnist on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times, used the anniversary of the Battle of the Little Bighorn in June 2005 to resuscitate the rhetoric. Relying on the polemical writings of economists Terry Anderson and Fred McChesney, Tierney attributed poverty and unemployment on the Crow reservation in Montana to “the rise of two federal bureaucracies” in the mid-nineteenth century. The standing army established during the Mexican War supposedly made it easier for American citizens to lobby for the seizure of Indian land. “Before them,” Tierney erroneously asserted, “settlers who wanted Indian land usually had to fight for it themselves or rely on local militias, so they were inclined to look for peaceful solutions.” Indian wars became a rationale, according to this scenario, for the perpetuation of a military organization and the promotion of its leaders. The other bureaucracy was, of course, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, whose agents supposedly denied Indian people private ownership of land in order to secure their own jobs. In a familiar refrain about the effects of trust lands being leased to non-Indians, Tierney wrote that “the system leaves Indians with little incentive to work their land or extract the maximum value by improving it.”68 As in the case of urban ghettos for African Americans, the high rate of poverty on many Indian reservations makes it easy for observers to isolate economic conditions and social policies among American Indians from the rest of society.69 Although seen less in both scholarship and media coverage than inner-city life, poverty on Indian reservations is highly visible to anyone who takes notice. Physical location heightens the appearance of demoralization and despair, inviting explanations of poverty

91

92

The Discourse over Poverty

that emphasize the role of cultural characteristics. The culture of poverty concept, which influenced welfare policy during the 1960s and has served conservative critics of welfare more recently, tends to attribute isolation and failure to self-defeating behavior.70 Public assistance is increasingly blamed for reinforcing or even encouraging bad values within groups perceived as a subculture, or underclass. The desire on the part of American Indians to make a living and raise their families on reservations, according to this perception, is a culturally driven flaw mistakenly patronized by federal Indian policy. Although the role that racism plays in shaping American ideas about poverty and welfare has been closely studied, little of this analysis includes specific language about American Indian livelihood.71 Fuller examination of American Indian impoverishment will eventually disclose an intricate relationship between the Indian experience and the welfare system in the United States. Understanding how Indian work has marginalized problems faced by working-class Indians is only one way to begin. Simplistic references to dispossession and desperation in Indian country ignore the dynamic and diverse engagement of Indian people with a changing economy. Many Indian men and women have overcome economic adversity on and off reservations. Meanwhile, many nonIndians live in rural poverty closely related to circumstances that afflict Indian communities. Many impoverished American Indians display resourcefulness and hard work that are also ignored in studies that focus only on helplessness and dependency. Understanding these aspects of Indian life requires us to expose the stubborn practice of rhetorically entangling the unique political status of American Indians with general welfare policy. But as we now follow a specific economic road taken by Indian women near the end of the nineteenth century, evolving perceptions of authenticity and passivity will stand in the way.

4 PERCEPTIONS OF AUTHENTICITY AND PASSIVITY

Indian Basket Making in Post–Civil War Louisiana

Choctaw families living near Pearlington, Mississippi, were visited in November 1890 by a special artist working for the New Orleans Daily Picayune. In the December 21 issue of the newspaper, he wrote an article about this community accompanied by some illustrations. One passage in this report is devoted to a particular kind of work performed by the women: It makes one ashamed to see these dusky daughters of the forest toiling so hard, working till 10 o’clock at night by the light of blazing pine knots, and at it again at sunrise, deftly weaving their pliable palmetto into really beautiful and useful forms, to be sold for a mere trifle. It is something of an art and a good deal of work to make these same Indian baskets. The palmettos have to be sought on the Banks of the La Croix, some miles away, and carried home. Then the stems must be stripped with a knife, each stem yielding but two or three available strips; these are then to be dyed of two or three colors, and finally woven entirely by hand—and foot—for the foot plays an important part in the process, the strips being held in order on the floor by the bare toes, while the fingers act as shuttle and loom. It was so that their mothers wove baskets, and so do they. The suggestion that it would be easier to work on a table than on the floor, and that a clamp would serve better to hold the strands in place than bare toes were received with silent contempt, as was also the intimation that fish creels, or hunting pouches, or hats would be as easy to make and more saleable than their pretty baskets.1

94

Perceptions of Authenticity and Passivity

This glimpse into how Choctaw Indians on the eastern edge of New Orleans worked at producing baskets for sale is a simple piece of Indian work produced by a passing stranger. The anonymous author probably never wrote or drew another article about American Indians in his career. Nevertheless, the brief exchange that went into the making of this account is worth consideration. Weaving baskets was an important activity—economically and culturally—for the Choctaw women living in the lower Pearl River estuary. The language chosen by outsiders to represent this basket making, however, wove a veil of romanticism and primitivism around the women’s own choices. But still visible for those willing to look closely at scenes like this one are signs of cautious innovation and thoughtful tradition in their livelihood. The agency of these American Indian women is the proverbial light under the bushel. Through all kinds of images, objects, and performances, American Indians collaborated with non-Indians—although unequally—in the representation of their culture. Standards of authenticity set by outsiders, defining the Indianness of everything from ceremony to arts and crafts to economic life, were not exclusively controlled by non-Indians but were partly shaped by Indian decisions and objectives. A cultural difference invoked by the U.S. government and its citizens to justify erosion of Indian landholdings and sovereignty could also, paradoxically, be mobilized by Indian people in their own determination to survive. Growing interest in American Indian basketry among scholars is contributing to this new line of inquiry.2 The making and selling of baskets by Indian women in south Louisiana is a promising site for another case study in the interactive dimensions of Indian Work. American Indian nations inhabiting the banks of the Mississippi River and connected waterways had suffered severe depopulation during the first century of European colonization, but toward the end of the 1700s they were joined by various groups moving west of the Mississippi. Because state and federal governments ignored these communities for a long time, historians have been slow in explaining their survival. Small Indian nations, nearly invisible in the midst of a much larger non-Indian population, were also overlooked in studies of race relations. How scholars generally interpret the relationship between culture and commerce in American Indian society represents an additional shortcoming. Without considering what Indian people themselves think about economic interaction with non-Indians and how they interpret the meaning of cultural

Perceptions of Authenticity and Passivity

change, it has been too easy to assume that displacement and marginalization naturally led to assimilation and disintegration.3 Baskets are “entangled objects,” to borrow a phrase from anthropologist Nicholas Thomas. The production of these material objects by Indians for exchange with non-Indians held very different meanings for both groups. Narratives produced by white observers and consumers are relatively easy to find, compile, and interpret. But the making, using, and selling of baskets from their weavers’ point of view constituted a separate narrative—one far more difficult to ascertain.4 Baskets might be best understood as native texts. Like documents and stories, they impart particular significance to activity. As Greg Dening has observed, much of history is experience “transformed into texts—texts written down, texts spoken, texts caught in the forms of material things.”5 Cultural difference can be expressed, interpreted, and modified through material objects, while the act of exchanging them also facilitates interaction between cultures. Since the colonial era, Indian women had provided pottery and basketry as well as foodstuffs to households across Louisiana, either as slaves working inside kitchens or as vendors from nearby villages.6 Recent archaeological studies indicate that during the eighteenth century American Indians supplied New Orleans residents with plentiful ceramics of various types. “Although some of these vessels were undoubtedly the ‘packaging’ in which Native American foodstuffs (such as bear oil, corn meal, and herbs) were marketed,” according to archaeologist Shannon Dawdy, “the wide range of vessel shapes and decorative elements present suggest that many served as everyday tableware in New Orleans’ households.”7 Baskets seldom survive in the archaeological record in such a humid climate, but evidence of basketry predates pottery in south Louisiana in the form of small fragments and impressions on clay. Indian basketry certainly accompanied ceramics and foodstuffs entering Louisiana households throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.8 Toward the end of the nineteenth century, tourists, collectors, and anthropologists offered a new mix of markets for Indian basketry. Selling baskets to urban consumers involved production and exchange that blended income from the commercial market with traditional practice inside the community. Producing for exhibition and ethnography furthermore helped connect Indian women to white patrons who just might be useful in other endeavors. Old ways supposedly uninfluenced by whites, as signified in Louisiana Indian baskets, are better understood as new strategies for engaging them. Disparate interests in otherness converged,

95

96

Perceptions of Authenticity and Passivity

therefore, every time an Indian woman handed one of her baskets to a purchaser or collector. “Participating in the manufacture of authenticity,” as Paige Raibmon writes about Northwest Coast Indians, “could bring economic, cultural, and political gains.”9

Louisiana Indian women’s skills in basket making were acknowledged in documentation at the very beginning of the nineteenth century. Describing the “many little tribes” inside Orleans Territory, Governor William Claiborne wrote to Thomas Jefferson in October 1808 that “the women have of late turned their attention to manufactures. They make a variety of Baskets and mats which are exchanged with the white Citizens for provisions and clothing.” In fact, a basket and mat attributed to Attakapa weavers were sent to the president along with Claiborne’s letter.10 Indian women’s attention to a market for baskets was integral in their communities’ adaptation to the rapidly changing circumstances that accompanied Louisiana’s incorporation into the United States. Men also manufactured traditional implements such as cane blowguns and wooden bows for sale to non-Indians along with the game, fish, and fowl that they had provided local markets for years. The steadiest means of tapping into the expanding plantation economy was through their local knowledge of resources and travel routes.11 Meanwhile, outside visitors and observers represented Louisiana Indian basketry in ways that warrant some interrogation. Recounting a trip taken down Bayou Plaquemine when she was sixteen years old, Françoise Pain described a sizable Indian village (probably Chitimacha) that had been situated along its banks in the mid-1790s: The unfortunates were not timid. Presently several came close to the flatboat and showed us two deer and some wild turkeys and ducks, the spoils of their hunting. Then came the women laden with sacks made of bark and full of blackberries, vegetables, and a great quantity of baskets; showing all, motioning us to come down, and repeating in French and Spanish, “money, money!” It was decided that Mario and Gordon should stay on board and that all the rest of the joyous band should go ashore. My father, M. Carpentier, and ’Tino loaded their pistols and put them into their belts. . . . Hardly had we gone a few steps when we were surrounded by a human wall, and I realized with a shiver how easy it would be for these savages to get rid of us and take all our possessions. But the poor devils certainly

Perceptions of Authenticity and Passivity never thought of it; they showed us their game, of which papa bought the greater part, as well as several sacks of berries, and also vegetables. But the baskets! They were veritable wonders. As several of those that I bought that day are still in your possession, I will not lose much time telling of them. How those half-savage people could make things so well contrived and ornamented with such brilliant colors is still a problem to us. Papa bought for mama thirty-two little baskets fitting into one another, the largest about as tall as a child of five years, and the smallest just large enough to receive a thimble. When he asked the price I expected to hear the seller say at least thirty dollars, but his humble reply was five dollars. For a deer he asked one dollar; for a wild turkey, twenty-five cents. Despite the advice of papa, who asked us how we were going to carry our purchases home, Suzanne and I bought, between us, more than forty baskets, great and small.12

This kind of wonder can be found in many scattered memoirs and diaries of white Louisianians, describing seasonal Indian visits to towns and plantations throughout the nineteenth century. Recalling early childhood in the 1850s on her grandparents’ Evergreen plantation in Rapides Parish, Clara Compton Raymond wrote that “once or twice a year the Indians came selling their baskets. . . . They would file in the yard and squat down in a circle.” Her grandmother “could speak a few words of their language and would bargain for the beautiful baskets that are now rarely seen.” Each basket was equal in value to the amount of flour, sugar, or coffee that could fill it. “Grandmuzzie” always bought plenty of baskets from the women and sometimes a blowgun from the men, while serving them food and asking about their health in the Choctaw language. “We children,” Clara remembered, “stood entranced watching them.”13 Meloncy C. Soniat similarly remembered how Choctaws from the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain visited his family’s plantation just upriver from New Orleans. “Many a time some of the Indian women would come to our home to sell their beautiful baskets, sassafras and gumbo filé,” he wrote in the 1920s. “My mother would always give them flour, sugar, coffee and bacon; and the Indians in turn would give me either a blow gun made of cane reed or some other small object such as a bow and arrows. The Indian woman would pack all given things in a large basket, which she carried on her back and held up by a strap around her forehead; if she had a small child the papoose would also be carried in the basket.”14 After the Civil War, an impulse to highlight both the quaintness and pathos of Louisiana Indians’ movement on white society’s margins entered

97

98

Perceptions of Authenticity and Passivity

more public narratives—visual as well as literary. “The presence of Choctaw squaws in the French Market became so commonplace,” according to the text beside Léon Frémaux’s crayon sketches of New Orleans characters, “that they attracted little attention from residents of the city, but they did intrigue the curiosity of visitors, especially when children small enough to be carried in a basket slung by a strap over the mother’s forehead . . . accompanied their parents” (Figure 8). With his illustration of the French Market in an 1866 issue of Harper’s Weekly

[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]

Figure 8. Léon J. Fremaux, “Choctaw Indian Squaws,” New Orleans Characters (New Orleans: Peychaud & Garcia, 1876).

Perceptions of Authenticity and Passivity

(Figure 9), Alfred Waud wrote: “Just in the hottest spot of the whole market the most picturesque subject is found, namely, the Indian dealers in herbs and baskets. Grouped around, in stolid indifference to the heat, with heavy folded wraps resting on their heads for protection against the sun, they patiently await customers for their okra, and other herbs and roots. Years ago a large number of these aborigines ornamented the city, but as they grow tame, they disappear from the city as fast as from their ancestral hunting grounds.”15 In 1877 Lafcadio Hearn could not report with certainty to musicologist Henry Krehbiel that the Choctaws still played musical instruments, but he did not hesitate to assert that “they are no longer a musical people.” Referring to those seen in New Orleans, this journalist, essayist, and novelist wrote that “the sadness that seems peculiar to dying races could not be more evident than in them.”16 For visitors to the Cotton Centennial Exposition, a guidebook described Indian women at the French Market as “the sole survivors of the race which inherited the land from their fathers. And it seems strange that these representatives of the aborigines should belong to that nation, the Choctaw, which was always hostile to the French.” In a school book on Louisiana history, Grace King and John Ficklen informed students that the Indian women seen in the French Market “are descended from the once dreaded tribe of Choctaws; while those on the Teche, who make the wonderful baskets, are all that are left of the Attakapas.”17 Martha Field, a journalist who wrote for a couple of New Orleans newspapers during the 1880s and 1890s, described twenty feet of space between the butcher stalls and dry goods bazaar as “one of the most picturesque places” in the entire French Market: It is here the Indian comes, that stolid, surly, usurped Queen of the St. Tammany Choctaws, accompanied by her women. And it is here they defer—but only for money’s sake—to the appetites and esthetic tastes of the white woman and the white man, and sell them their garnerings of forest lore. They sit on their fat haunches, their wiry black locks hanging over their flabby jowls. All about them are the wares they have for sale. Pounded leaves of sassafras and laurel, forming that dark green powder, “Gumbo File.” Bricks of palmetto roots that the conservative minority of housewives still prefer for scrubbing brushes. Fragrant fagots of sassafras, so good for a tisane in springtime; with bunches of dried bay leaves for flavoring soups and sauces and so delicious to place among one’s linen and let it grow lavender-sweet as the days go by.

99

Figure 9. Alfred Waud, “Sunday in New Orleans—The French Market,” Harper’s Weekly, August 18, 1866, p. 517.

[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]

Perceptions of Authenticity and Passivity Last and best of all, about them lie in green and bronze and amber piles, the sweet swamp canes and ribbon grasses woven into wonderful shapes and delicately dyed with the vegetable dyes, whose formula none but these Indians know. These baskets are of curious shapes. Here is one made in the sharp, three-cornered design, cut like a triangle. There is another like an elbow of a stovepipe; a third fashioned into a wall pocket for some lady’s dressing case. Towering over all these are the huge Ali Baba baskets, square at the bottom, round at the top, and fitted with square covers that pull down like a Dutch smoker’s cap. Each basket is amply large to hold a portly member of the Forty Thieves.18

Measuring the cultural impact of basket making for sale to whites is not simple, but earlier experts in Louisiana Indian culture and history were too quick to emphasize its deleterious effects. Selling baskets door to door, on street corners, and in the New Orleans French Market, according to one book, “was a humiliating activity and was little better than begging in the minds of many Indians.” Influences of the marketplace on artistry are also cast in negative light, with Indians accommodating to non-Indian interest in place mats, trash cans, sewing baskets, and cigarette cases. Bright commercial dyes, meanwhile, replaced more subdued reds, yellows, and blacks found on earlier baskets. Remorse over these trends, however, should not prevent us from recognizing the determination shown by Louisiana Indian artisans to maintain some continuity and tradition while catering, for the sake of income, to white collectors and patrons.19 An emphasis on cultural resilience does not deny that Indian people themselves, at certain times and places, feared what peddling might mean for their political as well as socioeconomic condition. In a Mohawk council with British officials held at Canajoharie in March 1763, for example, thirty-three “principal Women” voiced objection to further land cessions. Aware of the marginalized and impoverished condition among New England Indians at the time, these Iroquois women declared that “they would keep their Land, and did not chuse to part with the same to be reduced to make Brooms.” A century later, however, basket making by Mohawk women became one of the most important economic activities on the St. Regis Reservation. Summer resorts at Niagara and Saratoga, as well as state and county fairs in upstate New York, provided a steady market for Iroquois baskets. By the 1890s the sale of ash, hickory splint,

101

102

Perceptions of Authenticity and Passivity

and corn-husk baskets was amounting annually to more than $55,000, or an average of $250 of income for each family at St. Regis.20 New scholarship is looking comparatively at how marketing activity of women represented cultural practices and values, expressed ethnic and gender identity, and mediated between social spaces. Extensive study of women vendors in Latin American cities demonstrate how their lives are situated, in the words of anthropologist Linda Seligman, “within complicated webs of social ties, institutional structures, and economic forces.” Interweaving household with marketplace, cultural identity with economic activity, these women engage customers, tourists, and ethnographers in ways that creatively secure livelihood and culture. Students of market women elsewhere have vigorously explored how a group’s cultural values and practices influence the exchange activity of women, inviting us to consider similar situations in North America. Particular styles of displaying and selling wares indicate a purposeful expression of identity and autonomy by market women; however, stress sometimes occurs inside households and communities because gender or generational lines are transgressed in the process of expression. Although marketing does affect cultural values and social organization, some compatibility or overlap between traditional and innovative activities can be found. Marketing activity, as these studies also show, might even provide a chance for pursuing strategies of political protection against forces that endanger the community’s survival.21 The sale of basketry and pottery by North American Indians, formerly viewed as a sign of assimilation and degradation, might more accurately be seen as a means of adapting traditional skills to new circumstances. “Craft production by Indian women,” Jean O’Brien has observed about basket making and other artisanal skills in New England, “constituted one of the crucial threads that ran through the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.”22 This resilient economic activity, of course, responded to a marketplace increasingly controlled by commercial interests and bourgeois tastes. But more importantly, production for outside consumers and exchange with diverse parties provided women an opportunity to preserve a modicum of cultural and social continuity while adapting to changing economic conditions. Pueblo women in the Southwest began making pottery for white consumers as a means of contributing to family income. When farming, herding, hunting, and gathering became less productive by the end of the nineteenth century, Pueblo men found some alternative employment in railroad construction and mining. Fewer outside opportu-

Perceptions of Authenticity and Passivity

nities for women necessitated economic resourcefulness closer to home, so they adapted the traditional craft of ceramics to the emerging tourist economy and thereby maintained their central role in community survival.23 Catawbas in South Carolina, the only Indian nation east of the Pueblos to preserve its pottery-making tradition, provide a useful analogy from elsewhere in the American South for basket making among Louisiana Indians. The smoothly burnished and incised earthenware produced by Catawba potters for white consumers was crucial to their economy from the late eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. Peddling pottery had deep roots in Catawba history, and Thomas Blumer even argues that “trade in pottery saved the nation from extinction.” Throughout the nineteenth century, Catawba families sold cooking pots, water jars and pitchers, bowls, and pipes from door to door in some places and at town squares and crossroads between their reservation and Charleston. The automobile allowed them to reach buyers as far away as Jacksonville, Florida, and Moundville, Alabama. At Cherokee and other tourist stops in the Great Smoky Mountains during the 1920s and 1930s, shopkeepers wanted high quantity at low prices. This demand caused the quality of Catawba wares to diminish and discouraged the most talented potters from participating in that market, but interest taken by exposition organizers, ethnologists, and art enthusiasts ensured that craftsmanship would prevail and that value would rise. The identity as well as livelihood of Catawba people depended heavily on a tradition of producing and selling pottery.24 The production and sale of baskets by American Indians in various places clearly followed a similar pattern. Passamaquoddies, Penobscots, Micmacs, and Maliseets had a long tradition of peddling birchbark containers from their hunting and fishing camps in Maine and the Canadian Maritimes. As the fur trade economy declined in the nineteenth century, basket sales supplemented Indian families’ migrant farmwork, domestic service, and lumberjacking. Potato picking during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries created a huge demand for wood splint baskets as well as for Indian migrant labor. So Indian women shifted their production to this type of basketry, probably adopted years earlier from white basket makers. Birchbark and woodsplint baskets, meanwhile, became important objects for sale among spreading coastal, lakeside, and mountain resorts.25 Among Potawatomi Indians in northern Indiana, to cite another example, Notre Dame University became a convenient market for laundry, grocery, and wastebaskets that they made. Well into

103

104

Perceptions of Authenticity and Passivity

the 1930s, they regularly visited the campus wearing traditional dress and exchanging basketry for money or food.26 Twined basketry had long been a staple in the households of Havasupai women in northern Arizona, serving as trays, bowls, burden baskets, and water jars. During the 1870s and 1880s, however, the technique of coiling began to replace twining as Havasupai women catered to the taste of Hopi Indians who became principal buyers of Havasupai trays. This regional Indian trade network was steadily infiltrated by reservation and tourist markets, and by the early twentieth century, Havasupai women were selling more and more of their coiled baskets and trays to visitors at the National Park Service’s Grand Canyon Village. Quick production of smaller baskets diminished quality in general, but women continued to apply tradition and innovation in individual ways. The experiences of these basket makers varied widely. Some seldom left the community situated at the narrow bottom of a deep tributary canyon of the Grand Canyon, while others attended boarding schools and worked in white homes as far away as Los Angeles. Attention from collectors, including government agents and museum ethnologists, ensured that some basket makers would preserve high-level skill and distinctive style in Havasupai basket making into the second half of the century.27 Among Louisiana Indian women, the skills required for making baskets—whether they are treated as souvenirs, trinkets, or artifacts by outsiders—were handed down from generation to generation and practiced in family groups. The survival of community ties and values, therefore, could be facilitated by participation in the sale of baskets. The group’s relationship with the local environment was also reinforced, as basket makers regularly harvested river cane, palmetto leaves, and other traditional sources. Motivation for producing arts and crafts is becoming clearer today, as Indian communities develop their own museums and research centers that feature the history of cultural objects.28

Many Indian women in Louisiana during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries increased the visibility of basketry through their interaction with consumers and collectors. They continued to sell baskets in rural and urban marketplaces as a major part of household income and community livelihood. But as New Orleans became a popular destination for tourists, Indian women found additional buyers and wider interest. Because the main attraction was the city’s Creole culture, the

Perceptions of Authenticity and Passivity

image of Indian women as basket makers never became emblematic of regional authenticity and charm—certainly not to the degree that Pueblo Indian women in the marketplace, wearing traditional dress and carrying pots on their heads, became primary objects of the tourist’s gaze in the Southwest. Nor did Louisiana Indian communities at that time participate in tourism as much as did Florida Seminoles, who not only produced items for a craft market but performed in tourist villages along the Tamiani Trail. But Indian women in the New Orleans area served nonetheless as “cultural bodies,” in the words of Barbara Babcock, representing passively in the imagination of visitors what a real Indian was supposed to look like.29 A German professor of geography visiting New Orleans in the mid-1880s reported that “Some of the miserable remnants of the original copper-colored peoples of Louisiana can be seen in the antiquated market hall known as the ‘French Market.’” “They very much deserve attention from the foreigner,” he further commented, “because of the originality of their tribal life. Wrapped in blankets, selling laurel or sassafras leaves, they show in their faces all the marks of their race’s character—as well as all the apathy.”30 Indian women not only provided French Quarter residents with useful household goods and tourists with collectible souvenirs, but they reinforced through their very presence a romantic memory and selective history comforting to onlookers of all kinds. But far from being passive, the creative responses by Indian women to non-Indian expectations and sensibilities could actually be empowering for potters, beadworkers, and weavers by the twentieth century. When not simply conforming to consumer demand, Indian women’s artwork demonstrated tribal identity and pride. Over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Navajos had been weaving striped, terraced, and diamondpatterned blankets in a distinctive aesthetic style. After their imprisonment at Bosque Redondo in the 1860s, however, production for the non-Indian market lowered their quality. Beginning in the 1920s and with governmental encouragement, a revival of traditional designs and colors became an important means of cultural self-expression and artistic revitalization.31 Whether trading beadwork in prairie towns or turquoise jewelry on southwestern plazas or basketry in eastern marketplaces, Indian women across the United States kept traditional roles and skills alive through innovative application and accommodation. By the end of the nineteenth century, observers of Louisiana Indian basketry focused more and more on the aesthetic quality of the work.

105

106

Perceptions of Authenticity and Passivity

Cora Bremer, a journalist writing about a group of Choctaws along the lower Pearl River, deliberately called basket making by the women an art instead of a craft. “Intended for use in the most humble and utilitarian sense,” their basketry reflected “a cunningness of technique, a striving to express grace of line, geometric exactness and warmth of color, which is the proof, the foundation of art.” From Bremer’s account, it is clear that Choctaw women still used their baskets for drying herbs, storing goods and clothing, sifting cornmeal and coffee, and carrying burdens.32 But non-Indian demand for them obviously became more influential. Léon Granjean observed that increasing travel “across-the-lake” by New Orleanians for recreation and residence brought the market closer to the Choctaws on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain. “Many New Orleans homes,” he wrote in the 1870s “contain examples of Choctaw basket weaving—round baskets, square ones, conical baskets and V-shaped ones—either purchased from the squaws in the French Market years ago, or more recently in their home parish, St. Tammany.”33 Year-round activity went into gathering, stripping, dying, and weaving cane for baskets, and a strong aesthetic value went into the manufacture of each. Cora Bremer identified nature as the source of these women’s inspiration, “rather than upon the labored recitals and quotations of some Prof. So-and-so of this or the other art academy.” But surely their techniques and imaginations were informed through a formalized learning process, as younger basket makers observed and listened to their elders.34 River cane was cut and split usually during winter months, when it was wetter and more flexible. Bundles could be sold for as much as a dollar in the 1880s, with each containing enough cane for three or so baskets. Weavers trimmed and dyed the splints and plaited them into patterns. Choctaw designs included stripes, chevrons, squares, and diamonds. Types of baskets included winnowers and trays, market and storage baskets, and backpacks. Small baskets shaped like diamonds or hearts were usually reserved for special gifts.35 Coushattas around Elton, Louisiana, borrowed cane basket making techniques from a group of Choctaws at Bayou Nezpique. As river cane became scarce, they shifted to coiling pine needles and palmetto into baskets.36 David Bushnell visited the Choctaws at Bayou Lacombe in 1908–09, and typically for ethnologists of his time, he was disappointed over their apparent lack of knowledge about ancient ways and colonial times. Bushnell noted, however, that “the Choctaw are excellent basket makers, although their work at the present time is greatly inferior to that of a

Perceptions of Authenticity and Passivity

generation ago.” Because cane was “no longer found near-by,” they had to travel some twenty miles to the Pearl River to obtain it and were often using the stems of palmetto instead. Curious about how “brilliant aniline dyes” were replacing “the more subdued native colors,” Bushnell did not fail to mention that “large numbers of small baskets provided with handles are made and exchanged in the stores of the near-by towns for various goods; these are purchased by strangers and taken away as examples of native art.”37 When the Houma Indians migrated southward from the banks of the Mississippi River onto the coastal wetlands of Bayous Terrebonne and Lafourche during the early nineteenth century, palmetto had already become more important than cane as a material for basket making. There is even evidence that Houma people adopted some basketry techniques from Central Americans or Mexicans who might have married into their families.38 Commenting on how only a few Houma Indian families earned a cash income reaching $500 per year, Frank Speck in 1943 identified oyster-boat building and pirogue making as the occupation of some. Palmetto, cypress, and cane basketry, plus blowgun and moss mat making and what Speck called “a feeble souvenir industry,” brought in some additional income and even showed some commercial promise. “The Houma show pride in these creations of their culture,” he noted, “but have no outlet for them beyond the immediate neighborhood.”39 According to the WPA guide to Louisiana, Savoie’s Bayou Blue Store, located on U.S. Highway 90 between Raceland and Houma, “handles the basket work of a small group of Houma (or Ouma) Indians that live nearby. These Indians are of purer racial strain than the Houma who lived farther south. Their baskets are made of natural-colored strips of cypress saplings.” A Methodist school established in 1936 for the Houmas, next to Clanton Chapel on Louisiana Highway 11 (along Bayou Grand Caillou), included basketry and other handicrafts in its curriculum.40

The work of Chitimacha basket weavers drew the most vigorous attention from private and public collectors interested in Louisiana Indians at the end of the nineteenth century. The double-weave method was preserved longer by them than by other groups, and Chitimacha women aggressively pursued marketing opportunities beyond Bayou Teche and the town of Charenton. They kept old baskets for patterns and welcomed

107

[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]

Figure 10. Photograph of Clara Darden. Copyright © 2008 Harvard University, Peabody Museum Photo 2004.24.26766B.

Perceptions of Authenticity and Passivity

skilled basket makers from other groups. Zelia Marcotte, a Houma Indian woman living near Charenton, participated in the community’s production.41 Chitimacha basket makers even developed important ties with white women of prominence who facilitated access to buyers inside and outside Louisiana. Patronage of American Indian arts and crafts, especially in the Southwest and Far West, was becoming an increasingly desirable means for many privileged women to work on behalf of Indian women. Collaborating sometimes with anthropologists in a field largely neglected by male art experts, they were able to establish female authority in the preservation and promotion of Indian art.42 This generation of philanthropic Indian workers included some influential Louisiana and Mississippi women. Catherine Marshall Gardiner, whose husband operated a lumber business in Laurel, Mississippi, collected antique and contemporary Indian baskets from around the nation, including many exquisite ones made by Chitimacha and Choctaw women. Caroline Dormon, naturalist and educator in Natchitoches, bought many baskets for resale and helped publicize the artistic quality of Chitimacha basketry. Sarah Avery McIlhenny of the pepper sauce family and her sister, Mrs. Sidney Bradford of Avery Island, were also instrumental in expanding nationwide interest in Chitimacha baskets, which reached galleries and museums in the Northeast because of their efforts.43 At the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, thanks to these sisters’ efforts, Louisiana’s state exhibit included nearly a hundred Chitimacha baskets. The price paid for each basket ranged from ten cents for single-weave fanners to thirty dollars for a double-weave trunk. The latter basket plus twelve others were made by Clara Darden, an elderly woman considered the best artist among the Chitimachas (Figure 10).44 McIlhenny and Bradford sometimes advanced money to Chitimacha women, who would then repay them with baskets.45 The Christian Women’s Exchange in New Orleans stocked Chitimacha and Choctaw basketry in its store on Camp Street. Committed to enhancing income among rural women across the region by selling their handicrafts to downtown shoppers, the New Orleans store even shipped local Indian baskets to distant buyers. Attending a periodic meeting of the Crescent City’s branch of the National Indian Association, held at the Christian Women’s Exchange, a New Orleans lady might also purchase a Chitimacha basket or two while in the building.46 Mrs. Sidney Bradford was especially active in linking Chitimacha basket makers with anthropological scholars and curators. In 1905 her

109

110

Perceptions of Authenticity and Passivity

large collection of “Fine Old Twilled Baskets of the Chetimachas of Louisiana” appeared in a photograph published in Otis Tufton Mason’s Indian Basketry: Studies in a Textile Art without Machinery. Bradford also provided Mason, the nation’s most prominent expert on Indian baskets, with information about “the plants with which these Indians dye their basketry.”47 Five years later, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum in Washington, D.C., acquired a collection of Chitimacha baskets through Bradford’s mediation, along with her explanation of the designs woven on them. By 1914 she donated thirty-four Chitimacha baskets to the Louisiana State Museum in New Orleans, when several other men and women in the area were also bequeathing various kinds of Louisiana Indian baskets.48 Bradford also facilitated John Swanton’s fieldwork among the Chitimachas for his Indian Tribes of the Lower Mississippi Valley and Adjacent Coast of the Gulf of Mexico, published by the Smithsonian in 1911. Basketry, Swanton wrote, was “the chief glory of the Chitimacha Indians from an industrial point of view,” which, “thanks to the interest and personal efforts of Mrs. Sidney Bradford, of Avery island, has received a new impetus within recent years, and much which was on the point of being lost has been brought back to life.”49 By the time ethnomusicologist Frances Densmore visited Charenton in 1933, a few families known for basket making comprised “the nucleus of the band.” The Pauls, Decloux, and Dardens included the Chitimachas’ best weavers, whose work “has been encouraged and made profitable through the interest of white friends in the vicinity.” Densmore also observed that these same families “were nearest the old customs yet they wanted the younger generation to progress in the white man’s way.”50 In the case of anthropology over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a preoccupation with salvaging cultural artifacts was clearly at work.51 Indian women known for making baskets were likely to play an instrumental role in providing information as well as objects to early ethnographers. Interested primarily in language, James Owen Dorsey visited some Biloxis living near Lecompte, Louisiana, for a few months altogether in 1892 and 1893. “The people were skilled in basketmaking,” he reported, “and this art is still practiced by old Betsy, who was my chief informant.”52 Recent Columbia University graduate Mark Raymond Harrington visited several Louisiana Indian communities in 1908 and particularly noted Chitimacha basket making at Charenton. “One old art and one only is still kept up in something like its

Perceptions of Authenticity and Passivity

original purity—the art of making fine baskets of cane—baskets whose fadeless colors are a joy to all lovers of Indian handiwork.” Harrington observed, however, that the Chitimachas had to travel as many as thirty miles to find their cane. Describing the tedious and intricate steps of splitting, scraping, dying, and weaving, he exclaimed, “No wonder the Chitimacha ask and get high prices!” Harrington acquired Chitimacha baskets for George Heye’s museum in New York City and took photographs of the basket makers’ families.53 He is credited with collecting more “artifacts” for Heye than any other anthropologist. With a camera aimed from an ethnographic distance common at the time, he also attempted to record the context in which objects were manufactured.54 Ever since Joseph Henry, as secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, had advocated in 1859 the use of photography because “the Indians [were] passing away so rapidly,” the camera was a valuable tool in ethnographic fieldwork. How to display cultural objects in museums and publications was part of a larger transition in forms of representing different cultures. Women posing for anthropologists in their manufacture or use of baskets, for example, paralleled the construction of life group exhibits in natural history museums. Families from various Indian nations were even brought to international expositions, where millions of visitors could see them perform traditional activities such as making basketry and pottery. Photographs of baskets by themselves with a blank background, commonly appearing as plates in anthropological publications, also resembled display cases in the halls of museums. All of these exhibits intentionally represented the material culture of American Indians as frozen in time. Some exhibitors would eventually begin to convey the aesthetic and artistic quality of certain objects, but not without intense debate among experts about whether a museum of art or a museum of ethnology was the appropriate space for displaying Indian material culture.55

With special effort, the perspective and motivation of Indian basket makers can now be disentangled from those of anthropologists or collectors. The income earned for family and community clearly encouraged production and exchange, but other benefits are suggested in the evidence. Choctaw women and men living near New Orleans, for example, were permitted to ride in the best coaches when traveling on the railroad. Cora Bremer claimed that railroad officials were classifying these Indians as

111

112

Perceptions of Authenticity and Passivity

white because of their refusal to “affiliate with negroes,” particularly in school. But other factors were probably at work. “A little group of these dark people will enter,” in Bremer’s words, “packed with their baskets and sacks of filé, bound for some neighboring town’s market, and maintain a silence as unbroken as that of the benches upon which they sit.” The steamer Camelia, as basket maker Mathilde Johnson reminisced to Thomas Colvin, provided free passage to Choctaws crossing Lake Pontchartrain to reach the New Orleans French Market.56 The marketing activity associated with basketry, therefore, facilitated accommodation of Indian families on steamboats and trains while situating them as picturesque figures in public space. It was common for observers to comment on the reserved and passive demeanor encountered when buying baskets and herbs from Louisiana Indian women. Clara Raymond remembered how Indian women, after having sold baskets on her family’s plantation, “would shoulder their loads, solemnly, never smiling,” and in single file they “plodded on towards the setting sun.”57 Father Adrien Rouquette told Lafcadio Hearn in the 1870s that around the Choctaws’ homes north of Lake Pontchartrain, “he has seen them laugh.” Still insisting upon their sorrowful doom, the Greek-born writer commented doubtfully, “but that might have been half a century ago.”58 “At the French Market,” according to a Louisiana Writers Project publication in the 1930s, “Choctaw Indian squaws sat stoically at the curbs, offering gumbo filé—powdered sassafras, frequently used instead of okra to thicken gumbo—other herbs and roots, baskets and pottery.”59 But as Cora Bremer adamantly cautioned, this appearance “must not fix the idea that the red man is a grim personage.” “In fact,” she observed, “he is a very sociable party, spending sometimes the fruit of a month’s labor in entertaining visiting relations and friends who descend upon him from all points of the compass to enjoy his society for days and weeks.”60 Caroline Dormon likewise noted that a polite greeting is all that a stranger can expect before slowly winning entrance into the Chitimachas’ “inner gates.” Only then will one see their “intelligence, humor, and friendliness.”61 The detachment and silence evinced by Indian peddlers possibly expressed some thoughtful effort to maintain a beneficial boundary in intercultural relations. For the Chitimachas at least, there is evidence that basket making played a crucial role in protecting their community and even securing its political autonomy. Emile Stouff, chief of the Chitimachas from 1948 to 1968, wrote stories and memories in two notebooks that his

Perceptions of Authenticity and Passivity

wife discovered after his death. In a brief history of his people, he pieced together a fragmented account of how the Chitimachas had lost land during the nineteenth century. In the early twentieth century, they were subjected to further abuse by local lawyers who promised to help recover property for the Chitimachas while they obtained much of it for themselves. In 1915 the last remaining lands were being foreclosed when this happened: Now Tante MiMi was Chief Ben Paul’s wife. She was in cahoots with one Sarah McIlhenny at Avery Island in a basket trade. Miss Sarah would buy all the baskets the Chitimacha women would make. The basket makers gathered at Tante MiMi’s and decided to write to Miss Sarah and ask her help. Being a very rich woman, they were sure that she would help. She did not say she would or would not. She sent her lawyer to Franklin to pay off the mortgage, and there was no sale. The land belonged to Avery Island. Miss Sarah then made arrangements with Chief Ben Paul to rent the land to some farmers and pay her back, as she did not want the land. She only wanted her money back. So this was done. The chief let some Negro farmers work on share as they had no money to pay rental. Come harvest time, the Chief had a barn full of corn and sweet potatoes and no market. The stuff just stayed there and rotted. He sold some. Up to 1918, he had sold and paid back $600.00, more or less.62

As this remembrance indicates, Sarah McIlhenny’s strong personal relationship with Chitimacha basket makers led her to help their community in more ways than one. By the1910s several Chitimacha children were enrolled at Carlisle Indian School, thanks to her efforts to find educational opportunities for them. With some help from her brother John A. McIlhenny, a Rough-Rider friend of Teddy Roosevelt now living in Washington, D.C., as Civil Service commissioner, Sarah also pursued federal protection against the Chitimachas’ imminent loss of land.63 She purchased a judgment against the Chitimachas’ remaining 280 acres (held by an attorney claiming fees and interest) for nearly $1,500 and then transferred this much-disputed land to the Office of Indian Affairs. The Chitimacha Band of Indians in Louisiana, numbering sixty enrollees in its first official count, henceforth became a federal reservation.64

While basket making for outside consumers and collectors influenced the economic condition and political status of some Louisiana Indians,

113

114

Perceptions of Authenticity and Passivity

the representation of Louisiana Indian basketry by outsiders intersected with national trends in cultural and artistic appreciation. Ethnographers and collectors became more influential as promoters of the craft, with emphasis shifting from educational artifact to marketable art. During the early twentieth century, anthropology rendered increasing support to the manufacture and distribution of traditional arts and crafts of many Indian peoples across North America. The value of “authentic” handicrafts to the livelihood of Indian communities conveniently overlapped with their value to the language of non-Indian primitivism.65 When Mrs. William Pepper donated a collection of Chitimacha baskets to the University of Pennsylvania Museum shortly before her death in 1919, B. W. Merwin briefly described four of the most spectacular baskets and also summarized mortuary customs that included relatives receiving the ashes of the deceased inside small oblong covered baskets. Moreover, the museum curator declared that basketry was the “greatest cultural achievement of the tribe” and reported that “at present basket making is the chief industry of the Chitimacha.”66 The most far-reaching narrative of authenticity and passivity about Chitimacha basketry was a short piece written for Holland’s Magazine of the South by naturalist and educator Caroline Dormon. Published in 1931, “The Last of the Cane Basket Makers” portrayed a pitifully reduced community whose cultural integrity survived only in a fragile form. Being the “tiny remnant” of a “once great nation,” the Chitimacha Indians’ fate was no mystery to Dormon. “Like most of our primitive peoples,” she wrote confidently, “they could not withstand the rude shock of contact with our civilization.” But whereas other Indian people abandoned ancient weaving techniques, a “strange pride of race has held this remnant of a tribe true to their ideals, to unchanging standards, through all the wearing down of contact with alien people.” As in earlier published accounts by ethnologists and other observers, Dormon described the various steps of basket making, paying close attention to sources of natural dyes and to designs named after the eyes, teeth, tracks, and other aspects of specific animals. She concluded by characterizing the Chitimacha community as “a quiet backwater, surrounded by the surge of modern progress” and where people “live calm, simple lives.” Appreciating the women’s beautiful basketry but attributing it to their isolation, “one can but breathe a prayer that modernism may never touch them.”67 Choctaw women passively peddling their wares in New Orleans also made brief but purposeful appearances in local literature, as writers of

Perceptions of Authenticity and Passivity

the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries worked them into passing scenes and devices. The familiar image of Indian women always present at city markets provided George Washington Cable with an effective simile in his short story “Café des Exilés.” To create an opening portrait of the café on Burgundy Street, Cable described “an antiquated story-and-a-half Creole cottage sitting right down on the banquette, as do the Choctaw squaws who sell bay and sassafras and life everlasting.” In Kate Chopin’s short story, “Nég Créol,” the itinerant laborer named Chicot works around the fish market for wages in kind. Depicting this old African American’s streetwise barter activity, Chopin wrote, “He was glad to get a handkerchief from the Hebrew, and grateful if the Choctaws would trade him a bottle of filé for it.” Novelist Hamilton Basso, who grew up in the French Quarter, opened Cinnamon Seed by situating fourteen-year-old Dekker Blackheath in Jackson Square in the year 1917. Amidst people sitting on the iron benches and boys leapfrogging near Andrew Jackson’s statue, this young main character saw “an Indian woman walking home from market. Her neck was adorned with beads and there was a solemn brown papoose strapped across her back. Dekker followed her and wondered what it felt like to be an Indian, and be vanishing from the earth, and if what the kids in school said about Indian women were true.”68 In The WPA Guide to New Orleans, writers began a description of Choctaw Indians in the Vieux Carré by crediting them with being “very friendly to the white men,” and with introducing ground sassafras leaves, or filé powder, to Creole cuisine, most notably for the dish known as gumbo. Then a weekly routine in their appearance was sketched. “The Indians would come to the city from their settlements in Lacombe, Louisiana, three times a week. On weekdays they would sell their wares at the French Market and on Sunday the tribe would gather in front of the St. Louis Cathedral with an array of baskets, beads, pottery, and filé.”69 Indian women not only provided French Quarter residents with useful household goods and tourists with collectible souvenirs, but they reinforced through their very presence a romantic memory and selective history comforting to onlookers of all kinds. Collectors, anthropologists, tourists, and even creative writers ascribed their own purposes and meanings to the basket work of Louisiana Indian women. But for these working Indians, basketry was a means to far more complicated ends. Cultural expression and community identity were metaphorically woven into objects of economic value, providing

115

116

Perceptions of Authenticity and Passivity

women with a source of income as well as a connection between generations. The extent of their marketing activity is evinced in travel and newspaper accounts, reminiscences, illustrations, photographs, and other documents. But most of this literary and visual Indian work from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries portrayed Indian women seen along roads and bayous, in the marketplaces, and on their own porches as quaint or pitiful or both. White image makers nearly erased from the record an adeptness and an adaptability of Indian basket makers that demand closer attention. We are just beginning to recover the agency and voice that American Indian women delicately wove into all kinds of work.70 Selling baskets to travelers and neighbors became a valuable means for Indian women in post–Civil War Louisiana to express identity and earn income. Whether sitting in an urban marketplace or sending orders in the mail, however, their exchange of goods for money elicited nonIndian perceptions that tended to exaggerate a decline of culture. For many American Indian communities west of the Mississippi, vulnerable sites of cultural and economic exchange occurred even more frequently and densely. With the growth of recreational and intellectual interest in places such as New Mexico, Indian laborers as well as Indian artists found a new mix of consumers during the early twentieth century. The gaze of well-known non-Indian writers and artists produced a significant body of Indian work, including that of English novelist D. H. Lawrence. From Lawrence’s interactions with Pueblo people, in person and on paper, we can see up close American Indians working for wages on ranches and entertaining tourists. These activities allowed Indians in the American Southwest to bridge community customs with commercial opportunities, but to many visitors this kind of employment also reflected their spiritual decay.

5 PRIMITIVISM AND TOURISM

Indian Livelihood in D. H. Lawrence’s New Mexico

Among the many writers and artists who visited northern New Mexico during the early twentieth century, the English novelist D. H. Lawrence is seldom considered a reliable or representative source for views about the region’s Native American inhabitants. Lawrence tended to isolate himself from other literary tourists, whom he criticized for being so eager to report on Indian life and culture. The peculiar language that he deployed in his own writings about Indians has also contributed to a marginalization of his perspective. Shortly before his death in 1930, Lawrence tried to explain how the religion of New Mexico’s “Red Indians” had liberated him from contemporary civilization, what he called “the great era of material and mechanical development.” “The Indian,” he wrote, “however objectionable he may be on occasion, has still some of the strange beauty and pathos of the religion that brought him forth and is now shedding him away into oblivion.” To illustrate, Lawrence recalled working on his ranch outside Taos: “When Trinidad, the Indian boy, and I planted corn at the ranch, my soul paused to see his brown hands softly moving the earth over the maize in pure ritual. He was back in his old religious self, and the ages stood still. Ten minutes later he was making a fool of himself with the horses. Horses were never part of the Indian’s religious life, never would be. He hasn’t a tithe of the feeling for them that he has for a bear, for example. So horses don’t like Indians.”1 With this brief passage about work as a cue, D. H. Lawrence’s selfmarginalizing movement among fellow artist-observers and his diffident

118

Primitivism and Tourism

demeanor toward Indian people—what Aldous Huxley called his “inexplicably strange” character—might be put to use in further exploring interactions that went into Indian work.2 A feverous critic of how American Indians appeared in literature before he reached New Mexico, Lawrence self-consciously avoided practices of fellow writers and sought alternative means of representation after his own arrival. Yet this English writer’s apparent failure to do any better also dramatized the powerful restraint that a set of ideas known as primitivism held even on the most independent thinkers and imaginative artists in the early twentieth century. While sneering at contemporary writers, artists, art patrons, social scientists, and tourists who gazed at Pueblo Indians through enchanted eyes, he was nonetheless using them as raw material for his own primitivist fantasy.3 Lawrence concluded that “horses don’t like Indians” because he somehow believed that, unlike bears, they were not part of their spirituality. How New Mexico Indians had actually integrated the horse as well as other livestock into their livelihood over the last couple of centuries was of no interest to him. There has certainly been no lack of interest in the time that David Herbert Lawrence spent in northern New Mexico from 1922 to 1925, interrupted by a brief visit to England and two side trips to the nation of Mexico. Many scholars have explored in some depth how this English writer’s experiences in America profoundly shaped the fiction that he wrote during and after these years. Not long after Lawrence died, William York Tindall even psychoanalyzed his relationship with Susan, the cow on his New Mexico ranch, in order to understand not only Lawrence’s work but the overall problem of modernist literature. Twenty years ago director Christopher Miles made a film, “Priest of Love,” that dramatized Lawrence’s sojourn in New Mexico.4 Inspired by the landscape and people of the American Southwest, the artist in turn tried to translate his deeply felt impressions into provocative symbols. Suffering a life crisis during the hectic 1920s, he also found some solace on “the little ranch in New Mexico” because “the time is different there.”5 American Indians who lived in the region undoubtedly influenced Lawrence’s quest for a freer world, becoming like South Sea Islanders in Herman Melville’s novels “a great swerve in our onward-going life-course now, to gather up again the savage mysteries.”6 Despite extensive study of these and other aspects of Lawrence’s American experience, however, his actual feelings toward Pueblo Indians in New Mexico—those American Indians living closest to his ranchsanctuary outside Taos—remain relatively obscure. It is indeed difficult

Primitivism and Tourism

to separate the writer’s reactions to southwestern Indians from his entangled and troublesome relationships with Frieda Lawrence, Mabel Dodge Luhan, and Dorothy Brett, which have always received much closer scrutiny.7 Lawrence’s interest in Aztec religion and his visits to Mexico, also drawing greater attention from students of his life and literature, further confounded his portrayal of Indians within the United States.8 Nonetheless, a careful assessment of his personal as well as his literary encounter with Indians in the Southwest, particularly the Pueblos, offers a glimpse into the complicated relationship between social interaction and artistic representation in the production of Indian imagery. While artists of all kinds were creating words and images about the early twentieth-century American West, Native Americans throughout the region were adapting their livelihood to provide these new visitors with goods and services. Lawrence’s Indian work, after all, was produced in the midst of working Indians. Close analysis of Lawrence’s relations, in person and on paper, with his Pueblo neighbors in New Mexico touches upon a number of broader issues in the history of American Indians: the perception of Indians in literature and art produced by Europeans and Americans in the early twentieth century, the role of the art colony at Taos in criticism of U.S. Indian policy during the 1920s, and social and economic interaction between Indians and visitors in places such as Taos. The latter dimension of D. H. Lawrence’s story in New Mexico is especially interesting in the light of recent scholarship by Philip Deloria, Margaret Jacobs, Sherry Smith, and others who explore how American Indian people themselves participated in the process of image making.9 The representation of American Indians in literature, as Joshua David Bellin has argued, “emerges from contexts of encounter, from the interaction and intersection of peoples.” To continue studying the imagined Indian without considering the spaces of intercultural conflict, negotiation, and exchange in which much of the imagination took place is to perpetuate the voicelessness, namelessness, and facelessness that D. H. Lawrence himself assigned to Indian people in his own study of American literature.10 The primitivist fantasies that creative artists, anthropologists, and tourists brought to the American Southwest had real consequences for Indian people, whether we look at their employment in the commercial economy or their engagement with government policy. Even selfidentified “friends of the Indian” proved to be shortsighted in their views on the social and economic realities of American Indian life. In

119

120

Primitivism and Tourism

varying degrees, visitors to New Mexico lacked realistic perceptions that might have contributed to workable and sustainable changes in Indian policy. Many of the images that they created, instead, confined American Indians to narrowly self-serving roles. The designated role of American Indians, according to Lawrence and to many literary scholars who have followed him, was to represent a haunting spirit of the land. “The moment the last nuclei of Red life break up in America,” he wrote in Studies in Classic American Literature, “then the white men will have to reckon with the full force of the demon of the continent.” During the mid-1920s Lawrence suddenly found himself living in a nucleus of Native America, but the economic relations and political struggles preoccupying Pueblo Indians at the time did not square so easily with the English writer’s belief that “the red life flows in a different direction from the white life.”11 Personal interaction with southwestern Indians and close observation of their daily life kept interfering with the metaphysical meaning that he needed to impose on them.

Initially, American Indians stood in the background of anxieties and aspirations that Lawrence increasingly directed across the Atlantic Ocean from England beginning in 1915. The devastation of World War I made Lawrence despair over the decline of Europe. He flirted with the notion of starting a utopian colony of compatible creative individuals in some warm climate and even considered venturing into political activism, in the form of joint lectures with Bertrand Russell. Lawrence’s disappointments and frustrations only deepened when his novels were suppressed in England and when he and Frieda were suspected of being spies by London’s Scotland Yard. “I am struggling like a fly on a treach paper, to leave this country,” he whined to Lady Cynthia Asquith in November 1915. Lawrence hoped that Fort Myers, Florida, might soon become his and Frieda’s refuge, if they could find a ship sailing there before Christmas and if “the English government will let me go.” “I would like to go to a land where there are only birds and beasts & no humanity, nor inhumanity.”12 Feeling confined by the decadence and cruelty of the Old World, Lawrence followed in the tradition of many European artists and writers by investing hope in America as some kind of New World. “There is no more Europe,” he wrote to Waldo Frank in July 1917, “only a mass of ruins from the past.” Lawrence desired to “come to America, bodily, as soon as the war stops and gates are opened.”13

Primitivism and Tourism

In the two novels written by D. H. Lawrence during World War I, The Rainbow and Women in Love, scholars have found clues to his spiritual quest for a symbolic new world. When asked about the meaning of The Rainbow, Lawrence sneered, “I don’t know myself what it is: except that the older world is done for.” And in another reference to the same manuscript, he asserted more optimistically that “whatever else it is, it is a voyage of discovery towards the real and eternal and unknown land. We are like Columbus, we have our backs upon Europe, till we come to the new world.”14 In Women in Love, eventually published by a private printer in New York City in 1920, Lawrence metaphysically defined the new world as a place where daily life fulfills man’s deepest nature and where one can find the spontaneous expression of masculine affections. The beleaguered artist wanted “to transfer all my life to America,” as he revealed to Catherine Carswell, not because of its people and society— “Americans are as a rule rather dreadful, I think”—but because there “the skies are not so old, the air is newer, the earth is not tired.”15 With Lawrence in search of some new place conducive to both personal and social regeneration, Mabel Dodge Sterne’s invitation to visit her new home in Taos, New Mexico, was fortuitous. The patroness of reform, art, and Indians wanted him to write about New Mexico and its people with the brilliance he had shown in Sea and Sardinia.16 Lawrence had already written and published versions of essays that would become his Studies in Classic American Literature. There he explored the spirit of place that seemed to persevere both conquest and civilization. What had begun as a Cooperesque image of North American Indians was evolving into a foreboding philosophy. “Americans must recognize again, recognize and embrace,” he wrote in a New Republic article in 1920, “that which was abhorrent to the Pilgrim Fathers and to the Spaniards, that which was called the Devil, the black Demon of savage America, this great aboriginal spirit.”17 Would Indians in northern New Mexico live up to D. H. Lawrence’s expectations of the New World? Would they meet his demanding criteria for newness, sensual consciousness, and manly love? Would he be able to “bring together the two ends of humanity,” as he conceptualized it to Mabel, “our thin end, and the last dark strand from the previous, pre-white era?”18 In her campaign to attract Lawrence to New Mexico, Mabel Dodge Sterne sent him a copy of Charles Lummis’s Land of Poco Tiempo with an inscription that read, “Lawrence!—this is the best that has been done yet—And yet if you knew what lies untouched behind these externals,

121

122

Primitivism and Tourism

unreached by the illuminating vision of a simple soul yet! Oh, come!”19 In this book originally published in 1893, Lummis himself had invited curiosity seekers and social scientists alike to peer into New Mexico Indian life. “Their numerous sacred dances,” he wrote, “are by far the most picturesque sights in America, and the least viewed by Americans, who never found anything more striking abroad. The mythology of Greece and Rome is less than theirs in complicated comprehensiveness, and they are a more interesting ethnologic study than the tribes of inner Africa, and less known of by their white countrymen.”20 Archaeological expeditions to the Southwest brought teams of scientists, photographers, and surveyors into contact with Indian communities across the region. Beginning in the 1890s, they were joined in northern New Mexico by a more numerous array of artists and writers seeking new subjects and settings. By 1914 painters Joseph Henry Sharp, Ernest Blumenschein, Bert Philips, Irving Couse, Herbert Dunton, Walter Ufer, Victor Higgins, and Oscar Berninghaus had started art colonies at Santa Fe and Taos.21 In November 1917 Mabel’s newest husband, Russian paintersculptor Maurice Sterne, was visiting Taos. “Do you want an object in life?” he wrote back to Mabel. “Save the Indians, their art—culture— reveal it to the world.” So Mabel left Greenwich Village for Taos, separated from Sterne, and fell in love with Tony Lujan of Taos Pueblo. Mabel married Lujan in 1923.22 Mabel Dodge Sterne’s Taos home quickly became a mecca for artists and writers flocking to northern New Mexico. Langston Hughes first heard people talking about Taos at a party in Greenwich Village. “And the more exotic and jittery they were,” he wrote, “the more they talked of heading for Taos and the desert and the Indians. So I began to wonder what the Indians would think about their coming.” Based strictly on what he gathered from the New York City buzz about Mabel Dodge Luhan’s New Mexican salon, Hughes even wrote a poem, “A House in Taos,” which won him a first prize of $150 in Witter Bynner’s Intercollegiate Undergraduate Poetry Contest and its publication in 1927.23 Guests at Mabel’s house during the 1920s included poets Vachel Lindsay, Jean Toomer, and Witter Bynner, painters Andrew Dasburg, Marsden Hartley, and Georgia O’Keeffe, and writers Mary Austin, Willa Cather, and D. H. Lawrence.24 In one way or another, all were what Cherokee poet and playwright Lynn Riggs called “Pueblo enthusiasts.” Parodying their “lingo” in a November 1923 letter to Walter Campbell, his former professor at the University of Oklahoma, Riggs wrote, “The Pueblo life must

Primitivism and Tourism

be wonderful—the real communal life. And to think of how they are being contaminated by the damned whites and the stinking Mexicans!”25 Immediately upon the arrival of Frieda and D. H. Lawrence at Taos in September 1922, Mabel sent him on a five-day trip with her soon-to-be husband Tony Lujan and her friend Bessie Freeman to the Jicarilla Apache Reservation for a festival. She “wanted Lawrence to get into the Indian thing soon,” counting on “his deep, deep understanding of the mystery and the other-worldness, as he would call it, of Indian life.”26 Lawrence’s initial encounter with the Navajo, Pueblo, Ute, and Apache people attending the ceremonies and festivities augured a dismal relationship between the author and his putative subjects. Motoring one hundred and twenty miles across the New Mexican terrain so soon after his arrival did not put the Englishman in a receptive mood, but Lawrence showed an awkwardness and even repulsion toward American Indians in his own Indian work that he would never shake. “Weird to see these Red Indians,” Lawrence wrote right away, “the Apaches are not very sympatisch, but their camp, tents, horses, lake—very picturesque.” To E. M. Forster he reported apologetically, “I havn’t got the hang of them yet.”27 In an essay published shortly after in Dial, however, he offered a more revealing interpretation of this first encounter: “It was not what I had thought it would be. It was something of a shock. Again something in my soul broke down, letting in a bitterer dark, a pungent awakening to the lost past, old darkness, new terror, new root-griefs, old root-richness.”28

D. H. Lawrence was on a psychic journey, as in all of his foreign travels, which hindered him from becoming close to the local or indigenous peoples he met anywhere. “I never want to deny them or break with them,” Lawrence observed immediately about the Indians. “But there is no going back. Always onward, still further. The great devious onward-flowing stream of conscious human blood. From them to me, and from me on.”29 Joseph Foster, an American acquaintance of Lawrence, claimed that he tended to avoid American Indians and only “made feints toward understanding them with his own sensitive intuitions.”30 Lawrence did take quickly to the climate and landscape of the American Southwest, especially appreciating the huge and bright sky. “It is sunny here, and one can ride one’s pony in the sun across the sage,” as he reported to Curtis Brown.31 But to Mabel Dodge Luhan’s deep regret, no great novel or major prose about the Indians living in New Mexico during the 1920s

123

124

Primitivism and Tourism

came from Lawrence’s pen. To a great extent, D. H. Lawrence was just another tourist. His leisurely search for authentic cultures untouched by modern forces actually represented the very modernity that he was hoping to escape.32 American Indians working to survive in the modern world were bound to disappoint him. They would nonetheless influence whatever Indian work he managed to write. Although Lawrence’s personal standoffishness and metaphysical myopia caused him to reject the Indian way of life, he nevertheless wrote some of the most vivid and sensitive portraits of American Indian ritual yet written by a non-Indian. Aldous Huxley later attributed Lawrence with “a prodigious power of rendering the immediately experienced otherness in terms of literary art,” a “peculiar gift” which not even his own moodiness could revoke.33 Even the frustrated Mabel acknowledged that “in those essays he managed to write in Taos, about Indians and their dances, he captured a few fragments of a cosmos that he barely glimpsed.”34 Beginning with “Indians and an Englishman,” an account of his visit to the Jicarilla Apache Reservation, Lawrence translated the sights and sounds of Indian ceremony into a vibrant written narrative. In the “Dance of the Sprouting Corn,” one of three essays written in mid-1924, the reader witnesses the ceremony as if we were standing in the plaza of Santo Domingo Pueblo: You realize the long line of dancers, and a solid cluster of men singing near the drum. You realize the intermittent black-and-white fantasy of the hopping Koshare, the jesters, the Delight-Makers. You become aware of the ripple of bells on the knee-garters of the dancers, a continual pulsing ripple of little bells; and of the sudden wild, whooping yells from near the drum. Then you become aware of the seed-like shudder of the gourd-rattles, as the dance changes, and the swaying of the tufts of green pine-twigs stuck behind the arms of all the dancing men, in the broad green arm-bands.35

For decades Pueblo Indian dances had been the target of both scorn and sensation, especially in New Mexico newspapers, where accounts of “weird chants” and “strange celebrations” were standard fare for predominantly Anglo-American readers. White citizens of the United States, outnumbered by Indian and Hispano residents in a territory that did not become a state until 1912, relied upon language that characterized Pueblo rituals as exotic in sight and sound and excessive—even pornographic—in bodily motion. Nonetheless, a growing number of

Primitivism and Tourism

tourists and local residents looked forward to observing Indian festivals that were open to outsiders. The public presence of American Indians outside of their own communities, especially on town plazas and streets, was also subjected to a mix of derogatory and amused gazes, as newspaper stories reported incidents highlighting idleness and drunkenness.36 But even the more prosaic dimensions of Pueblo Indian life were captured more sensitively by D. H. Lawrence: And if it were sunset, the men swathing themselves in their sheets like shrouds, leaving only the black place of the eyes visible. And women, darker than ever, with shawls over their heads, busy at the ovens. And cattle being driven to sheds. And men and boys trotting in from the fields, on ponies. And as the night is dark, on one of the roofs, or more often on the bridge, the inevitable drum-drum-drum of the tomtom, and young men in the dark lifting their voices to the song, like wolves or coyotes crying in music.37

Lawrence’s writings about American Indians from 1923 to 1925 also evince a keen sociological eye for relations between Indians and nonIndians in the United States. Undoubtedly animated by his aversion toward American society, he sharply discerned subtle and not-so-subtle strains in racial interaction. Alluding at times to the Southwest as “comic opera played with solemn intensity” and “the great playground of the white American,” Lawrence underscored the incongruity—conveniently being avoided in their minds—among Indians, high-brow artists, cowboys, and Hispanic villagers.38 Lawrence’s own self-consciousness about being “a great stranger here” heightened his sensitivity to what he felt at Taos Pueblo was “a curious grudge, or resentment against everything: almost in the very soil itself.”39 It is worth contrasting this reaction with Lynn Riggs’s description of a scene at Santo Domingo Pueblo in 1924. During a dance ceremony, the Oklahoma writer of Cherokee descent who knew a thing or two about drama observed a tall Indian man with a suitcase, umbrella, and linen duster. “He scattered candy to the children and cried in Spanish: ‘How do you do? You nice Indians! I’m from New York and I think you’re so interesting!’ And people are fond of believing they have no sense of humor!” D. H. Lawrence was less likely than Riggs to perceive humor in some of American Indians’ own responses to white spectators.40 Perhaps Lawrence was being slightly paranoid when he detected “a jeering, malevolent vibration” from peering Indian eyes. He tended to

125

126

Primitivism and Tourism

sneer at anyone caught eying him. When Chicago newspaperman Joseph Foster and his wife first saw the famous novelist at Taos Pueblo’s San Geronimo Fiesta, wearing “the huge ten-gallon Stetson worn too far down over his ears,” Lawrence “turned around and frowned at us.”41 But the frail Englishman under an oversized cowboy hat could nonetheless make astute observations about the irreconcilable difference, “in the flesh,” between Indians and whites. In his revised essay on James Fenimore Cooper, rewritten in New Mexico and published in Studies in Classic American Literature, Lawrence depicts scenes of “race resistance” in which an Indian servant in a white household, Indian guides with a white hunter, and an Indian husband toward his white wife (a jab at Mabel?) display guile or even malice.42 D. H. Lawrence cautiously extended his analysis of Indian-white relations onto the wider political stage of U.S. governmental policy. Shortly after his arrival in New Mexico, he added his voice to the mounting opposition against Senator Holm Bursum’s bill—a congressional act which would have drastically reduced Pueblo lands. Published in the New York Times Magazine on December 24, 1922, “Certain Americans and an Englishman” forcefully summarized the historical background to the problem and characterized the contemporary status of the Indian in the United States: “He is an American subject, but a member of a dominated, defenceless nation which Congress undertakes to protect and cherish. The Indian Bureau is supposed to do the cherishing.”43 Lawrence also challenged American Indian policy in a poem entitled “O! Americans,” which was never published during his lifetime: The Indians of the pueblos have land. Let them lease their land to the American Government, as the Oklahoma Indians have done; And in return the Government would supply them with excellent farm-machinery. So, the speech in the pueblo, on Good Friday, behind closed doors. And when the doors were opened, the White Men drove away. And the old dark-faced men came out heavily, with a greater gloom than for many years, Though their souls have been growing heavy for centuries.44

Despite Lawrence’s apparent concern for the plight of Pueblo Indians, he maintained a revealing aloofness from political activities throughout

Primitivism and Tourism

his Indian work. “We are here as usual thick in things: even too thick,” he wrote to Bessie Freeman in late October 1922. “It has been the Bursum Bill till we’re sick of it.” Lawrence even expressed disdain for John Collier, the leader of the campaign against government policy. While Collier was “still trotting on his reforming mission somewhere Zuni way,” Lawrence was invited to join him at Santo Domingo Pueblo on November 5 when “all the elders from all the pueblos are to meet and have a Bursum Bill pow-wow.” The English novelist confessed that he was “not keen” on traveling by motorcar in cold weather, so he missed the important meeting that launched the All-Pueblo Council.45 Personal discomfort alone, however, does not explain his avoidance of direct participation in the Pueblo struggle against the Bursum Bill and other government measures. Lawrence believed that the destiny of American Indians should go forward without outside help or interference. White do-gooders, driven more by their own needs than by Indian needs, would do more harm than good. “Don’t trouble about the Indians,” he wrote to Mabel Dodge Luhan from Mexico in November 1923, “you can’t save them: and politics, no matter what politics, will destroy them.” I have said many times that you would destroy the Indians. In your lust even for a Saviour’s power, you would just destroy them. The same with Collier. He will destroy them. It is his saviour’s will to set the claws of his own white egoistic benevolent volition into them. Somewhere, the Indians know that you and Collier would, with your salvationist but poisonous white consciousness, destroy them. Remember, Jesus, and The Good, in our sense, in our mystic sense, not just the practical: Jesus, and The Good as you see it, are poison for the Indians. One feels it intensely here in Mexico. Their great Saviour Juarez did more to destroy them than all the centuries of Viceroys.—Juarez was a pure Indian.—This is really a land of Indians: not merely a pueblo. I tell you, leave the Indians to their own dark destiny. And leave yourself to the same.46

Unlike other writers and artists in New Mexico, Lawrence never responded with fervor to the Pueblo land crisis. He departed radically on this issue from his friend Witter Bynner, who wrote in 1923 that “even culturally speaking the Pueblo might not be a vanishing race were it not for their vanishing land.”47 Writing to Edward Nehls more than thirty years later, John Collier recalled D. H. Lawrence’s “none but a casual interest in the struggle that I and others were engaged in.” During their

127

128

Primitivism and Tourism

months together as neighbors on Mabel Dodge Luhan’s property, Collier remembered him as “a gentle, kindly and unaggressive individual” who was accepted and liked by the Taos Indians. “When they learned of his death,” reported Collier, some Indians climbed from Taos Pueblo to Lawrence’s ranch and “painted a large buffalo on his workshop door.” But the English novelist was engaged in a crusade of his own that took him on a very different path from the political crusade pursued by the reformer who became commissioner of Indian Affairs under Franklin Roosevelt. “Crusading for uninhibited experience, organic and spiritual,” in his own escape from English middle-class life, Lawrence discovered that the Pueblo Indians—much like “the Italian people of the hills”—“really didn’t need him.” Instead “he added a projection of some deeper chasmic darkness into the Indian,” according to Collier, “which may have been a perception of something that existed which I had not encountered.”48

What Collier skeptically called Lawrence’s “projection of some deeper chasmic darkness into the Indian” was a preoccupation with what the English writer considered the dark consciousness of primitive people. His obsession with this meaning was of course not unusual for European and American intellectuals at this time. Much of the growing anthropological as well as artistic interest in the American Southwest was driven by primitivist longing. Since the 1870s Pueblo Indian kivas, ceremonial and clan chambers built into the earth, had taken on a dark and mysterious aura in the minds of visiting intellectuals who sought, in the words of Aby Warburg, the “essential character traits of primitive pagan humanity.” An art historian who had visited the southwestern United States in 1895–1896 and photographed the Hopi Snake Dance, Warburg was telling fellow patients at the Kreuslingen Sanatorium in 1923 that Pueblo dances “are not child’s play, but rather the primary pagan mode of answering the largest and most pressing questions of the Why of things.” The poisonous reptile held in the mouths of Hopi dancers “symbolizes the inner and outer demoniac forces that humanity must overcome.”49 Lecturing in Santa Fe on July 27, 1924, to open a new anthropological museum, Edward Curtis declared that the only concern of his photographic project was “the old time Indian, his dress, his ceremonies, his life and manners.” Curtis had been photographing Pueblo people since 1903 but expressed nothing but criticism toward the “white friends” who were assisting in their campaigns against government policy. His interest was scientific. As Curtis had written earlier, “the

Primitivism and Tourism

American Indian has afforded advanced science an excellent opportunity to study primitive man at a most interesting period.”50 Critics have not been reluctant to declare that D. H. Lawrence’s own brand of primitivism, intermingled with his widening personal isolation, adversely affected the quality of fiction that he wrote during his American years. But to a lesser known extent, it also marred his observations about Indian life, spoiled his relationships with Indian people, and diverted his creative energy to the more mysterious and sensational mythology of the Aztec people of Mexico. Into otherwise realistic descriptions of Indian conditions and problems, including his criticism of the Bursum Bill, Lawrence repeatedly injected references to “the sacred fire of the old dark religion” and “an old dark thread from their vision.”51 Lawrence was insisting upon an isolation or insulation in Pueblo culture, while nonetheless using it to criticize an atrophied European civilization. In this latest version of a colonialist discourse, American Indian adaptation and resistance were either silenced or derided. The artist’s primitivist point of view was shared by influential anthropologists of his time. In 1924 American anthropologist Edward Sapir wrote about genuine culture as “inherently harmonious, balanced, self-satisfactory.” In a criticism of industrial society’s threat to genuine culture, Sapir represented Indian society as one in which the average person lived a “wellrounded life” at a “less sophisticated” level. But contact with whites caused the American Indian to slip “out of the warm embrace of a culture into the cold air of fragmentary existence”—even when he seems to be “making a fairly satisfactory compromise with his new environment.”52 Describing the Indian population at Taos Pueblo for Else Jaffe in 1922, Lawrence demonstrated this way of thinking: They are catholics, but still keep the old religion—making the weather and shaping the year: all very secret and important to them. They are naturally secretive, and have their backs set against our form of civilization. Yet it rises against them. In the pueblo they have mowing machines and threshing machines, and American schools, and the young men no longer care so much for the sacred dances.—And after all, if we have to go ahead, we must ourselves go ahead. We can go back and pick up some threads—but these Indians are up against a dead wall, even more than we are: but a different wall.53

Lawrence’s obsession with the mysterious otherness of American Indians prevented him from capturing the complexity and difficulty of intercultural communication, a shortcoming that he shared with most

129

130

Primitivism and Tourism

other fiction and nonfiction writers of his generation. Jean Toomer, who first visited northern New Mexico in 1925 and later returned on several trips, discerned some of the difficulty in a self-protective behavior exhibited by the Pueblos themselves. “The Indians have developed, as far as their religious experiences and views are concerned,” he wrote, “an effective non-violent resistance. It is a wall of silence which cannot be penetrated by outsiders. It just stops you, without hurting you, without making you angry or arousing the desire to force through it.”54 But as Guy Reynolds has argued, Willa Cather was exceptional in her ability to avoid essentializing cultural difference between Indians of the American Southwest and their European neighbors into a dark chasm. Cather was a guest at Mabel Dodge Luhan’s Taos home in 1925 and even visited D. H. Lawrence at his ranch. But unlike Lawrence, she followed her stay by producing a great work of fiction set in New Mexico. Cather researched Pueblo Indian relations with the colonial population in order to write Death Comes for the Archbishop and managed to dramatize in her novel both the limitations and possibilities of everyday translation between traditions. “The bishop seldom questioned Jacinto about his thoughts or beliefs,” Cather wrote. “There was no way in which he could transfer his own memories of European civilization into the Indian mind, and he was quite willing to believe that behind Jacinto there was a long tradition, a story of experience, which no language could translate to him.” In contrast with Cather’s fictional Father Latour, D. H. Lawrence showed little tolerance or empathy toward what anthropologists would later call the religious compartmentalization of twentiethcentury Pueblo life.55

What Lawrence perceived as American Indians’ deep awareness of the dark forces in nature was his principle interest in Pueblo people. So in his only major body of writings about them, Mornings in Mexico, he sought to portray a symbolic, and even actual, conflict between two irreconcilable forms of consciousness.56 In “Indians and Entertainment,” one of the three essays directly about the American Southwest included in this travel book, he declared: “The consciousness of one branch of humanity is the annihilation of the consciousness of another branch. That is, the life of the Indian, his stream of conscious being, is just death to the white man. And we can understand the consciousness of the Indians only in terms of the death of our consciousness.”57 This opposition took a more historical and sociological form in Studies in Classic Amer-

Primitivism and Tourism

ican Literature, when Lawrence preached, “the Red Man died hating the white man. What remnant of him lives, lives hating the white man. Go near the Indians, and you just feel it.”58 Lawrence’s descent “beneath the surface” of southwestern Indian life, to what he called the Indian’s “ancient, ancient race-self and religiousself,” had a mixed effect upon the accuracy of his Indian work.59 He captured the cosmology of the Pueblo Indians in a manner rarely achieved by contemporary scholars and observers of their culture. The interconnectedness among all beings and the continuous flow of both creative and destructive power from one to another struck a deep chord in Lawrence’s psyche. “Never the distinction between God and God’s creation, or between Spirit and Matter,” he noted in “Indians and Entertainment.” “Everything, everything is the wonderful shimmer of creation, it may be a deadly shimmer like lightning or the anger in the little eyes of the bears, it may be the beautiful shimmer of the moving deer, or the pine-boughs softly swaying under snow.”60 Lawrence dealt very effectively with what he could believe but ignored what he considered nonsensical or unimportant. He downplayed the institutional and organizational dimensions of Indian religion, corollaries of European structures that he shunned, and therefore missed the rich social and political life of Pueblo communities.61 Furthermore, his obsession with the dark side of consciousness caused Lawrence to belittle much of day-to-day Indian behavior and to underestimate the resourcefulness of Indian society. In his retrospective “New Mexico,” the artist delineated what did not interest him: The Indian who sells you baskets on Albuquerque station or who slinks around Taos plaza may be an utter waster and an indescribably low dog. Personally he may be even less religious than a New York sneak-thief. He may have broken with his tribe, or his tribe itself may have collapsed finally from its old religious integrity, and ceased, really to exist. Then he is only fit for rapid absorption into white civilization, which must make the best of him.62

In this regard, Lawrence was expressing a not uncommon reaction. Listen to a conversation between Jean Toomer and his companion Marian about a scene inside the La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe: As we passed through the lobby to the dining-room, we saw Indians sitting about, sitting in a long row near the desk. They wore much jewelry, heavy

131

132

Primitivism and Tourism silver and turquois. “Why are they here? Why are they sitting like that? They look fat and greasy. They look fat and greasy in Wisconsin. I thought the pueblo Indians were different. I’ve always heard they were.” “I can’t tell you. I’ve seen fine-looking poised handsome men in the pueblos. Perhaps these are on show. Perhaps they are here to sell things.” “I don’t like to look at them.”63

In “The Hopi Snake Dance,” Lawrence’s own favorite in his trilogy of essays on Pueblo Indians, one can follow the author as he extracts meaning from the Indian ritual. He begins by vividly and cynically describing the three thousand spectators who crowd around the village square each year, “greedy with curiosity” toward their “public pet.” Lawrence astutely observed the difference of this thrilling Hopi ceremony from the beautiful dances of other Pueblo peoples but moreover probes the “sort of religion” implied by its “touch of horror.” “To the animistic vision there is no perfect God,” he explains, “only the terrific crude Source, the mystic Sun, the well head of all things. From this mystic Sun emanate the Dragons, Rain, Wind, Thunder, Shine, Light.” Describing the uneven swaying motion of the snake priests, Lawrence declares that “culturally there is nothing. If it were not for that mystic, dark-sacred concentration.” Having reached his real subject, the impassioned philosopher displaces the dispassionate observer: “Man, little man, with his consciousness and his will, must both submit to the great origin-powers of his life, and conquer them.” Aware and wary of this potency, primitive men “travel back and forth, back and forth, from the darkest origins out to the brightest edifices of creation.” Across the “gulf of mutual negations,” civilized men sought the quickest form of conquest, “so we are conquerors for the moment.”64 D. H. Lawrence and others seemed unwilling to realize that Pueblo people during the early twentieth century were putting old traditions to new use in creative ways. To mitigate forces threatening them from the outside, New Mexico Indians modified community rituals into selfregulated public spectacles and sought material gain from festivals, arts, and crafts. Making some of their culture more visible to tourists, artists, and anthropologists just might protect them against further missionary, governmental, and—yes—even literary interference. Autonomy and selfcontrol in the Roaring Twenties required risky strategies. The Pueblos, of course, were also trying to make some sense of the latest outsiders, and music for them was an ancient means of expressing opinion about

Primitivism and Tourism

the presence of strangers. Burlesque had served Pueblo people for a long time as a means of handling other Indians, missionaries, and government agents on their own terms. Now, dance became a significant arena for mocking the European and Euro-American spectators crowding into their plazas. Playful imitation and embarrassment of tourists by clowns amused Pueblo people while controlling the environment.65

Not surprisingly, Lawrence was very clumsy in his personal relationships with the Taos Pueblo people, whose reservation stood between his own ranch and the town of Taos. The more American Indians tried to work artists’ and tourists’ fascination with them to their own advantage, the more contemptible they appeared in this Englishman’s written work on Indians. Lawrence responded bitterly to how whites were commodifying Pueblo culture, but perhaps he felt even greater scorn toward how Indians were appropriating the commodification for their own economic benefit. His own ambivalent participation in this unequal exchange only deepened his estrangement from Pueblo neighbors and aggravated his typically awkward interaction with local people. Mabel Luhan traded to Frieda and Lawrence a small portion of the Del Monte Ranch at Questa for the manuscript of Sons and Lovers. It was a run-down property worth about fifteen hundred dollars and located seventeen miles north of Taos. On 160 acres of sloping land, with sage and piñon for cover and a cluster of buildings in need of repair, they bestowed the name “Kiowa Ranch.”66 Lawrence and Frieda employed several Indian men and women to work around their household. American Indians in New Mexico, as elsewhere in the American West, constituted a readily available pool of skilled and unskilled labor for white employers. Since the mid-nineteenth century ranchers and farmers, railroad and mining companies, and government agencies were able to take advantage of a deteriorating economic situation for Indian families, as dispossession of land and resources undermined traditional means of livelihood. Art colonies and tourist stops also employed American Indians for a range of services that included performing dances at festivals, posing for painters, and cooking in kitchens. And of course southwestern Indian weavers, jewelers, and potters were producing more and more items for trading posts, exhibitions, and even New York City department stores, while Pueblo, Navajo, and Apache workers on excavation crews provided ethnological information as well as skilled and unskilled labor.67

133

134

Primitivism and Tourism

A very selective role played by some Pueblo people in Taos and Santa was to pose for portraits painted by members of northern New Mexico’s art community. Pueblo ceremonies and dances were the main subject of many of these artists from the very beginning, with painters like Henry Sharp consciously turning their backs on everyday life at Pueblo communities. But Walter Ufer, reaching Taos in 1914, departed from this trend by painting work and leisure scenes as well as close-up portraits. Other artists, including Sharp himself and Victor Higgins, followed Ufer’s lead. Most of these portraits represented unnamed individuals usually engaged in some creative activity or seated around traditional objects. One painting by Ufer now hanging in the Art Institute of Chicago, Jim and His Daughter, is a rare example of Indian subjects being identified, although only Jim’s first name is used and no name is ascribed to his daughter (Figure 11). Jim, by the way, often sat for Ufer’s more generic portraits of Pueblo Indians.68

[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]

Figure 11. Walter Ufer, Jim and His Daughter, 1923. Oil on canvas, 77.5 × 64.1 cm (301⁄2 × 251⁄4 in.). Gift of Mr. Howard Ellis. 1961.111. The Art Institute of Chicago.

Primitivism and Tourism

Before hiring Pueblo Indians around his ranch, Lawrence demonstrated a strong ambivalence toward them at social gatherings. Mabel often hosted parties at her home, where Indians from Taos Pueblo played music and danced for her guests. “Last night the young Indians came down to dance in the studio,” Lawrence wrote to Catherine Carswell on September 29, 1922, “with two drums: and we all joined in. It is fun: and queer. The Indians are much more remote than negroes.”69 Friends of the English novelist, when recalling such occasions, made it a point to describe his behavior in some detail. “He was prancing and stepping, yelling and waving around, out of time and out of step, like the rest of us,” wrote Knud Merrild, “not catching on to the rhythm at all.” Dorothy Brett recalled when once a young Indian woman asked Lawrence to dance. “Then how shy, how embarrassed you are, as you and she alone in the middle of the room begin to dance. The Indian girl is not at all shy, she is immensely pleased with herself as she links her arm in yours and turns you slowly this way and that with her. Shyly, gently, you tread the dance with her.”70 Mabel Dodge Luhan’s parties were rife with a comic tension, and Lawrence must have been keenly self-conscious about his own participation. As white intellectuals played Indian under the sway of drinks and drums, the Indian servants and performers joked discreetly about the absurdity of this scene. Joseph Foster, who left a newspaper career back east to attempt creative writing in “this beautiful nowhere,” nostalgically remembered a gathering of many painters and writers at Mabel’s Taos home. “A new Round Dance was forming, everybody was crowding in. The Indian voices rose higher and higher. The whites loved the moment, dancing shoulder to shoulder with the Indians. Yes, they loved being Indian for a short while.” Mabel herself found nothing more irresistible than “a roomful of Indians dancing to the drum,” claiming that Lawrence “flowed into it . . . dancing step, step, with a dark one on either side of him, round and round in a swinging circle for hours.”71 But Lawrence was far less confident about the natural state of such social interaction and was prone to veil his own anxiety with demeaning remarks about the Indians. “I watch the Indians stealing glances at you,” wrote Dorothy Brett. “They watch you, marveling at your strange appearance.”72 Reluctantly planning to take Thomas Seltzer and his wife to a winter dance at Taos Pueblo, Lawrence complained to Catherine Carswell that “the Indians are very american—no inside life. Money and moving about—nothing more.”73 By December 1922, Mabel reported to Mary Austin, Lawrence was “terribly overcome and oppressed

135

136

Primitivism and Tourism

by indians who he thought disliked him (though indians are not personal and rarely like or dislike people)—he stood it here about 3 months and now has gone up the mountain away from here about 20 miles—on to the Hawk’s ranch where he never sees an indian.”74 Lawrence could not avoid Indians, however, especially since he needed their labor upon becoming a property owner himself. In May 1924 three Indians and a Hispanic carpenter were helping him rebuild the threeroom log cabin and make adobes for the chimney (see Figure 12). Geronimo and his wife made an oven. Juan Concha, Pondo, and Candido regularly worked around the ranch. As a young man, Concha had been a model for painter Irving Couse. Describing for Mabel Luhan some minor problem, Lawrence wrote that “John Concha must have been mad with us all, to neglect those mares. I feel mad with him.—I always like my three Indians—they try to do all they can for me, so nicely.”75 In a letter to his niece Margaret, which included a drawing of the ranch, Lawrence wrote that “there’s always plenty to do—chopping wood, carrying water.” “Next week,” he reported, “the Indian Geronimo is coming up to help and mend the corral, & build a porch over our door.”76 On summer evenings, Lawrence spent time at a camp that his Indian workers arranged just uphill from his cabin. “We sit with the Indians round the fire,” he wrote to Rolf Gardner, “and they sing till late into the night, and sometimes we all dance the Indian tread-dance—then what is it to me, world unison and peace and all that.” Brett characterized Lawrence’s mood at one of these campfire gatherings as “brooding, withdrawn, remote”—“remote as the group of dark Indians are remote in their ecstasy of singing, the firelight playing on their viviid blankets, the whites of their eyes.” Probably like Lawrence, this English painter imagined herself to be “caught and held by the rhythm, the Indian rhythm, as if the very earth itself were singing.”77 Next spring Trinidad Archuleta, a nephew of Tony Lujan, and his wife Rufina were employed by the Lawrences to do household chores and ranch work. Trinidad and another young Indian helped Lawrence dig a ditch and lay pipe for irrigating the ranch. On May 30 Lawrence wrote to Ada Clarke, that Rufina and her sister “are dobeying the houses—plastering them outside with a sort of golden-brown mud— they look pretty. It is done every spring.” Rufina’s sister “has two little black eyed Indian children,” he added. Rufina and Trinidad also rode Lawrence’s buggy into Taos to buy supplies.78 Lawrence wrote to Baroness Anna von Richthofen on June 18, 1925, “Rufina is short and

[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]

Figure 12. Photograph of D. H. Lawrence, Frieda, and the Taos Indians who helped them, Kiowa Ranch, 1924. Collection of Material By, About, or Relating to D. H. and Frieda Lawrence, Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles, 654/7 (Box 1).

138

Primitivism and Tourism

fat and twenty, waddles like a duck in tall white Indian boots. Trinidad is chaste as a girl, with his two plaits. But both are very nice, don’t sweat over the work, do everything we want.” But something must have happened to change Lawrence’s attitude. In the midst of building a new corral with lumber from the old one and reroofing the barn, Lawrence suddenly “sent the Indians away—too much of a Schweinerei,” as he reported to Ida Rauch. “The Indians have gone,” Lawrence wrote in another letter to Richthofen that same day, “filthy beggars all of them.” “We had an Indian and wife to do for us, till last week” he reported to Carswell on June 20, “then we sent them away. ‘Savages’ are a burden.” So Lawrence hired “a Mexican boy,” but complained, “even him one has to pay two dollars a day: supposed to be very cheap labour.”79 Although the exact cause of Trinidad and Rufina’s departure is not known, Dorothy Brett suspected that Lawrence’s awkwardness played a major role. “The Indians work willingly and happily with you and they like you; and until you are told that they laugh at you behind your back, you like them enormously. But that hurts you—always you are sensitive to being laughed at.”80

No matter how regularly Pueblo Indian people interacted with D. H. Lawrence, they represented in his mind a dark consciousness of primitive life—a consciousness that he wanted desperately to confront and overcome. Parts of the fiction written while Lawrence lived in America captured brilliantly the wondrous landscape of the Southwest, but the image of its people that he conveyed through his stories confined Indians to the dark and violent corners of what now seemed to him a not-so-new world.81 Phoenix, Mrs. Witt’s groom of mixed Navajo and Mexican parentage, is introduced in the novella “St. Mawr” as an “odd piece of debris” from World War I whom she found in a Red Cross hospital in Paris. Lawrence was certainly familiar with the fact that many southwestern Indians had served in the U.S. armed forces during the war but turns the character of Phoenix into a one-dimensional symbol of the impersonal potency in natural life. He guides the American woman and her daughter across the spiritual wasteland of Europe, as depicted by Lawrence, simply “by the strength of his silent will.” Explaining Phoenix’s ability to subdue the wild horse, St. Mawr, the author infers that “there was, perhaps, a curious barbaric exultance in bare, dark will devoid of emotion or personal feeling.” Phoenix successfully persuades Lou and

Primitivism and Tourism

her mother to return to America, particularly the mountain West. Yet in the end, Lawrence has the woman overcome her sexual attraction to the Indian who, she convinces herself, “needed this plaintive, squeaky, darkfringed Indian quality, something furtive and soft and rat-like, really to rouse him.” The primitive and civilized modes of consciousness remain unbridged, therefore, and the alienated Lou seeks refuge in the wild landscape, rather than in the native man, of America.82 In “The Woman Who Rode Away,” Indian society comes to the symbolic forefront of D. H. Lawrence’s fiction. This short story takes its heroine on a journey of ultimate absorption into the dark consciousness of an isolated tribe. Fleeing from civilization, where she lived “under the nakedness” of her husband’s abandoned silver works in Arizona, the woman “felt it was her destiny to wander into the secret haunts of these timeless, mysterious, marvelous Indians of the mountains.” The fictional Chilchul Indians, situated high in a mountain desert in northern Mexico, are attributed with being the “sacred tribe of all the Indians”—the “descendants of Montezuma.” With an impersonal hatred and sexuality, tribal priests—resembling Aztecs and not Pueblos—sacrifice the woman in a final, eerie ceremony before a cliff cave and a spoke of ice.83 Resembling the popular genre of Indian captivity narratives in its bare plot, the fictional experience of “The Woman” perhaps fulfilled Lawrence’s deeply interconnected fantasies for both his own personal freedom and the historical destiny of tribal peoples. While the woman embodies flight from the individualism of Western civilization, as Weldon Thorton argues, the Indian tribe embodies the suicidal confrontation of primitive people with Western civilization. Rebelling against her own culture, the woman seeks refuge among American Indians. Losing faith in their own beliefs and rituals, the desperate Indians in Lawrence’s short story resort to sacrificing a white woman who represents the source of their cultural decline. As Thorton explains the terrible irony, “both this exhausted woman and this exhausted culture think they can find salvation in the other.”84 Without any doubt, D. H. Lawrence was captivated by the symbolic power of American Indians in European literature and art more than by the complex reality of their life in modern America. Perhaps he found their everyday world of interaction with neighbors and visitors in New Mexico too mundane. The Pueblos’ political struggle over land and sovereignty probably seemed too modern—even too American—for Lawrence’s primitivist desire. As Aldous Huxley explained some years

139

140

Primitivism and Tourism

later, Lawrence “passed his time in New Mexico on the fringes of the forest, between the inhuman Nordic sentimentality of aspen and tannenbaum, and the equally inhuman emptiness of this bright desert, the sky, the Rocky Mountains.” His remote ranch outside Taos had become his ideal refuge. But when describing the place to acquaintances such as Huxley, Lawrence “talked with a mixture of love and dislike.” In April 1926 he wrote to Rachel and William Hawk, “the ranch pulls, and I don’t call the ranch America.”85 That same month Lawrence revealed to Dorothy Brett that he was dreaming about the animals on his ranch but never even asked about the Indian men and women who had worked beside him. He could not think of returning to America because there was “something in the whole continent that repulses me.” Only five weeks before dying at Vence in the South of France on March 2, 1930, however, Lawrence believed that “my health will never be right in Europe” and that “New Mexico would cure me again.”86 Frieda Lawrence eventually returned to New Mexico—but with a new companion named Angelo Ravagli. At her request, Ravagli built a chapel just uphill from the ranch house and in 1935 brought the disinterred and cremated remains of Lawrence back to Taos. Frieda’s plan was to place the ashes ceremoniously in an urn at the shrine, where Lawrence devotees and curiosity seekers could visit. She apparently asked Pueblo singers and dancers to perform for the scheduled ceremony, in keeping with their prescribed place for gazing artists and tourists. Word reached Frieda, however, that Mabel Luhan wanted to steal the ashes and to scatter them over the mountain. Not incidentally, this rumor was transmitted by some Taos Indian women who worked for Mabel. So Frieda quickly and quietly had Lawrence’s ashes set inside a concrete tomb.87 The Lawrence Shrine stands indeed as one of the most peculiar sites in the Taos area, and many treat it as testimony to how the women in his life turned him into a legend. But it is certainly worth wondering what those American Indians who came to know D. H. Lawrence might have been thinking. The Pueblo women could be showing either their loyalty to Frieda or their antagonism toward Mabel. But foiling Frieda’s strange ritual in a native land, already altered in so many ways, might also represent, as Lawrence himself would have likely put it, some deeper resentment or rebellion. After all, the primitivist writings of the famous English novelist contributed immeasurably to what countless tourists to come would expect from American Indians in the Southwest.

CONCLUSION

Imagine two Englishmen, John Locke and D. H. Lawrence, engaging in a conversation across the centuries. Each advocates the importance of his own Indian work. The seventeenth-century writer, who never traveled to America, argues that the American Indian as hunter sheds valuable light on economic law. The act of hunting transforms the wild animals that Indians kill into their property, but the lifestyle of hunting disqualifies them from property rights to the land they inhabit. The twentieth-century writer, who did travel to America and even employed Indians on his New Mexico ranch, dismisses the issue of land ownership altogether. Instead, he counters with a celebration of the dark secrets represented in their ancient hunting rituals. The virtually unintelligible languages spoken between these interested observers of Indian people reflect the evolution of modern thought between their generations. The human progress anticipated by Locke, seeking profitable returns from trans-Atlantic commerce, meant nothing but decline to Lawrence, seeking spiritual refuge through trans-Atlantic travel. Across these dissonant voices, we also hear how persistent and plastic the ideological uses of American Indian livelihood could be. More importantly, the images and ideas floating through this imaginary dialogue make it difficult to see what was actually happening in American Indian economic life during both periods of history. While Locke was publishing his treatises and essays in England, Indian people along the lower Santee River were already producing deerskins for English traders. Hoping to get a better exchange rate without these middlemen, suspected of cheating them, a group of Sewees secretly built extra-large dugout canoes and made sails from mats. They loaded these boats with furs and provisions and embarked for England from a point

142

Conclusion

on shore where many English vessels had landed. Not far from the Carolina coast, a tempest wrecked this fleet of Indian voyagers. Those not killed by the storm, as trader John Lawson later learned, “were taken up at Sea by an English Ship, and sold for Slaves to the Islands.” The intricacy of this Indian involvement with the formative Atlantic world economy, although an especially tragic episode, was a far cry from the rather simplistic image of Indian livelihood created by the economic theorist.1 Two centuries later, in the Rio Grande Valley, Pueblo Indians were considering how best to deal with the nascent tourist economy of the American West. With access to water and control over fields and pasturage increasingly jeopardized by non-Indian users, Indian communities in northern New Mexico confronted serious economic adversity going into the twentieth century. A concomitant rise of interest in their culture, however, offered some possibilities for relief and recovery. As tourists, anthropologists, painters, photographers, and writers began to visit and even stay, Indian artists and artisans found a growing market for their own cultural products. Weavers, potters, basket makers, and jewelers were able to bring much needed income to their families, while the newcomers’ demand for all kinds of labor around their homes, shops, and studios also added wages to the economy of Indian communities. But D. H. Lawrence was intellectually less interested in working Indians than in dancing Indians, who represented to him a “dark destiny” or “deep blood-consciousness.” As his friend Joseph Foster likewise viewed the spectacle of Pueblo ceremonies, “they danced, danced their indifference to hunger, to their poverty.”2 Interface of non-Indian representations with Indian experiences, as explored through the various case studies in this book, demonstrates how language about American Indian livelihood has operated as an instrument of colonialism. The ideological use of notions such as backwardness, wastefulness, idleness, and timelessness—through writing, illustrating, painting, or photographing—proved to be as damaging as the material impact of unfair or coercive market forces. In coping with changing economic circumstances, which more often than not threatened them with some new disadvantage, Indian people entered economic spaces that elicited linguistic manipulation of their adaptive activity. Working or trading under the watchful and wary gaze of white witnesses added pressures and posed dilemmas. While eighteenth-century theories about some fundamental difference between hunting and farming societies circulated across the Atlantic

Conclusion

Ocean, North American Indians such as the Iroquois were developing strategies of adaptation and resistance in face of the newest challenges to their livelihood. Diversification of economic activity brought changes in agriculture and trade, while itinerancy became an important source of income for many families. Euro-American thought, however, overlooked this kind of improvisation with self-serving consequences. By the 1830s Albert Gallatin issued an ethnological rule, declaring that “the Indian” disappears in the presence of “the white man” because he would not work. Choctaws seeking work in towns or on plantations in Mississippi, ironically, were seen at best as loitering. Images of their marginality, especially when contrasted with nostalgic stories about precontact Indians, fed into propaganda about how removal from their homelands would save Indians from inevitable decline and disappearance. Noble savages reduced to lazy beggars served as a convenient rationale for the United States’ removal policy. Resourcefulness among American Indians, in face of dispossession and discrimination, continued to be concealed by popular images and ideas throughout the nineteenth century. Indians working and trading in marginalized spaces were especially vulnerable to expressions of pity and contempt from white onlookers, while the discourse over poverty evolving in the United States misrepresented the economic condition and political status of American Indian nations on a larger scale. Economic anxieties and conflicts among whites themselves influenced this insinuation of Indian people into a wider ideological dialogue and deepened feelings of resentment and animosity among white citizens. Inside Indian communities, meanwhile, income from commercial markets was blended with traditional practice as much as possible. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, a new mix of consumers began to interact with craftspeople. Indian women making baskets in Louisiana or ceramics in New Mexico, for example, now faced new opportunities and challenges, as anthropologists, collectors, and tourists sought an authentic Indianness in their products. Since the early twentieth century, tourism and recreation have become increasingly important to a growing number of American Indian communities—not only for individuals providing goods and services but also for tribal governments generating revenues and jobs. Controlling the cultural and social impact of this expanding presence of outsiders poses quite a challenge in itself, but there is also the issue of how new tribal enterprises are represented in the popular imagination as well as

143

144

Conclusion

in the intellectual world. Since cultural tourism began in New Mexico a century ago, as cogently observed by Theodore S. Jojola, the “Southwest Indian mystique” has raised troubling dilemmas for Indian people. For years the Pueblo communities have struggled with commercialization and misrepresentation of their culture, trying to balance economic engagement with self-protection. Now tourist businesses operated by the tribes—everything from museums to casinos—are challenging the communities to decide how open they want to become, how to present themselves, and how to invest profits earned from this commerce.3 Casinos are the most prominent spaces in present-day American Indian participation in the world economy today. Some three hundred nations operate casinos in more than half of the states in the United States, and their revenues total more than twenty billion dollars. Over the last thirty years, gaming became the quickest way for Indian communities to generate employment and growth. Increasing involvement in the hospitality industry gives tribes financial resources to tackle problems and build opportunities, but it endangers the distance from dominant society that they desire. And then there is the challenge of deploying images of Indianness that non-Indian guests expect. “To secure the financial success that might help alleviate some of the agonies that still exist as part of the legacy of colonialism,” as Mary Lawlor explains, many Indian communities might ironically end up “serving up romantic and reductive stereotypes of Indianness produced in and driving the colonial imagination of European America.” The alternative is for Indian nations operating casinos to practice what she calls “displayed withholding,” a way of making outsiders aware that they are prohibited from seeing certain aspects of Indian culture, which has been used effectively at Indian museums, powwows, tours, and other sites of self-representation.4 Hostile reaction in recent years to the spread of gaming across Indian country echoes the sentiments of earlier times. Arguments against Indian nations using their sovereignty to open bingo halls and casinos have included their inability to keep away organized crime, the special privileging that they received from the federal government, and the inauthenticity of high-stakes gambling in Indian societies. Overshadowed by all of this marginalizing rhetoric, Indian nations’ current turn to gaming for economic development is integrally connected to the national economy and is part of wider efforts to participate in global trends. Like theoretical discussions about hunting centuries ago, in the midst of Indian peoples’ expanding involvement in the commercial fur trade, the

Conclusion

fixation on casinos’ legitimacy and authenticity ignores the fuller picture. First of all, Indian gaming—while becoming more and more significant for the economy of many tribes—constitutes a small percentage of the overall gaming activity in the United States. The growth of overall gaming activity indicates how important lotteries and other forms of gambling have become to state governments. The impact of gaming is also widely uneven among Indian nations, with only those in particular areas able to succeed with casinos. Moreover, experimentation with gambling operations is only part of a more diversified entry by Indian nations into the tourism and recreation sectors of the expanding service economy. In other words, casinos are not the only ways that American Indians are using their cultural resources and geographic locations to draw income from travelers and visitors.5 Debate over the proliferation of high-stakes gaming operations among Indian nations comprises only the latest example of what Indian Work has argued about the problematic relationship between language and livelihood in American Indian history. In 1993 journalist Kim I. Eisler visited southeastern Connecticut to investigate development of Foxwoods Casino. “Indians are still in these woods,” she wrote, “but most of those who live on the Mashantucket Pequot reservation are hardly recognizable as such.” Finding “no basket-weaving, no pottery or firewood for sale here,” Eisler predicted that wealth and power generated by big-time gambling would “forever change the popular perception of Indians as ‘downtrodden.’ ” Implicit in her assessment of changes underway was an acknowledgement that marginalized activities such as making baskets and cutting firewood for white households had become authentically Indian. But this perception had taken some time to evolve, as we now understand it, replacing earlier judgment that these same activities signified a vanishing Indian. Now Eisler, writing for the Washingtonian, interpreted the Pequots’ successful economic project, which happened to be a casino, as an act of revenge against the white man. By getting even for centuries of exploitation, however, they were jeopardizing their image as worthy Indians. “Skeptics could and would argue endlessly about whether the new Pequots were or were not authentic Indians,” Eisler concluded later in her book, “although no one had questioned their right to declare themselves Pequots when they were poor.”6 To have been stuck for so long inside an invented opposition between authenticity and annihilation is one of the most enduring and enigmatic legacies of colonialism. American Indian people still too often must

145

146

Conclusion

confront either/or expectations about cultural tradition and economic innovation. Timeless culture, although admired and even imitated by non-Indians in various ways, purportedly hinders successful change among Indian societies. Entanglement in global economic processes, for better or worse, is also supposed to destroy cultural integrity. This unfortunate discourse conceals how dynamic and durable societies actually try to blend tradition with innovation while they accommodate and resist powerful forces.7 American Indian engagement with commerce through numerous and various means, over a long span of time, has consistently defied the narrow choices that observers insisted upon seeing.

notes acknowledgments index

NOTES

Introduction 1. Quote from Thomas Harriot’s A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1590) in Envisioning America: English Plans for the Colonization of North America, 1580–1640, ed. Peter C. Mancall (Boston: Bedford Books, 1995), 77. 2. Here I am describing Indian workers in such organizations as the Indian Rights Association, the Women’s National Indian Association, and the Lake Mohonk Conferences, who by the way considered one of their most important goals to be teaching Indian people how to labor for a living. For an example of how the word work was used by these nineteenth-century “friends of the Indian,” see Amelia Stone Quinton, “Care of the Indian,” in Woman’s Work in America, ed. Annie Nathan Meyer, 373–91 (New York: H. Holt, 1891). 3. Francis Paul Prucha, ed., Documents of United States Indian Policy, 2d ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 155–56. 4. In its usage of Indian work, my analysis closely resembles Jane E. Simonsen’s Making Home Work: Domesticity and Native American Assimilation in the American West, 1860–1919 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). 5. For some of the best examples of this new scholarship, see Alice Littlefield and Martha C. Knack, eds., Native Americans and Wage Labor: Ethnohistorical Perspectives (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996); Patricia Albers, “Labor and Exchange in American Indian History,” in The Blackwell Companion to Native American History, ed. Neal Salisbury and Philip Deloria, 269–86 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002); and Brian Hosmer and Colleen O’Neill, eds., Native Pathways: American Indian Culture and Economic Development in the Twentieth Century (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2004).

150

Notes to Pages 4–7 6. Patricia C. Albers, “From Legend to Land to Labor: Changing Perspectives on Native American Work,” in Native Americans and Wage Labor, 260. 7. Lucy R. Lippard, ed., Partial Recall: With Essays on Photographs of Native North Americans by Suzanne Benally, Jimmie Durham, Rayna Green, Joy Harjo, Gerald McMaster, Jolene Rickard, Ramona Sakiestewa, David Seals, Paul Chaat Smith, Jaune Quick-To-See Smith, Gail Tremblay, and Gerald Vizenor (New York: New Press, 1992), 32–33. 8. Robert Asen, “Imagining in the Public Sphere,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 35, no. 4 (2002): 345–67. 9. Elaine Scarry, Resisting Representation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 65. With the recent publication of Jackie Thompson Rand’s Kiowa Humanity and the Invasion of the State (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), I am delighted and privileged to find a skillful companion in this pursuit of the commonplace in American Indian history. 10. Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). 11. Philip J. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), 7, 12. 12. Robert H. Keller and Michael F. Turek, American Indians and National Parks (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998). 13. Sam A. Maddra, Hostiles? The Lakota Ghost Dance and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006). To trace how farreaching the influence of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show could be, see Louis S. Warren, “Buffalo Bill Meets Dracula: William F. Cody, Bram Stoker, and the Frontiers of Racial Decay,” American Historical Review 107 (October 2002): 1124–57. 14. Liza Black, “Looking at Indians: American Indians in Movies, 1941–1960” (Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, 1999); Nicholas G. Rosenthal, “Representing Indians: Native American Actors on Hollywood’s Frontier,” Western Historical Quarterly 36 (Autumn 2005): 329–52. 15. For examples of this process, see Larry Nesper, “Simulating Culture: Being Indian for Tourists in Lac du Flambeau’s Wa-Swa-Gon Indian Bowl,” Ethnohistory 50 (Summer 2003): 447–72; Jessica R. Cattelino, “Casino Roots: The Cultural Production of Twentieth-Century Seminole Economic Development,” in Native Pathways, 66–90. 16. A. E. Rogge et al., Raising Arizona’s Dams: Daily Life, Danger, and Discrimination in the Dam Construction Camps of Central Arizona, 1890s–1940s (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995), 132–49. Such an interplay between cultural performance and economic strategy can even be found in military prisons and boarding schools, where American Indians managed to turn the most assimilationist of institutions into spaces of resilience. Joel Pfister, Individuality Incorporated: Indians and the Multicultural Modern (Durham, NC: Duke University

Notes to Pages 8–14 Press, 2004), 66–132; Brad D. Lookingbill, War Dance at Fort Marion: Plains Indian War Prisoners (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006), 82–105. 17. Georg Henriksen, Hunters in the Barrens: The Naskapi on the Edge of the White Man’s World (St. John’s, Newfoundland: Institute of Social and Economic Research, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1973). Early in my career, another book had a huge influence on my own attentiveness to these spaces of vulnerability. Niels Winther Braroe, Indian and White: Self-Image and Interaction in a Canadian Plains Community (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975), studied day-to-day relations between a small band of Cree Indians in western Canada and the white townspeople and ranchers living around them. 18. Richard Frohock, Heroes of Empire: The British Imperial Protagonist in America, 1596–1764 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 115–21; Edwin A. Burtt, ed., The English Philosophers from Bacon to Mill (New York: Modern Library, 1939), 413. 19. Hamlin’s report is quoted in Laurence M. Hauptman, The Iroquois Struggle for Survival: World War II to Red Power (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1986), 103. 20. Richard J. Hooker, ed., The Carolina Backcountry on the Eve of the Revolution: The Journal and Other Writings of Charles Woodmason, Anglican Itinerant (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1953), 33, 56. 21. William Greider, Who Will Tell the People: The Betrayal of American Democracy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), 111. 22. Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (New York: Viking Penguin, 2003), 122–23, 164–65. For a pathbreaking analysis of how respective discussions of economic issues and ideas among Indians and non-Indians compared and connected with each other, see Alexandra Harmon, “American Indians and Land Monopolies in the Gilded Age,” Journal of American History 90 (June 2003): 106–33. 23. Albert Gallatin, A Synopsis of the Indian Tribes within the United States East of the Rocky Mountains, and in the British and Russian Possessions in North America (Cambridge, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 1836), 152–54. For the passage from John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1690), see Burtt, English Philosophers, 413. 24. Ronald P. Rohner, comp. and ed., The Ethnography of Franz Boas: Letters and Diaries of Franz Boas Written on the Northwest Coast from 1886 to 1931, trans. Hedy Parker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 5–6. 25. T. H. Breen, Imagining the Past: East Hampton Histories (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1989), 179–80. 26. David Boeri, People of the Ice Whale: Eskimos, White Men, and the Whale (San Diego: Dutton, 1983), 82. 27. Bunny McBride, Molly Spotted Elk: A Penobscot in Paris (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995), 219–20.

151

152

Notes to Pages 14–15 28. Boeri, People of the Ice Whale, 78–79. 29. By highlighting the different ways that white women in the antebellum North imagined American Indians and African Americans in their political activism, for example, Alisse Portnoy explains how reform positions taken on slavery were influenced by opposition to removal. Seeing the rhetorical connections between antiremoval and antislavery campaigns improves our understanding of why many chose colonization over abolition. See Alisse Portnoy, Their Right to Speak: Women’s Activism in the Indian and Slave Debates (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 92–95. Usage of Indian imagery by women suffragists well into the twentieth century has been traced by Gail H. Landsman in “The ‘Other’ as Political Symbol: Images of Indians in the Woman Suffrage Movement,” Ethnohistory 39 (Summer 1992): 247–84. John Campbell shows how abolitionists’ political rhetoric about Southern slave owners using bloodhounds to control and terrorize their slaves had actually originated with the Second Seminole War. Use of dogs by the U.S. Army against the Seminoles and their black allies in the 1830s stirred up images of Indians being attacked by Spanish conquistadors and runaway slaves being pursued by Caribbean planters. For the antislavery movement of the 1840s and 1850s, the brutal campaign against Indians and slaves in Florida made the bloodhound a powerful sign of slaveholders’ power over the nation. See John Campbell, “The Seminoles, the ‘Bloodhound War,’ and Abolitionism, 1796–1865,” Journal of Southern History 72 (May 2006): 259–302. 30. U.S. marines and sailors confronting Koreans during a long forgotten war in 1871—a provocative diplomatic mission gone awry—mobilized their notions of Indians to characterize their Asian enemies, one noting that they fought with the “coolness and immobility of Indians.” Frederick Low, a California businessman who had served as his state’s governor and congressman and now as ambassador to China was leading an expeditionary force to Korea, wrote in his diary, “Human life is considered of little value, and soldiers, educates as they have been, meet death with the same indifference as the Indians of North America.” The battle experience of this American expedition’s military commander, Admiral John Rodgers, included warfare against the Seminoles in Florida. This brief conflict with the Korean kingdom was the United States’ bloodiest military engagement abroad between the Mexican and Spanish-American wars and the first occupation of Asian territory by U.S. armed forces. See Gordon H. Chang, “Whose ‘Barbarism’? Whose ‘Treachery’? Race and Civilization in the Unknown United States–Korea War of 1871,” Journal of American History 89 (March 2003): 1331–65, quotes on 1355–56. The linguistic use of American Indians as analogy in U.S. foreign policy was significantly amplified during the repression of native resistance in the Philippines, when major features of Indian policy were directly applied to annexation of island territories. See Walter L. Williams, “United States Indian Policy and the Debate over Philippine

Notes to Pages 15–20 Annexation: Implications for the Origins of American Imperialism,” Journal of American History 66 (March 1980): 810–31; David J. Silbey, A War of Frontier and Empire: The Philippine-American War, 1899–1902 (New York: Hill & Wang, 2007), 88–97. 31. Cheryl Walker, Indian Nation: Native American Literature and NineteenthCentury Nationalisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); Timothy Sweet, American Georgics: Economy and Environment in Early American Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002); John J. Kucich, Ghostly Communion: Cross-Cultural Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2004); Mark Simpson, Trafficking Subjects: The Politics of Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Cari M. Carpenter, Seeing Red: Anger, Sentimentality, and American Indians (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008). 32. Paul C. Rosier, “ ‘They Are Ancestral Homelands’: Race, Place, and Politics in Cold War Native America, 1945–1961,” Journal of American History 92 (March 2006): 1300–1326. 1. Inventing the Hunter State 1. H. A. Washington, ed., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1869), 8:188–89. 2. This historiographical problem and others regarding Indian agriculture are raised in Thomas R. Wessel, “Agriculture, Indians, and American History,” Agricultural History 50 (1976): 9–20. Also see R. Douglas Hurt, Indian Agriculture in America: Prehistory to the Present (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1987); and David Rich Lewis, Neither Wolf nor Dog: American Indians, Environment, and Agrarian Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). 3. Francis Paul Prucha, American Indian Policy in the Formative Years: The Indian Trade and Intercourse Acts, 1790–1834 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 214; Bernard W. Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction: Jeffersonian Philanthropy and the American Indian (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973), 165. 4. Stuart Bruchey, Enterprise: The Dynamic Economy of a Free People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 43–44, 59, 72, 77, 105, 107, 224, 232–33, 288. 5. Notable departures from this neglect are William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill & Wang, 1983); and Peter C. Mancall, Valley of Opportunity: Economic Culture along the Upper Susquehanna, 1700–1800 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). Allan Kulikoff, The Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992) is an important contribution

153

154

Notes to Pages 20–24 to the study of class formation and capitalist transformation in rural America before 1840, but it ignores the involvement of American Indians. 6. T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 64, 156, 173, 295. 7. Cronon, Changes in the Land, 43–44, 51–52; James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 148–67. 8. Francis P. Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 60–84. 9. A strong case for this explanation is made in David D. Smits, “The ‘Squaw Drudge’: A Prime Index of Savagism,” Ethnohistory 29 (Autumn 1982): 281–306. 10. Samuel Purchas quotation in Jennings, Invasion of America, 80; John Winthrop quotation in Cronon, Changes in the Land, 56. 11. Jennings, Invasion of America, 81; Emmerich de Vattel quotation in Prucha, American Indian Policy, 241. The concept of vacuum domicilium was practiced less during the colonial era than commonly thought, making its enduring grip on later representation of American Indians all the more problematic. See Stuart Banner, How the Indians Lost Their Land: Law and Power on the Frontier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). 12. Paul Leicester Ford, ed., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1897), 8:213–14. 13. William G. McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 92–99, 128–32, 164–65, 214. 14. For two penetrating critiques of how theoretical models from this era have affected historians and social scientists, see Charles Tilly, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1984); and Andrew C. Janos, Politics and Paradigms: Changing Theories of Change in Social Science (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986). 15. Cronon, Changes in the Land; Michael Leroy Oberg, Dominion and Civility: English Imperialism and Native America, 1585–1685 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999); Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000). 16. Jess Edwards, “Between ‘Plain Wilderness’ and ‘Goodly Corn Fields’: Representing Land Use in Early Virginia,” Envisioning an English Empire: Jamestown and the Making of the North Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 217–35. 17. J. H. Elliott, The Old World and the New, 1492–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 50. 18. Gilbert Chinard, “Eighteenth-Century Theories on America as a Human Habitat,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 91 (1947), 27–57

Notes to Pages 24–27 (Montesquieu quotation is from page 28 of this article); Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction, 34–39. 19. The seminal work in our new understanding of hunting-gathering societies is Marshall Sahlins, “The Original Affluent Society,” in his Stone Age Economics (Chicago: Aldine, 1972), 1–39. 20. Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 73. 21. Leonard W. Labaree, ed., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1961), 4:228. 22. Alfred W. Crosby has developed the point ignored by Franklin and many subsequent American pundits in “Maize, Land, Demography, and the American Character,” Revue Française d’Etudes Américaines 16 (1991): 151–62. 23. Julian P. Boyd et al., eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1954), 9:218. 24. Ford, Writings of Jefferson, 8:344–45. 25. Washington, Writings of Jefferson, 8:225–26; DeWitt Clinton, “A Discourse Delivered before the New-York Historical Society, at their Anniversary meeting, 6th December, 1811,” Collections of the New-York Historical Society 2 (1814): 85; American State Papers: Indian Affairs (Washington, DC: Gales & Seaton, 1832–34), 2:496. 26. Hugh Williamson quotation in Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction, 39; Massachusetts Centinel, September 15, 1784; Joyce O. Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican View of the 1790s (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 44–45; Myra Jehlen, American Incarnation: The Individual, the Nation, and the Continent (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 72–73. 27. Frederick W. Turner, Beyond Geography: The Western Spirit against the Wilderness (New York: Viking Press, 1980). For a study of Genesis 1:28, rejecting the argument, begun years ago by Hayden White, that this verse in the Bible originated Europe’s destructive treatment of the environment, see Jeremy Cohen, Be Fertile and Increase. Fill the Earth and Master It: The Ancient and Medieval Career of a Biblical Text (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989). 28. This point is made in Peter S. Onuf, Statehood and Union: A History of the Northwest Ordinance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 5–19. 29. Alan Taylor, Liberty Men and Great Proprietors: The Revolutionary Settlement on the Maine Frontier, 1760–1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 49–59; Rachel N. Klein, Unification of a Slave State: The Rise of the Planter Class in the South Carolina Backcountry, 1760–1808 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 51–64. 30. Timothy Sweet, American Georgics: Economy and Environment in Early American Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002),

155

156

Notes to Pages 27–29 97–121; Woody Holton, “Did Democracy Cause the Recession That Led to the Constitution?” Journal of American History 92 (September 2005), 455–56, 463–64. 31. J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer and Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America, ed. Albert E. Stone (New York: Penguin Books, 1981), 76–78, 219–20. 32. For historiographical background and a particular interpretation on Jeffersonian agrarianism, see Joyce O. Appleby, “Commercial Farming and the ‘Agrarian Myth’ in the Early Republic,” Journal of American History 68 (March 1982): 833–49. 33. Adrienne Koch and William Peden, eds., The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Modern Library, 1944), 280–81. The influence of classical thought on Jeffersonian agrarians is argued effectively in Andrew W. Foshee, “Jeffersonian Political Economy and the Classical Republican Tradition: Jefferson, Taylor, and the Agrarian Republic,” History of Political Economy 17 (1985): 523–50. A tension between antiquity and innovation operating within Jeffersonian thinking is exposed in Drew R. McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 76–104. 34. This worry about modernization going too far animated many U.S. States leaders throughout the nineteenth century, especially the Democratic Party expansionists of the 1840s. See Thomas R. Heitala, Manifest Design: Anxious Aggrandizement in Late Jacksonian America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 95–122. 35. Koch and Peden, Life and Writings of Jefferson, 280; Appleby, “Commercial Farming,” and Capitalism and a New Social Order, 88–95. 36. E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1962), 149–52. 37. Arthur Young, Travels during the Years 1787, 1788 and 1789, Undertaken More Particularly with a View of Ascertaining the Cultivation, Wealth, Resources, and National Prosperity of the Kingdom of France (Dublin: Printed for Messrs. R. Cross, P. Wogan, L. White, P. Byrne, A. Grueber, J. Moore, J. Jones, W. Jones, W. McKenzie, and J. Rice, 1793), 1:174. 38. Boyd, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 11:415. For insight into changing images of peasantry in European culture, see Liana Vardi, “Imagining the Harvest in Early Modern Europe,” American Historical Review 101 (December 1996): 1357–97; and Graham Robb, The Discovery of France: Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 103–11. 39. John R. Nelson, Jr., Liberty and Property: Political Economy and Policymaking in the New Nation, 1789–1812 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), 96–98.

Notes to Pages 29–32 40. Marc Bloch, French Rural History: An Essay on Its Basic Characteristics, trans. Janet Sondheimer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 219–20; E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Pantheon Books, 1963), 218–20. 41. Ford, Writings of Jefferson, 8:345. The wider target of Jefferson’s stricture against Indian economic conservatism is detailed in Noble E. Cunningham, Jr., In Pursuit of Reason: The Life of Thomas Jefferson (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 276–77. 42. For the latest and best treatment of this period, see Alan Taylor, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006). Also see Alyssa Mt. Pleasant, “After the Whirlwind: Maintaining a Haudenosaunee Place at Buffalo Creek, 1780–1825” (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 2007). 43. Franklin B. Hough, ed., Proceedings of the Commissioners of Indian Affairs, Appointed by Law for the Extinguishment of Indian Titles in the State of New York (Albany, 1861), 1:86; Dorothy V. Jones, License for Empire: Colonialism by Treaty in Early America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 179–85. 44. Hough, Proceedings of the Commissioners of Indian Affairs, 1:91. 45. “Letters of the Reverend Elkanah Holmes from Fort Niagara in 1800,” ed. Frank H. Severance, Publications of the Buffalo Historical Society 6 (1903): 199. 46. Proceedings of Councils Held at Geneseo River with Senecas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Delawares, November 12, 1801, O’Reilly Papers, New-York Historical Society, New York City; also in Iroquois Indians: A Documentary History (Woodbridge, CT, 1985), microfilm, roll 44. 47. Hough, Proceedings of the Commissioners of Indian Affairs, 2:279. 48. William L. Stone, The Life and Times of Red-Jacket, or Sa-go-ye-wat-ha; Being the Sequel to the History of the Six Nations (New York: Wiley & Putnam, 1841), 56–59. 49. Speech of Cornplanter to General George Washington in Philadelphia, February 28, 1797, O’Reilly Papers; also in Iroquois Indians, roll 44. 50. Proceedings of Councils Held at Geneseo River, O’Reilly Papers; also in Iroquois Indians, roll 44. 51. My thinking here as been influenced by Greg Dening, Islands and Beaches: Discourse on a Silent Land, Marquesas, 1774–1880 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1980); Maurice Godelier, The Mental and the Material: Thought, Economy, and Society, trans. Maurice Thom (London: Verso, 1986); Stephen Gudeman, Economics as Culture: Models and Metaphors of Livelihood (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986); and J. Stephen Lansing, Priests and Programmers: Technologies of Power in the Engineered Landscape of Bali (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991).

157

158

Notes to Pages 32–35 52. Marvin Thomas Hatley, The Dividing Paths: Cherokees and South Carolinians through the Era of Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 162–63, 214. 53. Susan Kent, “Cross-Cultural Perceptions of Farmers as Hunters and the Value of Meat,” in Farmers as Hunters: The Implications of Sedentism, ed. Susan Kent, 1–17 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 54. Bryan D. Palmer, Descent into Discourse: The Reification of Language and the Writing of Social History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990); Miguel A. Cabrera, Postsocial History: An Introduction, trans. Marle McMahon (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004). 55. William Wyckoff, The Developer’s Frontier: The Making of the Western New York Landscape (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988). 56. Anthony F. C. Wallace, The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), 208–9. For additional information on the expansion of commercial agriculture in the areas, see Neil Adams McNall, An Agricultural History of the Genesee Valley, 1790–1860 (Philadelphia, 1952), 11–95; and Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815–1837 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1978), 16–24. 57. Wallace, Death and Rebirth of the Seneca, 226. 58. “Visit of Gerald T. Hopkins, A Quaker Ambassador to the Indians Who Visited Buffalo in 1804,” ed. Frank H. Severance, Publications of the Buffalo Historical Society 6 (1903): 221; Wallace, Death and Rebirth of the Seneca, 310–15; Marilyn Holly, “Handsome Lake’s Teachings: The Shift from Female to Male Agriculture in Iroquois Culture. An Essay in Ethnophilosophy,” Agriculture and Human Values 7 (1980): 80–94. 59. Hough, Proceedings of the Commissioners of Indian Affairs, 165–71. 60. Jedidiah Morse, A Report to the Secretary of War of the United States, on Indian Affairs, Comprising a Narrative of a Tour Performed in the Summer of 1820 (New Haven, 1822), App. 4. 61. Wallace, Death and Rebirth of the Seneca, 311. 62. Diane Rothenberg, “The Mothers of the Nation: Seneca Resistance to Quaker Intervention,” in Women and Colonization: Anthropological Perspectives, ed. Mona Etienne and Eleanor Burke Leacock, 63–87 (New York: Praeger, 1980). Also see Joan M. Jensen, “Native American Women and Agriculture: A Seneca Case Study,” Sex Roles: A Journal of Research 3 (1977): 423–41, reprinted her Promise to the Land: Essays on Rural Women (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991), 133–52; and Nancy Shoemaker, “The Rise or Fall of Iroquois Women,” Journal of Women’s History 2 (1991): 39–57. 63. Communication from Tuscarora Chiefs, April 26, 1799, enclosed in James McHenry to Israel Chapin, May 10, 1799, O’Reilly Papers; also in Iroquois Indians, roll 44.

Notes to Pages 36–38 64. Stone, Life and Times of Red-Jacket, 84–85. 65. Charles M. Snyder, ed., Red and White on the New York Frontier, a Struggle for Survival: Insights from the Papers of Erastus Granger, Indian Agent, 1807–1819 (Harrison, NY: Harbor Hill Books, 1978), 31–34; “An Act for the Relief of the St. Regis, Oneida, Onondaga, and Seneca Indians” [1817], in Laws of the Colonial and State Governments, Relating to Indians and Indian Affairs, from 1633 to 1831, Inclusive (Washington, DC, 1832), 92. 66. “Letters of Holmes,” 199. The significance of this early nineteenthcentury discrepancy between white observers’ perception of Indian hunting as primitive subsistence and American Indians’ application of hunting to the market economy is brilliantly explored in Daniel K. Richter, “ ‘Believing That Many of the Red People Suffer Much for the Want of Food’: Hunting, Agriculture, and a Quaker Construction of Indianness in the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 19 (Winter 1999): 601–28. 67. “Visit to Buffalo, in 1806, of the Rev. Roswell Burrows,” ed. Frank H. Severance, Publications of the Buffalo Historical Society 6 (1903): 235; Carl F. Klinck and James J. Talman, eds., The Journal of Major John Norton, 1816 (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1970), 9. 68. Estwick Evans, A Pedestrious Tour, of Four Thousand Miles, through the Western States and Territories, during the Winter and Spring of 1818, in Early Western Travels, 1748–1846, ed. Reuben Gold Thwaites, Cleveland, OH: A. H. Clark, 1904), 8:155. 69. Rothenberg, “Mothers of the Nation,” 71–79. For the long view of Iroquois people as a colonial workforce, see Gail D. MacLeitch, “ ‘Red’ Labor: Iroquois Participation in the Atlantic Economy,” Labor: Studies in WorkingClass History 1, no. 4 (2004): 69–90. 70. Anthony F. C. Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 120–27, quotation from 123. Also see Wayne Andrews, “The Baroness Hyde de Neuville’s Sketches of American Life, 1807–1822,” and William N. Fenton, “The Hyde de Neuville Portraits of New York Savages in 1807–1808,” New-York Historical Society Quarterly 38 (July 1954): 105–37; William C. Sturtevant, “Patagonian Giants and Baroness Hyde de Neuville’s Iroquois Drawings,” Ethnohistory 27 (Fall 1980): 331–48. 71. Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, Notes on the Iroquois; or, Contributions to American History, Antiquities, and General Ethnology (Albany, NY: E. H. Pease, 1847), 10–21, 32–38. To the very present, men and women from Iroquois reservations mix off- and on-reservation activities in a versatile pursuit of livelihood and a persistent expression of sovereignty. Military service, seasonal wage work (most notably high-steel construction), educational pursuits, and political missions have taken Iroquois people far away from their communities, but reservation land continues to be the primary source of security and autonomy.

159

160

Notes to Pages 39–42 Barbara Graymont, ed., Fighting Tuscarora: The Autobiography of Chief Clinton Rickard (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1973); Laurence M. Hauptman, The Iroquois in the Civil War: From Battlefield to Reservation (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1993); Hauptman, The Iroquois Struggle for Survival: World War II to Red Power (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1986); Richard Hill, Skywalkers: A History of Indian Ironworkers (Brantford, ON: Woodland Indian Cultural Educational Centre, 1987). 72. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “Dis-Covering the Subject of the ‘Great Constitutional Discussion,’ 1786–1789,” Journal of American History 79 (December 1992): 841–73. Also see Eve Kornfeld, “Encountering ‘the Other’: American Intellectuals and Indians in the 1790s,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d. ser., 52 (April 1995): 287–314. 73. Frederick M. Binder, The Color Problem in Early National America as Viewed by John Adams, Jefferson, and Jackson (The Hague: Mouton, 1968), 150. 74. Robert F. Sayre, Thoreau and the American Indians (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 21. 75. Lewis Henry Morgan, League of the Ho-dé-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois (Rochester, NY, 1851), 57. 76. Snyder, Red and White, 94. 77. Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser and Amy Ellis, with Maureen Miesmer, Hudson River School: Masterworks from the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 7–11; Alan Taylor, William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early Republic (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 39–40. 2. Narratives of Decline and Disappearance 1. After generations of scholarly neglect, settings outside the constricting political boundaries of Indian country are finally receiving attention as important locations of adaptation and resistance by Indian people to rapidly changing conditions. For a range of examples, see James F. Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Brenda J. Child, Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900–1940 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998); Alexandra Harmon, Indians in the Making: Ethnic Relations and Indian Identities around Puget Sound (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Jane T. Merritt, At the Crossroads: Indians and Empires on a Mid-Atlantic Frontier, 1700–1763 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Susan Sleeper-Smith, Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes (Amherst: Univer-

Notes to Pages 44–45 sity of Massachusetts Press, 2001); and Tanis C. Thorne, Many Hands of My Relations: French and Indians on the Lower Missouri to the Removal Era (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996). 2. Samuel Wilson, Jr., ed., Southern Travels: Journal of John H. B. Latrobe, 1834 (New Orleans: Historic New Orleans Collection, 1986), 67–71. 3. The only hint of American Indians on the Natchez landscape in D. Clayton James’s valuable book about the town in the early nineteenth century is a quotation from traveler Christian Schultz (1807–1808), describing a street fight between two white boatmen who were drunk and were vying for the attention of a “Choctaw lady.” Antebellum Natchez (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968), 262. 4. John Q. Anderson, ed., “The Narrative of John Hutchins,” Journal of Mississippi History 20 (January 1958): 1–29. 5. For seminal scholarship on various pre–World War II urban experiences of American Indians, see Jacqueline Peterson, “ ‘Wild Chicago’: The Formation and Destruction of a Multiracial Community on the Midwestern Frontier, 1816–1837,” in The Ethnic Frontier: Essays in the History of Group Survival in Chicago and the Midwest, ed. Melvin G. Holi and Peter D’A. Jones, 25–71 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1977); George Harwood Phillips, “Indians in Los Angeles, 1781–1875: Economic Integration, Social Disintegration,” Pacific Historical Review 49 (August 1980): 427–51; Bruce Katzer, “The Caughnawaga Mohawks: The Other Side of Ironwork,” Journal of Ethnic Studies 15 (Winter 1988): 39–55; and Russel Lawrence Barsh, “Puget Sound Indian Demography, 1900–1920: Migration and Economic Integration,” Ethnohistory 43 (Winter 1996): 65–97. The most accomplished study of a city’s Indian population over a long span of time is Coll Thrush, Native Seattle: Histories from the CrossingOver Place (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007). 6. “Documents: Tonti Letters,” Mid-America 21 (July 1939): 226–27; Mississippi Provincial Archives: French Dominion, vols. 1–3, ed. Dunbar Rowland and Albert Godfrey Sanders (Jackson: Mississippi Department of Archives and History, 1929–1932), vols. 4–5, rev. and ed. Patricia Kay Galloway (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984), 3:530–31, cited hereafter as MPAFD; John R. Swanton, Indian Tribes of the Lower Mississippi Valley and Adjacent Coast of the Gulf of Mexico, Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 43 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1911), 334–36. 7. Daniel H. Usner, Jr., American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley: Social and Economic Histories (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 15–32; Ian W. Brown, “The Eighteenth-Century Natchez Chiefdom,” in The Natchez District in the Old, Old South, ed. Vincas P. Steponaitis, Southern Research Report No. 11, pp. 49–65 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Research Laboratories of Archaeology, 1998).

161

162

Notes to Pages 46–49 8. Shannon Lee Dawdy, “Proper Caresses and Prudent Distance: A How-To Manual from Colonial Louisiana,” in Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, ed. Ann Laura Stoler (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 142, 159. 9. Germain J. Bienvenu, “Another America, Another Literature: Narratives from Louisiana’s Colonial Experience” (Ph.D. diss., Louisiana State University, 1995), 278, 409–504; Patricia Galloway, “Rhetoric of Difference: Le Page du Pratz on African Slave Management in Eighteenth-Century Louisiana,” French Colonial History 3 (2003): 1–16; Shannon Lee Dawdy, “Enlightenment from the Ground: Le Page du Pratz’s Histoire de la Louisiane,” French Colonial History 3 (2003): 17–34. 10. MPAFD, 4:122–23, 250, 338, 5:62–63. 11. MPAFD, 4:181; “Records of the Superior Council,” Louisiana Historical Quarterly 14 (July 1931): 458. 12. Mary Ann Wells, Native Land: Mississippi 1540–1798 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi), 149–77. 13. MPAFD, 5:48–49, 76. 14. MPAFD, 5:143–45. 15. MPAFD, 5:173–78. 16. Wells, Native Land, 149–77. 17. Robert V. Haynes, The Natchez District and the American Revolution (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1976), 87–88, 124–25, 136, 139–40, 142–52; Greg O’Brien, “ ‘We Are Behind You’: The Choctaw Occupation of Natchez in 1778,” Journal of Mississippi History 64 (Summer 2002): 107–24. 18. For overviews of Indian affairs in Mississippi during this era, see John D. W. Guice, “Face to Face in Mississippi Territory, 1798–1817,” and Samuel J. Wells, “Federal Indian Policy: From Accommodation to Removal,” in The Choctaw before Removal, ed. Carolyn Keller Reeves, 157–80, 181–213 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985); Thomas D. Clark and John W. Guice, Frontiers in Conflict: The Old Southwest, 1795–1830 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989), 19–39, 233–53; and Usner, American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley, 73–93. 19. Lawrence Kinnaird, trans. and ed., Spain in the Mississippi Valley, 1765–1794, (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1946–1949), 2:13, 61–62, 88, 291. 20. Spain in the Mississippi Valley, 2:380–81; Jack D. L. Holmes, Gayoso: The Life of a Spanish Governor in the Mississippi Valley, 1789–1799 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1965), 144. Our current understanding of Choctaw relations with colonial powers in the region has been significantly advanced by James Taylor Carson, Searching for the Bright Path: The Mississippi Choctaws from Prehistory to Removal (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999); and Greg O’Brien, Choctaws in a Revolutionary Age,

Notes to Pages 49–53 1750–1830 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002); and Charles A. Weeks, Paths to a Middle Ground: The Diplomacy of Natchez, Boukfouka, Nogales, and San Fernando de las Barrancas, 1791–1795 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005). 21. Dunbar Rowland, ed., Mississippi Territorial Archives, 1798–1803: Executive Journals of Governor Winthrop Sargent and Governor William Charles Cole Claiborne (Nashville: Brandon Printing, 1905), 1:69–72. 22. Mississippi Territorial Archives, 1:90–91. 23. Dunbar Rowland, ed., Official Letter Books of W. C. C. Claiborne, 1801–1816 (Jackson: Mississippi State Department of Archives and History, 1917), 1:70. 24. Gayoso to Carondelet, December 6, 1793, Despatches of the Spanish Governors of Louisiana, 10:460, Louisiana Historical Center, New Orleans. 25. Mississippi Territorial Archives, 1:194–95. 26. Daniel H. Usner, Jr., Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992). 27. Jacki Thompson Rand analyzes the same process as it unfolded on the Southern Plains. Work carried on by young Kiowa men—hunting and raiding for their families’ livelihood and status—was criminalized by the U.S. government and thereby went unseen as work. The image of a Kiowa warrior culture, advanced by anthropologists and other writers, further erased this work from public view. Kiowa Humanity and the Invasion of the State (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008). 28. Spain in the Mississippi Valley, 2:137. 29. Spain in the Mississippi Valley, 2:85–87, 143–44, 158. 30. Forbes to Carondelet, October 31, 1792, Papeles Procedentes de Cuba (Archivo General de Indias, Seville), legajo 203; Panton, Leslie & Co. to Carondolet, May 2, 1794, Georgia Historical Quarterly 24 (June 1940): 152–53. 31. Spain in the Mississippi Valley, 3:151–52. 32. Diary of Lieutenant Don Estevan Minor, Despatches of the Spanish Governor of Louisiana, 10:241–42; O’Brien, Choctaws in a Revolutionary Age, 86–97. 33. John Bradley to Elias Durnford, February 1, 1770, Mr. Fergy’s Account to the Governor in Council, of an attack Mr. Bradley and others have had with some Indians at Natchez, February 6, 1770, Mississippi Provincial Archives: English Dominion, 4:91–98, 101–4, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson. 34. John Q. Anderson, ed., “The Narrative of John Hutchins,” Journal of Mississippi History 20 (January 1958): 5–6. 35. Mississippi Territorial Archives, 1:148–49. For additional insight into animal husbandry among the Choctaws, see James Taylor Carson, “Horses and the Economy and Culture of the Choctaw Indians, 1690–1840,” Ethnohistory

163

164

Notes to Pages 54–56 42 (Summer 1995): 495–513, and Carson, “Native Americans, the Market Revolution, and Culture Change: The Choctaw Cattle Economy, 1690–1830,” Agricultural History 71 (Winter 1997): 1–18. 36. Official Letter Books, 1:67–70. 37. Official Letter Books, 1:202–04. 38. Official Letter Books, 1:13–14. 39. Official Letter Books, 1:67–68, 121. 40. William D. McCain, ed., Laws of the Mississippi Territory, May 27, 1800 (Beauvoir Community, MS: Book Farm, 1948), 237–40; A. Hutchinson, Code of Mississippi (Jackson, MS: Price & Fall, 1848), 267, 269. 41. Claiborne to Samuel Mitchell, April 29, 1803, Claiborne to Ochchummey, May 17, 1803, Indian Department Journal, 1803–1808, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson. For an insightful discussion of alcohol’s influence on American Indian societies and the role that it played in colonial practices, see Peter C. Mancall, Deadly Medicine: Indians and Alcohol in Early America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). 42. Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., Early Western Travels, 1748–1846, vol. 4, Cuming’s Tour to the Western Country (1807–1809) (Cleveland, OH: A. H. Clark, 1904), 351–52. 43. John A Watkins, “Choctaw Indians,” John A. Watkins Manuscripts, Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane University, New Orleans; McKee to Andrew Jackson, November 19, 1814, Andrew Jackson Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. 44. Henry Bradshaw Fearon, Sketches of America: A Narrative of a Journey of Five Thousand Miles through the Eastern and Western States (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, & Brown, 1818), 269. 45. H. S. Fulkerson, Random Recollections of Early Days in Mississippi (Vicksburg, MS: Vicksburg Printing & Publishing, 1885), 12. 46. Eliza Nutt to Rush Nutt, December 6, 1817, Rush Nutt Papers, NU 226, The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, California. 47. John Nevitt Diary, 1826–1832, Southern Historical Collection, Manuscripts Department, Academic Affairs Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 48. Dominique Rouquette, “The Choctaws,” typescript of a manuscript written in 1850, 37–43, Louisiana Historical Center, New Orleans; Walter Pritchard, Fred B. Kniffen, and Clair A. Brown, eds., “Southern Louisiana and Southern Alabama in 1819: The Journal of James Leander Cathcart,” Louisiana Historical Quarterly 28 (July 1945): 850–51. For examples of horses being purchased from Choctaws at Mobile, see transactions of October 7 and November 15, 1814, in Panton, Leslie & Company Receipt Book, Papers of Panton, Leslie and Company, University of West Florida, Pensacola.

Notes to Pages 56–60 49. Thwaites, Cuming’s Tour, 320–21; Estwick Evans, A Pedestrious Tour of Four Thousand Miles, through the Western States and Territories, during the Winter and Spring of 1818, in Early Western Travels, 1748–1846, ed. Reuben Gold Thwaites (Cleveland, OH: A. H. Clark, 1904–1907), 8:324; Thomas Nuttall, A Journal of Travels into the Arkansas Territory during the Year 1819, ed. Savoie Lottinville (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980), 258–60. 50. Christian Schultz, Jr., Travels on an Inland Voyage through the States of New-York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee, and through the Territories of Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, and New-Orleans: Performed in the Years 1807 and 1808 (New York: Isaac Riley, 1810), 2:140–43. 51. Howard Corning, ed., Journal of John James Audubon Made during His Trip to New Orleans in 1820–1821 (Boston: Club of Odd Volumes, 1929), 92. 52. Spain in the Mississippi Valley, 3:114. 53. Henry Kerr, Travels through the Western Interior of the United States from the Year 1808 up to the Year 1816 (Elizabethtown, NJ: Printed for the author, 1816), 40; Watkins, “Choctaw Indians.” 54. Villebeuvre to Carondelet, February 22, 1793, East Tennessee Historical Society Publications 29 (1957): 158. 55. Mississippi Territorial Archives, 1:123–24. 56. Evans, Pedestrious Tour, 324. For other episodes, see Usner, American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley, 107–8, 119–20, 134. 57. Official Letter Books, 1:67–68; Clarence Edwin Carter, ed., The Territorial Papers of the United States, vol. 6, The Territory of Mississippi, 1798–1817 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1937), 69–70; Claiborne to Dearborn, June 28, 1803, June 2, 1804, Indian Department Journal, 1803– 1808. 58. Claiborne to Dearborn, June 28, 1803, Indian Department Journal, 1803– 1808. 59. Holmes to William Eustis, December 12, 1812, Correspondence and Papers of Governor David Holmes, Territorial Governor Record Group 2, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson. 60. Gordon Sayre, “Plotting the Natchez Massacre: Le Page du Pratz, Dumont de Montigny, Chateaubriand,” Early American Literature 37, no. 3 (2002): 381–413. 61. Harry Liebersohn, “Discovering Indigenous Nobility: Tocqueville, Chamisso, and Romantic Travel Writing,” American Historical Review 99 (June 1994): 746–66, quote from 757–58. 62. Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1919), 274–78; Rena Neumann Coen, “The Indian as the Noble Savage in Nineteenth Century American Art” (Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 1969), 8–10.

165

166

Notes to Pages 61–67 63. Coen, “Indian as the Noble Savage,” 36–37, 98–99; Delacroix: An Exhibition of Paintings, Drawings, and Lithographs (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1964), 17; Jean Stewart, ed. and trans., Eugène Delacroix: Selected Letters 1813–1863 (Boston: MFA Publications, 1970), 212, 217. “The Natchez” was first bought by Charles Rivet, Préfect of the Rhone, and then won as a prize in a charity lottery by a M. Paturle. 64. Daniel F. Littlefield, ed., The Life of Okah Tubbee (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988). 65. Amy E. Den Ouden, Beyond Conquest: Native Peoples and the Struggle for History in New England (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 3. 66. Evans, Pedestrious Tour, 324; Nuttall, Journal of Travels, 258. 67. “President Jackson on Indian Removal, December 8, 1829,” in Documents of United States Indian Policy, ed. Francis Paul Prucha, 2d ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 48. 68. Joseph Holt Ingraham, The Southwest: By a Yankee (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1835), 1:24–26. 69. Pictorial illustrations also exaggerated the debilitated and forlorn characteristics of Indian subjects observed around towns and along transportation routes. For a discussion of literary and pictorial representations of nineteenthcentury Indians in the region, see Usner, American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley, 128–37. 70. R. W. G. Vail, “The American Sketchbook of a French Naturalist, 1816– 1837: A Description of the Charles Alexandre Lesueur collection, with a Brief Account of the Artist,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 48 (April 1938): 49–155; Jacqueline Bonnemains, Charles-Alexandre Lesueur en Amérique du Nord (1816–1837) (Le Havre: Muséum d’histoire naturelle du Havre, 1999), 42, 67–71; Thwaites, Cuming’s Tour, 285–86. 71. Karl Bodmer, Karl Bodmer’s America, intro. William H. Goetzmann, annot. David C. Hunt and Marsha V. Gallagher, biog. William J. Orr (Omaha and Lincoln: Joslyn Art Museum and University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 109–12, 118–20. 72. Miriam J. Shillingsburg, “The Maturing of Simm’s Short Fiction: The Example of ‘Oakatibbe,’ ” Mississippi Quarterly 38 (Spring 1985): 99–117. In a short story set in his home state of South Carolina, “Caloya; or, the Loves of the Driver” (1842), Simms built the plot around his childhood memory of the Catawbas’ itinerant journeys to Charleston. Both “Oakatibbe” and “Caloya” can be found in Simms’s Wigwam and the Cabin (New York: Wiley & Putnam, 1845). I am grateful to Katherine Osburn for encouraging me to amplify my analysis of “Oakatibbe” in this chapter and look forward to her own treatment of this material in her forthcoming book on the Mississippi Choctaws.

Notes to Pages 70–73

3. The Discourse over Poverty 1. New York Times, December 17, 2005, A15. 2. Laura M. Stevens, The Poor Indians: British Missionaries, Native Americans, and Colonial Sensibility (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Susan M. Ryan, The Grammar of Good Intentions: Race and the Antebellum Culture of Benevolence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003). 3. David S. Jones, Rationalizing Epidemics: Meanings and Uses of American Indian Mortality since 1600 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Mary Ellen Kelm, “Diagnosing the Discursive Indian: Medicine, Gender, and the ‘Dying Race,’ ” Ethnohistory 52 (Spring 2005): 371–406. 4. Oz Frankel’s States of Inquiry: Social Investigations and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the United States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), for example, includes official U.S. investigations of American Indians in his comparative analysis of how the modern “information state” took shape. 5. Stephanie Brzuzy, Layne Stromwall, Polly Sharp, Regina Wilson, and Elizabeth Segal, “The Vulnerability of American Indian Women in the New Welfare State,” AFFILIA 15 (Summer 2000): 193–203; Stephen Cornell, “What Is Institutional Capacity and How Can It Help American Indian Nations Meet the Welfare Challenge?” Paper presented at the Symposium on Capacity Building and Sustainability of Tribal Governments: The Development of Social Welfare Systems through Preferred Futuring, Washington University, St. Louis, May 21–23, 2002. 6. Kenneth J. Neubeck and Noel A. Cazenave, Welfare Racism: Playing the Race Card against America’s Poor (New York: Routledge, 2001), 55–56, 181, 200–203. Also see Michael K. Brown, Race, Money, and the American Welfare State (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999). 7. Robert H. Bremner, American Philanthropy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 5–6. 8. Bremner, American Philanthropy, 23–24; Walter I. Trattner, From Poor Law to Welfare State: A History of Social Welfare in America (New York: Free Press, 1974), 21–22, 30. 9. Warren M. Billings, ed., The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century: A Documentary History of Virginia, 1606–1700, rev. ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 343–46. Thanks to Katherine Osburn for pointing me to this document. 10. Daniel K. Richter, “ ‘Believing That Many of the Red People Suffer Much for the Want of Food’: Hunting, Agriculture, and a Quaker Construction of Indianness in the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 19 (Winter 1999): 601–28.

167

168

Notes to Pages 73–76 11. Edward Berkowitz and Kim McQuaid, Creating the Welfare State: The Political Economy of Twentieth-Century Reform, 2d ed. (New York: Praeger, 1988), 4–5. Although American Indians are not specifically mentioned in either book, Charles Noble, Welfare As We Knew It: A Political History of the American Welfare State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); and Brown, Race, Money, and the American Welfare State, are thoughtful overviews. 12. The Papers of Sir William Johnson (Albany: University of the State of New York, 1951), 10:354–55. 13. Gregory Evans Dowd, War under Heaven: Pontiac, the Indian Nations, and the British Empire (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). 14. Alice O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 3–39, 266–67; Shelton Stromquist, Re-inventing “The People”: The Progressive Movement, the Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 132. Neglect of American Indians in new studies of reform is also apparent in Steven L. Piott, American Reformers, 1870–1920: Progressives in Word and Deed (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006). 15. The complex history of American Indians’ political and legal status in the United States is fully explored in Vine Deloria, Jr., and Clifford M. Lytle, American Indians, American Justice (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983); and David E. Wilkins and K. Tsianina Lomawaima, Uneven Ground: American Indian Sovereignty and Federal Law (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001). 16. For good summaries of this entangled history, see C. Matthew Snipp and Gene F. Summers, “American Indians and Economic Poverty,” in Rural Poverty in America, ed. Cynthia M. Duncan, 155–76 (New York: Auburn House, 1992); and Judy Kopp, “An Overview of U.S. Government Assistance and Restitution to American Indians,” in The Native North American Almanac, ed. Duane Champagne, 947–58 (Detroit: Gale Research, 1994). 17. John Bushman, “Welfare Reform Reauthorization and Indian Country,” Indian Country Today, May 22, 2002; Daniel Kraker, “Navajo Welfare Efforts Seen as Major Success,” Weekend Edition Saturday, NPR, August 19, 2006. 18. U.S. Bureau of the Census, We the People: American Indians and Alaska Natives in the United States, Census 2000 Special Reports, Bureau of the Census, Washington, DC, February 2006, 12. Some 31 percent of the 1.9 million American Indians and Alaska Natives counted in 1990 lived below the poverty line (with the poverty line set at $13,924 of income for a family of four). Nearly 100,000 of them were participating in the Special Supplemental Food Program for Women, Infants and Children in April 1991. See Marlita A. Reddy, ed., Statistical Record of Native North Americans (Detroit: Gale Research, 1993), lv–lvi, 771, 814, 827. For analysis of Indian employment and income statistics

Notes to Pages 77–79 based on the 1980 census, see C. Matthew Snipp, American Indians: The First of This Land (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1989), 206–65. 19. Reddy, Statistical Record, 81; Rural Sociological Society Task Force on Persistent Rural Poverty, Persistence of Poverty in Rural America (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993), 175–78, 185–87; Robin M. Leichenko, “Does Place Still Matter? Accounting for Income Variation across American Indian Tribal Areas,” Economic Geography 79 (October 2003): 365–86. 20. Michael Harrington, The Other America: Poverty in the United States, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1981), x; Harrington, The New American Poverty (New York: Rinehart & Winston, 1984), 219–20. 21. Barbara Ballis Lal, The Romance of Culture in an Urban Civilization: Robert E. Park on Race and Ethnic Relations in Cities (London: Routledge, 1990), 69–70. For an overview of anthropology’s slow entry into economic analysis, see Kathleen Pickering, “Culture and Reservation Economies,” in A Companion to the Anthropology of American Indians, ed. Thomas Biolsi, 112–29 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004). 22. Ron Trosper, “The Other Discipline: Economics and American Indian History,” in New Directions in American Indian History, ed. Colin G. Calloway, 199–222 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988). 23. In “The View from Eagle Butte: National Archives Field Branches and the Writing of American Indian History,” Journal of American History 76 (June 1989): 172–80, Frederick E. Hoxie identified promising material in agency archives for studying economic activity on reservations and what it meant to Indian people. Early works in this scholarship include Thomas Biolsi, Organizing the Lakota: The Political Economy of the New Deal on the Pine Ridge and Rosebud Reservations (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992); Daniel L. Boxberger, To Fish in Common: The Ethnohistory of Lummi Indian Salmon Fishing (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989); David Rich Lewis, Neither Wolf Nor Dog: American Indians, Environment, and Agrarian Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); and Melissa L. Meyer, The White Earth Tragedy: Ethnicity and Dispossession at a Minnesota Anishinaabe Reservation, 1889–1920 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994). 24. Jacki Thompson Rand, Kiowa Humanity and the Invasion of the State (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 48–57. 25. Hugh Shewell, “Enough to Keep Them Alive”: Indian Welfare in Canada, 1873–1965 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004); Tressa L. Berman, Circle of Goods: Women, Work, and Welfare in a Reservation Community (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003). 26. Jean M. O’Brien, Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650–1790 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 44–45, 69; Jane T. Merritt, At the Crossroads: Indians and Empires on

169

170

Notes to Pages 79–81 a Mid-Atlantic Frontier, 1700–1763 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 147–56. 27. For seminal inquiries into the appearance of this imagery in popular culture, see Mary Fleming Mathur, “The Tale of the Lazy Indian,” Indian Historian 3 (Summer 1970): 14–18; and Rayna D. Green, “Traits of Indian Character: The Indian ‘Anecdote,’ ” Southern Folklore Quarterly 39 (September 1975): 233–62. 28. David D. Smits, “The Frontier Army and the Destruction of the Buffalo: 1865–1883,” Western Historical Quarterly 25 (Autumn 1994): 313–38. 29. Eugene Mitsuru Hattori, Northern Paiutes on the Comstock: Archaeology and Ethnohistory of an American Indian Population in Virginia City, Nevada (Carson City: Nevada State Museum, 1975), 5; Jane Lamm Carroll, “Dams and Damages: The Ojibway, the United States, and the Mississippi Headwaters Reservoirs,” Minnesota History 32 (Spring 1990): 12. 30. Donald Worster, “The Black Hills: Sacred or Profane,” Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 123–25; James Welch and Paul Stekler, Killing Custer: The Battle of the Little Bighorn and the Fate of the Plains Indians (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 87–89. 31. D’Arcy McNickle, “The Indian New Deal as Mirror of the Future,” Political Organization of Native North Americans, ed. Ernest L. Schusky (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1980), 108. 32. Yngve Georg Lithman, The Practice of Underdevelopment and the Theory of Development: The Canadian Indian Case (Stockholm, Sweden: University of Stockholm Studies in Social Anthropology, 1983). Seminal works in this effort are Joseph G. Jorgenson, “Indians and the Metropolis,” in The American Indian in Urban Society, ed. Jack O. Waddell and O. Michael Watson, 67–113 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971); Eleanor Leacock, “Women, Development, and Anthropological Facts and Fictions,” Latin American Perspectives 4 (Winter and Spring 1977): 8–17; and Richard White, The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983). 33. Helen M. Upton, The Everett Report in Historical Perspective: The Indians of New York (Albany: New York State American Revolution Bicentennial Commission, 1980); Clara Sue Kidwell, Choctaws and Missionaries in Mississippi, 1818–1918 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995). 34. Stephen Warren, “Rethinking Assimilation: American Indians and the Practice of Christianity, 1800–1861,” in Charity, Philanthropy, and Civility in American History, ed. Lawrence J. Friedman and Mark D. McGarvie, 107–27 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 35. Donald L. Parman, The Navajos and the New Deal (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976); Laurence M. Hauptman, The Iroquois and the New Deal (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1981).

Notes to Pages 81–83 36. Emma R. Gross, “Setting the Agenda for American Indian Policy Development, 1968–1980,” in American Indian Policy and Cultural Values: Conflict and Accommodation, 47–63 (Los Angeles: American Indian Studies Center, University of California, 1986); Paivi H. Hoikkala, “Mothers and Community Builders: Salt River Pima and Maricopa Women in Community Action,” in Negotiators of Change: Historical Perspectives on Native American Women, ed. Nancy Shoemaker, 213–34 (New York: Routledge, 1995); Daniel M. Cobb, “Philosophy of an Indian War: Indian Community Action in the Johnson Administration’s War on Indian Poverty, 1964–68,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 22, no. 2 (1998): 71–103; Cobb, “ ‘Us Indians Understand the Basics’: Oklahoma Indians and the Politics of Community Action, 1964–1970,” Western Historical Quarterly 33 (Spring 2002): 41–66. 37. For official glimpses into some of these issues, see William A. Brophy and Sophie D. Aberle, The Indian: America’s Unfinished Business (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1966); Alan L. Sorkin, American Indians and Federal Aid (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1971); and American Indian Policy Review Commission, Task Force Three, Report on Federal Administration and Structure of Indian Affairs (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1976). 38. The best examples of this approach include Frederick E. Hoxie, A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880–1920 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984); Susan Scheckel, The Insistence of the Indian: Race and Nationalism in Nineteenth Century American Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). 39. Although they do not suggest possible ties to Indian policy, Michael B. Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America (New York: Basic Books, 1986); and James T. Patterson, America’s Struggle against Poverty, 1900–1985 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986) carefully examine these prevailing aspects of American welfare. 40. See Chapter 1 above. 41. These connections between Indian policy and nineteenth-century reform still await close scrutiny. David J. Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971) is an original and thorough analysis of the asylum-like treatment of deviance and dependency, but it fails to draw any analogy or relationship with the Jacksonian policy of Indian removal. For a more recent interpretation of reform that at least includes a brief discussion of missionaries among Indians, see Steven Mintz, Moralists and Modernizers: America’s Pre–Civil War Reformers (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). 42. Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).

171

172

Notes to Pages 84–87 43. Howard R. Lamar, Dakota Territory, 1861–1889: A Study of Frontier Politics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1956; Michael D. Green, The Politics of Indian Removal: Creek Government and Society in Crisis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983); Ronald N. Satz, Chippewa Treaty Rights: The Reserved Rights of Wisconsin’s Chippewa Indians in Historical Perspective (Madison, 1991). 44. Hoxie, A Final Promise, 10. 45. Hiram Price, “Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, October 24, 1881,” in Documents of United States Indian Policy, ed. Francis Paul Prucha, 2d ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 155–56. 46. Puck, August 30, 1882, 406, 420. 47. Roger A. Fischer, Them Damned Pictures: Explorations in American Political Cartoon Art (North Haven, CT: Archon Books, 1996), 110–16. 48. Joan Mark, A Stranger in Her Native Land: Alice Fetcher and the American Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 118–19. 49. Robert G. Hays, A Race at Bay: New York Times Editorials on “the Indian Problem,” 1860–1900 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997), 91–92. Rations were reportedly reaching some 57,000 American Indians (out of a total population of 267,000), and annuities amounted to $1,507,543 per year (individual payments ranging from 50 cents to $255). 50. Taylor is quoted in Francis Paul Prucha, American Indian Treaties: The History of a Political Anomaly (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 366. 51. Kelly is quoted in Lawrence C. Kelly, The Assault on Assimilation: John Collier and the Origins of Indian Policy Reform (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1983), 187. In When Indians Became Cowboys: Native Peoples and Cattle-Ranching in the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), 48, Peter Iverson cites Granville Stuart, a Montana rancher married to a Shoshone woman, who called reservations “breeding grounds for a race of permanent and prolific paupers.” Stuart was pushing for the speedy allotment and sale of Crow Indian land. In 1886 Stuart would lose most of his forty thousand head of cattle to drought and a severe winter. 52. Heman Humphrey, On Doing Good to the Poor: A Sermon, Preached at Pittsfield, on the Day of the Annual Fast, April 4, 1818 (Pittsfield, MA: Phinehas Allen, 1818), excerpted in Seth Rockman, Welfare Reform in the Early Republic: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003), 58–59. 53. Charles Loring Brace, The Dangerous Classes of New York, and Twenty Years’ Work among Them (New York: Wynkoop & Hallenbeck, 1872), 97. 54. Richard Slotkin, Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (New York: Atheneum, 1985), 435–98, is a pathbreaking discussion of this connection. For a recent synthesis of U.S. history

Notes to Pages 87–92 in the late nineteenth century that pays sustained attention to American Indian experiences, see Rebecca Edwards, New Spirits: Americans in the Gilded Age, 1865–1905 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). 55. Hoxie, A Final Promise, 37. 56. Gerald Ronning, “Jackpine Savages: Discourses of Conquest in the 1916 Mesabi Iron Range Strike,” Labor History 44 (August 2003): 359–82. 57. Glenn C. Altschuler, Race, Ethnicity, and Class in American Social Thought, 1865–1919 (Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1982), 1–39, is exceptional in drawing this parallel between policies toward black freedmen and Indians. 58. Slotkin, Fatal Environment, 441. 59. Trattner, From Poor Law to Welfare State, 136–211; Altschuler, Race, Ethnicity, and Class in American Social Thought, 76–113. 60. Hoxie, A Final Promise, 147–210. 61. Alan Trachtenberg, Shades of Hiawatha: Staging Indians, Making Americans, 1880–1930 (New York: Hill & Wang, 2004). 62. Lawrence C. Kelly, The Assault on Assimilation: John Collier and the Origins of Indian Policy Reform (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1983). 63. Stephen Cornell, The Return of the Native: American Indian Political Resurgence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 71–218. 64. Gerald Vizenor, Crossbloods: Bone Courts, Bingo, and Other Reports (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), xxi–xxiii; James H. Schlender, “Treaty Rights in Wisconsin: A Review,” Northeast Indian Quarterly 8 (Spring 1991): 4–16; Donald L. Parman, Indians and the American West in the Twentieth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 177–81. 65. Francis Paul Prucha, ed., Documents of United States Indian Policy, 2d ed., expanded (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 301–2. 66. Parman, Indians and the American West, 175; Vizenor, Crossbloods, xxiii. 67. Charles Murray, Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 64. 68. John Tierney, “Bureaucrats and Indians,” New York Times, June 28, 2005, A23. 69. For a discerning analysis of how this isolation applies to the urban poor, see Michael B. Katz, ed., The “Underclass” Debate: Views from History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), particularly the editor’s remarks on pages 21 and 466. 70. Important early criticism of the culture of poverty concept can be found in Charles A. Valentine, Culture and Poverty: Critique and Counter-Proposals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968); and Eleanor Burke Leacock, ed., The Culture of Poverty: A Critique (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1971). Anthropologist Oscar Lewis introduced the concept to a wide audience in “The

173

174

Notes to Pages 92–95 Culture of Poverty,” Scientific American 215 (October 1966): 19–25. He derived this idea from his fieldwork among Mexican and Puerto Rican families and promoted it in order to encourage more active social policy. Interestingly, Lewis began his career by studying American Indians at Columbia University. His doctoral dissertation there, The Effects of White Contact upon Blackfoot Culture, with Special Reference to the Role of the Fur Trade, was published in 1942. Yet Lewis never elaborated on the socioeconomic experiences of North American Indians in his later theoretical discussions of poverty. 71. Jill S. Quadagno, The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Herber J. Gans, The War against the Poor: The Underclass and Antipoverty Policy (New York: Basic Books, 1995); Brown, Race, Money, and the American Welfare State. 4. Perceptions of Authenticity and Passivity 1. “Devil’s Swamp,” Daily Picayune, December 21, 1890. 2. Ann McMullen and Russell G. Handsman, eds., A Key into the Language of Woodsplint Baskets (Washington, CT: American Indian Archaeological Institute, 1987); Bunny McBride, Our Lives in Our Hands: Micmac Indian Basketmakers (Gardiner, ME: Tilbury House Publishers, 1990); Sarah H. Hill, Weaving New Worlds: Southeastern Cherokee Women and Their Basketry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Marvin Cohodas, Basket Weavers for the California Curio Trade: Elizabeth and Louise Hickox (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997); Sharon E. Dean, Peggy S. Ratcheson, Judith W. Finger, and Ellen F. Daus, with Craig D. Bates, Weaving a Legacy: Indian Baskets and the People of Owens Valley, California (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2004). Our knowledge of Louisiana Indian basketry has been recently advanced to a significant degree by Dayna Bowker Lee and H. F. Gregory, eds., The Work of Tribal Hands: Southeastern Indian Split Cane Basketry (Natchitoches, LA: Northwestern State University Press, 2006), a thoughtfully crafted and beautifully illustrated compilation of old and new essays. 3. Loretta Fowler, Shared Symbols, Contested Meanings: Gros Ventre Culture and History, 1778–1984 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), 242–43; Morris W. Foster, Being Comanche: A Social History of an American Indian Community (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1991), x; Frederick E. Hoxie, Parading through History: The Making of the Crow Nation in America, 1805–1935 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 3–5. 4. Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991). Splendid examples of how to explore contrasting notions of value and utility through objects are Laurier Turgeon, “The Tale of the Kettle: Odyssey of an Intercultural

Notes to Pages 95–99 Object,” Ethnohistory 44 (Winter 1997): 1–29; Timothy J. Shannon, “Queequeg’s Tomahawk: A Cultural Biography, 1750–1900,” Ethnohistory 52 (Summer 2005): 589–633; and Jacki Thompson Rand, Kiowa Humanity and the Invasion of the State (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008). 5. Greg Dening, The Death of William Gooch: A History’s Anthropology (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995), 14. 6. Diane E. Silvia, “Native American and French Cultural Dynamics on the Gulf Coast,” Historical Archaeology 36, no. 1 (2002): 26–35; Daniel H. Usner, Jr., American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley: Social and Economic Histories (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 56–72, 111–27. 7. Shannon Lee Dawdy, “La Ville Sauvage: ‘Enlightened’ Colonialism and Creole Improvisation in New Orleans, 1699–1769” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 2003), 115–20. 8. Hiram F. Gregory and Clarence H. Webb, “Chitimacha Basketry,” Louisiana Archaeology 2 (1975): 24–25. 9. Paige Raibmon, Authentic Indians: Episodes of Encounter from the LateNineteenth-Century Northwest Coast (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 11. Also see Ruth B. Phillips, Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast, 1700–1900 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998); and Shepard Krech III and Barbara A. Hail, eds., Collecting Native America, 1870–1960 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999). 10. Dunbar Rowland, ed. Official Letter Books of W. C. C. Claiborne, 1801–1816 (Jackson, MS: State Department of Archives and History, 1917), 4:223–24. 11. Usner, American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley, 73–127. 12. George W. Cable, Strange True Stories of Louisiana (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1889), 56–59. 13. Clara Compton Raymond, “The Old Plantation Home,” memoir in typescript, ca. 1930, p. 8, Manuscripts Department, Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana. 14. Meloncy C. Soniat, “The Tchoupitoulas Plantation,” Louisiana Historical Quarterly 7 (April 1924): 309–10. For a discussion of Indian baskets found in some historic Louisiana homes, see Dustin C. Fuqua, “Mystery Baskets of Cane River: Who Made Them?” in Lee and Gregory, Work of Tribal Hands, 175–91. 15. Crayon Reproductions of Léon J. Frémaux’s New Orleans Characters and Additional Sketches (1876), n.p.; A. R. Waud, “Pictures of the South. The French Market, New Orleans,” Harper’s Weekly, August 18, 1866, 526, illustration on page 517. 16. Elizabeth Bisland, ed., The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1906), 1:168–69.

175

176

Notes to Pages 99–104 17. Historical Sketch Book and Guide to New Orleans, Edited and Compiled by Several Leading Writers of the New Orleans Press (New York: Will H. Coleman, 1885), 169–70; Grace King and John R. Ficklin, A History of Louisiana (New York: University Publishing, 1893), 164–65. 18. Martha Reinhard Smallwood Field [Catherine Cole, pseud.], The Story of the Old French Market (New Orleans: New Orleans Coffee Company, ca. 1916), no pagination. According to Field’s son, she wrote this 25-page book for a coffee company’s advertisement sometime in the late 1880s or early 1890s. Frederick Field to Mrs. O’Keeffe, 1934, Historic New Orleans Collection, New Orleans. 19. Fred B. Kniffen, Hiram F. Gregory, and George A. Stokes, The Historic Indian Tribes of Louisiana: From 1542 to the Present (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 147. 20. The Papers of Sir William Johnson (Albany: University of the State of New York, 1925), 4:58; The Six Nations of New York: The 1892 United States Extra Census Bulletin, intro. Robert W. Venables (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 50. 21. Florence E. Babb, Between Field and Cooking Pot: The Political Economy of Marketwomen in Peru, rev. ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998); Linda J. Seligman, Peruvian Street Lives: Culture, Power, and Economy among Market Women of Cuzco (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004); Seligman, ed., Women Traders in Cross-Cultural Perspective: Mediating Identities, Marketing Wares (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), quote from pp. 2–3. 22. Jean M. O’Brien, “ ‘Divorced’ from the Land: Resistance and Survival of Indian Women in Eighteenth-Century New England,” in After King Philip’s War: Presence and Persistence in Indian New England, ed. Colin G. Calloway, 144–61 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997), quote from 150. 23. Terry R. Reynolds, “Women, Pottery, and Economics at Acoma Pueblo,” in New Mexico Women: Intercultural Perspectives, ed. Joan M. Jensen and Darlis A. Miller, 279–300 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986). 24. Thomas John Blumer, Catawba Indian Pottery: The Survival of a Folk Tradition (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), quotes from pages 15, 29. 25. McBride, Our Lives in Our Hands, 3–23. 26. James A. Clifton, The Pokagons, 1683–1983: Catholic Potawatomi Indians of the St. Joseph River Valley (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984), 116–17. 27. Barbara McKee, Edwin McKee, and Joyce Herold, Havasupai Baskets and Their Makers: 1930–1940 (Flagstaff, AZ: Northland Press, 1975).

Notes to Pages 104–109 28. McBride, Our Lives in Our Hands; Patricia Pierce Erickson, “ ‘Defining Ourselves through Baskets’: Museum Autoethnography and the Makah Cultural and Research Center,” in Coming to Shore: Northwest Coast Ethnology, Traditions, and Visions, ed. Maries Mauzé, Michael E. Harkin, and Sergei Kan, 339–61 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004). 29. Erve Chambers, Native Tours: The Anthropology of Travel and Tourism (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 2000), 23–27. For a comprehensive study of the Mikasuki Seminoles as a tourist attraction, see Patsy West, The Enduring Seminoles: From Alligator Wrestling to Ecotourism (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998). 30. Frederic Trautmann, ed., “New Orleans, the Mississippi, and the Delta through a German’s Eyes: The Travels of Emil Deckert, 1885–1886,” Louisiana History 25 (Winter 1984): 86–87. 31. Devon Abbott Mihesuah, Indigenous American Women: Decolonization, Empowerment, Activism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 150–52. Also see Jacki Thompson Rand, “Primary Sources: Indian Goods and the History of American Colonialism and the 19th-Century Reservation,” in Clearing a Path: Theorizing the Past in Native American Studies, ed. Nancy Shoemaker, 137–57 (New York: Routledge, 2002); and Rand, Kiowa Humanity, 126–50. 32. C. Bremer, The Chata Indians of Pearl River (New Orleans: Picayune Job Print, 1907), 5–7. 33. Grandjean’s commentary in Crayon Reproductions of Léon J. Fremaux’s New Orleans Characters, n.p. 34. Bremer, Chata Indians of Pearl River, 5–7. 35. Marshall Gettys, “Choctaw Baskets,” in Basketry of Southeastern Indians, ed. Marshall Gettys (Idabel, OK: Museum of the Red River, 1984), 35–42. 36. Donald G. Hunter, “Coushatta Basketry in the Rand Collection,” Florida Anthropologist 28 (March 1975): 27–37; Claude Medford, Jr., “Coushatta Baskets and Basketmakers,” in Basketry of Southeastern Indians, by Gettys, 51–56; Kniffen et al., Historic Indian Tribes of Louisiana, 146–57. 37. David I. Bushnell, Jr., The Choctaw of Bayou Lacomb, St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana, Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 48 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1909), 13–15. 38. Janel M. Curry-Roper, “Houma Blowguns and Baskets in the Mississippi River Delta,” Journal of Cultural Geography 2 (Spring/Summer 1982): 13–22. 39. Frank G. Speck, “A Social Reconnaissance of the Creole Houma Indian Trappers of the Louisiana Bayous,” America Indigena 3 (1943): 142. 40. Federal Writers’ Program of the Works Projects Administration, Louisiana: A Guide to the State (New York: Hastings House, 1941), 389–91. 41. Gregory and Webb, “Chitimacha Basketry,” 23–38.

177

178

Notes to Pages 109–110 42. Ira Jacknis, “Patrons, Potters, and Painters: Phoebe Hearst’s Collections from the American Southwest,” in Krech and Hail, Collecting Native America, 139–71; Molly H. Mullin, Culture in the Marketplace: Gender, Art, and Value in the American Southwest (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001); Erik Trump, “ ‘The Idea of Help’: White Women Reformers and the Commercialization of Native American Women’s Arts,” in Selling the Indian: Commercializing and Appropriating American Indian Culture, ed. Carter Jones Meyer and Diana Royer, 159–89 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001). 43. Betty J. Duggan, “Baskets of the Southeast,” in By Native Hands: Woven Treasures from the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art, ed. Jill R. Chancey, 26–73 (Laurel, MS: Lauren Rogers Museum of Art, 2005); Duggan, “Revisiting Peabody Museum Collections and Chitimacha Basketry Revival,” Symbols (Spring 2000): 18–22; Shane K. Bernard, Tabasco: An Illustrated History: The Story of the McIlhenny Family of Avery Island (Avery Island, LA: McIlhenny Company, 2007), 83. 44. Collection of baskets made by the Chitimacha Indians of Louisiana, Exhibited at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis, MS 7208, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. 45. Miss M to Charles E. Dagenette, January 31, 1914, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Central Classified Files, 1907–1939, Record Group 75, National Archives, Washington, DC. 46. New Orleans Times-Democrat, May 12, 1893; Marie Soules to Catherine Gardiner, April 25, 1905, Catherine Marshall Gardiner Papers, Lauren Rogers Museum of Art, Laurel, MS; Exchange Shop Inventory, 1892–1894, and Georgia M. Bartlette to Mrs. W. P. Flower, September 30, 1925, Christian Women’s Exchange Records, 1881–1967, Manuscripts Department, Special Collections, Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane University, New Orleans. 47. Otis Tufton Mason, Indian Basketry: Studies in a Textile Art without Machinery, 2 vols. (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1904), repr. American Indian Basketry (New York: Dover, 1988), 292. 48. “Proceedings of the Anthropological Society of Washington,” American Anthropologist, new ser., 11 (July–September 1909), 487; Louisiana State Museum, Fourth Biennial Report of the Board of Curators, April 1st, 1912, to March 31st, 1914 (New Orleans: Louisiana State Museum, 1914), 34–41. 49. John R. Swanton, Indian Tribes of the Lower Mississippi Valley and Adjacent Coast of the Gulf of Mexico, Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 43 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1911), 347–48. 50. Frances Densmore, “A Search for Songs among the Chitimacha Indians in Louisiana,” Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 133, Anthropological Papers, No. 19 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1943), 7–8.

Notes to Pages 110–112 51. David Jenkins, “Object Lessons and Ethnographic Displays: Museum Exhibitions and the Making of American Anthropology,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 36 (April 1994): 242–70; Michael O’Hanlan and Robert L. Welsch, eds., Hunting the Gatherers: Ethnographic Collectors, Agents and Agency in Melanisia, 1870s–1930s (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000); H. Glenn Penny, Objects of Culture: Ethnology and Ethnographic Museums in Imperial Germany (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Ira Jacknis, The Storage Box of Tradition: Kwakiutl Art, Anthropologists and Museums, 1881–1981 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002). 52. James Dorsey, “The Biloxi Indians of Louisiana,” in Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for the Forty-second Meeting. Held at Madison, Wisconsin, August, 1893 (Salem, MA: American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1894), 269. 53. M. Raymond Harrington, “Among Louisiana Indians,” Southern Workman 37 (December 1908): 656–61. For an excellent assessment of Heye’s commitment to the collection American Indian artifacts and of his support for ethnologists such as Harrington, see Clara Sue Kidwell, “Every Last Dishcloth: The Prodigious Collecting of George Gustav Heye,” in Krech and Hail, Collecting Native America, 232–58. 54. Natasha Bonilla Martinez, “An Indian Americas: NMAI Photographic Archive Documents Indian Peoples of the Western Hemisphere,” in Spirit Capture: Photographs from the National Museum of the American Indian, ed. Tim Johnson (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998), 36. 55. Michel M. Ames, Cannibal Tours and Glass Boxes: The Anthropology of Museums (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1992), 49–58; Moira T. McCaffrey, “Rononshonni—The Builder: David Ross McCord’s Ethnographic Collection,” in Krech and Hail, Collecting Native America, 43–73; Alison Griffiths, Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, and Turn-of-the-Century Visual Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 3–17, 46–60, 89, 100–109. Brumer points out on page 54 of his book on the Catawbas that when the Brown family staged pottery making for Harrington’s camera, it was the first such display. He wonders how other potters felt about this. For the role that anthropologists, art patrons, government officials, and native artists themselves played in subsequent growth of the Indian arts and crafts movement, see Susan Labry Meyn, More Than Curiosities: A Grassroots History of the Indian Arts and Drafts Board and Its Precursors, 1920–1942 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2001). 56. Thomas A. Colvin, “Cane and Palmetto Basketry of the Choctaws of St. Tammany Parish, Lacombe, Louisiana,” offered on the occasion of demonstrations of Lacombe Choctaw basket weaving by Thomas A. Colvin at the Southern Arts and Crafts Exposition in New Orleans, October 26–29, New Orleans, Southeastern Louisiana University Archives and Special Collections, Center for

179

180

Notes to Pages 112–116 Southeast Louisiana Studies, Hammond, St. Tammany Parish Collection Box 1, Folder 15. 57. Raymond, “Old Plantation Home,” 8. 58. Bisland, Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn, 1:168–69. 59. Lyle Saxon, Robert Tallant, and Edward Dreyer, Gumbo Ya-Ya: A Collection of Louisiana Folk Tales (New York: Bonanza Books, 1945), 31. 60. Bremer, “Chata Indians of Pearl River,” 9. 61. Caroline Dormon, “The Last of the Cane Basket Makers,” Magazine of the South, October 1931, 66. 62. Marcia Gaudet, ed., Chitimacha Notebook: Writings of Emile Stouff—A Chitimacha Chief (Lafayette, LA: Lafayette Natural History Museum and Planetarium, 1986), 13–14. 63. Moses Friedman to R. G. Valentine, November 4, 1910, William Brewster Humphrey to J. H. Dillard, June 30, 1913, Sarah Avery McIlhenny to Charles E. Dagenett, January 31, 1914, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Central Classified Files, 1907–1939. 64. Gaudet, Chitimacha Notebook, 14; Walter Guion to E. B. Merritt, June 26, 1916, E. B. Merritt to G. J. Boatner, September 20, 1919, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Central Classified Files, 1907–1939; Herbert T. Hoover, The Chitimacha People (Phoenix, AZ: Indian Tribal Series, 1975), 49–53. 65. Ames, Cannibal Tours and Glass Boxes, 59–69. For the role of women in particular, see Jane E. Simonsen, Making Home Work: Domesticity and Native American Assimilation in the American West, 1860–1919 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 183–214. 66. B. W. Merwin, “Basketry of the Chitimacha Indians,” [University of Pennsylvania] Museum Journal 10, no. 1 (1919): 29–34. 67. Dormon, “Last of the Cane Basket Makers,” 13, 66. 68. George Washington Cable, Old Creole Days (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1879), 85; Kate Chopin, “Nég Créol,” Atlantic-Monthly, July 1897, repr. in The Complete Works of Kate Chopin, ed. Per Seyersted (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1969), 1:506; Hamilton Basso, Cinnamon Seed (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1934), 6. 69. Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration, The WPA Guide to New Orleans: The Federal Writers’ Project Guide to 1930s New Orleans, new intro. by the Historic New Orleans Collection (1938, repr. New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), 164. 70. For a discussion of how to reach market women’s voice and agency from sparse records in Guadalajara, Mexico, see Judith Marti, “Nineteenth-Century Views of Women’s Participation in Mexico’s Markets,” in Seligman, Women Traders in Cross-Cultural Perspective, 27–44. A splendid example of this task accomplished for a North American Indian group is Rand, Kiowa Humanity, 126–50.

Notes to Pages 117–119

5. Primitivism and Tourism 1. D. H. Lawrence, Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Edward D. McDonald (New York: Viking Press, 1936), 142, 147. 2. Aldous Huxley, ed., The Letters of D. H. Lawrence (New York: Viking Press, 1932), x. 3. Leah Dilworth, Imagining Indians in the Southwest: Persistent Visions of a Primitive Past (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996), 5–7. 4. William York Tindall, D. H. Lawrence and Susan His Cow (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939); David Cavitch, D. H. Lawrence and the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969); James C. Cowan, D. H. Lawrence’s American Journey: A Study in Literature and Myth (Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1970); Keith M. Sagar, D. H. Lawrence: Life into Art (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), 260–77; Louis K. Greiff, D. H. Lawrence: Fifty Years on Film (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001), 204–23. Priest of Love, directed by Christopher Miles (1988), featured Ian McKellen as Lawrence, Ava Gardner as Mabel, Jorge Rivero as Tony, and Janet Suzman as Frieda. 5. Keith Sagar, ed., D. H. Lawrence and New Mexico (Salt Lake City, UT: Gibbs M. Smith, 1982), 101. With minimal editorial commentary, Sagar compiled Lawrence’s major writings on the Southwest in one book. The photographs printed in this volume, gathered by Sagar from private and public collections, offer important glimpses into the Englishman’s life in New Mexico. For the range of approaches to Lawrence’s time there, see L. D. Clark, The Minoan Distance: The Symbolism of Travel in D. H. Lawrence (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1980); Del Ivan Janik, The Curve of Return: D. H. Lawrence’s Travel Books (Victoria, BC: English Literary Studies, University of Victoria, 1981); Jeffrey Meyers, D. H. Lawrence: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 283–335; Michael Squires and Lynn K. Talbot, Living at the Edge: A Biography of D. H. Lawrence and Frieda von Richthofen (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), 261–96; Keith Sagar, The Life of D. H. Lawrence: An Illustrated Biography (London: Chaucer Press, 2003), 161–214; and Arthur J. Bachrach, D. H. Lawrence in New Mexico: “The Time Is Different There” (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006). 6. D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923; repr., New York: Viking Press, 1964), 137–38. 7. Lois P. Rudwick, Mabel Dodge Luhan (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987); Elaine Feinstein, Lawrence and the Women: The Intimate Life of D. H. Lawrence (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 181–212; Janet Byrne, A Genius for Living: The Life of Frieda Lawrence (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), 265–83.

181

182

Notes to Pages 119–122 8. Keith Brown, “Welsh Red Indians: D. H. Lawrence and St. Mawr,” Essays in Criticism 32 (April 1982): 158–79; Anthony Burgess, Flame into Being: The Life and Work of D. H. Lawrence (New York: Arbor House, 1985), 191–206; Peter Scheckner, Class, Politics, and the Individual: A Study of the Major Works of D. H. Lawrence (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1985), 124–36; Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 159–74. 9. S. Elizabeth Bird, ed., Dressing in Feathers: The Construction of the Indian in American Popular Culture (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996); Philip Deloria, Playing Indians (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); Margaret D. Jacobs, Engendered Encounters: Feminism and Pueblo Cultures, 1879–1934 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999); Sherry L. Smith, Reimagining Indians: Native Americans through Anglo Eyes, 1880–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). 10. Joshua David Bellin, The Demon of the Continent: Indians and the Shaping of American Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 1–10. 11. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, 36, 52. 12. Lawrence to Lady Cynthia Asquith, November 28, 1915, D. H. Lawrence Collection, 1904–1935, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. 13. Harry T. Moore, ed., The Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence (New York: Viking Press, 1962), 1:520. 14. Cavitch, D. H. Lawrence and the New World, 56. 15. Cavitch, D. H. Lawrence and the New World, 76–79. 16. Sagar, D. H. Lawrence and New Mexico, x. 17. Lawrence, Phoenix, 90. 18. Moore, Collected Letters, 2:672. 19. Knud Merrild, A Poet and Two Painters: A Memoir of D. H. Lawrence (New York: Viking Press, 1939), 28. 20. Charles F. Lummis, The Land of Poco Tiempo (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1893), 8. 21. Charles C. Eldredge, Julie Schimmel, and William H. Truettner, Art in New Mexico, 1900–1945: Paths to Taos and Santa Fe (New York: Abbeville Press, 1986); Dean A. Porter, Teresa Hayes Ebie, and Suzan Campbell, Taos Artists and Their Patrons, 1898–1950 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999); Don D. Fowler, A Laboratory for Anthropology: Science and Romanticism in the American Southwest, 1846–1930 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000); James E. Snead, Ruins and Rivals: The Making of Southwest Archaeology (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001); Jerold S. Auerbach, Explorers in Eden: Pueblo Indians and the Promised Land (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006).

Notes to Pages 122–125 22. Lawrence C. Kelly, The Assault on Assimilation: John Collier and the Origins of Indian Policy Reform (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1983), 116–18. 23. Langston Hughes, The Big Sea: An Autobiography (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1986), 259–63. 24. Arrell Morgan Gibson, The Santa Fe and Taos Colonies: Age of the Muses, 1900–1942 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983); Lois Palken Rudnick, Utopian Vistas: The Mabel Dodge Luhan House and the American Counterculture (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996); Smith, Reimagining Indians, 187–212; Flannery Burke, From Greenwich Village to Taos: Primitivism and Place at Mabel Dodge Luhan’s (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008). 25. Phyllis Cole Braunlich, Haunted by Home: The Life and Letters of Lynn Riggs (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988), 8–9; Jace Weaver, That the People Might Live: Native American Literatures and Native American Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 96. 26. Mabel Dodge Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1928), 177. The therapeutic aspect of Luhan’s expectations and of Lawrence’s reactions is skillfully examined in Joel Pfister, Individuality Incorporated: Indians and the Multicultural Modern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 152–83. 27. Warren Roberts, James T. Boulton, and Elizabeth Mansfield, eds., The Letters of D. H. Lawrence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 4: 296, 301. 28. Lawrence, Phoenix, 95. 29. Sagar, D. H. Lawrence and New Mexico, 5. 30. Janik, The Curve of Return, 23, 65–69; Joseph Foster, D. H. Lawrence in Taos (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1972), 35. 31. Lawrence to Curtis Brown, April 4, 1924, D. H. Lawrence Collection. 32. Erve Chambers, Native Tours: The Anthropology of Travel and Tourism (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 2000), 95; Martin Padget, Indian Country: Travels in the American Southwest, 1840–1935 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004), 169–210. 33. Huxley, Letters, xi–xii. 34. Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos, 253. 35. Sagar, D. H. Lawrence and New Mexico, 37. 36. Pablo Mitchell, Coyote Nation: Sexuality, Race, and Conquest in Modernizing New Mexico, 1880–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 81–86. 37. Sagar, D. H. Lawrence and New Mexico, 11. 38. Lawrence, Phoenix, 92; Sagar, D. H. Lawrence and New Mexico, 64. 39. Roberts, Boulton, and Mansfield, Letters of D. H. Lawrence, 4:304.

183

184

Notes to Pages 125–130 40. Braunlich, Haunted by Home, 10; Weaver, That the People Might Live, 96. 41. Foster, D. H. Lawrence in Taos, 33–34. 42. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, 36–37. 43. D. H. Lawrence, Phoenix II: Uncollected, Unpublished, and Other Prose Works by D. H. Lawrence, ed. Warren Roberts and Harry T. Moore (New York: Viking Press, 1968), 239; Kenneth R. Philp, John Collier’s Crusade for Indian Reform, 1920–1954 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1977), 34. 44. Sagar, D. H. Lawrence and New Mexico, 41. 45. Roberts, Boulton, and Mansfield, Letters of D. H. Lawrence, 4:331–32. For Collier’s role in campaigning against the Bursum Bill and other Pueblorelated policies, see Kelly, Assault on Assimilation, 118–37, 185–90, 224–27, 300–309. 46. Roberts, Boulton, and Mansfield, Letters of D. H. Lawrence, 4:527–28. 47. James Kraft, ed., The Selected Witter Bynner: Poems, Plays, Translations, Prose, and Letters (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 182. 48. Edward Nehls, ed., D. H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1958), 2:197–99. 49. Aby M. Warburg, Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America, trans. Michael P. Steinberg (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 2–4, 48–53; Curtis M. Hinsley, “Zunis and Brahmins: Cultural Ambivalence in the Golden Age,” in Romantic Motives: Essays on Anthropological Sensibility, ed. George W. Stocking, Jr., 169–207 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); Dilworth, Imagining Indians in the Southwest, 21–75. 50. Mick Gidley, Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indian, Incorporated (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 21–41, 71, 257–69. 51. Sagar, D. H. Lawrence and New Mexico, 17. 52. Edward Sapir, “Culture, Genuine and Spurious,” American Journal of Sociology 29 (January 1924): 401–29; George W. Stocking, Jr., “The Ethnographic Sensibility of the 1920s and the Dualism of the Anthropological Tradition,” in Stocking, Romantic Motives, 208–76. 53. Roberts, Boulton, and Mansfield, Letters of D. H. Lawrence, 4:310. 54. Frederik L. Rusch, A Jean Toomer Reader: Selected Unpublished Writings (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 244; Alan Trachtenberg, Shades of Hiawatha: Staging Indians, Making Americans, 1880–1930 (New York: Hill & Wang, 2004), 284–88. 55. Guy Reynolds, Willa Cather in Context: Progress, Race, Empire (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 161–63. 56. Thomas R. Whitaker, “Lawrence’s Western Path: ‘Mornings in Mexico,’ ” Criticism 3 (Summer 1961): 219–36; Janik, The Curve of Return, 65–69. 57. D. H. Lawrence, Mornings in Mexico (London: Martin Secker, 1930), 102.

Notes to Pages 131–136 58. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, 35. 59. Lawrence, Phoenix, 144. 60. Lawrence, Mornings in Mexico, 112–13. 61. Dexter Martin, “D. H. Lawrence and Pueblo Religion: An Inquiry into Accuracy,” Arizona Quarterly 9(Autumn 1953): 228–33. 62. Lawrence, Phoenix, 144. 63. Rusch, Jean Toomer Reader, 239. 64. Lawrence, Mornings in Mexico, 139–40, 143, 152, 164–67; Dilworth, Imagining Indians in the Southwest, 66–67. 65. Chambers, Native Tours, 95–96; Jill D. Sweet, “Burlesquing ‘The Other’ in Pueblo Performance,” Annals of Tourism Research 16 (1989): 62–75. 66. Lawrence to Thomas Seltzer, August 26, 1924, D. H. Lawrence Collection; Catherine Carswell, The Savage Pilgrimage: A Narrative of D. H. Lawrence (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1932), 172–73. 67. Alice Littlefield and Martha C. Knack, eds., Native Americans and Wage Labor: Ethnohistorical Perspectives (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996); Snead, Ruins and Rivals, 42–46, 141–42; Molly H. Mullin, Culture in the Marketplace: Gender, Art, and Value in the American Southwest (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001). 68. Charles C. Eldredge, Julie Schimmel, and William H. Truettner, Art in New Mexico, 1900–1945: Paths to Taos and Santa Fe (New York: Abbeville Press, 1986), 60–63, 83–87. 69. Roberts, Boulton, and Mansfield, Letters of D. H. Lawrence, 4:313. 70. Merrild, A Poet and Two Painters, 43–44; Dorothy Brett, Lawrence and Brett: A Friendship (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1933), 66–68. 71. Foster, D. H. Lawrence in Taos, 180; Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos, 194. 72. Brett, Lawrence and Brett, 89–90. 73. Roberts, Boulton, and Mansfield, Letters of D. H. Lawrence, 4:362. 74. T. M. Pearce, ed., Literary America 1903–1934: The Mary Austin Letters (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979), 173. 75. Lawrence to Seltzer, May 18, 1924, Lawrence to Mabel Dodge Luhan, Wed. [May 1924?], D. H. Lawrence Collection; James T. Boulton and Lindeth Vasey, eds., The Letters of D. H. Lawrence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 5:42; Laura M. Bickerstaff, Pioneer Artists of Taos, rev. ed. (Denver: Old West, 1983), 80. 76. A page of this letter is illustrated in Sagar, Life of D. H. Lawrence, 200. 77. Lawrence to Rolf Gardiner, July 4, 1924, D. H. Lawrence Collection; Brett, Lawrence and Brett, 70–71. 78. Lawrence to Ida Rauch, April 6, 1925, Lawrence to William Hawk, May 3, 1925, D. H. Lawrence Collection; Boulton and Vasey, Letters of D. H. Lawrence, 5:258–59.

185

186

Notes to Pages 138–144 79. Lawrence to Rauch, June 18, 1925, D. H. Lawrence Collection; Boulton and Vasey, Letters of D. H. Lawrence, 5:239, 266, 269; Brett, Lawrence and Brett, 218–24. 80. Brett, Lawrence and Brett, 72. 81. Ian S. MacNiven, “D. H. Lawrence’s Indian Summer,” in D. H. Lawrence: The Man Who Lived, ed. Robert B. Partlow, Jr., and Harry T. Moore, 42–46 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1980); Sagar, D. H. Lawrence, 260–77. 82. D. H. Lawrence, “St. Mawr,” in The Short Novels, 2:3–147 (London: Heinemann, 1956). 83. D. H. Lawrence, The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1928). 84. Weldon Thorton, D. H. Lawrence: A Study of the Short Fiction (New York: Twayne, 1993), 77–86. 85. Aldous Huxley, preface to A Poet and Two Painters, by Knud Merrild, xvi–xvii; Lawrence to Rachel and William Hawk, April 19, 1926, D. H. Lawrence Collection. 86. Lawrence to Maria Christina Chambers, January 21, 1930, D. H. Lawrence Collection. 87. Beverly Lowry, “Lawrence: Keepers of the Flame,” New York Times Magazine, October 1, 1989, 65, 86–87; Paul Horgan, Tracings: A Book of Partial Portraits (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1993), 81–102; Henry Shukman, “D. H. Lawrence’s New Mexico: The Ghosts That Grip the Soul of Bohemian Taos,” New York Times, October 22, 2006. Conclusion 1. John Lawson, A New Voyage to Carolina, ed. Hugh Talmage Lefler (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967), 17–19. For a richly nuanced analysis of American Indians’ interactions with the Atlantic world economy in early South Carolina, see James H. Merrell, The Indians’ New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of Removal (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989). 2. Joseph Foster, D. H. Lawrence in Taos (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1972), 103. 3. Theodore S. Jojola, “On Revision and Revisionism: American Indian Representations in New Mexico,” in Natives and Academics: Researching and Writing about American Indians, ed. Devon A. Mihesuah, 172–80 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998). Also see Valene L. Smith, “Indigenous Tourism: The Four Hs,” in Tourism and Indigenous Peoples, ed. Richard Butler and Thomas Hinch, 283–307 (London: International Thomson Business Press, 1996); and Larry Nesper, ed., “Native Peoples and Tourism,” special issue, Ethnohistory 50 (Summer 2003): 413–585.

Notes to Pages 144–146 4. Mary Lawlor, Public Native America: Tribal Self-Representation in Museums, Powwows, and Casinos (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 148. For a valuable study of other touristic sites of self-representation, see Laura Peters, Playing Ourselves: Interpreting Native Histories at Historic Reconstructions (Lanham, MD: Altamira Press, 2007). 5. Eve Darian-Smith, New Capitalists: Law, Politics, and Identity Surrounding Casino Gaming on Native American Land (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/ Thomson, 2004); Jessica R. Cattelino, High Stakes: Florida Seminole Gaming and Sovereignty (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). 6. Kim I. Eisler, “Revenge of the Indians,” Washingtonian, August 1993; Eisler, Revenge of the Pequots: How a Small Native American Tribe Created the World’s Most Profitable Casino (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 242. My thanks go to Katherine Osburn for bringing Eisler’s article to my attention. 7. For an important criticism of these categorizing figments of imagination, see William Roseberry, Anthropology and History: Essays in Culture, History, and Political Economy (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 17–54.

187

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The essays that became chapters in this book traveled across great distances over several years, originating and benefiting from various opportunities to present my thoughts about language and livelihood in American Indian history. My dedication of Indian Work to the American Indian Program at Cornell University is the least that I can do to acknowledge my deep debt to the many students, colleagues, and friends with whom I worked from 1980 to 2002. In their day-to-day efforts to advance knowledge about American Indians, to build a reciprocal relationship between Indian communities and educational institutions, and to promote success among Indian students, I had the rare privilege of participating in real-life interplay between language and livelihood. The Department of History at Cornell also deserves special thanks for both the intellectual nurturance and generous understanding that it provided to a scholar whose attention was always spread widely across a campus full of wonder. Cornell University is an exceptional place where interdisciplinary teaching, community service, and scholarly production are encouraged and facilitated—not just recited as self-promotional rhetoric. Professors who achieve a working balance among these objectives are genuinely respected and rewarded. Special recognition goes to Carolyn Martin, whose deep commitment to interdisciplinary work as arts and sciences associate dean and then as university provost was a galvanizing force during my term as American Indian Program director. I wish Biddy all the best in her new job as chancellor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. I carried these case studies loosely on several different journeys before tying them down in my new home at Vanderbilt University. The chapter on Iroquois livelihood began many years ago as a seminar

190

Acknowledgments

paper presented to American Indian graduate students at Cornell, benefiting especially from tough questions raised by Kevin Connelly, Mike Wilson, and Gerald Alfred, and the late Ron LaFrance. Drafts were presented to a Capitol Historical Society symposium in Washington, D.C., and to the Deutsch-Americanishes Institut at the Universität Heidelberg. A polished version was eventually published as “Iroquois Livelihood and Jeffersonian Agrarianism: Reaching behind the Metaphors and Models” in Native Americans and the Early Republic, edited by Frederick E. Hoxie, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999). I am grateful to the University of Virginia Press for permission to use this much-altered revision of that essay in this book. I presented material on American Indians in Natchez first at the Historic Natchez Conference of 1998 and later before the University of Texas Department of History, while doing research in Austin for my work on D. H. Lawrence. Thanks go to Jim Sidbury for the invitation to speak and for his thoughtful feedback. At the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians in 2003, this essay received very helpful input from Clara Sue Kidwell, Greg O’Brien, and Tanis Thorne. Hans Bak, whom I first met at the Newberry Library some thirty years ago, invited me to participate in the 1995 conference of the Netherlands American Studies Association, where I initially tested my ideas about American Indians and the welfare system. The chapter on basketry in Louisiana originated as a paper presented at the Southern Historical Association’s 2005 conference, where insights offered by Michael Perman, Theda Perdue, and Claudio Saunt made a big difference. I presented a longer version to the University of New Orleans Graduate School’s History of New Orleans Lecture Series in early 2007 and warmly thank Connie Atkinson for the opportunity and encouragement. Later that year Paul Tarver invited me to present these ideas at the New Orleans Museum of Art in conjunction with its special exhibit, “Blue Winds Dancing: The Whitecloud Collection of Native American Art.” A special word of thanks is owed to Mercedes Bordelon Whitecloud. I first met Mercedes when she and the late Dr. Thomas Whitecloud loaned a selection of fabulous baskets and textiles to the Historic New Orleans Collection for “Romance and Reality: American Indians in 19th-Century New Orleans,” an exhibit that I guest curated nearly a decade ago. Since then she has encouraged me to pursue my interest in Louisiana Indian basketry, offering me valuable advice and

Acknowledgments

warm hospitality along the way. Plenty more writing is yet to result from this ongoing partnership and inquiry. My work on D. H. Lawrence began as I traveled with Cornell University alumni on several study-vacation trips to northern New Mexico. Passionate interests of mine converged rather serendipitously as I learned more and more about what at first seemed like the ghostly presence of one of my favorite English novelists in one of my favorite American places. This chapter received sage advice on a few occasions. At an American Indian Graduate Student Association seminar held one early December, while everyone else was digging in for exams, Rebecca Marie Moore, Deidre Dees, and Sean Teuton showed up with some graceful questions and suggestions. Then in the year 2000, fellow colonial historians Betty Wood and Emily Clark hosted me for the American History seminar at Cambridge University and allowed me to stray into, of all things, twentiethcentury literature. Their generous observations were supplemented by those of Patricia Limerick, who just happened to be in the neighborhood. A version closer to this book’s chapter on Lawrence became a farewell lecture at Cornell University in 2002, which gave Alyssa Mt. Pleasant and others an opportunity to contribute to its evolution. At Vanderbilt University, Richard Blackett turned his graduate seminar students loose on two of my chapters, those on Natchez and New Mexico, and they were certainly up for the challenge. Thanks to Will Bishop, Christophe Dongmo, Joanna Elrick, Jon Hansen, William Hardin, Myriam Mertens, and Kevin Vanzant for written comments as well verbal remarks. Richard humored me on my unlikely swerve into literary criticism. Everyone in Vanderbilt’s history department has been graciously supportive in facilitating my move from central New York to middle Tennessee, even allowing this carpetbagger to serve as department chair for a few years. There was no faster way to learn about my new colleagues and to appreciate their many kindnesses and talents. Progress on Indian Work was generously supported by a Los Angeles Times Distinguished Fellowship at the Huntington Library in 2003–2004. Thanks are due especially to Roy Ritchie and Susi Krasnoo for their assistance and hospitality at that wonderful haven for scholarly adventurers. Interaction with other fellows added to the joy of working there, while conversations with Jorge Canizares-Esguerra, Ariela Gross, and George Milne were particularly helpful for parts of this book. Back at Vanderbilt University, its completion was made possible by research funds from the Holland M. McTyeire Professorship in History. Archivists

191

192

Acknowledgments

and librarians across the United States assisted me in countless ways, as reflected by many sources listed in my endnotes, but the staff at the Interlibrary Loan Service for Vanderbilt’s Jean and Alexander Heard Library have been consistently steadfast in channeling essential materials to me. My move to Tennessee was graced by Katherine Osburn, a colleague in American Indian history at Tennessee Technological University who quickly became a true friend. Her marvelous work on the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and her bountiful knowledge of Native American history have certainly helped compensate for the numerous colleagues that I left behind in New York. Katherine graciously read every piece of this book with amazing attentiveness and then generously offered feedback full of wit and wisdom. Two anonymous readers for Harvard University Press offered remarkably helpful and insightful comments, for which I am deeply appreciative. I am also grateful to Kathleen McDermott, my editor at the press, for seeing enough promise in this peculiar Indian work of mine to activate and navigate its passage to publication. Some challenging passages in life coincided, even collided, with the making of this book. I owe its completion, along with more precious rewards, to Rhonda Seals Usner’s enduring love and guidance.

INDEX

The letter f following a page number denotes a figure.

Abramoff, Jack, 69 Activism, Indian, 89; D. H. Lawrence and, 126–28 Adaptation strategies, 7–8, 142–46; Iroquois, 33–41, 143; development of American towns and, 45, 48–49, 54–57, 68; real vs. perceived hardships and, 78–79; basket making and, 94–96, 101–5, 116, 143; dances and ceremonies and, 132–34, 142 ADC support, Indians and, 72 African Americans, Indians compared to, 55–56 Agrarianism, Jeffersonian, 27–29 Agricultural revolution. See Agriculture, commercial Agriculture: Gallatin’s selective critique of, 11; Jeffersonian agrarian ideal and, 27–29 Agriculture, as Indian livelihood: misrepresentation of, in early national period, 18–20, 38–41; ideology and, 20–29, 34, 81–82; polarization of hunting and, 30, 32; U.S. government reform and, 33–36 Agriculture, commercial: American faith in, 28; impact of, on Indians, 28–29; Jeffersonian era and, 28–29, 33, 82–83; Iroquois resistance to, 29–41; Iroquois adaptation to, 33–34

Albers, Patricia, 4 Alcohol consumption, 51, 54 Allegany Seneca Indians, 34–35, 37 American Indian Citizenship Act, 70 American Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, 76 American Indian studies, 77–78 American Southwest, tourism and primitivism in, 117–40, 142 Amherst, Jeffery, 74 Anthropology: non-Indian representations and, 10–12; sociology vs., 77; Indian basket making and, 109–11; American Southwest and, 128–29 Apache Indians, 7, 123 Apess, William, 15 Appleby, Joyce, 28 Archaeologists, in American Southwest, 122 Archuleta, Trinidad and Rufina, 136, 138 Art colonies, in New Mexico, 122, 133–34 Artisans, Indian, in Southwest, 133, 142–43. See also Basket making, Indian; Pottery, Indian Assimilation: in early national period, 22; social reform and, 84, 88–89 Atala (Chateaubriand), 59–60 Attakapa Indians, 96

194

Index Audubon, John James, 56 Austin, Mary, 122 Authenticity (legitimacy), 13–14, 93–116, 145; Indian standards of, 94; manufacture of, 96; non-Indian representations of, 113–16; nonIndian primitivism and, 114 Babcock, Barbara, 105 Bacon, Nathaniel, 73 Banditry, 48, 50–54 Bandow, Doug, 69–70 Basket making, Indian, 5, 16, 93–116; process of, 93, 106–7; adaptation and, 94–96, 101–5, 116; market activities and, 95, 102–4, 116; nonIndian representations of, 96–101, 113–16; tribal identity and pride and, 105, 115–16; as art, 105–10; double-weave method of, 107; anthropologists and, 109–11; perspective and motivation of, 111–13 Basso, Hamilton, Cinnamon Seed, 115 Beard, Charles A., 19 Becker, Carl L., 19 Belford, James, 87 Bellin, Joshua David, 119 Benevolence, historical literature on, 71 Berkowitz, Edward, 73 Berman, Tressa, 78 Berninghaus, Oscar, 122 Black Hawk, 15 Black Hills, sale of, 80 Blowguns, 96–97 Blumenschein, Ernest, 122 Blumer, Thomas, 103 Boas, Franz, 11–12 Bodmer, Karl, 64–65; Choctaws at Natchez, 64f; Choctaw Camp on the Mississippi, 65f; Tshanny, a Choctaw Man, 66f Boeri, David, 13 Boudinot, Elias, 15 Bouligny, Francisco, 51 Brace, Charles Loring, The Dangerous Classes of New York, 87

Bradford, Mrs. Sydney, 109–10 Bradley, John, 52–53 Bradshaw, Mrs. Sidney, 109–10 Breen, T. H., 20 Bremer, Cora, 106, 112 Bremner, Robert H., 72 Brett, Dorothy, 135–36, 138, 140 Bruchey, Stuart, 19 Buffalo, destruction of, 79 Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, 6 Buffalo Creek, 30–31, 40 Bureau of Indian Affairs, 73, 75, 83–85, 88–89, 91; patronage in, 83–84 “Burial of Atala” (Girodet), 60 Burlesque, 133 Burrows, Roswell, 36 Bursum Bill, 126–27 Bushnell, David, 106–7 Bynner, Witter, 122, 127 Cable, George Washington, “Café des Exilés,” 115 “Café des Exilés” (Cable), 115 Cane, in basket making, 106–7, 111 Captain Pollard, 35 Casinos, Indian, 144–45 Catawba Indians, 103 Cather, Willa, 122; Death Comes for the Archbishop, 130 Cavelier, René Robert, 45 Cayuga Indians, 31 Cazenave, Noel A., 72 Ceramics, Indian, 143. See also Pottery, Indian Chakchiuma Indians, 47 Chapin brothers, 35 Chateaubriand, François-René de, 43; Atala and René, 59–60 Cherokee Indians, 22, 43 Chickasaw Indians, 43–44, 46–48, 51, 55 Chitimacha Indians, 107–13 Choctaw Camp on the Mississippi (Bodmer), 65f Choctaw Indians, 43–44; adaptation strategies of, 5, 55–57, 68, 143;

Index diplomatic protocols and, 48–50; alcohol and, 51, 54; banditry and, 51–54; jurisdictional boundaries and, 57–59; non-Indian representations of, 59–67; Mississippi Band of, 69–70; women basket makers of, 93–94, 97, 106–7; in French Market, 98–101; reserve and passive demeanor of, 112 “Choctaw Indian Squaws” (Fremaux), 98f Choctaws at Natchez (Bodmer), 64f Choctaw War, 46–48 Chopin, Kate, “Nég Créol,” 115 Christian Women’s Exchange (New Orleans), 109 Cinnamon Seed (Basso), 115 Citizens Equal Rights Alliance (CERA), 90 Claiborne, William, 50, 54, 58, 96 Clinton, De Witt, 25 Clinton, George, 30 Coen, Rena, 60 Cole, Thomas, 41 Collier, John, 89, 127–28 Colonialism, 1; Spanish, 48–49, 51; poverty and, 73; internal, 81–82; discourse/language and, 129, 142; legacies of, 145–46 Concha, Juan, 136 Consciousness and primitivism, 128–32, 138–39, 141–42 Cooper, James Fenimore, 41, 126 Copway, George, 15 Cornplanter, 31, 34–35 Cotton economy, 48, 55–56 Couse, Irving, 122, 136 Coushatta Indians, 106 Cronon, William, 23 Culture of poverty, 92 Cuming, Fortescue, 55, 63–64 Curtis, Edward, 128–29 “Dance of the Sprouting Corn” (Lawrence), 124 Dances, Indian, 124–25, 128, 132–33, 142; adaptation and, 6, 132–34

Dangerous Classes of New York, The (Brace), 87 Darden, Clara, 108f, 109 Dasburg, Andrew, 122 Dawdy, Shannon, 46, 95 Decline and disappearance, narratives of, 14, 16, 42–68; Pocahontas-like behavior and, 43; self-destructive quarreling and, 43; effect of, 59; “noble savage” ideal and, 59–61; as rationale for removal, 61–62; pictorial representations, marginality and, 63–65; “Oakatibbe” (Simms) and, 65–67; basket making and, 116; D. H. Lawrence and, 139 Deerskin trade, 51–52, 141–42 Delacroix, Eugène, The Natchez, 60–61, 60f Delaware Indians, 25, 79 Deloria, Philip, 5–6, 119 Dening, Greg, 95 Densmore, Frances, 110 Dependency, images of, 79, 84–92 Depopulation, 45, 94 Discourses: Indian leaders and, 15; on European economic life, 23; of rural virtue, 27; on poverty and Indian treaty rights, 69–92, 143; colonialist, 129 “Displayed withholding,” 144 Domine Peter, 31 D’Orgon, Henri le Grand, 46–47 Dormon, Caroline, 109, 112; “The Last of the Cane Basket Makers” and, 114 Dorsey, James Owen, 110 Dunton, Herbert, 122 Du Pont, Eleuthere Irene, 37 Du Pont, Gabrielle, 37; La reserve Indienne, 37–38 Du Pont, Victor, 37 Edwards, Jess, 23 Eisler, Kim I., 145 Elliott, J. H., 23 Enlightenment, Indian livelihood and, 22–27 Environmental determinism, law of, 24

195

196

Index Epidemic viruses/disease, 24, 45 Eskimo Indians, 14 Ethnographic studies, 11, 40 Evans, Estwick, 36, 58, 62 Fearon, Henry Bradshaw, 55 Ficklen, John, 99 Field, Martha, 99 Finnish Americans, 87–88 Fletcher, Alice, 86 Florida Seminole Indians, 105 Ford, Henry, II, 10 Forests, negative views of, 26–27 Fort Berthold Indian Reservation (ND), 78 Fort Nogales, 52 Fort Panmure, 48 Foster, Joseph, 123, 126, 135, 142 Foxwoods Casino, 145 Franchimastabé, 48–50, 52 Franklin, Benjamin, 21; “Observation concerning the Increase of Mankind,” 24–25 Freeman, Bessie, 123 Fremaux, Léon J., “Choctaw Indian Squaws,” 98f French Market (New Orleans), 98–101 Fulkerson, Horace, 55 Gallatin, Albert, 43; Synopsis of the Indian Tribes, 11 Gaming, Indians and, 144–45 Gardiner, Catherine Marshall, 109 Gardiner, John Lyon, 13 Gayoso, Manuel, 50 Gender roles: Iroquois, 31–32, 35, 101–2; basket making and, 93–116 Genesee River Valley, 33–38 Ghost Dance ceremonies, 6 Gift exchange protocols, 47–50, 73–74 Girodet de Roussy-Trioson, Anne-Louis, “Burial of Atala,” 60 Grand-Pré, Carlos de (Commandant), 49 Granjean, Léon, 106 Grant, Ulysses S., 84

Great Society programs, 76 Grigra Indians, 45 Guedelonguay, 47–48 Hamilton, Grant, “Teller’s Indian Grocery,” 85 Hamlin, John, 9 Handsome Lake, 18, 34, 37 Harrington, Mark Raymond, 110–11 Harrington, Michael, The Other America, 77 Harriot, Thomas, 1 Hartley, Marsden, 122 Havasupai Indians, 104 Hearn, Lafcadio, 99 Henry, Joseph, 111 Higgins, Victor, 122, 134 History of Louisiana (Le Page du Pratz), 46, 59 Holland Land Company, 33 Holmes, David, 59 Holton, Woody, 27 Hopi Indians, 104 “Hopi Snake Dance, The” (Lawrence), 132 Hopkins, Gerald, 34 Horses: theft of, 53; assumption about Indians and, 117 Houma Indians, 107 Hudson River School, 41 Hughes, Langston, 122 Humor, Indian, 125, 133, 135 Humphrey, Heman, 86–87 Hunting: as invented state, 18–41, 82; deleterious effects of, 26–27; polarized imagery of, 30, 32; Iroquois and, 30–33, 36–37; Choctaws and, 55 Hunting-gathering activities, 24, 32 Hutchins, Anthony, 42–44 Hutchins, John, 42–44, 53 Huxley, Aldous, 118, 124, 139–40 Hyde de Neuville, Anne-MargueriteHenriette, 37; Indian family on a hunting trip, 38f; Indian chief, 39f

Index Iacocca, Lee, 10 Ideology, 1–4, 70, 142; in Jeffersonian America, 20–29, 34, 81–82 Indian Allotment Act, 80–81 Indian Basketry (Mason), 110 Indian chief (Hyde de Neuville), 39f Indian family on a hunting trip, An (Hyde de Neuville), 38f Indian livelihood: intercultural entanglement and, 5, 95; peddling goods (itinerancy) and, 5, 56–57, 97–101, 143; performance as, 6–7, 61, 132–34; risk of traditional, 7–8; hunting as, 30–33, 36–37; town development and, 45, 54–57, 68; U.S. policy and, 79–81. See also Adaptation strategies; Agriculture, as Indian livelihood; Basket making, Indian; Language and Indian livelihood Indian removal bill, 39–40 Indian Reorganization Act, 89 “Indians and an Englishman” (Lawrence), 124 “Indians and Entertainment” (Lawrence), 130–31 Indian Tribes of the Lower Mississippi Valley and Adjacent Coast of the Gulf of Mexico (Swanton), 110 Indian work, defined, 2–3 Indian workers, 2–3 Ingraham, Joseph, 62–63 Inuit Indians, 13 Iroquois Indians: resistance to commercial agriculture of, 29–41, 143; views of hunting of, 30–33; gender roles and, 31–32, 35, 101–2; world view of, 32–33; U.S. government reform, Quakers and, 33–36; adaptation strategies of, 33–41; private property and, 35; non-Indian representations of, 37–41; ethnographic study of, 40 Itinerancy. See Peddling goods (itinerancy) Jackpine Savages, 88 Jackson, Andrew, 39–40, 62

Jackson, Halliday, 35 Jacobs, Margaret, 119 James, Benjamin, 52 Jefferson, Thomas: U.S. Indian policy and, 18–19, 82; view of American Indians of, 20–22, 82; on population and land use, 25; Notes on Virginia, 27–28; agrarian ideal of, 27–29, 31 Jeffersonian America: representations of Indians in, 18–20, 38–41; U.S. Indian policy in, 18–20, 82–83; ideology and, 20–29, 34, 81–82; agrarianism and, 27–29 Jennings, Francis, 21 Jicarilla Apache Reservation, 123–24 Jim and His Daughter (Ufer), 134 Johnson, Matilde, 112 Johnson, Pauline, 15 Jojola, Theodore S., 144 Jurisprudence, boundary testing and, 57–59 Katz, Michael, 82 Kelly, Melville C., 86 Kent, Susan, 32 Kerlérec, Louis Billourt de (Governor), 47–48 King, Grace, 99 King, Richard, 52 Kiowa Ranch, 133, 137f Kiowa Reservation, study of, 78 Klein, Rachel N., 26 Kupperman, Karen, 23 Labor, Indians and, 3–5, 10–14; seasonal, in Natchez area, 55–56 Lakota Indians, 6 La Morlière (Lieutenant), 47 Land of Poco Tiempo (Lummis), 121–22 Land speculation: Iroquois and, 30, 33, 35; Natchez Indians and, 45 Land use: as justification for conquest, 8, 11, 21–22; capitalist notions of, 23; European economic discourse and, 23; population theories and, 23–26

197

198

Index Language: jurisprudence and, 57–59. See also Literature; Representations, non-Indian Language and Indian livelihood, 1–17, 142, 145; in historical narratives, 8–10, 19–20; in Jeffersonian era, 22; Enlightenment and, 22–27, 31–32; Iroquois metaphors and, 31–32. See also Representations, non-Indian “Last of the Cane Basket Makers, The” (Dormon), 114 Latrobe, John H. B., 42–45 Lawlor, Mary, 144 Lawrence, D. H., 17, 117–40; representations of Indians by, 118, 124–25, 128–32, 138–40; relationship of, with Pueblo Indians, 119, 123, 133–36, 137f, 138; Studies in Classic American Literature, 120, 126, 130–31; symbolic New World and, 120–23; The Rainbow, 121; Women in Love, 121; psychic journey of, 123–24; “Dance of the Sprouting Corn,” 124; “Indians and an Englishman,” 124; U.S. Indian policy and, 125–28; dark consciousness of primitivism and, 128–32, 138–39, 141–42; Mornings in Mexico, 130; “Indians and Entertainment,” 130–31; “The Hopi Snake Dance,” 132; “St. Mawr,” 138–39; “The Woman Who Rode Away,” 139 Lawrence, Frieda, 120, 123, 133, 137f, 140 Lawson, John, 142 Le Fleur, Henry, 48 Legal victories, Indian tribes and, 89–90 LeMoyne brothers, 45 Le Page du Pratz, Antoine, History of Louisiana, 46, 59 Lesueur, Charles, 63 Letters to An American Farmer (St. John de Crèvecoeur), 27 Liebersohn, Harry, 59 Lindsay, Vachel, 122 Lippard, Lucy R., 4

Literature: representation in, 4–5, 119; of French-Natchez interaction, 46 Livelihood. See Indian livelihood Livestock, Iroquois and, 32, 36 Locke, John, 23, 141; Second Treatise, 8 “Losing Business, A” (Opper), 84, 85f Losing Ground (Murray), 91 Louisiana: colony of, 45–46; basket making in, 93–101, 104–16 Luhan, Mabel Dodge, 122–24, 133, 135–36, 140. See also Sterne, Mabel Dodge Lujan, Tony, 122–23 Lummis, Charles, Land of Poco Tiempo, 121–22 Mah-ge-gah-how, 80 Maliseet Indians, 103 Manufacture, Jefferson’s view of, 28 Marcotte, Zelia, 109 Marginality, 68, 143, 145; pictorial representations of, 63–65 Marketing activities of women, 102–4 Mashantucket Pequot reservation, 145 Mason, Otis Tufton, Indian Basketry, 110 McCarty, James, 61 McIlhenney, John A., 113 McIlhenney, Sarah Avery, 109, 113 McKee, John, 55 McNickle, D’Arcy, 80–81 McQuaid, Kim, 73 Meigs, Return J., 22 Merrild, Knud, 135 Merwin, B. W., 114 Mesabi Iron Range, 87–88 Micmac Indians, 103 Miles, Christopher, 118 Misrepresentations. See Representations, non-Indian Mississippi Valley, Lower. See Natchez Mobile (AL), 56 Mohawk Indians, basket making and, 101–2

Index Mohican Indians, 41 Monroe, James, 25, 40 Montauk Indians, 13 Morgan, Lewis Henry, 40 Mornings in Mexico (Lawrence), 130 Murray, Charles, Losing Ground, 91 Naskapi Indians, 7–8 Natchez: early, 42–68; non-Indian representations of Indians of, 43–46, 49, 59–67; pre-Revolutionary War history of, 45–48; post-1783 transformation of, 48–50; banditry as protest in, 50–54; adaptation strategies of Indians in, 55–57; jurisprudence in, 57–59 Natchez, The (Delacroix), 60–61 Natchez Indians, 45; non-Indian representations of, 59–67 Natchez War, 42–44, 46 Natick Indians, 78–79 National Park System, 6 Navajo Indians, 105, 123 “Nég Créol” (Chopin), 115 Nelson, Horace, 13–14 Neubeck, Kenneth J., 72 Nevitt, John, 56 New Deal: programs, 76; Indian, 89 New Mexico, tourism and primitivism in, 117–40 New Orleans (LA). See French Market (New Orleans); Louisiana New York (state), 33–38 Nixon, Richard, 10 “Noble savage” ideal, 59–61 Nomadism vs. sedentism, 32 Norton, John, 36 Notes on Virginia (Jefferson), 27–28 Nutt, Eliza and Rush, 56 Nuttall, Thomas, 62 “Oakatibbe, or the Choctaw Sampson” (Simms), 65–67 Oberg, Michael, 23 O’Brien, Jean, 102 “Observation concerning the Increase of Mankind” (Franklin), 24–25

O’Connor, Alice, 74 Office of Indian Affairs. See Bureau of Indian Affairs Ofogoula Indians, 46–48 Okah Tubbee, 61 O’Keeffe, Georgia, 122 Oneida Indians, 30, 34 Opper, Frederick, “A Losing Business,” 84, 85f Other America, The (Harrington), 77 Ouden, Amy Den, 61 Pain, Françoise, 96–97 Palmer, Bryan, 33 Palmettos, in basket making, 93, 107 Panton, Leslie and Company, 52 Park, Robert, 77 Passamaquoddy Indians, 103 Passivity, 16, 93–116; French market and images of, 98–101, 105, 112; creative responses vs., 105; as selfprotective behavior, 112; non-Indian representations of, 113–16 Patronage, in administration of Indian affairs, 83–84 Peddling goods (itinerancy), 5, 56–57, 143; basket makers and, 97–101 Penobscot Indians, 103 Pepper, Mrs. William, 114 Pequot Indians, 145 Performance, as Indian livelihood, 6–7; in Natchez, 61; American Southwest and, 132–34 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, 72, 76 Petrus, 30 Philadelphia Society of Friends, Iroquois and, 33–36 Philips, Bert, 122 Pocahontas-like behavior, 43 Pokagon, Simon, 15 Populations, modes of subsistence and, 23–26 Potawatomi Indians, 103–4 Pottery, Indian, 102–3

199

200

Index Poverty: divergent strategies to alleviate, 69; Indian treaty rights and, 69–92; ideological uses of, 70; colonial intrusion and, 73; invisibility of rural, 76–77; of American Indians, 76–81; real hardship vs. perceived hardship and, 78–79; cultural and class bias and views of, 79; non-Indian representations of Indians and, 79, 84–92, 143; U.S. Indian policy and, 79–81; areas of study needed on, 81–82; resentment of white toward Indian, 90, 143–44; culture of, 92 Price, Hiram, 84 Primitivism: non-Indian, and authenticity, 114; American Southwest tourism and, 117–40; as set of ideas, 118–19; consequences of, for Indian people, 119–20; dark consciousness and, 128–32, 138–39 Progressive Era, 88 Property: Locke and, 8; Iroquois and, 35 Protect America’s Rights and Resources (PARR), 90 Protest, banditry as Indian, 48, 50–54 Prucha, Francis Paul, 19 Puck, 84–85 Pueblo Indians: women artisans of, 102–3, 105; D. H. Lawrence’s personal relationship to, 119, 123, 133–36, 137f, 138; D. H. Lawrence’s representation of, 124–25, 129–32; adaptation of ceremonies and dances by, 132–34 Purchas, Samuel, 21 Quakers: Iroquois and, 33–37; land speculation and, 35; in Ohio Valley, 73 Quapaw Indians, 47–48, 52–53, 57 Racism: welfare policy and, 72, 92; D. H. Lawrence on, 125–26 Raibmon, Paige, 96 Rand, Jacki Thompson, 78 Ravagli, Angelo, 140

Raymond, Clara Compton, 97, 112 Reagan, Ronald, 90 Recreation, Indians and, 6, 143; casinos and, 144–45 Red Cloud, 80 Red Jacket, 30–31, 36, 40 Reformers. See Social reform Removal (conquest): rationales for, 8, 11, 21–22, 61–62, 143; bill, Jackson and Indian, 39–40; of Choctaw and Chickasaw, 44; Bursum Bill and, 126–27 René (Chateaubriand), 59 Representations, non-Indian, 1–3, 5–6, 8–17; in literature, 4–5, 119; in early national period, 18–20, 37–41; negative effects of contact and, 26–27, 61, 68; Natchez and, 43–46, 59–67; poverty and, 79, 84–92, 143; welfare policy and, 84–92; basket making and, 94, 96–101; of Southwest Indians, 118, 124–25, 128–32, 134, 138–40; of Indian dances, 124–25; primitivism and, 128–32; “displayed withholding,” 144; of Indians and casinos, 144 Reservation system, attacks on, 84–86, 88 Reserve Indienne, La (Du Pont), 37–38 Resistance strategies: other American groups and, 15; to commercial agriculture, 29–41, 143; wars as, 42–44, 46–48; banditry as, 48, 50–54; selfprotective behavior as, 112, 130, 144 Resourcefulness, Indian, 34, 55, 68, 92, 143 Reynolds, Guy, 130 Richter, Daniel, 73 Ridge, John, 15 Riggs, Lynn, 122–23, 125 Rochester (NY), 33 Romantic era, 59–61, 65 Rosier, Paul C., 15 Rothenberg, Diane, 35 Rouquette, Adrien, 112 Ryan, Susan M., 71

Index San Carlos Reservation, 7 Sapir, Edward, 129 Sargent, Winthrop, 49–50, 53, 57–58 Schoolcraft, Henry, 38 Secondat, Charles Louis de, Spirit of Laws, 23–24 Second Treatise (Locke), 8 Sedentism, nomadism vs., 32 Self-determination, Indian, 89 Seligman, Linda, 102 Seminole Indians, 105 Seneca Indians, 30, 33–37, 40 Sewee Indians, 141–42 Sharp, Joseph Henry, 122, 134 Sheehan, Bernard W., 19 Sheridan, Philip, 79 Shewell, Hugh, 78 Simms, William Gilmore, “Oakatibbe, or the Choctaw Sampson,” 65–67 Skocpol, Theda, 83 Smith, Adam, 8 Smith, John, 21 Smith, Sherry, 119 Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, 38–39 Social reform: in Jeffersonian America, 22, 33–36; welfare, U.S. Indian policy and, 83–85, 88–89 Sociology vs. anthropology, 77 Solnit, Rebecca, 10 Soniat, Meloncy C., 97 Southwest, U.S., tourism and primitivism in, 117–40 Speck, Frank, 107 Speculation, land. See Land speculation Spinning, Jefferson’s view of, 28 Spirit of Laws (Secondat), 23–24 Spoils system, 84 Spotted Elk, Molly, 13–14 St. John de Crèvecoeur, J. Hector, Letters to An American Farmer, 27 “St. Mawr” (Lawrence), 138–39 St. Regis Reservation, 101–2 Standish, Miles, 21 Stereotypes, 19, 28–29, 79, 142. See also Representations, non-Indian Sterne, Mabel Dodge, 121–24. See also Luhan, Mabel Dodge

Sterne, Maurice, 122 Stevens, Laura M., 71 Stouff, Emile, 112–13 Stromquist, Shelton, 74 Studies in Classic American Literature (Lawrence), 120, 126, 130–31 Subsistence: notions of legitimate, 13–14; modes of, 23–26 “Sunday in New Orleans—The French Market” (Ward), 100f Swanton, John, Indian Tribes of the Lower Mississippi Valley and Adjacent Coast of the Gulf of Mexico, 110 Sweet, Timothy, 26–27 Synopsis of the Indian Tribes (Gallatin), 11 Tante MiMi, 113 Taos (NM), 121–40 Taylor, Alan, 26 Taylor, James, 86 “Teller’s Indian Grocery” (Hamilton), 85 Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) programs, 76 Thomas, Nicholas, 5, 95 Thoreau, Henry, 40 Thorton, Weldon, 139 Tierney, John, 91 Timbering, Iroquois and, 36–37 Tindall, William York, 118 Tioux Indians, 45 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 44 Tonawanda Senecas, 36 Toomer, Jean, 122, 130–31 Toubamingo, 47–48 Tourism, 5–6, 16–17; and primitivism in American Southwest, 117–40, 142; importance to Indians of, 143–45 Town development, and Indian livelihood, 45, 54–57, 68 Trachtenberg, Alan, 88 Trading, 36, 51–52, 56–57, 141–42 Transactions (Williamson), 26 Treaty of Big Tree (1797), 33

201

202

Index Treaty rights, 5; welfare policy and, 69–92; relationship of Indians to U.S. government and, 70, 75; critics’ attack on, 84–86; resentment of whites toward, 90, 143–44 Trosper, Ron, 77 Tsa-wie, 79 Tshanny, a Choctaw Man (Bodmer), 66f Tunica Indians, 47 Turnbull Trade Company, 52 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 8 Tuscarora Indians, 30, 35 Ufer, Walter, 122; Jim and His Daughter, 134 Unemployment, 76 Urban poor, Indians compared to, 86–89 U.S. Indian policy: in Jeffersonian America, 18–20, 33–36, 82–83; Bureau of Indian Affairs and, 73, 75, 83–85, 88–89, 91; Indian poverty and, 79–81; D. H. Lawrence and, 125–26 Ute Indians, 123 Vacuum domicilium, 21 Vagabonds, 52 Vattel, Emmerich de, 21 Vaudreuil, Pierre François Rigault de (Governor), 47 Vaun, Lewis, 58 Villebeuvre, Juan de la, 57 Vincent, Philip, 24 Volpe, John, 10 Wage labor, Indians and. See Labor, Indians and Wallace, Anthony F. C., 33 Walnut Hills, 52 Warburg, Aby, 128

Watkins, John A., 55, 57 Watt, James, 90 Waud, Alfred, 99; “Sunday in New Orleans—The French Market,” 100f Welfare policy: Indian assistance to settlers and, 25, 72–73; Indian treaty rights and, 69–92; relationship of Indians to U.S. government and, 70, 75; Indians minimized in history of, 71–76; Indian assistance outside BIA, 75–76; state governments and, 76; in Canada, 78; non-Indian representations and, 79, 84–92; U.S. Indian policy and, 79–81; areas of study needed on, 81–82; social reform and, 83–85; corruption and patronage and, 84–85; resentment of whites toward, 90, 143–44 West Florida, 51 Whalemen, Indian commercial, 12–13 White Apple Village, 43–44 Wilderness, negative views of, 26–27 Williamson, Hugh, Transactions, 26 Winnemucca, Sarah, 15 Winthrop, John, 21 “Woman Who Rode Away, The” (Lawrence), 139 Women: elders, Iroquois, 31, 35; basket makers, 93–116; market activities and, 102–4 Women’s Clubs, General Federation of, 89 Woodmason, Charles, 9 Working-class, Indians compared to, 86–89 WPA Guide to New Orleans, 115 Wrenshall, John, 37 Yeoman, idealized state of, 83 Young, Arthur, 28–29