Explorers in Eden: Pueblo Indians and the Promised Land (review)

In this work, Auerbach focuses on how Eastern intellectuals, artists, and adventurers appropriated Pueblo Indian landscapes, cultures, and images in the name of "geopiety"—finding their own "Holy Land" in an American landscape torn by the forces of industrialization and social alienation between the 1870s and the 1930s. Using a diverse and well-known cast of characters, including ethnographer Frank Hamilton Cushing, tourism entrepreneur Fred Harvey, cultural critic Mabel Dodge Luhan, photographer Edward S. Curtis, and anthropologist Franz Boas' cohort of female graduate students, Auerbach argues that these travelers venerated Pueblo Indians as a means of rediscovering a Middle Eastern-style "Holy Land" in America. He attributes this attraction to white Americans' quest for a unique identity in a wilderness that had the potential to be another Eden, but was failing to meet that standard in the Gilded Age. The Pueblo Southwest pacified this longing for several generations of Eastern elites around the turn of the twentieth century.

Written in an accessible style, the book is a synthesis of recent scholarship about the American appropriation of Pueblo cultures. Auerbach's background in diverse subject areas gives him many tools with which to analyze the wide range of evidence available to discuss the Southwest during this period. The analysis prominently features photographs and images, but biography, psychohistory, gender history, and cultural history are all woven together to examine American "geopiety." The historical figures' references to Biblical images appear throughout the book, but Auerbach also features gender as a prominent analytical tool for understanding the impact that the Pueblos had on the identities of these Americans. The first section dwells on male adventurers and their search for a premodern masculinity and individuality in the Southwest. The second section turns to female ascendancy in the region's appropriation, following World War I. According to Auerbach, women found respite from the restrictions of Victorian mores in the Pueblos, and found their own place for liberated self-expression.

The book's heavy focus on image analysis and biography leaves much about the American Southwest's development as a kind of "Mecca" unexplained. The political, economic, or social motivations behind the appropriation of Pueblo peoples have no place in the book, even though such factors likely contributed more to the appropriation of Pueblo symbols and images than a desire to rediscover an American Eden. For example, the expropriation of Pueblo lands by mining companies and the erosion of Pueblo sovereignty by state and federal governments receive no attention, but these processes were crucial to the creation of an American identity and the availability of the Pueblos for American tourists, artists, and researchers. Auerbach actually challenges contemporary critics who claim that whites' obsession with the Pueblos was driven by capitalism, paternalism, and "Orientalism." He argues that these critics are "reducing" Pueblo Indians to "hapless victims of sexist domination and rapacious capitalist exploitation" (159), as if Eastern elites' "veneration" of Pueblo Indians did not attempt to reduce them to one-dimensional subjects of intellectual and cultural expansion.

Ultimately, Auerbach uses the Pueblos as his book's historical figures did—to explain a phenomenon entirely unrelated to Pueblo people themselves. Thus, the analysis perpetuates the abusive relationships that the explorers established to fulfill their own spiritual and intellectual goals. This kind of analysis ignores and silences living, vital, cultures for the benefit of understanding dead elites, an academic quest that has lost its relevance to scholarship and to understanding the international context that our nation occupies.