Dangerous Proximities: Anglo-American Humanitarian Paternalists in the Era of Indigenous Removal

Abstract

This article explores Indigenous removal as a trans-imperial phenomenon through the writings of U.S. superintendent of Indian affairs, Thomas McKenney, and three of his British imperial counterparts—George Arthur, Charles La Trobe, and Francis Bond Head—all of whom declared themselves committed to ameliorating the condition of Indigenous people and concluded that this project necessitated Indigenous removal from proximity to British or U.S. settler populations. All four men employed stereotyped paternalistic imaginings to justify removal as the humanitarian duty of the self-proclaimed “civilized” toward Indigenous people. Yet their writing about their own proximity to actual Indigenous people—in spaces that in the 1820s and 1830s comprised the “Wests” of Anglophone expansion in North America and Australia—also reveal Indigenous bodily realities and political imperatives that instead posed dangers to these “civilized” men and their paternal schemas. Although these four Anglo-American men’s rendering of such dangerous proximities do not, of course, fully explain the causes and horrors of removal policies, they suggest the need to look at the intimate spaces of Anglo-American imperial reach to reveal otherwise unacknowledged reasons why those proclaiming genuine concern for Indigenous wellbeing would support the stark subjugation and segregation of Indigenous removal.