Author: Patrick Wolfe (---.dial.indiana.edu)
Date: 09-10-01 13:26
Response to question 1.
The land and labor equation, as you call it, does not mean that settler-colonizers have failed to take advantage of indigenous labor. Rather, it means that the primary goal of settler colonization is indigenous peoples' territory rather than their labor. In each of the colonial societies that I have discussed--the United States, Australia, and Brazil--indigenous labor has been exploited by Europeans. In all three countries, indigenous labor came into its own in situations where imported slaves, indenturees, or convicts were lacking. As Stuart Schwartz has shown, for instance, prior to the consolidation of Portugal's African slave trade, the Brazilian sugar industry relied on indigenous labor for a substantial period (Schwartz, "Indian Labor and New World Plantations," _AHR_ 83 [1978]: 43-79). In both Australia and the United States, as the essay notes, Europeans could be vulnerably dependent on indigenous labor, particularly in the early, pre-settlement period of colonization that you term transitional. One thinks, for instance, of early colonizers' reliance on the indigenous guides, trackers, interpreters, and military allies of the middle ground.
At a later stage, many Indians were enslaved on North American plantations, while, in Australia, the cattle industry has relied on Aboriginal labor for most of its history. Numerous other instances could be cited. In cases such as these, Europeans' employment of indigenous labor has been incidental to--even in contradiction with--the primary project of expropriating and developing indigenous peoples' lands. In this connection, Europeans have characteristically been reluctant to acknowledge the extent to which they have relied on indigenous labor. This reluctance often found cultural expression in claims that the natives were lazy, sly, prone to go walkabout, or otherwise unfit for labor. Alternatively, Indians' contribution to the plantation economy could be effaced, as in the cases, noted by Ira Berlin, where planters simply reclassified their Indian slaves as black (Berlin,_Many Thousands Gone_, 145).
It is crucial to distinguish such situations from assimilatory contexts in which Europeans have sought to transform indigenous subjectivities by imposing the discipline of labor. In these contexts, far from being reluctant, the Europeans concerned (missionaries, Protectors of Aborigines, Bureau of Indian Affairs officials) have been anxious to publicize their success in transforming indigenous individuals into civilized and industrious candidates for absorption into European society. As the essay tries to show, their efforts have been central to the post-frontier operations of the settler-colonial logic of elimination. I take it that the framing of Indians as labor subjects refers to this transformative discourse rather than to Europeans' contradictory and largely unacknowledged reliance on unassimilated indigenous labor. In the transformative sense, Indians were not framed as labor subjects _as Indians_ but as individuals on the way to becoming civilized--which is to say, as non- (or no longer) Indians. This contrasts starkly with discourses on blacks. Rather than scheduling them for assimilation, the framing of blacks as labor subjects was central to their exclusion. As slaves, blacks were _only_ fit for labor (under the direction of whites). Whereas the "good" Indian as labor subject could ultimately become white, the good black as labor subject was the black who knew his place, which was outside and below white society (this was the essence of not being uppity).
Since the framing of Indians as labor subjects is a discourse of assimilation, we should expect Indians not to be framed as labor subjects under conditions when their assimilation was not sought. As the essay argues, the principal such condition was the tribal one. The balance of power between colonizers and natives in the trading-post context of mercantile capitalism, when tribes were yet to be fully conquered, was quite different from that which would develop in the protoindustrial context of agricultural development. During the earlier period, assimilation was not only militarily but also demographically impractical, since whites were generally in a minority. After the conquest, containment, and removal of the tribes, as the essay also argues, assimilationist discourse counterposed the individual Indian labor subject, working to improve his allotment, to the unassimilated tribes who maintained their wasteful collectivity on reservations. Here the Australian situation was different, since the missions and reserves on which Aboriginal people were sequestered were not concessions to their native title rights (which were not acknowledged) but total institutions designed to bring about assimilation. As such, they invite comparison not so much with Indian reservations as with the boarding schools for Indian youth.
Patrick Wolfe
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