Vanishing America by Powell Miles A

Author:Powell, Miles A.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2016-11-13T16:00:00+00:00

The Ideal Indian

Writers could simultaneously connect wilderness destruction to the decline of white America and to the disappearance of Indians because increasing numbers of Euro-Americans had begun encountering the nation’s wilds by “playing Indian.” White Americans had a history of impersonating Indians that dated to the birth of the Republic, when the Sons of Liberty had donned Native American attire before boarding British merchant ships moored in Boston Harbor to hurl their cargo of tea into the sea. In the mid-nineteenth century Lewis Henry Morgan had continued this tradition of Indian mimicry when he and some colleagues broke into an abandoned Masonic lodge to form the Grand Order of the Iroquois. By the early twentieth century unprecedented numbers of Americans were taking part in this pageantry. And whereas their predecessors could be satisfied with putting on Indian costumes to board ships or occupy lodges, this new generation overwhelmingly donned the trappings of Indian culture to experience wilderness.27

No figure contributed more to the movement to encounter nature by playing Indian than Ernest Thompson Seton, the cofounder of the Boy Scouts of America. Born in 1860 in South Shields, County Durham, Seton emigrated with his family to Canada, where he became enthralled with the country’s “wild” nature and peoples. In the late nineteenth century, he emerged as an influential artist and author, with a focus on wildlife that sometimes stirred up controversy for his anthropomorphizing of his subjects. He also retained his fascination with Indian culture. This admiration only grew in strength when he read the American psychologist G. Stanley Hall’s theories concerning “recapitulation.” Hall believed that in order for an individual to experience healthy psychological development, she or he had to proceed through all of the phases of human social evolution. Thus, children must receive the opportunity to behave as “savages” in their youth, if they were ever to function as “civilized” citizens in adulthood.28

Partly in response to Hall’s work, Seton determined that North America’s white youths, and maybe even some adults, should stimulate themselves by venturing into wilderness and engaging in activities associated with Native Americans, such as fire making or archery. In 1902, after moving to the United States, and visiting the Pine Ridge reservations to study Sioux and Cheyenne practices, Seton established the League of Woodcraft Indians, which remained the nation’s most popular youth organization through 1910. He desired as a role model for this club “a man who was of this country and climate; who was physically beautiful, clean, unsordid, high-minded, heroic, picturesque and a master of Woodcraft, besides which he must be already well-known.” Seton concluded, “There was but one figure that seemed to answer all these needs: that was the Ideal Indian of Fennimore Cooper and Longfellow.” Interestingly, Seton chose as his archetype a fictionalized Indian from the nation’s distant past, rather than the living, breathing indigenous peoples who still resided on the land. This selection reflected a process by which white Americans began to associate America’s wilderness with vanished and mythologized “pure” Indians, rather

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