The Writing Life ... One in a Series

Shades of Hiawatha came about through a process of discovery and interpretation stretching over some twelve years. In my earlier work, particularly The Incorporation of America (1982), I had puzzled over persisting conflicts and struggles centered on the meaning and identity of the nation, “the idea of America,” the visions of reality and of the future embodied in the national name. Ideas of the nation, of an American difference or exceptional destiny, have had genuine historical force, have shaped discourse and policy and focused debate over power, over justice, over what the nation putatively “stands for.” The broad cultural program of the American Studies field provides it with certain tools – the interdisciplinary method, for example – to pose and explore questions of meaning and identity that other branches of the historical profession have tended to sidestep. It’s hardly exceptionalist in itself to ask how exceptionalist ideas have served to define and misdefine reality in America.

There was no definite plan at the outset of my work on Shades, no exact theme or argument, only a desire to examine changes in the image and idea of the nation at a time of critical change at the turn of the twentieth century, an era of mass immigration, consolidating economic power, sharpening social conflict, and imperial expansion overseas. I had long wanted to expand the discussion in Incorporation of the fate of Indians during the western expansion after the Civil War, and chose the changing image of “the Indian” as a focal center of the new study of conflicted ideas of the nation and its peoples in this era.

How I got from there to here, from the initial interest in the rhetoric of national identity to Shades of Hiawatha, makes a story in itself. An interest in photographs of Indians led me to the vast Wanamaker Collection of pictures and texts at the Mathers Museum, Indiana University, a gold mine of materials regarding many aspects of Indian affairs and Indian-white relations in the early 20 th century. A treasure trove, it was also a Sargasso Sea that baffled my early efforts to pick my way through the tangled weeds, to decipher the story of the Wanamaker Department Store’s astonishing – at once ludicrous, bathetic, and sad -- “Expeditions to the North American Indians.” Chapter Five of the book, “Wanamaker Indians,” gives my best effort to tell that bizarre story, a challenge, I found, as much to get the tone right as to set the facts in order.

The book as a whole can be seen as an attempt to tell the Wanamaker story in different registers, its threads teased out and re-woven into a denser fabric, a broader tapestry of images, texts, and surmise. In 1908, during the first Wanamaker “expedition” to the Crow Agency in Montana, the major event was the filming of a dramatization, with native performers, of Longfellow’s “Song of Hiawatha.” Never mind that the Rocky Mountains, not the Great Lakes, served as the setting; a birch-bark canoe was imported from Duluth to lend a touch of authenticity. Why Hiawatha, I wondered, until it dawned on me that Longfellow’s wildly popular faux-Indian poem of 1855 gave just the kind of pacific, tractable, and magical figure of “the Indian” the ruling elites at the turn-of-the-century wanted as a model of the “First American” at the portal of the nation at Ellis Island. The Wanamakers had also, in 1913, planned to raise a material version of this figure, not named “Hiawatha” but simply “North American Indian,” in a gigantic monument on Staten Island, to greet immigrants even before the Statue of Liberty loomed into view.

Discovery of Hiawatha at the heart of the Wanamaker activities “among the Indians” helped me center the entire book on the dialectic of “staging” and “making,” the performance of an innocent unthreatening “Indian” as mediator in the “making” of Americans out of rough-edged, unwashed new immigrants. Learning about the extensive actual Indian performances of the Hiawatha poem in pageants at several locations on reservations and in large cities clinched the idea of “staging” with real events. I was able now to expand and re-focus an older essay on Henry James’s response to what he called “the inconceivable aien” at Ellis Island, to add to that chapter (“Conceivable Aliens”) a discussion of citizenship and contending theories of national identity at the time, posing John Dewey and Horace Kallen – the theory of pluralism -- against Teddy Roosevelt and other stalwarts of a hundred per cent Americanism. Finding the 1910 translation of Longfellow’s poem into Yiddish by the prominent Yiddish poet Yeohash, was a key moment in my conception of the book. The eloquently articulate introduction to that translation by the eminent Yiddish scholar and critic, Chaim Zhitlovski, confirmed for me the relevance of the figure of Hiawatha for one major immigrant culture.

The photographs of Edward Curtis, a monument of staged role-playing by natives in front of a theatrical camera, took the idea of performance to the burgeoning visual culture of the early twentieth century. Curtis produced images of allegedly authentic, pre-conquest Indians for consumption by an audience hungry for visual icons of putative national origins. The Curtis pictures and the role of photographs and film in the Wanamaker “Romance of the Vanishing Race” – an extravaganza staged regularly at the Wanamaker stores in Philadelphia and New York under the direction of the store’s “educational director,” Joseph Kossuth Dixon -- added the ballast of consumer culture (especially its visual component) to the larger study of the dialectic of staging and making.

The idea that Indians are integral to American identity is as old as the nation itself. Compared to blacks, Indians held a place of classic ambivalence in the national imagination. The white nation murdered Indians and took their lands, then embraced them as ghostly guardian spirits: an old story, absurd, cruel, and tragic. It’s the underlying story of Shades of Hiawatha. The book adds a dimension –- “making Americans” – that brings the unhappy tale into the early twentieth century and retells it as a revealing story of an era of fundamental change in the larger history of the idea of the nation. A choreography of various voices, images, texts, and events – the book is, in my mind, a cultural history – the book concludes with a native voice, the voice of Luther Standing Bear, who had lived the history of enforced acculturation, had become a “stage Indian,” a performer in “wild west” shows and in Hollywood westerns, and then an author telling the story of his own life as a Lakota Sioux.

It was enlightening to discover the exact fit, as refutation and as alternative, of Standing Bear’s self-told story to the other story rampant in the culture at the same time, the story that makes Indians out to be “first Americans,” as if the name of the nation were their original name. Hence Shades of Hiawatha tells a story of paradox, of misprision and misnaming, and of the oppression that names can impose. It starts in the distant past, when Columbus called the people he encountered “Indians” because he misunderstood where he was; it continues through Longfellow’s and the white culture’s misconception of indigenous culture and art and history, into the early twentieth century crux or crossing between immigrants and natives. Standing Bear’s alternative vision of aboriginal America dramatically sharpens our recognition of contending voices in the debate over the meaning of the terms Indian and America. The story has had no climax. It’s clear that it continues today in different but cognate guises. The experience of writing Shades of Hiawatha has clarified for me a chronic condition of injustice and blindness in the nation’s history, and also clarified an alternative vision of that history that may enable an alternative future, another version of a tribal creation story for the nation. The book attempts to revise and expand our notion of the multiple identities and meanings that have accrued to the name America in the course of the nation’s embattled history.

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