Avoiding Removal To Indian Territory
After it was public knowledge that Young Bear was white, her presence encouraged the community of Dead Man's village to construct itself as white and mask their Indian identity. This strategy combined with the politics of maneuvering, the tribal community (namely Miami chief Francis Godfroy), gained enough support to block forced removal. Young Bear had repeated opportunities to reveal her identity but never did until the 1830s when her Indian community was threatened with removal. To gain sympathy in Congress, Manaquana's lawyer, appointed by her white relatives, played to his audience portryaing Frances Slocum as an old woman who had enduring years of torture and captivity and only wished to remain near her family—both white and Indian. Pennsylvania Congressman Benjamin Bidlack, who introduced the bill, stressed the importance of Frances staying close to her newly found white relatives although they only ever met a few times. Frances Slocum petitioned to stay in Indiana and on March 3, 1845 Congress passed a joint resolution exempting Slocum and about twenty-one of her Indian relatives from removal to Kansas.
Read more about this topic: Frances Slocum
Famous quotes containing the words avoiding, removal, indian and/or territory:
“So Sam enters the universe of sleep, a man who seeks to live in such a way as to avoid pain, and succeeds merely in avoiding pleasure. What a dreary compromise is life!”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“Many a reformer perishes in his removal of rubbish,—and that makes the offensiveness of the class. They are partial; they are not equal to the work they pretend. They lose their way; in the assault on the kingdom of darkness, they expend all their energy on some accidental evil, and lose their sanity and power of benefit.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The Indian gods are imposing, the Greek gods are not. Indeed they are not brave, not self-controlled, they have no manners, they are not gentlemen and ladies.”
—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)
“When the excessively shy force themselves to be forward, they are frequently surprisingly unsubtle and overdirect and even rude: they have entered an extreme region beyond their normal personality, an area of social crime where gradations don’t count; unavailable to them are the instincts and taboos that booming extroverts, who know the territory of self-advancement far better, can rely on.”
—Nicholson Baker (b. 1957)