October 15 - 18, 2008 

Connecting Pre-Colonial, Colonial, and Post-Colonial History in George Dorsey’s Traditions of the Caddo

Carla Gerona

Department of History, Technology, and Society

Georgia Institute of Technology

Estados Unidos

In 1903 to 1905 George Dorsey of the Carnegie Institution in Washington D.C. collected a series of Caddo Indian "tales" in order to investigate "the religious system and ceremonial organization of the tribes of the Caddoan stock." Ironically, Dorsey’s next paragraph stated that the few remaining Caddo "retain practically nothing of their ancient culture."

This paper explores the problems and possibilities of using Dorsey’s collections to better understand conditions on the Texas borderlands during the pre-colonial and colonial period. My central argument is that the accounts that Dorsey collected reflected Caddo history and memories. Such accounts were meaningful before Europeans arrived and continued to be so throughout the Spanish and Mexican colonial periods. In the nineteenth century the United States forced the Caddo out of Texas and into Indian Territory (later Oklahoma), but the accounts still had currency when Dorsey collected them, even though he thought the “tales” -- along with the Caddo people who told them -- were on their way to extinction. Some of the accounts are first origins stories, others are important character tales, and a few correlate to specific historical moments; but all are Caddo history. Whereas Dorsey hoped to fix them as timeless “myths,” Caddos had kept these memories alive in oral recitals and ritual productions.

This essay draws on such work as Peter Nabokov’s A Forest of Time: American Indian Ways of History for methodological guidance in constructing this Caddo historicity. I examine the relationship that Dorsey had with his informants, White-Bread, Wing, and Annie Wilson, among others, and attempt to uncover the ways in which they might have censored or favored certain themes. The paper then turns to a closer analysis of the actual accounts. I examine the ways in which these accounts could represent “timeless truths” and also the ways in which the stories were anchored in specific historical time, whether measured by events, places, objects, or phenomena such as patterns of subversion or resistance. I compare Dorsey’s “tales” to others collected in earlier and later periods, noting similarities and differences.

My paper concludes with the argument that a close analysis of the accounts reveals a particular preoccupation with disappearance. Out of the seventy stories that Dorsey collected, sixty-six included instances in which central characters disappeared from one place to another, either through death, relocation, transformation, or captivity. For example, in one story Braveness marries Buffalo Woman who leaves with their son -- never to return. What are we to make of such stories in post-colonial times?

The fact that disappearance was so prevalent also suggests its opposite -- perseverance. Caddo people are still drawing on their memories and making history. I’m certain that as a non-Caddo academic I may miss many of the accounts’ meanings, nonetheless, I think it is crucial to try to draw on these indigenous sources to write more inclusive histories. This paper is part of a larger project in which I look at the Texas borderlands from the perspective of all of the people that lived there -- African, Anglo, Hispanic, and Indian.

About Carla Gerona

Carla Gerona is an Assistant Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She received her Ph.D. in history from the Johns Hopkins University in 1998 and her first book is, Night Journeys: The Power of Dreams in Transatlantic Quaker Culture (University of Virginia Press, 2004). Gerona is currently working on "More than Six Flags: An Ethnohistory of an East Texas Place from the Caddos to the Texians," which is a study of the multiethnic borderland around Nacogdoches before Texas's annexation to the United States. Gerona has received numerous research awards, including a National Endowment for the Humanities

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