The Transatlantic Indian, 1776-1930, by Kate Flint

Abstract

Kate Flint's book has a worryingly generic title. The Transatlantic Indian is a study of 150 years of cultural interaction between different nations and different individuals. Yet the title, and central concept of the book, threatens to reduce this historical, geographical and cultural complexity and diversity to one stereotypical figure. Were this approach to be taken towards white people over a similar period, we would rightly be chary. To be sure, Flint claims to be delineating a generic figure created by white people rather than imposing her own. But she risks reifying rather than deconstructing this figure, because her methodology leads her principally to discover its literary persistence rather than to examine discourses that do not make use of it or that question or undermine it. The danger of summarising long periods of poetry and fiction in brief is that one defaults to an old-fashioned history of ideas divorced from the nuanced cultural contexts and discourses in which those ideas were formulated and circulated. An attendant problem is the over-compression of the complex history of colonial politics and cultural interaction. Flint's first chapter, on eighteenth-century and Romantic responses to Indians, suffers from both of these problems: little of the richest period of British/Indian relationships is discussed and little of the literary context appears, whether captivity narratives, traders’ accounts, conjectural histories, bardic songs or romantic epics. Eighteenth-century Indian writers are reduced to passing references: such major figures as Joseph Brant and John Norton, both of whom came to Britain as diplomats and counted noblemen among their friends, were two of the most important transatlantic Indians from the political and literary points of view in the years after 1776. Norton's account of his travels is perhaps the most substantial work by an Indian writer in the nineteenth century. Yet it is not even mentioned. Also absent are William Apess, the most rhetorically sophisticated and pungent satirist of white attitudes to Indians, and John Tanner, the white boy captured aged nine and raised as an Indian, whose narrative of Ojibwa life Louise Erdrich has called ‘an intensely personal and emotional tale, and probably one of the very few in the captivity genre that appeals strongly to Native Americans’. Instead, we get a rather brief summary of Romantic poems and novels, and a few pages on the mutual influence of Felicia Hemans and the white American poet Lydia Huntley Sigourney, and on other women poets, including Mary Howitt and Eliza Cook. Here Flint makes an apology for the sentimental stereotypes employed by these poets that might be persuasive were it to be supported by fuller analysis of their texts. But she has no space, and moves on.