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

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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.