A 4th of July Special: The Native American Nakba
There are, of course, more than a few things to celebrate this 4th of July, but since everyone is already focusing on all that, perhaps I’ll lend my small voice as a tribute to the Native American Nakba.
Of course, many people typically choose to remember the dispossession and mass slaughter of the Native Americans on Columbus Day. However, this fails to capture the full extent of the American government’s complicity in ethnic cleansing campaigns for at least another century after its declared independence–what Helen Hunt Jackson called a Century of Dishonor (her work of course can itself be subjected to legitimate criticism).
There are a few nuggets that I found in Carolyn Merchant’s Reinventing Eden that I’d like to share, in an effort to re-capture that moment before the colonial encounter with the indigenous tribes left no room to resist its explicitly genocidal and hegemonic agenda. One is about apple cider, and the other about education.
Concerning differing origin stories, the story of Adam and Eve versus the Native Americans’ own varying creation stories:
According to Benjamin Franklin, Indians quickly perceived the difference between the two accounts. Franklin writes satirically that the Indians on being appraised of the “historical facts on which our [own] religion is founded; such as the fall of our first parents by eating an apple… an Indian orator stood up” to thank the Europeans. “What you have told us is all very good,” he said. “It is, indeed, bad to eat apples. It is much better to make them all into cider. We are much obliged by your kindness in coming so far to tell us these things which you have heard from your mothers; in return I will tell you some of those which we have heard from ours. (p. 142, Reinventing Eden, Carolyn Merchant)
On education, another Benjamin Franklin anecdote…
After the principal business was settled, the commissioners from Virginia acquainted the Indians by a speech… with a fund for educating Indian youth; and if the chiefs of the Six Nations would send down half a dozen of their sons to that college, the government would take care that they should be well provided for, and instructed in all the learning of the white people…. [The following day, they answered] when their speaker began, by expressing a deep sense of the kindness of the Virginia government, in making them that offer; “for we know,” says he, “that you highly esteem the kind of learning taught in these colleges, and that the maintenance of our young men, while with you, would be very expensive to you. We are convinced therefore that you mean to do us good by your proposal; we thank you heartily. But you who are wise must know that different nations have different conceptions of things; and you will therefore not take it amiss if our ideas of this kind of education happen not to be the same with yours. We have had some experience of it; several of our young people were formerly brought up at the colleges of the northern provinces; they were instructed in all your sciences; but when they came back to us, they were bad runners; ignorant of every means of living in the woods; unable to bear either cold or hunger; knew neither how to build a cabin, take a deer; or kill an enemy; spoke our language imperfectly; were therefore neither fit for hunters, warriors, or counsellors: they were totally good for nothing. We are however not the less obliged by your kind offer, though we decline accepting it; and to show our grateful sense of it, if the gentlemen of Virginia will send us a dozen of their sons, we will take great care of their education, instruct them in all we know, and make men of them.” (p. 224 Works of Benjamin Franklin, p. 151-152 Reinventing Eden)
For me, imagining such a time of imbalance, instability, and dynamism as this in American history was impossible before reading these texts; though it reminds me of colonial attitudes towards African, South American, Asian, and Middle Eastern countries in the past century. It is interesting that the language of resistance here is focused on protecting difference. Nevertheless, the colonial mentality instead sought to exterminate these differences, whether racial and ethnic or cultural, in tandem with the material interests that created financial incentive in this hegemonic framework. And yes, I refer to the United States government post-independence as a colonial figure because of its treatment of the Native American communities and its unending imperial expansion.
Perhaps most explicit as evidence for any deniers of history is Andrew Jackson’s campaign to forcibly expel the Cherokee Indians from the area of Georgia and Florida in order to facilitate white settling of the land and use of its resources (gold).
In one of the saddest episodes of our brief history, men, women, and children were taken from their land, herded into makeshift forts with minimal facilities and food, then forced to march a thousand miles(Some made part of the trip by boat in equally horrible conditions)
There were no pretenses made about the policy, authorized by the Indian Removal Act of 1830. The Act gave the President authority to engage in what was, to put it euphemistically, a land transfer program. Under this program, land where Indians resided east of the Mississippi would be cleansed of Indians, and exchanged instead for unsettled and unclaimed land west of the Mississippi. This led to the forcible and violent eviction of over 15,000 Cherokee mentioned above, called the Trail of Tears on account of how many innocent people died as a result.
There is something to be appreciated about these stories in our present time, given that the language of domination and false compromise bears a great deal of resemblance to the predominant modes of discourse vis-á-vis the Palestinians in Israel. The separation paradigm opens the door to a repeat of 1948 ethnic cleansing campaigns and may lead to another forcible eviction of Arab citizens from Israel. The American “land transfer” is spoken of in terms of removing the Indians from amongst us (the whites), in the same way that land transfer in Israel is concerned with removing the Arabs from amongst us (the Jews). In both cases, this exceptional class of colonized subject who still dwells within the colonial entity was supposed to be put in his proper place, across the border or river. Just as the United States promised these exchanges to be a guarantee of Cherokee independence and rights, Israel has promised this autonomy to be guaranteed in the long term. But we know all too well how this story ends. One can only hope that the Palestinians’ fate, and that of other indigenous peoples around the world, will be different.
