Re-representing the American "Ethnographic Imagination"

Abstract

Inventing the American Primitive: Politics, Gender and the Representation of Native American Literary Traditions, 1789-1936. By Helen Carr. New York: New York University Press, 1996. 320 pages. $50.00 (cloth). $20.00 (paper). In this ambitious and capacious book, Helen Carr plots the United States' sociopolitical-literary history of the construction of Native North Americans (Indian bodies and cultures) as "primitive," from the First U.S. Congress to the mid 1930s. Derived early from Scottish Enlightenment thinkers and later from German philosophers and European Romantics, the "idea of the primitive" in the U.S. shaped both the acknowledgment and understanding (or lack thereof) of Native American literary traditions. Carr brings an eclectic collection of academic discourses and theories to her examination of four centuries of historical, anthropological, and literary texts. Carr presents well-researched, richly-detailed historical discussions about the production of "primitivism" and the "ethnographic imagination" that enables it. She locates these discussions in a wide variety of sources: in the reports and correspondence of Henry Knox (the first U.S. secretary of war); an epic poem of American origins, entitled "Ouabi: or the Virtues of Nature, an American Tale. In Four Cantos" (1790), by Sarah Wentworth Morton (who published under the pseudonym Philenia); and "The Song of Hiawatha" (1855), the (in)famous [End Page 189] epic poem by Henry Longfellow that borrowed liberally from the Finnish epic song Kalevala, as well as from the poetry of Scandinavian Bishop Tegnér and the ethnographic observations recorded in the work of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, George Catlin, John Heckewelder, John Tanner, George Copway and others. Tracing the development of anthropology, Carr examines various ethnographic studies: from The League of the Ho-dé-no-sau-nee or Iroquois (1851) by Lewis Henry Morgan to Autobiography of a Papago Woman (1936), Boas-trained anthropologist Ruth Underhill's creative ethnography of Maria Chona. In the process, she analyzes the work of Bureau of American Ethnology cultural workers Alice Fletcher and Frances Densmore as well as the independent studies of Natalie Curtin Burlin whose work, according to Carr, "marks the beginning of a Western aesthetic reading of Native American poetry" (215). Burlin's insistence on the poetic value of Native song cycles paved the way for later artists and preservers of primitivist/modernist art, such as Mary Austin and Mabel Dodge Luhan who, in addition to preserving Native arts, promoted Indian song as imagist poetry. Carr illustrates how in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Indian "otherness" was cultural, but by the nineteenth century, with the rise of "scientific" racialism, Indian "otherness" had become racial. At the time of the American Revolution, Americans identified against Europeans and with Native Americans who they presented as images of man in a "free" or "natural" state, but soon battle lines were redrawn and European Americans again defined themselves in opposition to Native Americans, manifesting their presumed differences in a variety of ways, all of them linked to notions of Indian "primitiveness." The attempt to use Indians as a symbol of the new America, Carr claims, ends with the publication of Hiawatha (1855). This narrative poem exemplifies the primitivist notion of the tragic but inevitable disappearance of indigenous North American peoples and cultures in the march of progress and thus provides an "enabling myth" for nineteenth-century British colonialism as well as American dispossession of Indian lands. Much of this terrain has been covered before (by Henry Nash Smith, Roy Harvey Pearce, Richard Slotkin, Annette Kolodny, Robert Berkhofer, and others) and, though Carr is more self-conscious of her own participation in the dubious practice of representation, she offers little new to earlier emplotments of "savagism" or "primitivism" in its American mode. [End Page 190] Nonetheless, there are at least two unique contributions of her book: her ability to link the details of the stages of American primitivism to European intellectual and literary movements and her astute discussion of gender, a subject which has been too often ignored or conflated with considerations of primitivism. In...