A British Woman's Death Song re. an Indian Woman

Amos Adams

I am torn when I read Felicia Hemans' Indian Woman's Death Song.  My initial reaction to it, honestly, is to look for the generalizations.  Look for the stereotypes.  Dissect how and why a British woman felt she could write from the point of view of an "Indian."  I won't harp too long on the overt.  But the use of Indian is problematic.  Native American, better, slightly.  But the point is that colonization lumped all "Indians" into one word.  When, of course, in reality there were hundreds of tribes, hundreds of cultures, hundreds of nuances.  This may seem like a mere problem of semantics.  But the reality is, when we see this poem as "Indian Woman's Death Song,"--note the lack of the word "an" before the title--we see it not as the problem, the choice, of one woman, rather the problem, the choice, of a generalized group of women.  One woman's choice to canoe over a river with her children after being deserted by her husband can be seen as tragic.  It, like Edna in Chopin's Awakening, can be seen as an act of agency, of defiance, in a culture that tries to repress and suppress women.  But if this choice becomes a generalized norm, it no longer can be spun in this twistedly positive light.  It becomes barbaric, and barbaric becomes characteristic.

Another overt generalization:  "My warrior's eye hath looked up another's face" (20).  To assume that all native women are married to warriors is to assume that everyone in Colorado Springs is a minister.
However, now that I've gotten that out, I want to zero in a bit more on a positive aspect of this British Woman writing about this Indian Woman.  Note the italics of this: to further my attempt to avoid generalizing--for especially today, this is something we must be extra careful of.  I want to acknowledge at what shines through after getting past the generalized.  I find this poem a brilliant display of what could have been in early globalization: empathy.  This song is not a barbaric chant.  It's a lament.  One intended to make the audience sympathize with the woman singing it.

"Will he not miss the bounding step that met him from the chase?
The heart of love that made his home an ever-sunny place?
The hand that spread the hunter's board, and decked his couch of yore?
He will not! Roll, dark foaming stream, on to the better shore!" (28-31)

The assumption is that the native woman, too, lives in a patriarchal society.  Fine.  Get past that, past assumptions.  Then what we have here is a woman an ocean away, hearing a tale of another woman in distress, doing a seemingly horrific thing, and saying it's okay, I understand.  We understand.  Even what should be an even more barbaric act--the killing of the child--is spun in an empathetic light:

"And thou my babe, though born, like me, for woman's weary lot,
Smile--to that wasting of the heart, my own! I leave thee not;
Too bright a thing art thou to pine in aching love away,
Thy mother bears thee far, young fawn, from sorrow and decay" (36-39).

I'm not saying this was the right thing to do.  Absolutely not.  What I'm saying is that instead of barbarizing natives, as say James Fenimore Cooper did at times, or a Kit Carson dime novel, this passage attempts to give the woman genuine emotions.  Instead of killing her chid, she is depicted as saving her child from the pains of what it is to be a woman.