A History of American Literature

Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 139

Boudinot proudly claims. So, too, may all other Indians; all are “susceptible of

attainments necessary to the formation of polished society.” Boudinot expresses a

fundamentally progressive impulse, a belief in the Manifest Destiny of white culture

and in the ability of his people to participate in that Destiny. His tribe, in particular,

he suggests, have made great strides “in their movement towards civilisation,” with

“the invention of letters,” “the translation of the New Testament into Cherokee,” and

“the organisation of a Government.” Given time, “the Cherokee Nation ... will finally

become ... one of the Garden spots of America.”

Boudinot was specifically asking for support to accelerate the process of

acculturation when he gave his Address. That may be one reason why it is, on the

whole, a hymn to the values of white culture. It is worth making two further points,

however. One is that Boudinot anticipated communication between his people and

the whites as a two-way process: the whites would teach the Indians about their

cultural practices, and the Indians, in turn, would tell whites about their “intellectual

efforts,... their eloquence,... their moral, civil, and physical advancement.” The

second, more important point follows from the first. Acculturation, for Boudinot

and those like him, did not mean absorption. The Cherokees would become “civilized”

but separate, “not a great, but a faithful ally of the United States.” Following his

Address, Boudinot was to become editor of the Cherokee Phoenix, the first newspaper

produced by American Indians. It served a dual function: to inform local readers

about events taking place in their society, and to inform whites elsewhere of the

strides toward civilization being made by the Cherokee Nation. He was also to

become a translator of English works into Cherokee: a perfect illustration of his hope

that his people would acquire the blessings of white culture but maintain their own

separate but equal integrity. Boudinot’s hopes proved to be without foundation. The

Cherokee Nation was forced to remove less than ten years after the Address was

delivered, along the Trail of Tears; the consequences were, of course, little short of

genocide. Ironically, Boudinot was one of those Cherokees who signed the treaty

with the federal government, ceding Cherokee land in the East for Indian Territory in

the West. He did so in the belief that removal was now the only way the Cherokee

Nation could survive. It was a mistaken belief, and he paid for it with his life: he was

killed in Indian Territory by members of his tribe, who felt that he had betrayed them

by signing the treaty. Boudinot had wondered whether his people would, as he put it,

“become civilised and happy, or sharing the fate of many kindred nations, become

extinct.” Of the two alternatives, white society seemed on the whole to prefer the

latter. His life and work, consequently, and his death all became poignant testament

to the failure of accord: the vision Boudinot cherished, of his “native country” “taking

her seat with the nations of the earth,” never came near to being realized.

Oral culture of the Hispanic Southwest

Storytelling was not, of course, a monopoly of the Native Americans whose tales the

Schoolcrafts helped to record. Apart from those who told tales of Mike Fink, Davy

Crockett, and other frontier heroes or fools, there was a whole oral culture in the

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