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the present.⁶

      Dramatic Depictions: The Inca and Literary Responses to Indian Removal

      The dialogue about Indian Removal, carried out, in part, through articles and essays such as those just referenced, form an important context for understanding the poetry of the period that frequently took the Inca as a subject. In general, much of the verse depicting the Inca was unquestionably romantic and frequently sentimental. Noble but failed resistance to Spanish greed and aggression, Incan lovers who sacrifice themselves for one another, tyrannical treatment and the near saintly suffering of it, and the promises and failures of cultural, social, and racial amalgamation are frequently represented in poems that often circulated in the same newspapers and magazines as the previously referenced essays and articles. The fact that much of this literature is either sentimental or sensational is important—for it is in the affective registers of this poetry that much of its political and cultural work is done. A survey of several poems of the period gives evidence of this work—of the promise it held for helping Americans identify themselves in contradistinction to the Spanish of Black Legend, and of its all too frequent exacerbation of the injustices that marked settler colonialism.

“The Inca’s Daughter,” written by none other than “Walter Whitman” and published in the Long Island Democrat on May 5th, 1840—roughly 15 years before his magnum opus, Leaves of Grass—serves as an interesting example.⁷ “The Inca’s Daughter” narrates a scene in which an imprisoned Incan princess, who has apparently just survived torture on the rack, denounces her captors and then commits suicide rather than suffer further degradations. The sense that this poem may be as much a commentary addressed to contemporary readers as a historical drama about the Inca is heightened by the descriptive language Whitman employs in the poem. For example, despite being an Incan princess, Whitman also calls her an “Indian maiden.” Similarly, although initially introducing the Spaniards as “dark-brow’d,” he transitions to calling them simply “white lords” and “palefaces.” Moreover, no mention of “Inti” the sun god of the Inca is made, but reference to the Algonquin god “Manitou” is. Collectively, such references blend the drama of the Inca with that of the native peoples of Eastern America with whom Whitman’s readers were familiar, blurring the distinction between Spanish and contemporary American colonialism.

      Even more important, however, is the way in which the poem increasingly includes readers as the target of the address the princess makes just prior to her suicide. This begins with the princess’s aforementioned denunciation, which starts in the third stanza of the poem and goes on to occupy the majority of its remainder. The princess opens by asserting her nobility and claiming her right to autonomy through a series of questions: “And I—a Daughter of the Sun—Shall I ingloriously live?/Shall a Peruvian monarch’s child become the white lord’s slave?”—questions she answers herself by saying, “No: I’d not meet my father’s frown in the free spirit’s place of rest,/Nor seem a stranger midst the bands whom Manitou has blest” (Whitman 1840). This direct address of the princess to the Spaniards not only challenges the idea that it is right for her to suffer in this way but it also serves to create a sense of intimacy between the speaker and the reader, who are imaginatively present to witness that address as it is being delivered. This sense of intimacy is heightened at the poem’s climax, when the princess exclaims, “Now, paleface, see! The Indian girl can teach thee how to bravely die:/Hail! Spirits of my kindred slain, a sister ghost is nigh!” This poetic phrase addresses readers even more straightforwardly than before, reaching out directly to them with a command to “now” “see” themselves as included among the “palefaces” looking at her. This sense of the reader’s inclusion is heightened by the subsequent use of the word “thee,” a collective form of second person address (essentially the archaic version of “you”), which invites any “palefaced” reader to linguistically include himself or herself as part of the collective addressed. With the reader apostrophically drawn into the poem, the princess then shocks them as she takes “a poisoned arrow” and with “hand…clenched and lifted high” plunges it into herself and dies (Whitman 1840).

By ending in this fashion, Whitman’s poem neither prophesies a way forward nor justifies certain forms of social engineering; rather, it works to traumatize readers with the thought that they are complicit in the death of native peoples, standing by as silent witnesses even if they are not active participants in those peoples’ demise. At the same time that this seems to suggest that even those living far from the drama of Indian Removal are culpable for the injustices they are suffering under settler colonialism, the fact that the poem ends with the death of the Indian maiden also suggests that the time for action has passed, that the damage has been done, and that the sins committed through interaction with native people have had lamentable but irreversible consequences. In suggesting this, Whitman essentially ignores the fact that native peoples remained a collection of robust nations throughout the period, albeit struggling to maintain cultural coherence and political relevance in the face of Jacksonian policies and attitudes. In fact, by treating their “disappearance” or removal as having already occurred, he essentially erases native peoples from the scene, clearing the way for further acts of aggression by characterizing the drama as concluded rather than ongoing and capable of being changed or even reversed. It is a seeming contradiction that, in the words of Kirsten Silva Gruesz, represents both an early “complicity in the rhetoric of Manifest Destiny…[and] a profound ambivalence about it” (Gruesz 2002, p. 121).⁸

      A somewhat more direct call to action is found in the poem “The Peruvian Inca,” attributed simply to “Robertson,” and published in 1827 in the quarterly magazine of the Massachusetts Peace Society, The Friend of Peace. This 24-line poem narrates the capture and execution of Atahualpa, the Incan emperor at the time of Pizarro’s arrival. In doing so, it works to challenge readers who, like the Spanish, may have used religion as the justification of settler colonialism. Shortly before his execution, the poem depicts Atahualpa as being visited by a priest who “promised heaven” if Atahualpa converted. Atahualpa’s response stands as a scathing indictment of Spanish behavior during the colonization of the Inca. He asks, “are there any Spaniards in that place?” and then, upon hearing the priest answer affirmatively, proclaims, “If it be so,/Upon my word, I will not go/Where one of that inhuman crew/Can find a place” (Robertson 1827, p. 384). Apparently, the duplicitous and cruel behavior of the Spanish toward the Inca has undermined the priest’s ability to evangelize him, simultaneously eroding the foundation of one of the three central pillars (god, gold, and glory) justifying Spanish colonization. However, the poem does not end there; rather, the author targets Christian readers, addressing them apostrophically and even more directly than the Incan princess in Whitman’s poem. “Ye Christians, hear!/And boast no more of your religion, stained with gore;/Reflect—and ere abroad you roam,/Effect a due reform at home!” (Ibid). These closing lines draw the history of the Inca into the present and urge readers to apply it to contemporary circumstances, namely the treatment of contemporary native people who, like Atahualpa and the Inca, were frequently being evangelized and condemned at one and the same time under settler colonialism. Such a situation, the poet emphatically claims, unquestionably calls for “due reform.” Ending as it does, this poem freights its readers, especially its Christian readers, with an affective charge of shame, guilt, and culpability, as Whitman’s did. It suggests to its readers that they risk occupying the same tenuous moral ground as the Spanish, and that they must tread carefully or risk alienating native peoples to the point where further evangelization will be impossible—something that would, much as it had potentially done for the Spanish, undermine much of the American justification for many of their actions relating to native peoples. Such affective castigation invites the reader to reflect critically on the actions taken relative to native peoples and, in this instance, to consider what “reform” might look like.

The lack of specificity regarding “reform” blunts what might otherwise be a progressive call to action on behalf of native peoples. In fact, by leaving readers focused on effecting a “due reform

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