“To Bid His People Rise”: Political Renewal and Spiritual Contests at Red Jacket's Reburial

Abstract

Lauren Grewe NAIS 1:2 FALL 2014 44 LAUREN GREWE “To Bid His People Rise”: Political Renewal and Spiritual Contests at Red Jacket’s Reburial PRESERVED IN A TEXTUAL STANDOFF over the meaning of a local historical event are three unlikely interlocutors: Mohawk poet and performer E. Pauline Johnson, Seneca sachem and Civil War veteran Ely Parker, and American poet Walt Whitman. Brought together in the Buffalo Historical Society’s publication Obsequies of Red Jacket at Buffalo, these authors propose competing spiritual and political visions of how to memorialize the Seneca leader and orator Red Jacket’s reburial ceremony at the Forest Lawn Cemetery in Buffalo, New York on October 9, 1884. On that day, the Buffalo Historical Society reinterred Red Jacket and five other leaders from the Six Nations (also known as the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois), eventually constructing a monument to Red Jacket that features prominently in the cemetery to this day.1 An important literary figure himself, Red Jacket is at the center of a constellation of literary moments involving a surprising range of American Indian, First Nations, and European American authors. Woven into the Obsequies, in addition to Red Jacket himself, are Mary Jemison, Walt Whitman, George Copway, E. Pauline Johnson, and, distantly, John Greenleaf Whittier. My close reading of the Buffalo Historical Society’s slim volume Obsequies of Red Jacket at Buffalo will reveal the competing visions, both spiritual and political, surrounding Red Jacket’s reburial in October of 1884. Although the creators of Obsequies denied that the Six Nations had a continuing political presence at the reburial, the Historical Society’s minutes and the participation of representatives from the Six Nations suggest a different story. Native speakers and participants used the event for their own purposes, whether to debate about Christianity, to assert Native land rights, or to forge and renew important social ties and intertribal alliances. Amid the political work unfolding at Red Jacket’s reburial, three voices stand out for their competing visions of the spiritual significance of the event: those of the poet Walt Whitman, the Seneca sachem and Civil War veteran Ely S. Parker, and the Mohawk poet and performer E. Pauline Johnson. After engaging briefly with Buffalo’s religious history, Red Jacket’s life, and Native dispossession and reorganization in the Buffalo area, I will turn to these NAIS 1:2 FALL 2014 “To Bid His People Rise” 45 three authors’ different interpretations of the reburial as published in the Buffalo Historical Society’s pamphlet. Whitman’s poem about the reburial, “Red Jacket, (From Aloft.),” applauds the spiritual impulse behind the reinterment but questions the need for material monuments. His U.S. nationalist vision of Red Jacket’s reburial concerns the proper memorialization of national heroes, even as he contemplates his own memorialization. In his speech as recorded in Obsequies, Parker subtly undermines the spiritual premise of the event, asserting that Red Jacket was not a Christian but, in his words, a­ pagan. Therefore, he argues, the Christian reburial was a farce, and thus the Buffalo Historical Society was unable to incorporate Red Jacket within its nationalist vision of Buffalo’s importance. Johnson, however, counters Parker’s argument with her poem “The Re-interment of Red Jacket.” She offers a different model of Native Christianity while using the elegy to establish her own poetic authority. More important, in “The Re-interment of Red Jacket,” Johnson for the first time acknowledged her own Indian ancestry, counteracting Whitman’s spectral Indian with her own living presence at the reburial. While Johnson attended the reburial ceremony as part of a delegation of Six Nations citizens from both the United States and Canada, Whitman likely heard about the event from the publicity it gained in newspapers and periodicals across the United States. The day after the reburial, on October 10, 1884, the Philadelphia Press published the poem “Red Jacket (From Aloft.).”2 On first glance, Whitman’s poem commemorates Red Jacket’s reburial as part of the vanishing Indian myth so often found in nineteenth-century European American representations of Indians. In Whitman’s poem, Red Jacket witnesses the event from above as a specter, appearing not as a human voice but as “a...