Native sons

The Shawnees and the War

for America

Colin G. Calloway

Viking/Penguin Library of American Indian History: 256 pp., $19.95

--

The Cherokee Nation and

the Trail of Tears

Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green

Viking/Penguin Library of American Indian History: 208 pp., $19.95

THE experience of the American Indian is an itch in the national conscience difficult to scratch. We can say we abolished slavery, ignoring, of course, its social and psychological legacy for African Americans. We can say immigrants chose to immigrate, ignoring economic injustices they may suffer here or the political reasons that may have motivated them to leave their native countries. But how do we account for the irrefutable genocide and robbery of American Indians in American history? With our innate sense of entitlement and private property, how can we come to terms with the notion that the land on which we live might not rightfully be ours?

If we have dealt with the American Indian at all, it usually has been with two alternating stereotypes: the fallen nature god, whom we pity and whose artifacts we admire in museums when he is defeated; and the wagon-burner, who threatens territory and control when he is not defeated. Mostly, we choose to ignore the American Indian, and we adhere to the adage “The past is the past.”

The new Penguin Library of American Indian History has published “The Shawnees and the War for America” by Colin G. Calloway and “The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears” by Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green, the first two books in a proposed series that Calloway (also the series’ general editor) claims “will present readers with stories that have long remained untold, distorted, or misunderstood” and “will do much to change how we think about American history.” The authors in the series must endeavor then to interrogate not only so-called conventional narratives but also a mind-set intrinsic to American identity.

Calloway, in his introduction, indicates that he is not Shawnee and wisely, rather than trading in debates over privileged points of view regarding representation, identifies many of the sources -- records kept by the British, French, Spaniards and Americans, along with recorded Indian orations -- that have enabled him to “relate a crucial piece of American history [that] places the Shawnees center stage.” Equally important, he undermines the notion that there is one Shawnee point of view: The Shawnees have been, and remain, a complicated, diverse people who, before European contact, integrated aspects of other indigenous cultures, a flexibility that helped them to adapt and resist European and American cultures.

The Shawnees probably originated in the Ohio Valley, though it is unclear since conflicts with other tribes pushed west by the colonists displaced them well before significant European settlement. Calloway recounts the 60 years when the Shawnees “stood in the front lines, waging a war of territorial resistance that ranged across the present-day states of Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana and Missouri.” Moving from place to place, often spread apart as a nation, sometimes factionalized, they nonetheless earned a reputation as fierce fighters, several times organizing confederacies with other tribes to resist invasion and ultimately claiming the biggest American Indian victory ever, in 1791, at the Battle of St. Clair (also known as the Battle of the Wabash) in which more than 600 American soldiers were killed, making Custer’s defeat at Little Bighorn 85 years later look rather insignificant by comparison.

War wasn’t the only Shawnee response to foreign invasion. Tecumseh, arguably the most famous Shawnee warrior, and his brother Tenskwatawa, a visionary with a message of revitalization from the Spirit World, together formed one of the most powerful pan-Indian coalitions of warriors ever. Yet they were viewed as recalcitrant troublemakers by older generations of chiefs, most notably Black Hoof, who signed the Treaty of Greenville in 1795, establishing for compliant Shawnees an annuity system and a tract of land in the Ohio Valley where they could take up the plow. One would hardly call these older chiefs sellouts, however. Black Hoof and his followers, while becoming mostly farmers (ostensibly “civilized”), established an island of Indian resistance in which a traditional Shawnee moral economy, based on sharing and taking care of relatives rather than on individual ambition and accumulation of wealth, was able to persist. When Black Hoof and his followers were asked, and ultimately forced, to leave, Black Hoof refused, having had enough of broken promises and no doubt coming around to Tecumseh’s point of view.

The remarkable texturing of the historic period and the description of responses by early Americans and their leaders (such as presidents Jefferson and Jackson) set Calloway’s book apart from any that might recount the same story with mere facts and figures. The history engages us fully -- the prerequisite for any change of heart over how we think of American Indians.

Most readers have heard of the Cherokee Nation and know something about the Trail of Tears -- both the tribe and the shameful event the tribe endured manage to keep afloat in our history books. In their account, Perdue and Green broaden our understanding of both. Setting the stage for the Trail of Tears with a rich sense of Cherokee culture and history, as Calloway does with the Shawnee wars, the authors lift the story beyond a mere recitation of facts and recount a human story, not only tragic but also unbelievably heroic.

The Cherokees’ homeland once extended throughout Kentucky, upcountry South Carolina, western North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, northern Georgia and northeastern Alabama. They were hunters and farmers, and, like the Shawnees, possessed an intimate knowledge of the land, where features of the landscape served as mnemonic pegs reminding them of moral stories, and where at the time of European contact they claimed “a pharmacopeia of over eight hundred herbs.”

Even though the Cherokees were expert farmers, the British and later the Americans continued to view them as hunters and gatherers, a view that conveniently deemed them “less civilized.” Jefferson, desperately in need of land for his burgeoning republic, linked “civilizing the Indians” with land acquisition: Teach the Cherokees to read and write, teach them to become Christians and, most important, teach them to give up hunting and to rely solely on farming and they will appreciate the value of land and sell where they once hunted -- the bulk of Cherokee territory. The Cherokees adapted marvelously well, cultivating crops such as cotton and wheat, raising domestic animals, even, in some cases, owning and selling African American slaves. But “civilized and enlightened,” the Cherokees were better equipped to defend both their national identity and homeland, something Jefferson hadn’t anticipated.

Jackson made Indian removal his first legislative recommendation after his election in 1828: He signed into law what became the Indian Removal Act on May 28, 1830, giving him authority to set aside a region west of the states and territories for eastern tribes. The Cherokees refused the offer to move, and their skillful leader, Chief Ross, mounted an extensive public relations campaign. He sent delegations to Washington, D.C., and used the tribal newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, to articulate the tribe’s position. Georgia retaliated with its own campaign, blatantly racist and mindless of Cherokee rights: This included the position that tribal leaders were mixed-blood, mostly white, self-serving aristocrats who browbeat full-blood, real Indians, and the state’s approval of a lottery, in which Indian properties were up for grabs. Then, an unofficial delegation of 79 Cherokee individuals signed the 1835 Treaty of New Echota stipulating that the Cherokees would give up their lands and move to designated territory in the west.

Despite a petition containing the names of thousands of angry Cherokees, and with one vote more than the necessary two-thirds majority, the Senate approved the document and Jackson proclaimed it ratified on May 23, 1836, setting in motion the Trail of Tears, the mandated 800-mile march to what is now Oklahoma, which cost more than 4,000 Cherokee lives or a fourth of their population.

Early on in their book, Perdue and Green contrast the Christian creation story with the Cherokee creation story, pointing out that the former Adam and Eve are cast out of the Garden, becoming wanderers, whereas in the latter the Cherokees learned how to live in their Garden. All of us now find ourselves making homes outside the Garden.

These two wondrous histories not only interrogate what we may have understood before and enable us to change how we think about American Indians -- they illuminate our shared histories, Indian and non-Indian, so that we can’t forget. *