A City Upon Stolen Land: Westward Expansion, Indigenous Intellectuals, and the Origin of Resistance

Abstract:During the first century of American Indian intellectual history, two points of view developed to define this unique community. First, as Indigenous people, each writer represented was concerned about a particular nation, usually their own, e.g. Boudinot and the Cherokee, Apess and the Marshpee. Moreover, they wanted the whites to see their faces, as Cherokee or Marshpee, as opposed to merely "Indians," which were despised in the white imagination. Secondly, as Indigenous Christians, some, like Copway, were ministers, they evoked their version of the Brotherhood of Man idea as a way of getting whites to see Indigenous people as fellow human beings and as rightful citizens of the U.S. In the end, as Vine Deloria J.r once stated stated publicly: "All we've ever wanted from Christians is for them to behave like Christians."