ELH

"In One Word": Boudinot's Treason

Elias Boudinot is a critical stumbling block. On the one hand, his writings as editor of the Cherokee Phoenix—the first bilingual American Indian newspaper—in the years leading up to Cherokee removal establish him as a foremost Cherokee intellectual and, since the word was important to his self-understanding, patriot. On the other hand, his admiration for the United States as a model for culture and government, his Christianity, his belief that civilization grows from savagery to civility, and his disdain for any definition of Native culture that might include traditional practices or beliefs has caused him to be seen as a tragic figure caught between conflicting cultural values. Finally, his signature on the Treaty of New Echota, which set the stage for the "Trail of Tears," and his execution by his countrymen for treason against the Cherokee Nation, has branded him a traitor. Boudinot was a Christian of mixed white and Indian descent, educated in missionary schools in the Cherokee Nation and in Connecticut. For Boudinot and many others of his class, Cherokee civilization meant turning away from older cultural and governmental structures and modeling the Cherokee Nation after the United States.² However, during his four-and-a-half-year tenure as editor, Boudinot's [End Page 151] admiration for the United States went hand in hand with his efforts to protect the Cherokee Nation against U.S. incursions into land and political autonomy. As editor, Boudinot stood publicly against removal to lands across the Mississippi. But in 1831 and 1832, while away on a fundraising trip around the United States, he changed his mind. It is that change of mind, that momentous turn in support of removal, which interests me here.

After he returned to the Cherokee Nation from the United States, in July of 1832, Boudinot signed his name to a petition circulated among Cherokees calling for removal. He wanted to use the Cherokee Phoenix as a platform for explaining and arguing his new opinion. Principal Chief John Ross insisted that Boudinot refrain from publishing pro-removal arguments, and in response Boudinot resigned as editor. The passage I have taken as an epigraph comes from Boudinot's defense of his changed opinion, which he expressed in a letter written to the Phoenix after his resignation. The newspaper—under new editorship—refused to publish the letter, thus answering with silence Boudinot's query: "May I not, with a patriotism true and commendable, make a question?" The question was whether or not removal was now the only option and should therefore be embraced. The letter was not printed and the question remained, for a long time, unasked in a public forum.

The Cherokee Phoenix was intended to help reinvent the Cherokees as a literate nation with written laws and an educated populace that considers itself a citizenry. In 1827 Boudinot and others involved in the founding of the paper drew up a prospectus for the Phoenix. Its goals were to print:

1. 1. The laws and public documents of the nation.

2. 2. Accounts of the manners and customs of the Cherokees, and their progress in education, religion, and the arts of civilized life, with such notices of other Indian tribes as our limited means of information will allow.

3. 3. The principal interesting news of the day.

4. 4. Miscellaneous articles, calculated to promote literature, civilization, and religion among the Cherokees.³

It is a list that differentiates nation and its printable effects from manners, customs, progress, education, religion, the arts, literature, and civilization. The list argues that nationhood is a constant, founded in law and documentation, and that everything else about Cherokeeness is progressing—removing—away from one formation of culture and [End Page 152] toward another. The Cherokee Phoenix, in other words, was an agent of one kind of removal—from savagery to civilization—but not of another kind—physical removal, away from the Cherokee homeland to the lands west of the Mississippi known as Indian Country. As Boudinot himself wrote in his first editorial for the Phoenix: "Sufficient and repeated evidence has been given, that Indians can be reclaimed from a savage state, and that with proper advantages, they are as capable of improvement in mind as any other people; and let it be remembered, notwithstanding the assertions of those who talk to the contrary, that this improvement can be made, not only by the Cherokees, but by all the Indians, in their present locations."⁴ The ability of "all the Indians" to remove from "a savage state" to a civilized one is intended to prove that a shift in cultural statehood does not necessitate a shift in geographical statehood. But once Boudinot changes his mind, his "question for the safety of the remaining object of my affection" dispenses with such fantastical constructs as culture and nation. The Phoenix's mandate divided nation from culture in the pages of the newspaper, but now Boudinot wants to use that newspaper to promote the division of bodies from land. The people, he argues after changing his mind, are a constant. Land is fungible.

Boudinot's unacceptable desire to ask this question in the paper entangles the purpose of the newspaper itself. Benedict Anderson argues that a newspaper, as a tool of national invention, is remarkable for its serial publication, its resemblance to the narrative structures of fiction, and for its planned obsolescence:

The sign for this: if Mali disappears from the pages of The New York Times after two days of famine reportage, for months on end, readers do not for a moment imagine that Mali has disappeared or that famine has wiped out all its citizens. The novelistic format of the newspaper assures them that somewhere out there the "character" Mali moves along quietly, awaiting its next reappearance in the plot.⁵

The Cherokee Phoenix troubles the complacencies of this argument, namely, the assurance that little countries don't disappear, that entire populations aren't regularly wiped out by famine, disease, or violence, and that it would be ridiculous to think a country's survival depends on newspaper coverage. Rather than pushing a powerful nation, of and upon which it is the recorder and commentator, forward peacefully across "homogenous empty time," the Phoenix was intended to quite literally give the Nation rebirth, marking and reproducing an inaugural moment.⁶ Whether the Phoenix assumes a single rebirth of the [End Page 153] Cherokee Nation from the ashes, or, as with the mythical phoenixes after which it is named, a cycle of destruction and reinvention, the Cherokee world that the Phoenix recorded and invented was hardly ambling "sturdily ahead" between printings.⁷ The Nation was facing removal, and Cherokees were having to imagine what it might mean to continue as Cherokee once the land that structured traditional culture was gone. In this context, Anderson's dismissive joke about what can happen between one mention in the paper and the next—that "Mali has disappeared or that famine has wiped out all its citizens"—is no laughing matter. The disappearance of the land and the complete destruction of the people is exactly Boudinot's concern. If the land disappears, the people remain, but if the people are killed, the land will disappear, "and there," he dryly reminds his readers, "must be an end of the objects of our patriotism."

Boudinot calls his argument—that the Cherokees should agree to be set adrift from their land-base— a "question." This is important because unlike a straightforward argument, a question suggests an answer deferred to a future point of articulation. Boudinot asks if Cherokee land should perhaps disappear between one printing of the Phoenix and the next. "May I not," he asks, "with a patriotism true and commendable, make a question for the safety of the remaining object of my affection?" He neatly palms the disappearance of Cherokee land between one printing of the Phoenix and the next, between call and response. If a question is posed this week (shall we remove?) and answered the next (we've already gone!), then the seriality of the newspaper has carried the nation across the gap. The physical disappearance of the nation that Anderson so lightly conjures occurs in the twinkling of an eye, but the mass-death that is, in Anderson's formulation, disappearance's correlative is neatly avoided. Or so Boudinot imagined.

The call received a response, but it was one that stopped the presses for Boudinot; he was silenced and disappeared from the newspaper altogether. Then, on 29 December 1835, he signed a document much more active than a petition and more final than a newspaper editorial. The Treaty of New Echota, which bears twenty Cherokee signatures, among them Boudinot's, actually signed away the Cherokee homeland, and did so without the consent of the Cherokee National Council, Principal Chief John Ross, or the Cherokee people. The Treaty aided the process of removal and helped justify it in the United States. Boudinot's signature on the Treaty is the opposite of asking whether he can "make a question." Rather than staging a rhetorical question in order to draw a narrative line across disappearance as he imagines [End Page 154] a newspaper might, this signature destroys one narrative and founds another. It also stands as the moment of treason. As such the signature invented the "traitorous Boudinot," who has become such an object of fascination, and set in motion the events that would, among other things, lead to Boudinot's execution and thereby to the invention of the "tragic Boudinot." His "signature invents the signer," à la Jacques Derrida: "This signer can only authorize him- or herself to sign once he or she has come to the end [parvenu au vout], if one can say this, of his or her own signature, in a sort of fabulous retroactivity."⁸ Before the signature on the Treaty, Boudinot had changed his mind, a fact that, without the Treaty signature, would have been merely unfortunate, rather than devastating, for his reputation. He had asked, in a telescopic set of demurrals, if he could ask a question he'd already asked, and ask it in a forum—the newspaper—peculiar for its instant obsolescence and therefore for the non-fixity of the opinions stated in its pages. But with the signature, Boudinot is produced retroactively as a self, a man who would, did, and had become a traitor. The moment of Boudinot's question as a question is undone by his signature—a signature here acting to cancel any priority, any possible alternative, even any complexity. Boudinot becomes a retroactive if confusing self—a traitor or a tragic figure—and, in fact, disappears into that appellation. Boudinot's question—and the fact that he did question, had questioned, will have questioned—indeed the fact that he changed ossifies here into his (tragic?) treason.

Derrida's assertion that "the signature invents the signer" comes from his discussion of the United States Declaration of Independence. The Treaty of New Echota is a photonegative of the Declaration. The Treaty's signers were acting illegally not against the colonial power but against the people whom they wanted to save/invent as a nation from that colonial power, the same people whom they took it upon themselves to represent in signing the Treaty. The new legality they founded in the act of signing was the legality of the colonial power and the illegality of the colonized, rather than vice versa. They were signing the Cherokees further away from geographical and political independence and closer to complete legal and geographical ingestion by the colonial power. The Treaty is nevertheless like the Declaration because, in its interstitial relationship to competing legal paradigms and the power of its so-called representative signatures, it is foundational of a new order, and Boudinot's signature on it fixes him to that new order. He is no longer in the changeable but eternally continuous realm of national reiteration through question-and-answer. He has put his name at a moment of rupture. [End Page 155]

The Treaty signature, for all that it ultimately condemned Boudinot, did not spell the end of the 1832 unpublished letter. It turned the letter expatriate and defensive. The letter finally appeared in print in 1837, but not in a Cherokee newspaper. It was printed in a collection of Boudinot's writings aimed specifically against the Principal Chief, entitled "Letters and Other Papers Relating to Cherokee Affairs: Being a Reply to Sundry Publications Authorized by John Ross" and published under the aegis of a white publisher in Athens in the Creek Nation/Georgia. The compilation spoke against the cause of the Cherokees remaining in the southeast, and as such it was taken up by the United States government in its defense of removal and became public record in the United States as Senate Document 121, 25th Congress, 2nd session.⁹ By the time it appeared in the United States press the question that was never published in the Phoenix read as a defense of Boudinot's answer to that same question: the Treaty signature. The letter is transformed from a document suppressed by the Cherokee government to a document gathered to the bosom of the United States government, from a question framed for the consideration of the Cherokee public to an answer provided for the American public. A few months later, in the summer of 1838 the Cherokees were under forced march. More than 4,000 would die. On 22 June 1839, Boudinot was executed for his treasonous, illegal signature by fellow Cherokees in a surprise attack near his new home in the new Cherokee Nation.

Why did he do it? Why did he change his mind, why did he sign the Treaty? These tempting, immediately available questions adhere persistently to studies of Boudinot. Two foremost scholars of Boudinot's life and work, Bernd Peyer and Theda Perdue, each position Boudinot's life and death as emblematic of a colonial subjectivity torn between U.S. and Cherokee cultures. Peyer allows the weight of the struggle to rest in the societies at large, suggesting that Boudinot's "tragic fate . . . well illustrates the vicissitudes of transcultural experience in a colonial situation."¹⁰ Perdue puts the blame more squarely in Boudinot's lap, though she still blames colonization: "Elias Boudinot was a tragic figure not just because he made a serious error in judgment or because he paid the ultimate price, but because he could not accept his people, his heritage, or himself. He was the product of colonization, and his thoughts and deeds may well tell us as much about our own culture as about nineteenth-century Cherokees."¹¹ Perdue and Peyer both call Boudinot "tragic," and Perdue means it technically, building her claim on an implicitly Aristotelian definition of tragedy. The hero [End Page 156] (Boudinot) is neither inherently good nor evil (he is a divided figure, devoted to the Cherokees and also to "civilization"). He falls from a great social height (he is upper class, mixed-race, educated, and an influential newspaper editor) due to a shattering outside event beyond his control (the pre-removal legal and military actions of Georgia and the United States). His own subsequent hamartia, or bad judgment (the signature), wreaks havoc on both himself and all those he holds dear (he is executed, and 4,000 die on the "Trail of Tears"). The audience (Perdue's "our own culture" as opposed to her "nineteenth-century Cherokees") is moved to fear and pity, and experiences catharsis, or cleansing (we are absolved of Boudinot's failure through our understanding of his death as narratively justified and illustrative of the evils of cultural assimilation and political treason). Undoubtedly Boudinot, as the genetic, religious, intellectual, and cultural product of the colonial conflicts between Great Britain, the United States, and the Cherokee Nation, can be read as inhabiting the "wretched," to use Frantz Fanon's titular term, position of the colonized subject. Certainly Boudinot the writer, the asker of questions, the signer of treaties, can be seen as the exemplar of the "colonized who need to be produced in such a manner as to justify colonial domination, and to beg for the English book by themselves."¹² But the problem with the "tragic" model offered by Peyer and Purdue, and with it its twin, the "traitor" model, lies in its valorization of the individual as existing in subjugation and/or resistance to a largely exterior cultural conflict, which deeply affects and molds the individual but is in essential opposition to him or her. The individual can fail at the attempt to straddle an impossible "transcultural experience," or he can be "produc[ed]" by the wrong culture and therefore tragically fail to understand his true self, which, if it is un-produced, may even be natural. In any case, the individual fails to do the right thing, and that failure is reserved for the individual; it defines him. It is blamed on culture but in the end it belongs to the individual who, however much he may be corrupted or conflicted by culture, is in the final instance not of culture.

But is the alternative to these conflicted-by-culture tragedy/traitor narratives that adhere so persistently to Boudinot simply the argument that he was the product of his culture? A Foucauldian reading would allow us to absolve Boudinot of his tragic treason but of course such a reading also absolves us of Boudinot altogether, whether oppressed or oppressing. Michel Foucault argues that "[p]ower is not exercised simply as an obligation or a prohibition on those who 'do not have it'; it invests them, is transmitted by them and through them; it exerts [End Page 157] pressure upon them, just as they themselves, in their struggle against it, resist the grip it has on them."¹³ It is tempting and, to a large extent, useful to allow Boudinot, his change, and the actions precipitated by that change, to become a sort of cultural "transmission" of which the man himself is merely a relay. But David Murray, through a reading of sections of Foucault's The History of Sexuality, explains succinctly that Foucault has a limited use for the study of Native American literatures and cultures:

Even if we accept Foucault's argument that, as Peter Dews has paraphrased it, "any theory of sovereignty or self-determination must be abandoned, since the 'free subject' upon which such theories rely is in fact intrinsically heteronymous, constituted by power," it is not easy to see what we replace the old critical notion of subjectivity with. . . . [T]he idea of dialogue and even of presence has been seen as having special relevance to those groups denied any specific identity within the dominant discourses, for whom the whole proposition of a dominant discourse, without a corresponding idea of conflict and change, can be seen as itself only the latest and most insidious intellectual product of that dominance. As Arnold Krupat says, "it is no accident that those of us who work with hitherto marginalized materials show a certain reluctance to give up the voice in favor of the text as recently defined."¹⁴

Having met Foucault's concept of the text, in which the question of where the individual stands cedes to the radical non-differentiation of power relations, with the assertion of the continuing if troubled importance of "voice," Murray nonetheless critiques the quest for the heroic or tragic individual. He does not invoke Krupat's category of "voice" as a straight-up answer, but rather as an instrumental critical gambit. Voice, for Murray, is a temporary critical proposition that might allow us to move forward but which can be disposed of as a category once we have moved on. To give it a mathematical analogue, voice might be understood as the equivalent to the square root of negative zero, which is a non-existent, fantastical number, but inserting it into certain equations allows problem solving that is otherwise impossible. Murray explains that Krupat

is aware as anybody that "the writer is never present and that nonpresence cannot literally speak." Nevertheless he wants to retain the metaphor of author as speaker as "a willed line of informed approach." My own approach is similar, and tries to build in a recognition of the collaborative, and sometimes resisting, role of reading in the creation of this voice, which in this case means being aware of the impossibility of finally pinning down any historical figure's "real" voice.¹⁵ [End Page 158]

If Perdue and Peyer were invested in securing the "real" of Boudinot's voice through answering why he changed, Murray precisely emphasizes the critical impossibility of securing a "real" voice at all. Murray's complicated proposal allows for voice as a metaphorical, phantasmal category; that spectral voice allows him to pursue lines of inquiry that can represent resistance in complicity, creating a loophole that avoids the problems of the retroactive traitor, the endlessly tragic Indian, and the seemingly opposite but related Foucauldian rejection of the transformative power of personal agency. Such an approach might ignore Boudinot's change of opinion in favor of seeing his writings as discreet moments of "voice," legible as resistive or non-resistive in constellation with their cultural moments of production rather than demarcating a teleology of their writer's pathos. But I think Boudinot—whose "against" and "outside" are always also troublingly "with" and "inside"—and his signature on the Treaty of New Echota, offers a challenge to both these paradigms. Boudinot's signature requires us to recognize the geo-political alchemy involved in removal—the change from homeland to fungible property and the ingestion of the Cherokee Nation's land by Georgia and the United States—as literally formative of Boudinot as a self who, in the moment of formation, appears to change his mind.

Foucault and Derrida each point out that the self emerges specifically from the power structures of political organization. Eric Cheyfitz helpfully dismantles the seamlessness—or perhaps the groundlessness—of those arguments, suggesting that we must read the land itself into the invention of self. He points out the ways in which that self is bound to European practices of property formation, particularly in the Americas where they come into conflict with very different indigenous formations of self and property. "In the West," Cheyfitz argues, "property, in that tangled space where the physical and the metaphysical mix, is the very mark of identity, of that which is identical to itself: what we typically call a 'self' or an 'individual,' indicating the absolute boundaries that are predicated on this identity." Cheyfitz goes on to explain that while he strenuously resists the pressures that seduce us to "translate" Native American cultural formations into ideal versions of European anti-capitalist movements, he critiques the dependence of the Western self upon "place as property."¹⁶ Those places where Boudinot emerges as a self available for narratives of personal tragedy—those places, in other words, where he appears to change his mind—occur in the moments, and places, that the United States literally ingests and makes fungible the land of the Cherokee Nation, making the Cherokee Nation both of and in the United States. [End Page 159]

Boudinot's change comes very quickly after John Marshall and his Supreme Court define Native Americans as "domestic dependent nations" on 5 March 1831 in "Cherokee Nation v. Georgia." The passage in question reads:

Though the Indians are acknowledged to have an unquestionable, and, heretofore, unquestioned right to the lands they occupy, until that right shall be extinguished by a voluntary cession to our government; yet it may well be doubted whether those tribes which reside within the acknowledged boundaries of the United States can, with strict accuracy, be denominated foreign nations. They may, more correctly, be denominated domestic dependent nations. They occupy a territory to which we assert a title independent of their will, which must take effect in point of possession when their right of possession ceases. Meanwhile they are in a state of pupilage. Their relation to the United States resembles that of a ward to his guardian.¹⁷

Marshall cedes that "Indians are acknowledged to have an unquestionable . . . right to the lands they occupy," and he points out that the United States too has "acknowledged boundaries." According to the Oxford English Dictionary, to "acknowledge" is "to own the knowledge of; to confess; to recognize or admit as true," and "to own as genuine, or of legal force or validity; to own, avow, or assent, in legal form, to (an act, document, etc.) so as to give it validity."¹⁸ Marshall's acknowledgements, the first of which seems to "confess" that Indians have rights to land and the second of which "gives validity" to the relatively new shape of the United States, employ opposed rhetorics of reluctant concession and confident claim-staking. They also nod to two literally overlapping claims: that the United States exists here and that Indian nations exist here. Marshall's is a sleight of hand—for between the seemingly irreconcilable acknowledgments, Indian place-based sovereignty metamorphoses and is replaced by the eternal time-based "meanwhile" of a teacher-student relationship: "a state of pupilage." Boudinot seems to be the perfect subject of this law. He is suddenly, upon passage of the law, no longer a foreigner to the United States, but at home, incorporated, enwombed in the United States as domestic. Boudinot is now no longer a "civilized" example of a nation foreign to the United States. He is an eternally "savage" ward in the national "home [that] contains within itself those wild or foreign elements that must be tamed; domesticity monitors the borders between the civilized and the savage as it regulates the traces of savagery within its purview."¹⁹ [End Page 160]

"Cherokee Nation v. Georgia" has immediate effect in Boudinot's writings. In his editorial discussion of it, published in the Phoenix on 16 April 1831, Boudinot reads the decision positively for the Cherokee Nation and instructs his audience on how to understand the case. He argues that "the opinion plainly intimates that it is the duty of the Executive and Congress of the United States to redress the wrongs, and to guard the rights of the Cherokees if they are oppressed. The whole responsibility is thus thrown, by a judicial decision, upon those branches of the government. The rights of the Cherokees are as plain, as sacred, as they have been, and the duty of the Government to secure those rights is as binding as ever." He continues, "They [the Cherokees] stand upon a perfectly safe ground as regards themselves—if they suffer, they will suffer unrighteously—if their rights and their property are forcibly taken away from the them the responsibility will not be upon them, but upon their treacherous 'guardians.'"²⁰ On the one hand, Boudinot is sarcastic about the presumption of the U.S. in naming itself the "guardian" of the Cherokee Nation. On the other hand, he already exists under the legal spell of "Cherokee Nation v. Georgia": the decision is good, he argues, because it lifts the responsibility for the fate of the Cherokee Nation from Cherokee shoulders. The "perfectly safe ground" he imagines is not the physical ground of the Cherokee homeland. It is the moral high ground of a people already unjustly dispossessed. But that moral high ground imbricates Boudinot instantly into the mutually constitutive relationship of surveillance Marshall invokes with the eternal "state of pupilage." Boudinot scoffs at the rhetoric of guardianship even as he tacitly agrees to the power structure it sets in place, foreseeing that the power will forsake him but agreeing to that betrayal because, he argues, there is a "perfectly safe ground," even if that ground is metaphorical rather than literal:

It is more blessed to suffer than to be the oppressors. . . . If the white man must oppress us—if he must have the lead, and throw us penniless upon the wild world, and if our cries and expostulations will avail nothing at the door of those who have promised to be our guardians and protectors, let it be so. We are in the path of duty, and the Judge of all the earth will vindicate our cause in his own way and in his own good time.²¹

That higher court is the Christian God, who is the "Judge of all the earth," but whose judgment waits until earth itself is no more. That just reward could never be the retention or return of the Cherokee [End Page 161] homeland. Land has become, even here before he changes his mind and before he signs the Treaty of New Echota, a fungible, largely fantastical, entirely exchangeable, and ultimately doomed commodity.

One of the last pieces that Boudinot published in the Cherokee Phoenix before his change was a December 1831 letter recounting his trip home to the Cherokee Nation from the United States. He describes passing homesteads being built by white Georgians on Cherokee land, and learning that "the House of Representatives of Georgia Legislature passed, a few days since, a bill authorizing the immediate survey and occupancy of the Cherokee country."²² Place, to use Cheyfitz's terminology, is becoming property under Boudinot's very feet. It is in this letter that Boudinot's ambivalence, or at least his resignation to what he sees as inevitable, first comes to light: "If the long, protracted controversy between [the Cherokees] and Georgia must end in the loss of their beloved country, it must be so." Having resigned himself, Boudinot's concern is for the United States:

To take our lands by force is a serious matter—it is fraught with considerations full of interest to the people of Georgia themselves and to the whole Union.—A respectable portion of Georgia view it in that light. It would be robbery to all intent and purposes. And would the General Government look on with indifference and see its solemn pledges trampled in the dust? "There is a Lion in the way" whether the Government of the United States interferes or not—The integrity of the Union is at stake. As respects the Cherokees, their duty is plain—they cannot err. They reside on the land which God gave them—they are surrounded with guarantees which this Republic as voluntarily made for their protection and which once formed a sufficient security against oppression. If those guaranties must now be violated with impunity for purposes altogether selfish, the sin will not be at our door, but at the door of our oppressor and our faithless Guardian.²³

Solemn pledges of the United States government and the integrity of the Union worry Boudinot here; the Cherokees and white Georgians both play "them" to an implied United States "we," a still honorable United States invoked as "surrounding" the Cherokees with guarantees. It is not until the last moment of betrayal that the Cherokees become "we" again. Boudinot argues that should the U.S. betray the Cherokees, "the sin will not be at our door, but at the[ir] door." But once Georgia and the United States have legally and geographically ingested the Cherokee Nation, that door, those doors—the entrance to the domestic and domesticating space of the nation—are one and the same. A lynchpin of Marshall's reasoning in "Cherokee Nation v. [End Page 162] Georgia" is precisely that "the Indian territory is admitted to compose a part of the United States. . . . In all our intercourse with foreign nations, in our commercial regulations, in any attempt at intercourse between Indians and foreign nations, they are considered as within the jurisdictional limits of the United States."²⁴ Here in one of his last Phoenix pieces, writing from "within the jurisdictional limits of the United States" and from within the limits of the Cherokee Nation, "surrounded by the guarantees of this Republic," Boudinot is beginning to appear as a subject—and to appear to change his mind.

Although Boudinot and his executioners would seem to be at opposite ends of an ideological pole, it is the invocation of "the people" in the face of the loss of a homeland that structures both Boudinot's pro-removal patriotism and the Cherokee law that determines his execution. By 1829 the state of Georgia was putting intolerable pressures on the Cherokee Nation, and the fear that Cherokee land would be lost through the greed or fear of a few was very real. On 24 October 1829 the Cherokee National Council adopted a new treason law: if any "citizen or citizens of this nation should treat and dispose of any lands belonging to this nation without special permission from the national authorities, he or they shall suffer death." The law makes a further stipulation defining the criminal in terms of his geographical placement and displacement. Offenders who "shall refuse, by resistance, to appear at the place designated for trial, or abscond, are hereby declared to be outlaws: and any person or persons, citizens of this nation, may kill him or them so offending, in any manner most convenient, within the limits of this nation, and shall not be held accountable for the same."²⁵ Michelle Daniel points out that this stipulation can be traced back to the earlier clan-based Cherokee justice system that she calls the "blood feud," and that others call the "ancient law of clan revenge" or the "ancient law of blood," which placed the responsibility for executing murderers in the hands of clans.²⁶ The clan of the victim carried out the capital punishment of murderers or, if the murderer had fled, another member of the murderer's clan could be killed as an acceptable substitute. The "blood feud" was seen by non-Cherokees and by Cherokees like Boudinot as one of the primary signs of Cherokee "savagery." It was accordingly replaced, or, as Daniel suggests, buried, across the first decades of the nineteenth century, and replaced by a nationalized court system based on the United States' model. But the trace of the "blood feud" found in the 1829 treason law is more than a return of a repressed legal code. The fact that any citizen or citizens of the Cherokee Nation can act as the arm of the whole is also a trace [End Page 163] of traditional Cherokee governmental structures, which relied upon consensus rather than representative democracy. The appearance of these non-U.S.-inflected stipulations within a law governing the sale of Cherokee land to the United States signals the emergence of a legal system with strategic ties to both older Cherokee and U.S. models, ties articulating a definition of land-based sovereignty that aimed to combat the discursive, legal, cultural, and martial engines at work in Georgia and the United States to destroy Cherokee—and all Indian—cultural and legal claims to their homelands.

Cherokee traditionalists believed that the Cherokee homeland sat at the very center of the earth. Oklahoma was understood to sit at the very edge of this central position, and it lay to the west, the direction of death. As Perdue puts it, "[M]igration meant leaving the landforms that their mythology incorporated, the rivers and caves that were sacred, and the herbs and minerals that were essential to healing and divination."²⁷ The treason law, I would suggest, offers a different argument about the connection of the Cherokees to the land. It articulates an indissoluble sense of belonging to the land, but rather than seeing people and land in sacred spatial and cultural interdependence, the new law's argument relies on a metaphorics of nationhood that privileges the cohesion of people over the specificity of place: a metaphor of the body politic. The invocation of the "blood feud" to avenge the sale of Cherokee land produces a parallel between Cherokee bodies and Cherokee land. The murder of a Cherokee body is parallel to the sale of Cherokee land, and the older revenge of a clan tied by blood to a murder victim is parallel to the revenge of a people tied by the idea of nation to the land. But unlike Euro-American uses of the body politic metaphor, which downplay the importance of land and location to national belonging, this Cherokee use of the body politic metaphor re-ties place and populace together. Under the treason law, the land becomes the human body of the nation, vulnerable and living, while the citizens and their avenging action define the boundaries of nationhood; they are invited to execute the offenders "in any manner most convenient, within the limits of this nation." Boudinot was not executed in the Cherokee Nation imagined by the framers of the 1829 law, but in the new Cherokee Nation, by a nationally-inflected weapon: he was tomahawked for his signing of the Treaty. Execution on new ground by an old weapon was an especially fitting end for Boudinot the "traitor," since in his first editorial in the Phoenix, he hoped that someday "the terms, 'Indian depredation,' 'war-whoop,' 'scalping knife' and the like, shall become obsolete, and for ever be 'buried deep underground.'"²⁸ It [End Page 164] is the action of Cherokee citizens' united vengeance against those who would sell (kill) the land that defines, enacts and maps the consensus of the Cherokee Nation, geographically, culturally and politically. This is a remarkable argument for Cherokee belonging that allows the Nation both to remain in its homeland and to claim a non-traditional status as a modern, Enlightenment nation; the body politic is the land itself, the limits of the nation are its citizenry.

"In one word, I may say that my patriotism consists in the love of the country, and the love of the People." Boudinot's statement immediately defies its own stance, and the "one word: immediately splinters into a description of a divided passion: "my patriotism consists in the love of the country, and the love of the People." His two loves are "intimately connected," but they are not the same thing because "they are not altogether inseparable." If the divide has been there, implicit yet always potentially breakable, why the hint that there might be "one word," a single, un-fractured utterance that could contain an emotion that he claims has always been bipartite?

Again, the temptation is strong to see Boudinot as a fractured, tragic self who cannot reconcile his competing desires. But Boudinot's longed for "one word" that would embrace the dislocation of people from country is spoken, and spoken in one word, though not by him. It is spoken as a one-word antonym in the name of the 1829 law that condemns him to death: "treason." Treason is the betrayal of either the sovereign or the commonwealth, a betrayal of sovereignty itself. But here treason becomes the one word that can define Boudinot's understanding of the "intimate" relationship between people and country—a word that means an act intended to dissolve that relationship. For Boudinot, treason is patriotism; the protection of sovereignty is the destruction of sovereignty. It is a conundrum that reverberates in both the nineteenth-century Cherokee Nation and "our" own nation, with its many "Nations Within."²⁹ How to claim sovereignty without land? How to claim land without sovereignty? Most distressingly, how to invent a sovereignty that might exist with only people, and no land at all?

The horns of Boudinot's dilemma—a patriotism that can only imagine sacrificing the beloved nation—and his resolution of that dilemma in an act of treason finds a parallel in the American Revolution. Benedict Arnold and Elias Boudinot share an adamant refusal to admit or recognize their own traitorousness. Arnold felt the need to explain himself to his leader after the deed was done, just as Boudinot did to John Ross. Arnold insisted repeatedly in letters to George Washington [End Page 165] after his defection from the Continental Army, "I have ever acted from a principle of love to my country . . . the same principle of love to my country actuates my present conduct."³⁰ Robert A. Ferguson points out that, while treason holds a preeminent place in the pantheon of crimes, with John Locke condemning traitors as "the common Enemy and Pest of Mankind" and William Blackstone retaining medieval punishments (disemboweling while alive) for treason, it is exactly the heinousness of treason that falters and fails in a country undergoing the sort of upheavals experienced by white Americans during the Revolution and Cherokees facing removal.³¹ "This cry of treason is particularly volatile in a national community that is just forming. Since the act of becoming American in the Revolution requires rebellion, the language of community and the specific accusation of treason double back on themselves. . . . From the moment that a rhetoric of opposition even implies the separate possibility of revolution, treason is the impossible problem in Anglo-American exchange."³² Arnold fills an important function for Americans who have all committed treason against Britain by taking the heat for all treason. (As Benjamin Franklin apocryphally said upon signing the Declaration of Independence, "[W]e must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.")³³ I think it is worth considering a parallel between the ubiquitous treason of revolutionary Americans and their vilification of Arnold and the ubiquitous treason of Cherokees who remove, either voluntarily or under duress, and the continuing critical anxiety over Boudinot's signature on the Treaty of New Echota. Removing Cherokees, leaving their homeland at gunpoint and surviving when thousands around them die on the way to "Indian Country," nevertheless lived and breathed and died and birthed a terrible treason. The Cherokees undergoing and surviving removal had to enact and reinvent the nation in exactly the treasonous way that Boudinot suggested—they had to salvage and sustain a love of the people when the land had been lost, and discover and reify a passionate love of the new land.

"A Crime That Really Deprives Us": Emerson and Cherokee Removal

We only state the fact that a crime is projected that confounds our understandings by its magnitude—a crime that really deprives us as well as the Cherokees of a country; for how could we call the conspiracy that should crush these poor Indians our government, or [End Page 166] the land that was cursed by their parting and dying imprecations our country, any more?

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1838³⁴

In 1838 Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote to President Martin Van Buren, protesting the forced evacuation of the Cherokees to Indian Territory.³⁵ Emerson's open letter appeared in newspapers eight full years after Congress had passed the Removal Act of 1830, authorizing the exchange of lands west of the Mississippi for Indian lands in the east. Its appearance in print was as belated as Boudinot's 1832 "question," which finally found its way into print in 1837. In spite of years of protest and legal action by Native and white Americans, by the time Emerson published his letter the Cherokees were under forced march. But if Emerson's attempted intervention into actual removal came ludicrously too late, his articulation of the reverberations removal had among white Americans was right on time; the focus of his dismay lies with the white inhabitants of evacuated Indian land. The "crime . . . really deprives us," he writes, white Americans who, through the alchemy of removal, are now at a remove from political power as citizens (how can we call the government "ours"?) and from a sense of belonging on the land (how can we call the land "ours"?).

In order to make sense as a policy, removal relied upon a separation of sovereignty from place. In Emerson's letter, however, the unsutured nation is not the Cherokee's; removal "deprives" Emerson and other white Americans of a certain naturalized white sovereignty linked to land in the New World. Sovereignty linked to white belonging in formerly Indian land was of long and comfortable standing in the United States.³⁶ Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur's 1782 Letters from an American Farmer traces the agonized evolution of a farmer from English colonial to U.S. citizen. Under colonial rule, the Farmer easily accesses a logic of white belonging in the New World. The Farmer explains that through labor the land itself becomes the origin of its inhabitants' civic structures: "The formerly rude soil has been converted by my father into a pleasant farm and in return, it has established all our rights; on it is founded our rank, our freedom, our power as citizens."³⁷ Two centuries after Crèvecoeur, Anderson used virtually the same elements (minus rank) to define nation: "it is an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign."³⁸ The Farmer's "rights" and "power" are Anderson's "politic[s]," the Farmer's "citizens" are Anderson's "community," and [End Page 167] the Farmer's "freedom" is Anderson's "sovereign[ty]." But Crèvecoeur's Farmer gives pride of place in his definition to "land," while Anderson gives pride of place to the imagination. Anderson's formulation shows us how the Farmer's invocation of land protects him against the acknowledgment that white American belonging is not a natural secretion of the place itself.

Land, like the body, is both ideological and literal, and its double-exposure as the physical and discursive ground across and for which indigenous struggles for sovereignty have been fought situates it as a critical lodestone at each moment of the invention of America.³⁹ But Anderson waves aside the importance of land as a critical category in the invention of nations. He subsumes the question of geography under the term "limited": "The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations. No nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind."⁴⁰ Anderson is interested in land only in so far as geographical limits separate imagined communities from one another. For Anderson, land is another imagined element in the national fantasy; he gives it no attention as a category with its own histories of interpolation into that fantasy.

This is not to say that, because land is central for Crèvecoeur, he understands the importance of land where Anderson does not; for both men land is fantastical. Instead, Anderson's invocation of the "imagined" structure of nationhood, where Crèvecoeur would invoke the land, reveals Crèvecoeur's nightmare. For Crèvecoeur and generations of white Americans who followed him, the idea that the American land itself "establishes all our rights" kept the "imagined" origins of white sovereignty safely under wraps—even when all other forms of government seem repulsive. In letter three of Letters from an American Farmer, Crèvecoeur asks, "What is an American?" He answers his own question nimbly: "We are a people of cultivators scattered over an immense territory, communicating with each other by means of good roads and navigable rivers, united by the silken bands of mild government, all respecting the laws without dreading their power, because they are equitable."⁴¹ Here Crèvecoeur expands, to a geographic scale, the tripartite system of checks and balances the states were evolving to both enable and control the enormity of the experiment. Land (the "immense territory"), people (the "cultivators"), and "mild government" together form a balanced yet potentially infinite nation, in which the networks of communication and discipline are both social and physical, the civic and the geographic supporting and mirroring each other. Of [End Page 168] course this happy vision does not last in Letters, and the Farmer flees to live among Indians where he founds (perhaps facetiously) a new colonial order in the west where civic virtue can once more be based upon landed belonging. Even in this extremity the Farmer retains his faith in the power of working the land to create and maintain national affiliation: "As long as we keep ourselves busy in tilling the earth there is no fear of any of us becoming wild."⁴²

Half a century later Emerson does not have access to the Indian escape route. Indian nations are, after "Cherokee Nation v. Georgia," no longer over the hills and far away. They are now domestic and dependent, and the land they are forced, under the Removal Act, to exchange for their homelands will remain fungible U.S. soil. For Emerson, then, the breakdown of nation, land, and people comes not in the Cherokee Nation, which has been forced to move west of the Mississippi, but in the white nation that has absorbed the land base of the Cherokees into itself. Emerson describes the breakdown: "Our counselors and old statesmen here say that ten years ago they would have staked their life on the affirmation that the proposed Indian measures could not be executed; that the unanimous country would put them down."⁴³ Emerson fondly imagines that before removal there was the possibility of a "unanimous country," a democracy that depended not upon a majority decision but upon absolute consensus (a là traditional Cherokee government?). In his pre-removal Edenic democracy, geography and citizenry are mutually constitutive; the "unanimous country" is both the population and the land of the United States. Removal dissolves that happy congruence by turning "country" into the merely material—land: "how could we call . . . the land that was cursed by their parting and dying imprecations our country, any more?"⁴⁴ For Emerson, as for Crévecoeur, there is a fundamental codependence of white people and white geography in the foundation of a white government in the United States. With the policy of Indian removal, that codependence is shattered for the white nation, and Emerson is left with mere acreage, unhallowed by national belonging.

Here Emerson's rhetorical tactic shifts as he begins to describe the white populace of the United States as a body in radical breakdown:

And now the steps of this crime follow each other so fast, at such fatally quick time, that the millions of virtuous citizens, whose agents the government are, have no place to interpose, and must shut their eyes until the last howl and wailing of these tormented villagers and tribes shall afflict the ear of the world.⁴⁵ [End Page 169]

Emerson's use of a bodily metaphorics—Indians are "dying" and "tormented" while white Americans "shut their eyes" and have "afflict[ed]" ears—to explain and diffuse the complications of spatial dislocation works on two levels. Many have noted that the Constitutional definition of the civic results in the disappearance of the bodily citizen. Eva Cherniavsky puts it elegantly, "The particularized, or embodied, subject remains as such un-representable; the subject's specificity is precisely what is voided in his accession to the status of citizen."⁴⁶ For Emerson, removal disrupts the naturalness of white presence in North America, and therefore "the status of the citizen." As he mourns a "voided" correspondence between white land and white nation, a void ironically incurred by the removal of the body of the other, the white body rushes in, in all its confusing excess. The white body has a logical place in Emerson's argument because, with the breakdown of the suture between government, populace, and geography, the white citizen's ability to comfortably disappear into a larger and diverse body politic is disturbed. In other words, the body of the white male citizen appears, Oz-like, from behind the curtain when that body's claim to citizenship is called into question by the disruption of the trinity of people, land, and nation.

The introduction of bodily metaphor is also effective because of its strategic evocation of the sentimental paradigm, that essential nineteenth-century discursive strategy of national and racial consolidation. But in Emerson's letter to President Van Buren, it isn't the President's tears he elicits. This sentimental economy is played out on a national scale. The suffering of the Cherokees inspires a physical breakdown in the white nation as, wrenched from democratic efficacy, white Americans stand helplessly by as removal goes forward—a helplessness that removes the white American from the ability to imagine sovereignty, illustrated by Emerson through the metaphor of a bodily breakdown in sensation. The "unanimous country" of moral citizens "must shut their eyes" until the horrible sounds of removal no longer "afflict the ear of the world." In the face of the dislocating logic of removal, that dislocates—momentarily—white sovereignty as well as Indian, Emerson's white Americans are depicted shutting their eyes to block out sound, as if blindness could produce deafness. Why the mixed metaphor, the bodily confusion? The sentimental dialectic appears to fail here: tears don't elicit tears; instead, blindness blocks sound. But this cross-eyed sentimentality is highly useful; it effectively transposes the tragedy of Indian removal onto white Americans, asking readers to sympathize with their own confused attempts at sympathy. Government, [End Page 170] land, and populace are now separate, a tragic dismemberment that nevertheless allows Emerson to place blame on the government rather than the people for Cherokee removal. In a post-removal nation, the white populace and white geography gains, via a vision of the white national body's ineffectual suffering, the powerful and self-congratulatory weapon of a grotesque sympathy separated from any hope of political efficacy.

Emerson's agonistics continue in the letter, further articulating the disjunction between the white body and the white nation that he felt removal's separation of sovereignty and land had facilitated. Removal proceeds "at such fatally quick time," Emerson explains, that citizens "have no place to interpose." What at first appears to be another mixed metaphor—time and place—is in fact a keen recognition of the valorization of time over location in the logic of Indian removal. The teleology of white expansion, soon to be articulated as Manifest Destiny, disallows "place," that is, the specific location of a people in the case of the Cherokees or, for Emerson, a "place" from which white Americans might implement a moral politics. The dislocations of Indian removal—the radical separation of place and sovereignty, nation and location—sends Emerson into a tailspin about the status of white citizenship. He recognizes the power of the nation over time and space. But the wedge Indian removal has driven between his "unanimous country" and the government allows him to see, through the confusion of body, time, and land, the ways in which the consolidation and compartmentalization of white nationhood enables expansion while denying "the subject's specificity."⁴⁷

John Ross and Freedom of the Cherokee Press: "As Free as the Breeze That Glides upon the Surface"

In his 1828 Annual Message to the Cherokee Nation, the first delivered after the 1827 adoption of the new Cherokee Constitution, Principal Chief Ross dwelt on the importance of circumscribing the freedom of the Cherokee press. This passage firmly establishes censorship of the press as a means of protecting and validating the indissoluble connection between people and place:

The public press deserves the patronage of the people, and should be cherished as an important vehicle in the diffusion of general information, and as a no less powerful auxiliary in asserting and supporting our political rights. Under this impression, we cannot doubt, that you will continue to foster it by public support. The only [End Page 171] legislative provision necessary for conducting the press, in our opinion, is to guard against the admission of scurrilous productions of a personal character, and also against cherishing sectarian principles on religious subjects. The press being the public property of the nation, it would ill become its character if such infringements upon the feelings of the people should be tolerated. In other respects, the liberty of the press should be as free as the breeze that glides upon the surface.⁴⁸

Ross refers explicitly to "the people" twice in these five sentences, and obliquely five more times ("public press . . . our political rights . . . you will continue . . . public support . . . public property of the nation"). Clearly Ross understands the press, particularly the Cherokee Phoenix, as exactly the sort of journalistic engine that produces and reproduces the civic sphere. Ross sees the paper as produced by the people—"you will continue to foster it by public support"—and in turn producing the people—"asserting and supporting our political rights." So far Ross's recognition of the importance of the press to the way the people imagine their nation is not so different from Boudinot's. But where Boudinot explicitly argues that the land can be and in fact already is separate from the people, and where he wants the newspaper to be a vehicle for that separation by staging his "question," Ross places the separation of land and people as an abhorrent end-point of wanton freedom of the press and comes close to defining any such expression in the newspapers as treason. In a letter to the Cherokee General Council written after Boudinot's resignation as editor of the Phoenix, Ross puts his feelings clearly, explicitly binding the love of people and the love of nation together under the sign of the newspaper—the same dual love that Boudinot, in his letter of resignation, claimed, also under the sign of the newspaper, to be separable:

The views of the public authorities should continue and ever be in accordance with the will of the people; and the views of the editor of the national paper be the same. The toleration of diversified views to the columns of such a paper would not fail to create fermentation and confusion among our citizens, and in the end prove injurious to the welfare of the nation. The love of our country and people demands unity of sentiment and action for the will of all.⁴⁹

The liberty of the press, Ross goes on to explain, will be limited in that it must be prevented from "cherishing sectarian principles on religious subjects."⁵⁰ This is partly a reference to the fracturing of Cherokee cultural cohesiveness in the face of competing versions of Christian salvation. In the southeast, the Cherokees were the targets of Protestant [End Page 172] missionary efforts; Congregationalists, Baptists, and Methodists were at this time competing furiously for Cherokee converts. Each denomination approached conversion from doctrinal positions that tended to divide the Nation along class and race lines, with the Congregationalists targeting upper-class mixed-bloods and the Methodists and Baptists making headway among the generally more impoverished full-bloods.⁵¹ But Ross is not only cautioning against the divisive potentials of Christianity but also asserting the importance of traditional Cherokee belief systems based in the intimate and particular landscape of the Cherokee homeland. If Christianity divided the Cherokees along class and race lines, a "sectarian principle" directed at Cherokee traditional religion would be one that divided, or bisected, the Cherokees from the land that—like the newspaper Ross is ostensibly discussing—was both the origin and the object of how the Cherokees imagined themselves into nationhood. In other words, Ross fears two kinds of sectarianism, two kinds of division. Christian doctrinal difference divides people from people. But a more complex cocktail of influences of which Christianity is only one—pro-removal sentiment, the promise of capital gain, the loss of traditional religion—divides people from land and that, Ross insists, is an unspeakable division.

Ross's discussion of the newspaper is a discussion of Cherokee land. He strategically allies the limited liberty of the press with the sovereignty of Cherokee land in order to insist that "the people" and "the land," together, constitute the nation. Ross's yoking together of the necessity of press restrictions with the necessity of Cherokees maintaining presence on Cherokee land was central to traditional thought and had found earlier expression in the 1827 written constitution of the Cherokee Nation.⁵² The Cherokee Constitution was modeled on the United States Constitution, but it differed in two fundamental ways. The Cherokee Constitution restricted freedom of the press, thus explicitly rejecting the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, and it strongly reiterated the foundational tenet of Cherokee communal ownership of land, thus reorganizing as public the United States's privatized triumvirate of life, liberty, and property. After his assurance that sectarianism will be censored in the press, Ross directly reminds his listeners that "[t]he press [is] the public property of the nation." Given that this was Ross's first annual address after the ratification of the Cherokee Constitution, the invocation of anything as the "public property of the nation" was an invocation of a huge difference between the Cherokee Nation and its greedy neighbor: the principle of nationally held property in land, a principle upheld in section 2 of article 1 of the Cherokee Constitution.⁵³ [End Page 173]

Ross concludes his discussion of the Cherokee press by throwing a sop, in the form of a strange and striking simile that finally allies the press to the physical landscape: "In other respects, the liberty of the press should be as free as the breeze that glides upon the surface."⁵⁴ This concluding sentence is notable not only for being the single figure of speech in the passage—but also because it introduces land into an argument that has so far only coyly hinted at the its importance to the argument being put forward. The phrase is strange because it is attenuated. Landscape is both vividly evoked and abruptly elided. The breeze glides upon the surface of what? Land? Water? The nation? In any case, the press merely hovers above "the surface" and has no power to divide or penetrate or even know what it is that it glides upon. Ross is dramatizing the physical nation and its reading polity as unfracturable, and at the same time dramatizing its loss. His simile ends before it arrives at its subject. Is this because he deems the press so unimportant that it doesn't matter over what it hovers? Or is it because, in the final instance, Ross must, with Boudinot, "make a question" through the deferred future of an incomplete simile? Might the difference between Boudinot and Ross here be that rather than striving for "one word," as Boudinot does, Ross is content with no word at all? Let us recall the opening of Boudinot's letter: "In one word, I may say that my patriotism consists in the love of the country, and the love of the People. These are intimately connected, yet they are not altogether inseparable." For Boudinot, the prospect of defining patriotism "in one word," a word that would account for a Cherokee Nation split between land and people, becomes an ontological impossibility. Perhaps Ross cannot or will not complete his simile and name what surface it is upon which the breeze/press glides for similar reasons. Completing the simile would be to equate the land with the reading populace, and to do that, to compare land with people rather than somehow expressing the oneness of land and people, would be to imagine, speak, and thus enact the treasonous fracture Ross resists.

Once again, we find treason at the point of the separability of the land from the people. That the debate over Boudinot's treason centers around the problem of the freedom of the press arises from Boudinot's reliance on the notion of freedom of speech, in his desire to both believe in removal and secure his own patriotism and the approbation of the public. Ross, in denying freedom of speech, concomitantly denies that patriotism and public commendation could possibly extend beyond the division of land and people. If we accept that we could read "land" instead of "press" in the sentence, "The press being the public property of the nation, it would ill become its character if such infringements [End Page 174] upon the feelings of the people should be tolerated," we see how Ross binds the people and the land together in a definition of patriotism that does not allow for a question about removal to be made.

The "Trail of Tears" went forward, many thousands died, and many thousands who lived made—and their descendents continue to make—the Cherokee Nation in what is now Oklahoma. But to say that removal itself eventually occurred is to answer Boudinot's question (and Ross's denial of that question) in a particular way—it is to answer the question, albeit with an apparent historical truth. Of course literal bodily removal occurred (although a sizable number of Cherokees managed to avoid removal and remain in the Southeast). But is Ross, in refusing to finish the simile a decade before removal went forward, suggesting that indeed the Cherokees have never been, will never have been, separated from that land? The possibility of that separation, past and future, is the question (and the self) that Boudinot wants to make—and here the strangeness of the word "make" emerges. Boudinot wants to forge, to invent, a people separable from land. To say that removal will or did occur is to answer "may I not . . . make a question" with the answer it implies: "yes, make the question and in so doing make removal itself." It is to publish the question in the Cherokee Phoenix that was never published before removal because Ross suppressed it, nor after removal because the physical Cherokee press at New Echota, with its moveable type in both the Cherokee syllabary and English alphabet, never did make the crossing, never did bridge the loss of land and save, with editions printed in the new Cherokee Nation, "the remaining object of my affection," the people. The press was smashed to pieces and destroyed by the U.S. military as the "Trail of Tears" began.