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Zunis and Brahmins: Cultural Ambivalence in the Gilded Age
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ZUNIS AND BRAHMINS Cultural Ambivalence in the Gilded Age CURTIS M. HINSLEY Wretched men! to suffer themselves to be deluded with desire of novelty, and to leave their own serene sky to come and gaze at ours. (Michel de Montaigne, "Of Cannibals," 1580) God help my poor doomed Zunis! (Frank H. Cushing, diary entry, July 15, 1892) For five hundred years the New World Indian has served as the object and mirror ofWestern ambivalence toward the exercise ofpower and the direction of progress. It has been an instrumental ambivalence, abetting the very progress that it doubts. On Indian persons, real and constructed, have been played out both the first impulses and the second thoughts of American culture: God had hardened their hearts to the task and deafened their ears to the children's screams, explained the Puritan soldiers after the slaughter of the Pequot tribe in the swamps of Mystic in 1637 (Ziff 1973:91). Two centuries later, the insistent romantic motif of the noble savage that ran through Irving , Cooper, Schoolcraft, and Longfellow coexisted in complex, antidotal relation to the murderous frontier policies and Indian-hating metaphysics of Jackson, Harrison, and Crockett. A few, such as Melville, recognized this at the time for what it was: the inescapable counterpoint of self-ambivalence Curtis Hinsley is chair of the History Department at Northern Arizona University. His major previous publications include Savages and Scientists: The Smithsonian Institution and the Development of American Anthropology, 1846-1910 and (with Melissa Banta) From Site to Sight: Anthropology, Photography and the Power of Imagery. He is currently at work on studies of the Hemenway Southwestern Archaeological Expedition of 1886-89 and the Peabody Museum of Harvard. 169 170 CURTIS M. HINSLEY in American history. As if in compensatory balance, political and military destruction brought forth imaginative reconstruction of the American's shadow Other, the Indian. After the Civil War, as the venue of destruction shifted to the transMississippi West, a new cultural phenomenon emerged to help resolve the long-standing ambivalence: the museum process. The resolution was achieved by announcing and then demonstrating the end of Indian history. The museum process constructed a meaning of Indian demise within the teleology of manifest destiny; it indirectly addressed the insistent doubts of Gilded Age Americans over the import of industrial capitalism; and it did so by encasing, in time and space, the American Indian. Dehistoricization was the essence of the process. Anthropologists, journalists, politicians, and philanthropists collaborated to bring about what they assumed to have already arrived: the final stage of the transition of Native Americans from living communities to "life groups," from autonomous historical agents to market commodities and museum pieces. The museum process took many forms: World's Fairs, Wild West shows, anthropology museums and publications, on-site tourist attractions , curio shops and Indian markets. All provided public spaces for safe consumption of a newly dehistoricized Indian; in most of them, there was an element of theater. One of the more revealingly theatrical forms of the museum process was the Indian tour which, since Montaigne's Tupinamba, had provided standard tropes for Euroamerican cultural critique, as occasionally it still does (e.g., Janowitz 1987). Nineteenth-century Americans became used to hearing of a steady stream of Indian delegations to the East Coast, primarily to the seat ofgovernment in Washington, DC. While they customarily provided theaterdancing , singing, oratory-increasingly, visiting Indians occasioned little in the way of reflective commentary (Viola 1981:140-41), and, by 1830, little in the way of serious politics. By the post-Civil War period, a tradition that had begun a century before as a political act-a form of state visit for purposes of treaty negotiation-had devolved to a photo opportunity. In the last quarter of the century, Indian history itself was rapidly becoming theater, and the Indian visit, even when otherwise intended, became yet another form of the museum process. On February 22, 1882, anthropologist Frank Hamilton Cushing left Zuni pueblo with six Indians who had been selected to make a pilgrimage to the Atlantic Ocean: Palowaihtiwa, governor of Zuni and political chief of the Macaw clan; his father, Pedro Pino, or Laiiuahtsaila, former governor of Zuni; Naiiuhtchi, senior priest of the order of the bow; Kiasi, junior bow priest; Laiiuahtsailunkia, priest of the temple; and Nanahe, or Cornflower, a Hopi who had been adopted as a member of the little fire order in Zuni. Boarding the Atcheson, Topeka & Santa Fe railroad at Gallup, New Mexico, they ar- ZUNIS AND...