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Article Excerpt
When are you going to begin making a young lady out of this wild Indian, Mrs. Woodlawn?" So utters the visiting circuit rider about the tomboyish title character in one of the opening chapters of Carol Ryrie Brink's Newbery Award-winning novel Caddie Woodlawn, Far from an inconsequential remark, the travelling minister's association of the white tomboy with the non-white American Indians announces a recurring issue in Brink's novel. Throughout the 1935 narrative, the young girl possesses a strong relationship with the indigenous tribal people of western Wisconsin, where her family lives. As readers learn in the opening pages, for instance, Caddie's closest friend outside of her two brothers is not another rough-and-tumble girl or--echoing the pattern of countless other novels that feature tomboyish characters--a sissy boy. Instead, it is Indian John, the leader of the local tribe.
Although the circuit rider's characterization of Caddie as a "wild Indian" may emanate from the young girl's connection to the indigenous people in general and Indian John in particular, another equally powerful source is possible: her association with tomboyism. While the Anglo-American figure belongs to a different cultural heritage, possesses a different racial identity, and practices a different religion than the American Indians who inhabit her environment, her participation in this gender-bending code of conduct places her in dialogue with many common white stereotypes about them. In the same way that the tribal peoples of North America are seen as "wild" and "uncivilized," for instance, so too is Brink's title character because of her tomboyish ways. As Mr. Woodlawn himself remarks in the opening pages of the novel, his eleven-year-old daughter is "running wild instead of making samplers and dipping candles" (15). In addition, echoing the common racial classification of American Indians as "redskins," Caddie is repeatedly cast in an analogous manner: burned from exposure to the sun and flushed from her engagement in active outdoor play, her complexion is described as red, flush, or crimson at repeated points in the narrative (12, 16). Finally, reflecting prevailing white cultural beliefs that American Indians are "savage" and "uncivilized," the young girl is seen as acting in a similar way Indeed, when Mr. Tanner first encounters Caddie, she is making a decidedly "wild" entrance: bursting into the house, flinging open the dining room door, and spilling hazelnuts all over the floor. It is the young girl's rambunctious behaviour in this scene--not her friendship with Indian John--that prompts the circuit rider to compare her to indigenous peoples. In doing so, he connects Caddie with a long-standing phenomenon in American literature and culture whereby rowdy white children of either gender are accused of behaving "like a bunch of wild Indians."
Using these observations as a starting point, this essay unpacks the ways in which white tomboyism and American Indian tribalism are mutually constructed in Brink's novel. Caddie's tomboyish ability to cross the gender line between masculinity and femininity becomes mapped onto an ability to cross the racial one separating Anglo-Americans and American Indians. As a result, the young girl's resistance to the confines of white womanhood via her participation in tomboyism causes her to escape the confines of whiteness and instead be classified as a non-white "wild Indian." Especially when placed against the backdrop of prevailing societal beliefs about the "civilizing" power of white Christian women over both male unruliness and heathen "savagery," discourses about Anglo-American girlhood, Native American "primi-tivism", and United States frontier imperialism come to overlap and interlock in Carol Ryrie Brink's text.
Caddie's kinship with American Indian tribalism does more than simply serve as a metaphor for her tomboyish rebellion against white womanhood, however. It also becomes the means by which she paradoxically solidifies her status as an American. Although Caddie's connection to various facets of Native Indian tribalism may seem to contradict her patriotism--making the young girl a citizen of the local Indian tribe rather than the United States--it does not. During both the mid-1930s when Brink's novel was published and the mid-1860s when it is set, the continent's indigenous peoples were no longer considered an obstacle to American nationalism. Instead, they were viewed as a symbol of it. Brian Dippie and Philip Deloria have written that the era just before the outbreak of the Civil War marked a turning point in socio-political attitudes about the nation's indigenous peoples. After decades of waging wars against American Indians, forcibly relocating them to reservations, and decimating their populations through encroachment or disease, the threat that they posed to westward expansion and white settlement had been neutralized. In a powerful index of this phenomenon, the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs moved from the Department of War to the Department of the Interior in 1849.
With white Americans no longer needing to fear indigenous peoples, they began mythologizing them. Reversing previous rhetoric that positioned indigenous tribes and the United States in oppositional and antithetical ways, American Indians were now regarded as the first, original and even--in the words of Walter Benn Michaels--"true native Americans" (141). A cultural affinity with American Indian tribalism no longer existed at cross-purposes from American acculturation and assimilation; now, these traits could actually help to cultivate such qualities.
The pages that follow locate Carol Ryrie Brink's novel within this longstanding literary and cultural phenomenon and, in doing so, demonstrate how the tomboyish title character's possession of various physical, personal, and psychological forms of Indianization helps to assert her Americanization. Caddie's close friendship with Indian John and her engagement in a tribalized form of "wild" white tomboyism allow her to become what could be characterized as a "red-blooded" American.
Together with building on the long-familiar subject of Caddie Woodlawn as a historical novel chronicling events that transpired during the 1860s, this essay has another equally important goal: pushing the critical discussion about Brink's book in a new direction by refracting it through the long overlooked lens of attitudes about American Indians during the 1930s. Following the dictum that works of historical fiction say at least as much about the period in which they are written and released as the one in which they are set--arguably even more so--the final section of my discussion places Caddie Woodlawn back in context with contemporaneous socio-political events regarding American Indians, most notably the publication of the Meriam Report in 1928 and the passage of the Indian Reorganization Act in 1934. Both of these measures received national media attention, were the subject of widespread public debate, and signalled massive changes in public opinion and federal policy towards the nation's indigenous peoples. Bringing these elements to bear on Caddie Woodlawn reveals that this novel, which is ostensibly about the nineteenth-century past, engages in a tacit but traceable conversation with pressing issues from its twentieth-century present.
Caddie's engagement in a "wild" form of white tomboyism, and the way in which this behaviour forges a connection between her and the region's equally "wild" American Indians, emerges as early as the first sentence of Carol Ryrie Brink's novel. Using language that is suggestive of white Western stereotypes about indigenous peoples, the opening...
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