Writing Indian nations : native intellectuals and the politics of historiography, 1827-1863 / Maureen Konkle.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Konkle, Maureen.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Indians of North America--Historiography.

Indians of North America.

Indians of North America--Treaties.

Indians of North America--Government relations.

United States--Intellectual life.

United States.

Intellectual life.

United States--Race relations.

Race relations.

United States--Politics and government--19th century.

Politics and government.

Genre:

Treaties.

Physical Description:

viii, 367 pages : illustrations, portraits ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, [2004]

Summary:

In the early years of the republic, the United States government negotiated with Indian nations because it could not afford protracted wars politically, militarily, or economically. Maureen Konkle argues that by depending on treaties, which rest on the equal standing of all signatories, Europeans in North America institutionalized a paradox: the very documents through which they sought to dispossess Native peoples in fact conceded Native autonomy. As the United States used coerced treaties to remove Native peoples from their lands, a group of Cherokee, Pequot, Ojibwe, Tuscarora, and Seneca writers spoke out. With history, polemic, and personal narrative these writers countered widespread misrepresentations about Native peoples' supposedly primitive nature, their inherent inability to form governments, and their impending disappearance. Furthermore, they contended that arguments about racial difference merely justified oppression and dispossession; deriding these arguments as willful attempts to evade the true meanings and implications of the treaties, the writers insisted on recognition of Native peoples' political autonomy and human equality. Konkle demonstrates that these struggles over the meaning of U.S.-Native treaties in the early nineteenth century led to the emergence of the first substantial body of Native writing in English and, as she shows, the effects of the struggle over the political status of Native peoples remain embedded in contemporary scholarship.

Contents:

Americans 1

The Theory of Indian Difference and the Practice of Treaty-Making 8

Evading Indian Autonomy 17

Criticism and the Political Struggles of Native Peoples 26

Recognition, History, Playing Indian 36

1 The Cherokee Resistance 42

Everybody's Indians 42

Civilization and Misrepresentation 49

Debating Removal 61

Time Immemorial 71

Sequoyah, the Cherokee Antiquarians, and Progress 78

2 William Apess, Racial Difference, and Native History 97

A Real Wild Indian 97

Experiences 106

Nullifying Acts 119

Denominated Indian 131

Apess's Effects 146

3 Traditionary History in Ojibwe Writing 160

Getting Inside Indians' Heads 160

Ethnology and Effacement 166

Chaos, Conversion, and Progress 181

William Warren's Tribal Knowledge 197

Sentiment and Performance 205

4 Reclaiming Red Jacket and the Confederacy in Iroquois Writing 224

Learned Pagans 224

Contrary Eloquence in Red Jacket and David Cusick 232

Seneca Historians in the Wake of Racial Differentiation 250

Repoliticizing Red Jacket 265

Empire of the Real 274.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [329]-355) and index.

ISBN:

080782822X

0807854921

OCLC:

52819586

Online:

Publisher description