NOMECH: Animality and Indigeneity in American Automotive Culture

[Daniel Bowman of the University of Stavanger in Norway visited the Native American Literature collection in the Archives & Special Collections in the summer of 2024 and again in 2025. He selected these items and drafted labels for a small display in Frost Library during the summer of 2025; the content of that display is reproduced here. All of the materials included in this exhibit are available for use in the Archives & Special Collections.]

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

Nation of Mechanics: Animality and Indigeneity in American Automotive Culture (NOMECH). This project is funded by the EU Horizon MSCA PF 2022 programme and is led by Postdoctoral Fellow Daniel Bowman (University of Stavanger, Norway).

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 1862. 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.” (Page 16)

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 intertribal 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.