Shadowed Silhouettes

This chapter explores questions of loss, theft, and erasure by considering the collections of Indigenous artifacts in early American museums through the eyes of Native visitors and writers. Many museums, including Peale’s Philadelphia Museum, the Salem East India Marine Society, and the Columbian Institute in Washington, D.C., framed the theft and appropriation of Indigenous artifacts as a form of preservation linked to antiquarianism and myths of the “vanishing Indian.” Descriptions of visiting delegations to Philadelphia, however, challenge such attempts at erasure, revealing how Native visitors subtly performed their resistance to such practices within museum galleries. The literary collaborations between ethnologist Henry Rowe Schoolcraft and his wife, the métis Ojibwe poet Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, similarly demonstrate the conflicts between White and Indigenous collecting practices and interpretive frameworks. These accounts show how Native writers and visitors contested the broader claims to ownership and authority being invoked by museums during this period.

Global Racial Violence

This chapter examines the nineteenth-century history of American settler colonialism, what it reveals about the transformation of global politics in terms of racial violence, and, as a consequence, how it comes to structure ideas about global peace and order. It examines more specifically the case of American settler colonialism in the nineteenth century and the very ideas of the vanishing Indian. The nineteenth-century American Indian Wars were a critical dimension of the relationship between savage or racial warfare and global order. The discussion turns to Theodore Roosevelt’s idea that global politics is not (or not primarily) the realm of power politics; rather, the cleavages remain those of civilized races perpetually dominating or fearing racial violence from uncivilized barbarians. As a consequence, savage wars or racial wars become part and parcel of American imperial expansion, and their legacy is derived from the history of American settler colonialism.

Reader-Response Theory and Dialogic Analysis of Gerald Vizenor’s The Heirs of Columbus

This article has employed the theory of Bakhtin’s (1895–1975) dialogism, and Wolfgang Iser’s (1926–2007) reader-response theory to examine the socio-political, and historical implications of Gerald Vizenor’s The Heirs of Columbus. The Heirs of Columbus (Heirs) was written to dismantle the historical oppression of Native Americans (NA) throughout the post Columbian era. Dialogism is an umbrella term that creates difference between historical and Native American discourse, providing new passages to comprehend the marginalized silenced other; in other words, it helps create a voice for the vanishing Indian. We have systematically identified the use of dialogic techniques like subversion, carnival, polyphony and heteroglossia in Heirs while, at the same time, analyzing his text through the framework of Iser’s reader-response theory. We have come to the conclusion that Iser’s theory is not enough to analyze Vizenor’s revolutionary text since Vizenor provokes his readers to draw their own conclusions rather than conforming to set of fixed ideals of author.

Conclusion

By the turn of the nineteenth century, there were scant traces of the northeast’s former Native power. Wabanaki themselves struggled to hold on to their maritime past as Euro-American powers confined them to small reserves on land and then worked to forget their history of conflict, dependency, and defeat at the hands of a powerful Indian confederacy. Romantic notions of the “vanishing Indian” became commonplace in nineteenth century New England society, and coupled with a similar romanticization of pirates, Anglo- Americans increasingly lost sight of this dark chapter of their past.

James Luna and the Paradoxically Present Vanishing Indian

James Luna’s performances interrogate how representations of Native Americans have been made to fit western assumptions about the “real Indian.” Using his recognizably Native body as a marker of both presence and endangered existence, Luna links Peggy Phelan’s conception of performance as the presence of loss with the centuries-old stereotype of Native Americans as the “vanishing race”—a stereotype that continues to exert influence. In Take a Picture with a Real Indian (performed in 1992, 2001, and 2010), he invites viewers to have their photograph taken with him wearing one of three options: war dance regalia, a loincloth, or khakis and a polo shirt. Few people choose the third option. The performance foregrounds what has become a tradition of Native Americans performing/posing their native -ness as Otherness for the camera, strategically employing imagery that plays to nostalgic Western views of Native peoples as perpetually vanishing. I argue that Luna’s performances comment not only upon western preconceptions of Native Americans, but also upon the ways that Native Americans have historically reasserted their agency by manipulating such expectations, staging themselves to fit the stereotype.

“In a Few Years the Red Man Will Live Only in Legend and in Cooper’s Charming Accounts”: Portrayals of American Indians in Danish Travel Literature in the Mid- and Late Nineteenth Century

During the middle and late nineteenth century, a number of Danish travel writers visited the United States with a view to narrating about the New World to their readers back home. Four of the most prominent writers were Hans Peter Christian Hansen, Vilhelm C.S. Topsøe, Robert Watt, and Henrik Cavling. Among the many topics covered by these writers was that of American Indians. Establishing a narrative of the “vanishing Indian,” the writers endeavored to tie the Indians to a receding landscape of the past and—for the most part—to establish a contradiction between Indians and white “civilization.” Likewise displaying an interest in Scandinavian immigrants, the travel writers sometimes attempted to create links between the Indians and Scandinavian settlers. With no clear Danish interest in celebrating American exceptionalism in the shape of classical U.S. “Manifest Destiny,” the travel writers were nevertheless involved in processes of bonding with the dominant population element of the United States through their common “civilization” and whiteness.

Assimilating American Indians in James Fenimore Cooper’s Novels?

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