The logical conclusion to this thread is that Elizabeth Warren is a slave owner.
During colonization, not every white man was friendly to natives.
I'm once again telling everyone to read Settlers
I don't like the
framingtone(?) of this take because it lays the evil of these practices directly at the feet of indigenous tribes without taking into account that tribes were often either expected to cooperate with and support settler colonists or be massacred. This thread reads like they want to 'cancel' tribes for thisEdit- I kinda knee jerked here, seeing comments in the Twitter thread that they had no idea there was any relationship between natives and slave owners made me come back here and respond to the wrong thing tbh. Read my conversation with Optimus, it's a good thread!
Um no. The twitter post mentioned twice how there were tribes expected to cooperate as part of their treaty. But that still doesn't negate the fact that there were tribes that had African slaves, willingly participating in a fucked up system.
The outrage of the Twitter post is how those tribes are now trying to revise their history and erase their past. Yeah I can lay a lot of the blame on whites coming to North America wiping out the tribes and kidnapping and bringing African slaves here. But the tribes need to own that shitty history of participating in slavery, just we have own up to our shitty history in helping to wipe out the tribes as Buffalo Soldiers.
Sigh. The shit is fucked up. But covering up history does not help.
I mean, they never (and I checked some other threads they posted on this topic) discuss how these treaties came about or what happened to tribes who did not want to engage in slave catching.
My problem isn't the content, it's the framing. Yes revising the history is fucked, yes what they did is fucked, and yeah there should be a discussion on how freed slaves/descendants should be handled by the tribe. All this is good to bring up. But there's an undertone in the thread that seems to direct anger and fault towards the tribes as if they acted in a vacuum? IDK how to put it honestly, but it misses the mark a little bit for me
I don't have a problem with "framing". What the post author and I have a problem with is revisionist history.
Denying that the tribes participated in slavery also denied another fact, one the author was trying to get across but that you missed: Some of us can trace our ancestry back to those slave holding tribes. Myself, I have living cousins on the Choctaw Rez that my mom is still in contact with, as they are on her side of the family.
Erasing and revising history also erases people like me from their history, which is the main complaint behind that post.
I did mention that point. I think you, me, and the Twitter poster are largely in agreement and maybe I'm nitpicking. Maybe cause Twitter isn't the best way to share things like this.
But to reiterate, revionist history is not okay and it's important to be able to discuss native/slave relationships and their descendants openly and honestly. I guess I'm finding it odd to not even really discuss settler influence, but again, maybe I'm nitpicking
Undertone of anger?
Yeah, I'd be angry too with people revising my history and trying to flat out deny it.
But what you don't get it seems is that some of these tribes made that decision themselves. Like I said, there's a lot of shit in this country that can be laid at the white man's feet. But another disservice can be made by taking away autonomy from the tribes and their decisions, good or bad, even when facing annihilation, as some tribes who chose to go against the whites, had come to.
It would be bad to say that the tribes had no choice but to participate in slavery. That takes away their choices and autonomy, their right to self govern. Having that right to self govern means you can fuck up as well. No one exists in a vacuum, but that still doesn't mean your own actions don't have consequences. The tribes need to own up to their history. And we need to stop thinking that colonized people can't do shitty things, especially to other marginalized people, of their own will.
Good points, friend. I'm gonna self crit on this because I definitely over corrected after misreading where exactly they were coming from. And I agree with you on the points about autonomy, I try to avoid thinking along those lines but obviously wasn't thinking about that today. I didn't mean to imply that they had no choice in the matter, and a lot of the original discussion is in the current day
I feel like the conditions under which the treaties were signed don't justify the continued denial of citizenship rights to the Freedmen. Their group is also focused on more than just slave catching, its focused on the 5 Tribes that owned slaves. How can you justify that? Did the settler-colonizers have a gun to their head the whole time saying "You need to use the labor of these slaves or we will kill you?" idk maybe that is the case but it seems very unlikely.
I think that the calls should be directed at tribal leadership because they are the ones who have the power to legally acknowledge the Freedmen's citizenship right?
Nah, not a gun to the head moment for slave owners. My (limited understanding) is that these 5 tribes adopted slavery and other settler practices/customs in order to appeal to the idea that they were "civilized" and should be left alone, as well as turning to slavery to support themselves after settlers disrupted their territory or hunting grounds. Not an excuse, just loosely explaining, I just think it's important to remember these tribes didn't just turn to slavery on their own.
Is slavery okay? Nope. And I agree with you/the OP that the inclusion of Freedmen/descendants into these tribes is important, should be discussed, and no one should assume that all natives were anti-slavery, we should push back on slave owning tribes portraying themselves as allies to slaves, etc. I think I got caught off guard by this discussion (and others the OP had) completely leaving out the role of settlers in the discussion and overcorrected here
I think I assumed that most people would understand that slavery was brought to the tribes by settlers, but that is maybe too optimistic for Amerikkka. I haven't really spent much time looking into their other resources but maybe they have a deeper discussion of that history somewhere else?
Something on my reading list is Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South by Barbara Krauthamer. I haven't read it yet but someone recommended it to me. Most of my knowledge on the topic comes from Settlers or The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America. and a few other sources but I haven't done a true dive into native/slave relations
Thanks for the recs! I started settlers a while ago but got distracted by other books that came my way. I def want to return to it after the book I'm on now
Two good books on indigenous history:
The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America by Andrés Reséndez
An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Indigenous people in what's now the US were enslaved (and exported to the Caribbean) by the English. Let's not forget this either. https://www.npr.org/2016/06/21/482874478/forgotten-history-how-the-new-england-colonists-embraced-the-slave-trade
http://commonplace.online/article/indian-slavery-in-new-england/
Let's also not forget the thousands upon thousands of indigenous people in Central and South America and the Caribbean who were enslaved by the Spanish. It wasn't just "germs" that killed them. It was the process of colonial violence, dispossession, enslavement, and resource extraction, in conjunction with Eurasian diseases. This is a very good paper debunking the "virgin soils" theory that's been promoted by people like Jared Diamond and Alfred Crosby. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3491697#metadata_info_tab_contents
Two good books on indigenous history:
The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America by Andrés Reséndez
An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
errbody intersectional gangsta till the indigenous freedmen show up
You know who also loved a bunch of idyllic myths about Native Americans? Inter-war and Nazi-era Germans. Wild stuff, right?
