Book Review--Shari M. Huhndorf's Going Native

Shari M. Huhndorf’s Going Native is a focused analysis of the role the “native” played in the formation of a national identity for white America. She engages the subject from a variety of angles, ranging from reports on mass culturally indicative and formative events such as the World’s Columbia Exposition to landmark films such as Nanook of the North. Huhndorf examines the ideology shaping them, as well as the ideology they shaped and reinforced. She demonstrates, with specific and relevant references, how even cultural artifacts that extol the virtues of the native reinforce the supposed supremacy of the dominant white culture.

In the first chapter of Going Native, she describes in some detail the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. The very structure of the Expo reinforced the idea of a tiered society, split as it was into the White City and the Midway Plaisance. The former was a white-washed symmetrical series of buildings around square blown into a brilliant whiteness by electric lighting, and the latter the place in the Exposition where “[o]rganizeres relegated people of color,” a “mile-long, six-hundred-foot-wide stretch of land connecting Washington and Jackson Parks,” in which there were “a series of seventeen villages showcasing exotic subjects living and working in simulations of their ‘natural’ environments.” (42)

As Huhndorf points out, the role this played in the formation of a national identity was very much to define non-whites in general as belonging “to humanity’s past rather than to the historical present.” (42) That, in turn, places non-whites as less evolved, conforming neatly to pseudo-scientific notions of Social Darwinism. In any case, this provided an ideological framework for Manifest Destiny in which it was not inconsistent with the principals of the republic to pursue what was essentially an imperialist expansion across the North American continent. It was, after a fashion, natural that the more advanced, evolved and civilized white America would grow ever westward, while the primitive native societies disappeared in the face of a more evolved race and social system.

“After the conquest,” Huhndorf says “European Americans rewrote this history [of imperialism] in a self-justifying manner, by redefining Native Americans as part of their one past,” making their “disappearance” a passive process instead of an active campaign on the part of the United States (15). After that conquest, white America appropriated the native as a symbol of “white American identity,” and it was invoked in a bizarre campaign to regenerate and revitalize white civilization, rarely more obvious than the still-existent Boy Scouts.

Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North invokes the native as an example of a noble savage, simple child-like nature unspoiled by the industrialist world. In one scene, Nanook (his actual name was Allakariallak) bargains with a trader, grinning and laughing throughout. Huhndorf contradicts the perception of this exchange as evidence of Allakariallak’s child-like good nature (a result of his non-white, primitive background) simply by citing an interviewee’s understanding of the process of filming: “each time a scene was shot, as soon as the camera started to shoot, he [Allakariallak playing Nanook] would burst out laughing. He couldn’t help it…He laughed each time” (127). The interviewee, Charles Nayoumealuk, suggested that “Nanook” was most likely laughing at Flaherty’s “peculiar requests and odd scripting…at the expectations of non-Native viewers” (127). Ironically, the laugh that signified his child-like primitiveness to the white American audience was a laugh that most likely signified exactly how savvy, perceptive and intelligent he was.



Huhndorf, through a careful and close examination of well-documented (though apparently well-overlooked) evidence paints a clear and crisp picture of how “the Native” played a significant formative role in the shaping of American-specifically white American-consciousness and national identity.