In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

American Literary History 13.3 (2001) 592-602



[Access article in PDF]

Native Americans and American Identities in the Early Republic

Timothy Sweet

America does not repel the past.

Walt Whitman

The early national era was critical for eastern Native Ameri cans. Colin Calloway reminds us in his contribution to Native Americans and the Early Republic that "despite massive inroads in Indian country and Indian cultures, Indian people were still virtually everywhere in colonial America" (4). Jonathan Edwards lived among the Housatonics at Stockbridge as he composed Freedom of the Will (1754). Thomas Jefferson was familiar with Indians who camped near his family's plantation en route to Williamsburg, while his sometime adversary John Adams knew many who lived near his home in Braintree (Native Americans 337). The new nation's policy remained uncertain for some time, but in the mid-1820s the government began to remove eastern Native Americans west of the Mississippi. By the mid-1840s, Removal had destroyed what remained of the "middle ground" that had linked indigenous and European cultures since the early days of colonization. 1

During the Removal era, Roy Harvey Pearce has observed, Native Americans were "forced out of American life and into American history" (58). Removal coincided with the rise of American historiography (including historical novels) and the demise of American newness. That is, it marked a critical time in the process of nation-formation, according to the paradigm articulated by Benedict Anderson. When subjects recognize that it is "no longer possible to experience the nation as new, at the wave-top moment of rupture," national narrative supplements the forgetting of that newness with a remembering of an invented past [End Page 592] (Anderson 203). 2 The studies under review here that focus primarily on Removal--those by Renée Bergland, Susan Scheckel, and Eric Wertheimer--are all committed to Anderson's paradigm. All want to show how discursive engagements with Native American topics troubled the dynamic of forgetting/remembering that solidified national identity. Even so, investment in Anderson's paradigm, since it relegates Native Americans to particular spaces, times, and tropes, carries some significant limitations.

Anderson's emphasis on the importance of print culture, taken together with certain material facts of Native American life--generally low levels of literacy and limited access to the consumption and especially the production of print media--would largely exclude Native American concerns from the processes of nation-formation on these terms. Of course there were exceptions. Cheryl Walker's Indian Nation: Native American Literature and Nineteenth-Century Nationalism (1997), for example, explores the ways in which certain individuals who gained access to print--William Apess, Black Hawk, George Copway, John Rollin Ridge, and Sarah Winnemucca--attempted to transform American nationalist discourse in the nineteenth century. The most significant such attempt was mounted by the Cherokee Phoenix, which constructed a distinct, modern national identity having complicated linkages to Anglo-American nationalism. 3 At the same time, the Phoenix worked to differentiate the Cherokee nation from that other nationalism; its founding editor saw the paper's primary purpose as giving "the proper representation of our grievances to the people of the United States" (Boudinot). This specifically modern Cherokee identity, Joel Martin argues, coexisted with an "underground" identity lived by other Cherokees, providing a "screen behind which they could continue to lead traditional lives" (Native Americans 234).

Where Bergland, Scheckel, and Wertheimer analyze the representation of Native Americans within Anglo-American discourses of identity, most of the essays in the collection edited by historians Frederick Hoxie, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter Albert concern the lives of Native Americans themselves--lives that were often significantly intertwined with Anglo-American lives. None of the essays bears any particular commitment to Anderson's paradigm, even as Anglo counterpoint to Indian history. The difference is not entirely disciplinary. It is true that Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1991) has become part of the common conversation of English departments in a way that it has not in history departments. Yet these essays' focus on intercultural relationships (and, in some cases, intracultural divisions) would...

pdf

Share