No Man’s Land: Indigenous Sovereignty Across the 49th Parallel

The official process of Native removal was accompanied by the development of ideas and concepts about removal. American writers, critics, and commentators – those both sympathetic to the “plight of the Indian” and not – routinely advanced justifications for the expropriation of Native territory. In this presentation, I will address three of the most pernicious arguments in American letters from the British American colonial period to the mid-nineteenth century: the myth of the ‘vanishing’ Native, the myth of ‘landlessness,’ and the myth of the Native-woman-as-drudge. A number of writers have identified the obvious bias within these concepts for white metrics and attitudes towards civilization as both an abstract concept, a frame for viewing history, and a Euro-American reality. What has gone underdiscussed, however, is the close interrelationship of these ideas when it comes to land and its proper, ‘productive’ use – particularly how all three cast Native people as so deficient that, as Lewis Henry Morgan, they were the ‘zero of civilization.’

This presentation begins with a critical analysis of these justifications for removal. It then applies this analytical framing in an unlikely context: the Northwest War. Waged between the U.S. Army and the “United Indian Nations,” or Northwest Confederacy, this war involved, on one hand, the tacit recognition of Native territorial claims on the part of the United States, and on the other, the military defense of those claims on the part of a combined Native political entity. Yet even here, in the context of a military engagement, ideological justifications operated in white society to undermine claims to the territory the Confederacy was actively defending. The wardens of the Ohio Territory were seen to be both territorial guards and landless; to be historically doomed and a powerfully vital force.