Book Review: Shari M. Huhndorf’s Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination

Huhndorf’s book, Going Native effectively argues that Native peoples played varied roles in the American public’s mind, as reflected through popular culture. They were at once “peaceful and wise,” a symbol of childlike innocence, and savage and violent (2). No matter how the Native Americans are viewed, however, they “[serve] as a means of defining Western identities (either individual or collective) against an other, figured alternately as superior or inferior to oneself,” (6). Huhndorf claims that “scholarship in the field [of Native American studies] tends to view Native America in isolation from the dominant colonizing culture,” (5). Going Native attempts to remedy this oversight by specifically looking the way the dominant culture shaped films, novels, fraternal organizations, and Worlds Fairs to represent Native Americans from 1870 to 1941, and how these representations in turn shaped European American identities.

Dominant American culture in the 1870’s was attempting to distinguish itself from its European past. To do this, the American identity shifted to one of a technologically advanced and non-imperialistic people. Huhndorf explains that this image was reflected and reinforced through the 1876 Worlds Fair displays of Native Americans as violent and primitive. The displays, she argues, were organized such that the raw materials were on one side, and, as one walked through the exhibit, the objects became more “modern.” The Native American items were placed with more “primitive” works, thus relegating the Natives to history. Further, the presence of a multitude of weapons painted a picture of Natives as savage. Thus Natives were shown as “inevitably vanishing peoples whose significance and fate lay in their obvious inferiority to (white) civilization” (27). This allowed Americans to justify the colonization of Native peoples without feeling imperialistic, and to appear technologically superior in comparison.

The 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, particularly the Midway reinforced the view of Native Americans as vanishing, but this time with the end result of making Americans look like saviors of the poor savages. Displays of Native Americans were set next to scenes from Europe’s past on the Midway at the World’s Columbian Exposition (42). In this way, the colonization of Native America was justified as inevitable. Social Darwinism also played a role in this justification; “References to the Midway as a Tower of Babel… transformed conquest into Christian redemption,” (46). These views helped to fuel imperialism by the United States, since, “just as America controlled ‘its’ Indians, so had it a right – perhaps even a duty – to govern other natives as well,” (63.) This new view of Native Americans placed the dominant American identity as Christian philanthropists who are taking over new lands with their superior technology in order to save or replace the primitive people there, thus justifying American imperialism at home and abroad.

Huhndorf depicts the next era of views of Native Americans as defined by images of the peaceful, noble savage, who is simultaneously msculinized and feminized. This claim is supported with a variety of sources, including the Boy Scouts of America organization, films such as Nanook of the North, books such as My Eskimo Friends, and museum displays. All of these sources support Huhndorf’s argument that Americans idealized Native Americans as having “masculine hardiness and power,” which was seen as crucial to the imperialist movement (67). At the same time, Native Americans, particularly Eskimos, were depicted as “happy-go-lucky,” “like children,” and “feminized in relation to the… representative of the European world,” (103, 74, and 112). In this way, Native Americans were not seen as a threat or superior to European Americans, despite being portrayed as possessing some desirable traits. European Americans thus used Native Americans to show both what they wished to be and their own superiority and right to the Continental United States.

Huhndorf alludes to and in some cases describes alternative readings of interactions between Native Americans and European Americans which revolve around money rather than respect and have the Natives laughing at the Europeans rather than laughing out of childishness. These alternative histories would be interesting to learn about in greater detail to perhaps paint a fuller picture of the history of racial interactions.