Nancy Palm

Throughout his career, Thomas Cole frequently included representations of Indians in his landscapes, typically portraying them as marginal figures blending into the wilderness almost to the point of invisibility. I argue that this practice both naturalized the displacement of indigenous peoples and contributed to the construction of pervasive Indian stereotypes. My dissertation project comprises a reexamination of Cole’s landscapes in the context of Indian imagery, Indian policy, and attitudes concerning White-Indian relations in order to position his work within a broader cultural practice of constructing Indian identities, a process that reflected the anxieties and desires of EuroAmerican society more than it revealed an understanding of Native American cultures.

In the context of national expansion, Cole’s portrayals of ideal American scenery presented the idea of a vast and seemingly unpopulated North American continent open for geographic and economic development. However, Cole’s vehement disapproval of the spread of Jacksonian democracy complicates this aspect of his works. Targeted federal warfare against Native Americans was part and parcel of Jackson’s agenda, and continuing to examine the Indian presence in Cole’s landscapes will allow me to position Cole’s works within a larger context of how Native Americans were perceived and how their presence was visually and politically “managed” throughout the nineteenth century. While Cole has received extensive scholarly attention, as have visual representations of Native Americans, the dialogue and exchange between these two seemingly unrelated genres of American art have yet to be considered. I argue that racialized meanings in Cole’s visual representations of the landscape and its native inhabitants would have been understood implicitly in relation to contemporary concerns and assumptions about Native Americans. As the United States developed geographically and politically, stereotyped Indians continued to emerge as symbolic representations of the Native American race, and my objective is to situate Cole’s landscapes in this unsettling process.