'The Iroquois on the girders': poetry, modernity, and the Indian ironworker

This article concerns representations of Iroquois construction workers and of the part they have played in shaping the Manhattan skyline. It argues that the imaginative association of Indian and skyscraper pre-dates the visible presence of the Iroquois in the labour force, and that it emerges in an unexpected match between the vertigo at the heart of urban modernity and the ephemerality ascribed to indigenous peoples since the mid nineteenth century. As successor to this figurative parallel, the Indian ironworker comes to stand at a dense intersection of competing concerns, with primitivism and modernity, with mass production and autonomous craft, with wildness and nationhood. A special preserve of these fleeting energies is the provisional form of the American modernist poem.