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Formations of United States Colonialism
By Alyosha Goldstein Duke University Press
Copyright © 2014 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7596-8
CHAPTER 1
The Specters of Recognition
JOANNE BARKER
There is a story I know. It's about the earth and how it floats in space on the back of a turtle. I've heard this story many times, and each time someone tells the story, it changes. Sometimes the change is simply in the voice of the storyteller. Sometimes the change is in the details. Sometimes in the order of events. Other times it's the dialogue or the response of the audience. But in all the telling of all the tellers, the world never leaves the turtle's back. And the turtle never swims away.... The truth about stories is that that's all we are. —Thomas King, The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative
The questions addressed here include: How have Native peoples been written into and out of the categories of U.S. modernity's human, and to what legal, economic, and social ends? What work have the qualifications of Natives as (in)human done within imperial formations? How have Native peoples (dis)articulated themselves as the modern human?
In We Have Never Been Modern, Bruno Latour argues that modernity narrates "the passage of time" by designating the emergence of "a new regime, an acceleration, a rupture, a revolution in time." This designation discriminates a teleological progress to civilization from "an archaic and stable past" that is considered "lost" and "vanquished." Latour is concerned with how the ruptures between past (where nature is thought to reside) and present (where society has erupted) deny the hybridity of nature and society. He argues that knowledge and experience are produced within this hybridity and is concerned about the consequences of a denaturalized notion of "human society."
For here I want to remain with Latour's definition of modernity as a teleology of social formation and focus on the epistemological and ontological assumptions that that narrative makes about what constitutes the human. I do so because modernity's human—inflected through notions of society in opposition to nature—is the precondition on which all international and constitutional rights to self-determination are based. The question of what counts as human matters, then, not as an esoteric problem of epistemology or ontology—the truth, as it were, of knowing and being—but as a concern over the human's role in arbitrating Native legal rights, economic conditions, and social politics within the contexts of the global and the republic. How Natives have been written into and out of the legal categories of the human, and what kinds of humans they are righted to be or not to be, has everything to do with the mitigation of their property in the human and in history and, consequently, with their rights to the self-determination of their governments, territories, cultures, and bodies. Because, after all, "the truth about stories is that that's all we are."
In order to consider these issues, the chapter examines the coproductive relationship of imperialism, scientific empiricism, and federal recognition within the discourses and ideologies of modernity's human. It analyzes the politics of the evidence-as-knowledge demanded of Natives in order to prove historical "continuity" and cultural "distinction" as an "Indian tribe" to secure their recognition. It frames these demands within the struggles of the Delaware Tribe of Indians (Lenape) for recognition, and the specific controversies over the scientific veracity of the Wallam Olum, as a way of thinking through the imperial conditions in which Native humanity and human rights are made contingent on the empire's interests. It concludes by considering the work of modernity in disguising as a thing of the past that which is still very much present: the empire.
BRIEF CONTEXT
For readers unfamiliar with the struggles of the Delaware Tribe for recognition, some context is necessary to frame the analysis that follows. In 1866, the tribe signed its last of twenty treaties with the United States "consenting" to relocate (yet again) from their treatied lands in Kansas to Indian Territory. In 1867, the Delaware ratified an agreement with the Cherokee Nation negotiated by the United States that provided for their relocation into Cherokee territory. In 1894 and 1904, the Delaware and Cherokee went before the U.S. Supreme Court over the terms of that agreement, which interpreted the agreement through the provisions of a Cherokee treaty of 1866 to mean that the Delaware had been "incorporated" as "native Cherokee" into the Cherokee Nation (ignoring the provisions of the Delaware treaty ratified the same year).
Despite the rulings, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) continued direct relations with the Delaware. In Business Committee of the Delaware Tribe v. Weeks et al. of 1977, the Court reversed the 1894 and 1904 decisions based on those relations to rule for Delaware "independence" from the Cherokee. But in 1979, the BIA issued a letter to the Delaware, at the political behest of the Cherokee, informing them that their recognition was terminated. In 1996, the Delaware successfully appealed to the BIA and were reinstated. In 1998, the Cherokee appealed. In Cherokee v. Delaware, et al. of 2004, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit ruled that the BIA had overstepped its authority in reinstating the Delaware. It asserted that the BIA ignored Court precedence regarding Delaware status. It found that the Delaware had not been "independent" since 1867, having relinquished autonomy to the Cherokee by agreement. The decision had the consequence of terminating the Delaware for the second time. In 2006, the Delaware appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case. The BIA instructed the Delaware that they would have to reach an agreement with the Cherokee on the terms of their jurisdiction and territorial rights in Oklahoma in order for them to be reinstated. The controversial agreement that resulted was approved by both tribes and ratified by the Department of the Interior in May 2009. In August 2009, the Delaware appeared on the list of federally recognized tribes issued by the BIA.
In the thick cloud of conflicts with the Cherokee, the Delaware Tribal Council hired David McCutchen, a student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the California Institute of Arts, to assist them with research in the preparation of the kind of documentation that the tribe anticipated it would need to satisfy federal criteria for acknowledgement (these criteria were established in 1978, as analyzed below). In 1980, the Council passed a resolution that endorsed McCutchen's findings related to the Wallam Olum. The Wallam Olum is an epic tale purportedly translated into English in 1836. It claimed to record in pictographs and songs Lenape creation, a great flood, a long migration, settlement in the northeastern United States, and existence up to the moment before contact with colonists in the early 1600s. McCutchen's findings were published in 1993 as The Red Record: The Wallam Olum: The Oldest Native North American History. Almost immediately, David M. Oestreicher, then a graduate student in anthropology at Rutgers University, began publishing the results of his dissertation on the fraudulence of the Wallam Olum. Following the filing of his dissertation in 1995, the Delaware Council withdrew its endorsement of McCutchen's book and asserted that the Wallam Olum was not an authentic Lenape story. The withdrawal solicited criticisms of the Delaware for having been duped into endorsing a history that was not of its own making.
PART I: IMPERIAL LOGICS
In order to argue that modernity's human articulates a particular kind of relationship between imperialism, scientific empiricism, and federal recognition that undermines Native self-determination—such as experienced by the Delaware Tribe—I need to put into sharp relief the history of the Lenape Wallam Olum and the history of modernity's human. This association reveals the discursive and ideological logics of modernity's human as an empirical truth about what constitutes human society and social development that undergirds the interests of the empire. The logics are so powerful that they transform fraud into evidence and represents genocide as an inevitability of natural evolution.
Translators and Translations
The "original translation" of the Wallam Olum from Lenape into English was self-published by Constantine Samuel Rafinesque in 1836. It was reworked by Ephraim George Squier in 1849 and Daniel Garrison Brinton in 1885. All three were from the New England region and worked through regional historical societies and universities to present and publish their findings. While subscribing to very different perspectives about human origins and migration histories, they maintain together a teleological narrative of an American society achieved through progress. This narrative, as Jean M. O'Brien argues so powerfully in Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England, was necessary to the imperial logics of the genocide and dispossession of Native peoples. Centrally, it maintained that Native extinction had occurred naturally as a result of Native inferiority and not as a consequence of imperialist practices.
Rafinesque's self-published book, The American Nations; Or, Outlines of Their General History, Ancient and Modern, offers a hemispheric comparison of the linguistic and cultural similarities of Native groups. In it he assumes the veracity of a Biblical monogenetic history—arguing that Natives migrated to the Americas following a great flood that had raised land masses between China and Alaska making such a migration possible—to explain the relationships among and between the descendants of Moses in the Americas. To support this argument, he includes what he claims is a translation of the Lenape Wallam Olum—an epic tale of Lenape origins in eastern China, a great migration across the Bering Strait into North America, and a long journey across the continent into the northeastern territories of what was to become the United States. In accordance with Mosaic genealogies, it included a chronicle of Lenape male chiefs and concluded dramatically at the moment just before contact with the colonists. Much like Mel Gibson's Apocalypto (2006), this denouement fits well within the teleological narratives of both Christian theology and social evolution to figure an ultimately doomed people standing at the precipice of their own tragic extinction, foreshadowed by the ominous arrival of a civilized society.
Some scholars argue that Rafinesque's assertions were unpopular in 1836. This is owing, they maintain, to his claim that Natives had a civilization akin to that of Europeans and one whose demise could be directly linked to European colonization. But despite these alleged controversies, which only further the Wallam Olum's veracity, the translation was repeatedly questioned and questionable.
Rafinesque claimed that his translation was based on a set of birch-bark tablets with pictographic engravings painted in red and a set of transcriptions of accompanied songs. He said that he had acquired the tablets from a botanist named "Dr. Ward of Indiana" and the transcription of the songs from "John Burns" sometime between 1820 and 1822. Despite the fact that neither individual could ever be corroborated to have existed, Rafinesque insisted that Ward had been working in Indiana when he encountered a small Lenape village overrun by an epidemic illness. The village included an elderly man named Olumpees, a record keeper who was deathly ill (also uncorroborated). Ward was able to help Olumpees, and in payment was given the tablets, the only possession the man had to offer. Rafinesque said that Ward turned the tablets over to him because he knew they were valuable and could not understand them. At the same time Rafinesque received the transcriptions of the songs from Burns. Rafinesque said it took him until 1833 to complete his study. His proficiency in Lenape was based entirely on dictionaries produced by missionaries. Sometime between 1833 and his death in 1840, Rafinesque claimed that the original tablets and transcriptions were lost so that all that survived were his translations.
Squier reworked Rafinesque's Wallam Olum for a presentation before the New York Historical Society and an article for the American Review in 1849. Squier's version reflected his own polygenetic view about human origins and migrations within the Americas. As debates within the society ensued over its implications, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft—a geologist and ethnologist respected for his work as a federal agent, legislator, and superintendent of Indian affairs in the Northern Department in Michigan and married to Jane Johnston, an Ojibwa—responded. In personal correspondence to Squier, Schoolcraft asserted that the Wallam Olum was not an authentic Lenape story.
Brinton, a professor of ethnology and archeology at the Academy of Natural Science in Philadelphia and of linguistics and archeology at the University of Pennsylvania, reworked Rafinesque's Wallam Olum to argue for the distinctiveness of the language and cultures of Natives. At the same time, he advanced especially racist ideas about what that distinctiveness meant. Brinton believed that "all races were 'not equally endowed'" and that those lesser races were "disqualified" from the "atmosphere of modern enlightenment." He asserted that the "lesser races" had "an inborn tendency, constitutionally recreant to the codes of civilization" and that they were "therefore technically criminal." He concluded that these "lesser races" did not share in the "a priori notions of the rights of man." But because they embodied an earlier stage of social evolution that was on the verge of extinction, they were worthy of study.
Brinton's self-published The Lenape and Their Legends, with the Complete Text and Symbols of the Walam Olum, A New Translation, and an Inquiry into the Authenticity begins, "For a long time this record the Walam Olum ... was supposed to have been lost. Having obtained the original text about a year ago, I printed a few copies and sent them to several educated native Delawares with a request for aid in its translation and opinion on its authenticity." Those to whom he sent Rafinesque's text included "Reverend Albert Anthony, Reverend John Kilbuck, Mr. Horatio Hale, Reverend E. de Schweinitz, Dr. J. Hammond Trumbull, Prof. A. M. Elliott, and General John Mason Brown." He claims that all of these men confirmed the manuscript was "an authentic memorial, the original text" of the Lenape Wallam Olum. "It is a genuine native production, which was repeated orally to someone indifferently conversant with the Delaware language, who wrote it down to the best of his ability. In its present form it can, as a whole, lay no claim either to antiquity, or to purity of linguistic form. Yet, as an authentic modern version, slightly colored by European teachings, of the ancient tribal traditions, it is well worth preservation" and continued study. Brinton provides an overview of Lenape history and then a new translation of the Wallam Olum that conforms to his own racist understandings of social evolution.
The purported translations of the Wallam Olum by Rafinesque, Squier, and Brinton served debates over the history of Native origins, migrations, social development, and culture well into the 1990s. These debates reached a kind of crescendo with McCutchen's illustrated publication in 1993. But in 1995, Oestreicher offered extant evidence of its fabrication. "The so-called Delaware Indian pictographs are not Delaware at all but are in fact hybrid combinations of Egyptian, Chinese, Ojibwa, and even several Mayan symbols newly published at the time. As for the accompanying 'Delaware' text, it was fabricated by Rafinesque from the very sources he claimed to have used as translation aids.... As for his claim to have completed the translation by 1833, Rafinesque was simply attempting to predate some of the published sources from which the forgery was crafted." The recurrent reproduction of the Wallam Olum contributes to the way it served racist ideologies and practices in not only justifying but necessitating U.S. imperialism. It offered a history of "the Americas" and the emergence of the United States as an imperial power that negated U.S. genocide and dispossession for an affirmation of Christian theological and social evolutionary perspectives anticipating Native extinction. This modernist tale was the productive force through which the United States rearticulated its genocide and dispossession of Native peoples as tragic but expected, examples of what the United States had left behind in the dust of its own progressive advancement to a fully evolved democratic state. As observed by Latour, this modern state was divorced in all possible ways from the embodied nature of the Indian.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Formations of United States Colonialism by Alyosha Goldstein. Copyright © 2014 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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