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DanielMartinX

05-24-2005, 06:07 PM

The Sketchbook was published in 1819-1820 and shows Irving's attitudes long before writing A TOUR OF THE PRAIRIE. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 'TRAITS OF INDIAN CHARACTER' (1819) "THERE is something in the character and habits of the North American savage, taken in connection with the scenery over which he is accustomed to range, its vast lakes, boundless forests, majestic rivers, and trackless plains, that is, to my mind, wonderfully striking and sublime. He is formed for the wilderness, as the Arab is for the desert. His nature is stern, simple, and enduring, fitted to grapple with difficulties and to support privations," Irving writes in the Sketchbook. The narrator of the Sketchbook is nominally not Irving, although many of his obversations seem to come from Irving's perspective, so one cannot assume that this is absolutely his personal view. The word "savage," though acceptable at the time, has a strident and demeaning ring to our ears, for instance. But this passage links the Native Americans directly to the landscape that produced them. The connection between native peoples and the landscape that formed them is "sublime," and the hardships of life on the North American continent have made its inhabitants "sterm, simple and enduring." Irving continues: "It has been the lot of the unfortunate aborigines of America in the early periods of colonization to be doubly wronged by the white men. They have been dispossessed of their hereditary possessions by mercenary and frequently wanton warfare, and their characters have been traduced by bigoted and interested writers." Not only have they been dispossessed, Irving tells us, but "interested" writers have mischaracterized the Indians -- writers interested in proving a case or shaping the way that their readers interpret the native peoples. A variety of interests comes to mind: to prove the superiority of European culture, to prove the superiority of European religion, to justify the appropriation of land and wealth, to justify a racist campaign of removing traces of Indian life from the land itself. Irving grapples with the term "savage" and concludes that it is a dehumanizing term: "The appellations of savage and pagan were deemed sufficient to sanction the hostilities of both; and thus the poor wanderers of the forest were persecuted and defamed, not because they were guilty, but because they were ignorant." Because they have not been raised as Christians, they will be called "pagan" and "heathen" (Mary Rowlandson was quite free with this disparagement of the native people she saw), and because they have not been raised within European culture, they will be termed "savage." "Society has advanced upon them like one of those withering airs that will sometimes breed desolation over a whole region of fertility. It has enervated their strength, multiplied their diseases, and superinduced upon their original barbarity the low vices of artificial life. It has given them a thousand superfluous wants, whilst it has diminished their means of mere existence. It has driven before it the animals of the chase, who fly from the sound of the axe and the smoke of the settlement and seek refuge in the depths of remoter forests and yet untrodden wilds. Thus do we too often find the Indians on our frontiers to be the mere wrecks and remnants of once powerful tribes, who have lingered in the vicinity of the settlements and sunk into precarious and vagabond existence. Poverty, repining and hopeless poverty, a canker of the mind unknown in savage life, corrodes their spirits and blights every free and noble quality of their natures. They become drunken, indolent, feeble, thievish, and pusillanimous. They loiter like vagrants about the settlements, among spacious dwellings replete with elaborate comforts, which only render them sensible of the comparative wretchedness of their own condition. Luxury spreads its ample board before their eyes, but they are excluded from the banquet. Plenty revels over the fields, but they are starving in the midst of its abundance; the whole wilderness has blossomed into a garden, but they feel as reptiles that infest it." He contrasts this horrifying state of affairs with the situation before the Europeans came: "How different was their state while yet the undisputed lords of the soil! Their wants were few and the means of gratification within their reach. They saw every one round them sharing the same lot, enduring the same hardships, feeding on the same aliments, arrayed in the same rude garments. No roof then rose but was open to the homeless stranger; no smoke curled among the trees but he was welcome to sit down by its fire and join the hunter in his repast." Irving's narrator attacks the way that bigoted writers have overlooked history and social conditions: "In discussing the savage character writers have been too prone to indulge in vulgar prejudice and passionate exaggeration, instead of the candid temper of true philosophy. They have not sufficiently considered the peculiar circumstances in which the Indians have been placed, and the peculiar principles under which they have been educated." Irving then explains how the Pilgrims desecrated an ancient burial ground soon after their arrival, and the retaliation of the Indians was generally not explained in the European writing as a response to an affront. Rather, the Indian attack was described as an unprovoked example of the viciousness or savagery of native people. These kinds of misunderstandings were perpetuated by writers who consciously wanted to color the way that people looked at Native Americans -- for the motives I have listed above, as well as for others. "We stigmatize the Indians, also, as cowardly and treacherous, because they use stratagem in warfare in preference to open force; but in this they are fully justified by their rude code of honor," Irving writes, but as time has passed and American and European ways of warfare have changed, we too use stealth and stalking, snipers and other methods of warfare that we once complained about in Indian fighting. "The natural principle of war is to do the most harm to our enemy with the least harm to ourselves," Irving adds, "and this of course is to be effected by stratagem." Irving's sketch concludes with a dark prophecy: "We are driven back," said an old warrior, "until we can retreat no farther--our hatchets are broken, our bows are snapped, our fires are nearly extinguished; a little longer and the white man will cease to persecute us, for we shall cease to exist!" In his own way, Irving has gone a little ways toward trying to humanize the figure of the Indian, to argue for their rights and to plead that the white Americans will look again into this difficult relationship and change their views.