Colonial Literature and the Native Author

Indigeneity and Empire

Jane Stafford

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9783319387666
• eBook ISBN: 9783319387673
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

This book is the first study of writers who are both Victorian and indigenous, who have been educated in and write in terms of Victorian literary conventions, but whose indigenous affiliation is part of their literary personae and subject matter.What happens when the colonised, indigenous, or 'native' subject learns to write in the literary language of empire? If the romanticised subject of colonial literature becomes the author, is a new kind of writing produced, or does the native author conform to the models of the coloniser?
By investigating the ways that nineteenth-century concerns are adopted, accommodated, rewritten, challenged, re-inscribed, confronted, or assimilated in the work of these authors, this study presents a novel examination of the nature of colonial literary production and indigenous authorship, as well as suggesting to the discipline of colonial and postcolonial studies a perhaps unsettling perspective with which to look at the larger patterns of Victorian cultural and literary formation.

© The Author(s) 2016

Jane StaffordColonial Literature and the Native Author10.1007/978-3-319-38767-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: ‘I Adopt the Language of the Poet’

Jane Stafford¹

(1)

School of English, Film, Theatre and Med, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand

End Abstract

Once more I see my fathers’ land

Upon the beach, where oceans roar;

Where whiten’d bones bestrew the sand,

Of some brave warrior of yore.

The groves, where once my fathers roam’d –

The rivers, where the beaver dwelt –

The lakes, where angry waters foam’d –

Their charms, with my fathers, have fled.

O! Tell me, ye ‘pale faces,’ tell,

Where have my proud ancestors gone?

Whose smoke curled up from every dale,

To what land have their free spirits flown?

Whose wigwams stood where cities rise;

On whose war-paths the steam-horse flies;

And ships, like mon-e-doos in disguise,

Approach the shore in endless files.

From The Life, History, and Travelsof Kah-Ge-Ga-Gah-Bowh (George Copway), 1847.¹

In the English language, using the rhetorical forms of English literature, an Ojibwa reflects on mid-nineteenth-century Canada. The land before him, once his ancestors’, now has, as its sole marker of Indigenous inhabitation, ‘whitened bones’. The Ojibwa past can be evoked only imaginatively by a negative construction in which the speaker describes what is no longer there: groves, rivers, lakes, all linked visually by italicisation – ‘groves’, ‘rivers’, ‘lakes’ – along with the idea of their aesthetic power, their ‘charms’. This natural habitat has retreated before the settler presence and with it the Indigenous occupiers, their wigwams and smoking fires. What is actually before the speaker are the cities, ships and trains of the modern European nation, the technologies that displace the now-doomed original inhabitants of the place. ‘Where have my proud ancestors gone…To what land have their free spirits flown?’, the second stanza asks. But the question here is pointedly addressed to those who now possess and control this information, the ‘pale faces’. The erasure has been so complete that even the certainties of Indigenous metaphysics, the geography of the afterlife, have been lost. In the bone-littered present, the only spiritual reference is contained in metaphor: the encroaching settlers’ ships are ‘like mon-e-doos in disguise’.

The Ojibwa word ‘mon-e-doos’, with its linguistic specificity, contrasts with and acts against the conventional and generalised European rhetoric of the surrounding poem, its groves and dales. The book Life, History, and Travels by Copway has already introduced his readers to the mon-e-doos when he describes the world he inhabited before his conversion to Christianity:

You will see that I served the imaginary gods of my poor blind father. I was out early and late in quest of the favors of the Mon-e-doos (spirits), who, it was said, were numerous – who filled the air! At early dawn I watched the rising of the palace of the Great Spirit – the sun – who, it was said, made the world!… On the mountain top, or along the valley, or the water brook, I searched for some kind of intimation from the spirits who made their residence in the noise of the water falls.²

Copway identifies the Great Spirit as Ke-sha-mon-e-doo. He is terrible; he ‘shrouds himself in rolling white and dark clouds’; but at the same time, he is nurturing, manifest in the power, but also the bounty of the natural world:

His benevolence I saw in the running of the streams, for the animals to quench their thirst and the fishes to live; the fruit of the earth teamed wherever I looked. Every thing I saw smilingly said Ke-sha-mon-e-doo nin-ge-oo-she-ig – the Benevolent spirit made me.³

In translating the concepts of Indigenous religion into his English text, Copway falls naturally into the language of Romanticism, which becomes the bridge between his original belief system and the Christianity of his conversion:

I was born in nature’s wide domain! The trees were all that sheltered my infant limbs – the blue heavens all that covered me. I am one of nature’s children; I have always admired her; she shall be my glory; her features – her robes, and the wreath about her brow – the seasons – her stately oaks, and the evergreen – her hair – ringlets over the earth, all contribute to my enduring love of her; and wherever I see her, emotions of pleasure roll in my breast and swell and burst like waves on the shores of the ocean, in prayer and praise to Him, who has placed me in her hand.⁴

In a trajectory that William Wordsworth would have found entirely familiar, the language here moves easily from ‘nature’ to a personified and female ‘Nature’ to ‘Him who has placed me in her hand’. Bernd Peyer describes this as a ‘topical naturist-nativist tribute to the American wilderness’ and notes that ‘Copway seemed to personify the two predominant strands in liberal white attitudes towards Indians: romantic primitivism (the vanishing act) and benevolent reformism (the transformation act)’.⁵ The literary conventions of Romanticism are made to fit exactly with Copway’s narrative of Christian conversion. As the young Copway’s natural religion is replaced by his new Christian belief, so the unreflecting child who inhabits the natural world, who has an instinctive grasp of its immanence, changes into the adult, marked not only by separation but also by reflection, by knowing rather than being. As Wordsworth says of his childhood,

That time is past,

And all its aching joys are now no more…

Not for this

Faint I, nor mourn, nor murmur; other gifts

Have followed – for such loss, I would believe,

Abundant recompense.⁶

Christianity is thus presented not as an alternative to Copway’s original belief, but as its natural extension. It is his questioning of Ke-sha-mon-e-doo’s ‘will concerning me and the rest of the Indian race’ that leads him to ‘a true heaven – not in the far-setting sun, where the Indian anticipated a rest, a home for his spirit – but in the bosom of the Highest’.⁷ His instinctive relationship with a harmoniously spiritualised natural world is not rejected but is found to lack the teleology of what he presents as the more complex and intellectually satisfying Christianity.

In chapter 5 of his Life, Copway returns to this point when he quotes from Pope’s ‘An Essay on Man’:

Lo! the poor Indian whose untutored mind,

Sees God in Clouds, or hears him in the wind;

Whose soul’s proud science never taught to stray,

Beyond the solar walk or milky way.

Yet simple nature his hopes has given

Beyond the cloud top’d hill a humble heaven,

Some safer world in depths of woods embrace,

Some Island in the watery space,

Where slaves once more their native land behold,

No fiends torment, nor Christian thirsts for gold. ⁸

The original context of Pope’s passage is that of slavery rather than of settler displacement. Pope’s Indians desire a ‘safer world’ that replicates their now lost ‘native land’, a world freed from the torments of captivity and the exploitative economy that attends it. Copway uses the quotation in a description of his father’s conversion. In contrast to the lyrical account he has given of his own seamless move from pagan gods to Christian God, the comparison between his father’s beliefs and Christianity is more abrupt. While Pope’s picture of natural religion, seeing ‘God in Clouds…and hear[ing] him in the wind’, might parallel the Life’s earlier description of the Ojibwa world view, here Copway emphasises the limitations of this ‘humble heaven’ of the ‘poor Indian’. ‘A carnal heaven, indeed!’ he exclaims, ‘A sensual paradise! Oh! the credulous and misguided Indian…Little then did [my father] know of a heaven revealed in the gospel’.⁹

Copway’s use of the literary language of his European education is apparent not just from the way that he plays off one literary register against another. It is also demonstrated in the way his prose Life is punctuated by poetic excerpts: Methodist hymns and aphorisms, English translations and versifications of Ojibwa material (both his and those of other authors), literary quotations and poetry of his own composition. All these sources connect his narrative to wider discourses: of Christianity, especially that of Methodist missionary endeavours; of ethnographic Indigenous record; of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literary canon. These insertions are various but not decorative or random. The poem ‘Once more I see my fathers’ land’ comes after an account of his travels to the cities of the north-eastern United States where the extreme effects of settler presence and Indigenous dispossession are at their most obvious. The text of Charles Wesley’s hymn, ‘O for a thousand tongues to sing/ My great Redeemer’s praise’ is quoted after his account of his father’s conversion, an increase of one in the number of praising tongues. Next to the hymn’s English text is the Ojibwa version, ‘Oh uh pa-gish ke che ingo’dwok/ Neej uh ne she nah baig’, another way in which more ‘tongues’ – in this context, languages – are enlisted in the work of praising the Christian God.¹⁰ In chapter 3, the translated Ojibwa ‘War Song’ connects Copway both with a bloodthirsty past and with contemporary ethnographic collectors of Indigenous material. ‘War Song’, he states, ‘was first translated for Colonel McKinney, “the Indian’s friend,” on the shores of Lake Superior’. The theme of the song is the cyclical nature of vengeance and destruction in inter-tribal warfare: ‘[o]ur youths grown to men, to the war [we’ll] lead again,’/ And our days, like our fathers’, we’ll end – we’ll end’.¹¹ Whatever its veracity as ethnological record, ‘War Song’ is consonant with that aspect of the dying race narrative which posits that the savage habits of the native are the cause of their demise.

Cathy Rex argues that:

Copway, in writing his own life’s story, is placing himself on both sides of the ethnologist’s office: he is the object of study, urged to reveal his ‘authentic’ life story to a white audience thirsty for anything...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction: ‘I Adopt the Language of the Poet’
• 2. Littleness, Frivolity and Vedic Simplicity: Toru Dutt, Sarojini Naidu and Mr Gosse
• 3. ‘Constant Reading after Office Hours’: Sol Plaatje and Literary Belonging
• 4. ‘The Genuine Stamp of Truth and Nature’: Voicing The History of Mary Prince
• 5. Culture’s Artificial Note: E. Pauline Johnson, Tekahionwake, and her Audiences
• 6. ‘Pressed Down by the Great Words of Others’: Wiremu Maihi Te Rangikaheke and Apirana Ngata
• 7. Conclusion: Secret Fountains and Authentic Utterance
• Backmatter