A couple of months ago my friend the economics professor Michael Perelman referred me to a very important book on the Blackfoot and the whiskey trade in the 19th century. What it revealed is that whiskey was introduced by fur trading companies in exactly the same way that opium was introduced by the British into China--as a way of dominating a colonized people. He found out about the book on a history list on H-NET, so I took a look there to see what was going on. They have a list called H-AmIndian that seemed promising, so I joined it. While the list does contain useful information, most days it is my worst nightmare with nothing but announcements for journals, conferences, job openings, etc. Everybody who posts attaches their professional affiliation. About a month ago there were a flurry of messages dealing with American Indians and slavery. I didn't pay too much attention because the messages were framed in terms of the sort of scholarly minutiae that puts me to sleep. I also assumed that they were talking about Gros Ventre taking Blackfoot as slaves, or vice versa. As it turns out, they were talking about Cherokees who owned black slaves. I thought it might be useful to place this phenomenon--which amounts to a man bites dog story--into some kind of context, so I posted this: ---- American historian George Lipsitz's _The Possessive Investment in Whiteness_ (Temple Press) has just been published. Lipsitz, who is also the author of the ground breaking _Rainbow at Midnight_, focuses on the race/class dialectic. There is an extended discussion of the apparent anomaly of Indians possessing slaves in the first chapter of his new book. I had trouble understanding the reasons for this myself when it was first referred to on H-AMINDIAN. Lipsitz helps to explain the context: Aggrieved communities of color have often curried favor with whites in or-to make gains at each other's expense. For example, in the nineteenth century some Native Americans held black slaves (in part to prove to whites that they could adopt "civilized" European American ways), and some of the first chartered African American units in the U.S. army went to war against Comanches in Texas or served as security forces for wagon trains of white settlers on the trails to California. The defeat of the Comanches in the 1870s sparked a mass migration by Spanish-speaking residents of New Mexico into the areas of West Texas formerly occupied by the vanquished Native Americans. Immigrants from Asia sought the rewards of whiteness for themselves by asking the courts to recognize them as "white" and therefore eligible for naturalized citizenship according to the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1790; Mexican Americans also insisted on being classified as white. In the early twentieth century, black soldiers accustomed to fighting Native Americans in the Southwest participated in the U.S. occupation of the Philippines and the punitive expedition against Pancho Villa in Mexico. Asian American managers cracked down on efforts by Mexican American farm workers to unionize, while the Pullman Company tried to break the African American Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters by importing Filipinos to work as porters. Mexican Americans and blacks took possession of some of the property confiscated from Japanese Americans during the internment of the 1940s, and Asian Americans, blacks, and Mexican Americans all secured advantages for themselves by cooperating with the exploitation of Native Americans. ---- To my surprise, the post received fairly heated rebuttals: (1) That Cherokee elite entrepreneurs, some of whom were of mixed descent, came to own black slaves merely to demonstrate their ability to adapt to U.S. demands for assimilation is a simple-minded explanation. One needs to consider the entire society and economy of the southeast. Cherokee of mixed descent usually descended from Scotch-Irish trader fathers and Cherokee mothers. They were fully bicultural. As part of that they came to understand and value what they could gain from participating in the market economy. The most lucrative aspect of the market economy in the southeast in the late 18th & early 19th centuries involved plantation agriculture accompanied by slavery. All the major leaders of both "parties" among the Cherokee were slaveholders. Their investments in property, both real estate and human, influenced their attitudes about removal. Whether we as scholars today like that is immaterial. We need to embrace the full reality of native history in all its multifaceted dimensions and complexity, instead of expecting native historical actors to perform according to our stereotyped and romanticized expectations. It's the hardest aspect that we as educators must confront and productively deal with. Scholars, even those as esteemed as George Lipsitz, should refrain from facile explanations of native behavior until they have done adequate homework in the field. Failure to do so only perpetuates all those dreadful stereotypes. Melissa L. Meyer Associate Professor of History University of California, Los Angeles (2) Native American history is only a part of my work on racism and empire, but I have found the discussion of various facets of Indian Slavery extremely interesting and helpful. I would like particularly to applaud and support the point made by Melissa Meyer in her contribution stressing the `need to embrace the full reality of native history in all its multifacerted dimensions and complexity, instead of expecting native historical actors to perform according to our stereotyped and romanticized expectations.' Stereotyping, romantic or otherwise, leads inexorably to racism in one form or another. Simon Katzenellenbogen Department of History University of Manchester Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (3) I wish to reiterate what Melissa Meyer stated. I found the post offensive and inaccurate as well. However, it is often the case that posts like that are meant to bring anger and frustration to the audience that reads it. I hope that was not the case here. Cynthia Willis Esqueda Department of Psychology Coordinator of Native American Studies University of Nebraska-Lincoln ***** Hmmmm. For some reason, these scholars had an investment in representing the Cherokee as being diehard racists. I decided to take a walk over to Labyrinth Bookstore at lunch and see if I could find some book on Cherokee history that might shed further light. The first book I stumbled across, "After the Trail of Tears : The Cherokees' Struggle for Sovereignty, 1839-1880", by William G. McLoughlin, confirmed Lipsitz's thesis. It stated that the Cherokee were basically pressured into adopted slavery AGAINST their own traditional beliefs in universal racial equality because they felt it would protect them against racial oppression. It was a survival technique. After it was instituted, racist views began to take root. Eventually there were abolitionist trends within the Cherokee that mirrored the national movement. 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. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
