Documenting tradition: Territoriality and textuality in Black Hawk's narrative

American Literature

Volumn 80, Issue 4, 2008, Pages 676-705

  Rifkin, Mark ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 67650164760     PISSN: 00029831     EISSN: 15272117     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00029831-2008-035     Document Type: Article

References (86)

1. See Benjamin Drake, The Life and Adventures of Black Hawk with Sketches of Keokuk and the Sac and Fox Indians and the Late Black Hawk War (1838; reprint, Cincinnati, Ohio: George Conclin, 1846);
2. Cecil Eby, "That Disgraceful Affair," The Black Hawk War (New York: Norton, 1973);
3. William T. Hagan, The Sac and Fox Indians (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1958);
4. and Roger L. Nichols, Black Hawk and the Warrior's Path (Arlington Heights, Ill. : Harlan Davidson, 1992).
5. For discussion of shared cultural patterns of peoples in the region, see Charles Callender, Social Organization of the Central Algonkian Indians (Milwaukee, Wisc. : North American Press, 1962).
6. Black Hawk's words were recorded by Antoine LeClaire, a Potawatomi interpreter who had been employed by the U. S. government in the region for several years, who then gave the manuscript to John D. Patterson, a local newspaperman, to edit. For critical commentary on the text's production, see Joshua David Bellin, "How Smooth Their Language: Authenticity and Interculturalism in the Life of Black Hawk," in Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies 25 (2000): 485-511;
7. H. David Brumble III, American Indian Autobiography (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1988), 39;
8. Laura L. Mielke, " 'Native to the Question': William Apess, Black Hawk, and the Sentimental Context of Early Native American Autobiography," American Indian Quarterly 26 (spring 2002): 246-70;
9. David Murray, Forked Tongues: Speech, Writing, and Representation in North American Indian Texts (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1991), 68-69;
10. and Mark Wallace, "Black Hawk's An Autiobiography: Production and Use of an 'Indian' Voice," American Indian Quarterly 18 (fall 1994): 481-94.
11. Bellin, "How Smooth Their Language," 488, 500, 487, 498. I would not offer my interpretation if available evidence did not suggest that the idea for the text was Black Hawk's and that the content of the narrative was also his.
12. See Donald Jackson, "Introduction," in Black Hawk: An Autobiography, ed. Donald Jackson (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1955), 24-31.
13. On the connection between as-told-to texts and native cultural forms and agency, see Brumble, American Indian Autobiography;
14. Kathleen M. Sands, "Narrative Resistance: Native American Collaborative Autobiography," Studies in American Indian Literature 10 (spring 1998): 1-18;
15. and Craig S. Womack, Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1999), 51-67.
16. On sociospatiality as a way of talking about the dynamics of conceptualizing and occupying space, see Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (New York: Verso, 1989).
17. Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge, Eng. : Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991), x, xiv.
18. For examples of scholarship that draw on the middle ground paradigm, see Joshua David Bellin, Demon of the Continent: Indians and the Shaping of American Literature (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2001);
19. Andrew R. L. Cayton and Fredrika J. Teute, eds. , Contact Points: American Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi, 1750-1830 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1998), 1-15;
20. and Eric Hinderaker, Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673-1800 (Cambridge, Eng. : Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997).
21. Simon Ortiz, "Towards a National Indian Literature: Cultural Authenticity in Nationalism," Melus 8 (summer 1981): 8, 9, 11.
22. For differing discussions of native regional networks in the Great Lakes region, see Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Struggle for Unity, 1745-1815 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1992);
23. Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, A Gathering of Rivers: Indians, Métis, and Mining in the Western Great Lakes, 1737-1832 (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2000);
24. Jacqueline Peterson and Jennifer S. H. Brown, eds. , The New Peoples: Being and Becoming Métis in North America (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1985);
25. and Susan Sleeper-Smith, Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 2001). I have chosen the phrase "transtribal" over the more familiar "pantribal" because the latter connotes a coming together of different tribes or nations while the former more strongly emphasizes phenomena that cut across tribal identifications.
26. On native autobiography as definitionally outside the sphere of tradition, see Arnold Krupat, For Those Who Come After: A Study of Native American Autobiography (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1985), 21.
27. On tradition in the text, see William Boelhower, "Saving Saukenuk: How Black Hawk Won the War and Opened the Way for Ethnic Semiotics," Journal of American Studies 25 (December 1991): 333-61;
28. and Timothy Sweet, "Masculinity and Self-Performance in the Life of Black Hawk," American Literature 65 (September 1993): 475-99. Both critics, though, tend to discuss tradition as a closed system specific to a particular people rather than a set of regional regularities that changes over time.
29. I would like to thank Katherine Biers for helping me to clarify this point.
30. Black Hawk, Life of Ma-Ka-Tai-Me-She-Kia-Kiak, or Black Hawk (1833), in Black Hawk: An Autobiography, ed. Donald Jackson (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1955), 37. Further references will be cited parenthetically.
31. LeClaire is listed as a translator for the treaties of 1830, 1831, and 1832. See Charles J. Kappler, Indian Treaties, 1778-1883 (New York: Interland, 1972), 310, 350;
32. Vine Deloria Jr. and Raymond J. DeMallie, Documents of American Indian Diplomacy: Treaties, Agreements, and Conventions, 1775-1979, 2 vols. (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 2: 1252.
33. On Patterson, see Jackson, "Introduction"; Krupat, For Those Who Come After, 28-53.
34. For discussion of the circumstances surrounding the treaty of 1804, see Drake, Life and Adventures of Black Hawk, 49-62;
35. Eby, That Disgraceful Affair, 44-47;
36. Logan Esarey, ed. , Messages and Letters of William Henry Harrison, 2 vols. (1922: New York: Arno, 1975), 1:69-73, 1:100-101;
37. Hagan, Sac and Fox, 16-25;
38. Nichols, Black Hawk, 21-28;
39. Robert M. Owens, "Jeffersonian Benevolence on the Ground: The Indian Land Cession Treaties of William Henry Harrison," Journal of the Early Republic 22 (fall 2002): 405-35;
40. Anthony F. C. Wallace, Prelude to Disaster: The Course of Indian-White Relations Which Led to the Black Hawk War of 1832 (Springfield: Illinois State Historical Library, 1970), 17-23.
41. French, Spanish, and to some extent British authorities already had been made part of such native conventions in the area in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. See Hinderaker, Elusive Empires;
42. Murphy, Gathering of Rivers;
43. Sleeper-Smith, Indian Women;
44. Tanis C. Thorne, The Many Hands of My Relations: French and Indians on the Lower Missouri (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1996);
45. and White, Middle Ground. For the text's representation of prior Sauk relations with the Spanish, French, and English, see 45, 51, and 53.
46. Kappler, Indian Treaties, 74-75.
47. On the role of medals in the text and the region, see Kendall Johnson, "Peace, Friendship, and Financial Panic: Reading the Mark of Black Hawk in Life of Ma-Ka-Tai-Me-She-Kia-Kiak," American Literary History 19 (winter 2007): 771-99.
48. For discussion of the incommensurability of traditional native conceptions of land and Euramerican notions of property, see Eric Cheyfitz, The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from "The Tempest" to "Tarzan" (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1997).
49. For other moments at which this issue appears, see Life, 72, 89, 100-107, 142.
50. For an alternate reading of such moments, see Bellin, "How Smooth Their Language," 499.
51. On the civilization program, see Owens, "Jeffersonian Benevolence"; Jerome O. Steffen, William Clark: Jeffersonian Man on the Frontier (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1977);
52. Timothy Sweet, American Georgics: Economy and Environment in Early American Literature (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2002);
53. and Anthony F. C. Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1999).
54. For discussion of the Sauk hunting/planting cycle, see Charles Callender, "Sauk," in Handbook of North American Indians: Northeast, vol. 15, ed. Bruce G. Trigger (Washington, D. C. : Smithsonian Institution, 1978), 649-50;
55. Jeanne Kay, "The Fur Trade and Native American Population Growth," Ethnohistory 31 (autumn 1984): 265-87;
56. Nichols, Black Hawk, 10-12;
57. Esarey, Messages and Letters, 37.
58. and Nichols, Black Hawk, 35, 65.
59. On Sauk warfare, see Callender, "Sauk"; Drake, Life and Adventures of Black Hawk, 13-35;
60. Thomas Forsyth, "An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Sauk and Fox Nations of Indians Tradition," in The Indian Tribes of the Upper Mississippi Valley and Region of the Great Lakes, 2 vols. , ed. Emma Helen Blair (1911; reprint, Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1996), 2:183-245;
61. Nichols, Black Hawk, 1-20;
62. and Wallace, Prelude to Disaster, 5-9.
63. For an excellent discussion of how Black Hawk's narrative explores normative Sauk masculinity and employs the traditional figure of the warrior, see Sweet, "Masculinity and Self-Performance. "
64. Forsyth, "Account of the Manners and Customs," 186.
65. For discussion of the working of the Sauk clans, council, and moieties, see Callender, "Sauk";
66. Callender, Social Organization;
67. Major Morrell Marston, Letter to Reverend Dr. Jedidiah Morse, in Blair, Indian Tribes of the Upper Mississippi Valley and Region of the Great Lakes, 2:139-82;
68. Nichols, Black Hawk, 9-12;
69. The use of the term chief here is a bit misleading. While Keokuk achieved a position of respect as a warrior and sources from the 1820s suggest that at some point he became the head of the ki-šho-ha, one of the two moieties in which members of all twelve clans participated, neither role would have given him the authority to speak for the Sauks in matters of diplomacy or trade; nor was he a leader of one of the twelve clans. On Keokuk's rise to power before and after 1832, see Drake, Life and Adventures of Black Hawk, 68, 119-42;
70. R. Douglas Hurt, The Indian Frontier, 1763-1846 (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 2002), 183;
71. Nichols, Black Hawk, 68-69, 104;
72. Marston, Letter, 156-57;
73. Thomas L. McKenney and James Hall, History of the Indian Tribes of North America, with Biographical Sketches and Anecdotes of the Principal Chiefs, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: John Grant, 1933), 2:85.
74. Nichols, Black Hawk, 100, 104-5;
75. "Report of the Indian Bureau," H. doc. 2, 22nd Cong. , 1st sess. , 183;
76. In the winter of 1828-29, a number of settlers took up residence in Saukenuk, but the process of formal sale did not begin until 1829. The main purchaser in 1829 was George Davenport, the local trader, who bought an astounding amount of land- in excess of two thousand acres. See Black Hawk, Life, 104;
77. and Nichols, Black Hawk, 83-90.
78. Deloria and DeMallie, Documents of American Indian Diplomacy, 1251;
79. "Report of the Indian Bureau," 173-74, 180-91;
80. My portrait of prophet politics is drawn primarily from Dowd's A Spirited Resistance. On Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh's movement, see also R. David Edmunds, Tecumseh and the Quest for Indian Leadership (Boston: Little, Brown, 1984);
81. Hurt, Indian Frontier, 116-24;
82. and Timothy D. Willig, "Prophetstown on the Wabash: The Native Spiritual Defense of the Old Northwest," Michigan Historical Review 23 (autumn 1997): 115-58.
83. Nichols, Black Hawk, 105;
84. "Report of the Indian Bureau," 185-86, 189, 192, 196;
85. "Report of the Indian Bureau," 184-86, 196.
86. The "Prophet" who came to Saukenuk in 1807 is Main Poe, a Potawatomi chief who was seen as possessing spiritual power, was a close ally of Tenskwatawa, and was well known among the Sauks. See R. David Edmunds, "Main Poc: Potawatomi Wabeno," American Indian Quarterly 9 (summer 1985): 259-72.