“I Will Now Take the Goose Quill For My Bow”
The position of both Native American George Copway or Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh
and Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville in the light of the mid-19
thcentury Indian
Atlantic
Wieteke Vonk
University of Amsterdam
10593586
MA History: American Studies Thesis advisor: dr. George Blaustein
Abstract
In the middle of 19th century colonialism, the transatlantic literary world of the Indian Atlantic
prospered. Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville and Canadian Ojibwa George Copway or Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh were at the opposite side of this spectrum. Yet, both men wrote
autobiographies; found themselves in alien terrain; were Christians; lived in the same time period; were in their thirties at the time their books got published; and surrounded themselves with known intellectuals at that time. Therefore, their works provided an insight into both sides – the European and American – and races – the white and the Indian – of the Indian Atlantic. Due to his conviction of white superiority, Alexis de Tocqueville considered the disappearance of the Native American race as inevitable yet tragic, which showed through his liberal philosophy of the perfectibility of man, his Christian belief in human unity and his use of kinship language. Converted Ojibwa man George Copway had a desire for white society to see the Native American race as capable of achieving both Western intellect and Christian civilization while simultaneously claiming both collective and personal dignity for Native Americans’ ‘Indianness’, which showed through his fluid identity, his intimately paradoxical reasoning and his use of kinship language. By means of scrutinizing both Tocqueville’s and Copway’s position, a link between the existing ethnohistory of the Indian Atlantic and the juxtaposing viewpoints of both a European and a Native American travelogue about the ‘other’ race will be established.
Table of content
Introduction 7
Chapter 1: The rise of the Indian Atlantic 13
1.1 The dawn of ethnohistory 13
1.2 Native Americans as mythical creatures 15
1.3 The cultural broker 16
1.4 Familial language between Euro-Americans and Native Americans 18
Chapter 2: Alexis de Tocqueville 21
2.1 Superior yet empathetic 22
2.2 The Christian duty 25
2.3 A man in his time and place 27
Chapter 3: George Copway / Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh 29
3.1 Equality as a self-evident standard 30
3.2 Prestige in Europe 31
3.3 Lured into the limelight, fallen into oblivion 37
3.4 Through the looking glass of George Copway 40
Conclusion 46
Introduction
I would much more glory in this birth-place, with the broad canopy of heaven above me, and the giant arms of the forest trees for my shelter, than to be born in palaces of marble, studded with pillars of gold! Nature will be nature still while palaces shall decay and fall in ruins. Yes, Niagara will be Niagara a thousand years hence!
– George Copway, The Life, History, and Travels of Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh, 18.
Lying upon his coat, surrounded by the smoke of the hut, the Indian casts a scornful glance at the European’s comfortable dwelling. For himself, he proudly derives pleasure from his wretchedness and his heart swells and is uplifted by the sight of his primitive independence. He smiles bitterly on seeing us tormenting our lives in the acquisition of useless wealth. What we call industry, he calls shameful servitude.
– Alexis de Tocqueville, Two Weeks in the Wilderness, 918. In the debate about Native American stereotypes, myths, and Natives reclaiming their own narrative, the origins lead back to the moment that Europeans first set foot on American soil in 1492. European colonists and American Indians considered each other to be aliens, and it took several decades for each side to comprehend that ‘the others’ were also people. They constructed an image of the other, thereby blurring the lines between reality and fable.1 Since
the dawn of ethnohistory in the 1950s, it has become irrefutable that European colonists were wearing Western-tinted glasses. These made them associate Native Americans with the only kind of peoples – in compliance with their corresponding superstitions and classical allegories – that could live in the outskirts of the world. Such peoples included monsters, savages and cannibals.2 According to historian Alden T. Vaughan, these characterizations were based upon
nurture, not nature. The list of alleged Indigenous sins included nakedness, devil worship, lewdness and slovenliness. Yet, the Indians could be ‘redeemed’ if they embraced the two Western pillars: civilization and Christianity. Because of this belief, proponents of
colonization would use more empathetic character traits – such as compliant, modest and intelligent – to describe the Native American race.3 Notwithstanding the number of differing
1 Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1991), IX-X.
stances towards the latter, it has become clear that European accounts of the American Indian across the Indian Atlantic were inescapably tainted by bias and self-interest.
With this thesis, my goal is to show the position that both Native American George Copway or Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh and Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville had in the light of the mid-19th century Indian Atlantic. My first hypothesis is that Alexis de Tocqueville, due to his conviction of white superiority, considered the disappearance of the Native American race as inevitable yet tragic, which showed through his liberal philosophy of the perfectibility of man, his Christian belief in human unity and his use of kinship language. My second hypothesis is that George Copway’s desire for white society to see the Native American race as capable of achieving both Western intellect and Christian civilization while simultaneously claiming both collective and personal dignity for Native Americans’ ‘Indianness’ showed through his fluid identity, his intimately paradoxical reasoning and his use of kinship language.
Both the works of Alexis de Tocqueville and George Copway will be researched, as they provide an insight into both sides – the European and American – and races – the white and the Indian – of the Indian Atlantic. I will put Tocqueville’s book chapter The Three Races
in the United States, his essay Two Weeks in the Wilderness and his letters to Joseph-Arthur
de Gobineau under scrutiny by analyzing his religious background and philosophic beliefs and linking that to the way he addressed and discussed the (contact with the) Native American race. Moreover, I will scrutinize George Copway’s autobiography The Life of George
Copway and his travelogue Running sketches of men and places, in England, France, Germany, Belgium, and Scotland by connecting his Christian conversion and position as a
cultural broker within a white society to his fluid identity, seemingly paradoxical reasoning and familial vocabulary. With this research, I am making a link between the existing
ethnohistory of the Indian Atlantic and the juxtaposing viewpoints of both a European and a Native American travelogue about the ‘other’ race.
Alexis de Tocqueville’s travelogues are of great importance in the debate about the Indian Atlantic, as it is saturated with peculiar insights that illustrated his view on the Native American race. As a young French aristocrat, Tocqueville travelled to the United States to research the penitentiary system. He would turn out to be much more interested in U.S. society and politics, and therefore wrote his book Democracy in America in the 1830s. In this work, Tocqueville wrote lengthy passages about the different races inhabiting the country. He especially zoomed in on U.S. democracy, racism and the dynamics between the Old and the
“inferior to him”4. In the book chapter The Three Races in the United States and the essay
Two Weeks in the Wilderness, Tocqueville explored the relationship between the European
settler and the American Indians. The Frenchman frequently made sense of these interactions by using fraternal terms: the two races were brothers to each other.5 By calling all inhabitants
of America “the great human family,” Tocqueville emphasized the democratic equality which he thought to prevail there. 6
When one scrutinizes the use of Tocqueville’s kin-related vocabulary between Euro-Americans and Native Euro-Americans, the traveler’s fondness of this figure of speech catches the eye. Not only did he ascribe a mother-title to nature; the homeland of England (and more generally Europe) also served as a maternal figure. Tocqueville compared the complete American nation to a baby in a cradle, formed by the opinions and prejudices that reigned in aristocratic Europe. Just like a human, the nation slowly developed into a “fully grown democracy.”7 Native Americans weren’t included in this autodidact upbringing; rather, they
were thought to be stuck in time. The symbolic generation gap between these the colonists and the Indigenous was significant to Tocqueville. Even though the old-fashioned Indian was a “monarch of the wild,” he had not yet acquired the knowledge of taming it. 8 The
Euro-Americans thought of themselves as the children of democratic America, and in order to hide their colonial guilt, they saw American Indians as their brothers.
The aristocrat’s works have raised many issues, for both his Christian conviction that all men are created equal and his philosophy of the perfectibility of man are juxtaposed by his belief in the superiority of the white race. Moreover, it is not clear how these viewpoints relate to his usage of kin-related vocabulary. Exactly that mystery has been the subject of many a research, laid out over various disciplines. Whereas political scientists hint at a
Freudian psychoanalysis by claiming his rhetoric to be filled with hidden brutality, as political fraternalizing is a way for colonists to forcefully take Indian land, there are also studies that
4 Alexis de Tocqueville, “The Three Races in the United States,” in Democracy in America and Two Essays on
America, trans. Gerald E. Bevan (London, Penguin Books, 2003), 371.
5 Tocqueville uses fraternal vocabulary, such as “European brothers,” and “taking [the Indians] by hand as brothers,” see Alexis de Tocqueville, “Two Weeks in the Wilderness,” in Democracy in America and Two Essays
on America, trans. Gerald E. Bevan (London, Penguin Books, 2003), 920 and Tocqueville, “The Three Races,”
397.
6 Tocqueville, “Two Weeks,” 919.
show this familial language was part of an overarching Enlightenment line of reasoning.9
Furthermore, Tocqueville’s vocabulary was directly linked to his own upbringing in
aristocratic France; in America the familial bonds were much stronger than in Tocqueville’s homeland, due to the prevailing equality. In this case, the Frenchman’s words were linked to literary geography.10
Not only was there an influx of Europeans to America in the 19th century; North
American Indians occasionally crossed the Atlantic eastward to European terrain. A lot of these travels have not been accounted for due to the lack of Indigenous writing abilities in English. However, the Native man Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh, also known as George Copway, did record his travelling mid-19th century. His life as a converted Methodist missionary from the
Mississauga Ojibwa Nation (a subtribe of the First Nations people situated around modern-day Ontario) led him to spread the gospel through lectures and successful books; marry the English woman Elizabeth Howell; move to the United States in order to establish Methodist missions; and travel to Europe to attend the International Peace Congress in Frankfurt. Copway published an autobiography in 1847, followed by a book about the history of the Ojibwa Nation (published in 1850) and the travelogue Running sketches of men and places, in
England, France, Germany, Belgium, and Scotland in 1851. This travel narrative makes for a
strong work of comparison to Tocqueville’s travelogue Two Weeks in the Wilderness: on top of the two men being in alien terrain, they were both Christians; lived in the same time period; were in their thirties at the time their books got published; and surrounded themselves with known intellectuals at that time. Copway’s inner circle consisted out of elite figures such as writers James Fenimore Cooper, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Washington Irving, ethnographer Henry Rowe Schoolcraft and historian Francis Parkman.
Several critics have refrained from scrutinizing Copway’s texts due to his seemingly frantic identity shifts from being Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh, the Indian spokesperson for the Ojibwa Nation, to being the assimilated Reverend George Copway. Historian Donald B. Smith claimed these shifts to have made Copway “lose all touch with reality,” while fellow historian Bernd C. Peyer reported many a researcher thought the American Indian to be in a
9 See Rogin, Fathers and Children, (1975); and Laura Janara, "Brothers and Others: Tocqueville and Beaumont, U.S. Genealogy, Democracy, and Racism," Political Theory 32, no. 6 (2004); See Rogin, Fathers and Children, (1975); and Laura Janara, "Brothers and Others: Tocqueville and Beaumont, U.S. Genealogy, Democracy, and Racism," Political Theory 32, no. 6 (2004); Joy Porter, Native American Freemasonry: Associationalism and Performance in America, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), 186.
limbo between two utterly different worlds that “broke his spirit.”11 Literary scholar Tim
Fulford noted that Copway’s wife Elizabeth – who was a writer and poet herself – had an influence on his texts by rephrasing his words and including quotes from British Romantic writers. This was another reason to dismiss further scrutiny, as Elizabeth would have been “powerfully motivated by a desire to help civilize the “poor Indians”.”12 Additionally,
multiple fragments of his travelogue were taken directly out of tourist guidebooks.
However, George Copway’s indecisive profiling and the inclusion of both Romantic quotes and borrowed text fragments does not make the text unsuitable for research. The former factor is rather distinctive for a Native American writer who has the intention to simultaneously address a white Western society while retaining his Indian roots. It is for this reason that counterforces made a new case for Copway’s writing. One defense comes from cultural historian Cecilia Morgan. She noted that discrediting the Ojibwa man’s work due to possible unacknowledged co-authorship of his wife would hold him to a standard that non-Native men often don’t have to cope with – especially since this kind of uncredited marital collaboration was nothing out of the ordinary. On top of that, critics would be prone to neglect the “continuous and persistent” writing achievements that strengthened Copway’s
self-consciousness.13 Literary scholar Cathy Rex has advocated for Copway as well by arguing
that he created space for a new kind of Indianness. According to Rex, Copway culturally adapted the Indian identity into a “fluid intermixture of diverse elements that exceed[ed] and defie[d] the national and racial discourse of the nineteenth century.”14 Copway’s fluid identity
is supported by literary scholar Mark Rifkin, who concluded that the Ojibwa man created “a necessary function in Indian-white relations,” which entailed “inhabiting the putative middle space between wildness and civilization.”15
Notwithstanding the amount of scholarly work on Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh’s life and books, the combination of his fluid identity with his intimately paradoxical reasoning and usage of kinship vocabulary has not yet been zeroed in on. As it was a considerable part of his writing style, there’s significance to linking these traits to his Christian background and his
11 Donald B. Smith, “The Life of George Copway or Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh (1818-1869) — and a review of his writings,” Journal of Canadian Studies 23, no. 3 (1988), 25; Bernd C. Peyer, The Tutor'd Mind: Indian
Missionary-Writers in Antebellum America, (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 224.
12 Tim Fulford, “Romantic Indians and their Inventors,” European Romantic Review 17, no. 2 (2006): 148. 13 Cecilia Morgan, “Kahgegagahbowh's (George Copway's) Transatlantic Performance,” Cultural and Social
History 9, no. 4 (2015), 531.
Kah-ge-ga-gah-desire for both collective Indian and personal dignity. It will establish an extra layer to his words in the light of the Indian Atlantic: the transatlantic literary world that prospered in the midst of American colonialism.
By no means were Tocqueville and Copway representatives of the Euro-American or the Native American side, nor can generalizations be made from their words; they solely provided insights into their mind by writing autobiographies. Their backgrounds and
perspectives on the world are of interest, as they tell their version of the Indian Atlantic in the middle of 19th century colonialism. The focus is not on determining whether Tocqueville or
Copway were telling the truth in their books – that is not of importance. In the center of attention lay (1) the narratives that the two writers told, and (2) the manner in which they told it. Why did they deem these stories important to share with their readers? And what
conclusions are to be drawn from them?
In order to thoroughly and comprehensively distinguish the two sides of the Indian Atlantic, I will divide this thesis into three chapters. The first chapter will lay out the concepts surrounding the Indian Atlantic. I will start off with the emergence of ethnohistory as a discipline, as it laid the foundation for the Indian Atlantic. Moreover, I will dig into the myths surrounding the Native American, the roles that cultural brokers played in establishing the Indian Atlantic and the familial language that Euro-Americans and Native American used in connection to each other. In chapter 2, I will zoom in on Alexis de Tocqueville. Firstly, his bias towards the Native race and his sense of white superiority will be elaborated upon. Consequently, I will lay out Tocqueville’s understanding of race in relation towards both his belief of a working democracy and his belief in Christianity. I will then put his viewpoints into perspective by linking it to ruling thoughts on religion and democracy in the mid-19th
century. George Copway/Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh will be the focus of chapter three. I will begin with a background of his missionary education and his marriage, as these milestones were pivotal to the rest of his life. I will then expand on his European literary success and his following downfall. Finally, I will zoom in on the peculiarities in his books and link these to his background. In the conclusion, there will be an extensive elucidation of the two
1. The rise of the Indian Atlantic
The term ‘Indian Atlantic’ was obviously inspired by sociologist Paul Gilroy’s coinage of the ‘Black Atlantic,’ on which he elaborated in his book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and
Double Consciousness (1993). Gilroy’s concept of the Black Atlantic proved to be pivotal in
correcting the dominating white perspective on Africans and people of African descent by laying out the African diaspora, thereby emphasizing their double consciousness: being in but not from the West as a result of slavery.16
In the New World, a transatlantic literary world prospered during American colonialism. Literary scholars Tim Fulford and Kevin Hutchings were the first to call this world the Indian Atlantic in 2009, but how did it come into existence?
In the middle of the 18th century, colonists in America would not have been able to
sustain their rule without American Indians by their side as their war and trade partners. Therefore, the powerful desire of land and money brought the colonists in contact with the Native races. This did, however, not mean that the Euro-Americans thought of the latter as their equals. While the Native Americans required weapons, paint, blankets and alcohol, the European colonists sought – besides fur and land – a military ally. What followed, were many years of deal making that led both the Indians and the colonists into “a political and economic relationship that altered society – and the very landscape – on both sides of the ocean.” Native Americans learned of the commercial value that was attached to the land that they had been living on for centuries, which irreversibly changed their relationship with it. While colonists exploited the American soil more and more, European industries thrived in order to maintain the Indians’ growing demand for their products. As a result, Native Americans and European peasants were at opposite ends of a capitalized transatlantic business.17
The assumption is
t hus that fictive
kin play a
constructive role
in people’s lives.
In fact,
schol-ars rarely describe
how fictive kin
might also create
the kinds of
complications
(of
disappointment
from unfulfilled
responsibil-ity, unwanted
interference, and
outright conflict)
that routinely
emerge in kin
relations. There
are
exceptions. For
instance, Barker
(2002) wrote
about how some
of the nonkin
she observed
‘‘became
extrafamilial or
quasi-kinlike, with all
the ambivalence,
obligation,
exasperation,
trouble, joy, and
pleasure that kin
relations entail’’
(p. S166). Stack
(1974) also
acknowledged that
fictive kin
relations carried
with them
complex
obligations and
could be at
least somewhat
coercive. These
are also pointing I
raise again below.
The assumption is
t hus that fictive
kin play a
constructive role
in people’s lives.
In fact,
schol-ars rarely describe
how fictive kin
relationships
might also create
the kinds of
complications
(of
disappointment
from unfulfilled
responsibil-ity, unwanted
interference, and
outright conflict)
that routinely
emerge in kin
relations. There
are
exceptions. For
instance, Barker
(2002) wrote
about how some
of the nonkin
relationships
she observed
‘‘became
extrafamilial or
quasi-kinlike, with all
the ambivalence,
obligation,
exasperation,
trouble, joy, and
pleasure that kin
relations entail’’
(p. S166). Stack
(1974) also
acknowledged that
fictive kin
relations carried
with them
complex
obligations and
could be at
least somewhat
coercive. These
are also points I
raise again below.
Just before the Second World War erupted, anthropologist Franz Boas introduced a new view on Indigenous culture in 1938. Whereas Native Americans had been looked down upon by Europeans and American colonists for their ‘inferior’ way of living, Boas debunked this bias of evolutionary reconstruction by claiming about the “races of the New World” that “the general status of their civilization measured by their inventions and knowledge was nearly
of white culture. Nor was there a model culture, nor was there a stagnant one; cultures were simply differing throughout time and space.18 Yet, Boas’ approach still included a very static
perspective on precontact Native cultures.
As time passed, anthropologists changed their views. From the 1950s onwards, ethnologists believed that the Native cultures were vanishing as a result of Euromerican contact, which explained why the “primary aim of ethnologists was to record these cultures as thoroughly as possible before they disappeared completely.”19 In the 1960s, ethnologist Spicer
wrote the book Cycles of Impact: The Impact of Spain, Mexico, and the United States on the
Indians of the Southwest, which was originally a study on acculturation. Instead of gathering
field information from Indigenous informants, Spicer was challenged with archival scrutiny in order to deal with issues that were of high importance to the Native peoples he researched. He therefore learned that this kind of research demanded the help of a historians as well, which made him advance from a solely anthropologic perspective into the realms of ethnohistory.20
There was an enormous difference between the approaches of the two disciplines. Whereas anthropologists focused on the Indigenous past and the contemporary reservation life of Native Americans by emphasizing remaining social and cultural patterns, historians scrutinized their lives in between these periods of time while stressing the effects of white interference that brought about crucial changes to the daily Indian life. Thus, Indigenous people were the protagonists in anthropologic research; for historians, whites stood in the center of attention.21 By means of combining their efforts, ethnohistorians could not only
record the adjustments in Native Americans’ behavior as a result of Euro-American contact; they were also in the position to scrutinize and consequently recognize Western bias towards the native races. As an effect, multiple ethnohistorians used historical documents to shed new light on prevailing myths about the latter.22 Anthropologist William S. Simmons therefore
explained ethnohistory as a “form of cultural biography that draws upon as many kinds of
18 Franz Boas, The Mind of Primitive Man (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1938), 8, 175-196.
19 Bruce G. Trigger, “Ethnohistory: The Unfinished Edifice,” Ethnohistory 33, no. 3 (1986): 257. One of these ethnologists was John R. Swanton, who was mentored by Franz Boas at Harvard. For his most thorough work, see John R. Swanton, The Indian Tribes of North America (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1952).
20 Edward H. Spicer, Cycles of Conquest: The Impact of Spain, Mexico, and the United States on the Indians of
the Southwest, 1533-1960 (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1962).
21Robert Frederick Berkhofer, “The Political Context of a New Indian History,” Pacific Historical Review 40, no. 3 (1971): 359.
testimony as possible – material culture, archaeology, visual sources, historical documents, native texts, folklore [and] even earlier ethnographies.”23
1.2 Native Americans as mythical creatures
Whether Euro-Americans looked at Native Americans as brutal inhumane creatures or as the romanticized images of the ‘noble savage’ and the ‘vanishing Indian’, it was all part of their fertile yet fictive imagination process. Historian Richard White has claimed that colonists had “met the other, invented a long-lasting and significant common world, but in the end
reinvented the Indian as other.”24 According to Fulford and Hutchings, there were four
connected discourses that made Native Americans play a role in British culture. The first one was by being the potentially lethal foe of the British colonists in the French/Indian War from 1756-1763 and the subsequent Revolutionary War in 1776. The accounts of British survivors contained gruesome details about the ordeals of the Indian warriors. These stories travelled across the Atlantic to British soil, where they became part of a second discourse through published written media. The image of the torturing, brutal savage then quickly took roots in the Anglo-Saxon mind. Yet, the British-American settler would also provide the third
discourse, which included travelogues and in-depth accounts of peaceful Native societies and cultures from the 1760s onwards. The fourth discourse derived from Native Americans who visited England themselves as either political representatives or diplomats. Whether
consciously or not, they changed the ruling stereotypes of Indians as savages by being
eloquent, refined and having a memorable presence. These accounts were widely dispersed by magazines and newspapers, which led to more nuanced common assumptions of the
American Indians.25
Historian Olive Patricia Dickason constructed the backbone of these four different discourses in 1984 with the book The Myth of the Savage: And the Beginnings of French
Colonialism in the Americas. According to European folklore, brutal savages could eliminate
their evil and animalistic traits, which would turn them into glorified noble savages. By projecting this mythical development onto Native Americans, Christians granted themselves
23 William S. Simmons, “Culture Theory in Contemporary Ethnohistory,” Ethnohistory 35, no. 1 (1988): 10.
24 White, Middle Ground, XV.
Anglo-the ‘honor’ of converting Anglo-the latter. Yet, awareness of Anglo-the falsehood around Anglo-the brutal savage stereotype arose by those who got into contact with American Indians. Advocates of the peaceful tribes recognized that they were “savages in name only,” however, “such statements were regarded as a defense of le bon sauvage.” In the endeavor to prove the courtesy of the Native American, he was transformed into a romanticized and thus mythical figure – which robbed him of his class as a fellow human being and an individual mind.26
The myth of the vanishing Indian had strong ties to the romanticized ‘noble savage’ stereotype. As anthropologist and sociologist Berry Brewton had noted in 1960, the common consensus was that the “paragon of virtue” would disappear from Mother Earth. The only exception to that rule was the idealist who believed that the American Indian was capable of civilizing. Not all Euro-Americans considered it to be a satisfying solution for acquiring land; Ralph Waldo Emerson was but one of the prominent figures who thought of it as an inevitable tragedy. The belief in the forthcoming dissipation of the Native American was founded upon the strength of the everlasting European civilization, which would overshadow any kind of primitive peoples.27
1.3 The cultural broker
Yet, there are two sides to every story. An essential nuance that Fulford and Hutchings’ fourth discourse already hinted towards, is that Native Americans were not mere subjects, but also agents in the construction of the Indian Atlantic. Besides popular works from white writers like The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper and The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, there were also several American Indians who provided a voice to their own narrative. They rebutted the presumption that Native Americans passively fell victim to the degree of evanescence. Converted Indigenous writers like William Apess, Samson Occom, Joseph Johnson and George Copway profited from their missionary education during the 18th and 19th century. It made them able to shine a spotlight on their
Native background; proselytize their fellow American Indians; and in several occasions, provide sharp criticism of the Christian colonist who conveniently forgot the principle of ‘all men are created equal’ in the pursuance of the Manifest Destiny. Moreover, their double consciousness would shine through their words: they were Christian and educated, yet Indigenous – and they were reminded of that everywhere they went.
Native American scholar Jace Weaver emphasized the crucial role that Native Americans played in the development of transatlantic thought; he claimed their resources, ideas and presence were fundamental to that cultural exchange. Outlining the “Red Atlantic,” as Weaver called it, was a way to restore Native Americans in the narrative: “In helping create the Red Atlantic, they were integrated into – and integrated themselves into – the nascent world economy. Not merely slaves and victims (though they were that, too), they were self-determined and not simply selves-self-determined.”28
American Indians such as Apess, Occom, Johnson, and Copway perceived borders not as barricades, but as pathways to establish connections between peoples. Thus, according to historian Margaret Szasz, they served as cultural brokers. During the past centuries, thousands of Native American and Euro-American cultural brokers, or intermediaries, crossed these (often cultural) borders for multiple reasons: to serve as interpreters, traders, diplomats, spiritual intermediaries or government mediators. Because these brokers knew the zeitgeist of the ‘others’ and behaved accordingly, they yielded respect from both sides. However, the roles of cultural brokers have only been recognized and under scrutiny since World War II. Szasz ascribes this recent interest to the “growing concern for cultural pluralism:” both the U.S. and Canada endeavored to redefine themselves as multicultural societies when the war ended. This redefinition developed through the establishment of ethnohistory as an
interdisciplinary approach, as it combined aspects of history with ethnology.29
As historian Nancy L. Hagedorn noted, cultural brokers held a very delicate position in the creation of Native American and Euro-American relations. After all, by failing to
represent one of the two parties justly and accurately, misunderstandings could arise in just a matter of minutes – or even seconds. The brokers, or interpreters, had knowledge of both parties’ vocabulary, metaphors, manners of speech and delivery, customs, and protocol. For that reason, they could “manipulate protocol to gain the upper hand in council negotiations.”30
Obviously, cultural brokers operated at least partially out of their own interest. Yet, in the act of establishing trustworthy bonds, they were in the position to grant their entire people a more powerful place in society.
1.4 Familial language between Euro-Americans and Native Americans
28 Jace Weaver, “The Red Atlantic: Transoceanic Cultural Exchanges,” The American Indian Quarterly 35, no. 3 (2011): 422, 456.
According to historian and genealogist Carolyn Earle Billingsley, kinship should be
“considered a discrete category of analysis complementary to and potentially as powerful as race, class, and gender.”31 It is for this reason that the usage of familial language by both
Euro-Americans and Native Americans requires scrutiny and context.
In the 1970s, political scientist Michael Paul Rogin, who was inspired by his forebears32 and the Freudian psychology, was at the threshold of connecting familial
vocabulary to the way that colonists address Native Americans. According to Rogin, historians and political scientists had been “systematically deaf” to the language of kinship that Americans had used. This had led to a lack of understanding of the relationship between Americans and Native Americans.33 In his book Fathers and Children, Rogin claimed that the
familial language was a way for President Jackson to establish paternal authority and acquire a position as one of America’s fathers.
Notwithstanding that Rogin’s work was of great importance, it has received criticism due to interpretational problems. His bold statements about Jackson’s antipathy towards Native Americans were not provided with evidence. Yet, he did open debate on the topic of familial vocabulary towards Indigenous peoples in America.
In the 1990s, the debate about familial language took a rather surprising turn when archeologist Douglas Comer wrote a book about Bent’s Fort: a trading post in 1833 on the American side of the Arkansas river. Comer’s focus was the economic and social ties between U.S. colonists and Native American tribes, which he labeled as a fictive kinship – a word he ascribed to the realms of anthropology. According to Comer, “the practice of ritual exchange established a common, mythological ancestry” in the Native American mind. It humanized and familiarized both the colonists and the Native Americans.34 This multidisciplinary
research was a solid basis for the inclusion of familial language in historical research, as it mixed in seamlessly with the archeological and anthropological aspects of the phenomenon.
Another interesting approach to familial language in the sphere of history was by Native American historian Donna Akers. Her book about the Indian removal of the Choctaw Nation between 1830-1860, written in 2004, was one of the first American Indian insights
31 Carolyn Earle Billingsley, Communities of Kinship: Antebellum Families and the Settlement of the Cotton
Frontier, (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 1.
32 For prominent figures in the understanding of nature as a core part of America’s history, see Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950); and Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness, Harper Torchbooks The Academy Library TB 1139. (New York, NY:
into the symbolic relationship with Euro-Americans. Akers claimed familial language among Native Americans to be satisfactory to all parties involved, as it enabled them to welcome other people into their world, thereby humanizing them and legitimizing the formed
relationship. However, the colonists adopted the idea of a father-child kinship with American Indians, for they understood that relationship in terms of “benevolent dictator and subject.”35
Significant about Akers’ interpretation of kinship vocabulary is her understanding that the Euro-American version of the relation was one-sided and authoritative. She therefore implicitly refuted the common understanding of familial language as a consensual and beneficial relationship. Akers’ work, though not often cited, is therefore important in the understanding of redefined fictive kinship in the field of history.
Only recently, Tocqueville’s works have been scrutinized for his use of familial language between Euro-Americans and Native Americans. In 2004, political scientist Laura Janara published an article about the French aristocrat’s usage of kinship vocabulary. By utilizing Tocqueville as a source of primary information, she could shed new light on familial language. Both Janara and Rogin posited a mother figure in the imagined family, yet it differed who (or what) exactly fulfilled this role; it stood for nature according to the former, while being the symbol of liberty according to the latter. Janara claimed the “symbolic brotherhood” to be a sign of “sibling-rivalry-like democratic envy,” because kinship meant that the Americans were entitled to just as much land as the Native peoples.36 The constructed
kinship therefore provided reasons for using violence in times of conquest.37
Joy Porter, Professor of Indigenous Studies, did research on Native American Freemasonry in 2011. She discussed both the paternal and brotherly use of words by
Americans. According to Porter, it was quint-essentially American to adopt those apparently conflicting semantic positions, for Americans were able to have “seemingly mutually
exclusive outlooks at once.”38
In the discussion of the Indian Atlantic, myths of the American Indian, the roles of the cultural broker and familial language has been at the core of Native American and Euro-American relations. It is therefore crucial to gain an insight into both sides of the Indian Atlantic and scrutinize how these factors influenced behavior and thought on a personal level.
Only then one can start to understand how a dynamic world like the Indian Atlantic came about and developed throughout the years.
2. Alexis de Tocqueville
When one reads Two Weeks in the Wilderness, it becomes clear how Tocqueville’s opinions about Native Americans had been formed by prejudices about the ‘savage race’ that circled in the Indian Atlantic. As a man of his time, it was nearly impossible for the philosopher to be unbiased. However, as his contact with the Indians intensified, Tocqueville became charmed by their “expression of cheerfulness” that beamed with goodwill. He even notified the reader that throughout his travelogue, his description of the indigenous man would become “both more honorable and more equitable.”39 Moreover, the Frenchman became more aware of the
ruling stereotypes of the wildling outside of the wilderness by hearing more than one pioneer talk more favorable about the Native American than his fellow American.40 This first-hand
exposure towards the similarities between the two races induced the philosopher to become more empathetic of the Indian race. Tocqueville therefore included a description of an Indian man in his travelogue that was penetrated with admiration. The man in question looked stoical at the logs of his “European brothers,” for he could not grasp the idea that one would decline into the shameful servitude that the colonist called ‘industry’. According to the French philosopher, the Native American was already so content with a leafy tent and a land full of game, that he wouldn’t dare to ask more.41 The use of kinship terminology was a sign that
Tocqueville thought of the Indians as empathetic beings, who saw themselves as different yet equal to the American. Even though the Native man couldn’t understand the American, at least he tried to.
Furthermore, by assuming to know what the Native Americans that he came into contact with were thinking, Tocqueville was using his own sense of empathy. The Frenchman acknowledged the suffering of Indians; they were losing their land and lives to pioneers who had a “completely insensitive attitude, a kind of cold and relentless selfishness” towards the native peoples.42 The only thing that the Native American dreamt of was, according to
Tocqueville, a future full of untouched forests. The philosopher observed a helpless, unhappy and harmless people who were naïve and therefore prone to be the victim of deceit.
Tocqueville deemed it “pitiful” for the Native Americans to see the superiority of their “civilized European brothers” shine through in the way trade was conducted. It had become more and more challenging for Euro-Americans to fool the Indian about the value of a
product. Yet, the former would never express this thought so directly, to avoid any personal shame. The colonist thus perfected his vocabulary and remained as respectable a business man as before.43 Tocqueville was torn between feeling delighted about the superiority of the
merchant and having empathy for the childlike innocence of the Indian man. He recognized the Indian’s torment but couldn’t help admiring the colonist’s resourcefulness.
2.1 Superior yet empathetic
Of course, the philosopher still supported the claim that the white race was superior to other races. The fact that Tocqueville lived in a time and place where ethnocentrism and
imperialism were at the core of every interaction between Europeans and non-Europeans made it impossible for him not to be influenced by the ruling stereotypes of race. According to Tocqueville, the European colonist was the “epitome of man,” which made the Indigenous peoples of the American lands, the Native race, self-evidently “inferior to him.”44 Moreover,
Tocqueville was convinced that the Native American’s ingrained passivism and false perception of superiority would eventually lead him into evanescence.45 However, he didn’t
believe that racial differences in competence were innate, resistant to change and in accordance with laws of natural hegemony – a theory strongly advocated by Tocqueville’s dear friend Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau.
Gobineau published his Essai sur l’inegalité des races humaines in 1853. He claimed there to be an unequal division of three races – the white, yellow and black – that each had their own capabilities and limits due to their nature. Human equality was a chimera to
Gobineau; only the white race was capable of making a truly great contribution to this world. It would therefore be idle to civilize the yellow and black race, for they would never be able to stand at the same rank as the white man. In other words: Gobineau repudiated the idea of empathizing with Native Americans. There was more to his deterministic view; Tocqueville’s friend believed society to be doomed. Throughout time, more and more interracial breeding had brought mixed-blood offspring into the world. Gobineau claimed it to have resulted in a condemned degenerate society, because only a people with pure blood would survive the wretchedness of time.
Throughout the years, Gobineau and Tocqueville discussed the content of Gobineau’s work in several letters. Even though he greatly admired Gobineau, Tocqueville was not able
to refrain himself from quarreling with him. Gobineau’s viewpoint directly opposed the other Frenchman’s liberal theory of the perfectibility of man: “The destiny of man, either as an individual or as a nation, is what he wants to make of it.”46 Not only did Tocqueville not
believe in the inequality of men, he also deemed it to be a very dangerous theory, for it restrained human liberty. The doctrine would bring out “all the evils that permanent inequality creates – pride, violence, the contempt of fellow men, tyranny, and abjectness under all its forms” and eliminate empathy towards the inferior. Tocqueville believed doom not to
originate from a mixed blood society, but from a futile future prospective. By convincing the inferior races that they wouldn’t be able to alleviate their quality of life, humanity as a whole would relapse due to a lack of reasoning.47 This relapse had already sprouted; according to
Tocqueville, Gobineau reinforced the “greatest malady of their time”: the existing notion that man wasn’t capable of anything.48 The perniciousness of such a notion is in the body of
thought it suggests; by becoming habituated to a disillusion of men in general, one would be quick to lose his empathy.
One could claim that Tocqueville was especially disappointed in Gobineau for possibly paralyzing the white man’s empathy towards the inferior races. Even though Tocqueville believed in the individual capability of man to ameliorate himself, he did acknowledge that it was an impossible task for the black and red man to reach this goal without the help of the white race. The French philosopher had already, much to his discomfort, predicted the extermination of the Indian race and adherence to the doctrine would certainly bring that ominous nemesis closer to reality.49
Historian George Fredrickson defined racism as “a belief in the innate inferiority of the Other.”50 This definition posits Gobineau in the racist Herrenvolk category – but not
Tocqueville. Rather, Tocqueville believed that race was a culturally and educationally determined concept. When discussing the southern American view of the black race, he emphasized how the sentiment of racial superiority isn’t congenital but nurtured from the cradle onwards: “From birth, the [southern American’s] first conception of life teaches him that he is born to give orders and the first habit he learns is that of effortless domination.”51
The sharp contrast with the slave-free north of America convinced the philosopher that
46Alexis de Tocqueville, Selected Letters on Politics and Society, ed. Roger Boesche, trans. James Toupin and Roger Boesche, (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1985), 375, 300.
47 Ibid., 298-299. 48 Ibid., 303.
Gobineau’s belief was seriously flawed. A race could be superior to another, but this hierarchy was dynamic. Tocqueville understood a culture’s traditional customs and ideas as the basis of this fluid principle. However, the probability of the Euro-Americans to change their mores was miniscule; exactly the power of their race to establish democratic freedom was at the core of their pride. Except for when someone with differing opinions about religion, country, and race would come to power, the mores would be subject to change, otherwise, “[a] whole nation could not possibly rise, as it were, above itself.”52
The tension between Tocqueville’s belief in the perfectibility of the individual on the one hand and the recognition of very slowly changing mores on the other hand was
extensively elaborated upon by Fredrickson. He saw the Frenchman as a republican liberal or liberal republican and stated these titles were not juxtaposing each other per se.53 Fredrickson
noticed Tocqueville having doubts about the actual prospect of the native race moving out of barbarism, as he deemed Gobineau’s scientific racism to be “probably wrong” yet “very certainly pernicious.”54 Believing that the Indian man could become civilized granted a
possibility, however small, but without this belief there was certainly no option for him to ameliorate.
That did not mean Tocqueville was confident that human equality would actually root in the United States. According to Fredrickson, there was a “fine line between the biological racism that Tocqueville rejected and his fatalism about the prospects of changing the mores and social habits that distinguished the three races, separated them, and brought them into deadly conflict.”55 One could wonder how Tocqueville refuted Gobineau’s doctrine while
having little trust himself in the capability of Euro-Americans to thrive through empathy and equality. Fredrickson rightfully broached the limited capability of the philosopher’s liberal thoughts. The historian deducted Tocqueville’s words to an unprecedented conclusion: a democracy relied on the ethnic solidarity of its citizens in order to succeed and remain stable. For the United States, this meant that the democracy was thriving exactly because of the fact that the black and native races were disenfranchised.56 According to Fredrickson, it led
Tocqueville to perceive an unsolvable problem:
Localized white majorities would never give up their racial privileges. It would thus take some form of centralized dictatorship to accomplish such a revolutionary change.
In other words, one might readily conclude that the virtues of American democracy were inseparable from its vices and that one could not have one without the other. Left to itself as an expression of the liberty and equality of the white majority, American democracy would never treat blacks and Indians fairly and decently. Only by
undermining the liberty and self-government of the whites would it become possible to emancipate the blacks and protect the Indians. It was a dilemma for which Tocqueville saw no resolution.57
Thus, the liberty of the white man would have to be compromised in order for the other races to thrive. The myth of the vanishing Indian slowly turned into reality, and it had torn the Frenchman’s liberal belief. What was best for humanity was not simultaneously blossoming one’s society, hence the only hope for the native and black races was a
revolutionary benevolent president. Yet Tocqueville refused to let his empathetic capacities become paralyzed. The 19th century world was his context frame and he knew change would
take time. His empathy was therefore directed at the livelihood of the native race; if they only stood tall long enough, their white brother might invite them to society after all.
2.2 The Christian duty
Tocqueville was very skeptic of the colonist’s Herrenvolk attitude; he believed it to be hypocrite. In Two Weeks in the Wilderness, he illustrated the pitilessness of the
Euro-Americans by quoting a colonist who believed that the owners of America were the ones who could profit from it. Tocqueville juxtaposed this convict with the words that every American heard in church: “men are brothers and (…) the everlasting Being, who has fashioned each of them upon the same model, has given them all the duty of helping one another.”58 By
mentioning the content of the gospel, the Frenchman highlighted the innate double standard of the colonist. If Christianity entailed lending a helping hand to your fellow man, the Native American was simply not seen as human. Tocqueville recognized that double standard as a weakness, because the sentiment of American exceptionalism could only be harmonized with the opposing principle of human brotherhood “at the expense of logic.” This entailed
randomly discharging some religious beliefs in order to sustain the balance between
of empathy, and therefore chose to exclude the Indian American from democratic participation.
Tocqueville was drawn to the idea that all free men believed.60 Yet, how could a man
believe without compromising his personal convictions? In other words: how could the Euro-American be a convinced Christian while abandoning his Christian duty to sympathize with his fellow man and to help the indigenous race? In a democratic state, there was a different connection to believing than in a religious state. As the Frenchman saw religion as a useful tool to achieve happiness and importance in one’s life, he conceded that it would have to “avoid colliding unnecessarily with generally accepted ideas and the permanent interests which exist in the mass of people.” It would be impossible for Christianity in the United States not to be influenced by social and political circumstances. Even though the gospel was saturated with anti-capitalistic sermons, American priests would refrain from translating this into a constraining dogma. Instead, the preacher confined himself to the boundaries of the church to guide intelligence while respecting the already existing intellect of his followers. He did not try to adopt a different position from his fellow citizen, since the public opinion maintained the popularity of the Christian church. The Euro-American was thus still completely in charge of his day-to-day affairs.61
Notwithstanding that Tocqueville recognized and admired the vastness of the Christian belief in the United States, he did not approve of the biological racism that sprouted from public opinion. Through his letters to Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau, his disdain for the
seemingly hypocrite Christians that believed in innate inferiority translated into words quite strikingly. Tocqueville couldn’t comprehend how one could reconcile the racist doctrine with the theory of Christianity; the self-evidence of the unity of man was undeniable in Genesis. Moreover, the quintessential trait of the religion was to “abolish all distinctions of race (…) and [make] only one human species, all of whose members were equally capable of perfecting themselves and of becoming alike.” The human family that Tocqueville believed in so
vigorously would cease to exist if men adhered to Gobineau’s creed. Men would no longer be brothers – solely cousins at best. Even though Tocqueville had experienced the boundaries of Christianity’s power in the United States, he refused to see that as a standard for the believer’s understanding of one another. He therefore boldly concluded his letter to Gobineau with his
faith that most Christians wouldn’t “feel the least sympathy for [his] doctrines.”62 In other
words: one should have sympathy for his fellow man, for everyone was equal.
2.3 A man in his time and place
When one scrutinizes Tocqueville’s work, it is pivotal to consider the time and place that he lived in. The prevailing Eurocentric gaze held sway not solely on the colonists, but also on the scrutiny of the foreign Frenchman. With that been said, it was out of question that Tocqueville thought of his race as superior. His choice to still describe the Native American and Euro-American as ‘brothers’, is thus noteworthy. Tocqueville prognosticated the extinction of the Native race; hence he believed the Indian to be vanishing. Using familial language was a way to illustrate the tense relationship between the Euro-American and the Indian; Tocqueville strikingly showed the false egalitarianism that dominated the discourse. There was no brotherly equality, yet Tocqueville did believe in the virtue of that. His empathy for the Native American shone through the carefully chosen kin-related terminology to describe him, for this custom generally represents the close connection that one has with another. Familial language was therefore a powerful tool to create a sphere of exclusive intimacy and
understanding.
The Euro-American pseudo-kinship with the natives was already existent; it had proved to be quite a successful tool of both rhetoric and emotion. Yet, as Tocqueville’s encounters with Native Americans proved to be more fruitful than his prejudices had molded him to believe, his own stance grew more respectful. Tocqueville did not just describe the Indian man; he even tried to describe his thoughts. This was a clear sign of empathy, because without it he would not have attempted to understand the Native American. Tocqueville understood Indian torment but could not escape from acknowledging white superiority. However, it did not mean that he agreed with scientific racism. According to Tocqueville, every man had the capability to create his own destiny. Creating a futile future prospective would be dangerous to human liberty and therefore it had to be evaded at all costs.
Tocqueville foresaw that a paralyzed sense of the white man’s empathy would doom the native race.
Furthermore, a lack of empathy was contradictory to the Christian belief that so many Euro-Americans adhered to. The gospel preached the equality of men and taught its followers
considered this to be a weakness of American exceptionalism: it went against logic. The preacher confined himself to the realm of non-binding guidance in order to retain the American liberty. Yet, Tocqueville deemed it hypocritical to unify biologically racist
doctrines with the theory of Christianity. Not only was its core value that all men were created equal; it was idiosyncratic to the religion that all members were able to ameliorate themselves and ultimately be all the same. For all the doubts that Tocqueville had about the future of man, a few things were certain: he did believe in both the liberal and Christian theory that all men could perfect themselves due to their equableness and his use of familial language was a sign that Native Americans deserved empathy exactly because of those beliefs.
3. George Copway / Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh
As an Indian writer who published in English, Copway was an exception to the anglophone rule. His Methodist education in Canada had led him to convert his fellow Native man in American missions, while being able to vocalize the weaknesses of Western culture. Moving from British-ruled Canada to the U.S. while still remaining inside of original Ojibwa territory (the land stretches out over Ontario, Quebec and Manitoba as well as over modern-day Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota and North Dakota), Copway had the option to represent multiple national identities. Literary scholars Tim Fulford and Kevin Hutchings have noted that Copway was one of the Native Americans that functioned as a cultural broker: a person who had know-how of contrasting cultures and used it to mediate himself and the people he represented to an improved position by playing roles – thereby blurring the lines of secluded nationalism. In doing so, Copway could copy “the romanticisation of nature and of Native Americans made by Wordsworth, Southey and Byron” to suit his “rhetorical and political needs.”63 George Copway’s hybrid identity was a part of his mission to lead himself and his
Native brethren to a favored position within the dominant white society. The collision of the two completely different worlds was undeniable, and therefore needed to be molded to his own advantage.
Historian Robert Penner argued that Copway belonged to the arising group of Algonquian intellectuals who considered “the European settlement of North America [to be] a catastrophe, but it was a catastrophe that could yet be turned into a triumph of Christianity.”64
Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh’s position as a cultural broker has resulted in numerous accounts of seemingly paradoxical reasoning, which were frequently rhetoric maneuvers. The kinship vocabulary that Copway used, was a way to gain empathy from his audience. By being a member of a North American Indian tribe that had to deal with encroachment and consequently preaching the gospel as a converted Christian, Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh was both an outsider to the Ojibwa Nation and prone to discrimination by his fellow white missionaries. He therefore represented – in some ways – the pathetic life of an Indian man in his time.
3.1 Equality as a self-evident standard
At the young age of 16, the converted Methodist Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh was sent to the Ka-wa-we-non mission on the southeastern part of Lake Superior in 1834. This was followed up with a residence in the La Pointe mission in Wisconsin, where he stayed until 1836. Back in his home of the Rice Lake area in Canada, he was called upon by Rev. John Clark to serve as a Native teacher of the Methodist religion to fellow Ojibwas. He accepted the task with much apprehension: he felt “very unwilling to go.” In his autobiography The Life, History, and
Travels of Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh, Copway explained his mental state. The responsibilities of
the job made him insecure, as he was just “an unlearned and feeble Red man.”65 A few years
and a lot of religious assessments further – he translated the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles into Ojibwa, consequently set up a mission at Lac Court Oreilles, Wisconsin, and received education to become a missionary at the Ebenezer Manual Labor School near
Jacksonville, Illinois66 – Copway was ready to work as a missionary. As he learned how to
read the Bible in English and carry out the gospel in his second language, Copway grew out of his own perceived incompetence. Donald B. Smith has noted that Rev. Sherman Hall, who was the missionary that George translated the gospel with, wrote about the young teacher turned preacher in a somewhat alarming manner. According to Hall, Copway believed his judgement on missionary affairs in Ojibwa land to be just as credible as that of his superiors – if not more. Hall argued that Copway “would not be happy, if he felt that his movements were to be directed by others.”67 The Native man considered himself to stand on the same foot as
the white preachers, which signaled he wasn’t inclined to submit to prevailing racial ranks. As George returned back home to Rice Lake in 1839 after an absence of five years and four months, he attended the General Council of the Nation. There he met the Toronto-based English gentleman Captain Howell: the father of his future wife Elizabeth. Only half a year after Copway met Ms. Howell, she became Mrs. Copway. The former admired Elizabeth very much, as she had endured and “sacrificed so much in becoming the partner of an Indian missionary.”68 According to Smith, the sacrifice had to do with fighting the marital standards
of that time; it was certainly not common for a white woman to marry an Indian, not to mention the daughter of a gentleman. Elizabeth went against the advice of her family, which
65 George Copway, The Life, History, and Travels of Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh (George Copway), a Young Indian
Chief of the Ojebwa Nation, a Convert to the Christian Faith, and a Missionary to His People for Twelve Years; With a Sketch of the Present State of the Ojebwa Nation, in Regard to Christianity and Their Future Prospects.
resulted in an absence of familial witnesses at the Copway-Howell wedding.69
Notwithstanding that George Copway recognized the compromises that Elizabeth had made for them two to be together, he did not anticipate on the level of curiosity their marriage provoked in Buffalo, New York:
What a curious, inquisitive, and teasing people, some of the Yankees are! Yet, they are very friendly withal, for every one seemed to be striving to induce us to go to their homes to take tea and to pass the night. I had been married but a few days, and the following were some of the questions put to me : – “How did you obtain your wife?" “Where were you married?” “Did her father consent?” “How many of your people have married our white women?” These, and similar inquiries were constantly made, and were exceedingly annoying.70
Even though he did not record his responses, the passage proved Copway to be shocked by all the questions regarding his wedding. After all, the man was a Canadian
Methodist missionary who obviously commanded respect from his fellow citizen. The Ojibwa man did not wish his marriage to be regarded as an anomaly – if he did, he would not have uttered his discontent about the repeated inquiry. In this sense, Copway was ahead of his time; the self-evidence of the interracial marriage was obvious to him and he wished for others to see it like that too.
3.2 Prestige in Europe
Copway strived for a position as a leading father figure to the Native American community. He was aware of his prominent role in changing perspectives for Indians: instead of the mere ‘noble savage’ myth, he could give his people an eloquent voice. George Copway therefore needed the European to see all Native Americans as capable of achieving the same intellect. By ascribing the title ‘brethren’ to his fellow North American Indians, Copway placed all Indians on equal foot with himself.71 It was thus all the more important that he would come
across as credible.
However, it was obvious that Copway desired personal acknowledgement as well. By writing his autobiography – a practice that was highly uncommon for a Native person to do – and following that up with a travelogue, he deliberately shone a light on himself. The books
self-evidently emphasized the author’s intellect and integrity. According to Donald B. Smith, it showed “yet another departure from the culture of his people.”72 Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh’s
reputation was flawed within the Ojibwa community; Smith noted an account of an Ojibwa chief and two leading tribe members who accused Copway of taking £25 out of the tribe’s fund without permission in 1846. Combined with another accusation of embezzlement within the Grand Council of the Methodist Ojibwas of Canada West, Copway ended up in Toronto’s prison for a few weeks. Being expelled as a missionary and distrusted by his Native tribe, Copway needed to regain his reputation elsewhere. His autobiography turned out to be his redemption, as it went through seven printings.73
The autobiography made Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh’s status switch from degenerate missionary to celebrated writer and lecturer, which gave him the drive to take it one step further. In 1848, he suggested to the U.S. Congress the creation of Kah-ge-ga: an independent Indian territory of 30,000 square kilometers in present-day central and southeastern South-Dakota. The region would be populated by 100,000 Native Americans, who’d all receive Christian education. Smith characterized Copway as vain, because he named the proposed territory after himself.74 Bernd C. Peyer even claimed Copway’s pride to have risen to
“somewhat dizzy heights and fast approaching the levels of megalomania.”75 Possibly, the
Ojibwa man’s fame had turned him aloof. Yet, there was more to Kah-ge-ga than meets the eye. In a time in which many a place carried the name of its creator or endorser – Copway had lived in Jacksonville, which was named after President Jackson – it could have inspired Copway to suggest his own name for the proposed territory. Moreover, the meaning of Kah-ge-ga, which is ‘Ever-to-be’, indicated a symbolic nod to the perseverance of the Indian race.76 The actual plan to realize an Indian territory entailed more than sheer conceit as well.
Instead of merely enjoying his celebrity status, Copway was arguably trying to rectify the suspicion of his Native tribe towards himself. He remained vocal about his Indian roots and engaged in creating a permanent residence for his Native brethren in the midst of Indian Removal. His Indian nationalism and personal ambition caused him to act up; he was convinced that in order to become the American’s intellectual equals, Indians required the same educational and religious background while retaining their culture.
