From captors to captives: American Indian responses to popular American narrative forms

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FROM CAPTORS TO CAPTIVES: AMERICAN INDIAN RESPONSES TO
POPULAR AMERICAN NARRATIVE FORMS

by
Theresa Lynn Gregor
________________________________________________________________________

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)
May 2010

Copyright 2010 Theresa Lynn Gregor
ii

Dedication

To my maternal grandmothers—
Andrea Wachena Cuevas, renowned basketmaker,
Altagracia “Grandma Grace” Cuevas Carrisoza, tamale-maker extraordinaire, and
Norene Theresa Carrisoza Nesbitt, my namesake.

iii
Acknowledgements
The seeds of this project are rooted in my parents, Barbara and Rudy Osuna.
Growing up on the Santa Ysabel Indian Reservation as a Kumeyaay/Diegueno was
ordinary, unexciting, and, often, disheartening. We did not have much of anything. We
did not have electricity or a telephone or even a refrigerator until I was in third grade. In
retrospect, the things we lived without made me resilient and self-reliant. It is not without
surprise that I see how my childhood profoundly and irrevocably shaped my intellect, my
spirit, and my being. For the gifts that come from a simple if hard reservation life, I thank
my parents for instilling in me, quite unintentionally I am sure, my hunger. My hunger to
express myself, my hunger to work harder, my hunger to reach higher, my hunger to do
better, my hunger to help others, and my hunger for a good story, especially old tales
about cowboys and Indians. My fondest memories are the images of my mom curled up
on the couch reading her Harlequin romances alongside my stepdad reading a Louis
L’Amore novel.
My journey to complete the dissertation was one I began alone but soon shared
with my amazingly supportive husband, Dink. Through the ups and downs of newly
married life, he patiently supported my arduous efforts to advance to candidacy and begin
writing the dissertation. Our life took a few unexpected turns as I dissertated, but
throughout the process, he never complained, he listened attentively and inquisitively to
my ramblings as I tried to work out the arguments in each chapter, and, at my defense, he
sat quietly, stoically, and lovingly in my corner. For his love, his faith, and belief in me I

iv
am grateful. I remain ever-devoted to him and the rest of our journeys together.
No dissertation would be possible without the keen insight, advice, and
intellectual exchange from a mentor. My thanks and appreciation go to Professor Tania
Modleski, my dissertation chair, for helping me trace the early shoots of my fascination
with the Indian captivity narrative into film and then through women’s romance. Without
her patience and unfailing support throughout the time it took me to research and to write
the dissertation, I would have given up ages ago. To Professor McKenna, mia tocaya,
whose professional and personal relationship I deeply value, I express my sincere
gratitude. Finally, to Professor George Sanchez, el hombre con una corazon del oro y un
intelecto sin fronteras, my outside committee member, whose tireless campaign and
implementation of diversity gave me a “home” at USC that I did not know I was missing
until I found it. For his sage advice, tireless wisdom, and always honest assessments, I
humbly thank him for serving on my dissertation committee. My greatest aspiration is to
mentor others as he mentored me.
There are numerous faculty members and colleagues in the Department of English
doctoral program that nurtured the early manifestations of this project along in small
portions in seminars that I am forever indebted to. In particular, Professor Anthony
Kemp’s Early American Literature seminar provided the foundational work of the
dissertation; Professor Joe Boone’s Narrative Theory Seminar helped me cultivate a
deeper and keener eye for textual analysis, discursive trends, and literary theory; and
finally, Professors Ron Gottesman’s and James Kincaid’s amiable spirits, rigorous
intellects, and passion for fresh inquiry positively reinforced my decision to pursue my
doctorate at USC on separate occasions. To Professor Rebecca Lemon, I must also
v
express my gratitude for helping me prepare for the job market with realistic
expectations.
I was fortunate to enroll in Professor Ken Lincoln’s Native American Literature
Course and to also sit in on Joy Harjo’s Native American Women’s Literature course in
the American Indian Studies Program at UCLA in separate semesters. These seminars
provided much needed community, support, and validation for my work. I thank
wholeheartedly Professors Lincoln and Harjo for their generous time in reviewing and
commenting on my early drafts of the project. Their insights stick with me and continue
to shape my approach and reading of Native American literature. In particular, I deeply
appreciated Joy Harjo’s advice to “always tell a story” even if it means walking the
“razor’s edge” to do so.
To my colleagues and friends who commiserated with me through my long course
of graduate study I send the greatest thanks. To David Powell, I thank you for going
above and beyond the call of duty in not only sharing every seminar with me in second
year, but also for pinch-hitting as my Lamaze coach when my husband had to work! To
Annemarie Perez, my “official” peer-mentor, I thank you for those hours spent over
coffee from Trojan Grounds cajoling me and convincing me that I belonged in the
program. To Beth Bingelli who continues to make me strive to work harder and smarter, I
thank you for your brilliant insights, the great advice, and your wonderful parties that
always revived my spirit. To Jinny Huh, there are no words to describe your impact on
my life. You are my sister, my friend, my mother, my “wife”—without you I would have
been lost! Your advice saved me on more than one occasion and like the great big sister
vi
that you are—by watching you march out ahead of me, you made the road less rocky for
me. Thanks for forging the way!
To my esteemed and superb fellows from the American Studies and Ethnicity
Irvine Summer Doctoral Fellowship Program I extend my appreciation and gratitude to
the 2002 Summer Cohort. The experience transformed me completely and I feel like the
universe aligned for our paths to cross. To Ana Rosas I thank you for the whispered
conversation in Houston, Texas that I still dream about. You are an intellectual woman
warrior! I feel honored to call you a friend and colleague. To Lorena Munoz you are mi
hermana! Thank you for opening up your heart and home to me. You are an amazing
scholar and human being. Finally I thank Belinda Lum who helped me articulate my
“faith” on a dark night in a three-hour long conversation. You are my networking-idol
and I am eternally grateful for your presence in my life.
To my brother whom I love with all my heart for the life we endured growing up
and the lives we share with our families now I say thank you; to my generous and loving
Aunt Sheri Paipa I express my soul’s greatest thanks for leading by example and showing
me how to cope with life with grace and humor; to my large extended family and friends
from the Santa Ysabel Indian Reservation, especially to Bonnie Osuna Salgado, Beverley
Osuna Devers, Bernice Paipa, and my dearly departed great-Uncle Charles Cuevas, I give
my thanks for your support and the lessons you taught me through the years.
Finally, I want to acknowledge and thank my children who I birthed along with
this project. Emelia you are my blessed miracle. Your life is an awesome inspiration to
me and puts mine in perspective. To Evin, my little “Jewel,” you made me work harder to
accomplish what I feared I could not. To both of you, I thank you for helping me realize
vii
the possibilities of my body for creation, the boundaries of my being, and my infinite
capacity to love and be loved by you. All my work is for you.

viii

Table of Contents

Dedication ii
Acknowledgements iii
Table of Contents viii
Abstract ix
Preface xi
Chapter 1 "Breaking the Chains of American/Indian Captivity: 1
The Transformation of the American/Indian From
Captor to Captive"
Chapter 1 Endnotes 30
Chapter 2 "Louise Erdrich: Ojibwa Encounters with Colonial
Captivity Discourse" 33
Chapter 2 Endnotes 70
Chapter 3 "Held Captive by the Image: American Indian Spectatorship,
Representation, and Repatriation in Cinema" 74
Chapter 3 Endnotes 125
Chapter 4 "Captivity's Narrative Desire: Re-forming the Miscegenous
Primal Scene in the American/Indian Romance" 130
Chapter 4 Endnotes 192
Bibliography 196

ix

Abstract

From Captors to Captives: American Indian Responses to Popular American
Narrative Forms examines the metamorphosis of the American Indian captivity narrative,
its evolution in the American western and its function as a common trope in the
American/Indian romance, as well as the genre’s most recent appearance and function in
American/Indian poetry, prose, and film. Throughout my explication of the history,
evolution, and current production of the genre, I interrogate the representational
constraints of and the possibilities to transform American/Indian subjectivity while
carefully taking into account the actual affect such representations have on the daily life
of Native American peoples and cultures.
The American captivity narrative occupies a contested space in American
literature. On the one hand, many American Studies scholars believe that the production
of the captivity narrative marked the beginning of a new “American” literary tradition.
The unique genre eventually evolved to encompass a wide range of fiction and
auto/biography. In each of these distinct, yet related forms the captivity plot revolves
around a familiar power dynamic: a member of a majority group dominates a member of
a minority group; the members of the majority group are the indigenous people and the
members of the minority group are white Euro-Americans. Historically, the Indian
captivity plot resolves with the ransom, escape, or transculturation of the captive. If we
re-map the borders of the captivity narrative genre to include narratives of Indian
captives, such as the experiences of countless natives forced to attend American/Indian
x

boarding schools and the hundreds of thousands of aboriginal peoples relocated to and
surviving on federal Indian reservations, then we open up a discursive field in which to
address the complex parameters surrounding Indian subject formation and its subsequent
representations in American culture.

xi

Preface
My analysis of the captivity narrative‟s historical development demonstrates that
the captivity genre largely represented Euro-American anxiety over the policing of the
nation‟s growing and racially mixing body politic begins in Chapter One, “Breaking the
Chains of American/Indian Captivity: The Transformation of the American/Indian from
Captor to Captive.” Chapter One outlines the theoretical and methodological
development of the entire dissertation. This chapter provides the critical literary review of
the project and outlines the central questions of inquiry for the project.
Chapter Two, Louise Erdrich: Ojibwa Encounters with Colonial Captivity
Discourse,” begins the project‟s individual genre study by focusing on two canonical
captivity narratives. In “Ojibwa Encounters” I analyze the literary influence of Louise
Erdrich on the captivity genre by examining her response to two captivity stories: Mary
White Rowlandson‟s, A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mary White
Rowlandson (1682) and John Tanner‟s, The Falcon: The Captivity and Adventures of
John Tanner (1830). For literary scholars in general, the question about where to situate
the Indian within the Indian captivity narrative these days is a vexing and exciting issue.
On the one hand, critics are increasingly returning to the captivity genre to read for the
sublimated Indian voice, while others are sifting through archival accounts of Indian
captivity that include imprisonment, kidnapping, and the removal of Indian children who
are subsequently institutionalized in government boarding school. In this chapter, Louise
Erdrich‟s mixed responses to captivity discourse point to an important distinction
involving captivity and kinship relations that
xii

shift her categorization of an Ojibwa captivity tale from what she calls “those
inflammatory and cautionary tales” to an Indian autobiography. Chapter Two, thus,
reveals the different kinds of anxieties, resolutions, and tropes of captivity that circulate
and inform the American Indian captivity-writer and -reader‟s perspective of this cultural
phenomenon.
In Chapter Three, “Capture, Erasure, and Repatriation: American Indian
Representation and Spectatorship in Cinema,” I extend an analysis of tribal repatriation
practices to a cultural studies context to help revise and reform undesirable and/or
inaccurate depictions of Indian people and culture. Repatriation, as it is defined in and
through the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act (1990), is the recognition “that
Native American human remains and cultural items are the remnants and products of
living people and that descendants have a cultural and spiritual relationship with the
deceased. Human remains and cultural items can no longer be thought of as merely
„scientific specimens‟ or „collectibles‟” (Trope and Echo-Hawk, Repatriation Reader,
151). Following this landmark victory in Indian law, in this chapter, I deploy a reading of
cinematic representations of Hollywood‟s Indian through the lens of repatriation
discourse as signs of colonial appropriation and violence against Indigenous cultural
sovereignty and autonomy. In particular, I examine issues of gender and sexuality in
American Indian images of the hypermasculine “brave” and the hypersexualized “squaw”
in, primarily, Western films beginning with the iconic John Ford/John Wayne production
of The Searchers (1956) and Jackie Chan‟s comedic kung-fu Western Shanghai Noon
(2003). I end with a repatriation reading of Gary Farmer‟s roles in Jim Jarmusch‟s Dead
xiii

Man (1990) and Sherman Alexie‟s Smoke Signals (1998). Like the captivity narrative in
literary studies, the Western in film studies is the bedrock for many representations of
Indian life and people. On the eve of the 50
th
Anniversary of The Searchers, when
magazines like the December

2005 issue of Cowboys and Indians are lauding the critical achievement of Ford, Wayne,
and the film by paying a tribute to its production and release, it seems fitting that the
voices that were left out then and now should be given a space to speak. Thus, in the
chapter‟s conclusion, I contend that film is an essential component of Native American
culture and history, just as much for some Indian people as birdsinging and basket
making; therefore, it must also be repatriated when it is co-opted and/or misused.
From Captors to Captives ends with an examination of the trope of Indian
identity formation in a study of women‟s popular romance novels that feature American
Indian love stories. The fourth chapter, “Captivity‟s Narrative Desire: Re-Forming the
Miscegenous Primal Scene in the American/Indian Romance,” explores the extent to
which romance narratives inform tribal and individual formations of American/Indian
identity. Understanding the appeal and for popular American Indian love stories requires
the application of a diverse set of cultural, national, racial and political reading strategies.
One that takes into account the differences between mainstream US culture, history, and
identity politics with those of the heterogeneous cultural, national, and personal politics
of American Indians. My central inquiry in the chapter focuses on the development of the
American Indian love story through a reading of canonical and popular women‟s
xiv

romance stories. My analysis moves from a broad national focus that emerged in the late
nineteenth century with the publication of the first dime novel and the socially-
conscientious sentimental novel into the twentieth century production of Native
American love stories published for the first time by Native women. My study
interrogates novels written by non-Native and Native American authors, although

in every aspect of my reading I privilege and focus on the Native American as subject,
agent, and speaker within the primary and secondary literature. An integral part of my
analysis charts the representation of the American Indian woman in the novels as the
figure of the Native woman moves from a point of erasure in the early dime and
sentimental novels to a marginalized figure carving out a space for agency and existence
in the early twentieth century towards a final affirmation and solidarity of Native/female
presence at the century‟s end. Because the genre is dominated historically by plot lines
that favor the dominant cultural desire to romanticize and hyper-sexualize Indian culture
and people, by analyzing Indian responses to and production of this form, I demonstrate
the need to take into account the American Indian voice and worldview as it is deployed
in this immensely popular genre by Native writers and critics.
From Captors to Captives is an inherently multidisciplinary project that carefully
deploys and applies a mixed methods approach to the study of literature, film, and
popular culture in the fields of Native and American Studies. The dissertation treats
xv

American Indians as contemporary cultural readers and cultural producers. Thus, the
critical aim in the dissertation is to encourage future discussions and work between the
intersections of American and Native Studies in the area of popular American culture.

1

Chapter 1

Breaking the Chains of American/Indian Captivity: The
Transformation of the American/Indian from Captor to Captive

Introduction: Forging the Chains of Indian Captivity
The central paradox of the American captivity narrative genre is that the
indigenous captors of early American settlers
1
—the Indians—eventually become the
colonized captives of the United States of America. This paradox is easily resolved,
however, if we simply do not consider the publication of Mary White Rowlandson‟s
narrative as the “birth” of what some American Studies scholars contend is the
“cornerstone” of American Literature: the American captivity narrative. The captivity
tradition indeed began well before Rowlandson, but this little known fact is disavowed in
order to preserve another American myth founded on the misrepresentation of the nubile
archetypal Indian princess, Pocahontas.
2
It is well known in American Indian Studies that
Pocahontas was held hostage in Jamestown for three years prior to her encounter and
supposed “rescue” of John Smith. However, the pre-history of white capture of
indigenous people is repressed in favor of a more palatable imperial fiction of friendly
and welcoming natives who kindly taught the starving soul-searching Puritans how to
survive in the New World. Such fictions, Lisa Cacho compellingly argues, operate as
“disciplinary fictions,” which are a “representational strategy for telling stories of white
suffering … in which race and place are central markers for white victimization.”
3

Cacho‟s work helps me articulate the need for American Indian people to no longer
dismiss or hold the American captivity narrative in contempt. Instead Native Studies‟
2

authors and scholars must disrupt the foundation of these fictions by raising the
indigenous voices held hostage in past narratives about the present state of Indian
captivity. In other words, we need to “break the discursive chains” of the
American/Indian captivity narrative that reifies, silences, and represses the complex
historical, racial, and sexual formation of Native/American identities in literature.
From Captors to Captives examines American/Indian strategies of liberation from
the real and representational restraints of the captivity narrative genre. From Captors to
Captives is a project that interrogates the place of American/Indian captivity narratives
within the field of American Studies and American Indian literature beginning with an
analysis of what it means to be both “American” and/or “Indian.” Throughout the
dissertation, I deploy a solidus to denote this complex matrix of identity constructed in
captivity literature. The subject formation created in response to the solidus varies
according to time, place, nation, and historical conditions of colonialism in operation.
The cultural differences and similarities that divide yet irrevocably join these two
categories is precisely the terrain that the captivity literature traverses as a genre
renowned for its violent, graphic, sensationalistic, and transformative plots in American
literature. Understanding the transformation of American/Indian captors into captives is
an urgent project in this dissertation because American/Indian cultural identity remains a
prisoner to the American government and the larger American cultural imagination. As
long as the fictions of wild Indians capturing white women and children circulate in
national culture in literature and film, the captivity narrative genre will privilege the
dominant culture and exclude, misrepresent, and devalue the lived and complex
captivities of contemporary American Indians.
3

Captivity’s Facts and Fictions
The American captivity narrative occupies a contested space in American
literature. On the one hand, many American Literature scholars believe that the
production of the captivity narrative marked the beginning of a new original “American”
literary tradition. The so-called “birth” of the American colonial captivity narrative with
the publication of Mary White Rowlandson‟s The Sovereignty and Goodness of God
(1682) fulfilled this unique desire with the production of a “captivity narrative” that
features the harrowing experiences of a white captive held hostage by indigenous
“savage” captors. The new genre eventually evolved to encompass a wide range of
diverse narrative styles of fiction and auto/biography.
4
In each of these distinct, yet
related forms the captivity plot revolves around a familiar power dynamic: a member of a
majority group dominates a member of a minority group. In the unique case of the early
American captivity narrative, this equation is reversed from what we might initially
imagine in the twenty-first century: the members of the majority group are the indigenous
people and the members of the minority group are white Euro-Americans.
5
To quantify
the dynamic, in Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America
(2001), Daniel Richter estimates the number of indigenous Americans living east of the
Mississippi River from 1492 to the 1700s at over 2 million Natives while European
colonists numbered roughly a quarter million living, primarily, along the Atlantic
Seaboard. Due to the onslaught of diseases brought to America by the settlers, the Native
American population suffered an extreme decline as the influx of colonists grew between
4

1492 and 1700. “By 1750,” Richter explains, “the population balance had shifted
decisively, with Europeans and their African workforce exploding to nearly 1.25 million
and the Native population shrinking to probably less than 250,000” (7).
6
Not surprisingly,
the peak of captivity narrative production parallels the trend in Native American
population decline; as Euro-American colonization expanded westward, captivity
narratives proliferated, all the while the Native population declined. In the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, despite the reduced rates of an actual Indian captivity, the genre
evolved into early American texts as a plot device for the narrative drive, as a literary rite
of passage for the hero/ine in works by early American novelists. In both fictional and in
actual captive accounts, the captivity plot resolves with the ransom, escape, or
transculturation of the captive. Current research in the field now takes into consideration
the counter-captivity narratives narrated by Native American experiences at boarding
schools, forced removals to Reservations, and narratives of “confinement,” such as
prisoners during US/Indian conflicts.
7

Literary analysis of the captivity narrative shows that the plot resolution in one of
these forms generally leads to a consciousness-raising of the former captive.
8
In essence,
the traumatic experience transforms the captive, turning him or her into a double agent: at
once the representation of civilization restored and the new “native” informant inside and
outside the text. The captive‟s newfound duality invites many scholars to perform
“liminal” critiques of the genre, which demonstrate the effects of the captive‟s ability to
contrast cultural, racial, and/or gender difference in the world.
9
This line of inquiry
overwhelmingly privileges the experience of whiteness as the most desirable subject-
position of the narrative.
5

In the colonial American captivity narrative tradition, the racial category of
whiteness
10
gives the captive agency to reproduce his/her captivity in the form of a
narrative. Upon the former captive‟s release, ransom, or escape the cultural and colonial
privilege of whiteness transforms the captive from a powerless victim of cross-cultural
contact into an active agent who then discursively reconstructs the terms and conditions
of Indian captivity. The narrative reproduction of captivity, thus, inverts the power
structure in the act of writing the white captivity narrative. The writing gives the former
captive control over the Indian as subject of and subject to white discourse. Hence, the
Indians—the captors—eventually become the captives to white cultural and social
structures of power and knowledge, which historically indigenous people had little or no
access.
11

Literary analyses of the early colonial American captivity narratives demonstrate
that the restoration of the white captive to white culture is essential for the preservation of
neo-American civilization. Richard Slotkin (1974) writes that the captivity narrative
represents in miniature an “archetype” of the entire Puritan drama of redemption.
Christopher Castiglia (1996), Annette Kolodny (1975 and 1984), June Namias (1993),
and Rachel Blevins Faery (1990) further this notion by reading the rescue of (mainly)
white female captives as a metaphorical maintenance of the national body politic. In other
words, the threat of physical Indian captivity, Sacvan Bercovitch (1972) argues,
“typified” the symbolic (read, biblical) captivity of the entire Puritan enterprise: the
captivity of the soul to the flesh and/or of the bondage of the Puritan self to Old World
ideology and tyranny.
12
The “arche-typlogy” that Slotkin and Bercovitch discuss rests on
the formulaic capture and subjugation of a white woman in the wilderness; the dwelling
6

place, the infamous Puritan ministers, Increase and Cotton Mather, claimed of Satan and
his “demonic offspring”, the Indians. The capture and perceived loss of early American
mothers, daughters and sisters—the literal culture bearers of the New Puritan Israel—
reminded colonists of another matrilineal rupture with the “mother” country. Andrew Del
Banco‟s The Puritan Ordeal explains that the Puritans experienced a psychosocial
“melancholy” in severing ties with England. The mourning of this loss, Del Banco
continues, transfers into an American desire for constant “rebirth”, which he insightfully
reminds us is inherently symptomatic of an original “loss of identity” (248). Such dire
cultural identity crises inevitably infused the early captivity narratives with the need to
continuously reinforce a belief in white racial superiority and Euro-American
colonial/national impermeability.
While these non-Indian scholars of the field severely critique the imperialist
motivations behind such skewed and damning representations of Indian captors, Native
authors and scholars still harbor deep resentment of this arguably “archetypal genre” of
American literature because the popular and canonical narratives generally feature the
most horrific portrayal of Indian people and culture without historicizing the
circumstances that generated the capture of white captives in the first place. Recent
analysis shows that in many of the early American captivity narratives white captivity
occurs as a result of white encroachment on Indian lands, white violation of Indian
treaties, and Indian retaliation for violence committed by a member of the white
community in Indian country. The Indian captor‟s motives for the practice of captivity,
however, are usually excluded from the white captivity narratives when in fact as Pauline
Strong Turner‟s anthropological study shows the practice of Indian captivity has a long
7

and complex history among North American Eastern Woodland tribes. Pauline Strong
Turner‟s Captive Selves, Captivating Others explains the complex practice and history of
captivity in Indigenous American cultures and in colonial (con) quests. For many North
American Eastern Indian tribes, captivity was a common practice. She distinguishes
between two forms of indigenous practices of captivity by delineating what she calls a
“poetics and politics of reciprocity versus incorporation” (77).
Throughout its literary metamorphosis and despite ample evidence of indigenous
captivity
13
before and contemporaneously with Mary Rowlandson, the “American”
captivity narrative genre does not include in its category the literature written by
American Indians as a result of European contact and colonization. The exclusion of
Indian experiences as past and present captives of the U.S., however, is precisely the
domain of current critical and creative work by many Native authors and scholars. The
recent work of Philip Deloria is an exception to Maddox‟s claim that a consideration of
Indian “presence” in the shaping of “American mythology” is not “taken very seriously.”
Deloria‟s work which historicizes and contextualizes American Indian presence and
participation in American culture provides a strong foundation for to criticize the fictional
facts of America‟s legacy of conquest and freedom.
14
Thus, as the captivity narrative
became recognized as an entirely original American literary form, it became ever-present
in future literary works.
James Fennimore Cooper mythologized white/Indian relations as a stock plot of
his male adventure stories while female authors, Susanna Rowson, Catharine Sedgwick,
and Lydia Maria Childs further fictionalized the genre and embedded it in the emerging
female adventure story or captivity romance. While early colonial-American captivity
8

narratives cultivated and propagated the fictions of these beliefs, later manifestations of
captivity plots in frontier romances and westerns challenged and complicated the
development of the genre and of the nation. Lucy Maddox‟s Removals (1991) traces the
relationship between nineteenth century American Indian policy and the proliferation of
American literature to reveal the discursive gaps between literature and the social forces
that engendered its production. Maddox‟s work painstakingly reveals that the social
forces that influenced the nineteenth-century renaissance of American Literature had a
vested interest in maintaining the mythology of America‟s colonial history. She critiques
the inherent contradictions in the narration of the rise of American literature alongside the
rise of the American nation. She borrows the same structuring device that Mary
Rowlandson uses in her narrative to articulate the trajectory of her captivity through
vignettes of “removals.”
15
Maddox, however, deploys the term “removals” in opposition
to Rowlandson as a critique of the historical and social fictions that transformed the
Indian captor into the Indian captive in the nineteenth-century. In her conclusion, she
warily writes, “We have experimented with identifying the master narratives of the
nineteenth-century as attempts to give discursive authority to the myths of patriarchy, of
imperialism, of white racism. And yet, we still haven‟t taken very seriously the presence
of the Indians as a crucial factor in shaping any of these forms of American mythology”
(178). This project intends to take Maddox‟s insight “very seriously” and carefully
consider the “presence of the Indians” as cultural shapers of “American mythology.”
During the past one hundred years American Indians have made enormous strides
to overcome the centuries of oppression they endured with the formation of the US
nation. The histories of individual and tribal colonization are as diverse in the US as are
9

the nation‟s regions, cultures, and Native people; and, yet, for many Native Americans,
these stories differ only in the details and settings. All Native Americans share the history
of Euro-American settler colonialism, forced removal to reservations and later to
government-run boarding schools; and, in the twentieth century, tribes experienced the
end of conquest by sword and the beginning of systematic oppression through the
bureaucracy of the US government trustee relationship. The relationship between the US
and Indian tribes is forever bound in these struggles. However, thanks to the activism and
legal battles fought in the 1960s and 1970s Civil Rights Movement, American Indians
have renewed their sovereign right to negotiate treaties, compacts, and other political
resolutions with the federal government. The recognition of tribal sovereignty reinforced
many tribes‟ political desire to pursue economic, educational, and cultural forms of self-
determination. Nowhere in the US are these strides more evident than in several
California Native American communities; in particular, the legal implementation and
recognition of the Indian Self-Determination Act provided the opportunity for many
smaller California Indian tribes to create a niche market in the gaming industry beginning
in the 1980s. The onset of Indian gaming in California and elsewhere in the US ushered
in a new era of entrepreneurialism in Indian Country that has greatly assisted Native
people in developing tribal lands from a state of dependency upon neo-colonial
“handouts” from the federal government into a state of self-governance that includes
economic, political, cultural, and social autonomy.
Understanding the way in which national issues about American Indian political,
cultural, and economic development at a local, tribal and community level is an essential
component of my inquires. In other words, the critical questions we ask in academia must
10

provide an effective and measurable community outcome. While this task is often
difficult when focusing on literature and representational issues, my research develops
out of the understanding that theory is only as useful as its translation into action—in
many instances, the resulting action is the creation of a broader understanding and
consciousness-raising about one‟s interpellation by and ability to overcome oppressive
ideologies. In other words: my goal in producing this study at every level is to make
accessible an understanding of the way in which Native American subject-formation is
created vis-à-vis mainstream popular narratives by exploring the way in which Native
people themselves respond to and/or revise these structures.
While more and more Native Studies work calls for on-the-ground grassroots
action in providing a tangible outcome for research that can be utilized by Native
Americans, the question about what intellectual work is “useful” begins to play out along
disciplinary lines. Today, work produced in the field of legal studies, sociology, public
health, education, and business are privileged, while traditional disciplines such as
English and history are viewed as having little relevance to the daily lives of Native
peoples. Throw into the mix the divisive issue of studying “popular” cultural forms, such
as women‟s romance novels and western films, the eyebrows are raised even higher and I
am met with more skepticism about the efficacy of my study. In her work, So You Want
to Write About American Indians? A Guide for Scholars, Writers and Students (2005)
Devon Mehuseah calls for the intellectual work itself to be located within a specific
Indian community—steeped in the context of the individual Native culture, history, and
traditions—in order for it to be purposeful. To this end, my project charts the intimate
psycho-social impact of popular narratives that quite literally capture the “heart and
11

mind” of the American nation to normalize atavistic, unrealistic, and inappropriate
representations of Native Americans. Understanding the way that narrative, fantasy, and
the image form the complex matrix of human desire is critical to a healthy subjectivity.
Without desire, there is no passion, no art, no culture, and no community. There is no
greater community service, than to produce a study that transforms the social consumer
conscious of the Native American community from one of violence and victimization by
the word and the image to one armed with literary tools to work through and reconcile
these cultural differences to produce a new form of satisfaction and pleasure.
To this end, the intellectual pursuits of American Indian people since N. Scott
Momaday won the coveted Noble Peace Prize in Literature in 1968 have continued to
proliferate and reveal an Indian presence intervening in a variety of social, historical, and
literary critical studies. Exiled in the Land of the Free: Democracy, Indian Nations and
the U.S. Constitution, Eds. Oren Lyons, Vine Deloria Jr., et al. (1992) provides an
historical and legal critique of the influence of Northeastern tribal political structures on
the development of the US Constitution. Other Destinies: Understanding the American
Indian Novel, by Louis Owens (1992), is a key literary study of the Native American
novel essential to this project. In his analysis of canonical Native American writers,
Owens argues that the aim of the Native author is to escape the prescribed plots and
destructive narrative ends produced by the colonizer. In his follow up study, Mixedblood
Messages: Literature, Film, Family, Place (1998), Owens examines the place of the
“mixedblood” in Native literature. For Owens, the place of the racially mixed Native
protagonist in colonial literature like the captivity narrative and its variants ensured a
tragic fate of the character. Owens argues, however, that Native American literature
12

challenges the national discourse by revising the narrative trope of the “vanishing Indian”
to instead rewrite the script based on what Gerald Vizenor calls a narrative of
“survivance,” which insists on a Native presence despite historical erasure and
occlusion.
16

The critical debates and studies of tribal experience are diverse and, often,
divisive in particular when Native American Studies and captivity narrative studies meet.
However, the majority of Native American scholars agree that attention to tribal
specificity, cultural practices, and worldviews is the key to interpreting and facilitating an
understanding of tribal issues presented in the narratives. In her work in the field of
captivity studies, Kathryn Derounian-Stodola, a non-Native scholar, meticulously charts
the publishing history of the area as its field of study has gained popularity in the past
twenty years. In The War in Words: Reading the Dakota Conflict through the Captivity
Literature (2009), a monograph that records literary and historical accounts from both
American/Indian captivity sources to provide a more balanced view of the Dakota
Conflict of 1862 which resulted in the largest mass execution (of 38 Indians) in US
history, Stodola cites the proliferation of the field from 1997-2007 in which over thirty
books in the field were published. She confirms that most the book-length studies “focus
on Indian captivity narratives and on the experiences of non-Native hostages” (48);
however, more recent studies expand what Stodola calls the “elastic” boundaries of the
genre to include a focus on “„alternative‟ captivity” about African Americans and
Catholic novitiates (50).
17

Indeed, Indian captivity narratives influence and inform a wide variety of
historical and literary research. In her work on the British novel, Nancy Armstrong‟s
13

article, Captivity and Cultural Capital in the English Novel (1998), traces the rise of the
British novel of seduction by theorizing that the “American captivity narrative provided
the principle continuity consolidating Samuel Richardson, Jane Austen, and Charlotte
Bronte as a single literary tradition” (375). Her analysis follows up the critical link that
began in her collaborative publication with Leonard Tennenhouse of Imaginary Puritans
in 1992. Their work provided the missing link, if you will, to connecting “Indian
captivity narratives and captivation in seduction novels” between imperial and colonial
literary milieus. Armstrong‟s latter work recuperates and claims the Indian captivity
narrative as alternately a “colonial” and a “diasporic” paradigm that British writers
grafted narratives “for the heroines‟ identity from nationality and religion into class and
sexual conduct” (374:376). While Armstrong work is theoretically provocative for
providing such a critical missing link between colonial and imperial literary enterprises,
her theorization is problematic in its sublimation of racial distinctions that led to her
“discovery.” In essence, her language of recuperation, though unintentional I am sure,
evokes for the Native reader/critic, familiar red flags of warning in which a Native
American cultural artifact, the captivity narrative, is removed from its indigenous setting
for the benefit and pleasure of the colonizer. Armstrong‟s analysis is compelling to me
for many reasons; however, my focus on the Indian captivity narrative is to work against
such models of colonial exportation and instead to “repatriate” and situate the Indian
captivity narrative within an indigenous context.
Rachel Blevins Faery‟s Cartographies of Desire: Captivity, Race, and Sex in the
Shaping of the American Nation (1999) provides a critical and sustained reading of the
historical evolution and deployment of the popular images that American Indian captivity
14

narratives evoke in the cultural imaginary about two early female captives: Mary
Rowlandson and Pocahontas. Although each of Faery‟s subjects have ties to England,
Rowlandson as an expatriate and Pocahontas as immigrant via her death and burial at
Gravesend, Faery‟s work, unlike Armstrong‟s, maintains a critical American focus. By
tracing the cultural evocations of these two infamous female captives, Faery‟s analysis
situates Rowlandson and Pocahontas within a cultural economy and logic of captivity that
interrogates the sexualization of each subject according to US national anxieties, desires,
threats, and definitions of its body politic.
Christopher Castiglia‟s Bound and Determined: Captivity, Culture Crossing and
White Womanhood from Mary Rowlandson to Patty Hearst (1996) is also an important
study to this dissertation. Castiglia‟s account of Mary Rowlandson‟s narrative and
captivity literature in general is one of the first book-length studies I read in the field. His
analysis of the empowerment of the rescued or redeemed captive through the act of
writing her captivity account made me hunger to read similar accounts by Native
American women. Unfortunately for me, such a desire was not to be met by Castiglia or
many other critical scholars. Castiglia like Stodola and other leading scholars in the
captivity studies field acknowledge the need for further study of tribal accounts of
captivity in particular as “American culture continues to engage with factual and fictional
captivity and as Native writers and critics play an increasing role in captivity narrative
scholarship” the field will continue to stretch its “elastic” disciplinary borders.
18

In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, author and critic,
Toni Morrison discusses the “Africanist presence” in American literature. She writes,
“These speculations have led me to wonder whether the major and championed
15

characteristics of our national literature—individualism, masculinity, social engagement
versus historical isolation; acute and ambiguous moral problematics; the thematics of
innocence coupled with an obsession of figurations of death and hell—are in fact not
responses to a dark, abiding, signing Africanist presence” (5). She goes on to explain that
“Just as the formation of the nation necessitated coded language and purposeful
restriction to deal with the racial disingenuousness and moral frailty at its heart, so too
did the literature, whose founding characteristics extend into the twentieth century,
reproduce the necessity for codes and restrictions. Through significant and underscored
omissions, startling contradictions, heavily nuanced conflicts, through the way writers
peopled their work with the signs and bodies of this presence—one can see that a real or
fabricated Africanist presence was crucial to their sense of Americanness. And it shows”
(6). I want to assert here that likewise, the “Indianist presence” was equally crucial to
definitions of American literature, particularly in the captivity narrative, to definitions of
the American nation, and to definitions of the American Indian within its borders.
Sherman Alexie, the renowned Spokane/ Coeur D‟Alene author and critic, writes that,
ultimately, Indian people (and non-Indians alike) must learn to escape the “reservation”
of the mind. This dissertation is precisely an attempt to put this practice into action. From
Captors to Captives aims to reassert the Indianist presence in American literature, to
create theoretical lines of escape from the fictional facts of the captivity narrative
tradition and to deterritorialize representations of American Indians in American cultural
narratives.

16

Deterritorialization and the Practice of Renegade Reading

From Captors to Captives is an inherently multidisciplinary project that deploys
and applies a “mixed” methods approach to the study of literature, film, and popular
culture in the fields of Native and American Studies. I theorize my methods in terms of
“mixing” the theories in both fields in order to put them in dialogue not in competition
with one another in an attempt to discursively produce a theoretical study of fictional and
actual Indian captivity narratives that reflect the contemporary reality and identity of
many mixedblood Indian people. In the field of Native Studies, the politics of citation are
inherently linked to the politics of identity. A central component of my mixed-methods
approach includes a discussion of the complexity of Indianness embodied, quite literally,
by individuals claiming Indian ancestry. To be Indian one must demonstrate lineage
through the recognition of blood degree, which traces one‟s ancestry back to an original
and recognizable source of Indian blood.
19
The logic behind the maintenance of federal
blood quantum regulations for me is simple: the US government defined, and I contend,
captured the Indian from the inside out by socially grafting Indian identity to essential
characteristics of physiology that could theoretically “breed” out the Indian through
intermarriage with Euro Americans.
20

The presence of mixedblood American Indians today counters this “civilizing
plan;” since the literature of many mixedblood Indians asserts, recovers, and attempts to
maintain tribal ties at all cost. Therefore, much of my approach includes an examination
of the mixed up politics of identity that American Indians must negotiate via this matrix
of Indianness as it is defined through federal blood quantum regulations, various tribal
enrollment policies,
21
and the ever-powerful domain of popular culture. I base much of
17

my methodology on the critical work of the late Louis Owens (Choctaw-Cherokee-Irish),
whose provocative approach to the study of the American Indian novel invites a critique
of many seemingly binary relationships in narratives of Indian captivity and identity,
such as Indian vs. white, frontier vs. territory, tribal vs. individual, and pureblood vs.
mixedblood.
The current domain of American Indian literature and criticism, Owens argues, is
staked out like the territory that was once called the “American west” (that ever-changing
“frontier” that Frederick Jackson Turner defined as the space between civilization and the
wilderness). In the field of Native American Studies, it is important to distinguish
between a “frontier” and a “territory.” According to Owens, a territory, like the “West,”
is a landscape that has recognizable borders; whereas the frontier, far from being the
dividing line between civilization and savagery, represents uncharted and unmarked
terrain. For Owens, the frontier is an unmapped discursive space to imagine new
possibilities for representing Indian identity. I find Owens distinction between the two
terms theoretically useful because it gives me another layer to analyze the analogous
relationship between the designation of Indian identity based on blood quantum and the
designation of Indian people to reservations, which were once always established beyond
the boundaries of civilization.
From Captors to Captives: American Indian Responses to Popular American
Narrative Forms examines the complex relationship between American Indian literary
and cinematic productions in response to three popular American narratives: the captivity
narrative, the western film, and woman‟s popular romance novels. From Captors to
Captives addresses the paradox central to these genres: how the Indian captors
18

eventually become captives both literally as colonial subjects of the US and figuratively
as subjects in genres that construct Native identity without agency, voice, or culturally-
specific representations of diverse tribal life. I analyze the cultural work of contemporary
Native American writers and filmmakers that challenge and re-conceptualize
representations of American Indians within these literary forms. My study involves the
careful teasing out of inter-textual and inter-generic citations of Indian people as the
noble savages or the tragic “braves” or “squaws.” “To get to the genesis of Native
America serotypes,” Jacqueline Kilpatrick writes, “requires investigating the artistic
language that has propagated them. Human consciousness and art, including the arts of
literature and by extension cinema, do not result from or even come into direct contact
with the real world but rather represent its languages and discourses” (Celluloid Indians:
Native Americans and Film, 1999).
22
The origins of the “bloodthirsty savage” and the
“noble squaw,” Kilpatrick notes, originate in the Indian captivity narrative.

Although the actual words stupid or dumb are seldom seen in descriptions
of Natives—perhaps because fighting a stupid enemy or having a dumb
sidekick is not particularly flattering—Native peoples have been firmly
placed in the lower echelons of intelligence by many Euro-American
since first contact was made. Benevolent terms such as “innocent,”
“primitive,” or “unsaved” indicate a lesser intelligence, and the more
antagonistic descriptors certainly point to comparative dimness. For
instance, while the word stupid does not imply lack of cleanliness, the
word dirty does imply stupidity, and we are all familiar with the terms
dirty redskin, filthy heathen, and so forth. (xvii)

My research reveals that these stereotypes inform a critical politics of decolonization
within contemporary Native American fiction and film in which Native American
cultural producers and consumers are actively aware of the stereotype and its power to
19

negatively impact psychological and social development because these stereotypes form
conflicting normative bedrock in American culture that Native Americans continuously
encounter. From Captors to Captives, therefore, moves beyond conversations of
resistance, and instead asks in what ways are Native Americans are made complicit in the
consumption of these genres, and how does this complicity function as an impetus in
Native Studies to change the structures of representation that continuously market these
narratives to mainstream audiences and Natives alike?
The dissertation seeks to move debates about popular narrative forms away from
the historically Euro-American center towards one that recognizes a shared space with
indigenous narratives. Such a critical move is essential to providing a foundation to
bridge theory and practice as well as to benefit Native American communities in the
twenty-first century. The central core of my dissertation thus provides a contemporary
lens through which to view Native Americans as active cultural producers, consumers,
and critics working in, working through, and working with mainstream narrative
structures to decolonize American Indians.
The representation of Indianness, especially in captivity narratives, obscures the
above detailed description of Indian identity politics. If we re-map the borders of the
captivity narrative genre to include narratives of Indian captives, then we will open up a
discursive field in which to address the complex parameters surrounding Indian subject
formation. By recuperating the captivity narrative as an evolving and not merely a
recycled genre, this project will call attention to Indian people as (neo) colonial subjects
actively seeking what Gilles Deleuze calls a “deterritorialization”
23
of the self. For
Deleuze like Owens, deterritorialization signals a constant shifting of the frontier of
20

desire, identity, subjectivity, and fantasy in order to find a way out of a given
representation. In another context, theorist Rosi Braidotti deploys the term as part of her
feminist theory of “nomadism” or the “simultaneous occurrence of axes of
differentiation” (3). She finds that deterritorialization “entails a total dissolution of the
notion of a center and consequently of originary sites or authentic identities of any kind”
(5). For a majority of the Indian people in this country, the original sites of “authentic”
tribal identity often no longer exist much like the waning number of fullblood Indians.
Colonial contact and colonization effectively marred many physical (and biological)
24

Indian sites of origin; however the work of contemporary Indian authors recovers
ancestral terrain through various tribal practices of storytelling. Owens discusses this
process of recovery or the Indian escape from given representations in terms of
reimagining the familiar tropes of the American Indian like Pocahontas or Squanto as a
“cultural breaker” instead of as a “cultural broker.” He urges us to see the American
Indian as a “cultural breaker, break-dancing trickster-fashion through all signs, fracturing
the self-reflexive mirror of the dominant center, deconstructing rigid borders, slipping
between the seams, embodying contradictions, and contradancing across every boundary”
(Mixedblood Messages, 41).
25

From Captive to Captor makes a case for Indian people to deterritorialize the
Indian self, to declare sovereignty over Indian subjectivity, and to avow Indian desire and
imagination through the theory and practice of renegade reading. A renegade by
definition is a traitor or a turncoat. In this dissertation, I turn the definition of renegade
back on itself to ask: if a renegade is a traitor to what or whom is s/he betraying? One‟s
nation, culture, race? What if you belong to two or three nations? I use the term renegade
21

to suggest an oppositional strategy for reading and imagining representations of
Indianness that I contend are bound in actual/ fictional and discursive/representational
captivity narratives. A renegade Indian in Hollywood westerns always evoked a threat or
a danger because a renegade Indian is “off the rez”—uncontained and wild. Far from
being derogatory or merely belligerent, I graft a new meaning to the word to signify
decolonization, deconstruction, and deterritorialization. Renegade readers and writers are
not traitors; they are merely trading in the old politics for something new and
transformative. Renegade readers and writers recognize the multiple possibilities for
liberation from the “reservation” of the mind; they are word warriors and visionaries
imagining new cultural codes, exchanges, and identities. I use the “renegade” with the
same political intention that Owens uses “cultural breakers,” as Braidotti uses “nomads,”
and as Delueze would use someone who “deterritorializes” the self: in an active and
discursive opposition to white, male, heterosexist definitions of normative subjectivity.
In the highly influential and compelling work to develop a critical understanding
of Native American subject and cultural formation in their work on literary nationalism,
Jace Weaver, Craig Womack, and Robert Warrior defer to the work of Acoma poet,
Simon Ortiz. In American Indian Literary Nationalism (2005), these Native American
scholars/writers commemorate a speech Ortiz gave at a 1981 MELUS conference and
they deploy the strategies, methods, and indigenous consciousness that he outlines to
develop more rooted analyses of what American Indian literary nationalism might look
like as a critical literary practice. In his address to MELUS reprinted in their book Ortiz
states: “Throughout the difficult experience of colonization to the present, Indian women
and men have struggled to create meaning for their lives in very definite and systematic
22

ways. The ways or methods have been important, but they are important only because of
the reason for the struggle. And it is that reason—the struggle against colonialism—
which has given substance to what is authentic” (256). Ortiz goes on to explain that the
notion of cultural authenticity, or an authenticity in relationship to Native American
traditions, ceremonies, and identities is one of adaptation and transformation, which
Weaver, Warrior, and Womack refuse to delineate as hybrid.
Weaver and his coauthors oppose applying a “hybrid” label to Native American
cultural transformations because they see it as a postcolonial trap that tends to once again
appropriate indigeneity at the expense of the indigenous being. Weaver explains,
“Certainly one cannot deny the historical reality of cultural change…. Since 1492,
hybridity has been an attribute of both „races,‟ Native and Amer-European. Its positive
aspects, however, are often presented as unidirectional. For Europeans or Amer-
Europeans to hybridize with Natives is to become more American, more indigenized. For
Natives, it seems, it is to become less Native” (28). The critical move to decolonize
theories of hybridity is to understand instead that the history of Native American
“survivance,” to use Gerald Vizenor‟s term, is based instead on Ortiz‟s articulation of
Native ability to transform colonial influences and to adapt those experiences into their
own particular Indian worldview, to make them meaningful in a Native context and to
make them useful to the Native community is a “celebration of the … Indian struggle for
liberation.” Ortiz goes on to explain that the end result is a production that is:
[N]ow Indian because of the creative development that the native people
applied to them. Present-day Native American or Indian literature is
evidence of this in the very same way. And because in every case where
European culture was cast upon Indian people of this nation there was a
similar creative response and development, it can be observed that this
23

was the primary element of a nationalistic impulse to make use of foreign
ritual, ideas, and material in their own—Indian—terms. Today‟s writing
by Indian authors is a continuation of that elemental impulse. (254)

This tradition of transformation is a positive response to Audre Lourde‟s familiar and
famous impasse for a feminist critique of patriarchy: the master‟s tools will never
dismantle the master‟s house. Instead, the tools must be reinvented.
Ortiz, Weaver, Womack, and Warrior among others, suggest that indeed, in
American Indian communities one of the key tenets to indigenous survivance has been
the transformation of the master‟s tools to suit the needs, desires, and creative impulses of
Native American people in their struggles to resist colonization. Yet, Lorde‟s critique is
particularly striking in discussing the development of this theory or consciousness of
Indigenous Literary Nationalism precisely because the field is dominated by male voices
and the production of analyses of literature written primarily by Native men. Weaver,
Womack, and Warrior‟s text pays homage to Simon Ortiz, and then each chapter
subsequently explains their own intellectual journeys to articulate an Indian literary
nationalist position. Weaver‟s chapter deconstructs the work of Elvira Pulitano and mans
his defense of literary nationalism as a pluralistic not separatist critique of Native literary
production by prominent Native male writers such as N. Scott Momaday, Geary Hobson,
Thomas King, and his coauthor, Craig Womack. Womack deploys a similar critique
against Pulitano and shores up his argument by literally citing the ways in which his work
actually refutes Pulitano‟s criticism. Finally, Warrior‟s contribution to the text is his
personal memories of his intellectual development as a student of Edward Said, whose
critical insights and examinations of postcolonial discourse fed into Warrior‟s thinking
24

about the formation of literary nationalisms, secular criticism, and depleting notions of
hybridity. While I find the text extremely engaging and useful to my work in profound
ways, as a Native female scholar, I do also find the text heavily gendered in terms of its
all male-centered critiques and its dissemination of knowledge. Although Lisa Brooks is
also a contributor to the book; her chapter is the “Afterword” following the treatise of
the “Three W‟s” in a much shorter chapter that I think contributed just as much as the
other three men to the text‟s overall argument. By assigning her essay to the Afterword, it
appears that her inclusion may have been an editor‟s “Afterthought,” to provide a
semblance of gender balance to the text‟s heavily masculine proselytizing. The absence
of a more balanced gender critique in the text either by more equal representations of
Native male and female critics or by the inclusivity of analyses of Native American
women‟s literary contribution to the formation of American Indian literary nationalism is
difficult to understand when there are literary productions by Native American women
that contribute to and articulate similar “nationalistic impulses.” For instance, Louise
Erdrich‟s work in creating the fictional family saga of Northern Ojibwas in her
imaginative landscape of Argus, North Dakota rivals the literary landscape of Faulkner‟s
Yoknapatawapha County as do the novels by Paula Gunn Allen, Diane Glancy, and
Leanne Howe. While my intention is not to diminish the critical importance or
political/intellectual necessity to develop theories around Native American literary
nationalism by pointing out the gender imbalance of Weaver, Womack, and Warrior‟s
text, I want to contribute to the project by discussing issues that are strikingly absent:
namely, the place of women in this newly formed nationalism. Lisa Brooks‟ contribution
to their analysis of Leslie Silko‟s Garden in the Dunes provides an excellent example of
25

the way in which Native American female scholars can utilize the stories produced by
Native women to contribute to this intellectual enterprise.

Deterritorializing the Personal: The Intellectual History of the Project
My project spans across approximately five hundred years of American history. In
order to contain the scope and delimit the focus of my work, I use analyses already
published about the history of the captivity narrative and its evolution into the American
western and women‟s frontier romance
26
as a springboard to discuss the captivity
narrative‟s most recent form in Indian poetry and prose and in contemporary popular
fiction and film. Throughout my explication of the history, evolution, and current
manifestation of this genre, I interrogate the representational constraints of and the
possibilities to discursively transform Indian subjectivity. In this project, I ask, what
“lines of escape” are available to Indian people? How will a deterritorialization of Indian
identity resist new definitions of citizen, tribe, gaming tribe, state, and nation? How are
Indians already escaping given representations of Indianness—the vanishing American,
the noble savage, the mystic Shaman, Mother Earth, and Father Sky, etc? How are Indian
people rewriting the disciplinary fictions and redressing the discursive violences of the
captivity narrative in their own versions of and responses to this genre?
For me, growing up on a small Indian reservation in Northern San Diego County,
the literature and culture I encountered in the 1980s was largely packaged in popular
forms. The Kumeyaay/Diegueno traditions were repressed due to years of colonial
pressure to “assimilate.” Sure, we knew we were Indian. We were acutely aware of our
racial and social position on the reservation, but during my early years, being Indian was
26

a mark of poverty and racism. I can recount many painful personal stories about my
struggle to understand my heritage and to place it in a larger context of national
colonization, but that enlightenment did not come to me until I pursued higher education
away from the Reservation. Ironically, my time outside my tribal community helped me
learn to value my culture more than I did while I was at home in it. I attribute this attitude
and awareness in part to my own intellectual growth and maturation, but also to a shift in
American perceptions about Native life brought about by such movements as New Age
beliefs in holistic lifestyles that included mimicking Native American practices of
healing, spirituality, and eco-friendly living. The rise of multi-cultural tolerance in the
1990s further paved the way for the massively-popular reception of the Hollywood epic
film, Dances With Wolves (1992), by mainstream and Native American audiences alike. I
saw the film three times in the theater, once with my parents, once with my great-uncle,
who was born in the mountains, spoke fluent Kumeyaay, and was also a World War II
veteran, and once with my friends. But, again, the resurgence of Indian pride came from
an outside source.
These experiences presented intellectual quandaries for me as I furthered my
academic career in graduate school. The puzzles began making sense to me after I
completed two graduate seminars: one on early American literature and the other about
“Ideology in Film”. When I thought about the way in which I learned about Indian
culture in my home and its value in terms of my parents‟ and my subject-formation I
remembered that we talked about what it meant to be Indian after watching a movie or
sharing our experiences about reading a popular western or romance novel. For the most
part, we did not have long conversations about old traditional stories featuring tricksters
27

(I did not learn this word until my junior year of undergraduate work)—instead, the
stories I heard were the everyday experiences about the life my parents led in the 1950s
and 1960s growing up on the Reservation. My stepdad would talk to me about when his
brother and friends left for the Korean War and then later for Viet Nam. He talked about
helping his dad gather the free-range cattle from up on top of the mountain, or when he
would go hunting for deer, then share the meat with all the families on the reservation.
These times always seemed easier, simpler, and somehow “more Indian” than my life
growing up in the 1980s—so much more convenient—because instead of having only
kerosene lanterns for lights, we had Coleman camping lanterns that looked “almost like a
light bulb.” We were really “rich” when we were finally able to purchase a used
generator to run lights and a television a few hours a night. My parents always reminded
us not to take these things for granted. My brother and I laugh now at our memories of
cooking our dinner and breakfast in our fireplace because we ran out of propane and the
stove did not work for two weeks. We were maybe ten and twelve years old. Electricity
was a luxury that my parents, along with two other households, finally received on the
reservation in 2000.
I recounted these details in snippets to provide an overall context for the study
that follows. My point is not so much to singularly focus on my personal experience, but
to suggest instead that my family‟s experience of being Indian and living on an Indian
reservation for three generations is perhaps not so different from that of other Native
American people. Our sense of who we are and how our stories are passed on is not part
of a grand and romantic oral tradition as it might be for other tribal people. Instead our
lives were ordinary to us, boring, and most of the time depressing. We found solace and a
28

space of desire enacted in our separate and mutual fantasies created in watching and
reading popular culture. Movies, television, radio, and novels were entertainment, but
they were also building blocks for parts of ourselves that we often failed to articulate
voluntarily but could voice after working through the ideas presented in a book or movie.
In my graduate study, I was fortunate to read widely with an historical breadth
and depth that helped me see the literary origins of the narratives my family and I eagerly
consumed. The germ of this project began in my recognition of the allusions to early
American Indian captivity narratives that twentieth century Native writers referenced,
disavowed, and revised in their contemporary fictions. Thus, I began to look at popular
culture and it mis-representations with a new eye. If the misrepresentations were the root-
cause of much of mainstream America‟s racist and stereotypical beliefs about Native
Americans, then how did these false representations affect Native people? Do all Native
people recognize them as “false”? If we consume the images and representations—that is
actively engage popular culture as I did paying three times to see Dances With Wolves at
the movie theater—then to what extent are we then made complicit in this ongoing cycle
of production? While it is often easy for audiences to recognize images and
characterizations that are overtly politically incorrect, the more deeply one reads into
Native American history and literature, the task of identifying fact from fiction often
becomes more difficult. This approach is necessary, however, because mainstream
American trends in literature, film, and popular culture tend to reproduce stock tropes of
Indian identity and to leave out critiques about the way these representations play out at
the local, tribal, and community level. In what follows, I discuss three major popular
American narrative forms while keeping the issues I discussed above in mind. Studying
29

familiar tropes about Native Americans from popular culture provides a common ground
for discussions and analysis to take root. In my research, thus, the focus from the popular
to the critical (or from the familiar to the theoretical) facilitates a better understanding of
Native American Studies and shifting articulations of Native American identity, desire,
and consciousness.
Each of the following chapters traces the historical and literary evolution of the
captivity narrative and its evolution into the western and woman‟s romance novel from
an American Indian Studies perspective. By focusing on individual popular genres in
each section, my work lays the critical, historical, and literary foundation to examine
Native responses to each mainstream form. Previous literary critiques show that the
captivity narrative, the western, and women‟s romance rely upon specific tropes of Indian
representation and identification to reflect and reinforce the ever-changing subjectivity
and subject position of the questing American individual; however, these studies exclude
important questions regarding the effect and influence these genres have on American
Indian writers and their readers.

30

Chapter 1: Endnotes

1
Because captivity in the “Age of Exploration” was not an unusual practice among Europeans and various
indigenous cultures of the world (North and South America as well as Africa and Australia), I am limiting
the scope of my project to a broad comparative study of the transformation of the American Indian from
dreaded “captor” to defeated “captive” in the captivity narrative genre, which some American scholars
contend forms the “cornerstone” of American literature.

2
See Paula Gunn Allen‟s biography of Pocahontas which details her early life as a prisoner at Jamestown
prior to her development as a cultural liaison between her Tribe and the colonists in Pocahontas: Medicine
Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat (New York: HarperCollins, 2003).

3
“Disciplinary Fictions: Why Stories Structure Lives” from Disciplinary Fictions: Sociality of Private
Problems in Contemporary California, Ph.D. Dissertation in Ethnic Studies, UCSD June 2002. Cacho
reads disciplinary fictions as “dominant narratives … founded on racial fictions.” A significant component
of understanding and deconstructing disciplinary fictions involves “examin[ing] the ways in which
invaluable knowledge and ways of knowing are invalidated” (3-4).

4
Kathryn Derounian-Stodola includes slave narratives, providence tales, UFO abduction stories, the
sentimental novel of seduction, the frontier story or western as several varieties of the captivity narrative in
her Women’s Indian Captivity Narratives (1998).

5
Chicano Studies Historian, George Sanchez, notes that by 2010, Latinos will be the majority group in Los
Angeles; thereby, making “whites” again a minority. Although the numbers needed for American Indian
people to regain a “majority” status are astronomical, the notion of an “ethnic” majority outnumbering the
“white” minority suggest to me that the captivity narrative genre may soon see a revival in American
literature and film. Since, historically, the genre proliferates during national moments of identity crisis in
which the American “nation” feels threatened by people of color. See Richard Slotkin (1974), Faery
(1999), and Maddox (1993), Philip Deloria (1998), and S. Elizabeth Bird (1996).

6
Richter, Daniel K. Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America. (Cambridge and
London: Harvard UP, 2001).

7
See Derounian-Stodola‟s The War in Words: Reading the Dakota Conflict through the Captivity
Literature (Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 2009).

8
Castiglia, Christopher. Bound and Determined: Captivity, Culture-Crossing, and White-Womanhood from
Mary Rowlandson to Patty Hearst. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
9
See Castiglia, especially chapter two and four and Philip J. Deloria‟s Playing Indian (1999) for discussions
and applications of liminal critique.

10
See Winthrop Jordan White Over Black and White Man’s Burden.

11
With the exception of a few “praying Indians,” most indigenous people could not read or write in
English; therefore, the representation of Indian captors in early American captivity narratives is
overwhelmingly negative.

12
Bercovitch, Puritan Typology and on the bondage of the Puritan soul to the flesh as a metaphor for the
danger of material desire over spiritual redemption see Richard Slotkin‟s Regeneration Through Violence.
13
See Pauline Strong Turner, “Chapter Two: Indian Captives, English Captors, 1576-1622” in Captive
Selves, Captivating Others.

14
Indians in Unexpected Places, 2004.
31

15
In her narrative, Rowlandson structures her forced march away from “civilization” into the “wilderness”
in a series of twenty “removes.” The removes function as a narrative structuring device, but they also signal
Rowlandson‟s increasing removal from “civilization” into the “wilderness” at the hands of her Indian
captors. I think that Maddox reverses the power structure of this narrative device by suggesting that
“civilization” in turn removes the Indians from the wilderness as the wilderness is further removed to make
way for civilization. Frederick Jackson Turner calls this dividing line between civilization and the
wilderness the “frontier.”

16
Vizenor, Gerarld. Survivance: Narratives of Native American Presence. (Lincoln and London: University
of Nebraska Press, 2008).

17
I am writing a book review of Stodola‟s work for publication in the Fall Issue of the American Indian
Culture and Research Journal to be published in the Spring. Stodola is one of the leading researchers in the
field and her recent publication continues to break new ground in bridging the gaps between the solidus that
divides American/Indian captivity narrative accounts.

18
Stodola, 54.

19
For the Santa Ysabel Band of Diegueno Indians, this is based on the 1940 Census. Different tribes will
have various sources to determine tribal membership.

20
I am still researching the exact historical development of this policy; however, my research thus far
shows that the “civilizing mission” of the Indians began in earnest in the Jeffersonian Era. Jefferson is often
quoted as saying that he desired the mixing of Indian and white blood in order form a more perfect union
(pardon the pun). Initially, Jeffersonian humanitarians felt that intermarriage with Indians was an
acceptable civilizing technique as long as it was a white man marrying an Indian woman. In Seeds of
Extinction (1973), Bernard W. Sheehan writes, “But the case was clear. Intermarriage took place between
white men and Indian women. Hence the subtle defenses of civilized superiority would be maintained, the
father presumably would bring into the wilderness the ways of civilization. The most publicized unions
between white female and Indian male had taken place in captivity, which meant the subjection of the
white and the preservation of savagery” (178).

21
I am a Diegueno lineal descendent form the Santa Ysabel Indian Reservation. As I draft this proposal, I
am in the process of defending my Diegueno bloodline. I am currently on our tribal rolls as 3/32, which
means that my bloodline falls slightly below 1/8—the cutoff for tribal enrollment on our reservation. Our
family contends, however, that the tribe incorrectly recorded my great-great grandfather‟s blood quantum.
He is recorded as being ½ Indian and ½ white. We believe that he is completely Indian. If I can present
evidence—genealogical information—to support our claims, then the tribe will change his blood quantum,
which in turn will raise the blood degree of all of his descendants by ½.
On an academic level, my own tribal struggles are an embodiment of many of the tensions that I
encounter in the very genre that I study, such as proscribed and static notions of identity that are policed at
the local, state, and national level. I should also say that my non-enrollment has many consequences. 1.) It
limits my agency to work with or for the reservation where I grew up and currently live on 2.) It completely
denies me any agency to participate in tribal politics in any “official” capacity and 3.) It limits the possible
acceptance of my work for publication with some Native Studies journals and anthologies.

22
Kilpatrick, Jacquelyn. Celluloid Indians: Native Americans and Film. (Lincoln and London: University of
Nebraska Press, 1999): 2-15).

23
Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist
Theory. (New York: Columbia UP, 1994).

32

24
It is well known that many Indian women were forcefully sterilized by Euro-American doctors (well into
the 1970s) often directly after giving birth. For an emotional and vehement discussion of this practice see
Mary Brave Bird‟s Lakota Woman and Ohitika Woman.

25
When I read this I always see Sherman Alexie delivering a joke at one of his readings or Joy Harjo
blowing on her saxophone to accompany her poetry!

26
I am aware of several renowned archives, the D‟Arcy McNickle Center at the Newberry Library in
Chicago among others, where I could access original historical documents and captivity narratives. At this
time, such research seems far beyond the scope of the dissertation project.
33

Chapter 2

Louise Erdrich: Ojibwa Encounters with
Colonial Captivity Discourse

Louise Erdrich: Ojibwa Encounters with Colonial Discourse deconstructs several
American myths and stereotypes about Indians within the Indian captivity genre by
providing a rare Native American response to two highly popular captivity narratives:
Mary White Rowlandson‘s, A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mary
White Rowlandson (1682) and John Tanner‘s, The Falcon: The Captivity and Adventures
of John Tanner (1830). Erdrich‘s brief but significant critical and poetic reply to the texts
provides us with a record of her discursive encounter with colonial American literature in
which the captivity-reader and –writer (that Erdrich becomes when she rewrites
Rowlandson in her poem) explicitly identifies with the Indian captors instead of the white
captives. Erdrich‘s written responses reveal an understanding of and an appreciation for
the dynamic historical practice of Indian captivity that was motivated by complex
economical and social factors. Her reactions, however, are also not without contempt for
the genre itself and its historical reduction to what she calls ―those cautionary and often
inflammatory tales of abduction and redemption.‖
1

For the American Indian Studies scholar in particular and the Early Americanist
in general, the question about where to situate the Indian within the Indian captivity
narrative is a vexing and an exciting issue. On the one hand, more and more critics are
returning to the captivity genre to read for the sublimated Indian voice within these texts,
while others are rediscovering archival accounts of actual, physical narratives of Indian
34

captivity that include stories about imprisonment, kidnapping, enslavement, and the
institutionalization of Indians at government boarding schools in the 19
th
and early 20
th

centuries. In fact, Peter Beidler, whose scholarship on Erdrich has been invaluable to my
own, elsewhere detailed the intertextuality between Erdrich‘s fiction and John Tanner‘s
Indian captivity. His informative article traces these moments to illustrate the ―influence‖
of colonial American literature on Erdrich‘s writing
2
. While Beidler‘s findings are most
useful, particularly in the classroom, his research does not theorize what this kind of
colonial ―influence‖ means in a Native Studies context. If, as he suggests, American
Indian writers inevitably turn to non-Indian sources for historical and/or ethnographical
information about Native history and cultural practices, then at what point does American
Indian literature transform these colonial ―influences‖ into cultural work that politicizes
the center it is working from and through? This is one of the central questions that my
research addresses.
In what follows, I closely examine and unpack the implicit layers of Ojibwa
cultural authority that Erdrich strategically deploys in her rewriting of Rowlandson‘s and
her reading of Tanner‘s tales. In her close encounters with captivity discourse, Erdrich
challenges the genre‘s cultural script that does not allow for an American Indian
perspective to emerge from the narrative. The central ideas about Louise Erdrich‘s
encounters with colonial discourse were developed through a series of presentations at
annual American Literature Association conferences. In the most recent performance of
this paper at ALA (May 2004), I co-presented with Zabelle Stodola (University of
Arkansas), a leading scholar in Early American Literature and captivity studies, and with
35

Betty Donahue from Bacone College in a panel titled, ―Indians Re-Visioning the
Captivity Narrative.‖

Breaking the Laws of the Genre
The narrative tradition of captivity in this country is well documented and deeply
embedded in our national culture‘s imagination.
3
While Mary Rowlandson is well known
for writing one of the first American captivity narratives based on her experiences as a
Wampanoag captive in 1676, less is known about the writings of Indians as captives or,
for that matter, the way in which captivity narratives inform the Indian imaginary.
Although this gap in the literary and historical record is now under scholarly
investigation,
4
to begin to understand the effects of the captivity narrative on the literary
work of contemporary Indian authors we need much more critical inquiry. As we will see
Louise Erdrich‘s, “Introduction,” to John Tanner‘s highly popular captivity narrative and
her poetic revision of Mary Rowlandson‘s tale provide us with such an opportunity to re-
envision and revise our previous readings of the literary record of captivity. Erdrich‘s
interventions shift our focus from familiar conclusions about white captivity to more
complicated endings in which an Indian woman has the power to capture our
imaginations and challenge us to reconsider the cultural conventions of the genre.
In Richard Slotkin‘s Regeneration through Violence (1973), the laws of the genre
perform according to a narrative structure that adheres to several fundamental tenets
aimed at preserving the foundation of American culture. He provides one of the most
36

commonly cited definitions of the genre based on Mary Rowlandson‘s tale in his
landmark study of American literature. He writes that in the captivity narrative:
A single individual, usually a woman, stands passively under the
strokes of evil, awaiting rescue by the grace of God. In the Indian‘s
devilish clutches, the captive had to meet and reject the
temptations of Indian marriage and/or the Indian‘s ―cannibal‖
Eucharist. To partake of the Indian‘s love or of his equivalent to
bread and wine was to debase, to un-English the very soul (94).

Slotkin explains that the captive‘s rescue and return to the Puritan community ―is likened
to the regeneration of the soul in conversion‖ (94). In other words, the Euro-American
subject symbolically undergoes an existential makeover and is ―regenerated‖ through the
―violence‖ that captivity entails. Gordon M. Sayre, however, chooses to define the genre
less allegorically. In his collection, American Captivity Narratives (2000), he explains
that:
The captivity phenomenon arises out of encounters between unfamiliar peoples,
generally as a result of European imperialism in the Americas and Africa. The
two cultures brought into conflict are so foreign to one another that an individual
forced into the midst of the other community regards the new life as a kind of
imprisonment, a deprivation of all the familiar patterns of his or her native
surroundings. This ―otherness‖ may be portrayed as racial, religious, or broadly
cultural, but in any case it is profound enough that each side regards its own ways
as superior to the others, and captivity forces this prejudice to the surface, either
to be defended or abandoned. Most captives yearn to return home, and some die
in the attempt, but a few embrace their new lives. Generally only those who
survive and return are able to record their experiences in a published captivity
narrative (4).

He continues to explore the evolution of the genre and all its manifestations throughout
its literary history in his “Introduction” to the anthology and he explains the significance
of the scholarship surrounding the genre‘s unique variations: such as its study as a
providence tale, in slave narratives, and its influence on women‘s fiction. His definition
37

leaves ample room to cover these disparate forms under the umbrella of the genre‘s
rubric. Yet, he explains away the absence in the literary and historical record of any
accounts of captivity when the Indian captors become captives themselves as a lack of the
Indian‘s ―literacy in English and access to the publishing establishment‖ (6). While his
practical response to such a thorny issue is true on many levels, it is an assumption that
American Indian studies scholar Joanna Brooks proves otherwise in her forthcoming
book, This Indian World: The Writings of Samson Occom, 1723-1792. In her
groundbreaking study of Occom‘s extant political, philosophical, and theological
writings, Brooks provides ample evidence of American Indian written resistance and
opposition to early American colonialism. According to Brook‘s archival research,
Occom repeatedly and, often, vehemently characterized neo-Americans as ―thieves‖ in
his writing.
5

In light of Brooks‘ recent contribution to the field, coupled with Slotkin and
Sayre‘s definitions of captivity narratives as a normative outline for a basic captivity plot,
how then does a writer like Erdrich revise the so-called laws of the genre? In what form
does the revision take shape? What does this new form require from us as readers/critics?
Finally, in what ways is this revision beneficial for the Indian community? Does this
process reaffirm the Indian in the genre? Christopher Castiglia asks similar questions in
his remarkable study of white womanhood in the long captivity narrative tradition
extending between Mary Rowlandson and Patty Hearst, in Bound and Determined
(1996). One of the most important findings about white female captives in most of the
narratives in his study is that ―captives opt for resolution through revision, using their
cultural liminality to create interstitial narratives that recontextualize, denaturalize, and
38

reconstruct … identity-formations….‖ (10-11). According to Castiglia, captivity
narratives ―occasion identification with their analysis of power and its investment in
representation, with their critique of patriarchal culture, colonialist subjectivity and the
narratives that engender it, and with their exploration of the empowerment that can come
from different narratives, different identifications, and different alliances‖ (12). Thus,
Castiglia‘s insightful analysis provides us with an initial point to assess Erdrich‘s desire
to seek or read ―different narratives‖ and to form ―different identifications and different
alliances‖ through her engagement with Mary Rowlandson and John Tanner‘s texts.

Revising Rowlandson with Ojibwa Love Medicine
Published nearly three hundred years after Rowlandson‘s capture, Erdrich‘s
―Captivity‖ poem appears in her first book of poetry, Jacklight. It was released in the
same year as her award-winning debut novel, Love Medicine (1984). Instead, of
explicitly denouncing the genre‘s negative representations of American Indians in
Rowlandson‘s text, Erdrich ―opts to revise‖ Rowlandson in a strategic move that,
following Castiglia‘s analysis, she can perform because of her ―liminal‖ status as part
American Indian part German-French.
6
Her potential to occupy multiple subject-positions
provides her with the ability to ―create interstitial narratives‖ that historically a
monocultural identification with this narrative form suppressed. However, her liminality
and subject position differs from the white women captives in Castiglia‘s study because
Erdrich‘s subjectivity is configured through her gender as well as her mixed Indian
heritage. While Erdrich is also not typically considered a captive, her Indian
identification and tribal participation always already situates her within a colonial
39

paradigm constructed by discursive, legal, cultural, and historical practices to capture
(and Lucy Maddox documents, ―remove‖) American Indians (from American culture).
Hence, Erdrich is in the unique position to assert her intellectual sovereignty in and
through the poem and to ―recontextualize, denaturalize, and reconstruct … identity-
formations‖ that she believes are less than kind in Rowlandson‘s text from within the
very blurred boundaries of Native/American literature. Conversely, in the discussion of
John Tanner‘s captivity below, his tale of Ojibwa acculturation ultimately redeems the
form in Erdrich‘s eyes and makes her look to him more as a kin and less as a captive.
7

Erdrich‘s mixed responses to her encounters with captivity discourse signal a
critical gap in the literary and historical record that takes into account the affect of the
captivity narrative on the contemporary Indian imaginary. In other words, we know
already from Slotkin, Sayre, and Castiglia and their literary predecessors that the
American Indian captivity narrative as it was prototyped by Rowlandson‘s publication of
her captivity among the Wamponaogs became a popular literary vehicle for the
dissemination of anti-Indian and pro-colonial dogma during the young American nation‘s
development. We also know that most of these anxieties and concerns generally coalesce
around the protection of the white female body as a metaphor for the maintenance of an
unspoiled nation, and that, when provoked and, more recently in order to take preemptive
measures, this nation will respond with attacks against brown/black men and women to
defend those idealized images.
8
What we do not know however, and what this chapter
endeavors to show, are the kinds of anxieties, resolutions, and tropes of captivity that
inform an Indian perspective of this cultural phenomenon.
40

The fifty-eight lines of Erdrich‘s ―Captivity‖ poem are divided into six stanzas.
Each stanza provides a miniature vignette of Rowlandson‘s captivity in Rowlandson‘s
voice. Thus, we have Erdrich speaking for Rowlandson throughout the poem, which is a
departure from many captivity narratives in which the Indians rarely speak or when they
do are often ignored and misunderstood. The poem begins after the Indian attack on
Rowlandson‘s house. In the first two lines of the poem, we encounter Rowlandson as she
separates from her Puritan community and enters an Indian world: ―The stream was swift,
and so cold/ I thought I would be sliced in two. But he dragged me from the flood/by the
ends of my hair‖ (Lines 1-4). In Cartographies of Desire (1999), Rachel Blevins Faery
points out that these lines represent, for Erdrich, Rowlandson‘s psychic split from her
nascent self and the rebirth of her Indian self (74). Erdrich extends the metaphor further
to include a ―baptism of desire,‖ to borrow the title of Erdrich‘s second book of poetry,
for Rowlandson later in the poem.
9
She is surly and resistant at the outset of the poem just
as she is in her narrative. We learn in the poem‘s epigraph that she refuses to eat Indian
food because she fears that there may be something in it to make her fall in love with her
captor.
10
She cannot tell her captors apart and is afraid in the poem when she begins to
distinguish her captor from the others: ―I had grown to recognize his face./ I could
distinguish it from the others./ There were times I feared I understood/ his language,
which was not human,/ and I knelt to pray for strength‖ (Lines 5-9, p. 26). Her
transformation or acculturation occurs in the poem after she eats the fawn from a deer
that her captor kills: ―I told myself that I would starve/ before I took food from his
hands/but I did not starve./ One night/ he killed a deer with a young one in her/ and gave
me to eat of the fawn‖ (Lines 10-15). The consumption of the fawn signals the
41

enactment of a love medicine and it ―denaturalizes‖ Rowlandson‘s original narrative by
investing it instead with the sexual powers attributed to the deer according to Ojibwa and
other Indian sources of mythology.
In her article, ―Encounters with Deer Woman: Sexual Relations in Susan Power‘s
The Grass Dancer and Louise Erdrich‘s The Antelope Wife,‖ Annette Van Dyke explains
the significance for Native American writers to incorporate elements of the oral tradition
into the contemporary literary landscape. Van Dyke convincingly argues that Erdrich
relies upon the Lakota versions of the Deer Woman and Elk Man to ―weave a cautionary
tale‖ to explain the ―harm obsessive love can do to the community‖ (168 and 174). Van
Dyke explains that the stories of Deer Woman were traditionally used to clearly establish
kinship roles and behaviors for tribal members. A usurpation of these cultural codes
brings devastation to the community, as Van Dyke shows in her analysis of Erdrich‘s
sixth novel, The Antelope Wife (1998). In the novel, Van Dyke states that ―Erdrich draws
upon the Lakota spirits, Deer Woman, and her counterpart, Elk Man, connecting stories
of sexual obsession identified with them to the cannibalistic hunger of the Ojibwa ice
monster, the windigo‖ (175). In a footnote quoting Teresa Smith, Van Dyke, continues to
explain that the Ojibwa windigo ―acts as both a specter of starvation and a warning to
those who are excessively greedy. Gluttons may be eaten by windigos or become
windigos themselves‖ (184).
11

Erdrich accomplishes her provocative revision by incorporating her familiar
Ojibwa cultural beliefs in love medicines via the deer woman into incidents in
Rowlandson‘s narrative that speak about moments of hunger and her consumption of
Indian food.
12
Her revision of Mary Rowlandson‘s captivity, thus, ―recontextualizes‖ the
42

seemingly innocent acts of survival—like Rowlandson partaking of the same food as her
captors—with dangerous desires of sexual awakening. These topics in Rowlandson‘s
story, however, are strictly bound to Puritan ideologies that forbade miscegenation
because it would lead to spiritual and, by extension, colonial and/or national corruption.
Such acts of cultural and literary transgression would ―un-English the very soul‖ as
Richard Slotkin claims in his delineation of the genre‘s cultural codes.
13
Yet, the same
topics of miscegenation and consumption in Erdrich‘s poetic world are reinterpreted to
create an ―interstitial narrative‖ that allows Erdrich‘s imaginary Rowlandson, imbued
with a love medicine, to act upon her forbidden desire for her captor, and, hence form
―different alliances.‖
14

In reading Rowlandson‘s narrative, Erdrich is clearly inspired to revise her tale at
the moment when Rowlandson admits to eating the fawn in the ―Fourteenth Remove.‖
Erdrich embellishes Rowlandson‘s own words only a little when she describes this act of
consumption in the poem.
Rowlandson’s narrative:
As we went along, they killed a deer, with a young one in her, they gave
me a piece of the fawn, and it was so young and tender, that one might eat
the bones as well as the flesh, and yet I thought it very good (159)

Erdrich’s poem:
One night/ he killed a deer with a young one in her/ and gave me
to eat of the fawn. / It was so tender/ the bones like stems of
flowers/ that I followed where he took me‖ (26).

Despite her initial adherence to Rowlandson‘s actual text, Erdrich‘s interpretation of this
passage is radically different from Rowlandson‘s benign report of the event. As the poem
continues, we see a transformation in Rowlandson from a pious, resistant prisoner into a
43

woman consumed by her desire for her captor. Contrarily, in Rowlandson‘s own account,
she regains her faith more fervently towards the end of her captivity. In the poem, Erdrich
plays with the notion of faith and faithfulness by creating the presumably sexual
relationship between Rowlandson and her captor, Quinnopin.
After eating the deer meat, Rowlandson follows her captor into the woods, where
it is presumed they make love. ―He cut the cord/that bound me to the tree. / After that the
birds mocked. Shadows gaped and roared/ and the trees flung down their sharpened
lashes‖ (Lines 19-25). Just as she typologically reads signs of God‘s grace and
redemption throughout her narrative, Rowlandson is made to notice ―God‘s wrath‖ after
she consummates her relationship with her captor in the poem. Her encounter with
Quinnopin in the woods clearly upsets her identity long after she is removed from his
presence. The poem ends, like Rowlandson‘s narrative, with a glimpse of Rowlandson
after she is redeemed. At this point, Erdrich characterizes her as restless, longing, and
nearly mad—much like the obsessed, hungry windigo-spirit of Ojibwa culture. Speaking
for Rowlandson, Erdrich writes,
Rescued, I see no truth in things.
My husband drives a thick wedge
Through the earth, but still it shuts
To him year after year.
…
And in the dark I see myself
As I was outside their circle.

They knelt on deerskins, some with sticks,
And he led his company in the noise
Until I could no longer bear
The thought of how I was.
I stripped a branch
And struck the earth,
In time, begging it to open
44

To admit me
As he was
And feed me honey from the rock (27).

Erdrich‘s deployment of the Deer Woman story to revise Rowlandson‘s narrative
in the poem is significant because it infuses those ―cautionary and often inflammatory
tales of abduction and redemption‖ with her own Ojibwa ―cautionary tale‖ for
Rowlandson and for captivity narrative‘s contemporary audiences. In this instance,
Erdrich plays upon Rowlandson‘s fear of Indian love medicines contained in Indian food
by already casting Rowlandson in the role of the ―starving‖ and ―greedy‖ Ojibwa
windigo spirit whose presence in the Indian community, Van Dyke reminds us, brings
destruction.
Such strategic acts of revision represent Erdrich‘s desire to change the parts of
Rowlandson‘s text that she finds problematic as a mixed-blood Ojibwa woman. In her
study of Rowlandson‘s narrative and of Erdrich‘s poem in Cartographies of Desire
(1999), Rachel Blevins Faery claims that the poem disrupts the typical representations of
Indians in the captivity genre. It revises, she writes, ―Puritan encounters with Indians‖
and by extension, I would add that it concurrently ―reconstructs‖ Indian encounters with
Puritan discourse (1999, 76). Faery goes on to argue that we can read Rowlandson‘s text
as a map that ―secured‖ her return to her community and we can read Erdrich‘s poem as
the ―missing‖ text to Rowlandson‘s narrative. Erdrich‘s poem, Faery claims, recovers
―the sexual—connective—possibilities in the scene of captivity‖ that the patriarchal
Puritan Order ―exercised its power to suppress‖ (75).
While I agree with Faery that Erdrich certainly takes issue with the ―sexual
content…of the scene of captivity,‖ I believe her reworking of this material is not
45

necessarily to positively portray ―connective‖ possibilities insofar as Erdrich‘s poem
deconstructs the cohesiveness of captivity‘s literary history to show what happens when
cultural ―connections‖ or transactions are interrupted (by Rowlandson‘s ransom) and/or
are denied. Thus, Erdrich‘s Captivity is replete with irony and, a healthy dose of Ojibwa
poetic justice.
Instead of making Rowlandson complete, whole, and positively transformed at the
end of the poem as the Puritanical editors of her original manuscript did, Erdrich
demonstrates Rowlandson‘s fragmented subjectivity. Hence, Erdrich once again chooses
to revise familiar readings of the genre and its influence on previous analyses of white
American identity. In Erdrich‘s Indian imagination Rowlandson‘s split spirit—her lost
not her saved soul—is caught between two worlds and her windigo spirit haunts the
captivity discourse. In essence, Erdrich creates an image of Rowlandson as an obsessed
apparitional presence, which is a reversal of typical American representations of Indians
haunting the American imagination and the American literary landscape.
It is not surprising then that the final image we have of the Indians in the poem is
one of unity. It is the image of Quinnopin surrounded by his fellow tribal members,
kneeling on deerskins, singing. In stark contrast to captivities that represent the white
captive and white culture at the center and Indians at the margins, Erdrich creates a space
for the Indian community to redefine the center: they kneel side by side and sing to
maintain important community relationships. In Erdrich‘s poetic world, it is Rowlandson
who remains ―outside their circle.‖ Once again, Erdrich challenges the genre‘s cultural
script and, ultimately, reaffirms an Indian presence in literature, she helps us imagine an
alternative to Rowlandson‘s narrative ending in which the Wampanogs are singing
46

perhaps for strength, courage, and wisdom to fight off the colonial invaders that, after all,
Rowlandson‘s presence among them necessarily signifies.
But what would have happened if Rowlandson chose to remain with her captives?
Indeed, if as Erdrich imagined, her captor seduced her? Would Rowlandson‘s tale be
more appealing and less ―inflammatory‖ to Erdrich? Her response to John Tanner‘s
captivity provides ample evidence to speculate that the answer to my latter question
might very well be a resounding, ―yes.‖

From Captive to Cousin
Explaining that John Tanner‘s captivity tale was a ―family touchstone‖ and that it sat on
her Ojibwa grandparents‘ bookshelf next to ―The Bible, The Book of Mormon, and
Bishop Baraga‘s Ojibway Dictionary,‖ Louise Erdrich‘s ―Introduction‖ to John Tanner‘s
narrative provides an enthusiastic and compelling argument to read his book as an
(auto)biography rather than as a captivity narrative
15
. Indeed, the book‘s location among
such revered works of faith and heritage within her Ojibwa family library further
transforms the text from a mere (auto)biography into a cultural bible (of sorts). For
Erdrich, the laws of the captivity narrative genre seem eminently clear and equally
distasteful to her. However, to make the distinction that Tanner‘s text is not a captivity
story, she first has to delineate and then refute this classification. Among her chief
rationales for declassifying his text as a captivity narrative (although its very title
includes this description), is the fact that Tanner does not try to escape nor is he rescued
or ransomed, which are the genre‘s typical narrative endings.
47

Although John Tanner‘s story is classified as a captivity narrative, his is one of
the few accounts of a captive that acculturates to his captor‘s tribe. Others within the
genre include Mary Jemmison‘s A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison (1824) and
Biography of Francis Slocum: The Lost Sister of Wyoming (1891).
16
The acculturated
captivity narrative was one of the first to subvert the canonical form that so readily
accommodates and transmits Euro-American colonial ideologies of superiority and
dominance, and it also serves as a frightening parable to parents, like John Tanner‘s, to
keep young children in close quarters to avoid the horrors of Indian capture and
transculturation. It was common knowledge among the colonists that the younger the
captive, the more difficult it was to rescue or ransom them from the Indians because
unlike an adult captive, in most accounts when children were taken by Indians, the
purpose was to replace a lost or deceased family member as Tanner‘s capture soon proves
true.
17

Louise Erdrich describes John Tanner‘s life in her ―Introduction‖ to his narrative
as a ―paradigmatic quest to belong, a restless search for peace and place‖ (xiv) between
two worlds—white and Indian. At his narrative‘s end, we do not know whether Tanner
finds this peace or his place in the world. His story closes, with him retreating into the
woods to bring his daughters to live with him at the ―Saut de St. Marie‖ in Minnesota
where Henry Schoolcraft employs him as an interpreter (279-80). In the final pages of
his narrative, we read of his return to the woods to fulfill an errand and he vanishes
without a trace.
18
Based on her intervention into captivity discourse with her ―Captivity‖
poem, Erdrich continues to push the boundaries of the captivity genre challenging the
very classification of such a narrative written by an acculturated captive. In what follows,
48

I trace Erdrich‘s attempt to negate its captive origins and to make claims instead for it as
an (auto)biography of an ―authentic life‖ (xii). Her argument for this reclassification of
the narrative foregrounds the thorny question in American Indian studies about of who is
Indian? How is Indian identity determined? What is the function of literature to define
this identification? If literature is the cultural site in which the Indian voice speaks, then
how is American Indian identity redefined and/or distorted by popular American
narrative forms? These are precisely the critical questions that Erdrich raises in her
reading and endorsement of John Tanner‘s text.
Try as I might to read Tanner‘s narrative as an Indian (auto)biography that
happens to begin with a scene of captivity, I simply cannot get past the moments in the
text that adhere to the genre‘s cultural script. In fact, when I first read Erdrich‘s utter
refusal to classify Tanner‘s story as a captivity narrative in her ―Introduction,‖ I was
confounded. After reading her revision of Mary Rowlandson, which finds very little in
Rowlandson or her story to praise, I determined that Erdrich, though exceedingly
disgusted by the deplorable depictions of indigenous culture in the genre, would not go so
far as to deny its influence on a narrative that is obviously a captivity tale. Indeed, I had
expected her to take issue with the moments of the captivity that she finds problematic
and perhaps rewrite them as she does in her poem about Rowlandson. ―Captivity‖
judiciously and deliberately revises Rowlandson‘s text according to a very shrewd
reframing of the narrative with the insertion of the ambivalently menacing and enticing
Ojibwa love medicine and deer woman tropes. When I discovered that she did not
approach Tanner‘s narrative in the same way, I reached a critical understanding of
49

Erdrich‘s representation of Rowlandson as a sort of captive-be-damned and her
endorsement of Tanner as not a captive but rather a cousin.
Early in the ―Introduction,‖ Erdrich makes a claim that Tanner‘s narrative
―appeals strongly to Native Americans‖ because Tanner is ―culturally Ojibwa‖ (xi). She
bases this assertion on the fact that Tanner is adopted by an Ojibwa family and lives out
most of his adult life before he decides to return to white culture to seek out any of his
biological living relatives.
Erdrich‘s careful delineation and refutation of the major elements that comprise
what we have come to expect from the captivity formula demonstrate at once her
complete familiarity with the ―standard genre‖ as well as her desire to resist its
categorization of Tanner‘s narrative as such at all costs. In essence, Erdrich defines The
Falcon in complete antithesis to Mary Rowlandson‘s narrative, which embodies every
aspect of the definitions of the genre italicized for emphasis above. Her narrative is the
premier example of a ―framed‖ captivity narrative—it is framed by the editorial voices of
at least ―four prominent Puritan ministers.‖
19
In the passage above, Erdrich alludes to the
structures that define Mary Rowlandson‘s narrative in the same way that Richard Slotkin
cites it as an archetype for subsequent examples of the ―standard genre.‖
Erdrich‘s argument that Tanner‘s narrative is not a captivity narrative and that it
resists such definition due to its divergence from the categories listed above is not an
altogether a persuasive one. Although early captivity publications were heavily edited
and revised by Puritan ministers, the basic format of the genre exemplified by
Rowlandson and others remains the same in Tanner‘s narrative despite variations of his
tale‘s conclusion. The narrative commences with the recounting of the scene of captivity,
50

the middle passages describe the time spent among the Indians and they typically provide
one-of-a-kind ―insider‖ narrations of the internal familial and tribal structure of
relationships and practices of everyday life, and the ending generally involves the
captive‘s ―escape, ransom, transculturation, or death‖ (Derounian-Stodola xi). Tanner‘s
narrative adheres to this basic script and it provides a detailed account of his life among
the Ojibwa, including vivid descriptions of the fierce struggle to survive inhospitable
winters plagued by extreme bouts of famine. His tale begins with an account of his
capture, it continues with the subsequent narration of his removal farther and farther
away from his home, until he is completely cut off and dislocated from his family by
distance and culture. He gives up all hope of ransom or escape after his captors
repeatedly tell him that they killed his entire family (they substantiate this claim by
producing fresh scalps, which horrifyingly inhibit Tanner from attempting an escape) and
he resigns himself to becoming a useful member of his new family. Contrary to Erdrich‘s
claim that ―there is no sign that Tanner wants to return to his non-Indian kinfolk,‖ once
he is an adult he expresses several times throughout the narrative his desire to return to
white society and seek out his living relatives. He does not make this return, however,
until he is in his late thirties.
In the end, Erdrich claims Tanner is ―culturally Ojibwa‖ since he ―lived as an
Ojibwa, married an Ojibwa woman, cared devotedly for his mixed-blood children, and
was never able to accommodate himself to a non-Indian life‖ (xi). Although, in the very
next sentence, she recognizes the inherent paradox of her statement, writing that ―his
existence was a contradiction,‖ she adamantly argues for his text to be read as an
autobiography instead of a captivity narrative. The logic she uses to draw such a
51

conclusion is fairly straightforward. Because Tanner is adopted and reared by his captors,
he is for all intents and purposes an Ojibwa. Accordingly, Erdrich, and presumably her
Ojibwa grandparents and sisters, read his text as that of a relative; in other words, they
abide by Ojibwa customs of kinship and claim him as family, albeit a rather distant
cousin.
If we defer to Erdrich‘s authorial power, that is, if we invest our belief in her
ability to represent a certain degree of cultural knowledge, truth, and value as an
American Indian writer, and accept her reading of Tanner—as an autobiography of an
―authentic [Indian] life‖—and of Rowlandson as a captive-be-damned—then what are the
implications for the formation of American Indian literature and criticism when one of it
its most prolific writers looks up to Tanner, someone born white but raised Indian, as one
of her literary and cultural authority figures? Should he then become one of ours? This
dilemma immediately shatters all essentialist claims to identity construction, which are
important elements in the debate over who is Indian and the myriad ways in which that
identity is determined. Today most tribes determine Indian identity upon the basis of
strict, federally regulated statutes of blood quantum; however, Tanner‘s narrative
precedes this insidious colonial designation of tribal identity. In many ways, Tanner‘s
story helps illustrate the convoluted and complex cultural process involved in identifying
as Indian or tribal. Erdrich‘s adherence to Ojibwa customs of kinship in her reading of his
story, and her acceptance of Tanner‘s ―enigmatic [mixed Ojibwa-American] life‖
illustrates an important but controversial position in relation to Indian identity politics
today that I discuss shortly.
52

In the following pages, I use Erdrich‘s argument for the declassification of
Tanner‘s narrative as a captivity tale to further explore moments in the narrative when he
subverts/adheres to the formula. The key narrative moments of his text that I examine
include the death of his mother, his discordant relationship with his father, his wish
fulfillment of captivity, his questionable choice to remain with the Indians, his stated
desire to marry white in spite of his actual marriages to Indian women, his desire to
return to white society and its constant delay and frustration, and finally, his recognition
at an early age and throughout his life of worse types of confinement than Indian capture.

Shaw-shaw-wa-be-na-se’s Tale: An Ojibwa Auto/Biography
In 1789, a former clergyman from Virginia turned frontier farmer named John
Tanner (Sr.) told his son (also John Tanner) to remain indoors because he believed ―from
the actions of the horses, [that] there were Indians lurking about in the woods‖ (3).
Restless as any nine-year-old might be when confined to the house on a perfectly nice
spring day, the young Tanner easily distracts his stepmother by provoking one of his
younger siblings to tears and makes his ―escape into the yard.‖ Once he is outside he
admits that he wishes ―he could see these Indians‖ (3). In the next sentence, in an instant
of true wish-fulfillment fashion, he reports: ―I had partly filled with [wal]nuts a straw hat
which I wore, when I heard a crackling noise behind me; I looked around, and saw the
Indians; almost at the same instant, I was seized by both hands and dragged off betwixt
two‖ (3). Little did he know that his desire to ―see the Indians‖ would be realized with his
fateful capture and that it would prevent him from returning to white culture again until
he was in his late thirties. His eventual reunion with his brother and sisters he tells us
53

towards the end of his narrative is plagued by illness, poverty, a sense of foreignness, and
discomfort. For Tanner ―becomes‖ Indian, he marries Indian women, and fathers mixed
white/Indian children. He forgets his ―mother tongue‖ and ―becomes as one of them [the
Indians]‖ (25-6).
Immediately after he is ―seized‖ and ―dragged off,‖ one of Tanner‘s captor‘s
―rescues‖ him from another Indian who wanted to kill him. Despite Tanner‘s ignorance
of his captor‘s language, he later learns that his life is spared because he is already
considered to be a ―little brother‖ to Kish-kau-ko (5). Tanner is officially adopted by his
captor‘s, Manito-o-gheezik‘s, family several days later. He describes the scene that takes
place after he arrives at their home:
As soon as we landed, the old woman came down to us to the shore, and
after Manito-o-gheezik had said a few words to her, she commenced
crying, at the same time hugging and kissing me, and thus she led me into
the house. Next day they took me to the place where the old woman‘s son
had been buried. The grave was enclosed with pickets, in the manner of
the Indians, and on each side of it was a smooth open place. Here they all
took their seats; the family and friends of Manito-o-gheezik on the one
side, and strangers on the other. The friends of the family had come
provided with presents; mukkuks of sugar, sacks of corn, beads, strouding,
tobacco, and the like. They had not been long assembled, when my party
began to dance, dragging me about the grave. Their dance was lively and
cheerful, after the manner of the scalp dance (9).

Tanner also discovers later in his life that Manito-o-gheezik‘s wife, the ―old woman‖ in
the passage above, was so distressed after the death of her youngest son that she
―complained to her husband, that unless he should bring her back a son, she could not
live. This was an intimation to bring her a captive whom she might adopt in the place of
the son she lost‖ (4).
54

Unfortunately, soon after his adoption ceremony, Tanner falls asleep while he is
supposed to be trimming the leaves off tree boughs to make a fence, and he subsequently
becomes more a slave than a son to Manito-o-gheezik, who calls the young Tanner lazy
and ―good for nothing‖ (10). For the next two years Tanner suffered much abuse and
mistreatment from this Indian family until he was sold to Manito-o-gheezik‘s
―kinswoman, Net-no-kwa‖, who, Tanner informs us, ―notwithstanding her sex, she was
then regarded as principal chief of the Ottawwas‖ (15). Like his first Indian ―mother,‖
Netnokwa‘s son also dies and she buys Tanner to fill his place in her family.
20
Unlike his
life with Manito-o-gheezik‘s family, however, Tanner quickly realizes that he ―was to be
treated more indulgently than‖ before. He states: ―[Netnokwa] gave me plenty of food,
put good clothes upon me, and told me to go and play with her sons‖ (15). Net-no-kwa
treats Tanner well because she rears him as her own Ojibwa son. In fact, Tanner‘s vivid
details of her strong character, kindness, compassion, and her importance is especially
appealing to Erdrich. ―Whatever the source of her strengths,‖ Erdrich comments, ―the
portrait of Net-n-kwa is priceless‖ (xii-xiii).
Net-no-kwa‘s influence on John Tanner is understandable given that his first
childhood memory is his mother‘s death. ―This happened,‖ he explains in the story‘s
opening lines, ―when I was two years old, and many of the attending circumstances made
so deep an impression, that they are still fresh in my memory‖ (1). The loss of the
mother, through death or through the psychic understanding that she is not the proper
love object for the son is in classical psychoanalytic terms one of the most traumatic and
significant influences on an individual‘s later psychic development of the self. In
Tanner‘s life, this process is compounded by the fact that he does not have a loving or
55

nurturing relationship and perception of his father or his subsequent captor/adoptive
father. Tanner‘s description of and relationship with his father is brief and telling—his
father is stern and does not tolerate disobedience of any kind. The day before Tanner is
taken captive his sisters fail to tell him to go to school. Tanner‘s father is unaware of this
mistake and punishes Tanner‘s truancy by ―flogging‖ him severely. After this incident,
Tanner remarks that ―From that time, my father‘s house was less a home to me, and I
often thought and said, ‗I wish I could go and live among the Indians‘‖ (2). Tanner‘s
wish comes true immediately following his second repetition of it in the text. Upon his
―escape‖ from the house, which I describe at the start of the chapter, Tanner wishes to
―see [the] Indians‖ that his father fears are lurking about. Tanner‘s disobedience
demonstrates that he perceives his father‘s order for his ―confinement‖ indoors a
punishment, rather than one of the only solutions his father has to prevent his son‘s
capture. Once he is an Indian captive, Tanner loses his father in addition to his mother;
however, it is the loss of his mother that he seems most desirous to immediately restore.
Robert Baird finds that Tanner‘s desire to ―live among the Indians‖ is an example
of the fantasy of the ―family romance‖ at work in the captivity genre. In his essay, ―Goin‘
Indian: Dances With Wolves,‖ (1990), he explains via Freud that ―A ‗family romance‘
might be created in response to various motivations: the loss of parental love, fear of
breaking the incest taboo, realization of parental fallibility. … [T]he romance of Native
American parentage would satisfy the wish … where strong and noble parents live in
…harmony‖ (156). Although Baird assesses the family romance and the ―going Indian‖
phenomenon primarily in film, his reading of this intercultural exchange of identity helps
us understand Tanner‘s seduction by the myth ―that the original inhabitants of North
56

America represent ‗True Americans,‘ whose character deserves emulation‖ (154).
21
It is
the contradictions implicit in this desire that plague colonial Americans—they are settlers
not indigenous. Tanner‘s relocation to the frontier brings this contradiction into sharp
contrast coupled with the loss of his mother and his abuse from his father and seems to
contribute to his desire to ―see‖ and ―live among the Indians.‖ Thus, his eventual
capture fulfills the subconscious family romance fantasy and sets out to resolve the
discordance between the life Tanner was born into and the life he dreams of living.

Mother Tongues
The young Tanner easily replaces his missing mother‘s role with his first Indian
mother, but he is not as eager to replace his stern father with the equally aggressive and
explosive Manito-o-gheezik.
22
After his adoption ceremony into Manito-o-gheezik‘s
family, he begins to refer to Manito-o-gheezik‘s wife as mother or as my ―Indian mother‖
(11 and 14). It is not surprising then, that Tanner, during his recollections of the two
years that he spent with Manito-o-gheezik‘s family, never calls or refers to him as father.
Instead, it is the women in Tanner‘s life that are the most influential and important to him
and his narrative. Although he is unable to recall memories of his mother prior to her
death, her substitution first with Manito-o-gheezik‘s wife and then with Net-no-kwa,
reveal Tanner‘s deep primal need for this maternal care.
23

The relationship that Tanner eventually has with Net-no-kwa is also an aspect of
the narrative that Erdrich finds compelling. She writes:
The most arresting character in the drama of Tanner‘s life is Net-no-kwa,
matriarch of the small clan group into which he is adopted [rather sold].
Charismatic and hilarious, Net-no-kwa is a woman of courage, a prophetic
57

dreamer who occasionally drinks to excess. Although at first the
protectress and guardian of young Tanner, his adopted mother in time
becomes the proud beneficiary of his adult hunting skills. Soon there
develops between the two a joking relationship based upon genuine
fondness and respect. Tanner‘s loyalties run deep, and he obviously loves,
cares for, and admires Net-no-kwa. He draws a portrait of a powerful,
complex woman whose forceful presence blasts stereotypes (xii).

Indeed, Net-no-kwa teaches Tanner everything he needs to know about becoming an
Ojibwa man, especially the significance of a ―medicine hunt‖ when game is scarce.
24
Her
direction and her constant validation of his efforts to contribute to the family quickly
increase Tanner‘s flagging self-esteem. Unlike the relationship that Rowlandson has with
her Indian governess, Weetamoo, whose ―proud and defiant‖ demeanor are a source of
constant insecurity and worry to Rowlandson thereby setting up the figure of the Indian
―matriarch‖ in the captivity genre to be a woman to be reckoned with, without sympathy
and with much trepidation. The stereotypical image that Rowlandson‘s narrative creates
is without a doubt one of the ―stereotypes‖ that Tanner‘s depiction of Net-no-kwa
―blasts.‖ As Erdrich explains above, Tanner comes to rely on Net-no-kwa‘s skill and
sagacity to survive, and as an adult he employs her same ―prophetic‖ practice of fasting
and praying for guidance in the hunt.
Secure with his place in her family and under the tutelage of his new Indian
mother, Tanner now living in his fourth year of adoption/captivity explains his decision
to live with the Indians. He says:
I had now forgotten my mother tongue, and retained few, if any, ideas of
the religion of the whites. … At this time I was suffered to go entirely at
large, being subjected to no manner of restraint, and might, almost at any
time, have made an escape from the Indians; but I believed my father and
all my friends had been murdered [as Manito-o-gheezik told him], and I
remembered the laborious and confined manner in which I must live if I
returned among the whites where, having no friends, and being destitute of
58

money, or property, I must, of necessity, be exposed to all the ills of
extreme poverty. Among the Indians, I saw that those who were too
young, or too weak to hunt for themselves, were sure to find some one to
provide for them. I was also rising in the estimation of the Indians, and
becoming as one of them. I therefore chose, for the present, to remain with
them, but always intended, at some future time, to return and live among
the whites (26).

The ―choice‖ that Tanner makes to remain with the Indians is mitigated by his conviction
that his family is dead. Imagining the life he would lead as an orphan without property or
money, Tanner rationalizes that his return to white society would be much worse than his
life in captivity. It is important to keep in mind that Tanner‘s rationalization is based in
large part on false information, and this lie, that Erdrich would assert he partially knows
to be untrue, is the reason he gives to remain with the Indians. He makes the ―choice‖
appear to be ―forced‖ on him by his existing circumstances; however, we already know
that Tanner entertained dreams of living with the Indians several times. Thus, in four
formidable years, life with the Indians moves from the realm of fantasy for Tanner to his
primary point of cultural differentiation. He observes that life with the Indians is not that
bad—they take care of one another, young and old, and apparently, in his nine years
living in white society, he had seen something that would make him believe that his
return as an ―orphan‖ would not afford him the same kind of care and treatment.
This is a pivotal point in the narrative which, according to the genre‘s script,
subverts the primary American cultural desire to ransom or return the captive and thereby
symbolically restore the American family/nation. Furthermore, the ―mother tongue‖ he
forgets simultaneously signals the new mother tongue and the new identity he acquires.
He is, he says, ―becoming as one of them‖—no longer white, but Indian. Clearly this
59

passage is a liminal moment in the text in which Tanner, no longer a boy but a young
man, begins to assert an Indian identity. This passage is telling for the reasons I explain
above, however, his process of ―becoming‖ Indian is one which he never fully owns,
despite his descriptions of his dress, manner, and inclination to choose to remain with the
Indians. Does his ambivalence about his identity and his identification with the Indians
indicate his awareness of the genre in which his story is being told as well as his wariness
of his audience, who would be primarily white? Or does the ambivalence point to the fact
that his life ―was a collision of identities‖ that ―challenges all easy assumptions about
race and nurture‖ as Erdrich contends?

“Kah-ween-gwautch Ojibbeway: not altogether an Ojibbeway”
Much later in the narrative, while part of a large and diverse group of Indians
preparing a war party to go into battle against the Sioux, some Assineboins steal four of
Tanner‘s horses (126). The ringleader is Ba-gis-kun-nung, who plagues Tanner on other
occasions. In this instance, however, Tanner responds by following Ba-gis-kun-nung to
his village and stealing his horse back. He first tries a direct method, boldly walking into
the village and up to Ba-gis-kun-nung‘s family lodgings and saying, ―I want a horse‖
(138). Ba-gis-kun-nung of course refuses to give him one, and Tanner tells him that he is
going to take one from him anyway. With a little more posturing, Ba-gis-kun-nung tells
Tanner that he will shoot him if he catches him trying to steal his horses, and this is the
end of the first confrontation. The next morning, Tanner rises early to make good on his
threat to Ba-gis-kun-nung. His Indian brother, Wa-be-gon-a-biew, reticently accompanies
him. As they near the village, Wa-be-gon-a-biew tries to talk Tanner out of his mission,
60

but Tanner will not relent. Tanner describes the ensuing horse-stealing episode with
obvious humor:
When we had proceeded as far as I thought necessary, I had laid
down my load. Wa-be-gon-a-biew, seeing me resolute in my
determination began to run. At the same time that he started to run from
the village, I ran towards it, and the son of Ba-gis-kun-nung, when he saw
me coming, began to call out as loud as he could in his own language. I
could only distinguish the words ―Wah-kah-towah,‖ and ―Shoonk-ton-
gah,‖ (Ojibbeway—horse.) I supposed he said, ―an Ojibbeway is taking a
horse.‖ I answered, ―Kah-ween-gwautch Ojibbeway,‖ (not altogether an
Ojibbeway.) … I saw Wa-be-gon-a-biew still running like a frightened
turkey. He was almost out of sight. When I overtook him, I said, ―My
brother, you must be tired, I will lend you my horse‖ (138).

Tanner‘s light-hearted manner in which he remembers this encounter is a story of
hilarious brotherly bravery and cowardice that I am sure he must have told many times
around a warm winter fire. However funny the delivery of the incident, the implications
are more serious. His glib remark to his foe‘s son, ―not altogether an Ojibbeway,‖ reveals
at once his acknowledgement that he is ―culturally Ojibwa‖ in dress and manner, but
there is still a part of him that is white, and this part is always one in which he seems to
feel superior. Again, the story above is good for a laugh, but underlying the comedy I
read in Tanner a pride and even a bit of smugness that he is braver than his Indian brother
and that he is also more cunning than his supposedly fearsome Indian enemy due to the
part of him that does not entirely or ―altogether‖ make him Ojibwa.
For example, in one of the villages where Tanner is living an Indian man asserts
that the Great Spirit sent him a vision and has instructed him to deliver it to the people.
The spiritual vision is, of course, full of prohibitions and peculiar reforms, such as not
hitting a man, a woman, a child or a dog and never letting the fire in one‘s lodge
61

extinguish. Tanner expresses skepticism about the likelihood that this man is an actual
prophet, but states, ―as long as I remained among the Indians, I made it my business to
conform, as far as appeared consistent with my immediate convenience and comfort, with
all their customs‖ (145-46). Although he believes this person to be an imposter, he does
not openly resist the doctrine since many tribal members supported the false prophet and
his teachings. Instead, on his next visit to the trading house, Tanner asks the traders if
there were any divine revelations sent to them. He reveals:
But, as was usual with me in an emergency of this kind, I went to the
traders, firmly believing, that if the Diety had any communications to
make to men, that they would be given, in the first instance, to white men.
The traders ridiculed and despised the idea of a new revelation of the
Divine will, and the thought that it should be given to a poor Shawnee
(145).

The religious fervor that was sweeping through the tribe was reaching a level that was no
longer comfortable for Tanner to follow, so his instinct is to defer to the white men for
judgment. Tanner rationalizes that white society would receive God‘s message first
because they are superior. Although the assumption of white superiority is implicit, it
nonetheless upsets Erdrich‘s claims that because Tanner leads an Ojibwa life that he
entirely eschews all aspects of white culture.
Another, final example in which Tanner verbalizes his allegiance to white culture
occurs when Tanner seeks a wife. At around the age of twenty-one, Net-no-kwa
approaches Tanner about finding a wife for him. In Ojibwa culture the parents find and
negotiate a suitable match for the husband because the bride and groom should not have
any contact prior to the marriage. In order to convince Tanner to take a wife, Net-no-kwa
says that she does not want to have to worry about how Tanner is taking care of himself.
62

A wife, she explains, will ―look after your property and take care of your lodge‖ (84).
However, Tanner says, ―without hesitation that [he] would not comply with her request‖
(84). He further explains, ―I had as yet thought little of marriage among the Indians, still
thinking I should return before I became old, to marry to the whites‖ (85).
This statement provides yet another contradiction to Erdrich‘s somewhat romantic and
nostalgic reading of Tanner‘s text.
Although he does eventually marry two Ojibwa women and has several
mixedblood children, Tanner clearly states that this was not his original intention.
Whether Net-no-kwa‘s powers of persuasion prevailed upon Tanner to reconsider what
he was resigned to do or whether his desire to marry into white culture is the remnant of a
naïve bachelor mentality, we do not know. We only know that shortly after his refusal to
take an Ojibwa wife arranged for him by Net-no-kwa, Tanner becomes seriously ill and
nearly dies. After his horrible illness, he loses part of his hearing and is so weak and
depressed from his battle with this mysterious disease, that he attempts suicide. Thwarted
by Net-no-kwa and Wa-be-gon-a-biew in his attempt to end his life, Tanner remarks:
I reflected much on all that had passed since I had been among the Indians. I had in the
main been contented since residing in the family of Net-no-kwa, but this sickness I
looked upon as the commencement of misfortune which was to follow me through life.
My hearing was gone for abscesses had formed and discharged in each ear, and I could
now hear but very imperfectly. … I found that my cunning and my success [as a hunter]
had deserted me. I soon imagined that the very animals knew that I had become like an
old and useless man (96).
63

Tanner‘s sickness makes him ―old‖ before his time and perhaps his weakened
physical and mental states softened him to the idea of marriage to an Indian woman, but
whatever the reason, soon after his recovery he married Mis-kwa-bun-kwa, ―the red sky
of morning‖ (101)
25
. Tanner‘s acquiescence to the marriage with Mis-kwa-bun-kwa
remains ambivalently resolved. Does his change of heart signal his real desire to wed an
Indian bride or is it a sign that Tanner—considering himself ―an old and useless man‖—
believes that he is no longer a suitable match for a white woman, that somehow his
impaired hearing is a disability and makes him less of (an appealing) white man?
26

Indian Identity, “Blood Narrative,” and “Re-recognition”
As Tanner matures and becomes more his own man and less Net-no-kwa‘s
charge, his identity and its associated politics become more obscure. On the one hand,
Tanner tells us that he ―becomes as one of them.‖ On the other hand, he claims that he is
―not altogether Ojibbeway‖ and that he plans to marry a white woman. What are we to
make of these contradictions? Are they merely the byproduct from the ―collision [of his]
identities‖ as Erdrich proposes? Or are they signs of a deeper connection to Tanner‘s
white heritage that he is unable to completely abandon in large part because his narrative
is written according to the captivity genre‘s formula? Is the genre‘s code, in this instance,
impossible to liberate from narratives that privilege whiteness? To what degree is Tanner,
like many captives, simply the transmitter of this bicultural experience and his text‘s
editor the perpetrator of its narrative design and desire?
27
Furthermore, how do such
literary interventions and affinities affect how we determine cultural membership and
cultural authority?
64

Louis Owens begins his study of the American Indian novel and narrative theory,
Other Destinies and Other Plots (1992), by asking the very same question. He writes:
To begin to write about something called ―the American Indian novel‖ is
to enter a slippery and uncertain terrain. Take one step into this region and
we are confronted with difficult questions of authority and ethnicity: What
is an Indian? Must one be one-sixteenth Osage, one-eighth Cherokee, one-
quarter Blackfoot, or full-blood Sioux to be Indian? Must one be raised in
a traditional ―Indian‖ culture or speak a native language or be on a tribal
roll? To identify as Indian—or mixedblood—and to write about that
identity is to confront such questions (3).

Owens‘ statement demonstrates that the question of Indian identity is complicated by the
fact that this identity is mitigated not only by issues of blood quantum (a minimum
quantity designates ―Indianness‖ and this minimum varies from tribe to tribe), the politics
of tribal enrollment (based primarily on designations of blood quantum, but also upon
other factors, such as the ability to speak the tribal language), old tribal customs of
kinship also known as lineal descent, and, finally, upon imagined constructions of
Indians. ―[T]he American Indian in the world consciousness,‖ Owens continues, ―is a
treasured invention, a gothic artifact evoked like the ―powwows‖ in Hawthorn‘s ‗Young
Goodman Brown‘ out of the dark reaches of the continent to replace the actual native,
who, painfully problematic in real life, is supposed to have long since vanished‖ (4).
In Blood Narrative (2002), Chadwick Allen further explains that the myriad
classifications of Indian identity ―has been and continues to be controversial‖ (15). He
writes that ―discussions of indigenous ―blood,‖ for example, often raise disturbing issues
of essentialism, racism, and genocide. … Government officials, social scientists, and
indigenous minority peoples themselves have disagreed over whether biological kinship,
language, culture, group consciousness, community endorsement, personal declaration or
65

some combination of these ‗objective‘ and ‗subjective‘ criteria should be used to
recognize ‗authentic‘ indigenous status‖ (15). Both Owens and Allen turn to literature to
address the quandary of Indian identity-formation. While Owens works through the issue
in the American Indian novel and reads for moments when the American Indian author
escapes that:
‗great narrative of entropy and loss,‘ which is the Euramerican version of
Native American history since the fifteenth century.... The consciousness
shared in [Native Literature] is that of the individual attempting to
reimagine an identity, to articulate a self within a Native American
context. And in every case the mixedblood turns at the point of division
back toward an Indian identity and away from the collective dream of
white America (Syntax original, Other Destinies 22).

Owens and Allen endeavor to foreground the multiple social, historical, but most
significant to this project, textual structures, that Indian identity is defined in and through.
By theoretically reapplying N. Scott Momaday‘s phrase from House Made of Dawn
(1968), ―memory in the blood‖ or ―blood memory,‖ to three intertwining elements that
construct one‘s sense of indigineity through blood, land, and memory, Allen deploys an
interethnic comparative reading of Aotearoa/ New Zealand Maori and American Indian
literary and ―activist‖ texts. Using Momaday‘s contentious yet provocative trope, he
forcefully joins the notion of ―racial identity (blood) and memory (narrative)‖ that are
markers of Indian identification (1).
The interpretive frames that these critics use to approach American Indian
literature and the Indian identity formation represented therein coalesce around the notion
of a racialized memory that Momaday‘s trope aptly expresses. Allen adds to this equation
the implicit third element that plays a constitutive role in defining indigenousness: land.
Allen explains that his study ―analyzes a number of the narrative tactics developed by
66

writers and activists who self-identify as American Indian or New Zealand Maori to mark
their identities as persistently distinctive from those of dominant European-descended
settlers and as irrevocably rooted in the particular land these writers, activists, and their
communities continue to call home‖ (1-2). Allen maintains that the triad of
blood/land/memory is theoretically useful to understanding indigenous texts precisely
because it ―names both the process and the product of the indigenous minority writing
situating him- or herself within a particular indigenous family‘s or nation‘s ‗racial
memory‘ of its relationship with specific lands‖ (15). Likewise, Owens substantiates this
process when he argues that in American Indian novels, which reinforce and reaffirm an
indigenous cultural allegiance, do so by choosing an Indian way of life and by rejecting
an American (white) identification. In the Indian novel, Owens shows how this choice is
generally affected by a ―return‖ home located either on the reservation or within another
physical space deemed Indian country. Applied to Tanner‘s narrative, Erdrich‘s response
to it, and the captivity discourse in general, these hermeneutics for understanding native
identity and identification in literature answer several questions that I proposed earlier.
First, if we use Allen‘s theories of the blood/land/memory complex alongside
Owens‘ argument that the aim of the Indian author is to escape the prescribed plots and
narrative endings of white America to read Erdrich‘s recovery of Tanner and his narrative
as an ―authentic‖ Ojibwa autobiography, then we can begin to understand the narrative
tactics Erdrich uses to make such claims. By recalling the epigraph that begins the
chapter in which Erdrich nostalgically remembers reading Tanner‘s narrative as a child
on the ―sun-soaked back steps‖ at her grandparents‘ reservation home, we clearly have all
the elements of Allen‘s triad at work. In fact, Erdrich coincidentally asserts her cultural
67

authority in the order that Allen delineates: first, by locating the narrative as part of her
Ojibwa grandparent‘s special book collection that included the New Testament and
Bishop Baraga‘s Ojibway Dictionary (blood), which is on the Turtle Mountain
Reservation (land), and finally through her description of reading the book in the
backyard as a little girl (memory). The result of this process is that she situates herself
within her tribal history as an active remember-er, which is a process that can produce
cultural renewal and rejuvenation of past events in the present moment according to
Allen.
28
Although her situation, vis-à-vis Tanner and his narrative, blurs some of the
distinctions about blood/land/memory that define Indian identity, Erdrich‘s recuperation
of Tanner‘ captivity narrative and her redeployment of it as an Indian autobiography
exemplifies Allen‘s concept of ―re-recognition‖ (18). Citing the engagement of treaty
discourse by indigenous groups as an example of this process, Allen writes:
Maori and American Indian appropriations of and redeployments of treaty
discourse work to re-recognize, and, in the process, to revalue the
discourse of treaties. Treaty documents are neither ―transformed‖ or
―transfigured‖ by these activists and writers, and the authority inscribed in
treaties is generally not questioned. Instead, this disavowed discourse [by
the settler/colonizer] is reified—reclaimed from impotent abstraction and
once again rendered concrete. To rephrase Bhabha‘s definition of colonial
mimicry as ―almost the same, but not quite,‖ we might define indigenous
re-recognition as ―exactly the same, but then some.‖ Indigenous minority
redeployments of treaty discourse insist that the dominant power
remember the cross-cultural and cross-national agreements it forged with
indigenous nations during previous eras; contradicting Bhabha, they
reinstate and reinvigorate colonial discourse‘s original powers of legal
enforcement and moral suasion (19).

Thus, we can extrapolate and extend Allen‘s analysis of re-recognition from treaty
discourse to the captivity genre. To begin with, both treaty discourse and the discourse of
captivity are products and artifacts of colonial rule. Second, though each discourse is
68

distinctly different—one legal and the other literary—both were used to further the
colonial agenda to ―settle‖ indigenously occupied territories. Finally, it is this occupation
of land and text that privileges the settler/colonizer population. Indigenous writers,
according to Allen, challenge, subvert, and redeploy the discourse in the contemporary
moment to precisely ―unsettle‖ this comfortable colonial occupation.
29
Owens claims that
this form of literary resistance is ―at the heart of American Indian fiction‖ (5). It is
Erdrich‘s re-recognition of the value inherent in Northeastern indigenous culture that I
contend initiates her narrative choice to privilege an Indian way of life over the dominant
culture‘s representations of Indians.

“Bound and Determined” to Survive
Erdrich‘s engagements with Tanner and Rowlandson‘s texts demonstrate that
multiple structures of captivity exist and are ever changing. For Indian people the daily
struggle to assert and maintain a tribal identity in various forms of American culture is in
and of itself an unending battle. Attacks are made daily on Indian tribal and cultural
sovereignty. Unfortunately, to be ―culturally‖ Indian is simply not enough—one must
prove lineage, carry a card, ―be enrolled‖ and federally recognized. To be Indian today is
to be exactly what Nanapush and Fleur, two of Erdrich‘s most enduring characters in her
fiction, resist their entire lives and that is one that must become a ―track:‖ a number next
to a non-Indian name on a piece of paper made from the stolen timber and stolen land
that their ancestors once cared for and revered.
30
Thus, the ambiguousness with which
Erdrich approaches and responds to the captivity genre becomes understandable in the
context of contemporary Indian identity politics that are a labyrinth of rules and
69

restrictions imposed mostly by the US government to literally ―keep track‖ of what the
colonizer hopes is a diminishing Indian population.
Read together, these texts—Erdrich‘s revision of Rowlandson and her
introduction to Tanner‘s captivity narrative alongside the original versions represent a
multicultural and intertextual dialogue that ―re-recognizes‖ these captivity narratives and
signals the contemporary occupation of the texts by a Native writer. By raising issues
related to the extenuating circumstances of Indian captivity—namely, its re-readings by
American/Indians—draws our attention to its inescapable ―investment in colonial
subjectivity.‖
31
Erdrich‘s interpretation of these texts reveals the fluid not the fixed nature
of the binaries embedded in this discursive field—captivity/freedom, captive/captor, and
Indian/white—that make possible new readings, new alliances, and new possibilities for
identification. In the end, Erdrich‘s Ojibwa encounter with captivity discourse revitalizes
an indigenous worldview of tribal survival that Erdrich is known for.

70

Chapter 2: Endnotes

1
Erdrich, Louise. “Introduction.” The Falcon: The Captivity and Adventures of John Tanner. (Reprinted,
New York: Penguin Books, 1994).

2
Beidler, Peter G. ―The Facts of Fictional Magic: John Tanner as a Source for Louise Erdrich’s Tracks
and The Birchbark House” American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 24:4 (2000): 37-54.

3
Some of the most important historical explications include Sacvan Bercovitch‘s assessment of the
phenomenon in Typology and Early American Literature (1979), Richard Slotkin‘s Regeneration Through
Violence (1974), Alden T. Vaughn and Edward W. Clark‘s. Puritans among the Indians: Accounts of
Capture and Redemption, 1676-1724 (1981), and Andrew Del Banco‘s The Puritan Ordeal (1989).
Evidence of the genre‘s legacy in our culture is apparent most recently in the films, The Missing (2004),
directed by one of Hollywood‘s most golden of golden boys, Ron Howard, The Last Samurai (2003),
directed by Edward Zwick, and Hidalgo (2004) also released in the same year.

4
At the American Literature Association Conference in May 2004, Zabelle Stodola informed the panel that
she is currently researching and writing about Virginia Sneve‘s juvenile novel, Blackhawk, set against the
actual capture and hanging of a dozen Lakota warriors in Minnesota. Stodola has examined archival
sources of the hanging, which she claims is Minnesota‘s largest mass execution. Betty Donahue‘s work
explains Rowlandson‘s treatment during her captivity in terms of Wampanoag mourning rituals; her work
is under consideration for publication.

5
Joanna Brooks is currently a visiting Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of English at the
University of Southern California. She presented her recent research at a talk on September 13, 2005.

6
It is clear from her writing that her multicultural or mixed Indian/white—Ojibwa and French on her
mother‘s side and German on her father‘s— heritage influences her work. Erdrich recently published her
ninth novel, Four Souls (2004), which now links at least six of her books together in an ever more
intricately designed narrative about the lives and livelihood of the descendants of Little No Horse, a
fictitious Indian reservation in North Dakota where most of her novels take place. Interestingly, we did not
know the name of this reservation until the release of Erdrich‘s seventh novel, The Last Report at Little No
Horse (2001).
Beginning with her debut novel, Love Medicine (1984), Erdrich has published a novel nearly
every two years, a remarkable and laudable feat for any writer, but it is even more incredible in light of the
fact that Erdrich became a parent to six children after her literary career took off (three she birthed and
three she adopted when she married her late husband Michael Dorris, with whom she also co-authored a
novel, The Crown of Columbus). It is therefore not surprising, with her publication record, that she is the
most prolific American Indian writer to date and, arguably, the most critically acclaimed. Although she
admits that she writes for an Indian audience, she enjoys a wide commercial appeal to non-native audiences
as well. In fact, one of her more recent novels, The Master Butcher‘s Singing Club (2003), draws upon her
paternal lineage (her father‘s parents owned a butcher shop in Little Falls, Minnesota) and deals entirely
with the non-Indian experiences of a German immigrant and his family after World War I. In addition to
the publication of her novels, Erdrich has also published three books of poetry, two children‘s books, and
two works of non-fiction, including a memoir, The Blue Jay‘s Dance (1995), about motherhood and her
career as a writer. See Stookey, Lorena L. ―The Life of Louise Erdrich.‖ Louise Erdrich: A Critical
Companion. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999): 1-12.

7
See Castiglia, 10-12.

8
Post-9/11, narratives of capture and escape from the ongoing war in Iraq dominated news headlines at the
start of the US‘ offensive in the Middle East. The American captives highlighted in the most prominent
71

narratives were familiar prototypes: they featured a young innocent girl named Jessica Lynch and the hard-
working, dairy farmer from middle America, Tommy Hammil. With even more disturbing reports about the
abuse of Arab prisoners in Abu Graihb and other Iraqi prisons, it seems more important than ever that we
reexamine our legacy of freedom as it continues to be filtered through multiple structures of captivity.
Interestingly, the kidnappings and the narratives of rescue and/or escape have dwindled in the last year at
the same time that there is a growing outcry against the war at home.

9
Erdrich, Louise. Baptism of Desire. (New York: Harper & Row, 1989).

10
In Erdrich‘s poem she writes an epigraph that is supposed to come from Rowlandson‘s narrative, but it
does not. It is simply part of Erdrich‘s overall revision of her narrative. The epigraph states: ―He (my
captor) gave me a biscuit, which I put in my pocket, not daring to eat it, I buried it under a log, fearing he
had put something in it to make me love him.‖ Interestingly, Sherman Alexie also recites the epigraph in
his homage or simulation of Erdrich‘s poem in his Captivity poem in, First Indian on the Moon (New York:
Hanging Loose Press, 1992). The epigraph‘s origin was debated on the Early American Literature listserve.
Michelle Burnham traced an almost direct quote from John Gyles‘ captivity narrative; however, in the
Fourteenth Remove of Rowlandson‘s tale, Rowlandson admits to putting food in her pocket that a captor
gave her daughter on the day of their capture. This matter is of importance here because the epigraph
clearly sets up Erdrich‘s desire to weave into Rowlandson‘s narrative the theme of love medicine and its
subsequent consequences for the recipient.

11
Van Dyke, Annette. ―Encounters with Deer Woman: Sexual Relations in Susan Power‘s The Grass
Dancer and Louise Erdrich‘s The Antelope Wife.‖ Studies in American Indian Literatures. Vol. 15, No.
3&4. Fall 2203/Winter 2004: 168-188.

12
In addition to the book-length use of the deer woman story in The Antelope Wife, Erdrich also weaves
elements of this story into Love Medicine by characterizing June Morrissey as deer-like, thus imbuing her
character with a heightened degree of sexuality and desirability in the novel.

13
Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence, 94.

14
See Castiglia, 12.

15
―Alongside The New Testament, The Book of Mormon, and Bishop Baraga‘s Ojibwa Dictionary, the
darkly bound narrative of the captivity of John Tanner stood upright on my grandparent‘s Turtle Mountain
Reservation home. It belonged to my grandfather Patrick Gorneau, and I first read it on the sun-soaked
back steps of his house, just beyond the shade of the spreading woods where Tanner once joined an ill-fated
early nineteenth century Cree war party. The story of Sha-sha-wa-be-na-se, or The Falcon, was a family
touchstone, especially prized by my younger sister Lise. She managed to extract another copy from the
discard bin at the local library, and we passed around the Ross & Haines version until the bindings broke
and the pages had to be gathered up in a heap, secured with rubber bands‖ (Erdrich, ―Introduction,‖ The
Falcon. Edwin James, Ed. [New York: Penguin Books, reprinted in 2000,]).

16
Interestingly, Kevin Costner, director of the 1990 Academy Award winning film, Dances With Wolves,
admits to modeling the character of Stands-With-A-Fist (Mary McDonnell) after Francis Slocum, who is
taken captive by a raiding party of Pawnee Indians in the film. Unlike Stands-With-A-First, who is not
presented with an opportunity to return to white culture until Lt. John Dunbar (Costner) shows up to
―rescue‖ her in the film, Slocum refuses to return to white culture when an attempt is made to rescue her,
choosing instead to remain with her Indian captors/family.

17
In Captive Selves, Captivating Others, Pauline Strong Turner provides a wonderful study of the purposes
of captivity during the Age of Exploration. She convincingly argues that captivity was a multifaceted
72

practice for many Northeastern Woodland tribal groups, which would include tribes that were pushed out
of the Ohio River Valley after the American Revolution, and into the area where John Tanner was taken
hostage. Although the reasons for captivity varied from context to context, she claims that the prime age for
a captive who is sought after for the purpose of replacement is between the ages of 7 and 12. Otherwise, the
hope for a successful integration into the adopted family was hindered with resistance as many captivity
narratives confirm. She also stresses that captive-taking occurred inter-tribally before it became an inter-
racial or inter-national practice. Interestingly, in her study she stresses that the first New World records of
captivity are of indigenous people being lured onto ships and taken away by European explorers for the
purpose of providing evidence of a discovery of a new land and of new people.
On a further aside, a recent biography about Robert Fitzroy, the captain that sailed the Beagle with
Charles Darwin on board as a naturalist, titled, Evolutions Captain (2004), argues that were not for
Fitzroy‘s capture of four Tierra del Fuego natives several years prior to the Beagle’s second South
American voyage, then Darwin would perhaps not have been in the position to sail to such a pristine
location to conduct his observations of the natural world. This point becomes even more provocative when
the biographer reveals, rather, strongly suggests, that Fitzroy hastily commences the second voyage after
one of his Fuegian male captives impregnates the young female captive while they are boarding at an
Infant‘s School just outside of London. Thus, the revolutionary theories of evolution that Darwin espouses
owe its creation to a captivity narrative.

18
Erdrich‘s ―Introduction‖ appears as part of Penguin‘s Natures Classics series. (Tanner, John. The Falcon:
A Narrative of the Captivity and Adventures of John Tanner. Reprinted. Edward Hoagland, Series Editor.
(New York: Penguin Books, 1994) x-xv.

19
Derounian-Stodola, Kathryn Zabelle, Ed. Women’s Indian Captivity Narratives. (New York: Penguin
Books, 1998) 5.

20
Netnokwa purchases Tanner for several kegs of whiskey and a few gifts. Tanner remarks about the
transaction: ―Objections were made to the exchange until the contents of the keg had circulated for some
time; then an additional keg, and a few more presents completed the bargain, and I was transferred to Net-
no-kwa‖ (15).

21
Baird, Robert. ―Going Indian: Dances With Wolves (1990).‖ Hollywood’s Indian: The Portrayal of the
Native American in Film. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998) 153-169.

22
Tanner relates several moments of abuse and cruelty he endured at the hands of Manito-o-gheezik I
stated earlier an instance in which Tanner falls asleep on the job. Manito-o-gheezik becomes so enraged at
what he perceives as Tanner‘s laziness that he wants to kill him. Manito-o-gheezik‘s wife prevails upon
him to spare Tanner. In another, much harsher moment of punishment, Manito-o-gheezik smashes Tanner‘s
face in a pile of human excrement that someone deposits too close to the family‘s lodgings. Perceiving that
Tanner is responsible, Manito-o-gheezik rubs Tanner‘s nose in the mess to punish him for his apparent
offense. At this moment in the text the editor, Edwin James, interrupts the text to comment that:

Tanner has much of the Indian habit of concealing emotion; but when he related the
above to me, the glimmering of his eye, and a convulsive movement of his upper lip,
betrayed sufficiently, that he is not without enduring thirst for revenge which belongs to
the people among whom he has spent his life. ―As soon,‖ said he, in connection with the
anecdote, ―as I landed in Detroit on my return from Red River, and found a man who
could speak with me, I said ‗where is Kish-kau-ko?‘ ‗He is in prison.‘ ‗Where is Manito-
o-gheezik, his father?‘ ‗Dead two months since. ‗It is well he is dead.‘‖ Intimating that
though more than thirty years had elapsed, he intended now to have avenged himself for
the injury done him when a boy not eleven years of age (12).

73

While James may be partially right about Tanner‘s wish to seek revenge for the abuse he received from is
original captors, I read Tanner‘s response as he recalls this moment as a painful childhood memory of what
must have been an absolutely terrifying experience of pain and humiliation. The ―glimmer of his eye‖ could
possibly arise from the memory of himself as a frightened and lonely child suffering one of the most
traumatic moments of his entire life. Furthermore the ―convulsive movement of his upper lip‖ could also
signal his losing battle to control the onslaught of tears. Such visceral recollections of pain are no doubt to
be expected, despite his ―Indian habit of concealing emotion.‖

23
Although Tanner‘s father remarries after his mother‘s death, there is no description of her or of Tanner‘s
relationship with her except for the brief description of her caring for several young children on the day of
Tanner‘s capture.

24
The ―medicine hunt‖ occurs when the hunter fasts and prays for guidance from the Great Spirit to find
game. Net-no-kwa goes conducts several medicine hunts to help her young sons find food for the family.
Tanner seems always aware that the guidance she receives is a result of her own cunning abilities to track
animals.

25
Despite my knowledge of the difficult and painful existence they led, the Harlequin reader in me is
seduced by the potential romance story their names alone evoke: The Falcon and The Red Sky of the
Morning.

26
Tanner has four mixedblood children: three daughters, including one that dies from the measles, and one
son. It is unclear from his narrative if all of these children were a result of his union with Mis-kwa-bun-kwa
or from his marriage to his second wife (whose name we are never informed of). The eldest daugher is
named Martha and hers is the only child‘s name he reveals.

27
In other words, contrary to Erdrich‘s claim that Tanner‘s text is not ―editorialized,‖ he admits early in his
tale that he forgets his ―mother tongue,‖ and upon his reunion with his brother and sisters, he also tells us
that ―on account of my ignorance of the English language, we were unable to speak to each other except
through the use of an interpreter‖ (248). These admissions necessarily signal the mediation of his text by
an editor (in addition to the obvious editorial interruptions that occur in the narrative‘s footnotes).

28
In Allen‘s book, he discusses this phenomenon in relation to Ella Deloria‘s ethnographic fiction,
Waterlily. He notes that her work is rich in ethnographic details that discuss the everyday practices of
Dakota life and its intricate kinship structure. Allen claims, via his reading of Deloria‘s ethnographic text as
a ―store of collective memory‖ (88).

29
Allen uses the distinction between of settler as a means of distinguishing between the descendents of the
colonizer‘s that were born and raised in the US and New Zealand and indigenous people because a favorite
(postcolonial) argument from the descendants of the colonizers is that they are ―native‖ as well.

30
Nanapush is the old Ojibwa man or fatherly figure that appears in her novels. His name plays on the
Ojibwa Nanaboozho or trickster figure whose idiosyncratic life offers the occasion for storytelling. Erdrich
generally features Nanapush‘s alternating point of view to narrate a story. She employs this technique in
Tracks (1989)¸ The Last Report at Little No Horse (2000), and in Four Souls (2004). He adopts Fleur
Pillager in Tracks after her entire family is wiped out by an attack of consumption. Together their survival
is emblematic of the preservation and transmission of traditional Ojibwa culture from generation to
generation in the midst of continuous colonial aggression.

31
See Castiglia.

74

Chapter 3
Held Captive by the Image: American Indian
Spectatorship, Representation, and Repatriation in Cinema

Indian Spectatorship: “To be happy with less”
In “I Hate Tonto (Still Do),” a short article that Sherman Alexie wrote for the Los
Angeles Times after the debut of his breakthrough film, Smoke Signals (1998), he
explores the complex history of Indian representation in film.
1
In the article he assumes a
childlike enthusiasm for film and confesses that in his youth he often imagined himself to
be a “cinematic Indian, splattered with Day-Glo Hollywood war paint.” He declares that
he “loved movies about Indians, loved them beyond all reasoning and saw no fault with
any of them.” In fact, he claims that he also loved John Ford‟s The Searchers, despite
Ethan Edwards desire to kill the Indians who had abducted his niece. Movies informed
Alexie, a reservation born and raised kid, about the “the kind of Indian [he] was supposed
to be.” In the article he alternately cites what a cinematic Indian represents as an
authentic version of an Indian and what he actually embodies: “a cinematic Indian is
supposed to be a warrior,” Alexie writes, “ I haven‟t been in a fistfight since the sixth
grade and she beat the crap out of me.” Although the statement is written playfully, its
implications are serious. “When it came to movies” he elsewhere explains, “Indians
learned to be happy with less.”For Alexie, like many Native American spectators, the
problem with Indian representation in film is that the visual images are replicas of
stereotypes that arose from Indian captivity narratives. Therefore, the unrealistic

75
representations that Alexie imagined himself to be offered a limited visual pleasure and
one it seems that led him to simultaneously desire to emulate and hate these figures (the
warrior and the Tonto, which means “stupid” in Spanish, making Tonto quite literally the
dumb, i.e. silent, Indian) in film.
With such a complex and ambivalent relationship to film as a moviegoer, Alexie,
after launching his successful if controversial literary career, later adapted his poems and
short stories into screenplays. His movies to date include the crossover sensation Smoke
Signals (1998) and the semi-autobiographical experimental film, The Business of
Fancydancing (2003); both films explicitly target and deconstruct Hollywood‟s Indian
stereotypes.
2
It is therefore not surprising, given Alexie‟s strong sentiments regarding the
imagined Indians in Hollywood films, that in his literature he worked to demythologize
some of white America‟s treasured icons in colonial history including the Tonto and
Lone Ranger figures.
3
Alexie accomplishes this feat in his production of Smoke Signals
by hiring Native director, Chris Eyre, and casting Indian actors in all the lead roles. He
also makes a conscientious effort to film most of the scenes in his movies on the actual
reservation where he grew up, in Cour‟D‟Alene, Idaho. While such a practice might seem
nostalgic and even romantic, the scenes are shot in 8mm film to highlight the realism of
everyday reservation life. Finally, Alexie boldly challenges the popular Hollywood male
Indian figure in each of his films by queering two of his main characters; in fact, Alexie
cast Evan Adams, an openly gay Indian actor to play both Thomas Builds the Fire in SS
and Seymour Polatkin in Fancydancing. The result of Adams‟ performances is a striking
departure from the popularized image of the savage and virile Indian brave we are
accustomed to viewing, particularly in Westerns and captivity narratives. Although

76
Alexie has yet to make an actual Western movie or a movie that adapts the Western‟s
formula to meet his artistic needs, many of the poems, and in his first published
collection of short stories, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993), many
of his poems and short stories deal with popular Western figures and themes. In fact, his
most recent collection of short stories, The Toughest Indian in the World (2000), features
a beautiful and highly entertaining account of a love affair between a Spokane Indian
actress, Etta Joseph, an extra on the set of The Searchers, and none other than the Duke
himself, John Wayne. The story is memorable and significant to the case at hand because
it provides an important glimpse into Alexie‟s Indian mind and reveals how he
transforms Ford‟s classic Western and Western hero in his imaginative world.
In “Dear John Wayne,” Alexie takes us backstage, if you will, onto the set of The
Searchers, filmed on location in the breathtaking natural beauty of Monument Valley.
4

Alexie helps us reimagine the seductive allure of the film‟s production and the larger than
life figure of John Wayne through the eyes of an Indian woman. Alexie‟s story converts
our image of Wayne as the familiar American Indian fighter from Ford‟s films into an
American Indian lover. Etta recounts her love story during an interview with Spencer
Cox, an anthropologist who is researching “traditional powwow dancing” (191). Instead
of hearing about rare and ancient dance rituals, Cox listens to an astonishing account of
America‟s archetypal cowboy falling in love with an Indian extra that begins when Etta
matter-of-factly tells him, “I lost my virginity to John Wayne” (195). Far from living up
to Cox‟s perception of John Wayne as the Western hero that always rescues the white
maiden in distress, restores the white family, and preserves the white nation from

77
renegades and subversives, Etta paints an entirely different portrait of the man, and in
the process provides us with an Indian woman‟s perspective of the legendary actor.
At one point in the story, Etta remembers the first time John Ford addresses her
on the set.
“Girl, Ford had said, you are as pretty as the mesa.” For just a moment,
Etta had wondered if Ford might cast her then and there for a speaking
role, perhaps even give her the role of Look, the chubby daughter of the
Navajo chief, and send that other girl packing. Of course not! But Etta had
wished for it, however briefly, and chided herself for her ambition. She‟d
wished ill will on another Indian woman just because a white man had
called her pretty. Desperate and shallow, of course, but Etta had not been
able to help herself.
This was John Ford! He was not handsome, no, but he was a
Hollywood director. He made dreams come true. He was the one who
filled the movie screens with movies! He was a magician! He was a
feature-film director and she knew they were the kindest and most decent
men in the world. (197)

Etta‟s naivety is endearing; however, she is also unnervingly perceptive. Despite Etta‟s
novice wonder about Hollywod‟s allure, it does not completely blind her to the dangers
involved in placing her “ambition” above her sense of community and racial affiliation.
Alexie simultaneously reaffirms Etta‟s tribal identity in the passage at the same time that
he pokes fun at the authority and authenticity deferred to Hollywood directors. While
admiring the strikingly handsome Jeffrey Hunter, Etta then comments on his role in the
film: “[H]ere he was playing an Indian, a half-breed Cherokee, so perhaps Jeffrey
himself was part Indian. After all, Etta had thought, why would they cast a white man as
an Indian if he didn‟t have some Indian blood himself? Otherwise, the movie would have
been a lie, and John Wayne didn‟t lie” (197-98). Etta‟s account is Alexie‟s cheeky way of
commenting on the occupation of American Indian roles in films by non-Indian actors,
which is a practice, according to Etta, as sacrilegious as lying.

78
By the end of the story, Alexie has recreated our image of John Wayne, rather,
Marion, as Etta tells us he preferred to be called, from a tough as leather and hard as nails
cowboy into a soulful, tender, gentle and considerate lover. He is a loving father that
worries about his sons‟ emotional development, and in a touchingly funny scene, he tells
Etta about catching them painting their faces with lipstick in his trailer. Instead of
chastising them for being girly, he explains to them that experimenting with gender is a
normal process of maturation. He even encourages them to get in touch with their
feminine sides by confessing that he often tries “to think like a woman” (203). However,
Wayne does not listen or think like a woman when Etta begins to tell him that she is
insecure about her sexual competence. Instead of hearing her out, Wayne presumes that
she is afraid she might get pregnant, and he simply says, “ If you are pregnant, I will take
care of it” (199.) His cold practicality frightens Etta further and marks a critical point in
the narrative in which Etta resorts to her film knowledge of Wayne‟s behavior towards
Indians and she runs from him.
“Wait, wait, wait,” cried John Wayne as he chased after her. He was not a
young man. He wondered if he could possibly catch her. But she was a
child of the river and the pine tree, of wild grass and mountain. She
understood gravity in a different way and, therefore, tripped in the rough
sands of the desert. She fell face first into the red dirt and waited for John
Wayne to catch and hurt her. Isn‟t that what he had always done? Wasn‟t
he the man who killed Indians? (199-200)

Alexie‟s reinterpretation of Wayne and his relationship with Indians are provocative and
refreshing. To say that Alexie deconstructs typical American depictions of John Wayne,
the Great American Hero of the Great American Western is to oversimplify Alexie‟s coy
revision of the iconoclastic man. The story utilizes familiar tropes and stereotypes that
Wayne is known for with a difference: Alexie, a contemporary Indian man, is in control

79
of the representation and free to create his imagined version of America‟s favorite
cowboy/hero. Although his depiction presents a softer side of Wayne, Alexie reverses
stereotypes of the outer man with clichés of what the inner man might look like. The
result provides us with a complex glimpse of an Indian man‟s vision of a more desirable
John Wayne. Thus, Alexie, far from being “happy with less,” transformed his
dissatisfaction with the film‟s representations, and in his literary world, revised the
mythical man that held such appeal and contradiction for him as a child. In the end, he
found an avenue to recover, through the process of revision, some satisfaction without
compromising his needs or abandoning his identity.
Sherman Alexie‟s complex response to Indian representation in film, especially in
John Wayne movies, is common in American Indian literary and film studies. However,
the issue is generally not theorized as a potential site for cultural intervention or political
mobilization; instead, the comments, though emotionally charged, are cited as a catalogue
of grievances or as a shared racialized/ethnic experience. Because of the deep
psychological functions that film excites in the viewer, however, it is critical for Native
and Film Studies scholars to investigate the issue of Indian spectatorship more fully. The
lack of discourse that specifically addresses the Indian spectator encouraged me to
examine other responses by American Indian writers to Hollywood representations of
Indian people and culture. My research reveals that in most instances, Native writers have
mixed feelings about the representation of Indians in film as well as Indians watching
Indians on film. The problem is compounded by the fact that until recently filmmakers
were not concerned about portraying, with any accuracy or fairness, American
Indians/culture.
5

80
At the outset of a film study a Native scholar must confront the nature of film
theory: its structural basis derived from a Freudian psychological model may be a turnoff
because many of Freud‟s theories rely on classical Western, i.e. Greek, stories to explain
fundamental human psychic conditions and drives. Hence, film theory‟s foundation is
already too problematic to begin to address the inner workings of an Indian spectator‟s
desires. However, my work recognizes the limitations of the model and instead uses it as
a springboard to begin a new discussion. Hence, I utilize the theoretical work of African
American scholars that are in an equally discordant relationship with cinema and
representations of the African American body and culture. I especially find useful the
work about black spectatorship written by Manthia Diawara, bell hooks, and Jacqueline
Bobo.
While these scholars have made important inroads for the rest of us to follow, for
American Indians the most useful work should originate from community practices that
help ensure survival. Thus, I began my reading of film through the lens of repatriation
discourse. While the metaphor is not an exact translation, the comparison offers a site for
future critique. In essence, after reflecting about my experiences consuming films that
featured Indians and Indian culture, I began to see similarities between issues of tribal
repatriation and the history of Hollywood‟s Indian representations. Early cinema
developed alongside the burgeoning field of anthropology and ethnology.
6
Like these
early academic practices, the film industry was concerned about preserving indigenous
cultures and cultural artifacts for filmmakers this meant utilizing cinema as a method of
scientific observation and preservation.
7
The Native American Graves and Repatriation
Act or NAGPRA became law in 1990 in response to Native activism that called for the

81
repatriation or return of tribal remains and artifacts that were removed, sold, or
otherwise misappropriated from tribal sites of origin.
8
While this legislation specifically
deals with physical remains—bones, tools, ceremonial artifacts, etc.—its mandate is
relevant in other domains where American Indian cultural sovereignty is at stake; in
particular, regarding the issue of Indian representation and spectatorship in film. It is in
the spirit of strengthening the cultural sovereignty of Indian people that this chapter
investigates the reclamation of Hollywood‟s Indian through a process of “representational
repatriation” revealed in subtle inter-celluloid citations that originate in classic American
Western films, evolve in films that challenge the Western‟s conventions, and transform
the Indian‟s place within it. The response to John Wayne by Alexie, and from what we
will see from Louis Owens and Louise Erdrich, reveals the deep psychological
ambivalence that these Indian writers experienced as film spectators. Alexie‟s above
accounts demonstrate that Native Americans formed strong antipathies in childhood that
led them as adults to find an avenue of expression, primarily through literature, for their
dissatisfaction with the Indian images they witnessed on screen. In what follows, I assess
each writer‟s response to Wayne and Western films, which reveals the authors unsettling
feeling of frustration and unmet desire for something more meaningful from the Western
narrative tradition specifically and from the film industry generally.. While their revisions
in print are encouraging and empowering, the repatriation of the image on screen is the
area in which the Native American spectator may suture new meaning from old
representations of Hollywood‟s Indian.

Suffering Stings: Identification and Erasure

82
Before Alexie published his story, Louise Erdrich also wrote a creative response
to John Wayne and his films in her poem also titled “Dear John Wayne” (1984; which
Alexie‟s story recites in the “Butlerian sense” in its title). In the poem, Louise Erdrich
evokes a memorable summer night at a drive-in movie filled with Indians in the audience
watching a John Wayne flick. “August and the drive-in picture is packed./ We lounge on
the hood of the Pontiac” (12). The irony of the Indian spectators watching John Wayne
battle Indians while lounging on the hood of a car named after Indian people (the
Pontiac) in the poem is explicit; however, Erdrich makes a sharper and more insidious
comparison between the imperial fantasy being acted out on screen and the “hordes of
mosquitoes” attacking the movie-goers. Despite burning “spirals” of presumably
citronella candles to keep the preying insects at bay, “Nothing works. They break through
the smoke screen for blood” (12). John Wayne and the settlers in Erdrich‟s poetic world
are like the mosquitoes attacking the Indians and spreading “his disease … the idea of
taking everything” (13). Like mosquitoes that transmit cancerous viruses colonization
swept across Indian country and left its indigenous inhabitants with visceral reminders of
the attack on their bodies—the stinging welt from the mosquitoes‟ bite is like a corporeal
mark of the assault made on Indian minds, lands, and cultures. Erdrich writes:
Always the lookout spots the Indians first,
Spread north to south, barring progress …
The drum breaks. There will be no parlance.
Only the arrows whining, a death-cloud of nerves
swarming down on the settlers
who die beautifully, tumbling like dust weeds
into the history that brought us all here
together: this wide screen beneath the sign of the bear. (12)

83
Instead of providing a fantasy of escape or pleasure, the John Wayne film reminds
Erdrich‟s moviegoers of the colonial “history that brought us all here” to a place of
convergence where the wide screen symbolizes the colonizer‟s presence and the “sign of
the bear,” in the late summer, reminds readers that Erdrich maintains an Ojibwa
worldview.
At the end of the poem Erdrich writes, “the credits reel over, and then the white
fields/ again blowing in the true-to-life dark. / The dark films over everything./ We get
into the car/ scratching our mosquito bites, speechless and small/ as people are when the
movie is done./ We are back in our skins” (12-13). The contrast between whiteness and
darkness is stark in not only the movie but in the environment in which the spectator‟s
live. The “dark film” evokes an image of a shroud covering the colonial history of
violence against Indian people in this country and it suggests that Indians are forced to
occupy a position of “invisibility” vis-à-vis the film and its narrative.
9
Despite the film‟s
attempt in the poem to reinforce the subject-position in danger of erasure—the Indian
spectator‟s dark body in the dark night—the final line from the stanza—“we are back in
our skins”—suggests a return from an out of body experience or, more importantly, a
return from a removal, a displacement of identification assumed in order to protect the
Indian “skins” while watching the film. Furthermore, the reference to “skins” is also a
double entendre that connotes the literal return to the body from the imaginative escape
that film watching invites just as it also signifies the racial reference that Indians were
often called, redskins. The use of the word at the poem‟s end signals to me a
simultaneous sense of relief that the attacks against the Indian body from the film‟s
content and from the movie‟s light that attracted the mosquito hordes is finally over.

84
The figurative dislocation that Erdrich evokes in the poem illustrates the
complex terrain of Indian spectatorship. If an American Indian identifies with the Indian
representation on screen, then s/he identifies (in most Westerns) with the narrative‟s
enemy, which, in essence, means that the American Indian occupies a self-effacing
subject position. On the other hand, to identify with the white cowboy hero places the
American Indian spectator in a similar position in which one must disavow one‟s race,
ethnicity, and nationality in an equally self-denigrating move. Both points of
identification limit the potential for an American Indian spectator to occupy a subject-
position to imagine and hence transform one‟s subjectivity vis-à-vis the fantasy enacted
through cinema. Thus, I wonder, is the Western, like the captivity narrative, an inherently
inflammatory form to Native Audiences? Must the American Indian spectator always
suffer the stings of misrepresentation and dominance as the Indian audience does in
Erdrich‟s poem? Is it possible to lift the “dark film” over everything and reveal some
light, some truth, or some middle ground for identification? Are there any positions of
identification available to American Indian spectators of Westerns where they do not
have to be “happy with less” like Alexie and Erdrich so painfully describe? Another
response to John Wayne written by the late Louis Owens, esteemed writer and literary
critic, elaborates on these issues and helps us more fully understand the process of
identification that the American Indian spectator undergoes to carefully maintain a
critical distance and one‟s Indian identity while watching Western films.
Unlike Alexie and Erdrich‟s creative responses to John Wayne, in his critical
writing Louis Owens has also expressed a similar ambivalent position regarding his
simultaneous fascination for and contempt of Westerns and Indian representation therein.

85
In, “The Invention of John Wayne,” he writes that “from a Native American
perspective the figure of John Wayne is unsurpassingly strange and disturbing” (112).
10

He explains that he “grew up distrusting and even disliking John Wayne” (99). He goes
on to say that even before he learned that John Wayne was Marion Morris‟s pseudonym
he “suspected he was not real.” “For one thing,” Owens writes, “ he seemed too big and
too inescapable, always there during my childhood, spurring his horse across all our lives,
looming large in doorways, blocking the light” (99). Here again is another example of the
Indian memory of Wayne as an uncomfortable association with darkness. Owens‟
comment that Wayne‟s image is so large that he blocks out “the light” suggests then that
his position of identification as the Indian spectator is from a point of darkness, located in
the absence of light, like the drive-in movie goers in Erdrich‟s poem. The problem with
John Wayne and Indian representation in film according to Owens has less to do with the
actor and more to do with America‟s desire to continuously see acted and reenacted its
own ambivalent fantasies of conquest and survival. “Not merely from a Native American
point of view but from the perspective of any thinking human being,” Owens writes, “the
essential truth about the American hero is his falseness. The giant is a hollow shadow cast
by an insecure and alienated population of colonists who have never come to terms with
the land they invaded or the people they attempted to both exterminate and emulate”
(101). Despite his intellectual rationalization of Wayne‟s image and representation within
the history of American colonization, Owens admits to playing “cowboys and Indians” as
a child:
As an eight-year-old, however, just inside from playing cowboys and
Indians with my ten-year-old brother—who always got to be the
cowboy—I listened to young Breck Coleman, John Wayne‟s character in
The Big Trail (a 1930 film ancient even in my childhood) explain, “You

86
see, the Indians was my friends. They taught me all I know about the
woods. They taught me how to follow a trail…. And they taught me how
to make the best bow and arrows too.” I instinctively knew Breck
Coleman was lying. If the young white man had stopped short of the last
line, I might have bought the whole thing, but I did not believe Indians
would ever have taught that wimpy guy how to make “the best bow and
arrows too,” or that he even would have been capable of learning. It
sounded like the kind of thing I would have said if I were making the same
story up on the spot: “And they taught me how to make the best bows and
arrows, too.” (100)

Although Owens recalls that his brother “always got to be the cowboy,” his memory
about playing and watching the film are strikingly discordant because he does not discuss
how he reenacted or revised his role as the “Indian” in the game. Instead, he claims that
when he watched the film he “instinctively knew”—by virtue of his cultural authority as
an Indian—that Breck Coleman was a liar. Not only did Owens identification as an
Indian help him see through the “last line,” it was possible, ironically, because he inserted
himself into Coleman‟s role in order to imagine exactly how “it sounded … if [he] were
making the same story up.” Owens‟ comments reveal several positions of identification
for Indian spectators. The first location of identity for Owens is as an Indian in the film
that resists white culture but is ultimately vanquished. The second position is as an Indian
outside of the film that recognizes that the film represents a white or non-Indian fantasy.
The third position, according to Owens‟ memory, is as an Indian in the film that imagines
he is the hero/protagonist but is still aware that he is part of a non-Indian fantasy.
Curiously, the absent position of identification is the position in which the Indian
spectator imagines “other destinies” for the Indians on screen.
11
As an Indian spectator,
Owens, like the Indian spectator in Erdrich's poem, is unable to locate a position of

87
satisfaction in the film. Even after he inserts himself into the narrative as Bret Coleman,
his identification remains negative and false.
Owens is keenly aware of the representational crisis that Native Americans face to
maintain a contemporary presence in American culture. In his analysis of Wayne‟s
invention as the icon of American conquest and glory, he explains that there was “an
ever-present sense in the „Duke‟s‟ films that the Indian did not count and was just a
colorful residue of the past, with no stake in the world John Wayne was helping to
construct” (100). Furthermore, Owens has demonstrated in his literary and film studies
that at the heart of American Indian fiction is a struggle to reclaim Indian identity. “The
recovering or rearticulation of an identity, a process dependent upon rediscovering sense
of place as well as community, becomes in the face of such obstacles a truly enormous
undertaking” (Other Destinies, 5). The same struggle over identity exists for Native
audiences in which cinema, the powerful and accessible machine of cultural imagination,
captures and erases what Teresa de Lauretis would call the “positions for identification”
and, hence, a critical site for subjectivity to transform and for desire to achieve fulfillment
that Owens, Erdrich, and Alexie‟s memories illustrate.
12
In this light, the missing account
from Owens about how he reinterpreted or imagined the Indians role from the film in his
game of cowboys and Indians is an important omission. Owens argues, again in his
critique of Native/American fiction, that this is precisely the terrain where American
Indians must reinsert a tribal voice and identity into literary and historical records. He
writes: “It took five hundred years to sweep Indians off the main playing board of
American expansionism…. The last thing a mainstream readership [or spectatorship]
wants today is a body of writing [or a collection of films] that presents Indians as

88
threatening and disturbing in any way, that is, Indians as vital and able to assert control
over their own destinies and, in so doing, assert a degree of control over white American
destiny as well”.
13

Cinema and other forms of visual culture then seem to be the new frontier—in
which Native Americans confront and respond to an archive of foreign images of
themselves and their cultures. Thus, the real battle of the imagined “west” no longer
solely exists between the reinventions of the questing white cowboy and the battle worn
savage; instead, the struggle in this representational and existential crisis is sometimes
within and between Native Americans and images of themselves. That three renowned
Native American authors explicitly address their histories of watching John Wayne
movies reveals the important role these images and Western narratives have on the
formation of their identities. While Alexie and Owens each admit that they found some
of Wayne‟s movies enjoyable, neither explicitly describes which part (s) of the films or
which actor(s) provide the pleasure. Erdrich‟s poem, however, recreates the extremely
uncomfortable experience for Native spectators in which the only pleasure from the film
occurs at its end—when the “dark films over everything”—essentially making the dark,
Indian spectator‟s body disappear from Wayne‟s imagined view. It is ironic that for
Erdrich the most comforting subject position for her (I imagine her as the personae in the
poem) vis-à-vis Wayne and the Western film is one of invisibility, which is one of the
complaints of Indian representation within the genre to begin with.
Although I read Alexie, Owens, and Erdrich‟s accounts on separate occasions, I
did not start to think about them in a relational way until I began working more intently
on film criticism and theory, in particular while studying African American and feminist

89
film theory. Following Manthia Diawara‟s examination of resistant black spectatorship
(1993), I began to analyze the way in which the cinematic apparatus and Indian
representation sustains and/or subverts the Western plot in film. In what follows, I use
John Ford‟s, Searchers, as my paradigmatic Western because it is a foundational film for
non-Indian and Indian film critics.
14
Like Diawara, my critique of the films in this chapter
relies on feminist theory and criticism that explores the displacement of the pleasure and
scopic agency of any viewer except for the white male spectator in the repetition of the
overarching Oedipal narrative the Western film purportedly reproduces; however I am
also interested in the way this is played out via the repatriation of Indian roles in the film
(214-215).
15

Film Theory Dressed in Feathers
Instead of focusing solely on issues of gender, like Teresa de Lauretis does in
Alice Doesn’t (1984), her groundbreaking analysis of female spectatorship and the
problematic subject-positions available for women within an Oedipal narrative
construction in film, Diawara explores the relationship between Oedipus, the law of the
Father, and representations of African Americans in film; a triad in a Native American
context that is complicated by colonialism just as it is complicated by the specter of
slavery in African American film theory. I will return to this issue in more detail in a
moment. For now, let‟s turn to de Lauretis and her articulation of the central paradox of
film studies: it‟s basis on Freud‟s delineation of the Oedipus myth, which provides the
narrative drive and, hence, forecloses the possibility for any satisfying subject positions
for female spectators. The problem is twofold for women, de Lauretis posits, because

90
they necessarily identify with the camera—an active, hence masculine, process of
looking at the images and the narrative movement across the screen—and they identify as
well with the narrative image‟s figure of closure, which is historically defined as a
passive, feminized, space (Alice Doesn’t 143). If the social and historical construction of
Indian people within the national American imaginary begins with their representation in
the captivity narrative, then when the captivity plot is deployed in a Western film, in what
ways are its narrative endings (over)determined by the Oedipal logic that seeks to fulfill
the (white) hero‟s destiny/quest to resist/escape Indian captivity and the attendant cultural
anxieties it provokes (i.e., miscegenation and/or “going Indian)? Furthermore, how is this
Oedipal logic/desire subverted when the captive in the film is not white, but Indian?
To begin to answer these questions we must keep in mind the function of the
Oedipal myth in relation to the colonial history of Indian culture and its representation in
the national culture. For Indian people the representation of the Father, especially as it is
embodied by figures like John Wayne, is a familiar and tired trope. The infantilization of
Indian tribes is a well-known component of Euro-American imperialism and the
historical and cinematic records abound with examples of speeches made by Indian
agents, frontiersman, and, above all, military men on behalf of the Indian‟s great white
father. Hence to extend an analysis of the Oedipal myth to an Indian context is to
acknowledge that Indian people must work through the family drama within an
immediate tribal context but it must also be negotiated from without as it is imposed upon
them by colonialism. Therefore, for Indians to watch a film like The Searchers, or in
Louis Owens case, The Big Trail, the levels of identification and spectatorial positionality
multiply considerably.

91
If the current critical struggle in Native Film Studies exists, as I argue above,
between a representational instead of a solely material terrain, then what can a reading of
contemporary films through the lens of repatriation help American Indians and non-
Indians understand or work through that classic film theory can not? Where do we go
from here? We need Native and non/native actors/filmmakers to become aware of the
value inherent in the practice of restoring a more tribally informed representation of
Indians to Hollywood. We do not need to export our colonial past to foreign settings, we
need to rethink what is already here, already captured on film, and repatriate the images
of Indians that have been erased and misrepresented.
16
The politics of Native American
cinema are similar to yet vastly divergent from the roots in which theories about film and
fantasy develop. As I already discussed, the politics of Indians and cinema in its early
formation aimed to capture, through the use of film as an ethnographic tool, what was
thought to be the vanishing culture of Native American life. In their quest to represent the
“authentic” Indian, early filmmakers staged scenes of battle, dress, and Indian culture.
Unfortunately, the representations of American Indian life from this era later formed the
bedrock supply of Native images on screen. These images are now so completely
normalized by Hollywood that any new representations and/or storylines of Native
American life seem strangely unfamiliar and, often, inaccurate to mainstream audiences.
Contrarily, the classic Western plot can also sometimes seem equally strange and
unfamiliar to a younger generation of film scholars because the genre is no longer a
moneymaking genre. For Hollywood, the stakes involved to finance a Western
production are risky, especially when spectator reaction is so unpredictable, hence, the
genre is either recycled in sympathetic or revisionist fashion or billed as a “tribute” to a

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“traditional Western” that, as one film scholar privately commented to me, is “dead.”
Either way in today‟s blockbuster movie market, the genre is unprofitable. Although the
occasional sympathetic revisionist Western has come along, the problem with Indian
representation in film is extremely complex, and like the problem with the representation
of other minority groups in this country, it is tied to a dark history of racialized and
gendered violence.
In this regard, the violence against Indians on screen and off is similar to the
violence against women that was popularly filmed in the 1940s and 1950s (and beyond).
To answer my own question, where do we go from here? I suggest we turn towards the
critical model developed in response to the crisis in the representation of women in
cinema. Feminist scholars in the 1970s and 1980s in particular were at a similar
theoretical and critical crossroads as I am at this moment. In the late 1970 and 1980s, de
Lauretis, along with Tania Modleski, Mary Ann Doane, and Kaja Silverman, among
others, distilled the problem for women and cinema down to a complex issue surrounding
spectatorial identification and the seemingly limited vantage points available to the
woman watching herself (the figurative representation of herself) on screen. Facing this
dilemma head on, de Lauretis describes the problem for women in particular and I think
for minority groups in general with respect to their representation in cinema:
If we assumed a single, undivided identification of each spectator
with either the male or the female figure [in the film], the passage
through the film would simply instate, or reconfirm male
spectators in the position of mythic subject, the human being; but it
would only allow female spectators the position of the mythical
obstacle, monster or landscape. How can the female spectator be
entertained as subject of the very movement that places her as its
object, that makes her the figure of its own closure. (“Desire in
Narrative,” 141)

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Although my comparison of primarily white women and Native Americans (men and
women) may cause some to bristle, I do so to suggest that each group shares certain
similarities despite important differences in their overall treatment in and relationship to
cinema. If we substitute the category of “minority spectators,” which can include people
of color as well as gay and lesbians, for de Lauretis‟ “women” then the comparison
becomes clearer. Because minority spectators are interpolated as passive subjects and
objects of the white, heterosexual, male gaze in cinema, they historically and presently
occupy similar positions for identification on screen: the place of the gaze, the landscape
to be worked through, and the obstacle for the hero to overcome. De Laurtetis‟ analysis
and reformulation of this problem for women transformed film and feminist theories. The
seemingly paradoxical position of women spectators vis-à-vis cinema led de Lauretis to
reexamine the critical “sacred texts” of psychoanalysis, semiotics and cinema by
“rereading [them] against a passionate urging of a different question, a different practice,
and a different desire” (107). For de Lauretis, the difference she refers to above is the
sexual differentiation that forms a critical part of one‟s individual identity formation. The
processes—“textual, discursive, behavioral”—involved in our individual subject
formation, de Lauretis posits, are also key to the process of cinematic identification that
she finds problematic for women because they have been theorized, narrated, and filmed
for men, a masculine desire, and a male spectator (141). By identifying and
deconstructing the system under which female identity is formulated via narrative,
psychoanalysis, and film theories, de Lauretis scaffolds a new structure to assess the
politics of women‟s cinema based on questions, images, and analyses of/for women and
women‟s desire. Essential to this critical undertaking, de Lauretis remarks, is the

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recognition that cinema, like narrative, works for the man. However, following the
work of Tania Modleski, Shoshana Felman, and Kaja Silverman among others, de
Lauretis writes: “The real task is to enact the contradiction of female desire, and of
women as social subjects, in the terms of narrative; to perform its figures of movement
and closure; image and gaze, with the constant awareness that spectators are historically
engendered in social practices, in the real world, and in cinema too” (156). While the
figures and representations of subjects on screen are imagined, the individuals watching
the narrative movement unfold are dynamic individuals with different histories, desires,
sexualities, genders, ethnicities, nationalities, and politics. Thus, the breakthrough
contribution that de Lauretis makes to film theory and feminism is essentially a call for
the recognition of the multiple subject positions that an individual may occupy during the
process of subject formation, fantasy, and desire that a spectator experiences through
narrative-filmic processes.
This method of understanding the structure—psychoanalytic, semiotic, and
mythological—and formulation of the politics of cinema via de Lauretis is a useful
starting point to extend this line of thinking to the experience and the process of
identification for the Native American spectator. My query about the spectatorship for
Native Americans is similar to de Lauretis‟ about women with one critical difference:
instead of focusing on gender as the primary issue of critique, I focus on race and gender
in the Native history of colonization as well. My query then shifts from a questioning of
the positions for identification are available to American Indian spectators to one that
asks: In what ways do American Indian spectators need to be cognizant of the “duplicity”
and “contradiction” of the cinematic-narrative codes that constitute the Indian situation?

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Again, I must return to Alexie, Owens, and Erdrich‟s articulations as Western film
spectators as evidence that cultivating an “awareness” of the “contradictions” and
“duplicity” is also limiting; otherwise, each writer would have also included accounts of
pleasure and scopic satisfaction. de Lauretis gestures towards the inclusion of a racial
identification in her analysis of gender and its construction via cinematic-narrative codes
when she writes that “Clearly, at least for women spectators, we cannot assume
identification to be single or simple. For one thing, identification is itself a movement, a
subject-process, a relation: the identification (of oneself) with something (other than
oneself),” my repatriation analysis specifically deals with the racial formation of Indian
identity in its analysis.
17
I find particularly useful in my study, however, de Lauretis‟
emphasis on the process (narrative movement) of identification rather than only the
object (the gaze and the gazed upon) of identification, which challenges and deconstructs
longstanding classical film theories that support and encourage spectatorial analysis that
rests always and by default on a male/masculine configuration of desire (143). With these
theoretical frameworks in mind, let us turn to the text that initiates the conversation and
explore the way in which an Indian spectator‟s positions of identification multiply, shift,
and transform with a repatriated reading of Indian representation in Western films.
1956-2006: Still Searching for the Indian “Look” in Western Films
2006 marks the Golden Anniversary of John Ford‟s 1956 western classic, The
Searchers, an epic film about the search to find two white girls taken captive by
Comanche Indians at the end of the nineteenth century. Most critics in their analysis of
the film recall Ford‟s then unflinching portrayal of the brutality of Indian captivity and
the frontiersman‟s desperate struggle to preserve the American family in the face of a

96
hostile wilderness and hostile indigenous population. Interestingly, Ford scholars note
that he intentionally uses light and dark in the film to contrast the interior-family-spaces
and the exterior-wilderness-spaces.
18
In the cover story of the December 2005 issue of,
Cowboys and Indians—the self-proclaimed “premier magazine of the West”—William
C. Reynolds writes, “Given the innocence of the time, the dark aspects of The Searchers
were disturbing to many” (118). The “dark aspects” of the film that Reynolds alludes to,
primarily involve the representation of violence against women, hence, against
domesticity and civilization.
19
In it, John Wayne is Ethan Edwards, a confederate veteran
who returns home to his brother‟s family on the Texas frontier. Jeffrey Hunter plays
Martin Pawley, a mixed-race (Indian and Irish) young man raised by the Edwards after
Indians massacre his family. Set in 1868, amidst the fierce Apache wars of resistance, the
basic plot of the films revolves around the men‟s quest to find and rescue their lost sisters
from savage Indian captors.
The movie adheres to a conventional western script with little divergence except
for the heightened evocation of sexual violence against white women. The Indians are the
lawless aggressors that provide the impetus for the hero‟s action and subsequent bloody
violence. The hero must conquer unrevealed personal demons symbolized by his quiet
hatred for criminals and/or outlaws. The vanquishing of the enemy results in the
restoration of the missing part of the hero‟s character.
20
John Ford repeatedly filmed this
storyline in his oeuvre linking the healing of the man, with the healing of the family, and,
by extension, the healing of the nation. The cowboy/hero became the epitome of
patriarchal authority in the lawless West; thus, his celluloid demise, in the middle of the
twentieth century, was unthinkable, indeed, it was un-filmable.
21
Likewise, a

97
sympathetic depiction of the Indian characters in the film was equally untenable at this
time in America‟s cinematic and national history. Thus, the controversial Native
American scholar Ward Churchill writes, “Small wonder, given our continuous
bombardment with such malignant trash, that by the 1950s, probably earlier, American
Indian children had often become as prone to anyone else to „root for the cavalry‟ in its
cinematic extermination of their ancestors (and, symbolically, themselves).”
22

Adhering to the cultural practice of the day, the Indians in Ford‟s films were
largely cast as extras with very little or no speaking roles. When Indians did speak, they
spoke broken words or phrases in a slow atavistic manner. Unlike the recent trend in
Hollywood, Ford paid little attention to the authenticity of the Native language or to the
tribal affiliations of his Indian cast.
23
In fact, in The Searchers, the Comanches in the film
were played by primarily local Navajo actors living in and around the film‟s location in
Monument Valley. In his explication of Ford‟s Indian films, Ken Nolley explains that
Ford‟s disregard for representing American Indians in any other form but the popular
Hollywood stereotypes is a reflection of national policies that also failed to recognize the
diversity within Native American groups and that instead sought to unilaterally legislate
their destiny.
24
Nolley goes on to say that in the Western Hollywood mirrored current
federal practices that “detribalized” or captured and erased Indian identity through the
institutionalization of Indian Boarding Schools regulated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs,
which punished native children for practicing any form of cultural allegiance and forced
them to learn English and various skills to perform manual labor. Furthermore, Nolley
reminds us that Ford‟s films are notorious for making the violence against whites
abhorred while the violence against Indians lauded and desired. He writes, “[F]ord‟s

98
films function as if they were historical texts, constructing a sense of Native American
life on the frontier, participating in the social and political debates of the era in which
they were produced, and helping to construct much of what still stands for popular
historical knowledge of Native American life.”
25
Indian lawyer and cultural activist,
Rennard Strickland similarly observes:
What would we think Native American was like if we had only the
celluloid Indian from which to reconstruct history, if our exclusive
available data came from motion picture archives? For millions of people,
these are the only images seen. On one side we see the noble Redman, the
faithful Tonto-like companion. On the other side we see the Indian as
ruthless pillager. … The duality dominates. We would discover from our
viewing of Natives in film that no Indian woman who marries a white man
lives. Her death is preordained. We would also learn that no white man
who marries an Indian woman will have a long and prosperous family
relationship. … If our Indian ethnography were based only on the
Hollywood studios we would believe that the Apaches were the largest
tribe in the United States. Forget that census reports show that Navajos
and Cherokees combined constitute almost 20 percent of the United States
Indian population.
26

Obviously, the relationship between Indians and cinema is contentious and volatile. In
particular, for Ward Churchill, The Searchers, with its captivity plot, represents “the
worst of the lot”.
27
He goes on to explain:

Even when the intended fate of the “rescued” is not so grim, it is often
made plain that the purpose of their recovery is not so much to save them
as it is to deny Indians the “spoils” they represent. Just as the effrontery of
having „known‟ a white woman constitutes a death sentence for a native
man and frequently for his entire people, so too does her “fall from grace”
license punishment of the woman herself (italics original).

In spite of the overwhelmingly negative depiction of American Indians in film, the
cultural form remains appealing to Native consumers. Our dilemma then is to assess the

99
ways in which the canonical narratives and images, like the captivity plot of The
Searchers, that demean, misrepresent, and otherwise denigrate Indian subjectivity can be
reimagined and revised. Nearly fifty years after the release of The Searchers, it is more
than time that we take a fresh look at the film from a Native woman‟s perspective.
“Look” as Paradigmatic Hollywood Indian Woman
The female Indian character of Wild Goose Flying in the Night Sky or Look
(Beulah Archuleta), the Indian woman that Martin inadvertently marries, plays an
understated but highly central and disturbing role in the film. Look‟s role is one of the
only speaking Indian roles in the film, and it is, unfortunately, only in indecipherable
Indian or in broken English. She is a small, round woman. Her eyes gleam, she smiles
continuously, and after meeting Martin she becomes a dutiful wife who is eager to please
her new husband. After mistakenly trading with Indians for what he thought was a
blanket, Martin soon learns that he actually traded for a wife. Ethan soon dubs Martin‟s
new bride “Look” because Martin prefaces every comment he makes to her with, “Look,
I changed my mind. You can keep your blanket,” and “Look, you don‟t understand, I
don‟t want it.” Although Look‟s role in the film is small, and what some might say
insignificant, for American Indian filmmakers and spectators, her representation is a
familiar Hollywood image in need of repatriation. On the surface, Look‟s role in the film
is exactly what American audiences would expect, even desire, to see in the image of an
Indian woman in a 1950‟s film. She is a “squaw” who speaks Pidgin English and desires
to marry a white man. She is submissive—so much so that she answers to whatever name
Martin calls her—inscrutable, and seemingly cunning. Although her active role in the

100
film is brief, her mere presence and name, challenges many of Hollywood Indian
tropes for women then and opens up the possibility for future transformation now.
28

In a scene titled, “Indian Bride,” Ethan explains to Martin that “Look” is now his
wife and throughout the scene he continuously teases a distraught and frustrated Martin.
Oblivious to the joke, Look goes about the cowboy camp preparing and serving coffee to
the men while smiling sweetly. Martin becomes fed up with Ethan‟s taunting and decides
to go to bed. Upon seeing her “husband” lying down in his bedroll, Look hurriedly runs
over to Martin, lies down beside him, and snuggles up to his back. This is the last straw
for Martin, who then bolts upright from his blanket, pulls his knees up to his chest, and
with all his might kicks Look out of his bed and down the desert hillside. Ethan is clearly
amused by Martin‟s “rough” treatment of Look and he laughingly responds to the
situation by saying, “That‟s grounds for divorce in Texas.” After he brutally ejects Look
from his bed, Martin runs down the hill towards Ethan and tells him that if he really
“wanted to do some good, he would ask her if she knows where Scar is.” The comic tone
of the scene then dramatically shifts to a deadly serious close up of Ethan and Martin
holding a terrified Look between them. They question Look about her knowledge of
Scar‟s whereabouts and whether or not she knows if he has a young girl with him. She
shakes her head no and ambiguously says/asks, “Woman?” But Martin interjects and says
no, no, does he have “a little girl,” a “sister” with him? Look backs away shaking her
head no. At this point, Martin and Ethan miss a crucial piece of information that Look is
trying to divulge. Martin and Ethan interpret Look‟s utterance of the word “woman” as a
question not a statement because they imagine that Debbie is still the same little “girl”
she was when she was taken captive. Furthermore, Martin‟s designation of Debbie as a

101
“sister” is all the more telling because it at once masks and reveals the film‟s central
fear: that the white female captives will be subjected to sexual abuse by the Indian
captors. Martin‟s naïve remark suggests that he believes the Indians view Debbie as he
does—a girl, a sister, a child. Whereas, Look‟s comment speaks to the film‟s unspeakable
anxiety: Debbie is already a “woman;” she has already been despoiled. It is interesting to
note here that Ethan‟s character does not acknowledge the implications of Look‟s reply
when it in an earlier scene it is clear that Ethan knows that Debbie will share the same
fate as Lucy.
29
The scene ends and cuts to a shot of Ethan standing over an arrow made
on the ground the next morning. Look is gone, but she left a sign for them to follow. In
the voice over for the next scene, Martin says, “if she left us more signs to follow, we‟ll
never know” because winter approaches and "whites out" any traces of her.
Five minutes later in “reel” time, Ethan and Martin ride into the aftermath of a
massacre at an Indian village, and we bear witness to Look‟s murdered body. While
passing by an open teepee, Ethan peers in and recognizes her corpse. He cautiously
motions Martin in to view her, Ethan places a hat over her face, they bow their heads in
sadness, and the scene ends. Again in a voice over, Martin wonders why Look was at this
village. Was she looking for Debbie or was she there to warn Scar about the searchers?
He laments for the second time, “we‟ll never know.” Although these two scenes comprise
less than ten minutes of the film‟s total time, they provide a significant underlying current
of understanding the representation of Indian women in the film. Henry Brandon, a
German-born actor, plays the role of Scar, the most prominent Indian male character in
the film, while a presumably Navajo woman portrays the character of Look. The deadly
fate for each Native character is typical for Indians in Westerns; however, the complex

102
actions that drive the plot towards this end vary significantly. It is the divergence of
the same yet different treatment of Indian men and women that draws me to examine
Look‟s role in the film further.
While the Indians in the film are the stock characters who are there so that Ethan
can work through the issues haunting his angst-ridden soul, their roles and agency,
limited as they are, still offer critics useful material for analysis and discussion. However,
the Indian male role of Scar is typically the subject of these commentaries. In fact, in his
article to commemorate the 50
th
Anniversary of The Searchers critic William Reynolds
observes that Scar embodies the dark and intense hatred that Ethan harbors in his quest to
find his niece.
30
“The Duke‟s Ethan Edwards burns with a deadly anger,” he writes, “ that
is cleansed only at the end of the film with the death of the Comanche Scar.” In his
assessment of the movie, however, Ken Nolley includes a brief analysis of the repetition
in the “discovery” of two dead female bodies in the film: Lucy, the elder captive girl, and
Look, the Indian bride. Nolley notes that Lucy‟s dead body remains hidden from
spectatorial view, while Look‟s body is made available to the audience‟s eye. In fact,
although Ethan discovers both bodies, he does not tell Marty that he finds Lucy until
Brad (Harry “Dobe” Carey, Jr.) insists that he sees her walking around in the Indian
camp. This scene is one of the most disturbing and memorable in the film because the
suggestive but still unspoken truth is revealed about Lucy‟s fate.
Brad: “I saw her! I saw Lucy!”
Ethan: “What you saw wasn‟t Lucy… . What you saw was a buck wearin‟
Lucy‟s dress. I found Lucy back in the canyon. Wrapped her in my coat,
buried her with my own hands. I thought it best to keep it from ya.”
Brad: “Did they…? Was she…?
Ethan: “What do you want me to do? Draw you a picture? Spell it out?
Don‟t ever ask me! Long as I live, don‟t ever ask me more.”
31

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Upon finding Look, however, Ethan promptly calls Marty into the tipi to show him
what he stumbled across. There is no attempt to hide her dead body. Nolley reasons that
Ford filmed Look‟s murdered body but not Lucy‟s because Look was a “comic
stereotype” that did not pose a threat to or invoke any anxieties in the men, or
concurrently, the audience, whereas, according to this logic, Lucy‟s death is “un-
filmable” not because she was presumably sexually assaulted but because she was white.
The sight of Lucy‟s body therefore is threatening to both the mind and the eye because it
would force the audience to realize the vulnerability of their bodies.
In Nolley‟s analysis then comedy erases the tragedy of the Indian massacre,
Look‟s murder, and the unknown violations to her Indian body. In fact, Freud writes that
comedy or wit “affords us the means of surmounting restrictions,” which are often
sexually transgressive, aggressive, and deviant.
32
It is through the suggestive telling of
the joke or the portrayal of a comedic stereotype that cultural anxieties can be expressed
through a process of displacement. However, from an Indian woman‟s perspective,
Nolley‟s explication does not go far enough to explain or warrant the sadistic and
voyeuristic treatment of the Indian female body.
Classic film theory teaches us that the cinematic apparatus is an ocular machine
designed to control the narrative movement of the film via the sequence of shots. What is
relevant to this study is the understanding and positioning quite literally of the Indian
“Look” versus the white (female) body in the film. Ford could focus on Look‟s racialized
body because the historical moment of the film‟s production permitted him to do so not
because she was a woman, but because she was not a white woman. The racial difference
is the only plausible explanation between the difference in filming or not filming the dead

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women. Despite Nolley‟s explanation of Look‟s comic appeal to a non-Indian
audience, her “likeably comic” role does not absolve Look‟s transgressive desire to
marry. In fact, as Rennard Strickland reminds us earlier, it “preordains her death.” Look‟s
“comedy” fails to fully displace the threat of miscegenation that Martin‟s “rough”
ejection of her from the figurative “marriage bed” evokes. Her murder by the Cavalry, the
representation of national law and order in the film, is her required punishment for her
attempted subversion.
In her now classic essay on “The Woman’s Film: Possession and Address,” Mary
Ann Doane, explains that: “The woman‟s exercise of an active investigating gaze can
only be simultaneous with her own victimization. The place of her secularization is
transformed into the locus of a process of seeing designed to unveil an aggression
against itself” (emphasis added, 288). While Doane‟s analysis of the female gaze, its
transgression and subversion of the masculine scopic drive and its subsequent
punishment in film, is largely about films depicting white women, her theorization of this
process and the avenues for spectatorial identification that it opens up is helpful to
interrogate Look‟s actions and her potential role as a “searcher.”
How does Look, an Indian woman whose words and visual signs are ignored,
revise and recast Doane‟s analysis with her racialized and colonized body? And, in turn,
how does this insight shift representations of the Indian female in Hollywood? Clearly,
Look represents a double threat to the masculine scopic drive of the Western and her
punishment for such a transgression is filmable and, according to Nolley, “even lauded”
but to what extent is this practice part of the Western‟s seemingly inescapable formula?
Are there alternatives that challenge and attempt to revise this pattern of representational

105
abuse? Ultimately, can Look‟s murdered image be repatriated? Doane writes that the
female gaze in cinema threatens and subverts the masculine scopic drive to see, know,
and therefore possess and/or capture the female body. The woman who “looks” in the
film is always punished. In the case at hand, Look‟s position vis-à-vis the Western genre
and mid-twentieth-century American culture then is multiply threatening to the
established order of things. First, and foremost, she “marries” outside her racial group.
Second, she is the sexually aggressive brown/black woman (remember she chooses,
however benignly it is depicted in the movie, to “go to bed” with Martin). Third, she is
like the Sphinx in the Oedipal drama that provides indecipherable answers—the signs she
leaves behind are never fully understood because they are misinterpreted or erased (it
snows after she runs away from Ethan and Martin and her signs become literally “whited-
out” by the weather). Finally, she is renamed Look and thus ironically embodies the
film‟s title: If the cowboys are made “searchers,” and the Indian female body becomes
(the) “look” is she one of them, a “looker” or “searcher” or is she that which is “looked”
upon or both?
Although as a verb intransitive “look” has many nuances, according to Webster‟s
Encyclopedic Dictionary, in its third definition of the word, “look” means “to use the
sight in seeking, searching, examining, watching, etc.” (emphasis added, 1989: 845). By
“marrying” Wild Goose Flying and renaming her Look, the “searchers” invest the Indian
female body with the power to see and to reveal crucial knowledge but continuously
punish her for it. Look—despite the active command of her name —is ignored, abused,
and ultimately murdered because she is the wrong woman. Unfortunately, Ford does not
film what Look sees. To do so would yield white control of the gaze to a racialized body

106
that would, as Louis Owens contends, represent Indians “as vital and able to assert
control over their own destinies and, in so doing, assert a degree of control over white
American destiny as well.” Instead, we see her only when Ethan and Martin are looking
at her. In the end, she is punished for embodying the anxieties of miscegenation that her
Indian female body provokes and for the knowledge about the right/white woman that
she can/does not reveal. The enigmatic and ambivalent representation of Look is
unfortunately all too common for Indians and women in the Western, but one it seems
that popular filmmakers are willing to change.

Shanghai Noon and the Repatriation of the Indian Woman’s "Look"
Despite its fast-paced action and kung-fu comedy, Jackie Chan‟s take on the
Western in Shanghai Noon (2000) provides an opportunity for contemporary American
Indian audiences to take another look at the genre and the female Indian role in it. As its
title suggests, Shanghai Noon (2000), is a Far East meets Old West action-packed
Western filled with thrilling martial arts stunts and a slew of picaresque heroes led by an
all star cast featuring, Jackie Chan as Chon Wang (with the obvious John Wayne pun
intended) and Owen Wilson as a misfit outlaw cowboy, Roy O‟Bannon. At the stake of
his uncle‟s honor, Wang, an imperial guard for China, embarks upon a journey to rescue
the kidnapped Imperial Princess Pei-Pei from the greedy clutches of her American
captors. Upon Wang‟s arrival in the West, a series of unfortunate events beset him,
beginning with his beloved uncle‟s murder during a botched train robbery led by
O‟Bannon‟s Gang. From this point forward, the fates of Wang and O‟Bannon‟s are
linked in the film.

107
Although they begin as foes, they end the film as best buddies. The film
departs from a typical Western cast of characters with the portrayal of the iconic Chon
Wang/John Wayne by Jackie Chan. The basic plot and action in the movie adheres to the
genre‟s conventions as John Cawelti defines them in The Six-Gun Mystique;
33
however,
the film challenges what Tania Modleski calls the “bipolar racialized thinking” of the
genre as well as our expectations of the ethnicity and nationality of the Western hero.
34
In
the film, a beautiful but free-spirited Chinese woman from China‟s royal family is
abducted and taken into the wild American West by savage outlaws. The hero must
defeat the criminals, rescue the girl, and restore justice and order to the community.
However, Jackie Chan‟s Asian ethnicity and Chinese nationality bring a much needed
and refreshing perspective to this typically American cultural script. Furthermore, the
Chinese/Asian influence that Chan‟s presence and performance evokes, revises the
genre‟s familiar themes about patriarchal duty, honor, loyalty and justice with new
political, historical, and racial overtones. Shanghai Noon provides audiences and critics
alike with a rare opportunity in American mainstream cinema to see people of color
reenact a fantasy of the West in which they are triumphant instead of victimized. In
particular, the offbeat pulp Western comedy repatriates the image of the Indian female
“Look” that is erased in The Searchers.
The movie begins with scenes of China‟s Imperial Guard bowing majestically
before the Emperor, the Princess Pei-Pei, and other Chinese dignitaries. Chon Wang
peeks at the passing Princess but quickly bows his head in shame after the Princess sees
and returns his forbidden gaze. Bound by his duty to serve and obey his royal masters,
Wang later fails to stop the Princess from running away with her American tutor, who we

108
later learn facilitated the Princess‟s abduction. When the Imperial Palace finally learns
of the Princess‟s kidnapping, they request volunteers from the Guard to deliver the
ransom to the Americans in exchange for the Princess. Because he feels partially
responsible for the Princess‟s captivity, Wang volunteers for the duty much to his
superiors‟ chagrin. Wang is reluctantly allowed to participate in the rescue after his uncle
urges his superior officers to allow him to go as a porter. With his passage to America
secure and his mission clear, Wang seems resolved to restore the Princess and his honor
to China.
Unfortunately, his neat plan quickly goes awry when he encounters O‟Bannon
and his Gang on a train traveling to Carson City, Nevada (the location of the ransom
rendezvous). In a scuffle that ensues after one of O‟Bannon‟s gang members, in an
overzealous gesture of machismo, shoots Wang‟s uncle after he inadvertently walks into
a neighboring train car interrupting the robbery, Wang is cut off from the other Imperial
Guards who remain oblivious to the robbery, his uncle‟s death, and Wang‟s battle with
the cowboy bandits. While he is still dressed in his traditional Chinese garb and wearing
his queue (a long braid of hair that signifies his strength and commitment to the Imperial
Guard), Wang wanders in the Nevada desert in search of a route to Carson City.
As fate would have it, Wang encounters O‟Bannon buried up to his neck and left
to die in the hot desert sun after his Gang betrays and abandons him. Each man is a misfit
of sorts, and this chance meeting provides an opportunity to outsmart one another. Wang
needs directions to Carson City and O‟Bannon needs help out of the sand, but neither
yields entirely to the aid of the other. Clearly at an impasse, O‟Bannon sends Wang East
over the Rocky Mountains (in the opposite direction of Carson City), and Wang gives

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O‟Bannon a pair of chopsticks to dig his way out of his hole. Satisfied with their
mutual maltreatment of each other, the misfits part way.
The unlikely picaresque characters soon reunite after each man undergoes
transformation through a figurative rebirth. Wang‟s journey leads him across the Rocky
Mountains and into the wilderness where he encounters an unknown band of Indians. He
is “adopted” into their tribe after he helps rescue the chief‟s son from a menacing group
of enemy Indians. Wang‟s visit to the Indian camp mirrors a scene from Dances With
Wolves in which Lt. Dunbar (Kevin Costner) is sitting among the Lakotas, around the
campfire, smoking the pipe, and sharing tales of heroism and bravery from a recent
buffalo hunt. In hilarious distinction, Chon Wang also sits comfortably among his new
Native friends, but the scene—far from highlighting the foreigner‟s—in this case, Chon
Wang‟s—acceptance into Indian society, instead pokes fun at Wang and the entire
mythology of the “pipe smoking ritual” by dramatizing the lack of understanding
between the Indian hosts and the stranger. In Dances With Wolves smoking the pipe is
serious business that signifies to spectators that Dunbar holds a position of honor and
respect within the tribe. In Shanghai Noon, the pipe smoking is a way for the Chiefs to
get Wang to quit asking them for directions to Carson City because they do not
understand what he is talking about. The pipe smoking is further satirized when one of
the Chiefs basically equates the “sacred tobacco” with “marijuana” exclaiming in a
manner befitting Cheech and Chong, “This is some good shit.” While tobacco smoking
and “smudging” (burning dried sage or sweet grass to cleanse one‟s spirit or one‟s
environment) are common practices in many Native American communities, the
significance varies from tribe to tribe. In some cases, one smokes or smudges to signal

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the beginning of a ceremonial event including but not limited to prayer, a celebration,
or a memorial. Far from diminishing the importance of the cultural practice, the scene
pokes fun at the audience‟s expectation of the clichéd representation that smoking the
“peace pipe” in the Western often signified a monumental event instead of simply the
pleasure in smoking.
The Indian encounter scene ends following Wang‟s night of smoking with his
newly found Lakota friends. Clearly unsure of his surroundings, he wakes up in the
morning alongside a beautiful naked Indian woman. She seductively rubs his arm, and he
quickly wraps a blanket around his midsection and runs out of the teepee only to be
greeted by a cheering crowd from the tribe. Confused and embarrassed Wang rushes back
into the teepee much to the disappointment of the Indians. He soon exits with his
overnight guest in tow. The crowd cheers again and one of the Chiefs walks up to him,
hugs him, and places the girl‟s hand into Wang‟s in a gesture of happy approval. Wang
then realizes the Chief‟s actions and the crowd‟s elation signal his marriage to his “Indian
bride.” When he tries to explain that the situation is a misunderstanding, his new “bride,”
Falling Leaves (Brandon Merrill) tells her father that she does not understand his
hesitation to marry her because he did not “complain [about her presumably sexual
performance] last night.” After this comment, the Chief brusquely clasps Wang and his
daughter‟s hands together thereby daring Wang to refuse the marriage proposal. Thus,
Wang emerges from the wilderness and his brief respite with an unknown band of Indians
as an Indian. With his face marked with Indian paint, his braided queue down his back,
and his Asian robes, Wang and Falling Leaves head westward to Carson City. When
Wang enters a saloon to ask for directions, Falling Leaves stays behind and motions to

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Wang that she will be looking out for him. As soon as he passes through the bar‟s
swinging doors, a rough looking cowboy asks him, “Are you lost, Chief?” It is not until
Wang catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror behind the bar that he realizes that his
face is painted and that he looks like an Indian. Although he wipes his face clean, his
association with the Indians is already made clear.
I recited the details of Wang‟s adventure into the wilderness for several reasons.
First and foremost, the Indian encounter and Indian bride scenes are a departure from the
classical Hollywood version filmed in Ford‟s The Searchers. The comparison between
the two films might not at first seem apparent since Shanghai Noon is a comedy;
however, the comedy draws our attention to the revisions of the genre that the film
makes. Furthermore, Shanghai Noon offers spectators the opportunity to repatriate the
comedic stereotype that Ken Nolley argues “Look” represents in The Searchers with the
character of Falling Leaves. The racial reconfiguration of the genre‟s primary characters
opens up a new line of questioning revisionist Westerns. Does Jackie Chan‟s Asian
identity provide an escape clause against the Hollywood taboo of miscegenation or
intermarriage between different racial groups? Or is the Indian bride scene acceptable
only because the marriage is between two non-white individuals? In other words, what if
Wang, like Lt. Dunbar, stumbled into the Indian camp and married a white-captive
woman who had “gone native” instead of an Indian girl? Could the Western‟s
conventions withstand such a revision?
Although the Western accommodates storylines in which the white cowboy-hero
often marries or takes as a mistress an Indian or Mexican woman, the practice is always
reserved in the narrative scheme for the white male. Dunbar‟s marriage to Stands-With-

112
A-Fist, a transculturated white-captive, in Dances with Wolves allows him to safely
fulfill his desire for the female “other” because she recovers some of her whiteness by
serving as the interpreter for Dunbar and Kicking Bird, her adoptive Indian father.
Without Stands-With-A-Fist‟s re-identification with part of her whiteness, the union
might have been subject to punishment, such as by one or both of their deaths.
35
In
Shanghai Noon, however, Wang moves between the hero-cowboy as well as the native-
other position, but in a very slippery way. The Western‟s narrative codes would
traditionally deny him any subject position other than that of the sidekick, comic relief
(like Hop Sing from Bonanza), or the devious villain because of his non-white status. The
comedic nature of the film, in this instance, functions in a Rabelaisian fashion to place
questions of power, authority, and identity into flux and into play. The obvious play on
John Wayne that Chon Wang signifies in the film begins the revision that cheekily
challenges the audience‟s expectations of the standard Western.
If we break away from the “bipolar way of thinking”—that is white versus
other—about race in the West that Tania Modleski suggests dominates critiques of the
genre, we can extend our analysis and consider further the ways in which Chon Wang
and Falling Leaves‟ union provides a critical intervention into the genre and an important
step in the repatriation of Look.
36
Although, like Look‟s role in The Searchers, Falling
Leaves has a limited speaking role in Shanghai Noon, her actions speak louder than
words. For instance, instead of being punished for marrying outside her racial/ethnic
group, Falling Leaves assumes the role of the rescuer. From the moment Wang and
Falling Leaves are wed, her father instructs her to “watch out” for him. Throughout the
film, she motions to Wang that she is watching over him by gesturing to her eyes with her

113
fingers and then back to him. In three different scenes that include a prison break, a
near lynching, and the movie‟s final gunfight shoot-out, she arrives in the nick of time to
save Wang and O‟Bannon. The relationship between Chon and Falling Leaves is similar
to yet different from the relationship between Martin and Look. On the one hand, both
Martin and Chon mistakenly marry “Indian brides,” but Chon does not abuse or threaten
Falling Leaves. Instead, he accepts her presence in his new life. He is even relieved to
have her with him after she breaks him out of prison and then provides much needed back
up support in the final gunfight scene (her entire tribe surrounds the isolated church and
prevents another ambush against Chon and Roy). Given the similarities between the
scenes and the roles of the Indian women in each film, it is hard not to equate Falling
Leaves‟ role in the film with that of Look‟s in The Searchers. In fact, Falling Leaves‟
primary activity is to literally “look” out for Chon and, later Roy; thereby making her,
like Look, an/other searcher in the an/other kind of Western.
However, there are some important differences between the characters. The most
obvious difference is in the appearances of each woman; unlike Look, Falling Leaves is
stunningly beautiful. Whereas Look is a small, round woman with a pleasing face, her
sexuality is conveyed through the coy but nonetheless transgressive nature of her
figurative “marriage” to Martin. Our first glimpse of Falling Leaves, on the other hand, is
of her bare shoulders covered only by her long, flowing hair in the morning-after-sex
scene following Wang‟s pipe-smoking with his new Indian friends. There is no symbolic
transgression in Shanghai Noon regarding the Indian woman‟s or the Asian man‟s
sexuality—they did it!

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The Indian female‟s beauty and eroticism are characteristics that, in most
Westerns, would ultimately endanger her life. Although Falling Leaves fits Hollywood‟s
stereotype of the nubile Indian maiden, in Shanghai Noon, she remains alive and
beautifully intact at the films‟ end. She does not die tragically, is not kidnapped, maimed,
raped, or imprisoned. She proves her cunning, courage, and what Tania Modleski would
call her ability to “do what a [white] man‟s gotta do,” only better in the film. Her keen
sense of danger, her sharp shooting, and her multiple rescues of Chon make her all the
more memorable. In fact, once it becomes apparent that Chon‟s real love is for Princess
Pei-Pei, Roy makes an appeal for Falling Leaves‟ affection, and it is hinted that she may
take him as her next lover. That she is allowed to fully embrace her ethnicity and her
sexuality is a major revision of Look who is punished for merely lying down next to a
white man. For me, as an Indian female scholar, despite the film‟s other limitations,
watching an Indian woman like Falling Leaves in a Western (albeit a comedy) provides a
much needed revision and repatriation of the cinematic image of Look.
37

Like Shanghai Noon, Jim Jarmusch‟s Dead Man, represents an important
intervention into the Western film genre. Written and directed by independent filmmaker,
Jim Jarmusch, it is a project that he alone creates and protects by maintaining ownership
of all the negatives to this and his other films (Jacqueline Kilpatrick, 169). Although he
must inevitably negotiate with Hollywood for the distribution of his work (primarily
Miramax, a film company known to support offbeat independent productions), he is
known in the industry for his unwillingness to compromise his vision of the film at any
stage in its production. With a strong commitment to his craft, it is little wonder then that
he brings us a surprisingly new representation of an Indian man.

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Although the film has been called an anti-western or a neo/postmodern
western, Jarmusch insists that his intention was not to "deconstruct " the genre, his
reinterpretation of the Western's typical cast of characters includes lawmen, bounty
hunters, mountain men, cowboys and Indians that defy our usual expectations of their
performances. The basic plot deals with an easterner‟s, Bill Blake (Johnny Depp),
journey to the West to start his life anew after the deaths of his parents. He spends all of
his money on a train ticket to the town of Machine, located at the end of the railway line.
As Blake travels farther west, all representations of civilization and/or domesticity are
removed from the train: women, children, and well-groomed men. By the time he reaches
his destination, rough-looking mountain men dressed in fur and leather remain. Instead of
escaping misfortune on the frontier, Blake's situation progresses from bad to worse. The
job he anticipated is already filled; he befriends a prostitute-turned good girl; he is shot in
a lover's feud; he kills a man in self-defense and he is then labeled an outlaw. At this
point in the film, Nobody (Gary Farmer), a half Blackfoot and half Blood Indian, finds
Blake bleeding to death in the wilderness.
Nobody, it turns out, was taken captive by whites as a child and sent to England in
a cage because he demonstrated a penchant for imitating his captors. During his captivity,
he learned to read and write and soon found William Blake‟s poetry particularly
compelling. He eventually escaped and made his way back to the Northwest, where his
tribe renamed him, Xebeche, or "He Who Talks Loud Saying Nothing," because the
stories he told of his captivity were so unimaginable to his Native community, that they
did not believe anything he said. He chooses to call himself Nobody, and some critics

116
remarked that his name is apropos because the film is very much an odyssey and that
like Odysseus, he chooses "not to throw his name around in his adventures" (Kilpatrick,
171).
When Nobody believes he has found William Blake the classical poet on his
deathbed, he immediately begins to recite his poetry. Blake becomes extremely confused
and tells him that he does not understand what he is talking about. In this uncharacteristic
portrayal of hero/Indian, it is the Indian that is culturally more sophisticated,
knowledgeable about Western belles-lettres. Blake is very much the lost soul that
Nobody sees him as. Thus, Nobody takes it upon himself to prepare Blake for his
impending death by taking him to the "mirror of water," the gateway to the next life. Up
until the end of the film, Nobody's role in the film and his image on screen are
completely captivating. As Jarmusch himself explained, he wanted “to create an Indian
character who wasn't A) the savage who must be eliminated, the force of nature that's
blocking the way for industrial progress, or B) the noble innocent that knows all and is
another cliché. I wanted him to be a complicated human being" (Cineaste interview
quoted in Kilpatrick, 171). Although Jarmusch fulfilled many-a-Native-spectator‟s desire
to see a complex Indian character on screen, Nobody‟s murder by a psychopathic
cowboy, reminds us, once again, of Sherman Alexie‟s earlier comment that Indians must
learn to be “happy with less.”
38
Thus, Jarmusch‟s words ring hollow, when, in the end,
Nobody's depiction as a "complicated human being" is undermined by the character‟s
ultimate demise, which it seems to me is the worst cliché.
Although Sherman Alexie does not admittedly set out to repatriate the character
of Nobody in his film, Smoke Signals, Gary Farmer‟s performance as Arnold Joseph in

117
the film recalls Nobody‟s presence from Dead Man. Lauded as the first crossover film
written, produced, directed and featuring American Indians in cinematic history, Smoke
Signals garnered a tremendous amount of praise from both mainstream and Indian
communities. The film is a basic buddy/road film that deals with the dysfunctional
relationship between Victor (Adam Beach) and Arnold Joseph (Gary Farmer), and the
fateful accident that binds both characters to Thomas Builds-the-Fire (Evan Adams), a
boy the same age as Victor blessed with the gift of storytelling. Arnold is an alcoholic
and abusive father, and although the audience is privy to the fact that Arnold was
responsible for the fire that killed Thomas' parents from the opening of the film, Victor
does not learn this information until much later in the film. Arnold‟s greatest feat, he tells
his young son at the start of the movie, will be to disappear. He convinces Victor that he
is really a magician after he eventually disappears from his life altogether. After learning
about his father's death in Phoenix, Arizona, the central conflict in the movie is for Victor
to uncover the mystery shrouding Arnold's self-destruction and his abandonment of his
wife and child.
On their journey to the southwest from Wellpinit, Washington, Victor and
Thomas tell stories about their different experiences with Arnold. Chris Eyre, the
director, films the stories through the use of flashback scenes that seamlessly cut between
shots of the boys looking into a mirror or walking through a door and then suddenly
being transported to a memory in the past. This strategy is very effective in creating the
cinematic sensation of being flooded by memories that refuse to be shut out. In one
particularly poignant flashback scene, Victor recalls his parents drinking and dancing at a
party. Arnold drunkenly stumbles up to him and playfully asks him, "Victor, who is your

118
favorite Indian?" He repeats his question a second time before Victor mumbles,
"Nobody." When his father seems to not understand his response, Victor says even
louder. "Nobody," "Nobody, Nooo-body.," Arnold echoes back, clearly hurt that his son
did not name him as his "favorite Indian. " Arlene Joseph (Tantoo Cardinal), Victor's
mom intervenes and tells Arnold to leave Victor alone and the scene ends.
At first, I interpreted Victor's response to mean that he did not say that his dad
was his favorite Indian because he is an abusive and self-destructive alcoholic, hardly in
the position to be revered by anyone, let alone his child. But after further consideration, I
began to consistently read this moment as celluloid allusion filled with a dual meaning. In
essence, Victor's reply that "Nobody" was his favorite Indian was a veiled avowal that
Arnold (Gary Farmer) was indeed his favorite representation of Indianness. As an actor,
Farmer's presence and image on screen evokes a palimpsest of his prior performances
that would allow Alexie to playfully assert a positive affirmation through a seemingly
negative response. Furthermore, when we place the insertion of Nobody's presence in the
film alongside the larger drama that is taking place, that is the fact that Arnold/Nobody is
dead in the film and that Victor and Thomas are on their way to retrieve his ashes, then
my theory about the repatriation of the Hollywood Indian becomes more evident.
The film culminates with Victor learning the truth about his father's inability to
maintain a stable life. Arnold could not live with his guilt about causing the house fire
that killed Thomas‟ parents, so he numbed himself against the pain with alcohol. Victor
reconciles his relationship with his father in a dream/hallucination sequence in which
Arnold reaches out his hand and helps his son to his feet so that he can rescue Thomas
from a car accident. The final scenes of the film are of Victor throwing Arnold's ashes

119
into a river. He is overcome by his grief and he screams and cries as he shakes the
ashes out over the cascading water. Despite the fact that Arnold's presence in the film is
based on his absence, by the end of the film, he is literally reduced to ashes and he
literally has no body, Alexie's subtle citation of his role in Dead Man, provides a
necessary and important reclamation and revision of a Hollywood stereotype. Although
Farmer's role requires him to die in both films, in Dead Man, his death is in the service of
the hero who receives a proper burial and a proper departure to the next world. In Smoke
Signals, Victor repatriates Farmer's celluloid remains and gives Arnold/Nobody a proper,
culturally appropriate, Indian burial.
Gary Farmer‟s role as Nobody and his repatriated role as Arnold Joseph allow for
Native (and mainstream) spectators to bear witness to the contradiction between the two
representations. On the one hand, Nobody is a refreshing and very-much revised
representation of an Indian man in the Western; however, his fate at the end of the film
crumbles under the weight of generic convention and the need to conform. While such an
ending does not affect most fans of the Western, it does Sherman Alexie. His
reincarnation of Nobody‟s character through Thomas and Arnold Joseph‟s evocation of
him demonstrates an important but understudied aspect of Native American cinema: the
need and the desire for cinematic repatriation of Hollywood Indians. De Lauretis‟
analysis of the politics of women‟s cinema and the female spectator help me realize and,
subsequently, reformulate the process in which American Indian spectators work through
films and find pleasure in the experience. The problem with Indian representation in film
is that the visual images we are accustomed to viewing are replicas of stereotypes that
arose from Indian captivity narratives. Thus, Native Americans must perform multiple

120
identification processes in order to resist identifying with “the gaze, which both
historically and theoretically is the representation of the phallus and the figure of the
[white, colonizer‟s] male‟s desire” (143).

“Dear John…”
I try to demonstrate throughout this chapter the many layers of visual, narrative,
and cinematic codes that American Indians must understand, work through, and then
suture into a sense of identity that neither deconstructs nor disavows their culture and
existence but instead helps to create, sustain, and transform Native American subjectivity.
The films I chose for this analysis offer a starting point for others to take up and further in
other lines of inquiry. Like the captivity narrative in literary studies, the Western is the
bedrock in film studies for the foundation of many popular representations of Indian life
and people. In their own words, some of the most renowned American Indian writers of
the twentieth and twenty-first centuries admit to suffering through films that feature
Indians or Indian-cultural themes. Erdrich poetically describes her process or memory
watching John Wayne films by linking it with the visceral stings of mosquitoes attacking
the Indian viewers just as Wayne and his cowboys attack the Hollywood Indians on
screen. Sherman Alexie likewise admits, somewhat beleaguered, that he learned to “settle
for less” as a spectator of an Indian movie. Louis Owens furthers these sentiments and
states the problem best when he describes Native American representation as “captured in
the straightjacket of history.” However, Teresa de Lauretis teaches us that history, like
cinema and narrative, has codes that can and should be broken if they do not serve all its
agents—particularly women and spectators of color.

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Thus, Louise Erdrich‟s representation of John Wayne as a mosquito sucking
the blood-life from Indians becomes an apt analogy for the representation of whiteness
and its attendant colonial authority in the Indian spectator‟s imagination. Bell hooks
likewise explains this phenomenon in the African American cinematic experience as part
of the discordant “looking relations” between the colored person and the white.
39
The fear
on the part of the white/colonizer is one of difference based upon the myth of the dark
unreadable body (Fanon, Bhabha, Said); whereas, the fear for the colored person is based
upon a history of colonization, slavery, and disenfranchisement. A reading of Erdrich‟s
“Dear John Wayne” poem alongside Alexie‟s short story then combines two similar yet
distinct versions of the same issue: the dissatisfaction of Indians with historical and
contemporary Indian representations in film.
40
Therefore Erdrich and Alexie must revise
the cultural and celluloid relationship between Indians and the mythic American cowboy
represented by John Wayne in order to “read through” the text and suture together a more
satisfying narrative. In Erdrich‟s representation Indians resist the infectious disease (of
colonialism) by reclaiming their “skins” in the dark. In Alexie‟s story, he makes explicit
the paradox of Wayne‟s Indian hating—that John Wayne, hence white America, desires
what is forbidden to whites by the great American western narrative—miscegenation. In
the end, however, each work is a “Dear John Letter” symbolizing the end of a five
hundred year old dysfunctional oedipal relationship for Indian spectators and an attempt
to look for the repatriation of American Indian presence in the Western film.

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Chapter 3: Endnotes

1
28 June 1998.

2
Further references to these films will appear as SS for Smoke Signals and Fancydancing for Business of
Fancydancing.

3
In addition to “Dear John Wayne,” Alexie also has many references to America‟s colonial past as it is
portrayed on the celluloid screen. Including the poems “Rediscovering America,” “Billy Jack,” “Citizens,”
“The Native American Broadcasting System,” and “My Heroes Have Never Been Cowboys.”

4
Alexie, “Dear John Wayne.” Toughest Indian in the World. (2001).

5
Examples of Hollywood filmmakers who attempt to provide an accurate representation of American
Indian life include Arthur Penn‟s favorable depiction of Chief Dan George in Little Big Man, Kevin
Costner‟s nod to authenticity with regards to utilizing the Lakota language in Dances With Wolves, and
more recently, Ron Howard‟s similar usage of the Chiricahua Apache language in The Missing.

123

6
Pioneer filmmakers, D.W. Griffith, Thomas Edison, and Joseph K. Dixon to name but a few, used this
technology alongside the developing field of ethnography to literally capture the remnants of what was
perceived as a rapidly disappearing American Indian culture Thomas Edison (Sioux Ghost Dance,
kinetiscope production in 1894), D.W. Griffiths (The Battle of Elderbush Gulch, 1914; savage depiction of
Sioux warriors), and Rodman Wanamaker with Joseph K. Dixon as his film‟s “expedition leader” and
cultural informant to film his Indian Communication (1908) and Expedition of Civilization (1910).

7
In her study of early cinematic depictions of Native Americans, Alison Griffiths claims that the
convergence of ethnography with film technology resulted in the conflation of “science and spectacle” in
the early industry established a representational crisis for Indian people that we battle today. To satisfy
American culture‟s desire for the “exotic” and the “authentic,” Griffiths explains that early cinema
fabricated the spectacle of authenticity by “annexing …the scientific legitimacy” of the recently established
Bureau of American Ethnology (or BAE, established in 1879) [79]. Hence, these practices enabled the
nascent film industry to erase any possibility for Indian subject-formation in American culture to emerge in
the production of early US cinema. “Science and Spectacle: Native American Representation and Early
Cinema,” in Dressing in Feathers: The Construction of the Indian in American Popular Culture. Edited by
S. Elizabeth Bird. (Boulder, Colorado: West View Press, 1996) 79-96.

8
After an exhausting and centuries long legal battle, President George H. Bush finally signed into law the
Native American Grave Protection Repatriation Act on November 23, 1990. Jack Trope and Walter Echo-
Hawk explain that the Act “finally recognizes that Native American human remains and cultural items are
the remnants and products of living people and that descendants have a cultural and spiritual relationship
with the deceased. Human remains and cultural items can no longer be thought of as merely “scientific
specimens” or “collectibles” (Repatriation Reader, 151; emphasis added). While its basic purpose is to
“repatriate thousands of dead relatives or ancestors, and to retrieve stolen or improperly acquired religious
and cultural property for Native owners” (Trope and Echo-Hawk, 123), NAGPRA simultaneously signifies
an important first step in US-Indian relations to redress a long history of human rights violation.
Furthermore, NAGPRA‟s passage restores and recognizes in law the cultural sovereignty of tribes.
9
Bell hooks, “Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination,” Cultural Studies. Eds. Lawrence
Grossberg, Cary Nelson, Paula Treichler. (New York and London: Routledge University Press) 338-346).

10
Owens, Louis. Mixedblood Messages: Literature, Film, Family, Place. (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1998) 99-112.

11
Owens‟ first book of criticism is Other Destinies: Understanding the Native American Novel (Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1992).

12
De Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism Semiotics, and Cinema, (1984).

13
Mixedblood Messages, 77.

14
Among the Native American scholars who have written or commented on the film are Sherman Alexie,
Louis Owens, Rennard Strickland, Ward Churchill, and Jacqueline Kilpatrick among others. The non-
Indian critics comprise a bibliography unto themselves but the most relevant to this study are Ken Nolley,
Michael Riley, Peter Cowie, Jonathan Cawelti, Michael F. Blake, and Richard Slotkin. I discussed above
Alexie and Owens‟ critiques of the film. Strickland‟s comments are in Tonto’s Revenge, Churchill‟s work
is found in Fantasies of the Master Race, Carlton Smith‟s work is found in Coyote Kills John Wayne, and
Kilpatrick‟s criticism is in her Celluloid Indians .Nolley and Riley‟s work occurs in Hollywood’s Indian,
Cowie‟s is in his John Ford and The American West, Cawelti writes in The Six-Gun Mystique, Blake
discusses the film in Code of Honor: The Making of Three Great American Westerns, and Slotkins‟
analysis appears in his immense study of the genre, Gunfighter Nation.

15
Diawara cogently summarizes the influence of psychoanalysis on classical films studies. Viewing a film
is likened to the mirror stage in psychoanalysis in which the process of “identification … entails a

124

narcissistic form of regression which leads to a state similar to the infant‟s illusion of a unified ego.”
However, Diawara points out that “since spectators are socially and historically constructed as well as
psychically constituted, it is not clear whether the experiences of Black spectators are included I this
analysis” (211-212).

16
Recently, Hollywood produced films that dealt with the west and Western themes but they were
displaced onto foreign settings. Edward Zwick‟s The Last Samurai, featured Tom Cruise as a battle-worn
Indian fighter turned gun-dealer turned mercenary for the Japanese Imperial army. The dark and violent
history of Indian fighting haunts him and, ironically, transforms him into the ultimate “warrior”—he
becomes the last samurai. Hidalgo, stars Viggo Mortenson as a mixed blood Indian who denounces his
tribal identity in favor of riding for the Pony Express. The film highlights his natural understanding of
horses and the wild frontier and chronicles his adventures in a legendary horse race in the transplanted
“west” of America‟s current imperial battles: the Saudi Arabian desert.

17
Alice Doesn’t, 141.

18
See Cowie‟s John Ford and the American West.

19
If the plot sounds familiar, it is. Ron Howard recently reincarnated the film with an all-star cast that
included Tommy Lee Jones and Cate Blanchet in the lead roles of The Missing (2003). While the film
enjoyed mixed-praise for Howard‟s use of the Chiricahua language, the film did not do particularly well at
the box office. In The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw writes: “The reputation-trajectory of John Ford‟s The
Searchers from racist pulp to challenging classic has been a remarkable one, to which this movie is a
curious footnote…. It is as if The Searchers has been rewritten in keeping with strict rules of political
correctness: the hunters, the hunted, and their captives are all evenly split between white folks and Injuns so
that no offence or ground s of race or culture can be given or received” (27 February 2004).
20
Cawelti, 37.

21
Ken Nolley, “The Representation of Conquest: John Ford, 1939-1964.” Hollywood’s Indian: The
Portrayal of the Native American in Film. Eds. Peter C. Rollins and John E. O‟Connor. (Lexington:
University of Press of Kentucky, 1998) 73-90.

22
Fantasies of the Master Race: Literature, Cinema, and the Colonization of American Indians (San
Francisco: City Light Books, 1998) 178.

23
Here I am thinking about the films in the past twenty-five years that have attempted to portray a sense of
authenticity by consulting Native speakers to teach actors a particular language for use in the film. Cf. The
Missing, Dances With Wolves, Powwow Highway, Dead Man, and Little Big Man to name but a few.

24
“Representation of Conquest,”77.

25
Ibid., 77.

26
Tonto’s Revenge: Reflections on American Indian Culture and Policy. (Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press, 1997) 19.

27
Fantasies, 193.

28
Archuleta‟s screen credits are few but include her role as Mrs. Horn in Jeanne Eagels (1957), an
uncredited role as an Indian woman in Foxfire (1955), an uncredited role as a Blackfoot dancer in The Big
Sky (1952), and another uncredited role as a Passenger on the Bus in Key Largo (1948). She was born
in1912 in Oklahoma and died at the age of 57 in Los Angeles in October 1969. Her only TV appearance
was also in an uncredited role as a Crow Woman in an episode of Wagon Train called “A Man Called
Horse,” in 1958). www.imbd.com/searchers.

125

29
Lucy is the elder of the two captives. Ethan finds her buried in a shallow canyon grave, but does not tell
the other searchers that he found her. The death is revealed only after Lucy‟s fiancée believes that he sees
her in the Indian camp. When Ethan tries to convince him that it is not Lucy, he angrily reveals that not
only was Lucy murdered, she was sexually violated as well.

30
Cowboys and Indians, p. 120.

31
Reynolds also cites this scene in his article because it is a scene that Brad played by “Dobe” Carey
vividly recalls. After the scene ended, Carey explains, “There was silence. Duke put his hand on my
shoulder and didn‟t say a word. He didn‟t have to.” He also claims that “seriousness permeated the set” of
the film. He remembers: “The first scene I was in with Duke was the one where I discover m family‟s
prized bull had been slaughtered. When I looked up at him in rehearsal, it was the meanest, coldest eyes I
had ever seen. I don‟t know how he molded that character. Perhaps he‟d known someone like Ethan
Edwards as a kid. Now I wish I‟d asked him. He was even Ethan at dinnertime. He didn‟t kid around on
The Searchers like he had done on other shows. Ethan was always in his eyes.” I should note that the 50
th

Anniversary commemoration of the film again recalls the film‟s production, release, and impact on white
American culture. The Indian perspective is absent and the Indian voice is still silent.

32
Freud, Sigmund. Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious. The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud.
Translated and edited by A.A. Brill. (New York: Modern Library Edition, 1995). 601-774.
33
Among the many and fine distinctions of the formula that Cawelti discusses in his essay, are the notion
that the Western‟s basic structure must follow some variation of this narrative pattern:
The Western story is set at a certain moment in the development of American
civilization, namely at that point when savagery and lawlessness are in decline before the
advancing wave of law and order, bur are still strong enough to pose a local and
momentarily significant challenge [to a community or to society at large]. In the actual
history of the West, this moment was probably a relatively brief one in any particular
area. In any case, the complex clashes of different interest groups over the use of Western
resources and the pattern of settlement surely involved more people in a more
fundamental way than the struggle with Indians or outlaws. Nonetheless it is the latter
which has become central to the Western‟s formula (38-39).
The setting for the Western must be the frontier or some other liminal location between society and the
wilderness. The primary cast of characters involved in the Western plot includes, but is not limited to:
cowboys, Indians, outlaws, ranchers, the Cavalry, Railroad moguls, marshals, and the townspeople, which
generally has very few women and children. If a woman does have a primary role in the plot, her role is
typically embodies the struggle between civilization and savagery that the plot works to resolve. Cawelti
explain that “in the contemporary Western, this feminine duality shows up in contrast between the
schoolmarm and the dance-hall girl, or between the hero‟s Mexican or Indian mistress and the WASP girl
he may ultimately marry” (48). The schoolmarm symbolizes the “civilized code of behavior” that the hero
must ultimately restore, while the Mexican or Indian mistress embodies the hero‟s “savage, spontaneous
side” and his “need to use personal violence” (48). Which brings us to Cawelti‟s general definition of the
Western‟s hero is the character that internalizes the outward struggle between the law and the threat of its
disorder (55).

34
Old Wives Tales, p. 153.

35
See Strickland, Cawelti, and Slotkin.

36
Tania Modleski demonstrates that the Western film genre is no longer a white-only or male-only domain.
She explains that one of the primary reasons she decided to write about The Ballad of Little Jo was “to
consider how it deals with ethnic and racial diversity” because she believes “it provides a way to see—and
to see beyond—the unconscious racial dimensions of certain white female fantasies of the American West

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(both past and present) as well as of the theories of these fantasies in feminist scholarship” (Old Wives
Tales 153). She goes on to say that she does not want “simply to gesture toward a need for greater
inclusivity in white feminist literary and film criticism, but to show precisely how the binary thinking of
some feminist culture critics who have focused primarily on sexual difference has sometimes rested on
untheorized assumptions about race” (153). Modleski goes on to map out a compelling reading of gender
and race as they are evoked, challenged, and revised in the film by the title character, Jo Monaghan—a
cross-dressing woman who makes her life on the frontier, and later by her Asian lover (the only character
that knows her true identity until her natural demise at the end of the film). While Modleski‟s point is to
demonstrate the film‟s consideration of the “pleasures of transsex identification” she also makes several
important points about the ways in which race and racialized bodies are marked, displayed, and narrated
within the genre. Of particular importance to this section, is Modleski‟s analysis of the figure of the
Chinese man in the nineteenth-century American West.

37
Despite the transformative and subversive moments in the film in terms of Native American
representation, the positive portrayal of Indians unfortunately comes at the expense, ironically, of some
problematic depictions of Asian/American individuals and culture. In particular, one of the film‟s most
disturbing scenes in this regard occurs during a “Cat House” visit with O‟Bannon. In the scene, a saloon
hall girl asks O‟Bannon why he is “riding with a Chinaman?” O‟Bannon succumbs to the racism imbued in
the remark and disavows his friendship with Wang, which, of course, Wang overhears. Thus, the comedy
fails to completely erase the history of racism the Chinese in the West. Wang‟s Asian body is invested by
contemporary mainstream culture with the status of the “model minority,” or white but not too white, but in
the 19
th
Century West, Asians did not occupy this position in America‟s racial hierarchy Instead, they lived
in the era of Yellow Peril in which Chinese were treated as second-class citizens, lynched, and excluded
from the nation‟s body politic.
37
Thus, it makes Wang‟s body an ambivalent site of signification in the film.
Because Wang (Jackie Chan) is well known for his martial arts acting abilities (he was even featured in an
animated series, The Adventures of Jackie Chan), the audience is excited by the constant threat of his
demise on screen. The kung-fu action requires that his body be placed in peril, which, thereby, places the
Asian American spectator in the uncomfortable position that American Indians are often faced with: a
masochistic position of identification or a position of disavowal. Despite Wang‟s martial art skill, he is not
represented as a virile or sexually potent man. Instead, he appears shy and sexually inexperienced (even
after it is apparent that he had sex with Falling Leaves). Thus, the Asian male is once again emasculated in
mainstream cinema. While Wang‟s role as the Asian/American cowboy-hero bends the Westerns narrative
codes, it does not entirely break them.

38
My statement is based on many personal conversations, emails, and post-conference paper discussions
about this film and Nobody‟s role in it. The most recent occasion for its discussion was the Ethnic Studies
in California Conference at UC Berkeley, March 2005 in which I presented a conference paper that I
abstracted from this chapter.

39
Ibid., 340.

40
In an article that provides a survey of Indian-themed films in Hollywood, Ted Jojola writes, “In reality,
very little of what has transpired over this [twentieth] century is groundbreaking. Such invention will only
come when a bona fide Native director or producer breaks into the ranks of Hollywood, hopefully to
challenge the conventional credos of the industry from within. … So long as Native people are assigned
roles controlled by non-Natives, that image will remain unequal and revisionist” (“Absurd Reality II:
Hollywood Goes to the Indians,” in Hollywood‟s Indian (21). Alexie also notes in his newspaper article, “I
Hate Tonto,” that he enjoyed Jonathan Wacks‟ Powwow Highway(1987) the first time he saw it, but upon a
second viewing he “cringed” at the stereotypical representations of Indians and Indian culture it displayed.
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Chapter Four
Captivity’s Narrative Desire:
Re-Forming the Miscegenous Primal Scene in the American/Indian
Romance

“What popular art and literature have to say about what it means to be
American Indian in non-tribal America is not the essential function of art
and literature in Native societies.”
--Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, “American
Indian Intellectualism and the New
Indian Story”

“The world where American Indian men and women love, laugh, and
couple together lurks far away in the shadows.”
--Elizabeth S. Bird, “Gendered
Construction of the American Indian in Popular Media”

“[M]assive change cannot occur without participation in mass culture.”
--Kate McCafferty, “Palimpsest of
Desire: The Re-Emergence of the Captivity

Narrative as Pulp Romance

Romancing Native/American Studies
Understanding the appeal and condemnation or the burning love and hate of popular
American Indian love stories requires the application of a diverse set of cultural, national,
racial and political reading strategies that takes into account the differences between
mainstream US culture, history, and identity politics intersecting with the heterogeneous
cultural, national, and personal politics of American Indians. The epigraphs at the start of
the chapter speak to the issues scholars from various ethnic backgrounds encounter in
studying race, gender, and popular culture as well as the particular challenge in studying
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popular romance novels that feature American Indians. My central inquiry in the chapter
focuses on the development of the American Indian love story through a reading of
canonical and popular women‟s romance stories. My analysis moves from a broad
national focus that emerged in the late nineteenth century with the publication of the first
dime novel and the socially-conscious sentimental novel into the twentieth century
production of Native American love stories published for the first time by Native women.
My study critiques novels written by non-Native and Native American authors, although
in every aspect of my reading I privilege and focus on the Native American as subject,
agent, and speaker within the primary and secondary literature. An integral part of my
analysis charts the representation of the American Indian woman in the novels as the
figure of the Native woman moves from a point of erasure in the early dime and
sentimental novels to a marginalized figure carving out a space for agency and existence
in the early twentieth century towards a final affirmation and solidarity of Native/female
presence at the century‟s end.
I begin with a reading of two popular nineteenth-century publications Indian
romances—Ann S. Stephens‟ Malaeska: The Indian Wife of the White Hunter (1863) and
Helen Hunt Jackson‟s Ramona (1884)— to discuss the construction of the transgressive
and tragic Native female and male archetypes in the genre . Next, I examine the early-
twentieth-century production of an American Indian authored romance by Christal
Quintasket (Mourning Dove), Cogewea: The Half-Blood, A Depiction of the Great
Montana Cattle Range (1924). Then I situate the reception of contemporary productions
of popular romances by Native American Studies scholars alongside a critical reading of
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several examples from the genre written by Cassie Edwards (author of the popular
Savage Series who publicly claims her Choctaw heritage) and Janet Wellington a
relatively new and a non-Native romance writer who published an American Indian
romance that feature the Kumeyaay culture, a large California Indian tribal group
indigenous to Southern California, USA and Baja California, Mexico.
The American Indian romance is a primal national myth in US culture. Its narrative
origins are linked to the production of the first Indian captivity narratives, which featured
the harrowing accounts of (mostly) white females held captive at the merciless hands of
Native American men; however, the form quickly evolved from historical and (auto)
biographical narratives of violent inter-racial encounters into fictionalized narratives that
romanticized and eroticized the captivity plot in the form of frontier adventure stories
written by, about, and for women. If we examine this social narrative in more
psychoanalytic detail, the American Indian romance functions as a family saga in which
the child witnesses the primeval scenes of seduction and castration. In this instance, the
“child” is both the American/Indian subject, and the fantasy enacted following the scene
is its endless reproduction in and the American/Indian romance. Following the critical
lead from feminist critics studying the relevance and importance of popular culture and
women‟s literature to the psychic formation of the female subject, I extend a
consideration of racial and colonial implications of American Indians to the equation. In
this chapter, I explore the textual possibilities to liberate the American/Indian love story
from captivity‟s narrative desire, which is the recycling of the primal scene of American
colonization: the miscegenation between the European and Indigenous Americans.
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The critical inroads made by feminist literary scholars in the 1980s continue to be an
invaluable foundation for a critique of women‟s popular literature and subject formation.
My research follows the trajectories mapped out by Kay Mussell (Fantasy and
Reconciliation), Tania Modleski (Loving With a Vengeance), Cora Kaplan (Sea Changes:
Culture and Feminism), Jacques LaPlanche and J.B. Pontalis (“Fantasy and the Origin of
Sexuality”) and Teresa de Lauretis (Alice Doesn’t). While these scholars published what
are now the foundational texts for many feminist literary studies, the recognition and
cultural work of Native American writers and scholars was just beginning to register in
academia and the larger national culture in the 1980s. Thus, it has taken over twenty-five
years for the Native Studies field to develop and grown into a critical position of self-
reflection and interrogation in which scholars in the discipline are calling for more
nuanced study of gender in the field. While I acknowledge the problematic nature of
applying a blanket psychoanalytical reading to Native American Literature in general, I
believe the strategic deployment of a social and material analysis of the narrative appeal
and psychic pleasure in reading miscegenous plots in American/Indian romance is long
overdue. Key to my analysis is the central inquiry: What is the narrative appeal of the
American/Indian romance? How do the historically negative connotations of a
miscegenous romance shift with new possibilities for Native/American identification of
fantasy, desire, and subjectivity when the author is Native not Euramerican? In what
ways is the narrative then re-formed?
Beginning with the publication of early captivity romances in the eighteenth and
early-nineteenth century by Susanna Rowson (Charlotte Temple, [1794]), Lydia Maria
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Child (Hobomok [1824]), Catherine Maria Sedgwick (Hope Leslie [1827]), and ending
with Beadle and Company‟s distribution of Ann S. Stephen‟s Malaeska (1860) in the
form of a dime novel in the late nineteenth century, the Indian love story entered the
American national consciousness at the same historical moment in which actual Native
American people were being displaced from the national landscape through the lawful
enforcement and implementation of Indian Removal Policies.
1
Although the Indian love
story‟s narrative plotlines vary widely, in the end the genre followed the popular
representation of American Indians in the press as either vanishing noble Americans or
savage atavistic people blocking the progress of culture, civilization, and the fulfillment
of American Manifest Destiny. With its “either-or” narrative trajectory for the American
Indian, it is little wonder that Native scholars like Cook-Lynn and Bird are textually and
sexually turned off by the literary machines that continue to churn out static, predictable,
and racist romances that completely discount Native American cultural, political, and
personal sovereignty. The genre‟s historic adherence to what John Carlos Rowe calls the
“myth and symbol” school of thought and representation leads Native Studies critic Peter
Beidler to ask, “If all we knew about the nineteenth century American Indians was what
we read in Indian romances, what would we think about Indians?”
2

Beidler‟s rhetorical question is a familiar, weary refrain from Native American
Studies scholars in regard to mainstream and popular productions of American Indian
literature (and films). Beidler‟s question at once draws attention to the popular genre of
Indian romances and simultaneously dismisses its relevance to the study of contemporary
American Indians in one fell swoop. The unstated answer to his question is that the
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fictions produced in Indian romances are unfounded, inflammatory, and merely
stereotypical reproductions of the vanishing, uncivilized, and savage Native. Ward
Churchill similarly remarks in his writings that the production of popular American
narratives featuring Native American themes, peoples, cultures, or historical events are
merely colonial tools to perpetuate the “genocide of the mind” against American Indian
people. The problem for each scholar is not so much a matter of representation and
authenticity as it is an issue of cultural sovereignty and self determination having more to
do with cultural authority. Elizabeth Cook-Lynn writes that:
The role of Indians, themselves, in the storytelling of Indian America is as much a
matter of “jurisdiction” as is anything else in Indian Country: economics, the law,
control of resources, property rights. It goes without saying that it reflects our
struggle with the colonial experience of our concomitant histories. If that sounds
benign, it is anything but that. On the contrary, how the Indian narrative is told,
how it is nourished, who tells it, who nourishes it , and the consequences of its
telling are among the most fascinating-and, at the same time, chilling-stories of
our time.
3

Cook-Lynn's view echoes a central concern underlying American Indian Studies that
the principle methodology informing an analysis of Native American representation or
culture requires specificity with respect to the tribal history, culture, politics, and
worldview of the nation being discussed. The idea that Native literature‟s goal should be
purposeful and useful to a tribally specific community is significant to understanding a
fundamental methodology of Native American literary studies. This approach informs
and supports the specific tribal politics of intellectual and cultural sovereignty. This is
also precisely the tautology of John Carlos Rowe‟s “Creole nationalisms,” which breaks
away from the “myth and symbols” to acknowledge the relevance and alternative cultural
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origins and epistemologies of Native American tribal groups. Hence leading Native and
American Studies scholars articulate a scholarly practice that privileges the voices and
the creative/critical work produced by Native American people. The purpose is to ensure
that Native American cultures, histories, and communities are actively represented and
involved in the process of intellectual exchange.
Ironically, the intersection of popular culture and Native American representation
becomes the nexus of a contentious and often problematic field of inquiry for Native
American Studies scholars. How do we—Native, female, scholars—challenge the “myth
and symbol” school of thought and representation if we are not supposed to participate in
and/or consume the form in question? To answer this question, I scrutinized Cook-
Lynn‟s and Bird‟s dissatisfaction with popular art and literature‟s misrepresentation of
Native Americans as evidence of a common expression of angst and fatigue with the
genre encountered in Native American Studies. Their foray into the field of pop culture
simultaneously reveals a critical and crucial desire to engage, analyze, and critique
popular culture/literature, even if it is to discount its relevance to Native Americans.
While Cook-Lynn‟s epigraph and statement above draws a clear line of separation
between non/tribal functions and usefulness of popular art and literature in Indian life,
Bird‟s epigraph laments the fact that there is an absence of images and relationships
between Native American men and women in the media to appeal to an American Indian
audience. What is missing from critiques of popular romance in the field of Native
literary studies is a willingness to engage seriously the literature. It is easy to point out
that the narratives are formulaic, loosely based on history and that the depictions of
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Indian men and women are stereotypical and function to appeal to the white gaze, which
is the historical analysis that white female critics mount against the form and its overtly
sexualized and objectified masculine gaze; however, it is more difficult to account for the
consumption of popular culture as Native people and Native intellectuals. Thus, Kate
McCafferty‟s statement quoted at the outset of the chapter with its call for a more serious
study of the genre and its potential to bring about social change is particularly apt and
timely for this project.
Malaeska (1860) and Ramona (1862):
Transgressive and Tragic Colonial Paradigms of Native Femininity

It is not without coincidence that two of the best-selling Indian romances from the
nineteenth century feature stories in which the Native American suffers a life of tragedy.
To be Native American in the nineteenth century was to be pitied as part of a doomed and
vanishing race. Set against a national backdrop of New Republicanism and
Reconstruction after the Civil War, the nagging “Indian question” was answered with the
institutionalization of bureaucratic polices to incorporate Native America into the
national body politic. The federal measures included congressionally mandated removals
of Native Americans from their indigenous homelands to Indian reservations in the mid-
and western US. While the physical removal of Native Americans from the eastern
seaboard solved the immediate conflicts of westward migration into the Ohio River
Valley and the Great Plains, it did not resolve the Indian question completely. Thus, plans
to civilize the savages gained in popularity and resulted in the formation of the General
Allotment or the Dawes Act (1887) and the creation of Indian boarding schools. Both
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policies were conceived as measures to assimilate Indians into the US social, economic,
and cultural world (Pagans in the Promised Land, 2008).
America‟s educated elite were sympathetic to the plight of the Indians and formed
political charities to protest the mistreatment and abuse of America‟s first nations. The
“Friends of the Indians” was one such group (Harmon, 1990)
4
; however, the benevolence
of a few did little to assuage the national policy of removal imposed upon Native people
by military force from the Eastern seaboard to the West Coast. The implementation of the
reservation system under this policy of removal aimed to sequester and thus prevent any
tribal uprisings against the influx of Western immigrants to the American frontier
following the Louisiana Purchase and the successful Louis and Clarke Expedition
commissioned under President Thomas Jefferson.
Two late nineteenth publications of American Indian sentimental novels
dramatize these national issues of American/Indian conflict: Ann S. Stephens‟ story,
Malaeska: The Indian Wife of the White Hunter (1860) and Helen Hunt Jackson‟s
Ramona (1864). Malaeksa was first written as part of a serial publication in a popular
nineteenth-century magazine for women and it became an instant classic. Recognizing
the cultural appeal and financial opportunity of packaging a serial novel, Beadle and Co.
developed the dime novel to “reach all classes, old and young, male and female… to
captivate and enliven—to answer to the popular demand for works of romance, but also
to instill a pure and elevating sentiment in the hearts and minds of the people” at a
bargain price of a “dollar book for only a dime.”
5
Although Malaeska is set in
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eighteenth-century New England, a century before the opening of the American West, the
same neo-national narrative about the American-settler versus the Indigenous-occupier
that occurs in Malaeska echoes in the story of Ramona. Whereas Stephens writes
Malaeska as an episodic and tragic romance, in Jackson‟s Ramona, the American-setter
versus Indigenous-occupier cultural conflict is cast in the sentimental tradition that
characterized popular abolitionist fiction like Stowe‟s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In Ramona,
Jackson utilized her firsthand accounts as a Special Agent for the Commission of Indian
Affairs to provide compelling evidence to elicit support for the “Indian cause.” Her
experience as an Indian agent inspired Jackson to write a novel to garner support to
reform the destructive Indian policies that were tearing apart the fabric of ancient Native
American cultures. Thus, while Stephens looks back nostalgically to a time in early
American history to warn her readers of the mistakes made by American-settler‟s,
Jackson selected the popular sentimental novel as a literary tool to reach a wide audience
in the hopes of educating the American public about the tragic fate of the California
Indian. Unfortunately, both texts fell short in accomplishing such lofty social goals on a
national scale; what they did achieve, however, was the creation of two longstanding
literary paradigms for the American Indian love story that are recycled today: that is the
tragic fate of the Native American woman in the Indian love story.
In his preface to Malaeska, Bill Brown explains that that “inter-[racial]-marriage
was a fact of frontier history.” but Stephens, “effectively avoid[s] any treatment of
intermarriage itself” and instead “Mrs. Stephens concentrates on the transcultural price of
maternal devotion” (Reading the West 55). Malaeska creates the narrative trend in Indian
140

love stories to suppress the mixed-race Indian romance narrative in favor of a white-
washed tale that rejects the Indian woman as lover and, in the most insidious fashion, also
erases the narration of Native motherhood. In short, Malaeska charts the disintegration
and displacement of the Native/American family on both sides of the /.
A key concept in unraveling this web of contradictions is an understanding of the
articulation and development of white masculinity in nineteenth century literature. Just as
the cult of domesticity was complicit in preserving the national family and cultivating or
as Teresa de Lauretis explains “seducing” white woman‟s acquiescence to white
patriarchal order, white men were also busy constructing and enacting ideals about
American masculinities. E. Anthony Rotundo explains in American Manhood:
Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era that seismic shifts
in notions of American manhood occurred in the nineteenth century that would become
the basis for definitions of masculinity in the modern age. By charting the transformation
of white masculine ideals from “communal manhood” developed in colonial America in
which “a man‟s identity was inseparable from the duties he owed to his community”
towards nineteenth-century conceptions of “self-made manhood” in which “a man took
his identity and his social status from his own achievements … .”
6
The new emphasis on
gender roles for white men and women in the nineteenth century created a cultural
anxiety about cultural, racial, and gender differences seen in Other-American
communities; in particular, in those Native American communities that seemed to be
vanishing due to the implementation of new Indian Removal policies and the
implementation of Indian reservations and boarding schools. The narration of Indian love
141

stories by white female writers becomes a double-edged sword that cut against the grain
of patriarchy as well as notions of white female domesticity in which the gender
pressures that American women and men faced in the New Republic. Thus, miscegenous
romance plots featuring Native Americans in sentimental novels became the backdrop in
which new gender roles of identification could be played out in familiar colonial
landscapes. The family romance in the novels reified US white hegemony by protecting
the cult of true womanhood and figuratively punishing all transgressors of these orders.
In this context, the family drama that ensues in Malaeska after the revelation of
Malaeska and Danforth‟s “marriage” places the Native woman and child at the heart of
the American family feud of the sexes. In studies of women‟s romance, domesticity and
motherhood are social and cultural prescriptions for a loss of selfhood and identity under
the thumb of white patriarchy. The subjectivity of the “woman” is sacrificed as Brown
states at the altar of “maternal devotion.” But, in the American Indian love story the
sacrifice of love and romance made at the altar of “maternal devotion” is it the
teleological end for colonial conquest and oppression. These processes are inherently
different and separate functions for Native/American women due to the different racial
and social definitions of family order and motherhood.
The brief back story to Malaeska and William‟s romance reveals that Malaeska‟s
tribe accepted her union with the white hunter. “He had married the daughter of their
chief, and, consequently, was a man of considerable importance to the tribe” (73).
However, when the feud over the death of a Native man erupts into violence, William‟s
142

place in the tribe is jeopardized. Malaeska risks her life to save him from the tribal mob;
however, as William prepares to escape and notices that Malaeska is willing to abandon
her tribe to go with him, his real feelings for Malaeska are revealed. Malaeska‟s
acceptance and love of William is not completely reciprocated by him.
He had never thought of introducing her as his wife among the whites, and now
that circumstances made it necessary for him to part with her forever, or to take
her among his people for shelter, a pang such as he had never felt, came to his
heart. His affection struggled powerfully with his pride. The picture of his
disgrace—of the scorn with [sic] which his parents and sisters would receive the
Indian wife and half-Indian child, presented itself before him, and he had not the
moral courage to risk the degradation which her companionship would bring upon
him. (Italics added, 76)
William‟s choice to abandon Malaeska and their son ends with his death at the hands
of Malaeska‟s father. The simultaneous murder of William and her father symbolizes
Malaeska‟s complete and utter abandonment by alternative paradigms of patriarchy
represented in her traditional Native American father and in the new Native-American
mixture symbolized by the figure of her husband as the questing-frontiersman; thereby
figuratively placing her in the literary hands and mercy of the imagination of the white
female writer. Stephens‟ allows Malaeska‟s devotion and love for her husband to blind
her to William‟s true feelings and the deep personal conflict he faces in publicly
acknowledging his marriage to her. John Cawelti explains this ambivalent reaction on the
part of the questing white male in the western or frontier romance as the “man in the
middle” complex. William‟s narrative death fulfills this formula, and leaves Malaeska in
the middle of the unresolved plot. “The man-in-the-middle‟s problem usually is that he
cannot resolve his inner conflict by committing himself to one of the two courses of
143

action or ways of life that divide him. Classic westerns often end in the hero‟s death or in
violence, reluctantly entered upon, that does not fully resolve the conflict” (Cawelti 248).
Typically, the dark or unacceptable object of desire represented by the Native
woman in the sentimental drama is a narrative plot device that the hero must work
through, reject, and/or reform for the proper narrative transformation from morally unjust
or ambivalent into morally regenerated or redeemed in the proper representation as an
acceptable partner for the hero. After her complete rejection by their son and her
submission to John Danforth's threat to her should she try to intervene in her son‟s life
again, Malaeska makes her life‟s mission to understand and convert to William‟s religion
in the hope that she will join her lover again in the afterlife. Thus, she struggles, even
after William‟s death, to prove her worth as an acceptable love object for the questing
white male. “She thought of her own people incessantly—of her broken, harassed tribe,
desolated by the death of her father, and whose young chief she had carried off and given
to strangers” (94).
The plot then centers less on the romance between Malaeska and the young white
hunter and more on the irreconcilable differences created when Malaeska seeks support
from Danforth‟s American father who represents a rigid and racist white American
patriarchal order.
The elder [John] Danforth was a just man but hard as granite in his prejudices. An
only child had been murdered by the savages to whom the poor young creature
belonged. His blood—all of his being might descend to posterity—had been
mingled with the accursed race who had sacrificed him. Gladly would he have
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rent the two races asunder, in the very person of his grandchild, could the pure
half of his being been thus preserved. (94)
The antagonism birthed in the figure of the young Danforth, represented by the literal
mixing of two opposing views of the masculine ideal, creates the internal drama and
narrative drive for Stephens‟ tale whose cultural duty in the nineteenth century is to
maintain domestic order and decency. Malaeska is but the landscape, much like the
American wilderness, in which the men battled for recognition. Thus, in the story, racial
origins and mixed bloodlines are the primal tragic flaw for the would-be-hero, the young
William Danforth, with the ultimate blame placed on the shoulders of the subversive
Indian mother. “She was his mother; yet her very existence in that house was held as a
reproach. Every look that she dared to cast on her child, [sic] was watched jealously as a
fault. Poor Malaeska! [H]ers was a sad, sad life” (96).
From the beginning of the novel, Malaeska is depicted alternately as a forlorn Indian
mother and a suppliant wife as the story is titled, cast in competing roles, this the
depiction of her as an Indian woman with no viable role or agency to overcome her
situation except through her white lover.
A young Indian girl was sitting on a pile of furs …. She wore no paint—her cheek
was round and smooth, and large gazelle-like eyes gave a soft brilliancy to her
countenance, beautiful beyond expression. … An infant, almost naked, was lying
in her lap, throwing its unfettered limbs about, and lifting his little hands to his
mother‟s mouth, as she rocked back and forth on her seat of skins, chanting, in a
sweet, mellow voice, the burden of an Indian lullaby. As the form of the hunter
darkened the entrance, the Indian girl started up with a look of affectionate joy,
and laying her child on the pile of skins, advanced to meet him. …
Danforth passed his arm around the waist of his Indian wife, and drawing her to
him, bent his cheek to hers … her untutored heart, rich in its natural affections,
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had no aim, no object, but what centered in the love she bore her white husband.
The feelings which in civilized life are scattered over a thousand objects, were, in
her bosom, centered in one single being; he supplied the place of all the high
aspirations—of all the passions and sentiments which are fostered into strength
by society, and as her husband bowed his head to hers, the blood darkened her
cheek, and her large, liquid eyes were flooded with delight. (71-72)
The separation of Malaeska‟s motherly devotion from her womanly delight in her
husband in these passages is attributed to her uncivilized deportment as an Indian woman.
In “civilized life,” the passage states, her affections would be enlightened to her unique
circumstances and forced asunder—“scattered over a thousand objects”—which implies
a lessening of her love and desire for her husband. Her “untutored heart” is filled with
naïve innocence and focused only on the “one single being”—Danforth. This is the
familiar template for a white patriarchal fantasy readers are accustomed to encountering
in American literature. The image of the questing and lonely white hunter in the
wilderness forging his way on the frontier and recreating a new American self and
identity. Richard Slotkin calls this narrative trajectory“regeneration through violence”
due to the physical and cultural conflicts that erupted over in what Mary Louise Pratt
called the “contact zones” between the frontier and normative definitions of civilization.
7

If early American literature for men became synonymous with the Daniel Boone and
Natty Bumpo tales of Cooper, Brown, and Twain as Slotkin and others argue, then the
tales that Stephens and this formula is that the redemption and reconciliation that
regeneration incites does not include the Native American women the tales feature.
While some scholars claim that white female authors wrote Native American romances to
raise the national conscience about issues of social and racial injustice in the colonization
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of Native Americans, the overwhelming cultural and popular trend that the narratives
produced had quite the opposite effect.
I want to consider a less popular and more divisive theory. I read these sentimental
novels as revenge narratives for frustrated, oppressed, and disenfranchised white women
who were socially and culturally prescribed to second-class status in a patriarchal order.
The theoretical lens darkens considerably with a green eye of jealousy when white
women are placed in the subject position of rivals versus sisters in dark arms against
patriarchy. While Ann S. Stephens presents a sentimental and tragic picture of the
Indian lover/mother to garner support and sympathy for the disintegration of the
traditional Native/American family and culture, she also imagines and thus, projects, a bit
of good old fashioned revenge and jealousy onto the figure of the insecure, questing
white male—to warn him against the error in mixing races—that he and his progeny
cannot succeed in this female-authored formula either. Thus, the Native woman, as
Malaeska‟s fate as the innocent and “untutored” rival reveals, is the quintessential foil in
the gender wars between the colonizers.
For the American Indian female protagonist in the dime novel, the option of marrying
up or marrying out of one‟s station in life and living to tell about it is absolutely
unimaginable to her progenitor. The racial difference outweighs distinctions in racial or
social class mobility. The net result is the foreclosure of any cultural exchange or the
acquisition of cultural capital for the Native American woman. The only means Malaeska
has to redeem herself from her racial and cultural transgressions is through her spiritual
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conversion, which the Sara Jones, William's fiancée, validates through her spiritual
renewal facilitated by Malaeksa. "It is strange that the pure and simple religion which
lifts the soul up to God, should have been first taught to the beautiful young white from
the lips of a savage ..... When the pure and simple faith of the Indian was revealed--when
she saw how beautifully high energies and lofty feelings were mingled with the Christian
meekness and enduring faith of her character, [Sarah] began to love goodness for its own
exceeding beauty, and to cultivate those qualities which struck her as so worthy in her
wild-wood friend"(125). However, instead of finding a common affiliation--via a
synthesis of religious views and also between economically dispossessed groups—the
settlers on the frontier and the Native American tribes being colonized—the American
dime novel heightens the conflicts that arise between the two groups by cautioning
readers of the clear and present danger to the nation that racial mixing brings: a threat to
white patriarchy, which includes a threat from the "new white male" and his frontier
desires within it.
In narratives in which the Native male "mixes" with a white female a higher order of
racial mixing is assumed because the white woman still belongs to or has cultural origins
with her “home” in white patriarchy, thus the narrative of miscegenation, though taboo, is
redeemable (in similar ways as the production of Mary White Rowlandson‟s captivity
tale redeemed her). A narrative in which the Native female mixes with the white male,
however, is a complete subversion of white patriarchy because the female Indian destroys
the origin of white authority completely. Such an absolute transgression seals her fate in
the narrative as a social outcast and, as well as, marks her children with the bloodstain of
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racial impurity. Not only does Malaeska‟s tale threaten the white father (the eldest
Danforth), it also threatens the white female‟s domestic role to bear, nurture, and to
preserve the national family. The narrative outcome in this colonial romance is to punish
the race traitors—those that the author imagined existing in frontier US communities.
Therefore, the erasure of the Indian mother in favor of a more palatable narrative that
denies a connection with miscegenous origins in each of these early novels creates what
Freud calls the uncanny repression of a past that will not remain hidden or buried. The
return of the repressed is the same in each narrative: the mixed-race Native figure is
written out of the narrative as in the suicide by young William Danforth and/or in the
textual deportation of Ramona at the end of Helen Hunt Jackson‟s novel, which I discuss
at length in the next section. In other words, the uncanny return of the mixed-race child
fulfills a familiar or canny scene of that which cannot be repressed: the evidence of the
original transgression, the mixedblood child. The plot constructed according to white
colonial logic demands the destruction of the Native American woman—the alternative
cultural bearer and her offspring. Furthermore, the scene of erasure through the story's
denial of Native motherhood in the Indian love story functions to, on the one hand,
liberate white patriarchy from the consequences of colonization—the racial mixing that
he participates in the “contact zone” precipitated between white frontiersmen and Native
women—and, on the other hand, to punish the Native woman and her offspring for the
acts committed against them. The fate of the Native American woman in the sentimental
novel ultimately reflects the inter-generational trauma Natives experienced from
centuries of colonization, institutionalized racism, and sexism.
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By allegorically comparing Malaeska‟s relationship to multiple relationships of white
patriarchy and the relationship between the US Federal Government, the nation- State,
and Indian Nations, Cho argues: “In Malaeska, the tragic consequences of interracial
sexual union in a sentimentally rendered familial context represents the effects of a
putatively benevolent lament for the inevitable extinction of Native Americans in a
national context” (6). Cho‟s argument situates the text within the contested fields of
American and an American Indian Studies critique. In her reading of Stephens‟ serialized
publication and the revised dime novel, Cho claims the texts are an “allegory [for] the
dispossession of Native Americans.” The discussion opens up the text for a critique from
a reverse perspective: that of the Native American. Cho further explains that “Malaeska
mobilizes the „Indian question‟ to critique white supremacy and patriarchy
simultaneously” (1-2). Contemporary readings of the dime novel more strongly associate
the relationship between women‟s sentimental fiction and nineteenth-century nation-
building projects. The national formation of US culture at this time operated in opposition
to its settler-colonial economy. On the one hand, US Indian policy enacted by treaties or
“contracts” as Cho claims operated according to an “assimilationist” paradigm: to civilize
the savage. However, the actual practice functioned according to the logic of removal and
extermination as we see with the removal of the five civilized tribes beginning in 1829—
the Cherokees, Choctaws, Creek, Chickasaws, and Seminoles—west of the Mississippi
River.
Instead of expanding the possibilities for cross-cultural community building, the early
dime novel severely limited the outcomes for Indian love stories and created a popular
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American narrative trend that continued to feed the logic and practice of Indian
extermination versus Indian integration because the new American romance completely
shifted the agents of change and transformation from an Anglo- centric focus to an
Indigenously-centered story. There is no “regeneration through romance” for Native
consumers/people in this formula. Even the “friends of the Indians,” represented by white
matriarchs such as the character of Mrs. Danforth who is sympathetic to Malaeska‟s
plight and helps her secretly visit with her son despite Mr. Danforth‟s insistence that
Malaeska abdicate her parental rights to her mixed-race child, are ineffectual in
constructing lasting alliances or changes to policies governing US/Indian relations in the
nation allegorically represented by the home in the sentimental novel.
While Anglo-American women writers used literature as a voice to register protests
against the plight of white women restricted to the domestic sphere, the moral state of the
nation, and others outside of the national body politic, the racial injustices articulated in
their novels were typically subsumed beneath the iron fist of gender oppression wielded
by patriarchy, which seemed to also crush any imagination of real alliances between
white and Native woman through empathy and understanding. Ann Sophia Stephens‟
attempt to register social protest by “mobilizing the Indian question” as Cho argues she
does with the production of Malaeska, is similar to the production of another Indian love
story in which the Anglo-American author utilizes the sentimental romance to garner
support for the Indian cause.
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Although Helen Hunt Jackson was a self-proclaimed “friend to the Indians” and
worked as a special agent for the Superintendent of Indian Affairs in the late nineteenth
century, her novel, perhaps more than any other American tale, failed as sentimental
romance to “mobilize” public support for policy changes to the colonization of the
California Mission Indians. Jackson published Ramona in 1862 following her political
attempt to rally support for the fate of the California Indians in Century of Dishonor
(1881). Helen Hunt Jackson turned to the domestic novel to provide public awareness to
stop the genocide and dispossession of the California Mission Indians. The sentimental
romance, Ramona, by Helen Hunt Jackson finds a tidy solution to this problem of how to
“escape” gender and racial violence at the fin de siècle of the nineteenth century. In
Jackson‟s Indian love story, the Native hero/heroine is removed from the narrative
landscape. This is the familiar and popular narrative for Indian love stories.
Helen Hunt Jackson‟s heroine, Ramona Ortegna, is a mixed-race, half-Scottish-
American and half-San Gabrielena Indian ( a non-federally recognized tribe today),
raised by her father‟s scorned, ex-lover, a woman from an elite Mexican family, Senora
Ramona Gonzaga Ortegna. Her Indian identity is kept a secret from Ramona until it is
revealed that she is in love with an Indian sheep-shearer, Alessandro Asiss or as he is
commonly referred to in the text, “Alessandro the Indian.” Alessandro is from the
Pechanga Indian Village near present-day Temecula in Southern Riverside County,
California
8
. He is Luiseno, a tipai Indian.
9
The jacket cover from a recent Avon
republication of the book aptly explains the drama that ensues: “A great star-crossed love
was born. But the adopted daughter of Senora Moreno was defying the custom of her
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people. Her forbidden love would drive her from place to place with Alessandro until
tragedy would strike and Ramona would at last come to an understanding of herself.”
Thus, the novel‟s central crisis is the negotiation of Indian/Mexican identity as it is
constructed in the aftermath of the US/Mexican War, the rise of US westward migration,
and the dispossession of traditional Indian land bases. Ramona‟s defiance of “her people”
that the book cover mentions becomes a theme that the novel reiterates many times but it
is difficult to decipher which culture Ramona belongs to: the Mexican landholding family
she was raised in, the white culture she is alienated from, or the Indian community which
her heart tells her she belongs. The question the book cover raises regarding Ramona‟s
cultural affiliation and membership is an important component of the novel‟s overall
representation of Indian identity at the historical juncture when Southern California tribes
entered the American reservation system.
Community recognition of and by one‟s “people” is a fundamental aspect of subject
formation according to Charles Taylor and, he explains, it is central to a multicultural or a
mixed race identity. In the “Politics of Recognition,"
10
Taylor argues that the experiences
of the individual in a specific community with people that the individual believes are of
significance—that is they occupy a place in which their esteem, opinion, and respect is
valued by an individual is of the utmost importance to an individual‟s sense of cultural or
ethnic belonging. For Native American people, the location of this reinforcement begins
in the home with the family or kinship network, and then extends to the larger Native
American community. However, in Jackson's novel, the fundamental experiences of
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community recognition and kinship are denied to Ramona by the Ortegna's because of
her racially-mixed heritage.
In Jackson‟s novel, Ramona‟s identity crisis is a result of her knowledge that she is
not quite an Ortegna or Moreno; she is raised by her aunt and feels like an outsider in her
home despite the outward signs of her shared skin, hair, and eye color with her Mexican
counterparts. Her mestiza blood becomes a site of contestation not because she is white,
but because she is mixed. Her ambiguous and shifting relationship among all three
cultures signals Jackson‟s inability to reconcile Ramona‟s mixedblood identity in a
cultural moment when such notions of racial mixing were threatening to the American
body politic. For instance, Ramona‟s adopted Aunt confesses that she did not mind that
Ramona was part Indian, she was uneasy because she was only half. “„If the child were
pure Indian, I would like it better,‟ she said. „I like not these crosses. It is the worst, and
not the best of each that remains‟” (32).
Senora Ortegna‟s comments reveal the racial prejudice that exists on all sides of and
in between the color line in the South/West. However, in one of the novel‟s most
progressive revisions for a romance at this time, Jackson writes Ramona‟s return (albeit
temporary) to her Indian homeland. Her decision is based in large part due to her
romance with Alessandro and it is premised on her revelation to him that she is Indian.
The admission, which readers are aware Alessandro already knows, enacts one of the two
cultural transitions that Ramona undergoes in the novel; in this instance it is the
disavowal of her Mexican self in favor of her Indian self, which in another narrative
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might signal her regeneration or redemption, but in the American Indian romance, it
signals instead, Ramona‟s doom.
“„Alessandro!‟ She said in a tone that startled him.
„Senorita!‟ He said tenderly.
„You have never once called me Ramona.‟
„I cannot, Senorita,‟ he replied.
„Why not?‟
„I do not know, I sometimes think “Ramona,”‟ he added faintly, „but not
often; if I think of you by any other name than as my Senorita, it is usually
by a name you have never heard.‟
„What is it?‟ exclaimed Ramona, wonderingly.
„An Indian word, my dearest one, the name of the bird you are like,--the
wood-dove. In the Luiseno tongue that is Majel; that is what I thought my
people would have called you, if you had come to dwell among us. It is a
beautiful name, Senorita, and is like you.‟
Alessandro was still standing. Ramona rose; coming close to him, she laid
both her hands on his breast, and her head on her hands, and said:
„Alessandro, I have something to tell you. I am an Indian. I belong to your
people.‟” (176)
Jackson‟s narrative strategy to have Ramona “find herself‟ in her Indian community
is today a hallmark of Native American fiction; a sign of cultural regeneration and
redemption. The late Choctaw-Cherokee-Irish literary critic, Louis Owens, claims that
nearly all American Indian novels reveal a struggle to return or to “home in” on one‟s lost
or otherwise confused Indian identity.
11
However, the story itself falls short of the
transformative aspects that we might possibly consider on par with Leslie Silko‟s
Ceremony or Louise Erdrich‟s Tracks, in which the Indian protagonist finds a way to
survive the onslaught of American colonization. Jackson‟s reference in the passage above
to Ramona‟s Indian identity in the context of “belong[ing] to [Alessandro‟s] people”
suggests that Jackson can imagine a uniquely Native/American female identity, but that
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identity is a commodity that can be possessed and transferred in a colonial matrix
between white men/land holding Californios and female authors.
As “Majella” reintegrates into the Indian community she was born into, her cultural
association with her adoptive Mexican family remains strong. For instance, she
continuously refers to the Indians as “Alessandro‟s people” or “his people.” The narrative
form requires that Ramona sympathize with the Indians from a distance despite her name
change to Majel or Majella (the more affectionate Spanish form of the name).
Shortly after Ramona‟s confession of her authentic racial origin, the couple weds, and
they wander from Indian village to Indian village trying to make a life for themselves.
They are continuously subjected to encroachments on their home. In one of the scenes of
dispossession, Majella is afraid that Alessandro is losing his mind because, in fit of rage
and frustration, he sells their house, cattle, and property to a white man before they can
“take it away.” From the vista of her doorway, Ramona observes the transaction that
occurs in their fields:
In a few moments she saw the white man counting out money into
Alessandro‟s hand; then he turned and walked away, Alessandro still
standing as if rooted to the spot, gazing into the palm of his hand…at last
he seemed to rouse himself as if from a trance, and picking up the horses
reins come slowly towards her….
Deliberately, lingeringly, he unharnassed the horses and put them in the
corral. Then still more deliberately, lingeringly, he walked to the house;
walked without speaking past Ramona, into the door. A lurid spot on each
cheek showed the burning red through the bronze of his skin. His eyes
glittered. In silence Ramona followed him, and saw him draw from his
pocket a handful of gold pieces, fling them on the table, and burst into a
laugh more terrible than any weeping…. (253)
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He then proceeds to tell Ramona the details of his encounter with a white settler.
“[He] had not been plowing more than an hour, when, hearing a strange
sound, he looked up and saw a man unloading lumber a few rods off.
Alessandro stopped midway in the furrow and watched him. The man also
watched Alessandro. Presently he came toward him, and said roughly,
“Look here! Be off, will you? This is my land. I‟m going to build a house
here.”
Alessandro had replied, “This was my land yesterday. How come it is
yours today?” (254)
The scene marks the beginning of Alessandro‟s slow descent into madness brought on
by the continuous intrusion of American colonization on his traditional Indian life. In
effect, the depression and insanity represents his literal self-destruction, which is
symbolic of the destruction of the Indian culture he represents. At the novel‟s end,
Alessandro is eventually murdered for stealing a horse that he believed belonged to
Majella; in his altered state of mind, he simply imagined that he was taking it home for
her. Majella is left to fend for herself and her only surviving child, a daughter named
Ramona. Upon learning of Alessandro‟s murder, Majella‟s foster-brother, Felipe,
immediately seeks out Ramona to offer her his assistance. With little knowledge of the
oppressive ordeals that Alessandro and Majella faced Felipe Moreno reenters the
narrative and sets out to find and bring “his” Ramona home to the Moreno estate. Upon
her homecoming Felipe confesses his love to her and the Indian romance effectively
ends.
In the closing pages, Felipe informs Ramona of his desire to return to Mexico where
the Moreno name was “still held in warm remembrance” (349). His statement implies
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that the name is shamed by its association with Ramona‟s now infamous encounters with
her Indian identity. When Majella, once again, Ramona, agrees to accompany him, he
surmises that “she would spare her daughter the burden she had gladly, heroically borne
herself, in the bond of race” (347). Thus, Jackson‟s “star-crossed lovers” now represented
by Ramona and Felipe—substituted for Alessandro—as the more acceptable love object
can rightfully fulfill another destiny, in a foreign instead of in a domestic American land.
Jackson‟s equation of Ramona/Majella‟s “Indianness” as captured in or by the “bonds
of race” infuses the story with allusions to a reverse form of Indian captivity: Ramona is
not the Indian captor; she is the Indian captive. Hence, I read the novel in the same
tradition as the late eighteenth century and nineteenth captivity romances popularized by
writers such as Hannah Foster, Catharine Sedgwick, and Susanna Rowson with a
difference. Instead of focusing on the plight of the white American woman that identifies
with the adventures outside the home that Christopher Castiglia notes is at the center of
women‟s “wilderness” fiction, Jackson attempts to revise the genre to include the
experiences of an Indian woman‟s desire to escape the limitations of her prescribed
identity and domestic duties, but she doesn‟t quite achieve her desired outcome.
Jackson‟s novel was praised by many critics for its “tender love story;” however, it failed
to provide the desired effect to mobilize concern for Indian reform. Valerie Sherer
Mathes quotes Jackson as saying, “I am sick at heart, and discouraged…. I see nothing
more I can do or write” after she realizes that Ramona does not achieve its intended
purpose (Jackson and Her Indian Reform Legacy 86).
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The novel‟s sympathetic appeal to its readers on behalf of California‟s Mission
Indians is ineffectual precisely because at the novel‟s end Jackson makes it easy for
readers to imagine California without Indians or Mexicans. She reifies the text‟s latent
ideology of Manifest Destiny by suggesting with the representation of Alessandro‟s
madness and eventual murder that California Indians are unfit to occupy and control the
Edenic lands she so vividly describes in the novel. In a letter to an Indian agent working
for the Commission of Indian Affairs, Jackson writes that she desires “to aid … in
securing homes for the Mission Indians in Southern California” (Mathes 52) , which in
the novel she realized, ironically, by completely removing them from the American
imaginary scene. If we read the ending of Jackson‟s novel as a prediction of the future
there would be no Indians or Mexicans in California today. For as much as Jackson set
out to write a romance that appealed to the sentimentality of her readers to mobilize
sympathy for the “Indian cause” in the same way that Harriet Beecher Stowe‟s Uncle
Tom’s Cabin elicited support for abolition for African Americans, Jackson‟s novel
instead further romanticized the people, the region, and the history of war and conquest
that “caused” the Indian‟s problem in the first place.
In Jackson‟s novel, there was no imaginable salvation for California Indians because
the onslaught of American settler-colonialism was relentless. In this aspect of Jackson‟s
novel there is truth to the comment that the only life available to California Indians was
one of “hardship and deprivation.” In fact, the book was published during the height of
racist polices of extermination and destruction of California Indian livelihood. It was
federal and state policy to exclude any assertion of California Indian rights to land or
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autonomy; at this time, indigenous Californians were displaced from their indigenous
homelands, disenfranchised, and as “homeless” individuals subject to the vagrancy laws
that instituted their indentured servitude that functioned as a thinly veiled form of
legalized slavery.
Jackson clearly utilizes the metaphor of Ramona‟s "rescue" from a “fate worse than
death” as a reference to call up images of “Indian captivity” along with its sordid
allusions of racial and sexual violence. Such literary phrases would later become popular
refrains in films that featured white captivity such as in the production of The Searchers,
starring John Wayne and a young Natalie Wood. The underlying sentiment beneath these
comments is that to “go native” is to somehow “defile” the person, which harkens back to
early captivity narratives like Rowlandson‟s.
The narrative‟s return to a conventional captivity romance plot limits the novel‟s
ability to reform Native/American policy as well as Native/American romance. In the
end, the irreconcilable national, cultural and racial differences create a narrative
landscape of loss that constructs American Indians as ghosts—present but devoid of life,
identity, culture, family, or home; in need of a removal to another national context.
However, with the removal of Ramona, Jackson‟s politics lapse into tragedy instead of
transformation and change.
The tragic ending for both Ramona and Alessandro becomes doubly ironic because
they were a suitable love-match according to the romance formula—both characters were
of the same racial and economic class so no social taboos of miscegenation were crossed
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or violated, which should have created the possibility for their union, but it didn‟t. If the
romance genre failed to reform Indian policy as Jackson earnestly desired, is it possible
for a Native/American woman to reform the romance?

Mourning Dove’s Cogewea (1927): Re-Forming the
American/Indian Romance and Native Literary Criticism

According to Peter Beidler, reforming the Indian romance is one of, if not the,
primary impetus behind the publication of Cogewea: The Half-Blood (1927).
12
Mourning
Dove was long cited as the first American Indian female novelist until research by
LaVonne Brown Ruoff revealed that S. Alice Callahan‟s novel, Wynema, was published
in 1891.
13
Cogewea is a frontier Indian romance that Cristal Quintasket, also known as
Humishuma in her Okanogan language (which translates into “Morning Dove” or
“Mourning Dove” which became her pen name
14
), developed over a period of ten years
while working as a migrant farm worker in the Northwestern United States.
15
Beidler‟s
analysis of the novel reads Mourning Dove‟s “reading” of Theresa Broderick‟s popular
novel, The Brand (1909). Beidler reads Cogewea as evidence of early Native American
literary criticism. Beidler‟s argument ultimately deconstructs Cogewea‟s reading of The
Brand and dismisses it as evidence of Mourning Dove‟s “parodic rejection” of
Broderick‟s novel and its treatment of Native Americans. He surmises: “It is almost as if
she [Mourning Dove] read The Brand and said, „So that is what you think Indian life is
like! Well, let me tell you a more accurate version of that story‟” (51). He then attributes
Cogewea‟s ultimate “failure” as a literary critic to “her anger with the novel [which]
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appears more personal than literary” (53). My argument pushes his claims further to label
Mourning Dove‟s work as a Native feminist critique of a genre that was/is historically
written about, by, and for women along the same lines that Tania Modleski urged for the
study of women‟s romance in the 1970s and 1980s. She writes: “It is time to begin a
feminist reading of women‟s reading, for it is possible that even those men whose
livelihood depends on deciphering women‟s responses have remained largely ignorant of
the „evils‟ lurking behind the most orthodox plots” (Loving With a Vengeance 34).
Although Modleski‟s groundbreaking women‟s romance study by and large dealt
with the sociohistorical conditions and experiences of white women, while Shari Hundorf
specifically calls for critical studies to address “indigenous feminist thought and
practice.”
16
Implicit in Hundorf‟s comment is the need for analysis of Native American
literature from a feminist point of view that scrutinizes the relationship between Indian
women‟s identity and romance fiction as a necessary first step in the process to
decolonize and understand Indian women‟s textual and sexual desires. Furthermore, in
her compelling analysis of women‟s romance and fantasy in The Thorn Birds, Cora
Kaplan raises the provocative question about the way in which a miscegenous plot or a
narrative “heredity of transgression” functions in literature.
17
Thus the miscegenous
narrative in the American Indian love story is fertile ground to begin fully examine these
issues from the imagination of a female indigenous writer.
The miscegenous plot in Cogewea functions as the narrative‟s central conflict for the
protagonist as it does in Ramona and Malaeska. However, in the latter two novels, the
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revelation of Native American ancestry becomes the tragic flaw for the heroine (as it is
also for Fee in Thorn Birds); in Cogewea it is the source of her strength, knowledge, and,
ultimately, her narrative escape from the disastrous narrative ending that Ramona and
Malaeska met with. Although her biracial heritage is a source of conflict; Mourning Dove
foregrounds Cogewea‟s mixed-race identity from the outset of the novel.
“[W]e are between two first, the Red and the White. Our Caucasian brothers
criticize us as a shiftless class, while the Indians disown us as abandoning our
own race. We are maligned and traduced as no one but we of the despised
„breeds‟ can know. If permitted I would prefer living the white man‟s way to that
of the Reservation Indian, but he hampers me. I appreciate my meager education,
but I will never disown my mother‟s blood. Why should I do so? Though my skin
is of a tawny hue, I am not ashamed….” (42).
Here Cogewea laments her biracial identity and feels that she is the social outcast of both
races; however, she refuses to renounce her Indian blood—unlike Ramona and Malaeska
who are each forced to reject their Native cultures in order to survive. Connections to
culture and land via “blood” are central issues in Native American Literature. Chadwick
Allen in Blood Narrative (2002) coins the term “blood-land-memory” complex for
analysis of Native literature following N. Scott Momaday‟s poem about cultural memory
“in the blood.” In Allen‟s assessment, “blood memory achieves tropic power by blurring
distinctions between racial identity and narrative. . . . [It] relies on a series of
contemporary assertions rooted in indigenous worldviews and personal experience. ”
18

While the late 19
th
and early 20
th
Century literary scene concerned itself with the
advent of the modern age, by breaking with the repressive past, Mourning Dove reversed
this position by using popular literature as a vehicle to promote the preservation of Native
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American traditions, lands, and people. Mourning Dove‟s novel confronts the reality of
miscegenation for modern Native Americans in the 20
th
Century and uses the mixed-
blood metaphor as a central organizing principle and driving force in the novel. Her use
of the western romance form furthermore signals her personal knowledge of the genre‟s
historical deployment of the trope and reflects her decision to revise the fate for the half-
blood heroine. Indeed, Mourning Dove‟s novel intervened on a multitude of cultural,
social, and literary fronts in the early-twentieth century modern age. The publication of
Mourning Dove‟s novel in the midst of the modernist movement signals what Alicia Kent
calls, “a crucial transitional movement for Native Americans” (“Writing Her Way into
Modernity,” 39).
19
The modern period for Native/America consisted of two opposing
paradigms. For Anglo modernists, Kent explains, the movement marked a departure from
the past, a break with Victorian ideologies, and the search for cultural, psychological, and
sexual renewal; however:
The modern for Native Americans has a different starting point and impetus, and
it challenges Native American artists with a different set of concerns, for rather
than deny the past, the focus will be on saving an already denied past from
extinction. Modernity, then, for Native Americans, is not then just an inevitable
result of the material conditions in a capitalistic society, as Jameson conceives it,
nor the intentional break from the past; it is the forced assimilation of Native
Americans within American society. The present age looks different from the
vantage point of the Native Americans, who faced with the threat of cultural
extinction must work to preserve tradition rather than to deny it. (43).
The core distinction, then, exists in the very modernist definitions of breaking with
tradition and breaking with the past. Instead of projecting her personal, cultural, and
social anxieties outward onto another community, Mourning Dove turned inward and
combined her Native cultural knowledge with her American education to produce a richly
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heteroglossic text that strives to simultaneously preserve her cultural ties and to revise
mainstream literature‟s representation of the Native American.
20

The novel is set on a Montana cattle ranch named the “Horseshoe-Brand Ranch”
located near a newly formed Indian reservation that borders a white town. Cogewea
returns home from her stint at the “Carlisle Indian School” (16), the first US Indian
Boarding school. Upon her return, she is keenly aware of the racial and social class
distinctions of herself and her sisters living on the H-B Ranch. Racial tensions run high
throughout the narrative and individual characters embody the racial differences on the
ranch. The primary characters include Cogewea: “‟Chipmunk‟” of the Okanogans; the
„breed girl‟ with the hypnotic eyes” (16), her sisters Julia and Mary, Julia‟s Scottish
husband, John Carter, James LaGrinder, the mixedblood (half Flathead, half white) ranch
foreman, and a rag-tag assembly of other ranch hands named Silent Bob, Frenchy, and
the eastern interloper, Densmore, the inappropriate “pale face” suitor.
Cogewea‟s grandmother or “Stemteema” does not trust Densmore, the dashing white
man from the East that takes sport in seducing Cogewea: “He is here to cheat you; all that
any white man wants of the Indian girl. It is only to put her to shame, then cast her aside
for his own kind—the pale faced squaw. .. All that the pale face desires from the Indian
women, is pleasure and riches. When they get these, they marry back among their own
race” (103). Stemteema lives a traditional Indian life on the ranch out in the open plains
in a teepee that Cogewea often visits. The Stemteema serves as the voice of reason and
logic in the narrative by constantly reminding Cogewea about the dangers of inter-racial
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marriage and mixing. Despite the Stemteema‟s warnings, Cogewea dreams of a life filled
with purpose and grandeur.
What had the future in store for her? What would it bring? Would it, through her,
illuminate the pathway of others? Could she fill any sphere of usefulness; or
would she, like the race whose hue she inherited, be brushed aside, crushed, and
defeated by the cold dictates of „superior‟ earth-lords? She had struggled hard to
equip herself for a useful career, but seemingly there was but one trail for her—
that of mediocrity and obscurity. Regarded with suspicion by the Indian; shunned
by the Caucasian; where was there any place for the despised breed (17).
In her dreamy monologue, Cogewea simultaneously hopes for the possibility of
change yet laments the social and racial position she is cast by virtue of her genetic
composition. Her plight would become the central theme of Native American novelists
in the twentieth century according to Louis Owens. “For, in spite of the fact that Indian
authors write from very diverse tribal and cultural backgrounds, there is to a remarkable
degree a shared consciousness and worldview defined primarily by a quest for identity:
“What does it meant to be “Indian”—or mixedblood—in contemporary America”
(Mixedblood Messages 20). However, Mourning Dove dramatizes Cogewea‟s brooding
and struggle with her identity, romantic relationships, and search for her “place” in
society in the novel to offset the heroine‟s strength, composure, independence, and
confidence throughout the novel. Thus, the typical miscegenous plot of the
American/Indian love story becomes the source of a central identity crisis but not the
driving force to the heroine‟s doom.
One of the novel‟s central chapters features Cogewea reading The Brand (1909), a
popular romance novel that Beidler cites as an early “prototype of the Indian romance.”
21

166

In the scene, Cogewea begins to read The Brand, a popular novel with an “unjust
presentation of Indian sentiment and racist traits” (88). As Cogewea reads the novel she
becomes increasingly incensed by the “racist” sentiments attributed to the Native male
character in The Brand. “The thing does nothing but slam the breeds! As if they were
reptiles instead of humans,” she exclaims (Cogewea 91). Peter Beidler argues that
“Cogewea‟s anger is apparently caused less by The Brand’s flaws as a work of literature
than by her own involvement in events similar to those in the novel” (“Literary Criticism
in Cogewea” 50). Louis Owens cites this textual moment as a “literary self-conscious
moment” in which Mourning Dove allows her protagonist to reflect on Indian romances.
Given that Cogewea‟s vehement reaction to The Brand is a result of the Indian hero‟s
disavowal of his Native ancestry in order to win the love of a white girl. Cogewea
summarizes his plight: “He deems himself beneath her; not good enough for her”
(Cogewea 91). The renunciation of one‟s Native cultural affiliation is blasphemous to
Cogewea. She finds the hero‟s choice to turn away from his mother‟s ancestry in for the
love of a “white princess” ridiculous.
“Show me the Red „buck‟ who would slave for the most exclusive „white
princess‟ that lives. Such hash may go with the whites, but the Indian, both full
bloods and the despised breeds know differently. And that a „hero‟ should be
depicted as hating his own mother for the flesh and heart that she gave his
miserable frame. What a figure to be held up for laudation by either novelist or
historian! No man, First American, Caucasian, or of any other race, could be so
beastly inhuman in real life; so low and ungratefully base to want to hide his own
mother.” (Cogewea 91)
Her frustration and anger are similar to the frustrated reactions to the American Indian
romance that Native Studies scholars Cook-Lynn and Bird express in the epigraphs to the
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chapter. Recall Cook-Lynn‟s claims that mainstream popular art and literature have no
relevance to the lived-reality of Native American life; and Bird‟s sad observation that the
day in which a Native man and woman couple together in mainstream media is in the far-
distant future. Cogewea‟s contemptuous reaction to The Brand seems to be a long-
standing hereditary reaction for Native female romance readers. Furthermore, the reading
of the novel comes at a point in the narrative in which Densmore confesses to Cogewea
his love for her, which flusters and frustrates her (86).
The romance-reading scene is further complicated when Jim, the half-blood ranch
foreman who is secretly in love with Cogewea, interrupts Cogewea‟s reading. Cogewea
projects her anger with the Indian hero in the novel onto Jim and calls him a “miserable
breed!” (Cogewea 89). The combination of Densmore‟s confession and the plot of The
Brand irritate and fluster Cogewea‟s normally confident and rational self—transforming
her into the typical Indian heroine that is confused and vulnerable in the Indian romance
narrative.
In his reading of the scene, Peter Beidler outlines a side-by-side comparative reading
of Cogewea and The Brand, pointing out the similar plot structures, settings, and
characters in the two novels. He disagrees with Cogewea‟s allegations of the novel‟s
“literary racism” and instead argues that her contempt for The Brand “has to do, rather,
with Cogewea‟s own sensitivity about being a half-blood and her hopes for escaping her
Indianness through a white education and a white marriage” (“Literary Criticism in
Cogewea, 60). Beidler goes on to cite Cogewea‟s misreading of Broderick‟s novel and
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her dismissal of the novel on the basis of its racism. He provides compelling examples
from Broderick‟s novel to refute Cogewea‟s claims of racism to ultimately conclude that:
Cogewea, then, is less Mourning Dove‟s mouthpiece for criticizing racist fiction
than a complex character whose too-simple reaction to a vapid novel tells us more
about her than it does about the novel. Cogewea fails as a literary critic because
she cannot see past the assimilationist racism she herself has internalized and
because she refuses to take seriously the messages that stories can give her. The
wiser literary critic Mourning Dove—that combination of Indian writer and white
editor. She attacks The Brand less because it is racist than because it is
simpleminded, but she is less interested in decrying simpleminded novels than in
decrying unreflective readers like her own protagonist. (“Literary Criticism in
Cogewea 62)
Beidler‟s compelling reading of Mourning Dove/Cogewea as “literary critic” falls
short however, in fully realizing the significant contribution that Mourning Dove‟s novel
made at an historical moment when questions about Native (let alone, an Indian
woman‟s!) desire, agency, and literacy were vehemently denied by mainstream culture.
Instead of analyzing the “angry response” that Mourning Dove/Cogewea has to The
Brand as a potential site of critical intervention, a clue to an early twentieth century
Native American woman‟s struggle for autonomy in a society that would deny her rights
on the basis of her race and gender, Beidler explains away the response as a deliberate
character flaw in Cogewea.
Although Beidler‟s analysis of the two novels is enlightening, his disdain for romance
and romance readers are evident in his conclusion. Despite his clear antipathy for
“simpleminded novels” like The Brand and, arguably, Cogewea, Beidler reconciles
himself with the idea that “the purpose of Mourning Dove‟s literary criticism is to
encourage readers of all cultures to read more closely both their own fiction and that of
169

other cultures, and to appreciate more fully the relevance of narrative to their own lives”
(62). His final remarks regarding Mourning Dove‟s literary criticism completely erase her
agency when he references her as “the Indian writer and white editor”
22
—somehow
combining what he seems to think are redeemable subject positions for her to write a
book that would presumably be read by mostly unreflective and “simpleminded” readers,
like Cogewea and other Native/women. Ironically, his closing words reinforce the
tendency to erase the Native woman from the literary milieu in the Indian love story with
a difference: this time the culprit is not the author, but is the Native Studies critic.
Furthermore, this erasure is the exact trope that Mourning Dove worked to revise in her
novel: the presence of the Native American woman. Thus there are two fundamental fault
lines in his analysis that I will address: the first is a deeper analysis of Cogewea‟s “angry”
reaction/response to The Brand and the second is to offer an alternative explanation of
Mourning Dove‟s allusion to Broderick‟s novel and its use as a foil to her Okanogan
stories in the novel.
Mourning Dove self-consciously recycles the typical Native/American romantic plot
to subvert the narrative expectations and reconcile its usually tragic ending for the
Native/American woman. The central theme of the novel is a Salish cautionary tale that
warns young women about the jealousy and possessiveness of an inappropriate lover—or
more specifically, the Native story that forms the central plot resolution and revises the
Indian romance formula to include a script in which Native women are saved in and
through the narrative form for the first time. The Native narrative thread in the text is a
tale about a woman from her Stemteema‟s village dubbed Green Blanket Feet. Green
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Blanket Feet fell in love with a white trader that came to the village. Everyone warned
her not to marry with the Shoyapee (white man); however, Green Blanket Feet ignored
the warnings. For a time it seemed as if the Shoyapee had genuine feelings of affection
for Green Blanket Feet; he father two children with her. Then, he decided to return to his
white community and wanted to take the children with him. Green Blanket Feet at first
resisted and tried to convince him to stay or at least leave the children with her. He
refused; thus, she reluctantly travelled with him for her children‟s sake. As she travelled
farther away from her village, his treatment of her became increasingly abusive,
essentially making her nothing more than her children‟s nursemaid. He admitted that he
has a wife at “home” who could not have children, thus Green Blanket Feet was used as a
surrogate. He intended to kill her and take his children home. Realizing too late her fate,
she escapes from his camp late at night with one of her children. He hunts her down but
is thwarted by the darkness. Wearily and without any supplies to refresh her, she makes
her way back towards her village. Her child dies along the way from malnutrition and she
too almost perishes. In her desperation, she is reduced to cutting up her green blanket to
make wrappings for her feet. This is how she walks into her village and how she is later
named “Green Blanket Feet.”
Cogewea‟s grandmother tells her this story after she realizes that Densmore‟s
intentions for her granddaughter are less than honorable. However, Cogewea refuses to
listen to her grandmother‟s warnings about Densmore and instead foolishly believes that
Densmore can look past her mixed-racial identity and simply love her. This proves to be
Cogewea‟s downfall. Densmore is only in love with her because he thinks she owns a
171

share of the H-B Ranch. His plans are to trick her into marrying him according to her
Indian customs (which were not legally sanctioned) in order to have access to her
perceived riches. By the time she figures out his scheme, she is already in danger. He
kidnaps her and leaves her out on the range during a thunderstorm. However, his plans
are foiled by the wise Stemteema‟s visions of Cogewea‟s imminent danger and by Jim‟s
fierce loyalty to her. With the Stemteema‟s guidance, Jim locates Cogewea and rescues
her.
Cogewea rejects both stories, however, in what Beidler claims is her desire to “escape
her Indianness through a … white marriage.” While Beidler‟s reading is compelling, I
disagree with his conclusions about Mourning Dove‟s intention to make a literary
example out of Cogewea for misreading romance. On the contrary, I believe that
Mourning Dove intentionally creates Cogewea‟s anger, frustration, and contempt for the
canonical romance plot not as a singular instance to label Broderick‟s novel as “racist”
but to publicly decry the entire literary tradition. In reading Cogewea alongside Malaeska
and Ramona, two popular and canonical American/Indian romances, Mourning Dove has
Cogewea purposefully conflate the plot and racist characterizations in The Brand as a
token example of the genre. In fact, Cogewea‟s angry and, apparently, inaccurate,
representation of The Brand’s hero‟s disavowal of his Indian mother is actually the
outcome in Malaeska. Remember the scene in which William Danforth realizes his
connection to Malaeska: he jumps off a cliff to, as Beidler says, “escape [his]
Indianness.” Remember also in Jackson‟s novel that Ramona is forced to leave not only
her indigenous homeland but the American nation in order to “escape the bonds of race”
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that she fears will imprison her Luiseno daughter. Thus, Cogewea is hyper-aware of the
fate of her heroine--her racial and gender location in the western romance--and writes a
narrative infused with Native American traditional storytelling to help her navigate her
way through a narrative that historically navigated through her.
In contrast to the numerous popular Harlequin productions of Indian romances, there
are a few Indian love stories written by and about Native Americans. Classified as a
frontier romance with the original intention of being published as an ethnographic
account of turn of the century Indian life on the reservation, Cogewea is a surprising and
compact tale of life on a Montana cattle ranch for a rag-tag group of cowboys and
Blackfeet Indians. First and foremost the text and its overall narrative trajectory clearly
originated from a critique of mainstream American literary forms of representing Native
American people and culture. Victoria Lamont explains that the western romance novel
was an ideal literary form for Cogewea to “co-opt” and resist the “metanarrative of the
disappearing primitive” created by 19
th
Century literature and furthered by the 20
th

Century development of “salvage ethnography” (“Native American Oral Practice and the
Popular Novel; Or, why Mourning Dove Wrote a Western,” 373).
23
The novel further
uses an embedded Native American story as an overarching cautionary tale to bring about
the plot resolution and conclusion of the novel. Finally, and most significantly, the female
protagonist in the story is a thinly veiled representation of the strong-willed, determined,
and outspoken author. Mourning Dove, wearied and frustrated by misrepresentations of
Native Americans as uniformly savage and unredeemable in popular literature, sets out to
revise this trope by re-writing a western romance with a more palatable and culturally-
173

satisfying ending for a Native American female/reader/writer. Lamont thus notes:
“Western plots, despite their origins in the romantic tradition, were more representative
of the contemporary social world in which most Native American people lived—in
conflict and dialogue with Euramerican interests and culture” (374).
Despite her editor‟s influence on the text, the narrative‟s plot challenges many of the
conventional Native/American romance or adventure stories from the nineteenth century.
Cogewea embraces inter-racial romances and traditional Native American definitions of
family based on kinship relations and cultural practices, thereby making the novel critical
reading to further understand the way in which a Native American female writer co-
opted, revised, and adapted the social melodrama to narrate the transition of the Native
American from a “free” indigenous lifestyle to a “bureaucratic reservation” system in the
early twentieth century. “In a period marked by national commodification of the
„Vanishing American,‟” Susan Bernardin explains, “Mourning Dove explicitly disrupted
this cultural consensus by inscribing mixedbloods within the contemporary western
landscape,” which was a complete departure from the work of Jackson and Stephens
(Authority and Authorship in Cogewea, 489).
24

In his Bhaktinian analysis of the novel, Louis Owens argues that the competing
voices of Mourning Dove and McWhorter create a “transcultural dialogue” in which “the
reader easily hears the conflict between internally and authoritatively persuasive
discourse” (Other Destinies 45). The “internal” dialogue of the exchange that Owens
refers to is Mourning Dove‟s attempt to narrate the experience and subjectivity of the
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mixedblood woman—by deploying the Native American cultural and social
epistemologies denied to her—in a recognizably mainstream genre: the western romance.
However, her voice must compete with the “authoritatively persuasive discourse” that
McWhorter‟s editorials create in the text. “McWhorter‟s liberal discourse,” Owens
explains, “demonstrates a remarkable knowledge of literature, the Bible, world
geography, and diverse Native American cultures while appealing to the reader‟s
sympathy for a displaced people” (44). Thus, the heteroglossic text she produces registers
across modernity as a voice at once intervening into an authoritative discourse that would
deny or repress a Native/American female voice or utterance in an historical moment that
simultaneously denied, and systematically repressed, her very existence and agency.
Dissatisfied with contemporary representations and treatments of Native/American
life, Mourning Dove chose to reconcile the issue by actively engaging the popular form
and the angst surrounding the modern moment, which, Kent points out, coincide with
Mourning Dove‟s life span. “These external forces of modernity directly and indirectly
affected the life of Mourning Dove… she was born in 1888 … just as the Dawes Act was
entered on the books, and she died in 1936 just as the new era of tribal sovereignty was
ushered in under Roosevelt‟s New Deal for the Indians” (43). Mourning Dove lived
through the politics of removal and exclusion, marked by federal policies to “civilize the
savage” through forced education and the distribution of tribal lands by the General
Allotment Act (1887).
25
The fracturing of the Native/American family and tribal lands is
a central theme in the novel; thus, Mourning Dove made the political—personal—and
utilized the struggles she and her family faced under these “external forces” as fodder for
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her novel—not to affect national or even regional transformation, but to make public her
own personal desires and intervention in the literary and historical record. Mourning
Dove narrates the conflict and resolution of a mixedblood Indian woman as a potential
site of cultural renewal for the community instead of as a tragic flaw; however, this
position become clear only after Cogewea succumbs to and then rejects Densmore‟s
seduction, thus, “escaping the bonds of race” and the tragic ending for her half-blood.
Savage Obsession and Dreamquest: The Cultural Work of
Contemporary Mass-Marketed American/Indian Romances

Mourning Dove‟s work to revise the tragic ending for the half-blood and rewrite the
primal scene for Native/American half-bloods in the western romance proved to be a
profitable and appealing narrative for later twentieth century writers. The careful mixture
of ethnographic detail and historical setting became the hallmark for mass-produced
Native/American novels with the reworking of the family romance, miscegenous
plotlines, and the emergence of the ideal feminine man steaming up the pages with
tender, mind-blowing sexual encounters that awaken the heroine to a new sense of inner
strength, resilience, and independence. After Mourning Dove‟s publication of Cogewea
before World War II there were only a handful of Native American texts published,
including the work of D‟Arcy McNickle in the 1930s and Ella Deloria in the 1940s and
1950s. The publishing industry, however, did not begin to publish popular romances in
great numbers until Harlequin switched entirely to the production of romances in 1964.
26

By the 1980s, the American/Indian romance was a viable subgenre of the romance
publishing industry. In his rudimentary study of the popular Native/American romance,
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Peter Beidler found over “twenty-five different titles” published in 1990.
27
Edwards is a
fascinating case-study for the American/Indian romance not only because of her
expansive publishing history, but because she claims Native/American ancestry. In her
early works, her biographical information reveals that her grandmother was a full-
blooded Cheyenne. A simple application of the basic dividing of fractions to determine
degree of Indian blood even in Edwards‟ grandmother and mother married outside of
their Native community would make Edwards a minimum of one-quarter Native
American, which is more than the federal government‟s minimum degree of Indian blood
required for recognition. Why is this important given that Edwards seems to take the
writing of fiction rather seriously, especially in the deployment of poetic license in
writing whatever she chooses without authenticating truth or literary origin? I admit,
when I first read Edwards I was intrigued by the fact that a romance novel, even a mass-
produced one, could be so racist as to peddle a line of stories that eroticized Indian
“savagery.” After I finished reading my first three Edwards‟ books, Savage Obsession,
Savage Illusion, and Savage Beloved, I was more intrigued by the fact that Edwards
claimed to be Native and expressed her desire to write a romance about every Native
American tribe in the US.
28

Although Edwards‟ novels are not reviewed by many scholarly periodicals, they have
been the subject of critique in at least two scholarly studies: one by Peter Biedler that
appeared in the American Indian Culture and Research Journal and another written by
Christopher Castiglia in his book-length study of Captivity, Culture-Crossing and White
Womanhood. Neither critic commented on the fact that Edwards identified herself in her
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early biographical sketches as a Cheyenne descendent. This fact is of immense interest
and import to me and my research because her persistent production of pulp romances
with such inflammatory titles, Savage “This” and Savage “That” clearly indicates a
disconnect with the type of Indian romances Jackson, Stephens, and even Mourning Dove
wrote. The critical study of women‟s mass-produced popular fiction in this mainstream
context then becomes overlaid with questions of identity, authenticity, and authority, such
as how does Edwards‟ Native American identification inform her writing? Clearly, it
inspires her desire to write an Indian romance about “every tribe in the US,” but beyond
mass production, how does her Native ancestry shape her ideas about romance and the
way in which Indians and non-Indian representations function in the genre? More
recently, the prolific writer of the Savage Series of American/Indian romances, Cassie
Edwards, found herself in the New York Times in 2008 facing allegations from romance
readers of plagiarism. Edwards, whose series of Native/American romances includes over
98 published works over the pat twenty-five years, responded to the allegations with a
simple statement denying her culpability with a statement that said she simply did not
know she needed to cite her historical sources.
29
In the end, Edwards was not charged
with plagiarism and she continues to publish for Signet with her latest release in the
Savage Series, Savage Dawn (2009).
At first, I saw her work as overly ambitious, but now I believe her confessed desire to
achieve this phenomenal task reveals a deeper psychological desire for Edwards to
replay, reinvent, and rewrite the primal scene as a form of what Kaplan in her analysis of
romance fiction calls the “heredity of transgression in the text” (Fiction, Fantasy, and
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Femininity 143). If we speculate on the possibility of her actual identity as Cheyenne or
even the fact that if this statement is a fabrication that she somehow fantasizes it to be
true, then the power of the US primal scene of miscegenation could play a personally
powerful position in her psychic development. One in which she can occupy multiple
subjectivities in an endless recreation of the setting of desire, the fantasy of origins that
she herself may desire to understand, recreate, or preserve on social and personal level.
The problem with this possibility is that no Native Studies scholar would ever support or
endorse my speculation due to the inherently political and volatile regulations of Indian
identity via blood quantum and the cultural authority assigned to individuals with
verifiable, read enrolled, ties to Native communities.
While I would like to report that Edwards‟ representations of Indians and Indian
culture in her Savage Series is subversive and that her romances resist stereotype; I have
found, out of the dozens that I have read, that her stories play on the reader‟s expectations
of the word “savage” with the connotations of its early use in American texts to mean the
opposite of the civilized, Euro-American Puritan world, such as vicious, violent, evil,
wicked, etc. She deploys the word in her title to titillate—that is to raise one‟s eyebrows
at the suggestion of a “savage obsession” with one‟s lover to mean an all consuming
passion and desire—as well as to sometimes signal negative behavior or traits in some of
her characters. However, it is also used to describe in heightened dramatic way a
traumatic experience in the novel, such as captivity. For instance, in Savage Illusion, the
title‟s meaning becomes clear after the heroine, Jolena, realizes she is taken captive by
Spotted Eagle, her love interest‟s jealous best friend, Two Ridges. After she awakens in
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strange surroundings with her body mysteriously “aching,” she remembers the scene of
captivity: “the blinding rain,” “the lurid flashes of lightening,” “her screams,” and the
ambush. Then she “remembers strong arms around her waist, dragging her from the
wagon … but she now realized it had to have been a savage illusion” (226). While the
Indian captivity scene in the romance is a trope that is almost always evoked either in a
physical scene of captivity or in its metaphorical use in the language of love as in the
passage from Savage Obsession, “No matter how hard she tried, Lorinda was helpless to
free herself” or Yellow Thunder‟s words—“Because I love you, I must possess you”
(Italics added, Savage Obsession, 114). In these examples which mirror the relationship
between many heroines and heroes in Edwards‟ novels, love, lust, and/or sexual desire
are the threats of captivity and the taboo against miscegenation. Thus, captivity‟s
narrative desire in the romance is paradoxical because of its association with the loss of
one‟s physical control as well as its potential to liberate oneself from a solitary and
virginal existence: “I‟ve never felt so free,” Jolena says, “or so possessed” (Savage
Illusion 118).
The irony for Jolena is that her Savage Illusion revealed at the novels‟ end is that she
is the long-lost daughter of the tribal healer. His wife died in childbirth during her
exclusionary period away from the tribe. By the time the midwives found her body, the
child was missing. Settler‟s crossing through the deserted wilderness heard the newborn‟s
cries, followed it to its source, saw the dead mother, and rescued the orphaned child.
Although Jolena was raised culturally white, she has little issue regressing to her pre-
white state, in which her affection and attraction to her lover, Spotted Eagle, makes all
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the more sense given their blood affinity for one another. Thus, the miscegenation taboo
is avoided as is the taboo of incest when her half brother, Two Ridges, dies in storm after
having attempted to rape her. Jolena decides to keep this dark secret from her father upon
her meeting him; the secret is further repressed when she must perform the duties of
kinship and dress Two Ridges body for his burial according to Blackfoot custom: “She
could hardly stand to be near him when he was alive, much less now when he was dead”
(278). Jolena quickly rationalizes and excuses Two Ridges “attraction” to her as a
mistake caused by his close kinship connection to her: “His attraction to her had surely
been because he had misinterpreted their natural close feelings as lust” (279). Here the
dangerous consequence of cultural miscegenation is avoided by the enforcement of the
incest prohibition of “primitive” people. The fact that Jolena was raised white with no
cultural knowledge about her tribal ancestry reverses the prohibition of miscegenation as
in Ramona in which the heroine‟s secret “taint” of indigenous blood is revealed in time to
stop any further transgressions.
While Edwards‟ Savage romances are problematic and far from what I would
consider proof that romances provide a “liberatory function” for female readers that
utopian ideal for female subjects, Edwards‟ decision to write and publish the narratives
are evidence of a Native woman‟s desire to rewrite Indian love stories from multiple
tribal perspectives, which in and of itself politicizes her prolific publishing career. While
the effect of her novels on Indian female readers is an area of scholarly critique I will
explore for some time, my interviews about Edwards and her work reveal that the titles
alone do not entice Indian women to read the books nor do the provocative pictures of the
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hunky Indian men on the cover. Instead, a picture of a nicely beaded bag or piece of
Indian jewelry often catches the eye of the reader. While many of these readers admit that
her “savage” titles are “racist” they contend that they simply read through the stereotype
to see if the story has anything interesting to say. Many readers admit to enjoying the
steamy love scenes—often laughing at the many flowery phrases an author can invent to
describe human anatomy and sexual intercourse—although they know that real Indian
men “are not like” the Indian heroes in Edwards‟ novels.
30
These comments reveal a
complex engagement with the genre, and while the lasting effect on the Indian female
readers‟ sense of self is still an area under scholarly investigation, the textual and
psychological interaction with the novels suggests an active psychic engagement of the
form based on the negotiation of the Indian reader‟s cultural knowledge of the genre‟s
cultural script and her indigenous perspective of the world.

My cultural “homework” on Indian romances began in earnest in 2006 when I ran
across Janet Wellington‟s Dreamquest. The novel was featured on Sam Brown‟s Let’s
Speak Kumeyaay webpage, Brown is a respected local leader in the Southern California
Indian community. His family is active in cultural and language preservation and his
website is full of cultural and linguistic information about Kumeyaay people.
31
Imagine
my surprise and delight when reading one of his posts that recommended that people read
a Native American romance called Dreamquest, which features an inter-racial love story
with a Kumeyaay hero. His advertisement for the novel is this: “Click here for a link to a
book that has a Kumeyaay as a central character. It is a romance novel and I read it but
182

don‟t tell anyone I did. It does have a lot of cultural things in it.” Brown‟s confession and
endorsement of the novel is both expected and surprising. Of course, I read the novel and
bought seven copies to pass out to my family and friends since I too am a Kumeyaay
descendant.
Dreamquest is Janet Wellington‟s fourth novel. She grew up in the Midwest but
currently resides in Southern California where she teaches online writing courses. Her
website markets her skills as a “writer, speaker, instructor, and independent editor.”
Unlike Edwards, Wellington assiduously lists her historical references, a Kumeyaay
dictionary, and websites for further studies of Native American history, literature, and
ethnobotany. She consulted local scholars‟ work on linguistics as well as a contemporary
cultural center to verify her use of the language and cultural references in her book. Thus,
Brown‟s endorsement of her novel is not without merit and provides additional cultural
approval from a Kumeyaay “insider.”
The novel is set in present-day San Diego County. The heroine is an ethno-botanist
that teaches at a local college, Suzanne Lucas. Lucas is self-reliant, educated, and
resourceful, but she lacks love in her life. She is plagued by a persistent dream about a
trip she made to the Anza-Borrego State Desert as a young girl; during this trip she
encounters an elderly Indian man and young boy. She dreams about this scene repeatedly,
but more recently the young boy turns into a handsome warrior—which startles her
awake. The Indian encounter she experiences in the novel occurs in two separate
scenarios. The first occurs during a trip she makes to Anza Borrego; while hiking in the
183

desert, she is caught in an earthquake and is injured by falling rocks. An old man who
looks Indian appears to help her from the rubble. She follows him up a winding mountain
trail that leads to a cave, but when she enters the cave he disappears. Her injuries cause
her to lose consciousness and lapse into her familiar dreams. When she awakens, she
finds that she is not alone in the cave. The Indian warrior from her dreams is there with
her.
The second Indian encounter occurs in her classroom. One of her students is a hard
working and eager boy from the Barona Indian Reservation, another Kumeyaay tribal
community in San Diego County (253). Suzanne and Hector strike up a friendship
immediately; she tutors him and becomes his mentor. His success and newly formed
positive attitude at school spills over into his home-life and on his last day of class, he
introduces his mother to Suzanne. His mother greets Hector in Kumeyaay and brings a
gift for Suzanne. Hector‟s mother also recognizes restlessness in Suzanne and invites her
back to the reservation to visit with a traditional healer.
The narrative plot centers on the relationship between Suzanne and Hattepaa
Kwa‟stik or Little Coyote. During her trip to the Anza-Borrego Desert and a major
earthquake occurs in which Suzanne crosses a spatiotemporal portal and is transported
back in time. She meets Little Coyote in some sort of a time warp in which the modern
day and the pre-Reservation era of California Indians open up to one another, but only
she can travel back and forth through time. The plot‟s conflict arises when Suzanne
realizes that she must choose which “time” to live. At the end of the novel, a Native
184

healer from Barona explains to Suzanne that she is “special because most people don‟t
understand about the two worlds. . . . [She is] special like the shamans. Because [she]
wanted to be in this other place so much, in [her] dreams [she was] actually able to go
there” (269). Her lessons and interaction with her Native student facilitate her return to
her love, Little Coyote.
Even now that we have grown old, Coyote calls me by my English name, though
my people call me „Aashaa nemeshap. We have lived a difficult but happy life,
and each day my waking thought is to give thanks to have been given the choice
to enter my dream world to stay.
Coyote is the last kuseyaay to our small band of Kumeyaay. We still move from
place to place to evade the whites‟ tightfisted control and many rules. He is a wise
and spiritual man, and he learned well from his grandfather about the ways of the
shaman. And I have become a healer, my education complete after much study
with a woman who shared with me her endless knowledge of plants and their
special properties.
I am treated as though I am Kumeyaay by birth. As Grandfather explained,
“Sometimes it is not our blood that makes us Kumeyaay, but how we live and
what is in our hearts.”
We have three strong sons, my love and I. Every year we take them to the desert
to see the very spot where their parents fell in love. There we sit near the cave,
beside the pond and tell the story of how the path‟s of their father‟s vision quest
and my own dreamquest crossed and brought us together to live forever. (290-
291)
The fantasy of two worlds coexisting but in separate planes of existence that
Wellington creates is the fantasy of the white woman healer—or the eco-heroine—who
can live out her idyllic and material lives. The fantasy is also one of tribal kinship and
cultural practices that persist at the same moment as modernity but the value and efficacy
is “hidden” from modern view in an alternate reality that only the white heroine can see.
Perhaps the most insidious component of the narrative is the masquerade of the fantasy in
185

the cultural and historical details; the veil of authenticity creates the “savage illusion” of a
sympathetic, progressive, and pro-Indian romance. However, the Indian hero‟s “dream
quest” is realized through the white woman‟s “dreams” or fantasies. Without her the
Natives in the story have no agency, no reality, no vision, and no destiny; they are
literally unimaginable.
The symbolic implication of the revelation is chilling: the white female author is
literally the bearer of Native/American identity. Here the fantasy/prohibition of
miscegenation is entirely controlled by the imagination of the white woman.
Furthermore, the Indian woman also acts as a mere fixture in the setting for the white
female to work through; the Indian healer and mother is another “portal” for Suzanne to
access and take knowledge from; she has no other autonomous role in the story. The
“dream quest,” parallel lives, and alternate realities in two worlds that Suzanne achieves
in the novel are symbolic appropriations of an identity that her native student, Hector, and
his family ironically share in the novel. The social awkwardness, learning disabilities,
and lack of confidence that Hector demonstrate are symptomatic of a contemporary
Native American bi-cultural identity in which young Native/Americans must negotiate a
sense of community/family tradition and duty while simultaneously demonstrating an
ability to successfully navigate dominant Anglo-American cultural institutions of power.
Thus, Wellington‟s novel represents a complex articulation and fulfillment of the
American/Indian romance in which the white female fantasy settles comfortably in
multiple subject positions simultaneously: the educated feminist, the sexually fulfilled
186

lover, the questing and vulnerable heroine, the mentor, mother, nurturer, and, above all,
the creator of her own fiction replete with a docile and ideal feminine Indian man.
Conclusion
Anti-miscegenation laws were recorded as early as the 17
th
Century in colonial New
England and remained in effect in some parts of the US until the mid-twentieth century.
32

Despite the legal reprimand prohibiting inter-racial unions, the historical record abounds
with evidence of the contrary. Not surprisingly the punishment for violation of the statue
often criminalized the darker of the two persons involved in the relationship. With the
most severe punishments meted out to African Americans through legalized forms of
retribution, including brutal public executions. In her legal and cultural study of the
sexual power and instances of rape in colonial America, Sharon Block explains, “No rape
conviction against a white man … for raping an enslaved woman has been found between
at least 1700 and the Civil War” (65). The imbalance of sexual power is further
exacerbated in a Native/American context in which sexual assaults against Native women
was viewed as “a form of sexual imperialism” (82). Block writes:
[O]ne [scholar] argues that the rape of indigenous women could be justified as the
symbolic castration of Indian men. … The few nonfrontier court cases involving
women identified as Native American stand out from other rape cases. These
cases were exceptionally rate (less than half-dozen out of more than seven
hundred sexual assault prosecutions) despite the constant presence of Native
Americans in British colonies. Of this small number, two of the recorded sexual
attacks on Indian women in early American society suggest that white men‟s
prosecutable attacks on Indians were far different from most sexual assaults on
white women. In these incidents, rape appears to have been a purposeful attempt
to mark the distance between white and Indian through forced sex and sexual
torture. (82:3)
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Nevertheless, how do we move from the enforcement of miscegenation laws and the
practice of sexual imperialism upon Native Americans to fantasizing, romanticizing, and
reconciling the consequences of these violations in the American Indian love story? The
concepts seem outright paradoxical and are further complicated when we consider the
effect of such Indian stories on Native American readers and writers. If we concede that
Native women are a subset of the targeted audience for which romance in general is
written, then we must consider what the appeal is for these subjects working through
issues of desire and fantasy by reading romances filled with racist and problematic
plotlines? How does the narrative‟s construction of a miscegenous plot shift between the
races and genders of its authors? I suggest that the miscegenous Indian romances reveal a
deep and dark fascination that entwines national colonial and local interpersonal histories
in a complex matrix that for Native Americans crystallize around issues of blood
quantum and cultural identification. Similarly, Anglo-American writers focused on how
to maintain the national, American body politic, their roles as the national cultural
bearers, and the pillars of domestic virtue. However, all the women shared sentiments and
recognition of the gender inequality they all share under Anglo-American patriarchy.
How or why would the revelation of the inter-racial affair destroy the white man—if
as I state above the sexual imperialism of Indian women was practiced as a symbolic
form of castration of the Indian male. Then the real “love story” would, it seems, fall
back into that very Western philosophical tautology: a narrative to satisfy men and men‟s
fantasies and desires. This line of thinking then means that the miscegenation has to be
about something else, something more than just symbolically castrating the Indian
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male—for it to appeal to the Indian women; especially since the Indian men in the stories
are hypermasculine, uber-sensitive, caring, and tender lovers, as in Wellington and
Edwards' popular narratives. But again, in this case, the white woman is typically the love
object not the Indian woman. “[In] romance the fantasy of death and resurrection” she
writes, “enables people to avenge themselves on the world while appearing fatalistic
about their lot” (Modleski 48). Thus, the element in the Indian love story that wreaks
vengeance is the miscegenous plot featuring the Native woman that is continuously
resurrected, recycled, and revived; the uncanny truth that brings the “white” man to his
knees.
If the sexual assault/imperialism of Indian women was a symbolic castration of Indian
men, the men would then be neutered; made female. What happens to the Native phallus?
The Native phallus becomes the "dildo"--the phallic substitute between white
men/women—the external stimuli to excite a dysfunctional stale and repressed Victorian
sexuality. Again, in this context though, Indian women are the mere collateral damage in
the fray in the Anglo version of the romance; in the Native versions of the romance, the
Indian women survive and, ultimately, choose the Native man as their lover. The Native
phallus--symbol of power and virility--thus, is preserved/protected by the Native female‟s
maintenance of cultural ties and tribal identification. In this way, the vengeance is
enacted through a refusal of conquest—by fighting back—refusing the “destiny”
prescribed by colonial narratives—just as we teach women today to fight back against a
sexual assault and refuse to be taken to a second location—Mourning Dove fought back,
fought for the Native phallus—that grants both Indian men and women cultural
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sovereignty—for it is the ultimate marker of American mythology, the New World‟s
Holy Grail, and the colonial artifact indigenous people‟s learned to quest for, preserve,
and hide.
But are the Indian love stories only about the Native phallus? Is that really what
Cogewea was about? No it is also about the struggle over words—the battle to tell her
story—not McWhorter‟s, not Theresa Broderick‟s, not the traditional folktales of the
Salish. It is about the physical, literary creation of the primal miscegenous literary
scene—it is about birthing the voice of the Indian woman—her miscegenous creation, her
love child that she nurtures, does not abandon or orphan. Thus, the appeal for Native
women readers of the Indian love story might just be a recognition of another indigenous
woman‟s struggle to rise from the ashes, recreate and resurrect herself, her community,
and her family from the untimely destruction/death that the colonizer penned her in. This
at least is the fantasy the Native woman hopes to fulfill in reading the stories, but as Bird
and Cook-Lynn complain at the start of the chapter, this desire is not satisfied. This
would also be the role of the Indian woman in the miscegenous plot, either as the heroine
in a revisionist romance or as the author resurrecting the heroine in her story. Instead
most of the popular novels rub salt in old wounds by re-inscribing white patriarchal
fantasies that ultimately destroy the Native American community. However, we cannot
demand change with a defeatist attitude. We must demand better and settle for nothing
less than our heart‟s desire dressed in feathers or not.
Because the romance genre is a discourse written by, for, and about women, it is an
overlooked and discounted critical literary site to examine the construction of literary
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nationalisms in American Indian literary studies. While the romance of the Indian love
story had a greater appeal to the dominant culture, it is a critical mistake to dismiss the
seductive form as a source of great influence on the production and development of
Native American literature. I bring to the literary discussion critical theories and insights
regarding issues of gender, identity, sexuality within a (de)colonized matrix and their
implications on Native women‟s desire and fantasy depicted in romance literature. Thus,
my analysis charts an unmapped terrain—to locate hotspots of contention, dissent,
fantasy, and desire to begin a conversation, not a rant, about the complexities in
articulating and representing Native American men and women in the splendor that
gender, fantasy, sexuality, and identity display in the national, cultural imaginary. To this
end, the chapter revealed the nodes of masculine and feminine representations of Indian
men and women within the miscegenous plots of the American/Indian romance genre. In
order to understand the complex construction of Native masculinity and femininity we
must continue to look at its articulation from both the mainstream, US culture‟s
interpretation as well as to look within the Native American community to gain a more
historically accurate image of the competing forces and investments at play in its
production.
To re/form the popular American Indian romance, it is essential to examine the
historical and the current representations of the genre that express a desire to promote
cultural knowledge about a particular American Indian tribal group. As much as Native
American Studies scholars might believe that we are immune to elitism because we work
within or are from a marginalized racial and discursive community, the overwhelming
191

lacunae of serious inquiry into the field of women‟s literature and romance from Native
American Studies points to not only a lack of understanding about the way in which
popular fiction functions in the daily lives of women; the silence also suggests that there
is a serious critical gap in understanding the type of literature Native American audiences
have daily access to in urban centers and on rural Indian reservations. Thus, a careful and
concerned reading of the genre in its canonical and popular forms reveals that the place
where American Indian men and women “couple together” is not as-distant as we might
believe; it is indeed, right beneath our tawny up-turned noses.

192

Chapter 4 Endnotes

1
I am aware that the development of the women‟s sentimental novel and adventure story in the US includes
many more authors and references to frontier life and encounters with Native Americans; however, my
primary focus in this chapter and in the dissertation in general is on issues of popular narratives. Thus, I am
eschewing a linear trajectory that cites the literary and publication history that led up to Stephens‟
production of Malaeska as a dime novel. References include: Jane Tompkins, The Lay of the Land ,The
Land Before Her, Christopher Castiglia‟s Bound and Determined (1998), Lucy Maddox‟s Removals, and
Michelle Burnham‟s Captivity and Sentiment among others. During the nineteenth century American
Indians were removed from indigenous lands and placed on reservations west of the Mississippi River. The
most infamous instance of forced removal for a tribal group is that of the Cherokee, “Trail of Tears” in
1835. “Although the forced removal of the southern tribes took place during the 1830s, the idea of the
Indian removal had roots as far back as the 1780s,” according to Grant Foreman (Coward 1999: 66).
However, as recently as 1905, the Cupeno from northern San Diego County were forced to leave tribal
lands occupied at the foot of Rabbit Hole Mountain at present-day Warner Springs, California located in
Northern San Diego County.

2
Peter Beidler, The Contemporary Indian Romance: A Review Essay, American Indian Culture and
Research Journal, 1991 (Vol. 15), pgs. 97-125.

3
“American Indian Intellectualism and the New Indian Story,” American Indian Quarterly, Vol. 20, No. 1,
Special Issue: Writing about (Writing about) American Indians, (Winter, 1996), pp. 57-76.

4
Harmon, Alexandra. “When is an Indian Not an Indian? The “Friends of the Indian” and the Problems of
Indian Identity,” Journal of Ethnic Studies, Vol. 18 No. 2 (Summer 1990).

5
Quoted in Reading the West: An Anthology of Dime Westerns. Edited by, Bill Brown (Boston and New
York: Bedford/St. Martin‟s Press, 1997) pg. 59. All references to Malaeska are from the reprinted and
expanded edition published by Beadle and Co. in 1860 from this anthology (pgs. 60-164).

6
“Introduction: Towards a History of American Manhood,” pg. 2-3.

7
Slotkin (1974) and Pratt (1992)
8
"Helen Hunt Jackson's novel indicted Americans for dispossessing California Natives and generated
considerable sympathy for the Indians' losses. At the same time, however, it provided a convenient myth
supporting the American settlement of California. ... This myth of the disappearing Indians put them out of
the consciousness of non-Indian Californians for over a century. ... Ironically, gaming brought many non-
Indian Californians onto reservations for the first time, raising awareness of tribes' continuing existence. ...
More than one hundred years after Ramona was published, the inheritors of the American settlers have
helped restore California Indians to a place within the state's political and social landscape, at least for the
near term" (Ramona Redeemed 59-60).

9
Tipai means "person" in Kumeyaay, the indigenous inhabitants of Northern San Diego and Baja
California. Margaret Langdon explains that Tipai speakers are from the Yuman-Cochimi language family
("Diegueno, How Many Languages?"1990).

193

10
Taylor, Charles. Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition. (New Jersey: Princeton University
Press, 1994).

11
Owens . Mixedblood Messages: Literature, Film, Family, Place. (Norman: University of Oklahoma
Press, 1998.)

12
Beidler, Peter. “Literary Criticism in Cogewea: Mourning Dove‟s Protagonist Reads The Brand.”
American Indian Culture and Research Journal 19:2 (1995).

13
Wynema is the first novel published by a Native American woman writer. S. Alice Callahan was one-
eighth Muscogee Creek. Her father was a controversial political leader. Callahan was educated at an Indian
Boarding School and eventually became a teacher for her own tribe in Okmulgee. Ruoff speculates that the
Wynema is written in part about Callahan‟s own life experiences. In a larger project, I will include a
comparison a sustained analysis of Wynema with Cogewea as the two early literary examples of Native
female representation in the sentimental romance. The novel takes place at the end of the 19
th
Century that
uses the sentimental novel as does Jackson and Stephens to raise awareness about the social injustices
facing Native Americans. I did not include the novel in my original formulation of the chapter because I
planned to only deal with the way in which popular 20
th
century texts reinscribe the trope of the Indian love
story. However, in a longer work, I will pair readings of Wynema, Cogewea, Ramona, and Malaeska.

14
Karrell notes that Quintasket changed the spelling of “morning” to “mourning” after ----[insert date] and
[insert article citation].

15
Susan K. Bernardin follows up the research of Jay Miller and other studies that probe cultural
“authenticity” that Mourning Dove claims. In “Mixed Messages: Authority and Authorship in Mourning
Dove‟s Cogewea: The Half-Blood: A Depiction of the Great Montana Cattle Range,” Bernardin points out
the “contentious” claims of Mourning Dove‟s half-blood status. She explains, “Mourning Dove was known
by several different names during her life: Christal McLeod, Catherine Galler, Chrstine Quintasket. She
changed her pen name from Morning Dove to Mourning Dove in 1921 after visiting a Spokane museum
and discovering that she had misspelled it” (American Literature, Volume 67 Number 3 (Sep 1995): 505. I
tried to find the translation for her Okanogan name, Humishuma and was unsuccessful. The alteration of
the her pen name form Morning to Mourning is an ironic play of words to express her sentiments regarding
the state of her contemporary Native/America; however, I can‟t help but also speculate that the translation
itself is also a literary allusion and wry commentary on the name of another mixed-blood Indian literary
heroine: Ramona, Majella, the wood-dove? Female characters in women romance have often been
compared to “birds” and characterized as fragile, sweet-voiced, and caged. I am thinking here of literary
criticism of Austen‟s Jane Eyre. It seems more than coincidental to me that Mourning Dove would also
take poetic license to extend and twist this metaphorical relationship of the Indian woman/bird
characterization in her revision of the genre. I have not come across any critiques or other remarks about
this fact; it is merely my own oblique observation. For more discussion about Mourning Dove‟s mixed-race
genealogy, see work by Dexter Fisher, Jay Miller, and Alanna Kathleen Brown.

16
“Literature and the Politics of Native American Studies,” PMLA, Vol. No. :page 1626.

17
Kaplan, Cora. “Fiction, Fantasy, and Femininity,” Sea Changes: Culture and Feminism. (London: Verso,
1986): pages 117-146.
18
Blood Narrative: Indigenous Identity in American Indian and Maori Literary and Activist Texts.
(Durham and London: Duke UP, 2002), 178.

194

19
“Mourning Dove‟s Cogewea: Writing her Way into Modernity,” MELUS, 24:3 (Fall 1999), 39-66.

20
See Louis Owens, “Origin Mists: John Rollin Ridge‟s Masquerade and Mourning Dove‟s
Mixedbloods” in Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel (Norman and London:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1992) 40-48.

21
Beidler, 46.

22
Many Native Studies critics debate the novel‟s authenticity and authorship because of Mourning
Dove‟s extensive literary collaboration with Lucullus Virgil McWhorter, an early ethnographer and
advocate for Native American rights in the Northwest.
22
In the “Introduction” to the 1981 edition of the
book, Dexter Fisher explains:

Their collaboration was unique and all the more special because they were breaking
new ground in bringing together two disparate traditions: the oral culture of the
Okanogans and with the literary form of the western romance. Without question the
book is uneven, wrenched in parts, replete with clichés and unnatural language.
Nevertheless, it stands as the first effort of an American Indian woman to write a novel
based upon the legacy of her Indian heritage, and for that alone, as well as for the
preservation of those beliefs and stories of Okanogan culture that might have
disappeared, we must be grateful for Mourning Dove‟s aspirations and McWhorter‟s
assistance (xxvi).

23
Published in Western American Literature, (Winter 1995): 365-391.

24
American Literature, 67:3 (Sep 1995).

25
The Dawes Act divided up tribal lands and reservations into 160-acre parcels for the head of each
family; adult males over the age of eighteen were allotted 80-acres and individuals under the age of
eighteen received 40 acre distributions. “The remaining lands were called „surplus‟ and were opened
to white homesteaders. In 1887 an estimated 40 million acres of land was still in Indian ownership. By
means of this policy, over the course of the net forty-five years, the Unites States expropriated some 90
million acres of Indian lands. In 1890 alone, the US government managed to obtain from the Indians
some 17.4 million acres, roughly one-seventh of all Indian lands at that time” (Newcomb, Pagans in
the Promised Land, xxiii-xxiv).

26
Prior to the 1960s, Kay Mussell notes, Harlequin published other formulaic genres such as the
western and the detective story/thriller. In 1957, Harlequin published its first Mills and Boon novel.
Fantasy and Reconciliation, 32.

27
Beidler, Peter. “The Contemporary Indian Romance: A Review Essay,” American Indian Culture
and Research Journal 15:4 (1991) 97-126.

28
Thus far, nobody comments on the fact that Edwards claims Native ancestry; even in the plagiarism
scandal coverage, there is not a discussion of her potentially true claims to Native heritage. My guess
is that her critics see this as mere posturing for publishing authority to give her some semblance of
cultural credibility.

29
For more detailed information concerning the allegations of plagiarism that are rather convincing
195

and undeniably questionable, see the document prepared by the website bloggers for
smartbitchestrashybooks.com at:
http://smartbitchestrashybooks.files.wordpress.com/2008/03/cassieedwardsreve.pdf. Some of the
books copied from are canonical Native American historical, ethnographic, and literary texts including
works by Edward S. Curtis, Frances Densmore, Zitkala Sa, Charles Eastman, and N. Scott Momaday.
Interestingly, when the bloggers noticed the “eerie similarities” between Edwards‟ novels and other
printed material they immediately notified her publisher. The publisher responded by double checking
the allegations. However, in 12 January 2008, a New York Times article ran about the plagiarism
allegations quoting Edwards as stating that “when your write historical romances you‟re not asked to
do that [credit sources].” Interestingly, the archive of blogs on the “smartbitches” site reveals that
Edwards‟ book was recommended to a friend as an example of a “bad” romance. The friend who read
the book recognized a passage she had read from a historical Native American text and asked if all
romance writers plagiarized!

30
Interviews with family and friends of Native American ancestry from Kumeyaay women in Santa
Ysabel, California, 1999-2006.

31
http://www.kumeyaay.org/firstpage.htm.

32
David Hollinger (2003) Amalgamation and Hypodescent: The Question of Ethnoracial Mixture in
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Abstract (if available)

Abstract From Captors to Captives: American Indian Responses to Popular American Narrative Forms examines the metamorphosis of the American Indian captivity narrative, its evolution in the American western and its function as a common trope in the American/Indian romance, as well as the genre’s most recent appearance and function in American/Indian poetry, prose, and film. Throughout my explication of the history, evolution, and current production of the genre, I interrogate the representational constraints of and the possibilities to transform American/Indian subjectivity while carefully taking into account the actual affect such representations have on the daily life of Native American peoples and cultures.

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From Chicano therapy to globarriology: Chican@ popular culture and identity in late 20th and early 21st century Los Angeles

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Creator Gregor, Theresa Lynn (author)

Core Title From captors to captives: American Indian responses to popular American narrative forms

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publication Date 02/09/2010

Defense Date 11/30/2009

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag American Indians,captivity narrative,desire,identity,love story,Native Americans,OAI-PMH Harvest,repatriation,subject formation,Western,women's romance

Place Name USA (countries)

Language English

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Advisor Modleski, Tania (committee chair), McKenna, Teresa (committee member), Sanchez, George J. (committee member)

Creator Email theresagregor@sandiego.edu,theresagregor@yahoo.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m2846

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Document Type Dissertation

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