Indian Agency: Life of Black Hawk and the Countercolonial Provocations of Early Native American Writing

Indian Agency: Life ofBlack Hawk and the Countercolonial Provocations of Early Native American Writing ERIC GARY ANDERSON One of the salient facts of nineteenth-century American Indian history is that the forced removal of many Indian nations from their homelands happened at about the same time as the appearance ofwritten Native literature. As A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff explains, "The emergence of Native American authors parallels whites' conquest of Indian lands and the subsequent education of Native children in white-run schools. "I A strong majority of nineteenth-century non-Natives justified their colonial designs and genocidal practices by arguing that Indians were doomed to disappear anyway and were already well on the way to vanishing-dying and going if not entirely dead and gone. In the context ofthis catastrophic state of affairs, anumber of American Indians made the difficult transition from oral culture to print technologies and authorship, producing material and visible written texts in a foreign language, English , as a way of challenging these Euro-American assumptions and arguing for their own material, visible, and vocal indigenous presence as Indian selves and nations. Although sometimes sounding a conciliatory note, they more pressingly argued against renloval and dispossession by reaffirming N ative nationalism, lamenting the Native home places that had been lost, and unsettling the non- Native home places that supplanted them. The stance assumed in their texts is, in early twentyfirst -century terms, countercolonial ifnot outright postcolonial.2 ESQ I II. 52 I 1ST-2ND QUARTERS I2006 75 Black Hawk, paintedfrom life £yJ. O. Lewis in Detroit, 1833. Lithograph £y Lehman and Duval, ca. 1836. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-U5l62-108367. INDIAN AGENCY To illuminate the complexities and contradictions of Native American literary history, then, it makes sense to go back to the 1830s and to examine the ways in which Native American literature both is and is not, both can and cannot be, Native centered. Paradoxically and purposefully, nineteenth-century Native writing coincides with and in fact articulates Native resistance to the very colonial cultures that import and impose such technologies. The provocative late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century claims of Muscogee Creek writer Craig Womack and other advocates oC'NativeAmerican literary separatism " address and reHect analogous purposeful paradoxes: separatism is inseparable from the colonialism it resists and the comparative transcultural approaches it would seem to refute . 3 This essay investigates how these paradoxes work, mainly by way of one of the earliest nineteenth-century examples of American Indian life writing, Life ofMa-Ka-Tai-Me-She-Kia-Kiak or Black Hawk, "dictated by himself" and published in the racially charged border city of Cincinnati in 1833.4 More particularly , Black Hawk's book is an exemplary early work ofNative literature belcause it stages what might be called Indian unremoval. That is, Black Hawk takes two key signs of colonial mystification and power, writing and the English language, and uses them as a stay against assimilation rather than as a vindication of Western education. His book counteracts various manifestations of the Euro -American evacuation of Indiansincluding pedagogical retoolings of Indians and Indiannessby insisting on a complex, powerful, but in some ways still elusive Indian presence that white people clearly do not (yet) understand . Black Hawk's book, produced when he was in his late sixties , reflects a lifetime ofclose, diagnostic observation ofEuroAmericans . In the spring of1832, at the age of sixty-six, Black Hawk led a group ofseveral hundred Indian men, women, and children across the Mississippi River to reclaim their ancestral village along the Rock River in northwest Illinois. White people, he explains, had taken to squatting there, using and misusing the Indians' cornfields, and even putting up fences. So far as the United States government was concerned, these lands had been ceded to whites in I804, though, as Black Hawk indi77 ERIC GARY ANDERSON cates, the cirCUlmstances of that transaction were hazy and dubious . The Black Hawk War that ensued was a relatively shortlived affair, and one of its outcom.es was that Black Hawk himself was taken into custody as a prisoner of war. However, by the summer of r833, he joined a small number of other...