Escoceses en la América Colonial

Keywords: clan, kinship, landscape, chiefs, tribal, colonialism

Nota: mucho de "this book"

They were routinely described as wild, savage, barbarous, primitive, lawless, warlike, treacherous, vengeful, lazy, dirty, poor, superstitious, and always in need of instruction and improvement. They were the tribal peoples who inhabited the northern frontiers of Great Britain and the western frontiers of North America. They had more in common than the derogatory terms applied to them.

A Collection of Voyages and Travels published in London in 1745, the year of the last Jacobite rising, contained a frontispiece captioned “Description of the Habits of Most Countries in the World.” It depicted the dress of Chinese, Moguls, Persians, Turks, Tartars, Poles, Muscovites, Laplanders, Hungarians, Dutch, Spaniards, Hottentots, Negroes, Moors, and Mexicans. Scottish Highlanders, rather overdressed, shared the bottom of the page with Indians from Virginia and Florida.1 Some authors identify “a mutual respect and deep affinity” between Highlanders and Indians “based on parallel warrior traditions, a clan‐based social structure, and above all a profound independence of spirit.”2 Although this is overstated, there was something to it. According to an account from “a gentleman lately arrived” from New York, published in the Scots Magazine and repeated elsewhere, when the Black Watch Regiment arrived in America at the start of the Seven Years' War, Indians reputedly “flocked from all quarters” to see them, “and from a surprising resemblance in the manner of their dress, and the great similitude of their language, the Indians concluded they were anciently one and the same people, and most (p.4) cordially received them as brethren.”3 John Campbell, Earl of Loudon and commander in chief of the British forces in North America, said the Black Watch were more likely than any other troops to get along with Indians because “the Indians have an Opinion, that they [the Black Watch] are a kind of Indians.” General John Forbes referred to his Highland troops and his Cherokee allies as “cousins.”4 The Cherokee chief Oconostota, or Standing Turkey, was inducted into the Saint Andrews Club of Charles Town, South Carolina, in 1773 and thereby became an honorary Scotsman. British Indian agent Alexander Cameron lived with the Cherokees so long that he had “almost become one of themselves.” Countless Scots lived in Indian country, had Indian families, and in effect became Indians.5 Eighteenth‐century Gaelic poems referred to Indians as coilltich, “forest folk.” A poem reputed to be the first Gaelic song composed in North America said “Tha sinne ‘n ar n‐Innseannaich cinnteach gu leoir” [We've turned into Indians, sure enough]. (Originally “You are Indians, sure enough,” the words of the song seem to have been changed in the nineteenth century as Gaels came to see parallels between their own dispossession and that of Native peoples in America.6)

By the nineteenth century, in western Canada, eastern New York, and the mountains of Tennessee and Montana one could hear Cree, Mohawk, Cherokee, and Salish spoken with Gaelic accents. In the 1860s a visitor to Fort Pelly, a Hudson Bay Company post west of Lake Winnipegosis, heard Scottish children (whose parents dressed them in their clan tartans every Sunday) “acquiring a fluent use of Indian dialects in addition to their Scottish brogue which is so thick one could ‘cut it with a knife.’ ”7 Robert MacDougall, who wrote an Emigrant's Guide to North America in Gaelic, believed he saw (p.5) many similarities between Gaels and Indians, particularly in language. The “slow, soft, pleasant speech” he heard among the Algonquians of Canada was, he thought, “merely a branch of the Gaelic language,” and he found words with similar sounds and meanings: the Algonquian word saganash (white man) and the Gaelic term Sassanach (Englishman), for instance.8 Some observers even commented that Indians had a fondness for the bagpipes.9

American historians who simply identify Highland Scots as British, or even, in some cases, English, miss significant cultural distinctions and historical experiences. In their relationships to the land and to one another, Highland Scots often had more in common with the Indians than with the English. Both were known for their attachment to their homeland, and they expressed it in similar ways. “I grow out of this ground,” said a man from Skye in the 1770s.10 “Our Ancestors came out of this very Ground, and their Children have remained here ever since,” Canasatego (speaking for the Iroquois) told colonial delegates in 1744.11 The Highlanders' affections were “more deeply rooted in the soil … than any other people except mountaineers equally free,” noted a report on emigration in 1803.12 Highlanders and Indians alike inhabited storied landscapes and shared communal land‐holding practices. Even in the twentieth century, some Highlanders retained an attachment to the land that was spiritual and emotional, as well as economic. They “read” the landscape with an understanding born of intimacy across generations and preserved Gaelic place names imbued with mythical, factual, historical, and personal meanings:

They tell of personal experiences and of community events and activities, both in the past and in the present, and have a richness of meaning that goes far beyond the concern with simple reference to a spatial location or to a single event. In this way, place names bind the landscape with human imagination and experience and inform us about a multiplicity of close associations which thereby blend the human and natural worlds into one.13

The passage describes the purpose and persistence of Gaelic place names in the Highlands and islands, but it reads like an extract from Keith Basso's Wisdom Sits in Places, which demonstrates how the rich vocabulary of Western Apache place names provides a multilayered link between language and landscape, or from Okanagan novelist, poet, and ecological activist Jeanette Armstrong. For Western Apaches, writes Basso, the past “lies embedded in features of the earth—in canyons and lakes, mountains and arroyos, rocks (p.6) and vacant fields—which together endow their lands with multiple forms of significance that reach into their lives and shape the way they think.” Armstrong's father told her “that it was the land that changed the language because there is special knowledge in each different place. All my elders say that it is land that holds all knowledge of life and death and is a constant teacher. It is said in Okanagan that the land constantly speaks.”14

Like Highlanders, Indian people inhabited landscapes that were etched with the experiences of generations, held memories of the past, and were alive with the spirits of their ancestors. They read the landscape like a historical text.15 Mythic tales linked to specific places contained teachings that enabled people to live as true human beings.16 The lands held stories about the interdependence of people, animals, and the natural world.17 Tied to place by clan and family memories, stories connected the people to an ancient world whose lessons they must not forget and to the natural world, where they maintained proper relations with other forms of life. Lakota scholar Craig Howe's explanation of how land and identity related to the concept of peoplehood works for Highland Scots, as well as for American Indians: It was “a relationship between a distinct community and their remembered landscape, a relationship often encoded in stories about particular past events that their ancestors experienced.”18 As Rory Stewart was reminded while walking across war‐torn Afghanistan in 2002, “places in the Scottish Highlands are also remembered by acts of violence.”19

American Indians and Highland Scots recorded their histories in song and story and shared their worlds with spirits. Tales told around winter fires explained why things were the way they were, provided moral lessons, and warned of the perils of violating long‐established taboos and rituals. Witches could transform themselves into animal shapes, animals could communicate with humans, and certain animals must not be harmed. Birds were messengers of things to come. Omens were to be heeded; nature's powers could be harnessed and propitiated by rituals. Place names recalled mythic encounters with supernatural beings,20 although civilized folk purported not to believe in such “primitive superstitions.”

Landholding practices were not identical, of course. Before the system disintegrated in the eighteenth century, Highland clan chiefs mortgaged or leased the land. Mortgaged lands were known as wadsets, and leased lands were called tacks. Wadsetters and tacksmen in turn rented the lands they mortgaged or leased to subtenants. The importance of the link between tenant and land in the Highlands was reflected in the Gaelic concept duthchas, which expressed the belief that clanspeople had a permanent stake in the clan's homeland.21 Kinship and clan obligations ensured shared access to cultivable (p.7) lands and pasture. Under the traditional system of runrig farming, Highlanders lived in clustered settlements (clachans), held arable lands in common, and reallocated parcels of land. Tenant farmers kept herds of black cattle and other livestock that they drove each spring to the shielings, which were summer pastures in the uplands. The clan chief and tacksmen oversaw the working of the system, levying tribute, displaying generosity and hospitality, and organizing raids and defense. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries “improvers” saw the system as an obstacle to progress. As the clan system disintegrated, runrig farming died out, cash rent replaced clan and kinship obligations, and commercial sheep farming drove people to small, individual crofts on marginal lands.22

Highland and Indian societies revolved around clan and kinship, although the terms had some different meanings and things worked in dissimilar ways. The Gaelic term clann meant children or family and implied a kinship group that claimed descent from a common ancestor. Blood ties between a clan chief and his people might be mythical rather than actual, but the assumption of kinship represented an emotional bond. Kinship bound people together in Native American societies, but there too it often had more to with social relations than with biological connections, governing conduct between individuals and distribution of resources.23

Some Native societies, like the Plains Ojibwas, whom Highland settlers met at Red River in Manitoba, were patrilineal, like the Highlanders themselves.24 However, many of the Indian nations with whom Highlanders interacted traced kinship through women. The clan was the basic unit of Cherokee society. All Cherokees belonged to one of seven matrilineal clans, and all clan members supposedly descended from a common ancestor. Clan membership gave an individual a place in society, and clan ties bound autonomous Cherokee towns together as one nation and one people. Kinship relationships determined both personal and social relations, and clan members were obligated to care for, protect, and if necessary avenge the deaths of clan relatives.25

Clans have a deep history in the Highlands, but the clans most prominent in Scottish history—the Campbells, MacDonalds, Frasers, Camerons, and others—emerged from the Middle Ages, when Norman lords moved north and established feudal patterns of landholding that fused with Gaelic tribal traditions to produce a feudal tribalism. Originally based on kinship, clans came to revolve around land distribution and defense. A Highland clan was a group of extended patrilineal families held together by the paternalism and patronage of the fine (the elite, the clan chief, and gentry).26 Duncan Forbes of Culloden described a Highland clan in the mid‐eighteenth century as: (p.8)

a set of men all bearing the same sirname [sic], and believing themselves to be related the one to the other, and to be descended from the same common Stock. In each Clan, there are several subaltern tribes, who own their dependence on their own immediate Chief; but all agree in owing allegiance to the Supreme Chief of the Clan or Kindred, and look upon it to be their duty to support him at all adventures.

Smaller clans sometimes put themselves under the protection of a larger clan. In the thirteenth century, for instance, the chief of Clan McGillivray put his people under the protection of Clan Mackintosh. Others followed suit—MacPhersons, McQueens, McBeans, MacPhails, Frasers, and Shaws—thus forming the powerful Clan Chattan with the Mackintoshes at the head. Outsiders could be incorporated into the clan. Sir Walter Scott observed that “in ancient times, the Highlanders, like the Indians, added prisoners of war into their tribes,” carrying off children whose parents they had killed.27

Tribal chiefs on both sides of the Atlantic were expected to act for the good of their people. Traditionally, they reinforced the allegiance of their followers by giving away rather than accumulating wealth. Thomas Douglas, Earl of Selkirk, explained it as a function of the precarious nature of property in a tribal world: Those who acquired it by the sword one day were just as likely to lose it the next. “Thus among the antient Highlanders, the same men who made a glory of pillage and rapine, carried the sentiments of hospitality and generosity to a romantic excess,” he wrote.28 “Surplus went to feast, or gift, or to aid those in trouble,” wrote one scholar. She was describing the communal clan system in the Highlands but could equally well have been describing common Native American practice.29 From the liberality with which Comanches disposed of a chief's effects when he died, said Indian agent Robert Neighbors, “it would induce the belief that they acquire property merely for the purpose of giving it to others.” Chiefs who acquired possessions gained no prestige in Lakota society; in fact, mere possession of property “could be viewed as disgraceful.” Prestige—and followers—came from giving and sharing whatever one had.30

Highlanders retained their faith in their clan chiefs' paternal benevolence even as those chiefs increasingly put their own interests first. As anthropologist Eric Wolf explained, in such societies chiefs could exploit kinship mechanisms and kin‐ordered modes of production to increase their power. By restricting access to resources, controlling social labor, and exacting tribute, they produced “an aristocracy that utilizes and exhibits kin‐ordered ties as a mark of its distinctiveness and separateness, leaving to the commoner stratum only residual claims. The aristocratic class thus constitutes itself by radically (p.9) altering the bonds of kinship in order to promote social distance between rulers and ruled.”31

Native American societies lacked the feudal aspects of Highland clans. Except in precontact Mississippian chiefdoms and some Northwest Coast societies, leaders rarely possessed the power, paraphernalia, or economic leverage of Highland clan chiefs. Typically, chiefs led by building consensus rather than issuing commands and lacked the means to enforce their will. Scotsman Thomas Nairne, South Carolina's Indian agent in Creek country in the eighteenth century, found “Nothing more contemptible than the authority of these Chiefs, They seldom use any Coercion, only harangue, if by that they can persuade it's well, if not they rarely inforce their orders by sanctions.” Each town was “a sort of petty republick,” he said. The Shawnees, similarly, were described as “strangers to civil power and authority.” They believed that God made them free and “that one man has no natural right to rule over another.” Chiefs sometimes had a hereditary claim to leadership but generally people followed them because of their charisma and reputation and because they personified the virtues their society valued—courage, generosity, and concern for the community. “The subjects under discussion in council are at all times open to popular opinion, and the chiefs are the main exponents of it. The democratic principle is strongly implanted in them,” Robert Neighbors said of the Comanches. “Each chief is ranked according to his popularity, and his rank is maintained on the same principle.”32 As pressure from outside forces generated changes in leadership in Indian country, as well as in the Highlands, romantic writers likened Highland chiefs to Indian chiefs: Both imbued their speech with metaphorical language, and both represented a nobler past that was disappearing.33

Despite differences between clan and tribe, many contemporary observers saw Highland and Indian ways of life as fundamentally similar. They lived in tribal societies with a strong warrior tradition, they inhabited rugged homelands, and they were accustomed to deprivation and inured to hardship.34 Some people found much to admire in their social bonds. Anne (née MacVicar) Grant lived near Indians when she was growing up and among Highlanders as an adult. As a girl, she spent ten years in America when her father was stationed there with the army. Although she and her mother lived mainly in Albany, they sometimes made their home at Fort Oswego and other more distant locations. When Mohawk families visited the settlements, Anne “delighted to hover about the wigwam,” talking with the Indian children, “and we frequently mingled languages.” She always remembered the Indians “with kindness.” After she returned to Scotland in 1768, she married a Highland minister and learned to speak and read Gaelic. “I insist,” she (p.10) wrote to a friend, “the ties of blood bind stronger, and the duties of relationship are better understood, in the Highlands, than anywhere else.”35 Just as Indian people thought (and think) of themselves in relation to their ancestors and to generations yet unborn, so “no Highlander ever once thought of himself as an individual,” wrote Grant. “He considered himself merely with reference to those who had gone before, and those who were to come after him.”36

Yet what Highlanders and Indians had in common had less to do with dress, language, and social structure than with their historical experiences as tribal peoples living on the edges of an empire and confronting historical currents at work on both sides of the Atlantic. Although they lived in the centers of their own worlds and often expressed disdain for those who sought to change them, both peoples were treated as tribes in the original sense of the Latin term tribus: “barbarians at the borders of the empire.”37 Sir Arthur Chichester, lord deputy of Ireland in the early seventeenth century, described the Gaels of the Scottish Highlands and islands as “proud, obstinate, and disobedient … barbarous, irreligious, and headstrong people.”38 Seventeenth‐century New Englanders described Indians in identical terms. The Pequots, said Captain John Underhill, were an “insolent and barbarous nation.”39

In some ways, of course, the histories of Highland Scots and American Indians are so different as to render comparisons superficial. Highland Scots, though belonging to separate clans, constituted a single ethnic group that shared a common culture and language and inhabited a relatively small country. American Indian societies were separated by vast distances and by tremendous cultural and linguistic diversity. The bloody chronicles of clan, dynastic, religious, and national struggles, and the wrenching social and economic changes that constitute Scotland's past, as well as the massive depopulation, military subjugation, dispossession, and cultural genocide that characterize much of the Native American past defy easy interpretation as parallel histories. Nevertheless, for Highlanders and American Indians alike, identity was forged not only by land and culture but also by colonial experiences and cultural imperialism.

In North Britain and North America, colonial powers and capitalist forces subordinated tribal societies and incorporated tribal resources into new economic systems. The rise of the nation‐state entailed the destruction of kin‐based systems of social and political organization.40 As colonial expansion transformed tribal homelands into contested borderlands, the centers of (p.11) tribal worlds become someone else's periphery. Whether as place or process, the frontier has exerted an enduring influence on American history, historiography, and mythology. The frontier—a borderland shared with a richer, larger, and sometimes aggressive power to the south—also played a major role in Scottish history.41 Developments on the northern frontier of Britain affected the western frontiers of America. America's borders attracted displaced peoples from the north of Britain, while resources extracted from American lands fueled developments in Scotland and England.

On both sides of the Atlantic, tribal peoples scrambled to adjust to new colonial relationships, structures, and economic orders. Unfamiliar market forces broke old communal bonds and disrupted established ways of life. Kin‐ordered modes of production in which labor was owed gave place to capitalist systems, where wealth controlled labor, means of production, and distribution.42 Communal landholding practices gave way to commercial management of property. Industrialization and commercialization of agriculture demanded the appropriation and exploitation of land, the main basis of wealth in preindustrial society and the core of tribal life. Reorganizing land required relocating populations. The process accelerated in Britain in the eighteenth century, spread to North America and the rest of Europe in the nineteenth century, and continues to shape economic development in the Third World today.43

In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, clan chiefs in the Highlands of Scotland turned their estates over to commercial sheep farming. In what became known as the Highland clearances, people who had lived in the glens from time immemorial were relocated to crofts on the seacoasts, to factory towns in the Lowlands, or to emigrant ships bound for America. Sheep were brought in from the south to graze the lands these people vacated, while mutton and wool from the new Highland flocks were shipped south to industrial England. Indians in the North American fur trade wore woolen blankets made by children in Yorkshire textile mills from the wool of sheep grazing on the lands of displaced Highlanders, some of whom made careers in the North American fur trade. Lowland Scots who invested in sheep farming in the Highlands and later in cattle ranching on the Great Plains helped eradicate tribal pastoralism on communal land on both sides of the Atlantic. Sheep replaced cattle in the Highlands of Scotland, cattle replaced buffalo on the Great Plains.

As Highlanders and Indians endured assaults on their land, resources, and cultures and experienced massive economic and social change, colonial divide‐and‐rule strategies and competing tribal interests undermined tribal struggles for independence. Colonizing powers tried to replace traditional (p.12) loyalties to clan and tribe with loyalty to the nation. Some chiefs cozied up to colonial authorities to bolster their own positions, and some readily embraced new commercial values and economic orders. In Scotland, as in North America, “a united people was able to conquer a disunited one.”44

Given the workings of colonialism, it would be unusual if parallel experiences did not emerge. Imperial powers produced similar conditions and responses among very different peoples in various parts of the world.45 In the eighteenth century, for example, Scotland and the American colonies occupied similar positions and endured comparable peripheral experiences as “cultural provinces” of the English core.46

In the depressing film Trainspotting, based on Irvine Welsh's novel about heroin addicts in Edinburgh, one of the characters laments (between expletives) that not only was Scotland colonized, but (even worse) it was colonized by the English, a nation of “wankers.” Such sentiments may strike Native peoples of North America as odd. Indigenous peoples from America to Australia have encountered Scots as instruments, not victims, of British colonization. Some writers dismiss as fiction or sheer nonsense the notion that Scots were colonized, and Scotland's experience in dealing with England pales in comparison with that of other colonized peoples. Scotland was not conquered, occupied, and controlled in the way that other colonies were; events in Scotland were different even from those in Ireland, and Britain did not establish settler colonies in the Highlands of Scotland as it did in North America, Australia, or parts of Africa. Lowland Scots, the Scottish ruling classes, and Scottish capital played a greater role than English colonists in transforming the Highlands. Many of the changes that affected the Highlands in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would have happened anyway, as the old order succumbed to population growth it could not accommodate and new economic forces it could not resist.

Finding opportunities rather than oppression in the British Empire, many Scots became avid colonizers themselves. Moreover, not all Scottish emigrants were Highlanders or poor farmers. Scottish merchants formed commercial cliques and dominated the Indian trade in the southeastern United States and Canada. Scottish educators were prominent in colonial society; Scottish and Scottish‐trained ministers dominated the Episcopalian and Presbyterian churches, and more than 150 Scottish doctors migrated to America in the eighteenth century: “Almost the whole of the colonial medical profession was Scottish emigré or Scottish trained.”47 Highland soldiers fought for new territories, and Highland settlers then occupied them. Scotland itself became an imperial nation within the British state.48

(p.13) Likewise, most Americans prefer to think of empire as an entity from which they won independence, not something they themselves constructed in their own country.49 America's empire was very different from the British Empire, just as British colonialism in Scotland was unlike that in India. Nevertheless, the Highlands' relationship with both England and the Lowlands had a clear colonial dimension, and the expanding American nation built an empire on Indian lands and colonized Indian people.

Imperialism and colonialism are ill‐defined terms. Linda Tuhiwai Smith sees them as interconnected, with colonialism as “but one expression of imperialism.” Colonialism was “the fort and the port of imperial outreach,” and colonial outposts also served as cultural sites that represented an image of what “civilization” stood for.50 Edward Said wrote that imperialism exists “in a kind of general cultural sphere as well as in specific political, ideological, economic, and social practices.”51 Kahnawake Mohawk political theorist Taiaiake Alfred says colonialism is not just a historical era, a theory or a political and economic relationship. “It is a total existence, a way of thinking about oneself and others always in terms of domination and submission that has come to form the very foundation of our individual and collective lives.”52

The impact of colonial power on the lives of Native Americans has been pervasive, pernicious, and persistent, not to mention more severe, more devastating, and more enduring than that experienced by Highland Scots. Nevertheless, colonialism offers a useful comparative framework in which to view both peoples' histories. Colonialism is not a one‐size‐fits‐all concept; “nor,” as a scholar of northwestern Mexico's colonial frontiers explains, “does it elicit the same meanings in different geographic regions and time periods.” Yet insofar as it implies political domination over territories and people, economic control and exploitation of labor and resources, displacement of populations, and the imposition of alien values, beliefs, and structures, as well as cultural dislocation and diverse responses on the part of colonized peoples, colonialism applies to the Highlands, as well as to Indian country.53

A whole nation need not be colonized for colonialism to exist. To say that Highland Scots and American Indians experienced colonialism is not to say that they faced the same colonialism or were subjected to it in all the same ways. Both groups encountered their own brand of internal colonialism: Each one was subjected to political, economic, and cultural integration by the dominant core and suffered marginalization, dislocation, exploitation, and dependency.54 Colonization worked along class and regional, as well as racial, lines. Highland Scots fared differently from Lowland Scots, and Highland peasants differently from Highland landlords. Like the children who worked twelve to fourteen hours a day in British textile mills producing inexpensive (p.14) cloth, the Indians who bought the products of this child labor by overhunting were simultaneously participants in and victims of a colonial system that affected lives on both continents.

Colonial relationships did not always break down neatly into exploiter and exploited. As mercantile and capitalist forces incorporated people and redeployed their bodies and their labor, roles and even identities shifted. “The binary of colonizer∕colonized does not take into account, for example, the development of different layerings within each group and across the two groups,” notes Linda Tuhiwai Smith. The demands and pressures of colonialism moved people from one area of the empire to another as if they were commodities. “Hence there are large populations in some places of non‐indigenous groups, also victims of colonization, whose primary relationship and allegiance is often to the imperial power rather than to the colonized people of the place to which they themselves have been brought.”55

Tribal peoples developed strategies to deal with colonialism, to maximize their independence in an increasingly dependent relationship, and to manipulate colonial relationships to their own advantage. Sometimes they made a new place for themselves within an empire or between empires, and sometimes they restricted, frustrated, and reshaped imperial projects. Occasionally they responded to the violence and chaos unleashed by colonialism by projecting violence and chaos onto weaker neighbors. The Iroquois in the Northeast, the Osages on the prairies, and the Comanches and Lakotas on the Great Plains demonstrated that Indian peoples were capable of exploiting the conditions created by colonial contacts and competitions to establish “empires” of their own. These Native powers did not set up the structures and edifices associated with Roman or British models of empire, but they built and maintained hegemony, expanded their territorial control, exploited peoples and resources, utilized violence, dominated trade, waged economic warfare, and often incorporated other groups as subordinates in their patterns of power and diplomacy.56

Conquest and colonialism entailed more than defeating people, occupying their land, and exploiting their resources. It also involved constructing representations of the colonized peoples and separating them from their languages, their social relations, their ways of understanding the world, and their histories. Colonialism consumed other histories and submerged them in the narratives of the nation‐state and colonial education served as an instrument to incorporate “problem peoples” into the state.57 For a long time, British histories that included Scotland tended to end their coverage with the defeat of Prince Charles Edward Stuart and the Jacobites at Culloden in 1746, as American histories ended their coverage of Indians in New England with the (p.15) defeat of King Philip in 1676 or, nationally, with the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. Scots and Indians mattered only so long as they resisted the growth of the nation. American Indians and Highland Scots preserved their histories in their oral traditions, but in Britain and America tribal histories were ignored, or told from someone else's perspective and written in someone else's language.58 Today, adult Scots and Native Americans recall learning little or nothing about Scottish or Indian history in the British and American history classes they took at school. Their histories were usually placed on the margins of a larger national narrative rather than at the center of their own story. “Not only was our history largely suppressed but those parts of it which were acknowledged were often taught in such a way that they seemed to appear suddenly out of nowhere. A sense of continuity was difficult to grasp.” The writer was Scottish novelist William McIlvanney, citing Mary, Queen of Scots, and Bonnie Prince Charlie as examples of what he calls “the pop‐up picture school of history.” Pocahontas and Sitting Bull exemplify the same pop‐up phenomenon in American history.59 Prior to the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, wrote Sir Walter Scott, few people in England knew anything about the Highlanders or their history. Most people considered them “complete barbarians” and “cared no more about them than the merchants of New York about the Indians who dwell beyond the Allegheny mountains.”60 Scholars who attempt to reconstruct a fuller picture of the past—in Indian America and in Scotland—therefore have had to wrestle with the challenges of recovering the stories of the voiceless as they attempt to write history “from the bottom up.” They also have to try to untangle webs of myth and history woven by colonizers and colonized alike.

This book looks at Indian country as a whole but only at the Highlands of Scotland. Nevertheless, Lowland Scots crop up repeatedly in the story and appear as colonizers on both sides of the Atlantic. The Highlands and western islands (the Hebrides) of Scotland form a cultural as well as a geographic region. The rugged Highlands are separated from the rest of Britain by the “Highland line,” the boundary fault that runs from the mouth of the Clyde on the west coast, through Perthshire and Angus northeastward to the North Sea. The line was cultural and linguistic, as well as geographic, marking the Gàidhealtachd, the Gaelic‐speaking area beyond it. It ran through my mother's hometown, Crieff, which stands at the edge of the Highlands and was burned during the 1715 Jacobite rising. Crieff's minister in the late eighteenth century described his parish as divided into Highland and Lowland parts, (p.16) with Gaelic spoken in the former, Scottish‐dialect English in the latter. It was the site of a great cattle fair, where drovers from the Highlands brought their black cattle for sale and export to the Lowlands and England.61

The Highland‐Lowland divide was not such a racial gulf as Sir Walter Scott and others portrayed it, but the differences ran deep.62 In the fourteenth century Scots chronicler John of Fordun described Scotland as a country of two halves. The Lowlands were inhabited by law‐abiding, peaceful, and industrious citizens. “The highlanders and people of the islands, on the other hand, are a savage and untamed nation, rude and independent, given to rapine, ease‐loving, of a docile and warm disposition, comely in person but unsightly in dress, hostile to the English people and language and owing to diversity of speech, even to their own nation, and exceedingly cruel.”63 According to sixteenth‐century chronicler John Major, foreigners called Lowlanders “householding Scots” and Highlanders “Wild Scots.”64

The distinction held in the eighteenth century: The Lowlands were regarded as relatively civilized; the Highlands were regarded, by Englishmen, Lowland Scots, and foreign travelers, as a separate country, a land of savagery in need of civilization.65 The “fiery and ferocious” Highlanders seemed “a very distinct species” from their “cool and circumspect” Lowland neighbors.66 General George Wade—an Irishman—said Highlanders held Lowlanders “in the utmost Contempt, imagining them inferior to themselves in Courage, Resolution, and the Use of Arms, and accuse them of being Proud, Avaricious, and Breakers of their Word.” Highland clans that agreed on little else shared a common contempt for Lowlanders, he said.67 Moreover, Dr. Samuel Johnson said Lowlanders and Highlanders maintained a mutual dislike, and each regarded the other's way of life with contempt. The Highland Scots he met who spoke English spoke it well because they had learned it from the English, not from Lowland Scots, by whom they refused to be taught, “for they have long considered them as a mean and degenerate race.”68 Visitors from the continent noted the distinction: A merchant from Lisbon said Highlanders “call themselves the ancient Scots,” while Lowlanders were a mixture of ancient Scots, Picts, Danes, English, French, and others; an eighteen‐year‐old French aristocrat who spent five weeks in Scotland in 1786 said the Highlanders “are a people apart, and act as though they are entirely different from the rest of the Scots.”69

This book focuses on the Highland strain of the huge Celtic movement to North America, but other people from Britain's Celtic borderlands created new Celtic settlements on North American frontiers. Protestant Scots‐Irish migrated to these regions in great numbers, cut repeated swaths through Indian country, and earned an enduring reputation as shock troops of colonialism. (p.17) Like other people moving to America from Britain's border areas, they carried with them a frontier heritage of their own.70

Scots held no monopoly on mixing and mingling with Indians. By the eighteenth century, large stretches of Indian country had become crossroads of exchange and culture, where members of different Indian and European nations interacted regularly. In the babel of languages that resulted, Gaelic was just one of many tongues. In Creek country, U.S. Indian agent Benjamin Hawkins told Thomas Jefferson, “I hear the language of Scotch, French, Spanish, English, Africans, Creeks, and Uchees.”71

In such contexts, claims for a special affinity between a particular nation and Native Americans usually do not stand up to close scrutiny. Within each national group, individuals' characters, experiences, and attitudes affected relations with outsiders, as did the circumstances in which they met. The French earned a reputation for cultivating good relations with Indian peoples, but they did so largely because they had to. In the early seventeenth century Samuel de Champlain set the French on a course of intercultural cooperation as they built an empire on the fur trade; in the eighteenth century, outnumbered by English rivals, France depended on a network of Indian alliances.72 Individual Frenchmen lived with Indian people, and French‐Indian communities grew up in many places. However, when Indians frustrated French colonial designs, Frenchmen slaughtered Mesquakies (Foxes), Natchez, and Choctaws as readily as Englishmen slaughtered Pequots or Americans gunned down Cheyennes and Sioux. Many Germans have long demonstrated a romantic fascination with Native American cultures and portrayed themselves as “the Indians of Europe,” but few Indian people reciprocate the fascination. Indeed, Germans looking to expand eastward depicted the Poles and other Slavs as the Indians of Europe: Savage, “history‐less” people, they were doomed to ruin and should give up their lands to the march of progress. In the German East, the Nazis emulated the conquest and colonization of the American West. They dispossessed and destroyed indigenous people and proclaimed it a civilizing mission. “There is only one task,” Hitler declared: “To set about the Germanization of the land by bringing in Germans and to regard the indigenous inhabitants as Indians.”73

Highland Scots and American Indians met within larger contexts of cultural collision and colonial encounter that governed their interactions. Having been colonized and “civilized” themselves, Highland Scots sometimes identified and sympathized with Indian people they saw going through the kind of (p.18) hard experiences they or their parents had suffered, but Highland traders, soldiers, and settlers often displayed the same prejudices, sentiments, and behavior as other European traders, soldiers and settlers when dealing with Indians, and Scots sometimes took on the role of colonizing and civilizing Indians with zeal. Highland governors, soldiers, and traders were probably just as likely as their English or American counterparts to exploit, shoot, and cheat Indians, and Highland settlers proved as eager as anyone else to occupy Indian land. Indians in turn knew that Scots came to their country as part of a colonial endeavor that always subordinated and sometimes sacrificed Indian interests to British benefit.74 The notion that peoples were less prone to abuse or kill each other because they shared similar tribal structures does not stand up to historical scrutiny anywhere in the world.

Nevertheless, the British were not a homogenous group. Highland Scots and Englishmen had different ideas about what it meant to be British, had dissimilar experiences of colonial power, and did not necessarily share a common vision of empire. Many Scots “went native,” that is, they lived in Indian communities and identified with their adopted people. Arthur Herman contends that the Scottish Enlightenment's insistence that people of different places and periods shared a common humanity, a universal human nature shaped by environment and development, rendered them “largely immune to racial theories of White supremacy” (though not of cultural supremacy). This was not a phenomenon unique to North America. “In one colonial setting after another, Scots proved themselves far better able to get along with people of another culture and color than their English counterparts.”75 In India, according to Simon Schama, Scots were “the most phenomenally knowledgeable and culturally tolerant” of the British imperial administrators.” They took to India the lessons of the Scottish Enlightenment, an appreciation of the need to understand the people and culture they were dealing with, and a determination not to repeat in Asia the mistakes England had made in Scotland.76 Michael Fry, no misty‐eyed romantic when it comes to the Scots' role in imperialism, also notes the legendary adaptability of Scots in other cultures:

While in the pages of Rudyard Kipling or John Buchan we can read legends of Scotsmen who turned themselves into Asian khans or gods on Pacific Islands, in real life there was nothing more striking than this affinity of the Scots and Native Americans. The parallels in their martial values, oral culture and social structure do not perhaps fully account for it. Somehow, the generosity and freedom in both peoples made a mutual appeal to them across the racial barrier (which they, of course, did not acknowledge).77

(p.19) John Buchan, expatriate Scot, governor of Canada, and novelist (who on occasion had himself photographed wearing a Plains Indian headdress and clothing) had one of his fictional characters declare that “the truth is we are the only race on earth that can produce men capable of getting inside the skins of remote people. Perhaps the Scots are better than the English, but we're all a thousand per cent better than anybody else.”78

Highland Scots were not unique in the range and nature of their interactions with Indian peoples but, in the vast colonial encounter that is American history, Highlanders and Indians came together in unusually large numbers and across huge stretches of the continent. They brought to their encounters their own stories, mythologies, memories, and experiences, and they developed intricate and sometimes intimate relations. They fought in colonial conflicts, clashed over lands, and met and married in the fur trade. They wove tangled webs of family and allegiance, and their offspring often forged roles for themselves as mediators and culture brokers.

They also built new societies together. Highlanders met Indians on the peripheries of empire, and where they lived and slept side by side, they created fluid communities held together by shared experiences and interests, children, and ties of kinship rather than allegiance to the state. For a time, Michael Fry suggests, Highlanders and Indians offered “an alternative model of American development.” As occurred in South America, an incoming group integrated with the indigenous people and achieved “a mestizo culture … a fresh amalgam contain[ing] something of both.” But it was a road not taken. In Britain, eighteenth‐century ideas that culture and environment explained human difference and determined human potential give way to less flexible racial explanations that placed whites and nonwhites in permanently separate categories.79 In the United States, nation building demanded the displacement and destruction of Indian peoples to make way for white populations and white culture. “[T]he sharply drawn American frontier,” says Fry, “cut across the fluid and porous Scottish idea of a frontier.” In the late nineteenth century, government and settlers intended to transform the Canadian West into a modern agrarian society of white peoples, not to perpetuate the old fur trade society, where Highlanders and Indians mixed and mingled.80 Communities and families that contained Scots and Indians—and where one could be both Scot and Indian—did not figure in the American and Canadian vision of the future. It was that vision that most Highland Scots in North America ultimately embraced as they took their place on the white side of the racial divide.