We’re not going back
By Blog Editor
Trace Hentz (on WHY ICWA MATTERS)
Can you imagine
this: you are a young girl and someone throws a bag over your head and ties
your wrists and you end up on a boat? And that boat takes you to an island? And
there are others there, just like you?
Can you imagine
the horror of this, of being abducted?
This really happened
in the Americas but we are just finding out about
it. Brown University in Rhode Island is
investigating Indigenous slavery, finally looking at it in 2022. I studied this
slavery of American Indian people back in 2000 and wrote a paper called First
Contact. I read the paper at NAJA in Florida. Most did believe me but it was so
hard to find proof.
Who did this
slavery? Not just Spain and France, it was England, too. Some call this method colonizing the Americas and Indian people were
just another commodity, a way to make money.
Scholars now
estimate that between 2.5 and 5 million Natives were enslaved in the Americas
between 1492 and the late nineteenth century – an astonishing number by any
measure, even compared to the approximately 12.5 million Africans who were
brought as slaves from Africa in this same time period. This is a
long-neglected aspect of North American history in the age of European empires,
one historians are now exploring in much greater depth. To begin to tabulate
the immensity of indigenous slavery in the Americas and to centralize the
research that is being done, the team of researchers I’m leading are
documenting as many instances as possible of indigenous enslavement in the
Americas between 1492 and 1900. BROWN
UNIVERSITY (www.indigenousslavery.org)
Another example:
The Treaty of Hartford was
signed in 1637 and a different version was found hiding in the British Museum
20+ years ago. That discovery of a piece of paper in the UK didn’t make
any headlines in American or New England newspapers.
The final act of the Pequot
War was on September 21, 1638, when Miantinomi (Narragansett Sachem), Uncas (or
Poquiam, Mohegan Sachem), John Haynes, Roger Ludlow and Edward Hopkins signed a
tripartite treaty. Known as the Treaty of Hartford, the
articles of agreement specified: Forbade any followers of Sassacus (Pequot Sachem) to be called
Pequots.
Governor
John Winthrop (Slave owner: Harvard)
(1588–1649) Overseer (1637–1649) His Slaves:
The wife and two unnamed sons of Pequot Sachem Mononotto. At least four other unnamed Indigenous people,
two men and two women. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2022/4/26/harvard-legacy-of-slavery-report/
WE ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO KNOW
For academics and scholars who
write history, they definitely knew about the extermination of First Nations
Indigenous people, and their murders and their enslavement, but conveniently
chose not
to write about it. They knew
the evidence was right there all along, but they chose not to document
it.
‘I agree that much of this
history was hiding in plain sight (and in many published documents and sources
that historians had used for decades to research colonial history in New
England.’ —Ohio State University Professor Margaret
Ellen Newell, History Department (Her book, Brethren by Nature: New England Indians,
Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery, received the 2016
James Rawley prize for best book on the history of race relations in America,
Cornell Press. (Her response to an email
inquiry by author Trace Hentz) *
Most Americans don’t know that
slave owners killed their slaves without mercy, just to keep the rest in
terror, scared for their lives and their children’s lives:
“Gen. Charles LeClerc wrote the
French monarch Napoleon: We must destroy all the Negroes of the mountains, men
and women, and keep only children under 12 (then import new ones.) So the
French would need to inspire great
terror.” That is what they did.
Slavery in historical
perspective:
Slavery was the cornerstone of the colonization of the Americas. Of the
ten million or so people who crossed the Atlantic before 1800, about eight and
a half million—roughly six of every seven people—were enslaved Africans.
By the time the transatlantic trade was finally suppressed in the 1860s,
a total of 10 million to 12 million Africans had been carried into New World
slavery, while an estimated two million more had died in the passage. http://www.brown.edu/Research/Slavery_Justice/documents/SlaveryAndJustice.pdf
I’m sure plenty of you are aware
that historians (history snobs) have controlled the narratives a long long time and created
divisions in the way we think. You’d
guess right that they did this on purpose.
For years and years I searched
for the books that mention what happened to tribes in the east, how they were
loaded on boats and sold into slavery on the islands. I met people from
Bermuda who are relatives of these Eastern Indians who were enslaved.
You may not know these early
chapters of COLONIZATION and SLAVERY in the Americas. The next chapters are Residential
Boarding Schools and The Indian Adoption Projects, and all the laws made to crush
Tribal Sovereignty, etc. Let me say that SOME Euro-white people have TAKEN what
they wanted from the beginning and always invent ways to take more.
Like Goldwater Institute who is behind
the unravelling of tribal sovereignty. Like
dismantling ICWA and the federal law protecting tribes from having their
children stolen AGAIN via adoption.
Universities across the United
States and the world have been forced to confront connections to slavery
throughout their histories. From Brown to Yale, Oxford and in South Africa,
students, faculty, and administrations wrestle with how to expose, conceal,
honor, or memorialize the legacies of slavery.
I wonder if “they” realize how
much they suppressed
and oppressed
history by keeping it theirs, locked up in academia archives, in costly history
books, in their versions. Today European churches and especially Spain’s
churches and cathedrals are
crammed full of stolen and looted gold from Peru: Gold that was mined by Indigenous
slaves from the Americas.
Oh, our Indian bones are still
locked up in their dusty drawers, too, in those same Ivy League Schools.
To them Indians are the distant past, relics, disappeared. Some of
these schools are sweating the revelations how they profited from the slave
trade, too, of course.
We are not going back.
We will
not allow the future of Tribal Nations to experience HUMAN TRAFFICKING again via
adoption or slavery.
If the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) fails we will write a
stronger law.
I wrote more about this history here:
https://pressbooks.pub/cosmicglue/chapter/chapter-4/
