Cherokee Removal and Marxist Theory

Why do I write about such seemingly obscure topics like the Cherokee removal policy? In fact these questions are not just of historical interest. They reverberate today and have enormous implications for radicals throughout the New World.

While posing important strategic and tactical questions, they also confront Marxism with unresolved theoretical issues that were inherited from the rather incomplete investigations that Marx pursued in his Ethnological notebooks. They also stick out like sore thumbs from Engels's "Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State." While written entirely in sympathy with the plight of precapitalist social formations, they carry with them the heavy legacy of Lewis Henry Morgan's ethnology. Despite his enlightened attitudes, Morgan could not really transcend his epoch. The notion of successive, linear stages of barbarism, savagery, slavery, feudalism, etc. carries the heavy stamp of 18th and 19th century social science. Marxism still has a challenge before it to fully engage with the remnants of indigenous societies without the heavy hand of "stagism". It needs to take into account the kind of work done by people like Boas, but in addition it has to come to terms with much more profound questions on the nature of "progress" and "civilization". A fully developed Marxism will, in my opinion, have to emerge as a critique of civilization in the sense of Thomas Patterson's 1997 MR book "Inventing Western Civilization" that I reviewed for Science and Society.

Unfortunately, Science and Society, Monthly Review, Against the Current, New Left Review and New Politics--the premier general interest scholarly publications of the left--have not had a SINGLE issue devoted to indigenous society or struggles in the 10 years or so that I have been reading them. This reflects poorly on the left.

I am currently reading a brief (143 pages) but powerfully argued and researched book on Andrew Jackson's genocidal removal of the Cherokee and other "civilized" Indian nations from their homeland in the Southeast to west of the Mississippi. Titled "The Long Bitter Trail: Andrew Jackson and the Indians" and written by Anthony Wallace, it makes a strong case for seeing North American Indian society in much more complex terms than is usually the case in "stagist" dominated scholarship.

Instead of seeing indigenous peoples as an undifferentiated mass belonging to the "savagery" or hunting-foraging stage of history, Wallace joins with Eleanor Leacock and other Marxist-oriented anthropologists in identifying ways in which the exception proved the rule. For example, Leacock points out that the Northwest Indian tribes were already at the early stages of a kind of tributary class society when Columbus made his way to these shores. Fishing, instead of agriculture, provided the surplus product for the maintenance of a priestly/chiefly caste that might have evolved into a true class in Marxist terms.

What I learned from Wallace is that Indians living in the Southeast depended much more on horticulture than they did from hunting or foraging. Moreover, there is ample evidence that their mode of production is derived from Mexican indigenous societies from which peoples like the Seminole, Chocktaw and Cherokee most certainly sprang from. Wallace writes:

The Native Americans of the Southeast were the heirs of a highly advanced pre-Columbian civilization, named by archaeologists the "Mississippian Tradition," which was ultimately related to the high cultures of Mexico and Central America. The variety of corn (Eastern flint) that they grew originated among the Maya of Guatemala; the Mississippian religious symbolism echoed Aztec motifs, presumably brought north by traders from the Valley of Mexico. And like the Maya and the Aztecs, the Middle Mississippians built large pyramidal ceremonial mounds, some as high as 100 feet. A major Middle Mississippian central area, with pyramid, plaza, residences, and a perimeter defended by palisades and moats, might have as many as forty thousand residents. All this implies a strong, centralized administrative authority. At its apex, about A.D. 1200, the Mississippian Tradition produced what anthropologist Charles Hudson, a specialist on the Southeastern Indians, has called, perhaps too enthusiastically, "the highest cultural achievement ... in all of North America."

In all likelihood, the relatively advanced character of Southeast Indian life made their transition to "civilization" much easier than in the rest of the country, where hunting-and-foraging clashed with the agricultural proclivities of the colonists. Indeed, the Georgia Cherokee were in many ways identical to their white, Christian neighbors even to the point of owning slaves.

This, however, did not prevent the ruling class from conspiring to remove these peoples from Georgian and adjoining states. While presented as an inexorable struggle between the forces of "civilization" and "savagery", this was nothing more than a desire to seize rich land on behalf of the oppressor nationality. The Cherokees at this point were more of an obstacle to the class interests of Anglo-American farmers rather than to capitalism as such. Even when John Ross, landowning chief of the Cherokees and publisher of a Cherokee language newspaper, invoked the laws of the constitution, Andrew Jackson took the side of the Georgia planters whose Indian removal policy was backed by state law.

The main ideological architect of the Indian removal policy was one Lewis Cass (1782-1866) who was Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the Michigan Territory and Secretary of War under Jackson at different times in his career.

Cass's had a notion of a "hunter state." As Wallace describes it, "The hunter state was a stage in the progress of mankind toward civilization, a stage through which Europeans had long since passed. The Indians of Eastern North America, both in the North and in the South, he believed, still remained in the hunter state."

Anybody who has checked out my articles on Marxism and the American Indian will immediately recognize the origins of Cass's thesis. It comes from the rather widespread and deeply imbedded notion of "stages" found in British and Scottish political economy that preceded Marx. The notion of an evolution from hunting to farming to manufacturing, etc. is not peculiar to Marxism. It found expression in the vast corpus of colonialist apologetics that served to justify primitive accumulation in the New World. This kind of ideology was reinforced by the Victorian era Social Darwinism that also conceived of history in schematic terms, where one kind of economic mode displaced another because it was "fitter". Unfortunately, some of this thinking continues to pervade Marxism. Bad as it is in terms of theory, it has also led to terrible strategic and tactical mistakes as witnessed in Sandinista Nicaragua.

There, of course, is only one problem with Cass's thesis as applied to the Cherokee and other "civilized" tribes. It simply did not hold water. Wallace writes:

Cass paid scant attention to one major fact: throughout the area occupied by the Eastern Indians, horticulture, not hunting, actually provided the staple foods of the native diet-corn, squash, and beans-and fish and shellfish were as important as venison in supplying protein. In this, as we now know, the Eastern Indians were typical of horticultural or "neolithic"-level communities around the world. And it may be noted that even traditional hunters and gatherers in temperate and tropical climates commonly secure the bulk of their calories from wild vegetable products, fish, and shellfish. Nor did Cass pay much attention to the fact that this horticultural economy was carried on in the Northeast, both in pre-Columbian times and after, exclusively by women, and by both women and men in the Southeast. What Indian men should do, he declared, was learn to plow and keep domestic animals, and the women should spin, weave, and make soap-just as the Indian reformers wanted them to do. But the men would not undertake this new role, because they were incapable of reason (their language was defective) and they were irredeemably attached to the pleasures of the chase and the warpath. Nor did Cass think that Whiggish do-gooders would soon be able to civilize them, despite a few local successes.

All in all, the apologetics of Cass strikes one as being of the same cloth as Zionist arguments on behalf of the need to remove Palestinians. As long as there were uncivilized Arabs wasting the land that god gave the ancestors of the Zionist colonizers, there could be no progress. It was much of a lie in the USA in the 1830s as it is today.

The final chapter of Anthony Wallace's "The Long Bitter Trail" is packed with material that helps us to understand the intellectual and political framework that helped to shape the thinking of Marx and Engels on such questions. Marx and Engels both valued the work of Lewis Henry Morgan highly, who represents the best and the not so best aspects of social science and white progressivist thinking on the Indian question.

As Hunter Gray pointed out, racism does not create inequality. Instead, it is the ideological encrustation that grows out of social inequality. Man feels the need to explain why one group suffers while another group prospers. It goes against the grain of Christian morality to say that the Indian had to be treated as less than human because he stood in the way of white greed. Instead, apologists figure out a way to explain genocide in terms of a neutral "science". The Indian had to be kicked out of Georgia because he was lower on the evolutionary scale rather than because he was sitting on land that could be used to grow cotton.

In the 1840s and 1850s, one such "scientific" theory was based on polygenism, which asserted the racial inferiority of both Indians and Blacks. Philadelphia physician and phrenologist Samuel G. Morton wrote:

"Was it not for this same mental superiority, these happy climes which we now inhabit would not be possessed by the wild and untutored Indian, and that soil which now rejoices in the hearts of millions of freemen, would not be overrun by the lawless tribes of contending barbarians."

Morton's "theory" was based on the examination of hundreds of native skulls which he rated as more capacious than blacks, but less so than whites. Harvard naturalist Louis Agassiz, one of Morton's disciples, asserted that the black cranium housed a brain no larger than the "imperfect brain of a 7 month's infant in the womb of the white."

With this kind of racism enshrined at places like Harvard University, the infant science of ethnology would be ill equipped to treat Indians as equal human beings. We discover from Wallace that there is a direct lineage between Lewis Cass and Lewis Henry Morgan. While less disposed to the sort of phrenological analyses found in Agassiz and company, the early ethnologists all subscribed to the notion that Indians had to be suppressed because their "hunting" based societies were a threat to the advancement of civilization.

Henry R. Schoolcraft was an aide to Lewis Cass in Michigan, who studied Indian languages, customs and traditions in the interest of scientifically classifying a species that would soon be extinct. In 1845, Schoolcraft gave a lecture at the club Lewis Henry Morgan had organized in Rochester, New York for the scientific study of indigenous peoples. There is little doubt that Cass's influence was transmitted to Morgan through Schoolcraft who published "Notes on the Iroquois" in 1847. Indeed, Morgan invited Cass to become a member of his Rochester club of Iroquoianists. Showing Cass's influence, Morgan wrote in "League of the Ho-de-no-sau-nee or Iroquois":

"The passion of the red man for the hunter life has proved to be a principle too deeply inwrought, to be controlled by efforts of legislation. His government, if one was sought to be established, must have conformed to this irresistible tendency of his mind, this inborn sentiment; otherwise it would have been disregarded. The effect of this powerful principle has been to enchain the tribes of North America to their primitive state."

Where Morgan differed from Cass--thankfully--was over the removal policy. He believed that as long as efforts were sustained to civilize the Indian, he could remain in his homeland. Of course, this assumed that civilization was required. Looking back over the past 150 years, one might say that the Cherokee had a much more advanced civilization than the white plantation owners who sought to remove them to what would become Oklahoma.

Whatever differences Cass, Schoolcraft and Morgan had over this or another question of policy, they were united as members of and in identifying with the intellectual agenda of the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of American Ethnology, which persisted well into the 20th century. In this edifice, the notion of progressive stages of cultural evolution held sway.

And it was the theoretical orientation of the BAE that eventually shaped legislation that would sustain the genocidal practices of the previous three centuries and which continues today. One Smithsonian researcher wrote the introduction to a policy study of Indian land claims, which strongly supported the following words that originally appeared in an 1823 Supreme Court ruling on Indian land titles:

discovery [by Europeans] gave an exclusive right to extinguish the Indian title of occupancy, either by purchase or by conquest . . . We will not enter into the controversy, whether agriculturists, merchants, and manufacturers, have a right on abstract principle, to expel hunters from the territory they possess, or to contract their limits . . . The tribes of Indians inhabiting this country were fierce savages, whose occupation was war, and whose subsistence was drawn chiefly from the forest.

Unless Marxism finds a way to disassociate itself from any expressions that even faintly reflect such sentiments, it surely has no future in this hemisphere.