Racial Science and Indian Resistance

Gunn, Robert Lawrence. Ethnology and Empire: Languages, Literature, and the Making of the North American Borderlands. New York: New York UP, 2015. 241 + xiii pages. Paperback. $28. Robert Lawrence Gunn's Ethnology and Empire examines the "scenarios of troubled linguistic exchange and communicative misrecognition" that "echo routinely across the shifting borderlands and contact zones of American history" (3). Exploring the emergence of ethnology, and in particular ethnological linguistics, as sciences in the early nineteenth century, Gunn argues that "relays between developing theories of Native American languages, works of fiction, travel and captivity narratives, and the political and communication networks of Native peoples gave imaginative shape to U.S. expansionist activity and federal policy in the western borderlands" (4-5). While Gunn's claim that "the early-nineteenth-century practice of Native linguistic comparison" represents a significant "paradigm for the construction of racial difference" (7) will surprise no one familiar with current trends in American studies, his attempt to situate ethnological linguistics in the emergent spaces of cultural contact offers a valuable addition to the scholarship on nationalism and indigenous resistance. Gunn's investigation of these issues gets off to a slow start, with a lengthy first chapter that sketches the outlines of early nineteenth-century ethnolinguistics. Covering such pioneers in the field as Albert Gallatin, Peter Stephen Du Ponceau, Alexander von Humboldt, and John Heckewelder, Gunn demonstrates that "the emergence of comparative philology represents a key moment of disciplinary consolidation for the research practices of ethnology in North America in the 1810s and 1820s" (42). Though the historical reconstruction in this chapter is quite exceptional, the conclusions drawn from the source materials are rather predictable, with Gunn insisting that "linguistic questions are, inevitably, racially valenced" (44) and that, in the specific literary example of James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking novels, "themes of race" are developed "in light of language, and language in light of race" (49). One fears at this early point that Gunn is merely planning to add to the already overburdened body of American literary scholarship in which anything and everything becomes proof of the rise, growth, and calcification of U.S. internal colonialism. Thus it is refreshing to find that, in later chapters, Gunn's interest lies less in providing a survey of linguistic imperialism than in isolating unique instances of intercultural encounter that demonstrate the "highly unstable" (43) nature of such contacts. His second chapter, for example, focuses on the Long Expedition of 1819-1821 to suggest how Plains Indian languages, and in particular Plains Indian Sign Language (PISL), discomfited "a linguistic model that oscillated in its imagination between orality and print and failed largely to consider the embodied medium of Native expressive culture" (51). In this intriguing chapter, Gunn proposes a "largely uncontemplated truth of the contact scenario: the early American field practice of Indian linguistics is haunted by Indian Sign Language and is significantly complicated by its misrecognition of it" (63). Extending this insight in the following chapters, Gunn seeks to recover a clandestine, coded site of indigenous resistance to U.S. territorial expansion, whereby "the widespread practice of Indian sign language offers a compelling opportunity to reimagine Native political alignments along a shifting international borderland that remained largely opaque to Euro-American eyes in the 1820s" (84). …