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Benjamin Franklin, Native Americans, and European Cultures of Civility

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Carla Mulford
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Extract

In Treating Any Historical Cultural Moment, we are engaging a discourse of alterity that verifies our own being in time by drawing conclusions about others' existences at some other time. We are in the process of making history while discussing historical phenomena. In so doing, we are differentiating ourselves such that another's past is both apart from us and part of us, and the history we tell becomes our own. As Michel de Certeau has said about this process of history creation in his book, The Writing of History, we could be said to be creating intelligibility, an intelligibility “established through a relation with the other” and contingent upon a “process of selection between what can be understood and what must be forgotten in order to obtain the representation of a present” that is knowable. The history thus told is one tending to invoke a story line that itself reproduces a normative power arrangement in behalf of an already ongoing and authorized “text” of history. Some elements of the past thus discussed get silenced, while other elements are brought forward for discussion. In selecting, emending, adapting, and erasing, we are telling stories that seem to be about others but stories that are also abundantly about ourselves.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 24 , October 1999 , pp. 49 - 66
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1999

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References

Notes

1. de Certeau, Michel, The Writing of History, trans. Conley, Tom (1975; rept. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 2Google Scholar.

2. Ibid., 4.

3. In a wonderful book about the telling of stories about Haiti and erasure of Haitian history in stories about the “American” past, Trouillot, Michel-Rolph makes similar points in Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon, 1995)Google Scholar.

4. Clifford, James, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 230–31Google Scholar.

5. On the issue of an ongoing complicity, see the sources James Clifford cites in The Predicament of Culture, for the section Clifford identifies as “culture collecting,” 231ff. It should be noted that Clifford is speaking of 20th-century culture in his book; I have transformed and adapted his terminology to describe processes I consider to be ongoing from colonial times. That we are all always entangled in colonial enterprises is a point I take from recent anthropological work, but especially from Thomas, Nicholas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991)Google Scholar.

6. de Certeau, Michel has said of such history production as the one I am engaging that “in the West, the group (or the individual) is legitimized by what it excludes (this is the creation of its own space), and it discovers its faith in the confession that it extracts from a dominated being” (Writing of History, 5)Google Scholar.

7. Johnson, Samuel, A Dictionary of the English Language (London: W. Strahan, 1755)Google Scholar.

8. I have elsewhere discussed the issue of writing and indigenous peoples' presumed absence from “history,” in “Huehuetlatolli, Native American Studies, and the Problem of History,” Early American Literature 30 (1995): 146–51Google Scholar. See also Arnold Krupat's essay, “American Histories, Native American Narratives,” in the same issue of that journal (165–74), and see Krupat, 's book, Ethnocriticism: Ethnography, History, Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992)Google Scholar. Pagden, Anthony discusses the issue of language and writing in European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 129–40Google Scholar. An excellent essay on issues related to Spanish colonial efforts and concepts of language and writing is Mignolo, Walter D.'s “When Speaking Was Not Good Enough: Illiterates, Barbarians, Savages, and Cannibals,” in Amerindian Images and the Legacy of Columbus, ed. Jara, Rene and Spadaccini, Nicholas (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 312–45Google Scholar.

9. I am working through some of the issues that Arnold Krupat treats in his introduction to his book Ethnocriticism, and I am working from the more fundamental points Raymond Williams has made about the limited nature of any cultural hegemony, that what seem to be totalities are, in practice, degrees of dominance and resistance that provide for varieties of correlated emerging values to exist (Marxism and Literature [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977]Google Scholar).

10. Grafton, Anthony's New Worlds, Ancient Texts (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992)Google Scholar is a useful study about the inscriptions Europeans made of Native peoples into ongoing, classical visions.

11. Pagden, Anthony, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain, and France, c. 1500–c. 1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 17–18Google Scholar.

12. Pagden, , European Encounters, 133Google Scholar.

13. Pagden, makes these points, somewhat differently, in European Encounters (142–43)Google Scholar.

14. For Pagden, the principle of attachment occurs when a European writer “attaches” an unfamiliar action, or event, or element of description to a familiar one. “The stark incommensurability of the two is, or seems to be, dissolved in the supposed common recognition” of the two elements. Interestingly, the principle of attachment occurs “at the expense of de taching the original Amerindian practices from their contexts” (European Encounters, 21).

15. I make this point elsewhere with regard to Franklin, Benjamin's Narrative of the Late Massacres in “Caritas and Capital: Franklin's Narrative of the Late Massacre,” in Reappraising Benjamin Franklin: A Bicentennial Perspective, ed. Lemay, J. A. Leo (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1993), 347–58Google Scholar.

16. On the parodic and satiric effects of textual replications with difference, see Hutcheon, Linda, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (New York: Methuen, 1985)Google Scholar.

17. The more commonly used English title, Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America, is the title used in the ensuing discussion. The purported savages are the Iroquois, whom the English called the Six Nations people, the term retained in the discussion that follows. These are the Haudenosaunees, whose ancestral area comprises what we today call the states of New York and Pennsylvania.

18. It could be argued that Hans Hanson is a Swedish name rather than a Dutch name, yet Franklin would have been marking the tenuous historical relationship that existed, sometimes confrontationally, among traders who were Six Nations, Dutch, and English peoples at Albany. The best background on the trading situation remains the exemplary study of Conrad Weiser by Wallace, Paul A. W., Conrad Weiser, 1696–1760: Friend of Colonist and Mohawk (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1945)Google Scholar.

19. Montesquieu in Lettres Persane has Usbek declare “Happy is the man … who is a stranger to every land but the one in which he was born.” Diderot, according to Anthony Pagden, disapproved of traveling because its implication of the pursuit of personal gain was antithetical to inner tranquillity (European Encounters, 156–60).

20. See Pagden, , European Encounters, 170Google Scholar.

21. In European Encounters, Anthony Pagden discusses the literary-cultural shifts that took place during this era as a result of commercialization (170ff).

22. I am adapting the information in this section from Pagden, , European Encounters in the New World, 169–70Google Scholar.

23. As in Pagden, , European Encounters, 170Google Scholar.

24. The point about fiction is important: by midcentury, the captivity narrative as a genre was evolving from the early, intense religious statement of the earlier Puritan period to increasingly more fictionalized accounts that catered to a more secular, sensation-seeking audience. Indeed, captivity narratives were, as early as the 1730s, becoming marked by literary rather than cultural tendencies. Audiences had come to expect information about the indigenous peoples, the landscape, and the animals about which townsfolk had no first-hand knowledge. Although they often, like 17th-century narratives, contained discourses and disputes upon religion, the typical mid-18th-century captivity narrative — and its extract — centered less upon the internal trials and religious questionings of the captive speaker and more upon details of raids, forced marches, and wilderness living. Frequently, Indian life was fully described, along with the attempts of the captors — whether Indians or French or both combined — to assimilate the captive into their alien culture.

25. It appeared in the London Chronicle, June 23–25 and 25–28, 1768. Franklin's authorship of the piece has come under scrutiny, yet an autograph fragment of the manuscript is available in the American Philosophical Society. The text is printed, with a favorable discussion of authorship attribution, in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Labaree, Leonard et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 15: 145–57Google Scholar. For discussion of authorship, see Masterson, James R., “A Foolish Oneida Tale,” American Literature 10 (1938–1939): 53–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Aldridge, A. Owen, “Franklin's Deistical Indians,” Proceedings, American Philosophical Society 94 (08 1950), 398–410Google Scholar. See also Aldridge, , Franklin and His French Contemporaries (New York: New York University Press, 1957), 21–38Google Scholar.

26. Quoted in Dippie, Brian, The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy (1982; rept. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1985), 54Google Scholar.

27. See Aldridge, , Franklin and His French Contemporaries, 24ffGoogle Scholar.

28. It was printed in Ephémérides du Citoyen, ou Bibliothèque Raisonée des Sciences Morales et Politiques 2 (02 1769): 56–78Google Scholar.

29. Labaree, et al. , Papers, 15: 151, 152Google Scholar.

30. Ibid., 151.

31. Ibid., 156.

32. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, “Anthropology and the Savage Slot: The Poetics and Politics of Otherness,” in Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, ed. Fox, Richard (Santa Fe, N.Mex.: School of American Research, 1991), 17–44Google Scholar.

33. Lowrie, Robert said this in “Oral Tradition and History,” American Anthropologist 17 (1915): 597–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Lowrie's essay was a response to an article by Roland B. Dixon and John R. Swanton, “Primitive American History,” in the same issue, and both responded to Lowrie's response to them about the reliability of oral traditions for anthropologists.

34. Krupat, , “American Histories,” 167Google Scholar.

35. Trafzer, Clifford, “Grandmother, Grandfather, and the First History of the Americas,” in New Voices in Native American Literary Criticism, ed. Krupat, Arnold (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994), 476Google Scholar.

36. See Venables, Robert W., “The Founding Fathers: Choosing to Be the Romans,” in Indian Roots of American Democracy, ed. Barreiro, José (Ithaca: Akwe:kon Press of Cornell University, 1992), 67–106Google Scholar.

37. Thomas, Nicholas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 4Google Scholar.