Cultural Nationalism, Westward Expansion and the Production of Imperial Landscape: George Catlin’s Native American West

Abstract

In this paper I approach artist George Catlin’s landscape paintings and descriptions of 1830s Native America as a constituent component of an ambivalent imperialist iconography that depicted American westward expansion and Indian policy during the first half of the nineteenth century. Drawing upon iconological theory, I explore the multiple and often conflicting meanings encoded in Catlin’s work to show how his descriptions and images of the northern plains asserted his vision of the western landscape as Indian country, projecting a naturalistic, ‘scientific’ and purportedly authentic view of what was perceived as a rapidly fading scene. Although he claimed for his art an authenticity and naturalism drawn directly from nature, Catlin was profoundly influenced by a set of artistic and literary conventions propounded by those arguing for a distinctive national culture. Indeed, the American landscape and the Indian were symbols linking textually and aesthetically the natural environment and its aboriginal people to romantic notions of morality, exceptionality, and a national racial heritage. But while celebrating and promoting the Indian subject, nationalists painted a spectral picture of the Indians’ future complicit with Jacksonian policy designed to rid eastern lands of Native Americans. Catlin’s landscape paintings and descriptions problematically reproduced this irreconcilable tension in early nineteenth-century cultural nationalism and ultimately contributed to an imperial discourse on the Native American West: one that in Catlin’s works ambivalently contained its own critique, questioning the effects of westward expansion and Indian policy.