this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2024
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I'm all for the general gist, but "no criminals?" Bullshit.
They had slavery. Don't imagine it was a utopia just because colonizers hadn't made it worse yet.
They, like most other people in the world, had slavery, genocide, theft, the death penalty, and all sorts of other bad things. None of this excuses colonialism, at all. But to pretend that native peoples were some kind of wonderful noble savages is very very racist in and of itself. Even this comment is fairly racist because I just implied some kind of homogenous culture in North American indigenous peoples, which was obviously not the case.
Yeah but they didnt have a single instance of movie piracy.
YoU wOUldNt dOwNLoAd a HorSe
The self flagellation is a bit much, but I get it.
I mean, the quote is from a first nations person. The only one “pretending that native peoples were some kind of wonderful noble savage” is the person the quote is attributed to. A holy man of the Lakota tribe. Calling him discussing his tribe racist is…weird.
Comparison of "we" versus "our white brothers" is a racial one and not a tribal one.
Who exactly are you talking about when you say "they"? Indigenous peoples weren't all the same culture and didn't have all the same cultural practices.
WTF
I was all set to type up a little semi agreeing comment about how it was a continent-spanning complex mixture of very different tribes with different cultures and practices, only some of whom practice slavery
But I don't really know what I'm talking about so I read a little and I got distracted by this
And this
What the fuck was going on with the Native Americans
People being monstrous to each other is the norm. We're the weirdos.
Tru dat
It also helps that for the most part we have food and shelter and indoor plumbing refrigeration and etc
You seem like an expert on the topic, do you know if they had chattel slavery?
You seem like an expert on the topic, do those goalposts come with wheels?
Uh that was my first comment. How did I move the goalposts? How would you have asked the question? The other comment gave a decent answer. Not sure why you're offended. It's a legit question
I read your comment as being as snarky as mine was. I didn't realize it was an honest question, sorry.
Not until white people, no.
Source: am Cherokee and we didn't have chattel slavery until we were deemed "the south" and tried to fit in. Then some (that were rich enough) got slaves, and treated them horribly. Before that, "slaves" were more like indentured servants in that they could conceivably get freedom and were considered part of the tribe.
There was a huge exhibit in Tahleqah in the Cherokee courthouse museum last summer all about it. Even named names.
Indentured servitude is slavery. Full stop.
Indentured servitude is NOT chattel slavery. That's also not what pre-colonial Cherokee practiced, but it's a closer concept. It's a much longer oral explanation that I doubt you'd accept anyway.
I suggest you look up the definitions of both before equating the two. I'm partially Cherokee, and another part was a white man who was shipped to the American colonies as an indentured servant, under penalty of death. After 14 years he was free, purchased land, chose a wife, and had a family. That family wasn't born into slavery, the children weren't sold and shipped off as soon as they could be weaned from their mother's breast, and he was given all the rights that a white landowner could have in the 1700s. Someone sold into, or born into, chattel slavery could not do this. They were born, lived, and died at the mercy of their master.
There is a reason historians make a distinction. No, neither is acceptable. But chattel slavery was not practiced by native tribes prior to colonization.
You're Cherokee? Nice to meet you my very, very distant cousin. My white ancestors came in two waves, in the first most died during witch trials. The second wave (the relevant one) was a few Indentured servants, all but one died of bring overworked. That's a distressing common patttern of indentured servitude, there was an end date but you were unlikely to survive your master trying to get the best out of his investment. To call I Indentured Servitude less than slavery is degrading to every one of those people. For a more modern analogy, if Indentured Servitude isn't a form of slave labor, then prison labor, which is even listed in the Constitution as a form of slave labor is not in fact slavery.
Well I never said indentured servitude wasn't a form of slavery, but I wanted to make it clear that it wasn't chattel slavery like was mentioned earlier. I don't want the two equated, because while some people don't like the thought of "degrees of slavery", I think it's absolutely warranted as human beings in indentured servitude were thought of as human, but chattel slaves were not.
Indentured servitude was a huge step up from slavery though. It was (at least in Europe) a direct result of feudalism: just like the Duke swears allegiance to the king, gives him levies and taxes in exchange for protection, the serf was in a kind of feudal relationship. He received protection and a land to work (or a job in general) in exchange for a tithe and days of free labor. He wasn't treated as a commodity, bought and sold at a market, he was more like an apprentice, a subordinate or something of that kind.
E: i apparently confused classical servitude with indentured servitude💀 point still stands, slaves were slaves and there was no way for slaves to be freed if not by will of their masters.
E: also, goes without saying, if you were born a slave you would (most likely) have died a slave and so on for your children. It wasn't like that for indentured serfs, the contracts were signed for a specific amount of time, and they could "purchase their liberty" through their labor. Still an unjust system, but comparing it to slavery is just watering down the term tbh.
Most indentured servants never saw their contract end date, their masters would work them to death first.
Yeah, that makes sense to me. I would've been very surprised if they had chattel slavery on any level similar to the US.
It's interesting some people were offended I even brought it up. It's like they prefer to pretend all slavery was the same. I'm curious if they ever wonder who/what benefits from that mentality/narrative
Thanks for the info on that exhibit. It sounds super interesting!
chortle
Criminality as we understand it is a European concept. Native Americans had relatively advanced societies before the colonial settlers came through and genocided hundreds of tribes. Their politics were pretty complex, but they didn't have criminals the way we understand the term.
I wasn't able to dig much up on precolonial crime and punishment. Where did you find this?
I had some better luck digging with pre colonial natives crime US
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3n0u88/what_sort_of_criminal_law_did_native_american/ is of particular interest