Framing Chief Leschi: Narratives and the Politics of Historical Justice

Chapter 1: Colonialism

23 chapter 1 Colonialism Mary Robnett, a lawyer for the respondents in the Historical Court, began her opening statement by reflecting on the role of law in society: “[The rule of law] is really the core of our democracy, it’s the core of our civilization , our self-rule.” Although social mores and political imperatives may evolve over time, Robnett argued, “it is part of our free and democratic and very imperfect society that we have to rely on our laws, our application of laws, and the rule of law in order to preserve ourselves.” She emphasized the plural possessive—“our”—to appeal to shared American identity. In so doing, she argued that anyone who considered himself or herself a part of “our civilization” had the responsibility to protect the bedrock of the system , despite a history of legal actions that have not always reflected democratic ideals. The respondents’ strategy was to present legality as a set of universal standards that created and maintained order in society.The petitioners ’ indigenous ancestors did not experience the imposed legal order as a set of universal rules. Rather, they witnessed how liberal traditions, the bedrock of American civilization, enabled and justified settler colonialism in the mid-nineteenth century. In South Puget Sound, like other colonial settings in western North America, so-called universal notions were critical to Indian dispossession and American possession of new territory . The Historical Court judges, lawyers, and witnesses, however, did not seek to determine what, exactly, the law helped to preserve, nor the role it played in extending U.S. sovereignty over the region. At its core, Leschi’s case was only one aspect of a multifaceted colonial process of translating ideologies, values, and self-concepts into action “on the ground” in South Puget Sound. In the Age of Discovery, English colonists used common law, from which U.S. law was drawn, to transfer ideas, values, and social relationships from one location to another and effectively overwhelm other ways of being in the world. Similarly, U.S. law created a framework through which American society could be ex- colonialism 24 tended to western North American territories and naturalized in the new locales. Law is so closely intertwined with colonial goals and technologies as to be, according to some theorists, “constitutive of colonialism itself.”1 And yet, focusing too narrowly on the legal facts of Leschi’s case runs the risk of obscuring this larger picture: Leschi participated in and resisted a settler colonial order premised on taking possession of land and displacing indigenous people. The land itself is critical here. The ground (and water) constituted the level at which indigenous people and newcomers experienced the material realities of colonialism in South Puget Sound.2 Although colonial epistemologies contributed to extending U.S. sovereignty over Native people and much of their homelands by the twentieth century, colonialism in South Puget Sound reflected dynamic interactive politics and not just conquest.3 Native people recognized how U.S. technologies of colonialism, and the Western epistemologies from which they emerged, threatened their world. But, significantly, they also saw how appropriating these technologies could perhaps provide the means for protecting their claims and ensuring survival. The Western legal system in particular provided a framework in which indigenous people denied the legitimacy of colonial domination and defended their claims within it.4 The Historical Court was an example of this ongoing dynamic: Leschi’s descendants seized upon legality and the notion of justice to address their long-standing grievance over Leschi’s legal treatment. In so doing, the petitioners revealed the complicated relationship between liberalism and colonialism in a democratic settler state. This chapter explores the inherent tension in liberalism in order to explain how Americans used colonial technologies to justify and promote Indians’ disappearance and dispossession , as well as how Indians strategically embraced facets of Western liberalism to resist its effects.5 Knowing the Land When Natives and Europeans/Euro-Americans looked around the southern Puget Sound in the mid-nineteenth century, they each saw their surroundings differently.These varied geographies reflected different cultural values and ideologies, and the fundamental essence of settler colonialism is that one imagined geography contracted while the other expanded.6 These geographies informed different historical narratives of the southern Puget Sound as well. On the one hand, to indigenous people the region was 25 colonialism a sentient landscape that referenced a long and dynamic relationship with humans...