MONDAY

Presentations

Last Friday was a great start Style of presentation is not fixed Can be just questions Can be presentation and questions Can use power point, video or anything

that helps (I also like the free food idea but, it will not affect your grade)

Race and Contact

Shifting position of Native Americans

Gary Nash Red, White and

Black

One of earliest use of this color split 1784

Thomas Jefferson Notes on the State of Virginia Drew heavily “on what I have seen of man, white,

red, and black.” By this time these labels were well

known and used But, within the phrase are

indications of past understanding

White, Red, and Black The order of these words

reflects an earlier (16th and 17th Century) hierarchical ideas of race

Not be until middle of the eighteenth century that this divisions became solidified in these colors

Before this there was some flexibility in descriptions of Native Americans

Africa and Africans Early contact with Africa created much

literature Plays Poems Sermons Accounts of exploration

As Winthrop Jordon has shown Virtually all of these texts displayed the

“dark continent” and its people as unattractive, heathen and uncivil”

To describe Africans Europeans focused on skin color

English“Blacks, Blackamores or Negroes”

Spanish, Portuguese, Italian“Negros and negras”

Dutch“Negers”

All these words also had negative connotations

SpanishNegro – Gloomy, dismal, unfit, and

wretched

FrenchNoir – Foul, dirty, base, wicked

EnglishSimilar negative connotations

“The Libian dusky in his parched skin, The Moor all tawney both without and in, The Southern man, a black deformed

Elfe The Northern white like unto God

Himselfe” Thomas Peyton

The Glasse of Time, in the First Age (1620)

The link to color and people was fixed So was their position in relation to

Europeans

In contrast Native Americans would not be codified is such a color/identity way until the mid 18th century

Before this Native American identity was tied not to color but to culture

Critical pejorative terms social rather biological

There was no single term that linked to Native American

“Indian (with occasional West added )”

“Natives” “Savages (Salvages)” “Barbarians” “Heathens” All frequently used terms to describe

Native Americans Although descriptors were not often

color based Europeans did expend much ink on

Native Americans colors

For two centuries afterwards 1492 most accounts discussed complexion

Columbus, natives in the Caribbean “not at all black, but the colour of

Canarians” Sir Walter Raliegh, women of

Guiana “brown and tawnie”

Many reports described the “cause” of this color

Laudonniére 1587 “when they are borne they be

not so much of an olive colour and are far whiter. For the chief cause that maketh them to be this colour, proceedes annointings of oyle”

John Smith “a colour Browne when

they are of any age, but they are borne white”

John Rolfe Attributed color to

ointment and smoky houses, which, he contended, had the same effect on Indian hides that smokehouses had on English bacon

Thomas Morton (1610) “Their infants are of complexion white

as our nation, but their mothers in their infancy make a bath of . . . Such things will staine their skinne for ever, wherein they dip and washe them to make them tawney”

Rev William Crashaw A “Virginian Indian, that was with us

here in England, whose skinne . . . Was little more black or tawnie, than one of ours would be if he should go naked in the south of England”

These descriptions and the linkage to English color

Highlighted major difference in view of Europeans of Africans and Native Americans

Africans were different in bodies and nature

Native Americans in nurture and culture

Does not mean that prejudice was absent

Europeans criticisms included Nakedness

Cannibalism Barbarism

Idolatry Devil worship

Brutality Lechery

Indolence Slovenliness

But Europeans also praised Native Americans

Hospitality Integrity

Eloquence Hardiness Stoicism

Negatives usually outweighed positives

King James I summarized his subjects ethnocentric views

“beastly Indians . . . refuse of the world, and as yet aliens to the holy covenant of God”

The important phrase in the above is “as yet”

“as yet” Not matter

how much King James and his subjects despised Native American culture

They believed they could be converted to Neo- Englishmen

1634 William Wood published a book in England

Described the fauna and flora of New England

“Their swarthiness is the sun’s livery for they are born fair”

First American in 1764 carried the following footnote

“this was one of the popular errors given into by our author”

Reflected a fundamental shift from early 17th to late 18th Centuries

Americans (white settlers) began to see Native American color as fixed – and lower

Benjamin Franklin “All Africa is Black or Tawny, Asia is

chiefly Tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so”

This new classification as native color as fixed devalued them in the eyes of colonists

This change was also seen in the law

South Carolina law was passed for

“Determining all Causes and Consequences between White Man and Indian”

By 1730s Pennsylvania began to use the term “White” in its treaties with “Indians”

New York laws proscribed activities of

“Negro, Indian or Mulatto”

Another hint of shift is seen in religious language

Early 1700 Cotton Mather wrote a tale of a “Bewitched” girl who met the Devil

“He was not of a Negro but of a Tawny, or Indian color”

Also see shift of the word tawny Was an adjective

A tawny Indian Now a noun

Tawny

Conclusion

There are three major interrelated and mutually reinforcing influences for this shift in the Indians position

1) Anglo Americans anger at Indian Hostility

2) Indians rejection of Christianity and civility

3) Adoption of eighteenth century racial theories