On Native Ground: Indigenous Presences and Countercolonial Strategies in Southern Narratives of Captivity, Removal, and Repossession
Eric Gary Anderson, George Mason University
cite this page | printable version
 

Essay Sections:
Introduction | Locating Native Ground in Southern Texts | Conclusion | Recommended Resources

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."

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.

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."

Frontispiece for Mary Smith Captivity Narrative, 1815

Essay Sections:
Introduction | Locating Native Ground in Southern Texts | Conclusion | Recommended Resources

Published: 9 August 2007

© 2007 Eric Gary Anderson and Southern Spaces