The Worlds the Shawnees Made: Migration and Violence in Early America

Epilogue: Reconsidering the “Literary Advantage"

224 epilogue Reconsidering the “Literary Advantage” The appropriation of a past by conquest carries with it the risk of rebounding upon the conquerors. It can end up sacralizing the past for the subject people and encouraging them to use it in their effort to define and affirm their own identity. —Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony, 19971 Since the eighteenth century, eyewitnesses and historians have misunderstood both the causes of migration in the Eastern Woodlands and the varied motivations of migrants. For many American Indians and colonizers , long-distance migrants were inherently treacherous. The Shawnees have lived with these misconceptions for centuries. And because the Shawnees typically occupied perilous borderlands between competing colonizers, they developed a reputation for violence. When faced with oblivion, through combinations of coalescence and military defeat, Shawnees moved on. Each new location seemed to illustrate that an “innate sense of tribalism” inclined the various Shawnee villages toward “collective violence.”2 Colonizers laid the groundwork for this literary assault on the Shawnees and their migratory neighbors well before the founding of Jamestown . Armed first with the written word, the English made “the civilizing mission” a rationale for conquest. Europeans depended on science and technology to support their essential superiority.3 In contrast, American Indians were thought of as barbaric because they migrated often, especially as warfare became endemic. English cultural assumptions regarding technology, warfare, and mobility provided the lens through which the English justified their authority over Native peoples. Settler societies had long equated associated societies that depended on seasonal migrations with barbarism. The Elizabethan colonizer Sir John Davies used the seasonal round of the Gaelic Irish to justify the English conquest of EPILOGUE / 225 their homelands. In 1612, Davies explained that prior to Roman conquest, ancient Britons were “rude and dispersed” people who, because of their mobility, were “prone upon every occasion to make war.” Ever in debt to their Roman conquerors, reformed Englishmen in the early modern world believed that it was their duty to compel people who migrated seasonally to adopt the virtues of settled life. The English colonization of Ireland thus became the opening act in the longer history of English colonization. The conquest of Ireland provided the intellectual—and legal—basis for the assertion of English sovereignty over Indian lands, particularly those beyond the Appalachian Mountains, because the interior of the continent had become a haven for dispossessed and migratory peoples from the mid-Atlantic to the Upper Great Lakes.4 Historians and cartographers of British North America, from Cadwallader Colden to John Mitchell, argued that the Iroquois had conquered the Shawnee people and that they had secured, by right of conquest, the ability to sell their lands. As historian Jill Lepore points out, “War is, at least in part, a contest for meaning.” The Shawnees avoided conquest, but they lost the larger battle over their rights to the lands of the Middle Ohio Valley. They survived without legal sovereignty. Europeans, and the British in particular, justified this legal conquest because they believed that transience and violence were antithetical to civilization. Central Algonquians such as the Shawnees, the Miamis, and the Illinois watched as the British and their Iroquois allies used the power of the written word to define what the chaos of colonization meant. The “literary advantage” of colonizers became the Achilles’ heel of oral societies that were on the move. For most of the eighteenth century, the English used the written word to resolve questions of sovereignty and land ownership to their advantage.5 During the Seven Years’ War, nearly one hundred years after the Iroquois allegedly defeated the Shawnees in the Middle Ohio Valley, the British and the Iroquois signed a series of treaties that formally divested the Shawnees and the Delawares, among others, of their land in western Pennsylvania and beyond. Between 1754 and 1760, the British laid claim to Iroquois military history and used it to creatively imagine British sovereignty, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River. British cartographer John Mitchell explicitly linked Iroquois and British military history, from the seventeenth to the eighteenth centuries, in his 1757 map of North America. In the Lower Great Lakes region, Mitchell explained, “the Six Nations have extended their Territories to the River Illinois ever since the year 1672, when they subdued, and were incorporated with the antient Chaouanons.” Mitchell believed that through the Iroquois, the 226 / EPILOGUE “Ohio Indians” came “under the Six Nations,” and, by extension...