Captive Utterance: Black Hawk and Indian Irony

NEIL SCHMITZ Captive Utterance: Black Hawk and Indian Irony This is the text, Black Hawk: An Autobiography (1833), edited by Donald Jackson, an Illini Book from the University of Illinois Press, now entering the canon in American literature, coming in after The Narrative of the Life ofFrederick Doughss (1845), taking its place in the category of representative nineteenth-century American autobiography . John Neihardt's Black Elk Speaks (1932), once here, eloquent, beloved, is no longer canonical. Scholars (Robert Sayre, Sally McCluskey , Michael Castro, William Powers) have shown how significantly intrusive Neihardt was, writing the powerfully figurative beginning and ending of Black EWc Speaks. It is Neihardt, not Black Elk, who says at the splendidly Cooperian close of the text: "you see me now a pitiful old man who has done nothing, for the nation's hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead" (BE 276). Black Hawk, it might be said, now speaks in the place where Black Elk spoke, delivers his captive utterance, his entrusted discourse, through a similarly suspect agency: an Anglo editor, John Barton Patterson ; a mixed blood (French/Potawatomi) interpreter, Antoine LeClaire. Jackson's modern edition (1955) reissues Patterson's first edition with this important single change: Life of Ma-KaTai-Me-She-Kia-Kiak, or Black Hawk becomes Black Hawk, An Autobiography. How Black Hawk effectively speaks in Patterson's first edition, that text, title and all, against what Anglo-Indianist constraints, with what distinct Indian irony, to what end, this indeed is the issue. In his several readings of Black Hawk: An Autobiography, Arnold Krupat has pointed out Patterson's structuring and emplotment of Black Arizona Quarterly Volume 48 Number 4, Winter 1992 Copyright © 1992 by Arizona Board of Regents issN 0004-1610 Neil Schmitz Hawk's text. "Native American decline is the necessary condition for the comic ascent of Euroamerican civilization," Krupat writes, "and it is by means of this particular structure—the apparent tragedy as actual comedy—that the silent, absent editor speaks his acceptance ofprogressivist ideology, confirming the inevitability of Indian defeat in the manner of western autobiography" (TCA 49). The first documentary sentence of Black Hawk's narrative is surely Patterson's: "I was born at the Sac Village, on Rock River, in the year 1767, and am now in my 67th year" (41), and the whole of the final apostrophe, which has this contradictory statement, is surely also Patterson's: "We will forget what has past—and may the watchword between the Americans and Sacs and Foxes, ever be—'Friendship!'" (154). Patterson's text is valedictory, concedes the Conquest, provides a Farewell Address, wants to know about Mrs. Black Hawk, what Black Hawk thinks of slavery, his opinion of General Winfield Scott, speaks to Anglo-American interests. There is another text, Krupat allows, "gestures in Patterson's book that noticeably validate a certain alterity or difference, a relinquishment of full translation that yields, if not quite an Other voice yet still an Other viewpoint" (VM 151-52), but what it says, how it speaks—perhaps we should say, how it operates, what it does, this Krupat doesn't get into. In locating and specifying Patterson's Jacksonian Indianizing, we should not lose the substance of Black Hawk's resisting text, its contrary logic, its contestation. This is also true for Black Elk's visionary texts, which Raymond DeMallie has recollected and rearranged in The Sixth Grandfather : Black Elk's Teachings Given toJohn G. Neihardt (1984), important texts still there for our understanding. Black Hawk's text is defiant, litigious, maledictory. It forgets nothing : "I had not discovered one good trait in the character of the Americans that had come to the country" (60). It shows its manacle: "What do we know of the manner of the laws and customs of white people? They might buy our bodies for dissection, and we would touch the goose quill to confirm it, without knowing what we are doing" (87). It despises the interpreter. "We passed away the time making pipes, until spring," Black Hawk relates of his imprisonment at Jefferson Barracks in 183233 , "when we were visited by the agent, trader, and interpreter...