On Native Ground: Indigenous Presences and Countercolonial Strategies in Southern Narratives of Captivity, Removal, and Repossession
Eric Gary Anderson, George Mason University
Essay Sections:
Locating Native Ground in Southern Texts:
To the extent possible, I look at "earlier" Native southern
ground through the lenses developed by contemporary American Indian literary
critics and theorists; but I acknowledge that such ground can be very
difficult to locate, geographically as well
as
textually. The consequences of Indian Removal are far-reaching: to remove
entire
cultures from their
home places is to remove and forever change many different though overlapping
national literatures. Today, the majority of Native writers affiliated
with
the South live and work elsewhere. And many of the earlier texts I examine
are composed by non-Native authors; these texts include a body of neglected
pre-1850 captivity narratives that concern themselves with Natives both
menacingly present and uncannily absent (depicted as memories, ghosts,
or otherwise removed peoples). These narratives, in which Indian captors
(sometimes
with African American allies) remove white (and sometimes African American)
people, are in fact a steady presence throughout pre-1850 southern literature.
Though narrated by white Europeans and EuroAmericans, and in a few instances
by African Americans, these texts reveal non-utopian ways in which "the
South," in various ways and in spite of Indian removals, can be understood
as Native ground.
As Indian removal gets underway in the early 1830s, captivity narratives situated in the southeast continue to be produced, though the genre begins to show signs of exhaustion as its authors find it more and more difficult to convincingly present captive, dispossessed southeastern Indians as captors trading in and on white identity. Some of these narratives, like Mrs. Mary Godfrey's An Authentic Narrative of the Seminole War (1836), work as none-too-subtle Jacksonian propaganda; others, like the Narrative of the Life and Sufferings of Mrs. Jane Johns (1837), also set in Florida, commodify white women's suffering and white male grief in startlingly explicit ways. And both elide captivity altogether (though these texts continue to be generically categorized as captivity narratives) opting instead to depict local Indians as gangs of all-consuming homicidal psychopaths who need to be removed. That is, "Indian captivity" comes to signify "Indian removal."
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As Indian removal gets underway in the early 1830s, captivity narratives situated in the southeast continue to be produced, though the genre begins to show signs of exhaustion as its authors find it more and more difficult to convincingly present captive, dispossessed southeastern Indians as captors trading in and on white identity. Some of these narratives, like Mrs. Mary Godfrey's An Authentic Narrative of the Seminole War (1836), work as none-too-subtle Jacksonian propaganda; others, like the Narrative of the Life and Sufferings of Mrs. Jane Johns (1837), also set in Florida, commodify white women's suffering and white male grief in startlingly explicit ways. And both elide captivity altogether (though these texts continue to be generically categorized as captivity narratives) opting instead to depict local Indians as gangs of all-consuming homicidal psychopaths who need to be removed. That is, "Indian captivity" comes to signify "Indian removal."
As such, the Jane Johns narrative (like
various others) does not magically make American Indian
political or other perspectives newly visible or audible. It
does not offer
a clearly delineated map of Native southern ground. What it does
do, though, is situate southeastern Indians and white women alike
in ways more complicated than the above phrase ("gangs of all-consuming
homicidal psychopaths") suggests. Jane Johns is first introduced
in embryo, as an "unconscious participator" in an ambiguously
labeled "first
act of Indian tragedy," by which the narrator means Indian attack
against her parents. And, later, her own pregnancy is inseparable
from the Indians' most grievous attack against her, her husband,
and their house. When shot and scalped and burned, she is left
with wounds that provoke her doctor to exclaim "Merciful God!" Jane Johns's life history appears to be inseparable
from Indian
attacks.
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And even though this inseparability is presented as regrettable
and even horrifying, it also fails to clarify the differences between Indian
men and
white women. The narrative contains two tellings of the Indian attack on
the Johns place; the second telling comes to us more or less from Mrs. Johns's
perspective, though in the form of a third-person narration that suppresses
her voice just as it suppresses Native voices. In this narrative, one black
man has allied with eight Seminole Indians,
who speak "good English;" we're also told that Mrs. Johns knows at least
one Seminole phrase, and that any negotiations that take place can be done
in a common language. When Mrs. Johns is found by her father-in-law and his
friend, she's so badly wounded that she looks nonwhite: they think she's
an Indian, and they almost shoot her. All in all, this brief narrative focuses
on female desire in the face of suffering and loss—including loss predicated
on frontier confusions of racial identity.
This confusion is mirrored by the narrative's own confused generic identity. Ending abruptly with a supplication for money, this so-called captivity narrative turns out to be an appeal to readers' charity, or, less kindly, a panhandle. And, strictly speaking, we see escapes from Indians and deadly attacks by Indians, but Mrs. Johns is never actually taken captive; so is it even a captivity narrative? Granted, as I've already suggested, captivities in general become less explicitly about captivity per se, especially in early to mid nineteenth-century southern narratives, in part because of the obvious difficulties of pitching Indians as the removers of white people in the South at precisely the time that white people are removing Indians. At the same time, the confusions of identity I'm describing counter, at least as much as they shore up, Jacksonian nationalist certainties. In standing uncertainly at best on Native southern ground, the Jane Johns narrative muddies the waters and, as Patricia Yaeger puts it, "make[s] the usual expectations strange."
This confusion is mirrored by the narrative's own confused generic identity. Ending abruptly with a supplication for money, this so-called captivity narrative turns out to be an appeal to readers' charity, or, less kindly, a panhandle. And, strictly speaking, we see escapes from Indians and deadly attacks by Indians, but Mrs. Johns is never actually taken captive; so is it even a captivity narrative? Granted, as I've already suggested, captivities in general become less explicitly about captivity per se, especially in early to mid nineteenth-century southern narratives, in part because of the obvious difficulties of pitching Indians as the removers of white people in the South at precisely the time that white people are removing Indians. At the same time, the confusions of identity I'm describing counter, at least as much as they shore up, Jacksonian nationalist certainties. In standing uncertainly at best on Native southern ground, the Jane Johns narrative muddies the waters and, as Patricia Yaeger puts it, "make[s] the usual expectations strange."
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Frontispiece for Mary Smith Captivity Narrative, 1815
Essay Sections:
