The American Indian Poet of the First World War: Modernism and the Indian Identity of Frank 'Toronto' Prewett 1892-1962

My research on The American Indian Poet of the First World War uses as yet untapped archival resources in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom to provide access to the premier Native American Indian literary figure of the early twentieth century. It allows us to explore for the first time his friendships with some of the most famous names in British literature since Frank 'Toronto' Prewett, 1893-1962, had an exceptional and in many ways glittering life. Known as an Iroquois Indian from the North-Eastern United States, his experience of war brought him into close association with the British literary elite. His archives, recently acquired by an institution in Ottawa, reveal that he was published by Virginia Woolf, was the lover of Seigfreid Sassoon and that he had close friendships with both Robert Graves and with the doyenne of Bloomsbury, the rich and exceptional 'daughter of a thousand earls' Lady Ottoline Morrell. This research also reveals his friendships with Leonard Woolf, W.B. Yeats, Thomas Hardy, Wilfred Owen, Edmund Blunden, T.E. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, Mark Gertler, S.S. Koteliansky and Dorothy Brett.

This research not only unearths Prewett's centrality to the literary vanguard of the time, it also more generally explores the relationship of Native American Indian identity to modernist sensibility or sensibilities. It asks how Prewett was able to tap into an antimodern impulse that, strange as it may seem, ultimately acted in unison with the concerns of the modern, dominant, bureaucratic corporate state. The American Indian Poet of the First World War presented himself as an antidote to the spiritual homelessness and 'unreality' of the times and as such offered the kind of psychological self-sufficiency the élite associated with aboriginals. It was a brand of psychological calm which in the aftermath of a crushingly brutal war, they found they profoundly needed access to themselves.

The project takes archival research gleaned from ten sites and uses it to attempt to re-focus modern Native literary scholarship and to explore fresh perspectives on how writers such as Philip Deloria, Marianna Torgovnick, Charles Taylor and Daniel Howe contextualised both the American self and Indian identity. It also brings primitivism to the centre of a number of disciplinary debates on war and modernism. Prewett is compared with the period's other famous inauthentic or 'white Indian' veterans and his harrowing experiences within the Royal Artillery and Royal Welsh Fusiliers contrasted with actual Indian war experiences presented by historians such as Russel Barsh and Tom Holm. Prewett's 'Indian' war correspondence is further contrasted with how historians on both sides of the Atlantic (Strachan, Keegan, Ferguson, Tuchman, Fischer and Bond) contextualized the First World War with particular emphasis given to Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory in contrast with Jonathan F. Vance's Death So Noble.

Along with so many of his generation, Prewett suffered from depression or neuresthenia and this project questions whether this can be seen as part of the psychic crisis or 'therapeutic world view' that came to characterise the times. Investigation of archives held at Oxford and Cambridge archives in this regard allow us to explore the relationship between Prewett and the eminent anthropologist and institutional founder of the psychological discipline Dr W. H. R. Rivers. Rivers profoundly influenced the relationships to war of Sassoon, Owen and Graves and thsi research suggests that his engagement with Prewett marked a turning point for modernism within psychology.

Overall, this research seeks to make a series of conceptual arguments about Native American identity on both sides of the Atlantic during the First World war and its aftermath by bringing a wholly new set of archival sources into scholarly view.

It is intended that this research will have multiple impact across the three countries concerned, within the museum context, within specific Native American Indian communities and across and within a number of academic disciplines as discussed in the previous section. Perhaps the primary immediate impact will be upon the Frank Prewett Correspondence held by The Literary Archives at Ottawa. They will be delighted to see their new archival resource showcased within a volume published by a premier North American press. Not only will the resource gain essential exposure, it will do so within a monograph that speaks to themes, issues and complexities that transcend the specific history of the personality whose papers have been so carefully sourced, catalogued and archived. The link forged between UK scholarship and Canadian institutions concerned with First Nations history such as this is likely in itself to have specific value and to act as a springboard for further international research.

It is intended that this research will also greatly benefit New York State's premier Native American Indian owned museum, the Six Nations Indian Museum at Onchiota, New York. Run by the Iroquois artist and scholar John Fadden, the Museum is keen to organise an exhibit about Prewett to coincide with this research bringing his story to a wider audience through publication of the proposed monograph. I have a long-standing and positive relationship both with the Museum and its Director, having donated to the Museum a set of Indian archives once donated to me by Indian families so that I might write a previous book, To Be Indian, published in 2001 by The University of Oklahoma Press. Other Indian Museums in the Northeastern United States have also expressed an interest in mounting exhibits based upon this research including The Iroquois Indian Museum at Howe's Cave, New York and the Rochester Museum and Science Centre, Rochester New York. This last museum was run in the early decades of the twentieth century by another famous Seneca- Iroquois intellectual Arthur C. Parker. Another museum which has expressed interest in the potential of including this research within a wider exhibit on twentieth century Indian leaders is the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington. D.C.

Aside from its appeal to American museums, particularly those in the Northeastern United States, this research will be of significance to Iroquois Indian communities within the region. In particular, to communities connected with Prewett and his family at Tonawanda, New York and Tuscarora, New York. Amongst Native communities surviving in spite of some of the highest poverty levels in the nation, the work of reclaiming important Indian figures from the past has an immediate and powerful significance. The Indian contribution war, especially the First World War remains an under-researched area and the dissemination of research on Prewett will go some way towards rectifying this.

The University of Toronto Press have advised me that the proposed monograph is likely to sell well and to find a receptive audience within North American libraries generally. I also intend to write a journal article on an analogous theme using this research and to speak on this research within all the usual academic contexts as well as within a number of public forii, including local history groups, fraternal organisations and school and college history and literary groups. This research will also be disseminated within a series of academic networks including the Native Studies Network run out of the University of East Anglia and the British Association of Canadian Studies Aboriginal Studies Circle.