Natives, Nation, Narration: Reading Roanoke in the American Renaissance

The Hiawatha wampum belt, a record of "the founding ofthe L·ague ofthe Iroquois. " From Harriet Maxwell Converse (Yo-ie-wa-noh), Myths and Legends ofthe NewYork State Iroquois, Education Department Bulletin no. 43? (Albany: Univ. ofthe State ofNew York, l$o8),plate W,facingl40. "Such as these the shapes they painted / On the birch-bark and the deer-skin. " illustration by Frederic Remington, from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Song of Hiawatha (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, Riverside Press, 1890), facing 146. Natives, Nation, Narration: Reading Roanoke in the American Renaissance PENELOPE KELSEY Mohawk spiritual leader Tom Porter (Sakokwenionkwas or "The One Who Wins") relates a story about early American history that seems particularly relevant to any discussion of Native Americans and the American Renaissance. When Porter was growing up, his father shared with him a tribal anecdote about a meeting between a group of colonists, including Benjamin Franklin, and a cadre of Mohawk leaders near Albany, New York, in 1754· Mohawk oral tradition says that the colonists met the Mohawks in order to learn how the Iroquois constructed their government and so be able to follow its model. A painting held in the State Museum of New York confirmed this story for Porter when he found it in the late 1960s : it portrays a group of Mohawk leaders holding up wampum belts to Franklin, and the event is dated l754-IA(lditionally, a number of archival documents indicate that, in drafting the 1787 Constitution , the American colonists consulted numerous Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois, authorities on the Iroquois Great Law (Cayuga leaders were boarded in the Philadelphia vicinity for convenient consultation), and that this relationship between the Six Nations, not the example ofthe Greeks, was the primary basis for American democracy. Despite several welldocumented books on the subject, however, Americans remain resistant to the notion that the U.S. government is based preESQ \V.49\ 1ST-3RD QUARTERS | 2003 149 PENELOPE KELSEY dominantly on a tribal, non-European model.2 This selective ignorance illustrates the erasure of Native presence—in politics , culture, literature—that began with the inception ofthe nation and continued through the American Renaissance and into the present. One professed purpose of American writers in the midnineteenth century—the period of the American Renaissance as defined by F. O. Matthiessen—was to create a national literature specific to the conditions ofthe United States and equal in sophistication to the literary traditions of Europe. In building such a literature, these writers could logically have turned to the subject matter immediately at hand: not only the American landscape but also the peoples who preceded the EuroAmericans (and with whose continual presence in the landscape an "American" literature seemingly would have to contend ). What often is overlooked in the critical narrative of this moment is the fact that there were hundreds of tribal literary traditions, in richly related oral and written forms, already in existence at the time of the Renaissance. Unfortunately, no writer ofthe period engaged these tribal traditions in a manner that honored both their origins and those of the United States. In l855> Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, tutored by Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, wrote an epic poem about an Anishinaabe (Ojibwe/Chippewa) brave with an Haudenosaunee name: Hiawatha. (Ironically enough, Hiawatha was the Haudenosaunee warrior who assisted the Peacemaker, the Huron prophet who brought the Great Law of Peace to the Six Nations . Longfellow likely did not know he was invoking the national discourse that was the primary basis for American democracy , but his oversight presents us with a beautiful opportunity for reading against the grain.) What we learn from the example of Longfellow and his fellow writers is that, when Natives are not completely erased in American Renaissance writing, they are garbled or, in the case of Thoreau's work, vanished. Tribal cultures become a collective mishmash subject to the writer's flights of fantasy or merely disappeared relics interesting only as distant objects of study. Moreover, this use of Native culture and peoples as literary commodities constantly encodes the Native as the object, not the subject, of this 250 NATIVES, NATION, NARRATION literary discourse. Allowing for flexible temporal parameters in designating the American Renaissance, which seems necessary in order to include...