In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviews in American History 29.2 (2001) 222-227



[Access article in PDF]

Imaginary Indians in Modern Times

Nancy Shoemaker


Sherry L. Smith. Reimagining Indians: Native Americans Through Anglo Eyes, 1880-1940. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. ix + 273 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00.

As in her earlier, important work The View from Officers' Row: Army Perceptions of Western Indians (1990), Sherry L. Smith again looks at how a class of people, this time popular writers, conceptualized and described American Indians in the West. Organized chronologically, the book provides mini-biographies of ten men and women focusing on their actual experiences with American Indians, the images they created about Indians through their writing, and the personal satisfactions they derived from promoting their vision of "Indianness" to a broader public. The first generation Smith deals with were mostly men--Charles Erskine Scott Wood, George Bird Grinnell, and Walter McClintock, with a brief discussion of Mary Roberts Rinehart--who sought out the West, Indians, and nature in the late nineteenth century, the era of the United States' final military subjugation of Indians and formative years for western Indian reservations. For the turn of the twentieth century, Smith chose Frank Bird Linderman, Charles Fletcher Lummis, and George Wharton James, and for the early twentieth century through the 1930s, three women: Mary Austin, Anna Ickes, and Mabel Dodge Luhan.

Despite differing viewpoints and widely varying connections, or lack of connections, to living Indian communities, these ten people had much in common. Most significant, they did not claim to be scholars, and so their composite works make an interesting counterpoint to the booming interest in Indians occurring contemporaneously in American ethnography, a phenomenon scholars today have devoted much more attention to. 1 From this selection of popular writers, we can see that they shared with early ethnographers a pathos for the inevitable extinction of Indians, so they thought, and like many anthropologists saw in Indian cultures the opportunity to admire cultural diversity in ceremony, dance, traditional crafts, and community life.

Although less well-known to academics working in Indian studies today than anthropologists such as Franz Boas or James Mooney, these popularizers of pseudo-Indian lore probably had more influence on the popular mind and [End Page 222] on U.S. Indian policies. A telling example is the geographic path Smith's narrative follows, beginning with the northern Plains and ending at the Southwest, a route parallelling regional economic development of the American West, especially the tourist industry's commoditization of the western landscape and western peoples. Although many of these authors were armchair hobbyists who knew a few Indians but did most of their writing about Indians from a distance, their views sometimes bore directly on Indian policy. This is especially noticeable with John Collier, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs in the 1930s who spearheaded the federal government's turn away from destructive, forced assimilation of Indians to a program of cultural preservation. Collier knew and corresponded with Austin, Ickes, and Luhan, and his own favoritism toward the Pueblos as the world's ideal people stemmed largely from his association with these three women and other advocates of the Indian Southwest.

As Smith acknowledges in her introduction, one of the difficulties of doing cultural history is that we can evaluate the cultural product itself--a book, film, piece of music or art--but have few methods available for judging the effect of cultural production on audiences. Smith makes no attempt at calculating sales figures or searching for other indicators of the success of these authors in reaching the public, but then she does not need to. Publishing books and articles, giving lecture tours, associating and corresponding with other public figures, and receiving occasional fan letters demonstrate that these popularizers of the West are worth studying and understanding. There obviously was a constituency of other Americans eager to accept what were, with a few exceptions, shallow and ill-informed ideas about Indian life and society. These self-styled experts were both purveyors of images about Indians and reflections of an industrialized society eager to embrace sentimental depictions of...

pdf

Share