“This Natural Defect of Apprehension”: Native Americans and the Politics of Time in the Young United States

Abstract

In the years following the creation of the United States citizens of the young republic conducted a vigorous debate on Indigenous history, or rather on indigens and history. Some of the commentators who wrote about Native Americans during the long Federal Decade (1787-1800) acknowledged that they had a history and that indigenous traditions were helpful in tracing it; in their view Natives were people of and in history. Another significant group of historians and intellectuals held the exact opposite view: Natives were extra-historical people. Consequently, modern scholars have recognized various ways through which contemporaries construed Native Americans as a "people without history." This article sheds light on yet another and previously unnoticed cluster of late eighteenth century natural and political historians who constructed an even more radical and novel position: these authors argued that Natives were historyless, but they also lacked the capacity to understand the medium through which history unfolded, namely time. 1 2 Constructions of Native Americans as living in a perpetual present, devoid of historical agency and unable to perceive time, acquire their full meaning and significance within the larger discussion of history and historical consciousness in the young United States. Repeated representations of Natives as lacking temporal sensibilities (or more radically, a sense of temporality), and the consequent assertion that they lacked historical consciousness, was not only a means to further marginalize an indigenous population that by the late eighteenth century was rapidly vanishing from the eastern seaboard of North America. Denying Natives temporality came, I will argue, at a time when citizens of the young United States' own history-related anxieties were particularly aggravated: at the very moment when historians and commentators