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1. Carolinians in Indian Country
- University of Nebraska Press
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1. Carolinians in Indian Country The fire kindled at the Yamasee town of Pocotaligo in April 1715 might be attributed to localized disaffection had it not spread in time to engulf the entire indigenous South. That it found ready fuel among neighboring nations in the early weeks of the war suggests the existence of a common set of grievances among certain nations. In this chapter I analyze the nature of the tinder that made possible the spread of the conflagration over such a broad region. I argue that participation in trade elicited a series of specific complaints from a distinct cluster of Indian Nations prior to the war, and in so doing, I challenge some of the prevailing assumptions about trader misconduct and abusiveness. This is difficult, because Verner W. Crane and John R. Swanton have cast a long shadow over southern colonial historiography . Their explanation of the causes of the Yamasee War went unquestioned for more than fifty years. More recent studies have explored multicausal approaches to the war’s origins, including environmental pressures and the consequences of dependency on Anglo-Indian relations. In addition to recognizing for the first time the need to consider geographical differences among Native American participants, James Merrell’s work on the Catawbas broke new ground by assessing native perceptions and misperceptions of Europeans as filtered through the unreliable lens of trade. With few exceptions, however, even these studies routinely fall back upon the vocabulary of abuse and misconduct pioneered by Crane and Swanton in the 1920s.1 Efforts to apply dependency theory, in particular, have demonstrated a decidedly teleological tendency. Perhaps because AngloIndian trade relations had such a brief history prior to the Yamasee War, dating only to the 1680s, such studies tend to accelerate the advance of trade dependence excessively. At the same time, they often oversimplify the correlation between “abusive” English traders and the hegemonic power supposedly conferred on the English by advanced dependency. In short, they anticipate too much in too simple a manner in too little time. The present study invokes dependency theory sparingly and only to recalibrate scholarly assumptions about its rate of progress in the colonial South, on the one hand, and to urge, on the other, a more complex treatment of its local manifestations that includes not only the behavior of English traders but economic, cultural, and social changes as well.2 Southeastern Indians had their own ideas about proper and improper conduct and, for their own reasons, submitted a large number of trade-related complaints to Charles Town officials. Those complaints need to be analyzed as far as possible on their own terms as part of a complex, ongoing dialogue between southeastern Indians and Europeans. Yet in order to do so, native and European voices need to be untangled from each other to restore the basic outlines of the discourse. Some of the complaints traditionally cited as evidence of trader “misconduct,” for example, were not submitted by Native Americans at all. In many cases they were submitted by British traders themselves and probably represent partisan rhetoric directed at opposing trade factions. In the Journals of the Commissioners of the Indian Trade, by far the richest and most systematic source of such complaints, roughly thirty-two of the sixty-five cases adjudicated between 1710 and 1715 involved 14 tinder [44.222.87.38] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 06:57 GMT) internecine squabbles between British traders. The thirty cases that clearly emanated from Native American sources, however, contain a wealth of information about the sometimes subtle problems plaguing Anglo-Indian relations. The priorities framed in these complaints differed in several respects from those of British traders, and the well-founded frustrations of the peoples who submitted them deserve a more thorough analysis than mass categorization as complaints about “abuse.” By plotting the Anglo-Indian dialogue and insisting on the importance of identity as a determinative element in the shaping of discourse, the present study seeks to build the foundation for a native interpretive perspective that revolves around specific, practical issues raised by Native Americans themselves, that recognizes geographical distinctions, and that acknowledges the asymmetrical distribution of power.3 gender It may be best to begin where many historical accounts of British trade behavior prior to the Yamasee War have ended: with accusations of beatings and murders. These glaring incidents figure prominently in many characterizations of the Anglo-Indian trade relationship, yet they represented a distinct minority when compared with other categories...