A Longhouse Fragmented: Ohio Iroquois Autonomy in the Nineteenth Century

Chapter Four: Displacing the Longhouse

73 FOUR Displacing the Longhouse To remove the Senecas of Sandusky, Ohio . . . afforded me an opportunity of aiding in the benevolent policy of removing the Indians to a country better adapted to their habits and necessities, and of providing for those immediately under my charge such comforts upon their journey as they had been accustomed to. —Henry Brish to William Clark, August 31, 1833 The return of the headmen from Indian Territory and the death of Seneca John marked a turning point in the Sandusky people’s engagement with removal. It is unclear what precipitated the increased interaction of headmen with Indian agents, but by late 1828 Sandusky headmen were actively seeking councils with the president and other authorities to discuss the possibilities of removal. In a letter to Andrew Jackson from an administrative embassy of nineteen Sandusky men, Martin Lane interpreted the following in 1830: Our Great Father is again requested to give his red children his ear. They sent him a year ago their application informing him of their desire to dispose of their reservation on the Sandusky River in Ohio and their wish to go away beyond the Mississippi. They have received no answer to their request—They are fearful that their Great Father has not been made acquainted with their wishes. His red children are now more anxious than ever to emigrate—They wish to exchange their Lands here for others on the west side of the Mississippi—The game is destroyed around their Lands in Ohio and their young people are daily learning bad habits from the white people—They therefore wish to leave 74 A Longhouse Fragmented this country as soon as their Great Father will allow them to exchange their Lands and give them the means of departing for their new home.1 The federal government’s inability to successfully manage, fund, and support the reservation system is widely known. Indian Affairs, in all of its bureaucratic manifestations, never fully provided for reservation Indians according to treaty agreements, which only made communities more vulnerable to the constant assault from settlers who viewed natives as conquered peoples whose resistance to American national advancement impeded their God-given rights.2 From the 1817 treaty through the time of removal, annuities guaranteed by treaty to the Sandusky people went mostly unpaid or only partially paid. Basic rations of various sorts, such as beef, pork, flour, and sugar, arrived in minuscule quantities or in unusable condition from rot to ruin. Pleading letters from Johnston to multiple superiors detail the crises caused by delayed or nonexistent annuities and subsistence items guaranteed under previous treaties.3 Obviously, the violation of treaty agreements, settler pressures, and cultural preservation were important factors for the Sandusky people’s decision to remove. What we must understand, however, is that the Sandusky people, not the federal government, decided when to sign the removal treaty. The Sandusky people themselves, no doubt with the eager encouragement of Piqua agent Johnston and Superintendent Clark, contacted the president and agreed to travel to Washington, D.C., to execute the agreement. The details of the removal treaty were fifteen years in the making. The multiple councils and negotiations that had taken place between 1817 and 1831 provided the foundation for the removal agreement, but also tell of a complex process whereby the Sandusky people continually sought to maintain their autonomy. As a process whereby the Indian bureaucracy engaged autonomous sociocultural communities, removal— the events leading up to relocation, the treaty negotiations, and the move itself—generated a community situatedness. Community situatedness was informed by community culture but was also determined in the field of engagement where the settled and the settler met. Removal has thus far been analyzed in three ways: as an extension of the settler state’s powers, settler procedure, and the tragic outcomes of removal. All three are aspects of removal and are crucial in understanding its complexities. As a dialogical context, however, removal is situated by the multiple forms of knowledge brought to bear on settlers’ displace- 75 Displacing the Longhouse ment of indigenous peoples and thus a reality situated socially, politically, and temporally.4 Removal is a particular positionality where multiple axes of power converge to make it necessary and possible. Donna Haraway tells us that the “search for . . . a ‘full’ and total position is the search for the fetishized perfect subject of oppositional history . . .” and “subjugation is not grounds for etiology...