[In the following excerpt, Kroeber examines the idea of “writing Indians” in the fiction of James Fenimore Cooper and John Rollin Ridge.]

WRITING INDIANS

What I have called the ethnological phase of Indian post-Columbus experience began to emerge in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, when Washington Irving wrote sympathetically of King Phillip in his war with the New England colonists in the seventeenth century; when Henry Schoolcraft, after composing an epic poem on the Creek wars, began something like scientific research into Indian lifeways; when artists such as Bodmer, Caitlin, and Charles Bird King painted Indians and scenes of Indian life; and, above all, when James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking novels were enthusiastically received throughout Europe, as well as in America. Cooper's work spawned literally thousands of stories—right down to the film Dances with Wolves, an almost exact replica of the Cooper paradigm, especially its underlying nostalgia: the red man, like the wilderness, is inevitably being extinguished by the inexorable advance of Western civilization.¹

Cooper is often an inept writer, pretentious, but bumbling, in his plots, uncouth in his sentence structure, horrendously improbable in his dialogue but at times astounding in his imaginative prescience. He became the most influential proponent of the myth of the noble savage. Indeed, Mark Twain's condemnations of him may have been motivated less by revulsion at Cooper's literary offenses than by disgust with his admiration for Native Americans, since Twain's contempt for Indians seems to have been unbounded.² But Cooper's romanticizing of Indians was entangled with enough realistic criticism of white Americans to dramatize some parts of the essential tragedy of the Indians' victimization and that victimization's countereffects upon the Indians' destroyers.³

Cooper's novels are both aesthetically and factually preferable to many nineteenth-century literary representations of Native Americans, for example, Longfellow's popular midcentury poem The Song of Hiawatha (which sold nearly 40,000 copies the year it was published, 1855). Longfellow reveals the absurdly sinister underside of his nostalgia when, in the final episode, he has his Ojibwa hero, burdened with an Iroquois name, order his people to welcome the black-robed fathers who arrive from across the ocean as bringers of truth and the good life. Whereupon Hiawatha hops into his canoe and paddles himself off into the sunset. Although Cooper's cultural importance should not be underestimated, nor his literary innovations disregarded, it may be that, in the long run, all such self-conscious American literary efforts (such as Lydia Child's Hobomok [1824], analyzed by Priscilla Wald in this issue) to assimilate red peoples into white literature will need to be evaluated against the first appearances of works in English by Native American writers—an idea that twenty years ago could not gain a formal hearing in the Modern Language Association convention. (I speak from personal experience.)

In 1854, John Rollin Ridge, a Cherokee, became the first American Indian to publish a novel, The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murietta, the Celebrated Bandit.⁴ This blood-and-thunder potboiler will never supersede Madame Bovary as an object of stylistic analysis. Its literary interest, in fact, lies in its journalistic character. Ridge wrote the novel to take advantage of the celebrity of its protagonist, a Robin Hood figure who never existed, though a man who claimed to have killed him earned a substantial reward, proving that one should never underestimate the value of myth. For California readers, some of the interest in the “bandit Murietta” may have centered on the bounty hunter who reported shooting him—and who certainly did shoot some Mexicans. At any rate, Ridge exploits every hyperbolic resource of language to render his protagonist Byronically attractive, even providing him a consort as faithful as she is beautiful.

The chief attraction of the book appears to have been the bandit himself. Murietta was a Mexican who, like many of his countrymen, had come to California to mine gold. Some were successful, and, when California became one of the “united” states, these “foreigners” were brutally and illegally dispossessed of their property, an aspect of the “gold rush” that tends to slip out of our history books but that Ridge brings to the fore. The Californians' treatment of the Mexicans parallels the Georgians' treatment of the Cherokee, whose expulsion was in part precipitated by a discovery of gold in their territory. I hesitate, however, to praise Ridge for subversively encoding a condemnation of the Americans' treatment of Indians. For one thing, his novel includes a passage of scathing ridicule of California Indians that sounds like Twainian racism. To me, Murietta seems more interesting in that it illuminates a complicated sociohistorical situation in which the theme of a foreign Robin Hood could be seized on as a way to make money from American readers by a Cherokee, ambitious to succeed as a California journalist. One aspect of the confusing circumstances is highlighted by the volume of Ridge's Poems, the first such collection by an American Indian to be published in this country. These are, with a couple of slight exceptions, typically Victorian romanticizings in rhyme, sweet sentimentalizations that include such conventionalities as reference to a Cherokee girl's “white hand.”⁵

These verses (unlike the exuberant brutalities in Murietta) seem inappropriate for an author whose father, grandfather, and cousin were victims of savage murders that he long dreamed of avenging—some of that bloodcurdling biography being related in the preface to his innocuous poems. In different ways, both Ridge's poetry and his novel urge us to attend to the intricacy of how acculturative forces have worked among Native Americans, an intricacy that seems (at least to someone of my limited knowledge) to distinguish the Native American experience from that of most other “minorities” struggling with dominant white culture in the United States. Central to this peculiar play of forces, I believe, is that the Indians so consciously resisted and literally fought; though physically defeated, therefore, they were able to retain a more than merely defensive commitment to their values, even while adapting shrewdly in other ways to Anglo-white society. In materially poor and relatively small societies, any individual's existence as an embodiment of a specific culture is continuously experienced with extraordinary force. So far as the culture is a vigorous one, a firm, yet flexible, system of vital processes (as many Native American ones, in fact, were and are), new ideas, and practices can be translated and structured into traditional attitudes without extreme stress and without creating too much fear or guilt in individuals engaged in this acculturative activity. George Sword's more subtle, complicated, and more significant accomplishments within this boundary situation are examined in Elaine Jahner's essay in this collection.

Something of this intricate interplaying may be suggested by a summary of Ridge's familial-tribal background. His grandfather, Major Ridge (the title bestowed by General Andrew Jackson for his service in fighting against the Creek), was a full-blooded Cherokee who did not speak English. He sent his son John to a school in Cornwall, Connecticut, where he was a successful student and wooer of Miss Sara Northrop. Her mother was amenable to their relationship, but his father objected to it—he had expectations of a local Cherokee for a daughter-in-law. There were even more violent objections to the match in the Connecticut community. John's will prevailed, however, and he married Sara in Connecticut and brought her back to Georgia as his wife. His son, John Rollin, was born in 1827 in the large house of his father's plantation, which included slaves and a schoolhouse with an imported white teacher.

In the 1830s, the Cherokee were forcibly and, according to Supreme Court Justice John Marshall's famous decision, illegally “removed” from their prosperous farms in Georgia. John Ridge, like his father, had vigorously resisted this usurpation and believed that President Jackson would not permit it. When this hope proved illusory, and the Cherokee became increasingly subject to harassment without any legal redress, he decided it would be best to accept the unfair judgment and relocate to Indian Territory. Although he finally persuaded his father to accept this view, a majority of his people, led by John Ross, another distinguished Cherokee, continued to resist for some time. At Honey Creek, in Indian Territory (close to present-day Southwest City, Missouri), to which the Ridges traveled, John built a new house and school, and employed the same teacher whom he had employed in Georgia. In 1839, a group of Cherokee associated with the Ross party who had been forced to emigrate to Indian Territory decided to satisfy the Cherokee blood-law, which prescribed death for anyone ceding tribal land. The plotters determined to assassinate the Ridge family, who were, besides being political rivals to John Ross, convenient scapegoats for the newcomers' difficulties in the territory, especially with older Cherokee settlers. On the night of June 22, 1839, four men dragged John Ridge from his bed and stabbed him to death, while others assassinated Major Ridge and a cousin the same day. John Rollin never forgot the scene of his father's body “with blood oozing through his winding sheet, and falling drop by drop on the floor. By his side sat my mother, with hands clasped in speechless agony. … And bending over him was his own afflicted mother, with her long, white hair flung loose over her shoulders and bosom, crying to the Great Spirit to sustain her in that dreadful hour.”

John Rollin's mother took her surviving children out of the Cherokee Nation into Arkansas. There, John Rollin received a good education, and, in 1847, he married a white woman. Two years later, within Cherokee territory through the instigation of the Ross faction, he was deliberately provoked so that he could be murdered, but he succeeded in killing the agent provocateur and escaped back to Arkansas. Although he was ready to stand trial for this killing, his family persuaded him not to risk putting himself in the power of his enemies. He joined a party of gold-seekers and moved to California, where he worked as a miner, a trader, an auditor, and a county recorder. Here, he also began to make money, finally, as a writer, though he was slow to give up the idea of returning to the Cherokee Nation to avenge his father's and grandfather's murders.

In the early 1850s, John Rollin became editor of the Grass Valley Journal and thought he might have realized a handsome sum from the Joaquin Murietta, had not its publisher failed.⁶ Ridge did achieve something of a literary reputation in California, and his success as an editor enabled him to establish a good home for his family in the Sacramento Valley. At this time, he conceived the idea of setting up, with a surviving cousin in Arkansas, a periodical devoted to Indian concerns. Ridge's idea was that the journal

would be a medium not only of defending Indian rights, and of making their oppressors tremble, but of preserving the memories of the distinguished men of the race. … Men, governments, will be afraid to trample upon the rights of defenseless Indian tribes, where there is a power to hold up their deeds to execration.

Asserting that he would bring to the paper not only the “fire of my own pen” but also that of “leading minds in the different Indian nations,” Ridge hoped to do “justice to a deeply wronged and injured people by impressing upon the records of the country a true … account of the treatment they have received at the hands of a civilized and Christian race!” He immediately added: “If I can once see the Cherokees admitted into the Union as a State, then I am satisfied.”⁷ Here is displayed a paradoxical capacity of Native Americans to make use of the encroaching culture they resist. Ridge's ideal, which his father had also cherished, of the Cherokee fully realizing their tribal destiny by becoming part of the “united” states at whose hands they had suffered so unjustly, is difficult for most of us to understand today, since the possibility of sincere belief in the United States as representing a permanent advance toward political liberty has been so successfully eroded by the contrastive efforts of jingoistic patriots and academic intellectuals.⁸ The overwhelming attention to problems of African Americans in our society, moreover, has obscured the very different situation of Indians, who are not necessarily afflicted with that “double-consciousness” so famously formulated by W. E. B. DuBois. As Ridge/Yellowbird, with a kind of spectacular simplicity, illustrates, for some Indians at least, indigenous and European cultures could be complexly reinforcing rather than simply divisive. Our current tendency, an unconscious heritage of the Cold War, is to think of political emotions in solely oppositional terms, but it seems arguable that the strength of Ridge's loyalty to his Cherokee heritage (scarcely “blind,” since his family had been victimized by his own people) could give power to an idealized Americanism, and such Americanism supports his native culture. This interplay of conflictive reinforcements, rather than a merely divided consciousness, appears throughout Ridge's life and his written work, which in several ways anticipates much subsequent Indian writing in English. For example, although Murietta is rather overt fiction pretending to be history, it takes on the style and attributes of genuine history as it progresses toward its conclusion. Surprisingly, but revealingly, Murietta became the basis of what were claimed to be genuine historical accounts by white American historians.

What happened, briefly, was that Ridge's novel was pirated six years after its publication, and that popular piracy spawned others, so that three years after Ridge's death, his novel was reissued in a “third” edition, which then was used as a documentary source by California historians. This inventing of history was possible in part because of Ridge's mixing of history, biography, and fiction, a mixing that has continued to be a notable characteristic of subsequent Indian literary productions. Under modern conditions, writing produced by a member of any marginalized group is likely to be “journalistic.” But this “impure” mode that allows for an individualistic perspective on some clash of diverse social forces has been peculiarly congenial to Indians—for instance, Simon Pokagon, Will Rogers, D'Arcy McNickle, and, in our own time, Gerald Vizenor. As the second and last of these names remind us, a “journalistic” approach also facilitates humorous satire, a very powerful element in much traditional Indian discourse.⁹ Ridge's humor in Murietta is of a frontier style that jars our more delicate sensibilities. This humor, however, manifests a fundamental self-confidence underlying not only the work of writers I have just mentioned but also that of men such as LaFlesche and George Sword, who, in different ways (as discussed in the essays by Ramsey and Jahner in this collection), used writing to come to terms with the complexity of their lives on the precarious boundary between traditional, oral Indian cultures and technologically advanced, “scientific” American culture.

The importance of Ridge's writings (which include a broader range than my concentration on his novel has suggested), then, lies in their revelation of the flexibly powerful sense of cultural identity that continues to undergird even recent writing in English by Indians. That strength permits Indians to confront with surprising frankness and adroitness challenges to (and even radical transformations in) what provides them with the “native” identity. By so confronting these challenges, they strengthen their opposition to Euro-American preconceptions. It makes possible the extraordinary assimilation of diverse elements from competing social entities that enables the protagonists of modern novels by Indians, such as Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony and N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn, to survive. Ridge's work may also help us understand the spiritual appeal of the autobiography of Black Elk. This best-seller reconstitutes “Indian” religiosity effectively enough to make Black Elk Speaks, in the opinion of Vine Deloria, Jr., a kind of Bible for modern young Indians. As Raymond DeMallie and others have demonstrated, however, this reconstituting involved, for Black Elk, transmuting into his tradition elements of white religion absorbed through his participation in Christian services.

What is most impressive about the survival of American Indians, their success in not vanishing, is that they resist not merely by clinging to the past but by changing, accepting, even welcoming at least part of the present. Their persistence should provoke us (though so far it has not done so) to realize to what a large degree culture is transformation. Like homo sapiens' “big brain,” every culture provides a group of human beings with supranatural means for accommodating, in an original fashion, to “random” circumstances, what cannot be accomplished by creatures without our complex brain structures and the systems beyond biology it produces. Better recognition of culture's dynamically adaptive values, offered by an understanding of the ways in which Indians managed not to disappear (either through genocide or assimilation), offers us, were we willing to recognize it, an escape from the banality of such currently popular enterprises as theorizings on the “poetics of culture.”

Notes

1. Cooper's fiction brings to concentrated focus very old traditions of attitudes toward indigenous people, traditions that the Puritans brought with them and that tended to crystallize in an equation of Indians = heathen = past as the antithesis of Whites = Christianity = future.

2. The villainous Injun Joe of Tom Sawyer (whose original, Twain admitted, was a harmless town drunk) is a fairly mild example of Twain's racism, more uninhibited, for instance, in his description of the Goshoot Indians in Roughing It, and in his unfinished sequel to Huckleberry Finn, Huck and Tom among the Indians, which features a lovely blond woman abducted by swarthy, evil, corpse-mutilating Indians for purposes Huck says “it would not do to put in a book.”

3. Cooper's literary and moral strengths can be appreciated if one contrasts his work to that of his most successful imitator, the phenomenally popular German writer Karl May, whose incoherent romanticizings of the American Indian suggest a severe cultural pathology.

4. Ridge published this novel, and a good deal of his other work, under the name of Yellowbird, a translation of his Cherokee name. He was known to California readers as both an “Indian” and an “American.” His novel is available through the University of Oklahoma Press reprint of 1955 (sixth reprinting, 1986) with a valuable introduction by Joseph Henry Jackson. My simplified sketch of Ridge's early career should be supplemented by the biography by James W. Parins, John Rollin Ridge: His Life and Works (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991). On the Ridges' place in Cherokee history, one may consult (besides the sources cited in Priscilla Wald's essay in this issue) Gerald Reed, “Postremoval Factionalism in the Cherokee Nation,” in A Troubled History, ed. Duane H. King (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1979), 148-63; and Thurman Wilkins, Cherokee Tragedy: The Ridge Family and the Decimation of a People, 2d ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986). That John Rollin Ridge's situation in California was not solely determined by personal psychology and circumstances is interestingly revealed by the essay of Carolyn Thomas Foreman, “Edward W. Bushyhead and John Rollin Ridge, Cherokee Editors in California,” Chronicles of Oklahoma 14, no. 1 (1936): 295-311.

5. John Rollin Ridge, Poems (San Francisco: Payot, 1868). The description of Ridge's mother and grandmother with his father's corpse is from the introduction to this volume, a depiction that scarcely prepares one for the mildness of the verse. Ridge was not a major poet, but some of his poetry breaks free from the worst conventional sentimentalizing; his best-known poem, “Mount Shasta,” which he inserted in Murietta, derives not unworthily from Shelley's “Mont Blanc.”

6. So Ridge claimed; Jackson, in his introduction to the novel, throws doubt on this idea, and Parins accepts Jackson's view. The success of subsequent “versions” of Murietta, however, proves that Ridge had indeed struck a popular topic that did make money for others.

7. These ideas are discussed by both Jackson and Parins, though my quotations from Ridge's correspondence are from the essay by Angie Debo, “John Rollin Ridge,” Southwestern Review 17, no. 1 (1932): 59-71. On pages 66-67, Debo, although sympathetic, judges (in contrast to my opinion) the weakness of Ridge's literary work as deriving from his abandoning his true Cherokee heritage. In this issue, Priscilla Wald, examining this situation from the perspective of American social history, demonstrates how conflicts among the Cherokee helped to precipitate the State of Georgia's move against them, a focal point being the creation of a Cherokee constitution, supported by the Ridges as leaders of the “Americanized faction.” One understands how the Ridges might have conceived of a “constitutionally” established Cherokee nation subsequently becoming a state, but Wald seems correct in demonstrating how such “mimicry” blocks “acceptable” assimilation.

8. Ridge's situation interestingly suggests the value of Edward H. Spicer's discussion in the following pages of how every state contains two or more peoples, as well as validates Spicer's important point that “hidden” peoples are not peoples who are hiding.

9. The pervasive quality of humor in Indian oral tellings has impressed most students of Native American life, and what Bakhtin calls a carnivalesque quality, especially in its fondness for generic “impurity,” is a marked characteristic of traditional Indian discursive modes, toward which many contemporary Native American writers seem naturally to gravitate. It is worth noting that American ethnology, in contrast to European, has emphasized native humor, in part, one suspects, because American anthropologists lived more intimately with their native hosts. A magnificently hilarious example is Keith H. Basso's Portraits of ‘the Whiteman’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), whose first dedication is “For three Apaches, now gone away, who encouraged me to laugh at myself.” Basso has worked and lived with the Apache for more than thirty years.