Bad Faith and the American Indian: Laura Cornelius Kellogg and the Problem of Democratic Inclusion

Abstract

AbstractOneida writer and activist Laura Cornelius Kellogg’s 1920 hybrid text Our Democracy and the American Indian strategically uses US settler legal concepts, such as private property, to critique the US government’s hypocrisy in its unjust treatment of Native people. It appeals for sovereignty in a mode that turns these same unjust methods and tools against their government uses. Kellogg uses her treatise to show that not only has Congress acted in bad faith toward Native people, but that this bad faith can be turned back on the government and used to further Indigenous self-governance. Instead of completely rejecting private property ownership—the form of land relation the US government either excluded Native people from or granted them limited access to—Kellogg embraces it and adapts it for collective Native interests. This article reads Kellogg’s text alongside contemporary legal cases around Oneida sovereignty to show ongoing colonialism forces Indigenous peoples to draw on Anglo-American legal forms not to assimilate, but rather to survive. It suggests that state-recognized forms of Native sovereignty may be accessed only temporarily, and then through acts of bad faith strategy, in which the letter of the law is used to ends counter to the law’s ostensible intention.[Laura Cornelius] Kellogg uses her treatise to show that not only has Congress acted in bad faith toward Native people, but . . . that this bad faith can be turned back on the [US] government . . . to further Indigenous self-governance.