• Indigeneity and Immigration in Susan Glaspell’s Inheritors
• James H. Cox (bio) and Alexander Pettit (bio)

In 1911, Susan Glaspell was “disentangling herself ” from her native Iowa and preparing to move to New York City, where her fellow Davenporter and future husband George Cram Cook would eventually join her.¹ Her regionalist sensibilities remained strong, however, even as she embraced the progressive milieu of Greenwich Village and, from 1915, honed her skills as a playwright with the Provincetown Players. Like Cook, Glaspell was interested in the Midwest’s Indigenous history. Both felt a particular affinity with Black Hawk (1767–1838), the Sauk (Sac) leader best remembered for the eponymous 1832 war that resulted in his defeat and state-mandated humiliation as well as the loss of six million acres, comprising among much else the site of Davenport, where James Glaspell would settle his family in 1869.² Black Hawk expressed the pathos of loss in the dedication to General Henry Atkinson of his popular autobiography, first published in 1833 at Rock Island, Illinois and translated by Antoine LeClaire, the founder of nearby Davenport: “The changes of fortune, and vicissitudes of war, made you my conqueror. When my last resources were exhausted, my warriors worn down with long and toilsome marches, we yielded, and I became your prisoner.”³ According to Linda Ben-Zvi, Black Hawk’s autobiography taught Glaspell “different narratives and notions about America.” Black Hawk himself, “while associated with nature,” was for Glaspell “also the repository of moral values and intellect, noble but in no way a savage.”⁴

During her and Cook’s courtship, Glaspell came to share Cook’s fondness for Black Hawk’s Watch Tower, a popular amusement park in Rock Island on the historical site of Saukenuk, former capital of the Sauk Nation.⁵ One evening in June 1910, she would recall, she and Cook [End Page 31] savored “a few hours together on that bluff of Rock River, where the old Indian Chief had watched in other days, where Indian lovers, too, had known the sweetness and no doubt at times the pain and terror.”⁶ Glaspell’s imagining of herself and Cook as occupants of an Indigenous space and her gesture at the “pain and terror” that resulted from the park owners’ seizure of Native land anticipate concerns central to her play Inheritors, begun in January 1920, and first staged by the Provincetown Players in 1921.⁷ A less exclusive gathering held on July 1, 1911, approximately one hundred miles away may have also provided inspiration; surely it demonstrated the abiding cultural and political power of Black Hawk’s memory in the Midwest. Nearly 500 people congregated that day at the Eagle’s Nest Bluff artists’ colony in Oregon, Illinois, on the western bank of the Sinnissippi or Rock River, to hear seven speakers celebrate the dedication of Chicago-based sculptor Lorado Taft’s forty-eight foot tall concrete statue of an Indigenous man.⁸ Though conceived as “The Eternal Indian” and “modeled not on Black Hawk or any other Native person,” the statue was by 1912 “usually called by that warrior’s name.”⁹ The published record does not say whether Glaspell was present. But Inheritors assures us that she, like several of the participants in the Eagle’s Nest Bluff ceremony, was interested in the ethics of representation within a settler-colonial setting in Sauk and Meskwaki (Fox) country.

Glaspell dramatizes her concerns in Inheritors by enlisting Black Hawk and the Sauks—conspicuous only in the remembrances of the settler-colonialists who displaced them—in a regionalist enterprise that proposes immigration as a force for “re-Indianing” the Midwest. To further this effort, she substitutes a malleable idea of Indigeneity for an actual Indigenous presence. For Glaspell, Indigeneity accrues formal and political value through its assumption of broad exemplarity. Therefore she leaves Indigenous people strategically unrepresented: Indigenous characters on stage would muddle the play’s formal structure and political vision, as reductive as the latter seems from the perspective of post-civil rights era Native American and Indigenous literary studies. So even as she advances powerful anti-nationalist, anti-racist arguments, Glaspell does not acknowledge Indigenous contributions to and...

• Susan Glaspell的继承人的土著与移民
• 詹姆斯·H·考克斯（生物）和亚历山大·佩蒂特（生物）

我ñ1911年，格拉斯贝尔独是“解开她”从她的家乡艾奥瓦州，准备搬到纽约市，在那里她的同胞Davenporter和未来的丈夫乔治·克拉姆·库克最终会加入她。^1个然而，即使她拥护格林威治村不断发展的环境，并且从1915年开始，她在普罗温斯敦（Provincetown）演奏家中扮演剧作家的技能，她的区域主义敏感性仍然很强。像库克一样，格拉斯佩尔对中西部的土著历史很感兴趣。双方都对黑鹰（Black Hawk）（1767–1838）有着特殊的亲和力，萨乌克（Sac）领导人因1832年同名战争而被人们铭记，这场战争导致他的失败和国家规定的屈辱以及600万英亩的土地损失，其中包括其他地点是达文波特（Davenport），詹姆斯·格拉斯佩（James Glaspell）于1869年在此定居^。2黑鹰在献给亨利·阿特金森将军的自传上表示了失落的悲哀，自传于1833年在伊利诺伊州罗克岛首次发行，由附近的达文波特创始人安托万·莱克莱尔（Antoine LeClaire）翻译： ，使你成为我的征服者。当我用尽最后的资源时，我的战士们经过漫长而辛苦的游行而疲惫不堪，我们屈服了，我成为了你的囚徒。” ³根据琳达·本·兹维（Linda Ben-Zvi）的说法，黑鹰的自传教导了格拉斯佩尔“关于美国的不同叙述和观念”。黑鹰本人“虽然与自然相关联”，但对格拉斯佩尔来说“也是道德价值和理智的宝库，高贵但绝不是野蛮人。” ⁴

在她和库克的求爱期间，格拉斯佩尔来分享库克对黑鹰守望塔的喜爱，黑鹰守望塔是洛克岛上一个受欢迎的游乐园，坐落在索克国家前首都索克努克的历史遗迹上。⁵在1910年6月的一个晚上，她会记得，她和库克[尾页31]品尝“了几个小时一起在岩石河，那里的老印第安酋长曾在其他日子看着那虚张声势，在印度的爱好者，也有知道甜蜜，毫无疑问有时会感到痛苦和恐怖。” ⁶ Glaspell想象自己和库克是土著居民，并且她对公园主人没收土著土地而造成的“痛苦与恐惧”的姿态预示着她的戏剧继承者的关注始于1920年1月，并于1921年由普罗温斯敦球员首次上演^。7 1911年7月1日，在大约一百英里之外的较不那么独特的聚会也可能提供了灵感。毫无疑问，它展示了黑鹰在中西部记忆中持久的文化和政治力量。当天，近500人聚集在辛尼西比河或洛克河西岸伊利诺伊州俄勒冈州鹰巢'崖艺术家的住所，听见七位演讲者庆祝芝加哥雕塑家洛拉多·塔夫脱（Lorado Taft）48英尺高的混凝土的奉献精神。土著人的雕像。⁸该雕像虽然被设想为“永恒的印度人”，并且“并非以黑鹰或任何其他原住民为原型，但在1912年时被雕像“通常以那个战士的名字来称呼”。⁹公开的记录没有说明Glaspell是否存在。但是继承人向我们保证，她和鹰巢Nest诈仪式的几名参与者一样，对索克和梅斯克瓦基（福克斯）国家的定居者殖民地环境中的代表伦理很感兴趣。

Glaspell在继承人中戏剧化了她的担忧通过招募黑鹰和索克斯（Black Hawk and Sauks）（仅在使他们流离失所的殖民者殖民主义者的记忆中显着），在一个区域主义企业中提议移民作为“重新印第安纳”中西部的力量。为了进一步努力，她用可塑的土著概念代替了实际的土著存在。对Glaspell而言，土著具有广泛的代表性，因此在形式上和政治上都具有价值。因此，她从战略上没有代表土著人民：舞台上的土著人物会混淆剧本的形式结构和政治视野，从民权后时代的美洲印第安人和土著文学研究的角度看，后者似乎是一种还原。因此，即使她提出强有力的反民族主义，反种族主义论据，格拉斯佩尔也不承认土著人对和的贡献。