result is usually the replacement of the attractive free Indians by a degenerate popula
tion of negro s
emi-slaves. Ind
Target Audience
ians are too
independent and self-respecti
ng to work under su
ch conditions.
They prefer to emigrate or die. Negroes hate work, but they can be driven to it. (36) What is thereby discernible as the hidden historical force in Marsh's quest for white Indians is this dream of power and freedom promised yet continuously thwarted by capitalist development. As in a shadow play, the Indian and the black are the beings through which the ceaseless dilemma of labor-discipline and fre
edom in capital
ist enterprise is to be figured. The frontier provides the setting within which this problem of discipline magnifies the savagery that has to be repressed and canalized by the civilizing process. Anarchic Rubble of Racial Time While the white Indians for whom Marsh is searching are at least fixed by their mysterious location at the headwaters of the river in an unknown valley into which no black man
will venture, t
he black people of the coastline and of the riverine villages on the way to that valley create irrup
nexpected tim
e-warps. The blacks of Panama (and of the coasts of Colombia) upset white histories and the attempts of their authors to come to terms with the overwhelming turbulence of modern times. Bu
t the Indians are there to fix history and restore its sublime order. They are Origin-and as such they are
- also White and Woman. By no means does Marsh's gift-laden trunk travel, step by mythic step easing back
- wards through evolutionary time, to the home of the racially pure, the home of the Primitive. For as Marsh fights his way upstream
Required Materials/Facilities
- search of white Indianness, blasting his way clear with stic
- ks of dynamite, what he discovers,
- indeed what he himself is part of, i
- Participant Manual (one per participant)
- PowerPoint Presentation
- s not the originary but the rubble of histor
- y. At first this rubble
- occurs as isolated outcrops of white ruins. He
curses Captain Selfridge who, engaged in 187
