Center for Ideas and Society, Faculty Seminar

Participants

Joel Martin, Costo Chair & Professor, Religious Studies and History
Molly McGarry, Assistant Professor, History
Michelle Raheja, Assistant Professor, English
Clifford Trafzer, Professor, History
Ian Chambers, Graduate Student, History
Anthony Madrigal, Graduate Student, History

Joel Martin’s project implicates and energizes religious studies, cultural studies, archaeology, and ethnohistory. For example, as Costo Chair, Dr. Martin is actively seeking to turn credentialed archaeological expertise into a useful tool to serve tribal interests and the protection of cultural patrimony. This raises some very interesting theoretical, political, and curricular questions. In a similar way, his historical work and thinking is being affected by his involvement with tribes making history today. Dr. Martin’s project bridges the gulf between 19th century and contemporary tribal communities through his focus on revitalization movements. His current research centers on Cherokees’ “assimilation of assimilation” in the early 19th century, including their responses to/around Christianity, boarding schools, literacy, and Anglo-American gender regimes. Combined with his understanding of contemporary revitalization movements, Dr. Martin reflects on how his research changes how he thinks about revitalization theory, movements, and history and also how it affects his writing and teaching. He hopes that during the fellowship period he can conduct research on activism and revitalization movements collaboratively, present his findings, and publish an essay on the Cherokee’s reaction to assimilation policies.

Cliff Trafzer is currently working on a reinterpretation of Willie Boy, whose story was popularized in a 1969 Robert Redford film, Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here. Boy, a Chemehuevi or Southern Paiute native of Southern California, was accused in 1909 of murdering both William Mike, a Chemehuevi headman and shaman from the Twenty Nine Palms Band, and his daughter, Carlota Mike. The “hunt” for Boy led to what some scholars have called the West’s last and most famous manhunt. According to legend, Boy was not allowed to marry Carlota, his sweetheart, because he was too closely related to the Mike family. In retaliation, Boy killed the elder Mike and later raped and murdered Carlota when she slowed his flight from authorities. However, Dr. Trafzer’s archival and community-based research on the Willie Boy case has revealed a radically different version of events. According to Dr. Trafzer, Carlota was shot by the posse sent out to find Willie Boy. Through oral interviews, Dr. Trafzer has determined that Willie sang Salt Songs on the night of Carlota’s murder, which is customary for Chemehuevis, and then set a trap for the posse, shooting one of them and then watching the rest flee. Although the posse claimed to hear one more shot and were convinced that Boy had committed suicide, oral history interviews with Southern California Indians has revealed that Boy escaped and later died of tuberculosis in Nevada. Secundo Chino (Cahuilla and Chemehuevi), a member of the posse, related to Katherine Saubel and her father, Juan Siva, that because Boy’s body could not be located, law enforcement personnel were told to lie about the suicide. Dr. Trafzer’s work on this case has opened up renewed interest in collecting oral narrative and challenging the historical archive. Despite the publication of Jan Vansina’s influential Oral Tradition as History (1985), scholars continue to marginalize oral narrative as an unimportant aspect of the historical record. Even the prominent scholars who have worked on the Willie Boy case – Harry Lawton, Larry Burgess, and Jim Sandos – elided the key oral testimony of Native Americans who had intimate knowledge about Boy’s escape. Because oral narrative is so central to many Native American communities, especially those in Southern California, Dr. Trafzer’s work is a significant contribution to the field. During the fellowship period, Dr. Trafzer hopes to conduct more interviews, revisit the narratives he currently has on file, present his work to the group for feedback, and publish his findings.

Michelle Raheja considers how filmic reenactments of colonial power relations became a part of a long tradition of “playing Indian” in America, a tradition that has been a crucial means for European-Americans to distinguish themselves from Europeans, particularly their English counterparts. By incorporating aspects of an imagined Indian identity into their own newly emerging national identity, European-Americans could demonstrate their uniqueness and separateness in public and semi-public spheres such as the theater, fraternal organizations, and pageants without fear of actually becoming Indian. Over time, performing in redface has allowed individuals to test out new and politically oppositional ideas and has helped to assuage white guilt about, among other things the destruction of the environment. From the Boston Tea Party to New Age members of “rainbow tribes,” these performances have served to bolster the popular misconception that it is acceptable, even admirable, to play Indian since few Indians exist to play themselves. Appropriating an Indian identity through dress and generic cultural rituals has been essential to the formation of a specifically American identity since the 18th century. And not surprisingly, the phenomenon of playing Indian in fiction and more explicit appropriations such as public performances reveal more about contemporary political and cultural currents in U.S. history than it does about Native American life.

Dr. Raheja is interested in the ways in which Indian actors and entertainers participated in the creation of early films that featured a Native American plot. Without examining the complicated, active, and often anguished ways in which Indian actors and actresses have responded to the advent of film and filmic representations of Native American history, she argues, it is tempting to assume that Native Americans were merely victims of corporate interests and the desires of non-Native audiences and that they possessed no agency in the production of films dealing with Indian themes. On the contrary, a study of the autobiographical narratives Native American actors and entertainers wrote reflecting on their careers reveals that they have been, to varying degrees, influential in shaping filmic images of Indians and certainly have been invested in the discourse surrounding popular portrayals of Indianness. A reading of the autobiographies written by Native American celebrities about their experiences as actors reveals a complex and often contradictory response to playing Indian. During the fellowship period, Dr. Raheja will refine her work on ‘celebrity’ Indians, present an essay to the group, and incorporate the feedback she receives into a publishable article.

Molly McGarry’s project, entitled “Indian Guides: Channelling the Other in Nineteenth-Century American Culture,” interrogates the relationship between appropriations of Native American spirituality and the construction of American identity. During her time at the Center for Ideas and Society, she hopes to expand her project through collaborative research into an article for publication.

Spiritualism – a popular nineteenth-century religious movement centered around communication with the dead – utilized Indians as spirit guides. Relying upon a cultural understanding of Native Americans as highly spiritual, and mapping onto the spirit world the colonial relationship of the Indian as a guide for the white man, Spiritualists positioned Native Americans as a vital link between this world and the next. It was the Indian guide who could bring Spiritualists though the veil, tracing the invisible footprints beyond. Spiritualists’ identification with Native “others” was both figurative and literal. Opening themselves to other voices and other bodies, they understood themselves as being literally inhabited by Native spirits. This embodied identification produced a conflicted and contradictory racial politics. Spiritualists were in a small minority of white Americans who agitated for Native American rights and worked to halt a century-long campaign of Indian removal; at the same time, they appealed for the protection of native lands and sovereignty at least in part to salvage the spiritual life of white Americans. This project examines the vexed political couplings born of an imagined shared font of spirituality.

Spiritualist engagement with both real and imagined Indians speaks to much larger questions about the construction of American identity and the making of whiteness in a very particular historical moment. Recent scholarship has pointed to similar cultural ambiguities arising from conflicted racial imaginings and relations with African Americans. Blackness, in a range of cultural guises, has been an essential precondition for American whiteness, and has taken material shape in literature, minstrel shows, class and gender relations, political struggles and spatial geographies. Spiritualists’ relationships to Indians and “Indianness” similarly points not just to ambiguous or complicated relationships but to starkly contradictory racial impulses – a version of what historian Eric Lott has brilliantly termed “Love and Theft.”