- Race and Culture:Writing the Ethnohistory of the Early South
In 1830, Lewis Cass, the governor of Michigan Territory and an acknowledged expert on Indians, contributed an essay to the North American Review that urged the removal of the Indians east of the Mississippi. Cass believed that "a barbarous people, depending for subsistence upon the scanty and precarious supplies furnished by the chase, cannot live in contact with a civilized community." He had no doubt that North American Indians' "appearance and character . . . designate them as a distinct variety of the human race." He regarded the "civilization" program, instituted by George Washington's administration and aimed at assimilating Indians while appropriating their lands, as a "total failure" because of "some insurmountable obstacle in the habits or temperament of the Indians." Like any good debater, Cass acknowledged the evidence that challenged his position, in this case "the favourable reports that have been circulated concerning the Cherokees," and he moved to refute it. "That individuals among the Cherokees have acquired property, and with it more enlarged views and juster notions of the value of our institutions, and the unprofitableness of their own, we have little doubt," he wrote. "And we have as little doubt, that this change of opinion and condition is confined, in a great measure, to some of the half-breeds and their immediate connexions." That is, only intermarried whites and their descendants had made "progress," and their race accounted for their success.1 Cass's racial analysis of Cherokee society served a distinct purpose—the removal of eastern Indians—but the categories that he and his contemporaries constructed have proven to be remarkably pervasive and persistent in the scholarship on southern Indians. Modern scholars are careful to use the more antiseptic [End Page 700] "mixed blood," "métis," or "mestizo," rather than "half-breed," and to assure readers that "commonly understood, the difference between a full-blood and a mixed-blood was not biological or ancestral."2 Nevertheless, the language of blood that many scholars employ is rooted in the era of removal, a period in which white Americans did understand these terms to be both "biological" and "ancestral."3 Before we continue to use blood as an analytical tool and to linguistically link race and culture, we should take a close ethnohistorical look at the "mixed bloods" among southern Indians.
"Mixed-blood" children descended from Native people who married white women as well as white men, and southern Indians incorporated the offspring of both non-Indian mothers and fathers into their kinship system. Virtually all the white women who married Native men in the eighteenth century were war captives who were usually taken as children. Adopted into clans, raised in Indian families, married to Indian men, and mothers of Indian children, they were socially and culturally Indian. Although a few, such as the wife of the Cherokee headman Shoe Boots, ultimately returned to the United States, far more of these women remained in Native nations.4 In 1772, for example, British official David Taitt failed to recover a captive white woman whom Creek chiefs had agreed to surrender because she "run off with an Indian who is her husband, so that they Could not find her."5 In the 1790s, Hannah Hales, whom Creek warriors had captured in Georgia, rebuffed her white relatives who entreated her to come home when hostilities ended. Adopted by the Creeks, Hales "possesse[d] the rights of a Creek woman." Free to use unoccupied land, she had managed to acquire horses, cattle, and hogs as well as an African American slave, all of which, according to Creek law, she held separately from her husband whom she could, as United States Indian Agent Benjamin Hawkins observed, "throw away . . . whenever she chooses."6 When she became an adult, a French woman reportedly married the Chickasaw warrior who had taken her when she was five years old, and they had a large family. A white man observed that at age ninety-one "she still retained her European features, . . . but in every other respect was a Chickasaw."7 Interestingly, the white observer first noted her appearance, something that mattered little to the Chickasaws. For them, a...