Coerced Migration, Migrating Rhetoric: The ‘Forked Tongue’ of Native American Removal Policy in the Nineteenth-Century United States
Coerced Migration, Migrating Rhetoric: The ‘Forked Tongue’ of Native American Removal Policy in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Author(s): Estella Ciobanu
Subject(s): Geography, Regional studies, Social differentiation, Studies in violence and power, 19th Century, Migration Studies
Published by: Transnational Press London
Keywords: migrations; coerced migration; rhetoric; USA; 19th century; native american removal policy;
Summary/Abstract: It cannot be overstated how condescending the I/father–you/my children dichotomy sounds. (Neither the ‘Friends & Brothers’ interpellation nor the spurious ‘your father and friend’ self-identification nor the euphemistic ‘advises’ can mitigate its hierarchical thrust.) Some modern readers may not find such paternalism offensive, thanks to their regular congress with the clergy, whose discursive subject position is traditionally that of a (spiritual) father – the self-styled vicar (vicarius, ‘substitute’) of God the Father. President Jackson assumes here a comparable lordly position, yet one endorsed, he claims, from heaven (the deity) to earth (white male ballot). Claims to the natives’ land had long been sounded as an authority-related argumentum by verecundiam in appeals by European settlers to the charts issued by their monarchs as enforcers of Christianity, hence allegedly of God’s will. Granted that the differential governmental traditions and the European ruse – we have a chart to support our claim to your land; can you produce yours? – must have taken the natives by surprise. But did the ruse appear to them as the Great Spirit’s hand? Decidedly not.

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