a more ethical treatment of native peoples and a more robust defense of those peoples’ inherent rights. In gazing at themselves so intently, it seems, they could remain both preoccupied with negotiating their own identity in relation to American colonial and imperial predecessors and still largely blind to the moral, ethical, and political obligations they had to the native nations around them.
NOTES
1 1. It should be noted that this marked somewhat of a departure from earlier ways of conceptualizing the status and future of native peoples by white colonialists. During the 1790s, most American politicians and social theorists had coalesced around the idea that assimilation and cultural amalgamation was the answer for native people. Following a Lockean enlightenment paradigm which suggested that “no innate ideas, capacities, advantages or disadvantages distinguished one race from the other,” and that “enculturation alone accounted for whatever observable differences marked human varieties,” many, including figures like Jefferson and Washington, believed that native people “could become civilized” by enjoying “the fruits of [European] education and Christianity” (Dippie 4). However, as Brian Dippie has noted, the war of 1812—marked by a general willingness on the part of Native Americans to ally themselves with the British—imperiled this line of thinking.
2 2. A small but important sampling might include Chapter 3 of Gordon Sayre’s The Indian Chief as Tragic Hero: Native Resistance and the Literatures of America from Monteczuma to Tecumseh (2005), Alan Trachtenberg’s Shades of Hiawatha: Staging Indians, Making Americans, 1880–1930 (2004), Chapter 3 of Sherry L. Smith’s Reimagining Indians: Native Americans through Anglo Eyes, 1880–1940 (2000), Renee L. Bergland’s The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects (2000), Part 4 Chapter Eight of Jill Lepore’s The Name of War: King Phillips War and the Origins of American Identity (1999), Chapters 1 through Chapter 33 of John M. Coward’s The Newspaper Indian: Native American Identity in the Press, 1820–90 (1999), Chapter 2 of Susan Scheckel’s The Insistence of the Indian: Race and Nationalism in Nineteenth-century American Culture (1998), Chapter 1 of Cheryl Walker’s Indian Nation: Native American Literature and 19th-Century Nationalisms (1997), Chapters 1 through Chapter 33 of Martin Barker and Roger Sabin’s The Lasting of the Mohicans: History of an American Myth (1995), Robert S. Tilton’s Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative (1994), Chapter One of Lucy Maddox’s Removals: Nineteenth-century American Literature & the Politics of Indian Affairs (1991), Louise K. Barnett’s The Ignoble Savage: American Literary Racism, 1790–1890 (1975), and Chapter 11 of Richard Slotkin’s Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (1973).
3 3. The American Periodicals Series logs 757 mentions of the Cherokee in the 1810s, but from 1820 to 1830, that number increases to 3718. There were 4218 mentions during the 1830s. For the Choctaws, the APS records 285 mentions in the 1810s, 1572 in the 1820s, and 1234 in the 1830s. Mentions of both groups return to pre-1820 levels in the 1840s.
4 4. Interest in the Incan people and their civilization was virtually non-existent in the 1810s—with the APS logging only 153 mentions during the decade (roughly half the number of mentions of the Choctaws during the same period). However, during the 1820s, mention of the Inca increased a similar 500% to 723 mentions. The 1830s saw an additional increase, with 1978 mentions of the Incan people recorded, before falling off in the 1840s.
5 5. The focus is specifically on the Neo-Incan state—and thus the logic of this author’s piece is not entirely consistent. It is ironic that he or she essentially holds up the Neo-Incan efforts to remain a united population as a model for the Civilized Tribes whom he or she nevertheless suggests should remain as subjects within a colonial sphere—ironic because it was arguably by remaining outside of the Spaniards’ colonized realm that the Neo-Inca were able to retain their political and cultural cohesiveness for an additional 40 years.
6 6. The fact that Americans sought to use native peoples as a means of differentiating between themselves and earlier feudalistic societies discloses the centrality of native peoples to America’s conceptualization of itself as a “modern” nation. This would have important implications for the growing body of American literary work because, as Jean O’Brien describes it, the prevailing “relations of power [between whites and Natives] would have permitted [whites] to elide Indian history entirely” as they wrote. Nevertheless, they “embraced Indians because doing so enabled them to establish unambiguously their own modernity. Non-Indians narrated their own present against what they constructed as the backdrop of a past symbolized by Indian peoples and their cultures” in order to demonstrate “that it had made a stark break with the past…. Modernity is predicated on exactly this sort of rupture” (O’Brien 2010, p. xxi).
7 7. Whitman was undoubtedly influenced in his writing of this poem by what he saw on the stages of the New York theaters in the 1830s. A regular attendee at The Bowery Theater, in particular, but also The Park and the Chatham Garden Theater, these theaters were known to produce “Indian plays” frequently, and also works about the Inca such as Pizarro by Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Oralloosa by Robert Montgomery Bird. His poem actually shares some plot similarities with these works. In Whitman’s own words, “I spent much of my time in the theatres then [1830s] – much of it – going everywhere, seeing everything, high, low, middling – absorbing theatres at every pore” (Traubel 1961, v.1, p.455). Scholars have paid little attention to this early piece by Whitman. One of the few exceptions is Ed Folsom, who intuits that this poem sits as the beginning entry a long line of poetic commentary on indigenous American peoples that includes other pieces like “Death of Windfoot,” “The Half-Breed: A Tale of the Western Frontier,” “‘Red Jacket (Aloft)’ (1884),” and “‘Osceola’ (1890)” (Folsom 1994, pp. 72–76).
8 8. Gretchen Murphy has made a similar point by suggesting that reform-minded literature like Lydia Maria Child’s Hobomok, and here I would add Whitman’s “The Inca’s Daughter,” demonstrate that the “maintenance of cultural ideologies such as the Monroe Doctrine” and ultimately Manifest Destiny “requires a motivated blindness, an ability at once to recognize a contradiction and to forget its existence” (Murphy 2004, p. 60). Still, as she goes on to say, it is important to paint with a somewhat narrow brush, remembering that at the same time that these reform-minded writers might reinscribe certain less than desirable positions related to “the formulation” of lamentable “cultural ideologies” and practices, “this does not necessarily deny their subversive role in other cultural conversations” (Ibid.).
9 9. Jennifer Mielke has also recognized this literary phenomenon, albeit she does not include the Inca as part of the literary equation, as it were. She characterizes the phenomenon by saying that literary “portrayals of American Indians in the antebellum period were not exclusively allied with either removal or…disappearance” but rather “in the affective sense and in the sense of literal dislocation [these portrayals] also migrated all over the ideological map” (Mielke 2008, p. 4).