Authenticity and Tradition: Will/Can The "Real" Black Hawk Please Stand Up?
Competing Frameworks:
Nichols argues that despite the textual and editorial mish-mashing, readers “can indeed ‘tease out’ [Black Hawk’s] feelings and ideas” in the Life.[5] Although, he concedes, the text is clearly “a collaborative effort and not solely Black Hawk’s direct narrative,” readers can easily determine when editorial overreach has been exerted. For instance, Nichols points to clear moments of textual contradiction such as Black Hawk’s supposed dedication of the book to General Henry Atkinson and his description of events later in the text. Whereas the text credits Black Hawk with extoling “the kindness I received from you whilst a prisoner of war,” the main body of the text later oscillates without pause between “he received us kindly” and “we were now confined…and forced to wear ball and chain! This was extremely mortifying and altogether useless. Was [Atkinson] afraid I would break out of his barracks and run away?”[6] To Nichols, moments like this represent visible instances of Patterson or LeClaire’s interventions. As such, while readers should remain cautious attributing a narrative voice in any given passage, the “modern readers using some care can indeed find much that was Sauk and that was Black Hawk in this account.”[7]
Beyond the supposedly blatant moments of editorial intervention, however, Nichols contends that on the whole Black Hawk is locatable in the text for two additional reasons: first, because “the text includes data that neither the translator nor the editor could have known prior to the 1833 publication of the book;”[8] and second, because of the text’s repeated invocation and thick description of Sauk “tradition.” As he puts it:
Black Hawk's personality, cultural views, and self-justification all appear repeatedly. His recollections identify him with Sauk warrior responsibilities. As an openly unacculturated tribal member, he uses Indian customs to develop the story. Relating his individual military exploits, such as killings and scalpings, he seeks to legitimize his ideas and to justify his actions as examples of Sauk patriotism. When lodging complaints against his rival Keokuk, his focus remains on the latter's lack of traditional actions. Because Keokuk chose to negotiate and to surrender tribal lands, he is presented as unfaithful to tribal tradition and as ignoring his duties as a war leader. For Black Hawk, the need to protect the Saukenuk villagers and to remain true to his understanding of tribal military responsibilities came into conflict.[9]
To Nichols, then, the text’s consistency in presenting Black Hawk as a “traditionalist,” even when such “traditional” stances occasionally placed him at odds with fellow Sauks, suggests that these moments should be read as accurate depictions, self-conscious justifications that tracked with Black Hawk’s own actions.
However, as scholar Joshua David Bellin points out, this puts readers in an awkward spot, seemingly placing authenticity as in part contingent on its “otherness,” on its resistance to its editors and contemporary white culture—that which is not white, or not easily comprehensible to whites, becomes that which must be Indigenous. Such a position rests not only upon assumptions of a static, monolithic conception of tradition rooted in its foreign “backwardness,”[10] but it also counter-intuitively replicates the potential act of ventriloquism it seeks to move past: the genuine self must be “in a form…that preexists or precludes the contexts in which the text was created” and yet be found within the text.[11]
Nonetheless, although Bellin is critical of this approach, he maintains that authenticity can be found, but only if readers conceive of authenticity not as “some pure, determinate, unmediated essence that ‘speaks for itself’ outside of the contexts in which it speaks. Rather, the authentic Black Hawk (and Patterson, and LeClair, and so on) reside in, emerge through, the forces of intercultural conflict, accommodation, and interchange from which the Life itself was forged.”[12] In other words, Bellin uses a notion of “embeddedness” that refigures reader’s notions of authenticity by emphasizing how “all voices” are “equally products of and productive of situations of encounter.”[13] Thus, Black Hawk et al. are indeed in the text, but not necessarily recognizable in “single, identifiable threads”—their “realness must arise from, and consequently be sought in, the total tapestry,” shaped by the Indigenous-American encounter [14] If this formulation is abstract, however, the stakes are not. Bellin argues that without this reconceptualization of authenticity, and instead “to see Indian (and Euro-American) culture as ‘that which does not change, that which is not affected by contact,’ is to ensure the authentic Indian’s (or Euro-American’s) absence from the processes in which they were so deeply involved.”[15]
If Nichols offers in the affirmative that Black Hawk can be located, and if Bellin concurs, albeit with a different framework, there is yet a third, more recent approach by scholar Mark Rifkin that this exhibit draws upon extensively, which offers a hesitant “yes,” while refocusing the question in a more concrete way. For Rifkin, “the refusal of a static and ahistorical notion of authenticity need not require abandoning a notion of difference [between Indigenous and American epistemologies]; instead one can interpret the text as an effort to move between discrepant frameworks while making legible the conflict between them.”[16] Indeed, Indigenous dispossession, as theorist Robert Nichols’s Theft is Property! points out, “transforms nonproprietary relations into proprietary ones while, at the same time, systematically transferring control and title of this (newly formed property).” Thus, Indigenous dispossession is “not (only) about the transfer of property but the transformation into property,” by the settler-state.[17] Yet, rather than mooring these nonproprietary relations, and the Indigenous ways of knowing which underpin them, as a singular, stagnant, and essentialized concept, we can instead consider “traditional” Indigenous frameworks as continuously flexible relationships that offer social resilience, adaptive capacities, and collective continuance, which resist and respond to settler colonial impositions on Natives’ “own terms.”[18] Put another way, if Bellin seeks to reframe authenticity, Rifkin adds to this the need to reframe tradition in ways that allow readers to still see the discrepant epistemological frameworks of the US settler-state and Indigenous peoples, while not essentializing these differences. Prioritizing this perspective leaves readers less dependent on a true Black Hawk and more cognizant of how the Life “documents the limits and lacunae of the archive of imperial governance,” and insists upon Native persistence “despite its being rendered subaltern in U.S. law and policy.”[19]
Conclusion:
“Reintroducing Black Hawk and his text,” requires engaging with the question of if/what we can know Black Hawk and his/the text. This project suggests that we might be able to “locate” Black Hawk, while clarifying the risks attendant with this process. But it also highlights, without emphatically resolving the literary debate, that the question of the real Black Hawk need not distract from how readers can, perhaps more confidently, engage the text as a “documentary counterpoint to the texts of the treaty-system, sketching a set of regional native processes, practices, and principles that have no place in the atomizing political geography of Indian policy.” As Rifkin argues, “rather than abstracting Black Hawk from the narrative, or placing the text within a middle space of ‘encounter,’ one can track its attempt to mark the gap between U.S. and native notions of placemaking and political identity.”[20] The following section investigates the Life’s cartographic language as one way to “mark” this gap.
[1] Unless otherwise stated, for convenience all page numbers of The Life refer to the J. Gerald Kennedy, ed., (2008) version.
[2] Le Claire’s Certification in The Life.
[3] Roger L. Nichols, Black Hawk and the Warrior’s Path (Malden, Mass., 2017), 2nd ed., 170.
[4] Black Hawk to Le Claire in Le Claire’s Certification in The Life.
[5] Roger L. Nichols, ed., The Life (1999), xix.
[6] Black Hawk, The Life (2008), 88; Nichols, ed., The Life (1999), xviii.
[7] Nichols, ed., The Life (1999), xxi.
[8] Nichols, Black Hawk and the Warrior’s Path, 170.
[9] Nichols, ed., The Life (1999), xx.
[10] On the issue of “tradition,” see Jean M. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis, 2010).
[11] Joshua David Bellin, “How Smooth Their Language: Authenticity and Interculturalism in the Life of Black Hawk,” Prospects 25 (2000): 485-511, 487
[12] Bellin, “How Smooth Their Language,” 500.
[13] Bellin, “How Smooth Their Language,” 488 (“embeddedness”), 505.
[14] Bellin, “How Smooth Their Language,” 500.
[15] Bellin, “How Smooth Their Language,” 505.
[16] Mark Rifkin, Manifesting America: The Imperial Construction of U.S. National Space (New York, 2009), 77.
[17] Robert Nichols, Theft is Property!: Dispossession and Critical Theory (Durham, N.C., 2020), 30.
[18] Whyte, “Settler Colonialism, Ecology, and Environmental Injustice;” Rifkin, Manifesting America, 77, citing Simon Ortiz.
[19] Rifkin, Manifesting America, 108.
[20] Rifkin, Manifesting America, 80 (“counterpoint”), 77.