Rethinking Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Worlds: With and Through "Indian Eyes"

The 1903 photograph on the front cover of Kate Flint's The Transatlantic Indian features members of Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show. A central grouping of three male Native participants catches the reader's eye: staring at the camera, these men pose on the deck of an English street tram (or rail car) and are dressed in war bonnets, blankets, leggings, and moccasins. Standing both above and below them are two white men who appear to be conductors, wearing uniform jackets and caps, and a third, possibly a show representative, in a black coat and light-colored hat. In the bottom-right corner of the tableau, a small boy sporting a cloth cap appears, his blurry image suggesting that he managed to maneuver himself into the photograph at the last minute. Looking down from a second-story window, we see a few indistinct figures, their attention probably caught by the staging of the photograph. But the three "warriors" are not the only Natives in the picture. Standing in front of them, at the center and on the lower step of the tram, is a Native man in braids, wearing a black hat with matching coat, pants, and shoes. Above sit three other members of the troupe, longhaired young men wearing feathers and what appear to be blankets. In the front seat of the car is another Native person, looking out from behind its window, in partial profile. He is probably male, but it is hard to tell.

It is the meeting of these multiple worlds—of Britain, the United States, and North American Natives—and its implications for our understanding of Victorian culture that Flint's book explores. The "iconic image" of the Indian, she argues, was fundamental to the expansion of the new nation of the United States (1). It also was "central to Britain's conceptualization of the whole American continent" (2). "Indians," Flint demonstrates, were almost everywhere in Victorian England. In chapters that move through a wide range of representations of Native people, she deftly and persuasively demonstrates their ubiquity in British culture. Written texts figure prominently in this book, including the poetry and prose of British women who used the figure of the Native American as a means of critiquing both aggressive masculinity and American and British imperial expansion, as well as a range of popular fiction that, adopting a very different tone, employed the Indian as a launching pad for discussing savagery and civilization. However, The Transatlantic Indian sets itself apart from other works dealing with literary representations through its wider-ranging, historically situated treatment of material culture, including items like the late-eighteenth-century and early-nineteenth-century portraits of Mohawk leaders Joseph Brant and John Norton and those artifacts displayed in the Canadian pavilion at the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition.¹ Flint also examines the phenomenon of the performing Indian, ranging from George Catlin's 1840s Ojibwa troupes to the late-Victorian and Edwardian appearances of American Plains people in Cody's Wild West Shows. The book also explores the politics of gendered representations of Native peoples and British missionaries' encounters with Aboriginal people in Canada.

Flint's ambitions in this book go beyond simply documenting the presence of Native imagery and peoples. She also challenges British and American scholars to rethink those national boundaries that until now have largely functioned to demarcate their fields as "separate entities, failing to enter into sufficient dialogue with one another" (24). Here I would say that Flint is in very good company, as The Transatlantic Indian responds, for example, to Joseph Roach's notion of circum-Atlantic relations, so creatively and boldly explored in his Cities of the Dead, and to Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic (24–25). Flint thus wishes to push her readers to a different understanding of the practices and discourses that circulated these images, goods, and—most importantly—people. As Flint argues, "the capacity of Indians to inhabit British public, intellectual, and social spaces attests to their participation not just on the troubled terrain of the United States and Canada, but within a...