Editor's Commentary

Abstract

This issue looks at the concept of indigenous sovereignty from a variety of viewpoints, all of them basically political, framed in the perspective of time from the past to the present and the variations in the imperialism that has colored that perspective. "Lewis Cass and the Politics of Disease" tells of the official decisions to vaccinate American Indians or not as played out in the 1830s. This was a significant effect of imperialism; tribes were forced to move from their homelands for trans-Mississippian exile and to travel across territory where immigrants had brought smallpox to the inhabitants and polluted the water sources with cholera-infected sewage. Tribes not yet forced into this ethnic-cleansing removal but deemed hostile to the interests of the United States were denied vaccination. The sovereignty of all of them, those being marched into exile and those who had been labeled hostile, had been denied. J. Diane Pearson has drawn these shameful histories of imperial medicine, imperial land theft, and forced marches from the archives of official records to keep these events in mind in the twenty-first century.