Narratives and Color
Memorial Day is approaching, the day when municipal plunges will open for the summer. When Labor Day has fallen, and the pools shuttered again, every Indian with a child in grammar school can look forward to the surprise of having a Puritan, or perhaps an Indian, come home with a crayoned turkey. For Indians with children in the upper grades, fall is the season when Captivity is Taught. Mary Rowlandsen et seq frame the pre-patriotic literature, though there is more to delight the eye and mind elsewhere in the European literatures of the period, and that brings me to what is not taught. The other Captivity Narrative. The Slave Narratives.
Chad Smith, Barack Obama, and far too many others construct the past rather simply. Many Pequots were not taken into slavery not long after Mary Rowlandsen was captured by Narragansetts, to Haarlem. Orphans of immigrants were not "converted" in to chattel, as late as the Cherokee Removal period. The "bond" and "indentured" and "chattel" classes of labor, held in private hands with ready recourse to public force, varied over time and place, and the "one drop of blood" did not create enslavement, but was created to sustain a system in which color was present, but not in it self controlling. The Slave Narratives are full of green-eyed and passing, but for the marks branded on the face, back or mind (literacy was de jure incompatible with chattel status), whites.
That part of the curriculum seems to be owned by Mssrs. Sawyer and Finn, accompanied by Mr. Caruso's Friday, written at a remove of thirty years after the Federal, and the Cherokee Emancipations. Pity, as fiction isn't history, and untroubled by narrative, the "One Drop Rule" exists modernly to explain African-American slavery in the first half of the 19th century, rather than as it actually existed, as the means to disguise, to color, the enslavement of European-Americans.
A nation of nosebleeds should wrap its mind around the fact that human chattel in 1863 was not monochrome, and that the Dawes Commissioners, working at a further remove of twenty years, when Twain's artful fiction of "Jim" displaced the less artful works of Abolitionists and former Slaves, and their Antebellum passions for freedom, or death, already lived in the same universe as Ross Swimmer, Wilma Mankiller, Chad Smith and Barak Obama, a universe in which "Race" created "Slavery", rather than one experienced directly by the Abolitionists and the former Slaves, and even by the franker of the pro-Slavery public figures of the South, who are remarkably frank on subjects such as the purpose of religion and the function of class, independent of color, in which "Slavery" created "Race".
Of course, a gaggle of nations of alienated by allotments too should wrap their minds around the fact that the Dawes Commissioners were not, first and foremost, engaged in the non-economic activity of categorizing humans by race, color or creed, but in the economic anticipation of the eventual landrush, and the economic certainty that "non-Indian" land was alienable ab initio. Long before Eloise Cobell, the motive for the Dawes Commissioners was systematic breech of Individual Indian Trust. They just called it "Colored".
Then there's the three-fifths compromise was a compromise of the Philadelphia Convention of 1787, a year before the Great Compromise at the same convention. Modernly it is seen to diminish African-Americans, rather gratuitously, rather than as it was experienced, as the means to diminish non-chattel persons residing in non-Slave states, resulting in disproportionate representation of Slave State elites in the lower house of the Federal legislature, the Federal judiciary, and the Federal executive.
Shannon Prince, Cherokee (Aniyunwiya), is a Presidential Scholar, Inaugural Scholar, Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, and junior at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. He has an interesting OpEd in ICT We're imitating the enemy, making a moral argument why the Disenfranchisement Movement should be rejected by the Cherokee Nation.
