Early Indigenous Literatures

Petition to the Cherokee National Council, Nancy Ward and Cherokee Women

            In her book The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast, Lisa Brooks makes the claim that “in colonial America, Native petitions can be viewed as a genre unto themselves” (224). She elaborates that, during this era, petitions circulated among several entities: between different Indigenous tribes, among various members of a tribe, and between Indigenous tribes and colonial authorities such as the U.S. government. Brooks cautions us to read with care the tone in which a petition is written (224). She states that, rather than plainly divulging genuine feelings between the petitioner and the petitioned, a petition’s tone is more determined by the power dynamic as well as the past and present relationship they share (225). As we will see in our discussion of Nancy Ward’s petition, these dynamics are co-constitutive. The discourse on settler colonialism within this intra-tribal communication mimics the marginalized relationship the Cherokee people come to occupy with relationship to settler colonialism in the nineteenth century. Ward is unable to meaningfully challenge settler colonial ideologies even to members of her tribe, right until she goes to an unlikely site at the end of her petition: that of marriage between settler colonial men and Indigenous women.
            To parse out the 1818 petition, let us first lay out some details about the document’s primary writer. Following her pivotal role at the Cherokee’s Battle at Taliwa against the Creeks, Nancy Ward “was chosen to fill the vacant position of Agi-ga-u-e or ‘Beloved Woman’” of the tribe (McClary, 354). The Cherokees believed that the Great Spirit often used the voice of the Agi-ga-u-e to speak to them, and consequently her words were “always heard, if not always heeded” (McClary, 354). Therefore, when Ward spoke in the Council, of which she constituted a member, she did so in an “entitled” manner aligned with the “considerable political power and authority” she had (Kilcup,26). Ward often represented women’s voices in the Council, and often formed an alliance with other women to petition the governing body of the Cherokee people.
            Nancy Ward and her fellow Cherokee Women wrote one such petition to the Cherokee National Council on June 30, 1818. The petition, which begins by addressing those written to as “Beloved Children,” acknowledges Ward’s exalted position within the tribe. The petition features five paragraphs. The first paragraph begins by drawing on Cherokee spirituality to strongly recommend that no more Cherokee land must be let go of by corroborating this recommendation with a mention that it was “the Great Spirit–” who Ward has a special relationship with– that gave the tribe their land. However, the limits of Ward and the Great Spirit’s authority is greatly circumscribed in the reality of nineteenth century settler colonialism. We see this in the next three paragraphs, where Ward bounds her suggestion against selling land within the parameters of imperial ideology. Ward states that further removal of Cherokees from their land would cause the Cherokee people who have “become too much enlightened to throw aside the privileges of a civilized life” to “be brought to a savage station again” (30); that the happenstance would throw the Cherokees off the teleology of progress that they have achieved through conversion to Christianity, and “are in hopes” of getting deeper into through endeavours such as “instruction in other branches of sciences and arts” (30).
While a single paragraph is devoted to reasoning not to let go of the land based on Indigenous belief systems, several are devoted to justifications that align with the ideologies of civilization proffered by the colonizing class. Heeding to Brooks’ warning regarding tone, we cannot take this imbalanced ratio to be an indication that Ward’s own beliefs have become heavily inflected with colonial ideology. However, we can certainly view this upended ratio to gauge that colonial ideology had seeped deeply into Cherokee thinking such that it has become the vocabulary through which decisions are reasoned even within the tribe.
            In such a situation, where the potential critique of empire through Indigenous spirituality seems to have been severely compromised in the parlance about land rights, Ward’s final paragraph unexpectedly presents an alternate site which allows for such a critique: marriage. Let us consider this potent paragraph by reproducing it in full:

There are some white men among us who have been raised in this country from their youth, are connected with us by marriage, & have considerable families, who are very active in encouraging the emigration of our nation. These ought to be our truest friends but prove our worst enemies. They seem to be only concerned how to increase their riches, but do not care what becomes of our Nation, nor even of their own wives and children. (30)

                  Earlier adhering to the dominant discourse of colonial value systems, Ward uses the marital bond between the white husband and the Native woman to finally make her robust critique of settler colonialism. The settler colonial class’s ideology, earlier unchallenged in this essay, is finally critically remarked upon by Ward through the site of marriage. Ward articulates bluntly her brutal assessment of settler colonial men as completely characterless, concerned only about money, and having no ties of kinship with their own Native wives and children. In fact, Ward even suggests that marriage has acted as a means to allow these men to infiltrate the tribe and encourage the Cherokees to act against their interests– here, by encouraging them to abandon their land. In doing so, marriage foregrounds the relations between men and women as a central site in the enterprise of empire.
                  Marriage, then, combines with the issue of land to enable Ward to make a critique of settler colonialism. In her first paragraph, Ward positions land as sacred and common to the Cherokee people, not only the ones here presently but also the ancestors and future generations. In insisting on land’s common rather than individual possession by the tribe, Ward presents it as the very basis of their kinship. In contrast, the white men’s desire to make the tribe sell their land emerges as an indication of their lack of kinship to the Cherokees– a lack that exists even despite their ties to the tribe through children and marriage. Ward’s sentence that they “ought to be our truest friends but prove our worst enemies” captures the absolute degree to which the Indigenous expectation of kinship differs from the reality of the institution practiced by white settler colonialists. Marriage, it emerges, epitomizes the differences between the Cherokees who have a deep relationship with kinship in terms of communal care and the colonial class who has no such connection at all.



 

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