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From the beginning of recorded American history, the relationship between the Native Americans and that of the European settlers has been a turbulent time. Beginning with the first wave of colonization, through the time of the Puritans, weaving its way through history all the way up to Andrew Jackson's order of Removal, society has always held a vein of distrust and disdain for the natives of the New World. Support is drawn from text by Cabeza de Vaca and his encounter with coastal natives, and ending with a speech from Chief Seattle published in 1887 that appropriately summarizes "Indian indignation, resignation, and fortitude in the face of a history whose tendency was to marginalize the Native." The problematic representation in writing on Native Americans only supports the misrepresentation of natives to the American population. Readers are content to believe the picture that writers of this period and genre supply: that while the Native Americans are good and noble people, their demise is tragic but inevitable and their entire culture is simply condescended to two or three stock characters. It is from misrepresentation and mistreatment of Native Americans that leads to the faulty relationship between settlers and natives and the accompanying callousness of Americans to the natives' plight as they lose their way of life.

In the selected text from Cabeza de Vaca's, The Journey of Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, in which de Vaca is stranded in Florida and travels along the gulf coastline to Texas, he encounters natives who are familiar with settlers of the Spanish-variety, fearful conquistadores astride huge steeds in shimmering plates of armor. For the natives, that de Vaca and his men, who have healed them and helped them, are of the same descent and association as the Spanish settlers is an incomparable comparison. If, instead of persecution and colonization, the settlers of the northeastern coast of the New World had focused to the original principles of Christianity, as de Vaca and his men did, perhaps the history of Native Americans would have been written differently. The fear-saturated and distrust-centered relationship between the coastal natives and the Spanish settlers is only a foreshadowing of the shaky history to ensue between the Puritans and their successors.

Cabeza de Vaca, Álvar Núñez . "From the Journey of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca." Vol. 1. Ed. David Shields. New York: Pearson Custom Publishing, 2009. 2 vols. Print.

Perhaps part of the Puritans distrust of the natives came from their fear of the expanisve and thick wilderness of the New World. William Randel reviews John Canup's book Out of the Wilderness: The Emergence of an American Identity in Colonial New England, considering it to be an "absorbing, amply documented volume . . . provid[ing] a credible explanation of why New Englanders waited so long to view themselves as Americans rather than as Britons living overseas." The wilderness, and its inhabitants, the Native Americans, stood as a barrier preventing the former Britons from claiming the new soil as their home. It was a threat to their ideals and Puritan way of life as the wilderness represented "a multi-faceted threat to the English culture and character that they felt was essential to preserve in the New World." For this time period, the term wilderness was synonymous with the natives, and stood to summarize things fearful and threatening. From examples of the times such as pamphlets and sermons, Canup observes that "the wilderness also seemed to be not only home of all Native Americans but a rich breeding ground of such 'wild men' as Thomas Morton of Merrymount fame." It was almost impossible to assuage the Puritans fear of Native Americans with the assumed comfort of conversion and education of natives because New Englanders were worried of the possibility that "creatures of such dubious ancestry could never be cleansed of their wildness and that some of their culture might rub off on their teachers." It was this fear of wilderness that kept many settlers grasping at their European roots and arrogance.

Lydia Maria Child was a popular writer of the 1800s and a proponent of women's rights, abolition and Native American rights. In her children's book, Evenings in New England, the character of Aunt Maria, Child's own alter ego, interprets a personification of North America as meaning, "for several hundred years after America was discovered, it was inhabited only by Indians. Now the country is mostly filled with Europeans, and we look back to the savage state as to what we have been." While graciously including the image of the Native American and acknowledging its role in America, her writing supports the newly developing habit of problematic representation, and from this misrepresentation, romantic racialism stems.

Laura L. Mielke, the author of Sentiment and Space in Lydia Maria Child's Native American Writings, 1824-1870, suggests that Child's writing is problematic, both in her vision and in her literary strategy--"to spur sympathy by underscoring first difference and then the mediation of it." Writing with an emphasis on the difference between the two cultures--the civilized New Englander and the impoverished and sympathetic native--has the potential for backfiring and "any culturally marked or affirmed difference can become an insurmountable obstacle to sympathetic identification. Or still worse, sentimentalism can respond to difference by attempts to negate or suppress it." Child fails to secure a successful depiction of difference because she "alternately portrays difference as the impetus for sympathetic identification, the cause of violent repulsion, and the target of reform." Together, a failure to understand the significance and weight of differences between the two cultures, and problematic representation in Child's writing only continues to support the misrepresentation of natives to the American population.

Catherine Maria Sedgewick is a writer similar in purpose and style to Lydia Maria Child; particularly, her piece Hope Leslie carries some of the same Native American sentiments as found in Child's writing. Similarly, Sedgewick's writing was also widely popular and also deeply rooted in romantic racialism. In the novel of Hope Leslie, Sedgewick writes a captivity narrative that is different from other captivity narratives, such as The Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson which portrays natives as savage creatures unfit for conversion and untouched by attempts at civility. Instead Sedgewick relies heavily on basic Native American stereotypes of the time--that all Indians are noble savages, proud and majestic, associated with or reflected by nature--for her characters of Magawisca and Mononotto. While her intent to cast Native Americans in a positive light is well-meant, using romantic racialism as an influence for character development is an ignorant sign of how misrepresentation of Native American has and will continue to influence society's opinion of who the natives living in the wilderness really are. Problematic representation undermines the development of a sturdy relationship between the growing generations of former-European, now-American settlers and the declining generations of natives.

Sedgewick, Catherine Maria. Hope Leslie. Vol. 2. Ed. David Shields. New York: Pearson Custom Publishing, 2009. 2 vols. Print.

There were many contributing factors to the removal of Native Americans in 1830: western expansion pushing into Native American land, a desire for a more civilized frontier, distrust of the original inhabitants of the land that Americans were pushing into. Timothy Sweet's essay, Native Americans and American Identities in the Early Republic, calls on writing from Lucy Maddox in her 1991 publication, Removals: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Politics of Indian Affairs, to summarize the writing of the time, when "nineteenth-century American authors could hardly help but write about Indians, no matter what the nominal topic, and in so doing they participated, to varying degrees of complicity, in the discourse of removal." This was a period in which further misunderstanding of the Native Americans ensued; "either the Indian presence is ignored, or the Indians are remythologized by the critic." In his essay, Sweet uses examples current to the time period, in particular a piece by Mrs. Mary Jemison, the Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison, published in 1824. In the first edition, Sweet believes that it is possible for the reader to "see [Jemison] resisting the attempts of her amanuensis and editor, James Seaver, to contain her within the conventional categories of Indian and white." In later editions, the "resistant impulses" are smoothed out of the text

In 1887, Dr. Henry A. Smith translated the speech of Chief Seattle delivered during diplomatic negotiations of the Port Elliot Treaty. The speech summarized wholly the feelings of the natives in a post-Removal America. The translated speech became "an instant sensation, . . . popularly embraced as an authentic expression of Indian indignation, resignation, and fortitude in the face of a history whose tendency was to marginalize the Native" (Shields 48). Seattle understands that the only future for the "Red Man" is to be extinct under the white, but cautions that while the physical remains may have disappeared and the Indians become only a myth in the minds of whites, the "shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe" and haunt their children's children, "the White man will never be alone" (Seattle 53). Thus ends the relationship between settler and native: broken down and pushed to the edges of memory and continent until physically the natives disappear and all that is left is the haunting memory of the original inhabitants whispering to the white man that he is not alone.

Chief Seattle. Speech of Chief Seattle. Vol. 2. Trans. Dr. Henry A. Smith. Ed. David Shields. New York: Pearson Custom Publishing, 2009. 2 vols. 50-53. Print.

Shields, David, ed. Speech of Chief Seattle. Vol. 2. Trans. Dr. Henry A. Smith. By Chief Seattle. New York: Pearson Custom Publishing, 2009. 2 vols. 48-49. Print.

The relationship between Native Americans and white settlers first begins, indirectly, with the encounter between Cabeza de Vaca and the southern coastal Indians. It is the foreshadowing and foundation of the turbulent years to come. When Puritans arrive in the New England area, their fear of the wildness of nature and the inhabitants of the wilderness is irrational and consuming. The irrational terror colors their opinion of the natives and begins the system of misunderstanding and misrepresentation that becomes society's understanding of Native Americans and gives cause to the decline of the relationship between the red man and the white. Popular literary text from writers such as Lydia Maria Child and Catherine Maria Sedgewick perpetrate romantic racialism and further problematic representation. By the time Andrew Jackson begins his push for removal, most Americans are familiar with the topic of Native Americans, but unfamiliar with actual Native Americans whose basis is in reality, not romantic literature or condemning criticisms. Their relationship finally comes into decline and decay a few years after Removal, when Chief Seattle gives his speech on the extinction of the red man, how they were pushed to the edges of America and left there to be reduced to few in number and a faint memory of their former glory.

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