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

CHAPTER NINE A Haunted Nation: Cultural Narratives and the Persistence of the Indigenous Subject in James Welch’s The Heartsong of Charging Elk ANDREA OPITZ The primitive has somehow escaped from control. —Stuart Hall,“The Local and the Global” Nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history. —Walter Benjamin,“Theses on the Philosophy of History” THE “EMPTY” SITE OF PERFORMANCE In 1889 Marseille, France, one of the Oglala Lakota performing in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West awakens in the hospital after falling from his horse, left behind by the show that has traveled on to Italy. Abandoned in a foreign country where no one speaks his language, James Welch’s protagonist in The Heartsong of Charging Elk (2001) has exited the“safe”containment of Buffalo Bill’s history lesson—in which he was cast as“first citizen”—and so has quite literally exited the narrative space of American national history and culture; the“primitive,” as Stuart Hall so poignantly puts it,“has escaped control” (“The Local” 187). Charging Elk escapes from the hospital and wanders around Marseille for several days. He finally comes to a site that he recognizes as the place where the Wild West show had performed. He crosses the roundabout and walks up a wide street, eager to reach the field where the show had been erected. However, he finds that“there was nothing there. Not one tent, not one hawker’s stand, not even a fire pit where the Indian village had stood. He walked over to the large trampled circle of earth where the portable arena had been set up. The ground had been raked smooth. There was not a hoofprint on it, not one sign that the Indians, the cowboys, the soldiers, the vaqueros, the Deadwood stage, the ANDREA OPITZ 161 buffaloes and horses had acted out their various dramas on this circle of earth” (48). Charging Elk’s“reading”of the former performance site reveals no trace, seemingly, of the show ever having been in Marseille. In vain, he looks for any evidence of the fire pits or the enactment of the drama of western conquest. However, he discovers that the enactment of dreams and fantasies does not leave any retrievable trace, and while the show was a real experience for him and the other performers who had cooked on those fire pits, the performance is only representative of something fabricated. Even though at first glance “there was nothing there” Charging Elk remembers what had been there and so reveals the presence of an absence. Competing against the powerful forces of a cultural narrative that enacts what will soon become the dominant story of the West (and by extension the nation), he cannot recover the material and social histories and experiences that have been erased.Yet, he is able to witness and expose how every attempt has been made to “rake[] smooth” any trace left by these histories—traces that might disrupt the official narrative of the American nation and its conquest of the West. In this novel, what is produced by the Wild West show as the “vanishing Indian” emerges as a “ghost” in an alternative space—outside the “historical” narrative and thus outside the nation space—and reveals that“other”material and social histories indeed leave traces that are in excess of U.S. cultural and national narratives. Extending the revisionist and decolonizing work he began with Fools Crow (1986) and continued with Killing Custer (1994), Welch examines in his last novel the relation between U.S. government policies of removal, extinction, and assimilation, and the ways in which cultural and national narratives—as produced,for example,by Buffalo Bill’s traveling Wild West—work to“naturalize ”how indigenous peoples imagine themselves in relation to these narratives. Welch’s work critically intervenes in the kinds of inquiry American Indian literature, as well as Montana literature, can pose. Heartsong, which is based on a true story and set primarily in late-nineteenth-century France in the context of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West touring Europe, not only imagines a site of competing histories but also reimagines the relation of the indigenous subject to the American nation and its national narratives. In other words, Welch’s project is as much concerned with offering an alternative narrative as it is with theorizing what it means to be an American Indian and what it means to be an American in a national context that is highly racialized. Framing Charging Elk...

Share