Indian peoples made some four hundred treaties with the United
States between the American Revolution and 1871, when Congress
prohibited them. They signed nine treaties with the Confederacy, as
well as countless others over the centuries with Spain, France,
Britain, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, Canada, and even Russia,
not to mention individual colonies and states. In retrospect, the
treaties seem like well-ordered steps on the path of dispossession
and empire. The reality was far more complicated.
In Pen and Ink Witchcraft, eminent Native American historian Colin
G. Calloway narrates the history of diplomacy between North
American Indians and their imperial adversaries, particularly the
United States. Treaties were cultural encounters and human dramas,
each with its cast of characters and conflicting agendas. Many
treaties, he notes, involved not land, but trade, friendship, and
the resolution of disputes. Far from all being one-sided, they were
negotiated on the Indians' cultural and geographical terrain. When
the Mohawks welcomed Dutch traders in the early 1600s, they sealed
a treaty of friendship with a wampum belt with parallel rows of
purple beads, representing the parties traveling side-by-side, as
equals, on the same river. But the American republic increasingly
turned treaty-making into a tool of encroachment on Indian
territory. Calloway traces this process by focusing on the treaties
of Fort Stanwix (1768), New Echota (1835), and Medicine Lodge
(1867), in addition to such events as the Peace of Montreal in 1701
and the treaties of Fort Laramie (1851 and 1868). His analysis
demonstrates that native leaders were hardly dupes. The records of
negotiations, he writes, show that "Indians frequently matched
their colonizing counterparts in diplomatic savvy and tried,
literally, to hold their ground."
Each treaty has its own story, Calloway writes, but together they
tell a rich and complicated tale of moments in American history
when civilizations collided.
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