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Ian K. Steele’s Setting All the Captives Free provides a new interpretation of the nature of the 18th century’s Anglo-French wars, focusing on those taken captive. The following excerpt explores the concept of “white Indians”.
Knowledgeable writers during the first generation of Allegheny warfare, including Cadwallader Colden, Benjamin Franklin, and William Smith, voiced concern that many captives rejected redemption and the return to Christianity and civilization, preferring to become white Indians. Pennsylvanians knew the adage about the ease with which a white person could become an Indian, and the near impossibility of making a white person out of an Indian. The sophisticated author of Letters from an American Farmer rather wildly suggested that thousands of Europeans became Indian, but that no Indians became European. One modern commentator goes further in claiming, “One of the greatest scandals of the colonial, federal, and antebellum eras of American history was that the majority of those turned into ‘white savages’ flatly refused to return to ‘civilization.’”
Whether captives’ stories were preserved as tales of courage, adaptability, or adventure, or were infused with criticism of white society, they all imply that Indians had a method of re-education that could be very effective. The concern itself has always been Eurocentric, for it should not be surprising that traumatized and vulnerable orphans sought the protection of families that forcibly replaced the ones they had just seen destroyed. Eighteenth-century relatives and commentators, who presumed that heredity was an indelible determinant of character, were entitled to some surprise when environment and re-education clearly trumped genetics. Nonetheless, two linked questions are worth exploring: how was Indian incorporation of white captives undertaken, and how successful was it?
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By chance, the only other surviving detailed memoir of Iroquoian adoption on this frontier is that of Mary Jemison. Initially captured by a Shawnee war party that included Canadians, she was taken to Fort Duquesne, and there, likely with some compensation to the Shawnee, she was given to two Seneca women who had lost a brother in battle and had just come out of mourning to seek a prisoner or scalp in compensation. Arriving at a small Seneca settlement about eighty miles downriver, Mary waited in the canoe while these women went into their settlement and returned “with a suit of Indian clothing, all new, and very clean and nice.” Mary was washed, dressed, and taken to the women’s wigwam. The women of the village gathered there to inspect Mary, and proceeded with a traditional Iroquoian “requickening” ceremony, entirely in the hands of the women. One of them, likely a gantowisa (respected elder), made an impassioned speech lamenting the loss of a young warrior, while the other women wailed and wrung their hands. The mood then shifted abruptly to a happy welcoming of Mary, now Dickewamis – meaning handsome or pleasant girl. “I was ever considered and treated by them as a real sister, the same as though I had been born of their mother.”
In Mary’s account of her very long life as a worthy Seneca woman who had married a Delaware and a Seneca warrior in turn, and had had six children, she never suggested that she had, or missed having, the status of a clan matron. Jemison and Smith left the fullest of nine memoirs of Iroquoian captivity on the Allegheny frontier in this period, and it is noteworthy that all of them suggest full and prompt adoption. Whatever the humiliation of being called an enàsqua, Allegheny captives of the Seneca, Mingo, Kahnawake, and Wyandot-Huron did not claim that they were kept as pets, servants, slaves, or beasts of burden.
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If most memoirs of former captives shared a comfortable assumption about the progress that had followed white conquest, there was one truly remarkable exception that challenged them all. A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison (Canandaigua, NY, 1824), by James Everett Seaver, reached bestseller status soon after publication. Printer and bookseller James D. Bemis decided to print something of the unusual life of a remarkable elderly Seneca woman, “the white woman of the Genesee.” Bemis arranged for James Everett Seaver, a local teacher and writer of verse, to interview Mary Jemison. The result cannot be regarded as a first-person narrative, but Seaver’s stirring “as-told-to” biography was written in the form of an autobiography, rather like Filson’s account of Boone. Seaver interviewed Mary Jemison for three days in English, a language Mary could not read, had tried to maintain, but had not spoken much in over sixty-five years.
Seaver wrote the account of Mary’s long, arduous, and simple life as a Seneca as though it were in her words, including the supposedly verbatim recollection of substantial speeches, like that delivered at her adoption, in the Seneca language Mary did not then know. Seaver had Mary use phrases like “completely elude the sagacity of their pursuers,” and had her offer romantic hymns of praise for “uncontaminated” Indian life threatened with “extermination.” The whole chapter on her second husband, Hiokatoo (1708?–1811), an acceptable husband but a ferocious enemy of the whites, was based entirely upon Seaver’s interview with a “cousin,” George Jemison, and was added to satisfy white stereotypes, and perhaps to ease white consciences.
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