Ponteach, or the Savages of America: A Tragedy (review)

Robert Rogers was more renowned in his own time as a military leader than as a writer, leading a successful colonial militia known as "Rogers' Rangers" during the French and Indian War (1754-63). Off the battlefield, his forays into authorship were primarily dedicated to cultivating this image of martial achievement; he wrote two reasonably successful books on North America, one a broad historical account of the land and the Indigenous people and the other a collection of his own journals and firsthand observations. The review of his A Concise Account of North America (1765) in the Critical Review suggests that "the picture which Mr. Rogers has exhibited of the emperor Ponteack is new and curious, and his character would appear to vast advantage in the hands of a great dramatic genius." His subsequent dramatic work Ponteach, or the Savages of America: A Tragedy (1766) was panned by critics and was most likely never performed. This work has received increased attention in recent years because of its singular and sympathetic depiction of its First Nations hero, a fictionalized version of the real-life Ottawa leader Pontiac. This edition, edited by Tiffany Potter, is an important resource for studies in eighteenth-century British colonial representations, Indigenous studies, and work on transatlantic culture and literature.

Rogers was born in Massachusetts in 1731, but remained dedicated to the Loyalist cause until his death in London in 1795. In his final years, he was in and out of debtors' prison and battled alcoholism. Even during his periods of military achievement, he was pursued by allegations of misconduct and frequently found himself in debt. Potter suggests that his position was marginal to transatlantic British culture, existing within and outside of both British and colonial American authority. As a result, she argues, his text is "a document of resistance," a hybrid discourse that presents Ponteach as a man whose actions were largely "imposed upon him by the negotiated fictions of a prescriptive culture that, in defining itself as superior, required that resistance be located in acts outside of its social and linguistic control, limiting others to marginal speech and acts of violence or other extremity" (34-35). Rogers's efforts to humanize Ponteach are meant to "communicate the tragedy of the dehumanizing colonial relationship that [he] reports" (3). While it may be difficult to conceive of a powerful military figure in the British army as peripheral to the interests of empire and ambivalent about its goals, Potter's contextualization and the play itself bear this out convincingly.

The "Ponteach" that Rogers presents is not, Potter notes, the same as the historical Pontiac, but the play is nonetheless inspired by his life and the events surrounding the conflict that bears his name. Pontiac's Rebellion, also known less sympathetically as "Pontiac's Conspiracy" (1763-66), was a widespread First Nations resistance to British policy following the Seven Years War, which concluded with the French surrendering much of their North American possessions to Britain. For many indigenous people, this transfer of land was bewildering and frustrating, since it was not French land to give in the first place, and the new relationship that the British tried to force on the people they saw as their conquered subjects was drastically different from the smaller scale, interdependent trade network of the French. Potter delves further into the complex origins of the war and provides information on the enigmatic Pontiac himself. While relatively little is known about him, most accounts of the time depict him as an intelligent man who was virulently opposed to British control of his peoples' land. It is hard to know the extent to which his supposed ambition and arrogance were projections of British anxieties and expectations. Rogers's depiction of him is informed partly by his own encounter with the man, but also clearly by the protagonist of Oroonoko, which was popular again at that time.

The play's...