The Problem of Representation in Black Hawk

The problem of reading Life of Black Hawk is in the interpretation and translation of the original text (meaning Black Hawk’s oratory in his own language). These layers of control and editing problematize what ended up in print. That said, in the context of this filtered process, I want to consider how Black Hawk is represented in the text as an image of difference that confirms the audience’s expectations and inevitably hampers what voice he might have in the narrative.

For the most part, Black Hawk’s story is told in eloquent prose. With the exception of names, his speech in his native tongue is translated into relatively flawless English. But there are a few cases where instead of choosing the English equivalent for a word, the writer instead chooses an English interpretation of a word or phrase that is particularly “Indian” sounding. For example, instead of using the English word “soldier,” the writer says “brave;” instead of general, he says “chief;” instead of leader, he says “father” (ie: American father, British father, Great father). “Black Hawk” even refers to the White House as the Great father’s “wigwam,” even though he often used the word “lodge” to describe his own house.

All of these choices serve to reify ideas about how Indians speak and think. Maureen Konkle says, “Native writers in English are thus most successful in expressing their Indian identity when they provide evidence of what is understood as their culture through themes, forms, narratives, and figures correlated with the oral tradition written down by scholars” (458). Though Black Hawk did not write this narrative, I think the result is the same because he is represented in a way that the audience would expect. The effect of this choice is that the Indians’ difference is established – they do not think or behave in the same ways as white people, even when they are writing and speaking in English. Konkle confirms that “the positing of inherent difference between Indians and Europeans is a crucial step in denying Indians’ political status” (458).

I think this is generally true about how Black Hawk is represented in the text, but the consistent use of “father” when speaking about white leaders who offered guidance, trade, political help, military assistance, or who simply occupied a place of power, particularly functions to destabilize the Indians’ autonomy. Instead of establishing the leaders of the white people and the leaders of the Indians on equal footing, the rhetoric of father/children positions the Sauks as inferior and dependent. Konkle points out the conflict, noting that “Native tribes are simultaneously politically autonomous with respect to internal government and in the familiar colonial position of inferiority and permanent ‘pupilage’” (463).

So though I really enjoyed Life of Black Hawk, and it was not nearly as patronizing or white-washed as I expected, the layers of control and translation serve to impose the readers’ culture onto the text, altering the meaning and softening its blow against the injustices of the whites.

An Incomplete Portrait: Catlin and Huey

I want briefly to preface my blog by saying that this material was incredibly emotionally taxing and so difficult to process and write about (I’m sure you all felt the same way). My initial reactions were much too disjointed and emotional, so this blog is an attempt to process those feelings through the readings.

Initially, I was unsure about how to read Catlin’s paintings and Huey’s photographs beside each other because of the historical distance. However, I think Huey’s TED talk was a perfect example of how to present thematically related material, even if you’re trying to bridge over a hundred years of history. I was struck by the way he presented the historical injustice against Native Americans while displaying his pictures of modern day Pine Ridge. The poverty, injustice, gang violence, lack of education, and loss of property that the Lakota suffer today is a result of the broken treaties and genocide that the US government inflicted on them. By juxtaposing history with his photos, he makes the invisible visible––disallowing his audience to make the excuse that the Native Americans have done these things to themselves. So, with that in mind, I’ll compare a couple of Catlin’s paintings with Huey’s photos.

Catlin and Huey were both white men who professed good intentions about bringing a realistic depiction of Native Americans to light in order to change public opinion. However, both inevitably reify cultural assumptions about Native Americans that were harmful. Gareth John, in his piece about Gatlin says that his paintings “illustrate how in his quest for realism he inadvertently naturalized conventional, romantic, cultural nationalistic ways of seeing the Native American West as rapidly vanishing in the wake of ‘progress’” (186). Similarly, Huey received blowback from Pine Ridge residents after his initial photographs. He admits, “I appeared to many on the rez to be a poverty tourist, making money off the tears of the people, like many journalists before who had come through photographing dirty houses and drunk people [. . .] They were tired of that image” (Estrin). Unlike the people painted by Catlin, we are fortunate enough to be able to hear the voices of Huey’s subjects, and they reject the two-dimensional portrayal of Native Americans as poor and drunk. For this blog, in an effort not to make sweeping judgments about the essential nature of either the art or the people in it, I chose to focus on how Catlin and Huey similarly represent people in their portraits.

The first Catlin painting, “Kee-món-saw, Little Chief, a Chief,” is a portrait of a man from an Eastern tribe whose people had been relocated to the West. The man is in European clothing and is sitting in a traditional “portrait” pose. However, he is holding a flute of some kind (?) that is clearly a tribal item. He is an image of the colonized Indian––his appearance is still clearly Native and he is holding a tribal item, but he is dressed like a white man. He is hybridized, perhaps successfully fitting into white society. In the Huey picture I chose to pair with this painting, the subject is positioned very similarly. However, we are much closer to his face. Like the Catlin painting, this man is looking off into the distance where we cannot see, giving him an introspective kind of look. Also like the Catlin painting, this man is wearing “modern” clothing (like most of the people in Huey’s photos). This portrait allows us a closer look at the man’s face, heavily wrinkled and scarred, belying a life that might have brought him pain and strife. Both of these portraits have elements of the collision of Native culture and Anglo culture, even in the position of the subjects, but Huey’s allows us what we might consider the “next step”––a more personal point of view.

The second pair of pictures that I chose are also composed similarly. In the Catlin painting, “Stu-mick-o-súcks, Buffalo Bull's Back Fat, Head Chief, Blood Tribe,” Catlin was attempting to capture the “vivid realities of life” of the Northern Plain Indians as opposed to the death and depravity inflicted on the tribes who had more contact with whites. I was personally struck by this photo because I felt that it depicted the most emotion of any of the portraits in the collection. The subject’s eyes draw the viewer in immediately. He is completely decked out in traditional tribal garb, including face paint, which would capture an audience fascinated with a foreign culture. But the features of the man are remarkably human and relatable. This is why I also chose the Huey photo. I was struck by the sadness in the man’s eyes. Unlike the majestic Buffalo Bull’s Back Fat, this Lakota man is in ordinary, dingy clothes. But his eyes are also looking directly into the audience. If Catlin was trying to capture the image of an untainted culture in his portrait, in Huey’s photo we might see the residual emotional impact of what happened when people like Buffalo Bull’s Back Fat were subjected to violence and injustice. Both subjects in either piece are making a human connection with the viewer, which I think attests to both the talent and the good intentions of the artists.

Hobomok Vanishing

I began this week’s reading with the introduction to Hobomok. I was excited to read the text and I found the description of Lydia Marie Child to be pretty inspirational. When I read the text, my expectations of the relationship between Mary Conant and Hobomok were not met. I was underwhelmed by their marriage and what it seemed to be saying about the relationship between the Indians and the Puritans. So when I read Tawil’s “Domestic Frontier Romance, or, How the Sentimental Heroine Become White,” my unmet expectations and confusion/ambivalence to the text was clarified. Tawil notes, “By construing the relationship between ‘racism’ and ‘sentimentality’ as the relationship between a dominant ideology and an ‘alternative’ countertradition, the body of criticism that has risen up around Sedgwick and Child has in effect set their frontier fiction out of the reach of ideology critique” (100). I identified with this idea so clearly; I seek out intersectionality between feminism and anti-racism when I read texts that I perceive to be feminist. I think we can obviously make a case for Hobomok’s feminist qualities, but I there was a disconnect for me when I tried to see a connection between Mary’s oppression by her father and her community and the treatment of the Indians in the text.

The actual relationship between Mary and Hobomok, while it was different than what I expected, did serve a pretty clear purpose. First, Mr. Conant’s staunch Puritanism was a useful antagonist. By rejecting Charles Brown for a son-in-law, he forces Mary into Hobomok’s arms, “though there is a perfectly suitable mate for Mary in Charles Brown” (Tawil 110). In an effort to construct himself and his family as radically anti-English (and thereby Episcopalian), Mr. Conant’s behavior leads to Mary’s “mad” choice to marry Hobomok. Mary doesn’t express this exact idea in the text, but it’s almost like her actions are saying, “That’ll teach him!” The union serves to point out how much more appropriate Brown is for Mary, and when she returns with Brown, free from her legal obligation to Hobomok, Mr. Conant accepts both his Episcopalian son-in-law and his half-Indian grandson. This is a different kind of American identity that doesn’t define itself against England and the Indians, but hybridizes and absorbs them, thereby erasing them at the same time. 

Tawil says, “By marrying out and then returning to her birth community, Mary Conant in fact changed what it meant to belong to that group in the first place. She left a community in which the difference between Christian sects was paramount. But the community to which she returned was one in which Episcopalians and Puritans shared the more fundamental property of race” (112). The unity of the white community is solidified once the Indian is simultaneously absorbed and erased, through Hobomok and his offspring. Hobomok has to disappear to the West and die so that his son can become part of the new community. But, Mary mentions that she can’t go back to England because she has an indian son, so this identity is specifically American, not just white. So this relationship is definitely not the abolitionist/feminist/anti-racist one I was hoping for, but I’m interested to hear what my colleagues thought.

Humanity in Algiers

Last week we discussed how we can read domestic violence and the economic exchange of women’s bodies in Sansay’s Secret History as an allegory for racial violence and slavery. I think the preface of Humanity in Algiers is so blunt about reading slavery in Algiers against slavery in the US that it can hardly even be called allegory.

“With the same impropriety on our part do we reprobate the Algerines. ‘A vile, piratical set of unprincipled robbers,’ is the softest name we can give them; forgetful of our former depredations on the coasts of Africa, and the cruel manner in which we at present treat the offspring of those whom we brought from thence.” (4)

This preface sets the text up not only as a mirror to illuminate the injustice of American slavery, but suggests that any violence Americans suffer at the hands of North Africans is predictable retribution for previous American violence against them––chickens coming home to roost. This is a strong position from which to begin the narrative. So as I read the story, when I came across passages that made it seem like the author was taking a moderate stance or arguing for gradualism, I took it with a grain of salt. Suggesting that African Muslims are just as human as white, Christian Americans would be a hard pill to swallow for a pro-slavery audience. I read some of these “reasonable” moments as actually particularly radical.

For example, Omri, whom I understand to be kind of like the moral compass of the narrative, is troubled when he is unable to persuade Azem’s new master to allow him to return to his previous family. He prays, “O God! what has this thy creature done, that thou hast ordained for him eternal chains? Surely thy goodness will not punish without a cause, nor thy mercy inflict without a reason. But thy ways are mysterious, thy wisdom unsearchable, and the secrets of thy providence past finding out. I submit” (9). Initially, this sounded like an argument for gradualism by just “leaving it in God’s hands,” so to speak. But I think that coming from Omri, who helps lead Sequida to the more righteous path, this prayer is not washing his own hands of Azem’s fate, but aligning his purpose with God’s.

This moment is a bit more nuanced, but there are other passages where I think the critique of American slavery is more clear.

For example, at the beginning when the man offers to buy the American’s freedom, the narrator writes, “I replied, that, although I respected my master, I had left a wife and child in America; and that, of all blessings, to me a sight of them would be the greatest” (5). This struck me as absurd––of course the man would want to return home to his family. It seemed odd that he would mention respect for his master at all. I wondered if the audience for this text would have reacted similarly. The absurdity of an enslaved white man expressing respect for his African slaver highlights the injustice of even seemingly “benevolent” American slave masters.

Similarly, Selictor and Sequida are haunted by their decision to sell Azem instead of setting him free, though they had no contractual obligation to do so. They chose economic stability over moral obligation and grew to regret it. This turns on its head the “reasonable” argument that America, particularly the South, was economically dependent on slavery and that it was unjust to put those slave owners in an economically compromised position. 

So, in conclusion, I think the narrative begins with a strong position against slavery and continues to develop that position through the narrative, even in moments when the rhetoric is more measured and nuanced.