In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Chapter 1 The Christian Origins of the Vanishing Indian Laura M. Stevens They are wasting like the morning dew. —Eleazar Wheelock (1768) The history of the United States is a history of one nation's construction and many native peoples' deaths. Much of American culture is a meditation on this double-edged fact. The fascination with Indians can be seen, then, as a long eulogy, voicing the combined guilt and relief of selfabsorbed mourners made wealthy by an unloved relative's death. From James Fenimore Cooper's 1826 novel Last of the Mohicans to Kevin Costner 's 1990 film Dances with Wolves, the nonindigenous peoples of America have remained riveted to the spectacle of indigenous people passing away.1 Many of the qualities and images considered essentially "American"— freedom, aggression, virtue, the frontier—have found expression through reference to American Indian deaths. MichaelRogin has argued that "conquering the Indian symbolized and personified the conquest of the American difficulties, the surmounting of the wilderness. . . . Not the Indians alive, then, but their destruction, symbolized the American experience."2 America, as a territory or a culture, would hardly exist withoutvisionsof Indian death. As the most telling evidence of manifest destiny, dying Indians are also vehicles of affect directed toward varied ideological ends. That is to say, they have been central to nineteenth-century sentimental literature, to Jacksonian politics, and more recently to environmental movements.3 Suggesting "an uncompromising power they deemed benevolent," Americans catalyzed the process, described byAndrew Burstein, through which "Sentiment and coercive power, long seen in opposition, merged into the attractive combination that sentimental democrats have paraded at home and abroad ever since."4 The impact of this image has extended beyond the United States, influencing the conflicting emotions of other imperialists . Dying Indians are one manifestation of what Renato Rosaldo has 18 Laura M.Stevens termed imperialist nostalgia, "where people mourn the passing of what they have transformed," so that "putatively static savage societies become a stable reference point for defining (the felicitous progress of) civilized identity."5 Standing for conquest, images of dying Indians have helped to rationalize aggression, absolving responsibility through sad depictions of inevitable demise.6 The link between Indians and death is so fixed that texts of late twentiethcentury popular culture have needed only to display Indians to induce melancholy. Consider the "Keep America Beautiful" public service commercials on pollution in the 1970s, which featured the weathered face of Iron Eyes Cody in feathered headdress, shedding a single tear. Consider also the Indian in Oliver Stone's 1994 film Natural Born Killers. He is the only person whom the ultraviolent Mickey and Malloryregret murdering. His ghost haunts his killers, creating rare feelings of remorse.7 Like the house in Steven Spielberg's Poltergeist (1982), America is haunted by the Indian burial grounds on which it is built, the same graveyards upon which Philip Freneau, "the Poet of the American Revolution," built much of his literary reputation.8 Why have Americans so persistently described the deaths of native peoples ? Why this convergence of satisfaction and sorrow, of inevitability and guilt? How is it that carnage comes to be rendered with such affective control ? Why are Indians, especially perishing ones, so convenient to the stories and longings ofAmerica?While much scholarship has pointed out the role that the vanishing Indian played in assertions of manifest destiny, this provides only an incomplete explanation. In particular, we need to consider the earliest manifestations of concern with Indian mortality, that which is found in missionary writings.9 Although they were not nearly as successful as their French and Spanish counterparts at converting Indians, English missionaries wrote a great deal about their desire to save the souls of America's natives. They and their supporters, who lived in Britain aswell as America, produced large numbers of sermons, journals, letters, and fund-raising tracts in the colonial period. While manyof these texts reached only a small group of readers, enough of them enjoyed a broad enough audience—through broadsides, extracts in newspapers, and sermons—to affect the ways the British felt about American Indians. Missionaries have given us some of our earliest elegies to the vanishing Indian. Thoroughgood Moore, a missionaryfrom the Societyfor the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, wrote of the Iroquois in 1705, "They waste away, and have done ever since our arrival among them (as theysay themselves) like snow against the sun, so that very probably forty years hence there will scarce be an Indian seen in our...

Share