It\u2019s a story familiar to anyone who reads the news. A nation is invaded by a foreign power. To defend itself, that nation sells its natural resources on the open market and buys firearms to resist the invader.<\/p>\n
This story isn\u2019t in Syria or Afghanistan. It\u2019s in Southeast Alaska, and it\u2019s the one told by a new book, \u201cThundersticks: Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America.\u201d<\/p>\n
Professor David Silverman of George Washington University in Washington, D.C. spent five years researching how firearms spread across North America. In chapters stretching from New England to Florida, the Missouri River and the Pacific Northwest, Silverman explains how Native nations traded with Europeans and Americans for weapons, then used those weapons to resist colonialism.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn most of North America, colonial powers trade with Native people for furs, whether you\u2019re talking about beaver or buffalo, or sea otter in the Pacific Northwest,\u201d Silverman said.<\/p>\n
In exchange for those furs, \u201cindigenous people want all kinds of goods \u2026 but what they want most of all is guns, powder and shot,\u201d Silverman said.<\/p>\n
If colonial powers refused to trade those things \u2014 as the Russians did \u2014 they found themselves shut out by Native traders.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt speaks to Native savviness, it speaks to Native power and influence,\u201d Silverman said. \u201cThey control valuable economic resources that the gun traders want access to.\u201d<\/p>\n
East of the Mississippi River, British and French colonial officials often had to give firearms as gifts, simply to open trade.<\/p>\n
\u201cColonial states such as Britain, France, Spain and sometimes individual colonies provided Native people with firearms as gifts \u2026 in such volume that Native people didn\u2019t have to trade for them. That surprised me to no end,\u201d Silverman said.<\/p>\n
When they agreed to provide firearms, they strengthened anticolonial resistance.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019re cultivating friends even as they\u2019re strengthening enemies,\u201d Silverman said. \u201cAnd we might be engaging in the same sort of thing right now in Syria. The person you\u2019re arming one day might be your enemy the next day.\u201d<\/p>\n
\nInvading Russians<\/strong><\/p>\n In Southeast Alaska, the Russians were the invaders. Through the first two decades of the 19th century, fur traders attempted to implement the same policies they had enacted in Siberia: forced labor. In the Aleutians, Kodiak archipelago and the shores of the Kenai Peninsula, they required Natives to hunt for them and pay tribute in furs.<\/p>\n In 1792, Alexander Baranov, leader of the largest trading firm in Alaska at the time, met the Tlingit at the entrance to Prince William Sound.<\/p>\n \u201cDuring the darkest hours of the night, before daybreak, we were surrounded by a great number of armed men. They began to stab and cut down the natives who were with me,\u201d he wrote in a July 1793 letter. \u201cOn their heads they had thick helmets with the figures of monsters on them, and neither our buckshot nor our bullets could pierce their armor. In the dark, they seemed to us worse than devils.\u201d<\/p>\n The Russians used cannons to force the Tlingit to retreat, but 10 years later, it was the Russians who retreated. In the first Battle of Sitka, Tlingit attackers \u2014 many armed with firearms \u2014 overwhelmed and burned a Russian fort. Another attack ambushed and killed a hunting party, and a Russian post at Yakutat was destroyed about the same time.<\/p>\n One of the keys to the Tlingit victory was armament bought from American and British traders.<\/p>\n During the late 18th century and early 19th century, Alaska was at the center of a vast triangular trade between Europe, the Pacific Northwest and China.<\/p>\n Alaskan sea otter fur was prized in China, and Chinese products were valued in Europe and the new United States. To get the sea otter furs they needed, the Americans and British were happy to trade firearms.<\/p>\n Busting myths<\/strong><\/p>\n In the archives of New England, Silverman uncovered the records of traders who dealt with the Tlingit. It was part of a research journey that took him across the country, to two dozen archives and libraries and to talks with Natives across the United States.<\/p>\n The stereotypical myth is that unscrupulous traders would unload war-worn surplus weapons and cheap products on Natives who didn\u2019t know any better.<\/p>\n Silverman found the Tlingit \u2014 and Natives in general \u2014 certainly did know better, and they demanded only the best weapons for their trade.<\/p>\n \u201cNative people would not take whatever they could get,\u201d Silverman said. \u201cThey\u2019re not getting junk guns from traders, which I think is a widespread assumption.\u201d<\/p>\n Earlier in his career, Silverman worked at Jamestown National Historic Park in Virginia and became familiar with the smoothbore black-powder firearms used from the 17th through 19th centuries. <\/p>\n \u201cIt seemed to me these weapons were much easier to use; they fired more quickly than most accounts I had read,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Scholars tended to discount the impact of smoothbore firearms, saying they weren\u2019t much more effective than bow-and-arrow hunting and warfare at long range.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t quibble with that point, but Native people are very rarely firing on people from long range; they\u2019re firing on people from short range,\u201d he said. \u201cIt becomes easier to understand why Native people adopted firearms so quickly. Getting hit with a lead musket ball … it brings a deer down quickly. It brings a human being down quickly.\u201d<\/p>\n More deadly<\/strong><\/p>\n In 1804, the second Battle of Sitka was fought to a standstill between the Russians and Tlingit until the Russians successfully prevented the defending Tlingit fortress from resupplying its gunpowder stores.<\/p>\n Even afterward, the Tlingit so outgunned and outnumbered the Russians that the Europeans perennially felt besieged. As late as 1818, the Russians wrote that they were outgunned by the Tlingit. <\/p>\n By then, however, the sea otter trade was collapsing. Overhunting had made the animals almost impossible to find, and the same trade routes that brought guns to Southeast Alaska also brought disease.<\/p>\n \u201cAs they\u2019re acquiring guns, they\u2019re acquiring terrible epidemic diseases that unleash incredible destruction on their communities,\u201d Silverman said.<\/p>\n Furthermore, as trade shifted to the inland pursuit of beaver fur, Tlingit neighbors began to acquire weapons of their own.<\/p>\n When that happened, traditional tribal and clan warfare became much more deadly.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a historical lesson and cautionary tale\u201d when talking about firearms in Native America, Silverman said. \u201cIndigenous people in North America transformed their lives with firearms,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Tribes and people who owned them and traded them became powerful leaders able to defend themselves from imperial powers, who then have to deal with them diplomatically, as equals. <\/p>\n There\u2019s a downside to the firarms trade, too.<\/p>\n \u201cIt becomes a much more violent world,\u201d Silverman said. \u201cThis book offers a glimpse into that world where everyone is armed. When everyone is armed, more people die.\u201d <\/p>\n \u2022 Contact reporter James Brooks at james.k.brooks@juneauempire.com. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"