Manifesting America: The Imperial Construction of U.S. National Space

MANIFESTING AMERICA

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MANIFESTING AMERICA The Imperial Construction of U.S. National Space

MARK RIFKIN

1 2009

3 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Copyright ª 2009 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rifkin, Mark. Manifesting America: the imperial construction of U.S. national space / Mark Rifkin. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-19-538717-9 1. United States—Territorial expansion. 2. United States—Boundaries. 3. United States—Race relations. 4. Indians of North America—Land tenure. 5. Human territoriality—Political aspects—United States—History. 6. Nationalism—United States—History. 7. American literature—1783–1850—History and criticism. 8. American literature—19th century—History and criticism. 9. United States—Study and teaching (Higher) 10. Imperialism—Study and teaching (Higher) I. Title. E179.5.R54 2009 911'.73—dc22 2008053932

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The writing of this book, which began life as a dissertation, occurred over the course of seven years at four different institutions, so as one might imagine, I owe a great many thanks to a great number of people. This project would not have been possible if not for the tenacious and unflagging support, sustained critical engagement, and example of intellectual rigor and professional integrity offered by Eric Chyefitz. Nancy Bentley and Jim English were exceptional readers, providing needed feedback, advice, and encouragement, and I am deeply grateful for the amount of time they let me dwell in their offices. I seek to live up to the example set by these three. While Colin Dayan joined the department after I was well into the process of dissertating, conversations with her were immensely important to the shape this book eventually took, and Michael Awkward, Margreta de Grazia, and Chris Looby also were challenging inspirations. When choosing a graduate program, one of my primary considerations was whether there was a sense of community among the students, which I found in ways that never ceased to astonish me. Thanks especially to Cindy Port, Lisa Martinez, Louis Cabri, Martha Schoolman, Justine Murison, Adam Hotek, Kendall Johnson, Matt Ruben, Carmen Higgins, Sherri Wilcauskus, Hester Blum, Jonathan Eburne, Leigh Edwards, Melissa Homestead, Brett Wilson, Susan Essman, Rob Barrett, Yoonmee Chang, Veronica Schanoes, Jennifer Higginbotham, Elizabeth Williamson, Miriam Jacobson, Erik Simpson, Carolyn Jacobson, Amina Gautier, and Jeff Allred for your friendship and camaraderie. While working on this project, I also incurred debts to people at several other institutions. At Fordham University, Chris GoGwilt and Fawzia Mustafa gave me a position when I really needed one, and Mia Zamora and Michelle Dowd provided great company and much lunchtime laughter. For

vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

my time at the University of Chicago, thanks to Michael Millner, Katherine Biers, Eric Slauter, Raúl Coronado, Jacqueline Goldsby, and Cathy Cohen. At Skidmore College, I very much appreciated the feedback and support offered by Tillman Nechtman, Pushi Prasad, and Dana Gliserman-Kopans, and thanks also to Josh Woodfork, Ross Forman, Sarah Goodwin, Barbara Black, Kate Greenspan, Janet Casey, Susannah Mintz, Catherine Golden, Michael Marx, Jennifer Delton, Richard Kim, and Regina Janes. I am particularly grateful to Mason Stokes for aid and comfort in a difficult time. Bethany Schneider deserves special mention for going above and beyond every time. In less professional terms, I could not have made it through the last seven years without the Faeries, particularly Christian Hansen, Kent Latimer, Albo Jeavons, Keith Brand, and Craig Bruns. To Alex Avelin, Tammy Sears, and especially Jon Dichter, thank you for welcoming me into your homes and making me family. To Erika Lin, Sheila Avelin, and Anna Ivy, words cannot express it (and you already know). To Doodle, Bugga, and Zivvy, thanks for gifting me with the endless joys of unclehood. Research for this book was funded in part by dissertation fellowships from the University of Pennsylvania; a postdoctoral fellowship from the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture at the University of Chicago; and a Faculty Development Grant from Skidmore College. Portions of chapters 1 and 2, respectively, were published as “Representing the Cherokee Nation: Subaltern Studies and Native Sovereignty” in boundary 2 (32.3, 2005) and “Documenting Tradition: Territoriality and Textuality in Black Hawk’s Narrative” in American Literature (80.4, 2008). Thanks to Duke University Press for allowing me to include them here. Finally, I would like to thank Sharon Rifkin, Neal Rifkin, and Gail Dichter for making me possible then, now, and always.

CONTENTS

Introduction: Self-Determination, Subaltern Studies, and the Critical Remapping of U.S. Empire, 3 1. Representing the Cherokee Nation: Imperial Power and Elite Interests in the Remaking of Cherokee Governance, 37 2. The Territoriality of Tradition: Treaties, Hunting Grounds, and Prophecy in Black Hawk’s Narrative, 75 3. Comanche Metaphors: Juan Seguín’s Memoirs and the Figure of the Barbarian in the Struggle for Texas, 109 4. Partial Citizens and Insurgent Masses: Narrating Violence Past and Present in Post-1848 California, 149 Notes, 197 Works Cited, 241 Index, 271

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MANIFESTING AMERICA

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INTRODUCTION Self-Determination, Subaltern Studies, and the Critical Remapping of U.S. Empire In City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation (2005), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that land bought by the Oneidas does not fall under their sovereignty and therefore is not exempt from municipal taxation. The court reached this conclusion despite its acceptance of the following facts: the Oneida Indian Nation is a federally recognized tribe; the land in question historically had been under Oneida control as part of their “reservation”; and the property unlawfully was sold to whites in 1807 after most of the Oneidas had moved west due to pressure exerted on them by the state of New York, reinforced (or at least not mitigated) by the federal government. The majority opinion, written by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, offers a twofold argument. Oneida sovereignty cannot be recognized as extending over this territory because to do so would unsettle longstanding legal schemas, and the delay in the assertion of native claims to this territory eliminates the possibility of recovering exclusive authority over it now. “The fact that OIN [Oneida Indian Nation] brought this action promptly after acquiring the properties does not overcome the Oneidas’ failure to reclaim ancient prerogatives earlier or lessen the problems associated with upsetting New York’s long-exercised sovereignty over the area. OIN’s claim concerns grave, but ancient, wrongs, and the relief available must be commensurate with that historical reality” (1491). Put another way, official narratives of U.S. jurisdiction have disavowed alternative mappings and sovereignties for too long for them to be acknowledged now, and the failure of peoples dispossessed in the consolidation of U.S. national territoriality to remedy their own displacement bars them from regaining substantive control over their lands. The court’s perversely tautological propositions in this case illustrate rather dramatically the ways that U.S. national policy and identity 3

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MANIFESTING AMERICA

fundamentally is animated by and enacts an imperial dynamic—naturalizing domestic space by foreclosing countervailing political geographies.1 More than simply indicating the persistent afterlife of antebellum expansionism, the legal logic of the case condenses the broader ideological structure of U.S. empire I want to explore. In justifying the court’s findings, Ginsberg invokes the “impossibility doctrine,” which refers to the “impracticability of returning to Indian control land that generations earlier passed into numerous private hands” particularly given its likely “disruptive” effects in light of the “justifiable expectations” of non-Indian residents (1490–92). While recognizing the unconstitutionality of the taking of native territory, the court insists that it cannot now intervene because to do so would inconvenience too many non-natives. In other words, the continued enforcement of the policy of expropriating native lands has become too much of a sedimented “expectation” for it to be reversed. Of course, as noted by Justice John Paul Stevens in his lone dissent, the fact that the Oneidas already have gained legal possession of the land in question via purchase means that their assertion of sovereignty does not in fact require dislodging non-natives (1497); moreover, the majority opinion itself observes that the expansion of native sovereignty is entirely legally feasible, simply requiring that the land officially be put into trust by the Secretary of the Interior (1493–94). The figure of “impossibility” indexes something more than the limits of either practicality or constitutionality, pointing less toward a concern over native sovereignty per se than the articulation of a version of it not directly managed by the federal government. This “doctrine” seems to mark an anxious denial, a kind of primary repression not of a particular kind of governance so much as the possibility of an eruption of an autonomous political order within what the United States maintains is its own boundaries. In asserting a de facto right to superintend indigenous territories and populations in perpetuity, though, the decision repeatedly describes the dispossession of the Oneidas as an “ancient” act, displacing and safely sealing it into a long distant past and thereby casting current conflict over the contours of U.S. legal geography as instead merely anachronistic Indian longing for what has vanished. Lest such a dismissal of native authority seem more like a repetition of national violence than a recollection of bygone days, the court further calls forth the “acquiescence doctrine,” which we are told “does not depend on the original validity of a boundary line; rather, it attaches legal consequences to acquiescence in the observance of the boundary” (1492). According to the decision, “The Oneidas long ago relinquished the reins of government” and “did not seek to regain possession of their aboriginal lands by court degree until the 1970s” (1482, 1491). The supposed failure of the Oneidas to press their claims is interpreted as implicit assent to the surrender of

INTRODUCTION 5

sovereignty over the lands in question. More than the court’s circumscription of native authority or its dismissive and inaccurate representation of prior Oneida occupancy as inhabitance of a “wilderness” (1490), what is notable here is the ways the disjunction between Oneida and U.S. political mappings rhetorically is resolved through the simulation of consent, providing an overdetermined account of Oneida agency in order to foreclose any potential questions about the justice of the court’s actions. Thus, while the ruling presents the dimensions of state and federal governance as given, the legitimacy of that claim to self-evidence is premised on a narrative of native collective will, which not only defers discussion of ongoing forms of U.S. coercion but actually utilizes the representation of ostensible Oneida assent as a vehicle through which to naturalize their subordination. The assertion of the obviousness of national space and the construction of indigenous subjectivity appear here as interwoven discursive projects, the latter providing the catalyst for a conceptual alchemy in which evidence of the fractured and palimpsestic quality of national jurisdiction is transmuted into proof of the enduring coherence of the republic and its commitment to democratic process. What is at stake here, then, is not merely a recognition of native peoples’ existence as polities but the ways the state uses the apparent acknowledgment of native political identity as a vehicle for consolidating its own authority.2 The dialectic of “impossibility” and “acquiescence” at play in this case, I will argue, lies at the heart of U.S. imperialism in the antebellum period. The insistence, then and now, on the inherent coherence and contiguity of national geography suggests the political pressure coalesced around the image of unbroken unity within American borders. The grounding of the operations of the state apparatus in a clearly demarcated political cartography was of particular importance in the wake of the American revolution and the ratification of the Constitution, as a way of mediating the competing jurisdictional claims within federalism and coordinating (as well as validating) the range of bureaucratic functions the federal government now was called on to perform. The imagined map of the republic served, and serves, as a cohesive icon through which to give shape to and manage the relation between various institutional discourses and imperatives.3 However, in the antebellum period, the boundaries of the nation were not static, expanding to include Indian lands (surrounded by the states and on the “frontier”) as well as territory purchased from France and wrested from Spain and Mexico. These acquisitions, absorptions, and annexations trouble any easy differentiation of domestic and alien spaces and populations. Yet the U.S. government continued to assert, perhaps with even greater fervor, the obviousness of that distinction. The strain of this disjunction is registered in the legal claim that those peoples whose lands have been

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incorporated into the nation have in some fashion consented—acquiesced— to their insertion into U.S. jurisdictional terminologies and topographies. This administrative conceit, though, is shot through with the stress of interpellation; the official identities constructed for such domesticated populations are suffused with force, organized around the demand that they reconfirm both the self-evidence of national territoriality and the nation’s foundational commitment to liberty as emblematized by free choice.4 The imperial structure of U.S. jurisdiction prior to the Civil War, I contend, inheres in this double movement: recoding land formerly beyond the purview of U.S. governance as intimately embedded in national space; and producing subjectivities for involuntarily interiorized peoples that are designed to testify to their non-coerced acceptance of their place in national life. Manifesting America charts this dynamic with respect to Indian removal in the southeast and the old northwest (chapters 1 and 2) and the annexation of Mexican territory in Texas and California (chapters 3 and 4), illustrating the ways such internalized populations appropriated and contested U.S. geographies and identities in a range of nonfictional writings such as pamphlets, petitions, histories, laws and constitutions, and autobiographies. Geographically the chapters move from east to west, starting with territory considered “within” U.S. boundaries in the wake of the Revolution and then moving to various lands obtained through the Louisiana Purchase, the annexation of Texas, and the Mexican-American War. Addressing the discourse of Cherokee nationalism in the 1810s and 1820s, chapter 1 uses perhaps the best-known example of Indian removal to explore the ways native governance and self-representation were affected by U.S. administrative imperatives, specifically the internal class struggles over the institutionalization of “nationhood” in a constitutional structure resembling that of the United States. Turning to the western Great Lakes area, chapter 2 offers a reading of Black Hawk’s 1833 narrative as a way of illuminating imperial efforts to break up regional native formations into isolated tribal units for the purposes of installing U.S. law as the neutral medium of negotiation, and it traces the attendant insistence by allied native groups on the integrity of their traditional modes of diplomacy and land use. Also, as an as-told-to autobiography/history, the narrative raises important methodological questions about how to interpret various kinds of native textual production in light of the documentary procedures that were central to U.S. Indian policy. Shifting away from an exclusive focus on indigenous peoples, the second half of the book turns to the competing claims to land over which Mexico previously had asserted jurisdiction. Chapter 3 examines Juan Seguín’s autobiographical narrative as a window onto the complex relationships among peoples and forms of territoriality in the wake of the

INTRODUCTION 7

Texas revolution; it demonstrates how the characterization of Comanche land use as savage wandering was used by Anglos and Tejanos alike not only to disavow native placemaking but to deny the legitimacy of each other’s occupancy, even as successive Anglo regimes used discourses of citizenship and treaty-making to present the displacements they enacted as legitimate and even consensual. The final chapter turns to post-1848 California, exploring the differences between the kinds of legal subjectivity and forms of racialization at play there and those at work in Texas. While former Mexican nationals were displaced from their land in California as well, that process, and the discourses of citizenship and property through which it occurred, drew on the region’s history of native missionization and insurgency as a basis for outlining the contours of legitimate political identity and landholding, an ideological matrix whose governing topoi were organized around training for civilization rather than migration and “marauding.” The two halves of the book are linked by the attempt to trace the conditions of possibility for political self-representation and sovereignty on lands narrated as domestic, foregrounding the persistence of alternative mappings and political principles to those institutionalized by the United States.5 While playing on the notion of “manifest destiny,” my title points toward a different way of conceptualizing the U.S. appropriation of territory in the antebellum period. The concept of “manifest destiny” often is invoked in ways that create the impression of a zeitgeist in which public policy and popular opinion merge to create an unstoppable force.6 It largely appears as a monolith, an integrated totality rather than a shifting matrix in which national territoriality remains haunted by geopolitical formations absorbed but not entirely eliminated. Additionally, while “manifest destiny” conjures the dream of a potentially limitless projection of American power across continental, hemispheric, and even transoceanic distances, such a vision of expansion without end, although undoubtedly present in the antebellum period and after, leaves aside the question of governance, the ways territories and populations are incorporated into the constitutional, bureaucratic, and cartographic frameworks of U.S. law and policy. How does the United States differentiate between the spheres of domestic and foreign policy, and what interests and imperatives shape this, admittedly volatile and malleable, distinction? How are the domains of citizenship and alienage maintained, what do these categories mean for populations who find themselves and their lands narrated as inside the nation, and how is their collective consent invented as part of regularizing and legitimizing U.S. jurisdiction? Rather than focusing on the idea of a broad cultural mentality underwriting the drive for expansion, the book explores the process of manifesting

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national space. It addressesthe range of ways U.S. administrative and legal discourses worked to produce jurisdictional cohesion even in the face of overwhelming evidence of both the absence of government control over large swaths of territory ostensibly within the nation and the shifting and amorphous dimensions of the border itself. Tracking the semiotic and literal violence required to (re)constitute this bureaucratic fiction, my account investigates the numerous tensions, negotiations, and struggles generated by the intersection of U.S. mappings with the social formations and selfrepresentations of the peoples already occupying what comes to be narrated as domestic space.7 In this way, Manifesting America offers a genealogy of the dialectic of absorption and assent—of impossibility and acquiescence— that persists as a central element of U.S. imperial nationalism to this day.

REPUBLICAN SPACE AND IMPERIAL NATIONALISM

What is an ideology without a space to which it refers, a space which it describes, whose vocabulary and links it makes use of, and whose code it embodies? —Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space In Dominance Without Hegemony, Ranajit Guha argues, “there can be no colonialism without coercion, no subjugation of an entire people in its own homeland by foreigners without the explicit use of force” (24). What happens when the “homeland” discursively and institutionally is constituted in ways that deny that the colonizers are in fact “foreign”? Absent the territorial clarity of colonial intrusion/invasion, the settlement of an elsewhere legally distinct from yet administratively subordinated to the “home” country, what is imperialistic in antebellum U.S. boundary making is the ways that once-alien places and populations are inserted into a national hegemony structured around both the self-evidence of the distinction between foreign and domestic space and a putative commitment to democratic principles.8 Prior to the Civil War, the United States was not a colonial power, in the sense of exerting control over territory officially recognized as outside the nation-state and administered as colonies.9 In light of the origin of the state in the struggle to escape the British colonial system, U.S. officials repeatedly expressed their commitment to forms of governance that repudiated colonialism as such, citing the challenge it would pose to the separation of powers in federalism, the difficulties of determining the legal status of populations in occupied lands, its violation

INTRODUCTION 9

of national faith as pledged in treaties, and the political undesirability of overseas possessions that would have to be defended from European commercial and territorial interests. In order to sustain the ideology of republicanism, the territory over which the United States claimed authority had to be narrated as part of the nation, as within the space transected by constitutional networks of political representation. The notion of a structuring coincidence between the contours of national power and peoplehood presents the domestic and the foreign as clearly and easily differentiable, promoting a geopolitical imaginary in which the border cuts a clean line that is drawn and adjusted in light of popular choice rather than colonial coercion. Thus, U.S. legal geography appears as if it were the product and promoter of a national commitment to liberty.10 In addition to providing a moral rationale for U.S. independence and jurisdiction, this cartography of national identity and/as consent worked to legitimize federal policy toward those inside and outside national borders. Efforts to control the backcountry were a central element of U.S. politicaleconomy in the early republic. The claim that the territory on the frontier was part of a clearly delimited national whole validated government authority over a distant and heterogeneous social landscape, helping to make possible the following: the management and militarized disciplining of unruly settlers demanding title to lands, greater political representation, and more favorable commercial policy; the acquisition of states’ “western lands,” recoding them as federal “public lands” so as to make them available as payment to veterans and saleable as a way of financing the general government; and the regulation of the terms of land purchase in ways that often enabled extensive speculation and absentee landlordism by eastern elites. Additionally, the distinction between democratic cohesion and imperial dispersal was intimately implicated in attempts to assert definitive boundaries between the United States and adjacent European colonies and to denounce English, French, and Spanish designs on American territory as further examples of their grasping tyranny. The image of U.S. territorial coherence, therefore, mediated class, regional, federalist, and diplomatic tensions by treating the supposedly incontestable obviousness of domestic space as a physical manifestation of the ideal of a national union constructed of, by, and for the people.11 Within all of these overlapping projects, the acquisition of native lands was key. Such expropriation was part of attempts to appease settlers and gain their allegiance to the federal government, to reinforce federal supremacy over the states, and to extend the sphere of U.S. jurisdiction as against foreign claims. Often described as “within” national boundaries, native peoples still were understood by federal officials as having relative sovereignty over their traditional lands. Since lawful American access to

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such territory was premised on the negotiation of treaties, the extension of U.S. authority over native peoples and the “extinguishment” of native title could be portrayed as compatible with republicanism—a non-colonial relationship predicated on consent. In its emphasis on negotiating with native collectivities for the purchase of land, U.S. Indian policy drew on Anglophone precedents that differed markedly from dominant Francophone and Hispanophone patterns, the former largely establishing relations of trade maintained through residential proximity and the latter extending missionary and juridical authority over native peoples who were allowed certain powers as semi-self-governing municipalities.12 The treaty process formally acknowledged the voices of native peoples, but in setting the criteria of recognition and negotiation, it superimposed forms of political subjectivity at odds with existing modes of tribal governance and land use. Similarly, casting the annexation of Mexican territory as consensual, a result of purchase (after the Mexican-American War) or popular support (the Texas Revolution), facilitated its insertion into U.S. legal geography as merely a quantitative increase in national space rather than a qualitative confrontation between legal systems that differed in their ways of reckoning race, place, and trade.13 To illustrate this operative fusion of republican self-definition and imperial interpellation, we can look to the rhetoric of one of the most significant figures in the history of U.S. governance—Thomas Jefferson. His notion of an “empire for liberty” illustrates quite well the connection between the antebellum repudiation of colonialism and construction of an intensively absorptive nationalism. In a letter in April 1809 to James Madison in which he uses that phrase, Jefferson observes, “I am persuaded no constitution was ever before so well calculated as ours for extensive empire & self government.” As developed in earlier public addresses and official correspondence, this notion of a “constitutional” empire weaves together the goals of distinguishing the dynamics of U.S. political-economy from the perpetual violence engendered by European policy and peacefully extending national space in ways that preserve the fundamental bond of the American union. In his first inaugural address, Jefferson describes the situation of the United States in the following terms: “Kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe; too high-minded to endure the degradations of the others; possessing a chosen country, with room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation; . . . with all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and prosperous people?” Geography plays a central role in the national ideal offered here, positing a separation between the American scene and the infectious strife of the European “quarter of the globe” as well as linking the national public to a vast territory imagined as

INTRODUCTION 11

large enough for virtually endless growth. Jefferson speaks of the “country” as a political given, as a space whose contours are beyond question, and this absolute surety undergirds the rhetorical banishment of European power and “havoc” to an elsewhere far away from the “room” to be occupied by Americans while simultaneously concretizing the figure of the “people” by investing it with a determinate dimensionality.14 Moreover, the republican empire helps make possible a broader process of democratization that replaces European colonial logics with the possibility of true popular sovereignty. As Peter S. Onuf suggests in Jefferson’s Empire, from a Jeffersonian perspective, “Power would be diffused and decentered in the federal republic: the Americans would not longer be subject to the domineering rule of a distant metropolis, as they had been before declaring and securing their independence. Their new regime would be imperial in scope, far exceeding the most ambitious designs of a corrupt and despotic British ministry” (53). Within this logic, the expansion of national boundaries is a vehicle for extending the promise of freedom and diluting the possible concentration of political, economic, and military authority, thus disabling the potential for the coercive mobilization of such resources against the periphery. This connection is made explicit in Jefferson’s second inaugural address: “I know that the acquisition of Louisiana has been disapproved by some, from a candid apprehension that the enlargement of our territory would endanger its union. But who can limit the extent to which the federative principle may operate effectively? The larger our association, the less will it be shaken by local passions; and in any view, is it not better that the opposite bank of the Mississippi should be settled by our own brethren and children, than by strangers of another family?”15 The merely “local” is sublated in the national, preserving pacific political “association” while promoting access among members to the geographic and commercial benefits accrued most directly by those resident elsewhere in the union. The “federative principle” offers the potential for a farreaching integration of interests within a fully consensual network in which the absence of competition obviates the need for warfare, or compulsion of any kind. Because of its essential reliance on and further dissemination of republicanism, the process of acquiring territory is not at odds with the image of a stable and secure “country.” Since the incorporation of new lands is a product of choice rather than conquest, not only will they come to occupy the same constitutional status as existing states, but the lack of geopolitical struggle in annexation means that the clarity of U.S. borders remains intact. Bracketing the numerous conflicts between the United States and European powers over their claims in North America and the Caribbean, and the resulting uncertainty over the effective limits of U.S. jurisdiction,

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the Jeffersonian narrative of national union encounters perhaps its greatest challenge in addressing the position of native peoples. In his discussion of the uses of federal revenue in his second inaugural address, Jefferson includes “extinguish[ing] the native right of soil within our limits” and “extend[ing] those limits” as two of the primary ongoing expenses shouldered by the national government. Portraying native land as “within” U.S. boundaries helps stabilize national “limits” by intimating an indisputable preemption claim to indigenous space—an underlying U.S. control of the “soil” on which Indians presently reside and thus the exclusive right to acquire it when they decide to sell. This geopolitical conceit not only frames the inundation of native lands by “the stream of overflowing population from other regions” as distinct from colonial conquest but also legitimizes U.S. efforts to (re)define the terms of native occupancy. Inhabitance on U.S. territory means that while Indians “are covered with the aegis of the law against aggressors” they also must steadily forego “the hunter’s state”— land-intensive forms of political-economy and placemaking which bring them into conflict with neighboring white property-owners.16 Since Indians ultimately are domestic subjects, indigenous land tenure must conform to U.S. ways of defining tribal boundaries. Therefore, acceptable expressions of native sovereignty over traditional lands reach their limit in modes of territoriality that potentially challenge administrative mappings of domestic space, including forms of indigenous “hunting” and “wandering,” which were the objects of extensive administrative campaigns (as will be discussed at length in chapters 2 and 3). As part of the republican empire, though, Indian territory must be acquired and governed through consent. Jefferson rhetorically reconciles the potentially corrosive disjunction between the ideal of free assent to sale and the kinds of compulsive regulation he describes by compartmentalizing dissent as an irrational attitude on the part of a few wayward chiefs. In his words, they are “interested and crafty individuals . . . who feel themselves something in the present order of things, and fear to become nothing in any other,” and “who dread reformation, and exert all their faculties to maintain the ascendancy of habit over the duty of improving our [sic] reason.” Thus, the choice to retain socio-spatial formations at odds with U.S. geopolitical aims, including the refusal to “extinguish” title through sale, cannot be true choice because it is both undemocratic (the will of merely a few individuals) and illogical (an addiction to “habit”). Simulating collective Indian consent is crucial in representing the United States as a non-colonial “empire” whose unwavering commitment to “liberty” in the construction and maintenance of the union validates the exertion of authority over that space. Yet contentions that native peoples have acquiesced to U.S. policy are littered with the evidence of countervailing cartographies rendered impossible

INTRODUCTION 13

(or rather unintelligible as political formations) by the official portrayal of indigenous lands as interior to the nation.17 Contesting this republican topology, however, requires more than simply inverting its organizing terms, such as asserting that the United States in fact was colonial and that practices narrated as consent actually were coercive. Such a reversal is not inaccurate per se, but that strategy tends to preserve the underlying concepts as pure principles uncontaminated by the practices falsely propagated in their name, presenting the structures of Indian policy as a deviation from national norms rather than as a corollary to the interpellative logic of union that undergirds those norms. While potentially useful as a way of inserting oneself into and leveraging public discourse by seizing upon value- and affect-laden tropes, a reinvestment in notions of republicanism and popular consent can present them as the basis for political legitimacy in ways that end up depicting them as extra-political, as the uncontestable normative horizon of politics rather than as sites of political struggle. What exactly are the dimensions of the republic, and how are the contours of the body politic determined? What defines consent, and who determines these criteria? How does one adjudicate between competing visions of the nation’s territorial/jurisdictional limits or the proper forms of collective agency and decision making (or even what counts as a political collectivity)? Put another way, the question is less how to extend national principles than how to trace the force exerted by U.S. institutions in their imposition of national belonging on groups who do not desire to belong to the nation. As Carl Gutiérrez-Jones argues, “consent cannot be the cornerstone of justice where choice has not played a significant role” (44); later addressing the apparent “dichotomy of consent versus force,” he adds, “The law demands that we accept this dichotomy, but the mere fact of that demand by no means verifies that the dichotomy is actually determinant in events as we live them” (107). What is needed, then, are critical strategies that do not so much insist on a categorical distinction between imperialism and republicanism, between force and consent, as track the violence embedded in the articulations of national identity and territoriality that underwrite U.S. jurisdiction. Thus, the forms of political and territorial absorption at play in the antebellum period are not distinct from the ideal and icon of union but rather are enacted through it.

SELF-DETERMINATION AND GEOGRAPHIES OF CONSENT

Internalized peoples are presented within U.S. legal discourses as alwaysalready having accepted their place within national space, a process that

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involves constructing subjectivities for them that confirm the obviousness of U.S. administrative mappings. Examples in the antebellum period include the discourse of domestic dependent nationhood applied to native peoples and of citizenship for former Mexican nationals in the wake of both the Texas Revolution and the Mexican-American War. More than merely designating these groups’ relation to the U.S. government, these identities do important ideological work. They enact the extension of state authority by enfolding groups within existing administrative terminologies and topologies, giving them an institutionally recognized voice that reinforces the organizing framework of U.S. jurisdiction. This process of imperial interpellation both reorganizes existing political-economies and naturalizes U.S. control over the terms of debate. As Gerald Vizenor notes in his discussion of dominant representations of American Indians, “The simulations of manifest manners . . . become the real without a referent to an actual tribal remembrance” (8). The simulation and regulation of voice is crucial to the erasure of competing political geographies. Looking back to the language of Sherill v. Oneida, we can see again the absolute interdependence of the doctrines of acquiescence and impossibility, the bureaucratic invention of consent effacing the United States’ unilateral assertion of control over the process of defining and allocating sovereignty within its asserted boundaries. Anti-imperial critique, then, must take up the question of autonomy, of peoples’ control over their own socio-spatial identity and their metapolitical authority to define (or at least take part in meaningful negotiation over) what constitutes occupancy, trade, diplomacy, and development.18 In The Nations Within: The Past and Future of American Indian Sovereignty, Vine Deloria and Clifford M. Lytle draw a useful distinction between “self-government” and “self-determination”: “Self-government . . . has come to mean those forms of government that the federal government deems acceptable and legitimate exercises of political power and that are recognizable by the executive and legislative branches”; “self-government is not and cannot be the same as self-determination so long as it exists at the whim of the controlling federal government” (18–19). Originally emerging out of Wilsonian and Leninist attempts in the wake of World War I to address movements for national independence and their place within international politicaleconomy, the notion of self-determination has become over the last several decades a crucial vehicle through which indigenous peoples have entered into and articulated themselves within international law. One example of this process is the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.19 The document insists that such peoples should be acknowledged as political entities that have the right to define their own social organization in ways expressive of their ideals, interests, and modes of institutionality

INTRODUCTION 15

regardless of the legal statuses, norms, and practices structuring the settlerstates that enclose them.20 It notes axiomatically the “right to selfdetermination of all peoples, by virtue of which they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development,” and it asserts that “indigenous peoples have the right to maintain and develop their political, economic and social systems or institutions, to be secure in the enjoyment of their own means of subsistence and development, and to engage freely in all their traditional and other economic activities,” further indicating that state recognition of indigenous peoples’ territories and resources “shall be conducted with due respect to the customs, traditions and land tenure systems of the indigenous peoples concerned.” The Declaration, therefore, highlights the struggle over boundary making: where borders are placed, how they are determined, by whom and for whose benefit, and what they signify in terms of defining the political status of a given population and that population’s relation to the territory they inhabit. Moreover, the document suggests the potential discrepancy between state structures and indigenous geopolitics, indicating that recognition of the latter should occur in ways consistent with indigenous understandings and practices rather than by inserting indigenous peoples into the administrative logics and subjectivities of the settler-state. The Declaration’s principles can be used as a way of rethinking U.S. national identity and territoriality in the antebellum period in ways that include but exceed indigenous peoples. The document seeks to mark and critique the imposition of the state’s legal geography on populations whose own “political, economic, and social systems” are thereby delegitimized and effaced. Native polities were not the only formerly autonomous groups whose territoriality and governance were subsumed by administrative narratives of the self-evident coherence of U.S. domestic space. Former Mexican populations forcibly were incorporated as well, albeit through different legal subjectivities than native peoples.21 The critique of settlerstate sovereignty in the Declaration, then, provides tools for foregrounding the distinction between Anglo and Mexican sociopolitical systems and analyzing the ways the United States worked to translate the latter into the former. Attending to the erasure of once-Mexican “customs, traditions, and land tenure systems” highlights the process by which the (re)production of U.S. jurisdiction depends on the imperial elision of competing mappings of the same space, as discussed in chapters 3 and 4. Illustrating the process by which such geographies are disavowed helps denaturalize U.S. ideologies of politics, landholding, and collectivity, illustrating how alternative sovereignties officially are made impossible and drawing critical attention back to struggles over geopolitical identity (as opposed to the tendency to consider the legacy of the Mexican-American War primarily in terms of racial

16 MANIFESTING AMERICA

exclusion). Moreover, taking contemporary formulations of indigenous self-determination as a conceptual starting point for a genealogy of antebellum imperialism also foregrounds the status of indigenous peoples on lands previously claimed by Mexico, a topic often overlooked or marginalized in Chicano/a historiography. Such an analysis highlights indigenous presence, examines the legacy of Hispanophone imperial logics, and opens up the potential for considering how Anglo policy drew on regionally specific precedents from Mexican and Spanish Indian policy in racializing and displacing former Mexican nationals. In a broader sense, using the Declaration and its principles of selfdetermination as a touchstone for the critique of U.S. empire can reframe American Studies by emphasizing the importance of engaging with the political self-representations of dominated populations not only as a topic of discussion but as an organizing principle of our critical cartographies. More than affirming the rightful autonomy of peoples whose occupancy on the land precedes that of the surrounding state, the aim is to interrogate the authority that the state exerts over such peoples. The concept of selfdetermination draws attention to the power claimed by the nation-state not simply to superintend internalized populations but to adjudicate their forms of governance, territorialities, and interactions with other political entities. The claims of my argument, then, are largely negative, focusing less on finding a core of “self ”-hood than performing a kind of political groundclearing by examining the ways U.S. policy has sought to naturalize its authority over internalized populations and lands and to disown countervailing geopolitical formations. In This Is Not a Peace Pipe: Toward a Critical Indigenous Philosophy, Dale Turner observes that “[w]e cannot hope to fully understand the meaning and content of Aboriginal rights without understanding first how colonialism has been woven into the normative political language that guides contemporary . . . legal and political practices,” adding that “[t]he project of unpacking and laying bare the meaning and effects of colonialism will open up the physical and intellectual space for Aboriginal voices to participate in the legal and political practices of the state” (30–31). While specifically addressing Canadian policy, Turner suggests that the project of creating room for indigenous “voices” depends on a sustained commitment to “unpacking and laying bare” the imperial dynamics of state policy in ways that create intellectual and political room for imagining alternative forms of collective identification and organization. As someone who is not a member of the various populations whose histories and writings I examine, I cannot, and should not attempt to, position myself as the arbiter of what constitutes a desirable form or process of selfdetermination. However, following Turner’s suggestion, I seek to use the concept of self-determination in order to illustrate the force exercised by the

INTRODUCTION 17

U.S. government in closing down options for self-representation and/or channeling it into administratively regulated kinds of identity and articulation that allow for only very carefully choreographed participation in state processes. What is at stake is not simply asserting the possibility of alternative sovereignties on territory claimed by the United States but tracking the process by which the United States government has superimposed legal identities that seek to constrain and manage the self-representations of domesticated groups, producing the appearance of recognition for them and acquiescence by them.22 While marking my position as an outsider with respect to the groups I discuss, my negative critical stance also highlights the value of sustained investigation of the ways the state uses acknowledgment as a vehicle for consolidating its own jurisdiction. The analysis I am proposing is less concerned with itself promoting particular kinds of recognition than examining how the United States uses recognition as part of exerting control over domesticated groups and legitimizing various projects of expropriation. In tracking the state’s production of normative subjectivities and the effects of that process on the internalized populations forced to occupy them, a dialectical critique of identity, such as that offered by Theodor Adorno, can provide a useful framework in which to consider the ways the United States exerts metapolitical authority: “The name of dialectics says no more, to begin with, than that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder . . . Contradiction is nonidentity under the aspect of identity . . . Total contradiction is nonidentity under the rule of a law that affects the nonidentical as well” (5–6). He later adds, “difference assumes the logical form of contradiction because, measured by the principle of dominion, whatever does not bow to its unity will not appear as something different from and indifferent to the principle, but as a violation of logic” (48).23 Viewed from this perspective, the identities constructed for domesticated peoples by the United States testify to the violence of annexation, the coercion at work in the subjection of populations to an alien “law” as part of an effort to create jurisdictional “unity.” Moreover, the attempts by such peoples to articulate sovereignties at odds with those of U.S. legal geography appear as an untenable “contradiction”— an impossible eruption of difference within national space. While apparently confirming the self-evidence of national space, the official subjectivities constructed for internalized populations cannot fully encompass or erase their pre-existing socio-spatial formations, which leave remainders within U.S. administrative discourses. Reading for such signs of “nonidentity” challenges the obviousness of imperial categories and mappings, highlighting the force exercised in producing sanctioned forms of voice for domesticated peoples.

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This negative approach to self-determination, foregrounding the ways imperial policy overdetermines the possibilities for self-representation and sovereignty by place-based populations “within” U.S. boundaries, diverges from prominent strategies within both Native American and Chicano/a literary studies. Scholarly work on representations of and by native peoples in the nineteenth century and before clusters around two main paradigms: positing a “middle ground” on which Euramerican and native social formations meet and, perhaps, merge; or adopting a nationalist stance that emphasizes continuity of cultural/political expression in the face of imperial violence. The former body of work focuses largely on questions of conversion, cultural crossing, and the appropriation of native peoples as romantic/bestial primitives. While not necessarily drawing directly on Richard White’s study The Middle Ground, which I discuss at greater length in chapter 2, many scholars emphasize the complex circulation of persons, ideas, and practices between Euramerican and native publics in such a way that these populations can be said to participate in a shared experience of encounter and exchange that transforms all those involved.24 While certainly not disregarding the violence of dispossession, this critical fascination with forms of cultural circulation and fusion, itself part of a broader trend in scholarly work that I discuss in the next section, tends to draw attention away from the political-economy of settler occupation and its effects on articulations of native peoplehood. By contrast, a methodology grounded in the idea of self-determination attends to the efforts by indigenous communities to sustain themselves, and gain recognition, as polities. Additionally, in highlighting the struggle among populations over political power as well as the authority to define what constitutes politics, such a method positions questions of culture as inseparable from those of governance and native peoples’ relative autonomy with respect to state ideologies, agendas, and institutions. There also has been a more recent turn to studies focused on a single people in which indigenous philosophies, forms of narration, and types of cultural production often overlooked by the state are used to theorize the people’s history. The shift away from a primary focus on engagement with Euramericans and toward the exploration of longstanding principles of collective self-understanding among a people is itself a positive performance of self-determination, refusing to be defined by reference to non-natives and using tradition as an intellectual tool.25 However, the emphasis on the persistence and internal coherence of peoplehood can downplay discussion of the mechanisms through which the United States inserts populations into an alien political framework as well as the disruptive effects of that process. For example, in Our Fire Survives the Storm, Daniel Heath Justice argues

INTRODUCTION 19

that Cherokee nationhood is expressed through “complementary pairings [which] are deeply embedded in Cherokee culture and history” (27), focusing on the “Beloved Path” and “Chickamauga consciousness”—the equilibrium between “plac[ing] peace and cultural continuity above potentially self-destructive rebellion” and “armed response to U.S. violence” (30–31).26 Justice’s account portrays Cherokee governance as operating on different principles than that of the settler-state, a quality shared with other native peoples: “Indigenous nationhood is a concept rooted in community values, histories, and traditions”; it “challenges the assimilative foundations of state nationalism by its assertion of an inherent distinctiveness based on tradition, culture, language, and relationship to the world and its various peoples” (24).27 However, inasmuch as the complementary political modes Justice describes are understood as manifestations of an intrinsicially nonstatist nationhood, can they explain the negotiations and clashes among the Cherokees over the construction of a national government organized as a state (addressed in chapter 1)? This difficulty can be seen in his discussion of pre-removal politics within the Cherokee Nation: “Most Cherokees still followed the traditions and cultural practices of their ancestors, and while acculturated Cherokees dominated the political sphere, the ceremonialists maintained the social structure and stability within the Nation in the face of increasing outside pressures” (75–76).28 If “the political sphere” is influenced by “outside pressures,” is it then considered exterior to Cherokee national identity? What is the relationship between “the political” and “the social” here, and given that this bifurcation is occurring among Cherokees, what exactly is meant by the phrase “stability within the Nation”? Nationhood appears to name a “sphere” sealed away from struggle rather than the, changing and conflicted, dynamics of Cherokee governance and self-representation in the period. The emphasis on the consistency and continuity of a given people’s form of governance amidst the interventions of the settler-state, including employing the topos of nationhood as a way of marking that stability, runs the risk of creating the image of an insulated wholeness which can be contradistinguished from another “sphere” perforated by imperial pressures.29 In developing this line of argument, I run the risk of denying the relevance of indigenous knowledges to the historiography of indigenous governance. In Craig Womack observes in “Theorizing American Indian Experience,” “Indian experience is distinguishable because Indian people, like all peoples, have the right to describe their experiences and claim them as their own” (384). What I want to foreground is how native peoples’ ability “to tell their own stories” about their processes of decision making, diplomacy, land tenure, and resource use has been managed by the

20 MANIFESTING AMERICA

settler-state in ways that work to legitimize the expansion of U.S. jurisdiction. Rather than challenging Justice’s elaboration of complementarity as a way of talking about the normative principles of Cherokee governance, I want to put that account in dialectical relation to one focused on the uneven effects of U.S.-imposed modes of nationhood on Cherokee practices and self-articulations. How do U.S. administrative discourses affect Cherokee notions of collectivity? How are the institutional imperatives of the settlerstate translated into the terms of the “traditions and cultural practices” Justice addresses? How do these two processes—imperial interpellation and indigenization—operate across different sectors of the Cherokee population? How are they institutionalized, and how do forms of institutionalization affect the complex and shifting relation between these processes? As Dale Turner suggests, “Phrases like ‘traditional knowledge’ and ‘indigenous ways of knowing’ have become commonplace in both mainstream and indigenous cultures, yet we are not at all clear about what they mean in relation to the legal and political discourses of the dominant culture” (98). If an overinvestment in cultural crossing can displace the issue of self-determination, of a place-based collectivity with its own operating principles, stressing the ongoing “inherent distinctiveness” of indigenous polities can undervalue the effects of state policy on their internal workings and the self-understandings of indigenous people. Discussing Mohawk nationalism in Kahnawake, Audra Simpson observes in “Paths Toward a Mohawk Nation” that “when articulating and analysing indigenous nationhood, we must account for and understand the foreignness that embeds their aspirations—the machinery of settlement that has hardened into institutions of governance” (122), earlier noting that such nationalism is “replete with colonial ironies” (118). In addition to affirming the historical and ongoing presence of tradition and its importance for contesting the normalization of the legal rhetorics and geography of the settler-state, the negative methodology I pursue involves contesting the United States’ claim to possess an irrevocable authority to superintend native peoples (such as that asserted in Sherrill v. Oneida), and that project of clearing room for self-determination involves tracing the force exercised through U. S. terminologies and topologies. Within Chicano/a literary studies, the most prominent framework over the past twenty years has been that of the borderlands. As initially developed by Gloria Anzaldúa in her pathbreaking work of that name, the topos of “the borderlands” potentially moves toward an archaeology of competing forms of occupancy. Anzaldúa explores multiple and layered sets of claims in her rearticulation of the notion of Aztlán—the idea of an ancient Aztec homeland in the north to which Chicanos/as are the heirs. This dynamic is apparent in the lyrical refrain that bookends the text:

INTRODUCTION 21

This land was Mexican once, was Indian always and is. And will be again. (25, 113)

While “land” is singular, describing it as both “Mexican” and “Indian” within plural time frames (“once,” “always,” “will be”) conveys a sense of multiple and potentially conflicting claims, also defying a sense of linear progression in favor of a complex and shifting overlay. The volatility of geopolitics in the region over the past five hundred years is attested to in Anzaldúa’s observation that “This land has survived possession and ill-use by five countries: Spain, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, the U.S., the Confederacy, and the U.S. again. It has survived Anglo-Mexican blood fueds, lynchings, burnings, rapes, and pillage” (112). These moments not only undermine the image of territorial clarity underwriting nation-statehood, that of the United States in particular, but intimate the ways the suppression of both the historical movement of populations and competing contemporaneous claims is necessary to maintain the territorial imaginary of the state. Such an approach potentially can acknowledge both the co-presence of multiple, in the words of the U.N. Declaration, “political, economic and social systems” as well as their nonidentity with respect to each other. Anzaldúa’s account suggests that comprehending U.S. imperialism requires attending to the ways the institutionalized reproduction of the U.S. border participates in a broader imperial semiotics that generates coherence for the nation by repudiating the existence of alternative territorialities and sovereignties, seeing all such claims as, in Adorno’s terms, a fundamental contradiction of U.S. dominion. Instead of pursuing Anzaldúa’s incipient analysis of the ways geopolitical identity institutionally is defined and regulated and the attendant struggle among competing and layered formations, scholars inspired by her work largely have taken her critique as a call either to eschew sovereignty for locality or to dispense with geopolitical claims altogether as inherently oppressive.30 While emphasizing that separate nation-statehood is not the horizon of Chicano/a political imagination, the vision of “the borderlands” as “a discontinuous and fluid region where national borders form part of the repressive and exploitative conditions against which Chicanas have struggled” fails to address the struggle over how peoples and places are situated with respect to the jurisdictional field of a given state and/or the geographies of international law.31 Although emphasizing “the use of space to naturalize violent racial, gender, sexual, and class ideologies,”32 these accounts demur from the project of elaborating the specific ways collective Chicano/a forms of placemaking trouble the U.S. territorial imaginary. In suggesting that the

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assertion of territoriality homogenizes place and thereby disavows countervailing histories and forms of self-articulation, such studies create a polarized distinction between fixity and fluidity that leaves little room for analysis of collective articulations of place. Starting from the premise of selfdetermination, though, would emphasize the co-presence of discrepant, and perhaps incommensurate, geographies “within” the United States, foregrounding the conflict among various conceptualizations of space, the resulting complex overlay of collective territorialities, and the ways U.S. policy has worked to play those various geopolitical claims against each other to delegitimize and legally disavow them. Rather than merging populations by positioning them all as sharing the space of the borderlands, such an approach builds on the archaeological vision offered by Anzaldúa in ways that more fully address the presence of different kinds of socio-spatial mappings of the same place—of “this land”—and the ideological and institutional dynamics that have shaped the relationships among assorted kinds of populations, modes of occupancy, and forms of sovereignty. As discussed earlier, the rhetoric of consent can be almost as pernicious and obfuscating as the outright denial of institutionally recognized speech, especially given the role of this apparent assent in reinforcing U.S. hegemony and the representation of national policy as fundamentally democratic. Rather than offering a particular affirmative vision of collective identity, the notion of self-determination can be employed as a means of highlighting the historical disjunctions among various groups’ socio-spatiality and between those mappings and U.S. legal norms, thereby leveraging the U.S. jurisdictional imaginary. Such a critical praxis, organized around a reading of self-determination as negation, puts the dynamics of official intelligibility at the center of critical discussion while refusing the equally imperial demand that dominated peoples perform their difference.33 Instead of attempting to locate an authentic collective “self” suppressed by imperial ideologies, the goal of my readings is to track the shifting dimensions of various peoples’ self-representation as it is affected by the will-to-unity that shapes U.S. policy, in order to open room for critical and political engagement with forms of collective articulation that exceed, or defy, the objectifications of American legal geography.

BETWIXT AND BETWEEN, OR LOST IN TRANSNATIONALIZATION

At a conference I attended several years ago, the conversation turned to the topic of the need to internationalize American Studies. Someone had suggested that students in the field could be required to spend a year abroad in

INTRODUCTION 23

order to see how scholars and nonacademics in other countries see the United States, a proposal which echoes the mounting calls for a more geographically and politically expansive framework for the field that can aid in displacing, in Carolyn Porter’s phrase, the “idealized cultural nationalism that previously organized it” (470). Further elaborating this impulse, Paul Jay has suggested that “our criticism can best be revitalized by paying more attention to locations that are between or which transgress conventional national borders—liminal margins or border zones” (167).34 During the conversation at the conference, I suggested instead that students could be required to spend a year in Oklahoma, or rather in the indigenous territories surrounded by Oklahoma and referred to prior to statehood as Indian Territory. While the idea was greeted with confusion and somewhat blank stares, my point was not that reservations should be deluged with nonnatives looking to fulfill the demands of academic programs, but that the notion of extending the scope of American Studies by exceeding, traversing, or displacing the border tends to privilege links between “home” and “abroad” over and against an investigation of the competing geopolitical claims violently disavowed in the (re)production of national territoriality. The current critical emphasis on what moves across or is located at the margins of “conventional national borders” defers discussion of the ways domestic space is constructed and maintained through a persistent institutionalized violence against the prior inhabitants of the land and an erasure of their varied modes of occupancy, trade, and diplomacy—including their collective articulations of their own boundaries. The past fifteen years has seen the proliferation of figures of betweenness—such as the borderlands and mestizaje, the middle ground, the Black Atlantic, the contact zone, transculturation, encounter, and hybridity.35 While referring to differently configured formations, these concepts mark a broad-based attempt to develop a language of mixture and migration capable of decentering idealized visions of the United States constellated around an image of it as geographically and culturally enclosed. What remains unclear, though, is how a scholarly emphasis on the permeability of the nation and its imbrication in transnational processes can chart or challenge the force exerted in the ongoing reaffirmation of U.S. jurisdiction—at play, for example, in Sherrill v. Oneida. Furthermore, to what degree do such new scholarly mappings reflect or account for peoples’ ways of formulating location, their modes of placemaking and associated kinds of collective selfidentification? In The Anarchy of Empire, for example, Amy Kaplan argues for “thinking about imperialism as a network of power relations that changes over space and time and is riddled with instability, ambiguity, and disorder, rather than as a monolithic system of domination,” adding that she seeks to “emphasize

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the collapse of boundaries between here and there, between inside and outside, and the incoherence as much as the coherence that the anarchy of empire brings to the making of U.S. culture” (14–15). While I share the concern about developing a “monolithic” notion of U.S. control which would screen out the competition between political agendas and ideologies within policy making as well as the multifaceted ways dominated populations utilize such tensions in their engagement with the United States, I remain troubled by the use of terms like “instability” and “ambiguity” as the primary way of figuring “empire.” The idea of a “collapse of boundaries” seems to depend upon the existence of a prior distinction “between here and there, between inside and outside.” How are such lines (re)drawn? What kind of administrative regularities work to create and maintain the impression of geopolitical identity that is culturally complicated, crossed, and contested in the ways Kaplan suggests? Additionally, what leverage does the notion of “instability” provide in challenging the assertion of U.S. jurisdiction over various peoples and places, and what analytical room does it offer for countervailing articulations of collective identity and territoriality, except to subsume them within the “culture” that is the organizing frame? If the critique of U.S. power conducted through various deconstructions of the border illustrates the absence of a pure or consistent distinction between the inside and the outside of the nation, such analysis largely does not speak to the following: the ideological and institutional mechanisms through which border effects are generated; the attendant insertion/translation of prior sociopolitical networks into the terms of U.S. legal geography; and the question of how dominated populations negotiate their position within official mappings.36 The kind of dialectical analysis I am proposing shifts discussion from the inherent “instability” of U.S. imperialism to an engagement with the administrative making of U.S. nation-statehood—the ongoing process by which the borders are (re)produced and various peoples officially come to be understood as “within” them. In offering and developing the idea of selfdetermination as an interpretive paradigm for American Studies, though, I am not suggesting that transnational dynamics had no impact on U.S. “domestic” policy nor am I positing an impermeable distinction between continental and overseas modes of U.S. imperialism.37 However, while recognizing such connections and their import for developing a less insulated and exceptionalist version of American Studies, I am trying to trouble the emergence of a field imaginary in which the master tropes of transnationality, migration, and diaspora—figures of deterritorialized border crossing—crowd out a significant theoretical and methodological commitment to indigeneity—to questions of occupancy, sovereignty, and placebased collective political organization and opposition.38 In “Minefields and

INTRODUCTION 25

Meeting Grounds,” Priscilla Wald suggests that what is at stake in critical efforts to theorize the position of the United States within systems of transnationalism and globalization is nothing less than “the normative claims of American Studies.” How, then, do transnationalist methodologies frame the normative horizon of their modes of intellectual and political critique? By what ideals are they animated, and what kinds of sociospatiality do they envision? More pointedly, how are transnational topologies invested with an ethical charge and positioned as synecdoches for (post)modernity in ways that simultaneously cast a desire for geopolitical boundedness as reactionary, nostalgic, and/or archaic?39 In “The People and the Land ARE Inseparable,” Leslie Marmon Silko offers the following observation: “The people and the land are inseparable, but at first I did not understand. I used to think that there were exact boundaries that constituted ‘the homeland,’ because I grew up in an age of invisible lines designating ownership. In the old days there had been no boundaries between the people and the land; there had been mutual respect for the land that others were actively using” (85). Emphasizing less the spatial constriction produced by bounding than the ways the introduction of the ideology of “lines” comes “between the people and the land,” and between neighboring peoples as well, Silko highlights how imperial geographies disrupt existing understandings and practices of place. What she objects to here is not boundaries per se but the engrafting of jurisdictional and property grids that foreclose established patterns and principles of collective occupancy—a “sense of home” (90). Foregrounding self-determination puts critical emphasis on such confrontations between U.S. geographies and competing mappings by groups who do not seek to belong to, or to be superintended by, the United States. Scholarly strategies that privilege versions of deterritorialization, imagining a middle space or emphasizing movement between spaces, miss the force of Silko’s critique while implicitly contributing to the legally and popularly dominant conception of “substate” populations’ pursuit of greater control over their lands as foolhardy and/or unrealistic.40

MAPPING SUBALTERNITY

Through contrapuntal readings of government documents (statutes, court decisions, executive orders, and correspondence) and nonfictional writing by American Indians and Mexican Americans (petitions, laws, autobiographies, newspapers, histories), Manifesting America works to illuminate the conditions of recognition for geopolitical identity in the antebellum

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period, tracking how U.S. institutional imperatives shaped the possibilities for collective articulation by internalized populations and the various ways they inhabited those administratively orchestrated roles. Such a focus on self-representation requires that attention be paid to the textual production of these peoples, and given the fact that the groups that I am addressing had fairly limited access to publication and were largely not literate in English, the kinds of writings they produced tend to be nonfictional and related to questions of governance and the pressing material problems facing their communities, therefore falling outside the parameters of what usually is considered to be “literature.”41 These texts self-consciously are engaged in the effort to define collective identity and geography, foregrounding the discursive struggle over the terms of political speech and agency, but while they demonstrate that U.S. policy actively was contested by domesticated peoples, they also suggest the limits of their own intervention. The critical project of interpreting these texts is not simply a matter of setting one set of depictions against another, affirming those offered by members of dominated populations as against their portrayal in government records. Writings by members of internalized groups in this period, especially those specifically directed to the U.S. government or reading public, cannot themselves be taken as transcriptions of popular opinion/ consciousness. They are responding to, and to some extent working within, the language of U.S. law in ways that constrain the representational strategies they can pursue. As discussed earlier, U.S. governmental discourses produce subjectivities that confirm the coherence and consensuality of U.S. mappings, in the process disavowing prior geopolitical formations that would challenge the authority of the U.S. government over “domestic” space. In engaging such discourses, texts by imperially interpellated peoples are moving on a rhetorical terrain largely shaped by the jurisdictional ideologies of the United States. The accounts they offer, then, mediate between the structures of U.S. policy and the existing principles and practices of the peoples under discussion, reflecting the effort to intervene within a framework superimposed on them. In this way, the nonfictional narratives on which I focus explicitly or implicitly index, in Gerald Vizenor’s terms, the “shadows, memories, and imagination [that] endure in the silence of translation” (74). In recognizing the ways that these texts are influenced by the discursive and institutional network of U.S. policy, we also should be wary of assuming that the employment of U.S. terminologies and topoi in these texts necessarily is ironic—a deliberate act of imitation that covers for continued commitment to alternative understandings of occupancy and decision making.42 Deciding a priori that forms of representation that draw on U.S. political logics are simply a screen, a mimicry divorced from actual

INTRODUCTION 27

beliefs, risks oversimplification on multiple fronts: effacing the effects of imperial policy on communities’ internal processes of organization and selfarticulation; minimizing the capacity of peoples to adopt new practices (to adapt to changed circumstances); and disregarding the possibility of disagreement or contention within a given population over what course should be pursued with respect to the United States and/or what their forms of decision making and territoriality should be. These writings signify within a complex matrix formed by the relation between U.S. administrative structures, existing and evolving institutions of governance among a people, and ongoing collective practices that may be disowned by the previous two. Nor can we assume that ideas about the content of the distinction between strategy and self-determination necessarily are shared within a population or among the various groups inhabiting a particular region. These qualifications give rise to a guiding set of inquiries. To what extent do given texts by members of internalized groups embrace U.S. political logics and topographies as their ordering framework? Is this apparent acceptance of imperial ideologies a tactical appropriation, perhaps playing on tensions within U.S. administrative structures, or is it a reflection of emergent (and perhaps contested) forms of governance within a population? To what degree does the text’s portrait of a people elide conflicts among members and/or privilege a particular side/faction, and what is the relation between such conflict and imperial projects/ imperatives? To what degree does the text repudiate modes of occupancy and decision making still prevalent among a given people, or ensemble of peoples, because they do not fit norms which have been adopted by a subset of that population? Relatively overlooked in both Chicano/a and Native literary studies, these questions focus attention on the ways texts are situated in a complex relay between external and internal pressures. The difficulty lies in trying to read for antiimperial agency in ways that address the imperial imposition of subjectivity while simultaneously avoiding a reified vision of identity which presumes either a total affirmation or denunciation of U.S. political paradigms.43 What is needed is a way of critically assessing the relation between choice and force in various forms of representation that does not require positing an essential core of difference and that, therefore, does not reduce the concept of self-determination to the expression of a static or stereotypical vision of collective identity. Subaltern studies offers ways of attending to both U.S. policy’s effort to regulate the terms of political legitimacy/ intelligibility and the continuing presence of countervailing socio-spatial formations. In the words of Gyan Prakash, subaltern studies “delves into the history of colonialism not only to document its record of domination but also to identify its failures, silences, and impasses; not only to chronicle the career of dominant discourses but to track those (subaltern) positions that

28 MANIFESTING AMERICA

could not be properly recognized and named, only ‘normalized,’ ” aiming “to describe histories revealed in the cracks of the colonial archaeology of knowledge” (1486).44 With respect to the United States, subaltern studies can aid in plotting the alternative political and territorial configurations hidden in the “cracks” of U.S. legal geography. More specifically, such scholarship can help elucidate the ways that U.S. policy seeks to regulate the contours and content of domesticated peoples’ geopolitical identity and can aid in plotting the resulting tensions within and among such peoples over the proper form such identity and its representation should take. Put simply, the subaltern is that which cannot be incorporated into hegemony. If the notion of hegemony offers a flexible way of conceptualizing state authority as “a relation of forces in continuous motion” in which there can be “change in the relative weight that the elements of old ideologies used to possess,”45 a given hegemonic formation still has its limits as to what can be incorporated into its ordering regularities, and for Gramsci, the “subaltern” signifies such a limit. More specifically, it refers to a class or classes who are not integrated in any substantive way into the political system or the “national-popular will” represented by state institutions and policy.46 Addressing the potential for “spontaneous” collective activity by subaltern classes, however, Gramsci notes that their “traditional popular conception of the world” can provide a framework for such mobilization. Although deriding this “conception” as “a primitive and elementary historical acquisition” (198–99), he also earlier describes subaltern groups as possessing a “pre-existing” “mentality, ideology, and [set of] aims” which they “conserve,” maintaining a kind of “autonomy” from dominant political and economic structures (54). Refusing Gramsci’s dismissal of these modes of collective popular agency and self-understanding as “primitive,” subaltern studies scholars have suggested that such “traditional” conceptions bespeak the persistence of alternative social formations that exceed the paradigms of imperial policy. In the case of the antebellum United States, such a strategy of reading can help in marking the ways American Indian and Mexican peoples were absorbed into national space while also registering the continuing presence of their countervailing political mappings, those “pre-existing” geographies that defy the vision of national space organizing U.S. hegemony. As John Beverley suggests, “what subaltern studies makes visible is precisely the fissured character of the national narrative itself, the way it is intersected by other histories, other modes of production, other values and identities” (16). The critical task is to illuminate both the process of imperial interpellation and the continuing presence of, in Adorno’s terms, the remainders that exceed U.S. assertions of dominion. Reading for the subaltern in official and oppositional texts, then, involves attending to the following: the question of

INTRODUCTION 29

who sets the organizing representational framework; the struggles over how to narrate the collective identities and entitlements of absorbed populations; and evidence of the persistence of geopolitical matrices that do not fit U.S. models and mappings. Put another way, what is at issue is tracking how the possibilities for self-determination are constrained and undermined by subalternization—the insertion of formerly autonomous peoples into the U.S. jurisdictional imaginary in ways that disown their existing political cultures and modes of territoriality. Furthermore, subaltern studies explores how imperial intervention can create or exacerbate differences within a population or region, potentially giving rise to a mediator class—an elite—that identifies with and through imperial ideologies as against popular beliefs and practices. In addressing Indian reactions to British colonialism, Ranajit Guha has indicted what he terms “elitist historiography” for its “narrow and partial view of politics to which it is committed by virtue of its class outlook,” defining politics through reference to “the institutions introduced by the British for the government of the country and the corresponding sets of laws, policies, attitudes, and other elements of the superstructure.” This “view of politics,” he argues, works to screen out consideration of “the politics of the people,” “an autonomous domain” occupied by the subaltern classes that “neither originated from elite politics nor . . . depend[ed] on the latter.”47 If “class” here is taken to mean not just distinctions in wealth or in relation to the process of production but a more broadly conceived differential with respect to participation/privilege within imperial structures, this critical model offers a way of thinking in more specific and sophisticated terms about the distinction between consent and coercion in the adoption of U.S. political logics and modes of representation. The elite have chosen to define themselves through the terms of imperial policy, even while working against imperial rule, and their repudiation, or at least marginalization, of existing social structures depends upon an extension of imperial interpellation, reaffirming its “narrow and partial view of politics.” I explore this dynamic with respect to the institutionalization of a bourgeois version of Cherokee nationalism, the creation of a non-clan-based leadership among the Sauks, and the effort by Tejanos and Californios to present their claims as civilized as against those of “wandering” and missionized native peoples. The object of critique from this perspective is not the incorporation of new rituals, languages, or media but the adoption of discursive and institutional forms of denigration through which extant aspects of popular political culture and placemaking are disowned and/or erased. Guha and others’ work on the disjunctions within colonial populations demonstrates the historiographic dangers of ignoring internal conflicts over how to respond to imperial power, illustrating the ways that accepting the most archivally visible modes

30 MANIFESTING AMERICA

of identity and opposition as representative not only can efface less widely documented popular forms but runs the risk of naturalizing imperial models of “politics”—rendering invisible the “domain” of popular choice and the institutional power exercised by the elite. In other words, if subalternity marks a domain that largely has “left no reliable document,” we need to examine carefully the kinds of subjectivity we find in available writings and inquire about their relationship to the broader sociality of the populations represented in and by such texts.48 In what ways is the written record from which we are working imbricated in the class politics of literacy and publication? How are the accounts by members of internalized populations marked by elite concepts and identifications? Moreover, how do these writings register conflicts among imperially dominated/displaced groups, and how do we interpret texts in ways that highlight, rather than obscure, these socio-political faultlines so as to make clear the layered dynamics of the struggle for self-determination? To clarify, I am not suggesting that all forms of textual production should be read as elite in nature, that all negotiations with imperial institutions should be seen as inherently suspect and somehow corrupting, or that beliefs and practices that can be categorized as subaltern should be understood as more authentic—as closer to the true or inherent nature of a people. Rather, I am arguing that in attending to the writings of internalized populations as important examples of self-representation we also should be mindful of how they are informed by class differences within populations and regions as well as ongoing U.S. efforts coercively to impose modes of consent. I am suggesting the importance of reading for remainders and traces of nonidentity—the signs of popular political paradigms that have been marginalized or effaced. Thus, a subaltern studies approach not only directs critical attention toward the traces of “autonomous” political form(ul)ations that do not fit antebellum U.S. legal geographies but also maintains a sustained awareness of how oppositional texts may be shaped by differences within and among domesticated populations.49 Reading government documents and texts produced by internalized populations for such subaltern geographies, or more precisely for those geographies made subaltern through their dismissal/disavowal in imperial and elite accounts, reveals the shifting contours of the struggle in the antebellum period over how to represent both the territory claimed by the United States and the identities of domesticated peoples. In particular, sustained textual analysis of nonfictional narratives by members of these groups offers a clear and compelling picture of the multiple ways the U.S. jurisdictional imaginary was contested by those whose lands were absorbed into it, including how U.S. terminologies and topologies were refunctioned in the service of opposition. Such interpretation, however, also yields a rich

INTRODUCTION 31

sense of the administrative constraints imposed by the United States on such self-representation and the ways the imperial scripting of collective subjectivity defined the contours and limits of political intelligibility. These texts, therefore, illustrate the ingenuity and agency of resistance while simultaneously bearing the traces of what could not, or would not, be said. Interpreting such writings in ways attentive to both the ordering force of U.S. constructions of place and consent and the potential conflicts within and among absorbed groups, Manifesting America seeks to offer a genealogical contribution to the understanding of U.S. empire as an ongoing and shifting confrontation between U.S. legal geography and the claims of peoples whose connection to the land precedes and exceeds U.S. jurisdiction. By exposing the discursive and institutional mechanisms by which domestic space is constituted and the violence embedded in those republican logics, I hope to open room for making visible modes of occupancy, governance, self-representation, and ultimately self-determination, overwritten by U.S. mappings. Each of the chapters focuses on a particular site of U.S. territorial incorporation, illustrating the ways lands and populations administratively are interpellated as domestic while also exploring how such absorbed peoples respond to this process of internalization and retain countervailing forms of identification and placemaking. Moving from east to west and earlier to later, the chapters reflect the temporal as well as spatial arc of U.S. expansion in the antebellum period, offering a de facto history of the extension and naturalization of national boundaries while investigating the particular hegemonic forms, geopolitical struggles, and modes of selfrepresentation/subalternization at play in each case—the specific configuration of impossibility and acquiescence at work in the confrontation between U.S. mappings and existing political-economies. The first two chapters address American Indian claims east of the Mississippi, exploring the ways various peoples engaged with U.S. efforts both to reorganize their structures of decision making and occupancy and to reconfigure existing regional networks in ways that legitimized and enabled white settlement. Chapter 1 tracks the federal narration of native territory as always-already domestic, elaborating how the treaty-system constructs forms of collective subjectivity designed to enable the ostensibly consensual acquisition of indigenous territory and to resolve the jurisdictional tension between federal control over Indian policy and state claims to Indian lands. Rather than taking “nation”-hood as a neutral description of native collectivity, I explore the ways the United States used this term/ concept as a means of superimposing a vision of centralized political authority that facilitated treaty mediated land sales. Through discussion of

32 MANIFESTING AMERICA

the development of Indian policy in the early republic, the debates over Indian removal, and the seminal Cherokee court cases in the early 1830s, the chapter illustrates how the United States sought to manage native presence, claims, and voice in ways that reinforced the obviousness of U.S. legal geography. While largely superimposed, though, the language of Indian nationhood also allowed for organized opposition to U.S. territorial initiatives, which I illustrate through a detailed investigation of Cherokee articulations of national identity. Examining the statutes of the Cherokee government, the Cherokee Constitution, and the memorials sent to the U.S. government, I show how pre-removal Cherokee rhetoric appropriates the terms of imperial policy and redeploys them in order to refuse claims to Cherokee land as well as to mark the kinds of institutional pressures shaping the discourse of “consent.” Wealthy Cherokees literate in English, part of a growing slaveholding planter class, however, used their role as mediators between the majority of the Cherokees and the United States to create administrative and legal structures that marginalized social formations organized around clan and town affiliations. I show how Cherokee national discourse served as a vehicle of popular opposition to U.S. intervention while also increasingly becoming a medium for an emergent elite to consolidate its institutional authority, attempting to reconfigure Cherokee political-economy in the process. The texts of Cherokee nationalism, then, expose and resist the machinations of U.S. expansion while also revealing class-inflected forms of subalternization. In chapter 2, I enlarge the focus, shifting from discussion of the effects of Indian policy on one people to a consideration of the ways U.S. preemption claims necessitated the dissolution of the existing social matrix in the western Great Lakes and its replacement by treaty-based control over native land use and inter-tribal relations. The U.S. program of fragmentation and redrawing of inter-tribal borders helped maintain the administrative fiction of domestic space by undermining the fur trade with the British, making U.S. legal geography rather than native traditions the basis for defining occupancy and resolving conflicts, and rejecting the idea of shared possession or use of territory. More than imposing a centralizing political subjectivity so as to promote and regulate land sales, U.S. policy reified tribal boundaries and worked to break up existing patterns of hunting, warfare, and exchange. As against the “middle ground” paradigm, with its emphasis on cultural merger and hybridization, I draw on Simon Ortiz’s discussion of “tradition” as a form of continuity-in-change in order to illustrate the disjunction between U.S. mappings and longstanding regional processes, which I describe as “trans-tribal networks.” In this vein, The Life of Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak, or Black Hawk (1833) offers an alternative framework for conceptualizing land tenure, diplomacy, and commerce to

INTRODUCTION 33

that instituted through the treaty-system. More than telling the story of this Sauk warrior and his people, the narrative provides an account of the longstanding principles and practices that had ordered social life among native peoples in the region, and into which earlier Euro-traders had been incorporated. Itself a product of a complex process of transcription, translation, and editing, The Life, I argue, is less an example of cross-cultural fusion than a meditation on how native socio-spatiality is (mis)translated within U.S. legal discourse, marking the treaty-system’s misrepresentation of indigenous land tenure, fracturing of regional political-economies, and creation of new leadership roles that helped enable land sales but had little to do with existing modes of native governance. The chapter closes with discussion of the ways the narrative links Black Hawk’s actions to those of the prophet-inspired movements of the previous several decades, an association that reinforces the multi-tribal nature of the text’s claims/critique, further emphasizes its indebtedness to persistent forms of tradition, and positions his account within a longer and broader history of native opposition to U.S. strategies of displacement by consent. Moving from Indian removal to the annexation of Mexican territory, the second half of the book takes up the incorporation of Euramerican-occupied territory and the different administrative tactics it engendered. The last two chapters explore the effort to legitimize the forced internalization of places that could not be portrayed as always-already having been domestic and populations whose government much more closely resembled that of the United States. The lands on the northern frontier of Mexico, though, were far from devoid of indigenous presence. In both Texas and California, native peoples controlled substantial sections of territory, not only frustrating further extension of Euramerican control but continually raiding established settlements. Thus, in these areas, the United States confronted an entrenched yet embattled imperial structure in which Spanish-speaking populations formed an elite, and in both cases, the exertion of Anglo authority involved setting native and non-native groups against each other. While adopting Hispanic law as precedent in ways that denied the existence of native land claims, officials simultaneously cast non-natives as having acquired, or been infected by, the racial traits of the Indians, such that the prior system of landholding could be dismissed as barely modified barbarity. Chapter 3 shows how the effort to define and control the terms of landholding and political authority in the wake of the Texas Revolution depended on the circulation of charges of nomadism, Anglos and Tejanos representing each other as de facto Comanches and, therefore, as lacking a sustained connection to the land. In the political discourse of the Texas Republic, and continued in post-annexation state governance, the category

34 MANIFESTING AMERICA

“Mexican” comes to serve as a racialized figure of ingrained alienness and tendencies toward migrancy. Although never explicitly barred by Texas law from the rights of citizenship, Tejanos were cast as in but not of Texas in ways that both repudiated their land titles and depicted them as a destabilizing force. At the same time, they are presented as having chosen not to identify with Texas, explaining Tejano flight as a desire for mobility rather than a response to Anglo aggression. Through a reading of The Memoirs of Juan N. Seguín (1858), I illustrate how such Anglo charges were contested by portraying Tejanos as the “native” inhabitants of the region, highlighting their patriotic contributions to the cause of Texas as opposed to the opportunistic and invasive mobility of recent American immigrants. While appearing as a conflict between Anglos and Tejanos, though, this struggle over citizenship and property is shaped by the continuing presence of indigenous peoples, especially the Comanches who remained the dominant force in much of western Texas well into the 1850s. Unlike the native populations discussed in the first two chapters, the Comanches did not have permanent village sites, leading to their characterization as “wandering” by Euramericans. However, seeking to displace them, Euramerican authorities denied that the Comanches had a determinate territory to be recognized, but they were too numerous and too much at the center of regional political-economies to be dismissed entirely, leading to ongoing political/diplomatic negotiations that also allowed Indian policy to be cast as quasi-consensual. Given the Comanches’ ongoing significance in regional affairs, topoi of mobility in Anglo and Tejano discourses cannot be divorced from Euramerican-Comanche relations. From this perspective, Seguín’s text reveals an almost palpable absence in its studied avoidance of discussion of Indian affairs. Such elision is part of an effort by Seguín to disentangle Indians and “Mexicans” in the imagination of his Anglo audience while also leaving open the figure of the marauding savage to be used against emigrant Anglos, presenting their dispossession of Tejanos in ways that replicate descriptions of Comanche attacks. Through sustained discussion of Comanche geopolitics, its representation in Euramerican political and popular discourses, and the continuing presence of this rhetoric of migration in Anglo-Tejano relations, the chapter traces the imperial genealogy of these metaphorics of migration and reveals the layered quality of land claims in former Mexican territory. The final chapter takes up the issue of how governance in California in the wake of the Mexican-American War works to assert the coherence of American territoriality and jurisdiction by disavowing the continued existence of pre-war forms of collective identity and geography that might challenge it. U.S. policy relies on pre-war imperial hierarchies in asserting its authority, Indianizing Mexicans and Mexicanizing Indians. Federal and

INTRODUCTION 35

state law used the language of the treaty of peace to insert former aliens into U.S. ideologies of property and race, employing the rhetoric of citizenship to cast them as always-already having consented to the exertion of new and disruptive forms of authority over them and their land. Through readings of the debates of the California Constitutional Convention and Antonio María Osio’s The History of Alta California, I show how the Californios, the nonnative pre-war population, used the treaty and the war itself as counterhegemonic figures through which to invoke pre-war forms of identity and politics, challenging their enforced Americanization and the erasure of Mexican property-law. Like the Tejano strategies addressed in chapter 3, Californio efforts to secure recognition of their land and political rights recycle existing imperial topologies, portraying themselves as inheritors of Euro-culture and stalwart propagators of civilization among the savages. Reciprocally, through readings of the texts of unratified treaties negotiated with native peoples in California, accounts by federal negotiators, and memorials sent to the U.S. Senate by the California legislature, I show how Mexican precedent was invoked in Indian policy in ways that significantly altered the status of indigenous land claims in federal law, displacing the nation-paradigm used in the east and developing what I call “the reservation-paradigm” in which Indians are not acknowledged as having either coherent political identities or inherent occupancy rights. In the absence of a means of gaining recognition for their territoriality and sovereignty, native peoples engaged in extensive forms of popular insurgency. In particular, addressing the newspaper and official accounts of “the Garra Uprising,” a series of attacks on whites by native peoples in southern California in late 1851, I suggest the ways that traces of such non-written assertions of selfdetermination are preserved within the rhetoric of counterinsurgency employed by federal Indian agents. The chapter closes with a reading of a Julio César’s testimonio, underlining the importance of attending to the histories and geographies effaced in the administrative narrative of consent to U.S. policy as well as the persistence of internalized populations’ identities outside of and despite this institutional imperative. If U.S. borders were never fully fixed nor impermeable to a range of flows across them, the fetishized image of territorial coherence always has been a crucial part of national governance and self-representation. My aim is to outline the contours of that jurisdictional imaginary as it takes form in the antebellum period, tracking less its internal inconsistency than its confrontation with existing polities and regional networks and the various ways American Indians and Mexican Americans narrated that multifaceted struggle. Doing so, however, involves considering the complex ways such texts mediate between competing mappings and conceptions of collective identity—how they are shaped by the kinds of subjectivity created for

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internalized groups within imperial policy. How do these writings address the assertion of acquiescence, the official U.S. claim that dispossession is a function of prior assent? How do they engage with institutionalized modes of interpellation and domestication? As Sherrill v. Oneida suggests, this logic of voluntary expropriation remains good law and continues to energize and legitimize the exertion of imperial force “within” the nation. Elucidating the dynamics of that particular vicious catch-22, tracing its systemic effort to foreclose the possibilities for self-determination, and illustrating the persistence of alternative sovereignties that disturb and disjoint official mappings is the work of this study.

1 REPRESENTING

THE

CHEROKEE NATION

Imperial Power and Elite Interests in the Remaking of Cherokee Governance If it be said that the Cherokees have lost their national character and political existence, as a nation, or tribe, by State legislation, then the President and Senate can make no treaty with them; but if they have not, then no treaty can be made for them, binding, without and against their will. —Memorial and Protest of the Cherokee Nation, June 22, 1836 In “American Indian Intellectualism and the New Indian Story,” Elizabeth Cook-Lynn argues, “scholarship shapes the political, intellectual, and historical nation-to-nation past [of federal Indian law and policy] as an Americanism that can be compared to any other minority past,” further contending that “Indian Nations are dispossessed of sovereignty in much of the intellectual discourse in literary studies, . . . their natural and legal autonomy is described as simply another American cultural or ethnic minority” (127). This refusal of “minority” status challenges U.S. jurisdictional claims by insisting that native peoples’ political concerns and objectives cluster around “sovereignty” rather than citizenship, indicating that their portrayal as simply “American” effaces the question of their “autonomy.” Gesturing toward the issue of self-determination, Cook-Lynn foregrounds their existence as distinct polities before and after their absorption into the territorial imaginary of the United States, suggesting that this separateness should serve as the basis for discussing native peoples and their forms of cultural and textual production. What is at stake, though, in designating such a relation through figures of “nationhood”? More than a generic way of marking the sovereignty of indigenous peoples, nationality comes with “political, intellectual, and historical” entailments of its own, 37

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emerging as it does out of imperial efforts to demarcate and define the collective identities of indigenous peoples. While asserting their rightful control over their own lands and governance, describing native groups as “nations” implicitly privileges forms of centralized decision making in ways potentially at odds with traditional beliefs, processes, and modes of identification. Cook-Lynn seeks to foster “discussion concerning the connection between literary voice” and “Indian nationhood” (89), but investigating the institutional dynamics of the discourse of native nationhood pressures the notion of “voice” by drawing attention to nationalism’s enmeshment in the structures of imperial policy, its exacerbation of class differences within indigenous populations, and its tendency to create a unifying picture which disowns the disagreements and disjunctions that attend the previous two.1 As suggested in the Introduction, the administratively orchestrated consent of internalized populations can serve as a means of validating U.S. legal geography by presenting its terms as the self-evident terrain on which negotiation occurs. Indigenous populations in the antebellum period discursively and institutionally are inserted into a fraught process of domestication in which their lands come to be classified as “within” U.S. national boundaries. Cast as alien but not foreign in U.S. policy, native peoples are caught in the overlapping institutional projects of rendering domestic space continuous/contiguous, defining and negotiating the relative spheres of federal and state jurisdiction, securing public land to help fund the federal government, and demonstrating the fundamentally republican nature of U.S. authority. These intersecting imperatives, although not always congruent with each other, together constitute an imperial matrix that overdetermines the representation of native territoriality, voice, and identity, a process most visible in the operation of the treaty-system. As Eric Cheyfitz observes in “The Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute: A Brief History,” “Written in the language of reciprocity (of consensual agreement between sovereign nations), the treaty increasingly represented a coerced collaboration between Indian communities and the U.S. Government in a field of exponentially increasing discrepancies of material power, where Indian sovereignty was continually compromised in the very law that had translated Indian communities into the terms of sovereignty (the terms of the nationstate in the international sphere) in the first place” (251). Conceptualizing treaties as a crucial element in a broader system of imperial translation problematizes not only their claim to consensuality but the kinds of Indian national subjectivity on which that claim rests. Put another way, if treaties are taken as signifying the prior existence of native peoples as nations, interpreting such documents as a mechanism of imperial interpellation raises questions about the ways the discourse of nationhood inserts native peoples into a framework that facilitates treaty-making. It

REPRESENTING THE CHEROKEE NATION 39

posits a single representative government with power to speak for a corporate body and to coerce compliance with its decisions/agreements, a vision of native governance quite out of step with the decentralized, kinship-structured, consensus-based models prevalent among many peoples with whom the United States engaged in the early to mid-1800s. As noted in the Introduction, one of the elements of self-determination as outlined in the U.N. Declaration is indigenous peoples’ “right to maintain and develop their political, economic and social systems or institutions” and to gain/ receive/be granted “respect [for their] customs, traditions and land tenure systems,” and to what extent does the treaty-system, and the particular ideology of nationhood it embraced, allow for the possibility of maintaining prior modes of governance? Reading the discourse of nationhood as a process of translation means conceptualizing it as an institutionalized mode of articulation with complex, ambivalent, and shifting relations to U.S. imperial policy and extant native practices/processes. The Cherokees are a particularly rich site for such analysis due to their centrality in the construction of early federal Indian policy and their ratification in 1828 of a written constitution modeled on that of the United States, the first such adopted by a native people.2 The memorial quoted as an epigraph above suggests how Cherokee expressions of collective identity, of their “national character,” were caught within the vicissitudes of U.S. law and policy, specifically the role that treaties played in ameliorating potential crises of jurisdiction and political legitimacy.3 Written to protest the implementation of a removal treaty made with an extra-governmental faction and repudiated by virtually the entire Cherokee population, the memorial highlights the institutional pressure exerted on and by the rhetoric of Indian collective consent, suggesting the degree to which the representation of Cherokee national identity is entangled in the struggles within U.S. federalism over the precise nature and status of Indian lands. While the Cherokees have a “political existence” that precedes and exceeds the contradictions of U.S. constitutional theory and federal Indian policy, the expression of Cherokee national consent is embedded in the terms and binds of U.S. legal discourse, revealing Cherokee “national character” as a site of political contestation rather than a self-evident manifestation of a pre-existing “will.” In Writing Indian Nations, Maureen Konkle argues that a dominant culturalist paradigm within American Indian literary studies has led to an inability to engage with native peoples’ existence as polities. The reigning methology “cannot recognize the concept of a modernizing, autonomous Indian nation” and instead focuses on “cultural difference” (27). Konkle suggests that such scholarship functions as an extension of the civilized/ savage dichotomy operative in the nineteenth century: “the only way out of

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the implications of treaty relations was to insist, ever more vociferously, that Native peoples were intellectually and morally incapable of forming true governments” (4). While astutely noting the ways a racializing rhetoric of cultural insufficiency suffused U.S. political discourses, such an interpretation of “treaty relations” assumes that these texts and the bureaucratic system that underlay them merely recognized existing governments.4 However, what count as “true governments” within U.S. Indian policy, and by whom are such criteria set? If “nation” refers to the entity represented in treaties, how do we name the forms of collective identification, decision making, and land tenure that are disowned as pre- or non-political within the treatysystem’s portrayal of native peoples, and how do we address the complex and shifting relations in native social life among these various political modes, especially in the context of continuing pressure by the United States? These kinds of questions emerge in Konkle’s argument as elliptical qualifications: “Native peoples . . . insisted on their political autonomy, however they defined it” (6); “Native peoples . . . had always formed autonomous states, whatever the details of their form” (61); “claiming Eurocentric time leads to intellectual and political impasses, in particular, on the point of the value of traditional knowledge and history” (79). More specifically, in her reading of Cherokee texts written for a white audience which emphasize the Cherokee Nation’s potential for what could be termed modernization, she notes, “it’s difficult to say how much support they had from the majority of Cherokees for their specific arguments” (44). The possibilities for defining political autonomy, the impasses generated by particular formulations, and the dynamics of popular support within the Cherokee Nation strike me as central issues with which an analysis of native political struggle must be concerned but that are bracketed by Konkle’s methodological treatment of nationhood as itself self-evident. Before the early nineteenth century, Cherokee collective decision making occurred through consensus within autonomous towns, each of which contained members of all seven matrilineal Cherokee clans. To be Cherokee was to be a member of one of the clans, and towns had no coercive authority over each other or over their own residents; anyone dissenting from a decision of the town council simply was not bound by it. In response to the United States’ policy of bribing and strong-arming available headmen into signing treaties that were than taken by the United States as binding on all Cherokees, they created institutional mechanisms for speaking as a nation in negotiations with the United States, and the emergent mediator class at the forefront of the development of this incipient state apparatus, and disproportionately represented within it, used their position to create a legal code and bureaucratic structure that advanced their interests as an elite. While the construction of a self-consciously national government allowed

REPRESENTING THE CHEROKEE NATION 41

the Cherokees to intervene as speaking subjects in U.S. discourses, to refuse assent to U.S. initiatives from within the terms of the treaty-system, the institutional conditions of possibility for such agency involved displacing clans and towns as central aspects of Cherokee governance.5 A tension emerges within Cherokee nationalism, resisting imperial dislocation while marginalizing popular social networks in ways that render them subaltern. While allowing for organized opposition to U.S. initiatives by refunctioning the forms of official subjectivity created to facilitate the appropriation of native lands, the discursive and institutional structures of Cherokee nationalism were mobilized by an emergent elite to consolidate their own authority and interests, delegitimizing traditional social formations. Thus, the question of native national consent is bound up in that of representation, the institutionally, ideologically, and imperially overdetermined conflict between competing visions of Cherokee peoplehood. What is at issue, then, is not simply the ways U.S. legal geography intrudes upon and displaces Cherokee sovereignty but the kinds of collective subjectivity constituted for them within U.S. policy and the effects of such discursive structures, coupled with imperial institutional pressures, on their own forms of governance and land tenure.

TREATY SUBJECTIVITY

Between the conclusion of the Revolutionary War and the removal of the Cherokees from Georgia in 1838, the United States consistently asserted both the domestic status of native lands and the sovereignty of American Indians over their own territory. This apparent contradiction was central to the formation of federal Indian policy and arose out of the disparate aims that transected it. Relations with native peoples were crucial to a wide range of legal concerns in the early republic, including defining and legitimizing U.S. land claims, proving the capacity of the fledgling government to engage in diplomacy and to honor diplomatic commitments, asserting the priority of federal power over that of the states, and securing federal title to the western lands of several of the states (in exchange for “extinguishing” Indian title “within” the states) in order to sell them as federal public land for muchneeded revenue.6 The treaty-system mediated these institutional and ideological imperatives of national governance, serving as the matrix through which to negotiate the many interests at play in federal law. Antonio Gramsci observes, “when a struggle can be resolved legally, it is certainly not dangerous; it becomes so precisely when the legal equilibrium is recognized to be impossible” (257). Indian policy is such an “equilibrium,” balancing

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competing claims by managing the representation of native territoriality and voice. The resulting ensemble of laws, directives, and agreements is less a coherent logical program than a bundle of countervailing tensions which are not so much resolved as perennially suspended in a shifting compromise formation. Given these immense institutional pressures exerted on Indian policy, treaties can be seen as less reflecting native collective will than taking part in a broader process of producing bureaucratically workable forms of subjectivity. They define what constitutes native collective voice in ways that make federal governance possible, tactically reconciling or deferring jurisdictional struggles while legitimizing the imperial absorption of native lands as part of the normal, constitutional, and consensual operation of national law. The treaty-system and the kinds of native subjectivity that it circulates, though, were not created out of whole cloth but emerged out of a tumultuous struggle in the second half of the eighteenth century over how to conceptualize and conduct Euramerican-Indian relations. In light of the outbreak of extensive hostilities between whites and native peoples in the backcountry throughout the 1750s and 60s, in particular the Seven Years’ War and Pontiac’s Uprising, British authorities tried in 1763 to establish a clear boundary that would run straight from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. Known as the Proclamation Line, its purpose was to provide a mechanism for regulating Euramerican expansion by requiring that new purchases be made through formal treaties held in public council rather than the private transactions preauthorized by colonial governments, which previously had predominated. Such piecemeal purchases generated numerous conflicts over title (among colonies and ostensible property holders) and the right to sell (within and among tribes). However, while the Proclamation Line was designed to resolve diplomatic tensions and regularize the administration of Indian affairs, it resulted in massive colonial resentment due to both the limits it placed on settlement and speculation— angering poor and elite sectors of the population—and the new taxes that were levied to finance the military forces whose job it was to patrol and maintain the boundary. Even though the British government often ended up negotiating treaties for lands on which colonists had made claims of one sort or another, the pace of the process and the passing of the cost of the system onto the colonies themselves generated growing bitterness and outrage, resulting in the American Revolution.7 During the war, the major aim of Indian policy was to insure that the tribes remained neutral, a project that involved not only acknowledging native autonomy but trying to gain Indian recognition of U.S. independence. Diplomatic relations after the war, however, initially were conducted in a far more condescending tone, especially when engaging with those

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peoples that had in fact sided with the British, including the Cherokees, often addressing tribes as if they had been conquered. Increasingly, the assertion of dominance generated not submission but intransigence and outright violence, such as the ongoing warfare by the Chickamauga towns, those Cherokees who refused to accept peace with the United States. In the latter half of 1783, a more coherent plan began to be circulated among U.S. officials. The emerging perspective, as explained by George Washington, was that “policy and oeconomy point very strongly to the expediency of being upon good terms with the Indians, and the propriety of purchasing their Lands in preference to attempting to drive them by force of arms out of their Country; which as we have already experienced is like driving the Wild Beats of the Forest which will return as soon as the pursuit is at an end.” In August of 1786, Congress passed the Ordinance for the Regulation of Indian Affairs, which rationalized the organization of Indian policy by creating a system of appointed superintendents and deputies reporting to the Secretary of War. The act stipulated that licenses for trade with the Indians would be issued by the superintendents, thereby creating an administrative mechanism for preventing (or at least attempting to curb) intrusion on native lands. This alteration in political sentiment, though, also had a great deal to do with the dismal projections of failure should the United States enter into armed conflict. As Secretary of War Henry Knox observed in June 1789, “The Indians being the prior occupants, possess the right of the soil. It cannot be taken from them unless by their free consent, or by the right of conquest in case of a just war . . . But if it should be decided, on an abstract view of the question, to be just, to remove [them] by force . . . the finances of the United States would not at present admit of the operation.” Institutionalized in the requirement that Indian “lands and property shall never be taken from them without their consent” mandated by the Northwest Ordinance in 1787, the new view of Indian affairs by the federal government was cemented in the application of the treaty-making procedures under the Constitution to relations with native peoples.8 The treaty-system was largely a return to the post-1763 approach adopted by the British government and rejected by the colonists, a recursive move that generated similar kinds of animosity as the original policy. In addition to the continuing westward push of settlers and the unresolved claims of companies of speculators (in which many prominent federal officials were invested), the government had to contend with the states’ assertion of rights to native lands, a situation made more pressing not simply by the uncertain status of federal authority but the general government’s need for the states to cede their western lands, with the hope that they could be sold as public lands to fund national initiatives. The project of stabilizing Indian affairs by giving exclusive authority over it to the federal government was given shape in the transition

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from the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution. The former had read, “The United States in Congress assembled shall also have the sole and exclusive right and power of . . . regulating the trade and managing all affairs with the Indians, not members of any of the States, provided that the legislative right of any State within its own limits be not infringed or violated.” Protecting “the legislative right” of the states led to numerous questions over the scope of national Indian policy and the relation between state territoriality and federal jurisdiction. Partially remedying this confusion, the Constitution in Article I, Section 8 gives to Congress the power “To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes,” a clause which was passed without debate. While many states continued to circumvent federal authority in this area, particularly New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, most of those with large Indian populations eventually were brought into line, many through compacts in which the states ceded their western lands with the promise that the federal government would work to “extinguish” the “Indian title” to territory “within” their borders.9 In the wake of the uneven and contested efforts over the previous decades to construct a boundary between Euramerican settlements and native territories, the U.S. government appeared triumphant, at least in its account of itself. Indian treaties served as the marker of the diplomatic competency of national authorities, the supremacy of federal law over that of the states, and the preemptive rights of the United States to acquire Indian lands “within” its boundaries (as against claims/purchase by European powers). The specific agreements reached and transactions made through any given treaty gained institutional meaning within the complicated jurisdictional calculus of the treaty-system itself. Similarly, more than indicating assent to a particular set of propositions, the forms of native voice expressed in such documents represent the kinds of legal identity necessary to sustain the organizing narratives of Indian affairs and the kinds of geopolitical equilibrium they maintained. While clearly a response to native peoples’ outrage at the unrestrained intrusion of masses of whites onto their lands, as opposed to the forms of trade and intermarriage that prior to the mideighteenth century largely had constituted quotidian Euramerican-Indian relations in the backcountry, the employment of treaties by Britain and then the United States did not necessarily indicate greater institutionalized respect and room for indigenous voices. The idea of negotiating with a people for purchase of their territory requires the following: that there be leaders or a decision-making body that speaks as/for the people, capable of representing their consent; that peoplehood itself be understood in bureaucratic terms as a single integrated unit of governance; and that boundaries between peoples be understood as absolute, without overlapping claims or a complex and shifting matrix of use. This model of negotiation

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disallows two phenomena that were fairly ubiquitous in the eighteenth century among native peoples in contact with Anglo-Americans, namely the coexistence of bands with different political alliances and strategies among a single people and the participation of bands and peoples in pantribal confederacies. Such an understanding of sovereignty, diplomatic and military alignment, and land tenure as flexible within peoplehood and among peoples is very much at odds with the image of unified authority and exclusive ownership at play in Anglo-American conceptions of treatymaking—a vision of native geopolitics condensed in the topos of “nation”ality. What I am suggesting, therefore, is that treaties functioned within U.S. law as a mechanism of centralization along several axes, enabling a mapping of federal, state, and native jurisdictions as bounded fields in a coherent, nested hierarchy under the overarching territoriality and sovereignty of the United States. That is not to say that treaties were merely a cynical exercise, that individual agents of the U.S. government did not have a richer awareness of the complexities of native political-economies, nor that these documents and the broader system of which they were a part were seen in these terms by native peoples. Instead, I aim to track the kind of native subjectivity produced in the discourse of treaty-making, the institutional tensions managed in and through that discourse, and the attendant contours of native consent as cited by and circulated within U.S. institutions. Federal Indian policy sought to fashion consent in ways that contributed to easing the geopolitical strain within federalism, a goal illustrated by the provisions of the Trade and Intercourse Acts which provided the broad legal framework for the treaty-system. Initially passed in 1790 but limited to a two year period, the act was revised in 1793, at which point a clause was added providing for an appropriation of $20,000 a year to be used at the President’s discretion for increasing agriculture and the “civilized arts” among the Indians. The act of 1802 traces the “boundary line, established by treaty between the United States and various Indian tribes,” the word “between” suggesting a de facto border distinguishing the territory of the “United States” from that of the “Indian tribes.” However, the law also refuses to “prevent any trade or intercourse with Indians living on lands . . . within the ordinary jurisdiction of any of the individual states.” It, therefore, walks a fine line between federal and state power, supporting Indian autonomy via the supremacy of the former while leaving the precise meaning of “ordinary jurisdiction” unclear, implying a difference between legal authority and conventional geographic boundaries but demurring from making such a distinction explicit.10 The civilization fund served as a major part of Jefferson’s attempt to assert federal preeminence while also mollifying the states. In a letter in 1803 to Benjamin Hawkins, the U.S. agent to the Creeks, Jefferson explains the importance of civilizing measures in reconciling these

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seemingly discrepant objectives: “While they are learning to do better on less land, our increasing numbers will be calling for more land, and thus a coincidence of interests will be produced between those who have lands to spare, and want other necessaries, and those who have such necessaries to spare, and want lands.”11 Modern agricultural methods, made possible by the implements provided through the money appropriated in the act, supposedly would allow native populations to take up less space, leaving acres upon acres of territory that they would be willing to sell which could then satisfy land-hungry whites as well as put such supposedly excess native land under the “ordinary jurisdiction” of the individual state in which it was situated. Although native peoples often acted in ways that did not conform to the various images of them circulated in federal policy,12 the kinds of collective subjectivity constructed for them within U.S. law remained fairly consistent, creating continuity across what otherwise appear to be diametrically opposed political positions. In this vein, the Congressional debate over the Indian Removal Act (1830) reveals less a polarized contest between rapacious landgrabbers and righteous statesmen than a renegotiation of, in Gramsci’s terms, the “balance of forces” in Indian affairs (155), a struggle over the weight to be given state jurisdiction and preemption claims within a hegemonic framework in which the form and function of native voice are taken as a given. The law appropriated $500,000, which would be at the disposal of the President in order pay for the exchange of Indian lands east of the Mississippi for territory in the west and for the removal of such Indians to their new homes. The bill primarily was prompted by Georgia’s ongoing efforts to appropriate Cherokee lands. In an effort to gain redress for what was described as the federal government’s gross delinquency in fulfilling the terms of the agreement of 1802, in which it promised to “extinguish” Indian title in the state “as early as the same could be practicably obtained on reasonable terms” in exchange for Georgia’s cession of its western lands, the Georgia legislature sent a resolution to Congress in February 1828 demanding swift action on the compact. Due to the federal government’s inaction, and fueled by the discovery of gold and the accompanying rush onto Cherokee lands, the state between 1827 and 1829 passed a series of laws extending its control over Cherokee territory, outlawing Cherokee government processes, and creating a lottery by which to disburse Cherokee lands to citizens of Georgia.13 The debate over the bill illustrates the taken-for-grantedness of the kinds of representation at play in the treaty-system and the existing matrix of Indian policy. After making elaborate arguments about each state’s full sovereignty and jurisdiction over its own territory, the proponents of removal maintain with startling regularity that treaties are obstructing the true will of the

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Cherokees by empowering a tiny, nonrepresentative elite. This position appears in virtually every speech offered in favor of the bill by all of the major speakers arguing for removal, constructing an alternative narrative of Indian affirmation. Allegations that the Cherokee government is no more than an “aristocracy,” an “oligarchy,” “in the hands of a few half-breeds and white men” are accompanied by an insistence that “the scope and spirit” of Georgia’s laws seek “to restore the full blooded Cherokees, the great bulk of the nation, to their free will, and leave them to decide themselves whether they will emigrate or not.”14 Though patently ridiculous in its draping of the mantle of beneficent care over policy clearly motivated by self-interested greed, this repeated claim to be liberating the Cherokees, giving vent to their “free will,” does suggest the discursive obligation rhetorically to simulate indigenous collective agency as part of the construction of federal policy. Conversely, anti-removal elaborations of the disastrous effects of Georgia’s legislation on Cherokee governance do not so much challenge U.S. expansion as highlight the structural importance of native consent to it, emphasizing the constitutional conundrum created for the federal government by the state’s jurisdictional pretensions. Responding to proremoval contention that the proposed policy has an established history in U.S. government, Congressman Evans observes: “[The bill] proposes, as they have correctly said, an appropriation of money to be expended by the President in effecting the removal of Indians . . . We have been told that this has long been the settled policy of the Government; . . . if this has been the settled policy of the Government, . . . there has been also another policy and another practice pursued toward the Indian tribes . . . It is this: in all our relations with them, to respect their rights of soil and jurisdiction—to treat with them as free and sovereign communities” (1037). While formally affirming Indian communities as “free and sovereign,” Evans does not denounce the basic ideological premise of removal itself (the purchase of Indian land and extension of state jurisdiction over it), instead qualifying it through consent in ways that shift the internal temporality of removal— secure the land before jurisdictionally annexing it—without fundamentally altering the trajectory of U.S. policy. Thus, the critique of Georgia’s legislation seems to be less its absorption of Cherokee land per se than the ways its criminalization of Cherokee governance legally and politically undermines the federal government’s ability “to treat with them.” “The party with whom we [the federal government] contracted is annihilated . . . Well, sir, grant this, and what then? Then they [Georgia] bring in a bill to enable the President to hold treaties—but with whom?” (1040–1) There is a congruence here between sovereignty and sale, with the rhetoric of consent acting as the intermediary third term. As Congressman Test of Indiana notes, “if you strip the Indians of their sovereignty, . . . you have no need to

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purchase their lands, they belong to you; indeed, without admitting them that power, they cannot sell you their lands, for that is all that makes them nations” (1105). Native peoples’ categorization as “nations” seems at worst to be merely a conceit to manage jurisdictional conflict by enabling sale and at best legally to recognize the right to sell as opposed to the right to stay. While anti-removal rhetoric makes much of the notion of Indian consent, as captured in treaties, the dynamics of such collective agreement seem rather overdetermined within the discursive economy of the removal debates. What precisely does “consent” mean given the multiple legal and political functions that it is asked, implicitly and explicitly, to perform? Most often, anti-removal speakers indirectly define it as the absence of “coercion” or “compulsion,” as indicated by the brute fact of signing a treaty.15 In fact, the addition of a section stating “[t]hat nothing in this act as contained shall be construed as authorizing or directing the violation of any existing treaty between the United States and any of the Indian tribes” seems to have been what allowed the bill to be passed. Up until the proposal of this amendment on May 24, there had not been enough votes to bring the bill to a final vote in the House, the Senate having already passed its version on April 24 by a vote of 28 to 19. This amendment passed by 141 to 54 (1131), and only after this did the bill move to a final vote, passing by a vote of 102 to 97 (1133). That the vote on the treaty provision almost directly precedes the acceptance of the call for a final vote (only abortive attempts to table the bill and votes on whether or not to wait for absent Congressmen intervening) suggests that the formal inclusion of “treaties” in the language of the bill, absent any discussion of their substantive political import or the rights they confer, assuaged the concerns of enough anti-removal Congressmen to allow them to adopt the removal policy. In some sense, then, the language of treaties is directly responsible for the passage of the Removal Act. The same question posed by one of the pro-removalists seems pointedly relevant. “When gentlemen talk of preserving the Indians, what is it they mean to preserve” (1103)? The voice expressed in treaties is linked to the civilization policy of the Trade and Intercourse Acts in that the goal of both seems to be the construction of forms of native subjectivity that facilitate the sale of Indian territory. Ultimately, the discourse of Indian consent within U.S. policy seems to signify less a substantive engagement with the collective will of native peoples or an effort to secure their sovereign control over their lands than a process of internally coordinating U.S. jurisdictional principles and policy initiatives such that treaties enact a geopolitical equilibrium in which opposing government interests are balanced and potential political and constitutional crises averted. If the language of native collective consent functions as a way of creating a working détente in U.S. policy, this process of jurisdictional crisis

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management appears even more starkly within judicial discourse. Two key court decisions in the 1830s offer a clear sense of the means by which U.S. administrative mapping displaced, or perhaps more accurately integrated in uneven and stilted ways, competing land claims and discrepant precedents by including versions of indigenous sovereignty. Looking at Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) and Worcester v. Georgia (1832), one can see how a certain geopolitical grammar comes to order the language of governance. In these cases, the topic of Indian land claims serves as the occasion for rearticulating and reinforcing a foundational narrative about the territorial integrity of the nation. The court employs the figure of the Cherokee Nation for a range of different purposes within its rhetoric, using it as a kind of placeholder in order to displace discussion of the entrenched indeterminacies within U.S. policy and legal geography. In other words, the judicial narration of Cherokee nationhood helps fortify federal power in ways ultimately hostile to the Cherokees’ own territorial claims, while implicitly revealing the ways imperial interests overdetermine the possibilities of representing Cherokee voice in U.S. institutions.16 Cherokee Nation was filed as a response to Georgia’s recent passage of laws annexing Cherokee territory and placing it under the state’s jurisdiction, and the case became yet another major point of conflict between Georgia and the federal government. It was a suit brought by the Cherokees against the government of Georgia charging that its laws concerning Cherokee territory and governance usurped the authority of the federal government by violating the provisions of longstanding treaties, which are constitutionally recognized in Article VI of the Constitution as “the supreme law of the land”; the plaintiffs called for an injunction to curtail the injurious effects of the defendant’s legislation. The state refused the request of William Wirt, counsel for the Cherokees and former U.S. AttorneyGeneral, that it join in a case to test the constitutionality of its anti-Cherokee laws. In fact, the state refused to appear in the case at all, denying that the Supreme Court had jurisdiction and asserting that it would ignore the court’s decision. Governor George Gilmer submitted the official Supreme Court citation to appear before it to the legislature stating, “So far as concerns the executive department, orders received from the Supreme Court in any manner interfering with the decisions of the courts of the State in the constitutional exercise of their jurisdiction will be disregarded, and any attempt to enforce such orders will be resisted with whatever force the laws have placed at my command.”17 The Supreme Court was dealing with a rather explosive situation, involving a defendant who would not appear or even recognize the court’s authority and a series of legal questions that threatened to rend the republic. The court ruled that the Cherokees did not fall within the category of “foreign nation” and thus had no standing to sue.

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The constitutional peg on which the decision hangs is that in the commerce clause Congress is given the power “to regulate commerce with foreign Nations . . . and with the Indian tribes,” suggesting the founders’ intent to distinguish between these kinds of political entities and thereby disqualifying “Indian tribes” from federal recognition as “foreign” nations. The Cherokees, therefore, failed to qualify as proper claimants under the provisions of Article III, Section 2, which define the Supreme Court’s original jurisdiction.18 Yet rather than simply dismissing the case due to a supposed lack of jurisdiction, the court develops a legal designation for native communities living “within the acknowledged boundaries of the United States”—“domestic dependent nations” (17). How, though, does the court adjudicate the “boundaries” of the country, or more to the point, how does the denomination of the Cherokees as a “domestic dependent nation” foreclose discussion of the criteria for deciding what constitutes “foreign”-ness and allow the court to avoid responsibility for the consequences of its own decision? The immense rhetorical force of the opinion’s will-to-domesticate appears perhaps most strikingly in Marshall’s initial efforts to discuss the court’s lack of jurisdiction in this case. First, he concedes the compelling nature of the plaintiff’s position: “the argument . . . intended to prove the character of the Cherokees as a state, as a distinct political society, . . . has, in the opinion of the majority of the judges, been completely successful” (16). In countering the implications of this concession, Marshall appeals to an ostensibly unquestioned national consensus on the status of native lands. “The Indian territory is admitted to compose a part of the United States. In all our maps, geographical treatises, histories, and laws, it is so considered. In all our intercourse with foreign nations, in our commercial regulations, in any attempt at intercourse between Indians and foreign nations, they are considered as within the jurisdictional limits of the United States” (17). Marshall offers no definition of the “foreign,” tautologically using “intercourse with foreign nations” as a way of defining the Cherokees’ inability to qualify as such. “Foreign” has no content here; it marks a legal relationship to the United States that the decision is dedicated to denying to the Cherokees. To characterize Cherokee land as “foreign” would jeopardize the accepted “jurisdictional limits of the United States.” Rather than ruling on the merits, the court orchestrates an elaborate demurral through an assertion of the obviousness of the issue at hand. Instead of offering a judicial interpretation of jurisdiction, the court displaces its own agency through a proliferation of passive constructions, syntactically portraying the categorization of the Cherokees as an a priori fact rather than a performative result of the decision itself. The figure of the “domestic dependent nation” serves as the vehicle for the court to reconcile the demands of state sovereignty, federal policy and

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preemption, and Indian treaties, situating them all within a shared legal geography expressed and coordinated through the oxymoronic identification of the Cherokees as a “nation” but a “domestic” one. Cherokee nationhood works as a discursive placeholder for a multilayered jurisdictional structure organized around the idea of self-evident U.S. national space, constructing a subjectivity that simultaneously recognizes and evacuates Cherokee sovereignty while cutting off an avenue for political redress. As Priscilla Wald suggests in Constituting Americans, “Cherokee Nation was finally about the incomprehensible hole in the map within the perimeters of Georgia” (26).19 The use of Cherokee nationhood as a jurisdictional cipher also holds true in Worcester v. Georgia, except the latter case is concerned with preserving treaty relations in order to assert the supremacy of federal acts over those of the states and to maintain a legal means of extricating the Cherokees and other Indian nations from the eastern states.20 The apparent shift in attitude toward Cherokee claims between Cherokee Nation and Worcester can be credited in great measure to the difference between the plaintiffs. While alluding to many of the same issues and incidents, the latter case positions the Cherokees as contextual object rather than speaking, suing subject. Samuel A. Worcester and Dr. Elizur Butler, who went unnamed in the title of the case, were the actual plaintiffs. Arrested and convicted in 1831 with several other missionaries for violating an 1830 Georgia statute requiring state permission for entry by non-Indians into the territory claimed by the Cherokees, Worcester and Butler were the only ones who refused pardons from the state in order to bring a case to the Supreme Court that would test the legal status and efficacy of treaty provisions.21 Though federal authorization to travel into Cherokee territory by non-Cherokees was most directly at stake, the particulars of the suit lent themselves to a broader ruling on the relationship between treaties and state law. But a ruling that affirms treaty obligations in order to protect white missionaries is quite different from one that gives legal and precedential force to the Cherokees’ own representation of the terms of their sovereignty. Furthermore, Worcester is an appeal from a decision in the state courts rather than an attempt to use the Supreme Court’s original jurisdiction as a means of mobilizing federal authority to aid native peoples. The decision does not reverse Cherokee Nation or earlier decisions. Rather, it fine-tunes and consolidates a federalist system which does not repudiate state claims to Indian land but, temporally and bureaucratically, mediates access to it through treaties, limiting the official expression of Indian opinion to the signing of such agreements. Marshall rules that “the acts of Georgia are repugnant to the constitution” as they “interfere forcibly with the relations established between the United States and the Cherokee

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nation,” which “are committed exclusively to the government of the union” (561). Observing that treaties prevent state jurisdiction over Indian country is not tantamount to an acquiescence to Cherokee demands for self-governance on their traditional land base. In fact, treaties can serve as the perfect vehicle for simultaneously protecting federal supremacy, securing state sovereignty, and formally preserving native nationhood. While only tacit in the majority opinion, the reading of treaty rights as ultimately a vehicle for relocation is quite explicit in Justice McLean’s concurrence. Offering what appears to me as the subtext of Marshall’s argument, McLean contends the following: “Neither Georgia, nor the United States, when the cession [to the U.S. of Georgia’s western lands in 1802] was made, contemplated that force should be used in the extinguishment of the Indian title [.] . . . But, may it not be said, with equal truth, that it was not contemplated by either party that any obstructions to the fulfillment of the compact should be allowed, much less sanctioned, by the United States?” (588). The point of the above is made even more directly a bit later, “The exercise of the power of self-government by the Indians, within a state, is undoubtedly contemplated to be temporary,” to which McLean adds, “a sound national policy does require that the Indian tribes within our states should exchange their territories” (593). The topology of “within” necessitates the “exchange” of territories, but it must be accomplished without the use of “force.” Therefore, treaties help realize a certain jurisdictional geography while obviating the need for violence, refusing to countenance versions of sovereignty that introduce “any obstructions” to rapprochement between federal and state claims/authority. While Marshall’s omission of these, perhaps, more incendiary sentiments is not inconsequential, reading Marshall in terms of McLean helps highlight the quietist if not actively imperializing elements of the former’s narrative of treaty-based sovereignty. Even if one is tempted to read the language of the decision itself as a ringing endorsement of Cherokee rights, an unqualified affirmation of indigenous sovereignty, such an interpretation of the case’s implications falters before a consideration of the actual resolution to the controversy. Though the court declared unconstitutional Georgia’s laws in regard to Cherokee land, the Georgia Superior Court refused to acknowledge the writ from the Supreme Court, which adjourned before official word of the state court’s actions could be delivered. However, even had the court been in session, under existing federal statutes it had no power to compel Georgia to enforce the decision. At the same time, South Carolina began threatening to nullify federal tariff legislation. In order to use force against South Carolina in securing the supremacy of federal law, President Jackson would need the support of northern congressmen, many of whom were sympathetic to the situation of the Cherokees. Immense pressure, therefore, was put on

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Worcester and Butler, including a resolution by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), their sponsoring institution, to accept the pardon offered by Georgia’s governor Wilson Lumpkin before either the opening of the next Supreme Court session or the moment when federal action would become necessary in the nullification crisis. They did so on January 14, 1833, thereby enabling a focus on South Carolina, which relented under federal threats.22 However, the Worcester decision was greeted with joy in the Cherokee Nation. In a letter to the Cherokee delegation then in Washington, dated March 30, 1832, John Ross wrote, “Our adversaries are generally down in the mouth—there are great rejoicings throughout the nation on the decision of the supreme court upon the Cherokee case. Traitors and internal enemies are seeking places where to hide their heads.”23 The subtle insistence on removal even amidst the seeming triumph of sovereignty in Worcester suggests that the U.S. government’s avowals of native autonomy need to be interpreted in light of the ways in which they signify within the effort to balance the competing claims of federalism—to regularize jurisdiction and suspend political crises in U.S. legal geography. This process of domestication is dependent on the discursive construction of forms of native subjectivity through which to present U.S. policy as fundamentally predicated on consent, casting U.S. jurisdiction as a constitutionally regulated order free from the use of “force.” Using Indian nationhood as an empty signifier through which to manage potential controversies within federalism, U.S. legal discourse ties native collective self-representation to a particular mapping of U.S. national space, channeling the former into the institutional and rhetorical parameters of treaty-making which itself served as the means of legitimizing removal. Native voice and nationhood as it appears in federal Indian law in the antebellum period, then, is overdetermined by its role in reinforcing the self-evidence of national space and maintaining the jurisdictional equilibrium of U.S. hegemony, dissimulating the imperial assault on indigenous peoples by limiting their institutionally recognized speech to highly regulated modes of consent.

NATIONALITY AND ITS DISCONTENTS

In her autobiography, Mankiller: A Chief and Her People, former Cherokee Principal Chief Wilma Mankiller notes that in the pre-removal period, “Some Cherokees, mostly the prosperous mixed-bloods, began to treat women as second-class citizens, kept black slaves, and even owned large

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plantations” (78–79), adding, “Sadly, this strategy of adopting white culture backfired. The policy of appeasement failed to satisfy anyone” (86). The Cherokee state apparatus as it emerged in the 1820s was controlled by an elite who were ideologically committed to centralized authority and the privatization of land use, wealth, and kinship, developing a legal code and bureaucracy that rendered subaltern the forms of town-based consensus and clan identification that traditionally had defined and shaped Cherokee life—a dynamic significantly enabled by limited Cherokee literacy in English and familiarity with Euramerican legal concepts. National discourse becomes the vehicle for a class-inflected translation that asserts Cherokee autonomy from the United States but increasingly defines it through capitalist political-economy, constructing forms of national subjectivity that work to delegitimize longstanding popular systems of decision making, alliance, and conflict resolution. The articulation of Cherokee national identity in the 1820s, though, needs to be situated within the history of escalating imperial pressure that both facilitated the growth of an elite and provided the impetus for centralization. Over the course of the eighteenth century, as trade with the English became a crucial aspect of the Cherokee economy, inter-town communication and cooperation took on greater significance, since the English tended not to understand the decentralized, consensual, and affiliative dynamics of Cherokee life. By the end of the American Revolution, in which the Cherokees largely fought on the British side, they had been subjected to several devastating invasions by Anglo/American military forces, as well as having had to contend for decades with growing numbers of white intruders on treaty-guaranteed Cherokee land. Some form of centralization was necessary in order to prevent violence, redress treaty violations, and provide a popularly accepted mechanism for negotiating treaties, instead of the method of picking and choosing docile chiefs preferred by England and the United States.24 Though the United States suggested its recognition of Cherokee autonomy by signing treaties with them, starting with the Treaty of Hopewell (1785), these agreements also legitimized the appropriation by purchase of Cherokee land, often already occupied by white squatters the United States was unable or unwilling to remove. After securing several major land cessions by bribing prominent chiefs and holding secret councils with them, Jefferson’s administration adopted the policy of insisting that Indians east of the Mississippi accept allotment or removal, which would become the dominant pattern in federal Indian policy culminating in the Indian Removal Act. An attendant movement toward “national” government among the Cherokees occurs during what many historians refer to as “the first removal crisis,” a conflict between the Upper and Lower Towns

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mediated by interested U.S. officials seeking to seize land, resulting in the construction of a standing body that would represent all of the Cherokees in negotiations with the United States in the time between full council meetings—the first truly national institution. In September of 1809 at Willstown, representatives from various towns met in council and decided to create the National Committee—a group of thirteen headmen selected by the council that would oversee the administrative affairs of the Cherokees, all decisions of the Committee to be subject to debate and formal ratification during the next council. In the words of a letter of September 27, 1809, from the Cherokee council to the federal agent, the Committee’s purpose was “to manage our national affairs,” but for the most part, this meant handling correspondence with the agent and dealing with questions of treaty violations.25 Continued pressure from the United States led to the adoption of further protective consolidating measures. In June of 1817, Andrew Jackson went to negotiate with the Cherokees for additional cessions. He strong-armed thirty-one chiefs into signing a treaty, which he and Cherokee agent Return J. Meigs then claimed as official approval from the Cherokee Nation. The Senate ratified the document on December 26, 1817. This crisis was averted, however, by the intercession of various religious organizations, including the ABCFM, which helped broker a new treaty in 1819, in which in exchange for more cessions the Cherokees kept the remaining part of their land, rather than having the nation dismembered into individual plots or having to move west. In light of sustained American efforts to push forward with a policy of removal in what has been known as “the second removal crisis,” the annual council on May 6, 1817 passed a law laying out the “form for the future government of our Nation” which can be read as directly responsive to the initiatives of federal Indian policy.26 In addition to setting at two years the terms of the members of the Committee (referred to in the law as the “Standing Committee”), presumably to be elected by the General Council itself at its annual fall meeting, the law states that the Committee’s actions “shall not be binding on the Nation in our common property . . . without the unanimous consent of the members and Chiefs of the Council.”27 Explicitly defining the nature of collective representation in land dealings with the United States, the law unequivocally denounces the validity of any claims to Cherokee national voice in territorial matters that is not affirmed “unanimous[ly]” by the General Council. As the concrete manifestation and defender of the “common,” then, the General Council embodies the nation and therefore has the right to manage Cherokee land. However, what is the scope and content of such management, and to what extent is the law’s invocation of “our Nation” meant to license a centralization of power and policy among the Cherokees? While the act

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does state that “The affairs of the Cherokee Nation shall be committed to the care of the Standing Committee” (5), the only “affairs” mentioned have to with ongoing engagements with the United States, such that the term “Nation” gains its meaning in the context of Cherokee negotiations with the demands of imperial policy. The law begins by citing the number of towns present in the council (“Whereas, fifty-four towns and villages have convened in order to deliberate and consider on the situation of our Nation” [4]), suggesting that the towns serve as the basis of the act’s legitimacy. The act’s language, then, implies a delegation of certain administrative functions but does not appear to endorse a wholesale reallocation of decision-making authority. Consenting to nationalization within this ideological matrix, though, created institutions that could enact policy at odds with extant Cherokee practices, (re)defining the “common” in ways hospitable to capitalist production and exchange. As developed in the texts of Cherokee governance in this period, national discourse worked to increase trade, redefine property ownership and inheritance, and radically curb the authority of town councils, increasingly playing to and abetting the interests of a slaveholding elite while producing a large subaltern class still committed to clan and town affiliations whose access to political institutions and discourse is curtailed steadily and significantly.28 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” (699). Between 1817 and 1826, the General 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).29 If the vision of native peoples as nations circulated in U.S. Indian policy works to cohere U.S. legal geography by managing jurisdictional tensions and creating a clearly delimited subject for treaty discourse, such nationhood when performed can exceed the role scripted for it. Appropriating the language and practice of nationalism can allow native peoples to seize and refunction the terms of federal law, mobilizing the constrained forms of self-representation recognized by the United States to alternative ends.

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However, while the structure of Indian nationhood as developed in imperial policy does not exhaust the possible uses to which it can be put, its enmeshment in the existing imperial dynamic also shapes its employment by native peoples: “There is . . . an inherent contradictoriness in nationalist thinking, because it reasons within a framework of knowledge whose representational structure corresponds to the very structure of power nationalist thought seeks to repudiate.” Implementing the notion of nationhood, then, transforms collective identity just as the content of nationhood is itself transformed in the process of its application by an imperially dominated group to themselves; “in its very constitution as a discourse of power, nationalist thought cannot remain only a negation; it is also a positive discourse which seeks to replace the structure of colonial power with a new order, that of national power.”30 In this mediation, though, not all sectors of the population are equally active, those most familiar with imperial logics and institutions taking the lead. Intimate awareness of the forms of such political-economy often is coupled with investment in them, such that their adoption is envisioned as less merely tactical than normative. Put another way, the Cherokees most able to serve as leaders in the process of appropriating “nation”-hood are also the people most likely to accept the principles of liberalism that organize U.S. political-economy—representative governance with capitalist exchange and propertyholding—as the self-evident framework for national politics. Nationalist institutions come to serve as the vehicle for realizing that system among the Cherokees, albeit one whose “positive” goal is the maintenance of Cherokee political autonomy and the protection of their land base. The internal disjunction within the nation due to nationalism’s articulation of itself both within and against the structures of imperial policy can be addressed through the notion of “passive revolution.” In The Nation and Its Fragments, Partha Chatterjee describes the ways elite authority over national institutions enables the reorganization of the political-economy of “the nation”: “The dominance of capital does not emanate from its hegemonic sway over ‘civil society.’ On the contrary, it seeks to construct a synthetic hegemony over the domains of both civil society and the precapitalist community. The reification of the ‘nation’ in the body of the state becomes the means for constructing this hegemonic structure, and the extent of control over the new state apparatus becomes a precondition for further capitalist development” (212). From this perspective, one can read Cherokee national discourse as maintaining a “synthetic hegemony.” An elite composed of those members of the indigenous population most integrated into imperial bureaucracy and economy becomes the bearer of “bourgeois” ideology, though without the full development of a capitalist mode of production. Chatterjee argues with

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respect to India that “[w]hile the nationalist leadership sought to mobilize the peasantry as an anticolonial force in its project of establishing a nationstate, it was . . . careful to keep their participation limited to the forms of bourgeois representative politics in which peasants would be regarded as part of the nation but distanced from the institutions of the state” (160). In a similar vein, the national government becomes the vehicle for remapping Cherokee geopolitics by recasting representation of the Cherokee people in negotiations with the United States as validation for the official installation of “bourgeois representative politics,” providing “the foundations from which a positive content was supplied for the independent national state” (203). This emergent national imaginary works to displace, or at least to depoliticize, traditional forms of authority and spatiality organized around town autonomy and kinship networks, rendering them subaltern by denying them a substantive role in official governance.31 Periodically reiterating the government’s function as the defender of Cherokee territory against the United States reaffirms the consent of the majority, providing legitimacy for national institutions and leaders while they construct a bureaucracy committed to a modified version of “capitalist development” that steadily curtails the access of non-elite Cherokees to the political processes of nationhood. While William McLoughlin is right in his assertion that “there was no outright attack upon Cherokee traditionalism by the General Council itself (and could not be, because the majority were traditionalists),”32 this perspective overlooks the ways that traditionalists are marginalized despite their literally being in the majority. The stilted influence of the emergent elite in shaping national policy and voice has far less to do with raw numbers than its structural position within post-1817 governance as members of the National Committee, the vast class-influenced gap among the Cherokees in knowledge of English and Euramerican legal process, and the unevenness at the heart of national discourse in its narration of its own legitimacy. The Committee could not pass laws without the consent of the full General Council, most of the members of which prior to the late-1820s were non-English-speaking full-bloods. Thinking about the laws as texts, however, raises the question of how they were produced and the effect of this process on how one interprets them. The following facts are significant in considering Cherokee textual production prior to removal, especially the national legal code: the Cherokee syllabary was not invented until 1822, so that the Cherokee language could not be written before this; the Cherokee laws first were published in 1821 in Knoxville, Tennessee, primarily to discourage white intruders; an 1826 law orders the translation of the legal code into Cherokee, suggesting all existing copies were in English; copies of the laws in any language were not widely available until the Cherokee

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Phoenix, the official national newspaper, began publishing in 1828; and most importantly, as of 1835, less than one-quarter of the Cherokee population could read English or Cherokee, less than one-sixteenth reading English. Cumulatively these points suggest that the legal code existed only in English for almost the entire pre-Constitution period, so that the actual language and phrasing of the laws was controlled by the English-literate members of the National Council and Committee, those most likely to support centralizing authority and institutionalizing bourgeois norms. They at least were responsible for translating debate (presumably in Cherokee) into writing. This dynamic, though, suggests a much broader problematic: to what degree could Cherokees who did not know English substantively take part in the drafting of the laws? If the final form of the laws was in English, is it too much of a leap to suggest that they were composed in English and orally translated into Cherokee when brought to the General Council for discussion? Beyond literacy in English per se, the laws also depend on literacy in Anglo-American legal discourse—its objects and modes of articulation. Such knowledge widely correlates with knowledge of English in the period, reinforcing the disproportionate influence of “acculturated” Cherokees in the process of law making. Additionally, in contrast to the General Council’s annual gathering, the Committee met year round, and many of the laws end with the phrase “By order of the National Committee.” These two points together suggest that most of the laws likely were written in and by the Committee and brought to the General Council for its approval.33 Although even if the Committee, comprised almost exclusively by members of the elite, both largely set the agenda for the General Council’s annual meeting and had ultimate control over the language of the laws, they still could not force assent to the proposed provisions.34 By all accounts, the General Council still operated by way of consensus so that traditional headmen would need to be persuaded. However, consent becomes more complicated when considered within the frame of passive revolution, raising questions about how to assess assent within the context of a movement between conceptual and signifying systems. Since the vast majority of Cherokees in the nation and in the General Council were not familiar with U.S. legal and political structures, creating the Committee to deal with such issues on a day-to-day basis, they well may have deferred to the Committee’s knowledge and experience. Also, one cannot know to what degree headmen still were operating within the consensus framework of the towns, in which those who did not agree simply were not bound by the decision, so that the “national” unity created for preventing white intrusion and the sale of lands may not have been understood as extending in a unilateral way across activities unrelated to maintaining the integrity of

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Cherokee territory against the United States. The forms of national identity and voice presented in and constructed by the laws, then, need to be interpreted in light of not just their uneven relation to the Cherokee populace but the role of intersecting forms of literacy and disparate ideologies of governance in the legislative process within the General Council itself. This lopsidedness is magnified by the changes in the structure of the General Council prior to 1828, most notably limiting Council membership to thirtytwo (1820), whereas previously it had been unlimited, and mandating that all laws require the formal approval of the Committee (1823), thereby structurally giving the thirteen members of the Committee a voice equal to the thirty-two National Council members.35 These changes mark more than an intensification and formal validation of the Committee’s influence over the shape of Cherokee governance; they indicate the ways in which nationhood as articulated in the laws increasingly involves a marginalization of the towns. Perhaps of greatest significance in this process of legally resignifying Cherokee identity and remapping Cherokee space are the districting acts passed in 1820, which divided the nation into eight judicial and legislative sections and limited representation in the General Council to four per district (11, 15). These acts operate from the assumption of a coherent national geography that can be subdivided rather than a kinship-based association of towns. In restricting radically the number of people in the Council and transferring conflict resolution from local councils to formal judicial bodies, these laws divest the towns of any official standing as such. The towns functioned as more than an empirical phenomenon, homes in literal geographic proximity, but as an organizing concept of Cherokee social life that defined collective decision making as an autonomous local process.36 Thus, subsuming the towns within a national body with power to supersede town-based consensus exceeds a mere shift in the form of an already existing “national” entity, instead redrawing the topography of political authority through the positing of an overarching national identity that represents itself as supplanting, rather than complementing, traditional social formations. In what can be taken as an effort to legitimize this transformation, the law creating the judiciary directs “that a council house shall be established in each district for the purpose of holding councils to administer justice in all causes and complaints that may be brought forward for trial” (11). The mention of “councils” intimates continuity between the new system and older town-based conventions, giving a traditional cast to this initiative while still mandating that deliberation must be “agreeable to the National laws.”37 The persistence of town councils and the potential threat they pose to the consolidation of national hegemony, however, is registered in an 1825 law that declares, “members of the Committee and Council . . . shall possess

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no authority or power to convene Councils in their respective districts” (45), suggesting anxiety about the continuing activity of non-national councils. In addition to deauthorizing articulations of collectivity other than the officially sanctioned narrative of the nation-state, national discourse increasingly peripheralizes the clans, delinking Cherokee identity from kinship. Early efforts to curtail clan power include the laws of September 11, 1808, which outlawed blood revenge against law enforcement personnel (3–4), and the law of April 10, 1810, which outlawed blood revenge entirely (4),38 but prior to districting in 1820, the laws continuously affirmed aspects of Cherokee matrilineality. In formulating national governance in the wake of the second removal crisis, the 1817 law declares that the “improvements and labors of our people by the mother’s side shall be inviolate” (15), and an 1819 act states, “That any white man who shall marry a Cherokee woman, the property of the woman so marry [sic], shall not be subject to the disposal of her husband” (10), rejecting white patriarchal norms within Cherokee legal discourse. However, that same act requires that a white man taking a Cherokee as his wife must “marry her legally” in order for him to attain “citizenship,” adding that white men cannot have more than one wife and recommending “that all others should also have but one wife hereafter” (10). While immediately insulating Cherokee women from coverture, the law creates the category of “citizenship” as a feature of national governance/ identity utterly separate from matrilineal clan identification and privileges monogamy and Christian marriage in contrast to extant notions of sexual freedom.39 Thus, even in early legal support for clan conventions one can see the signs of an incipient movement to implement a conception of national belonging distinct from the seven clans and an ideology of kinship organized more around the nuclear family than extended webs of matrilineal association. This trend toward the privatization of family intensifies after the official dislocation of the towns from national governance, making the clans legally irrelevant while privileging capitalist norms as the basis for representing virtually all aspects of national life.40 In 1824 and 1825, the General Council passes the following laws: all free people of color in the Cherokee Nation are to be considered intruders (37); marriages between “negro slaves” and Cherokees are made illegal (38); written wills are made legally binding and the property of those who die intestate is to be “equally divided among his lawful and acknowledged children, allowing to the widow an equal share” (53); the children of Cherokee men and white women are to be “equally entitled to all the immunities and privileges enjoyed by the citizens descending from the Cherokee race, by the mother’s side” (57); and polygamy is made illegal (57). Together these acts qualitatively distinguish national

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citizenship from matrilineality by repudiating all children of African ancestry regardless of the identity of the mother, allowing white women’s children equal status, and outlawing Cherokee women from exercising their traditional prerogative of adopting outsiders into the clans. Within national discourse, being Cherokee ceases to be a function of clan membership. Most significant of all though, the law provides that for those without wills the “estate” will be split between “his” children and widow, officially making inheritance de facto patrilineal. Like the disaggregation of government policy from town consensus, this abjection of the clans through inheritance law and the production of “citizenship” allows for a discursive remapping of Cherokee geopolitics. Read in light of the official adoption of other measures facilitating capitalist land use, production, and exchange (including legal protection for slaveholding, contracts, fencing, and privatized control of fields), these changes demonstrate that by the mid-1820s Cherokee national discourse envisions the nation as a collection of surplus-producing households whose relation to the land is managed by reference to an abstract property code embodied in written documents, like contracts and wills. While land itself was not property, in the sense of being individually owned and saleable like a commodity, the Cherokee laws allowed “improvements” to be sold and required that three years pass before an abandoned area could be occupied. In these ways, especially given the nexus of contracts, inheritance, and plantation agriculture recognized and enabled by the laws, official Cherokee land tenure moves toward a capitalist conception of ownership with the exception that sale cannot pertain to the land itself. 41 National subjectivity, then, increasingly was shaped by this depiction of the nation as an assemblage of patriarchally defined households, administratively disowning traditional processes and foreclosing forms of collective voice and selfrepresentation that draw on such identifications. Traditional kinds of community and spatiality, however, do not simply disappear in response to such statutory alterations. The survival of such older/other arrangements, the inverted traces of subaltern agency, can be seen in the laws’ attempt to negate them and the discursive production of criminality—the mounting legal penalties for failure to conform to emergent administrative procedures. Casting noncompliance with the roles and preferred behavioral norms of the expanding national bureaucracy as criminal activity helps to sustain a narrative of popular consent to elite governance by refusing to acknowledge certain acts, or refusals to act, as potential expressions of dissent or the persistence of countervailing social norms.42 In fact, the laws are littered with attempts to compel adherence to the narrative adopted by the government, including the following: requiring the Light Horsemen “to obey the orders of the principal Chiefs” (42);

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requiring marshals to heed the summons of Supreme Court justices (48); seizing property for failure to pay taxes (29); two laws fining witnesses for not appearing in court (37, 62); disqualifying perjurers from ever serving as witnesses again (35); requiring marshals “to take cognizance of every violation of law” (37); and fining men for refusing to aid in enforcing the law when asked by a marshal (53). The actions to which the above laws allude could be interpreted, among other things, as the persistence of a popular belief that one was not bound by rules to which one did not directly consent, as an objection to the procedures and/or hierarchical structure of the bureaucracy, or as a broader form of quotidian opposition to emergent modes of ostensibly representative governance. While the precise meanings of these actions are difficult to ascertain, I would suggest that the laws’ representation of criminality suggests the existence of forms of popular agency that do not conform to the official national imaginary, registering a discrepancy between national ideology and popular practice. From this perspective, the national government’s periodic efforts to reposition itself as the defender of the “common property” worked to shore up its, in Chatterjee’s phrase, “synthetic hegemony” by dramatically displaying nationhood and its administrative structures as the mode for opposing the United States. For example, a law passed on October 23, 1822, declares “unanimously, and with one voice and determination, to hold no treaties with any Commissioners of the United States to make any cession of lands, being resolved not to dispose of even one foot of ground,” adding that “we are determined hereafter never to make any cessions of land” (23–24). Other laws related to treaty-making and the transfer of land to the United States include denying that emigrants to the west have any rights to Cherokee land in the east (5); penalizing the buying or selling of emigrants’ improvements to the land they are leaving (19); denying all citizenship and property rights to those who decide to emigrate (119); and condemning to death anyone who attempts to treat with the United States against the wishes of the General Council (136). Such performances of national unity reconnect national policy to popular concerns, thereby legitimizing the bureaucracy and deferring discussion of the disjunction between national and traditional forms of sociality and spatiality. The consistent administrative recoding of matrilineality and local autonomy as subaltern, however, testifies not to a kind of draconian crackdown on traditional practices but to the immense difficulty of producing adherence to the bureaucratic structures and modalities of nationhood. The Cherokees were not duped by a self-interested elite; the national government simply was irrelevant in most of their day-to-day lives, coming into focus in moments of crisis when U.S. agencies, officials, or citizens forcefully claimed Cherokee land. Interpreting Cherokee nationalism in this

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period, then, involves tracing its embedding in an emergent institutional apparatus and the uneven relation of most Cherokees to this administrative structure. In the case of the Cherokees, the term “subaltern” can be used to denote this gap within nationalism between those who advocated the creation of a modified capitalist legal geography and those who supported the defense of Cherokee territorial autonomy by “national” institutions but continued to endorse social practices and processes nominally superseded or outlawed by the Cherokee legal code. National voice, as I have been arguing, is overdetermined by the imperial context in which national discourse emerges and the class-inflected role of literacy in the production of the legal code and national bureaucracy. In this way, nationhood both is and is not an expression of the will of the Cherokee people, serving as the vehicle for opposing U.S. intervention while at the same time legally disowning (and to some extent seeking to dismantle) traditional social formations by marginalizing and criminalizing them. Thus, the question of Cherokee consent to nationalism and national institutions is complicated by the continuing movement between nonequivalent ways of conceptualizing collective identity in the context of ongoing pressure from the United States not only to assent to the loss of lands but to speak as a nation.

CONSTITUTIONAL CONFLICTS

Taking nationhood as the paradigmatic form of Cherokee political identity can foreclose discussion of the relation between competing visions of Cherokee peoplehood and the ways that internal negotiation was influenced by U.S. mandated modes of political subjectivity. Attending to that set of dialectical relations problematizes the critical effort to recognize native agency, voice, and consent by suggesting how the terms of recognition may themselves be part of the imperial dynamic. When viewed from this perspective, the Cherokee Constitution appears less as either a strategic display for the United States or an organic expression of collective identity than a site of negotiation between U.S. imperatives, elite interests, and popular sentiment. Formally adopting a model of government that in large measure resembles that of the United States certainly could be seen as illustrating to whites the status of the Cherokees as an autonomous polity. Given that the document’s provisions largely replicate the administrative network legally put in place over the previous decade, it also can be seen as the fulfillment of Cherokee nationhood as it had developed institutionally since the second removal crisis. These descriptions offer different ways of conceptualizing the political work of the Constitution, yet both are true. What they overlook,

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which would help connect these interpretations to each other, is the conflict among the Cherokees over the nature and scope of nationality. The text of the Cherokee Constitution reaffirms the integrity and inviolability of Cherokee space while remapping it, reaffirming the capitalist geography increasingly implemented by national institutions from 1817 onward.43 Article I asserts that “the boundaries of this Nation . . . shall forever remain unalterably the same” and refers to the territory marked out as “the common property of the Nation,” but just after, it declares, “the improvements made thereon, and in the possession of the citizens of the Nation, are the exclusive and indefeasible property of the citizens respectively who made; or may rightfully be in possession of them” (118–19). Reiterating existing legal protection for “improvements” and “contracts” (119, 123), the Constitution presents Cherokee land use and trade as mediated by standardized documents, requiring experts to translate relations among Cherokees and between them and their land into the abstract categories of legal discourse and depicting the nation as a regularized grid of private semi-ownership. In this way, it is continuous with existing Cherokee laws in their broad ideological commitment to slaveholding, fencing, patriarchal inheritance, and the development of an export economy. Within the Constitutional structure, the obligations of contract replace those of kinship as the constitutive principle of national life. Cleansing the public sphere of kinship’s supposedly archaic associations and duties, the Constitution disavows the clans’ role in collective decision making and as a key affective component of what it means to be Cherokee. It limits political participation to “free male citizens” (121), thereby formally excluding women from any official role in national life, a move foreshadowed by the limitation of jury service to men in 1825 (44). Given women’s central status within the matrilineal clan structure, their complete disenfranchisement can be interpreted as a further dislocation of kinship from politics, and given women’s traditional role in choosing town chiefs and their equal participation in town councils, this disenfranchisement also reaffirms and extends the government’s deauthorization of the towns as sites of political mobilization. Moreover, the Constitution further centralizes and hierarchizes political authority: increasing the size of the elite-dominated Committee from thirteen to sixteen (two representatives per district) while again reducing the size of the mostly fullblood National Council, from thirty-two to twenty-four (three representatives per district) (120); stipulating that “all bills making appropriations” must begin in the Committee (123); and giving the Principal Chief veto power over all legislation, requiring a two-thirds majority to override (125). While perhaps mimicking U.S. norms, these provisions also consolidate the bureaucratic apparatus that had been under construction for over a decade, further displacing the clans and towns from national political processes.

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If U.S. hegemony depends on the simulation of native consent, Cherokee national hegemony depends on the simulation of popular consent to its principles and procedures. What is at issue is how avenues for self-representation discursively and institutionally are shaped in ways that confirm the obviousness and legitimacy of a given system, exerting a kind of force that is itself disowned in the claim that the people have spoken for themselves. In order to address the slippages and erasures that occur in that process, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak argues in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, one needs to account for the ways in which “two senses of representation are being run together: representation as ‘speaking for,’ as in politics, and representation as ‘re-presentation,’ as in art or philosophy” (256).44 She suggests that conflating the two leads to an uncritical reiteration of existing forms of subjectivity, “The critique of ideological subjectconstitution within state formations and systems of political economy can now be effaced” (257); distinguishing between the two forms of “representation,” “implies not only a critique of the subject as individual agent but even a critique of the subjectivity of a collective agency” (260). The authority of the Cherokee government to represent (in the first sense) “the people” is posed within the framework of a particular representation (in the second sense) of Cherokee national identity and subjectivity, itself an extension of the vision of native identity projected in treaty-making and the civilization program. As a vehicle of passive revolution, the Cherokee Constitution speaks for/as the people, capturing popular desire to prevent U.S. intervention and using that endorsement of national policy to authorize the entrenchment of a bureaucratic structure at odds with the self-understanding of the majority of Cherokees. Such a tendency becomes more pronounced if one examines evidence of popular resistance to the institutionalization of the civilization program as national policy. A wave of opposition to Christianization and further centralization had been mounting from as early as 1824, reaching its peak in an organized movement against adopting a constitution. A letter from Reverend Samuel Worcester from May 1827 testifies to an anti-constitutional council held in March of that year in the town of White Path, a chief who had been removed from the National Council in November 1825. Along with this meeting, mission journals record a dramatic rise in anti-mission sentiment and a surge in the call for a return to traditional ways.45 The fact that allusions to popular mobilization against the Cherokee government’s civilization program are somewhat scattered within the archive creates the impression that these actions are merely spontaneous—idiosyncratic outbursts that bear little relation to each other and should remain marginal to the construction of historical and critical narratives. As Antonio Gramsci argues, however, “In the ‘most spontaneous’ movement it is simply the case

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that the elements of ‘conscious leadership’ cannot be checked, have left no reliable document. It may be said that spontaneity is therefore characteristic of the ‘history of the subaltern classes’” (196). The appearance of spontaneity, therefore, is inseparable from the politics of literacy; one of the ideological effects of privileging writing both in governance and scholarship is that those movements that “have left no reliable document” seem to have less of an organized structure or purpose. Rather than being dismissed as merely tangential, these moments of discontinuity and rupture in the archive can be read as traces of “conscious leadership”—modes of collective identification and political organization that fall outside the parameters of elite national hegemony. Opposition to the legal system is portrayed within national discourse not as advocacy for another set of principles and practices but as the irrational refusal of order itself, negatively defining government legitimacy. One can see this process at work in the organization of the constitutional convention. The act of October 13, 1826 laying out the details of the convention (to be held July 4, 1827) provides for the election of three representatives from each of the eight districts. However, electors are limited to “free male citizen[s]” and the candidates for the convention must be chosen from a list of ten per district—the eighty candidates being specified in the act itself (73–76). By naming candidates the law works to prevent attempts to undermine the convention, overwhelmingly slanting the election toward the elite.46 According to McLoughlin, “Of the twenty-one delegates elected, only four were full bloods; all delegates but nine could write their names in English” (Cherokee Renascence, 394). The government’s direct oversight of the choice of candidates appears as a somewhat coordinated effort to prevent the emergence of a political party organized around an anti-statist critique of national policy and its endorsement of capitalism and Christianity.47 The act calling for the constitutional convention also stipulates, “That the principles which shall be established in the Constitution, to be adopted by the Convention, shall not in any degree go to destroy the rights and liberties of the free citizens of this Nation, nor to effect or impair the fundamental principles and laws, by which the Nation is now governed” (76). This provision suggests a concern that the convention could roll back structural and ideological initiatives implemented over the previous decade. In many ways, the Constitution appears less as part of an offensive against U.S. federal and state policies than a strategic attempt to discipline campaigns of subaltern insurgency that had been building for several years. While the most organized forms of dissent seem to have been dampened by meetings between national officials and the leading anti-Constitution chiefs, the rebellious impulse clearly had not been quashed nor had the central issues fully been resolved as indicated by four laws passed in 1828,

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the year the Constitution went into effect: fining people for “contempt of the Court” (101); forbidding the disruption of “Divine worship” (107), a measure protecting both missionaries and Cherokee converts; increasing to $100 the fine for failing to appear as a witness (116); and most notably, punishing with one hundred stripes the crime “of forming unlawful meetings, with intent to create faction . . . , or to encourage rebellion against the laws and Government of the Cherokee Nation” (117). These pieces of legislation suggest both continuing patterns of noncompliance with previous laws and widespread, if diffuse, opposition to the Constitution—“faction” likely serving as a euphemistic way of designating and disowning town councils acting in extra-constitutional ways.48 As codified within the Constitution, and consolidated through the legislative management of the constitutional convention and the post-convention legal fortification of the constitutional order, Cherokee nationalism seeks to protect Cherokee territory from imperial appropriation while reordering Cherokee geopolitics. It represents itself as acting in the people’s interest while continuing to insulate the administrative apparatus from popular movements for change by managing what constitutes political agency and subjectivity. Cherokee constitutionalism entrenches the power of a slaveholding elite through a hegemony in which the government is cast as the embodiment of national community, rendering potential opposition as subaltern by displacing it from the realm of politics—recoding it as anachronism, spontaneity, rebellion, or crime. Forms of national selfrepresentation, such as the Constitution, therefore, need to be read not only for the ways in which they resist U.S. territorial incursions but for their simultaneous construction of class-specific narratives of collective identity that far from being ironic serve as the basis for institutionalizing capitalist political-economy and delegitimizing tradition.

“A NEW WAY OF MAKING INDIAN CHIEFS”

In March of 1835, a treaty for the removal of the Cherokees to west of the Mississippi was negotiated in Washington with an unauthorized group. It was brought by John F. Schermerhorn, a federally appointed agent, to the Cherokee capital of Red Clay in October and rejected by the Cherokee General Council, the treaty having already been vetoed in Council during the summer. In December the same document was brought to New Echota, the former capital, for Cherokee consideration while the delegation sanctioned by the Cherokee government was on the way to Washington D.C. to begin a new negotiation with the President and the Senate. Signed by less

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than one-hundred people out of a population of approximately eighteen thousand, the “treaty” was sent to the Senate and ratified on May 13, 1836, by a vote of thirty-one to fifteen, passing the two-thirds mark needed by one vote. Taken from a memorial protesting the signing of the document—the Treaty of New Echota—the phrase “a new way of making Indian chiefs” refers to the discrepancy between official Cherokee national decisionmaking processes and the United States’ efforts to find Cherokees willing to speak for the people.49 In using the word “new” to mark this distinction, the text reads the treaty ironically, suggesting that the claim to national assent that legitimizes the document is in fact a U.S. invention that has little to do with actual Cherokee “chiefs.” However, what precisely is the relation between the structure of Cherokee national institutions and the old way of making Indian chiefs to which the text alludes? What narrative of Cherokee nationality is offered in the memorials protesting the treaty? In contrast to available interpretations of these texts as primarily an ironic appropriation of the colonizer’s language, they can be read as an extension of the existing modes of Cherokee governance, revealing how their critique of the pressure exerted on Cherokee national voice is premised on an affirmation of Cherokee nationalist ideology. The commentary these texts offer on the meaning of native consent within federal policy, though, allows for a further elaboration of the institutional dialectics of consent (as well as of self-determination) in the context of U.S. imperialism, moving away from the static dichotomy of consent versus coercion to a notion of competing and overlapping formations. After a brief summary of the history of Cherokee relations with the United States, the memorial of June 22, 1836 emphasizes the manifest falseness of the United States’ claim to have secured Cherokee assent to removal: “This instrument, the delegation aver before the civilized world, and in the presence of Almighty God, is fraudulent, false upon its face, made by unauthorized individuals, without the sanction, and against the wishes, of the great body of the Cherokee people. Upward of fifteen thousand of those people have protested against it” (325). While alluding to the power vested in the national government to represent the Cherokee people, the text also calls upon the evidence of popular sentiment against the treaty to reaffirm that authority and the fidelity of government representation to popular will. It, therefore, oscillates between a quantitative position based on the number of signers/protestors and a qualitative one rooted in the question of who legitimately can sign a treaty. This ambiguity in the discussion of the grounds for repudiating the treaty, though, opens up into a broader critique of the forms of systemic force that shape the representation of Cherokee voice within U.S. policy, especially the various tensions and crises within U.S. governance that the

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removal treaty is called upon to resolve. In doing so, the memorials can be said to trace the contours of “consent” within U.S. law, how the possibilities of signifying Cherokee collective will are delimited by the work the treaty structurally is called on to perform. Highlighting the structural role of native national voice in reconciling various jurisdictional tensions, one of the memorials offers the following anatomy: “If interest or policy require that the Cherokees be removed, without their consent, from their lands, surely the President and Senate have no constitutional power to accomplish that object. They cannot do it under the power to make treaties, which are contracts, not rules prescribed by a superior. . . . Nor does the peculiar situation of the Cherokees, in reference to the States, their necessities and distresses, confer any power upon the President and Senate to alienate their legal rights, or to prescribe the manner and time of their removal” (325). Treaties necessitate “assent” and are the only legal means of effecting removal. The alternatives would be either ceding power over Indian affairs to the states, thereby violating existing treaties, or renouncing the need for consent altogether and justifying relocation on the basis of the United States’ greater military power, also violating previous treaties as well as more generally vitiating the United States’ narration of its own territorial legitimacy. That rather straightforward premise becomes overdetermined by the “peculiar situation” of the Cherokees, their claim to land supposedly within “the States.” Cherokee national “consent,” then, lubricates the resolution of federalist conflict over state jurisdiction, providing a means of nominally respecting “legal rights” while accomplishing the broader goal of removal. As another memorial notes, “Such an instrument, so obtained, so contaminated, cannot cover the real nature of the acts which it is invoked to sanction” (578). Asserting the right to say no exposes the discursive and institutional role scripted for the Cherokees within federal Indian policy and the consequent jurisdictional antagonisms Cherokee national voice is called on to manage/mask within U.S. legal geography. In repeatedly repudiating the administrative recoding of imperial duress as native choice, the memorials mark and challenge U.S. policy’s efforts to produce the effect of hegemony. Instead, they foreground the ways in which the rhetoric of consent dissimulates and works to legitimize systemic forms of violence: “The Cherokees cannot resist the power of the United States” (338); “If power is to be exerted, let it come unveiled” (579); “we have not forfeited our rights, and if we fail to transmit to our sons the freedom we have derived from our fathers, it must not be by an act of suicide, it must not be with our own consent” (668). More than merely rejecting a particular treaty, these statements highlight the structural (over)determination of Cherokee voice within U.S. discourse. This negation, though, raises the question of how the memorials themselves participate in Cherokee national

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governance, the ways they confirm its political-economy, vision of the people, and ideology of consent. In other words, how are they marked by their production within the Cherokee state apparatus? Furthermore, what does this connection mean for literary-critical interpretation of these documents and their class-inflected portrayal of national voice? The collective rejection of the removal treaty needs to be distinguished theoretically from a positive affirmation of the memorials’ depiction of Cherokee national identity. While critiquing the maneuvers of U.S. policy, these texts work to interpellate the Cherokees within capitalist formations, presenting resistance to the United States as equivalent to support for “civilizing” measures. Perhaps the most intriguing of these moments comes as part of a present appeal rhetorically routed through the future anterior: “Will the faithful historian who shall hereafter record our lamentable fate, say the Cherokee nation executed a treaty by which they freely and absolutely ceded the country in which they were born and educated, the property they had been industriously accumulating and improving, and, abandoning the high road by which they had been advancing from savagism, had precipitated themselves into worse than their pristine degradation? Will not the reader of such a narrative require the most ample proof before he will credit such a story?” (577). This argument asks the reader to appreciate the manifest incongruity between the provisions of the treaty and the obvious desire of the Cherokee people for acculturation. Attributing a singular logic to the nation, the passage’s critique of the United States depends upon the idea of a complete and conscious collective movement toward “accumulating and improving” “property” and away from “savagism.” The text adds that “our people had abandoned the pursuits, the habits, and the tastes of the savage” (576). Thus, the rhetoric of nationhood offered here functions as an extension of the operative administrative discourse and structures of Cherokee governance, totalizing disparate kinds of Cherokee resistance to removal into a single logic predicated on the pronounced subordination, if not wholesale abandonment, of traditional cultural formations as peripheral, anachronistic, and/or nonsensical.50 If the memorials track the relation between the shaping of Cherokee national voice within U.S. governance and the institutional functions such voice is called to perform, these texts also need to be situated within the representational dynamics of Cherokee governance. More specifically, reading for the subaltern within this framework highlights the ways that participation in the Cherokee state apparatus increasingly required the adoption of certain forms of subjectivity that largely screened out traditional beliefs and ideals. Reciprocally, the employment of particular “civilized” topologies in national discourse, including the memorials, should be

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interpreted in light of their relation to state structures through which national self-representation is regulated. In “Figures and the Law” in Ethnocriticsm, writing about response to the Indian Removal Act rather than the Treaty of New Echota, Arnold Krupat interprets the Cherokee memorials to the United States as an ironic intervention by a collective subject: “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” (156). This reading, though, appears to assume that all of the Cherokees equally assented to this “mode” and that they functioned as “one” in their appropriation of it. Krupat implicitly presents the Cherokees as all having the same relationship to “the ‘master’s’ language” as well as to traditional practices, perhaps strategically deploying the former to guard the latter. However, is there a difference between the “prevailing legalistic mode” of the United States and that utilized in Cherokee governance itself—in the organization and acts of the Cherokee Nation? Krupat does allude to Cherokee national governance, indicating that the Cherokees did “produce laws—not merely persuasive but coercive texts —to regulate their internal affairs” (151), but he does not develop the continuity between these texts and the memorials or suggest how the “coercive” dimensions of the former and their process of production might shape how we read the relation between the latter and the population they ostensibly represent.51 In speaking for the Cherokees against U.S. expansion, the memorials’ description of them as donning the “vestments of civilization” can be read as less a strategic use of the “master’s language” than part of the discursive production of legitimacy for Cherokee national institutions (578). Non-consent to U.S. policy rhetorically morphs in these texts into consent for the official narrative of Cherokee national identity that undergirds elite governance. Later in the same memorial, though, the use of the figure of the historian discussed above shifts from the obviousness of Cherokee consent to capitalism to a collective repudiation of the removal treaty. The text asks: “How will his [the “faithful historian(’s)”] astonishment be augmented when he learns that the Cherokee people, almost to a man, denied the existence and the obligation of the alleged compact, that they proclaimed it to have been based in fraud, and concocted in perfidy; that no authority was ever given to those who undertook, in their names and on their behalf, to negotiate it; that it was repudiated with unexampled unanimity . . . ; that they denied that it conferred any rights or imposed any obligations!” (578). The passage helps suggest an alternative logic to Cherokee resistance, or rather in focusing on the fact of refusal, it notes the “unanimity” of

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non-consent without giving it, in Partha Chatterjee’s phrase quoted earlier, a “positive content.” The movement between these discrepant moments of affirmation and negation suggests the representational work the text performs, giving voice to popular sentiment while recoding it. Critically registering such signs of disjunction allows for a critique, or at least an analysis, of the ways anti-imperial oppositional discourse can refract popular affect through the prism of the class and institutional agendas of those with access to literacy. Again, though, the question as I have been posing it is not whether or not the Cherokee government actually represents the people but the form and meaning of such representation, not consent versus coercion but the socio-political formations in which the possibilities for articulating (non)consent are discursively and institutionally shaped. Focusing exclusively on the collective refusal of removal, then, can reinforce the unified national “they” of acculturation. Such an elision of differences among the Cherokees creates the impression of an authoritative speaking/writing position, making resistance more legible at the expense of a sustained analysis and critique of the politics of representing consent. Introducing the figure of the “subaltern” methodologically foregrounds and compensates for the politics of literacy—the fact that there is no text of “savagism”—providing a conceptual fulcrum by which to leverage the institutionalized rhetoric of Cherokee unity and its attendant seminaturalization of the transition “from barbarism to civilization” (577). Displacing the polarized options of seeing nationalist discourse as either fully expressive of a collective consciousness or as an equally unanimous ironic employment of a “language” not their own profoundly alters how one interprets the memorials and national discourse more broadly. Reading for their critique of the discursive violence of U.S. policy and their own (institutionalized) narrative of acculturation and improvement allows for a more complex rendering of consent better attuned to the ways in which Cherokee political voice is doubly inflected, responsive to both U.S. policy/ invasion and the interests/initiatives of an emergent elite. Rather than attempting to rule native peoples as colonies, which would have exacerbated tensions in federalism and frustrated full-scale white settlement on native lands, U.S. law constructed forms of Indian national identity and consent, generating at least the appearance of hegemony. Doing so created a legal equilibrium that acknowledged a version of sovereignty while situating it within the imperial project of folding Indian lands into U.S. national space. The topos of the “Indian nation,” then, remains complexly enmeshed in, rather than outside of or purely resistant to, the history and dynamics of imperial policy as well as functioning as a site of (class) contestation within indigenous communities. I am not arguing that nationhood is inherently less authentic than tradition, however these terms

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are construed, as a way for native peoples to manage their own governance. Nor am I suggesting that self-consciously national governments are simply ventriloquized stand-ins for the United States. Yet while the figure of nationhood is meant to denote native peoples’ rightful self-determination, it also has been deployed within U.S. Indian policy in ways that legitimize U.S. preemption claims and facilitate land sales. Dale Turner observes, “Aboriginal intellectuals must engage the non-Aboriginal intellectual landscapes from which their political rights and sovereignty are articulated and put to use in Aboriginal communities” (90). Due to the fact that nonindigenous institutions legally define and regulate the “political rights and sovereignty” of native peoples, negotiation with the “intellectual landscapes” of imperial authority is necessary, and the language of nationhood is one vehicle of such engagement. More than providing a kind of filter through which the settler-state views indigenous communities, though, the intellectual frameworks of its institutions are “put to use in Aboriginal communities,” becoming a vehicle for reordering indigenous socio-spatiality and the relations among members of a given people. The confrontation between imperial imperatives and extant native practices potentially gives rise to a second struggle within a people, which can create new cleavages or exacerbate existing differences. Utilizing the discourse of nationhood as a generic way of naming native autonomy can defer analysis of what is at stake historically, institutionally, and geopolitically in that discourse, obscuring the ways that it served (and serves) as a site of conflict and mediation between a range of competing interests. Attending to such dynamics allows for a more careful exploration of how particular forms of imperial overdetermination shape and constrain the possibilities of indigenous self-representation, the ways the contours and content of native voice is affected by the official subjectivities imposed on native peoples by U.S. policy as part of its (re)production of national space.

2 THE TERRITORIALITY

OF

TRADITION

Treaties, Hunting Grounds, and Prophecy in Black Hawk’s Narrative In the majority decision in Worcester v. Georgia, John Marshall offers an argument about interpreting treaties that largely has been sustained as one of the central tenets of federal Indian law.1 Given the lack of widespread fluency in English among the Indians, and the hazards of attempting to convey the fineries of Anglo-American legal nomenclature in translation, treaties with native peoples should be read for the broad outline of the signatories’ intent, for the “practical construction” of their terms (554), rather than for the subtle connotative webs associated with particular word choices. In other words, since “chiefs were not very critical judges of the language,” a contention Marshall repeats for emphasis, these documents should be understood as the native negotiators would have understood them (551–52). Yet the decision does not question the cultural assumptions embedded in treaties or their employment as the overwhelmingly privileged mode of conceptualizing native geopolitics and engaging with native communities, leaving no room for addressing the ways native mappings and governance may be displaced or deformed by the demands of the treatysystem itself. At the edges of the decision’s logic, however, one can see the possibility of a disowned alternative creeping into view. At one point, Marshall claims that prior to contact with Europeans Indians’ “general employment was war, hunting, and fishing,” and in his analysis of the Treaty of Hopewell, he notes that the phrase “hunting grounds” was employed because “[h]unting was at the time the principal occupation of the Indians” but that this designation did not prevent building “an occasional village” or setting aside an “occasional cornfield” to “g[i]ve some variety to the scene” (543, 553). The reference to “hunting grounds” here indexes a cultural framework presented as separate from that suggested by “cornfield,” but the treaty is 75

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offered as a culturally neutral vehicle through which to transfer control over the equally culturally neutral land on which either activity—hunting or Euramerican agriculture—can take place. Yet how might the kinds of traditional mappings hinted at in the figure of “hunting grounds” provide a countervailing option to treaty-regulated subjectivities and mappings? Marshall’s discussion of hunting with respect to the Cherokees can be seen as reflecting a broader unwillingness or inability on the part of whites to surrender the image of the Indian as savage nomad, refusing to acknowledge that the Cherokees by the 1830s primarily were farmers and almost entirely had given up hunting as a central part of subsistence. Such a shift, however, was not true of most of the peoples in the western Great Lakes area, where the “hunting grounds” was not merely a lingering white stereotype but a topic of active concern and struggle.2 The relative enclosure of the Cherokees by white settlers by the late-eighteenth century meant that their principal diplomatic and trade connections were with the United States, but indigenous peoples to the northwest were less immediately vulnerable to unilateral U.S. efforts to set the terms of dialogue/debate due to their contiguity and the ongoing patterns of interaction with each other. More than simply an aggregation of exchanges between discrete native polities, the trans-tribal networks in which they participated—the relations of alliance, exchange, and war occurring among tribes into which Europeans were incorporated in the centuries after contact—had logics of their own. Such networks created a common conceptual framework that helped guide decision making within tribes as well as shaping various native peoples’ understandings of their own identity and spatiality in ways different from (though not unaffected by) Euramerican conceptions of political-economy and national borders.3 In the spring of 1832, a well-respected Sauk warrior named Black Hawk led a group of Sauks, Foxes, Kickapoos, and Potawatomies across the Mississippi River, through lands formerly occupied by the Sauks (and surrendered under threat of force over the previous two years) to Winnebago villages to which they had been invited. Despite the attempt of those with Black Hawk to surrender on at least three separate occasions, the military pursued the group and ended up viciously murdering most of them, largely women and children, in the Battle of Bad Axe on August 2, 1832. Characterized as an assault on white settlements by U.S. officials during and afterward, the movements of Black Hawk’s band were represented as a direct threat to the safety of the American public and a violation of existing treaties with the Sauks dating back to their supposed cession of their territory east of the Mississippi in 1804. In contrast, Black Hawk’s Life of Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak, or Black Hawk (1833) offers a genealogy of the conflict that contextualizes it within a decades-long struggle between the

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United States and the Sauks, as well as other native peoples in the western Great Lakes region, over how to conceptualize native landholding, diplomacy, and trade.4 Contesting the topos of “invasion” institutionalized in government declarations and reports of the supposed war, Black Hawk’s text offers what can be described as a traditionalist portrait of regional political-economy, tracing the presence and importance of trans-tribal topographies of hunting, warfare, and exchange presented as extraneous or dangerous in U.S. accounts of native landholding. Due to the process of translation, transcription, and editing through which the text was produced, many critics have focused on the difficulty of locating Black Hawk’s voice in the narrative.5 In “How Smooth Their Language: Authenticity and Interculturalism in the Life of Black Hawk,” Joshua David Bellin seeks to unblock this seeming interpretive impasse by emphasizing “the contact situation” and “Black Hawk’s embeddedness” in “the history of encounter.” Bellin argues that trying to access the real voice behind the narrative “abstracts the authentic Black Hawk from the text,” implicitly inventing an ideal of Sauk social life for which Black Hawk is taken as the representative as well as casting writing itself as a fall from what implicitly is envisioned as the prelapsarian wholeness of native culture(s) before Euro-contact.6 Yet the refusal of a static and ahistorical notion of authenticity need not require abandoning a notion of difference; instead one can interpret the text as an effort to move between discrepant frameworks while making legible the conflict between them. Greg Sarris has suggested that forms of native storytelling can “expose the chasms between two interpretive worlds over which the discourse must continue” (23). The potential difficulty posed by the fact of translation here does not so much distinguish the narrative from other, apparently more direct, literary creations as constellate it with the vast body of texts that comprise U.S.-native relations in which the negotiation between distinct social systems is endemic. From this perspective, the mediated quality of the narrative appears less as an interpretive problem than a political intervention. Rather than abstracting Black Hawk from the narrative, or placing the text within a middle space of “encounter,” one can track its attempt to mark the gap between U.S. and native notions of placemaking and political identity. In doing so, the central epistemological question becomes less authorial than administrative. Instead of asking how we can locate the voice of the speaker given the complex chain of transmission in the text’s creation, we can inquire about how indigenous geopolitical formations are interpellated into U.S. policy and how alternative accounts of native socio-spatiality enter into public discourse. The textuality of Black Hawk’s narrative can be understood as a selfconsciously antagonistic effort to inhabit while transforming a medium

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through which native self-representations had been disavowed, thereby elucidating the text’s extended meditation on the limits of U.S. institutionalized modes of representation.7 Such a reading, though, requires a revision of the “middle ground” paradigm which has gained great prominence over the last two decades in scholarly accounts of Euramerican-native engagement. In his immensely well-researched and instructive study of that name, Richard White characterizes the book’s organizing heuristic in the following terms: “The process of accommodation described in this book certainly involves cultural change, but it takes place on what I call the middle ground. The middle ground is the place in between: in between cultures, peoples, and in between empires and the nonstate world of villages” (x). By refusing to equate contact with conquest, White opens room for sustained discussion of native agency as well as the profound impact of indigenous beliefs and practices on colonists and colonial policy. In framing such negotiation as “in between,” however, White seems to imply the existence of a distinct social matrix located outside of the “cultures” of the peoples involved. In his more ethnohistorically thick descriptions, “the middle ground” appears as a moment within a broader antagonism— circumstances of practical conjunction in which the conflicting structures of different “societies” are brought temporarily into phase but in which each group continues to assess and act according to its own social logics, albeit influenced by and translating elements of the other. This qualified and dialectical sense of the “middle ground” as a contingent process of bringing peoples into sync in ways that remain transected by cultural difference, though, seems largely to have dropped out in the wider dissemination of the concept, scholars such as Bellin favoring the more encompassing notion of a hybridized “place.” Such spatialization of betweenness also usually involves a discounting of the notion of “tradition.” White suggests that he “tried to avoid using the term traditional to convey any meaning but old,” seeing the term as connoting a sense of “essentialized Indianness” which he seeks to eschew (xiv). Yet this choice leaves little conceptual room for thinking about sustained disjunctions between native and non-native understandings and practices of “place,” which I would suggest is itself crucial in making possible a focus on self-determination and attending to efforts by the settlerstate to insert indigenous peoples into its legal geography.8 In “Towards a National Indian Literature: Cultural Authenticity in Nationalism,” Simon Ortiz offers an alternative vision of tradition, as a dynamic and vital force in maintaining native social networks and contesting imperial intervention. Considering the celebration of Catholic saints’ days among Pueblo Indians, Ortiz argues that the adoption of these rituals “speaks of the creative ability of Indian people to gather in many forms of the sociopolitical colonizing force which beset them and make these forms meaningful

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in their own terms” (8). Here he offers several principles that can guide critical use of the concept of “tradition”: Euramerican “forms” explicitly are connected to broader patterns of imperial “force”; native cultural production and self-representation in response is put in the context of a struggle for autonomy from control by Euramerican institutions; and the incorporation of Euramerican objects and rituals into native social life can occur on native peoples’ “own terms,” recontextualizing them within a social system distinct from, though not unaffected by, Euramerican ideals and imperatives. Ortiz further observes, “through the past five centuries the oral tradition has been the most reliable method by which Indian culture and community integrity has been maintained” (9), adding, “because of the insistence to keep telling and creating stories, Indian life continues, and it is this resistance against loss that has made that life possible” (11). For him, tradition is constantly being remade but in ways that seek to establish continuity with older social patterns and to assert the legitimacy of native “socio-political” formations (themselves historically malleable) as against the imperial attempt to reorganize native communities and/or to remove them from their lands. Additionally, storytelling is itself a vehicle of self-determination, a means for native peoples to articulate and maintain their geopolitical identities while also engaging with new artifacts, practices, ideas, and languages.9 Extending beyond a given people, this concept of tradition further can help in foregrounding larger indigenous social constellations. In the previous chapter, I used the term “subaltern” to designate the disjunction between the elite endorsement of the kinds of collective subjectivity demanded by U.S. policy (albeit to oppositional ends) and continued popular investment in traditional structures of clan affiliation and townbased consensus. More broadly, the concept of subalternity can reference the ways indigenous modes of governance, land tenure, and self-identification are effaced by imperially imposed definitions of what properly constitutes politics and political identity, and in this sense, it applies to the attempted imperial erasure of a pre-existing indigenous social matrix in the western Great Lakes region, even though this dynamic operates on a much larger scale than the displacements occurring within and through Cherokee nationalism. Although acknowledging Indians’ theoretical right of occupancy, federal policy in the Old Northwest sought to break up longstanding native social geographies, creating rigid boundaries between peoples so as then to shrink the land held by each and to wedge in white settlements. As a chronicle of an oppositional movement, the disappeared history that precedes it, and the ongoing native social dynamics which shape it, Black Hawk’s narrative tracks and negates the subalternization of regional political-economy by U.S. policy, seeking to capture the “politics of the people” that underlay actions the United States narrated as insurgency.10

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The text highlights how the simulation of native assent to land sales depended on the erasure of extant trans-tribal models of governance, alliance making, and land use, engaging in a project of what Linda Tuhiwai Smith has called “reframing” in which “indigenous people resist being boxed and labelled according to categories which do not fit” (153). Thus, while a result of a layered composition involving transcription, translation, and editing, the text functions as a self-consciously traditionalist critique of the mappings and subjectivities of U.S. Indian policy.11 Moreover, the complex process of production distinguishes Black Hawk’s narrative from texts like the Cherokee national documents in its non-reliance on an English-speaking mediator elite, thereby sidestepping the class investments and problematics of the latter.12 Black Hawk’s narrative provides a documentary counterpoint to the texts of the treaty-system, sketching a set of regional native processes, practices, and principles that have no place in the atomizing political geography of Indian policy.

TRANSLATION AND THE TREATY-SYSTEM

The documentary record is invoked by U.S. officials as evidence of a shared understanding of native territoriality, casting the interested picture of Indian landholding in treaty discourse as simply a neutral description of actual patterns of occupancy and thereby allowing no room for registering qualitative differences between Anglo-American and indigenous ways of conceptualizing place and political identity. In response, Black Hawk’s narrative offers itself as a kind of counter-document, participating in the circulation of written texts so as to mark and contest the ways they had been used—especially in the form of treaties—to superimpose a fetishizing vision of indigenous land tenure. The text seeks to make this process of translation visible, highlighting its role in an unacknowledged history of imperial violence. Instead of focusing on the possibility of access to the real Black Hawk, although such a conceit might have been crucial to the sale of the text, the text’s prefatory remarks insist that Black Hawk seeks “to vindicate [his] character from misrepresentation” (37), presenting the text as an effort to redress white misunderstandings of him and his people. Framing the narrative as a response to erroneous depictions of Sauk actions, land, and identity emphasizes less the reader’s intimate connection to Black Hawk than the failure of existing texts accurately to capture the circumstances surrounding the events leading up to the supposed war.13 The narrative opens with a statement by Antoine LeClaire, identified as “U.S. Interpreter for the Sacs and Foxes.” He notes that the narrative

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resulted from Black Hawk’s desire to explain to “the people of the United States” “the causes that had impelled him to act as he has done, and the principles by which he was governed” (35). The fact that LeClaire served as an official interpreter further suggests that such “principles” are being differentiated from (or at least set in relation to) those at play in Indian policy and that native speech is entering public discourse through a process quite similar to that at work in treaty-making, positioning the text as a somewhat uncanny addendum to the administrative record. This implicit unsettling of the treaty-system is intensified in the advertisement by “The Editor.” Describing Black Hawk’s account of the treaty of 1804 as especially “worthy of attention,” Patterson observes, “In treating with the Indians for their country, it has always been customary to assemble the whole nation,” a convention disregarded in 1804; therefore “the Indians might well question the right of Government to dispossess them, when such violation was made the basis of its right” (38–39). By intimating the illegitimacy of U.S. claims to Sauk land, Patterson implies that Black Hawk’s narrative will provide a counterpoint to the treaty of 1804, documenting at least one of the voices dismissed in its drafting.14 As Santiago Colás argues with respect to Latin American testimonio, “The resistance value of the testimonio as cultural practice and artifact, far from resting on either the absolute identity between a people, their representative, the interlocutor, and the foreign sympathizer, seems rather to drive from the tension generated by the disjuncture between these different subjects” (170).15 Emphasizing the “disjuncture” between U.S. legal geography and native mappings, including the interested “misrepresentation” of the latter in the former, the Life works to document the ongoing and pointed erasure—the subalternization—of native self-representation in the language and texts of U.S. policy. In recounting the events leading up to the treaty of 1804, described as “the origin of all our difficulties” (54), Black Hawk tries to explain the logic of the Sauk leaders, indicating the alienness of U.S. political norms. In response to the murder of an American by a Sauk in 1804, leading to his arrest and confinement, several headmen go to St. Louis in order to “see our American father, and do all they could to have our friend released: by paying for the person killed—thus covering the blood, and satisfying the relations of the man murdered!” (53).16 What is at issue for them is less a conflict over boundaries and jurisdiction than the potential anger of the dead man’s kin who, in order to revenge his murder, could lead a war party against the killer’s village. Among native peoples throughout the region, payment in goods for this kind of loss served as a way of settling the blood debt and preventing an outbreak of hostilities. The Sauks, the text suggests, try to incorporate the Americans into such existing geographies/processes

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of war and alliance, using available mechanisms of pacification to create a relationship organized around ritualized kinds of ongoing exchange and relation—as opposed to the singularity and finality of sale. While U.S. officials certainly were not the first people of European descent encountered by the Sauks and other native groups in the western Great Lakes, the system they sought to initiate through treaty-making differed greatly from regional precedents.17 The French constructed trading posts, forts, and missions on the Illinois River in the 1670s and 1680s, and the effects of British and French presence were felt even earlier due to what have come to called “the beaver wars,” Iroquoian populations to the east pushing west to gain greater access to resources for the fur trade. However, even though European commerce had extended to the Mississippi by the latter half of the seventeenth century, becoming a central feature of regional political-economies by the mid-eighteenth century, exchange with native peoples did not function in ways that fit the policy directives or objectives of colonial administrators. European-produced goods were of great value and circulated widely, but their distribution largely occurred on indigenous terms. Most notably, traders often could gain access to native communities only by establishing kinship connections, particularly through marriage. Since French settlements on the central Mississippi and its environs never achieved the population density necessary for substantive autonomy from their Indian neighbors, they continued to depend on native networks for subsistence and protection. In the 1710s, the French government attempted to create larger and more permanent colonies in the region that would link New Orleans to Canada, thereby creating a French corridor to facilitate trade and provide a bulwark against further expansion in North America by England or Spain; despite the intentions of policymakers, these plans never came to fruition, as colonists largely were folded into existing patterns of alliance and residency organized around métis communities that had emerged out of unions between French men and native women. Unlike among the Cherokees, children of European-native pairings were less likely to be absorbed into native villages than to gather in their own, maintaining contact with native kin but developing a separate identity and differentiated role within regional trade formations. Although understood as distinct from native populations, these métis enclaves operated within logics of kinship and exchange shaped by their continuing proximity to and intimate involvement with nearby indigenous residents to whom they were related. In addition, from very early in the French colonization of North America freelance traders, known as coureurs, had been moving among native peoples, ranging widely through areas well beyond the reach of administrative regulation, and they helped establish durable commercial networks that connected merchants on the east coast to peoples in the western Great

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Lakes, networks to which métis people and communities became increasingly central by the mid-eighteenth century. These lines of exchange, which extended in complex and shifting ways from the British colonies and Canada to the Great Plains and New Orleans, operated almost entirely outside of any effective superintendence by colonial governments, and efforts to fold these trade formations into coherent imperial projects were thwarted in the late-eighteenth century by the massive realignment of European spheres of influence in the wake of the Seven Years’ War. In 1763, France surrendered to England its claim to Canada and territory east of the Mississippi, and its somewhat clandestine cession of New Orleans and land west of the Mississippi to Spain the previous year was ratified. Unable to fund further military campaigns against native peoples in the backcountry caused by the relatively unregulated activity of settlers and speculators, the British government created a boundary line largely following the course of the Ohio River south to limit expansion and thereby keep the peace. Previous patterns of trade were left more or less undisturbed, with the “English” presence west of the Ohio largely comprised by métis and formerly French settlers—who came to be called “the interior French.” At the same time, Spanish authorities founded St. Louis, which served as one of the principal nexuses of European and Euramerican exchange with native peoples well into the nineteenth century. Overtaxed by ongoing raids on the northern frontier of New Spain by nonsedentary peoples like the Comanches and Apaches and overextended in its claims to territory stretching from Florida to Alta California, Spain had extremely limited resources to police, or even monitor, the movement of people and goods across the land it nominally held or between its lands and those nominally claimed by the British. The interior French and peoples in the vicinity of the Missouri and Illinois, like the Sauks, were wellpositioned to serve as producers and middlemen in vast and expanding formations of exchange, which themselves complemented and extended longstanding native networks operating out of well-located indigenous villages likes those at Prairie du Chien on the upper Mississippi and at Green Bay. Thus, while circulating European-produced goods, like guns, pots, knives, and cloth, the matrix of contact in the western Great Lakes from the mid-seventeenth through the late-eighteenth centuries was not controlled by colonial directives or European markets, and its ordering principles were those that guided diplomacy, alliance, and trade among native peoples and their kin.18 The political-economy at play in the region when American officials arrive in the wake of the Louisiana Purchase, then, is not organized around Euramerican conceptions of possession or property-law. Although native practices of subsistence and exchange had been influenced by and

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incorporated Euro-presence over the previous century-and-a-half, that presence had not determined nor utterly transformed indigenous sociospatial formations. When the United States seeks to use a treaty as a way of purchasing Sauk land, that mode of engagement is utterly alien to established routines for interacting and negotiating with foreigners. Sauks had been participants in warfare with Euramerican forces, such as aligning with the Foxes against French efforts to exterminate them in the 1730s, engaging in Pontiac’s Uprising in 1763, and having their main village Saukenuk burned by Americans in 1780 due to their siding with the British, but the resolution of these conflicts had not entailed treating land as a commodity that could be sold. Moreover, rather than involving a formal diplomatic process overseen by men, prior models of alliance and association were dependent on women. In creating kinship connections, which were crucial for trade and peaceful coexistence, native women were the ones who provided and maintained links among disparate communities, and in producing goods for exchange, women’s labor was crucial, especially with respect to maple, lead, and crops over which they exerted a good deal of control due to their efforts in procurement and cultivation. Also, as will be discussed further below, women were believed to have a particular connection to fields and villages due to the work they did in maintaining these sites, giving them an important role in decisions with respect to occupancy and use. This gendered structure of trade, affiliation, and land tenure is disavowed in the U.S. treaty-system, making the latter even more alien to Sauk self-understandings and to existing regional dynamics. Thus, when the Sauks arrive in St. Louis in 1804 to negotiate, the United States did not respond as expected. When the headmen returned to Saukenuk, the principal Sauk village, they “appeared to be dressed in fine coats, and had medals,” and they offer the following account of what happened: “On their arrival at St. Louis, they met their American father, and explained to him their business, and urged the release of their friend. The American chief told them he wanted land—and they had agreed to give him some on the west side of the Mississippi, and some on the Illinois side opposite the Jeffreon . . . They had been drunk the greater part of the time they were in St. Louis” (53–54). The demand for “land” would have been alien to the Sauks, not having been a part of prior negotiations with the French, Spanish, or British. Thus, beyond the problem of the chiefs’ inebriation (“had been drunk”), their “agree[ment]” to exchange is suspect, in the sense that they would have had no framework in which to understand the treaty’s requirement that they “relinquish forever to the United States, all the lands included within the above described boundary.” Moreover, the clauses that place the Sauks “under the protection of the United States, and of no other power

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whatsoever” and insist that “they will never sell their lands or any part thereof to any sovereign power, but the United States” have no precedent in the region, given the longstanding and ongoing presence of subjects of multiple European powers as traders and residents and the absence of any prior extension of locally efficacious jurisdiction by non-native polities.19 Even if the provisions were fully translated, always an open question in treaty proceedings, they bear virtually no relation to previous social arrangements and therefore almost certainly could not have meant to the Sauk signatories what they did within Anglo-American legal discourse. Instead, the Sauks likely would have conceptualized the document in ways consistent with conventional structures of alliance and exchange in the western Great Lakes area. Such an impression is heightened by the anecdote that directly precedes the story of the treaty. Soon after the U.S. takeover of St. Louis, General Zebulon Pike appears in the main Sauk village offering an American flag and requesting that the British one be removed, but the Sauks refuse, “as [they] wished to have two Fathers!” (52), implicitly rejecting the model of exclusive protection/preemption favored by the United States In this context, the medals given to the chiefs in the process of treaty-making initially may have seemed like American assent to the more porous and multivalent political geographies previously at play in the region.20 Later, in the context of his discussion of the initial movement of white settlers into his village in the winter of 1828–29, Black Hawk sums up his opposition to the Americans’ (interested) misunderstanding of regional forms of land tenure and diplomacy: “My reason teaches me that land cannot be sold. The Great Spirit gave it to his children to live upon, and cultivate, as far as is necessary for their subsistence; and so long as they occupy and cultivate it, they have the right to the soil—but if they voluntarily leave it, then any other people have a right to settle upon it. Nothing can be sold, but such things as can be carried away” (101). The “right” of occupancy is correlated here to “cultivat[ion]” and “subsistence,” connected to the role of the land in sustaining the life of its people(s). It cannot be bought or transferred as a thing nor subdivided into saleable units; it either is “occup[ied]” or abandoned. If legitimate settlement follows upon others “voluntarily” vacating the territory, the text calls into question the validity of U.S. jurisdiction by repudiating not simply native assent to a particular sale but the possibility of ever construing the sale of Indian territory as consensual in light of the fundamental alienness of such a transfer to indigenous philosophies and spirituality. The passage suggests both the incomprehensibility of the fundamental premise of the treaty-system (and the consequent impossibility of informed consent to it) and the utter failure of the United States to understand patterns of native territoriality.

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The vision of native sovereignty contained in the treaties rests on the assumption that land rights can be divorced from the concepts and practices through which occupancy is lived and gains meaning. In many ways treaty discourse resembles Henri Lefebvre’s description of the spatial logic of commodification: “The space of the commodity may thus be defined as a homogeneity made up of specificities . . . Space thus understood is both abstract and concrete in character: abstract inasmuch as it has no existence save by virtue of the exchangeability of its component parts, and concrete inasmuch as it is socially real and as such localized. This is a space, therefore, that is homogeneous yet at the same time broken up into fragments” (341–42). Indian country is cast as a collection of purchasable fragments, a series of isolatable units in two dialectically related senses. Each tribe is depicted as having a demarcated territory completely distinct from that possessed by other tribes, and qualitatively different kinds of land (for hunting, planting, mining, and gathering maple, for example) are treated as comparable quantities of the same thing. These mutually reinforcing ideological maneuvers institute a logic of equivalency that divorces “the right of occupancy” in U.S. law from actual native topographies of subsistence and trade.21 Representing land as purchasable seeks to make native landholding compatible with U.S. legal geography by dislodging it from its cultural context, including regional understandings of use and patterns of reciprocity—a shared perspective signaled by the text’s invocation of the “Great Spirit” rather than a more circumscribed reference to specifically Sauk claims or practices. The narrative emphasizes the uncomfortable and somewhat incoherent movement between these two conceptual systems in its discussion of U.S. efforts in the wake of the War of 1812 (in which many Sauks fought alongside the British) to have the Sauks reconfirm the provisions of the earlier treaty, resulting in the treaty of 1816—to which Black Hawk was a signatory. “What do we know of the manner of the laws and customs of the white people? They might buy our bodies for dissection, and we would touch the goose quill to confirm it, without knowing what we are doing. This was the case with myself and people in touching the goose quill the first time” (87). Black Hawk explains his apparent willingness to accept U.S. “laws and customs” as a function of his actual ignorance of them. Depicting the “buy”-ing of Sauk land as the acquisition of cadavers implies that the commodification of territory as alienable units is comparable to a rending of Sauk bodies, emphasizing the violence immanent within treaty-making by casting it as uninformed consent to mutilation. The (mis)conception of native spatiality that is sale relies on a gruesome vision of the land as a dead thing that can be cut

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into parts, an idea that the text inverts in its repeated insistence on proximity to ancestral burying grounds as an integral part of opposition to removal. At one point Black Hawk notes, “I would rather have laid my bones with my forefathers, than remove for any consideration” (109).22 The imperial project of breaking up native landholding into more bureaucratically manageable bits is portrayed as disinterment and dismemberment—a crime against the living, the dead, and the earth itself. Moreover, the narrative presents itself as an alternative entextualization through which to restore, in Ortiz’s words, the “culture and community integrity” fractured within U.S. administrative discourse and mappings. While clearly declaring the illegitimacy of the treaty of 1804 and subsequent federal and state actions based on it, the text’s rejection of the document extends beyond its specific provisions, launching an expansive critique of the U.S. attempt to superimpose its own geography of sale over existing systems of land use and diplomacy. Foregrounding the oddity of the assumptions that shape federal Indian policy, the narrative traces their erasure of traditional formations, which it suggests are not peculiar to the Sauks but operate throughout the region—previously having incorporated waves of non-natives. Thus, the Life emphasizes how U.S. policy in its production of treaties enacts a broad-based displacement of native frameworks, naturalizing the documentary fiction of Indians’ consent to their own geopolitical dissection.

GEOGRAPHIES OF HUNTING

The imperial project of domesticating native territory in the Great Lakes area, as I have been arguing, involves making it divisible into purchasable chunks—commodifying land and breaking it into homogenous units in ways that ignore the experiential relationship of a people to the place they inhabit. Black Hawk’s critique of this tendency to evacuate occupancy of its cultural content and to dislodge land tenure from the ongoing set of native social processes through which territoriality is (re)defined is made more concrete in his portrait of hunting. Through it, the text explores the distinct and complementary roles that various kinds of land play within native identity and trade. The narrative offers an alternative mapping of regional geopolitics to that developed in the treaty-system, foregrounding not only U.S. efforts to contain native economies and mobility but the persistence of native geographies of use despite increasing pressure from agents, settlers, and the military. More than merely a functional element of traditional Sauk territoriality, the hunting grounds are in many ways the overdetermined

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figure, in both the narrative and U.S. policy, for what needs to be regulated and/or eliminated in order for the United States to achieve its jurisdictional aims, and conversely, they also mark, in the words of the U.N. Declaration, regional “means of subsistence and development” emerging out of transtribal “customs, traditions, and land tenure systems.” One way of beginning to address the hunting grounds is to ask where exactly they are. Initially, the treaty-recognized dimensions of hunting exceeded treaty-demarcated land claims. The Treaty of Ft. Harmar (1789), to which Sauks were signatories, promised that “the individuals of said nations shall be at liberty to hunt within the territory ceded to the United States, without hindrance or molestation so long as they demean themselves peaceably,” and while qualifying this right slightly, the treaty of 1804 states, “As long as the lands which are now ceded to the United States remain their property, the Indians . . . shall enjoy the privilege of living and hunting upon them.”23 These clauses suggest that the federal government acknowledges hunting as a central aspect of native subsistence and political-economy but also that sale cannot fully encompass native land tenure—that native spatiality is more flexible than the absolute boundaries of property and that occupancy is not reducible to the exclusionary logic of ownership. By 1824, though, a treaty with the Sauks and Foxes “to remove all future cause of dissensions which may arise from undefined territorial boundaries,” in which they sold lands between the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, includes the caveat “that none of their tribe shall be permitted to settle or hunt upon any part of” that ceded territory.24 Here hunting grounds are included within the boundaries of native territory as set by treaty. Described as merely a clarification, the effort to prevent “dissensions” works to fracture native landholding by more rigidly defining the territory to which Indians legally will be recognized as having access and by emphasizing treaty-based outlines of ownership over actual geographies of use. The project of breaking native territory into more clearly tribally differentiated and bureaucratically manageable units is given ideological force in the civilization program implemented under Thomas Jefferson, in which Indians were encouraged to abandon hunting in order to facilitate the sale of supposedly surplus lands. In Jefferson’s annual message to Congress in 1803, he lays out his plan for the transformation of native economies and land tenure, which given its paradigmatic status in Indian policy is worth quoting at length: The Indian tribes, residing within the limits of the United States, have, for a considerable time, been growing more and more uneasy, at the constant diminution of the territory they occupy, although effected by their own voluntary sales; and the policy has long been gaining strength with them, of

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refusing, absolutely, all further sale, on any conditions . . . In order, peaceably, to counteract this policy of theirs, and to provide an extension of territory, which the rapid increase of our numbers will call for, two measures are deemed expedient: First, to encourage them to abandon hunting . . . The extensive forests, necessary in the hunting life, will then become useless, and they will see advantage in exchanging them for the means of improving their farms, and of increasing their domestic comforts. Secondly, to multiply trading houses among them, and place within their reach those things which will contribute more to their domestic comfort than the possession of extensive, but uncultivated wilds. Experience and reflection will develop to them the wisdom of exchanging what they can spare and we want, for what we can spare and they want.

The hunting grounds here are the “uncultivated” residue of a savage state and need to be surrendered in order for Indians to gain access to the “domestic comforts” of modernity. Civilization is correlated with the inevitability of the territorial “extension” of American settlements, which is naturalized as inherent in white reproduction itself (“which the rapid increase of our numbers will call for”). Although Jefferson concludes that “encourag[ing] them to abandon hunting” automatically will lubricate the process of acquisition (“exchanging what they can spare”), his comments also indicate an entrenched relationship between the hunting grounds and the rejection of “all further sale.” The discourse of the civilization program, then, is haunted by the ways hunting is not merely an activity that occurs on native land but is a central part of traditional native identities. Herein lies the rhetorical sleight-of-hand whereby the United States sets the terms of geopolitical discussion and debate. If hunting as a set of beliefs and practices can be separated from the legal concept of occupancy, the United States can eliminate hunting while still appearing to acknowledge native political entities and land rights (including the right to sell), abstracting them from the social matrix in which occupancy actually is thought and lived by native peoples and casting native space as a kind of empty container that can be filled with different cultural contents.25 From this perspective, the attempt to curtail or eliminate the hunting grounds is less about trying to replace a specific set of practices than seeking to reorganize the principles of indigenous socio-spatiality. Black Hawk’s narrative responds to this intrusion by exploring hunting’s traditional cultural and economic dimensions. As part of an extended discussion of Sauk seasonal movements and various annual festivals, the text presents the story of the origin of corn. Through it, Black Hawk situates the right of occupancy within a particular understanding of land tenure, thereby challenging the anti-hunting bias of Jeffersonian agrarianism and the civilization program: “According to tradition, handed down to our people, a

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beautiful woman was seen to descend from the clouds, and alight upon the earth, by two of our ancestors, who had killed a deer, and were sitting by a fire, roasting a part of it to eat. They were astonished at seeing her, and concluded that she must be hungry, and had smelt the meat—and immediately went to her, taking with them a piece of the roasted venison” (93). After taking the meat, she tells them to return to where she is sitting in a year, and they do, finding corn, beans, and tobacco there. In this story, hunting serves as the symbol of an ethos of sharing and reciprocity with other beings for which crops are the continuing (divine) recompense. Moreover, the passage suggests the gender complementarity at the heart of the Sauk division of labor. Men’s responsibilities, including hunting, cannot be divorced from those of women, including cultivation, and these two separate yet linked spheres of activity converge symbolically as well as practically in the annual cycle Black Hawk describes, forging a connection between the hunting grounds and the fields of Saukenuk by portraying hunting not as the antithesis of cultivation but its (differently gendered) partner.26 While rooting native spatiality in the oral tradition, potentially as a counterpoint to the documentary archive, the narrative does not cast such traditional subsistence activity as isolated from Euramerican presence: “When we returned to our village in the spring, from our wintering grounds, we would finish trading with our traders, who always followed us to our village. We purposely kept some of our fine furs for this trade; and as there was great opposition among them, who should get these skins, we always got our goods cheap . . . They would then start with their furs and peltries for their homes” (89–90). The passage emphasizes the plentiful supply of furs, competition over them in ways favorable to the Sauks (“got our goods cheap”), and the traders’ subsequent movement away from Sauk space (return to “their homes”). The engagement with outsiders in trade appears as an engrained element of Sauk life, an accepted and longstanding part of their economy, thereby demonstrating the possibility of modes of interaction between Euramericans and indigenous peoples not based on the acquisition of land or the circumscription of native space. More than reducing the quantity of space occupied by native peoples, regulating longstanding patterns of hunting also serves as a tactic within the broader program of reinforcing U.S. preemption claims to native lands. Maintaining the exclusive right to acquire native territory, as well as the coherence of national space, depended on the United States’ ability to regulate and exclude Great Britain and other countries from access to native resources. Yet the United States did not actually possess the kinds of control implied by the assertion of that authority. As William Henry Harrison notes

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in communication with Secretary of War Henry Dearborn in 1802, British agents actively remained in contact with “the Indians residing within our limits.” In fact, the Sauk route through Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan on their way to Canada (specifically to Malden, just opposite Detroit) was so regular that it came to be known as “the Great Sauk Trail.” Up through the 1820s, the prevalent perforation of territory claimed by the United States by the fur trade continued to cut both ways—British traders going to native villages and hunting grounds supposedly within the United States and Indians moving well outside their treaty-set boundaries (and even beyond U.S. borders) in their journey to meet with these foreigners.27 The contrast between U.S. and traditional geopolitical formations, and the tenuousness of American claims to control over the region, is made manifest in the narrative’s depiction of Sauk participation in the War of 1812. Black Hawk reports that upon the arrival home of a group of “chiefs and head men” selected to visit Washington, D.C. in 1812, they tell those assembled at Saukenuk that the President promised to meet Sauk trade needs in exchange for their neutrality in the event of a war with Great Britain. While the British would be forbidden from trading along the Mississippi, the Sauks would be able to get the kinds of credit previously available to them, deferring payment for Euramerican goods (such as clothing, pots, guns, etc.) needed for the winter hunt until their return in the spring (61–62). Based on this guarantee, Black Hawk and the others agree to abide by the wishes of the “Great Father.” However, when the time comes for provisioning, circumstances are quite different than they expected: We had fine crops of corn, which were now ripe—and our women were engaged in gathering it, and making cashes to contain it . . . Myself and principal men paid a visit to the war chief at the fort . . . The trader came in, and we all rose and shook hands with him—for on him all our dependence was placed to enable us to hunt, and thereby support our families. . . . He said that he was happy to hear that we intended to remain at peace. That he had a large quantity of goods; and that, if we made a good hunt, we would be well supplied: but remarked, that he had received no instructions to furnish us any thing on credit! (62–63)

Emphasizing the importance of these goods to the Sauk subsistence cycle (“our dependence”), Black Hawk portrays the refusal of credit as a de facto assault on “our families,” making agreement to such a U.S.-managed “peace” equivalent to consent to starvation. The fort commander’s refusal to extend credit leads to a reversal of the prior commitment to neutrality—“Here ended all hopes of our remaining at peace—having been forced into WAR by being DECEIVED!” (64).28 Although the explicit focus here is on

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the dishonesty of the U.S. government, a point repeated throughout the narrative, this declaration does not so much suggest that Black Hawk and others decide to endorse the British over the Americans as that they adopt the course that they believe best will enable them to maintain their seasonal economic and subsistence cycle. Additionally, in beginning with a discussion of cultivation, the passage frames the winter hunt as a complementary part of native occupancy and subsistence, neither more nor less important to collective identity and survival than the raising of corn. More than merely an annoyance or distraction, the refusal of credit suggests a fundamental disregard for the practical and symbolic significance of the hunting grounds. Hunting, then, consistently appears in the text as a site of struggle between incommensurate understandings of space and tribal identity. Many if not most of the confrontations between Americans and Indians in the text occur over the former’s attempt to restrict native access to and use of their hunting grounds. In the wake of the end of the War of 1812, Black Hawk and the assorted Sauks and Menominees traveling with him go to see the commander of Fort Edwards in order to soothe tensions left unresolved by the failure of the Rock River Sauks to attend the treaty conference held in 1815 at Portage des Sioux to renew peace and friendship with native peoples in the area who had fought the United States.29 They ask permission from the commander “to go down to the Two-River country to hunt”: He said, we might go down, but must return before the ice made, as he did not intend that we should winter below the fort. “But,” said he, “what do you want the Menomonees to go with you for?” I did not know, at first, what reply to make—but told him that they had a great many pretty squaws with them, and we wished them to go with us on that account! He consented. We all started down the river, and remained all winter, as we had no intension of returning before spring, when we asked leave to go. We made a good hunt. Having loaded our traders’ boats with furs and peltries, they started to Mackinac, and we returned to our village. (84)

This passage features several important white misconceptions about native hunting. The commander assumes that it is a brief foray from their villages, rather than an extended sojourn necessary for subsistence and trade, and that he has the authority to dictate the scope and duration of native movement. His elevated tone seems particularly egregious and ridiculous in light of a successful assault lead by Black Hawk the previous year on a fort on which construction had begun across the river—a campaign inspired by the fear that the U.S. military would try to block the Sauks from reaching their hunting grounds on the Two-River (81–82). Additionally, the

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commander presumes an inherent separation between tribes, indicating that the primarily Sauk band needs a clear reason to include Menominees and intimating that absent such a defined purpose peoples should remain apart. To the contrary, Black Hawk’s incomprehension at the commander’s question suggests to the reader the routine, nature of such mixing. The deadpan statement that they “remained all winter” further emphasizes the persistence of traditional geographies despite U.S. territorial pretensions which rely on legal cartographies that have little to do with existing native topographies of use. Finally, the control over native peoples presumed by the commander is punctured by the continuance of the fur trade (including what most likely were British traders) despite the supposed triumph of American jurisdiction in the recent war—an exchange network that is represented here as occurring on native terms.30 Beyond addressing official efforts to control native space through the regulation/restriction of hunting and the fur trade, the narrative also tracks growing conflict with U.S. settlers, collecting examples of the murder and humiliation of numerous Indians due to their attempts to engage in routine forms of land use and seasonal migration.31 During a trip to Rock River to visit Black Hawk, Gomo, a Potawatomi chief, relays the story of a hunting trip near the American fort at Peoria. After the commander of the fort specifically had requested that he and his band help gather provisions for the soldiers, one of Gomo’s “principal braves” and the party with him were killed without provocation by a group of whites driving cattle in the area through which the Potawatomies were passing. Although Gomo informs the commander of the settlers’ actions and the latter expresses his astonishment at this seemingly random violence, nothing is done to find or prosecute those responsible (85–86). Similarly, Black Hawk’s adopted son is killed by whites while hunting despite his presence having been explicitly authorized by the local fort commander (69). Later, while on a winter hunt in the vicinity of Two-River, Black Hawk runs into “three white men” who “accused me of killing their hogs” and by whom he then viciously is beaten, and in a comparable incident, one of Black Hawk’s band is followed back to the village by a group of whites who accuse of him of cutting down their tree in order to get honey and then take his accumulated skins from his winter hunt as payment (97–98). In these episodes, hunting indexes a series of problems that increasingly shape U.S.-Indian relations at all levels in the region: the inability or unwillingness of the government to prevent whites from attacking Indians engaged in peaceful activities; the precipitous erosion of U.S. recognition for native travel and usufruct rights; the employment of violence to curtail and deny native claims to traditional lands; and the adoption of a vision of exclusive ownership in which the geographies of native hunting literally have no place.

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Those dynamics culminate in what the Life portrays as the conquest of Saukenuk. During the winter of 1828–29 while the Sauks are out hunting, Black Hawk receives word that white settlers have moved into the village, and after returning and finding the story true, he delivers a message to the settlers/intruders written down by the interpreter at Ft. Armstrong telling them “[n]ot to settle on our lands . . . as we were coming back to it in the spring” (99). Having delivered his message and assumed that the settlers “would remove, as I requested them,” he rejoins the rest of his band, and when they return to Saukenuk, they find “that the whites had not left it—but that others had come, and that the greater part of our corn-fields had been enclosed,” further noting that “When we landed the whites appeared displeased because we had come back” (100–1).32 The whites insist upon equating hunting with abandonment, yet in an inversion and negation of the ideology of Jeffersonian agrarianism, American farmers appear in the text not as agents of order and stability but as a chaotic force disrupting settled and regular patterns of residency and agriculture in the region, improving the land by seizing the existing native infrastructure. Emphasizing the whites’ interested misunderstanding of native seasonal migration and the appropriation of Sauk cornfields reinforces the traditional complementarity of hunting and planting as well as dispelling the notion of hunting as the absence of cultivation, an idea which helped justify the taking/purchase of Indian lands. The narrative further indicates that, rather than adhering to their own diplomatic commitments, the government backed settler claims by speeding up the process of sale so as retroactively to validate the existing pattern of displacement. As Black Hawk notes, “That fall I paid a visit to the agent, before we started to our hunting grounds, to hear if he had any good news for me. He had news! He said that the land on which our village stood was now ordered to be sold to individuals; and that, when sold, our right to remain, by treaty, would be at an end, and that if we returned next spring, we would be forced to remove!” (104). The agent recognizes the (albeit temporary) “right to remain” guaranteed “by treaty” only to note its impending elimination and the attendant authority of the United States to employ force in exerting its jurisdiction and precluding native occupancy. The campaign against hunting was part of a larger strategy to dismantle fur-trade networks, consolidating U.S. preemption claims by insulating native peoples from foreign traders and seeking to make them dependent on the United States for their subsistence needs. This policy also worked to separate native peoples from each other, segregating them on rigidly bounded plots of land and dissolving the complex traditional dynamics of the region into a set of relationships between individual tribes and the

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United States conducted on the latter’s terms. The “hunting grounds,” then, serves as a topos for a regional matrix into which Euramerican presence had been incorporated and which is effaced by the institutionalized mappings of U.S. law and the civilization program. The text’s representation of hunting highlights how the imposition of U.S. models functions as part of the imperial project of making Indian country modular, delimiting possession and occupancy in ways that displace native processes of territorial selfdefinition and that replace these extant regional spatial logics by installing U.S. legal geography as the self-evident norm.

WINNING THE PEACE

The economies and shifting topographies of hunting threatened U.S. jurisdictional mappings and preemption claims by undermining the institutional narrative of tribes as domestic subjects on treaty-delimited land plots, but ongoing active combat among native peoples was perhaps on a par with the fur trade and forms of seasonal migration in disrupting the emergent U.S. territorial imaginary. Such conflict involved the routine movement of armed parties across space (prospectively) occupied by white settlements, thereby refusing the dominance of U.S. political logics in the region. In other words, the continuance of inter-tribal war also meant the persistence of native modes of conceptualizing and contesting tribal boundaries. Although cast by the United States as merely savage bloodletting, Indian warfare often served as one end of a continuum for negotiating access to land and resources in which low-intensity violence could spur recalcitrant groups into peaceful trading, allow kin groups to punish the killing of their members, yield captives that could act as go-betweens, function as an outlet for youthful male aggression, and provide opportunities to gain positions of leadership within an otherwise hereditary political structure. The United States government’s imperial insertion of itself into regional struggle in the role of omnipresent peacemaker, then, did not bring order to the area—as in the story it told of and to itself—but further worked to reorder inter-tribal relations and intra-tribal governance so as to reinforce the fetishized identities and borders of the treaty-system.33 The U.S. project of curtailing or eliminating such conflict is not so much a campaign to bring harmony to the region as to engineer a particular kind of stability that both sustains U.S. claims to territorial coherence and facilitates white settlement. In a letter to William Henry Harrison about recent battles between the Potawatomies and Osages, Jefferson cautions that “the Indians on this side of the Missisipi [sic] must understand that that

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river is now ours, & is not to be a river of blood. If we permit those on this side to cross it to war against the other side, we must permit the other side to come over to this for revenge. The safety of our settlements will not admit of this.” Writing later to representatives of the Delawares, also in conflict with the Osages, he insists, “this war deeply concerns the United States. Between you and the Osages is a country of many hundred miles extent belonging to the United States. Between you, also, is the Mississippi, the river of peace.”34 The language of “peace” here is connected directly to asserting exclusive U.S. authority over the areas between tribal lands as well as positioning territory east of the Mississippi as de facto under U.S. control, reaffirming the ideology of preemption. The ongoing mobilities of Indian warfare do not merely threaten the “safety” of white settlers but undermine the jurisdictional and legal schema through which settlement is legitimized, and reciprocally, the expressed desire to end inter-tribal violence functions as a means of validating imperial intervention into native landholding, casting the expansionist effort to break up indigenous networks and isolate native peoples on rigidly delimited parcels as the creation of tranquility in the area. Thus, seeking to stop the flow of “blood” serves as a way of instituting a particular geography of “belonging” in which the United States claims sole possession over lands not explicitly reserved by treaty to specific Indian populations. As Roger L. Nichols observes, “As long as several tribes claimed or used parts of the same region, the government had little chance of buying it. Once the Indians agreed to a particular set of boundaries, however, federal negotiators had to deal with only one set of leaders, and the process of obtaining land cessions became easier” (74). The orchestration of multitribal treaties of peace and friendship worked to create stark lines of separation between tribes, which facilitated the transfer of possession via sale. Such agreements reinforced the territorial insularity of native peoples, portraying the space outside their strictly drawn borders as empty and awaiting white settlement, and they installed U.S. policy as the definitional nexus through which to ascertain and assess native claims, coding the imperial assertion of dominance as the maintenance of neutrality. The treaties with the Sauks testify to this dialectical connection between playing peacemaker and reifying tribal boundaries: the Treaty of Ft. Harmar (1789), signed by two Sauk representatives, states that participants will warn the United States of impending attacks by other tribes; in the treaty of 1804, “the said tribes [Sauk and Fox] do hereby solemnly promise and agree that they will put an end to the bloody war which has heretofore raged between their tribes and those of the Great and Little Osage”; and in the treaty of 1825, the various signatories agree “to establish boundaries among them and the other tribes who live in their vicinity, and thereby to remove all

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causes of future difficulty” and to look to the United States as mediator in cases of such inter-tribal “difficulty.”35 Cumulatively, these provisions suggest growing U.S. concern about the effects of inter-tribal warfare on its own land claims and the attendant strategy of using the treaty-system as a means of interposing in native peoples’ conflicts with each other, rerouting the relationships among them into a series of individual relationships between tribes and the United States. Given the geopolitical stakes of a U.S.-managed peace in the area, as well as the ways any violation of it is then construed as justification for U.S. military action (as in the “Black Hawk War”), the narrative’s depiction of Sauk combat can be read as an attempt to contextualize it as part of traditional political-economy within the region and beyond. Rather than senseless violence to be eliminated in the name of the supposed stability of civilized life, war, the text suggests, can be seen as an important aspect of the regional social matrix—as part of a spectrum of forms of (inter-)tribal mapping and self-understanding. Toward the end of his extended discussion of Sauk seasonal and life patterns, Black Hawk describes the basis for hostility between native peoples, observing, “All our wars are predicated by the relatives of those killed; or by aggressions upon our hunting grounds” (92). Revenge for murder and intrusions on each other’s territory are the primary incitements to and validations for war. Hunting is imbricated in such ongoing “aggressions” between tribes, hunting grounds marking less a clear division between neighboring groups than a site of potential struggle through which native peoples (re)produce their spatiality. Describing Sauk warfare, the text presents a series of similar clashes with the Osages, the Cherokees, and Sioux groups, and the prevalence and relatively small scale of these incidents suggest that native conceptions of territoriality take shape within an extant field of ongoing low-level struggle in which each tribe’s spatial self-understanding is enmeshed and out of which forms of Sauk political subjectivity emerge. Furthermore, as the text’s discussion of Fox-Menominee conflict indicates, inter-tribal combat and the travel between treaty-delimited areas it involved was still occurring by the early 1830s. In 1830 while on the way to Prairie du Chien for a U.S.-sponsored treaty conference with Sioux bands, a number of Fox chiefs were ambushed and killed by Menominee and Sioux warriors, and in July 1831 Fox warriors killed a group of Menominees in response. The text notes, “This retaliation, (which with us is considered lawful and right,) created considerable excitement among the whites! A demand was made for the Foxes to be surrendered to, and tried by, the white people!” A number of Fox “principal men” approach Black Hawk who observes, “I conceive the right [of the United States to put the Fox men on trial] very questionable, if not altogether usurpation, in any case where a

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difference exists between two nations, for him [“our Great Father”] to interfere” (115). In addition to insisting on the “lawful”-ness and of traditional methods for handling conflict, as opposed to the criminalization of “retaliation,” the text suggests that the imperial project of brokering (a selfinterested) peace not only inserts the United States as an overarching political and military arbiter but fundamentally undermines the autonomy of native peoples as sovereign entities. Such intervention, or “usurpation,” displaces an already-existing system (implied in the gesture toward internationalism—“between two nations”) through which native peoples routinely (re)define their political and territorial relations with each other, adjusting their own identities in the process. The U.S. effort to regulate inter-tribal dynamics, though, also affects intra-tribal questions of leadership, personal agency, and what it means to belong to a people, imposing a vision of containment that requires heretofore nonexistent kinds of internal regulation and management. Sauk governance was organized around a council of the hereditary chiefs of the twelve patrilineal clans into which the tribe was divided. The council lacked coercive power in enforcing its decisions, and war making was not controlled by the council, although they could and did offer recommendations. As Thomas Forsyth, the agent to the Sauk, observes in 1827, “any individuals of their [the Sauk and Fox] nations may lead a party to war, if he has enfluence to raise a party to redress any real or supposed grievance,”36 and the narrative’s description of Sauk participation in the War of 1812 illustrates the absence of an authoritative decision-making apparatus. Black Hawk notes that while he and others were off fighting alongside the British many of those left in the village decided to “descend the Mississippi and go to St. Louis, and place themselves under the protection of the American chief stationed there,” and they “were received as the friendly band of our nation . . . whilst their friends were assisting the British” (71). Later during the war, once Black Hawk has returned to Saukenuk, the village is visited by “a party of thirty braves, belonging to our nation, from the peace camp.” They reveal that they had decided to switch sides and had been attacking Americans, “the number that had been killed by the peace party . . . far surpass[ing] what our warriors, who had joined the British, had done!” (76).37 In addition to suggesting the mutability of Sauk alliances, this incident illustrates that native warfare is shaped by forms of individual judgment and is therefore amenable to fairly rapid change and contingent on immediate circumstances in ways quite different from the totalizing conception of native politics and subjectivity institutionalized in federal Indian policy. Such individual initiative in military affairs indexes the broader traditional independence of collective identity, action, and occupancy from an overarching bureaucratic structure, raising serious questions about the

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legitimacy of the vision of centralized native leadership and decision making embedded in the treaty-system. The implementation and naturalization of U.S. jurisdiction in the region, therefore, involves not just limiting the extent of territory utilized by indigenous peoples (in hunting and warfare, for example) but delegitimizing forms of intra-tribal autonomy that disrupt U.S. mappings. The Life traces this process of imperial introjection through its portrayal of Keokuk. Upon returning to his village after leaving the British forces during the War of 1812, Black Hawk observes that Keokuk has become a “war-chief” in his absence, previously having had no military experience and therefore no right to speak in council. By the early 1820s, he was signing treaties and serving as the person in charge of distributing the Sauk annuity, despite the fact that he was not a hereditary leader and had no such representative authority. He had achieved a position of respect as a warrior and sources from the 1820s suggest that at some point he became the head of the ki-sho-ha, one of the two moieties in which members of all twelve clans participated, but neither role would have given him the authority to speak for the Sauks in matters of diplomacy and/or trade, nor was he a leader of one of the twelve clans.38 After his initial appearance, Keokuk vanishes only to resurface later in the narrative as a proponent of removal after the occupation of Saukenuk by white settlers. Black Hawk observes, “Nothing now was talked of but leaving our village, Ke-o-kuck had been persuaded to consent to go; and was using all his influence, backed by the war chief at fort Armstrong, and our agent and trader at Rock Island, to induce others to go with him” (98), suggesting that the authority of Keokuk’s words comes primarily from their status as an extension of U.S. bureaucratic discourse and a harbinger of U.S. military might. At one point, Black Hawk says of Keokuk that he “has a smooth tongue, and is a great speaker” who “was busy in persuading my band that I was wrong” (107–8). A few pages earlier, Black Hawk uses similar terms to describe the whites who had taken possession of fields around Saukenuk: “The whites were complaining at the same time that we were intruding upon their rights . . . and called loudly to the great war chief to protect their property,” adding, “How smooth must be the language of the whites, when they can make right look like wrong, and wrong like right” (102). Like the whites, Keokuk’s “language” gains force through its alliance with “the great war chief,” also implicitly suggesting that he has come to view the land as “property”—a dissectable and dead thing.39 Keokuk functions as the villain of the narrative, appearing as an advocate for removal, an extension of U.S. speech, and a puppet for imperial interests. Through him, the text seeks to emphasize the extent to which apparent Sauk consent to U.S.- orchestrated land cessions and peace agreements is a documentary trick of vision that conceals the extent of U.S. intervention into

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Sauk governance. In the Life, Keokuk achieves prominence solely as a result of his investiture with authority by U.S. officials. This account, as one might expect, offers a somewhat lopsided picture, overlooking Keokuk’s attempts to oppose U.S. meddling in inter-tribal conflict and his efforts on behalf of those warriors who had taken part in the retribution killing of Menominees in 1831 for their murder of Fox leaders the previous year.40 Moreover, there is evidence that at least through the early 1830s Keokuk presented himself as acting under the orders of the hereditary chiefs and as serving as the speaker of the council rather than as a leader in his own right.41 Rather than seeing the narrative’s portrayal of him as merely skewed or inaccurate, though, one can view it as a condensation whose aim is to contest the official depiction of those with Black Hawk as a rogue band—“disaffected parts of tribes” and “bad Indians”—operating completely outside of the scope of law and against the wishes of the “real chiefs.”42 In response to that charge, itself predicated on taking treaties and the documents surrounding them as definitive with respect to what constitutes legitimate Sauk governance, Black Hawk presents Keokuk as unrepresentative, as working more for his own advancement than expressing the will of the Sauks, and thus as an unreliable indicator of popular assent to U.S. claims. If treaties are based on consent instead of coercion, how can a figure so disconnected from the needs and desires of his people possibly be taken as speaking for them? This challenge to Keokuk’s credentials upends the republican logic of the treaty-system, seeking to open room for an alternative, decentralized vision of Sauk politics. The narrative highlights this conflict between discrepant understandings of native collective identity and responsibility in its depiction of the negotiations leading up to the flight of Black Hawk’s band from Saukenuk in 1831. After clashing with white settlers in and around Saukenuk for almost two years, the Sauks remaining in the area around the village were ordered in June of 1831 to leave for west of the Mississippi (where many had already gone) or be forcibly removed by U.S. soldiers under the command of General Gaines.43 Black Hawk has the following exchange with Gaines in response to his observation that he has been sent “to remove you from the lands you have long since ceded to the United States”: I replied: “That we had never sold our country . . . And we are determined to hold on to our village!” The war chief, apparently angry, rose and said:—“Who is Black Hawk? Who is Black Hawk?” I responded: “I am a Sac! my forefather was a Sac! and all the nations call me a SAC!” (111)

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Reversing Gaines’ employment of an inclusive “you” to designate the kinds of collective native subjectivity constructed within treaty discourse, Black Hawk insists that he is part of a “we” who did not assent to the sale. Or more broadly, the gap between “you” and “we” here marks the failure of U.S. policy to engage traditional Sauk notions of identity and territoriality. Through the repetition of “who is,” Gaines questions Black Hawk’s right to represent the Sauks. Yet rather than verifying his credentials as a leader, Black Hawk offers the fact of his identity as a Sauk as sufficient proof of his and his band’s authority to determine the contours of their own occupancy; the use of “our” suggests communal claims on the village that cannot be vitiated by the actions of a few people nominated as representative leaders by the United States. Black Hawk was not a hereditary chief,44 but his assertion here does not depend upon holding a traditional position of leadership. Rather, he rejects the notion that decisions about Sauk occupancy rest with a small body of chiefs who have the power to dictate policy to the rest of the people. In this vein, his insistence that “all the women were on my side on account of their corn-fields” reintroduces the gendered dynamics of land tenure discussed earlier, reconnecting the question of leadership to the hunting/planting cycle (108). This moment highlights largely undocumented resistance to removal while also suggesting the gap between U.S. conceptions of governance and political subjectivity and native geopolitics in which kinship and labor play a much greater role in collective decision-making. In referring to “all the nations,” Black Hawk further implies that the norms toward which he gestures are not peculiar to the Sauks but that similar conceptions of collective agency and land tenure are at play among other native peoples in the region, situating the matter within an international formation and thereby unsettling the employment of U.S. law as a neutral vehicle of mediation. This scene highlights the increasingly counterinsurgent management of Sauk politics by the United States over the previous several years. As Ranajit Guha suggests, accounts of “peasant insurrections” cast them as “purely spontaneous and unpremeditated affairs,” thereby erasing the “less militant types of mobilization” that precede violence. The prevention of violence serves as a way of validating the imposition of forms of political subjectivity that reaffirm U.S. legal geography, rendering subaltern longstanding regional formations. An agreement signed in 1831 after Black Hawk’s retreat from Saukenuk asserts that the “British band of Sac Indians,” as those aligned with Black Hawk were called by the Americans, “are required peaceably to submit to the authority of the friendly Chiefs & Braves of the United Sac & Fox nation, & at all times hereafter, to reside & hunt with

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them upon their own lands west of the Mississippi river, & to be obedient to their laws and treaties.” The treaty of 1832 forced on the Sauks as a result of the “war” has a similar provision: “there shall never be allowed in the confederated Sac and Fox nation, any separate band, or village, under any chief or warrior of the late hostile bands; but that the remnant of the said hostile bands shall be divided among the neutral bands of the said tribes.” Within this frame, Black Hawk and those with him appear as merely a wayward faction disobedient to the real Sauk government (“the friendly Chiefs”), and their refusal to accept the validity of U.S. legal geography is depicted as a symptom of their broader disregard for law itself. In discussing the 1831 uprising, William Clark, superintendent of Indian Affairs for the St. Louis region, refers to leaders who did not protest removal as the “real chiefs and principal men” and dismisses those who oppose removal as merely “the disaffected parts of tribes.” This statement and the clauses quoted above indicate that the United States has arrogated to itself the authority to determine who will count as “real” native leaders, and the maintenance of a treaty-regulated peace will be the basis for doing so. Attempts to challenge the legitimacy of this imperially managed geopolitical order are cast as merely irrational aggression devoid of political meaning. By displacing trans-tribal practices and principles of warfare, the United States reorders tribal landholding and governance in ways that facilitate the extension of federal jurisdiction and the fulfillment of preemption claims, thus confirming the territorial imaginary of the nation.45 Rather than violating the “laws and treaties” of the Sauks themselves, as the treaty of 1832 suggests, Black Hawk’s band, the text insists, is being punished for contravening the policy aims and interventions of the “Great Father.” As a condition of rejoining the Sauks after Black Hawk’s six-month detention following the supposed war that bears his name, the United States demanded that he formally submit to Keokuk’s authority. In response, Black Hawk notes, “In this speech [the presiding general] said much that was mortifying to my feelings, and I made an indignant reply” (150). Similarly, the entire narrative can be seen as an “indignant reply” to federal Indian policy. Treaties present themselves as merely a recognition of native claims and a neutral mechanism for mediating conflict and supporting the rule of law. As I have argued, the Life challenges this impression by tracking the United States’ interdependent efforts to reorganize regional geopolitics: the exertion of control over the fur trade; the disruption of existing patterns of inter-tribal justice and diplomacy; and the regulation of what constitutes legitimate governance within tribes. Through these forms of manipulation, the United States seeks to break up trans-tribal networks, isolating native peoples from each other and producing forms of territorial boundedness and political centralization that fit federal objectives while documenting

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that process as if it were simply an acknowledgment of existing social structures. The narrative’s detailed account of the semiotics and spatial dynamics of hunting and warfare, then, not only emphasizes the coherence and persistence of traditional regional formations but traces the bureaucratic discourse—the “smooth tongue”—through which U.S. mappings are imposed.

PROPHETIC INSURGENCY

If the Life suggests an alternative framework for conceptualizing native land tenure than that organizing the treaty-system, its portrait of regional networks reflects, publicizes, and extends a vision of native geopolitics already peripherally registered in the texts of Indian policy. Most clearly documented with respect to the movement led by Tenskwatawa (the Shawnee Prophet) and his brother Tecumseh, U.S. records index, while marginalizing, a history of self-conscious native opposition to the imperial strategy of circumscribing native landholding and negotiating with individual tribes for sale of what is construed as solely their territory. Black Hawk’s narrative alludes to, and amplifies, this legacy of resistance, taking seriously multitribal land claims dismissed by the United States and situating his actions within the long tradition of trans-tribal, religiously inspired insurgencies— such as Tenskwatawa’s—that regularly coalesced in the broader Great Lakes region over the prior seventy years. Linking native claims to cultural differences between Indians and whites, such prophet-led and prophet-inspired movements brought members of geographically diffuse tribes, at times ranging from as far as Alabama to Canada, into association and alliance with each other for the purpose of resisting the advance of Euramerican settlement, articulating shared occupancy and political solidarity, and reclaiming supposedly ceded land.46 As many scholars have noted, leaders framed native revivalist movements as a return to neglected or abandoned lifeways while at the same time introducing new practices and prohibitions that reflected the influence of Euramerican cultures. Richard White, for example, argues, “In rejecting an American vision of the future that promised them only alternative routes to obliteration, they [prophets like Tenskwatawa] invented a traditional past of their fathers” (502), “cultivat[ing] otherness” (519). Rather than taking the assertion by prophets of a link to tradition as a misrecognition of the true genealogy of their ideas, however, Gregory Dowd asserts in A Spirited Resistance, “The prophets often called for the abandonment of things European, but they did not see this, as we tend to, as a call for a collapse

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backward into an actual or imagined precolonial condition. Rather, they experimented with ‘new’ ritual in ‘traditional’ ways” (2), later adding, “It was not the material or even the ceremonial inventory that they sought to revive, but the process through which strength was gained” (129). This account of consistency within change, especially in the context of opposition to the imperial seizure of lands and resources, resembles the model of tradition offered by Simon Ortiz discussed earlier in that what makes practices, beliefs, and/or identities traditional is not their antiquity but the “process” through which they emerge, the work they perform within indigenous communities, and the ways they are sustained. Like the Pueblo ceremonies Ortiz examines, prophet movements “gather in many forms of the socio-political colonizing force which beset them and make these forms meaningful in their own terms” (8), articulating a vision of solidarity among indigenous peoples against Euramerican control in which the present is conceptualized as continuous with the past. The discussion in Black Hawk’s narrative of the events surrounding his band’s decision to journey east to Winnebago territory in 1832 clearly indicates their (at least imagined) participation in this kind of insurgent native network. His band had been invited by Wabokieshiek—otherwise known as White Cloud or “the Winnebago prophet”—to come to his village to help in the planting of the fields. Yet Black Hawk indicates that while he remained in consistent communication with the Winnebago Prophet “[r]unners were sent to the Arkansas, Red River and Texas—not on the subject of our lands, but a secret mission, which I am not, at present, permitted to explain” (106). Such far-flung communications resemble the kinds of routine interregional journeys that accompanied pan-tribal coalitions (especially Tecumseh’s trip to gather support in the southeast in 1811). The reader also is told that Neapope, a chief allied with Black Hawk, had stopped at the village of the Winnebago Prophet, who told Neapope that he had “received wampum and tobacco from the different nations on the lakes—Ottowas, Chippewas, Pottowatomies; and as for the Winnebagoes, he has them all at his command” (116). This outline of expressions of alliance and likely aid from peoples throughout the Great Lakes region, particularly when combined with Neapope’s further claim of having received encouraging words from the British, indicates that the impetus behind the journey to the Winnebago Prophet’s village was less a casual visit than what Black Hawk and others likely conceptualized as the first maneuver in a campaign to recapture lost land, including Saukenuk. Additionally, Black Hawk’s band before and especially in the wake of the removal comprised not just Sauks but Foxes, Kickapoos, Potawatomies, and Winnebagoes displaced and angered by U.S. policy in various ways and functioning as something of a pan-tribal coalition.47

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Interpreting Black Hawk’s recrossing of the Mississippi through the prism of prior prophet movements, a connection entirely overlooked by critics, situates his band and the text within a genealogy of traditionalist resistance, which the text itself subtly invokes. Earlier in the narrative, Black Hawk inquires, “Why did the Great Spirit ever send the whites to this island, to drive us from our homes, and introduce among us poisonous liquors, disease, and death? They should have remained on the island where the Great Spirit first placed them” (61), and toward the end of the narrative, he repeats this contention, “I think . . . that wherever the Great Spirit places his people, they ought to be satisfied to remain, and thankful for what He has given them; and not drive others from the country He has given them, because it happens to be better than theirs!” (144–145). These moments echo almost exactly the sentiments expressed by Tenskwatawa, Tecumseh, and spiritual leaders of other native coalitions/confederacies as captured in the minutes of meetings with Euramerican officials. Compare the above to Tecumseh’s statement in a conversation with William Henry Harrison in August 1810: “The great spirit . . . gave this great island to his red children. He placed the whites on the other side of the big water, they were not contented with their own, but came to take ours from us.”48 The parallels in Black Hawk and Tecumseh’s rhetoric suggests that the articulation of Indian/white difference in the Life is not invoking the precontact past as part of a nostalgic longing for a vanished world, but instead implicitly is situating the actions of Black Hawk’s band within a tradition in which peoples throughout the Great Lakes area organized against Euramerican intervention. More specifically, previous leaders using the same kind of rhetoric as Black Hawk declared that the overlay of interests and occupancy rights by multiple tribes required that all the peoples in a given region and/or coalition consent in any sale of territory, challenging the imperial attempt to disaggregate shared regional patterns of land use into a series of claims by individual tribes. In a letter to the Secretary of War in December 1802, William Henry Harrison notes with respect to a proposed gathering of representatives from a series of neighboring tribes (including Delawares, Potawatomies, Kickapoos, and Sauks) to “agree with them on the permanent boundaries between theirs and the lands of the United States” that “[t]here appears to be an agreement amongst them, that no proposition which relates to their lands can be acceded to without the consent of all the tribes.” “Consent” here is defined not in terms of the will or actions of a single tribe or its chiefs but as a multi-tribal phenomenon in which the legal status and contours of “their lands” is understood as a collective regional “proposition.” This idea reappears almost a decade later in communications and negotiations with Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh. In a letter in July 1810

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to the Secretary of War, Harrison describes Tenskwatawa’s position on the U.S. purchase of native lands, “he said that the Indians had been cheated of their lands and that no sale was good unless made by all the Tribes.” The U.S. policy of seeking “consent” from a single tribe for purchase of the lands they inhabit is cast as violating widely held native notions of use, and these comments also indicate a desire on the part of members of a range of tribes to thwart U.S. efforts to reify tribal boundaries and isolate tribes from each other, which as I have suggested was crucial to the assertion of preemption and jurisdiction. Given the similarities between Black Hawk’s rhetoric and that associated with other native coalitions, including the narrative’s multilayered critique of the logic of sale and the fragmenting force of the treatysystem, I would suggest that the specific political imaginary and implications of the above also inform the Life and serve as an implicit referent in its invocation of “the Great Spirit” and Indian/white difference.49 In fact, Black Hawk’s narrative at times actively seems to invite such a connection to earlier trans-tribal movements. Fairly early in the text, he notes that “runners came to our village from the Shawnee Prophet . . . with invitations for us to meet him on the Wabash.” Several representatives from Saukenuk go to hear what Tenskwatawa has to say, and when they return, they are accompanied by “a Prophet” who explains “the bad treatment the different nations of Indians had received from the Americans, by giving them a few presents, and taking their land from them”: “I remember well his saying,—‘If you do not join your friends on the Wabash, the Americans will take this very village from you!’ I little thought, then, that his words would come true!” (58).50 Later, in the discussion of traditional Sauk annual and life cycles, Black Hawk observes, “If another prophet had come to our village in those days, and told us what has since taken place, none of our people would have believed him. What! to be driven from our village and hunting grounds, and not even permitted to visit the graves of our forefathers, our relations, and friends?” (89). Constructing a dense web of associations, these moments suggest that the strategies for responding to U.S. territorial initiatives offered by Tenskwatawa and those allied with him were right and should have been adopted more widely in the region, including among the Sauks. The passages critique the treaty-system, the exchange of “a few presents” for “their land,” while endorsing the kinds of regional networking in which the Shawnee Prophet was engaged. “Different nations” have all received the same kind of “bad treatment” from the United States, and the solution is to “join” “friends” who together can oppose the expropriation of native lands. In these moments, the narrative offers a traditional, noncommodified relationship to land shared by tribes throughout the region as an alternative to the logic and territorial imaginary of U.S. policy, indicating the truth and

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foresight of the analysis offered by prophet movements—in terms of both the threat posed by “Americans” and the attendant need for broad-based mobilization. The loss of Saukenuk, therefore, appears not as an inevitable effect of predestined progress but as the result of “bad” American policy combined with the Sauks’ inability at the time to see how much of a danger the treaty-system posed to existing trans-tribal geopolitics. Seeking to prompt a reassessment by readers of not merely the U.S. campaign against Black Hawk but Indian policy writ large, the references and allusions to prophet movements offer an alternative frame to that of treaty-discourse. Presenting Black Hawk’s recrossing of the Mississippi in 1832 as part of a broader defense of native tradition in the region helps highlight what the text portrays as a significant gap between Euramerican and indigenous norms, positioning the narrative as an effort to restore the native geopolitical context previously (and purposively) lost in translation. Through this prism, the official representation of the actions of Black Hawk’s band as an “invasion” appears as a counterinsurgent effort to efface regional native histories and principles that do not fit the contours of the treaty-system. Linking the events of 1832 to the topology of native prophecy situates the conquest of Saukenuk and the assault on Black Hawk’s band within a genealogy of violence, foregrounding U.S. efforts to dissect native space through the abstraction and commodification of land and the isolation of native peoples from each other in the name of an imperially orchestrated peace, which is more about preemption than protection. Tradition, then, appears as a kind of critical memory, the persistence of forms of trans-tribal consciousness despite the multi-pronged attack on native formations by the United States. In a telling statement very near the end of the narrative, Black Hawk notes, “my people have started to their hunting grounds, and I am anxious to follow them” (153), suggesting that the practices and forms of collective self-identification targeted by federal Indian law and the civilization program have not disappeared in the wake of removal. Given the importance of the hunting grounds in both the narrative and U.S. policy, the reference to hunting here signals the continuance of native networks despite imperial efforts to break them up into modular geopolitical units to suit U.S. jurisdictional mappings and territorial claims. Rather than a “middle ground,” what emerges in the Life is an antagonism in which existing shared modes of trade, subsistence, diplomacy, leadership, land tenure, and warfare need to be displaced in order to accommodate white settlement and associated assertions of the insulated coherence of U.S. domestic space. If the texts of Cherokee nationalism serve as one kind of response to the U.S. effort to produce forms of native political subjectivity that validate its policy, Black

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Hawk’s narrative offers another. Less occupying an imposed identity to oppositional ends, it refuses the structural premises of such identity, deconstructing or negating it in ways that, in Dale Turner’s terms, seek to “open up the physical and intellectual space for Aboriginal voices to participate in the legal and political practices of the state” (30–31). The text documents the limits and lacunae of the archive of imperial governance, testifying to the persistence of a countervailing conception of native collectivity and occupancy despite its being rendered subaltern in U.S. law and policy. As Gerald Vizenor observes, “the stories that turn tribes tragic are not their own stories” (16).51 Black Hawk’s story ultimately is not about disappearance but survival. It draws attention to traditional (regional) social formations alternately ignored and assaulted by the United States and insists on the meaninglessness of a rhetoric of Indian assent in the absence of a substantive reckoning with the self-understandings and lived topographies of native peoples.

3 COMANCHE METAPHORS Juan Seguín’s Memoirs and the Figure of the Barbarian in the Struggle for Texas During the summer of 1859 and escalating throughout the fall, Juan N. Cortina, a resident of Brownsville accompanied by other local Tejanos and some Mexicans, launched a series of assaults in the region to punish corrupt public servants and their allies who had been manipulating the criminal justice system to frighten Tejanos into abandoning their lands. The local grand jury described these events as a “Mexican” conspiracy “to take possession of the whole country to the Nueces,” continuing the tendency present in all manner of official and popular accounts of insistently eliding the difference between Tejanos and Mexican nationals by placing them under the supposedly unifying rubric of “Mexican.” Earlier that same year, citizens of Brownsville sent a petition to the army protesting the reassignment of U.S. troops from the eastern Rio Grande to the western and northern frontier of Texas. In it, they note that if the transfer were to occur they would be subject to increased assaults by “the bands of robbers and savages who frequently cross the river from Mexico for purposes of plunder and murder.”1 The depiction of Cortina’s, and similar, actions can be seen as part of a broader discourse of “Mexican” migrancy in which attacks on Anglos are represented as the result of inherent tendencies toward mobility and lawlessness which threaten the security of the United States and its citizens. The attribution of “Mexican” identity functions less as a claim about loyalty to the Mexican government than as a vehicle of racialization in which those so labeled are cast as unwilling or temperamentally unable to respect boundaries of any kind. Within this frame, actions designed to resist Anglo efforts to displace Tejanos from their territory are translated as the expression of inherent propensities toward disorder and “savage” placelessness. The anxiety over the penetration of Texas space by “Mexican” bandits was heightened by the simultaneous possibility of extensive native aggression. 109

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The movement of U.S. troops to which the citizens of Brownsville objected was the result of a command issued in January 1859 by Major General D. E. Twiggs. He was relocating military forces in order to deal with the ongoing threat of raids by Comanches, with whom white settlers, Texas Rangers, and federal soldiers had clashed in a series of highly publicized confrontations over the previous year. The resulting representation of Texas as under invasion from all directions worked to naturalize Texas jurisdiction by discounting competing territorial and political claims as merely illegitimate intrusion by various sets of marauders.2 The linking of “Indians” and “Mexicans,” especially the depiction of the latter as “savage,” is not happenstance or simply the result of contingent circumstances in the late 1850s and early 1860s. Instead, this conjunction is endemic and structurally central to the territorial imaginary of the state of Texas, and before it the Republic of Texas. The notion of “Mexican”-ness, and the particular kinds of racialization that it enacts in post1836 Texas, depends for its ideological coherence and content on its association with, or perhaps more accurately analogization to, existing ways of figuring Comanches. What I will argue is that Anglo modes of imperial interpellation and Tejano strategies of opposition both cannot be understood outside their mutual triangulation through representations of nonsedentary native peoples, of which the Comanches were the most prominent. The disavowal of native territorialities provided a template for dismissing Tejano claims as well, linking “Mexicans” to “Indians” as similarly barbarous threats to the security and jurisdictional cohesion of Texas space. The Indianization of non-native groups—their portrayal as having adopted to some degree the characteristics of their native neighbors—provided an implicit basis on which to disqualify large sections of the Spanish-speaking population from exercising rights under U.S. law without categorically barring them from citizenship or formally repudiating prior property claims en toto. The legal fiction animating Indian policy in the southeast and Great Lakes region, as discussed in chapters 1 and 2, was that Indian territory is always-already domestic, even if not under the jurisdiction of the states, but in Texas, California, and other areas wrested from Mexico, the United States confronts an existing Euramerican system of governance and propertyholding, which previously had been acknowledged as foreign. To leave prior residents undisturbed in their land titles as defined by Mexican propertylaw would have frustrated the extension of U.S. legal geography and blocked Anglo access to territory. Instead of engaging in an explicit program of removal, the United States defined non-native residents of annexed regions as potential citizens, recasting the confrontation between Euramerican systems as an assessment of the legal status and land claims of individuals. Dissolving the prior legal matrix into atomized pieces in this way allowed the denial of political and land rights to be presented as the result of the

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deficiencies of some claimants rather than a coordinated project of disenfranchisement and dislocation. In this vein, the term “Mexican” as it circulated in Anglo legal discourses designated not so much a formal political status imposed upon longtime residents as a disturbing potentiality within them, an inborn predisposition toward vagrancy and political instability. Drawing on Hispanic imperial tropes which had been used to repudiate the “barbarous” geopolitics of nonsedentary peoples, this racialized metaphorics of itinerancy recodes the displacement of Tejanos from their lands as a decision by those individuals to surrender to what is imagined as a kind of congenital inclination toward mobility. In post-1836 Texas governance, the Comanches serve as the de facto model through which to differentiate between legitimate and illegitimate forms of political identity and land tenure, serving as the negative limit for imagining and defining sovereignty. Unlike the Cherokees or the Sauks, the Comanches did not have permanent town-sites and significant agricultural production, instead maintaining subsistence through extended cycles of hunting and trade with (or alternately raids on) crop-growing communities, and taking up the organizing figures of Hispanic imperial ideology, Anglo administrative discourse portrays them as wandering, as an invasive, mobile presence without “national” claims to any particular territory.3 Representing nonsedentary populations’ land use as movement across terrain, instead of as a sustained engagement with it that could serve as the basis for politically recognizable claims, has been a persistent feature of settler-state policy. As Elizabeth Povinelli argues, “At most they [“huntergatherer peoples”] ‘own’ (because they in some way make) the things they hunt and gather but not the land on which they pursue these practices”: “It is only now emerging how deeply the liberal capitalist state has itself been defined in opposition to Western constructions of ‘hunter-gatherers’—the arch[e]-typical primitive—and therefore how difficult it is legally and economically for that state to make a fair assessment of . . . claims to traditional lands or their notions about land-use and labor-action.” Attending to such “notions about land-use and labor-action” reveals how what appears as movement between spaces through the lens of liberal notions of property-holding is understood as inhabitance of a locale by nonsedentary peoples. At work in the state disavowal of such occupancy is an “underlying conflict . . . over who will have authority to link practice and meaning and thus produce value, power, and authority for the self and social group.”4 Put another way, the issue is one of self-determination, to what extent and in what ways the state officially will validate peoples’ narration of their own spatiality. Examining the administrative production of national territoriality in light of those peoples labeled “wild” and “wandering” by Euramericans brings into focus the politics of occupancy, the struggle over

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what constitutes a legitimate way of defining place and thus political identity as well. Marking the evacuation of Comanche geopolitics within Hispanic and Anglo discourses highlights the conflict between discrepant forms of boundary making and the imperial processes through which some forms are subordinated to others in the making and maintenance of jurisdiction. The issue of mobility in relation to the U.S.-Mexico border has been a topic of sustained scholarly investigation, but largely not with respect to indigenous peoples. In fact, the relation between migrancy and occupancy has been one of the central problematics in Chicano/a studies since its inception.5 However, as I suggested in the Introduction, the focus on population movement, which tends to predominate in work operating within a “borderlands” paradigm, can end up replacing a consideration of different modes of placemaking, or, in the words of the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the presence of multiple kinds of “customs, traditions and land tenure systems.” For example, in Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies, Mary Pat Brady presents migration as a liberating rejection of reified notions of space that “presume a particular, naturalized, ideological link between people and place” while calling on indigenous peoples to embody this ideal: “Apaches, on the other hand, refused such a conceptualization of themselves. They chose a life of mobility over one of settlement” (147). “Mobility” here functions as the absence of possession rather than as its own kind of occupancy. While positively valued, the wandering of native peoples is invoked as the antithesis of “settlement” in ways that reproduce, rather than displace or undo, the structuring logic of Hispanic and Anglo imperial policy in the southwest. Nonsedentary peoples appear as a deconstructive figure, a metaphor of provisionality rather than as political agents engaged in a complicated negotiation among qualitatively distinct socio-spatial formations which intersect in overdetermined ways. By contrast, an investigation of the varied semiotics of settlement and mobility at play in Texas, and the conflicts between them, not only leverages U.S. mappings but provides a framework for tracing how discourses of migrancy are used to delegitimize countervailing claims by presenting others’ landedness as the absence of proper residency. In My History, Not Yours, Genaro M. Padilla argues, “the rupture of everyday life experienced by some 75,000 people who inhabited the far northern provinces of Mexico in 1846 opened a terrain of discursive necessity,” suggesting that Mexican American autobiographical narratives gave voice to the “fear and resentment” generated by this Anglo-American invasion. These texts recall a “memory of prior stability rooted in an idea of home buttressed against dispossession and alienation,” “reconstructing the homeland in the narrative imagination” (71–72). Padilla includes the narrative of Juan N. Seguín in his description. A third-generation San Antonian

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from a wealthy and influential family,6 Seguín played a major role in Texas’s war for independence and served in several high-level public offices prior to 1842 when he was forced by resident Anglos to flee to Mexico due to rumors that he was conspiring with Mexican forces to retake the country. The Memoirs of Juan N. Seguín (1858) covers the period from 1833 to 1842, juxtaposing the Tejano population with recently arrived U.S. citizens by depicting the former as ardent Texan patriots trying to defend themselves from the mercenary schemes of newly emigrant foreigners. Seeking to open room for Tejanos in Texas public and political discourse, it inverts the topoi of mobility used by Anglos to depict Tejanos as lacking a sustained/sustainable relation to place, emphasizing longstanding patterns of Tejano landholding and community building. Seguín’s narrative highlights and defends a socio-spatial formation that precedes U.S. (and Anglo) authority and exceeds its terms, highlighting, in Adorno’s terms discussed in the Introduction, the remainders of pre-independence geographies. Yet the vision of pre-1836 Texas as a Tejano “homeland” depends on disowning native land claims by contradistinguishing Hispanic settlement from the supposed rootlessness of indigenous peoples in the region. Furthermore, Seguín’s portrayal of Tejanos as “native” and of violent Anglo mobility redeploy the imperial image of the marauding savage, suggesting the ways anti-racist articulations of Tejano identity and agency require that Comanche land tenure be rendered subaltern.7 Reading Seguín’s narrative in light of its complicated relation to Comanche geopolitics reveals how post-independence assertions of valid possession rely on an accompanying rhetoric of rootlessness in which both Anglos and Tejanos seek to cast the other as de facto Comanches, not only bracketing native land claims but turning indigenous forms of inhabitance and subsistence into a tropology of racial incapacity. Attending to the dynamics (and erasure) of Comanche selfdetermination serves as a way of leveraging this ideological structure, highlighting the centrality of figures of nomadism in the racialization of Tejanos as well as the ways the intrasettler dialogue of Anglo-Tejano conflict disavows nonsedentary territoriality and political-economy.8 The chapter, therefore, illustrates how the struggle over political identity and propertyholding in Texas was organized around the recirculation of a metaphorics of barbarism mobilized against natives and non-natives alike.

SETTLING TEXAS

In Mexicano Resistance in the Southwest, Robert J. Rosenbaum suggests that much of the post-1848 “distrust and hostility” of U.S. governance by former

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Mexican nationals can be traced to the legal ambiguity over “how traditional Hispanic forms of ownership were to be translated into modes compatible with American law” and the kinds of expropriation and conflict generated by this shift (17). While in later sections I will address the significance of Comanche presence for Anglo and Tejano representations of each other, first I want to investigate the process of translation to which Rosenbaum refers. How did the institutionalization of an Anglo territorial imaginary in the wake of Texas independence rely on the administrative construction of “Mexican” identity and insertion of Tejanos into it, and how did that interpellation both enable the elision of Tejano land claims and validate Anglo violence by recasting its effects as voluntary Tejano movement? Rather than narrating the post-1836 dispossession, forced exile, and proletarianization of the Spanishspeaking population as racial exclusion within citizenship, these questions frame racialization as a vehicle through which the Anglo-dominated state (first the Republic of Texas and then the United States) reorganized the prior system of land tenure by linking “Mexican”-ness to mobility.9 In post-1836 governance, race is articulated through a discourse of space, specifically an opposition between settlement and mobility. Rather than making voting and public service contingent on “whiteness,” Texas constitutional discourse forges a powerful if subtle equivalency between foreignness, itinerancy, and nonwhiteness, creating a metonymic chain in which they come to represent each other to the detriment of Tejanos who are cast as being in but not of the nation. Under the terms of the 1836 constitution, all persons present in Texas on the day of the Declaration of Independence (March 2, 1836), “Africans, descendants of Africans, and Indians” excepted, “shall be considered citizens of the republic.” Nothing in the language of this clause suggests a circumscription of Tejano political participation on the basis of race. Yet the constitution also states, “All persons who shall leave the country for the purpose of evading a participation in the present struggle, or shall refuse to participate in it, or shall give aid or assistance to the present enemy, shall forfeit all rights of citizenship and such lands as they may hold in the Republic.” Earlier it stipulates that “all free white persons who shall emigrate . . . and who shall, after a residence of six months, make oath . . . that he intends to reside permanently in the same, and shall swear to support this Constitution” “shall be entitled to all the privileges of citizenship,” further asserting that “no alien shall hold land in Texas, except by titles emanating directly from the Government of this Republic.” Where do Tejanos fit within this discursive matrix of national belonging, and to what degree is Texas citizenship actually available to them?10 The constitution suggests a fear that the nation is imperiled from within and without—from residents who might flee or “refuse to participate” in

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creating and maintaining the emergent state and from aliens who might seek to assert claims to land inside the nation by reference to foreign “titles.” All pre-war landholding becomes suspect given that it emanates from Mexican law. White emigrants, though, not only are not considered a threat but actively seem to be solicited, which combined with the sale of land scrip to U.S. citizens by representatives from the Texas government suggests that the term “alien” is not applied to Anglos but rather attaches to those seen as non-“white” or whose “titles” derive from a prior legal system, which given the history of Texas could only be Mexican.11 More than raising the question of membership in the nation, “alien” signifies a racial status, or more precisely, the juxtaposition of “white” and “alien” creates a spectrum of nonbelonging in which racial and national differences slide into and become figures for each other, allowing “Mexican” identity to be cast as an inheritable set of tendencies that threaten the nation while extending the ban on foreign presence, influence, and land tenure to those who are not actually foreign to Texas—such as Tejanos. This categorical confusion/ conflation can be seen elsewhere in Anglo public discourse, including two-time Texas President Sam Houston’s tendency to describe the Republic of Texas as a product of the “Anglo-Saxon” race.12 Additionally in tying landholding to citizenship, the constitution implicitly, but effectively, subjects all territorial claims to the above test of patriotism, disowning Mexican property-law in favor of a de facto racialized vision of Texan subjectivity and opening the possibility of legally displacing Tejanos’ land claims on the grounds that they are held by aliens. This institutionalized set of associations further is incorporated into the Texas constitution of 1845 that accompanies U.S. annexation, which takes existing definitions of Texas citizenship as the basis for determining who among the prior residents of the Republic of Texas can vote and serve in public office in the new state— also indicating that the same kinds of evidence and legal procedures will govern the adjudication of land claims.13 In Racial Formation in the United States, Michael Omi and Howard Winant argue, “race is a concept which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies,” adding that what they call a “racial project” can be defined as the process of “connect[ing] what race means in a particular discursive practice and the ways in which both social structures and everyday experiences are racially organized, based on that meaning.”14 The racial project in Texas is alienization, the portrayal of Tejanos as out of place in the nation due to their Mexican lineage. Yet as indicated above, the term “alien” is not applied to a certain class of foreigners (“white persons”) but is applied to many longtime residents. This nebulous usage sustains the following disparate possibilities: holding open the potential of citizenship for loyal Tejanos; implying Anglo

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dominance without outright affirming it; assessing Tejano patriotism on a case-by-case basis; lumping all Tejanos together as racially Mexican and therefore suspect; asserting the coherence of Texas jurisdiction; and imagining Texas space as overrun by foreign titles that need to be excised. Thus, while theoretically offering Tejanos the opportunity to participate in Texas politics on an equal basis with Anglos, all subject to the same loyalty provision, Texas constitutional and legal discourse generates a flexible and racially coded alien status, coalesced around “Mexican”-ness, that can be invoked to repudiate individual Tejano land claims, to bring all of them into question, and to disqualify one or many Tejanos from citizenship (and therefore landholding) absent any evidence of actual political identification with Mexico. Moreover, making citizenship contingent on participation in the war for independence rather than on an explicit racial qualification allows for state-sanctioned violence against or dislocation of Tejanos to be represented as a result of the latter’s choice—their de facto decision to reject national belonging. State v. Casinova (1846) provides an example of how Tejanos institutionally were cast as “Mexican” and the kinds of social mappings implemented through that process. Juan de Casinova was among a group of approximately two hundred Tejano families led by Juan Seguín who fled from San Antonio in 1842, reducing the population of Tejanos in the city by about half although most returned within six months.15 After his death, his widow, Jesusa Leal de Casinova, filed suit in his name in the Texas courts to recover the “league and a labor” (approximately 4,600 acres) promised to all citizens of Texas under the 1836 Constitution. In 1837, Texas passed a law requiring that all people asserting title to land in Texas have their claims examined by three-person county boards, one of the requirements being that each landholder must present two witnesses testifying to his continuous residence on the land and his participation in the war effort. Also, additional land rights were awarded to “free white men” who arrived prior to October 1, 1837. In 1840, the legislature passed an “Act to detect fraudulent land certificates,” creating two boards of commissioners to travel the state and examine the validity of titles approved by the 1837 commission using the same standards of evidence, exempting titles that had been rejected by the previous board but confirmed through an appeal to a District Court.16 The legal question at the heart of the de Casinova case is whether or not Juan de Casinova retained his status as a citizen of Texas, and consequently his (and his heirs’) right to hold land in it, given his movement to Mexico and continued inhabitance there for four years. Land claimants needed to prove continuous residence in Texas from the time independence was declared “up to the time of th[eir] application” (404). While the fact of de Casinova’s absence from Texas was not in dispute, his widow’s attorney

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sought to argue that the particular circumstances of his departure did not vitiate his claim and that he left with the full intention of returning. The court determined that “the causes which impelled the claimant to abandon his own and fly to the country of the enemy were not for the purpose of business, or any other lawful purpose or reason whatever,” adding that the stories of assaults on Tejanos in San Antonio which prompted de Casinova’s flight were merely “rumors” and that his fears of attack, therefore, were “groundless” (408, 410). Thus, the court presents Anglo aggression as essentially a collective hallucination by Tejanos. In reaching this conclusion, the decision represents Tejanos as “Mexicans” in ways that are crucial to its logic. In describing de Casinova’s “fears and apprehensions,” Chief Justice Hemphill, the author of the decision, indicates that the story that prompted de Casinova’s flight was that “the Americans” “had threatened to kill all the Mexican born citizens of San Antonio” (402). Given that “citizens of San Antonio” refers largely to people who had lived in Texas their entire lives, what does it mean to be “Mexican born”? Hemphill further suggests that the “ancient inhabitants were connected by many ties with the citizens of the Mexican Republic” (407), and later, in assessing whether or not de Casinova planned to return to Texas or had actually changed his “domicile,” the decision offers the following observations: “He flies (as the record shows) because he believes that the whole Mexican race was to be extirpated; that they would be indiscriminately hewn down, and not one spared by the merciless hordes of Americans . . . Would he return when he could expect to encounter nothing but hostile visages or the ghastly memorials of his butchered countrymen?” (410). To be “Mexican,” then, is to belong to a particular “race.” Although the decision is careful to attribute such explicit sentiments to de Casinova himself (“he believes”), the understanding of Mexican identity as a racial phenomena is repeated and reinforced by its disaggregation from actual loyalty or political connection to the country of Mexico. The “ancient inhabitants” are not in fact “citizens of the Mexican Republic,” and the term “countrymen” in the above designates only those “Mexican born” persons residing in Texas. Furthermore, in attempting to settle the question of domicile, Hemphill describes de Casinova as taking up “residence in a foreign country” and leaving his “native country,” “abandon[ing] his own and fly[ing] to the country of the enemy,” and choosing “voluntary flight with the troops of the enemy, who were retreating before those of his own country” (407–8). Thus, de Casinova’s “Mexican”-ness is not a function of prior alignment with Mexico, instead subsisting in a set of attributes with which he is “born.” The content of “Mexican” subjectivity can be seen in the decision’s emphasis on the “ignorance and credulity” that supposedly led Tejanos to

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believe the stories of Anglo brutality. Proposing a racial propensity toward irrationality as a way of officially explaining the actions of de Casinova and others allows the court to evade discussion of the potential motives for Anglo assault, including the acquisition of Tejano lands. Put another way, instead of highlighting the disruption of Tejano communities and land claims by Anglos, Hemphill inverts this relationship, positioning Tejanos as a population whose mobility is wholly “voluntary” and therefore extraneous to any claim against Texas “which can be recognized as lawful” (411). The category of “Mexican” is called on to bear the burden of clarifying Tejanos’ movement by inserting racial identity into the conceptual and historical gap left by the complete exoneration of Anglos (“Nothing had transpired from the commencement of the war which had cast a shade on the humanity of the Americans” [408]). Consistently returning to the central contrast between “a fixed, certain intention of returning” and “a floating intention, to return at some future period” (407), the decision further associates Mexican identity with territorial indeterminacy—the absence of fixity and the failure to form clear and sustained political allegiances. Through the prism of such racialized subjectivity, not only is Anglo coercion transmuted into “Mexican” capriciousness but Tejanos are depicted as choosing flight, as implicitly consenting to relinquish Texas citizenship for reasons that have to do with a set of essential traits with which one is “born” and which are depicted as outside the realm of legal process or judicial redress. Moreover, even while invoking the Constitution of 1836 and laws passed before annexation by the United States, Hemphill refers to the forces fighting in the Texas revolution as “the American army” and persistently describes Anglos in the region as “Americans,” telegraphing Texas nation-statehood into U.S. jurisdiction.17 Juan Seguín’s Memoirs takes up these dominant tropes of inheritance, place, and political identity, reordering them in ways that stress Tejano landedness and highlight the introduction of disruptive “foreign” elements in the wake of the Texas Revolution. An autobiographical account of events from the beginning of the movement for independence in 1834 to Seguín’s enforced exile in 1842, the text chronicles his participation in the Texas military, his service as a senator in the Republic, his two terms as mayor of San Antonio, his resignation from that position and flight to Mexico due to rumors (circulated by General Rafael Vásquez of the Mexican army during an attack on San Antonio) that Seguín provided aid to Mexican forces, and his role later that same year in the campaign against San Antonio led by General Adrián Woll. The narrative’s most direct intervention into public discourse was as a rejoinder to recent newspaper attacks on Seguín’s reputation, operating as part of an effort to maintain his viability in San Antonio political life in which he had served as a justice of the peace and as president of his electoral precinct since his return to Texas in the wake of

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the Mexican-American War.18 As he notes in the “Preface,” “I now find myself exposed to the attacks of scribblers and personal enemies who, to serve political purposes and engender strife, falsify historical fact with which they are but imperfectly acquainted” (73). More than simply a maneuver within local or state party politics, though, the text confronts and contests the broader naturalization of Anglo dominance within legal discourse by offering an oppositional account of the process of state-formation in Texas. At the end of the penultimate paragraph of the narrative, Seguín asserts, “confidently I submit to the public verdict,” suggesting that the Memoirs is in dialogue with the law but also displacing the authority of its processes/ terms by speaking directly to “the public.” Seguín positions the details of his life as a synecdochic stand-in for the broader Tejano experience of displacement in the wake of the Texas revolution. As Raymond Williams suggests, “It is significant that much of the most accessible and influential work of . . . counter-hegemony is historical: the recovery of discarded areas, or the redress of selective and reductive interpretations” (116). By recalling the movement for independence and Tejanos’ role within it, Seguín’s text works to mitigate the “reductive interpretation” of Tejano identity within state policy and to stage a “counter-hegemony” in which they appear part, and to some degree constitutive, of the state.19 The text opens with an unqualified affirmation of his role in the revolution and the life of the Republic: “I embraced the cause of Texas at the sound of the first cannon which foretold her liberty, filled an honorable role within the ranks of the conquerors of San Jacinto, and was a member of the legislative body of the Republic” (73). Presenting Seguín as one of the founding fathers of Texas, the narrative places him at the origin of the war for independence (“the first cannon”), and rather than being conquered by Anglo forces, he is among “the conquerors” who subdued Santa Anna (the then President of Mexico) at San Jacinto, which was second only to the loss at the Alamo as the most famous battle of the war. The first half of the narrative offers a detailed description of Seguín’s military career, tracing his movements from when he volunteered for service in April 1835 through his command of forces in San Antonio in 1837 and 1838 during a period in which there were several campaigns by the Mexican army to capture the city. This extended discussion of his participation in the war effort, and of the Spanish-speaking soldiers that served with and under him, can be seen as an attempt to provide historical proof of a broad pattern of Tejano patriotism to the emergent state. Instead of defining himself as a member of a particular ethnic enclave by foregrounding the existence of a distinct sense of Tejano collectivity and community, Seguín contextualizes his and others’ contributions within an inclusive sense of identity as Texans. He later bemoans that his retreat to Mexico required him to surrender “all

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my privileges and honors as a Texan” (97). Further, the Memoirs challenges Anglo representations of Tejanos as foreigners by offering a running critique of Mexican governance. Referring to Mexico as a “foreign country” (74), Seguín asserts that he and the troops with him “pledged ourselves to use all our influence to rouse Texas against the tyrannical government of Santa Anna” (76). Despite Seguín’s service in the name of independence and against control by a “foreign” power, the text observes that he still is perceived as an alien. In his closing remarks, he notes, “The rumor that I was a traitor was seized avidly by enemies in San Antonio. Some envied my military position, as held by a Mexican; others found in me an obstacle to the accomplishment of their villainous plans” (101). “Enemies” gestures toward recently arrived Anglos previously depicted as troublemakers. In an earlier discussion of violence against Tejanos, he offers the following description: “At every hour of the day and night my countrymen ran to me for protection against the assaults or exactions of those adventurers [the “straggling American adventurers” mentioned on the previous page] . . . Were not the victims my own countrymen, friends, and associates? Could I leave them defenseless, exposed to the assaults of foreigners who, on the pretext that they were Mexicans, treated them worse than brutes?” (90). Pressuring the coding of Seguín and others as “Mexican,” the text implies that jealously, greed, and anger at Tejano opposition to “plans” for their displacement play more of a role in such categorization than any residual loyalty to Mexico. In these moments, the narrative suggests that being identified as “Mexican” precedes and exceeds any evidence of one’s position as a political subject of Mexico. The “rumor” of Seguín’s supposed treason gains credence because his “enemies” already envision him as “Mexican,” a charge that itself consists not of an indictment of political activity but of a racializing dismissal of Tejanos as “brutes.” The use of “Mexican” as an epithet plays on its association with a state hostile to Texas, but the Memoirs implicitly argues that such an attribution of alien status has nothing to do with actual political commitments and serves as a way of rhetorically manufacturing legitimacy and belonging for those who actually are foreign.20 In problematizing the classification of Tejanos as “Mexican,” the text links them to the land of Texas through an emphasis on their longstanding occupancy. It begins with Seguín’s description of himself as “A native of the city of San Antonio de Béxar” (73).21 While refusing to name Tejano as an explicit social category, the Memoirs uses “native” as a reoccurring topos through which to gesture toward such identity while redrawing the kinds of administrative cartographies at play in Texas governance. The term intimates an organic connection to the territory as well as an originary claim to it while not predicating that relationship on any particular political

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affiliation. In other words, the use of “native” indicates duration of residence but brackets the problems associated with questions of jurisdiction and property-law, offering a sense of landedness without tying it to the forms and requirements of land tenure institutionally implemented by a given government. Beginning with this connotatively rich yet somewhat nebulous assertion of belonging figuratively reallocates the burden of proof as mandated under Texas law. As discussed above, using the provisions of the Constitution of 1836 as the gradient for assessing valid land claims puts the onus on Tejanos to establish continuous residency and proactive loyalty. In foregrounding “native”-ness however, the text reconfigures Texan subjectivity by directing it away from the formal political apparatus as represented by the constitution and toward a more diffuse sense of being rooted in Texas as a place. At stake in this emphasis on longstanding residency is the effort to reimagine the terms of participation in the state that was produced by the revolution by asserting a pattern of sustained Tejano participation within a broader Texas public. That intervention is aided by two sets of events over the several years preceding the Memoirs that helped draw attention to the political and economic significance of the Tejano population—the unexpected victory of the Know-Nothing Party in San Antonio municipal elections in 1854 and the “Cart War” of 1857. The Know-Nothings were able to get several members onto city council while winning the mayoral race as well. In response, the Democratic Party set out to woo Tejano voters— soliciting their involvement in the party apparatus (with Seguín serving as vice-president of the party in Bexar County), investing in an association of Tejano Democrats, and founding a Spanish-language newspaper called El Bejareño calculated to appeal to Tejano communities. In these ways, the party attempted to recover its power base by presenting itself as a desirable alternative to Know-Nothings, who adopted a hard-line nativist stance including continually referring to Tejanos as “foreigners” and enacting antagonistic policies (such as discontinuing the translation of city documents into Spanish and outlawing forms of public amusement largely frequented by Tejanos). The disruption of the dominance of the Democratic Party within city politics resulted in the need to court Tejanos as voters, especially given that they continued to make up more than a third of the city’s total population. Additionally, in the year prior to the publication of the Memoirs, there had been a dramatic upsurge in assaults against cartmen, who served as the major means of transporting goods to and from San Antonio. The 1850 census indicates that about 58 percent of the Tejano population was employed in this profession, and unable to undersell these competitors, white teamsters who wanted access to this market used violence, attacking in large gangs. During the height of the assaults, many

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cartmen abandoned their routes, and many Tejanos abandoned San Antonio. Pressure from the Mexican government and from local merchants, due to the decline in business and the dramatic increase in the cost of goods as a result of the loss of cheap transport, led the governor to call out the state militia to protect the cartmen. The “Cart War,” as newspapers termed it, highlighted Tejanos’ importance to the state economy, undermining their representation as somehow exterior or extraneous—as merely a residual, migratory, or alien presence.22 The text responds to the above circumstances by asserting the necessary inclusion of Tejanos as part of what can be described as the “collective will” upon which the legitimacy of the government is based.23 By inserting a third term—Texan—the Memoirs intervenes in the continued institutional production of “Mexican”/“American” difference, challenging the imperial logic by which Tejanos are coded as aliens and therefore denied citizenship and land tenure. Presenting Tejanos as Texans insists on their status as part of the people that the government of Texas exists to serve. Seguín, however, notably does not refer to himself as “American.” The Texas constitution of 1845 extended U.S. citizenship to all residents who were defined as citizens under the laws of the Republic of Texas, so the text’s narration of Tejanos as national subjects within post-independence Texas functions as an implicit claim to the legal rights and privileges to which Americans are entitled. Why, then, would Seguín not make this argument more explicitly? Why does he seem to demur from presenting himself as an American? Moreover, why does the narrative end with the second campaign by the Mexican army against San Antonio in 1842? Given that the text is published in 1858 and seeks to clear Seguín’s name so that he can continue to participate in political life in San Antonio, why does it bracket discussion of all events after 1842, including the annexation of Texas, the Mexican-American War, and Seguín’s post-war return to public affairs in the city? In the narrative, “Americans” refers to U.S. citizens who emigrated just prior to or in the wake of Texas’s Declaration of Independence, also denoting those Anglos most involved in assaults on Seguín and other Tejanos. In describing the response to his military service, he notes that the “tokens of esteem and evidences of trust and confidence repeatedly bestowed upon me by the supreme magistrate . . . and other dignitaries of the Republic, could not fail to arouse a great deal of invidious and malignant feeling against me,” most directly attributing such sentiments to “several officers of the companies recently arrived at San Antonio from the United States” who disseminate their opinions “among the straggling American adventurers” present in the area (89). He later characterizes his pursuit by those who believed the rumors about his alignment with the Mexican army as “the persecutions of some ungrateful Americans who strove to murder

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me” (97). Similarly, Seguín describes his expulsion from San Antonio as the result of the machinations of “recently arrived” intruders: “A victim to the wickedness of a few men whose false pretenses were favored because of their origin and recent domination over the country, a foreigner in my native land, could I stoically be expected to endure their outrages and insults? . . . I separated from my country, parents, family, relatives and friends and, what was more, from the institutions on behalf of which I had drawn my sword with an earnest wish to see Texas free and happy” (73–74). Those responsible for his forcible ejection from his home are depicted as aliens, implicitly contrasting their unnamed “origin” and “recent” arrival with his rootedness. Seguín is made a “foreigner” not as a result of an innate “Mexican”-ness that leads him to chafe under “American” rule, as suggested by post-annexation Texas legal discourse, but due to an intentional process of alien(-)ation in which interlopers from elsewhere rely on force to impose their will on the territory (“domination”) and seek to break his connection to his “native land” rather than to build alliances in the service of a shared vision of a “free and happy” independent Texas. “American”-ization appears here less as the ultimate horizon of Texas’s destiny, as in many contemporaneous accounts, than as a threat to Texan (as opposed to specifically Tejano) identity and social order. Given that the Know-Nothings referred to themselves as “the American Party,” the text’s use of “American” further can be read as both weaving its history more tightly into the local political struggle in San Antonio at the time of the narrative’s composition and mobilizing Democratic party sentiment against the policy of refusing to recognize Tejano land claims by implicitly presenting those who pushed Tejanos off their lands as proto-Know-Nothings.24 Additionally, remaining silent about events after 1842 allows for Seguín to present his account as simply a clarification of historical fact, rather than a call for political transformation, and to avoid endorsing or repudiating U.S. expansion per se. Implicitly challenging the seeming inevitability of annexation, the text makes the Republic of Texas a historiographic prism through which to refract the question of the political and legal status of the ostensibly “Mexican born” population. The narrative reconstellates space and subjectivity, offering an alternative account of place and displacement by highlighting Tejano settledness and Anglo coercion. Yet its account of Tejano land loss also rests on a dichotomy that effaces the text’s elite orientation. Within the text’s account of Anglo violence, “native families” appear as equally imperiled, all in danger of suffering bodily damage and the loss of property. That impression, though, brackets both vast discrepancies in Tejano landholding as well as ongoing alliances between Anglo and Tejano elites. The Seguín family in particular had longstanding relationships with prominent Anglo families,

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especially the Austins, and were deeply enmeshed in what David Montejano terms the “peace structure” in post-independence Texas: “the ability to govern in the immediate postwar period [he is speaking here of U.S. annexation, but he also applies this formulation to post-1836 Texas] was secured through an accommodation between the victorious Anglos and the defeated Mexican elite, with the latter in command of the Mexican communities” (34, 29). Seguín’s polarized portrayal of landed “natives” seeking to defend themselves from landless/fugitive “Americans,” also referred to as “that class of people” and “a rabble” (97, 90), offers a vision of Tejano political-economy out of step with the lives of the approximately 60 percent of the Spanish-speaking workforce in San Antonio who by the late 1850s made their living carting goods around the state and into northern Mexico. Seguín also does not discuss the ejidos, or communally held plots of land in towns, which would have been of greater concern to less wealthy Tejanos than the larger estates he addresses.25 Additionally, while Anglos overwhelmingly dominated land speculation in Texas, purchasing almost 1.4 million acres from persons of Mexican descent, wealthy Tejanos from only fourteen families bought over 278,000 acres as well, a business venture in which Seguín took part.26 The narrative shows the flight from Texas to have nothing to do with Tejanos’ supposed lack of devotion or loyalty to Texas but actually with the ways they are embedded in it. For example, Seguín decries the “straggling American adventurers who were already beginning to work their dark intrigues against the native families, whose only crime was that they owned large tracts of land and desirable property” (89).27 Here the text provides a distinct content for the animosity directed at Seguín and other Tejanos, contesting the official narration of them as traitors and/or fools whose engrained propensities toward migration make them always-already foreign and whose movement therefore can be understood as a “voluntary” expression of these tendencies. Clearly distinguishing Americans from natives, the Memoirs highlights the former’s desire for the latter’s land, juxtaposing the one’s “dark intrigues” against the other’s peaceful residency: “The number of land suits which still encumbers the docket of Bexar County would indicate the nature of these plans [the “villainous” intentions of those who ousted Seguín], and anyone who has listened to the evidence elicited in cases such as this will readily discover the base means adopted to deprive rightful owners of their property” (101). In asserting that the official documents of the court testify to an organized campaign of dispossession, the narrative challenges the validity of the interpretive frame through which such cases were adjudicated, as in State v. Casinova. In contrast to the court’s deployment of a metaphorics of “Mexican”ness, which itself rests on the broader legal production of a racialized

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and placeless “alien” subjectivity, Seguín focuses on the continuity of “native” occupancy and its rupture by self-interested strangers to the region. His narrative insists on Tejanos’ connection to the land, commitment to independence, and their attendant status as part of the people of Texas, thereby seeking to revise the Texas bureaucratic imaginary in ways that accommodate prior geographies of occupancy.

(DIS)LOCATING COMANCHES

Extensive Comanche presence and power in the region persisted well into the 1860s, but looking at Seguín’s Memoirs, one would think that Indians were a peripheral concern. They are portrayed as a minor distraction from the real politico-military work of securing Texas independence. However, Seguín himself met with Comanche leaders in and out of San Antonio in 1834, was instructed in 1836 to maintain good relations with the Comanches who were considered allies of Texas at that point, and helped lead a campaign against them in 1839. Moreover, as a resident and then representative of San Antonio in the Texas Senate (serving on the Military Affairs Committee no less), he would have been well aware of a visit to that city by over one hundred Comanches in 1838 and subsequent peace negotiations as well as the infamous “Council House Fight” of 1840 in which thirtyfive of the sixty-two Comanches who had come to the city to negotiate a treaty and exchange captives were murdered. This slaughter led to a series of Comanche attacks on and near San Antonio over the next year, which prompted a full-scale military campaign against them. The text, therefore, leaves out a series of major events which would have been of direct concern to Seguín in the very military and political roles that he emphasizes. Furthermore, as noted earlier, rumors of actual and impending Comanche attacks were circulating widely throughout 1857 and 1858 while the text was being composed. Noted only twice in passing, Indians in the text appear as a generic annoyance, an easily contained problem requiring minimal government attention and action (80, 91).28 The almost entire erasure of the ongoing influence of indigenous peoples on state policy and action in the periods during and about which Seguín is writing is more than mere editing, instead suggesting a reconstellation of the imperial rhetoric of civilization as part of an argument for citizenship. The text refashions the prior discourse of settlement as a claim to nativity in ways that require erasing the ongoing history of struggle and negotiation with native peoples. In addition to allowing the Memoirs to bracket pre-war struggles over land tenure, generating a sense of calm and sustained

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occupancy against which it can juxtapose post-war dispossession by Anglos, avoiding mention of the Comanches helps create a particular discursive ecology in which to contest Anglo modes of racialization and dispossession. More specifically, the text can be understood as responding to the rhetorical merger of “barbarians” and “bandits” in Anglo public discourse in the late1850s. As noted earlier, this conjunction of “Mexicans” and “Indians” was particularly pronounced in newspaper and administrative responses to the uprising led by Juan Cortina in 1859, but evidence of similar formulations can be seen over the previous two decades in reports by Indian agents, statements by Texas officials, citizens’ petitions, and travellers’ accounts.29 In light of the proliferation of such depictions of “Mexican” roving, the portrait of Tejano landholding in the Memoirs and its virtual erasure of native peoples can be read as part of an emergent strategy to distinguish between these populations within Anglo imagination and policy. An analysis of the Comanche socio-spatiality effaced in Seguín’s account helps illustrate how topoi of savage nomadism shape post-1836 discourses of placemaking and political identification among Anglos and Tejanos. Examining the ways the Republic of Texas and the United States employ versions of the strategies developed under prior Hispanic regimes to render Comanche self-representation subaltern can foreground the ideological and institutional stakes of the Memoirs’ metaphorics of “native”-ness, showing how this rhetoric of stability is embedded in persistent imperial formations as well as how the rhetorical terms of Anglo-Tejano conflict are triangulated through a shared disavowal of Comanche sovereignty and self-determination. Within pre-1836 writing, Tejano space appears less, in Genaro Padilla’s words, as a “homeland” than as a war-zone (72). An appeal sent in December 1832 to the legislature of Coahuila y Texas from San Antonio illustrates the ways Tejano communities envisioned themselves as continuously embattled and as barely maintaining islands of order against the violent intrusion of savage hordes. Portraying Euramerican communities in Texas as in imminent danger of destruction, the petition repeatedly cites native peoples as the primary cause of local crises, relying on the image of the bloodthirsty Indian to compel the legislature to take action to redress this perilous situation. In its first paragraph it summarizes the history of Texas as one of unending conflict: “Many early settlers and their descendants have been sacrificed to the barbarians”; “every last one of us is probably threatened with total extermination by the new Comanche uprising.” Note that although the “barbarians” have inhabited the territory at least as long as the Tejanos (the reference to “early settlers”), they are not described as having any claims to the land or any specific relation to it, existing only as a “threat” to civilized placemaking. Residents of San Antonio and other towns appear as the innocent objects of a senseless campaign by a brute force, the sole

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purpose of which seems to be to obliterate settlement itself. In arguing for the importance of policies that work to increase Euramerican presence in the region, the petition further asserts, “Immigration is, unquestionably, the most efficient, quick, and economical means we can employ to destroy the Indians and to populate lands they now occupy—directing the immigrants to the northern interior whenever possible,” adding as the first of its demands to the legislature that “a civic militia of the frontier be organized in sufficient number and form to punish conveniently and carry out the extermination of the barbarians.”30 The petition depicts native peoples as vicious invaders without any sustained connection to the land whose raison d’être is the eradication of civilized communities. Such a discourse of depredations was not unique to Texas, instead serving as an integral part of Hispanophone imperialism throughout the northern “frontier” of New Spain.31 The de facto dismissal of native geographies was coupled with ongoing periodic meetings with native leaders, including the routine offering of extensive presents by Hispanic officials. This combination of diplomatic recognition and evacuation of indigenous territoriality can be described as the production of barbarian subjectivity—acknowledging some version of collective political agency in order to engage in negotiations so as to generate goodwill and secure a more favorable position within regional economies while simultaneously refusing to recognize native boundaries or modes of land tenure. The Comanches are probably the most well-known of the nonsedentary populations who occupied the area, and by the time of the publication of the Memoirs, they had been the dominant force in the region for well over a century.32 Separating from other Shoshonean bands and descending from the Rocky Mountains onto the Plains over the course of the sixteenth century, the Comanches first appear in Euramerican records as part of a report from New Mexico in 1706 and had become part of an emerging nexus of exchange between Puebloans, Spaniards, and other nonsedentary populations such as the Utes. As the Comanches moved east, they developed commercial and kinship relations with Caddos and Wichitas, pushing south the Apachean groups who had gained control of the region in the seventeenth century. They started receiving French traders in the 1720s, who, unlike the Spanish, were willing to exchange firearms. As Thomas Hall observes, “Guns spread from northeast to southwest, while horses spread from southwest to northeast” (94). While not engaging in agriculture, the Comanches received foodstuffs from peoples in New Mexico and east Texas, in exchange for horses and buffalo products. The size of the emergent Comanchería (as Comanche controlled territory was known under Spain) led to an internal diversification in which bands to the west, who were at the center of the trade nexus that developed on the Upper Arkansas

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River in the 1720s, would exchange a range of goods with Comanches to the southeast for the animals they acquired through hunting and raiding—this intra-Comanche circuit operating for a little over a century. The first documented appearance of Comanches in San Antonio comes in 1746, and as they pushed Apaches south, raiding in southwestern Texas increased. Due to the clear political and economic influence of the Comanches throughout the southern Plains, Spanish authorities in New Mexico and Texas negotiated an agreement with the Comanche bands in 1785–86, although the peace in New Mexico actually seemed to incite raiding in Texas by providing a stable market for the horses taken from there. From 1790 to 1815, Comanches became a fixture in the life and economy of San Antonio, visiting over 4,000 times according to one estimate, until the alliance fell apart due to the scarcity of funds and goods on the frontier during the Mexican Revolution.33 While goods from Missouri had been filtering onto the southern Plains for decades, largely through peoples like the Pawnees and the northern Comanches who served as middlemen, the establishment of the Santa Fé Trail in 1821 extensively increased U.S. presence in the political-economy of the western end of the Comanchería,34 progressively straining native relations with a recently independent Mexico which had neither the resources to satisfy Comanche and others’ demands for goods nor the available troops to prevent what was considered to be U.S. encroachment on Mexican jurisdiction. While relations with Mexican citizens in southern and western Texas continued to deteriorate, greater pressure was being exerted on Comanche resource domains by native peoples removed to west of the Mississippi, increased Anglo presence, and hunting by ciboleros (Spanish-speaking populations from New Mexico deeply immersed in the buffalo economy), leading to the diminished availability of buffalo and the attendant expansion of the role of horses and captives as objects of trade within Comanche networks. Loosely described, this is the state of affairs in the period just prior to the Texas Revolution. Rather than implementing the “domestic dependent nation” framework of U.S. law, Anglo governance in Texas in the wake of independence recycled the forms of barbarian subjectivity already at play in Euramerican policy in the region, recirculating topoi of mobility that presented the Comanches as placeless. “Wandering,” “roving,” and associated figures of nomadism defined nonsedentary peoples by their supposed failure to create a stable or sustained connection to any determinate location, such as in the 1838 characterization of the Comanches by the Texas Commissioner of Indian Affairs as “a wandering people, having no settled residence, and depend[ant] entirely upon plundering other nations, and the chase, for their subsistence.” Similarly, in 1840, the Texas Secretary of War declared that “this government assumes the right, with regard to all Indian tribes residing

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within the limits of the Republic, to dictate the conditions of such residence,” adding, “our citizens have a right to occupy any vacant lands of the Government, and . . . must not be interfered with by the Comanche.”35 In the wake of U.S. statehood this discourse of Comanche rootlessness helped mediate clashes between the federal and state government. Given Texas’s persistent refusal to “acknowledge that the Indians have any right of soil” and its retention of control over public lands as part of the annexation agreement, both federal and state officials repeatedly claimed that they lacked the authority to address crucial questions of Indian policy, such as who had the responsibility to restrict whites from settling on lands used by native peoples, who could deploy the military to contain native movement and prevent native raiding, and whether the federal Indian Trade and Intercourse Act was applicable to native peoples in Texas. In a letter in October 1846 to President Polk, Governor A. C. Horton states, “Under existing circumstances, the Executive of this State has no power or authority to avert the evils herein enumerated. The management and control of the Indians belong exclusively to the General Government,” and conversely, in an 1847 letter to Agent Neighbors, Secretary of War William Medill claims in regard to federal licensing for trade with native peoples “it is difficult, if not impossible, to determine at present how far the department has the power and jurisdiction, with respect to the Indian country in Texas, to carry that stipulation [of the recent treaty] into effect.” The figure of native placelessness allowed for the avoidance of direct federalist conflict by deferring the question of the specific legal dimensions of Comanche occupancy, and thus the precise area over which the federal government could exert jurisdiction, while still allowing for treaty-making and theoretically recognizing federal control over Indian affairs.36 While repudiating indigenous claims to specific lands, the Texas government needed to address the fact that vast sections of its territory actually were under the control of native populations, and treaties became the administrative vehicle for doing so. Over numerous decades, Comanches and other nonsedentary groups had grown accustomed to entering into agreements with Euramerican representatives through which they could secure easier trade relations and receive gifts/tribute (known as “presents”), and continued interest in such negotiations can be seen in the appearance in San Antonio of Comanche bands of various sizes desiring to initiate the process of treaty-making in 1836, 1838, and 1840. Texas tribes, however, certainly were not accorded the kind of “nation” status that was integral to the treaty-system elsewhere (such as in the southeast and Great Lakes regions as discussed in chapters 1 and 2), in the sense that Indian policy in Texas did not acknowledge indigenous communities’ rightful, if ultimately fleeting or fungible, control over specific, demarcated pieces of land. Instead,

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such policy presented itself as restraining Comanches’ nomadic tendencies. The treaty of 1838, for example, insists that “property of the citizens of Texas . . . in the hands of any of the Comanche Tribe” be restored to its owners while also outlawing Comanche raiding for horses and cattle under penalty of “punish[ment] . . . by the Whites,” and in return, the government promises to “punish any citizen of the Republic according to law, who may in any way infringe on the rights of the said Comanche or injure them in any way whatever.”37 The Comanches theoretically have “rights,” but they are neither enumerated nor do they challenge the grafting of Texan geographies of public power and private possession onto native social processes, implicitly situating legally cognizable “injury” within the capitalist frame of Anglo-American land tenure (“property”). From the perspective of Texas Indian policy, Comanche consent to treaties and other agreements functions as self-negation, implicitly legitimizing the narration of them as unsettled and invasive. Yet when examined more closely the records of Anglo-Comanche negotiation suggest the limits of such barbarian subjectivity, pointing toward ways Comanches qualified their participation in imperial administration and thereby tempered its geopolitical imaginary. Such tension routinely arises around the question of the degree to which particular signatories to treaties and other agreements could be taken as representative of broader Comanche commitment to the proposed terms. In a typical report written in 1848, Indian agent Robert S. Neighbors asserts the need for the United States to insist on more rigorous forms of Comanche corporate responsibility (“the whole band [should] be held strictly accountable for . . . depredations”) while offering a fairly detailed and instructive anatomy of the “divisions in the tribe” that mitigate such unity. He notes that the Comanche leaders with whom he speaks, including a powerful Penateka chief named Mopechucope, claim that they “exercise no control” over the particular bands known to be responsible for “depredations lately committed” and that “the late occurrences” are attributable to “those bands who did not consider themselves in treaty with the United States.” Moreover, according to Neighbors, the Penateka chiefs’ claim that they “have used every exertion to prevent further difficulty, and to return the stolen property, and have carried their measures so far that they found it would lead to war among themselves if persisted in.”38 While expressing a fervent desire for the expression of a singular Comanche voice/will, Neighbors’s report indicates the failure of such a homogenizing image to reflect Comanche social organization, instead highlighting the limits of political surrogacy and the extreme hostility generated by attempts at intra-tribal regulation. The issue is less whether or not Comanches consented to treaties than the meaning of treaty-making—not just what lands or parties are encompassed but the kind of relation it creates between the signatories and the

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vision of Comanche land tenure it proposes/enacts.39 The incongruity between the image of unified collective subjectivity constructed within Anglo administrative discourse and Comanche insistence on the partiality and contingency of their participation in negotiations and agreements indexes a broader crisis of representation, suggesting not just a disagreement over the scope of treaty commitments but tension between competing understandings of the nature of Comanche geopolitics.40 In refusing responsibility for actions by other bands, Comanche chiefs not only resist the kinds of representativity projected onto them—the imperial insistence that they be understood as speaking for an entire band, division, or tribe— but raise questions about the vision of Comanche subjectivity and sociospatiality that such institutionalized speech reiterates and reinforces. When read against the grain for the presence of subaltern politics, the archive of treaty-making in Texas reveals the interested erasure of Comanche placemaking at work in the simulation of collective native consent to Euramerican ideologies and geographies of settlement. In a set of resolutions sent to Congress in 1850, Governor P. H. Bell offers the following portrait of Indian relations: “The Indian tribes of this country, generally, are wild, wandering, and barbarous in their dispositions and habits, and have become very bold and adventurous, and difficult to restrain, from their unchecked successes and their predatory incursions into the Mexican Territory and their daring inroads into our own settlements; and it has become manifest from ample experience that the amicable relations with them, as established by treaties, are at all times liable to be broken, both from their own unreasonable whims, and the designs of base and wicked men.” In such accounts, putatively ingrained native character traits (“propensities,” “dispositions and habits”) are presented as responsible for the failure to fulfill the promise of the treaty-system, casting movement into ostensibly prohibited areas as “wandering” guided by “whims” and “wicked men.” However, by what logic is Comanche presence in such places understood as “incursion”? Acquisition of horses and captives from Texas and northern Mexico was a key part of Comanche subsistence and occupancy, both circulating as valuable goods in regional formations that had existed since the mid-eighteenth century. Comanche territoriality and trade consisted of fairly regular patterns of movement within a discernible, if malleable, geopolitical matrix defined by the following: the hunt for buffalo and horses; the acquisition of enough labor to produce buffalo-based exchange goods and to manage horse herds; and the maintenance of diplomatic and commercial relations with natives and non-natives.41 In Space, Place, and Gender, Doreen Massey argues that “the particularity of any place is . . . constructed not by placing boundaries around it and

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defining its identity through counterposition to the other which lies beyond, but precisely (in part) through the specificity of the mix of links and interconnections to that ‘beyond’ ” (5): “it is the vast complexity of the interlocking and articulating nets of social relations which is social space. Given that conception of space, a ‘place’ is formed out of the particular set of social relations which interact at a particular location” (168). While offered as a set of general theoretical propositions, the above description is useful as a way of conceptualizing Comanche spatiality in that it emphasizes a nexus of social functions and connections as against precise borders. From this perspective, practices described by Euramericans as theft, kidnapping, and invasion can be conceptualized as a form of placemaking—a “mix of links and interconnections” between overlapping spheres of hunting, raiding, and trading in which mobility, alliance, and exchange are organized around access to natural resources (horses and captives falling into something like this category) and participation in a range of shifting social networks.42 The discourse of native rootlessness also erased the active participation of Anglos in this market as purchasers of horses and buffalo products and as raiders themselves.43 Portraying Comanche land tenure as theft and/or invasion depends on the rhetorical pose of broken treaties, evacuating raiding and other “wandering . . . habits” of geopolitical content by depicting them as a series of self-interested infractions resulting from base impulses rather than as evidence of a different conception of place. All of the agreements negotiated with the Comanches in Texas include provisions outlawing the “stealing of horses” and calling for the return of “prisoners” taken during raids, so the charge of “lawless”-ness and “marauding” (which are used fairly interchangeably) appear simply to denote the aggregation of treaty violations.44 Treaties and the kinds of subject positions they produce serve as a means of coding Comanche occupancy as itinerancy by simulating collective native assent to remain within a bureaucratically delineated area. If a number of the same people are involved in both negotiations and depredations, though, how can the two activities be sundered categorically?45 Asserting a qualitative distinction between them requires that Comanche leaders be portrayed as representative political figures in one instance and as “bad men” (a phrase routinely used to characterize those who took part in raiding) in the other. The representation of native spatiality as “barbarous” and “predatory” can be understood as dependent upon a two-part ideological maneuver: discursively soldering the good faith of treaty-making to a particular mapping of legitimate Comanche territoriality (supposedly assented to and contained within the treaties themselves despite ample evidence of disagreement during and after negotiations about the placement and nature of such boundaries); and, reciprocally, discounting Comanche

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collective activity that occurs outside official negotiations and agreements as evidence of geopolitical claims, also denying that such activity can serve as the lens through which to interpret treaty provisions. Like the U.S. rhetoric of peacekeeping in the Great Lakes region discussed in chapter 2, the treaty-system is positioned as a neutral framework through which to interpret, resolve, and prevent confrontation, naturalizing Anglo ideologies of property and jurisdiction by presenting native mobility as a violation of treaty terms. The treaty of 1844 indicates that “the Government of Texas shall permit no bad men to cross the line into the hunting grounds of the Indians,” further noting that “if the trading houses should be established below the line, to be run and marked, the Indians shall be permitted to cross the line for the purpose of coming to trade.” The “line” alludes to the Indian trade act adopted in January 1843, which gives the president of Texas the power to regulate traders’ access to native peoples as well as authorizing the construction of a string of trading houses which theoretically will serve as both the limit of native movement south and east and of Euramerican settlement north and west. The construction of a quasi border between the settlements and native peoples suggests something like a diplomatic acknowledgment of indigenous space, but native peoples are not recognized as having sovereignty on the supposed Indian side, itself demarcated by trading houses which can be moved at will. Moreover, native-occupied land consistently is described as “hunting grounds,” which as discussed in chapter 2 was understood as expendable territory readily surrendered in favor of far less expansive farmlands. The pattern is repeated in the 1846 treaty, which promises that the U.S. will “locate upon [the “Indians”]’ borders trading houses, agencies, and posts” while leaving unstated where such “borders” are and therefore leaving indeterminate both the contours of Comanche space and the question of who has the power to delimit it.46 The rhetoric of the “line,” though, is not merely an artifact of imperial efforts to restrain Comanche mobility. As early as 1838, the commissioner sent to negotiate a treaty by the Republic of Texas reports, “The Comanche hav[e] made a positive declaration as regards their territorial limits,” an area “nearly equal to one fourth of the domain of Texas,” and in 1844, Mopechucope asserts, “all I want now is a line run between our countries . . . ; all above that line is Comanche Country and ever has been I my self never have left it nor never intends to [sic.].” These moments illustrate a Comanche sense of the boundedness of their space—the existence of an area which cartographically can be marked and from which settlers should be barred. Yet in the wake of the treaty of 1844, the Superintendent of Indian Affairs claimed that the shape of the treaty resulted from the fact that the Comanches “refused their assent to a permanent divisory [sic] line”

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indicating that they were “satisfied that the line of Trading Houses should be considered as the line,” a claim repeated by then-president Sam Houston and explained by a later governor in the following terms: “the Indians objected to being limited to any particular country.” This official narrative suggests that the nomadic tendencies of the Comanches militated against the creation of a firm boundary, presenting the absence of “a permanent line” as an attempt to comply with Comanche wishes. The minutes of the treaty negotiation, though, indicate that the above account is patently false, revealing instead an impasse between Pochanaquarhip (otherwise known as Buffalo Hump—a chief of the Penateka bands) and Houston over where the line should be drawn. Pochanaquarhip insists on a much lower trajectory than that indicated by Houston, stating, “I want the privilege to follow the buffalo on down. That country is full of bear, deer, wild horses and buffalo for my people to live on.” Presenting wandering as an entrenched Comanche (racial) trait and therefore a sufficient explanation for the terms of the treaty, Texas officials employ the rhetoric of rootlessness to recode the absence of a clear border between Texas and the Comanches due to unresolved political conflict as simply a manifestation of the latter’s roving tendencies, translating a tribally specific assertion of territoriality into a vague and movable “line” imagined as marking the current site of the “frontier.”47 Moreover, Comanche deployment of the figure of the borderline in the context of Euramerican ideologies of ownership simultaneously reconfigures what such occupancy means and the kind of geopolitical identity it expresses. In a conversation several years later reported by Agent Neighbors, Pochanaquarhip asserts, “For a long time a great many people have been passing through my country; they kill all the game, and burn the country, and trouble me very much. The commissioners of our great father promised to keep these people out of our country. I believe our white brothers do not wish to run a line between us, because they wish to settle in this country. I object to any more settlements. I want this country to hunt in.”48 As in the 1844 negotiations, the concern here is less with trespass into “our country” in the sense of an intrusion that challenges exclusive Comanche possession of their lands than with the ability of Comanche bands to obtain various animals necessary for their individual livelihood and collective well-being, given the destruction of vital resources that attends white expansion. When employed by Comanche leaders, the topos of the “line” serves as a tool in protecting native resource bases from white encroachment, destruction, and occupation. Yet this border is imagined less as the limit of Comanche activity than a protected sphere within a larger field of hunting and trade. In Pochanarquarhip’s negotiation with Sam Houston in 1844, he explains why he does not want trading houses built farther north: “I want the Trading House

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to remain where it is; and I want my friends, these other Indians, to settle on the line and raise corn and I can often come down among them. I am like the bird flying through the air. I can travel and am always traveling and can easily come down here.” Similarly, as quoted by Agent Neighbors in an 1848 report, Mopechucope questions the reasons given for the stationing of armed forces on the Comanche-Texas border: You told me that the troops were placed there for our protection, as well as the whites; that I know is not so. You told me, also, that if I wished to go below the line, if I would go to the captains of the stations, they would give me permission to go down below to hunt . . . I applied to Captain McCullough . . . He said he would not permit me, under any circumstances, to go down . . . I told him that I was an old man, and had hunted in these prairies before he was born, and before there was any white man for a long way below. I am now going down, and will try again to go to my old hunting grounds. If I am again refused a permission, I have done trying.

In these moments, “traveling” beyond the supposed limits of their territory appears as routine, presenting collective mobility as a regular and unremarkable element of Comanche life. Moreover, Anglo pretensions to authority over the territory are rejected. The militarization of the “line” is characterized as an act of aggression in its attempt to reorganize traditional occupancy and economies, and instead, Mopechucope asserts longstanding presence throughout central and southern Texas as ample justification for flouting Anglo attempts at containment.49 The figure of the reservation extends this effort to constrict, control, and centralize Comanche political-economies by limiting legitimate residency to a relatively small parcel of land and inventing forms of Comanche identity that suit such legal geography. As part of the project of further circumscribing Comanche land use as well as resolving some of the confusion of powers between federal and state jurisdiction in Indian affairs noted earlier, the state legislature agreed in 1854 to cede twelve leagues of land to the federal government “for the use and benefit of the several tribes of Indians residing within the limits of Texas,” control of which would revert to the state “whenever the land or any district thereof . . . shall cease to be used for Indian purposes.” Out of this grant, two reservations were created—one on the Brazos largely inhabited by Caddos and Wichitan peoples and one further west on the Clear Fork primarily for the Comanches. Receiving its first settlers in June 1855, the Clear Fork reserve was envisioned as a gift and depicted as a means of domesticating the Comanches: “where they can be located and encouraged in the cultivation of the soil and the arts of civilized life, their roving and migratory habits broken up, and the laws regulating

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trade and intercourse with the Indians extended over them.” More than providing a practical mechanism for training/containing a particular population, the reservation rhetorically was invoked as a symbol of stable settlement against which continuing forms of Comanche mobility could be made to signify as disruptive and dangerous rootlessness, equating Comanche inhabitance in Texas with residency at Clear Fork and attributing responsibility for “marauding” to populations cast as alien to Texas.50 This process of externalization requires the rhetorical production of a clear difference between “southern” and “northern” divisions, presenting the latter as beyond the borders of Texas and projecting onto them the supposed tendencies toward “wild”-ness and “wandering” seen as underlying “depredations.” In the report offering recommendations as to where to locate the proposed reserves, Captain R.B. Marcy describes the “southern Comanches” as “remain[ing] permanently within the limits of the State,” but by contrast, the “northern branch of the nation where nearly all the expeditions that penetrate Mexico are organized” regularly give vent to “that wild spirit of adventure which characterizes their untamed natures.” Given that the report itself notes that virtually all of the bands routinely are present within Texas boundaries and interact with each other, why are some designated as periodically being in but not substantively of Texas?51 Differentiating “northern” from “southern” bands serves a similar ideological function to the distinction between representative leaders and “bad” men, always-already classifying as “southern” those bands that seem amenable to settlement on the reserve and thus producing an image of unified agreement and stability against which to demonize continued patterns of mobility. In 1855, Agent Neighbors notes that the “depredations committed on our frontier during the past spring have been confined entirely to Comanches,” adding that “northern Comanches” “are the parties who have stolen most of the horses taken from our frontier citizens” over the previous two years. Yet he also observes that Sanaco, a Penateka chief consistently characterized as “southern,” “went off last winter” due to the belligerent actions of U.S. troops in the vicinity of the reservation and that “he has promised to come in this fall.”52 This is the same leader who when interviewed two years earlier by the team sent to choose and survey land offered the following description of the prospective reservation: “You come into our country and select a small patch of ground, around which you run a line, and tell us the President will make us a present of this to live upon, when every body knows that the whole of this entire country, from the Red River to the Colorado, is now, and always has been, ours from time immemorial. I suppose, however, if the President tells us to confine ourselves to these narrow limits, we shall be forced to do so, whether we desire it or not.”53 In

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contrast to the docility and desire for settlement attributed to “southern” bands, this statement gestures toward a rejection of the idea that they should receive their own massively reduced land base as a gift, further suggesting that the only intermittent presence of Sanaco’s band at the Clear Fork reserve over the next several years does not so much indicate a deferral of reservation residency as a refusal of it.54 One also can see in agents’ reports the increasing rhetorical torsions necessary to portray the “northern” band(s) as alien to Texas. In the following year’s report, Neighbors observes, “In fact, it would be impossible to protect the Comanches against the outside influences of the more powerful bands of these people north without a military force, as they use all their influence to induce the young men to leave the reserve and join them in their forays to Mexico and our border settlements.” The term “outside” creates a metonymic chain that invalidates all Comanche presence offreservation by presenting it as an assault from the “north” while reciprocally reinforcing the narration of habitation on the reservation as the result of a collective decision by the Comanches of Texas to remain rooted.55 While offering this story of “northern” enticement and “influence,” however, Neighbors himself notes that the “bands” he decries as marauders “are nearly related [to] and have intermarried with the Texas Indians.”56 Such reference to kinship networks that extend well beyond the reservation and breach the putative “northern”/ “southern” divide suggests a fairly severe disjunction between U.S. ethno-cartographies and Comanche socio-spatial processes and self-understandings. While clearly preceding Anglo presence and power in the region, Comanche geographies of hunting, raiding, trade, and networking are made to appear within Anglo administrative discourses as the wayward actions of those who cannot contain their propensities toward placelessness, thereby posing a dire threat to the civilized regime of property. This narration requires positing the possibility of stability, of the containment of Comanche activity within a rigidly bordered area achieved through quasidiplomatic agreements, against which continued mobility can be cast as duplicity, lawlessness, and incursion. Such pacts and the topoi mobilized around them (including the boundary line, charges of marauding, and the reservation), though, retain the image of the Comanches as inherently deterritorialized (“wandering”), portraying the space in which they legitimately can reside as a government gift. Yet as official accounts of negotiations illustrate, there were competing versions of Comanche identity, with native leaders persistently qualifying their representativity, challenging and reconfiguring Anglo terminologies and topographies, and insisting on the coherence and duration of Comanche occupancy. These traces demonstrate the existence of a subaltern political-economy the dimensions and

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dynamics of which are recoded as theft and invasion within Texas Indian policy. Such policy invokes the racialized subjectivity of the barbarian—an ingrained disposition toward roving and deception—to recast the struggle between competing geopolitical frameworks as the inability of certain Indians to engage in sustained processes of political relation and placemaking. Analysis of these dynamics within Texas Indian policy, offering a genealogy of figures of savage migrancy, provides an alternative understanding of the specific ideological and institutional dimensions of anti-Tejano racism. When viewed in light of prior Hispanic regimes’ ways of representing native peoples and disavowing their land claims, the interpellation of Tejanos within Texas administrative discourse can be understood as a version of this earlier framework. “Mexican”-ness as constituted in post-1836 governance is rather similar to the barbarian subjectivity constructed for the Comanches and other native peoples under Hispanic and Anglo regimes in Texas, emphasizing supposedly ingrained propensities toward territorial restlessness, lawlessness, lying, and rampant thievery. The metaphorics of nomadism serve as a means of undermining Tejano land claims en toto while casting this population as innately deceptive/traitorous and, therefore, as ineligible for membership in the nation. The yoking together of “Mexicans” and “Indians” in Texas public and political discourse mobilizes an existing opposition between civilized rootedness and barbarous roving to undo prior Euramerican settlement and to stabilize and render self-evident the authority and coherence of a new regime, drawing on prior Hispanic modes of geopolitical legitimation while extending such racializing spatial narratives to a new population—Tejanos. In response, Seguín’s Memoirs casts Tejanos as civilized settlers in ways that preserve the supplementary imperial image of marauding hordes. In addition to seeking to avoid implicitly alluding to the pervasive conjunction of Tejanos and nonsedentary peoples in Anglo public discourses, the avoidance of the Comanches in Seguín’s narrative leaves the barbarian position open, and as I will argue in the next section, the text substitutes “straggling American adventurers” for Comanches, relying heavily on the metaphorics of barbarism to make coherent and compelling its critique of Anglo expansion.

AMERICAN BARBARITY

Describing Seguín’s excruciating choice to leave Texas and serve Mexico, the Memoirs notes, “The alternatives were sad, the struggle of feelings violent. At last the father triumphed over the citizen” (74). In emphasizing

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his concern for the welfare of his family as a primary motivation for going into exile, the narrative seems to suggest that personal attachments trumped public obligations. However, if from one angle the affective bonds of domestic life appear to take priority over civic matters, from another the text is longingly invoking an alternative conception of citizenship, a prior formation in which fatherhood and political belonging are fused. As various scholars have shown, notions of honor inextricably bound up with ideologies of patriarchal authority were crucial components of Hispanic formulations of political power and legitimacy from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries, taking on a particularly intense and overdetermined form on the frontier of New Spain. The ability to protect one’s family and community from the assault of roving savages signified one’s fitness for full membership in the polity—a set of associations built out of state requirements and inducements to participate in military service, which persisted even after the formal extension of citizenship to Indians under the Mexican Constitution of 1824. Thus, as part of his double-sided effort to portray post-independence citizenship in ways that include Tejanos while avoiding reference to putatively wandering peoples with whom “Mexicans” had been linked, Seguín invokes a residual vision of political belonging in which those pursuing him are cast as barbarous assailants—threats to family, property, and civilized order itself. In this way, the desire for the consonance of family and country helps frame a broader indictment of American expansionism, transferring the imageries and anxieties linked to Comanche political-economy to emigrant Anglos.57 In Thread of Blood: Colonialism, Revolution, and Gender on Mexico’s Northern Frontier, Ana María Alonso argues that “the state promoted a construction of gender and ethnic honor that predicated masculine reputation, access to land, and membership in a corporate community on valor and performance in warfare against ‘barbarians,’” deploying “a technology of power through which military obligations became defined as part of the duties of citizenship” (7, 40).58 While addressing the history of Chihuahua, her observations also work well in the context of pre-1836 Texas, in which charges of irrational, unceasing, unconstrained assault by the Comanches were routine. In these accounts, unrelenting assaults on Euramerican homes and fields signal an ingrained drive toward rootlessness and viciousness: “They never plant any crops. Their sole occupation is hunting and war. The rest of the time they spend in idleness and crime”; “nothing can be planted on account of the Comanches . . . who frequently harass the city even in time of peace”; “due to the destructive war waged by the implacable enemies, the barbarians,” San Antonio is “threatened with total extermination by the new Comanche uprising.”59 In this rhetorical mode, barbarian subjectivity is shorn of its diplomatic aspects, instead appear ing solely as a

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roving will-to-violence which illustrates a racialized propensity toward unbounded and unmanageable wildness. As Alonso argues, “In official discourse . . . the lack of fixity in space was a rhetorical figure that condensed diverse significations. Placelessness was a privileged sign of the barbarians’ ‘quality’—of their animality and incivility, of their wild potency and indomitableness, of their location outside the social in the unbounded space of nature” (60). Reciprocally, depictions of excessive masculinity signify Comanches’ placelessness—the absence of clear political boundaries or legally cognizable land tenure. Hierarchies of race and gender, then, were interarticulated in ways that cast nonsedentary native peoples as totally lacking virtue and, therefore, as proper targets of military assault/containment. The territorialization of Tejanas as objects of patriarchal authority/protection and as metonymic signifiers of geopolitical order is coextensive with the deterritorialization of the Comanches, their representation as lacking determinate geopolitical claims.60 The contradistinction of proper Tejano manhood from the aggressive hypermasculinity of the Comanches also depends on the representation of Comanche women as beasts of burden rather than as co-participants in kinship-based forms of placemaking. For example, José Francisco Ruíz, the Tejano most knowledgeable about the Comanches, having spent eight years living among them during the 1810s, describes Comanche marriage as a process in which the bride “is purchased from her father or brother,” and he notes that “[m]en are at liberty to abandon a wife, but the wife has no such freedom.” Similarly, in a report to the Mexican government on conditions in Texas, José María Sánchez claims that Comanche women are “slaves to the men,” charging the men with an “excessive laziness” that makes them “very difficult to civilize.”61 Viewed from this perspective, one can see how Seguín’s narrative uses the political idiom of honor to pathologize, and subtly racialize, Anglo masculinity. The text transfers the topoi of barbarism (wandering, marauding, unconstrained assault, absence of proper homemaking, etc.) from the Comanches to the “Americans,” rhetorically invalidating their claims to Tejano land while reinforcing the equation of patriarchal domesticity with citizenship in ways that offer an alternative vision of belonging to that contained in Texas law. In the context of the demographic tidal wave that pushed Tejanos out of power and helped give rise to an Anglo-dominated political system, even in places with historically low numbers of Anglo residents such as San Antonio, Tejano ideologies of governance ceased to have the institutional purchase they once had. Rather than simply disappearing, however, they persist in less official forms, continuing to serve as a touchstone for Tejano self-representation despite their diminished efficacy as an administrative idiom. The norms and rhetorics of honor function in Seguín’s text as a way

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of mediating Tejano participation in a public and political sphere largely controlled by Anglos, less directly challenging the claims of dominant policy than indirectly leveraging them. Refracting the question of citizenship through the prism of honor works to enable Tejano political agency by seeking to alter, in Gramsci’s terms, the ideological “balance of forces” within Texas public discourse.62 Given the peripheral status of Indians in the Memoirs, they do not play the barbarian role within the rhetoric of honor. Instead, barbarism becomes a mobile metaphorics—a cluster of attributes and rhetorical strategies of contradistinction which implicitly evoke recollections and representations of the Comanches, as well as other nonsedentary peoples, while evacuating such associations of their specific historical and geopolitical content. In this way, the text retains the ideological and affective charge of anti-Indian sentiment and the attendant impression of defending social order against the onslaught of chaos while shifting the locus of this discursive structure to Anglos. Yet in light of the text’s stated goal of clearing Seguín’s name and setting straight the historical record, one needs to ask how its depiction of “Americans” as barbarous intruders could possibly appeal to Anglo readers. This narrative structure—of innocent settlers trying to protect themselves from savage invaders—resonates with available Anglo conceptions of civilized masculinity, particularly as expressed through distinction from the Comanches. In his account of Comanche life, having spent a brief period living among them, one-time President of Texas David G. Burnet states, “The women are held in small estimation; they are ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water’ to their indolent and supercilious lords. But this is common to all people, on whom the oracles of truth have never shed their humanizing influence,” and in his report surveying land for the Comanche reservation, Captain R.B. Marcy claims that upon the delivery of a woman from her father to her husband, “She thus becomes as much his property as his horse, and he acquires the most unlimited control over all her actions.” Such descriptions present the treatment of Comanche women as an index of natives’ lack of civilization and tendency toward unrestrained violence, positioning Anglo observers as, in Gayatri Spivak’s formulation, white men saving brown women from brown men. The presentation of women as slaves, as owned labor, reinforces the portrayal of Comanches as rootless by depicting them as lacking a home, itself defined by the supposedly consensual contract of marriage, and as failing to differentiate between spheres of aggression and compassion, employing force omni-directionally in ways that signal a complete lack of respect for others’ homes and property.63 Depicting Comanche women as utterly abject and lacking in will, with virtually no control over their circumstances and environment due to their almost total subjugation to their fathers and husbands, allows the social

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significance of the work these women perform to be discounted. It is cast as antithetical to proper homemaking and thus inherently unable to establish a secure sense of place. This connection between Comanche misogyny and nomadism is even more pronounced in published narratives by Anglos who had been captured by Comanches. Such texts present the absence of domesticity as a direct threat to Anglo women due to the Comanches’ supposed inability to respect the boundaries of settled communities and their need for extensive labor reserves in tending horses and processing buffalo hides and meat.64 As the Preface to Nelson Lee’s account indicates, the narrative’s aim is “to bring to the serious attention of his fellow countrymen the unparalleled sufferings of a large number of white persons, principally females, now in captivity among the various Comanche tribes” (1), later describing Comanche women as “subordinate officers” to their husbands performing “much in the relation of slaves” (106), and Caroline Harris emphasizes that she was forced to “yield to the beastly will of a Savage brute” who “not only claimed [her] as his wife, but treated [her] as his menial servant” (13), correlating her capture and rape with the broader failures of “wife”-hood among this “savage” people. Patterns of raiding and captivity, then, are represented as an extension of the primal violence of the Comanche family rather than an effort to integrate persons and natural resources into well-established kinship and trading networks that crisscross Comanche-claimed territory and which depend on the productive and affective labor of Comanche women (including those who had been captured/adopted and had decided to stay). The Memoirs relies on the resonance of this gendered vision of barbarity within Anglo popular discourse to create an identification between American readers and dispossessed Tejanos by Comanche-izing emigrants. The narrative reverses the racialization of Tejanos as “Mexicans” by aligning them with the civilized nexus of protection and domesticity while encouraging readers to distance themselves from the “straggling American adventurers” from whom Seguín flees. In this vein, the Memoirs casts Seguín’s actions as a kind of lesson in the rules of civility. He asserts, “I was never guilty of the barbarous and unworthy deeds of which I am accused by my enemies” (74), and in the penultimate paragraph of the narrative he insists, “During my military career, I can proudly assert that I never deviated from the line of duty, that I never shed, or caused to be shed, human blood unnecessarily, . . . and that, in the fulfillment of my duty, I always drew a distinction between my obligations as a soldier on the battlefield and as a civilized man after the battle” (102). In a rather direct way, he frames his account as a story of the difference between “barbarous” and “civilized” behavior, particularly in warfare. He further suggests that the unworthiness of the former lies in the degeneration of

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military service from an “obligation” performed on the carefully delineated territory of the “battlefield” to an expansive and undisciplined wave of brutality that overflows the properly demarcated arena of “the battle.” More than noting the fact of Seguín’s participation in the military, the text highlights that the value of such service lies in a soldier’s ability to understand the “distinction” between legitimate and illegitimate objects of force, and the absence of such awareness is the essence of barbarism. Within the topography of struggle he outlines, fighting is contained, insulating other social sites from attack and creating what amount to nonmilitary zones as exemplified by the domestic space of home.65 The choice between family and country addressed at the beginning of the narrative implicitly is contextualized as a ferocious severing of what should be consonant commitments, symptomatically signifying a profoundly dysfunctional polity. Through references to the suffering endured by his family and other noncombatants, including the “Mexican families who left San Antonio” under his care (100), Seguín depicts the use of armed force by Anglos against Tejanos as a fundamental breach of social order, an unthinkable violation of the structures of civilized life. Moreover, at no point does the narrative discuss the participation of Anglos in relations of domesticity and community life, neither noting the presence of Anglo women nor the marriage of prominent Tejanas (including a member of Seguín’s family) to elite Anglo men.66 This absence reinforces the rhetoric of nativity discussed earlier while also masculinizing the actions of unruly “Americans,” depicting them as unrestrained by the concern for persons and property condensed in figures of homemaking. Thus, the text subtly draws on a reservoir of images of Comanche raiding to convey the sensation of a barbarous invasion. The text’s vision of hypermasculine aggression by recent Anglo emigrants is given further force, shape, and scope by its implied linkage to the actions of the Texas army. The Memoirs consistently distinguishes between Anglo and Tejano forms of military masculinity, portraying the former as dangerously unrestrained. While Seguín at various points addresses the property interests at stake in the dispossession of Tejanos, his representation of Anglo troop movements focuses on the unwarranted and gratuitous demolition of Tejano ranchos. The issue first appears in the context of the reoccupation of San Antonio by forces under Seguín’s leadership. He is ordered by General Felix Huston “to destroy that city and relocate its inhabitants”; characterizing this decision as “premature and unjust,” he goes over the general’s head to President Sam Houston who rescinds the order, saving San Antonio but making a “bitter enemy” of the general (86). Noting that disaster was averted by the chief executive maintains the narrative’s, somewhat perfunctory, distinction between patriotic and opportunistic

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Anglos which is necessary for generating Anglo sympathy and identification and for constructing a Texan subjectivity that is neither “Mexican” nor “American.” More importantly, this episode suggests the presence of an irrational animus against the “native” inhabitants and the ease and readiness with which wholesale devastation appears as a viable, even preferable, tactic. Such violent tendencies are realized a bit later in the narrative, while Seguín is on the run from the “adventurers” who have threatened his life: “On the 30th of April, a friend from San Antonio sent me word that Captain James W. Scott and his company were coming down by the river, burning the ranchos on their way. The inhabitants of the lower ranchos called on us for aid against Scott” (96). Lacking any discernable purpose except destruction, this assault on Tejano property and families by the military both is continuous with the reign of terror conducted in and around San Antonio by bands of recently emigrated Americans and is virtually indistinguishable from the kind of unrestrained attacks and seemingly random incursions usually attributed to the Comanches. The text’s portrait of Anglo soldiers also can be read as a critique of the overwhelming presence of the U.S. army in and around San Antonio in the wake of the Mexican-American War, the city serving as the departmental headquarters for the U.S. military stationed in Texas (which as of 1848 was 14 percent of the regular army and had risen to 25 percent by 1856): “in 1850 a sizable fraction of the Anglo population in the Mexican settlements was essentially immune from the acts of civilian authorities. In San Antonio nearly half of the American population was part of the military presence, either as enlisted personnel or as wagon surveyors working for the military.”67 The failure of Anglo military forces to respect, or even recognize, the limits of the battlefield is most graphically shown in the narrative’s description of the scene that greeted Tejano families upon their return to San Antonio after the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836: “There was not one of them who did not lament the loss of a relative and, to crown their misfortunes, they found their houses in ruins, their fields laid waste, and their cattle destroyed or dispersed. I myself found my ranch despoiled; what little was spared by the retreating enemy had been wasted by our own army. Ruin and misery met me on my return to my unpretentious home” (89). Given the text’s reiterated focus on appropriate conduct in battle, its emphasis here on the vastness of the damage done to the property and domestic spaces of civilians signals to readers that the perpetrators lack all regard for the protocols of warfare. Such decimation of an entire community, including family dwellings, offers clear evidence of pathologically unregulated masculine ferocity, a barbarous inability to contain the violence of combat and an attendant incomprehension of civilized spatiality. Moreover, the narrative here inverts the “Mexican”-ization of Tejanos by

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conflating the actions of “enemy” forces with those of Anglo soldiers, implying a treachery to the “our” of Texan nationality and a disruptive and destructive itinerancy. The perspective of the passage is that of the innocent victims of senseless, unpredictable, and total desolation, so encompassing as to resemble a natural disaster—a picture of ubiquitous wreckage that finds its corollary in descriptions of the damage wrought by Indian raiding. Earlier Seguín describes “the American people” as “impetuous as the whirlwind” (74). While this characterization is qualified by suggesting it only applies when they are “aroused by the hypocritical clamours of designing men,” such an image—especially in light of heightened popular anxiety in 1857 and 1858 over native mobility, raiding, and presence in southern and western Texas— cannot help but implicitly call to mind similar characterizations of Comanches, such as Governor H. R. Runnels’s 1858 reference to “the threatening storm, which is now beginning to burst with all its fury on the suffering frontier.”68 The political resonance of the text’s characterization of “American” actions in Texas depends on the broader symbolic significance of an assault on stable, “native,” settlements within a pervasive metaphorics of barbarism, derived from representations of native peoples. The attacks on Tejano ranches scattered throughout the narrative create an ambient sense of menace, of impending even omnipresent danger. In addition to refuting the claim by Texas courts that Tejano fears of Anglo assault were baseless (such as in State v. Casinova), this thematic of Anglo incursion dovetails with the rhetoric of marauding in which Comanche economies, modes of land use, and occupancy are cast as the expression of a propensity toward lawlessness by roving and undisciplined bands of savages. What I am suggesting is that the kinds of subjectivity constructed for nonsedentary native populations under Hispanic and Anglo regimes are transferred to “Americans,” treating Tejano landholding as axiomatic and portraying the Americanization of Texas as raiding rather than a democratic process of national development. The emotional force of the Memoirs’s well-crafted and multilayered defense of Tejano territorial and political claims, then, rests on a familiar and still active racial topology of wandering. The narrative of American dynamism and progress that so often served as a justification for displacement of “indolent” native and Mexican populations is transposed into a discursive register in which expansionist tendencies appear as placelessness, a hyperactive nomadism that rather than evidencing a superior politicaleconomy instead endangers settled communities that find themselves in its erratic path. Additionally, in its portrait of Seguín’s military career, the text not only presents him, and by implication those Tejanos who fought with him, as

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conforming to the constitutional requirements for citizenship (including active declaration of loyalty to Texas and direct participation in the revolution) but employs topoi of home and family in ways that link military service to settlement and a sustained connection to place. As against the assumption of a (racial) tendency toward itinerancy and treachery among putative Mexicans, the Memoirs suggests that participation in the armed forces indexes a web of associations and commitments that provide Tejanos with a well-established sense of location and community. When describing his exile, Seguín states, “I separated from my country, parents, family, relatives, and friends, and what was more, from the institutions on behalf of which I had drawn my sword with an earnest wish to see Texas free and happy” (74). Here military service appears less as the hard evidence of his devotion to Texas than as a prominent element in an overarching patriarchal imaginary in which his connection to and protection of his family is as integral to his political identity as taking part in combat; these potentially distinct spheres are symbolically and symbiotically linked. The syntactic parallelism between “parents, family, relatives and friends” and “the institutions” of the state casts private associations as a necessary corollary to the public goals of defining and defending the “country,” offering immersion within local kinship networks (into which some Anglos were incorporated) as the criterion for assessing one’s status as a Texan and implicitly replacing the racialized notion of being “Mexican born” with participation in an array of social relations. In developing an image of stable and multilayered forms of Tejano belonging, the Memoirs employs the idiom of honor to shift the burden of proof in Anglo discourse in which Tejanos usually are presumed traitors until proven patriots.69 Toward the end of the narrative, Seguín notes that in being forced out of Texas he had “to become a wanderer” and was pushed “outside the pale of society” (96–97). Given the overwhelming association of wandering with native peoples in this period, such description figures the tragedy of Seguín’s exile as his reduction to the status of an Indian. Thus, while not explicitly named, the Comanches are not quite absent either, providing the unstated referent for the terms of Seguín’s critique. In other words, charges of nomadism, excessive masculine aggression, the lack of (a respect for) domesticity, and unregulated violence against noncombatants in this period not only cannot be separated from representations of the Comanches but indirectly take them as the model. They occupy an uncanny position as a kind of phantom signified which haunts geopolitical discourses in Texas, including negotiation and struggle among non-natives. In divorcing the topoi of barbarism from particular conflicts with native peoples, the text retains the residual ideological charge of that association while displacing the continuing history of diplomatic negotiations with those populations,

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making barbarian subjectivity mobile in ways that further evacuate it of political content by turning Comanche socio-spatiality into the vehicle of an extended metaphor. Introducing the Comanches into analysis of the text complicates Seguín’s rhetoric of “native”-ness, suggesting its imbrication in a longstanding and ongoing pattern of Euramerican refusal to recognize indigenous forms of occupancy. In addition, reinserting native populations as a substantive presence in discussion of Anglo-Tejano conflict draws attention to the varied kinds of political work performed by figures of nomadism as well as to the multiple kinds of land claims disavowed by them. I have argued that imperialism in Texas works through the deployment of discourses of mobility that dismiss other groups’ claims to the land by presenting them as rootless, and therefore as choosing placelessness. The Memoirs illustrates the limits of inverting this logic as a tactic of anti-imperial opposition. Seguín’s invocation of a residual ideology of honor to challenge Anglo dominance cannot be separated from the associated denigration of native land tenure condensed in images of wandering marauders. Situating the text within a genealogy of the role played by the settlement/wandering binary in imperial discourse under Mexico, Texas, and the United States reveals not only the durability of Comanche metaphors but the ways the figure of the barbarian, and the erasure of the sovereignty of nonsedentary peoples, is crucial to both hegemonic and counterhegemonic representations of U.S. national space, a disavowal of Comanche self-determination that cannot be remedied by a critical investment in the very discourses of migrancy by which native placemaking is elided.

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4 PARTIAL CITIZENS

AND INSURGENT

MASSES

Narrating Violence Past and Present in Post-1848 California [D]uring the war between the United States and Mexico the officers of the United States . . . offered and promised in the most solemn manner to the inhabitants of California, the protection and security of their persons and their property and the annexation of the said state of California to the American Union, impressing upon them the great advantages to be derived from their being citizens of the United States, as was promised them. That in consequence of such promises and representations, very few of the inhabitants of California opposed the invasion[.] —Petition of California landholders, February 11, 1859 What we particularly desire and ask of the Government is that certain public lands may be set apart for our use exclusively (which lands we have long occupied and improved) and from which we may not be forced by white settlers. —Petition of Cahuilla leaders, May 15, 1856 The Californio petition quoted above insists that the United States has failed to live up to its promises. Signed in 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo guaranteed that Mexicans living in territories taken during the war would be given U.S. citizenship and that their property would remain secure under U.S. law, even if they chose to remain Mexican citizens. These assurances are what the petitioners mean when they speak of “the protection and security” “offered and promised in the most solemn manner.”1 Engaging in a form of critical (counter)memory, they seek to remind Anglo officeholders of the ways the legitimacy of the current regime depends on the fulfillment 149

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of the agreement that brought an end to the conflict. Recalling the war and its resolution serves as a way of contesting the naturalization of U.S. rule in the region, and the consequent erasure of the prior system of propertyholding supposedly enshrined in the treaty. The need to reiterate such “representations” in an appeal to Anglodominated institutions, however, indicates the latter’s failure to adhere to the terms of the peace. The provisions of the treaty suggest an incorporation of foreign ideologies and topographies into the structure of U.S. policy, a dynamic that would be enacted most visibly in the recognition of Mexican precedent in U.S. legislatures and courts. Yet the imperial effacement of the pre-war legal structure, and the attendant remapping of land tenure and dislocation of former Mexicans, did not so much depend on ignoring the stipulations of the treaty as playing its provisions against each other. Unlike in Texas, there was no vote for annexation in California; it was seized as part of the broader war effort. The project of post-war governance in the region, then, was to recast that conquest as legitimate due to its basis in consent. The promise of citizenship to Californios served as the vehicle for simulating such hegemony, displacing the prior system of political identity while presenting these once-alien populations as new members of the nation fully integrated into its republican processes of representation.2 This incorporation worked to dismantle pre-war legal topography by dissolving the pre-war political collective into an aggregate of individual subjects all interpellated within U.S. jurisdiction. Within this frame, the preservation of property rights appears as the imperative to recognize a collection of private claims rather than to contend with the broader politico-legal geography that preceded U.S. rule and in which those claims were situated. The need to inspect the territorial claim of every landholder justifies a legislative reorganization of title that both dislodges many of the prior occupants and translates the conditions of occupancy itself into the terms of U.S. property-law, eventually resulting in the proletarianization of virtually all of the pre-war landowners. Additionally, rather than outright barring Californios from taking part in political institutions and processes, state law portrayed them as viable members of the polity contingent on their racial status. If Texas policy circulates figures of marauding migrants, political discourse in California engages in a process of mestizo-ization, denying access to nonwhites while categorizing Mexicans as suspect—needing to prove that they were not in fact mixed with the Indians. This matrix of racialization reflects the legacy of the missions, which had been the dominant mode of imperial control in the region since the Spanish conquest in the late-eighteenth century. Within it, “Mexicans” are imagined as needing to be trained in proper landholding and the rule of law, casting their subordination as a result of individuals’ innate racial traits rather than as the afterlife of conquest. As in Texas, prior

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imperial policy is turned back on the Hispanic elite as a way of delegitimizing their “customs, traditions, and kinds of land tenure systems.”3 The significant differences between racial formations in Texas and California suggest that processes of racialization in annexed territory do not draw on a generic discourse of “Mexican”-ness, but rather that “Mexican” subjectivity in U.S. law and politics takes shape in relation to the geopolitical dynamics and conflicts of particular areas. Part of what most notably distinguishes the pre-annexation geopolitics of Texas from that of California are the differences in indigenous patterns of inhabitance and resulting discrepancies in Hispanic imperial policy and non-native occupancy. The configurations of pre-1845 Tejano and pre-1848 Californio propertyholding emerge out of engagements with the native “land tenure systems” of those places, and thus, Anglo efforts to repudiate and replace prior modes of sovereignty in former Mexican territory do not work through a uniform pattern, instead drawing on previous geographically specific imperial tensions in fashioning and validating a new imperial regime. The official narrative of the U.S. absorption of California, however, remained haunted by the violence through which the state was acquired. Californios exploited this discursive faultline by repeatedly invoking the treaty in public representations, including state legislative debates. At such moments, the treaty is cited less as a marker of their full membership in the nation than as evidence of the existence of a socio-legal formation in the region that preceded the war. Emphasizing the treaty’s role in resolving armed conflict between sovereign entities implicitly contests its portrayal as a sale through which the territory was cleansed of all vestiges of Mexican rule. Instead, it becomes a figure for the ongoing existence of an embattled enclave whose incorporation into the United States has involved a statesponsored assault on their identity, challenging the story of their inclusion in the republic as citizens and emphasizing, in Adorno’s terms, their nonidentity with respect to U.S. principles of dominion. In this vein, historiography comes to serve as a rhetorical mode for staging dissent to current policy, foregrounding the discontinuities between U.S. and Mexican rule (and thereby making legible the post-war effort to eradicate the remnants of the latter) while emphasizing the shared political identity and interests of former Mexicans.4 We can see such a process of oppositional memory at work in Antonio María Osio’s The History of Alta California (1851), the first known book-length chronicle by a Californio of pre-war politics in the region. By offering an extended account of Hispanic governance in California, the narrative builds to a crescendo in which the extension of U.S. jurisdiction appears as a brutal severing of the territory from its Mexican national context, a bloody rupture and source of ongoing collective Californio trauma for which, the text suggests, the invader has not atoned.

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If Californio claims are predicated on the treaty that ended the MexicanAmerican War, the Cahuilla petition also quoted above is based on longstanding residence that precedes U.S. and Hispanic jurisdiction.5 Not parties to the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, native peoples did not look to it for confirmation of their territorial rights, and given Mexican law in California, they would not have had much to cite in the way of precedent. Consistent with the ideologies guiding policy across what had been New Spain, the refusal to engage with (sedentary) Indians as independent peoples helped validate not only the seizure of native lands but the use of native labor as the basis for agriculture, ranching, and trade in the region. Moreover, emphasizing the regulation, education, and employment of Indians first in the missions and then as workers on ranchos, post-war Californio rhetoric largely redeployed an existing discourse of domination in order to validate their own land claims, casting the non-Indian population as inheritors of the civilizing mission and thus as entitled to their hard-won improvements on the barbarous chaos that supposedly preceded Hispanic presence in the region. While highlighting the less rigid forms of racial classification and political disqualification at play under Hispanic rule, Californio representations of Indians denied that they formed separate political entities, at most acknowledging Indian villages (or rancherías) as semi-municipal units but not their status as parts of autonomous polities. Californio self-representation, then, is in many ways interwoven with a counterinsurgent discourse that erases indigenous geographies and denies the political character of their resistance, rendering subaltern native efforts to exercise sovereignty and self-determination as peoples. While Indianizing Mexicans, portraying Californios as de facto mestizos and thereby questioning their ability to take part in the institutions of public life, state and federal law also Mexicanize Indians, taking the lack of treaties (or treaty-like agreements such as those made with nonsedentary peoples in Texas) as evidence of an unobstructed Mexican jurisdiction over Indian lands that was transferred to the United States. Rather than inserting California tribes into the existing framework of federal Indian policy, their status is refracted through the prism of the Mexican cession and the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, and thus, native communities in California are not imagined as the subjects of treaties. Consequently, their inhabitance on their lands is depicted as predicated purely on government largesse rather than legal right. Federal agents in this period, in fact, repeatedly return to the figure of the mission as a way of conceptualizing the nature and direction of Indian policy in the state, reinforcing its supposed continuity with pre-war patterns and offering a version of the civilization program completely sundered from the question of sovereignty. In post-war California, then, one sees a shift from the nation-paradigm as developed in the east, as addressed at length in chapters 1 and 2, to what

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can be called the reservation-paradigm which would come to dominate Indian policy in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Indigenous groups are imagined less as self-governing political entities than loosely constituted bands. If Indian policy elsewhere involved the simulation of collective assent via the treaty-system, in California there is no such incitement of collective voice. Instead, the absence of outright native aggression is taken as de facto consent to government policy, creating a kind of contentless subjectivity whose only positive relation to political discourse is the potential for submission. While the Cahuilla petition indicates that native political speech does occasionally enter the archive, lack of access to literacy and virtually any form of publication means that the traces of native self-understanding and self-determination in California in the antebellum period come less from texts authored, initiated, or even signed by them, than as a disavowed or marginalized presence in government and press accounts. As Ranajit Guha argues in Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency, “counter-insurgency, which derives directly from insurgency and is determined by the latter in all that is essential to its form and articulation, can hardly afford a discourse that is not fully and compulsively involved with the rebel and his activities. . . . It should be possible therefore to read the presence of a rebel consciousness as a necessary and pervasive element within that body of evidence” (15). Through a reading of the documents surrounding what has been termed “the Garra Uprising,” named after the Cupeño leader who supposedly organized a series of native attacks in late 1851, I explore how government and newspaper accounts of Indians’ (potential for) violence seek to deny the existence of native peoples as polities even while testifying, in the inverted way Guha describes, to the persistence of traditional forms of collectivity and occupancy. Relying on the peace treaty as a source of legitimacy, federal and state law inserted the populations of California into the framework of U.S. jurisdiction, envisioning Californio land claims as an assortment of titles in need of validation and conceptualizing native villages as aggregates of potentially tractable laborers. In atomizing these groups, either by portraying them as citizens fully represented by national institutions or ignorant masses in need of training to become civilized subjects, U.S. policy seeks to dissolve prior geopolitical formations, playing on pre-existing tensions and conflicts in the region to dispossess all pre-war populations. Conversely, for Californios and native peoples alike, although in different and to some extent opposed ways, violence serves as a vehicle for making visible the political identities and geographies effaced in imperial discourse, either in the use the war as a trope of counterhegemonic memory or the organization of campaigns of insurgency to repel post-war invasions.

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“PUBLIC”-IZING MEXICAN LAND

Despite the promises of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, by the 1880s there were virtually no Californios in public office in the state and the vast majority of the pre-war elite had been reduced to poverty.6 Rather than merely abandoning the terms of the treaty, a process of imperial translation incorporates California into U.S. hegemony in ways that formally honor the treaty while radically diminishing the Californios’ access to political and economic resources, constituting them as individual subjects of the nation-state in ways that present them as always-already having consented to these modes of governance. Addressed as if it were an empirical question of legally recognizing occupancy, “property” serves as a site of discursive struggle in the wake of the war due to the differences between Mexican socio-spatial formations and U.S. jurisdictional norms, raising questions not only about what constitutes proof for any given claim but how the prewar legal matrix will be integrated or disintegrated in post-war policy. While the treaty requires that pre-war land rights be respected by the new regime, the document specifies neither the form nor mode of such acknowledgment. Federal law engages in the project of domestication by ostensibly recognizing Mexican landholding but decollectivizing it, treating Californio propertyholding not as a residual political formation protected en toto but as an aggregate of personal claims each of which needs to be confirmed. In this way, all Californio titles are made individually subject to adjudication, and differences between Mexican land law and U.S. land law are characterized as deficiencies or an absence of clarity in the former to be remedied by the application of U.S. standards to pre-war titles. In remapping landholding, however, U.S. policy must balance the economic imperatives of expansion, including access to the California coast for shipping and the demand for land for private use and commercial development (especially in light of the Gold Rush), against the need to generate legitimacy for U.S. law by producing at least the appearance of republican rule. The federal California Land Act (1851) serves as the primary institutional vehicle for overwriting Mexican topologies and representing this process as the democratic inclusion of the interests of the people of California in national governance. The law’s ostensible purpose was to confirm Mexican land grants by bringing all claims in the state in front of a Board of Commissioners, comprised of three members chosen by the President, who would be empowered to award official possession. However, the commissioners also had the authority to reject claims, thereby creating an administrative mechanism that could in piecemeal fashion dismantle the

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pre-war system of land tenure while putatively fulfilling the terms of the treaty. Moreover, all claims not presented to the board within two years automatically would “revert to the public domain.” Depicting the land in the state as presumptively “public” suggests an underlying spatial imaginary in which pre-war claims are envisioned as isolated units to be carved out of American domestic space rather than as part of a legal network over which U.S. jurisdiction has been imposed. Each claim is made more vulnerable by dissociating it from its position within an integrated geopolitical whole, working to erase the memory and material traces of that prior system in ways that disavow the institutional and military force exerted in converting foreign territory into domestic space. This atomization of (former) Mexican landholding, however, is cast as the implementation of the treaty’s protections for the benefit of the nation’s new citizen-subjects.7 The proposed law was not the only option available for addressing existing titles to annexed territory. William Carey Jones was appointed by the Secretary of the Interior in 1849 to report “on the subject of land titles in California,” and the document he drafted, the first official post-war assessment of Mexican land tenure, articulates the value of leaving the system of Mexican propertyholding alone as well as indicating important differences between U.S. and Mexican property-law.8 The questions posed to Jones by the Secretary of the Interior that frame the report seek to insert the complexities of the Mexican system into a simple binary of “perfect” and “inchoate” land claims, a rhetorical move that would be repeated in congressional debate. In response, the report specifically notes two significant aspects of pre-war property-law: the absence of an official survey of land grants, later taken as evidence of significant lacunae in Mexican governance; and the layers of certification involved in “perfect”-ing property claims, later used to depict Californio titles as tenuous. In marking the discrepancies between U.S. and Mexican forms of land law the report rejects the idea that titles under the latter are simply incoherent, or are inadequately distinct from public lands: “I think the state of land titles in that country will allow the public lands to be ascertained, and the private lands set apart, by judicious measures, with little difficulty” (34). He, therefore, denounces “any measure calculated to discredit, or cause to be distrusted, the general character of the titles there,” recommending “no other general measure, in relation to private property, than an authorized survey” (34–35). The report’s suggestions provide a counterpoint to the California Land Act, suggesting by contrast that the latter’s dissection of previously foreign land tenure was not so much self-evident at the time as represented as such to specific ideological ends. Debate over the Land Act occurred primarily in the Senate, and it was most forcefully championed by William M. Gwin of California, the bill’s

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author.9 The position he develops has three main elements: narrating the Californios as U.S. citizens whose titles are individually held rather than a collective network that preexists U.S. jurisdiction; portraying the proposed law as instrumental in accomplishing the goals of the treaty; and representing differences between U.S. and Mexican property-law as flaws in the latter that need to be corrected by the former. Gwin rejects the notion that the United States “conquered” Mexican territory, instead asserting, “Our title to California is based upon purchase, not conquest. We bought the country, and are paying for it” (60). His reading casts the treaty as a simple bill of sale that contractually specifies particular conditions for acquisition, one of which is that, in the words of the document, “property . . . shall be inviolably respected.” U.S. rule over the ceded territory appears not as an act of imperial violence but the routine operation of U.S. institutions over American space: “I represent the State as a whole, and I intend, to the best of my ability, to do justice to every portion of my constituents . . . Like other citizens of our country, they must abide by the decisions of our judicial tribunals, and if their claims are founded in justice they have nothing to fear” (54). Interpellating the Californios as part of a uniform national “us” enables the depiction of California as already incorporated into U.S. jurisdiction by bracketing the discrepancies between U.S. and Mexican land law, instead foregrounding the shared inhabitance of “our country.” All Californians are imagined as equally represented by Gwin and “our judicial tribunals” alike, the apparent equivalence of citizenship eliding the unevenness produced by annexation and the attendant differences among the supposedly national people in their relation to U.S. legal institutions and discourse. Including the Californios within this national “our” enables a rhetorical sleight of hand by which the land they hold is merged into a homogenous domestic space, occluding the fact that their titles are actually held under Mexican law and thereby inscribed in an ideological and cartographic matrix that precedes/exceeds the terms of U.S. jurisdiction. Gwin continues, “No portion of the people of California will ever countenance a violation of the rights of property, guarantied [sic] . . . under the treaty with Mexico. All they desire is that some competent and impartial tribunal, such as is provided for in this bill, will decide what is private property” (55). The “people of California” appear as a single, undifferentiated unit whose interests ostensibly cohere in the protection of “the rights of property,” their collective “desire” remaining in perfect harmony with “the treaty with Mexico.” However, do all Californians have the same idea of what constitutes “property”? Put another way, positing a community of interest among the people of the state not only effaces discrepancies between Mexican and U.S. property-law but obscures the fact that the wholesale judicial assessment of

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pre-war titles negatively impacts one section of the population—the Californios—to the benefit of another—Anglo buyers and squatters who can and did take advantage of the time, cost, and contingency of litigation to assert claims to Californio lands. Moreover, the overdetermined phrase “decide what is private property” hints at how the tribunal actively defines “property,” dislocating land tenure from its contours and meanings under Mexico and subjecting claimants to an extended regime of inspection while speaking as if the process were merely an innocuous registration of titles. This disjunction as well as the political and economic imperatives behind the proposed act, though, appear in an inverted way in Gwin’s defense of the bill in which he depicts it as a remedy for the inadequacies of Mexican law. In his account, Mexican rule appears exclusively as lack, as the failure to occupy land properly due to the inability to separate public from private lands. Describing the territory ceded in the treaty, Gwin states, “we have public and private property blended together in one common mass,” adding, “it is the duty of the Government to have them separated” (57). Pre1848 land title is depicted as an almost hopelessly tangled jumble that needs to be unknotted and organized by the United States, casting the act of “separat[ion]” as a benevolent effort by the new regime to sort through the virtually unmanageable “mass” inherited from the old regime. This image reappears later, connected more directly to a denunciation of the previous government’s supposedly incompetent administrative mapping: “It is notorious that claims in California are unaided by surveys from Spain or Mexico, and their locations are consequently not fixed nor established, except in the few cases in which they may have distinct natural boundaries. With this limited exception, all private claims are blended in the mass of public lands” (134). Differences between U.S. and Mexican administrative mappings, especially the former’s more rigid distinction between “public” and “private” space and denial of communal usufruct rights to shared water and grazing lands are recoded as the nonexistence of property-law in Mexican California.10 Congressional interrogation of title is interpreted as “extend[ing] to claimants the opportunity,” ostensibly frustrated under Mexican governance, “of having their equitable titles ascertained and carried into fee” (58), which will be “converted by them [government surveys provided for in Gwin’s bill] into permanent homes, resting upon indefeasible titles from the Government” (135). Thus, the project of opening up “public” land for occupation and development by Anglos is narrated and legitimized as a desire on the part of the Californios for increased personal security about the legal status of their lands.11 If Mexican law cannot distinguish between private and public lands, the U.S. government, Gwin suggests, has the responsibility of doing so not just for the Californios, of course, but for all those people seeking to purchase

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public lands in California. Depicted as in perfect conformity with the treaty, bearing the consent of “the native Californians,” and offering the gift of clarity and security to individual Californio propertyholders, the provisions of the Land Act assert the de facto Americanness of the territory while threatening to convert every single Californio claim into public land unless proven otherwise to the satisfaction of the Commissioners. In this way, the Congressional debate dissimulates the imperial work to be performed by the law in its reconstellation and remapping of “property.” In fundamentally challenging the legitimacy of Californio title, the Land Act enabled a systemic assault on pre-war land tenure. The law, then, can be understood as the central piece of an implicit federal campaign against Mexican topologies and title designed to make land available to a non-Californio public.12 However, what I want to emphasize is the ways that the act’s atomization and micromanagement of Californio title and its consequent overwriting of pre-war legal formations is legitimized as the gift of citizenship and membership in the national people. The force of conquest is represented as the natural law of property, the protection of individual rights, and the endowment of politically neutral social order.

CONSTITUTIONAL NEGOTIATIONS

In Telling Identities: The Californio Testimonios, Rosaura Sánchez argues, “the capacity of hegemonic frameworks to absorb all contestation . . . requires noting the importance of alternative discursive frameworks” (44). Despite the efforts of U.S. law and policy to portray the Californios as willing subjects, they did not simply acquiesce to institutionalized interpretations of the treaty that normalized their disenfranchisement and dispossession. An example of such collective opposition can be found in a memorial to the U.S. Congress in 1859 signed by forty-eight leading Californios protesting the already-devastating effects of the California Land Act.13 Describing themselves as “residents of the state of California . . . previously citizens of the Republic of Mexico” (238), they articulate their outrage at post-war depredations through the representation of themselves as Mexican. Instead of depicting the “promises and representations” of the treaty as following Californio capitulation to U.S. forces, the memorial suggests that the surrender to “the invasion” comes only as a “consequence” of guarantees of “protection and security [for] their persons and their property” (238). Within this historical counternarrative, the Californios are attributed an agency that precedes and exceeds that of U.S. jurisdiction. Further, characterizing the American settlers who came during the Gold

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Rush as “immigrants” (240), the memorial reiterates the priority of Mexican claims, suggesting how the citation of the pre-war past could serve as a discursive launching point for alternative, counterhegemonic forms of subjectivity. A similar tactic can be seen at work in the debates over the California Constitution. Drafted in 1849, in the wake of the first wave of the Gold Rush, it was the first serious effort to incorporate the territory from the post-war Mexican cession into U.S. jurisdictional norms. As such, the constitution carried the burden of beginning to work through the implications of the treaty, especially in defining what would constitute “citizenship” and its privileges. Anglo delegates to the convention continually cite the treaty, but they tend to do so in ways that present the Californios as a minority within the nation rather than as the bearers of the legacy of a prior regime whose legal norms differed in significant ways from those of the United States. As in the later debate over the California Land Act, discussed above, this homogenizing narrative of inclusion allowed for the dismantling of Mexican legal structures to be portrayed as the legitimate exercise of republican governance. In speaking for their constituents, largely in the southern portion of the state, Californio delegates did not so much refuse the gesture of citizenship as situate it within the context of conquest—the erecting of a new system on the remains of the old.14 The treaty appears in their speeches less as a point of origin than one of mediation, a marker of the need to negotiate between discrepant legal frameworks. The debates of the convention, therefore, reveal a struggle for hegemony in which Californios were outnumbered but in which their efforts to contest their racialization, marginalization, and dispossession by Anglos through the citation of pre-war precedent is quite legible. One of the first questions that came before the convention was whether or not California should become a state or should remain a Territory.15 While William S. Gwin, claimed that he “did not think there was a member on this floor in favor of a Territorial Government” (21), almost all of the Californios present advocated for foregoing statehood, at least for the moment. This position likely was motivated by the fact that the U.S. military government which officially had ruled California since 1846 had retained Mexican precedent and political institutions, maintaining the pre-war infrastructure in ways that left the legal and land-tenure system unchanged despite formal annexation. Given the experience of the prior three years, the Californios reasonably could expect that in remaining a Territory the region could continue to be spared all but the essentially nominal force of U.S. jurisdiction. In response to objections to the proposed deferral of statehood, Jose Antonio Carillo suggests, “since he did not believe it to be the interest of his constituents that a State Government should be formed” that instead

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“the country should be divided by running a line west from San Luis Obispo” (22), seeking statehood only for the area north of that line. However, even while tactically maneuvering to secure the continuance of pre-war social formations, Carillo does not name this goal as such. Rather, he relies on the somewhat elliptical term “constituents” to reference the collective desire to which he presents himself as giving voice. Moreover, reacting to the tendency among the Anglo delegates to differentiate between “Americans” and “native Californians,” he asserts that he “considered himself as much an American citizen” as anyone (23). Carillo’s proposal implicitly seeks to legitimize residual Mexican geopolitical structures as potentially “American,” framing the annexation of the territory as not necessarily equivalent to its interpellation into U.S. jurisdictional norms.16 Other delegates, though, offer a counterdiscourse in which becoming American means entry into an encompassing legal matrix that supposedly serves the needs of the entire national people, in which the Californios are subsumed. As Gwin notes, “the Constitution which they were about to form was for the American population. Why? Because the American population was the majority. It was for the protection of the California population—government was instituted for the protection of minorities— this Constitution was to be formed with a view to the protection of the minority: the native Californians . . . [The majority] are to be restrained from infringing upon the rights of the minority” (23). A comment by Kimball H. Dimmick makes clearer the stakes of this absorptive imaginary: “No matter from what nation they came, he trusted that hereafter they would be classed with the American people. The Constitution was to be formed for their benefit as well as to that of the native born Americans. They all had one common interest at stake, and one common object in view: the protection of government” (23). If for Carillo becoming “American” entails an incorporation into U.S. boundaries that is not tantamount to dismantling existing politico-legal formations in California, the above statements indicate the impossibility of such accommodation, casting “American” identity as a “common”-ness in which the uneven history of U.S. territoriality and expansion is dissolved into a seamless and consensual filiation to the U.S. government. Statehood must be instituted by “the American population” for the good of “the native Californians,” transmuting the residue of international conflict into intra-national “protection.” Thus, the extension of national subjectivity here functions as a way of thwarting efforts to preserve pre-war precedent, casting such erasure as the democratic inclusion of former Mexicans in the “American people.” This gesture reduces the qualitative distinctions between U.S. and Mexican governance to a quantitative discrepancy (“majority,” “minority”) within an encompassing national sameness.

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Even after Carillo’s motion is defeated, the issue recurs in a modified form in the discussion over how to draw the boundaries of the prospective state. If a constitution was submitted to Congress for the entire territory known under Mexico as “California,” many delegates worried that the possible admission of such a massive area as a free state would threaten to tip the balance of power between the North and the South, engendering a debate in Congress that could eventuate in the dissection of the territory. The feared results of such an action are summarized by Jacob R. Snyder: “If the Mason and Dixon line was run out to the Pacific ocean, where would it strike? Very near Monterey. Ah! what a beautiful State would that part of the country to the southward of Monterey make for the Southern portion of the people of the United States. Nearly the whole mass of the native Californians in the country would be included in the Southern portion. Would the Southern people desire to come here with their slaves? Yes, sir” (183). The image of bisection proposed earlier reappears here invested with the anxieties surrounding the brewing crisis over slavery, casting the “native Californians” as sympathetic to “Southern” interests and as a dangerous influence which if not properly contained will tip the balance of power in the nation. In reply to this line of argument, Carillo insists, “The only question is, what is California? It is the territory defined as such by the Government of Spain, and always recognized as such by the Mexican Government . . . Your duty is to form a constitution for what really is, and always has been, California” (193). While in some sense setting aside his previous proposal, this comment foregrounds the role Hispanic precedent does, and should continue to, play in California geopolitics, implicitly contending that to deviate from it is a violation of “duty”—an illegitimate imposition of legal principles that have no connection to the actual nexus of social relations (“what really is”). Although also refusing to alter the boundaries, Gwin rejects Carillo’s premise, asserting, “I care not what the Mexican authorities say the boundary is; but I know what the United States say it is,” further noting that the absence of delegates to the convention from the far east of the territory should not be seen as a block to including that land as part of the proposed state: “The Representatives here from [the southern portion of the territory] are unanimous in their votes against the establishment of a State Government. If we include the Territory these Delegates represent on the coast, why exclude the barren waste beyond, where no white man lives?” (197). Thus, not only can Mexican law be displaced entirely by that of the United States, but representatives of the Californios can be overruled legitimately through the ostensibly democratic process of majority rule.17 However, the superimposition of American identity and minoritization of the pre-war population is described in the debates not as an act of

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conquest but as an effort to honor the terms of the Treaty of GuadalupeHidalgo. While some participants resist the idea that the treaty could serve as a brake on the convention’s constitution-making powers, one delegate claiming that such an idea “could . . . destroy the sovereignty of the State” (68), most of those whose comments are recorded conceded, either explicitly or implicitly, that the treaty operated as “the law of the land” and the basis for the legitimacy of U.S. governance in the region. As L. W. Hastings observes, “if we do not recognize this treaty, no treaty of peace exists. We are then at war with Mexico . . . ; it is in virtue of this treaty alone that we are possessed of this territory” (65). Ultimately, the convention comes to the de facto consensus that the legitimacy of its actions depends upon conformity to the terms of the treaty. Consequently, when they turn to the subject of voting, the accompanying consideration of racial (dis)qualifications is framed as taking place within treaty discourse. The language upon which the convention eventually settles in determining eligibility for voting is the following: “every white male citizen of the United States and every white male citizen of Mexico who shall have elected to become a citizen of the United States, under the treaty of peace” (341). Reflecting pre-war Anglo assumptions about the ambiguous relation of Mexicans to whiteness as well as the complex cross-hatching of notions of national and racial identity, this clause also registers in a condensed form the repudiation of Mexican precedent and political identity in post-war governance, its overwriting by an individualizing American racial logic.18 Within the debates, the meaning of race is contested through the citation of the treaty, challenging the self-evidence of racial identities as constructed within U.S. law by referring back to the political conventions and categories of pre-war law. In response to the original proposal to limit voting to “every white male citizen of the United States” (61), absent any mention of Mexicans at all, Edward Gilbert notes, “The meaning of the word ‘white’ . . . was not generally understood in this country, though well understood in the United States” (62). In addition, Pablo de la Guerra, called “Noriego” in the convention minutes, asserts “that it should be perfectly understood in the first place what is the true signification of the word ‘white’,” since “many citizens of California have received from nature a very dark skin” yet are among those who “fill the highest public offices” (63).19 U.S. taxonomies of race, then, do not easily correlate with Mexican legal discourse. An exchange between Gwin, Noriego, and Stephen C. Foster lays out the distinction between modes of determining political participation: Mr. Noriego said that, according to Mexican law, no race of any kind is excluded from voting.

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Mr. Gwin wished to know if Indians were considered Mexican citizens? Mr. Noriego said that so far were they considered citizens that some of the first men in the Republic were of the Indian race. .... Mr. Foster said that, according to Mexican law, very few of the Indian race were admitted to the right of suffrage. They are restricted by some property qualification, or by occupation or mode of livelihood. But they are considered Mexican citizens according to the Constitution. (63)

Here we can see competing formulations, one predicated on determining who counts as a member of a particular race and the other based on “property qualification.” Under the prior system, voting and its related rights had depended less on a racial matrix defined by purity of lineage than a spatial matrix based on property. Drawing attention to this fact not only works to challenge the potential exclusion of Californios from whiteness but to insert the pre-war legal geography of land title as a central component of post-war citizenship. The effort to leverage Anglo racial logics ends up shifting the terms of debate toward the question of who is an “Indian.” Even those who are clearest and most eloquent about the importance of the treaty in legitimizing state governance concur in the legitimacy of expelling Indians from the voting public. For example, J. D. Hoppe, who previously had argued that “prohibiting Mexican citizens from the full enjoyment of the free elective franchise” would result in the rejection of the state constitution by Congress as “in direct conflict with the treaty of peace and the Constitution of the United States” (66), asserts, “the whole Indian race should be excluded from the elective franchise” (69). L. W. Hastings, however, offers an important qualification, “But men who have Indian blood in their veins are not for that reason Indians” (64), and much of the discussion turned on how, and whether, to distinguish people of Indian “descent” from “full-blooded” Indians. Potential jurisdictional conflict is subsumed by the figure of the “Indian,” through which a difference between political systems is transposed into a question of how to calculate “blood.” The repeated image of the polls being overrun by untutored savages, potentially under the sway of their (Californio?) employers, helped drive this fixation on relative Indianness, as well as the attendant anxieties about Mexico’s supposedly race-blind policies.20 Several of the Californio representatives, however, attempt to redirect attention away from the metaphorics of racial identity and back toward the issue of “property.” Calling on the other delegates to imagine themselves as an Indian holding land title under Mexico, Noriego asks, “Suppose he had to pay an equal tax with all other persons, to sustain the expenses of the State? Would it not be most unfair to deprive him of equal privileges, when

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he had to bear an equal burden?” (70). Sidestepping the effort to define the contours of acceptable Indianness, he narrates the preservation of Mexican constitutional norms as equivalent to the prevention of taxation without representation, suggesting that pre-war precedent not only could be incorporated into the post-war regime but that failing to do so actually constitutes a violation of American national ideals. Yet as W. M. Steurt contends, allowing “taxed” “Indians” to vote “might produce incalculable evils. It would compel researches in old edicts and musty records of by-gone days of foreign lands, and in a language of which we were ignorant” (306). In other words, the insistence on the dangers of giving “Indians” the franchise functions as a discursive bulwark against having to excavate the archive of Mexican governance in California to discover who were propertyholders, a process that would manifest an alien legal geography within what was now domestic space. However, it should be noted that Noriego’s effort to resist the foreclosure of Mexican law does not make him an advocate for the California tribes in their land rights. After describing “the Indians” as “a proud and gifted race” (305), he goes on to state “he did not at all desire that the mass of Indians should vote,” only those “entitled to vote under the laws of Mexico” (306–7). Thus, if one could characterize him as arguing for a kind of mestizaje, his vision of alternatives to U.S. hegemony reaches its limits when confronted with the native masses, indigenous communities not interpellated into Euramerican political-economy. Having begun by investigating the meaning of whiteness and displaced this problem by focusing on the determination of Indian bloodedness, the convention returns to a reconsolidated racial norm, but one cast as consonant with the aims of the treaty due to the fact that it does not legally equate “Mexican” with nonwhite, even while leaving in question the racial identity of any given Californio.21 This Anglicization of California citizenship, making it contingent on a relation to whiteness, though, is qualified by an amendment offered by Thomas L. Vermeule and adopted by the convention: “Provided, That nothing herein contained shall be construed to prevent the Legislature, by a two-thirds concurrent vote, from admitting to the right of suffrage Indians, or the descendents of Indians, in such special cases as such a proportion of the legislative body may deem just and proper” (341). While acknowledging the discrepancies between U.S. and Mexican modes of political subjectivity as brought out in the debates, this provision does not so much resolve the difference as defer it, shifting the responsibility of reconciling these disparate systems onto the legislature. The California constitution registers the haunting presence of Mexican law but diffuses it as the contingent subject of future legislative action.22 Features of Mexican precedent less directly related to the political contours of citizenship and jurisdiction, though, were incorporated into post-war law.

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Two of the most notable are the protection of the separate property rights of married women and the translation of all government documents into Spanish, and in both cases, the discussion registers anxieties around the persistence of an older/other social system on land claimed by the United States and the desire to erase markers of difference that testify to the superimposition of one socio-spatial formation onto another. Described by one delegate as an “invasion upon that system which has prevailed among ourselves and our ancestors for hundreds and hundreds of years” (257), the challenge to coverture was seen by some as an irruption of alienness within the domestic space of the nation. The dynamic of racialization noted above is present in this discussion as well, with the reference to “our ancestors” suggesting the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon common law to Hispanic civil law. In contrast, Henry A. Tefft argues, “it is our duty to give a favorable consideration to any proposition which does not do marked and radical wrong to any class in California, and which deeply concerns the interests of the native Californians” (258), acknowledging the importance of adopting some aspects of the previous matrix of propertyholding as a gesture of reconciliation to the Californios in the face of their subjection to U.S. jurisdiction. H. W. Halleck responds by “deprec[iating] the distinction that has been drawn here between one portion of the inhabitants of California and another,” insisting, “I do not, in discussing any question in this body, stop to consider the claims of particular classes” (259), and returning to the logic of majoritarian rule/consent discussed earlier, Francis J. Lippitt asserts: “It is very certain we have all got to come under one uniform code of laws. The general rights of property must be considered with reference to the great mass of the population—the Americans; the smaller party, the Californians must yield” (260). Even though these arguments failed to prevent the recognition of married women’s property in the state, they further evidence the uneasiness at the heart of the project of domestication in California and the force exerted to try to eliminate the prior regime so as to shore up the legitimacy of that of the United States. The debate over translating government records into Spanish replays in miniature the larger dynamic I have been tracing. Noriego urges in favor of the proposition that “you will bear in mind that the laws which will hereafter be published, will be very different from those which they obeyed formerly,” and accepting the measure, Lippitt still observes, “In the course of ten or twenty years, everybody will speak English, and it will then be a very easy matter to have the Constitution altered in that respect” (273). Here we see the Californio effort to draw attention to the forms of destruction and transformation brought about by annexation, including the use of the law as a vehicle of that process, and the Anglo attempt to cast uniformity as inevitable, if not quite yet existent, casting that unity as a

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result of quasi-natural tendencies rather than a sustained program of stateengineered social reorganization. In some sense within Lippitt’s framework, the absorption of the Californios is not itself a violent imperial act because it retroactively will become consensual in the course of time due to the very cultural changes brought about by it. The discussion of translation signals the Californio project of institutionalizing forms of counterhegemonic memory, seeking to create room not just for Mexican precedent but for the recognition of its difference from that of the United States as well as the historical conditions of its overlay by U.S. jurisdiction. This debate also illustrates a domesticating Anglo discourse in which Californios appear as an aggregate of citizens who cannot categorically be differentiated from others and whose consent to the (Anglo-dominated) nation is taken as (retroactively) self-evident.

THE VIOLENCE OF MEMORY

If the constitutional debates illustrate Californio efforts to use the treaty’s promises as a way of intervening in the institutionalization of an Anglo vision of citizenship and propertyholding, attempting to secure legal recognition for at least elements of the prior system of governance, Antonio María Osio’s The History of Alta California (1851) takes up the treaty as a site of mourning. Less seeking to alter the shape of post-war politics than to highlight their illegitimacy, the text depicts U.S. rule as predicated on an unjustifiable rending of the Mexican nation that violated all principles of law. Its intervention is to interject a counterhegemonic “structure of feeling” into post-war public discourse, not so much debating the merits of particular legal and administrative propositions as pointing toward residual “affective elements of consciousness and relationships” for which there is no place in the new regime.23 The earliest known post-war Californio narrative of the period, Osio’s text offers a chronicle of the region from the 1810s to the 1840s, using historiography as a way of articulating the ongoing significance of California’s Mexican past by emphasizing the felt Mexicanness of the Californios as well as the lawfullness of Mexican governance in the region. As in the convention debates, though, the text’s representation of pre-war geopolitics is predicated on not just repudiating native land claims but presenting the taming of Indian wildness as evidence of the presence of civilized order prior to annexation. Arriving in Alta California in 1825, Osio held a number of important government positions in the two decades prior to the American conquest, including serving as head of the Custom House in Monterey (the capital of

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the territory), a member of the territorial assembly (otherwise known as the disputacíon), and a juror on the Tribunal Superior (the final court of appeal in the region). After the composition of his narrative, Osio returned to Mexico in 1852, taking his manuscript with him. Though in the 1870s he considered giving it to H. H. Bancroft to be part of the source materials for the History of California, he decided to leave it in the care of his sister-inlaw, Solded Ortega. The text eventually came into the possession of Osio’s daughter, Beatrice Osio de Willaimson. After passing through a few more hands over the next century, the manuscript finally was deposited in the archives of Mission Santa Clara, where it was found and translated by Rose Marie Beebe and Robert M. Senkewicz. Though the History was composed in Spanish and does not enter the print public sphere, instead remaining in manuscript form, its pose of objectivity in its strict third person narration, even when Osio is describing his own role in events, and its almost-encyclopedic attention to the details of political intrigue during the Mexican period suggest its production for a wider audience.24 Given that Osio himself had served in several different roles in the Mexican government in California, knew many of the Californios and pre-war settlers who took part in the state constitutional convention and/or served in the state assembly, and wrote his history in the city adjacent to where the California legislature was meeting, one reasonably can assume that the text takes part in the larger public debate in the period over the nature and implications of the conquest. Thus, while the History was not necessarily widely circulated or read prior to the Civil War, it still provides an important index of Californio response to U.S. political discourse and the ways it framed the pre-war past. The political instability of pre-war California rapidly comes to serve as a central trope in officials’ efforts to legitimize U.S. jurisdiction in the region, with the United States cast as a kind of quasi savior bringing order to Mexican chaos.25 In response, Osio represents the United States as grasping, deceitful, and tyrannical. In The History, the threat of American invasion appears always on the horizon, foreshadowed even in its first pages when the reader is presented with the image of “American frigates” (“under the authority of George Washington” [42]) engaged in smuggling off the California coast in 1815 (35). The stakes of Mexican nationalism within the context of U.S. encroachment, though, become clearer in the text’s description of the Jones affair. In October 1842, Commodore Thomas Catesby Jones, under the mistaken belief that the United States and Mexico were at war, docked his warships at Monterey and claimed it for the United States. While Jones soon realized his mistake and returned authority to Governor Juan Bautista Alvarado, the ceremony in which power was transferred to the United States is described by Osio in funereal terms: “Once ashore, [Captain] Armstrong [Jones’s emissary] headed for the

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governor’s home. There the true californios, people who loved their country and were proud of their nationality, were forced to witness a painful ceremony for the first time. The national flag of the three guarantees was lowered from its native flagpole so that it could be replaced by the stars and stripes. This flag was alleged to be the symbol of liberty, but that was actually a lie. It belonged to an oppressor who displayed arrogance against the weak” (209). Foreshadowing the conquest in 1846, the episode becomes an occasion for Osio to sketch a comparison between nationalisms, emphasizing the “lie” of U.S. “liberty” in its oppressive and “painful” infliction of American identity on foreign nationals. This emphasis on the “true”-ness of the Californios in their devotion to “their country” appears again in the text’s chronicling of the war itself. Californios going to battle are described as “willing to defend with one last effort the nationality which they held so dear”; “they fought like true Mexican soldiers . . . with the enthusiasm which only the defense of one’s native country can inspire” (234). Foregrounding the soldiers’ patriotic affect dramatizes the conquest as a source of public crisis and trauma. In contrast to the vision of annexation as opportunity in government accounts, as a chance to establish the legal and political stability long lacking in the region, the United States is portrayed in Osio’s narrative as opportunistically exploiting the Mexican government’s habitual lack of concern for California, later referring to the United States as an “enemy who was lying in wait” (218)—an image suggestive of a beastly predator. Furthermore, U.S. control brings not legal order but political dislocation and economic marginalization. The raising of the American flag over the California capital on July 6, 1846, inaugurates a time of mourning: “At eleven o’clock the inhabitants of Monterey experienced the sorrow of seeing the stars and stripes wave for a second time from the flagpoles . . . [T]hey began to think about the loss of their nationality and of everything they had worked so hard to create. For experience has always shown that conquerors never have been able to maintain a brotherhood with those they have conquered” (232). This narration of the war and the attendant dispossessions and inequities afterward as conquest is buttressed by the above vision of popular grief for a lost Mexican “nationality.” Casting it as a kind of familial relation (“brotherhood”) heightens the reader’s sense of the onset of U.S. rule as tragedy by retroactively constructing national unity through the narration of melancholy at its loss. Representing the war as a rupture in nationality, building his history toward the tragic loss by the Calfornios of their Mexican nativity, requires that Osio address the many revolts that occurred in the region during the Mexican period. A large portion of the text, therefore, is dedicated to the

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project of recasting political turmoil as continuity, conveying the impression of an undisturbed system of order at work in the territory despite the appearance of upheaval and dissension. The longstanding disregard of the people of California by the general government is noted rather bitterly at several points in the narrative. After describing the valiant efforts of the Californios in repelling an attack by an anti-Spanish French pirate named Hipólito Bouchard, Osio indicates, “because they were californios, they did not even receive the thanks that they deserved, for no hijo del país [native son] was recognized by the Mexican government during its different periods” (44), later adding, “There usually have been many aspirants for jobs in the different branches of the Mexican government. These people easily obtain positions for themselves, at the expense of others whose skills are ignored because they live far away from the capital” (84). Even while venomously indicting the institutionalized forms of neglect to which Californios were subjected by the general government, Osio implies an unfulfilled yearning by the people of California for national attention and acknowledgement: “the Mexican government declared itself California’s stepfather and denied it protection as if it were a bastard child” (80). Envisioning the territory as part of national family, the metaphor of disowned paternity allows for a critique of Mexican governance while simultaneously insinuating California’s quasi-organic connection to Mexico. This image also implicitly redirects the very rhetoric of blood through which Californios are disenfranchised under Anglo rule toward an elaboration of the political ties and identifications severed in the conquest. At the same time, the text recodes what amounts to proto-nationalist organizing and policy in California as merely a symptom of a broader collective desire for better treatment by Mexican federal authorities.26 After detailing the failures of the administration of Governor Manuel Micheltorena, another outsider appointee rather than an “hijo del país,” Osio observes, “Even though the californios received very little formal education because there were not schools, they had a natural talent for assessing the capabilities of their governors at first sight” (210). The irony here positions the reader to identify with the beleaguered Californios, attempting to separate popular sentiment about Mexican identity per se from opposition to the governors. In this way, armed rebellions by non-Indians against leaders sent from Mexico City represent not a rejection of political order and constitutional governance, or even of Mexican national belonging, but a profound if frustrated longing for it, expressing anger at the general government’s refusal to treat the people of California as full citizens in the republic and its promotion of a cult of personality as the basis of officeholding. In this way, Mexican nationalism can be said to serve at least two purposes in the text: highlighting the violence of the U.S. conquest by

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emphasizing the Mexicanness of California despite the tensions between the locals and the national government; and demonstrating the ways pre-war rebellions testify to an overriding desire for full inclusion into the Mexican nation, thereby challenging the representation of the region as lacking any coherent political or legal structure prior to the extension of U.S. jurisdiction over it. While most of The History is comprised of descriptions of the rise and fall of gubernatorial administrations, a substantial amount of the first third of the narrative is devoted to decrying Indian uprisings, framing its discussion of Mexican nationality and jurisdiction by repudiating native land claims. In its effort to cast California as a somewhat stable space of settlement rather than a region perpetually rent by revolutionary violence, the text relies on discussion of Native American insurgency to provide a foil for Spanish/Mexican rule, allowing the latter to be portrayed not as invasion and subjugation but as the necessary taming of the savages and therefore a source of order amidst what otherwise would be chaos. Spending several pages detailing the Chumash uprising of 1824, perhaps the largest rebellion by mission Indians, the text depicts it as merely a murderous conspiracy: “The ultimate goal was to kill the gente de razón, those who did not belong to the Indian race” (55). The reduction of the broader project of territorial self-determination to the killing of non-Indians recodes revolution as native lawlessness.27 This counterinsurgent representation of Chumash collective mobilization and its quelling by Hispanic authorities is followed by an elliptical but suggestive description of the problems of horse herding at the time: Many mares would flee and join the countless other horses which were already crowding the fields . . . For when the horses would see others, they would charge ahead and try to join them. If they succeeded, they would be lost, since it was impossible to separate them out. All that a poor man living in the countryside had to do if he wished to obtain fine horses was to tame them. He could ask permission of the owners or simply take them from among the strays. These horses generally proved to be excellent animals. (69)

Engaging in a thinly disguised meditation on the wildness of California Indians, the above alludes to a number of overlapping dynamics at work in California’s political-economy in the period: the rapid increase in horses, and the consequent extension of mission lands for grazing; the growth of a trade in (stolen) horses between tribes in different areas within and beyond California; ballooning numbers of neophytes (Indians working at the missions) escaping and fleeing to native communities in the mountains; and the rise in the use of Indian labor, either leased from the missions or secured

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independently, in the pueblos and on ranchos—a development encouraged by the granting of lands to colonists under the 1824 constitution (the same year as the Chumash revolt).28 Merging all of these phenomena in ways that metaphorically conflate Indians and horses allows the text to condense complex struggles over space and resources into a parable about taming wild, roaming creatures and regularizing the territory through coordinated strategies of domestication. Implicitly, then, The History presents Mexican law as seeking to manage a bucking bronco, harnessing populations that constantly threaten to run wild and thereby serving as a force for stability and settlement. Conflict between the Californios and the Indians appears not as a struggle over territorial control but as a confrontation between law and chaos, working to dispel the racialization of Mexicans as mestizo and the related denigration of pre-war governance as unable to differentiate public and private lands. Yet Osio also marshals the figure of the Indian in the service of Mexican nationality. At several moments, apparently out of nowhere, Indians come to the aid of the Californios in repulsing the U.S.invasion. Prior to the Bear Flag Rebellion,29 Captain Archibaldo Gillespie arrives in the territory in search of John C. Frémont, and on the way to meet him, Gillespie comes to the conclusion that he is “in danger of being attacked by the Indians,” and a group does in fact attack Gillespie and is repulsed due to his force’s greater firepower (225–26). The Indians seem to rise spontaneously out of the landscape as a response to impending annexation, as if the terrain itself were rejecting U.S.occupation. Similarly, after Sonoma had been captured by Frémont’s men, a force of Californios under the command of Captain Don Joaquín de la Torre heads toward the city to retake it, stopping overnight at a rancho midway between San Rafael and Sonoma. “At sunrise the following day, before [de la Torre] had ordered the horses saddled, he received word from an Indian vaquero that about thirty Americans from the Sonoma side were close by. The Indian told him that he had raced at full speed to bring him the news” (230). Later, someone referred to only as “an Indian” warns Andrés Pico, brother of Governor Pío Pico (1845–46), that his force from Los Angeles is being closely followed by Americans bearing a cannon (239). These anecdotes convey the impression that “the Indians,” tribally undifferentiated and stripped of geopolitical specificity, reject American advances, aiding the Californios in their efforts to retain the territory, and thereby connecting the Californios to the land by rerouting indigeneity into a validation of the Mexican regime.30 Toward the end of the narrative, Osio asserts that the bravery of the Californio soldiers “should serve as an example for other places invaded by forces from the United States” (243), but the text’s challenge to the legitimacy of American jurisdiction demands that the narrative elide the relation

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between Hispanic law and imperial violence. It recodes almost a century of invasion and forced labor as settlement by casting it as the creation of a coherently Mexican order out of indigenous chaos. Put another way, Osio’s history suggests the continuity between counterhegemony and counterinsurgency in Californio self-representation, reclaiming Mexican spatiality through the disavowal of that of indigenous peoples. As in the debates of the state constitutional convention, the validation of pre-war political structures —or more broadly the insistence on the existence of civilized governance in the region—prior to U.S. annexation requires disowning native governance, coding the assertion of native collective agency as irrational wildness. This discursive maneuver, consolidating Mexican jurisdiction at the expense of recognition of indigenous political and territorial identities, is reproduced in U.S. policy even as the latter seeks to superimpose its own geographies over the matrix of Mexican citizenship and property-law.

FROM NATION TO RESERVATION

If the Californios are cast in federal and state law as consenting citizens in ways that reinforce the abjection and erasure of pre-war legal identities and geography, the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo still remains a site for articulating alternatives to U.S. (re)mappings, for constructing emergent positions from which to critique post-war governance. As I have argued, the treaty and its promised protections serve as a figure through which to recall the violence of annexation, highlighting the disjunction between Anglo and Mexican structures of governance in a counterhegemonic effort to leverage the obviousness of U.S. modes of political subjectivity and propertyholding. In reaffirming the territory’s prior Mexicanness, however, the treaty displaces indigenous land claims. Or rather, the United States employs it as a sign of the coherence of Mexican jurisdiction when articulating Indian policy in California, forestalling engagement with native mappings. Federal policy in California takes a different form than the nation-centered paradigm organizing the Indian treaty-system. Instead, such policy is shaped by the assertion of a prior Hispanic extinguishment of native title, which underwrites a discursive dissolving of tribes into aggregates of Indians who are represented as lacking legally cognizable collective identities or inherent land rights.31 I call this formation the reservation-paradigm, marking what seems to me to be an ideological sea change in Indian policy in line with the broader strategies of interpellation at play in the region. Rather than being addressed as, in the language of Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, “distinct political societ[ies]” with which the U.S. had to negotiate,

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native peoples are depicted as collections of subcitizens for whom land may be reserved out of the public domain due to humanitarian concern for their welfare (their presumed incapacity to support themselves without government aid) or concern for public safety (their supposed tendency toward popular insurgency under charismatic leaders). While I will address the anxiety around armed popular mobilization in the next section, along with the elitist narrative of native leadership through which such fears are managed, I first want to trace how beneficence and tactical pacification, as opposed to treaty-mediated obligation, come to define the government perspective on Indian affairs in California, outlining the jurisdictional and discursive formation that emerges as a result.32 Prior to annexation, native peoples in the region were ruled under a regime markedly different from that employed by the U.S. in early national policy. The convention of using treaties as the official means of engaging with, and acquiring land from, indigenous peoples is a hallmark of Anglophone legal traditions, but under Hispanophone governance, native peoples were not understood as possessing sovereignty over particular territories. As discussed in the previous chapter, negotiations with some nonsedentary peoples were part of Spanish and Mexican policy on the northern frontier, but they were not recognized as having legitimate authority over a determinate land base. Acknowledged as distinct semi-municipal units, native villages (rancherías) were not conceived of as autonomous polities or as parts of a larger Indian national entity. The dominant feature of Indian policy in pre-1848 California was the mission. Between the beginning of the Spanish occupation in 1769 and the onset of secularization in 1834, twenty-one missions were built along the coast. Breaking up while not eliminating traditional patterns of land use and exchange, the missions inserted tens of thousands of Indians into new circuits of production as laborers, creating a “demographic collapse” in native populations as a result of exposure to disease, cramped and unsanitary living conditions in mission dorms, and the disruption of existing social systems. In the wake of secularization, appointed civil administrators replaced ecclesiastical ones and the extensive lands previously claimed by the missions were distributed through the grant process described earlier. Despite the fact that the dissolving of the mission system was justified through reference to the rights of native peoples as citizens of Mexico, they were granted legal control over very little of their traditional territory.33 When the United States formally assumed control over the territory, it did not seek to alter the basic framework of Indian affairs in the region. Writing to the secretary of the Interior, Indian agent Adam Johnson observes, “it has occurred to me that no change was made by the treaty, and that the property held in trust for the Indians by the administrators under

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the government of Mexico might properly pass into the hands of Indian agents under the government of the United States . . . Should this not be the case, then let those lands under the government of the United States become part of the public domain.” While arguing against the “wholesale land Piracy” conducted “without any color of title whatever,” Johnson’s report reflects what would become the two-part structuring logic of Indian policy in California: that U.S. jurisdiction over native territory succeeds and mirrors that of Mexico; and that absent specific legal recognition for such lands they presumptively are “public.” The mission system serves as a topos through which U.S. administrative discourse disowns prior and persistent native geopolitics, treating the latter as definitively having been wiped away by the former. Johnson notes that those Indians residing on prior mission lands “seem to consider themselves as appendages thereto, belonging to the Priests of the Mission or the owner of the Rancho.” Thus, the figure of missionization anchors a narrative of California Indians as having lost, if they ever possessed, the political cohesion of native peoples in the east. Instead, they appear as a dependent mass in need of guidance, “belonging to” a master of one sort or another rather than having land that belongs to them and over which they as a political body exert sovereignty.34 Within this ideological matrix, recognition of even the most circumscribed occupancy rights becomes tenuous. In his report “on the subject of land titles in California,” discussed earlier, William Carey Jones notes, “I understand the law to be, that whenever Indian settlements are established . . . they have a right of occupancy in the land which they need and use; and whenever a grant is made which includes such settlements, the grant is subject to such occupancy.” Refusing even this limited form of acknowledgment, Senator William M. Gwin asserts during congressional debate in 1850, “With regard to the title which Indians may have to tracts of land in California, they are disputed. They are not recognized as having any title there by the Mexican law.” This comment is offered as part of the discussion of the proposed California Land Act, which in its final version calls on the Board of Commissioners adjudicating Mexican property claims to assess “the tenure by which the mission lands are held and those held by civilized Indians,” providing a vehicle for granting their rancherías a similar status to the one they held under Mexican law. The Board, though, never actually did so, leaving Indian landholding within a political limbo nominally defined by Mexican precedent, which was itself broadly construed as having vaporized anything approaching native national governance and land tenure.35 Despite the general pattern of Mexicanizing native peoples in ways that erase their identities as polities, treaties were signed with California tribes. However, not only were they not ratified, but their negotiation actually was

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the result of a budgetary error. The treaties were less part of a clear policy initiative than an administrative mistake due to discrepancies between the House and Senate versions of the annual appropriations act for Indian Affairs. No salary was set aside for the three men appointed as Indian agents for California, but in one of the versions of the bill, $25,000 was allocated for treaty-making so the agents become treaty-commissioners.36 Moreover, looking at these treaties one can see not simply the kinds of centralization discussed in chapters 1 and 2, or even the metaphorics of nomadism discussed in the previous chapter, but a complete evacuation of political subjectivity in which the sole content of consent is submission to U.S. geographies and goodwill.37 Nine of the eighteen treaties make explicit reference to the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in terms virtually identical to those of the following article from the treaty of January 5, 1852: “the several nations above mentioned do acknowledge the United States to be the sole and absolute sovereign of all the soil and territory ceded to them by a treaty of peace made between them and the republic of Mexico” (1124). This language empties “the several nations” of geopolitical identity even as it speaks to/about them, calling on them to “acknowledge” that the land already belongs to the United States by virtue of the treaty with Mexico. In other words, a precondition of engagement with the U.S. government is that these “nations” agree to the following propositions: that Mexico was sovereign over them; that it could transfer such sovereignty to the United States; and that native peoples therefore do not possess sovereignty over lands in California. Lest this provision be interpreted as merely a declaration of exclusive alliance with the United States or even a claim of preemptive right to native lands, the treaties explicitly disavow all potential territorial claims by California tribes. The first treaty contains the following provision, which appears virtually unaltered in the other seventeen: “The said tribes hereby severally relinquish, and forever quit claim to the government of the United States, all the right, title, claim, or interest, of whatsoever character, that they, or either of them may have had, or now hold, in and to any lands in the limits of the State of California, or the United States” (1082). These texts offer no hint of the actual dimensions of the land occupied by the California tribes, in fact implying that the various groups who sign the treaties have no legally cognizable claims to any territory at all. Absent acknowledgment of some space to which these groups have the inherent right of occupancy, even if cast as shifting and nebulous as in the Comanche treaties, what is the meaning of the signature? Or more importantly, what is the legal and political status/subjectivity into which the signatories are interpellated? While there is scholarly debate over the degree to which those who signed the treaties were empowered as tribal

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representatives, the treaties themselves displace this issue.38 By denuding the signatories of all land claims that precede U.S. governance, these supposed agreements transfigure whatever kind of consent is borne by each signatory, divorcing it from the socio-spatial matrix in which it was secured and deploying it within a framework that expunges any reference to the very territorialities that make such assent significant. What remains is a name emptied of any connection to native geographies and consequently a subjectposition sundered from the right to sovereignty and self-governance such territoriality implies. Put another way, these treaties try to institutionalize tribal consent to, in the words of Worcester v. Georgia, the “annihilat[ion of] the political existence of one of the parties” (554), which as that decision suggests contravenes the basic logic of treaty-making. Thus, in many ways, these documents invert Indian treaty discourse, turning it into a means of erasing the very native collectivities to whose existence it is supposed to testify. The treaties do not leave native peoples utterly landless, however, setting aside smaller areas within the state—referred to as “districts.” In contrast to other Indian treaties, though, these texts present the reserves they grant to native peoples as U.S. largesse, carved out of the state of California and to be inhabited by multiple populations who have no clear political relation to each other. Each treaty represents a negotiation with several tribes but offers only one shared piece of territory for them to occupy, thereby implicitly dissolving the tribes into a politically undifferentiated mass. In his report to the Senate on the proposed treaties, Commissioner of Indian Affairs Luke Lea notes, “Some of the stipulations of these treaties are regarded as new, the most important of which is . . . [the tribes’] permanent settlement within the limits of a State on lands not previously owned by them. This provision, as far as I know, is without precedent.”39 Moreover, rather than asserting the supremacy of federal jurisdiction, the treaty process reinforces state authority. In their address to the people of California seeking to justify the treaties, published in the Daily Alta California on January 14, 1851, the treaty-commissioners make the following observation: “As there is no further west to which they can be removed, the General Government and the people of California appear to have left but one alternative in relation to these remnants of once numerous and powerful tribes,viz: extermination or domestication. As the latter includes all proper measures for their protection and gradual improvement, and secures to the people of the State an element greatly needed in the development of its resources, viz: cheap labor—it is the one which we deem the part of wisdom to adopt, and, if possible, consummate.”40 In addition to distinguishing the policy to be pursued in California from that of removal as conducted in the 1830s and 1840s, the commissioners

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present their work as a process of making Indians available as “cheap labor,” without any mention here or in the treaties themselves about how (or even if) such work conditions will be regulated by the federal government. Unlike the aims of the “civilization program” elsewhere, which as discussed in chapters 1 and 2 sought to transform native land tenure through training in Anglo agriculture and inculcation of bourgeois domesticity, “improvement” in this case means direct superintendence by non-natives. The treaties provide, and even encourage, unmediated access to indigenous peoples as workers in ways that seem directly to contradict the terms of the Trade and Intercourse Act and other federal measures that seek to deny state jurisdiction over native communities. The treaties divorce Indian subjectivity from indigenous mappings, producing the impression of consent but denying the existence of determinate native polities and sovereign land claims while tracking Indian populations into the economy of peonage sanctioned and systematized by state law.41 The Senate ultimately refused to ratify the treaties due to claims by state legislators that these, in their terms, “wholesale Indian donations” were on valuable mining land. While the depiction of treaty-reserved land as “donations” is part of an effort by California lawmakers to repudiate all land claims by native peoples, the characterization is somewhat apt in that it captures the constitutionally ambiguous position in which the treaties sought to place indigenous populations and the territory reserved to them. The language of the treaties and the treaty-commissioners neither clearly recognizes native peoples’ self-governance nor prevents the extension of forms of state jurisdiction over them. The signatories and the tribes they represented may have accepted the treaties because they would have provided some measure of protection, but the term “donation” speaks to the ways Indian policy in California works to delink recognition of native occupancy on particular pieces of territory from acknowledgment of sovereignty and distinct indigenous identities, increasingly casting the federal government as granting parcels of land to collections of needy Indians rather than as negotiating with political entities with their own independent and pre-existing territorialities.42 This discursive and institutional tendency becomes more pronounced in the wake of nonratification, as can be seen in the reservation system proposed and initially overseen by Superintendent of Indian Affairs Edward F. Beale.43 Although describing the Indians as the “rightful owners of the soil” (3), the plan he develops in his 1852 report to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs is ordered around pacification, pity, and missionization. The paradigm for Indian policy Beale articulates involves not merely a Mexicanization of Indian land, which abjects tribal governance and land tenure, but the implementation of a mission logic in which Indians are a

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“purely laboring class” to be ruled through “a system of discipline at once mild, firm, and paternal” (4–5). Federal policy proposes that indigenous peoples be inserted into capitalist production as cheap labor, allowing in Albert L. Hurtado’s words for “a functional reconciliation of state and federal policies in California” (147). During the 1850s, seven such reservations were created by executive order, lacking the legal stability of treaty relations or even Congressional act, but by the early 1860s, all of them had been closed due to high native mortality rates and widespread refusal to settle on them as a result of shoddy government provisioning and the relative inaccessibility of traditional food sources.44 In trying to decide what Indians should have public land set aside for them as an executive order reservation, Beale is guided by the question of which areas most need to be kept “quiet” in order to ensure the safety of white businesses and settlements.45 In pleading for more funding to create additional reservations, he observes, “I know that they starve; I know that they perish by hundreds; I know that they are fading away with a startling and shocking rapidity, but I cannot help them. Humanity must yield to necessity. They are not dangerous, therefore they must be neglected” (3). Reservations are not here a legal acknowledgement of prior occupancy, or even collective native agency, but a contingent response to “dangerous” tendencies among certain Indian populations. Safety and sympathy supersede sovereignty as ways of conceptualizing administrative response to continuing native presence. Additionally, we can see here the way that ongoing forms of indigenous collective mobilization are transposed into a counterinsurgent rhetoric of quasi-criminal menace in which it appears not as popular political agency but as the potential for lawless aggression. Beale finds historical precedent for his proposed system in “the old Jesuit mission establishments”: “Those enterprising men . . . were enabled in a short time to bring into subjection, and render useful assistants, those very tribes who are now the source of so much anxiety and apprehension to our citizens. Surely that which was attempted and accomplished by a few poor priests, is not too great a task for the mighty republic of the U.S.” (4). In addition to reconfirming the importance of Hispanic precedent in defining the legal status of native peoples, the invocation of the mission system deflects attention away from land claims and reinforces the image of the United States as providing a kind of beneficent uplift to benighted populations. After the closure of the reservations established in the 1850s, there were no more reservations in southern California until the 1870s, and prior to the expansion of official tribal recognition in the late 1970s, most of those tribes that received any federal acknowledgement of their land claims in the interim did not have reservations (still not tribally specific) until the 1890s and early 1900s, meaning that the vast majority of California tribes received no recognition of their land rights for over fifty years and many for over a century, if

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at all. Yet the absence of such acknowledgment did not mean a large-scale abandonment of traditional occupancy. When delivering the eighteen treaties to the Senate for consideration, Commissioner of Indian Affairs Luke Lea notes, “there was, and is, in my judgment, good reason to apprehend that the hasty rejection of the treaties would be followed by a general Indian war in California, disastrous to the interests of that State and the country at large.” While no “general” offensive materialized, indigenous peoples asserted their identities and geographies through targeted forms of raiding and revenge, coded in legal discourse as “crime,” and through the simple and often undocumented refusal to move, engaging in implicit and explicit forms of opposition to U.S. mappings.46 Although such movements and formations largely, in Gramsci’s terms, “have left no reliable document” (196), they leave traces in others’ accounts, marking indigenous peoples’ continued subaltern presence in ways that I will address in the final two sections.

THE GARRA UPRISING AND THE SUBJECT(S) OF INSURGENCY

One of the unratified treaties negotiated by Commissioner O. M. Wozencraft, signed at the village of Temecula on January 5, 1852, comes on the heels of a wave of native violence in the region northeast of San Diego. In fact, Antonio Garra, the supposed mastermind behind the attacks who alternately was identified as a “captain” (a term often used at the time to designate native leadership in the region) of the Indians either from San Luis Rey (Luiseños) or Agua Caliente (Cupeños), actually was being held in prison while Wozencraft was negotiating the treaty. This insurrection ostensibly led by Garra was depicted in official and newspaper accounts as a unified effort stretching across the breadth of southern California whose purpose was to murder whites.47 At the meeting called by Wozencraft to speak to all of the peoples in the area, whom he lumps together as “Cahuiya” (Cahuilla), he informs them of “their individual responsibility for all derelictions—that they had no great Captain who could order them to do anything that was wrong,” further commenting in his letter to the commissioner of Indian Affairs, “We deem it bad policy to have any one Indian exercise a controlling influence over many.” Native mobilization appears in this account as a result of a tendency toward blind obedience, a lack of “individual” judgment in which Indians simply follow the orders of charismatic leaders. The proper response to insurgency, therefore, is to capture or check such domineering figures and to instruct the people in the need for them to become independent persons, as opposed to a collection of pawns for demagogues. In the same report, however, Wozencraft indicates that

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native discontent can be attributed to the taxation of their lands, the failure to fulfill promises of protection made to them previously by U.S. officials, and resentment at the attention given by the United States to the concerns of peoples farther north (“the failing to treat with others has been a fruitful cause of the war”). Even while acknowledging broad-based structural dynamics of federal and state policy that could produce sufficient anxiety and anger among a range of native groups in the area to explain the eruption of popular outrage, Wozencraft still reduces the situation to the momentum of a misguided mass in the thrall of the “controlling influence” of one or two key actors.48 While only one of innumerable acts and campaigns of resistance by indigenous peoples in California in the decades after the U.S. conquest, the “Garra Uprising” provides a particularly rich example of how native agency is erased in post-war public discourse, highlighting not only the absence of institutional mechanisms for acknowledging native collective identities but the ways the rhetoric of counterinsurgency creates forms of subjectivity evacuated of geopolitical content and context. In discussing how and why widespread peasant insurgency comes to be represented as the result of a conspiratorial plan, Ranajit Guha notes, “when a rural society is polarized so sharply . . . , it often leads to a generalization of violence making the individuality of other local conflicts merge in the overall confrontation between the subaltern classes and their enemies,” adding that the dominant narration of such events cannot “overcome the constraints of elitist outlook and it ends up inevitably with a false attribution—that is by blaming the inversion on a pre-existing plot.”49 Casting outbreaks of violence as the result of the designs of a small set of crafty leaders allows for these movements to be imagined as exceptional and easily contained, suggesting the rogue brilliance of a few, the gullibility of the many, and the underlying stability of imperial rule if not for the actions of a small number of agitators. In the case of Indian policy in California, this elitist perspective enabled proof of the persistence of native polities on their traditional lands to be transmuted into evidence of the possibility of remaking docile Indians into productive contributors to U.S. political-economy if the few malcontents could be located and neutralized. Yet how do these texts, even in their implicit repudiation of native sovereignty, register the continued existence of indigenous socio-political formations? Or more specifically, in the absence of a text that can serve as a metonym for collective voice, how can scholars mark such collectivity? U.S. policy in California, as I have argued, forecloses the kinds of national subjectivity available in the Indian treaty-system, offering Mexican jurisdiction as the alibi for recoding native lands as “public” and refashioning Indian occupancy as based on contingent government largesse rather than a

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legal right emanating from inhabitance that precedes U.S. jurisdiction. Looking at government and other Anglo accounts of Indians in southern California during the Garra affair and afterward, one can see the overlapping rhetorical projects of Mexicanization, (re)missionization, and massification I have discussed. Such reading, however, also reveals that the fears of and responses to native violence map out the contours not just of imperial interpellation but of ongoing native struggles for self-determination, further illustrating the ways a critical commitment to negation can open the possibility for marking both the presence of alternative social formations and the force of their disavowal in national narratives. Garra was held responsible for attacks in late 1851 on the U.S. military garrison on the Colorado River and J. J. Warner’s ranch, but the fact these two sites were targeted for native assault was not surprising and certainly did not need to be explained by reference to the controlling will and oversight of a single master planner. The Quechans, who were responsible for the assault on the garrison, had been staunch opponents of Euramerican authority in the region since the late eighteenth century, closing off Spanish overland travel from New Mexico to California for several decades starting in the 1780s. Additionally, the garrison had been moved earlier in 1851 due to almost continuous Quechan harassment over the previous year, itself likely related to ongoing struggles with Anglo settlers to control the ferry trade over the Colorado. Warner had been granted possession of the area surrounding Kupa by Governor Pío Pico in 1844, having come to California along the Santa Fé Trail in 1831. Many Cupeños worked for him, often subjected to extreme forms of discipline, one visitor calling them the “worst treated slaves in the United States.” In addition to potential anger at his treatment of his laborers, there was an ongoing dispute over the ownership of a vineyard within Kupa which Warner claimed, and given the many travelers who came in the orbit of Kupa and Warner’s ranch, the most popular among the southern overland routes leading straight through the area, the Cupeños and Warner competed for business in the provisioning trade.50 From the attack on Warner’s ranch in November 1851 that supposedly marked the beginning of the campaign to the capture of Garra by Cahuilla leader Juan Antonio in December that appeared to end it, newspaper coverage consistently issued hysterical warnings about the omnipresent threat of Indian invasion and massacre, portraying what appears to have been a multivectored movement by native peoples to reclaim their lands as blind obedience to a single charismatic, mission-educated leader—Garra.51 According to news reports, in late November 1851 Garra led a force of anywhere from several dozen to several hundred Indians in an attack on the ranch of J. J. Warner, a longtime resident whose extensive property in the San Diego region had served as a hub for trade between the territories of

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California and New Mexico. Simultaneously, in what was portrayed as a related action, Indians living on the Colorado mobilized against an American military post on the Gila River. News coverage connected the two incidents, cumulatively called “the Southern Indian War,” casting them as evidence of a coordinated plot to (re)conquer the entire area from Los Angeles to Mexico. On December 3, the Daily Alta California printed a report from a San Diego correspondent, dated November 28, that begins, “San Diego county is in a blaze from the Colorado to the Pacific” (100), and another article notes “proofs that the combined Indian forces which will probably be brought against the whites extend in one unbroken and dangerous chain of tribes from Santa Barbara to the Rio Colorado” (95). Moreover, Garra was presented as the scheming mastermind of these efforts: “The force of Antonio is estimated at from 4 to 500 men; but is just concentrating, and the tribe can muster within three days at least 3,000 men” (98); “he is said to be in command of not less than three thousand Indians, which he has been over twelve months organizing” (100). His control, these accounts suggest, extends virtually unbroken from the Colorado River to the Pacific Ocean, encompassing several thousand people, all mobilized toward the goals around which he has been “organizing.”52 This focus on Garra indexes a broader discursive formation in which native peoples are cast as lacking political intelligence and initiative. On November 27, the San Diego Herald reports that Garra “received a tolerable Spanish education at the Mission San Luis Rey,” adding, “As one of the principal chiefs his power and influence over the Indians is almost unbounded” (103). The narrative of Garra’s command rests on a series of assumptions about the power of civilization and the prominence of Indian servility. By linking the array of anti-imperial indigenous movements in southern California together as the work of one man and emphasizing his Euramerican training, the newspapers make mass uprisings appear as the result of a mission-trained elite, foregrounding not communal native assertions of place but the prominent influence of Hispanophone occupation on the region, the tribally undifferentiated homogeneity of the insurgents, and the role of given “chiefs” as the primary locus of resistance to U.S. settlers and their claims. Additionally, several reports connect the movements of the Indians associated with Garra to the Californios, implying that the latter were somehow responsible for native actions and aligning Mexican and Indian interests in ways that elide the relation between the uprising(s) and indigenous assertions of sovereignty. Articles in the Daily Alta California cite the Californios as the inspiration for the (pattern of) insurgency: “the attack is instigated and urged on by the lower class of Californians” (95); “The smothered fire is breaking out in a general Indian war, excited, as Indians themselves say, by California emissaries” (107). Indigenous insurgency appears as an irrational wave of

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violence, mass surrender to the whim of a virtual demagogue, and/or a movement remote controlled by (“lower-class”) Euramericans. In terms of the assault on the ranch itself for which Garra was tried and hung, he was not even present. Warner himself testified that he had no proof that Garra played any role in the apparent uprising, and available evidence suggests Garra actually opposed the attack. The figure of Garra is employed to explain events in ways that not only strain credibility but abject the decisions made by participants. In Ranajit Guha’s phrase, “the rebel has no place in this history as the subject of rebellion”; the motivations and agency of the insurgents themselves are rendered subaltern through the fetishization of an individual who can be blamed as the cause of the uprising. Such elision, or evacuation, of popular native consciousness also occurs in the discussion of Indian opposition to Garra, which in contemporary accounts coalesces around Juan Antonio, the Cahuilla headman who captured Garra, who is cast as having the same kind of charismatic, despotic sway as Garra. In his discussion of Antonio’s role in subduing Garra, Wozencraft describes the former as “fully inflated with his self-sufficiency” and as needing to be put “in his proper position,” suggesting that from the perspective of U.S. officials the elimination of the danger posed by Garra opened up a vacuum Antonio threatened to fill. Native actions appear to depend on a cult of personality rather than collective judgments about how to respond to changing geopolitical conditions, such as efforts by the state of California to tax native rancherías and the increasing intrusion on native lands and resources by private landowners like Warner. Analyzing the overdetermined subjectivity constructed for Garra, Antonio, and other native leaders in contemporary accounts reveals the stresses within the representation of native insurgency, or rather the pressure on counterinsurgent discourse to efface the issues of territoriality and sovereignty that give rise to eruptions of popular violence.53 Rather than challenging this elitist narrative, however, historiographic accounts largely have replicated it. In discussions of Garra and the events in southern California in late 1851 and early 1852, George Harwood Phillips’s Chiefs and Challengers is the source most often cited.54 After describing traditional forms of governance in the region, decentralized networks of connection between towns—each of which was composed of a lineage group intermarried with members from other towns and in which leadership largely was passed from father to son—Phillips claims that due to the effects of missionization and disease many of the lineages ceased to exist such that “clusters of lineages were coming under the personal control of powerful, self-made leaders.” “No longer governing as traditional headmen, these leaders ruled as powerful, territorial chiefs,” marking a “change from headmanship to chieftainship” that inheres in “a shift from the right to

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govern based on consensus to the ability to rule based on power” (45). In essence, he suggests that Spanish and Mexican policy had shattered traditional society, and what emerged in its wake was a completely different system predicated on trans-town and trans-clan forms of centralized power wielded by specific leaders. Although such stark social restructuring in response to the destructive effects of imperial invasion could be plausible, the Cupeños were subjected to missionization rather late, not until after 1816. While contact with Euramericans grew rapidly after the first decade of the nineteenth century, especially given that Kupa (also known as Agua Caliente) was located on long-established travel and trade routes at the junction where the roads to Los Angeles and San Diego split, the village of Kupa had always been an amalgamation of different groups and had been at the center of an extensive network of exchange with surrounding peoples. Furthermore, in terms of mission control, the majority of Cupeños who were converted were associated with Mission San Luis Rey, one of two missions that for the most part rather than relocating large numbers of people had natives travel in from existing villages for day labor managed by a group of alcaldes (Indian overseers chosen by the missionaries) made up mostly of the traditional Luiseño leadership. Thus, the direct undermining of native socio-spatiality was minimized at the mission with which the Cupeños had the greatest contact. Additionally, Cupeño oral tradition indicates that Antonio Garra was the leader (or nét) of the kávalim clan, the most powerful of the lineages in Kupa, suggesting that he occupied a longstanding position of authority within a multiethnic space in which intermarriage likely would have produced a flexible matrix of solidarity between a range of nearby groups, and the treaty negotiated with Wozencraft identifies each of the Luiseño signatories (among which the Cupeños were included) as the representative of a particular ranchería, likely suggesting that the older pattern persisted in which each village was lead by a single hereditary leader of the dominant lineage.55 Like Wozencraft and other officials writing in the 1850s, Phillips describes the mission system as having utterly overwhelmed prior socio-spatial patterns.56 He notes the widespread anger and anxiety among native peoples in the area provoked by a range of U.S. policy choices that threaten their governance and land tenure while insistently minimizing the significance of this popular sentiment and its relationship to ongoing collective geopolitical investments. Instead, he constructs a narrative in which resistance movements are understood as the work of a series of self-made leaders who succeeded through their own magnetism in consolidating authority around themselves. Perhaps the most complete fusion of counterinsurgent discourse with the trope of (re)missionization can be found in B. D. Wilson’s report as

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Indian subagent for southern California. Appointed by Superintendent Beale in 1852, Wilson was an established landholder and served as a Mexican official in the years prior to the U.S. conquest, and his most prominent previous engagements in Indian policy were leading campaigns in 1845 against Mojave raids and in 1846 to capture native insurgents (mostly Gabrielino) and commanding the city guard organized to protect Los Angeles during the Garra affair.57 The report can be read as a response to the movement attributed to Garra, and it turns to him fairly early on as a way of casting insurgency as mission training gone wrong.58 Noting that Garra was “educated at the Mission San Luis Rey” and “a man of power” for the Cahuillas and Luiseños, the report elides the geopolitical import of indigenous assaults on white-claimed land by designating the goal of Garra’s forces as “the general massacre of the American inhabitants along the coast” (11). Depicting the reclamation of indigenous territory through force as a scene of mindless, aimless violence, Wilson reorients the discussion from persistent forms of native territoriality to the history of efforts to civilize the Indians, positioning the authority exerted by Garra (as well as similarly fetishized native leaders like Juan Antonio) as an interruption or deformation of an established process of development. The geohistorical trope of the mission serves here as a way to anachronize present land claims and to depict signs of place-based collective affect as evidence of a perverse rejection of enlightenment. Wilson muses, “I am not certain that some of the Indians do not preserve a sort of vague belief that these immense [mission] buildings . . . are ultimately to be restored to them. It is no exaggeration to repeat that the Indians lurking about the Missions . . . are the worst in the country, morally speaking” (25). A “vague belief” in the rightful sovereignty of native peoples over the mission lands is explained by reference to the moral decline that supposedly resulted from the closing of the missions eighteen years prior. All signs of the failure or refusal of indigenous peoples to fulfill the Euramerican expectations they supposedly have absorbed already through mission education are taken as evidence of their collective backsliding, and within this frame, all examples of popular mobilization can be represented as cultural and historical exceptions within a larger program through which “the Government would lead them back to the Mission system” (57). Even while registering the existence of tribal solidarity, the report rhetorically seeks to dismiss it by casting it as merely a residual and reactive phenomenon that should/will fade with proper training: “having caught the idea that they are free, . . . with none to teach them the true hopes and duties of freemen, and finding . . . that American freedom does not profit them— some such motives, I suppose, may drive them to enjoy the old and kindred associations of their tribe” (26). The Indians of southern California lack

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coherent political identities (despite continuing “old and kindred associations”) and always-already are waiting for civilization. When “viewed as a mass,” “they have a common spirit of amity for the whites”; “they exhibit in common the traits which are always looked to as the groundwork of a rapid civilization”; “they have acquired the idea of separate property inland”; and “they are . . . docile and tractable, and accustomed to subjection” (31–32).59 What does it mean to view these peoples “as a mass”? More than simply considering these populations in the aggregate as a kind of statistical unit, this phrasing points toward a central discursive mechanism of U.S. policy in California, transforming peoples into a collection of generic Indians in ways that vaporize their existence as political entities. Within this logic, the leadership exercised by captains appears less as an expression of indigenous social formations than a kind of pervasive hypnosis. Wilson observes, “Juan Antonio frequently calls home his followers; and at any time, such is the subordination among them, all, except the old and sick, would permanently leave the settlements, upon a summons from their respective chiefs,” adding, “They exercise a sort of patriarchal supervision over the domesticated, as well as the wilder classes of the nation” which cannot be compared to “any regular government, or system of law” (29). As a counterpoint to the kinds of “subordination” that supposedly characterizes the relations of the native “mass” to their “chiefs,” Wilson is at pains to detail the former’s capacity and longing for insertion into Euramerican labor systems, including references to their familiarity with “property” and “subjection” and the insistence that once reservations have been secured they may “still wish to bind themselves as servants in families, as before” (50). By casting missionization and its work regime as consensual, the report portrays popular insurgency as an irrational relapse that clouds an underlying desire for civilization, displacing the political significance of armed revolt and obscuring the coercive dimensions of his suggested policy response to such insurgencies (including the 250 soldiers he proposes to station at the borders of Indian territory to lubricate the consent of a supposedly already “docile” population [38–39]).60 The subjectivity created for “chiefs” like Garra and Antonio, the vision of their “patriarchal supervision,” provides a way of recoding continuing forms of popular geopolitical affect as a kind of infantile dependence that the United States will replace with a regular system of labor and legal order toward which the best instincts of the Indian population are directing them anyway. Although the figure of the mission per se is not featured as prominently in later accounts, the emphasis on the need to manage native leadership in order to prevent outbreaks of violence persists in official reports throughout the 1850s. In 1856, Captain H. S. Burton, commander of the garrison in the vicinity of the San Diego mission, observes that the “Indians of San Pascual

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[sic; a Diegueño ranchería] are friendly and anxious to remain so but if their lands are taken from them without scruple, they must retire to the mountains, naturally discontented and ready to join in any depredation upon the whites.” Here the concerns of the village residents appear to be central, laying out a clear relationship between the seizure of traditional land and the recourse to violence in which the administratively unacknowledged connection of native peoples to their places of occupancy can be seen as the driving force behind acts of insurgency. Burton further notes longstanding tensions between the Luiseños at Temecula and the Cahuillas lead by Juan Antonio as well as the need for different subagents for the Luiseños and the Diegueños due to their differences from each other, suggesting an awareness of the persistence of collective identities (and hostilities) that are not reducible to the whims of particular dominant captains. Yet no sooner has he gestured toward such popular sentiments than he asserts, “By making the Captains of the different villages independent of one another receiving their orders and instructions direct from the Indian Agent, none of them will have influence enough usually, to cause a general outbreak of the tribes. It must be partially owing to the jealousies that will arise among different Captains.” Burton further indicates that while Manuelito Cota, an esteemed Luiseño captain, “deserves the most cordial approbation for his management of the San Luis Rey Indians” he should not be elevated to a position of authority as “Captain General” over all the Luiseños because “if he becomes discontented he can do great harm.” The potential for mass uprisings is again attributed to the will of “discontented” leaders, whom Burton seems to imagine can have no sustained relationship with each other except mutual suspicion and jealousy. Despite the numerous kinship connections among villages and the shared circumstances of land loss Burton notes earlier, the populations of the rancherías appear here as fully enclosed by the domain and desires of their leaders, such that no trans-village solidarity—or “general outbreak”—is possible.61 Even when native voices enter government records insisting on recognition for indigenous land claims and autonomy, they are situated within narratives of impending violence that emphasize not inherent sovereignty but pragmatic appeasement. In May 1856, a southern California landowner named Isaac Williams wrote to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to submit a petition signed by Cahuilla captains. The memorial itself asserts, “From time immemorial we have lived upon and occupied the lands of and adjacent to the Pass of San Gorgonia bounded on the North by the Cajon de las Negros and on the South and West by the Coast Range of Mountains.” Noting the dimensions of their traditional land base, over which they exert authority due to their occupancy since “time immemorial,” the Cahuillas protest the increasing invasion of their territory: “Since the occupation of

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California by the Americans and particularly within the last two or three years we have been encroached upon by the white settlers who have taken possession of a large portion of our best farming and grazing lands and by diverting the water from our lands deprive us to a great extent of the means of irrigation.” The petition offers a clear expression of continuing control over Cahuilla space and the independence of the Cahuilla people, and it calls on the U.S. government to restrain citizens in ways that sound virtually identical to similar appeals coming from native peoples east of the Mississippi from the American Revolution through removal, including an invocation of treaty relations as a basis for complaint (“In the year 1850 a treaty was entered into with us by O. M. Wozencraft an Agent of the Government but the said agent failed to comply with any of its conditions”). What distinguishes this claim from those earlier ones is the frame in which it is placed. In his introductory letter, Williams explains the circumstances that led to the drafting of the petition: “Apprehension that the outbreak might be general [spreading from “the Indians on Kern River and in the Tulare Valley”] among the various tribes or nations in the Southern portion of the State, I despatched a few days since, messengers to the Chiefs of the Caweello tribes and induced them to assemble at my Rancho for the purpose, in connection with other citizens, of having a friendly conference with them.” He adds that “the ‘Caweellos’ are a large and warlike tribe and should they once become hostile are capable of doing much mischief and injury.” The documentation of Cahuilla sentiment is the result of a fear of widespread insurgency, and their expression of geopolitical identity and outrage at U.S. incursion is contextualized as an example of their “warlike” propensities, suggesting that they be mollified to prevent the “mischief and injury” that could result if their volatile passions are left to operate unchecked.62 In administrative records, the emphasis on the threat of native violence, particularly as initiated and organized by powerful leaders, works to displace discussion of the political identification and agency of native majorities as well as continuing forms of popular connection to traditional lands. The rhetoric of counterinsurgency presents such feelings of belonging to a people and a place as impossible or ridiculous in light of the history of Hispanic rule, especially as exercised through the missions. Reading against the grain of this discourse, we can expose its elitist assumptions and try to reconstruct the networks of, to quote B. D. Wilson’s phrase, “old and kindred associations” rendered subaltern by it. Making the textual marks of insurgency the litmus test of the presence of native identities and geographies, however, runs the risk of naturalizing, in Guha’s terms, “the optics of a colonialist historiography” by implicitly accepting the absence of visible opposition as evidence of the dissolution of

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collective indigenous lifeways. In this vein, Phillips claims that Antonio Garra “instigated . . . the last in a series of resistance movements that began as soon as the Spanish arrived in southern California,” crediting him with a “broader vision” than those around him. Yet while the Cupeños had no formal political status under federal law until 1875, when they were acknowledged via an executive-order reservation that was cancelled just five years later, they continued to occupy Kupa until forcibly relocated in 1903 by order of the Supreme Court, coming into political focus again as the objects of mass displacement. Their removal to the Luiseño reservation at Pala, in what has been referred to as the California Trail of Tears, illustrates the virulence and tenacity of the post-1848 program of domestication—the Mexicanizing imaginary used to foreclose indigenous peoples’ self-articulation as autonomous polities in order to subject them to U.S. propertylaw.63 More importantly, though, this violent reappearance can be read as testifying to their coherence in the interim, their sustaining of collective identity despite its illegitimacy within U.S. discourses and institutions. Observing that “the tribal real is not an enterprise of resistance,” Gerald Vizenor suggests that anti-imperial critique needs to attend to the possibility of sustained forms of indigenous socio-spatiality that do not fit official paradigms of visibility, whether they are organized around a rhetoric of nationhood or of counterinsurgency (54). Moreover, the focus on the visibility of “resistance,” particularly in the form of insurgency, imposes a gendered vision of political agency and collectivity in which men’s role as warriors is privileged in ways that erase the work of sustaining households and maintaining networks of kinship support, for which women largely are responsible. We need strategies of reading that can map the negative political space surrounding the representation of (the potential for) native violence, searching for the inverted traces of native sovereignty and selfdetermination contained in U.S. disavowals of Indian land claims—or, perhaps more accurately, in U.S. policy’s elliptical invocation of such claims in its own vision of contingent civilization, beneficence, and pacification.

IN THE RUINS OF RECOGNITION

In their 1883 report on the condition of the native peoples of southern California, termed the “Mission Indians,” Helen Hunt Jackson and Albert Kinney note that at virtually every ranchería they visited they would be shown collections of semi-official papers dutifully collected by residents: “Every fragment of writing they had ever received, which could by any possibility bear on their title to their lands, they had carefully preserved; old

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tattered orders from army officers thirty years back, orders from justices of the peace, etc., all worthless of course, but brought forward with touching earnestness to show us” (6). This massing of moldering documents in the effort to prove the legal validity of their land tenure illustrates the sustained attempt made by domesticated populations to make their political identity and territoriality intelligible within U.S. discourses and the interestedness of U.S. protocols of acknowledgement. Put another way, what is at issue here is not the administrative failure to register the existence of these groups or their land use, for these accumulated texts compose an impressive archive of awareness that testifies to the fact of interaction with individual officials in various capacities over an extended period who themselves seem to treat these populations as de facto polities—as coherent and more or less selfgoverning entities. Instead, what is at stake here is the ways recognition is regulated, the discursive and policy structure that renders these records “worthless” in securing a viable institutional status for these groups’ selfmappings. Yet even though these moments of engagement cannot establish legally meaningful claims given the workings of U.S. law in California, together they form a kind of patchwork that itself suggests the contours of a consistent geopolitical presence that neither can be incorporated into U.S. jurisdiction nor fully and finally erased. The assembling of such fragments (or, in Adorno’s terms, remainders) points toward both the ways U.S. legal geography is haunted by alternative formations and how the latter are screened, reorganized, and/or disowned in their insertion into prevailing codes of recognition.64 The subjectivities constructed for domesticated populations do not so much repress as transmute prior forms of socio-spatiality, narrating them as lack, deviation, and disability while insisting on the obviousness of U.S. modes of representation (in both its senses). In this chapter, I have argued that the Californios are incorporated into U.S. citizenship in ways that seek to displace pre-war Mexican precedent and propertyholding, casting them as consensual participants in U.S. political processes while implicitly preserving their foreignness through Indianization—depicting the population as all potentially mestizo. Reciprocally, indigenous peoples are Mexicanized, denied sovereignty over their lands due to their supposed surrender of it at some point during the time of missionization. They enter U.S. legal discourse as willing workers and recipients of government benevolence on intermittently established, and often quite temporary, reservations or as insurgents in the thrall of a small set of exceptional leaders. Rather than trying to recover lost/erased geopolitical dynamics, or even to document their survival, my aim has been to explore how U.S. administrative discourses try to disjoint existing structures of territoriality by enfolding peoples into political identities that confirm the coherence of U.S. jurisdiction. I have sought to

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show how this absorption forecloses possibilities for self-determination by unilaterally determining what counts as relevant in defining governance and land tenure. Thus, I have adopted a negative stance, less arguing for the legitimacy of particular self-representations by internalized populations, or trying to establish by positive proof the validity of various claims to land and sovereignty, than tracking the ideological and institutional pressures shaping the process of recognition and the production of political legitimacy within U.S. hegemony. In concluding, I would like to turn to a text that thematizes these concerns, the testimonio of Julio César, a Luiseño whose oral history was one of many collected as part of the research for H. H. Bancroft’s massive History of California. César’s story appears not in the report of an Indian agent or another official but as an individual account in a privately financed historiographic project whose terms are dictated by the series of questions Bancroft’s assistants used in conducting their interviews.65 Neither an explicit critique of U.S. policy (like Black Hawk’s autobiography or Osio’s history) nor an announced act of advocacy (like the Cherokee memorials or Seguín’s memoir), César’s narrative stands at the threshold of interpellation. More observational than oppositional, it explores the negative space surrounding state discourses, not so much challenging or appropriating their terms as illustrating how prior and persistent social formations slide into and out of administrative view. Referring to himself as a “pure-blooded Indian, born at San Luis Rey, around the year 1824,” César begins by offering a damning account of mission life after secularization (469). Much of this description is devoted to detailing the lands and goods claimed by those appointed to run the mission from 1834 until the Mexican-American War. César’s somewhat laconic tabulation of the enormity of this systemic expropriation deserves quoting in full: When Don Pío Pico left his position as administrator of San Luis Rey he bought Santa Margarita rancho, including the cattle that belonged to the mission. I think he gave 500 head of cattle in exchange for the rancho. After he bought Santa Margarita, he took two more ranchos, which were San Mateo and La Flores. When Don José Antonio Estudillo stopped being administrator he took a rancho San Jacinto, livestock and all. No one ever found out if it really belonged to the Indians. Don José Joaquín Ortega, during his administration, took possession of nearly everything that belonged to the mission, but he did not take any of its land. It was said that Señor Ortega left the mission stripped bare, taking everything, including the dishes and cups. (470)

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Secularization here equals privatization, creating an administrative ecology in which native land tenure is displaced from view. The question of Indian claims to the ranchos seized by administrators is not so much resolved as ignored, made irrelevant. Property functions here as bitter irony rather than a vehicle of enlightenment, illustrating how the subjectivity constructed for the neophytes (Indians associated with the missions) as trainees being prepared for civilized landholding and governance abetted a program of wholesale theft. Inverting the image of ownership as improvement, César’s account highlights the ways the pursuit and patenting of land depended on a wanton disregard for the welfare of resident Indians and a structural abjection of native land tenure such that it is made administratively worthless, denuded of political or legal significance. While discussion of the malfeasance of administrators occupies the foreground, elliptical allusions to native rancherías pepper his narrative, registering relative Luiseño autonomy at various sites without providing a substantive picture of them. He explicitly notes the “large Indian population” which had occupied Pala and Temecula, the presence of many nonChristianized Indians at Pauma, and the continuing occupation of Potrero and Agua Caliente. Such indigenous settlements are not recognized legally and references to them in the text occur in the interstices of Euramerican geographies and histories, either appearing as part of a list whose purpose is to enumerate those “ranchos” that belonged to the missions or incidentally in stories about conflicts between Californios and Americans during the war. The narrative also offers no details of daily or political life in these places, with the exception of the observation that “Don Manuelito” “is now the chief of the Indians from the Potrero” (475). He briefly mentions the existence of these rancherías and intimates that a few had been lost, but he conveys very little information, if any at all, about what took place in these villages, their relation to each other, or the process by which some ceased to be under native control.66 Even more ambiguously, he observes at several points that Indians had left the mission or had stopped recognizing the authority of administrators (“the Indians were already living outside the mission” [470], “Indians no longer served the mission” [471], “the Indians had stopped obeying orders, unlike during the old days” [474]), but his account does not indicate to where they went or what sorts of governance replaced direct Euramerican management. These moments point toward a field of Luiseño socio-spatiality that is both preserved during and affected by the events of the previous three decades; the contours and content of this domain, though, remain obscure, a shadowy presence just beyond the document’s reach. César’s account replicates the dynamics of U.S. policy in

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its failure to investigate the internal dynamics of the rancherías but with the difference here that they are indistinct yet pregnant with unarticulated geopolitical import rather than being displaced as immaterial except as potential sites of uprisings. In this way, the narrative hints at the survival of other ways of mapping the social terrain that have been devalued or rendered subaltern but that also intrude upon dominant geographies of jurisdiction and propertyholding, appearing in the form of unreconciled, ambiguous, nonidentical fragments. Moreover, César seems to point toward the operation of an informal nexus of communication that continues to connect him to those rancherías even when he is away from them. “Later, in the time of the Americans, the goods that were left at the mission were divided up among the Indians at Pala, but I did not get anything because in 1849 I had gone to the placer gold mines in the north, and I never returned to San Luis Rey” (15). If he “never returned,” how did he know about what transpired in the area? Absent threatened insurgency, events around the former missions likely would not have been covered by local newspapers, so his awareness of the fate of the mission’s goods implies the existence of a means of transmitting information that is not dependent on officials or the print public sphere. Such a decentralized network unsanctioned by, and to some extent at odds with, imperial policy conforms well to the notion of “rumor.” In “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography,” Gayatri Spivak observes, “the power of rumour in the subaltern context” takes on its significance in contrast to “the authoritative writing of the law”: “rumour is not error, but primordially (originally) errant, always in circulation with no assignable source. This illegitimacy makes it accessible to insurgency” (23). From this perspective, it offers an alternative to administrative discourse, suggesting forms of collective memory, communication, and occupancy delegitimized within imperial governance. Given its ellipticality, his discussion of the rancherías can be seen as participating in the broader structure of rumor, gesturing toward a realm of meaning and experience that exceeds the nugatory references that appear within the “authoritative writing” of Euramerican policy. Yet in César’s narrative, the topics circulating through rumor are not connected to “insurgency,” instead indexing the kinds of information and social relations marginalized in the fetishization of insurgency as the principal mode of native agency and self-representation. While implying sustained forms of native collectivity and occupancy, the testimonio draws attention to their tenuousness in terms of the difficulty of sustaining them in the face of legalized forms of Californio, and then Anglo, occupation and the relative (in)visibility of such continuity

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within Euramerican discourses of jurisdiction and property. Reinforcing this sense of indeterminacy, César’s account concludes with the following: Now I find myself as poor as always, in this placed called Tres Pinos. I am never lacking food or drink, because I am always willing to work. The people are very fond of me and they help me by giving me work so I can earn a few reales. I was married in Los Angeles. I have a son, and here in Tres Pinos a grandson and two grandaughters. (475)

In noting his continued poverty, his abbreviated description of his conditions of “work” seems tinged with a somewhat wry tone, implying that the civilized benevolence of the “kind” people who “favor” him is part of the larger process of seizing native lands and labor that has led to him to Tres Pinos. Such a charge, however, is only intimated at best. Additionally, while to some extent perfunctory given the kind of survey-like questions presumably asked by the interviewer, the reference to his wife and children seems to gesture toward the future, and when combined with the passing references to continued Luiseño occupation of a largely unnamed elsewhere and the intimation of continued communication with those living near the mission despite his distance from it, this ending reinforces the sense of a persistent network, but one whose dimensions and internal dynamics remain opaque. In many ways, the narrative keeps pointing back toward what it is not saying, or more precisely to the elements of native life and history which do not fit into the frame of the history Bancroft is writing. Luiseño sovereignty and land tenure cannot be located positively in the text but instead inhabit it as rumor. In this way, César’s testimonio cannot serve as proof of the maintenance of “tribal political influence or other authority over its members as an autonomous entity” nor the continuous inhabitance of “a specific area,” which are two of the main criteria laid out in current regulations in order to qualify for federal recognition as a tribal entity.67 This failure as potential evidence, though, is not a sign of the narrative’s inability to serve as a tool through which to leverage the geographies of U.S. imperial domesticity. On the contrary, texts such as César’s direct attention toward the ways residual forms of political identification and territoriality are registered within the semiotics of U.S. law as meaningless, appearing as extraneous or empty data without legal relevance when not transposed into more administratively agreeable terms (like nationhood, citizenship, wandering, and insurgency). What is at stake here, then, is tracking the process by which institutional and ideological force is exerted through apparently non-coercive modes of state action, including establishing how the claim that coercion is absent is itself a vital part of implementing the imperial structure of U.S. jurisdiction, in the antebellum period and after.

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Centering critical discussion of the U.S. absorption of once-alien peoples on explicit aggression and armed violence would make the dynamics of expropriation and displacement that I have addressed appear exceptional, whereas I have sought to explore the ways such tendencies are engrained in the structural mechanisms of U.S. governance. If the state to some extent is defined by its monopoly on the valid exercise of violence, I am suggesting that the project of domestication depended (and depends) on the state’s monopoly over the process of defining what constitutes political legitimacy, subjectivity, and land tenure.68 To this end, my readings have focused less on demonstrating the illegitimacy of U.S. policy in Indian removal or in the wake of the Mexican-American War than on illustrating how the U.S. territorial imaginary, with its ostensibly fundamental commitment to republicanism, disallowed the possibility of engaging in sustained and substantive ways with the socio-spatial formations of already resident peoples. While I have shown how imperial formulations and strategies differed from region to region (and population to population) depending on the political and economic matrix that preceded U.S. claims and the way that the land legally became part of domestic space, I have argued that the determinate selfevidence of U.S. boundaries and the consensuality of U.S. rule were the interdependent organizing principles of U.S. policy across these discrepant sites. In challenging the operation of contemporary Indian policy in Canada, Dale Turner observes, “One can hope that indigenous understandings of nationhood arrived at through dialogue with the state will give rise to forms of governance that respect indigenous participation . . . [;] by engaging in political dialogue, they will at least be able to speak for themselves,” yet he also earlier notes, “The idea of Aboriginal participation, though, is a complex problem precisely because the relationship remains embedded in a colonial relationship” (79, 70). The process by which internalized populations and their lands were “embedded” into the administrative discourses of the United States in the antebellum period has been the focus of this study, illuminating the ways institutionally meaningful speech was managed so as to reinforce the validity of U.S. jurisdiction and the unity of national space. At the same time, however, the various nonfictional texts produced by domesticated groups cannot be understood as simply extensions of the imperial logics to which they responded but must be read as efforts to exert collective agency over political representation, even as the contours of such interventions were shaped in differing and complex ways by the demands of U.S. policy, internal differences (especially of class), and already existing imperial dynamics in the region. In these texts we see the appropriation, adaptation, deconstruction, displacement, reconfiguration, and repudiation of U.S. terminologies and mappings, each straining to make alternative

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socio-political formations intelligible within U.S. legal norms while contesting the authority arrogated by the United States to serve as the ultimate arbiter of what constitutes a viable geopolitical claim or identity. Moreover, U.S. administrative accounts of all sorts are littered with the traces of the self-representations of internalized groups as well as the evidence of profound disjunctions between their persistent political topographies and official schemas and subjectivities. Such moments in government texts as well as the texts produced by these groups testify to the survival of modes of placemaking, political order, and collectivity for which there was no place in U.S. mappings. In doing so, they provide not so much a standard against which to assess the authenticity or validity of later social formations as a means of prying open the process by which U.S. geopolitics is made self-evident in the story it tells to itself, revealing the ongoing presence of countervailing possibilities banished but neither entirely erased nor dislodged by administrative topologies. Ultimately, self-determination inheres not in the official U.S. recognition of the lands, identities, traditions, precedents, or governments of those peoples absorbed by it in its (re)production of domestic space but instead lies in breaking the United States’ stranglehold on the allocation and adjudication of sovereignty “within” its borders. Negating the legitimacy of its control over legitimacy, illustrating the force embedded in its institutionalized narratives of acquiescence, may allow for the possibility of a substantive dialogue whose terms are not always-already set beforehand and, thus, for speech that can say what previously had been disavowed as worthless, irrelevant, and impossible.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION 1. On the history of Oneida land claims against the United States, see Hauptman, Conspiracy of Interests; Hauptman and McLester; Lehman; Shattuck; and Taylor, Divided Ground. For recent investigations of the concept of “sovereignty” as claimed and exercised by nation-states, see Agamben; Barker; Biersteker and Weber; Doty; Hardt and Negri; Ivison, Patton, and Sanders; Lomnitz; Moreton-Robinson; Nelson, A Finger in the Wound; and Ong. 2. In employing the term “subjectivity,” I am drawing on Foucault’s conceptualization of discourse as “a field of regularity for various positions of subjectivity” (55). While not presenting sovereignty as merely a discursive phenomenon, I am suggesting that we can think of administrative processes as working in a similar way to produce a geopolitical formation, which also gives rise to particular kinds and configurations of subjectivity. On the recent history of the Supreme Court in its curtailment of tribal sovereignty, see Aleinikoff; Wilkins, American Indian Sovereignty. On the complex configuration of contemporary native sovereignty in its articulation with federal, state, and municipal governments, see Barker; Biolosi; Cattelino; and Silvern. Numerous native intellectuals have explored various dimensions of the inherent and unceded sovereignty of American Indian peoples. Examples include Allen, Blood Narrative; Cook-Lynn, Why I Can’t; Jaimes, The State of Native America; Lyons; Powell; Smith, Conquest; Warrior, Tribal Secrets; and Womack, Red on Red. In examining the dynamics of state recognition, I am building on the work of many others, including Taiaiake Alfred, Vine Deloria and Clifford Lytle, Eva Garroutte, Paige Sylvia Raibmon, and Dale Turner. 3. As Matthew Sparke argues, more than “serv[ing] as instruments of the state,” maps, “as technologies of spatial abstraction, . . . are indeed constitutive of the state,” adding, 197

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5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

NOTES TO PAGES 5 TO 8

“cartography contributes to the enframing of the abstract space around which this whole unstable complex of the state effect coheres” in ways that conceal “the state’s precariousness” (9, 11). See also Anderson, Imagined Communities; Brady; Brückner; Harvey; Lefebvre; Mignolo, The Darker Side; Ó Tuathail. I use the term “domesticated” to mark the making of domestic space as a process, one whose violence is suggested by the word’s animalizing connotations. While discourses and practices of marriage, homemaking, kinship, and the gendered division of labor are part of this forced incorporation, my analysis will focus less on the issue of “domesticity” per se. For discussion of the role played by figures of the home in U.S. imperial imaginings, see Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity.” For a very different understanding of the imperial work of dominant visions of homemaking, see Rifkin, “Romancing Kinship.” These examples are by no means definitive of U.S. “domestic” imperialism in the period. Other possible areas of study I do not address in the chapters include native peoples in New England, the Haudenosaunee (Six Nations or Iroquois Confederacy), the métis populations on the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, the citizens of France and Spain who remained in Florida and the territory covered under the Louisiana Purchase, the post-1848 status of New Mexico and Arizona, and native peoples on the Great Plains. My case studies are meant to sketch a broader set of imperial logics and strategies, to illustrate the varied ways these administrative maneuvers played out and were opposed in different regional circumstances and with respect to discrepant populations, and to offer these specific examples as a way of working out certain methodological and theoretical approaches that might productively be applied in other cases. The scholarship employing the notion of manifest destiny is incredibly voluminous. For recent overviews of the concept, see Greenberg; Johannsen, “Meaning”; Stephanson. For a recent effort to think “violence” as a structuring force of settler presence erased in accounts of national history, see Blackhawk. As developed in the work of Antonio Gramsci, hegemony refers to the “compromise equilibrium” between those in power and those over whom they govern in which “the dominant group,” itself defined largely but not exclusively in economic terms, integrates elements of “the general interests of the subordinate groups” into policymaking so as to maintain the latter’s tacit assent to be governed in this way (161, 182). This dynamic is aided by regular rituals of explicit popular affirmation like elections. Thus, a given hegemony allows for a certain amount of contention between groups over the shape of state policy (“a determinate balance of forces” [155]), but Gramsci further notes that the operation of the state can be characterized as “hegemony protected by the armour of coercion” (263). In the wake of the Civil War, the United States does become colonial in the conventional sense, conquering lands that then are governed as possessions of the United States but that remain legally and geopolitically distinct from the territory of

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the nation. The imperial logic of incorporation I address, though, does not simply disappear, but instead remains as a way of thinking about the difference between domestic and colonial space, as a conceptual and discursive platform for opposing explicitly colonial projects, and as a fall-back position once formal decolonization becomes a prominent part of international politics and law in the mid-twentieth century. 10. There is a vast literature and ongoing scholarly discussion about the nature, genealogy, and scope of “republicanism” in the early United States, particularly as distinguished from or complexly enmeshed with liberalism. For select moments in and surveys of this debate, see Appleby; Burgett; Kramnick; McCoy; Rodgers; Shalhope; Waldstreicher; and Warner, The Letters. My aim here is less to take up a position within this critical nexus than to suggest that the conversation itself, both in the early republic and contemporary criticism, largely is predicated on a certain set of geopolitical assumptions about the character and contours of national boundaries. For a similar, though differently configured, argument about the assumptions undergirding what he provocatively refers to as “the Republican Megasynthesis,” see White, The Backcountry. For discussion of the hostility in the early republic to the idea of colonies, see Bowen; Buell; Greene; and Greeson. Scholarly debate continues over whether or not to refer to the United States as “postcolonial” in light of its revolution against its prior status as colonies. For those who advocate such a designation, see Buell; Hulme, “Including America”; Schueller and Watts; and Watts. For those who question or reject this formulation, see O’Brien, “Place of America”; McClintock, 2–17; Sharpe; Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine, 255–84; and Warner, “What’s Colonial.” While I would agree with those who warn about the dangers of investing “postcolonial” with too much normative weight as a signifier for liberation, the designation of the United States as “postcolonial” encourages an analogy to twentieth-century decolonization movements that deemphasizes both the imperial force of U.S. articulations of jurisdiction and national space and the degree to which independence was an argument among Anglos over who would gain access to native-controlled resources (be it land, fishing areas, the fur trade, control over waterways, etc.). Also, in using the term “national” I am less interested in investigating U.S. nationalism as, in Raymond Williams’s terms, a “structure of feeling” that links citizen-subjects to the state than in exploring the kinds of geographies called forth by specific state discourses, projects, and processes. For theorizations of the connections and disjunctions between national feeling and the state apparatus, see Anderson, Imagined Communities; Bhabha, “DissemiNation”; Balibar and Wallerstein; Berlant, Anatomy of National Fantasy; Calhoun; Castronovo and Nelson; Hobsbawm; Joseph and Nugent; Nelson, Finger in the Wound; Nelson, National Manhood; Waldstreicher; Wald, Constituting Americans. 11. For discussion of geographic literacy in the early republic and visual representations of national boundedness, see Brückner. On policy in the backcountry and foreign

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13.

14.

15. 16. 17.

18.

19.

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relations on the borders prior to the 1840s, see Barnes; Cayton, “Separate Interests”; Cayton and Teute; Dunaway, The First American Frontier; Hietala; Hinderacker; Hurt; Jones, License for Empire; Lewis, The American Union; Meinig, vols. 1 and 2; Murrin; Nobles; Owsley and Smith; Sheehan, “The Indian Problem”; Skaggs and Nelson; Tucker and Hendrickson; Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians; White, The Backcountry; and White, Middle Ground. This briefest of glosses cannot do justice to the differences among and within European colonialisms in North America. I will address these patterns in greater detail in chapters 2, 3, and 4. For an overview, see Seed. For discussion of the uneven emergence of treaties as the primary mode of official English policy prior to the American Revolution, see Banner; Calloway; Den Ouden; Hinderacker; and Jones, License for Empire. On the confrontation between U.S. and Mexican systems of landholding, see Griswold del Castillo; Haas; Langum; Rosenbaum; Sánchez, Telling Identities; and Weber, The Mexican Frontier. Looney, 168; Peterson, Writings, 494. My reading of Jeffersonian ideology and policy has been influenced by Dimock; McCoy; Murrin; Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire; Owens; Tucker and Hendrickson; Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians. For efforts to trace the genealogy and usage of the term “empire” in the American colonies and early republic, see Kilian; Pocock, “States, Republics, and Empires.” Peterson, Writings, 519. Peterson, Writings, 519–20. Peterson, Writings, 520–21. For complementary critiques of the limits of treaty consent, see Alfred; Cheyfitz, “The Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute”; and Jones, License for Empire. For contrary readings of the treaty system that emphasize its mutuality and recognition of native polities, see Allen, “Postcolonial Theory”; Cook-Lynn, Why I Can’t; Konkle, Writing Indian Nations; and Williams, Linking Arms Together. On “socio-spatial formations,” see Soja. Within international law, “autonomy,” in a somewhat Orwellian twist, implies that a given people is recognized as relatively self-governing but still under the jurisdiction of the country “within” which it is located. See Lâm. Rather than employing the term in this specific sense, I am drawing on its broader connotation of freedom from superintendence by others. On “metapolitical authority,” see Rifkin, “Indigenizing Agamben.” The full text of the Declaration is available on the United Nations website at http://daccessdds.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N06/512/07/PDF/N0651207.pdf. The concept of “indigenous peoples” has developed as an identity within international law in response to the assertion by numerous “substate” populations that the right of self-determination for “peoples” contained in several United Nations covenants is applicable to them on the basis of their longstanding history as autonomous collectivities on lands over which states have extended their jurisdiction. On indigenous internationalism, see Anaya, Indigenous Peoples; Ivison, Lâm; Patton,

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20. 21.

22. 23.

24.

25.

26.

27. 28.

and Sanders; Morris; Nelson, A Finger in the Wound; Niezen; Quesenberry; and Trask. For a valuable critique of the kinds of abstraction that can characterize internationalist endeavors like the U.N. Declaration, see Allen, Blood Narrative, 195–220. Although I am focusing on those internalized by the United States, the Declaration also could serve as a framework for approaching populations outside U.S. borders who had their political-economies reconfigured by the United States to suit its diplomatic and trade objectives. Examples in the antebellum period could include native Hawaiians, the Japanese, the Chinese, and residents of countries in Latin America and the West Indies. The imposition by the United States of a model of independent foreign nationhood conducive to free trade—the militarized exporting of the ideologies of boundary making at play in domestic policy—could serve as the topic of a complementary study to this one. On these other sites, see Burnett, “The Edges of Empire”; Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods; Goudie; Greenberg; Hietala; Kame’eleihiwa; Linnekin; Merry; Rifkin, “Debt”; Ruskola. On negation and the refusal of state logics as tactics within contemporary forms of native political engagement, see Simpson, “On Ethnographic Refusal.” My turn to Adorno in the context of self-determination and subaltern studies owes a great deal to Asha Varadharajan’s work. My use of “nonidentity” and “remainders” also can be seen as consonant with the theory of “haunting” developed in Gordon. For examples of such studies, see Bellin, Demon; Bergland; Bross; Carr, Inventing; Maddox; Michaelson; Murray, Forked Tongues; Peyer; Sayre; Scheckel; Walker; Wertheimer; and Wyss. For studies that focus more on questions of governance, but that still tend to underplay the dialectical relation between divergent Euramerican and native geopolitical frameworks, see Konkle, Writing Indian Nations; Krupat, Ethnocriticism; and Murray, Indian Giving. For a countervailing focus on self-conscious “retraditionalization,” see Donaldson. For examples, see Justice; Womack, Red on Red; and, in a more limited way, Warrior, The People and the Word, 49–93. On the importance of a turn to nationalism in native literary studies, see Weaver, Womack, and Warrior. “Beloved” is a translation of the Cherokee term for elders, men and women, who traditionally were seen as sources of wisdom and authority, and “Chickamauga” refers to those communities of Cherokees who refused to negotiate with the American revolutionaries and engaged in active combat against the United States into the 1790s. See Justice, 27–42. I should note that I chose Justice as an example because he and I both write about the Cherokees but also because his study is perhaps the most fully developed response to the growing call over the past fifteen years to use indigenous concepts as crucial elements in scholarly analysis. For other discussions of native nationality as fundamentally non-statist, see Alfred; Smith, Conquest; and Turner. Justice also notes that the emergent bureaucratic structure of Cherokee governance in the 1820s excluded women as political agents and that Cherokees committed

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31. 32. 33.

34.

35. 36. 37.

38.

39.

NOTES TO PAGES 19 TO 25

to the civilization program became the “dominant political force” in the Nation (39, 65). For an argument for the use of “peoplehood” as a central matrix for American Indian Studies, even as against nationhood, see Holm, Pearson, and Chavis. See Aldama; Brady; Pérez,The Decolonial Imaginary; Pérez-Torres; Saldívar; and Saldívar-Hull. For an exception that addresses the accretion of competing political claims, see Alarcón. For a critique of Anzaldúa’s use of Aztecan genealogy as a problematic fetishization and pastoralization of “Indianness,” see Sáenz, 84–86. Pérez-Torres, 34. Brady, 6. The idea of performing indigenous difference is drawn from Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition. For further discussion of the insistence that indigenous peoples articulate themselves within stereotypical notions of alterity in order to gain public acknowledgment and sympathetic support from non-indigenous publics, see Allen, Blood Narrative; Brown; Deloria, Playing Indian; Garroutte; Ivison, Patton, and Sanders; Niezen; Raibmon; and Tuhiwai Smith. For similar formulations, see Desmond and Domínguez; Giles, “Transnationalism”; Murphy, Hemispheric Imaginings; Muthyala; Rowe, “Nineteenth-Century”; Saldívar, Border Matters; Singh and Schmidt, “On the Borders”; Wald, “Minefields and Meeting Grounds”; and Wilson, Reimagining the American Pacific. For the development of these figures, see Anzaldúa; White, The Middle Ground; Gilroy; Pratt; Jehlen; and Bhabha, “Of Mimicry.” For a discussion of “translation” as a way of understanding the incorporation of populations into alien forms of governance and land tenure, see Cheyfitz, Poetics. On the role of transoceanic trade in U.S. expansion, see Anderson, The Indian Southwest; Hall; Hietala; Tucker and Hendrickson; and Weber, The Mexican Frontier. For examples of recent work connecting empire in “domestic” and “foreign” space, see Brickhouse; Gruesz; Kazanjian; Stephens; and Streeby. On the notion of a “field imaginary,” see Pease. On the critique of migrancy as an organizing paradigm within postcolonial studies, see Loomba; Ong; Sharpe; and Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine. Additionally, the approach to placemaking and political identification I am suggesting is not equivalent to a focus on the local or simply pursuing greater specificity in the study of particular groups/locales, tropes which appear routinely as part of calls for transnational analysis. For examples, see Mignolo, Local Histories; PérezTorres; Schueller and Watts, “Introduction”; and Wilson, Reimagining the American Pacific. As Doreen Massey suggests, “what is specific about a place, its identity, is always formed by the juxtaposition and co-presence there of particular sets of social interrelations” (168). While often indirectly alluding to a particular (logic of) scale, the invocation of locality or specificity does not itself reveal the geopolitical “sets of social interrelations” in which one is situating a given community or area. Addressing the Ojibwe assertion of hunting and fishing rights on land claimed by

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40.

41.

42.

43.

44.

45. 46.

Wisconsin, Steven E. Silvern forcefully illustrates the impact of administrative and judicial scale setting: “The state embraced a set of normative geographical assumptions about the scale structure of federalism and state political authority which denied and excluded unsanctioned geographical scales, and spatial and political difference within its boundaries” (663). My point is that the issue of what scale is being used and who has the authority to set it should be central to our ways of theorizing U.S. empire and that calls for analysis with a smaller scope or more fine-grained approach do not address such questions. While offering a sympathetic critique of transnationalist tropes within American Studies, Anne Goldman’s Continental Divides repeats the problem of scale I describe in her use of the notion of “regions,” offering a robust reinterpretation of the geographies of American literature but taking the territorial frame of the nation as more or less a given. As Mathew Sparke suggests, the “emancipatory possibilities [of indigenous forms of self-representation] stem less from a postnationalism than from a multinationalism, an insistence that as First Nations these peoples also have discrete, territorially defined claims to sovereignty that, in some cases, transcend today’s international border and in all cases go back long before the Cartesian colonizaton of regional space by cadastral and national borders” (103). For a discussion of the importance of attending to nonfictional forms of textual production as sites of collective self-expression, see Brady; Konkle, Writing Indian Nations; Padilla, My History; Sánchez, Telling Identities; and Warrior, The People and the Word. For examples of the critical effort to open the category of literature and the scope of literary analysis to include forms of oral cultural production, see Ortiz; Sarris. For a problematization of this strategy, see Wood. For a sustained discussion of native peoples’ non-ironic relation to the language of U.S. governance, as against the conception of “mimicry” in postcolonial theory, see Allen, “Postcolonial Theory”; Warrior, The People and the Word. In Sovereign Selves, David J. Carlson explores how U.S. imperial logics come to inform native self-understandings. He addresses questions of individual consciousness that I tend to bracket, but in doing so, he tends to engage in certain methodological fusions that I seek to forestall in the questions I have posed. Namely, Carlson often presents writings as transcriptions of the authors’ consciousness rather than as complex public negotiations within existing discursive and ideological formations, and he also tends to take the most archivally visible examples of native perspective as representative in ways that efface questions of class, the shifting interface between publication and institutions of governance, and the politics of literacy. For differing definitions and descriptions of the work of subaltern studies, see Beverley; Guha, “On Some Aspects”; Mallon; Rodríguez, Latin American; SaldañaPortillo; and Spivak, “Subaltern Studies.” Gramsci, 172, 195. On the “national-popular,” see Gramsci, 130–33, 204–5, 418. On “subaltern classes,” see Gramsci, 52–55, 196–200.

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47. Guha, “On Some Aspects,” 37, 40. 48. Gramsci, 196. As John Beverley notes, “the admittedly paradoxical intention of subaltern studies itself is to displace the centrality of intellectuals, and what intellectuals recognize as culture and the written record, in social history and policy generation. This means being skeptical about seeing the literary intellectual as subaltern, even when it is the case of anticolonial intellectuals” (42). 49. Increasingly critics have been employing subaltern studies, and postcolonial theory more broadly, as a way of addressing the position of African Americans within statesanctioned projects of containment, deprivation, and violation. While seeking neither to rank oppressions nor to suggest that African Americans in the nineteenth century simply were part of the national public represented by U.S. governance, I do want to suggest that the use of the term “subaltern” to indicate the depth and breadth of antiblack institutionalized racism can end up defining U.S. imperialism in ways that extend the black/white binary and implicitly reinforce the territorial imaginary of the nationstate, obscuring the stakes of other groups’ assertions of sovereignty and in particular the challenge they pose to the naturalization of U.S. boundaries. More specifically, I am concerned with the propensity within American literary studies to collapse the politics of sovereignty into that of citizenship—conflating the struggle for autonomy from the state’s jurisdictional or financial control with that for access to the nation’s political and economic resources. For examples of the use of subaltern studies within African American literary studies, see Carr, “From Glory”; Elliott; Hartman; Macleod; and Mostern. On the black/white binary, see Perea. For examples of efforts to think beyond or against citizenship in African-American literary studies, see Gaines; Gilroy; Mostern; Stephens; Sundquist; and Warren, “Appeals for (Mis)Recognition.” For discussion of the complex relation between native and African American histories, see Brooks, Confounding; Forbes; Miles and Holland. The notion of internal colonialism can perform a similar kind of elision/ incorporation, presenting different groups inhabiting the United States as mutually subjugated by state-instituted racial ideologies. For examples of this dynamic, whether explicitly referencing internal colonialism or implicitly adopting its logic, see Burnham; Cherniavsky; Doolen; Rowe, Literary Culture; San Juan, Jr.; Wald, Constituting Americans. For alternately configured critiques of the use of internal colonialism as a way of conceptualizing race in the United States, see Omi and Winant, 44–46; and Pérez-Torres, 23–55. For discussion of the problems in depicting indigenous peoples as a “minority” within the nation, see Cook-Lynn, Why I Can’t Read; Deloria and Lytle; Smith, Conquest; and Wilkins, American Indian Sovereignty.

CHAPTER 1 1. American Indians were not made U.S. citizens en toto until the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act in 1924 (Prucha, Documents, 218). By traditional, I do not mean

NOTES TO PAGES 38 TO 42 205

2.

3.

4. 5.

6.

7.

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 culture and governance, see Alfred; Deloria and Lytle; Ortiz; Turner; Warrior, Tribal Secrets, 87–98; and Womack, Red on Red. For particularly rich accounts of both the power and pitfalls of nationalism as a discourse/practice of native collectivity in the present, see Simpson, “Paths”; and Warrior, “Native Critics.” The process of drafting the Cherokee Constitution was completed in 1827, but it was not officially ratified and implemented until the following year. See Laws of the Cherokee Nation, 76; McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence, 407. The Cherokees were among the first tribes with whom the federal government signed treaties, both after the end of the Revolutionary War and the adoption of the Constitution—the Treaty of Hopewell (1785) and the Treaty of Holston (1791). Furthermore, Georgia’s attempts to assert control over Cherokee land and Cherokee resistance to these efforts, which will be detailed later, resulted in the Indian Removal Act (1830), which was crucial in the “extinguishment” of Indian title east of the Mississippi, and the cases of Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) and Worcester v. Georgia (1832), both of which continue to be key precedents in federal Indian law. Also, due to the number of English speakers and writers within the Cherokee government, it generated a number of documents in English for textual analysis. For a complementary account of nationhood among the Creeks in the early nineteenth century, see Saunt. “Memorial” is the term that was used at the time for petitions to the U.S. government of all kinds, and the Cherokee national government sent numerous memorials to the president and to Congress. The particular one from which I quote is part of a protest of the Treaty of New Echota, a document supposedly indicating Cherokee consent to removal, which I will discuss at greater length in the final section of the chapter. For other similar discussions of the treaty-system, see Allen, “Postcolonial Theory”; Cook-Lynn, Why I Can’t; Williams, Linking Arms Together. 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: Dunaway, “Rethinking Cherokee Acculturation”; Hill, Weaving; Perdue, Cherokee Women; Persico; Reid, A Law of Blood (especially 29–34); Reid, A Better Kind of Hatchet; Strickland, Fire and the Spirits; and Sturm. My analysis of Indian policy differs from accounts that distinguish between “good” and “bad” law. For examples of this kind of legal scholarship, see Frickey; and Norgren. For a discussion of the ways in which federal, especially Congressional, authority over Indian tribes cannot be justified through any current theory of governmental or legal legitimacy, see Williams, “Legitimation and Statutory Interpretation.” On the Proclamation of 1763 and the history of Indian-British relations before the Revolution, see Banner, 10–111; Calloway; Dowd, War Under Heaven; Hinderacker; Hurt, 3–27; Jones, License for Empire, 1–119; Robertson, 3–27; and White, The Middle Ground, 223–365.

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8. Horsman, Expansion, 9; Prucha, Documents, 8–9; American State Papers 1:13; Prucha, Documents, 9. On the Chickamauga insurgency, see Hatley, 216–28; Justice, 34–38; McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence, 20–33; and Mooney, 61–79. For a careful consideration of Knox’s discourse on Indian affairs, see Carr, Inventing, 22–57. On the development of Indian policy in the early republic, see Banner, 112–90; Barnes; Cayton, “Noble Actors”; Cayton, “Separate Interests”; Horsman, Expansion; Hurt, 103–32; Jones, License for Empire, 120–86; and Prucha, American Indian Treaties, 21–155. 9. Prucha, American Indian Treaties, 38, 69. On officials’ participation in land speculation schemes both before and after the Revolution, see Banner, 100–7; Dunaway, The First American Frontier, 51–86; Hauptman, Conspiracy of Interests; Robertson; and Wallace, Jefferson, 21–49. For discussion of the legal and logistical incoherencies generated by the provision in the Articles, see Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, 268; Prucha, American Indian Treaties, 36–38. 10. Prucha, Documents, 14–15, 17–20. On the provisions of the 1793 act, see Horsman, Expansion, 62. In 1796, it again was changed: the boundaries of Indian country were clarified and the civilizing fund was reduced to $15,000 per year. Ending the pattern of passing temporary legislation on this subject, the Trade and Intercourse Act of 1802 reiterates the provisions of previous acts but sets no end-date for itself. The full text of the 1802 act can be found in Laws of the Colonial and State Governments, Appendix 33–42. It continues in force with only minor alterations until 1834, when it was revised (Prucha, Documents, 64–67). 11. Horsman, Expansion, 110. 12. In the case of the Cherokees, the government’s civilization program was interpreted within the existing framework of Cherokee gender relations, such that women, who traditionally tended the fields and gardens, welcomed tools to ease their labor. Since hunting was traditionally a male endeavor, men’s role in securing much-desired European goods had skewed the gender balance and had made men more crucial to Cherokee economies, leaving women more dependent on them for items considered basic to Cherokee life. The interest in farming and housekeeping showed by the civilization program, then, lent women’s work a greater prestige, partially reversing the trend of the previous several decades. See Perdue, Cherokee Women, 115–34. 13. For the text of the Removal Act, see Prucha, Documents, 52–53. Efforts by federal officials to convince native peoples to exchange their lands for territory west of the Mississippi had been a prominent part of Indian policy since Jefferson’s administration. In fact, Congressional authorization for such a trade, which was deemed outside the legal parameters of the treaty-system per se, was given in 1804 and reaffirmed in 1817 (Banner, 193; McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence, 215). On the history of removal efforts prior to 1830, see Garrison, 13–33; McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence; Owens; and Wallace, Jefferson, 206–40. On the cultural matrix of removal, see Maddox. For the text of the compact with Georgia, see Laws of the Colonial and State Governments, 188–91. On the history of the compact, see Phillips,

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14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

Georgia, 15–38. For a copy of Georgia’s resolution, see Cochran, 51–62, and for the text of Georgia’s laws, see Laws of the Colonial and State Governments, 195–229. For an overview of the lead up to removal and the passage of the law, see Satz. On the charge that the majority were not truly represented by the Cherokee government, see Register of Debates in Congress, 21st Cong., 2nd sess., 1020, 1086, 329, 1094. Further quotations from the debates will be cited parenthetically. For examples of official responses by the Cherokee government to this contention, see Moulton, Papers, 154–57, 360–62, 451. Many of the anti-removal speakers quoted from the writings of Jeremiah Evarts, an officer of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, whose serialized essays, published under the pseudonym “William Penn,” became a major part of the wider public debate over removal. For reprints of the “William Penn essays,” see Evarts, Cherokee Removal, and for Evarts’ biography, see Andrew. Congressman Evans inquires, “is there any remonstrance against the voluntary removal of these tribes? Is there an objection to it from any quarter, unless it is to be accomplished by coercion, or force, or withholding from them that protection which we are bound to afford?” (1038). Prior to these cases, the Supreme Court had addressed the status of native lands in Fletcher v. Peck (1807) and Johnson v. M’Intosh (1823). Neither of these cases, though, involved an Indian tribe as a party to the suit but were actions among whites. See Cheyfitz, “Savage Law”; Garrison, 73–102; Norgren; Robertson; White, Marshall Court, 703–711; Wilkins, American Indian Sovereignty, 27–35; and Williams, The American Indian, 309–24. For literary critical readings of the Cherokee cases, see Konkle, “Indian Literacy,” 460–71; Scheckel, 100–7; and Wald, Constituting, 22–39. Quoted in Phillips, Georgia, 75. For a discussion of the Cherokee cases in light of the history of intense state opposition to Supreme Court appellate jurisdiction over state judiciaries, see Johnson, The Chief Justiceship, 81–84. By the time that Cherokee Nation was filed, Georgia had already refused to honor a stay of execution by the Supreme Court in the case of a Cherokee arrested under the state’s new laws. For discussion of the case, State v. George Tassels, see Garrison, 103–24; Harring, 25–34; and Norgren, 95–98. For the correspondence between Principal Chief John Ross and William Wirt, the Cherokees’ lead attorney in the case, see Moulton, Papers. Though a majority agreed that the Cherokees could not sue in the Supreme Court on original jurisdiction, there was little agreement as to any other substantive legal point. While Marshall’s was the official opinion of the Court, two justices wrote concurring opinions that challenged Marshall’s reference to the Cherokees as a “state” (Justice Johnson calling the Cherokees a “race of hunters” and Justice Baldwin claiming that “there is no plaintiff in this suit” [22, 31]), and Justices Thompson and Story filed a joint dissent. In stark contrast to Marshall’s opinion, Thompson and Story proclaim, “it is their [the Cherokees’] political condition that constitutes their foreign character, and in

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22.

23. 24.

25. 26. 27.

NOTES TO PAGES 51 TO 55

that sense must the term foreign, be understood as used in the constitution. It can have no relation to local, geographical, or territorial position” (55). Despite the Court’s refusal to rule on the substantive question presented by the Cherokee Nation, Principal Chief John Ross expressed a measured optimism about the decision: “Upon the whole, I view the opinion of the Court as regards our political character and the relations we sustain towards the United States, as being conclusively adverse to the pretended rights which have been asserted by Georgia over us, under the countenance of the President” (Moulton, Papers, 217). While some recent scholarship has praised Worcester for the ways in which it “affirmed American recognition of Native American sovereignty” and “theoretically equipped Native American nations with legal protection,” I am more skeptical of its supposedly salutary aims (Norgren, 142). See also Frickey; Garrison; and Wilkins, “Quit-Claiming the Doctrine of Discovery.” The text of the relevant law can be found in Laws of the Colonial and State Governments, 220–23. For discussion of the background to Worcester, see Garrison, 169–76; Norgren, 112–17; and Phillips, Georgia, 79–81. Georgia also refused to send counsel to the Supreme Court in this case. For examination of Georgia’s role in the nullification crisis, see Ellis, 102–22; Phillips, Georgia, 66–86. For discussion of the legal aftermath of Worcester, from the decision to the pardons, see Garrison, 190–96; Norgren, 123–28. For an account of the role that the ABCFM played in getting the missionaries to relent, see McLoughlin, Cherokees and Missionaries, 296–99. Moulton, Papers, 241. In another letter, Ross expressed hope that the brewing crisis with South Carolina would force federal action against Georgia (Moulton, Papers, 267–68). The 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 U.S. between those who agreed to abide by the Treaty of Holston (1791) and those who did not—the Chickamaguas—who were beaten back by U.S. forces during the 1790s. See Hatley; McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence, 20–32; and Reid, A Better Kind of Hatchet. For a map and list of Cherokee towns and town formations in the early eighteenth century, see Hill, Weaving, 68. For discussion of Cherokee culture and history in the eighteenth century, see Hatley; Mooney, 31–82; Perdue, Cherokee Women; and Reid, A Better Kind of Hatchet. See McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence, 128–67; Wilkins, Cherokee Tragedy, 37–51. See McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence, 206–59; and Wilkins, Cherokee Tragedy, 81–96. See Laws of the Cherokee Nation, 5. All other references to specific statutes will be drawn from this volume and will be cited parenthetically by page number. Given the greater formalization of Cherokee governance at this historical point, I will refer

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28.

29.

30. 31.

32. 33.

34.

to the full Cherokee legislative body as the “General Council,” a term which encompasses the “National Council” and the “National Committee” which over the course of the 1820s would become the two halves of a bicameral legislature. Accounts by missionaries and travelers suggest the continued importance of clans and towns long past the point when the centralized government claimed to have superseded them. For examples, see Dunaway, “Rethinking Cherokee Acculturation,” 182; Perdue, Cherokee Women, 144; and Strickland, 79. Laws of the Cherokee Nation, 6–19, 34–49. My description of the laws’ composite picture of Cherokee life has been aided by Dunaway, “Rethinking Cherokee Acculturation”; and McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence, 277–330. For a history of Cherokee slaveholding, see Perdue, Slavery. Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought, 38, 42. Taiaiake Alfred’s description of contemporary tribal governance is relevant here: “the public sphere comes to be dominated by people who conform to the criteria for leadership imposed on Native communities, while those who meet the indigenous criteria for leadership remain secluded in the private realm of traditional life in the communities” (Peace, 30). McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence, 284. Between 1817 and 1824, the phrase “By order of the National Committee” appears on forty-five of sixty-two laws. For discussion of Sequoyah’s invention of the syllabary and its subsequent dissemination, see McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence, 350–65. For discussion of the ways in which the history of Sequoyah’s invention has been narrated by whites and natives, see Krupat, Red Matters. On the translation and publication of the Cherokee laws, see Strickland, 103–19; Laws of the Cherokee Nation, 81. For a statistical analysis of literacy circa 1835, see McLoughlin and Conser (especially the table on 682). I am not suggesting, though, that writing brings about the loss of an authentic Cherokee identity or that writing is somehow antithetical to the expression of Cherokee collective agency. As Maureen Konkle rightly argues in “Indian Literacy, U.S. Colonialism, and Literary Criticism,” “The assumption underlying the belief that true Indian identity . . . is always associated with the scholar’s traces of a preliterate past is that when Indians engage in the practice of writing, they undermine their own identity” (458). For similar critiques of the equation of Indian writing and cultural inauthenticity, see Murray, Forked Tongues; Ortiz; and Womack, Red on Red. The Standing Committee was populated almost exclusively by members of the emerging, predominantly mixed-blood elite (McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence, 407). From 1819 onward, the President of the National Committee, and later Principal Chief of the Nation, was John Ross, who himself could not speak Cherokee (Wilkins, Cherokee Tragedy, 206). On Ross, see Moulton, John Ross. The Cherokee Phoenix, the official national newspaper, reported on January 1, 1831, that the composition of the General Council was as follows: “The Legislature consists of two branches styled the National Committee and Council, the former number 16

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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, 698). Due to Georgia laws, the Cherokees 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 General Council dating from the mid-1820s. Used a great deal in Cherokee historiography as well as in writings in the period, the designation “full-blood” (or “mixed-blood” for that matter) is a bit of 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 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 McLoughlin and Conser, 693; Perdue, “Clan and Court”; and Sturm, Blood Politics. For broader questioning of the use of “blood” as a way of conceptualizing Cherokee identity in the period, see Justice. 35. Laws of the Cherokee Nation, 15, 31. The phrase “National Council” refers to a legislative body within the larger General Council. However, before the law of 1823 that makes the “concurrence” of the Committee necessary to pass legislation, there is no legal distinction between the National Council and the General Council. On the persistence of consensus decision making in the General Council, see Champagne, 122–23, 134–43; and McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence, 277–301, 326–49. Committee members likely took part in annual General Council debates, as suggested by a law passed November 2, 1820, providing “one dollar per day” for Council members and “two dollars per day” for “each Committeeman” “during the sitting of the National Council” (15). Historiographic arguments that the Cherokees 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 Duane Champagne argues, “The power of the Cherokee political consensus can be seen most clearly in the dismissing of leaders who favored removal” (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.

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36. Though towns become more geographically diffuse over the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, the idea of the town as the central vehicle of Cherokee decision making, including its autonomy and operation via consensus, remained a crucial part of Cherokee life. Households continued to affiliate with a town councilhouse to which people would travel, even over great distances. See Hill, Weaving, 93; McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence, 385–86; Perdue, Cherokee Women, 144–51. In fact, many towns moved on the Trail of Tears as units and recreated themselves in the west, where many place names reflect the old town names (Sturm, 11). 37. McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence, 285. 38. For discussion of the effects and meaning of these acts with respect to extant Cherokee notions of law and matrilineal kinship ties, see McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence, 139–43; Strickland, 77–79; and Wilkins, Cherokee Tragedy, 40–41. 39. On gender relations, matrilineality, and women’s sexuality among the Cherokees, see Fogelson; Leacock; and Perdue, Cherokee Women. 40. In fact, the acts of districting in 1820 themselves can be interpreted as an attempt to sever national processes from clan influence: the principal headman in each town had been chosen by a women’s council made up of a Beloved Woman, a respected elder, from each of the seven clans. See Dunaway, “Rethinking Cherokee Acculturation,” 179. Furthermore, some evidence suggests that the representation from towns to the General Council prior to 1820 may have been organized by clan (Sturm, 41). 41. On “property” as a particular relation to land use, see Cheyfitz, Poetics. 42. For additional evidence of noncompliance, see Perdue, Cherokee Women, 144–51; Strickland, 81–83; McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence, 366–411. Perdue notes in relation to the lack of cases in the Cherokee courts having to do with polygamy, as well as other crimes, “Either the Cherokees were exceptionally law-abiding or a dual system of jurisprudence existed in which some people, perhaps most, applied customary methods of social regulation to a traditional code of behavior and others followed the laws of the republic” (Cherokee Women, 151). 43. The text of the Cherokee Constitution can be found in Laws of the Cherokee Nation, 118–30. For discussion of Georgia’s and the federal government’s response to it, see Phillips, Georgia. For discussion of Osage constitutionalism, and its borrowings from the Cherokees, see Warrior, The People and the Word, 49–93. Warrior emphasizes the ways the drafting of their constitution served as an expression of Osage peoplehood in the context of U.S. imperialism, and while I would not disagree, my reading of Cherokee constitutionalism is focused less on the ability to express peoplehood than the struggle over whose version of it will be institutionally sanctioned and the kinds of ideological, administrative, and economic pressures influencing that process. 44. The section of Critique from which I quote is a revised version of the earlier essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 45. Laws of the Cherokee Nation, 67. Letter quoted in McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence, 391. For discussion of mass Cherokee movement against the missionaries,

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see McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence, 366–87. As McLoughlin observes, “The rebellion [which reached its peak in 1827] came from the bottom up, from a widespread popular uneasiness over the policies of certain national leaders. Its immediate cause was the effort of the National Council to force the adoption of a written constitution for the nation in 1827” (Cherokee Renascence, 366). 46. This intention is suggested by three pieces of evidence: reading backward from the delegates chosen, who were overwhelmingly English-literate mixed-bloods (McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence, 394); noting the removal of White Path from the General Council by the Committee in 1825 (White Path later serving as one of the members of an opposition council critical of the constitutional convention; Laws of the Cherokee Naiton, 67); and a survey of the names of the candidates, in which fifty-one of eighty have regular Christian names, suggesting mission exposure (education or conversion) as opposed to those with less Christianized names, like “Sleeping Rabbit” or “The Hair” (Laws of the Cherokee Nation, 73–76). 47. In 1826, the General Council passed a law proclaiming, “That no person who disbelieves in the existence of the Creator . . . shall be eligible to hold any office under the government of the Cherokee Nation, nor be allowed the privilege of his or her testimony in any court of justice” (77), which also appears in the Constitution (128). 48. On the reconciliation councils, see McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence, 394–95. While not signing the reconciliation agreement negotiated with some of the rebellious chiefs, White Path was elected as a member of the National Council in 1828 (McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence, 407). Anxiety about popular disruption of government routines is further evidenced by the passage on October 16, 1828, of an act to build a partition in the Committee Chamber in order to prevent communications between spectators and legislators which the statute claims have “retarded” Committee business (Laws of the Cherokee Nation, 89). 49. Cochran, 334. All other memorials quoted are from this volume and will be cited parenthetically. In May of 1838, the military was sent to Cherokee territory to enforce the treaty, commencing the Trail of Tears upon which approximately one-quarter of the Cherokee population died. Perhaps the clearest historical account of this process can be found in Wilkins, Cherokee Tragedy, 264–90. However, Wilkins is decidedly biased toward the treaty party. See also Moulton, Papers, 332–85. For demographic consideration of the number of fatalities on the Trail of Tears, see Thornton, 63–76. 50. For a different discussion of the rhetorical strategies at play in the memorials’ appeals to the civilization program, see Denson, 15–51. He emphasizes their appeal to friendship and good faith and effort to present Cherokee nationhood as less a threat to the United States than a mark of the success of its policy of aid, rather than focusing on the ways the texts are suffused by the internal tensions of Cherokee governance. 51. In Denson’s reading of Cherokee national discourse, he offers more of a recognition of its control by an elite (that such texts “should not be taken to reflect all

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Cherokees’ understandings of themselves and the United States”), but he still explains the “ideas and language that they employed” in the memorials primarily through reference to the fact that “[t]hese writings were meant to persuade nonIndians,” instead of as a function of the dialectical relation between elite Cherokee governance and U.S. imperial pressure (12).

CHAPTER 2 1. See Norgren. 2. Cornfields also were important parts of native subsistence and trade, but here Marshall is making a distinction between what he presents as civilized and savage forms of land use. On native farming in the western Great Lakes region, see Kay; Murphy, A Gathering; Sleeper-Smith. The area I am describing as “the western Great Lakes” extends from the Wabash River to just west of the Mississippi and from the Missouri River north to Green Bay. The Wabash serves as the eastern limit because in the wake of the Treaty of Greenville (1795) it replaced the Ohio River as the officially recognized boundary between U.S. public lands and Indian country. For efforts to delimit “the Great Lakes” or subsets of this category as semi-coherent regions, see Skaggs; Sleeper-Smith, 11–22; Tanner, 3–8; White, Middle Ground, 1–49. On the shared cultural patterns of peoples in the region, see Callender, Social Organization. 3. For differing discussions of such processes, see Cayton and Teute; Cook; Dowd, Spirited; Hinderaker; Holmes and Hart; Murphy, A Gathering; Peterson and Brown; Skaggs and Nelson; Sleeper-Smith; White, Middle Ground; and Williams, “Fur Trade.” I have chosen the phrase “trans-tribal” over the more familiar “pan-tribal” because the latter seems to me to connote a coming together of different peoples while the former more strongly emphasizes phenomena which transect, and perhaps underlie or even organize, processes of tribal identification/differentiation. My argument, then, takes issue with the assumption that in trading with Euramericans native peoples became “dependent” on them. For discussion of how native political economies can interact with capitalist exchange in fairly autonomous ways, see Albers, “Labor and Exchange”; Anderson, Indian Southwest; Hatley; Kay; Murphy; Murray, Indian Giving; Ray; Sleeper-Smith; Whelan; and White, “Encounters.” 4. See Drake; Eby; Hagan; Nichols; Wakefield. A government-mandated tour through eastern cities was arranged as part of an effort to impress those deemed responsible for the “war” with the awesome and undefeatable power of the United States. Black Hawk became such a popular figure that some newspapers began carrying (often fabricated) accounts of his doings called “Blackhawkiana.” See Jackson, 11–13; Scheckel, 107–111. 5. Black Hawk’s words were recorded by Antoine LeClaire, a Potawatomi interpreter who had been employed by the U.S. government in the region for several years, who

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7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

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then gave the manuscript to John D. Patterson, a local newspaperman, to edit. For critical commentary on the text’s production, see Bellin, “How Smooth”; Brumble, 39; Mielke; Murray, Forked Tongues, 68–69; and Wallace, “Black Hawk’s.” Bellin, “How Smooth,” 488, 500, 487, 498. I would not offer my interpretation if available evidence did not suggest that the idea for the text was Black Hawk’s and that the content of the narrative was also his. See Jackson, “Introduction,” 24–31. On the connection between as-told-to texts and native cultural forms and agency, see Brumble; Sands; and Womack, Red on Red, 51–67. I would like to thank Katherine Biers for helping me to clarify this point. For examples of scholarship that draws on the “middle ground” paradigm, see Bellin, Demon of the Continent; Cayton and Teute; and Hinderacker. On the importance of native storytelling as a form of political self-representation, see Brant; Sarris; and Womack, Red on Red. See Guha, “On Some Aspects” and “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency.” On native autobiography as definitionally outside the sphere of “tradition,” see Krupat, For Those, 21. On the use of “traditional” forms of storytelling in Euramerican media, see Brumble. On “tradition” in Black Hawk’s narrative, see Boelhower; and Sweet, “Masculinity.” Both critics, though, tend to discuss tradition as a closed system specific to a particular people rather than a set of regional regularities that changes over time. In the Great Lakes region and along the Mississippi, numerous creole and métis communities emerged in which Euramerican traders, their native wives, and the descendents of such couples would live in active communication and exchange with surrounding native villages but separate from them. The existence of such distinct spaces meant that métis children tended not to be folded back into native communities, even while remaining part of native kinship networks, therefore not becoming a native elite as in the case of the Cherokees. The contrast between the matrilineality of Cherokee kinship and the patrilineality of most Great Lakes peoples may help explain these differences, as most intercultural couplings were between white men and native women. See Brown and Schenck; Dickason; Eccles; Edmunds, “Unacquainted”; Faragher; McDonnell; Murphy, A Gathering; Peterson, “Many Roads”; Sleeper-Smith; Thorne; and Widder. Susan Scheckel argues that the text stages “a conflict in which the Indian no longer fights for a place in the land of his fathers but rather for his place in the history of (white) America,” allowing white readers in some sense to fight with Black Hawk in a battle already lost and thereby assuage their guilt without changing the outcome (114). Yet this reading does not explain why Black Hawk would seek to tell his story in the first place nor does it address the attempted intervention into public discourse performed by the text’s insistent critique of the treaty-system and the explication of native strategies of placemaking that, as I will show, suffuse the narrative. For discussion of contemporary reviews of the text, see; Jackson, 25; Mielke; Scheckel, 123–24.

NOTES TO PAGES 81 TO 90 215

14. LeClaire is listed as a translator for the treaties of 1830, 1831, and 1832. See Deloria and DeMallie, 2:1252; Kappler, Indian Treaties, 310, 350. On Patterson, see Jackson, “Introduction”; Krupat, For Those, 28–53. The process of translation is invoked even more dramatically by the printing of the dedication in the Sauk language preceding its appearance in English (36). For an alternative reading of these markers of translation as exoticizing, see Scheckel, 113. 15. On testimonio, see Beverley; Gugelberger; Saldaña-Portillo; and Williams, Other Side. 16. For discussion of the circumstances surrounding the treaty of 1804, see Drake, 49–62; Eby, 44–47; Esarey, 69–73, 100–1; Hagan, Sac and Fox, 16–25; Nichols, 21–28; Owens; Wallace, Prelude. 17. This historical sketch draws on Eby; Hinderacker; Murphy, A Gathering; Skaggs and Nelson; Tanner; Thorne; and White, Middle Ground. 18. For the text’s representation of prior Sauk relations with the Spanish, French, and English, see 45, 51, and 53. 19. Kappler, Indian Treaties, 74–75. 20. On the role of medals in the text and the region, see Johnson, “Peace.” 21. The “right of occupancy” legally is guaranteed even in such a blatant and blanket statement of the doctrine of discovery as Johnson v. M’Intosh (1823). On variegated land use by the Sauks and other native peoples in the region, see Kay; Murphy, A Gathering; Sleeper-Smith; and Thorne. 22. For other moments at which this issue appears, see 72, 89, 100, 103, 104, 107, 142. For an alternate reading of such moments, see Bellin, “How Smooth,” 499. 23. Kappler, Indian Treaties, 19, 76. The latter clause was the subject of great debate between the Sauks and the United States: first, in terms of the interpretation of “their property,” the Sauks largely construing this to mean as long as the land remained under U.S. jurisdiction and the United States meaning until the territory was sold to settlers; and second, over the campaign of U.S. officials, especially the Governor of Illinois, to remove the Sauks prior to such sale of the land around Saukenuk. See Drake, 102–16; and Hagan, 109–12. 24. Kappler, Indian Treaties, 207. 25. American State Papers, 1:684–85. Jefferson also links hunting with a natural decrease in native populations (Esarey, 333). On the relationship between farming and the market in Jeffersonian, and other agriculturalist, thinking in the early republic, see Sweet, American Georgics, 97–121. For the influence of Jefferson’s ideas and ideals on policy-makers in the region, see American State Papers, 1:653–54; Esarey, 54, 154, 492–93; Faragher; Horsman, Expansion; Jones, William Clark; Owens; Steffen; and Takaki. On the capitalist conception of space as an empty container, see Lefebvre. 26. Women were largely responsible for mining and gathering maple as well. See Kay, Murphy, A Gathering; My sense of the text’s gender dynamics is slightly different than Timothy Sweet’s emphasis on its portrait of warrior masculinity. See Sweet,

216

27.

28.

29.

30.

31. 32.

NOTES TO PAGES 90 TO 94

“Masculinity.” For discussion of the hunting/planting cycle, see Callender, “Sauk,” 649–650; Gussow, “Anthropological” and “Ethnological”; Marston, 148–153; Murphy, A Gathering; Nichols, 10–12; Sleeper-Smith; and Wallace, Prelude, 10. Esarey, 37. On the “Great Sauk Trail,” see Drake, 94–95; Eby, 69–70; Hagan, 101; and Nichols, 35, 65. By 1815, Thomas Forsyth, the agent to the Sauks, still is noting “the baneful influence of foreign emissaries in the character of traders” (American State Papers, 2:79), and as Major Morrell Marston notes in an 1820 report, Indians in the region still perceived virtually everyone involved in the fur-trade as British (Marston, 178–79). The commander’s choice to deny credit was not idiosyncratic but was in fact legally mandated by the federally regulated factor system of the Indian trade, which was one of the reasons for ending the system in 1822. See Marston, 176–77; Nichols, 76; Prucha, American Indian Policy, 66–101. On the way to the treaty conference, the Sauk principal chief died, and his brother who inherited the position saw the previous chief’s death as an ill omen, deciding not to continue the journey (82–83). The Sauks who had taken up residence on the Missouri prior to the war, however, did negotiate a peace treaty in 1815. See Kappler, Indian Treaties, 120–21. Until the Treaty of Ghent that ended the War of 1812, Mackinac was under British control, and it continued to serve as an important outpost for British traders after the war. See Black Hawk, 69, 85–86, and 97–98. Prior to the winter of 1828–29, there had been no white settlers within fifty or sixty miles to the east of Saukenuk, and one of the main draws for settlers was Ft. Armstrong, the United States creating the demand for land near the village. See Drake, 102; Hagan, 123; McKenney and Hall, 2:69–74; Murphy, A Gathering, 71, 162; Tanner, 123; and Wallace, Prelude, 29. Whites were also drawn to the region as part of a rush in the 1820s to the lead mines north of Saukenuk. See Kay; Murphy, A Gathering. The process of selling plots in Saukenuk began in 1829. Virtually all of the whites who had taken up residence in and around it over the previous year had not purchased the land, and therefore, their dispossession of the Sauks clearly violated the terms of the treaty. The main purchaser in 1829 was George Davenport, the local trader who bought an astounding amount of land—in excess of two thousand acres. See Black Hawk, 104; Eby, 77; and Nichols, 88–90. The Sauk agent at the time, Felix St. Vrain, expressed reluctance about removing the Sauks from Saukenuk because of the clause in the 1804 treaty allowing for use prior to sale. See “Report of the Indian Bureau,” 182–83. For another contemporary critique of government policy on this point, see Drake, 102–16. Yet by the late-1820s and the beginning of the administration of Andrew Jackson, the government increasingly was backing settler claims, often utilizing treaty-discourse (albeit in sometimes rather bizarre and contorted ways) to do so. For discussions of differences within earlier groups of settlers, see Perkins.

NOTES TO PAGES 95 TO 104 217

33. Inter-tribal war in the region in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries rarely was complete (all or even the majority of warriors in a given tribe taking part in any particular action or campaign), and its purpose usually was not extermination of another people or the wholesale expropriation of their land. On Sauk warfare, see Callender, “Sauk”; Drake, 13–48; Forsyth; Gussow, “Anthropological”; Marston; McKenney and Hall, 2:124–27; Nichols, 1–20; and Wallace, Prelude, 2–17. For comparative context, see Albers, “Symbiosis”; Anderson, The Indian Southwest; Blackhawk; Brooks, Captives and Cousins; Kay; and Holm. 34. Esarey, 186, 331–32. 35. Kappler, Indian Treaties, 20, 76, 250, 254. 36. Forsyth, 186. For discussion of the working of the Sauk clans, council, and moieties, see Callender, “Sauk”; Callendar, Social Organization; Drake, 29–33; Hagan, 7–11; Marston; Nichols, 9–12; and Wallace, Prelude, 2–8. 37. For U.S. government discussion of this band and reparations over a decade later for their attacks, see “Indian Depredations in Missouri.” 38. On Keokuk’s rise in power before and after 1832, see Drake, 68, 119–42; Forsyth, 192–93; Hagan, 89, 197, 205–10; Hurt, 183; Nichols, 68–69, 104; Marston, 156–57; McKenney and Hall, 2:85. For an excellent reading of the significance of the text’s representation of Keokuk’s failure as a warrior, see Sweet, “Masculinity.” 39. Several times Black Hawk specifically lists Keokuk as one of those responsible for the loss of Saukenuk, placing him alongside a number of U.S. officials including the “interpreter” (104, 112, and 142). The interpreter discussed here is Antoine LeClaire, further suggesting that the narrative was not altered in the process of translation/transcription since LeClaire would have a direct stake in eliminating these insults against him. On the representation of interpreters in the text, see Bellin and Schmitz, “How Smooth.” 40. See Hagan, 94, 97–98; “Report of the Indian Bureau,” 203–4. 41. Wallace, Prelude, 25, 30–31, 46. 42. “Report of the Indian Bureau,” 184, 186, 190. 43. See Drake, 105–16; Hagan, 106–22; Nichols, 97–100; “Report of the Indian Bureau,” 173–74, 180–91; and Wallace, Prelude, 36–37. 44. See Drake, 232; Nichols, 100, 104–5; “Report of the Indian Bureau,” 183; and Wallace, Prelude, 45–48. 45. Guha, “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency,” 45; Deloria and DeMallie, Documents, 1251; Kappler, Indian Treaties, 350; “Report of the Indian Bureau,” 184, 186. For contemporary examples of counterinsurgent accounts with respect to Black Hawk, see McKenney and Hall, 2: 75–78; “Report of the Indian Bureau”; Wakefield. 46. My portrait of prophet politics primarily is drawn from Dowd’s A Spirited Resistance. On Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh’s movement, see also Callender, “Shawnee”; Edmunds, Tecumseh; Hurt, 116–24; White, Middle Ground, 503–17; and Willig. 47. However, as the text notes, Neapope was wrong about the presence of broader support (121–22). On Neapope’s status as a chief, see Wallace, Prelude, 45, 48. On

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the composition of Black Hawk’s band, see Hagan, 139; Nichols, 105; “Report of the Indian Bureau,” 185–86, 189, 192, 196; and Wallace, Prelude, 35–36, 39–40. 48. Esarey, 457. 49. Esarey, 44–45, 439. Comments by U.S. officials indicate that they themselves saw a link between the events of 1831–32 and the prophet movements of previous decades. See Esarey, 127, 248, 223, 425, 439–40, 489, 539; “Report of the Indian Bureau,” 184–86, 196. Also, some of the same people, such as William Clark, were in power during both sets of events (the rise of the Shawnee Prophet and the “Black Hawk War”), contributing to the continuity in the way they were imagined and discussed by U.S. officials. See American State Papers, 1:807; Jones, William Clark; and Steffen. 50. The “Prophet” who came to Saukenuk in 1807 is Main Poc, a Potawatomi chief who was seen as possessing spiritual power, was a close ally of Tenskwatawa, and was well known among the Sauks. See Edmunds, “Main Poc.” During the years just prior to the Battle of Tippecanoe, there continually were rumors and warnings about the Sauks having joined with Tenskwatawa and their readiness to attack American settlers. See Esarey, 284, 336, 427, 446, 449, 513, 575. Prophetstown was fairly close to Sauk trade routes with the British, helping to explain the routine presence of Sauks there. On Sauk contact with Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh, see American State Papers, 1:807–8; Edmunds, “Main Poc”; Forsyth, 188–90; Hagan, 37–51; Murphy, A Gathering, 95–96; Nichols, 37–40; and White, Middle Ground, 503–17. Also, the Sauks had participated in the native war led by Pontiac in the 1760s, and Pontiac was even classified as a Sauk chief in one of the accounts of the history leading up to the events of 1832. See Drake, 27; Nichols, 7. 51. For a compelling discussion of the ways the text uses “pathos” as a “weapon,” though, see Boelhower (especially 337–39), and on the text’s use of sentimental discourse, see Mielke. For a very astute reading of the mention of “peace and friendship” at the end of the narrative as a reference to peace medals and a critique of U.S. duplicity, see Johnson, “Peace.” For discussion of Sauk politics post-removal, see Hagan; and Kay.

CHAPTER 3 1. “Difficulties on Southwestern Frontier,” 12, 70–72, 80–82, 43, 92–95. On Cortina, see De León, They Called, 53–55; “Difficulties on Southwestern Frontier”; Montejano, 32–34; Rosenbaum, 41–45; and Thompson. I use the term “Tejano” to refer to Spanish-speakers who prior to Texas independence had been citizens of Mexico, had not been U.S. citizens, and who were not actively connected to native communities legally recognized as such. The term “Anglo” refers to English-speakers legally coded as white who while possibly citizens of Mexico prior to Texas independence had been U.S. citizens before moving to Texas.

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2. On Comanche politics in 1858 and 1859, see Agnew; Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs (RCIA), 35th Cong., 1st sess., Schilz and Schilz, 43–46; Tate, 49–51; Winfrey and Day, 3: 280–310. The Comanches themselves are not so much a single polity as a network of bands linked together by kinship bonds and clustered into larger formations called “divisions.” See Anderson, The Indian Southwest; Foster; Kavanagh; and La Vere. 3. As of 1838, an agent of the Republic of Texas reported that the Comanches alone claimed land “which is nearly equal to one fourth of the domain of Texas,” and a census taken by W. B. Parker in 1855 reported that there were ten-thousand Comanches just in “southwestern Texas” (Winfrey and Day, 1:44 and 3:217). On the “raiding mode-of-production,” see Chase-Dunn and Hall. For overviews of the political-economy of the region in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Anderson, The Indian Southwest; Brooks, Captives and Cousins; Hall, Social Change; and John, Storms Brewed. On the Texas missions, see Hinojosa; Hinojosa and Fox; and La Vere. 4. Povinelli, Labor’s Lot, 8, 24, 4. Povinelli’s work addresses Aboriginal land tenure in Australia; for discussion of other contemporary “hunter-gatherer” peoples, see Ingold, Riches, and Woodburn. 5. Schematically put, the main struggle has been between a nationalist emphasis on territorial claims and a more transnational focus on migration. For examples of this debate, see Acuña; Almaguer, “Toward the Study of Chicano Colonialism”; Almaguer, “Ideological Distortions”; Anaya and Lomelí; Aranda; Barrera, Race and Class; Brady; Padilla, My History; Pérez; Pérez-Torres; Saldívar, Border Matters; Saldívar-Hull; and Sánchez, Telling Identities. 6. For the sake of clarity, I use the name “San Antonio” throughout regardless of the time period about which I am speaking. However, when founded in 1718, the town was known as the Villa de Béxar, usually shortened to Béxar, and was renamed San Antonio in 1837 (de la Teja, San Antonio, 8; Matovina, 107). On the increase of the Anglo population in Texas, see Ramos; Weber, Mexican Frontier, 158–78. 7. A later version of this strategy can be seen in Américo Paredes’s novel George Washington Gómez: “Early in the eighteenth century, before there was a United States and when Philadelphia was a little colonial town, Morelos was founded on the south bank of the river. During the century that followed it grew into a large and prosperous city. Its outer limits extended north across the river into what was then part of the same province, a vast expanse of territory teeming with the half-wild cattle and horses that were a prime resource for the people of Morelos. Then came the Comanches and the yanquis” (35). 8. On the idea of “intrasettler dialogue,” see Trask, 25. 9. For studies organized around the idea of discrimination within citizenship, see Alonzo; De León, They Called; Montejano; and Takaki. For an emphasis on the discrepancies between Anglo and Tejano cultures, see Matovina; Rosenbaum; and Weber, The Mexican Frontier.

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10. Gammel, 1:1077, 1079–80. During the Republic of Texas, there were a grand total of two Tejano members in the Senate and two in the House of Representatives (Matovina, 34). In the convention of 1845 to draft a state constitution, there was debate over whether or not to include the word “white” as a qualifier for voting and public service, but it was voted down. See Gómez-Quiñones, 220–22; Matovina, 36; and Montejano, 38–39. 11. See Gammel, 1:1400, 1488. 12. See Williams and Barker, 2:392, 526–27 and 3:26, 32, 224. 13. Gammel, 2:1279–80, 1294, 1298. While the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo granted citizenship to Mexicans residing in what was now U.S. territory and guaranteed the property rights of those who held land title under Mexico, the U.S. Supreme Court held in McKinney v. Saviego (1856) that the treaty did not apply to Texas given that it had been its own country and had been annexed to the United States prior to the Mexican-American War. Additionally, Article X of the original treaty, which specifically referred to property rights in Texas, was removed by the U.S. Senate during the ratification process. See Griswold del Castillo, 44–48. 14. Omi and Winant, 55–56. 15. See de la Teja, “The Making,” 48; Ramos, 319–20; Seguín, 100. This event is described in retrospect by one resident Anglo woman as flight by “the Mexican citizens of San Antonio who espoused the Mexican cause” (Maverick, 68). 16. Gammel, 1:1079; Gammel, 1:1404–18; Gammel, 2:313–16. For discussion of land laws in the wake of independence and annexation, see Alonzo, 145–81; Griswold del Castillo, 44–48, 81–86; Matovina, 26–30; and Montejano, 24–41. Reparations for Tejano lands lost as a result of this extended process of inspection was the subject of a 1941 compact between the United States and Mexico in which each agreed to take up the outstanding claims for debts and damages from the MexicanAmerican War lodged against the other, but since Mexico has not made good on its promise of payment for lost Tejano property, the issue remains legally unresolved. See Vargas. 17. For similar cases, see Ximenes v. State (1846) and State v. Manchaca (1846). 18. The text was written for the Anglo public, addressed as it is to “the American people” (73), and while presumably composed in Spanish, given that Seguín did not know English, the Memoirs was originally published as a volume in English. If a manuscript version exists, it has never been found, and little to nothing is known about the process of composition and translation. See de la Teja, “The Making”; Padilla, My History, 70. 19. As many critics have noted, Mexican American writing often revises extant institutionalized narratives by constructing a counter-history, mapping and making legible social topographies which both predate the U.S. exertion of control over formerly Mexican territory and persist (although not unchanged) alongside such imperial interpellation. See Garza-Falcón; Gutiérrez-Jones; Mendoza; Padilla, My History; and. Sánchez, Telling Identities.

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20. See Padilla, My History, 65–72. At several points the text uses “Mexican” as a descriptive term for Tejanos without additional commentary, but I would suggest that such usage should be interpreted within the ironizing frame the text elsewhere elaborates. 21. As noted above, there is no extant copy of the original Spanish version of the text, but I would speculate that the word being translated as “native” was “patrio,” which itself is resonant with a sense of familial belonging that inhabits while reversing the valence of the geo-racial logic of being “Mexican born.” 22. On the dynamics of Democratic politics and the “Cart War,” see de la Teja, “The Making”; Ramos, 332–72. For additional discussion of Tejanos in political life post1848, see Alonzo; De León, The Tejano Community; Gómez-Quiñones, 196–99, 221–25; Montejano; and Ramos. 23. Gramsci, 130–33. 24. On the Americanization of Texas in the minds of U.S. citizens, see Hietala, 10–94. My reading contrasts with Genaro Padilla’s argument that Seguín tries “to prove himself a loyal American citizen and yet a loyal Tejano” (My History, 68). On the Know-Nothings as “the American Party,” see Ramos, 348. For another Tejano narration of these events from the 1850s, which resembles Seguín’s but is both less wary of identification with Americans and more directly critical of them, see Navarro. Seguín’s rhetorical strategy also resonates with the numerous Anglo complaints pre- and post-1845 about the number of “useless loafers” and “individuals setting themselves up in armed bodies in defiance of the laws” entering Texas in search of profit and pleasure. See Matovina, 30; Nance, 24–25, 46–48, 59–67, 106–9, 418, 474, 489; Olmsted, 159, 299–300, 443–44; Ramos, 314; Report of Captain Marcy, 33; Smith, U.S. Army, 17; Williams and Barker, 2:120, 394 and 3:20, 76–77, 413, 452–53, 472. 25. On the history of property distinctions among Tejanons in San Antonio, see de la Teja, San Antonio; de la Teja and Wheat; and Poyo. 26. De León, The Tejano Community, 5. On Tejano land speculation, see Matovina, 26; Montejano, 28; Ramos, 292. On the Seguíns’ relationships with Anglo-Texans, see de la Teja, “The Making”; Dysart; Maverick, 49; Ramos, 142–44, 156–60; and Williams and Barker, 2:147. A similar set of alignments can be seen in the writings of José Antonio Navarro. See Navarro; Ramos, 344–47. 27. Tejano landholding in the area surrounding San Antonio dropped from approximately 64 percent in 1840 to 9 percent in 1850 (Matovina, 52). 28. On Comanche politics in the period, see Agnew; Foster; Hall, Social Change; Kavanagh; La Vere; Noyes; Schilz and Schilz; and Tate. Similar questions could be raised with respect to a good deal of Tejano historiography, which foregrounds conflict with Anglos but reduces the presence of indigenous peoples to little more than a footnote. For examples, see de la Teja, San Antonio de Béxar; De Léon, They Called; Gómez-Quiñones; Matovina; and Montejano. On Seguín’s government service, see de la Teja, “The Making,” 20, 35; Maverick, 23; Tijerina, 90; Weaver,

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31.

32.

33.

34.

35. 36.

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NOTES TO PAGES 125 TO 130

“Relations,” 21; and Williams and Barker, 2:34. The profound significance for Texas policy of the violent confrontation with the Comanches in 1840 in San Antonio is suggested by the numerous times Sam Houston references it while president of the Republic of Texas. See Williams and Barker, 3:318, 371, 373, 400, 452. For examples, see De León, They Called, 50, 52; Olmsted, 159, 297; Ramos, 108; RCIA, 30th Cong., 1st sess., 897, 900; Williams and Barker, 3:182; and Winfrey and Day, 3:173, 179. Weber, Troubles in Texas, 15, 17, 20, 29. Such representation is common in earlier reports as well; see de la Teja, “Discovering,” 86–88; Padilla, “Texas in 1820”; Sánchez, “A Trip to Texas”; and Taylor, The Letters. See Alonso; Brooks, Captives and Cousins; Hall, Social Change; Radding; and Seed. Distinctions were recognized between peoples living in what is now east Texas (such as the Caddos and some Wichita groups) who were dependent on various forms of farming and those to the north and west who did not farm at all or who almost exclusively satisfied their material needs through raiding and trade in buffalo products. See La Vere. My historical sketch draws on Anderson, The Indian Southwest; Betty; Blackhawk; Faulk; Foster; Flores, “Bison Ecology”; Flores, Journal of an Indian Trader; Gelo, “Comanche Land”; Gelo, “Recalling the Past”; Hall; Hämäläinen; John, Storms Brewed; John, “Independent Indians”; Kavanagh; La Vere; Noyes; and Spielmann. Kavanagh, 185. The differences between Euramerican-Indian relations in New Mexico and Texas also had to do with the longstanding presence of various kinds of trade fairs in the latter, the creation of genízaro (Hispanized natives who were former slaves or soldiers) communities in New Mexico that served as mediators, and the post-1786 development of a comanchero trade out of New Mexico (Euramericans and genízaros going to Comanche camps to trade). See Brooks, Captives and Cousins; Gregg; Kavanagh; and Lamadrid. After the 1803 acquisition of the territory of Louisiana by the United States, American traders began building relationships with native peoples in east Texas and along the Red River. In fact, the U.S. Indian agent in Natchitoches (John Sibley) received orders to make diplomatic and economic connections with tribes resident on land claimed by Spain. In 1807, Sibley even held a conference in which he invited a range of such groups, including Comanche leaders, so as to secure their friendship toward the United States and its citizens in direct violation of Spanish policy (Flores, Journal, 24–26). “Communication . . . the Indians in Texas,” 42; Winfrey and Day, 1:105. RCIA, 30th Cong., 1st sess., 893; Winfrey and Day, 3:78–79; “Communication . . . in relation to the Indians of Texas,” 5. For discussion of the relation between federal and Texas state Indian policy in this period, see Kavanagh; Neighbours; and Tate. Deloria and DeMallie, 1:573. Two treaties were signed with the Comanches during the Republic, in 1838 and 1844, and an “armistice” was negotiated in 1843 in preparation for formal treaty-making. For reprinted copies of all of the Indian

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treaties officially ratified by the Republic of Texas, see Deloria and DeMallie, 1:565–86. Five treaties were negotiated with the Comanches by the United States before the Civil War—in 1835, 1846, 1850, 1851, and 1853. The first primarily applied to those bands living north of Texas near the Canadian River (to secure unfettered transit for U.S. citizens through territory controlled by Comanches and Wichitas ), the second will be addressed below, the next two were never submitted to the Senate for ratification, and the last one largely addressed bands north of Texas. See Kappler, Indian Affairs, 2:435–39, 554–57, 600–2; Winfrey and Day, 3:130–136, 149–154. On Texas-Indian relations, see Kavanagh, 249–78; Muckleroy; Weaver, “Relations Between the Comanche Indians”; Winfrey and Day, vol. 1. 38. “Communication . . . Indians in Texas,” 19, 16–18. “Penateka” is the name of what scholars writing about the Comanches have called a “division”—a form of collectivity whose dimensions changed over time (and which sometimes dissipated, combined with other divisions, or was remade under a new name) operating at a scale somewhere between a smaller kinship-linked residential group called a “band” and a larger ethnic-linguistic formation potentially called a “tribe.” According to Thomas Kavanagh, “divisions were political organizations composed of local residential bands linked by kinship and sodality ties and recognizing a commonality of interest in group affairs, war, peace, and trade” (52). The debate over Comanche social organization will be addressed later in this section, but for the purposes of my analysis, I almost exclusively am discussing leaders associated by scholars and in contemporary accounts with the Penateka division (others of note in the nineteenth century include Kotsotekas, Yamparikas, and Tenewas). The term “chief” here refers to those persons with whom Euramericans engaged in formal negotiations, but the status of their leadership—whether a person in a given negotiation operated as a head of a band or of a division and the degree to which a person was understood as speaking for a given band and/or division—remains an open question. For discussion of Comanche political structure in the early- to mid-nineteenth century, see Berlandier; Burnet; Foster, 31–74; Kavanagh; Noyes; Padilla, “Texas in 1820”; Ruíz; and Sánchez, “A Trip.” 39. Accounts by Anglo officials routinely note Comanche leaders commenting on their efforts to get others to agree to be bound by a given treaty and offer testimony by those who have come to treat that they have done so based on the suggestion of a prominent chief or warrior. See “Communication . . . Indians in Texas,” 17; and RCIA, 34th Cong., 1st sess., 498; Winfrey and Day, 1:229, 266–67; Winfrey and Day, 2:7, 290–91, 338, 354, 369, 415. When informed of the Anglo practice elsewhere of using treaties to purchase land from native peoples, Comanche chiefs reject such an interpretation of the “presents” they receive during and after councils. See “Communication . . . Indians in Texas,” 21. 40. On “representation” as a problem of political “subject-constitution,” see Spivak, A Critique, 256–64. See also my discussion of Spivak’s analysis of “representation” in chapter 1.

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41. Winfrey and Day, 3:116. Not only did horses function as a kind of currency, in the sense of being seen as possessing value within multiple cultural and economic frameworks, but they served as symbols of prestige and authority within intra-tribal and intra-band political and kinship relations. Captives both were sold (including to Euramericans) and incorporated into Comanche society in a wide range of roles. Virtually all scholarly and contemporary accounts note that the adoption of persons not born Comanches was a crucial aspect of Comanche sociality and explains the impressive number of those identifying as Comanche given the limits of natural population increase, especially in light of the devastating effect on Comanche bands of numerous epidemic outbreaks in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Captives provided crucial labor in the management of horse herds and the processing of buffalo meat and hides. On the complex and shifting role of horses and captives in Comanche political-economy, marriage, and gift-exchange, see Anderson, The Indian Southwest; Betty; Brooks, Captives and Cousins; Burnet; Collier, Marriage and Inequality; Jones, “Comanches and Texans”; Kavanagh; and Noyes. 42. On Comanche modes of mapping, see Gelo, “Recalling the Past”; John, Storms Brewed; Kavanagh; Schilz and Schilz. 43. See Alonzo, 88, 138; Nance, After San Jacinto, 46–48, 59–67, 106–9, 140, 418, 474, 489; Ramos, 305. 44. Deloria and DeMallie, 1:573, 583; Winfrey and Day, 3:131–33, 150–51; Kappler, Indian Affairs, 2:555. While Texas authorities in many ways promoted Indian depredations in Mexico, the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo included a provision that the United States and Mexico would each prevent native raiding in the other, a provision eliminated in the Gadsden Purchase treaty of 1853. See Griswold del Castillo, 59–60; Williams and Barker, 3:32, 189. 45. For examples, see Kavanagh, 193–385; RCIA, 33rd Cong., 1st sess., 363, 426–28; RCIA, 33rd Cong., 2nd sess., 366; Schilz and Schilz; and Winfrey and Day, 2:235–36, 239–40, 284–85, 292–93, 325. 46. For the text of the 1844 treaty, see Deloria and DeMallie, 1:582–85. On the “line,” see Gammel, 2:842–45. Sam Houston also makes reference to a prospective “line” the previous year (Williams and Barker, 3:175–77). While resembling the U.S. Indian trade and intercourse acts, the Texas law does not stipulate that treaties must serve as the vehicle for gaining access to native-inhabited land. Also, the Republic and then state of Texas passed several acts giving preemption rights to public lands without offering any exemption for territory occupied by native peoples. See Gammel, 2:554–57, 1073–75; Gammel, 3:960, 1550–52; Gammel, 4: 457, 474, 1065–68. For the 1846 treaty, see Kappler, Indian Affairs, 2:554–57. 47. Winfrey and Day, 1:43–44; Winfrey and Day, 2:8, 354; Williams and Barker, 3:507; Winfrey and Day, 3:37; Winfrey and Day, 2:110. In response to Pochanaquarhip, Houston proposed the following compromise: “You are pleased with the Treaty and call it all good but that part about the line; we will sign all but that part, which we will rub out and go on as before” (112). On Pochanaquarhip, see Schilz and Schilz.

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While the statements by Mopechucope and Pochanaquarhip above coincide in their call for official Anglo acknowledgment of Comanche land use and occupancy, these chiefs actually propose two significantly different geographic configurations, the latter running much farther south than the former (Kavanagh, 271). 48. RCIA, 30th Cong., 1st sess., 893. This statement is part of a larger argument by Pochanaquarhip and Pahayuco, another Comanche chief, about the effect of eliminating the third article from the treaty of 1846, which the Senate struck out before ratifying the agreement. The article included the following promise: “In order to guard against the perpetration of frauds upon the Indians, under pretext of hunting and working mines, no person shall be permitted to go among them for that purpose, except by express license from the President of the United States” (Winfrey and Day, 3:45). 49. Winfrey and Day, 2:111; “Communication . . . Indians in Texas,” 24. As part of Mopechucope’s letter outlining Comanche territory, he notes, “I want you to let all your people know and particularly on the frontier that the Comanche are coming down . . . and when they see us not to think us enemies” (Winfrey and Day, 2:8). For an excellent discussion of the interwoven climatic, vegetative, and social developments affecting bison movements in the first half of the nineteenth century, see Flores, “Bison Ecology.” 50. Gammel, 3:1495; RCIA, 32nd Cong., 1st sess., 524. In 1856, land was allocated by the state for another reserve, this time specifically for “Indians residing west of the Pecos river” (Gammel, IV, 258). 51. Report of Captain Marcy, 28–30, 35. As part of his 1853 report, Agent Neighbors predicts, “the whole southern band can be induced to abandon their present roving life and depend upon the cultivation of the soil for their support” (RCIA, 33rd Cong., 1st sess., 426). The pre-1870s structure, contours, and relationship between “bands,” “divisions,” and “tribe,” as well as the applicability of the latter term to the Comanches as a whole, has been the topic of great ethnographic and historiographic debate. Significant points of contention include the following: the degree to which residential bands organized around extended kinship relations were integrated politically within overarching divisions; whether Comanches saw negotiations with Euramericans as occurring at the band or division level; the social function of divisions and where and how such functions were enacted; how to explain the profusion and shifting scope of ethnonyms (or division names) within documentary records; whether or not divisions can be understood as part of a “tribe” (meaning a nexus of linguistic, cultural, and kinship connections recognized by members as creating a shared identity rather than necessarily an entity for decision making or resource distribution) or as distinct tribes with a shared language and cultural traits; and more local questions about the size of particular divisions at a given time, their relative territoriality, and to which division a given person or band belonged. For important contributions to this debate, see Betty; Foster, 1–73; and Kavanagh. The term “band”

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52.

53.

54.

55.

56. 57.

NOTES TO PAGES 136 TO 139

is used inconsistently by Anglo writers in the antebellum period, often meaning something akin to what anthropologists refer to as a “division.” RCIA, 34th Cong., 1st sess., 498–500; Kavanagh, 364. For discussion of the movements of various Comanche bands on and off the Clear Fork reserve, see Kavanagh, 356–68; Neighbours, 165–233; and Schilz and Schilz, 40–47. Neighbours, 149. For a similar (although slightly more accommodating) statement by Ketumse, the other major Penateka chief at the time, see Winfrey and Day, 3:145. These two leaders are presented as the relevant figures with whom to negotiate about the Texas reservation by those who took part in the process of locating and surveying it. See Report of Captain Marcy; and Parker, Notes Taken, 176–211. Additionally, the total number of residents on the Clear Fork reserve consistently decreased from 1856 to 1859 (RCIA, 34th Cong., 3rd sess., 724; RCIA, 35th Cong., 1st sess., 551; RCIA, 35th Cong., 2nd sess., 525). I should be clear, though, that while I am arguing that the category of “southern Comanches” and its differentiation from “northern” bands was an ideologically loaded bureaucratic construct I am not denying actual differences between Comanche divisions, such as the Penateka and the Kotsoteka (the putative referents of “south” and “north” in administrative discourse). Rather I am suggesting that the relationship between the categories employed in Indian policy and Comanche collective self-understandings was tenuous at best and that the geographic and social relations between divisions was far more flexible and shifting than official reports (especially by agents in Texas) indicate. RCIA, 34th Cong., 3rd sess., 725. See also RCIA, 35th Cong., 1st sess., 551–54. Such conflations justify the use of the military to “protect” the reservation residents, such as in the devastating assaults by the U.S. military and the Texas Rangers against Comanches camping above Red River in 1858. The reservations in Texas were closed in 1859 in response to attacks by settlers, moving the residents to a new one on the Red River. On the reserves, see Agnew; Kavanagh, 356–68; La Vere, 197–201; Neighbours, 132–279; Tate; and Winfrey and Day, 3:305–40. Governors over the course of the 1850s increasingly advocated that settlers resist the “ruthless incursions of Indians” by “follow[ing] up the Indians and chasti[sing] them” as well as calling for Rangers to be “authorized to follow the Indians to their places of retreat, break up their lodges and execute on them that summary vengence [sic] which alone can give permanent peace” (Winfrey and Day, 3:258, 271). On Neighbors’s endorsement of ostensibly retaliatory violence against “northern” bands and punishment of Indians off the reserves, see Agnew; Neighbours, 153–54, 174, 190, 197, 207; RCIA, 34th Cong., 1st sess., 499; RCIA, 34th Cong. 3rd sess., 725; and RCIA, 35th Cong., 2nd sess., 525–26. RCIA, 34th Cong., 3rd sess., 726. See also RCIA, 35th Cong., 1st sess., 553–54. On honor, see Alonso; Brooks, Captives and Cousins; Gómez-Quiñones, 60–65; González, Refusing; Gutiérrez; and Radding. In her account of the extension of U.S. authority over Arizona, Mary Pat Brady also explores ways that Spanish-speaking residents reversed the language of barbarism used against them by Anglos (13–48).

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58. There initially were forms of racial distinction among settlers in San Antonio which gradually gave way to a more encompassing civilized/savage binary. This process was aided considerably by the growing social, economic, political, and familial alliances between the presidiales and the Isleños (the emigrants from the Canary Islands who founded the first civilian settlement in the area in 1731), who continually emphasized their racial pedigree and the privileges it should convey over other residents. See Hinojosa and Fox; Poyo. The claim of Isleño purity and its use as a rhetorical cudgel persists well past the period in which any claim to racial distinctiveness from the surrounding population empirically was tenable. See Navarro; and Rodríguez, Rodriguez. 59. Padilla, “Texas in 1820,” 54; Sánchez, “A Trip to Texas,” 257; Weber, Troubles in Texas, 15, 17. On the importance of the presidio and the military in the political and economic life of San Antonio throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, see de la Teja, San Antonio de Béxar, 119–39, 157–60; Gómez-Quiñones, 46; and Tijerina, Tejanos and Texas, 5–14, 31. Connection to the military, however, was not a ticket to wealth, especially in light of the loss of resources from Mexico in the 1810s and 1820s. See Weber, The Mexican Frontier, 107–12; Taylor, The Letters. 60. The critique of patriarchal nationalism in Chicana feminist scholarship often coordinates figurations of mestizaje and mobility as a way of challenging the territorialization of women’s bodies, but doing so tends to overlook the ways such articulations of identity in “the borderlands” also efface the placemaking of nonsedentary peoples. For examples, see Brady; Pérez, Decolonial Imaginary; and Saldívar-Hull. 61. Ruíz, 14; Sánchez, “A Trip to Texas,” 262, 265. 62. Gramsci, 155. On the population surge of Anglos in Texas, see Matovina, 8, 50–51; Ramos, 177–78; 335–38; and Weber, The Mexican Frontier, 160, 166, 177. 63. Burnet, 263; Report of Captain Marcy, 32; Spivak, A Critique, 287. For other examples of Anglo representations of Comanche women, see “Communication . . . Indians in Texas,” 35; Flores, Journal, 81; Parker, 186, 194; Neighbours, 73; and Winfrey and Day, 3:214. On the effort to distinguish slavery and proper domesticity in the antebellum period, see Stanley. 64. These narratives, though, also have two other notable generic features: they proclaim the Comanches’ hatred for Mexicans (the captivity usually resulting from Anglos having been confused for Mexicans); and while clearly portraying the Comanches as brutally savage, they report Comanches’ anger at Mexicans for intruding on their lands. See Harris, 8, 14, 18; and Lee, Three Years, 20, 74–75, 145–46, 163. 65. For a different assessment of the relation between masculinity and the military in the Memoirs, see Serrato. His reading, though, tends to pathologize Tejano masculinity, ignoring the strategic political goals of Seguín’s gendered self-presentation, its relation to broader and older Hispanic ideologies of honor and metaphors of barbarism, and the resonance between dominant Hispanic and Anglo masculinities.

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66. In fact such marriages help explain the predominance of Anglo mayors in post1836 San Antonio despite the greater number of Tejano voters (Matovina, 37–38). On Anglo-Tejana marriages, including among the Seguíns, see Dysart. On the presence of Anglo families in San Antonio and south Texas before and after the Texas revolution, see Alonzo; Maverick; Montejano; Rodríguez, Rodríguez; and Ramos. 67. Montejano, 38; Smith, U.S. Army. 68. Winfrey and Day, 3:303. 69. The judicial metaphor is particularly apt given Seguín’s claim that in being forced into exile he was “tried by a rabble” and that the text’s penultimate paragraph closes with the phrase, “I submit to the public verdict” (97, 102).

CHAPTER 4 1. Cleland, 238. For a history of the negotiation, provisions, and implementation of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, see Griswold del Castillo. Since at least the 1820s, California had been the object of expansionist speculation and official U.S. diplomatic maneuvering, including an attempt in 1835 by Andrew Jackson to buy San Francisco Bay and its environs for $500,000 (Acuña, 136). See also Griswold del Castillo, 3–13; Hurtado, 73; and Nunis. 2. On the self-definition of the Mexican population in California as “Californio,” see Sánchez, Telling Identities, 228–67. 3. U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, http://daccessdds.un.org/doc/ UNDOC/GEN/N06/512/07/PDF/N0651207.pdf?OpenElement. 4. For discussion of the political and cultural matrix in which Californio historiography is situated and the work it performs, see Bouvier, “Framing the Female Voice”; Castañeda, “Memory, Language and Voice”; Padilla, My History; and Sánchez, Telling Identities. 5. Petition from Cahuilla chiefs, May 15, 1856, National Archives and Record Administration, record group 75, M234, roll 35. Hereafter, I will use the acronym NARA. 6. See Acuña, 144–45; and Pitt, 130–47, 249–96. 7. From approximately 15,000 Euramericans in California in 1848, the number rose to over 500,000 by 1870 (Almaguer, Racial, 26). For the text of the California Land Act, see United States Statutes at Large, 31st Congress, 2nd sess., 631–34. For discussion of the legal and political structure of Mexican California, see Langum; and Luna, “En el Nombre.” 8. The report is printed in Report of the Secretary of the Interior, 31st Cong., 1st sess. Quotations will be cited parenthetically. Jones’s recommendations were rejected by Congress, and a motion to print his report was tabled in the Senate, but he printed a thousand copies independently. See Appendix, Cong. Globe., 31st Congress, 2nd sess., 49. Incidentally, Jones was Thomas Hart Benton’s son-in-law, and after the

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passage of the Land Act, he served as council for a number of land claimants, including his brother-in-law John C. Frémont (Costo and Costo, 259). Jones also speculated in former Mexican territory, eventually purchasing land from what had been the Mission San Luis Rey, including the Indian village of Pala (Shipek, Pushed into the Rocks, 30). 9. Citations from the debate are quoted from Appendix, Cong. Globe. 31st Cong., 2nd sess. The most ardent opponent of the bill was Thomas Hart Benton, who actively cites Jones’s report during the Senate debate. His alternative bill proposed that the committee be replaced by a “land recorder” to whom all documentary evidence of Spanish and Mexican titles would be given, and rather than having every claim adjudicated, the recorder, “in conjunction with the district attorney of the United States for the district in which the claim may lie,” would determine which claims appeared suspicious and only investigate/prosecute those. Furthermore, Benton’s proposal specifically recognizes the validity of oral testimony in the absence of documentary evidence supporting the claim, adding that “actual possession before the conquest of the country shall be held to be prima facie evidence of valid title.” For Benton, pre-war titles and the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, which ostensibly secures their protection, need to be interpreted within what can be called an international imaginary. The legitimacy of U.S. law and policy are contingent on broader principles that define “civilized” conduct and should mediate the exercise of brute sovereignty (52–53). Benton officially offers his amendment/replacement on January 2, and it is defeated by a vote of thirty-seven to ten on January 28, 1851. 10. For discussion of the differences between U.S. and Mexican forms of mapping, especially in terms of the use of natural boundaries and the role of common land, see Luna, “En el Nombre.” For a broader discussion of the differences between legal understandings of land and property in Anglophone and Hispanophone traditions, see Seed. 11. Jones’s report to Congress provides an excellent summary of the land grant procedure under Mexico. He notes that all grants in California from independence (1821) to annexation (1847) were made by “the different political governors” working from the provisions of the land laws of 1824 and 1828 (2–3). The former limited individual grants to eleven leagues, approximately 50,000 acres, and the latter stipulated that the process for granting lands in the territories, of which California was one, would work as follows: an individual would petition the governor for a particular piece of land, describing its boundaries; the governor would confirm that the desired land was vacant and that he approved the grant in what was called an informe, which was attached to or written on the original petition; relevant documents would be sent to the disputacíon, or territorial assembly, whose affirmation was required to perfect the grant; if the petition was rejected by the disputacíon, the governor would be responsible for sending an appeal to the supreme government. After the petition and verification, together known as the expediente, were sent to the disputacíon, the approval was recorded in the latter’s record of its

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13. 14.

15. 16.

17.

NOTES TO PAGES 157 TO 161

proceedings. Unless an individual specifically applied for a certificate proving the grant’s perfection,the disputacíon’s records were the only documentary evidence of completed title, and “as the journals of the assembly now remaining in the archives are very imperfect, it can hardly be doubted that many grants have received the approval of the assembly, and no record of it now exists” (4). Jones notes, “those which are not perfect—that is, which lack some formality or some evidence of completeness—have the same equity as those which are perfect, and were and would have been equally respected under the government which has passed away” (34). Ultimately, 813 claims were presented to the Board of Commissioners; 591 were confirmed, with 264 claims ending at the level of the Board, 450 at the District Court, and 99 at the Supreme Court. Costo and Costo, 258. For a discussion of the different tabulations of claims, see Acuña, 142. The U.S. District Attorney appealed virtually every claim sustained by the Board. In fact, for the northern district of California from 1853–58, there are at least thirty-eight cases appealed to the District Court by the District Attorney in which he then presented no case at all. See Hoffman. By the 1870s, the Californios were left virtually landless, but what led to this loss was less the findings of the Land Commission and the courts per se than the cost of maintaining drawn-out appeals that went on for decades, paying exorbitant taxes on lands that were under litigation, and fighting with squatters in and out of the courts in what Leonard Pitt has termed “backyard guerilla warfare” (95). Such struggle was increased by a federal law passed in March 1853 extending the rules of pre-emption claims for the public land in other parts of the country to California, thereby licensing a wave of squatting. See Acuña, 142–43; Costo and Costo, 257–59; Luna, “Chicano/Chicana Land Tenure”; Pitt, 83–199. The memorial is reprinted in its entirety in Cleland, 238–43. Of forty-eight participants in the convention, seven were Californios, including the one delegate recognized as an “Indian”—Manuel Dominguez. At the time of the convention, the Californios numbered under 13,000 of a non-native population of approximately 100,000 (Pitt, 43). For the full list of delegates, see Heizer and Almquist, 226–28. All quotations from the debates are taken from Browne, Report. On the military government in California prior to 1849, see Grivas. While Carillo’s proposal was affirmed by several delegates who were not of Mexican descent, most of them were old settlers with extensive investments in the pre-war land and political system. The issue of dividing the state actually was not put to rest in 1849 but remained alive in public discourse throughout the 1850s, which would have given the Californios political control in the south where they were in the majority until the 1870s. In 1859 a statewide referendum was held on bisecting the state, the legislature refusing to act despite popular approval of the measure. See Ellison, A Self-Governing Dominion, 167–91; Pitt, 204–5.

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18. The best account of the debate over the voting clause can be found in Heizer and Almquist, 92–119, though there are a few errors in the discussion of exactly when particular changes were made at different points in the debate. In addition, they provide an excellent discussion of the debate over allowing in free people of color, which I will not address in this chapter. See also Pitt, 42–47. I offer a different reading of the relation between the treaty and racial discourse than that presented by Thomas Almaguer and George Martinez. In Racial Fault Lines, Almaguer argues that Mexicans did not occupy the category of “nonwhite” within post-war governance and that regardless of class were “eligible for citizenship rights” (5, 45–74), ignoring the stipulation in the California Constitution that only “white” Mexicans can vote—a qualification that necessitates that a portion of the (former) Mexican population be considered non-white and therefore denied access to voting and its attendant privileges (holding public office, offering testimony in court, serving on juries, attending public school, and homesteading on public land [38]). In “Mexican Americans and Whiteness,” Martinez makes a similar claim to Almaguer: “The treaties . . . operated to turn [Mexicans] into whites” (380). While he offers an immensely provocative argument about the ways in which the oppression of Mexican Americans has been denied by forms of legal categorization that refuse to classify such systemic inequity as racism, his historical claims about the relationship between Mexicans and “whiteness” oversimplify the institutional workings of racial discourse in the nineteenth century. The racial coding of Mexicans as a “degraded” population in American public discourse begins well before the war. See Churchill; Johannsen, To the Halls; Streeby; Takaki, 154–64; and Wertheimer. Yet while appearing similar to earlier depictions and drawing a great deal from them, the post-war production of racial subjectivities in state law takes on a range of additional ideological functions in defining and implementing the terms of the treaty. 19. Lest Noriego’s rhetoric should be taken as broadly anti-racist, though, it should be noted that right after this statement he indicates, “But if, by the word ‘white,’ it was intended to exclude the African race, then it was correct and satisfactory” (63). In the official list of delegates, reprinted by Heizer and Almquist, the person called “Noriego” in Browne’s report of the convention is listed as “Noreiga, de la Guerra,” but in other sources, like in Pitt, the same person is identified as Pablo de la Guerra, who is not in the list of delegates. Since he is referred to as “Noreigo” in the text I am quoting, for consistency’s sake I will continue to do so, though more than likely that was not his name. 20. Browne, 37, 62–73, 306. 21. A proposal by Rodman M. Price that “[l]aws shall be made for ascertaining, by proper proofs, the citizens who shall be entitled to the right of suffrage” was rejected, leaving no constitutional mechanism for assessing who in fact counts as “white” (75). However, as Leonard Pitt describes, “arguments arose constantly at the polling window” over whether a not a particular person could count as a qualified voter

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23. 24.

25. 26. 27.

28.

29.

NOTES TO PAGES 164 TO 171

(132). Beyond the question of voting per se, the Californios were subject to other discriminatory forms of state legislation, including the following: the Foreign Miners’ Tax (1850) that required a $3 permit from any foreigner working in the mines, a fee levied against the Californios despite the fact that they were not foreigners—upheld by the state Supreme Court in People v. Naglee (1850) but repealed by the legislature in 1851; and a collection of laws in 1855 largely punishing gambling and other economic pursuits by Californios, among which was an antivagrancy statute called the “Greaser law” aimed at “all persons who are commonly known as ‘Greasers’ or the issue of Spanish or Indian blood . . . and who go armed and are not peaceable and quiet persons” (Heizer and Almquist, 151). See Acuña, 139–40; Heizer and Almquist, 138–53; and Pitt, 48–68, 196–202. Californios were also subject to various forms of vigilante justice in the period, referred to in 1857 as “Linchocracia” in the newspaper El Clamor Público (Acuña, 150). See Pitt, 148–80. The legislature, however, did not enfranchise Indians or “descendants” of Indians (Heizer and Almquist, 117). In fact, the California Supreme Court declared in 1850 in Suñol v. Hepburn that Indians had not in fact been citizens under Mexico (Menchaca, 220–22). Williams, Marxism and Literature, 132. The desire for broader dissemination is evidenced further by his failed attempts to publish the History in the 1870s (Beebe and Senkewicz, 9). Opportunities for publication in California prior to the 1850s were slim. In fact, the first printing press was brought to California in 1833 and no newspapers were printed in the territory until 1846 (Sánchez, Telling Identities, 16). For discussion of how printed matter reached the territory, see Sánchez, Telling Identities, 15–17, 118–20. Rather than dictating it to a third party in response to questions as with the Californio testimonios gathered by H. H. Bancroft in the 1870s, Osio wrote the history himself, which makes it a less mediated account, shaped by his own concerns instead of an Anglo interviewer’s or historian’s agenda. On the testimonios, see Sánchez, Telling Identities; Padilla, My History. For a particularly pointed version of such sentiments, see Arguello v. U.S, 552. For discussion of popular attitudes in California as “proto-nationalist,” see Sánchez, Telling Identities. The narrative stages the rebellion as a response to the actions of the missionaries rather than to the larger colonial jurisdictional claims to indigenous land. See 55–70. For other examples of Osio’s localized critique of the missions, see 57, 68. For discussion of the Chumash uprising, see Sandos, “Levantamiento!” For discussion of the matrix of horse theft and neophyte fugitivity, see Phillips, Indians and Intruders. For the growing use of Indian labor in the pueblos, see Hackel, “Land, Labor, and Production,” 127–30; Mason. Led by John C. Frémont on June 6, 1846, the Bear Flag Rebellion was a campaign by a collection of Americans supposedly, in their own words, to “liberate” California from “criminals” like the current governor Pío Pico. They forcibly detained several

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30.

31.

32.

33.

Californios, including M. G. Vallejo, and served as the frontrunners of American annexation. See Padilla, My History, 54–64; Pitt, 26–31. However, there is more evidence of native cooperation with the Americans in the war. For events in central and northern California, see Hurtado, 72–85; and Phillips, Indians and Intruders, 138–142. For discussion of support for Americans in the south, see Costo and Costo, 264. Additionally, quoting Thomas O. Larkin (U.S. consul in California), Phillips suggests that Indian horse-raiding in the 1840s overextended the military resources of California and depleted the ranchos to the point where neither could offer a sustained resistance to American forces (Indians and Intruders, 135). For discussion of the relationship between the Cahuillas lead by Juan Antonio and the Lugo brothers, a powerful Californio family, in the south, see Castillo, “The Impact,” 105–6; Phillips, Chiefs and Challengers, 47–51. There is great deal of debate as to how or whether the term “tribe” should be used to discuss indigenous peoples in the region. Alfred L. Kroeber created the term “tribelet” in order to address what he considered the smaller and more localized, village-centered, forms of collective identity and geography that he found in California, implicitly contrasting these to the larger formations of indigenous peoples elsewhere in the continental United States. The term became an accepted part of anthropological discourse about these peoples, with “tribe” reserved for “language families or languages, not actual social groups with territorial boundaries and unifying political leadership” (Simmons, 56). Later in Kroeber’s work, he came to consider “tribes” as “non-political ethnic nationalities” that functioned as a “cultural unit” (Bean, “Social Organization,” 99–102). Florence Shipek, however, suggests that “a national level of organization appears to have functioned above the band territorial unit [or what had been termed the ‘tribelet’] until its gradual, deliberate destruction under Spanish, Mexican, and American political controls” (Pushed into the Rocks, 4–5). Rupert Costo and Jeannette Henry Costo go even farther, asserting that the concept of “tribelet” is a gross misrepresentation of indigenous forms of social organization which divides up historically coherent peoples and serves to limit the possible land claims that can be made by a particular group (42–45). On this score, as well as others, they strongly critique the organization, and much of the information contained in, Heizer’s Handbook (Costo and Costo, xiii, 44, 130). While the refusal to acknowledge native peoples as nations and the creation of reservations was part of state policy in New England and New York from the colonial period onward, what I am describing here is a change in federal policy. See Den Ouden; Hauptman, Conspiracy; O’Brien, Dispossession; and Taylor, Divided. The recognition of rancherías did not include the vast majority of native peoples in the ceded territory who had never been made subject to the authority of the missions. The missions even at their height may have contained only a third of the total native population (Costo and Costo, 171). For discussion of these “wild” tribes prior to American annexation, see Costo and Costo, 162–65, 172; Hurtado, 32–54; and Phillips, Indians and Intruders. On “demographic collapse,” see Jackson and

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36.

37.

38.

NOTES TO PAGES 173 TO 176

Castillo. For analysis of pre-mission forms of socio-spatiality among the peoples of California, especially in the south, see Bahr, From Mission to Metropolis; Bean, “Social Organization”; Bean, Mukat’s People; Bean and Shipek; Bean and Smith; Costo and Costo; Dozier; Hill and Nolasquez; and Shipek, Pushed into the Rocks. For discussion of the mission period, secularization, and the period between secularization and U.S. annexation, see Bouvier, Women and the Conquest, 33–107, 140–68; Castañeda, “Engendering the History”; Castañeda, “Sexual Violence”; Castillo, “The Impact”; Costo and Costo, 155–99; González, “The Child”; Haas, 1–44; Hackel, “Land, Labor, and Production”; Hackel, “The Staff of Leadership”; Heizer and Almquist, 1–22; Holterman; Hurtado, 33–102; Monroy, 51–162; Phillips, Indians and Intruders; Sánchez, Telling Identities; Sandos, “Between Crucifix and Lance”; and Shipek, “California Indian Reactions.” Letter of January 1, 1850, NARA, record group 75, M234, roll 32. Report of the Secretary of the Interior, 31st Cong., 1st sess., 33; Anderson and Heizer, 10; United States Statutes at Large, 31st Congress, 2nd sess., 631–34. On the non-compliance with this part of the California Land Act, see Costo and Costo, 258–60. There were some Indians who held individual land-grants (Costo and Costo, 193–94). In Botiller v. Dominguez (1889) and Barker v. Harvey (1901), among other cases, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that native claims were not exempt from the requirements of the Land Act and had to have been filed and considered like all other claims. For additional discussion of the status of native lands under the 1851 statute as interpreted by state and federal courts, see Griswold del Castillo, 90–107. For discussion of the ambiguities and oscillations in U.S. federal Indian policy in California prior to 1851, as well as the apartheid-like system of passes instituted by the military governors in the southern portion of the state, see Hurtado, 89–99, 125–35; Phillips, Indians and Indian Agents, 3–15. Report of the Secretary of the Interior, 33rd Cong., special session, 8–9, 14. For discussion of the debate in the Congress over sending treaty agents and financing negotiations and background on the agents/treaty-commissioners, see Heizer and Anderson; Phillips, Indians and Indian Agents, 11–13. The commissioners appointed were Redick McGee, G. W. Barbour, and O.M. Wozencraft, who also had been a delegate to the California Constitutional Convention. The full text of the treaties are reprinted in Kappler, Indian Affairs, 4: 1081–128. They will be cited parenthetically. While the treaties are not identical, they are very similar, so I will read them as more or less a single object of analysis. For discussion of the eighteen treaties, see Anderson and Heizer; Costo and Costo, 237–54; and Phillips, Indians and Indian Agents. There is no record of the ratification debate over the treaties due to the fact that the Senate ruled that the discussion of the treaties and the documents themselves were to be made secret. The treaties themselves were declassified on January 18, 1905 (Heizer and Almquist, 76). See Costo and Costo, 230; and Heizer, “Introduction.” The question of consent is further complicated by the fact that the first treaties were preceded by military

NOTES TO PAGES 176 TO 177 235

engagements in the Yosemite valley, and the Mariposa Battalion, a state militia unit, was sent in after recalcitrant chiefs who did not want to send representatives. See Hurtado, 112–17; Phillips, Indians and Indian Agents, 37–108. For discussion of conflict farther north, see Hurtado, 117–22, and for resistance in the south, see Phillips, Chiefs and Challengers, 119–23. Also, several of the treaties make reference to tribes who “are still out in the mountains” and who when eventually brought in will be subject to the terms of the treaty. See Kappler, Indian Affairs, 4: 1087, 1107, 1109, 1114. 39. Kappler, Indian Affairs, 4: 1087 (italics in original). Rupert and Jeannette Henry Costo make the following observations with respect to the treaties: less than onethird of the tribes in the territory known as California negotiated and signed them; the treaties promised 8,518,900 acres in reservation land as opposed to the 100,313,600 acres claimed by California tribes; and they have no accompanying maps of lands ceded. See Costo and Costo, 225–32, 237–54. Some of the reservations proposed by the treaties did match the traditional geographies of the signatories, especially among the Luiseños and neighboring peoples in the southern portion of the state. See Shipek, Pushed into the Rocks, 30. The texts, though, do not register a tribally specific right to traditional lands as such. 40. Trafzer and Hyer, 139. The passage echoes Governor Peter Burnett’s annual message to the state legislature in 1851 (“a war of extermination will continue to be waged . . . until the Indian race becomes extinct” [Hurtado, 135]) and Secretary of the Interior A. H. H. Stuart’s annual report for the same year (“the only alternatives left are, to civilize or exterminate them. We must adopt one or the other” [Phillips, Indians and Indian Agents, 6]). 41. California’s Act for the Government and Protection of Indians, enacted in 1850, instituted the following legal changes: “chiefs or principal men” whose people refuse to comply with “the laws which relate to them” could be sentenced by state justices; setting “the prairie on fire,” a well-established form of land management among indigenous peoples in the region, became illegal; any Indian convicted of a crime could be leased out to “any white person”; and “loitering” and “leading an immoral or profligate course of life” became the basis for auctioning off “vagrant” Indians for “hire.” Criminal prosecution of Indians by state officials functioned as one of the chief ways of insuring the availability of a cheap labor force on Californio and Anglo ranches and in the cities, second only perhaps to the kidnapping of Indian children also licensed by the act. The full text of the law can be found in Heizer and Almquist, 212–15. “Captivity and removal of over 10,000 natives for labor and slavery through the California indenture act of 1850 . . . took a frightful toll” (Castillo, “The Impact,” 113). See also Hurtado, 149–92. Approximately 4,000 native children were kidnapped as a result of the 1850 law’s provision for “obtaining a minor Indian” (Almaguer, Racial, 131), which was given even greater scope in the 1860 revision of the law and finally repealed in 1867. See Heizer and Almquist, 22–64. For discussion of the critical importance of selected burning as a form of

236

42.

43. 44.

45.

46.

NOTES TO PAGES 177 TO 179

land management and a way of promoting cleanliness and containing the spread of vermin, see Lewis; and Preston. Anderson et al., 46. The tribes themselves were not informed that the treaties had not been ratified (Shipek, Pushed into the Rocks, 31–34). For comparison between the lands that would have been available to Indians under the treaty and the paucity of their lands as a result of nonratification, see Costo and Costo; Hyer; Hurtado; Shipek, Pushed. A demand for the ratification of the California treaties is included in the “Twenty-Point Proposal of Native Americans on the Trail of Broken Treaties” (1972) (Josephy et al., 45). The reports of his from which I quote are reprinted in Heizer, Federal Concern, 1–17. On the reservation system in the 1850s, see Hurtado, 142–48; Message from the President. In just over a decade of American rule, native population in California fell from approximately 150,000 to 30,000; while perhaps 65 percent of this decline can be attributed to disease it should be noted that almost as many natives died in 1848–60 as did in the previous eighty years—the population in 1769 estimated at about 300,000 (Hurtado, 1; Castillo, 108). By 1853, there were approximately 400,000 Indians in territory claimed by the United States—209,000 in territory ceded by Mexico with California contributing about 100,000 to that figure (Heizer and Anderson, 1). In fact, prior to Spanish colonization, the area now known as California had the highest population density of any region in North America (Castillo, “The Impact,” 100–1). Executive order reservations are those created by order of the President, which can also be rescinded by him, as opposed to those created by Congressional order or by treaty. This practice was ended by Congress in 1927 when it declared that the boundaries of existing reservations only could be changed by Congressional order (Getches et al., 267). Kappler, Indian Affairs, 4:1087. For discussion of the postbellum erasure of native polities, see Castillo, “Impact”; Hyer; Shipek, Pushed into the Rocks; and Sutton. Edward D. Castillo notes that the Indian Service reported in 1900 that only 5,497 of the 16,000–17,000 natives in California had received any kind of government aid (“Impact,” 118). While somewhat beyond the scope of this project, I should not that the shift from nation to reservation in California I have been describing can be seen as directly affecting the shape of Indian policy in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Most directly, this impact can be seen in U.S. v. Kagama (1886). The case is one of the most important decisions in federal Indian law, giving form to what has come to be known as the “plenary power” doctrine in which Congress is given ultimate and virtually unlimited power over native peoples. The case turned on the constitutionality of the recently passed Major Crimes Act, and it involved a murder on the Hoopa Valley Reservation, which had been created by executive order in California in 1864. The decision takes up the language of domestic

NOTES TO PAGES 179 TO 181 237

dependent nationhood from Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (discussed in chapter 1) but reformulates it as “local dependent communities.” This denationalization, which the court generalizes, is predicated on circumstances specific to California: “The Indian reservation in the case before us is land bought by the United States from Mexico by the Treaty of Gaudaloupe [sic] Hidalgo, and the whole of California, with the allegiance of its inhabitants, many of whom were Indians, was transferred by that treaty to the United States” (381). The absence of treaties in California allows for a rhetoric of dependency which then comes to serve as the prism through which to define the legal status of all native peoples. For discussion of the context and import of Kagama, see Harring, 142–74; Wilkins, American Indian Sovereignty, 64–117. Additionally, Helen Hunt Jackson’s federally appointed work with, and official and fictional writings about, the Indians of southern California in the early 1880s may have provided a significant impetus for the General Allotment Act (1887), given her involvement with the Friends of the Indian and the annual Lake Mohonk Conference with which Henry Lauren Dawes—the bill’s sponsor—also was associated. The act was championed by reformers as a solution to Indians’ inability to get land grants and the government’s attendant failure to protect them against white violence, southern California being taken as perhaps the worst available example of both. See Mathes. 47. “Agua Caliente” was the Spanish name for the village known as Kupa, which was Cupeño land but an important site for a range of tribes, including the Cahuilla, Luiseño, and Kumeyaay (Diegueño) (Phillips, Chiefs and Challengers, 16). The names of tribes in California is a subject of great debate for two main reasons: many of the names used in governmental and anthropological texts are Spanish and derived from the missions to which the majority of the tribe’s members were connected, for example Luiseño from the Mission San Luis Rey; and this process of naming in relation to missionization can obscure tribal identity, including the question of what tribes occupied what territories at what times and of the tribal selfidentification of particular rancherías. 48. Letter to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Jan. 9, 1852, NARA, record group 75, M234, roll 32. 49. Guha, Elementary Aspects, 223, 225. 50. On the Quechans, see Bouvier, Women, 74; Hyer, 57; Jackson and Castillo, 76; Phillips, Chiefs and Challengers, 72–74; and Message from the President, 34–35, 38, 45–52. On J.J. Warner and his ranch, see Hayes, 48–62; Hill, The History of Warner’s Ranch; Hyer, 41–64; Phillips, Chiefs and Challengers; Sandos, “Between Crucifix and Lance,” 217–20. For discussion of the taxing of Indians throughout San Diego County, see Hyer, 56–61; Phillips, Chiefs and Challengers, 67–76; Shipek, Pushed into the Rocks, 195. 51. The newspaper accounts from which I quote are reprinted in Trafzer and Hyer, 95–112.

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52. Apparently, the immediate hostilities abated after Garra’s capture on December 7 by Juan Antonio, a Cahuilla leader earlier described by the Daily Alta California as having “always been considered by the citizens of this country [to be] a well disposed and friendly chief” (91). A report from San Diego following this arrest reports that “Antonio Garra had been taken prisoner . . . and that a general breaking up of the Indians had taken place in consequence of the loss of their head” (97). For background on Juan Antonio, see Costo and Costo, 264; Phillips, Chiefs and Challengers, 47–61; Trafzer and Hyer, 87–93. After his arrest, Garra was tried on charges of treason, murder, and robbery, with J. J. Warner serving as both the interpreter for the court and the chief witness for the prosecution. According to the San Diego Herald, he testified that his own Indian servant when sent to interpret the demands of Garra’s force actually joined them. Garra was found guilty and executed on January 8, 1852. See Phillips, Chiefs and Challengers, 95–110; Trafzer and Hyer, 108–11. 53. Guha, “The Prose,” 71; letter from O.M. Wozencraft to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Jan. 9, 1852, NARA (National Archives and Record Administration), M234, roll 32. On the evidence presented in Garra’s trial, see Phillips, Chiefs and Challengers, 77–79, 106. Warner subsequently was made a subagent for the area surrounding his ranch in 1855. See letter from Superintendent Henley July 22, 1855, NARA, M234, roll 34. 54. For a shorter and earlier account that replicates the main features of Phillips’s, see Evans. 55. Kappler, Indian Affairs, 4: 1128. Available historical and ethnographic scholarship suggests that Garra already was present in Kupa and considered a leader by December 1846 when he met with Stephen Watts Kearny, the American military governor of California. See Hill and Nolasquez, i; Phillips, Chiefs and Challengers, 161–62. For discussion of traditional Cupeño social structure and decision making as well as Cupeño history through American annexation, see Bahr, From Mission, 27–42; Bean and Smith; Costo and Costo, 125–26; and Hill and Nolasquez, i–ii, 85–115. For description of Kupa post-1848, see Hayes, 48–62; Hill, The History of Warner’s Ranch. Additionally, scholarship on the Cupeños suggests that they emerged mostly from the Cahuillas with some Luiseño influence; for analysis of the traditional social structures of those groups, see Bean, Mukat’s People; Bean and Shipek; Costo and Costo, 121–25, 126–28; Dozier; Hyer, 7–36; and Shipek, Pushed into the Rocks, 5–18. For discussion of the governance of Mission San Luis Rey, see Shipek, Pushed into the Rocks, 19–25. 56. On the ways the historiography of insurgency tends to replicate the administrative concerns and discourses surrounding the original event(s), see Guha, “The Prose.” 57. For biographical background, see John Walton Caughey’s introduction to the 1952 reprint of the report. Quotations are taken from this source. On Wilson’s campaigns against Indians, see Churchill, 207–8; Dakin, 121–24; and Phillips, Chiefs and Challengers, 85. The report itself eventually was printed in the Los Angeles Star in July to September of 1868.

NOTES TO PAGES 185 TO 191 239

58. The connection between the report and the “Garra Uprising” is also noted in Phillips, Chiefs and Challengers, 128. The fact that Wilson had bought part of what had been the Mission San Gabriel also may have influenced his discussion of the status of former mission property (Dakin, 199). Such investment was not unusual, given that the subagents for southern California were almost all large landowners in the area, including J. J. Warner and Cave Couts. 59. The report does retain the notion of Indian “nation[hood],” but more as a bureaucratic convenience than a substantive engagement with native sovereignty, stating, “The respective limits of the nations could be defined as easily as counties are elsewhere . . . and the Indians would all readily acquiesce in any common sense arrangement” (34), making “nations” and “counties” synonymous and presuming an easy “acquiesce[nce]” to this jurisdictional “common sense.” Moreover, Wilson declares that “treaties,” and he puts the word in scare quotes, negotiated by state and federal agents “may have given them [the Indians] the most erroneous notions of themselves, and of their true relations to the people and the Government” (12). 60. The report also recommends mandatory (re)education (50), the combining of previously distinct villages (55), and the removal of chiefs in favor of “analogous off[ic]ers of more civilized life, such as justices of the peace and sheriff[s]” (59). 61. Letter of Jan. 27, 1856, NARA, record group 75, M234, roll 35. Like in the case of Garra, insurgencies in the 1850s often are described as the work of ingenious/ despicable leaders. See Hyer, 73; letter from H. S. Burton, Jan. 27, 1856, NARA, M234, roll 35. 62. Letter from Isaac Williams to Commissioner Maypenny and Petition from Cahuilla captains, May 15, 1856, NARA, M234, roll 35. For another example of the expression of Cahuilla discontent a little later that same year, see Message from the President, 125–27. 63. Guha, “Prose,” 61; Phillips, Chiefs and Challengers, 166. On the reservation at Kupa, see Hyer, 90, 93–94. In the case of Barker v. Harvey (1901) in which John G. Downey sued to eject the Cupeños from lands he owned by purchase from J. J. Warner, the court held that the tribe had no legal right to the land: “If these Indians had any claims founded on the action of the Mexican government they abandoned them by not presenting them to the commission for consideration [under the California Land Act]” (491). For discussion of the removal, see Bahr, “Cupeño Trail of Tears”; Hyer, 111–49; and Karr. For reference to the residents of Kupa by contemporaries in the late nineteenth century, see Hill, Warner’s Ranch, 151–53; Jackson and Kinney, 18–20. 64. For the use of the term “fragments” as a way of marking aspects of social life that do not fit, and are dislocated within, dominant narratives, see Pandey. 65. The questions themselves, though, are edited out of the resulting transcripts. For discussion of the structure and context of the testimonios gathered by Bancroft, see Sánchez, Telling Identities. There is at least one other native interviewed as part of Bancroft’s research—Lorenzo Asisara, a member of the Ohlone (or Costanoan)

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tribe. His two accounts appear within the transcription of an interview with someone else—a Californio named José Maria Amador (Asisara, 406). While César and Asisara’s texts are part of the archive collected by Bancroft, which is addressed at length in excellent studies by Rosaura Sánchez and Genaro Padilla, neither scholar discusses these particular narratives, or any attributed to members of California tribes. 66. Pala officially is granted reservation status by executive order in 1870, but due to popular pressure, the order was rescinded a year later. It was revived in 1875 through another executive order that created several reserves in southern California. Inhabitants of Temecula, however, were ejected by court order in 1859. See Hyer; Karr; and Sutton. 67. Prucha, Documents, 290. In addition to the history discussed in this chapter, the issue of recognition in California is complicated by the fact that a number of tribes were “terminated” by the federal government in the 1950s, meaning that they ceased to exist as federally recognized entities. See Castillo, “The Impact”; Karr; Shipek, Pushed into the Rocks, 34–151, 172–79; and Slagle. According to the BIA website, there are over fifty native groups in California currently seeking government recognition. See http://www.doi.gov/bureau-indian-affairs.html. 68. See Rifkin, “Indigenizing Agamben.”

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INDEX

Acoma Pueblo, 78 acquiescence doctrine, 4–5, 14 adoption, 82–84, 93, 127 (See also kinship) Comanche, 137, 142, 146, 224 n41 matrilineal, in Cherokee culture, 59–60, 210 n34, 211 n38 Adorno, Theodor, 17, 21, 28, 113, 151, 190, 201 n23 African Americans, 53, 62, 114, 204 n49, 231 n19 Agua Caliente, 179, 181,183–184, 192, 237 n47, 238 n55, 239 n63 Alamo, 119 Alonso, Ana María, 139–140, 222 n31 Alvarado, Juan Bautista, 167 American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, 53, 55, 207 n14 American Party, 123, 221 n24 (See also Know Nothing Party) annexation, 11, 17 (See also borders, expansionism, Manifest Destiny) of California, 6, 149–173, 229 n11, 233 nn29, 33, 238 n55 of Mexican territories, 6, 10, 33 of native lands, 5 of Texas, 6, 115, 118, 122–124, 129, 220 n16 antebellum period, 15, 25, 201 n21, 226 n51, 227 n63 in California, 153 expansionism, 4–5, 7–8, 10, 13, 16, 28, 31, 38, 194–195 federal Indian law, 53 Antonio, Juan, 181–183, 185–187, 233 n30, 238 n52 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 20–22, 202 n30

Apaches, 83, 112, 127–128 archive, 66–67, 90, 108, 131, 153, 164, 190 of H.H. Bancroft, 240 n65 of Californio assembly, 230 n11 of Mission Santa Clara, 160 Arkansas, 104 River, 104, 127–128 Articles of Confederation, 44 autobiography, 214 n11 of Black Hawk, 6, 32, 76–77, 191 of Juan N. Seguín, 34, 109, 113, 118–127, 138, 141–147 of Wilma Mankiller, 53 Aztecs, 20, 202 n30 Aztlán, 20 (See also borderland) backcountry, 9, 42, 44, 83, 199 nn10–11 (See also Pontiac's Uprising, Seven Years’ War) Bancroft, H. H., 167, 191, 194, 232 n24, 239 n65 Battle of Bad Axe, 76 Beale, Edward F., 177–178, 185 Bear Flag Rebellion, 171, 232 n29 Beebe, Rose Marie, 167, 232 n24 Bell, P. H., 131 Bellin, Joshua David, 77–78, 201 n24, 214 nn5–6, 215 n22, 217 n39 Beloved Path, 19, 201 n26 Beverley, John, 28, 203 n44, 204 n48, 215 n14 Bhabha, Homi K., 199 n10, 202 n35. Black Hawk, 76–108, 213–214 n4–6, 214 n11, 214 n13, 216 n31–32, 217 n33, 217 n39, 217 n45, 218 n47, 218 n49, 222 n32 Life of Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak, or Black Hawk, 6, 32–33, 75–108, 191 borderland, 20–23, 112, 227 n60 (See also Aztlán)

271

272

INDEX

borders (See also borderland, domestic) national, 9, 15, 21, 23–24, 76, 199–200 n11, 202 n34, 203 n40 state, 44, 136 of the treaty-system, 95–96, 133 tribal, 32, 132, 186 U.S., 5, 11, 24, 35, 91, 196, 201 n21 Bouchard, Hipólito, 169 Brady, Mary Pat, 112, 219 n5, 226 n57 Brazos, 135 Brownsville, 109–110, Buffalo Hump, 134, 224 n47, 225 n48 Burnet, David G., 141, 227 n63 Burton, H. S., 186–187, 239 n61 Butler, Elizur, 51–53 Caddos, 127, 135, 222 n31 Cahuillas, 149, 152–153, 179–188, 228 n5, 233 n30, 237 n47, 238 n 52, 238 n55, 239 n62 California, 6–7, 33–35, 83, 110, 149–191, 228 n1-n2, 228 n7, 229 n11, 230 n12, 230 n16, 232 n24, 232 n26, 232 n29, 233 n30, 233 n31, 234 n33, 235 n39, 235 n41, 236 n42, 236 n44, 236–237 n46, 237 n47, 238 n55, 239 n58, 240 n65-n67 (See also Cahuillas, Cupeños, Luiseños, and missions) California Land Act, 154–155, 158–159, 174, 228 n7, 229 n8, 234 n35, 239 n63 California Trail of Tears, 189, 239 n63 Californios, 29, 35, 149–172, 182, 190, 192–193, 230 nn12, 14, 17, 232 n21, 233 n29 Constitution of, 35, 159–161, 163–172, 231 n18, 234 n36, 244 Constitutional Convention, 35, 167, 172, 234 n36 Daily Alta California, 176, 182, 238 n52 Supreme Court of, 232 n22 Canada, 82–83, 91, 103, 195 captivity, by Comanches, 125, 128, 131–132, 142, 217 n33, 219 n3, 222 n33, 224 n41, 227 n64 of natives, 95, 222 n31, 235 n41 Carillo, Jose Antonio, 159–161, 230 n16 Cart War, 121–122, 221 n22 Caweello. See Cahuillas César, Julio, 35, 191–194, 240 n65 Chatterjee, Partha, 57, 63, 73, 209 n30 (See also hegemony, passive revolution, subaltern) Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 49–51, 172, 205 n2, 237 n46 Cherokees, 19–20, 29, 32, 37–41, 43, 46–47, 49–73, 76, 79, 80, 82, 97, 107, 111, 172, 191, 201 n26, 201 n28, 205 n2, 205 n3

Cherokee Constitution, 32, 39, 64–66, 68, 205 n2, 211 n43, 212 n45 Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 32, 49–51, 172–173, 205 n2, 207 n16-n18, 237 Cherokee Phoenix, 58–59, 209 n34 Chickamauga, 19, 43, 201 n26, 206 n8, 208 n24 clans, 29, 32, 40–41, 54–56, 61–62, 65, 79, 98–99, 205 n5, 209 n28, 211 n40, 261, 267 culture, 19–20, 39, 53–54, 58, 205 n5, 206 n12, 208 n24, 209 n28-n29, 210 n35, 211 n36, 211 n40 General Council, 55–63, 68, 209 nn27, 34, 211 n40, 212 nn46–47 governance, 19–20, 32, 37–52, 56–58, 60–63, 67, 69–72, 201 n28, 205 n2, 207 n14, 209 n33, 210 nn34–35, 211 n42 language, 19, 58, 72–73, 77, 209 nn33–34 literacy, 54, 58–60, 64, 67, 73, 207 n16, 209 n33 matrilineal kinship, 40, 61–65, 210 n34, 211 nn38–39, 214 n12 (See also adoption, kinship) memorials, 32, 37, 39, 69–73, 191, 205 n3, 212 nn49–51 Nation, 19, 37, 40, 49–53, 55–56, 205 n2, 208 n19, 208 n27, 209 n29, 210 n34 nationalism, 6, 19, 29, 32, 39–41, 54 National Committee, 55, 58–59, 209 n27, 209 n33, 211 n40, 212 n45-n46 removal, 6, 19, 32, 39, 41, 46–48, 53–55, 61, 64, 68–73, 87, 99–101, 205 nn2–3, 207 n14, 210 n35 sovereignty, 37–38, 41, 49–52, 54, 57, 73 territory, 32, 46, 49–52, 54–55, 58–60, 68, 205 n2, 212 n49 towns, 32, 40–41, 43, 54–63, 65–66, 68, 79, 205 n5, 208 n24, 209, 211 n40 Cheyfitz, Eric, 38, 200 n17, 202 n36, 207 n16, 211 n41 Chickamauga. See Cherokee. Chihuahua, 139 Chippewas, 104 Chumash, 170 Chumash, uprising of 1824, 170, 232 n27 Chumash revolt, 171 ciboleros, 128 citizenship, 7, 14, 34–37, 61–63, 110–166, 172, 190, 194, 204 n1, 204 n49, 210 n34, 219 n9,220 n13, 231 n18 City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation, 3, 14, 20, 23, 36 (See also acquiescence doctrine, impossibility doctrine) Clark, William, 102, 218 n49

INDEX 273

Clear Fork reserve, 135–137, 226 n52 Coast Range of Mountains, 187 coercion, 11, 30, 38–40, 72, 98, 186 Anglo, 118, 123 consent vs., 13, 29, 48, 52, 69, 73, 100 colonial, 8–9 hegemony and, 198 n8 U.S., 5, 17, 194, 207 n15 collectivity, (See also indigenous peoples, peoplehood, sovereignty, self-determination, tribe) Comanche, 223 n38 native, 31, 61, 108, 153, 180, 189, 193, 196, 205 n1 place-based, 20 Tejano, 119 colonialism, 8–10, 16, 27, 29, 139, 200 n12, 209 n33, 219 n5 internal, 204 n49 Colorado River, 136, 181–182 Comanches, 7, 33–34, 83, 109–114, 125–147, 175, 221 n28, 223 n-26 as nonsedentary people, 33, 83, 110–111, 126–130, 132–133, 135–137, 140–142 captives, 224 n41 clans, 219 n2, 223 n38, 225 n51, 226 n52 Comanchería, 127–128 Council House Fight, 125 geopolitics, 34, 112–113, 131, 137, 222 n34, 223 n39, 224 nn41–42, 226 nn54–55 land, 7, 113, 131–135, 142, 219 n3, 222 n33, 225 n49, 227 n46 marauding, 7, 34, 113, 132, 136–138, 140, 145 raids, 110–111, 132, 143 self-determination, 113, 126, 147 trade, 111 127–128, 131–132, 137, 142, 222 n33 treaties, 222 n37, 225 n48 uprising, 126, 139 women, 140–142, 227 n63 Congress, 43–44, 46, 50, 88, 131, 158, 160–161, 163, 205 n3, 206 n13, 207 n14, 228 nn7–8, 229 n11, 234 n35, 236 nn45–46 Connecticut, 44 consent, 45 (See also citizenship, coercion, hegemony, subaltern, subjectivity, treaties, and voice) Californiano, 150, 153–154, 158, 166, 172 Cherokee discourse of, 32, 39–41, 47, 55–58, 64–74, 86–87, 91, 99, 105–106, 205 n3 Cherokee policy making, 58–59, 64–74, 210 n35 in City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation, 5, 14 coercion vs., 29–30, 48, 53, 100, 186, 234 n38

Comanche, 130–131 displacement based on, 33–35, 43 geographies of, 13–22, 35, 38, 131, 175–177 Tejano, 118 terms of, 44–45 as part of U.S. republican imperialism, 9–13, 200 n14 Conser, Walter H., 56, 209 n33, 210 n34, 258 Constitution of the United States of America, 5, 43–44, 49, 163, contact, 23, 45, 75–78, 83, 91, 184 Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth, 37–38, 197 n2, 200 n17, 204 n49, 205 n4 corn, culture and origin of, 89–101 as forms of native land use, 213 n2 Cortina, Juan N., 109, 126, 218 n1 Cota, Manuelito, 187 Creeks, 45, 205 n3 Cupeños, 153, 179, 181, 184, 189, 238 n55, 239 n63 Dearborn, Henry, 91 de la Guerra, Pablo, 162–165, 231 n19 Delawares, 96, 105 Deloria, Vine, 14, 197 n2, 202 n33, 204 n49, 205 n1, 215 n14, 217 n45, 222 n37, 224 n46, Democratic Party, 121, 123 Detroit, 91 Diegueños, 187 Dimmick, Kimball H., 160 domestic, 9, 31 (See also annexation, borders, expansionism, incorporation, legal geography, Manifest Destiny, place) Californio, 154–156, 164–166, 176, 189 Cherokee, 249 Comanches, 135, 140–142, 146, 227 n63 comforts, 89 domestic dependent nation, 14, 50, 128 nation, 14, 50–51, 128, 237 n46 populations, 6, 12, 14, 17, 26–30, 36–38, 95, 186, 190, 195 space, 4–9, 12, 15, 23, 26, 31–33, 38, 41, 50, 87, 107, 110, 155, 195, 198 n4, 199 n9, 202 n37 Tejano, 142–144 U.S. policy, 7, 24, 53, 194–196, 198 n5, 201 n21 Dowd, Gregory, 103, 205 n7, 213 n3, 217 n46 early republic, 199 n10, 200 n14 agricultural market, 215 n25 geographic literacy, 199 n11 hostility in, 199 n10 Indian policy, 32, 41, 206 n8 U.S. political-economy of, 9 ejidos, 124

274

INDEX

El Bejareño, 121 elite Anglo, 143 authority of, 57, 79 Californio, 154 Cherokee, 37, 40–42, 47, 54–73, 80, 209 n34, 212 n51, 214 n12 classism, 29–33 Hispanic, 151 Mexican, 124 Tejano, 123 encounter, 12, 18, 23, 77, 82, 213 n3 Estudillo, Don José Antonio, 191 exchange, 18, 32, 76–77, 82–85 (See also trade) capitalistic, 56–57, 62 federal, 41, 46 of territories, 52, 55 expansionism, 4, 7, 11, 13, 31, 42, 47, 72, 82, 96, 123, 138–139, 145, 154, 160, 202 n37, 228 n1 (See also annexation, incorporation, legal geography, Manifest Destiny, property, treaties) family (See also honor, kinship, marriage) Cherokee, 61, 270 Comanche, 142–143 national, 169 in The Memoirs of Juan N. Seguín, 113, 123, 139–146 farming, 62, 76, 89, 94, 111, 133, 152 Cahuilla protests about, 188 by Californio native labor, 152 Cherokee, 62, 75–76, 206 n12 Comanche, 127 Euramerican, 76, 94, 177 Federal Indian policy and, 45–46 and the market, 215 n25 by natives in the western Great Lakes region, 213 n2 by natives in east Texas, 222 n31 federalism, U.S., 5, 8, 39, 45, 53, 73, 203 n39 in California, 34–35, 110, 149–158, 169–180, 189, 194 in Georgia, 46–53, 172–173, 205 n2, 206–207 n13, 207 n17, 208 n19, 208 nn21–23,210 n34, 211 n43, 237 n46 in Texas, 109–152, 218 n1, 219 n3, 220 n10, 220 n13, 221 n24, 222 n28, 222 n30, 222 nn35–37, 223 nn38–39, 224 nn44–46, 226 n53, 226 n55, 227 n59, 227 n62, 228 n66 Florida, 83, 198 n5 Forsyth, Thomas, 98, 216 n27, 217 nn33, 36, 38, 218 n50 Fort Armstrong, 94, 99, 216 n32

Fort Edwards, 92 Foster, Steven C., 162–163 Foxes, 76, 80, 84, 88, 96–102, 104, 215 n16 Frémont, John C., 171, 229 n8, 232 n29 friendship, 92, 96, 212 n50, 218 n51, 222 n34 Gaines, Edmund Pendleton, 100–101 Gabrielinos, 185 Garra, Antonio, 179–189, 238 nn52–53, 55 Garra Uprising, 35, 153, 179–189, 238 nn52–53, 55 gender, 21, 131, 189, 198 n4, 227 n65 (See also family, honor, marriage, masculinity) Cherokee, 206 n12, 211 n39 Comanche, 140–142 Mexico, 139 Sauks, 84, 90, 101, 215–216 n26 Georgia, 41, 46–47, 49, 51–53, 205 n2, 206–207 n13, 207 n17, 208 n19, 208 nn21–23, 210 n34,211 n43 Cherokee Nation v., See Cherokee Nation v. Georgia Worcester v., See Worcester v. Georgia Gilbert, Edward, 162 Gillespie, Archibaldo, 171 Gilmer, George, 49 Ginsberg, Justice Ruth Bader, 3–4 Gold Rush, 154, 158–159 Gramsci, Antonio 28, 41, 46, 66, 141, 179, 198 n8, 203 nn45–46, 204 n48, 221 n23, 227 n62 Great Britain, 29, 42–44, 54, 82–86, 90–93, 98–99, 101, 104, 205 n7, 216 n27, 216 n30, 218 n50 Great Lakes, 42, 87, 103–105, 110, 129, 133, 213 n2, 214 n12 western Great Lakes, 6, 32, 76–77, 79, 82–83, 85, 213 n2 Great Sauk Trail, See Sauks. Green Bay, 83, 213 n2 Guha, Ranajit, 8, 29, 101, 153, 180, 183, 188, 203 n44, 204 n47, 214 n10, 217 n45, 237 n49, 238 n53, 238 n56, 239 n63 (See also hegemony, insurgency, subaltern, voice) Gulf of Mexico, 42 Gutiérrez-Jones, Carl, 13, 220 n19 Gwin, William M., 155–157, 159–163, 174 Hall, Thomas, 127 Halleck, H. W., 165 Harris, Caroline, 142, 227 n64 Harrison, William Henry, 90–91, 105–106 Hastings, L. W., 162–163 Hawkins, Benjamin, 45–46

INDEX 275

hegemony, 8, 22, 28, 53, 57, 60, 66–68, 70, 73, 150, 154, 159, 164, 191, 198 n8 (See also citizenship, consent, subaltern, subjectivity, treaties) counter hegemony, 119, 172 synthetic, 57, 63 Hemphill, John, 117–118 honor, 119–120, 139–141, 146–147, 226 n57, 227 n65 Hoppe, J. D., 163 Horton, A. C., 129 Houston, Sam, 115, 134, 143, 222 n28, 224 n46 Huston, Felix, 143 hunting, 12, 32, 75–77, 86–95, 97, 99, 101, 103, 106–107, 111, 128, 132–134, 137, 139, 202 n39,206 n12, 215 n25, 216 n26, 225 n48 geographies of, 87–95 hunting grounds, 75–76, 87–95, 97, 106–107, 133, 135 Hurtado, Albert L., 178, 228 n1, 233 n30, 233 nn33, 35, 235 nn38, 40–41, 236 n42 hybridity, 23, 32, 78 (See also Bhabha, Homi K., mimicry) identity, 17, 22–30, 34–38, 57, 77–81, 98, 200 n19 Californio, 7, 35, 150–151, 233 n31 Cherokee, 17, 39, 54, 60–72, 82, 209 n33, 210 n34 Comanche, 111–112, 135–137 Cupeño, 189 geopolitical, 15, 21–28, 134, 175, 188, 196, 202 n39, 227 n60 legal, 44 Mexican, 109, 114–120, 151, 162, 169 native, 5, 73–76, 87, 92, 100, 190, 209 n33, 225 n51, 233 n37 nonidentity, 17, 21, 30, 151, 201 n23 racial, 162–164 Sauk, 80, 101, 108 Tejano, 113–120, 146 Texan, 123 socio-spatial, 14, 132 U.S. national, 3–4, 9, 13–17, 32, 160–161, 168 Illinois, 83–84, 91, 215 n23 Illinois River, 82 impossibility doctrine, 4 incorporation, 199, 204 n49 (See also annexation, expansionism, legal geography, Manifest Destiny) cultural, 29, 79, 202 n36 forced, 198 n4 ideological, 150 of territories, 11, 31, 33, 150–151, 160 Indiana, 47, 91 Indian Removal Act, 46–48, 54, 72, 205 n2, 206 n13

indigenous peoples, 6, 14–20, 34, 37–38, 53, 76–80, 90, 99, 104, 112–113, 125, 172–180, 185,189–190, 200 n19, 202 n33, 204 n49, 221 n28, 233 n31, 235 n41 (See also peoplehood, sovereignty, self-determination, treaties, entries for various tribes.) U.N. Declaration on the Rights of, 14–16, 21, 39, 88, 112, 201 n20, 228 n3 inheritance, Cherokee, 56, 62, 65 Tejano, 118 insurgency, 79, 153, 173, 238 n56 California, 7, 35, 153, 170, 179–189, 193–194 Cherokee, 67 Chickamauga, 206 n8 counterinsurgency, 35, 153, 172, 180, 188–189, 214 n10, 217 n45 prophecy, 103 intelligibility, 13, 22, 27, 31, 190, 196 interpellation, 6, 36, 191 imperial, 10, 14, 20, 28–29, 38, 110, 114, 138, 160, 172, 181, 220 n19 invasion, Anglo, 54, 112 of California, 149, 153, 158, 165, 170, 172, 181, 187 colonial, 8 Comanche, 132, 138, 143 Sauk, 107 of Texas, 110 U.S., 73, 77, 167, 171, 184 Iroquois, 82, 198 Jackson, Andrew, 52, 55, 216 n23, 228 n1 Jackson, Helen Hunt, 189, 233 n35, 237 n46 Jefferson, Thomas, 10–12, 45–46, 54, 88–89, 94–95, 200 n14, 206 n13, 215 n25 Joaquín de la Torre, 171 Johnson, Adam, 173–174 Jones, Thomas Catesby, 167 Jones, William Carey, 155, 174, 228–229 n8, 230 n11 jurisdiction, 17, 21, 25, 34–35, 42–52, 112, 173, 193–194 Anglo, 133 colonial, 232 n27 Hispanic, 152 native, 45, 51, 70, 81, 85, 121, 163 Mexican, 128, 152, 164, 170–172, 180 Texas, 110, 116 U.S., 3–17, 22–31, 37–39, 44–53, 56, 70, 85, 88, 93–107, 110, 118, 129, 135, 150–160,165–177, 181, 190, 194–195, 199 n10, 200 nn18–19, 204 n49, 207 nn17–18, 215 n23, 239 n59 Justice, Daniel Heath, 18–20, 201 n25

276

INDEX

Kaplan, Amy, 23–24, 198 kávalim clan, 184 Keokuk, 99–102, 217 n39 Kern River, 188 Kickapoos, 76, 104–105 ki-sho-ha, 99 Kinney, Albert, 189, 239 n63 kinship, 39, 82, 84, 101, 187–189, 198 n4, 214 n12 (See also collectivity, family, marriage) adoption, 82–84, 93, 127 Cherokee, 54, 58, 60–61, 65, 82, 211 n38, 214 n12 clans, 61, 65 Comanche, 127, 137–142, 146, 219 n2, 223 n38, 224 n41, 225 n51 matrilineal, 40,59–63, 210 n34, 211 nn38–39, 214 n12 Tejano, 146 Know-Nothing Party, 121–123, 221 n24 Knox, Henry, 43, 206 n8 Konkle, Maureen, 39–40, 200 n17, 201 n24, 203 n41, 207 n16, 209 n33 Krupat, Arnold, 72, 201 n24, 209 b33, 214 n11, 215 n14 Kupa. See Agua Caliente. La Flores, 191 land borderlands, 20–23, 112 Californio, 35, 149, 152–159, 163, 170–174 in City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation, 3–4 claims, 6, 32–35, 41, 49, 74, 83, 88, 93–97, 103, 110, 113–115, 121–126, 138, 147, 152, 155, 165–166, 170–178, 185–191 and the impossibility doctrine, 4 landholding, 7, 15, 33, 77, 80, 86–88, 96, 102, 115–116, 123, 126, 145, 149–155, 174 landlordism, 9 Louisiana Purchase, 6, 83 Mexican, 7, 15, 21, 33, 110, 114, 154–163, 171, 177 native, 3–9, 12–13, 15–16, 19–21, 25, 31–32, 35, 38–65, 70–107, 113, 123, 127–140, 147, 152, 164–166, 170–194 Tejano, 34, 109–126, 138, 141, 145 U.N. Declaration on, 39 U.S., 6, 8–11, 30–32, 38–45, 52–55, 63–64, 70–74, 88, 95–96, 104–107, 114–115, 125, 129, 139, 149–165, 173–185, 194–196 use of, 6–7, 10, 32–33, 40–49, 54, 62, 79–88, 93–107, 112–115, 121–125, 128–137, 140, 145,147–159, 174, 177, 190–195 Lea, Luke, 176, 179 LeClaire, Antoine, 80–81, 213 n5, 215 n14, 217 n39

Lee, Nelson, 142 Lefebvre, Henri, 8, 86, 198 n3, 215 n25 legal geography, 4, 9–10, 15, 17, 22, 24, 28, 31–32, 38, 41, 49, 51, 56, 64, 70, 78, 81, 86, 95, 101–102, 110, 135, 150, 163, 164, 190 Lippitt, Francis J., 165–166, literacy, 30, 54, 59–60, 64, 67, 73, 153, 199 n11, 203 n43, 209 n33 literary studies, 18, 20, 26–27, 37–39, 201 n25, 203 n39, 203 n41, 204 nn48–49, 207 n16 Los Angeles, 171, 182, 184–185, 194 Louisiana Purchase, 6, 83, 198 n5 Luiseños, 179, 184–185, 187, 189, 191–192, 194, 235 n39 Lumpkin, Wilson, 53 Lytle, Clifford M., 14, 197, 204 n39, 205 n1 Mackinac, 92, 216 n30 Madison, James, 10, 206 n9 Malden, 91 Main Poc, 218 n50 Manifest Destiny, 7, 198 n6 Mankiller, Wilma, 53 marauding, 7, 34, 110, 113, 132, 136–140, 145, 147, 150 Marcy, R. B., 136, 141, 221 n24, 225 n51, 226 n53, 227 n62 marriage, 44, 61, 82, 140–141, 143, 184, 198 n4, 224 n41, 228 n66 Marshall, John, 50–52, 75–76, 207 nn18–19, 213 n2 masculinity, 139–141, 143–144, 146, 214 n11, 215 n 26, 217 n38, 227 n65 (See also family, gender, honor, marriage) Mason Dixon Line, 161 Massachusetts, 44 Massey, Doreen, 131–132, 202 n39 McLean, John, 52 McLoughlin, William G., 56, 58, 67, 205 n2, 206 nn8, 13, 208 nn22, 24–26, 209 nn29, 32–34, 210 n35, 211 nn36–38, 42, 45, 212 nn46, 48 Medill, William, 129 Meigs, Return J., 55 Menominees, 92–93, 97, 100 mestizos, 152 metapolitical authority, 14, 17, 200 n18 Mexico, 5–6, 16, 21, 33, 42, 109–110, 112–113, 116–120, 124, 128, 131, 136–139, 147, 149, 156–158, 161–164, 167, 169, 173–175, 182, 218 n1, 220 nn13, 16, 224 n44, 227 n59, 229 nn10–11, 232 n22, 233 n31, 236 n44, 237 n46

INDEX 277

Constitution of 1824, 139, 164 Mexican-American War, 6, 10, 14–15, 34, 119, 122, 144, 152, 191, 195, 220 n13 Mexico City, 169 Revolution, 128 Republic of, 158, 175 Micheltorena, Manuel, 169 middle-ground, 18, 23, 32, 78, 107, 200 n11, 202 n34, 205 n7, 213 nn2–3, 214 n7, 215 n17, 217 n46, 218 n50 mimicry, 26, 65, 202 n35, 203 n42 (See also Bhabha, Homi K., hybridity) missions, 7, 10, 29, 53, 66, 82, 150, 152, 170, 173–174, 177–178, 180–181, 183–186, 188, 190–194, 211 n45, 212 n46, 219 n3, 229 n8, 232 n27, 233 n33, 234 n33, 237 n47 Jesuit, 178 Indians, 170, 189 San Diego, 186 (See also San Diego) San Gabriel, 239 n58 San Luis Rey, 182, 184–185, 229, 237 n47, 238 n55 (See also Luiseños) Santa Clara, 167 missionaries, 51, 68, 184, 208 n22, 209 n28, 211 n45, 232 n27 Mississippi River, 11, 31, 46, 54, 68, 76, 82–84, 88, 91, 96, 98, 100, 102, 105, 107, 128, 188, 198, 205 n2, 206 n13, 213 n2, 214 n12 Missouri, 83, 128, 217 n37 River, 88, 198 n5, 213 n2, 216 n29 mobility, 34, 87, 96, 109, 111–114, 118, 128, 132–133, 135–137, 141, 145, 227 n60 (See also marauding, nonsedentary peoples, raiding) Mohawks, 20 Mojaves, 185 Montejano, David, 124, 218 n1, 219 n9, 220 nn10, 16, 221 n22, 221 nn26, 28, 228 nn66–67 Monterey, 161, 166–168 Mopechucope, 130, 133, 135, 225 nn47, 49 Neapope, 104, 217 n47 negative dialectics, 17, 21, 28, 30, 113, 151, 190, 193, 201 n23 Neighbors, Robert S., 129–130, 134–137, 225 n51, 226 n55 New Echota, Treaty of. See treaties. New Mexico, 127–128, 181–182, 198 n5, 222 nn32–33 New Orleans, 82–83 New York, 3, 44, 233 n32

Nichols, Roger L., 96, 213 n4, 215 n16, 216 nn26–28, 32, 217 nn33, 36, 38, 43–44, 218 nn47, nonfiction, 6, 25–26, 30, 195, 203 n41 nonidentity, 17, 21, 30, 151, 201 n23 nonsedentary peoples, 83, 110–113, 127–129, 138, 140–141, 145, 147, 152, 173, 227 (See also marauding, mobility, raiding) Noriego. See de la Guerra, Pablo. Northwest Ordinance, 43 Nueces, 109 occupancy, 5, 7, 12, 14, 16, 20, 22–27, 31–32, 35, 79–80, 84–89, 92, 94–96, 101, 103, 105, 108, 111–112, 120, 125–126, 129, 131–132, 134–135, 137, 145, 147, 150, 151, 153–154, 174–174, 177–180, 187, 193, 215 n21, 225 n47 Ohio, 83 Ohio River, 83, 213 n2 OIN. See Oneida Indian Nation Omi, Michael, 115, 204 n49, 220 n14 Oneida Indian Nation, 3–5, 197 n1 Onuf, Peter S., 11, 200 n14 oral tradition, 79, 90, 184 (See also tradition) Ordinance for the Regulation of Indian Affairs, 43 Ortega, José Joaquín, 191 Ortega, Solded, 167 Ortiz, Simon, 32, 78–79, 87, 104, 203 n41, 205 n1, 209 n33 Osages, 95–97, 211 n43 Osio, Antonio María, 35, 151, 166–172, 191, 232 n24 Osio de Willaimson, Beatrice, 167 Pacific Ocean, 161, 182 Padilla, Genaro M., 112, 126, 203 n41, 219 n5, 220 nn18–19, 221 nn20, 24, 228 n4, 232 n24, 233 n29, 240 n65 Pala, 189, 192–193, 229 n8, 240 n66 Pass of San Gorgonia, 187 passive revolution, 57–59, 66 (See also Chatterjee, Partha) Patterson, John D., 81, 214 n5, 215 n14 -215 Pauma, 192 Pawnees, 128 Penatekas, 130, 134, 136, 223 n38, 226 n53 peoplehood, 9, 18, 41, 44–45, 64, 202 n29, 211 n43 Peoria, 93 Petition of Cahuilla leaders, 149, 152–153 (See also Cahuillas) Petition of California landholders, 149 (See also California)

278

INDEX

Phillips, George Harwood, 183–184, 189, 232 n28, 233 nn30, 33, 234 nn35–37, 235 nn38, 40, 237 nn47, 50, 238 nn52–55, 57, 239 nn58, 63 Pico, Andrés, 171 Pico, Pío, 171, 181, 191, 232 n29 Pike, Zebulon, 85 place, 6, 10, 13, 18, 20, 22, 24–25, 31, 33, 78, 80, 87, 93, 109, 112–113, 118, 121, 123, 125, 128–129, 131–132, 137, 140, 142, 145–147, 166, 177, 182, 185, 187–188, 196, 209 n39 (See also domestic, land, legal geography, socio-spatial formation) placemaking, 7, 12, 21, 23, 29, 31, 77, 112, 126, 131–132, 138, 140, 147, 196, 202, 214, 227 Pochanaquarhip. See Buffalo Hump Polk, James K., 129 Pontiac's Uprising, 42, 84 Portage des Sioux, 92 Porter, Carolyn, 23 Potawatomies, 76, 93, 95, 105, 213 n5, 218 n50 Potrero, 192 Povinelli, Elizabeth, 111, 202 n33, 219 n4 Prairie du Chien, 83, 97 Prakash, Gyan, 27 Proclamation Line, 42 property, 3, 7, 12, 25, 34–35, 42–43, 55–57, 61–65, 71, 83, 88, 99, 110–115, 121, 123–124, 130, 133, 137, 139, 141, 143–144, 149–151, 154–158, 163–166, 172–174, 181, 186–194, 211 n41, 215 n23, 220 n13, 200 n16, 221 n25, 229 n10, 239 n58 (See also annexation, Cheyfitz, Eric, expansionism, incorporation, land legal geography, sovereignty, treaties) prophecy, 33, 75, 103–107, 217 n46, 218 n49–50 Pueblos, 78, 104, 127 Quechan, 181, 237 n50 race, 10, 15–16, 21, 33, 35, 40, 61, 109–111, 113–119, 121, 125–126, 134, 137–138, 140, 142, 145–146, 150–152, 159, 162–165, 170–171, 204 n49, 214 n18, 221 n21, 227 n58, 231 nn78–79, 235 n40 raiding, 33, 128–130, 132, 137, 142–143, 145, 179, 219 n3, 222 n31, 224 n44, 233 n30 (See also marauding, mobility, nonsedentary peoples, wandering) rancherías, 152, 173–174, 183–184, 187, 192–193, 233 n33, 237 n47 Red Clay, 68 Red River, 104, 136, 222 n34, 226 n55 remainder, 17, 28, 30, 113, 190, 201 n23

removal, Indian, 6–7, 32–33, 39, 41–48, 53–55, 58, 61, 64, 67–73, 87, 99, 101, 104, 107, 110, 176, 187, 189, 195, 205 nn2–3, 206 n13, 207 nn14–15, 210 n35, 218 n51, 239 n63 representation, 6–9, 14, 26–29, 34, 38–42, 46, 55, 58, 60, 66, 69, 73, 78, 110, 131, 141, 145, 150, 164, 190, 195, 211 n40, 223 n40 (See also citizenship, consent, self-representation, Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, treaties, voice) self, 6–8, 16–19, 22, 26, 30–31, 35, 51, 53, 56, 62, 66, 68, 72, 74, 78–79, 81, 126, 140, 152, 158, 172, 191, 193, 196, 203, 214 reservation, 3, 23, 135–137, 141, 172–179, 184–186, 189–190, 226 nn53, 55, 233 n32, 235 n39, 236 nn44–46, 239 n63, 240 n66 paradigm, 35, 153, 172 residual formation, 122, 139, 147, 154, 160, 167, 194 (See also hegemony, subaltern, Williams, Raymond) Revolutionary War, American, 5–6, 41–42, 54, 188, 200 n12, 201 n26, 205 nn2, 7, 206 n9, 208 n24 Rio Grande, 109 Rock River, 92–93, Rock River Sauks, 92 Rocky Mountains, 127 Rosenbaum, Robert J., 113–114, 200 n13, 218 n1, 219 n9 Ross, John, 53, 209 n34 Ruíz, José Francisco, 140, 223 n38, 227 n61 rumor, 113, 117–118, 120, 122, 125, 193–194 (See also subaltern) Runnels, H. R., 145 San Antonio, 116–129, 139–140, 143–144, 219 n6, 220 n15, 221 nn25, 27–28, 227 nn58–59, 228 n66 San Diego, 179, 181–182, 184, 186, 237 n50, 238 n52 San Jacinto, 119, 191 Battle of, 144 San Luis Obispo, 160 San Luis Rey. See missions. San Mateo, 191 San Pascual, 186–187 San Rafael, 171 Sanaco, 136–137 Sánchez, José María, 140, 222 n30, 223 n38, 227 n59 Sánchez, Rosaura, 158, 200 n13, 203 n41, 219 n5, 220 n19, 228 nn2, 4, 232 nn24, 26, 234 n33, 239 n65 Santa Anna, 119–120

INDEX 279

Santa Barbara, 182 Santa Fé Trail, 128, 181 Santa Margarita rancho, 191 Sarris, Greg, 77, 203 n41, 214 n8 Sauks, 29, 33, 76–77, 80–93, 96, 98–102, 104–107, 111, 215 nn18, 21, 23, 216 nn29, 32, 217 nn33, 36, 218 nn50–51 of Rock River, 92 Saukenuk, 84, 91, 94, 98–101, 104, 106–107, 215 n23, 216 n32, 217 n39, 218 n50 the Great Sauk Trail, 91, 216 Schermerhorn, John F., 68 Scott, James W., 144 Seguín, Juan N., 6, 34, 109, 112–113, 116, 118–126, 138–147, 191, 220 n18, 221 nn26, 28, 227–228 nn66, 69 The Memoirs of Juan N. Seguín, 34, 109, 113, 118–122, 124–127, 138, 141–147, 220 n15, 221 n24, 227 n65 self-determination, 3, 13–14, 16, 18, 20, 22, 25, 27, 29–31, 36–37, 39, 69, 74, 78–79, 111, 126, 147, 152–153, 170, 181, 191, 196, 200 n19, 201 n23 (See also indigenous peoples, peoplehood, sovereignty, treaties, voice) self-representation. See representation, selfdetermination, sovereignty. Senkewicz, Robert M., 167, 232 n24 Seven Years’ War, 42, 83 Shawnees, 103 Shawnee Prophet 103, 105–106, 217 n46, 218 n49 Shoshones, 127 Silko, Leslie Marmon, 25 Simpson, Audra, 20, 201 n22, 205 n1 slaveholding, 32, 53, 56, 61–62, 65, 67, 140–142, 161, 209 n29, 222 n33, 227 n63, 235 n41 Snyder, Jacob R., 161 socio-spatial formation, 12, 14, 17, 22, 27, 33, 74, 77, 89, 112–113, 126, 137, 147, 154, 165, 176, 184, 189, 190, 192, 195, 200 n17, 234 n33 Sonoma, 171 South Carolina, 52–53, 208 n23 sovereignty, 3–4, 7, 9, 11, 14–15, 18, 21–22, 24, 45–47, 50, 52–53, 73, 111, 151–152, 162, 175, 178, 187, 196, 197 nn1–2, 204 n49 native, 3–4, 9, 11–12, 14–15, 17, 35, 37–38, 41, 47, 49, 51–52, 74, 86, 126, 133, 147, 152, 173–177, 180, 182–183, 185, 189–191, 194, 197 n2, 203 n40, 208 n20, 229 n9, 239 n59 space. See land, legal geography, place, socio-spatial formation, treaties. Spain, 5, 9, 16, 21, 82–84, 128, 150, 157, 127, 157, 161, 173, 184, 189, 198 n5,

215 n18, 222 n34, 229 n9, 233 n31, 236 n44 New Spain, 83, 127, 139, 152 speculation, 9, 40, 43, 83, 124, 206 n9, 221 n26, 228 n1, 229 n8 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 66, 141, 193, 199 n10, 202 n38, 203 n44, 223 n40, 227 n63 State v. Casinova, 116–118, 124, 145 Steurt, W. M., 164 Stevens, Justice John Paul, 4 St. Louis, 81, 83–85, 98, 102 subaltern, 3, 25, 28–32, 41, 54, 56, 58, 62–64, 67–68, 71, 73, 79, 81, 101, 108, 113, 126, 131, 137, 152, 179–180, 183, 188, 193, 203 n46, 204 n49 (See also citizenship, consent, hegemony, subjectivity, treaties, voice) subaltern studies, 27–30, 193, 201 n23, 203 n44, 204 nn48–49 subjectivity, 5, 7, 10, 27, 30–32, 35, 38, 41–42, 45–46, 48, 51, 53–54, 62, 64, 66, 68, 71, 79, 97- 98, 101, 107, 115, 117–118, 121, 123, 125, 127–128, 130–132, 138–139, 144–145, 147, 151, 153, 159–160, 164, 172, 175, 177, 180, 183, 186, 192, 195, 197 n2, 223 n40, 231 n18 (See also citizenship, consent, hegemony, self-determination, sovereignty, subaltern, treaties, and voice) suffrage, 114–115, 161–164, 168, 220 n10, 228 n66, 231 nn18, 21 Supreme Court, U.S., 3, 49–53, 63, 189, 197, 207 nn16–18, 208 n21, 220 n13, 230 n12, 234 n35 Tecumseh, 103–105, 217 n46, 218 n50 Tefft, Henry A., 165 Temecula, 179, 187, 192, 240 n66 Tenskwatawa. See Shawnee prophet. territory, See annexation, borders, domestic, expansionism, incorporation, indigenous peoples, land, property, sociospatial formation, sovereignty, treaties. Texas, 6–7, 10, 21, 33–34, 104, 109–141, 143–147, 150–152, 218 n3, 219 n6, 220 n13, 221 n24, 222 nn28, 33, 36, 223 n37, 224 nn44, 46, 226 nn53, 55, 227 n62, 228 n66 (See also Comanches) Annexation of, 122–123 Bexar County, 124 Constitution, 114–116, 122 Declaration of Independence, 114, 122 Rangers, 110, 226 n55 Republic of, 21, 33, 110, 114, 122–123, 133, 219 n3, 220 n10, 223 n37 Revolution, 10, 14, 33, 118–119, 128, 228 n66

280

INDEX

trade, 3, 14, 23, 32–33, 43–45, 47, 54, 56, 65, 76–77, 82–87, 90–95, 99, 102, 107, 111, 127–129, 131, 133–134, 136–137, 152, 170, 177, 181, 184, 199 n10, 201 n21, 202 n37, 213 n2, 214 n12, 216 nn27–32, 218 n50, 222 nn33–34 (See also exchange) Trade and Intercourse Acts, 45, 48, 129, 177, 206 n10, 224 n46 tradition, 6, 9, 12, 15, 18–20, 28, 32–33, 38–41, 52, 54, 58–60, 62–66, 68, 71–73, 75–80, 87–90, 93–94, 97–98, 101, 103–108, 111–112, 114, 135, 151, 153, 173, 178–180, 183–184, 187–188, 196, 201 nn24, 26, 204 n1, 205 n5, 206 n12, 208 n24, 209 n31, 210 n34, 211 n42, 214 n11, 229 n10, 235 n39, 238 (See also oral tradition) translation, 15, 20, 24, 26, 33, 38–39, 54, 58–59, 65, 75, 77–80, 85, 107, 109, 114, 121, 134, 150, 154, 165, 167, 202 n36, 209 n33, 215 n14, 217 n39, 220 n18, 221 n21 transnationalism, 25, 202 nn34, 39, 219 n5 trans-tribal networks, 32, 76, 102, 213 treaties, 9–10, 31, 33, 35, 38–46, 42, 44–49, 51–52, 54, 63, 70, 75–76, 80–81, 84–85, 86–87, 95–97, 99–100, 102–103, 106–107, 129–133, 152–153, 172–177, 179–180, 200 n17, 205 n3, 206 n13, 214 n13, 216 n29, 223 n39, 234 n36, 235 n38, 236 nn42, 45, 237, 239 (See also domestic, indigenous peoples, land, legal geography, place, self-determination, sovereignty, territory) treaty of 1804, 81, 87–88, 96, 215 n16, 216 n32 treaty of 1816, 86, 216 n29 treaty of 1825, 96 treaty of 1832, 102 treaty of 1838, 130, 222 n37 treaty of 1844, 133, 222 n37, 224 nn46–47 treaty of 1852, 175 treaty of 1853, Gadsden Purchase, 224 n44 Treaty of Ft. Harmar, 88, 96 Treaty of Ghent, 216 n30 Treaty of Greenville, 213 n2 Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, 149, 152–154, 162, 172, 175, 220 n13, 224 n44, 228 n1, 229 n9, 231 n18 237 n46 Treaty of Holston, 205 n2, 208 n24 Treaty of Hopewell, 54, 75, 205 n2 Treaty of New Echota, 69, 72, 205 n3, 212 n49

treaty relations, 40, 51, 188 Tres Pinos, 194 Turner, Dale, 16, 20, 74, 108, 195, 197 n2, 201 n27, 205 n1 Twiggs, D. E., 110 Two River, 92–93 Tulare Valley, 188 U. N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. See indigenous peoples. Utes, 127 Vásquez, Raphael, 118 Vermeule, Thomas L., 164 voice, 10, 14, 16–17, 32, 38, 42–49, 53–55, 58, 60, 62–64, 69–71, 73–74, 77, 108, 130, 153, 180, 187 Vizenor, Gerald, 14, 26, 108, 189 Wabash, 106, 213 Wabokieshiek, 104 Wald, Priscilla, 25, 51, 199 n10, 202 n34, 204 n39, 207 n16 wandering, 7, 12, 29, 34, 111–112, 128, 131–132, 134, 136, 139–140, 145–147, 194 (See also marauding, mobility, nonsedentary peoples) Warfare, 11, 32, 43, 77, 84, 95–99, 102–103, 107, 139, 142, 144, 217 n33 Warner, J. J., 181, 183, 199, 237 n50, 238 nn52–53, 239 n58 War of 1812, 86, 91–92, 98–99, 216 n30 Washington D.C., 53, 68, 91 Washington, George, 43, 167 White, Richard, 16, 18, 78, 103 White Cloud, 104, See Wabokieshiek Wichitas, 127, 135, 222 n31, 223 n37 Williams, Isaac, 187–188, 239 n62 Williams, Raymond, 119, 199 n10, 232 n23 (See also hegemony, residual formation) Wilson, B. D., 184–186, 188, 238 n57, 239 nn58–59 Winant, Howard, 115, 204 n49, 220 n14 Winnebagos, 76, 104 Woll, Adrian, 118 Womack, Craig, 19, 197 n2, 201 n25, 205 n1, 209 n33, 214 n6 Worcester, Samuel A., 51, 53, 66 Worcester v. Georgia, 49–51, 53, 75, 176, 205 n2, 208 nn20–22 Wozencraft, O. M., 179–180, 183–184, 188, 234 n36, 238 n53