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8. Patriotic Remains: Bones of Contention in the Early Republic
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Chapter 8 Patriotic Remains: Bones of Contention in the Early Republic Matthew Dennis Thou, stranger, that shall come this way, Nofraud upon the dead commit— Observe the swelling turf, and say They do not lie, but here they sit. —Philip Freneau, (( The Indian Burying Ground" (1787) Philip Freneau originally titled his popular 1787 poem "Lines occasioned by a visit to an old Indian burying ground." But its serious subject did not preclude a sly play on words. As the poet observed in a footnote, "the North American Indians bury their dead in a sitting posture." Newcomers— "strangers"—to the new American land, particularly its vast interior, took note of the "swelling turf of Indian burial mounds, pushed up slightly to accommodate the flexed bodies of single corpses. Freneau's caution, "No fraud upon the dead commit," addressed those who were fashioning American memory, urging them to be truthful. But what truth might observers of Indian graves tell, and how might that truth help compose a larger narrative of America's rising glory? "They do not lie," Freneau wrote of the literal position of interred Native dead, yet presumably he wished, too, that his readers recognize a responsibility to the truth, that required respect for the silence of the dead—for, as the saying goes, "dead men tell no tales." Imagining his vanishing Indians as mere "shades," ghosts destined for the Indian netherworld, the "land of shades," he understood what fraud was possible—not simply scholastic deception, but real property swindles as well. The United States could not expand except through the dispossession of Native people. Wishful thinking and official policy already combined to assign living Indians to the past, if not to actual graves; learned memorialists required a retrospective mode in order to prescribe the glorious American future. And, strangely, as they buried Indians metaphori- Patriotic Remains 137 cally, they found their mortal remains useful, sometimes as relics, sometimes as artifacts. The Indians' day was done as white Americans claimed their birthright as a chosen people, inheriting the continent that Indians had once (and inconveniently still) occupied. They felt this in their bones.1 This chapter examines the political and cultural use of human remains in the construction and practice of nationalism in the United States. It begins with the eighteenth-century attempt among white Americans to account for American Indian remains—both bones and ceremonial mounds—and to appropriate them for their own purposes, challenging or neutralizing claims by Indians to the American landscape. Though American Protestantism might have been expected to perpetuate Puritan aversion to the collection, circulation, and veneration of relics (a practice associated with medieval Catholicism), in fact, new forms of such adoration emerged during the first decades of the republic. A telling event symbolizes what was happening. In 1808, the New York Tammany Society—a patriotic political association in the days before it became an electioneering machine—staged a grand procession and reinternment ceremony to honor the men whose lives were lost aboard British prison ships moored in New York Harbor during the American Revolution. More than eleven thousand corpses had been unceremoniously dumped nearby at Brooklyn's Wallabout Bay.These remains became holy objects, which served to promote patriotic memory and national feeling . That is, nationalism was in the process of democratizing through the reverential treatment of the thousands of undistinguished bones representing ordinary American patriot-martyrs. In various ways, the remains of common soldiers and sailors—both identified and unidentifiable—would continue to cultivate memory, nationalism, patriotism, and the particular political agendas of memorializers, even though such bones received fewer "rites" than those of elite soldiers and statesmen. In a contrary way,ancient Indian mounds and Indians' bones were repossessed by white Americans, who found a way to claim them as "ancestors " and to steal their legacy—stealing the continent itself—from living Indian people. The skeletal remains of contemporary Indians and their grandparents were plundered, collected as curiosities, ignored, or plowed over by white settlers. Bythe end of the nineteenth century, Indian bones became objects of ethnological interest, catalogued by new corps ofAmerican scientists attempting to compile a natural history of man. This collection of remains (along with ethnological information and other material objects) represented an assertion of scholarly authority—a sort of intellectual and cultural dispossession that cut Native people "to the bone." It also contributed to the emergence of a racist theory of hierarchy among the peoples of the world, which served both U.S. nationalism and new imperialist agendas...