Settler Memory

The Disavowal of Indigeneity and the Politics of Race in the United States

Kevin Bruyneel

• Editorial: The University of North Carolina Press
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781469665245
• Categoría: Ciencias sociales
• Categoría: Estudios de nativos americanos

Faint traces of Indigenous people and their histories abound in American media, memory, and myths. Indigeneity often remains absent or invisible, however, especially in contemporary political and intellectual discourse about white supremacy, anti-Blackness, and racism in general. In this ambitious new book, Kevin Bruyneel confronts the chronic displacement of Indigeneity in the politics and discourse around race in American political theory and culture, arguing that the ongoing influence of settler-colonialism has undermined efforts to understand Indigenous politics while also hindering conversation around race itself. By reexamining major episodes, texts, writers, and memories of the political past from the seventeenth century to the present, Bruyneel reveals the power of settler memory at work in the persistent disavowal of Indigeneity. He also shows how Indigenous and Black intellectuals have understood ties between racism and white settler memory, even as the settler dimensions of whiteness are frequently erased in our discourse about race, whether in conflicts over Indian mascotry or the white nationalist underpinnings of Trumpism. Envisioning a new political future, Bruyneel challenges readers to refuse settler memory and consider a third reconstruction that can meaningfully link antiracism and anticolonialism.

CHAPTER ONE

The Settler Memory of Bacon’s Rebellion

“So I Dropped Indians”

In 1968, historian Winthrop Jordan published his award-winning and influential book White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812.¹ A few years later, he admitted there was a problem with it. In 1974, Jordan published an abridged version of White over Black, titled The White Man’s Burden: Historical Origins of Racism in the United States. In the preface, Jordan wrote about what happened to his original plan to include in the 1968 book the treatment of Indigenous people in the long history of American racism:

First of all, when I began work on what became White over Black I started by analyzing white American attitudes towards blacks and Indians. It soon became obvious, as I then thought, that I could not attempt both, so I dropped Indians. But in continuing with attitudes towards Negroes, Indians kept creeping (to use the prevailing stereotype) back in. So in fact there is considerable discussion about attitudes towards Indians in this book. Secondly, I remain convinced that white American attitudes toward blacks have done a great deal to shape and condition American responses to other racial minorities.²

Jordan’s telling language of “dropping” Indians from his analysis only to find them “creeping back in” resonates beyond his own experience to how the story of race and racism in the United States is generally constructed, remembered, and narrated. Jordan speaks to this point as it concerns U.S. historiography specifically when he notes in the book’s appendix, “Suggestions for Further Reading,” that “unfortunately, the tendency among historians is to separate ideas about Indians from ideas about Afro-Americans.”³ Note that his language is of the separation of ideas, not a lack of awareness of them.

Jordan implicitly acknowledges here that the problem with dropping Indigenous people is that the story of slavery and anti-Black racism is also one of settler colonialism, as anti-Blackness is a position not simply of the white subject but of the white settler subject. Since plantation slavery in the Americas required land from Indigenous nations, one cannot tell the story of white over Black without Indigenous dispossession and the construction of the “savage” other “creeping back” in, just as the narrative of whiteness and anti-Blackness informs and shapes the racialization and treatment of Indigenous people. These are a complicated, intertwined set of stories, to be sure, but not telling them together, or not putting them directly into conversation, constrains the potential reach and depth of the meanings one can draw from either story. The faint trace of Indigeneity that Jordan seeks to redress here speaks to his realization of the inherent limitations of his origin story of “American attitudes toward the Negro.” The story of anti-Blackness can only get so far if settler memory does its work. As such, I argue that the corollary to anti-Blackness in the U.S. racial context is not anti-Indigeneity, simply put, but what I call necro-Indigeneity. I derive this from the concept of necropolitics, first defined by Achille Mbembe to refer to “the contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death (necropolitics).… Necropolitics and necropower [account for] … the new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead.”⁴ I posit that necro-Indigeneity takes up a central role as the rarely seen structural support beam of the white-Black racial binary, of the U.S. racial hierarchy, and of U.S. political life in general.

Necro-Indigeneity is a key component of white settlerness because it is central to the settler practice of honoring or memorializing the “dead” as part of establishing the status and belonging of whiteness on territories dispossessed from Indigenous peoples. It thereby constructs Indigeneity today as eliminated or to be eliminated—marked for death by settler life. Furthermore, necro-Indigeneity also shapes the contours of racialized Blackness as split off from any claim to Indigeneity as a subject position, for as Shona Jackson argues, “Settler states that employed enslaved labor rely on two kinds of native death in perpetuity: the death of the Black as native and the death of the native occupant of the land.”⁵ Jackson is pointing to how the detachment of Blackness from Native identity confines Black subjectivity as a relationship to labor alone, not land, and the “death of the native” focuses on those people, Indigenous peoples of the Americas, who are obstacles to colonial claims upon territory. In this light, to consider the meaning of racism in relationship to necro-Indigeneity, racism takes the form and threat defined by Ruth Wilson Gilmore as “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.”⁶ Gilmore is referring to racism in general, but anti-Black racism epitomizes the historical and persistent “vulnerability to premature death” in the U.S. context, while necro-Indigeneity is the presumption of death already enacted, or to be marked for death that is not premature but overdo—the living dead, in Mbembe’s words. Anti-Blackness and necro-Indigeneity are mutually entwined although not collapsed and seamless concepts. Addressing this complicated relationship has proven difficult for writers and analysts of race in the United States, thus the inclination to “drop the Indians.”

This chapter examines the role of settler memory in the oft-repeated narrative of a historical event that many scholars take to be foundational for the political life of race in the U.S. context. This event is Bacon’s Rebellion from 1675 to 1677, which has taken on a powerful mnemonic role for scholars, especially of the antiracist Left, as the moment when the white race was invented. It is also a story that in its most popular form consistently “drops Indians.” To transition to this specific topic, I turn to critical legal and race studies scholar Michelle Alexander, finding in her work the effort to attend to the intertwined relationship of enslavement and dispossession while also replicating the tendency to “drop Indians.” Alexander’s most notable work, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, published in 2010, has achieved the rare feat for an academic book of shaping the wider public discourse about the role of mass incarceration in reproducing the contemporary racial order, especially as it concerns disenfranchising and subordinating Black Americans. The deserved popularity of the book matters here to underscore that the work of settler memory is not marginal to the collective memory of the political life of race in the United States. Settler memory is a shaping force on the analyses and narratives of influential writers on race in the United States, from Jordan to Alexander and many others I discuss in this chapter and beyond.

In Alexander’s book, Indigenous peoples and the history of colonial violence and dispossession make two notable, connected appearances. These both occur in the first chapter when Alexander sets out the origin story for her narrative that connects chattel slavery, the creation of the political meaning of race, the formal Jim Crow era, and the modern era of the prison industrial complex (the new Jim Crow era). The first appearance is an example of the increasing effort of scholars of race in the United States to not separate Indigenous and Black histories. In this sense, it is an important step in acknowledging the place of Indigeneity and settler colonialism as intertwined with the story of race and the institutions of structural oppression in the United States, such as mass incarceration.

In her discussion of the “birth of slavery,” Alexander attends to the relationship of the violence toward racialized human beings and the colonial seizure of land required for plantation slavery: “The demand for land was met by invading and conquering large swaths of territory. American Indians became a growing impediment to white European ‘progress,’ and during this period, the images of American Indians promoted in books, newspapers, and magazines became increasingly negative. As sociologists Keith Kilty and Eric Swank have observed, eliminating ‘savages’ is less of a moral problem than eliminating human beings, and therefore American Indians came to be understood as a lesser race—uncivilized savages—thus providing justification for the extermination of the native peoples.” Here, Alexander builds on the insights from the historical scholarship on slavery to make clear that the enslavement of kidnapped African people and their descendants in the so-called New World required the violent seizure of land from Indigenous nations. Alexander acknowledges and incorporates into her narrative the historical and socioeconomic relationship between the practices of settler colonial conquest and enslavement. At the same time, this specific narrative does end with her reproducing the familiar settler memory of the “extermination of the native peoples”—this being the logic of necro-Indigeneity. Thus, Alexander recalls the place and experience of Indigenous peoples and settler colonialism in serving one of two critical functions in the political life of race in the United States, which is to be the people sacrificed in the violence of dispossession necessary for eventually fostering the system of chattel slavery. After this sacrifice, Indigenous peoples and settler colonialism start to fade into the background in the political memory of enslavement, racism, racial injustice, anti-Blackness, and mass incarceration. This dynamic is particularly discernible in much of the antiracist Left scholarly memory about Bacon’s Rebellion, which is the formative seventeenth-century political struggle that shaped the meaning of race, the racial hierarchy, and the white-Black racial binary, or so the story goes. This is the second critical function that Indigeneity and settler colonialism play in the story of the political life of race in the United States, before it drops out, and I begin with Alexander’s discussion of it.

Bacon’s Rebellion and the “Invention” of the White (Settler) Subject

In The New Jim Crow, Alexander immediately follows up her account of the dispossession and “extermination” of Indigenous peoples during the birth of slavery with a discussion of the historical impact of Bacon’s Rebellion. This is the story, as Alexander puts it, of “Nathanial [sic] Bacon,” a “white property owner in Jamestown, Virginia, who managed to unite slaves, indentured servants, and poor whites in a revolutionary effort to overthrow the planter elite.”⁷ Alexander does not claim to be a scholar of this particular rebellion or of seventeenth-century Virginia, but just as with her initial discussion of the “extermination of the native peoples” as foundational to the origins of chattel slavery, Bacon’s Rebellion is de rigueur in many antiracist Left narratives of racialization in the United States. Alexander sets out the story of the rebellion:

Varying accounts of Bacon’s Rebellion abound, but the basic facts are these: Bacon developed plans in 1675 to seize Native American lands in order to acquire more property for himself and others and nullify the threat of Indian raids. When the planter elite in Virginia refused to provide militia support for his scheme, Bacon retaliated, leading an attack on the elite, their homes, and their property. He openly condemned the rich for their oppression of the poor and inspired an alliance of white and black bond laborers, as well as slaves, who demanded an end to their servitude. A number of the people who participated in the revolt were hanged [Bacon himself died of dysentery]. The events in Jamestown were alarming to the planter elite, who were deeply fearful of the multiracial alliance of bond worker and slaves. Word of Bacon’s Rebellion spread far and wide, and several more uprisings of a similar type followed.

The next and crucial step in the narrative is the aftermath of the rebellion, in which resides the origin story of the political purpose and life of race in what would become the United States. As Alexander explains, the planter class responded to the rebellion and fear of future rebellions of this sort by taking a “step that would later come to be known as a ‘racial bribe’ ”:

Deliberately and strategically, the planter class extended special privileges to poor whites in an effort to drive a wedge between them and black slaves. White settlers were allowed greater access to Native American lands, white servants were allowed to police slaves through slave patrols and militias, and barriers were created so that free labor would not be placed in competition with slave labor. The measures effectively eliminated the risk of future alliances between black slaves and poor whites. Poor whites suddenly had a direct, personal stake in the existence of a race-based system of slavery. Their own plight had not improved by much, but at least they were not slaves. Once the planter elite split the labor force, poor whites responded to the logic of their situation and sought ways to expand their racially privileged position.⁸

Alexander’s outline of Bacon’s Rebellion is a condensed version of the events as drawn from her main source, Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia.⁹ Positioned early in the first chapter of The New Jim Crow, it is also the final time in the book in which any Indigenous people or anti-Indigenous actions make an appearance in any way that is significant to the narrative and overall argument. In this regard, Alexander’s narrative is not unique, as it follows a well-worn, habituated path in U.S. critical race histories of addressing and then moving on from Indigenous people’s concerns. It is the work of settler memory that keeps writers and readers from steering off the course set by this path, as we can see through the habitual replication of the story and the meaning of the rebellion in the work of many other writers on race in the United States.

To start, Edmund Morgan’s account of Bacon’s Rebellion is one of the most cited by those who discuss it. In his chapter on the rebellion in American Slavery, American Freedom, Morgan provides detailed attention to the important role and presence of Indigenous nations, including the Susquehannock, Piscataway, Occaneechi, and Doeg. In so doing, Morgan is clear about Bacon’s overt anti-Indian sentiments and the fact that what ignited the rebellion as much as anything was Virginia colonial governor William Berkeley’s refusal to commission Bacon to lead his men in an attack against local Indigenous people—“to make war ‘against All Indians in general.’ ”¹⁰ After narrating the rebellion’s demise, Morgan concludes the chapter by noting “an obvious lesson in the rebellion. Resentment of an alien race might be more powerful than resentment of an upper class. For men bent on maximum exploitation of labor the implication should have been clear.”¹¹ While here he is referring to Indigenous people as the “alien race” driving Bacon’s violent anti-Indian crusade, the larger lesson that English elites took from this was the political value of “racism, to separate dangerous free whites from dangerous slave blacks by a screen of racial contempt.”¹² This contempt would be fueled through law, public policy, economic benefits, and social practices that racialized Blackness as signifying an enslavable people whom white people could denigrate, exploit, treat with violent impunity, and buy, own, and sell. The legal and informal capacity to treat Black people in this way came to be a defining feature of whiteness itself. To this end, “Virginia’s ruling class,” in a model that would be eventually followed in the emergent United States, “proclaimed that all white men were superior to black, [and] went on to offer their social (but white) inferiors a number of benefits previously denied them.”¹³ On this point, but even more directly, Theodore Allen in The Invention of the White Race, Volume 2: The Origins of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America argued that the rebellion was critical for inventing whiteness itself as a category and political identity with status and standing in relation to Black people, most notably. As Jeffrey B. Perry states in the introduction to a new edition of this second volume, Allen’s “major thesis” was that “the ruling class invented the ‘white race’ as a social control mechanism in response to labor solidarity as manifested in the later, civil war stages of Bacon’s Rebellion (1676–77). To this he adds two important corollaries: (1) the ruling elite deliberately instituted a system of racial privileges in order to define and establish the ‘white race’; and (2) the consequences were not only ruinous to the interests of African-Americans, they were also ‘disastrous’ for European-American workers, whose class ...