The Transatlantic Indian, 1776–1930

Kate Flint's The Transatlantic Indian is an important attempt at understanding the complex relationship between America's Indians (meaning, for the most part, those tribes situated in what had become the United States and Canada) and British culture from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. It sets out to explore the Native American as a recurrent figure in the British imagination and as a fundamental image in the formulation of national mythologies in Europe as well as in the Americas. From the first chapter, what is at issue is the speed with which American popular culture (traveling exhibits, travelogues, adventure novels, etc.) circulated in the British Isles. In this circulation, we come to understand the figure of the American Indian as a moral emblem and see as well, in British reactions to them, a replication of many of the common attitudes toward Indians that existed in the United States. But we also witness certain differences in the British attitude toward Americas Indians, especially when they are used as a mechanism for understanding Britain's political relationship with the United States. The point is that, in all this ambivalence, shifting images of the American Indians made them fundamental to the development of a national identity in Britain as well as in the United States.Significantly, this book is also about Native Americans who have crossed the Atlantic. So, it is also concerned with the ways in which Native public figures have influenced, even if tangentially, Britain's consciousness not only of Native peoples but also of their own national identities in relation to American national identity. As the first chapter argues, the figure of the Indian is “central to Britain's conceptualization of the whole American continent” and is also “a touchstone for a whole range of British perceptions concerning America during the long nineteenth century and plays a pivotal role in the understanding and imagining of cultural difference” (2).Even as Flint does much to interject in favor of actual Native Americans and their impact on British cultural politics, the book is still centrally concerned with Britain, British attitudes, and British texts rather than being focused on Indians. This is to say that a majority of the readings are American or British, and those that are not are mediated in clear and obvious ways by British or American intermediaries. The text is no less important, of course, for its relying on a framework that privileges British culture. In fact, its clear emphasis on non-Native sources is a function of the subject at hand, of the focus of the text, rather than any intellectual blind spot on the part of the author. In fact, Flint's impressively nuanced readings of a broad array of texts demonstrate an expansive knowledge of literary traditions on both sides of the Atlantic. Moreover, her engagement with critical discussions centered in that nexus are no less impressive.Flint's second chapter argues that (nonnative) writers both in Britain and in the Americas pen melancholic accounts of American Indians as a mechanism for demonstrating their own capacity for sympathy. Along the way, Flint reflects on a familiar set of expected ideas about American Indians that are ubiquitous on this continent and also found their way into British conceptualizations of the Indian: the popular romances of the bloody savage or the disappearing Indian, for example. We learn that just as for American readers, Indians for British readers “were not real people; they were primarily ciphers. They stood in for a range of British—and European—projections about primitive peoples and about what constitutes ‘natural’ humanity” (51).Chapter 3 deals wholly with George Catlin's traveling exhibits in Britain in the 1840s. The fact that his exhibits had the unusual fortune of finding a more or less blank canvas on which to write the image of the American Indian resulted in their having a profound effect on British conceptions of Indians and on the project of nationalism in the United States. Flint explores the net effects of Catlin's partnership with Arthur Rankin and their tour through Britain, which were two-fold: first, she notes the politics that underwrite the constitution of the American Indian as a pure spectacle or curiosity. Next, she notes the complex ways these visits elicited a new concern with, and sympathy for, issues of human rights, religiosity, and morals in British viewers.A significant side note to this chapter is a striking section on Native sexuality and miscegenation. By reading certain British women's reactions to Indian figures as sexual objects, Flint is able to make some remarkable comments on the politics of sexual desire in Britain in the mid-nineteenth century. Her reading, however, is focused primarily on British expressions of sexuality and on British reactions to miscegenation rather than on the kinds of dehumanizing venues that created the conditions of possibility for the objectification of Native subjects.At the end of the chapter, Flint discusses the reactions of some of Catlin's Indian curiosities to their travels in Europe. Significantly, their voices are mediated through Catlin's own writing. Nonetheless, as Flint argues, we witness through their commentaries on class divisions, poverty, and vice in British cities an important “engagement with the values of society” (85). This engagement clearly indicates a complex and intelligent Native perspective on British culture that is often lost in popular images of the traveling Indian.Chapter 4 treats the image of the Indian in British women's writing. Flint surmises that it may be due to their sensitivity to their own oppression that women writers tended to be more sympathetic than male writers in their treatment of Indians. This moment also signals an important rise in protest literature and humanitarian awareness (a seemingly natural outgrowth of sentimental literature) that will come to bear directly on Native-white relations.In chapter 5, Flint traces the varied reactions to Indian representations in the Great Exhibition of the Works of All Nations, held in London in 1851. She draws on press reactions to the exhibit, and the telling placement of Native figures there, to analyze British conceptions of the United States. These conceptions demonstrate an ambivalent response to a nation alternatively seen as crassly utilitarian and, therefore, artistically unimaginative or as a population bent on developing a pioneering national aesthetic all its own (120).Chapters 6 and 7 deal with popular accounts of Indians in British literature. Chapter 6 traces the role of the Indian in genres such as adventure fiction and imperial fiction, and chapter 7 discusses the gender politics involved in these popular figurations of American Indians. Flint notes, for example, that frequent and graphic descriptions of Native violence, witnessed firsthand in travel fiction, adventure fiction, memoirs, and the like, serve to bolster the writers' own masculinity through their relations to Indians. She also discusses sexualized images of Native women, such as Pocahontas, in British narratives.Chapter 8 reflects on the position of the Christian missionary at the nexus between “white imperial subjects, white colonial subjects, and non-white colonial subjects” (194). Flint attempts a highly nuanced discussion of missionary work in the Americas that recognizes the complex, intimate, and sometimes ambivalent interactions between missionaries and Native Americans. Her goal is not simply to note the violence of assimilation occasioned by the missionary philosophy but also to weigh those facts against “the more positive role many missionaries played in sustaining communities, in tempering and mediating cultural collisions, and in spreading understanding of native customs, beliefs, and ways of life—even as they were undergoing change” (197). In addition, she records the experiences of Peter Jones and George Copway (among others), who were Indian missionaries to Britain.Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show is the centerpiece of Flint's penultimate chapter. The upshot is that British responses to the show demonstrate Victorian Britain's complex attitudes toward American Indians and toward the United States as a nation. Its was an ambivalent reaction to a nation that could at times be seen as underdeveloped and remiss in undermining a healthy social hierarchy but that could also be seen as a model of modernity and progress. The reception of Buffalo Bill and his show in Britain, then, tells of British national identity and its shifting response to America, which Flint tracks over the course of three shows (in 1887, 1892–1893, and in 1902–1903). British responses to the show echo a European response to the growing power of the United States. (The reactions of Native participants in the show are remarkably scant, consisting of short recorded conversations in various places. As Flint maintains, “It is impossible to gauge what lies behind the silence” [248].)The argument of the last chapter is that the concept of “frontier” in Britain was significantly different from that in the United States. The distinction lay primarily in the fact that Britain, as a global empire (even if in decline), held frontiers at various points around the globe. Its was truly a “global frontier.” The American frontier was unique, however, in that it served as common reference point in the British lexicon, a reference point by which other imperial frontiers were to be evaluated. Flint claims that “if the American Indian readily provided many stereotypes through which indigenous people [worldwide] could be approached and judged, so could the American frontier readily be seen as the archetypal frontier” (260). This chapter, then, treats the role of the American Indian (as a defining figure of the American frontier) in British perceptions of empire.The book ends with a reading of two very important Native writers, Leslie Marmon Silko and James Welch, who write transatlantic voyages of their own in Garden of the Dunes and Heartsong of Charging Elk. Significantly, the text points toward a growing need for a Native-centered textual account of transatlantic voyages. That account would, no doubt, include the writers Flint begins with here but would also necessarily include the writings of Carter Revard and others. Perhaps the most valuable contribution of this book to literature on American Indians is that it points to much work that must still be done in transatlantic Native studies—especially in regard to contemporary literature. Flint's text is important, then, because it serves as a starting point for a kind of comparative work in Native studies that should extend itself further into the present than The Transatlantic Indian does. This book will undoubtedly remain a signal waypoint in a growing conversation about the American Indian's place in transnational studies.

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