What You Need To Read

I will post each quarter a list of items I have placed on my “To Get To” list, scholarship I will consider as I work to keep current in this vast field and begin to contemplate a third edition of Native America.   If there is something I have missed, or a work you would like me to add to the list, please feel free to drop me a line. For the March bibliography, click here.

Abram Kercsmar, Joshua. “Wolves at Heart: How Dog Evolution Shaped Whites’ Perceptions of Indians in North America.” Environmental History 21, no. 3 (July 2016): 516-540.

Anderson, Gary Clayton, “The Native Peoples of the American West: Genocide or Ethnic Cleansing?” Western Historical Quarterly 47, no. 4 (November 2016): 407-433.

Barr, Juliana.  “There’s No Such Thing as ‘Prehistory’: What the Longue Duree of Caddo and Pueblo History Tells Us About Colonial America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 74 (April 2017), 203-240.

Bowes, John P. ““Hang Them All”: George Wright and the Plateau Indian War.” Journal Of Military History 81, no. 2 (April 2017): 569-571.

Brewer II, Joseph Paul, et al. “Renaming the Indians: State-Sponsored Legibility through Permanent Family Surnames among the Sisseton and Wahpeton at Lake Traverse, 1903.” American Indian Culture & Research Journal 40, no. 3 (July 2016): 47-66.

Britten, Thomas A. “Abraham Lincoln as Great Father: A Look at Federal Indian Policy, 1861-1865.” American Indian Culture & Research Journal 40, no. 3 (July 2016): 103-122.

Bunnell, David.  Good Friday on the Rez: A Pine Ridge Odyssey, (New York: St. Martin’s, 2017).

Carder, Susan Fae. “The Development of a Gaming Enterprise for the Navajo Nation.” American Indian Quarterly 40, no. 4 (Fall2016 2016): 295-332.

Carlson, Shawn B., M. James Blackman, and Ronald L. Bishop. “Texas Mission Ceramics: Origins of Manufacture and Distribution during the Eighteenth Century.” Historical Archaeology 50, no. 4 (October 2016): 65-91.

Cevasco, Carla. “This is My Body: Communion and Cannibalism in Colonial New England and New France.” New England Quarterly 89, no. 4 (December 2016): 556-586.

Clatterbuck, Mark. Crow Jesus: Personal Stories of Native Religious Belonging, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017).

Colwell, Chip  Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits: Inside the Fight to Reclaim Native America’s Culture. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 22017).

Conrad, Paul. “Empire through Kinship.” Early American Studies, An Interdisciplinary Journal 14, no. 4 (Fall2016 2016): 626-660.

Fisher, Linford D. “Why shall wee have peace to bee made slaves”: Indian Surrenderers during and after King Philip’s War.” Ethnohistory 64, no. 1 (January 2017): 91-114.

Fisher, Samuel.  “Fit Instruments in a Howling Wilderness: Colonists, Indians, and the Origins of the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly ,73 (October 2016), 647-680.

Foster, H. Thomas. “The identification and significance of Apalachicola for the origins of the creek Indians in the Southeastern United States.” Southeastern Archaeology 36, no. 1 (April 2017): 1-13.

Galler, Robert. “Councils, Petitions and Delegations: Crow Creek Activism and the Progressive Era in Central South Dakota.” Journal Of The Gilded Age & Progressive Era 16, no. 2 (April 2017): 206-227.

Garrod, Andrew and Robert Kilkenny, I am Where I come From: Native American College Students and Graduates Tell Their Life Stories, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017).

Gelo, Daniel J. “Two Episodes in Texas Indian History Reconsidered: Getting the Facts Right about the Lafuente Attack and the Fort Parker Raid.” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 120, no. 4 (April 2017): 441-460.

 Grann, David.  Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, (New York: Doubleday, 2017).

 Harrison, Daniel F. “Change Amid Continuity, Innovation within Tradition: Wampum Diplomacy at the Treaty of Greenville, 1795,” Ethnohistory, 64 (April 2017), 191-215.

Herrmann, Rachel B. “No useless Mouth”: Iroquoian Food Diplomacy in the American Revolution.” Diplomatic History 41, no. 1 (January 2017): 20-49.

Hogeland, William. Autumn of the Black Snake: The Creation of the US Army and the Invasion That Opened the West, (New York: FSG, 2017)

Jacobsen, Kristina M.  The Sound of Navajo Country: Music, Language, and Dine Belonging, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017).

Lambert, Valerie. “The Big Black Box of Indian Country.” American Indian Quarterly 40, no. 4 (Fall2016 2016): 333-363

Lee, Robert. “Accounting for Conquest: The Price of the Louisiana Purchase of Indian Country.” Journal Of American History 103, no. 4 (March 2017): 921-942.

Lenhardt, Corinna. “Free Peltier Now!” The Use of Internet Memes in American Indian Activism.” American Indian Culture & Research Journal 40, no. 3 (July 2016): 67-84.

Lopenzina, Drew.  Through an Indian’s Looking Glass: A Cultural Biography of William Apess, Pequot. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2017).

Mays, Kyle T. “Community Self-Determination: American Indian Education in Chicago, 1952-2006.” History Of Education Quarterly 56, no. 4 (November 2016): 669-673.

Mihesuah, Devon A. “Diabetes in Indian Territory: Revisiting Kelly M. West’s Theory of 1940.” American Indian Culture & Research Journal 40, no. 4 (October 2016): 1-21.

Milne, George Edward. “Bondsmen, Servants, and Slaves: Social Hierarchies in the Heart of Seventeenth-Century North America.” Ethnohistory 64, no. 1 (January 2017): 115-139.

Orr, Raymond. Reservation Politics: Historical Trauma, Economic Development, and Intratribal Conflict. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017).

Precht, Jay. “Asserting Tribal Sovereignty through Compact Negotiations.” American Indian Quarterly 41, no. 1 (Witter2017 2017): 67-92.

Rifkin, Mark.  Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).

Rosier, Paul C. “Great Lakes Creoles: A French-Indian Community on the Northern Borderlands, Prairie du Chien, 1750-1860.” History 102, no. 350 (April 2017): 339-340.

Schillaci, Michael A., and Steven A. Lakatos. “Refiguring the Population History of the Tewa Basin.” Kiva 82, no. 4 (December 2016): 364-386.

Sharfstein, Daniel J.  Thunder in the Mountains: Chief Joseph, Oliver Otis Howard, and the Nez Perce War, (New York: Norton, 2017).

Snyder, Christina.  Great Crossings: Indians, Settlers and Slaves in the Age of Jackson, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).

Starna, William A. “After the Handbook: A Perspective on 40 years of Scholarship Since the Publication of the Handbook of North American Indians, Volume 15, Northeast.” New York History 98, no. 1 (Winter2017 2017): 112-146.

Steere, Benamin.  The Archaeology of Houses and Households in the Native Southeast, (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2017).

Stern, Jessica Yirush. The Lives of Objects: Native Americans, British Colonists, and Cultures of Labor and Exchange in the Southeast, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017).

Tepper, Leslie Heyman Salish Blankets: Robes of Protection and Transformation, Symbols of Wealth, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017).

Warren, Louis.  God’s Red Son: The Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America, (New York: Basic Books, 2017).

Waselkov, Gregory A. and Marvin T. Smith. Forging Southeastern Identities: Social Archaeology, Ethnohistory and Folklore of the Mississippian to Early Historic South, (Tuscaloosa: Univesrsity of Alabama Press, 2017).

Whalen, Kevin. “Indian School, Company Town: Outing Workers from Sherman Institute at Fontana Farms Company, 1907–1930.” Pacific Historical Review 86, no. 2 (May 2017): 290-321.

White, Kevin J., Michael Galban, and Eugene R. H. Tesdahl. “La Salle on Seneca Creation, 1678.” American Indian Culture & Research Journal 40, no. 4 (October 2016): 49-69.

Wilkins, David E. Dismembered: Native Disenrollment and the Battle for Human Rights, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017).

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Indian-Bashing in Syracuse? The Crisis at the Onondaga Nation School

This is a story worth watching.  Laura Lavine is the superintendent of the Lafayette School district, which operates with state funding the Onondaga Nation School.  She is also the Republican Party candidate for mayor in the city of Syracuse. 

Lavine runs on the slogan that she is “Progressive, Professional, and Prepared,” and there is scarce mention of the Grand Old Party on her website. She has pledged to get tough on crime in the city, improve its schools, and improve the quality of life in Syracuse neighborhoods.  She clearly attempts on her website to cast herself in a more open, welcoming, and tolerant manner than the national Republican party.  From my perspective, it does not appear to be working.

Onondagas have fought for this school.  The Onondaga Nation has placed on its website this 1978 video highlighting some of the school’s history. The founding of the school is a central part of the story of the awakening of Onondaga activism beginning in the early 1970s.  There have been Onondaga and non-native principals, and the relationship between the Nation School and the Lafayette school board has long been tense.  Onondagas have boycotted the school before.  They have debated intensely among themselves what they want the school to achieve.

I have not watched Lavine’s candidacy closely, and I know little firsthand about the tone of politics in Syracuse. But I have been studying Native American history for a long time, and my next book will be a history of the Onondaga Nation. I have spent my free work time reading its history.  When the current principal announced her retirement, the Nation hoped that the district would hire Simone Thornton, a teacher at the school with 20 years experience, an Onondaga, and a member of the community. Instead, the district hired Warren Smith, a vice-principal from nearby Fayetteville-Manlius who was not Onondaga.  Smith ultimately turned down the job, but Lavine announced that the district would not hire Thornton, the clear preference of the Onondaga leadership.  Onondaga Nation parents then withdrew their children from the school.

If you have watched any of our politics over the past few years, you will likely note that race and racism and their consequences are at the center of our debates, and the Republican Party, in places, has enjoyed great success in stirring up white resentment to the “complaints” made by people of color.  The language of race was woven through the Trump candidacy, and he skillfully deployed racist and anti-Semitic dog whistles to attract voters.  White voters, in many places, it seems are tired of  affirmative action, and important movements like Black Lives Matter, and the burgeoning Native Lives Matter movement I have written about on this website.  Lavine, I suspect, was unlikely to have received many Democratic votes in Syracuse, but she certainly can shore up her base (and stir up the dingbats) by playing tough with the Onondagas.  It is unfortunate, and it is ugly.  But in our tense political climate, that a Republican Party candidate engaged in Indian-bashing is not surprising at all.  It is up to Superintendent Lavine to explain her thinking and do the right thing.  If she truly wants to run as a “progressive,” a word that seemingly has lost all meaning, she needs to think about the consequences of her actions.

 

Intellectual Courage

I gave the following keynote address to the annual meeting of NYSACAC, the New York state organization for high school and college admissions counselors, which took place at SUNY-Geneseo earlier this month. In some ways, it encapsulates what I tell my students each semester on the first day of class in my Humanities class.

 

I am delighted to be here, and to join those who have welcomed you here to our beautiful campus.  Geneseo, as a place, shows up in the historical documents long before Rochester existed, long before Monroe or Livingston counties, long before there was much of anything European established in what became the broader upstate region. It lays in the heart of the ancestral homeland of the Senecas, the keepers of the western door of the Haudenosaunee, the Iroquois Longhouse.

Seneca soldiers and diplomats who lived in this Genesee valley played a role in the history of two empires, the French and the English, in the Iroquois League and Confederacy, and in the history of the native confederations that threatened the existence of the British Empire in America and then the young United States in the 1790s. They continued to live in this valley, at least some of them, even after Major-General John Sullivan led Continental forces through the Finger Lakes in 1779, burning crops and villages, and scorching the earth, as he went.  They were here in the 1790s and into the 1800s, before they moved to Allegany and Cattaraugus and Grand River in Canada.

Stories from the past.  I could tell you more: about Mary Jemison, the white woman of the Genesee.  She lived for a time as a captive, and adoptee, a refugee, and a Seneca homesteader down the road in what became Letchworth State Park, where you can see a statue of her and a replica cabin.  There are some documents with her mark on them in the county courthouse at the end of Main Street, where she deeded Seneca lands she claimed to white men associated with the Ogden Land Company, among whom numbered one of Geneseo’s founding fathers.  Her Seneca sons, who died violently, two of the three at the hands of their brothers, victims of the alcohol that could cut jagged holes in the fabric of Native American life.  There are New York State historical markers all over this county.  Biased, to be sure, but all telling historical stories about this part of New York State.

For nearly two decades, I have told stories like these to students at this school.  I have taught a lot of students over the years, and told a lot of stories. I am a historian.  That’s what we do.  I am interested in the past, and its connections to the present.  How things came to be.  Continuity and Change measured across time and space in peoples, institutions and cultures.  But all of that is just a way of saying that I am a guy that makes my living by asking questions.  And I love the questions—the search for evidence, the complexity and the lack sometimes of definitive answers, and the stories—the stories are at the heart of all that we historians do as teachers and writers.

I imagine that in your line of work you have stories that you can tell, too, stories of young people who have all sorts of challenges in front of them, or who survive trauma and neglect, some who have succeeded wildly and some who have broken your hearts.  I am sure you have stories of kids who are coming to you before they leave home to go to school, or to work, or into the service, or off to some experience—a gap year or a slack year or an adventure–and who want to begin writing their own stories for themselves, and perhaps by themselves, for the very first time.  These are stories, too, of continuity and change, of how things came to be, of being and becoming. Some of these young people are becoming competent and capable. Or they may be developing generosity and compassion, and some of them might be frightened and uncertain, sometimes for reasons that go deep into theirs and their family’s past, layers upon layers of stories you may have to disentangle if you want to understand them, where they are coming from, and where they hope to go. Some of them do not know what their story is going to look like, or how to begin writing it.

Like you, I have seen students who fall into all of these categories, students who, whatever they are feeling, can do so much to make this world—our world—a better place.

I can also imagine, and only imagine, the time constraints that you, and our colleagues who are out there in the classroom, work under in an era of increasing demands and declining resources. My teacher friends do so much, with so little, so often for people outside the building who have little understanding of what a good job actually looks like, who measure success in ways so foreign to the lived experience of you and your students.  And so it is with some trepidation that I propose to you today, if we are truly “dedicated to serving students as they explore options and make choices about pursuing postsecondary education” as Article I, Section 1 of your association’s by-laws read, that there is more that we can and should do for these young people who are so important to all of our futures.

My oldest daughter is one of these young people, She is at this point in her life where she interacts with her counselor a bit in high school, and talks with an occasional admissions representative.  She has entered this period that is so rich with opportunity and potential but also fraught with vulnerability. She is finishing up her junior year in high school. She has visited colleges and will visit some more and has begun to think when her way-too-busy schedule permits about what she might like to do with the rest of her life.  She has received all sorts of advice on what sort of story she might write, and she has received a lot of advice on how to navigate the college admissions process.  She has been plopped down in front of computers to navigate Naviance and see what her next step might look like. Programs to get her thinking about how to begin her story.

And based upon what I have seen as a parent and a professor, it seems to me that there is one area that is so essential to success in a college classroom, and especially at a liberal arts college like this one, that does not get talked about at high school enough: the importance of cultivating and encouraging intellectual fearlessness; to develop in young people the courage not to shy away from those things that seem to them–to all of us—to be extremely difficult. To master basic skills, of course. To be honest, curious, inquisitive, and relentless to be sure, but most of all, in terms of the questions they ask, the evidence they consider, the ideas they engage with, and the theses they advance, to be as fearless as they can be.  Now, on campuses like this, in this country, in this global community, more than ever.

Geneseo, as I have said, is still a liberal arts college. It’s a phrase that gets thrown around a lot.  We integrate the liberal arts into the curriculum whatever a student’s major. We here at Geneseo wear that label, a liberal arts college, proudly, and many of us still hope our students will, too.

But that is a difficult—an increasingly difficult—thing for them to do. I imagine that some of the students you advise have heard the jokes about liberal arts and humanities majors.  They have worried parents who fear that their kids will not be able to take care of themselves without a “marketable” degree. Some of your students, before they arrive on campus, will already have been asked, “What are you going to do with that degree?”  Sometimes those questions can come from innocent curiosity, like, really, what are you going to do with that degree. But these questions can also come with a barbed tip, too, in the sense that the liberal arts and humanities are thought by some people out there to have limited value because, unlike the STEM fields and business and “the Art of the Deal,” the liberal arts are too often thought of as adding little of value.

The governor of Florida, for instance, a few years ago, argued that we do not need more anthropologists.  Another Floridian, a United States Senator, during his brief, quixotic run for the presidency said that we need “more plumbers and less philosophers.”  The Lieutenant Governor of Kentucky told students at Eastern Kentucky University that they should not bother studying history, and that since they attended a public college, funded by taxpayers—people who work—that they should do something useful to the Commonwealth.   Why should the state subsidize the study of French literature, the governor of that state asked.  What value does it add for Kentuckians?  Even in the SUNY system we have seen a diminishment in the perceived importance of the liberal arts, social sciences, and humanities.

And all of this is too bad, for I would argue that the study of these fields adds a lot, because they give us the cultural capital necessary to participate in a democratic society in a meaningful and constructive way.  But thinking in terms of nuances, complexities, ambiguities, shades of grey; being one of the people who embraces the big questions, pursues the answers over the long haul, who appreciates the value of open debate and discussion, who endeavors to find truth, and digs like a terrier for answers—people like that can find these times we live in rough sledding. People who ask fundamental questions about why things are the way that they are and how they ought to be—they can be perceived as threatening to those in power, which is why we see this assault on institutions like the National Endowment for the Arts and the NEH, which fund in a variety of ways arts and humanities projects that explore issues that cut to the marrow of the human condition.

Our students now live in a world that you and I have helped to create for them where too many people confuse their feelings and their fears for facts, where being smart and engaged and critical and willing to ask questions can make one an object of scorn.  They live in a world as well where complexity is so often dismissed, where big and difficult answers to the big questions are avoided, that asking these sorts of questions can take a certain amount of courage.

Let me give you an example. The former talk show host Bill O’Reilly used to have a segment on his shows where he sent a correspondent out to do “on the street” interviews where his goal was to expose the ignorance of the liberals he so often criticized on his show. One time the correspondent ran into a highly knowledgeable young guy, college-aged, who was more than willing to engage in a reasoned and informed debate and before he could get to his second sentence, Boom! “Nerd Alert!” flashed on the screen, as if being knowledgeable about public affairs and the world in which we live is a bad thing, something to make fun of.

Many Americans live in a world where they simply do not invest their time and energy to ask questions, stay informed. When we have a President who lies baldly to the press, and a press that is more concerned with ratings and clicks than in pursuing difficult stories, that is interested in fad and outrage and that has the attention span of a 2-year-old, we arrive at that dire point where the use of “alternative facts” can really be a thing that we can talk about with straight faces.  We, collectively, the mature adults in the room, have modeled some very, very, poor behavior.  We reason sloppily or lazily; we are dishonest, or cynical; we are cowards and grotesquely ill-informed.  For instance:

  • A sitting congressman told an audience that the theory of evolution and the Big Bang were “lies straight out of the pit of hell.”
  • The chairman of a Senate environmental panel brought a snowball into that august chamber as proof that climate change is a hoax.
  • When only 36% can find North Korea on a map, and that remaining majority is far more likely to favor military action against a nuclear power led by a deranged mad man;
  • And when almost one in three Americans could not identify President Obama’s vice president, who was there for the entire eight years of his presidency,
  • We have come pretty close to bottoming out.

Think about this: Americans, according to a recent survey, are more likely to be able to identify any two members of the Simpson family than any one of the five freedoms protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, rights that now, as they have been at many points in the past, are under assault. (I known, you think Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie, but maybe not quite as readily of press, religion, speech, petition and assembly).  22% of Americans can name all five members of the Simpson family, while only one in one thousand could name all five first amendment freedoms.

We are complacent in the face of inequality and injustice.  As the searing documentary “The 13th” pointed out, the United States has 5% of the world’s population, but 25% of the people who live their lives behind bars, and we are working hard to increase that percentage, if we are to believe the current United States Attorney General.  But think about that: One out of every four persons who is incarcerated ON EARTH  is imprisoned in the land of the free, and the home of the brave, though that freedom and that bravery is, at times, quite hard to find. People of color are imprisoned at rates far out of proportion to their share of the general population.

OXFAM reported in January of 2017 that 8 men, the wealthiest in the world, own as much as the poorest half of the world’s population.  8 men own as much wealth as the poorest 50%, 3.6 BILLION PEOPLE.  The wealth of these eight men grew by half a trillion dollars over the course of the preceding five years, while the wealth of the poorest 50% fell by 1 trillion. At the height of his fame, Michael Jordan was paid more than all the factory workers in all of Nike’s factories combined.

We have seen gun-craziness, racism, rising antisemitism, fear.  You know it is all there, and you can, I imagine, think of additional examples.  Violence.  White supremacists marching in New Orleans and Charlottesville to protect monuments explicitly commemorating white supremacy. The election of an incurious and juvenile president who has, at various times,

  • insisted that freedom of the press—part of that pesky first amendment—does not allow the press to criticize him;
  • that torture, specifically prohibited by American laws, should be brought back;
  • that we should wall ourselves off from the rest of the world;
  • claimed that women are objects who can be grabbed and groped at his pleasure; and that the norms and values and responsibilities of civil society and basic ethics simply do not apply to his family and favorites.
  • I cannot keep up with it all—every time I thought I was done writing this address, another bit of news…And here is the point:

Rational, reasoned, and just public policy is difficult if not impossible without an informed, engaged, and rationally-thinking public willing to ask tough questions, to engage.

Fear.  Many Americans live in fear: of immigrants and Islamist extremists–but a plastic surgeon botching your operation is more likely to kill you in the United States than a terrorist. Peanuts kill more Americans than terrorists, as John Oliver pointed out.  Yet we are told to be fearful.  And many of us do as we are told. People around the globe and in this country—some of them, anyways—seem to have more confidence in fear and anger and hate than in their opposites. With malice towards many, and charity for few; with little interest in heeding the call of the Old Testament prophets to care for the widows and comfort the fatherless, the weakest members of society, and to seek out injustice and correct oppression.

Our students are coming of age in this moment where a lot of really old issues—race and inequality and class and gender and violence and justice, are resurfacing in complicated and anguishing ways.  The problems are out there.  But to name them and to ask, “What can we do?” and to gather the information to solve them, that can be tough.  And so many of these problems we face are rooted, in part, in a rejection of critical thought, in an embrace of the irrational, and a society with these problems can fall prey to demagogues with their simplistic answers, and will find it difficult to display emotional maturity, and will be prone to violence.

What are we going to do about all of this?  I don’t know. But maybe if we are to make America great again, or as great as it might be, it might be the young people who you help send to a school like this one, who get a solid grounding in the liberal arts, whatever their majors, who will best see that “injustice anywhere” just may be a threat to justice everywhere.  And that if it is “an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny, that binds us, one to another,” as Martin Luther King once wrote, that these kids, these young men and women, may be among those best suited to do something about it.   So those of us at a school like this, we who think and reason; we, the people who read the footnotes–we can deploy that wisdom that not only makes our lives richer but makes the world a better place—–only if we have the courage to act, and to use it.

All of us, you and I, we need to do a better job with the young people we advise and teach.

After all, we live in and have helped to create a world where—when we stand up in the face of the problems before us and ask, “Why?” and when we insist on a reasoned and relevant response to that simple question—it’s like an act of subversion, and subversive acts, even the smallest ones, require a degree of courage, of fearlessness.

It can beat your down, if you let it. I see it occasionally on this campus.  Despair. Hopelessness.  Cynicism.  Especially cynicism. I worry that it can beat down the young people with whom we work, if we do not do a better job in equipping them to be intellectually fearless. Again, look at the spectacle of public life that we are in the process of bequeathing to this generation. We might forgive them for an easy slide into a deep cynicism, but we must emphasize that cynicism is an intellectually lazy position, a colossal cop out or a reflection of a feeling of powerlessness.

But these young people do have power.

It can take courage to trust and to respect and to appreciate, as well as to care and to love, and to accept the validity of ideas presented by those with whom we would be predisposed to think we might disagree.  To never underestimate others, to take people seriously, whoever that person happens to be, to accept the possibility that those with whom we disagree might have a point and, indeed, to admit that we might be wrong.  To appear vulnerable in the face of those who despise us.  It is not an easy thing for us, and it is not an easy thing for our students.  It takes courage, and a willingness—a true commitment—to approaching everything and everyone with a readiness to see goodness and to be surprised.

It is so easy, and at a level perfectly understandable, to feel like the challenges we all face are too big and it is possible, I think, that we all feel at times like we are not enough to make a difference—that we need to be wealthier or have more expertise or access or a stronger prescription or whatever.  But what if the students we worked with used their skills and their thoughts and their reason and acted as if they were exactly what was needed? If we all knew we could work to close the gap between the way things are and the way things ought to be, even a little bit, would we have the courage to act? Would we really do it?

A long time ago I had a great history professor.  His name was Albie Burke.  He died about five years ago. And even though I left Cal State Long Beach where he taught in the late 1980s, I still got back to campus every other year or so to have lunch with him and to catch up, to talk about the Supreme Court, constitutionalism, politics, and all sorts of other things. We were both historians who sort of wanted to be lawyers.  I can remember feeling nervous and unprepared before having to present some of my work in seminar, my thesis project on two really big Supreme Court cases in the field of American Indian law.  And believe me, I was stressed out. We would meet in his very Spartan office, and he always made really incisive eye contact when you were speaking to him.  Bright, bright, blue eyes. He would listen very quietly, never interrupting.  Very comfortable with silences.  And then when you finished, spilling out your guts, telling him how you were not ready, he would pause for a few beats and then say:  “You will never be prepared. You still got to do it.”  He’d smile just a little bit as he said that. It was a tough lesson for some of his students, I think, but his point was that you can spend all your time worrying and fretting and fearing and preparing and not doing.  Fear can keep you from doing what needs to be done, in public life, and in terms of what you want for your own lives.  His daughter told a similar story at his memorial service about many conversations she had had with him just like that.  It is so easy to talk yourself out of pursuing your dreams, of tackling the challenges that may lie in front of you, and that lie in front of all of us.

It is this spirit that we must teach and nurture and cultivate.

How do we get there? Not by rubrics and grades and tests.  Not by slapping labels on kids without making clear to them that at the end of the day they will have to decide whether that label will serve as an explanation for their failures or an obstacle, however burdensome and unfair, that they will have to overcome if they are to succeed.

I know that I have a lot to learn still. I learn a lot from my students.  Maybe I do not know much at all.  But I do know this: Students do not become better people, or more courageous citizens, through exams and grading.  Students do not learn from many forms of assessment.  The tests and the grades we assign do nothing to make them better people. And yet we do this still. The non-profit ETS brings in over 1.6 billion dollars a year.

And when grades or test scores are used to as great an extent as they are at present to determine opportunity—to open doors for some students and close doors for others—they can have the effect of reinforcing inequalities and systematic injustices that have stood for far too long.

The grades your colleagues give, and the grades I give, and the subjects that many of us teach, may in fact matter less for the scores and the content that we are mandated to cover than for what we give to our students to help them to learn to think, and reason, and ask tough questions.  Students will remember how we made them feel, if we made them feel, more than any of the subject matter we teach them. I am willing to bet that if you take a minute, and think back to the time you spent in class, in high school or in college, and what you remember from those classes, that you might agree with me.  I hope so.

Maybe we can be the types of teachers who worry less about grades and missed deadlines, who will believe their excuses, and give out more “A’s.” I am walking proof, after all, that there is little relationship between high school and even undergraduate achievement and later academic success.   And nobody—NOBODY—will convince me that a sixteen or a seventeen or an eighteen-year old should have doors shut because they were not inspired or equipped by their overworked and underpaid teacher to complete their assignments, or able to place their rote work and assignments ahead of whatever crisis, great or small, was dominating their life.  Grades and test scores, to too great an extent, measure the dutiful but not the beautiful parts of our students.

Students.  I have used that word a number of times in this talk, but it is important to remember that we are talking here about young people—people like us years ago– with potential and with dreams who are still learning where their talents lie.  And we need those dreamers.  Stargazers.  That’s what Plato called them.

Here’s what a student of mine wrote for her Humanities final just a month ago. Humanities is a course that we used to really value here, and that used to make Geneseo special and unique.  I gave the students an essay by Roger Rosenblatt that appeared last fall in The Atlantic in which he reflected on his long career as a war correspondent, and the seemingly limitless capacity of people for inhumanity and barbarism.  It is powerful, heartbreakingly beautiful essay. The assignment, in the end, asked students to write about human nature, justice, and the problem of evil, as the contemplated this article, and works by Sophocles, Plato, Thucydides, Augustine, More, the Bible, Shakespeare, and some others I am not remembering.  “The question remains,” this very talented student wrote, “how do we account for all of the hatred, violence, and injustice that we witness? What words do we use to describe it? How can we possibly rationalize it and make sense of it? Where do we find its opposite in the world, and how do we eagerly point at that, so as to say, ‘See, this is also us. This is also me.’

“In a world and a human history overwhelmed by hatred, violence, and injustice, what counters it, I argue, is love, compassion, faith, and the courage to rise above it.”

Maybe we should refuse the rubric, and ignore the scores.  Look for the beautiful.  This rising generation of students is already better than us in important ways—their open-mindedness, their tolerance, their acceptance of difference. I really believe that. Encourage courage. We have a lot of influence.  Or at least we have the potential to be highly influential:  a cruel or an uncaring word from us, for example, even when cast off thoughtlessly or uncritically, or because we are stressed out or too busy, can do so much damage, while a kind word, a single note of encouragement, can do something that these students will remember for the rest of their lives, something that can help them write a beautiful life story.

So let’s do better.  Let’s encourage fearlessness, even where we have failed to demonstrate it ourselves.  I feel that I have the best job in the world. Really. There is nothing else that I can imagine doing because, like you, I get to spend my time talking to young people, many of whom are optimistic, who are neither jaded nor cynical but see the world as one with so much potential. And it is, for those with the courage to act.  How cool is that?

And each and every day, I have the opportunity, if I choose to truly be present, to truly listen, to be awed by their achievements, humbled by the obstacles they have overcome to get to this college, inspired by their creative thinking, pushed by their challenging questions, and amazed by the alacrity with which so many of them seek out injustice, attempt to correct oppression, and in thousands of small ways show the vital courage to make the world—our world—a better place.

I have enjoyed this opportunity to speak to you.  I thank you for listening, for giving me some of your time, and I hope that you enjoy and benefit from your time here at Geneseo, at this conference, and at this beautiful campus.

 

#NativeLivesMatter

Two important stories came across the line yesterday, and those of us who teach Native American history need to do a better job of following them.  On June 5, police officers killed Zachary Bearheels, a twenty-nine year old man with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Bearheels was punched in the head and shocked by a taser several times.  Omaha police have admitted that the officers’ conduct was a violation of departmental policy and that two of the officers involved would be terminated. 

According to the story reported on the Indian Country Today Media Network, Bearheels had been traveling from South Dakota to Oklahoma City aboard a bus. After a passenger complained about his conduct, he was kicked off and left stranded in Omaha.  Bearheels was behaving in a manner that police were called by witnesses.  He was attacked and abused by the police. Witnesses, and the internal reports of the Omaha Police Department, both indicated that Bearheels posed no threat and that the violence was entirely unjustified, and “egregious violations of the Omaha Police Department’s policy procedures and training on the use of force and the use of a taser.”

 

Bearheels’ death at the hands of the Omaha Police is one more example of the larger problem reported in a story looking at “The Police Killings No One is Talking About” that appeared In These Times. The story was written by Stephanie Woodard, and the evidence she presents is harrowing.  Police killed twenty-one Native Americans in 2016, up from 15 in 2014.  According to a 2014 study from the Center for Juvenile and Criminal Justice, Native Americans are more likely to be killed by police than any other demographic in the United States. Native Americans are 3.1 times more likely to be killed by the police than white Americans.

Joseph Murphy, for example, a thirty-three year old veteran of the Iraq War:  He died of a heart attack in a holding cell in a Juneau jail.  He had called for help, but guards yelled “Fuck You” and “I don’t care” in response to his pleas for medical assistance. Others were shot sitting in cars, or while holding knives, or while distraught and unwilling to listen to police demands that they comply. In nearly every case, the homicides were ruled justifiable.

And the parallels to what we have witnessed in the African-American community are clear.  Many reservation border towns are rife with racism and discrimination against native peoples.  I saw this first hand in Hardin, where I attempted to conduct interviews nearly twenty years ago. I had heard some of my Crow students describe the racism they faced at Hardin High School. I wanted to get at relations between the Crows and their white neighbors.  I was not able to immerse myself in the community deep enough to get white people to talk to me, but the problems were not hard to see there.   And in Billings, sixty miles from Crow, where I lived, and where native peoples were a despised and unwelcome minority.  Expressions of racism towards native peoples were, to me, shockingly common and public.

I have spent a large part of my career, in a sense, writing about white violence against native peoples. In my first book, I looked at the violence of the Anglo-American frontier, and the sources of the racial antipathy that took route there .  I wrote about the race wars pitting native peoples against land-hungry settlers in New England and the Chesapeake in the seventeenth centuries.  I wrote about the murder of an Algonquian weroance near Roanoke Island in 1586, and the consequences of that violent act.  In my relatively recent book on Canandaigua, I wrote about the violence on the Pennsylvania and New York frontier, where the unpunished murder of Senecas by frontier whites served as one of the major grievances American officials and Haudenosaunee diplomats needed to address.   I could teach my courses in Native American history focusing on acts of violence every day if I wished, from Roanoke to Jamestown, to Marblehead to the Lancaster Workhouse to Gnaddenhutten and Sand Creek, from Wounded Knee to Omaha and border towns throughout Native America where, too often, law enforcement officers are ending the lives of native peoples.  It is an old, old story, this, and it needs to stop.

Black Lives Matter has brought massive attention to the slaughter of African Americans at the hands of police.  The entire Black Lives Matter movement has done such important work in focusing attention on racism and discrimination and violence perpetrated by police against African Americans. At the same time, as Woodard points out, “a larger narrative is at play: racial issues in the United States tend to be framed as black and whites, while other groups are ignored.”

I plan on assigning Woodard’s piece when I teach my Indian law class again next spring, and spend some time on this issue.  Students come to college inclined to think of native peoples as being part of the past.  Their understanding of civil rights and discrimination and race relations is, as Woodard points out, too often limited to thinking in terms of matters black and white.  They can only benefit by reading closely these powerful stories, and learning that the police, in all too many instances, are viewed as a threat by the people they are supposed to protect and serve.

 

The Loving Decision and the Concealed History of Virginia’s Native Peoples

Yesterday was the anniversary of the Pulse nightclub massacre that took place a year ago in Orlando, the largest mass shooting in recent US History.  It was also the fiftieth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Loving v. Virginia, the case which struck down laws that prohibited marriage across the color line.

You may have seen the beautifully quiet and restrained telling of this story in last year’s Oscar-nominated film that starred Ruth Negga as Mildred Loving and Joel Edgerton as her devoted husband Richard.  The film avoided grandiose speeches, courtroom melodrama, and focused instead on the struggle of a couple, white and black, to hold things together in the Jim Crow south.

There was more to the story, however, for Mildred Loving always claimed that she was Native American, a descendant of Virginia’s native peoples.  This story is told in Sally Jacobs’  piece that appeared on WGBH. You might find Jacobs’ story useful in your classes.

[UPDATE: And you might find it useful for more than just the story.  Arica Coleman, mentioned below, wrote a fantastic book on this subject, and she has accused Jacobs of plagiarizing her work.  You should read Coleman’s criticism here and in the comments section which follows Jacobs’ piece.  Professor Coleman presents a powerful case, and we need to hear Jacobs’ response. MLO]

Mark Loving, Mildred’s grandson, contacted the Virginia Department of Historical Resources because he objected to the description of his grandmother on a state historical marker as “a woman of African-American and Virginia Indian descent.” So said Jacobs in her piece for WGBH. Mark Loving objected to the suggestion that Mildred Loving was anything other than a Native American woman.  “I know during those time that there were only two colors,” he said in an interview from last November, “but she was Native American.  Both her parents were Native American.  Mildred herself insisted in 2004 that she had no black relatives, according to Arica Coleman, who interviewed her for the fantastic book she wrote on mixed-race marriage.

Race is never simple, and Virginia’s history is a messy one.  In 1924, for instance, the Virginia legislature passed its “Racial Integrity Act” which defined white people as having “no trace whatever of any blood other than Caucasian.” The act included the so-called “Pocahontas exception,” stating that “persons who have one-sixteenth or less of the blood of the American Indian and have no other non-Caucasic blood shall be deemed white persons.”  Many Virginians, blissfully unaware that some of Pocahontas’s descendants had sired children with slaves, attempted to tie themselves firmly to Virginia’s romantic past by claiming descent from Pocahontas. Their interests had to be protected. Anyone who was not white, under the provisions of the law, was “colored.”

I take some time with laws like these in my classes in order to explain to them how nonsensical and ridiculous all of this is at a fundamental level.  Race is a construction, an invented category. The blood that flowed through one’s veins did nothing to effect culture and belief and values and behavior.  Still, Virginians enforced the Racial Integrity Act with a vengeance, and the Commonwealth’s first registrar of the Bureau of Vital Statistics, Walter Ashby Plecker, was a true believer.  “Let us turn a deaf ear,” he wrote revealingly in 1925, “to those who would interpret Christian brotherhood as racial equality.”  Virginia Indians, he believed, were not real Indians: they had been mongrelized, mixed with peoples of African descent, and as such he ordered his employees to alter the birth certificates of Indian children.  This was erasure, an attempt at extermination carried out with pens and paper. The certificates now would read “colored.”  Plecker claimed that he had science on his side—the same “eugenics” that later fueled the Nazi holocaust—but he admitted to close friends that he routinely changed racial designations from Indian to colored without any evidence.

Plecker’s racist crusade made it difficult for many native peoples in Virginia to prove that they were Indians.  The vital records upon which such a designation relied, after all, had been altered.  Native peoples in Virginia asserted a third racial identity in a biracial society.  They did not attend black schools because they felt no necessity to accept Plecker’s logic.  Many wanted access to the better facilities available to white Virginians.  Some of those who could pass as white did so, but many of Wahunsonacock’s descendants struggled in the face of this racist legal code.

During the Second World War, Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier complained about Plecker’s strict enforcement of Virginia’s racist legal code but Plecker was convinced that thousands of “mulattoes” in Virginia “are striving to pass over into the white race by the Indian route.” Plecker determined to keep the races pure, and the lines between them distinct.  When a draft board in Richmond ordered three Rappahannock men to report to an induction station for African American soldiers in Maryland, they refused. Authorities in Virginia prosecuted the men and sentenced them to six months in prison.  The government allowed Chickahominy soldiers to serve in white units only after the tribe demonstrated its own racism toward African Americans:  Chickahominies who married black people faced expulsion from the community; they tried to keep African American farmers away from the reservation, and prohibited black doctors and preachers from visiting their communities.  Most of the Virginia Indians who served did so in white units, but not without an enormous struggle.

There were solid historical reasons for Mildred Loving’s family to claim to be Indians.  But people on the margins intermarried throughout the South.  They always did, and racial identity could be fluid on the marchlands of the empires and the colonial state.

As Jacobs shows, in Virginia, along Passing Road, where the Lovings lived and loved, there is today debate about Mildred Loving’s identity.  Who she is still is debated.  In an attempt to navigate these troubled waters, Jacobs reported, “the state of Virginia rewrote its highway marker to describe the Lovings simply as an interracial couple and removed all mention of her being either African-American or Native-American. But that didn’t quell the controversy.”

In the face of local opposition, the state last week moved the location of the highway marker away from a roadside several miles from the Lovings’ gravesite. It’s now to be near the former Virginia Court of Appeals in Richmond, where the Loving case was once heard, over an hour’s drive away. Despite the controversy, Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe is set on Monday to dedicate the marker, which has been in storage for over a year.

That some of your students likely will have some familiarity with the recent film version of the Lovings’ story, and the recent salutary discussion across the country of how love must trump hatred, bigotry and racism, it might be useful to discuss this important case in Native American history classes.  And if not the Lovings’ story, there are similar cases throughout the American South, and throughout Native America.

 

 

 

 

Rotten to the Core

The recent story that appeared in The Intercept about the private security firm Tiger Swan, its cooperative intelligence-gathering with local, state, and federal law enforcement authorities, its propaganda work in behalf of the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the sometimes-brutal tactics it used to protect the corporate “assets” of Energy Transfer Partners, the Fortune 500 company behind the construction of the DAPL, should be a much larger story than it is.  The Tiger Swan story reveals the rottenness that lies at the core of America’s continuing treatment of native peoples and their allies.

Tiger Swan, as revealed in the documents obtained and published by The Intercept,  produced intelligence briefings for law enforcement agencies, kept close tabs on the Water Protectors at Standing Rock, and may have infiltrated the protesters’ camp.  They spread disinformation on social media,

Police guard a bridge near Oceti Sakowin Camp on the edge of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation on December 3, 2016 outside Cannon Ball, North Dakota, as Native Americans and activists from around the country gather at the camp trying to halt the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. / AFP / JIM WATSON (Photo credit should read JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images)

measuring the influence of their posts and stories, and may have kept something like an “Enemies List” to trace leaders of the protest movement.  All of this in the name of a corporation, the business interests of which they protected against an overwhelmingly peaceful protest movement run by people worried that the DAPL could jeopardize waters flowing through the Standing Rock Reservation.  To the mercenaries at Tiger Swan, the protesters were “jihadists” and they should be countered using similar tactics.

Fort Apache, the Bronx.  You remember that.  Or American soldiers in Vietnam marching out on patrol into “Indian Country.”  The supposedly warlike qualities of native peoples and the supposedly violent lands on which they lived have been transposed time and again as a way for American soldiers and officers to comprehend whatever conflict they engaged in.  These soldiers enter the theater in Apache helicopters, following the Tomahawk cruise missiles that preceded them.

Here, the scenario is flipped. The Jihadists that American forces fight in other parts of the world provide the language for Tiger Swan’s understanding of the #NoDAPL movement and, in effect, their lens for understanding native peoples at home attempting to protect their quality of life.  The language of war, of insurgency, has returned to Native America.

I have written about Standing Rock and the #NoDAPL movement before, so you know how I feel about it. If you are reading this blog, chances are you read about the protests, watched the DIY reporting from the protestors themselves, or saw the courageous on-the-ground journalism by Amy Goodman, her colleagues at “Democracy Now!” and other media sources.  Some of those reporters put their bodies on the line to bring this story to you and me.

You also will remember, no doubt, the images of private security forces roughing up the Water Protectors.  Painful images.  Disturbing.  Police dogs.  Military vehicles.  Body armor, automatic weapons, violence.

 

IF YOU WATCH or listen to right-wing media, you will learn that left-leaning college students, protesting on their campuses, are the major threat to freedom of thought, speech, and expression. Coddled and intolerant, the story goes, these fragile snowflakes will not expose themselves or allow others to be exposed to ideas with which they disagree. They will drown out the voices of those whose ideas they oppose.  You read about the protests at Middlebury.  And maybe you saw the recent news coming out of Evergreen State College in Washington. Be afraid of the students, we are told, and too many people seem willing to comply.

I am going to use this Intercept piece in my Native American history class in the fall. I may use it the first day, or I might assign it at the end. Whichever, I feel my students need to see this stuff, think about it, and remember that the power of history can hang heavy on the backs of too many Americans. It might rile the students up.  Maybe they will protest.  Maybe they will get pissed and start breaking shit.  More likely, if they are good history students—and most of them are—they will see this story for what it is.

In recent weeks, David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon has gained a lot of attention.  He tells the story of the murder of oil-rich Osages in the early twentieth century. It is a riveting story.  Historians have known about the Osage murders for a long time, but it is good that Grann brought it to the attention of a broader public.  Its significance should be clear.

From Jamestown to Standing Rock, from the Virginia Company of London to Energy Transfer Partners, the partnership of corporate and business interests with the forces of the centralized state has been a constant in American history.  This is not partisan.  Tiger Swan was doing business during the Obama presidency.  It continued its work under Creon Trump.

I reason here from the premise that no corporate asset is more valuable than a single human life.  Yet, as I write, I read about how state after state is trying to enact measures to criminalize protest.  I listen to the recording of Montana’s new congressman pummeling one reporter (who cannot fight back) and read how the tough-guy governor of Texas took a break from tormenting LGBTQ kids to joke about shooting others.

It is abundantly clear that the forces of suppression and violence that have been part of the lived experience of peoples of color on this continent for centuries are now threatening to affect non-native peoples in unprecedented and alarming ways.

There is a wonderfully revealing passage in Vine Deloria’s famous book Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. “When the Kennedys and King were assassinated,” Deloria wrote, “people wailed and moaned over the ‘sick’ society.  Most people took the assassinations as a symptom of a deep inner rot that had suddenly set in.  They needn’t have been shocked. America has been sick for some time. It got sick when the first Indian treaty was broken. It has never recovered.”

Dakota Access, and the sorts of collusion between law enforcement, corporate interests, and for-profit armies like Tiger Swan, show that the sickness Deloria described is still here. Indeed, it has festered, become malignant, and done its damage in new ways in this new world order. Tiger Swan did its work during the Obama years.  It continues its work now.  It continues to protect ETP’s corporate assets.  The sickness runs deep. The rottenness is profound. If, as Felix Cohen once wrote, native peoples, “like the miner’s canary,” mark “the shifts from fresh air to poison gas in our political atmosphere,” then “our treatment of Indians…reflect[s] the rise and fall in our democratic faith.”

Let’s not forget Tiger Swan.  Let’s remember that history is not only part of the past.