By 1815... both Glencoe and the rest of the Highlands had witnessed the complete disintegration of the clans which had for so long been central to the lives of Scotland's Gaelic-speaking communities. This disintegration was as inevitable - and had much the same causes - as the collapse, a hundred or so years later, of tribes like the Nez Perce. The civilisation which was coming into existence in eighteenth-century Britain... was utterly intolerant of older forms of social organisation. This civilisation... looked to the land primarily as a source of the commodities... which its burgeoning cities required in ever larger quantities... land had everywhere to be reorganised; that it was no longer sufficient for the Scottish Highlands to be given over to subsistence agriculture of the sort which had been practised by the clans; that it was not longer sufficient either for the American West.
In other words, the development of industrial capitalism transformed relations on the land, from ownership to usage, in order to further develop capitalism. The people who lived on that land were dispossessed, killed or forced into emigration.
Hunter tells the story of what happened to the Highlanders and Native Americans in painful detail. He also shows how some, like Angus McDonald, the key immigrant to Montana from the Highlands in this book, formed close and loving relations with Native Americans. Angus rose through a life working for the Hudson Bay Company, ironically, a company whose massive profits came from the systematic use and abuse of natural resources that Native Americans relied on. The fur trade that the Company developed becoming part of forcing transformation on to the indigenous communities, tying them into a global trading network which saw natural resources (like beaver fur) purely as commodities.
But Hunter shows that there was a fundamental difference between former Highland clan leaders and Native American chiefs. The former were white and could become integrated into a capitalist system that was based on white supremacy. The Native Americans could not. While Angus McDonald could form strong personal bonds, this was not the reality of the United States as a whole, where racism and white supremacy formed (and continues to form) an key part of its state ideology.
The links between native America and settler America... were always very tenuous. And though Highlanders were, from time to time, subjected to discrimination and persecution of a quasi-racial type, Highlanders were white. Highland chiefs, by virtue of that fact alone, had many more options open to them than were available to men like Sitting Bull, Looking Glass or White Bird. Because there was no insurmountable racial obstacle in their being assimilated into the upper echelons of British society, and because it suited the British government to hasten the destruction of clanship by thus subverting clanship's ruling elite, clan chiefs... found it surprisingly easy to take on what amounted to entirely new identities.
Hunter makes a further important point about race in this context. He emphasises that not all former Highlanders treated Native Americans positively. In fact most didn't. "More typical" he writes, where those who in the Red River area in 1813, "made good the loss of heir lands back in Scotland by appropriating other lands which had previously been occupied by the Metis.... Right across the North American continent... Highland refugees from eviction, clearance and other forms of oppression were to better themselves at the expense of the Indian peoples."
The point that Hunter returns to, is that the Highland people would have identified themselves as white, and the Indian people as inferior. When Patrick Sellar, who enforced the Sutherland Clearances and has gone down in history as an evil representative of the class who did this to the Highlanders, called those he dispossessed "aborigines", he did so to be deliberately insulting to his victims. Tragically "Most of North America's Highland settlers... were no less racist in their attitude to Indians that settlers from other places".
The tragedy, as Hunter draws out, is that many of the victims of the Clearances shared an understanding of the land and its use with the Native American people. Land as the "embodiment" of community. But this was not to stop them being drawn in to a violent confrontation which eventually saw the decimation and destruction of a way of life. This is shown, all the more tragically, through the book precisely because much of the McDonald clan and its descendants did become closely linked into the Native American communities and continue to play a central, and celebrated, role in those communities today.
James Hunter's work has long had an important role in highlighting how the destruction of the Highland communities had a global impact. This short book, by focusing on the story of one family, emphasises this and somehow makes it much more personal. He places the Highland Clearances and the dispossession inflicted on the Native American people as part and parcel of a tragic story that saw ecological destruction, genocide and dispossession as an essential part of the rise of capitalism. Today, the struggle to redress these historical consequences continues in both Scotland and North America.
Related Reviews
Hunter - Set Adrift Upon the World: The Sutherland Clearances
Hunter - Insurrection: Scotland's Famine Winter
Devine - The Scottish Clearances: A History of the Dispossessed
Hutchinson - Martyrs: Glendale and the Revolution in Skye
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