In the early years of the republic, the United States government
negotiated with Indian nations because it could not afford protracted
wars politically, militarily, or economically. Maureen Konkle argues
that by depending on treaties, which rest on the equal standing of all
signatories, Europeans in North America institutionalized a paradox: the
very documents through which they sought to dispossess Native peoples in
fact conceded Native autonomy.
As the United States used coerced treaties to remove Native peoples from
their lands, a group of Cherokee, Pequot, Ojibwe, Tuscarora, and Seneca
writers spoke out. With history, polemic, and personal narrative these
writers countered widespread misrepresentations about Native peoples'
supposedly primitive nature, their inherent inability to form
governments, and their impending disappearance. Furthermore, they
contended that arguments about racial difference merely justified
oppression and dispossession; deriding these arguments as willful
attempts to evade the true meanings and implications of the treaties,
the writers insisted on recognition of Native peoples' political
autonomy and human equality. Konkle demonstrates that these struggles
over the meaning of U.S.-Native treaties in the early nineteenth century
led to the emergence of the first substantial body of Native writing in
English and, as she shows, the effects of the struggle over the
political status of Native peoples remain embedded in contemporary
scholarship.
