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Reviewed by:
  • Writing Indian Nations: Native Intellectuals and the Politics of Historiography, 1827–1863
  • Cathy Rex (bio)
Writing Indian Nations: Native Intellectuals and the Politics of Historiography, 1827–1863. Maureen Konkle. Chapel Hill, N.C.: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004. 367 pp.

In Writing Indian Nations, Maureen Konkle interrogates the relationship between the first substantial body of published Native writing [End Page 603] in English and the treaties used by the U.S. government to negotiate with Indian nations during the early years of the republic. By tracing the development and transformations of the texts of a small but vocal group of Cherokee, Pequot, Ojibwe, Tuscarora, and Seneca intellectuals in response to the treaties, Konkle is able to demonstrate how through their texts, these writers were aggressively and actively asserting a Native political autonomy while engaging Euro-American thought about racial difference and Native identity. Konkle argues that it was the inherent contradictions present in the treaties during the early nineteenth century that enabled these writers to speak out. The treaties, on the one hand, posited Native peoples as having governments and boundaries that had to be recognized, yet the discourse outside the treaty relations inscribed the Native populations as timeless relics of prehistory. Konkle believes that this contradiction, along with the effects of the naturalization of racial difference during this period, generated this body of Native texts which must be viewed as the location of political struggle and aspiration for autonomy.

In her introduction, Konkle begins by contextualizing the political and intellectual climate confronting these Native writers through a survey of some of the political publications, written histories, and treaty negotiations of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The introduction also offers a strong critique of the current "multicultural paradigm" utilized in Native scholarship because, as Konkle argues, it "precludes an examination of the politics of the representation of Indians and the historicity of Native writing because it is largely driven by a fixation on determining, describing, and analyzing the cultural difference of Native peoples and Native writing"(27). Konkle's argument that we must read dynamic resistance instead of fixed difference in this body of Native texts is an intriguing method for engaging them. The scholarship and thinking of cultural studies, while espousing humanism, still holds the potential to fix Native identity through culture as latent destiny and as absolute difference that is static in time, just as racialist discourse had done in the past. Such deterministic thinking about Native identity threatens to reinscribe the nineteenth-century effects of sympathy and difference, which, Konkle argues, serve to "displace Native peoples' political struggle—their struggle for history and autonomy—while maintaining the ideological coherence of the United States" (28). By directing attention to the resistance and declarations of autonomy and historicity in these Native texts, Konkle reaches [End Page 604] beyond the Eurocentric binaries and attempts to conceive of a new way to read Native writing much in the way that theorists like Paul Gilroy, Etienne Balibar, and Immanuel Wallerstein endeavor to envision modes of thinking that transcend the race- and nation-specific character of modern identity politics.

Chapters 1 through 4 each examine a different tribal group whose texts contest the Euro-American political and racial hegemony. Chapter 1 ("The Cherokee Resistance") addresses the writing of the Cherokee leadership between about 1826 and 1837, the most volatile years of the Cherokee struggle against removal. Konkle specifically looks at the texts of Elias Boudinot, John Ridge, John Ross, and the Cherokee memorials to Congress in which claims "to be the same as whites, self-consciously, calculatedly, and persistently" are made (43–44). The greatest strength in this chapter is in Konkle's insistence on not reading these Cherokee leaders' seemingly paradigmatic acceptance of "civilization" as capitulations to Euro-Americans' ideas of superiority, but rather as seeing their texts as "the first systematic written Native engagement with Eurocentrism that addresses itself to the politics of knowledge about Native peoples" (49).

Chapter 2 ("William Apess, Racial Difference, and Native History") is devoted entirely to William Apess and his substantial body of texts. Konkle asserts that through historiography, by reading against and revising Euro-American historical accounts, Apess was...

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