138 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865speech, on Independence Day, he was coming to the end of a long career as a mediator
between his tribe and the whites, a lobbyist and a political leader. And Quinney used
the occasion to contrast American promise and performance. “I have been taught in
your schools,” Quinney told his audience, “and been able to read your histories and
accounts of Europeans, yourselves and the Red Man.” And what those books had
instructed him, he explained, was that “while your rejoicings today are commemorative
of the free birth of this giant nation, they simply convey to my mind, the transfer of
a miserable weakness and dependance of my race from one great power to another.”
The purpose of the speech was, in fact, threefold. It was, first, to emphasize the total
dispossession of his people. Robbed of their land, authority over them simply shifted
from white European to white American masters, they had been denied their place in
history, since their story did not appear as it should have in the school books American
children read every day. Second, it was to redress the balance a little by beginning to
tell that story: Quinney rehearsed the tale of his tribe from pre-Columbian days,
when prophecies circulated of “the coming of a strange race, from the sunrise” who
would crowd the Indians “from their fair possessions,” right up until the time of
telling. The third purpose was to encourage a more substantial redress. Acculturation
was necessary, Quinney believed, in response to white American expansionism but,
for Indians to achieve this, white Americans had to be willing to accept them as
equals. Even the plight of the slave, Quinney suggested, was not as bad as that of the
Indian. For, “while the slave is increasing, and increased by every appliance, the
Indian is left to rot and die, behold the humanities of this model Republic!” “For
myself and for my tribe, I ask for justice,” Quinney concluded, “– I believe it will
sooner or later occur – and may the Great and Good Spirit enable me to die in hope.”
Like many other Native American writers writing at this time, Quinney mixed pride
in a tribal past with belief in a new American future, defined by the linked blessings
of white civilization and Christian conversion. It was not for nothing that he was
referred to, among many of his contemporaries, as “the Last of the Mohicans.”
“Shall red men live, or shall they be swept from the earth?” another Indian writer
of the time, Elias Boudinot (1802–1839), asked in Address to the Whites, delivered
and published in 1826. And for Boudinot, just as for Apess, Conway, and Quinney,
to live meant for the “red man” to accommodate to and be accepted by the white.
Like them, too, his own story was a testament to accommodation. Born a Cherokee,
he was sent to a Moravian mission school where he was educated into white values
and practices. Initially named Buck Watie, he renamed himself after meeting Elias
Boudinot, the president of the American Bible Society, following the Cherokee
custom of adopting the name of a benefactor. It was while traveling to solicit
donations for a national academy and printing equipment for the Cherokee Nation
that Boudinot delivered his Address. More even than the address of Quinney or the
autobiography of Conway, it is a testament to a future in which Indians assume what
Boudinot, at one point, calls “the mantle of civilisation.” “You here behold an Indian,”
Boudinot informs his audience; “my kindred are Indians, and my fathers sleeping in
the wilderness grave – they too were Indians. But I am not as my fathers were –
broader means and nobler influences have fallen upon me.” He has improved,GGray_c02.indd 138ray_c 02 .indd 138 8 8/1/2011 7:54:40 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 40 AM