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Reading T ourist S ites, C iting T ouristic READINGS: A nglo Constructions o f N ative A merican Identity and the Case of TtoJMSEH

Dissertation

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the D e ^ e Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

Rosemary Virginia Hathaway, M.A.

* * * *

The Ohio State University 1998

D issertation Committee : A pproved by

Professor Valerie Lee, Adviser

Professor Patrick Mullen Adviser Professor Amy Shuman Department of English UMI Number: 9833995

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UMI 300 North Zeeh Road Ann Arbor, MI 48103 A b s t r a c t

Through a case study of contemporary cultural productions about the Shawnee leader

Tecumseh, this dissertation examines Anglo constructions of Native American identity in tourist sites, literature, and family kinship stories. As such, it combines the methodologies of ethnography and literary criticism to explore and critique the cultural phenomemon folklorist Rayna Green has termed “playing Indian.” Interviews with Anglo families claiming to be descendants of Tecumseh and fieldwork done on site at the outdoor drama

Tecumseh!, staged in Chillicothe, Ohio, each summer, are juxtaposed with four contemporary novels about Tecumseh's history: Allan Eckert’s The Frontiersmen (1967) and A Sorrow in Our Heart (1992), Orson Scott Card’s Red Prophet (1988), and James

Alexander Thom’s Panther in the Sky (1989). Notably, all of these writers are Anglo, and in most summers almost the entire cast of the outdoor drama—including those playing

Native Americans—are Anglo as well.

Given recent debates about multiculturalism, cultural representation, and postcolonialism, it is striking that Anglo productions about Native Americans have gone relatively unchallenged. This study strives to determine what it is that Anglos are trying to work out by retelling Tecumseh’s narrative, why Tecumseh himself should be the historical figure chosen for such a catharsis, and why Native American cultures in particular seem so readily available for unchallenged appropriation by whites. In so doing, the dissertation contests and redefines the concepts of ethnicity, authenticity, and tourism from both folkloric and postmodern perspectives.

11 Finally, the dissertation connects the touristic impulse to the act of reading itself, surmising that reading cross-culturally is often an act of tourism, an allegedly harmless peek into an exotic culture. Reader-response criticism and strategies of resistant reading are employed to show how texts that Anglos students often take to be good “snapshots” of ethnic difference—Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were

Watching God—both encourage and thwart such “touristic readings,” and how ethnic identity is constructed in each novel. As literature teachers, how do we properly contextualize and interrogate works by those outside our own cultural background so as to help students come to more nuanced and complex understandings of those texts?

Ill A cknowledgments

First and foremost, I wish to thank the members of my dissertation committee: to my adviser, Valerie Lee, I am grateful for the mentorship she has provided since my first quarter as a PhD student; she is responsible for showing me how the study of folklore and literature can be creatively combined (all complaints, therefore, should be directed to her).

To Pat Mullen I am grateful for ongoing support, for his living example of how folklorists can and should commit themselves to social change, and for my ever-growing appreciation of country music. I also want to thank Amy Shuman for stepping into this project without benefit of ever having me as a student (a fact I dearly regret) and providing wonderfully detailed and insightful feedback.

I am also indebted to other Ohio State folklorists who provided assistance or other ideas for this project—in particular, my thanks go out to Pamela Ensinger-Antos, who introduced me to Bill Dennis and his great aunt and grandmother, the Miller sisters, and their kinship stories; to Larry Doyle, who read early drafts of parts of this document; and also to Ellen

Damsky, who charitably offered to help me distribute surveys at Tecumseh! one evening, hardly suspecting what she was letting herself in for.

I am, of course, profoundly indebted to those who consulted with me on this project as informants: Virginia Cooke, Bill Dennis, Patty Free, Jim Horton, Renee Norman, and

Jamieson Price. My deepest thanks in this regard, though, must be extended to Marion

Waggoner, the producer of Tecumseh!, who let me into his theater and answered my questions despite his apprehension and my tentativeness. Needless to say, without the willing participation of all these people, this project would never have come to fruition.

iv The fieldwork for this dissertation was conducted largely during the summer of 1994, thanks to the support of a Summer Research Fellowship from the Ohio State University

Department of English. That funding, and moreover the freedom to travel that it provided, truly expedited the research process for this dissertation.

Finally, I wish to thank my family, who have nurtured me through this project and, at times, suffered with it nearly as much as I did. My parents, David and Joyce Hathaway, have unconditionally supported me through all o f this—and I’d especially like to thank my mother for being the first to prove that this can be done. And to my husband, Tom

Bredehoft: thanks for the “marital fellowship”—and the unflagging support—that allowed me to finally finish this dissertation. V it a

September 19, 1965...... Bom—Columbus, Ohio

1987 ...... B. A. English, The Ohio State University

1988-198 9 ...... Writer/Editor, Division of Research and Communications The Ohio Department of Education Columbus, Ohio

1991...... M. A. English, The Ohio State University

1989-199 6 ...... Graduate Teaching and Research Associate, The Ohio State University

1996-present...... Instructor, Department of English University of Northern Colorado

Publications

1 .“No Paradise to Be Lost: Deconstructing the Myth of ‘Domestic Affection’ in Mary Shelley’sFrankenstein." Trajectories of the Fantastic. Ed. Michael Morrison. New York: Greenwood Press, 1997.

2.“Praxis: The Necessity of Theory.” Folklore in Use 3.1(1995).

F ields o f Study

Major Field: English

VI T a b l e o f C o n t e n t s

P age

A bstract...... ii

Acknowledgments ...... iv

V ita...... vi

Introduction: Folklore and the Touristic Impulse ...... 1

C hapters :

1. Tourist Sites, The Postmodern Condition, and the Challenge to Folkloristics ...... 22

Uprooting the Discipline: Theory and Terminology...... 24

“Ethnicity”...... 28

Reinventing the Meaning o f‘Tradition” ...... 35

Arriving at Cultural Representation, Searching for “Authenticity” ...... 37

The Tourist Site...... 41

Praxis: Theorizing Tecumseh ...... 46

History of the Drama ...... 48

The Play...... 50

Written Text/Ethnographic Context ...... 57

2. “He’s not a character, he’s a marvel”: Reenacting Tecumseh, Reconstructing Ourselves ...... 60

Producers and Productions: Authorization, Ambivalence, Authority— 63

Performers and Performances: Illusion, Power, and the Body ...... 82

Tourist Texts: The Marketing of Native American Identity ...... 92

Audiences: Heterogeneous Homogeneity ...... 105

v ii 3. Folk Hero and Fetish: The Inscription of Tecumseh, “Aboriginal Knight” ...... 120

Ec\iQXt's Frontiersmen-. “Historical Truth’VContemporary Projection.. 127

Thom’s Panther in the Sky: A Kinder, Gentler Tecumseh ...... 143

Eckert’s Sorrow: Revising the Usual Suspects ...... 154

Card’s Red Prophet: Trading Fact for Fantasy ...... 165

Literacy and Readability ...... 176

4. Multiethnic Literature and a Theory of “Touristic Reading” ...... 187

Who is the “touristic reader,” and how do we chart her readings? 196

Amy Tan: Culture Traitor or Culture Broker? ...... 200

Narrative Structure...... 203

Folk Material as “Authenticating” Device ...... 209

Contesting Ethnicity ...... 214

Zora Neale Hurston and the “Spy-Glass of Anthropology” ...... 223

Dialect/Dialectic...... 225

Unsignified “Traditional” Folk Material ...... 230

Signifying on Taboos ...... 233

Toward a Strategy of Non-Touristic Reading ...... 243

5. When the Self Becomes the Other: Intemalizing Tecumseh...... 255

Works Cited or Consulted ...... 273

Appendix A: Transcriptions of interviews with Tecumseh! staff...... 281

Appendix B: Tecumseh! audience survey results ...... 318

v i u I ntroduction

F o l k l o r e and t h e T o u r is t ic I m p u l s e

I finally went to see Disney’s animated film Pocahontas after it had already been

out for a several months; I knew I needed to see it, but I just could not bring myself to lay

out the money for a first-run screening. When it finally arrived at a local second-run

theater, it seemed worth the price of admission, so I called up a friend of mine who shares

my love/hate relationship with Disney animation and persuaded him to go. Folklorists have

been appalled and fascinated by Disney’s animated reworkings of so-called “classic” fairy

tales over the years, and at the corporation’s ability to establish the contemporary

“Ur” texts of these tales through their retellings: ask any American child to tell you the story of Cinderella, and you will likely get the Disney version, replete with dancing mice who become footmen and the magic phrase “Bibbity bobbity boo.”

And so it was that many folklorists held their collective breath when they heard about the Pocahontas project. This is, after all, the corporation whose portrayal of

Southern African-American culture in Song o f the South touched off perhaps one of the first public debates about cultural representation and the use of folkloric sources in the popular media. As if in atonement, just a few years ago, Disney proposed to build what the Disney executives themselves were calling a “politically correct” history theme park called “Disney’s America.” In an interview for some related fieldwork, I spoke with Jim

Horton, professor of African-American history at George Washington University and director of the African-American Communities Project for the National Museum of

American History, who was then working as a paid consultant to Disney in a sort of

1 “damage control” capacity. Initially, Horton explained, Disney was “talking about doing

history seriously with a series of ‘lands.’ They were going to have, you know, ‘Native

American Land,’ and ‘Civil War Land,’ and so on, and in conversations, that bothered me

a lot....I wanted to see them do a more integrated history that came close to approximating

the way American history was lived.”

During the same fieldwoik trip, I also attended and did some collecting at an anti-

Disney march on Washington, and one of the speakers at the rally after the march was a

representative of the Piscataway Nation. In her address, she condemned Disney’s work on

Pocahontas, adding that “Pocahontas” was not the legendary girl’s real name; rather,

according to this speaker, it was a name given to her by white settlers, which meant—in the

Powhatan language—little whore. Needless to say, then, I went to the movie expecting the

worst.

If you have seen Pocahontas, then you already know that it is fairly innocuous; in

fact, in its apparent paranoia about being “politically correct,” the film is downright vapid.

There was one significant moment, though, that caused my companion and I to gasp in

utter horror, this was the scene in which Pocahontas “listened with her heart” and was suddenly able to speak perfect English. John Smith, a white man stereotypically portrayed

as being separated from the earth, was not of a mystical enough nature, apparently, to experience this miracle in reverse and magically be able to speak the Powhatan tongue. So

it was up to Pocahontas to work the nativistic magic necessary to allow them to communicate. Other than this gross romantic indulgence, however, the film is very conventional in its cautious portrayal of Native identity and this bit of “history,” if indeed the legend of Pocahontas is to be believed.

As Sam Gill explains in his work Mother Earth: An American Story, an analysis of white America’s equation of Native Americans and nature, “Tecumseh and the story of

Pocahontas are two aspects of the same American story: the story of the sacrifice of the Indian in the triumph of civilization over savagism” (39). And indeed, in many ways, the positioning and message of the movie Pocahontas is quite similar to the positioning and messages of the outdoor drama Tecumseh!, discussed in the first two chapters of this dissertation: in both, the writers and producers have been very careful not to assign blame on any particular party, with the net effect of erasing the record of oppression and cultural genocide experienced by Native American cultures as Europeans encroached on the North

American continent. In fact, at the end of the movie, my friend turned to me and said,

“You know. I’ve been puzzling over what it is that white people are trying to work out with

Native Americans, and now I know what it is: we’re trying to pretend that this just didn’t happen.” True enough: in Pocahontas, “blame” is displaced onto the English. They were the greedy, ethnocentric ones; “Americans” did not start this. In the Disney version, the villain is unmistakably English, and John Smith—the reformed and culturally relativistic

“good guy”—is the only man to disembark the colonists’ ship who does not speak with an

English accent. Since the voice is provided by Australian native Mel Gibson, he presumably could have done a plausible British accent (American actor David Ogden Stiers does a fine one as the evil Governor Ratliffe), so it seems that someone (Gibson or the director) made a conscious choice not to use the accent. As such, John Smith becomes one of “us”—an American, the one who did not want this to happen. If only it weren’t for those nasty Englishmen.

This kind of displacement—of guilt, as well as of perspective, identity, history, and culture—is critical in the study that is to follow. On the global level, this dissertation examines the critical issue of why and how Anglos participate in cultural narratives about the “Other,” and about their historical oppression. We need only look around briefly to see that, as a cultural group, Anglos are nearly obsessed with retelling and reenacting such stories: Why did Disney feel compelled to create a “P.C ” history theme park? Why did

Colonial Williamsburg reenact a slave auction in the fall of 1994?' More specifically, this dissertation approaches these large and pressing questions through a case study of

narratives that reenact and renarrate the life of Tecumseh, a Shawnee warrior and prophet

active in the old Northwest Territories in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Historically, he is often seen as the last line of defense against white movement into the

region; once his plan failed, the Woodland tribes were driven out of the area. But because

the Shawnee were not a print culture at the time, the history of this era has been produced

and reconstructed almost exclusively by Anglo historians and writers, and thus becomes a

bit suspect. The same is certainly true of all the contemporary accounts and novelizations

of Tecumseh’s life, which are solely the product of Anglo-American writers.

I seek in this dissertation to answer the conundrum my friend had also been mulling

over: what is it that whites are trying to work out with Native Americans, and with the

“Other” in general? And why are Anglos working these issues out through fiction, through

tourism, through the past, rather than through real-life interaction and dialogue with

contemporary Native groups and individuals? And what is it about the Native American

identity that makes it particularly available for this kind of appropriation? How was Disney

able to conceive of a “Native American Land” for its proposed park that would be

separated, segregated, from the rest of American history? Folklorists, cultural critics,

multicultural theorists, and people with any sort of cultural awareness at all can easily see

the fallacy—and the danger— of a reenactment which assumes that historical events and

cultures are or ever were isolated from one another, and removed from our own contemporary world. We now understand that culture-making is and always has been a multicultural, highly interactive, continuously negotiated process. But even folklorists

have not always perceived culture in this way.

Indeed, the roots of the folkloric discipline are formed by assumptions which may seem ludicrous to us now: that there is a rather “primitive” and agrarian group of people, the “folk,” whose ways of life are the survivals of ancient cultural wisdom; modernization and increasing literacy and technology are rapidly destroying these practices, thus robbing a

given culture of that ancient wisdom and thus, of its very historical and national identity.

Folklorists must intervene to preserve these practices (while simultaneously disparaging the

ignorant “folk”) so that contemporary culture can be reinvigorated and saved. This tongue-

in-cheek summary is not really too far off the mark; however, most folklorists today are

appalled by the elitism and narrowness of such a perspective. And yet, this is how the

discipline of folklore began; how far have we come from such a definition? And if we find this perspective naive if not repulsive now, then how are we defining our terms? I will

begin by addressing the very large question of how to define folklore in the context of this work; other folkloric terms essential to this study—“ethnicity,” “authenticity,” and

“tradition,” among others—will be defined in the following chapter.

The first several weeks of teaching an Introduction to Folklore class are always the most difficult, because students are struggling with and resisting the idea that folklore, as

Elliot Oring speculates, is a process or a perspective rather than an identifiable, finite group of folkloric “items.”^ While a quilt is almost indisputably a “folk object,” what makes it

“folkloric” has ver)/ little to do with its physical properties; rather, it is the how and why of the quilt’s construction that make it folkloric. On the first day of this course, I always bring in a variety of items and ask the students to determine if they are “folkloric,” and if so, what makes them so. I pass out not only quilts and limbeijacks, but a crocheted toilet- paper roll cozy, a folder of Xerox lore, and—borrowing a trick from folklorist Daniel

Bames—a pair of rolled-up sweat socks. Inevitably, the quilts and limbeijacks are clearly

“folk,” the toilet-paper cozy less so, but still a candidate; the Xerox lore leads to an interesting discussion of contemporary folklore and its reliance on technology. The socks, though, are the real stumper: students reject their “folkness” outright, but when asked how they roll their socks, and how they learned to roll them that way and why they do so. they gradually come to an understanding that folklore is more about what we do with things and why we do it that way than it is about the things themselves.

And so it is that I arrive at my own working definition of folklore and the parameters of its study. Over time, folklorists have defined their field of study and their approach in a variety of ways, from the study of “cultural survivals” to the study of “artistic communication in small groups”^ for myself, Oring’s delineation of folklore as process and perspective is most useful, though I would go a step further to more clearly identify what is being processed. In my view, folklore is an informal cultural hermeneutics,^ the noninstitutional ways in which members of a variety of cultures (i.e., folk groups) leam about, construct, express, resist, and/or alter the values, functions, aesthetics, and rituals of each group to which they belong. As Robert Cantwell explains in his Ethnomimesis:

Folklife and the Representation of Culture, folklore

...makes implicit reference to a body of knowledge and to the shaping influences of one mind upon another...[and] is set in contradiction to the unbounded field of formally constituted disciplinary knowledge, embedded in literacy or some other intellectual technology, whose authority arises from its connection to social power. (214)

While I would quibble with some of the implications here (namely, the idea that folklore cannot arise from literary or technological sources—we have only to look to xeroxlore, faxlore, and the growing lore of the Internet to dispute that claim), in general 1 concur with his delineation of folklore and folklife from “authorized” and “sanctioned” ways of knowing. Furthermore—and perhaps most importantly for the purposes of this dissertation—this cultural hermeneutics also extends to those outside the group, informing the group members (the emic group) about the differences between them and “Others” (the etic group). Thus folklore is not only the constructed expression of a particular group’s cultural identity; it also becomes the process for creating the group’s perspective on and judgment of the identity of “Others” (which in turn, of course, only tells us more about the emic group again). As Richard Bauman points out, it is crucial to remember that while much folklore is esoteric—that is, based on a group’s shared identity—folklore can also be

exoteric; '"difference of identity, not necessarily sharing, can be at the base of folklore

performance” (35, emphasis mine).

It is this definition of folklore which informs the study to follow. What I am

interested in examining here is the very interactive nature of Anglo and Native American

identities in the United States—the ways in which one has influenced and altered the other,

and the repercussions, both positive and negative, of that interaction. Specifically, I plan to examine what Anglo representations of the life of the Shawnee warrior and prophet

Tecumseh reveal about Anglo cultures and about our contemporary debates about multiculturalism, cultural pluralism, and “identity politics.” In deconstmcting the way that one ethnic folk group constructs and represents an(0)ther, I hope to show how the cultural hermeneutics that creates such representations may be challenged and altered both from within and outside the cultural framework.

The concept at the heart of this dissertation is one that is inextricably linked to the notion of folklore as the (multi)culturally constructed and transmitted expression and knowledge of identity: tourism. As folklorist Patrick Mullen once remarked, “As long as we have a concept of the ‘Other,’ we’ll have tourism.” It is to the credit of humanity that we maintain a deep and abiding fascination with how people who are different from ourselves live. Unfortunately, history has shown that we too often tend to react to that kind of information in aggressive and destructive ways—through enslavement, hostility, violence, annihilation, even allegedly “benevolent” interventions like colonization, missionary movements, and other attempts to force what we call “progress” on Others.

Thus, tourism, too, is a seemingly “benevolent” way to observe, interact with, leam about, and maybe change Others. Many so-called “third-world” countries are energetically trying to develop tourist economies in order to increase their wealth, power, and visibility. And tourism, at its surface, appears to create a level field for interaction: tourists literally pay to gain insight into an(0)ther culture; everyone seems to benefit. But in many respects, the underlying impulses behind tourism are not so different, nor more benign, than those of earlier interactions. Many tourists participate in the experience in order to validate their own culture, rather than that of an(0)ther. And while most tourists are allegedly questing for the “Authentic,” what they really want to see is arepresentation of the authentic. Like

Lot’s wife, they would likely turn into pillars of salt if they were actually able to perceive difference in an unmediated forum, as if such an unmediated scenario were even possible.

As Cantwell remarks.

The tourist seeking authenticity among strange people in exotic places finds himself blocked by his own status; the distance fixed between him and his object is at once the precondition of its charm and the barrier to his experience of it—hence his need to eat and drink, to photograph, and to buy, all ways of immediating the stubbomly mediated experience. {Ethnomimesis 112)

Jamaica Kincaid provides another powerful explanation of this paradoxical desire for mediation and quest for authenticity in her scathing indictment of tourism in her native

Antigua, A Small Place:

Antigua is beautiful. Antigua is too beautiful. Sometimes the beauty of it seems unreal. Sometimes the beauty of it seems as if it were stage sets for a play, for no real sunset could look like that....It is as if, then, the beauty...were a prison, and as if everything and everybody inside it were locked in and everything and everybody that is not inside were locked out....to feel better about their own miserable existence, so that they could be less lonely and empty—a European disease. (77, 79-80)

Kincaid’s description concretizes what Jean Baudrillard calls “hyperreality,” the process of

“substituting signs of the real for the real itself’ (4), what happens when reality collapses into “the minute duplication of the real, preferably on the basis of another reproductive medium” (141). While Baudrillard cites the media of advertising and photography specifically, I would argue that tourism is also a medium for hyperreal reproduction, a way-as Baudrillard phrases it—of “exist[ing] from the crisis of representation...[by] lock[ing] the real up in pure repetition” (142). This substituted reality, the hyperreal, is less threatening and more “authentic” than “reality,” which of course is a utopian, and

8 therefore nonexistent, ideal. By way of example, recently a first-year composition student responded to my prompt to write about an encounter with difference by describing a trip his family made to Disney World’s Epcot Center. In the paper, he recounted the unnerving experience of eating in an Italian restaurant where everyone was actually speaking Italian, and described how upsetting this had been for him. For this student, the hyperreal experience of visiting Epcot was more real, perhaps, than going to Italy itself; he wrote about the park’s division into separate “countries” with no sense of irony whatsoever. It is this conflation of the real and the hyperreal, of the authentic with the manufactured, that makes tourist sites such fascinating places to observe the simulation and representation of cultural identities.*

And so it is that folklorists have ventured into the territory of tourism, even as we are tourists ourselves—tourists with typewriters.* As we have become more interested in the dynamic interaction between cultures (see again Bauman), and as we have become more focused on the performative nature of folklore and its relationship to identity, we have naturally gravitated toward tourism, which could be described as the consciously constructed and performed identity of a particular region, country, and/or cultural group.

And, as performance theory has expanded our range of observation to include audiences as well as “performers” of folklore, we have become increasingly interested in the ways these two groups influence each other: how the audience affects performance, and how the performance directs audience reaction. Nowhere is this interaction more felt than in tourist sites, where creators and observers consciously and unconsciously negotiate their mutual identities: those being observed shape their “performance” to fit the expectations of tourists, and tourists work to integrate what they see with what they expected. It is an intricate dance that both alleviates and maintains the tension of “difference” that sustains the novelty and intrigue of tourist sites. It is what sociologist John Urry describes as the

“tourist gaze,” which he suggests is “intrinsically part of contemporary experience, of postmodernism” (82) because it implies that tourists are “semioticians, reading the landscape for signifiers of certain pre-established notions or signs” (12).

Significantly, Urry, one of the leading tourism theorists, suggests that the tourist gaze has less to do with tourists themselves and more to do with the “sign systems” they gaze at; the “problem,” from Urry’s perspective, seems to lie more in the object of the gaze and the complex of codes and signifiers surrounding it than in the gazer. I wish to focus on both the object of the gaze (the outdoor drama and the novels to be investigated in the following chapters) and on the gazer, but moreover on the less definable space between the two. What Urry and other tourism theorists have overlooked is that the tourist gaze is a dynamic and individual process, formed not by the object in question alone, but by a highly mediated interaction with and response to that object. As such, this dissertation strives to examine the process occurring between the object and the observer, rather than solely to dissect either the object or the observer to discover where “blame” lies. I would recast

Urry’s term “tourist gaze” as “touristic gaze,” again to emphasize the dynamics of perspective and process.

Terminological quibbling aside, though, Urry is dead on when he notes that “rather than being a trivial subject[,] tourism is significant in its ability to reveal aspects of normal practices which might otherwise remain opaque” (2). Thus, in evoking the concept of tourism in this dissertation, I seek to widen its scope to include not only literal tourism, but also literary tourism. If folklore is a perspective and process that occurs in a wide variety of cultural contexts, then so too is tourism: just as we approach the places and practices of

Others with a touristic eye when we act as literal tourists, so we are capable of approaching the literature of Others from a touristic perspective, looking to written texts to excite and educate us about the lives of Others. Here, too, is tourism a double-edged sword: it provides us with a forum for exploring the territory between cultures, but also limits and flattens our ability to see what is there. Tourism, like folklore itself, can be a conduit for

10 transmitting noninstitutionalized, informal cultural knowledge and understanding; on the

other hand, it can also be a conduit for reifying and even strengthening cultural stereotypes.

The specific conduits for this information are texts, and it is critical to note here that

in the context of this dissertation I am clearly using the term “text” very broadly. In a

recent issue of the Journal of American Folklore, ethnomusicologist Jeff Todd Titon discusses the historical evolution of the term “text,” finally arriving at an operative definition of the word as “any humanly constructed sign system” (434); that is, anything— be it a piece of writing, a performance, an event, an object, or a system of interacting—that

is expressive and open to interpretation. As Titon phrases it, this implies that adherents to this definition of text believe that “understanding expressive culture is like reading a

[formal] text” (434). Scholars in other disciplines—most notably postmodern literary critics and cultural studies scholars—use the term similarly, and this is the understanding of

“texts” that I am operating under as I examine and link both “traditional” literary (i.e.,

written) texts and touristic texts in the course of this study.

The texts about the life of Tecumseh—both touristic and literary—accomplish both of the previously mentioned tasks: they do appear to have some power to educate, challenge, and even transform tourists and their expectations; simultaneously, they also contain the potential for “misreading,” and for transmitting and perpetuating stereotypes about Native

Americans, in particular the idea of the Noble Savage. In the three chapters to follow,

I will expose and analyze in depth these twin potentials, both in relation to the tourist site of the outdoor drama Tecumseh!, performed annually in Chillicothe, Ohio, and in relation to the several contemporary literary texts about Tecumseh’s life. All of these works were penned by Anglo authors, each with his own claims of “authority” and “authorization.”

Thus, they provide fertile ground for examining and critiquing the cross-cultural interactions and representations that make tourism possible, that create folklore, and that are the source of many current conflicts and crises within United States culture.

11 In the final chapter, I will extend the concept of tourism to the study of literature, and posit that one of the dangers of some forms of allegedly “multicultural” pedagogy is that they incorporate texts by female, nonwhite, and/or non-Westem writers in a touristic way: “Look at the interesting Other.” That is to say, texts by these writers are approached differently than more canonical texts; they are perceived to represent an entire culture, rather than one view of it. Such texts are taught, in a sense, as “manuals,” tour guides, for understanding “Other” cultures. In examining Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, the chapter will demonstrate the ways those texts both court and resist the touristic gaze, and discuss ways that teachers of literature can help students recognize and thwart their own touristic reading tendencies.

In accomplishing all of the above, this dissertation strives to explore the ways in which contemporary folkloristics both draws on and informs other critical theories, and the ways in which the folkloric perspective can enhance our understanding of contemporary culture, literature, and—to some degree—political crises. While perhaps less zealous and romantic in our advocacy (or rather, patronage) of marginalized cultures than we once were, folklorists still seem to cling to a basic belief that interest in the wide range of human diversity is something to be cherished, explored, celebrated, honored, taught, learned, and-

-above all—respected. Certainly, such curiosity about “Others” is also something to be questioned, challenged, critiqued, and approached with great caution.

The remaining question to be addressed in this Introduction, then, is “Why

Tecumseh?” In part, of course, Tecumseh is just one representative of a larger Anglo fascination with/fetishization of Native Americans. Recently, the “New Age” movement has been taken to task for its appropriation of Native American spirituality and religious rituals; yet such appropriations are not the only instance of what folklorist Rayna Green calls “playing Indian” in either contemporary or historic Anglo-American culture. Nor should we believe that the overt criticism of this kind of appropriation signals a

12 fundamental change in our attitude toward “real” Native Americans in our society. From athletic teams like the Cowboys and the Redskins to the nomenclature and rituals of fraternal organizations like the Elks, the Moose, the Improved Order of Red Men, and even the Boy Scouts, incidents of Anglo-Americans “playing Indian” exist unabated and (until recently) generally unchallenged across our culture.

Few historic Native American figures, however, have engaged the imagination of white America as deeply and repeatedly as Tecumseh, the Shawnee prophet and leader who attempted to organize a diverse collective of tribes against European settlers in the early nineteenth century, only to be killed in Ontario in 1813. At least four dramas have been penned since his death, including Allan Eckert’s Tecumseh!^ Eckert is primarily a novelist, not a playwright, having also produced two hefty pieces of historical fiction centered around Tecumseh and his historical environs: The Frontiersmen (1967) and A

Sorrow in Our Heart: The Life of Tecumseh (1992). Tecumseh has other champions, too; the science fiction writer Orson Scott Card has transformed Tecumseh’s saga into a work of fantasy entitled Red Prophet (1988), and James Alexander Thom has written another lengthy fictional biography entitled Panther in the Sky (1989; the title is a rough translation of Tecumseh’s name), which aired as Tecumseh: The Last Warrior on the cable channel

TBS in June 1995.

Of course, other “famous” Native Americans have received similar play in the media recently, but Tecumseh seems to have withstood the test of trendiness to emerge again and again as a popular symbol in Anglo-American iconography. Generally speaking,

Tecumseh (as a figure) seems to have enjoyed three “renaissances” in American culture: the first in the time shortly after his death; the second, at the turn of the century up until the time of the first World War, and the third, from 1967 (the year Eckert published The

Frontiersmen) to the present.

13 Gill recounts the first wave of Tecumseh's popularity as a folk hero in Mother

Earth, focusing particularly on the impact of Tecumseh’s alleged explanation of why he

preferred to sit on the ground during a meeting with William Henry Harrison: “The Earth

is my mother, on her bosom I will repose.” During the period after Tecumseh’s death in

1813 until roughly the middle of the nineteenth century, several dramas, works of fiction

and poetry, and innumerable legends focusing on the life of Tecumseh (and particularly,

the legend attached to this statement) appeared in print. Gill attributes this, quite

convincingly, to the disappearance of Native tribes in the “settled” eastem U. S.:

The heroism, bravery, and humanity of Tecumseh were quickly appreciated by Americans. After the War of 1812, Indians in the region ceased to be a problem to settlement. A new mood evolved in which the passing Indian and Indian way of life were lauded and highly romanticized. Being a figure of such stature, mystery, and color, Tecumseh became a focal point for the expression of these new American sympathies....[He] had been transformed from the obstacle to land settlement...into...a folk hero. (12- 13)

As is the case with the contemporary drama Tecumseh!, then, Anglo reverence for the figure of Tecumseh becomes a “partial absolution....a benediction,” as Philip Young has argued is also the case in the story of Pocahontas. As Gill effectively argues, the first wave of Tecumseh’s popularity appears to have been a fairly simple case of projection and appeasement. It also reflects a larger cultural trend toward “using” Native American figures in American art and literature; as Robert Berkhofer explains in The White Man s

Indian, “The only time the Indian figured prominently in the higher forms of American art and literature occurred between the War of 1812 and the Civil War as the result of two trends: cultural nationalism and romanticism” (86). Berkhofer cites the publication of

Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales and Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha as but two of the more memorable instances of Anglo writers’ attempts to “transform [the Indian] from a bloodthirsty demon into a Noble Savage” in order “to pity truly the poor dying

Indian” (88). Certainly this motivation operated in the first wave of Tecumseh’s popularity as well.

14 The second phase of this “folk hero’”s popularity, however, becomes a little more complex, and points more toward the motivations driving the third wave of his popularity, which we are currently experiencing. For Tecumseh, like the phoenix, arose from his ashes at the turn of the century to meet a new set of needs. In his essay “The Influence of

Native Americans on Modem Conservationists,” George Cornell implies that the rapid industrialization of the American economy at the end of the nineteenth century inspired a

“back-to-the-land” movement (the beginnings of the modem conservation movement) that was in turn inspired by Native American peoples and beliefs.* Specifically, Cornell cites the work of Emest Thompson Seton, an English native and naturalized Canadian citizen, whose interest in wildlife studies and “woodcraft” led him to form a group called the

Woodcraft Indians in 1902. This is the group that eventually evolved into the Boy Scouts of America when Seton met Robert Baden-Powell and established that organization in

October 1906. Crucially, Seton’s concept of the Boy Scout identity was not to be based on

“the archetype frontiersman,” but on a more appropriate role model “‘who would be clean, manly, strong, unsordid, fearless and kind’”: Tecumseh. As Seton explained.

First, guided by my own preference, I selected a hero as a model. Not Robin Hood, nor Rollo the Sea King, nor King Arthur, but the ideal of Fenimore Cooper, perfectly embodied in Tecumseh, the great Shawnee— physically perfect, wise, brave, picturesque, unselfish, dignified. (Cornell 112)

This, of course, is also the figure that Tecumseh is intended to cut in the outdoor drama, with its emphasis on the perfect Native body and the picturesque tableau, and its characterization of Tecumseh as a rational being devoted to the dignity of all men, and thus transcendent of his Shawnee identity.

Interestingly (and significantly), Comell documents a quick and radical shift in the

Boy Scout identity at the beginning of the first World War, at this time, Comell explains.

Militarism was gradually creeping into the philosophy of scouting in the years before World War I, and it increasingly and explicitly replaced Seton’s focus on Indians. In 1910 Boy Scout President Colin Livingstone stated that the intent of the scouting movement “is not an attempt to make an Indian of the American Boy,” while Colonel Peter S. Bonus claimed, 15 “There is no attempt in our organization to approach any of the Indian names or styles of conducting the movement. Ours is to be along soldierly lines.” (113)

Seton rejected this shift and, in a bit of poetic irony, was ousted from the organization he

founded because he was not an American citizen, presaging the fascism that the identity

shift from naturalist to soldier both responded to and incorporated.

Thus, Tecumseh’s second wave of popularity was relatively short-lived, snuffed

out when it came into conflict with the evolving American identity as a dominant world

military power. Clearly, at this time, the Native American identity and the warrior identity

(so neatly combined in the outdoor drama) were considered to be incompatible, if not

paradoxical; Livingstone’s statement clearly implies that Indian boys were not American

boys, and that these two identities were utterly separate.

This schism might, however, explain the simultaneous reappropriation of the figure

of Tecumseh in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century by Native American groups

themselves. Gill claims that at this time, “the development of pantribal alliances in the

movement of Indian resistance to American demands for lands looked to Tecumseh both as

a model and for inspiration” (10), presumably with an eye to recreating—with hopes of

success, this time—Tecumseh’s effort to unite the tribes against white encroachment. Gill

argues further that this Native use of the figure of Tecumseh appears to continue into our day in the person of Russell Means, the AIM activist; Gill connects Means’ references to

Mother Earth with Tecumseh’s legendary statement, and asserts that “the broad intentions of the American Indian Movement correspond with those of Tecumseh and his brother

Tenskwatawa in their efforts to establish an alliance among Indian peoples” (139).

In the current third wave of Tecumseh’s popularity, then, there seems to be an attempt to fuse the twin images of Tecumseh as diplomat and Tecumseh as warrior, once considered paradoxical qualities, into a single image of masculinity. As the following two chapters demonstrate through a critique of both the text of the play itself, and moreover

16 through the way the drama is enacted in its context, the central issue in the text and at the

tourist site of Tecumseh! is the construction of a masculine ideal that combines the figures of the male pacifist and the male warrior. And just as earlier incamations of the figure of

Tecumseh responded to the larger sociopolitical context of their times, so the “third wave” Tecumseh responds to ours.

It seems no coincidence that Tecumseh should reemerge as a “folk hero” precisely at a moment of profound cultural crisis in the United States. Jameson has dated the roots of postmodernism to the early 1960s (53) and the consequent decentering of the authority of history and narrative may be partly responsible for the freedom novelists writing about

Tecumseh take in reinterpreting his life and recasting his character. Postmodernism certainly informs the “history/fiction” argument bandied about (albeit indirectly) in the

Tecumseh-focused novels of Allan Eckert and James Alexander Thom. In an apparent celebration of the unfettered nature of postmodern play, however, Orson Scott Card offers a Tecumseh-based novel that bypasses this debate entirely, and turns Tecumseh into a figure of fantasy.

Other recent sociocultural changes also make Tecumseh an attractive foil. As

Berkhofer argues, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, Native Americans in general were often seen to embody several countercultural agendas; this was the era of the “Indian as countercultural lesson” (Berkhofer 110). And Tecumseh figures into this dynamic in a very particular way: in all of the contemporary retellings of his history, the sociocultural dynamic that most seems to influence the third-wave Tecumseh is the deconstruction of the nature of gender, and the challenge to the long-held notion of “essential” sexual identity. It seems no surprise that the figure of Tecumseh should resurface during and after the

Viernam War era, a time when men had to make a choice between, or find an incontestable way to combine, the roles of pacifist or warrior.® Many young men defied their fathers— many of whom fought proudly and unquestioningly in the “Good War”—and suggested that

17 one need not fight to be a man. Small wonder, then, that Tecumseh should appear as a champion of this belief: in the first scene of the play, Tecumseh chastises his fellow

Shawnees for torturing a helpless white man, and is accused of being a “woman.”

However, when Tecumseh explains that it is neither manly nor honorable to kill a helpless victim, his companions take his side and swear to a modified form of pacifism, claiming that ‘Tecumseh’s words are wise beyond his years....All Shawnees will leam not only of his bravery this day, but also of his wisdom” (16). Thus from the play’s outset, he is established as a figure of equal and complementary parts soldier and diplomat, an appropriate and comforting male role-model in the immediate post-Viernam era of 1973, when the drama premiered. Notably, this reconception of Tecumseh’s character marks a clear break with the second-wave image of Tecumseh, when the Native identity was viewed as being diametrically opposed to a military identity. And certainly, the way the drama literally puts the spotlight on the warrior aspect of Tecumseh’s nature in its battle scenes seems designed to remind us that he is no wimp. The play’s early popularity may also have stemmed from a certain nostalgia for wars with clear and “lofty” motivations on both sides, as the conflicts between the Indians and the Americans are presented.

Contemporarily, the play continues in its popularity because of the influence of the multicultural movement, as paradoxical as that may seem. While we might suspect that popular awareness of such issues as cultural representation might hinder Teciintsehl's popularity, the opposite appears true: rather, the increased attention on the cultures and histories of “Others” seems only to add significance and credibility to the Chillicothe production, rather than to challenge or subvert its presentation of the “facts.” Perhaps part of the explanation for this apparently contradictory dynamic lies in the simultaneous popularization of the notion that history is a construction—and a contested one at that—if not a complete “fiction.” Tourists coming to see Tecumseh! seem, for the most part, to see history less as an assemblage of facts and more as an interpretation; at the very least, many

18 understand it as a matter of perspective, and often of multiple and clashing perspectives.

As such, this looser view of history grants Tecumseh! an even broader artistic license than it might have had in its early years of production. Any challenge to the show’s authority, accuracy, or authenticity can usually be neatly addressed by an appeal to this revised concept of history.

The above still does not fully address the question of why, even in an era of alleged

“multicultural awareness,” the outdoor drama Tecumseh! as well as the several novelizations of the Shawnee’s life should not only escape unscathed, but prosper. The specific answers to these questions will be answered in part by producer Marion Waggoner in chapter two: first, as he notes in explaining the show’s genesis. Native American stories and identities were (and still are) perceived to be much more “marketable” than other kinds of American origin myths. And the reason such productions can go relatively unchallenged regionally is because the Native Americans represented are, for the most part, absent.

Because they, unlike other ethnic groups in the area, are perceived as “extinct” or at the very least silent, tliey pose no threat to the hegemonic order, and thus Native Americans become a much easier “Other” for white Midwesterners to sympathize and identify with.

And clearly, the current popularity of the show attests to this function in the lives of some who see it; many comments echoed those of a fifty-two year old white female from

Pomeroy, Ohio, who said Tecumseh! “made [her] aware of Indians as people.” By wimessing the show or reading a novel about Tecumseh’s life, some tourists/readers can leave with a sense of having fulfilled their culturally sensitive “duty.”

Certainly Tecumseh is not the only Native American icon readily available for

Anglo consumption, nor must the text, event, or representation necessarily feature a

“famous Indian.” As Green notes above, there are numerous ways in which Anglos participate in “playing Indian.” Green takes her speculation about the reasons for such play far beyond the specific sociocultural ones I have posited above, contending that

19 [P]laying Indian is one of the most subtly entrenched, most profound and significant of American performances. Perhaps relief of guilt is an inherent part of the role, but, when taken in connection with other cultural performance epiphenomena of American life, I have come to think that cultural validation is the role’s most important function. For in playing Indian, certainly Anglo-American players are connecting...to the very beginnings of the mythological structure called America. (48)

Green suggests here that the roots of white desire to “play Indian” run far deeper than mere

absolution—perhaps deeper than we are even capable of articulating. In a sense, this dissertation seeks to replicate Green’s exploration on a micro level: where her article

brilliantly demonstrates the cultural issues being worked out by Anglos in the broad

phenomenon of playing Indian, this study will conduct a more focused investigation of the

issues being worked out by Anglo writers, readers, audiences and agents who are

inscribing Tecumseh, and explore why the figure of Tecumseh emerges so singularly as the

figure on which so many of these desires and representations hinge.' '

Having achieved that kind of micro analysis in chapters two and three, I will

reverse that dynamic and enlarge this study to extend the notion of tourism to literature and

oral history. By placing the notion of “ethnic tourism” (or “Other” tourism) in a larger

cultural and literary framework, the final chapter and conclusion will explore how and why

Anglos create and interact with cultural productions about the “Other” as they do, and what

the potentialities of such encounters are. First, though, we need to establish some operable

definitions of the slippery terms used through this introduction—ethnicity, authenticity, and

so forth—in order to set the parameters for such a wide-ranging study.

* This event, which received extensive national press at the time, is described in an article titled “Mock auction of slaves outrages some Blacks,” appearing in The New York Times on 8 Oct. 1994: Y7. ■ As cited in the first chapter of Folk Groups and Folklore Genres: An Introduction (11, 18). ^ The former definition comes out of one of the earliest theoretical approaches to folklore, that of “cultural evolutionism”; the latter definition, from Dan Ben-Amos (‘Toward a Definition of Folklore in Context,” 1972). ■* My use of “hermeneutics” here instead of “epistemology” derives from Paul Rabinow’s critique of the definition and history of the term “epistemology,” which he argues implies an underlying, universal foundation based on erroneous absolutes like “truth: and “reason” (Rabinow 234-236). “Hermeneutics,” conversely, suggests the historically situated, contested, and interpretive qualities of such cultural knowledge.

20 ’ As Urry notes, ‘Tourism is prefiguratively postmodern because of its particular combination of the visual, the aesthetic, and the popular” (The Tourist Gaze 87). * Thanks to Pat Mullen for reminding me of this line from the film Barton Fink, where the main character is described as “a tourist with a typewriter”—as Mullen notes, an apt description of folklorists, as well. ^ The plays include Tecumseh, a drama (1838) by Charles Main Tecumseh and the prophet of the West (1810) by George Jones; and Tecumseh, or, the Baale of the Thames (H36) by Richard Emmons. A quick subject search of the Ohio State University catalog lists sixteen different narratives about Tecumseh in the OSU collection alone. * Gill’s work also makes this connection, showing how Tecumseh’s statement may, in fact, be responsible for the personification of “Mother Earth” by contemporary environmentalists. ’ I was struck by this while doing research on the drama’s beginnings at the Chillicothe Public Library. Articles in the Chillicothe Gazette about the progress of the theater construction and so forth were juxtaposed with articles about the campus uprisings across Ohio and throughout the country in the early 1970s, and alongside articles in which women were identified according to their physical characteristics: “a petite blonde coed at Ohio University...” Much, and little, has changed since then. On average, almost exactly half of the survey responses on all the nights that data were collected indicated a belief in history as a combination of “fact-based truth” and “interpretation,” as phrased on the questionnaire. See Appendix B for a more complete breakdown of these statistics. " The impulse to inscribe Tecumseh continues: as I was completing this dissertation, I discovered yet another narrative history of the Shawnee’s life just published by British scholar John Sugden, titled Tecumseh: A Life (Henry Holt, 1998). (Sugden also authored an earlier, more traditional scholarly biography titled Tecumseh's Last Stand (U of Oklahoma P, 1985)). In recounting some o f Tecumseh’s various cultural manifestations, Sugden describes a series of adventure novels published in 1930s Germany whose hero was Tecumseh; their author, Fritz Steuben, used Tecumseh as a mouthpiece for Nazi ideology and German nationalism. Both Sugden’s contemporary interest in Tecumseh and his documentation of Nazi Germany interest suggests that the appropriation of Tecumseh is, and continues to be, an international phenomemon as well as one of fascination for Anglos in the U. S.

21 C h a pter 1

T o u r is t S it e s , T h e P o st m o d e r n C o n d it io n , AND t h e C h a l l e n g e t o F olkloristics

If the term “folklore” is difficult for laypersons and professionals alike to define,

how much more difficult it is, then, to define the terminology that underpins so much

folklore study: tradition, ethnicity, authenticity, ethnography, cultural representation. And

yet, in a study such as this, it becomes even more crucial to clearly redefine and challenge

such terms, for in such redefinitions lie the potential for (de)constructive critiques and

perhaps even revolutionary actions.

In The Gutenberg Galaxy, Marshall McLuhan shares a telling anecdote about a

sanitary inspector working in a village in Africa. In this tale, the well-intentioned but culturally limited inspector attempts to help the villagers understand the importance of water drainage systems, to improve the general health. To do so, he ushers them all into an unlit tent and shows them a film about the importance of such techniques. Midway through the

film, an agitated chicken appears in the film, for only the briefest of moments, in the bottom right-hand comer of the screen. After the film, the inspector asks the villagers what they saw. “A chicken,” they reply.'

What I like about this subtle cautionary tale is its double-edged punchline (though

McLuhan probably intends it as neither cautionary tale nor joke). What makes us laugh is not so much the “ignorance” of either the inspector or the villagers, but rather, our uncertainty at who it is we are supposed to be laughing at. It is the schism between these two modes of understanding that creates the discomfort as well as the humor here.

McLuhan explains this as a story about literacy: the inspector assumes that the villagers

22 will know not only how to see a film, but how to “read” it; in turn, though, he discovers his own ignorance, his failure to realize that such an ability is culturally constructed, and that he is the one with the “underdeveloped” perspective.

It is precisely the desire to avoid this sort of assumed cultural authority that has informed the development of postmodern ethnographic techniques, which in turn have fed our contemporary approaches to folklore fieldwork. As a discipline, folklore was partially founded on the belief that the intellectual elite had a responsibility to raid the cultural warehouses of the ignorant “folk” in order to rationalize, justify, historicize, and

“advance” their own “civilization.” While we have come a great distance from such a self- serving and elitist view of the folk and the purposes of folklore and folklore studies, such narrow conceptions of both the “folk” and their “lore” have not easily been shaken; indeed, some might read my critique of the folk-historical (re)productions of Tecumseh as yet another instance of the scholarly “elite” passing down dire judgments about the fate of culture and issuing prescriptions to prevent its “loss.” And such a criticism may be well- merited; it is certainly one that I have leveled on myself during the course of this project. It is my hope that a conscious and continuous awareness of this possibility will curb such superficially “benevolent” criticisms and allow the Tecumseh phenomenon—both as it is literally performed in the outdoor drama and as it is written in the novelized retellings of his life story—to be represented here in as honest and detailed a mode as possible.

Nevertheless, I cannot remove the lens through which the phenomenon is here perceived; as Ruth Benedict tells us, “We do not see the lens through which we look.”" Neither would I wish to remove that lens, for the tensions and ambivalences I encountered in the field should be as much a part of this written document that represents the work as it was a part of the work itself.

At the end of Roger Abrahams’ 1993 essay “Phantoms of Romantic Nationalism in

Folkloristics,” an insightful discussion of the lingering and pernicious effects of folklore’s

23 romantic-nationalist roots, the author issues a call for a new methodology that both recognizes and problematizes the discipline’s dubious origins, since they cannot realistically be abandoned entirely:

Cleaving to these romantic notions reinforces the essentialism of those who want to cling to the ideal of the folk community and the promises of wholeness and eternal return that live within such a perspective....But folklorists know the risks that adhere to this style of argument. We cannot retreat from operating with these new understandings in mind. My hope is that we will be able to construct a reflexive folkloristics that will identify these problem areas and help us think through the political and social implications of our work. (31, emphasis mine)

At heart, what I am setting out to do both theoretically, in this chapter, and practically, in the next, is no less than to offer my own response to this call. As mentioned in the introduction, tourist sites—particularly those that construct ethnic identities or reenact painful episodes of American history—provide very fertile ground for exploding our concepts of tradition, ethnicity, and authenticity, by casting those terms in light of contemporary debates about issues of cultural representation. In the rest of this chapter, I would like to proceed, term by term, to both explore and redefine each of these concepts so fundamental to folkloristics in general and to this study in particular, and then to connect these theories to the fieldwork methodology used in this particular case study.

Uprooting the Discipline: Theory and Terminology

In their response to Clifford and Marcus’ inadequate explanation as to why feminist perspectives were omitted from Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography,

Frances E. Mascia-Lees et al. point to a disturbing trend in the development of a postmodern aesthetic, which merits being quoted at length:

[I]t [is] curious that the postmodem claim that verbal constructs do not correspond in a direct way to reality has arisen precisely when women and non-Western peoples have begun to speak for themselves and, indeed, to speak about global systems of power differentials. In fact, Hartsock suggests that the postmodern view that power and truth are contingent and multiple may be seen to act as a truth claim itself, a claim that undermines the ontological status of the subject at the very time when women and non- Westem peoples have begun to claim themselves as subject....Similarly, 24 Sandra claims that “historically, relativism appears as an intellectual possibility, and as a ‘problem,’ only for dominating groups at the point where the hegemony (the universality) of their views is being challenged.” (Mascia-Lees et al. 15)

Mascia-Lees’ observations put into high relief the dilemmas of contemporary ethnography and folkloristics. Here we see the paradoxes inherent in two current aims of folklore studies: the desire, on the one hand, to “confess” one’s own shortcomings as a fieldworker and admit that anything one says about an Other culture is only a “half truth”

(cf. Clifford and Marcus), and—on the other hand—to promote and preserve the (assumed)

“essential” and “traditional” characteristics of a variety of ethnicities toward the goal of multicultural representation.

It seems ironic that at just the moment when folkloristics is undermining the constructed notions on which the discipline is predicated—“tradition,” “authenticity,” the existence of a distinct and self-contained “folk” and folk culture in contrast to an “elite” and elite culture—we are also being called upon in academic circles to provide “evidence” of the unique productions of specific folk groups as a way to highlight and honor their contributions to a larger United States culture. It is difficult to know which impulse to follow, since the two directions appear to be completely incompatible with one another in the past, any academic description of a given “ethnic group” and its “traditions” inevitably flattened both of those dynamic entities. However, this same paradox can work in our favor, since we may be able to use this crisis of representation to illustrate and challenge the ways that both the “folk” and “folklore” have been appropriated to reify ethnic and racial boundaries. Rather than rendering our discipline invalid, decentering the principles of tradition and authenticity (inherent in definitions of folklore from Thoms to Brunvand to

Toelken) may serve to break down perceived barriers between cultures that have traditionally been conceived of as being isolated.

Certainly, the problem of Tecumseh and his contemporary cultural manifestations is one which calls into question virtually all of the principles inherent to folklore study: to

25 examine Anglo constructions of Tecumseh’s history and identity is to examine, first and foremost, issues of authority and authorization, both in terms of a conflict between Native

Americans and Anglos about who has the authority to retell these stories, and in terms of the conflict between “folk” and “academic” history. The manifestations of Tecumseh also force us to confront and alter the parameters of our concepts of ethnicity and the performance of (ethnic) identity, both Anglo and Native American, and raise the perplexing specter of “authenticity” of both history and cultural identity in both tourist and literary texts. Lest we think that the Tecumseh phenomenon is an anomaly, we should recall the very long and well-documented traditions of enacting such historical and cultural performances in the United States,^ from local to regional to national celebrations (all the way from the Oak Harbor, Ohio, Apple Festival to the national Bicentennial celebration of

1976) to historical pageants and reenactments (from regional Civil War reenactors gathering for a weekend to the ongoing spectacle of Colonial Williamsburg). Indeed, it seems

Americans have a particular fondness for revisiting and reinventing the past, perhaps because we have such a short one. Our penchant for reinvention may in fact seduce us into believing that alterations we make now can erase mistakes of the past.

In particular, of late, the tourist industry in this country seems especially interested in recounting or reshaping painful historical episodes. Like the return of the repressed, we seem unable to let the dead rest. One of the mothers in Amy Tan’s novel The Joy Luck

Club “misinterprets” (but really illuminates) a fortune-cookie phrase “Look around you and dig deep” as “You become restless and rob graves”;^ and so it seems we, too, in our restless discomfort with the past, feel compelled to dig it up repeatedly. Clearly this is not necessarily a suspect activity, since some of the recent digging has “unearthed” pockets of buried history about historically under-represented groups that needed to be exhumed and brought to light. Too, such a process of digging and reburying is nothing new-one might say that history has always been constructed by such a process. Still, there does appear to

26 have been a remarkable increase in such prodding lately. Tecumseh is certainly not the only regional history drama to tell a story of oppression/ and such reenactments occur on the national level, as well, as the examples of Disney’s America and the Colonial

Williamsburg slave auction mentioned in the introduction show. In all of these reenactments or proposed reenactments, the focus has been on ethnic identity and representation. For producers and spectators alike (in an ideal situation), the problematic issues thus become how to construct and enact an ethnic identity and history in a way that nurtures rather than codifies; for the folklorist, the problem becomes how to write ethnographies about such places.

The site of such reenactments is usually a specific historical/geographical locality: in the case of Tecumseh!, that locale is Chillicothe, Ohio. Such regional events are allegedly designed to renarrate and thus celebrate and preserve local history and culture, but much of the time, these events express and constitute a far broader ideology. And this dynamic, too, is what makes Tecumseh! a worthy site for ethnographic scrutiny; as

Marcus and Fischer explain.

Regionalism goes to the heart of issues about elite politics, conducted through the manipulation of cultural forms, myths, and allegiances, and about the pervasive suspicion toward, and possible means of validating, authentic cultural expression in society dominated by a self-conscious faith in modernity. A return to local culture, and to some degree, the past, upon which the appeal of regional identity depends, is an ideal topic for a critical ethnography which seeks to expose the ways the notion of culture itself is conceived as a commonsense concept, deeply implicated in the political economy of contemporary American society. (Anthropology as Cultural Critique 156)

Thus, whileTecumseh! may seem like a small and perhaps even inconsequential product of local culture, I would argue along with Marcus and Fischer that those very qualities make it rife with ethnographic implications and complexities. I would also argue that the drama is also not only both reflective and constructive of a specific regional identity, but also of a specific ethnic and class identity. Tecwmse/z/—ostensibly about and authorized by Native Americans—is far more an Anglo production: not only literally, in

27 terms of the ethnicity of its writers, producers, and actors, but also figuratively, in terms of

the identities produced and reified at the site itself. As such, a brief discussion of the

rapidly changing definitions of “ethnicity” is merited here.

“Ethnicity”

In light of contemporary theoretical concerns about cultural representation, scholars

from a wide range of disciplines have questioned the nature of the quality labeled

“ethnicity,” but folklorists perhaps have a more urgent and invested concern in reevaluating

the term, since folklore is often (tacitly) evoked as “proof’ of ethnic identity. The January

1998 “special-topic” issue of the PMLA (January 1998) focuses on ethnicity, including

Sander Gilman’s introduction, a conglomeration of four smaller essays by Linda

Hutcheon, Homi K. Bhabha, Daniel Boyarin, and Sabine I. Golz titled “Four Views on

Ethnicity,”^ and several “case studies” of literature and other cultural productions as viewed through the lens of ethnicity. Definitions by Sollors and Fischer are cited across all four essayists’ “views,” as are a variety of psychoanalytic theorists, though few truly new or insightful observations about the process of ethnicity are made. However, the journal’s choice of topic demonstrates the increasing links between folkloric and literary areas of interest and scholarship; folklorists have been exploring questions of ethnic identity and expression since the inception of the discipline. Furthermore, the journal’s choice of cover art, a photo of “a storyteller figure by Michelle Paisano, a Laguna Pueblo potter” (table of contents, PMLA 113.1) stresses a link between ethnicity and folkloristics that these theorists assume, but fail to invoke or investigate. In short, literary theorists have assumed a connection between folklore and ethnicity without studying or citing the work that folklore scholars have already done in this area. And yet, folkloristics—with its emphasis on ethnography, context, and dynamic processes of culture—might seem better poised to interrogate and explode a term like “ethnicity.”

28 As John Roberts noted in an address at the Ohio State University in November

1993 entitled “African American Folklore in a Discourse of Folkness” (drawn from his article “African American Diversity and the Study of Folklore,” which appeared in Western

Folklore in April 1993), the very first issue of \hc Journal of American Folklore recognized

African-Americans as a folk group worthy of study, even as the American Folklore Society bickered (and eventually split) over whether Native Americans should be recognized and studied as such. As he writes.

This controversy...reveals the extent to which folkness had become a discourse on European-ness by the time it reached America. Folkness could not register Native American-ness as a subject for discussion. Despite this early perception of a problematic inherent in the European concept of the “folk” in the American context—a problematic that denied Native Americans the status of “folk” because of their non-European-ness—American folklorists historically have attempted to maintain continuity with a Eurocentric discourse of folkness in which the folk are seen as a homogeneous category of cultural producers. {Western Folklore 160)

Roberts uses this example to point to the arbitrary ways in which folklorists have generally defined the “folk,” and—in his address—proceeded to criticize Dundes’ oft-cited essay

“Who Are the Folk?” as continuing this practice of defining folk groups as those “who share at leastone common factor” (Dundes 6, emphasis mine). Roberts problematizes this notion of folk groups as being so constrained—defined by the “least common denominator” of shared factors, while dismissing the impact of multicultural interaction. Roberts’ critique hearkens back to Richard Bauman’s “Differential Identity and the Social Base of

Folklore,” in which Bauman claims that folklorists’ tendency to focus exclusively on esoteric (in-group) lore is not only limiting, but counterproductive; Bauman suggests that

“an awareness of intergroup contexts...bring one much closer to productive insights into the social matrix of the form” (35). By examining the lore that exists between the boundaries of academically isolated folk groups, Bauman implies, we can discover far more interesting and telling things not only about each group, but about the state of relations between races, religions, sects, and ethnicities in the United States. As

29 vemacular-architecture scholar Dell Upton has nicely capsulized the idea, turning our focus

front the discrete to the dynamic, the isolated to the interactive, allows us to “understand

ethnicity as a synthesis of imposed and adopted characteristics that is forged through

contact and conflict. It is a role played for the benefit of others” (4).^

In addition to critiquing the discipline’s tendency to isolate cultural groups, both

Roberts’ address and his article take folkloristics to task for failing to recognize its own

constructedness; he suggests that in persisting in our “traditional” concepts of the folk and

of ethnicity, “‘folk’ has become a reified category of cultural production” (159), one which

restricts our conceptions to the romantic and the homogeneous. In this sense, Roberts

echoes several other recent folklore theorists who have called on us to redefine what we

mean by ethnicity. In their introduction to Creative Ethnicity: Symbols and Strategies of

Contemporary Ethnic Life, Stephen Stem and John Allan Cicala redefine ethnicity as

[T]he process by which members of American ethnic groups absorb, invigorate, modify, and transmit folk expressions in a multicultural, pluralistic society. Interaction with members of one’s own ethnic group, and response to the cultural values of other groups, lead to the evolution of symbols and strategies that in tum draw on vast and varied cultural resources, (xi)

This definition is fairly satisfying, as it posits that ethnicity is constructed both through

esoteric and exoteric interactions, and through a continuous process of both passive

response to and active agency within the dominant culture. Although Stem and Cicala’s

definition is a bit circular-defining ethnicity on the presumption of a preexisting “ethnic

group”—their definition nevertheless rejects a biological explanation of ethnicity, positing

instead that ethnicity is communicative, interactive, symbolic, and strategic, right in line

widi Henry Louis Gates’ definition of race as a “trope” or “text” (Loose Canons 147, 79).

However, Stem and Cicala’s definition falls apart later in their introduction when they remark that the “third challenge [for folklorists] is to develop methods to deal with how ethnics leam to maneuver in a nonethnic world” (xvi, emphasis mine). The mere suggestion that a “nonethnic world” can exist is preposterous; furthermore. Stem and

30 Cicala’s failure to recognize “White” or “WASP” as ethnicities vividly unearths of the root of the problem. As Paul Lauter® suggests, the refusal to see whiteness as an ethnicity only maintains and reinforces its centrality, rendering it the invisible standard by which all otherness is measured. This oversight provides unshakable evidence for Roberts’ indictment of folklorists, painfully demonstrating the discipline’s ethnocentrism, and its insistence that “folk” is “Other.”

Perhaps a more salient definition of ethnicity can be found in Michael M. J.

Fischer’s article in Writing Culture, “Ethnicity and the Post-Modern Arts of Memory.”

Fischer suggests that

[E]thnicity is something reinvented and reinterpreted in each generation by each individual and that is often something quite puzzling to the individual, something over which he or she lacks control. Ethnicity is not something that is simply passed on from generation to generation, taught and leamed; it is something dynamic....a deeply rooted emotional component of identity...often transmitted less through cognitive language or leaming...than through processes analogous to the dreaming and transference of psychoanalytic encounters. ( 195-6)

Fischer’s definition is admirable not only because it maintains that ethnicity is formed through dynamic processes and interactions, but also because it resists quantifying the

“lore” through which ethnicity is transmitted. It allows for an unquantifiable fluidity of ethnicity that resists categorization and reduction. Thus, Fischer’s definition does not take the bite out of an ethnic identity by reducing it to disparate, identifiable “traits” and units of transmission. To this I would add the simplest and, in my mind, most flexible definition of ethnicity available in the literature, that of Werner Sollors in his introduction to The

Invention of Ethnicity. Here, he points out the relatively recent coinage of the word,’ and posits a contemporary conception of the term which addresses such folkloric concems as invented categories, context, coding strategies, and a wariness toward claims of authenticity. In short, he describes ethnicity as “not a thing but a process" (xv, emphasis mine), which neatly echoes Oring’s simple but evocative description of folklore itself.

31 So what does a process-oriented definition of ethnicity mean for folkloristics?

Again, I return to Bauman’s article. Studying only esoteric lore within ethnic groups is no

longer a viable or useful methodology, nor is it realistic; as the above definitions show,

ethnicity is created not only within the group, but in response to other groups and the

dominant culture. By studying these exoteric interactions and processes (and how they

affect the ethnic group’s own creation and articulation of its identity), we stand to leam a lot

more about all groups involved. Moreover, such studies can go a long way to interrogate

the dominant culture and its reaction to ethnicity of all kinds, including its own. Finally, as

Roberts notes, any redefinition of a given “folk group” and its “lore” needs to consider the

ways in which both have been “mediated by such factors as gender, class, sexual

orientation, region, education, and group affiliation” (164).

Several such studies already exist. Américo Paredes’ “Folk Medicine and the

Intercultural Jest” demonstrates both the esoteric and exoteric conflicts and the dynamics

involved in the telling of jokes about being fooled by a ciirandero. Paredes’ analysis

reveals that such jokes vary depending on the class/occupation of the teller and his relation

to “mainstream” Anglo culture; as such, they reveal a strong tension surrounding the issue

of acculturation, sometimes disparaging those who don’t acculturate, sometimes forcefully

resisting such acculturation. As Paredes says, “The ciirandero jests release a complicated

set of conflicting emotions ranging from exasperation to affection in respect to the

unacculturated Mexican-American coupled with a half-conscious resentment toward the

Anglo-American culture” (76). Thus, Paredes posits a study of ethnicity and its expression that neither exists in a vacuum nor projects a one-dimensional (and thus containable) image of its subject culture.

Janet S. Theophano’s “T Gave Him a Cake’: An Interpretation of Two Italian-

American Weddings” shows how ethnic expression can be partially or completely subsumed by personal expression, reminding those quantifiers of ethnicity to invert the

32 traditional literary maxim and trust the teller, not the “tale.” Theophano essentially “reads” the wedding celebrations one Italian-American mother threw for her two daughters. The first marriage was not approved of by the parents: the daughter was only eighteen, and her fiancé was not only not of Italian heritage, but also regarded as “shiftless.” The mother hosted a small buffet reception at home and served only traditional Italian-American wedding fare. When the second daughter married an Italian-American man several years later, the celebration was vastly different: held in a local country club, guests were served a sit-down meal that was entirely “English”: no Italian-American foods were served.

Theophano regards this not as the mother’s rejection of her ethnicity (as some of the wedding guests complained), but rather as an assertion of her independence and her capacity to take care of her daughters—for Theophano includes the all-important contextual information that during the several years between weddings, the mother’s husband (the daughters’ father) abandoned the family. The author reads the second daughter’s wedding as the mother’s rebellion against the patriarchal basis o f her ethnicity. Thus, Theophano’s study reveals something of its subject culture, but reminds us that material we gather from an informant must first be acknowledged as an expression of the individual before it can be labeled “representative” of an entire folk group. This Italian-American mother’s story offers active resistance to a monolithic view of ethnicity.

So too does Madeline Slovenz-Low’s “On the Tail of the Lion: Approaches to

Cross-Cultural Fieldwork with Chinese Americans in New York.” Yet Slovenz-Low’s study goes one step beyond Theophano’s, as it completely undermines ethnic boundaries by showing how the author (a white woman), via her academic interest in a Chinese-

American lion-dancing group, eventually became absorbed into that culture, even to the point of being asked to speak on its behalf. Slovenz-Low’s movement through successive levels of trust and understanding within the Chinese American lion-dancing group she studied (and eventually through those same levels in the larger Chinese American

33 community in New York’s Chinatown) remind us of the various “levels” of tourism described by sociologist Dean MacCannell, expanding on Coffman’s theories of “front” and “back” regions in social performance.'® MacCannell postulates that any tourist setting is composed of “front regions” (those intended for tourists) and “back regions” (those restricted to insiders), with a variety of levels in between that mediate between these two regions in order to simulate authenticity (101-102). Slovenz-Low’s progress parallels this movement from front to back regions: on her initial visit to the lion-dancing club’s rehearsal, she is an (uncomfortable) outsider, only observing movement. Eventually, she is asked to participate in a menial way (by menial, I mean in a way that is helpful to the group but reveals nothing about its operations). As her fieldwork continues, she is allowed further and further into the “back regions,” eventually being adopted by her martial arts teacher, marrying one of her informants, and being asked to act as an advocate for the lion- dancing group in public forums.

Slovenz-Low’s work provides a rigorous challenge to our definitions of ethnicity.

If we regard ethnicity as creative performance, as the dynamic communicative exchanges both within the group and with other groups and society at large, then we can say that—for all intents and purposes—Slovenz-Low has become Chinese American, if only in an adjunct sort of way. When I suggest this in Introduction to Folklore classes, students—most of whom seem willing to accept the idea of ethnicity as a culturally constructed category— begin to balk. Slovenz-Low’s experience offers a hard wall against which they slam into the racial and ethnic essentialism that is so hard to give up. Slovenz-Low may be an

“adopted” ethnic, they suggest, but she isn’t a “real” one; she’s not “authentic.”

This introduces the question of “authenticity,” which becomes heavily implicated here (and will be discussed more fully later in this chapter). If tourism is, as MacCannell suggests (pre-Baudrillard, it should be noted), a simulation of authenticity designed to disguise “actual” “authenticity” (if we can believe that such a thing even exists), and if

34 one’s interactions with an(0)ther ethnicity parallel this sort of movement from front to back regions, the question becomes: if one is an outsider, how does one know when one has reached the back regions? Regardless of how deeply we penetrate a culture outside our own (pardon the Freudian and imperialistic metaphor!), as outsiders we are unequipped to determine truth or authenticity, unable to recognize the back region when, and if, we ever reach it. Ultimately, there is no such thing as a back region; just as historic-geographic folklorists’ search for an Ur text proved elusive and illusory, so too does our search for an ethnic back region, for an “authentic” ethnic identity or expression. As Regina Bendix argues in her essay “Tourism and Cultural Displays: Inventing Traditions for Whom?,”

“[N]o matter how far into the everyday domain a tourist is allowed to peek, the authenticity remains staged by the very fact that the tourist is looking at it” (133).

This is not to suggest that there is no such thing as ethnicity or “ethnic” folklore, nor that to study such a thing is a fruitless and misguided task. As Roberts suggests, though, if we choose to do so, what is needed is both a broader and more interactive definition of ethnicity and a methodology that reflects such a definition. And we must also surrender the romantic notion that if we pursue such a study, we will eventually reach the

“essential” core of ethnic identity. Like a ball of string, we reach the center only to discover that we have unraveled the object of our scrutiny and found nothing.

Reinventing the Meaning of “Tradition”

If there has been a search for an “essential” ethnic identity in folklore, then there has also been a search for “authenticity,” for the “genuine” expression of “tradition” by a “folk group.” All of the quoted terms are currently under fire; they are also all words that were unironically central to the establishment of folklore as a discipline. As mentioned previously, though, the deconstruction of such terms has been a boon rather than a death knell to contemporary folkloristics; through some definitional manipulation of these terms,

35 folklore theorists have been able to reconcile such terminological challenges to enhance the contemporary study of folklore. For just as Stem and Cicala posit that there is a “creative ethnicity," so other theorists (Handler and Linnekin, Hobsbawm, Staub)' ‘ posit the idea of

“invented tradition.”

In the introduction to his 1983 study. The Invention o f Tradition, Eric Hobsbawm defines “invented tradition” as “a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past” (I).

Hobsbawm makes a clear distinction between “invented” traditions and those that merely adapt older traditions for contemporary purposes (5). The following year, however,

Handler and Linnekin exposed the arbitrariness of such a distinction, implying instead that all tradition is invented (or reinvented):

We would argue that tradition resembles less an artifactual assemblage than a process of thought—an ongoing inte^retation of the past....We suggest that there is no essential, bounded tradition; tradition is a model of the past and is inseparable from the interpretation of tradition in the present. Undeniably, traditional action may refer to the past, but to “be about” or to refer to is a symbolic rather than natural relationship, and as such it is characterized by discontinuity as well as continuity. (“Tradition, Genuine or Spurious” 41)

Thus Handler and Linnekin blast away the assumptions at the heart of Hobsbawm’s approach: that some traditions have roots in the past while others don’t, and that only those without such roots are “invented.” The others, presumably, are “genuinely traditional.”

The fallacy. Handler and Linnekin suggest, lies in the belief that there was a point in the past in which tradition was static and that it is possible to locate that historical moment when a traditional practice originated (again, the fallacious search-for-sources). Most folklorists working today will acknowledge that even the most time-honored and continuous traditions are, in fact, reinvented with each performance, in each new context.

Consequently, Handler and Linnekin’s definition is quite liberating; it frees folklorists from the endless look backward and instead allows them to examine the

36 interaction between a particular historical moment and the ways it shapes how traditions are

invented or reinvented. It also removes the evaluative/qualitative factor that privileges

“original” traditions over “invented” ones. And—more cmcially to this specific study—it

also implies that there are “inventors” who may be questioned and investigated about the tradition. Indeed, as Bendix argues, “[Tjhe idea of invention brings with it questions about the inventors and thus shifts the analytic focus from the event to the agency of those

involved in its creation and maintenance” (132).

This is the analytic focus I am choosing to take in examining the site of Tecumseh! :

Who created this tradition, and why? What are the priorities of the inventors? How does the drama seem to be defining “ethnicity,” “authenticity,” “tradition,” and other relevant terms? How self-reflexive are the inventors about their own positions, relative to the material, the audience, cultural changes and forces, the cultural group being represented, and potential opponents? How does the audience receive what is being reenacted? How do they seem to be defining ethnicity and authenticity? And finally, what is the role—present and future—of the cultural critic or folklorist in this kind of production? As Jim Horton,

African American historian and consultant on the Disney’s America project, implied in the introduction to this dissertation, we cannot simply wish such problematic “educational tools” away.'- So what part will we play in the continuing reinvention and probable proliferation of these sites?

Arriving at Cultural Representation, Searching for “Authenticity”

Once we have slid off the edge of the conjunction of all the previous slippery-but- cmcial terms, we inevitably land in the murky, turbulent waters of cultural representation.

This is the critical issue which has challenged academics and museum professionals of every stripe in recent years. In few fields, though, is the import of this concem as

37 immediate and ethically charged as in the fields of ethnography and folkloristics. As John

Dorst describes the problem in his “postmodern ethnography,” The Written Suburb,

A profound transformation has occurred in the very structure of cultural production...and this tectonic shift renders thoroughly problematic the ethnographic enterprise as professionally practiced. To put it in a formula, the culture of advanced consumer capitalism, or...postmodemity, consists largely in the processes of self-inscription, indigenous self-documentation and endlessly reflexive simulation. Theorists of ethnographic representation have for some time now acknowledged that all cultures generate texts about themselves..., but postmodemity virtually consists of this activity....By its very nature postmodemity abolishes a conceptual distinction traditional ethnography relies upon, that is, the distinction between the site of ethnographic experience/observation and the site of ethnographic writing. (2, emphasis mine)

Dorst implies here that the question of whether any given “cultural representation” is

accurate, authentic, or ethical is endlessly complicated by the nature of contemporary

cultural production, which has—as he and others (Baudrillard, Eco, Jameson)’^ suggest—

undermined the notion that there was ever a “genuine” thing or culture to be represented.

Thus, theory has moved beyond MacCannell’s estimation that “settings are not merely copies or replicas of real-life situations but...are presented as disclosing more about the real thing than the real thing itself discloses” (102): contemporary theorists instead speculate that there never was a “real thing” to be copied, that the “real thing” itself was a pastiche of prior representations.

In fact, we seem to have reached the point at which, as Robert Cantwell describes it. The question is no longer...whether the human mind is capable of representing reality to itself, but rather whether there is a reality at all that is not constituted by its representations, or whether, indeed, “representations” are somehow not “more real” than what can be represented or simulated—whether...the tangible waking world is not now itself simply a reproduction, in the Marxian sense, of socially legitimated cultural models drat, through the process of culture, have prepared and shaped our perceptions of it. {Ethnomimesis 293, emphasis mine)

The signified has been replaced by its sign; the hyperreal (Baudrillard, Eco) or the

“hysterical sublime” (Jameson) replaces the real. Cantwell calls this nothing less than an

38 “epistemological crisis,” one that certainly challenges and changes the face of that informal

hermeneutics that is folklore. For, as Cantwell also astutely (if disturbingly) notes,

folklore and folklife themselves are only static representations, invented labels that reduce

entire systems of culture to discrete, consumable units of representation. Describing a

recognized—and, more importantly, recognizable—type of vernacular architecture, he notes

that

There is, in a sense, no “Basque house” as such in Basque country; the “Basque house” is strictly an artifact of a culture in which such stylistic distinctions, and the framing of them by particular examples, is meaningful, in which such distinctions, moreover, are a function of that culture’s own economic and social arrangements. The Basque house, in short, is a mimesis, a representation, a fiction, an invention, in the same sense that the “Dutch buy-a-broom girl” or the “Chinese dragon dancer” is an invention.

So, indeed, is “folklife”—and in the same sense. (Ethnomimesis 286, emphasis Cantwell’s)

And yet, if we did not come up with a signifier (the term “Basque house”) to mark the signified (that particular type of structure), we would have no cultural “sign” to study, and we folklorists would be out of work. Thus are folklorists implicated in this system of semiotic substitution, and thus are we called upon, 1 think, to be hyperaware of issues of representation, even as we call the “reality” of such representations into question.

Clearly this demand becomes even more pressing when we study the representations of cultures and ethnicities other than our own. As Mascia-Lees et al. suggest in the quote at the beginning of this chapter, we should not greet this “crisis of representation” as an opportunity to forget the very real, very silencing impact that such representations can have on marginalized groups. Regardless of whether such representations are “authentic” or merely constitute a flimsy “veneer,” as Dorst terms it

(110), they can have pragmatic, personal effects. Presumably, in our own cultural and ethnic contexts, we are more cognizant of the cultural complexity behind the “sign,” and may be less likely to offer up representations that are decontextualized and overdetermined.

However, it is entirely too easy to do so with ethnicities and cultures outside our own, as

39 the case of Tecumseh! will suggest. In his evocative study of blackface minstrelsy in the pre-Civil War U.S., Love and Theft, Eric Lott discusses the dangers of these cross-ethnic representations, and explores the profound desires that motivate such representations. In his introduction, he notes that while such representations seem repugnant to us today, they are important loci of study because “minstrelsy not only affords a look at the emergent historical break between high and low cultures but also reveals popular culture to be a place where cultures of the dispossessed are routinely commodified—and contested” (8). By studying such phenomena, he suggests, we can not only trace the production of the

“cultural commodity ‘blackness,’” (39), but we can also examine “the complexities of white subject formation and subjectivity, and...the multiple determinations that make race such a complex lived social reality” (35).'^ The desires that motivate the minstrel acts Lott studies are really not too far different from those which seem to motivate audiences to consume the dramatic (re)presentation of Tecumseh!, even though Tecumseh! is allegedly a serious presentation of fairly “accurate” history, and not an overt farce.

Still, the “history” presented at TccMmje/i.'—regardless of its producers’ intentions-

-is much more a reflection and an active reconstruction of the present than it is of thepast.

The show constitutes a text that reproduces not merely history, but contemporary ideology.'^ In this, it is akin to Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, the “postmodern suburb” that is the subject of Dorst’s ethnography. Of that “site,” Dorst says its definitive feature is

...[T]he pervasiveness of an “historical hyperspace” in which depth in time is displaced by fragmentary surfaces. The essential qualification, though, is that depth in time is not simply obliterated by these postmodern surfaces. Rather a whole panoply of simulacra signifying historical depth and authenticity become the very texts inscribed upon such surfaces....Chadds Ford’s postmodemity trades heavily in the reproducible simulation of depth, in depth as consumable imagery, in historical authenticity as a commodified surface effect. (108, emphasis Dorst’s)

I can think of no better description of the site of the outdoor drama Tecumseh!, either: it, too, functions as an historical hyperspace where authenticity, ethnic identity, and history

40 are commodified and reproduced in ways designed less to simulate reality than to replace it.

“Authenticity” at the site of Tecumseh! is, as John Dorst describes a living history museum in The Written Suburb, “Less an integration of past and present than a licensed transgression of the boundary that marks off the museum display. Theater meets museum in these events”; accordingly, they operate not under a notion of “authenticity” in the sense of verisimilitude (though they may be consumed as such by visitors), but under a “rationale of ‘appropriate’ or ‘strategic’ authenticity” (74): what I will call, in the next chapter, the

“consumable authentic.”

The Tourist Site

As I mentioned early in this chapter, tourist sites—perhaps more than any other contemporary ethnographic locale—are the spaces where all of the concepts discussed above become praxis, where theoretical notions of “authority,” “authenticity,” “ethnicity,” and

“tradition” clash with the practiced and performed realities of those terms. The results can be successful, enlightening, and educational as well as misleading, stereotypical, even injurious; almost always, to the folklorist and cultural critic, those results are Jarring and paradoxical.

Perhaps the best folkloric account of the complicated nexus formed when these theoretical notions become very real conflicts in public settings is Deirdre Evans-Pritchard’s study of the controversy over who was “authorized” to display and sell goods on the plaza at the Portal of the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe, New Mexico, as described in her essay “The Portal Case: Authenticity, Tourism, Traditions, and the Law.” As Evans-

Pritchard sums up the conflict.

In 1976, some Anglo and Hispanic craftsmen and traders were selling from stalls on the sidewalk in front of Santa Fe’s Museum of Fine Arts. The Museum of New Mexico, the authority administering all state museums, objected to the presence of these vendors. After much argument, the museum evicted them with the support of civil authorities....When the vendors argued that they too should be allowed to sell at the Portal, they were told that the museum permitted only Indians to sell there. The 41 proceedings received extensive media coverage, contrasting the vendors’ complaints of unfairness with Indian claims that “Indian tradition and culture would be eroded if Indians were not allowed to sell their wares in the Plaza area” and if non-Indians were allowed to see their goods next to the Indians. (44)

Several lawsuits and museum policy-changes later, the Portal was officially designated for

Native use only, and more recently (within the last decade), the director of the Palace of the

Governors has appointed a Native-American staffed committee to determine that, in fact, all

goods sold on the Portal are handmade by the person selling them (49).

Evans-Pritchard argues that the real issue behind the controversy had less to do

with racial discrimination than with authenticity; the Plaza had become the primary tourist

attraction in Santa Fe, and as Evans-Pritchard cites locals as saying, “The Indians on the

Plaza have gained such a reputation that they have become a world-famous landmark in

Santa Fe....[They] are the largest drawing card in the city. It’s the Indians people come to

see” (44). Clearly, it was economically lucrative to pass a law that would reassure tourists

that they were seeing the “real thing”; it is also very easy to see what is dangerous and

problematic about this scenario. While the ruling favoring the Native American artists

carries economic benefits, as Evans-Pritchard notes, such benefits come at the cost of

cultural Harness and stereotype:

Consciousness of tourist expectations informs much of the Portal Indians’ display. They are aware that they must project a particular image for their work to be evaluated as true Indian craft and for diem to be able to sell it. They are encouraged to dress “Indian-fashion” at the Portal, and one rarely sees an Indian selling expressionist paintings or sculpture—although the Portal policy would not prevent this. (48)

As we will see in the following chapter, awareness of audience expectations about Native

American identity factors heavily into production decisions at Tecumseh! as well. And as such, Evans-Pritchard’s work perhaps provides the best prior “case-study” of the problems being examined here.

Another notable similarity is that at both the Portal and at the Tecumseh! site, the notion of authenticity that is constructed (and, in the Portal case, legislated) has very little

42 to do with historical fact. In its ruling on the Portal case, the court stated that “co-mingling

the cultures [on the Plaza] is less instructive because it fails to clarify the lines of historical

development,” even though—as a letter to the editor of the Santa Fe New Mexican pointed

out— “the Mexicans taught the Indians of the Southwest silversmithing. Atsidi Sani was

the first Navajo to learn from a Mexicano named Naki Tsosi (thin Mexican) around

1870” (46-47). Whether this bit of local history is true or not, it is true that New Mexico

has a highly creolized culture, and that the Plaza functioned as a place of commerce for

Natives, Latinos, and Anglos alike for more than a hundred years before the court’s ruling

(44). Contrary to the court’s ruling, the “New Mexican ” culture of today, as broad and

indefinable as that concept may be, would not exist but for the “co-mingling of cultures.”

There seems to be a bizarre fear of cultural or artistic miscegenation operating behind the

court’s ruling, another fetishistic theme that comes up in Tecumseh! (see discussion of the

Tecumseh/Rebecca Galloway romance, below).

The final similarity between the two tourist sites involves the issues of authority and

authorization, especially as those issues are connected with ethnicity. In order to exhibit at

the Portal, vendors must offer “proof’ of their ethnic identity by demonstrating that they

are “enrolled member[s] of an Indian tribe as evidenced by tribal records or by records of

the Bureau of Indian Affairs” (47). “Authentic” ethnic identity must not only be ascribed,

but legislated, rather than self-defined; as Evans-Pritchard notes, “a Canadian Indian

woman sold her crafts there for a while. However, a local Hispanic craftswoman who claims to be half-Tarahumara Indian is not allowed to sell under the Portal” (47). As we

will see in the following chapter, the Anglo producers of Tecumseh! also go to great

lengths to establish and convey their “authority” to retell the Shawnee leader’s story; and clearly, the sort of counter-representation going on at the Tecumseh! site—where an

“invisible” minority is replaced by the “authorized” dominant group—adds yet another dimension of complexity to the issues raised by Evans-Pritchard.

43 Before launching into a description of the Tecumseh! site and explaining a bit about

the drama’s history and text, though, it seems important to define the term "site’’—both the

tourist site and the ethnographic site. I use this term in the sense that Dorst brings to it:

site as “a complex ideological production—an ordering of texts” (10). In other words,

“site” does not merely describe the physical or geographical boundaries of a place, but also

encompasses what is meant to be signified by the place—and though that sounds a bit

cumbersome, I think it is necessary to say ‘‘''meant to signify,” because—as Dorst’s

definition suggests—there is an ideology at work behind such sites, though that ideology

may be vague and unformed even to the sites’ producers. The tourist site, then, can be any

space where cultural production occurs, where culture is performed as spectacle for an

audience—be it a literal performance like that of Tecumseh!, or the more subtly mediated

performances of literary texts or family histories that will be discussed later in this

dissertation. As such, I diverge from MacCannell’s more concrete notion of a tourist site

as necessarily being a physical place that is framed and marked as such.'*

And finally, before getting site-specific, I need to address the challenges of

postmodern ethnography, and describe more explicitly the methodology I employ below

and moreover in the fieldwork chapter to follow. As noted above, one of the calls I am

responding to here comes from Regina Bendix, who, in asking us to “shift [our] analytic

focus from the event to the agency of those involved in its creation and maintenance” (132),

turns our ethnographic gaze away from those whom we have traditionally regarded as “the

folk” and over to the more overt and conscious producers of culture. This is the rationale

behind my interviewing process; I chose to interview the two people primarily responsible

for the production of the outdoor drama and tourist site that is Tecumseh!, producer Marion

Waggoner and his theater manager, Renee Norman, as well as the actor who played

Tecumseh during the course of my fieldwork” , Jamieson Price. Along with Paul

Rabinow, I feel “temperamentally more comfortable in an oppositional stance,” and as

44 such have chosen informants who are “neither heroes nor villains, [who] seem to afford me the necessary anthropological distance, being separate enough to prevent an easy identification, yet close enough to afford a charitable, if critical, understanding” (258-259).

At least, it is my hope that the ethnography in the following chapter balances critique, charity, and understanding.

It is also important here to justify why I interviewed anyone at all, for while I admire Dorst’s groundbreaking work in The Written Suburb and his insightful theorizing about the complications of “doing” ethnography in a postmodem context, I disagree vehemently with his notion that such research at such sites not onlyneed not involve

“informants,” but should not. As he explains his methodology,

I have not been particularly concemed with the lives of people who inhabit Chadds Ford [the site of his study], nor with the social relations and categories of specific subjects. I confess my goal here to be unabashedly anti-humanistic....If what I have done here is in some sense post- ethnographic, it of necessity dispenses with informants as centered subjects who “speak for themselves.” (208-209)

While I agree that as folklorists and ethnographers we must problematize the concept and category of “informant” as well, since “post-ethnography must be aware of the commodification of the subjectivity in the informant” (209), I have fierce objections about leaving informants out of the mix entirely. To do so retums us to the even more dangerous state that Mascia-Lees et al. describe above: to render the producers and participants in such sites voiceless, to rob them of subjectivity, as elusive and commodified as the notion of “subjectivity” might be.'*

With this study, I wish to suggest that it is possible to explore the notions of subjectivity and cultural representation at a “postmodem” ethnographic site without giving up the human-centered, and humanistic, methodologies of the past. Indeed, some of the richest and most complicated moments of my fieldwork at the Tecumseh! site evolved precisely out of the precarious and very human interactions I had with my “informants,” and some of the most difficult aspects of writing up an ethnography of that site involved

45 my own struggle to represent my subjects fairly, even as I realized I was complicit in commodifying them for my own purposes. Dorst’s subject-less approach, while keeping more in line with the methodologies of contemporary cultural critics, also suffers in the same way that those studies do: by erasing the subjectivity of those they study, such critics only enlarge and prioritize their own subjectivity, and usually without any kind of critical self-reflexivity. I posit here that the “new ethnography” can and should include, problematize, and critique a variety of subjects—above all, that of the ethnographer herself, since she has positioned herself—theoretically—“above all.”

Praxis: Theorizing Tecumseh!

To get to the Sugarloaf Mountain Amphitheater, you must travel east of the town of

Chillicothe proper—which boasts being Ohio’s first capital—and travel over several hilly two lane roads, past the famous pair of hills pictured on the State Seal. Already the landscape is vaguely familiar, if only from subconscious recollections of the large state seals displayed for sale on the wall of the BMV office. A large and unexpected sign reading “Welcome to the Sugarloaf Mountain Amphitheater, Home of Tecumseh! An Ohio

Tradition” tells you to turn right rather abruptly; the arrow, it should be noted, is designed like a flint arrowhead. You travel up a long, winding drive, wider than the road you just left (and constructed, Scioto Society treasurer Herbert Friedman explains, by the Ohio

National Guard)to the top of the hill. There you encounter a large wooden building, looking not unlike a 4H camp dining hall. In fact, if you’ve arrived in time, you can still partake of the all-you-can-eat outdoor buffet dinner; or you can grab a quick snack at the concession stand—you’re welcome to take food into the theater with you.

The amphitheater itself—capable of seating 1500 people when filled to capacity, which happens most every weekend during its summer run—slopes down to a large stage area, designed to look as if it were carved out of the preexisting landscape: two large rock

46 cliffs (man-made) sit at either side of the stage; their terraced structure allows for a variety of staging areas. The broad space between is composed of sand and dirt, with a fake tree or bush here and there, and two “campfires” right up front, which are lit and put out during various parts of the play. Behind the whole scene is a man-made lake surrounded by real trees. Behind this lake, and also all the way down each side of the theater, are other dirt trails that cast members use to enter and exit the theater. What the audience cannot see, but perhaps the most “authentic” part of the whole landscape, is the cast and crew’s encampment down the hill below the stage, where the actors and some of the “techies” live in tent cabins all summer, and where the costume shop and on-site “munitions plant” (storage and assembly space for rifles, gunpowder, and other pyrotechnical devices used in the show) are located. This is MacCannelTs “back region,” a place “closed to audiences and outsiders, [which] allows concealment of props and activities that might discredit the performance out front”; it is this concealment of the mechanical (literal at the

Tecumseh! site) that creates the mystification that “sustain[s] a firm sense of social reality,” according to MacCannell (93). In other words, the outdoor setting, combined with the more traditional concealing of “theatricality,” serves to pull the spectator not merely into a theater, but into an older, more “authentic” social and natural realityThe whole setting is truly striking, and the script and the director both make ingenious use of the space. Despite the fact that the scenery never changes during the play, it is easy to move from one scene to the next and believe that we are geographically somewhere else.

Of course, the most dramatic aspect of the theater itself has nothing to do with any of this, and everything to do with the surroundings. As producer Waggoner explains, this is what pioneer outdoor dramatist Paul Green had in mind when he hit on the concept of outdoor drama: “[H]e labeled it as more of a symphonic experience, you know. Seeing, hearing, smelling...a total involvement in the senses....! mean, look at it: those are real trees, that’s real water, there are real...6frdj, and...all forms of wildlife.” And truly, the

47 most transcendent moments in viewing the play occur when nature appears to comply with the dramatic action: my first viewing of the show took place in the evening of one of the most appallingly hot and humid summer days in recent memory, but during the scene when

Tecumseh takes his love interest, Rebecca Galloway, out for a “moonlight canoe ride,” a sudden, cool breeze came up, and a full moon appeared over the “lake” from behind some clouds just as the pair’s canoe nosed out from backstage. It was a wonder to behold.

Notably, Waggoner claims that this setting “creates a sense of pilgrimage, a sense of being there” (emphasis mine). In short, the setting is meant to enhance the authenticity; and even for a presumably detached skeptic, at that moment, it certainly worked for me. I cite this anecdote both to reinforce the power that such dramas can have, and to further illuminate the setting, which is so crucial to this reenactment: though the play is published and presumably available to the general public, it is difficult to imagine its being staged anywhere else, and certainly not indoors. To be successful, the play requires, as

Waggoner suggests, the distinct sense of having traveled to another place and time. The more important questions may be, where do people believe they have traveled, and what have they come there for?

History of the Drama

Tecumseh! has been performed in the Sugarloaf Amphitheater every summer since

1973. At that time, a group of businessmen were looking for a way to bring more tourists-

-and tourist dollars-into Chillicothe and Ross County. They seized upon the idea of staging an outdoor drama, and formed a nonprofit organization called The Scioto Society

(the Scioto is the river that runs through Chillicothe) to investigate what would need to happen in order to realize their goal. As Marion Waggoner recounts it.

The Scioto Society, which produces the show, was founded in 1970. And work commenced on what, you know, what story [...] do we tell. Well, there was a canal [...] and there was Thomas Worthington, and uh, Simon Kenton, Daniel Boone, etc. etc. Well, uh, while Thomas Worthington has a home here, and I believe was the sixth govemor of Ohio, not too many 48 people know about him. So, you couldn’t—that was not bankable. And so, you have to look at something you can market, and so they decided on Tecumseh.

Choosing the story of Tecumseh over others, then, appears to have been almost purely a financial move on the part of the Society; as Waggoner also mentioned, while outdoor dramas focus on characters from a variety of American cultures, “Native American culture [...] is a popular genre.” This dissertation will certainly strive to speak to the issues of why Native American cultures, in particular, are so appealing (and “marketable”), and why the appropriation of these cultures by outsiders appears less fraught with political ambiguity than, say, whites portraying African Americans. Suffice it to say at this juncture, that in 1970, such a decision on the part of the Scioto Society was far less problematic than it might be today. What seems important to note is that the choice seems to have been made independent of awareness or concern about the concurrent Indian rights movement; as Waggoner says, “We were too poor to have a political mission before.” He also notes that “there really wasn’t a lot of thought process [...] in terms of now. Oh my goodness, how are we going to represent these people.’ I think it was done with as much accuracy as possible, and let the chips fall where they may.”

After deciding on its theme, the Scioto Society turned to writer Allan Eckert—noted for his fictional account of the history of the area. The Frontiersman'^ —and asked him to write a play based on his novel, but which would focus on Tecumseh. Three years later— the land for the amphitheater having been bought, cleared, and developed, and the play having been written—TecMmse/i.' premiered on June 30, 1973. So invested was the local community in the drama’s success by this time that theChillicothe Gazette brought in an outside reviewer, Jill Wiltberger, to critique the show “objectively”; nevertheless, she gave it a glowing review.^* Though the play has been altered somewhat since its inception— apparently there were several “indoor” scenes that got scratched, and the running time was

49 cut down from over three hours to its current two-and-a-half—by and large, it remains

Eckert’s original production and has been produced every summer since.

The Play

Eckert’s play itself is a curiosity. It is the only drama the writer ever produced, and—according to Scioto Society treasurer Friedman—Eckert swore he would never write another. Despite this, the play is not as amateurish as one might expect; rather, it does a fairly good job of streamlining events, complicating characters, and telling a compelling story. Perhaps its greatest virtue is its resistance to easy dichotomies: neither the

Americans nor the Shawnees are characterized as “good” or “bad,” “right” or “wrong.”

For the most part, it seems fairly historically accurate; the biggest liberty is taken with

Tecumseh’s love life. In the play, and in the novel on which it is based. The Frontiersman

(1967), Eckert alleges that Tecumseh had a romantic relationship with Rebecca Galloway, a white woman who lived in the Chillicothe area. In a later novelized biography of

Tecumseh,A Sorrow in Our Heart i\992\ Eckert reneges on this allegation, indirectly contending that it never happened."^

Also, Eckert appears to take advantage of the historical ambiguity about whether

Tecumseh was the prophet or whether his brother was; while R. David Edmunds’ definitive scholarly biographies of Tecumseh and his brother Tenskwatawa allege that

Tenskwatawa was the true prophet, Eckert reverses this, making Tenskwatawa a false prophet that the true prophet, Tecumseh, sets up to act in his absence. This reversal is key to the denouement of the play, when Tenskwatawa essentially “invites” attack by William

Henry Harrison in a disastrous attempt to prove his own prophetic powers, and thus destroys Tecumseh’s plan to unite the tribes. Tecumseh subsequently disowns him. The role-reversal is also key to the play’s exploration of its twin themes of masculine identity and appeasement of white “guilt.”

50 At heart, in all these reconstructions of Tecumseh’s life—be they dramatic

reenactments, like the drama Tecumseh!, or literary reconstructions, like Orson Scott

Card’s Red Prophet and James Alexander Thom’s Panther in the Tecumseh is

largely not so much a historical figure as he is an unsignified signifier, a tabula rasa on

which white America can ascribe all its ambiguous notions about Native Americans. In the

show, Tecumseh is fierce and yet diplomatic; a warrior and yet a pacifist; intensely committed to his people and their cause, yet capable of falling in love with a white woman,

Rebecca Galloway. Waggoner, the producer, says that the love plot in the play shows

Tecumseh’s “firailty,” despite the fictional nature of this relationship. The character of

Tecumseh in these works is merely an empty reconstruction, inscribed within the limits of white desire, of a real historical figure. The reenactment of his life, then, is like the return of the repressed: the unconsciously conscious working-out of profoundly ambivalent emotions and desires about how this nation was created.

To its credit, Eckert’s play does make noble if superficial efforts toward portraying this ambivalence. However, these efforts consist largely of throwing in a few disparaging comments about whites. In Tecumseh!, the effect is achieved largely in a scene in which

Tecumseh proposes marriage to Rebecca Galloway: she accepts initially, but raises questions about whether she would be accepted by his people, and how their children would be raised. When Tecumseh suggests that they can combine their cultural backgrounds, Rebecca balks, and says she will accept Tecumseh’s proposal only if

“[Y]ou’ll agree to abandon your way of life and live with my people the way we live”

(131). Happily, this generally evokes a unanimous “boo” from the audience; but has anyone on stage or in the audience really had their notions of how culture and ethnicity are constructed challenged? While Tecumseh’s solution to combine cultures suggests that both culture and ethnicity are constructed, and therefore open to creative reconstruction,

Rebecca’s demand and Tecumseh’s refusal negate that move, and return us squarely to the

51 camp of essentialized identities. While the audience boos Rebecca, there simultaneously exists a disturbing sense that she was right—that the erasure of Tecumseh’s ethnicity would be the only way their relationship could succeed. While this reaction, on the surface, appears to challenge the notion of cultural “purity,” the fact that the two do not get together

(an outcome happily justified by historical “fact”) also reinforces the taboo against miscegenation, both literal and cultural, thus echoing Lott’s assertion, above, about how cross-ethnic performances often fetishize such issues.

The other locus for critiquing whiteness comes when Tecumseh happens upon the

Galloways one night when they are out planting com by the light of the full moon. When

Tecumseh asks them why they are there, James Galloway replies that this is a technique that “we whites learned...for growing really good com from you Indians” (104).

Tecumseh laughs heartily and informs a chagrined Galloway that this is a trick, an act of

“signifying,” that Native Americans have played on whites so they can “sit by our fires on the nights of the planting moons...[and] laugh at the white men, as they so often laugh at us” (104). Galloway is incensed, but forgiving, because he is the play’s unquestionably

“good” white man. How do we know this? At their first encounter, he assures Tecumseh that though the land no longer belongs to the Shawnee, Galloway will care for it well, and furthermore, will never disturb the Shawnee burial ground that Tecumseh points out to him.

Indeed, Eckert’s play foregrounds the connection between the land and a masculine identity, and works diligently at constructing a masculine identity which allows one to be a peacemaker, to compromise, without being emasculated. During that crucial moment of bonding when Tecumseh realizes that Galloway loves the land as he does, Tecumseh yields it to him: “It is good that the first white man to come is one who loves the land and wishes to live on it, care for it. I would not wish any man here who only meant to break it in pieces to sell to others” (65). In return, Galloway assures him that he does indeed love the land,

52 and will not break it up for sale to others, and the two men shake on their arrangement. In

many ways, we can read this as a marriage ceremony where it is the land being “given

away” and “promised” between men. Notably, during this scene, Galloway’s wife and

daughter are off to the side, reinforcing the connection of men with the exchange of land—a

connection, this scene tells us, that transcends ethnic boundaries. Furthermore, producer

Waggoner himself offers this interpretation of the drama’s central theme:

[T]he real thrust [...] of this script, just in my opinion, and I’ve directed it, is that it’s a love story. It’s a love story of...the people and the land, you know. And the struggle over that property. Because it was more than just [...] for the Indian people, I think more than just a sectioning off of a parcel of land; it was, you know, interwoven thorough their lives and their whole culture. And then the Europeans obviously had a different concept of...of what land was and what it could be used for.

This reading suggests that the apparent romance between Tecumseh and Rebecca Galloway

is actually displaced by the larger, more encompassing romance between two opposing

cultures and the land. As such, Waggoner’s interpretation is very convincing. And yet,

while the drama appears to be about the land—almost to the point that the land itself

becomes the invisible central character in its plot—in the final analysis, the land itself

becomes a non-issue. What is really being contested and constructed in Tecumseh! is a

male identity and a masculine ideal.

In an article written for Ohio magazine about the outdoor drama Tecumseh! and cultural representations of Native Americans in contemporary culture, writer John

Fleischman provides us with a crucial bit of evidence to support this reading when he tells us that, in the Shawnee language, Tecumseh’s name was probably pronounced quite differently—more like ‘Tikamthi” or ‘Tikumfa.” Fleischman quotes Bil Gilbert as saying that because “English speakers found lisping awkward and unmanly...when, early in the nineteenth century, it became necessary to deal with the man, they spoke and wrote of him as Tecumseh” (24), a far more agreeably masculine name.

53 Throughout the play, Eckert maintains a continuous tension about whether wanting

to avoid violence and show respect for one’s enemies by treating them humanely is within a

masculine purview. In the very first scene, Tecumseh denounces his fellow warriors for

slowly torturing, killing, and then scalping (i.e., ritually emasculating) an unsuspecting

white man. For so doing, Tecumseh is asked if he is “a woman, afraid of blood?” (9). A

debate ensues about whether it is right to kill defenseless white captives, Tecumseh taking

the side that it is not, for which he is again ridiculed: “And you claim this woman as your

brother, Chiksika?” (12)—the word “woman” underlined in the original, printed script, to

be spoken as a curse, presumably. Yet finally, they do agree that all men—even white men-

-deserve to die like men: “We cannot call ourselves warriors—or even men!—if we think of

this [killing defenseless captives] as courage” (13). Clearly, while it is good and noble to

be a man, it is even better to be a warrior, and such a label carries an even higher code of

honor. In a later scene, Tecumseh himself tells the British General Proctor that if Proctor tums back from battle again, Tecumseh “will run with you no more. You are a woman, not a warrior! You should be wearing petticoats!” (165). In the hierarchy of identities constructed in Eckert’s play, it is normative to be a man; superlative to be a warrior; and worst to be a woman. These are the three categories Tecumseh must negotiate in the drama.

In many ways, the written text of the script (and moreover, the performance of the drama, as will be discussed in the next chapter) literally spells out the kind of fetishization of the (male) Other’s body that Eric Lott ascribes to the act of blackface minstrelsy; of that ethnic-cross-dressing phenomenon he says.

If minstrelsy was based on an extreme though contradictory white fascination with black(faced) men, there was no less a white male solidarity over against them that obviously inspired racist ridicule. In any case, we shall see how insistently blackface performance concemed itself with matters of the body—gender anxieties, unconventional sexuality, orality— which mediated, and regulated, the formation of white working-class masculinity. (86)

54 Tecumseh!, too—both textually and perfomiatively—fixates on the “Other’s” body; indeed, the motivation that drives both the white and the “Indian” characters seems to be more the preservation and assertion of male prowess than the preservation of land or culture. As Lott warns, “We ought to recognize...the degree to which blackface stars inaugurated an

American tradition of class abdication through gendered cross-racial immersion which persists, in historically differentiated ways, to our own day” (51 ).*^ I would argue that

Tecumseh! is one such example, though its concern with the body and masculinity of the

Other is, of course, quite different from the social forces and inter-racial relationships shaping blackface minstrelsy. Nevertheless, Tecumseh! is very much a production of masculinity through the vehicle of the Native American body.

Furthermore, from a qualitative as well as from a strictly quantitative standpoint, women really have very little role in the drama: Tecumseh’s sister, Tecumapese, has the second-largest female role, as well as the most interesting, since her character exerts a good deal of influence over tribal decisions until Tenskwatwa dismisses her as a “squaw.”

Rebecca Galloway, the white woman who (in the play, if not historically) is romanced by

Tecumseh, has the largest female role, and her mother has the third-largest number of lines of the women in the cast."® These are virtually the only speaking roles for women, however, in contrast with the nearly forty speaking roles for men. Presumably, some of the “general stage dialogue” lines could be taken by female cast members, but few are.

But perhaps the most convincing evidence for this gender-based reading of the play comes from the predominance of battle scenes in the play, and the audience’s reception of them. There are three major battles in the play, the “showstopper” of which is the reenactment of the Battle of Tippecanoe in the second act. At the conclusion of the script’s description of the battle, Eckert remarks in a stage note that the scene should not be ended prematurely, as “[ejxperience has shown that the audience will be applauding during this interval” (155). This was most certainly true during every performance I saw: the Battle of

55 Tippecanoe was by far the piece de resistance of the entire show, with its ear-splitting barrage of all manner of artillery fire (including cannons, rifles, and explosive shells hidden in the surrounding woods and in the man-made lake on stage), along with "warriors"— white and "Indian”—performing hand-to-hand combat on stage and dying dramatic stage deaths. The battle's conclusion invariably results not only in applause, but in laughter, cheering, and the creation of an utter festival environment within the audience. Such a response begs the question: what is being applauded here? On the surface, the spectacle, to be sure; but beneath that, is the audience not applauding the hypermasculine show of military force? The outrageous noise and show with which we ensured that the land was

“ours”?

The answer is to be found, partially, in the play’s characterization of the white frontiersman Simon Kenton: in more traditional histories, Kenton is portrayed as a fierce, nearly sadistic fighter of Native Americans, if not a outright hunter of them; yet in Eckert’s play, he is ennobled, the embodiment the play’s constructed masculine ideal. It is he who wishes to establish peace with the Indians, and yet is able to maintain loyalty to his own kind; it is he who spares Tecumseh’s dead body from being ravaged by white souvenir- seekers at the end of the play, saying, "They’s been cowards here! You deserved better’n that, Tecumseh” (174). Kenton becomes Clint Eastwood here: the tough, yet compassionate lone wolf, whose sense of honor transcends all earthly alliances. The reversal of Kenton’s "real-life” (as far as we know it) character in essence lets the white audience off the hook: Kenton, and therefore “we,” wanted things to work out differently.

And contemporarily, by reenacting Tecumseh’s life, by "playing Indian,” to return to

Rayna Green’s theory, we can try to exorcise those ghosts. Because so much of what we know about Tecumseh the man comes to us only through legend, we can inscribe him with whatever characteristics we deem necessary both to redeem our own guilt and reify our cultural notions of what Native Americans should be—stoic, brave, just, warrior-like,

56 reasonable, passive when necessary.’’ And within that construction, I believe, we also

find ideals for masculine behavior in our society.

Written Text/Ethnographic Context

This brief analysis of the text of Tecumseh! makes it clear that while the drama

purports to present an accurate and “authentic” account of the history and culture of the

Shawnee in Ohio, it is inextricably constructed by contemporary desires and concerns. The

story of the show’s genesis reveals the highly commercial motivations for the production,

and the text itself hints at the ideology behind the production: the creation of a masculine

ideal, and the absolution of white guilt.

It would be entirely too easy, however, to limit this study to a scathing critique of

the motivations and ideology behind the show. My goal here is not to indict those involved

in the production of Tecumseh!, nor is it to ridicule those spectators who are moved by the

show. As I hope this chapter has demonstrated, my aim is rather to examine the

phenomenon of Tecumseh! as a case study of the ways in which tourist sites problematize

all the issues central to folkloristics: notions of authority and authorization; ideals of

authenticity; definitions of tradition; and the problems of cultural representation. What is

going on at the Tecumseh! site is far more complex and subtle than the written text, as

examined here, may lead us to believe. For the script of the play itself is truly the least

consequential “text” operating at the Tecumseh! site. In order to understand

Tecumseh! as an ethnographic locale, we need to look at the complicated interactions

between the diverse texts on-site—not merely the written text, but the performative text, and most importantly the peripheral-but-central tourist texts such as the pre-show tours and the gift shop. Only by looking at the multidimensional performance of this site can we begin to

understand the ways in which it both obscures and enlightens those issues challenging contemporary folkloristics. On, then, to the “field.”

57 ' Thanks to Dan Bames for providing the written source for this story, which I first heard as a presumably apocryphal tale in a graduate folklore class I took with him. * Quoted in Alan Dundes’ “Folk Ideas as Units of Worldview” {JAF 84.331 (1971): 93-103) from her article “The Science of Custom” (The Century Magazine 117 (1929): 641-649). ^ More specifically, David Glassberg has traced this phenomenon in his study of American historical pageantry, and Rayna Green has traced the particular phenomenon of white enactments of Native identity (see bibliography for full references). ■* From Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club. New York: Putnam, 1989 (262). * Among these are Ohio’s own Blue Jacker. several Indian-captivity dramas such as The Long Way Home, staged in Radford, VA, and The Legend of Jenny Wiley, staged in Prestonsburg, KY; several narratives about Anglo/Indian intermarriage, including The Aracoma Story, staged in Logan, WV, and The Ramona Pageant, staged in Hemet, CA; and a few narratives ostensibly told from the Native point of view: Black River Traders, a drama in Farmington, NM, set on a Navajo reservation in the early 1900s, anc Trail o f Tears, staged in Talequah, OK, which chronicles the forced migration of the Western Band of Cherokees, “ending with a celebration of Oklahoma statehood” (information gathered from the Institute of Outdoor Drama’s website at http:iVwww.unc.edu/depts/outdoor/history97.html). * As Gilman explains, these four essays were first presented at the 1995 M IA convention as papers comprising a panel called “Ethnicity and Reading/Writing.” ’ Upton’s formulation also neatly connects this constructivist view of ethnicity with the dominant mode of folkloric analysis, performance theory. * Lauter describes this complex process of “erasing” white ethnicity in his Canons and Conte.xts. He by no means has the only opinion on the topic, however; bell hooks addresses similar issues in Black Looks: Race and Representation, as does Toni Morrison in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, among others. ’ As Sollors notes, “The word ‘ethnicity’ first saw print in 1941, in a book by W. Lloyd Warner that had the adjective modem’ in its title. Ethnicity would thus seem to make a perfect subject for a modem approach that utilizes the decoding techniques familiar from the scholarship of ‘invention’” (xiii). From Goffman’s seminal work. The Presentation o f Self in Everyday Life. “ Though not discussed specifically here, Shalom Staub addresses these issues in his essay “Folklore and Authenticity: A Myopic Marriage in Public Sector Programs” in The Conservation o f Culture: Folklorists and the Public Sector. More specifically, Horton commented that “I think that you can teach scholarly history in a public setting....but I think that if you can’t do it, history is doomed, because in the next century, history has got to be taught in places other than the classroom, or it’s going to die.” Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations-, Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyperreality; Jameson, Frederic. “Postmodemism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (full references in bibliography). Contrast Lott’s notion of the ways in which black and white subjectivities are mutually constructed with Stem and Cicala’s fallacious belief in an ethnic identity that exists in a “nonethnic world.” I rely here on the notion of “ideology” delineated by Paul Rabinow, where he (paraphrasing Foucault) conceptualizes ideology as something that has erroneously been perceived as opposing or obstructing an underlying “truth” (Rabinow 240). Along with Rabinow and Foucault, I operate here under the perception that ideology has always been present and inescapable; my goal here is rather to discem and critique the ideologies behind the production of Tecumseh! with the understanding that there would be no production of any sort without the presence of such ideological screens. MacCannell, in fact, cites five specific stages of “sight sacralization”: naming, framing and elevation, enshrinement, mechanical reproduction, and social reproduction (44-45). Price played the role of Tecumseh from 1991 through 1995. This danger is also articulated by Linda Alcoff, whose article “The Problem of Speaking for Others” will be discussed more fully in the following chapter. I would further argue that this kind of “informant-free” methodology is what I find problematic about many cultural studies analyses, which rely solely on the scholar’s observations. ” Personal interview (untranscribed), 16 June 1995. 58 “ Notably, this illusion is deliberately distorted (but never shattered) during pre-show tours which take spectators backstage and demonstrate pyrotechnical effects (described in more detail in the next chapter). However, these events are still highly bounded: tourists are never permitted into the “authentic” back region of the cast encampment, thus maintaining a fairly seamlessly controlled sense of the site. To be discussed more fully in Chapter 3. “ This review appeared on the front page of the Chillicothe Gazette on July 2, 1973. ^ In the “Author’s Note” preceding 1992’s A Sorrow in Our Heart: The Life of Tecumseh. Eckert says that “In a few cases [in The Frontiersmen] the author made use of material that later research proved to be either in error or exaggerated in the primary sources available at the time. Such errors, now discovered, have been pointed out m the amplification notes keyed to this present text” (xv). Of the 765 notes, though, I could not discover one that expressly addressed the controversy over Tecumseh’s alleged romance with Rebecca Galloway. However, the romance—so crucial to both The Frontiersmen and Tecumseh.'—is omitted from the 1992 text. Both Card’s and Thom’s novels will be discussed in Chapter 3. ^ Regarding the class connection Lott raises here: As the following chapter and the conclusion demonstrate, the assumption of a Native American identity on the part of actors and spectators is also a way for disenfranchised Anglos to connect themselves with the founding and formation of the United States, a way to procure higher class status in a culture that privileges families with old roots, but where such elevated status does not extend to those whose roots predate Anglos—i.e., indigenous peoples. “ This information is drawn from the show’s script (vii), which lists “Speaking Roles in the Outdoor Drama Tecumseh! In Order of Importance ”—each character’s name is followed by a parenthetical count of the number of words each part has. Notably, Tecumseh’s role is far larger than any other character—the list assigns 4466 words to him; the second-largest role, that of Tenskwatawa, has 3000 fewer words ( 1432). ^ And for a Native American to be all these things in an Anglo production like Tecumseh!, of course, he must also be dead; as I will argue in the conclusion, such constructions of Native identity are most prevalent in the Midwest, where the Native groups indigenous to the territory have long been absent and are “presumed dead,” no longer a threat, unable to speak for themselves.

59 C h a p t e r 2

“H e ’s n o t a c h a r a c t e r , h e ’s a m a r v e l ”': R e e n a c t in g T e c u m s e h , R econstructing O u r s e l v e s

“No ethnographer is truly innocent—we all begin with a narrative in our heads which structures our initial observations in the field.” —Edward Bruner, “Ethnography as Narrative”

“I’m not sure I can tell the truth....I can only tell what I know.” —Statement attributed to a Cree hunter testifying in hearings on the James Bay hydroelectric scheme in Montreal [Quote from James Clifford’s introduction to Writing Culture]

One summer, when I was probably about eight or nine years old, my parents decided that in lieu of one big vacation the three of us would take several smaller day trips from our home in Columbus. As I recall, it was the summer of historical reenactments: though I can’t match the specific memories to the towns we visited (Schoenbrunn, Zoar

Village, Coshocton, Roscoe Village), I can recall seeing a lot of soap-making demonstrations that summer. In my memory, I elide this episode with third-grade history class, where we made field trips to the Octagon and Serpent Mounds near Newark and down to Mound City and the Adena mound near Chillicothe, and had a “Pioneer Day” at school, where we all dressed up in sunbonnets and long dresses and made apple butter. Is it any wonder that that year I asked my mother to make me an Indian costume for

Halloween? I remember it to this day: a deep-brown shirt with a teepee appliqued onto it, with a matching fringed skirt. Though I admit it with deep shame now, I was a child who would have loved Pocahontas, had Disney released it several decades earlier.

I begin with this self-indulgent reminiscence for several reasons. As a white woman studying white constructions of Native American cultures and identities, I think it is vital for me to admit my own romantic roots in the topic; while I can see them for what they

60 are now, I also must acknowledge the difficulty in extricating myself from those notions.

As your basic easily misguided white liberal, I know that I, like many of my informants,

can easily cross that very tenuous line between advocacy and patronage, between

compassion and romance. The second and more germane reason to begin this way is

because on one of those day trips I made with my parents, we went down to the Sugarloaf

Mountain Amphitheater outside Chillicothe and saw the outdoor drama Tecumseh!, which

was probably only in its second or third season at that time. We sat close to the front, and the pyrotechnics, in combination with my thrill at such close proximity to what I then perceived to be “real Indians,” left a huge impression on me—probably yet another reason for selecting the Halloween costume I did the following October. This, as Bruner suggests in the epigraph to this chapter, is the “narrative” that structures what is to follow; it is my own inescapable story, rooted in a specific historical context, that underpins the “partial truth” (cf Clifford) constructed here.

To this day, Tecumseh! continues to be a popular place to bring children to educate them about local history: in an audience survey of approximately seventy-five people conducted over two performances, a third said they had come specifically to provide such an opportunity for their children or grandchildren, and about seventy percent of the audience said they felt that such presentations are a good way to learn about history. In his analysis of a reconstructed “Abe Lincoln village” in Illinois, anthropologist Edward Bruner remarks that “In these settings, many tourists play with time frames and experiment with alternative realities; it is a good way to learn about the past. Visits to historic sites have a strong entertainment and playful quality” (411). This sentiment is echoed by cultural critic

Henry Giroux, who has argued that we must begin to take corporate “edutainment” entities like Disney “seriously as a teaching machine, and not merely as a source of entertainment.”

Notably, these ideas are also shared by Marion Waggoner, the white producer of

61 Tecumseh!, who—while stressing the show’s efforts toward historical accuracy—makes no bones about the fact that “[F]irst and foremost, this is a play. This is not a history lesson.”

The basic conundrum here is clear: while tourists enter such sites expecting what they consider to be accuracy, authenticity, and the “truth,” producers are more concemed with the bottom line of entertainment and profit. As Waggoner points out, audiences

“don’t want to pay thirteen dollars to have somebody beat them over the head and say,

‘Aren’t you terrible?’ I mean, I certainly don’t feel any collective guilt, and don’t intend to,” a sentiment echoed by Jamieson K. Price, the white actor who portrayed Tecumseh in the drama from 1991 through 1995: “I personally don’t want to lay a guilt trip on...anybody, or myself.” This kind of rhetorical distancing—of the past from the present, the self from the “Other,” the “truth” from marketability—is certainly suspect, and would seem to undercut Bmner’s positive assessment of the leaming potential possible in historical reenactments. In fact, in a writeup of their fieldwork at Colonial Williamsburg,

Eric Gable and Richard Handler explicitly attack Bruner’s claim for “playfulness,” noting that such play may represent “the public enactment of fidelity to an essentialist authenticity, not [to] constmctivism” (576); in other words, what Bmner considers postmodem play may actually serve only to reify visitors’ belief in an “Ur” history or culture which can only be staged, not literally recreated. Or, as James Clifford notes,

[W]hereas the free play of readings may in theory be infinite, there are, at any historical moment, a limited range of canonical and emergent allegories available to the competent reader (the reader whose interpretation will be deemed plausible by a specific community). These structures of meaning are historically bounded and coercive. There is, in practice, no “free play.” (“On Ethnographic Allegory” 110)

Clifford’s remarks limit the range of interpretive possibilities at sites like Tecumseh!, and in so doing, suggest that so-called “free play” is really always bounded by context. And as this chapter will demonstrate, the interpretive possibilities at the Tecumseh! site are directed and bounded in specific ways. For example, the strict dichotomy between education and entertainment at the Tecumseh! site both limits and expands the visitor’s

62 interpretive range; and yet, such a paradox seems to be the rule at historical reenactment

sites. In this chapter, I will examine in more detail these and other paradoxes that manage

to coexist—sometimes creatively, sometimes dangerously—at the Tecumseh! site. Where

these dichotomies clash, I believe, is where there is potential—albeit a bounded potential—

for the kind of postmodern “play” that Bruner advocates.

Producers and Productions; Authorization. Ambivalence, Authority

In her article “Tourism and Cultural Displays: Inventing Traditions for Whom?,”

Regina Bendix has suggested that if we follow Handler and Linnekin’s ideas about

invented tradition to their logical conclusion, then we must ask questions about and of the

inventors, thus shifting our analytic focus from the performers and the performance to

those constructing and directing that performance. In so doing, we redirect our attention

“from the event to the agency of those involved in its creation and maintenance” (132). In

the case of Tecumseh!, this approach seems particularly apt, if not mandatory, since the

play was not written by a Native American, and is rarely performed by Native Americans:

in my first summer of fieldwork in 1994, not a single Native American was in the cast of

over sixty performers, about half of whom played “Indians” in the show. The inevitable

questions become “Who’s behind all this?” “By whose authority is this representation

occurring?” and “How aware are the producers of issues of cultural (mis)representation?”

In this section, 1 hope to address some of these questions, and raise some larger theoretical

issues about Anglo notions of authority and the potential for abusing cultural awareness.

As mentioned in the previous chapter, the show began in 1973 as the product of the

Scioto Society, a nonprofit group based in Chillicothe. And, as previously noted, the

history of Tecumseh was selected from a field of other local-history possibilities because it seemed the most “marketable.” While the Society and playwright Eckert did consult with the Absentee Shawnee in Oklahoma in order to verify “authenticity” and historical

63 “accuracy,” it is unclear whether the tribe ever officially “authorized” the production.

Nevertheless, the Society seemed to take this kind of contact and the lack of overt protest to signify authorization.

If we want to locate an explicit textual claim for this authorization, there is none; the program for the show, the most likely place one would expect to find some reference to the

Absentee Shawnees’ involvement, says nothing about the history of the show itself or the

Society’s consultation with the extant Shawnee. The program does, however, feature two short pieces on Shawnee history penned by the show’s original producer, W. L. “Rusty”

Mundell, as well as a map showing where each of the five Shawnee septs lived in the Ohio territory. Allegedly all of this is to demonstrate and validate the producers’ awareness of

Shawnee history. Yet neither of these blurbs mentions the current existence of the

Shawnee nation, nor its whereabouts.

In fact, another page in the program offers up a romanticized narrative about how the show is actively saving some Shawnee traditions from extinction. The article describes the Shawnee “Wolf Chant,” a “simple song of defiance, sung by braves as they removed their dead from the battlefield” (program, no page number). It goes on to note that the

Shawnee

[D]id have to modify many of [their] dances and songs that were not applicable, once final settlement with the white man was arranged. One such song was the “W olf Chant”....By 1974, only two older Shawnee remembered the song. One of these was over 80 years old, and could no longer sing. The other was Lay-quay-bea-skuk, descendent of Tecumseh and past Tribal Chairman of the Shawnee Nation. Lay-quay-bea-skuk agreed to the producer’s suggestion and sang the “Wolf Chant” while it was recorded by electronic tape....Thus through the outdoor drama Tecumseh! this ancient song is again heard here amidst the hills where it was sung almost two centuries ago. (program, no page number)

The posturing of producer-as-folklorist or cultural conservationist here is intriguing; the fact that the song was only known by two elderly members of the tribe (who, presumably, were shortly to take the song to the grave with them) implies that if not for the intervention of the noble (white) producers, this tradition—and by association, all of Shawnee culture—

64 would be lost forever. This narrative implies that Shawnee culture, on the brink of disaster in 1974, must surely be extinct by now, and that the only “survivals” of the culture are carried on through the drama itself. This romantic belief system, it must be noted, is identical to the ideology that spurred the initial development of folklore as a discipline—a belief system that, as the previous chapter detailed, contemporary folklorists still wrestle with, knowing that such a posture can only be damaging. As James Clifford warns,

I do...question the assumption that with rapid change something essential (“culture”), a coherent differential identity, vanishes. And I question, too, the mode of scientific and moral authority associated with salvage, or redemptive, ethnography. It is assumed that the other society is weak and “needs” to be represented by an outsider (and that what matters in its life is its past, not its present or its future. (“On Ethnographic Allegory” 113)

I can think of no better written example of the movement Clifford describes than the program’s description of the Wolf Chant: the rhetoric is at once redemptive, scientific, and clearly designed to shift custodianship of Shawnee tradition to the hands of outsiders at the same time as it conveniently renders Shawnee culture a thing of the past, without a present or a future.

The theories of invented tradition detailed in the previous chapter make it obvious where the problems with such assertions lie. The continuous and dynamic process of cultural change and reinvention informs us that the “Wolf Chant” might well have been

“lost” (or at least modified) even without white intervention, and to imply that Shawnee culture has been steadily depleted (to utter extinction) over the last two-hundred years is, of course, inaccurate. Certainly the culture was and continues to be altered, if not damaged, by interaction with whites (and undoubtedly many of these cultural shifts will be perceived as negative). But the culture persists in new and continually reinvented manifestations; the old may be recycled or even abandoned, but cultural momentum continues. The program’s tale of the Wolf Chant, to my mind, functions to effectively extinguish the presence of the contemporary Shawnee by implying that the old Shawnee traditions died along with the two remaining tradition bearers. The story also puts responsibility and “authority” for

65 bearing those traditions squarely into the hands of the producers and perfonners of

Tecumseh!: “Thus through the outdoor drama Tecumseh! this ancient song is again heard here amidst the hills where it was sung almost two centuries ago.” It is an amazing little feat of authorization, which frees the producers from having to contend with contemporary

Shawnee culture, since—as the story implies—it exists only at the Tecumseh! site.

Such a heroic posture is echoed at the drama’s new website, which proclaims that

“For almost two centuries this wealth of history imprisoned in the past has cried out for dramatization—it has cried out from the dust of library shelves, from microfilm in the vaults of the Library of Congress, from historical markers entangled by weeds and from shrines as lifeless as their own cold marble.”* Just as the program “rescues” the almost-lost Wolf

Chant, so—the website’s rhetoric implies—does the drama itself “rescue” Tecumseh from the “lifeless” and “cold” clutches of academic historians and “imprisoning” museums. In effect, the statement eliminates yet another contender—academics and museum “officials”— from the battle for authority over this bit of history by suggesting that a scholarly treatment of Tecumseh s story does not do it the justice that a dramatic account of it can. Authority is again squarely returned to the show’s producers.

Thus, the drama’s official program serves as a sort of concrete, though implicit, embodiment of authority that is packaged and presented to the audience, just as the website conveys authority to potential audience members surfing the web for summer tourism ideas. But how is authority expressed outside these sources, on site? How does the white producer, Marion Waggoner, validate his own authority to direct and retell Tecumseh’s life story? This is another question entirely. Before beginning my examination of Waggoner’s positionality as the show’s producer, however, I wish to note that the object of the following analysis is not to critique Waggoner’s politics or his rhetoric. I present this portrait as a way of fulfilling Regina Bendix’s call to ask questions about and of the producers behind tourist productions. As such, Waggoner’s views on politics, history,

66 multiculturalism, and his own “authority” over how he shapes these things in the performance of Tecumseh! are all factors in this analysis of how the play constructs Native

American identity, especially given the producer’s complex relationship with that

“Other” community

I first met Marion Waggoner in July 1994, after contacting the Scioto Society about the possibility of doing fieldwork at the Tecumseh! site. From the start, our interactions were characterized largely by suspicion on both our parts. Admittedly, when I first began my work on site, I was intentionally ambiguous about my agenda, since I suspected that to admit my own trepidation about the show up front would put Waggoner and others I interviewed on the defensive, and would prevent an honest response. In hindsight, this was a poor strategy: as the following illustrates, Waggoner already knew why I was there, and my reluctance to admit my agenda only made him more guarded. It took several more conversations before we were finally able to speak more openly about these issues.

Interestingly, however, my caginess ultimately demonstrates that Waggoner is attuned enough to debates about cultural representation to “catch my drift,” despite my inarticulateness, as in this excerpt from our very first meeting (W = Waggoner; H =

Hathaway):

W: You’re sp>ecifically interested in...what’s your r/ieme? What conclusions...What are you trying to find out?

H: I’m just interested in the idea of how...various cultures are represented in tourist sites, and how people who are putting on those performances are...constructing those representations. Um, how you put the show together, what kinds of things you take into consideration when you, ah, put together your production.

[A minute or so of irrelevant tape omitted]

W: [TJhrough this story the cultures are represented as accurately as we can portray them...there’s violence in the play; the first scene, you know, they scalp and mutilate a captive. Well, this doesn’t paint a pretty picture of Indian people...but it wasn’t a pretty time. And they did this. And the whites did similar acts. And there were no good guys and..mmm, bad guys...the thing on that, there were despicable people on each side of that fence. Anyhow, but the reason that’s done, is to height—show, there were bad things happening here. [...] And 67 so...this particular outdoor drama, I suppose...um...uh...there really wasn’t a formula, there really wasn’t I don’t think a lot of thought process in terms of now, “Oh my goodness, how are we going to represent these people.” I think it was done with as much accuracy as possible, and let the chips fall where they may.

Despite my bungled attempt to simultaneously explain and obscure my theoretical interests in the show, Waggoner clearly perceives my concern: the problematics of cultural representation and the question of authority over history. This is tremendously significant, because although I did not present Waggoner with a copy of my dissertation prospectus until nearly a year after this first meeting, he was tuned into my motivations without my having to articulate them.

His awareness could be explained in a variety of ways. Knowing me to be an

“academic,” Waggoner already sensed what my “problem” with the show would be, since many historical reenactments have come under fire recently. At the time of this first interview, Disney’s proposed American history theme park, Disney’s America, was being attacked by intellectuals from a variety of disciplines, and as an anecdote Waggoner will relate below shows, such conflict had already disrupted (and ultimately stopped) the staging of another outdoor drama. However, I suspect that his intuition and his defensiveness rose more from a general awareness of the sticky issue of cultural representation.

The second important issue raised in the above exchange is that of “accuracy,” a theme Waggoner retums to again and again throughout our discussions. In a sense, accuracy becomes his refuge from responsibility for the cultural representations he produces; if he commits himself only to having the show be as accurate as possible, then the “chips [can] fall where they may” in regard to other issues, because he has fulfilled what he ostensibly perceives as his primary responsibility. As he himself notes, though, the show is in fact consciously inaccurate at times—both in its history and in its costuming— in service of other ends (specifically, making Tecumseh seem “vulnerable” via the Rebecca

68 Galloway love-plot, as discussed in the previous chapter, and incorporating “inauthentic”

costumes to cater to Anglo expectations about “what Indians look like,” to be described

below). At one point, Waggoner suggests that even the play’s inaccuracies might have a

pedagogical function.

Being committed to “accuracy” allows Waggoner to distance himself from explicit

claims of authority over Tecumseh’s story, since it suggests he is more invested in accurate

production details. In all my talks with him, Waggoner has been very careful to distance

himself from any position of authority in terms of historical or cultural knowledge, though

he does rightly express his authoritative wealth of knowledge about outdoor drama.

Waggoner, who is probably in his late forties or early fifties, has spent much of his career

producing outdoor drama. From 1970 to 1976, he worked in various production positions

at Harrodsburg, Kentucky’s drama The Legend of Daniel Boone', his other outdoor drama

credits include writing and directing an outdoor drama called Simon Kenton, also staged in

Kentucky, and producing the Texas-based Beyond the Sundown and Xenia, Ohio’s Blue

Jacket before beginning his work at the Tecumseh! site. He has been associated with

Tecumseh! for over twenty years. He is a fervent believer in outdoor drama’s capacity to move people and to bring drama to people who might otherwise not go to the theater, and he is passionate about the quality of his own production.

When it comes to matters of Native American identity, Waggoner is both astute and cautious in his rhetoric. Notably, he is especially politic about positioning himself as a white man in the context of this Native American story. Most significant is the way he employs his marriage to a Native American woman—Nita Battise Waggoner, a member of the Alabama-Coushatta nation in east Texas. Interestingly, early in my first

(separate) interviews with Waggoner (W) and his theater manager, Renee Norman (N), both were quick to explain why they were using the label “Indian” rather than “Native

American”:

69 W: [M]y wife’s a full-blood Indian and I call them Indians, so...whatever.

*****

N: ...You know, the fact that, back in those days, if an Indian...or Native American, excuse me. I’ll—address that in a minute. [A minute or so passes as she makes another point] But I was going to tell you, uh...one comment we get from people a lot, who, uh, come to see the show, and who are interested, you know, and have studied Native American history, and they’re very, you know, sensitive to this, and they consider themselves really up on it—we get comment after comment that they arevery upset, and very disgusted that we actually have the Native Americans in our show calling themselves Indians. Because they are not Indians, they are Native Americans, and it’s insulting that we would have them...—Well, what you gotta understand is that...they called themselves Indians. The term “Native American” didn’t come about until this century.

H: So it would be an anachronism to put it in the show.

N: Right! So, we couldn’t have...Native Americans from the seventeen- hundreds sitting there saying, “We are Native Americans,” because..-that wasn’t so. They called themselves Indians.

During an address for Ohio State’s series of workshops on Folklore and Multiculturalism in 1994, Rayna Green made this very point, in much the same terms, explaining that she—a member of the Cherokee Nation—used the term “Indians” because it is the esoteric or emic term Native Americans use to describe themselves. So technically, both Waggoner and

Norman are correct in their explanation of why they use this term. However, there’s an uneasy sense here that familiarity with this “insider” knowledge has made both a little too comfortable with their position relative to “real” Native Americans. Knowing what the emic term is and using it are two different matters; but this linguistic

“authorization ” implies, I think, a deeper sense of “authority” among the producers, as though simply being culturally accurate and “sensitive” permits one to represent the

“Other” group.

In her landmark essay, “The Problem of Speaking for Others,” Linda Alcoff warns against this very impulse, which, it should be said, is often bom of good intentions, as

I think is the case with both Waggoner and Norman. However, as Alcoff points out,

70 [T]he practice of speaking for others is often bom out of a desire for mastery, to privilege oneself as the one who more correctly understands the truth about another’s situation or as one who can champion a just cause and thus achieve glory and praise. And the effect of the practice of speaking for others is often, though not always, erasure and a réinscription of sexual, national, and other kinds of hierarchies. (29)

This critique puts the apparently benevolent and understanding use of the term (and the use of other “emic” Native American knowledge by both Waggoner and Norman) in a more ambiguous light. Combined with the apparent erasure of contemporary Shawnee in the drama’s official program (as discussed above), this linguistic appropriation may signal a desire to contain rather than represent the “Other.”

And Waggoner, in particular, seems to (unconsciously) manipulate his insider knowledge of Native American culture to authorize his work, while simultaneously being aware that such a claim is problematic and “politically incorrect.” As he told me during our first meeting.

You know. I’ve lived on a reservation. And, uh, uh...my in-laws are all Indian people. Well, that doesn’t make me an expert, it only has exposed me to, uh, a high degree of prejudice, because I was one of two white people living on a reservation. I understand what prejudice is all about. And discrimination. It was done to me. Uh, in a very high degree...until I was accepted, or tolerated, or whichever. And it’s not...nice. I mean, it’s not blatant, and if you—in the script, it’s difficult to not fall into the trap of [clears throat] of...going with the path of least resistance, where that which sells the best... If we tried to tell this story any way other than generally how it happened, it probably would fail.

There is a remarkable tension here between the “authority of experience” (the fact that he is married to a Native American woman and has lived on an Indian reservation) and “identity politics” (he is not himself Native American).^ It is a curious little dance, one step forward toward authority, then two steps backing away from making such a claim. And yet, in some ways, this is the only position he can take. It is true, again, that Waggoner’s insider knowledge does grant him a greater awareness than that of the average Anglo, and he is aware enough of “the problem of speaking for others” to know that he cannot speak as a

Native American, nor even for them. On some level, I feel compassion for Waggoner on

71 this point; it is clear that he has an emotional investment and a deep understanding of contemporary Native life, but he knows that the ways he can use that understanding are restricted. In this respect, I think his position here is not dissimilar to my own in writing this dissertation: as I mentioned at the start of this chapter. I—like Waggoner here—have to monitor constantly that boundary between compassion and romance, patronage and advocacy. 1, like him, have to be constantly aware of my own position in relation to my subject matter. There is no small degree of self-censorship involved here, as demonstrated in Waggoner’s sort of back-and-forth position on his experience on the reservation and what that means about his “authority,” the parameters of his speech.

And yet, there are some other aspects of our interactions which disturb me greatly, discussions which suggest a less open mind at work. Waggoner’s politics are curious: a compassionate and intelligent man, he displays an “1 am the NRA” bumper sticker on his office door, and at one point during our initial conversation said to me, “And, uh...as 1 kid my wife sometimes, ‘white is right.’ There’s no morality to politics; whoever has the big stick, wins. That’s the way it is.” During perhaps our most significant meeting (which, unfortunately, went unrecorded), Waggoner and 1 finally put all our cards on the table. 1 had given him a copy of my prospectus, and to my astonishment, he reacted not defensively, but with interest. He had even clipped an article out of The New York Times* about the growing ethnic divide in the United States for me to read, and we began to have a heart-felt discussion about the increasing racial and ethnic factionalizing of the nation. 1 started to realize that perhaps we had more in common than 1 suspected, when Waggoner veered into a critique of the Clinton administration’s “socialist policies,” thus further complicating my identification with him.

By providing these contextual details, 1 do not mean to suggest that only a liberal (a

“good” white person) can be trusted to handle material as sensitive as Tecumseh’s life story. Rather, my own discovery of the above details further complicated my perception of

72 the already-complex personality at work behind the drama’s production, and issued a stem reminder to me about the dangers of easy categorization. In one informant I found embodied both my own concerns and a host of concerns and experiences radically different than my own. Could I—or some other misguided white liberal—handle the task of producing Tecumseh! any better? Probably not, for as the above demonstrates, the problems of cultural representation and historical reenactment extend far beyond simple political labels and identity politics; nor is there any guarantee that a Native American producer, even a Shawnee producer, would put together a production that was, on the surface, very different from the one now being performed. Because of the show’s historical and cultural content, an ideological thrust is inescapable. Perhaps the best one can hope for in any producer of a historical drama is an openness to the notion of history as an ongoing (re)construction, and in this respect, Waggoner is eminently qualified. In describing the show’s historical context, he notes:

While they were ringing the Liberty Bell and cracking it, this was going on out here. It wasn’t two different worlds, but it seemed like it. And most...most kids [clears throat] used to be had a perspective that...the, uh. Northwest Territory was a different time period than Philadelphia. “This was much earlier”...No, it was the same time.

And later he points out that

...Harrison, William Henry Harrison, was a man with a job to do. He didn’t—uh...we don’t try to portray him as a villain, we portray him as someone who...is enthusiastically carrying out his mission, which he did. He had political, uh, ambitions and whamot, uhhmm, but that maybe was not so much his fault as it was Thomas Jefferson’s...y ou know. Uh, I mean, Jefferson was a great one for...the Jeffersonian method of...expounding the virtues of the noble savage, and expounding the virtues of the slave...and yet he kept slaves. Now...[exasperated sigh] if they were so great, why did he continue to practice that institution? ’Cause it saved him money. [H: chuckle]

So clearly, Waggoner is well attuned to new interpretations of historical “truth”—in fact, everyone I spoke with in the cast or on the production crew seemed to be operating on the theory that history is constructed, rather than factual: Waggoner, Norman, and Jamieson

Price—the actor playing Tecumseh—all mentioned historical events whose “truth” has been

73 challenged and reinterpreted in recent years. Such a concern is also clearly connected to

Waggoner’s commitment to “accuracy,” mentioned above: Waggoner, Price, and Norman all seem to subscribe to the notion that as history is recast again and again, it will become more accurate, more “truthful” over time.

In addition to his op>enness to historical revision, Waggoner also seems aware of and receptive to multiculturalism, though with some troublesome adjoinders. He readily acknowledges the foolishness of having an “official” U. S. language, saying “I read an interesting article last year about, are we factionalizing, culturally, ourselves out of existence in the United States. Let’s have a second language. Well, let’s have a fourth or fifth. We always have” Expounding on this thought, though, he adds that

[N]ow there’s this—“I’m not American, I’m African American.” “I’m, I’m Native American.” “I’m Chinese American.” ‘I’m Thai American.” “I’m...” You know, I don’t want people to refer to me as white. I am German American. I me-so the point was, that...it’s, it’s diffused to the state of...chaotic state, and that~\f you want to look at it from a purely cultural standpoint, I think Tecumseh...kind of. Native people today—at least those I know personally—want to hold that together. Er...my son’s half Indian, OK? He doesn’t speak the language, the Alabama language. Um, some, you know. It’s important that they continue to speak their own language; it’s part of their heritage. Um, and I think, back then, people like Tecumseh realized that there would be those problems to where—ultimately, in two hundred years, they wouldn’t even remember who they were.

Again, Waggoner echoes here the frustrations of many who are concerned about identity politics, including myself: how do we get beyond labels without erasing their significance?

It is far too early to say that labels are not necessary (only Anglos have the privilege of being unlabeled, as Peggy Macintosh brilliantly demonstrates in her essay “White Privilege:

Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”), and yet—as Waggoner demonstrates here-insisting on such labels seems to foster division as well as pride. Here, Waggoner seems to be referring to and implicitly critiquing the widely held but false assumption that

“remembering who one is” and establishing a peaceful multiethnic coexistence are mutually exclusive goals. And yet, despite the fact that he has just said how important language is to identity, Waggoner has also acknowledged that his own son, who is Alabama-Coushatta,

74 does not know the language of his tribe. Is the suggestion, then, that “Others” must give up their ethnic identifiers in order to bring about that peaceful coexistence? His real meaning is difficult to discern.

And, in a sense, there is no need to parse his words, to come to a definitive consensus about his worldview. Comments any informant makes off-the-cuff to a virtual stranger, the fieldworker (and, in this case, a virtual stranger who seems to want to immediately debate the theoretical underpinnings of your livelihood) cannot be said to be gathered in a “natural context,” and certainly cannot be used to construct a static portrait of that informant. What is more important in the context of this fieldwork is how the ideology suggested here gets played out dynamically, in the drama itself and in its accompanying

“tourist texts,” the pre-show tours, the gift shop, and so forth, with the participation of a heterogeneous and ever-changing audience.

Before going on to discuss the “texts” of the performance itself and the tourist events and spaces that provide a context for those performances, however, it seems important to return to and complicate Waggoner’s view on the drama’s commitment to historical accuracy and authenticity. As mentioned previously, Waggoner ostensibly perceives his primary commitment being to accuracy; however, he also mentions that the show’s “bottom line” is entertainment, making it (by necessity) the show’s primary commitment. Waggoner himself makes clear this distinction when he remarks that “[Fjirst and foremost, this is a play. This is not a history lesson.” In a sense, his greatest challenge as a producer would seem to be balancing those twin (and often conflicting) objectives of accuracy and entertainment. In that equation, accuracy nearly always gives way to entertainment value, as Waggoner explains:

[T]he initial thrust of the script was to not paint a...not to be self-serving for...the residents of this area, whose founding fathers—uh, you know- carved a living out of the wilderness, etcetera, which they did. But it was to try to tell the story as accurately as possible...it’s not 100% accurate, I mean—we take, we take liberties with the script. Uh...withhistory, I should say.

75 Here, Waggoner suggests that although the drama’s “facts” have been disputed, the play continues to enact those inaccuracies as history for the sake of entertainment. This is the point at which Waggoner’s seeming “refuge” in accuracy becomes a bit shaky; but just as his initial commitment to accuracy (over authority) enables him to distance himself from issues of cultural representation, so his flexibility about accuracy enables him to substitute more “marketable” or appealing elements when necessary for the other cause of entertainment.

Waggoner’s acfmisson of the drama’s less than “ 100%” accuracy thus becomes permission to skew the story in ways that are now known to be inaccurate. And, as Alcoff suggests, this sort of authorization to tell the story is a privilege only whites can exercise.

The admission/permission claim has a couple of curious effects: First, Waggoner uses it almost to promote the show’s potential to spark further interest in and investigation of history, as in the following comment:

UJt [the playj’s not to give a pure history lesson. If while entertaining you can also interject and cause people to think, about, well—“Gee, I think I’d like to know more about it, so I’ll go check out a book and read, or next time I run across a picture of Tecumseh, I’ll say, ‘Hey, I saw that’”...and it would cause me to...to—we’ve had kids who’ve come to see this show who’ve written letters saying, “Hey, you’re wrong about this”...and they were right. And, uh, I mean. I’ve made many replies to young people who’ve written saying, you know, the dates are wrong, or Tecumseh’s age was wrong at his first battle...and they’re right, because his first battle, he was about nine years old...And so they...they listen, pretty much, and they, and then they check things out, so you know that when—that’s good. So if you can get that across, too, that's great.

The irony here is pretty clear cut: the show’s inaccuracy becomes its pedagogical strength, a kind of intellectual puzzle. If children who come to the show can figure out that it is inaccurate, perhaps they will be compelled to discover exactly how it is inaccurate, and then they will have truly learned something.

The second curious effect of this admission is that it effectively releases the writer, producers, and performers from accountability for the show’s inaccuracies. If everyone readily admits that the drama is a fictionalized account of Tecumseh’s life, then no one has

76 to be responsible for the inaccuracies in it. The problem, of course, is that by and large the audience does not know what parts are accurate and what parts are disputed, and—by virtue of its label—“historical drama”—it is accepted as true by the audience.^ This sort of freedom from culpability is best expressed in Waggoner’s account of what happened at another outdoor drama that attempted to retell the story of the Battle of Tippecanoe (a pivotal part of

Tecumseh! as well). I think it is worth quoting from this section of the transcription at length, since it encapsulates many of the questions about representation, historical

“truth,” and authenticity that we have been working toward so far (again, W = Waggoner and H = Hathaway):

W: The Battle of Tippecanoe, which was a monumental outdoor drama in South Bend, Indiana...ah. West Lafayette, was shut down because of that [“that” is a referent to miscommunication between producers and Native Americans, mentioned just prior to this].

They built a 2.5 million-dollar complex, worked on it for twelve years, and it was shut down in two years. They had Native people and wannabe—what I call “Wannabe” Indians—[clears throat] literally come up onto the set and stop the show during performance, put a knife to the producer’s throat...and, uh, then went into negotiations to—they had a committee to rewrite the script, and of course it failed miserably.

H: Hmm. Hmm. What were their objections? That it was inauthentic, or...?

W: They didn’t like the way Tecumseh was portrayed, [a minute or so of a recap of Tecumseh’s meeting with Harrison deleted] Tecumseh and Harrison were philosophizing, and...Tecumseh, they thought, was a lap dog, and was a traitor [? unclear] So we were unfortunate in that, and...but we don’t change the play every time someone comes in and says, “Well, this Rebecca Galloway thing didn’t happen. Why do you do it?” Uh, we...again, an—it’s never been Native people who’ve had strong objections to that. They, the Absentee Shawnee kind of chuckled about it...[clears throat] but first and foremost, this is a play. This is not a history lesson. It’s a play. It’s a piece of theater. That also falls in the genre of history play, dealing with a period of history and with particular people. So, if we did everything totally accurate, first of all no one would agree, on what is totally accurate—

H: Right-

W: I mean, when you have Draper [Lyman C. Draper, early historian of the Northwest Territories, whose papers are the foundation of most scholarship on Tecumseh and the region in this era] interviewing Daniel Boone in the flesh, and Simon Kenton in the flesh, as he did, and said, 77 “Daniel, tell me about the Battle of Blue Licks.” Well, I was born across the site from that battlefield, and I grew up there. Daniel said one thing. He goes to Simon and says, “Tell me about the Battle of Blue Licks.” He says another. They were both there! Hell, what’s happening here?!

H: Right, that’s the problem with history, yeah, [laughing]

W: And, well, it’s like anything else, it’s like...uh, an accident, viewing an accident: it’s perspective.

I absolutely love this analogy of history to an accident. Not only is it an accurate way to describe the way that history gets created and passed along, it is also a very telling way of describing it: history as an account of how damage was done. It is the way we explain, rationalize, and justify our messes after they have been made, after the shards of glass and pieces of twisted metal have been cleaned up.

Of course, this passage is significant in a variety of other ways, too. Once again we see that dance between authority and distance: “I was born across the site from that battlefield, and I grew up there”—as if, somehow, an intimate geographic relationship to that site nearly two-hundred years after its glory days instills one with an

“essential” knowledge of its history. More significant yet is the story of how The Battle o f

Tippecanoe's production was halted. In it, there is certainly a cautionary taie; Waggoner told this story very gravely, as if aware that at any moment his life could be endangered, as was the life of theTippecanoe producer. Most significant of all, however, is Waggoner’s account of the “wannabe Indians” who stopped the show. There is an implication here that

“real” Indians—like the Absentee Shawnee who “chuckle” about Tecumseh! n o objection to seeing their cultures represented in such productions; that in fact, they are amused by it. This is dangerous territory, indeed, since the logical conclusion is that

“real” Native people are not militant, but instead chuckle at the silly white man’s attempts to “play Indian,” in Green’s terminology. In essence, this utterly disempowers any Native person who intervenes to critique or prevent such representations, and again reasserts the producers’ authority over the material. As Alcoff has observed, such a privileged position

78 is “discursively dangerous....[T]he practice of privileged persons speaking for or on behalf of less privileged persons has actually resulted (in many cases) in increasing or reinforcing the oppression of the group spoken for” (7). While I think Waggoner intends to suggest that there is a kind of subversion in the Absentee Shawnees’ laughter (i.e., “Look how little the white man really knows about our culture”), this more oppressive interpretation of his remarks is available as well.

Just prior to the above portion of our conversation, Waggoner had explained in more detail his theory about “wannabe Indians,” a theory which does tend to support the more negative interpretation of his later remarks. As he said.

We haven’t had any...problems or anyone take...as far as Native people are concerned, that we know that are actually are Indian people. Other people who come up and say, “I’m Indian and I’m offended. I’m—” ..nine times out of ten, the individuals who are offended are just about as white as I am. And I’m about as white as you can get. OK? Those are the individuals who want to create problems and who want to drasN focus to themselves.

Again, an angry Native person is a “fake” Native person? This passage is ripe with important issues: the question of how to “tell” if someone is an “Other” (an issue which comes up in the way the show is staged, and will be discussed in the next section), as well as the very problematic idea that oppressed persons should sit quietly back and not disrupt the status quo.

I genuinely feel that I am doing a disservice to Waggoner here, though, since all of this seems to be pointing squarely toward an interpretation of him as a racist. As mentioned earlier, it was very clear to me through all our talks that he has thought about all of these issues deeply and critically, and that he is very aware of his position—as a white man—relative to his subject matter. Evidence of this awareness can be found in the following passage, which, like the previous one, deserves to be presented in a fuller context:

My perspective is different... than a Navajo kid... who...may be once a week get a bottle of pop. That’s a hell of a difference from the way things operate around here! At my house, anyway. So my perspective is different. I mean, it’s easy for me to philosophize this with a full belly and a Dodge 79 Dynasty, and...uh, medical insurance paid by the company I work for, and a loving wife, and all this...but, uh, and my kid’s, uh, an honor student and does sports and this and that—Well, by god. I’ve earned that.

But nonetheless, it’s a different perspective of—from that kid, or the, or a black child in, um—I’ll just pick on Louisville, Kentucky; everybody always wants to pick on Detroit—who...has one chance in, uh...six or seven of being shot? I suppose—I don’t know what I would feel if I were in that position. I don’t know how I would view white male Protestant. I just don’t know. I probably would be angry out of a sense of that collective...stuff, and saying, “You owe me, because my grandfather was a slave; you owe me forever.” Maybe I would say that.

Or maybe I would have a chip on my shoulder about repatriation. You know. I don’t want people digging up my ancestors; I don’t want people selling their bones; I don’t want people selling the artifacts; I don’t want people who say they’re Indian and not receiving...what some have purported to be a piece of Tecumseh’s flesh and burying it on a piece of ground they bought, you know, through a bank and saying it’s ceremonial ground. I don’t want that. And I don’t want government support either. I want...I want to be treated like a white male Protestant. And if I can’t, then maybe I’ll marry one. Because that’s maybe the only way I can get that kind of treatment.

Again, this passage provides testimony to the sort of tense, circuitous dance between authority and positionality that I have been pointing to throughout this section of the chapter. On the one hand, Waggoner is easily able to see the ways in which he lives a privileged life as a middle-class white man—he even details what some of those generally taken-for-granted privileges are (always having food and even “luxury” food items available, having a car and health insurance, and so forth). On the other hand, that willingness to identify with the “Other” only extends so far: he has earned his privileges

(as “Others” have earned their lack thereof?), and his final remark here suggests that those privileges may never be available to anyone other than, as he phrases it, “white male

Protestants.” There is also a perplexing suggestion here that assimilation is the only way to access those privileges; disruptive “Others” run the risk of being perceived as

“inauthentic,” as suggested above, and thereby renege their access to “white male protestant” treatment.

80 If anything, though, Waggoner’s comments seem less motivated by racism than by

the kind of painful struggle for cross-cultural understanding that many persons (both white

people and people of color) go through in trying to come to terms with their positionality

within American culture and in the presence of others—including myself as I execute this

project. Contemporary ethnographers all struggle with the boundary between reporting and skewing, being selective with one’s material and manipulating it. My purpose here is not to malign Waggoner or the production of Tecumseh!, for—as will be discussed later in this chapter—there is much potential at the site to challenge notions of history, ethnicity, and authenticity.

Nevertheless, 1 hope these excerpts from my conversations with Waggoner demonstrate the complex system of beliefs, agendas, and priorities operating at the

Tecumseh! site. On the positive side, we can readily see that the producer (and his staff and cast) have a flexible view of history: most tend to perceive it rightly as a fluid and dynamic process of interpretation, situated within larger social, historical, and personal contexts. Whether the agents at the site have a similar view aboutculture is a more questionable proposition. As the program presents it, Shawnee culture is ether already moribund or has been slowly self-destructing since Tecumseh’s death. And as

Waggoner’s comments suggest, the show is more interested in entertaining its audiences than it is with challenging their notions about both historical and contemporary Native

American life and culture:

[CJulturally, perspective is...which...camp you’re sitting in, 1 guess....[P]eople walk away from this show 1 think generally speaking, it’s an action-oriented show, it’s very epic...and 1 think they walk away, uh, thinking more about the spectacle than they do about the cultural aspects of it. And that’s why, because as 1 said before, it—we must entertain people, we must keep them coming here; to keep the operation going, um, first and foremost, they have to enjoy the play.

81 Performers and Performances: Illusion. Power, and the Body

Of course, one way to determine how the producers’ notions of history, culture,

and ethnic identity manifest themselves is to look at the performances of the drama itself,

and to ask questions of the performers, those enacting the Native American identity on

stage. As mentioned in the previous chapter, the written text of Tecumseh! is, in itself, a

fairly even-handed account of the settlement of the Northwest Territories in the late

eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. A variety of Woodland, Eastem, and Southern

tribes of the era are represented, if only momentarily or visually (i.e., characters

representing other tribes generally don’t speak), and as such, the play itself could be said to

present a fairly diverse portrait of Native American cultures. But how do those portraits

translate on the stage, when they are brought to life by actors? We must examine several

crucial, physical aspects o f the performances here: costuming, blocking (the physical

movement and position of characters on stage), and makeup; only then can we critique the

overall image of Native Americans that performances of the show project, as well as the

attitudes of the performers toward their roles.

To the show’s credit, the costumers have done extensive research into the dress of

the Woodland tribes during the era in which the show takes place. The show’s costume

shop is extensive and well maintained, and there is a serious reverence for authenticity

within its walls. Theater manager Renee Norman took me on a tour of the shop during my first visit to the Tecumseh! site, and—with great pride—showed me several of its more

treasured items: a white wolf headdress (apparently priceless, due to the dwindling population of the species) and a ceremonial feather that one of the characters uses, given to the show by members of the Absentee Shawnee. Yet, as Norman herself admitted, authenticity sometimes has to give way to tourist expectations:

We work our darndest for realism, to be true...\xvn, to what the Shawnee— which would be southern woodland Indian—what their culture was really like, what their lives were really like...but on the other hand, we have to bring in, and please, tourists, the showgoers. And they have expectations. And if you violate those expectations too much, then they’re unhappy. 82 Specifically, she goes on to say, audiences put a lot of emphasis on the attire the Native

American characters wear, and whether those costumes fit their own notions of what “real

Indians” wear (N = Norman, H = Hathaway):

N: [The Woodland tribes] didn’t «Je leather. You know. They didn’t have the large bison, you know, the large prairie animals. They used a lot of cloth. [...] They didn’t use what we typically think of of the fringed buckskin, deer...and yet, if we put on this great big huge gala, and just put everyone in kind of dull cloth colors, people would be disappointed. So you will see—you know, we do bring in the leathers. And, uh, we do bring in kind of the tourist expectation, but it’s mixed. If you ever see a picture of Tecumseh, he actually wore a turban.

R: Hmm.

N: No fancy headdress. Woodland Indians wore turbans.

R: Huh.

N: And, uh...at...different...seasons that we’ve done the show, we’ve had different ones of the main characters, actually, in the authentic turbans. But you can’t put too many of ’em onstage, ’cause the audience will sit here going, “That’s not real.”

R: [chuckle]

As producer Waggoner noted previously, the show’s primary goal is to entertain people—to keep them coming back so that the show can survive. And as Norman suggests above, in order to do this, the producers and the performers must be acutely attuned to the expectations and desires of the audience. They must make conscious decisions to meet certain tourist stereotypes in order to make the show believable.

This passage is especially remarkable in that it sets up several competing definitions of authenticity. In a general sense, we tend to think of something that is “authentic” as being either the “real thing” itself, or as being the best representative of the real (but absent) thing.® I think it is this latter quality that the producers and performers are using to define authenticity here-that is to say, “authenticity” here means that what the show represents or portrays is as close as the producers and performers can get, via research and so forth, to the “real thing”—the real cultures and peoples—being reenacted on stage. This

83 definition of authenticity approximates the one by which most academics and folklorists

operate. However, as Norman astutely points out, many audience members (at least in the

producers’ eyes) define authenticity by more stereotypic and contemporary standards:

because “Indians” in the movies wear buckskins and feathered headbands, that is

presumed to be the “authentic standard” of “Indianness.” The “researched

authentic” clashes with the “consumable authentic,”^ and audiences reject the former.

Thus, the audience becomes an active agent in the participatory process of creating an

acceptable, hybrid “authenticity standard” at the Tecumseh! site. This will become

significant later in this chapter when I posit that in other respects, the audience does not have this kind of resistant reaction to the representation of Native Americans, and thus does not exercise the same kind of production-affecting agency.

The other set of cultural images affecting how the audience constructs its notion of the consumable authentic is the current rage for “Santa Fe” style in interior design, clothing, and so forth. Audiences, as Norman implies, equate the images associated with the Santa Fe “look” with Native American cultures in general. Just as the consumable authentic standard calls for buckskins and feathered headbands, it also calls for the patterns and designs associated with the Santa Fe/southwestem motif. On this score, however,

Norman seems to suggest that the costumers have not acquiesced. As she explains it,

[A]t one point, um, there was a lot in this show, like I was saying, of Southwestern designs. People would put geometries on them, thinking that was Native American—no, that would have been down in Arizona. And we’ve worked—now it’s all, they use a lot of, uh, vines and flowers, and...shooting stars, not the bold geometries of, you know, the rough canyons and rock formations. [...] It’s...the art of the forest. And so we’ve worked really hard to bring that in...to the show.

As this example shows, then, audience expectations and reactions only exert so much influence over costuming decisions; on some counts, the costumers seem to feel more compelled to abide by their own definition of the “researched authentic.”

84 Audience expectations and stereotypes also seem to factor into the way the show is

physically staged, although neither Norman nor Waggoner mentioned this specifically,

probably due to the fact that the ideology behind the staging is less defensible than that

behind the limited use of “inauthentic” costumes. While blocking—the positioning and

movement of characters on stage—may not seem to be especially crucial to our

consideration of the drama’s construction of Shawnee identity and Native American identity

in general, it is in many ways vital to the way the audience receives the Native American

characters and understands the relationship between them and the white settlers. Notably,

the first group introduced are the Shawnee, who have just captured a white settler and who,

in the course of the scene, torture him and eventually kill and scalp him. Tecumseh stands

aside, looking sickened, and after the brutal deed, condemns the act and urges his fellow tribesmen to vow never to engage in such activity again, since it dehumanizes its victims.

In this first scene, then, Tecumseh stands—literally and figuratively—apart from his

Shawnee brethren; and while most histories do document Tecumseh’s stance against needless brutality, the physical positioning here illustrates that he is, on some level, not

“o f’ his people, but is a transcendent figure. Immediately, his primary ethnic identity is displaced by his allegedly more “global” understanding of the value of human life.

Furthermore, Tecumseh’s defense of and identification with the white captive makes him immediately sympathetic to (and more closely aligned with) an Anglo audience and its values.

Tecumseh’s “superiority” or transcendence is blocked into the show from this point on; in many pivotal scenes, Tecumseh is astride a horse or standing atop one of the man- made “cliffs” that flank each end of the stage so that he is literally towering over the

Shawnee or the settlers. Even the white settler family of James Galloway first spots

Tecumseh crouching defensively, prepared for attack or flight, atop one of the rock formations overhead. This sort of staging establishes the kind of reaction to Tecumseh that

85 Waggoner alludes to in the title of this chapter: that Tecumseh isn’t just a character, but a

“marvel,” one who hovers above everyone else on stage, like a superhero in flight.

And in most scenes where “Indians” and whites appear on stage together, they are blocked—appropriately enough—on opposite sides of the stage, crossing over only for an exchange of prisoners or for battle. Thus the blocking echoes the play’s focus on territoriality, the absolute lack of a “middle ground.” The only scenes where we see free movement between Indian and white characters are Tecumseh’s interactions with the

Galloways (which come to an abrupt halt when Rebecca asks Tecumseh to leave his people, his territory) or the Shawnee warriors’ interactions with their British allies, though these are marked by tension as well. Thus the blocking (as well as the written text of the play itself) implies that any interaction between whites and Native Americans was marked only by tension, misunderstanding, or outright violence.

Perhaps the most critical scene where whites and “Indians” appear on stage together is the scene in the second act which depicts Tecumseh’s meeting with General

William Henry Harrison at Vincennes; this scene, which theater manager Norman refers to as the “parade of chiefs,” locks the white characters at the center of the stage while all of the show’s horses (probably about twelve) flank either side of the stage, positioned either on the cliffs or up the ramps on either side of the seating area (by which actors make various entrances and exits throughout the show). Atop the horses sit “Indians,” all clad in different costumes, each intended to represent a different tribe—not just the Shawnee, but also the Miami, the Kickapoo, the Wyandot, and a variety of other Woodland tribes. It is, indeed, an impressive spectacle, and the blocking—which depicts the horseless, surrounded whites as weak and vulnerable—is certainly intriguing. It is the only moment in the show where Tecumseh shares his “marvelous” status with other “chiefs,” though of course he is still in charge. At the conclusion of the scene, the “chiefs” all ride off stage right and circle back around behind the man-made lake onstage, and it is indeed a sight to marvel at, a

86 genuine spectacle. The lighting of this moment is also worth mentioning: the “Indian parade” behind the lake is in full light, so we can clearly see the various costumes; meanwhile, the front stage has been darkened, and all the audience can see of the American troops are their silhouettes. So, laid over the rich reds and browns and greens of the chiefs and their horses are dark shadows of muskets and rifles and the billowing American flag.

Like many moments in the show, it is visually stunning: a friend who accompanied me to a performance whispered to me at this point, “My god, it’s like a Frederic Remington painting.” The analogy could not be more apt. This moving tableau perfectly captures both

Remington’s and the drama’s blend of romanticized ethnic roles, nature, patriotic symbolism, and violence.

But certainly the centerpieces of the show’s blocking, its most outstanding spectacles, are the battle scenes: in all, there are three major battle scenes in the show, one small one in the first act, and two in the second act, the “highlight” of which is the very protracted Battle-of-Tippecanoe scene. This comes fairly close to the end of the show, and is by far thepiece de resistance of the entire production, punctuated by an ear-splitting barrage of all kind of artillery fire (including cannons, rifles, and explosive shells hidden in the surrounding woods and in the man-made lake on stage), along with “warriors”—white and “Indian”—shooting, tomahawking, or knifing each other, or—in the absence of weapons—performing hand-to-hand combat on stage and dying dramatic deaths. During a pre-show afternoon tour (to be discussed later in this chapter), two cast members explained that these scenes—despite their lack of dialogue and relative brevity—require far more rehearsal than the rest of the drama as a whole—as much as “Fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, for three weeks. That’s just before the show started.” So clearly this is where the show is investing its highest production values.

And the investment pays off: every time I have seen the show, the Battle of

Tippecanoe is the highlight of the show. While the noise and surprise of the guns initially

87 startles audiences, this reaction seems rapidly to give way to a host of other responses:

laughter, exhilaration, relief, astonishment; in short, the creation of an utter festival

environment within the audience. At the end of the Battle, there is always a huge round of

applause, and frequent cheering or whistling. This begs the question: what is being

applauded here? On the surface, the spectacle, to be sure; but beneath that, is the audience

not applauding the super-masculine show of military force? The outrageous noise and

show with which we ensured that the land was “ours”? The Battle scenes, I think, are the

places in the show where the production’s loftier goals and the audience’s desires come

most into conflict. Waggoner’s comments tend to imply that these scenes are intended to

stir audiences to a greater understanding of the motivations of both groups involved, and to

arouse some sympathy for Indian losses. However, few in the audience seem to be

anything but excited if not delighted by these scenes. If they were intended to disturb, they

fail to do so in performance. Sheer spectacle overwhelms any kind of intellectual response,

a fact which Waggoner readily acknowledges: “I think [audiences] walk away...thinking more about the spectacle than they do about the cultural aspects of it. And that’s why,

because as I said before, it—we must entertain people, we must keep them coming here; to keep the operation going...first and foremost, they have to enjoy the play.” It is not difficult to see here how the blocking or staging of the show itself tends to simplify Native

American identity, how it fails to problematize the conflict between Anglos and Woodland natives, but instead glorifies the violence of that conflict.

A larger aspect of the staging that also factors into this simplification is the fact that unless the spectator has bought the official program for the show (not included in the ticket price), she is not going to know when and where the events on stage are taking place, except through inference. The show’s official program lists the dates and geographic locations of each of the show’s eighteen scenes (ranging in dates from 1784 to 1813, and from near Chillicothe to Kentucky to western Indiana to Ontario, Canada), though in larger

88 print, the “place” is listed merely as “The Ohio Country” (program, no page numbers).

Because the show has no sets to change, the stage remains essentially the same through the performance; there are few visual clues to alert the audience to shifts in time or place. The production makes very effective use of lighting cues and staging areas to indicate transitions from one scene to the next (indeed, it is remarkable that the show is able to tell such a wide-ranging story coherently with such minimal sets and props). However, the lights and stage movements obviously cannot indicate shifts in historical time or geography with any specificity. As a result, without the benefit of a purchased program indicating where and when each scene takes place, the net effect is to collapse all of Tecumseh’s history onto Chillicothe, when in reality he only spent part of his life (mostly as a child and a young man) there. Even with the aid of a program, the drama’s minimal staging allows and even encourages such a conflation. While in one sense I think this streamlining of time and space functions largely to prevent further confusion for the spectator (as it is, there are already a lot of characters and subplots to keep track of), this staged collapse of time and space also seems a fairly deliberate effort to boost local history and identity by making

Tecumseh’s entire life story the “story” of Chillicothe, as well. As Dorst notes, such cultural productions’ vagueness and generality “blur[s] cultural, historic, and geographic distinctions” in order to “accommodate the broadest possible participation” (29)—or, perhaps, to narrow it, by limiting the production’s interpretive potential.

But the most troubling aspect of the production’s staging, in terms of how it affects the show’s construction of Native identity, is the fact that the majority of actors playing

“Indians” are Anglos. Obviously, the actors’ physicality must be somewhat altered to achieve the “look” of Native Americans—and by this I mean the constructed Anglo notion of Native American physicality. To this end, cast members portraying Indians wear rust- colored body paint, and most wear nylon wigs of straight black hair. The makeup is so dark and must be applied so liberally and often that, frighteningly, “Indian” cast members

89 are segregated into their own dressing room, where the walls are painted a color similar to that of the body paint.

Importantly, the show as staged is curious in its positioning of the male body: while the female Indians are modestly dressed, the male Indians are clad primarily in loincloths, and are frequently bare-chested. As a friend who attended a performance of the show with me also noted, all the men playing Indians appear to have shaved all their body hair, even under their arms. While this certainly conforms to the stereotypical notion of the hairless “Native,” the juxtaposition of this apparent feminization of the body with the obvious showcasing of the male form is both disturbing and telling: there’s a culture of desire being produced here. We admire, perhaps even envy or lust after the near-naked and muscular male forms in front of us, but the removal of all body hair essentially removes any threat inherent in the object of our gaze. We may gaze upon the Other without danger.

So we have established that the play itself—while clearly striving quite nobly for authenticity—seems to devolve into emphasizing the physical “difference” of Native

Americans. The role of makeup in establishing a credible “ethnicity” for “cross-dressing”

Anglos is well noted, and seemingly uncontested, by cast members. In an interview

Jamieson Price, the actor who plays Tecumseh, he implied the primacy of this physicality when he told me that “as long as you’ve got a good makeup artist, you can do almost anything,” and suggested that with makeup, “Any good actor...should be able to...you know, portray...anything which is in their range...I mean...black people can play white people; Asians can play—Cauca—I mean, you can go anywhere, you know.” I’m intrigued by the fact that Price stops himself mid-thought here, as if he has suddenly realized the improbability of what he is saying. Only whites have the privilege to “play Indian”—or any

“Other” ethnic identity—and get away with it, and he quickly evades this realization here.

90 As John Szwed notes in his essay “Race and the Embodiment of Culture,” it is not uncommon for Anglos to become nearly obsessive in their emphasis on the physicality of the “Other,” and he implies that it is this obsession that leads Anglos to acts of minstrelsy:

[T]he high do leam and borrow from the low, and they have developed elaborate techniques and justifications to skirt the pollution and degradation involved in the transformation. Perhaps the best known technique is what might be called minstrelization, the process by which the low are characterized or emulated within a carefully regulated and socially approved context....This form of “passing” is distinctly different from that available to the stigmatized racial group. Where the low status member must first possess a physique at least marginally similar to the dominant group’s and must additionally master the high status group’s cultural devices, always risking discrediting, the high status minstrelizer has only to leam a minimal number of cultural techniques and temporarily mask himself as a subordinate. (26-27)

Szwed here captures precisely the process going on at the Tecumseh! site, and more specifically lays bare the failure of Price’s rationalizations, above. Price seems to catch himself in the act of creating one of the “elaborate techniques and justifications” Szwed refers to, but balks at recognizing it as such.

Furthermore, as Szwed implies and as Tecumseh! literally embodies. Native

American identity is easily and believably enacted for white audiences through only the most primitive (pun, perhaps, intended) of disguises—a few “consumably authentic” costumes, some red body paint, a black wig. To pass culturally as well as physically, the cast members read up on some questionable history, leam a few Shawnee words and the dead-and-dying “Wolf chant.” What Price fails to realize here is that audience stereotypes make his “passing” as Native American an easy task, and that even if he is “discredited,” as Szwed puts it, there is little risk involved. People would likely only giggle at worst, though he may be chastised by some of the militant “Indian wannabes,” as

Waggoner calls them (but they are not to be taken seriously, anyway). However, the dangers of passing for white—either on stage or in real life—are far greater; as every novel of passing illustrates, one risks censure and ostracism by one’s own cultural group and severe punishment by whites. To assume a white identity is also to assume power.

91 Waggoner himself alludes to this when he suggests that if he were Native American today,

he might think, “I want to be treated like white male Protestant. And if I can’t, then maybe

I’ll marry one. Because that’s maybe the only way I can get that kind of treatment.” Thus,

“passing” as the powerful is—on the surface any way—a far more dangerous and subversive activity than passing as the powerless. I wonder what the response would be if the

Absentee Shawnee put on their own show about Tecumseh and cast other Shawnees in the parts of the white settlers?

The real question, though, comes down to this: how and why do representations like this happen? What are Anglos doing with Native American identity at this and similar sites? And why is this kind of representation relatively uncontested? When Ted Danson appeared in blackface at a Friar’s Club banquet several years ago, he was uniformly criticized. Yet very few audience members at Tecumseh! seem even remotely phased by the fact that these are white people putting on “redface,” as it were, and representing an ethnicity that isn’t their own. While black minstrelsy has fallen out of practice and into disfavor, most incidents of Anglos “playing Indian,” as Rayna Green calls the act, are barely noticed, much less questioned or criticized. Some hints as to the answers to this all- important question may be found in the ways the production of Tecumseh! is packaged at a more global level.

Tourist Texts: The Marketing of Native American Identity

Having addressed the textual and performance levels of the production. I’d like to focus on the packaging of the play itself, the way it is marketed. This, to my mind, is the trickiest and most elusive area for the producers and performers of the show. In the past, television commercials for the drama have emphasized its “action sequences,” showing film of battle scenes or other physical activity: Indians leaping off o f high ledges and so forth.

At the beginning of the 1995 season, Waggoner told me that he was changing the emphasis

92 of the commercials to stress, instead, the “mystical” nature of Native Americans. I’m not

entirely sure which is worse; certainly both impulses are equally oppressive. And this

curious juxtaposition of the demonic and the romantic is one which characterizes the spaces

and productions surrounding the show itself.

The written text of Tecumseh! and its performance are only a couple of the

multiple, interactive texts operating at the Tecumseh! site: at the Sugarloaf Mountain

Amphitheater, there are a variety of touristic texts operating, as well. In addition to the

requisite gift shop, there is also a small “Prehistoric Indian Museum” (as it is called in the

show’s program). Furthermore, prior to the show, at least three different kinds of tours

are available at a nominal cost: a standard backstage tour, geared primarily toward adults

and families, which demonstrates the use of firearms and other weaponry in the show, and

familiarizes patrons with what goes on behind the scenes; a scout tour, conducted weekday

afternoons for organized groups of school-age children, which acquaints them with the

flora of Sugarloaf Mountain, shows them how the weapons and stage combat used in the

show work, and gives them a chance to pet the horses used in the show; and a woodland

and Indian lore tour, conducted right before the show for younger children, which again

acquaints them with the flora, and also with some “Indian folklore.”

I was particularly interested in seeing how the scout tour was conducted, since

certainly the Boy Scouts, and to a lesser extent the Girl Scouts, are organizations that

attempt to emulate Native American culture to some degree*; thus, I was curious as to how

the tour would represent Native Americans. The tour I joined in July 1994 was conducted

by the actor who played Simon Kenton in the show, Raymond Speakman. Though he was

not “in character” during the tour, Speakman did at times seem to bring some of the character of Kenton into his tour-leading: during this particular tour, an afternoon thunderstorm was threatening, and on several occasions Speakman looked intently to the skies or held up a hand to check on the wind direction. He himself buttressed this sort of

93 “natural man” pose early in the tour, when he told the group, “[R]ight now the lightening’s way off. But, if I feel a point where I think the lightening is—lightening is getting too close, we’ll turn around, we’ll come right back down here. OK? But we are goin’ ’head, and try to go into the woods, because as I said, the lightening is way off right now at this point.

OK? And—with twelve years’ experience here, I know when the lightening’s getting close, so you’ll be all right.” This remark dovetails nicely with his character in the show—

Kenton, in the drama, is portrayed as the quintessential frontiersman, living by his wits, obedient to his own principles rather than any man’s laws.

And so it was that he took the group into the woods and began pointing out various trees, telling the group how they could be identified by their bark or their leaves, and remarking occasionally on their medicinal or other uses. After climbing to the top of a hill, we were joined by two other cast members, both of whom were playing frontiersmen in the show, each of whom sported different kinds of rifles. The authenticity of these weapons was claimed, and then they were fired off, using such comical batting as toilet paper and leaves. Then these two escorted us a little way down the hill, functioning—ostensibly—as additional tour guides. Suddenly, one of the men stopped and looked suspiciously around, and the following dialogue ensued:

Phillips: ...We got prints, bud. Dunlap: They’re probably just hikers! Phillips: They’re moccasins. Tell you what: you go out thatta way— Dunlap: Why do / have to go out there? Phillips: Just go this way. I’m going to go over here and look, OK? [To group] You guys stay right here, we’ll be right back.

At this point, two “Indians” leaped out from behind some dense brush and ran toward the group wielding weapons and emitting loud, ostensible “war whoops.” The three

“frontiersmen” quickly loaded their guns and “shot” the attacking Indians, leaving them

“dead” on the ground. In the aftermath, a girl in front of me—maybe about 9 or 10 years old—turned to the girl next to her and whispered gleefully, “You can see their butts!”—

94 referring, of course, to the “dead Indians” in their loincloths. Again, this demonstrates the production’s ability to make the “Other” male body into an object of both desire and ridicule.

Shortly afterwards, the “dead Indians” got up and began addressing the group, introducing themselves and then, in unison, emitting a sort of indistinguishable grunt, which 1 guess was supposed to be some kind of Native American greeting. Then one of them said, “All right, let’s have a big round of applause for our frontiersmenr, a call which received loud shouts and cheers from the entire crowd. It was certainly odd to have these “Indians” call for a cheer for the “heroes” who’d just “killed” them. This maneuver also effectively shows children that these actors are not “really” Indians; that instead, they are as white as most of the kids on the tour, thus alleviating cultural anxiety about interacting with the Native Other. Presumably, this erasure of “real Indianness” then can also carry over into the show, and prevent children from being frightened by the spectre of

Indians on stage.

The tour’s bizarre conflation and confusion of “Indian” and “white” identities and of drama and “real life” embody exactly the sort of paradox referred to at the outset of this chapter; an uncomfortable juxtaposition of the present and the past, fact and fiction, self and Other, which Bruner argues creates space for learning. This could appear to be true, as shortly after this, while continuing our walk through the woods, one of the girls excitedly yelled, “Look! A Teepee!” upon spotting a red dwelling in the distance; another girl corrected her, “That’s a tent.” “Well, it’s a modem teepee, then,” the first girl retorted.

Maybe. While this exchange might still be jarringly stereotypical, 1 think it does demonstrate a certain kind of dislocation between expectation and reality that could have the potential to yield some interesting position-shifting on the part of tour participants.

Nevertheless, it is all too easy to see how the scout tour expresses exactly that combination of demonization and romanticization referred to earlier. Through his

95 explanations of the various uses Native Americans made of local flora, the tour guide

reinforces the popular romantic conception of Native Americans as the first

environmentalists, as people “essentially” more attuned to the forces of nature (a theme

which runs through many of the other texts about Tecumseh). And, by having two scantily

clad “Indian warriors” jump out at the children from bushes, the tour simultaneously

appeals to the kind of cowboys-and-Indians fright and delight which—while greeted a little

more skeptically now—is still popular in white cultures.

Too, there is the text of the gift shop, which—in many ways—encapsulates the

paradoxical reification and critique of stereotypes about Native Americans present in the

drama itself. The gift shop presents the most nightmarish manifestation of the schism

between demonization and romanticization; in this space, all manner of toy weaponry—

bow-and-arrow sets, spears, rifles, slingshots, and tomahawks—are sold alongside

dreamcatchers of all sizes, lots of silver and turquoise Jewelry, and pastel, air-brushed paintings of Native American women holding babies. Needless to say, any illusion of

authenticity gets cast aside here, and instead, customers are solicited through their

stereotypes—violent or romantic, take your pick—of Native American cultures. As was the case with the show’s costuming, the consumable authentic becomes the standard here; audience stereotypes about Native cultures dictate what is sold and purchased in the shop, thus establishing the stereotypical as the authentic.

However, two facts complicate this whole scene, the first being that many of the items in the shop are, in fact, produced by Native Americans. In particular, the Cherokees seem to have a comer on this market: many of these items are quite literally marked as being “authorized” by the group, bearing tags that read “Made in America by Native

Americans / Made by the Cherokees, Qualla reservation, Cherokee, N.C.” and displaying the official Cherokee trademaric and logo. The second complicating factor is that the manager of the gift shop is, herself. Native American-Nita Waggoner, the producer’s

96 wife, who, as mentioned before, is of the Alabama Coushatta nation. Waggoner denied several of my requests to speak with Nita about the gift shop, saying that it was their policy not to discuss its marketing strategies. Notably, though, on the occasion I did meet Nita casually (when I was distributing audience surveys before the show one night), she and another woman were sitting at a picnic table making dreamcatchers and adding the finished ones to a shirtbox full of them. I do not know if these are among the dreamcatchers for sale in the shop, but it would not surprise me if they were.

Given the involvement of Native Americans in the production, selection, and sale of items in the gift shop, the question thus becomes, who’s really being tricked and appropriated here? While none of the merchandise mentioned can be called “authentically

Native American” by any stretch of the imagination, it is purchased as such; yet the merchandise here is far more “authentically white”—that is, the white commercial standard of “Indian-ness.” What is being purchased is an admission of how little white America knows about Native America and Native Americans; what is being sold is unsignified signifiers: things believed to have meaning on the part of the purchaser, but which signify nothing about the culture they are intended to represent—things which say far more about the culture of the buyer. It is, needless to say, a depressing scene; almost as depressing as watching a kid, a boy maybe eight years old, aiming the toy rifle his parents bought for him during intermission at some of the “Indians” on stage during the second act of a performance I attended.

And, clearly, the souvenir trade at this and most tourist sites is a more or less conscious way for producers and tourists alike to encapsulate, market, and consume experience; souvenirs literally objectify experience, becoming portable “representations” of the representation already witnessed. As Robert Cantwell explains, “The impulse...is to somehow come into possession of the participant, indeed to become the participant. This may demand only a symbolic action—that we buy the product” (Ethnomimesis 271,

97 emphasis Cantwell’s). Here Cantwell implies that, in fact, some souvenirs may be bought as a way of not merely preserving experience, but of internalizing it, incorporating it into one’s own identity; in this sense, the consumable authentic operates on two levels: it reflects the consumerist nature of the tourist experience, but also reflects the tourist’s desire to consume the Other, to make the Other part of himself. Certainly the proliferation of

“Indian artifacts” in the Tecumseh! gift shop suggests that this is the motive of many tourists there. By purchasing the gaudy tomahawk (with its Cherokee mark of authenticity) or the silver-and-turquoise earrings, the tourist can become “Indian”—if only momentarily, and only superficially.

All of this evidence begins to point toward some answers to the vital questions raised above: how and why do representations like this happen? Why is this kind of representation relatively uncontested? And what are Anglos doing with Native American identity at this and similar sites?

Waggoner’s statements about the show’s “authorization” by the Absentee

Shawnee, his efforts to recruit Native American actors for the show, and the scholarship fund he has established for Native Americans—while just and sincere acts, all—also serve to free the show from any kind of political obligation to contemporary Native Americans. In both my first (recorded and transcribed) interview with Waggoner and my second

(unrecorded) one, he has either alluded to or outright claimed to distance himself from conflicts within the Shawnee nation. He makes a very clear demarcation between the show’s representation of early nineteenth-century Shawnee culture and extant Shawnee culture. His remarks about the reactions of Shawnee representatives to performances of the show—“They, the Absentee Shawnee, kind of chuckled about it”—also imply that contemporary Native Americans take such performances as a joke, and his remarks that the only “Natives” offended by the show are “wannabes” further authorize the production’s representation of Shawnee culture. All of these comments collectively add to that rhetorical

98 distance mentioned earlier; the show, while maintaining contact with contemporary

Shawnees, also separates itself from the contemporary Shawnee nation: all of the authority, none of the obligation.

Waggoner’s strategic positioning addresses the question of how the representation happens, and begins to answer why the representation is relatively uncontested.

Waggoner’s story about the failed outdoor drama in Indiana that focused on the Battle of

Tippecanoe (cited in broader context above) points toward an even clearer answer, to recap

Waggoner’s earlier comments.

The Battle of Tippecanoe, which was a monumental outdoor drama in South Bend, Indiana...ah. West Lafayette, was shut down because of [arguments over the representation of Native Americans and the interpretation of history]....They built a 2.5 million-dollar complex, worked on it for twelve years, and it was shut down in two years. They had Native people and wannabe—what I call “Wannabe” Indians—[clears throat] literally come up onto the set and stop the show during performance, put a knife to the producer’s throat...and, uh, then went into negotiations to—they had a committee to rewrite the script, and of course it failed miserably.

The protesters, according to Waggoner, were only able to have their voice heard by literally interrupting and stopping the p»erformance of the show; apparently, their prior complaints had not been heard. Waggoner’s story reminds us of a clear fact that both the staging and the touristic contexts of Tecumseh! try to disguise: that it is a static, stable, and formal presentation of history—the performances are not interactive in the full sense of the term.

The show does tolerate and even encourage a far more casual atmosphere than the atmosphere maintained at more formal theatrical productions—audience members can eat nachos and drink Cokes during the performance, and a voice over the public-address system at the beginning of the show asks people to keep the noise level to a minimum (not necessarily to keep quiet). Furthermore, audience responses tend to be exaggerated: as with the response to the Battle of Tippecanoe, polite, appreciative applause is replaced by loud applause, whoops, whistles, and cheers. The informal atmosphere, combined with the outdoor setting, allows for that. Nevertheless, the sense of “us” (audience) and

99 “them” (performers) is still rigidly maintained; unlike other historical sites where costumed, character- “interpreters” freely interact with visitors, audiences and performers alike respect the “fourth wall” of theTecumseh! performance.

And it is this fourth wall that effectively eliminates the possibility of protest. As

Waggoner’s story suggests, the only public way to interrogate the interpretation of history presented at the Tecumseh! site would be to actively stop the performance, to crash through that fourth wall and thus call attention to the constructed nature of performance, history, and ethnic identity. The Battle o f Tippecanoe protesters thus employed the most powerful tactic available to them to register their objections: in disrupting the play, they broke the “magic spell” of illusion that these dramas depend upon, and probably made it very clear to the audience that—rather than being transported back through time to relive an authentic historical past—they were, instead, watching a bunch of white actors present a single and contested version of local history. Unless someone were willing to deploy this maneuver at the Tecumseh! site, one would be hard-pressed to find the space or opportunity for a more interactive, unmediated, and complex presentation and discussion of history. In this sense, theTecumseh! site does not offer the kind of potential for postmodern play that Bruner advocates, since it is a site that relegates its visitors to a passive audience status, and thus keeps them and their questions and objections at bay.

Rather, the site encourages what John Dorst terms “participatory consumption” (Written

Suburb 133), where “active” participation in the site is available only through passive consumption. While the various tours offered before the show have greater potential for interaction, these are also guided, scripted, and formal, for the most part; visitors may not wander freely around the site asking questions of producers and performers, formulating their own interpretations.

Perhaps the most postmodern site of representation, though, occurs after the show is over: rather than taking the standard curtain call, the theater darkens after Tecumseh’s

100 body is carried off (while Graham Greene’s voice booms prophetically that Tecumseh “will return”), and then the house lights come on. Audience members are invited to interact with the cast and show their admiration during the “meet and greet” (as cast and crew term it) that takes place after the show, where cast members—still in costume—are available for

“out of character” talk and autographs in the lobby between the ticket booth and gift shop.

This is one of Jamieson Price’s favorite jobs in his role as Tecumseh, apparently because of the educational potential he sees in these interactions. He says that people stay for the meet-and greet because they

...do want to give back something that, that—they seem to have received by watching the show. Um, which I think is...I’m, I’m up there every night for the meet and greet, because...especially they want to see Tecumseh, they want to get Tecumseh’s autograph, um...and they want, you know, to see he’s OK, and to say “thank you.” Which, I’m up there every night doing that. And uh, it’s—it’s a PR call, just like any other...um, I feel, but it also helps people walk away from the show with a smile on their face. ’Cause it is a tragedy...and you can walk away from this feeling really really bad. Um...we don’t want that. We want you thinking. Sssh...I mean, want you to feel good about it, that you’ve seen this, and maybe changed you a little bit, maybe you’ve thought, you know, if, if, you know, as a child, it’s influenced the way they look at...Nativ—the Native American culture, and maybe in school they can go, “But wait a minute, wasn’t this, this—” you know, and they’ll come up with something different. Um, or a more...healthy spiritual awareness of what happened in this country, even a hundred and fifty, two hundred years ago.

There is a strange and opaque postmodern activity going on here; on the one hand. Price wants to reassure the children that heas an actor is OK, even as he also wants them to understand what happened to the real-life Native Americans who were represented in the play. And yet the audience members want—or Price implies that they want—Tecumseh ’ s autograph, not his. And yet part of the function of the meet-and-greet seems similar to the

“Indians” cheering their assailants on the scout tour: to show the audience that really.

Price—Tecumseh—is just like us, another white guy. The meet-and-greet thus seems to confuse further rather than to clarify the subjectivity of the representer and the represented; the activity functions both to tear down that fourth wall and then to re-erect it on a different and more intimate plane. Dorst refers to this mode as “vernacular postmodernism, ”

101 whereby a site is “thoroughly postmodern in its self-citation, but it has not complicated that process by consciously presenting its textuality as part of its own discursive practice. Its discourse is not cynical” (117). And truly, the kind of simultaneous unmasking and obscuring that goes on in the meet-and-greet after the show is indicative of the production’s paradoxical view of itself as entertainment and educational device, and its wish to retain full control over its own subjectivity.

It is, of course, impossible to say whether the creators of the show and its accompanying tours deliberately crafted them as they did in order to control too-creative

(and potentially critical) interpretations—to prevent audience “misrule.” Consciously or not, though, by so controlling the audience’s range of response, the show promotes its own uncontested ideology. Throughout his study of American historical pageantry, David

Glassberg suggests that such pageants were designed—often quite deliberately—less to reflect history than to employ it to actively shape the ideology of the past for present consumption and adherence:

Wrapped in the pageant form from its very inception was a blend of progressivism and antimodemism, customary civic religious ritual and the promise of artistic innovation....Like the customary civic ceremony, the pageant communicated beliefs about the nature of history and society to an ethnically diverse, geographically mobile local population....Pageantry’s most fervent advocates viewed it as no less than an instrument of communal transformation, able to forge a renewed sense of citizenship out of the emotional ties generated by the immediate sensation of expressive, playful, social interaction. (284)

The construction of the past in these pageants, Glassberg suggests, is designed to teach audiences how to behave and progress in the present. And though Tecumseh! evolved out of a different set of social and historical circumstances than the earlier pageants to which

Glassberg here refers, I would argue that the function of the show and the ideological principles communicated through it are really not aU that different.

As mentioned previously, the drama itself tries to be even-handed, depicting the losses suffered on all sides in the conflicts between the Americans, and British, and

102 indigenous peoples in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. However, its plot

is governed by a sense of tragic inevitability and overdetermination that effectively absolve

both its creators and its audiences from having to reconsider local history and one’s own connection to it. The message is that “This was bound to happen, so let’s not dwell on the

issue of responsibility; rather, let’s remove ourselves to a ‘simpler’ time when morals and motivations were much more clearly defined.” A similar message is enacted in the drama’s fictional relationship between Tecumseh and Rebecca Galloway, which suggests that human relationships have the potential to transcend ethnicity, although again, that sense of

“tragic inevitability” makes it impossible for the two to actually come together in a way that might genuinely challenge notions of culture and ethnicity. Finally, in its historically contested portrayals of Tenskwatawa as a false prophet and a selfish opportunist and

Simon Kenton as a peace-maker and protector of Tecumseh’s corpse, the play attempts to show ethical diversity within ethnic groups and erase labels of “victim” and “victimizes ” releasing white audiences from any sense of guilt about what happened to the woodland tribes (a fact that both Waggoner and Price readily admit to, above). In short, the drama constructs Tecumseh’s story in such a way that white audience members are comfortable with the history and “their” role in it. As I argued in chapter one, if there is a single character with whom we are supposed to identify, it is, in fact, Simon Kenton; we wish that things had worked out differently, as did he.

As previously mentioned, Rayna Green contends that whites persist in and enjoy portraying Native Americans because “in playing Indian...Anglo-American players are connecting to the America that existed before European invasion; they are connecting to the very beginnings of the mythological structure called America” (48). And certainly, a large part of the pleasure of the Tecumseh! experience for white audiences is—as Green suggests—to validate their own culture, just as Glassberg also suggests. Watching the show helps white audiences both recognize and then reject the “collective guilt” both the

103 producer and the lead actor himself claim not to feel, and to reassure ourselves that the

passion both sides felt for their cause somehow led to the “proper” result.

However, all of these explanations only begin to answer the question of

Tecumsehrs enduring popularity and apparent immunity to criticism. In many ways, I

think producer Waggoner approaches the real motivation best when he told me that coming

to the show “creates a sense of pilgrimage, a sense of being there.” Coming to see

Tecumseh!, returning to our roots, as it were, becomes a sort of secular religious

experience. Many theorists have described this spiritual aspect of the tourist experience: in

a rather Campbellian mode, Grabum likens the “tour” to a symbolic cycle of death and

rebirth (“re-creation”), where the vacation is a liminal pass through the sacred that

interrupts the “inauthentic” everyday world (26-27); similarly, MacCannell (evoking

Goffman) claims that “the ritual attitude of the tourist originates in the act of travel itself

and culminates when he arrives in the presence of the sight” (43). In a parallel move,

Glassberg labels pageantry, specifically, as a “sacred” event, a customary civic religious

ritual capable of becoming an instrument of communal transformation (284). Certainly, the show—with its serene outdoor setting, its moody music, its deus-ex-machina voiceovers

read by Oneida actor Graham Greene—strives to create an environment in which a transcendent experience is possible. And some nights, it truly is, as in the anecdote I cited

in the previous chapter, when—midway through the show—a full moon traversed the sky; a strong, cool breeze picked up, rustling the trees around the stage; and Tecumseh came paddling across the man-made pond, creating a moment that was startlingly magical. Do such moments excuse the very problematic aspects of the production? No. These moments do, however, go a long way toward explaining why the show continues to be popular after twenty-five years.

And I think they point toward a relatively unexplored group within folklore study, which merits closer attention: audiences themselves. Bendix has suggested that if we

104 follow Handler and Linnekin’s ideas about invented tradition to their logical conclusion,

then we must ask questions about and of the inventors, thus shifting the analytic focus

“from the event to the agency of those involved in its creation and maintenance” (132).

That is precisely what I set out to do when 1 began my Tecumseh! fieldwork; however,

what I rapidly discovered was that I had overlooked one of the most vital players in the

performance itself: the audience. If we really want to discover why tourists come to such

productions, and what they get out of them, we must shift our attention away from both the

performers and the producers and focus on audiences as well.

Audiences: Heterogeneous Homogeneity

It was the audience’s curious response to the Battle of Tippecanoe scene described

above that made it clear to me that I had overlooked this vital dynamic of the

Tecumseh! performance. Without (tacitly) approving audiences, the show would not have endured for over two decades, and would not be so well attended. As the cannons fired and “dead” cast members took dramatic falls into the man-made lake onstage that first night

I viewed the show, many of the hundreds of people around me cheered and laughed and responded in a way so vastly different than what I would have expected, it was as if I noticed their presence for the first time. Until that moment, I had perceived myself as one person in a passive sea of faces turned toward the stage; now, I felt the very palpable energy and involvement of those around me, realized their central role in managing and shaping the ultimate interpretations of the drama. This should not, of course, have been a surprise; were I better versed in general performance theory, I would already have been dividing my attention equally between the show and its audience. But folkloristic theories of performance largely train one to observe audience responses purely for the sake of context, or to determine the success of the performance. In this view, audiences play an active role in shaping performance, but the folklorist’s primary object of study has almost

105 always been the performer (with audience responses included largely for contextual detail).

Folklorists generally have not focused on the auf/ze/ice-as-subject, looked to them as the

primary shapers of meaning and function; these are roles usually assigned exclusively to performers.

And this, of course, is where the plot thickens, for, despite the best efforts of the producers and actors of Tecumseh! to put on a show that is reasonably accurate, authentic, and sensitive, the real task of interpretation—the locus of the production’s meaning—lies with the audience. The following is a profile the typical Tecumseh! audience, based on the results of the survey I distributed in the summer of 1995.’ While obviously not every member of the audience responded, I believe that the results generally reflect the average makeup of a Tecumseh! audience.

On the whole, audiences are largely white—on the two nights I conducted the survey, about 84% of respondents answering the question labeled themselves as such.

What is especially interesting is the way various people signified this; since I did not list any pre-ascribed racial or ethnic categories on the survey, people answering the question had to label themselves. As such, whites used a variety of phrases and symbols to indicate their identification; among them were the expected “Caucasian” and “white,” but also the intriguing “white/american,” “wh,” “cauc.,” “C,” “white anglo saxon,” “W,” “C—,” and of course, the inevitable few responses of “human being,” which almost certainly means white, since as multicultural theory informs us, “white” is the only unmarked identity category; presumably, only whites would feel such a lack of significance or connection to their racial or ethnic identity as to assume the privilege of transcending it. The “human being” response, of course, also represents a tacit protest to the question itself.

The variety of these responses is fascinating and theoretically intriguing. Especially compelling are the various single-letter abbreviations of “C” and “W” and C—,” the latter of which conjures connections with Alice Walker’s loaded use of the dashed name in The

106 Color Purple, where, paradoxically, the emptiness of “Mr. ”’s name gives it even greater weight. The implication here is that we all know exactly what these letters stand for, what follows them. There is also, in these and the longer abbreviations, a sense of hesitancy—an unwillingness to write out the whole word for fear of its meaning, its power, not unlike speaking the unknowable name of God. Or maybe this is indicative of a self- consciousness about using the word, due to the growing public awareness of

“whiteness” as a contested and perhaps, in some minds, an “attacked” identity category.

Notably, no person of a nonwhite group so abbreviated their identity—these were spelled out in full: Ogalala, Ojibwa, Puerto Rican. Even on the night that my advisor, Valerie Lee, distributed the survey to her all-African American group of show-goers, only one out of fourteen used the abbreviation “Afro-Amc.” The others all spelled it out: Black. Afro

American. African American. FYesumably, nonwhite respondents cannot assume that anything less than a full explanation of their identity will be “read” correctly. Granted, white respondents using abbreviations may simply have been trying to save some time, or may even have been irritated that this question required a written response, that they couldn’t simply circle a provided category. But it nevertheless seems significant that respondents assumed that I would understand what it meant to be “W” or “C” or “C—.”

The survey also asked respondents to indicate their age and highest education level.

Of those answering these questions, most are middle-aged or of retirement age—30 and older—though of course I did not distribute the survey to many children, so these numbers may not be especially reflective of audience composition. About a third of adult audience members have a high-school education; a little less than a quarter, some college or a college degree; and between seventeen and twenty percent, a graduate or professional degree. I suspect the overall education level of audiences is below that of more formal theater-going audiences, which of course suggests that as entertainment, Tecumseh! is decidedly

107 “middlebrow.” In fact, lead actor Jamieson Price shows a certain pride in the drama’s appeal to audiences who might not typically go to the theater:

[W]e get a different kind of, um, audience here than traditional theatergoers. We have a much wider....um...uh, what is it, demographic, that’s the word I’m looking for. Uh, than most theaters. We get people who have never seen theater before who, while they would probably never go see a theater, they’ll come see outdoor drama. Uh, and we get educated theatergoers who also will, you know, come in and go, “Hmph. That’s better than what I saw on Broadway," which we’ve heard. Which is really really nice to hear.

Where do audiences come from? As one might expect, Tecumseh! is primarily a local phenomenon: most respondents were from central and southern Ohio, or from other parts of Ohio. Only about twelve to thirteen percent were from out-of-state, while on the first night of the survey, about two percent were from outside the United States. These demographics are not too surprising, given the “local-history” theme of the drama; as

Glassberg notes, American historical pageantry has often been a way of “identiffying] local residents’ unique place in a succession of past and future generations, as well as distinguish[ing] the unique character of local communities from other kinds of social relations” (14). It is not surprising, then, that several respondents noted that they were bringing out-of-town visitors to the show; Tecumseh! becomes a source of civic pride, a way of connecting the Chillicothe area with visitor’s larger concepts of U. S. history, and possibly raising visitors’ esteem of the area and, by association, of their hosts.

The above, then, creates a general portrait of the demographic composition of the audience. How did they respond to the show? My questions focused largely on issues of cultural and historical impressions. I was seeking to discover what audiences knew about local and general Anglo and Native American history and cultures before the show; what they thought about history and how it should be learned; how well they thought the show represented what they knew; and how much power they felt the show had for stimulating leaming and generating change. The results of each survey (the two I conducted and the

108 one Professor Lee conducted) may be found in Appendix B; the numbers cited in the analysis that follows represent the averages of the three surveys.

While very few people claimed to know a lot about the life of Tecumseh and the history of the region before attending the show (only about eight percent circled “a lot” on the survey), most claimed to know either a little (28%) or quite a bit (31%). About a third

(32%), however, claimed not to know much about it at all. Nevertheless, three-quarters of respondents said the show reflected quite a bit or a lot of what they did know about

Tecumseh and regional history, suggesting that most respondents consider the show to be historically accurate.

Given their general unfamiliarity with the history and their belief that the show is accurate, it is not too surprising to find that the vast majority (again, about 75%) felt they learned either quite a bit or a lot from the show. Almost as large a number, about seventy percent, agreed strongly that this kind of presentation is a good way to leam about history.

Clearly, then, we can see that while Waggoner insists “that first and foremost, this is a play....not a history lesson,” audiences do not view the show in quite the same way.

While more than half cited “entertainment” as one of their main reasons for attending the show, the survey results imply that that “entertainment” is only the vehicle through which audiences expect to receive an “authentic” historical experience, if not an actual “lesson” in the formal sense. This is yet another case in which production goals and audience expectations seem to clash, and the gray area between these opposing aims is, I believe, the area in which misrepresentation occurs: audiences clearly think that what they are seeing is

“accurate,” yet producers readily acknowledge (though they do not admit it anywhere in the show’s program or other publicity materials) that the history has been “shaped” for dramatic purposes.

And yet more than half (about 60%) of the respondents seem to be aware of this conflict on some level, since these persons said they felt that historical reenactments like

109 Tecumseh! should put equal weight on historical accuracy and entertainment. This is a

curious reality, though it might suggest why many people thought that “Disney’s America”

might be a good idea: the American public perceives “real history” to be boring (Michael

Eisner, Disney chairman, even said so himself in justifying the proposed park), but

understands its importance; if history can be livened up a little—chiefly through entertaining

reenactments—then perhaps its “medicine” will be a bit easier to swallow.

As a sort of litmus test, I included a question about the nature of history itself,

asking respondents whether they thought of history as “fact-based truth,”

“interpretation,” or some of each. The results were surprising. Relatively few people

(about 26%) claimed that it was fact-based truth (I expected that percentage to be higher),

though even fewer said it was pure interpretation (about 21%). Most said that it was a

combination of both—close to fifty percent gave this answer. Though it is difficult to

speculate about how audiences might have answered such a question twenty-some years

ago when the show began, I would imagine that far fewer people would have conceded that

history does have an interpretive component. The fact that many people saw “fact” and

“interpretation” combining to create history, even if most people were unwilling to

privilege the interpretive nature of the beast, does seem to suggest a shift in public

conceptions of history.

However, it is more difficult to tell from the survey results whether there has been a concurrent shift in public perceptions of ethnicity, specifically in white perceptions of

Native Americans. While most respondents were willing to admit that they did not know much about Native Americans or Native American history, and very few claimed to have

interacted much with “real” Native Americans'", most seemed either assured or complacent enough about their knowledge to assume that it was accurate: a large percentage—on average, over eighty percent—said they thought that the show’s depiction of Native

Americans was pretty authentic or very authentic.

110 I should note here that I did not define “authenticity” on the survey, so it is difficult

to determine what, exactly, that means to the people who felt they found authenticity in the

show. However, only about ten percent of respondents circled “Don’t know” as their

response to the authenticity question, which suggests that most had a personal

understanding of the term and its connection with reenactments like Tecumseh!. Though

the definitions these audience members might provide might not jibe with current academic

definitions of authenticity (which, indeed, define it as an empty modifier), it seems clear

that most audience members have a critical definition of the term operating as they watch

and evaluate the show. Most importantly, I think this group of responses shows that the

majority of people come to such productions with an unresisting eye: they expect the

producers to have done the necessary research to make the production “accurate” and

“authentic,” and are willing to accept at face value the “truth” offered up by the show. Yet,

as I’ve previously noted, we know that the drama is historically inaccurate and inauthentic,

both because the producers have consciously altered some of the details, and, of course,

because the idea of an “authentic reenactment” is an oxymoron.

Still, audiences—most of whom admitted on the survey that they knew little or nothing about Native American history or contemporary Native culture—are, in a sense, preprogrammed to accept the construction of Native Americans presented on stage, even if the “Native Americans” they see on stage are, almost uniformly, non-Native themselves.

The “willing suspension of disbelief” necessary to read the performance demands that the audience accept the actors as “real” Native Americans. Not to do so—that is, to perceive and reflect on the constructed nature of the performance—disrupts the “sense of pilgrimage, of being there” (as Waggoner phrases it) that the production’s success hinges on. Even the Tecumseh! website encourages this response, noting that as the show begins, “The audience is no longer in the twentieth century. They are with Chiksika, the Shawnee warrior, as he leads his younger brother, Tecumseh, into his first battle!”

Ill And notably, it is this constructed verisimilitude that survey respondents most often

cite as their reason for believing that reenactments like Tecumseh! are a good way to leam

about history. The following are some of the comments respondents wrote in response to

the question of why they did or did not think that such presentations are a good way to

leam about history. This first set supports the notions that the history presented is

consumed as “authentic” and that the show relies on such a perception to work:

“[I]t really made me feel like I was really back in those days” —African American female, no age given, Columbus, OH

“It helps people see how something that they’ve read or heard about would look like in actuality.” —Puerto Rican male, “Mid-30s,” New York, New York

“It uses real people so it’s realistic” —Male, 7, Elida, OH

Many others contrasted historical reenactments with taking history classes, and especially

withreading about history in order to explain their preference for this type of “leaming”:

“Because reading [history] is extremely boring and watching it can be too sometimes. Real life drama allows you to actually feel like you’re a part of what’s going on. When you see it performed you remember more” — African American female, 10th grade, Columbus, OH

“It is a visual indepth presentation that you can’t receive from a book” — White male, 18, Westerville, OH

“Live theater is an excellent tool to bring history to life. Attention spans of todays [sic] youth are limited thanks to television. By bringing the history books to life one may have a chance of teaching them something.” -White male, 25, Cincinnati, OH

“It makes it more real to life and much more interesting than reading a book.” —White female, 42, Ashtabula, OH

“This kind of presentation is a good way to leam because, the drama brings out the realism as compare [sic] reading it from a book.” —Puerto Rican male, no age given, Zanesville, OH

Collectively, these responses demonstrate a real resistance to academic history. But while some in the academy may decry the loss of interest in reading and the demise of “high- culture” written texts as the primary source of education in our country, folklorists have long felt that vemacular ways of leaming have always been as influential, if not more

112 influential than more “formal” ways of leaming. In many ways, the comments of these respondents reinforce the reality of that process. And I think these remarks also suggest a larger trend in these days of multimedia capabilities; even Jim Horton, the historian who consulted with Disney on their proposed history theme park, remarked that

I think that you can teach scholarly history in a public setting, and I think you can do it in a way that is at least interesting—certainly dramatic—and compelling. I think that you have to do it with sensitivity, but I think that if you can’t do it, history is doomed, because in the next century, history has got to be taught in places other than the classroom, or it’s gonna die.

Horton’s sentiments here echo Bruner’s: like Bruner, Horton believes that public history sites have a kind of flexibility and immediacy that perhaps cannot be matched by written texts or in classrooms. Certainly many of the above respondents seem to already be tuned into this idea, and that is what compels them to come to the show. Thus, the question remains: what does the performance and packaging of Tecumseh! teach audiences about this part of U.S. history and about the Native Americans who were involved? And how does that knowledge extend to their contemporary lives and understandings of history and

Native Americans? As Horton commented later in our discussion, his primary concern about the Disney park was that “If they do [public history] badly it can be very harmful....That’s my bottom line here: let’s not let it hurt people in the way that American history has traditionally hurt people.”

And that, of course, is my primary concern about the production of Tecumseh!: how powerful is its representation of the Shawnee and their history? And is its power transformative or damaging (or both)? To address these concerns, the survey results most important to me were the write-in responses to the question of how the show may have changed respondents’ understandings of Native Americans and Native American history.

A smaller number of people than expected said the show changed their understandings

“quite a bit” or “a lot” (on average, about 20%). Notably, while 28% and 24% of the largely white respondent groups circled one of these two answers on the two nights I

113 conducted the survey, only about 7% of the all African-American respondent group did.

Again, I suspect that this might be due to a greater awareness (via personal experience) of the dangers of reading representation as cultural reality. By themselves, though, these numbers are fairly meaningless; the written responses provided to explain these changes in perspective offer more compelling insights into the show’s potential to provoke thought and change. The responses are fascinating and telling, encouraging and depressing:

“It gave me a clearer picture of how the Native Americans perceived and tried to deal with the advance of white people” —Puerto Rican male, “Mid- 30s,” New York, New York

“I think the history and script should consult with A.I.M. American Indian Movement and read Ward Churchill’s books regarding the lies presented about Indians from the master race” —Male, 45

“The story is very important and should be known by more people to fully understand what could have been” —“Human Being” male, 36, Chillicothe, OH

“Made me aware of Indians as people” —White female, 52, Pomeroy, OH

“Enhanced my compassion for this particular ethnic group” —White male, 45, Waverly, OH

“Indians lost a lot” —White female, 45, Westerville, OH

“I have Cherokee in my blood and I’m part of the Algonquin tribe. It is always enjoyable to see of other tribes and their story” —White (as reported in demographic section) male, 18, Westerville, OH

“I don’t believe that the Indians were very anxious to marry the white woman as a rule than vice versa the white man” —African American female, 61 [a reference to Tecumseh’s romancing and considering marriage to the white settler Rebecca Galloway—indeed, this aspect of Tecumseh’s history has been disproved by scholars since Eckert]

“The ways whites treated blacks and Indians.” —African American female, 11

Clearly, the show’s potential to provoke change—and more importantly, the kind of change thatis provoked—depends greatly on the perceptions and experiences individual audience members bring to the show.

114 As noted previously, audiences are largely white, middle-aged, have relatively similar educational backgrounds, and are nearly all from nearby towns and cities; however, as the above comments (and others to be found in Appendix B) illustrate, despite their apparent homogeneity, audiences are really quite diverse. Whether they recognize that same kind of cultural diversity in the ethnic groups represented in the show, however, is difficult to ascertain. The audiences who come to see Tecumseh.'—m spite of their apparent homogeneity—bring with them a variety of agendas, and appear to take away from the show exactly what they want to see, despite the fact that the show itself may have some power to disrupt audience expectations. Unfortunately, the show and its accompanying array of tours and souvenirs prove only that Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett was quite right when she noted that “our heritage is multicultural only insofar as we are allowed to watch what others do, to consume what others produce” (151). As long as Native Americans play no role in the lives of the white audiences who attend the show, the historical figure of

Tecumseh will continue to be distorted to match the “fantasy Indian” identity in each audience member’s mind.

As we well know from our own teaching experiences, it is nearly impossible to control student responses to works of literature; their own experiences, beliefs, cultural information, and readiness to leam are always framing and filtering the information received. It is no different for scholars, not despite but because of our own training as literary scholars and folklorists. In conducting this fieldwork and specifically in constructing, collecting, and analyzing the results of this survey, I found myself mired in my own subjectivity, my own position as a white woman academic entering this site to unearth exactly what I came to see. Though I might have “discovered” the audience around me during the Battle of Tippecanoe scene and suddenly realized its importance, a larger part of the momentousness of that realization was the discovery of myself as a member of that audience. If they were shaping and constructing an interpretation of the

115 performance over and above that intended by the producers, then so was I. And if I was experiencing my own response as vastly different from that of those around me, undoubtedly, others were too. And each person’s individual response—while appearing superficially to be the same as that of others—may have been motivated by entirely different impulses and desires. Without interviewing every member of a given audience after the show to discover how and why they responded as they did, I can never truly reconstruct or accurately interpret what I observed. And even if I could do that, it would still be an incomplete portrait.

I indulge in this self-reflexivity here not to negate all that I have just written, but to call it into question, to suggest that both Bruner and Horton are right in implying that public history sites have a double-edged potential: in packaging a ready-made historical interpretation for the public, we risk reducing historical episodes to simplistic and too easily digestible (and forgettable) bites—again, Dorst’s concept of “participatory consumption.”

The potential for postmodern play Bruner advocates may be present, but as Gable and

Handler note above, such an optimistic view of activity at tourist sites may reflect a kind of

“conservative constructivism” that may be used “to justify supporting good myths over bad facts,” to posit “authenticity as a model for, rather than a model of, reality” (576). Even allegedly “enlightened” tourists (with typewriters) like myself are complicit in the ideological project of sites like Tecumseh!. As James Buzard writes, the allegedly ironic actions of the “post-tourist” imply that

Theyenjoy inauthenticity, content in the knowledge that inauthenticity is all there is....[H]owever....the touristy action done ironically is still done: and in a cultural practice which engages so many different material and bureaucratic forces and has so many economic, social, and cultural results, the effective difference between the ticket bought in irony and the one bought in earnestness is surely negligible. Money is never ironic; neither is power. It is right to object to tourism’s coercive totalization....h\xi we should also be wary of a certain complacency in post-modern and post- touristic scepticism about “authenticity.” (337, emphases Buzard’s)

116 Buzard’s call for restraint and Gable and Handler’s warnings about conservative constructivism are necessary antidotes to the false belief that simply exploding concepts like

“authenticit)'” and “tradition” will create a more liberating kind of tourism and learning. As these survey results indicate, an awareness of history as part interpretation does not necessarily mitigate most people’s perceptions of its accuracy or authenticity. However,

Buzard (as well as Gable and Handler) err when they imply that tourists are either going to cling steadfastly to rigid notions of “the authentic,” or become wildly ironic postmodern players who only end up reifying what they started out to subvert. As I hope this chapter has demonstrated, audience responses to tourist events are vastly more nuanced and complicated than these critics allow. The majority of reactions catalogued here suggest that most responses fall somewhere in between those two extreme reactions. Such a wide middle ground leaves far more room for interpretive “play” and the kind of discovery

Bruner and Horton advocate. If tourists recognize that what they are seeing is an interpretation, is packaged, then they chance learning that history is a construct, that it is what we make it and how we see it, from our own historical perspective, through our individual cultural lenses. And as Horton says, “The reason that people think history is boring is because they think it’s done....If twenty people a day leam that history is ever- changing and interesting as hell—if twenty people a day leam that—boy, that’s such an invaluable service.”

A couple of comments—one from a completed survey and one overheard after a performance—go a long way toward illustrating the very positive kind of disruption of historical understanding and ethnic stereotypes that public history sitts—Tecumseh! in particular—can generate. In response to the question of how the show changed one’s understandings of Native Americans, one boy wrote a comment that I think captures both the problematic heart of the drama and its paradoxical ability to provoke change: he wrote,

“I thout [sic] that the Indians whar are ded [sic]” (African American male, 9). This

117 comment is ripe with a variety of understandings: first, it echoes a belief that many people east of the Mississippi have—that “Indians” are dead; since we do not see many of them in our everyday lives or on our local news (as Westerners are more likely to), we assume that they no longer exist. I began this dissertation with an anecdote about my friend’s assessment of the “message” of Disney’s Pocahontas: that Native American genocide did not happen. Here in the east, where we have few interactions and experiences with Native

Americans, they are either invisible or dead: the part-Native American student sitting across from us is “white” unless we find out otherwise. Otherwise, Native Americans ceased to exist for us once they left the old Northwest Territory. In many ways, as

I mentioned in the previous chapter, this boy’s honest answer is a fair statement of the impression that remains at the end of Tecumseh!—that after the last battle scene, when the

“Indians” slink off into the wings, it is symbolic of their “slinking” across the Mississippi; they slink toward obsolescence, death.

However, I am charmed and fascinated by the boy’s crossing out of the word

“whar” (i.e., “were”) and writing, instead, “are.” While this may have been mosdy a way of getting around having to figure out how to spell “were,” I think it also speaks to the change in his perspective: there is a sophisticated use of grammar here, as he understands that if the “Indians” are not really dead, then he cannot use the past tense—he needs to use

“are,” because they do exist. There has indeed been a shift in perspective here; something valuable has been learned, and even if that learning is only momentary, it demonstrates that despite the problematic nature of the way the Tecumseh! site constructs and enacts Native

American identity, audiences can still take away something very complex and insightful.

And, if a post-show exchange I overheard last summer is any indication, there may still be an opportunity for subversion: after the smoke of the last battle scene had cleared, a woman sitting behind me turned to her grandsons and said, “See boys? White people weren’t always good.” No remark could better capture the simultaneous challenge to and

118 reification of white history proffered by the show. Her grandson, maybe ten, knew better: he turned back to her and replied, “Some of them still aren’t.”

' This comes from a remark that Marion Waggoner, producer of Tecumseh!, made during an interview I had with him. See the full transcription of that interview in Appendix A (counter number 183). * The Tecumseh! website address is http://www.tecumsehdrama.com. ^ Waggoner seems to understand and yet play with Gerald Vizenor’s claim that “The insinuation of authenticity by adoption is obscure, passive, and indecorous; the pose is a renaissance language game” (35). James, Caryn. “They’re movies, not schoolbooks.” 21 May 1995: 2A+ ’ This crucial phenomenon is discussed in greater detail later in this chapter. * I am referring to “authenticity” in its larger public sense here; for a fuller treatment of “academic” notions of authenticity, see Chapter One. ’ Similar to what John Dorst refers to as “appropriate” or “strategic” authenticity in The Written Suburb. * See the Introduction to this dissertation for a fuller discussion of the explicit connections between Tecumseh and the Boy Scouts will be discussed in the following chapter. ’ The complete survey results from each night it was conducted are contained in Appendix B. On average, about 65% responded that they knew “not much” or “a little” about Native Americans and Native American history, and an equal percentage claimed little or no real-life experience with Native Americans. See Appendix B for complete results.

119 C h a p t e r 3

F o l k H e r o and F e t is h : T h e I n s c r ip t io n o f T e c u m s e h , “ A b o r ig in a l K n i g h t ”

“[T]he past as referent finds itself gradually bracketed, and then effaced altogether, leaving us with nothing but texts.” —Frederic Jameson, "Postmodernism, or. The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”

“There is much to be said for historical fiction.” —Response to Tecumseh! audience survey

If the outdoor drama Tecumseh! were the only contemporary retelling of the

Shawnee leader’s life, we might be able to view it as a regional idiosyncrasy, a novelty, rather than the literally performed touchstone of a larger cultural phenomenon. As documented in the introduction, though, the cultural productions of the last thirty years which take Tecumseh as their subject represent not the first, but rather the third wave of his popularity as a folk figure in U. S. culture. In this chapter, I would like to examine the four novels based on Tecumseh’s life that have appeared in the last three decades: Eckert’s

The Frontiersmen (1967) and A Sorrow in Our Heart (1992), James Alexander Thom’s

Panther in the Sky (1989), and Orson Scott Card’s Red Prophet (19SS).

These works may not be the usual stuff of scholarly attention, and the experience of reading them differs greatly from the experience of reading canonized or “literary” fiction.

In many ways, my own encounters with these texts parallel Jane Tompkins’ description of her first reading of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last o f the Mohicans:

It was like nothing I had ever taught before, or, for that matter, studied. It was bloody and lurid and totally unbelievable, and at the same time almost fantastically complex—though not with the kind of complexity I was used to....[Cooper] had no ambiguities worth shaking a stick at, and yet I began to see him as a profound thinker, one who was obsessively preoccupied

120 not with the subtle workings of individual consciousness, but with the way the social world is organized. (Sensational Designs 99)

Initially, I found these novels (especially those by Eckert) to be violent and shallow and full

of the purplest prose imaginable. Eventually, though, these novels revealed an internal

logic all their own; all four were grappling with extremely complex issues, and all within

the apparent restraints of historical “fact” and “accuracy.” As such, it was difficult to

ascertain how to approach these texts: it would be too easy simply to expose their literary

“flaws” (by New Critical standards) or to denigrate them as anti-intellectual or even racist

trash. Certainly, there is a great deal of stereotyping and projection motivating these

novels’ characterization of Tecumseh and Native Americans in general. Even so, they are complex cultural signifiers, on par with the drama itself.

Furthermore, I think it is particularly important to examine these texts in light of the fact that theyare all popular—rather than “scholarly”—representations of Tecumseh and this particularly bloody period of American history. As literary critics, we often erroneously believe that “popular” literature cannot and should not be gauged by the same exacting standards applied to more “legitimate” fiction. Tompkins effectively summarizes the reluctance to subject popular fiction to literary criticism as follows:

[Cjriticism, the objection goes, concerns itself with the specifically literary features of American writing. And what distinguishes a work as literature is the way it separates itself from transitory issues.... The fact that a work engages such issues, in this view, is an index not of its greatness, but of its limitation; the more directly it engages purely local and temporal concerns, the less literary it will be, not only because it is captive to the fluctuations of history, but also because in its attempt to mold public opinions it is closer to propaganda than to art.... (Sensational Designs 186, emphasis Tompkins’)

And yet, as Tompkins duly notes earlier in the same study, popular novels “should be studied not because they manage to escape the limitations of their particular time and place, but because they offer powerful examples of the way a culture thinks about itself’ (xi).

Literary and cultural critic Antony Easthope echoes this belief, noting that all social

121 discourses, including those of popular culture, must be included in any work of cultural

criticism—“not just those of an educated elite” (7).

And I would argue that in the case of Native American representations, it is perhaps

far more valuable to look at popular sources like Card, Eckert, and Thom’s novels, since

such representations are often where indelible cultural impressions are formed. Such an

examination seems especially important when Anglo writers cross boundaries to narrate the

stories of cultural groups not their own. Toni Morrison—speaking of Anglo writers’

constructions of African-American characters in their fictions—observes that

The fabrication of an Africanist persona is reflexive; an extraordinary meditation on the self; a powerful exploration of the fears and desire that reside in the writerly conscious. It is an astonishing revelation of longing, of terror, of perplexity, of shame, of magnanimity. It requires hard work not to see this. (17, emphasis Morrison’s)

While Morrison’s observation focuses specifically on representation of the “Africanist

persona” in the work of white writers, I think the observation can extend to Anglo

representations of the Native American persona as well; indeed, Berkhofer argues that “the

Indian of imagination and ideology [is] derived as much from the polemical and creative

needs of Whites as from what they heard and read of actual Native Americans or even at

times experienced” (71). And as Morrison suggests, it would require a far greater effort

not to read the novels about Tecumseh as anything other than the projections—romantic,

sexist, violent, even politically correct—of their authors. But this chapter will also attempt

to show, in Tompkins’ parlance, the kind of “cultural work” that these novels may be

trying to enact.

The novels about Tecumseh are further distinguished from general popular fiction

in that they are based on historical events, and thus exist in that blurry delineation known as

“historical fiction.” This is not to suggest that there is an “authentic” history against which we can measure these authors’ literary success or failure; measuring the gaps between

“fiction” and “reality” is decidedly not the goal of this chapter. Rather—as the quote from

122 Frederic Jameson which stands as the epigraph to this chapter suggests—scholars are working in an era when “history” itself is understood as a thing created and recreated through a pastiche of texts and perspectives, to the point where history itself is deconstructed by the very things that compose it.

Indeed, because Tecumseh emerges from a culture that at the time did not leave written records of its life (as did its oppressors), all we have even of Tecumseh’s “real history,” apart from the fictional accounts, comes to us through Anglo-authored texts: R.

David Edmunds details these sources at length at the end of Tecumseh and the Quest for

Indian Leadership, considered the definitive scholarly biography of the Shawnee leader.'

Even Edmunds notes, though, that “the real Tecumseh has been overshadowed by a folk hero whose exploits combine the best of fact and fiction” (217). As a folklorist, I feel little need to delineate the “folk” Tecumseh from the “real” Tecumseh, since doing so does little to aid my investigation of why Tecumseh as a folk hero is so available and popular for contemporary appropriation. Nevertheless, this territory between “fact” and “fiction” is as contested a territory as is the land that the Shawnee and the Anglo settlers fight over in the retellings themselves. In fact, Eckert’s and Thom’s books form a tripartite debate about historical accuracy: Thom’s Panther in the Sky offers a literary response to Eckert’s The

Frontiersmen, and Eckert’s subsequent work, A Sorrow in Our Heart: The Life of

Tecumseh offers a rebuttal to Thom’s challenge.

Eckert, however, would deny that what he is writing is fiction in the first place.

Both The Frontiersmen and A Sorrow in Our Heart begin with lengthy lectures from

Eckert about his narrative technique, painstakingly (and painfully) authenticating the accuracy of what is to follow, and clearly labeling it history. This is a position that Eckert has not wavered on in the thirty years since the first book’s publication; during a presentation for the Thurber House Evenings with Authors series in November 1995‘,

Eckert responded to a question about his methods with a fairly vehement attack on the

123 scholars who attack him, alleging that his methodology is equally if not more rigorous than that of “real” historians.

While I rather enjoy and appreciate Eckert’s sort of anti-establishment challenge to academic “authority” (a challenge we need to respect and consider), the logic driving his rejection of the label of “fiction” seems faulty. The “Author’s Note” at the outset of T/ie

Frontiersmen begins with the bold assertion “This book is fact, not fiction. The note continues to explain how it is, then, that the text should read so much like a novel, replete with dialogue. Eckert explains that while “it is true, of course, that no one can know for certain what any other person was thinking or what he actually said in times past....all of the dialogue of this narrative is very closely traced and, in large measure, represents what the actual principal...wrote that he had said or thought at the time” (“Author’s Note,” no page number). Presumably due to criticism he received for making such a claim, Eckert expands on this theory in another “Author’s Note” prefacing I992’s A Sorrow in Our

Heart. Here, he labels his technique “narrative biography,” and explains it thus:

This is a biography, true, but it is more than merely that; it is what I choose to call narrative biography, in which the reader may, as with a good novel, feel himself drawn into the current of events and be able to identify closely with the characters....In this respect the author uses considerably more dialogue than one normally associates with strictly historical works. Such dialogue is not invented conversation but, rather, a form of painstakingly reconstituted dialogue that lies hidden in abundance in historical material. Such hidden dialogue is normally written as straight historical commentary, without direct quotes, but in it are couched the keywords that legitimately allow such information...to be returned to vibrant and meaningful conversation that remains accurate to the intent and direction of what is occurring at any given time. (“Author’s Note,” emphasis Eckert’s, no page number)

Anyone who’s ever been to Florida knows, however, that fresh-squeezed orange juice is nothing at all like “reconstituted” frozen juice. The USDA would not allow one to pass reconstituted juice off as fresh, so why does Eckert bother to make such an ultimately fruitless (pardon the pun) claim for “reconstituted dialogue”? One wonders why Eckert seems so consistently obsessed with establishing this kind of textual authority for himself.

124 To be sure, it is just as obvious when one is drinking Tang and not any kind of Juice

product whatsoever; however, at a certain point, the insistence on creating such

impenetrable boundaries between levels of authenticity becomes not only ridiculous, but

suspect. Of course, folklorists have not escaped this kind of quibbling, either; recognizing

“genuine” folklore has long been a process of delineating, explicitly or implicitly, levels of authenticity, and in the 1950s Richard Dorson went so far as to distinguish folklore from

“fakelore.”

Gratefully, folkloristics has since collapsed the distinction between the two; indeed, this dissertation would not be possible if it still existed. Correspondingly, other areas of scholarly inquiry have also bowed to the notion that knowledge and “fact” are reconstructed according to an array of historical, cultural, geographic, and political dynamics. Still, Eckert claims the authority to an Ur text that is decidedly non-fictional.

He even goes so far as to suggest that he is, in some sense, “channeling” for Tecumseh:

“In telling Tecumseh’s story, the viewpoint taken in the writing was, of necessity,

Tecumseh’s. As such, we see him acting at any given time on the basis of what he knows or discovers through his own personal experience or contact with others” (“Author’s

Note,” no page number). Here Eckert admits to not only speaking for the Other, but—in a sense—/ee/mg and thinking for the Other, assuming an intimate, esoteric understanding of the Other’s psyche. It seems unbelievable that Eckert—an Anglo man writing two centuries after Tecumseh lived—could truly presume to have access to such knowledge. And yet, he does.'*

James Alexander Thom avoids this sort of ultimately futile rationalization; in fact, he instead “signifies” (to borrow Henry Louis Gates’ terminology) on Eckert in an

“Author’s Note”—which notably appears at the conclusion of (rather than as a preface to) his novel—where he says.

Although I have carefully sought the ascertainable truth, sometimes I have had to choose one unprovable version over another in order to proceed with the story; I hope that readers will not cite my work as an authority on one 125 side or the other of any of the perennial quibbles. Too many readers have been led astray already by authors who claimed to have found the last word. (684)

It seems fairly certain that the “author” referred to is Eckert, and that Thom is taking him to task for his defensive claims to authority. Nevertheless, Thom has his own claims to authenticity. As with Eckert’s second book, Thom’s novel seeks to present the history from the Shawnee point of view, and Thom asserts his “permission” to do so in the

Acknowledgments prefacing the novel:

In the embrace of the Shawnee Remnant Band of Ohio—descendants of the Shawnees who followed Tecumseh to the end in the War of 1812—my heart has melted and my mind has expanded....I am grateful also for the guidance, friendship, and technical information given by many non- Shawnee experts...who have familiarized me with everything from folklore and period weapons to details of dress and battle plans....Entering into the round world of this splendid people, sharing their bittersweet heritage, learning and retelling the story of their beloved leader, has enriched my life. (Acknowledgments, no page number)

The above quote shows us that while Thom, like Eckert, is presuming a Shawnee point of view and “speaking for” the group and Tecumseh specifically, his claims are rooted in contemporary face-to-face interaction with the Shawnee. This is already far cry from

Eckert’s more “mystical” connection with the group, and it also acknowledges the contemporary existence of the Shawnee, which is never referred to in any of Eckert’s productions, either the novels or the play. Still, Thom’s take is clearly romantic in tone, and even as folklorists we have to question a claim to authority based on a knowledge of a group’s folklife, since we know that folklore can not only change radically over time (in form, function, and context), but that it is never a complete and not always an accurate reflection of cultural values, beliefs, and attitudes.^ And while Thom does astutely recognize that no version of Tecumseh’s story is ultimately “provable,” he—like Eckert— seems to maintain the underlying premise that “good” history turns on facts. Indeed, all four of the novelizations of Tecumseh’s life—Eckert’s two contributions as well as Thom’s and Card’s accounts—include an “author’s note” somewhere, indicating that the

126 “history/fiction” dispute is one that the authors feel compelled to address, that they must somehow position their work in relation to “fact” for their readers.

This territorial dispute between “history” and “fiction” is played out in the texts themselves, both on a literal level (as in the author’s notes mentioned previously) and on a figurative level, as each work creates its own version of “truth” that ranges anywhere from being playfully allegorical with Tecumseh’s “academic” history to being consciously resistant to that history. Thus, it seems fittingly ironic that the first of the contemporary

Tecumseh novels—Allan Eckert’s The Frontiersmen—s\\o\x\& be the one most insistent on its

“truths,” while the second—Card’s Red Prophet—is the least concerned about issues of truth. Analysis of each of the four novels will help demonstrate how Tecumseh’s current literary manifestations both shape and reflect, through the novels’ subtexts, a variety of contemporary Anglo fetishes and fears. Below, I will discuss both of Eckert’s productions in conjunction with Thom’s Panther in the Sky, because the three novels seem to be interreferential, part of a cycle of narratives responding to each other in both overt and abstract ways. Card’s novel will be discussed last, since generically it is a whoUy different kind of novel; even so, it is thematically linked with the others.

Eckert’s Frontiersmen: “Historical Truth’VContemporarv Projection

Allan Eckert’s first foray into Tecumseh’s life story came with his 1967 novel The

Frontiersmen, the first in a proposed series of books about “manifest destiny” called the

“Narratives of America” series. This novel, in turn, was the source for Eckert’s 1973 script for the outdoor drama Tecumseh! Notably, though, the play’s events do not pick up in the novel until some four hundred pages into the book; the first two-thirds of the novel are devoted more closely to the life of Simon Kenton and the Anglo-Indian conflicts surrounding white settlers’ first movements into Kentucky, the Ohio Valley, and the rest of the Northwest Territory. As such, the novel reads like two separate books; because the

127 two main characters—Kenton and Tecumseh—were bom thirteen years apart (in 1755 and

1768, respectively), Kenton's career is declining just as Tecumseh is coming into power.

Their paths rarely intersect, so it seems a curious pairing for Eckert to choose.

Nevertheless, Eckert makes the parallel explicit at the book’s outset by first giving

an account of Simon Kenton’s birth, followed immediately by an account of Tecumseh’s

more apparently miraculous birth. From the start, we seem compelled to take these two

men as the finest representatives of their respective “races,” a point Eckert implies in his

repeated focus on the ideally masculine and powerful bodies of each. Of Kenton, he writes

that

His eyes were stiU that penetrating blue and his thick auburn hair curled to his shoulders, adding to the aura of strength and self-confidence that surrounded his well-proportioned frame....He was easily the largest man there, towering some five inches over six feet and weighing fully two hundred fifty pounds, all of it muscle and bone. He had the look of ruggedness and indestructibility about him. His fists were like small hams and no clothing, no matter how loose, could hide the swell of bulging biceps and calves, thigh, and chest muscles. (230)

Of Tecumseh:

The personal appearance of the brave was uncommonly fine, for though he was not particularly tall—three inches less than six feet—he had a fitness and a symmetry about him that made him stand out at once in any group. His face was oval rather than angular, his nose straight and well-formed and his mouth at once kind and sensitive, yet strong and determined. His eyes were direct, a clear and nearly transparent hazel, and his complexion was a smooth and unblemished tan. The hair which fell to just below his broad shoulders was a glossy black and his arms and legs were straight and well made. (404)

While Kenton’s description is almost scary in its sense of explosive masculinity—he reads

more like a comic-book superhero than a human being here—Tecumseh’s description is

more gentle. These figures parallel those in Fenimore Cooper’s novels, where “at their

best Cooper’s good frontiersman [sic] represented the ideal blend of the two cultures in a

somewhat primitivistic vision” (Berkhofer 94), while the Native Americans themselves are pure objects for the Anglo gaze. Even more notably here, though, Eckert’s description of

Tecumseh seems at pains to distinguish him from “Other” Shawnees and Native Americans

128 in general: his facial features, as Eckert describes them, imply a similarity to stereotypical

Caucasian features, and he is merely “tan.” In fact, at a later point in the novel (notably,

during the episode about Tecumseh’s courtship of and proposal to Rebecca Galloway),

Eckert repeats this description of Tecumseh’s “oval” rather than “angular” features, adding

that “his skin was a rich tan rather than the reddish-bronze cast so many of his tribesmen

possessed” (580). This distinction seems especially aimed at separating Tecumseh from

“his race,” and also serves to reassure the reader that perhaps a marriage to Rebecca would

not be as taboo as it might normally be; after all, Tecumseh is not “really” an Indian.

Aside from providing the important function of distinguishing Tecumseh from

Native Americans in general, such descriptions neatly echo other themes that Eckert

explores in the novel, themes that he also explores in his play and in his later “biography,”

A Sorrow in Our Heart: specifically, issues of gender identity and ethnicity. Thom and

Card’s novels also develop these themes, as well as the connected theme of literacy, which

will be addressed at the end of this chapter.

From a purely historical standpoint, Eckert appears to have all the best intentions in

his representation of the history of the Ohio frontier. The rather disjointed, diary-like

structure of the novel (each section begins with a date, e.g. “October 2, 1818 — Saturday”)

seems designed to provide easy and presumably objective alternation between Anglo and

Indian perspectives on events. Too, Eckert seems concerned about presenting a well-

balanced portrait of each of his major characters, although we hear far more about Simon

Kenton’s personal life than we do about Tecumseh’s (as in A Sorrow in Our Heart,

Tecumseh's two marriages to Native American women are covered in just a few paragraphs, although his alleged relationship with Rebecca Galloway merits a bit more ink, about eight pages of text). In Eckert’s defense, this focus on Kenton’s personal life

(seemingly at the expense of Tecumseh’s) is probably due more to availability of information about Kenton than to any authorial bias.

129 Still, the narrative seems confused in places about the spin it wants to put on events, and the ambiguity does not seem designed to lead the reader to his or her own conclusions. Ultimately, the novel does suggest that what has happened to the Shawnees is tragic; the epilogue includes the very moving observation that after the War of 1812,

“names such as Shawnee and Chippewa, Wyandot and Delaware, Ottawa and Seneca and

Huron were the names of places rather than people” (692). However, in the interest of drama and audience desires, the narrative caters to audience expectations about both Anglo and Native American identities; in other words, the representation of both groups trends toward stereotype. With the frontiersmen in particular, this stereotyping is most evident in the constructed use of a sort of pseudo-hillbilly “frontier” dialect. Notably, both “good” frontier people and “bad” ones employ the same dialect (a contrast to Thom's novel, to be discussed below, where only “bad” Anglos appear to use this dialect), as in this exchange between Simon Kenton and another settler upset to find Shawnees camped out on Kenton's property:

“They’s a couple Shawnee devils camped right over yonder,” one of the men told [Kenton]. “We don't much like the idee of you harborin’ the enemy an’ we aim to wipe ’em out right now.” [...] “Pay close attention,” [Kenton] said softly, “’cause I ain’t going to repeat. Mebbe you’ll massacre them Injens, but not whilst I’m alive. And if you aim to kill me, they’s a few other white men present who’ll be took off suddenlike first!” (639)

Since Eckert’s portrayal of Kenton otherwise implies that he is a generous and fair man, clearly the dialect is not being used strictly to denote ignorance, as seems to be the case in

Thom’s novel. In fact, the “greatest frontiersman of them all,” Daniel Boone, also a character in Eckert’s novel, speaks with a similar “faux-redneck” brogue; in telling Kenton of his plans to move further west, Boone explains that “most of my friends has got theirselves kilt, man can’t move athout bumping into somebody,” and says he plans to go see his son Jesse: “Reckon I’ll hunker down with him some” (379). In any other text, such broadly stereotypical (and, to the reader with a more experienced ear, phony-

130 sounding) Appalachian accents would certainly imply a character’s naivete or backwardness, but here Eckert seems to employ it as a sign of authenticity. Without getting into an elaborate discussion of the uses and abuses of dialect, suffice it to say that in

The Frontiersmen, the stereotypical nature of the dialect as rendered seems ultimately to defeat Eckert’s apparent purpose of making his characters sound “authentic.”

In its representation of Native Americans, though, the stereotypes of The

Frontiersmen seem more pervasive and deeply entrenched. Much like the play, the novel seems to be attempting a precarious balancing act between compassionate representation and audience expectations. And much like the play, the emphasis ends up being on the more brutal and bloody aspects of the history; on subsequent readings of The

Frontiersmen, I found myself wishing I had kept a “body count,” tallying the number of deaths in the book as a whole, since violent death seems to be an integral part of nearly every chapter of the book. And this is where the novel’s representation of Native

Americans seems especially prone to stereotyping: while Anglo Americans certainly committed their share of atrocities against Native Americans in their quest for further territory (and indeed, that encroachment was itself an act of violence), the heinous acts of whites are rarely dwelled on at the kind of length and with the kind of detail that Native

American acts are.

In fact, perhaps the most brutal American act in the quest to take Ohio-the massacre of a whole community of Moravian Indians at Gnadenhutten in 1782®—is described very briefly and clinically, in the course of about five pages, while the Delawares’ torture and buming at the stake of the American Colonel William Crawford is described with a sort of perverse glee over almost twice as much space. Below are a couple of excerpts from each incident to illustrate the contrast. The first is the summary description of the massacre at

Gnadenhutten:

Builderback, having been handed a cooper’s mallet by one of his men, stepped up behind Abraham and dealt him a blow which caved in the entire back of his skull. The Indian dropped instantly, and even as the chief’s 131 arms and legs jericed spasmodically, Builderback cut away the scalp and held it aloft in triumph while his men cheered lustily. Moving now in a clockwise fashion from Abraham, Builderback felled thirteen more [Moravians] in succession, each blow making a hideous smacking sound. (293)

Crawford’s death, on the other hand, is elaborately carried through each of its many sickening stages, from the Delawares’ initial peppering him with gunpowder until “the end of his penis was black and shredded and still smoking” (305), through their slicing off his ears, to his being burned at the stake and prodded with red-hot poles. Unbelievably, he is still alive after all of this and being scalped, so

A squaw...entered the circle of ashes with a board heaped full of brightly glowing coals, and these she scattered on Crawford’s back and held them with the board against the officer’s bare skull....Crawford groaned faintly and rolled over and then slowly, ever so slowly, drew up his knees and raised himself to a kneeling position....A few squaws touched buming sticks to him but he seemed insensitive to them. (307-308)

Finally, Crawford's “living motion stopped” as “skin and flesh blackened” (308).

Nor is this the only example of a very detailed description of Indian torture, although it is certainly the longest and most repulsively descriptive. One cannot read this without wondering what the purpose of such a passage might be in the whole of the text:

Could it be to illustrate the tremendous anger of the Delawares over all the previous abuses they had suffered at the hands of white settlers? Are we, as readers, supposed to think that

Crawford deserved this, or that somehow he is to represent vengeance for all Native

American suffering and deaths? Contrasted with the novel’s description of Anglo atrocities, and given the relish Eckert seems to take in describing the horrific and the grotesque, such high-minded ends would not seem to be the case.’ Unfortunately, however, Eckert’s seeming quest for the kind of dramatic tension that would sustain a reader through a 700-page narrative leaves an indelible impression on the reader that the

Native Americans are the stereotypical “bloodthirsty savages” that Anglo audiences expect and desire them to be; meanwhile, Anglo American atrocities like the Moravian Massacre seem like isolated incidents of individual evil. Furthermore, there is little ambiguity about

132 how heinous the Moravian massacre was; while Anglos might argue that other equally

grotesque slaughters of Native Americans were somehow justified, the massacre of

Moravians—who were Christian converts and farmers—seems more “criminal” since they

were more “like us.”

It is worthwhile to pause at this point, though, and consider the functions of such

stereotypes about Native Americans in Eckert’s work. In her discussion of the use of

stereotyped characters in 19th-century American fiction, Tompkins argues that

[T]he presence of stereotyped characters, rather than constituting a defect in these novels, was what allowed them to operate as instruments of cultural self-definition. Stereotypes are the instantly recognizable representatives of overlapping racial, sexual, national, ethnic, economic, social, political, and religious categories; they convey enormous amounts of cultural information in an extremely condensed form. {Sensational Designs xvi)

I will not go so far as to adopt Tompkins’ suggestion that a consideration of how a text is

“working” culturally allows us to bypass concems about the effect of such stereotypes;

however, this take on the role of stereotypes in popular fiction does support the notion that

Eckert’s novel reveals far more about his own and other Anglos’ fetishes and fears about

Native Americans.

Within The Frontiersmen itself, the perception of Native Americans as stereotypical

“bloodthirsty savages” is necessary if the reader is to see Tecumseh as being somehow

“different” from other Native Americans, and even from his fellow Shawnees. As in the drama, an understanding of Tecumseh’s character in The Frontiersmen is founded on his apparent ability to “transcend” his ethnicity, to descry the “primitive” acts of his brethren and try to find a more “civilized” and humane resolution to their conflicts. This representation of Tecumseh as transcendent, as “more” than just a Shawnee or even just a

Native American, is inherent in virtually all the contemporary retellings of his life story.

Eckert certainly creates such a portrayal in The Frontiersmen, and continues this characterization in A Sorrow in Our Heart. Thom also relies on this “transcendent” identity in Panther in the Sky. And as I will discuss in the conclusion of this dissertation, Anglo

133 kinship stories claiming a connection to Tecumseh also rely on this notion of Tecumseh’s

being “not like the Others.” Of course, in any hero tale, the hero must be somehow

superiiuman, if not literally semi-divine or divine; however, more seems to be at work

behind the creation of Tecumseh as such a transcendent figure. In order for him to “work”

as an admirable character for white readers or audiences, he must be stripped of his ethnic

identity, or at the very least, he must subordinate his ethnic identity to a cause.

That dynamic is certainly at work in The Frontiersmen. Not only does Tecumseh

not “look” especially “Indian” in Eckert’s account (as above), he also does not “think” like

one. As in many of the other narratives of his life, Eckert's portrayal emphasizes

Tecumseh’s disagreement with general tribal attitudes about violence and torture, and early

on Tecumseh tries to mend the “bloodthirsty” ways of his fellow Shawnee. In a scene that

the drama copies almost verbatim, Tecumseh (at age fifteen in Eckert’s account) condemns

his fellow warriors for torturing and killing a prisoner, and presents them with “an

uncomfortable truth” in the form of a question: “What bravery, what courage, what

strength is there in the torturing of a man unable to defend himself?...In the very act of committing it we lower ourselves to something beneath animals, to something evil and hideous and revolting....How have we the right to call ourselves warriors, or even men, if we act in such a manner?” (321).

While one might expect his older companions to dismiss his comments or regard them as blasphemy, because Tecumseh has already proved himself a capable warrior, they vow then and there—as in the opening scene of the play-to change their ways. In so doing, they support Tecumseh’s suggestion that before this moment, they were “beneath animals” and “evil,” but now they have seen the light. This notion that Tecumseh is the

“first enlightened savage” seems a dubious honor, and a disturbing way to set up his character; yet, nearly every narrative of his life does so. In fact. The Frontiersmen goes so far as to claim that on the basis of this incident alone, the Shawnees knew that “Tecumseh

134 was destined to become the greatest leader the Shawnee tribe had ever known” (322).

Notably, unlike his later work, A Sorrow in Our Heart, Eckert downplays Tecumseh’s eventual split with the mainline Shawnees in The Frontiersmen', Tecumseh is less a renegade here and more an independent thinker in a very “American” sense.* When his older brother Chiksika tries to answer the many challenges Tecumseh poses to the current

Shawnee system of government and the division of the nations by reciting to him a

Shawnee etiological myth, Tecumseh is dissatisfied with the traditional answer. He realizes that “if his questions were ever to be answered...he would have to find those answers for himself, for there was none who could tell him” (269), an example of

Tecumseh’s very “American” independent thinking that later—as Eckert contends—leads

Tecumseh to model his Indian amalgamation not on any Native American model, but after the example of the United States themselves (618).

The novel’s rather ambivalent representation of both Native Americans and Anglos in the Northwest Territory—both in a general sense and through the characters of Tecumseh and Kenton in particular—is further distorted by a serious lack of irony about who is genuinely being victimized on this frontier. In several places, the novel describes how many earlier Kentucky settlers—including Simon Kenton and Daniel Boone—lost the vast acreages of land they had claimed in the territory because they had not gone through the proper legal channels to secure them; as Eckert writes, “The sharp landgrabbers were making killings preying on the ignorance and illiteracy of the frontiersmen who opened this land” (37). Boone complains that “it’s bad enough to be stripped of my land without being abused and being accused of falsehood” (367), and there is little or no irony here about the fact that Boone, Kenton, and the others had exercised exactly the same kind of presumptuous greed to get the lands they claimed from the Indians.

Later in the novel, Eckert mentions that, at his estate in Kentucky, Kenton had “a crew of Negro slaves [to] kee[p] the house and grounds in perfect condition” (477); on the

135 next page, he presents a seemingly warm testimony to Kenton’s generosity: “There were those who took outrageous advantage of his generosity. Nor was this generosity limited to the giving of com. His door was always open to friend or stranger alike. Travelers of every grade were received with kindness” (478). No issue is made of the seeming conflict between Kenton's status as a slaveholder and his “good-hearted and trusting” (478) nature.

When Kenton later moves to Ohio, he now has “twelve Negro servants" (502, emphasis mine), but no information is provided as to whether these are freed slaves or under what terms they live. O f course, we cannot fault Eckert’s 1967 text for failing to excoriate

Kenton as a slaveholder, and for lacking the kind of broadly integrative historical perspective we expect today. However, given Eckert’s contention that the book is “fact, not fiction,” such oversights undermine Eckert’s more overt attempts to represent the

Shawnee and other nations fairly. There is a kind of overdetermination driving such representations—the sense that what happened to the indigenous peoples of the Ohio Valley was inevitable, if tragic, and that Anglos were somehow “destined” to predominate.

This sense of inevitability not only has the effect of absolving the Anglo characters

(and indeed, the reader) from any responsibility for this tragedy, but it also allows Eckert

(and Thom as well) to lionize Tecumseh in a way that would not have been possible had the

Shawnee warrior actually succeeded. Tecumseh’s ultimate failure enables him to become a tragic hero, and—in Eckert’s account—the very ideal of manhood. Though Ernest Seton was ousted from the nascent Boy Scout movement for suggesting that Tecumseh would be a good model for American masculinity, his ideal becomes manifest in these novels, and

The Frontiersmen is no exception.

The novel—like the drama, as discussed in the previous chapter—sets up a clear hierarchy of gender identities in which being a rational warrior is the highest form of masculinity, being a woman is an insult, and being an old woman is the worst of all fates; as Chiksika reassures his brother Tecumseh as he is about to die in battle, “Happy am

136 L..to fall in battle and not die in a wegiwa like an old squaw” (371). As in the play, when

both Anglo and Shawnee men insult each other, accusations of being a “woman” are

popular epithets. The drama’s lines about cowardly warriors needing to wear petticoats

appear in the novel as well (618,665, 667), uttered by whites and Indians alike. Among

the Native Americans, another frequent put-down involves calling someone a squaw, as

when the Delaware Chief Pipe responds to an outrageous request from Simon Girty by

asking him, “Do you think I am a squaw, white man?” (301, emphasis Eckert's), and

when William Henry Harrison says the British leader Proctor should be “treat[ed] as a

squaw and put petticoats on him” (667). Indeed, one Native turncoat challenges his

opponents by “calling them miserable squaws and shouting the most terrible insults he

knew at them” (642), being called a squaw apparently one of those offensive insults. As

with other contemporary novelizations of Tecumseh’s life which also manifest this

traditional gender hierarchy, no one seems to find a paradox in the representation of the

Shawnee as a nation that worships a female deity and has as its leader a man who refuses to sit on the ground—preferring instead to “repose” on the “breast” of his “mother,” the Earth-

-but which derides and denigrates women.’ It seems very difficult to believe that such a hierarchy is not merely the projection of the contemporary authors and their own desires and fears.

And indeed—as in the drama-very few female characters populate The

Frontiersmen. Tecumseh’s sister, Tecumapese, actually plays less of a role in the novel than she does in the play, and the whole courtship-of-Rebecca-Galloway episode takes up a scant eight pages of the seven-hundred page text. Nonhelema, the Shawnee woman warrior, is mentioned briefly, but does not play a major role in the novel’s action at all.

The representation of ideal womanhood seems to come in the character of Ruth Calvin,

Simon Kenton’s lover during his early days on the frontier. During the brief episode

Eckert offers as a portrait of their relationship, Ruth unexpectedly announces to Simon that

137 she will not marry him—that she likes having him as a lover, but does not care for him enough to love or marry him: “I am your woman, but not your wife....I can stop being your woman, but I could not stop being your wife. Will you promise not to force me—or even ask me—to be your wife?” (312). After he makes this promise, Ruth announces to him that she is pregnant; the tone of this section implies that the reader is to admire her independence and good sense, but also that by having no expectations of Simon, and by being so understanding of his frontier wanderlust, she is an exceptional if not ideal woman.

In contrast, the novel’s portrayal of the two wives Kenton subsequently takes implies that while they might have been beautiful or strong women, neither of them really quite understood Kenton, and maybe put a damper on his apparently essential male need to explore and do battle. Similarly, before his two brief marriages, Tecumseh is described as having “a beautiful Cherokee maiden to cook for him, make and mend his clothing and provide for his carnal pleasures” (382). The stilted language here—“provide for his camal pleasures”—suggests that these are basic services that the independent frontier warrior can expect from woman, and that the women are to understand that the great demands made of these men makes any more permanent relationship impossible. There seems to be no small amount of male fantasy at work here about an Edenic time when men could be explorers and warriors and have women when they were desired with no strings attached.

In fact, as in other Tecumseh renarratives (see especially Thom, below), the genuinely intimate relationships in The Frontiersmen exist exclusively between men.

During the first half of the book, in fact—which covers the period of the early settlement of

Kentucky, when there probably were very few women on the frontier—Kenton goes through a period of what might be called “serial monogamy” with different male frontiersmen with whom he makes alliances. The language used to describe the formation and dissolution of these partnerships is both implicitly and explicitly like courtship.

138 Early on, Kenton meets Alexander Montgomery, whose “quiet confidence” Simon

“very much liked” (180). After a detailed description of Montgomery’s physical

appearance, Eckert tells the reader that “it was not unexpected, therefore, when Boone

asked Simon to pick another man and scout ahead after they crossed the Ohio River, that

[Kenton] chose Montgomery. It was a good feeling to have a solid dependable man riding

beside him” (181). The language here echoes that used to describe Tecumseh’s first

marriage: “After [Monetohse] set her sights on Tecumseh, it was not any great surprise to

the others when she won him” (476). Monetohse is dispensed of more quickly than any of

Kenton’s paitners, however; Tecumseh “divorces” her, Shawnee-style, in the very next

paragraph, presumably because she was too domineering and nagged him too much: “Her

requests became demands and she railed at Tecumseh constantly, finding fault in all he did.

Because of her nagging he was soon spending more time away from his wegiwa than in it”

(476).

Dissolutions of male parmerships, however, are generally more amicable and

performed with the best interests of both men in mind. As Kenton’s dissolution from

another companion, Tom Williams, is described:

For a long time Simon Kenton had foreseen the breakup of his partnership with Tom Williams and he shouldered full responsibility for it. He liked Tom well enough and trusted him as a steady, dependable paitner, but their very natures were too dissimilar for them to remain together any longer. The wonder of it was that they had stuck together this long. (144)

There is little sense of animosity in these breakups, although afterwards Simon does feel

“free once more to roam the Kentucky country unencumbered” (144). The easy dissolution of these parmerships and Kenton’s pleasure in being unencumbered echo the primary frontier value, as Kenton later describes it, of living in a “land where a man could be his own master, beholden to no one” (327). Few women—Tecumseh’s first wife, and well as both of Kenton’s wives—can understand the primacy of this value (except, of course, for

Ruth); hence, stronger allegiances are formed between the men themselves.

139 The most explicit paralleling of these homosocial partnerships with marriage comes in Eckert’s description of Kenton’s relationship with his fellow frontiersman, Simon Girty

(who later sides with the British). These two go so far as to have a formal ceremony to establish their “blood brotherhood”:

One night, as Kenton and Girty were resting in a small cave along the Muskingum, Girty suggested that the two of them bond themselves together in brotherhood in a sacred rite they had learned with the Senecas.... Simon agreed readily, and Girty, with shallow flicks of his knife, laid open his own and Simon’s right wrists. They then gripped each other’s forearm so that the incisions met and pressed tightly together and their blood mingled. The grip was held for several minutes, during which first Girty and then Kenton swore eternal friendship, brotherhood, devotion, and protection, one for the other, as long as diey both should live. (104)

The verbatim use of language from the standard Protestant wedding ceremony here (“as long as they both should live”) suggests a consciousness on Eckert’s part of equating this ritual with that marriage, and indeed I think we are meant to see the frontiersmen’s alliances not only as similar to marriage on a contractual basis, but in fact as superior to marriage; the homosocial relationships formed among the frontiersmen are always forged with a mutual, if unspoken, understanding that the desires of the individual always take precedence over the goals of the pair: in other words, the devotion to the independent quest is unquestionably the primary allegiance. For instance, later in the same chapter Girty and

Kenton are forced to “split up” when their exploration plans diverge, at which point Kenton teams up with Williams.

This kind of homosocial tension is not unique to Eckert’s account of this history, however, this theme is one which Thom also employs in hisPanther in the Sky. Thom’s use of these homosocial themes, however, goes beyond the rather simple level of merely illustrating frontier values to interrogating those values and calling into question the more psychological motivations for violence and conflict.

The absolute primacy of male characters and masculinity in The Frontiersmen does not mean that women are entirely absent from this landscape, however. Their influence,

140 though, is strangely indirect. Certainly the most central female character in the novel (as in the drama) is Rebecca Galloway; she provides not only a love interest for Tecumseh, but is also credited with teaching him to read English (a development that will be discussed— along with the issue of Tecumseh’s literacy in general—at the end of this chapter).

Although Eckert later admitted that there probably never was a romantic relationship between Tecumseh and Rebecca, and she does not appear at all in A Sorrow in Our Heart, she nevertheless plays an interesting role in The Frontiersmen.

As mentioned in the previous chapter, Tecumseh!'s producer, Marion Waggoner, explains the drama’s “love plot” as an effective, shorthand way of demonstrating the warrior’s fallibility. In Eckert’s original novel, however, it seems to serve only as another minor digression into an interesting, if tangential bit of folk history. Although several earlier passages describe Tecumseh’s interactions with the Galloways, the romance, proposal, and rejection take only a few pages in The Frontiersmen, and afterwards the

Galloways disappear from the novel altogether, at least as a physical presence. As in the drama, it is Rebecca’s request that Tecumseh become culturally “white” that forces him to withdraw his proposal. Curiously, though, Tecumseh does not seem to be insulted by this request, even though the alleged romance takes place at the height of his campaign to unite the tribes under a dogma of Pan-Indian ism that forbids miscegenation and urges Indians to drop all Anglo-influenced cultural practices.

What seems especially odd is the novel’s implication that had the marriage happened, the entire course of history in the Northwest Territory might have been altered:

[Wjhile she tried to keep from thinking of it, [Rebecca] continued to consider the possibility that this incident of love between herself and the Shawnee chief might, in some way, be made to change future events; events which...seemed not only impending, but inevitable. With a woman's intuition she knew...that a terrible ordeal was in store and that she, an unknown sixteen-year-old girl on the frontier, had it within her power to alter the very course of history.... [I]f she gave her consent to marry Tecumseh...[could] she turn the power of this unusual man from war to peace? No one but she and Tecumseh could ever fully know what calamity would be thereby averted. (576-577)

141 Rebecca’s sudden acquisition of the power to change the course of history itself constitutes a shockingly enormous influence for a minor character—especially a female one—to be given in the novel, if only hypothetically. That she fails to seize the opportunity, however, allows the masculine ethic to reign, despite this brief shift in control, and also feeds into the underlying appeal of all Tecumseh narratives: his folk hero status is entirely dependent on the fact that not only did his quest fail, but that it was doomed to failure from the start; however, he valiantly rallied against fate, the last of his kind. Furthermore, Rebecca’s potential for influence further undermines the power of the Native Americans themselves, since the above passages suggest that she alone has more control over the outcome of

Anglo-Indian conflicts than Tecumseh’s entire amalgamation of warriors does.

Even more remarkably, despite her outrageous request and the termination of their relationship, Rebecca still appears to exert some influence over Tecumseh long after the affair ends. During the War of 1812, Tecumseh recalls “his promise made long ago to

Rebecca Galloway on the Little Miami River” and “issue[s] stem orders to all his Indians that they were not to abuse the captives in any way” (643). This prohibition “was a disappointment to his warriors, to whom the butchery of captives had always been a sweet fruit of victory” (643). Even this late in the novel, there is still a sense that Tecumseh is the only Native American capable of rising above the apparently “innate” brutality of his

“savage” brethren; but he is only able to do so under the influence of an Anglo woman.

Given these notions of Tecumseh’s leadership philosophy being Anglo-influenced

(if not fully Anglicized), it seems odd, then, that The Frontiersmen should end with a romantic paean to Tecumseh’s god-like ability to inspire a pan-Indian revolution. The conclusion of The Frontiersmen implies that all Native Americans might one day rise again under Tecumseh’s Christ-like influence:

Tecumseh will come again! In that hour of the second coming, there will be nakude-fanwi «davva—“one town of towns.” It will mark the end of strife, wars and contentions among all Indian tribes. Then the celebration will consummate all that the Great Spirit intends for His red

142 children.—Tecumseh will again be born under the same circumstances, to lead his people to this “one town of towns” for all Indians. (690-691)

Again, this final note of respect—indeed, of reverence and awe—is not completely incompatible with the representation of Tecumseh and Native Americans in general in the novel, but it is nevertheless problematic. First, there are entirely too many other smaller representations of Native American “essential” identity that undercut this final evocation of pan-Indianism; secondly, the novel circles around to conclude with a completely romanticized portrait of Indian identity, made possible only by the disappearance of the

Shawnee at the novel’s end. If the appeal of Tecumseh as a folk figure relies on his failure, then the general romanticization of Native American identity relies on its absence.

Fortunately for Eckert, both are possible here, and they are themes that he returns to in his

1992 revision of this material, A Sorrow in Our Heart, to be discussed below. Before retuming to Eckert, however, it is important to look at the intermediate Tecumseh-based novel that forms a pivotal role in the cycle of contemporary novels about the Shawnee leader, James Alexander Thom's Panther in the Sky (1989), a novel which seems to function both as a critique of The Frontiersmen and as a stepping stone for Eckert’s own revision of Tecumseh’s story.

Thom’s Panther in the Skv: A Kinder. Gentler Tecumseh

James Alexander Thom’s Panther in the Sky is perhaps the best of the fictional renarratives of Tecumseh’s life. Thom is a historical novelist of some critical renown, whose other works include Follow the River (1981)~the story of Mary Ingles’ capture by and escape from the Shawnee—as well as Long Knife (1986) and From Sea to Shining Sea

(1984). Panther in the Sky, in fact, achieved enough acclaim to be turned into a made-for-

TV movie entitled Tecumseh: The Last Warrior, which premiered on the cable channel

TNT in June 1995.

143 Thom does little to disguise the fact that Panther in the Sky is an attempt to reclaim the figure of Tecumseh from Allan Eckert’s clutches. In the “Author’s Note” that follows the text (already discussed above), he seems clearly to be signifying on Eckert, calling into question if not outright debunking the more dramatic and dubious aspects of Eckert’s accounts: that Tenskwatawa was banished from the Shawnee tribe after betraying

Tecumseh; that Tecumseh proposed marriage to Rebecca Galloway; and that Simon Kenton found but refused to identify Tecumseh’s corpse after the Battle of the Thames.

Notably, Thom couches his narrative in opposition to what he characterizes as a white historical tradition, claiming that he does not aim to resolve the disputed aspects of

Tecumseh’s history, but rather, is “looking especially for insights into the culture, morality, ceremony, and psychic condition of the Shawnee people in the time of their greatest crisis” (683). Certainly this seems to be a different motivation than Eckert’s in writing The Frontiersmen, although Eckert does seem to be trying to “cash in” on the crisis of representation in A Sorrow in Our Heart: The Life of Tecumseh, a revision of his earlier account ostensibly told from the Shawnee perspective (published in 1992, three years after Thom’s novel). Indeed, the Booklist reviewer cited Thom’s efforts toward authenticity as the book’s greatest strength, praising the novel’s “sufftis[ion] with fascinating elements of native [sic] American lore, legend, and culture,” arguing that the novel “represents historical fiction at its finest” (Flanagan 1433-1434). A Chicago Tribune review cited on the back of the book itself likewise praises “Thom’s masterful storytelling and his passion for Shawnee lore, customs and especially mysticism,” again demonstrating the erroneous equation between folk materials and “authenticity.” Though not discussing

Panther in the Sky, Wolfgang Hochbruck wryly debunks such “folk authorization” by noting that “no doubt there are sacred as well as secret tribal myths and stories, existing in their own time in a continuing tribal tradition, but they are certainly not brought to you by a publishing house” (12).

144 Thom treads some even more dangerous ground in the “Author’s Note,” however,

when he implies that his narrative speaks for the Shawnee:

Often in this book I have written the red people’s version of some particular incident. Sometimes their version can be reconciled with that of white historians, but not always. Often I have chosen the red man’s version because that is the way my central characters would have perceived it and sometimes just because I found it more credible. (683-684)

Thus, while Thom later asserts his hope that “readers will not cite my work as an authority

on one side or the other of any of the perennial quibbles” (684), this earlier statement

seems to belie that wish. Thom does appear to hold his production up as the more credible

and “authentic” account of Tecumseh’s life, because told from the opposite perspective.

And therein lies the mb: while Thom seems less inclined to insist that his text is history and not fiction, as Eckert does, he still makes the same kinds of claims to authority and authenticity that Eckert does. In fact, in the anecdote that ends the “Author’s

Note,” Thom implies that although he too is a white author, he is, perhaps, the

“best” white author to tell Tecumseh’s story:

...Two talkers, a compassionate, liberal-minded white man and a Shawnee veteran of Viet Nam, had been conversing earnestly for hours about matters close to their hearts. Now my fellow white man shook his head and blurted something I had almost known he would say: “But, my God! How can you go and fight a war for a country that’s treated your people the way it has?” The Shawnee smiled and wagged his head slowly. He put his fist against the man’s knee, chuckled, and said, “You palefaces still can’t understand that this is our country, can you?” (684)

In a sense, this passage conveys an image of Thom as the superlative white man-so sensitive to the Shawnee point of view that he can foresee and mock the shallow liberalism of his “own kind.” Of course, it could be argued that what I am doing in this dissertation is no different, and I would have to confess that in many respects it is not. However, by using this anecdote as a way to round out and frame his rationale for writing Panther in the

Sky as he has, Thom seems to suggest here that his ability to transcend mundane identity

145 politics puts him beyond criticism. And for better or worse, the reader must bear in mind that this is the agent behind the would-be “Shawnee-spun” text.

Call it the anxiety of influence, but the most striking initial impression of Panther is its seemingly oven and meticulous effort to create a narrative as unlike Eckert’s

Frontiersmen as possible, issue by issue, moment by moment. The primary aspect of the novel in which this dynamic is apparent is in the novel’s point of view. Unlike Eckert’s novel, which—in its chronological, almost journalistic structure—shifts back and forth between the Shawnee story (Tecumseh) and the Anglo stories (Harrison, Kenton,

Galloway), Panther presents virtually the entire history from the Shawnee perspective, thus making for a striking moment when we are allowed to “overhear” a conversation between

Harrison and Mad Anthony Wayne, unmediated by an Indian perspective (310-3II). By contrast. The Frontiersmen rarely includes a Shawnee episode that does not involve whites, either directly or indirectly.

Another aspect of the novel that seems to be constructed as the antithesis of Eckert’s work is its strong characterization of women, Anglo and especially Shawnee. Early on.

Hard Striker—overhearing the cries of his wife laboring to give birth to Tecumseh—remarks to his other son, Chiksika, that while he “will hear men and boys make mockery of women, saying they are weak and silly,” Chiksika must “never let [his] lips speak such things” (14). Later, Turtle Mother (Tecumseh’s mother) tells her daughter that “men only think they are in control of things. Woman guides man’s path more than he would ever believe” (30). This nod toward feminism (or at least, a fuller representation of the women involved in Tecumseh’s history) stands in stark contrast to Eckert’s representation of women in The Frontiersmen, where they are remarkably voiceless and frequently victimized.

Perhaps it is this commitment to representing female characters less stereotypically that leads Thom to account for the relationship between Tecumseh and Rebecca Galloway

146 as he does. In Thom’s version, the romantic link is the result of a cultural misunderstanding; when Tecumseh presents her with a gift of silver brooches as thanks for helping him leam to read and write, Rebecca gets it in her head that this constitutes a dowry: “This was how Indian suitors announced their intentions, she had heard: by bringing very valuable gifts. And the pipe with her father...Oh, there was no doubt of it” (415). Later, Tecumseh tells her he had no such intention, and—in another reversal of

Eckert’s version—tells her that she “could not come and live among [his] people” (454) anyway, because of the taboo on miscegenation in Tenskwatatwa’s teachings. Here it is

Tecumseh, not Rebecca, who unequivocally denies the possibility of a union. Another aspect of Thom’s account that adds complexity to the narrative is his explanation of how it was, then, that the folk story of a romantic relationship between the two continued to be told. Thom’s version suggests that Rebecca was so concemed (and boastful, perhaps) about the possibility of Tecumseh proposing to her that she told several people outside the family, and “her father felt embarrassed” (453). Thom convincingly suggests that a tried- and-true folk method was used to offset that embarrassment; as one white settler tells another,

“Y’know, don’t ye, Jim Galloway says that redskin p’posed to marry his girl Becky. Heard about that? Man, that takes some uppity Indian! Pretty, well-raised gal like her! Man!” He shook his head angrily. “Galloway said she turned him down good and proper, but nice-like. Said she couldn’t be no squaw.” (455)

Galloway apparently has revised the story to be more flattering to his family, then has put it back in the gossip pipeline for redistribution. This seems a very plausible interpretation and explanation of events, aside from the ridiculous use of an unidentifiable dialect here, which—it should be noted—Thom mostly refrains from using elsewhere in the novel. The dialect, it may be supposed, is intended to show the reader (in case the content of the dialogue itself was too subtle) how ignorant these gossipmongers are.

147 Nevertheless, the “Becky episodes” also point to similarities between Thom’s

narrative and Eckert’s, especially Eckert’s drama. Becky openly lusts after Tecumseh; the

passages describing her fretful wait for Tecumseh’s proposal are peppered with

expressions like “She wanted him. Oh, she wanted him! But he was of another

race!” (415), and a scene where Becky, lying in bed in a reverie about her would-be lover,

...sighed and tossed, making the comshuck mattress rustle until her mother’s voice would come out of the darkness...“Becky? Are y ’all right, dear?” “I’m hot,” she had whimpered, throwing off the covers, then lying there feeling the air on her sweatAlamp nightdress. Once she had pulled it up around her waist and had lain there in the dark that way, growing excited in the loins, until she remembered that God could see everything...and had covered herself...with shame. (416)

Passages like this—blue or purple as they might be—serve two functions in the novel. First,

they sharply contrast with Thom’s descriptions of the Shawnees’ far more earthy and

uninhibited sexuality, and they also set Tecumseh up as an object of intense desire, much in

the same way the loincloth-clad male actors in the outdoor drama do in a more literal sense.

Both functions clearly reify age-old white stereotypes about the racial Other: much like

white constructions of African American sexuality, the Shawnee in Thom’s novel and

Eckert’s play are potent, erotic beings, simultaneously arousing desire, fear, and envy

within the Anglo spectator/reader. Too, the language here is patently modeled after romance-novel conventions, and in using this kind of prose, Thom may well be trying to appeal to a female readership—one which is clearly not the intended audience for Eckert’s prose style.

And certainly the issue of the white gaze (and more specifically, perhaps, the white female gaze) is at work elsewhere in Thom’s novel; we are treated to several descriptions of

Tecumseh from the perspective of white characters that periodically remind us of what a fine physical specimen he was, as the following two passages illustrate:

These garments had assumed the shape of his physique, so the depth of his chest and muscularity of his shoulders were very evident....Now just a little over thirty, Tecumseh was all force and dignity....In his simple but

148 beautiful garments, with his erect posture and candid gaze, Tecumseh looked to these people as graceful and elegant as a lord. (354-355)

The commissioners and spectators all had their eyes on this striking warrior chief who, even in unadorned deerhide, made a finer sight than either the white man’s Indians in their dark suits or the garish, befeathered warriors. Some of the whites knew this Tecumseh was a legendary warrior...; others had no idea who he was but could sense his importance, not only by his bearing, but by the expectancy that had fallen over the other warriors. (438)

This second passage, in particular, suggests that Tecumseh’s very body—in its

“Native” perfection-enables him to transcend all other Indians present; in a sense, he becomes here the literal embodiment of Indian and masculine perfection. His clothing, too, reminds us that he is neither an extremist nor a sellout.

Other Shawnee characters are described similarly, though not in as superlative terms as is Tecumseh. Nevertheless, the emphasis still falls on the Native’s “essential” and uninhibited sensuality. When Tecumseh’s sister joins the dance where she and her eventual husband choose each other, the romanticization of the Other’s body and allegedly vociferous sexuality is clear:

Star Watcher admired the smooth, splendid brown muscles of Stands Firm’s strong back and shoulders, buttocks and thighs and calves agleam with sweat and oil in the dancing firelight, and she imagined her hands moving on those hard, shapely muscles...[He] was wearing only a short, narrow, bead-omamented loincloth, beaded moccasins, and a feather in his scalplock. Every line of beautiful muscle was delineated under his fatless skin....All her skin was wide awake to every feeling. When her loose, light doeskin dress swayed around her, it caressed her hips and the tips of her breasts. The desire in her loins was coming awake now, seeming to flow down with every footstep and drumbeat. (153-154)

The similarities between this description and some horrible pseudo-anthropological film from the twenties featuring scantily clad, dancing African “Natives” are disturbing. Thom evokes what Berkhofer calls the “romantic savage” (as opposed to the enlightened savage), a figure that “depend[s] on passion and impulse alone for a direct apprehension of nature in all its picturesqueness, sublimity, and fecundity” (79). As such, Thom’s portrayal seems to cross a line into stereotype at best, and sexual objectification at worst. Granted, he may be pushing the envelope here in an effort to centralize the often marginalized beauty of the

149 Other’s body, and round out his Shawnee characters by not desexing them.‘° But when contrasted with Rebecca’s “shameful” episode with the nightgown above, and combined with the fact that all the objects of desire in this novel are Native Americans, such a positive spin stops dead in its tracks.

Nevertheless, Thom does complicate this issue of the gaze in some interesting ways. The novel creates some intriguing homoerotic tension in a meeting between

Tecumseh and William Henry Harrison. Recalling a time during an aborted peace talk when the two had nearly come to blows, Harrison seems fondly to recall drawing his sword and pointing it “at that deep, wide, muscle-girt chest, that heaving, red-painted, dark-oak barrel of a chest,” the memory of which causes him—like Rebecca—to lie

“thinking of Tecumseh’s eyes, which he had plumbed for so long,” and also of

Tecumseh’s voice: “how he had loved the sound of this man’s voice and the rich music of the Shawnee tongue played in that voice” (495-496). All this prompts the question: who in this novel doesn’t want Tecumseh? No wonder “it was strange to Harrison, this succession of feelings he had had last night” (496). The next day, Harrison and Tecumseh are chatting while sitting on a log, and Tecumseh moves closer and closer to Harrison until

“their shoulders [are] touching,” at which point Harrison moves away, and Tecumseh continues to nudge him along the log until “Harrison [is] sitting on the very end of the log, and Tecumseh [is] pressing firmly against him” (497). While Tecumseh explains that he is doing this to show Harrison how it feels to be continually pushed off one’s territory (and indeed, this episode has the feel of a likely bit of folklore about the two famous men), the homoerotic subtext is played out here, too. Later, Thom ties Harrison’s seemingly sexual feelings to his militaristic ones, as Harrison contemplates encountering Tecumseh in battle—

“seeing each other and going straight at each other with naked steel,” which leaves

Harrison feeling “the delicious chill of dread. What an enemy that man would be!” (510).

Having Harrison desire Tecumseh as an “enemy,” and then eroticizing the relationship

150 between a soldier and his enemy, adds a level of complexity to the intent and motivation behind the white gaze. Tecumseh himself echoes but undercuts this homoerotic tension during his final battle with Harrison, when he muses, “Harrison, O enemy, will you never come as close as you did once, there by your own house, when you pointed your little sword at me?” (669). While Tecumseh here reciprocates Harrison’s lust for battle, he seems far less impressed by Harrison’s prowess, as a warrior or otherwise.

Another way in which the novel complicates the issue of the gaze is by reversing it; at several points, the tables are turned and it is the Shawnee who are gazing at and contemplating the white body. From his first encounter with a white man to his friendship with Rebecca Galloway, Tecumseh, too, is frightened and intrigued by the body of the

“Other”—in this case, the Anglo Other’s body. In Thom’s account, the first white man

Tecumseh meets is the man whom the Shawnee adopt and who comes to be known as Blue

Jacket. Tecumseh finds Blue Jacket’s body, which “was white like a fish’s belly,”

“strange, and...curiously beautiful” (40). But the sight is so outside of his experience that when Blue Jacket runs the gauntlet, Tecumseh can only speak of Blue Jacket’s body as an object, noting that when “the white person’s head...turned slightly,.../r was all red with blood” (41, emphasis mine). Such a strange being cannot possibly be human. After several more encounters, Tecumseh notices that the white body smells different, and his brother Chiksika tells him that “white men had a bad smell around them,” leading

Tecumseh to wonder “how they could bear to be near each other” (76-77). With even further experience, his ideas about white bodies get a little more complicated and ambiguous; for example, when he meets Daniel Boone, the white man’s physique seems to

Tecumseh as if Boone “were a white man who had a pa-waw-ka” (107)—that is, a white body endowed with a Native “soul.” Tecumseh seems similarly impressed with the body of Simon Kenton, “a bigger and more powerful man than he had ever set eyes on before” (127). Curiously, the white person who seems to stir Tecumseh’s interest the

151 least is Rebecca; in passing, he notes that “her body had interested him, even though she was of that race” (425), but elsewhere she is described (from Tecumseh’s perspective) as being pale and scrawny (451 ).

Eventually, Tecumseh develops enough respect for the white man’s body that he shames his fellow warriors into vowing not to torture prisoners after they castrate a white captive (230-233). This episode, of course, clearly parallels the first scene of Eckert’s play, in which Tecumseh admonishes his comrades for killing a white captive. And when he discovers Tenskwatawa eating the cooked flesh of some white captives later in the novel, Tecumseh similarly denounces this lack of respect for the human body. In essence, though, these castigations do more to construct Tecumseh as a human-rights advocate than to portray him as a friend or admirer of Anglos.

Nevertheless, these glimpses of the white body as seen through Tecumseh’s eyes also point toward another aspect of Thom’s novel which distinguishes it from other novelizations of Tecumseh’s history: his seemingly self-conscious construction of white identity. At any rate, “whiteness” does seem to be a far more contested, slippery, and ambiguous identity category here than in either of Eckert’s works, where whites are generally portrayed as being simply “good” or “bad.” There is little range or ambiguity in the characterization of whites in Eckert’s novels, while Thom—in keeping with his politically aware rendering of the Shawnee tale—complicates his white characters’ identities.

While in Eckert’s drama the most vile curse that can be laid on a man—Indian or Anglo—is to accuse him of being a woman, throughout Thom’s account, the worst curse one Indian can lay on another is to accuse him of being white. Both Black Hoof and Little Turtle are chastised, respectively, for having become “fully a white man’s Indian now” (359) and

“wholly a white man’s Indian now” (458). Later, Tecumseh similarly criticizes Big

Warrior, chief of the Creek nation with the accusation that “Your blood is white! Even your skin is growing white, to show it!” (541).

152 Such accusations may seem simplistically essentialist, but Thom is careful to complicate what could be a one-dimensional construction of white identity. From

Tecumseh’s first encounter with whites on, Thom’s novel traces Tecumseh’s own increasingly complex view of and relationship to his enemy. As noted above, on first viewing a white body, it does not even register as human, as he uses the referent “it” in describing his encounter with Blue Jacket. His relationships with various Anglo captives, many of whom are adopted by the Shawnee, gradually introduce Tecumseh to the strange ways of these encroachers, but it is his meetings with Simon Kenton and James Galloway that truly challenge Tecumseh’s own perceptions of white identity. In fact, it is

Galloway’s invitation to dine with his family that forces Tecumseh to consider and reconsider his perceptions of Anglos and how he ought to interact with them:

All the afternoon, Tecumseh had been thinking that he should not go and eat with the white people, who were here, wrongly to Tecumseh’s mind, on Shawnee land. In earlier days, in the south with the Cherokees, he had watched families from cover like this, and sometimes he had shot the men and boys....It was strange to be watching them like this and not attacking. These people were intruders not on the distant lands of his Cherokee brothers, but on the very land where his own town had stood... And yet, now for the first time in many years, the smell of cooking and sounds drifted over the vacancy where Chillicothe had been. This man and his family were making lives and foods grow here....It was therefore hard to blame him as a man. (353-354)

Later, Tecumseh ponders the paradox of why it is he has “cared much for most of the white people I have known, even though they are my chiefest enemy” (427). While the morality of these two passages is fairly simplistic, it is also fairly credible: as we often tell students, the only way that ethnic prejudice and stereotypes can really be battled is through personal experience. And one must credit Thom for giving us a fictional account of

Tecumseh’s interior struggle with these issues; both Eckert’s play and his book tend instead to explain Tecumseh’s alliance with Galloway as being based on a mutual love for the land, thus fostering their connection through an extemal device, rather than through internal struggle. Thom’s portrayal of The Tecumseh/Galloway relationship does much not

153 only to explain the history of that relationship, but to add complexity to constructed Indian and Anglo identities alike.

And truly, it is this resistant reading of Tecumseh’s life story that gives Thom’s text the complexity and insight that raise it above the level of the other novelizations of the

Shawnee warrior’s life. While Thom also struggles with the very complicated and sometimes contradictory problems of representing a historical figure and era accurately, he also seems to take pleasure in crafting a very different story than the one most readers might expect to hear. And in fact, Thom’s project seems to have directly influenced

Eckert’s second account of Tecumseh’s life story, A Sorrow in Our Heart.

E ckert’s Sorrow . Revising the Usual Suspects

Indeed, Eckert’s 1992 Tecumseh: A Sorrow in Our Heart is a fascinating piece of historical revisionism, easily belying Eckert’s own assertion in The Frontiersmen that that book was “fact, not fiction” (“Author’s Note,” no page number). Sorrow proves, to the reader if not the author, that history is fiction, regardless of how many facts it contains; whileSorrow recounts basically the same events as The Frontiersmen, Eckert’s choices about what events to include and not include, the kind of emphasis to be placed on those events, and the lenses through which he filters the events, characters, explanations, and motivations differ so vastly between the two works that they can hardly be said to tell the same story.

Specifically, in the twenty-five years between the two books’ publication dates,

Eckert appears to have shifted his position on the influence and relationship between

Tecumseh and James Galloway so much that Galloway does not even appear in Sorrow's

800+-page narrative. Furthermore, Eckert appears to have been influenced by Thom’s account, or perhaps by larger social forces in the two intervening decades, and thus his more recent work (like Thom’s novel) includes far more description of Shawnee customs

154 and folkways, and also tries to present a more neutral account of “how the (North) West

(Territory) was won”; at any rate. Sorrow offers a far less pro-American point-of-view on the events thanThe Frontiersmen. Furthermore, Eckert introduces new influential characters in Tecumseh’s life who were not at all part of the first narrative, including two captive white girls who teach Tecumseh how to read and speak English (171,257), and also presents some more complicated intra-family relationships, describing how

Tecumseh’s nephew, Spemica Lawba, allegedly became an ally and spy for the U.S. Army

(515-517 and elsewhere), and how his sister, Tecumapese, left her Shawnee husband to marry a French trader (666). Another significant difference in Sorrow's account is

Eckert’s portrayal of Tecumseh as a renegade or outlaw character, this version of the story, unlike the version recounted in The Frontiersmen, stresses that Tecumseh not only separated himself from the main band of the Shawnee, but that later in his career as an

Indian strategist and warrior, he actively opposed and fought against the goals of the mainline Shawnee, whom Eckert characterizes as appeasers in Sorrow. This is a markedly different account of Tecumseh’s role in the tribe than the role presented in The

Frontiersmen, and is the primary means by whichSorrow manages to characterize

Tecumseh as having somehow transcended his “race” (an issue to be discussed in more detail below). And while these additions or shifts in emphasis as a whole tend to enhance

Eckert’s representation of Tecumseh by making his life story more complex, by the same token, their newness—combined with some very striking omissions from Eckert’s earlier work-suggest exactly the notion that Eckert resists: that history is a construction, and as such, is inherently fictitious, no matter how “factual.”

Eckert acknowledges that “there will no doubt be a number of surprises in store for those who followed the activities of Tecumseh” in The Frontiersmen, noting that in the previous work, he had “made use of material that later research proved to be either in error or exaggerated in the primary sources available at the time” (xv), and saying that such

155 errors will be addressed in the notes at the book’s end. Eckert’s reluctance to embrace the ambiguity of his sources and his own account is palpable here, and one wonders why a writer who has spent so much of his career poring over family histories, letters, and scraps of sometimes conflicting evidence should still be so unshakably tied to “facts” and “truth.”

One does admire his insistence on accuracy and documentation, but such a commitment seems more than a little at odds with the goals of a fiction writer, or even the writer of a

“narrative biography,” as Eckert describes Sorrow (xiii). Perhaps—as theKirkus

Reviews critic noted—“narrative biography” is “an apparent euphemism for poetic license” (1570), although Eckert would surely take offense at such a claim.

Nevertheless, as he did in his talk for the Thurber House, Eckert seems very conscious of and even a bit self-righteous about his role as an “outsider” historian, as evidenced not only in the “Author’s Note,” but also through his use of a complicated and nontraditional notation scheme, best described by Gregory Evans Dowd, who reviewed

Sorrow for the Journal o f American History:

Eckert does not engage or assist other scholars. He has no system of citation, only peculiarly coded, dense, alphabetical lists of sources for each chapter....a complicated three-step process that is of little use anyway, since no source is directly cited to substantiate any particular claim....In one note, Eckert openly challenges two points made by another scholar, stating that the historian had disclosed “no specific source references for these contentions.” The same can be said of every contention in Eckert’s thick book. (1597)

It is a justly deserved criticism, but one that misses its mark. Eckert does not want to be a scholarly historian; rather, he seems determined to align himself with the “tribal historians” he so frequently refers to in the long prologue that combines a description of

Tecumseh’s birth with a long and detailed account of Shawnee history (1-41). On multiple occasions in that section, Eckert segues between Tecumseh’s birth narrative and Shawnee history via allusions to the tribal historians. Eckert suggests that the role of the tribal historian was one of the most powerful in a tribe:

Such tribal historians were carefully selected and intensively trained over a period of years with no other goal than to pass on to these rising generations 156 that which was the truth of what was past, without embellishment, without amendment, without personal bias, always with incredible accuracy, and, at the same time, instilling in their listeners a fierce and lasting pride in and for their own people. (6)

The rhetoric here is remarkably similar to that of the “Author’s Note” that almost immediately precedes this passage; in some sense, this reads like Eckert’s own self- determined job description. Thus, it is clear that Eckert’s goal is not to contribute to the scholarly historical work on Tecumseh, but—by writing something that is somehow more sincere, more attuned to an ill-defined “Shawnee” sense of history—to create a piece of work that stands quite apart from traditional scholarly work.

Regardless of Eckert’s insistence that he stands alone in his commitment to

“accuracy,” the twin facts thatSorrow is thematically similar to but factually different from

The Frontiersmen suggests—as the Kirkus Reviews critic phrased it—an “interpretive zeal” that makesSorrow “a biography that works better as fiction” (1570). And the import of these thematic similarities is nowhere better captured than in the seemingly unintentional ambiguity of another reviewer, who comments that “Eckert captures

Tecumseh’s viewpoint and makes clear his pride in the history and culture of his people” (Braun 1201, emphasis mine). The pronouns presumably refer to Tecumseh, but the continued focus in Sorrow (as in The Frontiersmen) on the body (both white and

Native American), and on masculinity (and a concomitant misogyny) suggest that, in fact,

Eckert is really painting a proud portrait of his own ethnic group here.

Another similarity between Eckert’s two novels (and between Eckert’s work and

Thom’s) is, again, the intense, almost obsessive focus on Tecumseh’s physical form. As in Thom’s work, Eckert’s Sorrow portrays Tecumseh as the perfect physical specimen; in fact, at one point, Eckert even writes—a la Thom— that Tecumseh had “not., an ounce of fat on his body” (373). In a longer description, Tecumseh is reverently described in this way:

There could be no doubt that Tecumseh, now only four months from being nineteen, quite well epitomized what a young Shawnee warrior should be. He was neither uncommonly tall nor short, neither slim nor heavy. His physique was excellent, smoothly muscled without being muscle-bound. 157 Walking, standing, or sitting, his posture was erect and his carriage gracefuI....AIl his features were well formed, nicely molded but not extreme in any way, his forehead broad but not bulbous, his nose strongly formed but not overly large or hooked or too straight. By far his most dominant extemal feature was his amazingly expressive eyes, able in an instant to change from gentle warmth to bright points of controlled anger, from sparkling gaiety to deep sorrow, from compassion to iron implacability. (344)

Similarities to “Goldilocks” aside, this passage suggests that Tecumseh’s looks were “just right”—offensive to no one, pleasing to all. In contrast to Tecumseh is Tenskwatawa, whose physical ugliness alerts both his fellow Shawnee and the reader that he is not to be trusted:

The Prophet walked now with a pompous strut, wore furs and feathers and frills that set him apart, painted his face and body and limbs in grotesque ways and had removed die black patch that covered his empty eye socket and placed into the hole a round white stone upon which had been painted a hideous glaring eye. (602)

In Eckert’s fairy-tale like moral scheme, it is easy to tell the heroes from the villains by their relative physical beauty. Never mind that it is a beauty defined and measured on Anglo terms, as evidenced when Eckert writes that Tecumapese’s features are “so cleanly chiseled she might have been sculpted beneath the hands of a Michelangelo” (513). The implication is that people find Tecumseh an attractive leader in part because he is an attractive person;

Dowd suggests that because “Eckert’s leaders are heroic,” “Tenskwatawa...does not fit the bill” (1597), and by thus dismissing Tenskwatawa as an ugly charlatan, Eckert may be misrepresenting the “real” history.

In should be noted, though, that this sort of equation between physicality and heroism also applies to the white settlers in the book. The characters the reader seems to be directed to identify and sympathize with are all described as superior physical specimens, too; this is especially true of the character of Simon Kenton. During the brief period when

Kenton is a captive of the Shawnee, Tecumseh is awed by his physical prowess: “How could the whites, usually so weak and unskilled in fighting, produce men like this giant warrior?...The story of what [Kenton] had done this day would be told for a long time to

158 come around the council fires” (142); later, Tecumseh experiences a “welling of

admiration...for this huge white man” (183). Still, it is clear here that Kenton’s

admirableness is a product of his sheer size and strength, not his actual appearance or

appeal.

In most other instances, “whiteness” as a physical characteristic is undesirable and

disdained. When the Anglo runaway Marmaduke Van Swearingen is adopted by the

Shawnee and renamed Blue Jacket, he must go through a ceremony to rid himself of his

white blood (61). Eckert also does a neat bit of signifying on his Anglo readers when

Tecumseh laments the incursion of whites settlers into the Missouri Territory: “It is well

known to us that when one white like that moves in, others soon follow. What will happen

there is what already happened here” (510). Intentional or not, this passage is a nice send-

up of the “There goes the neighborhood” sentiment that became cliché among Archie

Bunker-types after desegregation. And, like many contemporary Anglos’ view of Others,

the Shawnee find it hard to distinguish between the white settlers; at one point, Chiksika

suggests that it is pointless to try to do so, since they are all enemies: “I believe what my

father said to me moments before he died—that the whites mean only to devour our

lands....He did not say just the British or the French or the Americans—he said the whites,

and they are all whites” (277, emphasis Eckert’s).

Nevertheless, as in The Frontiersmen, Eckert seems very willing to continue

making strong distinctions between men and women of all ethnicities, again positing a very

exaggerated sense of masculinity that at times incorporates a hefty dose of misogyny. As

in The Frontiersmen and the outdoor drama, cowardly warriors are called women; I noted

at least eight instances of this in Sorrow, with some epithets seemingly copied directly from

the earlier novel (as well as the play): “Are you a woman, afraid of blood?” (310); “And

you call this woman your brother, Chiksika?” (311, emphasis Eckert’s); and Tecumseh’s biting directive to the British General Proctor, “You are unfit to command. Go and put on

159 petticoats” (771). A couple of the more innovative sexist remarks are worth closer

analysis, however. As Chiksika is dying from battle wounds, he reassures Tecumseh by

saying, “Happy am I, little brother...to fall in battle and not die in a wegiwa like an old

woman, to which I would prefer the carrion birds to pick my bones” (382). Chiksika’s dying words (almost identical to those uttered in The Frontiersmen, it should be noted) suggest once again that the most powerless and shameful position in the world is to be a woman, even worse an old woman. The elaboration about the carrion birds in this version only drives the point home further.

Stunningly, Eckert seems completely oblivious to the weird contradictions about the role of women he establishes in this novel when, in a single page, he has Tecumseh urging the tribes into battle by reminding them that they “are not women” and then invokes the wrath of “our great mother earth,” warning that the warriors’ “ears will be filled with the rumble and roar of her anger. She will cause your houses to fall to the ground and the bones of every man to tremble with the trembling of the ground” (662). Apparently, female deities are accorded unlimited fury and power, but Shawnee women are ornaments at best and obstacles at worst. As Leroy Eid, reviewer of Sorrow for the journal Historian notes, “Tecumseh’s love life takes up about two...pages” (383), an accurate estimate.

Tecumseh’s two marriages to Indian women each are described in about four paragraphs, until the first wife is “divorced” for being “domineering, accusatory, berative, and demanding” (489) and the second dies (502). Even in his description of Nonhelema, the

Shawnee woman warrior, Eckert emphasizes not her prowess in battle, but rather has

Tecumseh musing about “what Shawnee chief it might be who could manage a wife who was such a giant of a woman and so accustomed to dominance” (130). These episodes, with their depressingly misogynistic messages, provide a very clear sense that—despite his claims to be telling this stoiy from the Shawnee perspective—Eckert is merely projecting his own very traditional and problematic notions of gender onto the Shawnee.

160 What makes the above even more troublesome is that these are the episodes where

women actually do play some kind of role in the narrative; elsewhere, they are either

completely absent or trivial, as in the scene where Tecumseh meets with an American

envoy and asks “his woman to bring them coffee” (645). “His woman” has no name, and

disappears as suddenly as she appeared, and this scene and others where Tecumseh has a

walk-on bedmate during his travels indicate the novel’s view of women as disposable and

fit only to serve or to meet sexual needs. During one scene where Tecumapese tries to

answer a question Tecumseh asks about why peace with the whites seems impossible, she

begins a thoughtful reply only to be interrupted and displaced by Chiksika (210-212).

Better she be regarded as a work of art, a Michelangelo, than that she be heard. Perhaps no

other aspect of Eckert’s novel more fully belies his assertion that he is only “reconstituting”

history than the issue of his representation of women, for surely both Shawnee and Anglo

women played a far greater and more integral role in this episode of American history.

The above thematic similarities betweenSorrow and Eckert’s earlier works are only

half the story, however. There are also a couple of thematic differences that go a long way

toward suggesting what Eckert’s agenda in this novel is—and in fact, go a long way

toward suggesting what all of the Anglo novelists writing about Tecumseh are doing. The

most notable difference between The Frontiersmen and Sorrow is Sorrow’s addition of

material about Shawnee customs and folklife; like Thom, Eckert appears to be using folklore as an authenticating device, a way presumably to add depth and credibility to the text. In fact, one wonders if Eckert added this material in response to Thom’s novel, which would have come out three years before Eckert’s Sorrow (when one would assume

Eckert was working on his own novel or considering it). None of the reviews of either book suggests this kind of influence, but in actual reading it seems palpable, especially since Eckert virtually repeats some of Thom’s folk references. Among the most notable of these parallels are Eckert’s descriptions of the ritual through which Tecumseh acquires his

161 “pawawka” or talisman (II8-121) and the “frolic dance” by which Shawnees allegedly selected mates (191, 196-97). Both of these rituals are also thoroughly presented in

Thom’s Panther, as well. When reading the passages in Eckert’s novel, one cannot help but feel a sense of one-upmanship driving the narrative, as if Eckert were irritated that

Thom had stolen his line.

But perhaps the most significant difference between Eckert’s Sorrow and his earlier works lies in the characterization of Tecumseh himself. In stark contrast to the way

Tecumseh was represented in the earlier texts. Sorrow paints Tecumseh as a renegade, almost an outcast from mainstream Shawnee society. In fact, in many ways Tecumseh is dissociated not only from the Shawnee, but from Indians in general; the most recurrent way this occurs is through Tecumseh’s constant objection to the torturing of white captives.

Certainly Tecumseh objected to this behavior in those earlier texts as well, but in Sorrow,

Tecumseh’s disgust seems motivated not so much by a belief in universal human rights as by a disgust with Shawnee tradition; when, at age ten, he expresses his disgust with the practice to Tecumapese, she replies by reminding him that

“All throughout the history of our people it has been our tradition to torture prisoners....It is said that by our doing this, the courage of the prisoner, as he dies, is taken into ourselves...” “When I see it happen,” Tecumseh admitted, “I want to shout at the others to stop, but I know they wouldn’t and so all I can do then is take myself away...” (161-62)

The clear implication here is that Tecumseh’s trouble is with Shawnee tradition, and his solution is to separate himself from it. He makes this point quite explicitly to Chiksika on another tribal matter later in the novel:

Tecumseh suggested, in what could only be considered as blasphemy, that a tradition, if found to be unjust, should be closely reexamined and perhaps its precepts revised if not suitable to the circumstances that exist at present, so long after the tradition was established. (263)

Chiksika reprimands him severely for even thinking such a thing, although folklorists might delight in Tecumseh’s endorsement of reinvented tradition. Nevertheless,

162 Tecumseh’s intellectual challenge to Shawnee tradition—which he is later able to enact—

suggests that Tecumseh somehow transcends tradition, and thus that he transcends his

people.

Nowhere does this seem more clear than in a scene later in the book when

Tecumseh—seemingly having given up his appeal to change tradition by appealing to his

fellow Shawnees’ humanity—instead asks them to think about how the tradition makes

them look: “Most, if not all of you...know my feelings against the torture of prisoners. I

ask that you refrain from what you are planning to do here. It is by such acts that we are

called savages or barbarians” (408). Tecumseh’s attempt at an image makeover for the

Shawnee fails: the warriors kill the prisoner anyway, which suggests that, in fact, they are

savages or barbarians, and that Tecumseh is the only humane one among them.

To his credit, Eckert does seem to make an attempt to parallel such Shawnee

brutalities with Anglo ones, but these efforts fail more often than they succeed. In one

notable passage, Eckert (as he does in The Frontiersmen) follows the description of a

Shawnee ambush of an Ohio River keelboat with an account of the Anglo massacre at

Gnadenhuttun, but the passages are just that: a description versus an account. The

Shawnee attack is described in glorious and gory detail, the Shawnees “yipping and shrieking,” the white babies “ripped screaming from the arms of their mothers” to be

“swung in a vicious circle and...slammed against a large rock” (281-82). In contrast, the

Gnadenhutten massacre is explained very factually:

At Gnadenhutten the 96 [Moravian Indians] who were still bound-35 men, 27 women, and 34 children...were systematically executed by being struck from behind with a huge coopers’ mallet and their scalps taken off. When the deed was completed, Williamson had ordered both the church and the house burned with the bodies inside, which was done. (288)

While there is something chilling about the clinicalness of Eckert’s description of the

Gnadenhutten incident—the cold logic with which the murders were carried out-its starkness also suggests that somehow the passionless American killings are easier to take,

163 more explicable, than the passionate Shawnee ones. The net effect is that this attempt to balance Shawnee and Anglo atrocities fails. Through all this. Tecumseh emerges as the reader’s sole “hope,” the only one who can see past all the barbarism. Yet, as the reader knows, his compassion only dooms him.

Eckert builds on this characterization of Tecumseh as “one of us” by having his character spout a pluralistic worldview and by having white characters confirm the reader’s suspicion that Tecumseh is different from other Shawnees and other Indians in general.

Tecumseh’s pluralism begins with other Indian tribes but eventually extends to whites, as the following two passages illustrate. In the first, Tecumseh realizes through his travels among different tribes that their similarities outweigh their differences;

[D]uring their stays with the Miamis and Potawatomies, Sacs and Kickapoos, Sioux and Winnebagoes, Kickapoos and Cherokees, [Tecumseh] absorbed a great deal of the culture of each, which differed so widely. At the same time he came to the reinforced realization that, though tribes were different in many of their habits and customs, yet the people themselves were basically similar, irrespective of tribe or race in the way they worshipped. They were all humans and they all had human desires and needs that were essentially alike....Each had the fundamental cravings to love and be loved, fears to overcome, ambitions to attempt fulfilling and basic human values to be nurtured. (381 )

In the second, Tecumseh advises his nephew that he is fully aware that such intra-group diversity exists among whites, too: “No people...are all bad, Spemica Lawba, just as none are all good” (400). How can a reader argue or be threatened by such a rational and tolerant individual (with emphasis on the individual)? In case we needed further assurance that Tecumseh has somehow transcended others of his “race,” at varying points white characters note that “here before [us] [is] no savage one step up from barbarism” (591),

“no ordinary Indian,” but rather “a man of great intelligence and power” (630).

A backhanded compliment, to be sure, but also an efficient way to defang the threatening

“Other.”

In my mind, though, this rhetorical strategy works less to the benefit of the reader than it does to the benefit of the author himself; by implying that Tecumseh was not your

164 usual “savage,” Eckert neatly circumvents the ethical dilemma of speaking for the Other.

Indeed, Thom would seem to be operating by the same theory, although to his credit, he does seem more attuned to the potential ethical morass of his task. The only novelist writing about Tecumseh who does not make such claims is Orson Scott Card, and he is able to do so only because he has found a way to evade the complicated issues raised in the other novels—fact vs. fiction, authentic representation vs. colonialism—by writing an explicitly fantastic novel. Red Prophet.

C ard’s Red Prophet'. Trading Fact for Fantasy

After the sort of “thrust and parry,” point-by-point struggle in these three novels by

Eckert and Thom, then, it is something of a relief to approach Orson Scott Card’s Red

Prophet and discover that historical accuracy and cultural authenticity are not only nonissues in his narrative, but that he in fact seems to eschew such concems altogether. “

However, even in its apparent postmodern liberation from “fact,” Card’s almost wholly fantastic novel nevertheless caters to the same (and by now predictable) stereotypes about

Native American identity, as represented in the figure of Tecumseh.

In fact, while Card’s “Author’s Note” also precedes the text, it functions—as discussed above—to steer the reader away from a direct comparison between history and the fiction of Red Prophet. In fact. Card carefully contrives this by slightly altering the names of both Tecumseh (“called “Ta-Kumsaw” here) and Tenskwatawa (“Tenskwa-Tawa”)'" and by providing a couple of maps at the novel’s outset that shows familiar-yet-strange geographic names: the Wabash is the “Wobbish,” the Miami River is the “My-Ammy,” and the Ohio territory is the Hio territory. He offers the reader a parallel universe “whose history is often similar to, but often quite different from our own” (“Author’s Note,” no page number). And certainly. Card’s account does more than just take liberties with

Tecumseh’s history; it fully revises it, suggesting that a fantastically gifted white boy living

165 near Tippecanoe, Alvin Miller, Jr., is intimately involved—if not directly responsible—for

the success or failure of the Indian union Ta-Kumsaw and Tenskwa-Tawa are trying to

create. It is Alvin who helps heal Lolla-Wossiky (Tenskwa-Tawa’s name before his

“rebirth” as the prophet), thus enabling him to tap into his prophetic powers; it is Alvin

who must accompany Ta-Kumsaw for an entire year, acting as a human talisman against

Tecumseh’s death.

It seems ironic, then, that in many ways. Card’s representation of the roles of both

Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa seem much closer to those described by Edmunds in his

biographies of the brothers.'^ In Red Prophet, the focus is on Tenskwa-Tawa—or rather,

initially it is on Lolla-Wossiky, the “whiskey Red”'"* who lies outside William Henry

Harrison’s office door in a perpetual drunken stupor. Calling Lolla-Wossiky his “pet Red”

(14), Harrison fails to recognize the signs of LoIIa-Wossiky’s prophetic skills, and is thus more afraid of his brother Ta-Kumsaw than of the truly dangerous “Red.” In diametric opposition to the characterization of Tenskwatawa in Eckert’s accounts. Card’s Tenskwa-

Tawa may be physically ugly, but he is not the selfish, opportunistic con artist he is portrayed as elsewhere. Rather, we are told early on that

Mother loved Ta-Kumsaw very much, more than any other mother in the tribe loved any other son; but even so, she loved Lolla-Wossiky more. Many times she told them all how baby Lolla-Wossiky cried the first time the air grew bitter cold each winter. She could never get him to stop, no matter how she covered him with bearskins and buffalo robes. Then one winter he was old enough to talk, and he told her why he cried. “All the bees are dying,” he said, that was Lolla-Wossiky, the only Shaw-Nee who ever felt the death of bees. (35)

In fact, it is the intensity of his connection to nature that drives Lolla-Wossiky to drink; the presence of the white man so disturbs his connection to the earth that he must drink to numb the pain the disturbance causes. And it is his prophetic gift which enables him to shun alcohol, re-name himself, and both formulate the idea for and take on what Card suggests was the lead role in creating the Indian amalgamation: “This was where

[Tenskwa-Tawa] would call the Reds together, teach them what he saw in his vision, and

166 help them to be, [sic] not the strongest, but strong; not the largest, but large; not the freest, but free” (98). In Card’s formulation, Ta-Kumsaw is a magnetic leader and a fierce warrior, but he is no prophet; he is always secondary to Tenskwa-Tawa.

Not that Ta-Kumsaw is happy about this: in fact. Card represents him as being at best cranky, and at worst jealous and arrogant about having to share power with his brother. As Measure, one of the white brothers captured by Ta-Kumsaw, observes, “Ta-

Kumsaw looked annoyed, but that was pretty normal for him” (174). His other brother,

Alvin, who travels extensively with Tecumseh later, also says that “traveling with Ta-

Kumsaw was like traveling alone, when it came to company” (273). And Ta-Kumsaw is no more congenial with his own brother; when Tenskwa-Tawa orders Ta-Kumsaw to take

Alvin with him on his travels, Ta-Kumsaw resists, shouting “Ta-Kumsaw does not obey these mad visions! Ta-Kumsaw is the face of the land, the voice of the land!...The voice of the land doesn’t obey a one-eyed whiskey Red” (178). He continues to reject his brother’s prophecies (see also 195) right up until he is forced to concede at the novel’s end that Tenskwa-Tawa was right; in a complete reversal of Eckert’s portrayals, it is Ta-

Kumsaw who must submit to Tenskwa-Tawa’s authority, who must beg forgiveness: “It was the Prophet’s gifts the Red folk needed now, not those of a warrior like Ta-

Kumsaw...a bloody-handed man who led his people to destruction....[Ta-Kumsaw] wept and knelt at his brother’s feet, clinging to his knees” (308-309).

And this is another point where Card’s account diverges sharply from the representations of Tecumseh in all the other novels: whereas all three of those novels (as well as Eckert’s drama) emphasize Tecumseh’s near-pacifism (or rather, his belief in

“ethical” violence) Red Prophet disavows this claim. Ta-Kumsaw is a warrior, through and through; while he is known among whites as an opponent of torture (155), Card seems to credit Tenskwa-Tawa with originating this belief. Some of the whites assume Tenskwa-

167 Tawa has become a Quaker, in fact, because he is so committed to nonviolence. And the brothers disagree bitterly about their philosophies on violence:

“Stand at my side in that battle,” said Ta-Kumsaw. “You’ll lose by your killing,” said the Prophet. “I’ll win my cause.” “By dying.” “If the land calls for my death. I’ll answer.” “And all your people with you.”... “Not me. Not my people. We won’t stretch out our neck for the White man’s knife.” (196, emphasis Card’s)

And of course, as noted above, Ta-Kumsaw eventually comes to see that his brother was right about this all along. In a nice bit of irony, though, Ta-Kumsaw does express his own bemusement that while the Anglos are so quick to condemn Native American torture, they fail to see how central persecution is to their own Christian beliefs; looking around at the statues of saints in the cathedral at Detroit, Ta-Kumsaw notes that they are all “shown being tortured in the most gruesome ways” (207).

And that example perhaps best underscores the fact that—despite this seemingly more historically accurate portrait of each brother’s contribution to the cause of Indian unity—Card’s agenda is definitely not to set the record straight. Rather, Red Prophet sets up an elaborate Christian allegory, suggesting that—with the final defeat of Tecumseh’s cause—the whites effectively drove themselves out of the Edenic American landscape. The novel also functions as a fairly traditional bildungsroman, in which the ten-year-old protagonist, Alvin Miller, Jr., leaves home for a year, during which he is apprenticed

(spiritually) to older men and retums no longer his mother’s “sweet little Alvin” (311).

These two seemingly opposed directives merge in the fact that Alvin and Tenskwa-

Tawa are spiritually drawn to each other, in fact, after being led on a “vision quest” to the white village on the Tippecanoe, Tenskwa-Tawa realizes that Alvin is the “dream beast” who led him there, and Alvin heals Tenskwa-Tawa’s emotional wounds, allowing him to become the Prophet (90-95). In tum, Tenskwa-Tawa helps the then six-year-old Alvin understand his healing powers—when they can be appropriately used, and how to access

168 them. The mutual “dream beasts” part ways, then, until four years later when Ta-Kumsaw rescues Alvin and his brother Measure from a renegade band of Indians allied with William

Henry Harrison, and brings Alvin to his camp on Lake Michigan, where Tenskwa-Tawa waits.

It is this second meeting that truly sets up the religious allegory. The narrative does not clearly explain Tenskwa-Tawa’s motivation for doing so, but—in what seems to be an effort to help Alvin understand his own “calling”—Tenskwa-Tawa commences a Christ-like display of his own mysterious powers:

Ta-Kumsaw handed his brother a flint-tipped arrow. The Prophet sat down in the sand and jammed the point of the arrow into the sole of his left foot, then his right foot. Blood oozed copiously from the wounds. Then he did the same to his hands, jabbing himself so deep in the palm that it was bleeding on the top side of his hands, too.... “This is the power of the Red man—the blood of his body—the fire of the land!” Then he tumed and started walking out into Lake Mizogan. No, not into the lake— it. Alvin couldn’t hardly believe it, but under the Prophet’s bloody feet the water became smooth and flat as glass, and the Prophet was standing on it. (161, emphasis Card’s)

Tenskwa-Tawa’s “bloody footprints [mark] the smooth path through the storm” so that

Alvin can follow him onto the lake, something he feels compelled to do “like Moses when he saw the burning bush” (162). A1 is able to walk across water himself because “the

Prophet loved him....Whatever the Prophet was doing, he used his own blood and pain to do it with” (163).

The parallel drawn here between Tenskwa-Tawa and Christ is unmistakable, and more than a little shocking. The allegory seems to work on several different levels. On the one hand, we seem directed to understand by this comparison that Tenskwa-Tawa is, among the Shawnee and their allies, a religious figure perhaps on par with Christ. At the very least, he does become the Shawnee Moses in this account, since it is he who leads his people out of the East and to the “promised land” west of the Mississippi. Such an analogy seems designed to legitimate Tenskwa-Tawa and his prophecies by aligning them

169 with a belief system perhaps more familiar and palatable among his readers; however, in so

doing, the analogy also reinforces the “primacy” of a Christian belief system. This point is

underscored earlier when Revered Thrower, the minister of Alvin’s church, defends an

alleged “Red-lover,” the subtly named Armor-of-God, by suggesting that Armor knows

which side is the right one: “The Lord God loves all his children, even the heathens....But

we all know that if it ever comes to fighting between Christian and heathen, Armor-of-God

will stand on the side of righteousness” (150). Thus, we see that while Card appears to be

taking a jab at Thrower here, ultimately, in the extended allegory linking Tenskwa-Tawa

and Christ, Christ always has to come out on top. It is the Christ story that illuminates the

plight of the Shawnee, not the other way around.

This dynamic is amply illustrated again after the Battle of Tippecanoe, when

Tenskwa-Tawa again takes to the water, this time as a way of stopping the slaughter of his

people: “[A]ll at once the creek went smooth as glass...he could still see a solitary Red

man walking on the water, just like Jesus in the story” (242). The sight leads the whites

not only to stop their massacre, but to cry ‘What have I done? What have I done?’ The cry

was echoed be a dozen, a hundred, three hundred voices” (243). Again, the reference to

the crucifixion is unmistakable; and here, William Henry Harrison becomes Pontius Pilate, denying the holiness of the spectacle and disavowing his involvement (246-47). The net effect is not to illuminate the Prophet’s teachings and their validity in a Shawnee context,

but to subsume them into Christianity.

Card, a member of the Mormon Church, may simply be trying to enact the belief from the Book of Mormon that Christ not only came to the United States but interacted with

Native Americans. In fact, folklorist Brian Attebery, the only literary critic to have published any work on Red Prophet, contends that the novel is attempting to revive the vernacular (non-Church sanctioned) Mormon belief in and folklore about the supernatural and folk magic; in so doing, Attebery argues. Card may be indirectly critiquing the official

170 church. This interpretation seems plausible, but raises the question: why use the story of

Tecumseh to do it? Again, this familiar folk figure gets reinscribed to serve more local and particular concems. Furthermore, the conflation of the Shawnee Prophet and Christ—while a fascinating and compelling analogy—ultimately fails, just like Tenskwa-Tawa’s baptism early in the novel: he feels nothing except the chill of the water he’s immersed in, and in fact finds Christianity a very empty, “foreign” belief system. If Card is really trying to chastise white culture for the variety of ways it massacred Native American cultures, why subsume Native American spiritualities under Christianity, by having the great Shawnee

Prophet become Christ? On the surface, this “Christianization” of the Tecumseh myth represents only another form of colonialism.

On another level, though. Card appears to be trying to establish a sort of archetypal link between Shawnee spirituality and Christianity, via a Campbellian dynamic of

“universalism.” As such, the novel suggests that under the skin, we are all alike, an interpretation that seems especially plausible given that Alvin himself eventually embodies this theme literally by housing a “Red ” soul in his “White” body. Nevertheless, just as

Alvin’s Red soul is masked by his whiteness, so Tenskwa-Tawa’s spirituality is couched here in purely Christian terms. This spiritual hybridization—which ultimately reverts back to its essentialized component parts—reflects the novel’s representation of ethnic identity, as well.

Despite its attempts to complicate and merge the two, in the end, the narrative constructs both Anglo and Indian identities in an entirely essential ized way. Red Prophet suggests that the two ethnic groups are virtually different species, and significantly, the distinction between the two has to do with the relationship of each to the land. As noted at the outset of this dissertation. Native Americans have long been called the “first ecologists”

(Cornell 105), but Card takes this to an extreme: not only are the “Reds” of his novel more respectful of the land, but they actually have an entirely different relationship with the land.

171 When a white man tramps through the woods, “the land rebel[s] against his step: crackling underfoot, bending the wrong way, shouting out to the Red man. Here was where the enemy stood!” (36). Meanwhile, “Reds [don’t] leave footprints” (133) because the land

“covers” for them, rewards their respect with a kind of supernatural nurturing. It is this

“green sense” or “green music,” as characters in the book variously call it, that enables Ta-

Kumsaw and his war party to cover two hundred miles on foot in a day, because when “the

Red man called on the strength of the land to help him,”

The ground pushed back against his feet, adding to his strength. The bushes parted, making paths; space appeared where there was no space; Ta- Kumsaw raced across streams and rivers so quickly that his feet did not touch the bottom of the stream, merely sank just enough to find purchase on the water itself....The land answered by feeding him, giving him strength. (198)

It is this very romantic notion of Native Americans being in greater harmony with the land— and the land reciprocating in supernatural ways—that “proves” that “Reds” and “Whites” are essentially different. But as Gerald Viznor has succinctly noted, “The romance of nature and the other is a mode of dominance in literature” (29): No matter how benevolent or positive such an equation appears to be, its ultimate effect is domination.

At first, it might appear that Card is trying to subvert this equation when we discover that Alvin—the ten-year-old white boy—is also able to hear this “green music”; he is “a White boy who walks like a Red man” (178), a boy who prompts Indians to ask, “Is he White like his skin, or Red in his heart?” (200). Notably, though, A1 says he can only hear the green music and feel the green sense when he “wasn’t rightly paying attention to

[his] own skin” (142). In other words, A1 is only able to connect with nature when he isn’t

“White.” Regardless, Ta-Kumsaw sees this gift that AI has and decides that he “should teach him to be Red....perhaps this boy of all Whites could learn to feel the land” (201).

As Tenskwa-Tawa remarks, “If anyone can tum a White boy Red, Ta-Kumsaw can”

(197).

172 “If anyone can tum a White boy Red, Ta-Kumsaw can”: that phrase, perhaps more effectively than any sentence in any of the novelizations of Tecumseh’s life, most succinctly and perhaps unwittingly conveys the underlying motive for all these contemporary retellings of Tecumseh’s life. Tecumseh, as a folk figure, has the power to tum the Anglo reader or spectator “Red”: by hearing and understanding his life story, we can somehow not only absolve ourselves for historical wrongs, but come closer to shedding our own ethnic identity and acquiring that of the “Other.”

This idea is reiterated in the climax of Card’s novel, the Battle of Tippecanoe, where Tenskwa-Tawa’s pacifist followers are mowed down by William Henry Harrison’s troops; it is only when the Prophet walks on the water that the WTiites stop the slaughter and realize what they have done, as noted above. But the Prophet claims that this realization alone is not enough; the men must then tell the full story, repeatedly, daily, like the Ancient Mariner. As Tenskwa-Tawa admonishes the troops, who stand with blood dripping from their hands:

Tell the whole story. Leave nothing out. Don’t say that someone fooled you—you all knew when you fired on people who had no weapons that what you did was murder....So tell the story as it happened, and if you tell it true, your hands will be clean....If some stranger comes along, and you don’t tell him the whole story before you sleep, then the blood will come back on your hands, and stay there until you do tell him....[E]very day of your life you’ll have to find someone who has never heard the story from your lips before, and tell it to him—every day!—or your hands will drip with blood. (245-247)

This is a powerful narrative strategy, and shows that Card has a real sense of the functions of some kinds of oral storytelling—its ability to satisfy a compulsive need to unburden oneself, to keep history alive so it will not be repeated. What the narrative also suggests, though, is that perhaps by continually retelling the untellable story, we can perhaps come closer to identifying with, if not outright tuming into, that which we have destroyed.

In both positive and negative ways. Red Prophet suggests that such a goal is ultimately unattainable. Despite its being categorized as fantasy, the novel seems unable to

173 disrupt cultural assumptions about the inevitability of history and the permanence of ethnic difference. Tenskwa-Tawa rejects Armor-of-God’s hope that one day there will be “no difference between Red and White,” since he knows that this would mean the erasure of

“Red” culture in favor of “White” (74), and the narrative never suggests an alternative to the “Reds,” led by Tenskwa-Tawa, moving across the Mississippi and establishing a separate, segregated nation. Perhaps Card believes that there are limits to his fantasy- readers’ imaginations. Even Alvin, who retums home “more like a Red man” (309), has to concede that eventually he will be “White again in [his] step” (310). Thus, as the novel ends, the narrative leaves us with no possibility of a dynamic relationship between the two cultures: Whites are Whites, Reds are Reds, and never the twain shall meet—except in the ongoing narrative spilled out by the repentant White settlers at Tippecanoe.

To be fair. Card’s account—by virtue of its resistance to being bound by historical accuracy—offers a more complex, if equally troubling account of Tecumseh’s life story.

The Christian allusions, the supernatural elements of the plot, and the direct—if somewhat misguided—confrontation of the ethnic dilemma inherent in this story (and the compulsive need to tell it) make this a provocative and insightful revision of the usual story. Card succeeds in taking Tecumseh’s story out of its historical context and casting it in its

(properly) larger mythical one.'^

In fact, the most astounding mythical aspect of Red Prophet~as well as one of its most fantastic elements—is the presence of the character of Napoleon Bonaparte. In Red

Prophet, Napoleon not only makes a military visit to French Canada, but he also acts as Ta-

Kumsaw’s military co-leader in the Battle of Detroit. And you thought that Tecumseh was allied with the British during his final campaigns in the territory. One is left to wonder, then, why Card has brought Napoleon into this at all. In many ways, he seems to exist as a foil for both a foil and parallel for Ta-Kumsaw; as Ta-Kumsaw himself suggests at their first meeting, Napoleon will be remembered as “the greatest general who ever lived. And I

174 will be known as the greatest Red” (204). Also, at the novel’s end, Napoleon is being shipped back to France for trial as a traitor, and he ponders to himself that “he would never find his equal in this world, unless it was God himself, or Nature” (308); this scene of

Napoleon’s return to his people in defeat is followed immediately by an account of Ta-

Kumsaw’s arrival at Tenskwa-Tawa’s new home across the Mississippi. It seems unclear what Card’s object in drawing this parallel is. At one tum, the comparison flatters;

Napoleon is described as being a leader of intense personal magnetism, able to charm even the most reluctant follower to his cause. So would seem to be the case with Tecumseh, too, who traveled broadly, encouraging tribes once hostile to the Shawnee to support his plan for unity. At another tum, though. Card’s characterization of Napoleon also stresses the Corsican general’s megalomania, and the ways it blinds him to the “inevitable” course of historical change. Are we to assume that this was Tecumseh’s weakness as a leader, too? Certainly, Card’s characterization of Ta-Kumsaw does suggest that Ta-Kumsaw was more warrior than visionary, but it still seems a stretch to link his fate—both literally and figuratively—to that of Napoleon’s.

Perhaps the conjoining of Napoleon and Tecumseh’s careers is designed, instead, as another way of “humanizing” Tecumseh, giving an Anglo reader a key to his character by equating it with what may be a more familiar historical figure. This seems clear by

Card’s evocation of a familiar trope in all of these novels, that of Tecumseh’s literacy.

During their first meeting, Napoleon surprises Ta-Kumsaw by asking, “Do these peasant squatters south of here know that you’ve read Newton, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Adam

Smith?”, to which Ta-Kumsaw replies, “I don’t think they know I can read their languages” (204). It is only later that we discover that is was an Anglo girl—Becca

Weaver'®—who taught Ta-Kumsaw to read and write English (289). Once again, we are faced with the apparently requisite information about how and why Tecumseh became literate; and in many ways, Napoleon seems to traverse the narrative just to ask this pointed

175 question about Ta-Kumsaw's knowledge so that the reader may be satisfied with the “Red” man’s apparent civility.

And this brings us to the final, and crucial question of this chapter why detail

Tecumseh’s “reading list” at all? To conclude, I will discuss how each of the four novels incorporates the issue of Tecumseh’s literacy, and then offer some speculation about why it is so important that Tecumseh be fictionalized as a literate subject, since I feel that in exploring that question, we will come to a greater understanding of the kind of “cultural work” these novels attempt.

Literacy and Readability While all four of the novels discussed above address issues of gender and ethnicity to varying degrees and in a variety of both simplistic and complex ways, the one premise all three authors appear to agree on, and the single trope they use more or less uniformly, is the issue of Tecumseh’s literacy. In neither of his biographies of Tecumseh or

Tenskwatawa does Edmunds say that either was able to read or write English, and in fact,

Gregory Evans Dowd, an historian who reviewed Eckert’s A Sorrow in Our Heart for the

Journal of American History, remarks that it will “surprise other Tecumseh scholars, ethnohistorians, and historians at large” to leam that “Tecumseh was fully literate” (1597).

Yet all three novelists make an a priori assumption that Tecumseh can, in fact, both read and write English (in Card’s account, he is also literate in French), and all four novels make an explicit issue not only of the fact of Tecumseh’s literacy, but also go to some lengths to explain how and why he became literate, and how he is able to wield his literacy as a strategic weapon in his war against the white settlers. That Eckert, Thom, and Card as different as their narrative agendas appear to be—would all be willing to purport this single piece of unsubstantiated “fact” raises important questions about why Tecumseh must necessarily be literate in all of the Anglo accounts of his life.

176 In Eckert’s The Frontiersmen, the “agents” of Tecumseh’s ability to read and write

English are an adopted Anglo captive, Stephen Ruddell (known among the Shawnee, allegedly, as “Big Fish”) and later, Rebecca Galloway. As is also the case in Thom’s book, Tecumseh is in awe of James Galloway’s library and conversations about books form the basis of their friendship (552-553). Eckert goes so far as to claim that “there was only one [Shawnee] who could not only speak [English], but read and write it with relative fluency. This was Tecumseh” (445). But Ruddell not only aids Tecumseh’s reading and writing skills; he also aids Tecumseh’s cultural literacy, knowledge which apparently serves him well: “[T]he knowledge Tecumseh had picked up from the white youth—not only the language but much knowledge of the customs, beliefs and social structure of the whites—was always to be of benefit to him” (446). Later, Rebecca “spent long hours teaching him the better use of her own tongue” (553), apparently refining Tecumseh’s command of English.

Why is it, then, that the novel’s representations of Tecumseh’s literacy are so inconsistent and conflicting? At one point, Tecumseh pens a letter to Governor Edward

Tiffin that Eckert includes in its entirety. Very significantly, however—as with other correspondence quoted in the book—this letter is not footnoted; it is thus impossible to know whether Eckert’s version is taken verbatim from an original text or is, instead, reconstructed/“reconstituted.” One suspects the latter, given the letter’s seemingly conscious effort to warp the grammar in stereotypical and uneven ways:

We have immediately retum our prayers to the great Spirit above, for you, and will never forgotten your goodness towards us, and we thanks him for having given us such a good and wise man....We had all got our young men and young women together to try to lam them good things...to fixt ourselves in a good place for to raiz shanty full grain for our women and children. (547)

Later in the same letter, though, Tecumseh “writes”:

We thought we were doing well, particularly when it was requested by our Father Jefferson to do so...but to our sorry and great surprise, we were interrupted and all the people of Mad River or about were preparing to come against us to destroy the whole of us. (547) 177 Again, without knowing if represents an actual document, the variations in Tecumseh’s grammar seem inexplicable, due more to inconsistency on Eckert’s part than to historical record. However, Tecumseh’s English writing ability stands in even starker contrast with his English speaking ability, which at many points seems not only flawless but eloquent, as in this bit of a lecture made to Harrison on learning that the U. S. had purchased Indian lands from unauthorized tribal representatives:

Brother, do not believe that I came here to get presents from you....By taking goods from you, you will hereafter say that with them you purchased another piece of land from us...It has been the object of both myself and brother to prevent the lands being sold. Should you not retum the land...those who sold the lands shall be called and shall suffer for their conduct. (606)

As with the written documents, there is no indication of whether this is verbatim text from an actual speech Tecumseh gave or not; of course, even if it is drawn on a historical text, it would be a transcription of a spoken text, and thus will obviously have been highly mediated by the transcriber and probably others. Still, this passage (and other similarly fluent and elegant speeches Tecumseh gives in English in the novel) contradict the patchier representations of his literacy. More than just authorial sloppiness, though, I think these inconsistencies reflect a certain ambivalence about just how literate both author and readers are comfortable with Tecumseh being. Given the likelihood that a literate Tecumseh would have been a more influential Tecumseh, it follows that authors would want to be cautious in their representation of Tecumseh’s literacy, not just to leave historical record untroubled, but to leave the reader untroubled as well. Obscuring the nature of Tecumseh’s literacy also obscures his power, making him a more manageable and identifiable Other.

Curiously, Eckert does suggest that being literate would have had such a powerful influence on Simon Kenton’s life, noting that the frontiersman lost a great deal of his land due to his illiteracy (367), but also goes to some lengths to explain how Kenton’s photographic memory and other skills more than compensated for his inability to read and

178 write (479). Blue Jacket—bom to Anglo parents but adopted by the Shawnee as a young

teenager—recalls enough of his English to be able to use it to his advantage in spying, but—

like Caliban—when he does use the “master’s tongue”—no matter how strategically—finds

“the very fact that he had spoken English distasteful in his mouth” (315-316). These

varying takes on literacy raise questions about Tecumseh’s motivations for learning English

in the first place. The novel suggests that he does so simply because he is an intellectually

hungry child (445), and though he does employ his knowledge of English for military

strategy on occasion, the implication seems to be that his literacy stems more generally

firom his benign curiosity about Anglos and their culture.

Thom seems to interpret Tecumseh’s alleged literacy in a more believable way,

making Tecumseh’s literacy a tool for subversion. While both Eckert’s Frontiersmen and

Card’s Red Prophet seem to present literacy as the key to Native American success (and,

by implication, as the explanation of their failure), Thom instead presents a more

ambiguous picture of the potential of literacy. Thom does this chiefly by drawing on the

Caliban trope. The Shawnees try to persuade Blue Jacket to teach them English, in hopes

that it will aid them in their fight against the settlers, but

Blue Jacket had come to hate his old language, and he told Big Fish that he should forget it and told Tecumseh that it was not a worthy effort to try to leam it, saying, “I would rather we drove the whitefaces so far away that we would never hear their tongue again. It is like an obscenity to speak it.” As much as Tecumseh admired Blue Jacket, though, he did not agree with this...it would be useful to know the enemy’s tongue... Much of the secret of their souls, he thought, must be in their books. (189-190)

And true enough, one of the more important turns in Thom’s account of Tecumseh’s history relies on Tecumseh’s literacy. When Barron, an envoy of Harrison’s, arrives to

invite Tecumseh and his fellow leaders to meet with The President in order to prove that

Indian lands had been sold without the proper authority, Tecumseh—who claims that he is

“sick...of these men of an inferior, clumsy, greedy race” (477)—decides to use the Anglo

179 stereotype of Indian illiteracy and ignorance to his advantage. In the following dialogue,

Barron begins by patronizingly explaining to Tecumseh that

“A rightful owner, by law, is someone who has a deed. You know of ‘deed’? O f‘title’?” “A white man I know once showed me his deed. They are on paper, yes? They have words and lines on them.” “Yes, that’s right, I reckon.” “And so a land treaty, such as the one made at Fort Wayne, is a deed or title?” “Well...yes, in a way...” “But then a deed or title is something a white man would have but a red man would not have?” “Umm...” Barron shrugged and nodded. “And only one who has a deed or title to a land can sell that land?” “Well...I suppose that’s what the governor means, yes.” “Then Barron, since Little Turtle and Cracking Noise and Winnemac are red men—at least on their skins—and had no deeds and titles, then they could not sell those lands to him. I believe this is what you have been saying.” (480-481)

In this artful debate, Thom shows that indeed, sometimes the master’s tools can be used to

dismantle the master’s house. Tecumseh skillfully proves that all power does not lie in

literacy, as the Anglos so often assume; as Blue Jacket explains earlier in the novel,

“Because they can draw lines and numbers and words to describe a place, they believe they

have the power to buy and sell it. It is because of this power to write words that they think

they have the other power” (235).

Nevertheless, Tecumseh finds this power irresistible from the moment he first lays eyes on the “livres” found on a boat seized from some French priests. He immediately

realizes not only the significance of the find, but its potential use. Yet when he asks

Chiksika whether it would profit them to use the books, Chiksika replies, “It is surely bad medicine to trap words out of the air like birds and imprison them on rags....Think of doing such a thing to words!” (146). Still, this episode (in Thom’s account) embarks

Tecumseh on a quest for English literacy, a quest that notably culminates in his friendship with the Galloways.

180 By Thom’s account, it was Rebecca who really helped Tecumseh out with his

language skills—reading, writing, and speaking. And when he first enters the Galloway’s

home, Tecumseh is awed by their library, “the best this side of the mountains,” as

Galloway boasts (355). In each of the three meetings between the two men that Thom’s

novel describes, books play a major role, becoming, in some sense, the bond that cements

their friendship. This is where Thom’s treatment of the literacy issue becomes slightly

paradoxical: these Tecumseh/Galloway episodes imply that the friendship between the two men might not have existed without Tecumseh’s knowing “the master’s tongue”—hardly a subversive portrayal of literacy. Too, Thom seems unable to resist speculating about the

flaws or limits of Tecumseh’s literacy: in their first meeting, Galloway seizes on

Tecumseh’s interest in his library and asks, “So you know books, even?”, to which

Tecumseh replies, “I know Bible. I know of Hamlet Prince and the...skull” (355).

Thom cannot seem to resist poking fun at Tecumseh’s failure to understand the concept of fiction, having Tecumseh ask Galloway if he “knew this York [Yorick]” (356). Thus,

Thom uses his own fiction—that Tecumseh was literate at all—to undermine his own

“noble” portrait of the Shawnee leader and his subversive use of literacy.

Thom and Eckert might be surprised to leam the similarity with which they portray

Tecumseh’s literacy in their recent works; while literacy is not as big an issue in Eckert’s A

Sorrow in Our Heart as it was in The Frontiersmen, the emphasis inSorrow lies more in

Tecumseh’s uses of his literacy. Like Thom, Eckert implies that a large part of what makes

Tecumseh a great military strategist and diplomat is his literacy. For example, in one peculiar scene, Tecumseh “cross-dresses” as a white settler and enters the American fort at

Cincinnati on four separate occasions. On one of these forays, he acquires some crucial intelligence simply by reading a sign posted in the fort: ‘Tecumseh’s lips curled in scorn when he read the posted General Order that said the army would emerge victorious from any encounter with the savages because, it has been proved that savages, if violently

181 attacked, will always break and give way” (420, emphasis Eckert’s, presumably to

indicate the actual text of what Tecumseh read). Thus Tecumseh uses his literacy not only

to discover the Americans’ combat strategy, but also to leam of their perception of Native

Americans. It is a nice, if ironic moment in Eckert’s work.

However, other places where Tecumseh uses his literacy strategically are more

ambiguous. Eckert’s presentation of just how literate Tecumseh really was shifts quite a bit

in the course of the novel; the primary means by which this representation is drawn is through letters Tecumseh allegedly sent to various American and British officials. Eckert

introduces the first of these—a letter sent by Tecumseh to Ohio Govemor Edward Tiffin—by politely acquiescing that Tecumseh’s “command of written English was perhaps not as pronounced as might be desired,” a rather subdued way to introduce a letter which contains phrasing identical to that used in The Frontiersmen: “We have immediately retum our prayers to the Great Spirit above, for you, and will never forgotten your goodness to towards us, and we thanks him for having given us such a good and wise man” (557).

Although nothing is said about Tecumseh’s developing command of written English in the

intervening pages, in less than a hundred pages Tecumseh is composing a letter to Indiana

Govemor William Henry Harrison advising him that “We cannot say what will become of us, as the Great Spirit has the management of us all at Her will” (648). In yet another letter to Harrison, Tecumseh inquires, “Why should not we, who are the leaders, settle the matter between us alone, so that the blood of our fine young men need not be shed in the fight which presents itself?” (760). Somewhere in the intervening pages, Tecumseh has become a master of the subtleties of verb tense and flowery language, and we hear nothing about how this happened. Indeed, none of the “amplification notes” accompanying these passages indicate whether any of these letters are still extant or if they ever existed at all; and paradoxically, the similarities between Tecumseh’s phrasings here and in The

Frontiersmen indicate less a basis in fact than in Eckert’s own imagination.

182 Presumably, all Tecumseh novelists’ play with Tecumseh’s literacy is merely a literary device, or wishful thinking. At any rate, one of the larger obstacles contemporary

Anglo writers fictionalizing Tecumseh must address is his alleged illiteracy; how can an author be expected to get inside the head of, and write about, someone who could not write himself? By making Tecumseh literate, all of these writers seem to be trying to

“humanize” Tecumseh: if he can read and write and speak our language, can he really be that different from us? And isn’t it easier to understand him as a human being if he can understand us? Granted, most of the Tecumseh novels also feature white characters who speak Shawnee or other Indian languages, but their Shawnee fluency is not employed so strategically. In the Tecumseh novels, and especially in Eckert’s work, Tecumseh’s literacy is an Anglo invention designed to make both the writer and the reader more comfortable both with Tecumseh and the Native “Other,” and also with the “speaking for” that other which makes the novel possible. The logic seems to go that if Tecumseh was literate in English—and thus able to comprehend what is being said and written about him by the white man (as in the fort-spying passage above)—then neither Anglo readers nor writers are doing him any disservice by representing him in English.

But this raises the question of why—given the lack of historical evidence that

Tecumseh was literate—all of these authors are at pains not only to suggest that he was literate, but to outline very explicitly how he came to be literate, to offer up a fictional literacy autobiography for audience consumption?

The obvious response is that literacy is sort of the hallmark of humanity for many

Anglo Americans; thus, nonliterate subjects are more difficult to humanize. Such a connection between literacy and humanity has been borne out historically, most notably in the example of slaves being denied literacy. Under the dictates of that “peculiar institution,” illiteracy was “practical” in that it appeared to make people much easier to control; however, it also served a more abstract purpose: illiteracy dehumanized the

183 “Other,” made it possible to keep him at bay and under control. As all these writers suggest—explicitly or implicitly—if Tecumseh is literate, he becomes a far more powerful and unpredictable “foe.” Making a racially different subject literate empowers that subject and perhaps comforts the author as he tries to represent the “Other.”

Of course, if Anglo writers employ the literacy trope as a means of empowering the

Other, we also have to consider its equally pervasive (and paradoxical) counter-use: the perception that literacy is also a corrupting force, one that erodes the “exotic purity” of that

Other. Neither Eckert, Thom, nor Card seems to suggest Tecumseh has been “tarnished” by his literacy, at least not in a negative way. Rather, in the purview of these writers,

Tecumseh has only to benefit from his literacy. Nevertheless, Tecumseh’s literacy does isolate him from his brethren, which becomes a kind of corruption. The counterexample is

Blue Jacket, who—in Eckert and Thom’s accounts—resists using his mother tongue,

English, for fear it might somehow make him white again; he regards the language itself as an “obscenity” (Thom 189).

These opposing notions of literacy—its ability both to empower and corrupt— effectively humanize the Other, but also separate him from his “kind.” Both functions of literacy enable the Anglo novelist to inscribe a Tecumseh who is both understandable and palatable to a contemporary Anglo reading audience, and thus, Tecumseh’s literacy is almost required for him to be representable at all. The notion of a nonliterate subject is so at odds with the very act of writing about that subject—representing that subject—that the subject must be made literate before any sort of representation can take place. The pseudo ethnographer/novelist is already distanced from his subject by time and ethnicity. Without thea priori assumption of Tecumseh’s literacy, the author is then even further removed from his subject by language, and in many ways, this seems the most treacherous gap of all, but also the one that seems to be least regarded in all of these texts.

184 As illustration of this principle, consider what a novel by a contemporary Anglo author about Tecumseh’s life would be or do, were its subject not represented as being literate. I would speculate that such a novel could not exist; the gap between the subject and its mediator, the author, would be too great for any kind of representation at that point.

Literacy, in fact, would seem to be the least common denominator required for any kind of understanding between “self’ and “Other”; given the current cultural context for Anglo

Americans, we seem unable to tolerate an nonliterate subject. In order to understand an(0)ther culture on even the most basic level, we must have a subject that reads and is, therefore, readable. Even beyond the Native American characters in all these novels, the authors subtly encourage us to identify with various Anglo characters based on their relative literacy; witness Thom’s use of a non-grammatical Appalachian dialect to indicate loathsome characters, contrasted with Galloway’s love of books, and Eckert’s seemingly unnecessary apology for Kenton’s illiteracy (and his detailed explanation of how the frontiersman used other intellectual skills to prevent his illiteracy from hindering him too much). The necessities of literacy and readability are ones that come into play in even more complex ways in the following chapter, in which I will discuss the concept of “touristic reading” and closely examine several novels to see how they encourage or discourage us to

“read” their subjects in proscribed ways.

' Edmunds cites the sources that Eckert apparently also consulted: “Primary materials focusing upon Tecumseh and the Shawnees during the period of Tecumseh’s life are relatively few...the largest collection is the Tecumseh Papers, in the draper Manuscripts at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin....Other important collections with the Draper manuscripts are the William Henry Harrison Papers, the Simon Kenton Papers, the Thomas Forsyth Papers, and Draper’s notes” (Edmunds 226). These, of course, do not account for the totality of Edmunds’ sources. ’ Held at Ohio Dominican College in Columbus, Ohio on November 15, 1995. ^ The edition I cite throughout this chapter, however, clearly refers to the book as “historical fiction” on the spine, a necessary nod toward cataloging requirements which I’m sure greatly chagrins Eckert. * I, however, will refer to both of Eckert’s narratives as narratives or novels throughout this chapter. ’ Indeed, this was a caution clearly laid out by William Bascom in his essay “The Four Functions of Folklore” (1954). He well understood the reductive dangers of his analytical approach, and in the essay cites several instances in which drawing general conclusions about a culture based on its lore grossly misrepresents that culture. ‘ The Moravian Indians, it should be noted, were Christian converts who became farmers after their conversion. It seems notable that this should be not only the massacre that Eckert chooses to focus on, but 185 that it is one of the few such incidents that is consistently remembered and taught in Ohio frontier history. In a sense, the crime against the Moravians seems even more unjust because—after all-they were trying so hard to be like Anglo settlers. ^ Rather, as a friend who grew up in Chillicothe and read the book as an early adolescent recalled, she kept reading it for all the blood and gore. *In general, Tecumseh is a far less threatening character in The Frontiersmen than he is inA Sorrow in Our Heart. Presumably, a more moderate (and moderating) Shawnee warrior would have seemed more likely to appeal to an Anglo readership in 1967, at a time when the American Indian Movement was very vocal and politicized. In 1992 it may have seemed "safer" to represent Tecumseh as a more militant figure, both in his dealings with Anglo Americans and within his own Shawnee nation. ’ Edmunds notes that Shawnee belief in a supreme female deity emerged after 1830; prior to this, “the tribe prayed to a male figure called the ‘Finisher’ or the ‘Master of Life’ as the primary power in the universe ” {Tecumseh and the Quest for Indian Leadership 60). However, Edmunds also notes that some anthropologists believe the female deity, “Our Grandmother” or the “Creator,” has always been the “most important figure in the Shawnee pantheon.” In fact, an acquaintance I met last summer—Marian Hessink, an Anglo woman living and teaching on a Navajo reservation in New Mexico—told me that she knew several Dineh (the specific name of the people she works with) who read and loved Panther in the Sky, precisely because of Thom’s sensuous representation of Native Americans. “ Despite his resistance to historical boundaries, though. Card’s novel itself demonstrates how truly “bound” to history Tecumseh’s story is; even though he is writing a fantasy novel. Card cannot bring himself to revise the end of the story: Tecumseh’s pan-Indian alliance is still defeated, and the tribes are still driven west of the Mississippi. *■ Because of these name changes and also because of the fantastic nature of Card’s novel, I will make every effort in discussing this novel to try to keep the historical figure of Tecumseh separate ft-om the fictional character of Ta-Kumsaw by using those names to indicate when I am referring to the fictional character and when I am referring to the historical figure. Edmunds’ scholarship suggests a clear separation of the brothers’ roles—Tecumseh as the military strategist and recruiter, Tenskwatawa as the genuine prophet—while all of Eckert’s works suggest that Tecumseh was both strategist and prophet, and Tenskwatawa was merely his puppet. Card uses the term “Red ” to refer to Indians throughout the novel; the word is used freely by both Anglo and Native characters in the book. Notably, use of this terminology is neither explained nor problematized anywhere in the text. Attebery claims that “the tale of Alvin Maker may prove to be the most important American fantasy to date,” since it is “a myth truly rooted in national experience and belieT’ (68). But is the “important” myth Alvin’s, or that of Tecumseh himself? I would argue the latter. “Becca Weaver” seems to be loosely based on Rebecca Galloway-she is an Anglo woman who captured Ta-Kumsaw’s heart, married him, and bore him a daughter in Card’s account However, like the Lady of Shalott, she is confined to a single room where she must weave “history” day and night.

186 C h a p t e r 4

M u l t ie t h n ic L it e r a t u r e and a T h e o r y o f “ T o u r is t ic R e a d in g ”

“Since its origins in the eighteenth century, the novel as a genre has really been about authenticity, the confusion between fact and fiction.” —Anthropologist Richard Price in an interview in the journal Lingua Franca

“A text always contains within itself directions for its own consumption.” —Tzetvan Todorov

In the “performance” of all the texts about Tecumseh previously discussed—the drama and its accompanying tourist displays, as well as the several novels about the

Shawnee leader’s life—I have focused largely, as per Regina Bendix’s call, on the producers of those texts—the actors, directors, and authors behind the productions. As noted in the fieldwork chapter, though, the audience is an equally active participant in the construction of meaning at the Tecumseh! site, and it should be duly noted here that the interpretations of the novels of Eckert, Thom, and Card in the previous chapter represent the interaction of only one reader with those texts; we carmot and should not assume that all readers will absorb unquestioningly the agenda I see being carried out in those texts.

Indeed, as Janice Radway cautions in her analysis of romance novels, as academic critics we must be particularly careful not to assume that readers of so-called “popular” fiction are-

-as we might stereotype them to be—unthinking consumers and victims of market manipulation, questionable ideologies, and plain “bad taste”:

[T]he commonplace view that mass cultural forms like the romance perform their social functions by imposing alien ideologies upon unsuspecting if not somnolent readers is a function of a particular theory and method. The theory assumes that cultural commodities control those who purchase and use them...and thereby must affect their values and beliefs. The method consequently discounts what readers do with texts and the various statements they make about them as irrelevant or mistaken. The condescending treatment of the mass-culture audience is, in the end, the

187 final, logical consequence of a theoretical position that...ignores the complexities of sign production or semiosis.... (8, emphasis Radway’s)

The texts discussed so far are exceedingly complex sign systems; the Tecumseh! gift shop functions as a visible manifestation of this, with its overwhelming and contradictory displays of merchandise, and even the most egregious passages in Eckert’s novels suggest a very complicated (if not especially nuanced) take on frontier life. How tourists and readers will respond to those sign systems depends on an enormous variety of factors, only a very few of which are suggested in the audience polls.

As Radway suggests, it is not the text, but the reader who determines the literary

“value” of a particular work; as such, I would like to suggest that the kind of voyeuristic reading afforded by the structure and tone of the Tecumseh novels is not the “fault” of their

Anglo writers, nor is it solely the product of the texts themselves. Rather, such readings are the product of the interaction between reader and text. Indeed, just as a reader might resist the ideologies that permeate the Tecumseh novels, so might a reader look at a more

“canonized” or “literary” text with a less-than-resistant eye. Of course, there are multiple kinds of resistance—and issues being resisted; as such, in any given group of students, a complex web of competing resistances is at work. However, I would contend that in general, readers—particularly college students—might be conditioned to be less resistant readers of “literary” texts, due to a perception that if a work in on the syllabus, it must be more “legitimate” than popular fiction, and therefore more “true” and less questionable.

My impetus for the ideas in this final chapter comes from two comments made in an

American Literature survey course I taught in 1994, a class of about forty-five students— both lower- and upperclassmen, English majors and non-English majors. Given the students’ wide range of experience and comfort with reading and discussing literature, they were nevertheless a talkative and generally cooperative group of readers. They also readily caught on to my folkloric and multicultural biases in interpreting literature, a contextual fact

188 that partially explains their willingness to volunteer culture-based observations about texts.

The first of these notable observations occurred while we were reading Zora Neale

Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God; we had been discussing how Hurston’s contemporaries had criticized her use of dialect, claiming it propagated white stereotypes about African Americans. In the ensuing discussion, a white student commented that

Hurston’s usage was appropriate because “That’s how people really talked then.” Later in the same course, while reading Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, another student (African

American) rhapsodized about how much she enjoyed the author’s descriptions of early

20th-century China, because “she really makes you feel like you’re there.” O f course, the former student was too young to have been living in central Florida in the 1930s, and the latter was similarly too young to have been in wartime China. Nevertheless, both students latched onto what they perceived as the “authentic” moments in those two novels, and cited them as “proof’ of the texts’ literary value.

On a certain level, these students are correct: Hurston’s marvelous ear for language and gift for creating dialogue that is simultaneously unpretentious and evocative are what makes Their Eyes such a joy to read; Tan’s almost fairy-tale like descriptions of an “Other” world and her ability to forge startlingly fresh metaphors are what make the China sections of her novel completely engrossing. And yet, we do not have to look too much further to see what is problematic about such statements: how do these students “know” how African

Americans in Florida spoke in the early twentieth century? How do they “know” what life was like for aristocratic Chinese families in the early twentieth century? And yet, in order to make an assessment of “authenticity,” students presume this sort of knowledge. When— in an effort to complicate this reading tendency-I remind students that Amy Tan is an

American writer who only visited China once before writing The Joy Luck Club (and was certainly not there before or during WWU), and tell them how much flack Hurston received from other Harlem Renaissance writers—particularly Richard Wright—about her use of

189 dialect, they fairly easily see where their logic failed them, but continue to cling to their

prior assessment of these texts.

These comments best illustrate the process I call touristic reading: the fallacious practice of assuming that any given text by a writer outside one’s own cultural group is necessarily an accurate, authentic, and authorized representation of that “Other” cultural group. The touristic reading is a snapshot, a still photo (with the emphasis on “still”): a cultural portrait that selectively edits out signs of dynamism or contention, both within the text and within the culture represented by the text, and features only what the reader wants to see. Just as, when we visit Paris, we try to compose our shot of the Eiffel Tower so as to eliminate as many other tourists as possible, as well as signs of crass modernity—trash cans, souvenir stands, tour buses, and the like—so touristic reading insists on recomposing the literary text according to what what the reader has, in a sense, already seen. And just as we seek to have the Eiffel Tower take up as much of the frame of our photo as possible in order to frame, in turn, the experience of being in Paris, so too in touristic reading do we desire to frame our literary experience of the “Other” by seeing only what we want to see or are conditioned to see.

Tourism, in its most widespread practice, is about shedding context, or perhaps more accurately, about imposing an external context on a site. Recently, I overheard a fellow American tourist in Cambridge, England, saying, “I want a picture of that building”-

-not because she knew what it was, but because she knew what shewanted it to be; she understood how it fit a preinscribed context in her own mind. Similarly, in the process of touristic reading, the literary tourist imposes a predetermined cultural awareness on a text; the interaction between the text and the reader thus results in cultural ascription, the projection of a cultural identity onto a group by “outsiders” to that group. The text, in turn, becomes the reader’s Baedecker to the unfamiliar, the author and the teacher the tour guides.

190 Touristic reading is fraught with ambiguity. On the one hand, encouraging students

to appreciate the "otherness" of a text may have some positive and tangible repercussions:

an awakened interest in cultures other than their own may lead them to be able to think

more critically about their own cultural context(s) and the ways they react to and interact

with different cultural contexts. On the other hand, such reading is one-dimensional;

students read such texts as interesting sorts of fictionalized travelogues, and then return to

the safety of their own culture(s) without really having dismpted their notions of their own

culture in any more than a superficial way. The near-cliche that we spout to children just

learning to read as an enticement to do so is “Books open doors to new worlds,” yet this

formula overlooks the problems of finding other worlds in books, the ease with which the

book and the world can be closed when one’s cultural security is threatened. Books can

open doors, but only to awareness, and the opening must be followed by the self-motivated

act of going through the open door, fully entering the text. If we are going to give students

texts that “open doors,” we must also encourage the step of moving through them—of

going beyond being a mere touristic observer hovering in the open doorway.

In evoking the idea of tourism in this chapter, I refer to a larger theoretical notion of

“tourism”—not Just tourism in the sense of visiting historical sites and “attractions,” but

tourism as, in fact, a kind of reading, a peculiar brand of literacy or hermeneutics by which

spectators make meaning not only about what they are seeing, but also about their own

lives and the lives of Others.

As such, I think we can extend this definition to the literal act of reading, as well;

consider, for example, the cover illustration of the first edition of Anne Tyler’s novel Tke

Accidental Tourist: a very comfortable looking armchair with wings. In many ways, this

illustration is an apt metaphor for the way we approach or present reading in U. S. culture:

reading allows us to be armchair travelers to other places, other times. While such an

image may seem generally innocuous, this construction of reading becomes problematic

191 when readers approach texts written by those outside their own culture. The opening of the traditional literary canon to non-white, non-male, and non-Western writers calls on us to reexamine this construction of reading, lest we approach such texts touristically and produce reductive readings that fail to acknowledge difference within cultures as well as cross-cultural interaction. Like The Accidental Tourist's protagonist, Macon Leary, we understand that going abroad, leaving behind what is familiar, is sometimes a necessity, but we prefer to do it with as little disruption as possible. And what less threatening way to venture out than to sit in our comfortable armchairs and read things by and about Others?

The chair has wings to take us to other worlds, but because they are textual worlds, we can at any point shut the book and grip the solid arms of the chair, secure in our own cultural grounding.

As such, reading, like tourism itself, is a mixed blessing in terms of the multicultural agenda: it presents a wealth of opportunities for introducing students to cultures outside—and even within—their own, but does so with the accompanying danger that those cultures will merely be subsumed under previous ways of understanding.

Certainly we have already seen evidence of this in audience responses to Tecumseh!, and this is always a problematic consideration for folk-festival organizers. The same dangerous dynamic applies to reading; as Melanie McAlister argues in a critique of The Joy Luck

Club, often when Anglo readers approach “ethnic” texts,

[W]hat is reinforced is a simplistic and ultimately condescending attitude toward “ethnic art,” one that requires that representations of, and by, “the Other” be contained and presented as information, rather than as any challenge to the categories of the aesthetic of the mainstream. (106)

If, however, we begin to understand tourism as a kind of hermeneutics itself, and present it as such to our students, we may be able to help them recognize their own touristic impulses when approaching such texts. Furthermore, while some literary texts are better than others at resisting touristic reading, no text is immune from it. To both avoid and learn from the mistakes of touristic reading, we have to be selective not only about what texts we offer,

192 but about how we present them. And we must offer students lenses through which to read and understand what and how they are reading.

I believe that by examining such texts through the lens of folklore, and in particular, through the lens of contemporary theorizing about tourism and authenticity, both literary critics and folklorists can complicate~po5/«ve/y—notions of cultural representation and authority. While I think it would be productive and compelling to do a reading ethnography similar to Radway’s at some point to determine the variety of ways Anglo readers approach and comprehend texts by non-white writers, at the moment I would prefer to focus more on the theory of touristic reading, and the ways in which texts themselves might encourage or discourage this type of reading.' I struggled for a long time to determine what texts would be most suitable for this kind of examination, and how best to approach an examination of those texts. Initially, I thought about comparing works on similar themes by Anglo and non-Anglo writers, such as comparing the neo-slave narratives of William Styron {The Confessions o f Nat Turner) and Sherley Anne Williams

{Dessa Rose) or Toni Morrison {Beloved). But such an approach would be entirely too simplistic, and too rooted in the muck of identity politics and the notions of ethnic

“authenticity” and authority to properly illustrate the dynamics of touristic reading.

Furthermore, such an approach would depend on the very assumptions that I wish to avoid making in regard to touristic reading: that such readings are the product of the text itself, or of the writer’s identity and agenda. Rather, I wish to emphasize that touristic readings are the product of a dynamic interaction between the reader and the text, and while the text itself may encourage or discourage such readings, reading touristically also requires the presence of a non-resistant reader. This last assertion is an important one, as I wish to conclude this chapter by discussing pedagogical strategies to help students avoid being touristic readers, not only of texts by writers who are culturally separated from them by race or ethnicity, but also by factors of gender, history, class, and so forth.

193 My own agenda in so doing is fairly straightforward, and has already been alluded to above: the institutionalization of multicultural theory into the academy seems to have resulted largely in superficial nods to diversity: some substitutions in the canonical

American literature syllabus, a brief lecture about the social context in which works by writers of color were produced, and the hope that either token inclusion or disciplinary isolation will constitute (or at least adequately substitute for) full representation. While such steps are necessary, they are only the smallest of beginnings; however, in many cases, such efforts constitute the whole “movement.” To my mind, stopping at this point may—to paraphrase Robert Frost—fall “so far short they might as well not try to go at all,”" since this approach not only encourages but may inevitably produce touristic, one dimensional readings of texts, which some students may then take to represent social reality. While this dissertation earlier cited Bruner's contention (widely held by most folklorists and anthropologists working today) that ethnography is fiction, this should not suggest that the corollary is equally true—that fiction is ethnography. Taken metaphorically, such comparisons between fiction and ethnography are very productive; however, the more literal equation betwen the two is the premise at the heart of touristic reading.

In this chapter, I wish to examine the two previously mentioned novels marked by students as “authentic”—Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1989) and Zora Neale Hurston’s

Their Eyes Were Watching God ( 1937)—to determine how readily they either lend themselves to or resist ascriptive, touristic readings, and how in some cases these novels seem to play very consciously with the ascription/self-description split. While these two texts might initially appear to have nothing in common, either in terms of their historical context, ethnic origins, or narrative style, their authors are aligned in some interesting ways: Sau-ling Wong and others have remarked that Tan “has been chosen to perform the

Asian American spokeswoman/figurehead function” (‘“ Sugar Sisterhood’” 201-202), and

194 Hurston, too, “was the dominant black woman writer in the United States” in her time, as

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has noted (“Afterword” 186). The “rewards” of such preeminence,

of course, are mixed: in both writers’ cases, it leads to some commercial success

(posthumously for Hurston), but also to misunderstanding, both by those outside their

own ethnic group, and by those within. Both texts were and are often elevated to the status

of being “representative,” regardless of the writers’ intentions, and thus have been critiqued

by other contemporary Asian American writers (in Tan’s case) and other African American

writers of the Harlem Renaissance (in Hurston’s case) for distorting ethnic “reality” and

pandering to Anglo expectations and desires.^

But are either of these novels really as (mis)representative, distorted, or

“pandering” as they are accused of being? To be sure, both Hurston and Tan had to be

aware, on some level, that their texts would be read by an Anglo audience (among others),

and both probably wrestled quite openly with the representation issue themselves. For

Hurston, this seems especially true, since her literary career was largely underwritten by

white patrons, and since the issue of how best to “represent the race” was an ongoing

debate among Harlem Renaissance writers."* To assume that either writer had the didactic

and egocentric agenda of “representing” an entire culture in a single text, though, seems not

only fallacious, but is also undermined by the texts themselves. Amy Tan has even come

forward to discuss openly her discomfort with being Asian-American literature’s “poster child,” arguing that she does not want to “be subjected to a standard of representational realism,” since she prefers to “write stories about life as [she] ha[s] misunderstood it”

(“Required Reading” 5,7). Despite the authors’ own resistance to being cast as ethnic tour guide, however, the touristic reader sees these novels as almost perfectly representative pieces of ethnographic fiction. How, where, and why does this happen?

I have also chosen these texts because of their use of materials that are marked as

“folkloric,” since I believe that the use of such material can be double edged. On the one

195 hand, “folk” materials are often employed to subvert or challenge audience assumptions

about the culture represented; however, because they are marked as “folk,” they are often

read as “authentic,” and thus also contain the power to reify preexisting cultural

expectations. Such “folk moments” may be the locus of touristic reading, but they are

frequently the moments in a novel that can be re-read to undermine touristic readings as

well. In addition to demonstrating this two-way process in discussing the works of Tan

and Hurston specifically, I will end the chapter by discussing Leslie Marmon Silko’s short

story “Yellow Woman,” a work that actively resists touristic readings, in order to discuss

larger pedagogical strategies.

Who is the “touristic reader.” and how do we chart her readings?

Clearly the first place to begin this inquiry is to explain who the touristic reader is

and what the process of touristic reading entails, since they are my own hypothetical and

theoretical constructions. Currently, the only literary critic who seems to be connecting the

idea of tourism with reading is James Buzard, whose The Beaten Track: European

Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800-1918 (1993) explores “what modem ways of thinking about ‘culture’ and personal acculturation’ owe to the nineteenth century’s ambivalent confrontation with a democratizing and institutionalizing tourism” by looking at “a wide range of texts drawn from literature, travel-writing, guidebooks, periodicals, and business histories” (5). Buzard acknowledges that while “tourism is now being studied in a variety of disciplines,” his “belief that it fundamentally engages and tests cultural representations has made [him] approach it mainly from the direction of literary analysis” (13, emphasis Buzard’s). This shared belief in the important connection between tourism and literature is certainly part of my rationale for exploring the idea of “touristic reading” as well. But my study diverges from Buzard’s in focus: in both The Beaten Path and his essay “Translation and Tourism: Scott’s Waverley and the Rendering of Culture,”

196 Buzard is primarily concerned with '‘historiciz[ing] this value-laden concept [of the tourist]

in order to discover what function it has been serving in our representations of culture”

{Beaten Path 3). My concern has more to do with the act of reading itself: how the representations texts present are read and understood by readers. Reading is, after all, perhaps the most basic form of appropriation: in order to make sense of what we read, we must always “translate” the text and subsume its contents to what we already know. I am interested in discovering how and why readers make choices in that process: how much they are guided by or thwarted by the text in creating either a touristic or a more complicated reading of the text and of the culture represented by the text.

Given this emphasis on the interaction between the reader and the text (rather than on the author or the construction of tourism and the tourist in literature), I think it is perhaps easiest to couch my concept of touristic reading in light of reader-response criticism, since this is the school of literary theory and criticism most closely aligned with my project in this chapter, and, in fact, with the project of folkloristics in general. New

Historicism, cultural studies, reader-response theory and contemporary folkloristics all share an emphasis on the centrality of context (of multiple and shifting contexts, in most cases), and a complementary challenge to the notion of “objectivity.” However, reader- response theory is perhaps the most relevant theory to incorporate here because of its additional reliance on the ideas of “performance” and “reception,” concepts equally central to contemporary folkloristics.

The notion of how much “meaning” in any given text is generated by the author, the text itself, or the reader has been thoroughly debated by reader-response and reception theorists in the evolution of this mode of criticism. As Jane Tompkins traces the debate in

Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism, the locus of textual meaning has gradually shifted from the text (as in the New Criticism) to the author (whom

Georges Poulet contends “imprisons” the reader’s consciousness), to the reader herself

197 (Iser) {Reader-Response Criticism x-xvii, 201, 223-224). Fish contends that “the formai features of the text, the authorial intentions they are normally taken to represent, and the reader’s interpretive strategies are mutually interdependent” (xxii), although his view has been challenged to establish the more prevalent contemporary thinking that the text cannot exist apart from the act of reading, and that the text is, in fact, recreated anew with each act of reading. Robert Stepto convincingly takes this one step further by postulating that “it is the reader—not the author or text and certainly not the storyteller in the text—who is unreliable” (309). Stepto's declaration that “the principle unreliable factor in the storytelling paradigm is the reader (white American readers, obviously”) decenters even such a reader-centered theory of literary criticism, suggesting a dynamic in which texts may be authored for (and against) readers who are expected to misunderstand them, and in which readers may do the unexpected and actually “begin to hear” (309, emphasis

Stepto’s).

Clearly such a view matches the view in contemporary folkloristics that entities once presumed to be stable—folkloric “texts,” tradition, ethnicity, and so forth—are, in fact, reinvented with every performance, in each new context. In fact, this dynamic view of the notion of “text” has led a number of reader-response critics (and others) to recognize the value of anthropological methodologies (specifically, ethnography) to understanding the process by which readers interpret and thus recreate texts. This realization, in turn, has produced several ethnographies of reading which critique Fish’s context-less and vague construction of the “reader” as an “informed reader, neither an abstraction, nor an actual living reader, but a hybrid—a read reader (me) who does everything within his power to make himself informed” (“Literature in the Reader” 87). Radway’s aforementioned fieldwork with romance readers is one such example, as are the ethnographic studies of

Elizabeth Long (with informal reading groups in Houston) and Greg Sarris (with schoolchildren on the Kashaya Pomo reservation in northem California). Such studies

198 provide far more specific evidence about why readers are attracted to some texts while

rejecting others, and about how they make meaning of what they do read. Furthermore,

the studies of Radway, Long, and Sarris also demonstrate the vital connections between

anthropological/folkloristic and literary studies of texts, giving further credence to

Jonathan Boyarin’s claim in the Introduction to The Ethnography o f Reading that

[TJhe distinctions between the approaches of anthropologists and literary scholars...is [sic] not so much methodological as chronotopic—between those who are learning how to include textuality as one of the fields of interaction they study in the present, and those who are teaming to see fields of interaction shaping and surrounding the textual remains of the past.... Yet we have only begun to explore how the kind of attention to the shifts of meaning in context that characterize the best ethnography can complement the new sense literary scholars have of reading as culturally and historically determined. (2-3)

The “folk” definition of the discipline of folklore is “the bastard that the anthropology department begat on the English department”; perhaps we are finally achieving our legitimacy, as literary scholars recognize not only the theoretical intersections between the two disciplines, but also the methodological ones.

Again, an ethnographic study similar to those of Radway, Long, and Sarris would be the best way to describe the “touristic reader” and to map her readings of the given texts.

In the absence of that, I am constructing a hypothetical reader that is as abstract, but presumably more specifically defined than Fish’s “informed reader.” Here, 1 am postulating the touristic reader as an educated white, middle-class reader of either gender, echoing Toni Morrison’s assertion in Playing in the Dark that “the readers of virtually all of

American fiction have been positioned as white” (xiii). Compellingly, Morrison asks,

“how is ‘literary whiteness’ and ‘literary blackness’ made, and what is the consequence of that construction?” (xiii). These are questions I wish to explore through a close examination of the works of Tan and Hurston.

It is important to answer these questions, because while I resist Todorov’s rather simplistic claim that “‘fiction’ is not constructed any differently from ‘reality’” (81) on the

199 same grounds that I resist the notion of fiction as ethnography, I also understand that when

Anglo students read texts by writers of color, they often do take fiction to represent a total, lived reality. As Sollors notes in his afterword to Cultural Difference and the Literary Text,

“reading texts ‘for their ethnicity,’ or, in other words, within ethnic boundaries, may... make certain ethnic authors more visible than others,” and the texts of those authors “have often been received in a way that would...try to make them ‘typical’ of the group, no matter what they said or wrote” (155). If Anglo students have had little real-life contact with the group represented in the fiction, it seems plausible that they are more likely to consider the text to be “realistic,” and use the text to create or legitimate their personal construction of that ethnic group. As Radway argues, the value of fiction is “a function of its capacity to be used as a map that, despite its status as a representation, is a tool for enabling the reader to move about more effectively in the world to which it refers” (“Book-of-the-Month Club”

278). Presumably, the less familiar the world represented is to the reader at the outset, the more likely the reader is to use the text as text as a “tool” for getting around that world. Yet some texts make themselves better tools than others, and a single text can offer a reader multiple “tools,” some more helpful than others.

Amy Tan: Culture Traitor or Culture Broker?

Amy Tan’s 1989 novel The Joy Luck Club enjoyed tremendous popular and critical acclaim when it appeared, leading to a feature film adaptation, a children’s picture book based on one of the mother’s stories from the novel, the anthologizing of several of the novel’s chapters as short stories in various collections, and the establishment of Tan as the

U. S.’ most visible contemporary Asian American writer (Wong 174,202). Amy Ling notes that Tan’s debut novel “is in parts an echo and a response and in parts a continuation and expansion of [Maxine Hong] Kingston’s book” The Woman Warrior (130). In its exploration of the mother-daughter relationship and its negotiation of the “hyphenated”

200 Chinese-American identity, these parallels are clear. However, the fact that Tan’s book was received even more enthusiastically and by an even larger audience than Kingston’s autobiographical work (published in 1976) suggests that these themes alone were not responsible for The Joy Luck Club's success. Sau-ling Cynthia Wong’s brilliant essay

‘“Sugar Sisterhood’: Situating the Amy Tan Phenomenon” contextualizes Tan’s success both in terms of Asian American literary history and in the cultural and political climate in which the novel appeared in 1989, coming to a conclusion very similar to the one I argue here: thatThe Joy Luck Club appeals to many Anglo readers because of its “value as [an] anthropological document, giving the non-Chinese reader access to an enigmatic culture”

(184).

The reasons for the novel’s appeal are both simplistic— it is well written, engrossing, and riffs on the emotionally loaded theme of mother-daughter relationships— and also complex and problematic. The student comment cited in the introductory section of this chapter, I think, best suggests the popular appeal of The Joy Luck Club: the student remarked that the mothers’ stories of China (which constitute the middle two sections of the novel) were her favorite parts, because the vivid descriptions were so “real.” These parts of the novel may, among Anglo readers unfamiliar with Chinese American cultures, evoke a satisfying sense of Orientalism, or Eastern exoticism. And yet, other parts of the text challenge readers to resist this impulse, to understand that the China presented by the mothers in their stories is a construction, a vehicle for imparting larger lessons on their daughters. And the daughters’ stories take up the question of the nature and significance of a Chinese American ethnicity in some complex and at times contradictory ways which would seem to encourage a more complicated understanding of ethnicity.

A full-fledged ethnography of Anglo readers of this text would be a better gauge of the way readers respond to The Joy Luck Club: however, if both popular and scholarly critical responses to the novel are any indication, it does appear that many readers miss or

201 overlook the subversive moments of Tan’s text in favor of those that better fit expectation/

A review of the literary criticism produced since the novel’s appearance reveals a disturbing tendency either to disregard the ethnicities of the characters altogether—focusing instead on the “universal” mother-daughter theme—or to address the issue of ethnic identity in shockingly simplistic ways. In an otherwise intriguing reader-response analysis of the novel, for example, Stephen Souris diverges into a discussion of how his dissatisfaction with the novel’s “happy ending” is relieved “when Tan’s contribution...is considered in the context of Asian values” (116). After this, he launches into a detailed discussion of what “Asian values” are, exactly, basing his egregious conclusions on only two texts, both of which were written to help psychotherapists counsel non-Anglo clients (116-117).

These therapeutic texts themselves appear to make very little distinction between Asians and

Asian Americans as disparate ethnic groups, nor do they acknowledge the vast distinctions among Asian and Asian American groups themselves; Souris does not complicate these views, either. His reading of the ending of Tan’s novel suggests that while troubling, it is nevertheless “ethnically appropriate,” though this conclusion is based on the fallacious equation of a generalized portrait of “Asian values” with the bicultural complexity of the novel’s characters, who are also separated by provincial origin, language group, family identification, class, and—between the mothers and daughters—generation and ethnic affiliation.

I choose to start my analysis of Tan’s works with this critique of Souris because his interpretation well exemplifies the problems of “touristic” reading. Readers approaching texts by those outside their own cultural groups are bound to look for narrative devices, themes, tropes, and characterizations that meet their expectations of the group or that match their experiences with that group. The Joy Luck Club works to both meet and thwart those expectations, not only in its narrative structure, but also in its use of folk material as an

202 “authenticating” device, and in its representation of the “nature” of ethnicity. Ultimately, though, the novel privileges expectation and simplicity over subversion and complexity.

Narrative Structure

Periiaps the most oft-treated aspect of The Joy Luck Club in criticism is the novel’s

“dialogicity,” the fact that it has seven individual narrators, the three living mothers and their daughters, plus the overarching narrator, Jing-mei (June) Woo, who—since her mother’s death—must tell her own stories and also “speak for” her dead mother. Indeed, any critical examination of The Joy Luck Club would seem, by necessity, to have to begin with a discussion of how the book is arranged, and why. Souris cites an interview he had with Tan in which she claimed that she never intended her work to be a novel, but that the publishers’ reviewers assumed it to be a novel, and thus it became one (120n).

Nevertheless, in its final form, the text does resemble a novel more than a short-story collection, and seems intended to be read as one, given the frame story about the “Aunties” beseeching June to travel to China to meet her half-sisters, a journey she successfully completes to end the work.

Still, the fact that this novel is narrated by seven different characters does beg analysis, and also lends itself to an investigation of touristic reading. Initially, the presence of multiple narrators would seem to discourage touristic reading: with cultural perspectives and insights coming from not one, but seven speakers, a reader seemingly could not fail to gain a contested view of the cultures being represented. Several critics have supported this view: Chen claims that

By granting subjectivity to each woman. Tan compels each to tell her own story in her own words....the mother-daughter tensions as constructed in their own discourse are fraught with complexities of racial, gender, and class issues, not just the simple binary opposition of Americanness and Chineseness, mothers and daughters. (6)

203 Scheuller attaches this idea specifically to the issue of ethnicity, arguing that ‘Tan’s

decision to have several mothers and daughters telling their different stories reflects her

awareness of ethnicity as a constantly shifting social construct” (80). Interestingly,

though, neither critic offers specific or contrasting examples from the text of how each

narrator constructs her individual ethnicity.

And in fact, there are few such examples. The narrative “voices” vary very little

from one story to the next; most of the mother’s “China” stories (with the exception of An-

mei Hsu’s first story, “Scar”) follow a pattern of having an introductory episode set in the

present (where the mothers appear to be indirectly addressing their daughters) followed by

their “China” or origin stories. Note the similarities between the narration of these three

introductory episodes, each delivered by a different mother:

Yesterday my daughter said to me, “My marriage is falling apart.” And now all she can do is watch it falling. She lies down on a psychiatrist couch, squeezing tears out about this shame. And 1 think, she will lie there until there is nothing more to fall, nothing left to cry about, everything dry. (241)

Look at this end table. It is heavy white marble on skinny black legs. A person must always think not to put a heavy bag on this table or it will break. The only thing that can sit on the table is a tall black vase. The vase is like a spider leg, so thin only one flower can be put in. If you shake the table, the vase and flower will fali down. (275)

If you are bom poor here, it’s no lasting shame. You are first in line for a scholarship. If the roof crashes on your head, no need to cry over this bad luck. You can sue anybody, make the landlord fix it. You do not have to sit like a Buddha under a tree letting pigeons drop their dirty business on your head. (289)

In all of these introductory pieces, the mothers’ language is choppy, using simple, present- tense sentences, few contractions or possessives, and omission of subjects. Apparently,

Tan—with a master’s degree in linguistics—made a concerted effort to replicate the speech patterns of immigrant Chinese®; however, the net effect, as Wong describes it, is to

“indicate the comforting presence of cultural mediation to the ‘mainstream’ reader” ( 189), since such linguistic conventions do fit Anglo stereotypes about how “Chinese people”

204 speak English. These passages may also fit Anglo stereotypes about “how Chinese people

think,” as well, in that each mother employs an effective, if concrete metaphor (calling on

Buddhist or Zen notions) to frame her concerns about her daughter.

The narration of the daughters’ stories also varies very little. Tan does seem to

have somewhat more success distinguishing between the daughters, but this may be due to

the fact that—because all of their stories are told “in America”—Tan can add to each story the

kind of detail that is presented more as “mythic gloss” in the China stories. Too, because

the daughters all knew each other from childhood, they frequently appear as characters in

each other’s stories. This is perhaps the way in which the novel best represents diversity

within its Chinese American community: when Rose Hsu Jordan describes how she told

her divorce narrative to Waverly and Lena, and how each reacted, we get a clearer picture

of the dynamics that exist between these women outside the bounds of the stories

presented. This glimpse into the daughters’ extra-narrative lives and interactions reminds

the reader that the stories they are privy to are, in fact, carefully selected, mediated, and

narrated, and certainly not a complete portrait.

In the character of Waverly, especially. Tan seems to be prodding her reader to

question this particular narrator’s authority: in both of the stories Waverly narrates about

herself, “Rules of the Game” and “Four Directions,” Waverly characterizes herself as sympathetic, even victimized. The first story describes how her mother managed to psychologically destroy her ability to play chess, a battle of wills that continues in the second story, when Waverly is convinced her mother is trying to sabotage her relationship with her fiancé. However, in the other daughters’ stories—especially in Jing-mei’s—

Waverly is decidedly unsympathetic, even cruel. In June’s first story, “Two Kinds,” she describes Waverly as “snotty”: “We had grown up together and shared all the closeness of two sisters squabbling over crayons and dolls. In other words, for the most part, we hated each other” (148). When June fails miserably at her piano recital, Waverly rubs it in by

205 commenting that “You aren’t a genius like me” (151). By June’s account, Waverly’s

personality only worsens with age; in one of her adult stories, Waverly tells June over a

New Year’s dinner that she should switch hairdressers, because the one she currently sees

“/5 gay....He could have AIDS” (229, emphasis Tan’s). At this same dinner, in front of

both of their families, Waverly reveals that the freelance advertising work June has done

for her law firm is “unacceptable,” “not sophisticated” enough for the firm (231). These

external views of Waverly suggest that she may not be a reliable narrator, and may in turn

be read as an indication that—since all of the stories are told from a first-person perspective-

-we might be more critical of how each narrator presents herself: in trying to make herself

sympathetic, or in trying to shape her narrative to get a particular message across, the

mothers and daughters may not be accurately representing themselves. And if that is the

case, then this may serve to warn readers that such self-interest belies accuratecultural

representation as well.

Notably, though, the one character who does not appear in any of the others’

stories is June herself, though of course she does appear in her “mother’s” stories, since

she is required to narrate them herself. Still, June’s conspicuous absence from other parts

of the text, combined with her overarching presence throughout the novel as a whole (she

is the only character who gets to speak four times instead of two) does function to make her

simultaneously the most familiar character in the novel, and yet the one we know the least

about. While we hear a lot about the personal lives of Lena, Waverly, and Rose (and also

about their mothers), we know next to nothing about June’s daily life, short of the fact that

she works as a copywriter for a small advertising firm. While virtually all of the other

women’s stories focus on issues of marriage and estrangement, we know nothing about

June’s romantic history; her stories—and her struggles—focus far more on her relationship with her mother. There are several immediate explanations: June’s mother has just died, so naturally that would be the focus of her current emotional energies; Tan may have

206 wanted to examine the mother-daughter conflict apart from the issue of marriage in one of her pairings; or possibly Tan wanted to portray June as both the least emotionally mature of all the daughters, but also the one who ultimately is best able to make peace with the memory of her mother. Nevertheless, the distinct lack of any outside perspective on June

(as we have with almost all the other characters) does make her character strangely inviolable, and may, in fact, support W ong’s assertion that

The Americanized daughter, who needs to be enlightened on things Chinese, serves as a convenient, unobtrusive stand-in for the mainstream reading public. White readers, their voyeurism concealed and their curiosity indulged by “naturalized” explanations, are thus relieved of possible historical guilt, firee to enjoy Chinese life as a depx)liticized spectacle. (197- 198)

I would further specify Wong’s thesis to say that it is June, in particular, whom the reader is invited to identify with and “see through,” literally and figuratively: because we know so little about June, because she is transparent, a reader can overwrite the blanks in June’s life story so as to best construct June as the reader herself. And ultimately, it is through June’s eyes that the reader eventually does “see” China at the novel’s end.

Thus, the scant differences in narrative voice between the mothers and the daughters, as well as June’s empty, almost ghost-like dominance over the entire novel’s structure suggest that while Tan may have intended to create seven distinctive voices, seven different accounts of what it means to be Chinese in America or Chinese American, those voices ultimately become undifferentiated. In teaching this novel, I have discovered that most students have some degree of difficulty keeping the characters straight—who is whose mother, which story in the previous section was told by the narrator of the later one, and so forth. Several critics have argued that this confusion or “collectivity” of narrative voices, as Maria Heung phrases it, “finally dissolves individualized character and plot and instead collectivizes them into an aggregate meaning existing outside the individual stories themselves” (612). This is a thesis echoed by Gloria Shen, who suggests more positively that “[wjhile immersed in particular and individual perspectives, the reader...also confronts

207 the more general and lasting concerns of many generations” (235), resulting in a narrative that “presents a continuous whole more meaningful than the sum of its parts” (235).

Ling’s assessment of this strategy, though, points to a less positive effect: “Though the mothers all have different names and individual stories, they seem interchangeable” (138).

Thus, the polyvocal narrative—despite its power to undermine monolithic notions of culture—instead serves to reinforce such notions.

Both Hueng and Souris credibly argue the idea that the novel’s “dialogicity” makes it ripe for a reader-response analysis, since—in its almost puzzle-like form—it calls upon the reader to actively reconstruct its pieces in order to make narrative sense of it; Souris says that in “standing back after reading and selectively meditating on the assemblage, there are several ways the segments enter into a dialogic relationship through the active agency of the reader responding in a controlled way to textual prompts” (120). Hueng more cogently argues that “the novel’s resonant structure and its use of parataxis effectively write the reader into the text as a crucial participant in the making of meaning” (613). The implication here is that the narrative structure itself encourages more active, and thus presumably more resistant (and less touristic) reading. Certainly, the novel’s form does call on the reader to be a more active participant in making connections and “meaning” within it. However, the overwhelming number of narrators, combined with the lack of stylistic markers that might emphasize the individuality of each narrator finally resolves into a collective and undifferentiated reading of the text’s characters. In the end, for the touristic reader, one Chinese mother is just like another, and every Chinese American daughter has the same problems.

This erasure of individual difference may explain why so much of the criticism of

Tan’s novel focuses almost exclusively on the theme of mother-daughter conflict: since the text simplifies the matter of ethnic identification for the reader by suggesting that being

“Chinese” and being “Chinese American” is essentially the same for all of the novel’s

208 women, ethnicity becomes an issue that can easily be overlooked in favor of a more

“archetypal” examination of the mother-daughter bond. In fact, critic M. Marie Booth

Foster pays lip service to the notion that “in literature that focuses on mother/daughter relationships, feminists see 'context—historical time and social and cultural group’ as

important” (215), yet continues to insist that “the quest for voice becomes an archetypal journey for all the woman” (209), quite apart from cultural context. This is the kind of nod to, then subsequent erasure of ethnicity that the novel’s structure allows. While the mother-daughter relationship is undoubtedly a major aspect of Tan’s novel, it is not the only one. Furthermore, McAlister contends that Tan’s novel itself resists the

“universalization” of this theme, instead positing that the mother-daughter relationships in the novel are “inscribed at the intersection of racial and class ideology in the United States”

(113). Thus, the text does offer some ways for the resistant reader to make distinctions between characters within the novel, even while comprehending the overarching theme that links all of them. In general, though, the blending of voices throughout the text would seem, for the touristic reader, to allow for an unchallenged and uncomplicated reading of what it means to be a Chinese immigrant to America and a first-generation Chinese

American.

Folk Material as ‘‘Authenticating” Device

At the outset of this chapter, I noted that the central fallacy in touristic reading is the idea that fiction is ethnography, an assumption made all too often by readers of texts written by those outside their own cultural groups. Wong describes this impulse and shows how it is actively courted in The Joy Luck Club, noting that

[T]he issue is not so much how Tan has failed as a cultural guide; it is, rather, the text- and reception-oriented question of how and why the American reading public has responded so eagerly to her writings as faithful chronicles of things Chinese. Tan’s fiction has apparently been able to hold in colloidal suspension two essential ingredients of quasi-ethnographic Orientalist discourse on China and the Chinese....These ingredients are “temporal distancing” and “authenticity marking.” Tan’s ability to 209 somehow keep both details and “nondetails,” as it were, in busy circulation allows readers with culturalist propensities—that is to say, a large proportion of the American reading public—to recognize the genre and respond accordingly, with enthusiastic purchases as well as a pleasurable mix of respect and voyeurism, admiration and condescension, humility and self- congratulation. (184-185)

While I think Wong’s characterization of “the American reading public” is itself

overgeneralized and somewhat essentialist (a point discussed at greater length later in this chapter), she convincingly pinpoints the mode by which Tan’s novel does, indeed, encourage touristic reading: specifically, by placing the mothers’ stories outside of diachronic time, and by imbuing them either with exotic description or a distinct lack of detail. For example, we rarely hear even about what Chinese province the mothers’ stories took place in, or when, while the daughters’ stories list not only street names (Tan 90, 187) but names of neighbors (110), specific dates (92), and familiar details including brand names like Rice Krispies (166). The result is that the mothers’ stories become “an important source of pleasure for white readers, who accept and appreciate it as a ‘mythic’ treatment of a remote but fascinating China” (Wong 187). The irony, of course, is that the myth becomes more “real” than “reality”: as Wong aptly notes, “an author with more direct historical knowledge about China...may well be less successful in convincing the American reading public of the ‘truthfulness’ of her picture” (190, emphasis Wong’s).

One of the specific ways The Joy Luck Club achieves this mythologizing effect, of course, is through the use of folkloric materials. Throughout the mothers’ China stories, we are treated to descriptions of such apparently “backstage” folk performances as the

Moon Festival, Lindo’s “traditional” marriage ceremony—the result of an arranged marriage, no less—and grandmothers’ moralistic folktales about the fate of greedy girls.

Whether or not these folkloric materials are “authentic” or not is questionable^; however, their very evocation implies both authenticity and authority to the reader not part of the folk group represented. Since the exoteric reader generally will not know the cultural context of the folk materials, there is no reason for the reader not to believe that they are, in fact,

210 “authentic,” an assumption touristic readers are readily prone to making (and an assumption they probably are not as likely to make about texts by contemporary writers of their own ethnic group, where fiction is more likely to be regarded as fiction, and not as ethnographic

“truth”).

Belief genres, in particular, are regularly employed in the mothers’ China stories.

Most of the mothers’ stories include some element of the supernatural, albeit in varying ways. In her story “Red Candle,” Lindo Jong tells how she escaped her first (arranged) marriage by exploiting her mother-in-law’s “superstitious” beliefs. Knowing that the marriage candle lit on her wedding night—“burned continuously at both ends without going out”—ensures that the marriage “can never be broken” (54), Lindo blows it out herself.

However, she nurses this secret until she can strategically exploit another of her mother-in- law’s beliefs, that dreams are prophetic: at the most opportune moment, Lindo tells her mother-in-law that she not only dreamed that the marriage candle went out, but that dead ancestors appeared in the dream to tell her that if the marriage were not dissolved, Tyan-yu

(Lindo’s husband, the mother-in-law’s son) would die. The mother-in-law, portrayed here as the “gullible folk,” immediately releases Lindo, who eventually makes her way to the

United States. Lindo’s disbelief in these alleged cultural beliefs seems to mark her for emigration; how could someone so sensible and logical remain in such “backward” conditions, among such superstitious and irrational people? Even as this story employs folk beliefs to mark its authenticity, it also uses them to disparage the source culture.

Not all the mothers (or daughters) view such “Chinese superstition” dismissively, however. Ying-ying St. Clair speaks often about her power to “know a thing before it happens” (275), a power her daughter readily acknowledges (161). This prophetic power seems to be tied to Ying-ying’s belief 'mfeng shur, as Lena describes it.

One time when I was growing up in San Francisco, she looked at the way our new apartment sat too steeply on the hill. She said the new baby in her womb would fall out dead, and it did. When a plumbing and bathroom fixtures store opened up across the street from the bank, my mother said the bank would seen have all its money 211 drained away. And one month later, an officer of the bank was arrested for embezzlement. (161)

Her mother tries to prevent the inevitable by compulsively rearranging all the furniture in the apartment, trying to restore the proper balance (111-112). Later, when Ying-ying comes to stay with Lena and her husband at heir new house, Lena “wonder[s] what she will see” (162), hoping that her mother's second sight will somehow help her find balance in her own life. The folk belief system is employed here more positively: Lena confirms

Ying-ying’s powers, so we know they must be “real.” On the other hand, the stamp of approval is delivered by Ying-ying’s American-raised daughter, who presumably is

“sophisticated” and “rational” enough to make such judgments. Furthermore,/e/ig shiii has been wholly appropriated by mainstream U. S. culture, thereby making it a “safe” belief system for Lena (and hence, the reader) to put credence in. Once again, the text seems to encourage the reader to see this folk practice as both authentic, exotic, and wholly validated by more familiar (U. S.) cultural practices.

Perhaps the most intriguing use of folk belief, though, takes place across An-mei

Hsu and Rose Hsu Jordan’s stories. In An-mei’s first story, she describes watching her mother “cut a piece of meat from her [own] arm,” put it in a soup, and feed it to her dying mother, An-mei’s grandmother. This, An-mei tells us, “is how a daughter honors her mother. It is shoii so deep it is in your bones” (41). Presumably, this traditional

“foodway”/cure is designed not only to show honor, but also to heal. The cure does not work—the grandmother dies—but An-mei is incredibly moved by the sight. Later, her mother makes an even greater sacrifice to save An-mei: seeing how miserable her own life is as the third concubine of wealthy Wu Tsing, and how miserable An-mei’s will be as a result, An-mei’s mother poisons herself with opium, strategically timing her suicide to coincide with the lunar new year. In so doing, her death yields greater power than her life ever could have, since

[0]n the third day after someone dies, the soul comes back to settle scores. In my mother’s case, this would be the first day of the lunar new year. And 212 because it is the new year, all debts must be paid, or disaster and misfortune will follow. (271 )

An-mei’s knowledge of this belief allows her to ensure her daughter of a future. Like

Lindo, An-mei’s mother manipulates a widely held folk belief; however, the text implies that An-mei’s mother believes it as well. This particular use of folk material—whether the material itself is “authentic” or not—seems to resist both dismissal and co-option, unlike the previous examples, in that the belief is validated within its own context.

But An-mei’s belief system is even more complex when presented from her daughter Rose’s point of view. Rose’s childhood story describes the drowning of her youngest brother, Bing, and her mother’s efforts to bring him back. When rescue crews fail to retrieve Bing’s body, the family goes home; by the next morning, however, An-mei has devised a way to bring him back. Her ritual creatively combines elements of a presumably “Chinese” belief system with elements of Christianity, a belief system An-mei has picked up (ambivalently) since becoming a Baptist after her emigration. In combination, though, these elements depart from both cultural traditions and take on an entirely personal tone:

She held in her hand the white Bible. And looking out over the water, she called to God, her small voice carried up by the gulls to heaven. It began with “Dear God” and ended with “Amen,” and in between she spoke Chinese.... “An ancestor of ours once stole water from a sacred well. Now the water is trying to steal back. We must sweeten the temper of the Coiling Dragon who lives in the sea. And then we must make him loosen his coils from Bing by giving him another treasure he can hide.” My mother poured out tea sweetened with sugar into the teacup, and threw this into the sea. And then she opened her fist. In her palm was a ring of watery blue sapphire, a gift from her mother, who had died many years before....This would maJce the Coiling Dragon forgetful of Bing. She threw the ring into the sea. (136-138)

This story differs dramatically from the others in its use of folkloric materials: An-mei’s ritual for retrieving Bing’s body constitutes an invented tradition, an attempt on her part to combine the best of two cultural belief systems in hope that this will make the ritual twice as likely to succeed. The ritual’s failure, however, does not (as is the case with Lindo’s

213 story, for example) suggest that An-mei’s belief was foolish. Nor do An-mei’s efforts seem designed only to show the depth of her denial. Rather, this episode raises real questions about the constnictedness of folk belief in general, in any culture; as such, it emphasizes the constructed nature of cultural and ethnic identity as well. Clearly, An-mei no longer feels “purely” Chinese, nor does she fully embrace her new Christian beliefs; rather, her invented ritual seems to be an enactment of her new sense of a blended ethnic

identity. That it fails only shows the difficulty of successfully combining divergent cultural perspectives and identities. As opposed to the other ways in which the text employs “folk” material, Rose’s story of her mother’s attempted rescue highlights the constructed nature of ethnic identity. In a sense, it doesn’t matter whether the “Chinese” elements of An-mei’s ritual are “authentic” or not, since it is clear that the entire ritual is invented; as such, this is one of the moments in Tan’s text that best resists touristic reading, though it, too, runs the risk of misinterpretation.

Contesting Ethnicity

The final and perhaps the most powerful way in whichThe Joy Luck Club both supports and resists touristic reading is in its investigation of the question of whether ethnic

identity is an “essential” quality, or whether it is, in fact, a constructed category. Wong suggests that this is whereThe Joy Luck Club diverges most dramatically from Kingston’s

The Woman Warrior, whereas Kingston’s text “ceaselessly deconstructs its own narrative authority and overtly thematizes the epistemological difficulties of American-bom Chinese”

(195), such issues are “never actively interrogated” in Tan’s work (196). Wong offers a few examples of places where the text offers up such an interrogation, concluding that these efforts are not only minimal, but may be deliberately underplayed by Tan in support of a larger, more essential view of ethnicity. As the above analysis has demonstrated, the novel’s very structure and its use of folk materials can either support or resist an essentialist

214 view of ethnicity, although the reader does have to woiic to make such connections.

However, I would disagree with Wong and argue that the issue of constructivism vs. essentialism is not always so muted in the text of The Joy Luck Club; this struggle is played out more often and more openly than she allows.

Strikingly, many of the textual moments that present this conflict most overtly and complexly involve the mother-daughter pair of Waverly and Lindo Jong. The first instance of this involves Waverly’s account of running into some white tourists in her Chinatown neighborhood, and of becoming the object of their touristic gaze:

Tourists never went to Hong Sing’s, since the menu was printed only in Chinese. A Caucasian man with a big camera once posed me and my playmates in front of the restaurant. He had us move to the side of the picture window so the photo would capture the roasted duck with its head dangling from a juice-covered rope. After he took the picture, I told him he should go into Hong Sing’s and eat dinner. When he smiled and asked me what they served, I shouted, “Guts and duck’s feet and octopus gizzards!” Then I ran off with my friends, shrieking with laughter... (91)

This scene neatly captures the central touristic fallacy: that the truly “authentic” site, the restaurant with its menu only in Chinese, is not the preferred tourist site; or more precisely, its authenticity is suitable for co-option with a camera, but not for first-hand experience.

Waverly’s description of how the white tourist composes his photo, making sure to include the frightening “Otherness” of the duck, in contrast with the more palatable “Otherness” of the cute Chinese American children, demonstrates her awareness of how the tourist is, in fact, composing her—h&v neighborhood, her ethnic group. She seems to understand that— in taking her picture alongside the ghastly duck—he is containing her not only within the borders of a negative, but also within a negative cultural border, one which closes in upon her subjectivity. Her taunt—an ironic restatement of what she expects the tourist is already thinking about food in Chinatown—seems, then, a way of disrupting that border. Since this event follows Waverly’s own exotic account of what can be found in Chinatown markets—“live frogs and crabs...boxes of dried cuttlefish, and row upon row of iced prawns, squid, and slippery fish” (91)—Waverly herself might seem to be complicit in this

215 touristic view of Chinatown; Wong, in fact, suggests that the story’s “exoticizing ...of everyday detail” (191) undermines the subversive power of the scene of Waverly’s encounter with the tourist. I would argue, though, that Waverly’s exoticization of her own neighborhood may, in fact, be interrogating cultural essentialism on yet another level: it may be Waverly’s way of showing that, as a Chinese American, these foodways and streets seemed somewhat “foreign” even to her.

Waverly’s second story also illustrates similar intercultural play and confusion.

When her fiancé. Rich (an Anglo) comes to dinner at her parents’ house for the first time,

Waverly realizes how poorly she has prepared him for the event:

But the worst was when Rich criticized my mother’s cooking, and he didn’t even know what he had done. As is the Chinese cook’s custom, my mother always made disparaging remarks about her own cooking.... “Ai! This dish not salty enough, no flavor,” she complained, after tasting a small bite. “It is too bad to eat.” This was our family’s cue to eat some and proclaim it the best she had ever made. But before we could do so. Rich said, “You know, all it needs is a little soy sauce.” And he proceeded to pour a riverful of the salty black stuff on the platter, right before my mother’s horrified eyes. (197)

While Waverly does qualify her mother’s comment as being typical of a “Chinese cook,” the overall impression of this scene is not so much that Rich has violated some kind of essential cultural norm, but that he has violated family norms. In teaching the novel, this scene often provokes students to recall similar mistakes they have made when dining for the first time with a significant other’s family. While the episode walks a fine line between essentialism and constructivism, the fact that most readers understand Rich’s error as a violation of family rules may reflect a received understanding about how larger cultural norms are always reinterpreted and varied between families within an ethnic group.®

And the episode of Rich’s “first encounter” with Waverly’s family affords another opportunity for the text to remind Anglo readers to be cautious in delineating the cultural knowledge they think they know from the information they are actually given. After the disastrous meal. Rich confesses to Waverly that when Lindo “was talking about that dead

216 guy showing up on Dynasty, I thought she was talking about something that happened in

China a long time ago” (199). This seemingly offhand remark functions in a couple of

ways: first, it demonstrates again (echoing the earlier scene with the tourist) how much

cultural misunderstanding depends on the part of the outsider’s preconceived expectations

about that culture, the tourist’s refusal to see beyond the parameters of his precomposed

portrait. On another level, this remark also reminds us again that even Lindo—who, along

with the other mothers, is perceived as ethnically “Chinese”—is no longer fully a part of her

native culture, since she is clearly an active participant in U. S. popular culture.

The final Waverly/Lindo exchange that puts the issue of essentialism vs.

constructivism into high relief is Lindo’s final story, “Double Face.” The title itself comes

from Lindo’s own questioning of her “American face” versus her “Chinese face” (289),

both of which she is able to use both consciously and strategically, though her own sort of

ethnic and cultural code switching. Apparently, though, Lindo has failed to share this

insight with her daughter, who—as the story opens-tells her mother she worries that if she

goes to visit China, they might think she is “one of them” and not “let [her] come back to

the United States” (288). Lindo is flabbergasted (presumably at Waverly’s presumptuous essentialism) and replies, “When you go to China...you don’t even need to open your

mouth. They already know you are an outsider....They know just watching the way you

walk, the way you carry your face. They know you do not belong” (289). Waverly is

upset, and Lindo knows why: “[N]ow she wants to be Chinese, it is so

fashionable....Only her skin and her hair are Chinese. Inside—she is all American-made”

(289). Later in the story, Lindo recalls that on her own return trip to China a few years earlier, everyone “knew my face was not one hundred percent Chinese” (305), despite her having been bom and raised to adulthood there.

Lindo seems to have a clear understanding of the cultural construction of ethnic and cultural identity, and how it has impacted both her and her daughter’s self-identification.

217 Her comment about Waverly’s sudden desire to “be Chinese’’ also neatly illustrates the

notion that ethnic identity is not stable over time, but that how one identifies oneself can

vary dramatically over time, space, and context. Her daughter—like her fiancé. Rich—

seems, however, to be invested in seeing her mother still as a foreigner from a remote land,

and Lindo expresses her displeasure at her daughter’s apparently intentional

misrepresentation of her mother’s immigration story, asking, “Why do you always tell

your friends that I arrived in the United States on a slow boat from China? That is not true,

I was not that poor. I took a plane....Why are you attracted only to Chinese nonsense?”

(295-296).

The story that Lindo relates shows, in fact, how she was able to skillfully

manipulate Anglo stereotypes of Chinese immigrants in order to forge a new life for herself

in the United States. Her first job is alongside An-mei Hsu in a fortune-cookie making

factory, where she pockets the thin paper strips, believing them to be “classical American

sayings” (299). She is astonished to discover that they are, rather, believed to be “classical

Chinese sayings”:

[An-mei] picked up one of the strips of paper and read it aloud, first in English: “Do not fight and air your dirty laundry in public. To the victor go the soils.” Then she translated in Chinese: “You shouldn’t fight and do your laundry at the same time. If you win, your clothes will get dirty.... “They are fortunes,” she explained. “American people think Chinese people write these sayings.” “But we never say such things!” I said. “These things don’t make sense. These are not fortunes, these are bad instructions.” “No, miss,” she said, laughing, “it is our bad fortune to be here making these and somebody else’s bad fortune to pay to get them.” (299-300)

And thus, Lindo gets a crash course in American stereotypes—though it must be noted that

Tan’s comical mistranslations of English into Chinese do have a double-edged effect: while they are amusing, they are so at the mothers’ expense, and the net effect is to ridicule the mothers’ unsophisticated and literal understanding of the English language. Still, though, Lindo quickly realizes the more figurative value of such expressions, and uses a strip that reads “A house is not a home when a spouse is not at home” (301) to encourage

218 her companion Tin Jong to ask her to marry him. This is the only way she can convey her desire to him, since he speaks Cantonese and she Mandarin, and they can only converse in the very basic English they have learned in class: “I see cat. I see rat. I see hat” (300).

Despite these obstacles, though, Lindo and Tin are able to create a new, hybrid linguistic and cultural identity by which they can survive in what is increasingly a less-“foreign” context for them.

It is in June’s final story of her return to China, however, where Tan’s ability to

“balance on a knife edge of ambiguity, producing texts in which Orientalist and counter-

Orientalist interpretive possibilities jostle each other” (Wong 191) is most evident, and where the essentialist/constructivist view of ethnicity is presented most problematically.

Here, June becomes a literal tourist as she travels to China to meet her half-sisters; in so doing, she becomes the lens through which the reader perceives China. The entire chapter teeter-totters precariously between subverting June’s expectations about China, thus revealing her “American-ness,” and validating her “essential” Chinese nature. The chapter opens with June’s realization that

The minute our train leaves the Hong Kong border end enters Shenzhen, China, I feel different. I can feel the skin on my forehead tingling, my blood rushing through a new course, my bones aching with a familiar old pain. And I think. My mother was right. I am becoming Chinese. (306)*

June counters this most essentialist of statements by joking about genetics, presumably revealing her understanding of the biology/culture debate, imagining herself “transforming like a werewolf, a mutant tag of DNA suddenly triggered, replicating itself insidiously into a syndrome, a cluster of telltale Chinese behaviors” (306-307, emphasis Tan’s). And yet, don’t the “tingling skin,” the “blood,” the “bones aching” suggest just such a physical transformation? Hard as Tan might try, in this chapter, her efforts to rein in June’s tendency to essentialize her ethnicity ultimately fail, as June looks out the window and feels

“as if I had seen this a long, long time ago, and had almost forgotten” (307). It is this

219 emphasis on a sort of immutable ethnic collective unconscious that permeates the rest of the story.

Nevertheless, June is aware of herself as a tourist: at the train station, she notes that she is “eye level only with other tourists” and could “never pass for true Chinese”

(312). And at the hotel in Guangzhou, June marvels at the luxurious hotel lobby, the color television in the room, the wet bar with Bacardi and Cadbury chocolate, wondering repeatedly, “This is communist China?” (319). Like any other tourist in search of authenticity, she seems a little disappointed to find herself in “what looks like a grander version of the Hyatt Regency” (318), and is pleased when the hotel shampoo has “the consistency and color of hoisin sauce,” remarking, “This is more like it. This is China”

(320)—as manifested in “authentic” shampoo. Unlike the novel’s other scenes of tourist encounters, though, this one seems to be presented unironically; there are no markers to direct the reader to critique or subvert June’s reactions. And yet, while her reactions clearly mark her as an American—and thus invite the American reader to concur with her observations—we are simultaneously asked to see her as essentially “different,” as she herself remarks at the opening of the chapter, now that she is in China. This is the moment at which the text most encourages touristic reading: June is an American like us, and thus will have “appropriately American” reactions to what she sees and experiences, but she is also a better tourist than the Anglo reader could ever be, precisely because—being Chinese

American—she can also, through some trick of genetics, tap into a far deeper, more

“authentic” tourist experience than we ever could. And indeed, June achieves the ultimate tourist experience that all desire, but few achieve: full immersion into the “Other” culture, an undistorted, unmediated view of all the back regions.

There is a slight attempt to complicate the unambiguous “naturalness” of June’s new feeling shortly afterward, when she “think[s] about what [her] mother said, about activating [her] genes and becoming Chinese,” and June remarks that she “wonder[s] what

220 she meant” (320). However, this is the last time June raises a question that might challenge the picture of ethnic essentialism at the novel’s end. Once she has heard her father tell her mother’s story to her—in Chinese this time, so that she somehow more fully understands it-

-her genetic “transformation” seems nearly complete.

The full transformation occurs, though, when June is reunited with her two half- sisters in Shanghai. June has one brief, final moment of doubt about her ability to “be”

Chinese (like her sisters, for her sisters), saying, “I am so nervous I cannot even feel my feet. I am just moving somehow” (331 ). In a way, though, her separation from her body at this point has less to do with her ambivalence and more to do with her sense of transcendence: perhaps she can no longer feel her feet because they are no longer touching the ground, as she has overcome “worldly” concerns about race, nationality, and ethnicity, and entered into a higher plane, where she becomes one with her essential being. This appears to be the case, as when she is reunited with her half-sisters, her fear disappears, leveled by sheer biological sameness:

“Mama, Mama,” we all murmur, as if she is among us. My sisters look at me, proudly. "'Meimei jandale” says one sister proudly to the other. “Little Sister has grown up.” I look at their faces again and I see no trace of my mother in them. Yet they still look familiar. And now I also see what part of me is Chinese. It is so obvious. It is my family. It is in our blood. After all these years, it can finally be let go. (331)

In the midst of this rapturous paean to essentialism, there are a few momentary nods to a more constructed identity: June cannot see her mother’s face in her sisters’ face; only a part of her is Chinese; it is her family as much as her ethnicity that she is reconnected with."*

Nevertheless, as Wong argues.

The ending of the novel itself offers a powerful essentialist proposition: despite much wavering...“family” and “blood” eventually triumph over history....This ostensible reconciliation presupposes the reality of a self- alienating ethnic malaise...then locates redemption in origin, thus in effect nullifying or at least discounting the “American” temporality of the Chinese American experience....The ending of The Joy Luck C/w6...suggest[s] that there is indeed a locus of truth, and that locus is origin. (194, 196)

221 Indeed, for June, the tourist’s dream has come true: she gets to “go native’’—and her readers get to do so along with her. It seems especially significant that the novel ends, then, with a tourist photograph, a Polaroid shot of June and her half sisters at the moment of their reunion. As they watch, June tells us “I know we all see it: Together we look like our mother. Her same eyes, her same mouth, open in surprise to see, at last, her long- cherished wish” (332). Ostensibly, then, the three of them erase all their differences at the end, becoming, instead, a single figure. Notably, though, it is a one-dimensional figure, ghosts in a photograph that—since it has no negative—cannot be reproduced.

In short, then. The Joy Luck Club offers readers opportunities both to validate and challenge their exoteric views of an unfamiliar culture, with the bulk of the text encouraging touristic reading. Wong notes, in fact, that often “the same narrative detail may yield widely divergent readings” (192), and agrees that “subversions of naive voyeurism can be detected by the reader attuned to questions of cultural production” (191). On the whole, however, I find Wong’s assessment of the “average” reader of The Joy Luck Club to be in itself essentialist and reductive; she suggests that

The white middle-class book-reading and book-buying public of the post- civil rights era...has leamed to enjoy its exotica flavored by the rhetoric of pluralism and an awareness of domestic and global interethnic connectedness....[GJiven the current vogueishness of multiculturalist rhetoric, the safest course for the befuddled non-Chinese reader might be to take the fictional “insider” speaker at face value. (190, 193)

Wong offers up a representation of the “white middle-class reader” nearly as one dimensional as she claims Tan’s portrait of Chinese Americans is. While I do not disagree with her general premise—that white readers (and indeed, white audiences at Tecumseh!, white readers of Anglo-permed stories about his life, and so forth) are participating in a very suspect cultural exchange—I would argue that the desire motivating such exchanges can vary dramatically, as the Tecumseh! audience surveys demonstrated in the case of that particular cultural production. Wong is right to interrogate the “Other-containing” function of the kind of “happy pluralism” she imagines readers take away from The Joy Luck Club,

222 but this is clearly not the only function made possible by the text itself, nor can it possibly incorporate everything that readers bring to the text. Wong may be correct (if elitist) in claiming that such resistant readings are not likely to be conducted by “the ‘airport newsstand’ readership of Tan’s works” (193), but students in a college classroom, I believe, can readily be helped to see how the essentialist/constructivist debate gets played out in a text like The Joy Luck Club, and because students generally receive the text so positively, it may actually be a good place to begin such an interrogation.

Zora Neale Hurston and the “Spv-glass of Anthropology”**

Like Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God was generally better received by Anglo critics than by African-American critics, and was also targeted by her contemporaries for (mis)representing African American culture. The most notorious and oft-cited review of the novel was penned by Richard Wright, whom Gates characterizes as both “Hurston’s dominant black male contemporary and rival,” as well as the writer with whom Hurston had the least in common (“Afterword” 188). Wright’s review, though, seems to suggest that Hurston ought to emulate more closely realist writers like himself:

Miss Hurston voluntarily continues in her novel the tradition which was forced upon the Negro in the theater, that is, the minstrel technique that makes the “white folks” laugh. Her characters eat and laugh and cry and work and kill; they swing like a pendulum eternally in that safe and narrow orbit in which America likes to see the Negro live: between laughter and tears....In the main, her novel is not addressed to the Negro, but to a white audience whose chauvinistic tastes she knows how to satisfy. She exploits the phase for Negro life which is “quaint,” the phase which evokes a piteous smile on the lips of the “superior” race. (Zora Neale Hurston: Critical Perspectives Past and Present 17, emphasis Wright’s)'"

For “quaint,” read “folk,” and it is clear that Wright’s objection is to the folkloric aspects of

Hurston’s writing, precisely those qualities which touristic (mostly Anglo) readers today still perceive as the “authentic” and authenticating moments in the text. So perhaps, on some level, Wright’s fears were justified. Certainly the language of Lucille Tompkins’

223 review of Their Eyes for The New York Times Book Review seems emblematic of

Wright’s concerns; she begins her review of September 26, 1937, by noting that

This is Zora Hurston’s third novel, again about her own people—and it is beautiful. It is about Negroes, and a good deal of it is written in dialect, but really it is about every one, or at least every one who isn’t so civilized that he has lost the capacity for glory. {Critical Perspectives 18)

Tompkins here seems to travel the same road as a number of the contemporary critics of

The Joy Luck Club: the “themes” of the novel somehow enable it to transcend its ethnic

origin and become something for “everyone,” a move that first romanticizes ethnicity, then

erases it. Notably, Tompkins locates the “glory” in Hurston’s novel in its use of dialect.

Alain Locke also admired Hurston’s use of “rare dialect,” calling Their Eyes “folklore

fiction at its best,” but then undermined those very compliments by rhetorically asking

Hurston,

When will the Negro novelist of maturity...come to grips with motive fiction and social document fiction? Progressive southern fiction has already banished the legend of these entertaining pseudo-primitives whom the reading public loves to laugh with, weep over, and envy. {Critical Perspectives 18)

As with Wright’s review, Locke’s seems to demand of Hurston a certain kind of

conformity or allegiance to a cause, much in the same vein as contemporary writers critical

of Tan. This provides a tricky conundrum: while we are quick to see the fault in reviews

like those of Wright and Locke, in our contemporary environment of hyperawareness of

issues of representation, we are more sympathetic to critiques like Wong’s critique of Tan.

While Wong certainly does a far more persuasive job of showing where, specifically,

Tan’s text encourages Orientalist readings, the core issue seems to be the same: how much effort does the novelist need to exert to ensure that the cultural representation offered by her text is an “accurate” one—or at least, a challenging or subversive one?

Clearly this is unreasonable weight to put on a novelist, since it is for the most part not a demand we make of Anglo writers. Rarely is a white novelist criticized for

“misrepresenting” her culture, largely due to the fact that because the majority of published

224 fiction in the U. S. is written by Anglos, there are always counterexamples available.

Additionally, since (as Lauter argues) “white” is equated with “normative,” there is, in a sense, nothing that needs to be represented; Anglo readers and writers assume a familiarity with white cultures that cannot be assumed with “Others.” Rather than measuring texts like

Tan’s and Hurston’s against an imaginary yardstick of “representativeness”—whose criteria no group could ever come to a consensus about—these texts need to be evaluated on their own terms. As was the case with Tan’s work, Hurston’s novel also dances with her Anglo audience, both catering to its expectations and subverting it at every turn. The novel accomplishes this through the very device it was criticized for on its publication—its use of dialect—and also through its use of folk materials, both “traditional” or expected materials, and also nontraditional or taboo materials.

Dialect!Dialectic

Before examining contemporary interpretations of Hurston’s use of dialect, most of which fully reverse negative judgments like Wright’s, it is necessary to understand the context from which Wright and others made their criticisms. As Gayl Jones notes,

Wright’s concern that any use of dialect would be perceived as mere “minstrelsy” was grounded in the fact that minstrel “audiences...were used to hearing ‘dialect’ only in comic contexts” (“Breaking Out” 141). Thus, for Wright and other African American writers, any use of dialect—even a usage like Hurston’s, which attempts to reclaim the artistry and rhetorical subtlety of African American vernacular-could only be read by outsiders as comical evidence of “black innate mental inferiority, the linguistic sign...of human bondage” (Gates, “The Speakerly Text” 176). More recently, Michelle Wallace has inverted this perception to suggest instead that “Hurston’s self-conscious manipulation of a kind of minstrelsy...may be the crucial mark of Afro-American cultural and artistic productivity” (173).

225 What seems most remaricable today about Wright’s critique, though, is its implication that the novel’s entire text is written in dialect, thus overlooking its very complicated blend of dialect with free indirect discourse. And it is, in fact, the structure and narration of the novel that offers the first opportunity for resistant reading. The dialect itself offers a locus of “authenticity” within the text, as my student noted—especially since much of the dialect functions to illustrate verbal folk exchanges such as Signifyin(g), the dozens, and joke cycles. However, the dialect is framed by the much more traditionally literary—even epic in its tone—narration provided by Hurston’s omniscient narrator. A good example of this occurs in the scene in which Janie rhetorically castrates Joe by

“scoring” or out-signifying him in front of the other men in the store:

“Tain’t no use gettin’ all mad, Janie, ’cause Ah mention you ain’t no young gal no mo’. Nobody in heah ain’t lookin’ for no wife outa yuh. Old as you is.”... “Humph! Talkin’ ‘bout me lookin’ old! When you pull down yo’ britches, you look lak the change uh life.” “Great God from Zion!” Sam Watson gasped. “Y’all really playin’ de dozens tuhnight. ”... Then Joe Starks realized all the meanings and his vanity bled like a flood. Janie had robbed him of his illusion of irresistible maleness that all men cherish, which was terrible. The thing that Saul’s daughter did to David. (75, emphasis Hurston’s)

Hurston’s combination of dialect and more literary narration here—including a Biblical allusion—not only explains the import of what Janie has done to her readers, but also recasts the “dialectical” interactions of the characters in a larger and more literarily validated narrative style. It is a technique employed throughout the novel, and with a further purpose: Gates cites Hurston’s observation that “the white man thinks in a written language, and the Negro thinks in hieroglyphics” by way of suggesting that “Hurston conceived of it [the combination of “dialect-informed free indirect discourse”] as a third language, as a mediating third term that aspires to resolve the tension between standard

English and black vemacular” (“The Speakerly Text” 215).

226 In other words, Hurston’s “third language” is designed, in many ways, specifically fo r the touristic reader, as a mediating device that “translates” the Other into more familiar terms. However, I would argue that rather than pandering to an Anglo audience,

Hurston’s narrative strategy is far more complex than this initial interpretation would allow; it is imbued with the very folk rhetoric her characters employ: specifically, the act of signifying, defined (partially) by Gates as “a pervasive mode of language use” that enables the speaker “to manipulate language in such a way as to facilitate the smooth navigation” between Anglo discourse and African-American discourse (Signifying Monkey 76, 80).

Applying this concept to Their Eyes, it becomes clear that Hurston’s use of dialect- informed free indirect discourse is a narrative technique that endorses an ideology of apparent accommodation: even though what these characters are saying appears (literally, on the page) to be “foreign,” it is “translated” into the experience of outsiders, as well.

However, Hurston uses this “third language” to signify on her white readership; while the free-indirect discourse would seem to bridge the dialect passages with more narratively

“traditional” or familiar prose, Hurston’s shifts between the two modes often function more to redirect prying, touristic eyes away from the “sacred” folk text and back to territory less vulnerable to misinterpretation.

Some critics have recognized this subversive potential, but believe the novel’s structure fails to follow through on it. Hazel Carby, in particular, critiques what she sees as Hurston’s attempt to create the illusion of authenticity without recognizing her own role in constructing that sense of authenticity:

When Hurston complained about the “race records” and the commercialization of the blues, she failed to apply her own analysis of processes of cultural transformation....Hurston may not have dressed the spirituals in tuxedos but her attitude toward folk culture was not unmediated; she did have a clear framework of interpretation, a construct that enabled her particular representation of a black, rural folk culture. (76)

In other words, Carby suggests that Hurston—given her background in anthropology— knew very well that the scope of her portrayal of African American culture was limited and

227 romantic, and that her narrative choices would direct readers to accept this cultural

representation as “truth.” According to this rubric, the third-person narration acts as a

distancing device that pretends only to frame the dialect-informed parts of the text, when in

fact it actively alters and manipulates them.

Yet Hurston’s emphatic distinction between the two narrative modes seems to

suggest not so much a desire to manipulate the reader’s response toward any specific end,

but rather to limit or contain it. Despite the combination of these modes, though, the dialect

passages are still the parts of the novel that get marked as “authentic.” In a sense, then,

Hurston’s use of dialect both succeeds and fails in its multiple agendas: at the same time

that the dialect usage constructs a dynamic and clearly marked folk community, it also risks

overshadowing the rest of the narrative. When this happens, touristic readers (and critics)

become exclusively focused on the novel’s use of dialect and fail to see how Hurston’s

invention of a “third language” suggests that “ethnic authenticity” is a linguistic

construction, and that dialect is the product of cultural negotiation and not of essential

“difference.”

This kind of emphasis on dialect as the locus of authenticity also negates another of the functions of Hurston’s third language: as both Gates and Barbara Johnson argue, the

“double-voiced” nature of the narration becomes a rhetorical analogue to W. E. B. DuBois’ notion of double-consciousness. In other words, the twin narrative modes, and the ways

in which they play off of one another, become Hurston’s linguistic representation of the bifurcated experience of being African American in an Anglo-dominated culture. This dualism is echoed in the text’s themes, as well: when Janie realizes that “she had an inside and an outside now and suddenly she knew how not to mix them” (68), this can also be taken as a sign of her awareness of her own double-consciousness. And if the rest of the novel tracks Janie’s further recognition that she must “mix” those selves to reach her beloved horizon, then the novel’s narrative structure—its combination of dialect and

228 omniscient narration—serves as a model for her about how she might make such a combination work. In so doing, the novel’s structure—as well as its plot—ought to remind the reader that identity is a continuous act of becoming, one that involves a great deal of

“mixing,” rather than a fixed and immutable “fact.” In a larger sense, then, Janie’s mixing of her inside and outside also serves as a model for the idealized African American community on the muck: whereas Eatonville seems only to become progressively more

“Anglo identified” under the power of Joe Starks, Janie and Tea Cake insist that the

Bahaman workers be “gradually drawn into the American crowd” (146) on the muck. The very fact that Janie migrates through at least three different African American communities during the course of the novel—each one radically different from the one before—also undercuts a monolithic snapshot of “black life in the 1930s,” as touristic readers might be inclined to view the novel.

And certainly, such touristic readings of Their Eyes are all too common. Much like

Souris’ essay on The Joy Luck Club, critic Rich Potter takes an over-generalized approach to validating the cultural authenticity of Hurston’s novel. He falls prey to Carby’s warning that the text “represent[s]...'Negroness’ as an unchanging, essential entity, an essence so distilled that it is an aesthetic position of blackness” (77). In describing Janie’s journey to the muck. Potter ignores the diversity within the muck community as well as its own constraints, preferring instead to see it as a kind of Black Eden, a return to the authentic:

Tea Cake and Janie settle in an old cabin and become engrossed in the simple, soulful, romantic, earthy, vibrant lifestyle of the muck, which is consistent with traditional African American folk cultural pattems....Thus the muck is with little doubt that realm representative of the folk values and lifestyle Hurston believes is uniquely Black and an invaluable part of the evolving African American consciousness. (24-25)

Again, just as Souris attempted to validate the ending of The Joy Luck Club as culturally appropriate by citing its reflection of unspecified “Asian values,” so Potter views the muck as the living example of unnamed and unspecified African American “folk values.” And as with Tan’s text, we cannot simply label such a reaction as a gross misreading of the text.

229 The fact is that Hurston does—as Carby suggests—construct the muck as a Utopian environment (Carby 77). In both her fiction and her ethnographic writing, Hurston explicitly expressed her fear that rural Afncan-American folk culture was on the verge of extinction—a widespread motivation for most anthropological fieldwork at this historical juncture. However, even though Hurston’s portrayal of the “folk” is decidedly limited and romantic, and despite the fact that such a portrayal encourages touristic reading, both

Huiston’s use of specific folk material and her representation of life on the muck are more nuanced and dynamic than either Carby or Potter acknowledge.

Unsignified “Traditional” Folk Material

In addition to the novel’s narrative technique and its thematic echoes, the novel’s use of folkloric material also both invites and resists touristic readings. Even more so than the use of dialect, Hurston’s use of folklore walks a thin line between meeting and thwarting the expectations of her white readership. Again, though—as with the novel’s narrative structure—a closer examination of how Hurston employs and marks her folk materials suggests that the novel is more subversive and political than is generally perceived. The knowledge that Hurston was an active folklorist, and had done extensive fieldwork in the very region in which Their Eyes is set, may encourage readers to perceive the novel’s representation of these materials as “authentic,” but the same knowledge can also be used to complicate easy equations between Hurston the ethnographer and Hurston the novelist. While Hurston’s fieldwork undoubtedly informs her depiction of folklife, especially in Eatonville and on the muck, we need to be cautious about how directly we connect Hurston’s ethnographic work with the novel itself, to avoid implying that the novel is itself ethnography. The reason for this caution is not to draw clear distinctions between fiction and ethnography; in fact, the permeability of such generic distinctions could be overtly brought into play as yet another way of resisting touristic readings. However, to

230 isolate the uses of folklore in the novel under the reductive heading “ethnographic details” is to fail to understand the very creative uses Hurston makes of the folklore in the text.

Even if some of the novel’s “ethnographic details” are derived from Hurston’s fieldwork experiences, within the context of the novel they serve very specific purposes.

The example cited above—where Sam Watson remarks that Joe and Janie are “really playin’ de dozens”—is one of the few instances in the text where a label is put on the folklore being represented; elsewhere Hurston tells us that the men on the store porch are engaging in “acting-out courtship” with the three girls who stroll by (63), and that the

Bahamans are performing fire dances behind Janie and Tea Cake’s house (146), but otherwise, the folkloric material in the text goes relatively unmarked and unexplained.

Furthermore, such material is also only marked by characters in dialect, and not by the more “authoritative” third-person narrative voice, suggesting a reluctance to separate the material from its usual context. Considering that Hurston could have used the novel—and her authoritative omniscient narrator, more specifically—as an explicitly didactic tool for educating her white readership about African American folklore, her insistence on integrating the material into the rest of the text without comment seems deliberate and significant.

The most notable example of this unsignified inclusion is Chapter Six, the chapter featuring the joke cycles surrounding Matt Bonner’s Yellow Mule, who eventually dies and receives an elaborate mock funeral; these episodes are followed by a lengthy “debate” between Sam and Lige Moss about caution vs. nature (a masterful battle of signifying), the

“acting-out courtship” previously mentioned, and a quick reference to the story cycles about John de Conquer (a topic that is finally elaborated on in Chapter Eighteen).

Remarkably, very little of the published criticism on the novel addresses Chapter Six; in many ways, it seems almost “disposable” in the novel’s narrative arc, since very little in terms of plot advancement happens there. And yet, it is not only the longest chapter in the

231 entire novel, but it is also the site of one of Janie’s most important epiphanies: the

aforementioned realization that she has an inside and an outside. Clearly, then, this was a

significant chapter to Hurston: why, then, does she seem to bury the significance of her

folk material—a burial which seemingly has resulted in a critical dismissal of the vemacular

treasures she seemed to want to celebrate not only in this chapter, but in the novel as a

whole?

I believe Hurston’s cloaking or apparent “soft-pedaling” of her folkloric material is

quite strategic, and comprises her best defense against her critics’ claims that by including

this kind of material in her novel, she is pandering to Anglo expectations and propagating

racist stereotypes. Perhaps, if Hurston had wielded her anthropological authority more

overtly, such an accusation would be substantiated. But her deliberate refusal to play the

role of ethnographic interpreter in Chapter Six allows her to present her folkloric materials

not as “exotic” eccentricity, but as part of the day-to-day functioning of this community—

so routine as to not require explanation. Hurston’s deliberate omission of ethnographic

explanation or analysis thereby excludes the unknowing (touristic) reader from fully

understanding what is going on; in so doing, Hurston prevents these materials from being

“mistranslated” or co-opted. This strategy both supports and resists a touristic reading of

Their Eyes', on the negative side, the lack of mediation in Chapter Six (and other “folk” parts of the text) has the potential to leave the touristic reader thinking he has just had an encounter with an “enigmatic” Other, and also leaves the reader (and the critic) with the sense that this material is at best secondary to the “real” story. However, this cloaking strategy is also one of the novel’s greatest strengths: by not explaining to readers what they are witnessing and its functions or purposes (as she certainly could have), Hurston “saves de text”—the complete text—from the potential misunderstanding of touristic eyes, thereby preserving its integrity. This cloaking strategy, combined with the “third language” of her

232 narrative strategy, gives Hurston complete control over which aspects of her text she chooses to mediate for her audience.

Signifying on Taboos

It is not only the more obvious folkloric material that Hurston cloaks and refuses to mediate, however. In addition to incorporating more traditional folk materials in her novel,

Hurston also signifies on more taboo aspects of African-American folklore. And if the traditional materials are cloaked so as to be able to slip past the touristic reader’s radar, the more controversial folk materials are even less mediated and more soft-pedaled. And yet, the passages in which this “taboo” material is introduced also represent the novel’s most political moments. It seems shocking now that a critic like Richard Wright could accuse

Hurston of writing a novel with “no theme, no message”—in short, with no political sensibility whatsoever—when the novel addresses issues of miscegenation, Jim Crow racism, and the entire debate over black destiny, as represented in the debate between W.

E. B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington. Clearly, though, the novel’s discussion of these matters slipped under even Wright’s highly tuned radar, indicating again that Hurston seems to have a strategy in mind here. By including this kind of “taboo” material in her text—even in a way in which it is almost destined to be overlooked—Hurston breaks the rules about which aspects of culture are “tellable” and which are not. This signifying on her part seems to undercut the notion that the novel conforms to racial (and racist) expectations, for in addition to the already complicated nexus of race and gender identities addressed in the novel, Hurston adds the complicating (and contentious) issues of class and color, thus challenging her readers to understand how any individual “identity” (such as

Janie’s) is actually constructed at the intersections of several competing identities.

The first example of this kind of taboo folk material comes early in the novel; upon discovering Janie kissing Johnny Taylor at the gate, Janie’s grandmother (Nanny) feels

233 compelled to tell her “de text’' that she has been saving for just this moment, when Janie’s

womanhood becomes a danger. What Nanny tells Janie is her family’s oral history, a

straightforward enough folk genre; but Nanny’s text is also a story of rape, exploitation,

and miscegenation. Janie’s mother was the product of a sexual relationship between

Nanny and her slave master (a relationship that Naimy describes fairly unproblematically),

and Janie herself is the product of her mother’s rape by a schoolteacher (16-18). Very little

is made of this genealogy in criticism of the novel, and yet it seems crucial to an

understanding of the novel’s politics. In the figure of Janie—who is later described as

having a “coffee-and-cream complexion” (134)—Hurston both embodies and undercuts an

essentialist interpretation and application of Du Bois’ philosophies. Janie is “light” enough

to compel the “milky”-skinned Mrs. Turner to suggest that people like she and Janie

“oughta make us a class tuh ourselves” (136)—presumably, to join the “talented tenth”— but

the fact that Janie’s lightness is attributable to her slaveowner grandfather and her

rapist/schoolteacher father implicitly critiques the value of formal education, and more explicitly mocks class distinctions based on such dubious lineage. Furthermore, Hurston

blasts the notion of racial essentialism by having the racially mixed Janie become the

subject of a quest toward immersion in Afncan-American culture, which she finally (thinks she) achieves when she arrives on the muck and can fully participate in its folk culture. For as much as critics argue that the novel tracks Janie’s quest for a voice, so it is also tracking her quest to reconstruct her ethnic identity while simultaneously deconstructing the issue of class; as DuPlessis argues, for Hurston race is “a determinant that itself could be overruled by class and economic self-interest” (99).

Janie’s lightness is explicitly tied to class issues throughout the novel, another indication that the novel is, indeed, highly political, and it is this issue of class that offers the most fruitful opportunity for resistant, non-touristic reading in the novel. Class is an issue from the novel’s beginning: as Janie retums from the muck in her overalls, the

234 “porch sitters” wonder, “Why don’t she stay in her class?” (2), even though her attire signals her recent working-class experience. Janie tells Pheoby that she has been “classed o ff’ against her will (107), first by her grandmother, who wanted her to “pick from a higher bush” (13), then by her second husband Jody, who calls Janie a “pretty doll- baby.-.made to sit on de front porch and rock and fan yo’self and eat p’taters dat other

folks plant just special for you” (28). Ironically, though, Jody decisively excludes Janie from the store porch in Eatonville and forces her to work against her will. When he dies,

Janie decides her days of being classed off are over, but discovers that because she “slept with authority...she was part of it in the town mind” (44): her wealth and status as Joe

Starks’ widow only increase the class distance between her and the townspeople, who go

“mad” when they discover that Janie is seeing Tea Cake (105). Ultimately, in order to break with the rigid notions of class that bind her, Janie must sell the store and leave town, going with Tea Cake to work on the muck and immerse herself in what Hurston presents as democratic folk culture almost utopian in its separation from the depressing and dangerous white-controlled towns of Jacksonville and Palm Beach, where Tea Cake is stabbed at one time, and forced into unpaid labor burying bodies at another (120, 161).

The muck is not without its own problems, however, in fact, Hurston seems to use the muck as her heart of darkness, the place where she can best interrogate the problems that, as Coker remarks, “keeps our own selves down” (37). For it is on the muck that

Janie meets Mrs. Turner, the “milky sort of a woman” who is the most vehemently race conscious character in the novel. Like the chapter about Matt Bonner’s mule, this one

(Chapter Sixteen) also seems “disposable” in terms of plot advancement. While it does introduce the character of Mrs. Turner’s brother, who later leads Tea Cake to question

Janie’s fidelity and finally to strike her, little else happens in this brief chapter except for its detailing of Janie’s encounters with Mrs. Turner. However, these encounters are crucial to an understanding of the political nature of the novel (and Hurston’s own politics within the

235 Harlem Renaissance movement), for it is through the character of Mrs. Turner that Hurston

is able to address the issue of “color (and Caucasian features) within race” which have

“always been a painful part of Afncan-American heritage” (DuPlessis 114).

Mrs. Turner befriends Janie because of her “white” features, but significantly,

those external features are, for Mrs. Turner, merely the visible signifier for Mrs. Turner’s

more overriding concern with class. Despite Janie’s temporary insistence on “slumming”

with the fieldhands, Mrs. Turner reads Janie’s complexion as the indicator of her essential

worthiness: “Janie’s coffee-and-cream complexion and her luxurious hair made Mrs.

Turner forgive her for wearing overalls like the other women who worked in the fields”

(134). Here again, Hurston seems to soft-pedal the issue of Janie’s being light-skinned by

inextricably and necessarily linking that issue with the issue of class: a woman who looks

like Janie, in Mrs. Turner’s mind, should not be out working in the field. In so doing,

Hurston does not downplay the issue of racism, as her critics suggest; rather, she makes it

an even more complicated and contentious issue than the reader might have previously

imagined, since Hurston eradicates the possibility of a monolithic concept of race by

demonstrating the crucial ways that race and class intersect with and undercut each other.

Additionally, Hurston raises the taboo issue of esoteric racism/colorism, which adds yet

another dimension to her representation of ethnic identity.'^

In their conversations, Mrs. Turner and Janie discuss matters that Mrs. Turner

imagines should be of equal importance to them as members of the same “race,” but Janie becomes acutely aware that what Mrs. Turner is really talking about is class, as this long excerpt shows:

“Mis’ Woods, Ah have often said to mah husband. Ah don’t see how uh lady like Mis’ Woods can stand all them common niggers round her place all the time.” “They don’t worry me atall. Mis’ Turner. Fact about de thing is, they tickles me wid they talk.” “You got more nerve than me. When somebody talked mah husband intuh comin’ down heah tuh open up uh eatin’ place Ah never dreamt so many different kins uh black folks could colleck in one place. Did Ah never

236 woulda come....Yo’ husband musta had plenty money when y’all got married.” “Whut make you think dat. Mis’ Turner?” “Tuh git hold of uh woman lak you. You got mo’ nerve than me. Ah jus’ couldn’t see mahself married to no black man. It’s too many black folks already. We oughta lighten up the race.” “Naw, mah husband didn’t had nothin’ but hisself. He’s easy tuh love if you mess round ’im. Ah loves him. ”... “You’se different from me. Ah can’t stand black niggers. Ah don’t blame de white folks from hatin’ ’em ’cause Ah can’t stand ’em myself. ’Mother thing. Ah hates tuh see folks lak me and you mixed up wid ’em. Us oughta class off.” “Us can’t do it. W e’s uh mingled people and all of us got black kinfolks as well as y aller kinfolks. How come you so against black?”... “If it wuzn’t for so many black folks it wouldn’t be no race problem. De white folks would take us in wid dem. De black ones is boldin’ us back.” “You reckon? ’course Ah ain’t never thought about it too much. But ah don’t figger dey even gointuh want us for comp’ny. We’se too poor.” (134-135)

It is difficult to understand how Their Eyes could be perceived by its contemporary critics as being apolitical with an exchange like this placed at precisely the point in the novel when

Janie thinks she has discovered the ideal African American community, a place where—as

Mrs. Turner herself notes—“so many different kins of black folks could colleck in one place” (134). In this passage, Hurston again evokes the twin issues of race and class, and shows the dangers of trying to isolate them from one another, recalling Janie’s earlier realization about the need to “mix” things up. Too, Hurston injects even more irony into this passage by representing Mrs. Turner’s pronunciation of “kinds” as “kins”: where

Mrs. Turner sees sharp division, Hurston (and Janie) see kinship and connection. As if in response to this, Janie herself reminds Mrs. Turner that “We’se uh mingled people,” in turn reminding the reader that what is exoterically labeled the “African American community” is itself diverse and contested territory. The issue that Mrs. Turner overlooks,

Janie astutely notes (despite her self-disparaging remark that she “ain’t never thought about it too much”), is not “color” or “looks,” but class; whites don’t want to associate with them not because of their appearance, but because they are “too poor.” Mrs. Turner, on the other hand, readily admits she wants to associate with Janie because of her appearance, but

237 is blind to her own classism, the fact that she would like Janie even better if she would

“class off.” In this light, Janie’s comment that she “ain’t never thought about it too much ” can only be read as a bit of ironic politeness: Janie most certainly has thought about what it means to be “classed off,” as she tells Phoeby, and in fact consciously abandoned her middle-class occupation, home, and social position in Eatonville to join the heterogeneous collection of “black folks” on the muck.

But Hurston does not end her critique of esoteric racism here; she extends it to the larger African American community by having Mrs. Turner couch her colorist views in the debate (well defined and still influential at the time of Hurston’s writing) between W. E. B.

DuBois and Booker T. Washington about the best course for African American advancement. Mrs. Turner aligns herself with DuBois in an attempt to draw out Janie’s own position in this definitional controversy. She tells Janie,

“You oughta meet my brother. He’s real smart. Got dead straight hair. Dey made him uh delegate tuh de Sunday School Convention and he read uh paper on Booker T. Washington and tore him tuh pieces!” “Booker T.? He wuz a great big man, wasn’t he?” “’Sposed tuh be. All he ever done wuz cut de monkey for white folks. So dey pomped him up. But you know whut de old folks say ‘de higher de monkey climbs de mo’ he show his behind’ so dat’s de way it wuz wid Booker T. Mah brother hit im every time dey give im chance tuh speak.” “Ah wuz raised on de notion dat he wuz a great big man,” was all that Janie knew to say. “He didn’t do nothin’ but hold us back—talkin’ ’bout work when de race ain’t never done nothin’ else. He wuz uh enemy tuh us, dat’s whut. He wuz a white folks’ nigger.” According to all Janie had been taught this was sacrilege so she sat without speaking at all. (136)

It is difficult to read Janie’s silence here: does she feel she doesn’t know enough to enter into a debate with Mrs. Turner about this issue, or is she dumbstruck at Mrs. Turner’s

“sacrilege”? Again, Janie’s silence seems more the product of good manners than ignorance: she well understands how Mrs. Turner has chosen to “justify” her colorism

(and thus disguise the real issue of classism) by couching it in terms of a more acceptable public debate. If anything, Janie seems merely astonished that Mrs. Turner—herself a

238 working woman who depends on the business of the other migrant workers for her livelihood—could denigrate the value of work. Notably, the brother with “dead straight hair” seems to rely on that physical feature as his sole means of getting by in the world:

Mrs. Turner tells Janie that “He’s sorter outa work now,” but that “He’s uh fine carpenter, when he kin git anything tuh do” (136-137). Again, Hurston seems to be slyly signifying on Mrs. Turner and perhaps also on some of her fellow Harlem Renaissance intellectuals with this complex portrait of a man who can use his looks to avoid doing any work at all.

And Hurston may well be aligning herself vj\\h Booker T. Washington here, since she too was accused by her contemporaries of “cuttin’ de monkey for white folks”; as Langston

Hughes wrote of her,

[S]he was always getting scholarships and things from wealthy white people, some of whom simply paid her to sit around and represent the Negro race for them, and she did it in such a racy fashion....To many of her white friends, no doubt, she was the perfect “darkie,” in the nice meaning they give the term—that is a naive, childlike, sweet, humorous, and highly colored Negro. (Awkward, Introduction 14)

Given this perception of Hurston among her peers, it is easy to see how she might align herself with Booker T. Washington, also perceived as an accommodationist; Washington, like Hurston, was concerned about the “Negro farthest down.” Yet Hurston’s intent establishing this parallel does not seem to be to espouse Washington’s political agenda.

Rather, Hurston seems to use the Washington/DuBois debate here to raise the issue of representation in general, and to suggest that one person cannot speak for an entire ethnic group; Hurston might have felt that her ideas—like Washington’s—had been appropriated, mistranslated, and oversimplified by those with a competing agenda. If that is the case, then perhaps Janie’s silent defense of Washington here serves as a warning to Hurston’s readers to see her project in its own context, according to its own terms. In so doing,

Hurston calls on the reader to consider both herself and Janie as independent subjects—not

“representative” characters—and also asks the reader to see the various communities in

239 which Janie dwells as contested spaces, not monolithic sites of “black folk life.” As

Wallace notes,

Hurston’s extraordinary textual ambivalence about race, class, nationality, sex, religion, and family, her cryptic, inscrutable subjectivity, offers a crucial vantage point on the crisis in signification that fuels postmodernism and haunts Western self-esteem—and which, not coincidentally, lies at the core of the Afro-American experience. (174)

Critics who focus on the notion of Janie as a questing hero, or who focus on the issue of Janie’s voice in the text are destined to overlook the very sections of the novel that offer up the kind of complex and critical dialogue about the very issue of representation in the text: those “folk episodes” illustrated in Chapters Six and Sixteen, as well as the complexities of the novel’s narrative levels. Carby’s essay, while insightful, focuses almost exclusively on the novel’s narrative technique, and though she closely addresses the question of how the “folk” are constructed in Their Eyes, she does not look very closely at the folklore itself, nor at how it operates in the novel. DuPlessis, on the other hand, comes to a radically different conclusion by focusing on the oft-dismissed parts of the text: the

“folklife” in Chapter Sbc, Janie’s encounter with Mrs. Turner, and her trial. Because Janie does not “speak” much if at all in these parts of the novel (indeed, she doesn’t even wimess the mule’s funeral, since Joe forbids her to go), these moments are generally interpreted as being extraneous to the text or as evidence that Janie never really does acquire her own voice or autonomy. However, DuPlessis argues that these sections of the novel where

Janie is represented by “undepicted speech” are also its most political moments, places where Hurston “resolves a tension about power and powerlessness (as it intersects with race)”; these junctures function as “Hurston’s nan'ative resolution of conflictual social determinants of race, class, and gender” (108). As I hope the above has shown, to say that

Their Eyes does not address the complexity of ethnic identity is to wholly misread the novel. But how do critics arrive at such opposing understandings of the text?

240 Like Wong’s probe into Amy Tan’s popularity, Carby also properly asks why

Their Eyes Were Watching God has become a sort of “Ur” text in African American literature:

We need to return to the question why, at this particular moment in our society, Their Eyes Were Watching God has become such a privileged text. Why is there a shared assumption that we should read the novel as a positive, holistic, celebration of black life? Why is it considered necessary that the novel produce cultural meanings of authenticity, and how does cultural authenticity come to be situated so exclusively in the rural folk? (89)

Carby raises some excellent questions here, and her critique exposes the romantic and problematic premises underpinning Their Eyes, as well as the cultural dynamics the novel selectively omits. Largely, Carby seems to be disappointed that Hurston bought into the anthropological methodology of her day, which encouraged fieldwork with “dying” cultures, the goal being to document the group before it became “extinct.” Hurston made no bones about the fact that she feared northward migration, urbanization, and technology spelled the death of Afncan American folk culture, and Carby suggests that this was

Hurston’s most damning mistake; had Hurston broadened her own perception of the

“folk,” she might have created a narrative less subsumable to stereotype. [BJell hooks describes a similar discomfort with Hurston’s anthropological romanticism, noting that

Hurston envisioned her anthropological work as a means of preserving black folk culture. Yet she never directly states for whom she wished to preserve the culture, whether for black folks, that we may be ever mindful of the rich imaginative folkways that are our tradition and legacy, or for white folks, that they may laugh at the quaint dialect and amusing stories as they voyeuristically peep into the private inner world of poor Southern black people. (Yearning 136)

[H]ooks’ commentary here best illustrates Stepto’s theory that the real locus of unreliability in a narrative lies in the reader. Did Hurston really need to specify to whom her novel was directed, though? On that score, hooks seems to endow the author with excessive powers of influence, and negates the ambiguities about the audience issue that make Their Eyes a complex and compelling text to read.

241 Nevertheless, hooks rightly implies that while Hurston’s text may in some ways encourage voyeurism, the individual reader determines whether the text will be consumed voyeuristically or touristically. More troublingly, though, hooks also seems to suggest here that it is the very “folkloric” nature of text that invites tourism, more so than other kinds of cultural material might. The issue of “representation” and “realism” seems to be thrown into even higher relief when folkloric materials are evoked, especially in texts by nonwhite writers. But I think we err in casting blame on authors themselves; as the introduction to this chapter stressed, touristic reading is the product of an interaction between the text and the reader. Most texts—and certainly the two discussed above—offer complicated and sometimes even contradictory “directions for [their] own consumption,” to recall the quote from Todorov that stands as the epigraph to this chapter. The “folkloric” aspects of both Tan’s The Joy Luck Club and Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, when read resistantly, seem to function more to complicate notions of ethnic identity rather than to reify them, as critics claim. In most cases-and especially in Hurston’s work-the use of folkloric material is more often subversive: in choosing not to focus on sanctioned issues, or to adopt a more realistic style, Hurston gives voice to a realm of experience generally shunned and dismissed as being “non-literary.” And while Tan’s use of folkloric material seems less overtly subversive, it nevertheless has functions far beyond fulfilling

Orientalist desires.

But how do we encourage students to adopt such non-touristic reading strategies?

In the battles over cultural representation and its relation to the admission of texts to the canon—or their exclusion from the canon—students are given very little credit: canon- makers tend to assume that unless a text overtly addresses issues of race, class, gender, and the construction of those categories, it will inevitably be read simplistically. The burden is again placed on the author and the text, rather than on the reader and her

242 interaction with the text. This narrow focus on texts alone seems wrong-headed; perhaps it is our pedagogical strategies—the ways we teach students to read texts—that need revising.

Toward a Strategy of Non-Touristic Reading

To begin interrogating the ways we present multiethnic texts to students, I would like to return to the Marshall McLuhan anecdote that began chapter one, in which a sanitary inspector working in Afnca showed a film about water-drainage techniques to a group of villagers gathered in a tent. After the film, the inspector asks, “Well, what did you see?”

And several people respond, “A chicken.” Apparently, a chicken made a brief cameo appearance in the film—in the bottom, right-hand comer, and only momentarily, before it took flight after being frightened. Yet this became the only image that registered with the villagers. And just as the villagers, who have not learned how to see and “read” films, see only the familiar—a chicken—so students untrained in “reading” not only other cultures, but more importantly, in reading their own touristic impulses, will see only the familiar. As this anecdote suggests, what students do perceive can potentially be utterly unrelated to the text presented. As readers and as cultural observers, we are most blinded by our own perception; thus, “basic” literacy alone—in the sense of being able to recognize words on a page—is insufficient for “reading” texts by and about others.

An immediate reaction to this observation might be, “What does it matter?” We are talking about texts here, not social “reality”; and indeed, I myself noted at the beginning of this chapter that we need to steer students away from the belief that reading alone is a political activity that substitutes for other kinds of activism and involvement. But even if students read multiethnic texts passively, those texts still can become influential sources of students’ cultural knowledge. As Berkhofer and Johnson have observed about Anglo perceptions of Native Americans and African Americans, respectively:

For most Whites...the Indian of imagination and ideology has been as real, perhaps more real, than the Native American of actual existence and contact. (Berkhofer 71) 243 Questions of identity, difference, and race-representation are interestingly at issue in [Hurston's] 1928 essay entitled “How it Feels to Be Colored Me”....[A]ny student of literature trained in the European tradition and interested in Hurston out of a concern for the noncanonical is implicitly asking her that same question. (“Thresholds of Difference” 131)

Taken together, the above two quotes underscore the urgency of addressing the

reality of touristic reading. As Johnson implies, Anglo readers come to texts outside their own cultural context seeking an “authentic” representation of the “Other”’s experience;

Berkhofer extends this notion to warn that how readers use a text to answer those questions can indelibly shape their notions of any given group and affect real-life behavior. In our jouissance about the liberatory power of postmodern play, let us not forget that texts can be sites of reification as much as of deconstruction. The mere act of introducing noncanonical texts into the classroom in and of itself does not have any subversive power, in fact, such additions can create the multiethnic tourbus effect mentioned earlier in this chapter, or develop a sort of literary Disney’s America, with stops in Native American Land, African

American Land, and so forth. If we ourselves are Anglo, and the majority of our students are as well, the risk of touristic reading is greatly increased; the representations of “Other” cultures are far more likely to be read as “real,” and more likely to be read in simplistic and non-resistant ways. Granted, this generalized waming may not apply to all classrooms; depending on students’ individual and collective experiences, as well as the teacher’s, there may be many constructive ways in which touristic readings can be avoided. My goal here at the conclusion of this chapter, then, is to explore some ways in which teachers can best evoke the kind of contextualized and complex readings that resist touristic reading.

Obviously, such an effect can be achieved through means as simple as the selection of texts that inherently challenge and subvert notions of cultural identity; the presentation of the historic and cultural contexts in which those texts were produced and received; and class discussion that draws on personal experience and cultural stereotypes, and addresses the ways those factors either elide or contrast with each other. But I think that there are larger

244 means beyond these by which we can “train” students in the techniques of resistant (non-

touristic) reading.

The first of these, I offer, would be to address our own teacherly impulse to

approach literature courses as “tours”: often, we tell students on the first day of a literature

survey class that they are about to embark on a “whirlwind tour” of American literature; and even though our ostensible motive in saying this is to let students know that the experience they are about to have is incomplete, the predominant impression is that the students should sit back, relax, and leave the driving to us, while enjoying the view out the window as we follow the itinerary/syllabus. If we choose to begin a literature class this way, why not also use the opportunity to introduce the concept of tourism itself, to discuss the issues and problems of literary tourism immediately, as a way of encouraging a more active and resistant kind of reading from the start? Folklorists may be especially well poised to help students navigate texts in this way, given their notions of culture and ethnicity as continuously reinvented and dynamic processes, and also given their emphasis on the necessity of contextual understanding to any sort of interpretation.

Is contextualization the only answer, though? Wendy Ho counters the attacks on

Tan’s alleged pandering to Orientalist impulses by offering a variety of ways in which the novel can be presented to students to prevent such readings. Specifically, she suggests providing background readings on women in Chinese and Chinese American history and the history of U. S. immigration policies and other legalized forms of discrimination against Chinese immigrants, and also recommends several other novels and films that provide alternate perspectives on similar themes (335-337). Such contextualization is not only valuable, but may also be requisite for a fully historicized and culturally specific understanding of The Joy Luck Club (or any other novel about Chinese American communities), but Ho’s detailed and extensive recommendations raise a crucial question:

Would we advocate this same kind of vigorous contextualizing for all kinds of U. S.

245 literature? Not should we, but would we~do we? Canonized writers like Hemingway and

Twain have only recently become subject to this kind of intense historicization and

contextualization, resulting in fascinating scholarship;'^ however, this kind of grounding is

not required in the study of those authors as it is for the study of writers of color. Such a

double standard implies that the work of traditionally canonized writers is privileged first as

“art,” and therefore transcends time- and place-bound concerns. And yet, when questions

of ethnic identity are overlooked in Tan’s work to focus on more “transcendent” themes,

we (for I include myself here) are quick to accuse critics of erasure.

How are we to overcome this kind of double standard about context? First, as

teachers we can try to stress the importance of cultural context to all works of fiction, and do our best to historicize and contextualize all the texts we teach. Obviously, though, there

is not time to perform the kind of rigorous contextualization Ho calls for with every text in

a literature class, especially in a survey class. And to my mind, this kind of hyper- contextualizing also revolves on a flawed premise: that each piece of “folk material” in a book, each aspect of culture described has an analogue in “real life” that must be brought in for comparison in order to understand and interpret the work of fiction. Such a methodology presumes that ethnography is fiction, or should strive to be. We scoff at

Alain Locke’s urging Zora Neale Hurston to write works of “motive fiction” or “social document fiction,” because we understand that this was neither her style nor her agenda.

And yet, we continue to expect non-Anglo writers to balance style with anthropological realism, or perhaps to even change their style to ensure a higher level of

“representativeness.”

Any given text can only represent itself. What we need to do in the classroom is not to propagate this fallacious line of reasoning by trying to draw exact equations or analogies between ethnic “reality” and fiction. Some degree of contextualizing is necessary, useful, enlightening to the touristic reader’s understanding of a text, just as it

246 would be for a more familiar text. However, what is more crucial is a discussion of the issue of context itself. In what “context” do the folk material and cultural representations offered by a given text exist? Only in the text itself. The text, in this case, is also the context; as such, we profit more by asking ourselves and our students how folklore, ethnic identity, and cultural “reality” are constructed within the text itself: how those things function and what they signify within the text itself. To be sure, providing a larger context for understanding a novel’s source culture and its specific folkways can tremendously clarify, enhance, and complicate students’ interpretation of the text; Pat Mullen cites the example of teaching Morrison’s Song o f Solomon, which ends with both Pilate and

Milkman Dead “flying” away. Without an understanding of Afncan American folktales about people learning how to fly to escape slavery and returning to Africa, the conclusion of Morrison’s novel is confusing at best and inexplicable at worst. Nevertheless,

Morrison’s allusion to this folktale goes beyond mere retelling or representation; in the context of the novel, she is doing something entirely new with the tale.

Thus, while it would certainly be interesting to know, for example, whether Amy

Tan’s “Moon Festival” is actually celebrated, and how it is celebrated, should such knowledge dictate or direct our understanding of how the Moon Festival operates in the text of The Joy Luck Clubl Providing cultural context is a necessity, but we need to be cautious about suggesting that folkloric material is overdetermined—that whatever it means and however it functions outside the text governs its meaning or function within the text.

We also need to allow for cross-cultural folkloric allusions; for example, Jessie Redmon

Fauset’s Harlem Renaissance work Plum Bun: A Novel Without A Moral (1929) signifies on such Anglo-identified fairy tales as Cinderella, borrowing their tropes and then consciously inverting them. In teaching texts with folkloric material (or simply teaching them from a folkloric persepctive), students need information about real-life analogues for that material, but they also need to be encouraged to understand how the folklore is being

247 reconstructed and manipulated for the specific purposes of the fiction. Allowing students to continue perceiving the folklore as mere reflection rather than as active construction denies the very thing that makes fiction, and folklore, not only possible but also engaging and dynamic: the process of invention. To be sure, we need to contextualize multiethnic literature as much as possible; in some sense, as teachers of literature we are always already tour guides. But as such, we need to take our duty seriously and try to explicate and complicate both text and context as much as possible.

Folklorists, I believe, are well poised to help students learn to become resistant (and non-touristic) readers because of the disciplinary centrality of this concept of context. As I hope the above has illustrated, when I invoke the idea of context here, I am not suggesting that folklorists have special access to specific cultural contexts that they can bring to bear on a novel, although that may be the case. Rather, I am referring to folklorists’ larger understanding of context as being bound up in, if not determinate of, meaning in any given text-oral, written, performed, or constructed. Folkloristics offers readers a way of interpreting “culture” as represented in a text as a product of that text, not necessarily as a lived reality. While any given part of a text may have an analogue in “real life,” it is not mandatory to examine the two side-by-side to ascertain what is going on in the text. By breaking touristic readers of the habit of instantly equating fiction and reality by invoking the idea of context, we may subtly urge students to understand that just as individual texts within a tradition reinvent themes, tropes, plots, and metaphors, so individuals within a cultural group other than their own are also reinventing their own cultural identity within a larger ethnic “tradition,” and that the two processes may have very little in common. This simultaneously more specific and more global notion of context resists easy assumptions and equations between fiction and culture.

Another concept that can be deliberately brought into play in the literature classroom that also encourages resistant reading is that of authenticity, as related to the issue of

248 context. When students and critics either praise a text’s “authenticity” or criticize its

“inauthenticity,” another kind of fallacious logic comes into play. Wong, for example, has

evidence that some of Tan’s translations from the Chinese are inaccurate, and that Tan has

“Westernized” some of the Chinese wedding traditions she employs. Her argument that

these “errors”—coupled with the text’s implicit marking of itself as authentic—makes Tan’s

novel Orientalist is a sound one; however, it follows the methodlogy described above,

which presumes that a non-white writer has less license to play with language and cultural

material than Anglos. It also operates by a definition of authenticity that I think we need to

encourage students to become conscious of: that authenticity is extracontextual. By this

reasoning, something is perceived as “authentic” only when it appears and functions the

same way regardless of context. Thus, the Moon Festival becomes “authentic” in the mind

of the touristic reader because she assumes Tan is offering an accurate ethnography of the

ceremony; Wong assumes it is inauthentic because she has a real-life analogue with which

to compare it. Both schools of thought are flawed, though, since they assume a narrow

and romantic sense of authenticity as an extracontextual quality that is, or should be,

inviolable. If a direct analogy caimot be made between cultural practice and its fictional

representation, the logic goes, then the representation is considered flawed, “inauthentic.”

By helping students recognize this desire for authenticity, and then by helping them probe

the dangerous assumptions behind it, we can help students understand not only the double

bind it places non-white writers in, but also help them appreciate the play and

experimentation inherent to all kinds of fiction.

The final folkloric concept that can be employed to discourage touristic reading—and

the one that links, or perfiaps more accurately opposes, these concepts of context and

authenticity— is that of invention. To illustrate the usefulness of this concept not only to discouraging touristic reading, but also to aiding interpretation of a text, I would like to

249 look briefly at how it comes into play in Leslie Marmon Silko’s short story “Yellow

Woman.”

Silko’s story stands out as an illustration of this issue because of the ways it first confuses, then conflates, and finally collapses all distinctions between myth and reality. As the story opens, the unnamed narrator is awakening after lovemaking with an enigmatic stranger she met by the riven he calls her “Yellow Woman,” the name of a well-known folktale heroine, and he claims to be a ka’tsina spirit who has “abducted” her in the mode of the traditional stories. She is reluctant to believe this, however, and valiantly tries to reestablish clear boundaries between “folklore” and “reality,” only to discover that she cannot quite convince herself that such boundaries are not permeable:

“But I only said that you were him and that I was Yellow Woman—I’m not really her—I have my own name and I come from the pueblo on the other side of the mesa. Your name is Silva and you are a stranger I met by the river yesterday afternoon.” He laughed softly. “What happened yesterday has nothing to do with what you will do today. Yellow Woman. ”... I was wondering if Yellow Woman had known who she was—if she knew that she would become a part of the stories. Maybe she’d had another name that her husband and relatives called her so that only the ka’tsina from the north and the storytellers would know her as Yellow Woman... This is the way it happens in the stories, I was thinking, with no thought beyond the moment she meets the ka’tsina spirit and they go. “I don’t have to go. What they tell in the stories was really only then, back in time immemorial, like they say.” (124-125)

In this passage, the narrator resists the conflation of multiple boundaries: the geographical boundaries that dictate where she is from and who she is, as well as boundaries between myth and reality, diachronic and synchronic time, and her own perceived identity boundaries, which she thought were well-established, but discovers are actually quite fluid.

To anchor herself in reality, she reminds herself that she “live[s] now and [she’s] been to school and there are highways and pickup trucks that Yellow Woman never saw” (126), hoping that the recollection of this concrete evidence of modernity and contemporaneity will shore up the once-solid boundaries now dissolving around her.

250 Silva, though, asks her how she thinks the stories began in the first place, thus calling into question the notion of a “contextless,” primordial origin of cultural myths; when she asserts that “Those stories couldn’t happen now,” he replies—even as he wipes his hands on his Levis—that “[S]omeday they will talk about us, and they will say, ‘Those two lived long ago when things like that happened’” (127). Silko’s juxtaposition of the time-bound (Levis, highways, pickup trucks) with the timeless forces both the narrator and the reader to reconsider how and why certain cultural materials get dismissed while others become representative of reality, and further challenges us to consider why this isolation of the two from each other seems almost mandatory. Silva asks the narrator—and Silko asks us—why these seemingly opposed elements cannot coexist, why “time immemorial” cannot be now, and more crucially, why it is so important to us to separate those.

In so doing, Silko’s story invents a world where the narrator’s rigid notions about geographic boundaries, time, and identity collapse: from Silva’s mountaintop shelter, the narrator struggles to see where the boundaries between the Navajo and Pueblo reservations, the Texan and Mexican lands are, and interrogates Silva about whether he is

Pueblo or Navajo. Her inability to see the boundaries, and his refusal to identify himself, finally enable her to see past boundaries altogether and admit that she “doesn’t believe there were highways or railroads or cattle to steal” (129). In short, she has learned to invert her mode of understanding the world, to read different signs than the usual ones offered.

Thus, when she returns to her family at the story’s end, she does not interpret the fact that her grandmother is fixing Jell-O as a sign that she has retumed to “reality,” or that her

“mythical” experience was only the product of her imagination. Rather, she states that

“because I believe it, he will come back sometime and be waiting again by the river” (133).

Silko’s “Yellow Woman” neatly illustrates the highly subversive ways in which folklore can be employed in a literary text. While the story connects what happens to the narrator to a “real-life” story cycle in Pueblo culture, the way the folkloric material is

251 employed in the narrative actively resists easy interpretation or commodification. The folk

material here functions not to authenticate or represent culture, but rather to displace and

invert it; Silko reinvents the folktale here not as a quaint bit of cultural authentication or

local color, but as a powerful tool for interrogating the limiting boundaries imposed on the

narrator by an Anglo-dominated society, where pickup trucks and Jell-O are more culturally

valid and “real” than folklore, where geographical boundaries equal personal identity.

Even though the narrator must reenter the world of commercial reality, she no longer sees it

as an anchor, and while she plans to tell her family that she was kidnapped by “some

Navajo,” she no longer needs to believe that version of the story. Her enactment of the

folktale permits her to see far more deeply both into and beyond her own cultural boundaries.

And is this not the same reaction we want students to have to texts, especially texts by writers outside their own cultural experience: a transformative insight into and beyond their own boundaries? If so, then we need to cease offering multiethnic texts to students simplistically, hoping that in merely consuming them, such an insight can take place. We need to point to the uses of cultural material in texts not as static sites of pure representation, but as places where culture and identity are constructed and contested. We need to urge students, like Silko’s narrator, to stop looking for the familiar—pickup trucks and Jell-O—and start seeking out the places in multiethnic texts where boundaries collide and collapse. And I believe we can do this by consciously evoking the idea of tourism, asking students to recognize their own desire to impose a predetermined context on a text and to read past that impulse, to look again, widening the frame of the picture they take away. While the texts I have examined in this chapter raise the question of touristic reading in terms of reading across ethnicity, these same concepts can be applied in terms of reading across gender, nationality, and even time: my husband, a medievalist, similarly complains about students taking medieval texts as being “representative” of all of medieval culture.

252 Developing a theory of touristic reading—and concurrently, a methodology for preventing

or resisting it—offers a way, perhaps, to bridge the gap between New Criticism and cultural

studies: the suggestions offered at the end of this chapter ask that we look at a given text

both within and apart from its larger historical and cultural contexi(s), using our

understanding of context to elucidate parts of the text where appropriate, but stopping short

of insisting that the text wholly represent or reflect that context. Such a methodology

enacts the trajectory of Silko’s narrator, rejecting imposed boundaries and allowing that

what one experiences when reading a text may defy all expectations.

* In the absence of such an ethnography. I think this is the only approach to this concept that would not succumb to the misrepresentation of “readers” in general that Radway warns against. ’ From Frost’s “Home Burial.” ^ For criticism of Tan as cultural representative, see Wong’s “Sugar Sisterhood” essay and The Big Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Asian-American Writers (full bibliographic information in list of works cited). * Robert E. Hemenway details Hurston’s relationships with various white patrons, but especially with Mrs. Rufus Osgood Mason, in his Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. For a discussion of the representation debate among African American writers before and during the Harlem Renaissance, see Gates’ Signifying Monkey. ’ McAlister’s “(Mis) Reading The Joy Luck Cluh” nicely summarizes Orientalist print reviews of Tan’s novel on its publication. ® Tan details this strategy in her essay “Mother Tongue.” ’ Wong spends about four pages of her article debunking the “authenticity” of Tan’s use of some folk materials, but moreover of her “mistranslations” of various Chinese words and phrases ( 180-183). * This is only one of Rich’s gaffes in the course of the evening. He also brings a bottle of wine, not knowing that Waverly’s family rarely drinks. And this very scene provides the basis for what is perhaps one of the most egregious—and literally “textbook”-examples of how ethnic novels are read and taught touristically: in “Required Reading,” Tan tells the story of how a college publishing house wanted to use an excerpt of this section of the novel in one of its multicultural anthologies. The discussion questions after the selection included the horrifying gem, “If you are invited to a Chinese family’s house for dinner, should you bring a bottle of wine?” (5). ’ Tan echoes this feeling herself in the author blurb inside the book’s back cover, which ends by noting that when Tan first visited China in 1987, she “found it was just as her mother said: ‘As soon as my feet touched China, 1 became Chinese.’” 1 should note—despite this rather snippy criticism—that 1 cry every time 1 read the ending of this novel, and 1 have probably read it seven or eight times over the years. This is a testimony to the beauty of Tan’s writing, but probably also a further indication of its danger: its ability to provoke such powerful emotions can only reinforce the faith in essentialism that the ending enacts. " Hurston’s own term, from her Introduction to Mules and Men. ’■ Wright’s review first appeared in the periodical New Masses on 5 Oct. 1937. “Colorism” is Alice Walker’s term, defined in In Search o f Our Mothers' Gardens as “prejudicial or preferential treatment of same-race people based solely on their color” (290). '■* Debra Moddelmog has a book forthcoming from Cornell UP that examines Hemingway’s own gender identification and construction as a new way of approaching the sexism in many of his works; she has also published some preliminary work on this issue: "Reconstructing Hemingway's Identity: Sexual Politics, 253 the Author, and the Multicultural Classroom" and "Protecting the Hemingway Myth: Casting Out Forbidden Desires from The Garden of Eden” (full references in bibliography). Another example is Shelley Fisher Fishkin’sWas Hack Black?: Mark Twain and African-American Voices, which examines how Twain’s experiences with African Americans and African-American folklore may be played out in his most famous—and controversial—novel.

254 C h a p t e r S

W h e n t h e S e l f B eco m es t h e O t h e r : Internalizing T e c u m s e h

In the summer of 1994, as I was just beginning my fieldwork at the

Tecumseh! site, my mother showed me an unpublished (but carefully typed and bound) family history from her cousin Madge, with whom she had recently renewed contact.

Incredibly, part of this history claimed that a branch of Madge’s family was directly related to the Shawnee leader and prophet, Tecumseh. Since I had just begun my Tecumseh! fieldwork, I was both amazed and repelled to discover that members of my own family— albeit, distant relations—were attempting a similar kind of identity-appropriation I saw going on in the outdoor drama. The family history my mother gave me—written by

Madge’s nephew, David Kennedy—makes its kinship claim through a woman named Mary

Ice, who was allegedly kidnapped by Indians as a child, married their chief, and gave birth to Tecumseh at fourteen.

Of course, such claims are fallacious; nevertheless, they are persistent and rarely challenged. Numerous families with roots in the Ohio valley and throughout the

Appalachians make similar claims, despite the existence of several scholarly and popular histories of Tecumseh’s life which could easily debunk such claims. Because such connections can so easily be disproved, families making such claims clearly find in them a powerful sense of identity that transcends historical fact. And because it is here, on this intimate family level, that the full depth and danger of the appropriation of Tecumseh becomes manifest, it is with this phenomenon I choose to end this dissertation. My interest in this conclusion is, therefore, not to investigate the tmth value of such claims, but instead to explore the motivations of white families making such claims, both through an

255 examination of my family’s written text and through fieldwork with another Ohio family claiming kinship to Tecumseh. In so doing, I hope to come to some larger conclusions about Anglo appropriations and retellings of Tecumseh’s story on all levels, from the very

“folk” level of family stories to the literary and highly mediated forms of the novel and theatrical performance.

Such claims to kinship with a “famous” Native American figure are neither unique or isolated; Rayna Green has thoroughly investigated white claims to Native American ancestry in her essay “The Tribe Called Wannabee,” noting that families do so as a way of

“connecting to the very beginnings of the mythological structure called America” (48).

Kinship claims with Tecumseh respond to this motivation, as well as a complex of others: they provide a way for white Americans (particularly of the middle- or lower-middle class) to increase family status in a culture that privileges Pre-Revolutionary and

Revolutionary ties; more importantly, they give Anglos a convenient way of both identifying historically with the exotic “Other” while keeping that Other safely distanced in the past. Such kinship claims imbue family identity with historical import and exoticness while preserving contemporary access to white privilege. Such an identification—logically, if paradoxically—depends, of course, on the physical absence of Native Americans.

In fact, many Anglo families with roots in the same part of the country as my mother’s family (northern West Virginia, southeastern Pennsylvania, and on into the Ohio valley) make similar claims—not claims to kinship with Tecumseh, specifically or exclusively, but nearly every family that settled in the area has some kind of Indian confrontation/captivity narrative. To go beyond such a routine narrative and claim kinship with the greatest Native figure of the region, though, seems an especially intriguing phenomenon.

The means by which such kinship claims are established in these family histories— whether written or oral-is a complex, ambiguous, and sometimes self-contradicting system

256 of validation and authorization. The author of my own family’s history describes such texts in this way:

A family history is like a standard waving on a hill, its [sic] a milestone of a sort, ready to be taken up by some later member and carried to higher ground. I hope that those who read this history will someday improve it and correct any mistakes I may have inadvert[ently] included. (K. David Kennedy, December 1985, no page number)

I find this statement fascinating, as it combines a belief in the constructed nature of history with a simultaneous and seemingly contradictory belief that there is an “Ur” truth—the notion that in regards to history, mistakes can be made, and when discovered, should be corrected.

In his preface to this family history, Kennedy eloquently expresses the difficulties of writing history, which merits being quoted at some length:

It has taken the better part of 15 years to assemble the material for this book. The hardest part has been following incorrect leads and trying to get them in the proper perspective. I believe all histories are correct and incorrect, I have done the best I could possible do and I am satisfied with this work. After all, I spent the money for research, drove the thousands of miles, recorded the tombstones, read the hundreds of rolls of microfilm, interviewed the many people who contributed stories, thoughts, and material, and after reading many family histories and books, mulled this assemblage of material over in my mind.... (K. David Kennedy, December 1985, no page number)

Again here we see the tense, back-and-forth dance between the opposing notions of history as fact or as fiction. Nevertheless, while acknowledging the potential for error in his history, Kennedy employees a genuine “folk” technique of validating his text; the invocation of authority gained via hard work. Since he has done all the spending, driving, reading, interviewing, and sorting, he alone has the power to gauge the soundness of his work. It is this reliance on a kind of folk authority that brackets and supports the text.

Reliance on folk authority (over and above more canonized sources of historical authority) is evident throughout Kennedy’s text: the author calls on the folkloric devices of first-person narrative, multiple variants of a similar story, and aural wimessing of that story as the means of validating the family’s kinship claim. Nowhere is this appeal-to-authority

257 more evident than in this stunning first-person narrative, presumably left by Mary Ice

herself, buried toward the end of Kennedy’s 100-page document:

I was kidnapped by an Indian at Ice’s Ferry in 1774, age 11. Had to marry the Indian who took me at 13, gave birth to Tecumseh near Ice’s Ferry at age 14, 1777. I was ransomed with my baby in 1779, then I married Andrew Ice at Ice’s Ferry in 1782. (Kennedy family history 94)

Kennedy, the document’s author, further “validates” this claim by listing a variety of kin who “collaberated” [presumably he meant “corroborated”?] it: “Franklin Snodgrass,

Charles, James, Elisha, Squire Snodgrass, Rev. Thomas Cunningham, Rev. William

Kendall.” The story is then recounted in third-person narrative from a variety of other sources.

Also in tme folk-narrative style, the history itself is unselfconsciously postmodern: the narration of kinship claims spirals in on itself; like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the writing has so many layers of narration that it becomes virtually impossible to tell who is speaking. As such, it is even less possible to locate any sense of authority in the part of the text that makes the Tecumseh kinship claim—details about who is giving the first-hand accounts, where the author found them, how they are documented, and so forth, are completely muddled. Furthermore, even the most continuous section about Tecumseh’s life history is jumbled, jumping back and forth between his childhood and his adulthood, between his mother’s perspective and his own. We could account for all this as poor scholarship or a confused writing style on Kennedy’s part, but the coherent nature of other parts of the history suggest something different. I am certain that the writer was unsure of the veracity of the kinship claims; at several points, he questions the claims’ authenticity, at one point even conceding that “No biography of Tecumseh, nor any historical research has verified this claim” (92). And yet, he also says that “What I am writing, you will find irrefutable. Some historians with vivid imaginations keep on writing history that has but little or no foundation” (84-85). It is hard to tell what kind of truth value he is trying to

258 attach to the kinship claims here, and it is my belief that this was a very strategic move: by confusing the issue, he allows the history to be told as true, whether it is or not.

Folklorists categorize narratives that are told as true but not necessarily believed as

“legends,” and the classification system used in Ohio State’s own folklore archive lists, as a synonym for “local legend,” “local history.” If we are now realizing that all history is constructed, then it follows that all history is, on some level, legend. And legends, as we know, are inscribed with all kinds of emotional baggage by the cultures that produce them.

What kind of cultural and familial baggage is carried by Tecumseh kinship legends?

The kinship claim here, as mentioned previously, comes through a woman named

Mary Ice, who was kidnapped by Indians as a child—the age varies in the account—and was married to their chief and gave birth to Tecumseh at about age 14. She and Tecumseh were later ransomed back. Tecumseh, as presented in this text, “was kind to prisoners, orator, brilliant thinker, honest, truthful, and dependabl [sic]. Hatred toward Indians caused a lot of this to be hidden, to protect the families concerned” (Kennedy 95). Such a representation is very revealing about the motivations behind white claims to Native ancestry: whether Tecumseh’s virtues are a product of his white blood (as is the case in so many “tragic mulatto” narratives in both Anglo American and African American literature) is not made explicit, but the relationship between Tecumseh and his white “family” definitely supersedes that between Tecumseh and his “Indian” family; when Tecumseh’s life is threatened by other white settlers, the history quotes him as saying, “I would so much like to remain with Mother and my white friends; but as a matter of safety it would I think, be better to take me back for a time to my father” (96).

The politics of this identity claim become clear here. As in many narratives about

Tecumseh—oral, written, and performed, as is the case at the outdoor drama—the Shawnee leader is great largely because he is portrayed as having somehow transcended his Native

American identity. He is a “great man,” not merely a “great Indian.” Even James

259 Alexander Thom’s fairly sensitive novel of the life of Tecumseh, Panther in the Sky,

continuously dwells on Tecumseh’s shame and disgust at some of his people’s

“savage” ways, and his puzzlement at feeling more than a passing regard for some white

men. In the Kennedy family history, too, Tecumseh is more drawn to his white family

than the Shawnee people; he returns to the Shawnee, the above passage implies, mostly

because he fears that his physical “Otherness” will bring danger to his white kin. Thus,

the Kennedy family story neatly contains the “Other” both in the context of the story and in

the larger context of the entire family history. Tecumseh was only “part Indian” to begin

with, if we believe that his mother was a white woman, and besides, the whole story may

not be true—or so the logic goes. Giving the story such a wide berth allows those who choose to believe it to internalize only those parts of the stoiy they are comfortable with: that is, it enables them to claim identity with Tecumseh through a white ancestor (rather

than via a Native line), and also allows them to dismiss the story entirely, lest such a connection compel them to rethink their contemporary politics.

After I began exploring my own family’s story, a friend who teaches at another university in Ohio told me that one of her students’ families also claimed kinship with

Tecumseh. Thinking it would be interesting to contrast the Kennedy s’ Tecumseh story with another family’s, I contacted the student. The first question he asked me was “Do you know what Tecumseh’s mother’s last name was?” Not wanting to censor his own opinions on that score, I volunteered the Shawnee name I’d read in the academic histories, then—on hearing his noises of disappointment—quickly added, “But of course, there are other ideas about who his mother was.” “Oh,” the student replied, “because my mother says her last name was Tee.’ That was my grandmother’s mother’s maiden name.”

Again I was delighted, horrified, shocked—and for a moment, admittedly, in love with the idea that perhaps there was some truth to the story. I, myself, was seduced by the well-documented dynamic of legend study that posits that multiple and varied tellings—far

260 from casting doubt on a story’s validity—only boost its credibility, even if those variants contradict each other. Such kinship claims, I realized in that moment, are not meant to be

'"truth claims,” since people persist in making them even in the face of overwhelming evidence against them. These claims constitute a belief genre; they are stories that carry so much psychic weight within the families that transmit them that they must be believed regardless of all evidence to the contrary. As such, it is important to regard family histories as a belief genre, and only by so doing can we discover the deep significance of these narratives within individual families and within white, middle-class American culture. If these kinship stories are not outright truth claims, then, they are"identity claims,” and the identity they embody, challenge, and construct is one that is deeply important to those making the claim. And it is here, on this intimate family level, that the full depth and danger of the appropriation of Tecumseh becomes manifest.

In June, I met with the student’s grandmother and great-aunt, the Miller sisters, in their hometown of Chillicothe (also the site of Tecumseh!). We exchanged xeroxed materials about the Ice family history and the Tecumseh kinship claim, and the story is, in fact, remarkably similar; the Millers’ version reads that after her capture by Indians, “Mary is supposed to have married a son of the Chief and become mother of the famous

Tecumseh” (“The Father of the Ice Family,” document from Virginia Miller Cooke).

Some significant factual details are at odds between the two versions; while the Kennedy text has Mary claiming she was 14 when she allegedly gave birth to Tecumseh, the Miller text says that “she would be 28 to 33 when Tecumseh was bom” (ibid). Significantly, however, awareness of these contradictions did not stop any of us from being anywhere from intrigued to convinced of the kinship claim.

This same strange little dance of identification and distancing was played out for me in my interview with the Miller sisters. Notably, no one I interviewed-neither my mother nor her cousin Madge, nor the two sisters from Chillicothe who also shared their kinship

261 stories with me—cited a longstanding tradition of telling the Tecumseh-kinship stories

within their families. The “news” that they might be related to Tecumseh was discovered

by someone else’s genealogical research. As the conversation with Virginia (V) and Patty

(P), the Miller sisters, went (H = Hathaway):

H: Well, wa—was the first time you guys heard these stories, then...through...the family genealogy- P: I heard it from Virginia, I didn’t know anything about it. [R: OK] V: I heard it through the girls all hunting and looking. H: OK, so it wasn’t something that, like, [V: Well, my mother-] stories that you’d heard while you were growing up— V: Our mother...my mother was thick with this.

And yet, despite the fact that her mother had been “thick with” this story, neither Virginia

nor Patty claimed to have been told the story growing up; it was a relatively recent find for

them, the result of Virginia’s daughter’s genealogical research. Both of the sisters and my

mother, however, had often been regaled as children with stories of “Indian Billy” Ice, a

white boy who—after being abducted by Indians as a child—adopted their culture and

remained “wild” even after his release and return to his family. My curiosity was piqued

as to why the Indian Billy stories would remain, while the Tecumseh stories would be lost.

The answers to this question, I think, also probe the larger issues surrounding these stories, which are indicative of the stories’ fascination and credibility among middle-class whites—issues of race, miscegenation, class, and social status.

Strangely, the notion of miscegenation does not seem to pose a problem in either of these family histories, as it might in other “mixed-race” kinship claims. Stories about the offspring of Anglo- and African-American relationships are usually buried, presumably due to racism, shame at an ancestor’s abuse of power, the very unromanticized status of

African Americans as an ethnic group for most whites, and so forth. Stories about Native

American kinship, on the other hand, are often glorified. I suspect, though, that this white desire to identify with Native Americans is very recent, probably only dating from the

1960s, when Native Americans began to be romanticized as environmentalists and

262 countercultural heroes. My mother and Virginia Miller Cooke were bom in the same year,

1927. As Depression-era children, the “Indian Billy” stories may have been told as a way to offset feelings of deprivation (with their “you-think-you’ve-got-it-bad” theme), or may have had a more general function of waming children about the dangers of wandering off

(they may be abducted and be transformed in profound and irreversible ways). At any rate,

I suspect that as children hearing these stories, neither Virginia nor my mother was expected to identify with Indian Billy. Such stories, I imagine, were “safe” because they subtly preached the dangers of miscegenation without directly addressing the issue, as the

Tecumseh stories would have. Now, in a time when the miscegenation taboo is—if not waning—at least is the subject of public obsession, and when people are feeling driven by a desire to identify with the “Other,” the Tecumseh stories are not only tellable, but quite attractive.

Part of their attraction lies in their status-building potential. I was surprised to discover that the Miller family had only recently leamed of this story. In retrospect, though, their enthusiasm for the story is probably driven both by the story’s newness and by the way it would elevate the family’s sense of its historical relevance. Tecumseh is

Chillicothe’s great claim to historical fame, despite the fact that he only lived there briefly as a child. Nevertheless, the town has tumedhis history into their history, and thus, for a

Chillicothe family like the Millers to discover that they are related to Tecumseh (indeed, that their progenitor actually gave birth to this great leader) is a tremendous social boon indeed.

Reflecting on my interview with the sisters, the status-building capacity of the

Tecumseh-kinship claim is only part of a whole complex of similar claims that attempt to situate the family at the center of a range of crucial historical events. I should have known this was going to be the case when—after I showed the sisters the Kennedy family history I had brought—one of them asked, “Now, is that the Kennedys? John Kennedy [?]”, to which I replied, “I don’t know...[laugh] I think these are the West Virginia Kennedys!”

263 Over the course of our two-hour talk, the sisters talked not only about the Tecumseh claim, but also about family connections to the owners of the King Ranch in Texas (inspiration for the TV seriesDallas), to Custer, and to a passenger on the Mayflower, as well as speaking of other brushes with fame the two of them had as singers in an all-girl country-western band during World War H. Perhaps the most revealing exchange, though, involved the celebration of Chillicothe’s civic bicentennial, which had just been celebrated about a month before our discussion:

V: [To Patty] Do you—did you think we were left out with the first f^amilies, when...we weren’t on that—in that paper the other day?' P: Oh, Oh...of Chillicothe? V: They had the...first families that were, came to, uh— P: No, I didn’t see anything— V: But we didn’t turn in anything, see... H: Ooooh. [Understanding what she’s referring to] P: You mean listed...with that organization. V: Yeah. For the bicentennial. P: Yeah H: Oh. Did they have some sort of listing recently, or something...? Of who the, uh, first families—? V: Oh, they had a—oh, yeah. They could—th— P: I didn’t think about anything of that thing. H: Oh, the bicentennial thing is all done, now?

[V & P talking at same time about the bicentennial festivities— indecipherable]

V: Our families were over here early.

Virginia seems a little miffed that their family had not been included in the list of “first families’’ that appeared in the paper, while Patty appears anywhere from indifferent to dismissive—“I didn’t think about any of that thing.” In my mind, both of these are responses to the nature of class in our society, particularly the nature of the middle class— there is a strong, if unconscious, awareness of one’s social position, and two traditional responses to that awareness: a struggle for recognition as being above the class that one is in (represented by Virginia's indignation about not being included), or a wholesale dismissal of its significance (represented by Patty’s response). Thus, family stories that establish kinship between “regular folks” and famous historical figures or places become a

264 folkloric method of boosting one’s social status without the necessity of acquiring tangible

wealth or power in the present.

In his notable essay on family misfortune stories and their function within a very specific ethnic and socioeconomic group—i.e., middle- to lower-middle class whites—

Stanley Brandes argues that such stories serve to explain the family’s current lack of wealth and social status in a culture where the lack of those qualities is perceived as a personal failure of will. Similarly, kinship stories connecting middle-class whites to famous historical figures function to minimize what Brandes calls the “hidden injury of class’’ by suggesting that the family’s historical significance is so deeply rooted in the very foundation of the country that their current social status is irrelevant—that any student of history will understand that the family’s importance transcends its current social and economic condition.

I would argue that there is vastly more than this status-building dynamic at work in the Tecumseh kinship stories. A connection with a Mayflower passenger or a Civil War general would fulfill that function quite sufficiently. Something more complicated is being evoked in these stories in which whites connect themselves with nonwhite—and specifically

Native American—ancestry. And the fact that belief in these extra-ethnic kinship claims is even more deeply rooted and volatile than intra-ethnic claims is apparent in Virginia Miller

Cooke’s reaction to my question about her family’s interest and belief in the story:

H: Have you been doing all this...reading...because of—what you found out about the family tree, that sort of sparked your interest? V: Oh, I...I try to read, um, ’bout anything. Um...but [name I can’t make out?], my son, told me—he’s the one that reads all the time. And he’ll fight you. He’ll-he gets—I don’t even like to talk to him about it! P: You know, he don’t think that. V: No, no— H: Oh, he doesn’t believe the story [about the family’s relationship with Tecumseh], huh? V: [laughing, in a sort of wistful way] He just doesn’t. He’s read so much, he doesn’t believe—see, that’s why I said, he’s brainwashed, that’s what I think. He really wants to [believe], deep down in, I think. Personally. H: Wants to believe it? V: Mm-hmm. 265 This bit of transcription neatly encapsulates everything that is significant about these kinship claims. First, Virginia finishes a long discussion of all the books she has read about Tecumseh (and clearly, she has read a lot and knows the history very well) by paradoxically concluding that books are not necessarily reliable sources of “truth”; in fact, she says that her son has read so much of the history that he has been brainwashed, rendered incapable of seeing the truth in the family version of the story. Then she clearly ties the importance of the claim to the issue of belief by suggesting that despite his book learning, she suspects that her son still has a powerful, deep-seated, and emotional need to believe that the kinship claim is true.

And Virginia herself is clearly a believer: later in the interview she tells me that

“Word of mouth usually is truer.” By way of explaining this, she comments that you can’t believe what you read, “because if it didn’t come down by the word of mouth, any of these writers’ll just pick up a name” and run with it, presumably without checking. Of course,

R. David Edmunds, Tecumseh’s most prominent and thorough scholarly biographer, makes the exact opposite claim, writing that “the real Tecumseh has been overshadowed by a folk hero whose exploits combine the best of fact and fiction” (217). Somewhere in between Virginia’s belief and Edmunds’ dismissal lies the whole debate about the nature of history, which—to return to the beginning of this paper—David Kennedy himself addresses at the outset of his family history. Nevertheless, on a folk level, it is the very multiplicity of historical accounts that gives anecdotes like the Tecumseh kinship claims their credibility and authority. As Virginia implies, the fact that the story has come down in a variety of forms, no matter how contradictory, only bolsters its credibility.

For folklorists, of course, the question of “who’s right” and the notion of historical truth and accuracy are secondary concerns at best. What interests us is more what people believe, why, and how they Justify and authorize those beliefs. The Tecumseh kinship claims are an important part of the histories of many white families in and around

266 Appalachia, including—embarrassingly enough—my own. Furthermore, with the

romanticization of Native Americans (made possible in the Eastern U.S. by the virtual

absence of viable and visible Native American communities), such stories have been and

will continue to grow in their popularity and glamour. Why? The simple answer can be

found in the increased awareness of identity politics in the U. S. over the last decade. I

refer here not to academic theories and studies of such issues, but moreover to the sort of

“folk” perception of these issues. The Tecumseh kinship stories, it seems to me, arise

from a deeply felt need to identify with the Other, and are perfect candidates because they

allow whites to identify with an ethnic group which, in the East, anyway, is perceived to be extinct and is therefore nonthreatening; there is a clear geographic barrier to having to

identify too closely with the Native American “Other.”' Furthermore, such stories allow

whites to identify with not just any Indian, but with one of the greatest Indian leaders in official national memory. And finally, Tecumseh’s place in a very distant past (he died in

1813, only 10 years after Ohio became a state) erects a solid barrier of time between contemporary whites and their alleged Native American ancestor. Such distancing devices allow Tecumseh-kinship stories to provide a much-desired sense of exoticness for whites who may perceive that their cultural heritage is being decentered and devalued, while simultaneously allowing them to continue to reap the benefits of being part of that privileged group.

There are some who would say that since such kinship claims are clearly fallacious, as well as carrying the potential to insult if not further disempower contemporary Native

Americans, they should be disregarded. As I hope this chapter demonstrates, however, such expressions should not be dismissed or buried as cultural garbage. These stories offer invaluable—if painful—reflections and reconstructions of a variety of cultural ideas about history, race, ethnicity, family, and the ways one constructs and transmits one’s historical, racial, ethnic, and familial identity. Moreover, these stories are ideal tools for

267 exploring the ways that academic discourse about the slipperiness of history, authority, and

“truth” is both reflected in, and perhaps shaped by, the folk themselves.

As such, then, the family kinship stories are closely linked to the cultural productions (the outdoor drama and novels) renarrating Tecumseh’s life, and also fit into the mbric of “touristic reading” discussed in chapter four: all of these cultural productions are frequently motivated in white cultures as a way of appropriating cultural difference, whether to understand it, subdue it, or consume and embody it. Again, it is difficult to pinpoint individual motivation; however, the desire to consume these texts is a constant, as evidenced not only by the large audiences at performances of Tecumseh! over its twenty- five year run, but also by the popularity of texts like Tan’s The Joy Luck Club and

Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God as well as by the eagerness of people like the

Miller sisters to tell their family kinship stories. Clearly, there is a strong interest in some branches of Anglo culture to do something about cultural difference. I use vague terminology here purposefully, since what individuals are trying to do about it—recognize it, understand it, celebrate it, defuse it, contain it, eliminate it—varies remarkably. Still, these texts serve critical functions in Anglo culture, and it is worth trying to articulate those functions at the end of this dissertation.

As I hope both the fieldwork chapter and the chapter on touristic reading demonstrated, there is a growing popular awareness of the “crisis of representation”; audiences and readers increasingly understand that both history and culture are being contested as static categories. However, most consumers still seem largely willing to receive any given cultural production as “accurate enough” representation. Given this relative lack of concem about “proving” a text’s autlienticity (but merely accepting it at face value), I would argue that in some aspects of Anglo culture, the function of these cultural productions is not “representativeness.” While audiences viewing Tecumseh! and readers

268 of The Joy Luck Club, for example, might appear to be seeking an “authentic representation” of the “Other,” the overriding function seems more to be that of mediation.

All of these cultural productions function largely not to represent various U. S. cultures, but to mediate within and especially between those cultures. While mediation is generally construed as being part and parcel of representation—the tool by which representation is achieved—I think there are some important distinctions between the two processes that need to be made. The concept of “representation” generally presumes that the audience receives the text as a mimetic reflection of its source—a flat, one-dimensional copy of an image, a kind of cultural Polaroid snapshot, like the one that ends The Joy Luck

Club. As the Tecumseh! audience surveys demonstrate, though, most audiences for that particular production are to some degree aware that the history they are seeing has been actively shaped and constructed to meet the ends of entertainment, and I would argue that— contrary to Wong’s asessment in the previous chapter—many Anglo readers are also aware that the written representation of cultures other than their own is not a passive reflection of

“reality.” Rather, most are aware that the work is the primary tool in a process of mediation that attempts (if it does not always succeed) to open a negotiable channel between text and reader, reader and Other, allowing for exchange. Granted, this exchange often results in misunderstanding, appropriation, and the reification of ethnic steretypes; however, the reader negotiates these responses on her own: where “representation” indicts the text for (mis)representing its subject, “mediation” effectively captures the. dynamic between text and reader/tourist/teller that leads to that misunderstanding, appropriation, and reification. In performance, all of the texts discussed in this dissertation allow the viewer, reader, and listener to negotiate an understanding (albeit, a skewed one) about the culture being mediated, but moreover, about the tenuous connections and congruences between this “Other” culture and their own.

269 To illustrate this point, I would like to return to the example of my former student who wrote about being distraught by the Italian-speaking waiter at Disney’s Epcot Center.

While the student certainly understood quite consciously that he was witnessing the petformance of national identity, that representation alone was disorienting enough; it mediated “Italian culture” for the student in a relatively risk-free environment. I would argue that the impetus for watching the outdoor drama, reading the novels about Tecumseh or those by “real” ethnic writers, and telling stories about possibly being related to a famous Native American is to achieve similar mediation. All of these cultural productions— whether viewed, read, or told—allow Anglo audiences to negotiate connections between their cultural reality and others in a relatively risk-free space.

1 predict that as the U. S. population becomes increasingly more diverse (and concurrently, increasingly culturally segregated, as is already happening), we are likely to wimess an even greater proliferation of and interest in these sort of mediating cultural productions within Anglo culture. Some of these are already emerging in the realms of both cultural/historical “heritage” tourism and in literature: in the wake of the abortive

Disney’s America project. Colonial Williamsburg staged a slave auction as part of its increasing efforts to broaden (and thereby “authenticate”) its scope; Oprah Winfrey has demonstrated her single-handed power to bring complex works like Toni Morrison’s Song o f Solomon to a popular audience; and the Anglo writer Tony Hillerman has created a series of mystery novels revolving around Navajo culture that has gained a wide readership not only among whites, but among Navajos as well. Whether these mediating productions are helpful or harmful in terms of cultural representation and intercultural relations is difficult to say. On the one hand, they do offer an outlet by which Anglos can work out some of their anxieties about cultural change and difference, but often these productions function as a simulacrum, to borrow Baudrillard’s term: a substitute for cultural interaction, rather than a sort of testing ground for it. The mediating function of the text,

270 then, becomes pure intellectual exercise or catharsis, rather than a tool for real-life interaction.

As I ponder this dilemma and end this dissertation, I keep being reminded of a small group of people in the audience at one of the performances of Tecumseh! I attended.

They “looked” “white,” but were dressed in “Native American” garb that manager Renee

Norman would have categorized as “inauthentic,” at least for Woodland tribes: the lone woman in the group was wearing a sort of fake-buckskin, fringed garment, her hair in two braids with a feathered band around her forehead. The three men in the group were less

“marked” as “Indian,” their attire falling somewhere between the “Indian” look and the

“frontiersman” look. Were they “wannabe” Indians, the kind Marion Waggoner described as being the ones who cause all the trouble? Their reaction to the show didn’t seem to be one of disgust or protest, but rather of appreciation. I think about their enigmatic presence in the audience, and I look at how virtually every word in the above sentences is, by necessity, called into question by the use of quotation marks, and I wonder, where is cultural authority located these days? My gaze, as I looked at that small band of audience members, was ethnographic: who were they? What kind of identity and ideology were they “performing,” and how did it interact with the larger performance on stage? I noticed other audience members, mostly Anglos, looking at them with varied reactions of humor, ridicule, curiosity, and condemnation. And I wondered how any “real” Native American present that night might have reacted, and whether perhaps thesewere “real” Native

Americans, but I myself was too biased by appearances to allow that possibility.

I evoke this memory here because I think it caputures the confusion—in some ways, a very positive confusion—present at that moment in the Sugarloaf Amphitheater...a confusion that I think is always already present in just as many permutations in U. S. culture at any given moment. As I and the other audience members speculated about the identity of this conspicuously “different” group of people, I think we all wanted cultural

271 clarity to assuage our collective anxiety—an authoritative voice to tell us who these people were, and whether they had the “right” to dress as they did. And yet we all seemed to know that such a voice would not speak (although Graham Greene’s voice would soon resound throughout the theater itself to restabilize cultural order).

I think about the anxiety that that small group of people produced, and I feel giddy, somehow—not because I approve of what they were doing (not that I even know what they were doing, if anything), but because of their power to remind us—by their mere presence— that categories are breaking down around us, dissolving like the boundaries between lands in Silko’s short story, and that no authoritative figure is going to step out of the wings to sort things out again. It is the small, unexpected, unstaged, silent moments like this in any cultural production, I suspect, that contain the power to topple empires. And if such moments do not encourage us to actively engage with the “Other,” they at least force us to confront our construction of that Other, and of ourselves.

' The town of Chillicothe celebrated its bicentennial in 1996, so there was an even greater focus than usual on its place in Ohio and U.S. history. Here, Virginia is referring to a list of the “first families of Chillicothe” that had appeared in theChillicothe Gazette as part of the commemoration. - Since moving to Colorado two years ago, I have noticed that this identification-denial process occurs a little differently in the West. Because there is a definite Native American presence in the population, the “presumption of extinction” excuse does not work. Segregation seems to be the effective substitute: at Cheyenne Frontier Days in Wyoming, the Native American exhibits and performances are staged in an isolated tipi village at the very perimeter of the grounds, and while some individual Indians may take part in the traditional rodeo events, the only overt display of such cultural influence is the rodeo’s featured Indian racing event, in which Native-American participants—some in tribal garb—mount horses bareback and race them once around the ring.

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Transcriptions of interviews w ith T e c u m s e h ! s t a f f

Key to transcriptions:

The abbreviation “R” indicates a question or comment by the interviewer, Rosemary Hathaway. Otherwise, all comments are those of the interviewee.

Words in italics indicate strong emphasis by the speaker.

Square brackets indicate contextual information and detail observed by the interviewer.

I. Transcription of interview with Marion Waggoner, Producer. Recorded at the Sugarloaf Mountain Amphitheater, Chillicothe, Ohio, on July 20, 1994.

SIDE ONE

000 You’re specifically interested in...what’s your theme! What conclusions...What are you trying to find out?

008 R: I’m just interested in the idea of how..various cultures are represented in tourist sites, and how people who are putting on those performances are...constructing those representations. Um, how you put the show together, what kinds of things you take into consideration when you, ah, put together your production.

020 Inasmuch as the rebirth of outdoor drama, which is, ah...you know, American theater...uh..it is said, has given the world two things: the musical, musical comedy, and outdoor drama. Outdoor drama is not unique to America, of course-I mean, the Greeks...it was, in the nineteen, uh, late 20s and early 30s that uh, a fellow by the name of Paul Green, who was at that time teaching philosophy at the Chap—at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, had studied in France, etc., Paul won a Pulitzer Prize for Abraham’s Bosom on Broadway back in the 30s, but decided to mesh the old world drama style with the, with American history, and he labeled it as more of a “symphonic” experience you know. Seeing, hearing, smelling...a total involvement in the senses. So. The movement blossomed out from the Carolinas, principally, and which now has spread to the far West— Kodiak, Alaska to Hawaii, and Florida St. Augustine up to the Maine Coast and anywhere in between. So all of these history plays—now there are pageants, which are different, of course, than dramas—and then there are uh Shakespeare festivals, religious plays, and those are all counted as outdoor drama, but outdoor historical drama, per se, in...usually involves [clears throat] a play or a story about a character or an event or events that are indigenous to that area, much like this show with Tecumseh, who was in this area certainly, and it creates a sense of pilgrimage, a sense of being there, and so you come outside, in this symphonic fomm, and if 281 you don’t get rained on, um...you know, you get a real....I mean, look at it: those are real trees, that’s real water, there arex&d\...birds, and...all forms of wildlife that just enhance the [??? loud noise] And so, you’re immersed in it, it’s a sense of being there, and you know the battles and the spectacle elements help bring the story to life, which may be what heightens that sense of realism when, you know, you mentioned as a younger person. Certainly it’s—you’re able to do something with a dimension that you can’t do on screen. It takes it out of a...one- or two- dimensional situation into a third one, which, uh...

055 Most of these plays are based on historical characters that are...the major shows, I guess, and many different cultures: Native American culture, which is a popular genre, uh...plays about Black people, etc., etc. [Suddenly two actors start rehearsing a scene behind us and their voices dominate the tape; after a bit of this, Waggoner suggests we move out of the Amphitheater. Tape cuts off and begins again at the new site]

064 The, uh...Anyway, the, uh, sense of pilgrimage is created in the, the different—you know, you’re talMng about different cultures—ours, of course, is Native American, and, uh, European, and the encroachment that was taking place in the late sev—mid, uh, late seventeen-hundreds...formative period. But there are plays around the country on, um. Black people who were adopted by the Shawnee, on um, uh, slavery issue, the uh Blacks who amalgamated with, uh. Native tribes...uh, like in the Carolinas, um...you know, tribes down there, uh...any number of issues are covered in cultures. As far as...as far as what’s taken into account here, for instance, with Tecumseh, it was, uh...The Scioto Society, which produces the show, was founded in 1970. And work commenced on what, you know, what story...we...do we tell. Well, there was a canal, you know, days, and there was Thomas Worthington, and uh, Simon Kenton, Daniel Boone, etc. etc. Well, uh, while Thomas Worthington has a home here, and I believe was the sixth governor of Ohio [raises voice here as in a question], not too many people know about him. So, you couldn’t—tliat was not bankable. [Chuckles] And so, you have to look at something you can market, and so they decided on Tecumseh...Simon Kenton, and then lifted that—Allen Eckert, who did the script, who wrote the Winning of America Series, including the first. The Frontiersmen, and so this play was lifted out from that..lifted from that book.

086 And so, it’s..uh, aside from, you know, producing an outdoor historical drama, a tourist attraction, to generate a bottom line, its...initial thrust, at least through the script, and I’ll not. I’ll not speak for Allen, but I’m, I mean I’ve spent a lot of time with Allen over the years...was, not a patent-formula script, uh....the narrator, which is traditional in an outdoor historical drama, was removed, after the first year, so that the fourth wall was not broken by a narrator speaking to the audience. That never occurred here; the narrator was the tribal historian who spoke to the young members of the tribe, never directly to the audience...which several of the shows up until that time did.

096 It was a vehicle...The narrator was a vehicle to,\.o...\xh...\xh...connect those missing years very swiftly and very quickly—

R: Right, right—to fill in the gaps—

Right, exactly. Whereas wedo have three bridge narration pieces here—actually, two. Which are on tape, you know, as kind of a god-out-of-the-machine deal, but- 282 -uh, and Graham Greene cut those for us. The Native actor, uh, and, uh, he did, you know, he’s known for Dances with Wolves and Thunderheart and that’s PR too, but...So we bridge those with those narration pieces as opposed to...the narrator.

106 But at any rate, the initial thrust of the script was to not paint a...not to be self- serving for...the residents of this area, whose founding fathers—uh, you know- carved a living out of the wilderness, etc., which they did. But it was to try to tell the story as accurately as possible...it’s not 100% accurate, I mean—we take, we take liberties with the script. Uh...withhistory, I should say.

113 But at any rate...the initial thrust was to represent both the cultures, the Indian—or however you politically want to say that-I mean, my wife’s a full-blood Indian and I call them Indians, so...whatever. Uh, but to tell the story of the Native American and the European and that conflict ...and the real thrust of this stor— of this script, just in my opinion, and I’ve directed it, is that it’s a love story. It’s a love story of...the people and the land, you know. And the struggle over that property. Because it was more than just a—for the...for the Indian people, I think more than just a sectioning off of a parcel of land; it was, you know, interwoven through their lives and their whole culture, etc. And then the Europeans obviously had a different concept of...of what land was and what it could be used for.

R: Mmm hmm.

127 So, that, that whole conflict, through this story the cultures are represented as accurately as we can portray them...there’s violence in the play; the first scene, you know, they scalp and mutilate a captive. Well, this doesn’t paint a pretty picture of Indian people...but it wasn’t a pretty time. And they did this. And the whites did similar acts. And there were no good guys and..mmm, bad guys...the thing on that, there were despicable people on each side of that fence. Anyhow, but the reason that’s done, is to height—show, there were bad things happening here. And also to show the character Tecumseh saying, “We shouldn’t”—which is historically correct, which is saying, “We shouldn’t be doing this to people.” That you don’t do this to other human beings. It’s just not right, we’re not like slaughtering hogs. And so it’s a vehicle, which happened to be true—most historians agree on that— but, so we see that side of...of, of those individuals, and we see the...uh, the rationale behind the whites, what they needed, wanted, had to have...

142 And so...this particular outdoor drama, I suppose...um...uh...there really wasn’t a formula, there really wasn’t I don’t think a lot of thought process in terms of now, “Oh my goodness, how are we going to represent these people.” I think it was done with as much accuracy as possible, and let the chips fall where they may.

R: Mmm hmm.

146 Uh, the Absentee Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma—there’re three...we could, of course, with historians and many Indian tribes, go around about this all day—but, generally speaking, there were three-there are three recognized tribes in the United States of America that are Shawnee. The Absentee Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma...not absent from Ohio, but absent from Oklahoma, who went down to Mexico, and the Mexican government said “Get these people the hell out of here,” and so the United States government offered them parcels...io come home, those who were in absence. Absentee Shawnee, the Eastern Band of the Shawnee..um, 283 and which predominantly...which initially hit the Kansas area. The Absentee are the Shawnee—Oklahoma Tecumseh [?]...uh, then the Loyal Band of Shawnee, which were...the Eastern Band were under the supervision of the Cherokee for many years, and then the Loyal Band of Shawnee, Don Greenfeather and his group, those are the only three.

161 There are many other groups who claim to be, and there are groups within this state who...uh, claim to be, but not are recognized...by the United States Government, nor by the Shawnee people. That’s a political ballgame. But, whu uh the uh individuals here who founded the Scioto Society and who worked on the script with Allen did...did have enough insight to contact the Absentee people, where the direct descendants of Tecumseh...uh, were located—some of them. Art Rolette, who was then tribal chairman, chief, governor—they’re now called governors out there—was a direct descendant of Tecumseh. He was also...tribal—he was the chief of the Absentee. [Clears throat]

172 So, Art was approached and agreed to assist technically on the development of the script, i.e., to talk about how the language was currently spoken, so that we have language tapes, so that when we speak Shawnee in the show...[lowers voice significantly] it’s supposed to be Shawnee, some people have difficulty with it—but at any rate, it’s not gibberish.

178 Customs...costumes, uh, we do period dress as much as possible...uh, the storyline itself, which we have Rebecca Galloway falling in love with Tecumseh, which Eckert said happened, now he says it didn’t happen, but we haven’t changed the play, and whatever. That’s a vehicle too, so that we can see the human side of Tecumseh.

R: Mmm hmm.

183 Otherwise he’s just a monolithic giant up there spouting out words. And you never get to see any..frailty at all. So he’s not a char—he’s not then a character, he’s a...marvel.

185 But, so Art Roulette and other descendants of Tecumseh worked on it technically that way. They’ve been out since. As a matter of fact, I think...the former governor’s in town today, and probably will be here this evening.

R: Huh.

Uh, along with people from the Eastern Band and the Loyal Band and that’s another whole political situation over here. But they’ve been out, or the elders, off and on over the years, and...we’ve developed a scholarship fund for their young people which we promised to do, and we’ve done that.

192 So. Culturally, then, I think...there, there might have been some planning to say, “Well, if we’re going to do a script, let’s just make sure it doesn’t, first of all, offend anyone...or as few people as possible—and then let’s try to portray and show the Shawnee, or depict the Shawnee, asaccurately as we can, through the costuming, through the mannerisms, through the dialogue, through the ambiance, and to try and get a...to try to get a, uh, fairly accurate representation, rather than...uh...coming out and everybody looks the same, and everybody’s wearing

284 the same...hair, and everybody’s wearing the same buckskin, and etc. So, I suppose one could say that...that was with the standpoint of authenticity.

205 Same way with the, with the whites. Of course, the research is much clearer on that. We [?]...prodigious in terms of leaving records, albeit...true or false, you know, and none the less we leave them. Uh, whereas the Shawnee did not record...um...much of their..much of their...uh, habit. Thomas Wildcat Alfred, who was a great-great...great grandson of Tecumseh, did leave an expose on the life of the Shawnee, uh, the social, you know, religious practices, etc. So, we, the...we try to incorporate as much of that as is, is...plausible, and is, is...uh, needed.

218 The, uh, the war dance we do is not traditional, because that would bore everyone to tears. Those were very repetitive, monotonous, and went on for hours, sometimes days. So we had to stylize that in order to keep the attention and advance the storyline. It is a piece of theater first and foremost.

222 The Wolf Chant is real, and was taught by Art Roulette to the company at that time and he recorded it, etc., so I suppose...uh...I suppose culturally, in terms of trying to sell something through the tourism medium...uh, I don’t know that there’s a best way to go about it, but I suppose it, uh—a decent way to go about it is simply try to...uh...be as accurate as you possibly can be, and be as objective as you can be...uh, with the script.

232 Prejudice is something that...of course, if we, if I knew the answer to that. I’d be— solve world peace and I’d win a Nobel Prize. Unfortunately I don’t think that’s going to happen. [We both chuckle] But prejudice is easy and it’s not always a negative thing either. It’s easy to be prejudiced in terms of operating a theater, or doing a script, when you’re not one of them.

R: Mmm hmm.

238 You know. I’ve lived on a reservation. And, uh, uh...my in-laws are all Indian people. Well, that doesn’t make me an expert, it only has exposed me to, uh, a high degree of prejudice, because I was one of two white people living on a reservation. I understand what prejudice is all about. And discrimination. It was done to me. Uh, in a very high degree...until I was accepted, or tolerated, or whichever. And it’s not...nice. I mean, it’s not blatant, and if you-in the script, it’s difficult to not fall into the trap of [clears throat] of...going with the path of least resistance, where that whichsells the best... If we tried to tell this story any way other than generally how it happened, it probably would fail.

R: Uh-huh.

252 If we tried to say Tecumseh was a great god, uh, and that all the whites were terrible people, and tried to impose a sense of collective guilt, then people wouldn’t come and see it. They don’t want to pay thirteen dollars to have somebody beat them over the head and say “Aren’t you terrible?’’ I mean, I certainly don’t feel any collective guilt, and don’t intend to. But...or if we told it from the standpoint that Simon Kenton was the best thing since sliced bread, had no faults...uh, was a...uh, paragon of virtue, then...I think that would be wrong, too.

285 261 R; Uh-huh. That’s why, that’s why I find...these things so fascinating, because there are so many issues that you have to consider simultaneously, and some of them seem to be in direct conflict with each other and it’s just—

263 Well they are!

R: ...remarkable to me that, you know, it’s possible to negotiate some kind of...you know, medium ground there.

You know, I...we might have trouble tomorrow morning; [R: Right, right] we might have it tonight, I don’t know. I mean, I never know. We haven’t had any...problems or anyone take...as far as Native people are concerned, that we know that are actually are Indian people. Other people who come up and say, “I’m Indian and I’m offended. I’m—’’ ..nine times out of ten, the individuals who are offended are Just about as white as I am. And I’m about as white as you can get. OK? Those are the individuals who want to create problems and who want to draw focus to themselves. And they’re...that’s just the way I see it, now.

273 Uh, you know. Carter Camp was staying at my house, uh, four weeks ago, he and his family. Carter was at Wounded Knee, and he and Dennis Banks and...Leonard Peltier, and those—on the Walk for Justice, trying to get Leonard freed. And...um...those people aren’t the problem. And what is the problem? Uh, the problem I suppose is, uh, miscommunication, but...we haven’t had a situation where people, you know, have walked in and went [clears throat] “My god, what are you doing?”, um...The Battle of Tippecanoe, which was a monumental outdoor drama in South Bend, Indiana...ah. West Lafayette, was shut down because of that.

R: Huh.

286 They built a 2.5 million-dollar complex, worked on it for twelve years, and it was shut down in two years. They had Native people and wanna-be—what I call “Wanna-be” Indians—[clears throat] literally come up onto the set and stop the show during performance, put a knife to the producer’s throat...and, uh, then went into negotiations to—they had a committee to rewrite the script, and of course it failed miserably.

R: Hmm. Hmm. What were their objections? That it was inauthentic, or...?

They didn’t like the way Tecumseh was portrayed. It was—The Battle o f Tippecanoe was the name of the show, and of course—Tecumseh and Harrison met only...once—possibly twice—once—and, briefly, when they were arguing over...they basically argued, and they met twice. And uh, or is generally accepted...and um, Tecumseh screamed and yelled and lost his temper, stormed out, and finally came back when he was cooled down, uh, several days later.

301 But they didn’t like the way that [clears throat] they had portrayed him. Tecumseh and Harrison were philosophizing, and...Tecumseh, they thought, was a lap dog, and was a traitor [? unclear] So we were unfortunate in that, and...but we don’t change the play every time someone comes in and says, “Well, this Rebecca Galloway thing didn’t happen. Why do you do it?” Uh, we...again, an—it’s never been Native people who’ve had strong objections to that. They, the Absentee Shawnee kind of chuckled about it...[clears throat] but first and foremost, this is a 286 play. This is not a history lesson. It’s a play. It’s apiece of theater. That a / 5 0 falls in the genre of history play, dealing with a period of history and with particular people. So, if we did everything totally accurate, first of all no one would agree, on what is totally accurate—

R: Right

I mean, when you have Draper interviewing Daniel Boone in the flesh, and Simon Kenton in the flesh, as he did, and said, “Daniel, tell me about the Battle of Blue Licks.” Well, I was bom across the site from that battlefield, and I grew up there. Daniel said one thing. He goes to Simon and says, “Tell me about the Battle of Blue Licks.” He says another. They were both there! Hell, what’s happening here?!

324 R: Right, that’s the problem with history, yeah, [laughing]

And, well, it’s like anything else, it’s like...uh, an accident, viewing an accident: it’s perspective. But at any rate. So. We first and foremost want to entertain people. That—and—if, within that mission, if that mission is accomplished, [clears throat] then...and they can...uh, uh, takeaway something, an idea, which is what theater is all about, and I suppose that...you know, without becoming too esoterical [sic], theater is to communicate ideas. Or to change minds. You know. Most theater today is political, as it has always been. So, as a communicative art form, and that’s the purpose of theater, is to communicate ideas. To entertain while you’re doing that was always the trick.

R: Mmm-hmm.

So that the king wouldn’t cut your head off.

R: Right, [chuckling]

You know what I mean?

R: Right, yeah.

And...Sophocles perfected that so he could slam the Senate, and Shakespeare perfected it so he could, you know, slam the...Tudors, or whoever was in power, and so theater was really bom of the—out of the pulpit of politics.

344 It’s not—and it’s the same way here—and it’s not to give a pure history lesson. If while entertaining you can also interject and cause people to think, about, well— “Gee, I think I’d like to know more about it, so I’ll go check out a book and read, or next time I run across a picture of Tecumseh, I’ll say, ‘Hey, / saw that’”...and it would cause me to...to—we’ve had kids who’ve come to see this show who’ve written letters saying, “Hey, you’re wrong about this”...and they were right. And, uh, I mean. I’ve made many replies to young people who’ve written saying, you know, the dates are wrong, or Tecumseh’s age was wrong at his first battle...and they’re right, because his first battle, he was about nine years old. Twelve. Nine to twelve.

357 And so they...they listen, pretty much, and they, and then they check things out, so you know that when—that’s good. So if you can get that across, too, that’s great. 287 And if you can cause people to think or experience and walk away...from a...cultural standpoint and say, you know, you’re looking at people predominant— we recruit Native people [although during the summer of this interview none were in the show or on the crew] and sometimes we’re able to hire them, sometimes we’re not. I go to Arizona—the Pima—the Alabama-Coushatta, Lakota, it’s difficult. So they walk away knowing these people’re wearing makeup, but...an idea, that this is how they lived, or this is the feeling, and...maybe they hadn’t been exposed to that side of Indian people...before.

370 And so, then they start to investigate the culture, which is, you know, uh....uh...how they dressed, when they lived, you know—when was that? Well, guess what? While they were ringing the Liberty Bell and cracking it, this was going on out here. It wasn’t two different worlds, but it seemed like it.

376 And most, or at least...I mean. I’m not a teacher—I used to substitute teach, and that doesn’t count, but—most kids [clears throat] used to be had a perspective that...the, uh. Northwest Territory was a different time period than Philadelphia. “This was much earlier”...No, it was the same time.

382 And this was the...thi—r/uj territory was the French and the English and the Americans—just like imperialism today—“Our little brown people against your little brown people.” And that’s all it is; it was imperialism at work. And...most kids don’t make that connection, that—that’s what was happening. And first the Indian people were the little brown people. And people like Tecumseh, and Pontiac...uh....Logan [loud throat clearing] and others, uh, they could see that. And really, just hacked them off. So, if—if...if they can make that connection, and maybe dig a little deeper, then you feel like, “OK, as uh, as an organization...nonprofit organization, which the Scioto Society is—very non-profit—uh...

398 ...And our mission as is stated is to enhance the cultural, historical, educational, and economic environment of the tri-county area. So—Hi Robert! [Robert asks him how he’s doing] Pretty good. [Picks up pace here as if he’s trying to wrap things up] If we can make the bottom line work on the drama, and keep hiring people locally and operations for hiring actors and infusing the economy and we can [clears throat] have people come in, and...have an event that’s a two, three- hour experience where they can bring their/am//y, uh, and if we can have some of them who might.../earn something...then...uh...hope—maybe we’re fulfilling that, that mission.

409 So...uh...from a cultural standpoint, at least here, as best I can say, is that we have...uh...incorporated at—what-at least what we know, elements of that culture in the script,/or authenticity, for storyline advancement...and for, uh, general entertainment. And, uh...without a political mission. We, we were too poor to have a political mission before. Uh, um...is that generally...?

417 R: Yeah, that’s...that’s really, that’s—that’s really interesting to me. I was wondering, when you were talking about how the, the play’s sort of, uh...a love story between the people and the land. And, uh—

421 Well, now that’ll be different interpretation, perhaps, for everyone [R: Yeah, yeah], but when you look at the broad picture, what’s this play about. What is it a6aar?....Well, it’s about Tecumseh. Well, yes—but what’s it a/?oar? [R: Mmm Hmm.] Uh, his conflict with the whites? Yes. What wasthat about? Uh, they 288 were two different cultures. Well, so what? What’s that about? It was about the land. It wasn’t...

429 R; Yeah. That’s what I find really interesting. I wonder if, if people...um, come away with an—you know, even though these’re events that happened...you know, two hundred some years ago, I wonder if people are able to come away with some sort of a contemporary understanding of that. You know, with all the— [W: I’m not sure, yeah—] With a lot of Native tribes wanting to—[W: Repatriate] Yeah, yeah, I wonder if, if people ...I wonder if you think people can people are- can m ^e a connection, to, uh, you know contemporary society like that, or...

437 I think that...I think the, surely they do, and, and, and surely they don 'f, but uh [R: Laughter] Many people do, surely, go away with that. I guess there’s always a nebulous thing, it seems like that on the surface [clears throat] uh, people- -you know, again I go back to a, you know, it’s not...a satire, sort of, like, uh, watching the thing and going, “Well, there’s a lot of spectacle, there’s good battles, and Tecumseh died in the end...Um, what was that all about?’’ Uh...We view events...we tend to isolate events; it’s kind of like the chaotic theory, we...we tend to...I, I think, isolate events, and dwell on those and not look at the big picture. [R: Mmmmhmm]

451 Uh...plus the fact that [clears throat] that neb-that, that that nebulous thing out there wasnot a philosophical debate between the Native American culture and, uh, uh, European culture, which—German, Irish...Chi—whatever youwere here, um...I mean, they still had theirbrogues. That was not the issue. They wouldn’t have been killing each other over the fact that theytalked differently. Or that...they worshiped their god differently. Well, that’s fine. It’s not until you get in somebody’s pocketbook that they really get...really get antsy, you know? And I think you can tie a lot of that back to territoriality. I don’t—I mean, at least...I’ll put it this way: why are we interested in what the hell goes on in Haiti? [A contemporary foreign policy debate of the summer of 1994; interestingly, this issue also factored into my Disney fieldwork in Virginia]

R: Mmm hmm [kind of dubiously]

465 You know? Well, national security? Mmmm,

R: Maybe.

Maybe. What is national security? Economic well-being. To promote our lifestyle. Well, Tecumseh...saw that as an immediate threat. Uh, it wasn’t a philosoph—I—now, I wasn’t there, but...is it, is it so hard to imagine that he said, “Wait a minute, in twenty years, we’re not ev—going to have a place to practice our religion, we’re not going to have a place to, uh, carry on our, our culture the way that I was able to do, and my...ah, grandfather was able to do, and how will our children live? As whites? As what?’’ And so, it became, uh, an economic issue in terms of the culture, I mean...if...if you don’t control your destiny, then how do you control your destiny?

483 I suppose that’s the difference in class warfare. Republicans and Democrats are...So. I think it’s easy to see why Tecumseh was so adamant about it. Because it was an issue of, uh...he was tied to the land. Whoever owned the land, and whoever had possession of the land...uh, dominance of the land, called the shots. 289 Uh, um...the issue’s...not the difference between Moneto...and Jesus Christ, or...[voice drops] you know what I mean? Uh, and looking back, the perspective, you can see how that may be, may be true. May be true, in a sense. They’re not here anymore, and we are.

500 And, uh...as I kid my wife sometimes, “white is right.’’ There’s no morality to politics; whoever has the big stick, wins. That’s the way it is. So. Uh. We try to- -we, that’s the wrong pronoun—Allen Eckert, you know, scripting the thing, the play, uh, tried to get this point across [clears throat] without...Harrison, William Henry Harrison, was a man with a job to do. He didn’t—uh...we don’t try to portray him as a villain, we portray him as someone who...is enthusiastically carrying out his mission, which he did. He had political, uh, ambitions and whatnot, uhhmm, but that maybe was not so much his fault as it was Thomas Jefferson’s...you know. Uh, I mean, Jefferson was a great one for...the Jeffersonian method of...expounding the virtues of the noble savage, and expounding the virtues of the slave...and yet he kept slaves. Now...[exasperated sigh] if they were so great, why did he continue to practice that institution? ’Cause it saved him money. [R: chuckle]

525 And why is it that George Washington—and you know. West Virginia has that little square that runs up there, geographically? [R: Mmm hmm] That was all his. [R: Hmm.] One wonders why we extol the virtue of a man who spent thousands and thousands of personal dollars Just to...keep the troops going, mi [drawn out] think I know why. Um, you know. And yet, on the other side of the coin, everybody’s gotta live someplace. And you know, there’s no—1 don’t see how that can be rectified. Someone says, “Well [clears throat], how do you rectify it?” I don—I don’t know. Give ’em back Ohio? Are we going to do that? Redly? [R: It’s not very realistic. Yeah.] No. Are we going to pay them off?

543 Whatever, but you don’t...I read an interesting article last year about, are we factionalizing, culturally, ourselves out of existence in the United States. Let’s have a second language. Well, let’s have a fourth or fifth. We always have. I mean—

R: There’s never been one language.

Right, exactly. But, but now there’s this-‘T’m not American, Vm African American.” “I’m, I’m Aar/ve American.” “I’m C/zmejg American.” “I’mTTia/ American.” “I’m...” You know, I don’t want people to refer to me as w/«'re. I am German American. I me—so the point was, that...it’s, it’s diffused to the state oL.chaotic state, and that—\i you want to look at it from a purely cultural standpoint, I think Tecumseh...kind of. Native people today-at least those I know personally—want to hold that together. Hr...my son’s half Indian, OK? He doesn’t speak the language, the Alabama language. Um, some, you know. It’s important that they continue to speak their own language; it’s part of their heritage. Um, and I think, back then, people like Tecumseh realized that there would be those problems to where—ultimately, in two hundred years, they wouldn’t even remember who they were.

[Intermpted at this point while an employee informs Waggoner that he has a message]

576 OK, I’ll shut up now.

290 R: [chuckle] Well, that’s what interests me, is that, that—you know, all these issues of, you know, identity politics and focusing on...you know, a culture in isolation when that really isn’t realistic, that isn’t the way that any culture that’s...extant in the United States right now is. You know, we’ve all...evolved in contact with each other, you know, and, so it’s...I think that kind of factionalism you’re talking about is—can be really kind of problematic.

588 Well, I mean, I don’t—you know, I just look at it from a purely logical standpoint. And, iVs—again, like I say, prejudice is an easy thing...to let happen. My perspective is different...than a Navajo kid...who...maybe once a week get a bottle of pop. That’s a hell of a difference from the way things operate around here! At my house, anyway. So my perspective is different. I mean, it’s easy for me to philosophize this with a full belly and a Dodge Dynasty, and...uh, medical insurance paid by the company I work for, and a loving wife, and all this...but, uh, and my kid’s, uh, an honor student and does sports and this and that—Well, by god. I’ve earned that.

609 But none the less, it’s a different perspective of—from that kid, or the, or a black child in, um—I’ll just pick on Louisville, Kentucky; everybody always wants to pick on Detroit—who...has one chance in, uh...six or seven of being shot? I suppose—I don’t know what I would feel if I were in that position. I don’t know how I would view white male Protestant. I just don’t know. I probably would be angry out of a sense of that collective...stuff, and saying, “You owe me, because my grandfather was a slave; you owe me forever.’’ Maybe I would say that.

625 Or maybe I would have a chip on my shoulder about repatriation. You know. I don’t want people digging up my ancestors; I don’t want people selling their bones; I don’t want people selling the artifacts; I don’t want people who say they’re Indian and not receiving...what some have purported to be a piece of Tecumseh’s flesh and burying it on a piece of ground they bought, you know, through a bank and saying it’s ceremonial ground. I don’t want that. And I don’t want government support either. I want...I want to be treated like white male Protestant. And if I can’t, then maybe I’ll marry one. Because that’s maybe the only way I can get that kind of treatment.

640 So, culturally perspective is...which...camp you’re sitting in, I guess. But....I don’t, you know, people walk away from this show I think generally speaking, it’s an action-oriented show, it’s very epic...and I think they walk away, uh, thinking more about the spectacle than they do about the cultural aspects of it. And that’s why, because as I said before, it—we must entertain people, we must keep them coming here; to keep the operation going, um, first and foremost, they have to enjoy the play. But, it doesn’t have to be that...you know, “This is the good side and this is the bad side.” It was...it was all through there.

R: Mmm hmm, mmm hmm.

658 And so it caught them back to—

R: Let them make their own judgments.

Yeah, back to—what was it, that little thirty-second radio thing they used to do— “Learn more about it”? So then...they, the, well, they learn more about it and go, “This Tecumseh, this Tecumseh-” you know... 291 666 R: Is that the objection that, you know, the—the people that you say are sort of “wannabees,” is that sort of the objection they have, that...is the emphasis on, you know, the spectacle over the, you know “political correctness” or whatever you want to call it”

671 Basically. When it boils down—when it, when it’s all separated that—and then most times, you never know what it is. It’s just that—what don’t you like? Uh, using sacred, uh, sacred dance. Well, excuse me, but that’s not even a Shawnee dance, so—how could it be sacred? Uh, or...Tecumseh and that white woman. Hate white people. Whatever. But yes, you put it, I think, into its perspective. The uh..I don’t know, not everybody in the world comes up to me and says, “Hey, I like this” or didn’t like that. It’s just that...[clears throat] um...like I say, tomorrow, tonight, Larry Knuckles, the Governor, could walk in and say, “We hate this thing.” You know. He didn’t say that when he was here year before last.

694 Uh...the tribal elders, they all went away...chuckling over how we pronounced the words, and saying, you know...I said, “Well, how do you like the play?” “Heh— s’all right.” ...OK....Back to Oklahoma. So...

R: To deal with the reality of it.

Yeah.

[Very long pause while I think about what to ask next]

706 Do you think—I, the—I think you used the term “recovered issues” sort of, to talk about what some of the, what the focus of a lot of these regional outdoor dramas are? And...is that sort of a trend, do you think, that they’re sort of reclaiming parts of history that have been forgotten, or, you know, particular, you know like ethnic history that may have gotten sort of glossed over...

716 Well, I don’t know what motivates each group. Uh, I serve as a consultant nationally to the, to different planning groups, as do other people, [long pause] They’re dl motivated...a little differently, but it all goes back to, they want to tell a story that’s indigenous, something they’re proud of. There’re some folks up in Northern Ohio right now who’re fiercely dedicated, very much involved, and I say this and I, I do not mean to be sarcastic or make light of it, but—who have an organization put together, who’ve been...planning for a number of years, who’ve been to the fall conference of the Institute on telling the story of the first merry-go- round in America. And, they—I mean, these people are serious, OK? And it originated in, um...oh, up near Cleveland, I guess. First merry-go-round in America. Carousel, or—same thing, really. Well, that was the first one. And they’re now doing outdoor drama about this.

R: Gonna have a carousel on the stage, or something?

I would imagine, [end of side one of tape]

SIDE TWO

292 000 [cuts in due to tape leader] ..."My Old Kentucky Home.” Stephen Collins Foster? He spent some time there. Well, of, course, you knov/—kk\vwwt! [a sort of sucking sound]

R: Latch on to that.

Yeah. Bardstown’s got him. And, 'course, that's—you know, they're very proud of him: “My Old Kentucky Home’”s right here, state park, a—the, the outdoor drama, which is a beautiful, beautiful show—s’absolutely gorgeous. Uh...Harrodsburg, Kentucky—I produced that show...uh, back in the, uh seventies. Uh, they did a script, in Harrodsburg, Kentucky, population fifty-six hundred. Home is the Hunter. See, these one, diese one-word titles didn’t come along until the early seventies, [voice lowers—following two words spoken very dTama.ûcaï\y]Tecumseh. Bluejacket. Uh, they’re—until, up until that time period, they were all. Home is the Hunter. Cross and the Sword The Lost Colony. Eh, you know. Dances with Wolves. \]\i...Home is the Hunter was about Jim Harrod. James Harrod. Harrodsijwrg, Jim Harrod...it’s good. Fort Harrod was there: the oldest settlement west of the Allegheny Mountains.

R: Hmm.

But you’ve got to say it correctly: the oldest permanent settlement west of the Allegheny Mountains, because Boonesboro was built at the same time, except they vacated Boonesboro for six months. Therefore, we’re the oldest permanent settlement west of the Allegheny Mountains.

R: Gotta get all the—

We have the oldest—

R: —qualifiers...

...newspaper west of the Allegheny Mountains, by god. A Jeffersonian, democratic publication. Well that’s funny; when I got to Chillicothe, they said they had the oldest publication west of the Allegheny Mountains. And I’m thinking, “Now which one of these people is telling the truth, which one”—they’reboth telling the truth. Again, from their perspective. The people in Harrodsburg, then- let’s do a drama about Jim Harrod. OK. And the founding of Harrodsburg, and the carving of, uh, life out of the wilderness, and...and they did, and it failed, miserably, after about two years, and then they went—“Uhhh, Jim Harrod,” because nobody heard of Jim Harrod. OK? “What’re we gonna do, what’re we gonna do.” Daniel Boone. Fess Parker’s on TV as Daniel Boone now; we’ll do it on Daniel Boone.

R: Yeah

Uhh, but, uh, they went to Jan Hartman—they called him Jan [hard “J” sound] because he’s Jewish, and you couldn’t have a Jew writing a drama in Harrodsburg, Kentucky. His name’s “Jan” [hard “J”] . Uhh, they go, they go to Jan [mocking hard “J” sound] and say, “Can you write us a script? Uh, but we need it in six months” or something. “OK.” Um, “I’ll call it 'The of Daniel Boone’- that way we can do anything we want to.” ’Cause it’s called “The Legend of Daniel Boone.” And they did! 293 R: Anything can be a legend, right—

And, and it—it has lasted now for twenty-five years. And playing to about sixteen to eighteen thousand people every year, and it’s downtown Harrodsburg, two blocks from the railroad track of the freight line, and uh, it’s a...I say all that tongue in cheek, but it’s true, and so—it’s “The Legend of Daniel Boone.” Why isn’t is at Boonesboro? Well, they just didn’t get there soon enough. You know. Uh...so they’re very proud, and th-the big political upheaval of the people who started Home is the Hunter—iim Harrod, who was sacred, and now this damned Daniel Boone thing. With Jim Harrod in there as a minor lead. And they’re still fighting over that.

040 They renamed the theater, it’s “The Jim Harrod Memorial Amphitheater”...anyhow...well, they’re sort of proud of Daniel, at least it’s working. Uh, but most of these shows try to take indigenous characters, uh...and, you know, something they’re proud of—I don’t think the folks out at Wounded Knee would want to do anything, uh, on the seventh cavalry.

046 Uh, The Long Way Home, which is in, uh Radford, Virginia? OK. Uh, then, uh, Mary Ingles’ story?

R: The Little House on the Prairie?

Well, no, this is the Mary Ingles, the...Follow the River [another historical novel by James Alexander Thom, who wrote Panther in the Sky]. She was captured by the Shawnee—

R: Oh, OK.

051 And was taken, uh...as a matter of fact, into this area, on one—and then back, anyhow. They have to portray that story as with the, with the, uh, Indian people as, d& the bad guys, tand they were\ I mean, you know? And they’re saying, “Well, we’re, we’re fighting this problem.” They were up here the other day, and they were—um, they were going, they want to redo everything, and so “We’re fighting this problem, you know, because we want to be politically correct, and, uh, where can we go talk to Shawnee people?” Well, see, they’re ch—which we talked about. Their trying to, to take,uh, an issue and flavor it differently. Ah, “How can we make this a story where, uh, the frontiersman comes in as the valiant savior of the woman, takes her away, and these bad people who captured her, are— get their due, but we don’t want it to be too bad, because, you know, we want to be politically sensitive.” You can’t. I mean...tell it the way it happened is probably the best way to do it.

063 Why did they take her captive. What happened to them to make them takeher captive, [long pause] Ah...you know. So, some people—which is more in line with your question, is “how do they deal with that issue”—I don’t know how they’ll deal with it, but I think the best way to deal with it’s tell the tmth. Or at least, as best you know.

R: Yeah, and I think that’s the best approach, what you said; you know, let’s go back and look at why they were motivated to do that in the first place.

294 069 And through the story, bring that out, yeah. Uh, why do they...tear the top of this guy’s head off down here in the first act of the show? Well, we talk about that. Why? Because. Whites are coming in, we’re slaughtering every piece of game we need to feed our families; they’re tddng the land; uh, look what they’ve done to Logan’s family. I mean, my god, they put this daughter up in a tree, they slit her belly open, they ripped the child out of her womb and wrapped it around a sapling...Now. I think that we have the right to do this to him. That’s why we’re doing it. Uh....uh, there’s always a reason.

078 Right...it’d be historically inaccurate to say, “Let’s just go talk to these people.”

Yeah, which is what Logan tried to do.

R: Hmmm, hmm.

Hello! [speaking to Renee Norman, theatre manager, who’s come up to us. End of Waggoner interview.]

II. Transcription of interview with Renee Norman, Theater Manager. Recorded at the Sugarloaf Mountain Amphitheater, July 20, 1994.

080 R: Um, well, if you could just tell me sort of how you became involved with the show, and...you know, what this all means to you, and what your interests are...that sort of thing.

Uh, OK [laughing]

R: Be open-ended about it [laughing]

084 Yeah! Well, actually, I had no interest in history at all. But, uh, I was interested in—actually, it started up in—I’m from North Dakota. And, uh, I was working...um, on my doctorate in psychology up there, needed an out, and got into community theater. One of the fellows who worked with me in community theater- -I was a backstager. I was a techie. I did the grunt work. I did the management work, and that. And, uh, one fellow who was up there working while his wife was teaching at the university, also worked here in the summers. And he was directing. And decided he wanted some multi-talented people backstage, and said, “You wanna come down for a summer?” I came down for a summer...which became another summer and another summer...and, uh, I started out just as a general Indian, and then a costumer. I could sew; they loved that.

096 So...that was my first year, and I understudied...a female role in the show, Mrs. Galloway, who’s kind of like the mother of the love interest. And, uh, the second year we had a New York director come in. And he had liked...the way he saw me play it, when I understudied it, so he asked me to come in...as Mrs. G. So I did that for two years, and in the time that I was here, decided that I really...wanted to be the bridging gap. Backstage theater was too wnreal...for me, but where I was in the hard-core sciences, and all “real-world,” that wasn’t artistic enough. So where- -how do you bridge the artistic side of life and the real-world side of life?

295 105 And then Marion, working with Marion, I was going, “He’s doing it. He’s doing it.’’ And so I said, “OK."’ And I went into, uh, business administration and said, “I’m gonna get into arts administration.’’ Went into business administration, told Marion I can’t come back and act in the summer; I’ve got to get management real- world experience, and he offered me theater manager. Did that last year, and now...am on the permanent production staff, doing management, marketing, strategic planning, year-round. So I kind of came about it the long way ’round, and now I’m fascinated by history, because my years here, because my years here have gotten me so, so interested—especially Native American history, and the depth—and not just the show, and not just the history of it, but then meeting people today who are part of the Native American culture. And Native American beliefs. I love ’em. They fit with me. It’s kind of again that artistic side of the scientific world.

117 And I’ve studied the Native American history of this area, plus now my area back home, ’cause I would go back home to North Dakota every winter, and study...f/zeir history. And then I met a fellow who was from way up in the Northeast, and they have the Indian history up there...nobody realizes that they had powerful leaders and wonderful culture, just like here, just like out west, except it was wiped out, you know, back in...the sixteen- and seventeen-hundreds. So no one knows about it.

125 This area of the country, people around here know about it, but the rest of the nation doesn’t, because it was wiped out in the seventeen and eighteen countries. The only area anybody really knows anything about is the west, because that hung on...until this century, when we had recorded history. And so when everyone thinks of Native Americans or Native American culture, and the history of Native Americans, they think of thewest. You know, you always think of the—the silver jewelry, the...um...the turquoise, you know, when you see Native American work, that’s what you see.

R: Santa Fe.

132 That’s Southwest—you know, you get—you see Native American pictures, or blankets, or artifacts, and its all the bold geometries, so it’s kind of become—all we know is the Southwest. And we transmitted that to the whole rest of the United States. But if you go through the different areas, you see each one had its own fanfuftically [word spoken very dramatically] rich culture, wonderful leaders, it’s /o^cinating to read their stories.

137 And from, you know, Maine, you know, all the way through California, and the Northeast—or the Northwest, excuse me—Washington, Oregon—beautiful artifacts, beautiful cultures, all different cultural beliefs. You know. It’s as varied as Europe was. You know, you wouldn’t confuse Sweden with Greece. And that’s what’s fascinating me more than anything.

R: Mmm hmmm.

Of course it all started with Tecumseh.

142 R: Mmm hmm. Hmmm. Yeah, that’s what really interests me, too, is this sort of idea that there is, you know, this sort of monolithic Native American “culture,” and people...seem to fail to realize how many different groups there were, and 296 there's—you know, that they were as different as, you know, you’re saying, you know...Sweden is from Greece. Yeah.

Mmm hmm. But we don’t realize that. It’s something we strive for here. Here...it’s, again, that bridging area, that we have to work hard-we work our damdest for realism, to be true...nm, to what the Shawnee—which would be southern woodland Indian—what their culture was really like, what their lives were really like...but on the other hand, we have to bring in, and please, tourists, the showgoers. And they have expectations. And if you violate those expectations too much, then they’re unhappy.

156 So, you look at it, and—we have a fanfa^tic—you’ll see some wonderful costumes in the show; we’ve had afanizsûc costume designer who’s worked...for about the last five years building up Acr knowledge, going to, um...she’s been up to Chicago, where there is a huge museum of man and nature, and researched costumes, researched customs, and she’s putting woodland...yon know, costumes native to this area in. They didn’t use leather. You know. They didn’t have the large bison, you know, the large prairie animals. They used a lot of cloth. Plus it’s—well, you cm feel the weather.

R: Right.

Hot and muggy. So they used a lot of thin cloth. They didn’t use what we typically think of of the fringed buckskin, deer...and yet, if we put on this great big huge gala, and just put everyone in kind of dull cloth colors, people would be disappointed. So you will see—you know, we do bring in the leathers. And, uh, we do bring in kind of the tourist expectation, but it’s mixed. If you ever see a picture of Tecumseh, he actually wore a turban.

R: Hmm.

No fancy headdress. Woodland Indians wore turbans.

R: Huh.

And, uh...at...different...seasons that we’ve done the show, we’ve had different ones of the main characters, actually, in the authentic turbans. But you can’t put too many of ’em onstage, ’cause the audience will sit here going, “That’s not real.”

173 R: [chuckle]

And, uh...[clears throat] Oh, things like—and interesting in the summertime, the Shawnee women wore loincloths and nothing else. Just like the men. Of course, we can’t do that on the stage! [laughs]

R: Sounds good to me, though, right now. I’ll tell you! [It was about 96 degrees that day you could actually see the humidity in die air]

[We both laugh]

176 You know, and-it’s things like that; it’s balancing...\hc actual realism with what will make the public happy. Uh, we’ve done a lot of detail work. All the, uh...um, decoration on the costumes over the last five years, we’ve worked really 297 hard—she's worked to find, she gets pictures of decorations that they used, the patterns and the prints that they used, because at one point, um, there was a lot in this show, like I was saying, of Southwestern designs. People would put geometries on them, thinking that was Native American—no, that would have been down in Arizona. And we’ve worked—now it’s all, they use a lot of, uh, vines and flowers, and...shooting stars, not the bold geometries of, you know, the rough canyons and rock formations.

R: Right, right.

It’s...the art of the forest. And so we’ve worked really hard to bring that in...to the show.

R: Mmm hmm.

188 [After a longish pause] And, there are other things, you know, where realism has to be sacrificed. For, uh, safety. You know, the fact that, back in those days, if an Indian...or Native American, excuse me. I’ll—address that in a minute.

R: OK.

Uh, had, you know, gotten a weapon, had a gun, say...that he had won in battle— in a war dance, he would..that. And he would carry that. Because that was a symbol of strength. Well, we can’t go running around doing a war dance with loaded weapons on stage for safety. So you will see at one point, it’s—so much is going on you don’t see it, but at one point, guns are shot off in our war dance. What happens, everyone’s dancing, who—those who have rifles go get the rifles, shoot them off, put them away, and go back to dancing. You know. It’s just little things like that. We have to be safe.

201 Um, in the real world they actually killed each other. We don’t do that here. But I was going to tell you, uh...one comment we get from people a lot, who, uh, come to see the show, and who are interested, you know, and have studied Native American history, and they’re very, you know, sensitive to this, and they consider themselves really up on it—we get comment after comment that they are very upset, and very disgusted that we actually have the Native Americans in our show calling themselves Indians. Because they are not Indians, they are Native Americans, and it’s insulting that we would have them...—Well, what you gotta understand is that...theycalled themselves Indians. The term “Native American” didn’t come about until this century.

R: So it would be an anachronism to put it in the show.

Right! So, we couldn’t have...Native Americans from the seventeen-hundreds sitting there saying, “We are Native Americans,” because...that wasn’t so. They called themselves Indians. We were the Indians, and the whites were either the “white men” or the “Long Knives” for the sabers that they had on the ends of their guns. And so that’s one thing that comes up quite a lot. You know, they say, “Here you are, doing this wonderful thing—why do you call them Indians?” “Because they called themselves Indians.” During the period that we...are putting...on that stage.

298 219 So that’s why I—we call them “Indians” here constantly, and it’s really hard to make that flip, and realize “OK, now I’m talking...modem times, ‘Native Americans’.” But, that’s something interesting that comes up quite often. People going, “Why do you call them that?” That’s what they called themselves—

R: Right...

So it’s small quirks, lots and lots of quirks, of trying to—to blend, you know, the eighteenth century with the twentieth century. That...go up and down. But it’s redly interesting.

R: An incredible amount of juggling you have to do around here.

[Norman laughs] Yeah, it is.

227 R: Hmmm. Hmmm. Well I was wondering, when you—um, you know, when you said you first started with the show, you were cast just...as...an Indian, in the show.

Yep. Generic Indian.

R: OK. [With a sort of laugh] What kind of direction do you get, you know, /o r that? You know, just—

Actually, quite a lot.

R: Yeah?

Because—

R: I mean, are you working on the authenticity thing, then also...?

And it’s not just the authenticity, you know, of the times-, but of how people would really interact. I mean, you put sixty people out there on stage, portraying...uh, “village life,” say—that’s what we cdl a lot of scenes in the background of what’s happening up front. “Village life.” And you can go out there and say, “OK, I’m an actor, and I’ve been told to be in this spot here for the next couple minutes, and then I’m supposed to move over to that spot there." OK, fine—you can do that, but what would they really have been doing at that time? And not just doing, but thinking, talking about...how would they have interacted? You know, they had social hierarchies. How would you interact with—you know, say you’re talking to the woman next door? Say you’re talking to one of your husband’s other wives. Say you’re talking to...you know, a chief. Well, what is your interaction with these different people on stage, and if there’s sixty of you, you figure that was a town. They had relations, they had friendships, they had feuds—you know, everything that a small town would have. And the director—we have really good one this year for working on crowd scenes—how would they interact. You know. When the leader gets up there and says “Listen to me,” would they all be standing there, you know, with hands crossed paying good attention to him? You know, go to a parade. What do you see happening in a crowd? And so that’s probably because there are no lines, there’s no—what they say in theatre, “motivation”—you know, “What’s the motivation for doing this.” You have to come up with it...on

299 your own, between you and the director. Um, whereas, when you’re given lines, that’s given you a lot right there. You have none; how do you make it up?

258 And, uh, it’s really hard to get crowd scenes to look...realistic. You know, when you have it blocked in the script: “OK, at this point, everyone reacts loudly,” and then his lines continue, you gotta work really, really, really hard to get it to sound like a natural build and fall-off rather than someone taking a knob and going, “Rrrreeh, rrreh. Rrrrreeh, rreh.” [Mimics sound of volume being turned up and down] Which can can happen when they just sit there and read the script and go, “OK, now I react, now I quit. Oh, now I react.”

264 So it’s, uh, a lot of detail work. Um, the background is all detail work. To get, then, the bigger gross [?] picture to look right.

R: Hmm. Hmm. So, do—do they have you read up on...the history, or...

Before we come in—well, the one thing we do have to read, um, to get a feel for it is the original book. Allen Eckert’s The Frontiersman. Most people go ahead...and just find other books. Um. There are two more books out on Tecumseh now—uh. Sorrow in Our Heart...and, um....Panther in the Skyl Yeah, Panther in the Sky, I read that one five years ago; it’s kind of faded. But, uh, they’ve read both those to get a feel for Tecumseh’s life and...everyone else around him.

275 It’s kind of fascinating to be a character in a show and start reading a book and find that character in that book.

R: Mmmm, that would be pretty amazing.

You know. It is. So, that’s—and then, uh...some of us go even farther than that; over the last five years of reading all kinds of actual—not novels,hu\. factual books— on Native American lore, and religion, and history, and culture. Fascinating stories. They transmitted their culture through each generation through stories, and I love their stories. It’s like listening to Aesop’s fables, or the Parables. Everything has a, a story and a—you know, uh—what’s the word I’m thinking of...moral—

R: Yeah, some sort of implicit lesson you’re supposed to get out of that.

Yeah. Right, right. They can get pretty pithy, too ’cause they were just part of the earth.

288 R: Yeah, hmm. That’s amazing. Are there, are there any Shawnee actors, who sort of—

Not this year.

R: OK.

No. It varies from year to year, as to...um, how many Native Americans, or what Native Americans we have in the show, depending on who auditions. Because...even though there is an interest now in Native American—you know, movies, and shows, and plays—uh, those Native Americans that you do see, who 300 are acting, are way up at the top. Big bucks. You know, the Graham Greenes...of the world. Although we do have Graham Greene narrating.

296 Um, here in outdoor drama, this is kind of—I don’t know, I call it the “boot camp” of professional theater. You, uh—you know, we are nonprofit, as most are, and...we’re trying to bring in the family audience, so you keep...prices at about one-fifth to one-sixth of what it would normally cost. So costs are a—so pay is low. So who you usually get in here are, um, besides the leads—our leads are professional Equity actors—but the rest of the company are all college student like in their last couple years of theater; students just out of theater—you know, like, most of them, you can say they’re within four years of college and trying to break into the professional world, and they come here to get their start.

308 And so...you don’t find many Native Americans auditioning at that level. We have had...a couple years ago, we had seven in the cast. You know, but they lose interest. And we’ve had them from...Maine, Alaska, North Dakota, Arizona...Oklahoma...the Shawnee that are left in this nation now are in Oklahoma. They got pushed out of this area of this country, as you will see tonight. And, uh..we will—that’s one thing that surprised me, because coming from North Dakota—out west—Native Americans are just part of everyday street life. You know? They’re right there with you; you live with them. And—

318 R: I think you’ re right; in this part of the country—

There aren’t any.

R: ...it’s just sort of perceived as, you know—

Yeah. It’s, it’s part of history, it’s not part of today.

R: Yeah, they’re sort of “extinct.”

Exactly.

R: Something you think of as—

They’ve driven—been...lost. For—history has proven they were driven out of the Eastern half of the nation. And so, uh...here it’s something that you talk about. And...out there it’s something that you live. But in this area of the country it’s hard to find...if we didn’t go about, because—Marion does go around the entire nation, to different theater conferences, auditioning people, and that’s where...we pull in our Native American actors.

327 R: Do you think the show helps, at a—you know, thinking about that, the fact that, you know, most people in this area, in Ohio, are not gonna really have much experience with Native Americans in their everyday life—do you think the show sort of bridges that gap, maybe, somewhat? You know, makes it...a little more present for them?

332 Oh, definitely, definitely. Um, this area of the country. I’ve found, is, is...more interested in their history than out west....where I live. Out west it’s, like I said, one—it’s part of your daily life; it’s not history, you just live it everyday, you kind of get used to it and take—take it for granted? And two, it’s very new, and very 301 modern...thinking. Here, people are very rooted in the past. Very rooted in history...of this area of the country. Very proud of their history, of this area. And so they’re aSxcîidy...interested in the history. And then, you give them something like this that shows them a side they haven’tseen, you know, ’cause they’ve heard the history of their family, of how they came here, of how this area was settled. And say, “Well, let’s take a step beyond that. What was here before then”—and this is an excellent way of transmitting that. Because it’s—it’s the frwfA. We don’t glorify the white man; we don’t glorify the Indian; we tell the truth as it happened. in an entertaining format. And it definitely, definitely helps, because it takes those people that one step beyond thinking of, “Well, here’s how we settled this area” to “Whoa. Here’s the other side of the story of what happened when we settled this area.” That was the whole reason Tecumseh! was started, as a teaching tool. To...tell people about history of this area. And it’s worked! It really has worked, [pause]

355 It’s gotten a lot of people, too...you know, you’ll get people who come back. And it was the thing that triggered their interest in the history of this area, and their interest...in Native American culture. And they’ll come back and say, “It all started it, and this is where I am now and this is what I’ve done since.”

R: That’s neat.

Mmm hmm.

[Pause]

Warm.

R: Yeah.

[Laughter]

R: Huh. Well, that’s—those are really...about all the questions that...I have, unless there’s anything else that, you know-

No. Um...I was gonna say, if you have a chance today, we have, uh, scout tours, which are a, an entire afternoon program. Uh, for scout troops that come in, and it goes from, let’s see—two to three, three to four, four to five, five to six, six to seven....that one’s lunch [?]. And, uh, if you can hook up...with one of the scout tours, we have like—the first thing they do is they go up and they kinda get to know, uh, a little bit of woodland information, and then they get kind of the fun, interesting, uh...um, combat demonstration, and pyro demonstration. But from six to seven is the woodland and Indian /ore...and there’s a gal from our cast who comes up here and gathers them all up, and spends from six to seven o’clock with them. And it’s geared for little kids, you know, so it’s a little kids’ entertainment level? But it might be interesting for you—

R: That would be interesting.

Yeah. To...join with her and take—um, if you want to do that I’ll let her know, and just keep an eye—are you going to be up here this aftemoon?

R: Yeah, yeah. 302 Keep an eye out...and also, if you want to join any other part of the scout tours, you know, let me know, and you can Just tag on in the back.

[396-436 Discussion about living quarters behind the stage. Norman describes living conditions and how the intimacy contributes to the bonding of the cast and their interactions on stage.This didn’t seem especially relevant to my research, so I did not transcribe this part.]

436 R: How many people, total, are there in the cast?

Um...sixty-three, with cast and crew. We’ve got a total of about hundred, overall, working here. For the company as a whole.

[439-452 More discussion of cast interaction; Norman describes how she misses acting.]

452 Well, tonight you won’t see Jamie, ’cause tonight’s his understudy’s night; you’ll see Rob.

R; OK. Too bad; I was going to ask you if I could talk to him, but I guess he’s—

Well, he’ll be up here watching the show.

R: OK.

So, he’ll be up here this evening. You probably won’t recognize him...

R: Probably not!

[Laughter]

Doesn’t quite look like Tecumseh when he’s out of makeup.

R: Yeah. I, I—I’m sure that’s true. Wow. Maybe I could ask you to point him out to me or something.

Sure.

[End of interview as Norman takes me on a backstage tour.]

III. Transcription of interview with Jamieson Price, actor playing Tecumseh. Recorded at the Sugarloaf Mountain Amphitheater, August 30, 1994.

R: Well, I don’t know if Renee talked to you at all, about—

Just...very briefly—

R: —what I’m working on. 303 You are working on, uh, a bunch of outdoor dramas? A thesis on this, or...?

R; Well, what I’m looking at, really, is, um...I’m a folklorist, [J: OK.] and so—I’m doing some research on, um...cultural representation, of...historical reenactments [J: All right...Yes] in tourist sites. So, that’s part of the reason why I’m interested [J: Wow, OK] in what you all are doing here. And I was telling her, when I was down here before, that, you know, I grew up in Columbus, so [J: Ah!] my parents brought me down here when I was a kid [J: laughter] to see this, and...you know, I was telling her that it was really...you know, kind of a pow—a real powerful experience for me at the time, you know [J: Yes] just sort of overwhelming in many ways, and...sort of shaped a lot of the ideas I think that I had at that time about [J; Interesting!] Native Americans and, and the culture and all that. And so I Just sort of eh—wanted to talk about...you know, what it’s like for you, um...to be playing this role, and...you know—

Well, it’s interesting because that’s—

R: —how you prepared for it, and that kind of thing.

I mean, that’s a lot of, I think, what we’re trying to do out here, is to affect..individuals, and particularly children, since they’re the future; um...of a different way of looking at the Native American, um...story. That I know that / received in school, none of this. [R: Right, right.] I had no idea who Tecumseh was. I didn’t know until I started working over at Blue Jacket—I was working in Columbus in ’85 to ’87 with the Columbus Ensemble Theater [R: OK...], and I’d hooked up with the director...um, during my senior year of undergrad, which was 1983...and my—made my professional debut in living history, doing, uh, characters in the Nelson House in Yorktown, Virginia. [R: OK] Um, members of the Nelson family; um, the Marquis deLafayette, at one point, we did—there was two, two actors...portraying four different scenes. Sometimes we would actually make the transition from character to character in front of the audience, and it was as close as I am to you. and we were taking them through this house on a tour. It was a lot of fun.

R: Huh.

030 Um, I learned...r/ze /2 about the Revolutionary War from a first-hand basis, because I was talking—I was, I was being characters that had lived during that time, so our research was very, very, um...immediate, primary—it was like it’s happening today kind of idea, which brought history alive for me in a new way, ’cause I’d always kind of—“Uuh, history’s boring.” All of a sudden it wasn 't, and I was trying to bring it to life for other people, and I found a real...interest in myself, in history, and...what has gone before. Because of that, it makes up a lot of our thought today. Um...then I did, and the next summer I came back and I did it in um, another living history character, but I did it in the Moore House, which is where the surrender terms were negotiated between Cornwallis and Washington. But...[with a chuckle] Cornwallis didn’t want to meet with Washington? For whatever reason, so he said he was sick, and sent his lieutenants...to Washington, said, “Fuh. OK, here aremy lieutenants,” and sent his lieutenants in there, so they, the two never actually met. [R: Huh.] And the terms were negotiated in this house.

304 043 So, in the research—and I had some wonderful, a wonderful historian helping me...um, who worked in Yorktown—and he found a lieutenant Henry Jamieson- same spelling as my first name, that’s my mother’s maiden name—from that part of Scotland that my ancestors are from, so I played a probable ancestor of my own [R: Wow, wow] as one of the lieutenants who had been there with the negotiators, and...I treated it like it was the next day, so these people were walking—being led through the house by this park ranger, and all of a sudden I walk [snaps fingers] around a comer, and...talk to them as if it had happened yesterday, that the terms were negotiated, so I learned about the Revolutionary War then through the British side...that was my first, um, real understanding that history is written by the winners. And there’s a very, very different perspective that you get if you play the other side [laughing].

R: Right. Here you are...

And I was like, “Wow, OK.” Um. Then that same director started a theater in Columbus, I moved up there, and in nineteen-eight—1987, when that theater folded, a stage manager I was working with also stage managed at Blue Jacket in Xenia...and he said, “Anybody wanna come down and audition for this show, you spend a summer playing, uh...a frontiersman or an Indian, you ride horses bareback and shoot guns, and it’s a lot of fun,” and I—“Sounds great to me!”, so I came down and auditioned. I um...ended up understudying the role of Blue Jacket, then, for two years, and then I played him for two years. So I spent four years over there. That was my first, um...research into the Native Americans, especially in—the Woodland Indians in this area, that I had no idea about before. We are very very much exposed through Westerns to...uh, the Sioux, to all the Plains Indians; but the Woodland Indians, who traded with the whites for like two hundred years!- -we’d...don’t know mu—that much about ’em, we’re not talking much about ’em. So it was very very interesting for me to start learning about that culture.

064 And...Tecumseh was mentioned, and, \xva—Tecumseh! ‘was written by the man...one of the—Rusty Mundell, who was one of the...beginner—the, uh, originators of Tecumseh! And so there’s this, sort of uhhh...nice rivalry between the two outdoor dramas. Blue Jacket is much much younger; it’s about, only eleven years old, as opposed to twenty-two years that Tecumseh! is.

R: Yes, I thought thatTecumseh! was...earlier.

Uh...but we play softball, that’s the biggest rivalry, is—that we play softball every summer, we play at least two games...usually two games at a time ’cause we play four total. Uh, this year we played basketball, we talked about playing golf—I mean, it was a real sports kind of summer.

073 So I’d started seeing Tecumseh! in 1987. And, was fascinated by...the production. It—as you said, is a very, very powerful, moving story. Uh, the production’s a very high quality, which is nice, and the writing is very good. Allan Eckert, um, is quite the writer; and it’s very very nice to work...with that material. Um...I think it’s much more... focused and clear and clean-as clean a script for a production, much more so than Blue Jacket is, which can be kind of confusing, and now going back and seeing Blue Jacket, it’s like, “Thatis confusing!” [laughs]

‘ I believe here he meansBlue Jacket rather thanTecumseh!. Mundell penned the former, while Allan Eckert wrote the latter. 305 080 Um...but I was fascinated by, you know, the character, and went, “God, I’d h—I’d love to play that role!” and um...eventually it came about that I did. I was working in Florida, and uh...I’d decided not to come back to Blue Jacket; I’d played it for two years, and they offered me the, the secondary lead of Blackfish, which is a totally good role, but I was working in Florida doing some good work, and I thought, “Well...you know, I ca—I need to move on, that’s fine,” so I, I turned them down, and the next night, Marion Waggoner, the producer of Tecumseh! called me and said—

R: He’d heard the news, huh?

—“I’d like to talk to you about playing Tecumseh.” And...it was wonderful, because I mean I was...trying to act as professional as possible, at the same time leaping up and down on my bed. I mean, it was a dream come true, and so I managed to uh, convince him—’cause I was doing a show, I couldn’t come up and audition—so I talked with him over the phone, I tdked with the director over the phone, I sent them tapes of some work that I’d done...and sending videotapes is always a pain because...it does not represent what you can do. But they had enough faith in me, from what they’d to—and also they talked to a whole lot of other people who recommended me, which is wonderful. The cast of Tecumseh! in particular was very very supportive, ’cause they’d seen me do Blue Jacket, went, “Yeah, he can do it. Hire him.”

095 So Marion did. And, uh, it worked out: I’ve been here four years now, and uh...it’s wonderful to be able to try to touch people. In the way that theater can Because I mean that’s what theater’s all about, is...is touching people’s hearts, moving their—their minds and their bodies in a way which can’t be moved...almost any other way. Uh, I mean, film can have an effect on you, but it’s distanced. There’s—live theater has such an incredible connection to an audience, because the audience feeds the actors and the actors feed the audience; it becomes a circuit, uh, of energy, that can really have a phen—a phenomenal effect not only on the audience but on the actors, too. I mean, there are nights out here when everything just goes...like clockwork. Um, this show is easy to do-its’s a marathonl I mean, it’s a physical and a vocal marathon; sometimes, I have more energy at the end than I do at the beginning. [R: Hmm.] Because the audience has just/eci...the production, [longish pause] Conversely, there’s nights when it’s uh—

R: Right—not so much that way!

—I’m really tired by the end of it. Um...but that’s what I concentrate on, um, every night. I, you know, that’s my thought as I go into it, is, you know, let’s tell the story. Um. “Don’t try to do anything, just try to touch them.” And let the words and the actions of this man come through. And when they do, I mean—it’s, it’s amazing, ’cause this, this story can take people through...quite the range of emotions. From...you know, surprise and fear at some of the battles, to elation, joy, laughter, tears...I mean, it’s, it’s in—an incredible production, and that’s, I think, part of what’s kept me coming back....and the chance to te—try to, uh...tell history from a different point of view.

118 We look at Native Americans and we think, you know, OK...uh, the traditional Western, Hollywood portrayal of the Indian, which is horrible...um, or reservation life today, which is unbelievable, um...we look at men such as Washington and 306 other leaders as...heroes, and as good men: once you start researching it from the other side, you see another side to these people. Um...my wife and I were, were talking, uh, she’s seen the show now for two years, and has picked up A Sorrow in Our Heart, and is reading it, and was just amazed and appalled...ai what— because it’s documented, it’s not heresay, it’s “Yes, Washington signed these orders saying, ‘OK, we need this land, so feel free to wipe out the Native Americans who live on it.”’ [Chuckle of disbelief] And this is the father of our country'. To whom there are monuments erected, who is...held up as this ideal of Christian...ethics and honesty, and all this—

R: He’s on the dollar bill—

—And, and y et... we have to understand that within the context of the time, but is that ever right? Um. It was very funny, because my, my wife said, you know, “He’s no better than Hitler!” Well, uh, maybe a little bit better, but...that’s an interesting parallel, that...he—I mean, basically, Washington ordered the genocide just like...Hitler did...I—it was a different time, and much more public, um, with the way, uh, that Hitler did it, and..and he lost, and everyone else went, “Oh, that’s really bad”...um, it wasn’t quite as public here, and yet when you look at before Columbus landed, I think it was something like seven million Native Americans living here, and, I mean, the diseases that the Europeans brought decimated the numbers...but [as to?] the wholesale slaughter of a people that, were here before us! [chuckle] Which is kind of embarrassing.

143 Um. I personally don’t want to lay a guilt trip on, on anybody, or on myself— there’s a certain responsibility that I feel that we need to be aware of, of history. Of both sides of history, and—because no one ev—no one really knows, exce—unless they were there. And even then they have their own special viewpoint.

147 But trying to understand from...the white side and then from the Native American side, hopefully, we can get some sort of middle ground that may be closer to the truth...than is generally taught, um...by the “moral” or otherwise majority...that’s in control. Um...in the United States, and, and elsewhere; uh, I mean, it works not only for the Native American story, but for a number of others, this just happens to be the one we’re concerned with here.

153 Uh...so I find that fascinating, and, very very exciting and fulfilling as an actor, because...it’s all in communication. And we try to communicate with each other as actors on stage, but we also try to communicate with the audience. And, when we come up after the show, and, for the—our “meet and greet” session, when we...take pictures and sign 5000 autographs a night, um....the response that we get is wonderful. And—

R: What kind of things do people say to you?

Well—we do touch some people; I mean, they—you know. I—they cry, um, they’re very very appreciative. We don’t have a curtain call. Most outdoor dramas don’t seem to. I’ve been to a few that have. But the traditional theater, where you do the show and then you have a curtain call, and it lets the audience appreciate the actors, and show that appreciation. Um, we don’t have.

163 So we have the meet and greet instead, which is very very interesting, because they get to come up and meet us personally, they’ve just watched Tecumseh beshot, so 307 it’s also good for the kids when you come up and go, “I’m OK—see?” It was all— we’re all actors, all of this is fake. Um. Because some of the kids are, are very scared... about it. I mean, there’s some that...you know, won’t shake your hand, won’t look at you, are scared by you, uh...people who come up with the program in their hands and go, “This isn’t yow.” And look at my head shot in there, and it’s like, “No, this is theater, and this is a wig, and this is makeup, to make me look this way.” Um.

169 It’s funny, because we get a different kind of, um, audience here than traditional theatergoers. We have a much wider....um...uh, what is it,\h—\h&...demo graphic, that’s the word I’m looking for. Uh, than most theaters. We get people who have never seen theater before who, while they would probably never go see a theater, they’ll come see outdoor drama. Uh, and we get get educated theatergoers who also will, you know, come in and go, “Hmph. That’s better than what I saw on Broadway," which we’ve heard. V^ich is really really nice to hear. [R: Yeah] Uh...so we have a very very wide audience, um, that we try to reach, and they all seem very very appreciative—I mean, we get, uh, we get fan letters, and cards, and things like that, which is nice, but people do want to give back something that, that- -they seem to have received by watching the show.

181 Um, which I think is—whi—I’m, I’m up there every night for the meet and greet, because...especially they want to see Tecumseh, they want to get Tecumseh’s autograph, um...and they want, you know, to see he’s OK, and to say “thank you.” A^ich, I’m up there every night doing that. And uh, it’s—it’s a PR call, just like any other...um, I feel, but it also helps people walk away from the show with a smile on their face. ’Cause it w a tragedy [R: Mmm hmm], and you can walk away from this feeling really really bad. Um...we don’t want that. We want you thinking. Sssh...I mean, want you to feel good about it, that you’ve seen this, and maybe changed you a little bit, maybe you’ve thought, you know, if, if, you know, as a child, it’s influenced the way they look at...Nativ—the Native American culture, and maybe in school they can go, “But wait a minute, wasn’t this, this—” you know, and they’ll come up with something different. Um, or a more...healthy spiritual awareness of what happened in this country, even a hundred and fifty, two hundred years ago.

192 R: Hmm. So did you—did you do a lot of research, on Tecumseh, before you played the role, did you— [Price: yeah] —read Eckert’s books, and—

Um...back over at Blue Jacket, of course, um...Eckert’s...you know, he’s like the research resource material. So I had read The Frontiersman from the...first year, um, and it’s still something that I’ll pick up and thumb through, because it’s, um, an amazingly graphic novel, um, narrative that really Just uh...can give you some really good stuff to work on. Uh, just imagery in your mind. Um, reading oth— Al, Allan’s other books...regarding the era, um...once you start doing something like this, and you, uh, are coming back year after year...you keep your eye open for things. And so over the years I’ve picked up...influences and, and suggestions, “Why don’t you try reading this,” and I’ll look at something. Um, some of it’s good; some of it, you can, you know, not use; but a lot of it I can, and uh, so I’ve picked up a lot of stuff over the years and read different books, and been referred to other things...um...I’ll watch a PBS special on the Native Americans now with a different eye than I have had before. And uh, be able to take what I can from it, and use it if possible.

308 206 So there’s a, quite a bit of research that goes into it, just to form the background. However, as an actor, in any play...there has to be, within the script, everything you need. Um. And, this is a well-enough written play that you could go in there not knowing anything about Tecumseh, read the script, and go from the script, and still do a good production. I think that it’s—it gives you a better spectrum of things to work from, having had that research, but it’s also not something that you can use while you’re on stage. Which is something that I’m—I’m now in graduate school and have one more year to go....that’s something that I learned, uh, because for years I’ve been way too int—intellectual an actor. Um. And uh. I—I think too much! [laughs] And...what’s interesting about that is, that from an audience point of view, you—don’t—you don’t pick up what the actor’s thinking, you pick up what the actor’s doing and saying. Ajid that...in that regard, my grad school has been wonderful, because it’s allowed me to stop thinking and to start doing. And you get out there and you do—

R: Unusual for graduate school!

Is it? But it, it’s nice because it’s, you can get out there and...I guess it would be for, for-but not for theater, because that’s what you’re supposed to do. Um, I mean, acting is being, acting is doing, acting is performing an act/on, and getting that down, so that it’s like—I go out there and just do the work. Say the words, and go through the motions, and that says something. Actions speak louder than words, they say—also, much louder than thoughtsl Uh, you can have all those thoughts, and then do a lot of research and a lot of thinking oj^the stage, but once I get out there. I’m having to, uh...react to things, and to notice things...freshly, every night—I mean. I’ve done...[sighs while appearing to count] we have five more to go; I have done around two hundred and seventy-some performances of this show. And...to make it fresh every night, to make it different—

228 R: Yeah, that would have to be tough—

Well, it is and it isn’t. As long as you don’t think, long as you just go out there and go, “OK, here I am-look at that! Look at those individuals. What are they saying? What do I need to say to them? How do I get to move these people, and get them to, you know...um, do what I want them to do?” That makes it fresh, because then I’m constantly working towards trying to, um...[snaps fingers] be effective, to make an effect on someone else, to influence their behavior, um, in one way or another. You know, whether it’s to get Harrison \o...leave the land, give back the land he took...and he won’t do it, so I lay down an ultimatum....um...or whether it’s trying to convince Tenskwatawa...you know, that he’s...he’s gotta stop killing people [laughing] ’cause it’s not...we don’t execute our own people, that’s not the way we do things! Uh...it’s very very easy to do that. And...that makes it flow. I mean, the night will go by...very very quickly. Just because I’m going, “OK, now what do I need—I need to go do? I need to do this, I need to do that, I need to do this, I need to do that.” And you go out there and you do it.

243 So there’s a lot of preparation...but then you’ve gotta leave that preparation behind, and then go out there and just do it on stage.

R: Yeah, yeah, [pause] What would you say...in terms of your portrayal, I mean, you talk about um...you want people to come away with a different, you know—or at least being more thoughfiil, maybe, about history, and how it’s been written [Price: Yeah] and how—yeah. Would you say that’s sort of your 309 primary...you know, you talked about your primary goal is to touch people and to move them-um, is that sort of your primary motivation, in the way you play the role?

Not really. Um, because...the way you play the role...is different from, as an actor, what I’m trying to do with my life. Um, my mother always said, “You leave the world a better place than you found it.” Theater is one way in which I’ve found...to...educate, illuminate, to touch people, and therefore to change them; to give them something of myself, and if it helps them, great, and if it doesn’t, oh well, I tried. Um. So on one level, my motivation is, is indeed that...in playing the role, the motivation has to be what Tecumseh's motivation is. Actors become the strangest schizophrenics [laughs]; I’m, for years though acting was a controlled schizophrenia, because you have to be three or four different people at the same time. I mean, I always have to know that I am Jamieson Price, and I’m out here, and—an actor, and I’m w/zfte, and I’m trying to this. Um. At the same exact time, Tecumseh has got to be there. Has got to be solidly there, and attempting to complete his life’s mission. And to unite the tribes and to drive the whites back across the mountains. And to be seriously working towards achieving that goal, while I’m on stage. So then the motivation in playing the role is what Tecumseh’s motivation was, which is the preservation of his race. Of his people. And...therefore, it assumes paramount importance, and it is incredibly important.

272 At the same time, w e’re also got a lot of battles out there, and we’re combatants, that are performing stage combat, which is the illusion of violence, and so you’ve gotta be out there...trying to look like you’re killing somebody, and at the same time being very very clean and clear about how...those ma—those, um, moves are performed. Uh, almost...well more than a third, but less than a half of our rehearsal time is spent in working on those battles. And in working on stage combat, so that we don’t have accidents out here, ’cause we do seventy-four performances a summer. And...there’s a lot of fights that go on, and try to make them as, as believable as possible...and yet as safe as possible—that’s another person that you are when you’re on stage. Um. And you’ve got to be aware of when you need to be one person and when you need to be another, and how...how much energy that you, as an actor, I as an actor, can push into the persona of Tecumseh, at the same time—while maintaining the stage combatant safety margin. Uh, as well as the actor, making sure that I have...what it takes to get through the entire run of the show. Um. That’s one of the considerations of an actor playing Tecumseh, is, “OK, I’ve got...two and a half hours, and I’m on stage almost all the time, and I’m speaking most of the time, and some of it’s very high energy, and I’ve gotta maintain that six nights a week for three months. [Laughs] Which can be kind of rough. And especially when, as a graduate student now...um, after two years of...finishing Tecumseh!, and going into school, and I’m two weeks late for rehearsals and one week late for classes, so I leap right into classes. I finish up school—I usually give my final on...Friday, and then on Sunday night I’m here. And Monday morning we start rehearsals. So...for the past, since nineteen—I started grad school in...ninety-two, the fall of ninety-two—I have been running steadily ever since. I mean, granted, we have a, a month off for Christmas...during which I try to sleep, um...or go visit my parents, who now live in Maine, of all places, so, it’s, yeah—it’s kind of rough. Um. Maintaining that furious pace, and staying healthy, staying safe, so I don’t injure myself and put myself out of the show, um, and yet still maintain a high production quality, is, is a—paramount consideration there; that’s something I have to think about and pace

310 myself for. Um...so there’s a whole lot of motivations that go into...um...into performing a role like this.

308 Um.. It’s kind of funny; I mean, money really isn’t...money is a necessary evil. Um. If I could. I’d do this show for a lot less money than I do it for. Because i believe in it. However, I’ve got...bills to pay, and all that kind of stuff, so, um, there’s a certain level...I’m thirty-three now, so there’s a certain level of...debt that I’ve built up. Um, school loans, now, to pay off; um, I got married last New Year’s Eve, so now I have a family...uh, with a seven-year-old stepdaughter and a, uh...”one in the oven,” so to speak. Uh, so there’s a whole lot of stuff that, that— that, you know, I have to be aware of as, as Jamieson. In order to—“OK, I need this much to come back here and do this role.” Uh. So, whether or not I come back next year is a big consideration. I’ll be graduating...I may need to stay in LA, if I have an agent and they say, you know, “We need you here for these auditions.” And it looks like it’s something that I could do, and, and it is worth it, then I might have to give up coming back here and making...a reasonably good salary, that I know every week I’m going to get paid. Uh...that’s going to be a major consideration. And Marion Waggoner and I have, have talked...um, extensively over that, and that’s—we’re going to be in contact over the winter going, “OK, you know, how’re we doin’, how’re we doin’.” Uh, ’cause I would love to come back...there’s only so many years that I’m gonna be able to do this role. [R: Right] Even as young as thirty-three is, I mean—sooner or later. I’m gonna not wanna come back and go through this; it is an incredibly strenuous thing to do. [R: Yeah, it’s gotta be exhausting] But...it’s wonderfully fulfilling at the same time. Uh, and I receive a lot of—I—my...um, fulfillment from performing it, and from, uh, the audiences that we see, uh, and talk to, and the people who...are touched by it, and who walk away with a different understanding. Than they came in with.

333 R: Yeah, that would be the worthwhile thing. Do you get much flack about the fact that you’re white and you’re playing a Native American? Has there been much-

Only in Chicago and LA.

R: Really. Hmm. From...other actors, agents, or—

Oh yes. From other actors. Um. Here in the Midwest, um, especially in this area, they’re used to Tecumseh! They’re used to Blue Jacket, to Trumpet in the Land, to white people dressing up as Indians. Um...and they understand the...the theatricality of that, I suppose? Uh, in recent years, uh, I believe it was on Broadway, um, from Miss Saigon—

R; I remember hearing about that.

—uh, a gentleman by the name of Jonathan Price...no relation! Uh, wasplaying, um—I think he was playing an Asian...or was supposed to play an Asian. And...received a whole lot of flack about that, so I was up in Chicago, and I was coming...you know, and talking with the Chicago actors, and they’re like, “Wait a second, you play a Native American? Isn’t that, you know, politically incorrect?” Um, out in LA, a little bit. They’re kind of, ’11 giggle and laugh about the idea, and go, you know, “That’s not right; that should be a Native American playing it.” Well, you...find me a Native American actor, who has got the capability of doing

311 this role, and will do it for the money...rd step aside in a heartbeat. I would—I believe wholeheartedly in Native Americans coming and doing this show.

353 The problem is...the state of the reservations these days; um, a level of training and education that’s on those reservations; what the government is doing to the Native Americans...in keeping them...at the poverty level that they’re at; there just aren’t that many Native Americans running around who are capable of, of— performing...roles such as Tecumseh. Now there are plenty—we’ve had a bunch in the show...um, the Absentee Shawnee of Oklahoma, who are the only Shawnee left in the country, come out here every year, check up on us. Uh, they were technical advisors in the, the um...the writt—the generation of the show, in the writing of it, and in the first productions of it. So..we’re very much in contact with that...um, with those people, and with the Shawnees in saying, “OK, are we doing whatyou want us to do, do you have any suggestions for...um...for what we’re doing.”

365 They understand that it’s...you know, it’s a theatrical piece. The whole definition of theater is the imitation of an action, that’s what drama, the Greek word means, and it’s...I mean, actors portray people who aren’t themselves all the time, and if you start restricting, um...OK, only a black man can play Othello. Only...um, Asians can play...in, in Miss Saigon or in Madame Butterfly, uh, only Italians can play in, uh...any of the Shakespeare plays that deal with It—with Italy, inRomeo and Juliet. Only, um, Scotsmen can play Macbeth. Uh...which I’m going to go play, and I have Scottish heritage, but I’m not a Scotsman. You start running into this whole kettle of fish that, that totally denies the, uh...the theatricality, the—that— what theater is, as aconcept] [laughs] And it’s like, you know, relax. Any good actor...should be able to...you know, portray...anything which is in their range. Um. I mean, it...black people can play white people; uh, Asians can play—Cauc—I mean, you can go anywhere, you know, as long as you’ve got a good makeup artist, you can do almost anything. Uh, once you start getting into TV and film, it gets a little more difficult, because the camera is so close...um...but what we see in Hollywood and that type of thing, we get into typecasting. You don’t look for an actor who can portray a role; you look for someone who is exactly what you are looking for.# Um, and therefore, you have the low production quality of, of—the fare that’s on TV these days. Uh, it’s wh—yech! It’s, it’s—

R: ‘They’ll look good, but they can’t really do anything”?

—Yeah, or, they’re not acting, they’re going out there and they’re playing themselves, and acting...uh, casting agents look for...a certain type, which totally goes against what theater is, and watching someone ...bring alive a role cross- culturdly, there’s a very very different understanding that someone...from a different culture can bring to an examination of your own culture.# Uh, interpretation is everything! And you look at-and it’s, an actor is an interpretive artist.

396 The audience themselves are interpretive artists, because they sit there, and they’ll interpret what you interpret for them. [R: Right] Um, so there’s all that in there that, that—is what theater’s all about....So, I mean, whereas I—you know, I would love to have—a Native American play Tecumseh, um, we had one back in 1990, and he did not work out very well, and he’s a friend of mine, I worked with him over at Blue Jacket, but, uh, his personality is not one that is conducive to a leadership role within a company such as this, where you—we have...sixty-five, 312 seventy people out there on stage, um...he did not work well and play well with others.

406 Um, and that’s something that’s a very definite concern out here, where you’ve got three months...living widi these people, and...working with them, and doing a lead role that they’re going to look up to you in a certain way, and you have to behave in a certain way, and, um...not, not that you should be put up on a pedestal—and I fight against that all the time; uh, when I first get here people’re like, “Oh, god-you play Tecumseh! Oh, wow!” And it’s like, “Yeah. That’s just a role, like any other in this play. I may have more lines than you do, but that just means I have to speak more often. You know. You’ve got your own job to do,” and one thing that Brent Gibbs, our director this year, is very very good about, is providing..encouragement t—for people to develop their own story lines, which then feed into the main story line of what’s going on on stage, so we have an incredible variety...of actors out there who are working...um...for their own story. And how they relate to every other actor on stage and to Tecumseh, and how they feel about what Tecumseh’s saying, or what Chief Black Hoof is saying...or Blue Jacket, or any—I mean, it’s just, it’s a lot of fun to work with, because everybody is reacting how their character feels.

R; And it’s not stuff that’s necessarily scripted, either.

No, not at all. It’s not scripted at all. It’s what’s fleshed out—a script is merely a skeleton for a production; the fleshing out of it is up to the actors and to the director. Uh, to bring it to life and to bring it to life in a way which is...rich, detailed, believable, and yet still has, uh, a certain through-line, has a focus that the audience can follow clearly and go, “Oh, I know what’s happening at this scene.” Even though you’ve got a bunch of people out there who’re following their own story lines. So we have to be careful with people; sometimes their story lines get out of hand, or get too big, and that’s where the director can come in and go, “Uuuuh, you need to—just kind of back your story line down a little bit, or feed it more into the main line...of, of the action. So, uh—I mean, ev—as an actor in a show, every actor’s gotta believe that the show revolves around them. Because...every individual’s world revolves around them. You are your own lead character in your...life, and in your, your personal drama, your personal story. Same thing happens with the actors out there. They’ve gotta look at the show...not as, um, “OK, this is Tecumseh’s show,” no, “This ismy show, and Tecumseh’s a major character in it!”

436 And, and it works that way, that then you get a lot of people thinking that, and looking at it from that point of view, and you—come up with this incredible tapestry of life, that’s on that stage, that people just...feel like they’ve been taken back two hundred years, and are watching things happen. Even though they realize it’s a play; even though the lights go down, and a scene changes, they’re able to follow it, and believe in the reality of each scene.

R; And that’s gotta be helped by the fact that everybody is...you know, living in such close...community all summer.

Yes. The, um, living conditions out here, where everyone is living in little cabins, kind of like a summer camp deal, does help a lot with providing almost a uh, communal atmosphere, almost a tribal thing happening with us. As actors, that where, we have—you know, dressing rooms which’re—showers in the bathrooms, 313 and we all have to take turns, get in line, get along with each other; we have a kitchen that’s gotta—work all of us out, you know, have their own refrigerators, and we have to share. And we have to work with each other. Um. That translates onto the stage in a very very nice way. It...provides a certain cast unity, which you must have in any production; if you have a cast which is not unified, then you have a bunch of different...factions going on on stage that...you know—there’s—the, the energy does not ever coalesce into this one, um, thing, that then is going to go out to the audience. Um, if you get actors all putting their energy together...and then all of that energy going out to the audience, and the energy of the audience all comes back to the actors, and then that’s where you get that circuit going. It works for each individual actor, but also as, if the actors as a whole can do that...you blow the ceiling off the production. It’s the most fascinating thing...um, when you get a bunch of people—it works, um—like, with the Gregorian monks. Chanting. Um. It works, uh, t’ai chi, where people are, are doing the movement and the breath at the same time. Um. You see it, ah, in an aerobic workout, where the person leading and everybody doing the same thing: Once you get a bunch of people putting their energy into the same thing and focusing on the same thing, an incredible energy happens. Ah, and that’s what we strive for, I think, in theater, is trying to get that energy, everybody doing the sa—get everybody focusing on the same idea, and then that idea then goes out...to the audience. And they can very very clearly get it, because all the actors are working/or that. It is, again, very difficult, and in a three-month run, because actors will also get bored on stage, and they’ll want to start playing, and they’ll want to start...tryin’ to make it fresh and lively for themselves.

469 This has been the most professional cast that I’ve worked with out here, and over at Blue Jacket as well. This cast has been really reallywonderful in their focus. But even they...have been known to fool around a little.

R: When you’re doing seventy-two performances, yeah.

And, uh...as I said, there’s a fine line, where you can...keep it within the realm of reality...because the Native American—I mean, it’s, it’s too easy to portray them as these Noble Savages, and they don’t smile, they’re just really dignified most of the time—yeah, they weredignified, but they laughed. They loved, they cried; they did everything that we do. Um, and that’s something that we, we try very much to portray...real people. Uh, Dances with Wolves was the first...movie which really allowed...I think, a wide, um, audience to...to look at Native Americans and go, “Wow! They’re people Just like we’re people.” Which is a lot of the message, I think, of this show. Um. And an important message these days, is...you know, we’re all human beings here...whatever the color of our skins. Uh...Tecumseh’s...slogan, if you will, of “Nekuta fanwei idata” [CHECK SPELLING OF THIS!!! !!] means “One town of towns,” and referred to his Tippecanoe village being a village of Indians and not just a village of tribes coming together that...were all...“W e’re all Indians, and if we all get together, then they have to listen to us.” It works globally as well as locally.

487 Um, and by extension. I...work with that idea—of “one town of towns”...is, you know, the—the new age bumper-sticker of, of “Think Globally and Act Locally.” That... I mean, Tecumseh was referring only to the Native Americans, because that was his specific, uh, mission, although his was not out there—he was not out there to, um, wipe out the whites. And, he was very much against the torture and slaughter of prisoners, he...was a visionary in that sense, of, “If we can get all 314 these warriors together,” he wanted to get fifty-thousand warriors together, if he can get that mass together, that army...they wouldn’t even, even had to fought. The, uh, the United States Army at ^at time numbered twelve thousand. And if Tecumseh had had a fighting force of fifty thousand, the whites would not have attacked. Could not have attacked, ’cause they knew they couldn’t have won; the Indians were much better fighters. ’Cause the—the Americans at that time were coming out of the British tradition of “OK, everybody line up and shoot at each other,” and the Indians were like, “You’re out of your minds! We’re up in the trees\ You’re/ujro/ 7 !” Uh....s’where we learned it from. And took it to Vietnam, [chuckles] But. Um...amazing how everything is kind of linked up together.

R: Yeah.

But the idea that, that uh...you know, that—he wouldn’t have had to fought, and then, they would have divided the land, and he was like, “OK, you guys take from the Alleghenies east, which is where you are, and that’s fine; we’ll take the rest,” that...could have been amended; I mean, had Tecumseh gotten his thing together...this would have been a very very different country. Maybe better! Who knows; that’s all conjecture. Um.

509 But had we been able io...assimilate, and to integrate the two cultures, as opposed to annihilating one or the other, um, I think this country would have been incredibly strong. Because the Native Americans had a very very spiritual...sense of harmony with the land, and with the earth, that now we are learning...you know, we’re, we’re busy destroying our ecosystem!

[Pause while an announcement comes over the PA system]

People uh...uh, the, the Holocaust sayers [?] or whatever, are like, “We’re destroying the earth, we’re destroying the earth,” and I think it’s uh...George Carlin, who said, uh, “Oh, the earth’s gonna be here; we’re just destroying ourselves." And it’s very true. There’s virtually nothing we can do that will destroy the earth; but we can change the ecosystem, we can set up, uh, an environment...in which we cannot survive—but something will. And, just like the dinosaurs, we’ll die out, something else’11 take over. We...have to understand the fr—the fragile— [interruption by PA] ...the, the fragile nature of human life. And of life in general. But I think that’s...part of the Native American, um, message, is living in harmony with the environment. Uh, they did. And if—had we been able to learn from that, as opposed to...going in and destroying everything...uh, and saying, “This is our land, we own this; this is it for us now,” the Native Americans are like, “No, you’re borrowing it from your grandchildren.” Because they’re going to be here after you, and you’ve gotta...save something for them. It’s a nice idea, and one which I think will—hopefully become more popular. I mean, now that we’re all going, “Wow, you know, if you just make toxic dumps everywhere, then, ah, it’s not gonna—” ...You know, if we remove the forests, and deplete the oxygen level...it’s gonna be harder and harder for us to survive.

[At this point. I’m sorry to say, the batteries in my recorder were beginning to die, so the tape becomes very difficult to decipher from here until the end of the interview]

532 Actors have to be generalists; we have to learn about a lot of different things, and as such, I mean. I’m very interested in science, and in astronomy, and in...um, now history, uh...I was a psychology major before I turned to theater. Understanding a 315 wide variety of subjects is...is, is very interesting, and from, I guess...carbon content, or, er, in archeological research? The Earth’s oxygen content used to be up...in the thirties. Thirty percent. It’s now down to like, under twenty. And it’s like sixteen or seventeen. That’s scary! That we are depleting that much of the world’s oxygen supply, which is what we need to live! But. Kind of off the subject, but it’s related, in a certain way.

R: No, it is, it is. That’s interesting, [pause] I, I wonder what you think—you know, playing, since you’ve played Tecumseh now for four years, it seems to me that...you know, of all the Native American leaders who...’ve sort of been...celebrated throughout history, he seems to be one of the most popular, in a lot of ways, and that...this show, and then Allan Eckert’s books, and then there’re several other books that have been written about him, you know, either actual histories, or, you know, fictional stories based on his life—

Price: Yes.

—I just heard that they’re going to make a movie, I guess? Out of the Panther in the Sky book? [undecipherable dialogue for a couple of seconds]

Price: Yeah. That’s...that’s a different kettle of fish, [clears throat self consciously]

R: I guess, I was just wondering, you know, what—why do you think...we’re so attached to him, as a character?

551 Um, because of his heroic qualities....Humans throughout history have, have worshiped heroes. Um. Heroes are very interesting people, people who stick up for their ideals. Um...and who will die for them. Makes us think that they have something important to say; hopefully they did-I think Tecumseh did. I don’t— think everybody should die for their ideals—Jim Jones, [laughs] uh. I’m sure there’s quite a few out there! Um, but we’re able to kind of sift through that and, and...be intrigued by it, I mean—a bunch of books, movies been made about Jim Jones, too. But we get into, uh...you know, why...’why was their life [?]; what were they...so focused on. Um...because the vast majority of...us don’t have that kind of clear...focus, “This is what my life is for, this is what I’m here on earth to do,” uh, you see that in...the, the sixties’ lack of, of orthodox spirituality and discovering who, you know...um, “Who am I, what is—” and the whole “Me Generation” and that kind of stuff, it’s all searching for some semblance of a message, of a purpose in life. That for a long time, um, the, orthodox religions were incapable of giving.# Uh, people, I think, started asking really pointed questions and...[indecipherable]. We’re all looking for a purpose; we’re all looking for some kind of...um...meaning in our lives. And when you...see a character, read about a character, or are introduced to a character such as Tecumseh, who had a very very clear idea of his meaning, um, whether it was just...you know, then you get into the whole psychology of the thing, that when he was bom, there was a meteor, um, and so from his birth, they said, you are going to be a special child. Luckily, his physical...um, abilities, were in line with that; he was apparently a very...adept...child, I mean, a, a good warrior...he was right in there at the, at the head of the pack. Uh, he was a natural leader, but he’s also reinforced by the fact that he was bom under a certain sign. That people went, “OK, you’re— you know, that’s something about you, that’s different” um...enabled him, as a

316 person, to achieve, uh, a certain...clarity of meaning in his life. You know, “OK, this is what I’m here to do; I’ve got—I biow it, and I’m gonna do it.”

583 Um. I think we also have respect for people that...don’t give up. Um...Blue Jacket is a character...you know, that gave up. He-after the Battle of Fallen Timbers, he got—[indecipherable] getting the chiefs together to sign the Treaty of Greenville, which gave away all the, all the land. Um. And it’s, and it’s giving up—saying, “OK, you guys won; here you are, there you go”—well, Tecumseh went, “No way.” “You’re gonna have to...pry my cold dead fingers off this land to get me offa here.” Which in, in—you know, that—

R: Which is what happened.

—which they did! Uh. But I think that we have a great respect for that. Um, Harrison—even though...Tecumseh’s—m^or—nemesis, uh...had a great respect for Tecumseh, and I think Tecumseh had a great respect for Harrison. Um, because he recognized Harrison’s danger potential, saying, “This is our greatest threat; this man is going to nail us if we’re not careful. And, we’ve gotta work around him, or, or manipulate him,” um...had Tenskwatawa been...more cut from Tecumseh’s cloth, um, that manipulation...might have gone the other way. Instead of Harrison’s manipulating Tenskwatawa, Tenskwatawa might’ve been able to manipulate Harrison. Harrison had orders not to attack.

[At this point, the battery problem becomes insurmountable—it becomes impossible to accurately transcribe the tape. However, I suspect that the tape ran out not long before the end of the interview itself.]

317 A p p e n d ix B:

T e c u m s e h ! Audience Survey R esults

Descriptive Explanation of Survey Results

While the informant demographics' and survey answers don’t vary a whole lot between the two evenings I conducted the survey, both the quantity and the quality of the responses received were far better on the first night, June 15.

On the second night I conducted the survey, I received less than half the number of surveys returned the first night (25, as opposed to 54). This was despite the fact that on the second night I had a colleague helping me hand out and explain the surveys, thus distributing more surveys than I had the first night.

Furthermore, the quality of the surveys received the second night was very poor compared with those received the first night. On the first night, the majority of informants completed all parts of the survey, including the two questions that required a written answer. On the second night, however, many informants left questions blank, and very few ( an average of 22% versus an average of 52% on the first night) wrote in answers to the questions asking for a written response. I can only explain this by saying that it was a Tuesday evening; perhaps people felt more rushed to get home than they did on the first evening, a Thursday. The audience on June 27 also seemed more restless and talkative in general; the June 15 audience was more attentive, overall. Also, having someone other than myself distribute the survey may also have negatively impacted the return rate, since people might not have felt a personal investment in completing it.

The third set of survey results was collected by my adviser, Valerie Lee, from an African- American youth group called Pathfinders that her own children participate in.

' Notably, though, the informants completing the survey on the second night were a far more homogeneous group in ethnic terms (92% white) than the group the first night (75%). 318 Audience Response Survey Results 6.15.95 (54 total surveys completed)

Demographic Information (partially completed on all 54 surveys)

Age Under 10 2 3.70% 10-17 9 16.67% 18-29 7 12.96% 30-45 2 2 40.74% 4 5 -6 0 7 12.96% Over 60 5 9.26% Info not provided 2 3.70%

ithnicity Anglo 41 75.93% African American 0 0 % Native American Ojibwa 1, Oglala 1 3.7% Latino American Puerto Rican 2 3.7% Asian American 0 0 % Other “Human,” “Human Being” 2 3.7% Info not provided 7 12.96%

ncV status Ohio residents 44 81.48% Other U.S. residents 7 12.96% (Connecticut 1, Kansas 1, Michigan 2, New Mexico 1, New York 1 Non-U.S. residents 1 (South Africa) 1.85% Info not provided 2 3.70%

Sex Female 31 57.40% Male 23 42.59%

Highest level of education completed Students presumably still enrolled in elementary/secondary school 9 16.67% High School 16 29.63% Some college 4 7.40% College II 20.37% Professional/Graduate degree 9 16.67% Other 5 9.26%

Responses to Survey Questions

How much did you know about the life of Tecumseh and the history of this region before tonight’s performance? Not much 16 29.62% A little 19 35.19% Quite a bit 11 20.37% A lot 8 14.81%

319 How closely did the drama reflect what you already knew about this history? Not much 2 3.70% A little 8 14.81% Quite a bit 31 57.41% A lot 10 18.52% Other 3 5.55% (One each: no response, two responses circled, “Don’t know”)

How much do you feel you learned about the history of Tecumseh and this region from tonight’s show? Not much 2 3.70% AUttle 8 14.81% Quite a bit 30 55.56% A lot 14 25.92%

Do you think that this kind of presentation is a good way to learn about history? Disagree strongly 0 0% Disagree slightly 1 1.85% Don’t know 1 1.85% Agree slightly 6 11.11% Agree strongly 46 85.18%

Why or why not? (Thirty informants (55.55%) responded to this question; their comments are transcribed below. Any missing demographic information was not provided by the informant.)

“It helps people see how something that they’ve read or heard about would look like in actuality.” --Puerto Rican male, “Mid-30s,” New York, New York “It’s an enjoyable way” —White female, 69, Wooster, OH “It’s good for people to realize what went on with Indians and whites and visually seeing it shows a lot visually. But then some of the visual may be of what we today interpreted it, not how it really was” —White female, 16, Reynoldsburg, OH “Very accurate-excellent historical accuracy” —White male, 38, Ray, OH “Because it has real people I can see” —White male, 11, Elida, OH “So many people in diis region do not know the history of the area” —Oglala female, 30, Ray, OH “It uses real people so it’s realistic” —Male, 7, Elida, OH “Because it is educational and interesting at the same time” —White male, 43, Van Buren, OH “It makes a real impression.” —White female, 65, Shreve, OH “Easy to be attentative [sic]” —White male, 51, Pomeroy, OH “It is easier to understand when you see first hand.” —\^ ite female, 52, Pomeroy, OH “It makes the history come alive, seem as real to us now as it was then. There is much to be said for historical fiction.” —White female, 44, Beavercreek, OH “Reflect manner of lifestyle instead of memorization of facts” —White male, 34, Columbus, OH “It’s an interesting way to learn the history of the region. It sticks with you.” — White male, 36, Portsmouth, OH “Yes, because it’s entertaining and when you leave that’s when you realize you’ve been educated.” —White female, 25, Chillicothe, OH “Visual effects with narration help strengthen comprehension and understanding” - -“Human being” male, 36, Chillicothe, OH 320 “Sets more into memory for me” - “Human” female, 35, Chillicothe, OH “Gets people interested in history” —White female, 41, Cincinnati, OH “Brings it to life” —White male, 42, Ashtabula, OH “It makes it more real to life and much more interesting than reading a book.” — White female, 42, Ashtabula, OH “It was fun and entertaining so it kept my attention better than the average history lecture.” —White female, 15 1/2, Beavercreek, OH “It shows you about history and brings it to life.” —White female, 13, Ashtabula, OH “Because of the live action it gets the attention of kids” —White female, 9, Ashtabula, OH “The drama puts you in the situation” —White female, 24, OH “This kind of presentation is a good way to learn because, the drama brings out the realism as compare reading [sic] it from a book.” —Puerto Rican male, Zanesville, OH “A picture is worth 1,000 words, they say. You can’t learn from just one or two types of media” —White female, 15, Beavercreek, OH “One picture is worth a thousand words.” —White male, 67, Shreve, OH “It is interesting enough to keep people’s attention. It also shows many sides of people; shows them as humans, not cardboard characters. It becomes real” — Female, 42, Lima, OH “People remember more what they see than what they hear.” —White female, 17, South Africa “I don’t think people come to see history. The come to see the show for entertainment” —Female, 48, Mt. Pleasant, TX

Do you think such performances should emphasize historical accuracy or entertainment? Historical accuracy 16 29.63% Entertainment 1 1.85% Don’t know 0 0% Both 32 59.26% Other 4 7.41% (two answers—historical accuracy and “both”—circled) No response 1 1.85%

In general, do you think of history as fact-based truth, or as an interpretation of past events? Fact-based truth 9 16.67% Interpretation 12 2 2 .2 2 % Some of both 30 55.56% Don’t know 0 0 % No response 1 1.85% Two responses circled 2 3.70%

Notably, this question received more voluntary written “asides” than any other question. Comments included:

Next to the “Interpretation” selection, an informant who circled “Fact-based truth” wrote “Just makes it a story, ‘historical fiction’” —White female, 15, Beavercreek, OH

An informant who circled both “Fact-based truth” and “Interpretation” wrote “wishfully” next to the former and “reality” next to the latter —“Human” female, 35, Chillicothe, OH

321 An informant who circled both “Some of both” and “Don’t know” wrote “We weren’t there, so we can’t tell.” —White female, 25, Chillicothe, OH

How authentic do you feel the history and the representation of Indians you saw tonight were? Not authentic 2 3.70% Pretty authentic 34 62.96% Very authentic 10 18.52% Don’t know 7 12.96% No response 1 1.85%

Comment: “There were some things they did not get right.” —Ojibwa male, 23, Sault Ste. Marie, MI

How much did you know about the presence and history of Native Americans in this region before tonight’s show? Not much 8 14.81% A little 21 38.89% Quite a bit 14 25.92% A lot 10 18.52% No response 1 1.85%

Comment: Next to circled “Quite a bit,” informant wrote “Had seen before” - “Human being” male, 36, Chillicothe, OH

How much real-life experience with Native Americans had you had before tonight’s performance? Not much 29 53.70% Quite a bit 10 18.52% A little 9 16.67% A lot 6 11.11%

Note: There was a very high correlation between responses to this question and the previous one; those who said they knew “not much” or “little” of the Native American history also said they knew “not much” or “little” about contemporary Native Americans. Similarly, those who said they knew a lot about the history also said they knew a lot about contemporary peoples.

Did the show change your understanding of Native Americans and Native American history? Not much 18 33.33% A little 2 0 37.04% Quite a bit 11 20.37% A lot 4 7.41% Two responses circled 1 1.85% (“A little”/”Quiteabit”)

If so, in what ways? (Twenty-six informants (48%) responded to this question; their comments are transcribed below under the heading of the general response they gave to this question. Any missing demographic information was not provided by the informant.)

322 Not Much “We are from Southwest” —White female, 42, Albuquerque, NM “I always knew they were fighting for their land” —White male, 11, Elida, OH “It reflects what I already knew.” —Female, 42, Lima, OH “I knew they were OK before I came” —Male, 7, Elida, OH

A Little “It was a lot tougher to survive. I’m shore [sic]” —White female, Lucasville, OH “I understand now why Indians wanted their land so badly” —White female, 13, Ashtabula, OH “Greater illustration of the history book facts. Fleshing out the story really increases understanding. You can relate to it more when you experience it.” - White female, 15, Beavercreek, OH “For a Native American narator [? difficult to read] there were a few things they could have made changes on” —Ojibwa male, 23, Sault Ste. Marie, MI “I didn’t realize they used their hands and spoke at the same time, I thought they just did one or the other.” —White female, 15 1/2, Beavercreek, OH [This remark really jumped out at me; I, too, had noted this sort of “sign language” that the Shawnee characters were performing onstage—I don’t recall noticing this last year, so I was glad to have this informant confirm my observations!] “It showed the struggle and made it real, unlike textbooks that skim over importance” -White female, 25, Chillicothe, OH “It was a lot tougher than what they made it look” —White male, 17, Lucasville, OH “It was harder than what they made it look” —White male, 14, New Boston, OH “It gave me a clearer picture of how the Native Americans perceived and tried to deal with the advance of white people” —Puerto Rican male, “Mid-30s,” New York, New York “Made it more familiar to me.” —White female, 65, Shreve, OH “I think the history and script should consult with A.I.M. American Indian Movement and read Ward Churchill’s books regarding the lies presented about Indians from the master race” —Male, 45

Ouite a Bit “The story is very important and should be known by more people to fully understand what could have been” —“Human Being” male, 36, Chillicothe, OH “This deepened what I’ve already learned.” —White female, 44, Beavercreek, OH “Made you understand more about their feelings.” —White female, 42, Ashtabula, OH “Better understanding of why they wanted to keep there [sic] ;and” —White male, 42, Ashtabula, OH “Makes me want to learn more” —White female, 69, Wooster, OH “Seeing the history from their point of view” —White female, 40, Van Buren, OH “Made me aware of Indians as people” —White female, 52, Pomeroy, OH

A Lot “The unfairness to our Native Americans” —White male, 67, Shreve, OH “A better understanding of what Indians put up with.” — “White anglo saxon” male, 65, CN “In the way I could understand it better than a book.” —White female, 9, Ashtabula, OH

323 “Enhanced my compassion for this particular ethnic group” —White male, 45, Waverly, OH

What was your strongest reason for attending tonight’s show? (Circle all that apply.) (Note: Numbers will add up to more than 54 or 100% because informants could choose more than one answer.)

Visiting the area 14 25.92% Bringing children for educational purposes 14 25.92% Entertainment 33 61.11% Recommended by relatives/friends 29 53.70% I’m a history buff 13 24.07% Other (“Bringing friends/relatives”) 1 1.85%

Comments:

“Wanted refreshed” —White female, 25, Chillicothe, OH who circled “entertainment” “I’m Native and Proud.” —Oglala female, 30, Ray, OH who circled “entertainment”

A udience Response Survey Results 6.27.95 (25 total surveys completed)

Demographic Information (partially completed on 24 of 25 surveys)

Age Under 10 0 0 % 10-17 3 12% 18-29 4 16% 30-45 5 2 0 % 4 5 -6 0 7 28% Over 60 5 2 0 % Info not provided 1 4%

thnicity Anglo 23 92% African American 0 0 % Native American 0 0 % Latino American 0 0 % Asian American 0 0 % Other 0 0 % Info not provided 2 8 %

icy status Ohio residents 21 84% Other U.S. residents 3 12% (Pennsylvania 2, South Carolina 1)) Non-U.S. residents 0 0 % Info not provided 1 4%

324 Sex Female 12 48% Male 12 48% No response 1 4%

Highest level of education completed Students presumably still enrolled in elementary/secondary school 3 12% High School 9 36% Some college 0 0% College 6 24% Professional/Graduate degree 5 20% No response 2 8 %

Responses to Survey Questions

How much did you know about the life of Tecumseh and the history of this region before tonight’s performance? Not much 6 24% A little 7 28% Quite a bit 9 36% A lot 2 8 % No response 1 4%

How closely did the drama reflect what you already knew about this history? Not much 0 0% A little 5 20% Quite a bit 12 48% A lot 5 20% No response 3 12%

How much do you feel you learned about the history of Tecumseh and this region from tonight’s show? Not much 0 0% A little 7 28% Quite a bit 11 44% A lot 4 16% No response 3 12%

Do you think that this kind of presentation is a good way to learn about history? Disagree strongly 0 0 % Disagree slightly 0 0 % Don’t know 1 4% Agree slightly 7 28% Agree strongly 15 60% No response 2 8 %

Why or why not? (Seven informants (28%) responded to this question; their comments are transcribed below. Any missing demographic information was not provided by the informant.)

“Very interesting” —White female, 44, Cable, OH 325 “If I didn’t know anything about it, I would have learned a lot” —White female, 28, Chillicothe, OH “Holds your attention better” —White female, 27, Chillicothe, OH “It is a visual indepth presentation that you can’t receive from a book” —White male, 18, Westerville, OH “Good idea if based on fact” —White female, 40, Hallsville, OH “Brings it some reality” —White female, 45, Westerville, OH “Live theater is an excellent tool to bring history to life. Attention spans of todays [sic] youth are limited thanks to television. By bringing the history books to life one may have a chance of teaching them something.” —White male, 25, Cincinnati, OH

Do you think such performances should emphasize historical accuracy or entertainment? Historical accuracy 8 32% Entertainment 0 0% Don’t know 0 0% Both 15 60% Other 2 8 % No response 0 0 %

Comments:

Of the two people who indicated a response other than those provided, one wrote “3/4” next to historical accuracy and “1/4” next to entertainment (white female, 47, Columbus, OH); the other circled the word “emphasize” in the question, underlined, the word “both,’ and wrote “oximoron” [sic] in the margin (white male, 57, Philadelphia, PA), apparently thinking that if I wanted to know which factor should be “emphasized,” I shouldn’t have had the option of “both.”

In general, do you think of history as fact-based truth, or as an interpretation of past events? Fact-based truth 8 32% Interpretation 5 2 0 % Some of both 12 48% Don’t know 0 0 % No response 0 0 %

How authentic do you feel the history and the representation of Indians yc were? Not authentic 2 8 % Pretty authentic 17 6 8 % Very authentic 4 16% Don’t know 2 8 % No response 0 0 %

Comment:

One informant who circled “Pretty authentic” also wrote “w/poor acting” ii (white male, 25, Cincinnati, OH) How much did you know about the presence and history of Native Americans in this region before tonight’s show?

326 Not much 6 24% A üttle 8 32% Quite a bit 11 44% A lot 0 0% No response 0 0%

How much real-life experience with Native Americans had you had before tonight’s performance? Not much 12 48% Quite a bit 9 36% A little 3 12% A lot 1 4%

Comment:

One informant who circled “Quite a bit” also wrote “Chief Black Hawk” in the margin, with no further explanation (white female, 45, Westerville, OH)

Did the show change your understanding of Native Americans and Native American history? Not much 14 56% A little 4 16% Quite a bit 5 20% A lot 1 4% No response 1 4%

If so, in what ways? (Four informants (16%) responded to this question; their comments are transcribed below under the heading of the general response they gave to this question. Any missing demographic information was not provided by the informant.)

Not much “Already understood it.” —No information provided

A Little “Indians lost a lot” —White female, 45, Westerville, OH

Ouite a Bit “More sympathetic” —White female, 70, Columbus, OH “I have Cherokee in my blood and I’m part of the Algonquin tribe. It is always enjoyable to see of other tribes and their story” —White (as reported in demographic section) male, 18, Westerville, OH

What was your strongest reason for attending tonight’s show? (Circle all that apply.) (Note: Numbers will add up to more than 25 or 100% because informants could choose more than one answer.)

Visiting the area 3 12% Bringing children for educational purposes 10 40% Entertainment 17 6 8 % Recommended by relatives/friends 5 2 0 % I’m a history buff 9 36%

327 Comment: “James Galloway is my great-great grandfather” —White male, 61, Proctorville, OH

Audience Response Survey Results—Pathfinders Group August 1995 (14 total surveys completed)

Demographic Information (partially completed on all 54 surveys)

Age Under 10 2 14.3% 10-17 4 28.6% 18-29 1 7.1% 30-45 2 14.3% 4 5 -6 0 1 7.1% Over 60 1 7.1% Info not provided 3 21.4%

Race/Ethnicity Anglo 0 0% African American 14 100% Native American 0 0% Latino American 0 0% Asian American 0 0% Other 0 0% Info not provided 0 0%

Residency status Ohio residents 14 100% (All respondents were from Columbus, OH)

Sex Female 4 28.6% Male 9 64.3% Info not provided 1 7.1%

Highest level of education completed Students presumably still enrolled in elementary/secondary school 6 42.9% High School 1 7.1% Some college 0 0% College 3 21.4% Professional/Graduate degree 7.1% Info not provided 21.4%

Responses to Survey Questions

How much did you know about the life of Tecumseh and the history of this region before tonight’s performance? Not much 6 42.9% A little 3 21.4% 328 Quite a bit 5 35.7% A lot 0 0%

How closely did the drama reflect what you already knew about this history? Not much 1 7.1% A üttle 1 7.1% Quite a bit 7 50% A lot 4 28.6% No response 1 7.1%

How much do you feel you learned about the history of Tecumseh and this region from tonight’s show? Not much 0 0% AUttle 1 7.1% Quite a bit 8 57.1% A lot 5 35.7%

Do you think that this kind of presentation is a good way to learn about history? Disagree strongly 0 0% Disagree slightly 2 14.3% Don’t know 1 7.1% Agree slightly 2 14.3% Agree strongly 9 64.3%

Why or why not? (Ten informants (slightly more than 70%) responded to this question; their comments are transcribed below.)

“Because it really made me feel like I was really back in those days” —African American female, no age given “Because most people don’t want to read abut it but if you watch it that’s different” —African American female, 11 “I love Indians” —African American male, 9 “Because reading it is extremely boring and watching it can be too sometimes. Real life drama allows you to actually feel like you’re a part of what’s going on. When you see it performed you remember more” —African American female, no age given, “ 10th grade” “Most people learn alot [sic] from visual representation” —African American female, 15 “Kids get a better picture of what really happened to the Indians” —African American female, 35 “The presentation was dramatic and was intense enough to command my attention.” —African American male, 49 “What you see has a greater impact than what you read” —African American female, 61 “Reinforces stereotypes—Caters to the dramatic” —African American female, 23 “Because it is entertaining and educationable [sic]” —African American female, 15

Do you think such performances should emphasize historical accuracy or entertainment? Historical accuracy 6 42.9% Entertainment 0 0% Don’t know 1 7.1% Both 7 50% 329 In general, do you think of history as fact-based truth, or as an interpretation of past events? Fact-based truth 4 28.6% Interpretation 3 2 1.4% Some of both 6 42.9% Don’t know 1 7.1%

How authentic do you feel the history and the representation of Indians you saw tonight were? Not authentic 0 0% Pretty authentic 7 50% Very authentic 3 21.4% Don’t know 4 28.6%

How much did you know about the presence and history of Native Americans in this region before tonight’s show? Not much 5 35.7% A little 7 50% Quite a bit 2 14.3% A lot 0 0%

How much real-life experience with Native Americans had you had before tonight’s performance? Not much 8 57.1% Quite a bit 4 28.6% A little 1 7.1% Alot 0 0 % No response 1 7.1%

Did the show change your understanding of Native Americans and Native American history? Not much 9 64.3% A little 4 28.6% Quite a bit 1 7.1% A lot 0 0%

If so, in what ways? (Five informants (about 36%) responded to this question; their comments are transcribed below under the heading of the general response they gave to this question.)

Not Much “I don’t believe that the Indians were very anxious to marry the white woman as a rule than vice versa the white man” —African American female, 61 [a reference to Tecumseh’s romancing and considering marriage to the white settler Rebecca Galloway—indeed, this aspect of Tecumseh’s history has been disproved by scholars since Eckert]

A Little “Native Americans had a very hard battle” —African American female, no age given “The ways whites treated blacks and Indians.” —African American female, 11 “I thout [sic] that the Indians whar are ded [sic]” —African American male, 9

330 Ouite a bit “I didn’t know much about them and this helped me understand more.” --African American male, 14

What was your strongest reason for attending tonight’s show? (Circle all that apply.) (Note: Numbers will add up to more than 14 or 100% because informants could choose more than one answer.)

Visiting the area 0 0% Bringing children for educational purposes 5 35.7% Entertainment 5 35.7% Recommended by relatives/friends 5 35.7% I’m a history buff 4 28.6%

331 IMAGE EVALUATION TEST TARGET (Q A -3 )

1.0 Jria 25 2.2 c Là l.l I iiiiim 1.8

1.25 1.4 1.6

150mm

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