ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes Native Americans’ and African Americans’ hybrid and strategic learning in the decades after the American Revolution. Native women married traders and devised new hybrids of Indigenous and colonial practices. African men developed unique religious identities within Christianity. However, “Cherokee civilization”—a fraught and freighted project even among the Cherokee open to it—became quite unthinkable among whites, who preferred removal by the 1820s. Moreover, among enslaved and free blacks, first reading and then writing became illegal during the 1820s. Both the phenomenon of hybrid learning by the colonized and the exclusions practiced by colonials represented a continuity with settler colonial society’s history of racialization. By the end of the 1820s, elite and nonelite whites had taken steps—tacitly or expressly—to identify formal education with civilization. Education became an attribute of white superiority over the “savage” and “barbarian” Indians and Africans.
