“How Indians Got Red”

In The American Historical Review journal entry “How Indians Got Red,” author Nancy Shoemaker explores the use of skin-type and skin color in the identification of American Indians, notably as ‘red’, or ‘red-skinned’.  As a strategy of adaptation, American Indians in pre- and post-colonial history (16th-20th century America) adopted and incorporated European use of “race [instead of] the older categories of Christian and pagan” as a means of identification and differentiation among European, African, and American Indian persons.  Shoemaker notes two likely scenarios whereby American Indians came to identify themselves as ‘red’.  In the first scenario, using the term ‘red’ “may have been a response to meeting strange new people who identified themselves as ‘white’”, differentiating themselves from both ‘white’ Europeans and ‘black’ African and other slaves.  “[Secondly], some Indians may have considered themselves ‘red’ or been called so by other Indians before the arrival of Europeans.” While both scenarios complement one another, Shoemaker notes that, based on numerous written accounts that survive from the era in addition to analyses of Indian languages, Indians indigenous to the (roughly) Southeastern portion of The United States originally derived the word ‘Indian’ from the word for the color red.  Conversely, Indians indigenous to the Northeastern portion of the United States seem to have adopted the ‘red’ descriptor from French contact. In one example taken from a 1725 account of an encounter with a Taensa chieftain, French diplomats were regaled with an allegory told by the chief explaining the origin story of his group.  In the allegory the Taensa chief explained that “Long ago…there were three men in a cave, one white, one red, and one black…The white man went out [of the cave] and took the good road that led him into a fine hunting ground…The red man…went out second…astray from the good road…where the hunting was less abundant…[And] the black man [went out and] got entirely lost in a very bad country…,” typifying the recorded observations of Southeastern Indians identifying themselves as ‘red’.

Shoemaker notes that it is a “common misconception” that Carl Linnaeus, renowned for his binomial nomenclature system of the classification of organisms, was responsible for the first attribution of red to American Indian skin, briefly mentioned in the 1740 edition of System Naturae. Rather, this was more likely a coincidence, as the 1725 encounter seems to indicate.  In fact, as mentioned earlier, a collapse of the Christian versus pagan system of categorizing races was more likely than not to have been the catalyst for identifying persons by skin color in the early 18th century.  Europeans during this century were grappling with both “the rise of black slavery” and “the hard questions posed by the existence of Indians” themselves, which challenged the creation myths of European religious institutions.

As the 18th century ended and Cherokee Indians grappled with the fateful issues of encroachment and racism, they “became ‘red’ because of trying to define ‘whiteness’,” adapting to the racial denotation to navigate the quickly burgeoning colonial government.  As Shoemaker notes, “the adaptability of racial categories to fit political and social alignments illuminates critical features of the idea of race in general.  People do not believe in race abstractly but instead manipulate racial categories to suit contextualized objectives.”

“The Pueblo Revolt of 1680”

            In the late 16th and 17th centuries, in what is now modern-day New Mexico in the United States, a large civilization commonly known as the Pueblo inhabited the Rio Grande Valley and beyond.  The Pueblo are well known for the elaborate living structures and resulting communal spaces they built out of stone and mud, some of which still stand today.  By this time, in 1598, the Spanish Crown had established an outpost in the area, for "colonizing, mining, and missionary work." Juan de Oñate y Salazar, a conquistador with an army and a handful of missionaries, was tasked with engaging in commerce with, and converting to Christianity, the approximately 30 to 40 thousand Pueblos inhabiting the area. "Missionary work among the Indians seemed to go well from the outset," but in their zeal the missionaries cracked down on indigenous religious practices, including seizing "ceremonial chambers (kivas) and altars, [forbidding] dances, and [destroying] masks and prayer sticks," severely infringing on the communal nature of the Pueblo people, resulting in a bloody revolt in 1680.  "Of the 2,500 [Spanish] colonists approximately 380 were killed, including 21 of the 33 resident friars," and the Spanish were rousted from the settlements in a defiant act of resistance, not to return in force until 1696.

In fact, underlying this resistance to assimilation were profound cultural differences between the Pueblo people and the Spanish, including divergent religious worldviews, the inability of the Spanish to engage with the local customs of the Pueblo "[u]nlike the Jesuits in Arizona and northwestern Mexico”, and "differing ideas of moral obligations." The Pueblo people had as their "locus" the underworld, whereby everything "[emerges] through an opening in the underworld's roof (seen as a naval or shipapu from earth...) [from where] everything came from below to dwell on the surface of this world," the opposite of the Christian 'heaven'.  As well, any similarities in the indigenous lifeways and the practices of the Spanish missionaries including "altars, religious calendars, aids for prayer..., costumes [for the] priesthood...,regularly appointed ceremonies [and] ritual chants" were entirely overlooked or ignored by the invaders, and Pueblo people who resisted were regularly punished, or even executed. And lastly, as a communal people, who "emphasized the well-being of the collectivity rather than that of the individual," the Pueblo ideation of moral obligation contrasted sharply with the Spanish missionaries' ideas about personal salvation and individualism.  "The church thus embodied a community-dividing thrust...[and] cut through families and clans, through moieties and secret societies."

Sometime after 1670, a new governor, Juan Francisco Treviño, redoubled the efforts of the Spanish Crown to suppress the Pueblo religion and by 1675 some forty-seven ceremonial leaders were arrested and either hanged or whipped.  One of these, a Peublo called el Popé, along with other disaffected Pueblo men, led the rebellion that would topple the Spanish in 1680.  Already versed in warfare because of raiding parties by nearby Apache and Navajo Indians, the military rout proved successful and ushered in two decades of relative peace before Mexico was eventually conquered again in 1696.  Often characterized as a warlike clash between civilizations over economies and power, many American Indian resistances like the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 were the result of more nuanced "cultural antagonism,", in this case with "fundamentally religious roots,", and the specifics help shed light on the complex interactions between invading forces and indigenous people in early America.

“King Philip’s Herds”

            Livestock brought by British colonizers to 17th century America was “considered…essential to [the] survival” of the earliest European squatters in New England.  “But the animals exacerbated a host of problems related to subsistence practices, land use, property rights, and ultimately, political authority,” even among the most elite members of Indian and colonial settlements.  As scholar Virginia DeJohn Anderson in her journal article King Philip’s Herds notes, Metacom, known as King Philip to the European settlers, and son of Massasoit, the great sachem of the Wampanoag who had made peace with and even saved the lives of settlers at Plymouth, was caught up in the web of politics surrounding livestock.  Having acquired pigs from the settlers and grazing them on nearby islands, he was reprimanded for allowing his herd to forage unchecked.  In fact, “it was by no means unusual for seventeenth-century New Englanders to find themselves in trouble with local officials, particularly when their search for gain conflicted with the rights of the community.” The introduction of domesticated livestock to the Americas represented a unique challenge as both Indians and colonizers attempted to live in harmony.  As soon as 1624, “four years after the Mayflower’s arrival,” Europeans were bringing cows, pigs, and other animals to the newly discovered continent.

            Unfortunately, by 1650 the colonies were “well stored” with livestock that began adversely impacting the fertile grassland nearby the colonies where indigenous people had traditionally grown corn and other subsistence crops.  In an effort at adaptation, surrounding Indian tribes “subdu[ed] – indeed domesticat[ed] – the wilderness with English people and English beasts…[as it was considered] a cultural imperative.” Fourteen “praying towns” were established by the colonizers to help Indian people with the process of adapting to animal husbandry. As a result, Indians like Metacom found themselves in direct competition for grazing and containment areas for livestock, with the English “insisting that [Indian livestock herders] yield to them, [though] they would not yield in any way to [them].” In this way, English colonizers used techniques including earmarks and unbalanced court proceedings to tip the scales of hog pricing and grazing rights in favor of themselves.

            One solution offered by the British to this intractable problem of land-use and property rights was for Indians to “fence cornfields before they could seek reparations.” Those Indians who did not, however, were denied the right to sue for damages, and even those who did often found the colonial government unable or unwilling to enforce the laws in their favor. Where Indians and colonists entered into joint-use land agreements, the rules were also tipped in favor of the Europeans, as trapping, a traditional form of hunting for indigenous people on the continent often resulted in similarly lopsided court rulings, impeding the Indian peoples’ rights to hunt on joint-use lands.

            All these political and racial issues overshadow the fact that animal husbandry had been adopted by the Wampanoag and other tribes in lieu of perfectly adequate subsistence hunting, fishing, and agriculture that had served them for hundreds or thousands of years before the arrival of the European colonists.  “Animal husbandry…challenged native spiritual beliefs and practices,” drastically changed the traditional role of women by increasing their workloads as they cared and micromanaged cattle, sheep and pigs instead of assisting with hunted and gathered foods at home, and ran counter to the aspect of the Indians’ spiritual worldview that regarded animals as manitous, “equally rightful occupants of the forest and whose killing required an intimate knowledge of their habits,” such as the deer that was traditionally trapped in the nearby wooded areas.  As Anderson notes, “the presence of livestock...[would,] in the end, [result in] war,” representing “a symbolic expression of enmity,” and contributed to the broader, and equally grim, narrative of the decimation of indigenous peoples all over the North American continent.

Bibliography

Nichols, Roger L., ed. The American Indian: Past and Present. 6th ed. Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008.