Nation of Mechanics: Animality and Indigeneity in American Automotive Culture (NOMECH)

Daniel Joe Bowman

Associate Professor

Faculty of Arts and Education
Department of Cultural Studies and Languages

The NOMECH project examines fiction by Indigenous American authors of the late twentieth century for literary representations of animals, automobiles, and the natural environment.

NOMECH develops a novel approach to reading the road journey in American fiction (a genre which has historically excluded Indigenous writers) by centring Indigenous stories in which the environment is frequently presented as a character in and of itself, in contrast to the colonial tendency to personify the cars and ignore the living nonhuman world under the wheels.

Combining approaches from literary studies and the environmental humanities, NOMECH explores the extent to which Indigenous American authors present counter-narratives to the colonial story of automobility in which human contact with the natural environment is defined by driving over it: moving from a relationship based on dominance, conquest, and subjugation to one which places more emphasis on mutually beneficial ways of living with other animals and technology.

Indigenous Automobility Exhibition at Amherst College

Summer Bridge Research Institute: “Inequality in Native American Representation”

Dates: 16-20 June 2025

Locations: Amherst College, Robert Frost Library, KWEC

Amherst College’s Robert Frost Library is home to the Kim-Wait/Eisenberg Collection of Native American Literature, an archive of over 3000 Native-authored books and periodicals. As part of the Summer Bridge Research Institute summer school, first-generation or low-income students are given the chance to explore the college’s research facilities, with the aim of inspiring and equipping them with skills and experiences concerning research so that they might pursue it later on in their college career. This year’s summer school on the theme of “Inequality in Native American Representation” worked with Native collections, scholars, and archivists at Amherst College to expose these students to Indigenous texts and think about how these relate to questions of representation and research concerning Native American and Indigenous studies and inequality.

The NOMECH Project made three key contributions to the summer school:

Firstly, NOMECH facilitated a special guest speaker for the students: the writer, educator, and Indigenous comic book store owner “Dr Indiginerd” Lee Francis IV (Laguna Pueblo). Dr Francis spoke about the history, challenges and accomplishments of Red Planet books, his award-winning comic book store in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which focused on spotlighting comics written by and featuring Indigenous peoples (operating under the name A Tribe Called Geek since January 2025). The students got the chance to ask Lee Francis directly about his experiences of Native American (mis)representation (or missing representation) in comic books and popular media more broadly. Dr Francis not only opened their eyes to the taken-for-granted stereotyping of Indigenous peoples in predominantly settler-dominated media forms, but also pointed them in the direction of KWEC’s extensive archive of Indigenous comic books in which the Native characters are not relegated to savages or sidekicks.

Secondly, using works found during research trips to the KWEC archives, Daniel Bowman curated an exhibition in the Robert Frost Library on Indigenous American automobility. Telling stories of Indigenous writers and motorists from the 1910s to the 2020s in four items (two historical newspapers and two novels), the prominently displayed exhibition brings the aims of NOMECH to the wider college audience, and showcases one of the many stories to be found within the largest archive of Indigenous literature in the world. The exhibit texts are reprinted alongside the images below, and you can read more about the exhibit texts on the Amherst College Special Collections Blog.

American car culture, particularly in the latter half of the twentieth century, has disavowed the material ecological costs of automobility through symbolic recreations of animal species and Indigenous peoples in car advertising and branding. The Chevrolet Apaches, Jeep Cherokees, and Winnebagos, as well as the Colts, Mustangs, Impalas, Pintos, and Pandas, to name but a few of the automotive menagerie, tie both animals and Indigenous peoples to automobiles.
Using literary fiction and periodicals found in the Special Collections at Amherst College, we can see not only the presence of Indigenous peoples in the driving seat, but also the lingering equine metaphors that have become so ubiquitous in car culture that we rarely notice them: the Cheyenne in a Cheyenne, the horse in horsepower.

Finally, Daniel Bowman ran a workshop at the summer school with the aim of demystifying the archives, explaining to the students every step from discovering the archive, planning a visit, coping with large amounts of reading, to ultimately producing the exhibition which they could all view in the library. The students learned about the importance of asking questions, drawing on the expertise of archivists, and why doing this kind of original research matters when it comes to writing about Indigenous histories.

Related Publications

Bowman, Daniel (2024) Nation of Mechanics: Automobility, Animality, and Indigeneity in John Joseph Mathews's Sundown (1934). European Journal of American Studies. ISSN 1991-9336. 19.1. DOI: 10.4000/ejas.21304

This study demonstrates how John Joseph Mathews’s novel Sundown (1934)complicates the stereotype of Indigenous technological ineptitude by presenting Indigenous ownership and operation of automobiles following the Osage Oil Boom.Drawing on a range of literary historical sources such as Horseless Age, Mathews’s ecological writing, and traditional stories of the Osage, my reading of Sundown examines the inherent difficulties in separating the symbolism of the automobile from its material ecological consequences. In much the same way that animal symbols are co-opted in automotive branding, Indigenous identities are exploited in car culture to conjure up a nostalgic past in which the ecological and colonial violence of American Modernity is conveniently forgotten. I argue that Mathews’s Osage characters find themselves in a double-bind as they seek to refute stereotypes of technological primitivism whilst still maintaining and respecting Indigenous connections to the natural world.

Bowman, Daniel (2024) Cars, Cans, and Crying Indians: Automobility, Littering, and Indigeneity in 1970s US Environmental Literature. ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. ISSN 1076-0962. DOI: 10.1093/isle/isae046

This study examines representations of automobility and littering in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977) and Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975) within the context of the “Crying Indian” PSA, demonstrating how settler environmentalism risks reenforcing stereotypes that oversimplify Indigenous relationships with land. I argue that through scenes of driving and littering, settler and Indigenous conceptions of land are revealed: as something that belongs to people in a colonial sense, and as something people belong with in Grounded Normativity. Native relationships with land emerge as counterpoints to the “Ecological Indian” stereotype and to colonial notions of land ownership.