Alexis De Tocqueville, in DEMOCRACY

IN AMERICA, witnesses an event

on the Trail of Tears: the expulsion

of the so-called Five Civilised Tribes –

Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee,

and Seminole – from the Deep South.

They were expelled to make way for share croppers,

gold prospectors, cotton plantations.

The government promised the people asylum

on what it described as empty grasslands

to the west of the Mississippi.

 

In December 1831

De Tocqueville is in Memphis, Tennessee.

The snow has frozen hard, and immense ice floes

are moving fast down the Mississippi.

He watches a large family group of Choctaws

arrive, among them are old people dying

and newborns. Their possessions are only

what they have been able to carry

on the long exhausting walk from the south east.

They are silent as they pass him, knowing

their injuries are beyond remedy.

There is no room for their dogs in the vessels

that will take them across to the west bank.

As the boats leave the shore the dogs begin to howl,

then enter the icy waters to follow them.

 

***

 

De Tocqueville’s sympathetic testimony

seems the exception that proves the following

rule: that it is some sort of hubris makes

those of European heritage

record and justify – almost by default –

in detail, and with self-righteousness,

their settler-colonial iniquities,

their removal of people from their homelands,

their furtherance of capitalism,

whether by cavalry, cannons, starvation,

litigation, fraud, whether in

the Americas, Ireland, Siberia,

Australia, Algeria, New Zealand,

Indo-China, Malaya, Kenya,

Tanzania, Uganda, Rhodesia,

South Africa…