By Any Other Name: Rhetorical Colonialism in North America

Abstract

For countless ages Nature had been preparing America for her new tenant. Stores of metal and beds of coal had been laid down; inland seas had deposited fertile plains; river valleys and mountain chains had fixed highways for settlement; forests had stretched over the land, and waterfalls foretold the rumble of mills. All was ready for sentient life.\n-Fredrick Jackson Turner, “American Colonization”’\nMuch like the legendary historian Frederick Jackson Turner, famed wordsmith William Safire understands the power of language in public affairs. His widely admired Sujire’s New Political Dictionary: The Definitive Guide to the New Language of Politics not only delineates our political vocabulary, but also announces its own presence with authority. No self-respecting Euro-American can resist such a title; new is, after all, better than old and nothing could be better than a new dictionary for a new language. The name plays upon the quintessential Euro-American desire to begin again, to leave the Old World and make of the New a “shining city upon a hill,” and to disdain that city, in turn, and “light out for the Territory.” Inhabiting Safire’s “new” language, however, are the same peoples that populated Frederick Jackson Turner’s America, John Winthrop’s City, and Huck Finn’s Territory. Safire discusses sachem, a term used to connote political power among the nations of the Haudenosaunee (People of the Longhouse-often called the Six Nations Confederacy or the Iroquois League), as follows:\n“Take me to your leader,” a bromide used in dealing with savages, is reflected in the first recorded use of “sachem.” . . . The braves and warriors of Tammany named their leader the Grand Sachem, who presided over meetings held at the “wigwam.”

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