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3. Subaltern Indians, Race, and Class in Early America
- University of Pennsylvania Press
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3 Subaltern Indians, Race, and Class in Early America Daniel R. Mandell During the long eighteenth century, the distant and scattered English outposts in North America became linked provinces that played important roles within the sprawling British Empire. Those provinces developed mature societies, economies, and governments; their port towns and hinterlands enlarged their connections with other parts of the Atlantic World. Independence pulled those provinces out of the empire and increased their role in the Atlantic World, causing Euro-Americans to reshape their notions of nationhood. As part of this process, they renegotiated old categories of social status and shaped an ideology of race linked to that evolving class structure. Entangled within that process were the surviving coastal Natives who lived along the interstices of the region’s economy and culture, with communal and largely subsistence economies within and wage labor without.1 As a modern market economy and new notions of class, nation, and race developed in the Revolutionary United States, the remaining Indian reserves attracted a noticeable number of blacks and whites, in part because such developments were partially neutralized in those communities. Many if not most Indians also left their reserves for long periods: men worked on the ships that carried goods and information around the Atlantic World, and women sold crafts and worked in white households. As these Natives became more integrated into the regional and world economies, and many married blacks and some whites, they were increasingly perceived as part of the undifferentiated people of color that became the lowest rank in the early republic . These Indians and their communities shed new light on the region’s alienated socioeconomic classes. One might think of this as the emergence of the modern counterculture, in which Indians were, from the beginning of the world capitalist economy, both magnets for and symbols of the opposition to that system. This case study highlights how class embraces many aspects of life and culture as well as work and economic status, and how class and race are often linked in the history of the Atlantic World. During their initial encounters, Eastern Woodland Indians sought to assimilate Europeans through diplomacy and by forging ties of kinship, a goal and tactics that reflected the Natives’ social and political structures. European often called tribes“nations”and described sachems as monarchs, perceptions that reflected their own developing nation-states as well as the structure of many Native groups, as described by Daniel Richter’s chapter in this book. When colonial leaders desired Native resources or assistance, they first tried to determine the boundaries and leaders of a particular community and then negotiated with those individuals as they would with fellow sovereigns. Competition between colonial powers and among Native peoples, plus European contempt for Native culture and land use, led Europeans to ignore those ideals and to regard Natives as barbarians. Moreover, while Europeans negotiated arrangements with Native leaders, thereby recognizing as well as transforming a tribe’s sovereignty, they were not forging a relationship of equal nations.2 Indeed, that pattern fits Immanuel Wallerstein’s world systems structure, in which the core (capitals of colonial powers) dominates the periphery , which supplies labor and resources but receives relatively little.3 However, Natives largely managed to elude such relationships for centuries . While they participated in Atlantic trade, swapping furs and deerskins for consumer goods, they simultaneously resisted the developing capitalist world system. Goods that seemed relatively worthless to Europeans had high religious and social value to Native peoples, and Natives preferred to envision trade as a political and social relationship.4 They were not alone: some elements of the old European class system resisted the transformations of the new capitalist economy, particularly in rapidly modernizing England. This is perhaps the deeper, structural way of understanding why Indian societies proved attractive to a noticeable number of colonists, whether deserters or captives.5 English depictions of aboriginal cultures may have unintentionally provided a counterpoint to the often alienating pace of social and economic change.6 Theories of world systems and of class need to account for groups who both participated in the capitalist economy and continued to resist its transformations. As we shall see, Indian enclaves within long-colonized areas of the United States would continue to attract such resistors and “dropouts.” Still, the larger view cannot be denied. Abstract monetary value in the capitalist economy flowed primarily to Europe. This relationship became formalized in eighteenth-century theories of mercantilism and also is de50 Mandell [54.226.222.183...