Continents of Liberty: Emerson and Gerald Vizenor’s Chair of Tears

Ralph Waldo Emerson protested what came to be known as the Trail of Tears in a public letter to President Martin Van Buren in 1838. The Cherokee Nation, he argued, had been cheated by a “sham treaty” (Emerson, “Letter” 50), the will of the people ignored, and a false acquiescence to removal written into law. In making a passionate appeal to the highest “chair” of the land, Emerson underscored the great political and moral stakes involved:

In speaking thus the sentiments of my neighbors and my own, perhaps I overstep the bounds of decorum. But would it not be a higher indecorum coldly to argue a matter like this? We only state the fact that a crime is projected that confounds our understandings by its magnitude—a crime that really deprives us as well as the Cherokees of a country—for how could we call the conspiracy that should crush these poor Indians our government, or the land that was cursed by their parting and dying imprecations our country, any more? You, sir, will bring down that renowned chair in which you sit into infamy if your seal is set to this instrument of perfidy; and the name of this nation, hitherto the sweet omen of religion and liberty, will stink to the world.

(51)

Though Emerson was clearly sympathetic to the plight of the Cherokees and ashamed of what removal policies suggested about his nation, his understanding of Indigenous peoples did not posit their cultural equality in relation to European Americans. As he suggests early in his letter, what recommends the Cherokees, in particular, are their efforts to throw off “primitive” habits and surrender to assimilation:

Even in our distant State some good rumor of their worth and civility has arrived. We have learned with joy their improvement in the social arts. We have read their newspapers. We have seen some of them in our schools and colleges. In common with the great body of the American people, we have witnessed with sympathy the painful labors of these red men to redeem their own race from the doom of eternal inferiority, and to borrow and domesticate in the tribe the arts and customs of the Caucasian race.

(49–50)

Emerson’s letter did not, of course, halt the removals, and Van Buren became the latest “chair” to blaze the Trail of Tears.

Gerald Vizenor’s novel Chair of Tears (2012)—an elaboration of a short story included in Earthdivers: Tribal Narratives on Mixed Descent (1981)—is set in the present on a university campus in Minnesota, but the historical trauma of cultural destruction and “sham treaties” and indeed the implications of Emerson’s ideas as expressed in his letter to Van Buren and elsewhere seem very much at play in its imaginative world. The novel repeatedly cites the toxic machinations of federal agents, and its second epigraph is actually drawn from Emerson’s seminal essay Nature (1836). One may be tempted, perhaps, to take this invocation of an ostensible ally more or less straightforwardly, especially given the at least superficial correspondences between these authors’ philosophical assumptions. In this and other works, Vizenor would seem to affirm Emerson’s reverence for a natural order animate with spirit, along with the creative possibilities of communion with it. Both Chair of Tears and Nature are intimately concerned, moreover, with the question of how to see rightly and similarly insist, with characteristic optimism, on the possibility and moral urgency of an endless process of revelation in human understanding.

And yet, Vizenor’s deployment of Emerson here appears much more complicated than a simple avowal of affinity and respect. It is, in fact, illuminating to read Chair of Tears as a profound critique of Emerson (who would save the Cherokee people, but not as Cherokees) and a radical revision of his exuberant assertions in Nature of a gigantic, effectively deified self that might fully comprehend and subordinate its environment. This European American version of autonomy (“self-rule”) is, Vizenor’s work implies, not only blind to the actual relations between humans and the rest of creation but...