SOURCE: “James Nelson Barker's Pocahontas: The Theatre and the Indian Question,” in Nineteenth Century Theatre, Vol. 23, Nos. 1-2, Summer, 1995, pp. 5-32.

In the following essay, Crestani examines Barker's The Indian Princess as the first American drama to explore the relationship between Euro-Americans and Native Americans.

April 6, 1808. Philadelphia theatregoers witness at the Chestnut Street Theatre the première of James Nelson Barker's The Indian Princess; or, la Belle Sauvage. The play excites curiosity for its complete novelty: it is the first play on a North-American Indian subject written by an American-born playwright and performed on a professional stage. And because of this parade of firsts the play is remembered in every American theatre history text.¹

As a cultural artifact, the play is part of the process of self-definition undertaken by the United States at the end of the eighteenth century. After the Revolutionary War, the acquisition of political independence...