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2004 Atlantic Seminar Working Paper Abstracts
The following list of abstracts describes the papers presented at the August 2004 meeting of the Atlantic History Seminar, “Indigenous Cultures, 1500-1825: Adaptation, Annihilation, or Persistence?” A copy of the program, where paper titles may be viewed in the context of the sessions, is also available. Links from each author's name on the program pages will return the reader to the appropriate abstract here.
Carmen Alveal. “Land, Politics, and Society in Colonial Brazil: A Native Perspective”
This paper deals with a conflict over land in the Mangaratiba Region, in the Captaincy of Rio de Janeiro during the eighteenth century. The major agents of the conflict were the Indians themselves, indicating that the struggle for land was not only between whites and Indians, or among whites. The Indians’ lawsuit over possession of land reveals an internal struggle for power in the old Mangaratiba Indian Settlement. For the purpose of the research, the sources used were the judicial litigations judged at the Appelation Court of the Tribunal da Relação, kept at the National Archive. [WP# 04014]
David Aworawo. “Cultural Atavism and Adaptation: The Varying Responses to Western Culture in Benin and Warri, 1520-1750”
In the early period of European expansion, many Portuguese explorers, missionaries and merchants travelled southward along the west coast of Africa, reaching Benin in 1485 and Warri shortly thereafter. Adventurers from other European countries followed about a century later, and from the sixteenth century onward, Benin and Warri, like other African states visited by the Europeans, began intensely to witness “the impact of the West.” Located around the Atlantic coast in Southern Nigeria, Benin and Warri were inhabited by diverse groups whose cultures came to be greatly influenced by the activities of the Europeans. Many, including kings and princes, became Christians and learned the Portuguese language. However, whereas European cultural influence endured among the Itsekiri of Warri, it generally did not among the Edo-speaking people of Benin. This was a reflection of the differing perception of the people of European culture up to the mid-eighteenth century. [WP# 04017]
R. Jovita Baber. “Vexatious Outsiders: The Shaping of Colonial Spaces in Tlaxcala, New Spain, 1550-1590”
This paper examines the development of race laws in colonial Latin America, and the use of those laws by a native community in New Spain (now, Mexico), called Tlaxcala. It aims to understand, first, how the activities of Tlaxcalans shaped the formation of law, and, second, how law and their use of law shaped the racial landscape of Tlaxcala. Toward the end of the century, the native population fell to its nadir—as thousands of native people died from plagues; concurrently, the Spanish population increased significantly—as Spaniards bought, rented, and settled on uncultivated lands. Although the shifts in the racial composition of the region were particularly notable at the end of the century, racial transformations had begun with contact. With the arrival of Cortés in 1519, the native nobility gifted several of their daughters to Cortés and his captains to secure an alliance between the two peoples. After the conquest, they married their daughters to Spanish conquistadors and, later, to low-ranking Spanish officials. Many Spaniards settled in Tlaxcala with the implicit consent of Tlaxcalans. Some lived with Tlaxcalan commoners. These mixed-race couples begat mestizo (Spanish/Indian mixed-race) children, in and out of wedlock. Thus, by the end of the century, the mestizo population had increased considerably. Despite these demographic shifts, the leaders of Tlaxcala insisted that the community was an “Indian” (indio) community, and petitioned for laws to prohibit Spaniards, mestizos, and other races, and frequently sued to evict Spaniards from the community. Rather than being against Spaniards, however, I show that Tlaxcalans opposed recalcitrant Spaniards who refused to conform to community norms and authorities. Using the laws strategically, they shaped the racial landscape of the region. Moreover, I show that culture and identity—not race, as scholars generally argue—defined the separate Repúblicas for Indians and Spaniards. [WP# 04013]
Heidi Bohaker. “Contesting the Middle Ground: The Dynamic Tradition of Indige-nous Kinship Networks and Cross-Cultural Alliances in North America’s Eastern Great Lakes Region, 1600-1700”
Atlantic world histories such as Richard White's 1991 The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 enrich historical understanding of the early modern period by including indigenous peoples as actors on a broader geopolitical stage. However, by privileging narratives of contact, encounter, and exchange, such histories inadvertently sever indigenous cultures from their own historical experiences. White's “middle ground” constructs such a disconnect. This new cultural space, White argues, was co-created by the refugees of Algonquian-speaking (Anishinaabeg) peoples and representatives of the French empire, after the Anishinaabeg world was “shattered” following epidemic disease and mid-seventeenth century Iroquois attacks. My research, in contrast, finds cultural resilience and continuity, which becomes visible only through understanding the Anishinaabeg world view. Oral traditions, iconography, and material culture illuminate a rich, on-going history of how long-standing kinship networks and cross-cultural alliances shaped the region’s political geography throughout the period. [WP# 04020]
Denise Ileana Bossy. “‘A White Eagle Wing and a Yamasee Boy’: Indian Slavery in South Carolina after the Yamasee War, 1721-1732”
This paper examines the lasting importance of Indian slavery in the greater South Carolina region after the devastating “Yamasee” War—a pan-Indian war that almost destroyed the British colony. I challenge the traditional scholarly argument that the war signaled the end of Indian slavery. Instead, by considering Indian models of slavery and captivity, I demonstrate how and why Indian slavery remained vitally important not only to Indian communities throughout the region but to European, particularly British, as well. Indians were proactive in Indian enslavement both before and after the war, with distinct traditions of slavery that shaped trade, politics, warfare, and diplomacy. Yet, analyses of Indian slavery after the Yamasee War ignore Indian models of slavery and the salient role it played in local intercultural and international affairs. Though burdened by the common problems encountered with colonial source materials, this paper draws on several key documents to reconstruct Indian conceptions of slavery after the war—particularly peace talks among Creek, Cherokee, Chickasaw, and British head men that were recorded verbatim. We are left with a deeper understanding of the dynamics of Indian slavery and its relationship to this Atlantic world. [WP# 04003]
Patricia Lopes Don. “The Death of Don Carlos of Texcoco: The Indian Inquisition in Early Mexico City, 1539”
In November 1539, the Inquisition of New Spain tried Don Carlos of Texoco, a renowned leader of the indigenous community in the Valley of Mexico, and condemned him to death by burning. The death of Don Carlos brought to a climax several years of inquisitional activities of the church of New Spain, as religious and civil leaders attempted to coerce indigenous communities to conform to Christian behaviors and beliefs. The Spaniards had recognized for some time that the indigenous peoples were far from internalizing a Christian world-view, though they were nominally baptized. The history of the Inquisition in Spain suggested that it might be a very effective instrument for forging a cohesive political community, and the archbishop of Mexico City, Fray Juan de Zumarraga, had made himself an enthusiastic enforcer in the mid- to late 1530s. Ultimately, his notorious trial and burning of a prominent indigenous leader in 1539 forced the Spanish to reconsider whether a religious war for the indigenous spirit was worth provoking a possible indigenous rebellion. Though Don Carlos offended on innumerable spiritual grounds—ecclesiastical insult, blasphemy, lewdness, bigotry, and incitement to homicide—it was his rash talk denying Spanish authority and claiming indigenous sovereignty that brought him to the stake. This paper focuses on Don Carlos’ biography, the chain of events leading to his inquisition, and his point of view as representative of the indigenous elite’s reaction to Christian authority and enforcement. The paper suggests that Don Carlos’ resentment built from the year 1532, when mendicants, especially Franciscans, began a rigorous campaign to end polygamy among the Indian nobility, a direct threat to the indigenous elite’s economic, social, and political power in the Indian communities. [WP# 04012]
Andrew B. Fisher. “Primordial Identities Imagined and Contested: Peasant Communities and Memory in the Eighteenth-Century Hot Country of Guerrero, Mexico”
This paper examines indigenous peasant communities in the hot country of the mid-Balsas River Depression of western Mexico under Spanish colonial rule (1521-1821). Sparsely populated prior to the conquest, the area’s villages tottered on the brink of extinction for much of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Survival, in fact, often entailed either redefining community affiliation to accommodate needed outsiders or resurrecting lost settlements decades, if not centuries, after their original disappearance. Modest demographic recovery and commercial expansion in the late colonial period required closing off village bound-aries to perceived non-Indians as a way to protect besieged resources. This strategy entailed asserting a new interpretation of the community anchored in a primordial past that overlooked more recent and problematic developments. Case studies of three area villages—Zirándaro, Tanganguato, and Cacalotepeque—illustrate the limitations of such efforts and offer insight into the meaning of indigenous collective survival by the end of the colonial era. [WP# 04007]
Maximilian C. Forte. “Writing the Caribs Out: The Construction and Demystification of the ‘Deserted Island’ Thesis for Trinidad”
One of the tenets of the modern historiography of Trinidad is that its former aboriginal inhabitants were practically extinct by the middle of the nineteenth century and that even prior to that Trinidad was virtually a deserted island. As a consequence, Trinidad's modern cultural development could then be cast as suffering from a dearth of indigeneity. I argue that what is essentially a terra nullius principle is the constructed result of racialized assumptions and naming practices embedded in colonial policy and historical literature of the late 1700s to early 1800s. The enforced silences on Amerindians in many historical sources that now form part of the canon of Trinidadian historiography present a problem of absence, contradicted by ethnographic realities of indigenous presence. Amerindians were increasingly racialized and labeled in a manner that would permit writers eventually to erase them from the historical register. Depictions of the irredeemable savage, romantic primitivist nostalgia, and what I call “pathetic primitivism” mark the writings of the period in question. In the latter case, Amerindians were defined as dwindling in numbers (according to notions of racial purity), and were depicted as child-like, untrue to their heritage, ignorant of their culture, spiritually broken, and lifeless in character. The political economy of this region of the Atlantic world is critical for understanding the interests at work behind the production of these various narratives and images of the Amerindians in Trinidad, ranging from European colonial questions of “Who are the Indians?” to “Where are the Indians?” [WP# 04016]
Leonardo Hernandez. “The Periphery of the Periphery: Pre-Atlantic and Atlantic History as Seen from Southeastern Mesoamerica”
My paper focuses on the pre- and post-contact history of native societies along the southern edges of Mesoamerica, in particular modern-day El Salvador and Guatemala. As is traditionally the case in explaining the collapse of the Aztec state, many historians tend to interpret post-contact developments in the region in terms of defining moments and ruptura—the phenomenon of a clean slate that gave us the concept of the “Indian” and victim. Certainly, pre-Hispanic societies would never again be the same after 1492, but the history of the Caribbean Basin and southern Mesoamerica had countless examples of “defining moments” before the arrival of Europeans. This paper will look at what they were and their importance in order to discuss cultural adaptation and negotiation in a region that became peripheral to the workings of empires and commercial systems. Because of this fact, political, commercial, and cultural hegemony in southern Mesoamerica has not been characterized by homogenous processes of acculturation imposed by outsiders but by contrasting rates of cultural negotiation mediated by such factors as precedent, geography, and ecology. [WP# 04009]
Kittiya Lee. “Among the Vulgar, the Erudite, and the Sacred: The Oral Life of Colonial Amazonia”
This essay examines the development of Língua Geral Amazônica (LGA) in the Brazilian Amazon in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Based on dialects evolved among speakers of the Tupi-Guarani language family, LGA originated from the late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Atlantic seaside barter between white traders and native communities. Similar to the roles played by other línguas gerais in colonial Brazil, LGA became the language of trade, contact, and colonization in Amazonia. It was employed not only in the inter-ethnic communications between European and Indian, but also to mitigate interactions among whites from disparate regions of the Old World as well as among Amerindians from distinct tribes. In this study, I propose that increasing contact with the Portuguese language, the linguistic legacies left by the Tupinambá, and missionaries’ on-going utilization of translations recorded in the sixteenth-century dialect of Tupi acted together to trigger syntactical and lexical alterations in LGA. By the mid-eighteenth century in colonial Amazonia, LGA had developed three registers of orality, which I describe as expressing vulgar, erudite, and sacred speech. [WP# 04013]
Philip Levy. “Rattlesnakes and the Competition between Indian and European Fellow Travelers”
Colonial-era travel was full of perils for the many Indians and Europeans who took to the trail in each other’s company. Among these many dangers few were as well documented, or as imbued with cultural meanings, as were chance encounters with a trailside rattlesnake. Indian and European travel partners brought to the trail very different understandings of the nature of these animals and how best to deal with them, while believing that their own way of coping with serpentine peril was the most logical and efficient. This chapter explores the various meanings Natives and Europeans attached to rattlesnakes, and what happened when these deeply held ideas clashed on the trail. Although fellow travelers appropriated elements of each other’s habits over the colonial era, they neither built a shared way of confronting snakes, nor did one way come to dominate. Instead, Indians and Europeans used snake encounters (and other travel moments like these) to locate, refine, and maintain cultural differences. [WP# 04005]
Daniel R. Mandell. “Land and Labor, Race and Class: Indian Persistence and Change in Southern New England, 1780-1820”
Indian communities in southern New England that survived the Revolution were distinguished by reliance on fishing and hunting, subsistence agriculture, and informal landholding by women as well as men. This economic and cultural system was reinforced, ironically, by state laws and guardians. At the same time, many Indians peddled baskets and medicine to rural white households, or moved to the growing port towns to work as whalers or laborers. These individuals, who often married African descendants or poor whites, were sometimes considered Indians, at other times blacks, but generally treated as part of the emerging proletariat. Even as Indians developed these connections to the Atlantic world, economic and political forces reshaped New England’s society and economy. An ironic result was that the remaining Indian reservations became reservoirs of “anti-market” traditions that drew poor whites and blacks threatened by an increasingly uncertain economy. These cross-currents make Indians and their communities useful places to examine not only Native continuity and change, but also the intersection and divergence of race, class, and identity in the early Republic. [WP# 04002]
José Gabriel Martínez-Serna. “Instruments of Empire: The Jesuit-Indian Encounter in the New World Borderlands”
This essay analyzes the common elements in the Jesuit-Indian encounters in the Americas during the seventeenth century in the context of European imperial rivalries. The territorial expansion of European colonial empires in the New World created borderlands, areas where the Indians and their culture played an active role in everyday life and the coercive reach of the imperial governments was limited. The Jesuit-Indian encounter occurred in different settings: they had to contend with national cultures and imperial institutions of which their missions were an integral part, and during the period under discussion these powers were often at war with each other, both in Europe and the Americas. Despite these differences, there is also the complicated issue of “Indian” as a coherent category of analysis. Most of these groups were unrelated, and many even mutually incomprehensible. And yet throughout the American continent, the Jesuits’ pastoral techniques and missionary strategies show similarities, suggesting a common institutional framework beyond the respective national-imperial and Indian cultures. A comparison of the Jesuit-Indian encounter in the borderlands of the Americas can bring into relief the common Jesuit contribution to the borderlands of the New World. The early history of the Jesuit order is crucial in understanding a common Ignatian episteme, formed by a common training, and the special role the periphery has in the Ignatian vocation. The importance of the Society’s missions in the ethnohistory of the North and South American Indians is without parallel. In the borderlands of New France and New York, and the peripheral captaincy of Maranhão in the Brazilian Amazon region we see the complex (and sometimes paradoxical) role the order played in establishing modern political and cultural boundaries. Using the method of comparative history, I use these two Jesuit-Indian encounters to demonstrate the importance of the Jesuit missions in the expansion and consolidation of the European colonial empires in the Americas during the seventeenth century. [WP# 04011]
Andrew Miller. “Abenaki-European Relations before 1725: Adaptation, Persistence, or Evolution?”
The experience of the Abenakian peoples of northern New England before 1725 was one of ever-greater integration into the early modern Atlantic world, as their local material productions, and then their religious, political, and military allegiances, became commodities of value to their colonial neighbors and then the imperial systems to which those colonies belonged. Study of Abenakian cultural activity during this period reveals features that one may classify as adaptive or persistent, but on the whole neither rubric seems especially useful as an analytical tool in this case. The key factor influencing Abenaki-European relations seems not to be any creative or conservative tendencies in Abenaki culture, but rather the particular material circumstances in which those relations took place. As the Abenakis’ home lay on the margins of European colonization, European interest in and power over the region was weak, and this weakness was the primary shaper of Abenaki-European interaction. As such, study of the region may provide a model for exploring indigenous-European interaction in other marginal areas of the Atlantic world. [WP# 04001]
Edward Osowski. “Underneath Triumphal Arches: Eighteenth-Century Indigenous Survival in New Spain's Urban Core”
This essay draws on a remarkable set of archival sources that describe eighteenth-century indige-nous Mexicans’ struggle to construct, coordinate, and arrange triumphal arches for the Catholic festival of Corpus Christi. The street arrangement of the arches, which the Nahua elite of Mexico City brokered, the high-ranking rural municipal officials who brought their community members to the festival, and the conflicts between indigenous and Spanish municipal councils are presented. An ethnohistorical analysis of the indigenous organization of the festival suggests that native conceptions of political order survived into the late eighteenth century even within the strongest concentration of Hispanic ideology, political power, and economic strength in New Spain. The Corpus Christi records dramatize direct conflict and negotiation over the control of festival labor between Europeans and indigenous people. Such highly local perspectives are beneficial to forming an accurate portrait of the give and take of the core and periphery in Atlantic system. [WP# 04008]
Alan G. Shackelford. “Navigating the Opportunities of New Worlds: The Land of the Illinois in Prehistory, Protohistory, and History”
When the Illinois Indians first encountered the Europeans in the middle of the seventeenth century, they were already experienced at navigating cross-cultural frontiers and adapting to new worlds. The late prehistoric archaeological record of the region occupied by the historic Illinois indicates it had witnessed dynamic social, cultural, and environmental change over the preceding three centuries. Cross-cultural ties with Oneota peoples and the extension of the range of North American bison had only recently attracted Central Algonkian Illinois-Miami speakers toward the Mississippi Valley from their ancestral Ohio homes. Flexible notions of community, adaptive subsistence practices, and mechanisms for creating new while maintaining old cross-cultural relationships facilitated the westward migration of the Illinois. These experiences on the Illinois’ “Old World” frontier provided them with a meaningful past upon which to draw as they faced a context changed by integration into the early modern Atlantic world. [WP# 04019]
Gunvor Simonsen. “African and Afro-Caribbean Voices in the Lower Courts of the Danish West Indies”
What happened when the court scribe meticulously recorded the proceedings of the lower court and the police court in the Danish West Indies? Or, to ask the question differently, which representational structures determined the transformation of oral proceedings into written text? Asking these questions allows for an exploration of how court records can be used to construct interpretations of Afro-Caribbean culture in the Danish West Indies. Focusing first on court procedures and second on what enslaved Africans and Afro-Caribbeans told the court about the practices of obeah and other expressions of spiritual authority, I argue that the interests of Africans and Afro-Caribbeans were instrumental in determining the final outcome of the representational practice of the lower courts and the material result of the practice—namely, the court record. [WP# 04015]
Jessica Ross Stern. “Gifts in Southeastern American Indian and Anglo-American Exchange”
Historians who have characterized gift exchange by looking only at the moment of transfer, and not the entire life of a gift, have missed the broader implications of American Indian and British settler gift exchange in southeastern North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Arguing that the gift was an extension of the giver, this paper outlines the various ways southeastern American Indian groups produced, presented, received, and used gifts. Although settlers in Georgia and South Carolina fully understood how to use gifts to encapsulate and transmit their identity, they did not develop a system to publicly recognize the valuations inscribed in gifts received from Native Americans. Instead of beginning with origins, this paper proposes that the generative method, which starts by examining a series of performances and only later seeks to understand how these performances were limited or accentuated by one’s native culture, is the most effective way to understand cross-cultural trade. [WP# 04004]
Astrid Steverlynck. “The Women of Matininó: Amazons, Exchange, and the Origins of Society”
In this paper I explore the significance of the exchange of ciba and guanín through an analysis of the myth about the Women of Matininó among the Taíno people of Hispaniola and other myths about amazon-like women in lowland South America. The myth refers to the origins of society and introduces a principle of social regeneration achieved through exchange, symbolically represented by ciba and guanín. These myths help us to understand the fundamental significance of exchange as the basis for social regeneration in Amerindian society. At the same time, these ideas throw light on the encounter between Europeans and Amerindians and the exchanges that took place between them. [WP# 04013]
Irene Vasquez. “From Indigenous to Native Others: The Changing Constructs of Hijos de la Frontera in Eighteenth-Century Northern Mexico”
My paper, acknowledging transatlantic-impelled developments, analyzes social changes among the indigenous peoples in colonial Nueva Vizcaya, a region including Chihuahua, Durango, Sinaloa, and Sonora, during the eighteenth century. I have found through a careful re-reading and textual analysis of Spanish chronicles, priest’s reports, and Native petitions that cultural negotiations were basic to relationships between Spaniards and Native peoples in the Borderlands region. Indigenous peoples such as the Tepehuan resisted Spanish-imposed settlements, Christianization, and subordination to civil and religious officials throughout the eighteenth century. [WP# 04010]
Sophie White. “‘Dressed in the French Manner’: Illiniwek Wives of Frenchmen in the Illinois Country during the French Regime”
This paper focuses on a group of Amerindian women who entered into sanctified marriages with French men in the Illinois Country, Upper Louisiana, starting in the late seventeenth century. Extant evidence suggests that these women made a wholesale shift to European styles of dressing; at first glance, their material culture would thus appear to anticipate the definitive shift of the region toward European dominance. And yet, the gendered analysis of indigenous and colonial societies in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries provides material for an alternative reading of the same evidence that showcases the persistence of native social and gender frameworks, albeit in a radically altered context. In this analysis, the dynamics of the fur trade bring into relief the ways in which the display of European dress on the bodies of Amerindian wives of Frenchmen were instrumental in communicating status within French colonial and native societies. It is thus precisely through their apparent visual and material assimilation within the hegemonic colonial order that these Amerindian wives of Frenchmen, ironically, perpetuated indigenous cultures. [WP# 04021]
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