Comparative Drama

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...