How Becoming “Civilized” Ended with the Trail of Tears
The portrayal of Native Americans in popular culture often overlooks a complex history that included slavery
Not long ago, I participated in a book club hosted by Writers and Editors of Color (WEOC), an international collective of writers representing the kaleidoscope of peoples of color (full disclosure; I am an editor for WEOC’s publication on Medium and a member of the group’s leadership).
Our book club’s first selection was the 1619 Project, A New Origin Story. The book is a sequel to the 1619 Project, a long-form re-examination of the legacy of chattel slavery developed by Nikole Hannah-Jones and published by The New York Times Magazine in 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. We hosted a discussion on Twitter Spaces each week focused on one of the book’s chapters.
The 1619 Project, A New Origin Story is an anthology of painstakingly sourced essays, short stories, and poems by scholars and journalists such as Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Jamelle Bouie, Ibram X. Kendi, and Carol Anderson. Each chapter explores a historical aspect of Black history, covering politics, race, healthcare, and justice.
To say the 2019 publication and the subsequent book are controversial is an understatement. Although a vocal right-leaning minority, some historians question the project’s central premise: anti-Black racism is foundational to America’s creation.
Indeed, WEOC’s selection of the 1619 Project, A New Origin Story for its book club stemmed from the organization’s effort to counterbalance the right-wing vitriol arrayed against Ms. Hannah-Jones’s work, and the telling of Black history in general, by publishing essays in support of the 1619 Project’s central thesis.
It is difficult to question that the Founding Fathers, most of whom were enslavers, viewed their African captives as inferior to white Europeans. They made no secret of their position on slavery and white supremacy, clearly articulating their sentiments in their writings and speeches. In his remarks in Notes on the State of Virginia, published in 1785, for example, Thomas Jefferson made his position on enslaved Africans clear:
I advanced it, therefore, as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time or circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments of both body and mind…
This unfortunate difference of colour, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people…
The slave, when made free, might mix with, without staining the blood of his master. But with us a second is necessary, unknown to history. When freed, he is to be removed beyond the reach of mixture.
To be clear, an honest debate on the validity of The 1619 Project’s thesis certainly is fair game. That said, what the Republican Party and its far-right minions seek is an erasure of any telling of American history that includes the kidnap, enslavement, and post-Civil War disenfranchisement of Black citizens by way of Jim Crow laws.
Native Americans, slavery, and the road to becoming “civilized”
One of the book’s chapters, entitled “Dispossession,” examines the assimilation and forced relocation of Indigenous tribes written by Tiya Miles, a historian a professor of history at Harvard University. The chapter also chronicles the complicated intersectionality between Native American tribes of the day and enslaved Africans.
In 1792, George Washington urged Congress to create a “civilization plan” directed at the so-called Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole). Miles writes that, from the U.S. government’s point of view, “civilizing” was code for the total adoption of Euro-American culture:
As civilized tribes, Washington reasoned, the Native people would neither need nor claim so much land. And in exchange for the Cherokees' consent to "civilizing" practices, the United States promised to prevent Americans from pushing past the new boundaries…
The policy demanded that Native men give up the bow for the plow, and that Native women cease farming corn and turn their attention to the domestic work of spinning thread, weaving cloth, and other "properly" feminine activities…
Native people were advised to adopt Christianity and begin producing "civilized crops" like cotton. And Native tribes, which held lands in common, were expected to embrace, as Henry Knox put it, "a love for exclusive property.”
…If Native people did not prove that they could rise above savagery and assimilate, Hawkins and others believed, they would be crowded out or killed.
Miles writes that an unspoken yet essential component of ‘civilizing’ on the part of Indigenous tribes was the adoption of slavery:
And there was yet one more thing. Native communities were encouraged to adopt what had emerged as a defining characteristic of civilized Euro-American society in the South: the enslavement of Black people.
Because the federal civilization policy was conceived, developed, and enforced by enslavers who felt their way of life was advanced and ideal, it included the tacit expectation that the most progressive among Native Americans, those who would lead their people into the future, should also enslave Black people. Although this was not explicitly written into the plan, Natives who enslaved people found favor with the U.S. government, garnering positive reviews in the federal agents' reports, and earning government contracts and military honors.
In a 2018 interview with Smithsonian Magazine, Miles explains that, ironically, Native Americans themselves experienced slavery before African Americans, and for approximately 150 years, both groups were enslaved in tandem. But as the African slave trade increased in the eighteenth century, the enslavement of Native Americans decreased. According to Miles, there was a recognition among Indigenous peoples that not only was the enslavement of Blacks an indication of cultural assimilation, but it was also a symbol of economic status:
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.”
Popular culture vs. uncomfortable history
Ho-Tul-Ko-Mi-Ko, Chief of the Whirlwind, whose English name was Silas Jefferson, was of African and Creek parentage. Raised by the Creeks in Alabama, Jefferson became the official interpreter of the Creek Nation. According to Charles Milton Bell, a renowned photographer of Native Americans, Jefferson was “to all intents and purposes one of the tribe, taking a wife from among them, and sharing all their troubles.”
Under the Cherokee Nation’s matrilineal system of the 17th and 18th centuries, children of mixed ethnicity born to a Cherokee mother became part of her family and clan. Cherokee children also derived their social status from their mothers.
John Ross, the leader of the Cherokee Nation from 1828 to 1866, was only one-eighth Cherokee by blood. Born to a Scottish father and a mother who was part Cherokee, the blue-eyed, fair-skinned Ross identified as Cherokee while receiving an education in white institutions. The bilingual Ross was the perfect go-between in Cherokee negotiations with the U.S. government. As was the case with the wealthy elite across the Civilized Tribes, Ross was an enslaver.
Despite the efforts of Civilized Tribes to adopt all aspects of Euro-American culture, the U.S. government broke numerous treaties, seizing millions of acres of land. Finally, during Andrew Jackson’s presidency, federal and state supporters of Native expulsion worked together to compel Cherokees to migrate from the South to Indian Territory, western lands acquired in 1803 in The Louisiana Purchase.
In 1835, an unauthorized political faction of Cherokee men, believing removal was inevitable, signed the Treaty of New Echota. The Cherokee Nation agreed to surrender claims to its remaining territories for $5 million and western lands in the so-called Indian Territory, located in present-day Oklahoma.
Congress amended and ratified the unauthorized treaty knowing it lacked the approval of the Cherokee National Council or the signature of John Ross. And thus, the Treaty of New Echota provided the legal pretext for the forced removal of Indigenous tribes known today as the Trail of Tears.
After failing to stop the treaty’s implementation, Ross assumed the task of shepherding the migration of the Cherokee—and hundreds of enslaved Africans—on their grueling trek from the southeast to present-day Oklahoma. The arduous journey to the Indian Territory stretched over 1,000 miles through parts of Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Tennessee.
During what is known as the removal era, U.S. troops forced approximately 50,000 Native Americans and their enslaved Africans from their ancestral homelands. The removal claimed between 4,000 and 5,000 Cherokee lives, including Ross’s wife, who died near Little Rock, Arkansas.
Although he is only mentioned briefly in the 1619 Project, A New Origin Story, Ross’s story, and Jefferson’s, illustrate the fact that much of what we think we know about America’s past has little to do with historical truth. As with much of American history, the representation of Native Americans as little more than “noble savages” overlooks the level of assimilation, good and bad, within the Civilized Tribes.
But for many Republicans, the mere discussion of the uncomfortable aspects of the country’s history is equivalent to “radical woke culture.” But the GOP’s machinations may have unexpected consequences.
By attacking Nikole Hannah-Jones and her work, Republicans only prove her point.
I read similar accounts in the book Native Nations: A Millenium in North America by Kathleen Duval. A fascinating read that took me deeper into Native American history than I knew existed.