Posted: October 2nd, 2013

Interconnections during Slavery

Prof Instructions:

This journal is where you tie together what you are learning from the reading. Each journal must cover several weeks worth of readings, and should be 8-10 pages in length.  DO NOT SUMMARIZE the readings; instead you have to think about what ideas each reading contained, and then weave these ideas into a well-written informal paper.  You can include your own reactions, but the journal is primarily to be  about the issues the article raised.  Although it is a journal it does need an organizing statement  and a conclusion based on your own thoughts. 

I have PDFs of most of the readings and will scan those I do not have.

The readings are based on 5 lectures:  For an idea the topics for this are:

Lect 1:  Rethinking Slavery, Part I: Slavery in Latin America
Lect 2:  Rethinking Slavery, Part II: Indigenous Peoples and Slavery
Lect 3:  Rethinking Slavery, Part III: The Cherokee Nation – Slavery and repercussions
Lect 4:  Rethinking Slavery, Part IV: Creeks and Seminoles
Lect 5:  Rethinking Slavery, Part V: Bonds and Divisions


Extra Info:  Course Description: Black Indians and Native/Black Relations

“The Essence of this country is bound up in Indian land and African Slave labour“

The words by Commanche activist Paul Smith speak to the processes underlying the development of the United States.  And yet, clearly, these same processes have the the development of the Americas.  While different colonial regimes worked in distinct ways in different regions; all were based on appropriating Indigenous land, and to a greater or lessor extent, on importing African Slave Labor. Moreover the repercussions of these underlying formative processes are manifested today in every nation-state across the America’s as communities of diasporic Africans and Indigenous peoples struggle with the commonalites and contradictions relating to their sometimes divergent and sometimes shared histories. – A distinct Black or Indigenous communities, or as the “red-black” peoples created by their intermarriage.  Across the Americas, relations between diasporic Africans and Indigenous peoples have fostered both magnificent alliances and intense conflicts, which vary according to region or nations-state.

In order to address these powerful and painful realities, this course begins with the conceptual issues shaping racial formation for Black and Native Peoples.  It then engages extensively with the need to rethink how we understand slavery – addressing both the African and the Indigenous experience. Next it examines the two processes that affected indigenous and african peoples in in a very different manner – the abolition of slavery and processes of Independence and Nation building among the different settler states of the Americas