Native Acts: Indian Performance, 1603-1832

1. Lying Inventions: Native Dissimulation in Early Colonial New England

[1] Lying Inventions Native Dissimulation in Early Colonial New England Matt Cohen Truth is a Native, naked Beauty; but Lying Inventions are but Indian Paints, Dissembling hearts their Beautie’s but a Lye, Truth is the proper Beauty of Gods Saints. Roger Williams, A Key into the Language of America (1643) “‘Indian as performance’ is not an idea that has caught on,” writes Craig Womack, “unless one is referring to notorious fakers—the likes of Grey Owl and Jamake Highwater.”1 Womack ’s opposition to the utility of “Indians as performance” opens a host of questions, not only about the many meanings of performance or acting—to the discussions of which Native America, past and present, has much to contribute—but about the politics of embodied representation. Those questions resonate from disciplinary discussions in the academy to the performance of Indianness in contemporary media and courtrooms . The performative lens seems at once to verify Indianness and to undermine the possibility of identity-based definitions. But Womack’s mention of “fakers” also raises the question of simulation or dissimulation: given almost any definition of [28] Matt Cohen “Indian,” it may be possible to forge an Indian identity. Such concerns have a long history. Focusing on their manifestation in early colonial New England, I argue that claims of deception are hotspots for thinking about the utility of performance as a category of analysis no less than the historical dynamics of cultural conflict and dispossession. In his seminal work on the ethnohistory of early colonial eastern woodlands Native societies, James Axtell argued against widespread colonial European claims that Indians were born liars. Axtell maintained that Native speakers could not have deceived in this way, because they lived in an oral culture. While Natives were “notoriously taciturn among Europeans,” Axtell writes, nonetheless “as peoples without writing they believed in the inviolability of the spoken word, particularly in public councils and treaties.”2 Apart from the odd technological determinism that underlies such an assertion—that writing makes possible verbal deception—the numerous examples of Native performance discussed in this volume suggest that Axtell overstates his case. Recent work on material forms of representation among indigenous Americans (such as paths, bark inscriptions, and wampum) suggests the extent to which the aural and the inscribed worlds intertwined.3 Europeans like Roger Williams, in such depictions of Indians as the stanza with which this chapter begins, certainly represented Indians for their own ends, yet here Williams depicts both truth and deception as available to Natives. To examine questions of deception or epistemological uncertainty is vital to an understanding of Indian performance because in order to extend our knowledge of Indian agency in the past, we need to acknowledge that Natives can deceive like other humans. My analysis of Indian deception, then, riffs on both Williams and Womack. Womack and many other Native critics Lying Inventions [29] have emphasized the roles of property and space in the study of indigenous American representation: the question of when or whether Indians dissimulate is inseparable from claims to ownership or use of land. Yet no less important in studying Indian or European performances are the historically specific notions of performance holding sway at a given moment in the past. And finally, today’s uses of the term performance, uses that fuel Womack’s dismissal, might by that same emotional token call on us to locate performance theory that resonates with Native intellectual goals and debates today. My object is not to define performance so much as to suggest that its utility lies in how it makes us think about the temporality of analysis. It demands historicization, in this case an understanding of the complexity of seventeenth-century ways of thinking about performance, imitation, and dissimulation. Performance also demands transhistorical thinking, toward which end I read several individual episodes of Indian acting through the lens of both historical circumstance and present-day arguments from performance theory. If a performance mediates conscience and context through a body, it also mediates the past and the future through the present. The problematics of performance in the seventeenth century continue to shape both the structure and the content of anxieties about Indian performance today. If, as Michael Taussig argues, there is a persistently “elusive pattern of mimesis and alterity underscoring colonialism,” New England still exhibits that warp and weft.4 The tools of Native Studies, ethnohistory, and performance theory highlight those patterns. In this essay...