Indigenous Warfare and Tactical Aesthetics

John Funchion's paper, “Indigenous Warfare and Tactical Aesthetics,” establishes how writers represented Native American warfare to both tribal and white-settler readers. In A Treatise on the Mode and the Manner of Indian... [ view full abstract ]

John Funchion's paper, “Indigenous Warfare and Tactical Aesthetics,” establishes how writers represented Native American warfare to both tribal and white-settler readers. In A Treatise on the Mode and the Manner of Indian War (1812), Colonel James Smith laments that New England writers devoted too much attention to the religious character or conversion of Native Americans. Smith thus gestures to the problem of erasure examined in Dillon’s presentation, but he does so to insist that a new body of military studies of Native American warfare must be produced. He chastises British tacticians for regarding “Indians” as “undisciplined savages.” Rather than casting them as nightmarish monsters, he admires their tactical sophistication and the independence with which their disciplined warriors operate. This in no small part stems from the partisan’s mooring to particular place: the land and insurgent belong to a larger political ecology in Jane Bennett’s sense of the word. Smith imagines the Native American as a model for the U.S. partisan fighter and political sovereignty. He does not express a desire to “play Indian” in the manner Philip Deloria describes, but he wishes instead to become Indian in a more philosophically abstract sense.

This radical iteration of individualism assumes a distinctly anti-federal character that cannot be easily reconciled with liberal thought. Treatises such as Smith’s laid the groundwork for novelistic treatments of the Native American that moved away from the familiar gothic tropes found in fictions such as those by Charles Brockden Brown. Drawing on recent scholarship on the gothic that departs from Fiedler’s influential account of the genre, Funchion argues that tactical writing on Native American warfare helped inaugurate a new regime of representation that imagines forms of white sovereignty derived from consciously constructed rather than unconsciously repressed colonial fantasies. Novelists such as Robert Montgomery Bird, John Neal, and William Gilmore Simms would subsequently develop these white representations of indigenous sovereignty in their fiction.