Pen and Ink Witchcraft: Treaties and Treaty Making in American Indian History

by Colin G. Calloway

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.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Native American

392 pages, ebook

First published December 1, 2012

About the author

Colin G. Calloway is John Kimball Jr. 1943 Professor of History and Native American Studies at Dartmouth College. His previous books include A Scratch of the Pen and The Victory with No Name.

Reviews

[David Nichols · Rating 4 out of 5]

Twenty years ago Francis Paul Prucha referred to American Indian treaties as a “political anomaly,” which if true does not explain why the United States government negotiated over 400 of these “anomalies” with the continent's Native American inhabitants. Colin Calloway, author of over a dozen books on Native American history, here undertakes an answer to this question, and an exploration of how Indian treaties functioned for whites and Indians. Devised in the colonial era as instruments for promoting peace and trade, treaties were by the eve of the American Revolution turning into straightforward transfers of land, and the newly independent United States was glad to use them as “stepping stones of empire” (2). Native Americans endeavored to maintain a degree of control over these negotiations and to use treaties to gain access to new resources, but found that the “pen and ink witchcraft” increasingly served to dispossess them and engender more conflict. It was not until the twentieth century that Indians found treaties could serve more salutary political ends.

In the colonial era, Native Americans used treaty conferences to conduct rituals that reaffirmed a peaceful relationship: presenting calumets, smoking tobacco, telling stories, giving wampum to document those stories, and exchanging captives. They also provided opportunities for all the leading adults of a given nation, including women, to give talks and approve political decisions. For Europeans, what mattered in treaties were signed agreements, understandings regarding trade and boundaries and, eventually, land. The newly-independent United States negotiated Indian treaties almost exclusively to obtain land, first relying on deception and commercial debt (which Indians had accrued with private traders) to leverage sales, later using economic coercion (e.g. William Harrison's withholding of annuities from the Lakes Indians in 1809), threats of force, and the co-option of chiefs with money. In the 1850s and '60s treaty commissioners moved onto the Plains and into the Pacific Northwest, spending about $300 million to buy the Indian titles to the lands of the old Louisiana Purchase, and threatening that Native Americans would “walk in blood” if they didn't sign and move onto reservations (179). In California the U.S. didn't even treat with the Indians, claiming they were merely “tenants” on the land and seizing their territory without compensation. By the mid-nineteenth century, “power trumped protocol” (173).

The narrative core of book consists of three chapters on three specific treaties: Fort Stanwix (1768), New Echota (1835), and Medicine Lodge (1867). The first was a vast meeting of Six Nations Iroquois with commissioners from three colonies (NJ, PA, and VA), along with imperial Indian Superintendent William Johnson and representatives of Pennsylvania's Indian traders, all of whom colluded in the purchase of several million acres of Ohio Valley land (which the Iroquois did not legitimately own) for L13,000 in cash and goods. The event accelerated the transformation of treaties from diplomatic instruments into straightforward land transfers; it fatally undermined the Six Nations' power, as the eastern colonies no longer needed their help to expand their settlements and influence westward; and it was the proximate cause of a 1774 war between Virginia and the Shawnees. The second treaty (New Echota) was a much smaller affair, attended by a few hundred Cherokees and signed by only twenty men, but it was just as momentous: in exchange for $5,000,000 and a western reservation, the Cherokee “nation” (or a tiny part of it) agreed to give up their eastern lands and move to Indian Territory. The vast majority of the Cherokees opposed Removal, denounced the treaty as illegitimate, and signed petitions against it. Congress and the Van Buren administration, however, held the agreement to be legitimate and forcibly removed the Cherokees, killing 4,000 of them. The treaty also ignited a civil war between the signatories (the Treaty Party) and the anti-Removal majority after Removal.

The Treaty of Medicine Lodge was in some ways the coup de grace for the treaty system, since the House of Representatives balked at its expense and expressed resentment of the Senate's exclusive authority to approve Indian treaties. The council was a colorful affair, attended by large delegations of Arapahoes, Cheyennes, and Kiowas, by the members of the new Federal Peace Commission, and by a panoply of newspaper journalists. It was also dictatorial. The commissioners told the Indians they'd come to show them the proper way to live, ignored Kiowa chief Satanta's protests that he didn't want “medicine houses” (schools and churches) built for his children (200), overlooked Kicking Bird's satirizing of their dress and speech, and imposed on the signatory nations a 400,000-square-mile land cession and a requirement that they send their children to English schools. Treaties had once been intended to create peace, but like the two other treaties Calloway examines this one led only to fighting: to Kiowa and Comanche attacks on intruding white hunters, and eventually to the destructive Red River War of 1874-75.

By then the treaty system was defunct. U.S. officials increasingly opposed it because they felt it undignified to treat with “squalid nomads” (228), and the House of Representatives objected to laying out money for expensive treaties ratifiable by Senate alone. After 1871 Congress used laws and joint resolutions to seize Indian land: 90 percent of the Sioux reserve in 1877, over 100 million acres of “surplus” reservation land under the Dawes Act a decade later. The Supreme Court, in the 1903 case of Lone Wolf vs. Hitchcock, affirmed Congress's plenary authority to override Indian treaties, but the Court walked this back slightly in the 1905 Winans case, and new court rulings between 1959 and 1973 held that treaties gave Indians some authority over own internal governance and policing. Artifacts of an era in which there was a balance of power between white colonists and Indians, and subsequently employed as an inexpensive device for obtaining Indian land, ratified treaties became in the twentieth century a statutory foundation for the restoration of Indian sovereignty.

Like most of Calloway's books, PEN & INK WITCHCRAFT is clearly written and deeply researched, but a little heavy on detail and light on analytical signposting. It's not hard to determine Calloway's conclusions – that treaties increasingly generated violence rather than peace, and that these “licenses for empire” eventually became charters of Native American legal autonomy. One does wish, though, that he'd spelled them out more clearly for the benefit of casual readers and students. One additional piece of analysis I would have liked to see here is comparative: with how many other indigenous societies did the British empire and its successors negotiate treaties? Lisa Ford addresses this question in SETTLER SOVEREIGNTY and suggests the answer is “very few” - one legitimate treaty with the Maoris, none whatsoever with the Australian Aborigines. She attributes this to changes in the British Empire's “legal technology;” I suspect differentials in military power between colonists and indigenes are likelier to prove the more significant variables. Calloway is more interested in telling a North American story, and one must admit that, incorporating as he does the whole continent and a long block of historical time, he tells it pretty well.

[Thomas Isern · Rating 5 out of 5]

A historical work with powerful currency. I have written twice about this book in the weekly feature, Plains Folk. It is, to begin with, vintage Calloway; don't expect anything breathless or light. This is deep history on certain salient and symbolic treaties in American history, with context on the treaty-making system. It is current because the old Indian treaties have proved to be living documents, charters - sometimes adhered to, other times flouted - for the evolution of Indian-white relations in the settler society. The plains treaty selected for focus is the Treaty of Medicine Lodge, which, with its companion piece, the Treaty of Fort Laramie, forms a framework of continuing regional importance.

[Bruce · Rating 5 out of 5]

This work provides a more accurate history than taught in K-12 and likely intro to US history courses. Though using 3 different treaties 'negotiated' at three different periods of American history as a basis the author goes through a history of Indigenous American relations with European immigrants and their descendants. Partial 'biographies' of the main participants in the "negotiations" intermingle with portions of American history to give a more accurate picture of American history and dispel the various myths that were taught in K-12 education. A book that should be required reading before graduation from high school.

[Janice · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good overview of the history of treaty-making.

[Fvandrog · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book highlights and interesting and important aspect of American history. It is, however, rather dryly written with extensive personal histories of the major players involved in negotiating and drafting the treaties. I feel it is unfortunate that there are virtually no links between these personal histories and the resulting treaties beyond the frequent mentioning of the white negotiators getting their hands on large acreages.

Not a book I would recommend to anyone with a casual interest in (American) history, and even for those who make an extensive study of Indian-colonist relations, there's probably many other books that are more accessible.

[Brian Andersen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Colin G. Calloway's "The Shawnees and the War for America" was one one the first books I read on the Shawnee and it helped fuel my newly sparked interest in this history. I even listened to the audiobook not too long ago. I was excited when I saw this book by the same author. It is filled with great information but it doesn't read all that well and I found it hard to get through. I agree with a previous reviewer that the stories just didn't link together. Maybe they weren't supposed to. Good content, poor execution? Still good as reference material I suppose but not for an engaging read.

[Denise · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book outlines the major treaty making process with the native tribes during the 19th century and its impact on the welfare of the tribes. It also makes the reader very aware of how those treaties were a vehicle to steal land and livelihood from them. Pen and Ink Witchcraft was a very appropriate term to describe the evils of the treaties and how they denigrated the tribes in the end. Also explained are how those treaties have effected the tribes into the modern age and what some of the groups are doing to combat them.

[Jonna Higgins-Freese · Rating 5 out of 5]

I didn't finish because it wasn't something I needed to know right now, but Calloways' style is always so absorbing, and it made me wonder -- how is it that we never *did* read a treaty in American literature or social studies, although we memorized the Preamble to the Constitution? At least the treaty regarding the land on which we were learning would have been salient.

[Lexi Inks · Rating 3 out of 5]

Calloway is a great historical writer that packs a very dense amount of facts within the broader story of American Indian treaty history.