The Silence of Ely S. Parker: The Emancipation Sublime and the Limits of Settler Memory

Abstract

NAIS 1:2 FALL 2014 The Silence of Ely S. Parker 1 Articles MARK RIFKIN The Silence of Ely S. Parker: The Emancipation Sublime and the Limits of Settler Memory I’M WATCHING Lincoln in a movie theater, and in the middle it cuts from a scene about the machinations of political operatives paid by the Lincoln administration to secure House votes for the Thirteenth Amendment to a scene of General Ulysses S. Grant in Virginia meeting with Confederate commissioners . One of the men in the frame appears to me to be Native. Later, at the end of the film in a scene set at the Appomattox courthouse, the site of General Robert E. Lee’s surrender, that man returns, and I suddenly realize that it must be Ely S. Parker.1 A chief of the Tonawanda Senecas who played a central role in their fight to reclaim their reservation in the wake of the supplemental Treaty of Buffalo Creek of 1842, Parker served as secretary and aide to Grant from Parker’s enlistment in the army in 1863 through Grant’s election as president. The men originally met in 1860 while Parker was serving as a civil engineer in Galena, Illinois.2 The published screenplay confirms the historical identity of this figure on the screen, including Parker in the official cast of characters (Kushner, xvi).3 In the scenes in which Grant appears, though, it never designates Parker by name, instead including him as one of the general’s other unremarked “aides” (91), “officers” (140), or “staff” (157). Furthermore, at no point in the movie does he speak. The film’s screenwriter, Tony Kushner, clearly felt it necessary to represent Parker’s existence for the sake of accuracy, but even as the movie captures his presence, it vacates that fact of any substantive significance, with Parker functioning more or less as a historical prop. I could not help reading the film’s simultaneous awareness of his presence and failure to address it as a kind of allegory for the ways Native sovereignties, histories, and struggles with the U.S. settler-state cannot meaningfully enter into an historiographic imagination organized around the Civil War, especially one in which emancipation serves as the pivot point for narrating national time. Onto what other histories does Parker’s presence open? If we were to approach Lincoln as something like a distillation of how the Civil War continues to be envisioned Mark Rifkin NAIS 1:2 FALL 2014 2 in the U.S., how might Parker’s unnamed and silent appearance suggest the ways that such accounts of the U.S. past foreclose an engagement with Indigenous polities and geographies as well as the ongoing history of state assaults on them? In this way, Parker’s passing and unremarked entry into the film’s imagination can be read as a trace, pointing toward temporalities of indigeneity and settler colonialism that remain unintelligible within the narrative of the Civil War as epochal/redemptive break.4 Clearly a product of contemporary perspectives and sensibilities, ­ Lincoln suggests the role the Civil War plays in current forms of national self-­ representation, particularly as they seek to cast the United States as a multiculturalnationcommittedtomodesofantiracistinclusion .5 Withinthisvision of history, emancipation serves as a crucial marker of a national commitment to equality, but one that requires a break in the usual operation of the nation in order for the promise of liberty to be actualized. In Lincoln, the Civil War appears as a transformative caesura in the time/space of the nation, a state of exception in which the legal and political order of the country is suspended in the process of realizing national ideals. Giorgio Agamben suggests that “the state of exception appears as the legal form of what cannot have ­ legal form,” and he asks, “If the state of exception’s characteristic property is a (total or partial) suspension of the juridical order, how can such a suspension still be contained within it?” (1, 23). A national norm of universal equality that has no precise legal status and that directly contravenes the institutionalized structure of chattel slavery ostensibly serves as the basis for a suspension of law in the...