In the early years of the republic, the United States government
negotiated with Indian nations because it could not afford
protracted wars politically, militarily, or economically. Maureen
Konkle argues that by depending on treaties, which rest on the
equal standing of all signatories, Europeans in North America
institutionalized a paradox: the very documents through which they
sought to dispossess Native peoples in fact conceded Native
autonomy.
As the United States used coerced treaties to remove Native peoples
from their lands, a group of Cherokee, Pequot, Ojibwe, Tuscarora,
and Seneca writers spoke out. With history, polemic, and personal
narrative these writers countered widespread misrepresentations
about Native peoples' supposedly primitive nature, their inherent
inability to form governments, and their impending disappearance.
Furthermore, they contended that arguments about racial difference
merely justified oppression and dispossession; deriding these
arguments as willful attempts to evade the true meanings and
implications of the treaties, the writers insisted on recognition
of Native peoples' political autonomy and human equality. Konkle
demonstrates that these struggles over the meaning of U.S.-Native
treaties in the early nineteenth century led to the emergence of
the first substantial body of Native writing in English and, as she
shows, the effects of the struggle over the political status of
Native peoples remain embedded in contemporary scholarship.