When Mary Shelley added the posthumous title “England in 1819” to one of her husband’s sonnets, she localized the terrible consequences of unjust and failing legal and political structures in a particular country in 1819. But the implications of Shelley’s poem, and its diagnosis of a failing governing order, reached far beyond England, given that colonization and imperialism had created forced, negotiated, and voluntary relationships between the British and peoples all over the globe. What did it mean to be subject to Shelley’s “Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay” if your people had been colonized by the English and were now entangled in those laws (10 [SPP 327])? How could your people and their descendants maintain an effective, treaty-based, nation-to-nation relationship with an “old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King” or expect long-term, kin-based, reciprocal justice from “Princes, the dregs of their dull race” (1, 2 [326])?

This chapter explores the way in which Shelley’s verse speaks to, or influences, two kinds of texts: the treaties between the various Indigenous peoples of North America and British or settler governments, and Indigenous-authored poetry that interacts with these treaties. The chapter begins by conceptualizing 1819 (an iconic year in Romantic studies) as a “treaty year,” one in which Shelley’s “England in 1819” and The Mask of Anarchy, despite their apparent focus on domestic politics, can be read alongside major global diplomatic events that occurred in settler-Indigenous relationships in North America, such as Treaties 21 and 27 in British Canada and the Treaty of Saginaw in the United States. In these documents, and the negotiations around them, repeated reference was made to the status of the British monarchs, their moral standing, and their intergenerational relationships with Indigenous peoples, at exactly the moment that Shelley was suggesting that the British crown could not be trusted on these terms. I argue that while Shelley’s poems and these treaty negotiations do not directly engage with each other in their moment of composition, they can be read intertextually in terms of the moral and legal failings of the British state that Shelley’s poems diagnose as part of a global political culture.

The chapter then turns to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Native American poets who used Shelley’s political poetry as a source for considering the 1819 treaties, subsequent treaty agreements, and the consequences of colonization. My focus here is on writers who were members of the southeastern Native nations referred to at the time as the “Five Civilized Tribes.” These nations (the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Seminoles, and Mvskoke Creeks) were all subject to the genocidal policies set in motion by the 1830 Removal Act, which forced Native nations west of the Mississippi in the events now referred to in English as the Trail of Tears. Later in the nineteenth century, these peoples were further disenfranchised by the Curtis Act (1898), which breached the treaty rights established as the basis for removal, divided up and individualized land title, and dismantled tribal government. My initial focus is on Too-qua-stee (Cherokee) and James Roane Gregory (Yuchi and Mvskoke Creek). Gregory’s and Too-qua-stee’s different allusions to and adoptions of Shelley’s 1819 poems in their own verse demonstrate, I argue, that both “England in 1819” and The Mask of Anarchy were interpreted by Indigenous poets as highly relevant to their contemporary concerns about broken treaties, even as they operated out of different cultural traditions and with different treaty breaches in mind. In Indigenous epistemologies and understandings of the diplomatic process, treaties had significant affective and performative dimensions as well as legal ones, and poetry was an appropriate medium through which to engage with treaty documents and discourse. The relevance of poems such as “England in 1819” and The Mask of Anarchy was apparent to Indigenous poets and activists precisely because Shelley had diagnosed the associated political and ethical failings that they too would explore through their poetry. The chapter also considers the ways in which Shelley’s more meditative poems, such as “Mont Blanc,” might be drawn into a wider conversation about colonization, treaty-making, and Indigenous peoples, when identified as influences on Indigenous expression, via the poetry of a third writer from these nations, John Rollin Ridge (Cherokee). Finally, the chapter assesses what these connections from 1819 mean for treaties and Indigenous rights today.

Since the Indigenous poets I focus on in this essay are all either Mvskoke Creek or Cherokee, I choose to take my critical and methodological guidance from scholars from those nations. Mvskoke Creek literary critic Craig Womack has noted that, in terms of literature and contact, “it is just as likely that things European are Indianized rather than the anthropological assumption that things Indian are always swallowed up by European culture.”¹ My aim in this essay is to think, then, about an Indianized Shelley, one whose works were put to various uses by Indigenous authors in the name of treaty rights, sovereignty, and autonomy. Shelley’s poetry, I wish to suggest, with its excoriation of corrupt power structures, its comprehension of legal orders derived from the natural world, and its visions of new and better worlds, was ideally suited to these aims. So too, in the case of The Mask of Anarchy in particular, were the poetic forms and allegories that Shelley expertly deployed. Before I turn to verse, however, I want to consider the significance of Indigenous treaty-making in Shelley’s own historical moment.

The title “England in 1819” has provided a ready-made framework for scholars to focus intently on the events of a key year in the period we define as the Romantic era. But there is at least one aspect of the politics of 1819 that is sometimes overlooked in the field of Romantic studies: it was a boom year for treaties with Indigenous peoples. In that crucial year, having inherited some of Britain’s relationships with Indigenous groups, the American government negotiated four important treaties: two with the Kickapoo, one with the Ojibwe, and one with the Cherokees. Across the border in British Canada, 1819 also marked treaties that led to two small but important land purchases, the Long Woods Treaty, now known as Treaty 21, signed with the Mississauga on March 9, 1819, and the Rideau Purchase, known as Treaty 27, also signed with the Mississauga, on May 31 the same year. It is these latter treaties, signed by the same British government that Shelley was excoriating, which I wish to focus on first in order to consider the global dimensions of Shelley’s “England in 1819.”

Treaty 21 and Treaty 27 were designed to give control of Indigenous land to British Canada in what is currently called Ontario. In both cases, the final documents were drawn up in 1822, several years after the initial discussions, and for that reason reflect an important change in personnel. The officials in the 1819 negotiations were, as the 1822 documents point out in identical language, acting on behalf of “his Late Majesty King George the Third, of Blessed Memory.”² The final agreement, however, is signed by “the Chiefs and Principal Men of the Missisague [sic] Nation of Indians [and] His most Gracious Majesty George the Fourth, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, King, Defender of the Faith.” What the Mississauga are agreeing to is the relinquishment of their land “unto His said Majesty King George the Fourth, His heirs and successors, to the only proper use, benefit and behoof of His said Majesty, His heirs and successors forever,” in return for “unto each man, woman and child of the said Missisagua [sic] Nation of Indians who at the time of entering into the said agreement inhabited and claimed the said tract of land, and to their descendants and posterity forever, an annuity of two pounds and ten shillings.” What the documents do, in other words, is encode long-term familial relationships and lines of descent as the basis for reciprocity, legal protection, and justice, and begin those lines of descent in the particular identities of George III and George IV.

This kinship-based relationship made sense, and continues to make sense today, in terms of the legal structures that would have guided the Mississauga negotiators. As part of the wider Anishinaabe peoples, the Mississauga would have been informed by the understandings of kinship and treaties that Anishinaabe legal scholar Aaron Mills has outlined in his research, based on his work with elders:

Shelley’s poem provides a grim gloss on these ideas, not just in the opening description of the personal and political failings of the two Georges but in the wider sense that the legal and political system that sustains them is equally corrupted. Colonial treaty-making depended on the notion that the parties were entering into familial relationships with each other, both in the present and in future generations. The language used by Indigenous negotiators and replicated by settler or imperial officials reflected these kin relations: it was typical to refer to the other side of the treaty partnership as fathers, brothers, uncles, and sons. “England in 1819” serves as a reminder that the corrupt conduct of the British crown and government, conduct which had led to a “fainting country” and “a people starved and stabbed,” fatally jeopardized any good-faith, kin-based relationships that Britain might wish to enter into with Indigenous peoples (5, 7 [SPP 326]). Shelley’s “Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay” are woven through Treaties 21 and 27, holding out the promise of protection and fair treatment in a manner that actively seeks to influence the people signing the document before delivering violence and punitive justice, and offering the feckless leadership of the Hanovers as a deeply compromised version of the intergenerational obligations that the wider Indigenous cultures in North America adhered to and would recognize. While Shelley imagined the legal frameworks of Britain in these lines of verse, those legal frameworks no longer adhered to any kind of national boundary. A British-based legal system had, by 1819, spread across the world, and documents such as Treaties 21 and 27 did not simply reflect the “golden and sanguine laws,” but were identifiable instruments of those laws, formed out of the language and political and cultural structures that upheld them, and entangling anyone who engaged formally with those legal instruments in that wider system of law. The familial and intergenerational relationships that treaties promised relied on the honor of the British crown to uphold its responsibilities; Shelley’s 1819 poems laid out the reasons why these relationships were doomed to failure.

By 1819, the British monarchy had not controlled their American colonies for almost fifty years. But the history of nation-to-nation negotiation on the North American continent meant that, although Indigenous groups in the United States were now dealing with American federal and state governments, they continued to make reference to their long-standing connections to the nations of Europe, including Great Britain. These relationships had always been, on both sides, expressed as family relationships; the dominance of Native Americans in pre-Revolutionary times had meant that diplomacy between Indigenous nations, the British crown, and its settler representatives was conducted on their terms, making use of the discourse of fathers, uncles, and brothers that helped situate governmental actors within a web of reciprocal, hereditary, kin-based relationships. We can see some of the effects of this language in a speech given by O-ge-maw-ke-ke-to at the Treaty of Saginaw between the Ojibwe and the Americans on September 24, 1819. O-ge-maw-ke-ke-to said, via an interpreter:

The “English Father” implies both the titular King of England, whoever might happen to occupy that role, and more specifically, George III (still technically king in 1819 and certainly the point of reference for the late eighteenth-century events to which O-ge-maw-ke-ke-to refers when he says “He never asked for them”), but also to some extent George IV, in his role as regent in 1819. We might not recognize O-ge-maw-ke-ke-to’s complimentary descriptions of Georges III and IV as having much connection to the “old, mad, blind, despised and dying King” or “Princes, the dregs of their dull race,” but of course they do: the flaws that Shelley so rightly points out in the British crown provide a tragic gloss on O-ge-maw-ke-ke-to’s confident sense that he could refuse to negotiate with the Americans because of a strong, kin-based, diplomatic relationship with the British, personified in the royal family, an alliance that he believed could be reactivated (1–2 [SPP 326]). As Shelley’s poem could have shown O-ge-maw-ke-ke-to, however, the leaders of Britain were deeply extractive in their conduct; “Rulers who neither see nor feel nor know, / But leechlike to their fainting country cling” were already treating their own nation in the manner they and their settler heirs intended to treat the colonies (4–5 [326]). The failures that Shelley notes in his own country’s leadership are the same failures that left these prior treaty relationships in tatters, their obligations virtually meaningless, and likewise left Indigenous peoples bereft of alliances they had relied upon and cultivated over many years.

But the connections between Shelley, treaties, and Indigenous speakers and writers are not just contextual and historical questions of kinship and kingship. The language and forms of Shelley’s poetry, especially his poems of 1819, became a powerful source of inspiration for Indigenous writers of later generations, who attempted to revisit the agreements made in 1819 and beyond in their poems. From the end of the War of 1812, there had been a slew of treaties between the southeastern Native nations and the United States government, as the victorious Americans looked to capitalize on their success and expand the settler-colonial state. Although some Native nations, including the Cherokees, had fought alongside the Americans against the British, the postwar treaties aimed at a ruthless land grab and the forced dismantling of Native sovereignty. Many of these treaties were organized by then-General Andrew Jackson, later, as president, to be the architect of the 1830 Removal Act, and John C. Calhoun, who would go on to be Jackson’s vice president.

The poems this chapter considers are by different Indigenous authors writing at different times, but they are all composed by members of the five southeastern nations and they have a common source in the events of the watershed year of 1819. As noted by Sharon O’Brien, a settler historian who worked with members of the Muscogee Nation, the Mvskoke Creeks passed a law around 1819 “declaring that no tribal lands could be sold without approval of the national council, under penalty of death. Federal negotiators, however, ignored the nation’s refusal to negotiate and concluded a series of illegal treaties,” a sequence of events that eventually led to removal and then to the late nineteenth-century treaty breaches that James Roane Gregory, whose poems this chapter examines, lived through, wrote about, and fought against.⁵ Meanwhile, in February 1819, the Cherokees had agreed to what they hoped would be a final treaty with the United States, sending their leaders from Georgia to Washington to negotiate. This crucial treaty document opened with a preamble about Cherokee priorities:

The 1819 treaty, in other words, was an attempt by the Cherokees to cede a final portion of their land in Georgia in order to see off the threat of removal to the west. This negotiation, like the Mvskoke Creek law, was part of an urgent effort by Indigenous leaders to hold on to land and sovereignty; it was designed to end the process of dispossession and disenfranchisement that had characterized the years since American independence and to be the last land cession they would make.⁷ But the United States government simply failed to live up to the undertakings made in this critical treaty, leading, eventually, to the genocide of the Trail of Tears. Some key ideas discussed in Gregory’s, Too-qua-stee’s, and Ridge’s poems thus have a particular resonance with the year 1819 and the last-ditch attempts by the Cherokee leadership to secure their homelands via treaty provisions and by the Mvskoke Creek to refuse any further treaty negotiations.

One particular term stands out as a link between Shelley’s verse and some of these Indigenous-authored poems. At the conclusion of Treaty 27, the document notes: “IN WITNESS WHEREOF, the parties to these presents have hereunto set their hands and seals the day and year first above written. The Indians not knowing how to write, have made their marks against their respective seals.” I want to take some liberties with Shelley’s intentions here, and suggest, for the purposes of globalizing and Indigenizing his poem, that we read his phrase “a book sealed” (11 [SPP 327]) as referring to a sealed treaty. Both elements of Shelley’s phrase overlap with treaty discourse and paraphernalia. Definitions of a “book” in Shelley’s time include “a legal document, especially a charter or deed by which land is conveyed,” while a “seal” described both the actual physical wax device on a document and the figurative sense of promising or authenticating one’s words and undertakings.⁸ The word “seal” or “sealed” appears repeatedly in the treaties of 1819 and beyond; the conclusion to Treaty 27 describes it, in the normal legal formulation, as “signed, sealed and delivered,” before the respective seals, marks, or totems of the participating signatories are recorded. Seals were the physical manifestation of sovereignty and the right to negotiate or accept terms. My point here is not that Shelley intends his readers to think of a sealed treaty – no doubt, as most commentators have pointed out, he means to refer to the Bible as a sealed book, a metaphor in which the sense of both “book” and “seal” converge around the idea of a covenant or agreement. But what might a nineteenth-century Indigenous reader have made of the word “sealed” in Shelley’s poem? What would the natural associations of that word suggest to such a reader, beyond the implications of the Bible? And how might those associations then get reformulated in Indigenous poetry?

There are some Indigenous-authored poems that sit between a poem such as “England in 1819” and the treaties of 1819 and can help emphasize the importance of Shelley’s promissory poetics for treaty-based relationships in the settler colonies. In 1895, the Mvskoke Creek writer James Roane Gregory, a lawyer and judge, wrote a poem called “The Promised Seal.”⁹

Gregory’s poetry in English often has an awkward quality, according to his editor Robert Dale Parker, and perhaps can be explained by Gregory’s own comment that he thought in Mvskoke. But a reader can also hear the strong echoes of a Shelleyan syntax, meter, and vocabulary hiding behind this poem, such as the structure and sound of the opening line, “Monopolies, greedy host, Pander” compared with Shelley’s “Religion, Christless, Godless” (11 [SPP 327]) or Gregory’s “Helpless children, crushed ’neath tyrant’s heel”¹⁰ with Shelley’s “A people starved and stabbed in the untill’d field” (7 [326]). It is entirely possible that the mission school-educated Gregory does have Shelley’s poem in mind here (he was known to be a voracious reader) and from that foundation, we might consider the way in which Gregory interprets the hint provided by Shelley’s word “sealed” (11 [326]).¹¹

Parker notes he was unable to identify the titular “promised seal” mentioned in this poem, nor the event that occurred in September 1895, to which the poem refers, but I would like to suggest one possibility.¹² The relevant lines are “The seal of next September’s thunder. / Count each vote.”¹³ Gregory was nominated for principal chief by the Progressive Party of the Creek Nation, an election that he lost in September 1895. Might the seal, then, be the seal that the principal chief used on official documents from around 1885 – the Great Seal of the Muscogee Nation? Many Indigenous groups adopted seals as a way of signaling nationhood, sovereignty, autonomy, and the paraphernalia of the state that they had seen mobilized most visibly in the seals used by European and American governments on treaty documents, alongside a host of other strategies designed to signal to their treaty partners that they had legitimate and recognizable political structures.¹⁴ The Cherokees, Chickasaws, Mvskoke-Creeks, Seminoles, and Choctaws had all signed treaties that featured phrases such as “the parties have hereunto set their hands and seals,” and the word typically implied not just a wax seal but also a mark or signature of assent.¹⁵ Each of these groups had adopted a formal collective seal sometime in the nineteenth century after their forced removal west of the Mississippi, usually as part of a process to establish a written constitution and to regularize relationships with the federal and state governments, having seen the symbolic power of the seals used on treaties.¹⁶ The need for this paraphernalia and material paratext had become acute by the time that Gregory was composing his poem; although the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Seminoles, and Mvskoke Creeks were exempted from the Dawes Act of 1887, which allotted Native land into individual titles, the 1898 Curtis Act nullified that exemption, a clear violation of the treaties of 1819 and beyond that had guaranteed control of their new tribal lands to the nations who were removed to the west.¹⁷

For Gregory, the idea conjured up by Shelley’s “book sealed” is perhaps something more tangible than Shelley’s original notion of a metaphorically sealed Bible, something instead associated with sovereignty and Indigenous autonomy, the right to make and administer laws on one’s own terms and in a manner that prioritizes kinship relations. That is not necessarily what Shelley meant by “a book sealed,” but it is also not outside the bounds of Shelley’s political sensibilities, nor a distortion of the broader meaning of “England in 1819.” Gregory’s final image (“They strike strong, when Injuns cast the seal”) is his own version of the phantom bursting from the grave, a darkly positive image of the hope that can arise from political despair, or as the editors of the Longman edition of Shelley’s poems suggest in their interpretation of “England in 1819,” a suggestion of the “way to a radically altered future” (Poems III: 189).

The signal importance of the word “seal” for Gregory can be ascertained from the fact that it appears in another of his Shelleyesque poems from the same year.¹⁸ “Otheen, Okiyetos” (Mvskoke for “I really, really mean what I am saying”) addresses an unnamed but hostile interlocutor, who is asked “hast thou been true,”

In this instance, the “seal” in question is a settler one, such as those found on treaties, which symbolizes the promises and written undertakings that state and federal governments were setting aside. The consequences of this promise-breaking are laid out in “Otheen, Okiyetos” in terms that echo Shelley’s denouncement of his own government:

The images of a land in turmoil and a people struck down resonate with Shelley’s ideas. Gregory’s image of the Mvskogee who “fell ’neath the death blow” recalls Shelley’s image of the Peterloo victims, while Gregory’s sense of “honor’s grave” reminds us of the “graves from which a glorious Phantom may / Burst” at the conclusion of “England in 1819” (13–14 [SPP 327]). These echoes in Gregory’s work are not simply a shared imagery of violence and hope but also a meditation on treaties and their afterlives. The connection to the notion of broken promises and the betrayal of the meaning behind “thy high gifted seal” reimagines “England in 1819” and The Mask of Anarchy within Mvskoke Creek expectations of treaty relationships.

Gregory was not the only member of the Five Tribes to see potential in Shelley’s verse. Too-qua-stee/De Witt Clinton Duncan (Cherokee), who had been removed from his homelands as a baby on the Trails of Tears, graduated from Dartmouth College, and became a teacher of English, Latin, and Greek, seems to have borrowed extensively from The Mask of Anarchy in his “The Dead Nation: An Elegy at the Tomb of the Cherokee Nation, by One of Her Own Sons” (1899).²¹ Lamenting his “poor luckless nation,”²² Too-qua-stee alludes to the Cherokee creation story and the “halcyon peace”²³ that reigned until colonization, before introducing this sequence of ideas:

Shelley’s Murder, Fraud, and Hypocrisy are here reimagined as the “Pestilence, and Art, and Might” of settler-colonial violence, in a stanza form and meter which mirror that of The Mask of Anarchy and draw out the potential of Shelley’s poem to represent a collective, plurivocal expression of anger and revolution. And this was not the only time Too-qua-stee turned to Shelley to make a political point. His “A Vision of the End” deploys similar allegories, perhaps augmented with some of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”²⁵ In a dystopic imagining of a polluted landscape, where “government, a monstrous form”²⁶ is located, Too-qua-stee writes:

Like his “Pestilence, and Art, and Might” in “The Dead Nation,” Too-qua-stee’s Greed and Ambition here echo Shelley’s allegories of political corruption and malfeasance, symbolizing the ways in which kinship and reciprocal treaty-based relationships had become perverted in Cherokee country. While Shelley’s royals were “mud from a muddy spring,” Too-qua-stee’s allegorized settler leader is a “monarch of the slime,” a vile version of the father/uncle/brother figure who was imagined in settler-Indigenous treaties.

In these poems, the grotesqueness that Shelley located in Peterloo and in the wider nation in 1819 has been localized to illustrate the failure of treaty promises in the United States. Too-qua-stee’s “The Dead Nation,” in particular, was a direct response to the loss of Native land and sovereignty heralded by the 1898 Curtis Act and was one of a number of poems he devoted to that subject. The immediate effect of the Curtis Act was the loss of 90 million acres of Native land, land which had been guaranteed via treaties to the Five Tribes when they relocated, some voluntarily but many under violent duress, to the west of the Mississippi. In response to these treaty violations, poets such as Gregory and Too-qua-stee saw enormous potential in the poems of liberty, resistance, and the sovereignty of the people that Shelley had produced in 1819, both as records of previous acts of resistance and as diagnostic tools for the dishonorable behavior of settler governments and officials when it came to treaty promises and the kinship relationships they encoded.

There is another strain of Shelleyan influence in nineteenth-century Native American poetry, however, one that mobilizes an alternative set of Shelley’s poems and imagines an alternative kind of Indigenous relationship with settler-colonial treaty partners. John Rollin Ridge (Chees-quat-a-law-ny/Yellow Bird) belonged to a prominent Cherokee family and was a prolific poet. His life was profoundly shaped by Indigenous-settler treaties. His father and grandfather were members of the Treaty Party, a group of Cherokee men who signed an unauthorized agreement with the United States government, the 1835 Treaty of New Echota. This treaty required the Cherokees to leave their lands in the southeast and move to the western side of the Mississippi, despite consistent and vigorous opposition from Principal Chief John Ross and many other Cherokees. In 1839, most of the Treaty Party, including Ridge’s father and grandfather, were assassinated as traitors for their part in the 1835 agreement, an event that is still controversial in Cherokee country today.²⁸ Ridge remained true to the deeply conservative values of the Treaty Party throughout his life, which included support for slavery and a strong strain of anti-Black racism, a belief in assimilation as the only path forward for Indigenous peoples but within the context of “Indian Country” becoming its own state in the Union, and a sympathetic but patronizing attitude to Native Americans who were not part of the Five Tribes. He would go on to be a treaty negotiator himself for the Cherokee Nation.

Scholars have noted that Ridge’s poetry reflects the influence of Shelley, whom he had probably read at school, but on this occasion, it is not the radical political poems but the meditative works on nature and Shelley’s concepts of the role of the poet that operate as intertexts.²⁹ A poem such as Ridge’s “To a Mockingbird Singing in a Tree,” for example, domesticates Shelley’s skylark while retaining the address to a bird that should “Soar on, as now, abhorrent of control.”³⁰ The poem ends, as Shelley’s does, with a lesson about listening to nature:

This notion of the role of the poet in listening to and interpreting nature is developed further in Ridge’s “Mount Shasta,” the poem of which he was most proud.³² It opens with a stanza that echoes some of Shelley’s language in “Mont Blanc,” an obvious inspiration for Ridge’s verse:

While much of “Mount Shasta” could be excerpted to draw attention to Shelley’s (and Romantic literature’s) language and concerns, I want to focus on one moment in the poem, and a corresponding moment in “Mont Blanc,” which brings the notion of treaties and Indigenous sovereignty into the literary framework. In the final stanza of “Mount Shasta,” Ridge looks towards the future of the American West, writing:

Although very different in its sentiments, the poem’s turn to law, government, and the administration of the land connects to a power Shelley too vests in a summit when he writes:

Ridge composed his poem in 1853–1854, after moving to California to join the gold rush, but he remained deeply involved in the affairs of what he consistently referred to as “the Cherokee Nation.”³⁵ In these lines, he contemplates the possibility of a sovereign administration that would mirror the authority of the landscape, almost vesting legal power in the mountain. His focus here is on the “Golden State” of California, but he was also entirely committed to the idea of Native statehood, the long-held belief that the area of the United States occupied by the Five Tribes following their removal should become an autonomous state of the Union.³⁶ This view corresponded with Ridge’s complicated political outlook; it was a position that championed Indigenous assimilation into the political structures of the United States, while at the same time carving out space for his people’s sovereignty and autonomy. In the 1850s, while writing poems like “Mount Shasta,” Ridge also wrote journalism advocating for a Native state, one that would, like California, be able to construct its own “Sovereign Law” grounded in the natural world, as well as articles that advocated for the role of the poet by quoting the dying words of Pushmataha, a Choctaw leader who had passed away while in Washington negotiating with the US government.³⁷ In Ridge’s mind, the roles of statesmen, treaty negotiator, and poet were all intertwined, in a reflection of what his biographer aptly calls his “almost Shelleyan belief in the power of the pen.”³⁸ A poet-legislator like Ridge could, he believed, translate the mountain’s sovereign power into an alternative political reality in which Indigenous statehood could be realized.

Shelley’s poetry operates as an intertext for the 1819 treaties and the relationships that flowed from them for different reasons on the two sides of the US-Canadian border. In the case of Treaties 21 and 27 in Canada, as discussed earlier, the relevance of Shelley’s characterization of the British monarchy is clear; treaties between the British crown and the First Nations of Canada relied on the integrity of the leaders that Shelley derided in “England in 1819” and The Mask of Anarchy. The context in the United States was different, of course, but some of Shelley’s themes of corrupt political leadership, injustice, and violence against innocent people could be easily transferred from the British to the American government, which, despite the revolutionary rhetoric about throwing off the tyranny of British rule, had reproduced that tyranny in its relationships with Indigenous peoples. The work of transferring those themes, and of binding Shelley’s poetry to the broken American treaties of 1819, is undertaken in the poems of Gregory, Too-qua-stee, and Ridge, all of whom are able to intuit the power of Shelley’s conceptualizations of injustice and of what Kir Kuiken has dubbed “counter-sovereignty” in his verse, although they put those conceptualizations to very different literary and political uses.³⁹

As the Cherokee literary scholar Daniel Heath Justice has noted,

Justice’s comments are useful for conceptualizing what poets like Gregory, Too-qua-stee, and Ridge were aiming to do in their utilization of Shelley. They are “responsive” to his verses, I would suggest, not “reactive,” and they deploy that responsiveness in the service of relationships between peoples, lands, generations, and systems. They are similarly responsive to the treaties that guaranteed their rights and sovereignty, just as treaties themselves are, at least in theory, responsive to relationships.

So much for the Shelley of the nineteenth century, but what about the “Shelley for our times” that this collection imagines? What is the relevance of the poems, the treaties, and the subsequent Indigenous responses to Shelley for our twenty-first-century moment? On July 9, 2020, the US Supreme Court issued a landmark decision around Native title and treaty rights. The McGirt decision confirmed that an 1866 treaty between the United States and the Mvskoke Creek nation in Oklahoma guaranteed land rights and sovereignty over their territories in the state.⁴¹ The decision was widely seen as a vindication of the treaty rights of all of the nations that had been removed to Oklahoma and other western states.

It was fitting that one of the most widely read responses to the McGirt decision was penned by the then-US poet laureate, the Mvskoke Creek poet Joy Harjo. In Harjo’s New York Times article in response to the McGirt decision, she notes the way justice and time are linked in Mvskoke epistemology:

Harjo does not need Shelley’s ideas to speak her truth; the structures of Mvskoke knowledge are more than enough. But, as Romantic scholars, we can see the ways in which Harjo and Shelley express a shared ideal, manifested across different timescales. “Ye are many, they are few” is a condensed, present-focused expression of the fact that real power lies not with those who currently occupy the offices of state but with those who are resolute, patient, and community-minded. Literary activism is a crucial part of this spirit of resistance, and it stretches from Shelley, across “Indian country” to Gregory, Too-qua-stee, and Ridge, and on to Harjo in a series of vital embodiments of the idea that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

As Susan Wolfson, Stuart Curran, Timothy Webb, and others have argued, a lot hangs on that word “may” in Shelley’s final couplet in “England in 1819”: “graves from which a glorious Phantom may / Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day” (13–14 [SPP 327]).⁴³ It is, as Wolfson points out, either tentative or enabling, depending on how you want to read it, suggesting either “perhaps” or “is empowered to.”⁴⁴ It could signify a rather tenuous possibility, something situated in an uncertain future. But it also has an enabling, empowering potential, the same kind of political potential concentrated in our phrase “not if, but when,” or, as Joy Harjo put it, “Justice is sometimes seven generations away, or even more. And it is inevitable.”⁴⁵ While I personally prefer the more optimistic reading of Shelley’s “may,” a reading that emphasizes the sovereignty and autonomy of people to reimagine their world, I think the genuine uncertainty and irresolution of that term isolates the vital point that sovereignty and autonomy can be entirely real and yet still ineffective in the face of the forces that work against them. It is that tension that makes Shelley’s poems so powerful for readers well beyond their apparently localized and temporalized context. And it is that potential that means that Shelley’s poems are, on some quite meaningful level, actually about Indigenous autonomy and honoring the treaties of 1819 and beyond.