In the later part of the eighteenth and the early part of
the nineteenth century, Americans were still trying to find their place. As the
culture of rebellion against British rule faded and the culture of nation
building began, the Indians were no longer viewed as part of “us” and began to
be viewed as “them.” “We construct identity by finding ourselves in relation to
an array of people and objects who are not ourselves.” [1] This division of us
versus them was not confined to just the early Americans and the Indians. It
also existed between the North and South with regard to slavery. As Indians
became the new nostalgia culture among some early Americans, slaves became the
peasant culture.
Early Americans used Indian disguises not as disguises but
as a symbol of rebellion much the way we today wear a football jersey not to
convince people we are on a team but to show that we are part of a group.
“Indian disguise allowed individuals to cross the boundaries of law and
civilization while simultaneously reaffirming the existence and necessity of
those boundaries.” [2]
Another aspect of early American culture was the forming of
secret societies. “Fraternal organizations commonly claimed to possess
mysterious archaic knowledge, encoded to elude complete human comprehension.”
[3] This was yet another way early Americans maintained a sense of law and
order while perpetuating a hint of rebellion.
Most of these secret societies eventually disbanded due to political
pressure, lack of interests or simply going out of fashion. However one of these
early secret societies formed by Louis Henry Morgan was able to morph itself
and stay relevant. This particular secret society was established to “promote Liberty
and to defy the tyranny of the English Crown” [4]. It eventually became more of
an archeological group that gathered all the information and artifacts they
could about Indians realizing that Indian culture was dying.
That idea was not simply held by Louis Henry Morgan’s group.
The view of Indians changed. They went from being part of the natural landscape
to a nostalgic relic that was being pushed aside to make way for a modern
society. As much as early Americans loved to revel in that nostalgia, they didn’t
hesitate to continually force the Indians west in the quest for nation building
much to the detriment of Indian culture. “Americans built the nation on
contradictory foundations: a highly positive interior brand of Indian Otherness
coexisted with exterior savages lurking outside societal boundaries.” [5]
Towards the mid- nineteenth century American culture began
to define itself as something exclusively its own, yet barrowing from other
cultures. “If you were to enter an isolated log cabin in the Far West and even
if its inhabitant were to exhibit many of the traces of backwoods living, he
will most likely have one small room nicely furnished in which to spend his few
leisure hours and in which you will certainly find the Bible and in most cases
also some cheap edition of the works of the poet Shakespeare.” [6]
However, Shakespeare in European culture was something to be
revered and not to be trifled with. American culture was just as comfortable
watching a serious performance of a Shakespearean play as they were with
watching a parody of a Shakespearean play. Mark Twain himself began writing a
parody of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in which he told the tale of Hamlet’s foster
brother Basil being today’s equivalent of a door-to-door magazine salesman and
complaining about the way everyone around him spoke. This once again showed
that nothing is off limits and that early American culture was a culture of
rebellion.
Despite today’s issues being different from those of early
Americans, our culture is still very much the same where it is maintaining a
sense of law and rebellion and “us” against “them” with “them” sometimes being
within our own borders and other times “them” being outside our borders.
- Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian, (New Haven: Yale Historical Publications, 1998), 21
- Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian, (New Haven: Yale Historical Publications, 1998), 26
- Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian, (New Haven: Yale Historical Publications, 1998), 60
- Wikipedia, Improved Order of Red Men http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IORM#History
- Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian, (New Haven: Yale Historical Publications, 1998), 74
- Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 18
