Ponteach, or the Savages of America

by Tiffany Potter

  As Linda Colley documents in her discussion of captivity narratives, ‘Before 1756, most of what British newspapers and magazines printed about America had been brief, factual and overwhelmingly commercial, often little more than a record of incoming and outgoing transatlantic vessels at specific ports. But as the war advanced, far more attention was devoted in papers, pamphlets and books to the American interior, to issues other than trade, and to human interest stories, understandably so, since individual Britons and different varieties of American were now encountering each other at a hitherto unknown rate and degree of intensity’ (Captives 174). Variously accurate information was available to Londoners in the eighteenth century, then, though, given the demands of readership and the political requirements of the colonial mission, only intelligent and devoted readers could reasonably be expected to have substantive knowledge of North American Indian people and the specific political and military actions underlying the economies of trade and colonialism between North America and Britain. Rogers’ Journals, the Concise Account, and even Ponteach benefited from and contributed to a surge of interest in the lives of various types of Americans around the time of the Seven Years’ War, when troops from Britain (and often their families) were sent to North America in substantial numbers. Under these circumstances, in the late 1750s, ‘this vast territory and all its complex dangers came to seem to Britons at home infinitely more real and absorbing’ (Colley, Captives 161).

  Even with the much clearer historical picture available to modern readers, part of the challenge of discussing Ponteach is this problem of reading Ponteach (and Pontiac). It is dangerously easy to allow the character to slip into archetypes of the noble savage. For Marilyn Anderson, for example, Ponteach speaks ‘wisdom based on an intimate knowledge of nature’ (236), and embodies ‘all of the virtues of the noble savage, [and so] is set up as a model for white Americans to emulate … [since] according to the criterion for heroic dramas, someone had to be representative of the very highest of virtue and honour’ (226, 228; original emphasis). In contrast, Laura Tanner and James Krasner argue that the view of Ponteach as a hero, noble and tragic, is actually based only on the first act, and that in fact even other characters recognize him as petulant, self-absorbed, and dangerously misguided in his ambition. This seems to me a better, though still not fully nuanced sense of Ponteach’s characterization. Tanner and Krasner, however, go on to use this insight to argue that the play is written only as an allegory: a warning on the nature of rebellion in the days preceding the American Revolution, with Rogers a ‘political playwright, lampooning American revolutionary leaders as crafty, two-faced savages, trying to rob the king of his fairly gained land’ (17). The problem of this reading of Ponteach is that in neither the play nor Rogers’ historical publications is there any substantive evidence that he had the literary talent for a cultural critique so subtly inlaid that it was universally missed by contemporary readers and reviewers. And it seems hugely problematic to assume that a play engaging almost exclusively Native North American cultures, written by a man who knew Pontiac and had recorded concerns about his mistreatment, is significant merely as a volley between Whig and Tory in London. Given the play’s tone throughout, I can see no way to argue that the ‘intensity of Rogers’ condemnation of Ponteach demonstrates the fury with which Whig revolutionary rhetoric was attacked by Tories’ (16). It is true, though, that the character of Ponteach becomes increasingly unattractive as the play goes on, driven by a series of small snubs to press his confederacy to great violence and what would be enormous losses, and condoning the on-stage torture of even the wife and babies of the villain Honnyman until he is reminded that they will bring a large ransom at the end of the conflict. Susan Castillo notes this change as well, though she too attributes it more to Rogers’ political experience than to his sense of Pontiac, arguing that Rogers ‘is ventriloquizing the character of Ponteach in order to enact some of the dilemmas of Creole subjectivity that he himself had encountered … and the transformation of Ponteach from noble statesman to treacherous bloodthirsty savage mirrors Rogers’s own shifting allegiances and his increasing inclination towards the British view of the American rebels as the embodiment of chaos and anarchy’ (222–3).

  While any play by a writer so consistently pulled in different cultural directions might be expected to reflect the sort of multiple cultures of reference that Castillo and Tanner and Krasner point out, Ponteach’s representation of a real, widely known and politically important Indigenous leader cannot be written off as significant primarily as English anxiety in disguise. Questions of constructions and performances of identity are, however, extremely important here. The Ponteach of Act I certainly is noble, and speaks with dismay at the distinction between word and act that he perceives in the ‘false, deceitful, knavish’ British (II ii). He has been unable to construct any consistent identity on which to base negotiation because, the play suggests, North Americans and Britons maintain incompatibly distinct understandings of the relationship between public and private identity. It is not just that national identities and languages are different, which of course, forms the most basic obstacle to communication and coexistence; it is that the very conception of identity is a product of nation. Rogers’ representation of British identity in the conflict is a reinscription of Mandevilleanism, set up to commend honourable public appearance regardless of private virtue. Private vice has public benefit for Rogers’ hunters, traders, and colonists, but that private vice is also one of the roots of violence in the Indigenous/colonial relationship. Perhaps by virtue of practical necessity for the sort of early colonists Rogers depicts here, that which is valued is nationally self-serving, regardless of conventional ideas of honesty or virtue; the latter qualities have become merely reassuring linguistic touchstones without further implication.

  As Honnyman’s Act I speech makes clear, Rogers draws the colonial British identity as one that manipulates private wrongs such that they disappear in the absence of their publicity: if no one knows, there is no crime. In response to Orsbourn’s anxious query after they have shot and scalped two Indian hunters, ‘d’ye think this is not Murder? / I vow I’m shock’d a little to see them scalp’d,’ Honnyman replies, ‘It’s no more Murder than to crack a Louse, / That is, if you’ve the Wit to keep it private … as they live like Beasts, like Beasts they die.’ This leaves Orsbourn ‘content; my Scruples are remov’d. / And what I’ve done, my Conscience justifies’ (I ii).37 Honnyman advises Orsbourn to ‘conceal yourself’: both the man and the evidence of his actions. The word ‘conceal’ is repeated several times in this scene: Honnyman warns Orsbourn, ‘conceal yourself, and mind your Eye’; after the murders they ‘must conceal the tawny Dogs’; and after covering them with brush, ‘There they will lie conceal’d and snug enough’ (I ii). Honnyman and Orsbourn thus seem to affirm a convention of concealment and deceit among at least certain types of British settlers. This accepted disparity of appearances and actuality among the colonists leaves Ponteach’s Ottawas vulnerable because they expect equation, at least until they become ‘poisoned by the infection of our Foes’ (III iii): ‘Whose very Language is a downright Lie? / Who swear and call on Gods when they mean nothing? / Who call it complaisant, polite good Breeding, / To say Ten thousand things they don’t intend, / And tell their nearest Friends the basest Falsehoods?’ (III i). With the exception of Ponteach and Philip, both described as contaminated by English values, Rogers’ representatives of the Great Lakes Nations are purported to speak honestly and directly and to expect the same of others, assuming that they are judged and valued upon their acts and the words that represent them: ‘I call no Man bad, till such he’s found, / Then I condemn him and cast him from my Sight; / And no more trust him as a Friend and Brother’ (I iv). Ponteach depicts its Ottawa and Mohawk cultural identities as ones in which ideal self relies on a congruent relationship between public and private identification.

  The play also individualizes the Ottawas’ and Mohawks’ struggle to eng
age the Europeans’ contradictory construction of identity and its destabilizing effect on their own perception of identity and relationships with each other. Ponteach’s second son Chekitan, for example, proclaims effusively his love for Monelia, but the Mohawk princess replies, ‘Hoh! now your Talk is so much like a Christian’s, / That I must be excus’d if I distrust you.’ Chekitan is horrified that she would ‘compare an Indian Prince to those / Whose Trade it is to cheat, deceive, and flatter’ (III i), but his ability to communicate has been contaminated. This leads to his immediate willingness to accept the word of his duplicitous brother Philip because Chekitan is unwilling to see any ‘Indian Prince’ in these English terms. And this culturally infused lapse of communication is what leads to the destruction of the second generation of Ottawas and Mohawks in Rogers’ imagining.

  In this crucial exchange that we see the fatal implications of the partial naturalization of Europeanness in the second-generation Ottawa and Mohawk characters. Without thinking, Chekitan has come to embody colonial ambivalence: he despises the Europeans and their dishonesty, yet emulates their patterns of romantic speech and their inherent iteration of gendered identity. It is reminiscent of what Bhabha terms ‘the White man’s artifice inscribed on the Black man’s body. It is in relation to this impossible object that emerges the liminal problem of colonial identity and its vicissitudes’ (‘Remembering’ 117). Here, Chekitan’s contamination of identity performs double duty. First, it radicalizes his relationships upon purely racial lines, rendering him vulnerable to his treacherous brother, and thus contributes to Ponteach’s military defeat; and second, it prevents reproduction and regeneration, driving the lovers apart because they can no longer presume to speak the same figurative language.38

  The foreboding sense of The Wolf that each generation has been weakened more than the last is confirmed:

  We’re poison’d with the Infection of our Foes,

  Their very Looks and Actions are infectious,

  And in deep Silence spread Destruction round them.

  Bethink yourselves while any Strength remains;

  Dare to be like your Fathers, brave and strong,

  Nor further let the growing Poison Spread. (III iii)

  Not just for Ponteach, then (himself ‘infected’ with deceitful ambition), but for all of the allied sachems, the fear of loss of control of identity is definitive. The young need to emulate not just their literal fathers, but also myriad preceding generations, with ideas of self and nation established long before every interaction required mediation by the ‘version of themselves the other side invented’ (White, ‘Fictions’ 64). Nation is no longer about territory, history, or family: even nations often traditionally in conflict are united for survival ‘while any Strength remains.’

  Ponteach’s first appearance in the play follows the shocking scene of the hunters Honnyman and Orsbourn murdering and scalping two Indians to steal their load of furs, justifying the act with the argument that ‘It’s no more Murder than to crack a Louse’ (I ii).39 These scenes can be interpreted in different ways, of course, but though I find Julie Ellison’s discussion of Ponteach often persuasive, I cannot agree in any way with her reading of the opening scenes ‘exposing the crimes of French and English traders and settlers against the Indians’ as ‘low comic scenes’ (90). It seems to me that Ponteach’s tragedy begins from its first moments, and to read it otherwise is to trivialize the most historically detailed and accurate (and angry) section of the play. The play calls for the events of Act I scene ii, as well as later murders, scalpings, and the torture of an innocent woman and her breastfeeding infant, to occur on stage rather than off. Staging these scenes of violence would render their physical quality as sickening as Honnyman’s philosophy and its consequences, and there can be no surprise that the next scene establishes a direct and simple contrast between the cursing, overconfident English military leaders and the idealized Ponteach of the play’s first act. Ponteach’s response to Colonel Cockum’s and Captain Fisk’s insults (whose more horrific human and economic implications have been established in the first two scenes) is

  So ho! Know you whose Country you are in?

  Think you, because you have subdu’d the French,

  That Indians too are now become your Slaves?

  This Country’s mine, and here I reign as King;

  I value not your Threats, nor Forts, nor Guns;

  I have got Warriors, Courage, Strength, and Skill.

  Colonel, take care; the Wound is very deep,

  Consider well, for it is hard to cure. (I iii)

  This assertion of dominion is only a lead-in, though, for the next increment in the play’s movement from private encounters between private citizens, to semi-private military encounters, and finally to public political exchanges between Ponteach and the three governors of the colony: Sharp, Gripe, and Catchum. Rogers’ allegiance in the latter scene is obvious in names alone, and his Concise Account accuses those promoted above him of exactly such ignorance. But the slights move beyond private morality as the governors embezzle the king’s gifts to the sachems, and then the sachems’ gifts to the king, until their own greed has left the chiefs insulted and vulnerable to Ponteach’s calls for rebellion, and their nations at war. Ponteach comes to stand in both for the plight of the devalued individual in revisionist colonial systems of hierarchy and for the ‘doomed Indian’ stereotype that would be so widely referenced in the nineteenth century; the difference between Rogers’ portrayal and those typical of the eighteenth century is that Ponteach is shown to be complicated, human, and respected by a fellow warrior even as that warrior depicts his end.40

  Though both the play and eighteenth-century English culture in general tend to assume that women are to be excluded from political public discourse, it is not just Ponteach to whom Rogers gives a split significance. The Mohawk princess Monelia is certainly rendered a passive, typically feminized object that men desire and over which they do battle, but she is also significant in much more emblematic ways. Of course, the myths and metaphors surrounding colonist-colonized sexual relationships are myriad, from nations figured as naked women awaiting plunder by the colonial master to the dark-skinned rapist attacking white women who stand in for European or colonial culture. There is also a conventional narrative of European men preventing barbaric colonized men from mistreating women, which Gayatri Spivak summarizes as ‘White men are saving brown women from brown men’ (296), and finally the Pocahontas tradition of the Indian princess who falls in love with a European man, which Peter Hulme suggests uses romance narratives to assert ‘the ideal of a cultural harmony through romance’ (141). Elements of Ponteach conflict with the larger cultural myths of colonialism in their articulation of a slightly distorted version of a narrative widely assumed natural and true. Much to the same effect, Rogers rewrites interracial sexuality in a way that allows Monelia in particular not only to stand in for America in the larger project of colonialism, but also to embody the selectivity of consent in the ostensibly collaborative systems of trade and exchange among colonists and Indians.

  As Ania Loomba has observed, narratives of romantic consensuality frequently parallel trade: colonial trade ‘is projected as a transaction desired by both parties, an enterprise mutually beneficial and entered into via the exercise of free will’ (134). Loomba’s examples come from colonial India, but a nicely parallel study is offered in Sylvia van Kirk’s Many Tender Ties, which documents in a less metaphorical way the links among trade and romantic partnership in cases where sachems of various nations married their daughters to Hudson’s Bay Company fur traders in order to cement trade benefits. Such cases suggest that mutually beneficial visions of colonialism may be fictionalized through narratives of romantic alliances, but that those fictions are also based on historical actualities. Ponteach, though, asserts a coercive nature in intercultural trade: in Act I, two Indian hunters are murdered and scalped because Honnyman and Orsbourn are unsuccessful hunters but still desire profit through
trade; a second man is cheated when a European trader gives him alcohol, uses a weighted scale, and takes advantage of different systems of quantification; and Sharp, Gripe, and Catchum cheat the Ottawas as a group of both goods and good will by skimming both sides of exchanges of gifts of respect. In these scenes, Rogers does not appear to object to the idea of colonialism as a potentially mutually beneficial trade relationship, but he does seem to object to the ignorance and short-sightedness behind such greed. Rogers observed at first hand the effects of cheating traders and of corrupt officials who opted to ignore the fact that colonial trade (and the peace that it helped to maintain) depended upon mutualism: both sides must benefit from trade (though not necessarily equally), or there is no benefit to the Indians in allowing colonists access to their traditional resources. Ponteach does not suggest that trade inevitably leads to coercion and retaliatory violence – Rogers benefited too much himself from cross-cultural trade to make such a case – but his play makes clear the need for some sort of balanced reciprocity in line with both established Indigenous traditions and traditional trade among Europeans. Throughout the series of scenes in Act I in particular, Rogers legitimizes the case for rebellion as he depicts a complete disregard for expectations of reciprocity and informed consent. The relationships are neither mutually beneficial nor, because they are based on violence and deceit, consensual.