Playing Indian Post-Independence

This is an anonymous letter written to John Pintard, the founder of the New York chapter of the Tammany Society, a few years after the organization was established in the 1790s.

To John Pintard,

I heard you recently founded the New York Tammany society within the past few years, and membership has sharply increased since it began in 1789.  I have to wonder how and why many men find your organization very appealing, participating particularly in relation to your Indian-influenced traditions, events, and clothing.  At your annual Saint Tammany’s day celebration, I heard, “The society members walked in Indian file, wore Indian costumes, painted and smeared their faces, and carried bows, arrows, and long smoking pipes” (47).  Unlike the Red Men, your organization performs very public, political activities.  Maybe the time period in which you founded it reveals your motivation behind establishing the society and the events you hold.  Founded a little over a decade past American independence, the society may have felt politically marginalized leverage and standing among city residents during the formation of state and federal bureaucracies.  While men that “played Indian” before independence rallied for a new American nation against the English crown, your society, which is also native-influenced but founded after independence, had to find a new target to rebel against.  Like organizations pre-Independence, however, your society’s Indian urban traditions contain many of the same contradictions.  While you use the Indian identity to uplift the identity of white others, particularly the Irish, you distance yourselves from the savagery and other negative perceptions of Indians.  Exoticizing their culture, you use their identity only for the growth and develop of your own.  You should be more critical of your use of Indian dress and ask yourself why you all continue to don it.