What You Need To Read, December 2017

Back with the final “What You Need To Read” in Native American history for the year.  These are all recent additions to my “Must See” list. If I have missed anything that you have found particularly rewarding or valuable, or if you would like one of your works to be included on the list, feel free to drop me a line and I will catch you next time.

Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018).

Peter Cozzens, The Earth is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West, (New York: Knopf, 2017).

Christine M. DeLucia, Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017).

Alejandra Dubcovsky, “When Archaeology and History Meet: Shipwrecks, Indians, and the Contours of the Early-Eighteenth-Century South,” Journal of Southern History, 84 (February 2018).

Katherine Ellinghaus, Blood Will Tell: Native Americans and Assimilation Policy, (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 2018).

John Ryan Fischer, Cattle Colonialism: An Environmental History of the Conquest of California and Hawai’i. (Chapel Hill: Universityof North Carolina Press, 2015).

Hansen, Karen V., et. al., “Immigrants as Settler Colonists: Boundary Work Between Dakota Indians White Immigrant Settlers,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, 40 (September 2017), 1919-1938.

Joe Jackson, Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary, (New York: MacMillan, 2017).

Jeffers Lennox, Homelands and Empires: Indigenous Spaces, Imperial Fictions, and Competition for Territory in Northeastern North America, 1690-1763 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017).

John M. Low, Imprints: The Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians and the City of Chicago. (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2016.)

Robert Aquinas McNally, The Modoc War: A Story of Genocide at the Dawn of America’s Gilded Age, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018)

C. S. Monaco, The Second Seminole War and the Limits of American Aggression, (Baltimore: Hopkins, 2018).

Randy A. Peppler and Randall S. Ware, “Native American Agriculturalist Movements in Oklahoma,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 41 (No. 1, 2017), 73-86.

Powers, David M. “William Pynchon, the Agawam Indians, and the 1636 Deed for Springfield,” Historical Journal of Massachusettts, 45 (Summer 2017), 115-137.

Timothy Shannon, Indian Captive, Indian King: Peter Williamson in America and Britain, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017)

Sabol, Steven, “In Search of Citizenship: The Society of American Indians and the First World War,” Oregon Historical Quarterly, 118 (Summer 2017), 268-271.

Christina Snyder, “The Rise and Fall of Civilizations: Indian Intellectual Culture During the Removal Era,” Journal of American History, 104 (September 2017), 386-409.

Kevin Whalen, “Indian School, Company Town: Outing Workers from the Sherman Institute at Fontana Farms Company, 1907-1930,” Pacific Historical Review, 86 (May 2017), 290-321.

K. Whitney Mauer, “Indian Country Poverty: Place-Based Poverty on American Indian Territories, 2006-2010,” Rural Sociology, 82 (September 2017), 473-498.

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

 

#NativeLivesMatter

As screwed up as is our political system, with a President pouting because the leader of Korea called him “old,” and with Republicans slowly slouching towards the position that their party ought not to support the Senate candidacy of a constitutional illiterate who once liked to fondle 8th-graders, perhaps it is too much for me to hope that we might come together around one, simple premise, the urgency of which was underscored in this weekend’s news: that heavily-armed, militarized law enforcement agencies need to stop gunning down children.

Jesus Tap-Dancing Christ, how freaking hard it is to not kill kids?

You may have seen the story here or here.  Maybe stories like these have become so common that they no longer shock.  Jason Pero, a 14-year old eighth-grader, gunned down by a deputy sheriff.  The Wisconsin Department of Justice released preliminary findings yesterday:

“The Wisconsin Department of Justice (DOJ) Division of Criminal Investigation (DCI), at the request of the Ashland County Sheriff’s Office, has been investigating an officer involved death (OID) that took place on November 8, 2017 in Odanah, Wis., which is located on the Bad River Reservation.

The Ashland County Emergency Communications Center received a 911 call reporting a male subject walking on Maple Street carrying a knife. Ashland County Sheriff’s Deputy Brock Mrdjenovich responded to the scene and encountered a 5’9”, 300 pound male subject who fit the description given by the 911 caller. The subject was later identified as 14-year-old Jason Ike Pero. Pero approached Deputy Mrdjenovich with a large butcher knife and he refused numerous commands to drop the weapon. On two occasions, Pero lunged at the deputy while the deputy was attempting to retreat. Deputy Mrdjenovich fired his service weapon at Pero, striking him twice. Life-saving measures were initiated however, Pero was pronounced dead at Memorial Medical Center in Ashland. DCI has determined Jason Pero was the same person that called 911 reporting a man with a knife, giving his own physical description. Initial information indicates that Pero had been despondent over the few days leading up to the incident and evidence from a search warrant executed on Pero’s bedroom supports that information.

Deputy Mrdjenovich has been interviewed by DOJ and is on paid administrative leave in accordance with Ashland County Sheriff’s Office’s policy. Deputy Mrdjenovich has worked for the Ashland County Sheriff’s Office for approximately one year.

The family members of Jason Pero have been offered victim witness services by the DOJ Office of Crime Victim Services.

The Ashland County District Attorney’s office will receive the written reports following the conclusion of the investigation. DCI aims to turn over all OID investigative reports to the prosecutor within 30 days of the incident.

The Wisconsin DOJ-led investigation of this incident has been a collaborative effort between DCI, the Wisconsin State Patrol, and the Wisconsin State Crime Laboratory. The Ashland County Sheriff’s Office has been fully cooperating with DCI during this investigation.

Jason was a big boy, according to the report, and if he lunged at a deputy that officer might have had reason to be alarmed. But I read that initial statement–the warrant to search a dead child’s room, the quick determination about the identity of the 911 caller, the effort to portray this as a “suicide by cop” case–as defensive measures by law enforcement officials  attempting to justify a deputy’s violent actions, an attempt to account for what Jason’s mother believes is murder.  But even if this report is correct, and I think we all have reason to be suspicious until we learn otherwise, Jason still did not deserve a bullet through the heart.  There were ways this could have been contained.  There were ways this could have been prevented.

Look, at the end of the day I do not care if Jason had a knife. If a handful of deputies cannot take care of a child with a knife through non-lethal means, then they need to find something else to do.  I am not a cop, obviously. But I have kids. Sometimes they do stupid things.  Anyone who has been a teenager or spent time with a teenager knows that their highs can be high and their lows very low. They get depressed and they get despondent.  Sometimes they need help. Jason Pero may have been one of them. Hell, when I was a kid I had moods, too, and I mouthed off to the cops in my comfortable suburb.  But we were white kids, and kids like us do not get killed by police.  I no longer tell my own children, these beautiful young people of mixed-racial heritage, to view the police as their friends. I cannot do it anymore.  I tell them to be careful.  To watch themselves.  To be afraid, because they will hurt you and they will get away with it.

I am not a cop, but I am a historian, so I look at events like the killing of Justin through a very long lens. I do not know much about the specifics beyond what I have read, and I am not familiar with the local history of the Bad River Band of the Lake Superior Chippewa.  I do not know the context. But I am going to watch this case and try to learn more.  And I will keep reading history.  And I know, from my own research and reading, of too many stories where native peoples were gunned down for looking the wrong way at white people in positions of authority.  Murdered for merely existing.  It does not happen as much as it did, say, in the 1790s in the western parts of New York State and northern Pennsylvania, or in Crow Country in the late 19th century–stories you read in Native America. Of course.  But It Is Still Happening. Nobody can deny it. And those of us who study this history, in Canada and in the United States, are talking about it more and more.

The police exist to keep order, and to protect the lives, liberties, and property of white people. You do not have to read a lot of history to know that this is so.  Because white Americans too often view peoples of color and their communities as the locus for criminality in the United States, and they view native communities as centers of dysfunction, desperation, crime, and lawlessness, they react fiercely to any perceived threat.  Even peoples of color away from these communities–on football fields and on college campuses, for instance–are shouted down, cast as menacing or as disloyal, and placed in the position of having to insist that their Black Lives and Native Lives Matter.

It is an old story, and sometimes it wears me down.  Some of my teaching time is spent telling students that it does not have to be this way, that we need not remain prisoners to a shameful past.  But sometimes those words ring hollow.  That is how I feel now.  I understand why parents tell their children to fear the police.  I struggle to suppress my deep revulsion when I see three police cars pulled up behind the vehicle driven by an African-American man in my comfortable Rochester suburb.  The rot runs deep. The killing needs to stop.  Militarized and well-armed law enforcement agencies, I see them in my town where the local police blotter reports on crimes as serious as an occasional broken car window and a stolen I-pod or smashed Jack-O-Lantern.  Everywhere, I sense, police see people of color as a threat, including comfortable Brighton, New York.  What happened in Wisconsin last week can happen anywhere a person of color walks down a street. And from Tamir Rice to Justin Piro, and many others who have not come to mind as I write this post, all I can say is that the police must stop murdering children.

Treaty Day, 11/11

Today is Treaty Day in Canandaigua, New York. An annual commemoration of the treaty the Six Nations of the Iroquois signed with the United States in 1794 is held there each year, with a parade from the Canandaigua Primary School to the County Court House lawn at 130, and a commemoration ceremony at 200.  For the rest of the day, there are vendors and displays and speakers at the primary school.  The school site itself is significant because a large number of the 1600 Indians who attended the treaty council between September and November in 1794 camped on land that ultimately became the school’s play fields.

Two years ago I published a book about the Treaty of Canandaigua.  The United States negotiated about 370 treaties with a large number of American Indian nations. These diplomatic agreements do various things. Some of them established peace after periods of warfare. They granted to the United States control over the internal affairs of tribes.  They allowed the government to further its variety of “Civilization” programs, from the provision of spinning wheels and livestock to early moves towards allotment, and they were the instrument through which the land that made up Native America became part of the United States. Some of these treaties were fraudulent. There is no doubt about that.  Some of them were deceptive, and others coerced. Many were, in short, instruments of colonial control. Canandaigua, I argued, was different.

After the Revolution, the United States dictated a treaty of conquest to the small number of Six Nations people who gathered in November of 1784 at Fort Stanwix.  The United States negotiated similarly coercive treaties with the southeastern nations at Hopewell and with the Ohio Valley tribes at Fort McIntosh.  At Stanwix, American treaty commissioners dispensed with the long-recognized protocols of Iroquois diplomacy, thumped the gathered Indians on the chest, and explained to them what the new American empire would look like. The Iroquois were expected to release prisoners and provide hostages as a measure of their good faith. And they were required to give up all of their lands west of a line drawn four miles east of the Niagara River, a move designed to contain the Six Nations within the State of New York and cut them off from the British posts at Oswego and Niagara, and their kin who had resettled at Grand River in Ontario. The treaty did nothing to address some significant grievances that were felt particularly by the Senecas, the largest and westernmost of the Iroquois nations in New York. The Senecas complained of white encroachments on their land.  The complained about murders, 13 of them by white frontiersmen between 1784 and 1790, and an uncertain number more afterwards. And they complained on limitations on their ability to move: the lack of access to the Niagara River, and the claim asserted by Pennsylvania to the so-called “Erie Triangle,’ that tag of land you pass through in the Keystone State when you follow Interstate 90 from, say, Buffalo to Cleveland.

These grievances were significant. And the native peoples in the so-called Northwest Territory shared many of them–encroachment, violence, and so on. To deal with the threat posed by the confederated Northwestern nations–Shawnees, Delawares, and many others–President Washington sent out an American army led by Josiah Harmar to teach them that the soldiers of the United States numbered like the trees in the woods, the stars in the sky.  The Americans were defeated handily, “thrown on their backs.” Harmar lost one hundred men and five hundred horses.  The Northwestern confederates attacked American settlements in Kentucky, Virginia, western Pennsylvania, and their allies did damage in the Carolinas and Georgia as well, They pushed back American settlement. Another army went out under the command of Arthur St. Clair.  Its story is told by Colin Calloway in The Victory with No Name. They marched out into the Ohio country. On the 4th of November in 1791, the Northwestern confederates attacked them.  Of St. Clair’s 1400 men, 910 were killed or wounded.  St. Clair lost 1200 muskets, lots of artillery, his horses.  Twenty percent of the entire armed forces of the United States was wiped out in one day.

Could it get worse? Yes.  The British still held their forts at Oswego, Niagara, and Detroit on the margins of an Iroquoia that had remained under siege since the Revolution.  Settlers were terrified.  The British looked at these Indian victories and began to discuss among themselves the possibility of carving out a neutral Indian Barrier State, with its southern boundary running along the Ohio River.  What would happen if the powerful and aggrieved Six Nations joined with the Northwestern confederates? The entire frontier would be exposed, and native warriors posed an existential threat to the United States.

So what to do? Seneca diplomats and American officials both recognized that they could address the challenges they faced through negotiation and diplomacy better than through warfare.  The Senecas had learned well what American soldiers could do to their homeland from the Sullivan Campaign of 1779.  Iroquois diplomats traveled widely, risking their lives, some of them dying, in an effort to avoid war and protect their communities.

Timothy Pickering, the emissary appointed by Washington, met with the Senecas at Tioga in the fall of 1790, in the wake of the Pine Creek murders, a crime for which the one person tried was acquitted. Pickering learned from this that no jury would convict a white man for murdering Indians.  Native lives did not matter, he lamented.

Meanwhile, other Seneca leaders were meeting with American officials in Philadelphia, a meeting in which George Washington pledged to protect the Iroquois from any additional land grabs by the State of New York.  And in the fall of 1791, Pickering met with a larger group of Senecas at Newtown Point, to establish friendship and alliance.

The United States needed the Six Nations. Pickering understood that better than any of his American policy-making peers.  The Six Nations served as American eyes and ears in the west, for instance.  The British continued to work with Indians in the region, including the Senecas, from their posts at Detroit and Niagara. And the State of New York, despite Washington’s promises, continually offered fresh sources of grievance through fraudulent and illegal land sales.  In my current book project on the Onondagas I spend a lot of time on the 1788 and 1793 purchases. 

To resolve these crises, the United States called a council to meet at Canandaigua, which was far enough away from Niagara, Pickering hoped, to keep the British from interfering.  That was the hope. 1600 Haudenosaunee showed up at Canandaigua in the fall. They brought with them many grievances.  Encroachment on their lands must stop.  Murders must stop. And their land issues: access to the Niagara River and the claim to the Erie Triangle.

Now here’s the thing.  Before the treaty council commenced at Canandaigua, the northwestern Indians had been defeated at the Battle of Fallen Timbers. The defeated Indians fled toward a British post, and there they found no shelter or assistance.  From this Pickering knew, then, that there was no immediate threat that the Senecas would join with the Northwestern confederates because they had been defeated.  And there was no longer any immediate threat that the British would get involved or that their dreams of a neutral Indian Barrier State could come to fruition because, when push came to shove, they kept their gates closed to their allies.

But Pickering negotiated anyways. It is a big part of the story I tell in Peacemakers.  A treaty of seven articles, some of which very clearly served the United States.  Peace and friendship, of course, but also the fourth article, which stated that the Six Nations would never claim any additional lands in the United States. The Six Nations, Iroquoia, would never grow again.  The United States secured the right to cut military roads through Seneca country, and the right to bring its “civilization” program to the Six Nations.

So what did the Six Nations get?  They got, for a time, the return of their lands along the Niagara River. More importantly, they were guaranteed the right o the “free use and enjoyment of their lands.”  The phrase is used three times in the brief treaty.  The United States recognized this right and did so unambiguously.  Native peoples could do what they wanted on their own lands, free from the interference of any outside authority.  They were sovereign nations.

Of course, the legacy of Canandaigua is mixed.  New York, in violation of federal law, continued to buy land, particularly from the Oneidas, Onondagas, and Cayugas, who were completely dispossessed by 1795.  Private interests, with the support of the United States, started carving parcels from Iroquoia.   At Big Tree, in 1797, three years after Canandaigua, the Senecas parted with nearly all of their lands, save for eleven small reservations. I have written about that transaction here. And in more recent years the expansion of the St. Lawrence Seaway, the Moses Parkway and the Niagara Power Authority, and, of course, Kinzua Dam, the subject of Scott Sackett and Paul Lamont’s fantastic new documentary. Much of what was secured at Canandaigua has been lost.

So what are we left with? The treaty exists. That is a fact.  That phrase, “free use and enjoyment,” is an important touchstone for Haudenosaunee people who face continual threats to their autonomy and independence, their sovereignty and the integrity of their economic enterprises through taxation and state interference.

There is a sticker that is sometimes seen in Indian Country. “Honor Indian Treaties,” it says.  Yet so many Indian treaties are little more than real estate transactions where American commissioners dictated cessions to militarily defeated people and asserted control over their communities. Treaties were too often instruments of colonial control, licenses for empire and subjugation. Canandaigua was different.  At the time the treaty was negotiated in 1794, Haudenosaunee people still retained the capacity, should they choose to align themselves with the Northwestern confederates, to pose a grave threat to white American settlement.  And they used that power, and their own considerable diplomatic skill, to secure the return for a time of a key parcel of land. More importantly–and this is what is commemorated every year at Canandaigua on Treaty Day, though they acknowledge the losses, the celebrate the recognition and confirmation of their right to the “Free Use and Enjoyment of their Lands.” We are native nations, the Haudenosaunee people gathered at Canandaigua assert, and we are still here.

Historians and the Problem of Evil

Elzbieta Plackowska, forty-five years old, was convicted late in September for murdering her seven-year old son Justin and a five-year old girl, Olivia Dworakowski, who she was babysitting.  The crime occurred more than five years ago, on 30 October 2012. After telling the children to get down on their knees to pray, she started after them with a pair of kitchen knives. She stabbed Justin more than one hundred times, then slashed his throat. Olivia she stabbed more than fifty times. Her throat was cut as well. She also stabbed to death two dogs that were in the apartment. It was a horrifying crime, and I find it difficult to comprehend the terrifying last moments in the lives of those two children.

For the past several years, I have told the students in my Humanities course this harrowing tale. I do so as part of our discussion of Augustine’s Confessions. I spend three days discussing The Confessions. One of the many topics Augustine wrestled with was the problem of evil.  The Manicheans, with whom Augustine spent a lot of time, had one explanation for the existence of evil but this answer left Augustine dissatisfied and unmoved.

In his attempts to understand the nature of God and the relationship between an all-powerful and good God and the existence of evil, Augustine concluded that the farther away from God something was, the more disordered it became, and more scattered and fleeting.  The notion was Platonic. Heaven is close to God, human souls and minds are a step farther away, and bodies, the world of flesh and materiality, farther away still.  This conceptualization allowed Augustine to deal with the problem of evil in a way that made sense to him.  Evil, he wrote, “is nothing  but the diminishment of good to the point where nothing at all is left.”

I want the students to think about this.  I ask them for their definitions of evil. They usually answer with cases, as in “Stalin was evil,” or the latest mass shooter is evil.  I wonder whether they think Augustine’s definition is helpful. Does it help them comprehend the acts of which they speak.  Does his definition work for them? The brutality of the twentieth century, in the closing years of which these students were born: what of that? Does Augustine’s explanation of evil allow us to understand Hitler, Rwanda, Pol Pot, and Jeffrey Dahmer?

So I ask them about Elzbieta Plackowska.  I tell them her story.  Is she evil? Does Augustine’s explanation provide us with what we need to make sense of so senseless an act of violence?

The story often stuns the students.  I can see that reaction very clearly and very powerfully. Certainly they did not see this story coming. So many of them are young and sensitive and some of them are overpowered by it.  There is usually some silence before anybody speaks. Invariably someone mumbles out something quietly about insanity and, indeed, I point out that Plackowska’s attorneys attempted an insanity defense.  I try to let the conversation go. Do we call “insane” what people in an earlier time might have called “evil”? Is the institutional and diagnostic apparatus of psychology, applied to the criminal justice system, just an attempt to explain the inexplicable, to make sense of the senselessness of nightmarish violence?

I do not know enough about the history of psychology to answer that question, but I do want the students to think about the issues Augustine–and Elzbieta Plackowska’s knee-buckling acts of violence–present.

I always have loved Norman Maclean’s Young Men and Fire, but I disagree to some extent with his criticism of historians and the very discipline of history.  We historians, he suggested, are reluctant to go to the edge, and go beyond the strict confines of “what happened” and “who” and “why” and “where.”  We pull back from the big, existential questions. In the case of Maclean, we do not attempt to get inside the heads of the impetuous young men who died fighting the Mann Gulch Fire in Montana in 1949. In his attempt to uncover and imagine their dying thoughts, Maclean believed, one might find meaning and wisdom. He did, and the result is an absolutely beautiful meditation on fire and the meaning of life.

Historians, however, do more of this than Maclean believed. I think here of Martha Hodes’ gorgeous The Sea Captain’s Wife and Rachel Hope Cleves’ Charity and Sylvia, both of which are books that sit on my shelf close to Maclean’s. In my own work, I wrestled with some of this in my book on Roanoke, The Head in Edward Nugent’s Hand, and in my attempts to understand how it was that a Mohawk missionary to the Oneidas decided one day to begin claiming that he was the long lost child of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI.

But if you look at history as it’s taught to young people, there is abundant evidence to support Maclean’s critique. Filling in blanks, bubbling in scan-tron forms, clicking on one of a number of choices–and, indeed, the way that history is presented in all-too-many textbooks–it leaves students with the sense that history really is little more than a series of events and facts to be mastered and remembered.

And I do find when my students in history courses work on their research projects, sometimes they pull back from the suffering, the evil that may exist at the heart of their story.  When I encounter these students, I urge them to read parts of James Merrell’s Into the American Woods, the most beautifully and powerfully written piece of serious scholarship in my field that I have read in a great many years. His treatment of massacre of the peaceful, but suspected, Christian Indians by the “Paxton Boys” late in 1763 informed what I wrote about this event in Native America. I did not want my readers to think that “this thing happened and it was really, really bad,” but rather to understand what it was like, not just to be there, but to have been a participant in the event, a victim, or a perpetrator.  Merrell does this so well. It is a wise, but very dark book.

Next week, in my Native American history survey course, I will discuss with my students “Indian Affairs in the Civil War Years.”  The title for that day’s meeting, I admit, needs some work.  The students will read a chunk of Native America, a handful of documents on federal Indian policy from the annual report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, and documents on the Dakota War in Minnesota in 1862 and the Sand Creek Massacre in southern Colorado in November of 1864.  I spend most of the hour on Sand Creek. I place on a Powerpoint slide an excerpt from a letter written by Silas Soule, a soldier in Colonel Chivington’s force, who refused to obey his commanding officer’s order to kill all the Indians at Sand Creek.  In a letter to his family written a short time after the slaughter, Soule wrote:

“The massacre lasted six or eight hours, and a good many Indians escaped.  I tell you Ned it was hard to see little children on their knees have their brains beat out by men professing to be civilized.  One squaw was wounded and a fellow took a hatchet to finish her,  she held her arms up to defend her, and he cut one arm off, and held the other with one hand and dashed the hatchet through her brain.  One squaw with her two children, were on their knees begging for their lives of a dozen soldiers, within ten feet of them all, firing –when one succeeded in hitting the squaw in the thigh, when she took a knife and cut the throats of both children, and then killed herself.  One old squaw hung herself in the lodge –there was not enough room for her to hang and she held up her knees and choked herself to death.  Some tried to escape on the Prairie, but most of them were run down by horsemen.  I saw two Indians hold one of another’s hands, chased until they were exhausted, when they kneeled down, and clasped each other around the neck and were both shot together.  They were all scalped, and as high as half a dozen taken from one head.  They were all horribly mutilated.  One woman was cut open and a child taken out of her, and scalped.

  White Antelope, War Bonnet and a number of others had Ears and Privates cut off.  Squaw’s snatches were cut out for trophies.  You would think it impossible for white men to butcher and mutilate human beings as they did there, but every word I have told you is the truth, which they do not deny.  It was almost impossible to save any of them.”

Apparently there is a movie about Soule.  Who knew? If you have seen it, I would love to hear your thoughts. Soule is an attractive hero, a compelling character. He testified against his fellow soldiers and his commander. He was murdered shortly thereafter in Denver.  Nobody was ever tried for the crime, and his murder went unpunished.

Shocking stuff, to be sure. Sometimes students will shake their heads, dismayed or disgusted or disturbed by Soule’s words. But I urge them to go further. Into the woods.  Why did this event happen in this way? Why did these horrible deeds occur? Most accounts of Sand Creek,with the exception of Ari Kelman’s masterful A Misplaced Massacre,  will describe how the Cheyenne and Arapaho at Sand Creek were no threat, were attempting to comply with orders and were caught completely unaware.  Chivington was a bad guy and he was roundly criticized in the east afterwards.  But what about the rest of his men, those who took trophies, and cut up bodies, and murdered those who begged to be spared? Why did these Colorado soldiers make this choice? And what of the crowds at the Denver Opera House, who cheered when scalps taken from the slain were presented to them during intermission?

They were racist, no doubt.   The students have no difficulty in drawing that conclusion.  But there are racists everywhere, I tell them.  You might know some, I say.  But they do not always pull out their guns and shoot babies in the face. They do not castrate the dead, carrying off their prizes as tobacco pouches, or mutilate the bodies of the women they killed. How did these men get there? How does anyone get there? War, Thucydides once said, “is a violent teacher.”  What lessons do acts like these leave us with?

The value of our endeavors as historians, the worth of the historical enterprise, might be measured by how well we can explain these brutal realities, and draw out their dark lessons.  We who write about and study the history of native peoples, we need to go to the black heart of the frontier experience, of colonialism, and injustice.  We must do more than decry how awful these events were.  We must teach them, and reach as far into the darkness as we can to understand them, and help others to do so as well.

So, Elzbieta Plackowska.  The officers who responded to the crime scene were shattered by what they saw.  Many of them needed counseling.  How could she have done this? She claimed at first that she was attacked by a black man, that it was a home invasion.  She said as well that the children were possessed, that they took the shape of demons, or that she lost control of herself.  There was evidence as well that she resented her husband, a long-haul truck driver, that she was deeply alone and wanted to hurt him in the worst way that she could imagine.  If that is what motivated her, then I suspect she succeeded.  But lots of husbands and wives resent their spouses, and they don’t all do this.  In the end, I do not know what was going through Elzbieta Plackowska’s mind when she picked up those knives, but I do know that labeling this act as evil, or insane, or deranged or whatever word you want to use, doesn’t help me get closer to finding the meaning of this event, and learning its dark lessons about who and what we are.

Why Dennis Banks Matters

Dennis Banks, one of the most important leaders of the American Indian Movement, or AIM, died last week.  Banks was eighty years old.

The  obituary that appeared in the New York Times, written by Robert McFadden, covered the key points in Banks’ long career, but it has justly been maligned for its resort to stereotype in describing Banks’ appearance (“high cheekbones,” “raven-haired,” “dark, piercing eyes”); its over-emphasis on Banks’ considerable legal troubles without describing the harassment and persecution AIM faced from federal, state, local, and, at times, tribal police officials; and a nasty, judgmental tone when it came to Banks’ family life and large number of children.

If you follow the conversation on Twitter about the Times obituary, you will see that some of these critiques are sensible, others a bit off-base.  Many of the critics suggested that the obituary dishonored Banks by pointing out his criminal troubles and the confrontational and sometimes violent nature of AIM activism.

My own objection to the obituary is a bit different, for it seems to me that McFadden badly misunderstood the goals and the significance of the American Indian Movement and Banks’ role in it.

We should be clear. AIM has, to too great an extent, monopolized discussions of American Indian activism in the second half of the twentieth century.  This is a failing of the historians, and not AIM itself. Native American “activism,” a term that has been used uncritically, at the local and reservation level, and often occurring away from the gaze of national media, long predated AIM.  Still, McFadden questioned the significance of AIM’s activism and, in so doing, much of Banks’ life work.  Banks, he said, brought some attention to Indian causes, but he “achieved few real improvements in the daily lives of millions of Native Americans living on reservations and in major cities” and who continue to “lag behind most fellow citizens in jobs, housing, and education.” He never slayed the dragon.

I am not quite sure what McFadden expected, and what he might have defined as meaningful change or “real improvements.”  His language, which I am willing to believe was unintentional, still struck me as a snide dismissal of AIM and of American reform in general.  If problems still exist after the reformers’ careers have ended, McFadden seems to suggest that it was all for naught.

Of course AIM made outrageous demands that never were going to be fulfilled.  Of course their actions, at time, generated opposition among certain members of the communities in which they worked.  At times, by any standard, AIM members behaved badly.  It would be foolish to expect native peoples to speak with one voice, for factionalism and disagreement are facts of Native American life.  And it would be foolish as well to expect one organization, no matter how charismatic its leaders, to wipe out the enormous injustices and inequalities native peoples faced.

Banks plays a significant role in my present book project, a history of the Onondaga Nation.  After jumping bail in South Dakota, Banks found shelter in California. Jerry Brown, the state’s once and future Democratic governor, refused to honor demands that he be extradited.  But when the Republican George Deukmejian became governor of the Golden State, Banks made his way to New York, where he found “sanctuary” on the the lands of the Onondaga Nation.  He stayed there for much of 1983 and 1984.  The decision of the chiefs and clanmothers at Onondaga to grant Banks sanctuary was part of the Onondagas’ assertion of nationhood that made it, in many ways, the center of discussions about Native American Nationhood in the last quarter of the twentieth century.

Banks missed out on a lot during his sanctuary, was homesick, and at times struggled to keep busy on the small nation territory.  He organized running clubs, took a job, but the evidence in Syracuse newspapers and other sources suggest that not all Onondagas were happy with his residence on the nation territory.  I have much left to learn about Banks’ time on the Onondaga Nation, but it seems that all these things factored into his decision to leave. He surrendered to authorities in the fall of 1984.

McFadden, in an obituary rife with cliches that focused on dysfunction, violence, and alcoholism in Native American communities, could not see the significance of AIM’s work.  He did not understand the toll persecution and legal harassment took on the movement, nor the barriers against which it operated. Nor did he acknowledge how the activism of the 1960s and 1970s, from the Fish-Ins and Alcatraz, to the Trail of Broken Treaties and the occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs headquarters in Washington, to the stand-off at Wounded Knee in 1973, and hundreds of other acts of defiance and protest in Native American communities small and large, made American policy makers who previously had hoped to “terminate” Native Americans reconsider their positions.  You can see the shifts in policy beginning under President Johnson, accelerating under Richard Nixon who, despite that whole Watergate thing, was a pretty good president for native peoples.   And it culminated in the significant legislation of 1978, which I discuss in the final chapter of Native America, one of the most important and creative periods in law-making in all of Native American history. Of course Banks and his allies and associates left much work undone, and of course there were significant limitations in what solutions federal authorities were willing to consider, but without the efforts of thousands of native peoples, on their own, in AIM, or in other Native American rights organizations, none of this significant legislation would have been enacted.

Nobody summarized the significance of this activism better than Paul Chaat Smith, whose Everything You Know About Indians is Wrong, is a wonderful introduction to this important subject.  Speaking of this period in Native American history, from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee, Smith wrote that

“It is our people at our looniest, bravest, most singular and wonderful best, and moving beyond words even to those of us who resist cheap sentiment and heroic constructions of complicated and flawed movements.  Yet there it is, over and over again: Indians who objectively have little or nothing in common choosing to join people they often don’t even know who are engaged in projects as bizarre as laying claim to a dead prison on an island that is mostly rock, or picking up a gun to take sides in the Byzantine political struggles of the famously argumentative Sioux.”

McFadden said that Dennis Banks and his partner in so many AIM campaigns, the late Russell Means, were the best known Native Americans since Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse.  Maybe so, but Americans seem to know little about Sitting Bull and almost nothing about Crazy Horse except for their names.   Banks’s influence is a significant one, and all one has to do is search the archives of the New York Times to see that.  It is disappointing that McFadden’s obituary is such a disappointing last word on so significant a life.

I Read Trump’s Proclamation for Native American Heritage Month So You Don’t Have To.

On Halloween, a really bad day for the dumpster fire that is the Trump Presidency, Our Bronze Creon issued his proclamation that November is Native American Heritage Month.  Traditionally this proclamation is made on the last day in October, and usually it garners little attention.

Little Hands, No Plans

Still, other than his announcement several months back that he had decided to reverse the Obama Administration’s belated halt to the Dakota Access Pipeline, President Trump has had nothing to say about Native American issues.  At a certain level, that is understandable.  The entire presidency is wobbling under the existential threat posed by the Mueller investigation.  But here, as elsewhere, it is worth looking at what Our Bronze Creon has had to say.  And here, as elsewhere, his words and his deeds pale in comparison to those of his predecessors.

Trump’s proclamation begins with a bit of meaningless fluff, noting that “American Indians and Alaska Natives are inextricably linked with the history of the United States.”  Ignoring the many earlier efforts at settlement throughout the Americas, including the Jamestown settlement beginning in 1607, Trump strangely chose to open with the assertion that “Beginning with the Pilgrims’ arrival at Plymouth Colony and continuing until the present day, Native American’s contributions are woven deeply into our Nation’s rich tapestry.”  We will give him a pass on that misplaced apostrophe–it is a frustrating mistake my students make as well.  But it is odd, isn’t it, that a President who has expressed such fascination with the Senator from Massachusetts who he has derisively dubbed “Pocahontas” would ignore the English efforts to plant a colony in Virginia?  There was a time in American historical writing when New Englanders, Virginians, and North Carolinians all competed to make their state the birthplace of the United States.  Trump apparently and uncharacteristically has come down with Massachusetts.

His proclamation honored “the contributions and sacrifices” made by Native Americans.  Those contributions included military service, assistance to the first European settlers and, in a sideways glance at the discredited “Iroquois Influence” thesis, the gift of “democratic ideas to our constitutional Framers.” Trump’s predecessors also occasionally mentioned the notion that the United States Constitution and American democracy were influenced or shaped by Native American antecedents, but the number of published scholars who find this view persuasive can be counted on one hand.

As far as his own administration’s policies, the President claimed that

my Administration is committed to tribal sovereignty and self-determination. A great Nation keeps its word, and this Administration will continue to uphold and defend its responsibilities to American Indians and Alaska Natives. The United States is stronger when Indian Country is healthy and prosperous. As part of our efforts to strengthen American Indian and Alaska Native communities, my Administration is reviewing regulations that may impose unnecessary costs and burdens. This aggressive regulatory reform, and a focus on government-to-government consultation, will help revitalize our Nation’s commitment to Indian Country.

This is all highly general.  Nothing specific here at all, and little awareness of what the words he used mean.  Self-determination?  Not much of that thus far, except for a commitment to allow those tribes interested in developing their coal resources, like the Crows, to start digging. There is scant evidence that the Trump administration has any interest in tribal sovereignty, and Interior Department press releases say little more than the President did here: that the government will cut regulations that hold Indian country back.  If you find this a paltry solution to the challenges native peoples face, and the wide range of issues with which they contend, you can request a meeting with the Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Indian Affairs by filling out this form right here.  You might want to be a bit flexible in scheduling, as Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke’s choice to head the Bureau of Indian Affairs has only been on the job for two weeks.

You can look over the posts on this blog, and it will not take you long to see that I have been very critical of the President.  But I wanted to be fair on this, so I read earlier proclamations by Trump’s predecessors of Native American Heritage Month.

Long ago, the first President Bush noted that “before European explorers set foot on the North American continent, this great land has been cultivated and cherished by generations of American Indians. Unbeknownst to their fellowman halfway around the world, these Native people had developed rich, thriving cultures, as well as their own systems of social order. They also possessed a wealth of acquired wisdom and skills in hunting, tracking, and farming — knowledge and skills that would one day prove to be invaluable to traders and settlers from Europe.”  The elder Bush provided some specific examples of great Native American leaders, including Sacajawea, Sequoyah, and Charles Curtis.  And he spoke of his administration’s signal accomplishments in Indian affairs, the founding legislation for the National Museum of the American Indian.  And he looked to the future, too:

During the National American Indian Heritage Month, as we celebrate the fascinating history and time-honored traditions of Native Americans, we also look to the future. Our Constitution affirms a special relationship between the Federal Government and Indian tribes and — despite a number of conflicts, inequities, and changes over the years — our unique government-to-government relationship has endured. In recent years, we have strengthened and renewed this relationship. Today we reaffirm our support for increased Indian control over tribal government affairs, and we look forward to still greater economic independence and self-sufficiency for Native Americans.

Unlike President Trump, Bill Clinton in the final year of his presidency remembered both the accomplishments of native peoples and the consequences they had suffered as a result of the nation’s past policies.  “This month,” he said in November of 2000, “we celebrate the culture and contributions of the first Americans,” but also “remember with sorrow the suffering they endured because of past Federal actions and policies that had long-term and often devastating consequences for Native Americans and their culture.”  Clinton’s presidency was one of importance for native peoples, and he looked forward.  “As the new millennium dawns, there is reason for optimism,” he stated. “During my 1999 New Markets tour of the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota and my visit to the Navajo Nation in New Mexico in April of this year, I saw firsthand a strength of spirit and hope sweeping through Indian Country.”  He said his administration had worked hard to help native communities “through economic development initiatives and improved education and health care.”  His tone was retrospective.  He was proud of what his administration was done but, conscious that its time was coming to an end, that there was so much more he wished he could do.

We still have much to accomplish, however. While my Administration has worked hard to bridge the digital divide and bring the Information Superhighway to Indian Country, some areas still do not have telephone and power lines. We continue striving to provide American Indians with the tools they need to strengthen family and community life by fighting poverty, crime, alcohol and drug abuse, and domestic violence, and we are working with tribes to improve academic achievement and strengthen tribal colleges.

We are also seeking to ensure that tribal leaders have a voice equal to that of Federal and State officials in addressing issues of concern to all our citizens. I reaffirmed that commitment to tribal sovereignty and self-determination by issuing this month a revised Executive Order on Consultation and Coordination with Indian Tribal Governments. This order builds on prior actions and strengthens our government-to-government relationship with Indian tribes by ensuring that all Executive departments and agencies consult with Indian tribes and respect tribal sovereignty as the agencies consider policy initiatives that affect Indian communities.

This year, my Administration proposed the largest budget increase ever for a comprehensive Native American initiative for health care, education, infrastructure, and economic development. Just last month, as part of the Department of the Interior appropriations legislation, I signed into law one segment of this budget initiative that includes significant investments for school construction in Indian Country and the largest funding increase ever for the Indian Health Service. These are the kinds of investments that will empower tribal communities to address an array of needs and, ultimately, to achieve a better standard of living.

Back in 1994, when I first met with the tribal leaders of more than 500 Indian nations at the White House, I saw the strength and determination that have enabled Native Americans to overcome extraordinary barriers and protect their hard-won civil and political rights. Since then, by working together, we have established a new standard for Federal Indian policy–one that promotes an effective government-to-government relationship between the Federal Government and the tribes, and that seeks to ensure greater prosperity, self-reliance, and hope for all Native Americans. While we cannot erase the tragedies of the past, we can create a future where all of our country’s people share in America’s great promise.

It is, quite simply, a statement that stands in stark contrast to the Trump administration’s perfunctory proclamation.  George W. Bush’s proclamations, similarly, were brief, but managed to avoid the mailed-in, bored tone of the Trump announcement.  Bush could point to some minor legislative accomplishments, and pledged to preserve the “nation to nation” relationship between the United States and native peoples and sovereignty and self-determination.

His successor, Barack Obama, whose presidency was indeed significant for its accomplishments in Indian Country, used his proclamations to set an agenda and highlight all it had done.  In 2012, for instance, President Obama mentioned the Cobell settlement and the Hearth Act, important achievements. In 2013 he recognized native contributions and accomplishments, but also “the painful history Native Americans have endured — a history of violence, marginalization, broken promises, and upended justice.  There was a time,” he continued,  “when native languages and religions were banned as part of a forced assimilation policy that attacked the political, social, and cultural identities of Native Americans in the United States.” Despite these hard-hearted policies, and “through generations of struggle, American Indians and Alaska Natives held fast to their traditions, and eventually the United States Government repudiated its destructive policies and began to turn the page on a troubled past.”

It is not enough to argue that these differences are matters of style. They are.  But they reflect differences in policy as well.  All presidents state their support for self-determination. They all work to uphold tribal sovereignty, they say.  But few of them think through what those words mean, and contemplate meaningful policies to honor these pledges.  Obama himself was slow to act in important areas.  He acted on Dakota Access only at the last second, and arguably too late to implement policy changes that would not be so easily set aside by President Trump.  But he did have much to point to, and he did so in his last proclamation in 2016.

Over our long shared history, there have been too many unfortunate chapters of pain and tragedy, discrimination and injustice. We must acknowledge that history while recognizing that the future is still ours to write. That is why my Administration remains dedicated to strengthening our government-to-government relationships with tribal nations and working to improve the lives of all our people. Three years ago, I issued an Executive Order establishing the White House Council on Native American Affairs to help ensure the Federal Government engages in true and lasting relationships with tribes and promotes the development of prosperous and resilient tribal communities. Last month, I hosted the eighth Tribal Nations Conference and brought tribal leaders together to identify key issues we still face. We have worked to better protect sacred lands and restored many acres of tribal homelands, as well as supported greater representation of indigenous peoples before the United Nations and called for further implementation of the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. And we have taken steps to strengthen tribal sovereignty in criminal justice matters, including through the Tribal Law and Order Act.

Through the Affordable Care Act and permanent reauthorization of the Indian Health Care Improvement Act, we empowered more Native Americans to access the quality health care they need to live full, healthy lives. Throughout their lives, 84 percent of American Indian and Alaska Native women and girls will experience some form of violence, and in 2013, I signed the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, which allows tribes to prosecute non-Native individuals who commit acts of domestic violence in Indian Country. And through the North American Working Group on Violence Against Indigenous Women and Girls, we are strengthening regional coordination on the rights of women and girls from indigenous communities across the continent.

In recognition of the immeasurable contributions that Native Americans have made to our Nation, we continue to advocate for expanding opportunity across Indian Country. We have supported tribal colleges and universities and worked to return control of education to tribal nations — not only to prepare Native youth for the demands of future employment, but also to promote their own tribal languages and cultures. We are investing in job training and clean-energy projects, infrastructure, and high-speed internet that connects Native American communities to the broader economy. We are connecting more young people and fostering a national dialogue to empower the next generation of Native leaders through the Generation Indigenous initiative. Through www.NativeOneStop.gov, we have also worked to improve coordination and access to Federal services throughout Indian Country. Indian Country still faces many challenges, but we have made significant progress together since I took office, and we must never give up on our pursuit of the ever brighter future that lies ahead.

I have written on this blog about how consequential a presidency I thought Obama’s was for Native American communities. His accomplishments, compared to that of his predecessors, were significant.  He was entirely justified in talking about them in his proclamation. But now, sadly, as we struggle through the first year of a presidency that has been mired in crisis and scandal from the moment it began in January of 2017, that has stirred up racial division in the country and apologized and excused public displays of white supremacy, and that has shown outright hostility to the causes and concerns of peoples of color, the pursuit of that “brighter future” mentioned by President Obama seems to have been set aside.

And that is just one more tragedy of the presidency of Our Bronze Creon, one more component of the electoral nightmare that began last November.  It is one thing for a President to be “unconventional” and, as his dwindling number of supporters argue, to be unconcerned about being “politically correct.”  It is another matter entirely to show, through sins of omission and commission, that he could not possibly care less.