Occasionally, in searching archives for Native American materials, archivists uncover strange things.
This summer, for example, Brian Carpenter, Curator of Native American Materials at the American Philosophical Society (APS), reached out to me by email to find out if I knew anything about a broadsheet titled The Indian Phoenix.
The APS Curator of Printed Materials, David Gary, unearthed some old newspapers that were sitting neglected in an un-cataloged box. One of these was a newspaper called The Indian Phoenix. It appeared to have had one issue only: May 14, 1836. It was printed by someone named James Dickson in Washington, DC, who was concerned with promoting the “cause of the Indian.”
Masthead, “The Indian Phoenix.” American Philosophical Society.
Gary told me that, judging from a quick examination of the paper, it appeared that it was “likely only produced in one issue by James Dickson on May 14, 1836.” Its contained anti-Mexican and anti-abolition sentiments, vehemently supported the Texan Revolution, and argued for the nobility and dignity of Native Americans. Gary also noted that “the paper’s manifesto hints at a quick decline as Dickson said ‘no subscription will ever be permitted to be received, nor a solitary number of the Gazette sold.'”
He checked with the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, MA and they said they had no record of such a publication,
The 1830s saw lots of short-lived publications on the “Indian Problem” like The Indian Phoenix, but I had never run into this one. It is especially interesting because of the Texas/Mexico materials. I asked Gary and Carpenter to send me a scan of the front page.
With a little digging, I discovered that James Dickson was an associate of Sam Houston who had hidden out among the Cherokee after his failed 1829 attempt to secure an independent republic in east Texas, called “Fredonia.” To this David Gary added a few interesting details: “He was arrested soon after starting what he called the “Texas Navy” on Lake Ontario in September 1836. He bought a ship, got as far as Detroit, ran out of supplies, and had to requisition food. The Michigan authorities arrested him for piracy, although the newspaper account seems to be exaggerating the charge. He was trying to take recruits to Texas to fight Santa Ana.”
Apparently, Dickson saw the Cherokee as fellow travelers—slaveholders and anti-federal government types—and dreamed up a scheme of rounding up a pan-tribal army to wrest the area of Fredonia from Mexico and establish an independent republic. This newspaper was his recruitment tool and manifesto. The “Phoenix” of the title seems to have been his homage to the Cherokees with whom he stayed. Their national newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, was published from 1828-1837 in New Echota Georgia—until the Georgia militia destroyed the press and the federal government forced the Cherokees onto the Trail of Tears.
Dickinson’s efforts to establish Fredonia failed, and by the 1840s, he disappears from the historical record, having embarked on an exploratory journey to the Rockies.
Yet even though this is not an “Indian” newspaper, it does shed some light on how Native peoples were coopted to the service of the American national imaginary, at precisely the moment that the federal government was forcibly routing them from their homes and forcing them to unpromising lands west of the Mississippi.
Poetry from the front page of the “Indian Phoenix.” American Philosophical Society.
The Indian Phoenix is simply one of the more outrageous examples of the appropriation of indigenous peoples and issues for the purposes of advancing the cause of Euro-American colonial expansion. Dickinson, for example, defends the Indians by suggesting King David’s taking of many scalps from his enemies as a worthy precedent for frontier warfare in America. Such imagery draws much of its power from biblical typology, likening the actions of the leader of Israel to those of contemporary Native Americans. Dickinson asks his readers to see the hand of God in the Indians’ ways. Moreover, such a comparison plays into the popular American nationalist fantasy that cast the Native peoples of the continent as members of one of the lost tribes of Israel.
The entire front page is filled with doggerel raging against Mexican activities in Texas. Looking over the Valley’s Mexico, Dickson intones:
The power and the glory of the Aztec all gone;
Like the leaves in the forest in autumn are strewn,
Were the splendor and hope of that race overthrown.
But the day star is rising unclouded and bright
That shall clear and illumine long ages of night
And restore to that valley the Indian race,
And leave of their white lords no longer a trace.
These verses encapsulate the fundamental aesthetic of settler colonialism in the United States. The Indian, at once vanished and pitied, awaits the Euro-American forces of westward expansion who will unleash the revenge owed former colonial armies, only to absorb the reclaimed “valley” into a new nation built upon the borrowed spiritual power of “the splendor and hope of that race overthrown.”
