"The Primitive Has Escaped Control": Narrating the Nation in The Heartsong of Charging Elk

In 1889 in Marseilles, France, one of the Oglala Lakota performing in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West awakens in the hospital after falling from his horse, left behind by the show that has traveled on to Italy. Abandoned in a foreign country where no one speaks his language, the protagonist of James Welch’s TheHeartsong of Charging Elk has exited the “safe” containment of Buffalo Bill’s history lesson—in which he was cast as “first citizen”—and with it has quite literally exited the narrative space of American national history and culture; the “primitive,” as Stuart Hall so poignantly puts it, “has escaped control” (187). Charging Elk escapes from the hospital and wanders around Marseilles for several days, finally arriving at a site that he recognizes as the place where the Wild West show had performed. He crosses the roundabout, walks up a wide street, eager to reach the field where the show had been staged. However, he finds that

There was nothing there. Not one tent, not one hawker’s stand, not even a fire pit where the Indian village had stood. He walked over to the large trampled circle of earth where the portable arena had been set up. The ground had been raked smooth. There was not a hoofprint on it, not one sign that the Indians, the cowboys, the soldiers, the vaqueros, the Deadwood stage, the buffaloes and horses had acted out their various dramas on this circle of earth.

(48)

Charging Elk’s “reading” of the former performance site reveals no trace, seemingly, of the show ever having been in Marseille. In vain, he looks for any evidence of the fire pits or the enactment of the drama of western conquest. However, he discovers that the enactment of dreams and fantasies does not leave any retrievable trace, and while the show was a real experience for him and the other performers who had cooked on those fire pits, the performance is only representative of something fabricated. Even though at first glance “there was nothing there,” Charging Elk remembers what had been there and reveals the presence of an absence. Competing against the powerful forces of a cultural narrative that enacts what will soon become the dominant story of the West (and by extension the nation), he cannot recover the material and social histories and experiences that have been erased. Yet, he is able to witness and expose how every attempt has been made to “rake smooth” any trace left by these histories—traces that might disrupt the official narrative of the American nation and its conquest of the West.

Extending the decolonizing work he began with Fools Crow and continued with Killing Custer, Welch interrogates in his last novel the relation between U.S. government policies of removal, extinction, and assimilation and the ways in which cultural and national narratives—as produced, for example, by the traveling Wild West show—work to “naturalize” how Indigenous peoples imagine themselves in relation to these narratives. The Wild West show as popular cultural production creates “the Indian,” literally removing Native Americans into the American (and European) imagination as “first citizens” of the nation, securely conquered within and tied to this nation’s creation myth. Although he was part of the enactment, by being left behind Charging Elk ends up not moving into the Euramerican imagination. Left behind like a ghost in this highly ambiguous space, Charging Elk exposes how the “Indian” is repeatedly produced as vanishing, quite literally, at the end of the show. Quite contrary to the narrative of the “vanishing Indian,” Heartsong conceptualizes cultural identity as becoming—an identity that is performed and conceived in relation to the fragmented memories and histories of his own culture, the representations of him as “exotic” and little more than a feathered creature, and legal and political regulations.

It is tempting to read Charging Elk’s being stranded in France, his sense of alienation and racialized otherness, as an allegory for the forced removal of Native peoples onto reservations. Imagining the Lakotas’ removal onto the Pine Ridge...