GORDON M. SAYRE. The Indian Chief as Tragic Hero: Native Resistance and the Literatures of America, from Moctezuma to Tecumseh. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2005. Pp. x, 357. Cloth $55.00, paper $22.50

Abstract

How is it that Indian “chiefs” like Metacom and Pontiac, once despised as devious inhuman foes, have ended up as celebrated and revered heroes? The question has tantalized historians, whose explanations include the time-honored practice of idealizing the enemy for the sake of self-glorification. It is a form of boasting to raise your defeated enemy to the status of superhero. There is also the less-than-conscious wish of conquerors in wars of aggression to assuage guilt, especially when victory includes genocide and appropriation of the foe's homeland. With impressive erudition and insight Gordon M. Sayre's book challenges such older explanations by recasting ambivalence as a sign of a new cultural amalgam of mixed white and native origin. The conquering culture projected its own values and wishes on symbolic enemies it called “chiefs,” while natives absorbed enough Western culture, especially religion and politics, to make the projection plausible. “Indian chiefs” get to be “tragic heroes” as a result of reciprocal mimesis, each side mimicking and adopting elements of the other's ways.