The Fuel and the Balm of "Progress"

In the first two chapters of Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination, Shari M. Huhndorf shows how the views European-Americans had of Natives and Native culture abetted continuing colonial expansion even while alleviating guilt about the morality of such conquest. Huhndorf writes that the popular sentiment, from the end of the Civil War through the end of World War II, was that “[b]ecause real Indians were destined to disappear, European Americans [were] the proper heirs to ‘Indianness’ as well as of the land and resources of the conquered Natives” (5). There are three facets to this thesis: that the Natives were “destined to disappear,” Huhndorf’s description of what white middle-class America perceived as “Indianness,” and that the whites were the “proper heirs” of the Indians’ assets (spiritual and otherwise).

That the Natives were destined to disappear, Huhndorf argues, was deeply important to resolving European American feelings about the conquest of the continent (31). The 1876 World’s Fair, devoted to a display of American progress in the nation’s first century, displayed Native artifacts to contrast with the more technologically sophisticated European American inventions (27). The 1893 World’s Fair, dedicated to celebrating the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s landing in the Caribbean, again focused on European American superiority, this time based around racial, rather than strictly technological terms (30). These exhibits displayed the simplicity or even barbarianism the European-Americans expected of Native peoples (42-43). In the case of both the 1876 and 1893 World’s Fairs, Native life is consigned to the past. Thus the destruction of Native America by Europeans was “an inevitable part of the ‘universal law of progress’” and therefore “a cause not for sorrow but for celebration” (31).

While Natives were perceived by whites as hostile savages for much of American history, by the middle of the time period discussed by Huhndorf the Native resistance had been effectively quelled by the European American government. Natives were therefore seen as far less of a martial threat (51). For the majority of the first two chapters of Going Native, Huhndorf argues that Natives and Native life were instead seen as “a space of … purity and even redemption” (119) as well as a site to rekindle masculinity stifled by “overcivilization” (70). Images of Native life “provided a fantasy of freedom from the violence, constraint, and tedium of modern American life” (104). The “Indianness” – masculinity – is, Huhndorf argues, what motivated European-American men to “go native” or otherwise emulate what they perceived was Native culture and values.

The final prong of Huhndorf’s thesis is that Native culture and natural resources were seen as the rightful appropriations of European Americans. Organizations such as the Boy Scouts used Indians as “role models” when “training individual boys in manliness” (70-71). This “manliness” was used for the direct benefit of European-Americans: “Indians seemed to provide a way of rejuvenating an increasingly degenerate white society (73). More directly, the land occupied by Natives could, if exploited by whites, provide significant riches. Thus the originally Native-owned resources were the fuel for the “progress” of Western society and the Native culture was the balm to the social and moral ills linked to such progress.

The delineators of masculinity at the turn of the century as described by Huhndorf persist into the 21st century. This history of masculinity was new to this reader and quite intriguing in regard to how the products of the “conqueror” brand of masculinity have been condemned in the past century. The building of super-weapons, institutionalized racism, and continued “development” of natural spaces all fit under the 19th century definition of masculine behavior. Perhaps the persistence of the destructivist ideal in the West is founded upon pride in the Western colonialist heritage.

While Huhndorf addresses how Native culture was seen as an ideal for masculinity, little discussion is given to how perceptions of Native culture were viewed in relation to Western femininity or feminism, besides in relation to masculine ideals. Indeed, how Western women perceived Native culture is essentially neglected. In the era discussed in the first two chapters of Going Native (i.e. approximately 1870 through 1940) Western women were being redefined and redefining themselves. To European-American men, Natives were both the models of masculinity and the objects of conquest. Whether Western women, resisting patriarchical values and themselves popular and increasingly unwilling objects of conquest, viewed Natives and Native culture as allies or as enemies is nontrivial at the least and deserves proper treatment.