Native Americans, Chinese, and White Progressivists in the Land of Sunshine, 1895-1909

In 1895, Charles Lummis, amateur ethnographer and recent arrival from the East Coast, took over the editorship of a Southern California real estate magazine, Land of Sunshine, and transformed it into a forum for the growing Euroamerican elite. magazine consistently featured three types of texts: articles promoting settlement and investment in California, ethnographic studies of Native Americans, and regional literature-fiction and nonfiction written primarily by migrants from New England. Between 1896 and 1903, the Land of Sunshine also carried nine pieces on Chinese subjects by Sui Sin Far/Edith Eaton, a writer of British-Chinese descent raised in Canada. fact that Lummis, generally a stickler for authenticity, was willing to pass off Eaton's first four contributions postmarked in Montreal as stories about the California Chinese suggests that he had a stake in representing this group in his magazine. I examine the intersection of the literary and ethnographic in the writings of Lummis, Sui Sin Far, and Mary Austin, to argue that Lummis used representations of racial minorities, particularly Native Americans and Chinese, in constructing a new regional identity of California's middle-class Euroamerican settlers. Land of Sunshine, which briefly brought together Lummis, Austin, and Sui Sin Far around the enterprise of ethnographic representation, needs to be viewed as part of a much wider development. As Euroamericans became increasingly interested in non-western cultures towards the end of the nineteenth century, anthropologists such as Adolf Bandelier, Frank Cushing, Elsie Clews Parsons, and others went into the field to supply this demand. Meanwhile, numerous writers of color responded by publishing autobiographical and auto-ethnographic texts that worked against misrepresentations by the mainstream press and the objectifying gaze of the anthropologists. (1) In times before anthropology became an academic discipline, the line between professional and amateur ethnography was blurred, and both groups of writers resorted to a wide range of literary forms to reach mass audiences. This crucial context has been sensitively reconstructed by such scholars as David Brumble, Paul Radin, Arnold Krupat, and Alexia Kosmider. Consequently, I shall limit myself here to the case of one California magazine in the years it was under Lummis's editorship. Since the Land of Sunshine was Lummis's brainchild, subordinated to his own and his sponsors' interest, it is worth looking at some of his exploits before he took on the editorship in 1895. Son of a Methodist seminary professor and itinerant minister, Lummis shared his father's moralistic turn if not his religious convictions. After dropping out of Harvard on the eve of his graduation in 1882, Lummis mapped out his own itinerary: a walking tour from Ohio to California. What began as a commission from the Los Angeles Times for articles written on the road turned into a position as city editor of the Times. But while Lummis's itinerancy completely redirected his career, historian Edwin Bingham points out that it had another, equally important, formative outcome: The Southwest had made an impact on Lummis in many respects as potent as a religious conversion, with the result that he became a self-appointed and zealous missionary in its name (108). Under Adolf Bandelier he spent four years doing archaeological and folklore studies in the Southwest, Peru, and Bolivia, before settling into the editorship of the Land of Sunshine. In this capacity, between 1895 and 1909, Lummis played a key role in transforming the physical and cultural landscape of Southern California. His periodical sought to define the meaning of California for both insiders and outsiders and to create a regional identity for the wealthier newcomers from the East. In subscribing to high-cultural moral values and aesthetics, as well as to the idea of regionalism, the Land of Sunshine had much in common with East Coast magazines like Atlantic Monthly and New England Magazine. …

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