By Alex Oreskes, Class of 2018

After the War of 1812, white Americans, Europeans, and Native Americans all knew with certainty that the United States of America did exist and probably would continue to exist for some time. For white Americans, this raised a few questions. What defines this new country? What defines the people who live in it? In brief, who are we? Many Americans had at least one answer in mind: not European. For American artists, this posed a challenge. They needed to make their own art that would define the nation.  The European Romantic movement had found inspiration in ruins embedded in nature, fertile ground for elegy and lamentation. However, there were no huge ruins in the United States. The only past there was to romanticise was nature itself and the Native Americans. Thus, American romanticists such as the Hudson River School built a romantic image of the past which contained scenes of sweeping nature and noble Indians, all of which were gone or disappearing. However, Native Americans like Elias Boudinot of the Cherokee Nation pushed back by trying to give a modern view of their people. By linking Native Americans to a romantic vision of the past, white American artists yoked Native Americans to a past that was fast disappearing in favor of progress, and allowed themselves to believe that the disappearance of Native Americans was just a part of the growth of their new nation. Native Americans themselves saw the necessity of trying to fight against this fatal romanticism, and made an effort to show they could live alongside the modern United States.

Thomas Cole, one of the most prominent artists in the Hudson River school, in particular linked Native Americans to his romanticized landscapes, which he viewed as rapidly, lamentably, disappearing. In his painting, Falls of Kaaterskill, a lone Native American stands on one side of a water fall, surrounded by the forest, across from a rainbow, and, beneath the falls, dead trees litter the rocks (Thomas Cole, Falls of Kaaterskill 1826). The Native American’s clothing is the same color as the surrounding leaves and Cole embeds him squarely in the middle of this natural scene. Moreover, the unstrung bow in his hand mimics the bare tree branches all around him. This Native American figure is unmistakably linked to the landscape surrounding him. However, the beauty of this landscape is disappearing, even in a still painting. A rainbow, a transient beauty, dominates the other side of the waterfall. Moreover, a large dead tree, an image of death and decay, takes up the bottom of the painting. Cole echoes these themes in another painting: The Clove, Catskills. A Native American figure stands on a rock with a shaded autumn forest in the middleground and a dead tree in a dark space to his right (Thomas Cole, The Clove, Catskills 1827). Here again, the reds of the figure’s dress match the reds of the fall trees. Moreover, the figure does not necessarily appear at first glance because he blends into the shadow cast by the trees. The dead tree and the darkness in the far right of the painting again add a dark note of mortality into this otherwise vibrant scene. In both paintings, the Native American figure is painted to make him appear as part of the landscape—not an inhabitant of the landscape. Cole makes an effort to remind the viewer the landscape is mortal and fragile, and Cole is very conscious that expanding American industry, such as the Catskill tanning industry, is destroying the nature he is immortalising. (When he painted the Kaaterskill falls, there was already a safety rail for tourists which he left out). By linking the Native Americans to the nature they live in, he also suggests that those Native Americans are casualties of American expansion. Even in trying to emphasize that nature should be preserved, Cole implies that the destruction of Native Americans goes hand in hand with the progress of the United States.

In the play, Metamora; or, the Last of the Wampanoags (which premiered in 1829), King Philip, the famous Native American leader who fought the New England colonies in 1675, is likewise treated as a noble warrior who found his defeat at the hands of expanding colonies—a defeat of equal parts tragedy and inevitability. As Metamora, who white settlers knew as King Philip, lies dying in the last scene, he gives his swan song:

My curses on you, white men! May the Great Spirit curse you when he speaks in his war voice      from the clouds! Murderers! The last of the Wampanoags’ curse be on you! May your graves and the graves of your children be in the path the red man shall trace! And may the wolf and panther howl o’er your fleshless bones, fit banquet for the destroyers! Spirits of the grave, I come! But the curse of Metamora stays with the white man! (Jill Lepore, The Name of War, 191)

Again, the piece links Native Americans to the land. Metamora wants the Great Spirit to speak “from the clouds” and the remains of the whites to be desecrated by “the wolf and the panther.” More importantly, the tragedy in this death monologue comes from how futile Metamora’s curse is and how inevitable his destruction. Metamora wants “the graves of your children [to] be in the path the red man shall trace.” However, the audience of Metamora—at least in the North, where Native American tribes had been mostly expelled—would be aware that such a reversal of fortune was near impossible. Moreover, to a Christian audience, “the Great Spirit” is fantasy and Metamora is invoking the wrath of an imaginary god. Metamora’s curse is sad and tragic because it never comes true. Furthermore, the white audience already knows Metamora as “the last of the Wampanoags” who has been destroyed by the onslaught of the “white men.” The dramatic irony of this scene allows the audience to see Metamora as foolish and, therefore, think of his defeat as naturally proceeding from his misconceptions. The scene is tragic because Metamora believes in a false god, and can not discern the tide of history. Thus, his destruction was inevitable. Even when a Native American is the tragic hero of a play, white artists burden him with the inevitability of defeat, and, while tragic, they ultimately portray these events as the natural course of history.

Native Americans, such as the Cherokee Nation, tried to escape from this characterization by proving that they could modernise their nation along a Western model and, in so doing, move their cultural presence into the present. In 1826, Elias Boudinot, a member of the Cherokee nation, only months after the Creek had lost much of their territory and with support for the removal of Native American tribes growing, asked a group of Philadelphian elites to support the Cherokee’s cause. In trying to prove the Cherokee had substantially modernized, Boudinot claimed that “there is not a single family in the nation, that can be said to subsist on the slender support which the wilderness can afford” (Elias Boudinot, An Address to the Whites, 1882). Boudinot wants to make it clear that the Cherokee no longer live off “the wilderness.” Thus, they are no longer like the hunters of Cole’s paintings, living amongst disappearing nature and have instead adapted to a more stable mode of life. To further this point, Boudinot describes how in sixteen years the number of pigs in the Cherokee Nation doubled, the number of wagons more than quintupled, and the number of ploughs sextupled (Boudinot, 1883). Boudinot is specifically trying to show that the Cherokee are now following a Western model of large scale agriculture and that they have abandoned their traditional ways. In so doing, Boudinot pushes the white American image of the Cherokee into the future by cutting their ties to the past which Cole and Metamora are romanticising. However, Boudinot is not challenging this tragic and romanticised vision of Native Americans in the past, only trying to escape from it. Boudinot says of the Cherokee Nation that “Their fathers were born in darkness, and have died in darkness; without your assistance so will their sons” (Boudinot, 1886). Boudinot freely states that the Cherokee were in “darkness” not long ago, and plays into the notion that they were tragically primitive. Moreover, he does not refute the idea that the natural course of nature will keep their sons in darkness. Boudinot is in essence agreeing that the Native Americans are tragically ignorant like Metamora and, therefore, vulnerable to an expansionist United States. Boudinot’s point of departure is that the “assistance” of white Americans could easily reverse this trend and the destruction of Native Americans is not an unavoidable consequence of the growth of the United States. Boudinot exemplifies that Native Americans did not passively accept their consignment to the past and, in fact, tried to make white Americans see them as part of the present.

However, we know that Boudinot’s efforts were not successful. Four years after he gave “An Address to the Whites”, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act. Nine year after that, the Cherokee lost their legal battle and the government forced off their homeland in the Trail of Tears. In the end, the romanticists won out. In our day and age, most white Americans don’t think much about Native Americans. Perhaps they remember some of the history they learned in school. Maybe they have read Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales or seen Pocahontas or gambled at Mohegan Sun or are fans of the Washington Redskins. White Americans view today’s Native Americans as the remnants of a sad tragedy, but an irreversible one. This paper itself, by looking at Native Americans through their characterization in the past, is perhaps guilty of linking them to the past. Artists like Cole and Cooper probably didn’t think about the fact that they were launching an act of cultural warfare. In trying to find out what this new American nation was they obfuscated the lives of peoples who had lived on the continent for generations. The Cherokee did not disappear after they walked the Trail of Tears. They live to this day on the other end of that trail, in Oklahoma and North Carolina. It is not within the scope of this paper to discuss how Americans should move past this tyranny of images, but it is no secret that “Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.”

Work Cited

Lepore, Jill. The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity. New

York, NY: Vintage Books, 1999.

Boudinot, Elias. An Address to the Whites (as quoted in the Riverdale Constructing America

Reader). 1826.