Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination (review)

In Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination, Shari Huhndorf excavates a pattern of cultural imperialism in American life that first emerged in the late nineteenth century and persists to the present day. The phenomenon of "going native," Huhndorf writes, involves the "widespread conviction that adopting some vision of Native life in a . . . permanent way is necessary to regenerate and to maintain European-American racial and national identities" (8). The strength of this book is not only in the variety of examples from film, popular literature, and museum exhibitions that Huhndorf offers to document the prevalence of this dynamic but also in the complexity that she ascribes to it. This book deftly explains how "going native" has been at once a means of expressing European-American ambivalence about the subjugation of indigenous peoples, a way of founding a national mythology that places white Americans as the natural heirs to the continent, and a strategy for concealing those same claims to racial dominance. Most compellingly, Huhndorf shows that when European Americans depend upon Native images and culture for rejuvenation, they do so in a way that displaces the presence of actual, living Native peoples and that ignores the political and economic realities of those lives.

Going Native builds upon previous studies of primitivism, such as those by Marianna Torgovnick and Helen Carr, yet attends to the cultural and political consequences of primitivist appropriation in ways that few other critical works do. The most lasting contribution the book makes may be in Huhndorf's demonstration of how the portrayal and even emulation of American Indians has played an indispensable role in the figuration of U.S. nationalism since the turn of the twentieth century. Huhndorf pursues this argument by relying on a series of "case studies," each representative of a different historical period and each encompassing a terrain of representation contested through several examples. This method allows her simultaneously to offer a comprehensive history and to provide illuminating historical and literary interpretations of cultural phenomena. While several of these subjects will be familiar to the student of American studies, the lens through which Huhndorf examines them consistently produces new insight. For instance, her reading of the presence of American Indians at the Centennial Exposition of 1876 and the Columbian Exposition of 1893 shows how Natives were transformed during this period into progenitors of white America in a way that would soon offer support for the nation's new imperial ventures abroad. At the same time, Huhndorf also brings to the fore matters that have too often been left in the background of U.S. cultural history, as in her chapter on the figuration of Eskimos during the interwar period of Arctic exploration.

Equally significant, Huhndorf's shrewd analysis goes beyond simply identifying and then castigating those European Americans who have disregarded the repercussions of their cultural appropriation. The result is that Going Native persuasively demonstrates how such acts can be much more revealing of their historical moment than they at first might seem. The most impressive payoff of this kind comes in her treatment of Asa "Forrest" Carter, a former member of the Ku Klux Klan who fabricated a Cherokee past in order to produce a popular memoir, The Education of Little Tree, in 1976. In order to understand why a white segregationist might "go native" in this way, Huhndorf turns to Carter's previous novel, Gone to Texas, a popular western about the "outlaw" Josey Wales later made famous by Clint Eastwood. Here Huhndorf finds a recurring identification between displaced Southern whites and American Indians through a sense of shared victimization at the hands of the Northern government following the Civil War. Gone to Texas, therefore, makes legible the manner in which Little Tree positions Southern whites as the sympathetic heirs to disappearing Indians. In both works, this imagined link naturalizes white...