Comment by TheOneTrueChapo [comrade/them]@hexbear.net on *Permanently Deleted*

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I’m once again telling everyone to read Settlers

I don’t like the ~~framing~~ tone(?) of this take because it lays the evil of these practices directly at the feet of indigenous tribes without taking into account that tribes were often either expected to cooperate with and support settler colonists or be massacred. This thread reads like they want to ‘cancel’ tribes for this

Edit- I kinda knee jerked here, seeing comments in the Twitter thread that they had no idea there was any relationship between natives and slave owners made me come back here and respond to the wrong thing tbh. Read my conversation with Optimus, it’s a good thread!

I mean, they never (and I checked some other threads they posted on this topic) discuss how these treaties came about or what happened to tribes who did not want to engage in slave catching.

My problem isn’t the content, it’s the framing. Yes revising the history is fucked, yes what they did is fucked, and yeah there should be a discussion on how freed slaves/descendants should be handled by the tribe. All this is good to bring up. But there’s an undertone in the thread that seems to direct anger and fault towards the tribes as if they acted in a vacuum? IDK how to put it honestly, but it misses the mark a little bit for me

I did mention that point. I think you, me, and the Twitter poster are largely in agreement and maybe I’m nitpicking. Maybe cause Twitter isn’t the best way to share things like this.

But to reiterate, revionist history is not okay and it’s important to be able to discuss native/slave relationships and their descendants openly and honestly. I guess I’m finding it odd to not even really discuss settler influence, but again, maybe I’m nitpicking

Good points, friend. I’m gonna self crit on this because I definitely over corrected after misreading where exactly they were coming from. And I agree with you on the points about autonomy, I try to avoid thinking along those lines but obviously wasn’t thinking about that today. I didn’t mean to imply that they had no choice in the matter, and a lot of the original discussion is in the current day

I feel like the conditions under which the treaties were signed don’t justify the continued denial of citizenship rights to the Freedmen. Their group is also focused on more than just slave catching, its focused on the 5 Tribes that owned slaves. How can you justify that? Did the settler-colonizers have a gun to their head the whole time saying “You need to use the labor of these slaves or we will kill you?” idk maybe that is the case but it seems very unlikely.

I think that the calls should be directed at tribal leadership because they are the ones who have the power to legally acknowledge the Freedmen’s citizenship right?

Nah, not a gun to the head moment for slave owners. My (limited understanding) is that these 5 tribes adopted slavery and other settler practices/customs in order to appeal to the idea that they were “civilized” and should be left alone, as well as turning to slavery to support themselves after settlers disrupted their territory or hunting grounds. Not an excuse, just loosely explaining, I just think it’s important to remember these tribes didn’t just turn to slavery on their own.

Is slavery okay? Nope. And I agree with you/the OP that the inclusion of Freedmen/descendants into these tribes is important, should be discussed, and no one should assume that all natives were anti-slavery, we should push back on slave owning tribes portraying themselves as allies to slaves, etc. I think I got caught off guard by this discussion (and others the OP had) completely leaving out the role of settlers in the discussion and overcorrected here

I think I assumed that most people would understand that slavery was brought to the tribes by settlers, but that is maybe too optimistic for Amerikkka. I haven’t really spent much time looking into their other resources but maybe they have a deeper discussion of that history somewhere else?

Something on my reading list is Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South by Barbara Krauthamer. I haven’t read it yet but someone recommended it to me. Most of my knowledge on the topic comes from Settlers or The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America. and a few other sources but I haven’t done a true dive into native/slave relations

Two good books on indigenous history:

The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America by Andrés Reséndez

An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

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