(1500 to 1800)
You who are wise must know, that different Nations have different conceptions.
—Canassatego, an Onondaga Haudenosaunee addressing English colonial officials in 1744
This essay focuses primarily on the Indian nations who lived in what is now the United States between 1492 and 1800. Within its limited length, many Indian nations and many significant themes cannot be addressed. But the inquisitive reader is invited to explore the rest of this encyclopedia and the many other volumes that have been written about the First Nations of the Americas.
For the First Nations and for Europeans and non-Indian Americans, the year 1492 is indeed a major turning point in history, but is also part of a continuum. Far less than 5 percent of the human history of the Americas has occurred since 1492 because far more than ten thousand years of Indian history had already shaped the Western Hemisphere. Both the First Nations and the Europeans brought into 1492 all the ideas and trends that their respective cultures had developed during the previous centuries.
Thus the actions of both the First Nations and the Europeans were shaped by their prior experiences. For example, the First Nations in the Southwest had experienced a collapse of some of their major societies due to setbacks such as droughts (especially 1276-1299), as well as wars with other Indian nations. The Pueblo and other peoples in the Southwest, who had survived droughts and the other challenges, confronted the Spanish invasion of the early 1500s as yet another challenge in a sequence of challenges, not simply as "the" challenge. A comparable series of crises prior to 1492 occurred to the east: from areas such as eastern Oklahoma and eastern Iowa, eastward throughout the Mississippi and Ohio Valleys, and all the way to the Southeastern Atlantic coast. Many of the various cultures known collectively today as the Mound Builders collapsed at different times during the centuries prior to 1492. Thus the Creeks in the Southeast, one of the surviving cultures of the pre-1492 Mound Builders, perceived Spanish invasions in the early 1500s as another in a series of challenges. In the Northeast, as early as 1142, a leader known as The Peacemaker inspired the establishment of a new confederacy among five previously warring nations: the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayu-gas, and Senecas. The Iroquois Confederacy—the Haudenosaunee, or People of the Longhouse—sur-vived despite the collapse of several trading partners and sometime rivals living to the west of them—several of the Mound Builders societies. The long-lived experience of the Haudenosaunee living on the eastern periphery of the Mound Builders carried over after 1492 when new trading partners and sometime rivals—the French, Dutch, and English colonists—placed the Haudenosaunee on the periphery again. This time, instead of turning their philosophical, diplomatic, and trading skills westward toward the Mound Builders, they turned eastward to deal with the Europeans.
Of course, the Europeans were also products of their recent past. While Indian nations were still slowly regrouping after droughts and cultural collapses, the Europeans were still striving to cope with the trauma of the Black Death (bubonic plague). The severe traumas caused declines in populations on both sides of the Atlantic and raised a common question: had people lost the approval of their respective gods and spiritual pantheons? Another common factor on both sides of the Atlantic before 1492 caused continual upheaval: warfare. In Indian America before 1492, the presence of warfare as a factor of human life was manifested in the stockaded towns in the East and the fortified towns in the Southwest. Across the Atlantic, virtually all of Europe was at war, either nation to nation or with the Muslims. Spain brought to the Americas all the methods and legal constructs of their wars against the Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula, ongoing since 711 and only recently ended with their 1492 victory at Granada. In the 1580s the English transferred the methods of their imperial war against Ireland directly to the Roanoke colony in North Carolina. By fighting Muslims in Eastern Europe, Captain John Smith gained the military experience he then brought to Virginia. In 1624, he noted frankly that the current war between the
The Significance of Pre-1492 Worldviews
English at Jamestown and the Powhatan Indians was but an episode in human history:
What growing state was there ever in the world which had not the like? Rome grew by oppression... .
The Significance of the Pre-1492 Worldviews of Indian America
American Indians and invading Europeans possessed very different worldviews. The specific details of the worldview held by each American Indian nation and each European nation were varied and complex, but one of the basic differences in overall philosophies related to the nature of creation itself. The spiritual foundation of most American Indian nations was that the world was made up of interdependent and equal beings: Humans and all other beings had separate mortal functions but equal spiritual identities (what might be termed equal "souls"). In contrast, Europeans believed that only humans had souls. For Europeans, the world was a divinely ordained hierarchy—what might be termed "the Genesis Pyramid." Humans, the only beings possessing souls, were atop this ecological pyramid. Beneath the humans were mortal beings that lacked souls and were thus objects or things intended for use by the superior humans.
These differences in worldviews clashed in many ways, but for the First Nations one of the most significant conflicts was when furbearing animals in the north and deerskins in the south became commodities in trade with the Europeans. Taking pelts and skins, along with the meat, for local use was part of the interdependent worldview that Indian hunters followed in the past. Now the demand for animals was part of a larger and vicious cycle: If Indians did not hunt enough, they could not buy enough guns from their local European ally to defend their nations against their European and local Indian enemies. They were compelled to kill more animals or face national defeat. Many religious and political leaders during the centuries after 1492 called for a rejection of the European trade goods and a return to traditional ways, but the appeals did not square with the realities of national life and death. Given the circumstances, it is not surprising that so many of the Indian nations involved in European trade had whole segments of their people accept one form or another of Christianity, many trying to layer the new religion onto traditional beliefs: After all, if you were a Christian, you were comfortably on top of the Genesis Pyramid. Animals were no longer equal souls; they were now objects ordained by the European god to serve the needs of humans. And, although human slavery had been a part of some Indian cultures prior to 1492, the enslavement of other Indians became another major source of wealth in the race to make an Indian nation strong enough to survive the new realities. Further, the example of all the Europeans, even the English Quakers, showed that the enslavement of Indians and then Africans was an integrated part of the European economy and Christianity. Despite the appeal of alternatives, most Indian individuals resisted conversion to Christianity, but they struggled to survive economically while trying to maintain their traditional religions. The final choice was apathy. The paradox of all these choices continued after 1800 and remains a dilemma for Indian people in the twenty-first century.
Differing worldviews often emerged during diplomatic encounters. For example, in 1734, the Creek leader Tomochichi set sail for England as an emissary to demonstrate the Creeks' support of the new colony of Georgia. When he met George II, Tomochichi was carrying eagle feathers that had been passed throughout the Creek Confederacy to signify unity of purpose. King George was referred to by his own people by what was also the symbol of his power: "the Crown." The eagle feathers represented a consensus of the Creek people, while the Crown represented a hierarchy over "subjects." Each nation pledged friendship to the other (the king did not stress the point that England, by the "right of discovery," considered the Creeks to be subjects). After the meeting, Tomochichi was asked by the Earl of Egmont, a trustee of the Georgia colony, if he was impressed by the king's palace and England in general. Tomochichi replied that, while the English had more material goods than the Creeks, the English were probably not any happier than Indians and that "the English lived worse than the Creeks who were a more innocent people." Before he returned to his homeland, Tomochichi also explained that he was uncomfortable around only one man: the archbishop of Canterbury, who appeared to him to be a formidable conjurer.
The roles of women reflect the spiritual teachings of balance that most Indian nations followed,
As women balanced men both politically and economically. A Creek leader known only as the Woman of Cofitachique encountered Hernando de Soto in 1539 but was unable to persuade him to enter her country peacefully. Instead, he took her hostage and enslaved many of her people to bear the supplies of his expedition. Among the Chero-kees, the duties of Gigau (Beloved Woman) demonstrate the significance that women brought to the Cherokee nation, just as the Clan Mothers among the Haudenosaunee balanced the male leaders. During the era of the American Revolution, Nancy Ward, the Cherokees' Beloved Woman, chose to support the Cherokee majority who sought neutrality during the war, while among the Haudeno-saunee during the same era, the Mohawk leader Mary (Molly) Brant encouraged Haudenosaunee alliances with the British. While their decisions may in retrospect be criticized, the fact is that no white woman during the American Revolution, including Abigail Adams or Martha Washington, had a small fraction of these Indian women's authority or status. In fact, it was the status of Indian women within the First Nations that caused some white women, captured by Indians during colonial wars, to refuse to return to white settlements after the wars. Other women fled to Indian communities voluntarily. The security and happiness that these women found are illustrated by a servant woman, possibly black, who had fled to live among a Haudenosaunee nation, probably the Oneidas, shortly before or during the American Revolution. In 1784 at Fort Stanwix, New York, she talked with Frangois Barbe-Marbois, a French colleague of the Marquis de Lafayette. Barbe-Marbois decided to draw her out because
Her color and bearing did not seem quite savage. I asked her in English who she was.
She pretended at first not to understand. Pressed with my questions she told me that she had formerly served at the home of a planter in the State of New York, but that she had tired of the position of a servant and had fled, and that the Indians had welcomed her, and that she lived very happily among them. 'The whites,' she told me, 'treated me harshly. I saw them take rest while they made me work without a break. I ran the risk of being beaten, or of dying of hunger, if through fatigue or laziness I refused to do what I was told. Here I have no master, I am the equal of all the women in the tribe, I do what I please without anyone's saying anything about it, I work only for myself,—I shall marry if I wish and be unmarried again when I wish. Is there a single woman as independent as I in your cities?'
For Indian people after 1492, perhaps the greatest loss, the greatest trauma, was not the steep drop in population due to war and disease, although that was traumatic enough—on average, only 10 percent of any particular Indian nation survived. It may not have even been the political, geographic, or personal family losses. Perhaps the greatest loss with the greatest effect over the centuries was spiritual. Why did the spiritual forces with whom Indians had communicated for centuries, even thousands of years, not intervene when the Europeans turned to conquest, as all Europeans eventually did? This concern not only raised a philosophical issue, it caused some to doubt the religious leaders who were trying to continue the Indian religions of the past. In turn, their concern was another factor that made the various Christian faiths of the newly arrived Europeans more attractive. One of the most eloquent and poignant philosophical responses was by an Aztec poet in Mexico. This anonymous poet wrote the following lines about the year 1523, two years after the Spaniards and their Indian allies overran the Aztec capital at Tenochtitlan and the sister city state of Tlatelolco:
Nothing but flowers and songs of sorrow are left in Mexico and Tlatelolco where once we saw warriors and wise men.
We know it is true
That we must perish for we are mortal men.
You, the Giver of Life, you have ordained it.
We wander here and there in our desolate poverty.
We are mortal men.
We have seen bloodshed and pain
Where once we saw beauty and valor.
We are crushed to the ground; we lie in ruins.
There is nothing but grief and suffering in Mexico and Tlatelolco where once we saw beauty and valor.
Have you grown weary of your servants?
Are you angry with your servants,
O Giver of Life?
Columbus and the Right of Discovery: Rapacious Fiction Turned into Legal Fact
The voyage of Columbus in 1492 set in motion traumatic changes in the histories of the First Nations and the Europeans, but it also has a direct relevance to the laws and legal issues of the twenty-first century. The United States still claims that the so-called right of discovery makes the U. S. government sovereign over Indian people and all the lands they once occupied or continue to occupy. The United States is not alone in this position, for the doctrine of the right of discovery provides the initial legal foundation for Canada and for all the other internationally recognized nations whose boundaries lie within the Western Hemisphere. The convoluted history of the right of discovery begins in 1492 when Columbus set sail from Spain carrying a document from the Spanish monarchs proclaiming that any land and peoples Columbus might "discover” would automatically become, respectively, the property and the subjects of the sovereign rulers of Spain. In 1493 and again in 1494, Pope Alexander VI sanctioned the right of discovery through the sacred intervention of the Catholic Church, thereby making the right of discovery a religious as well as a political principle. The pope also sanctioned the division of the entire Western Hemisphere between Spain and Portugal. Not surprisingly, the Catholic monarchs of other nations including England and France resented this, and they subsequently sent out their own ships, declaring their own nations' rights of discovery (England asserted the right of discovery following the 1497 voyage of John Cabot, while France claimed the right of discovery after the 1524 voyage of Giovanni de Verrazano). After the American Revolution, the new United States claimed that its new nation had inherited England's right of discovery.
On March 29, 2005, the United States Supreme Court case delivered its decision in City of Sherrill, New York v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York et al. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote the majority opinion that ruled against the Oneidas. Only one of nine Justices dissented: Justice John P. Stevens. In Sherill, Justice Ginsburg and the Supreme Court blithely reaffirmed the doctrine of discovery:
Under the 'doctrine of discovery,' County of
Oneida v. Oneida Indian Nation of N. Y., 470 U. S.
226, 234 (1985) (Oneida II), 'fee title to the lands
Occupied by Indians when the colonists arrived
Became vested in the sovereign—first the
Discovering European nation and later the original States and the United States.'
The doctrine of discovery has legal precedents in United States law, especially since 1823 when the Supreme Court asserted the right of discovery in Johnson and Graham's Lessee v. William M'Intosh. But the institution of slavery had precedents too, and the Supreme Court has ceased affirming that abomination.
The United States as a Transformed "Wilderness"
In the Sherill case, Justice Ginsburg also contended that, with the arrival of the whites, the land was "converted from wilderness.” In fact, the land was the domain of the Haudenosaunee—the Iroquois Confederacy, which in spite of all the odds survives to the present day. When the Europeans first encountered the Haudenosaunee, they lived in towns and grew extensive crops of corn and other foods. Their extensive trade routes crisscrossed New York and, linking with the trade routes of other First Nations, reached the Atlantic Coast, the Gulf of Mexico, and the western Great Lakes. Thus Ginsburg's contention that New York State was a wilderness is a lie, but it is an old lie. It is a thinly veiled restatement of vacuum domicilium, another legal term inherited from the era of Columbus. The Latin term vacuum domicil-ium means "lacking habitation"—empty land that is not used. By defining Indian homelands in this manner, Europeans asserted that the lands were wild and open to settlement. The concept of vacuum domicil-ium was so widely accepted that the English philosopher Sir Thomas More incorporated the idea in his famous Utopia, published in 1516. In part, More's Utopia is a summary of the rights of the European conquerors in the Western Hemisphere (those who use "utopian” to mean "ideal” need to reread the book!). In More's view, these conquerors, these Utopians, are of course idealistic and never venal, but they also understand that a just war can be carried out if land is not used:
If the natives won't do what they're told, they're expelled from the area marked out for annexation. If they try to resist, the Utopians declare war—for they [the Utopians] consider war perfectly justifiable, when one country denies another its natural right to derive nourishment from any soil which the original owners are not using themselves.
Discovery and the Rights of Indians The right of discovery doctrine was a magic wand that the Europeans claimed gave them absolute sovereignty over the Indian peoples they encountered. Under the doctrine, Indian nations ceased to be sovereign and were defined as protectorates at best and at worst entirely subordinate. The right of discovery also automatically made every individual Indian a "subject" of a European government. Thus, if Indians rose up against a European colonial power, they were legally regarded as "rebels" who were resisting a legitimate sovereign government; they were committing treason. Under European law at the time, rebels had no human rights. This was extended specifically to Indians in 1512 by the Spanish: The "Requirement" warned Indians that rebellions would not be perceived as wars between equal states, but rather as wars by the Spanish against "vassals who do not obey and refuse to receive their lord and resist and contradict him." Legally, then, the warriors and their families had no rights. In battle, all could be slaughtered. If any were captured, they had no rights as prisoners of war: They could be enslaved or killed, and their property could be confiscated.
If Indians were treated humanely—despite their "treason"—such treatment was regarded by the Europeans as an act of mercy, not of justice. Efforts to mitigate this harsh legal reality were occasionally made by European political leaders and religious reformers, such as the sixteenth-century Spanish priest-philosopher Bartolome de Las Casas, but they have always been in the minority. Furthermore, even white reformers like Las Casas believed that the white occupation of most Indian lands and the triumph of Western civilization were inevitable, but that the process of assimilating the Indians into this inevitable future should be carried out through the highest concepts of white ethics and justice. This "Las Casas attitude" is exemplified by prominent white philosophers such as Roger Williams (seventeenth century), Benjamin Franklin (eighteenth century), Helen Hunt Jackson (nineteenth century), and John Collier (twentieth century).
The Impact of European Trade Goods
The impact of European trade goods caused Indian nations to adapt in ways that would alter their pre-1492 cultures. An example of this phenomenon after 1492 was observed in 1634 by Harmen Meyndertsz van den Bogaert. He ventured westward into the Mohawk Valley from Fort Orange, a Dutch trading post established in 1619 at what is now Albany, New York. He was one of the first Dutch traders to enter Mohawk territory, part of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy). But he discovered that trade goods had preceded him, perhaps brought in along Indian trading routes such as those that linked the Mohawks to New England, to French Canada, or to English Virginia. On December 13, 1634, van den Bogaert arrived at the Mohawk town of Onakahoncka:
We came to their first castle that stood on a high hill. There were only 36 houses, row on row in the manner of streets, so that we easily could pass through. These houses are constructed and covered with the bark of trees, and are mostly flat above. Some are 100, 90, or 80 steps long; 22 or 23 feet high. There were also some interior doors made of split planks furnished with iron hinges. In some houses we also saw ironwork: iron chains, bolts, harrow teeth, iron hoops, spikes, which they steal when they are away from here.
Van den Bogaert's assumption that the iron goods were stolen is an indication of a European attitude all too typical of early contact. But what is most remarkable in his account is his description of the traditional longhouses that the Mohawks had already fitted with plank doors swinging on iron hinges. Did these doors with iron hinges affect the interior, communal nature of the longhouses, each of which was the home of several matrilineal families under the guidance of one of the oldest women? Subtle changes brought by the installation of iron hinges were more than matched at this Mohawk town by a far less subtle change: Smallpox had already broken out in the town. Sadly, both iron hinges and smallpox were the result of trade. Gradually, the Mohawks and their neighbors moved out of longhouses and into smaller homes to lessen the impact of the infectious smallpox virus.
One of the major items of trade was the horse. For example, by the end of the 1600s in the Southeast, the Creeks traded deerskins, furs, and corn to the Apalachees in Florida for Apalachee horses. The Creeks then traded most of the horses to the English. But this trade was constantly interrupted by wars between the two peoples—a warfare often encouraged by the rival European powers in the region: the Spanish, the English, and the French. In 1701, the
Spanish persuaded the Apalachees to raise the prices of horses, and the Creeks went to war as a result. In the Southwest, horses became important trade items, especially after 1680 when the Pueblo leader Pope and his allies at least temporarily liberated the Pueblos and other Indian nations in the Southwest from Spanish rule. Plains Indians soon traded, and occasionally raided, for horses raised by the Pueblos or Spaniards. After the Spanish reconquered the Pueblo nations, the Pueblos stayed on their horses and even served as mercenary cavalry for the Spanish. For example, in 1720 on the Platte River in Nebraska, forty-five Spanish troops supported by sixty Pueblos fought Pawnee and Oto warriors, who fought on foot. The battle went against the Spanish troops, but a courageous charge from some of their mounted Pueblo allies saved the Spaniards from annihilation.
Trade with Europeans was important everywhere, including Alaska. In 1740, a young Russian scholar, Stephan Petrovich Krasheninnikov, accompanied Captain Vitus Bering on a voyage that led to Russia's claim to northwestern North America, including Alaska. Both the Russians and the Inupiats sought peaceful relations and trade, but Krashenin-nikov noted that the Inupiats were already using iron knives. Thus by 1740, European trade goods had reached the Inupiats either through other First Nations or directly from Europeans.
What kinds of European goods were traded? In 1761, Sir William Johnson, Superintendent for Indian Affairs in the Northern Colonies, prepared a list. Johnson's list exemplifies how pervasive trade goods had become in the daily life of Indian peoples. Entitled "A List of Such Merchandise as is Usually sold to the Indians," Johnson included coarse woolen blankets of various colors (called strouds); "French Blankets in great Demand being better than ours" (even though the war with the French was ongoing!); English blankets; Welsh cottons; "Flowered Serges"; "Calicoes"; "Linnens & ready made Shirts, of all Sizes"; needles; awls; knives; "Jews Harps small & large"; "Stone & plain rings"; "Hawks bells'; horn combs; "Brass Wire different Sizes"; "Scizars & Razors"; "Looking Glasse"; Brass & tinn Kettles large & Small"; "Women & Childrens Worsted and Yarn Hose with [an ornamental pattern called] Clocks"; "Roll of Paper Tobacco. Also Leaf D[itt]o"; "[tobacco] Pipes long & Short"; "Red Leather trunks in Nests" (chests or suitcases in which ever smaller ones nested within a larger one); black and white wampum; "Silver Works. . . which the Indians wear"; "Tomahawks or small hatchets well made";
"Pipe Hatchets"; "Tobacco, & Snuff boxes"; "Pewter Spoons"; "Gilt Gill [four-ounce] Cups"; gunpowder; flints; "Small bar lead of l 1/2 lb each"; "Goose, Duck, & Pidgeon Shot"; fowling muskets; beaver and fox traps; iron spears for fishing and killing beavers; and "New England, or [New] York rum."
Captured by White People
"Captured by Indians" is a phrase that frequently appears in history books and has been a theme of novels and Hollywood movies. The records show that, after a European-Indian war, captured whites, from the north to the south, were returned to their European colonies. We have abundant accounts of this in what are termed "captivity narratives." But where are the accounts about the return of Indians "captured by white people"? The simple fact is that, after every war, which the whites eventually always won, Indian prisoners were typically sold into outright slavery or extended periods of servitude. For example, in 1599 Acoma, a pueblo atop a 350-foot mesa in what is now New Mexico, rose against Spanish invaders led by Juan de Onate, but Onate's troops successfully stormed the pueblo. Of Acoma's approximately 1500 inhabitants, 600 were killed, chose suicide by jumping off the mesa, or were murdered by the Spaniards after they had surrendered. Hundreds of others escaped. About 500 women and children and seventy or eighty men who had surrendered were taken prisoner. Prisoners were treated mercilessly by Onate, who regarded them as rebels against a legitimate sovereign and hence without rights. Onate sentenced twenty-four warriors who were over twenty-five years of age to slavery for life—after the Spaniards chopped a foot off each of the warriors, as a reminder of the danger of resistance to Spanish will. Two Hopis, seized along with the Acoma warriors, had their right hands cut off and sent back to their mesa-top towns as a warning to the Hopi people not to entertain any plans of war. Other men and women were sentenced to twenty years of slavery. Onate dealt with the children of Acoma as follows:
All of the children under twelve years of age I declare free and innocent of the grave offenses for which I punish their parents... . I place the girls under the care of the father commissary, Fray Alonso Martinez, in order that he, as a Christian and qualified person, may distribute them in the kingdom and elsewhere in
Monasteries or other places where he thinks that they may attain the knowledge of God and the salvation of their souls.
The boys under twelve years of age I entrust to Vicente de Zaldivar Mendoza, my sargento mayor, in order that they may attain the same goal.
Also under this sentence, seventy girls—a considerable proportion of Acoma's future mothers—were taken to Mexico and distributed among various Catholic convents. As for the mesa-top town itself, Onate ordered Acoma to be completely leveled, and it was not reoccupied until the people sentenced to twenty years of servitude could finally return and rebuild it.
After New England's King Philip's War (named after the Wampanoag leader King Philip, Metacomet), the Pilgrims and the Puritans believed that the surviving Indian prisoners had forfeited all rights and could be sentenced to work for whites in New England for specific lengths of time and that many could even be sold into slavery in the West Indies or elsewhere. Hundreds of Indian men, women, and children, including Philip's wife and son, were sold into slavery and shipped to Virginia, Spain, Portugal, the Azores, the Spanish West Indies, Bermuda, and the Mediterranean coasts, including Tangier.
Ultimately, all colonists, whether they were Catholic, Protestant, or Jewish, sold Indian slaves. Furthermore, some of the most enthusiastic suppliers of Indian slaves were other Indians. Indian slave traders captured other Indians from rival nations and sold them as slaves to European colonists, who shipped them out of ports such as Charleston, New York City, Montreal, and Quebec. By the late 1600s, for example, the Creeks in the Southeast constantly raided the Choctaws and brought columns of Choctaw prisoners to Charleston's slave market. In exchange, the Creeks obtained manufactured items such as kettles, guns, knives, woolen goods, calico dresses, shirts, brass earrings, and silver gorgets. By the mid-1700s, the Comanches and other Plains Indian nations were selling Indian captives as slaves to the Pueblos and Spaniards.
In addition, trade agreements and treaties between Indian nations and Europeans, in both the North and the South, often had the provision that the European trade was in part dependent on Indian willingness to capture and return any black slaves who escaped into Indian country. For example, in 1768, General Thomas Gage reported on the slave hunting of the Creeks:
[T]he Creeks have restored such of the Negroe Slaves, as could be taken; they were also in pursuit of others, who made their escape from the Indian Towns, when they found they were to be delivered up. The Scalp of one of those Fugitives was brought in and delivered to the Commissary, which Circumstance will break that Intercourse between the Indians and Negroes, so much to be dreaded by all the Southern Provinces.
The value of Indians as deterrents to fugitive slaves was a constant in colonial history. The English names given to a few prominent eighteenth-century Cherokees speak for themselves: Slave Catcher of Chota, Slave Catcher of Kitruwa, Slave Catcher of Conutory, Slave Catcher of Tomatly, and Slave Catcher of Conasatchee.
The North was no different. For example, on October 4, 1774, the Oneida Haudenosaunee in what is now New York State, with the approval of the entire Iroquois Confederacy, agreed to provide New England Indians—including Narragansetts, Mohe-gans, Montauks, Pequots, and Niantics—with a portion of Oneida lands. In this treaty, the Oneidas and the British addressed the fact that blacks had intermarried or were living among these nations. This was regarded by the British as encouraging a potential refuge for the other blacks or mixed-race people who might later use the area as a base to stimulate a slave revolt. Thus the Oneidas agreed to a treaty provision that carefully defined how the land
Shall not be possessed by any persons, deemed of the said Tribes, who are descended from, or have intermixed with Negroes, or Mulattoes.
This policy also suggests one reason why the remnants of eastern Indians who did not remove from their homelands had, and continue to have, a mixed-race heritage.
African American history, Indian history, and colonial white history, as exemplified by the preceding evidence, are intertwined. The myth persists that the first black slaves were introduced into the English colonies in Virginia in 1619, when in fact no less a figure than Sir Francis Drake brought black slaves to the Roanoke Colony in 1586 (they were undoubtedly slaughtered when Drake agreed that the
Colonists should leave Roanoke and return to England). Furtheremore, these were not the first enslaved Africans to arrive in what is now the United States. In 1526, the Spanish established a short-lived colony in the borderland of Georgia/ Florida, bringing with them African slaves. These Africans managed to join with local Indians in driving out the Spanish, marking the first successful black slave revolt within the present borders of the United States. But interracial unity became the exception, not the rule. Both in the North and in the South, European powers promised to continue trading with the Peoples of the First Nations, with one of the conditions being that any escaped black slave encountered by a First Nation would be returned.
Epidemic Diseases
The First Nations had no immunities to diseases accidentally introduced by the Europeans. Diseases such as smallpox and the bubonic plague, combined with conquest and enslavement, wiped out 90 percent of Native populations. But direct contact with the invaders was not the only way diseases spread. At least one wave of epidemics was accidentally introduced by the Spanish into the Indian nations along the Florida coast between 1513 and 1521. The disease was unintentionally carried by Indian traders along the commercial network among Indian nations that had existed long before 1492. Along these trade routes, the epidemic reached the Seneca Nation in what is now western New York by 1525. Only one instance of intentional biological warfare is documented: in 1763 at Fort Pitt during the war organized by the Indian leader Pontiac. But whites took advantage of the diseases by expanding the settlements during epidemics and by using the coincidence of epidemics to attack Indian nations already weakened, as in 1622 when the Puritans attacked the Massachusetts nation. Epidemic diseases were also intensified whenever Europeans forced Indians into resettlements, such as California's Catholic missions, where Indians labored and died for the benefit of cross and empire. They lived in crowded conditions that made them more susceptible to epidemic diseases. The actual conditions at the missions contrast dramatically with the romance and beauty associated with the flowering grounds of today's tourist attractions.
The 1763 Treaty of Paris marked the end of the Seven Years' War, known in North America as the French and Indian War. No Indian diplomats were present. This treaty and the second Treaty of Paris in 1783 that ended the American Revolution are the most significant treaties in Indian history east of the Mississippi. The most significant impact of the 1763 Treaty on the First Nations was the transfer of Canada by France to Great Britain (a transfer based on France's right of discovery, which Britain now claimed to inherit). This clause forced all the Indian nations north of the Ohio River into a trade dependence on the British. Previously, while the French were in Canada, Indian nations could stand neutral, side with the French, or side with the British. After the treaty, they could no longer play one off against the other in trade agreements. Furthermore, the British decided to pay for the war at the same time it consolidated its new power. While this decision resulted in new taxes, which many of the white colonists opposed, it also meant that the British could charge the First Nations higher prices for trade goods because there was no competition from France. Even before the Treaty of Paris was signed, the Indian allies of the defeated French (Quebec had fallen in 1759) joined with a few of the Indian nations usually allied with the British to rally behind the Ottawa leader Pontiac.
Under the 1763 Treaty of Paris, Britain returned Cuba to Spain in exchange for Spanish-held Florida. When Spain abandoned Florida, however, she did not abandon her converted Catholic Indian populations. The Spanish feared that their Calusa and other Indian allies on the west coast of Florida would not fare well under British rule. Furthermore, about eighty Calusa families were devout converts to Catholicism. Interestingly, under the Spanish, the Calusas had also carried on their pre-1492 tradition by sailing back and forth to Cuba in seagoing canoes, trading. Spain decided to give refuge to the eighty Calusa families, and in 1763 the families made their way to Cuba, where they took up permanent residence. Ironically, these mission Indians reestablished an Indian presence on Cuba that the Spanish had annihilated two centuries earlier.
California Indians were also affected by the 1763 Treaty of Paris. After vacating Florida and turning it over to the British in exchange for Spain's right to reoccupy Cuba, Spain moved to secure the far western frontier by moving up the California coast. In addition to expanding Spanish holdings in North America, this effort was also intended to secure the area against possible pressures from both Russia and Britain. Spain established missions as stepping-stones in its occupation of coastal California, with
The first of twenty-one missions, San Diego de Alcala, founded in 1769. California Indians were crowded into the missions to work for crown and cross, to be converted to Catholicism, to die of epidemics, and to be buried in mass graves.
The Era of the American Revolution (1763-1783)
The so-called era of the American Revolution (1763-1783) was actually an era of two parallel revolutions. The better-known one is that of the colonists who went to war against each other in their "war for independence." Paralleling that conflict were the revolutions and civil wars among American Indian nations, such as the revolution from 1763 to 1766 by the Ottawas and other Great Lakes Indians under Pontiac and the civil wars among the Cherokees and the Haudenosaunee during the American Revolution. By the 1760s, the dilemma among both Natives and colonists was how to effectively coordinate society after Britain no longer faced its French rival in Canada. While the stakes were as different as the cultures were, the dilemmas for the First Nations and for the whites (in both London and the colonies) were remarkably similar: How much change could the establishment safely concede, and how much change could the revolutionary thinkers push upon the old system before open warfare broke the societies apart? Like their colonial neighbors, the American Indian nations finally divided into factions. The differences and the similarities soon became a stew, called the American Revolution, a single continental cauldron.
The Treaty of Paris of 1783 ended that revolution, but, like its 1763 counterpart, no Indian representatives were present. Yet the British used the right of discovery to transfer to the United States jurisdiction over the Indian lands east of the Mississippi. Thereafter, the United States claimed, through the transfer, both the right of discovery and absolute sovereignty over Indian people. During the negotiations that led to the treaty, the original intent of the United States, at least as it was conveyed to their Spanish ally, was to establish a right of sovereignty over the land with regard to other non-Indian nations (such as Britain, Spain, and France). However, regarding Indian nations, the United States intended to claim only the right of preemption—the right of the United States to obtain Indian lands to the exclusion of other non-Indian powers. In Paris, in August 1782, the Spanish negotiator Conde de
Aranda (Pedro Pablo Abarca de Bolea) recorded, in his diary, a discussion he had with U. S. negotiator John Jay of New York. Regarding the lands that lay west of the English colonies, Aranda asserted:
"That territory belongs to free and independent nations of Indians, and you have no right to it."
John Jay replied:
"These are points to be discussed and settled between the Indians and ourselves. With respect to the Indians we claim the right of preemption; with respect to all other nations, we claim the sovereignty over the territory."
Once the treaty was signed, however, the bolder assertions of the United States to complete sovereignty, through the British transfer of the right of discovery, became clear to the British and to their Indian allies. This assertion was immediately challenged by the First Nations (and it has been challenged in court proceedings down to the present day). For example, during a May 1783 meeting with the commander at Niagara, a Mohawk chief, Aaron Hill (Kanonraron), expressed anger and amazement that the British could even think of breaking their honor and their treaties by granting the Patriots jurisdiction over the lands of the Haudenosaunee and other Indians. As reported on May 18, 1783, by the British commander Allan Maclean "exactly as translated":
[T]hey told me they never could believe that our King could pretend to Cede to America What was not his own to give, or that the Americans would accept from Him, What he had no right to grant. . . . That the Indians were a free People Subject to no Power upon Earth, that they were faithful Allies of the King of England, but not his Subjects... it was impossible... to imagine, that the King of England Should pretend to grant to the Americans, all the Whole Country of the Indians Lying between the Lakes and the fixed Boundaries, as settled in 1768 between the Colonies and the Indians. . . . That if it was really true that the English had basely betrayed them by pretending to give up their Country to the Americans Without their Consent, or Consulting them, it was an act of Cruelty and injustice that Christians only were capable of doing, that the
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Indians were incapable of acting So. . . to friends & Allies, but that they did believe We had Sold & betrayed them.
Indian Treaties
The word "treaty" today has a specific legal definition in the United States: a formal agreement between nations ratified by the U. S. Senate. But the history of treaty making on both sides of the Atlantic is actually the history of diplomacy, because a treaty, broadly, is any formal agreement between nations. Before 1492, competing Indian nations throughout the Western Hemisphere conducted both war and formal diplomacy that led to agreements and treaties among themselves. Many First Nations, such as the Creeks and the Cherokees in the South and the Haudenosaunee in the North, were able to fight wars and negotiate treaties from positions of relative strength, factors enhanced by the European-American colonists' need for Indian allies in their own colonial wars with rival colonial powers. After the American Revolution, however, wars and treaties became increasingly one-sided in direct proportion to the United States' ever increasing population and economic power.
Thus while treaties in the 1790s still reflected at least some semblance of the balances of power evident before the American Revolution, after the War of 1812 treaty terms were decidedly weighted in favor of the United States, especially with regard to how much the United States could intrude in the affairs of Indian nations. The difference between earlier and later treaties is demonstrated by a comparison of the 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua made between the Haudenosaunee and United States with the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie made by the United States with the Lakotas and the Arapahos. Articles Two and Four of the 1794 treaty assert a clear separation of each signatory's jurisdiction. Article Two states: "The United States acknowledge [plural] the lands reserved to the Oneida, Onondaga, and Cayuga Nations to be their property; and the United States will never claim the same." Article Four declares that "the Six Nations, and of them, hereby engage that they will never claim any other lands within the boundaries of the United States; nor ever disturb the people of the United States." Article Two of the 1794 treaty also notes that the Six Nations has the clear right to determine whether any other Indian "friends" can live among them, noting that "the United States will never. . . disturb them or either of the Six Nations, nor their Indian friends residing thereon and united with them, in the free use and enjoyment thereof: but the said reservations shall remain theirs, until they choose to sell the same to the people of the United States who have right to purchase." Future issues will be resolved through mutual negotiation "by the Six Nations or any of them, to the President of the United States, or the superintendent by him appointed."
Contrast this clear separation of jurisdiction with the 1868 treaty, which states in Article Two that the United States has the right to exert control—"the consent of the United States"—over which Indians can reside on the lands. The treaty also grants the United States a right to intrude into the affairs of the Indian nations: "The President may, at any time, order a survey of the reservation" and that "the United States may pass such laws on the subject of alienation and descent of property as between Indians and their descendants as may be thought proper." Thus, future issues would be resolved not through the mutual negotiation called for in the 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua, but by unilateral decisions by the United States government.
The Shawnee Quest for Pan-Indian Unity (1745-1813)
In 1745, the Shawnee Indians living along the Ohio River realized that it was time to halt the English colonial expansion to the east of them. The next year, 1746, the Shawnees began to promote new alliances among Indian nations east of the Mississippi. Such a pan-Indian movement was not yet necessary among Indian nations on the Pacific Coast, the Rockies, the Great Basin, or the Plains—they were still politically independent, although the Plains nations were increasingly dependent on trade either with the French to the east of them in the Mississippi Valley or with the Spanish in the Southwest. And in the Southwest, pan-Indian movements, such as that of Pope among the Pueblos, Apaches, and Navajos in the 1680s, had been overwhelmed by 1700. The Shawnees' vision of a pan-Indian movement intended to create a new Indian unity from the north to the south. This unity would be stronger than the regional alliances and confederacies that already existed, such as the networks of the Creek Confederacy and the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy). The Shawnees had a unique perspective on the situation on the frontier because some of their nation
Lived in the South, near and even among the Creeks, while others lived in the North. Neither the northern nor the southern Shawnees had the power of larger nations such as the Creeks, and so the Shawnees more readily realized Indian vulnerability.
In February 1746, the Shawnees sent emissaries throughout the Mississippi Valley and the Southeast trying to convince Indians to give up their old rivalries and unite against the Europeans. The Indians' dependence on white trade goods, however, constantly worked against the Shawnees' proposal, for the Europeans and then the United States could use trade agreements as diplomatic maneuvers to divide Indian nations. During the French and Indian War, the Shawnees at first sided with the British, but English immigrants forced the Shawnees to defend their homelands until peace was made by 1758. The Shawnees now attempted to mediate peaceful solutions, but in 1774 this effort collapsed when white frontiersmen again forced them into what became known as Lord Dunmore's War, named for the governor of Virginia. This spilled over into the American Revolution, where the Shawnees tried to stop the expansion of white frontiersmen who were allied with the Patriot cause. The Shawnees provided major leadership after the American War in battles against the expanding United States, helping to defeat Governor Arthur St. Clair in 1791 but suffering defeat in 1794 along with other Indian nations at the Battle of Fallen Timbers. Thereafter, the Shawnee vision continued to inspire many Indian people and would reach its culmination under the Shawnee leader Tecumseh. In 1813, Tecumseh was killed on a northern battlefield during the War of 1812 and his southern allies were also defeated. The Shawnee vision, ongoing since 1745-1746, died with Tecumseh.
The Flow of North American History after 1750
Events after 1750 forever altered the pulse of Indian history north of Mexico. For more than a thousand years before Columbus, and for two centuries after Columbus, American Indian history had been shaped from south to north. The great Indian civilizations of Mesoamerica had exerted their influence northward and eastward, creating wave after wave of cultural frontiers north of Mexico. Then Spanish conquistadors moving northward from occupied Mexico or from the Caribbean invaded the Southwest and the Southeast. By the middle of the eighteenth century, however, the momentum had been altered. The Southern frontiers remained both important and dynamic, but, during the late 1600s and the early 1700s, events to the Northeast increasingly became the most important influences on all of American Indian history north of Mexico. By 1750, the primary locations of the events defining the destiny of the continent shifted. From 1750 until 1800, the vast continent north of Mexico was shaped primarily by events and decisions coming from the Northeast and, after 1800, from all areas east of the Mississippi.
In the centuries after 1800, as in the previous three centuries, there were at least four basic choices that Indian nations followed to survive as intact nations:
1. Spiritual reformations
2. Continued nonviolent resistance, both through negotiations such as treaties and in appeals to white laws and courts
3. Continued military resistance
4. Adaptation of white manufactured goods and technology
As for the United States, after 1800 it broke every colonial treaty it had inherited from the British and all of the more than 395 treaties that the United States made with Native nations.
The Triumph of the Arts and the Human Spirit
An encouraging conclusion to this survey is the fact that American Indians continued to produce a wide range of stunning art. This is evident in painting, wooden and stone sculpture, rock art, pottery, quill-work, and beadwork. Music and dance never ceased to be important, as both old and new music and dance sought to link the First Nations with continued spiritual inspiration or a reaffirmation of social bonds. Both before and after 1800, the First Nations never ceased to express the highest aesthetics and creative beauty of the human spirit.
Robert W. Venables
See also American Revolution, Native American Participation; Canandaigua, Treaty of; Canassatego; Doctrine of Discovery; Franklin, Benjamin; Haudenosaunee Confederacy, Political System; Mission System, Spanish; Mound Cultures of North America; Spanish Influence; Slavery; Tecumseh; Treaty
Diplomacy, with Summary of Selected Treaties; Tribal Sovereignty; Williams, Roger; Women in Native Woodland Societies.
References and Further Reading
Allen, Robert S. 1992. His Majesty's Indian Allies: British Indian Policy in the Defence of Canada, 1774-1815. Toronto, ON: Dundurn Press.
American State Papers, Class II, Indian Affairs. 1832.
Vol. 4 of American State Papers. Documents, Legislative and Executive, of the Congress of the United States. Washington, DC: Gales and Seaton.
Anderson, Fred. 2000. Crucible of War: The Seven
Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Anonymous. 1846. "The Early Records of
Charleston.” In Chronicles of the First Planters of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, from 1623 to 1636. Edited by Alexander Young. Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown.
Atkin, Edmond. [1755] 1967. The Appalachian Frontier: The Edmond Atkin Report and Plan of 1755.
Edited by Wilbur R. Jacobs. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Barlowe, Arthur. 1955. "Discourse of the First Voyage.” In The Roanoke Voyages, 1584-1590,
Vol. 1. Edited by David Beers Quinn, 91-116. London: Hakluyt Society.
Beauchamp, William M. 1921. The Founders of the New York Iroquois League and Its Probable Date: Researches and Transactions of the New York State Archaeological Association. Vol. 3, No. 1. Rochester, NY: Lewis H. Morgan Chapter, New York State Archaeological Association.
Bemis, Samuel Flagg. 1962. fay's Treaty: A Study in Commerce and Diplomacy, rev. ed. New Haven, CN: Yale University Press.
Berkhofer, Robert F., Jr. 1979. The White Man's Indian. New York: Random House Vintage Books.
Berlo, Janet C., and Ruth B. Phillips. 1998. Native North American Art. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Biggar, H. P., ed. 1924. The Voyages of Jacques Cartier. No. 11. Ottawa, ON: Publications of the Public Archives of Canada.
Billington, Ray Allen. 1974. Westward Expansion: A History of the American Frontier, 4th ed. New York: Macmillan.
Bolton, Herbert E. 1921. The Spanish Borderlands.
New Haven, CN: Yale University Press.
Bond, Richmond P. 1952. Queen Anne's American Kings. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Boyd, Julian P., ed. 1938. Indian Treaties Printed by Benjamin Franklin, 1736-1762. Philadelphia, PA: Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
Bradford, William. 1952. Of Plymouth Plantation. Edited by Samuel Eliot Morison. New York: Random House.
Bradford, William, and Edward Winslow. [1622]
1966. fournall of the English Plantation at Plimoth. Ann Arbor, MI: Readex Microprint.
Bradford, William, and Edward Winslow. [1622]
1865. Mourt's Relation or Journal of the Plantation at Plimouth. Boston: John Kimball Wiggin.
Calloway, Colin G. 1994. The World Turned Upside Down: Indian Voices from Early America. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's.
Calloway, Colin G. 1995. The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press.
Calloway, Colin G. 1997. New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Campisi, Jack. 1988. "The Oneida Treaty Period,
1783-1838.” In The Oneida Indian Experience: Two Perspectives. Edited by Jack Campisi and Laurence M. Hauptman. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.
Cappon, Lester J., et al. 1976. Atlas of Early American History: The Revolutionary Era, 1760-1790. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Caughey, John. 1938. McGillivray of the Creeks. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Cave, Alfred A. 1996. The Pequot War. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
Champlain, Samuel de. 1907. Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, 1604-1618. Edited by W. L. Grant. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
Coe, Michael, Dean Snow, and Elizabeth Benson. 1986. Atlas of Ancient America. New York: Facts on File.
Cohen, Felix. [1942] 1972. Handbook of Federal Indian Law. With a foreword and other material by Robert L. Bennett and Frederick M. Hart. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Colden, Cadwallader. [1747] 1958. The History of the Five Indian Nations Depending on the Province of New-York in America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Commager, Henry Steele, ed. 1973. Documents of American History, 9th ed. Upper Saddle River,
NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Cook, Frederick, ed. 1887. Journals of the Military
Expedition of Major General John Sullivan Against the Six Nations of Indians. Auburn, NY: Knapp, Peck & Thomson.
Cook, Sherburne F. [1940, 1943] 1976. The Conflict Between the California Indian and White Civilization. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Corkran, David H. 1962. The Cherokee Frontier: Conflict and Survival, 1740-1762. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Corkran, David H. 1967. The Creek Frontier,
1540-1783. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Cotterill, R. S. 1954. The Southern Indians: The Story of the Civilized Tribes Before Removal. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Crane, Verner W. [1929] 1964. The Southern Frontier, 1670-1732. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Deloria, Vine, Jr., and Clifford M. Lytle. 1998. The Nations Within: The Past and Future of American Indian Sovereignty, 2d ed. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Deloria, Vine, Jr., and Raymond J. DeMallie. 1999. Documents of American Indian Diplomacy. Vol. 1. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Deloria, Vine, Jr., and David E. Wilkins. 1999. Tribes, Treaties, and Constitutional Tribulations. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999.
Dobyns, Henry F. 1983. Their Numbers Become
Thinned: Native American Population Dynamics in Eastern North America. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.
Douglas, Frederick H., and Rene d'Harnoncourt. 1941. Indian Art of the United States. New York: Museum of Modern Art.
Downes, Randolph C. 1940. Council Fires on the Upper Ohio. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Edmunds, R. David. 1983. The Shawnee Prophet. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Edmunds, R. David. 1984. Tecumseh and the Quest for Indian Leadership. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.
Emerson, Thomas E. 1997. Cahokia and the
Archaeology of Power. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
Erhard, Thomas Erhard. 1970. Lynn Riggs: Southwest Playwrigh
World History
