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Reviews
The Indian Chief as Tragic Hero
Native Resistance and the Literatures of America, from Moctezuma to Tecumseh
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By Gordon M. Sayre
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(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Pp. 368. Illustrations. $22.50)
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Injun Joe's Ghost
The Indian Mixed-Blood in American Writing
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By Harry J. Brown
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(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004. Pp. viii, 271. Notes, bibliography, index. $47.50.)
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| In the 1500s, indigenous Mexican boys attending a mission school outside the Aztec capitol of Tenochtitlan painted hundreds of images of the conquest of Mexico. A Franciscan friar, Bernadino de Sahagun, used their art to illustrate a twelve-volume history of New Spain. But the book (known as the Florentine Codex) was considered too radical for publication, and it languished in a private library in Florence for more than three hundred years. Few scholars today have examined the pictures. Even fewer scholars have seen the images from The Half Breed or The Place Beyond the Wind, silent films released in 1916 starring respectively Douglas Fairbanks and Lon Chaney as mixed-blood Indian protagonists. Like many silents, the films were never intentionally preserved; in 1978 they were salvaged from a cache of 510 reels that had been buried in an abandoned swimming pool beneath an ice skating rink in the Yukon. |
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Today, scholars who write about Native Americans must go beyond the familiar archive of nationalist romances and official histories and search for traces of indigeneity wherever they can, from the libraries of Italy to the landfills of the Canadian West. Both Gordon Sayre and Harry J. Brown take us into these excitingly expanded new archives, and both connect the new materials to more familiar sources. |
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