Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Los Angeles, 2008. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 253-262).

This thesis examined the rhetoric and discourse of the elite political actors in the Cherokee Indian Removal crisis. Historians such as Ronald Satz and Francis Paul Prucha view the impetus for this episode to be contradictory government policy and sincere desire to protect the Indians from a modernizing American society. By contrast Theda Perdue, Michael D. Green, and William McLoughlin find racism as the motivating factor in the removal of the Cherokee. In looking at letters, speeches, editorials, and other documents from people like Andrew Jackson, Theodore Frelinghuysen, Elias Boudinot, and John Ross, this project concluded that the language of civilization placed the Cherokee in a no-win situation. In internalizing this language, the Cherokees tacitly allowed racism to define them as an inferior group to Anglo-Americans. In the absence of this internalization, the Cherokee Indians surely would have faced war with the United States.

What, this project asks, are the impacts of the alliance between women and Native Americans in the nineteenth century debate over Indian Removal? How might groups similarly excluded from patriarchal systems of government by race and gender turn exclusion into arguments for inclusion? In what ways might this alliance change interpretations of the women’s right and Native American rights movements? While arguments made by women and Native Americans during Indian Removal receive considerable scholarly attention, most studies-especially those concerned with women’s involvement- subordinate Indian Removal to abolition or create significant omissions in the narratives of both movements by adopting a critical approach that interprets strategic use of racialized and gendered ideology as assimilation. In “ Creating Domestic Dependents” I fill these gaps and situate Indian Removal as a significant intersection of the Native American rights and women’s rights movements. Using historical romances by Catherine Sedgwick and Lydia Child, Catherine Beecher’s “Circular Addressed to the Benevolent Ladies of the United States,” the Cherokee Nation’s “1829 Memorial” and “Letter to the American People,” and domestic fiction by E.D.E.N Southworth and Nathaniel Hawthorne, I argue that, during Indian Removal, white women and the Cherokee come together to fight for rights by situating property-- the very thing used to exclude them-- at the center of their arguments for rights and against Indian Removal. In doing this, they create interdependent approaches that simultaneously embrace and reject prescribed societal roles in order to construct a rhetorical strategy composed of moments of public solidarity and strategic distance.

In 1697 Massachusetts settler Hannah Duston was taken captive by a group of Abenaki Indians. Duston and her companions escaped captivity by using a tomahawk to kill ten of her captors. Within her captivity narrative, Duston inhabits the role of captor rather than captive, providing a literary framework for reading and understanding the process of Indian Removal in the nineteenth century. Like white captives in the early colonial period, Native Americans in the nineteenth century faced pressure to assimilate, forced marches through unfamiliar territory, and acts of shocking violence like the Wounded Knee Massacre. During this time period, the United States government and army as well as white settlers took on the role of captors, keeping Indian tribes in captivity with these tactics. Understanding the period of Indian Removal as a type of captivity narrative increases our understanding of the shocking violence that accompanied the Indian Removal Policy. As a literary genre, captivity narratives created a national narrative of violence between white settlers and Indian tribes. The struggle for domination in the genre thus became the central struggle of the United States as white Americans embraced and advanced the fight against Native Americans for land and cultural supremacy in North America.

This thesis analyzes the specific journalistic conventional practices of newspapers in Georgia as they focused on the “Cherokee Question” in 1828-1832, the critical period during which the state considered the removal of the Cherokees from Georgia. The research compares news and opinion texts in five Georgia newspapers with news and opinion texts in the newspaper launched by the Cherokee nation in 1828,the Cherokee Phoenix. While the conventional practices in the white-owned press tended to legitimize removal, the Phoenix adopted some of the same conventions in order to defend and negotiate Cherokee culture and issues.