Native Representations
Moderators: Jen McGovern
jennifer-mcgovern@uiowa.edu
and
Anne Peterson
anne-m-peterson@uiowa.edu
"The Last Indian"
Syndrome Revisited: Metamora, Take
Two
So
much critical attention has surrounded John Augustus Stone's 1829 melodrama, Metamora; or the Last of the Wampanoags,
that its stepsister, John Brougham's 1847 burlesque, Metamora; or the Last of the Pollywogs has been almost forgotten.
In this essay I argue that Stone, using the idiom of colonial discourse in
portraying the "last Indian" on stage, offers in Metamora what Berkhofer has termed "the idea of the Indian," which is "a White
image or stereotype," hence an invention, a simplification (3). Working
from Homi Bhabha's definition of stereotype ("The Other Question"), I
go on to show the fixity of the "last Indian" syndrome as colonial
discourse on the American (literary and theatrical) scene. Actor Edwin
Forrest's performance of Metamora for forty years has contributed to the
simultaneous reiteration (through words and bodies) of Jacksonian politics, in
its vilest materialization—the Indian removal of 1830—and colonial affirmation
of genocidal fantasies. Through a
diachronic, repetitive mimesis of Indianness on stage, I argue, without much
variation in costume, pose, or movement, Edwin Forrest's performance has
contributed to the fixity of the image of the aesthetic Indian on display in
the American imaginary (of manifest destiny). Surviving photographs and
paintings of "Metamora," through multiple levels of mediation,
reinforce this thesis of fixity and control of representation. Almost one
hundred and fifty years later, the image of Forrest as the image of the Indian on stage invites a
reevaluation of the melodrama in relation to its famous parody, John Brougham's
burlesque, Metamora; or the Last of the
Pollywogs.
Without
denying many of the melodrama's merits, I argue that Brougham's parodic gesture
in his burlesque can be read as a serious response to the "serious"
play glorifying the dead Indian chief, informed by its own time, crafted for a
changing audience in the American theatre, reflecting major changes both in
dramatic and American culture at large. Undoubtedly, Brougham's
revision/rewriting of Stone's play troubles the nation's fascination with
playing Indian. Taking the ludic dimension of the play a few steps further,
Brougham's own "agenda" informs a play that takes mimicry seriously
and mocks the seriousness of Stone's historical mimesis or adaptation of
history for expansionist agendas. Reading mimicry in Brougham's play as a
potential site of partial Indian presence on mid-nineteenth-century American
stage, I revisit the contexts of the plays' production and reception,
emphasizing the role of the actor in marketing a political agenda and the role
of the audience in embracing models of masculinity and paternalism; then I
consider the specific ways in which Brougham's burlesque rewrites Stone's
melodrama through what I call, following Philip Deloria, "playing at
playing Indian," and examine the relationship between dramatic and social
performances of Metamora,
interrogating the role of ethnic humor in dismantling essentialist models of
ethnicity.
Cristina
Stanciu
stanciu@uiuc.edu
Transgression on the Page:
Elizabeth Oakes Smith's The Western
Captive
and the Phenomenon of the
Mammoth Weeklies' “Extras”
In
1842, the New York weekly magazine The
New World published Elizabeth Oakes Smith's The Western Captive; or, the Times of Tecumseh as an
"Extra," a quarto-sized volume that could be hawked on the street
cheaply, for twenty-five cents. This
paper explores the content of Smith's story—a fictional captivity narrative
which tells the story of a young white woman who does not wish to return to the
repressive domesticity of non-Indian life, and places it within the context of
the "Extra" itself. Like the
liminal space occupied by the "Extra" in the world of publishing,
Oakes Smith's heroine, Margaret, also occupies a place of intermediacy in her
refusal to return to her life in the white community, even as her race, and her
decision not to marry, make her acceptance in the Indian community sometimes
difficult. Similarly, "Extras"
competed for reading audiences with the novel yet did not have the novel's
autonomy as a text. Connected integrally to the oversized weeklies which
published them, "Extras," like Margaret, who has to forge her own
identity independent of those dictated for women in Indian and white societies,
became a unique publication format all their own in the antebellum period,
which has itself been defined as a period of intermediacy in terms of attitudes
towards race and gender relations.
Anne
Peterson
The
anne-m-peterson@uiowa.edu
Olive Oatman's “Fugitive
Pose”: Native Presence in The Captivity
of the Oatman Girls
In
1851, two girls witnessed the murder of their parents, two sisters, and two
brothers, with a third brother presumed dead; the Oatman girls were taken
captive by Apache (Yavapai) Indians and later traded to the Mohave for two
horses and some blankets and beads. Mary
Ann Oatman died, but her older sister, Olive, survived the five-year ordeal and
returned to white society. These
historical facts are integral to The
Captivity of the Oatman Girls (1857), but the details of the Oatman
massacre and the girls' abduction are depicted as sensationally as any
novel. The Captivity of the Oatman Girls represents a complex blend of the
genres of the Indian captivity narrative and the historical novel. Editor Royal B. Stratton revised the
narrative several times; in fact, critics and historians debate whether or not
Stratton should be considered the actual author of the text and question how
involved Olive was in telling her story.
Olive Oatman's voice seems to have been silenced by the insistent
language of "progress" and "civilization" that Stratton
reiterates throughout the narrative; the fact that she became a transculturated
Mohave Indian and the possibility that she may have become a wife and mother
while living with her adopted tribe have been omitted from the narrative. Yet traces of white society's unease with
Olive's transgressive past remain in the narrative, in the text itself and in
the images that accompany the text.
Olive was tattooed permanently on her face by the Mohave tribe and an
engraved illustration of her face is used as the frontispiece of the
narrative. This image indicates that
Olive survives her captivity at the cost of 19th century social
norms; Olive's permanent disfigurement reminds the reader of her unintentional
subversion of Anglo-American values.
Olive's tattooed visage suggests that frontier violence overturns social
hierarchies and that women must become like "Natives" in order to
survive in the West.
However, the tattooed representation of Olive Oatman also resembles Gerald Vizenor's description of the "fugitive poses" that appeared in Native photographs. Vizenor contends that even when Native peoples have been erased from history, traces of their presence remain. Olive's experience as an adopted member of the Mohave tribe is made visible in her tattoo, particularly because she gives public lectures after her return to white society. While on the lecture circuit, as well as in photographs and engravings, Olive juxtaposes her "civilized" attire with her "savage" tattoo—implying that she has developed a hybrid Anglo-Native identity as well. In these images are traces of Olive Oatman's Native presence, a woman who "somehow shook ones' belief in civilization," as her friend Susan Parrish writes (Schlissel 69). Olive directly meets the gaze of the reader in the frontispiece—yet does the reader hear her voice in the text? In this paper, I will argue that Olive Oatman's "fugitive" pose leaves traces of her Native presence in the text, challenging the "facts" of Stratton's fictionalized captivity narrative.
Jen
McGovern
The
jennifer-mcgovern@uiowa.edu
Buried Voices:
The Spoken For in the Narrated 'Autobiographies' of Four Native Women
Helen
Carr credits the Boasian school of anthropologists with some advancement beyond
gross generalizations of the "savage mind," studies advocated by the
Henry Schoolcraft/John Wesley Powell group, which garnered "ethnographic
data from the nineteenth century . . . to construct a universal evolutionary
ladder, leading from primitive to civilized" (133); however, the spliced
recordings, omitted oration, and morally "opprobrious" commentary
which infiltrate Truman Michelson's Fox woman's testimonial, "The
Narrative of a Southern Cheyenne Woman" (1931), and "Narrative of an
Arapaho
Woman"
offer evidence that these anthropological biases perpetuated through the first
half of the twentieth century. By carefully reading these texts, along with
Ruth M. Underhill's recording of Papago Woman, I intend to show how Michelson
and Underhill depoliticize and disempower the texts; by prohibiting the Native
American Women's ownership of the texts as well as by editing the texts to
facilitate publication, the ethnographers have not only displaced the author
from what has been labeled as her text, but created a pseudo-author that
functions to represent and advance the goals of the interlocutor. The texts
themselves, not autobiography and not testimonio, become displaced, occupying
an as yet untheorized space of analysis.
Alice
D'Amore
adamore@purdue.edu