Pen and Ink Witchcraft
Pen and Ink Witchcraft
TREATIES AND TREATY MAKING IN AMERICAN INDIAN HISTORY
Colin G. Calloway
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Calloway, Colin G. (Colin Gordon), 1953-
Pen and ink witchcraft : treaties and treaty making in American Indian history / Colin G. Calloway.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–19–991730–3 (alk. paper)
1. Indians of North America—Treaties. I. Title.
KF8205.C35 2013
346.7301’3–dc23
2012045536
ISBN 978–0-19–991730–3
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
“that pen and ink witch-craft, which they can make speak things we
never intended, or had any idea of, even an hundred years hence; just as
they please.”—the Ottawa chief Egushawa in council on the banks of
the Ottawa River, 1791
“Nations that deserve the Title of Treaty breakers, that are not to
be bound by the most solemn Covenants, but break the chain of
Friendship, will soon fall into Contempt.”—Governor James Glen of
South Carolina to the Six Nations, 1755
To Marcia, Graeme, and Meg
{ CONTENTS }
Acknowledgments and a Note on Terminology
Introduction
1. Treaty Making in Colonial America: The Many Languages of Indian Diplomacy
2. Fort Stanwix, 1768: Shifting Boundaries
3. Treaty Making, American-Style
4. New Echota, 1835: Implementing Removal
5. Treaty Making in the West
6. Medicine Lodge, 1867: Containment on the Plains
Conclusion: The Death and Rebirth of Indian Treaties
Appendix: The Treaties
Notes
Bibliography
Index
{ ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND A NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY }
Anyone doing Indian history has to take account of Indian treaties. I began reading them nearly forty years ago, as a graduate student poring over the manuscript records of innumerable Indian councils in the British Museum and the Public Records Office (now the National Archives) in London. But many scholars have thought about treaties, … talked about them, and written about them long before I took on this project. In addition to those whom I have cited in the notes and bibliography, an incomplete list of individuals I remember talking with, listening to, and learning from over the years must include N. Bruce Duthu, the late William N. Fenton and the late Francis Jennings, Laurence M. Hauptman, Frederick E. Hoxie, Francis Paul Prucha, K. Tsianina Lomawaima, Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark, the late Helen Hornbeck Tanner, Dale Turner, Jace Weaver, and David Wilkins. They and other friends and scholars fueled my interest in Indian treaties at one time or another even if they didn’t know it, although they bear no responsibility for this book.
A few had more direct influence. William Campbell and I found ourselves studying the Treaty of Fort Stanwix at about the same time; for Bill it was the core of his dissertation—now his first book—and for me it was a story that had to be told in the book I was envisioning. I am grateful to Bill for sharing his manuscript with me and for reading my chapter on Stanwix. I am indebted to Theda Perdue for reading and commenting on the chapter on New Echota. Not for the first time (and I’m sure not for the last) I called on my good friend and colleague Bruce Duthu to cast his expert eye over what I had to say about treaties in modern America. I would not have found Howling Wolf’s drawing of the Medicine Lodge treaty council without Joyce M. Szabo, and Sharon Muhlfeld first provided me, many years ago, with the original reference for the pen and ink witchcraft quotation. Ned Blackhawk and a second, anonymous, reviewer carefully read the manuscript for Oxford University Press and provided thoughtful comments and insightful suggestions that helped me to bring out the story more effectively.
In completing the research for this book, I benefited enormously from the assistance of good staff members at the Baker/Berry Library and Rauner Library of Dartmouth College; at the National Archives at College Park, Maryland; and at the Manuscripts and Archives Division of the New York Public Library. For assistance in acquiring illustrations and sometimes other materials, I am grateful to Josh Shaw at Rauner Library; Bridgeman Art Library International–New York; Chicago History Museum; Washington State Historical Society; Library and Archives, Canada; Pennsylvania Historical Society; New-York Historical Society; New York State Library; Oklahoma Historical Society; University of Oklahoma Western History Collections; History Colorado (the Colorado Historical Society); and the National Anthropological Archives and Human Studies Film Archives of the Smithsonian Institution.
As in all my writing and teaching, I use the terms “Native American” and “Indian” interchangeably. I also use “tribe” and “nation” interchangeably when describing Native American tribal nations, and I do not mean to suggest that they are either less than or the same as nation-states. I recognize that the tribal names that appear in historic records and later histories often reflect other people’s names for the nations in question, not the names the people used to identify themselves, and sometimes not the preferred names today. However, though respectful to the peoples involved, replacing anglicized names with the tribes’ own names causes other problems. Many readers might recognize Haudenosaunee as a more appropriate term for the Iroquois, and some might recognize Kanien’kehaka as Mohawk, but applying this practice consistently to every Indian nation mentioned in the book would confront readers with a bewildering array of unfamiliar terms. For this reason, I suspect, Taiaiake Alfred replaces Mohawk with Kanien’kehaka as the appropriate name for his own nation, but he continues to use anglicized names like Sioux, Cheyenne, and Cherokee when referring to other people.1 Rather than privileging just a few tribes with their own names, I have opted for consistency, using the anglicized names more familiar to most readers, except in cases like Dakota and Lakota, which are not only commonly recognized but also specify particular divisions of the Sioux.
Pen and Ink Witchcraft
&nb
sp; { Introduction }
In the summer of 1701, 1,300 Indians descended on Montreal, a town with slightly more than one thousand inhabitants. The Indians came from nearly forty separate nations, from as far away as Acadia in the East and the Mississippi in the West. Many of them traveled months to get there. A dozen years earlier, a huge Iroquois war party had destroyed the nearby settlement of La Chine, killing or capturing one hundred people. But the Indians who flocked to Montreal in 1701 came to talk, not to fight.
The Great Peace of Montreal, as it came to be known, was an international summit meeting, the culmination of years of negotiations. After decades of recurrent conflict with the French and their Native allies, the Five Nations that composed the Iroquois League—the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas—faced a demographic crisis. War and disease had scythed their populations, and they needed peace.1 So did the French and the Indian nations who allied with them. An Onondaga chief named Teganissorens had begun exploring paths to peace after a French army destroyed three Mohawk towns in 1693, and his shuttle diplomacy between Onondaga, Albany, and Quebec had slowly built momentum. For almost three weeks in the summer of 1701 Montreal was the stage for a brand of political theater that played out time and again in North America over the course of three centuries as Europeans and Indians engaged in rituals of diplomacy, exchanged lengthy speeches in formal councils, and hammered out deals in private meetings.2 In between the negotiations, Montreal resembled a Bruegel painting, brimming with human activity, as delegates came and went, visiting, feasting, wandering the streets, looking in stores, and trading goods and stories. Indian men, women, and children, speaking dozens of different languages and wearing distinctive hairstyles, body tattoos, and clothing, found themselves rubbing shoulders with French soldiers and colonists, donning French hats and coats, and sampling French food. In the final peace treaty signed on August 4, the various nations agreed to bury the hatchet, consider each other friends, and recognize the French governor as the mediator in disputes. The western tribes allowed the Iroquois to share hunting territories north of Lake Ontario and west of Detroit, and the Iroquois agreed to allow France’s Indian allies access to trade at Albany. Iroquois delegates in Albany also made a new alliance with the English. The Iroquois secured a pivotal position in the international relations of eastern North America and essentially embarked on a new foreign policy, assuming a neutral role in the escalating conflict between Britain and France. It was always an imperfect neutrality—Mohawks regularly fought alongside the English, and Senecas often sided with the French—but it enabled the Iroquois to recover from the crippling losses of the previous century and to sustain their position as the major Native power in the Northeast in the next century.3
Not all Indian treaty councils were as big, dramatic, or far-reaching in their influence as the Great Peace of Montreal. But some were, and all of these meetings were human and cultural encounters that were hugely important to both the Indian people who participated in them and those who did not participate but whose lives were nonetheless affected by those who did and the documents they signed.
Narratives of American history emphasize the bloody series of wars with indigenous peoples that marked European colonization of North America and the westward expansion of the United States. But colonization and expansion were also marked by a series of treaties with Indian peoples. Wars and treaties—violence and law—worked hand in hand in taking America from the Indians. Although Indians sold land to individual colonists or groups of colonists, governments tried to curb the practice and treaties became the primary instruments by which an Indian continent passed into non-Indian hands, and tribal homelands were transformed into real estate. Treaties functioned as stepping-stones of empire. They enabled colonists to establish a foothold on the continent, colonies to expand their domains, and the United States to march westward, one chunk of territory after another. In treaty after treaty, Indian people were coerced, deceived, manipulated, and misled into giving up their lands in return for pittances and promises that more often than not proved empty. In treaty after treaty, Europeans and Americans produced documents that they utilized to justify, codify, and perpetuate their acquisition and occupation of America. When the imperial or federal government tried to protect Indians and their lands from fraud and dispossession, colonial and state governments, land companies, and speculators often undermined their efforts, making treaties and land deals of their own. Indian leaders understood that the words spoken in treaty councils, translated, transmitted to writing, and recorded on paper had the power to take away their lands and their rights. They called the process “pen and ink witchcraft.”4
Indians participated in the pen and witchcraft process by putting pen to paper, signing their agreements usually by marking an x next to or below their names. As the Ojibwe/Dakota scholar Scott Lyons explains, “An x-mark is a sign of consent in a context of coercion; it is the agreement one makes when there seems to be little choice in the matter. To the extent that little choice isn’t quite the same thing as no choice, it signifies Indian agency.”5 Nevertheless, the notion that Indian negotiators were invariably naïve, gullible, and befuddled by legal language or drink does not gibe with the evidence regarding Indian presence and participation that emerges from the records of treaty negotiations. Confronted by duplicitous dealings, divide-and-rule tactics, the arrogance of power, and threats of starvation and destruction, Indians frequently spoke out forcefully, matched their colonizing counterparts in diplomatic savvy, and shaped the outcome of negotiations as they tried, literally, to hold their ground. Sometimes they employed negotiations and treaties to preserve their lands and postpone dispossession. Confronted by hard choices, Indian delegates often knew exactly what they were doing and what the consequences of their decisions were likely to be. And after the treaties were made, they remembered what they had done, protested against abuses of the treaties they had made, lobbied hard to have treaties honored or overturned, and, finally, fought for their treaty rights in the “courts of the conqueror.”6 Early treaties that revolved around trade and required Indian cooperation were more often agreements between equals than were later treaties that revolved around land and required Indian dispossession. When the Mohawks opened their territory to Dutch traders early in the seventeenth century, they negotiated a pact of peace and friendship. The metaphor for the relationship was embodied in the Gus-Wen-Tah or Kaswentha, a two-row wampum belt: a background of white beads linked the Mohawks and Dutch in peace, while parallel rows of purple beads represented them traveling the same river side by side but each group in its own boat, forever separate and equal as autonomous nations.7 As time went on, power relations became increasingly lopsided. The contradictions, flagrant abuses, and hypocrisies in treaty making became glaringly apparent when the United States adapted and applied processes and procedures developed in the colonial era to fuel national expansion with the rapid acquisition of Native lands. Tracing the evolution, application, abolition, and resurgence of treaties illuminates shifts in power, changing attitudes about the place of Indian people in American society, and contested ideas about indigenous rights in a modern constitutional democracy. Treaties are a barometer of Indian-white relations in North America.
Europeans claimed America by the right of discovery. Rights of discovery, Europeans agreed, gave them first claim against other Europeans, although, of course, they frequently and fiercely contested each other’s claims. They established claims to territory by planting standards, making speeches, and acting out other rituals of possession, often in the presence of bemused Native people they had assembled to bear witness to the event.8 At Sault Ste. Marie in 1671, for instance, amid music and pageantry and with four Jesuit priests and delegates from fourteen Indian nations in attendance, the French announced that Louis XIV was taking possession of the entire Mississippi Valley, an area the size of the Indian subcontinent. It was a fiction, of course—France lacked any real power in the area and depended on a network of Indian allianc
es and recurrent local rituals to build and sustain its western empire—but the purpose of the ceremony was to exclude the English rather than to establish an actual French presence.9 European powers invoked the doctrine of discovery to claim that Christian nations that discovered new lands gained property rights over such lands and could assert sovereignty over the indigenous people living there. Europeans justified taking the lands of indigenous people according to their own colonizing rule of law, which was grounded in medieval discourses of conquest, and they felt free to transfer their claims to other powers without consulting the territory’s indigenous inhabitants.10
In the colonial era, Indians made treaties with the French, Dutch, Spaniards, British, and various British colonies. Roger Williams declared in 1630 that Europeans could justly occupy lands in America “only by purchasing those lands from their rightful owners, the Indians” (an opinion that got him into hot water with the authorities in Massachusetts Bay Colony), but individuals and groups who purchased land from Indian people in private transactions and deeds often employed fraudulent practices. They threatened violence, designated “chiefs” to act for the tribe, plied Natives with alcohol, forged signatures, mistranslated terms, misrepresented boundaries, and often furnished shoddy trade goods in exchange for the lands they acquired. Colonial governments struggled to regulate or prohibit any private purchases and the question of whether individuals had the right to buy Indian lands remained a recurrent issue. Events in the 1760s initiated a new era of treaty relations that brought to the fore tensions—between local interests and imperial or national authority, as well as between Indians and white settlers—that characterized treaty making and treaty maintenance for generations to follow. At the end of the so-called French and Indian Wars in 1763, France relinquished its North American territory, handing over everything east of the Mississippi to Britain and its possessions west of the Mississippi to Spain. Confronted with a vast new empire to administer, the British colonial government tried to control the process of acquiring Indian land by establishing formal treaties between Indian tribes and the Crown’s representatives as the legal means of doing so. Twenty years and a revolution later, Britain ceded all its territory south of the Great Lakes, east of the Mississippi, and north of Florida to the United States, and the government of this new nation set about obtaining full title to the territory in much the same way. The federal government claimed the sole right to acquire Indian lands, which became part of the public domain, and it then re-sold land to American citizens. Transactions carried out by land companies and individual speculators, sometimes in defiance of imperial or federal laws and regulations, were sometimes designated as “treaties,” but formal treaties between sovereigns were the legal basis for acquiring most Indian land in America.11
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