Native American Imperialism

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As Yehuda Berg said, “words have energy and power with the ability to help…[and] to harm.” Expanding upon his reflection to examine varying social perspectives on American colonial and imperial contexts, one may discern that officials of European descent such as Meriwether Lewis and William Clark converted white words and ideas into mutually intelligible Native American and black terms to persuade or force tribal leaders and slaves to adopt white customs. In so immediately communicating their wants, white officials sought to realize material and martial manifest destinies with time. Accordingly, many Americans of color responded to these bombardments of white supremacy by re-enacting white behaviors to satisfy whites and hence reduce white …show more content…
Further along in the development of economic imperialism in America, black slaves demonstrated resistance to Southern plantation owners and masters’ stringent restrictions on their social and political freedoms by working within the church to show solidarity under a white-mandated, nihilistic desecration of black expression. As history shows, the hollow diplomacy of white negotiators putting white interests above native desires, gendered and environmentally-aware indigenous acts of counterhegemonic gumption within the Eurocentric binary of so-called noble savagery and Southern slaves’ bound freedom to overlay African spirituality over the teachings of Baptist and Methodist ministers prove that each group mutually recognized its adversary to advance its own material, institutional and environmental mores and hopes, not to further cross-cultural …show more content…
One should technically note that Thomas Jefferson’s two military liaisons-cum-explorers spent a few months at Fort Clatsop, and Native Americans were far from alien as a race to the two white voyagers by the early nineteenth century. Nevertheless, the two white men did not stay there long enough to fully grasp the lifeways of local peoples including the Clatsops, Chinooks and Killamucks. Because Lewis and Clark did not have pre-existing knowledge of the specific lifeways of these groups, they instead relied on acquaintances with previously-encountered indigenous peoples to, as one scholar said, “make the strange familiar.” For example, less than forty-eight hours after arriving at Fort Clatsop, Clark judged that the entire Clatsop people with whom the expedition traded “resembled the...[Chinooks] in every respect except that of stealing, which we have not c[a]ught them at as yet.” He placed the value judgment of stinginess upon the Clatsops because they differed from his expectations based of all local groups. By the end of their stay, on Monday January 6th 1806, Lewis surmised that these three groups with whom the expedition traded “in common with other savage nations ma[d]e their women [and men] perform
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