Ethnogenesis and Ethnohistory of the Seminole Maroons |
Ethnogenesis and Ethnohistory of the Seminole Maroons
Journal of World History
Volume 4, Number 2 (Fall 1993)
pages 287-305
Kevin Mulroy, Associate University Librarian
University of California, Los Angeles
At what historic moment and by what means does a ‘people’ spring into being?” ask Jacqueline Peterson and Jennifer Brown in their introduction to the 1985 ground-breaking study, The New Peoples: Being and Becoming Métis in North America. It is an intriguing question, and one that ethnohistorians are beginning to ask with regard to a wide range of groups living on many different frontiers. The editors of The New Peoples take strong issue with Frederick Jackson Turner’s belief that American national identity emerged on the frontier as transplanted immigrants were “fused into a mixed race.” Rather, they argue, the story is one of “genesis of composite ‘mestizo’ populations and the creation of bold and startlingly original ethnic and national identities throughout the two continents” of North and South America. “The rise of the ‘new peoples,’ ” Peterson and Brown believe, “is the most significant historical consequence of the wrenching collision and entanglement of the Old World with the New.” As Rebecca Bateman has pointed out recently, “the very processes responsible for the decimation of many cultural groups of the Americas led to ethnogenesis, the birth of new ones.” This paper will argue in favor of Peterson and Brown’s conclusions by examining the beginnings of one of these new and distinct peoples, the Seminole maroons, whose ethnogenesis took place on the southeastern frontier in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, largely as a result of such entanglements between the Old World and the New.
The Seminole maroons’ ethnogenesis and cultural development place them within the frame of reference of neoteric or cenogenic societies, explanations of which tend to stress the multiple heritages of groups formed as a result of frontier expansion. Nancie L. Solien Gonzalez has defined a neoteric group as “a type of society which, springing from the ashes of warfare, forced migration or other calamity, survived by patching together bits and pieces from its cultural heritage while at the same time borrowing and inventing freely and rapidly in order to cope with new, completely different circumstances.” Such groups tended to welcome and even encourage rapid change in order to survive and prosper. Indeed, one might say that they were created by the circumstances to which they adapted.
Coining another term, Kenneth M. Bilby has described cenogenic societies as those
born of conditions associated with the major transformations wrought by the worldwide expansion of capitalism—the large scale uprooting of peoples through wars, conquest and colonization, slavery, migration, and the forced removal of people from their ancestral lands. Most of them emerged from frontier setlings. The resulting sociocultural “fusions” were truly new creations, owing much to the past, but without precedent at the same time. Indeed, the fact that those who evolved these new societies and identities were forced to call upon several cultural pasts, not just one or two, guaranteed original outcomes.
There is considerable overlap between the Gonzalez and Bilby models, but Bilby restricts his argument to small-scale societies. He also takes issue with Gonzalez’s notion that such newly formed societies are essentially “without roots,” arguing instead that “the special kind of abrupt ethnogenesis involved in the creation of these societies does not preclude the transmission of a great deal of cultural knowledge from the past.” Bilby’s central defining characteristic lor cenogenic societies, in fact, is the importance of history and historical consciousness in the development of their self-definition and identity, a notion crucial to an understanding of Seminole maroon ethnohistory…
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Tags: Black Seminoles, Journal of World History, Kevin Mulroy