Leigh Claire La Berge is Professor of English at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and author of
Divine Lynxes: When the Middle Ages ended with the bubonic plague pandemic and the first iterations of wage labor began and merchant capital began to take hold, cats as symbols of economic power and economic disinheritance did not disappear, rather they were transformed. This chapter narrates in feline terms the conquest: The ship that delivered the first abducted Africans into Virginia was named The White Lion, a claim to both racial and regal power, and this ship introduces the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the largest forced migration in world history. White masters, white indentured servants, and Black slaves arrived into the thriving and diverse continent of First Nations America, and some of these nations traced their own lineage back to a cat—the Sky Lynx in the case of the Haudenosaunee.
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