Representing the Cherokee nation: Subaltern studies and native American sovereignty

Boundary 2

Volumn 32, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 47-80

  Rifkin, Mark ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 67650153135     PISSN: 01903659     EISSN: 15272141     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/01903659-32-3-47     Document Type: Article

References (95)

1. Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, "American Indian Intellectualism and the New Indian Story," in Natives and Academics: Researching and Writing about American Indians, ed. Devon A. Mihesuah (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 127.
2. For discussions of the continuing problems facing indigenous peoples due to the administrative modalities of U.S. recognition of tribal status, see M. Annette Jaimes, ed., The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance (Boston: South End Press, 1992).
3. For the relation between Native American politics and the movement for indigenous rights internationally, see Glenn T. Morris, "International Law and Politics: Toward a Right to Self-Determination for Indigenous Peoples," in The State of Native America, 55-86;
4. and Steven V. Quesenberry, "Recent United Nation Initiatives Concerning the Rights of Indigenous Peoples," American Indian Culture and Research Journal 21, no. 3 (1997): 231-60.
5. By traditional, I do not mean static or somehow "premodern." Instead, the word traditional works to preserve a sense of cultural distinctiveness against the colonialist/capitalist pressure to assimilate to other norms. For investigations of the role of tradition in native cultures and governance, see Vine Deloria Jr. and Clifford M. Lytle, The Nations Within: The Past and Future of American Indian Sovereignty (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998);
6. Taiaiake Alfred, Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999);
7. M. Annette Jaimes, "American Indian Studies: Toward an Indigenous Model," American Indian Culture and Research Journal 11, no. 3 (1987): 1-16;
8. Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life (Cambridge: South End Press, 1999);
9. Robert Allen Warrior, Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 87-98;
10. and Craig S. Womack, Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
11. Cook-Lynn, "American Indian Intellectualism," 89.
12. The Cherokees are a particularly rich site for such an examination due to their unique position within legal and literary history. Central in the construction of early federal Indian policy, they were the first tribe to ratify a written constitution modeled on that of the United States, and several early Cherokee texts have been anthologized, particularly the petitions of the Cherokees to the U.S. government in the 1830s, also known as the Cherokee memorials. For a useful introduction to the place of the Cherokees in early federal Indian law, see Jill Norgren, The Cherokee Cases: The Confrontation of Law and Politics (New York: McGraw Hill, Inc., 1996).
13. For examples, see Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, "The American Indian Fiction Writers: Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, the Third World, and First Nation Sovereignty," in Why I Can't Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays: A Tribal Voice (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 78-96;
14. Chadwick Allen, "Postcolonial Theory and the Discourse of Treaties," American Quarterly 52, no. 1 (2000): 59-89;
15. and Maureen Konkle, "Indian Literacy, U.S. Colonialism, and Literary Criticism," American Literature 69, no. 3 (1997): 457-86.
16. Eric Cheyfitz, "The Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute: A Brief History," Interventions 2, no. 2 (2000): 251.
17. For a broader investigation of translation as a linguistic and legal matrix of conquest, see Eric Cheyfitz, The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from "The Tempest" to Tarzan (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997).
18. For examples, see Duane Champagne, Social Order and Political Change: Constitutional Governments among the Cherokee, the Choctaw, the Chickasaw, and the Creek (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992);
19. and Claudio Saunt, A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733-1816 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
20. My understanding of the traditional functioning of the towns, their decision-making processes, and the role of clans in the life of the towns has been shaped by the following: John Phillip Reid, A Law of Blood: The Primitive Law of the Cherokee Nation (New York: New York University Press, 1970), esp. 29-34;
21. John Phillip Reid, A Better Kind of Hatchet: Law, Trade, and Diplomacy in the Cherokee Nation during the Early Years of European Contact (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976);
22. Wilma Dunaway, "Rethinking Cherokee Acculturation: Agrarian Capitalism and Women's Resistance to the Cult of Domesticity, 1800-1838," American Indian Culture and Research Journal 21, no. 1 (1997): 155-92;
23. Richard V. Persico Jr., "Early Nineteenth-Century Cherokee Political Organization," in The Cherokee Indian Nation, a Troubled History, ed. Duane H. King (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1979), 92-109;
24. Theda Perdue, Cherokee Women: Gender and Cultural Change, 1700-1835 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), esp. 41-59;
25. Rennard Strickland, Fire and the Spirits: Cherokee Law from Clan to Court (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1975), esp. 40-52;
26. Circe Sturm, Blood Politics: Race, Culture, and Identity in the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002);
27. and Sarah H. Hill, Weaving New Worlds: Southeastern Cherokee Women and Their Basketry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
28. For discussion of clan membership as traditionally the defining part of what it means to be Cherokee, see Perdue, Cherokee Women, 41-59;
29. and Reid, A Law of Blood, 35-48.
30. William G. McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), 366, 378. Champagne's comparative study of the southeastern tribes, Social Order and Political Change, shares similar problems to Cherokee Renascence in its somewhat uncritical use of the rhetoric of nationhood.
31. For examples of "postcolonial" literary critical readings of Native American textual production that utilize theorists outside of subaltern studies, especially Homi Bhabha, see Priscilla Wald, Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 20-40;
32. Cheryl Walker, Indian Nation: Native American Literature and Nineteenth-Century Nationalisms (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997);
33. and Arnold Krupat, The Turn to the Native: Studies in Criticism and Culture (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), esp. 30-55.
34. For a more extensive description/theorization of the work of this group, see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography," in Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 3-32;
35. and Gyan Prakash, "Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism," American Historical Review 99, no. 5 (1994): 1475-90.
36. For a provocative effort to apply subaltern studies to the United States, see Eva Cherniavsky, "Subaltern Studies in a U.S. Frame," boundary 2 23, no. 2 (1996): 85-110. I tend to think that her usage of the critical term/trope subaltern elides rather than elucidates Native American struggles for self-determination by presenting native peoples as racialized minorities rather than properly sovereign polities.
37. Wilma Mankiller and Michael Wallis, Mankiller: A Chief and Her People (New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1993), 78-79, 86.
38. For discussion of Cherokee culture and history in the eighteenth century, see Tom Hatley, Dividing Paths: Cherokees and South Carolinians through the Era of Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993);
39. James Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee (1900; repr., New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1995), 31-82;
40. Reid, A Better Kind of Hatchet; and Perdue, Cherokee Women. For discussion of English and American Indian policy prior to 1789
41. see Dorothy V. Jones, License for Empire: Colonialism by Treaty in Early America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982);
42. Reginald Horsman, Expansion and American Indian Policy, 1783-1812 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1967), 3-52;
43. and Francis Paul Prucha, American Indian Treaties: The History of a Political Anomaly (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 23-85.
44. Cherokees traditionally lived in towns that were clustered into their own loose geographic alliances. During most of the eighteenth century, there were four or five such clusters, but by the end of the American Revolution, these had coalesced into two larger configurations - the Upper and Lower Towns. While these were not really Cherokee designations, they approximate the split in dealings with the United States between those who agreed to abide by the Treaty of Holston (1791) and those who did not, who were beaten back by U.S. forces during the 1790s. See Reid, A Better Kind of Hatchet; and McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence, 20-32.
45. For a map and list of Cherokee towns and town formations in the early eighteenth century, see Hill, Weaving New Worlds, 68.
46. McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence, 58-108.
47. For discussion of the removal policy, see Ronald N. Satz, American Indian Policy in the Jacksonian Era (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975), 9-151;
48. and Prucha, American Indian Treaties, 156-82.
49. For the text of the removal act, see Francis Paul Prucha, Documents of United States Indian Policy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 52-53.
50. For an alternative account of the events of the first removal crisis, from 1808-1810, see Thurman Wilkins, Cherokee Tragedy: The Ridge Family and the Decimation of a People (1970; repr., Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986), 37-51.
51. Wilkins, Cherokee Tragedy, 50-51.
52. Laws of the Cherokee Nation Adopted by the Council at Various Periods, Printed for the Benefit of the Nation (1852) (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, Inc., 1973), 5. All other references to specific statutes are drawn from this volume and are cited parenthetically by page number.
53. Between 1817 and 1826, the council passed numerous pieces of legislation designed to institute particular aspects of capitalist practice. These included the following: regulating ownership of turnpikes (1819); nullifying all contracts with slaves not preapproved by their masters (1819); authorizing marshals to collect debt (1820); instituting a fifty-cent poll tax on each "head of a family" and "single man" under sixty (1820); setting up a registry for advertisements of "estray property" (1824); outlawing "improvements within the distance of one-fourth of a mile of the field or plantation of another" (1825); allowing the building of fences to demarcate ownership (1825); classifying "improvements" as exclusively the possession of those who made them (1825); and protecting contracts against a statute of limitations on seeking judicial relief for "contested claims" (1825) (Laws of the Cherokee Nation, 6-19, 34-49).
54. and Dunaway, "Rethinking Cherokee Acculturation," which offers an incredibly helpful analysis of the rise in Cherokee exports as a sign of more substantive social changes.
55. As William McLoughlin and Walter H. Conser note, "Perhaps something like twenty-five or thirty families out of a total of 2,637 in the nation - roughly 1 percent - seem to have accumulated the major share of wealth" ("The Cherokees in Transition: A Statistical Analysis of the Federal Cherokee Census of 1835," Journal of American History 64, no. 3 [1977]: 699).
56. and Strickland, Fire and the Spirits, 79.
57. For a history of Cherokee slaveholding, see Theda Perdue, Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society, 1540-1866 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1979).
58. For an examination of the role of slavery in the eighteenth century as part of the trade economy with the English, see Reid, A Better Kind of Hatchet.
59. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 160.
60. Chatterjee borrows this concept from the work of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. See Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 52-55.
61. Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, 203.
62. On the problems of using "civil society" as a category for conceptualizing resistance to exploitation and imperialism, see John Beverley, Subalternity and Representation: Arguments in Cultural Theory (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), 115-32.
63. The Cherokee Phoenix, the official national newspaper, reported on January 1, 1831, that the composition of the council was as follows: "The Legislature consists of two branches styled the National Committee and Council, the former number 16 members and the latter 24. The presiding officers of both these branches are full Cherokee. Of the Committee, two only, including The President, are full Indians; of the rest seven are half Indian, two more, and five less than half. Of the Council, 16 are supposed to be full Indians, seven half, and one only one-fourth" (quoted in McLoughlin and Conser, "The Cherokees in Transition," 698).
64. Due to Georgia laws, the Cherokee held only one election under the constitution of 1827, and McLoughlin suggests that it mostly endorsed those who already were in power (Cherokee Renascence, 407). Therefore, these numbers likely reflect the relative composition of the council dating from the mid-1820s.
65. Used a great deal in Cherokee historiography as well as in writings in the period, the designation full-blood is a bit of a misnomer, in that the question of how someone comes to be "Cherokee" is a fraught one. There are at least three competing frameworks for understanding Cherokee identity: matrilineality and matrilineal adoption; citizenship in the Cherokee Nation; and possession of Cherokee "blood," irrespective of the sex of the progenitor. In practice, then, "full-blood" usually means someone who is neither of white nor African descent but may have ancestral ties to other Native American tribes, and in the period, this designation strongly correlates with maintenance of traditional beliefs and practices, though it is unclear the degree to which one's relation to tradition determined whether or not one was designated as a "full-blood" (especially prior to the semistandardization of blood quantum definitions in the late nineteenth century). See Sturm, Blood Politics; McLoughlin and Conser, "The Cherokees in Transition," 693;
66. and Theda Perdue, "Clan and Court: Another Look at the Early Cherokee Republic," American Indian Quarterly 24, no. 4 (2000): 562-69.
67. For similar critiques of the equation of Indian writing and cultural inauthenticity, see Simon Ortiz, "Towards a National Indian Literature: Cultural Authenticity in Nationalism," Melus 8, no. 2 (1981): 7-12;
68. David Murray, Forked Tongues: Speech, Writing, and Representation in North American Indian Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991);
69. and Womack, Red on Red.
70. and Champagne, Social Order and Political Change, 122-23, 134-43.
71. Historiographic arguments that the Cherokee actively consented to the adoption of republican forms of governance and capitalist forms of ownership and exchange most often cite popular actions around questions of removal. As Champagne argues, "The power of the Cherokee political consensus can be seen most clearly in the dismissing of leaders who favored removal" (Social Order and Political Change, 142). However, my point here is precisely that questions of territorial integrity need to be differentiated from other issues and cannot be taken as evidence of a broader popular investment in national politics or nationalism as a way of organizing Cherokee life.
72. Laws of the Cherokee Nation, 15, 31. During the 1820s, the legislature unevenly became bicameral, shifting from a council advised by the National Committee to two separate bodies - the National Committee and the Council - each with its own vote on legislation. In this shift, the legislature as a whole came to be called the "National Council." I have been using "council" to talk about the governing body as a whole and will continue to do so. When capitalized, then, "Council" refers to one section of the bicameral legislature.
73. In fact, many towns moved on the Trail of Tears as units and re-created themselves in the west, where many place names reflect the old town names (Sturm, Blood Politics, 11).
74. M cLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence, 139-43;
75. Alfred, Peace, Power, Righteousness, 30.
76. See Perdue, Cherokee Women; Raymond D. Fogelson, "On the 'Petticoat Government' of the Eighteenth-Century Cherokee," in Personality and the Cultural Construction of Society: Papers in Honor of Melford E. Spiro, ed. David K. Jordan and Marc J. Swartz (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990), 161-81;
77. and Eleanor Leacock, "Ethnohistorical Investigation of Egalitarian Politics in Eastern North America," in The Development of Political Organization in Native North America, ed. Elisabeth Tooker (Philadelphia: American Ethnological Society, 1983), 17-31.
78. For discussion of Georgia and the federal government's response to the adoption of the Cherokee Constitution, see Ulrich B. Phillips, Georgia and State Rights (Yellow Springs, Ohio: Antioch Press, 1968).
79. For correspondence between the Georgia legislature and the federal government, including Georgia's demand that the Cherokees be removed, see House Document 211, 20th Cong., 1st Sess. (173). The text is reprinted in The New American State Papers: Indian Affairs, ed. Thomas C. Cochran, vol. 9 (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources Inc., 1972), 69-85.
80. For discussion of women's roles, see Dunaway, "Rethinking Cherokee Acculturation";
81. Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, 196.
82. Such critical practice is of particular import in cases where there is as little access to publication as among the Cherokees. There was no printing press in Cherokee territory until 1828, and when introduced the press was owned by the government and principally used for publishing the national newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix. For laws having to do with funding for a national press, the building of a printing house, and the Phoenix, see Laws of the Cherokee Nation, 47, 81-82, 85-87, and 114.
83. Ranajit Guha, "The Prose of Counter-Insurgency," in Selected Subaltern Studies, 63.
84. "Memorial of the Cherokee Representatives," in The New American State Papers: Indian Affairs, 9:334.
85. However, Wilkins is decidedly biased toward the treaty party. See also The Papers of Chief John Ross: Volume 1, 1807-1839, ed. Gary E. Moulton (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), 332-85.
86. For demographic consideration of the number of fatalities on the Trail of Tears, see Russell Thornton, The Cherokees: A Population History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 63-76.
87. Beverley, Subalternity and Representation, 94.
88. The phrase "State legislation" refers to the laws passed by Georgia from 1828-1830, which included dividing up Cherokee territory and reapportioning it into existing state districts, extending state law over the Cherokees, outlawing the meeting of Cherokee councils and the operations of the Cherokee government generally, and creating a lottery to allocate plots of Cherokee land to white settlers. For the text of the laws, see Laws of the Colonial and State Governments, Relating to Indians and Indian Affairs, from 1633 to 1831 Inclusive . . . (1832; repr., New York: Earl M. Coleman, 1979), 195-229.
89. See Phillips, Georgia and State Rights.
90. The alternatives would be either ceding power over Indian affairs to "State legislation," thereby violating existing treaties, or renouncing the need for consent altogether and justifying relocation on the basis of the greater military power of the United States, also violating previous treaties as well as more generally vitiating the United States' narration of its own territorial legitimacy. See Richard E. Ellis, The Union at Risk: Jacksonian Democracy, States' Rights, and the Nullification Crisis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987);
91. and Norgren, Cherokee Cases.
92. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 256. The section of Critique from which I quote is a revised version of the earlier essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?"
93. Spivak, A Critique, 257, 260.
94. Arnold Krupat, "Figures and the Law," in Ethnocriticism: Ethnography, History, Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 156. The piece itself, though, is about the passage of and response to the Indian Removal Act rather than the removal treaty.
95. Cook-Lynn, "American Indian Intellectualism," 111.