Native American Literature by Sean Teuton

Author:Sean Teuton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780199944545
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2017-10-09T16:00:00+00:00

Antiquarians and Indian salvage

To succeed, Native American Studies had to tear free of the “salvage anthropology” that shaped the European study of indigenous people from the first moments of contact. As early as 1527 when Cabeza de Vaca wandered around Texas and published his detailed account of Native Americans, such explorers have sought to understand the worlds of indigenous peoples, but they did so usually in ethnocentric terms, and through the eyes of the conquerors. The Old World voraciously consumed proto-anthropological accounts, numbering Native people of the Americas among the most studied people in the world. John White thus entered an already engrained tradition when he arrived with the 1585 Roanoke Colony of North Carolina and created the first known European depictions of Native Americans in North America, and by 1608 to aid his trade and mining mission John Smith began to publish his account of Native people in Virginia. In 1620 William Bradford began his record of Plymouth wherein he includes careful study of the colony’s indigenous neighbors with an eye toward converting them to Christianity.

By the eighteenth century North American settlers began to make Native Americans the focus of their studies, with intellectuals such as Cadwallader Colden writing his History of the Five Indian Nations (1727) and James Adair his History of the American Indians (1775). In 1791 William Bartram published on his extensive travels in the indigenous Southeast. One of the best-known antiquarians was Thomas Jefferson, who, in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), described excavating and examining Native American burial remains in earthen monuments on his estate. An early member of the American Antiquarian Society established in 1812 and peopled by many American founders, Jefferson discussed the necessity of antiquarians to study, collect, and catalogue, that is, salvage, the ancient Adena and Hopewell monuments on the Ohio River before settlers plowed them under.

Of course the question of whether Europeans truly could understand the histories of these indigenous peoples, let alone whether they had the right to desecrate Native American burials, did not arise. Long before their arrival in the Americas, Europeans had invented the interdependent concepts of savagism and civilization. Civilization, in a manner, needed savagery to affirm its superiority. For this reason the savage had to remain, if only in memory. Native people thus existed as relics who demanded collection. In fact, like many North Americans, Jefferson believed not only that contemporaneous Native Americans bore no relationship to America’s ancient earthworks, but also that his era’s savage Indians had actually exterminated the continent’s ancient, advanced race of “moundbuilders.”

Along with the concept of savagism, the idea of the Vanishing Indian drove the collection and study of Native objects and peoples. As a discovered remnant of unchanging, primitive man, the Indian would melt before the tide of American progress. He would leave the land to civilized people, who evolved in time, possessing both a history and the intellectual means to record it. North Americans who crossed the frontier, such as Superintendent of Indian Affairs Thomas

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