87: Steve Hoelscher's Picturing Indians

Steve Hoelscher's Picturing Indians: Photographic Encounters and Tourist Fantasies in H.H. Bennett's Wisconsin Dells argues that Bennett's photography turned the Ho-Chunk people of the Wisconsin Dells into objects of the "camera's colonizing gaze," but that the Ho-Chunk also subverted Bennett's exploitation of them.  Bennett's photographs can thus be read as negotiations of power, where visual images both represent and shape the material world.

Photographs of Native Americans exploded at the turn of the last century due to the rise of commercial photography, mass tourism, and the final conquest and colonization of Native Americans.  While the most famous photographer of Native Americans was Edward Curtis, who wanted to record a vanishing way of life, H.H. Bennett had the far less noble goal of profiting by selling images of Ho-Chunk people to white tourists visiting the Wisconsin Dells.  Yet while Bennett worked to stage photos that communicated white nostalgia for a vanishing way of life, his Ho-Chunk models actively worked to resist becoming tourist objects: they wore certain items, posed in certain ways, and used the money Bennett gave them for their own economic and cultural survival.  And in real life, the Ho-Chunk have managed not just to survive but to retain and buy back their homelands in a very real repudiation of American cultural and political imperialism.

Throughout, Hoelscher works from a wide range of primary sources, including five years of interactions with Ho-Chunk people and close connections with Tom Jones, a contemporary Ho-Chunk photographer.  He is careful to contextualize Bennett's photography in the cultural, political, and economic milieu in which it was created, and to balance Ho-Chunk and white perspectives.  The result is a profoundly interconnected relationship between Native and white cultures that uses Bennett's tourist photos as a nodal point.

71: Frederick Hoxie's A Final Promise

Frederick Hoxie's A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880-1920 argues that the attitudes and goals of policy reformers, educators, and politicians involved in Indian assimilation at the turn of the century changed radically in 1900.  From 1880 to 1900, the assimilation campaign combined ethnocentric intolerance with a "racially optimistic" belief that Indians should and could fully assimilate with American culture; after 1900, this optimism shifted to a pessimistic view that Indians and other "backward" people could never become fully equal to whites.  By contextualizing assimilation policy within a broader context of social upheavals and reform at the turn of the century, Hoxie links this shift in policy to a growing pessimism in American culture about the value of racial diversity as a result of economic expansion, industrialization, immigration, and urbanization.  He argues that with social institutions straining to serve increasingly diverse populations, after 1900 the old goal of maintaining cultural homogeneity and equality was replaced by a new social order that connected race and ethnicity with economic class.  Assimilation from 1900 to 1920 thus meant assimilating into society as the other to American whiteness.

48: Richard White's The Middle Ground

In The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815, Richard White argues that the French and Native Americans negotiated a middle ground in the Great Lakes region; unlike in other parts of the country, colonization here created a region characterized by negotiation among groups with relatively equal power.

For White, "middle ground" has two distinct meanings:

• A productive "process of mutual and creative misunderstanding;" this includes both sides' willingness to justify their own actions in terms of their partners' perceived cultural expectations; folks who sought out similarities between their culture and their partners' culture; and the understanding that even the most tenuous cross-cultural similarity can be used in negotiations if both sides accept it.
• A "quite particular historical space that was the outcome of this process:" the Great Lakes region, aka the pays d'en haut.

Because the middle ground is a spatial metaphor, it's possible to conflate the process of creative misunderstanding and the physical space, so that the Great Lakes region becomes the product of two cultures that have roughly equivalent power, a historically-specific place where creative miscommunication between Europeans and Native Americans created new, hybrid cultural forms.

White is careful to characterize this middle ground as a place constituted not by violence and bloodshed but by adaptation, compromise, and mutual respect.  He is also careful to link it specifically to the Great Lakes region, because he derived it empirically there via oral and written histories and archival sources.  However, he does allow that the process of the middle ground might be transferable to other regions, as long as these other regions include a rough balance of power, a mutual need or desire for what the other possesses, and an inability for either side to force the other to change because neither side is bigger or more powerful than the other.  The space of the middle ground might be transferable as well, so long as it includes an infrastructure that can support and expand the process.

With this study, White makes a number of important interventions.  He turns culture into a spatialized process; he considers the possibility of a frontier as a space of mutual understanding and negotiation, where hybrid cultures are created; he recognizes the agency of Native Americans in shaping the middle ground, and uses oral histories with the descendants of these tribes to understand the memory of this process; and he shifts the development of American culture from New England to the Great Lakes region.  And rather than assume rational, perfectly informed actors, he acknowledges and even appreciates that "biased and incomplete information and creative misunderstanding may be the most common basis of human actions" ever.

44: Jill Lepore's King Philip's War

Jill Lepore's The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity argues that all wars are contests for meaning, and that the peculiar characteristics of King Philip's War, especially that it was a frontier war between literate and non-literate peoples, make it a critical moment in the formation of a uniquely American identity.

King Philip's War was a frontier conflict between Native Americans and colonists in what is now New England between 1675 and 1678.  Also called Metacom's Rebellion, King Philip's War was the deadliest per capita battle on American soil.  Lepore reconstructs this battle by reading accounts of it from the perspectives of both colonists and Indians, and as a result the book is a much larger study of a war between two cultures, literate colonists who fight with words, and Indians, both literate and illiterate, who write in "blud not ink." The book is also an analysis of the ways in which these binaries break down in war, so that sometimes colonists take pleasure in torturing Indians instead of trying to translate pain into language, and sometimes Indians make their frustrations legible by destroying property or stripping and scalping colonists in a kind of symbolic, rather than pleasurable, "denuding," or erasure of the social meaning the colonists had given the land and themselves.  Further, in theatrical representations of this war in the 1800s, the roles switch, so that Americans are playing Indian and representing Philip as a noble savage, and Native American tribes go through American legal channels to preserve their identity.  American identity is thus intimately connected to language, to the frontier warfare early colonists fought, and to the Native Americans themselves.

Throughout The Name of War, Lepore is careful to anchor her analysis of "text" in the material world of bodies and landscape, actions and objects; the book is thus both a part of the discursive turn and a reaction to it.  It is also thoroughly interdisciplinary in both source and method, as much a work of literary analysis as a work of history.  I don't feel like this kind of sustained, thorough engagement with both texts and the material bodies and spaces and actions that produced them happens nearly as often as it should.

36: Virginia Anderson's Creatures of Empire

In Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America, Virginia Anderson argues that in seventeenth-century Chesapeake and New England, domestic animals put English settlers and Native Americans into close contact and thus actively shaped the history of early America and settler/ native relations.  By putting livestock at the center of early American history, Anderson contributes to a growing body of literature in animal studies, which, like environmental history, decenters human historical agency by elevating the broader environmental context.  Because colonists and Indians related to animals very differently and because these relationships had a huge impact on the landscape, focusing on animals also allows Anderson to investigate the imposition of one worldview over another in a holistic way.

Anderson divides her book into three sections: a discussion of the many ways Algonquians and English settlers thought about different kinds of animals at the beginning of the 17th century; a history of the introduction of livestock into the Chesapeake colonies and New England and the development of regional husbandry practices; and a comparison of two near-simultaneous conflicts in the 1670s, Bacon's rebellion and King Philip's War, with an emphasis on the relationship between disputes over livestock and the outbreak of violence in both regions.  Building on Bill Cronon's Changes in the Land, she argues that the English settlers sought to turn the New World into England, which included imposing their view of animals as property on the landscape and on Native Americans.  There were regional differences: Chesapeake farmers, with tobacco as their cash crop, let pigs and other animal run free and go semi-feral; New England farmers, who had to deal with colder climates and rocky soils, ran family farms rather than large plantations, and kept a closer eye on their herds.  However, in both regions, Native American responses to new animals and practices ranged from cautious acceptance of pigs (which seemed like deer or dogs) to outright rejection of environmental destruction by animals.

In some ways, this book is a continuation of the spatial turn in American Studies: English attitudes toward animals were closely linked to their attitudes about property, and Algonquian attitudes toward animals were linked to their more holistic view of humans, animals, and the environment, so disputes over animals spatialize and materialize conflicting worldviews.  By broadening the concept of agency to include environmental and non-human actors, it also presents a more contextual (and thus possibly more complete and less biased, or at least differently biased) history of early America.

35: Patricia Limerick's Legacy of Conquest

A Westerner studying at Harvard, Patricia Limerick wrote The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West with three main goals: to knit together the Old West of frontiers, cowboys, and conquest and the complex, 20th century west into a coherent history; to warn against the dangers of the narrative of Progress for the West, environmentally and culturally; and to finally overturn the Turner thesis and shift the focus of Western history from the frontier-as-process to the West-as-place.  She achieves these goals by synthesizing existing scholarship in a variety of historical subdisciplines, including urban, social, business, labor, Chicano/a, Indian, and environmental, and by taking the West's many regions and perspectives into account.

Much of the book, then, involves dispelling myths of the Old West by retelling the history of the West from a variety of perspectives.  Limerick investigates the ideology of Western independence, which can only exist in a national and international context; real estate and property as the emotional center of Western history; and writing mining as labor history.  Most importantly - she spends the second half of the book writing a history of the West from Native Americans' perspective.  While she pulls from Native sources somewhat, her main strategy is to read Anglo sources from a Native American perspective; the result is a portrayal of resentful  people reduced to dependency on a single centralized agency, choosing rationally from among a dwindling number of opportunities.

With this new, synthetic history of the West as a place instead of a mobile frontier or a cowboys-and-indians fantasyland, Limerick argues that the West is a "place undergoing conquest and never fully escaping its consequences," and that "Western history has been an ongoing competition for legitimacy - for the right to claim for oneself and sometimes for one's group the status of legitimate beneficiary of Western  resources."  In other words, the West has long been shaped by a competition between different ethnic groups for property rights, even as the Western frontier functions as a kind of creation myth for white America.  This book thus complicates American narratives of Progress and manifest destiny even as it reclaims the West for historical study.

32: Philip Deloria's Playing Indian

In Playing Indian, Philip Deloria investigates Americans' long history of dressing up and acting like Indians, and he discovers that Americans use Indian play to work through who they are as individuals and as a nation.  This argument - that pretending to be something you're not helps you figure out who you are - is not terribly innovative, but in Deloria's hands, playing Indian connects particular kinds of representation with particular politics.  Thus, playing Indian is not just about representing "American ideas about Indians;" it's about putting ideas about Native Americans at the center of what it means to be American, even as Native Americans themselves are quarantined and hidden from white view.

To make this rather complex argument, Deloria traces the American game of playing Indian from the Boston Tea Party and other Revolutionary War incidents through 19th century societies, early 20th century Boy Scouts and Campfire Girls, post-WWII Indian hobbyists, and "new-age pseudo-Indian spirituality."  In each of these instances, he shows how Americans played Indian to define themselves: Tea Partiers (the first ones) wanted to imagine themselves as part of the continent's ancient history and to separate themselves from England; 19th century secret societies wanted to show that they possessed secret, authentic, uber-patriotic knowledge; Boy Scouts and Campfire Girls embraced Indian play as an escape from modern consumer society and a return to the primitive and the authentic; Cold War hobbyists sought out real Indian objects and people in the hopes of becoming Indian; new-age multiculturalism turns Indians into fashion statements and distracts cultural attention from the poverty of the Rez.

Because this is a history of American images of Indians and not of Indians themselves, the book focuses on the development of these American institutions and identities more than on the plight of the tribes as they were relocated and forced into reservations, though the real-world history of Native Americans underpins his argument that Indian play does serious cultural and political work.  In doing so, he places himself not just within the literature on relationships between Indians and American culture, but also in a growing body of literature on whiteness and othering.  Like Roedgier and other whiteness scholars, he draws on a wide variety of cultural sources to show how the other is key to the construction of the self; by viewing Indians through the lens of American Indian play, he also shows how incorporation by a dominant culture always constructs and shapes an oppressed one, politically as well as culturally.

31: Richard Drinnon's Facing West

In Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building, Richard Drinnon uses an old American Studies analytical tool called "myth and symbol" to get at the ideological and mythological justifications behind westward expansion from the colonial era to the present day.  The idea behind myth and symbol is that cultural productions, like novels, paintings, political essays, advertisements, etc., may not represent the real world as it is, but they do a really good job of representing the world as the artist and his or her intended audience see it.  Especially if the cultural production is intended for a mass audience (so that it represents the world view of a lot of people), the myth and symbol school holds that the worldview it espouses can be used to explain the behavior, culture, and mindset of a group of people.  Old school American Studies scholars applied this method to dime novels, paintings, and so on get at the "American mind;" Drinnon applies it to the writings of folks ranging from John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Frederick Jackson Turner to John Dunn Hunter, Dean Worcester, and Alden T. Vaughn, and he uses it to pull out the connection between racism ("indian-hating") and empire.