Decidedly, this was myth being written by the emergent mainstream culture, which was like its European counterpart historical. Because the Native American cultures did not have an indigenous written history but were nevertheless profoundly not to be ignored as a vital presence in or more exactly impinging on the mainstream culture from its margins, the mainstream's perceptions shaped the manner in which the indigenous culture was portrayed by artists and thus perceived by their audience. The profound lack of an indigenous voice can be inferred from Riley's examination (666-71) of the six-year life of the Cheroke Phoenix, an Indian-owned newspaper that was suppressed in 1834 by the Georgia legislature, some five years before the infamous Trail of Tears.
The representative artists are few, though familiar: Hawthorne, Cooper, and lesser lights in the first half of the century; Jackson, Twain, Parkman, Melville, and even lesser lights in the second half. Dissertations in recent years have focused chiefly on Indian portrayals by Jackson and Cooper. Ballard (1655-a) sees a crisis of conscience in the literary treatment of Indians by Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Melville, who to various degrees accepted the gradual displacement of Indians as perhaps regrettable but certainly necessary to the advancement of white culture in America. Thigpen (707-a) believes Cooper's positive and negative portrayals of Indians are variously romantic and unrealistic, but ultimately unreflective. Scribner
(507-a) and Mathes (241-a) each find Jackson's portrayal of Ramona striking in its realism, a departure from the minor escapist fiction owing to a personal encounter with an Indian victim of white culture, which had the effect of radicalizing her in regard to the plight of California's mission Indians and the various Plains tribes. Elsewhere, Mathes and others develop the theme of Jackson's literary and political efforts to reshape and reform federal Ind...