Browsing by Author "Chaves, Kelly K."

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    Saltwater Sovereigns to Land-Locked Subjects: The European and Colonial takeover of Indigenous maritime space in New England and Atlantic Canada, 1550-1755
    (University of New Brunswick, 2020-01) Chaves, Kelly K.; Milner, J. Marc; Waite, Gary
    Native Americans living along North America’s Atlantic coastline had always been maritime people. Before Europeans arrived on the continent, Indigenous mariners fished and whaled in their territorial waters. When European explorers appeared, Native seafarers met the newcomers not on the “in-between space” of a sand strewn beach, but as maritime equals paddling in their ocean-going canoes towards the anchored carracks in their harbours. Native Americans’ maritime capabilities astonished Europeans and challenged their long-held beliefs of oceanic superiority. As colonization progressed, English settlers, imbued with nationalistic rhetoric proclaiming themselves to be “sovereigns of the seas,” quashed southern New England’s Indigenous maritime resistance against their settlements through a series of wars and coastal land grabs that dispossessed Native peoples from their coastal lands and adjoining territorial waters. English colonizers allowed subjugated Indigenous populations to re-integrate into the maritime world in specific industries, which controlled and coerced Indigenous mariners to work for colonial merchants through debt peonage. Yet, not all Indigenous seafarers surrendered their autonomy. In the French held lands of Acadia and eastern Maine, Wabanaki mariners fought New Englanders’ attempts to empty their territorial waters of pelagic and demersal creatures and to expand colonial fishing settlements into their homelands by attacking colonial fishing vessels. An imperial geopolitical struggle between Britain and France for control of the fishery resulted in the British conquest of downeast New England and Acadia (renamed Nova Scotia) in 1713. Indigenous people, incensed by the handover of their traditional spaces from one European government to another, exerted their regional maritime power from 1715 to 1726 to counter the expanding presence of Englishmen and New Englanders in Maine and Nova Scotian lands and waters. A series of autonomous Indigenous maritime wars threatened the destruction of New England’s fishing fleets and caused an uproar in the British colonies. Indigenous maritime resistance ended only when British forces attacked Native communities on land. Subsequent treaty negotiations favored British expansion into the Indigenous maritime environment and legally extended English sovereignty over Native peoples in Maine and Nova Scotia, effectively drowning Native Americans’ maritime autonomy beneath the ocean’s waves.