“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.

1. For works dealing with slave resistance in the United States and the Caribbean, see, for example, Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: International Publishers, 1963); John H. Bracey, Jr., August Meier and Elliott Rudwick , eds., American Slavery: the Question of Resistance (Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1971); Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650-1838 (Bloomington Indiana University Press, 1990); Stephanie M.H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982); Sharla Fett, Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); David Barry Gaspar, Bondmen and Rebels: a Case Study of Master-Slave Relations in Antigua, with Implications for Colonial British America (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1985); David Barry Gaspar and David Patrick Geggus, eds., A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine, ed., More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996); Eugene D. Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979); Darlene Clark Hine and Kate Wittenstein, “Female Slave Resistance: The Economics of Sex,” in The Black Woman Cross-Culturally, ed. Filomina Chioma Steady (Cambridge: Schenkman, 1981), 289-299; Gary Y. Okihiro, ed., In Resistance: Studies in African, Caribbean and Afro-American History (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986); Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1985) and Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1975).[↑]
2. Camp, Closer to Freedom.[↑]
3. Theda Perdue, Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society, 1540-1866 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1979), 98[↑]
4. Michael Roethler, “Negro Slavery Among the Cherokee Indians, 1540-1866” (Ph.D. diss., Fordham University, 1964), 129.[↑]
5. The brevity of Bibb’s time in Indian Territory no doubt informed his particular experiences. Gilbert Osofsky, ed., Puttin’ on Ole Massa: The Slave Narratives of Henry Bibb, William Wells Brown and Solomon Northup (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 141.[↑]