American Indian Removal beyond the Removal Act

NAIS 1:1 SPRING 2014 American Indian Removal beyond the Removal Act 65 JOHN P. BOWES American Indian Removal beyond the Removal Act THE INDIAN REMOVAL ACT was not just enabling legislation passed by Congress in May 1830. It did more than grant authority to the President of the United States to arrange for the relocation of eastern Indians to lands west of the Mississippi River. The Indian Removal Act, as well as the debates and events connected to it, established a discourse that has continued to frame discussions of the historical era in which it occurred. That discourse is one layered in the language of constitutional authority, civilization versus savagery, property rights, states’ rights, tribal sovereignty, and government jurisdiction. It­ provides the foundation for a broad conversation encompassing American imperialism during the Jacksonian Age, “a determination to expand geographically and economically, imposing an alien will upon subject peoples and commandeering their resources.”1 In addition, the process has created a powerful and tragic narrative concerned primarily with the experiences of the southeastern Indian tribes and their forced removal from the eastern half of the continent.2 The portrayal of the Indian Removal Act of 1830 as a watershed historical event has thus been influenced by the construction of the American national narrative as a whole. Whether it is seen as ending “the drift and indecision of previous administrations” or forcing “the recognition that attitudes that had been vaguely and randomly expressed before had now to be consolidated into a unified, practical, and defensible national policy,” the legislation has left its mark as a significant moment for federal policy.3 Teachers and scholars have long emphasized the well-known battle among the assembled forces of Andrew Jackson, Christian missionaries, Georgia politicians, and Cherokee Indians to illustrate the bill’s place within a transformative era of American history. John A. Andrew III presents Indian removal as “Jacksonian Democracy’s first great crusade,” which “became a key to understanding a concomitant change in American culture.” Similarly, Mary Hershberger has deftly illustrated the connections between women’s involvement in the antiremoval petition campaign of 1830 and the early abolitionist movement. In an impressive study of political behavior, Fred Rolater has asserted that the debates over Indian removal contributed significantly to the emergence of John P. Bowes NAIS 1:1 SPRING 2014 66 the second American party system. Rolater’s argument was foreshadowed by Ronald Satz’s foundational work on Jacksonian Indian policy that also highlighted the broader political implications of the congressional debates over the legislation. For Andrew, Hershberger, Rolater, Satz, and others, the battle over American Indian removal influenced vital elements of American society during a period of tremendous change.4 But removal was also an act of all-encompassing violence. This violence played out on a local level and did not simply happen in an abstract world of political debates and historical narratives. Literary scholar Scott Richard Lyons states in harsh terms that, “removal is to migration what rape is to sex.” It was not antiseptic. It was not clean. In all cases it involved some manner of coercion. Removal forcefully renamed the physical and cultural landscape as it marginalized Native ways of living and being.5 Lyons expands upon this idea, stating that, “while the original political policy was concerned with actual physical removals like the Trail of Tears, the underlying ideology of removal in its own way justified and encouraged the systematic losses of Indian life: the removal of livelihood and language, the removal of security and self-esteem, the removal of religion and respect.”6 In this light, federal removal policy should be viewed as a continuation of, rather than a transition from, the civilization policy begun in the late eighteenth century that attacked Indigenous religions, subsistence patterns, and landholding practices. And this wholesale dispossession continued in the histories written in the decades that followed. It is a trajectory shown quite clearly by James Buss, who describes the literary genocide committed by nineteenth-century historians of the lower Great Lakes who crafted stories that hinged on the “moment of Native dispossession and victimless settlement.”7 The scholarship examining Cherokee removal is not devoid of this violence . Nor does...