The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U. S. Indian Policy by Brian W. Dippie (review)

Reviews 169 The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U. S. Indian Policy. ByBrian W. Dippie. (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1982. 423 pages, $24.95.) During the last five years there has been an outpouring of books dealing with the white man’s perception of the American Indian and the meeting of Native Americans and Euro-Americans in the setting of the American frontier. Professor Brian Dippie’svolume is a welcome addition to this list. In The Vanishing American the author covers the period in American history from the early 1800s to the end of World War II with an emphasis on white attitudes towards the American Indian. This is not primarily a book about Indians or about Federal Indian policy but rather about white percep­ tions of Native Americans built on the framework of U.S. Indian policy. The thread that runs through the volume is that of the disappearing American Indian. Dippie is not so much concerned with the actual figures depicting declining population but rather what whites thought about Indian demogra­ phy. The theme of the vanishing Indian was a significant factor in white thinking throughout the century and a half that the author covers. Dippie’s sources are mostly from published materials and include writing by political figures, artists, literary persons, historians, and anthropologists. They run the gamut from Thomas Jefferson to Franklin Roosevelt, from George Catlin to James Fraser, from James F. Cooper to Ernest Hemingway, from Francis Parkman to Robert Berkhofer, and from James Mooney to Franz Boas. Most of the writings selected appeared in speeches, debates, magazines, novels, poetry collections, and monographs, and represent contemporary think­ ing on the American Indian. Dippie divides his work essentially into three periods: the segregationist approach which resulted in Removal and the Trade and Intercourse Acts of the 1830s; the assimilationists’ view which gained momentum after the Civil War and culminated in the Dawes Act of 1887; and the more recent concern for cultural relativism and self-determination found in the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act. The author weaves the ideas of immigration, extermina­ tion, assimilation, civilization, and segregation into the framework of the physical disappearance of the Indians and that of cultural extinction. Dippie concludes that while the vanishing American concept was a powerful force throughout Indian-white relations, it has not reached realization. A particularly strong point in the book is the literary analysis of various works that address the Indian question. Dippie deals with James Fenimore Cooper, D. H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, Washington Irving, Henry W. Longfellow, and Oliver La Farge in particular. Out of the hundreds of people who wrote on the Indian he picked out many fine spokesmen. Unfortu­ nately, however, he neglected the statements of agents and missionaries involved with the Indians, the Lake Mohonk Conference participants, and those who served on the Board of Indian Commissioners. 170 Western American Literature Dippie’s contribution may best be seen as a cultural history, and in this sense he has sampled a significant segment of American opinion in tracing the white view of the vanishing American. JOHN W. BAILEY, Carthage College Nature and Madness. By Paul Shepard. (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1982. 178 pages, $15.95.) After publishing three more or less traditionally framed (though certainly original and provocative) studies on the humanity-nature relationship, Paul Shepard apparently felt the need to start fresh and go as deep as possible. Man in the Landscape (1967) dealt with a range of philosophical and aesthe­ tic responses to the environment; The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game (1973), with the meanings of hunting in human history; Thinking Animals (1977), with the importance of other life forms to human development. These books, and a number of essays on place and on the implications of ecology, put him in the front rank of contemporary philosophers on man and nature. No one has argued more persuasively, or from broader research, that fulfill­ ment of the ecological vision (that is, the perceptual approach associated with systems science) would involve major transformations in our style of civili­ zation. Nature and Madness takes the study inside, into developmental psychol­ ogy and its relation to history. Yet this isalso Shepard’sbroadest work. He...