“All the Land Had Changed”: Territorial Expansion and the Native American Past in Pauline Hopkins’s Winona “All the Land Had Changed”: Territorial Expansion and the Native American Past in Pauline Hopkins’s Winona Colleen O’Brien Studies in American Fiction, Volume 41, Issue 1, Spring 2014, pp. 27-48 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: For additional information about this article [ Access provided at 6 Apr 2021 02:01 GMT from Carnegie Mellon University ] https://doi.org/10.1353/saf.2014.0003 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/544426 https://doi.org/10.1353/saf.2014.0003 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/544426 “All the Land Had Changed” 27 Studies in American Fiction 41.1 (2014): 27–48 © 2014 by Johns Hopkins University Press “All the Land Had Changed”: Territorial Expansion and the Native American Past in Pauline Hopkins’s Winona Colleen O’Brien University of South Carolina Upstate The first chapter of Pauline Hopkins’s third and least-known book, Winona, A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest (1902), seems not to fit its title. Although the magazine novel advertises “Negro” characters and the geography of the “South and Southwest,” its prehistory begins among aristocrats in England, and then recaps a particularly fraught historical episode that displaced the Seneca people of Western New York in the first half of the nineteenth century. The novel opens in the vicinity of what would become the Seneca Nation in 1848, extending from a crucial Underground Railroad station—the city of Buffalo, New York—to an island in the Niagara River that became part of the British colonies after the French and Indian War, and then returned briefly to the Seneca. Contested territory and unstable borders become a central theme in the novel, whose characters later traverse proslavery Missouri and John Brown’s Bleeding Kansas. The origin of the story, however, is a personal and familial conflict over land on an English estate, even further from the United States South. An aristocrat flees England and a set of trumped-up murder charges to find refuge among the Seneca, who rename him White Eagle. The fugitive, neé Henry Carlingsford, is innocent, but has been framed by his scheming cousin, Titus, who covets the estate he would inherit. Men greedy for land displace White Eagle again when he settles in New York. The fictional White Eagle experiences a very real moment in Seneca history: David Ogden, who had wrangled with the Seneca since at least 1818 because they essentially refused to sell their land, finally gained government support to expel them from that land. By 1838, as Matthew Dennis 28 Studies in American Fiction explains, “the Seneca lost all their remaining New York lands, except a one-square-mile reservation at Oil Spring, and were nearly removed to a trans-Mississippi reservation in Kansas.”1 Although they managed to reclaim two reservations by 1842, this dispute over land was a major blow to the Seneca that is still unresolved.2 White Eagle is exiled for the second time “[w]hen the Indians gave up Buffalo Creek Reservation to Ogeten [sic] in 1842, and departed from Buffalo” (290).3 Hopkins generalizes this specific Seneca event to point toward the United States government project of Indian removal: the second paragraph of the novel explains, “From 1842, the aborigines began to scatter. They gave up the last of their great reservations then before the on-sweeping Anglo-Saxon” (287). Yet she does not apply the image of the expansionist Anglo-Saxon to “White Eagle, who had linked his fortunes with the Seneca” (288).4 Not only does “White Eagle” find himself on contested Indian ground, he also “link[s] his fortunes” with an entirely different kind of disputed property. Within the next ten years, two unnamed women who are fugitive slaves redefine his life and identity as much as the people who named him “White Eagle.” He marries one of the women and adopts the other’s child. He never meets the woman who, during her flight from slavery, died and left an infant son named Judah. The woman who will become White Eagle’s wife carries the infant to freedom, and then the fugitive slave and exiled English aristocrat raise Judah as their own. She dies after bearing him a daughter, Winona, but he lives on with his two children, who are also his heirs. Ultimately, his cousin, the “on- sweeping Anglo-Saxon” destroys White Eagle (287). After framing Henry Carlingford in an attempt to steal his inheritance, Colonel Titus has moved to Missouri and become a slave owner. By a very Hopkinsian twist of fate, the fugitive slaves linked to White Eagle belong to Titus. When Titus learns that the two women left behind children whom he can claim as his own property under the Fugitive Slave Law, he strikes out to find them. The opportunity to dispose of his cousin only sweetens the deal, and Titus shoots White Eagle in the back of the head before he remands Winona and Judah to his plantation in Missouri. Winona and Judah are thus heirs to the Carlingford estate and heirs to “the condition of their mothers”—slavery. By the end of the novel, however, brother and sister have escaped to join John Brown’s militia in the Kansas/Missouri borderlands, where Judah has the opportunity to avenge his father’s death and Winona gains the right to claim what is rightfully hers. Two aspects of this complex and sometimes convoluted story make it particu- larly important to scholars of American culture. First, Hopkins’s literary engagement with Seneca history and culture, though limited and at times problematic, offers an early “All the Land Had Changed” 29 example of an African American activist writer attempting to represent Native American people and the issues of injustice they faced. While Lois Brown suggests that “Hopkins does not delve as deeply as she might into issues of Native American genocide, treaty conflicts, or wars,” this essay identifies subtle echoes of what Hopkins perceived to be Native American culture.5 The implicit parallel between Indian removal and “the mem- ory of recent happenings in the beautiful Southland, against the Negro voter” is fairly clear—both groups have been denied their land and their rights. By invoking Buffalo Creek, furthermore, Hopkins literally lays the groundwork for one of the novel’s main arguments—that connections to the land derived from work and respectful stewardship, rather than inheritance or conquest, are the foundation of freedom and justice. This emphasis on land rights leads to my second point, which is that the novel engages questions of nature and the environment in remarkable ways. Her ambiguous— Seneca, black, and English aristocrat—hero and heroine duo call dominant ideas of race and nature into question by their very existence.6 No good character falls “naturally” into the ethnic identity he or she supposedly “belongs” to (White Eagle sheds his Anglo-Saxon cultural past, for example), and characters can seemingly transform themselves from one cultural identity to another. They can make themselves at home in whatever landscape they occupy; the resonating history of the environment empowers them. Although, as Paul Outka argues, the laws of slavery rendered African Americans powerless by natu- ralizing the identity of the enslaved into the landscape and treating them as chattels, the convergence of black and Indian stories in Winona attempts to recast that relationship to the land.7 Written in 1902, when the United States consolidated its imperial power as far as the Philippines, the novel layers the historical moment of Seneca dispossession with the early tremors of the Civil War in Bleeding Kansas and a renewed eruption of white supremacist violence in the South. But the violated landscape in Winona strikes back, invigorating exploited people to claim what is theirs. To illustrate how Winona accomplishes all of this, section two of this essay discusses Hopkins’s representation of the First Nations. Her specific, though fleeting, concern for Seneca dispossession is not the only lens through which she invites the reader to see Native history. She also introduces an important natural symbol, a plant commonly called the Indian-pipe, known in Native American legend but not so familiar in non-Native literature. As a literary symbol, however, actual peace pipes would also have been familiar to Hopkins’s readers because pipes made from red stone are the first symbolic objects to appear in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s popular Song of Hiawatha. But Hopkins also seems to build on what Longfellow construed as the peace pipe’s 30 Studies in American Fiction legendary significance—a reminder not to fight over land. This is because she uses the Indian pipe plant (which does not appear in Song of Hiawatha) as a frame for the story’s action. For Hopkins, the story of the Indian-pipes plant is implicitly connected to land rights, stewardship, and retribution. Section two also discusses Winona’s perspective on environmental justice and the implicit meanings of nature and civilization, both as they are defined by her Seneca- identified sibling duo and by the coercive forces of Indian removal, slavery, or imperialism. In this respect, Hopkins’s literary engagement with nature reflects many of the aspects of contemporary African American ecological or environmental thought. For instance, Kimberly Ruffin prefers the term “ecology” to assert that “(1) humans are indeed ‘natu- ral’; (2) humans have developed a powerful and distinct culture within nature; and (3) cultural definitions of ‘humanity’ influence an individual’s experiences among humans and with nonhuman nature.”8 The way that Winona and Judah immerse themselves in a natural world that literally quakes with divine justice does cast them as “natural,” just as cultural definitions of “humanity” and, I would add, “civilization” propounded by Titus in particular and United States government policy in general stand in the way of their individual claims to the landscapes they inhabit. More importantly, Hopkins takes issue with conceptions of nature and civilization that justified Indian removal, slavery, and imperialism. The third section argues that, while Winona critiques the way that dominant cul- tural forces naturalize the exploitation of the earth and of specific groups of people, it also suggests a different way of relating to the land. In the midst of the righteous rebellion that Winona and Judah participate in so that they may re-establish their own (and symbolically a Native and African American) connection to the land, their interactions with the natural world become a significant part of the plot. The way that dominant culture naturalizes racial oppression and the onward march of “civilization” to exploit indigenous people and their land is at issue, yet the book also has a positive environmental aspect. Hopkins comments on the ways that humans interact with the natural world, either respecting the land and practicing good stewardship, or confronting it with the intent to conquer. This corresponds to contemporary definitions of environmental criticism and suggests that we might think of Hopkins as an environmentalist. By 1902, as Kimberly Smith il- lustrates, African American environmental thought was in the midst of a longstanding tradition of “black agrarianism” rooted in the belief that “achieving freedom would mean, prominently, achieving the right to the land on which they labored.”9 Winona and Judah learn, first through their experience as Seneca people, then as enslaved black workers, that “All the Land Had Changed” 31 the land can and should be the source of one’s freedom. As Smith states, “an attachment to place—an attachment based on one’s positive relationship to the land rather than on legal barriers to movement” can forge an ecological or environmental sensibility that also has important implications for racial and social justice.10 Winona and Judah commune with the environment, relating to nature in powerful and productive ways that are not mediated by the landscape of slavery or delimited by Hopkins’s flawed sense of Native American nature. By the end of the novel, they transcend national and racial affiliations to act on behalf of universal—and environmental—justice. Hopkins’s Indian-pipes Previous scholarship on Winona argues that Hopkins creates “imaginative alliances” among blacks, Native Americans, and even Filipinos. Her use of Native American figures may shortchange Indian culture, but it is her interest in unifying and breaking down boundaries between the “darker races” that merits further critical attention.11 I want to extend that discussion to consider how Hopkins uses popular conceptions of native people to critique encroachment and assert land rights. Because her representations of First Na- tions cultures are imaginative, not based on affiliation, I refer to the ecology of people and non-human nature as a landscape, an artistic representation of place that endows it with meaning. As she draws parallels among the historical landscapes of slavery, Indian removal, and United States territorial expansion in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, she subsumes these historical forces within a natural symbol, the “Indian-pipe.” Simply put, the lesson of the Indian-pipe teaches that there are consequences for using violence to appropriate land. She also criticizes one form of appropriation while applying another. That is to say, her literary appropriation of Native American lore, particularly when it builds on Longfellow’s already botched appropriations, seems to come more from white authors than from actual native sources. As a novel themed largely around conflicts over land and property rights, Winona gestures toward The Song of Hiawatha’s symbolic Peace-pipes, an image that would have been quite familiar to her turn-of-the-century readers due to Hiawatha’s commercial suc- cess, Edmonia Lewis’s statues, the emergence of “Hiawatha Pageants,” dramatic readings of the poem by the likes of Frances Watkins Harper’s daughter, Mary, and the musical composition of three cantatas named for and inspired by “The Song of Hiawatha” by the renowned Samuel Coleridge Taylor.12 Within the creatively rendered landscape of her novel’s varied geographic settings, Hopkins employs a familiar story and plays on one of its major symbols. 32 Studies in American Fiction In the opening lines of Longfellow’s poem, the Creator calls the nations together at a sacred site and exhorts them to live in peace. (According to Native lore, this place is often identified as the Coteau des Prairies in South Dakota.) After the warriors are “cleaned and washed from all their war paint,” they take red pipestone from the quarry and “[s]moothed and formed it into Peace-Pipes” (12).13 The wisdom of the “creator of nations” admonishes them to recognize that “[a]ll your strength is in your union” and accept the “signal of the Peace-Pipe”—as a covenant and promise never to fight over land rights again (9). Because the Creator has given them an abundant natural world to live in, replete with “lands to hunt in / . . . bear and bison / . . . streams to fish in” and the like, they were commanded to be content and cease “wrangling and dissension” (10). But the landscape in Winona, whether it is claimed by an English aristocrat, the Seneca Nation, or John Brown’s freedom fighters, sees constant wrangling and dissension. When the natural world is converted to a capitalist landscape, just as when a person is remanded to slavery, all the greed and violence that precipitated Longfellow’s version of the peace pipes story resurfaces. Hopkins’ use of the Indian-pipe plant keys into a story of retribution absent from Longfellow’s poem.14 Whereas part of the novel draws from Longfellow, which is far from the most accurate or realistic way to portray Native culture, Hopkins’s version also echoes an addendum to the legend of the Creator instructing his warriors to live in peace. In some oral traditions, the Peace-pipes story has a sequel—another version in which conflicts over land resume, disturbing the era of peace initiated by the Creator. In this iteration of the tale, the Creator turns the leaders responsible for the strife into the plants as punishment.15 The way Hopkins uses the symbol of the Indian-pipe nonetheless signals her familiarity with this version of the story. Just before Titus lands on White Eagle’s island to commit murder and remand Winona and Judah to slavery, brother and sister uncover an Indian-pipe plant in the brush. The Indian-pipes appear again at the end of the novel, after Winona and Judah have fought for and regained their freedom, when they return home to see that “the plant stems lay concealed among the bushes as of old” (434) and justice has been restored. Men like Titus and his overseer, Thompson, who violate the sovereignty of free soil and personhood must, like the Native Americans who were transformed into Indian-pipes, be punished. The Indian-pipes create a frame for the novel, marking both the genesis and resolution of its crises over land and entitlement. They signify the power the landscape has over its inhabitants and the manner in which the righteous draw from nature and nature’s laws to protect their sovereignty of self and entitlement to specific parcels of land. Hopkins’s natural world is not a passive “other,” “All the Land Had Changed” 33 much as the land, as Robert Nelson explains in terms of Native American literature, “has a life of its own”; its “vitality,” as Nelson suggests, is “a quality imposed on the land by human imagination but not vice versa.”16 Hopkins’s Indian-pipes, like Longfellow’s Peace-Pipes, become a familiar trope of unity and harmony in the natural world that contrasts dramatically with discrepancies in human power relations enacted through Indian removal, slavery, and imperialism. As White Eagle raises them, Winona and Judah’s relationship to the land ostensibly derives from their relationship with the first people—the Seneca—among whom they have as- similated. Because they respect the land and experience union with nature rather than the urge to conquer it, Winona and Judah garner power from nature. In idealized and somewhat stereotypical fashion, brother and sister travel by canoe and wear moccasins; they eat fish from the lake, mushrooms from the earth, and drink “copious draughts of pure spring water from a nearby rill” whose “gentle gurgle” mingles with the roaring of nearby Niagara Falls (295). Because both of their birth mothers have died, their primary mother figure is the old Seneca woman Nokomis (named for Hiawatha’s grandmother and caregiver in the Longfellow poem), who tells Winona the story of the Indian-pipes. Nokomis serves as the memory of the landscape itself; her presence and that of the Indian- pipes at the very beginning of the novel recalls a time when people lived in peace with one another and with nature, much like in the story of the peace pipes. The reader can anticipate that this golden period of peace, Winona and Judah’s idyllic childhood, will be disturbed. Yet just as the people of the Seneca Nation who struggled to restore their own sovereignty, Winona and Judah fight to regain their inheritance of freedom as well as their father’s estate in England. In this sense, as I have indicated above, they reverse the trajectory of the “civilizing mission.”17 This triumph comes more through their “Indian training” than their father’s Anglo heritage. Although Hopkins represents Native American culture poorly, as did Longfellow, those problems are beyond the scope of this article.18 What I find intriguing, nonetheless, is the imagined alliance she attempts to construct between African and Na- tive American struggles for sovereignty. Drawing again from Longfellow by taking the name of one of his major characters, Hopkins introduces Indian ways of knowing early in the novel. A moment after the two children “push the leaves aside together, revealing the faint pink stems of the delicate, gauzy Indian-pipes,” they argue about whether “No- komis knows” and “speaks truly” of the natural world (291). Nokomis has admonished them not to touch the plants because disturbing them destroys them, much as greedily snatching up any natural resource disturbs peace. Winona believes Nokomis, but Judah 34 Studies in American Fiction doubts the tale because “in school you learn not to believe all the silly stories that we are told by the Indians” (292). Although he claims, a few pages later, that they are Indians, Judah has already learned from Anglo-American culture that Indians lie. The balance of the novel, however, illustrates the truth of the Indian-pipes story: that retribution awaits those who are aggressive and greedy. Within moments of the conversation about the Indian-pipes, Titus and his over- seer, Thomson, appear. The two embody the antithesis of Nokomis’s reverence for the sanctity of the natural world and the natural rights of its inhabitants. As I mentioned earlier, Titus kills White Eagle so he will become the sole heir to the Carlingford estate. When he finds Winona and Judah, he declares that he has “struck it rich” (296). He kid- naps the children, taking them back to “civilization”—the plantation he has purchased in Missouri (296). Civilization, as President James Monroe suggested to the Seneca in 1818, meant “improving land by Cultivation.”19 By the 1850s, this logic of capitalist agriculture justified slavery in Missouri. Exploitation and greed, in this story, escalate from the familial level to the national level. Like the US government, Titus combines the practices of Indian removal and remand to slavery when he steals Winona and Judah. His dishonest manipulation of the right to inherit property on a familial level mirrors the national practices of encroaching on Indian territory and promoting the Westward expansion of slavery that also take place in the 1850s.20 Titus and Thomson frequently assault Judah in an attempt to make him conform to a subordinate position as laborer. Judah never submits to the overseer, Thompson, despite numerous whippings, and instead showcases his ruggedly masculine talents by breaking horses.21 This is one of the ways he aligns his cultural knowledge with the landscape he inhabits. When the Colonel offers to let Judah tame a particularly wild horse that has beaten Thomson, he forgets that he has been enslaved and instead draws from (what Hopkins imagines as) his Native American background to outshow Thomson. First, “Judah stepped forward and began giving his orders without a shade of servility, seeming to forget in the excitement of the moment his position as a slave” (323). Next, ordering an audience of Thomson and Titus’s rowdy, gambling white friends to “stand back, all of you,” he hypnotizes his audience: “The power of the hypnotic eye was known and practiced among all the Indian tribes of the West. It accounted for their wonderful success in subduing animals” (324). Notably, the idea of his Native American past relieves Judah, if only momentarily, from his subjugated “position as a slave” and endows him with abilities unavailable to Anglo-Americans (with the exception, perhaps, of men like White Eagle and John Brown). The spirit he draws from is of “the West,” his current loca- “All the Land Had Changed” 35 tion, not Seneca territory; hence we might assume that it is exuded by the landscape itself. Yet the “power of the hypnotic eye” is not just a mystical, romanticized representation of Native Americans’ relationship to horses. Rather, it is the power of “mind over instinct,” which suggests that a form of wisdom undergirds these talents (324). Although his cultural background is Seneca, Judah’s powers are akin to the “tribes of the West” (324).22 Perhaps because he is in Kansas City, he is able to appropri- ate the “Western” Indian’s skill by proxy. The important point is that deploying these imagined cultural traits and connecting them to the landscape is an act of the mind, not instinct. In this way, constructions of identity are provisional and protean—the only thing that is “natural” is that the just can adapt and assimilate to a place when they aim to protect it from encroachment. Judah proves his power through his cross-cultural affilia- tions and his ability to function within different landscapes. He maintains his “Indian” qualities despite the fact that Titus has remanded him and designated him, according to the authority of the Compromise of 1850, a black slave. Even when the jealous and em- barrassed Thomson seeks vengeance by sending Judah to the slave jail for a whipping, Judah refuses to submit or be broken. “Strung up by his thumbs to the cross-beams,” he endures “torturing agony” without a sound, having “learned his lesson of endurance in the schools of the Indian stoic” (327). While these stereotypes may be disturbing to twenty-first century readers, it is important to remember that Hopkins’s access to, or knowledge of, the indigenous people she tries to valorize was limited in Boston in 1902. Hopkins’s tendency to borrow directly from other texts (like dime novels) partially explains these unfortunate inclusions. The suggestion that these qualities are of the mind—a form of wisdom—indicates that this connection to the landscape and its rightful inhabitants can be learned but must also be remembered. Particularly in contested territory, the upward spiral of history consolidates memories of injustice. In this way, Judah can simultaneously, or alternately, act as a Seneca, an African American, or a man allied with the tribes of the West. The trope of the Indian-pipes conveys an argument about the individual’s rela- tionship to the natural world that places Hopkins in dialogue with a set of issues raised in environmental studies. Her depiction of her characters’ relation to nature transcends what Lance Newman calls “the lithified historical experience of slavery in rural settings,” representing instead “the image of nature as a sacred space [that] produces militant politi- cal consciousness.”23 Hopkins imagines what Lawrence Buell calls “place knowledge” as the result of “long existential immersion” in a particular locale that makes “attachment to place” a “creative force.”24 Her depiction of Winona and Judah’s relationship to the 36 Studies in American Fiction landscape—first as Seneca children living a primeval existence, then as slaves on Titus’s Missouri plantation, and finally fighting in the woods against Missouri Rangers—gestures toward a new paradigm of entitlement and justice. Magnolia Farm Because Winona and Judah ultimately extirpate the forces that create “wrangling and dissension”—the proslavery Missouri Rangers who exploit and enslave workers on that land, they become Hiawatha figures for the twentieth century. Perhaps Hopkins under- stood Longfellow’s Hiawatha as a hero who forged a synergistic relationship to the land by cultivating corn, and then became a great leader by unifying his people. Perhaps she knew of the historical Hiawatha as the Mohawk founder of the Iroquois confederacy, who helped unite five nations who spoke different languages and practiced different customs. The latter historical possibility, which she might have read about in Lewis Henry Mor- gan’s League of the Ho-de-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois (1851), would better suit her own vision of uniting “blacks in all quarters of the globe.” Like this Hiawatha figure, her hero and heroine offer a new model of civilization, wherein people of different “tribes” maintain their autonomy but coalesce in the interest of creating a society beyond the coercive, capitalist-agrarian models of civilization that justified Indian removal and slavery.25 I can only speculate on Hopkins’s knowledge of the Iroquois by looking closely at her choice to begin the story in the Seneca Nation, her use of the Indian-pipe, and the way that her Seneca-Black-Anglo characters differ from the likes of Titus. The figure of Titus clearly represents a particular kind of relationship to the landscape that produces imperialism and exploitation. While Hopkins is looking back on the antebellum period, Titus’s impulses display a type of capitalist white supremacy that would further expand after Reconstruction. Historian Gail Bederman describes the way that the advent of man- hood suffrage guaranteed by the Fifteenth Amendment conflicted with white Southerners’ need to control the political and economic landscape of the South.26 Nationalist rhetoric evidenced the “natural” superiority of the Anglo-American male through his relationship to the landscape—his ability to tame the wilderness and cultivate the “empty” space of the frontier. Hopkins’s representation of white expansion into the frontier has much in com- mon with the imperial expansion that was extending as far as the Philippines in 1902, and the landscape represents what W.J.T. Mitchell describes as a “fetishized commodity . . . what Marx called ‘a social hieroglyph,’ an emblem of the social relations it conceals.”27 Yet the relationship that Winona and Judah forge with the landscape actually reveals the “All the Land Had Changed” 37 workings of race and gender within social relations. Although “these semiotic features of landscape, and the historical narratives they generate, are tailor-made for the discourse of imperialism, which conceives itself precisely (and simultaneously) as an expansion of ‘culture’ and ‘civilization’ into a ‘natural’ space in a progress that is itself narrated as ‘natural’,” nothing about the white man’s world is natural for Hopkins.28 In Winona, the black Indian hero and heroine’s relationship to each landscape they encounter entitles them to define and disseminate a non-Anglo version of civilization wherever they go.29 As historical revision, Winona invokes Native American legend (or Longfellow’s version of it) to define a society’s level of civilization in terms of its ability to deal fairly and respectably in issues of property. The connection between stealing land from Na- tive Americans and stealing labor and self-sovereignty from African Americans impels Hopkins’s indictment of Titus’s version of “civilization.” Titus also represents the broader social and political context created by Anglo-American men like him in 1902. The rhetoric of civilization that justified slavery, manifest destiny and policies such as the Roosevelt’s corollary to the Monroe Doctrine characterizes a specifically Anglo-American form of nationalism, one intrinsically tied to the American landscape.30 In early twentieth-century Anglo-American rhetoric, as Eric Kaufmann suggests, a man’s ability to identify with his natural surroundings signified his sense of belong- ing in the context of a national identity. Kaufman describes an exceptionalist national ideal of Anglo-masculinity that fuses Thomas Jefferson’s yeoman farmer with Theodore Roosevelt’s frontiersman who draws an exceptionally American spirit from the untamed frontier.31 Hopkins plays with these ideals, unmasking the incipient capitalism in yeoman ideology as well as the economic impulse of the frontiersman. She connects Titus to agri- cultural production on his cotton plantation and places him in the Southwest frontier of Missouri. Ostensibly, Titus cultivates his plantation in Missouri (although, as discussed below, Hopkins makes it clear that his slaves really do the work that legitimates such a connection to the landscape). Ideally, per Roosevelt, he should also be able to master the rugged terrain of the woods in Kansas—and he has great confidence that, as the captain of a band of pro-slavery Missouri Rangers, he can do so—yet it is Winona and Judah who will draw from the natural power of the woods to defeat Titus. While Winona and Judah’s experience as members of a displaced Seneca Na- tion creates their initial understanding of injustice, their experience as enslaved laborers opens their eyes to the economic injustice of disenfranchising slaves whose labor created the nation’s wealth. The siblings witness the magnitude and sacrifice of uncompensated African American labor. Hopkins’s depiction of the capitalist slaveholder’s idyllically 38 Studies in American Fiction named “Magnolia Farm” swelters with indignation: “the summer sun hung evenly over the great fields of cotton” where the slaves produce their master’s wealth, but they are thoroughly disenfranchised from the benefits of that wealth. Even “the rambling house cast no shadow” on the fields, not even affording a little shade. As Titus watches people work, in contrast, “the broad piazza at the back afforded ample shade from the mid-day rays, sheltered as it was by great pines.” He is merely a passive observer in the produc- tion of wealth as he sits on “The porch, with its deep, cool shadows.” Titus epitomizes an inverted racist caricature of lazy former slaves who sit on the porch and refuse to work that would develop during Reconstruction as well as the Northern free labor stereotype of the aristocratic, languid southerner. He is in his element on the porch, which “commanded a view of the working force, and made it a favorite resting place for the Colonel” (317). While his slaves pick cotton in the sweltering sun, Titus lounges and sips a mint julep like the patriarch of a plantation romance.32 But as representative of the Anglo-masculine presence that supposedly built the United States and plans to civilize the Americas, he proves a casual (and notably lazy) observer of the labor and produc- tion that extracts wealth from the landscape. His fraudulent masculinity neither draws vigor from the land nor cultivates it to make it productive—the slaves are the only ones with a legitimate relationship to the land. Although, as Hazel Carby points out, Winona also invokes “the historical landscape of slavery to represent the contemporary social order,” Winona’s identity has not been circumscribed by that artificial landscape.33 Her landscape of identity is hybrid, liminal, and “natural” in a way that contradicts racial science’s claims about nature. Nor does Winona’s gender get in the way of her participa- tion in “organized and individual acts of resistance and self-defense against oppression”; because Hopkins endows Winona with the ability to fashion herself anew, she has a malleable gender and a racial identity that are ready-made to answer what Carby has termed the “call for organized acts of resistance against contemporary persecution”—the racial and gender repression within an increasingly expansionist, masculinist, and white supremacist nation.34 Like the errant chiefs who are punished by being turned into Indian-pipes, how- ever, the Colonel will face retribution. The narrator implies that the artificial claim Colonel Titus has upon the landscape, based on the ridiculous premise that he has produced its wealth, epitomizes the injustice of white territorial expansion in Missouri and the crime of slavery (this also parallels the project of imperialism in the early twentieth century, as I explain below). In Hopkins’s estimation, his illegitimate claim to the landscape, based on coercion and the curtailment of his slaves’ liberty, results in Titus’s daughter’s punish- “All the Land Had Changed” 39 ment. Titus suffers divine retribution even before Winona and Judah escape; his child is crippled, a condition that Hopkins attributes to her father’s moral degeneracy. Equating the child’s disability with a biblical curse and divine retribution, the narrator reminds us, “it is taught that evil deeds shall be visited upon the progeny of the doer unto the third and fourth generations” (318). From the perspective of twenty-first century ideas of disability, this is another instance of Hopkins lack of sensitivity, since she attributes a child’s disability to her father’s sin. It is important to emphasize, however, that this is a biblical rather than a Lamarckian inheritance: the curse references lingering proslavery arguments that Noah’s curse upon Ham relegated people of African descent to a condition of perpetual servitude, but it redirects the curse on the enslaver. The oppressed, in acts of divine justice, are scheduled to revisit this “evil” on their oppressors. Forebodingly, the narrator suggests that Colonel Titus’s slaves are about to strike back at him. “All the land had changed” Hopkins depicts Titus’s assertions of authority and entitlement as racist manifestations of exploitation and domination. She also destabilizes primitivist association between indigenous or African people and nature, as opposed to Anglo “civilization,” because she challenges the very idea of race as natural and thus undermines the myth of civiliza- tion. Because they grow up on a secluded island, Winona and Judah are not exposed to the logic of domination and mastery that defines African or Native American “blood” as inferior, nor do they even register the pseudo-science that assigns biological meaning to race. Raised among Seneca people on an island that provides sanctuary from slavery and the color line, Winona and Judah grow up oblivious to racial categories. As the rustic frontiersman Ebenezer Maybee explains, neither child “realizes what ‘bein’ a nigger’ means; they have no idee of their true position in this unfrien’ly world” (310). Although their experience with Titus apprises them of their supposed “position,” they do not accept it. Rejecting the artificial constructions of Anglo-American civilization, they negotiate their racial alliances through a relationship to the natural world whose laws they abide.35 Just as race is a lie perpetuated by the so-called civilized world, so too is gender. Winona undoes the stereotype of the hypersexual African American female. Although Titus tries to “cultivate” her into a sex slave, the assertion that she has “the pluck of a man” and that “[s]he doesn’t whimper, but jus’ saws wood and keeps to her instructions” suggests that she can be a nurturer, a provider, or a protector—but never a “fancy girl” (348). In this sense, the Indian pipes also foreshadow the threats to the sovereignty of Winona’s body. Just before they are kidnapped, she chastises Judah when he reaches to 40 Studies in American Fiction touch the Indian-pipes, telling him they will turn black. Indeed, handling destroys the flowers, which blacken as they die. Titus and his overseer, Thomson, likewise handle Winona by kidnapping and remanding her to slavery, legally blackening her, and then attempting to cultivate her exotic beauty by priming her in musical and other artistic skills in order to render her suitable for a New Orleans fancy girl auction. The Colonel’s investment in Winona’s musical skill, which he says will “pay ten dollars for every one invested” is telling, since cultivating land is also a justification for exploitation (320). Of course, Winona resists these attempts to commodify her body, and refuses to accept the racial or gender identity that Titus imposes on her. Dorri Beam has explicated the significance of flowers to nineteenth-century evocations of female sexuality, yet the ap- pearance of these particular flowers demands further consideration in terms of questions of land and landscape.36 Due to her vital connection to nature and her resistance to white society, Winona is no submissive “fancy girl,” nor is Judah a passive or obsequious black man. Hopkins connects both hero and heroine’s negotiations of gender identity to their “Indian training,” and their particular abilities seem to develop and expand as they move closer, geographi- cally, to Indian nations other than the Seneca (344). Meanwhile, their greater proximity to the system of slavery does not hinder their sense of personhood or self-sovereignty, although the Missouri plantation landscape familiarizes Winona and Judah with African American experience and the need for an insurgent black landscape. Ultimately, both brother and sister refuse to identify with the strictly delineated plantation landscape and its rigid system of production—whether physical or sexual. After the pair escapes Titus’s plantation, the insurgent historical landscape of antislavery Kansas becomes their third home. In Kansas, “all the land ha(s) changed” (375). The change in landscape is integral to Winona’s transformation into a freedom fighter, because “the woods calmed her,” reminding her of “the primal life she had led” on the island, where her mind has “not a thought of racial or social barriers” (376). Link- ing her cultural affiliation with the Seneca to her experience as an African American, she gains hope in the woods, where she hears “the whisper of a secret that has lasted from the foundation of the world”—a message of racial and gender equality grounded in natural rights (376). Winona challenges proscriptive definitions of race and gender, even in Brown’s camp. When the men convene to discuss breaking an English lawyer, Maxwell, out of the Missouri jail, “as was the fashion of the day, the women listened but did not intrude their opinions upon the men” (380). Breaking down this particular “social barrier,” Winona seeks counsel with Brown and “intrude[s]” her opinions, and her plan “All the Land Had Changed” 41 of action, upon him (380). He accepts her input and agrees. Perhaps Hopkins was aware that Seneca women traditionally offered counsel within tribal leadership. This passage substantiates the claim that Winona is an early black feminist text as well as a critique of economic and environmental exploitation. If we consider breaking gender barriers a form of feminism, would that not also apply to the way that Winona’s and Judah’s fluid racial identities break down racial barriers?37 Although the rhetoric of Anglo-masculinity attempted to naturalize racial and gender identities and use them to justify white men’s exclusive entitlement to resources and power, Winona is at once very connected to the natural world and living evidence that the “natural” qualities of race and gender are protean and provisional rather than immutable. If her “pluck” and readiness with a rifle are not sufficient evidence that a woman can cross gender lines, she actually masquerades as a man to rescue her love interest—a benevolent yet very vulnerable and helpless English lawyer, Maxwell. She devises a scheme to rescue Maxwell by disguising herself as a mulatto, Allen Pinks. Pinks claims to have been a “cook and a head-waiter on a steamboat aboard the Missouri river” who was “stopped on suspicion of being a fugitive slave” and delivered to the State prison, where the Rangers also hold Maxwell (386). When Winona joins him, Maxwell awakens from nightmares of “phantom terrors” to “the soft hush of a tender voice stilling the tumult” (386). This powerful voice is also connected to the landscape: like the naturalistic “whisper of a secret” that emanates from “the foundation of the world” and calms Winona, this voice gives Maxwell hope (386). It also disrupts the boundaries of racial and gender identity to enact a militant form of justice. A week later, after Pinks/Winona has nursed Maxwell to health, the healer be- comes a warrior. At midnight, Pinks, John Brown, and Ebenezer Maybee appear in the jail to save Maxwell who, “standing helpless in his cell,” recognizes Winona’s disguise. Awed by her bravery and overcome with love for her, “All the beauty and strength of the man, and every endowment of tenderness came upon him there as the power came upon Sampson” (392). Interestingly, the beauty, strength, and tenderness that at first seem odd qualities in Pinks then seem perfectly fitting to Winona, whom Maxwell still refers to mentally as “the man” Pinks. Something about this moment of recognition makes those gendered qualities acceptably masculine, and they “c[o]me upon” Maxwell. He, too, acquires the seemingly disparate powers of beauty, strength, and tenderness simul- taneously; shared between a man and a woman, the gender of the qualities themselves becomes ambiguous.38 Recalling the moments when nature, or the Native American past, endow Winona and Judah with the power of resistance, Maxwell absorbs power from Winona through her very presence. 42 Studies in American Fiction Winona plays an instrumental role in rescuing Maxwell, who previously has helped her escape slavery. She, Judah, Brown, and Maybee deliver “the invalid” to Kansas, where “freedom, cleanliness, and nourishing food” and most certainly free soil restore him to full health (397–398). As they work to protect freedom in Kansas, Winona continues to shift from identifying primarily as a black woman to reincorporating Seneca aspects of her self. Brown even calls her a “pretty squaw,” a word Hopkins does not seem to find derogatory although it does add to the list of negative terms and stereotypes that Hopkins applies to Indians (375). Winona regains her “Indian” qualities from the landscape she occupies. As was the case with her father, her connection to place signifies her freedom from socially constructed identity categories. The liberation of Maxwell is only the beginning of the insurgent activity inspired by the landscape. The manner in which the natural world endows Winona and Judah with the power to fight for natural rights suggests that Hopkins imagines nature or the landscape as a vital force and active participant in the struggle for justice. Free Soil Kansas also provides Judah a space and an outlet to act on his fantasies of revenge against the Missouri plantation and its despicable Anglo-masculine villains, Titus and Thomson. Accompanied by Brown’s freedom fighters in the woods of Kansas, Judah eventually avenges their father’s death by slaying Titus in hand-to-hand combat. Judah is not so transformed by slavery’s barbarism, however, that he can pull the trigger in cold blood when he corners Thomson, the overseer. Instead, he offers him a chance to escape by jumping off the edge of a ravine into “the Possawatamie gurgling along sixty feet below over pebbles” (413). Judah offers Thomson the chance to save himself by mastering a sublime and imposing landscape—a true test of Anglo-American manhood that Thomson fails miserably. At odds with the harmony and peace that attend Judah’s synergy with the land- scape, Thomson crashes into the stream in front of Winona, who happens to be patrolling the forest surrounding the Brown camp to look for the wounded. Judah then travels down the ravine and finds Winona trying to assist the man who helped murder their father and enslave them. Judah and Winona decide to show mercy to Thomson, which results in his deathbed revelation that Winona is the heir to a British fortune and land. Thomson dies a rather unheroic death, nonetheless, and he clearly does not belong in the natural space that ultimately conquers him. The artificial power he garners from slavery’s fraudulent and unnatural authority fails and he cannot survive on free soil. Unlike Thomson, who is defeated by his surroundings, Judah seems to draw energy from nature itself. Thomson literally and figuratively pales in comparison to “All the Land Had Changed” 43 Judah, whose “ebon visage” and “inexorable energy” connect him to the sacred free soil landscape (414). As Judah takes control of the scene, the world is set aright again, return- ing to the “golden period” described earlier in the novel when Winona and Judah find the Indian-pipes (291). The battle scene in the woods resolves into a description of the landscape that recalls the period of the Great Peace: “The morning sun broke in dazzling splendor over the earth; the birds were feeding their young families and flew from tree to tree in neighborly fashion; the murmur of bees humming and out of the stream far below mingled harmoniously. All was peace” (414). The climactic point of the novel invokes an idyllic and peaceful landscape as the backdrop for a scene of justice attained: Judah stands empowered to correct the wrongs of “a century of lacerated manhood” (414). Judah is the one who belongs in that beautiful setting—Judah, because he has labored there, has established a legitimate claim to the natural world around him. By making the natural environment an active character in the novel, Hopkins challenges conventional debates about race. The concept of the environment shaping race was longstanding (such as in the Count de Buffon’s early letters to Thomas Jefferson), but Hopkins challenges imperialist ideas about nature and culture that predominated in her historical moment. Rather than an entity that limits and circumscribes human develop- ment, the landscape of the New World is a source of power and self-determination for righteous rebels like Winona and Judah. The natural world is sacred—a source of vital inspiration and the embodiment of natural law—and capable of resisting the political boundaries that humans attempt to impose on it. Drawing a correspondence between sovereign territory and the concept of a sovereign people, Hopkins resists hierarchical classifications of human culture that are rigidly demarcated by supposed “natural” boundaries. By imagining themselves as connected to the natural world rather than attempting to master it, then, her heroic characters defy both political boundaries and identity categories, restoring a natural order in which one attains a sense of personal identity from a productive relationship to the land rather than artificial and externally assigned criteria. This creative force is both a way of imagining the natural environment and a way of understanding the relationship of the sovereign and inalienable self to a landscape imagined as sacred. Both the national issue of Indian removal and the individual issue of one vil- lainous Anglo-American man’s wrangling to steal his cousin’s inheritance create the backdrop for the novel’s explicit concerns: freedom in the new US territories in the 1850s and freedom from slavery for the hero and heroine. The parallel between these explicit concerns and the immediate concerns that Hopkins faced in 1902 is important—her 44 Studies in American Fiction concern for the sovereignty of colonial territories and the sovereign rights of African Americans also applies to US imperialism and the specific forms of violence aimed at US blacks during what is often termed the “nadir” of race relations in the years surround- ing 1900. Events from the mid-nineteenth century are measured against the aftermath of the Spanish-American War and the nadir of lynchings and race riots in the South; the narrator explicitly connects the 1850s to the “world now living in anxiety and toil” and interrupts the story midway to compare its plot to “recent happenings in the beautiful Southland” (291, 317). Thus Indian removal, slavery, the Spanish-American War, and the repeal of Black voting rights in the South are part of an historical continuum that reproduces violence and exploitation. It is therefore important to look at the way the landscape becomes a subject in Winona and ask whether Hopkins then becomes an early proponent of eco-literacy; the implicit awareness that racial subjugation goes hand-in-hand with the destruction of the natural world presages some of the most compelling messages of the twenty-first- century environmental movement. The interdependence between the economics of labor and politics of the environment is another lesson that manifests in Hopkins’s use of the Indian-pipes trope. The Euro-American imperialist mentality that governed national politics in Hopkins’s historical moment legitimated the appropriation of bodies of land and racially-marked bodies in the name of progress and productivity, but in the frame of the Indian-pipes story, these practices amount to nothing but greed and disrespect. In the twenty-first century, this mentality has precipitated a global economic and environ- mental crisis. As Vandana Shiva argues, “scientific and technological progress is guided by this narrow and distorted concept of productivity, which externalizes the social costs of livelihood destruction and the ecological costs of ecosystem destruction.”39 Hopkins does not address ecosystem destruction per se, but the way that she romanticizes the natural environment in glimpses of its “primeval” grandeur suggests a longing for the past, a period before the landscape became an object of expropriation and greed. Hopkins’s investment in rightful inheritance and entitlement to the country’s land provides Winona’s major organizing principle, and through this principle she voices a challenge to Anglo-American male political power and territorial expansion. At the same time, she conflates Native and African American history, which might conveniently explain away African American entitlement to the highly desirable land available in Indian Territory. The occasional similarities and collisions between Hopkins’s radical African American prose and Anglo-American national rhetoric, particularly when she broaches the topic of expansion as a violation of sacred landscapes and sovereign bodies, highlight “All the Land Had Changed” 45 the complexities of her position as an African American woman trying to negotiate the intersecting paths of race, class and gender at the dawn of the twentieth century. Notes 1. Paulina Hopkins, Winona, A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest in The Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins ed. Henry Louis Gates (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1988), 193. Further refer- ences will be cited parenthetically in the text. 2. For more background on the Ogden Company and the Seneca nation, see James E. Manley, “History of Lein Park: Lot 329.” Town of West Seneca. http://www.westseneca.net/index.php?q=history_ of_lein_park%20 (accessed October 13, 2011); and Matthew Dennis, Seneca Possessed: Indians, Witchcraft, and Power in the Early Republic (Philadelphia, Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). 3. Lois Brown’s extensive biography of Hopkins notes that Hopkins does not mention major events in Native American history, but this brief reference to the Seneca has been overlooked. See Lois Brown, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: Black Daughter of the Revolution (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2008). 4. This English aristocrat’s conversion experience contrasts starkly with the English cousin who framed him for murder, took his family fortune, and assimilated to Anglo-American culture as a slave- holder. I am not arguing that “link[ing] fortunes with the Seneca” releases one from responsibility for the activities of Anglo-American culture, yet the fact that “White Eagle” discovers a different way of life and learns from the Seneca to understand the world differently deserves comment. 5. Brown, Hopkins, 368. 6. By this I mean that they have no genetic lineage in the Seneca Nation, but they are Seneca. To be enrolled as a citizen of the Seneca Nation, one needs to live and work on the reservation. The Seneca adopted white members because their criteria for membership are not based on blood, but it is unclear whether Hopkins was aware of this practice. 7. See Outka, Race and Nature from Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance, (New York: Palgrave, 2008). 8. Kimberly Ruffin, Black on Earth: African American Ecoliterary Traditions (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 2010), 18. 9. Kimberly Smith, African American Environmental Thought (Lawrence: Univ. of Kansas Press, 2007), 19. 10. Ibid., 27. 11. O’Brien, “‘Blacks in all Quarters of the Globe’: Anti-Imperialism, Insurgent Cosmopolitanism, and International Labor in Pauline Hopkins’s Literary Journalism,” American Quarterly 61.2 (2009): 245–270. 12. Michael David. McNally, “The Indian Passion Play: Contesting the Real Indian in Song of Hiawatha Pageants, 1901–1965,” American Quarterly 58.1 (March 2006): 105–136; Allen Trachtenberg, Shades of Hiawatha: Staging Indians, Making Americans 1880–1930 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004); “Debut of Miss Mary Harper” New York Globe 11 Aug. 1883, p. 1. 46 Studies in American Fiction 13. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Song of Hiawatha (New York: Bounty Books, 1968), 12. Further citations will be cited parenthetically in the text. 14. Hopkins refers to Longfellow’s poem in an installation of her “Famous Women of the Negro Race” series that features sculptor Edmonia Lewis. As she describes Lewis’s small statues entitled “Hi- awatha’s Wooing” and “Marriage,” Hopkins states “They are charming hits, poetic, simple, and no happier illustrations of Longfellow’s poem were ever made than those by Miss Lewis.” See Hopkins, Daughter of the Revolution, ed. Ira Dworkin (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 2007): 187–188. 15. For a written version of this story, see Corydon Bell, John Rattling-Gourd of Big Cove; A Collection of Cherokee Indian Legends (New York: Macmillan, 1955). 16. Robert Nelson, Place and Vision: The Function of Landscape in Native American Fiction (New York: Peter Lang, 1995), 8. 17. O’Brien, “Blacks in All Quarters of the Globe,” 254. 18. Philip Deloria’s Playing Indian (Yale Univ. Press, 1998) is a foundational discussion of the ways literature appropriates Native American culture. 19. Dennis, Seneca Possessed, 184. 20. Notably, similar circumstances resurfaced in 1902 with the opening of Indian Territory and the disenfranchisement of blacks in the South; lynchings and race riots often resulted in the confisca- tion of the black victims’ property by white aggressors. 21. Amy Kaplan uses the term “rugged masculinity” to describe this kind of figure, usually heroic, in other turn-of the-century texts. See Kaplan, “Romancing the Empire: The Embodiment of Ameri- can Masculinity in the Popular Historical Novel of the 1890s,” American Literary History 2.4 (1990): 659–90. 22. Other displaced nations, including the Cherokee, lived on lands near the Kansas/Missouri border in the 1850s; they would be displaced again when the government re-ceded those lands in 1866. 23. Lance Newman, “Free Soil and the Abolitionist Forests of Frederick Douglass’s ‘The Heroic Slave,’” American Literature 81.1 (2009): 128, 134. Newman points out that critics including Lawrence Buell in Writing for an Endangered World (Cambridge: Belknap-Harvard UP, 2001), T.V. Reed, Jeffrey Myers and Michael Bennett have called for a revisionist approach to ecocriticism and new para- digms of understanding nature in African American literature. See Bennett, “Anti-Pastoralism, Frederick Douglass, and the Nature of Slavery” in Karla Armbruster and Kathleen Wallace, eds. Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 2001); Jeffrey Myers, Converging Stories: Race, Ecology, and Environmental Justice in American Literature (Athens, Univ of Georgia Press, 2005); T. V. Reed, “Toward an Environmental Justice Ecocriticism,” in Joni Adamson, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein, The Environmental Justice Reader: Politics, Poetics, and Pedagogy (Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 2002). 24. Buell, Writing, 17. The “creative force” in Winona also presages the premises of landscape theory. Hopkins treats the idea of human relationships to land in much the way Barbara Bender describes it—as complex, sometimes contradictory, and multivalent. In European and Anglo-American cul- “All the Land Had Changed” 47 tural contexts, land becomes landscape through the play of human power relations, thus the way a subject relates to the land indicates his or her ability to negotiate personal power. See Barbara Bender, Landscape: Politics and Perspectives (Providence: Berg, 1993). Representations of idyllic land- scapes in Euro-America cultures, likewise, usually mask deep social striations and exploitation. The very presence of an idyllic landscape should send up red flags, as Don Mitchell in The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996) and Stephen Daniels in Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1993) point out. As Denis Cosgrove states, “landscapes have an unquestionably material presence, yet they come into being only at the moment of their apprehension by an external observer”; see his “Modernity, Community and the Landscape Idea,” Journal of Material Culture 11.1 and 2 (2006): 50. 25. For more on Longfellow, Morgan, Marx, Engels, and the Hiawatha figure, see Trachtenberg, Shades of Hiawatha, 16–29 and 50–97. 26. See Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the US, 1880–1917 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995). 27. W. J. T. Mitchell, Landscape and Power (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1994), 17. 28. Ibid. 29. Whereas, as Shirley Samuels points out, early nineteenth-century historical novels by white authors implicate women in “claims about citizenship and identity” that legitimate supremacist “claims about national territory,” Hopkins uses a female character to challenge the claims of Anglo- masculine civilization and entitlement. See Samuels, “Women, Blood, and Contract,” American Literary History 20 (December 2007): 57. The struggle for sovereignty among the Seneca and the Buffalo Creek case provide historical context to this challenge. 30. Roosevelt did not articulate the corollary as such until 1904, but the practices that precipitated the need to articulate it were certainly in play much earlier. 31. Eric Kaufmann, “‘Naturalizing the Nation’: The Rise of Naturalistic Nationalism in the United States and Canada,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 40.4 (1998): 666–695. For a reading of Jefferson’s yeomanry as proto-capitalist, see Timothy Sweet, “American Pastoralism and the Marketplace: Eighteenth-Century Ideologies of Farming,” Early American Literature 29.1 (1994): 59–75. The novel’s various settings also revise the Anglo-American emphasis on landscape as a signifier of national identity. Like Jefferson, who locates the spirit of American identity in the sublime beauty of Harpers Ferry and Niagara Falls and in the citizens’ ability to master such imposing landscapes, Hopkins refers to these same significant and highly symbolic places in her novel. The story opens “just upriver from Niagara Falls” and concludes as John Brown sets out for Harpers Ferry (405). 32. Hopkins’s critique of the figure of the aristocratic slaveholder has much in common with the argu- ments Jeremy Wells makes about the South in Romance of the White Man’s Burden: Race, Empire, and the Plantation in American Literature, 1880–1936 (Nashville: Vanderbilt Univ. Press, 2011). 33. Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987), 154. 48 Studies in American Fiction 34. Ibid., 155. 35. Carla Peterson characterizes Hopkins’s racial theory as a hybrid identity that “depends on a com- plex working out of both hereditary and environmental factors” in “Unsettled Frontiers: Race, History, and Romance in Pauline Hopkins’s ‘Contending Forces’,” in Famous Last Words: Changes in Gender and Narrative Closure, ed. Alison Booth, (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1993), 184. 36. See Dorri Beam, “The Flower of Black Female Sexuality in Pauline Hopkins’s Winona,” in Recovering the Black Female Body: Self-Representations by African American Women, ed. Michael Bennett, Vanessa D. Dickerson, and Carla L. Peterson (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 2001), 71–96. 37. Lois Brown sees the fact that Winona and Judah’s identities are “frequently misread” as a form of silencing, in Brown, Hopkins 372. What she then describes as “narrative veils” make ethnic identity somewhat inscrutable for the characters, including Winona and Judah (376). In contrast, I suggest that this indeterminacy only makes them more capable of adjusting to different situations and different landscapes, always coming out stronger. 38. Siobhan Somerville discusses the jailhouse scenes, including Winona’s cross-dressing and refer- ences to homosexuality, in “The Prettiest Specimen of Boyhood’: Cross-Gender and Racial Disguise in Pauline E. Hopkins’s Winona,” in Skin Deep, Spirit Strong: The Black Female Body, ed. Kimberly Wallace-Sanders (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 2002), 201–217. 39. Vandana Shiva, “Bringing People Back into the Economy,” Center for Ecoliteracy Publications, 2011, http://www.ecoliteracy.org/publications/print/vandana_shiva_print.htm (accessed October 13, 2011).