Off the Map, Beneath Our
Feet: Cartographic Amnesia
and the National Body
Adam Rosen-Carole
1Abstract
The imaginary consolidation of America as a sovereign nation-state situated on a state-centric inter-national topography was and remains predicated on spatializing practices bound up with the ongoing eradication of indigenous people(s) and simultaneous effacement, or at least repression, of the vio-lence of the (neo)colonial encounter. The American nation-state is founded on the all-but-forgotten bodies and worlds of indigenous peoples and is continually secured by a narrative constellation that reduces the decimation of people(s) to a clearing of space on which a sovereign nation could be con-structed or within which it could evolve. This article will trace the various techniques of decimating indigenous cultures and bodies that facilitate efforts of nationalist historiography that reduce indi-genous cartographies to mere space situated within a narrative trajectory of American national unification.
Keywords
cartography, topology, indigeneity, historiography, narrative, America
The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretense but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea—something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to.
—Joseph Conrad,Heart of Darkness
As Toni Morrison astutely observes of many of those tempted to venture across the Atlantic, ‘‘the attraction was of the ‘clean slate’ variety, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity not only to be born again but to be born in clothes, as it were. The new setting would provide new raiments of self.’’1 Engrossed by a fantasy of reclaimed innocence, with innocence not infrequently figured as unfet-tered autonomy, colonists and more transient exploiters were often impelled across the Atlantic by trepidations about the economic and political turmoil of their European homelands. Coupled with anxious desires to escape severely constrictive or otherwise inhospitable socioreligious regimes, this led to many Europeans’ becoming enamored with the prospects of absolute individual or collective
1Department of Philosophy, Bard College, New York, USA
Corresponding Author:
Adam Rosen-Carole, Department of Philosophy, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, USA Email: rosen@bard.edu
Reprints and permission:
self-determination and unlimited profit promised by the Americas (and elsewhere). As Morrison observes, on the colonial stage, ‘‘the habit of genuflection would be replaced by the thrill of com-mand. Power—control of one’s destiny—would replace the powerlessness felt before the gates of class, caste and cunning persecution. One could move from discipline and punishment to disciplin-ing and punishdisciplin-ing; from social ostracism to social rank. One could be released from a useless, bind-ing, repulsive past into a kind of history-lessness, a blank page waiting to be inscribed.’’2
Seeking to be born again free of natural vulnerabilities and consequent social and political depen-dencies, often to be reborn in costumes tailored to emphatically individual contours and providing the armature requisite for glorious self-development, a great many Europeans embarking on colonial or otherwise exploitative expeditions were motivated by a fantasy of the unequivocal recognition of their utterly individual achievements, of their absolutely autonomous selves, or inversely, by a tasy of absolute communal embedding—in either case by a fantasy of purity. According to this fan-tasmatic template, the ‘‘New World’’ setting would not expose settlers’ vulnerability to the vicissitudes of unknown environs—that is, their natural being—nor their dependence on the hospi-tality of others—that is, their constitutive sociality. Rather, the setting was imagined as one in which the colonial body would be enveloped and encoded as the instrument of the fully self-determining or absolutely embedded colonial subject. The New World was envisioned as nature reborn as resource; it would provide new raiments of self. The consequences of such desperate grasping at innocence, of such longings to be reborn free of history, were, of course, disastrous.3
The imaginary consolidation of America as a sovereign nation-state situated within a state-centric geopolitical topography was and remains predicated on spatializing practices that eradicate(d) indi-genous people(s) and cartographies while simultaneously effacing the gross violences of (neo)colo-nialism. The sovereignty of the American nation-state is founded on the largely forgotten but not transcended bodies and worlds of indigenous peoples and is (thus) continually secured by a narrative currently circulating through textbooks, political science and policy-making discourses, moral phi-losophies, juridical historiography,4 anthropological discourses,5 and popular imaginaries that reduce the decimation of indigenous people(s) and places to the clearing or discovery of the space on which a sovereign nation-state could be constructed or within which it could evolve.6Such a nar-rative, as Henri Lefebvre elaborates,
a product of violence and war, it is political; instituted by a state, it is institutional. On first inspection it [space] appears homogenous; and indeed it serves those forces which make atabula rasaof whatever stands in their way, of whatever threatens them. . .These forces seem to grind down and crush everything before them, with space performing the function of a plane, a bulldozer or a tank. The notion of the instru-mental homogeneity of space, however, is illusory [i.e., socially-politically mediated]—though empirical descriptions of space reinforce the illusion—because it uncritically takes the instrument as a given.7
Such a narrative is also testimony to the residual—muted, placeless, yet insistent—claims of indi-genous peoples and places that unsettle yet paradoxically thereby embolden the self-confidence of the political present.
coalesced to situate the New World as a basically uninhabited, thoroughly malleable space, colonists and more transient exploiters became increasingly bold in their appropriation of lands and of the labor of the people(s) living with them, as well as in their extermination efforts directed at indigen-ous populations; once the actual annihilation of indigenindigen-ous bodies and worlds produced a landscape sufficiently conforming to colonists’ motivational assumptions,10it became possible for historians to deny the violence of the colonial encounter and its legacy by reproducing the fantasy of the essen-tial vacuity of the New World or relegating such violence to a marginal—tragic yet ostensibly over and done with, ‘‘prehistorical’’—moment within the narrative development of ‘‘American his-tory.’’11Insulating America’s self-representation from its founding, continuing violences whereby state sovereignty and national integrity were/are continuously wrought, such historiography repeats and effaces the presumably foundational violences, the violently spatializing practices, of the colo-nial encounter.
In the following, we will attend to a number of discursive and practical techniques through which the decimation of indigenous cultures and bodies was pursued that allow(ed) later nationalist histor-iography in its various and varied modalities to reduce indigenous cartographies to mere space on which the teleological trajectory of American national unification could unfold and thereby track the emergence and lasting unease of America’s self-representation as a sovereign nation-state among oth-ers. Only once America could code the lands over which it claims sovereignty as divested of compet-ing—that is, indigenous—claims and significance could it posture as a sovereign nation-state among others. But since such coding could not but be an overcoding, efforts to naturalize America’s sovereign state-centric political imaginary tend toward extravagance, for example, belligerent assertions of sovereignty and unlikely eruptions of nationalism wherein the perturbations of the largely forgotten but untranscended past are preserved, becoming the haunting specter of the immemorial.
King Duarte of Portugal, in the first half of the fifteenth century, describes what are, for him, pri-marily a geospecific variant of non-Christian non-Europeans as follows: ‘‘Canary Islanders are not united by a common religion, nor are they bound by the chains of law, they are lacking normal social intercourse, living in the country like animals. They have no contact with each other by sea, no writ-ing, no kind of metal or money. They have no houses and no clothing except for coverlets of palm leaves or goat skins which are worn as an outer garment by the most honored men. They run barefoot quickly through the rough, rocky, and steep mountainous regions, hiding . . . in caves in the
ground.’’12
The relentless negativity of this description is striking. Canary Islanders are figured exclusively in terms of their deviation from Euro-Christian norms: they are neither religious nor lawful, they do not inhabit human dwellings, and so on. The cumulative effect of this ultimately self-referential series of negations is to situate the Canary Islanders as barely human, if at all. Portrayed as ‘‘living in the country like animals’’; with the agility and dexterity of beasts running ‘‘barefoot quickly through the rough, rocky, and steep mountains’’; as mostly naked and ‘‘hiding . . . in caves in the ground’’
like timid animals; and so forth, Canary Islanders’ status as human becomes eminently questionable; and therewith, their entitlement to natural rights becomes equally questionable. Although at least officially throughout the fifteenth century the status of indigenous people(s) as rights-bearing beings ultimately depended on the papacy, papal determinations were often informed by accounts such as Duarte’s. Sovereignty, considered the site of supreme interpretive hegemony, is fundamentally dependent on those who control the form and content of the archives.
who existed wandered about perpetually in scattered bands, grubbing out the most marginal subsis-tence by hunting and gathering, never developing writing or serious appreciations of art, science, mathematics, governance, and so on. Aside from our utilization of furs and hides for clothing, the manufacture of stone implements, use of fire, and domestication of the dog, there is little in this view to distinguish us from the higher orders of mammalian life surrounding us in the ‘American wilderness.’’’13
As Franciscus de Vitoria declared in 1532, indigenous people of what would come to be called the Americas ‘‘have no proper laws or magistrates, and are not even capable of controlling their fam-ily affairs; they are without any literature or arts, not only the liberal arts, but the mechanical arts also; they have no careful agriculture and no artisans.’’14Although moments of ambiguity intrude on the negativistic thrust of the statement—such people(s) have no ‘‘proper’’ laws or magistrates, have families but cannot control their affairs, are without ‘‘careful’’ agriculture—as with Duarte, indigenous phenomenality is subdued to the strictures of an eminently Eurocentric discourse such that indigenous people(s) come into view only as the inverted reflection of European self-representations. As wild, unlawful, dangerous, and without any redeeming cultural productions that would warrant even the attention of those fetishistically enamored with the exotic, ‘‘the indigenous’’ emerge primarily as prospective objects of European extermination or regulatory programs.15With no mechanical arts, eking out a meager life from their presumably nomadic hunting and gathering ventures and rudimentary agriculture, it is a wonder they survive; indeed, as the indigenous are already on the brink of extinction, to contribute to this fate would only be to hasten what is naturally inevitable. Such depictions make indigenous people(s) seem eminently exploitable: beast-like beings fated to oblivion who would not be terribly aggressed against if their ways of life were thor-oughly extinguished. Perhaps it would even be better that way.16
Paradoxically, because they were pervasively figured as inverted Europeans, indigenous peo-ple(s) became tightly bound to European self-representations—indeed, so much so that detailing the inversions of the indigenous became a perverse venue for European narcissistic stabilization and self-engrossment. With their attention ostensibly directed outward at indigenous inverts, Europeans were able to circumvent the barrage of resistances ordinarily accompanying direct self-glorification and all the more insistent when self-acclaim is occasioned by narcissistic crisis, that is, arises as a defense. As their anxieties about who they were or would become—both in their homelands and in the New World—were reduced by redirection into impulsions to speak of indigenous inversions incessantly, Europeans became increasingly dependent on indigenous people(s) as the rhetorical occasions for their self-aggrandizement and self-specification. Reflected as the inverse of backward, uncivilized, immoral, yet evidently fascinating indigenous people(s), Europeans at home and abroad secured their representations as advanced, civilized, and moral at a time when these self-characterizations were clearly under pressure. In the narcissistic reflecting pool of colonialist con-structions of indigenous people(s) as European inverts, European self-identity was ensured, indeed naturalized—which was all the more important for colonists far from their European homelands and frequently frustrated and disappointed therewith, yet still passionately attached to their status as proper European subjects.
autonomous from nature yet not so autonomous as to be deprived of their proper political identities. Furthermore, by so doing they were afforded the fantasmatic consolation of imagining nature to be as nonthreatening as indigenous people(s) and vice versa.
Given the extent to which early travel geographies, official and unofficial reports from the colo-nies, colonial advertisements, and other such communicative circuits were saturated by this pro-nounced negativity, it is little wonder that indigenous people(s) were soon ‘‘converted into chattel, ultimately to be worked to death for the wealth and ‘glory’ of Spain’’17and other European states. For according to the prevailing imaginary, such actions would not amount to a conversion but only a practical elaboration of the bestial status of the indigenous. Informed by this imaginary, the Spanish, according to Pedro de Cieza de Le´on, ‘‘thought no more of killing Indians than if they were useless beasts.’’18And with the pope leagues away and likely informed by similar bestializing dis-courses, the papal arrogation of the ultimate authority to determine the rights-bearing status of indi-genous people(s) was no impediment to such devastations.
What might have been dynamic dialogical engagements were foreclosed, and when actual,19 suppressed and denied in favor of practices of Euro-parasitism on indigenous hospitality and absurd gestures of interpretive imperialism such as the following:
To the Europeans . . . no formal institutions were apparent. Leaders seemed to come and go almost whimsically. One might be negotiating with one chief on one occasion and be faced with a different per-son for no apparent reaper-son except that the Indian council had designated a new man [or woman] to speak for them. In tracing the source of political authority [when this was at all attempted], whites were really baffled. No one seemed to be in charge of anything. A promise need not even be written down, and there seemed to be no appeal to any formal authority when things went wrong. In frustration, an early painter designated the Iroquois chiefs ‘‘kings,’’ because there seemed no way to describe their status within the tribe except through the medium of familiar English feudal terminology.20
In his letter of March 14, 1493, Columbus likewise refers to a particular indigenous person as ‘‘the King,’’ just as Bernal Diaz Del Castillo, a member of Corte´s’s invading force, would soon refer to ‘‘their Prince’’ in 1519.21When indigenous people(s) were not rendered simply as inverted Euro-Christians, they were still understood wholly in terms of Euro-Christian self-representations. Although depictions of indigenous political structures as identical to (an idealized version of) those found in Europe seem to indicate a countervailing tendency to the framing of indigenous people(s) as Euro-Christian inversions, in a very serious sense, it speaks the same. When representatives of ‘‘Eur-opean nations encountered peoples of other continents [and acted on the] . . . presumption . . . that
these peoples shared the view that political power must be located in a specific person and [conse-quently] . . . attributed immense absolute powers to those spokesmen of other nations who dealt
with them,’’22whether this was a disingenuous measure of expediency or a genuine confusion, what is plainly evident is that Euro-Christians were relentless in their arrogation of interpretive hegemony.
Rather than adopt a posture of inquisitive openness to the complexities of indigenous political forms that would allow for the confounding and recalibration of European expectations, rather than seek to understand the intricacies of the various indigenous political-representational schemas and make efforts to adapt to them, Euro-Christians were predominantly self-absorbed in their interac-tions with indigenous people(s). Colonists and other exploiters ‘‘used to dealing with kings, queens, and royalty . . . insisted on meeting the supreme political head of each tribe. When they found none,
initiated a self-fulfilling prophecy. As Vine Deloria Jr. and Clifford Lytle relate, occasionally indi-genous peoples would assimilate themselves to European expectations for reasons of political expe-diency, especially to facilitate peace:
European treaty commissioners always insisted on dealing with the ‘‘head’’ chief of the Creek Confed-eracy and, rather than learn the complicated system the Creeks used to allocate the functions of war and peace, began to insist on signing their treaties with the most influentialmiccos[town head chief] of the upper and lower towns of the Creek Confederacy. After a time these offices seemed to appear as a means of dealing with the Europeans and eventually the Creeks organized a council of kings who were the mic-cosof the respective towns presided over by themiccosof the most important towns of the upper and lower halves of the nation.24
However, one may wonder why Euro-Christians felt compelled to assume into existence political structures among the indigenous visibly resembling their own, given that indigenous people(s) were pervasively deemed European inverts, beasts, or simply exploitable or negligible features of the landscape. Would it not be entirely inappropriate, indeed downright perverse, for beasts to comport themselves as Euro-Christians? Likely, the assiduous negativity pervading descriptions of indigen-ous people(s), as much as efforts of political assimilation, were motivated by justificatory expe-diency—merely instrumental, they were eminently interchangeable. The Europeanization of indigenous political structures, as in the following account, and similar such assimilative conduct seem to be little more than an attempt to establish a more comfortable context for colonization, such comfort being purchased at the price of superficial concessions to the papacy’s insistence that indi-genous people(s) be provisionally extended the presumption of humanity, and such comfort amount-ing to the maintenance of (self-)imperiled self-representations as properly Euro-Christian subjects. ‘‘In September 1608 Christopher Newport . . . returned to the colony with instructions from London
to perform a ‘coronation’ of Powhatan. To solemnize the ceremony, Newport had brought along a copper crown, European furniture and clothing, and instructions to build [someone the English referred to as] the emperor an English house. . . The company apparently desired to make Powhatan
some type of vassal or minor lord, prior to any large-scale English migration.’’25This ‘‘emperor of Virginia’’ was then depicted in advertisements circulated throughout England as submitting to the English Crown and agreeing to English purchases of ‘‘his people’s’’ lands.26
We are now in a position to understand why theRequerimientowas mumbled beneath the breath of onrushing Spanish exploiters, generally, why discourses of salvation were often halfhearted at best, and why the issue of natural rights became central to those (Europeans) specifying the range of appropriate European-indigenous relations. Christian-Europeans’ commitments to sustaining their proper political-religious identities, identities imperiled by their own desires and activities, required at least superficial concessions to the humanity of indigenous people(s). Deigning to con-cede the humanity of indigenous people(s) became a conduit for identification with Euro-Christian authority and thereby an ideological fac¸ade in which Christo-European exploiters took shelter from the image of wild nature they were enacting. Since they were predominantly instrumental, such con-cessions were easily revoked. As Varner and Varner recall inDogs of Conquest,‘‘to many of the conquerors, the Indian was merely another savage animal, and the dogs were trained to rip apart their
. . . [native] quarry with the same zest as they felt when hunting wild beasts.’’
27
and the lands with which they lived were divested of cultural, moral, and political significance. In short, ‘‘Europe was hungry for raw material, and America was abundant forests, rivers, land.’’30It was ultimately gross territorial categories and not the capacities and activities of those inhabiting various territories on which the distinction between the Christian or non-Christian yet nonetheless human inhabited lands of Europe and the bestial ranges of the New World was based.
As Vine Deloria Jr. notes (in a manner bound to generate considerable discomfort due to his colonial-style massificaton of varied indigenous people[s] into the masculine monolith he calls ‘‘the Indian’’), ‘‘because the Indian occupied large areas of land he was considered a wild animal.’’31 Surveying the landscape, colonists considered ‘‘Native Americans . . . bodies inthat wilderness,
indwellers of the very animal world the newcomers so arrogantly sought to rise above,’’32thus ideal objects of sacrifice on the altar of autonomy. Equated with the lands with which their lives were intimately interconnected, indigenous people(s) were often ‘‘relegated [at best] to the status of a pic-turesque species of wildlife,’’33 a status that could, at most, motivate a conservationist ethos of fetishistic enclosure and display but certainly not political or moral respect. As Chief Justice Story would confirm in 1823, although the papacy’s image of the indigenous as convertible, thus poten-tially human, was unavoidable, it was ultimately the instrumentally felicitous image of the indigen-ous as beast that prevailed: ‘‘as infidels, heathens [i.e., potentially convertible], and savages [i.e., unconvertible because inhuman], they were not allowed to possess the prerogatives belonging to absolute, sovereign and independent nations. The territory over which they wandered . . . was, in
respect to Christians, deemed as if it were inhabited only by brute animals.’’34 Characterized ambivalently as nomads—not recognizably human, not simply animal—a characterization perhaps somewhat appropriate for the Shoshone and Paiutes but certainly not appropriate for all or even a significant percentage of the indigenous people(s) of what would come to be called North America, indigenous people(s) were subsumed under a dedifferentiating imaginary that, despite its ambiva-lence, further solidified their status as more animal than human. Indigenous people(s) were coded as nomadic not, or at least not simply,35because they were perceived to be incessantly mobile— many early colonial treaties and other land transfer documents testify to colonial understandings that indigenous peoples inhabited and maintained authority structures within relatively discrete parcels of land—but largely because their movements were not regulated by Euro-colonial interests. Move-ments not in the interests of Europeans became ‘‘nomadic roaming.’’ Described as ‘‘wandering’’ and occasionally hunting and gathering for subsistence, or as the ‘‘prehistoric’’ antecedents of those newly arriving on the(ir) lands, indigenous people(s) were, again, negatively defined against Euro-colonial self-representations.36
Columbus’s ‘‘observations of people are recorded in accounts of the landscape that locate them as only one among many objects in the new territory: the transcribed journal of November 25, 1492 reports that ‘Hitherto, things had gone better and better for [Columbus], in that he had discovered so many lands as well as woods, plants, fruits and flowers as well as the people.’’’37‘‘The people’’ are swept into a naturalistic frame that collapses their distinctiveness from their surroundings, absorbs them into the felicitous homogeneity of an eminently exploitable landscape—here a terrible irony abounds. According to Ward Churchill’s etymological efforts, tellingly, ‘‘although the initial mean-ing of ‘tribe’ pertained to the original three groups of Romans, and later to the Hebrew clans of ancient Israel, by the time it began to be applied to indigenous peoples outside the flow of European history it was beginning to be applied to the ‘animal kingdom’ as well.’’38
participating in the nature of men rather than beasts. Negotiating (among themselves) a compromise between bestializing and natural law discourses, the Puritans of the Plymouth Plantation and Mas-sachusetts Bay Colony, from the early 1620s until 1629, explicitly interpreted all indigenous lands except those on which villages were erected or agricultural fields tilled asterritorium res nullius.40 This stance set the stage for Locke’s influential claim in 1698 that ‘‘land that is left wholly to nature, that hath no improvement of pasturage, tillage, or planting, is called, as indeed it is,waste.’’41 Unilat-erally transforming instrumental motive into legal justification, Locke and the likeminded propagated a universalistic natural rights discourse that, although in competition with discourses situating the indigenous as brute beasts with no claims on the(ir) lands, conspired to the same effect: ethnoeco-cide.42So far from antagonistic, these formally distinct discourses, because both were informed by a bestializing and nomadizing imaginary, often converged to enhance their mutual effect. A Puritan colonist thus proclaims, ‘‘this then is a sufficient reason to prove our going thither to live lawful: their land is spacious and void. And there are few that do but run over the grass. . .They are not industrious,
neither have art, science, skill or faculty to use either the land or the commodities of it . . . As the
ancient patriarchs therefore removed from straiter places more roomy, where the land lay idle and waste, and none used it . . . so it is lawful to take a land which none useth, and make use of it.’’
43
Although as with ‘‘heathens’’ elsewhere there was a certain ambivalence concerning the proper designation of indigenous people(s) as human or inhuman,44unlike heathens’ elsewhere, indigenous peoples’ humanity’s being in question was sufficient to alleviate most Euro-colonial anxieties per-taining to the expropriation of their lands and labor and the annihilation of their bodies and cultures (of course this happened elsewhere, but much more anxiously). Coupled with a desire to avoid asserting authority over matters it could do little about, its acceptance of the questionability of the humanity of indigenous people(s) was enough to put the papacy in a position in which it very seldom admonished colonists and their supporters for infringements of their natural rights.
In a 1637 letter, Roger Williams bears witness to the insistent ambiguity, indeed manifest con-tortions, of Euro-Christian depictions of indigenous people(s), as well as to the leveraging of this ambiguity against the natural rights-bearing status of indigenous people(s). Williams declares that he ‘‘would not feare a Jarr with them yet . . . would fend of[f] from being fowle, and deale with them
[Narragansetts] wisely as with wolues endewed with mens brains.’’45 Williams’s refraining from being ‘‘fowle’’ certainly does not signify respect for indigenous people(s) or their rights but rather results from calculations of expediency. Refraining from manifest cruelty toward indigenous peo-ple(s) makes sense to Williams because such peopeo-ple(s) are exceptionally dangerous—they are ‘‘wolues endewed with mens brains,’’ that is, creatures that can experience not just the hurt but the wrong of cruel treatment (like humans) and on its basis undertake to exact terrible revenge (like wolves). Even when artifacts plainly indicative of human design were explicitly recognized as indi-genous in origin, dehumanizing discourses derailed what might have been a simple relay from human artifact to human artificer. And even when the ways of life of indigenous people(s) accorded with Euro-Christian-determined criteria for humanity, thus warranting the extension of natural rights, such extension was impeded by the overwhelming force of a dehumanized image of the indi-genous. Thus, the Jamestown Colony’s doctrine of ‘‘right of Warre’’ entitling the English to ‘‘invade the Country and destroy them’’ was considered the means ‘‘whereby wee shall enjoy theircultivated places[and] theircleared groundsin all their villages.’’46What should have entitled indigenous peo-ple(s) to the(ir) lands became an incentive to their expropriation.
yet liue, andare onely removed from their dens.’’47As beasts, the ‘‘Pequin’’ [Pequots] are targets of wanton destruction, expelled from the normative horizon not just of property but of human warfare, generally, of politics and morality.48
More than a century later, indigenous people(s) were still being corralled into a bestializing ima-ginary, as in Lieutenant General John Burgoyne’s 1777 invective: ‘‘I will let loose the dogs of hell, / Ten Thousand Indians who shall yell / And foam and tear and grin and roar, / And drench their moc-casins with gore.’’49 Anticipatorily projected as foaming and roaring, indigenous people(s) are recruited into a bestializing phantasmagoria that seeks to peremptorily justify gruesome atrocity on the basis of the animality it will expose. For Burgoyne, horrendous cruelty is the laudable means by which indigenous bestiality is rooted out and appropriately dealt with. Yet even for Burgoyne, ambiguity intrudes. Perversely grinning in the throes of their maiming and sufficiently adept at dis-simulation to require extreme means of unmasking, the indigenous are not simply brute beasts.
More or less ambiguous bestializing enframing persisted throughout the eighteenth century, showing up in the discourses of those influential enough to secure its legacy. George Washington, for instance, contends that despite the confusions that are bound to arise in virtue of the human-like appearance of the indigenous and despite the benefits that would accrue to Euro-Americans were they to treat the indigenous as if they were humans invested with natural rights (specifically, prop-erty rights), historical experience compels the recognition of indigenous people(s) as beasts:
I am clear in my opinion, that policy and œconomy 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 County; which, as we have already experienced, is like driving wild Beasts of ye forest, which will return as soon as the pursuit is at an end, and fall perhaps upon those that are left there; when the gradual extension of our settlements will as certainly cause the savage, as the wolf, to retire; both being beasts of prey, tho’ they differ in shape.50
Immured in the phantasmagoria of indigenous bestiality, Washington will not consider efforts of indigenous people(s) to reclaim their homelands a recognizably human undertaking, as he surely would if the roles were reversed. John Adams was likewise in the grip of this imaginary. In an 1884 letter to Secretary of State James Monroe, he claims that ‘‘their habits, and attachments, and prejudices were so averse to any settlement that they could not reconcile themselves to any other condition than that of wandering hunters. It was impossible for such a people to have possessions. Their only right upon the land was to use it as hunting grounds.’’51Although Adams situates indi-genous people(s) more as savages than beasts—their nomadism is a matter of ‘‘habits . . .
attach-ments, and prejudices’’ and indeed they are ‘‘a people’’ who maintain a certain highly qualified ‘‘right upon the land’’—the practical consequences of the rhetorical distinction are negligible.52
Reinvigorated by discourses of manifest destiny54 and exemplifying their rationalized rage, depictions of indigenous people(s) as beasts and/or savages—now sometimes devils or demons, yet further figures of the inhuman in human guise—remained in force throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century: ‘‘that such a Beautiful Country, was intended by its Author to be for-ever in the possession and occupancy of serpents, wild fouls, wild beasts and savages, who derive little benefit from it, no reasonable man, can for one moment believe who sees it.’’55 Or more aggressively:
animals, vulgarly called Indians. . . [these] wild Indians. . . cattle . . .[to whom] I would as soon admit a right in the buffalo to grant lands, as in Killbuck, the Big Cat, the Big Dog, or any of the ragged wretches that are called chiefs and sachems. What would you think of going to a big lick or place where the beasts collect to lick saline nitrous earth and water, and addressing yourself to the great buffalo to grant you land . . . I am so far from thinking the Indians have a right to the soil, that not having made a better use of it for many hundreds of years, I conceive they have forfeited all pretense to claim, and ought to be driven from it. With regard to forming treaties or making peace with this race, there are many ideas: They have the shapes of men and may be of the human species, but certainly in their present state they approach nearer the character of Devils.56
Targets of aggressive bestialization on both official and popular fronts, indigenous people(s) remained objects of intense aggression as the turn of the century approached. An 1890Aberdeeen Saturday Pioneerarticle recommends that the government ‘‘wipe out these untamed and untamable creatures.’’57
Figured as wildly unpredictable yet instinctually governed, as if but a bit of mechanical nature; perverse and untamable yet to a degree politically domesticable; vengeful and cruel yet possessed of a sense of natural justice; pliable and exploitable yet prone to talionic vengeance; nomadic yet enraged by the dispossession of their traditional homelands; anarchic yet politically inscrutable;58 a prehistorical relic impeding the progressive march of history yet a doomed race naturally fated to extinction; wolves in sheep’s clothing, the fantasy of the indigenous beast was made to bear the burden of colonial/American abjection, to encapsulate all that would need to be eradicated or repressed in the colonial and later American pursuit of autonomization from nature and thereby of purity. Concretized and contained in, thus fantasmatically eliminable along with such an emi-nently extinguishable figure were the disavowed self-images, along with the persistent fears, of colo-nial and later American exploiters. Thus aimed at this overdetermined figure were an onslaught of colonial and American discourses and practices through which the aggressors sought to stage an accomplishment of autonomy in which they could not and did not entirely want to believe. Through the overt and much publicized dispossession, destruction, and sadistic punishing of the indigenous-as-beast, colonists and later Americans would make a spectacle of their violent uprooting from nature and history, returning again and again through this theater of cruelty to the anguished excite-ment of autonomy with which they were ill-equipped to negotiate.59Sighs of liberation are sha-dowed by shudders at uprooting. Mythologized, the indigenous as beast became the permanent platform for colonial/American self-purification enacted through ever-unfinished dispossession and destitution.60
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
Notes
1. Toni Morrison,Playing in the Dark(New York: Random House, 1993), 35. 2. Ibid.
3. Examples are Columbus’s extermination of the Taino population of what is today Haiti and the Dominican Republic; ‘‘the 1622 attack by Opechancanough and the Powhatan Confederacy [that] had led whites on the Chesapeake Bay to establish an open hunting season on Indians, a precedent well-known in New England’’ (cited in Richard Drinnon,Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building[New York: New American Library, 1980], 46); colonial governor Wyatt’s attempts at ‘‘rooting them out from being longer a people upon the face of the earth’’ (cited in Ward Churchill,A Little Matter of Genocide: Holo-caust Denial 1492 to the Present[San Francisco: City Lights, 1997], 166); ‘‘Corte´s’ butchery of an estimated 20,000 Mexicans (Aztecs) per day, ultimately putting to the sword more than 300,000, as he set his men to systematically reducing all evidence of their civilization to rubble . . . the Spanish system of forced labor (ecomiendo) under which entire American Indian populations were worked to death. . . the Virginia Col-ony’s extermination of the Powhatans. . .Lord Jeffrey Amherst’s 1763 instruction that his subordinates use smallpox to ‘extirpate’ the Ottawas. . .the U.S. Army’s replication of the tactic against the Mandans in 1836
. . .the 1864 orders of both civil and military authorities in Colorado for the total extermination of the Cheye-nees and Arapahoes’’ (Churchill,A Little Matter of Genocide,63–64). ‘‘A bare sampling of some of the worst must include the 1854 massacre of perhaps 150 Lakotas at Blue River (Nebraska), the 1863 Bear River (Idaho) Massacre of some 500 Western Shoshones, the 1864 Sand Creek (Colorado) Massacre of as many as 250 Cheyennes and Arapahoes, the 1868 massacre of another 300 Cheyennes at the Washita River (Okla-homa), the 1875 massacre of about 75 Cheyennes along the Sappa Creek (Kansas),’’ the 1865 massacre of Paiutes at Mud Lake, ‘‘the 1878 massacre of still another 100 Cheyennes at Camp Robinson (Nebraska). . . the 1890 massacre of more than 300 Lakotas at Wounded Knee (South Dakota),’’ and the internment of Nava-jos from 1864 to 1868 (killing half) perpetrated by the U.S. military after forcing them to undertake the ‘‘Longest Walk,’’ a 400-mile displacement from their ancestral homelands (Lenore Stiffarm and Phil Lane Jr., ‘‘The Demography of Native North America: A Question of American Indian Survival,’’ inThe State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance,ed. M. Annette Jaimes [Boston: South End, 1992], 34). ‘‘All told, it is probable that more than one hundred million native people were ‘eliminated’ in the course of Europe’s ongoing ‘civilization’ of the Western Hemisphere’’ (cited in Ward Churchill,Indians Are Us? Cultural Genocide in Native North America[Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1994], 30). The indi-genous population of the Americas has been decimated by some 90 percent and their lands reduced 98 percent from their original size (Churchill,A Little Matter of Genocide,97).
4. Cf.Fletcher v. Peck,10 U.S. 87 (1810), in which Chief Justice Marshall refers to indigenous lands as ‘‘vacant’’ to secure the legitimacy of American title.
5. For criticism of anthropological effacement of American indigenous peoples, see Vine Deloria Jr., ‘‘Anthropologists and Other Friends,’’ in hisCuster Died For Your Sins (London: Collier-MacMillan, 1969); Stiffarm and Lane, ‘‘The Demography of Native North America,’’ (ibid.); and Francis Jennings,
The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest(New York: Norton, 1976). For further analysis of the mutual imbrication of anthropology and foreign policy, see John Borneman, ‘‘Amer-ican Anthropology as Foreign Policy,’’American Anthropologist97 (4): 663–72.
6. As is manifest in many versions of environmental ethics and American International Relations (IR) theory, contemporary discourses tend to reify the lands as unequivocally American and then concern themselves with how best to negotiate security dilemmas or promote conservationist land management policies Cf. Rosen, ‘‘Scandals of Sovereignty,’’Ethical Perspectives14, no. 3 (2007): 311–340.
9. See Richard Grounds, ed.,Native Voices: American Indian Identity and Resistance Native Voices: Amer-ican Indian Identity and Resistance(Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2003).
10. An example is General Washington’s order to ‘‘lay waste all the settlements around . . .that the country not only be overrun but destroyed, [and not to] listen to any overture of peace before the total ruin of their set-tlements is effected’’ (cited in Drinnon,Facing West,331–32).
11. See Wilcomb Washburn, ‘‘Land Claims in the Mainstream of Indian/White Relations,’’ inIrredeemable America: The Indian’s Estate and Land Claims,ed. Imre Sutton (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1985); H. Rosenthal,Their Day in Court: A History of the Indian Claims Commission(New York: Garland, 1990); Margaret Mead and Ruth Bunzel,The Golden Age of American Anthropology: The Growth of the Science of Man on the North American Continent as Told by Those Who Laid the Foundations(New York: George Braziller, 1960); and Hannah Arendt’s account of the infinite profitability and desolate wild-erness of America inOn Revolution(New York: Penguin, 1990).
12. Cited in Robert Williams Jr.,The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: Discourses of Conquest
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 69.
13. Ward Churchill,Struggle for the Land: Native North American Resistance to Genocide, Ecocide and Colo-nization(San Francisco: City Lights, 2002), 15.
14. Cited in Williams,The American Indian in Western Legal Thought,104.
15. It was not just derogatory depictions of indigenous people(s) but also enthusiastic and acclamatory dis-courses that situated indigenous people(s) as inverted Christo-Europeans. Even those whose experiences with indigenous people(s) impressed them greatly tended to portray indigenous people(s) as the romanti-cized inverse of European debauchery. Vespucci, for instance, insists that ‘‘they deal truly with one another, without laws, without books, without judges’’ (cited in Williams,The American Indian in Western Legal Thought,127). Likewise, Richard Eden, who published the first English translation of Amerigo Ves-pucci’s accounts of ‘‘the New World’’ in the mid-sixteenth century, renders indigenous people(s) as ‘‘a smooth and bare table unpainted . . . upon which you may at the first paint or write what you list, as you cannot upon tables already painted’’ (cited in Williams,The American Indian in Western Legal Thought,
130–31).
16. In 1820, Daniel Webster extols, ‘‘now more than a million of people, descendents of New England ances-tors, [are] living free and happy, in regions which scarce sixty years ago were tracts of unpenetrated forests. Nor do rivers, or mountains, or seas resist the progress of industry and enterprise. Ere long, the sons of the Pilgrims will be on the shores of the Pacific’’ (cited in Daniel Richter,Facing East from Indian Country
[Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001], 244). With an explicitness that was possible (again) only once America was assured of its status as a sovereign nation-state among others, in 1903 theSioux Falls Presseditorialized, ‘‘The Cheyenne River Reservation is ripe for opening. The white people need the lands and the Indians are making no good use of them and would be infinitely better off without them’’ (cited in Fergus Bordewich,Killing the White Man’s Indian: Reinventing Native Americans at the End of the Twen-tieth Century[New York: Anchor, 1997], 122).
17. Churchill,A Little Matter of Genocide,87. 18. Ibid, 103.
19. Indigenous warfare tactics were utilized by the colonial/American revolutionary army; so too was a tradi-tional indigenous method of raising a volunteer army via persuasion rather than draft. See Bruce Johansen,
Forgotten Founders: Benjamin Franklin, the Iroquois and the Rationale for the American Revolution
(Ipswich, MA: Gambit, 1982), 117 ff. Colonial crops were borrowed from indigenous peoples such as the Pequot and Pennoboscott and used expansively throughout the colonies; indeed, ‘‘two-thirds of vegetal foodstuffs now commonly consumed by humanity were undeniably under cultivation in the Americas and
explorers/exploiters and their indigenous guides. The colonial context was rife with Euro-indigenous dialogical interactivity. However, rather than acknowledge their dependency on indigenous people(s) and their practices of agriculture, mapping (see J. B. Harley and David Woodward, eds.,The History of Cartography[Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987]), and politics (such as the Iroquois Constitution, which was intensely studied by a number of colonists and parts of which bear a striking resemblance to aspects of the American Constitution; see Johansen, Forgotten Founders), colonialists desperately attempted to stabilize and secure the separation of Indian and European, disavowing the dependency of the colonial regime on the hospitality and know-how of indigenous people(s).
20. Vine Deloria Jr. and Clifford M. Lytle,American Indians, American Justice(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983), 9.
21. Cited in Virgil Vogel, ed.,This Country Was Ours: A Documentary History of the American Indian(New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 35.
22. Vine Deloria Jr., ‘‘Self-determination and the Concept of Sovereignty,’’ inNative American Sovereignty,
ed. John Wunder (New York: Garland, 1999), 22.
23. Vine Deloria Jr.,Custer Died for Your Sins(London: Collier-MacMillan, 1969), 204. 24. Ibid., 86.
25. Williams,The American Indian in Western Legal Thought,207.
land title was still valid. However, this posture was reversed by the Supreme Court’s ruling that the U.S. federal government had already accepted the money as their trustee.
27. John Grier Varner and Jeanette Johnson Varner,Dogs of Conquest(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983), 193.
28. Of course, such identificatory investments were, in many cases, feeble resistances to direct participation in gruesome atrocities.
29. Emblematically, Tocqueville claims that ‘‘although the vast country that I have been describing was inhab-ited by many indigenous tribes, it may justly be said, at the time of its discovery by Europeans, to have formed one great desert’’ (Alexis de Tocqueville,Democracy in America,Vol. 1 [New York: Vintage, 1945], 26). 30. Simon Ortiz,From Sand Creek: Rising in This Heart Which Is Our America (Tucson: University of
Arizona Press, 2000).
31. Deloria,Custer Died for Your Sins,8. 32. Drinnon,Facing West,xii–xiii.* 33. Deloria,Custer Died for Your Sins,6.
34. Cited in Williams,The American Indian in Western Legal Thought,316.
35. ‘‘The European image of ‘culture’ has for centuries used monuments and buildings as the most significant markers [of civilization]. . . Those, for example, who dwelled in forests have had no significant culture for people whose gaze fails to discern the lineaments of culture in the spatial practices of peoples dwelling in areas with limited clearings’’ (cited in Michael Shapiro,Violent Cartographies[Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997], 23). In his travel geography, Richard Hakluyt repeatedly claims, echoing the Roman principle ofterritorium res nullins,that the right of conquest is justified by the lack of civilization throughout ‘‘the New World.’’ Leslie Cormack, ‘‘Geography and the State in Elizabethan England,’’ in
Geography and Empire,ed. Anne Godlewska and Neil Smith (Cambridge, UK: Blackwell, 1994), 13–30. 36. The ‘‘father of American physical anthropology,’’ Samuel G. Morton, would later claim that indigenous peoples are ‘‘inherently endowed with a ‘peculiar and eccentric moral constitution’ in which ‘wildness’ was an indelible racial trait’’ (Bordewich,Killing the White Man’s Indian,183).
37. David Campbell,Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 111.
38. Churchill,Indians Are Us?332. See also William Stanton,The Leopard’s Spots: Scientific Attitudes toward Race in America, 1815–59(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960).
39. Cited in Williams,The American Indian in Western Legal Thought,210. Notice the strain on Gray’s efforts to bestialize indigenous people(s): he speaks of beasts and brutish savages, ‘‘which,’’ rather than ‘‘who,’’ have no interest in, that is, rightful claim on, their lands but also speaks of the hands of these beasts, not paws.
40. Similarly, although in his 1625Discourse on Virginia,Samuel Puchas claims that the indigenous ‘‘range rather than inhabite’’ their ‘‘unmanned wild country’’ (cited in Williams,The American Indian in Western Legal Thought,218), in a 1688 letter, he describes ‘‘the savage’’ who ‘‘likesmoreto roam around than to take the trouble to cultivate the lands’’ (cited in Georgiana C. Nammack,Fraud, Politics, and Disposses-sion of the Indians: The Iroquois Land Frontier in the Colonial Period[Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1969], 20; emphasis added). A telling legacy of this ambiguous imaginary is the jurisdiction of the U. S. Department of the Interior: it handles both wildlife and indigenous peoples.
41. John Locke,Second Treatise on Government,ed. C. B. Macpherson (Cambridge, UK: Hackett, 1980), 26. As a secretary to the proprietors of the Carolina colony who assisted in writing the colony’s first constitu-tion, Locke’s influence was not just academic.
identity and way of life whose components are the people—cui-ui-tuccatta, the lake—cui-ui pah—and the fish, cui-ui’’ (cited in Bordewich, Killing the White Man’s Indian, 148). Likewise, Katherine Smith, an elder from the Big Mountain region of the Joint-Use Area (JUA), informed Senate inquirers in 1972 that she would ‘‘never leave the land, this sacred place. The land is part of me . . . All that has meaning is here (cited in Churchill,Struggle for the Land,151). As Vine Deloria Jr. describes the ‘‘tribal-communal way of life,’’ it ‘‘views land as the most vital part of [humanity’s] . . . existence. It is THEIRS. It supports them, tells them how to live, and defines for the HOW they live. Land . . . provides a center of the universe for the group that lives on it. As such, the people who hold land in this way always have a home to go to. Their identity is secure. They live with it and do not abstract themselves from it and live off it’’ (Vine Deloria Jr., We Talk, You Listen: New Tribes, New Turf
[New York: Macmillan, 1970], 175). Explicit ethnoecocidal aggression persisted from the beginnings of colonization through the early days of American independence (and onward), as exemplified by the 1779 scorched-earth campaign embarked upon by the U.S. Army throughout the Seneca, Cayuga, and Onondaga lands. In this campaign, Major General Sullivan decimated fields, houses, and orchards in an undifferentiated attack on indigenous bodies and lands. General Clark did much of the same in 1780 against the Shawnees and others, as did General ‘‘Mad Anthony’’ Wayne in 1794 as he burned much of the Shawnee heartland. Similarly, the 1860s Kit Carson Campaign ‘‘featured a scorched earth policy directed at such targets as the Dine´ sheep herds and the peach orchards which had been care-fully established over several generations’’ (Churchill,Struggle for the Land,135). The pursuit of eth-noecocide gives the lie to those who claimed to understand indigenous people(s) as mere menageries of beasts wandering vast tracts of lands.
43. Cited in Michael Kammen,People of Paradox: An Inquiry Concerning the Origins of American Civiliza-tion(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 34.
44. Emblematically, William Petty’s 1677The Scale of Creaturessituates ‘‘savages’’ between ‘‘men’’ and ‘‘animals proper’’ but does not allow this liminal category to unsettle its dualistic confidence (William Petty,The Collected Works of Sir William Petty[London: Routledge/Thoemmes, 1997]).
45. Cited in Drinnon,Facing West,53.
46. Edward Waterhouse,A Declaration of the State of the Colony and Affaires in Virginia(London: imprinted by G. Eld., 1662), 23; emphasis added.
47. Cited in Drinnon,Facing West,53.
48. Sovereignty is perhaps best thought of in a constitutive relation not with ‘‘bare life,’’ that is, the needs and violability of organic being, but with life that can be bestialized, held in liminal precarity between the human and the animal, abandoned to a zone of indistinction where it is unreservedly exposed to all—one might want to call this placeless place the birthplace of secular modernity; it is certainly an unmarked mass grave. To consider sovereignty the ultimate site of decision that asserts and thereby enacts a distinction between friend and foe may be to participate in sovereignty’s fantasy of itself. What the figure of the bestialized reveals is that the manner of his or her treatment is ultimately decided not by a sovereign but by anyone. The withdrawal of the sovereign ban abandons us to ourselves.
49. John Burgoyne,Orderly Book of Lieut. Gen. John Burgoyne,ed. E. B. O’Callagahan (Albany, NY: J. Mun-sell, [1777] 1860), xxii.
50. George Washington, ‘‘Letter to James Duane,’’ inThe Washington Papers,ed. Saul Padover (New York: Harper and Bros., 1955), 355 .
51. John Adams, ‘‘Adams to Secretary of State James Monroe Sept 5, 1814,’’ inWritings of John Quincy Adams,Vol. 5, ed. Worthington Ford (New York: Macmillan, 1915), 110–21.
53. Francis Prucha, ed.,Documents of United States Indian Policy(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975), 228.
54. An example, as was proclaimed on the congressional floor, is the following: ‘‘Congress must apprise the Indian that he can no longer stand as a breakwater against the constant tide of civilization. . . An idle thrift-less race of savages cannot be permitted to stand guard at the treasure vaults of the nation’’ (U.S. Senate,
Congressional Globe,appendix 74, 27th Congress, 2nd sess. [Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1846]). See also Anders Stephanson,Manifest Destiny: American Expansionism and the Empire of Right(New York: Hill and Wang, 1995). Note in passing that ‘‘Hitler took note of Native Americans, indigenous people of the Americas, specifically within the area of the U.S. and Canada. He used the treat-ment of native people, the policies and processes that were imposed upon them, as a model for what he articulated as beingLebensraumpolitik,the politics of living space. In essence, Hitler took the notion of a drive from east to west, clearing the land as the invading population went and resettling it with Anglo-Saxon stock, primarily, as a model by which he drove from west to east into Russia, displacing, relo-cating, dramatically shifting or liquidating populations to clear the land and replace it with what he called ‘superior breeding stock,’ meaning Germanic peoples’’ (Ward Churchill, interview with David Barsamian,
Z-Magazine,December 1995, http://zena.secureforum.com/Znet/zmag/articles/dec95barsamian.htm). 55. Caleb Atwater,The Indians of the Northwest, Their Manners, Customs, &c.(Columbus, 1850), 256, cited
in Vogel,This Country Was Ours,107.
56. H. H. Brackenridge,Indian Atrocities: Narratives of the Perils and Sufferings of Dr. Knight and John Slover among the Indians (1867), cited in Vogel, This Country Was Ours, 103–106. Much later, in 1945, giving juridical-institutional shape and authority to the bestialization of indigenous peoples, Justice Jackson inNorthwest Bandsdetermines that indigenous peoples do not constitute nations, states, polities, ethnic or racial groups, or even communities but are mere ‘‘menageries.’’ For a synopsis of the case, see David Wilkins,American Indian Sovereignty and the U.S. Supreme Court(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997), 136–65. Compare John Stuart Mill: ‘‘a savage tribe consists of a handful of individuals, wandering or thinly scattered over a vast tract of country’’ (John Stuart Mill,Essays on Politics and Culture,ed. Gertrude Himmelfarb (New York: Doubleday, 1962), 52.
57. Cited in Churchill,Indians Are Us?316.
58. ‘‘To the extent that the Americas were the ‘New World,’ there could be no interest in the study of its antiquities. Although civilizations had existed there for millennia, there was no attempt to recover their history. Moreover, this inattention was overdetermined by the European assumption that the peo-ples had no historical texts. Their literary media—for example writing in such forms as knotted ropes and pictorial narratives like those on the wampum belts—[which signified social status, territorial claims, bonds of solidarity among communities, treaty records, and on which were inscribed myths of community origin] did not fit within the genres of what Europeans recognized as texts’’ (Shapiro,
Binding Law of the Five Nations was a written constitution created by the Iroquois [on sacred wam-pum belts] and enunciated such democratic ideals and doctrines as initiative, recall, referendum, and equal suffrage’’ (Deloria and Lytle, American Indians, American Justice,82); that written histories existed in the form of petroglyphs, wood and tusk carvings, and winter-counts recorded on animal skin; that ‘‘having continuously occupied the continent for at least 50,000 years, the native inhabitants evidenced a total population of perhaps 15 million, cities as large as the 40,000-resident urban center at Cahokoa . . . highly advanced conceptions of architecture and engineering’’ (cited in Ward Churchill,
From a Native Son: Selected Essays on Indigenism, 1985–1995 [Boston: South End, 1996], 21), Europeans remained steadfast in their conviction that indigenous peoples were coextensive with the space in which they were ‘‘found’’ and subject to rightful plunder. As Harley and Woodward explain, ‘‘just as Indian maps were often destroyed, so too were the traces on an Indian geography frequently eradicated from the space of European maps. The maps increasingly convey, through the articulation of the blank spaces and terra incognita, the assumption of an uninscribed earth. Later, in North America, they would contribute to the myth of an empty frontier.’’ Harley and Woodward,The History of Cartography,5. 59. Consider the following. The Pequot War ‘‘established the credibility of the English will to exterminate,
lessened the likelihood of ‘conspiracies’ to resist their rule . . . [and] established a peace based on terror that lasted more or less four decades’’ (Drinnon,Facing West,48). Subsequent to the massacre, the slain bodies of the Pequots were circulated within a colonial regime of terror in which they were made to func-tion as warnings against resisting the will of the colonizers. Enveloped in an insistently bestializing discourse, ‘‘the Pequots were ‘rooted out’ as a tribe’’ and subject to ethnoecocidal extermination. ‘‘There would have been no known living members of that tribe had the colonizers had their way’’ (Drinnon,Facing West, 55). Although certainty, the colonists ‘‘sought . . . ‘to cut off the Remem-brance of them from the Earth’’’—after the war, ‘‘the General Assembly of Connecticut declared the name [Pequots] extinct’’ (Drinnon,Facing West,55) and ‘‘the word ‘Pequot’ was . . . removed from English maps: the river of that name was changed to the Thames and the town of that name became New London’’ (David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World [London: Oxford University Press, 1992], 115)—paradoxically, the colonialist venture was to maintain the memory of the vanquished Pequots as a testament to the vengeful might of the Eng-lish. It seems that the English strategy was at once to decimate the Pequots and overlay their lands with English markings and to preserve the absence of the Pequots from the(ir) lands, rendering the absence conspicuous. For colonialism to proceed unencumbered, the Pequots would have to be destroyed and indigenous cartographies would have to be reduced to the enticing space of colonial adventure, yet the status of these lands as historically Pequot would have to be preserved to secure an abiding memorial to the profundity of English might. Paradoxically, to be recognized as such, sovereignty is bound to preserve, even as it effaces, the memory of its victims.
in the history of American-indigenous relations will be detailed in a forthcoming companion article. The following is just one detail for now: the (English) Ordinance of 1787 designated certain North American lands as unequivocally belonging to indigenous people(s) and announced the punishments that would fall on British colonists intruding into or attempting to illicitly appropriate these lands.
Bio
Adam Rosen-Caroleis a Visiting Assistant Professor of Social Science and Cultural Studies at Pratt
