October 31, 2022: Symbolic Scares: The Wendigo

[Horror has long been as much about the sources of the scares as the jumps they produce, and American horror is no exception. In this week’s series, I’ll AmericanStudy some of the symbolisms behind our scary stories. Leading up to a special weekend Guest Post on a very scary disease, past and present.]

On the supernatural legend that also offers cultural and cross-cultural commentaries.

I’m not sure what kind of collection it was—whether it was an anthology of folk tales, of scary stories, of cultural myths and legends, of Americana—but I do know that only one story from it impacted this young AmericanStudier enough to stick with me nearly four decades later: an account of a party of hunters in rural Canada encountering the demon known as the Wendigo. I can even remember the way I felt inside when my Dad read the lines about the rising and howling wind, which at least in this version of the tale signaled the imminent arrival of—or perhaps even contained—the creature. Let’s just say that, unlike the boy who left home to find out about the shivers, from then on I knew exactly what that condition felt like, and didn’t need to venture outside of the pages of that very scary story to do so.

So I’m here to tell you that the Wendigo is, first and foremost, a deeply effective scary story. But the creature and story, across their many versions, also offer complex and compelling lenses into American cultures, on two distinct and equally meaningful levels. For one thing, apparently Wendigo stories can be found in the belief systems and communal myths of numerous Algonquin-speaking native tribes across both the United States and Canada, including the Ojibwe, the Cree, the Naskapi, and others. While those tribes share a basic language system, they are as culturally and socially distinct as they are geographically widespread—and yet they share closely parallel images and accounts of these cannibalistic demons of the woods. While we have to be careful about how we read such potentially but ambiguously symbolic shared mythic figures—Joseph Campbell-like, sweeping structuralist pronouncements being largely discredited these days—there seems to be no question that the Wendigo represents a part of the collective identity and perspective of these tribes.

But as they have evolved, Wendigo stories have also come to represent something else, and perhaps even more telling: tales of the perils of cross-cultural exploration and exploitation. That is, in many of the last century’s Wendigo tales, including both the Blackwood one linked above and the one that I remember from my childhood, those being threatened or destroyed by the creature tend to be non-native hunters, often if not always venturing into native territories, encroaching on previously protected or sacred spaces, or otherwise seeking to make their mark on a land not quite their own. As my friend Jeff Renye has traced at length throughout his evolving scholarly career, Weird Tales such as Blackwood’s often highlight the dangers posed by an sort of spiritual boundary-crossing, so this particular trend is certainly not unique; but in these cases, I’m arguing, the boundaries being crossed are not only spiritual but also, and perhaps more importantly, cultural. Which is to say, while the Wendigo has always been cannibalistic, the particular identity of those upon whom he feasts has significantly, and symbolically, shifted over time.

Next scary story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Scary stories you’d AmericanStudy?

July 18, 2022: UtahStudying: Indigenous Utah

[On July 24, 1847, a weary group of about 150 migrants founded Salt Lake City. So for the city’s 175^th birthday, this week I’ll AmericanStudy Utah histories, leading up to a special weekend post on that founding community!]

On just a few of the many communities and stories of indigenous Utah.

1)      The Paiute: That particular hyperlinked Paiute history comes from the branch of the tribe located in modern-day Oregon—but it features one of my all-time favorite Americans, Sarah Winnemucca, who was the daughter and granddaughter of chiefs and who became not just a vital spokesperson and activist for the tribe, but one of the most inspiring 19^th century Americans from any community. And while the tribe, like most in the US, did spread out across a region that encompasses multiple states, it was indeed particularly part of modern-day Utah, including fraught and violent encounters with Mormon migrants in the mid-19^th century that have to be front and center in any story of the state’s history. 

2)      The Goshute: It was the Goshute who had the most consistent such encounters with Mormons and other white settlers to Utah, however, as a significant portion of the tribe were native to the desert region right around Great Salt Lake. As a result of that proximity the federal government began attempts to remove the Goshutes to a reservation as early as the late 1850s, but the tribe successfully resisted those attempts for more than half a century; when they finally gave in to removal in 1912, it was to the Skull Valley Reservation, only about 50 miles from their ancestral homelands. Every tribe’s experience of histories of removal and the reservation system is distinct and worth full collective memory, but the Goshute in particular offer a crucial reminder of that system’s frustratingly arbitrary nature.

3)      The Ute: The Ute reservation, located about 150 miles east of Salt Lake City, is the nation’s second-largest and a complex and multi-layered setting in its own right. But of course indigenous communities are in no way defined by the histories and aftermaths of their relationships with white communities, and despite this series’ overall subject I don’t want to focus only on those dynamics in this post either. Instead, I’ll note here the Ute’s close association with two elements of Utah’s stunning landscapes (on which more in tomorrow’s post): their longstanding connection to the buttes which in 2016 became the basis of the Bears Ears National Monument, a site managed by members of the tribe among other indigenous communities; and the centuries-old Ute petroglyphs near Arches National Park (on which more tomorrow as well). Indigenous Utah long predates white settlement, and remains as present on the landscape as its communities are in the state in 2022.

Next Utah history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other Utah histories or stories you’d highlight?

May 17, 2021: Small Axe and America: New Orleans and Creolization

[One of my favorite cultural works of the last year was Small Axe, filmmaker Steve McQueen’s anthology film series about the West Indian community in England from the 1960s through the 1980s. I’m not an EnglandStudier, but I think there are plenty of ways to apply the five wonderful films to AmericanStudying. So this week I’ll highlight a handful, leading up to a Guest Post on McQueen’s prior films!]

On how New Orleans helps us better engage America’s defining creolizations.

I’ve written a good bit about New Orleans in this space: from this early city-centric post inspired by Mardi Gras and my first visit to the city; to this one from the same blog era on one of my favorite American novels and a book that’s as much about New Orleans as it is about its huge, multi-generational cast of characters, George Washington Cable’s The Grandissimes (1881). Those posts illustrate a few of the many reasons why I believe New Orleans is so distinctly and powerfully American, as I hope have this week’s posts in their own ways, despite the specific focus on Katrina. And indeed, the responses to and aftermaths of that horrific storm likewise reveal some of the worst as well as the best of American history, society, culture, and art; on that final note, I should highlight one more time a text I could definitely have featured in the week’s series and one of my favorite 21^st century American novels, Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones (2011).

To say much more eloquently than I ever could a bit more about why I’d define New Orleans as so deeply American, here’s one of the central characters from Treme that I didn’t get to analyze in this post, Steve Zahn’s DJ Davis McAlary. As a radio DJ, and a highly opinionated person to boot, Davis is often ranting, much of it about the best and worst of his beloved New Orleans (and all of it a combination of communal and self-aggrandizing, convincing and frustrating). But my favorite Davis monologue, in the opening scene of the Season 4 episode “Dippermouth Blues,” is far quieter and more thoughtful. Coming out of playing a hugely cross-cultural song, Davis calls it, “A stellar example of McAlary’s theory of creolization. Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, the Great American Songbook meet African American musical genius. And that’s what America’s all about…‘Basin Street, is the street, where all the dark and light folks meet.’ That’s how culture gets made in this country. That’s how we do. We’re a Creole nation, whether you like it or not. And in three weeks, America inaugurates its first Creole president. Get used to it.”

Those of us who loved that aspect of Obama and even called him “the first American president” as a result didn’t have to “get used to” anything, of course. And as for those whom Davis is addressing more directly in those closing lines, well to say that they seem not to have gotten used to it is to significantly understate the case (which of course David Simon and his co-creators knew all too well, as that final-season episode of Treme may have been set around New Year’s 2008 but was made and aired in late 2013). Indeed, when I was asked by audiences during my book talks for We the People about why we’ve seen such an upsurge in exclusionary rhetoric and violence over the last decade, I’ve frequently argued that backlash to Obama—as a representation of so many perceived national “changes”—has been a central cause. Which is to say, it’s not just that we need to “get over” the reality of our creolized history, culture, and identity—first the we who love those elements need to do a better job making the case for them, both as valuable and as foundationally American. There’s no place and no community through which we can do so more potently than New Orleans.

Next Axe application tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other takes on Caribbean American connections?

March 27-28, 2021: Reframing the Pilgrims

[March 22^nd marks the 400^th anniversary of the Pilgrim-Wampanoag Peace Treaty, signed by Plymouth Governor John Carver and Wampanoag Confederacy sachem Massasoit. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied a handful of Indigenous New England histories, leading up to this weekend post on the vital need to reframe the Pilgrims through this lens.]

On a starting point for reframing our collective histories, and how we (and I) need to go beyond it.

Although it’s been significantly overshadowed by [gestures at everything in 2020-2021], the 400^th anniversary of the Mayflower and the founding of the Plymouth colony remains a striking moment for American collective memory. For at least the last couple hundred years, the Pilgrims have functioned for many voices and conversations as a consistent shorthand for a national origin point, a narrative that we see everywhere from anthemic songs like Katharine Lee Bates’ “America the Beautiful” to counter-cultural poets like Sylvia Plath among many, many other places. Even those voices advancing an explicitly alternative or oppositional vision of American identity often use the Pilgrims in this foundational way, as illustrated by Malcolm X’s famous 1964 phrase for the origin point of African American history, “We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock; the rock was landed on us!” The fact that Plymouth Rock is a mythological (and relatively recent) invention is, I would argue, precisely the point: this is about the creation and perpetuation of a national mythos, and the cultural work that such myths can do across the centuries.

If we’re going to start revising that collective national myth, the vital first step is to reframe Plymouth in the ways that the historic site formerly known as Plimoth Plantation has modeled: first by creating the new introductory film “Two Peoples: One Story,” and then by changing the site’s name to Plimoth Patuxet. Of course the Pilgrims and Plimoth Plantation are part of that foundational moment in American history, but so too are the Wampanoag and all the Indigenous peoples who were part of 17^th century Patuxet—and more exactly and crucially, if we are to see that moment as one of the origin points for America, it has to be through the combination of those different cultures and communities, the origins of one story and place out of those multiple peoples. The phrase “E pluribus unum” (Latin for “out of many, one”) has appeared on the Great Seal of the United States since 1782, but I really don’t think we’ve even begun to collectively engage with the most accurate and productive meanings of either of the phrase’s key terms: not the diverse collection of cultures and communities that should comprise the “many”; and not the inclusive vision of the nation constituted out of all those cultures that should define the “one.”

Those national reframings and redefinitions have been central goals of mine since at least my second book, Redefining American Identity. But of course I try, while working to share those ideas and perspectives with audiences of all kinds, to keep learning and evolving myself as well, and over the last year in particular I’ve come to believe that my critical optimism and critical patriotism have to be more fully complemented by an even deeper engagement with the darkest and most destructive American histories (an engagement I’ve certainly tried for, to be clear, but that requires further work). The Wampanoag and all their fellow Patuxet Indigenous cultures and communities have endured and continued to contribute significantly to American identity on countless levels—but they did so and have done so despite the best efforts of the English to at best exclude and far too often destroy these native peoples (efforts that the federal government has continued in recent years). Remembering those most horrific histories doesn’t mean dismissing the Pilgrims or Plymouth entirely—but it does mean foregrounding, just as the 1619 Project has done with slavery and African American history, that the most inspiring American communities have been those which have borne the brunt of these horrors and yet continued to exemplify the best of our collective identity.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other Indigenous or early American histories you’d highlight?

March 26, 2021: Indigenous New England: Brothers Among Nations

[March 22^nd marks the 400^th anniversary of the Pilgrim-Wampanoag Peace Treaty, signed by Plymouth Governor John Carver and Wampanoag Confederacy sachem Massasoit. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Indigenous New England histories, leading up to a weekend post on the vital need to reframe the Pilgrims through this lens.]

On a different and more inspiring vision of the arrival era.

If you’ve been well trained by a literary analyzer like this AmericanStudier, one of your main responses to the new definition of cross-cultural American diversity I first advanced in this space in my December 5, 2011 post (and have returned to in many others since, including my second book) might be “So what?” I tried to address some of the broadest national narratives that could be transformed by my ideas back in the “What would change” series of posts (written the week that that aforementioned book in which I make this argument was released), and certainly I would still emphasize such broad topics (language, mixture, the melting pot, and a phrase like “All-American”) in response to your hypothetical analytical query. But within that book, each main chapter focused on a particular century in American post-contact history and culture, and along those lines I would also argue that a definition of American identity and diversity focused on cross-cultural transformation would allow—in fact require—us to rethink some of our dominant images (both positive and negative) of different time periods.

When it comes to the arrival and contact period, for example, for a long time our national narratives of the first European arrivals to the Americas have focused on two distinct, in many ways opposed, but each in their own way oversimplifying stories. Some of the most defining national narratives have of course focused on the Puritans, and most especially on the Mayflower Pilgrims; those narratives have tended to be largely positive and celebratory, as exemplified by the recurring “city on a hill” imagery which leaders like John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan have used both to describe the Pilgrims and to carry forward their idealizing visions of their mission and community. In the dominant Pilgrim narrative, Native Americans tend to figure mostly just as friendly helpers (a la Squanto) who help the Pilgrims survive and then, well, more or less vanish from the story. On the other hand, another defining national narrative emphasizes Christopher Columbus and 1492 as key origin points; for at least the last few decades, driven by multicultural historical revisions and the rise of disciplines like ethnic and Native American studies, that narrative has tended to be largely negative and critical, as illustrated by the many protests that met the 1992 Columbus quincentenary and sought to turn the conversations both to the many cultures that constituted the Pre-Columbian Americas and to the often horrifically violent and destructive aftermaths of Columbus’s “discovery” for those cultures.

There’s certainly both historical accuracy and contemporary relevance to the positive and the negative narratives of European arrival, but my definition requires a different vision: one that emphasizes not arrival itself, not the cultures doing the arriving, and not those already here and affected by the arrivals, but instead the relationships and interconnections between and ultimately mutual transformations of all of those cultures. And to that end, I can’t recommend highly enough Cynthia Van Zandt’s BrothersAmong Nations: The Pursuit of Intercultural Alliances in Early America, 1580-1660 (2008). Van Zandt’s book is exemplary as historical scholarship, utilizing archival primary sources in consistently clear and complex ways, and refusing to settle for anything less than a fully rounded analysis of the multiple cultures and moments and encounters on which she focuses. But it’s just as exemplary, to my mind, in its fundamental purpose, in Van Zandt’s desire to examine aspects of the arrival era that are centrally defined neither by European success nor by cultural oppression or violence; instead, she argues convincingly throughout, many of this period’s central interactions were hesitant, tentative, partial, and most significantly cross-cultural in every sense. If they did not always extend into the remainder of the 17^th and 18^th centuries, that does not mean that they are not crucially defining American interactions, both because future cultures and communities would likely not have existed without them and because, through a more 21^st century lens, they provide inspiring evidence that separation, hierarchy, and violence were far from the only options available to early American cultures.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other Indigenous or early American histories you’d highlight?