Cather Studies, Volume 9: Willa Cather and Modern Cultures

2. Thea’s “Indian Play” in The Song of the Lark

21 2 Thea’s “Indian Play” in The Song of the Lark S A R A H C L E R E Much critical attention has been paid to the role of southwestern Indian ruins in The Professor’s House; however, far less space has been devoted to the use Cather makes of indigenous culture in The Song of the Lark. In The Professor’s House, Tom Outland’s experiences with cliff-dweller culture include concrete historical and anthropological qualities that appear to be largely absent from Thea Kronborg’s encounters with Native ruins. Tom excavates and catalogs relics; Thea has transcendent moments of identification with long-dead Native women . On the surface, Thea’s response to Panther Canyon appears to be entirely emotional and almost intentionally ahistoric. Yet her sojourn in Panther Canyon is, in reality, heavily grounded in contemporary antimodern anxiety surrounding gender roles and the appropriation of American Indian culture. By allowing Thea to identify herself so closely with these non-white women, Cather is indulging in a variation of the practice Philip Deloria terms “playing Indian.” Thea’s identification with the long-dead Native women of Panther Canyon allows her to identify herself as an artist without completely abandoning the qualities of domesticity that Cather’s successful female characters invariably possess. Both ethnographers and tourists found Native peoples of the 22 sarah clere Southwest more historically and aesthetically compelling than the tribes who occupied the Great Plains. Plains Indians’ role as nomadic hunters seemed less appealing and less “civilized” to white Americans than the agrarian lifestyle practiced by the Native occupants of the Southwest.1 In terms of the evolutionary continuum upon which late-nineteenth-century anthropologists placed non-white peoples, southwestern Indians seemed closer to European culture (and thus more advanced) than their counterparts in the central United States.2 By the time Cather wrote The Song of the Lark, stereotypical images of Plains Indians dominated popular perceptions of Native peoples. Their aggressive attacks on wagon trains formed the plots of dime Westerns , and their feathered war bonnets were staples of the period’s numerous Wild West shows. As non-Indian Americans imbibed these images, individual Plains tribes were being systematically removed and exterminated.3 The omnipresence of these stereotyped depictions meant that to middle-class culture seekers, Plains Indians lacked authenticity. In contrast, southwestern Indians appealed to literate tourists, who felt they had a legitimate intellectual and aesthetic interest in Native peoples. In the early years of the twentieth century, preoccupation with the southwestern corner of the United States was not unique to Cather. She joined a range of intellectuals, including Mary Austin and Mabel Dodge Luhan, in traveling to and writing about the area. With its ethnically diverse population and flexible borders , the Southwest in the later nineteenth century was not quite “American.” This vision of the Southwest as space set aside from the main course of westward expansion is particularly relevant to The Song of the Lark, where it becomes for Thea a refuge from modernizing America. Unlike the rest of the western United States, southwestern territory could still function as a regenerative, imaginative space, allowing individual Americans who visited to recuperate and escape from the complexity of the modern United States. The central feature of the southwestern United States that enthralled everyone from archaeolo- 23 Thea’s “Indian Play” in The Song of the Lark gists, to tourists, to Willa Cather herself, was the presence of sites of Anasazi ruins, known simply as “cliff-dweller” ruins.4 These structures, actually built into the rock face, were abandoned hundreds of years before the first white settlers arrived in the Southwest. Archaeological evidence shows an agrarian culture that had evolved a settled, domestic lifestyle. The exact fate of the former occupants of these dwellings has never been determined , adding a compelling layer of historical mystery to the region. On a national level, this interest in the cliff-dweller ruins reflected not only a need for another trajectory of exploration but a very real sense of ambiguity regarding the whole project of empire, both within the borders of the United States and abroad. Michael Tavel Clarke asserts, “The failure of the Cliff Dwellers contradicted American faith in the foreordained victory of civilization over savagery and thus also challenged American faith in its new program of overseas imperialism” (400). The notion that a people as “culturally superior” as the Anasazi...