Native American Whalemen and the World: Indigenous Encounters and the Contingency of Race

Abstract

Nancy Shoemaker examines how New England Native American whalemen experienced race in their global movements. Drawing on recent claims that race is contingent on an individual’s location within different social structures, Shoemaker highlights how Native Americans, disenfranchised in nineteenth-century New England, encountered constructions of race differently as they ventured into the global economy. Relying on Native American–authored logbooks and diaries and Pacific region newspaper accounts, Shoemaker’s book encourages rethinking Native Americans as colonized New England subjects and recognizing their participation in the exploration and colonization of the Pacific.Untangling the shifting complexities of race experienced by traveling Native Americans, Shoemaker divides her book into four sections, each devoted to a different setting challenging the meaning and relevance of race for Native Americans: Native Americans’ integration into the social hierarchy of whaling vessels, Native Americans’ interactions with indigenous groups in the Pacific and the Arctic, Native Americans’ assimilation into colonial societies in the Pacific world, and, finally, Native Americans’ experiences with colonialism back home. Through these sections Shoemaker exposes how Native American whalemen occupied positions of power in different settings and investigates the shifting interpretations of race that, at least partially, erased the concepts of the stereotypical Indian dominating racial discourses in New England.Particularly insightful is Shoemaker’s argument that Indians on whaleships rose to positions of authority. Even inexperienced Native whalemen benefited from stereotypes regarding their natural abilities as keen hunters with extraordinary eyesight and were immediately placed into the position of boat steerers. On subsequent voyages Indians quickly rose through the ranks of mate and even, rarely, to captain. Native American officers on whaling boats were respected by their white inferiors even as these same white people asserted their racial superiority off the ship.Similarly, Shoemaker exposes the complicated position of Native Americans in beach encounters and whalemen’s settlement in colonial contexts. Native Americans, aware of the complicated history of colonialism in their homes, nominally occupied the position of white explorers in the colonizing encounter, because these encounters were perceived through a colonialist binary. While this recasting of Native Americans as Europeans may have confused Native American whalemen, they were complicit in maintaining the distinctions. Similarly, Native American “beach combers,” who settled in indigenous communities in the Pacific, were regarded by colonial authorities as white colonists with the same rights and protections as European colonists. In contrast, if racially marked whalemen from other locations, such as Cape Verde or Hawaii, settled in New England, they were subsumed into the racialized hierarchies of the United States, being treated as African Americans or Indians or both, which left them disenfranchised and dependent on state guardians.Finally, Shoemaker returns to New England’s Indian reservations, questioning whether Native whalemen’s social standing on ships transformed local understandings of Native Americans in New England. She demonstrates that many of those whalemen returned to become outspoken advocates for their oppressed and disenfranchised communities, yet white observers largely ignored their existence in their reports, because these empowered, outspoken Indians threatened their stereotype of Indians.Shoemaker’s study opens up new ways of understanding the importance of race to Native American whalemen, who on their voyages experienced race as a flexible category that ignored but also devalued their experience as colonized subjects. Shoemaker’s monograph reminds readers to be more careful in understanding historical constructions of race, proving the need to study local understandings of race in a global, multidimensional context that contributes to complex self-understandings of indigenous people and challenges the simple constructions of race broadcast by white contemporaries.