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  • "Lo, the Poor Indian":Native Americans, Reality and Imagery
  • Daniel R. Mandell (bio)
Daniel H. Usner, Jr. Indian Work: Language and Livelihood in Native American History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009. 202 pp. Figures, notes, and index. $49.95.

Among many other issues faced by Native Americans, the perceptions of outsiders are a particular concern. Anthropologists generally have terrible reputations among Indian people for distorting what they saw during temporary residences. Historians are often detested for their dependence on written documents when interpreting nonliterate communities. Such issues become particularly significant when connected in troublesome ways to efforts to maintain life and limb in the modern economy along with core social and cultural distinctions. Visitors to reservations become disenchanted and even angry when they see "junk" (including autos) strewn around yards, largely because they hoped and expected a vision of "tree huggers" or bison hunters living in harmony with Nature. In nearly every state, often-bitter controversies have erupted over efforts by tribes to build and operate casinos. In New England, with which I am most familiar, those controversies focus on whether "those people are really Indians"; the doubters point to how those operating or hoping to build a casino (or indeed seeking federal tribal status) neither look nor act like stereotypical Indians.1

Daniel Usner shows in Indian Work that such controversies have a long tradition in America, from the late sixteenth century when John Locke denigrated Native agriculture in ways that justified taking their land, through the early twentieth century and D. H. Lawrence's confusion when he sought the exotic Indian in the American Southwest but could not deal with the very real people who inhabited Taos. Usner details Native realities and white perceptions through five case studies discrete in time and place, yet linked so that the reader is aware that this is just the tip of an issue deeply rooted in U.S. culture. And while Indian Work often foregrounds white perceptions, it also pays close attention to the real lives and experiences of Native Americans, explores their role(s) in shaping and even using those perceptions, and considers the roles of those images of Indian work in American culture and identity. Usner's book [End Page 407] highlights "how language about American Indian livelihood has operated as an instrument of colonialism" and how terms like "backwardness" and "timelessness" have substantive harmful effects (p. 142).

After an introduction that links images of Indians with broader U.S. concepts of poverty, class, and ethnicity, Usner offers a complex and satisfying explication of why political and intellectual leaders in the early Republic insisted on viewing Natives as nomadic hunters even though they knew about Native horticulture. Men like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson embraced Enlightenment notions that the rapid growth of the colonial population "proved" the inferiority of Native agriculture, and that wild meat and forests were detrimental to "civilized" society, culture, and population. More important, Jefferson knew that his agrarian vision of America's republican future depended on supplying the European market and therefore (like other agricultural reformers of the time) linked America's republican virtue to the expansion of its commercial agriculture. Hence the steps taken by the Iroquois by 1800—embrace of plow agriculture, domesticated cattle, and nuclear families living on separate homesteads (and by implication the more famous Cherokee efforts)—had little effect on American stereotypes. Moreover, the Iroquois refused to divide their lands in severalty, and both sexes saw their traditional roles as critical to their communal and physical survival. Commercial agriculture was indeed a risky proposition, as many bankrupt American farmers knew at the turn of the century, and Iroquois instead continued hunting and took seasonal wage labor as a way of maintaining their accustomed flexibility in the new market economy. As Usner points out, the course that the Iroquois chartered, "blend[ing] familiar subsistence practices with new market and wage opportunities" would later be "replicated among western Indians" (p. 42).

That very flexibility, unfortunately, fed the Anglo-American narrative of Native "decline and disappearance." Indian Work next explores how this "language of nostalgia and conquest" developed in the early nineteenth century even as the Choctaws and others in the Natchez area...

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