The Other Within: White Shame, Native-American Genocide

Abstract

In this article, the author asks about the genocidal history of the United States, and the forms of reparation and recognition that can be found in white racial shame and white racial guilt. Examining the history of white supremacy in the United States, the author queries the differential practices of twin racial regimes: African-American slavery and the extermination of Indigenous peoples. Because of these differential practices of persecution, the “vanished Indian” will enter white psychoanalysis through the evocation of “creative racial shame”; whereas African-American slavery has entered that psychoanalysis through depressive white guilt. Much as psychoanalysis has distinguished pathological guilt from the depressive guilt that leads to reparation and remorse, the author distinguishes pathological shame from a creative form of shame that allows us to see the Other whom whiteness has vanished.

Keywords:

• white supremacy
• genocide
• trauma
• shame
• guilt

Notes

¹ O'Brien (2010) notes, for example, that the Pokanoket in Cape Cod were enslaved in 1614.

² Gallay estimates that before 1715, approximately 30,000–50,000 Native people were taken as slaves by the British.

³ Most notably in the arena of African American slavery. In the 18^th century Native Americans had a considerable role in African-American slavery. See Krauthamer (2013).

⁴ Jackson passed the Indian Removal Act in 1830.

⁵ This mythology is ongoing. David Brooks (2015) writes in “The American Idea”: “America was settled, founded and built by people who believed they were doing something exceptional.… American was defined by its future, by the people who weren't yet here and by the greatness that hadn't yet been achieved … once the vast continent was settled the United States would be one of the dominant powers of the globe.”

⁶ Thus “Ishi,” as the last known member of the Native American Yahi people, would be celebrated and studied as the last “wild Indian” (Kroeber, 1961).

⁷ Even now, there seem to be ongoing disputes about this firsting and lasting. In 1996, the 8,500-year-old skull of “Kennewick man” was discovered in Washington, and claimed as Caucasian. Native Americans said that these were the bones of their ancestors, and tried to reclaim Kennewick Man for burial. Lawsuits contested repatriation. Recently, Danish scientists settled this dispute over identity and history: they conclusively determined that Kennewick Man is most closely linked to Native Americans. Nonetheless, repatriation is still in doubt.

⁸ The term, ‘redskin’ originated as a descriptor of the wounded craniums of these scalped bodies (see Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014).

⁹ Also, for example, in their effort to dominate South Carolina, the British attacked French-allied Choctaws, and also attacked the Apalachee to strike at the Spanish. The Chickasaws switch alliance from the French to the British, and take native slaves for the British (Gallay, 2002). In the King Philip's War (1675–1676), New England colonists went to war with their allies—Mohegan and Pequot—against Wampanoags, Narragansetts, Nipmucs, and others. For Native Americans, there were 5,000 casualties (Gallay, 2009).

¹⁰ By the mid-18^th century, the capture and sale of Native slaves decreased east of the Mississippi as tribes formed confederacies and refused large-scale slaving (Gallay, 2009).

¹¹ Native slavery was officially outlawed in the mid-18^th century, but it continued.

¹² These tribes included the Choctaws, Chickasaw, Cherokee, and Creeks. Miles (2009) traces Native American plantation slave practices through the Cherokee family of Shoe Boots and the Cherokee Van family (Miles, 2005). Krauthamer (2013) highlights these practices of the Choctaw and Chickasaw in Indian Territory.

¹³ According to black slave narratives, conditions varied—often Indian masters were described as more humane. See Minges, 2004.

¹⁴ The Choctaws did not develop slave codes until after removal. But later, their laws would forbid marriage with African Americans, and prohibited black slaves from learning to read or from owning firearms, in disturbing mimicry of white masters (Snyder, 2010).

¹⁵ The Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, Creek, and even the Seminoles (Krauthamer, 2013).

¹⁶ With the Dawes Act of 1887, federal land allotments are determined by “blood quantums,” with “full blood” Indians receiving the largest allotments, and former black slaves the smallest (Krauthamer, 2013).

¹⁷ The transgenerational legacy of this complexity persists: in the recent controversy about removing the Confederate flag flying above the South Carolina capital, a white conservative wanted to erect a monument to a Cherokee chief who became a confederate general (Pitts, 2015). To this day, there are tensions between Native tribes and “black Indians” (Saunt, 2005; Miles, 2005).

¹⁸ By contrast, Northern Creeks actually anticipated the 13^th Amendment, abolishing slavery, granting freed slaves equal tribal status in September 1863. (Saunt, 2005).

¹⁹ As Snyder (2010) put it, “rather than a one-way monologue crafted by the white elites, the language of race was a dialogue shared by whites and Indians and shaped by the violent intimacy of the Southern border wars. New articulations of race blended with—and complicated—older notions of Native identity. Challenging colonialism, Indians drew on their experiences with ‘Virginians’ to craft a racial ideology underpinned by nativism” (p. 172).

²⁰ Northern Ohio, tribe unknown.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sue Grand

Sue Grand, Ph.D., is a member of the faculty and supervisor at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis. She is also on the faculty at the Mitchell Center for Relational Psychoanalysis; a faculty member in the trauma program at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies; a member of the faculty in the trauma program, Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis; a faculty member in the Couples and Family Specialization at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis; and a visiting scholar at the Psychoanalytic Institute for Northern California. She is the author of two books: The Reproduction of Evil: A Clinical and Cultural Perspective (Analytic Press) and The Hero in the Mirror: From Fear to Fortitude. She is an associate editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues and Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. She is in private practice in New York City and Teaneck, New Jersey.