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Pastoral Landscape with Indians: George Copway and the Political Unconscious of the American Pastoral

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Timothy Sweet
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Extract

After squanto taught the colonists at Plymouth in 1620 “both the manner how to set [their corn], and after how to dress and tend it,” Indians seem to have disappeared from the American pastoral scene, except as unwelcome intruders. Seventeen years later, writes William Bradford, “the Pequots fell openly on the English at Connecticut, in the lower parts of the river, and slew sundry of them as they were at work in the fields.” Mary Rowlandson opens the story of her captivity during King Philip's War similarly, describing how the Narragansetts came out of the wilderness to attack the farmsteads at Lancaster, setting fire to buildings “with flax and hemp, which they brought out of the barn,” and later celebrated by feasting on the animals they had captured: “miserable was the waste that was there made, of horses, cattle, sheep, swine, calves, lambs, roasting pigs, and fowl (which they had plundered in the town) some roasting, some lying and burning, and some boiling to feed our merciless enemies.” These accounts — in which Indians violate the pastoral scene, killing peaceful tillers of the soil and wantonly consuming the stock that had been so carefully husbanded — suggest that in the 17th Century, despite the original beneficence of Squanto, Indian “savagery” was perceived as a threat not only to the lives of individual colonists but to agriculture itself, the foundation of the colonial economy in North America. But it was the agrarian culture of the English that turned the Indians into “savages,” for the Pequot War and King Philip's War began, as Francis Jennings has demonstrated, with the colonists' hunger for land.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 18 , October 1993 , pp. 1 - 27
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

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References

NOTES

1. Bradford, William, Of Plymouth Plantation 1620–1647, ed. Morison, Samuel Eliot (New York: Knopf, 1952), p. 85.Google Scholar

2. Bradford, , Plymouth Plantation, p. 294.Google Scholar

3. The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682Google Scholar; rept. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1930), pp. 4, 10.

4. Jennings, Francis, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (New York: Norton, 1976).Google Scholar

5. Quotations from George Copway's works are cited in the text using the following abbreviations:

RS Running Sketches of Men and Places, in England, France, Germany, Belgium, and Scotland (New York: J. C. Riker, 1851)Google Scholar

L The Life, History, and Travels of Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh (Philadelphia: James Harmstead, 1847)Google Scholar

IL Indian Life and Indian History, by an Indian Author (1850; rept. Boston: Albert Colby, 1860)Google Scholar

O Organization of a New Indian Territory East of the Missouri River (New York: S. W. Benedict, 1850)Google Scholar

6. Jefferson, Thomas, Notes on the State of Virginia (1787; rept. New York: Norton, 1982), p. 165.Google Scholar

7. Ruoff, A. Lavonne Brown, “George Copway: Nineteenth-Century American Indian Autobiographer,” Auto/Biography 3, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 12.Google Scholar

8. Buell, Lawrence “American Pastoral Ideology Reappraised,” American Literary History 1 (1989): 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Buell argues, however, that the ideological valence of the pastoral is underdetermined, noting that it has been a vehicle for radical as well as conservative or consensualist agendas. See also Kolodny, Annette, The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience in American Life and Letters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975)Google Scholar; and Jehlen, Myra, American Incarnation: The Individual, the Nation, and the Continent (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986)Google Scholar. Kolodny, articulating connections between American pastoralism and the pervasive image of the feminine landscape, finds the pastoral to be a site in which male psychosexual fantasies have been played out in relation to the land. Jehlen argues that the material and conceptual act of taking possession of nature grounded the development of a white, male, middle-class ideology of individualism.

9. See Pearce, Roy Harvey, The Savages of America: A Study of the Indian and the Idea of Civilization, rev. ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), esp. pp. 66–73, 120–34Google Scholar. Pearce argues that Americans invented an image of the Indian as a “savage,” one who by definition could have no part in the order of civilization and who could thus legitimately be destroyed; part of this invention consisted in the representation of Indians as essentially hunters, a form of economy and social organization deemed inferior to agrarianism. Jehlen, , in American IncarnationGoogle Scholar, briefly notes the cultural logic of dispossession in the 18th Century (pp. 64–65). This topic in Cooper's The Deerslayer is analyzed extensively by Fisher, Philip (Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel [New York: Oxford University Press, 1985], pp. 22–86)Google Scholar, who takes Jacksonian Indian removal as his point of departure in order to read The Deerslayer as an allegory of colonization.

Most scholars of the pastoral motif in American literature, however, neglect the fact of Indian removal. See, for example, Buell, , “American Pastoral Ideology Reappraised”Google Scholar; Smith, Henry Nash, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970)Google Scholar; Marx, Leo, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964)Google Scholar; Tichi, Cecilia, New World, New Earth: Environmental Reform in American Literature from the Puritans through Whitman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979)Google Scholar; and Burns, Sarah, Pastoral Inventions: Rural Life in Nineteenth-Century American Art and Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989)Google Scholar. For Smith, 's reassessment of Virgin LandGoogle Scholar, in which he acknowledges the desirability of greater critical awareness of Indians as historical actors, of government Indian policy, and of whites' perceptions of Indians, see Smith, Henry Nash, “Symbol and Idea in Virgin Land,” in Ideology and Classic American Literature,” ed. Bercovitch, Sacvan and Jehlen, Myra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 21–35.Google Scholar

10. Marx, , Machine in the Garden, pp. 118, 122.Google Scholar

11. Jefferson, , Notes, pp. 97, 63, 60–61, 93.Google Scholar

12. Jefferson, , Notes, pp. 96, 165.Google Scholar

13. de Crèvecoeur, Hector St. John, Letters From An American Farmer (1782; rept. New York: Dutton, 1957), pp. 18, 205, 208, 215.Google Scholar

14. Crèvecoeur, , Letters, pp. 217–18.Google Scholar

15. Quoted in Prucha, Francis Paul, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indian, 2 vols. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press), vol. 1, p. 142.Google Scholar

16. Prucha, , Great Father, vol. 1, pp. 135–44.Google Scholar

17. Copway, , Organization, p. 6Google Scholar. See also Prucha, , Great Father, vol. 1, pp. 183–84.Google Scholar

18. The work of Bingham, George Caleb, although more frequently depicting Indians as subjects rather than as incidental figures, also falls into this patternGoogle Scholar; the border between the wild and cultivated landscapes is seen only as a concern of whites, as for example in The Emigration of Daniel Boone (1851)Google Scholar. Burns's, Pastoral InventionsGoogle Scholar provides an extensive survey of the pastoral motif in visual art through 1900; none of the illustrations reproduced here, by Asher Durand, Eastman Johnson, W. S. Mount, George Inness, et al., acknowledges the displacement of Indians that made pastoralism possible. Gidley, Mick (“The Figure of the Indian in Photographic Landscapes,” in Views of American Landscapes, ed. Gidley, Mick and Lawson-Peebles, Robert [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989], pp. 199–220)Google Scholar demonstrates that the representation of Indians as objects in “nature” rather than subjects of “culture” persisted into the 20th Century.

19. See Cole, Thomas, “Essay on American Scenery, 1835,” in American Art 1700–1960: Sources and Documents, ed. McCoubrey, John W. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965), pp. 98–110Google Scholar. Cole asserts that views of “wild, uncultivated nature” inspire “a calm, religious tone” of mind, while the “cultivated” landscape encourages the “domestic affections” (p. 100). While he does not mention Indians in this essay, it seems clear that in his paintings he regarded them as objects of representation, creatures of the wilderness, rather than as subjects of either of these mental states.

20. All of Cole's depictions of Indians are historical fictions. This is obvious in the illustration of Cooper's novel, but it is true in the other paintings as well, in which Cole placed Indian figures where they would not normally have been. Gidley, (“Figure of the Indian,” p. 215Google Scholar) points out that the figures in Cole's, A Distant View of Niagara (1824)Google Scholar could not have been painted from observation, for the area had been subject to commercial development for some years. The case of Schroon Lake is similar. Located in Eastern New York some twenty miles west of the Southern tip of Lake Champlain, Schroon Lake was part of the territory originally occupied by the Six Nations; but they had been confined to Western New York since the Treaty of Ft. Stanwix in 1784 (see Prucha, , Great Father, vol. 1, p. 44)Google Scholar. In 1826, ten years before Cole's depiction of Schroon Lake as a wilderness inhabited by Indians, Cooper, remarked that this entire area was “nearly a wilderness still, although the Red Man has entirely deserted this part of the state” (The Last of the Mohicans [1826; rept. New York: Signet, 1980], p. vii)Google Scholar. All of Cole's paintings referred to here are reproduced in Baigell, Matthew, Thomas Cole (New York: Watson-Guptill, 1981)Google Scholar, except the wilderness view of Schroon Lake, which is reproduced in Cikovsky, Nicolai et al. , American Paintings from the Manoogian Collection (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1989), p. 17.Google Scholar

21. Fisher, , Hard Facts, pp. 22–86Google Scholar. Pearce, who oddly enough minimizes the role of violence in Cooper's narratives, argues that Cooper was not really interested in Indians except as a symbol, one pole of the opposition between the savage and the civilized; the frontiersman Natty, mediating this opposition, represents the “intermediate result of the civilizing process” (Savages of America, p. 203).Google Scholar

22. Bryant, William Cullen, “The Prairies,” in The Heath Anthology of American Literature, ed. Lauter, Paul et al. (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1990), vol. 1, p. 2701.Google Scholar

23. On Bakhtinian dialogism and Native American literature, see Krupat, Arnold, The Voice in the Margin: Native American Literature and the Canon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989)Google Scholar; and Murray, David, Forked Tongues: Speech, Writing, and Representation in American Indian Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991)Google Scholar. Krupat argues that all Native American autobiographies are “the textual result of specific dialogues (between persons, between cultures, between persons and cultures) which claim to represent an Indian subject who, him- or herself, is the result of specific dialogical or collective sociocultural practices” (p. 134). This frame is elaborated by Murray, who argues that such dialogues often resulted in what at first seems to be a ventriloquistic voice, in which an Indian subject speaks, but does not necessarily affirm and often covertly criticizes, the terms of white ideology.

24. For examples of Ojibwa song, see Johnston, Basil, Ojibway Heritage (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976).Google Scholar

25. Seattle, , “Speech of Chief Seattle,” in The Heath Anthology of American Literature, ed. Lauter, Paul et al. (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1990), vol. 1, p. 1772.Google Scholar

26. Seattle, , “Speech of Chief Seattle,” p. 1771.Google Scholar

27. He had seen the failure of a similar, although less agriculturally oriented, proposal by Canadian Ojibwas in the 1840s (see Copway, , Indian Life, pp. 132–41).Google Scholar

28. In Indian Life, Copway describes the council held “long ago” on the Mississippi “at some point above the falls of St. Anthony” in which hunting lands were equitably divided among the Ojibwa, Menominee, Sauk, and Ottawa nations (p. 30).

29. For a description of this model, see Johnston, (Ojibway Heritage, pp. 61–64)Google Scholar. Leaders ruled in accordance with the active consent of the governed as represented primarily by a council of elders. Leaders usually came from particular totemic groups although others could be chosen by the elders based on ability. Civil and military powers were separate except, occasionally, in times of crisis. Copway's history of the Ojibwa supports this assessment while also stressing that property was held in common and that participation in warfare was strictly voluntary (see Indian Life, p. 136).Google Scholar

30. Jefferson, , Notes, p. 93.Google Scholar

31. Quoted in Prucha, , Great Father, vol. 1, p. 324.Google Scholar

32. Prucha, , Great Father, vol. 1, p. 261.Google Scholar

33. Prucha, , Great Father, vol. 2, pp. 659, 665.Google Scholar

34. Quoted in Prucha, , Great Father, vol. 2, p. 664.Google Scholar

35. Prucha, , Great Father, vol. 2, p. 895.Google Scholar

36. Quoted in Prucha, , Great Father, vol. 2, p. 671.Google Scholar

37. Krupat, , Voice in the Margin, p. 142.Google Scholar

38. Copway's relation to the dominant white ideologies often resembles that of another Christianized Indian of the early 19th Century, William Apes. Murray argues, against Krupat, that Apes exploited the ambiguity of his position in order subtly to criticize white society and argue for Indians' rights, even in texts that seem at first to be mere white “ventriloquism”; although Apes voices the discourse of “salvationism,” he often does so in a critical way that “does not necessarily make him a white mouthpiece” Forked Tongues (p. 58)Google Scholar. Copway is positioned similarly. For example, he engages with white discourse in his attendance at the Third General Peace Conference at Frankfurt in 1850 as a member of the American delegation (described in Running Sketches); but in that engagement he participates in an important critique of white culture, implying that whites do not conduct their politics in a “civilized” and “Christian” manner. Copway's persistent critique of government Indian policy was necessarily conducted in the discourse of white politics.

39. Jameson, Frederic, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981).Google Scholar

40. Martin, Calvin, Keepers of the Game: Indian-Animal Relationships and the Fur Trade (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 148.Google Scholar

41. Martin, , Keepers of the Game, p. 146.Google Scholar

42. Ruoff, , “George Copway,” pp. 9, 10.Google Scholar

43. Knobel, Dale, “Know-Nothings and Indians: Strange Bedfellows?” Western Historical Quarterly 15 (1984): 183.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

44. Quoted in Prucha, , Great Father, vol. 1, pp. 324–25.Google Scholar

45. On the mandate of “environmental reform” from the Puritans through the mid-19th Century, see Tichi, , New World, New Earth.Google Scholar

46. The Dawes Act ignored the environmental conditions determining what type of cultivation (dry farming, irrigation, grazing, or various combinations) was appropriate, as well as the capacity of different kinds of land and methods of farming to support different numbers of people, although this was partly rectified in 1910 (see Prucha, , Great Father, vol. 2, p. 877).Google Scholar

47. Jameson, , Political Unconscious, p. 19.Google Scholar