Transmotion Vol 1, No 1 (2015)
Clements,William B. Imagining
Geronimo: An Apache Icon in Popular Culture. Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press, 2013. 305 pp.
http://unmpress.com/books.php?ID=20000000005364&Page=book
From the time that he
first emerged as a figure of interest in news reports emanating from the
southwest in the 1870s, the Apache shaman and war leader Geronimo has endured
as a recurrent, and ambivalent image of "Indianness" in American popular
culture. This, essentially, is the thesis of William Clements' copiously
researched new volume. Over the course of seven chapters, Clements surveys
Geronimo's presence in newspapers, folklore, film, literature, photography, and
public appearances. Largely refraining from in-depth analysis of his examples,
Clements instead aims to provide readers with a useful and provocative archive
of material from which to draw for further study. Readers in Native American
Studies will be particularly interested in his discussion of how Geronimo
attempted (with mixed results) to exert some control over his image during his
own lifetime. And readers with a particular interest in Gerald Vizenor's work
will find a variety of provocative examples of Geronimo's "postindian" presence,
examples sure to reward further consideration.
Clements begins his book
with a discussion of the contemporaneous newspaper coverage of Geronimo's
exploits, his eventual capture by the U.S. military, and his relocation to
Florida and Oklahoma, where he would live out his days in exile from his
Arizona homeland. Not surprisingly, this survey reveals that the majority of
the early accounts of Geronimo tended to depict him as an archetypal savage, or
"red devil," with only a handful of instances where his later image as a freedom
fighter and patriot began to emerge. Suggestive of the complex role that the
colonial construct of Indian "savagism" plays in American history, though,
Clements also draws attention to the emergence of a genre of "Geronimo stories"
in the oral culture and folkways of the American Southwest. Anglo setters, in
particular, employed both the spectral figure of Geronimo and a range of
tall-tales regarding their encounters, or near-encounters, with him, as a means
of legitimizing their presence in this newly tamed "frontier." This corpus of
Geronimo stories identified by Clements thus comes across as one rich with
potential for further analysis. This type of material clearly cries out to be
situated within the framework of recent revisionist paradigms in western
history.
The best-developed
section of the book is Clements' discussion of Geronimo's agency vis-a-vis his own
image. He takes up this topic in a long chapter dealing with Geronimo's
presence at three World's Fairs between 1895 and 1904 and his participation in
Theodore Roosevelt's inauguration in 1905. Clements here makes good use of key
concepts in post-colonial theory (such as Spivak's notion of the subaltern) as
well as James Clifford's important interventions into our understanding of
ethnography and museum studies to provide a historically grounded and persuasive
account of semiotic struggle. The battle over Geronimo's image (waged between
Geronimo himself and a wide-range of American actors with their own economic
and ideological motives) emerges here as an emblematic story whose implications
extend well beyond its turn-of-the century context. Clements is not always as
successful in making these broader connections; his linkage of Geronimo's
reported conversion to Christianity to the literature surrounding Black Elk in
a subsequent chapter is thin, by comparison. But the gestures that he makes
along these lines are always welcome ones, as they offer still further evidence
of the symbolic potency surrounding Geronimo as an "icon."
Clements' discussion of
photographic representations of Geronimo's is both particularly stimulating and
representative of the way that his book draws attention to an archive in need
of further analysis. He grounds his discussion of the photographs with a brief
nod to the philosophical distinction between idea (here understood as an image
that becomes emblematic or representative) and event (here understood as an
image where the subject retains its individuality). The resulting insight that
Geronimo's image functions as both
image and event is a provocative one. For many American viewers, in his time in
particular, Geronimo has provided the "face to savagism" (155). His intense
stare, never-smiling face, and willingness to pose well-armed are well-known
features in his photographic portfolio. Interestingly enough, this side of
Geronimo has also been repurposed in recent years; one of the most famous
photographs depicting him along with three other armed Apache men now
symbolizes pan-Indian patriotism in a poster bearing the label "Homeland
Security: Fighting Terrorism Since 1492."
At the same time, as Clements notes, Geronimo's face remains one of the most
distinctive and inimitable images in American culture. It is suggestive, in
this regard, that in presenting Geronimo as one of the emblematic "vanishing
Indians," Edward Curtis was forced to render him in profile, thus blunting much
of the effect of his visual distinctiveness. Clements concludes his discussion
of Geronimo in the photographic record by loosely invoking Vizenor's notion of
trickster discourse. While he does not pursue this insight with any
specificity, it seems clear that much could be achieved in applying Vizenorian
critical concepts to these powerful images. Minimally, the photographed Geronimo
(viewed as idea/event) represents an intriguing example of visual irony.
It should be noted that,
because of the nature of Clements' project, there is a certain amount of
unavoidable unevenness in Imagining
Geronimo. For example, the long chapter on literature reveals, first, that
Geronimo is often only invoked in the title of works in which he makes no
actual appearance and, second, that when he does play a larger role he is
usually "flat and undeveloped" (192). With little interpretive interest
inherent in the material, then, Clements discussion of the "literary Geronimo"
seldom rises above the level of listing and describing sources. The concluding
chapter's discussion of Geronimo's presence in film, on the other hand,
provides evidence to support Clements' central claim about the fluidity of his
image. Nevertheless, this chapter is surprisingly short (about one third of the
length of the literature chapter) and undeveloped. Contrasting the earlier
chapter on the World's Fairs with the chapter on film is suggestive, in this
respect, for in the former Clements' efforts to thicken the historical and
critical context yields a much more complex survey of the archive itself. One
imagines he could have done some of the same in his treatment of film.
There are moments in Imagining
Geronimo where the reader is confronted with an impressive collection of
material that cries out for a theory with which to approach it. To be sure,
Clements' book does achieve what it set out to do; it provides readers with a
comprehensive overview of Geronimo's appearances in popular culture that avoids
the suggestion of a "simplistic developmental contour" that Clements finds in
the work of earlier scholars (4). Where this book really shines, though, is in
those moments when it moves beyond being a largely bibliographical study toward
becoming a full-fledged analysis. It does so often enough to suggest some of
the ways that future scholars will be able to build on the foundations Clements
has established.