ABSTRACT
The lithograph "American Progress" depicts a central tension that runs through nineteenth-century legal and cultural texts concerning the political status of American Indian communities. As a manifestation of "American progress" exemplified by vanquishing tribal communities and erasing their presence from US society, the lithograph is more hopeful than prophetic. Legal determinations of tribal sovereignty and American Indian political rights were implicated in wider debates in post-revolutionary America about how to develop a "theoretical foundation for sovereignty" within a divided nation. Tribal sovereignty is implicated with racial identity through practices of racialization that were resonant in legal decisions dating from the "treaty-federalism era". Scholars of comparative racialization argue that "racialization is inherently comparative, a psychosocial and historical process", involving the "recognition and activation of relations that entail two or more terms".
