The Indian Who Made America

Alan Trachtenberg. Shades of Hiawatha: Staging Indians, Making Americans, 1880–1930. New York: Hill and Wang, 2004. 369 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $30.00.

Hiawatha, Gitche Gumee, Minnehaha: these are words familiar to many, though few may know why (certainly this reviewer did not). It all goes back to a Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem, "The Song of Hiawatha," and the peculiar fascination it evoked in Americans a century ago—some fifty years after its original publication. In an imaginative tour of American culture ranging from the art of Edward S. Curtis to the bizarre promotional schemes of Wanamaker's department store, Shades of Hiawatha explores the process by which these words, and the romantic fascination with things "Indian," were driven into the collective unconscious of Americans.

The book's persistent question is, why this fascination with an invented Indian legend at precisely the time of massive immigration from eastern and southern Europe? This juxtaposition of "East" and "West" will probably be the book's lasting legacy. The histories of immigrants and Native Americans have generally been treated separately. But Trachtenberg has hit upon a revealing (if occasionally odd) series of connections between the two. It is no coincidence, he argues, that the "open door" immigration policy that let in millions from all regions of Europe, coexisted with the allotment era in Indian policy, which sought to assimilate Native Americans into American society by breaking up their communal landholdings into individual units. In the minds of the American men he focuses on, images of pre-contact Native Americans could be used to assimilate Europeans into a new national culture even as contemporary Native Americans were driven off to boarding schools where they would lose their hair and, in theory, their traditional culture.

Beginning with an extended preface that provides an overview of the period's most relevant issues, the book scatters into six separate chapters that neither the lengthy introduction nor the non-existent conclusion manage to pull together into a convincing whole. Individually, however, they make the case that images of vanishing Indians did everything from expiate the guilt and racial anxieties of the mega-rich, promote commercial expansion, give Robert Frost the idea for a rather gruesome poem, and provide Jewish immigrants with compelling terms to negotiate their transition into American society.

The introduction, "Dreaming Indian," surveys Americans' habit of "playing Indian in fantasy and imagination" from the "beginnings of a discernable national consciousness in seventeenth-century New England" until the late nineteenth century (p. 13). The very debatable question of whether there was an incipient American national consciousness in seventeenth-century New England (and not Virginia?) accurately reflects the book's conflation of the northeast with America. Trachtenberg justifies this focus by pointing out that the "postfrontier West was in many ways an Eastern creation, as much in the myths of romance as in the new social realities." What the actual inhabitants of the West and South may have made of this evidently matters less than "the many ways that Eastern preemption of the West became a powerful nationalizing force" consisting of several "binding elements": "ideas of race and white supremacy, of the rightness of divisions between rich and poor among the whites themselves, of Anglo-Saxon superiority over recent immigrants, and of America's 'manifest destiny'" (p. xii).

Next, in "Singing Hiawatha," Trachtenberg unravels the origin and appeal of the poem after it first appeared in 1855. For those with any knowledge of Native American cultures, the poem is a terribly confusing hodgepodge of terms and tribes. This was rather deliberate. Longfellow did not want to accurately reflect the culture of any single group. Rather, he wanted his tale to appear to have both specific tribal roots and pan-tribal appeal when in fact it had neither. The poem's famous words are a perfect example of his technique. Each derives from a radically different linguistic group: Hiawatha is Iroquoian, Gitche Gumee is Algonquian, and Minnehaha is Siouan. The specifics...