Indian Chief Research Articles

Pioneer Performances: Staging the Frontier (review)

Matthew Rebhorn. Pioneer Performances: Staging the Frontier. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. x + 207 + 13 b/w illus. $65.00 casebound. A commonly held idea about theater in the United States is that it somewhat miraculously emerged fully formed in the twentieth century with the arrival of works by Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, among others. All that had come before was merely prologue. A similar idea holds in the popular imagination regarding westward expansion, that only after the frontier had ostensibly ceased to exist at the end of the nineteenth century did the United States fully emerge as a modern entity. While it may be said that each of these overgeneralizations is informed by certain elements of truth, they both have long served to obscure or render irrelevant the many complexities and complications of cultural history in what was in fact a radically transformative century. Both the history of nineteenth-century American theater and the history of nineteenth-century American expansionism are best understood as processes and events marked by often contradictory engagements with dominant ideologies. And in the contradictions, according to Matthew Rebhorn, may be found the keys to appreciating cultural history not as a single path toward inevitability but rather as a constant and vexed negotiation between differently empowered entities. Tracking the performance and reception histories of a variety of widely popular and highly influential theatrical events--including Edwin Forrest's career-defining performance as the title character in Metamora; the long-standing influence of James Kirke Paulding's The Lion of the West; the connection between blackface minstrelsy and cliches about the frontier; and frontier-themed works by Dion Boucicault, Joaquin Miller, and Augustin Daly--Rebhorn's Pioneer Performance offers a much-needed analysis of how the twin paths of frontier and theatrical history intersected over the course of the nineteenth century. Overall, this book makes it abundantly clear that far from being a mere prologue to the twentieth century, theatrical productions in the United States prior to 1900 that focused on the so-called frontier proved vital to the interrogation and articulation of ideas about identity based on race, gender, and nation. In the interest of full disclosure, I will mention that in 2006 I edited a special issue of this journal in which I included an essay by Matthew Rebhorn about the vocal innovations that defined Edwin Forrest's performances of an Indian chief in Metamora. (1) Now expanded and further developed as the opening chapter of Pioneer Performances, Rebhorn's explication of Forrest's challenge to classical, prevailing forms of vocal performance very nicely establishes the grounds upon which to read performances of the frontier as something other than mere reiterations of dominant ideology. Of particular note in this regard is the elegantly simple but frequently overlooked idea that attention to the material evidence of actual performance would almost certainly affect how one reads the extant text of a play. Responding to critics who have read the text with which Forrest worked as a fairly unambiguous endorsement of expansionist ideology, Rebhorn avers that [b]y exploring the way Forrest constructed his 'savage' voice, we see that in performance the play had a much more qualified and resistant relationship to the juggernaut of American imperialism (28). In short, Rebhorn argues persuasively that Forrest deserves credit for radically reconfiguring through his theatrical presentation of a Native American that which may be called a quintessentially American voice. Equally compelling is Rebhorn's argument that the foundational precepts of both frontier rhetoric and melodramatic form are subjected to scrutiny and criticism in the blackface minstrelsy of T. D. Rice's farce The Virginia Mummy. Tracing a series of comparisons between Rice's performances and those called for by the text of the widely popular Lion of the West, which tells the tale of a prototypically Davy Crockett-like frontiersman's triumphs over elite society, Rebhorn suggests a tantalizing redefinition of nineteenth-century melodrama that emphasizes the political engagement common to both racial satire and the earnest performance of frontier heroism. …

One Hundred Sixty-One Knots, Two Plates, and One Emperor: Creek Information Networks in the Era of the Yamasee War

Indian information networks crisscrossed the colonial Southeast. Operating outside European control and hidden from European eyes, these networks' existence and importance have been assumed but never fully explicated. This article explores some of these inter- and intra-Indian connections. Rooted in the Lower Creek town of Coweta and analyzing sources from the vantage point of Indian country, it shows some of the different ways in which Creek Indians remained informed of and connected to developments in the colonial Southeast. Exploring the networks forged by one particular Indian chief—Brims, Mico of Coweta—helps evince the breadth and extent of information channels among native people. The information networks linked, modified, and influenced by Brims show more than the movement of news; they offer insight into the power structures that shaped the colonial Southeast.

A New Mitochondrial C1 Lineage from the Prehistory of Uruguay: Population Genocide, Ethnocide, and Continuity

Uruguayan population has been considered as of European descent, as its Native populations victims of genocide apparently disappeared in the 19th century. Contradicting this national belief, genetic studies have shown a substantial Native contribution. However, the continuity between prehistoric, historic, and present populations remains unproved. With the aim of adding elements to prove a possible population continuity, we studied a mitochondrial lineage, part of haplogroup C1, analyzing the complete genome of a modern Uruguayan individual and the hypervariable region I (HVRI) in prehistoric, historic, and contemporary individuals. Several individuals carried the mutations that characterize this lineage: two from an archaeological mound located in the east of the country, the Charrúa Indian chief Vaimaca Perú and five individuals from the present population. The lineage was initially characterized by its HVRI sequence, having the four typical C1 mutations and adding 16051G and 16288C; other mutations were also found: 16140C was found in all but the oldest individual, dated 1,610 years BP, while 16209C, 16422C, and 16519C were found only in some individuals. Hypervariable region II showed the typical C1 mutations and 194T. The coding region, analyzed in modern individuals, was characterized by 12378T, while other mutations found were not common to all of them. In summary, we have found and described a new lineage that shows continuity from prehistoric mound builders to the present population, through a representative of the extinct Charrúa Indians. The lineage appeared at least 1,600 years ago and is carried by approximately 0.7% of the modern Uruguayan population. The continuity of the lineage supports alternative perspectives about Uruguayan national identity and the meaning of the genocide, best labeled as ethnocide because of its consequences. It also contributes to the discussion about who the prehistoric mound builders were, and to the origin, at least in the maternal line, of a Charrúa Indian. From a more general perspective, we can conclude that the characteristics, evolution, and expansion of founder haplogroup C in America have not yet been elucidated.

A New Mitochondrial C1 Lineage from the Prehistory of Uruguay: Population Genocide, Ethnocide, and Continuity

Uruguayan population has been considered as of European descent, as its Native populations victims of genocide apparently disappeared in the 19th century. Contradicting this national belief, genetic studies have shown a substantial Native contribution. However, the continuity between prehistoric, historic, and present populations remains unproved. With the aim of adding elements to prove a possible population continuity, we studied a mitochondrial lineage, part of haplogroup C1, analyzing the complete genome of a modern Uruguayan individual and the hypervariable region I (HVRI) in prehistoric, historic, and contemporary individuals. Several individuals carried the mutations that characterize this lineage: two from an archaeological mound located in the east of the country, the Charrúa Indian chief Vaimaca Perú and five individuals from the present population. The lineage was initially characterized by its HVRI sequence, having the four typical C1 mutations and adding 16051G and 16288C; other mutations were also found: 16140C was found in all but the oldest individual, dated 1,610 years BP, while 16209C, 16422C, and 16519C were found only in some individuals. Hypervariable region II showed the typical C1 mutations and 194T. The coding region, analyzed in modern individuals, was characterized by 12378T, while other mutations found were not common to all of them. In summary, we have found and described a new lineage that shows continuity from prehistoric mound builders to the present population, through a representative of the extinct Charrúa Indians. The lineage appeared at least 1,600 years ago and is carried by approximately 0.7% of the modern Uruguayan population. The continuity of the lineage supports alternative perspectives about Uruguayan national identity and the meaning of the genocide, best labeled as ethnocide because of its consequences. It also contributes to the discussion about who the prehistoric mound builders were, and to the origin, at least in the maternal line, of a Charrúa Indian. From a more general perspective, we can conclude that the characteristics, evolution, and expansion of founder haplogroup C in America have not yet been elucidated.

The First Black Prairie Novel: Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance’s Autobiography and the Repression of Prairie Blackness

This essay situates Chief Buffalo Child’s Long Lance: The Autobiography of a Blackfoot Indian Chief (1928) within the cultural context of its production, the anti-Black racial climate of the Canadian Prairies in the early part of the twentieth century, in order to analyze the textual repression of its author’s Blackness. Although the Autobiography has been discredited as a fraud because, as Donald B. Smith discovered, Long Lance was not in fact Blackfoot as the Autobiography claims, but “mixed blood” from North Carolina, this essay reclaims it as the first novel penned on the Prairies by a Black author, for it tells a true— more metaphorical and allegorical than factual—story about the desire on the part of displaced “new” world Blacks for Indigenous status and belonging. This essay examines the implications of claiming the Autobiography as the first Black prairie novel and explores how reading it as fiction rather than autobiography extends our understandings of “passing,” racial identification and transformation.

White Woman, Indian Chief: Beatrice Ravenel and the Poetic Consciousness of Captivity

REBECCA HARRISON University of West Georgia White Woman, Indian Chief: Beatrice Ravenel and the Poetic Consciousness of Captivity1 I run the gauntlet like a savage captive, Torn into ravellings Not by the spears of men but by the gold pins of the women! –“The Selfish Woman,” Beatrice Witte Ravenel WHEN THE CHARLESTON POET BEATRICE WITTE RAVENEL PUBLISHED HER collection of poetry The Arrow of Lightning in 1926, she displayed a keen interest in the Carolina Low Country and in the writing of history. Ravenel’s most remembered poems in this collection, the only one published in her lifetime, concern the Yemassee Indians; in these poems, as Susan Donaldson argues, Ravenel’s poetic voice, embodied by the mockingbird, the totem of the Yemassee, becomes “a daring and resourceful thief, a ‘Trick-tongue’ that steals the music of others and deceives its listeners” (184). Associating this mockingbird with her own poetic axis, Ravenel writes, “You are no dryad, / No young squaw of trees; / You are a conjurer. / You sing the songs of all birds with a difference” (The Arrow 22). Ravenel uses this voice, one capable of transmutation, to challenge narratives that marginalize or demonize native cultures. The narrator captures the echoes of native history in order “To tell of the passing of nations, / Of the exquisite ruin of coasts, of the silvery change and / the flux of existence” (The Arrow 24). In effect, Ravenel frees her subject from mainstream narratives that I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Tom McHaney for his advice on Ravenel’s unpublished poem “Sanute the Chief.” I would also like to thank Noel Polk and an anonymous reader for their comments on an earlier draft of this essay. The Southern Historical Society at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill made this work on Ravenel possible through the John Eugene and Barbara Hilton Cay visiting scholar grant. I am indebted to Laura Clark Brown and her staff who facilitated my research while at the collection. The Wilson Library at UNC and the Houghton Library at Harvard University graciously gave permission to publish selections from the Ravenel and Lowell papers. 152 Rebecca Harrison justified westward expansion and violence against native peoples.1 This concern with otherness and the consequences of colonization locate themselves not only in the reemployment of the tribal voice of the Yemassee, but more specifically through the use of tropes originating in the early American captivity narrative, which Ravenel, like many Southern women writers, strategically employs to critique identity borders maintained by white male agendas. Beatrice Witte Ravenel is a remarkably understudied figure in the canon of the Southern Renaissance, even within the female tradition of the period. Though greeted with positive critical reception, numerous accolades from the Poetry Society of South Carolina, and the attention of renowned authors such as Amy Lowell, her work faded into the margins of the Southern literary landscape until Louis D. Rubin, Jr. attempted to revive interest in her poetry in his 1969 edition titled The Yemassee Lands. His introduction to this collection positions Ravenel’s work as “better than any other poetry being written in the South . . . outside of Nashville”—quite the compliment in 1960s scholarship to place a woman alongside the Fugitives—and he hails her work as “worthy of lasting attention” (5). Yet in spite of Rubin’s attempt, the field has seen only two article-length publications and one dissertation chapter devoted entirely to this important figure. The bulk of her verse remains in relative obscurity and her contribution localized to her participation in the Poetry Society of South Carolina. My goal in this essay is thus two-fold. First, I want to make a case, through a focused study of Ravenel, for looking at the influence of the genre of captivity narratives on the women writers of the modern South. Second, while my interests lie in her use of captivity tropes and images of early America, I contend that there is a need for broader critical engagement with the full range of Ravenel’s published and unpublished work.2 Beatrice Witte was born in 1870 to Charles Otto and Charlotte Witte and grew up in Charleston society where she enjoyed numerous...

Chief In-mut-too-yah-lat-lat (Thunder-Traveling-Over-the-Mountains): A Reluctant Warrior

The article profiles Chief In-mut-too-yah-lat-lat, the Nez Perce Indian chief who was also known as Chief Joseph. The Nez Perce War began in 1877 when white soldiers forced Chief Joseph's tribe to relocate to a reservation in Oklahoma. Chief Joseph was interviewed during a trip to Washington D.C. in 1879, and his story was recorded in the book That All People May Be One People, Send Rain to Wash the Face of the Earth.

Cognitive mapping of chief executive officers' minds: confronting Chinese global competitiveness

In Western philosophy on epistemology, there has long been the traditional divide between what is a priori vs. a posteriori. This is taken as the starting point for a conceptual framing of an empirically grounded inquiry into the minds of Indian chief executive officer (CEOs) about Chinese strategic thinking. The objective of this a posteriori experimentation is to cross culturally map Indian CEOs' knowledge – broadly defined as understandings, doubts, responses, surprises, concerns, beliefs and values, when they are put face-to-face with rapidly rising Chinese competitive pressures. To provide the focus of inquiry, the author uses the precepts of the 2,500 years old Art of War by Sun Tzu as experimental parameterisation of knowledge concerning Chinese competitive, strategic thinking. From the results of experimentation, the first and main author then produces a cognitive map that yields intriguing insights to the mental state of CEOs' knowing and concerning about Chinese strategy.

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

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.

The Role of Native American Voices in Rethinking Early American Literary Studies

The Role of Native American Voices in Rethinking Early American Literary Studies Robert Warrior (bio) Sovereign Selves: American Indian Autobiography and the Law. David J. Carlson. University of Illinois Press, 2006. 217 pp. The Indian Chief as Tragic Hero: Native Resistance and the Literatures of America, from Moctezuma to Tecumseh. Gordon M. Sayre. University of North Carolina Press, 2005. 341 pp. In his study of Native American autobiography and law, David Carlson seeks to take part in "critical conversations" about the generic definition of autobiography, methodology in scholarship on law and literature, and "the viability of 'authenticity' as a critical term in the study of Native American literatures" (2). Gordon Sayre's book, which seeks an answer to his question as to how Native American military leaders sometimes became beloved heroes within early American literary texts, is similarly ambitious. Sayre focuses on "the entire phenomenon of North American native resistance struggles and the leaders who organized them as represented not only in dramas, epic poems, and historical novels but also in popular histories such as Francis Parkman's The Conspiracy of Pontiac (1851), in the transcribed speeches by these native leaders, and in the documents created by soldiers, traders, and missionaries directly involved in these conflicts from the conquest of New Spain through the War of 1812" (3). Both of these books are meticulously researched, clearly written, and deeply engaged in the currents of American literary studies. As I will detail, each provokes different questions as to where early Americanists [End Page 369] might seem to be headed vis à vis the role of Indigenous voices in future reconceptualizations of basic issues of their field. Before discussing some of those issues, though, I want to say clearly that both books share an importance to the field that makes them deserving of wide readership. Carlson organizes his study primarily around a discussion of Pequot writer William Apess and Dakota author Charles Alexander Eastman. These important figures are treated in two chapters each of Sovereign Selves, and Carlson also includes two introductory chapters that discuss the importance of legal discourse to Native American literature and history and an analysis of the ways in which one specific treaty, the 1784 Treaty of Fort Stanwix between the United States and the Senecas, provides an important basis for Seneca rhetorical responses to American colonialism. Through all of these chapters, Carlson both advances a set of ideas that have been expressed in Native American literary studies and makes a provocative and persuasive point about the legal basis of identity formation for American Indians. That is, Carlson extends a discussion that runs through the work of various scholars, including Jace Weaver, Maureen Konkle, and others, about the centrality of legal and policy issues to Native American literary and rhetorical production. In focusing on autobiography, though, Carlson pursues these ideas to the point of making a case that the formation of ideas of the self that occurs among Native Americans in various eras also derives from legal discourse. In other words, legal ideas constitute the parameters in which the new sorts of Native identity play out in the unfolding of colonialism among American Indian nations. In a previous generation of scholarship, as most of those with even a nodding acquaintance I hope will agree, deployments of new ways of being Native American have been seen as coming from much more vaguely rendered notions of acculturation or assimilation. Some of the more interesting work in recent years has specified these processes to a greater extent, but has looked to educational and religious institutions for the locations from which these new ideas regarding identity have derived. Carlson's argument has the benefit not only of holding up across a wide swath of time (the distance, after all, between Apess in New England and New York in the 1820s and 1830s to Charles Eastman across the twists and turns of the Progressive era is vast) but also of locating the shifting geography of Native ways of self-understanding in the middle of processes of colonial domination rather than in secondary or tertiary places. Apess, as [End Page 370] a figure responding as someone whose history is deeply marked by near-annihilation during...

The Indian Chief as Tragic Hero: Native Resistance and the Literatures of America, from Moctezuma to Tecumseh

The Indian Chief as Tragic Hero: Native Resistance and the Literatures of America, from Moctezuma to Tecumseh

The Indian chief as tragic hero: native resistance and the literatures of America, from Moctezuma to Tecumseh

Talks about Native American leaders in the literatures of North America. leaders of anticolonial wars of resistance - Metacom, Pontiac, Tecumseh, and Cuauhtemoc - spread fear across the frontiers of North America. Yet once defeated, these men became iconic martyrs for postcolonial national identity in Canada, the United States, and Mexico. By the early 1800s a craze arose for Indian tragedy on the U.S. stage, such as John Augustus Stone's Metamora, and for Indian biographies as national historiography, such as the writings of Benjamin Drake, Francis Parkman, and William Apess. With chapters on seven major resistance struggles, including the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 and the Natchez Massacre of 1729, The Indian Chief as Tragic Hero offers an analysis of not only the tragedies and epics written about these leaders, but also their own speeches and strategies, as recorded in archival sources and narratives by adversaries including Hernan Cortes, Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz, Joseph Doddridge, Robert Rogers, and William Henry Harrison. Gordon M. Sayre concludes that these tragedies and epics about Native resistance laid the foundation for revolutionary culture and historiography in the three modern nations of North America, and that, at odds with the trope of the complaisant vanishing Indian, these leaders presented colonizers with a cathartic reproof of past injustices.

From Indian Killer to Worthy Citizen: The Revolutionary Transformation of Michael Cresap

HE graveyard at Trinity Church is a veritable who's who of eighteenth-century American heroes. At the corner of Broadway and Wall streets in Manhattan, Trinity Churchyard was the burial ground for many of early America's famous politicians, generals, inventors, and magnates. The gravestones of John Peter Zenger, Alexander Hamilton, Albert Gallatin, Horatio Gates, Robert Fulton, and John Jacob Astor litter this urban cemetery now dwarfed by New York's skyscrapers. In the shadow of these giants lies another grave, that of Michael Cresap, a militia captain from western Maryland who died in New York in October 1775. Cresap was an unusual figure to be buried with full military honors in one of the most prestigious colonial burial grounds: his notoriety came from his expertise in killing Indians, especially for murdering the family of Mingo Indian Chief Logan in the Ohio valley the summer before. How, then, did the whom Thomas Jefferson labeled a man infamous for the many murders he has committed on the frontier get to Trinity?1 The answer lies in the particular needs of the revolutionary project itself. As colonial rebels watched by the candid world, Whig leaders had to initiate and shape interpretations that explained what they were doing and, ultimately, who they were, a process that largely took place

The Last of the Raccoon

The Last of the Raccoon Diana Hume George (bio) I hit the raccoon on the road. Three decades ago I was driving home alone late at night in an old couch-like Buick or Pontiac or Oldsmobile, trying to make it to the off-reservation house where I had recently ended my marriage. We'd created a mutual myth—he was my primal man, I his white goddess. Lennie is a Seneca Indian of the Iroquois Nation and I am a white Presbyterian minister's daughter. Neither of us had any idea who the other was or what we were doing. The marriage didn't work, nor could it have. When I saw that, I left him. Ending us is still one of the hardest things I've ever done. I was very young, and marriage to an Indian man had been part of my lifeplan for almost a quarter of that life. Through intermarriage I thought I was fighting old racist traditions in both our families. My family had been appalled that I was crossing lines of race and culture. His family didn't like it any better—our child brought whiteness into the family bloodline—but my half-blood, two-heart baby was the only son in that generation, and once we were actually married, my Indian in-laws fell in love with him. Marrying into the family was something they could eventually accept, but never my divorcing out of it. My husband's grandmother Elida was a reservation wise-woman, a canny combination of old ways and new, half protector of Seneca tradition, half bingo queen. Elida and her family were members of the Turtle Clan, so the turtle was their totem animal. Elida placed a curse on me for divorcing her grandson. She called me on the phone—on the phone—and shook turtle rattles through the lines, chanting in Seneca, then translating so I'd know what she'd done. Her curse was that I'd never be happy after leaving her grandson. Bad luck would follow me in everything I did, she [End Page 124] said, but especially in love. I laughed and hung up on her, half charmed by her AT&T curse. Within an hour I had a flat tire. I didn't believe in her curse, I claimed, but car trouble and love trouble came to me in the years after that. Somehow I wrecked the Pontiac my car-racer boyfriend gave me. My financial marital problems years before had begun with the purchase of another Pontiac, with its Indian chief profile on the blue high-beam button. That boyfriend accused me of cheating on him (I wasn't) and chased me around the house. I had to wall myself up in the bedroom and call the police, who had to call in their dogs, he was that crazy. Animals can help people. The turtles helped Elida curse me, and dogs saved me from that crazy man. Twenty years later my beloved collie died while trying to save my failed second marriage—we got back together for awhile when Alfie was ill, strewed roses on his grave together. But our problem with each other was too big even for Alfie. Once, in the decade after Elida's call, I quietly asked an Indian friend if his own grandmother could take off the curse, which did seem to be working. She'd never liked Elida anyway—those reservation wise-women can get pretty competitive—so she lifted the curse with a counter-curse, but I don't think it worked. Elida had strong Love Medicine, stronger Hate Medicine. Somewhere along in there, I hit a raccoon on the road, a woman driving home alone at night, always afraid that the old car would break down in the dark, almost smelling home in the far distance around an S-curve snaking through the reservation that was famous for killing drunk people in their cars at night. I was sober. Black eyes gleamed back at my car-eyes and then came that terrible thump, more like hitting a dog than a raccoon. I turned the car around to see how badly it was hurt...

White Teachers, Indian Children

TWO YEARS ago, my ignorance and I began to teach on Montana's Rocky Boy Reservation. Until then, I had never really thought of myself as white. My identity was formed by the facts that I am an Appalachian woman, the daughter of a coal miner, a hillbilly -- somehow not quite white. But at Rocky Boy Elementary, I was bride-dress white, and it mattered more than ever before. Before Montana, my only Indian experience had been in the summer of 1959. Our family was on the way to Florida, and the route took us across the Smoky Mountains. My father nervously maneuvered our 1949 Buick along the twists and turns and through the tunnels that curled around and through the mountains. road was narrow. turns were sharp. valley was far below. There were no guard rails. I held my eyes tightly shut but could not contain persistent slow-motion images of our car flying off the mountainside and drifting silently to the ground below. Moments after the mountains were behind us, a wooden sign welcomed us to the Cherokee Indian Reservation. Stretched out before me was the closest thing to Disneyland I'd ever seen. Motels, restaurants, and souvenir shops were lined up wall to wall on both sides of the highway. There were cars and people as far as I could see. My father wheeled our tank of a car into a parking space right in front of Big Bear's Cherokee Trading Post. I jumped out of the car and ran to the window. There before my eyes was a virtual cornucopia of essential Indian and frontiersmen's regalia. They had everything I needed -- hard plastic bows with yellow-suction-cup-tipped arrows; rubber tomahawks decorated with secret Indian symbols; cardboard headdresses adorned with blue, red, or yellow feathers; and a real cedar ash tray with a ceramic insert showing a hillbilly boy with his pants down. Put your butts here, it said. While that was funny, it paled alongside the bag of corn husks labeled Hillbilly Toilet Paper. My eyes continued to scan the window until they landed on a genuine faux fur coonskin cap. I knew I had to have it and began to concoct a plan to attain it. As I crafted the finer points of the coming battle between my mother and me, my eyes were diverted. coonskin was erased from my mind and replaced by the most remarkable thing I'd ever seen. There, right in the parking lot, stood an enormous painted teepee. I was lured to it as though under a spell. But I forgot all about it when I saw an Indian chief standing beside it. I looked him over as if he were a museum specimen. His arms were tightly folded across his chest, his headdress was feathered all the way to the ground, and his stance conveyed emotionless power. like Tonto, I thought. The chief wants us to take a picture of him with you and Tom, my father said. I couldn't imagine why, but, sure enough, the chief motioned to us to come stand beside him. I was going to get my picture taken with a real Indian! Why, it could be the best thing that ever happened. My neighborhood status would shoot to the top when kids saw me standing beside the chief. My little brother refused to loosen his death grip on my mother's arm. Always a baby. He's going to ruin everything. I took matters into my own hands. With whispered threats of bodily harm once Mother and Daddy weren't there to protect him, I pulled him into camera range. Just before the camera snapped, I flashed my biggest smile, Tom's face froze in terror, and the chief contorted his face to create an appropriately fierce look. Later, I saw my father drop quarters into a cup labeled tips. TODAY, MOST Indian children are taught by white people who, like me, possess only the sanitized knowledge and understandings of Indian people and their history from bland white history texts. We learned about the pilgrims, but not about the Indians who saved them; about Lewis and Clark, but not about the Indians who saved them; about the great westward expansion, but not about the destruction of the Indian way of life it required; about reservations, but not about the attempted genocide. …

In Search of the Savage Sauvage: An Exploration into North America's Political Cultures

Introduction On his 1534 voyage to the St. Lawrence, Jacques Cartier first encountered the Sauvage when he saw Beothuk Indians, elusive in the distance, as his ship reached the barren coast of Labrador. He described these aboriginal inhabitants of North America as having well-formed bodies, but as gens effarables (frightening) et (the older French spelling of sauvages) with their hair tied up on the top of their heads like a handful of twisted hay with feathers in it, and clothed in skins of animals (Cart ier, 10 I). As his journey progressed Cartier made closer and closer contact, until the French were trading with and offering food to various sauvaiges. He wound up kidnapping two sons of Donnacona, an Indian chief, and taking them back to France. The appears in 1600, where the French sauvaiges become savages in Hakluyt's English translation. Subsequent translators have continued Hakluyt's practice. The Indian as appears throughout the Thwaites Jesuit Relations translations and in other nineteenth and twentieth century translations of the records of French missionaries and explorers, including those for the Champlain Society. But the French word has a quite different meaning from the English word savage. Sauvage as used by Cartier and the other early explorers and missionaries had few of the connotations of brutishness and ferocity now associated with the English savage. Translations that treat the two words as synonyms give a misleading impression to English-speaking readers of how the early French missionaries and explorers regarded Canada's aboriginal people, and masks important differences between the French and English colonists in North America in their dealings with aboriginal people. This paper explores th e differences between the Sauvage and the Savage. It identifies two basic constructs: one the bon sauvage, or good Indian found by the French missionaries and explorers; the second the savage discovered by the English colonists. The two constructs differ profoundly, as did the way the two colonial powers treated North America's aboriginal inhabitants. (1) I. Savage and Sauvage The differences between the present meaning of and do not lie in what the words denote, for both refer to the aboriginal inhabitants of North America. But words have much broader implications and resonances than the simple denotation of an object, event, or person. They relate to and imply a whole range of other things, and their broad connotations shade, in important but often hidden ways, the cultural associations and implications of the people or things denoted. The most recent Oxford English Dictionary definition of the English word savage, as a noun and adjective is: Savage...[adjective]: 1 fierce; cruel (savage persecution; a savage blow). 2 wild (a savage animal). 3 archaic offensive uncivilized; primitive. 4 informal angry; bad-tempered (in a savage mood). 5 archaic (of scenery etc.) uncultivated (a savage scene). 6 Heraldry (of the human figure) naked. [noun]: 1 archaic offensive a member of a primitive tribe. 2 a cruel or barbarous person. (2) According to the Dictionnaire Larousse the adjective also can be used with these sorts of connotations of action violente, impitoyable, bruwle, barbare, ftiroce as in competition pour le pouvoir, Se defendre avec une energie or capitalisme sauvage but Larousse offers this as the eighth of nine meanings, and the first seven contain no connotations of ferocity or brutality, but rather an absence of domesticity and cultivation. To illustrate the difference in usage: if canoeists go to a store to buy bug repellent they will find that the Deep Woods appropriate for the Canadian North becomes, on the French side of the canister Off Regions Sauvages. …

In Search of the Noble Savage: Some Romantic Cases

The idea of the noble savage is as early as Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave (1688), a novel by Aphra Behn, or Friday, the cannibal in Robinson Crusoe(1719).In Chateaubriand's major novels with New World settings it mirrors European yearning for naivete and purity. In Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales both the “white savage” Natty Bumppo and his friend, the Indian chief, Chingachgook are destined to be outmoded by historical forces. An early novel, Typee: A Peep at Polyneasian Life during a Four Months' Residence in a Valley of the Marquesas, by Herman Melville discloses that the Typee way of life is not very conducive to upholding the European myth of the noble savage. Robert Louis Stevenson's relative success in falling into the embrace of the South Seas when he settled in Samoa is contrasted with Paul Gauguin's contradictory search for Rousseauesque refuge in a primitive culture and his yearning for recognition as an artist by European contemporaries. The idea of the noble savage has been a productive misprision or cultural lie in many respects but today its lingering cliche supports a superannuated hord of lesser Gauguins.

On archaeological praxis, gender bias and indigenous peoples in South America

This article discusses several aspects of the practice of archaeology in South America, specifically in the Southern Cone. Examining two key issues: the socio-political context of knowledge production and the positioning of South American archaeology in relation to its European and North American counterparts. Three cases that bridge these issues are examined. First, Gero’s argument for gender bias in the recording of field data, based in her ethnographic work during the excavation of the Paleondian site of Arroyo Seco 2. Second, the reburial of the human remains of Inakayal (an Indian chief who died at the end of the nineteenth century). Third, the excavation of the Inca mummies of the Llullaillaco peak in the southern Andes. The first is a critique on methodological grounds, the second demonstrates that Argentinean archaeology cannot free itself from its colonial past and the third illustrates the ethical dimension of archaeological praxis, specifically the complex interaction between local and foreign archaeologists.

Rwanda Revisited

Report of the Independent Inquiry into the Actions of the United Nations during the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda, UN document S/1999/1257, 16 December 1999, 82pp. Online at http://www.un.org/Docs/sc/letters/1999/1257.The flood of books, commentaries, TV documentaries, theses, and commission reports on the Rwanda genocide seems to know no end. Some early superficial or partisan accounts have given way to better informed, if no less tragic, recitals of those terrible events. Nevertheless, such is the controversy and confusion generated by the genocide that blighted Rwanda and shamed the world that great expectations awaited the two 'official' reports under review, anticipating that they would clarify the outstanding issues. The secretary-general of the United Nations, Kofi Annan - a central figure in the drama - commissioned the first and the Organization of African Unity (OAU) initiated the second.(f.1) Neither disappoints. While not free of controversy or in total agreement on every point, the two assessments taken together are about as definitive as one can expect at this stage. Their judgments are bound to carry great weight. No one with an interest in the causes, course, complexities, and consequences of the genocide can afford to ignore them. Both reports were partly funded by Canada.The authors of the reports share two distinctions. First, they alone were 'accorded the opportunity to research the confidential records of the UN' (OAU 132; UN 4) and were able to interview a wide range of (largely the same) individuals who were actively involved. Secondly, they were given a genuinely free hand in reaching their own conclusions, and they took full advantage of that independence to write frankly, even brutally.The UN Inquiry comprised a three-man team: a former Swedish prime minister as chair, a former Korean foreign minister with experience as United Nations special representative in Cyprus, and a Nigerian general who had served as field commander of ECOMOG, the West African peacekeeping force, in Liberia and as head of the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization in Jerusalem. The OAU panel consisted of seven 'Eminent Personalities,' two of whom were former heads of state (of Botswana and Mali) and two were illustrious women, one Liberian and the other Swedish. The remaining three were an Algerian ambassador, a retired Indian chief justice, and Stephen Lewis, UNICEF deputy executive secretary and, earlier, one of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney's inspired appointments as Canadian ambassador to the United Nations. The senior writer on the project was another Canadian, the indomitable Gerry Caplan.(f.2)The mandates of the two bodies differed in significant respects. The Inquiry was enjoined to establish the facts related to the United Nations role and response in Rwanda and to 'draw relevant conclusions and identify the lessons to be learnt.' The actions of African organizations and governments, as well as outside powers, are, in the main, left to the OAU panel and others to explore (UN 1, 4). Moreover, the period under review covers only nine months - from the launching of UNAMIR, the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda, in October 1993 to the winding down of organized killing following the military conquest of the country by the (Tutsi) Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) in July 1994.The OAU report is considerably more comprehensive in terms of time frame, territorial scope, and range of actors. Its investigations extended to regional as well as Rwandan developments 'surrounding' the genocide over nearly four years, from the Arusha Peace Accords in August 1993 to the overthrow of the Mobutu Sese Seko regime in neighbouring Zaire in May 1997 (p 288). Five introductory chapters set the conflict in context by tracing the roots and evolution of the crisis from colonial times to Arusha, and seven concluding chapters carry the post-genocide story to the end of the decade.The OAU eminences, unlike their UN counterparts, were explicitly enjoined to examine the roles played by the OAU, internal and external forces, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), as well as the UN, 'before, during and after the genocide. …

Myasthenia gravis

Neurology 1997;48(Suppl 5):S1-S7 This article is an overview of gravis and a background for the other articles that follow in this issue. Other reviews have appeared since 1992. [1-7] Myasthenia gravis (MG) is probably the best understood autoimmune disorder. None other has captured the attention of so many generations of neurologists and neuroscientists. It is instructive for students of gravis to appreciate the historical achievements in the order of their occurrence, and the many individuals who have contributed to the understanding of the disease. The ancient history of MG is controversial. Possibly the first description of a patient with gravis appeared in 1644 in correspondence from colonial Jamestown, Virginia, pertaining to Indian Chief Opechankanough. [8] In 1685, Sir Thomas Willis described a patient with bulbar symptoms that could have been psychogenic. [9] The clinical syndrome was identified by Wilks in 1877, [10] Erb in 1879, [11] and Goldflam in 1893. [12] In 1895, Jolly [13] named the disease myasthenia gravis pseudoparalytica. By 1900, Campbell and Bramwell [14] had reported 60 cases. In 1934, the efficacy of physostigmine was shown by Walker. [15] One year later, Dale and colleagues [16] described the chemical nature of neuromuscular transmission at motor end-plates. Harvey and Masland [17] summarized the salient electrophysiologic features of MG in 1941. In the same year, Blalock, [18] and later Keynes, [19] described trans-sternal thymectomy in gravis that included as complete a removal of the gland as possible, whether or not a tumor was suspected preoperatively. In 1960, an autoimmune cause of MG was suggested by Simpson [20] and by Nastuk et al. [21] However, the immunologic basis of MG awaited basic understanding of acetylcholine (ACh) release at motor end-plates, as described by Katz and Miledi. [22] Nature provided two gifts that facilitated characterization of the …