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Ghost Dancing in the Salon

The Red Indian as a Sign of White Identity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Michael Hatt
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Extract

In May 1885, the Apache chief Geronimo, along with three other chiefs and a large band of adherents, absconded from their reservation in Arizona and fled to the mountains of New Mexico. The reservation life that had been imposed upon Indians by the United States government was a life that endeavored to mold them into good citizens; they attended school and church, wore European style clothes, farmed rather than hunted, and gave up many Indian traditions. It was a life Geronimo and his followers were unwilling to endure, and after some years of uneasy equilibrium, the chief led a revolt that turned into the so-called ‘Apache War.’ Geronimo held out for over a year, and it was not until the summer of 1886 that the war ended, and the chief surrendered. Eighteen years later, in 1904, the old Apache appeared at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, the great World's Fair held in St. Louis, one of the grandest of the many such expositions staged in the late nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Here, he earned himself some money by charging fairgoers to have their photograph taken with him. There proved to be no shortage of whites eager to have a souvenir image of themselves posed with him; and others even bought the buttons off his coat as more tangible mementos of the old warrior.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 45 , Issue 177 , March 1997 , pp. 93 - 110
Copyright
Copyright © 1997 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

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References

Notes

1. Some of the material in this article is taken from "'To a Man, a Race, and a Cause: St. Gaudens and the Shaw Memorial,'" the Tomas Harris Lectures 1996, which I delivered at University College, London, in March of that year. I would like to take this opportunity to extend my profound thanks to Profes sor David Bindman and the History of Art Department at University College for inviting me to speak.

2. One might object to the term ‘Indian' on the grounds that it is racist; the more widely accepted, and more acceptable term, seems to be ‘Native American.' However, I wonder if the latter really is an advance. The aboriginal peoples of North America only become Native Americans after a colonial power has named that land mass ‘America' - and hence ‘Native American' is complicit with the colonial appropriation of the country just as ‘Indian' is. Moreover, the use of any homogenizing term, rather than the names of individual peo ples, like Zuni or Cherokee, is a problematic gesture. The solution would have to be something unusably cumbersome like ‘peoples of the geographical land mass that subsequently came to be America'! I therefore use Indian for two reasons: firstly, that the very difficulty of finding an acceptable term is a reminder of their status as a subject people of a colonial power, and, second, because Indian signifies the construction of the aboriginal in white discourse and the white imagination, and my topic here is actually the white represen tation of a native people.

3. J. Durham, "Cowboys and…," Third Text, 12, Autumn, 1990, p. 7.

4. D. G. Brinton, Races and Peoples: Lectures on the Science of Ethnography, New York, 1890, p. 253.

5. F. S. Drake (ed.), The Indian Tribes of the United States, 2 Vols., Philadelphia, 1891, Vol 1., p. 11.

6. H. J. Gans, "Symbolic Ethnicity: the Future of Ethnic Groups and Cultures in America," Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2:1, 1979.

7. The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 36, No. 856, 21 May 1892, p. 122.

8. H. Garland, "The Red Man as Material," Bookiover's Magazine, August 1903, p.196.

9. Quoted in W. E. Washburn, The American Indian and the United States: A Docu mentary History, 4 Vols., New York, 1973, Vol. 1, p. 435.

10. Ibid., p. 458.

11. G. Chakravorty Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Bas ingstoke, 1988, pp. 275-6.

12. Spivak, "Practical Politics of the Open End" in Sarah Harasym (ed.), The Post-Colonial Subject, London and New York, 1990, p. 108.

13. Spivak (note 11 above), p. 279.

14. See for example those cited in the Indian Commissioner's Report for 1891, reprinted in Washburn (note 9 above), pp. 560-564.

15. Spivak (note 11 above), p. 291.