Savagery Repositioned: Historicizing the Cherokee Nation

Abstract: Americanist scholarship often portrays historicization during Cherokee removal in terms of a single Indian-Anglo binary, with images of anachronistic savagery denoting the broadly cultural rejection of Native peoplehood from political modernity. What follows draws on contemporary challenges to such binary formations by Native scholars, however, to offer an alternative to reading removal discourse as the expression of a homogenous ideology predicated on exclusion. By separating the narrativity of Indianness from the representation of Native peoples, the essay situates the “Indian” as the figure through which historicism becomes juridically operative with regard to different crises of settler sovereignty. Accordingly, readings of John Marshall’s foundational ruling in Johnson v. McIntosh (1823), the state of Georgia’s attack on Cherokee sovereignty in State v. Tassels (1830), and T. Hartley Crawford’s “Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs” (1838) show that the narrativity of Indianness resolves crises for uneven, even competing institutional actors. However, the essay begins with Elias Boudinot’s canonical pamphlet, “An Address to the Whites” (1827). If this emergent narrativity conditioned the seizure of Native space on the basis of settler political modernity, then “An Address” can be grasped as appropriating the discourse of “savagery” to historicize Cherokee peoplehood as constituting an independent nation.