The Life's Interlocuters: Continuity in the Settler Colonial Script
Ultimately, this textual pattern—or, settler colonial script—that disavows effective Indigenous resistance and seeks to erase/eliminate Natives runs through most of the Life’s introductions, from Patterson’s original edition (1833) to early twentieth-century editions (1912, 1916), and even to contemporary editions (2008). While not an exhaustive account, this section of the exhibit displays the continuity of settler colonial rhetoric used by the Life’s interlocuters across the centuries, demonstrating the historiographical need for a (re)introduction of the text.
Early Interlocuters:
Early twentieth-century interlocuters employ the same settler colonial logic used by Black Hawk’s white contemporaries. They make a token out of Black Hawk and make his violent caricature representative of all Indigenous people. James D. Rishell’s introduction to the Life (1912), for instance, claims Black Hawk as “a true type of the American Indian; always foremost on the warpath and the chase; learned in every trick of ambush and attack…. His faults and his virtues were those of his race strongly emphasized in him.”[6] Quickly, comments of these ilk are related back to the imagined divide between “savage” Natives and “civilized” whites. “Those wild mysterious people, lurking in the forest or below the horizon,” Rishell continues, “have made themselves known to civilized man chiefly by the sharp inscription of the scalping knife.”[7] Writing only four years later (1916), Milo Milton Quaife echoed this statement, arguing that “the Indian was a savage; even, it may be granted a splendid type of savage. As measured by civilized standards of achievement in the various realms of human activity, the red man was vastly the white man’s inferior.”[8] Both Rishell and Quaife remove any tribal specificity from their descriptions of Black Hawk (and omit entirely tribal identifiers like Sauk, Fox, Menomonee, Potawatomi, Sioux, etc.), overwriting the Life’s descriptions and placing these peoples instead in aggressive, monolithic opposition to white “civilization.”
Continuing the settler colonial script, after presenting such stark cultural differences (and their normative “value”), these writers present the essentialized Black Hawk and his fight against the settler state as inevitably doomed to fail. Rishell’s take is implicit, for he contends “the war which bears [Black Hawk’s] name” is “of little military significance.” For him, the only noteworthy story, apparently, is of the death and dashed hopes of fleeing Sauk women and children: “they escaped only, however, to be met…and relentlessly massacred.”[9] Far more important to this so-called “thrilling story,” is that it “mark[s] the end of an epoch. It was the last stand of Indian tribes in the old Northwest” and realized the “exhausted patience of the pioneers” in securing “vast and wonderful land.”[10] Although he comes to the same conclusions, Quaife adopts a more explicit teleology: “that Black Hawk must be crushed admits of no dispute.”[11] After briefly describing the “impotent warfare” of Black Hawk and his followers, Quaife connects the inevitability of Black Hawk’s defeat to his “savagery” and emphasizes how this defeat ultimately benefits white Americans. “Hard as their fate may seem to the conquered,” he insists, “it is an essential accompaniment to the progress of the human race. We need not regret, therefore, that the white man triumphed over the red and wrested from him the North American continent. The progress of civilization was involved in the victory of the superior race.”[12]
Each account thus minimizes the violence of settler colonization. Rishell’s implicit narration mostly omits violence; the only exception signals the finality of violence, pointing to the ultimate success of the settler colonial project—Indigenous elimination and white prosperity—and placing anti-Indigenous violence as a discontinuous artifact of the past that cannot affect the present. Quaife’s explicit account disavows the accountability of settler colonial violence altogether: “the American people … never intended to deliberately wrong the Indian,” and, he elaborates, “no government ever entertained more enlightened and benevolent intentions toward a weaker people than did that of the United States toward the Indian.”[13] If any “failure of the government to realize its good will toward the red men” could be found, it “was due to factors over which it could have no control.”[14] Here, both writers carefully navigate the dilemma, as Robert Nichols puts it, “of squaring their reliance on extralegal violence as constitutive to their founding and continued expansion with their self-image as distinctly free societies governed by the rule of law.”[15] Disregarding the Life’s explicit mentioning of violence at the hands of settlers and the settler-state, these texts instead seek to overwrite the text and convince the reader of how limited or unintended—but nevertheless beneficial—these acts were.
Why, then, should readers engage with the text, according to these early interlocuters? The positions advanced by them, after all, seem to offer confirmation of settler colonial beliefs rather than propose some new reading of the Life. The answer to this question is entangled with Jean O’Brien’s idea of “firsting and lasting,” by which she means the practices settlers used to “cast Indians as prefatory” to an exclusive settler modernity and to “make claims about Indian fates and especially about Indian disappearance.”[16] These authors portray the Life as a voyeuristic look at, in Quaife’s words, “the viewpoint and state of mind of a typical representative of the vanquished race.” Rishell goes even farther in proclaiming the Life’s significance:
Black Hawk and the Life are thus only significant to these authors because of their self-fulfilling function: Indigenous peoples, according to settler logics, have been successfully eliminated. In the same way that Nichols argues that Native people are only perceived as landowners in order to be /once they are dispossessed, here Indigenous people are depicted as historically relevant only when they are portrayed as irrelevant to the future.[18]
The mirror images of this explicit fashioning of Black Hawk’s always-already defeated role in the text—settler modernity, “successful” elimination—bookend these early interlocuters’ texts. Rishell begins his introduction to the Life by introducing readers to Antoine LeClaire and J. B. Patterson, agents of the settler state, rather than the titular actor.[19] Meanwhile, in Quaife’s account, the “true” subject-purpose of the Life is made clear even before he opens his introduction by labeling the War as “one of the pathetic tragedies of the development of our middle border.”[20] Here, the publisher’s preface reveals that the reader will appreciate not the Sauk struggle to retain their rightful homelands against the scheming settler-state, but rather the “the history and literature of the Old Northwest Territory…[and] its romance.”[21] Each text opens by affirming to the reader that the settler era is secure and that what follows is an exciting look at an Indigenous counterfactual, a Native impossibility.
Both Rishell and Quaife culminate the narrative of settler progress in their conclusions: each ends with successful white settlement and the emergence of American heroes. Rishell’s ending, as alluded to above, questions the importance of Black Hawk’s War, calling it “of little military significance.” But rather than being completely irrelevant for its failure to add any “luster to American arms,” it is important in the wider picture of the (now-secured) settler narrative because it “called into the field a remarkable number of men destined to impress themselves indelibly upon our history”[22] and “was the last stand of Indian tribes in the old Northwest.” “That vast and wonderful land” was thus guaranteed for settlers.[23] Quaife’s conclusion differs little. He agrees that “the war had an influence not to be measured by the degree of magnitude of its military events”—other than its cultivation of American leaders like “Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln, Winfield Scott and Albert Sidney Johnston, and many another noted Civil War character.”[24] And Quaife also elaborates on the success of settlers in their taming of a previously “unknown wilderness.” “As a result of the war,” he continues, “much of it was explored, while the fear of the Indian and the Indian title to the land disappeared together” and “suddenly the rush of white settlement…began.”[25] This “tide of settlement” successfully “filled northern Illinois and Wisconsin with settlers.”[26] Evidently, these authors’ interest in Black Hawk’s perspective begins and ends—literally—with the confirmation of successful white settlement.
Has Anything Changed?:
Fast forward nearly 100 years and one might expect a significant shift in editorial tone and content. And yet, in J. Gerald Kennedy’s introduction to the Life (2008) readers still find Natives and anti-Indigenous violence both lodged safely away in the past. As well, readers encounter repeated claims that emphasize the “inevitability” of Black Hawk’s defeat and the success of white settlement. Despite Kennedy’s awareness of past interlocuters’ shortcomings—“once regarded as the poignant story of a fallen leader and a vanishing way of life, the autobiography now seems a more complex analysis of cultural upheaval”—he repeatedly slips into the same settler colonial logics as his editorial predecessors.[27]
Like his precursors, Kennedy describes the Black Hawk War as a predetermined skirmish—in his words, a “hopeless situation.”[28] To him, it was a battle between a “discipline[d] and “persist[ent]” white militia with “deadly effectiveness” versus an old warrior whose “tactics were as puzzling as his objective.”[29] His depictions, however, are contradictory. A few sentences later, for instance, the reader discovers that this well “discipline[d]” militia became “impatient” with the “slow maneuvering of the regular army,” so its members “brazenly took it upon themselves to annihilate the Indians.”[30]
Beyond contradiction, Kennedy’s emphasis on violence is selectively inconsistent. Certainly, he is right to emphasize the bloodshed and the “one-sided fighting” (in terms of casualties).[31] But it is in these brutal moments where his descriptions are the thickest—gone is the supposedly “more complex analysis of cultural upheaval.” On the contrary, Kennedy repeatedly depicts Black Hawk as primitive. Apparently, he has “little concern for time,” possessing “only a general sense of passing time; seasons and years come and go,” despite the Life’s rich descriptions of cultural rituals and relationships that clearly mark the passage of time.[32] Echoing Rishell’s previous portrayal of Natives as “mysterious people,” Kennedy deliberately inserts this descriptor into his depiction of Sauk religious beliefs: “at one point [Black Hawk] alludes to a mysterious good spirit, with wings ‘ten times larger’ than a swan’s, living on Rock Island before the building of Fort Armstrong.”[33] Tellingly, the effect of Kennedy’s addition of “mysterious” to the text’s description matches the effect of his omission of how the text portrays what follows the good spirit’s disappearance. Both render Sauk people as simple, superstitious, and ultimately obsolete. The Life, however, relates what Kennedy does not: “no doubt a bad spirit has taken his place” since white intrusion.[34] In other words, settler violence was not only inflicted upon Indigenous bodies, as Kennedy aggressively describes, but also upon the dynamic relationships Sauk people had with each other and with the environment. Without presenting both facets—Sauk lifeways and settler violence—in more equal proportion, and without explicitly making the connection of how the latter disrupted the former, Kennedy’s uncritical account appears to signal less a concern for revealing anti-Indigenous violence and more the same settler telos of his precursors: the Natives were, in fact, successfully eliminated.
Ultimately, this implication is confirmed at the end of Kennedy’s introduction. Here, like earlier interlocuters, Kennedy proclaims that “Black Hawk’s story” is important because “it was a fateful turning point in American history.”[35] His uncritical emphasis is on erasure—Indigenous people were eliminated. Thus, for him “Black Hawk’s story…is also the story of a great tribe reduced today to a remnant.”[36] Like his monolithic depictions of Sauk culture, his portrayals of Indigenous people place them in a static past tense. What, then, continues further? The success of white settlers. In shocking parallel with Rishell and Quaife’s account, Kennedy also considers it important to inform the reader that “the Black Hawk War gave impetus to the careers of several Americans destined for later greatness,” going so far as to annotate these great Americans into the Life when they are otherwise rendered nameless in the original text.[37] Furthermore, Kennedy’s last editorial contribution—a map of the “Principal Sites” of the Black Hawk War—projects settlers as moving forward throughout history, while leaving Natives behind. It not only erases most traces of Native presence in the land (omitting all Indigenous peoples in the area, not just the Sauk), but also labels the land west of the Mississippi River as “Unorganized Territory,” implying its transitory status as “to-be-colonized.”[38] These depictions overwrite the Life’s nuanced picture of Sauk lifeways and relationships to the land demonstrated in the previous section and bring the settler narrative of an exclusive modernity to completion.
Conclusion:
Examining these three works together reveals a settler colonial script that persists despite the years that separate their publication date and despite the disavowal of previous interlocuters adopted by Kennedy’s more contemporary account. The same logic of elimination—rhetorically and physically—is present in each of the texts. In concert with the previous section, this exhibit seeks to expose these settler narratives and highlight how the Life actively resists these interpretations. The following section, however, examines how these logics persist outside the text itself, how settlers overwrite the Indigenous landscape / Indigenous relationships to the landscape with their own institutions, and how these acts work to facilitate the textual claims to Indigenous disappearance.
[1] Patterson’s Advertisement, The Life (2008), [7], (n.p.).
[2] “Black Hawk’s Dedication,” The Life (2008), [6], (n.p.).
[3] Patterson’s Advertisement, The Life (2008), [7], (n.p.).
[4] Patterson’s Advertisement, The Life (2008), [8], (n.p.).
[5] Patterson’s Advertisement, The Life (2008), [8], (n.p.).
[6] James D. Rishell, ed., The Life (1912), ix.
[7] Rishell, ed., The Life (1912), ix.
[8] Milo Minton Quaife, ed., The Life (1916), ix-x.
[9] Rishell, ed., The Life (1912), x.
[10] Rishell, ed., The Life (1912), xi.
[11] Quaife, ed., The Life (1916), 21.
[12] Quaife, ed., The Life (1916), 12.
[13] Quaife, ed., The Life (1916), 12.
[14] Quaife, ed., The Life (1916), 12.
[15] Robert Nichols, Theft is Property, 38; see also Adam Dahl, Empire of the People: Settler Colonialism and the Foundations of Modern Democratic Thought (Lawrence, Kans., 2018), esp. 1-73.
[16] Jean M. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis, 2010), xxii (“prefatory”), xvii (“disappearance”).
[17] Quaife, ed., The Life (1916), 14; Rishell, ed., The Life (1912), x.
[18] See generally, Nichols, Theft is Property, chap. 1.
[19] Rishell, ed., The Life (1912), viii.
[20] Quaife, ed., The Life (1916), ix.
[21] Quaife, ed., The Life (1916), v.
[22] Rishell, ed., The Life (1912), x.
[23] Rishell, ed., The Life (1912), xi.
[24] Quaife, ed., The Life (1916), 21 (“influence”), 22 (list of “characters”).
[25] Quaife, ed., The Life (1916), 21-22 (“disappeared”), 22 (“settlement”).
[26] Quaife, ed., The Life (1916), 22.
[27] J. Gerald Kennedy, ed., The Life (2008), xxvii.
[28] Kennedy, ed., The Life (2008), xiii.
[29] Kennedy, ed., The Life (2008), xii.
[30] Kennedy, ed., The Life (2008), xii.
[31] Kennedy, ed., The Life (2008), xiii.
[32] Kennedy, ed., The Life (2008), xx.
[33] Kennedy, ed., The Life (2008), xx.
[34] Black Hawk, The Life (2008), 45. Emphasis in original.
[35] Kennedy, ed., The Life (2008), xxviii.
[36] Kennedy, ed., The Life (2008), xxviii.
[37] See for instance Kennedy’s treatment of Zachary Taylor in Kennedy, The Life (2008), 39, n. 50; quotation at x (“later greatness”).
[38] Kennedy, ed., The Life (2008), [xxxi], (n.p.).