Worshiping Power. Peter Gelderloos
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argument that slavery was already practiced in Africa, or that even before European contact, one-third or 50 percent of the population in such-and-such society were slaves. This is a confusion going back at least to Roman times, when Tacitus—used to the brutal chattel slavery of his own empire—wrote that the Germanic tribes also practiced slavery. In societies with a warrior class, there frequently also existed a class of dependents. These might be war captives, oath breakers, or people who did not participate in warfare. In some societies such dependents could be bought and sold, but in general they had rights that might include prohibitions on beatings and severe punishments, on the breaking up of families, and guarantees to food, housing, religious freedom, and dignity. Masters also had an obligation to protect their dependents. In many African societies, masters and so-called slaves worked side by side in the fields and enjoyed roughly equal living conditions. Using the same word to refer to this kind of servitude and to the murderous, totalitarian chattel slavery of the Europeans is completely misleading and inappropriate. Let’s use another example. Wage labor can accurately be described as a kind of slavery: a universal slavery in which autonomy, self-sufficiency, or running away are impossible, and the conditions of slavery are only mitigated by the fact that the slaves have the right to hire themselves out to other masters. In our society, then, some 95 percent of the population are slaves. The prior existence of dependents in African societies in no way changes the fact that the Atlantic slave trade constituted a genocidal interruption to their ways of life, just as our practice of wage slavery would not make it any less brutal for an alien civilization to cart away half our population for forced labor on an asteroid colony.
In response to threats of extermination first from English slavers and colonizers and then from US settlers, the Cherokee made a number of initial steps towards state formation before integrating themselves as subjects of the US government. It is interesting to note that before colonization, the Cherokee had already experienced an anti-authoritarian revolution. Oral histories and scholarship both suggest a popular rebellion against the Ani-kutani, a hereditary priestly class that, though not constituting a state, held a number of privileges. Before the nineteenth century, Cherokee priests had taken on a different function as medicine men, acceding to the office not through inheritance but by having their personal abilities recognized by the community.23
After the British decimated the indigenous opposition to the Virginia colony, they implemented an extensive campaign to sign alliances with indigenous groups, whom they used as agents of economic production and as proxy forces to fight the French for dominance of North America. The Cherokee accepted an alliance with the British, selling them deerskins and slaves and fighting against French proxies like the Shawnee. By the mid-eighteenth century, population pressures and land encroachments by the settlers caused the alliance to break down, and the Cherokee fought a series of wars, first against the British and later against the new American state. Before these wars, English traders and government officials had frequently tried to appoint leaders or even “emperors” to the Cherokee people, but the Cherokee resisted and retained their decentralized structure, with communal land holdings, autonomous villages, and elected leaders with strictly limited powers. After being conclusively defeated by the English and Americans, and with dispossession and forcible resettlement on the rise (but still before the Trail of Tears), the Cherokee opted for a strategy of acculturation. This was not, however, a consensus position: a band led by Dragging Canoe established eleven towns on the Chickamauga Creek and fought a guerrilla war against the settlers from 1776 to 1794.
George Washington, the greatest landlord and slaveowner of the Virginia colony and first president of the new American state, encouraged the assimilationist Cherokee to give up communal land tenure. They adopted European methods of agriculture and industry, modified their traditional gender divisions, invited Christian missionaries to convert them, and established a government in 1788. Their first three leaders, up until 1827, were all resistance figures who had fought alongside the famous Dragging Canoe. In 1821, the recently statist Cherokee were instrumental in defeating the indigenous resistance in the Creek War, handing a victory at Horseshoe Bend to General Andrew Jackson, the very man who as president would force them onto the Trail of Tears a few years later. The statist Cherokee practiced slavery, operated businesses, and engaged in commerce. In 1827, they adopted a constitution modeled on the US document, with two-tiered legislature and three branches of government. It is worth pointing out, however, that these cultural changes were most pronounced among the ascendant Cherokee elite. The majority fought for and preserved traditional ways of life, until and after the Indian Removal Act of 1830 forcibly evicted them.24
It is curious to note that in the first two centuries of contact between the Cherokee and the English, most of the Europeans who integrated themselves in Cherokee society were Scots, and secondarily Irish and Germans, whereas the settlers most notorious for encroaching on Cherokee lands were Scots-Irish from Ulster. The Scots-Irish were originally Scottish settlers whom the English Crown resettled as part of a strategy of state-formation in historically anarchic Ireland. The Scots and the Irish were people who had historically resisted state formation; meanwhile in Germany there were a great many peasants suffering from primitive accumulation and the late imposition of a modern state. Processes of state formation or state resistance create cultural differences that can last over centuries and affect whether or not people facilitate or resist state power.
The Muskogee Nation of southeastern North America faced a similar process of colonization. A part of the Muskogee clung to peaceful resistance and negotiations while others took to guerrilla resistance to try to end encroachment on their lands. Settlers practiced genocidal tactics, like slaughtering all the deer to starve out the Muskogee hunters. Eventually, the Muskogee were partially acculturated. Relations with the expanding state had created a “privileged class [that] was dependent on their colonial masters for their personal wealth.” Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz writes:
This small elite in the Southeast embraced the enslavement of Africans, and a few even became affluent planters in the style of southern planters, mainly through intermarriage with Anglos. The trading posts established by US merchants further divided Muskogee society, pulling many deeply into the US economy through dependency and debt. […]This method of colonization by co-optation and debt proved effective wherever employed by colonial powers in the world, but only when it was accompanied by extreme violence at any sign of indigenous insurgency. The United States moved across North America in this manner. While most Muskogees continued to follow their traditional democratic ways in their villages, the elite Muskogees were making decisions and compromises on their behalf that would bear tragic consequences for them all.25
The Rickahoken of central Virginia provide an even more tragic example. Defeated in an early war against the Virginia colony along with other members of the Powhatan confederacy, they resorted to an alliance with the British. In exchange for weapons and permission from the Crown to continue existing, they had to provide the British with tobacco and slaves. It is believed that the Rickahoken decimated the Shanantoah (who lived in the valley named after them, the Shenandoah) some time after the 1660s, when a German-Czech explorer found the valley to be heavily populated. Perhaps the Rickahoken themselves resettled the area, because in 1705 another white invader reported the valley to be so densely populated by “Tobacco Indians” that there were no remaining sites for settlement. Curiously, just twelve years later, Lt. Governor Alexander Spotswood led a party of patricians—land speculators and surveyors—over the Blue Ridge Mountains and into an empty Shenandoah Valley, which they divided up as planned. How did he know they would find the area depopulated? It is believed that in the preceding years, the Rickahoken, distrusting their greedy allies in the Virginia colony and fleeing warfare in the increasingly volatile Appalachian corridor, took refuge with the Huron in the far north. The history textbooks (of the settler state that grew out of Virginia and the other colonies) tend not to mention this complex set of conflicts, instead assuring their readers that European settlers found the Shenandoah Valley uninhabited.
All of these processes of genocide, each with different results, are standard effects of the extension of state power. The extreme disparity in military technologies allowed Europeans to create settler states, enslaving, depopulating, and repopulating the territories they conquered. However, the earlier stages of this process show how an aggressive state can cause its stateless neighbors to either form their own states in the hopes of securing an alliance, or to engage