4.
Figures and the Law:
Rhetorical Readings of Congressional and Cherokee Texts
At this time 1890 we are too near the removal of the Cherokees for our young people to fully understand the enormity of the crime that was committed against a helpless race, truth is the facts are being concealed from the young people of today. School children of today do not know that we are living on lands that were taken from a helpless race at the bayonet point to satisfy the white man's greed for gold.
—U.S. ARMY PRIVATE JOHN G. BURNETT
This threat of being deprived of a great part of her domain by an alien and semi-barbarous people appeared intolerable and unthinkable to Georgia . . . [who] forbade the Indians to play with their make-believe government. . . . With the Indians out of the way, Georgia was for the first time in her existence master of her own territorial destiny.
—E. MERTON COULTER
In the second chapter of this book, I offered a rhetorical reading of one of anthropology's classic works, Franz Boas's Race, Language, and Culture . The intention was to examine the textual grounds for a number of contradictory general-
izations about Boasian "science," and the various "convergences," as I have called them, of ethnography and literature in the contexts of modernism and postmodernism. Boas's writing bears a signature, to take a term from Derrida; it is author- and style-specific, in Clifford Geertz's sense;[1] thus my rhetorical critique of Race, Language, and Culture sought to give voice to what the text itself could not speak, what the individual author could not or would not say.
When one turns to the rhetorical analysis of those nearly anonymous texts called laws, however, the project of critical rhetorics—I mean by this term to offer a parallel to the recently developed field of critical legal studies[2] —in its attempt to speak what the text cannot or will not say becomes a critique of ideology. For laws, of course, are not merely public texts but publicly sanctioned texts. That is to say, their language does not merely express or represent but effectually permits, prohibits, or requires particular acts. Laws, then, are the specific outcome of successful rhetoric, public speaking oriented toward persuasion. Once that outcome has been written into law, however, these texts are no longer persuasive but coercive, and may be enforced with the full power of the state. Laws are fixed in letters; but the letter of the law remains open to acts of interpretation. These have traditionally been engaged in not by literary critics but by lawyers—although it is the case, of late, that the interests and concerns of some lawyers and some literary people have also converged to a quite striking degree. If ethnography and literature are most readily seen to con-
verge in relation to postmodernism , law and literature, I believe, most readily converge in relation to rhetoric .
I will not attempt to give now (as I did not earlier) even a sketch of the historical development of rhetoric in the West from Plato to Aristotle; from the Romans to the Renaissance; thence until our own time. My particular concerns here, I believe, require only that I note my sense that rhetoric, in the Classical period where it began as a formal subject of detailed inquiry (and where, as Eric Cheyfitz has shown, it served as a pretechnological technology of control), concerned itself with analyzing the particular figures of speech appropriate to specific public occasions of speech, whether these were "deliberative" or "juridical" (Kahn 21). All the rare birds of rhetorical terminology—metalepsis and catalepsis, catachresis, oxymoron, antiphrasis, and so on—are subdivisions of the four "master tropes," metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony, and all are names for linguistic constructions, each one of which might be more or less effective in persuading an audience to a particular position, at a particular moment—whether justice (both legally and philosophically) or property were involved.
Rhetorical figures or tropes, then, provide charged images of their objects of concern; but these images, presented in any extended discourse, cannot help but imply a narrative, or, simply, tell a story. This is the case for contracts, laws, Supreme Court decisions, or formal histories quite as well as for the texts we conventionally refer to as "stories." As I have noted regularly throughout this book, in the West, these stories are intelligible as exemplars, variants, or combinations of the four plot structures—I am again following Northrop Frye and Hayden White—called romance, tragedy, comedy, or irony (satire, for White)—plot structures which may be discerned, as White has abun-
dantly shown, in texts where the narrative is indeed implied rather than stated, and where the story told offers itself as "truth" rather than as "fiction," e.g., in history and historiography, and also, as I shall try to show, in law where it seeks to make history by imposing a story. My text is the Indian Removal Act of 1830.
1
The Indian Removal Act of 1830 presents a series of images rhetorically figured, and a story about the Indian, a particular narrative construction of Indian-white relations—both of which work together to make certain kinds of sense of the material they organize: the tropes in which images are presented, and the stories that presentation narrates, having, in a phrase of Hayden White's, explanatory force. Or, as Edward Said even more tellingly puts it, not merely explanatory force. In a brilliant discussion of what he calls "images of centrality," Said speaks of the power of these images to give "rise to semi-official narratives with the capacity to authorize and embody certain sequences of cause and effect, while at the same time preventing the emergence of counter-narratives" (1988 58). Finally, Said writes, "centrality is identity," determining "what is powerful, important and ours" (1988 57), and so, too, what, defined as "theirs," is precisely not important, is powerless. Said's "images of centrality" are, of course, cultural productions, of the "superstructure," as an older Marxism would say, and thus they can only be "semi-official" in their capacity to authorize. But the law of the land is most certainly official; and the "sequences of cause and effect" it authorizes, and the identities it recognizes as "powerful, important and ours," through the images it provides and the stories it tells,
have predictive efficacity, for the law permits the state to compel compliance by means of force.
As is well known, the idea of "trans-lating" the eastern Indians westward so that an expanding Euramerican population might "improve" and more productively use Indian lands had already been considered by Jefferson and Monroe as a sort of permanent solution to America's Indian problem. This solution seems to have become an urgent national priority at the time of Jackson's presidency not only because (I am largely persuaded by Michael Rogin's arguments)[3] Jackson was obsessed with Indians; not only because it took until the latter 1820s for the white population's need or, as seems more substantially the case, greed for land to grow sufficiently to exert acute pressure upon Indian holdings; not only because gold was discovered in 1829 in Georgia at Dahlonega on the western boundary of the Cherokee nation; not only because even some clergy and laypersons sympathetic to the Indians became convinced they would do best beyond the corrupting influences of frontier whites. Important as all these factors were, there is also a narrative dimension to the history we are considering.
This is to say that Indian removal could finally be written into law and enforced in the 1830s because by that time, a certain story about America and about "civilization" had become sufficiently acceptable that it could be used as ideological justification for "certain sequences of causes and effects," for the policy of—to cite Berkhofer again—"expansion with honor" (145ff). This story, as numerous
commentators have remarked—and it is a story that has been reinvoked from the invasion of Massachusetts to the invasion of Panama and the recent war in the Gulf—organized images of the white man and the Indian in such a way as to satisfy Americans that they might not only have their way, but have it—in Alexis de Tocqueville's phrase, which I shall cite more fully below—in complete conformity and with "respect to the laws of humanity" (339), naked self-interest clothed with justice and sanctity.
The particular story to which I am referring has been told many times, by no one better than by Roy Harvey Pearce, who, more than thirty-five years ago, in Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind , described the way in which "the history of American civilization would . . . be conceived of as three-dimensional, progressing from past to present, from east to west, from lower to higher" (49), with the acutely developing problem, therefore, as Pearce stated it, "of understanding the Indian, not as one to be civilized and to be lived with, but rather as one whose nature and whose way of life was an obstacle to civilized progress westward" (41). To achieve this "understanding" required, in Pearce's careful distinctions, a very particular "Idea, [a] Symbol, and [an] Image" (vi–vii). The idea was that of the savage and his savagism; the symbol was the Indian, as represented in a series of images whose functional purpose would be, on the level of culture, to reconcile our national interests with our national ideals. These images , I suggest, in order that they might represent the Indian symbolically in a manner consistent with the idea of his savagery, must be figured ironically , from a tropological perspective, and, from the perspective of narrative, must be emplotted, structured as a story tragically .
The story of Indian savagery must be structured as a trag-
edy because the story of Euramerican civilization—the Euramerican narrative of identity, in James Clifford's phrase—was structured as a comedy. Comedy is the name the West gives to stories that organize images in terms of a progress toward reconciliation and integration; in the Classical period, or in Shakespeare, for example, comic plots end with a dance, or a dinner, or both of these at a wedding. In general, the tale America seems to have told of itself, the story that gave the Euramerican self-images and an identity in the nineteenth century, was a narrative of the inexorable advance of civilization toward the fulfilment of its manifest destiny, the extension of the frontier ever westward, ever forward, to establish a continental arch from sea to shining sea.
The "civilized" protagonists of the American comedy, as in any comic story, encountered opposition and resistance, in this instance on the part of those they called Indian "savages." It is in the nature of comic plots that any regressive "blocking characters," in Northrop Frye's phrase (167), those who would stand as "an obstacle to civilized progress westward," in Pearce's phrase (1989 41), must be overcome—but the comic mood is such that no pain, no pity, or terror, is to be felt at their defeat. What I want to show is that the Indian Removal Act inscribes the narrative of the Indian as a tragedy, and that the tragedy of the Indian stands in relation to the comedy of the Euramerican as figures of the savage stand to figures of the civilized man.
If comedy is an integrative structure which cheerfully reconciles and unites its characters, tragedy is a dispersive structure which fearfully casts out and severs its characters from the places and persons they would be near. Terrible as such exile is, still, it is tragedy's insistence, it is just; the climactic moment of tragedy comes in the recognition of
the wisdom of resignation to the existing order of things—an order that is presented as necessary and unalterable. To tell a particular kind of story, comic or tragic, as White has shown—as also to refuse to tell any one kind of story, as I have tried to show—is always to offer a particular kind of explanation of the world as experienced, or, to refer again to Said, to authorize a particular sequence of historical causes and effects (1988 7).
As it is on the macro-level of narrative structure or plot—tragedy, comedy, and so on—so, too, is it at the micro-level of sentence structure, or style. I return here to the subject of the figures of language, which themselves present some human beings as "in" and "us," other human beings as "out" and "them." Ironic tropes such as antiphrasis or negation, catachresis or misuse, oxymoron or paradox, and aporia or doubt, all work at the level of style to deny and to disperse. And these are the tropes, I suggest, which govern the representation of the Indian savage in the Indian Removal Act as in much discourse of the period. (Such representations, it should be noted, have particular effectivity in determining the kind of tragic emplotment in which they appear.)
2
The Removal Act is titled an "ACT TO PROVIDE FOR AN EXCHANGE OF LANDS WITH THE INDIANS RESIDING IN ANY OF THE STATES OR TERRITORIES, AND FOR THEIR REMOVAL WEST OF THE RIVER MISSISSIPPI ."[4] Its first section asserts "that it
shall and may be lawful for the President of the United States" to set aside specifically described and designated lands west of the Mississippi "for the reception of such tribes or nations of Indians as may choose to exchange the lands where they now reside, and remove there." As an act to provide for the exchange and removal of those Indians "as may choose " to exchange and remove, this legislation reproduces, in its very language, a number of paradoxes particular to the period, but, as well, paradoxes inherited from the broader context of Christian patriarchal culture.
Etymologically, that is, to provide is simply to see ahead, from Latin, pro-videre . The verb form makes its nominal appearance in the word providence , generally indicative of God's foreknowledge of events, with a strong implication of predestination. But this foreknowledge, in Christian doctrine, is also taken as compatible with free will, the human creature's ability to choose . As a pertinent literary example, consider John Milton's description of Adam and Eve, in Paradise Lost , as sufficient to stand yet free to fall. This is altogether paradoxical, in my view (although it may be a paradox that Milton exploits for antimonarchical effect). God knew, of course, that they would fall, but nonetheless—somehow—they were still sufficient to stand. Section I of the Removal Act both provides for an exchange, while it insists upon the free agency of the Indians. This paradoxical situation reproduces the paradox also central to pre-Christian classical tragedy where the protagonist cannot escape his fate yet nonetheless affirms his status as tragic
(rather than, say, merely pathetic) by taking responsibility for his fate: it is as if he chose it. The Indian, to the framers of this bill, must not be mere victims of civilization's providence but free agents who can voluntarily "choose" to exchange and remove—for all that, in point of actual fact, as we shall see, there was not very much of a choice at all.
More particularly, these paradoxes reflect such things as the determination of Jefferson and Monroe that Indians must not be allowed to act against the best interest of the United States (although Monroe, who had to face the issue more acutely than Jefferson, was against the use of force), as this confronts the determination of another former president, John Quincy Adams, that the government keep its original promises to the Indians, regardless of American self-interest. Historically central to these paradoxes is what Brian Dippie has called the "embarrassment of 1802 when the federal government, in exchange for Georgia's western lands, bound itself by compact to extinguish existing Indian title in the state, despite the 'solemn guarantees' previously made to the indigenous tribes" (56–7). The problem facing the framers of the Removal Act was, in Robert Berkhofer's phrase, how to reconcile national interest with national honor.
In his First Message to Congress, President Jackson explicitly denied the right of independent governments or states (like that of the Cherokee) to exist within the United States (in particular, Georgia; cf. Guttmann and Halsey 37–8), and clearly affirmed his commitment to Cherokee removal. Yet even Jackson could not avoid the "providential" Christian paradox, as he asserted that Cherokee "emigration should be voluntary , for it would be as cruel and as unjust to compel the aborigines to abandon the graves of their fathers and seek a home in a distant land" (in Gutt-
mann and Halsey 39, my emphasis). Jackson's inflexible determination that the Indians choose to remove encountered the Cherokees' inflexible determination not to choose to remove, and the impasse was resolved by the use of, first, subterfuge and intrigue, and, finally, state violence, which sent the Cherokee westward on the "Trail of Tears" in 1838.
Section II of the Removal Act states
That it shall and may be lawful for the President to exchange any or all of such districts [newly created, in the west] . . . with any tribe or nation of Indians now residing within the limits of any of the states or territories, and with which the United States have existing treaties, for the whole or any part or portion of the territory claimed and occupied by such tribe or nation, within the bounds of any one or more of the states or territories, where the land claimed and occupied by the Indians, is owned by the United States, or the United States are bound to the state within which it lies to extinguish the Indian claim thereto. (My emphasis)
The language here, I believe, reflects Jackson's strong sense of the government's historical error in treating the Indians as sovereign nations in the past, offering, it appears (I am neither a lawyer nor a legal scholar), an interpretation of international and national law that would seek to remove the "embarrassment" of Article I, Section 4, of the Georgia Cession of April 24, 1802 (Guttmann and Halsey 10) simply by deciding the matter in Georgia's favor (e.g., "or ," above). This section of the Act, that is, seems to assert that all land "claimed and occupied by the Indians" is in fact if not in deed "owned by the United States" and thus, that Indian occupancy is simply at the sufferance of the United States in the person of the President. This, to be sure, is the inter-
pretation put forth by then Representative and, later, Governor of Georgia, Wilson Lumpkin in the House debate upon the subject, and it is consistent with the declaration of the Georgia Senate in 1827 "that the state might properly take possession of the Cherokee country by force, and that it was owing to her moderation and forebearance that she did not thus take possession " (1095 my emphasis). Here, the legal force of the federal government's past treaties with the tribes is simply abrogated in favor of the right of the states to regulate their internal affairs as they see fit, with Indians presenting no exception—something to which Chief Justice John Marshall would take exception in Worcester v. Georgia in 1832. Lumpkin's sense of the matter is that whatever Federal/Indian relations may be, Georgia/Indian relations are another matter altogether—with the effect, of course, that Indians be damned.
Although the Act has six more sections, we have already, by Section II, reached the climactic moment of our story, the tragic epiphany of the law which reveals a president in the position of god or fate, possessor in the name of the United States of all lands far and wide, who can remove or allow to be removed any Indians, as he sees fit, with the providence of this act—and this independent of those Indians' desire, for all the fact that they must be presumed to have a choice in the matter. What follows is largely denouement, the president and the United States offering financial payment or otherwise unspecified "aid and protection" to the forced exiles, as if to say, as typically with tragedy, that all is, if not well, at least as it should be: that the world represented here, however painful, is, nonetheless, just.
Thus Section III of the Act makes it "lawful for the President solemnly to assure" the Indians that "the United States will forever secure and guaranty to them, and their
heirs or successors" the new lands to which they have removed, a very curious assurance, even in regard to a commander-in-chief with powers over the territories, inasmuch as the preceding section of the bill has just reneged on all previous such assurances as guaranteed by treaty "forever." The Cherokee in their "Memorial" to Congress of July, 1830 (I look at this again just below), were quite clear that were they to remove and "make themselves comfortable in their new residence, they [would] have nothing to expect hereafter but to be the victims of a future legalized robbery!"[5] (Guttmann and Halsey 59)
Section IV announces "That if, upon any of the lands now occupied by the Indians, and to be exchanged for, there should be such improvements as add value to the land," the president is to determine the value of these improvements and pay for them—once more, an ironic provision in light of the fact that capacity to improve the land had always been a touchstone of civilization, the Indians now to be removed for their inability to be civilized, yet paid for any improvements. One wonders at the spectacle of President Jackson, who had said of Cherokee lands in his First Message to Congress that these were "tracts of country on which they have neither dwelt nor made improvements " (in Guttmann and Halsey 39, my emphasis), charging the Treasury for just these nonexistent improvements.
Section V specifically offers "the emigrants" such "aid and assistance as may be necessary for their support and subsis-
tence for the first year after their removal." Section VI promises the exiles protection "at their new residence, against all interruption or disturbance from any other tribe or nation of Indians," and as well "from any other person or persons whatever." However sincere the government may have been in wishing to protect the removed Cherokee from further white encroachment and in preventing intertribal warfare (as, for example, with the Osage), its record in regard to the former was consistently abysmal, and its capacity in regard to the latter—considering that the Cherokee were being relocated to areas where there were already Chickasaw, Creek, Choctaw, and Osage—was modest at best. Thus I find a certain irony in this provision as well; and the Cherokee "Memorial" cited above once again may be consulted for the Indians' own understanding of the meaning of federal protection.
Section VII seems to me oddly placed and difficult to understand from the text alone; it would seem to respond, again, to the government's concern to prevent the setting up of sovereign states in the new territories to which Indians were removed, and, again, to prevent intertribal warfare. But the language is curious. Section VII states
That it shall and may be lawful for the President to have the same superintendence and care over any tribe or nation in the country to which they may remove, . . . that he is now authorized to have over them at their present places of residence: Provided , that nothing in this act contained shall be construed as authorizing or directing the violation of any existing treaty between the United States and any of the Indian tribes.
Two matters especially strike me here. First, for all the blandly paternalistic benevolence of the phrasing, granting
to the president the "same superintendence and care over"—the preposition seems telling (i.e., idiomatic usage would seem to permit "care for " as well as "care over ")—the Indians he has had heretofore, there is something ominous in the assertion that there is no "world elsewhere," not "another country" in which the Indians, should they so choose, might escape presidential "superintendence and care." To read this phrase as ominous, let me say, is not a matter of a presentist perspective only; for many in the age of Jackson understood perfectly well the kind of "care" he would have "over" the Indians, the Indians included.
Second, since everything in this act is based upon a view that "existing treaties between the United States and . . . the tribes" misconstrued the claims of Indian title, the United States purchasing what might simply have been claimed by right of conquest, by eminent domain, or by the doctrine of domicilium vacuum , thereby rejecting the basis for all existing treaties between the United States and the tribes, it seems appropriate to read these words as offering an ironic sense of history—or else a deep hypocrisy.
Section VIII is the conventional appropriations section, concluding the matter by appropriating "the sum of five hundred thousand dollars" for "the purpose of giving effect to the provisions of this act." Thus, ironically or not, money has the last word.
The Removal Act was passed in the Senate by a vote of 28 to 20, and then, in the House, by a vote of 103 to 97. For want of four votes, in the words of Henry Storrs, Whig of New York, we might now "break up [the Indians'] society, dissolve their institutions, and drive them into the wilderness" (in Washburn 1057). Jackson signed the bill into law immediately, on May 28, 1830. As Alexis de Tocqueville summed up the matter:
The Spaniards by unparalleled atrocities which brand them with indelible shame, did not succeed in exterminating the Indian race and could not even prevent them from sharing their rights; the United States Americans have attained both these results with wonderful ease, quietly, legally, and philanthropically, without spilling blood and without violating a single one of the great principles of morality in the eyes of the world. It is impossible to destroy men with more respect to the laws of humanity. (339)
The "primary premise" of the imagery in which the Indian is depicted in the Removal Act, in Robert Berkhofer's phrase, "is the deficiency of the Indian as compared to the white" (113). As the published debate over the Removal Act makes clear, the bill denies to the Indian sovereignty over land and person; as "noble savage" the Indian is oxymoronically depicted; as "murderous savage," "embarrassment" (e.g., in the remarks of Wilson Lumpkin, Democrat of Georgia), encumbrance or nuisance, he is figured by catachresis (misuse, absurdity, anachronism, etc.) or antiphrasis, as negation of the civilized person, its antithesis or zero degree. Ultimately, inasmuch as it remains unclear at this time whether the Indian would indeed "civilize" himself or "vanish," no statement about him can quite have determinate meaning: the figure for such indeterminacy is the figure of aporia or doubt. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 set the terms of discussion for the "Indian Question" for more than half a century.
3
The full effects of the Removal Act were not felt by the Cherokee until 1838. First, in 1835, fewer "than one hundred Cherokees," of more than fifteen thousand eastern
Cherokee, in "alliance . . . with the Jackson-Georgia Removal Party" (Woodward 174–5) signed the Treaty of New Echota, agreeing to the cession of all the Cherokee's eastern lands to the federal government for a sum of five million dollars (less the cost for removing the Cherokee to the west, a cost which came to over one and a quarter million dollars). Then, in 1838, some twelve thousand remaining Cherokee were forced by federal troops under the command of General Winfield Scott to head westward on the infamous Trail of Tears. The kind protection of the government notwithstanding, fully one third, four thousand people, died en route.
But the Removal Act was only the first of several "documents of barbarism," in the recent phrase of one Native American legal scholar.[6] In the century and a half since its passage, a great many other Indian bills have been proposed and enacted to attempt to deal with America's ongoing "Indian problem." I will make reference only to those that seek to make general policy. First is the General Allotment or Dawes Act of 1887. The intention of Dawes was presumably to give the Indians a last chance at "civilization" by bringing them to a proper appreciation of the virtues of private property; the Act provided for the allotment in severalty of lands formerly tribally—communally, indeed "communistically"—held. Like the Removal Act, Dawes was supported both by those who genuinely wished to do what they thought best for Native people as well as by those who simply wanted another means of obtaining what land was left to the Indians. In 1934, under the Wheeler-Howard, or
Indian Reorganization Act, Indians were to be "reorganized," allowed, that is, to retain what remained of older, more traditional lifeways if they wished—their wishes, unfortunately, to be made known to the government by strictly parliamentary means that were unfamiliar at best, and, at worst, repugnant to many members of the tribes. In 1953, Indians were to be "terminated": according to the provisions of House Concurrent Resolution 108, the government announced its intention to terminate or sever its longstanding special relationship with the tribes. Only the Menominee and the Klamath, among the larger tribes, were actually "terminated" by the government (with predictably disastrous results) before this policy was amended and then abandoned. Nineteen sixty-eight brought the Indian Civil Rights Act, and 1975 the Indian Self-Determination Act, both of which, for all the positivity of their titles, brought very mixed blessings to Native peoples.[7]
The American "image" of the Indian, as presented seminally in Pearce's work and elaborated in the important studies of such scholars as Robert Berkhofer, Brian Dippie, Richard Drinnon, and Michael Rogin, appears "officially" as Indian "policy" in the "narratives" we call laws—where they have the most important material consequences. And it is, of course, possible to offer a narrative and figurative analysis of each of these major acts.
For example, the Dawes Act appears to be predicated on ironic images of an oxymoronic, or paradoxical, type that can be emplotted comically as a tale of acceptable citizenly integration into a turn-of-the-century society facing un-
precedented immigration. The classic literary illustration here comes from Henry James's 1904 visit to Ellis Island (described in The American Scene of 1907), in which James recognizes the unanticipated necessity "to share the sanctity of his American consciousness, the intimacy of his American patriotism, with the inconceivable alien" (1968 85). In an age in which the "inconceivable alien" must some-how be conceived of as also an American, the Indian can become just another hyphenated citizen, no longer the American Indian but, oxymoronically, the Indian-American—an American who, like all his brother and sister hyphenate Americans, is to be melted in the great melting pot into a Christian capitalist.
This melting pot notion of monocultural purism or nativism was, apparently, particularly strong from 1915 or so to 1922 (cf. Matthews), for all that it was strongly opposed by movements for both cultural pluralism and liberal cosmopolitanism (cf. Hollinger). After the Great Depression, in the era of Franklin Roosevelt, cultural pluralism, cosmopolitanism, and, generally, a somewhat greater—if grudging—willingness on the part of the dominant culture to accept at least some degrees of difference as potentially "American" are more marked. In these years, to grant the fact that newly arrived Americans might choose to retain and display degrees of Italianness, or Jewishness (etc., etc.), no longer appears, at least to some, as quite such a profanation of the "sanctity of [the] American consciousness," nor a violation of "the intimacy of . . . American patriotism" as it did to James. In this context, the original inhabitants of this continent might also be permitted to retain traditional cultural forms, without—the irony here is all too apparent—seeming "un-American." The figure by which this view of the ethnic American is represented is
metaphor, the figure based upon analogous substitutability; e.g., by analogy, Chinese -American or Mexican -American or Native American may be substituted for American . Non-WASP lifeways, in this view, need not be melted out or away, but, instead, they may become distinctive threads in the uniquely American coat of many colors. This alternative image of America has its counterpart today in the image—call it residual or emerging—of American society as a rainbow or mosaic. In any case, the Wheeler-Howard or Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 would seem to image the Indian metaphorically while (still) emplotting his story comically.
The "termination" policy, according to which the federal government announced its intention to sever special relationships with (and responsibilities to) the tribes, images the Indian in more or less ironic tropes of a catachrestic type, and projects, for the story of the "terminated" Native, radically ironic emplotments. Indians are once again figured as anomalous and antithetical persons, and so they may be cast adrift to manage as they can. Stories about these drifters and outsiders will be cast in the ironically absurd narrative mode known in the West from Kafka, on to—I here name artists whose influence is roughly contemporaneous with the institution of the termination policy—Beckett, Ionesco, Antonioni, and Edward Albee. Finally, it may be said that the Indian Civil Rights Act and the Self-Determination Act, heir to the reformational and reintegrative hopes of the sixties, recapitulates Wheeler-Howard's imagery and structure: metaphor, figuratively; comedy, narratively. Once again Indians are to be allowed to manage their own affairs—so long as they do so, as John Collier himself wrote, "with the aid of modern organization methods" (in Dorris 52).
These remarks take their subject matter at what is ob-
viously a very high level of generalization. But, as I hope I have shown in my analysis of the Indian Removal Act, particularization of a rhetorical, narratological, and historical nature would certainly be possible. Rather than attempt this, however, I want to turn to the sort of analysis urged most strongly by my ethnocritical perspective, and examine an "official" Cherokee response to the threat of removal. Thus, to take a phrase from Roy Harvey Pearce, I want to try "to do for the Red side of the story what [I] did for the White" (1973 90).
But there are a great many problems in the way of any attempt "to do for the Red side of the story" what is fairly easily done "for the White."
4
The most "advanced" of the "five civilized tribes," the Cherokee were able, by 1830, to write their own language in the syllabary devised by the mixedblood Sequoyah (George Guess) in 1821. In the estimate of one of their number, John Ridge, by 1826 approximately a third of the eastern Cherokee were competent in the writing of English.[8] As early as 1808, the Cherokee had adopted their earliest known written law, and in 1827, amid much fanfare,
they had drafted and adopted a constitution modeled closely upon that of the United States—both of these documents written in English. Thus the Cherokee were well positioned, when the pressures upon them of Georgia and of Jackson to remove intensified, to fight for their rights by a variety of textual means, among them letters, petitions, and "Memorials"[9] to the courts, the Congress, and the various officers of the federal government, and also by means of articles and editorials in The Cherokee Phoenix , a newspaper founded in 1828 by Elias Boudinot and edited by him until 1832 (it ceased publication in 1834). "The Cherokee Phoenix ," according to Rennard Strikland, "contains the most articulate presentation of the Cherokee position" (67n) on removal. Speaking for what seems to have been an overwhelming Cherokee consensus in opposition to removal, the Phoenix was apparently "sent to the four corners of the United States," inspiring "white newspaper editors in New Orleans, New York, Washington City, Philadelphia, Boston, and Baltimore to recopy its editorials citing Jackson's and Georgia's oppression" (Woodward 168). These editorials (in English and in the Sequoyah syllabary) no doubt provide "semi-official" narrative responses to the removal threat—for all that much of what appeared in the Phoenix was often supposed to be the work of—or, at the least, carefully over-seen by—the Rev. Samuel Worcester, longtime Congregational Minister to the Cherokee.[10]
But what of an "official" document, one to parallel the Indian Removal Act? I believe that there can be no such Cherokee text, strictly speaking, because the Cherokee in 1830 could only produce laws—not merely persuasive but coercive texts—to regulate their internal affairs. They had not the power—nor, I believe, the tradition or inclination—to "provide" for the behavior of others outside the Cherokee Nation. While Georgia and the United States could and did pass legislation determining what the Cherokee might and might not do, the Cherokee could not and did not pass legislation to determine what Georgia and the United States might and might not do. Instead, as I have said, they wrote and distributed editorials in the private sector of their own Nation and in the United States generally, and sent petitions and "Memorials" dated, passed, and signed by members of the General Council of the Cherokee Nation (Principal Chief, Assistant Principal Chief, Executive Counsellors, etc.) to the federal government. It is to these latter documents, I believe, that one must look for a text at all approximating to the discursive order of the Indian Removal Act.
Correctly anticipating that President Jackson's First Annual Message to Congress (I have referred to it above) would strongly support their removal from the east, the General Council of the Cherokee Nation met in November of 1829 to draft a "Memorial" to both Houses of Congress petitioning for their right to remain. This Memorial is the nearest thing I know to a Cherokee parallel to the Indian Removal Act.[11]
Bills for the removal of the Cherokee having been introduced into both Houses early in 1830, and debate on the
Removal Act having begun in the House on February 24, this "official" document of the Cherokee Council, along with twelve other memorials "from the native citizens of the nation themselves, and adopted throughout the country, and to which are appended upwards of three thousand names" (H. R. 311 1), was "Committed to the Committee of the Whole House on the State of the Union to which is committed the bill No. 287, to provide for the removal of the Indian tribes in any of the States and Territories West of the river Mississippi, and for their permanent location" (1). It was "Presented, and laid on the table, March 15, 1830."
I will offer some analysis of this "official" Cherokee Memorial shortly, supplementing my account (in the notes, for the most part) with reference to the first of the individual petitions from the "native citizens of the nation." This latter text has been widely known to the world, let me note, as a consequence of its inclusion, in condensed paraphrase , in the tenth and last section of Volume I of de Tocqueville's Democracy in America .[12] But before proceeding, it seems necessary to ask what sort of analysis would be appropriate to a document like this.
This is to say that inasmuch as we have before us texts in English—and texts, it appears, originally composed in English rather than, as so much so-called "Indian oratory,"[13] translated from Indian to English—which are specifically addressed to a Euramerican audience, it might seem proper to perform upon them just the sort of rhetorical analysis one might perform upon any text in English. And yet, surely it is also worthwhile at least to raise the question (for all that, as I note just below, I can't very well answer it) whether such texts might not owe something to traditional Cherokee oratorical practices, so that the imposition upon them of a purely Western analytic grid would badly distort them. As the first Memorial from the individual Cherokee citizens puts it, "we address you according to usage adopted by our forefathers, and the great and good men who have successfully directed the Councils of the nation you represent" (7 my emphases). This, it seems to me, means according to the "usage[s]" of Western rhetorical practice, and also to those of traditional Cherokee oratorical practices.
But traditional Cherokee oratorical practices, like those of most of the indigenous people of the Americas, are very little known.[14] Most of what there is to work from in textual form are, to reorient a phrase from Donald Bahr, "foreign policy" speeches in English translation of (one may reason-
ably assume) varying accuracy—although there do not exist transcriptions of Native language originals against which to compare them. In this regard, the oratorical speeches translated into English by Euramericans obviously differ from the Cherokee documents composed in English by Cherokee. And yet the translated speeches and the Cherokee Memorials alike result from what are artificial, or, at the least, nontraditional occasions. For the speeches, the occasion for rhetorical performance is an encounter between delegations of whites and Indians for the purpose, in the vast majority of cases, of negotiating Indian land cessions. On these occasions, it should be noted, neither party could proceed in a manner entirely familiar to their culture, although this similarity does not suggest an equality: however necessary innovations of eloquence were to both Native and non-Native peoples, the latter always held the balance of power.
This is to say that Euramericans, on these imperial occasions, had to engage in a measure of formal improvisation, while the Native Americans, as colonial subjects, had to improvise in regard to content, a much more radical step. The whites, whose power depended upon such things as fixing boundaries and property lines, making deeds, arranging payments for land, and so on, speak of these matters to the Natives in a kinship language they had not for centuries used among themselves or with any other Western nation, a language—to take a term from Michael Paul Rogin—of "fathers and children": e.g., The Great White Father in Washington reminds his Red Children, etc. Meanwhile, the Indians seem to have spoken in much the same language they had always used among themselves and with other Indians (e.g., often beginning with formulas that had cosmological reference, indicating the distinctiveness
and long duration of their own culture or "way," etc.) but found themselves in the position of trying to make this traditional formulaic language speak of things it never had spoken of (permanent boundaries, deeds, payments for land, annuities, etc.), in Eric Wolf's terms, to make a kin-ordered language convey capitalist concerns. To press the matter no further, I will only say that while I am far from prepared to attempt, here, any reconstruction of the principles of traditional Cherokee oratory, it yet seems reasonable to assume that traditional Cherokee public speech would inevitably have been based upon the cultural "postulates," in Rennard Strickland's phrase, "commonly accepted by the traditional Cherokee" (21), and that they would reflect the epistemological, ethical, and psychological views of Cherokee people.
5
And yet, having said this much (or little), I must nonetheless confess that in the "official" Memorial of the General Council of the Cherokee Nation to Congress, I don't find anything of substance that I might refer to traditional Cherokee oratorical practices. The majority—twenty-two of the thirty-seven signatories—of the "Memorial" affix an "x mark" rather than a "proper" signature in alphabetic script or in the Sequoyah syllabary to this document, and thus announce themselves as people who do not write. But the "President of Committee," Lewis Ross, the "Clerk of Council," John Ridge, the Principal Chief, Assistant Principal Chief, and two of the three "Executive Counsellors" signing approval of the document do affix their names in script. And these are very likely the men responsible for composing the actual text—one which, as I have said, seems to be in close conformity to American (Western, textual, legal) practice.
To repeat, I find little or nothing in it that would seem to be dependent upon traditional (oral, unlettered) Cherokee practice,[15] but it has not been readily available for study, and I have reproduced it in its entirety in an appendix to this chapter so that any sharper eye or ear than mine may discover what I may have missed. Let me add here that the distance of the Cherokee Memorial from traditional Cherokee oratory, as it seems to me, has—as Eric Cheyfitz has shown in discussions of "Frederick Douglass" in his narrative, and of Caliban in The Tempest —both alienating and liberating potentialities. On the one hand, to accede to the "master's" language, in the Cherokee case, to adopt the prevailing legalistic mode, is to abandon one's own language; on the other hand, to take possession of the master's "books" is to obtain some important part of the master's power—which then, to be sure, may be turned to one's own purposes.
The Memorial of the Cherokee Council opens with what I take to be deliberate although unstated reference to the Declaration of Independence. Jackson had cited the Declaration, in an opinion presented to the Cherokee by the Secretary of War in 1829, as impugning Cherokee rights to their aboriginal homelands, and the Memorial does indeed offer a counterargument to Jackson's on this point later on
in the text. But by opening with language that parallels the Declaration's own well-known language, the Cherokee, I believe, seek to substitute metaphorical figures for the ironic, antiphrastic figures (e.g., as noted above, the Indian as opposite and negative of the white man, etc.) regularly employed for the representation of Native people by Jackson, Georgia, and the proponents of removal. The opening words of the Cherokee Memorial, I mean to say, by echoing the language of the Declaration of Independence assert the legitimacy, at least, of political equivalences between the Cherokee and the American colonists. As two peoples who each had, formerly and in the present, to fight for their right to independence, Cherokee and Euramerican may be metaphorically compared rather than antiphrastically contrasted , analogical comparability being the essence of metaphorical figurations.[16]
Addressed, as I have said, "To the Honorable Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled" (2), the Cherokee Memorial of 1830 begins:
We, the representatives of the people of the Cherokee nation, in general council convened, compelled by a sense of duty which we owe to ourselves and nation, and confiding in the justice of your honorable bodies, address and make known to you the grievances which disturb the quiet repose and
harmony of our citizens, and the dangers by which we are surrounded. (2)
The Declaration of Independence does not begin this way, of course, for it initially narrates the wrongs done to the colonists by King George. But it then moves to the following words:
We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America in General Congress assembled, appealing to the supreme judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions . . .
Where the Declaration first establishes the "long train of abuses and usurpations" for which the British King George III is responsible, the Cherokee Memorial only later establishes some of the abuses not of George but of his namesake state, Georgia. Where the colonists were no longer petitioning George, their principal oppressor, but presenting a "Declaration" to all the world to judge the justice of their case, the Cherokee are decidedly petitioning—not Georgia, their principal oppressor, nor the president, Georgia's staunch supporter, but, rather, petitioning the Congress of the United States, just that body that had adopted the Declaration. (Cf. Thomas Jefferson, "Congress proceeded the same day to consider the Declaration of Independence, which had been reported and lain on the table the Friday preceding, and on Monday referred to a Committee of the whole" [639]—exactly the referee of the Cherokee Memorial.)
Yet in spite of the similarity I have remarked, there is a crucial difference to note as well. For unlike the American colonists who found themselves compelled "in the course
of human events" to declare their independence, the Cherokee find themselves compelled, rather, to affirm theirs. And the Cherokee, I believe, are aware of and mean strategically to exploit the irony that the central, virtually sacred document that had proclaimed the sovereignty of the United States Americans should now be instantiated as the document—so Jackson had claimed—serving to undermine the sovereignty of the indigenous Americans. For "It remains to be proved," the Cherokee Council asserts with a turn to the specifically logical rather than the rhetorical dimension of the issue, "how our right to self-government was affected and destroyed by the Declaration of Independence, which never noticed the subject of Cherokee sovereignty" (3).
Whatever the metaphorical equivalence of Cherokee Indians and American colonists, there is, again, a difference. For, as the Cherokee memorialists write, "It is a subject of vast importance to know whether the power of self-government abided in the Cherokee nation at the discovery of America. . . and whether it was in any manner affected or destroyed by the charters of European potentates" (2–3). And the bulk of the Cherokee Memorial rehearses a history in which both the British colonialists and the American colonists become sovereign (and so free to be imperialists in their turn), consistently treated with those in original possession of the land as independent and (themselves) sovereign nations. That is to say, from the "discovery" of America until the present moment, the representatives of European powers and of the United States treated with the Cherokee metaphorically from a legal and political perspective.
Thus the Cherokee anticipate Jackson's charge in his First Message to Congress that it is intolerable and unconstitu-
tional for any state to allow an Indian tribe "to erect an independent government" (Guttmann and Halsey 38 my emphasis) within its borders. It is the insistence of the Cherokee, supported with a very great deal of (to my mind persuasive) evidence, that they have always been, and have been treated as, an "independent government," a nation sovereign on its own territory. Here again the Cherokee seem fully aware of the irony inherent in the fact that, having recently taken for themselves the specific forms of the American government—having, as they put it, exercised their "right to improve our Government" (4 my emphasis)—they should find that government perceived as an invention, newly erected, rather than as merely a version of what has always been.
In addition to these local, or thematic, ironies, I would suggest that the "official" Cherokee Memorial, from the point of view of emplotment, attempts to replace America's "official" tragic narrative of Indian decline with either an ironic or a comic counternarrative.[17] In figurative terms, to repeat, the Cherokee seek to undo an ironic tropology and to put in its place a metaphorical one; in narrative terms, however, the Cherokee offer to the Congress not the tragic tale it is used to, but instead, a tale that in the light of past
history and present circumstances can only be emplotted ironically or comically.
For the Cherokee Memorial insists that if, indeed, the Cherokee people must remove, they will do so entirely against their will, not voluntarily or by free choice, for "our attachment to the soil of our ancestors is too strong to be shaken" (H. R. 311 5). Thus the Cherokee refuse to accede to the central condition of tragedy, as it is understood by Sophocles or, indeed, by Jackson in his First Message to Congress, refusing a voluntary resignation to their fate. "The power of a State," the Cherokee fully recognize, "may put our national existence under its feet, and coerce us into her jurisdiction; but it would be contrary to legal right, and the plighted faith of the United States' Government" (4). Cherokee removal, as emplotted by the Cherokee , is not the tragic story the whites would tell of the sad-but-just punishment meted out by God, fate, or even the progress of history; instead, the Cherokee insist, the story of their expulsion can be nothing but the story of ironic victimization; should they be removed from their homeland, theirs would be no tragic tale, but rather, the merely pathetic story of people in the wrong place at the wrong time who, despite all their efforts to save themselves, were nonetheless crushed not by right but by might alone. The Cherokee memorialists will not allow their dispossession to be seen, as savagist ideology would have it, as inevitable or necessary, neither God's will, nor Nature's law. Rather, should they be "translated" west of the Mississippi, such an outcome would be the result of no more than the force of American imperial power.
But, of course, the purpose of the Cherokee Memorial in substituting such a bitterly ironic story for the comfortable tragedy familiar to American savagist thought is pre-
cisely to enlist the aid of Congress in preventing that story from taking place. Having announced their firm adherence "to what is right and agreeable to [themselves]," and their strong attachment "to the soil of [their] ancestors" (5), the Cherokee shift to a sketch of a happier outcome than that of removal. Noting that they have "been invited to a retrospective view of the past history of Indians who have melted away before the light of civilization, and the mountains of difficulties that have opposed [their] race in their advancement in civilized life," they yet "rejoice that [their] nation stands and grows a lasting monument of God's mercy, and a durable contradiction to the misconceived opinion that the aborigines are incapable of civilization" (5). As the preceding quotation may already indicate, the Cherokee, as they move toward the conclusion of their Memorial, offer a narrative of identity in which they describe themselves not only as politically analogous to Americans in regard to independence and sovereignty, but as like them in sharing a morally, religiously, and socially progressive future.
The Cherokee delegation writes,
The opposing mountains that cast fearful shadows in the road of Cherokee improvement, have dispersed into vernal clouds; and our people stand adorned with the flowers of achievement flourishing around them, and are encouraged to secure the attainment of all that is useful in science and Christian knowledge. (5)
The florid imagery continues as the Cherokee look to a continuance of "the fostering care of the United States" under which they have "prospered" (5); the latter phrase is repeated as they appeal, in conclusion, "for justice and humanity to the United States, under whose kind and foster-
ing care [they] have been led to the present degree of civilization, and the enjoyment of its consequent blessings" (6). With "patience" the Cherokee await the "final issue of [Congress's] wise deliberations" (6), and, rhetorically at least, propose a comic future in common with the dominant Euramerican society, as each progresses, at its own pace, toward the heights of Christian civilization.
The Cherokee Memorial, as I hope the reader will agree, is a very powerfully persuasive document. Nonetheless, it did not sufficiently persuade the Congress, where, finally, in the House, for want of four votes, as I have already noted, the Indian Removal Act was passed, and the Cherokee committed by law to the ironic destruction they had clearly foreseen and fought to avoid. Subsequent Memorials to Congress did not prevent the extension of Georgia law over the Cherokee in June of 1830, nor their forced removal westward in 1838.
