By Jonathan Ault
Assistant Archivist – Reference, MPMRC
While writing A Tramp Abroad in 1879, Mark Twain noted that “It is hard to draw a line here, with any great degree of exactness, between the French, the Comanches, and the several other nations existing upon the same moral and social level. It must in candor be admitted that in one point the Comanches rank higher than the French, in that they do not fight among themselves, whereas a favorite pastime with the French, from time immemorial, has been the burning and slaughtering of each other… I very much doubt if the French are more cruel than the Comanches; I think they are only more ingenious in their methods.”
Native American poet and novelist James Welch similarly addresses the relative levels of “civilization,” as perceived in the late nineteenth century, between American Indians and their European counterparts in his most recent novel The Heartsong of Charging Elk. Taking as his point of departure the historical circumstances of a young Lakota who was inadvertently left behind during Buffalo Bill’s “Wild West Show” tour through Europe in 1889, Welch chronicles the experiences of Charging Elk. After contracting influenza and being injured in a fall from his horse during a performance in Marseille, Charging Elk is then confined to a local hospital. Meanwhile, the rest of the entourage continues along its itinerary. Bureaucratic incompetence and the subsequent turn of events strand the protagonist in France for the next sixteen years.
Initially longing to return home, he gradually re-invents himself in accordance with his new surroundings as hope of returning dims over the years. In the process, mutual distrust and stereotypical misconceptions between Charging Elk and his new neighbors diminish (but do not disappear entirely.) By the time Buffalo Bill’s exhibition travels through France a second time, in 1905, Charging Elk has built a new life for himself. An encounter with the Lakotas participating in the 1905 exhibition underscores Thomas Wolfe’s aphorism that one cannot go home again.
From childhood, Charging Elk faced the pressure to assimilate. In 1879, he and his parents are moved into the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, where white educators and missionaries attempt to re-cast the Lakota in a Euro-centric mold. Charging Elk and his close friend (kola) Strikes Plenty resist these efforts, choosing instead to live several miles away in the Stronghold, where they and other Lakotas are able to maintain their traditions, albeit among Spartan living conditions. During one clandestine visit to his parents at Pine Ridge, Charging Elk is chosen to join the European tour of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. Hoping to earn money for his parents, he reluctantly agrees to go. In Marseille, Charging Elk finds another culture striving to maintain its identity against great odds: that of the Provençals, infiltrated by agents of the dominant French nation. Alone, all but forgotten, and unable to return to America, he is forced to adopt many of the trappings of Marseille’s foreign society in order to survive as the duration of his sojourn lengthens from months to years. Though he avoids the wasichu (white) churches, he learns the French language, obtains European-style suits of clothes with the money he earns from his various occupations (fishmonger, soap factory worker, and dockyard worker), and marries a French girl from the countryside. By 1905, Charging Elk has sufficiently changed that he tells Joseph (a Lakota youth who rebels against de-tribalization as strenuously as Charging Elk once did) that “I am not the young man who came to this country so long ago… I speak the language of these people. My wife is one of them and my heart is her heart. She is my life now.”
Moreover, from the account of post-Wounded Knee reservation life for the Lakotas which he hears from Joseph and Joseph’s aunt and uncle, Charging Elk is compelled to wonder how much remains of the life he left behind: “But to forbid the grown-ups to speak Lakota, to perform the ceremonies — it was unthinkable. It was all they had left even when he was there.”
Despite his successful adaptation, Charging Elk confronts racial stereotypes and prejudice throughout the novel. Strikes Plenty is not chosen to join Buffalo Bill’s 1889 entourage because he does not appear to be “Indian enough.” Charging Elk himself is expected to assume the persona of a “wild Indian” during the performances. Residing in France, among distrusted colonial subjects from Algeria and Indochina in the era of the Dreyfus Affair, he remains a peau rouge (red skin) savage in the eyes of many white French citizens. Even characters whose philanthropy is fueled by Christianity (Madeleine Soulas) or socialism (Martin St.-Cyr) find it is easier to love humanity in the abstract than to love individual humans, especially those who are different, ethnically and otherwise.
A tale of human resilience and survival, Heartsong nevertheless simultaneously depicts the sad eclipse of the Lakota tradition in the face of white cultural aggrandizement, the valiant efforts of the younger Charging Elk and the youth Joseph notwithstanding. In relating this story, Welch also offers a pointed commentary on the racial attitudes that obtained in Euro-America as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth.
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