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Chapter 11 “Believing That Many of the Red People Suffer Much for the Want of Food”: A Quaker View of Indians in the Early U.S. Republic In the spring of 1804, Gerard T. Hopkins traveled from Baltimore to Fort Wayne, in Indian country. As secretary of the Baltimore Yearly Meeting of Friends and a member of its Committee on Indian Affairs, he carefully kept a journal, which he later edited to “convey inteligibly, both the route we took and the various circumstances attendant upon our Journey”; his traveling companions were fellow committee member George Ellicott and a young man named Phillip Dennis, who had been employed to live with the Indians and “instruct them in Agriculture and other useful knowledge.” Hopkins’s journal records that, when the three travelers reached Fort Wayne, they appeared be‑ fore a council of chiefs convened by Miami leader Little Turtle. Speaking with the assistance of resident Federal agent and interpreter William Wells, they announced that, “in coming into the Country of our Red brethren, we have come with our eyes open and . . . ​ are affected with sorrow in believing that Many of the red people suffer much for the want of food and for the want of Clothing.” If only the Miamis would “adopt our mode of Cultivating the earth and of raising useful animals,” they would, the Quakers assured them, “find it to be a mode of living not only far more plentif[ul] and much less fatiguing but also much more Certain . . . ​ than is now attendant upon hunting.”1 Eyes may have been open, but brains apparently were not processing much of what was seen. For Hopkins also noted that a few days before the Quak‑ ers delivered their speech, one of the supposedly starving Native women—​­ Wells’s wife and Little Turtle’s daughter, Sweet Breeze—​­ treated them to “an 228 European Power and Native Land excellant dinner” featuring “a very large well roasted wild Turkey [and] also a wild Turkey boiled,” both accompanied by “a large supply of Cramberry Sauce.” Later, the Marylanders visited a camp where Miami women and their “very fat and healthy looking children” dressed in “very costly silver orna‑ ments” were producing maple sugar for Euro‑​­ American markets.2 Hopkins did not know it, but it is likely that the Indians engaged in that commercial activity because it was early April and not yet time to plant the corn, beans, and squash that their agriculturalist ancestors had known how to grow for at least eight hundred years before Dennis was born. To insist that these people were ill‑​­fed and ill‑​­clad was a remarkable triumph of ideological construction over visual and gastronomical evidence. As Hopkins tried to “convey inteligibly” his experiences, he relied less on what he had actually seen than on what he thought he knew before he began his journey. An easterner whose knowledge of Native people came largely from eighteenth‑​­ century books—​­ most of them published by European au‑ thors who themselves had not even visited North America—​­ he deployed a powerfully wrong‑​­ headed analysis of who Indians were and what kind of problems they faced as the new republic assumed control of the continent. Despite a maize of evidence, this analysis insisted that Indians were not really farmers. Despite the economic importance of the trade in fur and hides (and, at Fort Wayne, maple sugar), it similarly insisted that they did not participate in the modern commercial economy in any significant way, except to pur‑ chase rotgut liquor and other self‑​­ destructive luxuries. Supposedly hunters living hand‑​­ to‑​­ mouth in a world where game lands were rapidly shrinking, these imagined Indians had to be facing starvation because their way of life was doomed by the presence on the continent of an allegedly more advanced society based, unlike theirs, on agriculture and commerce. Their only earthly salvation was to take up the plow that Hopkins and his companions offered them. The belief “that Many of the red people suffer[ed] much for the want of food”—​­ and that such abstract categories as “red people” and “hunters” pro‑ vided in themselves sufficient explanation for the economic and social distress of Indians whose particular circumstances need not be considered—​­ proved almost impervious to contradictory evidence, in part because it so conve‑ niently justified Euro‑​­ American expropriation of Indian land and resources. But for Hopkins and his fellow turn‑​­of‑​­the‑​­nineteenth‑​­century Quakers, the noble work of turning starving hunters into sturdy subsistence farmers...

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