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Introduction: Map and Territory, Space and Place
- University of Nebraska Press
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[95] Introduction Map and Territory, Space and Place In January 1890 Commissioner of Indian Affairs Thomas Jefferson Morgan declared that “pupils” in federally supported Indian schools “should understand the significance of national holidays and be permitted to enjoy them.”1 He listed eight such occasions and gave specific instructions for how Indian students were to celebrate three of them: Washington’s Birthday, Arbor Day, and Franchise Day, a new holiday memorializing the passage of the Dawes General Allotment Act, which was to be celebrated on 8 February as an occasion marking “the possible turning point in Indian history.” To Morgan, celebrating Franchise Day and Washington’s Birthday in quick succession should not be a cause for concern, for “no . . . opportunity should be lost by which Indian youth may be imbued with ideas distinctively national as distinguished from those that are tribal.” He saw “a natural sequence in the exercises of the two days. The Indian heroes of the camp-fire need not be disparaged,” he wrote, “but gradually and unobtrusively the heroes of American homes and history may be substituted as models and ideals.”2 The outcome of this program, however, was less an exact substitution than something more interactive, porous, and hybrid. In attempting to prescribe the proper celebration of holidays Morgan was aware that on such occasions, cultural identity is performed and reinforced. Performance, according to theater historian Shannon [96] Jackson, “derives from a Greek root meaning ‘to furnish forth,’ ‘to carry forward,’ ‘to bring into being.’”3 Holidays involve the ritualized and repetitive “furnish[ing] forth” of certain details: on Arbor Day, for example, we plant trees. He realized as well that holidays could be effective means of “bringing into being” certain substitutions based on selective forgetting. Celebrating George Washington’s birthday, for example, rather than the anniversary of Chief Joseph’s return to Idaho—hearing tales of “the hardships, dangers, and heroisms , by which the country of which [Indian students] are now to be a part has reached such a position” rather than the story of a local hero’s principled resistance—would, Morgan hoped, cause students to forget “the fact that they are Indians.”4 Remembering and forgetting, however, are selective and opportunely fickle processes, especially when they are tied to intercultural holiday observances such as those observed by training schools or celebrated in frontier communities. In such places, as Joseph Roach observes, ritual celebrations and performances can “illuminate the process of surrogation as it operated between the participating cultures . The key . . . is to understand how . . . societies . . . have invented themselves by performing their pasts in the presence of others. They could not perform themselves, however, unless they also performed what and who they thought they were not.”5 These instances of performance , surrogation, intercultural interaction, and selective forgetting are vividly apparent in accounts of how the Fourth of July was celebrated in Lewiston and at Fort Lapwai in 1889. Although Commissioner Morgan included Independence Day in his list of federally sanctioned holidays, he did not issue precise instructions for its observance, presumably because the rituals of its celebration were so familiar. Since the early 1880s, on the Nez Perce Reservation, celebrants had participated in activities long associated with summer solstice gatherings—horse racing, dancing, drumming, and gaming—even as they had attended local patriotic celebrations featuring oratory, fireworks, and picnic feasts. In the neighboring town of Lewiston white territorial citizens frequently invited Native riders, drummers, and dancers to join their celebrations of their nation’s birthday. The 1889 holiday may have seemed to be an esland [3.238.235.181] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 06:07 GMT) [97] pecially significant “turning point” of the sort Morgan imagined, both for the citizens of Idaho Territory, poised on the cusp of statehood , and for the Nez Perces, who were considering the transformative consequences of the allotment. Yet as I demonstrate, the anticipated transformations—of frontier territory into modernizing state and of Nez Perce warriors into citizen-farmers—were divisive issues and proceeded in fits and starts. In the case of allotment the process was incompletely successful. At the “Grand Celebration of the Anniversary of American Independence at Lewiston, I.T.” in 1889, James Reubens had been invited to give the keynote patriotic address.6 It might seem odd that the citizens of Lewiston would so honor a representative of the Nez Perces, with whom they had recently been at war. In fact, just twelve years earlier, as war threatened, rumors had circulated that...