Transmotion Vol 1, No. 1 (2015)
DEBORAH L. MADSEN
"Natives have always been on the move,
by chance, necessity, barter, reciprocal sustenance, and by trade over
extensive routes; the actual motion is a natural right, and the tribal stories
of transmotion are a continuous sense of visionary sovereignty" (Gerald Vizenor, Manifest
Manners ix)
The concept of Native sovereignty in Vizenor's writing is both complex
and simple, connected inseparably to his notions of "survivance" and
"transmotion." While he would seem to reject the territorial understanding of
"tribal sovereignty" as a restrictive concept that limits the practices of
sovereignty to designated geographical boundaries (like the reservations
described as "federal
enclaves where tribal people are contained" in Earthdivers
34), the sovereignty that "transmotion" encompasses is, as Michael Snyder
explains, "rooted in traditional Native uses of land and cultural practice"
(47-48). These land usages and cultural practices assume the fundamental right
of unrestricted movement, a right which is highlighted in the Preamble to The Constitution of the White
Earth Nation where the Anishinaabeg of the White Earth Nation
are initially defined as "the successors of a great tradition of
continental liberty." In his commentary on the Constitution, David Carlson
cites the list of definitions of selected terms used, published in Anishinaabeg
Today (Wednesday, September 2, 2009), which includes the phrase
"continental liberty": "Continental liberty refers to the
Continent of North American [sic], and native liberty refers to the natural
freedoms and rights of natives before contact with Europeans. Natives had established
extensive and active trade routes throughout the continent and hemisphere.
Trade routes, and other associations of native communities required a
sophisticated sense of rights, travel, trade, and native liberty" (19; quoted
in Carlson 28).
The
sovereignty of transmotion is, then, the right to freedom of travel but not
simply the right of motion. Transmotion is the freedom to move across physical
and conceptual boundaries; between what, in Interior Landscapes, Vizenor
calls "communal tribal cultures and those material and urban pretensions that
counter conservative traditions" (162). However, in the absence of that freedom
of physical movement, many other freedoms become impossible. This is where the
inherent link between transmotion and survivance becomes crucial. As I have
written elsewhere,
in its original French meaning ... [s]urvivance signifies
the qualification to inherit an estate and formal recognition of the legal
status of a survivor. Or, in Vizenor's words to Jöelle Rostkowski, '[s]urvivance
... is the heritable right of succession or reversion of an estate, and, in the
course of international declarations of human rights, a narrative estate of
native survivance.' What this means in a Native context is the readiness of
individuals and communities alike to continue the transmission of tribal
cultures, values, and knowledges to future generations, through international
and domestic legal instruments, through creative storying in literature, art,
music, and through the practices of everyday life. (XIII)
Transmotion, then, is the practice
of transmitting tribal cultural practices across time as well as spaces of
travel and trade. Above all, it is the freedom explored by Jodi Byrd in The
Transit of Empire to resist "the cultural and political modes [by which]
'Indianness' [is] regulated and produced by U.S. settler imperialism née
colonialism" (xv), a regime of production that generates an understanding of
indigeneity, Byrd continues, "as rooted and static, located in a discrete
place" (xvi).
Christopher
Schedler opens his essay, "Wiindigoo Sovereignty and Native Transmotion in
Gerald Vizenor's Bearheart," with an incisive account of the criticisms
of Vizenor's tricky position on the issue of tribal sovereignty—made from
the perspective of American Indian literary nationalism by Elizabeth Cook-Lynn
and Sean Kicummah Teuton—[EDITOR QUERY: in which Schedler defends?otherwise the "he" is a bit
ambiguousi] in which Schedler defends Vizenor's vision of
"the inherent Native rights of presence, motion, and survivance on this
continent as an 'originary' form of sovereignty, which is sustained through
treaties but is not limited by them," quoting Vizenor's claim that "Sovereignty
as transmotion is not the same as notions of indigenous treaty sovereignty;
transmotion can be scorned and denied, but motion is never granted by a
government" (Schedler 35; Fugitive Poses 188). As Schedler goes on to
explain, treaty sovereignty is constrained by the context in which it is
granted: the authority of the US federal government. But as Vizenor insists
throughout his work, indigenous sovereignty, ultimately, is not a power that
can be granted. The sovereignty that is indigenous "presence, motion, and
survivance" – transmotion – inheres in Native peoples and not in
the settler state.
This
conception of Native sovereignty, as articulated by Vizenor, has always been in
conflict with the claims to sovereignty made by settler-colonial authorities:
not only the federal US government but, much earlier, those colonial governments
and the European Crowns they served that initiated the symbolic economy of
"Indianness" that Jodi Byrd addresses. Metacom's War (or "King Philip's War" 1675-1676) offers a dramatic
instance of this early conflict, as well as the process of clearing colonial space through the settler-colonial "logic of elimination" defined by Patrick Wolfe as the
separation, dispossession, removal, and disappearance of indigenous peoples
from their homelands (Wolfe 387).[1] Among the many grievances that Metacom presented to the deputy governor of Rhode Island colony, John Easton, during their negotiations in June 1675 were the increasing pace of land loss, the threat posed by Christian proselytizing, and the loss of tribal jurisdiction. These grievances represent two major dynamics of later US settler colonialism: territorial and cultural dispossession. However, at the outset of hostilities, the settler colonies employed a further strategy of Native displacement and sequestration, culminating in the internment of so-called "praying Indians" on Deer Island in Boston Harbor: the focus of this essay.[2] Atrocities committed against Christian "indians" have a special resonance: as subjects of the English Crown, a fact acknowledged by Metacom in his negotiations with Easton, these "friendly" Natives should have enjoyed the protections accorded English subjects.[3]
The denial of such protections through the suspension of English sovereign law makes this internment an instance of Giorgio Agamben's "state of exception." Agamben's
exploration of the concept draws heavily on Carl Schmitt's Political
Theology (1922), in which he theorizes sovereignty as arising from the
assertion of authority rather than the normative power of law, demonstrated in
the sovereign's capacity to suspend law in states of emergency. Indeed, the
suspension of law is neither only nor most importantly an assertion of the
sovereign's authority; in its performance, this act is constitutive of
sovereignty itself. It would be inaccurate to assume that Metacom's grievances
were complaints about rights actively taken away from passive Native
communities by English settlers; rather, the settler assertion of the right to
Christianize, the right to claim land, the right to legal jurisdiction, were
performative assertions that produced the colonizing authority that settlers
claimed. The power of Agamben's reworking of Schmitt's fundamental idea of
sovereignty, and much of its appeal to scholars of settler colonialism, lies in
his topographical mapping of the concept into spatial or territorial terms:
"Being outside yet belonging, this is the topological structure of the state of
exception" (2005, 35). Through this paradoxical construction, the exception
defines "the very space in which the juridico-political order can have validity"
(1998, 19). Native space, while belonging to the territory that is to be
colonized and yet placed outside it in juridico-political terms, is rendered
exceptional by the assertion of sovereign settler authority to claim land,
jurisdiction, and cultural control. In the spaces of New England "praying
towns," the rule of Judeo-Christian law produced an exceptional discursive and
material space in which "praying Indians" both belonged to the category of
English subjects and yet were placed outside it. As Mark Rifkin so cogently
points out in his analysis of the frontier as a space of exception, "being
within the sphere of state sovereignty but not covered by the normal legal
principles of national law... bespeaks the fundamental anxiety that animates the
settler-state" (2014, 176). Though he is referring to an historical context
some hundred or more years after Metacom's War, the discursive dynamics that
Rifkin identifies can be seen clearly at work in this earlier moment of the
historical record. That is, the state of exception exploited by the US after
1776 had been animating the settler-state at least since the seventeenth
century.
Beyond the battles, bloodshed, and unprecedented destruction in New England of Metacom's War, the conflict was essentially one of stories,
the "authorizing" power of rhetoric, in
what Vizenor calls "the word wars" (Wordarrows viii). Granted, the war was motivated by conflict over legal jurisdiction and ownership of land; the imposition of English judicial structures and the worldview embedded in those structures—urgent issues related to
Native sovereignty. But these grievances were grounded in a system of conflicting symbolic meanings expressed in cultural narratives, most notably
the nascent ideology of American exceptionalism. As I hope to point out, the "exceptional" state of New England Native communities—and specifically the so-called "praying Indians"—represents
the attempt to create a state of discursive stasis, of rhetorical immobility: a state imposed by the English Crown, through
the government of the settler colonies, as an act of imperial sovereignty. I want to suggest that this symbolic discursive condition contributed materially both to the confinement of
Christianized Natives
first in the enclaves known as "praying towns" and later the internment camps on Deer Island and Long Island, and also to the enduring simulation of the "indian" (The
Everlasting Sky xiii-iv; Manifest Manners vii; Fugitive Poses
15-14) that is located outside the historical space of European modernity and its conceptual space of
rights discourses.
In Fugitive Poses Vizenor refers to "[t]ricky stories, totemic pictures, and mental mappery [as] the embodiment of native transmotion and sovereignty" (170). Transmotion then is an expression of native ontology, located in narratives that bring together the physical land with an expression of Native cultural presence. This Native presence is, as Niigonwedom James Sinclair describes in his essay "A Sovereignty of Transmotion," a vision of "both the physical and psychological realms of the universe [as] made up of interconnectivities and relationships"
(127). Words that express transmotion, he continues, are "not only mythic vehicles and vessels for Anishinaabeg spirituality, philosophy, and 'traditional' teachings... but [are] historical, subjective, and political Anishinaabeg-centered creative, critical, and activist acts" (127). The right to physical spatial movement is a
key aspect of
indigenous sovereignty, as
is the Native spiritual, philosophical, and subjective engagement with material space,
without which sovereignty
can be rendered precarious and vulnerable to domination by settler-colonial interests. A fully-realized sovereign politics addresses not only the right to land but also the right to express a specifically Native-centered relationship to land through physical and conceptual
mobility. The example of the internment of converted Native communities on Deer Island (and elsewhere) highlights the necessary interconnection between territorial and cultural sovereignty.
Exceptional
"Indians"
The events of 1675 to 1676 constitute one of the major turning-points in
early settler-Native relations. Metacom's War was bloody, brutal, and devastating for both sides. More than a series of violent martial encounters, however, the war highlighted the fundamental incommensurability of Native and settler ontologies, focused on the issue of sovereignty. In this
essay, I want to
think about this
ontological incommensurability in relation to issues of mobility and confinement. As Jean O'Brien notes, in Dispossession by Degrees,
Because Indians moved their fields every few years to avoid soil exhaustion, landownership shifted with land use as well as the seasons. Ideas about property rights in hunting, fishing, and gathering related to ecological use... But principles of mobility existed alongside notions of fixity, as in movements between central village sites and, for example, the annually abundant fish spawning sites. (21)
These practices, related to Native mobility and fixity, were
increasingly denied to the Native communities of New England in the period leading up to and following the war; mobility not only in territorial space but also in judicial, cultural, and spiritual terms was at issue for Metacom from the start. In June 1675, in negotiations with the deputy governor of the Rhode Island colony, John Easton, Metacom presented a series of grievances which included the increasing pace of land loss through fraudulent land sales protected by English law,
the invasion of Native cornfields by the settlers' cattle, the threat posed by Christianization and the selling of alcohol, and the loss of tribal jurisdiction.[5] Of course, the latter complaint—the expansion of English legal jurisdiction over Native communities—had been rankling since the treaties agreed in the aftermath of the Pequod War. The extension of colonial judicial
sovereignty intensified in the wake of John Sassamon's death in 1674, but the
assertion of settler sovereignty that culminated in the
internment of Christianized Native communities on Deer Island went beyond the
imposition of English law—in a manner illustrative of Schmitt's account
of sovereignty as an artifact of authority rather than law—to assert the
Crown's sovereign right to suspend the application of legal rights to certain
subjects. As acknowledged subjects of the English Crown, the "praying Indians"
who were removed to Deer Island should have enjoyed the protections extended to
all English subjects. But they were not. In this respect, "praying Indians"
occupied a discursive position that increasingly reduced the capacity to
exercise the sovereignty of transmotion by enforcing a cumulative regime of
sequestration, confinement, and immobilization.
In
his account of the establishment of the "praying towns" by the missionary John
Eliot, between 1651 and 1674, Neal Salisbury argues that the fourteen towns
deliberately isolated Native converts from "both settlers and independent
Indians" (1974, 32). Town government was structured on a biblical model and the
court system was analogous to that of an English county court; while Native men
played a role in town governance, all decisions were subject to approval by the
"superintendent of subject Indians" (32), a position occupied by Daniel Gookin
at the time of the war. The legal code enforced by the town courts, designed by
Eliot, regulated a range of customs and behaviors in the interests of pursuing
the colonial project of "civilizing" the Christian converts. Through
territorial isolation and acculturation, Salisbury claims, "[i]n countless
subtle ways the Indians' distance from their past was reinforced while they
were as far as ever from being accepted as members of 'civilized' society"
(34).
The
settler or migrant rhetoric of American exceptionalism,
which has roots in this colonial period, posits the United States
and its founding Pilgrim Fathers as the nation uniquely able, and indeed charged, with the mission to
bring into being a perfected world. From the colonial period, the understanding of New England's exceptional destiny has depended upon the "visible sainthood" of leaders who
guide God's mission into the wilderness of the New World. But the assumption of sainthood for some relies upon the conviction that others
are diabolical agents, active agents of
evil, determined to destroy
the divinely-sanctioned New
World experiment. The prominent Boston minister Cotton Mather, in The Wonders of the Invisible World (1693), describes the land colonized by New Englanders as having originally belonged to Satan, who is just waiting to claim his lands back: "The New-Englanders are a People of God settled in those, which were once the Devils Territories; and it may easily be supposed that the Devil was Exceedingly disturbed, when he perceived such a people here accomplishing the Promise of old made unto our Blessed Jesus, That He should have the Utmost parts of the Earth for His Possession" (xi-xii
original emphases). In these settler terms, the exceptional nature of colonial New England lies in the ability to win over, for Christians, territory (both literal and spiritual) that is Satan's. But in order to do this, those visible saints must engage in continuous combat with the invisible agents of Satan who will use any means to retake what they believe is theirs.
Within this symbolic context, seventeenth-century Native communities occupied an ambivalent position. On the one hand, Natives were seen as heathen, as barbarous, uncivilized, and often as the agents of Satan. On the other hand, Natives were also interpreted as tools in the hands of a punishing God. So sometimes their attacks on English settlements were interpreted as the acts of Satanic agents, working on behalf of the Devil who was trying to recapture his lost territory. At other times, Native people were interpreted as God's scourge, punishing the colonists who were failing to advance in their
exceptional mission. This is how Metacom's War was interpreted by Daniel Gookin, a
sympathetic observer: "To make a rod of the barbarous heathen to chastise and punish the English for their sins" (Historical
Account 437). Since gentle chastisements had not worked to produce among colonists "effectual humiliation and reformation, hence the righteous and holy Lord is necessitated to draw for this smarting rod of the vile and brutish heathen, who indeed have been a very scourge unto New England, especially the Jurisdiction of Massachusetts"
(437-8).
Elsewhere,
Gookin is more ambivalent in his inscription of Christian converts into the
Puritan providential scheme. J. Patrick Cesarini's account of the
interconnections between Gookin's empiricism and providentialism highlights the
complexities of his thought concerning the exceptional position of "praying
Indians." In his Historical Account, Gookin writes the active presence
of Native allies into the historical record of Metacom's War, in ways that
caused the book to be refused publication in 1677. As Cesarini points out, he
presents the hostility of settlers as the justification for Native mistrust
and, in some cases, defection to unconverted communities (492). Indeed, Gookin
claims that the "praying towns" were at one point during the war offered as a
kind of human shield or "wall of defence [sic] about the greatest part of the
colony of Massachusetts" both as
evidence of the fidelity and loyalty of the inhabitants and their desire to
"take off the animosity and displeasure that they perceived was enkindled in
some English against them" (Historical Account, 436). He then takes the
opportunity to observe that the English could have avoided much of the
suffering of the war if only they had embraced converted Natives as their full
allies. At its most radical, Gookin's writing portrays the "praying Indians" as
victims of what Cesarini calls "a Puritan colony unable to control itself
– either politically or spiritually" (500). This view leads Gookin then
to propose a dramatic reversal of the providential role played by Puritans and
"praying Indians" respectively: in order to test the authenticity of their
conversion, God has transformed the settler community into a scourge of
indigenous converts. This is a radical subversion of the providential scheme in
which, as Cesarini explains, "the Indians were considered the objects,
the special instruments, of God's agency, but the English alone were God's subjects.
God spoke through the Indians, but he never spoke to them" (497
original emphases). The perception that the settlers may be in need of
reminders of God's disfavor was not, as Cesarini notes, confined to Gookin;
contemporaries like Increase Mather saw Metacom's War as a providential sign of
the colonists' sinful backsliding and so called for a general renewal of the
covenant that joins all members of all New England churches with each other and
with God.
Gookin
claims that his "primary appeal on behalf of the converts was to remind
colonial authorities that they were bound by their covenants to deal justly
with them" (Cesarini 506). Here then is a further "exceptionalization" of
Christian Natives: they were English subjects but denied the protections of
that status; they were members of the Puritan covenant but they were denied the
rights of membership.[6] Even such a sympathetic commentator as Daniel
Gookin admits as much, in a striking use of typological rhetoric to express his
providentialism. Describing one of the "praying
towns"—Okommakamesit—he writes: "This town doth join so near to the
English of Marlborough, that it was spoken of David in type, and our Lord Jesus
Christ, the antitype, Under his shadow ye
shall rejoice: but the Indians here do not much rejoice in the English
men's shadow; who do so overtop them in their number of people, stocks of
cattle, &c. that the Indians do not greatly flourish, or delight in their
station at present" (Historical Collections 45).[7] By failing
to answer the biblical promise ("spoken... in type") of flourishing in the
shadow of the "godly," the "Indians" fail to answer (in the antitype) the
exceptionalist promise of the New England mission. The symbolic promise
symbolized by David and fulfilled by the coming of the Messiah has not been
fulfilled by the promise of the converts' delivery into a new dispensation.
They are excluded from the divine destiny of the New England colonies by
biblical authority, which Gookin interestingly spatializes. Thus, even
converted "Indians" can never become sufficiently converted to participate
fully in the exceptionalist colonial mission and so can never possess the full
rights that attach to a Puritan subject of the English Crown.
There
is no doubt that converted Natives submitted formally to the sovereignty of the
colonial government and hence to the Crown. Neal Salisbury traces the events
that led the Massachusett sachem Cutshamekin to submit formally to the
Massachusetts Bay government in 1644, in a move designed to protect his
standing among his people but that instead opened his community to the
influence of missionaries, which soon challenged his authority. Salisbury
remarks, "The Massachusett thereby became the first Indians in New England to
enter a new legal status, one in which they were neither independent nor
assimilated into white society" (1974, 36). Four years later, the Massachusetts
General Court, at the session held on 4 November, announced that two ministers
would be sent each year to preach in Native communities because of the fact
that "divers of them [Indians] are become subjects to the English, and have
engaged themselves to be willing and ready to understand the law of God"
(Shurtleff, 178). Daniel Gookin, in his Historical Collections of the
Indians in New England, explains that "The reason, why the English government is
concerned with the Indians' affairs in
point of
rule and order, is
because all those praying Indians in
Massachusetts colony did long since, before they began to
worship God, actually and solemnly submit themselves unto the jurisdiction and government of
the English in
the Massachusetts, as
the records do
declare" (39). And in
his "Notes on the Nipmuc Indian Reservation at Hassanamesit," quoting from the
Massachusetts Bay Records (MBR, 30:146),
Thomas Lewis Doughton highlights the moment in May 1668 when Nipmuc
sagamores formally "submitted" to English colonial authority, which is worth
quoting at length:
The humble submission and subjection of the Native Indians sagamores and people of the Nipmucks inhabiting within the bounds of the patttens [sic] of Massachusetts and near adjoining unto the English towns so-called of Mendon and Marlboroug[h]
We the inhabitants of Mongunkachogok Chaubunkongkomuk Asukodnogest Kesapusgus Wabuhquoshish and the adjacent parts of Nipmuk being convinced of our great sinns & how good it is to turn unto the Lord and be his servants by praying or calling upon his name ... do give up ourselves to God ... we finding by experience how good it is to live under laws & good government and how much we need the protection of the English. We doe freely out of our own motion and voluntary choyce do submit our selves to the government of Massachusetts
(n.p.).
Despite
this symbolic and material "subjection" to the Crown, in the course of the war,
"praying Indians" were denied their
fundamental rights as English subjects. The order for their removal was passed by the General Court in Boston in October 1675; survivors were permitted to return to the mainland in May 1676. The notion that an entire community can be deemed a security risk is a recurrent theme in American history, but this settler logic reaches back into the colonial heritage, and produces the enduring image of the threatening unassimilated
"Indian." That the people could be removed to Deer Island so efficiently was the consequence of their earlier confinement to so-called "praying towns"
– notably Natick, from which everyone was removed to Deer Island.
In the 1647 tract, "Day Breaking if
not the Sun Rising of
the Gospel with the Indians of
New England," John Eliot describes the missionary effort to
persuade the Massachusetts General Court to
establish a
separate town for converted Natives (9, 27). The request came from Native leaders and, as
scholars such as
Jean O'Brien have noted, represented one strategy by
which Native communities attempted to
retain some formal title to
what land they could claim, as
well as
allowing Native participation in
political and legal matters. However, as
she goes on
to explain in
relation to
Natick specifically:
The commonwealth
elaborated a special judicial mechanism for Indians when Daniel Gookin was
appointed as superintendent of Indians in 1656. The system Gookin implemented
followed the precedents of the submission agreements and Praying Town codes,
while creating a structure of Indian magistrates operating under the ultimate
supervision of the English. There was to be no mistaking who gained ultimate
power. (Dispossession by Degrees, 50)
And,
in the course of
the war, towns such as
this became effective prisons for converted Native people. Interestingly, in
his account of
the
establishment of the "praying towns", Daniel Gookin cites two reasons why
objections to the grant of land are invalid. The first and foremost is
"forasmuch as it was all their native country and propriety, before the English
came into America; the answer is ready: First, that the English claim right to
their land, by patent from our king" (Historical Collections 39). Gookin
implicitly draws on the doctrine of vacuum domicilium but explicitly
links the right to land with the sovereignty of the English Crown. There is a
contradiction here: if land is rightfully granted to his subjects through the
sovereign power of the English King then, as English subjects, Christian
Natives should not need to justify their claim to the land. And yet they do. It
is here that Gookin captures the paradox of indigenous exceptionalism, the
consequences of which are formulated so clearly by Mark Rifkin:
The
knowledge of the prior presence and continuing existence of Indigenous peoples
in now-'domestic' space... enters settler law as the difficulty of
legitimizing the state's jurisdiction over Native peoples. The attendant series
of logical and normative confusions, contradictions, and crises generated by
this problem leads to the legal and administrative construction of a state of
exception for Native Peoples. (177)
Movement,
Stasis, and the State of Exception
The
internment of the inhabitants of the fourteen "praying towns" was not a sudden
move on the part of the colonial authorities but a process: the culmination of
the erosion of the sovereign Native freedom of movement that intensified during
the period of the war. [AUTHOR QUERY: Is this meant to
be here?ˆDM: oops! No! The para should read "... of the
war. Starting in 1675 ..."] Exception vs transmotion
The
session held on 9 July 1675, where Gookin was present, voted to repeal the law
allowing licensed persons to sell to "any Indian or Indians, not in hostility
wth us, pouder, shott, lead, guns, hand gunnes, rapier blades, swords, &c"
(Shurtleff, 45). In
the August 1675 session the Massachusetts Council ordered all converted Natives to
be confined to
"praying towns" and, according to
Gookin's report of the Court records, a series of further constraints on Native mobility was
imposed: hunting in the woods was prohibited, as was entertaining "any strange
Indians," and a limit was set of one mile from their "dwellings" unless
accompanied by English persons (Historical Account 450). This
issue of Native "dwellings" is supplemented by the Court's assertion that "The places of
the Indians' residence are, Natick, Punquapog, Nashobah, Wamesit and Hassanamesit. And if
there be
any that belong to
other places, they are to
repair to
some one of
these"
(Historical Account
451).
This proclamation defines "Indianness" according to the occupation of space,
constraining indigenous identity to specific spaces and enforcing through the
threat of death the identification of place with "Indianness." For a Native person
to be "out of place" would be to become a "not-Indian" or a "strange Indian"
who can be killed with impunity because such a person has no ontology within
this exceptional scheme, once they are located outside the circumscribed
paradoxical space of "the Christian Indian."
The provision for enforcing these orders was death, for which Native people found
outside their designated place would be to blame. In this way, the exercise of
the sovereignty of transmotion – which so clearly subverts the immobility
of the state of exception – was effectively deemed a capital offence. Native people could move between towns only with the express authorization of the General Court and the confinement of
Christian Natives was further intensified during the following legislative session, on
13 October 1675, when the Massachusetts Council ordered that Christian Indians be forcibly removed to
Deer Island. This is
the opening article of
the session: "WHEREAS not wthstanding the councils former prohibition of
all Indians coming to, or
remayning in, the toune of
Boston, wee finde that still there remajnes ground of
feare that, vnless more effectuall care be
taken, wee may be
exposed to
mischiefe by
some of
that barbarous crew, or
any strangers, not of
our nation, by
the coming into or
residing in
the toune of
Boston, this Court doeth therefore order"... and eight separate orders follow (Shurtleff 47). Firstly, that no
one will "entertain or
countenance" any "Indian" under penalty of
treason; secondly, guards will prevent the entry of
any "Indian" into Boston and armed guards will accompany any "Indian" allowed access and those who are "employed upon any message or
business" of
the Council will be
taken directly to
the Governor and by
him be
"disposed of
& secured during their necessary stay for the dispatch of
their business," while no
other "Indian" will permitted to
stay in
the town "unless in
prison";
thirdly, any unguarded "Indian" could be
lawfully "secured" by
any person; fourthly, that the military are instructed to
be alert for the approach of
canoes; fifthly, that the Charles Town ferry is
prohibited from allowing any "Indian" to
disembark unless accompanied by
an armed guard; sixthly, that any person may lawfully "apprehend and secure" any "Indian" approaching the town; seventhly, and I
want to
quote this order in
full:
That account be
taken of
all straingers who are not his majestjes subjects, and that they remajne not in
toune vnless security be
given for their fidelity, and that none be
admitted but vpon the like security, and that no
master of
any vessell bring in
any
wthout
acquainting the Gouernor therewith, & presenting their persons in
order to
their examination, who, if
vpon their examination can give no
good account of
their business, and security for their good behaviour, shall be
sent to
prison vnless they doe forth with depart (Shurtleff 47).
The final order in this list of constraints on Native mobility specified that no
inhabitant of
Boston could lawfully entertain "any stranger" in
their house, under pain of
any penalty the Court might see fit to impose (Shurtleff, 46-7). I
have quoted the seventh order in
full because, again, it
formally if
implicitly, excludes converted Natives from the category of
"his Majesty's subjects." In
the state of
exception, subject Native people were rendered immobile by
these orders and those that specified the condition of
capital punishment under which detainees were interned. The Court Record states:
Whereas this Court haue, for weighty reasons, placed sundry Indians (that haue subjected to
our goumt) vpon some islands for their and our security,--
It is
ordered, that none of
the sajd Indians shall presume to
goe off the sajd islands voluntarily, vpon pajne of
death; and it
shallbe [sic] laufull for the English to
destroy those that they shall finde stragling off from the sajd places of
theire confinement, vnlesse taken of
by order from authorjty, and vnder an
English guard. And it
is further ordered, that if
any person or
persons shall presume to
take, steale, or
carry away either man, woeman, or
child of
the sajd Indians, off from any the sajd islands where they are placed, wthout order from the Generall Court or
council, he
or they shall be
accounted breakers of
the capitall law printed & published against man stealing; and this order to
be forthuith posted and published.
The whole Court being mett, it
is ordered, that the country Tresurer take care for ye provission of
those Indians that are sent doune to
Deare Island, so
as to
pvent their perishing by
any extremity that they may be
put vnto for want of
absolute necessaries, and for that end he
is to
appoint meet persons to
vissit
[sic] them from time to
time (Shurtleff 64).
The effects of this confinement are described by Gookin as follows:
"By this order... the poor Christian Indians were reduced to great sufferings,
being hindered from their hunting and looking after their cattle, swine, and
getting in their corn, or laboring among the English to get clothes, and many
other ways incommoded also, were daily exposed to be slain or imprisoned, if at
any time they were found without their limits" (Historical Account 451).
And even while acknowledging the severe sufferings and the brutal conditions of Deer Island, the Court enforced the detention of
Christian Natives with the threat of summary execution. At
the end of December 1675, Gookin accompanied John Eliot on a visit to the
Island. In his account of this visit he reflects that
I
observed in all my visits to them, that they carried themselves patiently,
humbly, and piously, without murmuring or complaining against the English for
their sufferings, (which were not few), for they lived chiefly upon clams and
shell-fish, that they digged out of the sand, at low water; the Island was
bleak and cold, their wigwams poor and mean, their clothes few and thin; some
little corn they had of their own, which the Council ordered to be fetched from
their plantations, and conveyed to them by little and little; also a boat and
man was appointed to look after them. (Historical Account 485-86)
The
Paradoxical Rhetoric of the Exception
The
tone of Gookin's account is apologetic; he explains parenthetically that the
Council was obliged to take these measures "to quiet the people" (451) but
rhetorically he is caught between a sympathetic view of the Native right to
freedom of movement—the sovereignty of transmotion—and the impact
of settler violence against all indigenous people, including "praying Indians."
Indeed, he attempts to navigate the complex position of Native communities that
are acknowledged as sovereign nations, on the one hand, and domestic
combatants, on the other. He cites the opinion of the Council that restrictions
on Native mobility are necessary because the hostile tribes act "contrary to
the practice of civil nations" (450). Trapped physically and rhetorically
between the status of "civil nations" and hostile subject peoples, Gookin's
communities of "praying Indians" were exceptionally marked for forced removal,
immobilization, and summary execution should they exercise the right to
transmotion. Rendered "strangers" in their traditional
lands, but at the same time subjects of the Crown before the representatives of
which they rhetorically prostrate themselves, "praying Indians" were placed in
the exceptional rhetorical position of being "out of place" wherever
they were placed. Being "out of place" for any Native person, who could not
justify being in the place where (s)he was apprehended, was treated severely.
For example, in the same session of the Court, "Two Indians, one an old man
named Mannapaugh, & Mannanesit, a young man, his sonn, pretending
themselues to belong to Vncas, being found at Chelmsford, where the haystacke
was fired, giving no reason of their coming & staying here, was judged to
be spyes, and ordered to be sent away by the Treasurer" (Shurtleff 58). This
phrase, "to be sent away by the Treasurer," was a euphemism for being sold out
of the colony to the West Indies as a slave. And here we have perhaps the most
scandalous exemption from the protections of law suffered by the Native peoples
of New England during this conflict—the
selling into slavery of loyal "Indians," who had no real part in the conflict.
As Jill Lepore explains, a dramatic case was that of Metacom's son. When
Metacom's wife and 9-year-old son were apprehended, they were imprisoned in
Boston while the Court debated the child's fate. Contradictory scriptural
passages were invoked to determine whether or not the child should be executed:
on the one hand, the injunction that the crimes of the father should not be
visited upon the child and, on the other hand, biblical examples where children
grow up to be the scourge of future generations. After eight months delay, the
boy was sent into exile – sold and shipped to Barbados or Jamaica. As Lepore
notes, the legality of enslaving this child was debated but the legality of
enslaving Native subjects of the English Crown, interpreting them instead as
sovereign enemy combatants, was not debated. Indeed, as she observes: "This
ambiguity, over whether Indian peoples are sovereign or subjected, would lie at
the heart of Indian-white relations in the colonies and later the union, until
the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Cherokee
Nation v. Georgia in 1831, in
which John Marshall would assign Indians the unique status of 'domestic
dependent nations'" (164).
This contradictory and ambivalent condition
– the subjected sovereign subject
– represents Agamben's state of exception as the situation in which the rule of law is exceptionally suspended in an act that validates in its very exercise the sovereignty of the power that suspends the law. In this case, the General Court of Massachusetts, threatened in its very existence by Metacom's resistance, asserted its sovereignty over
communities of converted Natives by first accepting their formal subjection to English rule and then exempting those
Native subjects from the protections of English law. The denial of such protections through the suspension of English sovereign law makes this internment an
illustrative instance of Agamben's state of exception.
According to
Agamben, exemption from the law through the intervention of a sovereign power confirms that power's sovereignty and transcendence of law by the act of creating the exception. Though this exception is enacted as
being itself exceptional, Agamben points out that in fact such exceptions prove the rule of sovereign power: "The paradox of sovereignty consists in the fact the sovereign is, at the same time, outside and inside the juridical order....
The sovereign, having the legal power to suspend the validity of the law, legally places himself outside the law" (Homo
Sacer 15).[9] For example, Gookin recorded Joseph Tuckapawill's remarks when he and his family were offered hospitality by English friends of John Eliot before they were sent to Deer Island:
... I am
greatly distressed this day on
every side; the English have taken away some of
my estate, my
corn, cattle, my
plough, cart, chain, and other goods [Tuckapawill explained]. The enemy Indians have also taken a
part of
what I
had; and the wicked Indians mock and scoff at
me, saying 'Now what is
become of
your praying to
God?' The English also censure me, and say I
am a
hypocrite. In
this distress I
have no
where to
look, but up
to God in
heaven to
help me; now my
dear wife and eldest son are (through English threatening) run away, and I
fear will perish in
the woods for want of
food; also my
aged mother is
lost; and all this doth greatly aggravate my
grief. But yet I
desire to
look up
to God in
Christ Jesus, in
whom alone is
my help ... I
never did join with them against the English. Indeed, they solicited me, but I
utterly denied and refused it. I
thought within myself, it
is better to
die than to
fight against the church of
Christ. (qtd. Doughton, n.p.)
Here
we see the space of the exception at its most brutal. Immobilized juridically
so he has no recourse to either English or Native justice (both steal from him
with impunity), caught
discursively between
the categories of
Native and English, and confronting the prospect
of internment at the hands of his fellow English subjects and covenant members,
John Tuckapawill is left with only the thought of death. He has no other place to go.
The
losses experienced by exceptional "praying Indians" like Tuckapawill are
suggested by Michael
Clark
who, in his introduction to
the Eliot Tracts, describes the profound changes undergone by
converted Native people:
the shift to permanent
residence versus a seminomadic [sic] lifestyle, the need for European farming
techniques to make the permanently cultivated fields productive, corollary
changes in gender roles and generational expectations regarding children and
the elderly, and new British names, clothes, and hairstyles, ... name only the
most obvious examples of how life changed for the Indians who moved into the
Praying Towns. (18)
To
these factors Neal Salisbury adds those that were the indirect consequence of
environmental changes. For example, the scarcity of bear's grease prevented its
use on skin and hair, while furs required for clothing and the construction of
wigwams were inaccessible (1974, 34). Harold W. Van Lonkhuyzen, in his
"Reappraisal of the Praying Indians," makes the same point about changing
material lifeways but takes this further to observe the ways in which these
changes are related to profound shifts in tribal ontology: so the increasing
reliance on domesticated animals produced an alteration in relations with
animals and animal spirit masters (412), the building of fences changed
attitudes towards property, land, and the earth; the influence of
heteropatriarchy disrupted gender and social roles; and education, especially
reading, "altered the converted Indians' cognitive appreciation of the world"
(413). These transformations, for Christian Natives like Tuckapawill, were the
consequences of their choice to live within the territorial jurisdiction of
New England and to
accept the
sovereignty of the English Crown. And yet they were imprisoned in murderous conditions because they remained "Indians" despite their religious conversion and cultural assimilation. Why?
Salisbury shows convincingly that while the "praying towns" may have seemed to
be in transition to a state of full assimilation into English culture, the
greatest opposition to the towns came from those settlers in closest proximity
to them, revealing that full integration was never, in fact, on the colonial
agenda (1974, 41-42).
The experience of the "praying Indians" exposes the fact that race, and white supremacy specifically,
underpins the settler-colonial state of exception.[10] The General Court Record reports multiple cases where the "wrong kind of Indian" was inadvertently sold into slavery
– because all
Native people looked alike to English eyes. Those who could not be sold were indistinguishable from those who could; the enemy was indistinguishable from the ally. As
the Court reflected, "It being difficult to Discern between Friends & Foes
... This Court doth order and appoint that ... such [Indians] as are not [abroad] are forthwith to return to their respective stations, as also such as are Sojourning within any of our Towns excepting only those who are constant dwellers in English Houses" (quoted O'Brien, Dispossession by Degrees 70; Mass Archive, 30: 315, 1689/90). The only way to protect friendly
Natives was to
imprison them. The bodily markers of difference operated only to distinguish "White" from "Red," not to signify degrees of political and cultural allegiance.
Gookin, in his Historical Account, is only one of many proponents of the
view that internment on Deer Island was a good thing for converted Native
people because confinement offered protection from violently hostile settlers
(485). Jean O'Brien explains that the term "Friend Indians," to signify allies,
was agreed between the English and the Mohawks who had been raiding "praying
Indians" since the 1660s. She describes how "[t]heir negotiations centered on
the problem of how to tell the difference between the two" (Dispossession by
Degrees 65). Mohawks, thinking militarily, would ask: "Why would 'Friend
Indians' require 'stockadoes' for protection? 'Friend Indians' resided 'in ye
woods,' not barricaded within a fortress in the shadow of English settlements"
(65); in contrast, English thinking was in terms of allies and the Council
specified four towns where "friends" lived: Natick, Punkapoag, Hassanamisco,
and Wamesit. O'Brien notes that "These Indian settlements carried English
implications about boundaries, and the sedentary organization of town
activities," unlike the Mohawk who had different ideas about where friends and
allies would be located (Dispossession by Degrees 66).
In discursive terms, the category of
the "indian," [AUTHOR QUERY: is this meant to be lower case? DM:
YES!!] to which enemies and allies of the English alike were subject, reduced all
Native people to the cultural binaries of civilization versus savagery. In these terms, all "Indians" were "savages" and of necessity excluded from the exceptional destiny of English America.
Placed under erasure as Native yet un-erasable as Christians, the rhetorical or
categorical immobility of the exception to which Christian Natives were subject
can be seen as the symbolic counterpoint to their material confinement –
in praying towns, in English garrisons, on Deer Island and Long Island –
and in the continuing restrictions on indigenous mobility, on Native
transmotion, imposed in the aftermath of Metacom's War.
Conclusion:
Transmotion, Survivance, and the Lessons of Deer Island
Harold
Van Lonkhuyzen highlights the profound consequences of immobilization or what
he calls the increasing "sedentarism" (412) of the New England tribes during
this period, a tendency that was accelerated under the influence of
missionaries like John Eliot: "sedentarism impeded mobility and disrupted
traditional subsistence cycles of food gathering and production" (412). In
addition to changing usages of the land through the abandonment of indigenous
forms of agriculture—and the changing material lifeways to which this
gave rise—converted Natives experienced changes in their ontological
orientation to the world. Among the examples that Van Lonkhuyzen offers is
fences, the impact of which he traces directly to missionary influence: "The
fences Eliot encouraged the Natick men to build simply could not be integrated
into the Indians' traditional ethos but instead required and simultaneously
reinforced a new one. Many other bands never made the significant change in
behavior and cognitive understanding such enclosures necessitated. Fences went
unbuilt; those that were, were not maintained" (413). We might recall here
Stone Columbus' proclamation: "The notion of sovereignty is not tied to the
earth, sovereignty is neither fence nor feathers" (Heirs of Columbus
67). The new tribal nation imagined at
Point Assinika is aligned with a vision of borderless sovereignty that exceeds
but does not deny territorial sovereignty: Stone Columbus continues, "The
essence of sovereignty is imaginative, an original tribal trope, communal and
spiritual, an idea that is more than metes and bounds in treaties" (67). Immobilization
in place, secured by the discourse of exceptionalism, works to oppose the
sovereignty of transmotion. Many scholars have addressed the ironic outcomes of
the acculturative efforts of Native people in this period; the effort to adapt
English social, judicial, and cultural structures to traditional tribal
practices in the interests of maintaining claims to land, but which resulted in
losses in terms of land and cultural practices, and sovereignty over both. In
the aftermath of the war, those survivors who escaped enslavement were
sequestrated in the four remaining "praying towns" that Salisbury describes as
"no longer havens for those making conscious commitments to Christianity; they
were reservations for an entire Native population" (1974, 54).
Reserved
and exceptional, the indigenous inhabitants of towns like Natick found, in the
decades following the war, that the material necessities of traditional tribal
life became increasingly scarce (such as deer and timber); in the 1680s the
first white settlers arrived on the Natick reserve; and Van Lonkhuyzen ventures
to guess that the practice of communal habitation was abandoned around 1700
(424). Over the following fifty years or so, whites came to occupy all the
offices of town government, Native languages fell into disuse, and rights to
common land were vested in family inheritance rather than communal membership
(Van Lonkhuyzen 423-427). In the state of exception, converted Natives were
immobilized discursively and territorially in place; while bounded and fenced
this space was not quarantined from the material impacts of the wider
settler-colonial environment. Consequently, the capacity of these Native
communities to create the conditions for an inheritable estate, a fundamental
aspect of survivance, were compromised (though not destroyed) along with the
denial of imaginative freedoms that constitute the sovereignty of transmotion.
The legacy of this history then is twofold: insight into the discursive workings of settler colonialism and the possibilities for indigenous resistance highlighted by Vizenor's concept of "transmotion":
"that sense of native motion and ... active presence, [which] is sui generis sovereignty" (Fugitive Poses 15). The
liminal discursive position of "exceptional" Native people during Metacom's War was materialized or symbolized by, but also enabled, their detention on Deer Island and elsewhere. The
very denial of
indigenous mobility highlights its crucial importance in the structure of settler
colonialism. As Niigonwedom Sinclair notes in the essay cited at the beginning of this
essay, transmotion in Vizenor's Anishinaabe conception "is the practical combination of perception and expression, thought and action, imagination and motion...Transmotion is not about giving up tribal identities, knowledges, and beliefs when you leave the imaginative world, but bringing them into being... It is this movement between imaginative and 'real' worlds that brings sovereignty into being" (145). It is perhaps to historical events such as Metacom's War that Vizenor responds in
his emphasis on
the symbolic importance of mobility as a fundamental aspect of Native sovereignty, an emphasis that
characterizes the imaginative and discursive sovereignty asserted by The
Constitution of the White Earth Nation. An emphasis on issues of territorial
treaty sovereignty risks the stasis of the exceptional, liminal figure of the "indian"—as the fate of the Deer Island "Indians" shows. In contrast, transmotion, an
indigenous understanding of mobility that brings together discursive and territorial practices of sovereignty makes possible a Native-specific, "sui generis" sovereignty.
NOTESNotes
1. Patrick Wolfe describes settler colonialism as a
structure that works in two dimensions: "Negatively, it strives for the
dissolution of native societies. Positively, it erects a new colonial society
on the expropriated land base" (388). Here, I focus on the negative dimension
of settler colonialism as it works to erase not only physical but also
conceptual traces of prior Native presence.
2. I am suggesting that the internment of Native
communities on Deer Island in 1675-76 is an early colonial instance of what
became the federally imposed Native "enclaves" that Vizenor references, for
example, in Wordarrows as reservations (82), and in Chair of Tears where
the museum enclaves (115) that exhibit Native subjects contrast with actual
Natives who are, significantly, "museums in motion" (116, emphasis
added), and in Earthdivers where he describes how "[t]he curse of racism
rules the ruinous institutions and federal enclaves where tribal people are
contained" (34).
3. In view of Vizenor's comprehensive critique of the
term "Indian," throughout I have used the term "praying Indians" where it is
used in the documentary record but the terms "converted Natives" and "Christian
Natives" in my own usage.
4. On the
erasure of Native people from the discourse of modernity in general and the
colonial New England discourse of nation-building in particular, see Jean
O'Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New
England (2010).
5. See John Easton, "A Relation of the
Indian War" (1675) in A Narrative of the Causes which led to Philip's Indian
War of 1675 and 1676, ed. Franklin B. Hough, 1-31. See also Neal
Salisbury's introduction to his edition of Mary Rowlandson's The Sovereignty
and Goodness of God, and Yasuhide Kawashima's compelling account of the
aggressive extension of legal jurisdiction by Plymouth Colony, which shifted
discursive relations between settlers and indigenous peoples in the direction
of war, in Igniting King Philip's War (2001).
6. On the
central discursive importance of the federal covenant to proto-national identity,
see Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (1975).
7.
In reference to settler opposition to the establishment of praying towns,
Salisbury observes: "The most intransigent opposition came from the residents
of Marlborough, whose conflict with the praying town of Okommakamesit,
immediately adjoining, persisted into King Philip's War" (1974, 40).
8. Edward
Randolph was sent to New England as an emissary of King James II to report on
the extent of the losses occasioned by the conflict. In 1685 he reported: "No
advantage but many disadvantages have arisen to the English by the warre, for
about 600 men have been slaine, and 12 captains, most of them brave and stout
persons and of loyal principles, whilest the church members had liberty to stay
at home and not hazard their persons in the wildernesse.
The
losse to the English in the severall colonies, in their habitations and stock,
is reckoned to amount to [£]150,000/ there having been about 1200 houses
burned, 8000 head of cattle, great and small, killed, and many thousand bushels
of wheat, pease and other grain burned (of which the Massachusets colony hath
not been damnifyed one third part, the great losse falling upon New Plymouth
and Connecticot colonies) and upward of 3000 Indians men women and children
destroyed, who if well managed would have been very serviceable to the English,
which makes all manner of labour dear" (460). Benjamin Trumbull, in his History of Connecticut
(1818; I. 351) notes that "All the buildings in Narraganset, from Providence to
Stonington, a tract of about 50 miles, were burned, or otherwise destroyed"
(editorial note; Gookin, Historical Account, 437n).
9. See Mark Rifkin's essay in which he offers a
revision of Agamben's concept of the state of exception from three
perspectives: "the persistent inside/outside tropology he uses to address the
exception, specifically the ways it serves as a metaphor divorced from
territoriality; the notion of 'bare life' as the basis of the exception,
especially the individualizing ways that he uses that concept; and the implicit
depiction of sovereignty as a self-confident exercise of authority free from
anxiety over the legitimacy of state actions" (90).
10. We might recall here Samson Occom's similar
recognition at the end of his Short Narrative of my Life (1768) that
although he exercised imaginative transmotion, moving between Mohegan and
English cultural worlds, still he was confronted with the daily racism of white
supremacy. Occom concludested, "I must Say, I believe it is because I am a poor
Indian. I can't help that God has made me So; I did not make myself So.–"
(Collected Writings, 58).
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archived URL for this article will be available 21 December 2014. DM: above I
have replaced the URL with the stable updated URL. EDITOR QUERY (from
copyeditor): not sure whether to leave this in. I've taken out other urls in
accordance with MLA style guides, but it seems like the author might want this
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given at
http://plato.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/encyclopedia/archinfo.cgi?entry=schmitt]
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