"Indians": Textualism, Morality, and the Problem of History Author(s): Jane Tompkins Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Autumn, 1986), pp. 101-119 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343557 Accessed: 07-09-2016 20:09 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Critical Inquiry This content downloaded from 134.124.73.189 on Wed, 07 Sep 2016 20:09:23 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms "Indians": Textualism, Morality, and the Problem of History Jane Tompkins When I was growing up in New York City, my parents used to take me to an event in Inwood Park at which Indians-real American Indians dressed in feathers and blankets-could be seen and touched by chil like me. This event was always a disappointment. It was more f imagine that you were an Indian in one of the caves in Inwood Park to shake the hand of an old man in a headdress who was not overwhelmed at the opportunity of meeting you. After staring at the Indians for a while, we would take a walk in the woods where the caves were, and once I asked my mother if the remains of a fire I had seen in one of them might have been left by the original inhabitants. After that, wandering up some stone steps cut into the side of the hill, I imagined I was a princess in a rude castle. My Indians, like my princesses, were creatures totally of the imagination, and I did not care to have any real exemplars interfering with what I already knew. I already knew about Indians from having read about them in school. Over and over we were told the story of how Peter Minuit had bought Manhattan Island from the Indians for twenty-four dollars' worth of glass beads. And it was a story we didn't mind hearing because it gave us the rare pleasure of having someone to feel superior to, since the poor Indians had not known (as we eight-year-olds did) how valuable a piece of property Manhattan Island would become. Generally, much was made of the Indian presence in Manhattan; a poem in one of our readers began: "Where we walk to school today / Indian children used to play," and we were encouraged to write poetry on this topic ourselves. So I Critical Inquiry 13 (Autumn 1986) ? 1986 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/86/1301-0007$01.00. All rights reserved. 101 This content downloaded from 134.124.73.189 on Wed, 07 Sep 2016 20:09:23 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 102 Jane Tompkins "Indians" had a fairly rich relationship with Indians before I ever met the unprepossessing people in Inwood Park. I felt that I had a lot in common with them. They, too, liked animals (they were often named after animals); they, too, made mistakes-they liked the brightly colored trinkets of little value that the white men were always offering them; they were handsome, warlike, and brave and had led an exciting, romantic life in the forest long ago, a life such as I dreamed of leading myself. I felt lucky to be living in one of the places where they had definitely been. Never mind where they were or what they were doing now. My story stands for the relationship most non-Indians have to the people who first populated this continent, a relationship characterized by narcissistic fantasies of freedom and adventure, of a life lived closer to nature and to spirit than the life we lead now. As Vine Deloria, Jr. has pointed out, the American Indian Movement in the early seventies couldn't get people to pay attention to what was happening to Indians who were alive in the present, so powerful was this country's infatuation with people who wore loincloths, lived in tepees, and roamed the plains and forests long ago.1 The present essay, like these fantasies, doesn't have much to do with actual Indians, though its subject matter is the histories of European-Indian relations in seventeenth-century New England. In a sense, my encounter with Indians as an adult doing "research" replicates the childhood one, for while I started out to learn about Indians, I ended up preoccupied with a problem of my own. This essay enacts a particular instance of the challenge post-structuralism poses to the study of history. In simpler language, it concerns the difference that point of view makes when people are giving accounts of events, whether at first or second hand. The problem is that if all accounts of events are determined through and through by the observer's frame of reference, then one will never know, in any given case, what really happened. I encountered this problem in concrete terms while preparing to teach a course in colonial American literature. I'd set out to learn what I could about the Puritans' relations with American Indians. All I wanted was a general idea of what had happened between the English settlers and the natives in seventeenth-century New England; post-structuralism and its dilemmas were the furthest thing from my mind. I began, more 1. See Vine Deloria, Jr., God Is Red (New York, 1973), pp. 39-56. Jane Tompkins is professor of English at Duke University. She is the author of Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 (1985) and editor of Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism (1980). Her current work concerns the construction of male identity in American popular culture. This content downloaded from 134.124.73.189 on Wed, 07 Sep 2016 20:09:23 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Critical Inquiry Autumn 1986 103 or less automatically, with Perry Miller, who hardly mentions the Indians at all, then proceeded to the work of historians who had dealt exclusively with the European-Indian encounter. At first, it was a question of deciding which of these authors to believe, for it quickly became apparent that there was no unanimity on the subject. As I read on, however, I discovered that the problem was more complicated than deciding whose version of events was correct. Some of the conflicting accounts were not simply contradictory, they were completely incommensurable, in that their as- sumptions about what counted as a valid approach to the subject, and what the subject itself was, diverged in fundamental ways. Faced with an array of mutually irreconcilable points of view, points of view which determined what was being discussed as well as the terms of the discussion, I decided to turn to primary sources for clarification, only to discover that the primary sources reproduced the problem all over again. I found myself, in other words, in an epistemological quandary, not only unable to decide among conflicting versions of events but also unable to believe that any such decision could, in principle, be made. It was a moral quandary as well. Knowledge of what really happened when the Europeans and the Indians first met seemed particularly important, since the result of that encounter was virtual genocide. This was the kind of past "mistake" which, presumably, we studied history in order to avoid repeating. If studying history couldn't put us in touch with actual events and their causes, then what was to prevent such atrocities from happening again? For a while, I remained at this impasse. But through analyzing the process by which I had reached it, I eventually arrived at an understanding which seemed to offer a way out. This essay records the concrete experience of meeting and solving the difficulty I have just described (as an abstract problem, I thought I had solved it long ago). My purpose is not to throw new light on antifoundationalist epistemology-the solution I reached is not a new one-but to dramatize and expose the troubles antifoundationalism gets you into when you meet it, so to speak, in the road. My research began with Perry Miller. Early in the preface to Errand into the Wilderness, while explaining how he came to write his history of the New England mind, Miller writes a sentence that stopped me dead. He says that what fascinated him as a young man about his country's history was "the massive narrative of the movement of European culture into the vacant wilderness of America."2 "Vacant?" Miller, writing in 1956, doesn't pause over the word "vacant," but to people who read his preface thirty years later, the word is shocking. In what circumstances could someone proposing to write a history of colonial New England not take account of the Indian presence there? 2. Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, Mass., 1964), p. vii; all further references will be included in the text. This content downloaded from 134.124.73.189 on Wed, 07 Sep 2016 20:09:23 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 104 Jane Tompkins "Indians" The rest of Miller's preface supplies an answer to this question, if one takes the trouble to piece together its details. Miller explains that as a young man, jealous of older compatriots who had had the luck to fight in World War I, he had gone to Africa in search of adventure. "The adventures that Africa afforded," he writes, "were tawdry enough, but it became the setting for a sudden epiphany" (p. vii). "It was given to me," he writes, "disconsolate on the edge of a jungle of central Africa, to have thrust upon me the mission of expounding what I took to be the innermost propulsion of the United States, while supervising, in that barbaric tropic, the unloading of drums of case oil flowing out of the inexhaustible wilderness of America" (p. viii). Miller's picture of himself on the banks of the Congo furnishes a key to the kind of history he will write and to his mental image of a vacant wilderness; it explains why it was just here, under precisely these conditions, that he should have had his epiphany. The fuel drums stand, in Miller's mind, for the popular misconception of what this country is about. They are "tangible symbols of [America's] appalling power," a power that everyone but Miller takes for the ultimate reality (p. ix). To Miller, "the mind of man is the basic factor in human history," and he will plead, all unaccommodated as he is among the fuel drums, for the intellect-the intellect for which his fellow historians, with their chapters on "stoves or bathtubs, or tax laws," "the Wilmot Proviso" and "the chain store," "have so little respect" (p. viii, ix). His preface seethes with a hatred of the merely physical and mechanical, and this hatred, which is really a form of moral outrage, explains not only the contempt with which he mentions the stoves and bathtubs but also the nature of his experience in Africa and its relationship to the "massive narrative" he will write. Miller's experiences in Africa are "tawdry," his tropic is barbaric because the jungle he stands on the edge of means nothing to him, no more, indeed something less, than the case oil. It is the nothingness of Africa that precipitates his vision. It is the barbarity of the "dark continent," the obvious (but superficial) parallelism between the jungle at Matadi and America's "vacant wilderness" that releases in Miller the desire to define and vindicate his country's cultural identity. To the young Mille colonial Africa and colonial America are-but for the history he w bring to light-mirror images of one another. And what he fails to see in the one landscape is the same thing he overlooks in the other: t human beings who people it. As Miller stood with his back to the jungl thinking about the role of mind in human history, his failure to see th the land into which European culture had moved was not vacant b already occupied by a varied and numerous population, is of a piece wit his failure, in his portrait of himself at Matadi, to notice who was carrying the fuel drums he was supervising the unloading of. The point is crucial because it suggests that what is invisible to th historian in his own historical moment remains invisible when he turns This content downloaded from 134.124.73.189 on Wed, 07 Sep 2016 20:09:23 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Critical Inquiry Autumn 1986 105 his gaze to the past. It isn't that Miller didn't "see" the black men, in a literal sense, any more than it's the case that when he looked back he didn't "see" the Indians, in the sense of not realizing they were there. Rather, it's that neither the Indians nor the blacks counted for him, in a fundamental way. The way in which Indians can be seen but not counted is illustrated by an entry in Governor John Winthrop's journal, three hundred years before, when he recorded that there had been a great storm with high winds "yet through God's great mercy it did no hurt, but only killed one Indian with the fall of a tree."3 The juxtaposition suggests that Miller shared with Winthrop a certain colonial point of view, a point of view from which Indians, though present, do not finally matter. A book entitled New England Frontier: Puritans and Indian 1675, written by Alden Vaughan and published in 1965, p rectify Miller's omission. In the outpouring of work on the E Indian encounter that began in the early sixties, this book is major landmark, and to a neophyte it seems definitive. V knowledges the absence of Indian sources and emphasizes materials which catch the Puritans "off guard."4 His announced that "the New England Puritans followed a remarkably human erate, and just policy in their dealings with the Indians" seems by the scope, documentation, and methodicalness of his pr p. vii). The author's fair-mindedness and equanimity seem eve apparent, so that when he asserts "the history of interracial from the arrival of the Pilgrims to the outbreak of King Phili a credit to the integrity of both peoples," one is positively reas p. viii). But these impressions do not survive an admission that comes late in the book, when, in the course of explaining why works like Helen Hunt Jackson's Century of Dishonor had spread misconceptions about Puritan treatment of the Indians, Vaughan finally lays his own cards on the table. The root of the misunderstanding [about Puritans and Indians] ... lie[s] in a failure to recognize the nature of the two societies that met in seventeenth century New England. One was unified, visionary, disciplined, and dynamic. The other was divided, self- satisfied, undisciplined, and static. It would be unreasonable to 3. This passage from John Winthrop's Journal is excerpted by Perry Miller in his anthology The American Puritans: Their Prose and Poetry (Garden City, N.Y., 1956), p. 43. In his headnote to the selections from theJournal, Miller speaks of Winthrop's "characteristic objectivity" (p. 37). 4. Alden T. Vaughan, New England Frontier: Puritans and Indians, 1620-1675 (Boston, 1965), pp. vi-vii; all further references to this work, abbreviated NEF, will be included in the text. This content downloaded from 134.124.73.189 on Wed, 07 Sep 2016 20:09:23 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 106 Jane Tompkins "Indians" expect that such societies could live side by side indefinitely with no penetration of the more fragmented and passive by the more consolidated and active. What resulted, then, was not-as many have held-a clash of dissimilar ways of life, but rather the expansion of one into the areas in which the other was lacking. [NEF, p. 323] From our present vantage point, these remarks seem culturally biased to an incredible degree, not to mention inaccurate: Was Puritan society unified? If so, how does one account for its internal dissensions and obsessive need to cast out deviants? Is "unity" necessarily a positive culture trait? From what standpoint can one say that American Indians were neither disciplined nor visionary, when both these characteristics loom so large in the enthnographies? Is it an accident that ways of describing cultural strength and weakness coincide with gender stereotypes-active/ passive, and so on? Why is one culture said to "penetrate" the other? Why is the "other" described in terms of "lack"? Vaughan's fundamental categories of apprehension and judgment will not withstand even the most cursory inspection. For what looked like evenhandedness when he was writing New England Frontier does not look that way anymore. In his introduction to New Directions in American Intellectual History, John Higham writes that by the end of the sixties the entire conceptual foundation on which [this sort of work] rested [had] crumbled away.... Simultaneously, in sociology, anthropol- ogy, and history, two working assumptions ... came under withering attack: first, the assumption that societies tend to be integrated, and second, that a shared culture maintains that integration.... By the late 1960s all claims issued in the name of an "American mind" ... were subject to drastic skepticism.5 "Clearly," Higham continues, "the sociocultural upheaval of the sixties created the occasion" for this reaction." Vaughan's book, it seemed, could only have been written before the events of the sixties had sensitized scholars to questions of race and ethnicity. It came as no surprise, therefore, that ten years later there appeared a study of European-Indian relations which reflected the new awareness of social issues the sixties had engen- dered. And it offered an entirely different picture of the EuropeanIndian encounter. Francis Jennings' The Invasion of America (1975) rips wide open the idea that the Puritans were humane and considerate in their dealin with the Indians. In Jennings' account, even more massively documente than Vaughan's, the early settlers lied to the Indians, stole from them 5. John Higham, intro. to New Directions in American Intellectual History, ed. Higham and Paul K. Conkin (Baltimore, 1979), p. xii. 6. Ibid. This content downloaded from 134.124.73.189 on Wed, 07 Sep 2016 20:09:23 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Critical Inquiry Autumn 1986 107 murdered them, scalped them, captured them, tortured them, raped them, sold them into slavery, confiscated their land, destroyed their crops, burned their homes, scattered their possessions, gave them alcohol, underminded their systems of belief, and infected them with diseases that wiped out ninety percent of their numbers within the first hundred years after contact.7 Jennings mounts an all-out attack on the essential decency of the Puritan leadership and their apologists in the twentieth century. The Pequot War, which previous historians had described as an attempt on the part of Massachussetts Bay to protect itself from the fiercest of the New England tribes, becomes, in Jennings' painstakingly researched account, a deliberate war of extermination, waged by whites against Indians. It starts with trumped-up charges, is carried on through a series of increasingly bloody reprisals, and ends in the massacre of scores of Indian men, women, and children, all so that Massachussets Bay could gain political and economic control of the southern Connecticut Valley. When one reads this and then turns over the page and sees a reproduction of the Bay Colony seal, which depicts an Indian from whose mouth issue the words "Come over and help us," the effect is shattering.8 But even so powerful an argument as Jennings' did not remain unshaken by subsequent work. Reading on, I discovered that if the events of the sixties had revolutionized the study of European-Indian relations, the events of the seventies produced yet another transformation. The American Indian Movement, and in particular the founding of the Native American Rights Fund in 1971 to finance Indian litigation, and a court decision in 1975 which gave the tribes the right to seek redress for past injustices in federal court, created a climate within which historians began to focus on the Indians themselves. "Almost simultaneously," writes James Axtell, "frontier and colonial historians began to discover the necessity of considering the American natives as real determinants of history and the utility of ethnohistory as a way of ensuring parity of focus and im- partiality of judgment."9 In Miller, Indians had been simply beneath notice; in Vaughan, they belonged to an inferior culture; and inJennings, 7. See Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (New York, 1975), pp. 3-31. Jennings writes: "The so-called settlement of America was a resettlement, a reoccupation of a land made waste by the diseases and demoralization introduced by the newcomers. Although the source data pertaining to populations have never been compiled, one careful scholar, Henry F. Dobyns, has provided a relatively conservative and meticulously reasoned estimate conforming to the known effects of conquest catastrophe. Dobyns has calculated a total aboriginal population for the western hemisphere within the range of 90 to 112 million, of Which 10 to 12 million lived north of the Rio Grande" (p. 30). 8. Jennings, fig. 7, p. 229; and see pp. 186-229. 9. James Axtell, The European and the Indian: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America (Oxford, 1981), p. viii. This content downloaded from 134.124.73.189 on Wed, 07 Sep 2016 20:09:23 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 108 Jane Tompkins "Indians" they were the more or less innocent prey of power-hungry whites. But in the most original and provocative of the ethnohistories, Calvin Martin's Keepers of the Game, Indians became complicated, purposeful human beings, whose lives were spiritually motivated to a high degree.10 Their relationship to the animals they hunted, to the natural environment, and to the whites with whom they traded became intelligible within a system of beliefs that formed the basis for an entirely new perspective on the European-Indian encounter. Within the broader question of why European con devastating effect on the Indians, Martin's specific aim why Indians participated in the fur trade which ultima the brink of annihilation. The standard answer to th always been that once the Indian was introduced to copper kettles, woolen blankets, and the like, he literall his hands off them. In order to acquire these coveted ite the animal populations on which his survival depende Indian's motivation in participating in the fur trade wa the same as the white European's-a desire to accumulate In direct opposition to this thesis, Martin argues that t Indians ruthlessly exploited their own resources had no supply and demand, but stemmed rather from a breakdow worldview that tied them to the game they killed in a spirit of parity and mutual obligation. The hunt, according to Martin, was conceived not physical activity but as a spiritual quest, in which the spi must overmaster the spirit of the game animal before t place. The animal, in effect, allows itself to be found and hunter has mastered its spirit. The hunter prepared h rituals of fasting, sweating, or dreaming which reveal th prey and where he can find it. The physical act of ki important element in the process. Once the animal is ki its parts used for clothing or implements, its remains m of in ritually prescribed fashion, or the game boss, the " species, will not permit more animals to be killed. The relati Indians and animals, then, is contractual; each side must of the bargain, or no further transactions can occur. What happened, according to Martin, was that as a re introduced into the animal population by Europeans, th disappeared, began to act in inexplicable ways, or sicken plain view, and communicated their diseases to the Indi consequently, believed that their compact with the a broken and that the keepers of the game, the tutelary 10. See Calvin Martin, Keepers of the Game: Indian-Animal Relationship (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1978). This content downloaded from 134.124.73.189 on Wed, 07 Sep 2016 20:09:23 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Critical Inquiry Autumn 1986 109 animal species whom they had been so careful to propitiate, had betrayed them. And when missionization, wars with the Europeans, and displacement from their tribal lands had further weakened Indian society and its belief structure, the Indians, no longer restrained by religious sanctions, in effect, turned on the animals in a holy war of revenge. Whether or not Martin's specific claim about the "holy war" was correct, his analysis made it clear to me that, given the Indians' understanding of economic, religious, and physical processes, an Indian account of what transpired when the European settlers arrived here would look nothing like our own. Their (potential, unwritten) history of the conflict could bear only a marginal resemblance to Eurocentric views. I began to think that the key to understanding European-Indian relations was to see them as an encounter between wholly disparate cultures, and that therefore either defending or attacking the colonists was beside the point since, given the cultural disparity between the two groups, conflict was inevitable and in large part a product of mutual misunderstanding. But three years after Martin's book appeared, Shepard Krech III edited a collection of seven essays called Indians, Animals, and the Fur Trade, attacking Martin's entire project. Here the authors argued that we don't need an ideological or religious explanation for the fur trade. As Charles Hudson writes, The Southeastern Indians slaughtered deer (and were prompted to enslave and kill each other) because of their position on the outer fringes of an expanding modern world-system.... In the modern world-system there is a core region which establishes economic relations with its colonial periphery. ... If the Indians could not produce commodities, they were on the road to cultural extinction.... To maximize his chances for survival, an eighteenthcentury Southeastern Indian had to ... live in the interior, out of range of European cattle, forestry, and agriculture. ... He had -o produce a commodity which was valuable enough to earn hitn some protection from English slavers." Though we are talking here about Southeastern Indians, rather than the subarctic and Northeastern tribes Martin studied, what really accounts for these divergent explanations of why Indians slaughtered the game are the assumptions that underlie them. Martin believes that the Indians acted on the basis of perceptions made available to them by their own cosmology; that is, he explains their behavior as the Indians themselves would have explained it (insofar as he can), using a logic and a set of values that are not Eurocentric but derived from within Amerindian culture. Hudson, on the other hand, insists that the Indians' own bel 11. See the essay by Charles Hudson in Indians, Animals, and the Fur Trade: A Criti of "Keepers of the Game," ed. Shepard Krech III (Athens, Ga., 1981), pp. 167-69. This content downloaded from 134.124.73.189 on Wed, 07 Sep 2016 20:09:23 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 110 Jane Tompkins "Indians" are irrelevant to an explanation of how they acted, which can only be understood, as far as he is concerned, in the terms of a Western materialist economic and political analysis. Martin and Hudson, in short, don't agree on what counts as an explanation, and this disagreement sheds light on the preceding accounts as well. From this standpoint, we can see that Vaughan, who thought that the Puritans were superior to the Indians, and Jennings, who thought the reverse, are both, like Hudson, using Eurocentric criteria of description and evaluation. While all three critics (Vaughan, Jennings, and Hudson) acknowledge that Indians and Europeans behave differently from one another, the behavior differs, as it were, within the order of the same: all three assume, though only Hudson makes the assumption explicit, that an understanding of relations between the Europeans and the Indians must be elaborated in European terms. In Martin's analysis, however, what we have are not only two different sets of behavior but two incommensurable ways of describing and assigning meaning to events. This difference at the level of explanation calls into question the possibility of obtaining any theory-independent account of interaction between Indians and Europeans. At this point, dismayed and confused by the wildly divergent views of colonial history the twentieth-century historians had provided, I decided to look at some primary materials. I thought, perhaps, if I looked at some firsthand accounts and at some scholars looking at those accounts, it would be possible to decide which experts were right and which were wrong by comparing their views with the evidence. Captivity narratives seemed a good place to begin, since it was logical to suppose that the records left by whites who had been captured by Indians would furnish the sort of firsthand information I wanted. I began with two fascinating essays based on these materials written by the ethnohistorian James Axtell, "The White Indians of Colonial America" and "The Scholastic Philosophy of the Wilderness."12 These essays suggest that it would have been a privilege to be captured by North American Indians and taken off to Canada to dwell in a wigwam for the rest of one's life. Axtell's reconstruction of the process by which Indians taught European captives to feel comfortable in the wilderness, first taking their shoes away and giving them moccasins, carrying the children on their backs, sharing the scanty food supply equally, ceremonially cleansing them of their old identities, giving them Indian clothes and jewelry, assiduously teaching them the Indian language, finally adopting them into their families, and even visiting them after many years if, as sometimes happened, they were restored to white society-all of this 12. See Axtell, "The White Indians of Colonial America" and "The Scholastic Philosophy of the Wilderness," The European and the Indian, pp. 168-206 and 131-67. This content downloaded from 134.124.73.189 on Wed, 07 Sep 2016 20:09:23 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Critical Inquiry Autumn 1986 111 creates a compelling portrait of Indian culture and helps to explain the extraordinary attraction that Indian culture apparently exercised over Europeans. But, as I had by now come to expect, this beguiling portrait of the Indians' superior humanity is called into question by other writings on Indian captivity-for example, Norman Heard's White into Red, whose summation of the comparative treatment of captive children east and west of the Mississippi seems to contradict some of Axtell's conclusions: The treatment of captive children seems to have been similar in initial stages .... Most children were treated brutally at the time of capture. Babies and toddlers usually were killed immediately and other small children would be dispatched during the rapid retreat to the Indian villages if they cried, failed to keep the pace, or otherwise indicated a lack of fortitude needed to become a worthy member of the tribe. Upon reaching the village, the might face such ordeals as running the gauntlet or dancing in center of a throng of threatening Indians. The prisoner migh so seriously injured at this time that he would no longer b ceptable for adoption."1 One account which Heard reprints is particularly arresting. A y girl captured by the Comanches who had not been adopted into a but used as a slave had been peculiarly mistreated. When they wan to wake her up the family she belonged to would take a burning from the fire and touch it to her nose. When she was returned to her parents, the flesh of her nose was completely burned away, exposing th bone.14 Since the pictures drawn by Heard and Axtell were in certain respects irreconcilable, it made sense to turn to a firsthand account to see how the Indians treated their captives in a particular instance. Mary Rowlandson's "The Soveraignty and Goodness of God," published in Boston around 1680, suggested itself because it was so widely read and had set the pattern for later narratives. Rowlandson interprets her captivity as God's punishment on her for failing to keep the Sabbath properly on several occasions. She sees everything that happens to her as a sign from God. When the Indians are kind to her, she attributes her good fortune to divine Providence; when they are cruel, she blames her captors. But beyond the question of how Rowlandson interprets events is the question of what she saw in the first place and what she considered worth reporting. The following passage, with its abrupt shifts of focus and peculiar emphases, 13. J. Norman Heard, White into Red: A Study of the Assimilation of White Persons Captured by Indians (Metuchen, N.J., 1973), p. 97. 14. See ibid., p. 98. This content downloaded from 134.124.73.189 on Wed, 07 Sep 2016 20:09:23 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 112 Jane Tompkins "Indians" makes it hard to see her testimony as evidence of anything other than the Puritan point of view: Then my heart began to fail: and I fell weeping, which was the first time to my remembrance, that I wept before them. Although I had met with so much Affliction, and my heart was many times ready to break, yet could I not shed one tear in their sight: but rather had been all this while in a maze, and like one astonished: but now I may say as, Psal. 137.1. By the Rivers of Babylon, there we sate down; yea, we wept when we remembered Zion. There one of them asked me, why I wept, I could hardly tell what to say: yet I answered, they would kill me: No, said he, none will hurt you. Then came one of them and gave me two spoon-fulls of Meal to comfort me, and another gave me half a pint of Pease; which was more worth than many Bushels at another time. Then I went to see King Philip, he bade me come in and sit down, and asked me whether I woold smoke it (a usual Complement nowadayes among Saints and Sinners) but this no way suited me. For though I had formerly used Tobacco, yet I had left it ever since I was first taken. It seems to be a Bait, the Devil layes to make men loose their precious time: I remember with shame, how formerly, when I had taken two or three pipes, I was presently ready for another, such a bewitching thing it is: But I thank God, he has now given me power over it; surely there are many who may be better imployed than to ly sucking a stinking Tobacco-pipe. Anyone who has ever tried to give up smoking has to sympathize with Rowlandson, but it is nonetheless remarkable, first, that a passage which begins with her weeping openly in front of her captors, and comparing herself to Israel in Babylon, should end with her railing against the vice of tobacco; and, second, that it has not a word to say about King Philip, the leader of the Indians who captured her and mastermind of the campaign that devastated the white population of the English colonies. The fact that Rowlandson has just been introduced to the chief of chiefs makes hardly any impression on her at all. What excites her is a moral issue which was being hotly debated in the seventeenth century: to smoke or not to smoke (Puritans frowned on it, apparently, because it wasted time and presented a fire hazard). What seem to us the peculiar emphases in Rowlandson's relation are not the result of her having screened out evidence she couldn't handle, but of her way of constructing the world. She saw what her seventeenth-century English Separatist background 15. Mary Rowlandson, "The Soveraignty and Goodness of God, Together with the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed; Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1676)," in Held Captive by Indians: Selected Narratives, 1642- 1836, ed. Richard VanDerBeets (Knoxville, Tenn., 1973), pp. 57-58. This content downloaded from 134.124.73.189 on Wed, 07 Sep 2016 20:09:23 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Critical Inquiry Autumn 1986 113 made visible. It is when one realizes that the biases of twentieth-century historians like Vaughan or Axtell cannot be corrected for simply by consulting the primary materials, since the primary materials are constructed according to their authors' biases, that one begins to envy Miller his vision at Matadi. Not for what he didn't see-the Indian and the black-but for his epistemological confidence. Since captivity narratives made a poor source of evidence for the nature of European-Indian relations in early New England because th were so relentlessly pietistic, my hope was that a better source of evide might be writings designed simply to tell Englishmen what the Amer natives were like. These authors could be presumed to be less severely biased, since they hadn't seen their loved ones killed by Indians or be made to endure the hardships of captivity, and because they wer writing propaganda calculated to prove that God had delivered his cho people from the hands of Satan's emissaries. The problem was that these texts were written with aims no l specific than those of the captivity narratives, though the aims wer a different sort. Here is a passage from William Wood's New England Prospect, published in London in 1634. To enter into a serious discourse concerning the natural conditions of these Indians might procure admiration from the peo of any civilized nations, in regard of their civility and good n tures.... These Indians are of affable, courteous and well disposed natures, ready to communicate the best of their wealth to t mutual good of one another; ... so ... perspicuous is their lov ... that they are as willing to part with a mite in poverty a treasure in plenty.... If it were possible to recount the courtesies they have showed the English, since their first arrival in tho parts, it would not only steady belief, that they are a loving peop but also win the love of those that never saw them, and wipe of that needless fear that is too deeply rooted in the conceits of man who think them envious and of such rancorous and inhumane dispositions, that they will one day make an end of their Engl inmates. 16 However, in a pamphlet published twenty-one years earlier, Alex Whitaker of Virginia has this to say of the natives: These naked slaves ... serve the divell for feare, after a most bas manner, sacrificing sometimes (as I have heere heard) their Children to him.... They live naked in bodie, as if their sh 16. William Wood, New England's Prospect, ed. Vaughan (Amherst, Mass., 197 88-89. This content downloaded from 134.124.73.189 on Wed, 07 Sep 2016 20:09:23 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 114 Jane Tompkins "Indians" of their sinne deserved no covering: Their names are as naked as their bodie: They esteem it a virtue to lie, deceive and steale as their master the divell teacheth to them.17 According to Robert Berkhofer in The White Man's Indian, these divergent reports can be explained by looking at the authors' motives. A favorable report like Wood's, intended to encourage new emigrants to America, naturally represented Indians as loving and courteous, civilized and generous, in order to allay the fears of prospective colonists. Whitaker, on the other hand, a minister who wishes to convince his readers that the Indians are in need of conversion, paints them as benighted agents of the devil. Berkhofer's commentary constantly implies that white men were to blame for having represented the Indians in the image of their own desires and needs.'8 But the evidence supplied by Rowlandson's narrative, and by the accounts left by early reporters such as Wood and Whitaker, suggests something rather different. Though it is probably true that in certain cases Europeans did consciously tamper with the evidence, in most cases there is no reason to suppose that they did not record faithfully what they saw. And what they saw was not an illusion, was not determined by selfish motives in any narrow sense, but was there by virtue of a way of seeing which they could no more consciously manipulate than they could choose not to have been born. At this point, it seemed to me, the ethnocentric bias of the firsthand observers invited an investigation of the cultural situation they spoke from. Karen Kupperman's Settling with the Indians (1980) supplied just such an analysis. Kupperman argues that Englishmen inevitably looked at Indians in exactly the same way that they looked at other Englishmen. For instance, if they looked down on Indians and saw them as people to be exploited, it was not because of racial prejudice or antique notions about savagery, it was because they looked down on ordinary English men and women and saw them as subjects for exploitation as well.'9 According to Kupperman, what concerned these writers most when they described the Indians were the insignia of social class, of rank, and of prestige. Indian faces are virtually never described in the earliest accounts, but clothes and hairstyles, tattoos and jewelry, posture and skin color are. "Early modern Englishmen believed that people can create their own identity, and that therefore one communicates to the world through signals such 17. Alexander Whitaker, Goode Newesfrom Virginia (1613), quoted in Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York, 1978), p. 19. 18. See, for example, Berkhofer's discussion of the passages he quotes from Whitaker (The White Man's Indian, pp. 19, 20). 19. See Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Settling with the Indians: The Meeting of English and Indian Cultures in America, 1580-1640 (Totowa, N.J., 1980), pp. 3, 4. This content downloaded from 134.124.73.189 on Wed, 07 Sep 2016 20:09:23 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Critical Inquiry Autumn 1986 115 as dress and other forms of decoration who one is, what group or category one belongs to."20 Kupperman's book marks a watershed in writings on EuropeanIndian relations, for it reverses the strategy employed by Martin two years before. Whereas Martin had performed an ethnographic analysis of Indian cosmology in order to explain, from within, the Indians' motives for engaging in the fur trade, Kupperman performs an ethnographic study of seventeenth-century England in order to explain, from within, what motivated Englishmen's behavior. The sympathy and understanding that Martin, Axtell, and others extend to the Indians are extended in Kupperman's work to the English themselves. Rather than giving an account of "what happened" between Indians and Europeans, like Martin, she reconstructs the worldview that gave the experience of one group its content. With her study, scholarship on European-Indian relations comes full circle. It may well seem to you at this point that, given the tremendous variation among the historical accounts, I had no choice but to end in relativism. If the experience of encountering conflicting versions of the "same" events suggests anything certain it is that the attitude a historian takes up in relation to a given event, the way in which he or she judges and even describes "it"--and the "it" has to go in quotation marks because, depending on the perspective, that event either did or did not occurthis stance, these judgments and descriptions are a function of the historian's position in relation to the subject. Miller, standing on the banks of the Congo, couldn't see the black men he was supervising because of his background, his assumptions, values, experiences, goals. Jennings, intent on exposing the distortions introduced into the historical record by Vaughan and his predecessors stretching all the way back to Winthrop, couldn't see that Winthrop and his peers were not racists but only Englishmen who looked at other cultures in the way their own culture had taught them to see one another. The historian can never escape the limitations of his or her own position in history and so inevitably gives an account that is an extension of the circumstances from which it springs. But it seems to me that when one is confronted with this particular succession of stories, cultural and historical relativism is not a position that one can comfortably assume. The phenomena to which these histories testify--conquest, massacre, and genocide, on the one hand; torture, slavery, and murder on the other--cry out for judgment. When faced with claims and counterclaims of this magnitude one feels obligated to reach an understanding of what actually did occur. The dilemma posed by the study of European-Indian relations in early America is that the highly charged nature of the materials demands a moral decisiveness which the succession of conflicting accounts effectively precludes. That 20. Ibid., p. 35. This content downloaded from 134.124.73.189 on Wed, 07 Sep 2016 20:09:23 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 116 Jane Tompkins "Indians" is the dilemma I found myself in at the end of this course of reading, and which I eventually came to resolve as follows. After a while it began to seem to me that there was something wrong with the way I had formulated the problem. The statement that the materials on European-Indian relations were so highly charged that they demanded moral judgment, but that the judgment couldn't be made because all possible descriptions of what happened were biased, seemed to contain an internal contradiction. The statement implied that in order to make a moraljudgment about something, you have to know something else first-namely, the facts of the case you're being called upon tojudge. My complaint was that their perspectival nature would disqualify any facts I might encounter and that therefore I couldn't judge. But to say as I did that the materials I had read were "highly charged" and therefore demanded judgment suggests both that I was reacting to something real-to some facts-and that I had judged them. Perhaps I wasn't so much in the lurch morally or epistemologically as I had thought. If youor I-react with horror to the story of the girl captured and enslaved by Comanches who touched a firebrand to her nose every time they wanted to wake her up, it's because we read this as a story about cruelty and suffering, and not as a story about the conventions of prisoner exchange or the economics of Comanche life. The seeing of the story as a cause for alarm rather than as a droll anecdote or a piece of curious information is evidence of values we already hold, of judgments already made, of facts already perceived as facts. My problem presupposed that I couldn'tjudge because I didn't know what the facts were. All I had, or could have, was a series of different perspectives, and so nothing that would count as an authoritative source on which moral judgments could be based. But, as I have just shown, I did judge, and that is because, as I now think, I did have some facts. I seemed to accept as facts that ninety percent of the native American population of New England died after the first hundred years of contact, that tribes in eastern Canada and the northeastern United States had a compact with the game they killed, that Comanches had subjecte captive girl to casual cruelty, that King Philip smoked a pipe, and so It was only where different versions of the same event came into conf that I doubted the text was a record of something real. And even the there was no question about certain major catastrophes. I believed tha four hundred Pequots were killed near Saybrook, that Winthrop was t Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony when it happened, and on. My sense that certain events, such as the Pequot War, did occur i no way reflected the indecisiveness that overtook me when I tried to choose among the various historical versions. In fact, the need I felt make up my mind was impelled by the conviction that certain things h This content downloaded from 134.124.73.189 on Wed, 07 Sep 2016 20:09:23 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Critical Inquiry Autumn 1986 117 happened that shouldn't have happened. Hence it was never the case that "what happened" was completely unknowable or unavailable. It's rather that in the process of reading so many different approaches to the same phenomenon I became aware of the difference in the attitudes that informed these approaches. This awareness of the interests motivating each version cast suspicion over everything, in retrospect, and I ended by claiming that there was nothing I could know. This, I now see, was never really the case. But how did it happen? Someone else, confronted with the same materials, could have decided that one of these historical accounts was correct. Still another person might have decided that more evidence was needed in order to decide among them. Why did I conclude that none of the accounts was accurate because they were all produced from some particular angle of vision? Presumably there was something in my background that enabled me to see the problem in this way. That something, very likely, was post-structuralist theory. I let my discovery that Vaughan was a product of the fifties, Jennings of the sixties, Rowlandson of a Puritan worldview, and so on lead me to the conclusion that all facts are theory dependent because that conclusion was already a thinkable one for me. My inability to come up with a true account was not the product of being situated nowhere; it was the product of certitude that existed somewhere else, namely, in contemporary literary theory. Hence, the level at which my indecision came into play was a function of particular beliefs I held. I was never in a position of epistemological indeterminacy, I was never en abyme. The idea that all accounts are perspectival seemed to give me a superior standpoint from which to view all the versions of "what happened," and to regard with sympathetic condescension any person so old-fashioned and benighted as to believe that there really was some way of arriving at the truth. But this skeptical standpoint was just as firm as any other. The fact that it was also seriously disabling-it prevented me from coming to any conclusion about what I had read-did not render it any less definite. At this point something is beginning to show itself that has up to now been hidden. The notion that all facts are only facts within a perspective has the effect of emptying statements of their content. Once I had Miller and Vaughan and Jennings, Martin and Hudson, Axtell and Heard, Rowlandson and Wood and Whitaker, and Kupperman; I had Europeans and Indians, ships and canoes, wigwams and log cabins, bows and arrows and muskets, wigs and tattoos, whisky and corn, rivers and forts, treaties and battles, fire and blood-and then suddenly all I had was a meta- statement about perspectives. The effect of bringing perspectivism to bear on history was to wipe out completely the subject matter of history. And it follows that bringing perspectivism to bear in this way on any subject matter would have a similar effect; everything is wiped out and you are left with nothing but a single idea-perspectivism itself. This content downloaded from 134.124.73.189 on Wed, 07 Sep 2016 20:09:23 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 118 Jane Tompkins "Indians" But-and it is a crucial but-all this is true only if you believe that there is an alternative. As long as you think that there are or should be facts that exist outside of any perspective, then the notion that facts are perspectival will have this disappearing effect on whatever it touches. But if you are convinced that the alternative does not exist, that there really are no facts except as they are embedded in some particular way of seeing the world, then the argument that a set of facts derives from some particular worldview is no longer an argument against that set of facts. If all facts share this characteristic, to say that any one fact is perspectival doesn't change its factual nature in the slightest. It merely reiterates it. This doesn't mean that you have to accept just anybody's facts. You can show that what someone else asserts to be a fact is false. But it does mean that you can't argue that someone else's facts are not facts because they are only the product of a perspective, since this will be true of the facts that you perceive as well. What this means then is that arguments about "what happened" have to proceed much as they did before post-structuralism broke in with all its talk about language-based reality and culturally produced knowledge. Reasons must be given, evidence adduced, authorities citied, analogies drawn. Being aware that all facts are motivated, believing that people are always operating inside some particular interpretive framework or other is a pertinent argument when what is under discussion is the way beliefs are grounded. But it doesn't give one any leverage on the facts of a particular case.21 What this means for the problem I've been addressing is that I must piece together the story of European-Indian relations as best I can, believing this version up to a point, that version not at all, another almost entirely, according to what seems reasonable and plausible, given everything else that I know. And this, as I've shown, is what I was already doing in the back of my mind without realizing it, because there was nothing else I could do. If the accounts don't fit together neatly, that is not a reason for rejecting them all in favor of a metadiscourse about epistemology; on the contrary, one encounters contradictory facts and divergent points of view in practically every phase of life, from deciding whom to marry to choosing the right brand of cat food, and one decides as best one can given the evidence available. It is only the nature of the academic situation which makes it appear that one can linger on the threshold of decision in the name of an epistemological principle. What has really happened in such a case is that the subject of debate has changed from the question of what happened in a particular instance to the question of how knowledge 21. The position I've been outlining is a version of neopragmatism. For an exposition, see Against Theory: Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago, 1985). This content downloaded from 134.124.73.189 on Wed, 07 Sep 2016 20:09:23 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Critical Inquiry Autumn 1986 119 is arrived at. The absence of pressure to decide what happened creates the possibility for this change of venue. The change of venue, however, is itself an action taken. In diverting attention from the original problem and placing it where Miller did, on "the mind of man," it once again ignores what happened and still is happening to American Indians. The moral problem that confronts me now is not that I can never have any facts to go on, but that the work I do is not directed toward solving the kinds of problems that studying the history of European-Indian relations has awakened me to. This content downloaded from 134.124.73.189 on Wed, 07 Sep 2016 20:09:23 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
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