Osiyo (which is the way we Cherokees say hello to friends),
Having gone to a beautiful Bar Mitzvah yesterday and participated in a play
about slavery and exodus, with me playing the teacher of the Pharaoh, I
began to think on slavery and how the story of slavery and escape had held
the Jewish people together for nearly 3,000 years. The story is everywhere
but at the ceremonial the Rabbi told us that the Israeli people were not
really slaves until they wanted to leave. That in truth they were "an
over-taxed minority."
Here's a little one page comment that I put together today based upon the
question I had from yesterday. I wonder if the story would have changed
had they been unable to get away and had spent the next 500 years in Egypt,
and had a 98% die off of their population as a result. What would the world
have been like for that small population after the discovery of oil in the
Middle East? Here's my little essay about our encounter with that and
those attitudes here. Narcissus is, of course, a Greek story and I always
thought that Freud abused the Greeks with his local interpretations of their
spiritual stories. Of course no one has done that to the Jews right?
Consider the following with notes and bibliography at the end.
VULNERABLE SOFT MINING AND CAPITALISM:
The way that Europe was able to capitalize their colonies in the Americas
and Africa was through the mining of people.(1) Their wars and diseases
initially made the Indigenous nations defenseless. Followed by their
diplomats and businessmen going in and disenfranchising the remnants and
setting them against each other for profit. Then they mined the cities for
young women and children and any man under fourteen years of age. The
Elderly and the men over fourteen were murdered.(2) The die-off from wars,
diseases and enslavement so changed the fire patterns of the initial 100
million people who were here, that data is currently being gathered as to
the effects of the removal of all of that Carbon Dioxide from the air and
extreme reforestation in the Amazon as having a stimulus effect on the
continuation of the Little Ice Age in Europe. It's felt that the 98% die
off and enslavement was a tipping point in global weather change worldwide.
(3)
First they created religious reasons for the Native population's deaths.
"God was giving America to his children the Europeans."(4)
Then after the foundation of the United States, they created scientific
reasons for the inferiority of Native Peoples and their ideal purpose in the
service of other "higher" folks. (5)
They labeled Indian people like they labeled dogs. This group was good for
hunting and gathering, that group could handle the heat in the fields well
and were better for plantation work.(6) These theories were written
extensively about by the founders of American, Canadian, Spanish and
Australian science. A whole new field was invented to justify it. The
field of Anthropology.(7)
Like miners mining gold in deep mines, they mined the discoveries,
inventions, arts, agriculture and other artifacts as "natural resources" and
didn't hesitate to put their own names on things they only found. One of the
greatest discoveries was a mound filled with incredible antiquities just
outside of Spiro, Oklahoma. The "owner" formed a mining company and when
an antiquities bill was passed, to carefully excavate what was being
destroyed, the mound was ruined and blown up by the businessmen owners.
Here's a pretty good description although they got the end wrong. (8) The
Oklahoma Historical Society wrote that they destroyed the mound rather than
having it carefully excavated by the Museums.
The search for capital using the native populations, their culture and their
property as "Natural Resources" is a bona fide tradition in America. If
you want to see our Art, most of it is to be found in "Natural History"
Museums. As if we had no industry, discoveries or made no contribution to
the history of humanity.
Not having the capital to pay for their ventures, the Europeans mined the
remnant populations for slaves and the resultant profits, from selling
people, capitalized the America Colonies. (1) Jack Forbes states that
thousands of American Indian slaves per year were shipped out of the port of
Charleston, S.C. to be sent to the Caribbean Islands to work the
plantations.
Australia was different and if there are any aborigines left that could talk
about that, I will let them tell the story of their meetings with the
European common criminals sent to live among the Songlines of the Aborigine
peoples.
In America, the Europeans not having the technology to conquer the forest
assumed the cities, houses, roads and fields of the people who died from
disease or were murdered by the slavers. (9)
Notes:
1. Alan Gallay: "The Indian Slave Trade, The Rise of the English Empire in
the American South";
Yale U. Press ; 2003,
2. Alan Gallay ed.; "Indian Slavery in Colonial America",
Univ. of Nebraska Press 2009
3. Dull, Nevie, Woods, Bird, Avnery, Denevan: "The Columbian Encounter and
the Little Ice Age: Abrupt Land Use
Change, Fire, and Greenhouse Forcing"; Annals of the
Association of American Geographers; Sept. 2010
4. Steven T. Newcomb: "Pagans in the Promised Land, Decoding the Doctrine
of Christian Discovery" ;
Fulcrum Pb. 2008
5. Robert Bieber: "Science Encounters the American Indian";
U of Oklahoma Press, 1986
6. J. Leitch Wright, Jr.: "The Only Land They Knew, American Indians in
the Old South",
U. of Nebraska Press, 1988
7. Ben Kiernan: "Blood and Soil, A World History of Genocide and
Extermination from Sparta to Darfur"; Yale, 2007
8. http://www.lithiccastinglab.com/gallery-pages/spirocraigmoundpage1.htm
9. Francis Jennings: "The Invasion of America, Indians, Colonialism and
the Cant of Conquest"; W.W. Norton, 1975
REH
ps note where this story by professor Alan Gallay of Western Washington
University was first published. Do you think it has anything to do with
all of those stories about Islamic slavery published and gossiped about
here? :>)) REH
Forgotten Story of Indian Slavery
by Alan Gallay, Arab News, www.aljazeerah.info (2003)
LOS ANGELES, 3 August 2003 - When Americans think of slavery, our minds
create images of Africans inhumanely crowded aboard ships plying the middle
passage from Africa, or of blacks stooped to pick cotton in Southern fields.
We don't conjure images of American Indians chained in coffles and marched
to ports like Boston and Charleston, and then shipped to other ports in the
Atlantic world.
Yet Indian slavery and an Indian slave trade were ubiquitous in early
America. From the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the Gulf of Mexico to
Canada, tens of thousands of America's native peoples were enslaved, many of
them transported to lands distant from their homes.
Our historical mythology posits that American Indians could not be enslaved
in large numbers because they too readily succumbed to disease when exposed
to Europeans and they were too wedded to freedom to allow anyone to own
them. Yet many indigenous people developed resistance to European diseases
after being exposed to the newcomers for well over a century. And it is a
racist conception that "inferior" Africans accepted their debased position
as slaves - a status that American Indians and Europeans presumably could
never have accepted. This is a gross misconception of history.
We are just scratching the surface of what this all means. For the
enslavement of Indians forces us to rethink not only the institution of
slavery, but the evolution of racism and racist ideologies in America.
In the 17th century, Europeans, Africans and American Indians all accepted
slavery as a legitimate social institution. Treatment and status of the
enslaved varied greatly from group to group. War captives provided most
slaves, though the Europeans made slavery inheritable. Africans and Indians
did exchange slaves as commodities, but Europeans introduced an
international market economy for labor, as colonial plantation societies
developed an insatiable demand for workers, spurring the African slave trade
as well as various forms of bond labor for impoverished Europeans.
In the American South, European traders, mostly British colonists operating
out of Charleston, South Carolina, engaged local and distant Indians to
undertake slaving against their neighbors, who could be made to walk to
ships that would carry them to Barbados, New York, Antigua and other ports
in the Atlantic world, where they would work as slaves. The South
Carolinians used some of these slaves to work their own plantations, but
because of the ability of captives to escape over familiar territory among
familiar peoples, their captors preferred to export most of them elsewhere.
Capital from selling Indian slaves was used to fund plantations and purchase
Africans. It was as if one could create capital out of thin air: The only
effort lay in capturing the prey and transporting it to market.
Native peoples engaged in slaving for a variety of reasons. In exchange for
captives, they received European trade goods. Many also hoped to forge
closer relations with the British. To refuse to become slave raiders, they
risked becoming categorized as potential victims, with their enemies then
filling the role of slavers. The result: A frenzy of slaving infected the
region, as natives captured not only their enemies, but people they had
never met. Some went farther and captured their friends and allies.
Small-scale raids with attacks on fewer than a dozen people evolved into
large-scale wars, with the British and their American-Indian allies seeking
captives in the thousands. Extending southward from Charleston, British and
native raiders followed attacks upon the native peoples of Georgia with a
massive onslaught against Indians on Spanish missions in northern Florida.
Systematically, the raiders extended all the way to the Florida Keys.
Simultaneously, the English established important ties with the Chickasaw,
who became the key slavers of the lower Mississippi Valley, extending their
attacks west of the Mississippi and south to the Gulf of Mexico. The
Chickasaw, surrounded by enemies on all sides, used slaving as a way to
strengthen themselves at their enemies' expense, but great losses in slaving
wars weakened them immensely.
The numbers are difficult to calculate, but I estimate that 30,000 to
50,000, perhaps more, American Indians were exported from Charleston.
Thousands more were exported from ports like Boston and Salem, and, on a
much smaller scale, by the French from New Orleans. Untold numbers, which
scholars are just beginning to calculate, will ultimately include the
thousands who were not exported from their region but lived out their lives
as slaves on plantations in Virginia, as farm laborers in Connecticut and as
domestics in New France. Although the scale of enslavement pales in
comparison to the African slave trade, it is notable, for instance, that
from 1670 to 1717, far more American Indians were exported from Charleston
than Africans were brought in.
Scholars long have known about the Indian slave trade, but the scattered
nature of the sources deterred a systematic examination. No one had any
conception of the trade's massive extent and that it played such a central
role in the lives of early Americans and in the colonial economy.
Indian slavery complicates the narrative we have created of a white-black
world, with Indians residing outside on a vaguely defined frontier. The
Indian slave trade connects native and European history, so that plantations
and Indian communities become entwined. We find planters making more money
from slave trading than planting, and if we look more closely we find
Indians not only enslaved on plantations but working as police forces to
maintain those plantations and receiving substantial rewards for returning
runaway slaves.
We are also learning a great deal more about American-Indian peoples. Most
importantly we can now tell the stories - the tragedies - that befell so
many who were killed in slaving wars or spent their days as slaves far from
their homes. They and their peoples have been largely forgotten. The
Natchez, Westo, Yamasee, Euchee, Yazoo and Tawasa are among the dozens of
Indian peoples who fell victims to the slaving wars, with the survivors
forced to join other native communities. These are tales that Indians
themselves have not told: Just as the story of Indian slavery was excluded
from the European past, it was largely forgotten in American-Indian
traditions.
Americans often wish the past would just go away, save for those symbols we
celebrate: Pocahontas saving John Smith, the "noble savage," and the first
Thanksgiving. The image of Pilgrims and Indians sharing a meal is one of the
most cogent images we have of American Indians and of the colonization of
this continent.
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