The Transatlantic Indian, 1776–1930 (review)

Kate Flint’s The Transatlantic Indian is an important attempt at understanding the complex relationship between America’s Indians (meaning, for the most part, those tribes situated in what had become the United States and Canada) and British culture from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. It sets out to explore the Native American as a recurrent figure in the British imagination and as a fundamental image in the formulation of national mythologies in Europe as well as in the Americas. From the first chapter, what is at issue is the speed with which American popular culture (traveling exhibits, travelogues, adventure novels, etc.) circulated in the British Isles. In this circulation, we come to understand the figure of the American Indian as a moral emblem and see as well, in British reactions to them, a replication of many of the common attitudes toward Indians that existed in the United States. But we also witness certain differences in the British attitude toward Americas Indians, especially when they are used as a mechanism for understanding Britain’s political relationship with the United States. The point is that, in all this ambivalence, shifting images of the American Indians made them fundamental to the development of a national identity in Britain as well as in the United States.

Significantly, this book is also about Native Americans who have crossed the Atlantic. So, it is also concerned with the ways in which Native public figures have influenced, even if tangentially, Britain’s consciousness not only of Native peoples but also of their own national identities in relation to American national identity. As the first chapter argues, the figure of the Indian is “central to Britain’s conceptualization of the whole American continent” and is also “a touchstone for a whole range of British perceptions concerning America during the long nineteenth century and plays a pivotal role in the understanding and imagining of cultural difference” (2).

Even as Flint does much to interject in favor of actual Native Americans and their impact on British cultural politics, the book is still centrally concerned with Britain, British attitudes, and British texts rather than being focused on Indians. This is to say that a majority of the readings are American or British, and those that are not are mediated in clear and obvious ways by British or American intermediaries. The text is no less important, of course, for its relying on a framework that privileges British culture. In fact, its clear emphasis on non-Native sources is a function of the subject at hand, of the focus of the text, rather than any intellectual blind spot on the part of the author. In fact, Flint’s impressively nuanced readings of a broad array of texts demonstrate an expansive knowledge of literary traditions on both sides of the Atlantic. Moreover, her engagement with critical discussions centered in that nexus are no less impressive.

Flint’s second chapter argues that (nonnative) writers both in Britain and in the Americas pen melancholic accounts of American Indians as a mechanism for demonstrating their own capacity for sympathy. Along the way, Flint reflects on a familiar set of expected ideas about American Indians that are ubiquitous on this continent and also found their way into British conceptualizations of the Indian: the popular romances of the bloody savage or the disappearing Indian, for example. We learn that just as for American readers, Indians for British readers “were not real people; they were primarily ciphers. They stood in for a range of British—and European—projections about primitive peoples and about what constitutes ‘natural’ humanity” (51).

Chapter 3 deals wholly with George Catlin’s traveling exhibits in Britain in the 1840s. The fact that his exhibits had the unusual fortune of finding a more or less blank canvas on which to write the image of the American Indian resulted in their having a profound effect on British conceptions of Indians and on the project of nationalism in the United States. Flint explores...