August Brave Heart Sanchez

Monday, April 13, 2015

English 404M Writing in Blood

The Violence of Andrew Jackson: How language perpetuated violence against Indigenous
peoples in early American History

There are many moments in history that are filled with incredible violence. So prevalent
is violence in American history that it can arguably be one of the defining characteristics of this
nation. Physical violence, in which the military of the United States is greatly proficient, is
predicated by a language of violence. Andrew Jackson, the architect of one of the most violent
events in historythe Trail of Tearsneeded to convince congress to approve of the act that
would remove the Five Civilized Tribes, the Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and
Seminole peoples, from their areas of the Southeast, especially Alabama and Georgia, to beyond
the boundary of white civilizationin Indian Country. To do so, Jackson needed to utilize a
language of separation and violence, but inherent within such language are systems of
separation, and justifications for the violence inflicted upon non-whites. Language is able to both
physically and spatially separate Others, and because of such distinctions, permit violence
against this Other as a savage group. Andrew Jackson, in his rhetoric to Congress with the
purpose of removing the Five Civilized Tribes from their ancestral homelands in the Southeast,
utilized a language of separation and violence that functions as the means and justification for
the government to exist in opposition to a savage other.
This essay will flow as follows: after a brief contexualization of Andrew Jacksons
presidency, I will launch into an account of both the Economy of the Manichean Allegory and

The Camp as the Nomos of the Modern to show how language make separation possible, before
returning to a close reading of Jacksons speech to congress and the Indian Removal and
Relocation Act. Then Racism, Nationalism and Biopolitics, and Necropolitics will come together
for a final review of how violence works in a colonial context.
Before diving into the writings of Andrew Jackson, it would be pertinent to see where his
presidency and words fall in the long history of Americans and Indians. Well before 1776, the
British and the French, the biggest powers rivaling each other over the land of what would
become the United States had various methods of dealing with the Indians. Both would use
peaceful methods, allowing commerce to speak louder than pen and paper; at other times, the hot
lead from a musket would be the diplomatic envois. However, while official policy on Indians
could be either civil or not, most citizens of the colonies where less than pleased by the existence
of physical bodies preventing the whole-sale theft of most of what is now New England down
the coasts to Mexico. With the Declaration of Independence and subsequent war, the newly
emancipated colonies took over as the dominating power over and policy maker for Indians.
While the French and the British, both having treated with Indians for centuries longer than the
Americans, had a degree of formal ceremony in diplomatic negotiations, the Americans were as
blunt as their bayonets sharp. America was on the war path, and sought every available piece of
land, regardless of whether or not it was occupied. By the time that Andrew Jackson came to be
President of the United States in 1829, he earned the name the Indians called him: Sharp Knife.
The Hero of New Orleans, he had fought viciously in several wars in an effort to remove and
destroy the Seminole Indians of Georgia and Florida. In 1829 as one of his first acts he signed
into effect the Indian Removal and Relocation Act: appropriating $500,000.00 for the removal of
the Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw, in particular, but leaving the language broad enough

to apply to any Indian nation (411-412 cong). This would become the piece of legislation for the
infamous Trail of Tears in 1838-9, which relocated all of the Five Civilized Tribes to the
Oklahoma Territory in an hurried, deadly journey. America fought constant wars with various
Indigenous peoples throughout most of its history. With the Great Sioux Nation finally defeated
at the Massacre at Wounded Knee, the Indian Wars were over. The West was won. The land
was free for the taking, and the Indians were now a vanished people. Any that were left alive
were herded onto reservations to live out the rest of their lives both out of sight and out of mind.
There they remain (Dunbar-Ortiz)
The Economy of the Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial difference in
Colonialist Literature entered in the corpus of post-colonial literature in 1985. In it Abdul
JanMohamed argues succinctly that colonialist literature writes in racial difference, and that
doing so is the mechanism that justifies and excuses colonial violence. To begin with,
JanMohamed outlines two phases of colonialism: the dominant and the hegemonic. The
dominant phase is characterized by the dominant power, the colonizer who exercise[s] direct
and continuous bureaucratic control and military coercion of the natives (61). The natives
consent is primarily passive, indirect, or coerced. The hegemonic phase of colonialism follows
the dominant phase and is characterized by the native, colonized groups internalizing the
colonizers system of values, attitudes, morality institutions, and more important[ly], mode of
productionsthe hegemonic phase relies on the active and direct consent of the dominant,
though (62). The dominant phase lasts until the dominated people are granted
independence, and continues indefinitely as the hegemonic phase. These two phases are
separated in literature by the level of overt violence exhibited.

By this designation of historical colonial periods, Andrew Jacksons policy towards

Indians and about half of Americas history falls into the dominant phase of colonialism, the rest
is hegemonic.
But literature is also categorized by approaches to representations of natives; there are
two major classes, the imaginary and the symbolic(61-2, JanMohamed). The imaginary
literature makes no assumptions of giving any agency or depth to native characters; they are
stock, stoic, backgroud set pieces, entering the frame only when needed, and exiting with hardly
a ripple. The imaginary representation of the native other is the most fabricated fiction and use
language that births stereotypes, being born of ignorance and racism. Symbolic literature seeks to
have a greater truth value than imaginative literature by substituting the stereotypes produced
and used by imaginary literature with more definite signs of the native group. Signs are
gathered either by a literary study of the natives, or by firsthand experience (ethnology). Whereas
imaginary literature is concrete in its self-affermation of the Other-ness of the native, and the
superiority of them, the symbolic texts openness towards the Other is based on a greater
awareness of potential identity and a heightened sense of the concrete socio-politico-cultural
differences between self and Other (74). Symbolic texts attempt to use language as a means of
attempting knowledge of an Othered people, but both symbolic and imaginary languages only
succeed in reaffirming the authors own assumptions and internalized racial biases.
This is the Economy of the Manichean Allegory: it is through these methods that writers
display and perpetrate racial difference, and racial Othering. By writing through either imaginary
or symbolic lenses, the author lends authority to and normalizes the Othering of native peoples.
It is the literal ascription of a people.

It must be noted that the context for the Economy of the Manichean Allegory was
Colonialist literature, that is fiction, and that Jacksons speeches to the congress and the pain and
death he inflicted are very much real. However, the structure for analyzing literary works was
provided by JanMohamed; while originally intended for fictional literature such as Coetzee or
Conrad, the Economy of the Manichean Allegory is readily available for other types of literature
that demonstrate separation, such as political speeches, or legislation.
In The Camp as the Nomos of the Modern, Giorgio Agamben lays out how the camp is a
place is a place of law, a place of rule, a place of both, and a place of neither. For Agamben the
camp is defined not by what it is, but by the circumstances that created it. Camps are created in a
state of emergency; they exist to solve a specific set of problems unique to that time. Not only
are they made in a state of emergency, but, because of their function as separate from the
dominant group, and often consisting of terrible conditions, the Camp can only exist in a state of
emergency, something that Agamben makes clear in his piece. Additionally he states that the
signifier of the Camp is that fact and law as separately existing and produced entities are blurred
into something that is neither law, nor fact. Whoever entered the camp moved in a zone of
indistinction between outside and inside, exception and rule, licit and illicit, in which the very
concepts of subjective right and juridical protection no longer made any sense (170 Agamben).
Because of this indistinction between right and wrong, good and bad, and acceptable and not, the
inhabitants of the camp enter a place of zo: of bare life, a life that is only, barely not death.
One could say that modern biopolitics is supported by the principle according to which Where
there is bare life, there will have to be a People [a People who are living a full life]on
condition that one immediately add that the principle also holds in its inverse formulation:
Where there is a People, there will be bare life (179).

Agamben wrote The Camp as the Nomos of the Modern using the Nazi Germany era as
exemplary. This serves perfectly to illustrate how a state of emergency came to be and how it
was simply extended to allow the Camps to continue to exist. However, the same ideological
scaffolding can and does apply to the United States of America substituting racial Others
(Indians) for the Jews and Gypsies. Since before it was an independent nation, the United States
has been constantly under attack from within. Despite the fact that most of the attacks that the
government saw as aggression were simply counter-raids (a counter-raid being the appropriate
response when attacked as reciprocity was a foundational idea for most Indians), the United
States, almost immediately, and without reserve, launched into a series of wars that would last
for over one hundred years. A state of emergency wasnt just present, but was continuous. It is
this constant state of emergency that allows the Camp to exist, and for the Indian, the Camp was
called the Reservation. The Reservation existed outside of the dominant groups scope and view:
indeed reservations were often made in Indian Country, an undeveloped track of land
somewhere beyond the Mississippi River inhabited only by savages. On the Reservations
Indians were subject to the laws of the federal government, especially through treaty-making.
However, as the execution of these treaties was mediated by an Agent for that Reservation, who
was, more likely than not, corrupt enough to exploit the largely written illiterate Indians, the laws
and facts of the reservations were not nearly as clearly defined as they might appear on paper and
in records. Medicine food and clothing were points of contention: there are numerous accounts
of medicine being shipped well after most of the inhabitance of a reservation have died, vastly
insufficient quantities of medicine, food and clothing, and willful refusal to give Indians
medicine, clothing, food or the means to acquire it (Brown). It becomes increasingly obvious
why the Camp and the reservation are the same.

Finally, to get into Jacksons speech.

This speech to congress was given on December 7th, 1829 during the first year of his
presidency, while attempting to persuade Congress to ratify his proposal for the removal of the
Indians in the then southwest: todays Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee areas. It
being his most pressing piece of legislation for the year, Jackson was eager to get the consent of
Congress (Chapters 13-14, Remini). He opens his speech: It gives me pleasure to announce to
Congress that the benevolent policy of the government, steadily pursued for nearly thirty years,
in relations to the removal of the Indians beyond the white settlements, is approaching to a happy
consummation (25 Journal). Already Jackson is evoking the ideologies of both the Manichean
Allegory and the Camp as the Nomos of the Modern in the first sentence. The valued language of
having pleasure in announcing the happy consummation of the deportation of the Indian
people plays directly into the dominant/power position of the colonizer. The place of Indian
removal as beyond the white settlements evokes the Camp as the Nomos of the modern not
only in the separation of the colonized and colonizer by great tracts of land, but as a place of
Other. Jackson wastes no time getting to Colonial language.
He does not, however, suddenly stop after the first sentence. Jackson continues in his
justification for the removal of the Indians with the language of separation. In reference to the
general government of the United States, and that of the individual states, Jackson makes sixteen
specific references of positively values statements. He continuously refers to the governments as
just, good, liberal, and generous. Liberal, and its permutations, occurs four times
throughout his speech. There are no negatively valued statements about the government.

In talking about the Indians Jackson makes nine references with negative values, with
savage occurring five times within. Indians are additionally, consistently characterized as
wondering. There were three instances of positively valued references towards Indians; however
it is important to contextualize them. The Indians are described as powerful, but, the words
following are disappeared, and exterminated. Additional language includes annihilation, two,
extinguished, two, exterminated, one, and rude in the sense of mindless and animalistic (OED).
Jackson evokes the Manichean imaginary language with his characterization of both
Indians, in the negative, and the American government in the positive. Indians are nothing more
than forest-dwelling savage wanderers, the government, prosperous, industrious, and civilized.
This dichotomy of language and people is purposefully created and crafted, and Agamben would
argue, necessary for the state. Jackson makes this clear in his speech, and his eventual removal of
the Five Civilized Tribes to Oklahoma. While the covert purpose is to exploit the colonys
natural resources thoroughly and ruthlessly through the various imperialist material practices, the
overt aim, as articulated by colonialist discourse, it to civilize the savage, to introduce him to
all the benefits of Western cultures. Yet the fact that is overt aim, embedded as an assumption in
all colonialist literature is accompanied in colonialist texts by a more vociferous insistence,
indeed fixation, upon the savagery and the evilness of the native should alert us to the real
function of these texts: to justify imperial occupation and exploitation (62, JanMohamed).
Mark Kelly, in Racism, Nationalism, and Biopolitics: Foucaults Society Must Be
Defended, 2003 takes this a step further. He states that one of the components of state racism
isnt just killing, but creating conditions that can kill an Othered group as part of a biopolitical
war. Biopolitics is the ability to control people by maintaining them in life, not just using the
right to kill by actually controlling the life itself (60, Kelly). Inherent to biopolitics is a state

based racism, which identifies those it will kill, but also those it keeps alive. State racism allows
for the identification of enemies as being outside of the populations, whether they are to be found
inside or outside the boundaries of the state, and thus licenses the killing of these people, or
simply letting them die (60, Kelly). It can be argued that the reservation spase is from the cam
in the racist paragim, but exists a a space to let die. Especially with the horror stories of death of
Indian people by negligence, greed, corruptions and racism (Brown).
Achille Mbembe takes all this one step further: instead of there being only the Manichean
language of separation, followed by the Camp as a place of law(less) death, coming together to
produce a biopolitical state of death and letting die, Mbembe continues with the assertion that all
of this is racial. States war; but, however, the requirement of being a State is that one is civilized,
and to be civilized, one must exert ones sovereignty over death, by being the arbiter of death, but
civilly (23). Sovereign States war, but a state of sovereignty does not apply to a colonial Other.
In the eyes of the conqueror, savage life [the colonial Other]is just another form of animal life
(24), and as thus, not privy to the same rights of civility the Sovereign States. Killing an Other
carries none of the moral weight as killing a fellow man; how could it when it wasnt a man that
was killed, but a savage, an animal?
In the modern state of the 1830s United States, the colonial other, as it would be
indefinitely, was the Indian, relegated to the reservations and Indian Country, the Camp.
Although the more direct method of outright extermination could and would be used to great
effect (as evidenced by the Sand Creek Massacre (1864) and the Massacre at Wounded Knee
(1890)), letting die was also a viable option, and the one for which Jackson opted.

This speech to Congress, on the topic of the removal of the Indians to beyond the white
settlements (25, Congress) isnt just the language of separation and hate, although it clearly is a
biased piece of writing, but it is also a violent condemnation to death of whole Indian peoples. It
is theorized the Jackson had four options in dealing with the Indian problem, 1. Genocide, 2.
Intigrate the two societies, 3. Protect and leave be, 4.. Removal. While it can be argued that his
decision of removal was Jackons best option, and thus also the best option for the Five Civilized
Tribes, (279-8, Remini) his decision still bears the weight of the willing allowance of death of
the same tribes. While lacking the immediate violence of slaughter, removal to a reservation in
Indian Country constituted the same death. Despite the obscene treatment accordedby the
government, the tribe not only survived but endured. Aspredicted they escaped the fate of
amny extinct eastern tribes (271, Remini). It wasnt just death that Jackson bestowed upon the
Indians, but a dearth of caring for their existence that lead to their continued existence that is
more happenstance-ual than purposeful on the part of the government.
Andrew Jackson will be remembered for many things, especially his service to the
military that garnered his position as the President of the United States. The trail of Tears, despite
it taking place just after his leaving office, is equally credited to him as Jackson was the architect
of the piece of legislation that would lead eventually to loosing eight year legal battle with the
Cherokees, culminating in the long walk that took over 4,000 lives (269, Remini). One of
Americas most violent episodes in its short history is attributed to him, and, despite the
supposed kindness and liberality that he displayed for Five Civilized Tribes, Jackson is rightly
attributed this act. Violence is what he was known for, and his attempt at peace was only
violence again.

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