Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance

1 Ordinary Life and the Ethics of Occupation

1 In “Eulogy on King Philip” (1836), Pequot minister and activist William Apess explores how forms of citizen-feeling emerge in the context of institutionalized structures and imperatives that are themselves predicated on the disavowal of Native sovereignty. The project of settlement appears as crucial in the construction and persistence of U.S. modes of governance: “a foundation was laid in the first Legislature to enslave our people by taking from them all rights, which has been strictly adhered to ever since. Look at the disgraceful laws, disfranchising us as citizens. Look at the treaties made by Congress, all broken. Look at the deep-rooted plans laid, when a territory becomes a state, that after so many years the laws shall be extended over the Indians that live within their boundaries” (134). The dynamics of U.S. state formation axiomatically constrain and displace Native peoples, extending “laws” over them and their lands that deny their “rights” as autonomous polities. This political infrastructure provides the context in which settler sentiments take shape. Apess offers an imaginary conversation between the president of the United States and Native peoples that lays out the implicit terms of Indian relations and national belonging: “We want your land for our use to speculate upon”; “it aids us in paying off our national debt”; “our fathers carried on this scheme of getting your lands for our use”; “this has been the way our fathers first brought us up, and it is hard to depart from it” (135). The continual reproduction of national membership as such depends on the extension of a geopolitical claim to Indigenous “lands,” and the topos of familial inheritance here connects quotidian feelings of citizenship to 1 QW ordinary life and the ethics of occupation 2 Ordinary Life and the Ethics of Occupation propertyholding, indicating that the experience of national belonging is shaped by ongoing processes of settlement through which the national “we” (literally) is given form. Through the figure of inheritance, Apess suggests that the legacy of displacing Natives and effacing their survival remains ongoing, connected as it is to the sensation of intimate filiation to the nation. Enumerating the violent acts and retrospective justifications by English settlers in New England throughout the seventeenth century, Apess exhorts, “Let the children of the Pilgrims blush while the son of the forest drops a tear and groans under the fate of his murdered and departed fathers” (114). The shame borne by these “children” lies in their relation to those Indigenous peoples whose decimation and dispossession cleared the space for their occupancy and, by implication , that of all subjects of the state. Moreover, Apess’s repeated invocation of the trope of parenthood emphasizes that the broader dynamics of expropriation and erasure he addresses are realized as quotidian forms of private landholding passed through legally recognized family lines. He observes, “[I]t does appear that the Indians had rights, and those rights were near and dear to them, as your stores and farms and firesides are to the whites, and their wives and children also” (116). The everydayness of settler domestic life occurs in places whose availability for such inhabitance depends on the suspension of Native “rights.” The practice of citizenship both reveals and engenders an orientation toward settlement regardless of one’s apparent sympathies: “Although in words they deny it, yet in the works they approve of the iniquities of their fathers” (115). As opposed to something like a conscious repudiation of indigeneity, subjects in the contemporary moment live their citizenship as a structure of feeling and set of routine orientations in ways that arise from and propel the extension of claims to Native lands and dismissal of Native polities. Turning to Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and Herman Melville, I take Apess’s insights on the ordinariness of settlement as a guiding frame for rethinking approaches to the field of nineteenth-century American literary studies. My aim in reading these authors is not to investigate how they represent Native peoples, but instead to track how nonnative texts are affected by histories, legalities, and policies of Indigenous dispossession and settler jurisdiction in ways that do not appear to have anything to do with Indians. If we understand the United States as a settler-state, one Ordinary Life and the Ethics of Occupation 3 founded on top of polities that precede its existence, which then are proclaimed to be “domestic” and thus made subject to...