Abstract
On 12 March 1611, King James I issued a third colonial charter to the Treasurer and Company for Virginia for “the purpose of reclaiming the barbarous natives to civility and humanity.” After the independence of the United States, President George Washington suggested to James Duane of New York that Native Americans were “savage as a wolf.” President Thomas Jefferson later embraced this opinion in a letter to William Henry Harrison, explaining that the United States wished “to draw [Indian men] to agriculture” and Indian women to housework. American lawmakers agreed. On March 3, 1819, the US Congress passed the Civilizing Fund Act to “civilize” Indians. Soon, the United States transferred this policy to West Africa through various organizations, including the American Colonization Society and the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. While many Western scholars have successfully identified the agency of missionaries and their sponsors in the process of “civilizing” Natives, most of them still struggle with deciphering the agency of Natives in Western archives. In the words of Historian Thomas Spear, this is because Natives are “outside of the documentary record.” This paper proposes the research method of parallel agency as a new approach to help solve this visibility problem of Natives supposedly absent from the written record. This research method also helps to decolonize the study of Native “civilizing” processes, especially those of Cherokees and West Africans, the first targets of American civilizing missions.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Civic, Political, and Community Studies
KEYWORDS
US CONGRESS, CIVILIZING FUND ACT, MISSIONARIES, CHEROKEES, WEST AFRICA, LIBERIA
