Survivance and Fluidity: George Copway's The Life, History, and Travels of Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh

Between 1847 and 1851, George Copway (b. 1818), a member of the Ojibwe Nation and a native Canadian, found himself riding huge waves of popularity in the United States and abroad.¹ The Methodist missionary, writer, lecturer, and Indian rights activist First gained public attention through the 1847 publiCation of his autobiography, The Life, History, and Travels of Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh (George Copway), which was enormously well received and went through seven editions by 1848. Over the next four years, Copway additionally published two revised and appended versions of his autobiography, a tribal history of the Ojibwes, and a travel narrative; began his own weekly newspaper in New York; and proposed to the U.S. Congress a plan for the establishment of an independent Indian territory.² With multiple books and a newspaper in print, plentiful speaking engagements on Native themes up and down the Atlantic seaboard, and several noteworthy publication Firsts, George Copway had become a bona fide member of the inner circles of America's literary, political, and social elite. He was intimately familiar with such famous figures as the ethnographer Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, historian Francis Parkman, and writers James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whom Copway purportedly inspired to write The Song of Hiawatha, a romanticized poem about the Lake Superior Ojibwe. with such varied and distinguished accomplishments, Copway was certainly one of the most prolific and visible Native authors of his time.

However, Copway's numerous literary and social contributions have largely remained overlooked by present-day scholars. Because of the general downward trajectory of Copway's life, his constant (and often disreputable) self-reinventions and identity changes, as well as his (perceived) failure to project any identity beyond that of the "Noble Christian Savage"—the lowly and inferior Indian struggling through the aid of Christianity to become "white"—scholars have tended to criticize Copway and his body of texts from a purely psychological standpoint.³ For example, Bernd C. Peyer argues that Copway was caught between two irreconcilable worlds. Peyer notes that Copway "consistently acted out both systems of belief in his various public guises, one as Kahgegagahbowh, 'Chief of the Ojibwa Nation,' and the other as the Reverend George Copway, 'Missionary to his People'" (Tutor'd 236) and that this "frustrating attempt to shape his identity according to his audience's whims . . . forced him to undergo various personality transformations that finally broke his spirit" (Tutor'd 224). Donald B. Smith has even gone so far as to note that Copway, as his life progressed and he purportedly became increasingly more disconnected from both his Ojibwe and European identities, "began to lose all touch with reality" ("Life" 25) and that, consequently, his works should be cited "very cautiously" ("Life" 29) and read with "considerable sympathy" ("Life" 28).⁴

Such readings position Copway as a transculturated individual with a conflicted sense of self who is unable, in both his life and his texts, to incorporate his Ojibwe heritage into the white, antebellum American society that was thirsty for exotic Indian curiosities. These readings conflate the events of Copway's life with the material in his texts, add a dash of speculation about his mental processes, and finally provide an unsupportable reading of Copway's psychological state rather than his literary endeavors. This is in part because these critics provide analysis that spans Copway's entire body of texts rather than offering sustained analysis of any one of his works.

However, when taken independently, Copway's texts, particularly his 1847 autobiography The Life, History and Travels of Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh, can be viewed as venues through which he forges a new possibility for Indianness, a self-determined identity that defies and resists the static national, racial, social, and intellectual categories imposed by nineteenth-century hegemony. Rather than viewing his texts (and life) as failures to successfully integrate Indian, Christian, and "civilized" literary identities into a hybridized whole, I argue that Copway is instead creating a space within his autobiography in which an Ojibwe...