Abstract

In the early nineteenth century, various native peoples engaged in a multilateral debate over their place in the republic, a debate that revolved around issues of identity, sovereignty, cross-cultural relations, rights to resources, and, increasingly, the concepts of civilization and savagery. This article provides a multicultural intellectual history of various Indians and Anglo-Americans in the Louisiana Purchase. It centers on the Arkansas River Valley, where Thomas Jefferson instructed Indians from the east to settle, and on four of its peoples—native Osages and Quapaws and immigrant Cherokees and Anglo-Americans.

As Indian and white westward migration intensified competition for game and land, Arkansas Valley inhabitants (old and new, Indian and white) began to look to the federal government to help resolve their disputes, and they couched their arguments in terms that appealed to United States policy-makers. But when local Indians and whites employed the concepts of civilization and savagery, they defined them in their own ways and used them for their own purposes—to argue for their rights to government protection and to land.

Although white settlers' desires ultimately prevailed, alternative visions mattered, both in their own right and because they affected the ways in which Anglo-Americans defined themselves and others. Thus, this article presages debates over race and removal later in the century and adds to recent scholarship showing that race is not simply a system of beliefs imposed by whites on nonwhites.

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