Relics of the Unseen Presence? Evocations of Native American Indian Heritage and Western-Hero Road Poems in Bruce Baillie’s Mass for the Dakota Sioux and Quixote

In this paper I discuss the ways in which Bruce Baillie’s Mass for the Dakota Sioux (1964) and Quixote (1965) evoke Native American Indian heritage and western-hero road poems by challenging the concept of the American landscape and incorporating conventions traditionally associated with cinéma pur, cinéma vérité, and the city symphony. Both pictures, seen as largely ambiguous and ironic travelogue forms, expose their audiences to “the sheer beauty of the phenomenal world” (Sitney 2002: 182) and nurture nostalgic feelings for the lost indigenous civilizations, while simultaneously reinforcing the image of an American conquistador, hence creating a strong sense of dialectical tension. Moreover, albeit differing in a specific use of imagery and editing, the films rely on dense, collage-like and often superimposed images, which clearly contribute to the complexity of mood conveyed on screen and emphasize the striking conceptual contrast between white American and Indian culture. Taking such an assumption, I argue that although frequently referred to as epic road poems obliquely critical of the U.S. westward expansion and manifest destiny, the analyzed works’ use of plot reduction, observational and documentary style as well as kinaesthetic visual modes and rhythmic editing derive primarily from the cinéma pur’s camerawork, the cinéma vérité’s superstructure, and the city symphony’s spatial arrangement of urban environments. Such multifaceted inspirations do not only diversify Mass’ and Quixote’s non-narrative aesthetics, but also help document an intriguing psychogeography of the 1960s American landscapes, thus making a valuable contribution to the history of experimental filmmaking dealing with Native American Indian heritage.

“In my mind I Saw my mother”: Virginia Woolf, Zitkala-Ša, and Autobiography

This essay considers how the self becomes a subject in Virginia Woolf’s memoir, “A Sketch of the Past,” written in 1939, and Dakota Sioux writer Zitkala-Ša’s autobiographical essays, published in the Atlantic Monthly over several months in early 1900. I analyze how both women conceive of their nationality, social position, and politics amid competing pressures vying for their minds and bodies; how mothers and maternal loss shape their autobiographies; how physical and psychological place and displacement influence their lives and writing; and how matters of audience affect their literary self-portraits. Significant differences of course exist between Woolf, raised in an upper-middle-class family in late-Victorian England, and Zitkala-Ša, born on a Sioux reservation at the height of America’s “Indian wars” and initiatives to eradicate Native American languages, cultures, and spiritualities. Nevertheless, their autobiographical reflections on their childhood and young adulthood express comparable feminist impulses and narrative strategies.

Lincoln’s Decisionism and the Politics of Elimination

Abraham Lincoln’s hallowed place in American memory is secure: He saved the Union, put an end to slavery, and was assassinated for these very successes. At the same time, Lincoln’s many undeniable achievements came at terrible—and lasting—democratic cost. Informed by the work of Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben, this essay aspires to illuminate that cost by analyzing two cases where Lincoln exercised a sovereign decisionism—one involving the exile of Ohio politician Clement Vallandigham for publicly opposing the Civil War and the draft, a second involving the mass execution of Dakota Sioux Indians for daring to rise up and enact their own sovereign prerogatives during the war. This decisionism reveals Lincoln’s problematic resort to anti-political practices to deal with adversaries. Given the damage Lincoln did to American democracy, the essay also investigates what he might have done to make amends for it. Finally, it explores how Lincoln’s place in American history might be remembered more agonistically, architecturally speaking, on the Mall in Washington, D.C.