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."