MacDowell’s Vanishing Indians

Abstract: This essay examines Edward Macdowell’s borrowing of Native American music in two piano miniatures, “Indian Idyl” from New England Idyls and “From an Indian Lodge” from Woodland Sketches. The composer’s passive treatment of the Native American subject aligns with a cultural shift at the turn-of-the-century, what historians call the “vanishing Indian.” With the violent defeat of Native American resistance at Wounded Knee and the assimilation of tribes under the Dawes Act, Native Americans became reimagined as historical figures that simply “vanished” long ago, and thus became nationalist symbols for an industrializing nation. Through close analysis, this essay suggests how MacDowell’s music was part of a broader cultural embrace of the “vanishing Indian.

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