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2. Stratification and Class in Eastern Native America
- University of Pennsylvania Press
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2 Stratification and Class in Eastern Native America Daniel K. Richter The words class and seventeenth-century Native North American have perhaps never before been seen in the same sentence. Nor should they have been, if by class we evoke meanings familiar to Karl Marx, E. P. Thompson , or their successors. Clearly the economic, social, and cultural nexuses of inequality in Native America differed so profoundly from those of Western Europe that such meanings of class are irrelevant to the Indian societies of Eastern North America—at least until the eighteenth-century times and places discussed by Daniel Mandell in the next chapter. Yet if we are to understand the ways in which the emerging class formations of Western Europe interacted with Native American societies, both in the earliest stages of contact and over time, it is worthwhile to consider exactly what forms of inequality , hierarchy, and stratification did prevail in eastern North America in the era of European colonization. These, too, are words seldom seen together. Inequality, hierarchy, and stratification fit uneasily in our ways of thinking about Native experiences. They usually enter the conversation, if at all, as consequences of European contact, as symptoms of cultural breakdown, as words loaded with negative moral freight, as things that had somehow to be taught to Indians. Nonetheless , scholarship now indicates that distinctive forms of economic, social, and political stratification—not edenic egalitarianism—were the norm among the agricultural peoples of eastern North America at the time of their first contacts with Europeans. An appreciation of that norm has profound consequences for understanding what came later. As Karen Kupperman has suggested, when early European travelers and colonizers described Native American leaders as “kings,” “lords,” and “emperors ,” they knew what they were talking about. “In England,” Kupperman observes, “aristocrats and monarchs, knowing that government rested more on honor and credit than on law or force, took care to surround themselves with visual emblems of magnificence . . . , presenting their persons in ways that affirmed their place atop the hierarchy.” Such modes of presentation “were designed to convey ideas that mortal minds could not grasp directly; their desired effect was to evoke in the affirming audience a sense of wonder or awe.” And nearly everywhere they looked, English travelers described Native leadership in ways that “echoed the language of English aristocratic selfpresentation ,” convinced as they were that “Indians exhibited the same natural courtesy, virtue, and care for their reputations that characterized England ’s nobility.”1 Indeed, linguistic, sartorial, and ceremonial markers of exalted status attached to hereditary Native leaders throughout most of eastern North America . The title of the Chesapeake Algonquian paramount chief Powhatan was mananatowick, which shares common linguistic roots with manitou, or “power.” Algonquians of southern New England distinguished between “ahtaskoaog or ‘principal men’” and “missinnuok or ‘common people.’”2 Mohawks set apart rotiyanehr (the term combines the concepts of “great” or “honored one” with “one who keeps the peace”). The Jesuit author JosephFran çois Lafitau further distinguished (with different orthography) “Roiander Gôa, meaning ‘noble par excellence,’ from gaïander, the usual [Mohawk] word meaning nobility.” In the Southeast, terms such as mico and “beloved man” carried similar connotations, while everywhere chiefs displayed their lofty status by wearing rare copper or shell ornaments on their bodies and living in communal houses that were larger, if not always more elaborate, then those of common folk.3 Few could match the trappings of the litter-borne, pearl-garlanded “Lady of Cofitachiqui,” who met Hernando de Soto in 1539, or Powhatan’s ritual storehouse guarded by“foure Images as Sentinels, one of a Dragon, another a Beare, the third like a Leopard, and the fourth like a giantlike man, all made evill favouredly, according to their best workemanship.”4 Nonetheless, there was no doubt about who was a member of the elite. “Although the chiefs have no mark of distinction and superiority so that, except in a few individual cases, they cannot be distinguished from the crowd by the honours due to be paid them, people do not fail to show always a certain respect for them,” concluded Lafitau. “The councils assemble by their orders; they are held in their lodges unless there is a public lodge, like a town hall, reserved only for councils; business is transacted in their names; they preside over all sorts of meetings; they play a considerable role in feasts and community dis36 Richter [44.220.245.254] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 07:58 GMT) tributions; they are often...