Native Resistive Rhetoric and the Decolonization of American Indian Removal Discourse

Abstract

This essay examines nineteenth-century Native resistance to the American Indian removal policy as a strategy of decolonization. Attention focuses in particular on the tactics of decolonization employed in the rhetoric of the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole nations as it functioned to expose the dilemmas and hypocrisies of U.S. government justifications for Native removal as animated by discourses of territoriality, republicanism, paternalism, and godly authority. This analysis of the rhetorical strategy and tactics of decolonization helps to reassess the agency of nineteenth-century American Native voices and to gauge in general how rhetorics of resistance can be articulated in colonial contexts.