Sensitive Negotiations

Indigenous Diplomacy and British Romantic Poetry

Nikki Hessell

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781438484761, 9781438484778
• eBook ISBN: 9781438484785
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: Literature

Examines how Indigenous figures used British Romantic poetry in their interactions with settler governments and publics.

Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Indigenous peoples in North America and the Pacific engaged with the latest and most fashionable British Romantic poetry as part of transcontinental and transoceanic cross-cultural negotiations about sovereignty, treaty rights, and land claims. In Sensitive Negotiations, Nikki Hessell uses examples from North America, Africa, and the Pacific to show how these Indigenous figures quoted lines from famous poets like Lord Byron and Felicia Hemans to build sympathy and community with their audience. Hessell makes new connections by setting aside European-derived genre barriers to bring literary studies to bear on the study of diplomacy and scholarship from diplomatic history and Indigenous studies to bear on literary criticism. By connecting British Romantic poetry with Indigenous diplomatic texts, artefacts, and rituals, Hessell reimagines poetry as diplomatic and diplomacy as poetic.

Chapter 1

Truth and Reconciliation

The Case of “the Monster Brandt”

In the winter of 1821–1822, the Scottish poet Thomas Campbell made a new acquaintance. John Brant (Ahyonwaeghs) and his cousin, Robert Johnson Kerr, were Mohawk emissaries from Upper Canada who were visiting England to discuss land purchases and treaty violations with the British government. But when Brant contacted Campbell, he was keen to talk poetry.1 In 1809, Campbell had published Gertrude of Wyoming, a narrative poem set in Pennsylvania and based around a real event, the Battle of Wyoming, which was fought by white settlers on the one hand and British troops and their Haudenosaunee allies on the other, during the American Revolution. In the poem, the young settler heroine, Gertrude, and her family, are visited by an old acquaintance, Outalissi, an Oneida man, who warns them of the impending attack by the British forces:

This is no time to fill the joyous cup,

The Mammoth comes,—the foe—the Monster Brandt—

With all his howling desolating band;

These eyes have seen their blade and burning pine

Awake at once, and silence half your land.

Red is the cup they drink; but not with wine:

Awake, and watch to-night, or see no morning shine!

Scorning to wield the hatchet for his bribe,

’Gainst Brandt himself I went to battle forth:

Accursed Brandt! he left of all my tribe

Nor man, nor child, nor thing of living birth:

No! not the dog that watch’d my household hearth,

Escaped that night of blood, upon our plains!

All perish’d!—I alone am left on earth!

To whom nor relative nor blood remains.

No! not a kindred drop that runs in human veins!” (III, 138–53)2

The “Monster Brandt” here is John Brant’s father, the eighteenth-century Mohawk leader Joseph Brant (Thayendanegea), who was, from a European perspective, one of the best-known Indigenous figures of that period in the Americas. John Brant contacted Campbell, thirteen years after the publication of his poem and fifteen years after his father’s death, to dispute this literary characterization. His father, he pointed out, was not at the Battle of Wyoming, and was not the villain that Campbell had made him out to be.

This chapter differs from the others in my book because it discusses an alternative kind of quotation practice. In the chapters that follow this one, I discuss Indigenous diplomats who typically quoted Romantic poetry to mobilize positive values and elevate sentiments that they believe could help their cause. In this chapter, I am considering an instance in which the exact language of a Romantic poem was regarded by Indigenous diplomats as false, malicious, and in need of correction, not simply because of its inaccuracy, but because of the effect that poetic falsehoods could have on Indigenous sovereignty and land rights. However, the encounter between Thomas Campbell and John Brant still reinforces the significance of quotation, of verbatim language, and of the role that Romantic poetry played in Indigenous diplomacy. It underlines the mismatch between Indigenous and settler-imperial notions of genre divisions, fact and fiction, and poetic license. And it reminds us that the deployment of this poetry by Indigenous diplomats was never a flight of fancy or a rhetorical flourish, but rather a quest for accountability and justice.

Gertrude of Wyoming has been read by David Simpson, Kevin Hutchings, Kate Flint, and Tim Fulford in their important interventions in debates about Romanticism and colonization.3 But scholarship on the poem, coming as it does from within literary studies, has typically located the encounter between Brant and Campbell within a reading of Campbell’s intentions and actions. Where Brant’s intentions and actions are considered, they tend to be cast as a case of filial duty: Fulford writes that Brant “resented” the portrayal of his father, while Hutchings provides a nuanced reading of Brant’s mobilization of discourses of civility and civilization to “defend his father’s honour.”4 But these readings dislocate the encounter from the wider diplomatic context in which I would like to read it. Brant was in London to discuss a long-held grievance about the boundaries of the Grand River settlement in Upper Canada, on which his people lived, a grievance that stretched back to Indigenous-British relationships in the eighteenth century and that persists today. Instead of considering the encounter with Campbell as a kind of personal matter taken up in the middle of a diplomatic mission, we should relocate it as an essential element of the diplomacy, in which lines on a map and lines of poetry were never entirely separate. Brant wanted to talk poetry, but poetry, in this era, played a vital role in diplomacy.

Haudenosaunee Diplomacy and Transatlantic Politics

John Brant’s mission to London in 1821–1822 was a chapter in one of the richest and best-documented diplomatic relationships of the transatlantic colonial world. British engagement with the Haudenosaunee people, of which the Mohawks are one group, stretched back to the earliest moments of contact in North America and was part of a complex network of connections between the Haudenosaunee and various European powers. The Haudenosaunee, also known by Europeans as the Iroquois or the Six Nations, are a league of sovereign nations who were brought together by a leader known as the Peacemaker in the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries.5 The original five nations (the Mohawks, Senecas, Cayugas, Onondagas, and Oneidas) were joined by the Tusacaroras in the 1720s to form the Six Nations. In the eighteenth century, they were led by a council of fifty people taken from the different nations, collectively known as the Rotiyanehson, each of whom had a title that would be passed on to a new leader on their death. This political and spiritual framework included a formal process of diplomacy, which was designed to create peace and harmony. Conferences and negotiations could only be held around the designated council fire, and each of the nations played a defined role that maintained political balance and order.6 Speeches and agreements were recorded and confirmed using strings or belts of wampum beads.7 The official council meetings were often supplemented by smaller, private meetings, sometimes referred to as meetings “in the bushes,” in which interested parties discussed shared concerns before the speeches were delivered in the council setting.8

One element of this process came to be known as the condolence ceremony. The story of the Great Law explained that the Peacemaker had brought the chief Hiawatha back to health after the death of his daughters by giving him three strings of beads and speaking words of condolence; one string of beads dried his tears, the next cleared his throat, and the last one opened his ears. These actions became part of the Haudenosaunee league’s “requickening” practices, to be used in situations where a leader had died and needed to be replaced, but also as the opening ritual of Haudenosaunee councils more generally. The condolence ceremony involves one group, the clear-minded, visiting the mourning group to condole with them. The two sides each perform the act of wiping each other’s eyes, unblocking their ears, and clearing their throat, in order to acknowledge past losses, but also to remove barriers to communication. This requickening process is followed by the performance of the “Six Songs,” which express the sorrow of the mourners but also the happiness surrounding the meeting of the two sides and their reengagement with the Great Law of Peace.9 The connection between creative expression and the political communication process is encapsulated in a phrase sometimes translated as “Let me drive it into your mind with a song,” which is used to introduce the performance of a song in support of the messages being delivered.10

These processes of negotiation and communication, which were formed among the Haudenosaunee themselves, came to characterize their engagements with the European powers, in which the existing Haudenosaunee league morphed into a political confederacy. As Timothy J. Shannon has noted, a shared cross-cultural diplomatic language and set of practices emerged in the early eighteenth century, partly to circumvent the difficulties of translation. Stock metaphors, including opening or unblocking paths, burying hatchets, linking arms, tending the tree of peace, and polishing or repairing the chain (a reference to the image of the Covenant Chain that symbolically bound the Haudenosaunee to the Dutch) were used by Haudenosaunee and European speakers alike and accompanied by the exchange of wampum belts and strings.11 A vital symbol of the relationship between the Haudenosaunee and the European powers was the Two Row Wampum belt, which contains two parallel lines of purple beads. These lines had stood for the Haudenosaunee and the Dutch, traveling side by side in separate canoes, respectful of each other’s customs but operating autonomously.12 Over time, the Two Row Wampum became a more general symbol of the way in which the Haudenosaunee imagined themselves as equal partners to their European allies, and it remains a potent symbol of Indigenous autonomy alongside settler nation-states.13 These hybrid processes, objects, and lexicons filtered back to Europe via treaties, journals, letters, travelogues, and newspaper accounts. To a large extent, what late-eighteenth-century Europeans imagined as “standard” Native ceremony, oratory, and diplomacy were in fact derived from Haudenosaunee practices.

The condolence ceremony, while still operating as a Haudenosaunee protocol for the replacement of deceased leaders, also became both a model for (and a critical opening activity in) cross-cultural treaty protocols.14 In 1768, for example, at a council that Joseph Brant attended, the British diplomat Sir William Johnson and his Haudenosaunee counterparts undertook the condolence ceremony before discussing boundary lines. Johnson’s son, Sir John Johnson, would perform the same ritual at a meeting in Niagara in July 1783.15 Similar examples can be found throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The condolence ceremony was essential to the process of creating a respectful space in which the two sides could negotiate.

Multiple layers of repetition characterized these cross-cultural diplomatic encounters. The Haudenosaunee elements of the process, including the condolence ceremony, were themselves repetitions of the rituals laid down by the Peacemaker. Negotiations around the council fire involved the repetition of propositions by both sides, first by the proposers, and then by the listeners, in order to ensure that the issues at stake were fully comprehended before debate and negotiation began.16 Speakers reminded one another of past negotiations, and wampum records as well as written texts were cited as evidence.17 For the Haudenosaunee, these repetitions were the point of the negotiations; the relationship itself was what mattered, and it required constant renewal or requickening.18

Joseph Brant was a central figure in late-eighteenth-century Haudenosaunee diplomacy. A skilled linguist, who had been educated in both Haudenosaunee traditions and the Anglophone colonial education system, Brant served as a captain in the British army in Great Britain’s conflicts with other European powers and the emergent American settler population. He was present at the negotiation of the 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix, which set the boundary between British and Haudenosaunee land holdings, and he would refer back to this document when writing to colonial officials in the future. He developed into an important go-between in the ongoing relationship between the British and the Haudenosaunee because of his skills as a linguist and translator, and he may have taken on the role of a “pine tree chief,” one of those whom the Rotiyanehson employed because of their particular merits or abilities.19 In January 1776, Brant went to London on a trip facilitated by his brother-in-law Sir William Johnson, the British superintendent of Indian affairs, where he met King George III, conducted diplomatic business, posed for a portrait by George Romney, and was interviewed by James Boswell.20 He sat at the heart of a complex network of political and artistic affiliations that stretched across the Atlantic.

The American War of Independence divided the Haudenosaunee.21 The Mohawks, along with the Senecas, Cayugas, and Onondagas, fought on the British side, after obtaining a guarantee that they could return to their lands at the conclusion of the hostilities.22 The British defeat and subsequent capitulation to the Americans in the negotiation of the Treaty of Paris, which ended the war, left the Haudenosaunee in limbo; the Treaty contained no reference to Native Americans, and the newly formed American government felt no obligation to honor Britain’s promises. Thus, a new understanding between the British and the Haudenosaunee was required....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction: The Power of (Poetic) Promises
• 1 Truth and Reconciliation: The Case of “the Monster Brandt”
• 2 Romanticism and Removal: Elias Boudinot, Felicia Hemans, and the Cherokee Phoenix
• 3 Digressive Diplomacy: George Copway and Byron’s Lines on the Rhine
• 4 “Always Build a Fence around the King’s Word”: Sol Plaatje and The Deserted Village
• 5 Petitions and Repetitions: Rēweti Kōhere and the Ashes of Byron and Macaulay
• Conclusion: Coming to Terms with Romantic Poetry
• Coda
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover