Hawk Black - Life of black hawk, or ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak: dictated by himself

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LIFE OF BLACK HAWK OR MA-KA-TAI-ME-SHE-KIA-KIAK

BLACK HAWK, or M-KA-TAI-ME-SHE-Kl-KIK (Black Sparrow Hawk) as he was known among the Sauk people, was born in about 1767 at the tribal village of Saukenuk on the Rock River in Illinois. He earned a reputation as a fearless warrior, became a war chief, and fought with the British during the War of 1812. When American settlers began overrunning Saukenuk and the surrounding country in the late 1820S, Black Hawk challenged the treaty by which Indian land was being sold, resisted displacement, and set himself against Keokuk, the tribal leader who advocated removal to Iowa. In 1832 Black Hawk led a large band of Sauk and Fox, along with sympathizers from other tribes, across the Mississippi and into Illinois, defying the U.S. Army and the Illinois state militia. He led parties in several raids and skirmishes as American forces pursued his contingent into the Michigan Territory (now Wisconsin). At Bad Axe on the Mississippi River, the army and militia cornered most of the fugitives and slaughtered them. Black Hawk himself escaped and later surrendered. He spent nearly a year in government custody, meeting President Jackson at the White House and then touring the East as a trophy captive. Upon his return to the Midwest, he dictated his life story. Black Hawk died among his people in Iowa in 1838.

J. GERALD KENNEDY is William A. Read Professor of American Literature at Louisiana State University and the author of The Astonished Traveler: William Darby, Frontier Geographer and Man of Letters and Poe, Death, and the Life of Writing. He is the editor of the new Portable Edgar Allan Poe and is at work on a wide-ranging study of the cultural conflicts that undermined American literary nation-building.

In a book without precedent in American literature, an aging Sauk warrior named M-ka-tai-me-she-ki-kik (literally, Black Sparrow Hawk) unfolded his life story in 1833 to explain why he led resistance to military eviction from his tribes homeland on the Rock River in Illinois. Never before had an Indian addressed the reading public as the survivor of a war of extermination waged by American forces. Translated by Antoine LeClaire, an interpreter of French Canadian and Potawatomi descent, and transcribed by a shrewd but sympathetic newspaper editor named John B. Patterson, the oral narrative of the leader known as Black Hawk reconstructs the long struggle of the allied Sauk and Fox tribes against an encroaching white population, a crisis that culminated in four months of open conflict and the defeat of Black Hawks band at the Battle of Bad Axe on August 2, 1832. The Black Hawk War officially ended when the Sauk and his Winnebago ally, Wabokieshiek (the Prophet), surrendered three weeks later to a U.S. Indian agent. After a year in government custody, which included military confinement and a forced tour of eastern cities, Black Hawk rejoined his tribe in present-day Iowa. Before doing so, however, he apparently asked LeClaire to write down his story for the many white people who had flocked to see him in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York. The resulting autobiography (to borrow an inexact term from modern print culture) placed before American readers a troubling narrative, the first thoroughly adversarial account of frontier hostilities between white settlers and native people.

Until Black Hawk told his life story to LeClaire and Patterson, virtually all published histories of the border wars had projected a decidedly Anglo-American perspective. Such writings routinely portrayed Americans of European descent as innocent victims of Indian cruelty, and they did so for religious, economic, and political reasons: white people wrote and edited the narratives, owned the printing presses, published the books, and ultimately bought, read, and quoted them, typically to reenforce their ethnocentric belief that, as part of the exceptional destiny of America itself, God had ordained their conquest of native tribes. Beginning with William Bradfords History of the Plymouth Plantation, most chronicles of colonial America demonized natives who defended tribal lands against the advance of white settlers. The captivity narrative, arguably the first distinctively American literary form, had (by the time of Black Hawks Life) been flourishing for more than 150 years, disseminating horrific tales of survival in which Christian piety enabled white hostages to withstand the cruelties of their native captors. Even the young American nations most hallowed civic document, the Declaration of Independence, explicitly reviled the merciless Indian savages. Yet white Americans also believed that history had doomed native tribes to extinction, and for a half century prior to Black Hawks narrative, poets were composing elegies to the supposedly vanishing Native American. Since the mid-1820s, a more recent genre, the frontier novelpopularized by Coopers The Last of the Mohicans-had romanticized the deadly conflict between American pioneers and the Indians; for Cooper, the eradication of native tribes (personified by Chingachgook, the last surviving Mohican) seemed the mournful yet inescapable result of advancing white civilization. Very few antebellum American authors saw the destruction of Indian cultures as either an avoidable or a remediable tragedy.

In the context of public resignation to what might now be deplored as ethnic cleansing, however, Black Hawk delivered a stinging minority report, a counternarrative exposing the brutality and unscrupulousness of whites determined to steal Indian lands and to eradicate native people. Only a few prior Indian declarations had made their way into print-speeches by tribal leaders such as the Seneca chief Red Jacket or conversion testimonials by Christianized natives such as the Mohegan Samson Occam. The only previous book-length memoir by an Indian writer, the Pequot William Apesss A Son of the Forest (1829), had voiced resentment of white injustices, but as a fully literate Methodist, Apess also asserted the right of Indians to inclusion in a multicultural American nation. Black Hawks Life presented a radically different perspective: that of a native speaker who wanted no part of Christian, Anglo-Saxon America and who summarized the grievances of a people deceived, pursued, and slaughtered by an alien oppressor. More compellingly than anyone before him, Black Hawk challenged American illusions of national virtue and conversely insisted upon the ethical nature of his own culture. His life story thus comprised an indictment of land-hungry settlers and the government that used military force to expedite the violent seizure of Indian lands.

The nearly forgotten Black Hawk Wara disgraceful chapter in U.S. national annals, according to historian Cecil Eby-marked the first decisive victory in President Andrew Jacksons campaign of Indian removal, a paternalistic policy implemented in 1830 to protect eastern tribes (and thus eliminate the threat they posed to American territorial expansion) by banishing them to a hinterland west of the Mississippi. Endorsed by James Monroe in 1825, the removal project had been conceived to subjugate the great tribes of the Southeastthe Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole. But for several years prior to 1832, the incursion of white settlers into western Illinois had provoked indignation and resistance from a remnant of the Sauk tribe who still looked to England for protection from American interlopers. Black Hawks British band firmly believed that disputed lands between the Illinois and Mississippi rivers had been fraudulently seized by the U.S. government. In 1804, Gen. William Henry Harrison had induced four well-liquored Saukswho were never authorized to bargain away tribal territoryto put their marks on an unreadable agreement whose legal technicalities they could not have guessed, ceding northwestern Illinois (roughly one-third of the state) as well as parts of present-day Wisconsin and Missouri. Years later, when pioneers pushed into the region, building homesteads and tilling the very fields that Sauk women had cultivated for decades, Indian resistance provoked action from the U.S. Army and the Illinois state militia. The resulting conflict lasted fifteen weeks, claimed roughly 600 casualties (mostly Indians), and cost perhaps seven million dollars. The Black Hawk War gave impetus to the careers of several Americans destined for later greatnessAbraham Lincoln, Zachary Taylor, Jefferson Davis, and Winfield Scott among them. But in that election year, no one benefited from the defeat of Black Hawks forces (which included Sauk, Fox, Kickapoo, Winnebago, and Potawatomi braves) more than the president himself, for the victory demonstrated both his apparent control over the Indian problem and his steely determination to prosecute removal.