Native Land Talk: Indigenous and Arrivant Rights Theories by Yael Ben-Zvi (review)

Yael Ben-zvi's Native Land Talk aims to highlight the myriad ways in which indigenous and African-descended thinkers contributed to Atlantic world rights discourses in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The work complicates existing scholarship that understands the state as the guarantor and legitimizer of rights, and it argues instead that indigenous peoples, the enslaved, and formerly enslaved peoples created and mobilized their own theories of rights in order to resist settler regimes. In doing so, Native Land Talk tackles and poses important questions regarding the development of human rights and Enlightenment ideas—ideas that are often understood as the product of European thinkers and actions. Even more broadly, the work adds to scholarship that understands resistance to Euro-American colonial regimes as influencing the development of those regimes and the ideas that undergirded them.

Ben-zvi works to recover the rights theories presented by indigenous and African-descended individuals such as Olaudah Equiano, Samson Occom, and David Walker, and teases out the rhetorical and conceptual differences that existed among the authors and between theorists Ben-zvi carefully terms indigenous and arrivant. Analyzing narratives, petitions, and newspapers, among other print sources, the author reveals that nativity and space offered core logics that allowed indigenous and arrivant peoples to contest Eurocentric ideas of rights that were, for British settlers, grounded in their portable rights as Englishmen and, for Euro-Americans, grounded in their own "nativist" ideas that developed along with Manifest Destiny in the nineteenth century. Along the way, the book examines two central binaries—native-settler and black-white—that, according to the author, not only exist in scholarship but also work to facilitate the violence of settler regimes. Rather than find evidence of solidarity between indigenous peoples and African Americans in the period under study, the author finds that "[b]y demanding separately that the oppressive settler regime respect their rights, African Americans and Native Americans fortified binaries that the settler regime also wished to maintain in order to secure itself from joint African American and Native American resistance" (7).

Ben-zvi reveals the power of these binaries in the analysis of Samson Occom, the Mohegans, and the establishment of Brothertown in the book's second chapter and in other contexts throughout the text. In the Brothertown case, because British settlers claimed that the acceptance of Africans in indigenous communities "justified settler possession of Indigenous lands," Occom, Ben-zvi contends, worked to ostracize Mohegan women who married non-natives and he worked to specifically prohibit African Americans from membership within Brothertown (66–67). Such efforts, Ben-zvi suggests, reveal the extent to which individuals like Occom "obeyed settlers' racial classifications" (66). In Ben-zvi's research and analysis, Olaudah Equiano's writings are the only texts included that "articulated visions of Indigenous and arrivant solidarity," though it is unclear based on the analysis presented how representative this may be of indigenous and arrivant texts and ideas of the period (67). The author's findings nonetheless center questions both new and old regarding how subjugated peoples navigate hierarchical relations of power within those regimes.

Ben-zvi reveals that one way in which individuals confronted colonialism with rights talk was by reconfiguring Euro-Americans' hierarchical relations of power. Ben-zvi shows in the first chapter that Olaudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, for example, offers an alternative conception of relationships among the world's peoples. In this chapter's reading of that text, Ben-zvi understands Equiano as envisioning "the world's population as a community united by horizontal, nonhierarchic relations that challenge Eurocentric constructions of a vertical, hierarchic global order where non-European peoples are subordinated to ideals of property and mastery" (38). The author explains that, while arrivant theorists such as Equiano offered visions of "resettlement" that included nonhierarchic relations and the establishment of centers of Africans and African-descended peoples in Sierra...