The leaders of anticolonial wars of resistance--Metacom, Pontiac,
Tecumseh, and Cuauhtemoc--spread fear across the frontiers of North
America. Yet once defeated, these men became iconic martyrs for
postcolonial national identity in Canada, the United States, and
Mexico. By the early 1800s a craze arose for Indian tragedy on the
U.S. stage, such as John Augustus Stone's
Metamora, and for
Indian biographies as national historiography, such as the writings
of Benjamin Drake, Francis Parkman, and William Apess.
With chapters on seven major resistance struggles, including the
Pueblo Revolt of 1680 and the Natchez Massacre of 1729,
The
Indian Chief as Tragic Hero offers an analysis of not only the
tragedies and epics written about these leaders, but also their own
speeches and strategies, as recorded in archival sources and
narratives by adversaries including Hernan Cortes, Antoine-Simon Le
Page du Pratz, Joseph Doddridge, Robert Rogers, and William Henry
Harrison.
Sayre concludes that these tragedies and epics about Native
resistance laid the foundation for revolutionary culture and
historiography in the three modern nations of North America, and
that, at odds with the trope of the complaisant "vanishing Indian,"
these leaders presented colonizers with a cathartic reproof of past
injustices.