Civilization, Law, and Customary Diplomacy: Arguments against Removal in Cherokee and Seneca Letters to the Federal Government

"THE CHEROKEE PEOPLE will never consent to sell their freedom—nor dispose of their heritage in the soil which moulders the bones of their ancestors."¹ This is what Cherokee chief John Ross and others, all part of a delegation for the tribe, wrote in April 1834 in a letter to secretary of war Lewis Cass. A little over three years after this letter was sent by the southeastern tribe, a group of Seneca chiefs from the Buffalo Creek reservation, part of the northeastern Haudenosaunee-Iroquois Confederacy, in one of their many communications to the president of the United States, expressed a similar reluctance to remove while seeking to explain their attachment to their land. They wrote that they had "resolved to adhere to our present locations to remain and lay our bones by the side of our forefathers."² While such a statement hinting at a traditional attachment to land through ancient burial sites was not all that unusual for the Senecas, it was one of the very rare instances where the Cherokee leadership in their communications with the federal government referred to something customary instead of focusing exclusively on their level of civilization or on their rights.³

In this article I will focus on letters, petitions, and memorials written to the federal government by the Senecas and by the Cherokees to oppose removal. Both had been formidable military and diplomatic powers in the colonial period, and both came to be threatened by removal at more or less the same time.⁴ I will explain why, despite a shared focus on civilization and as well as on rights that both reflected the government discourse, there are also traces of customary practices in some of the letters, though more so among the Senecas than the Cherokees. I argue that the communications resulting from communal writing practices, even more and for longer among the Senecas than the Cherokees, reveal not only the oft-denied persistence of customary practices, but also constituted attempts on the part of the two tribes to persuade the government to reinitiate diplomatic relations with the U.S. government reminiscent of those of a bygone era.⁵ As the literary scholar Christopher Teuton has indicated, to this day for Native Americans "orality continues to be invoked as a marker of authenticity," and the way tribes in the removal era were forced to engage with governmental discourses that were used to justify removal may well have contributed to the idea that some of them had surrendered their "Indianness."⁶ Yet the letters analyzed here show that Cherokee and Seneca authors did not surrender anything, but rather used writing in defense of their own customs.⁷

Civilization and Law

In their fight against removal the Cherokees in their correspondence with the federal government used strategies that were not all that dissimilar from those employed by the Senecas, although the ways and the degree to which they were utilized by each tribe at times differed considerably. The most dominant of the arguments used in the letters were invocations of the degree of civilization already attained and appeals to rights or law, which was logical as these were discourses already dominant within the federal government.⁸ When appealing to the level of civilization they had already reached, both tribes saw the need to provide some proof, generally in the form of material, educational, and moral advances made. They used these to argue that removal for them would be counterproductive, as it would not advance them toward civilization (as governmental rhetoric defined it).

The Senecas in their correspondence with the federal government repeatedly emphasized all advances made, be they material, educational, or moral. For instance, they stated that "our ancient hunting grounds have been changed into productive farms and thriving villages and cities."⁹ They also pointed to having made rapid advances in civilization, morality, and religion, concluding that they were "not, like the western Indians, wanderers beyond the pale of civilization."¹⁰ In contrast to this prevalent Seneca practice, the Cherokees provided very little tangible proof for...