Usurping the contract: the Geneva campaign (1923–1924) and the refusal of settler sovereignty

ABSTRACT

I extend analyses of refusal by arguing that it is an orientation toward the contract of recognition that contextualizes Indigenous peoples' engagement with the discursive economies and institutions upholding settler sovereignty. Using the Haudenosaunee's Geneva campaign as a case study, I argue that refusal “desecrates” the contract of recognition by usurping and reinterpreting the contract's location of sovereign authority in the nation-state. Specifically, the essay highlights a way of demanding sovereignty that does not depend on official channels of recognition sanctioned by (inter)national institutions even while it works within those same channels of recognition.

KEYWORDS:

• Six Nations
• League of Nations
• desecration
• refusal
• recognition

Acknowledgments

This article is adapted from the author's dissertation, which was completed under the guidance of Timothy Barouch, Brandon Bayne, Christian Lundberg, Kumi Silva, and Eric King Watts at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. The author also wishes to thank Lucy Ann Burgchardt, Greg Dickinson, Luis J. Gomez, Keith Richotte, Mary Stuckey, and the anonymous reviewers for their immensely helpful and encouraging feedback.

ORCID

Margaret Franz http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2740-3542

Notes

1 Lisa Ford, Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia, 1788–1836 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

2 Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Benton describes imperial expansion as a “search” for sovereignty because “empires did not cover space evenly … [they] were politically fragmented; legally differentiated; and encased in irregular porous, and sometimes undefined borders” (2). For similar accounts of the legal irregularity characterizing North American expansion see Mark Rifkin, Manifesting America: The Imperial Construction of US National Space (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); and Maria Josefina Saldana-Portillo, Indian Given: Racial Geographies across Mexico and the United States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).

3 For in depth accounts of the shift to assimilationism see: Frederick Hoxie, A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880–1920 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2001); C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa, Crooked Paths to Allotment: The Fight over Federal Indian Policy after the Civil War (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2014).

4 This essay follows in Seneca jurist Robert B. Porter’s footsteps regarding the naming of Indigenous peoples:

I will refer collectively to the peoples of the American continent throughout this article as “Indians” or “Indigenous peoples” … [Native Americans] still seems less utilized among Indians than the term “Indian.” Moreover, use of the term “Native American” suggests acceptance of an unsavoury assimilationist connotation (75).

See: Porter, “The Meaning of Indigenous Nation Sovereignty,” Arizona State University Law Journal 34, no. 1 (2002): 75–113.

5 Jason Edward Black, American Indians and the Rhetoric of Removal and Allotment (Oxford, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2016).

6 Frederick E. Hoxie, Talking Back to Civilization: Indian Voices from the Progressive Era (Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001); Lucy Maddox, Citizen Indians: Native American Intellectuals, Race, and Reform (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005); Kiara M. Vigil, Indigenous Intellectuals: Sovereignty, Citizenship, and the American Imagination, 1880–1930 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

7 Mary E. Stuckey and John M. Murphy, “By Any Other Name: Rhetorical Colonialism in North America,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 25, no. 4 (2001): 78. I’m using “traditional” in the same was that Eric Cheyfitz uses it in “The (Post)Colonial Construction of Indian Country: US American Indian Literatures and Federal Indian Law,” in The Columbia Guide to American Indian Literatures from the United States Since 1945, ed. Eric Cheyfitz (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). Per Cheyfitz,

traditional … signif[ies] an ongoing resistance marshaled in the postinvasion period against the European translation of Native land, the inalienable ground of indigenous economic, social, and cultural life constructed through kinship relations, into property: land commodified and thus made alienable through its fungibility (9).

8 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang argue that the incommensurability of sovereignties is precisely why “decolonization is not a metaphor;” it actively and materially unsettles settler colonization. See “Decolonization is not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, and Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40.

9 Lisa King, “Speaking Sovereignty and Communicating Change: Rhetorical Sovereignty and the Inaugural Exhibits at the NMAI,” American Indian Quarterly 35, no. 1 (2011): 77.

10 Ibid., 78.

11 For an overview of “sovereignty” in AIIS see: Taiaiake Alfred, “Sovereignty,” in A Companion to American Indian History, eds. Philip J. Deloria and Neal Salisbury (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002), 461–74; Danielle Endres, “American Indian Permission for Mascots: Resistance or Complicity within Rhetorical Colonialism,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 18, no. 4 (2015): 670–3; Scott R. Lyons, “Rhetorical Sovereignty: What Do American Indians Want from Writing?” College Composition and Communication 51, no. 3 (2000): 447–68; Porter, “The Meaning of Indigenous Nation Sovereignty”; Jolene Rickard, “Visualizing Sovereignty in the Time of Biometric Sensors,” South Atlantic Quarterly 110, no. 2 (2011): 468–7; Mark Rifkin, “Indigenizing Agamben: Rethinking Sovereignty in Light of the ‘Peculiar’ Status of Native Peoples,” Cultural Critique 73 (2009): 88–124; Mark Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), especially 179–90.

12 See: Lisa King, Legible Sovereignties: Rhetoric, Representations, and Native American Museums (Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University Press, 2017).

13 Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 11.

14 Robert J. Branham and W. Barnett Pearce, “Between Text and Context: Toward a Rhetoric of Contextual Reconstruction,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 71, no. 1 (1985): 19.

15 Randall A. Lake, “Enacting Red Power: The Consummatory Function in Native American Protest Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 69, no. 2 (1983): 127–42.

16 Lake disputes the tendency for scholars to define consummatory and instrumental rhetoric as dichotomous: “I have pointed to the coincidence of instrumental and consummatory dimensions in rhetorical acts, and to certain limitations of the former and possibilities of the latter.” See: “Between Myth and History: Enacting Time in Native American Protest Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 77, no. 2 (1991): 145. This essay follows in Lake’s footsteps in troubling the distinction between instrumental and consummatory appeals as well as in exploring the “possibilities” of the latter.

17 Lake, “Enacting Red Power,” 141.

18 “Haudenosaunee” means “People of the Longhouse,” which is a metaphoric and geographic Longhouse extending east to west from Mohawk Valley, Lake Oneida, the Finger Lakes region, and the Genesee, Allegheny, and Niagara Valleys in the borderlands of what is now the United States and Canada. Increased settlement after the Revolutionary War led the Mohawk to move to the Grand River region in what is now Canada and the Cayuga, Onondaga, and Seneca to move to around Buffalo Creek. The Haldimand Treaty with the British established a reserve between Lakes Ontario, Erie, and Huron for the Six Nations in 1784. The Jay Treaty institutionalized the US-Canadian border across Haudenosaunee lands but guaranteed the right “the Indians dwelling on either side of said boundary line” to freely cross. See Alan Taylor, “The Divided Ground: Upper Canada, New York, and the Iroquois Six Nations, 1783–1815.” Journal of the Early Republic 22, no. 1 (2002): 64.

19 Brian Titley, A Narrow Vision: Duncan Campbell Scott and the Administration of Indian Affairs in Canada (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1986), 113–14. Importantly, not all Haudenosaunee were against assimilation. For an overview of the disputes between hereditary chiefs and elected representatives see: Laurence Hauptman, Seven Generations Iroquois Leadership: The Six Nations since 1800 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2008), 124–30. Francis Paul Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 912.

20 Titley, A Narrow Vision, 114.

21 Hauptman, Seven Generations, 130.

22 See: Chauncey Garlow, A.J. General, and Arthur Anderson, Tragic Plight of the Six Nations (Iroquois) Indians: Petition for the Intervention of the League of Nations and Non-Member States (Pax Niton, Isle of Wight: J.R. Ockleshaw-Johnson, 1933). http://cendoc.docip.org/collect/deskaheh/index/assoc/HASHc240/ddab3bcc.dir/R3626-1-1903-1903-19.pdf. This is a petition sent to the League of Nations by two Six Nations chiefs (Garlow and General), who had been working on the Six Nations status case throughout the 1920s, and Anderson, a British businessman. Notably, Anderson petitioned various governmental and non-governmental bodies on behalf of the Six Nations, but he also tried to steal $600,000.00 and was thus, ostracized by Six Nations leaders. See Titley, A Narrow Vision, 129–34.

23 Arnulf Becker Lorca, Mestizo International Law: A Global Intellectual History, 1842–1933 (New York: Cambridge University Press), 284–87.

24 Clinton Rickard, Fighting Tuscarora: The Autobiography of Chief Clinton Rickard, ed. Barbara Graymont (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1994), 61–5.

25 Akwesasne Notes, “Deskaheh: An Iroquois Patriot’s Fight for International Recognition,” in Basic Call to Consciousness, ed. Akwesasne Notes (Summertown, TN: Native Voices, 2005), 48–53. See: Audra Simpson, “The Ruse of Consent and the Autonomy of ‘Refusal’: Cases from Indigenous North America and Australia,” Postcolonial Studies 20, no. 1 (2017): 26.

26 Deskaheh considered the campaign a failure, Akwesasne Notes, Basic Call, 48–55. In Origins of Indigenism: Human Rights and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), Ronald Niezen calls the Geneva campaign a “blip,” but ultimately maintains that it went on to influence what would become a global movement for Indigenous peoples’ self-determination (36). Robert Nichols also describes the campaign as a failure to obtain legibility as a nation-state in “Realizing the Social Contract: The Case of Colonialism and Indigenous Peoples,” Contemporary Political Theory 4, no. 1 (2005): 42–62.

27 See: Branham and Pearce, “Between Text and Context.”

28 Clinton Rickard, Fighting Tuscarora, 61–5; Jolene Rickard, “The Indian Defense League in America,” Akwesasne Notes 48 (30 Sep 1995). See Niezen, Origins of Indigenism, 32–40.

29 Taiaiake Alfred, Wasáse: Indigenous Pathways of Action and Freedom (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 359–61; Rickard, “Visualizing Sovereignty,” 468–7.

30 Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Allen Warrior, Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee (New York: The New Press, 1996). Oren Lyons was an influence and participant in Wounded Knee: “When the Oglalas declared Wounded Knee to be a sovereign nation, they formally sought the recognition and assistance from the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy” (227).

31 Simpson, “Ruse of Consent,” 26.

32 Branham and Pearce, “Between Text and Context,” 22.

33 I am referring to the definition of sovereignty as the will to reterritorialize the political order in Patchen Markell, Bound by Recognition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 10–1.

34 Ibid., 29–30.

35 Ibid., 28.

36 Ibid.

37 Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978), 729.

38 Akwesasne Notes, ed., “Deskaheh,” 48–53; Hauptman, Seven Generations, 124–30.

39 Most of the critiques of recognition respond to Charles Taylor’s theory of cultural recognition emerging from Hegel, Herder, and Fanon. Authors criticize Taylor’s reliance on Hegelian antagonism (e.g., Kelly Oliver, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition [Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2001]) as well as recognition’s displacement of a materialist politics of redistribution (e.g., Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange (New York: Verso, 2003)). This essay, however, is indebted to the argument that Taylor ignores the role of the state in shaping what recognition even is. See: Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Markell, Bound by Recognition; Karma R. Chávez’s critique of inclusion in “Beyond Inclusion: Rethinking Rhetoric’s Historical Narrative,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 162–72, offers a similar challenge.

40 Ford, Settler Sovereignty, 189–92.

41 Johnson and Graham’s Lessee v. William McIntosh, 21 U.S. 543 (1823); The Cherokee Nation v. State of Georgia, 30 U.S. 1 (1831), at 18; Samuel Worcester v. State of Georgia, 31 U.S. 515 (1832).

42 Titley, A Narrow Vision, 36.

43 Danielle Endres, “The Rhetoric of Nuclear Colonialism: Rhetorical Exclusion of American Indian Arguments in the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Siting Decision,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 6, no. 1 (2009): 44.

44 Edward A. Everett, Report of the New York State Indian Commission to Investigate the Status of the American Indian Residing in the State of New York (Albany, NY: New York State Indian Commission, March 17, 1922), 9.

45 Helen Upton, The Everett Report in Historical Perspective: The Indians of New York (Albany, NY: New York State American Revolution Bicentennial Commission, 1980), 77.

46 Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, 35.

47 Ibid., 53–60.

48 Canada, Canadian Annual Review (Government of Canada: Department of Public Works, 1923), 208–9, quoted in Nichols, “Realizing the Social Contract,” 43.

49 Oliver, Witnessing, 10.

50 Markell, Bound by Recognition, 38.

51 See Frantz Fanon’s discussion of blackness, recognition, and antagonism at the end of Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 185–91; For Fanon’s critique of recognition applied to the North American context see: Coulthard, Red Skin White Masks, especially ch. 4–5.

52 Markell, Bound by Recognition, 29.

53 For an explanation of medium and resistance see: Armond R. Towns, “Rebels of the Underground: Media, Orality, and the Routes of Black Emancipation,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 13, no. 2 (2016): 184–97.

54 Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus.

55 Lake, “Enacting Red Power,” 130–31.

56 Renee Montaigne, “North Dakota Commissioner: Standing Rock Sioux Sat Out The State Process,” November 2, 2016 in Morning Edition, 4:26, https://www.npr.org/2016/11/02/500331158/north-dakota-commissioner-standing-rock-souix-sat-out-the-state-process.

57 See Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/idnative2020/; This campaign has similarities with MECha’s theorization of Aztlan. The emphasis on the census, however, refuses dominant state-sanctioned classifications of legal status.

58 Black, American Indians and the Rhetoric of Removal, 61.

59 Kelly, 170. For a discussion of the problem of legibility and desecration see Linda Diane Horwitz and Catherine H. Palczewski, “Racing/Sexing the Rhetorical Situation: Angela Davis’ Embodied Contextual Reconstruction,” in Race and Hegemonic Struggle in the United States: Pop Culture, Politics, and Protest, eds. Michael G. Lacy and Mary E. Triece (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 175–97.

60 Branham and Pearce, “Between Text and Context,” 22.

61 See Joanne Barker, Native Acts: Law, Recognition, and Cultural Authenticity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 81–146.

62 Sally Weaver, “The Iroquois: The Grand River Reserve in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, 1875–1945,” in Aboriginal Ontario: Historical Perspectives on the First Nations, ed. Edward Rogers and David B. Smith (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1994), 213–57.

63 Winston Churchill letter to Lord Bing of Vimy, September 23, 1921. Cited in Garlow, General, and Anderson, Tragic Plight of the Six Nations (Iroquois) Indians, 5.

64 Nichols, “Realizing the Social Contract,” 44.

65 Lorca, Mestizo International Law, 282; “Iroquois Tribe Asks Sovereign Status,” The New York Times, December 23, 1922.

66 Petition addressed to “The Honourable Sir James Eric Drummond,” August 8, 1923. https://cendoc.docip.org/collect/deskaheh/index/assoc/HASH9252/c582fe50.dir/R612-11-28075-30035-6.pdf.

67 Lorca, Mestizo International Law, 283.

68 Deskaheh, Chief Deskaheh Tells Why He’s Here Again (London: Kealeys Limited, 1923), 3.

69 Ibid., 7.

70 Ibid.

71 The Six Nations, The Redman’s Appeal for Justice: The Position of the Six Nations That They Constitute an Independent State (1924). Digital copy retrieved with permission from Six Nations Public Library. http://snpl.ca/.

72 See: George P. Decker, “Letter” (December 24, 1923). Box B23. 5. Delegation d’Irlande et al., “Letter,” (27 Sept. 1923). IV, Box B23.3, Howard R. Berman Collection, Charles B. Sears Law Library, University of Buffalo, New York.

73 Lorca, Mestizo International Law, 18–20.

74 Ibid.

75 Lorca, Mestizo International Law, 41–3.

76 Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of Jus Publicum Europaeum, trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos Press, 2006).

77 The Six Nations, Redman’s Appeal for Justice, 2.

78 Antony Anghie, “Colonialism and the Birth of International Institutions: Sovereignty, Economy, and the Mandate System of the League of Nations,” NYU Journal of International Law & Policy 34, no. 3 (2002): 513–634. C.f. Schmitt, Nomos.

79 Gawasonaneh, “An Aboriginal Experiment,” The New York Times, January, 21, 1923, accessed August 12, 2019, ProQuest Historical Newspapers, 6.

80 See essays by Oren Lyons, John Mohawk, Robert Venables, and Howard Berman in Exiled in the Land of the Free: Democracy, Indian Nations, and the U.S. Constitution, ed. Oren Lyons (Santa Fe, NM: Clear Light Publishers, 1992).

81 Erik M. Jensen, “The Imaginary Connection between the Great Law of Peace and the United State Constitution: A Reply to Professor Schaaf,” American Indian Law Review 15 (1991 1990): 295–308; Gregory Schaaf, “From the Great Law of Peace to the Constitution of the United States: A Revision of America’s Democratic Roots,” American Indian Law Review 14, no. 2 (1988): 323–31, https://doi.org/10.2307/20068293.

82 Deskaheh, Tells Why, 8.

83 Letter from Deskaheh to Six Nations, Dec 16, 1923. IV, Box B23.5, Howard R. Berman Collection, Charles B. Sears Law Library, University of Buffalo, New York.

84 Ibid.

85 “Iroquois Chief Asks League Recognition,” The New York Times, December 23, 1923, accessed August 12, 2019, ProQuest Historical Newspapers, E3.

86 Hauptman, Seven Generations, 135–6.

87 Tribe of the Six Nations: Note of the Secretary-General, Geneva, March 18, 1924, IV, Box B23.7. Howard R. Berman Collection, Charles B. Sears Law Library, University of Buffalo, New York.

88 Garlow, General, and Anderson, Tragic Plight.

89 Lorca, Mestizo International Law, 284–5.

90 Lorca, Mestizo International Law, 286.

91 Vine Deloria, Jr. and David E. Wilkins, The Legal Universe: Observations on the Foundations of American Law (Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 2011), 2; C.f. Patricia J. Williams, Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).

92 See: Matthew L. M. Fletcher, “The Original Understanding of the Political Status of Indian Tribes,” St. John’s Law Review 82 (2008): 153–81.

93 Rifkin, “Indigenizing Agamben,” 95.

94 The Six Nations, The Redman’s Appeal, 17–8.

95 Simpson, “Ruse of Consent,” 27.

96 The Six Nations, The Redman’s Appeal, 17.

97 Ibid.

98 Deskaheh, Letter to the Editor of Headway, August 16, 1924. Compiled in Garlow, General, and Anderson, Tragic Plight of the Six Nations (Iroquois) Indians, 4.

99 Simpson, “Ruse of Consent,” 30; Tehanetorens, Wampum Belts of the Iroquois (Summertown, TN: Book Publishing Company, 1999), 12.

100 Michael K. Foster, “Another Look at the Function of Wampum in Iroquois-White Councils,” in The History and Culture of Iroquois Diplomacy: An Interdisciplinary Guide to the Treaties of the Six Nations and Their League, eds. Francis Jennings and William N. Fenton (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1985), 105.

101 Ibid., 102.

102 Genevieve Renard Painter, “A Letter from the Haudenosaunee Confederacy to King George V: Writing and Reading Jurisdictions in International Legal History,” London Review of International Law 5, no. 1 (2016): 1–39.

103 Weaver, “the Iroquois,” 250.

104 It is not clear exactly how Deskaheh and Decker obtained the wampum. During the time period, there was an ongoing dispute between the hereditary council of chiefs, the elected council, Canadian Indian Affairs, and various museums over stolen wampum. In fact, Deskaheh was under investigation by Indian Affairs for supposedly bringing the Geneva the original Haldimand Treaty and a silver peace pipe. Letter to Deputy Minister of Justice Department, W.S. Edwards, Nov. 5, 1924. “Indian Affairs.” (RG 10, vol. 3018. 220). Public Archives of Canada.

105 The Six Nations, The Redman’s Appeal, 5.

106 Tehanetorens, Wampum Belts, 12; See: Angela Haas, “Wampum as Hypertext: An American Indian Intellectual Tradition of Multimedia Theory and Practice,” Studies in American Indian Literatures 19, no. 4 (2007): 77–100.

107 The Six Nations, The Redman’s Appeal, 5.

108 Saldaña-Portillo, Indian Given.

109 The Six Nations. The Redman’s Appeal, 11.

110 Quoted in Alfred, Wasáse, 368.

111 Ibid.