The Demon of the Continent by Bellin Joshua David;

Author:Bellin, Joshua David;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

manifests, more clearly than volumes of idle and empty professions, our intentions toward [the Indians]. . . . Our professions have been loud, our philanthropic exertions may have been great, but our selfish regard to our own interest and convenience has been greater, and to this we ought to attribute the steady decline, the rapid deterioration of the Indians. We may be told of their constitutional indolence . . . destining them to be forever stationary, or rétrogradant; but while remaining monuments and vestiges, as well as historical records of unquestionable authority, assure us, that a few centuries ago they were . . . a great, a prosperous, and a happy people; we ought not to forget that injustice and oppression have been most active among the causes which have brought them down to their present deplorable state.

Written in 1830, the year in which Schoolcraft was pinning the Indian Removal Act on “time and circumstances,” this passage reveals that the ethnologic story of the Indians as a “race, doomed by inscrutable destiny” belongs not within the canons of invariable law but within a legacy of acts aimed at the Indians’ “utter extermination.” Indeed, James takes on Schoolcraft directly in his introduction. Referring to an article of Schoolcraft’s that reads, “we are among those who think that [Indian] customs and manners, laws and observances, have not materially changed, at least since the days of Cabot and Hudson,” James counters such “Unchangeable Character of the Indian Mind” logic with his own explanation of Indian decline.35 Moreover, James’s sentence reading “we may be told of their constitutional indolence, destining them to be forever stationary,” leads one to believe he also intends to contextualize the words of a main force behind both ethnologic research and Indian removal: Schoolcraft’s patron, Cass, who had portrayed the Indians in April 1827 (scant months before the Tanner-James collaboration began) as a people wholly “stationary,” who pass their lives in “listless indolence” and are “destined to disappear.” (That James may have meant to indict Cass is strengthened by an episode in the Narrative, one of the few to finger individual evildoing, in which Tanner reports that Cass plied him with rum to test whether he had inherited his adoptive race’s supposedly constitutional intemperance—a bitter commentary on governmental encouragement of the alcohol trade and on ethnology’s discourse of genetic determination.) The Tanner narrative, in sum, is concerned both with the politics of its own fashioning and with the political landscape within which ethnology could seem to transcend such considerations. Schoolcraft’s reaction against it—his portrayal, in particular, of Tanner as a man so overcome by “Indian notions” as to fit rather than fight the paradigm of Algic Researches—can thus be traced to his intolerance of any story that might expose his own.36

And in this respect, the most tantalizing aspect of the Tanner-Schoolcraft relationship is the prospect that the stories Schoolcraft called his own were themselves forged from that relationship. As Sayre points out, it is reasonable to think that Schoolcraft’s interpreter in the late 1820s may have “aided in the collection and translation of Ojibwa tales.

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