Hostname: page-component-74656f9884-npj9w Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-10T05:35:16.044Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Sundown and “Liquid Modernity” in Pawhuska, Oklahoma

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 May 2012

HANNA MUSIOL
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The early twentieth-century oil boom radically transformed the Osage reservation in Oklahoma, and in the early 1920s the Osages became the world's richest community because of their collective sharing of profits from mineral resources. In 1934, John Joseph Mathews, an Osage American tribal historian, published Sundown, his only work of fiction, a peculiar Bildungsroman about the life of Chal Windzer in the aftermath of oil discovery on the Osage reservation. I argue that Mathews's use of the novel of formation is a particularly important literary and intellectual intervention. First, at a time when the significance of material resources to the American economy and American national imaginary was growing, Mathews uses the generic convention of progress to narrate oil's social “formation,” alongside the tale of Chal's dissolution, his failure, that is, of the very development which the novel's genre implies. Second, Mathews's literary representation of the oil boom as the Great Frenzy – a period of widespread violence and cultural chaos – complicates traditional accounts of capitalist economic development, which define late-stage capitalism and its financial deregulation and IT boom as an era of radical cultural “fluidity” (Bauman, Sennett). By drawing attention to the material and social fluidity of oil culture and the force with which it affected the Osages, Sundown points to a specific Osage American colonial, and thus always already transnational, history of (petro)modernity. The character of modernity, Mathews shows us, is inextricably tied to the conditions under which human and natural resources are extracted and allowed to become “social.” The destabilization of reservation culture derives equally from oil discovery itself, and the technological transformations within the energy industry, from the colonialist conditions that impose capitalism upon the Osages, and from the very collectivist modes of wealth distribution that the Osages adopted in order to resist colonial exploitation. Thus Mathews's novel reveals an alternative genealogy of the destabilization of cultural forms to the one that begins with post-Bretton Woods global financial deregulation, the collapse of state institutions in the global North, and the late twentieth-century emergence of new communication technologies. For the Osages in the 1920s and for the characters in Sundown, crude oil and colonial exploitation, as well as, paradoxically, anticapitalist legal provisions of the Allotment Act's collectivizing of it, make reservation culture “liquid” and “uncertain” precisely at the time of America's entering into the presumably “solid” econo-political phase of development.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 2: Special Issue on Oil Cultures , May 2012 , pp. 357 - 373
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

Tell everybody, when you write your story, that they are scalping our souls out here.

John Goodskin about Osage culture in Pawhuska in 1920Footnote 1

We tend to ignore … history. We are unable to put the pieces together …

Immanuel WallersteinFootnote 2

Literary form [is] the most profoundly social aspect of literature.

Franco MorettiFootnote 3

In his work on globalization and contemporary cultural transformations, Zygmunt Bauman argues that in the “‘developed’ part of the planet,” people now live in a “liquid” phase of modernity, marked by the radical instability of cultural forms and social institutions, a reality “never before encountered.”Footnote 4 To Bauman and other scholars,Footnote 5 this era of radical “uncertainty”Footnote 6 is closely tied to transformations within labor structures and to the organization of the state in the global North, deriving in large part from the post-1970s financial deregulation and the emergence of electronic communication.Footnote 7 My project focusses on an Osage reservation in the first half of the twentieth century, where oil culture produced symptoms of “liquid modernity,” well before the invention of the Internet or the collapse of the Bretton Woods regulatory system of financial exchange. Rather than seeing these similarities as accidental, unrelated, I argue that examining petromodernity in Pawhuska can help us rematerialize, historicize, and reterritorialize accounts of cultural, material, and political instability. The very transformation of “information” into a global commodity through electronic distribution has a complicated history, which cannot be fully understood away from the developments of energy industries and the violent conditions under which raw materials are extracted from actual physical, geopolitical places rich in mineral resources.Footnote 8 Similarly, the haphazard, transnational flow of capital has a much longer history than the one that starts with the dissolution of the Bretton Woods system in the 1970s or with the advent of electronic communication. Thus I want to use the 1934 Bildungsroman Sundown, by John Joseph Mathews, a celebrated Book-of the-Month Club writer and an Osage American tribal historian,Footnote 9 to trace the “solid”-to-“liquid” narrative of global modernity along the oil flow back to the early twentieth-century Osage oil culture. The novel demonstrates that colonialist practices of “primitive accumulation,”Footnote 10 which Karl Marx envisioned as a prelude to the “solid” phase of modernity, in fact enable and often coincide with both “solid” and “liquid” manifestations of “hydrocarbon civilization.”Footnote 11 In other words, I contend that John Joseph Mathews's novel Sundown allows us to think about “solidity” and “liquidity” not as chronological stages of modernity but as its expressions, often occurring simultaneously, if in different geopolitical spaces. Moreover, in my view, contemporary “liquidity” or “uncertainty” does not, as Richard Sennett argues, “exist nowadays without any looming historical disaster,”Footnote 12 a luxurious claim to make about the 1980s or the 1990s. What his point suggests, however, is that such denying of ongoing “historical disasters” of their material reality, and deemphasizing of the connection between econo-political developments in the global North and the “liquefying” of cultures and people in (neo)colonial sites of “extraction,”Footnote 13 is instrumental to contemporary understanding of cultural “liquidity.” Mathews's work, I argue, is of particular importance because it shows how oil extraction and its violence simultaneously produce social stability in American industrial centers and a cultural fragmentation on the Osage reservation. To demonstrate my point more clearly, let me turn to the “oily” matter of Osage petromodernity as narrated in Mathews's Sundown.

The novel is a Bildungsroman about Chal Windzer, an affluent Osage American man whose life coincides with the birth of the petroleum culture on the Osage reservation in Oklahoma in the early twentieth century. Despite his wealth and multiple educational and career opportunities off the reservation, Chal passes through life unable to comprehend or to influence the rapid transformations occurring around him, or to see his place in the dangerous world of the Great Frenzy,Footnote 14 or Reign of Terror,Footnote 15 as the Roaring Twenties were called on the reservation. Chal and other mixblood and fullbloodFootnote 16 Osages struggle to “adjust”Footnote 17 themselves to the new reality of oil culture, to “civilized ways of talking and acting,”Footnote 18 but find no happiness “amid the clanking, screaming of steel, groaning bull wheels and rasping cables; amid the chuffing and coughing of operation; amid the rumbling and roaring of passing trucks.”Footnote 19

The title of the novel indicates that petroleum, which animated Henry Ford's factory culture and Pawhuska in Osage County, also effected a “sundown” for Osage traditions, for a way of life, and for the prairie, “where oil and salt water had killed every blade of grass.”Footnote 20 Oil discovery certainly made the Osage suddenly, and briefly, “the richest tribe in the world.”Footnote 21 However, the sudden overproduction of oil also had a devastating economic, environmental, and social impact on reservation culture, producing – the novel argues – the richest but also the most chaotic and bloodiest chapter in twentieth-century Osage history.Footnote 22 Nonetheless, petroleum both on and off the reservation was undeniably a “vibrant matter,”Footnote 23 crucial to the newly emerging American auto and energy industries and to national identity, and it left multiple traces, seeping into, or at times flooding, the symbolic sphere of American culture.Footnote 24 In popular and high art of the period, oil was an American emblem of the era, a key “power-thing” that made the USFootnote 25 a major technological and political power, and a symbol of national vitality. Since its force was often feared, petroleum was a leitmotif of sorts in such novels as Upton Sinclair's Oil! (1927)Footnote 26 and such studies as The United States Oil Policy (1926),Footnote 27 which offered scathing indictments of the oil industry, capitalism, and greed. Yet oil's creative power also dazzled consumers of the arts in diverse genres, media, and venues. The opulence of industrial exhibits and promotional materials at world's fairs and expositions across America were legendary, and visual and literary productions sponsored by the petroleum industry were quite common.Footnote 28 Thus, despite ideological resistance to it, oil culture was associated with intensified aesthetic experimentation across genres and media.

Sundown, however, is a conventional novel of formation set in the context of the Osage oil boom, and the novel allows us to consider the actual and very complex conditions under which petroleum culture emerged on the Osage reservation. I would argue that if we understand what forces truly destabilized Osage cultural forms and social institutions, and what made Osage modernity in Oklahoma so “fluid” and “uncertain,” we may be able to see what links Mathews's oily “liquid” times to our supposedly “immaterially”Footnote 29 “fluid” modernity.Footnote 30 Mathews shows that it is not simply the physical and social plasticity of oil alone that produces “liquid modernity” in Pawhuska.Footnote 31 Nor is the capitalist overexploitation of resources the sole culprit. Sundown emphasizes the transnational, colonial conditions of Osage oil culture, which, paradoxically, financially enriched the Osage in the early twentieth century and further upset their traditions, “deranging” their political and cultural institutions; the novel also uses the conventional Bildungsroman's development to indicate oil's flexibility and Chal's failure to “become” in such circumstances.

I. COLONIAL DESIGNS AND OSAGE PETROMODERNITY

Nothing prepared the Osage for the oil boom that made them rich.Footnote 32 The new land that the Osage moved to in the nineteenth century was not, as C. B. Glasscock put it, “worthless acreage,”Footnote 33 but it was still “a land no white man would have,”Footnote 34 and at the time of the Removal Act of 1870 “no white man” was aware that it hid mineral resources that would generate millions of dollars for the tribe. Their numbers decimated by violence, illness, and poverty, the Osage were “in danger of extinction”Footnote 35 by the time the Osage Removal Act forced them to cede their land in Kansas and move to a new location in Oklahoma (there were 12,000 Osage in 1815, but less than 3,500 by 1860Footnote 36). Later, on the new reservation, the Osage experienced federal mismanagement of their tribal fund, as well as the ongoing “civilizing” efforts of the US government.Footnote 37 Thus the oil discoveryFootnote 38 and subsequent Osage oil boom were referred to as the “most ironic practical joke ever played … upon the government and taxpayers of the United States.”Footnote 39 However, the Osages’ ability to take advantage of the oil wealth in the first place had less to do with the accidental discovery of oil on their new land than with their own efforts to negotiate a special agreement as a condition of accepting the Dawes Allotment Act, which forced most Native American tribes across the US to privatize, or “allot” to individuals, communally owned tribal lands. The Osage opposed the Act's passage, and although they were unable to exempt the tribe from allotment, their protests forestalled allotment to a time much later than that enforced on other tribes, by which point they were aware of the presence of oil on their reservation land. In 1906, in a radical legal and political maneuver, they agreed to privatize their “surface” land but not its subsurface mineral resources.Footnote 40 Thus, while ceding the communal ownership of their land, the Osage gained an “underground reservation,”Footnote 41 and the tremendous profits derived from oil were divided equally among all tribal members, or descendants of members listed on the 1906 Osage census.Footnote 42

In the post-Allotment era, there were many attempts to restrict the access of Osage to their newfound wealth. Oil companies, federal and local governments, and the widely abused reservation credit system consistently indebted and defrauded Osages.Footnote 43 The so-called guardians assigned to Osages who had been deemed legally “incompetent” took personal advantage of estates in their care, and various species of speculators, drug dealers, and other “exploiters of oil” who “had come [to the reservation] like Cortés, to get rich”Footnote 44 further profited from Osage wealth. Yet Osage oil royalties until the 1930s were immense, ranging from $10,000 to $15,000 annually per person,Footnote 45 and the communalization of mineral resources collectively pulled the entire tribe, not just the lucky few (as was the case with other American tribes), out of poverty. Osage financial independence seemed to frustrate the progressive rhetoric of America's “civilizing mission” and the widely accepted racial and cultural hierarchies that never placed Native Americans on the receiving end of capitalist or colonial largesse. Native Americans were often viewed as unfinished social subjects who needed to be “civilized” first in order to become consumers and political participant subjects, and in the oil era the public longed for the comfort of a prior “Golden Age,” a time before “Indians [rode] in limousines [and] squat[ted] in blankets among Grand Rapids furniture.”Footnote 46

II. FORM AND PROGRESS: THE MATTER OF MATHEWS’ BILDUNG

One of the most resonant and persistent questions in literary scholarship concerns the relationship between literary forms and the cultural work they perform,Footnote 47 and it is particularly important to consider the significance of Mathews's use of the conventional Bildungsroman for his only fictional work.Footnote 48 Contemporary scholars emphasize that the novel of formation centers on the processes of “individuation” but also offers models for the exploration of processes of “socialization”Footnote 49 that make people social subjects.Footnote 50 Joseph Slaughter and Marianne HirschFootnote 51 point out that the Bildungsroman's ongoing appeal transcends literary vogues precisely because the genre “has viable social work to perform” for marginalized social subjects in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, even if it had lost its “social … appeal” for “the Anglo-European white male (the ostensibly already-incorporated and capacitated citizen).”Footnote 52 That is, despite its emphasis on conventionality, progression, linearity, and the protagonist's individual or social development, the novel of formation continued to enjoy wide popularity and perhaps even gained new audiences in the early twentieth century,Footnote 53 telling stories of New Women, New Negroes, or New Americans becoming political and social subjects.Footnote 54 Moreover, indigenous American literary history itself had a rich tradition of oral and written “life histories,”Footnote 55 autobiographies or traveloguesFootnote 56 which had informed twentieth-century Bildungsromans by Native American authors. Meanwhile, I see additional reasons for the Bildungsroman's popularity in the early twentieth century. During that period, nonhuman objects of various kinds (new modern commodities, commodified natural resources such as oil, and “exotic” artifacts) began to enjoy a growing political, economic, and cultural significance.Footnote 57 Thus the popularity of the novel of formation in twentieth-century American literary culture, I argue, is also linked to the Bildungsroman's ability to articulate a growing socialization and politicization of nonhuman matter as well as the social becoming of marginalized human subjects.Footnote 58

While Mathews's earlier projects were praised as great “studies of the Indian mind,”Footnote 59Sundown was criticized for its “decidedly inarticulate quality,”Footnote 60 in its presentation of “a young Indian's attempt to adjust himself to a fundamentally alien civilization.”Footnote 61 Readers saw the protagonist's inability to express himself and to “progress” as a formal failure of Mathews's Bildungsroman. However, Mathews certainly did not employ the genre to validate the Western concept of progress. Nor did he allow his human characters to form, as “progress” for them was inseparably tied to the physical, economic, and cultural violence of colonization. Instead, he deployed this literary convention precisely to narrate the impossibility of social becoming for Osage and Osage American social subjects and to contrast it with the rapid cultural, social, and political incorporation of oil, engendered by American colonialism. Chal never “becomes” – he neither fully “Indianizes” nor “civilizes” – and his cultural duality collapses within the narrative apparatus of the genre that expects him to progress and “achieve” things.Footnote 62 Oil, on the other hand, manages to “become” different things: commodities (cars, fashion, cosmetics), “magical” gushers on the prairie,Footnote 63 environmental pollution – all things that suddenly appear on the reservation that are made, bought, or consumed by oil and oil wealth. Oil also transforms Chal and other characters in the novel, and in less than three decades changes the entire Osage community from “vanishing Indians” or “noble savages” into icons of the new wealth, who drive Cadillacs, use morphine, and spend money decadently.Footnote 64 And since the terms of Osage allotment tied Osages’ genetic and national identity to an oil entitlement, oil, in the novel, and oil ownership, literally, penetrate and fracture the identity of mixed and fullbood Osages alike.Footnote 65 In this context, Sundown is a Bildung of the “social life” of oil,Footnote 66 of its physical but also social and political force and plasticity. As such, it becomes a narrative of the Osage “queer world,”Footnote 67 as Chal calls it, of frenzied modernity, “liquid” in both the material and Baumanian senses,Footnote 68 with petroleum as its emblem, not its cause. That is, oil is the character whose Bildung reveals the “liquefying” force of colonial modernity, and the novel of formation serves as a technology to extract and contain that history. However, the novel's form also works as a terrifying “veneer”Footnote 69 that constrains and unravels, rather than develops, the life of its human protagonists: Chal, his family, and his Osage and American friends.

Sundown begins with the birth of an Osage American man whose father, John Windzer, names him Challenge in hopes that he will “challenge … the disinheritors of his people.”Footnote 70 Oil is another great hope for Chal's father, and Mathews announces its presence on the reservation in the same scene.Footnote 71 John travels to a reservation store to boast of the birth of his son, only to have his impromptu celebration interrupted by local fullbloods and mixbloods who argue that the “guv'mint” and the Reservation Oil and Gas company might try to “git a finger in” the Osage oil and “ruin the [Osage] Nation.”Footnote 72 This early passage foreshadows oil's future key role in the affairs of the tribe, the state, and the prairie. After the Allotment, John is “thrilled … in the atmosphere of growth and progress,”Footnote 73 expecting “something cataclysmic and revolutionary,”Footnote 74 some “petro-magic,”Footnote 75 to improve the lot of the Osage.

Meanwhile, on and off the Osage reservation, John's son, Chal, lives a confused existence, wandering from place to place, and finding no satisfaction in education, work, sex, or drinking. Chal drifts from one life phase to another without joy or purpose, yet his journey seems predictable and predetermined. Mathews depicts Chal's childhood on the reservation, his first encounter with Christian religion, his Americanization in a reservation school (and later at university), his tenure in the Air Force, and, finally, his return to the reservation. These conventions, categories of “being Native” and “becoming American,” were familiar “Bildungs”Footnote 76 to Native Americans across the US at the time, and it is not surprising that Chal consistently views his own development and socialization through the prism of American colonialist rhetoric. Since such rhetoric (and colonial practices of forced assimilation associated with it) literally outlined the strategies of social incorporation for Native Americans,Footnote 77 for oil-rich Chal to form as a social being means, for instance, subjecting himself to the pedagogical experiments of his reservation schoolteacher, Miss Hoover, who loves “teach[ing] little Indian minds”Footnote 78 and “see[ing] them open like flowers …”; undergoing the reeducation of “blankets,”Footnote 79 as Americans refer to Chal and his Osage friends at a university; and owning modern commodities. Oil royalties and a hefty inheritance from his father give him instant access to such “civilizing” things and activities – money, clothes, his roadster, airplanes, as well as education, golf, and sex with white women – and yet, toward the end of the novel, Chal is never really “doin’ anything”Footnote 80 apart from “slumming.” Despite following the logic of the civilizing mission – despite his American education, his World War I career as a pilot, his wealth, his sexual exploits and active social life – Chal is “growing angrier in his futility.”Footnote 81 Unable to connect to either his Osage or his non-Osage peers or to situate himself in the new reality of an oil-boom culture, he feels forever lost and incapable of the great deeds his parents expect of him. The novel concludes as Chal, after one of his long drinking binges, announces in a half-conscious state that this time he intends to go to Harvard Law School to become a “great orator.”Footnote 82 Soon after, he passes out, and Sundown ends.

Sundown describes a sunset for Chal and other Osages on the reservation, for whom material wealth, reindigenization, and assimilation all fail to fulfill the promise of meaningful cultural participation. In this sense, Mathews writes an anti-Bildungsroman. Yet, in classic Bildungsroman fashion, Mathews also shows the beginning of the many new lives of oil, and this other character (described in parallel with the story of Chal's development) seems much more vibrant and more alive. Chal's blood seems to flow much slower through his veins than the oil that is “carried out of the old reservation … through large pipelines and long trains.”Footnote 83 Its flow makes and unmakes people, brings wealth and produces the world's biggest field of derricks in the middle of the prairie. Petroleum seems to have the vitality – the force, flow, and direction – that Chal dreams of with envy yet can never achieve.

Introduced as a key character in the first chapter, oil is narrated as physical and social; it is the material mineral that comes from underground and the one protagonist that can form and become: a force that marks the symbolic horizon for reservation inhabitants; and Mathews constantly points to petroleum's intervention in the reservations’ natural and social environments. Derricks, which initially “spring up among the blackjacks,”Footnote 84 soon tower above them “like some unnatural growth,”Footnote 85 eventually redrawing the prairie's frontier with “sterile forests set against the sky.”Footnote 86 The gushers, “shoot[ing crude] high into the air,”Footnote 87 dazzle tourists and Osages alike. Oil prices, oil leases, “oil bizness”Footnote 88 are town news and soon world news as well.Footnote 89 And just as oil wells, oil ponds, and derricks transform the physical landscape, oil attracts new people to the reservation – “representatives of oil companies, geologists, lease men, and oil field employees from the ends of the earth”Footnote 90 as well as “men and women with criminal tendencies”Footnote 91 – and remakes the social landscape there. Soon, it literally “fabricates”Footnote 92 with people on the reservation, giving them names – baby Osage Oil DuBois, for instanceFootnote 93 – and new identities.

Petroleum's material fluidity and social flexibility in Mathews's novel challenge popular assumptions about the role of wealth in “white” and Native American cultures. After all, part of the ideological rationale behind the Dawes Allotment Act was that private property ownership would finally “civilize” savage Indians. Oil indeed gives the Osage access to supposedly “civilizing” commodities, and does so, ironically, by letting them skip the stage in which they were to engage in a white-man-approved type of labor – farming – to generate wealth. Yet oil wealth betrays the Osage, and Mathews narrates the socialization of oil, the new all-powerful commodity, while simultaneously showing that in the context of colonialist and capitalist exploitation – and even under the collectivist redistribution of wealth, post-Allotment – similar possibilities are unavailable to Chal. Mathews seems to argue that the Bildungsroman does not have the capacity to narrate the successful “progress” of an Osage American human subject, because prior to the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act no literary or political convention imagines an Osage American capable of becoming a “fully capacitated social subject” without sacrificing his/her Osageness.Footnote 94

Thus Sundown traces the development of oil culture but does not validate or legitimize it. Instead, it forces readers to focus on what makes oil “become” social, on the colonial “designs” of allotment that give it political and cultural power, and on what is left behind in the process – the material and human social debris that the oil flow produces, Mathews argues, and that form the new Osages and Americans of the 1910s and 1920s: the always-confused Chal, his misguided father, his fullblood mother, and his friends: peyote worshiper Sun-on-His-Wings, morphine-addicted Running Elk, as well as prostitutes, drug dealers,Footnote 95 and oilmen. The framework of the novel of formation works, then, as a narrative technology demonstrating oil's vitality rather than Chal's socialization. If anything, Mathews suggests, Sundown should make us reconsider assumptions about progress and modernity. The arbitrariness of economic and cultural development on the Osage reservation, which in the 1910s and 1920s is a space of colonial exploitation with oil at its center rather than people, reveals the terror within projects of “civilization,” of destructive but always forward-moving technological progress, and of the cultural and “material weight” of oil extraction, distribution, and transformation into commodities.Footnote 96

III. FLUIDITY, HISTORY, AND MODERNITY

By turning his attention to the way Osage oil makes cultural and economic forms fluid – by pointing to oil's own transnational flows and the conditions of oil's own transformation into new thingsFootnote 97 – Mathews complicates the easy chronology of the stages and transformations of capitalist modernity.Footnote 98 Through his attention to the fluid, to the messy matter of petroleum itself, Mathews urges us to consider a very material history of technological, economic, and political developments, one that is attentive to the oily matter of crude petroleum that enables these developments and also to the messy matter of colonial projects that accompany the physical extraction of mineral resources in Mathews's and our times.

The limitations of the global-North-, information-technology-centered history of late capitalism seem obvious if one views that history from the vantage point of 1920s Pawhuska, Oklahoma, even if these limitations seem less obvious from the perspective of the global financial capitals: New York, Zurich, London, and so on. If a convenient genealogy of capitalist development depicts the second half of the twentieth century as an Internet-assisted march toward a global econo-political and cultural chaos, a movement of undoing the social, economic, and political protections and stability of the prior era,Footnote 99 then Sundown exposes the limits of such narrow and too-linear articulations of development. While Western industrial centers may undergo a transition from “solid” to more “liquid” economies from the late twentieth century on, Western cultural and manufacturing centers are not the only sites where the drama of economic and cultural development plays out.Footnote 100 Nor are such expressions of modernity in the global North ever independent of violent mining for human and nonhuman resources in nonmetropolitan environments.

In Mathews's time, the widespread application of new forms of labor organization and control, such as Taylorism and Fordism, as well as the legal and political interventions that strengthened the power of state or federal governments, indeed produced shifts within the social structure of American society. The emergence of new masses of wage laborer–consumers produced “solidity” and certainty in cultural, social, and political forms. However, Mathews's novel dramatizes the ways in which these developments fail to produce order in all geopolitical spaces and for all social subjects at the same time; in fact, his work reveals the ways in which this solidity within “core industries”Footnote 101 and societies is not only synchronous with but also always dependent on “liquefying” cultures elsewhere. Thus the territorial and fiercely violent “extraction” of humans as well as natural resources – defined as “primitive accumulation”Footnote 102 or “accumulation by dispossession”Footnote 103 – might be best understood not as a stage that precedes or follows the consolidation of the capitalist system, but as an ongoing colonialist project upon which the economic “world-system” depends.Footnote 104

In the case of Pawhuska, the Osage experience of “liquid modernity”Footnote 105 had much to do with the place the Osage hold in the history of American colonization of the continent. Thus the chaos and frenzy of the 1920s and 1930s in Pawhuska produce solidity elsewhere; they unravel precisely at a time when white male workers in other parts of the US are disciplined by Frederic Winslow Taylor and Henry Ford. Within Taylorist ideology, workers perform their routines at Ford's conveyor belts, work a predictable number of hours, receive predictable wages, experience a modicum of stability, and thus are empowered as a class of worker–consumers.Footnote 106 In contrast, the Osages, simultaneously outside and incorporated into the national US, like residents of many colonized, semiautonomous territories then and now, never enjoy such a “solid,” predictable phase of modernity. On the Osage reservation, Taylorism, Fordism, and state-sponsored social and political architecture, whether represented by the US Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Department of the Interior, or the Osage Tribal Council, never produce order and stability.

Mathews's attention to oil and the “progress” it brings challenges the logic that places the Osage and other Native Americans in a state of “cultural [and economic] childhood.”Footnote 107 In the local, reservation world in Sundown, the “oily matter” of petroleum desynchronizes social time, showing how unevenly oil culture affects the Osage, their “Negro chauffeurs,” the “virginal” white girls who sell dope to get rich off Osage oil,Footnote 108 the Osage women, and the criminals. None of the people or the physical spaces engulfed by Osage oil's power can resist its destabilizing force, and Mathews sees these changes as yet another sign of oil-induced, violently territorial, and ultimately colonialist pandemonium. On a macroscopic scale, oil, as depicted in Sundown, is more than an “actant” or “intervener.”Footnote 109 Petroleum diffuses, linking bodies and commodities across national and racial borders in unusual configurations, and its power to radically alter Osage culture in the short span of thirty years stems from its material properties and from the emergence of technologies that discover new uses for it; from the econo-legal provision of the 1906 Allotment Act; and from federal policy designed to exploit, if not actually persecute, Native Americans.Footnote 110 Oil gains its force because colonial institutions and legal frameworks imbue it with power, and render rampant overexploitation of Osage wealth acceptable. And, as Nancy Lee Peluso and Michael Watts compellingly argue and document,Footnote 111 the same dirty oil, extracted not in the virtual space of the Internet but in specific physical locations – in Ecuador, in the Black Sea region, or in the Gulf, and often under much more exploitative conditions that the ones present on the Osage reservation – enables our own “liquid times.”Footnote 112 Thus, in Sundown, Mathews not only questions the possibility of progressive and linear articulations of Osageness or Osage Americanness in a novel of formation, but also challenges a certain kind of cultural narrative that relegates entire regions and peoples, along with their experiences of economy, culture, and politics, to the realm of historical irrelevance. Narrating America's supposedly “solid times” through the prism of colonial exploitation and the extraction of petroleum, Mathews accounts for modernity's colonial expressions, which manifest themselves differently in areas of human and raw materials “extraction” than in the globally connected “core” spaces of political and economic significance.Footnote 113

References

1 Quoted in William G. Shepherd, “Lo, the Rich Indian,” Harper's Weekly (Nov. 1920), 723–34, 734.

2 Wallerstein, Immanuel, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), ixGoogle Scholar.

3 Moretti, Franco, Graphs, Maps, and Trees: Abstract Models for Literary Analysis (London and New York: Verso, 2007), 92Google Scholar.

4 While I borrow the phrase “liquid modernity” specifically from Bauman's, ZygmuntLiquid Times: Living in the Age of Uncertainty (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 1Google Scholar, 69, 79, several other studies of late capitalism emphasize fluidity and uncertainty as key markers of post–World War II capitalism. See Sennett, Richard, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company 1998), 30Google Scholar; and idem, The Culture of New Capitalism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), which explicitly invokes Bauman's “liquid modernity” (13). Bauman's earlier project, Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), 1–33, examines the relationship between “order building” and its “waste” and “chaos” more directly.

5 Nancy Fraser, “From Discipline to Flexibilization: Reading Foucault in the Shadow of Globalization,” in idem, Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 116–30; David Harvey, “Neo-Liberalism and the Restoration of Class Power,” in idem, Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development (New York: Verso, 2006), 7–68. Harvey, however, in The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), is extremely attentive to the ways in which capitalism migrates its crises across national borders and how neoliberalism enables exploitation of environments, resources, and people.

6 Bauman, Liquid Times.

7 For Sennett, “flexible capitalism” is explicitly a late twentieth-century phenomenon (The Corrosion of Character, 9), and he does not examine in detail the “liquid” dimensions of colonial modernity that pre-date and facilitate the establishment and dissolution of the Western welfare-state model and the increased flexibility of the transnational flow of capital.

8 Imre Szeman offers a brilliant discussion of globalization as seen not only through the prism of the seemingly weightless transfer of capital and information across national borders, but also in the context of the very tangible, heavy “transfer of material weight” of oil, in Ursula Biemann and Imre Szeman, “Forced Transit: A Dialogue on Black Sea Files and Contained Mobility,” in Ursula Biemann, Imre Szeman, Angela Melitopoulos, and Maurizio Lazzarato, Political Typographies: Visual Essays on the Margins of Europe (Barcelona: Antoni Tàpies Foundation, 2007), 13–45, 35–36. For a comprehensive discussion of the violent “hydrocarbon capitalism,” and the role that abundance of nonrenewable resources plays in the projects of neocolonial economic exploitation, see Watts, Michael, Violent Environments, ed. Nancy Lee Peluso and Michael Watts (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2001), 189–212Google Scholar, 189.

9 Mathews, John Joseph, Sundown (London and New York: Longmans, Green and Co, 1934)Google Scholar. Mathews produced several documentary, nonfiction book projects, but only one novel.

10 Marx, Karl, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (New York: Modern Library, 1906), 784–87Google Scholar.

11 Michael Watts, “Petro-Violence: Community Extraction, and Political Ecology of a Mythic Commodity,” in idem, Violent Environments, 189–212, at 191.

12 Sennett, The Corrosion of Character, 31.

13 See Watts's discussion of “colonial and (precolonial) violent ‘extractions’” of humans and rubber in Ecuador. Watts, “Petro-Violence,” 202.

14 Burns, Louis F., A History of the Osage People (Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, 2004), 439Google Scholar.

15 Sundown, 266, 304.

16 Although these are obviously racist categories, I use them to refer to historical terms with legal and cultural significance, as they defined degrees of legal and cultural belonging and of Osageness.

17 Sundown, 112.

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid., 239.

20 Ibid., 250.

21 “Oil Makes Osages of Northern Oklahoma Richest Indian Community in the World,” New York Times, 21 May 1923, 1; “Auctions of Oil Land Enrich Osage the American Indians,” Los Angeles Times, 4 March 1934, 15.

22 For accounts of this gruesome period see Burns, 439–42; Logan, Lawrence J., The Osage Indian Murder Plot: The True Story of a Multiple Murder Plot to Acquire the Estates of Wealthy Osage Tribe Members (Frederick, MD: Amlex, 1998)Google Scholar. Declassified FBI files about the Osage murder cases are available at http://foia.fbi.gov/foiaindex/osageind.htm, accessed 20 April 2011. See also Michael Watts's discussion of more recent instances of “petro-violence” in Ecuador and Nigeria. Watts, “Petro-Violence,” 207.

23 Bennett, Jane, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

24 Michael Watts calls it petroleum's “mythos” (“Petro-Violence,” 191).

25 See Phil Patton's work on commodities and American national culture, Made in the USA: The Secret Histories of the Things that Made America (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1992)Google Scholar.

26 Sinclair's, UptonOil! (New York: Penguin, 2008)Google Scholar.

27 Ise's, JohnThe United States Oil Policy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1926)Google Scholar criticized the deregulation and predatory nature of oil extraction. In his view, both led to waste and overexploitation of oil resources, caused environmental damage, and lowered oil prices to below the cost of production.

28 Joseph Mathews's, John own The Osages: Children of the Middle Waters (Norman: Oklahoma University Press, 1961)Google Scholar was sponsored by his oil tycoon friends.

29 I borrow this word from Maurizio Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor,” in Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, eds., Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 133–47.

30 Bauman, Liquid Modernity; Sennett, The Corrosion of Character, 9, 46–63.

31 Bauman, Liquid Modernity.

32 Glasscock, C. B., Then Came Oil: The Story of the Last Frontier (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1938), 147Google Scholar.

33 Glasscock, 146.

34 Matthews, The Osages, 776.

35 Ibid., 335.

36 Burns, A History of the Osage People, 243.

37 The “civilization” of the Osage involved, among other things, forcing Osage men to take up farming, an occupation they viewed as unmanly; educating Osage children in reservation schools; and altering gender roles and family structures to conform to the Western model of the family unit.

38 The first commercial well appeared in 1897. Mathews, The Osages, 772.

39 Glasscock, 146.

40 Burns, 400, points out that never before “had American law allowed Indian allotment on the basis of separating the surface ownership from mineral ownership.”

41 Wilson, Terry P., The Underground Reservation: Osage Oil (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985)Google Scholar.

42 Ibid., 74–75.

43 Mathews also discusses this practice in Sundown (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984).

44 Matthews, The Osages, 776.

45 Glasscock, 147. William Shepherd, “Lo, the Rich Indian,” 724, cites the instance of an Osage woman who made nearly as much money as President Wilson in the 1920s. Surely his Harper's readers found this information shocking.

46 “Osages Before Oil,” Time, 7 Nov. 1932, n.p., available at www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,744704,00.html, accessed 20 April 2011.

47 Tompkins, Jane, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; see also Jacques Rancière, “The Politics of Literature,” trans. Julie Rose, in idem, The Politics of Literature (Malden, MA: Polity, 2011), 3–30.

48 The Bildungsroman was an unusual choice for Mathews, whose literary career began in 1932 with the nonfiction Wah'Kon-Tah: The Osage and the White Man's Road (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1981), in which he transcribed the memoirs of the Indian Agent Laban J. Miles, and ended in the 1960s with the magnum opus The Osages, a 600-page collective tribal history. Fascinated by indigenous traditions, he dedicated most of his life to preserving and reconstructing what he considered vanishing Native American lore. He documented indigenous oral and visual culture in his tribal history, helped found the Osage Museum – the first tribally owned museum in the country – and received two Guggenheim fellowships to research First Nations’ cultures in Mexico in 1939 and 1940. For a discussion of Mathews's early work see Kalter, Susan, “John Joseph Mathews’ Reverse Ethnography: The Literary Dimensions of Wah'kon-Tah,” Studies in American Indian Literatures, 14, 1 (2002), 26–50Google Scholar. For Mathews about his return to the Osage reservation see Logsdon, Guy, “John Joseph Mathews: A Conversation,” Nimrod, 16, 2 (1972), 70–89Google Scholar.

49 Slaughter, Joseph R., Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

50 In Sennett's view, people see “life as narratives … of not so much what will happen as of how but how things should happen,” in Sennett, Culture of New Capitalism, 25.

51 Slaughter, 27; Hirsch, Marianne, “The Novel of Formation as Genre: Between Great Expectations and Great Illusions,” Genre, 12, 3 (1979), 293–311Google Scholar.

52 Slaughter, 27.

53 It is impossible to imagine the great commercial success of national literary magazines such as Cosmopolitan or McClure's, without their serialized Bildungsromans.

54 Note that Mathews is part of a larger twentieth-century literary tradition of “life” writing. See, for example, Johnson, James Weldon, The Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man (New York: Sheldon, French, and Company, 1912)Google Scholar; Yezierska, Anzia, Bread Givers (New York: Persea Books, 2003; first published 1925)Google Scholar; Dove, Mourning, Cogewea, the Half Blood: A Depiction of the Great Montana Cattle Range (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981Google Scholar; first published 1927).

55 Brown Ruoff, A. LaVonne, American Indian Literatures: An Introduction, Bibliographic Review, and Selected Bibliography (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1990), 52Google Scholar.

56 Ibid., 4–75; Warrior, Robert Allen, The People and the Word: Reading Native Nonfiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

57 Patton, Made in the USA; for a discussion of “things” and their political power see Bruno Latour, “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik: Or How to Make Things Public,” in Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds., Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 4–31.

58 Sundown is not an exception here. Many early twentieth-century Bildungsromans centered on the unsuccessful individuation and socialization of human persons and the socialization of modern things. For example, consider the contrast between the difficult lives of female protagonists and the vibrant lives of artifacts in Nella Larsen's Quicksand, ed. Thadious M. Davis (New York: Penguin Books, 2002; first published 1928); and between Delilah and her famous pancake mix in Fannie Hurst's Imitation of Life (New York: P. F. Collier, 1933).

59 Eda Lou Walton, “The Osage Indians,” The Nation, 8 Jan. 1933, 156. Interestingly, although national presses consistently emphasized Mathews's Indianness, Mathews was only part Osage. During the era of intertribal conflicts between fullbloods supporting collectivization of resources and mixbloods favoring assimilation into the US national culture and privatization of land, an Osage American mixblood, educated in the US and Europe, would often be treated with suspicion by tribal elders and feel alienated from traditional Osage culture. In short, white readers would describe Mathews's identity as Osage, following the one-drop rule of racial identity; for Osages, and for Mathews specifically, one's “Indian” identity did not depend simply on one's genetic traits but was defined in complex ways, as a matter of heredity, kinship, or cultural identification, or in relation to one's views concerning tribal property rights. For a discussion of Mathews's and the novel's protagonist's cultural identity read Carol Hunter's “The Protagonist and a Mixed-Blood in John Joseph Mathews’ Novel: Sundown,” American Indian Quarterly, 6, 3–4 (1982), 319–37; also, see her discussion of the schism between “bourgeois” mixbloods and fullbloods living in traditional camps in “The Historical Context in John Joseph Mathews's Sundown,” MELUS, 9, 1 (Spring 1982), 61–72, 65.

60 “An Educated Indian,” York Times Book Review, 25 Nov. 1934, 19–20, 20.

61 Ibid.

62 For a different interpretation of Chal's alienation as modernist posturing see Christopher Schedler's “John Joseph Mathews: Tribal Modernism,” in idem, Border Modernism: Intercultural Readings in American Literary Modernism (New York: Routledge, 2002), 41–52.

63 Sundown, 73.

64 Articles in national publications aimed to shock readers with descriptions of Osages’ outrageous purchases. What Watts, “Petro-Violence,” 205, 193, calls “petro-magic,” or “wealth without effort,” was not expected to materialize on an Indian reservation. Whereas it was good style for white Americans to overspend and overconsume, an Osage “pay[ing] $2000 for Clock to Chime His Reservation Tepee” was a national scandal. “Osage Indians Face Depletion of Oil Incomes,” Christian Science Monitor, 2 Nov. 1929, 1.

65 Mathews often mentions “a strange chemical running through [various characters’] veins,” and it is unclear if he means whiskey, morphine, or oil. Sundown, 14.

66 Appadurai, Arjun, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

67 Sundown, 20.

68 Bauman, Liquid Times.

69 Ibid., 13, 14.

70 Ibid., 4.

71 Ibid., 6–8.

72 Ibid., 8.

73 Ibid., 49.

74 Ibid.

75 Watts, “Petro-Violence,” 205.

76 I use the term after Sennett, Culture of New Capitalism, 89, as a “convention of life.”

77 Sundown was written before the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act reversed, or at least ameliorated the impact of, federal policies of forced assimilation and privatization of Native American lands.

78 Sundown, 26.

79 Ibid., 110.

80 Ibid., 241.

81 Ibid., 310.

82 Ibid., 311.

83 Ibid., 241. See also Michael Watts's reflection on how such “liquid mobility” of oil simultaneously signals abundance and vitality as well as “evacuative despoliation” and “environmental threat.” Watts, “Petro-Violence,” 205.

84 Ibid., 78. Mathews calls the region the “blackjacks” because of its blackjack oaks.

85 Ibid., 62.

86 Ibid., 239.

87 Ibid., 3–74.

88 Ibid., 183.

89 Ibid., 239.

90 Ibid., 77.

91 Ibid.

92 Pottage, Alain and Mundy, Martha, eds., Law, Anthropology, and the Constitution of the Social: Making Persons and Things (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

93 Sundown, 86.

94 Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc., 27.

95 The use of morphine and marihuana in addition to whiskey was widespread on the reservation. Wilson, The Underground Reservation, 156. Shepherd mentions “mescal” – by which he most likely means peyote – and alludes to heroin use. Mathews often references ceremonial peyote use in Sundown (83, 162, 184, 277).

96 Biemann and Szeman, “Forced Transit,” 36.

97 Oil is fluid and transnational matter; it is extracted on the Osage reservation by transnational corporations, and the oil-rich land is at once American and Osage and, before the Removal Act, had belonged to different Native American nations. Yet oil also “produces a state” and valorizes its power. Watts, “Petro-Violence,” 204.

98 See Jameson, Fredric, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003; first published 1991), 1–66Google Scholar.

99 Bauman, Liquid Times; Sennett, Culture of New Capitalism; Klein, Naomi, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2007)Google Scholar.

100 Moreover, these contemporary transformations are enabled by the constant supply of raw materials that must be physically extracted.

101 See Immanuel Wallerstein's discussion of “unequal exchange” and “core” and “peripheral” products. Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis, 28.

102 Marx, Capital, 784–87.

103 David Harvey, “Accumulation by Dispossession,” in The New Imperialism, 137–82. Harvey updates Marx's term to “accumulation by dispossession,” precisely to describe the post-1970s world. Naomi Klein refers to similar contemporary colonialist exploitation as “disaster capitalism.” While deeply indebted to these scholars, I emphasize colonial, human, and material “extractions,” not as a stage but as an ongoing technology of accumulation. Watts, “Petro-Violence,” 202.

104 Wallerstein. Also see David Harvey's discussion of global geographies in “The Geography of It All” and “Creative Destruction on the Land,” in idem, The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 140–214.

105 Bauman, Liquid Times, 1.

106 Cross, Gary, An All-Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 20–21Google Scholar.

107 Parker, Robert Dale, The Invention of Native American Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 29Google Scholar.

108 Sundown, 248.

109 Latour, Bruno, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 75Google Scholar.

110 The Bureau of Indian Affairs, Justice Department, and local police neglected to investigate Osage murders until the 1930s. They also turned a blind eye to the speculative economic practices on the reservation as well as the abuse of the legal system of “restricting” Indians. Watts, “Petro-Violence,” 192, would call such practices “an incomplete decolonization.”

111 Nancy Lee Peluso and Michael Watts, “Violent Environments,” in Watts, Violent Environments, 3–38.

112 Bauman, Liquid Times.

113 Watts, “Petro-Violence,” 202; Wallerstein, 1–41.