Hidden Literacies

Playing Indian

“A Tale of the Tow-Path,” written by Homer Greene for The Youth’s Companion, ran as the lead story over six issues of the magazine from January 7 to February 11, 1892, the cliff-hanger end of each segment a prod to buy the next week’s paper. Chit Chat copies this serial format: the January 1893 issue contains four serial stories, some but not all of which can be traced through other extant copies of the magazine. In “Trading Post Stories: In the Wilderness,” the trapper “Mink Skin” tells a rapt Trading Post audience of the various times when he “nearly got killed” by Indians, robbers, and wild animals. “[‘]I should think you had had an adventure[,’] my men all cheered” and demonstrating the serial nature of such oral sites of storytelling, “I told him [them] that we would have the other next time.” The stories serialized in Chit Chat have different settings and situations, but whether tales of island castaways, of a wilderness fur trader beset by robbers, the crew of a gun boat, or a white boy captured by Indians, the basic content of the narratives are remarkably similar: a mix of exploration of wild lands and fights with dangerous enemies. The world-making play that undergirds the Nelsons’ bookmaking is essentially imperial: a thing of conquest, settlement, development, and war. Serials, like empires, thrive on expansion.

The Nelsons well knew that claiming lands entailed the death and expulsion of prior inhabitants. Walter recalls:

Playing Indian was the most exciting game we played in those days and I hardly believe I should yell louder if I should see a genuine, wild-Indian than I did then. The last year or two, that we lived there we had a platform in a great spruce for the white-man's fort and our stratagems, surprises, and pitched-battles were blood-curdling in their intense reality and the neighbors said that we could be heard half-a-mile away as some body was being scalped by the wooden tomahawks or getting killed from ambush in the alders with milk-weed spears.


As Philip Deloria has shown, “playing Indian” has proved a highly durable cultural performance, a way of expressing a wide range of American virtues from the revolutionary era to the present.  Sometime after 1898, the Nelsons photographed the Indian play of other, younger children, perhaps including their little brother Ernest [fig. 7]. In the boys’ own “blood-curdling” play some children must have wielded “wooden tomahawks” and “milk-weed spears,” but the “we” of Walter’s narration plays the white man. Thus, as Robin Bernstein says of the violent ways white children used their black dolls, children and their play “were not only repositories and reflectors of racist culture; they were its co-producers” (212). The exuberant creativity and pleasure of the Nelson archive are powerfully, crucially, and perhaps inextricably linked to the most exploitative and destructive aspects of American history and culture. Part of what is hidden in the charming literacy of the Nelson’s periodicals is genocide.

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