Native Acts: Indian Performance, 1603-1832

10. Editing as Indian Performance: Elias Boudinot, Poetry, and the Cherokee Phoenix

[10] Editing as Indian Performance Elias Boudinot, Poetry, and the Cherokee Phoenix Theresa Strouth Gaul Elias Boudinot (Cherokee) appeared before New England audiences on numerous occasions over the course of his career as a spokesman for Cherokee rights. He first undertook a speaking tour of New England in 1826, gathering funds for the proposed publication of the Cherokee Phoenix, a newspaper he would edit from 1828 to 1832.1 He returned to the New England lecture circuit in 1832, delivering speeches representing the Cherokee Nation’s position in its conflict with the U.S. government over removal, a crisis that reached a peak in that year with the Supreme Court’s decision in favor of the Cherokees in Worcester v. Georgia.2 Little is known of Boudinot’s public performances on these occasions, but a letter penned by author Louisa Jane Park offers a tantalizing insight into his manner of presentation and its reception. In April 1832, Park, accompanied by several younger girls and a servant, attended an event at the Federal Street Church in Boston which featured a number of orations on Cherokee rights. Speakers included Congressman Edward Everett, minister Lyman Beecher, activist and author William Apess (Pequot), and Boudinot. As she described in a letter [282] Theresa Strouth Gaul to her mother, Park’s young companions found Boudinot a particularly disappointing performer: [The previous speaker] was followed by Mr Elias Boudinot—a swarthy, independent-looking gentleman, drest like other people, to the great astonishment and disappointment of Caroline Knowles and her companions; I could scarcely persuade them that this was one of the Indians they came to see; little Charlotte Coolidge seemed to think she had been imposed upon, and declared she “would not have stirred a step if she had known”; mighty was her wrath at not beholding a “real wild Indian with his hair streaming down his back, a tomahawk in his hand, and a wampum belt, making a speech to us in Cherokee.” What especial edification they thought of deriving from such an harangue, I know not. Mr Boudinot was educated at Yale College, is the Editor of the Cherokee Phoenix, and talked like a man of sense and education. He has a fine command of language, but there was nothing figurative in his style; and his address was very long, sometimes dry and uninteresting.3 Boudinot’s perceived failure to represent Indianness on a Boston stage takes on added complexity when one considers his performance in relation to an earlier spectacle involving Boudinot: the burning of his effigy in a New England town seven years earlier. In 1825, his fiancée Harriett Gold, a member of a prominent white family of Cornwall, Connecticut, announced her engagement to her relations and townspeople, who knew Boudinot from his residence as a student at a local mission school. In a wave of anti-amalgamation furor, a gang of youths gathered on the village green and set fire to what Gold described in a letter as a “painting of a beautiful young lady and an Indian.”4 Given dominant modes for visually representing American Indians in the early nineteenth century and Gold’s underlining of the word “Indian,” one can safely assume that the Indian depicted on the painting displayed all Editing as Indian Performance [283] the stereotypical qualities of Indianness—“hair streaming down his back, a tomahawk in his hand, and a wampum belt”—that Boudinot refused to perform on the stage in Boston. These two moments in Boudinot’s history underline the potential and perils of Indian performance in the 1820s, a decade characterized by mounting controversy over the question of Indian removal and public fascination with “Indian dramas” on the stage.5 For at least some members of his Boston audience, Boudinot’s failure to meet Anglo-American criteria for Indianness undercut the credibility and power of his performance. In Cornwall, stereotyped notions of Indian identity trumped even the facts of his distinguished record as a scholar at a local academy, his conversion to Christianity, and contemporaries’ acknowledgment of his polished appearance.6 When representing himself, Boudinot refused to “play Indian.”7 When depicted by whites, he was reduced to the stereotypical savage of captivity narratives, who imperiled white civilization via his sexual threat to white womanhood and whose body must be purged from the nation’s borders. These diametrically opposed responses to his public presentations and representations must have rendered Boudinot acutely...