The Dead Body Politics of American Identity Formation, 1812–56

This paper excavates the cultural politics and political economy of the
“Vanishing Indian.” While much of this scholarship invariably situates
this ubiquitous 19th century American trope as a rhetorical representation, I consider the ways in which the “Vanishing Indian” was necessarily rooted in the emerging capitalist economy of the late eighteenth- to mid-nineteenth centuries. By combining cultural history, race/ethnicity, and issues of representation as categories of analysis,
this paper addresses a predicament peculiar to settler colonialism: the dilemma faced by European-Americans who attempted to make the transition from colonial to national without being indigenous. The ancient mummified remains of an early Woodland aboriginal woman disinterred in Mammoth Cave, Kentucky in 1813, are the axis around
which this paper revolves. The history of her disinterment and display
links the development of American national identity through the evolution
of yet another form of “Indian Removal,” practiced, below ground as it
were—that of early American archaeology.