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Saving Saukenuk: How Black Hawk Won the War and Opened the Way to Ethnic Semiotics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

William Boelhower
William Boelhower
Affiliation:
William Boelhower is Associate Professor of American Studies in the Faculty of Letters, University of Trieste, Via Lazzaretto Vecchio, Trieste, Italy.
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Extract

If you went looking for traces of the Sauk village where Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak (or Black Sparrow Hawk) was born and which, in his refusal to give it up, became the ultimate cause of the Black Hawk War in 1832 – the last Indian war east of the Mississippi – you would not find much: a few smart allusions to the great Sauk warrior on storefront signs and other such promotion gestures over on Rock Island, Iowa, but no archeological evidence at the juncture of the Rock and Mississippi rivers to suggest that the village ever existed. And yet, according to Cecil Eby, by 1790 Saukenuk was “the most imposing town in the Northwest, Indian or white, with more than 100 wickeups (many extending 60 feet in length) and from April to October inhabited by some 3,000 Sauk.” There are, however, scattered verbal signs that might draw the archeologist or historian back and forth over other tableaux of potential Sauk geography, like Sac City in Sac County, Iowa, and Black Hawk County due West of Dubuque. Then there is Prairie du Sac and Sauk City on the Wisconsin River, Wisconsin, two historically vibrant sites which novelist August Derleth turned to good use in his saga of Wisconsin. But when it comes to dealing with a defeated people who also happen to belong to the red race, the names themselves often become signs of cultural obscurantism, if not commemorative oblivion. In list form the available nomenclature amuses: Sacs, Saukies (which the Indians themselves used), Sockeys, Socks, Sacques, Saucs, Sakis. This embarrassing take-your-pick liberality clearly enough sets forth a problem of transliteration; it also evokes the more complex issue of cultural translation tout court: us/them, inside/outside, center/periphery, hegemonic culture/minority culture, structure/chaos.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 25 , Issue 3 , December 1991 , pp. 333 - 361
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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References

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17 For the notion of semiosphere I am indebted to Lotman, Jurij M., La semiosfera, ed. Salvestroni, Simonetta (Venice: Marsilio, 1985), 59–110Google Scholar. For Lotman, , “The semiosphere is that semiotic space outside of which semiosis cannot exist” (58)Google Scholar. For my attempt to use this notion cartographically, see my essays “Inventing America: Towards a Model of Cartographic Semiosis,” Word & Image, (04 1988), 475–97Google Scholar; “Nation-Building and Ethnogenesis, The Map as Witness and Maker,” in The Early Republic: The Making of a Nation, The Making of a Culture, ed. Ickringill, Steve (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1988), 108–31.Google Scholar

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26 Ibid.

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