Remembrances of Removal: Native Resistance to Allotment and the Unmasking of Paternal Benevolence

Abstract

This essay explores the ways that American Indians in the late nineteenth century enacted collective memories of the Indian Removal Act (1830) in their dissenting responses to the General Allotment, or Dawes, Act (1887). I argue that these collective memories served as a means for American Indians to unmask the paternal benevolence associated with the Dawes Act, while simultaneously aiding them in repositioning U.S. and Native identities. Such resistance was supported by forging connections between the removal and allotment policies. This essay proceeds, first, by contextualizing allotment and removal within the ideologies of expansion and paternalism that were vital to nineteenth-century U.S.-Native relations. Next, collective memory is discussed as a rhetoric of resistance through an analysis of speeches, commentaries, memorials and petitions proffered by American Indian communities in their rebukes of the Dawes Act. Finally, the essay presents the implications of collective memory on Native resistance to the U.S. government's nineteenth-century Indian policies.

The author thanks Shawn Parry-Giles, Lisa Burns, Amy Heyse, John Meyer, and two anonymous reviewers for offering suggestions for improvement. Two earlier versions of this essay were presented at the National Communication Association convention, Boston, MA (2005), and the Carolinas Communication Association convention, Charleston, SC (2006).