The Language of American-Indian Removal

The prevalent of American-Indian removal begins and ends with the removal of the five southeastern nations from their homelands east of the Mississippi river. However, American-Indian removal was an evolving process, with its roots in Britain's foreign diplomacy in the colonies in the early 18th century to the highly predatory removal policies of the American government in the 19th century. There are four critical treaties that showcase how over time, American-Indian nations were regarded with less respect in treaty negotiations and ultimately the ability to keep any land as diplomacy turned into removal over the course of a century. This presentation will show that there was a very clear transformation in the language of these treaties, that an observer can see the interests of the authors' perspective in negotiations shift to setting terms for a people they viewed as inferior. This process was not abrupt; the ideas behind removal did not begin with Jackson’s election, but began to appear during the revolutionary era, when American colonists began to focus on their own interests at the expense of the Indigenous peoples. Colonial desire for a strong economic presence in America was intertwined with efforts to remove Indigenous peoples from lands the colonists wanted to live on. From William Johnson’s intense cultivation of diplomatic relations between the British and the American-Indian peoples, to Jackson’s brutal conquest of the Mississippi, the culture surrounding these treaties altered the relationships between their colonial authors and the peoples they negotiated with. Removal became more radical and more demanding the more power as the colonists established a local American government, with visions of conquest.