Indian Camp

Despite its sparse prose and simple structure, “Indian Camp” is a complex story that explores themes around Performing Masculinity, The Inevitability of Death, and Indigenous Resistance to Euro-American Colonization. By using short, declarative sentences and realistic dialogue, Hemingway leaves many of the story’s major tensions below the surface, trusting the reader to interpret how colonization has affected this tribe and the gendered and racialized expectations that mold a young man’s reluctant passage into manhood.

Hemingway builds his story through short, descriptive sentences as well as gaps in the narrative. This less-is-more approach is enhanced by the third-person limited point of view, in which the narrator shares some of Nick’s thoughts but none of the other characters. For example, the opening scene opens in media res, with Nick and Dr. Adams boarding a boat. The reader does not know where they are going, but neither does Nick; the boy only finds out they’re on the way to the “Indian camp” when they’re on the water. This gap in Nick’s knowledge, bridged by his fathers’ belated explanation, establishes the father-son dynamic long before the reader hears the doctor scold Nick for thinking he knows something. The observations detailed on this journey raise questions and establish some of the main themes. For example, an Indigenous man struggles to row the boat in which Nick and his father laze, illuminating the “colonizer-colonized” dynamic.

Likewise, the sentence “Uncle George gave both the Indians cigars” (15) could be a simple bit of character building, but given how few descriptive details exist in the story, this act becomes imbued with significance. The narrator does not mull on Uncle George’s motivations—indeed, the narrator never confirms why George is there in the first place—leaving the reader to extrapolate meaning from the exchange. Cigars are a phallic symbol. Uncle George relaxed and smoked a cigar on the journey to the camp while an Indigenous man rowed his boat, asserting his dominance as a white man. His cigar gifts are likewise a masculine display, one that is rejected by the Indigenous men in the camp, who all smoke pipes instead. Moreover, Nick and the reader learn at the camp that the men are there to deliver a baby. Many new fathers give out cigars to celebrate a child’s birth, so George’s actions here provide the first hint that George is this child’s father. The narrative never explicitly says whether this is the case, but the looming possibility of the child’s parentage deepens the text’s themes of colonialism.

The bulk of the story takes place in a “shanty,” in which the pregnant woman screams in agony, and which the narrator describes as smelling awful. The details of this odor are not described, and the combination of screaming and bad smells creates a vague sense of foreboding. This is not a proper facility for a dangerous medical procedure, and this tone foreshadows the other ways in which Dr. Adams dehumanizes his patient throughout the procedure. He neglects to bring anesthesia despite knowing surgery is a possibility, and while he is described as sterilizing surgical implements, he later brags that he did “a Caesarian with a jack-knife and sewing it up with nine-foot, tapered gut leaders” (18). This description of the procedure—absent any reference to the mother—has Dr. Adams simultaneously reveling in his brutality and exalting his performance as the pinnacle of scientific, masculine performance: “one for the medical journal” (18).

This performance of masculinity is contrasted with the pregnant woman, the story’s only substantial female presence. Dr. Adams dehumanizes her when he tells Nick that her screams “do not matter” (16)—he does not think of her as a person in pain but as a medical problem to solve. Male power extracted through female subjugation is presented literally and violently during surgery, with four men holding the pregnant woman down while Dr. Adams performs unanesthetized surgery on her. The reader is not given access to the woman’s thoughts, and she does not speak; she is characterized through her actions. The pregnant woman’s screams are not, as Dr. Adams puts it, the involuntary response when “[a]ll her muscles are trying to get the baby born” (16). Instead, they stand against the disinterest and violence of the white characters as focalized through the narrator. Her screams demand attention and will not be ignored. Despite her struggle, the hierarchies of colonization and misogyny hold firm. The woman bites Uncle George—another clue that he is the child’s father—and he uses anti-Indigenous and sexist slurs against her; here, he raises his pain above hers despite hers being far greater. After Dr. Adams successfully extracts the baby, he hands the child over, unconcerned for the mother despite her looking nearly dead. His feat has been accomplished; the mother is merely a tool used to assert his masculine dominance as a white man and a doctor.

The story focalizes exclusively on its white characters, granting no dialogue to any of the Indigenous characters, not just the pregnant woman. In particular, the lack of explanation about the woman’s husband draws the reader in, inviting them to contemplate his silence and absence before his suicide. The narrator devotes only a few short lines to him, telling the reader that “[h]e had cut his foot very badly with an ax three days before,” and that he turned to face the wall after Dr. Adams said his wife’s screams don’t matter. The husband’s despondency and death by suicide deepen the interpretation that the child is not his, drawing a contrast between the white performances of masculinity in the shanty and his own quiet emasculation. Still, the husband exerts agency through his suicide, a last grasp at control. The story’s lack of focus on him parallels the white characters’ lack of care.

The husband’s unexplained death contextualizes the story’s final line. Despite all that he saw that day, Nick feels “quite sure that he would never die” (19). After all, the death and carnage that he witnessed were directed toward the Indigenous characters, not him, his father, or his uncle. With the Indigenous characters absent, Nick can enjoy the natural calm on the lake. The narrator notes that the water is tranquil and the sun is rising. Most importantly, Nick sees his father rowing, taking the place of the Indigenous rowers at the start of the story and assuming the stereotypically masculine role of navigator. Nick associates dying with the Indigenous people and vitality with his father, and in his self-proclaimed belief in his own immortality, he chooses to emulate his father’s masculine performance, rooted in colonization.