3—
History, Science, and Geronimo's Story

The first Indian war to be fought after passage of the Indian Removal Act, the Black Hawk War was also the last to be fought east of the Mississippi.^[1] Any hope that Indians might live unmolested in the Great American Desert across the river, or even within an Indian state, proved illusory as land-hungry settlers crossed the Mississippi into an area increasingly represented, in Henry Nash Smith's account not as a desert but as the "Garden of the World."^[2] On the Plains, in the Great Basin and Plateau, in the southwest and the Pacific northwest, the familiar pattern of contact,

conflict, and conquest reasserted itself. Indian war, in William Hagan's bitter phrase, "that great American institution," persisted as the leading edge of history, whose inexorable law decreed that Indians must vanish in the name of civilization.^[3] And "progress" created "State-prisoners" and "fertilizer" in abundance.

Through the expansionist 1840s and into the 1850s, the Indian continued to be represented in art and imitated in life. In the East, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a Harvard professor and the first to teach Faust at an American college, saw Black Hawk in 1837 in Boston, read Henry Schoolcraft's Algic Researches (1839), and transformed Schoolcraft's Manabozho into his own Hiawatha. Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha (1855) sold out its first printing of 4,000 copies on the day of its publication and completed its first year in print with sales of 38,000. Hiawatha elegiacally counsels his people to abandon the old ways and adapt themselves to the coming of "civilization," but he does so in a verse form which only "civilization" can provide; Longfellow derived Hiawatha's trochaic meter from the Finnish epic, Kalevala .

In the west, Kit Carson and Jim Beckwourth, following, as it were, the unlettered footsteps of Daniel Boone, turned themselves—temporarily—into white Indians, the better, as Conrad's Kurz would conclude for a later imperialism, to "exterminate the brutes." But by the end of the 1860s, Indians could no longer even serve whites as models in warfare; with the technological advances gained in the Civil War, Indian-like stealth and ecological expertise became largely obsolete in Indian war. The extension of the railroads, the development of sustained winter pursuit (a time

when Indians traditionally considered themselves safe from attack), and the perfection of rapid-fire weaponry provided further evidence to confirm the "law" of "history." Not even the fierce resistance of the Plains tribes, it soon became apparent, could impede the triumph of "civilization" over "savagery." Increasingly it seemed that, as General Philip Sheridan supposedly remarked, the only good Indian would be a dead Indian.

There were to be plenty of dead Indians before the "long death" on the Plains was over and the frontier officially closed in 1890. First, however, the Natives would enjoy one famous victory. It was nearly on the eve of America's first Centennial celebrations, on June 25, 1876, that a combined force of Cheyenne and Sioux annihilated General George Armstrong Custer's Seventh Cavalry on the Little Big Horn River. The Custer fight occasioned national interest in its day, and it remains as the Indian fight every American has heard of. Those who know nothing about Indians are still likely to recognize the names of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, leaders in the Custer fight. Yet there exists no full-scale contemporary autobiography of these world-historical chiefs nor of other major leaders who fought Custer. This is because the Custer fight was not an Indian defeat; it did not immediately subject these warriors to the military and political discipline of the whites and so it did not either subject them to white discursive discipline.^[4]

This is not to say that even the Custer fighters managed to live out their lives as they wished. The march of "civilization" was not to be denied, and they, too, were brought down. White soldiers murdered Crazy Horse before he had uttered more than a few terse remarks to the whites who

cared to hear from him. Sitting Bull, after some years spent in Grandmother's Land—Canada—surrendered to the Commander of Fort Buford with the words " . . .I bow my head."^[5] Earlier, in 1870, before his submission, Sitting Bull had consented to draw a representation of his coups, and he twice more drew pictographic autobiographies after his surrender. Yet, according to Lynne O'Brien, "In both technique and subject matter, his autobiographies are generally traditional. White influence, shown in such things as his use of paper and pencil, does not interrupt the basic native pictographic design."^[6] Even after acknowledging defeat, Sitting Bull "never seriously departed from the traditional rules of pictographic composition."^[7] It is O'Brien's conclusion that "his image of himself in his society was not destroyed by defeat. He felt no need to explain his actions to whites in white forms. White armies might defeat him, but white culture could not intrude upon the way he saw himself."^[8] Sitting Bull was also murdered by soldiers.

That the Indians were victorious at the Little Big Horn was only an exception to a rule that remained in effect. Through the 1870s and 1880s, Indian war meant Indian defeat and destruction. In 1877, the surrender of the Nez Perces, after their spectacular "flight" (an event that was particularly well covered by the newspapers of the time) focused attention on a defeated Native American who might well have become a hero of Indian autobiography, Young Joseph, or Heinmot Tooyalakekt ("thunder traveling to loftier mountain heights"). But the text, which has been called, at least since 1907, "Chief Joseph's Own Story," is not, as its title seems to suggest, an Indian autobiography; rather, it is a translation by Bishop W. H. Hare of a speech given

by Joseph to an audience of congressmen and other government officials, and published in 1879 in the North American Review as "An Indian's Views of Indian Affairs," a title more appropriate to its content. Dealing with the usual injustices done to the Indians and describing a war which the New York Times for October 15, 1877, called "on our part . . . nothing short of a gigantic blunder and a crime," Joseph's talk gives very little of the story of his own life.^[9]

In the 1880s, not only the New York Times but most influential easterners spoke out, as their ancestors fifty years earlier had done, against western injustice to the Indians. Yet eastern kindness often was not much better for the Natives than western cruelty. After the work of Lewis Henry Morgan, Indian "savages" could be seen as "barbarians," and so only one step removed from the phonetic alphabet and written "civilization." Now that Indian "savagery" was no longer, strictly, the antithesis of "civilization," it was perhaps possible, as Captain Richard Pratt, founder of the Carlisle Indian School, put it in a famous slogan, to "Kill the Indian and save the man!" It might be said that Pratt's slogan became the rallying cry for the eastern Friends of the Indian as they collectively came to be known. These Friends "put their faith principally in three proposals," as Francis Paul Prucha has written:

. . . first, to break up the tribal relations and their reservation base and to individualize the Indian on a 160-acre homestead by the allotment of land in severalty; second, to make the Indians citizens and equal with the whites in regard to both the protection and the restraints of law; and third, to provide a universal government school system that would make good Americans [!] out of the rising generation of Indians.^[10]

The first step in the destruction of the communal—"communistic," as these Protestant individualists saw it—culture of the Indian was to do away with the collectively held land-base of the tribes. The Dawes Severalty Act of 1887 became the means to this end; as the Indian Removal Act may be taken as the political expression of American thought about the Indian from, roughly, the 1820s through the 1840s, so too may the Dawes Act be taken in regard to the 1880s into the twentieth century. Dawes provided, in William Hagan's account:

. . . that at his discretion the President could allot reservation lands to the Indians, the title to be held in trust by the United States for twenty-five years. Full citizenship for the Indian would accompany the allotment. Heads of families were to receive 160 acres with similar amounts going to other Indians. The surplus, after the Indians had been taken care of, was to go on the market.^[11]

In practice, this introduction to the blessings of private ownership meant pauperizing the Indian. Between 1887 and 1934, when the Indian Reorganization Act instituted a new Indian policy, of the 138,000 acres of land held by the Indians, no more than 48,000 to 55,000 were left to them, and at least half of what remained was desert or semidesert land.

Only a year before passage of the Dawes Act, far from the halls of Congress on the southwestern frontier, Geronimo and his band of some thirty-odd warriors surrendered one last and final time to the twenty-five-hundred-man army of American "civilization" under General Nelson A. Miles.

Not only Geronimo's band of Chiricahua but other, nonoffending Apache bands were rounded up and put aboard trains for the malarial conditions of Fort Marion, Florida. Used to the dry heat of the desert, the Apaches in Florida sickened and died with good regularity until, some eight years later, they were shipped northward and westward, now to be prisoners at Fort Sill, Oklahoma.

It was there, in 1904, that Geronimo met Stephen Melvil Barrett, newly appointed superintendent of schools at Lawton, Oklahoma, and affiliated with the University of Oklahoma. Barrett had assisted Geronimo in selling a war bonnet, and shared with him an unfavorable view of Mexicans. In 1905, Barrett asked Geronimo if he would "allow [him] to publish some of the things he had told [him]." Geronimo refused, but, Barrett's account continues, he proposed instead that if Barrett "would pay him, and if the officers in charge [at Fort Sill] did not object, he would tell [him] the whole story of his life."^[12] The officers did object, and Barrett wrote to President Theodore Roosevelt, whose interest in Indians was well known, for permission to proceed with Geronimo's autobiography. Barrett's "Introductory" to Geronimo's Story of His Life , the book that resulted from their collaboration, prints ten letters of "Endorsements" passing the proposed project up and down the line of command for comment and approval. Before the manuscript was finally published, it would be reviewed by the president and the War Department, whose objections to statements made by Geronimo were duly noted by Barrett. At the president's suggestion, Barrett also "appended notes throughout the book disclaiming responsibility for adverse criticisms of any persons mentioned by Geronimo" (p. xiii). Understandably,

yet I think regrettably, Barrett's "narration of his dealings with the War Department" has been deleted by Frederick W. Turner in his edition of the Barrett/Geronimo text, Geronimo: His Own Story , the most readily available modern edition, as "obviously superfluous material."^[13] But this obscures the presence of state power attending upon the production of the text, a presence by no means "superfluous" for our understanding. Turner also deletes Barrett's "account of Apache/white warfare in the nineteenth century," and relegates to an appendix an account of Geronimo's surrender.^[14] But this, too, deprives the reader of understanding as it removes the evidence of Barrett's explicit intervention in Geronimo's "own" story, as well as of Barrett's "own" opinions on these matters.

"Early in October," of 1905, Barrett's "Introductory" continues, "I secured the services of an educated Indian, Asa Daklugie, son of Whoa [Juh, Who], chief of the Nedni Apaches, as interpreter, and the work of compiling the book began" (p. xx). (Whoa had been an ally of Geronimo's in battle, and he died by drowning, after too much drinking—as Geronimo would also die, of exposure, following an alcohol-induced accident.) Exactly how much education and of what kind Asa Daklugie had is not clear. Geronimo's manner of narration, according to Barrett, was simply to tell what he thought important, in the way he thought appropriate, and then to leave Barrett and his interpreter to recall and transcribe what he had said. Although Geronimo would "listen to the reproduction (in Apache) of what had been told" (p. xxi), answering questions and occasionally providing further information, it seems inevitable that the final text (there does not seem to be an original manuscript

extant) is very much the work of Daklugie and, most particularly, Barrett himself.

Like J. B. Patterson, Barrett was no stranger to the frontier; his father had been a wagon-train boss, and his grandfather had settled the family in Indian territory in the 1830s. Also like Patterson, Barrett presented his subject's life in autobiographical form, but there is little else his book has in common with Patterson's.

Patterson appears to have accepted the task of writing Black Hawk's Life as an opportunity and a responsibility; neither he nor LeClair who engaged him to the project conceived of themselves as its initiators. We have already noted LeClair's presentation of the Life as the expression of Black Hawk's desire, and Patterson, in his "Advertisement" to the public, affirms and amplifies:

Several accounts of the late war having been published, in which [Black Hawk] thinks justice is not done to himself or nation, he determined to make known to the world, the injuries his people have received from the whites—the causes which brought on the war on the part of his nation, and a general history of it throughout the campaign.

Patterson, we recall, presented Black Hawk as "a Hero who has lately taken such high rank among the distinguished individuals of America . . . a Warrior, a Patriot and a State-Prisoner . . . still the Chief of his band, asserting their rights with dignity, firmness and courage." For Patterson clearly shared his period's fascination with the heldensleben and its attraction to the new form of autobiography.

But, although in his "Introductory" Barrett acknowledged that the idea of publishing a life story originated with Ge-

ronimo, in his preface, he gives no indication whatever of Geronimo's active initiation of the project. "The initial idea of the compilation of this work," Barrett writes,

[is] to give the reading public an authentic record of the private life of the Apache Indians, and to extend to Geronimo as a prisoner of war the courtesy due any captive, i.e. , the right to state the causes which impelled him in his opposition to our civilization and laws.

If the Indians' cause has been properly presented, the captives' defense clearly stated, and the general store of information regarding vanishing types increased, I shall be satisfied. (p. v)

Barrett shares with Patterson that reading of history which sees it as the progress of "civilization" and "law" to triumph over "savagery" and "anarchy." And he shares with Patterson the desire to add to the record an Indian's own statement of his people's "defense" and of the "causes" of his personal "opposition" to "civilization." But Patterson's explicit interest in justice and the conflict between nations, an ethical view of historiography, has here become more nearly a concern with fairness and balance, a presumptively neutral, objective, or scientific view. By 1905, the federal government had not treated with the tribes as nations for more than thirty years; the Indian had dropped out of history and could himself determine nothing. For Barrett, Geronimo is certainly no hero. Not only is Geronimo denied the context of heroism, but of individuality as well; for he is no different from "any captive," any "prisoner of war," no world-historical figure, but just another "vanishing type."

What we have, then, is Indian autobiography in the age not of Carlyle but of Hardy; there are no more heroes, and

personal agency counts for little. In eastern autobiographical writing, we have moved from Thoreau's bold determination "to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning," in a book in which "the I, or first person . . . will be retained,"^[15] to Henry Adams's decision to suppress the I, or first-person. Adams was a professional historian whose amateur account of his education was importantly influenced by the new centrality of the mechanical and physical sciences. Barrett, author of Practical Pedagogy (1910), was a professional educator, a student of sociology whose amateur attempt at history writing was importantly influenced by the new centrality of the social sciences. For Barrett is interested in the ethnographic record quite as much as the historical record; he permits Geronimo to tell his story as a means to telling the story of the "private life of the Apache Indians"—itself a means to increasing "the general store of information regarding vanishing types." As any-Apache, just another "vanishing type," Geronimo becomes representative of his culture and thus more valuable for the purposes of science than he would be as an extraordinary or distinctive Apache. For we have also moved from the nineteenth century's interest in the determining individual to the twentieth century's interest in the determining culture.

Barrett was a student of "Indian sociology," and his last book, published in 1946 when he was eighty-one, was Sociology of the American Indians . He did not use the anthropologists' term culture in Geronimo —not in his prefatory and introductory remarks, in his notes, nor in paraphrase/translation of any word of Geronimo's. Yet his phrase, "the private life of the Apache Indians," appears consistent with Tylor's 1871 definition of culture as " . . . that complex

whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society."^[16] And Barrett's understanding and application of "the culture concept" is generally consistent with its use in American social science of the period by Franz Boas and his students.

"The gospel's course hath hitherto been as that of the sun, from east to west," Richard Sibbes had written in 1630, "and so in God's time may proceed yet further west."^[17] Also from east to west had proceeded the new gospel of science in anthropology, borne from Kiel, Germany, to Morning-side Heights, New York, by Franz Boas and then carried to far California by Boas's student, A. L. Kroeber, the first to take a doctorate in anthropology under the master at Columbia. Boasian anthropology established itself as a professional, university-based discipline in reaction to the older, amateur American anthropology which went back perhaps to Jefferson and Colden, to Father Heckewelder, Schoolcraft and, most particularly, to the great Lewis Henry Morgan. I shall consider Boas and his influence on Indian autobiography more fully in the next chapter; here, I would indicate three particular areas of disagreement between the new, Boasian anthropology and the older, evolutionary anthropology primarily associated with Morgan. For the explanatory categories of "race" or "natural law," the Boasians substituted the category of "culture." For the "nomological," generalizing, and deductive "comparative method" of the evolutionary anthropologists, they substituted the method called "historical particularism," an "idiographic" approach founded upon a sense of the uniqueness of historical events,

and the almost infinitely complex specificity of cultural instances. For ethnocentric rankings of other cultures as "higher" or "lower" as they approached or remained distant from the pinnacle of Euramerican "civilization," they substituted the concept of "cultural relativism," which valorized the "emic" account of cultural phenomena, the view from the "inside," as seen through the eyes of the native informant him or herself—a procedure that required the anthropologist to develop at least some minimal competence in the native language.^[18]

Boasian scientific anthropology constituted its field in the mode Hayden White has defined for fin de siècle historiography as the mode of irony; sophisticated, self-conscious, skeptical, the new anthropology hypostasized the distinction between "facts" and "interpretations" and set out to gather the former and avoid the latter.^[19] Boas's notorious warning against the inference of "laws," even in the sense of generalized probabilities that might govern the field, was a potent factor in the development of American anthropology for nearly half a century.

Barrett, too, appears determined to avoid "interpretation," and to refuse any generalization. Thus he must suppress—as "unscientific" because inevitably "subjective"—ethical categories so far as he can; unlike Patterson, he cannot employ words like injury, justice , or injustice very readily, neither in his presentation of Apache culture nor in his presentation of the history of Indian-white relations. This is not to say that he is unmindful of the ethical issue; rather, his "ironic" understanding of "objectivity" forces him to affect a "neutral" presentation. In Geronimo's Story of His Life , Barrett's chapter 10, for example, "Other Raids" (this

is part of the material omitted from Turner's edition), interrupts Geronimo's narrative; here, Barrett speaks in his own voice and gives an account of the equivalent "lawlessness of the frontier" (p. 86) on the part of whites, Mexicans, and Indians. His chapter 18, "Surrender of Geronimo" (Turner prints this separately, as an appendix), concludes:

We do not wish to express our own opinion, but to ask the reader whether, after having had the testimony of Apaches, soldiers, and civilians, who knew the conditions of surrender, and after having examined carefully the testimony offered, it would be possible to conclude that Geronimo made an unconditional surrender?

Before passing from this subject it would be well also to consider whether our government has treated these prisoners in strict accordance with the terms of the treaty made in Skeleton Cañon. (p. 176)

We infer the editor's unexpressed "opinion" pretty well, but Barrett will not speak the word injustice himself. Like Boas, he believes that the "facts" must speak for themselves.

Explicitly, Barrett's only concern is to offer "the reading public an authentic record" of Indian culture and history; and "authenticity"—consistent with "objectivity"—is a function of the "inside" view. Barrett's use of the word private , I mean to say, is synonymous with a term like emic , or—awkwardly, but perhaps vividly—actor-oriented . For "private" does not mean intimate, affective, or individualized but, instead, means from the perspective of the subject. And this seems to be why the autobiographical form was chosen by Barrett—as it would be by Boas's early student, Paul Radin, who as we shall see inaugurated the profes-

sional, anthropological variant of the Indian autobiography.^[20] Whereas Patterson used the form, consistent with its first appearances in Euramerican culture, as the appropriate vehicle for the extraordinary individual to express his uniqueness, allowing even the Indian who had attained world-historical status to speak for himself, in the twentieth century, beginning with Barrett, the autobiographical form is used to allow the scientist to express his objectivity. The first-person pronoun demonstrates his absence from the text, and so, too, demonstrates the "objective . .  authenticity" of his account.

Ignoring matters of translation, selection, and arrangement in the compilation of the work and, oblivious as yet to both the developed Nietzschean and the developing Heisenbergian problematics in history and science, Barrett, like the professional anthropological Indian autobiographers who came after him, appears to have retained the autobiographical form as an attempt to reject the inevitable "artifactuality" of any textual narrativization of reality. In the ironic mode, neither science nor history has anything to do with ethical choices—or, for that matter, with esthetic ones. Putative questions of justice still force themselves upon one who would only deal in matters of "clear statement" and "proper presentation" but they must be relegated to chapters of their own, to appendices, or footnotes; and the responsibility for interpreting these materials is always the reader's. "Clear statement" and "proper presentation" are also Barrett's sole esthetic criteria. These observations may help us understand the considerable differences in style and structure between Patterson's Black Hawk and Barrett's Geronimo , as well as the different content of their (nonetheless) similar functions.

Patterson seems to have believed, in Donald Jackson's phrase, that "a noble Indian deserved noble prose";^[21] he sustained that belief until 1882 when he issued his final edition of the Life as an Autobiography , for he not only added some material but elaborated the diction still further. These new words were not Black Hawk's—he had died in 1838—but Patterson's alone. Barrett's any-Indian, on the other hand, appears in a prose that is neutral and flat, an "objective" style, as it were, pretending to a straightforward mirroring of the "order of things," transparently communicating the "facts" of Geronimo's life.^[22] The documentary, scientific effect is enhanced by Barrett's use of footnotes; in these, as in parts of the text itself, he quotes others and gives information to balance out the historical and scientific record of "vanishing types" in conflict with "our civilization and laws." Patterson's Life , composed in the name of justice, is tragically emplotted; narrated from Black Hawk's point of view, it is a story of decline and fall, terminating in what Frye has called the "epiphany of law." That "law" is nothing but the progressivist vision of the triumph of Euramerican "civilization" over Native American "savagery," and it is part of the discursive function of the work to affirm the "law" of progress. Thus, as I have noted, from the point of view of Patterson and his contemporary readers, the structure of Black Hawk's Life is not tragic at all, but comic, the sad comedy of "civilization" progressing to a happy ending in which the red-skinned "blocking characters" are overcome; "the normal response of the audience . . . is 'this should be.'"^[23]

But the emplotment of Barrett's Geronimo is ironic—from Geronimo's point of view, it would seem, but certainly

from Barrett's, for he is the one responsible for the selection and arrangement of the text as we have it. Unlike Black Hawk's Life , Geronimo's story, though one of "opposition to our civilization and law," contains no sense of historical agon , and itself illustrates no law whatever. A tale merely of things-that-happened, it is structured by the apparently neutral, or natural, categories of time and space. The book is divided into four parts, the first of which ("The Apaches") and the last ("The Old and the New") are largely accounts of Apache culture as a synchronic unity. The diachronic history of particular interest to white civilization is presented in part 3 ("The White Men"), but in its length, detail, and manner of narration this is almost exactly parallel to part 2 ("The Mexicans"): both the second and third parts chronicle successful and unsuccessful Apache campaigns in warfare, and there is no suggestion that the events leading to Geronimo's twenty-year-long incarceration and the effective destruction of Chiricahua culture by the whites are in any way more significant or important than other of Geronimo's fights south of the border. They are not Geronimo's fights, in any case: for none of "The Apaches," "The Mexicans," or "The White Men" is singled out as a world-historical figure, or individualized. Geronimo is no more than an Indian who happened to be present at certain events, not an author of history; even at his Waterloo, he is no Napoleon but more nearly a Fabrizio del Dongo.

It may be suggested that that was how Geronimo saw things and presented them to Barrett. It is not possible effectively to disprove such a view although its consequence is an estimate of Geronimo as quite an obtuse fellow. From the testimony of James Kaywaykla, Samuel Kenoi, and Ja-

son Betzinez, all of whom knew Geronimo, and felt free to find fault with him, whatever else he may have been he was not obtuse or stupid.^[24] It seems rather more likely that it is Barrett for whom the events leading up to the final surrender of Geronimo's small band in 1886 have no special importance. Looking back from the vantage point of 1905, and looking through the lens of ironic scientism, Barrett might well have seen them as no different from a long series of Indian defeats, one of the last steps on the road to vanishment.

In his preface, Barrett had announced Geronimo's story in a passive language, establishing it as an expression of white "courtesy" unable to come into existence on its own initiative. He assigns this same passive language to Geronimo in the fourth and last part of the book, even as Geronimo speaks of "Hopes for the Future," and concludes with the specific hope that a further "courtesy," permission for the Apache to return to Arizona, may be granted. For "we can do nothing in this matter ourselves," Barrett's Geronimo says, "we must wait until those in authority choose to act" (Geronimo's Story of His Life , p. 216). The "one privilege" Geronimo requested was not granted in his lifetime; he died, as he suspected he might, "in bondage," in 1909. The remnant of his people who wished to go home were allowed to return to the West, to the Mescalero reservation in New Mexico because the citizens of Arizona would not let them in to "their" state.

With tragic reconciliation to the "law of history," Black Hawk had also acknowledge his "humility" before "the power of the American government" (see the dedication), stated his regrets for his former hostility to "civilization,"

and announced that "the white man will always be welcome in our village or camps, as a brother" (pp. 153–154)—as if there were yet a situation permitting some choice in the matter; as if the Sac and Fox might yet live as a confederated people able to act as well as to suffer. But this is not at all the nature of Geronimo's conclusion. The only action left to him is to tell his story—if the whites permit it; for him to acknowledge defeat would be superfluous. Nor can there be any tragic reconciliation to the newly revealed order of things, for there is neither order nor revelation nor tragedy here: things simply happened as they happened. The history of the Indian in the ironic mode has no particular meaning or pattern; the scienticization of history on this model requires that it be removed from moral judgment as well as from esthetic arrangement. The objective scientist can be neither a moralist nor an artist; he is not responsible for the way things are or for the arrangement of his text; irony is taken as the avoidance of tropes, not as one tropological choice among others. Barrett's account of the "Indians' cause" and the "private life of the Apache" is indeed offered only to stock "the general store of information regarding vanishing types." Thus Barrett's "scientific" contribution—like much of Boas's own, in the view of Leslie White, Marvin Harris, and others—is to provide us with a "factual" increment, the significance of which, although inevitably implied, yet remains to be stated.

In the nineteenth century, historians—whether journalists, painters, poets, novelists, or biographers—had often accompanied or followed immediately after the army to do "justice" to the dispossessed and defeated Indian, at least in their representations if no way else, preserving what the

"law" of progress decreed must otherwise vanish. Patterson's Black Hawk functioned as part of the Euramerican discourse of assujettissement , in confirmation of the progressivist presumption that Indian "savagery" must everywhere accede to white "civilization." Yet it also functioned to question the justice (if not the accuracy) of that presumption, both in the explicit commentary of its editor and its subject and, most particularly, in its very form, in which—and for the first time—the Indian appeared neither vanished nor silent, to speak for himself.

In the twentieth century, it was the imperium of knowledge that advanced against the Indian. The frontier became the field work, Frederick Jackson Turner's key to American history transforming itself into the key to the new, American anthropological science. In the early part of the century especially, it was not so much the individual Indian himself but his culture that would be preserved in the scientist's representations; the Indian autobiography of the historical Hero became the "life history" of the representative type. Yet having rejected the "law" of cultural evolution and its assertion of the supremacy of "civilization," the Boasians had—or at least offered—no explanation of why the Indian still had to vanish—a premise they accepted fully, as the urgent injunction to gather and preserve as much as possible as rapidly as possible with no time lost to theorizing, would indicate. The eventual acceptance of the theoretical position of "cultural relativism" seems to have come at the price of its practical inconsequentiality—for a time, at least. Nonetheless, just as Patterson's book both affirmed and opposed that law which justified every depredation against the Indian, Barrett's Geronimo extended but also limited what

Fredric Jameson has called the "imperializing hubris of conventional bourgeois science,"^[25] whose "objectivity," as Frantz Fanon remarked, is always turned against the native. The new discourse of science sought to establish the claim that none but those whose credentials marked them as bona fide workers in the "knowledge industry"—university-trained and -based professors like Boas and his students or "super-intendents of Education" like Barrett—could "objectively" represent the "facts" of a world already divided into the provinces of specialists, anthropologists, and sociologists.

Although, as I have said, the autobiographical form may have been retained primarily as testimony to the "objectivity" and "authenticity" of the scientist's document, the central convention of autobiography, that the subject speaks for himself, does keep the Indian voice alive (however much mediated), as it preserves, though only as information, the Indian culture. In the Dawes period, when Friends of the Indian methodically sought Native destruction not by extermination but by "civilization," this function of Indian autobiography worked against the grain of the dominant social ideology; rather than try to kill the Indian and save the man, Indian autobiography presented the man inseparable from his Indian-ness.