Kate Fullagar - Facing Empire: Indigenous Experiences in a Revolutionary Age

Facing Empire

FACING EMPIRE

Indigenous Experiences in a Revolutionary Age

Edited by

Kate Fullagar and Michael A. McDonnell

FOREWORD BY Daniel K. Richter

Johns Hopkins University Press

Baltimore

2018 Johns Hopkins University Press

All rights reserved. Published 2018

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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ISBN-13: 978-1-4214-2656-3 (paperback : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 1-4214-2656-0 (paperback : alk. paper)

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ISBN-10: 1-4214-2657-9 (electronic)

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In recognition of the scholarship of Tracey Banivanua Mar (19742017)

CONTENTS

KATE FULLAGAR AND MICHAEL A. MCDONNELL

BILL GAMMAGE

MICHAEL A. MCDONNELL

REBECCA SHUMWAY

JENNIFER NEWELL

SUJIT SIVASUNDARAM

COLIN G. CALLOWAY

NICOLE ULRICH

TONY BALLANTYNE

ROBERT KENNY

KATE FULLAGAR

JOSHUA L. REID

JUSTIN BROOKS

ELSPETH MARTINI

SHINO KONISHI

FOREWORD

Now you are hearing the reasons of our paying so much attention to the British, the Seneca orator Sagoyewatha (Red Jacket) told a US commissioner in 1791. [I]t is because they give us such good advice. They always tell us we must be independent, and take advice from nobody, unless it pleases us. Of course Sagoyewatha was speaking to the US enemies of the British and pulling their postcolonial beards. Still, it is hard to imagine a statement more opposite to the one that opens Kate Fullagar and Michael A. McDonnells introduction to this fascinating volume: Woollarawarre Bennelong, visiting London from what colonizers called New South Wales, was so disgusted by what he heardor rather did not hearfrom British officials that, on his return home, he declared he would go to England no more. No paying attention to British advice for him. There was no single way in which Indigenous peoples faced the British empire and heard its messages in the Age of Revolution.

Indeed, there were far more than thirteen ways, the number of chapters in this volume. As the following pages show, between about 1760 and 1840, empire revealed its many faces in places as diverse as the ones that Britons labeled Australia, North America, West Africa, the Pacific Islands, New Zealand, the Persian Gulf, and the Cape of Good Hope. Agents of the British empire used those labels as they looked out on peoples they ruled (or more often dreamed of ruling) around the world. To those peoples, however, the spaces had different names, and they belonged not to the British but to the Eora, Anishinaabeg, Fante, Mori, Wahhabis, Khoesan, and Macleods. The contributors to Facing Empire situate themselves in those contested Indigenous spaces to help us understand the varied faces that the British empire displayedor rather the varied faces that Indigenous peoples imposed on their would-be European rulers. For, as these chapters show, while there may have been one British empire, there was no single British imperial experience. Indigenous peoples saw to that.

So, too, did the varied ecological, human, and political landscapes where experiences of empire took shape. Indigenous Australians, Bill Gammage demonstrates, used fire-stick farming to divide their land into zones of fire and no fire. Anishinaabeg, McDonnell explains, used dense but flexible bonds of kinship to structure a North American Great Lakes community that absorbed or rejected European empires on its own terms. Fante, Rebecca Shumway argues, used their connections to the British on the Gold Coast of West Africa to ward off a more threatening imperial foe, their Asante neighbors. And so it went in every locale, around the Pacific, around the Indian Ocean, around coastlines and continental interiors. What Fullagar and McDonnell call Pathways, Entanglements, and Connections all worked out largely on Indigenous terms, and, as the contributors to this volume show, it was often difficult to determine who was colonizing whom.

There was no single story, no unified British imperialism, no common experience of indigeneity. But comparisons, contrasts, and commonalities can emerge for readers who immerse themselves in the rich details these chapters provide. Familiar words take on new meanings. Homeland security , class formation , commerce , even treaty and mission , resonate differently after one hears from Colin G. Calloway, Nicole Ulrich, Tony Ballantyne, Robert Kenny, and Elspeth Martini. Meanwhile, unfamiliar juxtapositionof Cherokees and Polynesians, Makahs and Mori, Asians and Scotsreveals unanticipated connections in the hands of Kate Fullagar, Joshua L. Reid, and Justin Brooks. The authors approaches are as varied as the Indigenous spaces they explore.

To see how the British empire functioned from these varied perspectives is not just to face empire from its peripheries rather than its metropole. It is to appreciate that what those in the imperial metropole considered peripheries are better seen as empires many centers, the dispersed sites of intense interactions with Indigenous peoples and, in many cases, settler colonists. To face empire from these dispersed centers, then, is to see imperialism at work, to glimpse anew its mechanisms, strengths, weaknesses, and violence. Most importantly, it is to escape a view of empire in which Europeans are active and Indigenous peoples passive, Europeans are aggressors and Indigenous peoples mere victims. When Sagoyewatha explained the reasons of our paying so much attention to the British, he was also reminding us to shift our focus from the British themselves to Indigenous reasons and modes of attending to them. On the need for that shift in focus, Woollarawarre Bennelong surely would have agreed. The chapters in this volume bring us many steps closer to understanding why.

D ANIEL K. R ICHTER

Granville Ganter, ed., The Collected Speeches of Sagoyewatha, or Red Jacket (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2006), 27.

Facing Empire

INTRODUCTION

Empire, Indigeneity, and Revolution

KATE FULLAGAR AND MICHAEL A. MCDONNELL

In the early spring of September 1795, an Indigenous Eora man arrived home on a ship from Britain. The man was Woollarawarre Bennelong. He had been gone for nearly three years, visiting the land of the people who had set up a penal colony in his native district back in 1788. Bennelong had been one of the first Aboriginal people to communicate with the leader of the New South Wales colony, Arthur Phillip. Accepting Phillips invitation to accompany him to London in 1792, Bennelong became the first Indigenous person from todays Australia to step upon British shores.

Despite Phillips high expectations, Bennelong did not elicit quite the level of attention in Britain that had accrued around earlier Indigenous envoys from other parts of the world. Few dignitaries were impressed enough to meet with him. Perhaps they were too distracted by the imminent prospect of war against their enemy, the French Revolutionary state. More significantly, though, Bennelong turned out to be rather disappointed with Britons, unmoved one way or another by their contemporary revolutionary challenges. In addition, the English weather and cramped naval living conditions made him ill and depressed.