Status Updates From Playing Indian (Yale Histor...

The powerful and creative identity embodied and performed at the Tea Party made it clear that Americans were, in fact, something new.

It remained far easier, however, to say what Americans were not or what they might become than to articulate what they actually were.

There was, quite simply, no way to conceive an American identity without Indians. At the same time, there was no way to make a complete identity while they remained.

The exterior, savage Other assured Americans of their own civilized nature, and , more important, justified the dispossession of real Indians. The presence of actual Indians, persistently struggling to maintain land and sovereignty, necessitated the continued reconstruction of the savage, exterior Other throughout the 19th century.

The uncertainty that continued to haunt Americans can be traced to the contradictory meanings assigned to interior and exterior Indians. Tammany and other interior Indians proved crucial in letting one oppose the Eng. and be Americ. Complete incorporation of this particular form of Indian was impossible, however, as long as its savage twin existed at the edge of expanding national borders.

P2 ever effectively developing a positive, stand-alone identity that did not rely heavily on either a British or an Indian foil.

After the Revolution, Americans remained stuck in the middle, lost somewhere between "simultaneous identity" and "no identity."

In playing Indian, Americans invoked a range of identities...all of which emerged from the categories Indian and Briton. In the process they created a new Identity (American) that was both aboriginal and European and was also neither. ...Although this control was effective in establishing an American identity as both non-English and non-Indian, its continued openness prevented its creators from ever effectively P1

liminal rituals.

social order disrupted when a new category created.
not an other but not an inner either
something new.

Tammany warriors and Tea Party Mohawks transformed metaphor into a theatrical reality, literally becoming what they were not.

With the onset of outright war in 1775, the figure of the Indian appeared as not only noble and civilized, but also willful, determined, and strong. Indians appeared on military flags, newspaper mastheads, and numerous handbills. In a clear reference to the Tea Party, later printers would portray the American Congress as a colonist in Indian disguise.

everyone is drawing Indians to use a symbol of the colonies meanwhile the actual Indians are dying by starvation, illness, genocide, etc. etc etc etc.

white people be whiting while the brown people they're using as symbols are dying.

Because many American political cartoons were reprinted or redrawn from British sources, these British conventions frequently came into play in reverse form in the colonies.

British cartoonists used Indians to symbolize the colonies as alien and uncivilized and therefore needful of (and deserving) the rule of the empire. At an intersection between noble and savage, tawny white or colored, the figure of the Indian had enormous iconographic flexibility. By [depicting it differently] British cartoonists could depict the colonies [differently].

The order and discipline that characterized the Tea Party suggest that it was an event plotted and controlled by those elites, who took pains to avoid involving a crowd that had demonstrated a collective mind of its own. Indian costume now signified not only a leap across British legal boundaries, but also discipline and planning in the execution of crowd activities.