With men often killed during or immediately after slave raids, the Ottawa and Illinois brought captive women to the Frenchmen, who took them as wives and mistresses. French Catholic Church and colonial officials were aghast to learn that the French traders were entering into such relationships in large numbers. Moreover, based on their appearance and practices, the Frenchmen were becoming Indianized—”rendering themselves almost savage”—rather than the Indians becoming Gallicized. Desperate French colonial authorities dispatched “a supply of nubile French girls” to Louisiana but as one official lamented the Frenchmen seemed to prefer Indian women. Indian slavery thus produced a blurring of ethnicity, especially in trade centers such as Kaskaskia, the largest community in upper Louisiana wherein “sexual relations between Frenchmen and Indian women were utterly routine.”80
Gifting, ethnic mixing, and reciprocal relations did not inoculate French colonialism from war and genocide. The southeastern frenzy of slaving extended to French colonial enclaves, especially Mobile where captive slaves were brought for sale and shipment. As a result of slavery and other tensions, in 1729 the Natchez, the largest indigenous group in the Mississippi Valley, assaulted the French at Fort Rosalie on the eastern bank of the Mississippi. The Indians killed indiscriminately, as more than 200 French died, and put their homes to the torch.81
The Natchez assault produced an indiscriminate response from the French, who carried out “a series of vicious reprisals that within two years had decimated the tribe and shattered its integrity forever.” Frustrated by the Indian style of guerrilla warfare—they “approach like foxes, fight like lions and disappear like birds,” as one French officer put it, the French launched “campaigns of genocidal intent.” These early eighteenth-century campaigns targeted not only the Natchez but the Fox and Chickasaw as well.82
Slave raids embroiling the Spanish and indigenous people entered Texas from the north. In the early eighteenth century, indigenes descended from the Plains to raid for horses and captives to exchange with Europeans for guns and other goods. “Such raids sent ripples and then waves through native alliances and enmities across Texas, drawing Spaniards into conflict with powerful groups of Comanche, Wichita, Caddo and Apaches through the end of the century,” Juliana Barr notes. A coalescence known as Apaches attacked Spanish horse herds, missions, and presidios, provoking an indiscriminate response against the “barbarous enemies of humankind.” Whereas Indians took relatively small numbers of captives, the Spanish took far more slaves in their reprisal raids. With slavery formally illegal in New Spain, officials authorized the raids under the Catholic doctrine of just war. Spanish officials dispatched the Indian slaves to Mexico City, Havana, and Veracruz. They took many times more women than men and kept some of these for their own desires. As the frenzied cycle of slavery unfolded in Texas, “The loss of their wives and children drove furious Apache warriors to expand their onslaughts against Spanish horse herds.” After decades of raiding, the Spanish and the Apache made peace, leaving the field open in the latter half of the century for the Comanche and Wichita to plague the Spanish rancheros, missions, and outposts.83
Centuries of endemic warfare prevailed in New Mexico, where, as Ned Blackhawk points out, Spanish authorities “clearly understood the importance of violence in solidifying colonial rule.” The slave trade anchored the Spanish–Ute alliance as the Utes conducted pitiless raids against defenseless non-equestrian tribes further north in the Great Basin. The Ute engaged in “violent subjugation of vassal Indian communities and their women.” After torturing and killing most of their male victims, the Ute paraded women and children before potential buyers in annual trade fairs. “The serial rape of captive Indian women became ritualized public spectacles at northern trade fairs.” The flesh trade in the southwest was obviously “heavily gendered, with adolescent girls among the prime targets” owing to a high demand for them in New Mexico.84
Slavery infused by colonialism came last to the Northwest, the area about which the Europeans knew the least and explored last. Spain, Russia, and Britain descended on the northwest in the mid-eighteenth century, with trade focused mainly on furs, including sea otter pelts sent across the Pacific to China. As elsewhere Indians had long taken and exchanged captives but as in the other regions the European-infused market system introduced new technologies and accelerated the violence. The arrival of colonialism in the Northwest brought a new and more intensive slave trade that unleashed a “cruel system of predatory warfare,” as a contemporary European described it.85
On the Cusp of the Imperial Wars
The colonial encounter had created an entirely new world for indigenous peoples as well as for Europeans. For the indigenes the colonial encounter brought disease, disruption, enslavement, diaspora, indiscriminate killing, destruction of communities, and loss of ancestral homelands. Violence was nothing new to Indians but the scope and intensity of the colonial violence was unprecedented. The indigenous way of life rooted in reciprocal relations with the natural, spiritual, and human world had been irrevocably changed by the encounter. While Indians sought balance through gift giving, alliance building, social interactions, and performance of rituals, the epidemics and the intensity of colonial violence shattered this way of life. Whereas indigenes viewed nature as there to be exploited in balance, establishing community or moving from place to place as needed for fishing, hunting, planting, and gathering, Europeans sought to establish bounded places, to possess colonial spaces.
Individual property rights, commodification of the land, patriarchy, Christianity, and nation-state identity represented radically different and ultimately triumphant conceptions of land use and relations between and among people and the natural world. As Ethridge observes, “The contestants in this imperial struggle who were organized into nation-states held the advantage—Europeans prevailed decisively in this struggle.”86
The changes brought by the Europeans were not, however, simply imposed on Indians, rather the indigenes often recognized what was happening, adapted, and seized the opportunities available to them. Whereas Indians had trapped animals for food, clothing, and shelter, maintaining the imperative of balance, the Europeans brought a burgeoning global marketplace with them, giving rise to the fur trade, which spurred near-extermination of the beaver for the making of felt hats. Indians sought to access the new technologies and trade goods introduced by Europeans, especially guns and ammunition, but also tools, metals, cloth, and alcohol. They thus accommodated and played a vital role in affirming the European approach to the natural world—that it could be exploited in extremes and imbalance if the market so demanded—in order to get the things they needed or desired.
It has become fashionable to aver that Indians adapted and displayed their own agency within the colonial encounter and that is true. It is also true that the overwhelming majority of them died, their cultures and way of life were shattered beyond recognition, and they now confronted a people in the Europeans whose technologies, economic and spiritual drives, racial formations, and ethnocentricity offered little hope of compromise. They were not doomed to extinction but they did confront a people determined to remove them from the land by whatever means necessary.
Although whole peoples such as the Apalachee, after having thrived for centuries, were virtually destroyed, other Indians adapted and through a process of ethno-genesis created new and powerful confederacies such as the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, and Seminole. They had armed themselves and learned hard lessons through horrific violence, reconfigured their identities, and successfully adapted to the colonial environment. They had finally put a stop to the Indian slave trade, which had entailed perpetual warfare, and now traded relatively more peacefully and profitably within the colonial market system in deerskins rather than in slaves. Having rebuilt their cultures and strengthened their new confederacies, the indigenes recognized that they could exploit the Europeans, who entered into violent competition for control of the continent. During the imperial wars of t
he eighteenth century, Indians could and did play these Europeans off against one another through often-deft manipulation of trade and alliances. As long as more than one European power remained in contention for the new empire, indigenous people had a fighting chance to keep some of their land and maintain their identities.
3
“No Savage Shall Inherit the Land”: Settler Colonialism through the American Revolution
During the eighteenth century, explosive settler colonization established a structural framework that would drive Indians from the land. Trade and diplomacy enabled relatively peaceful relations between Europeans and indigenes in the first half of the eighteenth century. Thereafter, the influx of settlers and the outbreak of the French and Indian War heightened the conflicts involving Indians, imperial authorities, speculators, and settlers. The American Revolution spurred indiscriminate killing on the western borderlands and a determination on the part of the Americans to cleanse Indians from the land.
Under the Doctrine of Discovery, deeply rooted in European tradition, the English colonies laid claim to colonial space, arrogating the right to dispossess the indigenes, deemed heathen and uncivilized.1 Euro-Americans employed the law as a means of disavowing the colonizing act. In some cases Indians legitimately sold land. Other times speculators and officials cheated them out of land, sometimes in collusion with their own “chiefs” or other tribes. Inaccurate translation and misunderstanding led to nasty surprises and simmering resentments. Even though settlers, speculators, and government officials knew that most land sales and treaties were fraudulent and one-sided, their implications not clear to the indigenous partners, they nonetheless provided the desired veneer of legality. In the final analysis, as Stuart Banner points out, “In the colonial period the Indians sold an enormous amount of land to the English, but in the end they were poorer than when they began.”2
Both the Europeans and the indigenes had well-ensconced traditions for the conduct of diplomacy, yet a cultural chasm often divided them. For Euro-Americans the primary goals of summitry with Indians were two-fold: to gain control of land for speculators and settlers; and to secure alliances in time of war. As settler colonization grew, Euro-Americans sought written treaties that would sanction land seizures under the authority of the law. Meanwhile, both the English and French courted Indian allies during the course of their long struggle for supremacy in North America. Indigenous groups could and did exploit the imperial rivalry for gifts, guns, ammunition, trade goods, manufactured items, cloth, blankets, and for support against their own indigenous rivals.3
Indigenes viewed diplomacy more broadly, as a means to establish mutual respect and kinship ties that would enable relations to go forward. Indians thus focused on the process and the rituals associated with diplomacy whereas Euro-Americans homed in on the outcome of negotiations. Indians, with their cultures rooted in oral traditions rather than writing, often were not fully aware of the terms and significance of the written accords. Symbols and gestures often meant more to them than words. From the indigenous standpoint, if mutual respect and kinship ties had been effectively established, negotiations had succeeded in laying a foundation for future cooperation. Euro-Americans considered the negotiations to be over once a treaty had been signed whereas to Indians the signatures might appear as merely a ritual valued by the other side, but not something to bring an end to the negotiations as a whole.
After often having walked for days if not weeks to arrive at the council fires, Indians might reasonably expect to be greeted with gifts and fanfare appropriate to the occasion of their arrival. Euro-Americans instead often did not hide their contempt for the bedraggled savages coming into their midst. In 1785, for example, when Choctaw diplomats arrived after a two-month trek for a summit in Hopewell, South Carolina, they were tired and hungry and expected to be showered with food and gifts. The Americans instead viewed them as “beggars” and “the most indolent creatures we ever saw.”4
Once they had arrived at the council fires, Indians, with their emphasis on the process of diplomacy, typically were in no hurry to conclude an accord. If they were tired and hungry, they needed time to rest; if there was alcohol available, they might wish to drink it and enjoy themselves for a few days. Euro-Americans learned to use Indian fatigue, hunger, and desire for alcohol, as well as the allure of guns, ammunition, and trade goods, to secure the kind of agreement they wanted.
The rituals of the council fire took time to unfold and symbolism meant everything. White, for example, was the color of peace, hence if indigenes unfolded a white deerskin upon which the Euro-American negotiator might be invited to sit, such a gesture was highly significant to the tribes, but this symbolism might be completely lost on the colonizer. To Indians a cloudy day might be a bad day to go forward with negotiations and a sunny day a good one. Mutual smoking of the calumet, which took the newly formed kinship ties and understandings to the spirits in the sky by means of the smoke, was highly significant to Indians.
While Euro-American diplomacy was heavily freighted with racial categorization, Indian diplomacy often put more emphasis on gender. With warfare often perceived as a masculine struggle to determine which set of males would rule, an indigenous woman might serve as an envoy to break a masculine impasse and jump-start peace talks. If near the end of negotiations Indian women came into the council fires to embrace the men on the other side, this might represent a meaningful display of recognition of kinship ties, showing the Euro-Americans that they had been “adopted” by the tribe.
Although cultural barriers, double-dealing, and misunderstanding plagued European-Indian accords, diplomacy could keep the lines of trade and communication open and keep the peace or forge alliances in wartime. Indians as well as Euro-Americans sought and often achieved through alliances material gain, political leverage, revenge against their enemies, and an outlet for masculine drives. On several occasions Indian chieftains traveled to Europe, where they were well received by royal courts, reflecting a high degree of colonial ambivalence. Through the painstaking efforts of Indians, Europeans, and go-betweens or middlemen, some of whom had mixed parentage that provided them with essential language skills, many understandings were reached, especially in the first half of the eighteenth century.
The explosive growth of settlement, the structure of settler colonialism, ultimately overwhelmed diplomacy. As the balance of power shifted to the colonizer, land speculators, settlers, and colonial authorities acted unilaterally. Even when colonial officials strove to rein in settlement, squatters and speculators showed contempt for their directives and disregard for Indian claims to colonial space.
Indigenous people were willing to try diplomacy but when it failed they were also willing to take up the hatchet to preserve their homelands. Violent Indian resistance—”savage” attacks on “white” people—traumatized the settlers, inflamed colonial discourse, and led to campaigns of dispossession backed by indiscriminate violence.
Even as they rationalized exterminatory campaigns as a defensive response to Indian savagery, the settlers mastered the Indian way of war. They learned to skulk in the woods, conduct search-and-destroy operations, attack villages at dawn, destroy Indian food stores in winter, take Indian scalps, enslave them, deport their children, and above all relentlessly to take Indian land. Ultimately many Euro-American settler colonials avowed that the “Indian problem” demanded resolution, indeed a final solution.5
Amid the campaigns of dispossession and imperial warfare, epidemic disease continued to ravage indigenous people. While millions of Indians became sick and died, millions of settlers arrived and thrived. This dichotomy powerfully fueled the settlers’ fantasies of their providential destiny to lay claim to colonial space, to displace a “dying race.” As this dialectic played out, ambivalences became unsettling and accommodation with indigenous people less and less necessary.
Indians and the Imperial Wars
Conflict in North America was hardly limited to the “colonizer and the c
olonized,” as indigenes fought indigenes and Europeans battled other Europeans for trade, prestige, and control of the land. Eager to access European goods, and to profit from trade and alliances, indigenous people willingly and often enthusiastically took part in a series of European-inspired imperial wars. Warfare between and among Europeans provided Indian warriors an opportunity to manifest their manhood, to strike back against their indigenous rivals, to access European goods and trade, and to attempt to preserve their lands.
The imperial wars pitted the English, allied with the Iroquois Confederation based in the Finger Lakes region of New York, against the French and their Indian allies on the Midwest borderlands.6 The major European conflicts were King William’s War (1689–1697); Queen Anne’s War (1702–1713); King George’s War (1744–1748); and the decisive French and Indian War (1754–1763).7
Ambivalence and a “long peace” prevailed throughout much of the first half of the eighteenth century between Indians and Euro-Americans. Even as settler colonialism brought increased pressure on Indian land, the Europeans also brought opportunities for commerce and alliances. Indians acted as a buffer between rival Europeans and played a major role in a thriving exchange economy on the borderlands. The indigenes anchored a robust trade in furs, deerskins, foodstuffs, and other items.8
American Settler Colonialism: A History Page 9
