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…
By David Selzer
