Questions of Archive and Method in Transatlantic Studies

In Kate Flint's capacious book, The Transatlantic Indian, 1776–1930, Britons and native North Americans do quite a lot of ocean-crossing, seeing and being seen. Englishmen head to Montana to hunt game, while their missionary brethren head to Canada to hunt souls among the Cree. In the 1840s nine Ojibwa and fourteen I owa Indians traveled in the other direction. Once in the British Isles, they became live features in George Catlin's popular exhibition of Indian artifacts. (Bill Cody's similarly contrived Wild West Show at the end of the century was even more popular.) Pauline Johnson, "poet, fiction writer, journalist, performer, half Mohawk and half English" (276), travels from her home on the Six Nations Reserve in Canada to England, where she reads her work and displays her person in both evening wear and native costume. Charles Dickens's famous tour of the US, the novels of Mayne Reid, the impact of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha (1855) in England, the racial politics of Punch's illustrations of Indians and their English admirers—Flint's book is full to bursting with fascinating episodes in which Britons and North American native people encounter one another in fact and fiction. Flint is working with a very long nineteenth century here, reaching back to eighteenth-century and early Romantic images and forward to the modernist treatments of D. H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley, but the heart of the book is solidly Victorian in its chronology and orientation. At the same time, the dates that bookend Flint's survey—the Revolution to the threshold of the "American Century," we could say—remind us that British relations with North America's Indians are inextricable from Britain's uneasy and intimate relation to the US.

One notable effect of looking at Indians through a British prism is to bring British Canada more fully into the picture than is usually the case in US-based studies. I mentioned Pauline Johnson, but another fascinating treatment is of the little-known Gilbert Parker, born and educated in Canada, and the author of Translation of a Savage (1894), a novel about Lali, daughter of a First Nations chief "translated" to England when she follows her betrothed, a British trader, to his home. In Flint's skilled analysis, it is the kind of text—at once profoundly ideological and exploratory of fissures and ambivalence in the ideological structure—that conveys some of the complexity of its cultural moment. Translation of a Savage testifies, as indeed do most of Flint's sources, to the "serviceability" of the Indian for a multitude of acts of self-definition (I allude to Toni Morrison's classic argument about the Africanist presence in US literature). To my mind, the most important argument from Flint's book—not a new argument exactly, but newly configured—is that Indians, real and fantasized, were central figures in the geopolitical and geocultural developments internal to the anglophone Atlantic world. Canadian culture is a key player in this story, of course; one can get a sense of how key if we look at moments in Flint's exposition when the faithful Canadians stand in for the "civilized" imperial relation to native people that the bad child—the US—could have been predicted to betray from its rebellious beginnings. As the geographer D. W. Meinig reminds us, however, the geopolitical entity known as Canada emerges from antagonisms between Britain and (largely) British North Americans, antagonisms that always involved native people as an ever-present problem but also a point of leverage. Canada

was a thoroughly British creation, and its larger geocultural premise of an encompassing, assimilating British North America would, as was understood to some degree then, have to cope not only with an ever-pressing neighbor to the south but with an existing nation within: the original Canada for...