Vanishing Indian Research Articles

On “Deadnaming” the “Vanishing Indian”

Recently, deadnaming has been the predominant terminology invoked to describe the act of referring to a trans* person by a former, but no longer used, name. While it is perceived as a formidable language to condemn this type of anti-transgender harm and violence, the necropolitical implications of referring to this act as “deadnaming” necessitates a trans* Indigenous critique of the manifestation of settler coloniality within transnormativity and its rhetoric. By analyzing the polarizing tension between birth name and deadname, this article turns to US legal documents, specifically the language within states’ legal birth certificates, for the better-for-now language of the “given name,” which might provide the destabilization needed to disrupt the temporal specificity implied within the “birth name” and “deadname” binary to imagine and embody an otherwise of the trans* imaginary. In thinking with Billy-Ray Belcourt's (Driftpile Cree) feral queer Indigeneity, this article concludes by surveying the possibilities of anti-colonial trans* experiences beyond the US settler nation-state's socio-legal surveillance, with its insistence on (trans*-/settler-) normative legibility (for “citizenship” within its biopolitical sphere).

The “Vanishing Indian” and the Vanishing Pole: From a Middle Ground to a Logic of Elimination in the European and Global Periphery, 1840–1880

This article examines the use of the “Vanishing Indian” and “Doomed Race” extinction narratives in the writings of Henryk Sienkiewicz, Paul Edmund Strzelecki, and Sygurd Wiśniowski with respect to the Indigenous peoples of North America, Australia, and New Zealand. It locates these writers in the context of mid-late nineteenth century Poland, at the periphery of Europe and of empire, arguing that they demonstrated an ability to detect and critique the injustices of colonialism and sought out a rhetorical “middle ground” between Poles and non-European victims of empire in their work. However, their sympathy was in tension with Poland's historic role as a regional metropole, the need to assert their status as White Europeans, and the lure of settler colonialism. The “middle ground” they sought to create ultimately gave way to a “logic of elimination” that neutralized this tension, justifying colonialism to themselves and to other agents of empire.

The United States at the Center of the Action

The United States at the Center of the Action

Assimilating American Indians in James Fenimore Cooper’s Novels?

Abstract The article employs critical concepts from sociology and anthropology to examine the stereotype of the Vanishing Indian and disclose its contradictory character. The article argues that in James Fenimore Cooper’s late novels from the 1840s a type of American Indian appears who can be regarded as a Vanishing Indian in many respects as he displays some slight degree of assimilation but at the same time he can be found to reveal a surprising amount of resistance to the process of vanishing and marginalization. His peculiar mode of survival and his mode of living demonstrate a certain degree of acculturation, which comes close to Gerald Vizenor’s survivance and for which I propose a term critical integration. I base my study on Susquesus (alias Trackless), Cooper’s less well-known character from The Littlepage Manuscripts, a three-book family saga.

Indigeneity and Mestizaje in Ana Castillo'sThe Mixquiahuala Lettersand Leslie Marmon Silko'sAlmanac of the Dead

This article argues that conceptions of indigeneity and mestizaje conveyed in Ana Castillo's The Mixquiahuala Letters and Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead are influenced (differentially) by the very colonialist assumptions the novels otherwise aim to dismantle. I compare how indigeneity and mestizaje are defined in Letters and Almanac (with particular attention to their oppositional features), addressing relationships between these definitions, popular colonialist discourse, and anti-colonial articulations of identity that have developed in American Indian and Chicana/o communities. Significantly (and tragically), Letters' Chicana protagonist, Teresa, envisions her recovery of a cohesive cultural identity as a return to a distant indigenous past (via traveling from the U.S. to Mexico) — which, I demonstrate, places Letters in conversation with Mexican indigenismo, the myth of the Vanishing Indian, and the myth of Mexico as an Infernal Paradise. Almanac's Menardo, by contrast, grows up with a strong sense of Mexican indigenous ideologies but cuts his family ties and conceals his cultural identity after discovering that identification as Indian will disqualify him for entrance into Mexican high society. Through Menardo, introduced as “the mestizo,” Almanac critiques Mexican mestizaje as a cultural construct, and I consider whether this critique functions as the sort of exclusionary gesture Castillo has ascribed to some North American Indians when it comes to Chicana/o claims to indigeneity. At the same time, I consider how Teresa's inherited presuppositions about indigeneity perpetuate discourses that have functioned to bar indigenous peoples from the full rights of citizenship and self-determination. That Menardo eschews what Teresa strives to recover can best be understood, I argue, in the context of the different national circumstances in which they grow up, the consequences of Chicana/o diaspora, and traditional versus colonially influenced American Indian standards for tribal identification.

Ethnographies of Empire and Resistance: “Wilderness” and the “Vanishing Indian” in Alexis de Tocqueville’s “A Fortnight in the Wilderness” and John Tanner’s “Narrative of Captivity”

Ethnographies of Empire and Resistance: “Wilderness” and the “Vanishing Indian” in Alexis de Tocqueville’s “A Fortnight in the Wilderness” and John Tanner’s “Narrative of Captivity”

Digitizing Cherokee Culture: Libraries, Students, and the Reservation

Anyone who has used the internet in the classroom surely knows that the technological revolution has produced as many pitfalls as it has miracles. From the perspective of multiethnic studies, the World Wide Web's dream of cybertopia must be carefully considered in relation to the corresponding nightmare of erasing racial identity. As Joe Lockard observes in the essay collection Race in Cyberspace, 'Virtual community' is an appeal for a transcendent communitarianism, one where race and ethnicity have been left behind as remnants of an Old World Order (172). And while it is certainly true that faceless interactions on the internet can diminish the importance of cultural identity, I want to argue that the proliferation of digital archives, which make vast amounts of historical material available to a much wider audience, creates new opportunities (and problems) for helping students and teachers understand the complexities of race in America. More specifically, this article will explore the pedagogical possibilities associated with the University of Georgia's ongoing project to archive, preserve, and interpret Cherokee culture in digital form. (1) In the hope that other teachers may be able to learn from our triumphs and tribulations, I will retell the convoluted story of how the flagship university in the state responsible for the Trail of Tears (2) came to undertake the mission of digitizing thousands of documents related to Cherokee culture, building a pedagogical website designed to make these archives more accessible for classroom use, and reaching out to the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation on reservations in western North Carolina. (3) While many scholars have noted the tendency of chat rooms, bulletin boards, MUDS, and MOOS to efface racial and ethnic identity, analogous problems associated with digital archives have not yet been as fully explored (see Nakamura, Kolko, Holmes, and Bell). risks are perhaps even more profound given the much broader historical scope of archives. My intent here is to detail the struggle to correct the problematic subtext that was invisibly encoded into two of the largest digital archives related to Cherokee material at the University of Georgia: the Cherokee Phoenix, the complete record of the first Native American newspaper, 1828-1834, and the Southeastern Native American Documents, 1730-1842, a collection of more than two thousand documents related to Indian history in the region. Make no mistake, these archives are a wonderful scholarly resource whose capabilities have not yet been fully appreciated by scholars, students, or teachers. And yet, as I began to work with these electronic resources in the classroom, it gradually became clear to me that, because the materials are limited to the pre-removal period, the archives inadvertently reinforce the Myth of the Vanishing Indian or the idea that the Cherokee disappeared from Georgia in 1838. (4) dangers associated with this tacit erasure of the living Cherokee cannot be ignored, particularly at a university built on land that rightfully belongs to the Cherokee. In Worcester v. Georgia (1832), the US Supreme Court ruled that The Indian nations ... retain[ed] their original natural rights, as the undisputed possessors of the soil, from time immemorial, and hence Georgia's claim to the land was unconstitutional, void, and of no effect (Marshall 242, 225). My point is not to exacerbate or to assuage the all-too-deep laceration of white guilt; there is no balm in Gilead to heal such a wound. Rather, I want to analyze how digital archives can be incorporated into the classroom to improve the teaching of America's multiethnic heritage. More specifically, this article will detail how the archives were built, the complications of using them in the classroom, and the struggle to identify and correct the narrative of the Vanishing Indian that lies hidden beneath the glossy surface of search engines and hyperlinks. …

The Lessons of a Sentimental Education: Zitkala-Ša’s Autobiographical Narratives

G e r t r u d e K A s e b i e r , “ Z i t k a l a - S a ,” c a . 1 8 9 8 P h o t o g r a p h i c H i s t o r y C o l l e c t i o n N a t i o n a l M u s e u m o f A m e r i c a n H i s t o r y , S m i t h s o n i a n I n s t i t u t i o n S U S A N B E R N A R D I N University o f Minnesota, Morris The Lessons of a Sentimental Education: Zitkala-Sa’s Autobiographical Narratives i In the post-frontier culture of the turn of the century, nationally prominent magazines such as Harper’ s and Atlantic Monthly documented and lamented the “vanishing” West even as they debated the possibilities of assimilating its original inhabitants in the future.1 Alongside a wide range of writings about Indians in both magazines—articles on federal Indian policy, western sketches, ethnographic Indian “tales”—appeared stories by Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, or Zitkala-Sa, a mixed-blood Sioux writer and activist. Zitkala-Sa used her novel status as a literary Indian woman to challenge her readers’ embrace of nationalist narratives rele­ gating Native Americans to destinies of assimilation and disappearance.2 Like the Native American women writers who preceded and followed her in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century—S. Alice Callahan, Pauline Johnson, Mourning Dove—Zitkala-Sa drew from sentimental and autobiographical genres and then strategically revised those genres for a predominantly non-Indian readership. This strategy encouraged her to claim and reshape the narrative and moral authority associated with the two literary forms. The challenges she faced in doing so appear most prominently in her three autobiographical stories, published in consecu­ tive issues of Atlantic Monthly in 1900. The first literary response to the era’s Indian education system, Zitkala-Sa’s stories selectively use the lan­ guage of domesticity to scrutinize sentimental ideology’s foundational role in compulsory Indian education as well as its related participation in national efforts to “Americanize” the Indian.3At the same time, her auto­ biographical fiction reveals how two seemingly competing discourses involving Indians, eastern-based humanitarian reform and literary 214 Western American Literature Westerns, entwined in their efforts to include the “Vanishing Indian” in a triumphant national story of progress and expansion. Zitkala-Sa was a recipient of the era’s nationwide efforts to assimi­ late Indians through schooling, efforts engineered and promoted by the self-styled “Friends of the Indian,” a small but influential group of eastern educators, ministers, and government officials. Using available print media—including magazines, pamphlets, and petitions—the Friends urged both the government and the public to “Americanize the Indian” via citizenship, Christianity, education, and private land ownership. In the Atlantic, one such reformer, Henry Dawes, argued in 1899 that “the present Indian policy of the nation [is] to fit the Indian for civilization and to absorb him into it. It is a national work” (281). To that end, the Friends of the Indian made compulsory education the cornerstone of their efforts to assimilate those who had long defied incorporation within the nation.4 Armed with vocabulary drawn from domesticity, Commissioner of Indian Affairs Thomas J. Morgan identi­ fied compulsory education as the most effective way to make the Indian youth “feel that the United States, and not some paltry reserva­ tion, is their home” (225). Like the Friends of the Indian, Zitkala-Sa was invested in the goals and methods of educating Indians. She carried this focus throughout her abbreviated period of mainstream literary production (1900-1902) and throughout her subsequent career as member and officer of the first secular pan-Indian organization, the Society of American Indians (SAI); as editor of the SAI journal; as independent lobbyist for educa­ tion reform and self-determination; and as founder of the National Council of American Indians.5 Born in 1876 to a white...

The Myth of the Vanishing Indian

The Myth of the Vanishing Indian

Cancer, Its Cause and Treatment . II. Volume. By L. Duncan Bulkley. New York, Paul B. Hoeber. 1917.

<i>Cancer, Its Cause and Treatment</i> . II. Volume. By L. Duncan Bulkley. New York, Paul B. Hoeber. 1917.