Beasts of burden: How literary animals remap the aesthetics of removal

This essay explores three genres of Native storytelling and their echoes in contemporary literatures of removal. The Five “Civilized” Tribes—the Choctaw, Seminole, Creek (Muscogee), Chickasaw, and Cherokee Nations—have not only been shaped by the memory of removal but also by the process of telling it as history, of feeding an American appetite for tragedy, which maps their displacement on its material, cultural, and political axes. In the U.S. historical imagination, removal thus exceeds the bounds of event and condition to form an aesthetic within the larger arena of trauma discourse. By invoking each genre and its alter-species figures, Five Tribes authors enact a decolonization strategy that takes aim at this removal aesthetic as well as the colonial Eurowestern cartographic consciousness that undergirds it, which construes Indigenous people and non-human animals as lacking any sovereignty in a U.S. landscape. By articulating Native ecologies and place-making practices, authors unravel Eurowestern models and attend to what Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) calls “a long-term process involving the bureaucratic, cultural, linguistic and psychological divesting of colonial power” (p. 98) as reflected in popular representations of removal, specifically the Trail of Tears. At stake in contemporary stories for Five Tribes communities is a process of remapping home spaces under the historical and present condition of removal, a cartographic act that expresses Indigenous knowledge, thereby countering aesthetics of removal.