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

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.

The Word Carrier was the official newspaper of the Santee Normal Training School in Santee, Nebraska. Opened in 1870 by the Reverend Alfred L. Riggs, the aim of the school was to provide education and training to the Santee Sioux who had been forcibly removed from their ancestral homeland in Minnesota in 1962. While many students at the school went on to become Christian ministers, engineers, teachers, blacksmiths and, in some cases, automobile mechanics, the school’s mission reflected the broader context of forced assimilation and suppression of Indigenous American cultures.

In the context of Indigenous automobility, The Word Carrier also represents an important historical record of Santee students’ engagement with early car culture. The pages visible in this exhibit show two road trips between Nebraska and Massachusetts in a second-hand Ford truck by Mr Gordon Hurd (a missionary and former pupil of the school) along with his family and dog, the first in 1921 and the return trip in 1924. This road trip diary reveals a number of things: Firstly, we can see how environmental the experience of rural driving was in the 1920s. The party are continually at the mercy of the elements, and excellent mechanical knowledge is essential as breakdowns were very common. Secondly, we learn in the final instalment that Mr Hurd has 14 years’ experience in driving cars and motorcycles, meaning that, contrary to automotive advertising of the period, Indigenous peoples were not just part of the scenery to be reached by white automobile touring parties. Note that he is called a “crazy Indian” by other drivers he encounters:

“I have had my first accident of my 14 years’ experience in driving all kinds of cars and motorcycles. […] As soon as I could bring my crippled machine to a stop I got out and entered a veritable uproar of men and women who shouted and gesticulated till I finally got it into my head that I was a crazy Indian (I knew better than that from experience,) I ought to be beaten up and jailed and whatnot” (16).

The Word Carrier, Vol. 53, No. 4 (1924)

Akwesasne Notes was a newspaper founded in 1969 by Ernest Benedict of the Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne. It became the largest and most influential Indigenous American newspaper in the country, covering pan-tribal issues and challenging colonial injustices. One regular feature in the 1970s issues was a section sharing instances of racism, usually in the form of corporate misappropriation of Indigenous identities. Following the release of the Chevrolet Cheyenne pickup truck in 1971, we can see a response highlighting the damage that such appropriation can cause (bottom of displayed page):

“Whites don’t understand the sense of being co-opted, of having their name attached to alien places and things. […] There are a Cheyenne assault helicopter, a Cheyenne Mountain Air Defence center, a Cheyenne pick-up truck […] all named for the Cheyenne, who suffered the worst genocide of any tribe on the Plains” (14).

Akwesasne Notes, Vol. 4, No. 2 (March 1972).

These instances of car companies using the names of Indigenous nations in their branding were particularly prevalent in the 1970s, and were reflected in road fiction by authors such as David Seals. His 1979-novel The Powwow Highway makes explicit reference to such cultural appropriation (note also the equine reference to pintos):

“He did take courage from the many, many remnants of his culture still visible: there was the Comanche Lounge, the Navajo Trucking Company, Kiowa and Seminole and Bannoch and Huron streets. He took hope from the Jeep Cherokees passing him (whooping madly!), the Ford Pintos (whinnying furiously!), the Chevrolet Cheyenne pickups (“run down them slowpokes!”).”

David Seals, The Powwow Highway (163).

The novel There There (2018) by Tommy Orange (Cheyenne and Arapaho) demonstrates that, despite the infrastructural and cultural violence that American automotive culture has caused to Indigenous peoples, the car and the road trip nevertheless play a crucial role in maintaining inter-tribal connections and continuing Indigenous stories:

“For powwows we come from all over the country. From the reservations and cities, from rancherias, forts, pueblos, lagoons, and off-reservation land trusts. […] To get to powwows we drive alone and in pairs on road trips; we caravan as families, piled in station wagons, vans, and in the backs of Ford Broncos. […] We lie, cheat, and steal our stories, sweat and bleed them out along the highway, until that long white line makes us quiet, makes us pull over to sleep. When we get tired we stop at motels and hotels; we sleep in our cars by the side of the road, at rest stops and truck stops, in Walmart parking lots. We are young people and old, every kind of Indian in between.”

Tommy Orange, There There (134-135).

While these powwow road trips are not explored any further in Orange’s novel, we can think all the way back to Mr Gordon Hurd’s road trip of 1921, as seen in The Word Carrier, through to the fictional road trip of David Seals’ The Powwow Highway in 1979, and all those in between which the NOMECH project seeks to retrace.

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.