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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 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?
During colonization, not every white man was friendly to natives.
The logical conclusion to this thread is that Elizabeth Warren is a slave owner.
Indigenous people in what’s now the US were enslaved (and exported to the Caribbean) by the English. Let’s not forget this either. https://www.npr.org/2016/06/21/482874478/forgotten-history-how-the-new-england-colonists-embraced-the-slave-trade
http://commonplace.online/article/indian-slavery-in-new-england/
Let’s also not forget the thousands upon thousands of indigenous people in Central and South America and the Caribbean who were enslaved by the Spanish. It wasn’t just “germs” that killed them. It was the process of colonial violence, dispossession, enslavement, and resource extraction, in conjunction with Eurasian diseases. This is a very good paper debunking the “virgin soils” theory that’s been promoted by people like Jared Diamond and Alfred Crosby. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3491697#metadata_info_tab_contents
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
