“Dispossession” by Tiya Miles

Chapter 5 is prefaced with a photo of two young Ho-Chunk cousins, Carrie Elk (ENooKah) and Annie Lowe Lincoln (Red Bird), c. 1904.

In chapter 5, Tiya Miles examines the complex relationship between enslaved Africans and Indigenous Americans.

Miles begins her examination with the 1785 Treaty of Hopewell. After years of war with the colonists, during which they suffered devastating losses, the Cherokee Nation had little choice but to come to an agreement with the United States. Under this treaty, the Cherokees promised to accept “the protection of the United States of America, and of no other sovereign,” as well as to return any property obtained during the many years of conflict. This included some Black captives who had been liberated from the colonists during battle but were now held by the Cherokees. Two nearly identical treaties would follow with the Choctaw and the Chickasaw the same winter.

Because the adoption of these treaties awarded the protection of the United States to those covered under its terms, this stratified a new set of privileges among the existing racial hierarchy in the United States. Though members of Native nations were less “free” than they had previously been, their privilege had been codified in relation to Black Americans, who were still classed as property. To retain this privilege, they were encouraged to participate in this racial hierarchy to its fullest extent by enslaving Black people.

While Hopewell did not introduce slavery to the Native nations—Indigenous and African people had, in fact, forged some cultural common ground as a result of the earlier international slave trade, mixing culturally and sometimes genetically, too—it did set the terms for their relationship with the colonial slave state. Slavery, which once might have been seen as a shared history of subjugation, soon became a tool for Native people in the struggle to stay on the “free side” of the color line.

As intermittent conflict continued to arise in the years that followed, it became clear that Native people who assimilated were less likely to experience trouble or oppression at the hands of the militant Americans. This assimilation included the adoption of Christianity and an American way of life but especially participation in the slave trade. Over time, slavery became entrenched among the nations who signed treaties at Hopewell.

Eventually, even capitulation to slavery and American assimilation was not enough to spare the Native nations from federal expansion. Under Andrew Jackson, proponents of Native expulsion worked to push the Cherokee people west, forcing them along the route that eventually became known as the “Trail of Tears.” The enslaved Black people they held were exiled, too, bearing much of the labor of the journey.

“Trouble the Water” by Barry Jenkins

“Trouble the Water” is prefaced by an epigraph dated August 30, 1800, the date on which an enslaved man named Gabriel plotted a rebellion. The piece fictionalizes Gabriel’s story, capture, and eventual execution, emphasizing his refusal to accept his enslaver’s name by crossing it out of the narrative in an act of visible redaction.

“Sold South” by Jesmyn Ward

“Sold South” is prefaced by an epigraph dated January 1, 1808, the date on which the international importation of enslaved people was made illegal. Rather than ending the slave trade, this intensified the domestic market. Ward’s piece fictionalizes the separation of a family sold apart to meet this increased demand as they see each other for the last time.