Henrietta Reed
Outline

 Define concept of ‘Vanishing Americans’ and outline
reality
 Timeline of Indian policy – theory put into practice
 Presence of ‘Vanishing Americans’ theory in art
 Zane Grey’s The Vanishing American (1925)
 The Famous Players-Lasky Corporation Film (1925)
(both film and book are culmination of the discourse
of the vanishing american and are useful in
conceptualising its efect on the history of native
americans)
‘Vanishing Americans’

 Frontier seen as the ‘meeting point between savagery
and civilisation’
 Native Americans become known as the Vanishing
Americans
 Certainty that savagery was inferior to civilisation and
belief that civilisation would triumph over savagery
 Berkhofer ‘Civilisation must triumph over savagery no
matter how noble it might be’
 Idea perpetuated by evolutionary theorists ‘survival of
the fittest’
‘Vanishing Americans’

 Brian Dippie, during C19 ‘vanishing american
achieved the status of a cultural myth
 Theory constructed to benefit the cultural identity of
the Anglo white American
 White Americans presented as the ‘flourishing
American’
 Perception of the concept as an inevitable process,
Indian race destined to ‘recede before civilisations
advance’
Reality

 Rather than vanishing native Americans were in fact
multiplying and by 1980 their numbers had reached
1.4 million and could be characterised as ‘one of the
fastest growing minority groups in the US’
 Number of Indians increased by 2.3% from 1933-1934
 Brian Dippie; Indians today have achieved victory
over the vanishing American myth. ‘will enter the
C21 unsubdued, unassimilated and unmistakably
alive
Timeline of Indian policy

 1830 Indian Removal Acts
 1887 General Allotment/Dawes Act
 1907 Lacey Act
 1917 Sells Declaration
 1919 WW1 Veterans Act
 1924 Citizenship Act
Vanishing Americans in
Art

 Artists concerned with showcasing real Indians
 Julie Schimmel ‘imagining them in remote and
pristine environment’ distanced from whites
 George Catlin 1796-1872. Based his art work around
the theory of the vanishing americans
 His art dealt with the construction of the ‘noble
savage’ who was inferior to whites but ‘enobled by
his simplicity and nature’
 Noble Savage + Civilisation = Degraded/Bloody
Savage

Indian fate in art

 James Earle Fraser 1894,
End of the Trail
 Indian fate summed up
by poets, novelists in images
drawn from nature
William Cullen Bryant 1824- ‘An Indian at the Burying place of his
fathers’
They waste us - aye –like April snow
In the warm noon, we shrink away;
And fast they follow, as we go
Towards the setting day, Till they shall fill the land, and we
Are driven into the western sea.
Zane Grey ‘The
Vanishing American’

 Grey; critical of westward expansion and the
treatment of Native Americans
 Nophaie, a young Navajo brought up by a party of
whites- novel deals with his struggle to find a place
in society
 Wider scale: novel deals with changes Native
Americans experiences in C20, their demise and the
concern over their future
Film

 1925 Silent film directed by Richard Dix and Lois
Wilson based on Greys novel
 Changes to the structure of the novel for the film
altered the message it gives
 Indians presented as more than a ‘visual spectacle’
inconsequential to the push of westward expansion
 Sympathetic to the Indians but has an inherent
Darwinist philosophy
Conclusion

 ‘Vanishing American’ theory important in political
and cultural interpretations of the Indian in 19th and
20th Centuries
 Very influential theory- made even those who
opposed the treatment of Native Americans succumb
to inevitability of the fate of the Indians
 ‘Vanishing American’ theory was used to socially
construct the concept of the Native Americans as a
doomed race and thus secure white domination by
legitimizing tactics which marginalised Native
Americans