According to Trail of Tears, Major Ridge worked the land and eventually built up the best plantation. He owned 30 slaves and gave his son John 20 slaves when John got married.
Supposedly only about 8% of the Cherokees owned slaves. The slave-owners were mainly the mixed-blood elite who adopted the Southern plantation culture. So slave-owning wasn't endemic to the traditional Cherokee culture.
Another posting discusses a couple of key points: 1) Why the Cherokees sought to own slaves. 2) Why people keep bringing up the Cherokees' slaves.
Cherokee slave-owners
I can only surmise that the academic establishment feels the need to highlight this essentially anomalous institution because it feels the need to provide a "nuanced" view of the American Indian as opposed to the radical indigenist position of people like Ward Churchill or Vine Deloria Jr. This really is an indictment of the bourgeois academy.
Anybody who can think critically will understand what was going on. In the general onslaught against blacks and Indians in the 19th century, a small group of highly assimilated Indians in the southeast opted to participate in racial exploitation of another oppressed group. This falls into the same category of Jews collaborating with the Nazis. Instead of condemning the overall racist system that caused such a violation of Indian beliefs and behavior, these scholars twist the evidence in order to support an interpretation that would minimize the genocidal aspect of American history.
I have gotten inured to these reactionary rationalizations: "The whites massacred the bison, but the Indians massacred the saber-toothed tiger," "The whites colonized the Inca, but the Inca were feudal overlords themselves," etc. I have no doubt that this business of slave-owning Cherokees is being used in the same fashion.
Rob, I agree that many people try to use Native American human rights abuses as justification for white human rights abuses, but I do find some of your arguments a bit problematic.
ReplyDeleteFor example, the fact that 8% of Cherokee owned slaves (only a small percentage of whites owned slaves as well) doesn't change the fact that it took the majority of Cherokees to vote for a government that permitted slavery.
Nor is the history of Cherokee slave ownership as simple as a belief in racial equality that was trampled when they were forced to own slaves -- Cherokee leaders strategically chose to use slave ownership and black codes as a way to protect themselves. Whites saw the world as divided into a white/non-white binary. Cherokees often sought to secure rights by espousing a non-black/black view.
Furthermore, Cherokees began trading slaves in the early 1700's and Cherokees owned slaves in the 1800s. This wasn't due, in the main, to being under duress, but simply because slave ownership was profitable -- and those profits funded infrastructure that benefitted Cherokees whether or not they held slaves. Many Cherokees very early and rather uncritically accepted a view of black inferiority -- it didn't take much forcing.
I don't have time for a long post, but I suggest your read this legal article by Cherokee scholar, Elmhurst College president, S. Alan Ray. http://law.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=7231&context=expresso
Suffice it to say that the Cherokees owned slaves not because they were forced to go against anti-racist beliefs, but rather that this is a case of a government with agency choosing to do something that is inexcusably evil. This doesn't make Cherokees bad people -- but it does mean that their government perpetrated a brutal crime. Trying to avoid racism towards one's own group neither justifies nor forces people to enslave or oppress another. The Cherokees could have been like the Seminoles -- blacks and Natives allied together against oppresion.
Finally, the question of why people keep bring up Cherokee slavery is as chilling to me as the question of why people keep bringing up American conquest. I'll give you two answers -- the first is that the victims/heroic survivors of both crimes still struggle with the ramification today. The second is that these people who were told they weren't human, who were whipped, bought, sold, driven from their lands, etc., those people whose oppression built up and made possible two nations, the Cherokee Nation and the U.S., matter and deserve to be remembered. Everytime we seek to silence their stories we erase, once more, their humanity.
"those people whose oppression built up and made possible two nations, the Cherokee Nation and the U.S., matter and deserve to be remembered."
ReplyDeleteThe Cherokee Nation, in fact, pre-dated the presence of Black slaves.
I mean that slavery helped develop, not originate, the Cherokee Nation. Thank you for that important clarification : )
ReplyDeleteAlternate-history wise, I doubt you could say that the black slaves "made possible" either the United States or the Cherokee Nation.
ReplyDeletedmarks, please read the link I suggested -- it describes how slavery was critical to the growth and survival of the Cherokee nation and was written by a Cherokee scholar who is a college president. As for how slavery was critical to the U.S. http://www.reparationsthecure.org/Articles/Lamb/MeetingOpposition
ReplyDelete"The entire early American economy, in the North as well as the South, was fueled by the products and revenues generated by the institution of slavery. As, for example, the government raked in millions of dollars in taxes on cotton alone, all whites--whether they were rich or poor, slave holder or passionate abolitionist--benefited from slavery because the whole infrastructure of this nation was built on money made from it, directly or indirectly.
As I learned from CURE member Ken Lewis, we even owe the success of the American Revolution to money generated by slavery in the colonies. For example, Robert Morris, who made his money in the slave trade and trading slavery products, is known as the "Financier of the American Revolution" because he bailed out Washington's army several times, thus helping to save the revolution from going down in defeat from lack of money. This country's true history is replete with such facts.
If you dig deep enough, you will find that every large metropolitan area in the country benefited greatly from slavery. Take New York City where I live, which--despite the fact that it was the heaviest slave holding region north of the Mason-Dixon Line--has always enjoyed a reputation as one of the liberal refuges from slavery during the decades leading up to the Civil War.
As Howard Dodson, Chief of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, has illuminated, from the beginning, every white person in New York benefited from the enslavement because slavery was a publicly organized and operated institution created by the laws of the colony of New Amsterdam. The first enslaved Africans brought to New York in 1625 weren't brought as private "slaves" to work for individuals, but as public "slaves" to work for the City. They built forts, constructed houses--in general were the labor force that created the foundation of New York City as we know it today.
From the founding of the republic through the years leading up to the Civil War, New York City, as the financial and commercial capital of the US, controlled the sale of the slave-produced goods that were sold abroad. Cotton grown by enslaved Africans was shipped up here from the South, and from here sold to Europe. Which leads us to this truly shocking fact: because of the city's economic dependence on slavery and the slave trade, when South Carolina seceded from the Union in 1861, Mayor Fernando Wood proposed that New York City also secede and join the confederacy. Fortunately, the City Council voted down this proposition!" It continues on from there.
"Why people keep bringing up the Cherokees' slaves."
ReplyDeleteActually I've heard about it less than slaves owned by whites. Also the article you quote isn't the greatest:
"It was a survival technique."
Those poor cherokees had no choice! They had to enslave other human beings! Am I the only one who's disturbed by the fact that the author is basically a slavery apologist?
"This really is an indictment of the bourgeois academy."
The b-word? Is the author 15 and wearing a cliche guerva t-shirt and whining about how 'capitalism just ain't fair man'? When someone uses words like that I find it hard to take them seriously.
"This falls into the same category of Jews collaborating with the Nazis."
And we got to godwin's laugh in no time flat!
"Instead of condemning the overall racist system that caused such a violation of Indian beliefs and behavior"
More apologist crap for slavery and (while I'm not sure if slavery was originally part of cherokee culture) it's not as if Indian tribes never practiced slavery.
Anon: Again, if there weren't black slaves, the US would have very likely started, thrived, and grown. There'd probably have been a lot more Irish and indentured servitude to fill out the underclass. And perhaps more Natives too.
ReplyDeleteStephen said: "The b-word? Is the author 15 and wearing a cliche guerva t-shirt and whining about how 'capitalism just ain't fair man'? When someone uses words like that I find it hard to take them seriously."
You are so right. Using code words (sacraments?) these cartoonish Marxian concepts makes arguments laughable.
One might as well quote Velikovsky as appeal to Marx. They both have about as much validity.
Exactly, it's just hard to take someone who uses that sort of language seriously.
ReplyDelete