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What am I to myself that must be remembered, insisted upon so often?[...]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/171562

from Jodi Byrd’s Transit of Empire

“Did you know Tocqueville was there at removal?” [my father] would ask. He was obsessed with Tocqueville’s description of the Choctaw dogs who threw themselves into the Mississippi to chase after their owners who were unable to take them on the boats into Indian Territory. But more often than not, he’d tell me his philosophy about Indians in America. “We didn’t have time, money, or power,” he’d say more than once. “You put that in your book. That’s what your work is missing.” And then he’d laugh and tell me he couldn’t wait to read more.

Since he last called, I have thought of little else. Indians did not have time, money, or power. The indigenous critical theory scholar in me wants to argue with my dad, to point out all the ways the Chickasaws and other indigenous nations have always had power, time, and resources through relationship with land, complicity in chattel slavery, negotiations with the British, French, Spanish, and Americans, or in the very ability to rebuild one more time out of the destruction the militaries, laws, and legislative bodies left behind. But there is something also fundamentally true in what my dad wanted me to say for him, particularly in the ways Indians figure and do not within the academic, literary, cultural, and political inquiries that seek to delineate the problems facing so many people, be they settlers, diasporic immigrants, or natives in those lands stolen from indigenous peoples.”

from “THE PRESENT AND PROBABLE FUTURE CONDITION OF THE THREE RACES THAT INHABIT THE TERRITORY OF THE UNITED STATES,” Tocqueville.

At the end of the year 1831, while I was on the left bank of the Mississippi, at a place named by Europeans Memphis, there arrived a numerous band of Choctaws (or Chactas, as they are called by the French in Louisiana). These savages had left their country and were endeavoring to gain the right bank of the Mississippi, where they hoped to find an asylum that had been promised them by the American government. It was then the middle of winter, and the cold was unusually severe; the snow had frozen hard upon the ground, and the river was drifting huge masses of ice. The Indians had their families with them, and they brought in their train the wounded and the sick, with children newly born and old men upon the verge of death. They possessed neither tents nor wagons, but only their arms and some provisions. I saw them embark to pass the mighty river, and never will that solemn spectacle fade from my remembrance. No cry, no sob, was heard among the assembled crowd; all were silent. Their calamities were of ancient date, and they knew them to be irremediable. The Indians had all stepped into the bark that was to carry them across, but their dogs remained upon the bank. As soon as these animals perceived that their masters were finally leaving the shore, they set up a dismal howl and, plunging all together into the icy waters of the Mississippi, swam after the boat.

route9litmag

by Halie Theoharides

"Goth Beach" by Jen May

Bilton’s Mountainside

There has always been an owl on my door But gods used to look more like clouds That didn’t change Gods with clouds for hair Clouds with molten noses Gods on mountains with clouds for houses And...

Long after they have burned to ash, the hound dog sits there Mourning the succulent bones he believes the logs used to be. Imagination is often the boss of memory.

"Antebellum House Party," Terrence Hayes.

1966.

(.)

John Collier to Charles Lummis. 21 September 1922, New Mexico.

"...I spent today with the individual Indians and will continue tomorrow, and tomorrow night will be an all-night session with the Council. It really seems before the job is done we will have the entire pueblo working together and thinking in common terms and lit with a new hope. Of course, I am working in everything else that is possible with the land question: credit, stock breeding, peyote. (By the way I am beginning to doubt whether peyote is doing harm amid most of the Indians. This is a subject we must make an original study of.)"

In 1922 John Collier worked with pueblos in norther New Mexico to resist some of the policies put forth by the BIA. Collier's big achievement in the 1920s was pushing the point that the BIA was a problematic institution at a policy level, rather than assigning blame only to individual agents. Collier helped reverse the 1887 Dawes Act, which allotted land to individuals, rather than allowing land to remain commonly-owned (this policy gave precedent for the government to take and resell thousands of acres of tribal land).

Collier became the Commissioner of Indian affairs in 1933, and he helped push the Indian Reorganization Act through congress (people call it the Indian New Deal, but it's really an old one-- allowing lands to be communally owned and managed as they were before the Dawes Act). His management was imperfect, but he helped reintroduce some semblance of tribal sovereignty into US policy.

The letter I've excerpted was written about two years after Collier and his family moved to Taos. It's an early sign of Collier's growing consciousness. He writes, offhandedly, "I am beginning to doubt whether peyote is doing harm..." and this sets in motion a line of thinking that was radical (among white Americans) in the 1920s, when face paint, long hair, peyote, and a lot of religious rituals were illegal on reservations. Here's Collier beginning to think about the importance of non-assimilative cultural practice, and eventually that shapes his philosophy on land management.