Red Jacket and the Decolonization of Republican Virtue

History has not always been kind to Sagoyewatha, or, as he is more commonly known, Red Jacket. One of the most eloquent spokesmen for Native sovereignty in the early national period, Sagoyewatha was nonetheless accused by his peers of cowardice, alcoholism, and egotism. Although none of these character allegations damage his contributions to Indian nationalism (many of the charges originated in political rivalry), the more insidious argument about Red Jacket's life treats him like one of James Fenimore Cooper's vanishing race. An influential Seneca leader after 1790, Sagoyewatha is generally recognized as a principal engineer of the 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua, which guaranteed Indian sovereignty over four million acres of upstate New York. In other achievements, he defended arrested Senecas from state prosecution, made numerous trips to Washington, D.C., to lobby for Seneca rights, and he stridently opposed missionary presence on Indian lands after 1803. Echoing the social opinions of the late 1820s, however, Euroamerican and Indian historians alike have characterized him as the "last" of the Senecas, a tragic figure who represented the final days of his nation.¹

Fortunately, this picture is beginning to change. Christopher Densmore's recent biography has helped to clear away the cloud of demonization that obscured Red Jacket's life. Literary scholars and historians, such as Maureen Konkle and Matthew Dennis, have begun to frame Sagoyewatha's career as an influential contribution to discourse about Native sovereignty. Furthermore, given the existence of a large number of Red Jacket speeches with good provenance, his work provides an archive of Indigenous political thought and action that has yet to receive the study it deserves.²

The tendency to conclude that the major developments of history are over (a lament of ancient and modern historians alike) has had misleading consequences for interpreting the legacy of Red Jacket's political speeches. For example, read in the context of the last two centuries of Haudenosaunee (Iroquois, or Six Nations) poverty in upstate New York, Red Jacket's most heavily anthologized speech, his reply to the missionary Jacob Cram in 1805, tends to recirculate tropes of noble savagery.³ Despite his witty and historically knowledgeable refusal to accept a missionary presence on Native land, Sagoyewatha seems unable—or unwilling—to broker a solution to prevent the decline of the ensuing two hundred years. His reasons for rejecting the missionary's proposals are compelling, but they might seem out of step to modern students who feel that his position underestimates the growing threats of Euroamerican imperialism.

This retrospective critique of Red Jacket's politics, however, risks the danger of assuming that our present is the single, inevitable product of the past. As Vine Deloria Jr. and others have shown, there are more subtle and wide-ranging versions of such historiographic prejudices that shape our assumptions about what constitutes an objective or scientific hypothesis about culture, but the basic assumptions of the argument stay the same: the Indians were a lost cause.⁴

If, however, we think of early national Seneca diplomacy as capable of rhetorical agency rather than as simply subject to events out of Native control, the historical record can look significantly different, and the efficacy of Indian performance at treaty councils becomes more visible. At the bargaining table, the Senecas had notable success protecting their interests after the Revolution, especially at Canandaigua in 1794.⁵ Particularly after their support of the United States during the War of 1812, the Senecas took the opportunity to strengthen their position in New York State. Although he was realistic about the threat of removal after 1815, Red Jacket was confident that the Six Nations maintained an advantage at council negotiations with the United States. In view of their past achievements, the later experiences of dispossession in the 1830s (viewed in hindsight as irresistible) were not yet part of the Seneca political horizon.

Despite Euroamericans' skill with printed texts to secure their interests, the Haudenosaunee used the spoken word and the rituals of treaty negotiations very effectively in their relations with the European colonists. Regrettably, these negotiations did not always protect Indian lands...