Medicine Bundle: Indian Sacred Performance and American Literature, 1824–1932 (review)

De Lancey W. Gill. WOMAN AND CHILD, BOTH IN NATIVE DRESS WITH ORNAMENTS, CHILD READING BOOK. 1900. Cocopah tribe. Black-and-white photograph. Courtesy of the National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution (GN 02824B).

For scholars of American literature and culture, the premise of Joshua David Bellin’s Medicine Bundle—that “Indian performance … has long played a significant, indeed a definitive, role in the constitution of America”—may not seem exceptionally new (15). Native American influence on Euro-American art, politics, and culture in the nineteenth century has been detailed in numerous works over the last thirty years, including Robert Berkhofer’s The White Man’s Indian (1978), Philip Deloria’s Playing Indian (1999), and Alan Trachtenberg’s Shades of Hiawatha (2004), among others. Where Bellin covers new ground is in his consideration of tribal sacred performance alongside more mainstream representations of Indianness, as well as his emphasis on the reciprocal nature of white-Indian interaction. While Native ceremonial traditions (which Bellin refers to as “Indian medicine”) helped shape a white American identity, likewise Euro-American language, ideologies, and performance practices (what Bellin calls “white medicine”) simultaneously “played a role in the constitution of revised and revitalized Indian identities” (8). Bellin terms this site of mutual identity formation the “medicine bundle”: “a dynamic and inventive arena from which neither party, Indian nor white, can emerge without sharing and shaping the other’s medicine” (9).

By reading written and performance texts from a century that saw radical changes in the cultures and geopolitical borders of Native and non-Native peoples alike, Bellin demonstrates how the medicine bundle’s processes of co-creation are at the heart of the lives and literatures of this continent. In each chapter, he illuminates how particular sacred performances interacted with their secular counterparts to effect changes and adaptations in both cultural locales. In chapter 1, the Mandan Okipa ceremony vies with George Catlin’s attempts to represent it in writing, painting, and pageant. In chapter 2, Bellin reconsiders the assimilationist rhetoric of Memoir of Catharine Brown, a Christian Indian, of the Cherokee Nation (1824) in light of Cherokee women’s centrality to sacred dances. Considering Brown’s performance of Euro-American domesticity alongside Cherokee traditions reveals how she “adapted colonialist conventions to carry not the form but the force of the traditional” (127). In his final chapter, Bellin argues that Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West show, Lakota performances of the Ghost Dance, and autobiographical narratives of two “show Indians” (Luther Standing Bear and Black Elk) interacted to revise and regenerate Plains Indian identity in the early twentieth century.

Medicine Bundle offers valuable contributions to the fields of American literature, American studies, and performance studies. Bellin’s ability to synthesize disparate critical traditions into a coherent methodology for reading popular and neglected historical texts deserves much recognition. However, his model of intercultural interaction is disconnected from the political stakes he acknowledges in the work of nineteenth-century Native writers and performers. Insisting that Indian and white medicine “are coeval and coequal” in the medicine bundle seems at odds with the later claim that Native peoples are literally performing for their lives during this era of increased governmental oppression and abuse (65). Considering the radical discrepancies in political power and living conditions between Native and Euro-American peoples during the time period, can there really be “no absolute difference between the performance of medicine by Indians and by whites” (9)? Lacking a satisfactory discussion of this question, Medicine Bundle’s analysis of Euro- and Native American identity formation, though astute and persuasive, falls short of groundbreaking.