Lost in Conflation: Visual Culture and Constructions of the Category of Religion

Issues of stereotyping with regard to Native American or First Nations peoples have been the subject of scholarly works from a number of different fields, and the element of religion often has loomed large in these treatments.¹ Yet even in an era when the general public is acutely attuned to such issues, stereotypes of First Nations peoples continue to be presented in a number of different public contexts, including, as I will discuss below, European American actors appearing "brownface" or "redface" in a theatrical production. Perhaps more surprisingly, stereotypes of Native American religions also continue to be presented in selected religious studies textbooks, particularly introductory ones.

In a previous work I broached the question of how Cherokee people in North Carolina have negotiated stereotypes of "American Indians" as part of a long history of being involved in the tourist trade.² Building on the idea of resilient images that are at odds with reality yet are imbedded deeply as cultural tropes, I begin to explore with the present essay how selected representations resonate with examples from the larger field of visual and narrative tropes that inform academic and popular constructions of putative First Nations "religions" and "religion." I am keen to investigate by what means particular stereotypes continue to prevail and in this context consider how general scholarly notions about First Nations religions may have been formed. Of course, I am not seeking to identify an urtext containing such imagery in order to pin upon it centuries of concept formation. Rather, by investigating the relationship of a chosen set of selected images to one another, I aim to consider possible marketing strategies, to invoke the apt metaphor of the cultural marketplace, that have prolonged the shelf life of these images far beyond their expiration date.

I begin with the assertion that Theodor de Bry's 1590 publication of Thomas Harriot's A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia influenced European readers' emerging conceptions of "religion" by selectively presenting customs of First Nations peoples in the form of highly ramified visual images. The volume featured engravings by de Bry that were based on theatrum mundi-style watercolor portraits painted by John White during his 1585 voyage to the colony of Roanoke on the coast of present-day North Carolina. White's images depicted the Algonquian-speaking inhabitants of that region, whom scholars today refer to as "North Carolina Algonquians."³ When Paul Green wrote his influential 1937 outdoor "symphonic" drama The Lost Colony about the disappearance of Roanoke's inhabitants, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright drew from these earlier works to create a fanciful scene of "Indian ritual." The play continues to be performed seasonally in coastal North Carolina, on Roanoke Island at the Fort Raleigh National Historic Site, the location of England's first settlement in the "New World." In 2007-8 a traveling exhibition of White's watercolors from the collection of the British Museum visited the North Carolina Museum of History, where it was conjoined to a display about the de Bry engravings as well as an exhibit relating the play's history.

Together, at that moment in time, these works comprised a literal, physical, and serial conflation of images. This amalgam of exhibits strikingly (and unintentionally) illustrated the way in which, over the course of more than four centuries, these works have comprised a serial conflation of visual depictions of First Nations practices, identified as "religion," that has become imbued with powerful cultural cachet. I submit that though the drawings, engravings, and play describe late sixteenth-century "Indians," they continue to influence constructions of the category "religion." This is because such images and the ideological ciphers that they contain resonate with contemporary authors and audiences; more broadly, they remain constituent elements of generalized teleological grand narratives of the United States as well as other nations. Evidence of the contemporary influence of these images can be found not only in The Lost Colony but also in permanent exhibits in major museums, in textbooks, and on educational websites, as I will demonstrate below.

In...