How Native American Slaveholders Complicate the Trail of Tears Narrative
- Thread starter Oceanicpuppy
- Start date
Oceanicpuppy
Superstar
Erasing History.
The narrative can be flipped and distorted.
“See black people are mixed with Indian blood”
“See black people are the real Americans Indians they were not Slaves from Africa ”
When the truth is Indian tribes own black slaves.
It distorts and is erasing the crimes of the community. It does not serve black people to claim Native American identity.
It distroys black/ African identity and history. People who want to keep this lie are enemies to the truth and enemies to black progress.
Oceanicpuppy
Superstar
Have y’all noticed that this narrative of “black people are the real Indians” only started to surface recently?
It’s a clear agenda to erase the crimes of slavery.
Something is fishy.
It’s a clear agenda to erase the crimes of slavery.
Something is fishy.
FlyGuy
pimp of the year
I actually saw a FB post that claimed that, saying nobody would have survived the Atlantic ocean
Cabbage Patch
The Media scene in V is for Vendetta is the clue
It’s get more disgusting andwith Natives in South America too. @Every Moment... Older was going to post about how the Indians sided with Dutch and fukked up and destroyed a mass slave rebellion in Guyana.
Guyana would have been the first Haiti.
They definitely were not the helpless compassionate friends of African slaves like the history books and movies tell us.
The history books don't say that, though. That's nikkas believing the 'my such and such was X', and not being taught that either your ancestor lied in order not to be classified as black, and/or your ancestor was treated differently by other natives on top of the government for being black and native.
Nikkas ate up the coloreds against whites narrative.
The five civilized tribe natives were on some model minority shyt begging desperately to be classified as white -- because so many were.
All of those Cherokee fighting with the confederates were Irish. The more Irish, the better you were treated on the trail.
The only natives worth a shyt during that time period were Seminoles, and they weren't even a real tribe.
That's why I don't use the words musty and maroon. Nikkas saying musty as an insult, might as well be dropping the n bomb with an -er.
Anyway, it's why I keep saying reparations wil also have to come from Natives -- and they ain't giving up that mob casino money for their own relatives, they are not going to welcome a discussion about restitution to descendents of former slaves.
Field Marshall Bradley
Veteran
How Native American Slaveholders Complicate the Trail of Tears Narrative | At the Smithsonian | Smithsonian
/https://public-media.smithsonianmag.com/filer/8e/94/8e94fd25-7bbd-4771-8ede-8cf22db023e2/094183pv-wr.jpg)
Choctaw chief Greenwood LeFlore had 15,000 acres of Mississippi land (above, his Mississippi home Malmaison) and 400 enslaved Africans under his dominion. (Library of Congress)
When you think of the Trail of Tears, you likely imagine a long procession of suffering Cherokee Indians forced westward by a villainous Andrew Jackson. Perhaps you envision unscrupulous white slaveholders, whose interest in growing a plantation economy underlay the decision to expel the Cherokee, flooding in to take their place east of the Mississippi River.
What you probably don’t picture are Cherokee slaveholders, foremost among them Cherokee chief John Ross. What you probably don’t picture are the numerous African-American slaves, Cherokee-owned, who made the brutal march themselves, or else were shipped en masse to what is now Oklahoma aboard cramped boats by their wealthy Indian masters. And what you may not know is that the federal policy of Indian removal, which ranged far beyond the Trail of Tears and the Cherokee, was not simply the vindictive scheme of Andrew Jackson, but rather a popularly endorsed, congressionally sanctioned campaign spanning the administrations of nine separate presidents.
These uncomfortable complications in the narrative were brought to the forefront at a recent event held at the National Museum of the American Indian. Titled “Finding Common Ground,” the symposium offered a deep dive into intersectional African-American and Native American history.
For museum curator Paul Chaat Smith (Comanche), who has overseen the design and opening of the widely lauded “Americans” exhibition now on view on the museum’s third floor, it is imperative to provide the museum-going public with an unflinching history, even when doing so is painful.
“I used to like history,” Smith told the crowd ruefully. “And sometimes, I still do. But not most of the time. Most of the time, history and I are frenemies at best.” In the case of the Trail of Tears and the enslavement of blacks by prominent members of all five so-called “Civilized Tribes” (Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole), Smith went one step further, likening the ugly truth of history to a “mangy, snarling dog standing between you and a crowd-pleasing narrative.”
“Obviously,” Smith said, “the story should be, needs to be, that the enslaved black people and soon-to-be-exiled red people would join forces and defeat their oppressor.” But such was not the case—far from it. “The Five Civilized Tribes were deeply committed to slavery, established their own racialized black codes, immediately reestablished slavery when they arrived in Indian territory, rebuilt their nations with slave labor, crushed slave rebellions, and enthusiastically sided with the Confederacy in the Civil War.”
In other words, the truth is about as far a cry from a “crowd-pleasing narrative” as you could possibly get. “Do you want to hear that?” Smith asked the audience. “I don’t think so. Nobody does.” And yet, Smith is firm in his belief that it is a museum’s duty to embrace and elucidate ambiguity, not sweep it under the rug in the pursuit of some cleaner fiction.
Tiya Miles, an African-American historian at the University of Michigan, agrees. At the “Finding Common Ground” event, she meticulously laid out primary-source evidence to paint a picture of Indian/African-American relations in the years leading up to the Civil War.
Native Americans, she said, had themselves been enslaved, even before African-Americans, and the two groups “were enslaved for approximately 150 years in tandem.” It wasn’t until the mid 18th-century that the bondage of Native Americans began to wane as Africans were imported in greater and greater numbers. Increasingly, where white colonists viewed Africans as little more than mindless beasts of burden, they saw Native Americans as something more: “noble savages,” unrefined but courageous and fierce.
Perversely, Native American ownership of black slaves came about as a way for Native Americans to illustrate their societal sophistication to white settlers. “They were working hard to comply with government dictates that told native people that in order to be protected and secure in their land base, they had to prove their level of ‘civilization,’” Miles explained.
How would slave ownership prove civilization? The answer, Miles contends, is that in capitalism-crazed America, slaves became tokens of economic success. The more slaves you owned, the more serious a businessperson you were, and the more serious a businessperson you were, the fitter you were to join the ranks of “civilized society.” It’s worth remembering, as Paul Chaat Smith says, that while most Native Americans did not own slaves, neither did most Mississippi whites. Slave ownership was a serious status symbol.
Smith and Miles agree that much of early American history is explained poorly by modern morality but effectively by simple economics and power dynamics. “The Cherokee owned slaves for the same reasons their white neighbors did. They knew exactly what they were doing. In truth,” Smith said, the Cherokee and other “Civilized Tribes were not that complicated. They were willful and determined oppressors of blacks they owned, enthusiastic participants in a global economy driven by cotton, and believers in the idea that they were equal to whites and superior to blacks.”
Read more: How Native American Slaveholders Complicate the Trail of Tears Narrative | At the Smithsonian | Smithsonian
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So you love letting white people tell you about your history huh?
Oceanicpuppy
Superstar
Maybe we should question the people writing this nonsense.
Who and Why would someone want to deny slavery happened?
Field Marshall Bradley
Veteran
the coli loves viewing black history and themselves for that matter via a white lens....
shyt’s pathetic
Cabbage Patch
The Media scene in V is for Vendetta is the clue
Probably natives don't like nikkas and don't trust nikkas, and buy the same stereotypes about nikkas white people do.
It's complicated.
Natives see nikkas as non-people like cacs are non-people. But nikkas have no power, cacs do, so nikkas are held in even less esteem while being considered the same as cacs.
Maybe we should question the people writing this nonsense.
Who and Why would someone want to deny slavery happened?
Some of our people want to distance themselves from Africa to the point that they'll absolve whites of their crimes in the process.
Oceanicpuppy
Superstar
That’s disgusting to me.
