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History's Shadow: Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century
288
by Steven Conn
Steven Conn
History's Shadow: Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century
288
by Steven Conn
Steven Conn
34.99
In Stock
Overview
Who were the Native Americans? Where did they come from and how long ago? Did they have a history, and would they have a future? Questions such as these dominated intellectual life in the United States during the nineteenth century. And for many Americans, such questions about the original inhabitants of their homeland inspired a flurry of historical investigation, scientific inquiry, and heated political debate.
History's Shadow traces the struggle of Americans trying to understand the people who originally occupied the continent claimed as their own. Steven Conn considers how the question of the Indian compelled Americans to abandon older explanatory frameworks for sovereignty like the Bible and classical literature and instead develop new ones. Through their engagement with Native American language and culture, American intellectuals helped shape and define the emerging fields of archaeology, ethnology, linguistics, and art. But more important, the questions posed by the presence of the Indian in the United States forced Americans to confront the meaning of history itself, both that of Native Americans and their own: how it should be studied, what drove its processes, and where it might ultimately lead. The encounter with Native Americans, Conn argues, helped give rise to a distinctly American historical consciousness.
A work of enormous scope and intellect, History's Shadow will speak to anyone interested in Native Americans and their profound influence on our cultural imagination.
“History’s Shadow is an intelligent and comprehensive look at the place of Native Americans in Euro-American’s intellectual history. . . . Examining literature, painting, photography, ethnology, and anthropology, Conn mines the written record to discover how non-Native Americans thought about Indians.” —Joy S. Kasson, Los Angeles Times
History's Shadow traces the struggle of Americans trying to understand the people who originally occupied the continent claimed as their own. Steven Conn considers how the question of the Indian compelled Americans to abandon older explanatory frameworks for sovereignty like the Bible and classical literature and instead develop new ones. Through their engagement with Native American language and culture, American intellectuals helped shape and define the emerging fields of archaeology, ethnology, linguistics, and art. But more important, the questions posed by the presence of the Indian in the United States forced Americans to confront the meaning of history itself, both that of Native Americans and their own: how it should be studied, what drove its processes, and where it might ultimately lead. The encounter with Native Americans, Conn argues, helped give rise to a distinctly American historical consciousness.
A work of enormous scope and intellect, History's Shadow will speak to anyone interested in Native Americans and their profound influence on our cultural imagination.
“History’s Shadow is an intelligent and comprehensive look at the place of Native Americans in Euro-American’s intellectual history. . . . Examining literature, painting, photography, ethnology, and anthropology, Conn mines the written record to discover how non-Native Americans thought about Indians.” —Joy S. Kasson, Los Angeles Times
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226115115 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 09/15/2008 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Steven Conn is associate professor of history at Ohio State University. He is the author of American Museums and Intellectual Life, also published by the University of Chicago Press.
Read an Excerpt
History's Shadow
Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth CenturyBy Steven Conn
University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2006 Steven ConnAll right reserved.
ISBN: 9780226114958
1 - Native Americans And The Problem of History, Part I
I regret with you, the want of zeal among our countrymen for collecting materials concerning the history of these people.In 1903, W. E. B. DuBois wrote, “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line,” and thus penned perhaps the most enduring pronouncement on the state of America ever made. By the time DuBois wrote, America’s racial “problem” had become, on a host of levels, a matter of black and white. The color line, in DuBois’s view, separated white from black. The contours of that line shaped the very essence of what America was in its soul, and the erasure of that line became DuBois’s life work.
Benjamin Smith Barton, 1797
DuBois’s famous statement needs to be seen as a prophecy—a remarkably prescient one at that—and as a summing up. We have become so accustomed to thinking of DuBois as a prophet of the key issues surrounding race in the twentieth century that it has been easy to forget that he came to maturity as much in the twilight of the nineteenth century as in the dawn of thetwentieth. Among the developments he witnessed in the waning of Victorian America was the disappearance of a third race from the national consciousness. DuBois may have seen the world in black and white when he wrote in 1903, but when he was born in 1868, the nation’s racial dynamic came in three colors: black, white, and red.
By the turn of the twentieth century, DuBois was already the nation’s most profound thinker on matters of race. Yet it is not at all clear that he spent much time thinking about that third race. As his biographer David Levering Lewis remarks, DuBois recognized that in the United States there formally existed only two races—Asians had been “excluded” while Native Americans had become “invisible.” Invisible because by the time DuBois made his prediction about the color line the frontier had been “closed” for thirteen years, and the massacre at Wounded Knee had effectively ended a generation of continuous warfare between the federal government and native groups. Noting that most young people had never even seen an Indian, the author of an 1885 children’s book about Indians pronounced:“With the exception of a few roving bands of Apaches and other wild tribes of the plains, the Indian pictured in these pages no longer exists.” The color line between black and white might well have become the “problem” of the twentieth century, but only because for most Americans the “problem” of the Indian had been finally “solved.”
In this outlook, DuBois was no different from most Americans, black or white, early in the twentieth century. My purpose is not to chide DuBois for his oversight. Rather, his relative silence on the question of Native Americans at the turn of the twentieth century underscores how thoroughly they had disappeared from Euro- and even African-American consciousness.
Three generations earlier such invisibility would have seemed nearly impossible. In a speech given to a New York City church congregation, Thomas McKenney, the first Superintendent of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (1824 –1830), quoted a “distinguished citizen of Virginia” reminding his listeners of the nation’s two part problem: “one of these relates to the black population which we carry in our bosom; the other to the red population which we carry on our back.” In his Notions of the Americans, a collection of letters to Europeans about the United States James Fenimore Cooper published in 1827 as his version of Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, Cooper put his comments about Native Americans immediately after his comments about slavery.
Alexis de Tocqueville, as astute an observer of antebellum society as DuBois was of the Gilded Age, certainly saw the United States as tri-colored. He paired Indians and African slaves almost metaphorically as polar opposites: “The Negro,” he wrote in his classic Democracy in America, “has reached the ultimate limits of slavery, whereas the Indian lives on the extreme edge of freedom.” Although they shared nothing of “birth, physique, language, nor mores,”they did share “their misfortunes.” The effects of slavery on Africans proved “not more fatal” than the effects of too much “independence” on Native Americans.
For citizens of the United States in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Indians were everywhere. They lived in a world, as Anthony Wallace put it recently, “in which Indians themselves were a constant presence.”
A presence and, as we have already hinted, a problem.
The diplomatic struggles and military encounters that characterized Euro-Native relations during the Revolutionary period are well known. American colonists found themselves fighting against Indians allied with the French, and then once more when other Indian groups became allies of the British during the Revolutionary War. Beyond the formalized violence of war, Euro-Americans clashed with Indians on numberless occasions, most often when tensions over land on the ever-expanding frontier came to a boil. When the revolutionaries established an independent republic, Indians may well have been a near-constant physical presence, but they now found themselves in, but not of, the new nation. In Wallace’s words,“native Americans fell outside the pole of the Jeffersonian republic, but inside the arena of Jeffersonian geo-politics.”
It makes sense to begin our considerations with Jefferson. Jefferson, in fact, was DuBois’ predecessor as a philosopher of the nation’s racial dilemma. None of the other founders spent as much time or intellectual energy thinking about Native Americans. Likewise, none of the others shaped policies that would prove so fateful to Native Americans. More than any other member of his circle, Jefferson recognized the increasingly intractable nature of relations between Euro-Americans and Indians. Writing to Benjamin Hawkins, Jefferson first commended him for “the attention which you pay to their rights . . . the want of which is a principle source of dishonor to the American character.”But then he turned more despairing: “the two principles on which our Conduct towards the Indians should be founded, are justice and fear. After the injuries we have done them they cannot love us, which leaves us no alternative but that of fear to keep them from attacking us, but justice is what we should never lose sight of.” Jefferson did not describe the relationship between white Americans and Indians with the famous metaphor he used to describe the institution of slavery, but he might as well have. Native Americans represented another wolf held by its ears.
Yet, as Anthony Wallace has portrayed him, Jefferson, much as he struggled with the issue, could simply not envision a future for the United States that included a place for “Indians as Indians.” As president, Jefferson tried to design an Indian policy that would humanely assimilate Native Americans into the new republic, but his vision of national expansion turned out not to have any room for Native Americans. Whatever uneasiness Jefferson felt about centralized power he lost to his “desire to obtain Indian land, at almost any cost.” The buffer zone Jefferson tried to create between settlers and natives during his administration failed to prevent abuse of the latter by the Euro-Americans. By 1816, the policy was a “nullity, in Wallace’s estimation.
Most significantly, Jefferson’s purchase of the Louisiana Territory in 1803 set in motion a sequence of events and forces that reached its antebellum conclusion in the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Jefferson’s desultory policy of civilization and assimilation culminated, ironically but perhaps predictably, in Andrew Jackson’s Trail of Tears. By the mid-nineteenth century, Indians remained a problem of national “geopolitics,” but they no longer constituted the kind of presence they had been a scant fifty years earlier.
For Jefferson, Native Americans represented another kind of dilemma as well. Whatever agonizing he did over questions of geopolitics, Jefferson found in Native Americans an irresistible set of intellectual problems. As discussed in subsequent chapters, Jefferson the scholar pursued and encouraged the study of Native Americans with real enthusiasm and vigor. In his work emerge the beginnings of American linguistics, archaeology, and ethnology. In this respect, Jefferson was exemplary, but he was by no means alone. In the nineteenth century, Indians were the subjects and objects of all kinds of speculation, research, polemic, and jeremiad in the worlds of science and letters. By 1841, the anonymous author of Events in Indian History anticipated a certain weariness and impatience from the reading public when he began his short volume this way: “Another book upon the Aborigines of North America! Have we not volume upon volume of works on the Indians of this continent?”
I should be clear at the outset that my book does not add to the “volume upon volume of works” written about Native Americans. Strictly speaking, this study is not really about Native Americans at all, and I am certainly no historian of Native America. The challenge of writing the history of Native Americans has been taken up by historians and anthropologists, both Native and non-Native, including Anthony Wallace, Vine Deloria, Richard White, Daniel Richter, and Lucy Murphy, to name a few whose works stare down at me from my shelves. (Recently, historian Ellen Fitzpatrick has provided an excellent account of the rise of Native American historiography in the twentieth century.) This book, I trust, would not cause further grimaces from the acerbic R. S. H. who wrote in 1848: “So much has of late been written upon the Indians that I tremble in approaching them.... [T]hey have suffered [at] innumerable hands, been bemoaned in lamentable prose, and wept over in most imaginative poetry: their fate has certainly been a hard one."
Nor does this book belong exactly with those by scholars—most notably Robert Berkhofer, Anthony Pagden, Roy Harvey Pearce, and Bernard Sheehan—who have addressed the ways in which Europeans and Euro-Americans have imagined the American Indian. Berkhofer’s landmark book The White Man’s Indian, for example, demonstrated how the ways in which Native Americans were portrayed in popular culture served as blank screens upon which Euro-Americans could project their own fantasies and desires.
Rather this is a study of the volumes upon volumes of books like Events in Indian History, and of their authors. It examines Native Americans as objects of study and as subjects of intellectual discourse in the nineteenth century. This study amounts to an intellectual history whose major actors are the Euro-American men (and occasionally women) who, for a variety of reasons and with a variety of motivations, took it upon themselves to study, record, and write about Native Americans. Neither intellectual historians nor historians of Native Americans have really considered fully how the curiosity that Indians aroused—and the ways that curiosity was pursued— shaped the nineteenth-century American mind. Studying Indians, I will assert, constituted a central, if now largely forgotten, part of the nation’s intellectual discourse, defining American science and social science, and shaping conceptions of the nation’s history. That is the story I have attempted to tell here.
In examining the study of Native Americans as a chapter in the nation’s intellectual life, I make three, interrelated claims. First, the very existence of Native Americans posed fundamental challenges to the way Euro-Americans understood the world. They found themselves unable to answer basic questions: Who are these people, and where did they come from? How are they related to other human groups, past and present? Have they demonstrated historical progress, or are they doomed to extinction? Attempts to answer such questions lay at the heart of the way several intellectual genres developed in this country.
Second, as they attempted to answer these basic and fundamental questions, Euro-Americans relied first on the only explanatory apparatus they had available: biblical and classical texts. As the nineteenth century wore on, however, and more research accumulated, it became increasingly clear that Indians were descended neither from a lost tribe of Israel nor from any colony of displaced Etruscans—to name two of the more popular theories that circulated in the antebellum period. I suggest that the failure of biblical and classical texts to explain the questions posed by Native American language, culture, and history—along with more familiar phenomena like the arrival of German criticism and Darwinian natural science—shaped the transition from a sacred world view to a secular one. Although that shift occurred on both sides of the Atlantic, I suggest that the American intellectual encounters with Native Americans gave a particular cast to the way it happened here. As Samuel Drake put it in his 1851 Biography and History of the Indians of North America, “if we are to attribute everything to miracles, wherefore the necessity of investigation?”
Finally, though, what troubled Euro-American scholars the most about Native Americans was their relationship to history. While people at all points in the past and at all points of the compass have had an interest in their own history, it is surely the case that history as a formalized practice and as an organized discipline only emerged during the course of the nineteenth century. That emergence had two components, each bound tightly to the other. On the one hand, the practice of history developed its own methodology during the nineteenth century, based on a set of rules that governed what historical questions should be asked, what constituted historical evidence, and in what form history should be written. On the other hand, Americans developed a new historical consciousness during the nineteenth century—a rough consensus shared by many about how the mechanisms of history worked, the exceptional place of the United States in the flow of history, and a sense, both reassuring and disquieting, that the distance that separated the present from the past grew almost daily. Method and consciousness reinforced each other, thereby drawing the boundaries of what constituted history.
This book argues that the attempts to study and understand Native Americans figured centrally in that process of definition. Trying to answer questions posed by the very presence of American Indians and the astonishing variety of their cultures forced Americans to confront the meaning of history, both their own history and the history of the Native Americans: How should history be studied? What drove its processes? Where might it ultimately lead? The change of American historical consciousness across the stretch of the nineteenth century meshed with attempts to figure out exactly where and how Indians fit into “history,” as it was pursued and understood. Did Native Americans have a history? If so, how should it be recovered? More importantly, could “their” history be seen as part of “ours”? My sense is that the intellectual encounters with Native Americans made it possible for Euro-Americans to define history apart from myth, history apart from culture, and the realm of history as something quite different from the realm of the past. By the 1890s, Native Americans could very well have a past, but they did not, by and large, have a history. In this sense, Native Americans constituted history’s shadow.
To get at this intellectual history, I have relied heavily on the discourse surrounding Indians that appeared in print during the nineteenth century. Vast as this literature is—the anonymous author of Events in Indian History did not exaggerate!—it comes as no surprise that it varies widely in a host of ways. Some of this variation stems from the wide variety of writers who turned their attention to Indians—from presidents and diplomats, to scholars and scientists, to ministers and poets. Then too, this immense body of writing, appearing in the form of books, magazine and journal articles, pamphlets, and lectures, was read by very different audiences as well. Writings about Native Americans in the nineteenth century traversed the full spectrum from the serious and learned, to the silly and laughable.
My purpose is not to sort out the serious from the trivial, to separate the scientific and scholarly wheat from the popularized, fantastical chaff,although some winnowing inevitably happens here. Rather, by treating these publications more or less as a single body I am attempting to demonstrate how pervasive Indians were in the intellectual life of nineteenth-century America. Further, I am arguing that the sheer volume and variety of this published material can reveal important things—not necessarily about the Indians themselves, but about the Euro-American culture that produced and read it.
Some years ago, when writing about the American 1930s, Warren Susman made a similar claim. One doesn’t have to insist, he argued, that Superman comics are better than Shakespeare’s plays to recognize that Superman might reveal a great deal about the culture of the 1930s. So it is here. Much of what got written, published, and read about Indians in the nineteenth century has been roundly and decisively dismissed by anthropologists, linguists, archaeologists, and others as useful or even legitimate science. After all, few among us take seriously the theory of the lost civilization of Atlantis, despite the currency it had in the mid-nineteenth century. Nonetheless, these writings remain important fragments of our intellectual and cultural history. In 1833, for example, Josiah Priest gave the reading public a ripping tale of the ancient and vanished races that once populated the American West. Not a word of his American Antiquities and Discoveries in the West is probably taken seriously today. By 1835, however, the book had sold 22,000 copies: serious sales even by today’s standard. This book, and others like it, ought to command serious historical attention.
Yet at the same time, however, the trajectory I trace here describes the way in which discourse about Native Americans became increasingly professionalized. As in all other fields of intellectual life, the lines separating professional and respectable scholarship from mere popularizing were being drawn more sharply. The development of America’s nineteenth-century intellectual life in many ways mirrors the delineations between “highbrow” and “lowbrow”that Lawrence Levine has charted in other areas of American culture. These realms interacted, to be sure, and the differences between the serious and the popular were never as sharp as many late nineteenth-century scientists and intellectuals insisted they were. One has only to think of the Barnumesque displays of Native Americans at the 1876 Centennial and at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition—the former sponsored by the United States National Museum, the latter by the fair’s department of anthropology—to remember that highbrow and lowbrow continued to intersect well into the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, the nature of intellectual discourse did change across the century. My concerns lie with how the study of Indians shaped what came to be considered the serious side of American intellectual life.
Continues...
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Table of Contents
List of IllustrationsAcknowledgments
1. Native Americans and the Problem of History, Part I
2. Images of History: Indians in American Art
3. Fade to Silence: Indians and the Study of Language
4. The Past Is Underground: Archaeology and the Search for Indian History
5. The Art and Science of Describing and Classifying: The Triumph of Anthropology
6. Native Americans and the Problem of History, Part II
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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