with Anglos. The trading posts established by US merchants further divided Muskogee society, pulling many deeply into the US economy through dependency and debt. […]This method of colonization by co-optation and debt proved effective wherever employed by colonial powers in the world, but only when it was accompanied by extreme violence at any sign of indigenous insurgency. The United States moved across North America in this manner. While most Muskogees continued to follow their traditional democratic ways in their villages, the elite Muskogees were making decisions and compromises on their behalf that would bear tragic consequences for them all.25
The Rickahoken of central Virginia provide an even more tragic example. Defeated in an early war against the Virginia colony along with other members of the Powhatan confederacy, they resorted to an alliance with the British. In exchange for weapons and permission from the Crown to continue existing, they had to provide the British with tobacco and slaves. It is believed that the Rickahoken decimated the Shanantoah (who lived in the valley named after them, the Shenandoah) some time after the 1660s, when a German-Czech explorer found the valley to be heavily populated. Perhaps the Rickahoken themselves resettled the area, because in 1705 another white invader reported the valley to be so densely populated by “Tobacco Indians” that there were no remaining sites for settlement. Curiously, just twelve years later, Lt. Governor Alexander Spotswood led a party of patricians—land speculators and surveyors—over the Blue Ridge Mountains and into an empty Shenandoah Valley, which they divided up as planned. How did he know they would find the area depopulated? It is believed that in the preceding years, the Rickahoken, distrusting their greedy allies in the Virginia colony and fleeing warfare in the increasingly volatile Appalachian corridor, took refuge with the Huron in the far north. The history textbooks (of the settler state that grew out of Virginia and the other colonies) tend not to mention this complex set of conflicts, instead assuring their readers that European settlers found the Shenandoah Valley uninhabited.
All of these processes of genocide, each with different results, are standard effects of the extension of state power. The extreme disparity in military technologies allowed Europeans to create settler states, enslaving, depopulating, and repopulating the territories they conquered. However, the earlier stages of this process show how an aggressive state can cause its stateless neighbors to either form their own states in the hopes of securing an alliance, or to engage in rebellion, flight, and defensive warfare, potentially undergoing an anti-authoritarian social evolution. Even the most peaceful, trade- or conversion-oriented states, seeking to maintain relations with other populations, have sometimes ended up disrupting their new neighbors to the point of destroying them. All states view stateless populations as potential property, and deny their fundamental right to exist. “We had to destroy the village in order to save it,” that phrase of bureaucratic insanity from the Vietnam War, expresses the statist mentality in the most lucid, logical way possible.
Negotiation with a state tends to result in domination, whether the form that takes is inclusion in exploitative trade networks, imperial annexation, or total annihilation. True independence from states can only come through warfare.
In Suriname, Jamaica, and Haiti, Africans running away from enslavement by the Dutch, British, Spanish, or French, and banding together to form communities of resistance in the mountains and forests formed a number of stateless societies. Many of these groups were firmly anti-authoritarian. After failing to subdue Suriname’s Boni maroons in a guerrilla war that lasted 150 years, the Dutch tried civilizing them by signing treaties promising peace if the maroon communities would help hunt down and recapture slaves who escaped thenceforth. The maneuver failed, and today seventy thousand descendants of the “bush maroons” still live in relative autonomy in Suriname.
The English had a little more success on Jamaica, but they also ended up fighting guerrilla wars for a hundred years against the maroon communities that began to form there in the 1650s. The most noted resistance figure of the Windward Maroons, who were organized in a decentralized, anti-authoritarian fashion, was Granny Nanny. The Leeward Maroons, on the west side of the island, were organized hierarchically. Their leaders were men, the most famous of whom was named Kodjo. It was the Windward Maroons who resisted signing peace treaties with the English the longest. After signing the treaties, the maroons on Jamaica were obliged to help the British return newly escaped slaves and suppress slave rebellions, in return for peace and partial autonomy. The British thus forced the maroons to accept a kind of border, a differentiation between the maroon citizens, who were entitled to the right of freedom, and the colonial subjects, governed by British slave laws. The border was a first step towards creating distinct nationalities, ending the subversive hospitality with which the maroons had previously welcomed all runaways into their community. In the end, what was most important for the British was not to reassert control over specific people or a specific territory, but to close an open space in which their divisions of race, nationality, and class lost all meaning.
The most dramatic example of maroon resistance comes from Haiti. In the 1750s, Mackandal led a group of enslaved African plantation workers in a rebellion against the French colony. The movement was hierarchically organized, and when its leader was executed, it quickly died out. In 1791, the rebellion that would eventually defeat the French Crown, the English, the Spanish, and then the French republican troops under Napoleon broke out and spread in a horizontal, decentralized fashion, not developing hierarchical forms for several years. The most influential people in sparking the uprising were two Voudun priests, a man and a woman. It is noteworthy that among all the maroon resistance movements, the decentralized ones were the only ones in which women also held leadership positions, and leadership was more often shared, whereas the centralized movements, which were also more likely to imitate European cultural and political forms, were exclusively led by men.
Eventually, Toussaint L’Ouverture claimed the title of general and organized a European-style army, centralizing the resistance movement. On the cusp of victory, he submitted to Napoleon’s demands, helping the French to restore a certain kind of order to the island. This betrayal sparked a new decentralized rebellion, which forced the French out. A number of Toussaint’s officers, however, inserted themselves into leadership positions, establishing a European-style state with French assistance. One after another, first Dessalines and then Henry Christophe, ruled like tyrants and were eventually assassinated by their own people.26
Haiti provides an example of the rebel state. This model arises from the militaristic pressures of a resistance war, from the possibilities a rebellion offers for charismatic figures to ascend and come into control of a proto-state structure (the rebel military), and from the cultural dominance of the occupying state (which implants statist forms of legitimacy, a statist cultural pedigree, and statist methods of military organization in the collective consciousness of the occupied people). Though it seems paradoxical, in the end it is a common occurrence for a colonized people to imitate the colonizer even as they rebel against him, such that a movement for freedom from a specifically statist oppression becomes a reproduction of state authority.27
14 Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, 211–12.
15 Ibid., 258.
16 Ibid.
17 For a further elaboration of this view as it pertains to differing strategies in a social movement (direct democracy vs. anarchy), see Anonymous, “Fire Extinguishers and Fire Starters: Anarchist Interventions in the #SpanishRevolution,” CrimethInc., June 2011, http://www.crimethinc.com/texts/recentfeatures/barc.php. As it pertains to social theory, see Marianne Maeckelbergh, The Will of the Many: How the Alterglobalisation Movement is Changing the Face of Democracy (London: Pluto Press, 2009).
18 Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, 212.
