Postcolonial Theory and the Discourse of Treaties

Bibliographic Data

ID2955812
AuthorsChadwick Allen (corresponding author)
Year2000
Volume52
Issue1
Pages59-89
Publication date2000-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAmerican Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0003-0678 • E-ISSN: 1080-6490
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/aq.2000.0001
OpenAlexW2020189696
LanguageEN
Citations received5
References cited22

Often when discussing treaty rights with whites, Indians find themselves being told that "We gave you the land . . . ." --Vine Deloria, Jr., Custer Died For Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (1969) Today, treaties are a presence, a recurrence of . . . intrinsic native sovereignty. --Gerald Vizenor, Fugitive Poses (1998) During their nineteen-month occupation of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay in 1969-1971, American Indian activists calling themselves Indians of All Tribes published a document in their protest newsletter titled "'We Hold the Rock': Alcatraz Proclamation to the Great White Father and his People." 1 The Indian activists announce that they "reclaim" Alcatraz Island "by right of discovery," then present "the Caucasian inhabitants of this land" a parodic "treaty" in order "to be fair and honorable in our dealings with all white men." In mock treaty provisions, the activists offer to purchase Alcatraz Island for twenty-four dollars "in glass beads and red cloth" and vow to establish a "Bureau of Caucasian Affairs." The treaty promises that this agency will set aside a portion of land for the benefit of Caucasians, "to be held in trust . . . in perpetuity--for as long as the sun shall rise and the rivers go down to the sea." In further provisions, the activists offer their Caucasian treaty partners "our religion, our education, our life-ways in [End Page 59] order to help them achieve our level of civilization and thus raise them and all their white brothers up from their savage and unhappy state." In its specific language use, the Alcatraz Proclamation conflates the Dutch purchase of Manhattan Island in 1626 with the creation of the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1832 and with the preambles and specific articles of nearly 400 treaties negotiated between the United States and various American Indian nations between 1788 and 1868. 2 The Proclamation thus aligns the activist occupation of Alcatraz Island with a larger project of American Indian historical reclamation and re-imagination, demonstrating an American Indian sensibility that these past events and the written and oral traditions that record them possess ongoing, "living" relevance in the present. Further, the rhetorical effectiveness of their effort is accomplished, in part, by anchoring the activists' contemporary demands and "radical" interpretations of American history to corroborating evidence already inscribed in discourses the federal government and most non-Indian U.S. citizens recognize as dominant, in particular, to evidence inscribed in the discourse of treaties. The evocation of the literally hundreds of texts in which the federal government recognizes and affirms indigenous sovereignty enables Indians of All Tribes to enlarge the political scope of their action, to convert the "tiny island" of Alcatraz into "a symbol of the great lands once ruled by free and noble Indians." These and related strategies for reclaiming American Indian histories and arguing their contemporary relevance are not unique to Indian activism but are also found in American Indian literature. Indeed, in this essay I argue that the appropriation and redeployment of treaty discourse helps define the particular type of (post)colonial hybridity at work in a number of American Indian novels, poems, and song lyrics. 3 Before performing those specific analyses, however, I should note that I arrived at my arguments about the significance of U.S.-Indian treaty discourse somewhat indirectly, while conducting research in Aotearoa/New Zealand on Maori literature and activism. Contemporary Maori mobilizations of the discourse of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi suggested a broader, comparative context for works by American Indians, an international framework that emphasizes both the rhetorical complexity of indigenous minority writing in settler nations and, importantly, the distinct dynamics of its particular form of (post)coloniality. Such comparisons led me to question, for example, the usefulness of theories of hybridity and mimicry that totalize the experiences and [End Page 60] discursive strategies of various colonized and formerly colonized peoples. Much of so-called "orthodox" postcolonial theory emphasizes what it defines as an ambivalence inherent in colonial discourses and argues that, by revealing or exploiting

Aside · Proclamation · White (mutation · Global Peace and Security Dynamics