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Sundown and “Liquid Modernity” in Pawhuska, Oklahoma

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 May 2012

HANNA MUSIOL
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Abstract

The early twentieth-century oil boom radically transformed the Osage reservation in Oklahoma, and in the early 1920s the Osages became the world's richest community because of their collective sharing of profits from mineral resources. In 1934, John Joseph Mathews, an Osage American tribal historian, published Sundown, his only work of fiction, a peculiar Bildungsroman about the life of Chal Windzer in the aftermath of oil discovery on the Osage reservation. I argue that Mathews's use of the novel of formation is a particularly important literary and intellectual intervention. First, at a time when the significance of material resources to the American economy and American national imaginary was growing, Mathews uses the generic convention of progress to narrate oil's social “formation,” alongside the tale of Chal's dissolution, his failure, that is, of the very development which the novel's genre implies. Second, Mathews's literary representation of the oil boom as the Great Frenzy – a period of widespread violence and cultural chaos – complicates traditional accounts of capitalist economic development, which define late-stage capitalism and its financial deregulation and IT boom as an era of radical cultural “fluidity” (Bauman, Sennett). By drawing attention to the material and social fluidity of oil culture and the force with which it affected the Osages, Sundown points to a specific Osage American colonial, and thus always already transnational, history of (petro)modernity. The character of modernity, Mathews shows us, is inextricably tied to the conditions under which human and natural resources are extracted and allowed to become “social.” The destabilization of reservation culture derives equally from oil discovery itself, and the technological transformations within the energy industry, from the colonialist conditions that impose capitalism upon the Osages, and from the very collectivist modes of wealth distribution that the Osages adopted in order to resist colonial exploitation. Thus Mathews's novel reveals an alternative genealogy of the destabilization of cultural forms to the one that begins with post-Bretton Woods global financial deregulation, the collapse of state institutions in the global North, and the late twentieth-century emergence of new communication technologies. For the Osages in the 1920s and for the characters in Sundown, crude oil and colonial exploitation, as well as, paradoxically, anticapitalist legal provisions of the Allotment Act's collectivizing of it, make reservation culture “liquid” and “uncertain” precisely at the time of America's entering into the presumably “solid” econo-political phase of development.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 2: Special Issue on Oil Cultures , May 2012 , pp. 357 - 373
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

1 Quoted in William G. Shepherd, “Lo, the Rich Indian,” Harper's Weekly (Nov. 1920), 723–34, 734.

2 Wallerstein, Immanuel, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), ixGoogle Scholar.

3 Moretti, Franco, Graphs, Maps, and Trees: Abstract Models for Literary Analysis (London and New York: Verso, 2007), 92Google Scholar.

4 While I borrow the phrase “liquid modernity” specifically from Bauman's, ZygmuntLiquid Times: Living in the Age of Uncertainty (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 1Google Scholar, 69, 79, several other studies of late capitalism emphasize fluidity and uncertainty as key markers of post–World War II capitalism. See Sennett, Richard, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company 1998), 30Google Scholar; and idem, The Culture of New Capitalism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), which explicitly invokes Bauman's “liquid modernity” (13). Bauman's earlier project, Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), 1–33, examines the relationship between “order building” and its “waste” and “chaos” more directly.

5 Nancy Fraser, “From Discipline to Flexibilization: Reading Foucault in the Shadow of Globalization,” in idem, Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 116–30; David Harvey, “Neo-Liberalism and the Restoration of Class Power,” in idem, Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development (New York: Verso, 2006), 7–68. Harvey, however, in The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), is extremely attentive to the ways in which capitalism migrates its crises across national borders and how neoliberalism enables exploitation of environments, resources, and people.

6 Bauman, Liquid Times.

7 For Sennett, “flexible capitalism” is explicitly a late twentieth-century phenomenon (The Corrosion of Character, 9), and he does not examine in detail the “liquid” dimensions of colonial modernity that pre-date and facilitate the establishment and dissolution of the Western welfare-state model and the increased flexibility of the transnational flow of capital.

8 Imre Szeman offers a brilliant discussion of globalization as seen not only through the prism of the seemingly weightless transfer of capital and information across national borders, but also in the context of the very tangible, heavy “transfer of material weight” of oil, in Ursula Biemann and Imre Szeman, “Forced Transit: A Dialogue on Black Sea Files and Contained Mobility,” in Ursula Biemann, Imre Szeman, Angela Melitopoulos, and Maurizio Lazzarato, Political Typographies: Visual Essays on the Margins of Europe (Barcelona: Antoni Tàpies Foundation, 2007), 13–45, 35–36. For a comprehensive discussion of the violent “hydrocarbon capitalism,” and the role that abundance of nonrenewable resources plays in the projects of neocolonial economic exploitation, see Watts, Michael, Violent Environments, ed. Nancy Lee Peluso and Michael Watts (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2001), 189–212Google Scholar, 189.

9 Mathews, John Joseph, Sundown (London and New York: Longmans, Green and Co, 1934)Google Scholar. Mathews produced several documentary, nonfiction book projects, but only one novel.

10 Marx, Karl, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (New York: Modern Library, 1906), 784–87Google Scholar.

11 Michael Watts, “Petro-Violence: Community Extraction, and Political Ecology of a Mythic Commodity,” in idem, Violent Environments, 189–212, at 191.

12 Sennett, The Corrosion of Character, 31.

13 See Watts's discussion of “colonial and (precolonial) violent ‘extractions’” of humans and rubber in Ecuador. Watts, “Petro-Violence,” 202.

14 Burns, Louis F., A History of the Osage People (Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, 2004), 439Google Scholar.

15 Sundown, 266, 304.

16 Although these are obviously racist categories, I use them to refer to historical terms with legal and cultural significance, as they defined degrees of legal and cultural belonging and of Osageness.

17 Sundown, 112.

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid., 239.

20 Ibid., 250.

21 “Oil Makes Osages of Northern Oklahoma Richest Indian Community in the World,” New York Times, 21 May 1923, 1; “Auctions of Oil Land Enrich Osage the American Indians,” Los Angeles Times, 4 March 1934, 15.

22 For accounts of this gruesome period see Burns, 439–42; Logan, Lawrence J., The Osage Indian Murder Plot: The True Story of a Multiple Murder Plot to Acquire the Estates of Wealthy Osage Tribe Members (Frederick, MD: Amlex, 1998)Google Scholar. Declassified FBI files about the Osage murder cases are available at http://foia.fbi.gov/foiaindex/osageind.htm, accessed 20 April 2011. See also Michael Watts's discussion of more recent instances of “petro-violence” in Ecuador and Nigeria. Watts, “Petro-Violence,” 207.

23 Bennett, Jane, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

24 Michael Watts calls it petroleum's “mythos” (“Petro-Violence,” 191).

25 See Phil Patton's work on commodities and American national culture, Made in the USA: The Secret Histories of the Things that Made America (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1992)Google Scholar.

26 Sinclair's, UptonOil! (New York: Penguin, 2008)Google Scholar.

27 Ise's, JohnThe United States Oil Policy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1926)Google Scholar criticized the deregulation and predatory nature of oil extraction. In his view, both led to waste and overexploitation of oil resources, caused environmental damage, and lowered oil prices to below the cost of production.

28 Joseph Mathews's, John own The Osages: Children of the Middle Waters (Norman: Oklahoma University Press, 1961)Google Scholar was sponsored by his oil tycoon friends.

29 I borrow this word from Maurizio Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor,” in Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, eds., Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 133–47.

30 Bauman, Liquid Modernity; Sennett, The Corrosion of Character, 9, 46–63.

31 Bauman, Liquid Modernity.

32 Glasscock, C. B., Then Came Oil: The Story of the Last Frontier (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1938), 147Google Scholar.

33 Glasscock, 146.

34 Matthews, The Osages, 776.

35 Ibid., 335.

36 Burns, A History of the Osage People, 243.

37 The “civilization” of the Osage involved, among other things, forcing Osage men to take up farming, an occupation they viewed as unmanly; educating Osage children in reservation schools; and altering gender roles and family structures to conform to the Western model of the family unit.

38 The first commercial well appeared in 1897. Mathews, The Osages, 772.

39 Glasscock, 146.

40 Burns, 400, points out that never before “had American law allowed Indian allotment on the basis of separating the surface ownership from mineral ownership.”

41 Wilson, Terry P., The Underground Reservation: Osage Oil (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985)Google Scholar.

42 Ibid., 74–75.

43 Mathews also discusses this practice in Sundown (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984).

44 Matthews, The Osages, 776.

45 Glasscock, 147. William Shepherd, “Lo, the Rich Indian,” 724, cites the instance of an Osage woman who made nearly as much money as President Wilson in the 1920s. Surely his Harper's readers found this information shocking.

46 “Osages Before Oil,” Time, 7 Nov. 1932, n.p., available at www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,744704,00.html, accessed 20 April 2011.

47 Tompkins, Jane, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; see also Jacques Rancière, “The Politics of Literature,” trans. Julie Rose, in idem, The Politics of Literature (Malden, MA: Polity, 2011), 3–30.

48 The Bildungsroman was an unusual choice for Mathews, whose literary career began in 1932 with the nonfiction Wah'Kon-Tah: The Osage and the White Man's Road (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1981), in which he transcribed the memoirs of the Indian Agent Laban J. Miles, and ended in the 1960s with the magnum opus The Osages, a 600-page collective tribal history. Fascinated by indigenous traditions, he dedicated most of his life to preserving and reconstructing what he considered vanishing Native American lore. He documented indigenous oral and visual culture in his tribal history, helped found the Osage Museum – the first tribally owned museum in the country – and received two Guggenheim fellowships to research First Nations’ cultures in Mexico in 1939 and 1940. For a discussion of Mathews's early work see Kalter, Susan, “John Joseph Mathews’ Reverse Ethnography: The Literary Dimensions of Wah'kon-Tah,” Studies in American Indian Literatures, 14, 1 (2002), 26–50Google Scholar. For Mathews about his return to the Osage reservation see Logsdon, Guy, “John Joseph Mathews: A Conversation,” Nimrod, 16, 2 (1972), 70–89Google Scholar.

49 Slaughter, Joseph R., Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

50 In Sennett's view, people see “life as narratives … of not so much what will happen as of how but how things should happen,” in Sennett, Culture of New Capitalism, 25.

51 Slaughter, 27; Hirsch, Marianne, “The Novel of Formation as Genre: Between Great Expectations and Great Illusions,” Genre, 12, 3 (1979), 293–311Google Scholar.

52 Slaughter, 27.

53 It is impossible to imagine the great commercial success of national literary magazines such as Cosmopolitan or McClure's, without their serialized Bildungsromans.

54 Note that Mathews is part of a larger twentieth-century literary tradition of “life” writing. See, for example, Johnson, James Weldon, The Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man (New York: Sheldon, French, and Company, 1912)Google Scholar; Yezierska, Anzia, Bread Givers (New York: Persea Books, 2003; first published 1925)Google Scholar; Dove, Mourning, Cogewea, the Half Blood: A Depiction of the Great Montana Cattle Range (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981Google Scholar; first published 1927).

55 Brown Ruoff, A. LaVonne, American Indian Literatures: An Introduction, Bibliographic Review, and Selected Bibliography (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1990), 52Google Scholar.

56 Ibid., 4–75; Warrior, Robert Allen, The People and the Word: Reading Native Nonfiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

57 Patton, Made in the USA; for a discussion of “things” and their political power see Bruno Latour, “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik: Or How to Make Things Public,” in Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds., Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 4–31.

58 Sundown is not an exception here. Many early twentieth-century Bildungsromans centered on the unsuccessful individuation and socialization of human persons and the socialization of modern things. For example, consider the contrast between the difficult lives of female protagonists and the vibrant lives of artifacts in Nella Larsen's Quicksand, ed. Thadious M. Davis (New York: Penguin Books, 2002; first published 1928); and between Delilah and her famous pancake mix in Fannie Hurst's Imitation of Life (New York: P. F. Collier, 1933).

59 Eda Lou Walton, “The Osage Indians,” The Nation, 8 Jan. 1933, 156. Interestingly, although national presses consistently emphasized Mathews's Indianness, Mathews was only part Osage. During the era of intertribal conflicts between fullbloods supporting collectivization of resources and mixbloods favoring assimilation into the US national culture and privatization of land, an Osage American mixblood, educated in the US and Europe, would often be treated with suspicion by tribal elders and feel alienated from traditional Osage culture. In short, white readers would describe Mathews's identity as Osage, following the one-drop rule of racial identity; for Osages, and for Mathews specifically, one's “Indian” identity did not depend simply on one's genetic traits but was defined in complex ways, as a matter of heredity, kinship, or cultural identification, or in relation to one's views concerning tribal property rights. For a discussion of Mathews's and the novel's protagonist's cultural identity read Carol Hunter's “The Protagonist and a Mixed-Blood in John Joseph Mathews’ Novel: Sundown,” American Indian Quarterly, 6, 3–4 (1982), 319–37; also, see her discussion of the schism between “bourgeois” mixbloods and fullbloods living in traditional camps in “The Historical Context in John Joseph Mathews's Sundown,” MELUS, 9, 1 (Spring 1982), 61–72, 65.

60 “An Educated Indian,” York Times Book Review, 25 Nov. 1934, 19–20, 20.

61 Ibid.

62 For a different interpretation of Chal's alienation as modernist posturing see Christopher Schedler's “John Joseph Mathews: Tribal Modernism,” in idem, Border Modernism: Intercultural Readings in American Literary Modernism (New York: Routledge, 2002), 41–52.

63 Sundown, 73.

64 Articles in national publications aimed to shock readers with descriptions of Osages’ outrageous purchases. What Watts, “Petro-Violence,” 205, 193, calls “petro-magic,” or “wealth without effort,” was not expected to materialize on an Indian reservation. Whereas it was good style for white Americans to overspend and overconsume, an Osage “pay[ing] $2000 for Clock to Chime His Reservation Tepee” was a national scandal. “Osage Indians Face Depletion of Oil Incomes,” Christian Science Monitor, 2 Nov. 1929, 1.

65 Mathews often mentions “a strange chemical running through [various characters’] veins,” and it is unclear if he means whiskey, morphine, or oil. Sundown, 14.

66 Appadurai, Arjun, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

67 Sundown, 20.

68 Bauman, Liquid Times.

69 Ibid., 13, 14.

70 Ibid., 4.

71 Ibid., 6–8.

72 Ibid., 8.

73 Ibid., 49.

74 Ibid.

75 Watts, “Petro-Violence,” 205.

76 I use the term after Sennett, Culture of New Capitalism, 89, as a “convention of life.”

77 Sundown was written before the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act reversed, or at least ameliorated the impact of, federal policies of forced assimilation and privatization of Native American lands.

78 Sundown, 26.

79 Ibid., 110.

80 Ibid., 241.

81 Ibid., 310.

82 Ibid., 311.

83 Ibid., 241. See also Michael Watts's reflection on how such “liquid mobility” of oil simultaneously signals abundance and vitality as well as “evacuative despoliation” and “environmental threat.” Watts, “Petro-Violence,” 205.

84 Ibid., 78. Mathews calls the region the “blackjacks” because of its blackjack oaks.

85 Ibid., 62.

86 Ibid., 239.

87 Ibid., 3–74.

88 Ibid., 183.

89 Ibid., 239.

90 Ibid., 77.

91 Ibid.

92 Pottage, Alain and Mundy, Martha, eds., Law, Anthropology, and the Constitution of the Social: Making Persons and Things (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

93 Sundown, 86.

94 Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc., 27.

95 The use of morphine and marihuana in addition to whiskey was widespread on the reservation. Wilson, The Underground Reservation, 156. Shepherd mentions “mescal” – by which he most likely means peyote – and alludes to heroin use. Mathews often references ceremonial peyote use in Sundown (83, 162, 184, 277).

96 Biemann and Szeman, “Forced Transit,” 36.

97 Oil is fluid and transnational matter; it is extracted on the Osage reservation by transnational corporations, and the oil-rich land is at once American and Osage and, before the Removal Act, had belonged to different Native American nations. Yet oil also “produces a state” and valorizes its power. Watts, “Petro-Violence,” 204.

98 See Jameson, Fredric, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003; first published 1991), 1–66Google Scholar.

99 Bauman, Liquid Times; Sennett, Culture of New Capitalism; Klein, Naomi, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2007)Google Scholar.

100 Moreover, these contemporary transformations are enabled by the constant supply of raw materials that must be physically extracted.

101 See Immanuel Wallerstein's discussion of “unequal exchange” and “core” and “peripheral” products. Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis, 28.

102 Marx, Capital, 784–87.

103 David Harvey, “Accumulation by Dispossession,” in The New Imperialism, 137–82. Harvey updates Marx's term to “accumulation by dispossession,” precisely to describe the post-1970s world. Naomi Klein refers to similar contemporary colonialist exploitation as “disaster capitalism.” While deeply indebted to these scholars, I emphasize colonial, human, and material “extractions,” not as a stage but as an ongoing technology of accumulation. Watts, “Petro-Violence,” 202.

104 Wallerstein. Also see David Harvey's discussion of global geographies in “The Geography of It All” and “Creative Destruction on the Land,” in idem, The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 140–214.

105 Bauman, Liquid Times, 1.

106 Cross, Gary, An All-Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 20–21Google Scholar.

107 Parker, Robert Dale, The Invention of Native American Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 29Google Scholar.

108 Sundown, 248.

109 Latour, Bruno, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 75Google Scholar.

110 The Bureau of Indian Affairs, Justice Department, and local police neglected to investigate Osage murders until the 1930s. They also turned a blind eye to the speculative economic practices on the reservation as well as the abuse of the legal system of “restricting” Indians. Watts, “Petro-Violence,” 192, would call such practices “an incomplete decolonization.”

111 Nancy Lee Peluso and Michael Watts, “Violent Environments,” in Watts, Violent Environments, 3–38.

112 Bauman, Liquid Times.

113 Watts, “Petro-Violence,” 202; Wallerstein, 1–41.