PART III: TOTEM ENVY

Frankel, Oz

States of Inquiry: Social Investigations and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the United States

PART III
TOTEM ENVY

In August 1845, the ethnographer Henry Rowe Schoolcraft was invited by a young lawyer, Lewis Henry Morgan, to address a gathering of the New Order of the Iroquois, a fraternal organization of young white men convened for their annual meeting in Aurora, New York. By the light of the campfire, Schoolcraft declared, “No people can bear a true nationality, which does not exfoliate, as it were, from its bosom, something that expresses the peculiarities of its own soil and climate ... And where,” he insisted, “can a more suitable element ... be found, than is furnished by the history and institutions of the free, bold, wild, independent native hunter race?”1 Besides listening to literary expositions, Morgan and his friends in the New Order of the Iroquois dedicated much of their time together to Indian pageantry. These precursors of the modern men’s movement painted their faces, wore native costumes, called each other by Iroquois names, and lit the “council’s fire.” Their most important initiation rite, duly labeled “Indianiation,” was the Iroquois ceremony of adopting captive warriors. Much attention and care were given to structuring the fraternal society according to the organization of the original Iroquois League, whose remnants were now living on small reservations scattered throughout Canada and western New York.

By 1850, the United States had completed its westward territorial march to the Pacific Ocean. A new sense of national mission, celebrated as a “manifest destiny,” sanctioned this rapid, aggressive movement. Many eastern tribes had been already removed and relocated west of the Mississippi. The Indian frontier, now wholly entrapped in U.S. territory, was relatively quiet, if only—as we know—for a limited time. Americans commonly assumed that the native inhabitants of the continent or their ways of life were vanishing and doomed for extinction, a prediction voiced at times as a great concern and, at other times, as a policy prescription. Just as the American Indian was expected to disappear, a new fascination with Indian artifacts, history, mythology, and customs emerged. These materials were to be salvaged in order to generate a new and epic national culture, distinct from that of England and other European countries. Walt Whitman, for example, maintained in 1846, “Have we no memories of the race, the like of which never was seen on any other part of the earth—whose existence was freedom—whose language sonorous beauty?... Are these not the proper subject for the bard or the novelist?”2

During the summer of 1845, the state of New York employed School-craft to conduct a census of the Iroquois reservations, to which he added a study of their history and culture. He also published a private edition of this report under the title Notes on the Iroquois (1847). Two years later, Congress appointed him to supervise a comprehensive research project concerning all Indian tribes in the United States, including those in the just acquired territories of the West. This survey resulted in six monumental volumes issued annually under the initial title Inquiries respecting the History, Present Condition, and Future Prospects, of the Indian Tribes of the United States (1851–57). Also, in 1851, the young Lewis Morgan completed his own study League of the Iroquois, after years of gathering ethnographic materials for scholarly papers and collecting aboriginal artifacts for the New York State Cabinet in Albany. Morgan would become one of the leading figures of American ethnology, widely acknowledged as a pioneer in the fields of structuralist and evolutionary anthropology. He introduced kinship as an object of scientific inspection. Morgan’s later work, especially Ancient Society (1877) inspired other discoverers of “society,” namely, Marx and Engels, and consequently had a far-reaching influence on communist archeology.

Schoolcraft’s and Morgan’s projects during the 1840s and the 1850s featured an expanded role for the state in circulating knowledge about the Indian population for the purpose of policy making, state building, and commemoration. Indian research, moreover, took place during an important debate regarding the future of the aboriginal inhabitants of America, their character and prospects, a dispute that featured an intriguing permutation of the problematic of double representation—the relationship between political representation and scholarly or artistic depictions of social groups that were excluded from the polity. Concurrently, anthropology became a beneficiary of federal patronage of science through expeditions and explorations. By the second half of the 1840s, when the newly established Smithsonian Institution was poised to lead the national scientific community, its secretary, Joseph Henry, launched the Smithsonian Contribution to Knowledge series with Ephraim G. Squier and Edwin H. Davis’s archaeological essay on the Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley (1848).

The following two chapters examine Schoolcraft’s and Morgan’s respective enterprises by addressing the following questions: Why did the federal and state governments lend their support to these projects? How was ethnographic knowledge accumulated, presented, and validated (whether by specific techniques of representation or on the basis of the author’s unique experience and expertise)? What role was assumed by these ventures in the actual relationship between the aboriginal tribes and U.S. society? What was the degree of Indian complicity in, collaboration with, or resistance to those inquiries? Finally, the discussion situates Schoolcraft’s and Morgan’s studies, as we began, in a discourse in which national and personal identities assumed an Indian face. In this regard, mid-nineteenth-century explorations of the Indian subject featured more complex exchange relations between investigators and the investigated than most other inquiries we have examined in this book. Racial masquerade was emblematic of the “removal policy” to the west, as was the desire to move Indians to the past.

Reenactment or role playing had two interrelated consequences. First, the elaboration of a familial alliance between the “red man” and the “white man” was mediated by various historical constructs that arranged the relationships between Indians and whites in temporal, sequential terms. Second, Morgan’s “discovery” of society in the Iroquois reservation of western New York centered on familial institutions as the kernel of the human bond. Morgan would eventually apply his insight into Iroquois kinship (with important modifications) to the entire human society, past and present, in a somewhat expansionist fashion—from the concrete family to “the family of man.” Important aspects of his ethnology would later become essential to the modern imagination of the social sphere, especially the perception of society as a multifaceted and yet inherently, or even inescapably, rational and functional total mechanism, a view he developed by gazing at an aboriginal “counter-society” and then back to his own. In addition, Morgan’s work marks the transformation of ethnology itself from a frontier experience (or a missionary tactic) to a decidedly middle-class science. The focus of many of these projects on western New York enables a detailed examination of a specific locus of investigation. Among the Indian tribes, the Iroquois were particularly close to American society, further along than many other nations on the road to the coveted “civilization.” They were also conceived of as having unique historical relations with the U.S. federal state, especially because of their own confederate organization. Interestingly, Schoolcraft, Morgan, Squier, and the Smithsonian’s Henry were all natives of rural New York.

Grouping the literature on Indian tribes, much of which was dedicated to ethnography and archeology, together with what is ordinarily understood under the rubric of social reportage (e.g., investigations of slums, child labor, prisons, and asylums) merits further explanation. This classification may not seem as peculiar if we consider that facts about the Indians’ physical and moral condition as well as about their civilization and history were tools of policy making. Before the Civil War, the native population was the only group for whom the federal government was directly responsible. Presumably independent nations—signing treaties with the United States and, at times, waging war against it—they were also dependent wards of the state and subjected to external impositions. State paternalism was most tangibly manifested in the bureaucracy of officials (superintendents, agents, and subagents) appointed to dispense provisions and cash grants (annuities) to Indian tribes and to oversee efforts at educating them. The most potent symbolic expression of this dependency was the convention—adopted by Indians and their white interlocutors—of referring to the will of the federal government in the person of the president, designated the “Great Father in Washington.”

In the antebellum mind, native peoples occupied a precarious position between nature and human society. Their unsettled and unsettling presence generated a tremendously diverse market of knowledge: missionary annual reports that regarded the Indian as yet another domain of philanthropic attention, epic novels on the Indian subject (popular since the 1820s), philological dictionaries and other products of post-Enlightenment and mostly eastern salon anthropology, and expedition narratives that captured the Indian as an integral part of the studied terrain together with lizards, cacti, and rock formations. Typically, information was divided, as in Schoolcraft’s national project, between the history, the present condition, and the future prospects of the native tribes. Distinct discursive strategies governed each of these segments. While ethnology, archeology, and philology sought to capture a bygone or about-to-disappear Indian existence (and addressed the question of origin), the tribes’ present condition was the subject of reformist literature that employed moral and vital statistics as well as other familiar modes of social reporting. The speculative or prescriptive “future prospects” were preoccupied with the possibility of acculturation. At the conclusion of the Civil War, the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission asked whether former slaves could be citizens. Meanwhile, the Indian future was under slightly different interrogation: Can they be civilized? At the same time, the promise of citizenship was the logical conclusion of the civilizing process. This inquiry required not merely assessing educational policy and institutions but also adjudicating aptitude, in other words, scrutinizing the Indian subject’s mental properties and stature of character.

The relationship between the Indian’s glorious past and fragile present raised complex questions. The past/present/future typology threatened to fragment the Indian subject. It was a type of historicism that emphasized sharp discontinuities. Any attempt to delineate connecting paths required alternative historiosophical strategies. This approach stood in contrast to the self-conception of the antebellum United States as a society that had been born in perfection and thus escaped the forces of history. Discussions of the aboriginal subject were therefore never outside some temporal configuration that arranged not just sequences of events but also fundamentally distinct epochs and their relations. Thus Morgan’s later work moved from actual history to “ethnological periods,” and Schoolcraft’s writings followed the trajectory of the Christian notion of moral history. In fact, the question of origin accompanied the Indian subject from the very beginning of the European presence in the Americas: Who were their ancestors? Did they come from a different continent? Do they belong to the same human grouping? Did they replace former civilizations or did they originate in them?

During the first half of the nineteenth century, the aboriginal was simultaneously removed along spatial and temporal axes. He was further distanced from U.S. society, which was also largely removed from its past as a frontier in which the Indian was an immediate presence rather than a subject of literature or scientific discourse, contemplation, and projection. In the 1840s, the literature on the past and the future of the Indian acquired a darker patina. The publication of Samuel Morton’s Crania Americana (1839), in which he presented the proto-racist, phrenologyinspired doctrine that would lead him to endorse polygenism rearranged the debate over the Indian along new and more polemical lines. Rooted in Enlightenment racial taxonomy, polygenism challenged the biblical narrative that traced a common origin for all humanity, arguing that indigenous peoples in America (and elsewhere) were of a different and inferior breed. Although many in the emerging scientific community (most importantly, Harvard professor Louis Agassiz) embraced this view and applied it to the freedmen question, polygenism met resistance. Many among Morton’s opponents subscribed to no less racist positions but nonetheless could not accept, for diverse reasons, his direct challenge to the monogenist tradition. Both the staunch Democrat Schoolcraft and the Whig-turned-Republican Morgan framed their studies as resounding attacks against polygenism and its collateral pessimism concerning the future of American Indians and their ability to adapt to life in the modern world.

A consequence of this debate was a heightened sensitivity regarding the accurate portrayal of the Indian subject. Claims concerning misrepresentation abounded. “Misrepresentation” was a rather nebulous assertion that referred to factual errors due to faulty science or excessively sentimental treatment, especially in works of fiction. The term frequently denoted a moral failure, a misjudgment of the Indian, his virtues, and character. The intellectual “Indian wars” were largely waged among whites and involved nonaboriginals acting as “friends of the Indian,” speaking for and representing the Indian in the worlds of science, art, and politics. The prospect of complete civilization and citizenship (or extinction), together with strenuous efforts to establish some affiliation between natives and antebellum white “natives,” distinguished the literature on the Indian tribes from the kind of knowledge produced in the colonial context. (In the United States, empire is always closer to home.) Obviously, there were many similarities as well. As we shall see, U.S. anthropology attempted intermittently to delineate between American Indians and other indigenous societies but otherwise was committed to its inherent universalism. Moreover, Indian literature was susceptible to the fantasy and ambivalence that Homi Bhabha, among others, identifies as the subject of the colonial discourse: splitting, doubling, turning into its opposite, and projecting.

The federal executive was arguably the most important producer in this market of information on native tribes. The fate of the aboriginals as dependent or as enemy constituted a significant portion of the tiny administration’s activities at the time and was the subject of numerous annual and special reports compiled by several federal agencies. Congress printed in great quantities government reports and narratives of expeditions, as well as additional documents that addressed native peoples— petitions, memorials, committee reports, and documents that originated in individual states. Since the 1820s, the annual reports of the Indian Office and later the Indian Bureau became a platform for the exposition of the removal policy. (The Indian Office was established in 1824 as part of the War Department and in 1849 was transferred to the newly created Department of the Interior.) The expulsion in the 1830s of the Cherokees and other “civilized nations”—the notorious “trail of tears”—entailed a fierce public controversy and intense production of pamphlets about the condition of those tribes.

Immediately after the Civil War, Congress launched an effort to reconstruct Indian policy. It also endeavored to study the circumstances of native tribes independent of the information it received from the federal executive, state governments, citizen groups, or the Indians themselves. The Doolittle Committee of 1865 examined the Sand Creek massacre of November 1864, but it also sought to respond to periodic complaints about corruption and mistreatment by the Indian administration. Senator James R. Doolittle and six other senators and congressmen, organized in three groups, conducted arduous field investigations that stretched from the prairies to the Pacific coast. In the process, they met with and recorded the words of many Indian chiefs. Since the early days of the republic, government had made a special effort to capture the voices of Indian leaders by transcribing speeches into official reports.3

Information concerning the material conditions of the Indian tribes and the relative success of their acculturation was comparable to the yield of social inquiries into the physical and moral condition of the poor. Unlike the lower echelon of society, however, native tribes’ political representation was largely tied to their status as ostensibly independent entities. Washington, D.C., witnessed a hectic traffic of Indian delegations in town to negotiate treaties or present petitions. One such delegation of Pottawatomie leaders arrived in the Capitol in late 1845. The chiefs hired a former Indian official, Richard Smith Elliot, as a political advisor and press agent. The delegation made its presence conspicuous by carefully staging colorful appearances on Pennsylvania Avenue and other public spaces throughout the city and by regularly releasing information to the press corps on the course of the negotiations. Indians were invested in the flow of information about them, and they collaborated, albeit cautiously, in the effort to accumulate knowledge on their material condition, customs, and history.