Red States

Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, and Southern Studies

Gina Caison, Jon Smith, Riché Richardson

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780820353357
• eBook ISBN:
  9780820353340
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

Red States uses a regional focus in order to examine the tenets of white southern nativism and Indigenous resistance to colonialism in the U.S. South. Gina Caison argues that popular misconceptions of Native American identity in the U.S. South can be understood by tracing how non-Native audiences in the region came to imagine indigeneity through the presentation of specious histories presented in regional literary texts, and she examines how Indigenous people work against these narratives to maintain sovereign land claims in their home spaces through their own literary and cultural productions. As Caison demonstrates, these conversations in the U.S. South have consequences for how present-day conservative political discourses resonate across the United States.

Assembling a newly constituted archive that includes regional theatrical and musical performances, pre-Civil War literatures, and contemporary novels, Caison illuminates the U.S. South's continued investment in settler colonialism and the continued Indigenous resistance to this paradigm. Ultimately, she concludes that the region is indeed made up of red states, but perhaps not in the way readers initially imagine.

CHAPTER ONE

Recovery

Recently been reading and planning “Lost Colony” play.
Another trip to Roanoke Island to consider plans for the theatre,
exhibits and celebration. Bothered a bit about the “authenticity”
of material. But after all the “feeling” of the participant is
important too.

—Paul Green, March 29, 1937

In the fall of 2016, the popular FX series American Horror Story launched its sixth iteration, Roanoke. Set largely in rural eastern North Carolina (though filmed in Santa Clarita, California), the sixth season focuses on a house of horrors, ostensibly haunted by the ghosts of the 1590 Roanoke Lost Colony. The stories of the historical Lost Colony figure very little in the plot of the season, and the series imagines a landscape filled with rural abjection and death. Incidentally, there are very few, if any, appearances by Native characters as the show seems more preoccupied with supernatural violence at the hands of the fictional leader of the Lost Colony, Jon White’s fictional wife, Thomasin White (Kathy Bates). White takes over the colony in her husband’s absence and becomes known as “The Butcher” after becoming a follower of the original “Supreme” witch Scáthach (Lady Gaga), who had previously killed a group of soldiers. Notably, the English blame the local Native people, not Scáthach, for the massacre of the soldiers. The season is told in a set of frame tales. The first is a documentary format, which recounts the strange and horrific occurrences affecting an interracial couple, Matt and Shelby, after they purchase an eighteenth-century farmhouse in the woods. This documentary, My Roanoke Nightmare, intersperses narration from the real-life Matt and Shelby (André Holland and Lily Rabe) and reenactment scenes featuring a fictional Matt and Shelby played by Dominic Banks (Cuba Gooding Jr.) and Audrey Tindall (Sarah Paulson). My Roanoke Nightmare also features the story of Matt’s sister Lee Harris (Adina Porter), played by the fictional Monet Tumusiime (Angela Bassett). Then, after the success of that television “documentary,” the season morphs into a “Return to Roanoke,” where the reenactment cast of the first documentary moves back into the house with their “real-life” counterparts to have a “reality television” experience during the particularly dangerous time of the “Blood Moon,” when the ghosts of the Roanoke colony are at their most vengeful. As a result of this foolhardy decision on behalf of the director, the entire cast—real and fictional—die with the exception of the real-life Lee Harris, who is put on trial for the death of her husband and several of her companions in the house. After she is acquitted, she ultimately returns to the site of the house and essentially sacrifices herself to appease the Roanoke ghosts and protect her daughter. In short, this 2016 Roanoke iteration recounts an all-consuming loss where every attempt at recovery begets more death.

I have attempted to outline the basic plot structure as simply as possible, but rest assured that the frame tale and found-footage style of the interlocking documentary worlds make the show almost inscrutable. While the intricacies of the season’s form deserve their own space for analysis, I am most interested in how and why the Roanoke story found its traction again in 2016. Long a touchstone of regional apocryphal history and tourism, the Roanoke colony produces a certain type of mystery around the beginning of English colonization in the Americas, though nowhere near as gory or as sensational as the one that FX provides. However, perhaps in this revisionist approach, something about American Horror Story: Roanoke hits the mark in how the earliest English act of settler colonialism continues to resonate across the continent. Roanoke might very well be the first English American horror story, but it begs the consideration of whose horror. When placed in its southern landscape, on which Roanoke draws in the most offensively stereotypical of ways with an inbred, cannibalistic Polk family (toting guns and thick accents), the story of Roanoke becomes not just a tale of the horror wrought by English colonialism but also a projection of the dark fantasies of an abjected U.S. South, repressed from a larger national imaginary.

In this way, the show’s relative absence of Native people reads as a practical relief (who could imagine how FX might employ those narrative and representational stereotypes) and a telling omission. Roanoke, historically speaking, cannot be considered without addressing the eastern Algonquian people who populated the region where the English settled. After all, it is their historical horror story. The show directly depicts the horrific actions of the early colonists and their later ghosts, but their violent acts are rendered into an abstract horror, a senseless routine of killing to maintain “their land.” Perhaps these motives, however, are not so far off. The trouble is that in the depiction of the sacrificial destruction of contemporary bodies, the audience might imagine the Butcher and her colonists as aberrations, ghostly protagonists who only kill non-Natives, rather than their likely historical counterparts who enacted numerous terrors against living Algonquian people. Significantly, the Polk family, who seem to stand in for all rural southern whiteness, have had a long-standing deal with the Roanoke ghosts: they bring the Butcher someone to sacrifice each year during the Blood Moon so they too can stay on “their land.” And in this way, the show becomes about the horror of settler colonialism where white southerners continue to offer tithe to the ghosts of Roanoke in order to maintain their own land claims. In some ways, settler colonialism has become so good at this narrative that, as American Horror Story demonstrates, it no longer needs Native people at all. Any body will do. And yet the recurrence of variations of the Roanoke story appear again and again, particularly when, as I will demonstrate in this chapter, anxieties about national and regional loss approach their own climaxes. Through a close reading of the Island’s earliest archival presences and an interrogation of its resulting historical fictions, I examine how as a foundational signifier, Roanoke depends on Native history in order to establish settler-colonial land claims and narrative order for the region we now call the U.S. South.

The Long Loss

Through a sustained analysis of Paul Green’s dramatic text The Lost Colony (1937), I demonstrate how these imaginings of the early U.S. South (indeed, before it was the United States) remain bound up with concerns over regional distinctiveness characterized by narratives of backwardness and exceptionalism grounded in scenes of Native history. Such narratives enforce the problematic idea that the U.S. South as a region remains exceptional to American exceptionalism. Green’s The Lost Colony represents a particularly powerful illustration of this logic as it reaches back through time to a “founding moment” of southern exceptionalism in 1587 and carries through the present with its continued yearly staging on Roanoke Island. This instance of Green’s historical imagining informs this chapter’s consideration of how even the earliest records of the space that will eventually become the U.S. South are marked by the concurrent ideas of loss and archival absence. In other words, indigeneity in the region that will become the U.S. South traffics in the concept of loss long before the Confederate Lost Cause. To examine this, I trace texts from the late 1500s through the contemporary performance of Green’s outdoor drama. Because these outdoor dramas are reperformed every year amid various political moments, they serve as an apt site to investigate how local imaginings of Native history enter the collective ether.

Paul Green’s 1937 self-described symphonic drama depicts the events leading up to the historic disappearance of 115 men, women, and children from Roanoke Island. The outdoor drama continues to play six nights a week every summer in Manteo, North Carolina, and because of this text, many consider Green to be the father of the “outdoor drama,” a genre characterized by its extensive production materials, use of local history, annual performances, and, of course, staging in large outdoor theaters. Although one could easily quibble with several of the textual details in Green’s play, it is clear from his papers and extensive surviving archive that he conducted rigorous research when writing the script.¹ His grasp of the mood, tenor, and implications of the Roanoke voyages mirrors those of many of the extant texts relating to the sixteenth-century colonial expeditions, and his use of historical details and individuals have numerous archival antecedents. Of course, any staged events on Roanoke Island after John White leaves the 1587 colony stem entirely from Green’s imagination. Despite this creative license, almost all of Green’s characters correlate to some part of the archive. However, the only Native woman in the play, Agona, corresponds to no written historical record. In fact, she hardly even exists in Green’s script as she offers only one line throughout the play: “Tee-hee.” So while other Native characters, such as Manteo, Wanchese, and Wingina, and all of the English characters, Queen Elizabeth I, Walter Raleigh, John White, and Simon Fernando, are based on individuals who exist in the historical record, the Native Agona alone stands as the mark of a profound absence in the archive. The relationship between absence, presence, loss, and recovery becomes a preoccupation for ordering the earliest Roanoke interactions, and it is the circulation of these ideas around indigeneity that begins to accrue additional “lost” meanings across the deep time of the region.

As with many “Indians” in the historical record, only a lacunary trace of their presence remains. However, many times these individuals stand in absent spaces where their reconstruction depends on historical imagination. This is not to say that these Indigenous people did not exist as significant agents in the colonial history of the Americas but rather to suggest that being Indian in these contexts is often marked by archival sites of loss and recovery. In this way, this chapter engages the work of Anishinaabe critic Gerald Vizenor, who posits that “The Indian is the simulation of the absence” (Manifest Manners 14). Significantly, the historically absent Agona from Green’s play is the very person who, along with her lover Tom, buoys the colony’s hopes for survival. Arguably, the play’s ending makes clear that many, if not all, of the colonists will perish. Agona and Tom appear to be the only two equipped to survive, and of all the characters, it seems that they will people the “New World” with their combination of Indigenous knowledge and resourceful Devon ethics. Certainly, the trope of racial mixing is not an original narrative in the Americas, as it constitutes a familiar narrative from Pocahontas to la Malinché.² However, in most cases there exists at least a recorded historical trace of the Native woman. At best, Green’s Agona is modeled after a woman whom White’s watercolors depict eating from a bowl.³

It might be easy to dismiss Green’s representation of the Algonquian people as an instance of stereotypical Indian representation in the twentieth century. As Michael Harkin argues regarding renderings of the 1587 colony, the “trope of inevitable loss and change allowed modern readers and audiences to incorporate the events of the Lost Colony into their own individual and collective history” (“Performing Paradox” 109).⁴ I agree with these sentiments; however, I argue that this feature of the Lost Colony is not simply an invention of modern authors and their audiences. The precise ways in which early moderns wrote about the Roanoke colony and its relationship with Native Algonquians expose how loss and absence operated alongside ideas of early ethnography as the English began to link their own identity with positive proof within the archive and the landscape. On the one hand, just as the prominent character Agona appears on the stage influencing the other characters’ actions while remaining textually unrepresented in the script, the early English representations of Indian people render them absent in the written archive despite their likely enormous influence on the colony. On the other hand, in the visual archive Indians dominate the landscape where the English are rendered as conspicuously absent despite their obvious presence in the colonial venture. In other words, to be rendered “Indian” in these texts is to participate in an economy of strategic and simulated absence that informs much of the early modern writing on these expeditions and their later land claims on Virginia. While indeed numerous critics have noted the ways in which early moderns erased American Indians from the landscape, I examine a more conspicuous albeit less-cited creation of absence in the Roanoke archive: the created and absenting of the English and the material evidence of their presence.⁵ This control of the absent body and/or item switches the terms by which we might understand lost items, and it applies pressure to the historiographic problems of reading an archive’s absences for the loss of the Indian. Each of these concerns remains bound up with the power structures of a colonial gaze that informs not only the early modern actors but those of us who attempt to recover information from their written records.

It may seem anachronistic or even an act of historical “upstreaming” to use a twentieth-century play to help us reread the archive associated with the late sixteenth-century voyages. Despite these dangers, such a transhistorical comparative approach may reveal more than it conceals. For instance, Joyce E. Chaplin argues that White’s drawings “introduced Virginia’s natives to the English as if he were displaying them in a theatre. The spectators who had the front-row seats, meaning the English who colonized Roanoke, are invisible even though they were actually interacting with the natives whom White depicted” (51). This description of the staged depiction of Roanoke from the original visual documents resonates in many ways with the contemporary consumption of this history in its yearly staging as an outdoor drama in North Carolina. Significantly, the absent body for Chaplin’s argument is not the Indian but the English. The twentieth-century play replicates the power structure that informs the earliest documents in its mediation between an archive and a repertoire where some presences are noted while others are assumed.⁶ The power to stage the Americas as a “New World” open for colonial conquest for European audiences creates a dynamic between objects and subjects, the viewed and the viewer. As Thomas Cartelli argues regarding the later Plymouth colony, there was a rhetorical effacement of Native people from the New England landscape that served to presage a physical removal.⁷ With the Roanoke voyages, however, we have a slightly different set of factors and outcomes. It is not simply the representation of absence that causes settlers to feel as if they can take over Indigenous land claims. Instead, it is the power to control the absented body or item that ultimately justifies dispossession. Simply put, the fact of absence is not the only determining factor. In these early records of Virginia, it is the power to frame the loss of objects, others, or even oneself that ultimately matters. This framing of loss persists through present critical work in the field. To point out “loss” begs for the power of recovery, and the act of scholarly recovery is one to approach with caution as it can result in further uneven power dynamics between scholars and the communities their work affects. By interrogating the language of loss around the spiralic recurrence of Roanoke narratives, I hope to complicate the use of this language for continued narratives of Native history.

In Reconstructing the Native South: American Indian Literature and the Lost Cause, Melanie Benson Taylor attempts to synthesize elements of the Confederate Lost Cause with the region’s Native American literature and history in order to make sense of the contemporary forces of global capitalism. Indeed, such work has value. It does, in Taylor’s words, ask us to “confront difficult questions: in the aftermath of Removal and colonial devastation, what remains—for either group—to be recovered?” (21). While she asserts that she does not wish to “forge a false harmony between historically antagonistic groups” or “deny the necessity and the reality of tribal sovereignty and nationalism,” much of her analysis may unintentionally do just that (21). To be clear, not much remains to be recovered for the South of the Confederate Lost Cause because it is impossible to recover what was never lost in the first place: namely, the continual possession of stolen lands and white racial supremacy in policy, policing, and practice. As for what remains to be recovered for the Native South, we might begin with the present-day state of Georgia. While I hear Taylor’s assertion that “we have been swift to defuse the white South’s most damaging myths and performances, we have been notably more hesitant to deconstruct Natives’ similar and no less compensatory fictions” (21), I ask, what compensation? When there are still no federally recognized tribes in the state of Georgia, and when in 2017 I am ushering through the proposals for Georgia State University’s first Native American literature course offerings, I wonder about the use of deconstructing that which is only beginning to be rebuilt.

Whereas Taylor looks to examine the convergence of multiple lost cause narratives across southern and Native contexts, I seek to pull them apart a bit—to show their vast dissimilarities. From a biological perspective, convergence is used to describe organisms that are wholly unrelated but only appear to have shared characteristics due to similar environmental conditions. As Taylor argues in her contribution to the recently reimagined Southern Literary Journal, south, when it comes to Native people and southerners, “The convergences are so obvious, ultimately, that they shouldn’t be surprising—and yet they are, and often unpalatably so” (“In Deep” 70). I wonder, however, about this idea of convergence. Indeed, surrounding conditions have placed Native people and communities in predicaments similar to those of many other humans living on the planet, including non-Native southerners, during the time of late capitalism. However, the point of convergence is that two things—though appearing alike—are in fact not the same. So when Taylor quips regarding the uncanny linkage between images of Native people and the Confederate flag, “A lost cause is a lost cause,” I cannot help but wonder about the assumptions embedded in such a claim (71). The cause of the Confederacy is not the cause of Native sovereignty on this continent. As I demonstrate throughout the first part of the book, to draw the equivalence and rest it on the idea of convergence is to attempt the same psychological leaps as early southern writers when they attempted to draw the image of the Indian into their own narratives of white southern identity. Furthermore, even the use of the word “loss” continually enforces the idea that Native people are responsible for the theft of their lands, suppression of their languages, and dismantling of their sovereign political organizations. My colleague Brook Colley has often suggested that we replace every instance of the word “lost” with a more accurate verb.

Much of my contention with Taylor’s examination of lost cause convergences has to do with the presentist focus of her work. When Taylor asks, “Is it acceptable to identify an Indian ‘Lost Cause,’ much as we have acknowledged the futility of the white South’s tribalism and nostalgia?” I am prompted to turn toward Robert Warrior’s statements on the lost cause’s currency in American Indian studies (21). Via previous work from Edward Said, Warrior points out, “a cause seeming lost or not is a matter of many things, including the juncture in history at which the determination is being made, the sort of narrative the determination is part of, and the perspective from which judgment on the cause is being pronounced” (218). And he reminds us that “American Indians have never lost some fundamental things, like the relationship to their homelands,” and that for Said, “no cause is ever finally lost until its hope is extinguished in the l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Terminology
• Red States: An Introduction
• Chapter One: Recovery
• Chapter Two: Revolution
• Chapter Three: Removal
• Chapter Four: Resistance
• Chapter Five: Resilience
• Rights and Returns: A Coda
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index