The Texts of Eugene O'Neill's The Fountain: Indigeneity, Stereotype, Survivance

Eugene O'Neill's anti-colonialist agenda in The Fountain (1925) is remarkable for its embodiment in a furiously agential Indian, Nano, who vanquishes and outlasts his tormentor, Juan Ponce de Leon. An "old Indian woman" endures too, mockingly. The play thus protests the genocidal fantasies that Gerald Vizenor calls "vanishment" and approximates Vizenor's "survivance," or "a sense of native presence over absence, nihility, and victimry." Essential to O'Neill's imagining of the survivant Indian is the dismantling of stereotypes, those that putatively ennoble and those that bluntly denigrate.