"She Better Off Dead than Jest Livin' for the Whip":
Enslaved Women's Resistance in the Nineteenth-Century Cherokee Nation
In the last half of the past century, scholars from an array of
disciplines have complicated and interrogated our understanding(s) of
slave resistance—of the resisters and the various manifestations of
resistance itself.[1]
We no longer categorize resistance as solely
centered around acts of collective rebellion grounded in slave
uprisings. Scholarly discourse about slave resistance has evolved to
incorporate the actions of enslaved women in order to manipulate their
fertility and obstruct male access to their bodies. It also includes
special languages created by enslaved people to communicate beyond the
scope of their owners' comprehension. Everyday acts of slave resistance
emerge, too, in clothing and other adornments, as well as in the
geographical spaces of celebration marked out by the enslaved far from
their owners' gaze.[2]
Yet even as our examination of slave resistance in
the Americas has expanded in depth and breadth, certain sites have only
been explored in a rather cursory manner. The interactions between
Native Americans and African-Americans, for example, have been a
relatively recent pivotal point of reference for scholars. Yet slave
resistance has become one of the most controversial, and often denied,
aspects of the discourse related to the enslavement of people of African
descent by Native Americans in nineteenth-century Indian Territory
(current-day northeastern Oklahoma).
Part of the reason for this void in Native American and
African-American historiographies is that some have argued that Native
slaveowners practiced a more "benign" or "mild" form of bondage compared
to European-American enslavers. For example, Theda Perdue, in her
seminal work on slavery in the Cherokee Nation, posits that "although
Cherokee planters required hard work from their bondsmen, they probably
treated their slaves much better on the average than did their white
counterparts . . .. Thus relative leniency on the part of masters seems
to have been characteristic of Cherokee slavery before and after
removal."[3]
In his dissertation, Michael Roethler also supports this
hypothesis. He claims that "the benign attitude thus demonstrated to the
Negroes by the Cherokees leads one to conclude that slavery existed
among the Cherokees in a mild form . . .. Surely, the slaves dreamed of
freedom. Until that happy day would arrive, however, they remained
content with their lot among the Cherokees."[4]
The 1849 slave narrative
of Henry Bibb also reinforces the notion of a "mild" form of slavery
practiced by Indians.[5]
Because of this reasoning, many have not been
compelled to pursue this topic. Rather, in most cases, it has been
ignored, as though slave resistance in Native nations did not exist. As
a result, the commodification and vulnerability of enslaved people of
African descent in Native nations have been veiled time and again,
buried by a particular construction of Native spaces as solely sites of
Black refuge. In lieu of a safe haven, the world of bondsmen and
bondswomen in the Cherokee Nation was defined by their owners'
individual needs, as well as the overall laws of the Nation.
In addition to (mis)conceptions of "mild" bondage in Indian
territory, the traditional story of collusion and cooperation between
African-Americans and Indians still shapes the narrative of Black-Indian
interaction in the United States. However, the stories of enslaved
people in the Cherokee Nation dispute such a generalization and identify
it as a selective representation of the past. In fact, the specific
pathways of resistance taken by enslaved people in the Cherokee Nation
illustrate some commonalties among slave resisters and acts of
transgression in Indian Territory and the southeastern states. Unruly
enslaved people on their owners' farms and plantations in the Cherokee
Nation subtly and overtly expressed their opposition to bondage on a
daily basis. Those who survived the horrors of the Trail of Tears tested
the chains of bondage in the new Cherokee country west of the
Mississippi.
Scattered documents reveal a partial story of the resistance of
enslaved African-Indians to daily indignities of bondage. Perhaps like
no other topic in African-American-Native American studies, the reality
of slave resistance interrogates romantic, essentialist, and monolithic
conceptions of Black-Native collusion. Just as notions of
African-American slave resistance in the Americas evolved in the past
century, with heightened emphasis on the agency of enslaved women and
men living within the confines of the peculiar institution, a similar
transformation has become necessary in the exploration of the
enslavement of people of African descent by Native Americans. Indeed,
the interactions between enslaved African-Indians and Native American
enslavers might provide evidence for a reconceptualization of slave
resistance that speaks to the dynamic power relations between enslaved
and enslaver that are informed and problematized by notions of race,
gender, place, and nation.
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