Cartographic Language in The Life
Competing Landscapes:
The treaty reduces and commodifies the land into an economic valuation, but the Life insists on demonstrating that this land is not “empty space” to be commodified and parceled. Rather, it “supplied” the Sauk with “good water,” “furnished us with an abundance of excellent fish…and never failed to produce good crops of corn, beans, pumpkins, and squashes.”[1] The emphasis in the text is less on the geographic extent (or, magnitude) of the land and more on the Sauk’s relationship with it. Nor are the boundaries, when mentioned, the same rigid lines of division as depicted in the treaty: instead, the text portrays Sauk land as “join[ing] those of the Foxes.” [2]
Moreover, the Life portrays the relationship between the Sauk and the land as one meaningfully rooted in history and memory. “Here our village stood for more than a hundred years,” the text proclaims. And this place is singular, irreplaceable, the Life continues: “there is no place like that where the bones of our forefathers lie, to go to when in grief.” The text portrays the loss of these homelands as inconceivable: “If another prophet had come to our village in those days, and told us what has since taken place [with the treaty of 1804 and the later intrusion of settlers], none of our people would have believed him! What! to be driven from our village and hunting grounds, and not even permitted to visit the graves of our forefathers, our relations, and friends?”[3]
Here too, in addition to portraying Sauk lands as “memory lands,” the text actively rebukes the Treaty and demonstrates the persistence of Indigenous networks. “Relations,” might refer to other Sauk, but the same language was used by Keokuk, for instance, to describe Fox Natives. Paralleling the Life, Keokuk in 1830 rebuked further treaty negotiation with the US unless it was on Sauk terms, lamenting that “their relations, the Fox Indians…had been invited to go up to [Prairie du Chien], and the white people killed them” therefore “it was impossible to walk over their dead relations to go.” Censuring US authority, Keokuk continued “on this Island [Saukenuk] was the Council fire of the Sauk and Fox Indians, and here they would council and nowhere else.”[4]
Insistent Indigenous Counterpoints:
Mark Rifkin argues that by “emphasizing the ‘disjuncture’ between U.S. legal geography and native mappings, including the interested ‘misrepresentation’ of the latter in the former, the Life works to document the ongoing and pointed erasure—the subalternization—of native self-representation in the language and texts of U.S. policy.”[5]
This dynamic can be seen further in the text’s invocation of overwritten Indigenous modes of geopolitical relations, despite U.S. treaties’ demands that (1) “the said tribes do hereby solemnly promise and agree that they will put an end to the bloody war which has heretofore raged,” and (2) that further disputes between Indigenous peoples be arbitrated by “the superintendent of Indian affairs or one of his deputies” so that the accused “may be punished agreeably to the laws of that state or territory where the offence may have been committed.” The Life, in contrast, describes how Black Hawk maneuvered tensions with the Potawatomi, following the ambush and death of Wàsh-e-own, for example, by giving “two horses and my rifle to his relations, not to break the peace—which they had agreed to.”[6] While this episode suggests the persistence of Indigenous networks and diplomatic practices as a counterpoint to the treaty, the text later directly notes the rightfulness of these frameworks. Describing a contest between the Foxes and the “Menomenees and Sioux,” in which the Foxes sought to “avenge the murder of their chiefs and relations,’ the Life depicts US intervention as “unjust.” Rather than a raging, seemingly lawless and “bloody war,” however, the Life rejoins that “this retaliation…with us is considered lawful and right.”[7]
Elsewhere, the text further details that these acts of retaliation are not arbitrary; in fact, “each party knows that the other has a right to retaliate.” And rather than presenting this arrangement as a cycle of vengeful chaos, the text suggests that this shared understanding actually limits violence and maintains Indigenous geopolitical relations, “induc[ing] those who have killed last, to give way…as neither wishes to strike.” Such interactions, the Life claims, have an established basis: “all our wars are predicated by the relatives of those killed; or by aggressions upon our hunting grounds.”[8] Yet, when the Sauks, as Rifkin notes, “try to incorporate Americans into such existing geographies/processes of war and alliance, using available mechanisms of pacification to create a relationship organized around ritualized kinds of ongoing exchange and relation,” the US instead seeks to impose “the singularity and finality” of the unrepresentative treaty in a “mode of engagement…utterly alien to established routines for interacting and negotiating” with both other Indigenous peoples and with foreigners.”[9]
This “singularity and finality” is encapsulated in the treaty itself, but also in its explanation to Black Hawk, marking the attempt of the settler-state to empty the landscape of Indigenous people and Indigenous meaning. American General Edmund Gaines, for instance, writes of informing Black Hawk that although “we know of nothing uncommonly valuable in the land”—at once, neutering Sauk ownership with the general case “the land” (and attempting to mark its neutral transformation from Sauk land to “the land”) and ridding both the landscape and Indigenous understandings of the land its significance—“it is ours—purchased & paid for, & a part of it is in cultivation.”[10] So too, does Gaines’s emphasis on settler “cultivation” work to erase the text’s detailed description of multifaceted Sauk practices of land cultivation, a textual act of occlusion that mirrors the violence in the real world: “One of my old friends thought he was safe. His corn-field was on a small island of Rock river. He planted his corn; it came up well—but the white man saw it!—he wanted the island, and took his team over, ploughed up the corn, and replanted it for himself! The old man shed tears; not for himself, but the distress his family would be in if they raised no corn.”[11]
Gaines then ends his speech by discursively simulating the act of transformation to its completion. What begins as an ambivalent assessment of “the land” culminates in “I did not come here to talk. And I have said enough. The world is wide enough for all of us: this is our part of it, & that (to the west) is yours.”[12]
Conclusion:
Ultimately, however, the Life, serves as a documentary counterpoint to Gaines’s rhetoric and official US policy, insisting on not treating land as a salable commodity, and asking:
“What right had these people to our village, and our fields, which the Great Spirit had given us to live upon? My reason teaches me that land cannot be sold. The Great Spirit gave it to his children to live upon, and cultivate as far as is necessary for their subsistence; and so long as they occupy and cultivate it, they have the right to the soil—but if they voluntarily leave it, then any other people have a right to settle upon it. Nothing can be sold, but such things as can be carried away.”[13]
Tracking the gap between the text’s portrayals of Sauk placemaking and geopolitics and that of the settler-state, allows readers to profitably see Sauk persistence and critique despite settler colonial attempts to erase Native peoples from the historical record.
[1] Black Hawk, The Life (2008), 45-6.
[2] Black Hawk, The Life (2008), 45.
[3] Black Hawk, The Life (2008), 46.
[4] June 9, 1830, “Letters Received,” Sac and Fox Agency, 1824-1833, m. 237, reel 728.
[5] Rifkin, Manifesting America, 81.
[6] Black Hawk, The Life (2008), 36.
[7] Black Hawk, The Life (2008), 68.
[8] Black Hawk, The Life (2008), 49.
[9] Rifkin, Manifesting America, 80-81 (incorporate), 84. Here, Rifkin details the long history of how “[N]ative practices of subsistence and exchange [in the Great Lakes region] had been influenced by and incorporated Euro-presence over the previous century-and-a-half,” but how these interactions “had not determined not utterly transformed [I]ndigenous socio-spatial formations.”
[10] “Memorandum of Talks between Edmund P. Gaines and the Sauk,” June 4, 5, 7, 1831, in Ellen M. Whitney, comp. and ed., The Black Hawk War, 1831-1832, vol. 2: Letters and Papers, part 1, (Springfield, Ill., 1973), 27-33, 28.
[11] Black Hawk, The Life (2008), 56.
[12] Memorandum of Talks between Edmund P. Gaines and the Sauk,” June 4, 5, 7, 1831, in Ellen M. Whitney, comp. and ed., The Black Hawk War, 1831-1832, vol. 2: Letters and Papers, part 1, (Springfield, Ill., 1973), 28.
[13] Black Hawk, The Life (2008), 56.