Indian Puritan Missions
1 2018-03-27T13:43:13-07:00 Sheena Cox d081a74ba0f898541e9177c60c2e2a51804ce9e5 29561 1 Puritan mission John Eliot, known as the first to preach the Christian Faith in Indian Villages. For more information on early American Puritan missionaries: http://public.gettysburg.edu/~tshannon/hist106web/Indian%20Converts/the%20puritans3.htm plain 2018-03-27T13:43:13-07:00 Sheena Cox d081a74ba0f898541e9177c60c2e2a51804ce9e5This page is referenced by:
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2018-03-27T13:00:21-07:00
Native American Transformations
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2018-04-27T16:37:55-07:00
By: Sheena Cox
“Wichita Squaw in Summer Dress,” is a common representation of a Plains woman in the nineteenth century. Her bare chest suggests “natural wildness,” open sexuality, and a failure to assimilate to a modernizing nation. Her empty expression is symbolic of the “Stoic Indian,” and her necklace gives the photo a "tribal" quality. She sits as the antithesis of white, feminine purity.
Soule, an amateur photographer in the 1850s, found his claim to fame in 1868, when his photo “Scalped Hunter” was published in Harper’s Ferry Magazine. His photography style catered to the expectations of popular belief: stereotypical images on the Western frontier. His photos included Native Americans, Mexicans, and European immigrants, as well as landscapes, villages, construction sites, and military forts. By representing the Wichita woman in this manner, he contributed to the myth that Indigenous people were uncivilized and incapable of modernity or progress. This kind of image kept Indians in a static place in the American imagination.
Over time, ideas and images about Indigenous peoples have changed depending on colonial and national agendas. In the early American period Native American tribes were deemed the “lost” souls of the New World who desperately needed the guidance of Christian missionaries. In travel literature, captivity narratives, and other forms of print, Indians were depicted as peoples from heathen cultures, with a natural “wildness” that European immigrants might succumb to if they did not resist the evil temptations. Soule's work was an extension of this after the invention of the camera. Such rhetoric and images justified and reinforced dispossession, violence, gender roles, and Anglo superiority.
In the Revolutionary era, for example, Anglo colonists dressed as Native Americans to protest their grievances with Great Britain. This occurred most famously during the Boston Tea Party. Historian Philip J. Deloria writes, “In the national iconography, the Tea Party is a catalytic moment, the first drumbeat in the long cadence of rebellion through which Americans defined themselves as something other than British colonists.” Deloria’s Playing Indian shows how Anglo-American men found ways of representation and self-identification through fraternal organizations such as the Philadelphia Tammany societies, or the multiple Orders of Red Men. While Anglo-American settlers strived to feel a “natural affinity” for the land as the Indians did, they simultaneously brutalized and displaced Indigenous people from the land. According to Deloria, this contradiction exemplifies the image of Indians as noble savages:, “a term that both juxtaposes and conflates an urge to idealize and desire Indians and dispossess them.” Despite the mock play and dress, their actions towards Native Americans revealed how they despised them at the same time.
Eighteenth and nineteenth-century Enlightenment philosophies and western expansion, including into the Pacific, portrayed Indians as violent, cannibalistic, hyper-sexualized beings who ravaged Anglo settlements, and raped and tortured Anglo women and children. To depict the Indian in this way served the newly emerging American empire as some looked to expand economically and geographically.
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2018-03-27T14:14:06-07:00
Representations of Captivity
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2018-05-02T01:22:46-07:00
By: Sheena Cox
The photo, "German Sisters," is of two rescued Cheyenne captives. Their sufferings are clear from their pose and the expressions on their faces. The women are embracing each other in a similar way that white women captives were drawn in narratives from the 1830s. However, Germans in the mid to late nineteenth-century were suspected of having established a "kinship" type bond with the Comanche people. Even though the German sisters are considered "Anglo," their nature was thought of as more aligned with Comanche lifestyles than Anglo-Americans. This provides some context for why Soule photographed the German sisters. In the Anglo-American imagination, and his as well, German captives represented life on the Southwest frontier.
According to Scott Zesch's popular The Captured: A True Story of Abduction by Indians on the Texas Frontier, the "peaceful co-existence" ceased to exist by the 1860s and German captivity were reported consistently. All reports indicate that the captives were ages eleven or twelve, lived among Indigenous societies, and later rescued. The reports are so similar that the historian must question their authenticity, Which Zesch does not do. The Anglos producing these reports were motivated by settler colonial agendas. Soul's photograph represents the depiction held by nineteenth-century Americans about what was happening in Texas as they sought to migrate. Works like The Captured that still treat these narratives as accurate reports, and still circulate in history classrooms, contribute to the myth that defends the colonization of Texas.
Accounts of captivity circulated in the early American Republic and gained popularity in the early nineteenth-century. In 1838, the captivity narratives of Clarissa Plummer and Caroline Harris were published in New York by Perry and Cooke, an elusive publishing company. Little information exists on the publisher, and there does not appear to be any other publications beyond the two narratives under its name. The very purpose for its short life may have been to publish these stories. The allure of a quick profit is something to consider, but why publish captivity narratives, based in Texas, in New York at this time? Popular fiction perhaps? Likely not. Rather, the narratives have a political and national agenda as they play on social fears and justify colonial violence just as Soul’s representations of captives did three decades later.
The stories of Clarissa Plummer and Caroline Harris were dramatic retellings of the captivity accounts of Rachel Plummer and Cynthia Ann Parker. All the women in the narratives are Texas emigrants, captured by Comanche tribesman, and victimized on the brutal Texas frontier. These accounts also echo another tale, an Australian narrative written and published at the same time about a woman named Eliza Fraser. Fraser was captured by Australian Aboriginals in her emigration from Britain. The narratives mask colonial and imperial agendas through their emphasis on the “barbarous” other, Christian values, and white femininity.
“Never, no never could a human being of my sex be reduced to a more wretched condition. The old savage (whose companion I was not by compulsion to become) was, in person as well as disposition, the most ugly and disgusting of the human race; a wretch whose heart was callous to every human feeling; nay, one who could coolly and deliberately dash out the brains of the harmless new-born babe, it could not be expected could be moved to pity, or in any way affected by the tears of its distracted mother.”
Comparing images and narratives of captivity on a global scale helps us understand more about how and why this type of sensationalism was used? Each woman is a white Christian mother who inevitably watches as her children and husband are either murdered or lost to treacherous conditions, and then falls into the sexual servitude of “savage,” Comanche or Aboriginal men. The women are eventually rescued from captivity and share their stories of terror. The stories highlight one of the great fears and threats to white manhood that existed at this time, sexual encounters between white women and non-white men. Much of the Southwest remained settled by non-Anglo men, and as economic and social upheaval created uncertainty for the male patriarchy, the image of the non-white other was continually reinforced.
Although the accounts entertain the reader as a novel would, and are very obviously imagined, they nonetheless became firmly embedded in the American imagination and myth as it highlighted social anxieties during the time. They identified and reinforced categories of otherness in effort to define dominance and power as divinely Anglo. Historian Reginald Horseman argues that by the 1850s, an ideology of white superiority was firmly planted in the American mindset. In the wake of Jacksonian Indian Removal policies, captivity narratives, scientific journals, literary works, art, and photographs all helped reinforce racial and gendered stereotypes. The rhetoric also justified violence, dispossession, and displacement against non-white peoples as Anglo western migration increased.