American Georgics by Sweet Timothy;

Author:Sweet, Timothy;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Chapter 6

Cherokee “Improvements” and the Removal Debate

In an era that saw forced or coerced removals of many indigenous Americans from their homelands, the Cherokees’ was the only case to gain a large measure of white support. Ralph Waldo Emerson, for example, although generally unconcerned over the fate of indigenous peoples, wrote a letter of protest to President Martin Van Buren asking, “Will the American government steal? Will it lie? Will it kill?”1 A key to the Cherokees’ enlistment of white support was their ability to tap into an American discourse that identified the rural as a site, source, and refuge of civic virtue. This discourse of rural virtue, as we have seen in the previous chapter, was established in a rhetorical battle against backwoods farming waged during the early years of the republic. The marks of rural virtue were sedentary farming, which improved the land, and embeddedness in market relations, which was enabled by that improvement. In the terms of this discourse, Indians were, on the one hand, characterized as savages whose land was not cultivated, not “improved,” and thus could not ground American political virtue. On the other hand, the virtue of the rural was potentially extended to the Indians in arguments that they ought to be removed westward, where they and the land could simultaneously be cultivated.

In countering this logic to argue against removal from their homeland, Cherokees drew on images which were familiar to whites through the discourse of rural virtue but which had roots in Cherokee agricultural traditions as well. Their deployment of such georgic imagery in a counternarrative of improvement mounted significant critiques of both the dominant white image of the Indians’ “savagism” and the idealization of the “middle landscape” as white property.2 The counternarrative accurately represented certain aspects of the Cherokees’ relation to their land in the pre-Removal era, such as their impressive agricultural productivity. However, it elided other aspects, such as the persistence of communal labor practices and the conception of land as a national heritage, rather than as individual, alienable property; for these continuations of traditional culture could have been seen as evidence of savagism.

Colonization had brought about transformations in the Cherokees’ two primary economic-environmental activities in the precolonization era: farming and hunting. Farming had been a significant means of subsistence prior to colonization. During the eighteenth century, farming declined as men took exclusively to hunting. Participating in a colonial market for furs and skins, they came to embody the hunter-savage role preconceived by Europeans. By the century’s end, however, hunting was less economically viable than farming. In the nineteenth century, the resurgence of farming among Cherokee men, as well as its continuation by women, provided a significant new means of cross-cultural self-definition. Whereas in the eighteenth century the Cherokees had explained themselves to whites using the image of the hunter, to argue against the land cessions that would disable the hunting activities that had become so economically useful to whites, in the nineteenth century, spokesmen such as Elias Boudinot, John Ridge,

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