Cooke Dissertation

COOKE, JASON SCOTT, PhD. Indian Fields: Historicizing Native Space and Sovereignty in the Era of Removal. (2017) Directed by Dr. Mark Rifkin. 326 pp. Familiar to most anyone with knowledge of U.S. history, antebellum Indian removal likely evokes a drama comprised of two roles: on one hand, Indian peoples as represented by elite Cherokee activists, and, on the other, their political antagonists in the nascent states' rights movement, among whom the infamous Andrew Jackson stands both as agent and symbol. What may be surprising, however, is that Americanist scholarship on Native removal similarly reduces it to an overarching Indian-Anglo binary. As against a two-worlds model that frames removal writ large in terms of a single political dualism, I argue that regionally specific forms of Native dispossession around the time of the Indian Removal Act (1830) yield different narrative assemblages of Indian identity. Further, these assemblages correspond with differences in the historical conditions of settler colonialism in different parts of the country, conditions irreducible to a single narrative premised on the territorial claims of the United States. Combining work in the field of Native studies by scholars such as Gerald Vizenor and Jodi Byrd with post- structuralist insights into the relationship between narrativity and historicism, this dissertation develops a geographic paradigm that emphasizes the ways in which both Native and settler actors use linear narratives of history to fashion claims to territory. Each chapter situates the work of an Indigenous activist of the period (the Cherokee spokesperson Elias Boudinot, the Pequot minister William Apess, and the Sauk warrior Black Hawk) in relation to non-Native political and literary texts that lay claim, whether implicitly or explicitly, to lands otherwise held by these activists' respective nations. Accordingly, the project argues for a change in the conceptualization of Indian identity. Rather than a vexed yet essentially referential signifier for Native peoples, Indianness as a narrative construct marks the point at which uneven and at times competing territorial claims by different settler actors gives way to a portrait of the historical necessity of a given claim. What is more, this narrativity becomes available to Native peoples themselves as these regional struggles unfold. Insofar as it renders a linear historicity in the service of land claims, narrating Indianness gives Native activists a means to represent place-based Indigenous sovereignty to audiences not inclined to make sense of this concept. INDIAN FIELDS: HISTORICIZING NATIVE SPACE AND SOVEREIGNTY IN THE ERA OF REMOVAL by Jason Scott Cooke A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Greensboro 2017 Approved by Committee Chair © 2017 Jason Scott Cooke For Joen, whose history it is my joy to witness. ii APPROVAL PAGE This dissertation written by Jason Scott Cooke has been approved by the following committee of the Faculty of The Graduate School at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Committee Chair ___________________________________ Committee Members ___________________________________ ____________________________________ Date of Acceptance by Committee Date of Final Oral Examination iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS A lot of time and effort went into this project, and I owe a debt of gratitude to many people. The English Department staff makes sure that everything runs as smoothly as possible for panicky graduate students—and Alyson Everhart steers that ship. Thanks to Dr. Keilan Rickard of Student Health Services for being a great listener. I would like to thank Edward Jacobs, Imtiaz Habib, and Jeff Richards for setting me on this path. And to my former classmates, especially Zach Laminack, Craig Morehead, and Dan Burns, thanks for your camaraderie and for creating an intellectual environment that undoubtedly contributed to my work. I will miss our cubicle days. Foremost among this group are my committee members. I thank Karen Kilcup both for being a critical yet dedicated reader and for pushing me to continue developing the project. I would like to thank Karen Weyler for years of invaluable mentorship and for helping to shape me into a confident scholar. And Mark Rifkin, I would need another chapter to express my gratitude to you. In lieu of that, I'll just say that none of this would have been possible without your commitment to my success. You have been a patient and exemplary teacher, and I look forward to you remaining a great and cherished friend. Then there are the people behind the scenes. To John and Donna Sondberg, thanks for your support. To mom and dad, thanks for insisting that I do the best that I could in school all those years ago. To my siblings, Jamie and Tyler, thanks for keeping me balanced. And to Britt and Joen—nothing here works without your presence in my life. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION: FROM A HISTORY OF REMOVAL TO THE HISTORICITY OF SETTLER COLONIALISM .............................................1 Knowing Indian Land .................................................................................11 Dispossession at the Limits of History .......................................................19 From History to (Settler) Historicity ...........................................................27 II. INDIANIZING CHEROKEE CIVILIZATION: HISTORICIZING (SETTLER) SOVEREIGNTY IN THE NATIVE SOUTHEAST ....................................................................36 Revising State Sovereignty: Historicizing Indianness in the Wake of Cherokee Civilization ....................................................42 Playing Historian: Familiarizing Settler Belonging After Cherokee Removal .......................................................................61 Repositioning Savagery in Elias Boudinot's "An Address to the Whites" ...................................................................84 Notes .........................................................................................................112 III. HISTORICIZING INDIAN CHARACTER IN NEW ENGLAND: (DIS)PLACING NATIVE SOVEREIGNTY IN CHILD, SEDGWICK, AND APESS ...........................................................................120 Hobomok's Surrogate Fatherhood ............................................................128 Sublating Magawisca's Nature ..................................................................159 Characterizing a History of Violence in William Apess's Eulogy on King Philip ...........................................179 Notes .........................................................................................................203 IV. REALIZING NATIVE DISPOSSESSION IN THE OLD NORTHWEST: FRONTIER HISTORICITY, TERRITORY, AND INDIAN WITHDRAWAL IN KIRKLAND AND BLACK HAWK ..........................209 Indian Withdrawal and the Future-Anterior Territory .....................................................................217 Boosting (the Backwoods) to a New Frontier ..........................................231 v Black Hawk's Parallax View ....................................................................257 Notes ........................................................................................................292 V. CONCLUSION: PLACING SETTLER COLONIALISM IN THE CONTEXT OF NATIVE SOVEREIGNTY ...................................296 Notes ........................................................................................................306 WORKS CITED ..............................................................................................................307 vi 1 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION: FROM A HISTORY OF REMOVAL TO THE HISTORICITY OF SETTLER COLONIALISM In April 1829, a Cherokee delegation led by John Ross, Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation, met with President Jackson's Secretary of War John Eaton to protest the administration's insistence on removal. Though not the first, this meeting gained added urgency by the recent discovery of gold on Cherokee lands that were also claimed by Georgia. In addition to intensifying already massive settler encroachments, the discovery led the state to annex the lucrative territory, thus beginning its infamous legislative assault on Native political autonomy. Eaton's response predictably rehashed the arguments for Native occupancy laid out in Johnson v. McIntosh (1823), in which Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall excavated and normalized a centuries-old doctrine of discovery. Yet Eaton did so toward what must have been a stunning assertion. In addition to tracing the supposed precedents for state sovereignty, he found the immediate cause of intensifying violence and state aggressions alike to be the "course" taken by the Cherokee in "establishing an independent, substantive, government" within Georgia's borders (qtd. in Prucha 45). The irony was not lost on Cherokee activist Elias Boudinot. He would respond in the Cherokee Phoenix the following June that his people "have always had a government of their own" and Georgia a pretext for its usurpation; yet nothing was said of the impossibility of adapting such governance when his people observed "savage laws" (Boudinot 108-9). He hammered the point. In retrospect, it could 2 not but seem that "the illustrious Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe were only tantalizing us" by encouraging "the pursuit of agriculture and

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