Real Native Genius: How an Ex-Slave and a White Mormon Became Famous Indians by Angela Pulley Hudson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Real Native Genius: How an Ex-Slave and a White Mormon Became Famous Indians by Angela Pulley Hudson Malinda Maynor Lowery Real Native Genius: How an Ex-Slave and a White Mormon Became Famous Indians. By Angela Pulley Hudson. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Pp. [xiv], 255. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-2443-3.) Real Native Genius: How an Ex-Slave and a White Mormon Became Famous Indians chronicles the lives of two artists, evangelists, medical practitioners, and performers of “Indianness,” Warner McCary and Lucile Celesta Stanton (p. 5). They were popularly known as Okah Tubbee and Laah Ceil to audiences at the peak of their careers, but because their aliases were legion, I refer to them by their birth names. Born in the 1810s, McCary and Stanton grew up in different communities—the slave society of Natchez, Mississippi, and the Mormon outpost of Kirtland, Ohio, respectively. The couple capitalized on the fluidity of individual identities in a nation obsessed with racial hierarchies and played on the nation’s ideas about American Indians as vulnerable yet authentic voices contributing to a larger romantic nationalist movement. Throughout their journeys, the pair exploited Mormon and American fascinations with lost or vanished Indians to claim a spotlight, and an income, through McCary’s musical talents and Stanton’s abilities as a healer and religious charmer. Their lives exemplify how conceptions of indigeneity—if not the realities of indigenous people—were central to the formation of American national identity. Though it does not focus on a particular Native American group, Angela Pulley Hudson’s book contributes to the literature on the Native South. She explores people who passed from one race to another and played with racial expectations and identities, a subject of great relevance to southern history. From the eighteenth century to the present day, the South has had figures of consequence—the Gibsons of South Carolina, the Knights of Mississippi, the Hemingses of Virginia, Amanda America Dickson of Georgia, Buffalo Child Long Lance of North Carolina, and Mardi Gras Indians in Louisiana, just to name a few—who have subverted the boundaries of race (and often, wealth and gender). Racial transgression is as important to southern history as racial conformity is. Native peoples’ very existence was a transgression of black-white boundaries that undermined the power of white authorities. In the antebellum period, federal and state governments sought to take the determination of authenticity away from Native communities, thus reinforcing the power of whites’ ideas about racial ancestry to mark someone as legitimately “Indian.” In this context, McCary and Stanton’s charade was viable and even successful. The couple illustrate that white men were not the only ones defining race. Real Native Genius is an excellent example of the contributions that historians trained in ethnohistory and American Indian history can make to southern history. With ingenious research, inventive interpretation, and an elegant style, Hudson relates an improbable, yet wholly American, gothic tale characterized by racial, religious, and gender ambiguities. Hudson’s approach to the topic is influenced by an ethnohistorian’s eye for reading between the lines of obscure [End Page 162] sources that are sometimes intentionally misleading. Anyone investigating the history of race and racial formation can learn from her. In McCary and Stanton, we see how antebellum Americans were able to consider racially interstitial places and people as part of America’s larger understanding of itself. Histories of identity formation also belong to American Indian nations, which largely lost control over their representations during the antebellum period, allowing room for McCary and Stanton to emerge and gain fame. In large measure, that authority has yet to return. Americans still consume and then challenge the origins and authenticity of Native peoples, in ways similar to the doubts that McCary and Stanton experienced. That these attacks continue means that while scholars recognize American national identity as a mutable, sophisticated phenomenon, they do not accord American Indian national identities the same treatment. Understanding the role that race played in the development of this double standard is a significant enterprise, to which this book makes a fascinating contribution. Malinda Maynor Lowery University of North Carolina at Chapel...