“This argument is imposing, but we must examine it more closely, before we yield to it. The condition of the Indians in relation to the United States is, perhaps, unlike that of any other two people in existence. In general, nations not owing a common allegiance, are foreign to each other. The term foreign nation is, with strict propriety, applicable by either to the other. But the relation of the Indians to the United States is marked by peculiar and cardinal distinctions which exist nowhere else….They may, more correctly, perhaps, be denominated domestic dependent nations. They occupy a territory to which we assert a title independent of their will, which must take effect in point of possession, when their right of possession ceases. Meanwhile, they are in a state of pupilage; their relation to the United States resembles that of a ward to his guardian. They look to our government for protection: rely upon its kindness and its power; appeal to it for relief to their wants; and address the president as their great father.” -John Marshall
In Suffering Childhood, Anne Mae Duane writes about the tension in Marshall’s response to Cherokee v GA— that Indians are somehow at once too independent to behave as colonial children, but also completely dependent on the state. This case was obviously precedent-setting for the treatment of Native American nations from 1831 to the present. But it’s interesting in a broader context, too. In Don Pease’s seminar last fall he talked about how the process by which a nation defines citizenship can exclude groups. The laws of a nation cannot recognize some subjects as people—here, the Cherokee Nation isn’t recognizable as a nation as the United States understands it. As I understood Pease’s argument, it was the tribal organization of the Cherokee nation that made individual Cherokee subjects either unrecognizable as US citizens, or at least ineligible for that citizenship so long as they maintained tribal affiliation.
Marshall’s closing paragraph speaks to this point. He concludes with this dismissal of the Cherokee Nation as a legitimate state: “If it be true, that the Cherokee nation have rights, this is not the tribunal in which those rights are to be asserted. If it be true, that wrongs have been inflicted, and that still greater are to be apprehended, this is not the tribunal which can redress the past or prevent the future.”
The whole statement is nicely transcribed here.
Thorpe with Alice Corbin Henderson and Alice’s daughter Olive.
John Lomax’s Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads came out a couple of years after N “Jack” Howard Thorpe’s Songs of the Cowboy, but Lomax’s ended up being the more famous of the two books. Thorpe’s book is a truer folklorist’s project, and his authorship-related field notse make it a more interesting read, to my mind. Consider this exemplary note before the song “Mustang Grey”: “Authorship credited to Tom Grey, Tularosa, New Mexico. I first heard it sung by a man named Sandford, who kept a saloon in La Ascension, Mexico, about 1888.” In contrast, Lomax collected most of his songs by correspondence, which makes his project a little more dubious as an attempt to record oral culture (although it’s true that a few of Thorpe’s poems were recorded from letters and periodicals, he makes note of it).
But Lomax ended up being the more famous of the two, and I think this is in part because he framed the oral culture he recorded in Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads as a continuation of Anglo-Saxon history, which was probably like catnip to academia in the eugenics-obsessed first decades of the twentieth century. But whatever rhetorical strategies the authors employ in their editorial notes, both books are amazing to flip through. One of the most interesting choices Lomax makes is including a letter from Theodore Roosevelt concerning Lomax’s collection of cowboy songs (transcribed below). I especially like that Lomax decided to reproduce the letter in facsimile, so that the reader must parse Roosevelt’s handwriting. It’s the move of someone who loves and works in archives.
Cheyenne
Aug 28th 1910
Dear Mr. Lomax,
You have done a work emphatically worth doing and one which should appeal to the people of all our country, but particularly to the people of the west and southwest. Your subject is not only exceedingly interesting to the student of literature, but also to the student of the general history of the west. There is something very curious in the reproduction here on this new continent of essentially the conditions of ballad-growth which obtained in medieval England; including, by the way, sympathy for the outlaw, Jesse James taking the place of Robin Hood. Under modern conditions however, the native ballad is speedily killed by competition with the music hall songs; the cowboy becoming ashamed to sing its crude homespun ballads in view of what Owen Wister calls the “ill-smelling saloon cleverness” of the far less interesting compositions of the music-hall ringers. It is therefore a work of real importance to preserve permanently this unwritten ballad literature of the back country and the frontier.
With all good wishes, I am
Very truly yours
Theodore Roosevelt
