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.