In celebration of the United States’ 250th anniversary, the Historical Society is highlighting a coin in our collection produced for our nation’s last big birthday. The size of a penny, this bicentennial commemorative coin was created by former SAHS president, Hubert Carcaba. Carcaba was also a charter member of the Ancient City Coin Club of St. Augustine, founded in 1959.
Carcaba created three of these coins, all with different patriotic emblems. One shows an eagle and a shield; another displays Independence Hall (where the Declaration of Independence was signed). The third has a perhaps lesser-known symbol representing the United States: the side profile of a woman in a feathered headdress. By commemorating America’s birthday with her visage, Carcaba contributed to a long history of representing this country with an abstractly indigenous identity.
Reverse of commemorative coin.
Obverse of commemorative coin.
Using Native American women as metaphors started long before the American Revolution, but American colonists gave this symbol new meanings in the lead-up to the War of Independence. Centuries prior, Europeans illustrated the American continents as an Indigenous woman. While labeling native nations as “savage,” Europeans simultaneously idealized the “primitivism” of the land. They considered it to be a picturesque utopia, populated with virtuous citizens uncontaminated by the “social complexity” of Early Modern European life. England, Spain, and others invented the concept of the “noble savage,” the notion that Indigenous Americans were both “savage” and “virtuous.” Eighteenth-century writer Charles Dennis Rusoe D’Eres encapsulated this idea in his memoir, stating that “[t]he character of an Indian, is a compound of ferocity and gentleness; they are at once led away by passion, & at the same time possess virtues that would do honor to people of more refined taste.”
In the run-up to the Revolution, American colonists took the image of a NativeAmerican woman and repurposed it to represent not just the land, but their collective political identity formed in opposition to the Stamp Act, Tea Act, and the Boston Port Bill. The image of America as a Native woman was already a part of the cultural zeitgeist, but colonists attached their invented and appropriated Native identities to this symbol in the process of separating themselves from England. The symbolic power American colonists contributed to this imagery relied on the concept historians have termed “playing Indian.” By appropriating Native identities, as participants in the Boston Tea Party did, White colonists created an ‘American’ identity based on self-defined ideas of Native custom that superseded and separated themselves from royal law. In short, “As England became a them for the colonists, Indians became an us.”
Carcaba
Part of this process of co-opting Native identities was the attempted erasure of real Indigenous people. Colonists, “claimed to be the first people who established cultures and institutions worthy of notice,” an idea that stole ‘Native’ identities from Indigenous people. This required the literal and figurative erasure of real Native Americans, which ensured the legitimacy of English settlers’ supposedly Native modernity. By positioning the customs, values, and cultures of Indigenous people as primitive, colonists delegitimized real Native claims to land and life. Americans also claimed their appropriated Native identities predated and overruled English law.
With this coin, Carcaba built on a long and complex legacy of that symbol. The feathered headdress is a visual reminder of separation from England, analogous to the use of the “Mohawk” identity by the Sons of Liberty at the Boston Tea Party. However, both appropriations are also tied to the reality of the displacement of real Native American nations. In celebrating the United States’ 250th year, it is important to understand the nuanced history of our independence.
Written by: Sydney Livingston, Assistant Collections Manager
Edited by: Robert Covert, Collections Manager & Editor-in-Chief
Sources:
Berkhofer, Richard. The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to
the Present. Vintage, 1979.
Deloria, Philip. Playing Indian, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.
D’Eres, Charles Dennis Rusoe. “Memoirs of Charles Dennis Rusoe D’Eres, a native of Canada
[…],” 1800. Evans Early American Imprint Collection. University of Michigan Library Digital Collections.El Escribano, vol. 13 no. 1. January 1976.
“Meeting Notes,” Ancient City Coin Club of St. Augustine. April 17, 1959.
O’Brien, Jean. Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England, University of Minnesota Press, 2010.
Coin donated by Valerie and Tim Nichols, 2009.