Ten Indians

One of the defining features of “Ten Indians” is the language that the Garners use to discuss Indigenous people, slurs and stereotypes that are especially jarring in a 21st-century context. While their diction characterizes them as bigoted individuals, Ernest Hemingway uses the Garners to critique the anti-Indigenous bias that is deeply embedded in American culture more broadly. Through setting, symbolism, and contrasting characterization, he examines how white settler colonialism depended on anti-Indigenous violence to spread and how American culture maintains this bias.

Multiple aspects of the story’s setting expand the Garners from a single American family to a symbol of American settler colonialism. First, the story takes place on the Fourth of July, linking the events of that day with the very idea of America as a free nation with its own identity. Independence Day not only celebrates the United States’ liberation from Britain but also its conquest of Indigenous people—indeed, the Declaration of Independence decries “merciless Indian Savages” as the natural enemies of white settlers. While the Declaration of Independence famously states that “all men are created equal,” “men” refers to a very specific class of people: white, Christian, landowning men. Hemingway choosing the Fourth of July as his story’s date puts it in conversation with other works that critique the holiday’s hypocrisy, such as Frederick Douglass’s speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”

In “Ten Indians,” the date is mentioned in the same opening paragraph as Joe Garner “drag[ging]” an unnamed Indigenous man out of the road before getting back into his wagon. This creates a metaphor for Manifest Destiny—the white settler violently removing Indigenous people from his path. Notably, the Garner family is riding in a wagon rather than another vehicle, drawing on the symbolism of covered wagons in the American mythos. Wagons like Conestoga wagons carried the American pioneers west, and their role as cultural icons deepened with the emergence of the Western genre in the early 1900s. As such, this vehicle deepens the Garners as a metaphor for the American people, making their anti-Indigenous attitudes representative of American attitudes more broadly. This is also represented in their watching a baseball game, America’s pastime. Nick mentions to his father that Petoskey won the game—Petoskey, the name of a town in Michigan, is an Odawa word. Here, the original cultural context is erased and overwritten, referring to a baseball team instead. This reflects cultural erasure as an aspect of genocide, similar to how the Indigenous characters in this story are either unconscious or absent.

While the Garner family represents white American settlers more broadly (including the way racism is taught to children), Nick is a contrasting figure who represents how a new American identity can emerge. He does not use slurs or speak negatively about Indigenous people, and he has genuine affection for Prudence, an Indigenous girl. Nick leaves his shoes behind in the Garners’ wagon and walks home barefoot, signaling his affinity for nature. This aligns Nick with the natural world and Indigenous people rather than the ideas embodied by the wagon. While the Garners are largely defined by their bigoted comments, Nick’s interiority is dominated by observations about nature, and he does not dwell on his heartbreak. This alludes to the possibility of interacting with the world in a more equal way, living in sync with the American wilderness and Indigenous people rather than trying to dominate them.