Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Local Origins of National Indian Policy: Cherokee and Tennessean Ideas about Sovereignty and Nationhood, 1790-1811

2003; University of Pennsylvania Press; Volume: 23; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/3124984

1553-0620

Cynthia Cumfer,

American Environmental and Regional History

A series of remarkable phenomena marked the bitter last years of the two-decade intermittent conflict between the Cherokees and the pioneers in the Tennessee region. Chronicled by the Knoxville Gazette, numerous frontiersmen recounted attacks against them by Indians in which bullets passed through their clothes without touching their flesh. The first published account in 1792 originated in eastern Tennessee when a man hunting horses related that a party of Indians fired on him. Four balls passed through his clothes and shattered his powder horn without injuring him. Over the next several years, settlers described numerous similar occurrences throughout the territory. This bizarre chain of events terminated in 1796 when Oconostotee, a Cherokee chief, responded to the Gazette that the settlers attacked the Cherokees. The white men removed and fired into their own clothing to establish self-defense in order to escape prosecution by the national government, which was pressuring the frontier people to keep the peace under the federal treaties.1Oconostotee's letter and the Gazette's publication of his rebuttal revealed significant tensions in the tripartite relationship between the Cherokees, Tennesseans, and the federal government-frictions generated by different ideas about Indian policy, Cherokee sovereignty, and nationhood. This article explores the ideas and assumptions underlying the construction by the Cherokees and the settlers of their relationship with the United States from the organization of the Southwest Territory in 1790 and the recognition of statehood in 1796 until the advent of the War of 1812. My focus is on local perceptions and the robust ways in which these ideas informed and were transformed by events. I study federal thought only inasmuch as it impacted or was influenced by Cherokee or settler formulations.Historians narrate a story about Indian policy from the formation of the American nation through removal in the 1830s in which federal officials are the lead and (especially in the earlier period) almost the only actors. In these accounts, the United States originated and implemented a policy that aimed to civilize Indians. The national government entered into treaties with Indian tribes as separate political entities but believed that they would soon be absorbed into the superior white society. When this failed to occur, pressure grew to appropriate Indian lands. In response to state aggression on Indian jurisdiction in the 1830s, Chief Justice John Marshall, a Federalist, judicially recognized partial Indian sovereignty. Granting the states the right to determine policy about Indians in their jurisdiction, Democratic President Andrew Jackson refused to enforce Marshall's rulings and permitted removal of the eastern Indians to the region west of the Mississippi.2The traditional narrative neglects the role played by transmontane local parties-both aboriginal peoples and settlers-in promulgating ideas about sovereignty and nationhood that informed federal policy. Writing primarily from the perspective of the northwestern tribes, Native-American students generally conclude that the decline of European influence in the United States in the 1790s terminated the ability of the aboriginal peoples to play off one European power against another and foreshadowed their decline. This finding inadvertently discourages examination of the intellectual formulations by Indians of the connection between the first peoples and the national government.3 Meanwhile, most students of the trans-Appalachian West have overlooked the contentious development of nationalism among the settlers in this region. Writers have studied the internal political strife associated with moving into statehood, but few have examined the difficulties of the larger adjustment between the national and local governments. The federal government's handling of Indian affairs was the cause of much of this friction.4 Scholars have further overlooked the connection between these local ideas about nationalism and theories about Indian sovereignty. …