Eclipse of Empires: World History in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture

Chapter 5 - Northmen and Native Americans: Longfellow’s Resistance to Eclipse

5 Northmen and Native Ameri­ cans Longfellow’s Resistance to Eclipse The arrival of European colonizers supposedly put an end to the era of the Indian. U.S.Ameri­cansimaginedthattheeclipseoftheNorthAmeri­canIndianworldby European and Euro-­Ameri­can empire had already been thoroughly accomplished by the nineteenth century. Although Native Ameri­ cans—like the ethnic Dutch community—stubbornly persisted in existing, necessitating continuing removals and military conflict, the idea of the vanishing Indian backdated their defeat and cemented the decline of their civilization. As Irving had done with his disappearing Dutchmen in A History of New York, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow drew from and perpetuated the cultural dominance of the vanishing trope in his long narrative poem, The Song of Hiawatha (1855).Hiawatha’sdisappearanceintothelandsoftheWestattheendofthepoem has been central to critics’ assessment of Longfellow’s problematic racial politics. Daniel Aaron, on the first page of the introduction to the Everyman edition of the poem, writes that Longfellow “accepted the Red Man’s inevitable extinction,” and Lawrence Buell, in the introduction to the Penguin Classics Longfellow collection , sums up the poem as an embodiment of “the discourse of savagism: that is,nineteenthcenturyliberalcomplacent-­sympatheticconstructionof Indianculture as noble, exotic, and doomed.”1 The Song of Hiawatha’s nationalistic popu­lar receptionillustratesthatthepoemmadeavailableafantasyofsuccession,ofpower passing from the vanished Indian to the Euro-­ Ameri­ can United States.2 However, I would argue that in addition to Longfellow’s complicity with the racial politics of vanishing, a competing strand of The Song of Hiawatha actually resiststhevanishingoftheIndianinwaysthatbeliethepoem’snineteenth-­century reception history, in which readers of­ten gravitated toward the racist messages of the poem. To be sure, Longfellow’s resistance to the vanishing Indian trope is impartial and imperfect, but the overall effect of the poem does not generate a resigned acceptance of Indian disappearance. Most narratives of imperial eclipse work to depict the culture of the eclipsed empire as vital and compelling, so that the dissolution of that culture can have maximum emotional impact and inspire 120 / Chapter 5 anxiety over the resemblances discovered between U.S. society and the eclipsed culture. The vitality of the eclipsed culture holds meaning precisely in its relationship to the downfall that will ultimately overtake it. In contrast, The Song of Hia­ watha not only works to depict the culture of the Ojibway (the people who now of­ten call themselves Anishinaabe) as vital and compelling but also makes some attempts to forestall its dissolution by keeping Ojibway language and presence in the landscape alive. Longfellow’s resistance to native vanishing becomes most clear when viewed against the backdrop of certain elements of the poem’s reception. Some early reviewers of his work obsessed over its Scandinavian sources. Longfellow, an accomplished linguist and dedicated student of world cultures, did indeed draw from Finnish, Swedish, Norwegian, and Icelandic influences. But the sheer eclecticism of Longfellow’s many foreign and domestic influences makes his reviewers’ concerted focus on the Scandinavian elements seem odd. This oddness can be explained by the fact that in the racial climate of this period, emphasizing Scandinavian influences of­ten resulted in an equal and opposite de-­ emphasizing of Native Ameri­can influences. During this period, a theory that Vikings had discovered and settled in New EnglandcenturiesbeforeconvenientlyredrewthemapofformerNativeAmeri­can possessions in the area. This “Vinland” hypothesis possessed enormous cultural cachet in the period from the 1830s to the 1890s, due in part to the racial politics inherent in the idea of a pre-­Columbian Viking foray into the Americas. The very concept of a European “discovery” of the New World, whether origi­ nally by Columbus or Leif Eriksson, sidestepped the question of prior inhabitants. Norsemen couldthereforeprovideaconvenientdistractionfromthetroublingspecterof Native Ameri­can land claims. The prevailing tendency to connect or even confound Norsemen with Native Ameri­cans in descriptions of the New England landscape functioned to reinscribe the land’s history as a Viking one rather than an Indian one; the former was altogether a far more comfortable prospect. The era of Viking empire had clearly ended and provided no hindrance to the rise of Euro-­ Ameri­ can empire. In fact, through their whiteness, Vikings actually helped to validate the racial ideology of Anglo-­ Saxonism that fueled U.S. manifest destiny. Native Ameri­cans, on the other hand, interfered both symbolically and physically with Euro-­Ameri­can territorial entitlement. So the U.S. government removed them from the physical land while U.S. writers removed them symbolically from the history of the land, replacing them in some cases with Norsemen.3 This po­ liti­ cally convenient substitution also...