Indian Work

Language and Livelihood in

Native American History

DANIEL H. USNER, JR.

Harvard University Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

2009

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

d e d i c a t e d t o c o r n e l l u n i v e r s i t y ’ s

a m e r i c a n i n d i a n p r o g r a m

—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

Introduction: The Pursuit of Livelihood
and the Production of Language

1 Inventing the Hunter State:

Iroquois Livelihood in Jeffersonian America

2 Narratives of Decline and Disappearance:

The Changing Presence of American Indians
in Early Natchez

3 The Discourse over Poverty:

Indian Treaty Rights and Welfare Policy

4 Perceptions of Authenticity and Passivity:

Indian Basket Making in Post–Civil War
Louisiana

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

2 Indian chief, possibly Red Jacket, 1807

3 Eugène Delacroix, The Natchez, 1835

4 Karl Bodmer, Choctaws at Natchez

5 Karl Bodmer, Choctaw Camp on the

Mississippi, 1833

6 Karl Bodmer, Tshanny, a Choctaw Man

7 “A Losing Business,” Puck, 1882

8 Léon J. Fremaux, “Choctaw Indian Squaws”

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 in-
dustrious 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 busi-
ness; I will weave baskets; it is a thing which I can do. Think-
ing 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 excel-
lence 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.”

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 short-
comings 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 be-
coming 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 prac-
tices and policies bolstered by this ideology.

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 pur-
suit 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 histori-
ography and the cultural history of non-Indian ideas and images com-
prises 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 In-
dians working before the watchful eyes of non-Indians. But the intri-
cacy 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 strategi-

cally use the phrase Indian work in reference to two different dimen-
sions. At one level of analysis, Indian work refers to image making of
various kinds. Since the earliest accounts of America produced by Euro-
peans, 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 of-
ficials, 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.

This book explores a diverse sample of writings created by such “In-

dian 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 anthropolo-
gists 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 Af-
fairs 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.”

Whether analyzing govern-

ment 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.

The phrase Indian work is also used to capture various activities pur-

sued 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, displace-
ment from homelands and loss of resources, employment off reserva-
tions 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, espe-
cially 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 cul-
ture 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

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.

The pop-

ular 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 work-
force, therefore, is not sufficient. “The entire ideological system within
which the stereotypes are nested,” Patricia Albers exhorts, “must be
dismantled.”

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 photo-
graphs in which “Native people are falsely ‘foregrounded,’ pushed up to
the front row, to the photographic firing line. The backgrounds, how-
ever, 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 “ac-
complices in the manipulations.”

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 dis-
abling 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 ex-
plored in this book intend to show, are difficult to discern without in-
terrogating the non-Indian narratives about them.

The difficulty that physical work in general poses for literary represen-

tation and analysis constitutes another challenge in this endeavor. Pass-
ing descriptions of commonplace activities are too easily overlooked,
passed over for longer scenes of what observers consider extraordinary
or exotic behavior.

But the problem is further complicated whenever in-

tercultural interpretation is involved. Readers are taken in this book to
various sites of representation and resistance, where dominant lan-
guage 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 evi-
dent when both dimensions of Indian work—the ideological work pro-
duced about Indians and the physical work produced by Indians—are
explored together. Imagining American Indians as savage hunters in Jef-
fersonian 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 be-
tween Indians and non-Indians as well as for public policies.

Livelihood can be interculturally “entangled,” in the way that anthro-

pologist Nicholas Thomas has characterized material objects.

There is

a hybridity in economic activities—whether looking at the fur trade, tran-
sient 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 ob-
servers 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 be-
came a valuable means of expressing identity and earning income. Non-
Indian 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 cus-
toms with commercial opportunities, but to many visitors such employ-
ment 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 cur-
rent 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,

Introduction

athletes, entrepreneurs, and warriors, in his study, “moved within white
expectations, usually challenging and reaffirming those expectations at
the same time.”

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 associ-
ation with the natural world.

During the early 1890s, Lakota men par-

ticipating 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 imprison-
ment.

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 ex-
ploitation, while protecting cultural integrity and personal dignity.

Performance of Indian identity was an expanding sphere of wage-

earning work for American Indians. Playing to white expectations be-
came a primary source of income, even a profession, for many. Whether
looking at the Adirondack Mountains and Niagara Falls in the North-
east, 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 trav-
elers 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 circum-
stances. 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 op-
portunities for the production of crafts and the performance of dances.
With some degree of ambivalence, Indian families improvised a liveli-
hood around the sale of products and services that narrowly and some-
times problematically represented their heritage.

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 con-
struction 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 Roo-
sevelt area. Working in crews of twelve to fourteen men, some super-
vised 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 scat-
tered work sites, however, Indians now practiced ceremonies and so-
cialized 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.

Efforts to hold on to economic activity that supports tradition but be-

comes difficult to sustain can be loaded with risk. But from the perspec-
tive 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 dur-
ing 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

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.

Neglect of this relationship between livelihood and language by histo-
rians is especially ironic, considering how deeply economic premises
about Indians contributed to fundamental narratives of American iden-
tity. Since the formative years of liberal economic thought in the seven-
teenth 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 in-
terests of European ideologues from the beginnings of contact. John
Locke deployed the imagery of Native Americans as hunters and gather-
ers 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 nat-
ural state. But in the same philosophical work, Locke denies that Amer-
ican Indians have any property right to the “Earth it self.” “God gave
the World to Men in Common,” but only the “Industrious and Ratio-
nal” can claim ownership of land. Because Indians supposedly failed to
increase the productivity of the land, they could rightfully be dispos-
sessed 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.

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 de-
structive 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 ex-
planation 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 inter-
ests and shape government programs. To justify the 1950s policy of

Introduction

termination, which was dissolving several tribal governments and relo-
cating 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 pro-
ductive 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” soci-
ety actively resists integration?

Well, it seems to be probable that the two kinds of culture cannot co-

exist 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 manifes-
tation 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.

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 anal-
ogy 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 Ap-
prehension.”

Zoom forward two hundred years to a meeting at the

White House in Washington, D.C., in which automobile manufacturing

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 indus-
trial 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.”

Once these deeply embedded images and ideas are exposed, compara-

ble 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 Cal-
ifornia. “The whites who administered Native American subjugation
claimed to be recruiting the Indians to join them in a truer, more coher-
ent 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 agri-
culturalists, while so many whites were feeling self-doubt about Chris-
tianity and trying to escape from agricultural toil, “was akin to those
contemporary efforts whereby charities send cast-off clothing to impov-
erished regions: the Indians were being handed a system that was worn
out, and it is no surprise that they had trouble wearing this cultural cer-
tainty so full of holes.” Solnit sees Indian conflicts and labor strikes in
1877 as inexorably bound together in a struggle against industrial con-
trol 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.

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

Introduction

Indians supported themselves through production and exchange pro-
foundly 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 popu-
lation 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 doubt-
ful.” 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 in-
dustrious 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 per-
haps 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.”

Making this ideological adversity even more vexing, labor actually

performed by American Indians, as much as labor supposedly not per-
formed by them, became a rhetorical instrument in the hands of later
ethnologists. Franz Boas, in one of his earliest trips to the Pacific North-
west, wrote on June 1, 1889, about American Indians at Victoria on Van-
couver 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

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 cheek-
bones, straight, shortcut hair, and dark eyes. They remind us so strongly
of the east Asiatic peoples that throughout British Columbia there is the in-
disputable 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 Chi-
nook [Jargon], in which the conversation goes along easily. The visitor
who leaves the much-traveled tourist roads in British Columbia has to de-
pend 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 mis-
sionaries do. A number of tribes, however, have even escaped this influ-
ence, as for example, the Kwakiutl of northern Vancouver Island.

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 Mon-
tauk 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.”

Notions of legitimate subsistence activity—as defined by social scien-

tists 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 op-
position from some whites who seem to know better than they do what
is “authentic” about their livelihood. Selling carved ivory was accept-
able 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 sell-
ing 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 hun-
grier now.”

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 mak-
ing all too easily conflated one with the other. American Indians them-
selves 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 politi-
cally savvy and well-informed community leader in his own right, Ho-
race 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

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 cen-
tury caused some ambivalence toward her father’s more local strategy.
Believing that he possessed the intelligence and industry to have be-
come financially well-off, she saw his refusal to become “an indepen-
dent 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 indepen-
dence. The independence that she tentatively wished for him was noth-
ing other than confinement from his point of view.

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 ar-
tifacts 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.

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 fruit-
ful.

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 mili-
tary personnel and strategy between Indian wars and overseas wars, the
centrality of Indian imagery also becomes more and more evident.

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 contribu-
tions to dialogues of various kinds—political, religious, environmental,
and more—can no longer be ignored.

The same is true for Indian en-

gagement with twentieth-century policies at home and abroad. Experi-
ences of American Indians as well as ideas about them, as Paul C. Rosier
has recently demonstrated, “can broaden our understanding of how do-
mestic 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.

The particular challenge taken up in this book is to include the role

played by ordinary Indian people in shaping public perception and pol-
icy, sometimes inadvertently collaborating with the production of im-
ages and ideas that reinforce stereotypes. Instead of having oratory and

Introduction

literature directly created by American Indians, in this project we turn
to conversations and interactions that largely went unrecorded. Descrip-
tion 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 de-
bated by historians for a long time. So in Chapter 1, I explore how Iro-
quois diplomacy and oratory during the years of the early republic
facilitated to some extent the construction of a mythology about no-
madic hunting. The centrality and versatility of colonial discourse about
Indian livelihood in the development of economic thought is demon-
strated along the way. A questionable imagery of vanishing noble sav-
ages 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 cen-
tury, 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 gov-
ernment. 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 eco-
nomic future of Indian people. Basket making by Indian women in late
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Louisiana, the subject of Chap-
ter 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 econ-
omy of these women’s communities, it facilitated white notions of In-
dian 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 cre-
ative 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 hid-
den 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 liveli-
hood.

The reclamation of Native American livelihood from these various lay-

ers of colonial language is my ultimate objective. Economic theory and
history were deeply complicit in the subjugation and displacement of In-
dian people, so exposing their influence on perceptions and interactions
across the centuries is a necessary step. My intention, however, is nei-
ther 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. Clear-
ing 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.

Introduction

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.”

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 pre-
scription for economic change became known as the “civilization pro-
gram” 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, descrip-
tions of Indian livelihood from the early national period are especially

perplexing.

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 agri-
cultural 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 In-
dian societies?

Not too long ago, historians of Indian policy during the early national

period continued to accept at face value the language used by Jeffersoni-
ans 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 de-
pended 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 me-
nial functions that kept ordinary existence intact, and by cultivating the
soil, she compensated for the sparse return from her husband’s hunt-
ing.”

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 progres-
sive school of Charles A. Beard and Carl L. Becker through the debates
over rural capitalism to more recent concern with consumption, histo-
rians 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 Amer-
ican Indians. That they taught the colonists to cultivate corn is briefly
mentioned, and references to Indians as obstacles to growth and settle-
ment are sprinkled across the narrative. But even their role in the fur
trade is somehow ignored.

Over the years scholarly attention de-

voted to Indian societies focused mainly on cultural and political
dimensions of their relations with colonial societies. The more widely

Inventing the Hunter State

noticed inquiry into socioeconomic changes and their ideological rami-
fications among England’s North American colonies, meanwhile, ignore
connections and comparisons with American Indian experiences.

Con-

sequently, 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 Amer-
ican 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 popula-
tion. 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. At-
tention to the cultural burden of interpreting imported goods might
seem a likely place at least to mention Indians, but they still do not ap-
pear 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 condi-
tions in their own marketplaces of revolution.

To begin restoring American Indians to their integral place at the inter-
section 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 ig-
norant 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 ob-
servers of Indian livelihood during the colonial period lacked the con-
ceptual 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.

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.

And certainly by the late eigh-

teenth century, cosmopolitan thinkers such as Benjamin Franklin and
Thomas Jefferson were capable of appreciating the successful applicabil-
ity 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.

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.” Euro-
peans wrote profusely about nomadic people living off the forest, con-
trary 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.”

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 mid-
eighteenth century, Swiss jurist and diplomat Emmerich de Vattel for-
mulated 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 na-
tions, 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.”

As president of the United States at the beginning of the nineteenth

century, Thomas Jefferson seemed ready to perfect the practice of mis-
representing and manipulating American Indian livelihood. The pro-
motion 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

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 ampu-
tates & abandons to the hunter the parts for which he is pursued should
be theirs.”

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 im-
mediate 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 Ten-
nessee 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 promis-
ing farmers and competent citizens. In 1816 he returned to a portrait of
sluggish agricultural improvement in order to rationalize removal one
more time.

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 cam-
paign to erase Indian agriculture from the national consciousness, al-
though 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 dif-
ficulty 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 con-
structed during the early national period.

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 be-
havior and social development.

Thanks to studies by Karen Kupperman, William Cronon, and Michael

Oberg, we now have a better understanding of how ambivalent, how ten-
tative, and even how divided Europeans had been in their earliest inter-
actions with American Indians.

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 be-
ing 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 ad-
vances our understanding of this process by showing that representations
of American Indian land use as wasteful actually contributed to the legit-
imization and eventual dominance of the newer values most notably
associated with the writings of John Locke. Attacking peasant use of Eu-
ropean land with disparaging images of Indian use of American land
proved to be an effective line of comparative discourse.

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 pro-
vided Europe by the mid-seventeenth century, would inexorably become
a fully formed model of economic life.

By the late eighteenth century, European and American philosophers
were reaching a new consensus about how to explain differences and sim-
ilarities among human societies. Believing in a uniformity of human be-
havior, 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 re-
sources determined the rates of growth in population and of movement
up a ladder of evolution. In his Spirit of Laws, Charles Louis de Secon-
dat, baron de Montesquieu, relied upon a theory of natural abundance
to explain everything from demographic to political conditions among

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.

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 con-
scious and creative decision making about how, when, and where to pro-
cure resources.

But there was a highly specific empirical background behind the con-

fidence 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 in-
crease 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.”

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 pro-
creation 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 In-
dians “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.”

Inventing the Hunter State

Franklin somehow failed to recognize that American Indian agricul-

tural methods, especially their success with corn, helped make the rapid
growth of the colonial population possible.

Instead, a demographic im-

perialism rested on the syllogism that “husbandmen” use land more
productively, as evidenced by their increasing numbers, and that addi-
tional land would be needed to support the growing population of “hus-
bandmen.” 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.”

But

before the United States would “advance” upon Latin American coun-
tries, there was the matter of North American Indians. In his Inaugural
Address of 1805, Jefferson commiserated how “the stream of overflow-
ing population from other regions” overwhelmed “the aboriginal inhab-
itants.” “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 im-
provement of the mind and morals.”

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 de-
clared, “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 ap-
proach of cultivation.” President James Monroe reported to Congress in
1817, “The hunter state can exist only in the vast uncultivated desert. It

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.”

Such ultimatums delivered to Indian hunters went even deeper than

a hunger for the land that they supposedly underused. Many Enlighten-
ment thinkers believed that the very forests containing wild animals were
detrimental to people’s health and that the consumption of wild meat de-
teriorated social behavior. In the 1789 American Philosophical Society
Transactions, Hugh Williamson wrote that “while the face of this coun-
try 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.”

To this way of thinking, the coexistence of fields and forests was unac-

ceptable. 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.

But throughout the colonial period and well into the nineteenth century,
it also reflected the immediate concern among elites that proximity to In-
dians and their environment would make American settlers uncontrol-
lable 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.”

Groups with

an interest in commercial production and land speculation in backcoun-
try 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 eigh-
teenth-century frontier regions, promoters of hierarchy and control
condemned those frontiersmen who resisted commercial agriculture for
succumbing to the temptations of savagery.

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 in-
cluded 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, as-
serted that excessive debt and tax collection disabled and dispirited pro-
ducers, causing a decline in exertion.

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 fe-
rocious, 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.”

From the backwoods of Enlightenment thought, so to speak, we now

reach the more familiar terrain of what is called Jeffersonian agrarian-
ism. Like so much of American history, this important ideological devel-
opment 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.

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 Vir-
ginia. “Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phenomenon

Inventing the Hunter State

of which no age nor nation has furnished an example.” In post-
Revolutionary 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 pre-
vention, 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.”

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 pro-
moted as a suitable activity for Indian women, was not considered ap-
propriate for a white male citizenry.

But far from being nostalgic or anticommercial, Jeffersonian agrari-

anism 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 af-
ter 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 provi-
sions 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.”

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 tradi-
tional agrarian systems and rural social relations.”

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 con-
veyed his dismay over supposedly wasteful practices in Brittany by writ-
ing 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 bru-
tal filthy places that can be seen; mud houses, no windows, and a pave-
ment 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?”

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 ex-
pose their wives and children to labour above their force or sex, as long
as their own labour can protect them from it.”

American Indian communities in the late eighteenth and early nine-

teenth centuries, therefore, had to contend with a language about agri-
cultural 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 farm-
ers.

The livelihood of American Indians came under closer scrutiny just

when pressures on their territory made life notably more difficult. Agri-
cultural reform thus constituted a double-edged sword, compelling Indi-
ans 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 Europe-
an peasants, as wasteful and irrational behavior that needed to be liber-
ated from traditional obligations and constraints.

Jefferson summarized

in 1805 what he considered “powerful obstacles” to teaching agriculture
to Indians: “The habits of their bodies, prejudice of their minds, igno-
rance, 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.”

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

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.

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 Penn-
sylvania, “which being contiguous to the Settlements of the White Peo-
ple, 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.

Iroquois spokesmen were highly defensive about the preservation of

hunting grounds, apparently emphasizing their importance over farm-
land. 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.”

In 1800 Red

Jacket played up the difference between societies in a speech to the Rev-
erend 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 fol-
low 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.”

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.” “In-
stead 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 com-
pared 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.”

What meanings lay behind this council language used by Indian speak-

ers? This is an especially difficult question since the records contain only
English versions of Iroquois thoughts, which were not easily or accu-
rately 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 Iro-
quois 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 cul-
tivate 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.”

But hunting was the men’s sphere, so male

diplomats might predictably underscore its importance—sometimes an-
noying their female relatives. Between formal speeches delivered at Buf-
falo 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.”

Hunting grounds might have demanded special attention because they

were also the most vulnerable kind of Indian land at the end of the eigh-
teenth century, as game became harder to find and hunters encountered
hostile settlers. “Turn our faces which way we will,” Cornplanter com-
plained 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?”

“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.”

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 Amer-
ica 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

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 pro-
duce 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 under-
mining interdependency.

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 adapt-
ing livestock to their way of life, cattle, hogs, and sheep did not easily
assimilate into their belief system. More time was needed to replace cul-
turally 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.

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 Euro-
American 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 sen-
tience, 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 ani-
mals and do not hunt situate wild and domestic animals in separate cat-
egories 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.

This type of categoriza-

tion 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 meta-
phorical utterances to reach social and economic circumstances. What
Bryan Palmer called the “linguistic turn in social history” does not neces-
sarily 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.

Veiled behind the lin-

guistic Indian work produced by Jeffersonian observers was a more com-
plicated 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 ram-
pant land speculation and political corruption characteristic of rapid
economic development. The Holland Land Company and other specula-
tors 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.

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 reserva-
tions. 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.

In this general setting Iroquois leaders had to respond to the agricul-

tural reform offered them by the U.S. government. In May 1798 repre-
sentatives from the Philadelphia Society of Friends began to implement

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.”

To some extent the Iroquois took the advice of these outside re-

formers, 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 agricul-
tural revolution seems to have taken hold in some of the Iroquois com-
munities. 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.

But before we too quickly conclude that the Iroquois conformed to

the Jeffersonian model of economic life, a closer look at changes in liveli-
hood is in order. Indian initiatives and responses during the early nine-
teenth 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 pre-
scription 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 continu-
ing land grabs. In 1790 Cornplanter had issued a very mixed signal to
President George Washington about the prospects for Iroquois liveli-
hood 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.

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 Pol-
lard 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.” Pol-
lard 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.”

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 specula-
tors and settlers. And the Quakers often defended the land rights of Iro-
quois 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” em-
ployed 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 in-
termediate spaces prepared by their women with the hoe, according to
former custom.”

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 re-
sponses 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.

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 inci-
dents. 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.

The federal government’s practice of rewarding

selected individuals and communities for adopting its plan more rap-
idly than others threatened to divide Iroquois people with inequality

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.”

Ownership of live-

stock 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.

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.”

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 hunt-
ing, and that with the produce of the Chace, he had hired people to
build and to work for him.”

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.”

For as long as possible, many Iroquois families tried to preserve hunt-

ing 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 some-
times shingls, the latter of which I have bought for one dollar and fifty
cents per thousand and paid for them in merchandise.” Quaker reform-
ers 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.”

Into western New York Indian communities undertaking these chal-

lenges came two Indian workers who for a passing moment created im-
ages 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 commu-
nities were a compelling subject. When Baroness Anne-Margueritte-
Henriette Hyde de Neuville visited her friend in Angelica in 1807–1808,
Gabrielle made sure that she saw Indian people on and off their reser-
vations. 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 experi-
ences 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 wa-
tercolors painted by the Baroness Hyde de Neuville convey creative adap-
tations 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

Inventing the Hunter State

poor loitering savages in spite of the humane measures adopted by the
government to protect their waning independence.”

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 pub-
lished in 1847, Henry Schoolcraft described a livelihood that mixed a
diversity of activities: the cultivation of various crops, hunting and gath-
ering, the raising of livestock, and harvest work on neighboring white
farms.

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 ex-
plained 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

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.

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

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.

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

Inventing the Hunter State

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.

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

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 Repub-
lic.”

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 re-
morse 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.”

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.”

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 defi-
nition 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 set-
tlers demanded further cessions. But while the Iroquois people strug-
gled 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 ad-
ditional technologies, but they had no intention to scrap an autonomous
vision of their future. “We were placed here by the Great Spirit for pur-
poses 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 coun-
ternarrative 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 improve-
ments 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.”

Inventing the Hunter State

The Iroquois struggle to protect their rights to govern and utilize re-

maining 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 In-
dians 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 peo-
ple on the margins of a romantic landscape. Whether headed to extinction
or confined to the past, the northeastern Indian played the role of pas-
sive 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 cap-
tured in popular art and literature. Iroquois and Mohicans who period-
ically 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.”

Across the United States, many American Indians had

made itinerant activity along travel routes and on urban streets a valu-
able 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.

Inventing the Hunter State

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 in-
formal 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.

In November 1834, one hundred and five years after the Natchez In-

dians 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 In-
dian past from the planter who happened to be his wife’s maternal un-
cle. Hutchins claimed, falsely, that his father had witnessed the Natchez
War. So it was supposedly Anthony Hutchins’s version of events that was

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 them-
selves. 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 disre-
garded 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 exul-
tant and boastful Natchez, decided to destroy them for revenge. The
love of a young and beautiful Natchez woman for a French military of-
ficer, 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 war-
riors and sit around their council fire, the Natchez live only in the his-
tory 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 spe-
cious description of the Natchez War, however, there is a paragraph

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 Mis-
sissippi’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.

The juxtaposition in Latrobe’s journal of a romantic rendering of

Natchez’s Indian past with a pitiful report of its current Indian occupa-
tion invites further scrutiny into another place for the multidimensional
study of Indian work. The Native American presence in this Missis-
sippi River town following the Natchez War of 1729 remains obscure
and episodic, with occasional references in history and literature to
Choctaw raiding and vagrancy.

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 experi-
ences 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 ap-
parently 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.

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 scholar-
ship 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 Ameri-
can towns in very active and intricate ways. As evidenced in such an ar-
ray 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.

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 be-
tween French colonists and native villagers. Like many other groups
along the Mississippi River, the densely populated Natchez villages suf-
fered heavily from the spread of disease over the seventeenth century.
René Robert Cavelier, sieur de La Salle’s initial encounter in 1682 oc-
curred amid widespread depopulation. By the time the LeMoyne broth-
ers launched the French colony of Louisiana, traders and missionaries
were making frequent visits to Natchez country, where some 3,500 peo-
ple 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 vil-
lages to join the highly centralized tribe.

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 offi-
cials began pressuring Natchez villages to make land available for to-
bacco plantations.

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 plan-
tation manager who lived in Louisiana from 1718 to 1734. His three-
volume History of Louisiana was published in 1758 and described
Natchez society in great detail, accompanied by illustrations of cere-
monies 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.

Amid the natural history of

flora and fauna and the narrative of major events spanning three vol-
umes, du Pratz offered critical commentary on colonial Louisiana and
sympathetic treatment of Indian society. “With the most idealistic hu-
manism of the Enlightenment,” in the words of Shannon Dawdy, he de-
picted the Natchez as “peers of the French”—a decent people struggling
under despotic rulers.

Although the particular complexity of eighteenth-

century 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 lo-
cus of American Indian activity over the rest of the eighteenth century
and well into the nineteenth century. Economic engagement and politi-
cal 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 imagina-
tion. 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 man-
aged 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.

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.

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.

Two years later, a group of twenty to thirty Natchez people living at the
Upper Creek town of Abikudshis requested permission from the gover-
nor 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.

At the end of July 1754, Chickasaws in three or four war parties at-

tacked 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 appar-
ently 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.

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

Narratives of Decline and Disappearance

lost their way and were unable to return to their post in Illinois. Ap-
pealing for the deserters’ pardon at their request, the Ofogoula chief re-
minded 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 sol-
diers, Guedelonguay promised in the future to return all deserting sol-
diers and other malefactors without any conditions.

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.

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 Franchi-
mastabé, rising chief of the western district of the Choctaw nation, con-
tributed 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.

A changing appearance of American Indians in Natchez from the Span-
ish colonial period through Mississippi’s early statehood reflected diffi-
cult and intricate efforts of the Choctaws in particular to cope with a
powerful transformation of the Lower Mississippi Valley after 1783.

Choctaw leaders expressed their reaction to shifting international rela-
tions through diplomatic gestures at Natchez, in face of government of-
ficials’ 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 resis-
tance. 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 terri-
torial period of Mississippi history. Contemporary descriptions of Indian
people on the streets and along the riverbank of Natchez, usually ex-
pressing 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 doc-
uments 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 insis-
tence 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.”

On September 30, 1790, five Choctaw chiefs sum-

moned 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.

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 infrac-
tions of Indian diplomatic protocol. Greeting a large party at the Con-
cord 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 Ammu-
nition 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.”

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

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.”

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.”

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 go-
ing 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 alco-
hol 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.”

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 be-
cause “you must be attended by many of your people who would ex-
pect 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 house-
hold weaving in order to enjoy better times, “with Independence as the
Whites.” “If you and I could be the happy Instruments of making it Gen-
eral amongst the Choctaws,” Sargent told Franchimastabé, “it would
gladden our hearts in our declining years, as insuring the Welfare of
their Children after them.”

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 peri-
ods. 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.

Informal relations between Indi-

ans and non-Indians now became suspect, treated generally by govern-
ment 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 entan-
glement of issues makes it impossible to precisely distinguish symbolic
acts of protest from prosaic kinds of disruptive activity.

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 inhabi-
tants.” “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 com-
mon 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.”

There is no question that Mississippi Indians both inadvertently and

intentionally facilitated crimes against property in the Natchez area. But

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.

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. Pan-
ton, 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.”

But Franchimastabé voiced his own objec-

tion 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 sav-
ages the skins which they owe to the traders in the villages, and as a re-
sult these traders are unable to pay their debts.”

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 con-
cerned 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 compen-
sate their own traders for loss caused by the competition.

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 plun-
der. 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 In-
dians led the return firing into the camp, drove the bandits away, and re-
trieved 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 down-
river 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.

The Choctaws themselves often made it impossible to ascertain spe-

cific 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 fre-
quently 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 com-
bat 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 live-
stock, buildings, and crops.

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 com-
plained, “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.”

In some other cases, Choctaw pilferage reflected immediate scarcity

caused by either a natural shortage of food sources or a neglect of sub-
sistence activities. Begging Natchez residents for food was then insepa-
rable from robbing their households. In the spring of 1802, more than
two hundred Choctaw men, women, and children were encamped within

Narratives of Decline and Disappearance

six miles of town. “They almost entirely depend upon begging and steal-
ing,” according to Governor Claiborne, who feared that it would be
“difficult to shield the Indians from much violence” that might be com-
mitted by citizens angry about losing their livestock.

Under these cir-

cumstances, the threat of further violence moved both ways. When later
in 1802 about eight Indians from a camp near Daniel Grafton’s corn-
field killed a steer and wounded another on his plantation, they defiantly
threatened to cause further damage.

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 in-
clined; from these sources disputes arise, and I am looked up to, as the
Arbitrator.” Twelve days before the territorial governor wrote this let-
ter, a Choctaw who “drank too freely of Spirits” in town “became inso-
lent, and was chastised with some severity by an unknown citizen.”
Missing since the evening he was whipped, this Choctaw man was sus-
pected of being dead.

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 them-
selves much in fault” for the trouble with visiting Indians.

In 1800 the

territorial assembly had imposed a penalty on taverns and stores for sell-
ing liquor to Indians as well as slaves, but this and subsequent laws
proved ineffective in preventing townspeople from exchanging alcohol
with Indians.

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 Indi-
ans.” 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.

The striking effects of banditry and intoxication among American Indi-
ans received significant attention in the reports of colonial and territo-
rial 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 cen-
tury, and Natchez was the site of some resourceful strategies of eco-
nomic adaptation pursued by Choctaws and other Mississippi Indians.
Indian inhabitants of the Mississippi Territory responded to their deteri-
orating 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 oc-
curred 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 non-

Indian 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 ob-
served 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 be-
sides other articles of manufactured goods, which are charged to them
at most exorbitant prices.”

John A. Watkins recalled his first acquain-

tance 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 No-
vember 1814 to recruit warriors, he “found the towns abandoned, the
people had either gone hunting or into the settlements to pick cot-
ton.”

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.”

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

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.”

No matter what passing observers thought about these itinerant In-

dian workers, local planters had come to depend upon them for extra
help. Eliza Nutt wrote to her husband in December 1817 from their plan-
tation 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 back-
ward coming in this fall.” Rush Nutt was away in northern Virginia at
the time, purchasing additional slaves for his Mississippi operation.

Clermont Plantation near Natchez, John Nevitt regularly hired Ameri-
can 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.”

Choctaws also used the bustling river town of Natchez as a market-

place 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 food-
stuffs, pelts, horses, baskets, and firewood there well into the nineteenth
century.

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.

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 instru-
ments made from cane, while a drummer struck a two-gallon tin kettle
covered with a buckskin. Their solemn march to the arriving boat, cli-
maxed 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 pas-
sengers either stopping or disembarking at the busy docks.

“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.

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.”

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 blan-
kets, stroud & calico supplemented by a Jug of whiskey.”

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 tak-
ing revenge or accepting payment for losses suffered, a system that dif-
fered 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 wa-
ter, but his boat and cargo of oil, bear skins, and deerskins were taken.
“He wanted to take revenge,” but Lieutenant Colonel Juan de la Ville-
beuvre 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.

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 citi-
zens and officials to apprehend the culprits. But fearing that the innocent

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.”

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 commu-
nities, 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.

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 han-
dled inside tribal jurisdiction. Indians were expected to turn citizens and
slaves accused of committing crimes on Indian land over to American of-
ficials. 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.

But this practice did not guar-

antee 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 com-
pensation for an Indian who was killed in Natchez about two Months
ago.”

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 vic-
tims 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 mur-
der, Governor David Holmes anticipated “that the friends of the Indian
will not be satisfied with this verdict.”

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 ro-
manticized 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 Indi-

ans, 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 nineteenth-
century 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, pub-
lished 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.

“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.

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 en-
countered in western New York were notably disappointing. Ironically,

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!

Important European paintings of note were directly influenced by

Chateaubriand’s novels, as were chinaware, clocks, and other furnish-
ings. In 1808 pioneer French romanticist Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-
Trioson 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 atmos-
phere that is gloomy, Catholic and romantic.” In the Salon of 1835, Eu-
gène 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

Narratives of Decline and Disappearance

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.

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

persecutors, travel down the Mississippi. The young woman, seized with
labour pains, has just given birth on the shore.”

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 cab-
inetmaker from Pennsylvania and probably was the father of Robert and
Kitty, who inherited his property. Three- or four-year-old Warner re-
mained 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. Ac-
cording to Okah Tubbee’s staged story about himself, this woman in-
sisted 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 appren-
ticed 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, pro-
moter, 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.

Meanwhile, images of pitiful Indians loitering around Natchez—vividly

demonstrating the destructive effects of close contact—contributed to a ra-
tionale 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 contin-
uing 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.

In Jacksonian Amer-

ica, this kind of linguistic manipulation played right into the hands of

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. “Con-
siderable numbers of Choctaw appeared at this season,” he noted, “strag-
gling through the streets of Natchez, either begging or carrying on some
paltry traffic, but chiefly for the sake of liquor.”

Descriptions like these

resonated in many readers’ minds when President Andrew Jackson de-
clared, 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.”

Echoing eighteenth-century myths about coastal peoples con-

veniently 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 even-
tually 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 preju-
dice 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 ex-
tremity 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 care-
lessly 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 mis-
erable, 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 pictur-
esque ensemble of the scene.

A derisive attitude is profusely expressed in Ingraham’s words. The In-
dian’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 communi-
ties situated in close proximity to much larger non-Indian populations
across the eastern United States.

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 de-
scription, 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

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.

Swiss painter Karl Bodmer also captured the seasonal presence of Indi-

ans 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

Narratives of Decline and Disappearance

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

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

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 of-
fered him a couple of shabby beaver pelts.

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 em-
ployed by a planter near Natchez to help pick cotton. Simms had trav-
eled 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

Narratives of Decline and Disappearance

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

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

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

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

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

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 per-
suaded, even by gradual steps, and with the hope of certain compensa-
tion, 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 pos-
sibly 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, unre-
strainable 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.

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 main-
tain 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

Narratives of Decline and Disappearance

protest, indigent groups begged and robbed for sustenance, and entrepre-
neurial 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 con-
tact. 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 despera-
tion 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 de-
cline and disappearance all too easily folded into a protracted discourse
over poverty.

Narratives of Decline and Disappearance

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 writ-
ing 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 con-
tempt toward these same clients and even working for their opponents.
In one column favoring Abramoff’s lobbying efforts, Doug Bandow fea-
tured 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 de-
fined 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 gener-
ate 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

poverty. Bandow backed up his celebration of the Choctaws’ corrected
path with figures about income, employment, and sales. Such an ideolog-
ical 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.

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 liveli-
hood. The actual experiences of Indian people as objects of govern-
mental 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 treat-
ment 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 ser-
vices to Indian people from those granted to other Americans. But as cit-
izens of the United States under the 1924 American Indian Citizenship
Act, Indians living in poverty did become a significant group of partici-
pants 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 under-
standing of their particular relationship to welfare policy. But we will
also realize that imagery of American Indian livelihood across the cen-
turies 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 liveli-
hood 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 marginal-
ization 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 un-
derclass, has effectively blinded us from Indian people’s long-standing
involvement in central economic processes.

Lingering problems in the historical literature on charity and wel-

fare 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 colonial-
ism centuries earlier. Recent approaches to sensibility and benevolence,
however, offer promising solutions. Laura M. Stevens’s study of mission-
ary writings in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Anglo-America situ-
ates the representation of American Indians at the very center of the
creation of an imperial self-image. Generating pity for Native Ameri-
cans 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 dis-
course 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 re-
moval was in shaping white identity and power. The image of desper-
ately dependent Indians in need of protection and salvation—no matter
how distorted it was—served the interests of both proremoval and anti-
removal advocates.

Exploring wider and more complex linkages between the construc-

tion of attitudes toward Indian people and the formation of social poli-
cies affecting all citizens of the United States should produce valuable
results. Recent attention to medical discourse over American Indian

The Discourse over Poverty

health has been especially informative in demonstrating how much can
be learned through this kind of analysis.

Students of the nation-state’s

various instruments of control and reform are finally discovering how in-
formation about American Indians influenced the political development
of the United States.

To trace the variety of shifting connections to In-

dian 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 pro-
grams across the nation. Moreover, new light might also be shed on the
entanglement of culture and class that still confounds American think-
ing about poverty and welfare.

The role played by racism in the formation, implementation, and al-

teration of American welfare policy has become essential for under-
standing 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 obvi-
ous. Recent policy analysis is finally including more details about the
system’s impact upon American Indians. Some western states systemati-
cally tried to exclude their Indian populations from ADC support dur-
ing the early years of the Social Security Act, and the poorest Indian
reservations have been especially hard hit by recent reforms.

Yet much

more needs to be learned about American Indians’ unique relationship
with what sociologists Kenneth J. Neubeck and Noel A. Cazenave con-
ceptualize as “welfare racism.”

Whether making trivial remarks in quick passage or committing serious
errors in interpretation, references to American Indians in general discus-
sions of poverty and welfare are consistent with their overall treatment in
economic studies. Indian assistance to early settlers in the form of provi-
sions 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.

Bremner and other histo-

rians of welfare also mention the role of Indian warfare in the origins of
social policy. Indian conflicts created refugees, orphans, and disabled sol-
diers 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 con-
tribution is usually relegated to the impact of military resistance upon
national institutions and character. The impoverishing effects that colo-
nial intrusion and dispossession actually had upon native life are seldom
mentioned.

Perhaps a truly valuable episode from early American his-

tory 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 gov-
ernor and council of defending local Indians who were “Robbers and
Theeves and Invaders of his Majesties’ Right and our interest and Es-
tates.” Behind this complaint about “protected and Darling Indians,” not
without significance, was Bacon’s own desire to grab a share of the In-
dian trade already monopolized by Governor William Berkeley.

Anxi-

eties and conflicts among whites over the economy would implicate
American Indians as ideological targets—sometimes of nostalgia, some-
times of scorn, sometimes of pity, and sometimes of resentment. Explain-
ing 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.

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 nation-
state, the Bureau of Indian Affairs is characterized as the oldest welfare
agency in the United States. In one of the more cautiously worded state-
ments 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.”

Such a sum-

mary hardly reflects any knowledge about the actual workings of Indian
sovereignty and Indian policy.

The rhetorical association of gifts and annuities with Indian depen-

dency actually has a lineage that dates at least to mid-eighteenth-century

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 au-
thorities 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 prac-
tice of providing gifts to Indian leaders, claiming that it made their peo-
ple 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.”

Of course, Indian people under-

stood the custom of gift exchange quite differently, demanding expres-
sions of generosity and reciprocity that were essential in maintaining
alliances between nations. Partly in response to Amherst’s draconian pol-
icy, Indian nations across the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes launched
powerful military resistance against English forts and posts.

Important contemporary studies demonstrate the importance of his-

torical analysis for understanding poverty and welfare policies but con-
tinue 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 separa-
ble from class or ethnicity in poverty knowledge.” Consideration of con-
temporary 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.

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 di-
minished under various circumstances, a degree of sovereignty was pre-
served through treaties, legislation, and litigation. The federal agency
responsible for relations with Indian nations, eventually called the Bu-
reau 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 educa-
tion provided to American Indians by the Bureau of Indian Affairs con-
stitute 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 set-
tlement of tribal claims won against the United States. The notion that
this distribution of money and services constitutes a welfarelike depen-
dency is a distortion of the formal government-to-government relation-
ship that operates in Indian country.

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 as-

sistance and entitlement programs increased significantly over the sec-
ond 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 obli-
gations 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.

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 re-
form 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 dur-
ing the 1960s included “Indian Desks” within their offices to ensure
that the particular needs of Indian people were addressed. The Ameri-
can 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 self-
governing responsibility over welfare, education, and other programs
through direct contracts with the federal government.

There is grow-

ing 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.

Given this complicated history of assistance and entitlement, it is sur-
prising 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 In-
dians and Alaska Natives counted in the 2000 U.S. census were impov-
erished. 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. Unemploy-
ment rates on many reservations still exceed 40 percent. Twelve of the
45 poorest counties in the United States are within the boundaries of In-
dian reservations. Under these circumstances, public assistance remains
essential to many American Indian families.

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 sig-
nificant number of Indian people inhabit some of the poorest rural
counties in the United States.

Even the discovery of rural poverty dur-

ing the 1960s seemed to ignore the condition of Indians. In the 1971
edition of The Other America, Michael Harrington apologized for omit-
ting American Indians from his original 1962 publication that proved to
be an important call for a war on poverty. Harrington’s omission is es-
pecially puzzling because when he was fourteen years old, as more re-
cently 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.

A division of labor that developed between the social sciences of an-

thropology and sociology also contributed to long-lasting neglect of Amer-
ican 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 concentrat-
ing their attention on primitive or traditional cultures. Slippage of Ameri-
can 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 anthropolo-
gists like Boas and Lowie have expended on the study of the life and man-
ners 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.”

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.

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.

In a masterful

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 method-
ological attack on American Indians’ well-being and independence, con-
stituting 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 re-
ceived, 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.”

There is even some recent advancement in the close-up analysis of wel-

fare policy among American Indians. Hugh Shewell explains Indian wel-
fare 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 liveli-
hood, 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 Canadi-
ans 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 pro-
grams 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 sub-
sistence 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.

Overcoming so much neglect toward poverty among American Indi-

ans requires a disentanglement of real hardship from perceived hard-
ship. 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 ac-
tivities. But their economic improvisation was perceived as idle and dis-
orderly 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 Christ-
ian 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.

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.

Scholars who seriously study the experiences of American Indians

with poverty and welfare must inevitably ask, How did specific govern-
ment policies regarding territorial and commercial expansion or agricul-
tural and mineral development undermine Indian livelihood, expropriate
Indian land, and marginalize Indian people? Perhaps the most com-
pelling 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.”

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, in-
structed 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 (twenty-
five cents) per day or starve.” A spokesman for Anishinabeg in Minnesota

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 enter-
tain.”

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 fu-
ture. 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 pep-
per, 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.

Even when it comes to explaining how Indian policy itself caused or

exacerbated poverty among American Indians, historians have been re-
miss. 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 In-
dian Allotment Act:

For the most part, the alienated lands were the best lands: the river bot-
toms, 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 ad-
vantages. 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 in-
tensified the poverty of all.

During the height of dependency-theory analysis of third world nations
and world systems, a few anthropologists and historians turned to Amer-
ican Indian nations for examples of internal colonialism and underde-
velopment. Systematic analysis along these lines took hold mostly in
Canadian Indian scholarship.

In addition to the various causes of Indian impoverishment over time,

several welfare-related topics warrant deeper investigation. The strug-
gles 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 cen-
turies, deserve historical study.

Exploration into philanthropy practiced

by religious and other organizations needs to pay more attention to how
Indian people themselves viewed and used such intervention.

The con-

struction of reservation facilities by Indian workers and employment of
Indian artists and craftspeople under New Deal programs also consti-
tute an interesting story.

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.

The efforts by tribal governments to provide their own social

services under the Self-Determination Act, recently in face of severe bud-
getary constraints and reductions, also demand greater attention.

Closer examination of these and other subjects will undoubtedly pro-
duce a better understanding of how American Indians, over many gen-
erations, have resourcefully attempted to blend old with new means of
livelihood in order to support an autonomous cultural life.

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.

General ideas

and programs that contributed to the formation of an American welfare
system have interacted with Indian policy in some significant ways. In-
vestigation 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 be-
tween 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 bol-
stered by images of American Indian life. Movements to reform the poor
occasionally intersected with measures to assimilate Indians. Character-
ization of welfare programs as wasteful and counterproductive was also
reinforced by widely publicized evidence of corruption and incompe-
tence in the administration of Indian affairs.

As demonstrated in Chapter 1, the formative years of U.S. Indian pol-

icy coincided with the ascendancy of a theory of social change that re-
lied heavily upon the bifurcation of societies into hunting and farming
categories, with agriculture representing the more advanced stage of de-
velopment. Ignoring how many American Indians actually mixed farm-
ing 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 re-
duced 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 in-
dustry 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 eco-
nomic independence through Indian-like activities. Backcountry and sub-
sistence 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.

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, mission-
ary 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 reser-
vation 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, work-
houses, and prisons also resembled the federal government’s conception
of reservations as institutions designed to control and discipline a disor-
derly population.

Thanks to the innovative work of sociologist Theda Skocpol, we bet-

ter 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.

Like machine pol-

itics 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

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 reser-
vations were awarded to friends and family of officials. Patronage helped
drive the government’s acquisition of Indian lands, with bribes and kick-
backs 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.

Organized reformers of American Indian policy attacked the corrupt

and costly effects of patronage throughout the second half of the nine-
teenth century. President Ulysses S. Grant assigned the management of
many Indian reservations to Protestant denominations in a largely un-
successful experiment to clean up the Indian Office, while increasingly
strident critics targeted the entire treaty and reservation system for dis-
mantling. Under this kind of pressure, Congress in 1871 stopped making
treaties with American Indian nations and in 1887 set in motion the al-
lotment of reservation lands into individual landholdings. In their ideo-
logical 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 af-
fairs is to abandon the present system of supporting and coddling the
Indians.”

And some high-ranking government officials eagerly con-

tributed 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 busi-
nessman declared, “and it is presumed no one will question the expedi-
ency 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, es-
pecially when all of the products of such labor go to the Indian.”

Political cartoons contributed to this new line of Indian work with im-

ages 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 in-
cluded “no-work pie,” “idleness soup,” “loafing chowder,” and “nothing-
to-do fritters.” Inside this magazine, the editor sarcastically lamented an

The Discourse over Poverty

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 In-
terior, “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.”

The front cover of an 1883 issue of Judge featured “Teller’s Indian Gro-
cery” 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 ra-
tions, and then subside into tranquil, but by no means inexpensive qui-
etude, till the lengthening days send them on the war path again.”

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

Rhetoric about economic dependency became more and more instru-

mental 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 in-
crease 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.”

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 In-
dian up, as intended and expected, the annuities are degrading the Indi-
ans 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.

“If there are treaties with In-

dian 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 efface-
ment, simply that we may keep a treaty that our fathers made with
him?”

Self-governance on reservations, like treaty obligations, was re-

peatedly 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.”

A multifaceted characterization of American Indians, ranging from de-

praved indigents to pampered wards, carried resonance far beyond In-
dian 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 con-
gregation in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, Heman Humphrey (future president

The Discourse over Poverty

of Amherst College from 1823 to 1845) argued that necessity alone is re-
sponsible 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 la-
borious employment, so long as he can subsist without it. Who ever
heard of an industrious savage?”

American Indians continued to be a

convenient analogy for reformers confronting idleness and crime in rap-
idly 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.

As the struggle between labor and capital escalated along with war

between the U.S. Army and Indians during the 1870s, the American In-
dian served as a symbol of the dangerous and expensive consequences of
dependency.

Opposition to labor militancy deployed Indian warfare

as a metaphor for the disorder threatened by striking workers. The pau-
perizing 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 mil-
lions 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.”

The reservation Indian and the city pauper alike could only im-

prove their circumstances through work and discipline. Rural workers
were by no means spared this ideological association. In the early twen-
tieth century, mine owners on Minnesota’s Mesabi Iron Range waged a
propaganda campaign against striking Finnish miners that compared

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 in-
teractions with American Indian neighbors, Finnish Americans in north-
ern Minnesota turned the hostile label Jackpine Savages into an honorable
badge of independence and resistance.

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 lib-
eral reformers who abandoned reconstruction plans to create opportu-
nity 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.

“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.”

During the Progressive Era, governmental activism was revitalized in

response to rapidly changing social and economic conditions. More ac-
tive public agencies attempted to mitigate the effects of industrialization
and to assimilate masses of urban immigrants, while an emerging pro-
fession of social workers began to formulate new antipoverty and assis-
tance programs.

These developments in the wider world of social work

had a counterpart in Indian policy. The Office of Indian Affairs intensi-
fied its control over Indian people during the first two decades of the
twentieth century, seeking to accelerate the destruction of tribal govern-
ments 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.

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 them-
selves to acculturate.

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 Ameri-
can Indians. Their appreciation for ethnic cultures gained in urban set-
tlement 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 In-
dian relations with the United States. Collier was granted the opportu-
nity to direct such reform in 1933 when Franklin Delano Roosevelt
appointed him commissioner of Indian Affairs.

Like other Americans afflicted by the Great Depression, American In-

dian 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 re-
turn 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 relation-
ship 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.

While American Indians have been strongly asserting their political au-
tonomy and actively pursuing their treaty rights in recent years, misrepre-
sentation of Indian poverty and welfare nonetheless has continued.
Indian work hostile to tribal sovereignty, in the ongoing tradition, dis-
torts 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

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 well-
being 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 Al-
liance (CERA). The rhetoric of this anti-Indian campaign is loaded with
familiar assertions that American Indians are a privileged group, unde-
servedly and unfairly living on welfare paid for by non-Indian taxpay-
ers. Rights reserved by Indian nations in their treaties with the United
States, while becoming increasingly instrumental in their economic devel-
opment strategies, are being implicated in wider antiwelfare and antigov-
ernment movements. Across the United States, successful Indian casinos
and bingo halls are condemned for having unfair advantage over non-
Indian gambling enterprises.

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 pol-
icy issued by President Ronald Reagan’s administration in January 1983
acknowledged the unique government-to-government relationship be-
tween tribes and the United States, it could not resist taking aim at its fa-
vorite 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 con-
trol of Indian resources, and promoted dependency rather than self-
sufficiency.”

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.’ ”

The Discourse over Poverty

Scrambling Indian political status with the welfare system, meanwhile,

continued to occur in the intellectual debate over welfare. In his semi-
nal contribution to conservative policy making, Losing Ground,
Charles Murray’s only reference to American Indians is a curious pas-
sage 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?”

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 un-
employment 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 Amer-
ican citizens to lobby for the seizure of Indian land. “Before them,” Tier-
ney 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 Bu-
reau 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.”

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 iso-
late economic conditions and social policies among American Indians
from the rest of society.

Although seen less in both scholarship and me-

dia coverage than inner-city life, poverty on Indian reservations is highly
visible to anyone who takes notice. Physical location heightens the ap-
pearance of demoralization and despair, inviting explanations of poverty

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 attrib-
ute isolation and failure to self-defeating behavior.

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 in-
cludes specific language about American Indian livelihood.

Fuller ex-

amination 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 mar-
ginalized 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 non-
Indians live in rural poverty closely related to circumstances that afflict
Indian communities. Many impoverished American Indians display re-
sourcefulness 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 en-
tangling 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 percep-
tions of authenticity and passivity will stand in the way.

The Discourse over Poverty

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 arti-
cle about this community accompanied by some illustrations. One pas-
sage 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 beau-
tiful 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 car-
ried home. Then the stems must be stripped with a knife, each stem yield-
ing 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.

This glimpse into how Choctaw Indians on the eastern edge of New

Orleans worked at producing baskets for sale is a simple piece of In-
dian 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 mak-
ing 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 ro-
manticism 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 out-
siders, 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 ero-
sion 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 con-
tributing to this new line of inquiry.

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. Be-
cause 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 schol-
ars 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 inter-
action 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 marginal-
ization naturally led to assimilation and disintegration.

Baskets are “entangled objects,” to borrow a phrase from anthropolo-

gist Nicholas Thomas. The production of these material objects by Indi-
ans for exchange with non-Indians held very different meanings for both
groups. Narratives produced by white observers and consumers are rela-
tively easy to find, compile, and interpret. But the making, using, and sell-
ing of baskets from their weavers’ point of view constituted a separate
narrative—one far more difficult to ascertain.

Baskets might be best un-

derstood as native texts. Like documents and stories, they impart particu-
lar 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.”

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 bas-

ketry as well as foodstuffs to households across Louisiana, either as slaves
working inside kitchens or as vendors from nearby villages.

Recent ar-

chaeological 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.”

Bas-

kets 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.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, tourists, collectors, and an-

thropologists 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 in-
side the community. Producing for exhibition and ethnography further-
more 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,

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 authentic-
ity,” as Paige Raibmon writes about Northwest Coast Indians, “could
bring economic, cultural, and political gains.”

Louisiana Indian women’s skills in basket making were acknowledged
in documentation at the very beginning of the nineteenth century. De-
scribing 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.

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.

Meanwhile, outside visitors and observers represented Louisiana In-

dian 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 flat-
boat 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.

This kind of wonder can be found in many scattered memoirs and di-

aries of white Louisianians, describing seasonal Indian visits to towns
and plantations throughout the nineteenth century. Recalling early child-
hood 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.”

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 ei-
ther 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.”

After the Civil War, an impulse to highlight both the quaintness and

pathos of Louisiana Indians’ movement on white society’s margins entered

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,” ac-
cording to the text beside Léon Frémaux’s crayon sketches of New Or-
leans characters, “that they attracted little attention from residents of the
city, but they did intrigue the curiosity of visitors, especially when chil-
dren 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

Perceptions of Authenticity and Passivity

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

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

(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.”

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.”

For

visitors to the Cotton Centennial Exposition, a guidebook described In-
dian 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.”

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 pic-
turesque 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 for-
est 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.

Perceptions of Authenticity and Passivity

Figure 9.

Alfred W

aud, “Sunday in New Orleans—The French Market,

”

Harper’

s W

eekly,

ugust 18, 1866, p.

517.

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

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.

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, accord-
ing 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 ciga-
rette 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 determina-
tion shown by Louisiana Indian artisans to maintain some continuity
and tradition while catering, for the sake of income, to white collectors
and patrons.

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 coun-
cil 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 re-
duced 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,

Perceptions of Authenticity and Passivity

101

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.

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 ethnog-
raphers in ways that creatively secure livelihood and culture. Students of
market women elsewhere have vigorously explored how a group’s cul-
tural 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 oc-
curs 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.

The sale of basketry and pottery by North American Indians, for-

merly viewed as a sign of assimilation and degradation, might more
accurately be seen as a means of adapting traditional skills to new cir-
cumstances. “Craft production by Indian women,” Jean O’Brien has
observed about basket making and other artisanal skills in New En-
gland, “constituted one of the crucial threads that ran through the
seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.”

This resilient eco-

nomic activity, of course, responded to a marketplace increasingly
controlled by commercial interests and bourgeois tastes. But more im-
portantly, production for outside consumers and exchange with di-
verse 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 em-
ployment in railroad construction and mining. Fewer outside opportu-

Perceptions of Authenticity and Passivity

102

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 commu-
nity survival.

Catawbas in South Carolina, the only Indian nation east of the Pueb-

los to preserve its pottery-making tradition, provide a useful analogy from
elsewhere in the American South for basket making among Louisiana In-
dians. 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 pot-
tery had deep roots in Catawba history, and Thomas Blumer even ar-
gues 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, shopkeep-
ers wanted high quantity at low prices. This demand caused the quality
of Catawba wares to diminish and discouraged the most talented pot-
ters 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 liveli-
hood of Catawba people depended heavily on a tradition of producing
and selling pottery.

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 con-
tainers 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 bas-
kets 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, be-
came important objects for sale among spreading coastal, lakeside, and
mountain resorts.

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

Perceptions of Authenticity and Passivity

103

the 1930s, they regularly visited the campus wearing traditional dress
and exchanging basketry for money or food.

Twined basketry had long been a staple in the households of Havasu-

pai 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 reserva-
tion 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 ex-
periences 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 Hava-
supai basket making into the second half of the century.

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 prac-
ticed in family groups. The survival of community ties and values, there-
fore, 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 becom-
ing clearer today, as Indian communities develop their own museums
and research centers that feature the history of cultural objects.

Many Indian women in Louisiana during the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries increased the visibility of basketry through their in-
teraction 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 desti-
nation 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

104

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 carry-
ing pots on their heads, became primary objects of the tourist’s gaze in
the Southwest. Nor did Louisiana Indian communities at that time par-
ticipate in tourism as much as did Florida Seminoles, who not only pro-
duced 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, rep-
resenting passively in the imagination of visitors what a real Indian
was supposed to look like.

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 com-
mented, “because of the originality of their tribal life. Wrapped in blan-
kets, selling laurel or sassafras leaves, they show in their faces all the
marks of their race’s character—as well as all the apathy.”

Indian

women not only provided French Quarter residents with useful house-
hold 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 diamond-
patterned 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 govern-
mental encouragement, a revival of traditional designs and colors be-
came an important means of cultural self-expression and artistic
revitalization.

Whether trading beadwork in prairie towns or turquoise

jewelry on southwestern plazas or basketry in eastern marketplaces, In-
dian 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.

Perceptions of Authenticity and Passivity

105

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.

But

non-Indian demand for them obviously became more influential. Léon
Granjean observed that increasing travel “across-the-lake” by New Or-
leanians for recreation and residence brought the market closer to the
Choctaws on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain. “Many New Or-
leans homes,” he wrote in the 1870s “contain examples of Choctaw bas-
ket 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.”

Year-round activity went into gathering, stripping, dying, and weav-

ing cane for baskets, and a strong aesthetic value went into the manu-
facture of each. Cora Bremer identified nature as the source of these
women’s inspiration, “rather than upon the labored recitals and quota-
tions of some Prof. So-and-so of this or the other art academy.” But
surely their techniques and imaginations were informed through a for-
malized learning process, as younger basket makers observed and lis-
tened to their elders.

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.

Coushattas around El-

ton, 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.

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

106

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.”

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 be-
come 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.

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.”

According to the WPA guide to Louisiana, Savoie’s Bayou Blue Store, lo-
cated 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.

The work of Chitimacha basket weavers drew the most vigorous atten-
tion from private and public collectors interested in Louisiana Indians at
the end of the nineteenth century. The double-weave method was pre-
served 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

Perceptions of Authenticity and Passivity

107

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

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

Perceptions of Authenticity and Passivity

109

skilled basket makers from other groups. Zelia Marcotte, a Houma In-
dian woman living near Charenton, participated in the community’s pro-
duction.

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, espe-
cially in the Southwest and Far West, was becoming an increasingly de-
sirable 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 author-
ity in the preservation and promotion of Indian art.

This generation of philanthropic Indian workers included some influ-

ential Louisiana and Mississippi women. Catherine Marshall Gardiner,
whose husband operated a lumber business in Laurel, Mississippi, col-
lected antique and contemporary Indian baskets from around the na-
tion, 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.

At the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, thanks

to these sisters’ efforts, Louisiana’s state exhibit included nearly a hun-
dred 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 el-
derly woman considered the best artist among the Chitimachas (Figure
10).

McIlhenny and Bradford sometimes advanced money to Chiti-

macha women, who would then repay them with baskets.

The Christ-

ian 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 handi-
crafts 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.

Mrs. Sidney Bradford was especially active in linking Chitimacha bas-

ket makers with anthropological scholars and curators. In 1905 her

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.”

Five years later, the Smithsonian Institution’s Na-

tional Museum in Washington, D.C., acquired a collection of Chiti-
macha baskets through Bradford’s mediation, along with her explanation
of the designs woven on them. By 1914 she donated thirty-four Chiti-
macha baskets to the Louisiana State Museum in New Orleans, when
several other men and women in the area were also bequeathing vari-
ous kinds of Louisiana Indian baskets.

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. Sid-
ney 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.”

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.”

In the case of anthropology over the late nineteenth and early twen-

tieth centuries, a preoccupation with salvaging cultural artifacts was
clearly at work.

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 bas-
ketmaking,” he reported, “and this art is still practiced by old Betsy,
who was my chief informant.”

Recent Columbia University graduate

Mark Raymond Harrington visited several Louisiana Indian communi-
ties in 1908 and particularly noted Chitimacha basket making at Char-
enton. “One old art and one only is still kept up in something like its

Perceptions of Authenticity and Passivity

110

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 photo-
graphs of the basket makers’ families.

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 at-
tempted to record the context in which objects were manufactured.

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 manufac-
ture or use of baskets, for example, paralleled the construction of life
group exhibits in natural history museums. Families from various In-
dian nations were even brought to international expositions, where mil-
lions 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 Amer-
ican 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 In-
dian material culture.

With special effort, the perspective and motivation of Indian basket mak-
ers can now be disentangled from those of anthropologists or collectors.
The income earned for family and community clearly encouraged pro-
duction 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

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111

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 main-
tain 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.

The market-

ing activity associated with basketry, therefore, facilitated accommoda-
tion 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 to-
wards the setting sun.”

Father Adrien Rouquette told Lafcadio Hearn

in the 1870s that around the Choctaws’ homes north of Lake Pontchar-
train, “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.”

“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, fre-
quently used instead of okra to thicken gumbo—other herbs and roots,
baskets and pottery.”

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 soci-
ety for days and weeks.”

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 “intel-
ligence, humor, and friendliness.”

The detachment and silence evinced

by Indian peddlers possibly expressed some thoughtful effort to main-
tain 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

112

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 farm-
ers 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.

As this remembrance indicates, Sarah McIlhenny’s strong personal rela-
tionship 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 educa-
tional opportunities for them. With some help from her brother John A.
McIlhenny, a Rough-Rider friend of Teddy Roosevelt now living in Wash-
ington, D.C., as Civil Service commissioner, Sarah also pursued federal
protection against the Chitimachas’ imminent loss of land.

She pur-

chased 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.

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

Perceptions of Authenticity and Passivity

113

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” handi-
crafts to the livelihood of Indian communities conveniently overlapped
with their value to the language of non-Indian primitivism.

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.”

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 an-
cient 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 ac-
counts by ethnologists and other observers, Dormon described the vari-
ous 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.”

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

114

the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries worked them into pass-
ing scenes and devices. The familiar image of Indian women always
present at city markets provided George Washington Cable with an ef-
fective 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 leapfrog-
ging 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.”

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.”

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 as-

cribed 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

Perceptions of Authenticity and Passivity

115

women with a source of income as well as a connection between gener-
ations. 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 mak-
ers 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.

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 non-
Indian 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 signifi-
cant 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 re-
flected their spiritual decay.

Perceptions of Authenticity and Passivity

116

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 min-
utes 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.”

With this brief passage about work as a cue, D. H. Lawrence’s self-

marginalizing movement among fellow artist-observers and his diffident

demeanor toward Indian people—what Aldous Huxley called his “inex-
plicably strange” character—might be put to use in further exploring
interactions that went into Indian work.

A feverous critic of how Amer-

ican 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 twen-
tieth century. While sneering at contemporary writers, artists, art pa-
trons, 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.

Lawrence concluded that “horses don’t like In-

dians” because he somehow believed that, unlike bears, they were not
part of their spirituality. How New Mexico Indians had actually inte-
grated 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.

Inspired by the land-

scape 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.”

Amer-

ican 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.”

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 ranch-
sanctuary outside Taos—remain relatively obscure. It is indeed difficult

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118

to separate the writer’s reactions to southwestern Indians from his en-
tangled and troublesome relationships with Frieda Lawrence, Mabel
Dodge Luhan, and Dorothy Brett, which have always received much
closer scrutiny.

Lawrence’s interest in Aztec religion and his visits to

Mexico, also drawing greater attention from students of his life and lit-
erature, further confounded his portrayal of Indians within the United
States.

Nonetheless, a careful assessment of his personal as well as his

literary encounter with Indians in the Southwest, particularly the Pueb-
los, offers a glimpse into the complicated relationship between social in-
teraction 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 re-
gion 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 dimen-
sion 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.

The represen-

tation 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 perpetu-
ate the voicelessness, namelessness, and facelessness that D. H. Lawrence
himself assigned to Indian people in his own study of American litera-
ture.

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 commer-
cial economy or their engagement with government policy. Even self-
identified “friends of the Indian” proved to be shortsighted in their
views on the social and economic realities of American Indian life. In

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119

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 Na-
tive America, but the economic relations and political struggles preoc-
cupying 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.”

Personal interaction with southwestern Indians

and close observation of their daily life kept interfering with the meta-
physical meaning that he needed to impose on them.

Initially, American Indians stood in the background of anxieties and as-
pirations 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 disappoint-
ments 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 Christ-
mas 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 in-
humanity.”

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.”

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120

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.”

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.”

With Lawrence in search of some new place conducive to both per-

sonal 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.

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.”

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?”

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,

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121

unreached by the illuminating vision of a simple soul yet! Oh, come!”

In this book originally published in 1893, Lummis himself had invited
curiosity seekers and social scientists alike to peer into New Mexico In-
dian 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.”

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 Hig-
gins, and Oscar Berninghaus had started art colonies at Santa Fe and
Taos.

In November 1917 Mabel’s newest husband, Russian painter-

sculptor 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, sepa-
rated from Sterne, and fell in love with Tony Lujan of Taos Pueblo.
Mabel married Lujan in 1923.

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 Intercolle-
giate Undergraduate Poetry Contest and its publication in 1927.

Guests

at Mabel’s house during the 1920s included poets Vachel Lindsay, Jean
Toomer, and Witter Bynner, painters Andrew Dasburg, Marsden Hart-
ley, and Georgia O’Keeffe, and writers Mary Austin, Willa Cather, and
D. H. Lawrence.

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 pro-
fessor at the University of Oklahoma, Riggs wrote, “The Pueblo life must

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122

be wonderful—the real communal life. And to think of how they are be-
ing contaminated by the damned whites and the stinking Mexicans!”

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.”

Lawrence’s initial encounter with the Navajo, Pueblo, Ute, and Apache
people attending the ceremonies and festivities augured a dismal rela-
tionship between the author and his putative subjects. Motoring one hun-
dred 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 sympa-
tisch, but their camp, tents, horses, lake—very picturesque.” To E. M.
Forster he reported apologetically, “I havn’t got the hang of them yet.”

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.”

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 peo-
ples he met anywhere. “I never want to deny them or break with them,”
Lawrence observed immediately about the Indians. “But there is no go-
ing back. Always onward, still further. The great devious onward-flowing
stream of conscious human blood. From them to me, and from me
on.”

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.”

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.

But to Mabel Dodge Luhan’s deep regret, no great novel

or major prose about the Indians living in New Mexico during the 1920s

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123

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 hop-
ing to escape.

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 my-

opia 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.

Even the frustrated Mabel acknowl-

edged 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.”

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 hop-
ping 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.

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 character-
ized Pueblo rituals as exotic in sight and sound and excessive—even
pornographic—in bodily motion. Nonetheless, a growing number of

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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 news-
paper stories reported incidents highlighting idleness and drunkenness.

But even the more prosaic dimensions of Pueblo Indian life were cap-
tured 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.

Lawrence’s writings about American Indians from 1923 to 1925 also

evince a keen sociological eye for relations between Indians and non-
Indians in the United States. Undoubtedly animated by his aversion to-
ward 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, cow-
boys, and Hispanic villagers.

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 every-
thing: almost in the very soil itself.”

It is worth contrasting this reac-

tion 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.

Perhaps Lawrence was being slightly paranoid when he detected “a

jeering, malevolent vibration” from peering Indian eyes. He tended to

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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.”

But the frail Englishman under an oversized cowboy hat could nonethe-
less make astute observations about the irreconcilable difference, “in the
flesh,” between Indians and whites. In his revised essay on James Feni-
more Cooper, rewritten in New Mexico and published in Studies in
Classic American Literature, Lawrence depicts scenes of “race resis-
tance” 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.

D. H. Lawrence cautiously extended his analysis of Indian-white rela-

tions onto the wider political stage of U.S. governmental policy. Shortly
after his arrival in New Mexico, he added his voice to the mounting op-
position 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 domi-
nated, defenceless nation which Congress undertakes to protect and cher-
ish. The Indian Bureau is supposed to do the cherishing.”

Lawrence

also challenged American Indian policy in a poem entitled “O! Ameri-
cans,” 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.

Despite Lawrence’s apparent concern for the plight of Pueblo Indians,

he maintained a revealing aloofness from political activities throughout

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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 Bur-
sum 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 Novem-
ber 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 impor-
tant meeting that launched the All-Pueblo Council.

Personal discomfort

alone, however, does not explain his avoidance of direct participation in
the Pueblo struggle against the Bursum Bill and other government mea-
sures. 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 poli-
tics, 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 Mex-
ico. Their great Saviour Juarez did more to destroy them than all the cen-
turies 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.

Unlike other writers and artists in New Mexico, Lawrence never re-

sponded 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.”

Writing to Edward Nehls more than thirty

years later, John Collier recalled D. H. Lawrence’s “none but a casual in-
terest in the struggle that I and others were engaged in.” During their

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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 re-
former who became commissioner of Indian Affairs under Franklin Roo-
sevelt. “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.”

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 Europe-
an and American intellectuals at this time. Much of the growing anthro-
pological 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 myste-
rious aura in the minds of visiting intellectuals who sought, in the words
of Aby Warburg, the “essential character traits of primitive pagan hu-
manity.” An art historian who had visited the southwestern United
States in 1895–1896 and photographed the Hopi Snake Dance, War-
burg 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.”

Lecturing in Santa Fe on July 27, 1924, to open a new an-

thropological museum, Edward Curtis declared that the only concern of
his photographic project was “the old time Indian, his dress, his cere-
monies, 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

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128

American Indian has afforded advanced science an excellent opportu-
nity to study primitive man at a most interesting period.”

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 con-
ditions 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.”

Lawrence was insisting upon an isolation or insulation in Pueblo cul-

ture, while nonetheless using it to criticize an atrophied European civi-
lization. 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 gen-
uine culture as “inherently harmonious, balanced, self-satisfactory.” In
a criticism of industrial society’s threat to genuine culture, Sapir repre-
sented Indian society as one in which the average person lived a “well-
rounded life” at a “less sophisticated” level. But contact with whites
caused the American Indian to slip “out of the warm embrace of a cul-
ture into the cold air of fragmentary existence”—even when he seems
to be “making a fairly satisfactory compromise with his new environ-
ment.”

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 our-
selves go ahead. We can go back and pick up some threads—but these In-
dians are up against a dead wall, even more than we are: but a different
wall.

Lawrence’s obsession with the mysterious otherness of American In-

dians prevented him from capturing the complexity and difficulty of
intercultural communication, a shortcoming that he shared with most

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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 exhib-
ited by the Pueblos themselves. “The Indians have developed, as far as
their religious experiences and views are concerned,” he wrote, “an ef-
fective 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.”

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 re-
searched 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 trans-
late to him.” In contrast with Cather’s fictional Father Latour, D. H.
Lawrence showed little tolerance or empathy toward what anthropolo-
gists would later call the religious compartmentalization of twentieth-
century Pueblo life.

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 ir-
reconcilable forms of consciousness.

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 Indi-
ans only in terms of the death of our consciousness.”

This opposition

took a more historical and sociological form in Studies in Classic Amer-

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130

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.”

Lawrence’s descent “beneath the surface” of southwestern Indian life,

to what he called the Indian’s “ancient, ancient race-self and religious-
self,” had a mixed effect upon the accuracy of his Indian work.

captured the cosmology of the Pueblo Indians in a manner rarely achieved
by contemporary scholars and observers of their culture. The intercon-
nectedness 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 cre-
ation, or between Spirit and Matter,” he noted in “Indians and Enter-
tainment.” “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.”

Lawrence dealt very effectively with what he could believe but ig-

nored what he considered nonsensical or unimportant. He downplayed
the institutional and organizational dimensions of Indian religion, corol-
laries of European structures that he shunned, and therefore missed the
rich social and political life of Pueblo communities.

Furthermore, his

obsession with the dark side of consciousness caused Lawrence to belit-
tle much of day-to-day Indian behavior and to underestimate the re-
sourcefulness 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.

In this regard, Lawrence was expressing a not uncommon reaction.

Listen to a conversation between Jean Toomer and his companion Mar-
ian 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

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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. Per-
haps these are on show. Perhaps they are here to sell things.” “I don’t like
to look at them.”

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 mean-
ing 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 as-
tutely 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 un-
even swaying motion of the snake priests, Lawrence declares that “cul-
turally there is nothing. If it were not for that mystic, dark-sacred
concentration.” Having reached his real subject, the impassioned philos-
opher 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, primi-
tive men “travel back and forth, back and forth, from the darkest ori-
gins 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.”

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 self-
regulated 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 self-
control 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

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the presence of strangers. Burlesque had served Pueblo people for a long
time as a means of handling other Indians, missionaries, and govern-
ment 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.

Not surprisingly, Lawrence was very clumsy in his personal relation-
ships 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 advan-
tage, the more contemptible they appeared in this Englishman’s written
work on Indians. Lawrence responded bitterly to how whites were com-
modifying Pueblo culture, but perhaps he felt even greater scorn toward
how Indians were appropriating the commodification for their own eco-
nomic 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 sev-
enteen 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.”

Lawrence and Frieda employed several In-

dian 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 de-
teriorating 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, jewel-
ers, 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.

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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 com-
munities. 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.

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Figure 11. Walter Ufer, Jim and His Daughter, 1923. Oil on canvas, 77.5

× 64.1 cm

(30

⁄

× 25

⁄

in.). Gift of Mr. Howard Ellis. 1961.111. The Art Institute of

Chicago.

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

Before hiring Pueblo Indians around his ranch, Lawrence demon-

strated 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.”

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.”

Mabel Dodge Luhan’s parties were rife with a comic tension, and

Lawrence must have been keenly self-conscious about his own participa-
tion. 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,” nostalgi-
cally 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 mo-
ment, dancing shoulder to shoulder with the Indians. Yes, they loved
being Indian for a short while.” Mabel herself found nothing more irre-
sistible than “a roomful of Indians dancing to the drum,” claiming that
Lawrence “flowed into it . . . dancing step, step, with a dark one on ei-
ther side of him, round and round in a swinging circle for hours.”

But

Lawrence was far less confident about the natural state of such social in-
teraction and was prone to veil his own anxiety with demeaning re-
marks about the Indians. “I watch the Indians stealing glances at you,”
wrote Dorothy Brett. “They watch you, marveling at your strange ap-
pearance.”

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.”

By December 1922, Mabel re-

ported to Mary Austin, Lawrence was “terribly overcome and oppressed

Primitivism and Tourism

135

by indians who he thought disliked him (though indians are not per-
sonal 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.”

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 three-
room log cabin and make adobes for the chimney (see Figure 12).
Geronimo and his wife made an oven. Juan Concha, Pondo, and Can-
dido 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.”

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 Geron-
imo is coming up to help and mend the corral, & build a porch over our
door.”

On summer evenings, Lawrence spent time at a camp that his

Indian workers arranged just uphill from his cabin. “We sit with the In-
dians 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 character-
ized 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.”

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.

Lawrence wrote to

Baroness Anna von Richthofen on June 18, 1925, “Rufina is short and

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136

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).

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

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 hap-
pened 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 re-
ported to Ida Rauch. “The Indians have gone,” Lawrence wrote in an-
other 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.”

Al-

though 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.”

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 over-
come. Parts of the fiction written while Lawrence lived in America cap-
tured 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.

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 south-
western 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 im-
personal 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

138

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, dark-
fringed 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 land-
scape, rather than in the native man, of America.

In “The Woman Who Rode Away,” Indian society comes to the sym-

bolic forefront of D. H. Lawrence’s fiction. This short story takes its hero-
ine 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 Mex-
ico, are attributed with being the “sacred tribe of all the Indians”—the
“descendants of Montezuma.” With an impersonal hatred and sexual-
ity, tribal priests—resembling Aztecs and not Pueblos—sacrifice the
woman in a final, eerie ceremony before a cliff cave and a spoke of ice.

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 Wel-
don Thorton argues, the Indian tribe embodies the suicidal confronta-
tion 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.”

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

Primitivism and Tourism

139

later, Lawrence “passed his time in New Mexico on the fringes of the
forest, between the inhuman Nordic sentimentality of aspen and tan-
nenbaum, 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.”

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 be-
side 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, how-
ever, Lawrence believed that “my health will never be right in Europe”
and that “New Mexico would cure me again.”

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 devo-
tees 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 trans-
mitted by some Taos Indian women who worked for Mabel. So Frieda
quickly and quietly had Lawrence’s ashes set inside a concrete tomb.

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 repre-
sent, as Lawrence himself would have likely put it, some deeper resent-
ment 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.

Primitivism and Tourism

140

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 trav-
eled to America, argues that the American Indian as hunter sheds valu-
able 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, seek-
ing 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 imagi-

nary 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 En-
glish traders. Hoping to get a better exchange rate without these mid-
dlemen, 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

on shore where many English vessels had landed. Not far from the Car-
olina 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 intri-
cacy of this Indian involvement with the formative Atlantic world econ-
omy, although an especially tragic episode, was a far cry from the rather
simplistic image of Indian livelihood created by the economic theorist.

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 pas-
turage increasingly jeopardized by non-Indian users, Indian communi-
ties 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 commu-
nities. But D. H. Lawrence was intellectually less interested in working
Indians than in dancing Indians, who represented to him a “dark des-
tiny” or “deep blood-consciousness.” As his friend Joseph Foster like-
wise viewed the spectacle of Pueblo ceremonies, “they danced, danced
their indifference to hunger, to their poverty.”

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 back-
wardness, wastefulness, idleness, and timelessness—through writing, il-
lustrating, 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

142

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, over-
looked 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 pre-
contact Indians, fed into propaganda about how removal from their
homelands would save Indians from inevitable decline and disappear-
ance. Noble savages reduced to lazy beggars served as a convenient ra-
tionale 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. Eco-
nomic anxieties and conflicts among whites themselves influenced this
insinuation of Indian people into a wider ideological dialogue and deep-
ened 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 ceram-
ics in New Mexico, for example, now faced new opportunities and chal-
lenges, 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

Conclusion

143

in the intellectual world. Since cultural tourism began in New Mexico
a century ago, as cogently observed by Theodore S. Jojola, the “South-
west Indian mystique” has raised troubling dilemmas for Indian people.
For years the Pueblo communities have struggled with commercializa-
tion 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.

Casinos are the most prominent spaces in present-day American In-

dian participation in the world economy today. Some three hundred na-
tions 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 hos-
pitality 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 suc-
cess 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 reduc-
tive 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 cer-
tain aspects of Indian culture, which has been used effectively at Indian
museums, powwows, tours, and other sites of self-representation.

Hostile reaction in recent years to the spread of gaming across Indian

country echoes the sentiments of earlier times. Arguments against In-
dian 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 in-
authenticity of high-stakes gambling in Indian societies. Overshadowed
by all of this marginalizing rhetoric, Indian nations’ current turn to gam-
ing 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 In-
dian peoples’ expanding involvement in the commercial fur trade, the

Conclusion

144

fixation on casinos’ legitimacy and authenticity ignores the fuller pic-
ture. First of all, Indian gaming—while becoming more and more signif-
icant 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.

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 recogniza-
ble as such.” Finding “no basket-weaving, no pottery or firewood for sale
here,” Eisler predicted that wealth and power generated by big-time gam-
bling would “forever change the popular perception of Indians as ‘down-
trodden.’ ” 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 In-
dian. But this perception had taken some time to evolve, as we now un-
derstand 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.”

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

Conclusion

145

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 ac-
tually try to blend tradition with innovation while they accommodate
and resist powerful forces.

American Indian engagement with com-

merce through numerous and various means, over a long span of time,
has consistently defied the narrow choices that observers insisted upon
seeing.

Conclusion

146

n o t e s

a c k n ow l e d g m e n t s

i n d e x

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 In-
dian,” 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. Simon-

sen’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: Ethnohistori-
cal Perspectives (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996); Patricia Al-
bers, “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).

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 Na-

tive 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 far-
reaching 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, “Repre-
senting 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: Be-

ing Indian for Tourists in Lac du Flambeau’s Wa-Swa-Gon Indian Bowl,” Eth-
nohistory 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 Dis-

crimination 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 assimi-
lationist of institutions into spaces of resilience. Joel Pfister, Individuality Incor-
porated: Indians and the Multicultural Modern (Durham, NC: Duke University

Notes to Pages 4–7

150

Press, 2004), 66–132; Brad D. Lookingbill, War Dance at Fort Marion: Plains In-
dian 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, an-
other book had a huge influence on my own attentiveness to these spaces of vul-
nerability. 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 Strug-

gle 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 Rev-

olution: The Journal and Other Writings of Charles Woodmason, Anglican Itin-
erant (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 Tech-

nological 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: Let-

ters 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: Uni-

versity of Oklahoma Press, 1995), 219–20.

Notes to Pages 8–14

151

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 ac-
tivism, for example, Alisse Portnoy explains how reform positions taken on
slavery were influenced by opposition to removal. Seeing the rhetorical connec-
tions between antiremoval and antislavery campaigns improves our understand-
ing 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 blood-
hounds 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 no-
tions of Indians to characterize their Asian enemies, one noting that they fought
with the “coolness and immobility of Indians.” Frederick Low, a California busi-
nessman 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 Amer-
ica.” 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 In-
dian policy were directly applied to annexation of island territories. See Wal-
ter L. Williams, “United States Indian Policy and the Debate over Philippine

Notes to Pages 14–15

152

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 Nineteenth-

Century Nationalisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); Timothy
Sweet, American Georgics: Economy and Environment in Early American Liter-
ature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002); John J. Kucich,
Ghostly Communion: Cross-Cultural Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century Ameri-
can 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 Uni-
versity Press, 2008).

32. Paul C. Rosier, “ ‘They Are Ancestral Homelands’: Race, Place, and Pol-

itics 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 Agricul-
ture in America: Prehistory to the Present (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas,
1987); and David Rich Lewis, Neither Wolf nor Dog: American Indians, Envi-
ronment, 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 Uni-
versity Press, 1962), 214; Bernard W. Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction: Jeffersonian
Philanthropy and the American Indian (Chapel Hill: University of North Car-
olina Press, 1973), 165.

4. Stuart Bruchey, Enterprise: The Dynamic Economy of a Free People (Cam-

bridge, 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

Notes to Pages 15–20

153

to the study of class formation and capitalist transformation in rural America be-
fore 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: Ox-
ford 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 en-
during grip on later representation of American Indians all the more problem-
atic. 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 Ci-

vility: English Imperialism and Native America, 1585–1685 (Ithaca, NY: Cor-
nell 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: Univer-
sity of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 217–35.

17. J. H. Elliott, The Old World and the New, 1492–1650 (Cambridge: Cam-

bridge 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 20–24

154

(Montesquieu quotation is from page 28 of this article); Sheehan, Seeds of Ex-
tinction, 34–39.

19. The seminal work in our new understanding of hunting-gathering soci-

eties is Marshall Sahlins, “The Original Affluent Society,” in his Stone Age Eco-
nomics (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 Ameri-
can 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 Dis-

course 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; Massa-

chusetts Centinel, September 15, 1784; Joyce O. Appleby, Capitalism and a New
Social Order: The Republican View of the 1790s (New York: New York Uni-
versity Press, 1984), 44–45; Myra Jehlen, American Incarnation: The Individ-
ual, 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, re-
jecting 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 Set-

tlement 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),

Notes to Pages 24–27

155

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: Pen-
guin Books, 1981), 76–78, 219–20.

32. For historiographical background and a particular interpretation on Jef-

fersonian 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 influ-
ence of classical thought on Jeffersonian agrarians is argued effectively in An-
drew 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 op-
erating 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 ex-
pansionists of the 1840s. See Thomas R. Heitala, Manifest Design: Anxious Ag-
grandizement in Late Jacksonian America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1985), 95–122.

35. Koch and Peden, Life and Writings of Jefferson, 280; Appleby, “Com-

mercial Farming,” and Capitalism and a New Social Order, 88–95.

36. E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 (London: Weiden-

feld & Nicolson, 1962), 149–52.

37. Arthur Young, Travels during the Years 1787, 1788 and 1789, Under-

taken 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 Har-
vest in Early Modern Europe,” American Historical Review 101 (December
1996): 1357–97; and Graham Robb, The Discovery of France: Historical Ge-
ography from the Revolution to the First World War (New York: W. W. Nor-
ton, 2007), 103–11.

39. John R. Nelson, Jr., Liberty and Property: Political Economy and Policy-

making in the New Nation, 1789–1812 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press), 96–98.

Notes to Pages 27–29

156

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 stric-

ture 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 Di-

vided 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 Af-

fairs, 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: Colo-
nialism 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, Ononda-

gas, 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 & Put-
nam, 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 (Lon-
don: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986); and J. Stephen Lansing, Priests and Pro-
grammers: Technologies of Power in the Engineered Landscape of Bali
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991).

Notes to Pages 29–32

157

52. Marvin Thomas Hatley, The Dividing Paths: Cherokees and South Car-

olinians 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. Su-
san 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 McMa-
hon (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,” Agri-
culture 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 Perspec-
tives, 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 Iro-
quois Indians, roll 44.

Notes to Pages 32–35

158

64. Stone, Life and Times of Red-Jacket, 84–85.
65. Charles M. Snyder, ed., Red and White on the New York Frontier, a Strug-

gle 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 nineteenth-

century discrepancy between white observers’ perception of Indian hunting as
primitive subsistence and American Indians’ application of hunting to the mar-
ket 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 Iro-

quois people as a colonial workforce, see Gail D. MacLeitch, “ ‘Red’ Labor:
Iroquois Participation in the Atlantic Economy,” Labor: Studies in Working-
Class 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 Iro-
quois 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 po-
litical missions have taken Iroquois people far away from their communities, but
reservation land continues to be the primary source of security and autonomy.

Notes to Pages 36–38

159

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 Consti-

tutional Discussion,’ 1786–1789,” Journal of American History 79 (December
1992): 841–73. Also see Eve Kornfeld, “Encountering ‘the Other’: American In-
tellectuals 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 po-

litical 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 Ne-
braska Press, 1998); Alexandra Harmon, Indians in the Making: Ethnic Rela-
tions and Indian Identities around Puget Sound (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1999); Jane T. Merritt, At the Crossroads: Indians and Em-
pires 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 39–42

160

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 (Co-
lumbia: 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 quo-
tation from traveler Christian Schultz (1807–1808), describing a street fight be-
tween two white boatmen who were drunk and were vying for the attention of
a “Choctaw lady.” Antebellum Natchez (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univer-
sity Press, 1968), 262.

4. John Q. Anderson, ed., “The Narrative of John Hutchins,” Journal of Mis-

sissippi 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 Crossing-
Over Place (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007).

6. “Documents: Tonti Letters,” Mid-America 21 (July 1939): 226–27; Mis-

sissippi 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 Re-
search Report No. 11, pp. 49–65 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Research Laboratories of Archaeology, 1998).

Notes to Pages 44–45

161

8. Shannon Lee Dawdy, “Proper Caresses and Prudent Distance: A How-To

Manual from Colonial Louisiana,” in Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Inti-
macy 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 His-
tory 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: Univer-

sity 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 (Jack-
son: University Press of Mississippi, 1985); Thomas D. Clark and John W.
Guice, Frontiers in Conflict: The Old Southwest, 1795–1830 (Albuquerque: Uni-
versity of New Mexico Press, 1989), 19–39, 233–53; and Usner, American Indi-
ans 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 understand-
ing of Choctaw relations with colonial powers in the region has been signifi-
cantly advanced by James Taylor Carson, Searching for the Bright Path: The
Mississippi Choctaws from Prehistory to Removal (Lincoln: University of Ne-
braska Press, 1999); and Greg O’Brien, Choctaws in a Revolutionary Age,

Notes to Pages 46–49

162

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: Univer-
sity of Alabama Press, 2005).

21. Dunbar Rowland, ed., Mississippi Territorial Archives, 1798–1803: Ex-

ecutive 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. govern-
ment 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 Caron-
dolet, 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 Gover-

nor 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 an-

imal husbandry among the Choctaws, see James Taylor Carson, “Horses and
the Economy and Culture of the Choctaw Indians, 1690–1840,” Ethnohistory

Notes to Pages 49–53

163

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 Ochchum-

mey, May 17, 1803, Indian Department Journal, 1803–1808, Mississippi De-
partment 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: Long-
man, 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, Manu-

scripts Department, Academic Affairs Library of the University of North Car-
olina at Chapel Hill.

48. Dominique Rouquette, “The Choctaws,” typescript of a manuscript writ-

ten 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 Histori-
cal 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 54–56

164

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 au-
thor, 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 Territor-

ial 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 Pa-

pers of Governor David Holmes, Territorial Governor Record Group 2, Missis-
sippi 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.

Notes to Pages 56–60

165

63. Coen, “Indian as the Noble Savage,” 36–37, 98–99; Delacroix: An Exhi-

bition of Paintings, Drawings, and Lithographs (London: Arts Council of Great
Britain, 1964), 17; Jean Stewart, ed. and trans., Eugène Delacroix: Selected Let-
ters 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 Docu-

ments 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 charac-

teristics of Indian subjects observed around towns and along transportation
routes. For a discussion of literary and pictorial representations of nineteenth-
century Indians in the region, see Usner, American Indians in the Lower Missis-
sippi 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, an-

not. 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 & Put-
nam, 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 treat-
ment of this material in her forthcoming book on the Mississippi Choctaws.

Notes to Pages 61–67

166

3. The Discourse over Poverty

1. New York Times, December 17, 2005, A15.
2. Laura M. Stevens, The Poor Indians: British Missionaries, Native Amer-

icans, 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 Eliz-

abeth Segal, “The Vulnerability of American Indian Women in the New Welfare
State,” AFFILIA 15 (Summer 2000): 193–203; Stephen Cornell, “What Is Insti-
tutional 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.

Notes to Pages 70–73

167

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 Amer-
ican 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 Univer-
sity Press, 2001), 3–39, 266–67; Shelton Stromquist, Re-inventing “The People”:
The Progressive Movement, the Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Lib-
eralism (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: Row-
man & 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, Amer-
ican Indians, American Justice (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983); and
David E. Wilkins and K. Tsianina Lomawaima, Uneven Ground: American In-
dian 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 Cen-
sus, 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., Sta-
tistical 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 73–76

168

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. Cal-
loway, 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, Orga-
nizing 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 An-
ishinaabe 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 (Al-
bany: 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

Notes to Pages 77–79

169

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 cul-

ture, 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: Archaeol-

ogy 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. Nor-
ton, 1994), 87–89.

31. D’Arcy McNickle, “The Indian New Deal as Mirror of the Future,” Po-

litical Organization of Native North Americans, ed. Ernest L. Schusky (Wash-
ington, DC: University Press of America, 1980), 108.

32. Yngve Georg Lithman, The Practice of Underdevelopment and the The-

ory of Development: The Canadian Indian Case (Stockholm, Sweden: Univer-
sity 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 Indi-

ans of New York (Albany: New York State American Revolution Bicentennial
Commission, 1980); Clara Sue Kidwell, Choctaws and Missionaries in Missis-
sippi, 1818–1918 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995).

34. Stephen Warren, “Rethinking Assimilation: American Indians and the Prac-

tice 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 79–81

170

36. Emma R. Gross, “Setting the Agenda for American Indian Policy Devel-

opment, 1968–1980,” in American Indian Policy and Cultural Values: Conflict
and Accommodation, 47–63 (Los Angeles: American Indian Studies Center, Uni-
versity 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 Ad-
ministration’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: Univer-
sity of Oklahoma Press, 1966); Alan L. Sorkin, American Indians and Federal
Aid (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1971); and American Indian Pol-
icy 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: Uni-
versity 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: So-
cial 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 (Balti-
more: 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).

Notes to Pages 81–83

171

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, Oc-

tober 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 Po-

litical Cartoon Art (North Haven, CT: Archon Books, 1996), 110–16.

48. Joan Mark, A Stranger in Her Native Land: Alice Fetcher and the Amer-

ican Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 118–19.

49. Robert G. Hays, A Race at Bay: New York Times Editorials on “the In-

dian 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 Ok-
lahoma 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 al-
lotment 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: Phine-
has Allen, 1818), excerpted in Seth Rockman, Welfare Reform in the Early Re-
public: 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 84–87

172

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 Amer-

icans, 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. Schlen-
der, “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 (Prince-
ton, 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). An-
thropologist Oscar Lewis introduced the concept to a wide audience in “The

Notes to Pages 87–92

173

Culture of Poverty,” Scientific American 215 (October 1966): 19–25. He de-
rived 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 In-
stitute, 1987); Bunny McBride, Our Lives in Our Hands: Micmac Indian Bas-
ketmakers (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. Ratche-
son, 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 bas-
ketry 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 Cul-

ture 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 92–95

174

Object,” Ethnohistory 44 (Winter 1997): 1–29; Timothy J. Shannon, “Quee-
queg’s Tomahawk: A Cultural Biography, 1750–1900,” Ethnohistory 52 (Sum-
mer 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 Late-

Nineteenth-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., Col-
lecting 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 type-

script, ca. 1930, p. 8, Manuscripts Department, Tulane University, New Orleans,
Louisiana.

14. Meloncy C. Soniat, “The Tchoupitoulas Plantation,” Louisiana Histori-

cal 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.

Notes to Pages 95–99

175

17. Historical Sketch Book and Guide to New Orleans, Edited and Com-

piled 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 Univer-
sity Press, 1995), 50.

21. Florence E. Babb, Between Field and Cooking Pot: The Political Econ-

omy 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, Mar-
keting 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 Indi-

ans 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 99–104

176

28. McBride, Our Lives in Our Hands; Patricia Pierce Erickson, “ ‘Defining

Ourselves through Baskets’: Museum Autoethnography and the Makah Cul-
tural 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 En-
during Seminoles: From Alligator Wrestling to Ecotourism (Gainesville: Univer-
sity 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 His-
tory of American Colonialism and the 19th-Century Reservation,” in Clearing
a Path: Theorizing the Past in Native American Studies, ed. Nancy Shoe-
maker, 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 Indi-

ans, 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 Bul-
letin 48 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1909), 13–15.

38. Janel M. Curry-Roper, “Houma Blowguns and Baskets in the Missis-

sippi 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.

Notes to Pages 104–109

177

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 Commercializa-
tion 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, Ex-

hibited at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis, MS 7208, Na-
tional Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

45. Miss M to Charles E. Dagenette, January 31, 1914, Records of the Bu-

reau 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 Geor-
gia 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 Mu-
seum, 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 Ad-

jacent Coast of the Gulf of Mexico, Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of Ameri-
can 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 109–110

178

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 Mu-
seums, 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 Work-

man 37 (December 1908): 656–61. For an excellent assessment of Heye’s com-
mitment 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, Collect-
ing Native America, 232–58.

54. Natasha Bonilla Martinez, “An Indian Americas: NMAI Photographic

Archive Documents Indian Peoples of the Western Hemisphere,” in Spirit Cap-
ture: 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 Harring-
ton’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 demonstra-
tions 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

Notes to Pages 110–112

179

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 Col-

lection 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 Plan-
etarium, 1986), 13–14.

63. Moses Friedman to R. G. Valentine, November 4, 1910, William Brew-

ster Humphrey to J. H. Dillard, June 30, 1913, Sarah Avery McIlhenny to
Charles E. Dagenett, January 31, 1914, Records of the Bureau of Indian Af-
fairs, 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 Bu-
reau 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: Univer-
sity of North Carolina Press, 2006), 183–214.

66. B. W. Merwin, “Basketry of the Chitimacha Indians,” [University of Penn-

sylvania] 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 Scrib-

ner’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 Or-
leans, 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 112–116

180

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 (Cleve-
land: 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 com-
piled Lawrence’s major writings on the Southwest in one book. The photo-
graphs printed in this volume, gathered by Sagar from private and public
collections, offer important glimpses into the Englishman’s life in New Mex-
ico. 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: Uni-
versity 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: Al-
fred 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 (Madi-
son: 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: Harper-
Collins, 1995), 265–83.

Notes to Pages 117–119

181

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, Mod-
ern 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 De-
loria, 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 Scrib-

ner’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 Mex-
ico 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 (Albu-
querque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006).

Notes to Pages 119–122

182

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: Thun-

der’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 Rud-
nick, Utopian Vistas: The Mabel Dodge Luhan House and the American Coun-
terculture (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 Com-
munity (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: Indi-
ans 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 Coun-
try: 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 Mod-

ernizing 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.

Notes to Pages 122–125

183

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 Pueblo-
related 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 Ambiva-
lence in the Golden Age,” in Romantic Motives: Essays on Anthropological Sen-
sibility, 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, Incor-

porated (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 Ethno-
graphic Sensibility of the 1920s and the Dualism of the Anthropological Tradi-
tion,” 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 Writ-

ings (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 Mex-

ico,’ ” 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 125–130

184

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 Collec-

tion; 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 Let-

ters (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. (Den-
ver: 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.

Notes to Pages 131–136

185

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 Par-
tial Portraits (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1993), 81–102; Henry Shuk-
man, “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 nu-
anced analysis of American Indians’ interactions with the Atlantic world econ-
omy in early South Carolina, see James H. Merrell, The Indians’ New World:
Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of Re-
moval (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, Eth-
nohistory 50 (Summer 2003): 413–585.

Notes to Pages 138–144

186

4. Mary Lawlor, Public Native America: Tribal Self-Representation in Muse-

ums, 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 Surround-

ing 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.

Notes to Pages 144–146

187

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The essays that became chapters in this book traveled across great dis-
tances over several years, originating and benefiting from various oppor-
tunities 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 ac-
knowledge 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 rela-
tionship between Indian communities and educational institutions, and to
promote success among Indian students, I had the rare privilege of partic-
ipating in real-life interplay between language and livelihood. The De-
partment 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 re-
spected 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 be-

fore tying them down in my new home at Vanderbilt University. The
chapter on Iroquois livelihood began many years ago as a seminar

paper presented to American Indian graduate students at Cornell, bene-
fiting especially from tough questions raised by Kevin Connelly, Mike
Wilson, and Gerald Alfred, and the late Ron LaFrance. Drafts were pre-
sented 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 Freder-
ick E. Hoxie, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville: Uni-
versity 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 es-
say received very helpful input from Clara Sue Kidwell, Greg O’Brien,
and Tanis Thorne. Hans Bak, whom I first met at the Newberry Li-
brary some thirty years ago, invited me to participate in the 1995 con-
ference 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 Or-
leans Graduate School’s History of New Orleans Lecture Series in early
2007 and warmly thank Connie Atkinson for the opportunity and en-
couragement. 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 in-
terest in Louisiana Indian basketry, offering me valuable advice and

Acknowledgments

190

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 Univer-

sity alumni on several study-vacation trips to northern New Mexico. Pas-
sionate 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 In-
dian Graduate Student Association seminar held one early December,
while everyone else was digging in for exams, Rebecca Marie Moore, Dei-
dre 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 Cam-
bridge University and allowed me to stray into, of all things, twentieth-
century 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 lec-
ture 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 semi-

nar 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 ver-
bal remarks. Richard humored me on my unlikely swerve into literary
criticism. Everyone in Vanderbilt’s history department has been gra-
ciously supportive in facilitating my move from central New York to mid-
dle 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 as-
sistance and hospitality at that wonderful haven for scholarly adventur-
ers. 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

Acknowledgments

191

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 In-
terlibrary Loan Service for Vanderbilt’s Jean and Alexander Heard Li-
brary 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 Amer-
ican history have certainly helped compensate for the numerous col-
leagues that I left behind in New York. Katherine graciously read every
piece of this book with amazing attentiveness and then generously of-
fered feedback full of wit and wisdom.

Two anonymous readers for Harvard University Press offered remark-

ably helpful and insightful comments, for which I am deeply apprecia-
tive. I am also grateful to Kathleen McDermott, my editor at the press,
for seeing enough promise in this peculiar Indian work of mine to acti-
vate 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.

Acknowledgments

192

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; Iro-

quois, 33–41, 143; development of
American towns and, 45, 48–49,
54–57, 68; real vs. perceived hard-
ships 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 prim-

itivism in, 117–40, 142

Amherst, Jeffery, 74
Anthropology: non-Indian representa-

tions 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

Index

194

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; non-
Indian 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; non-
Indian representations of, 96–101,
113–16; tribal identity and pride
and, 105, 115–16; as art, 105–10;
double-weave method of, 107; anthro-
pologists 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

195

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),

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

Index

196

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),

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),

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; polar-
ized 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-Marguerite-

Henriette, 37; Indian family on
a hunting trip, 38f; Indian chief,
39f

Index

197

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 entan-

glement 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” (Law-

rence), 124

“Indians and Entertainment” (Law-

rence), 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 com-

mercial 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; adap-
tation strategies of, 33–41; private
property and, 35; non-Indian repre-
sentations of, 37–41; ethnographic
study of, 40

Itinerancy. See Peddling goods (itiner-

ancy)

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; sea-

sonal, 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

Index

198

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; represen-

tations 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 En-
glishman,” 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 Tiem-

po, 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 Representa-

tions, non-Indian

Mississippi Valley, Lower. See Natchez
Mobile (AL), 56
Mohawk Indians, basket making and,

101–2

Index

199

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 transfor-
mation 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 repre-

sentations 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),

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 self-
protective 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

Index

200

Poverty: divergent strategies to alleviate,

69; Indian treaty rights and, 69–92;
ideological uses of, 70; colonial intru-
sion 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 repre-
sentations 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 authen-

ticity, 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,

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; nega-
tive 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 Indi-
ans, 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,

Reserve Indienne, La (Du Pont),

37–38

Resistance strategies: other American

groups and, 15; to commercial agri-
culture, 29–41, 143; wars as, 42–44,
46–48; banditry as, 48, 50–54; self-
protective 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

201

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 Adja-
cent Coast of the Gulf of Mexico,
110

Sweet, Timothy, 26–27
Synopsis of the Indian Tribes (Gallatin),

Tante MiMi, 113
Taos (NM), 121–40
Taylor, Alan, 26
Taylor, James, 86
“Teller’s Indian Grocery” (Hamilton),

Temporary Assistance for Needy Fami-

lies (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 liveli-

hood, 45, 54–57, 68

Trachtenberg, Alan, 88
Trading, 36, 51–52, 56–57, 141–42
Transactions (Williamson), 26
Treaty of Big Tree (1797), 33

Index

202

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 to-
ward, 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 Amer-

ica, 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 representa-
tions and, 79, 84–92; U.S. Indian pol-
icy 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,

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

Document Outline

Contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction: The Pursuit of Livelihood and the Production of Language
1. Inventing the Hunter State: Iroquois Livelihood in Jeffersonian America
2. Narratives of Decline and Disappearance: The Changing Presence of American Indians in Early Natchez
3. The Discourse over Poverty: Indian Treaty Rights and Welfare Policy
4. Perceptions of Authenticity and Passivity: Indian Basket Making in Post-Civil War Louisiana
5. Primitivism and Tourism: Indian Livelihood in D. H. Lawrence's New Mexico
Conclusion
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index

[Daniel H Usner Jr ] Indian Work Language and Li(BookFi org)

Document Outline