Monthly Archives: September 2020

#NativeLivesMatter

Indigenous Lives Matter: Some Thoughts on the Death of Reynold High Pine, 1972.

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The authorities in Yellowstone County quickly determined Reynold High Pine’s case of death. They found his body in the Burlington Northern Freight Yard on Billings’ south side early in the morning on May 14, 1972. County Coroner Leonard A. Larson concluded that the sixty-year-old man from Pine Ridge had stumbled into the path of a coming train around 6:30pm the evening before. Larson chose that time because it was then that the last train passed through the yard on those tracks before workers spotted the body at 4:30am. So certain was he that Larson felt no need for either an autopsy or an inquest. He did not even bother to draw a blood sample.

Native Americans in Billings did not think that Larson had things right. They suspected a cover-up, and they had good reason. Larson’s conclusions about High Pine’s time of death could not have been correct. Several witnesses saw High Pine at the Standard Bar on Minnesota Avenue, hours after the coroner said he died. These witnesses saw High Pine around midnight, in an altercation with Orville “Buzz” Jones, a 23-year old police officer who had just finished his shift at 11:00pm and was working, in uniform, as a bouncer at the bar. It just did not add up. High Pine was 5’3″, and 130 pounds. Jones had a full foot on him, seventy pounds, and a night stick which witnesses said he used.

T.R. Glenn, a Crow and the chairman of the Montana chapter of American Indian Movement (AIM) based at Eastern Montana College, said that “There is a conflict between the police version of what happened and the stories of the southside people who were witnesses.” Glenn and his associates–Ray Spang, a Northern Cheyenne, and a Winnebago named Frank LeMere–decided to visit Billings police chief Gerald T. Dunbar.

Frank LeMere in 2017.

Glenn, Spang, and LeMere were upset. AIM as an organization was founded in the Twin Cities of Minnesota to monitor police brutality against the cities’ Native American population. HIgh Pine’s case looked and smelled like police brutality at a minimum, and the cover up of a murder at worst, especially because Dunbar denied that there had been any incident involving one of his officers.

They didn’t get far. Dunbar said that he would meet with “any group to hear a complaint if they acted rationally and didn’t shout.” The AIM activists did not meet Dunbar’s standard. He refused to meet with the “Long-Haired–until they acted decently and didn’t have a chip on their shoulder.” LeMere, who was in no mood to be told what sort of protest was proper and suitable for the chief of police, afterward said that “we simply exercised our right to protest inadequacies in police dealing regarding Indians. An Indian dies in Billings and everyone forgets–not even an autopsy was performed and this has got to change.” LeMere wondered how many more Indians would die.

Other Native Americans in Billings, not involved with AIM, were watching the conduct of the police. The 92 members of the moderate Billings American Indian Council joined the AIM activist in raising questions about High Pine’s death. Protests were scheduled and organized, with word of a march bringing in indigenous peoples from throughout North America.

This pressure forced Yellowstone County Attorney Harold Hanser to organize an inquest. He said his decision “was not prompted by Indian protest.” One of the jurors on the panel was a Crow, but the other four were white men, all familiar to the coroner. They concluded that the “probable cause” of High Pine’s death was being struck by a train, but they clearly had their doubts. They underlined the word “probable” in their report. None of the protesters were satisfied.

I do not know how Reynold High Pine died. But I question the coroner’s conclusions, and I bet you do, too. It is folly to pretend that historians do not live in the world of events. Though our craft emphasizes the importance of objectivity, it is never quite that simple. We read the work of scholars who preceded us. We work our way through the primary sources. We must do so honestly and fairly. We should not allow our biases and prejudices to color our interpretation of the sources we read. Few historians would disagree with these simple propositions.

Think about this story. I learned of Reynold High Pine because I saw an article in the important Native American newspaper Akwesasne Notes, which I had been reading because of its relevance to my research on the history of the Onondaga Nation. It was something that I stumbled across. Something about this story caught my eye. The reasons for this are not hard to imagine. I lived in Billings for four years, and I taught at Montana State University at Billings, formerly Eastern Montana College. I heard from more than a few Crow and Northern Cheyenne students I came to know about the rough treatment they received from the police and the county sheriff in Billings. But there is more to it than that. I read that story about High Pine in Akwesasne Notes the same day that the district attorney in Louisville, Kentucky, announced that the grand jury would indict none of the officers who gunned own Breonna Taylor in her own apartment. I read the article amidst the grief and frustration in Rochester, where I live now, that has surfaced since police videos became public showing officers strangling a troubled and naked African-American man on a winter night back in March. I attended some of the protests in downtown Rochester, just a couple of miles from where I live.

The point is that we historians, at the end of the day, seek answers to questions, and we set out to answer these questions in a systematic, thorough, and disciplined manner. These questions can come from many sources. It might be our sense that something is wrong in the prevailing interpretation of a historical event, and we want to know what really happened and why. But sometimes the events happening around us cause us to see something new in the sources–a connection, a parallel, or a line of inquiry–we might never have dreamed of otherwise.

Black Lives Matter. We’ve been saying this since Ferguson, Missouri. Indigenous peoples, too, are killed in disproportionate numbers by law enforcement. This reality has bothered me for years, and I have written about it in a number of posts that have appeared on this blog. Reynold High Pine’s story shows us that the lives of Native peoples don’t mean much in cities and towns where they live on the margins, struggling to get by, coming and going, fucking up, falling apart, and too often getting beaten down. What is, always has been. White people have taken Native peoples’ lands and they’ve taken Native peoples’ lives. And in this country, historians will provide the only accounting of a problem that is as old as the encounter between natives and newcomers on these shores. and that may not be much of an accounting at all when so many Americans are so determined to hear nothing bad about their nation at all.

Haudenosaunee History

Your Territorial Acknowledgment Is Not Enough

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My college does a territorial acknowledgment before many public events on campus. We are not alone in doing this. We acknowledge that SUNY-Geneseo stands in the historic homeland of the Seneca Nation of Indians and the Tonawanda Seneca Nation. It is an important first step, but one for which my feelings are ambivalent. We do this acknowledgment in rooms where no Native American students are present. We do it for ourselves.

            During our commencement ceremony, a Haudenosaunee flag stands on stage and another flies in our student union, beside the flags of all our foreign students’ nations. Only a tiny number of Native American students have walked the stage at commencement, or ambled through the Union. We consulted with no Indigenous peoples when we began acknowledging our location at the Western Door of the Iroquois Longhouse.

            A just-announced diversity initiative will lead to a more public celebration of Indigenous Peoples’ Day, something we so quietly recognized several years back that it is as if we do not want anyone to know. And we will not raise the Haudenosaunee flag on the college flagpole, unlike some of our sister institutions in SUNY.

            So let’s get serious for a second.  During a troubling year when the college has dedicated itself to exploring the difficult question of how we might become an anti-racist campus, what we have done with and for Indigenous peoples is simply not enough.  We are quiet crusaders on the cheap.  Our gestures, and that is all they are—have been tiny and few and they cost us nothing.  We talk a good game, but that’s it. To say that we acknowledge that our college stands on what was once Indigenous land at a college that makes little effort to recruit, support, and retain Indigenous students is about as hollow a thing as I can imagine. And believe me, there are many schools—in SUNY and beyond– that do even less than us

            GENESEO, more than many colleges across North America, stands directly on Native American land.  “Chenussio” appears in New York’s colonial records and in the writings of French Jesuit missionaries in the middle of the seventeenth century.  The Genesee Valley, the beauty of which we sing in our college’s song, was a hub of indigenous activity for many centuries.  Geneseo stands directly at the Western Door of the Haudenosaunee longhouse and critical events in Seneca history took place near and on the very ground the campus occupies. The Big Tree Treaty of 1797, for instance, was negotiated in one of our parking lots.  The Senecas there signed away all their lands in western New York, from that gorgeous Genesee river valley to Lake Erie, eleven small reservations excepted. The town’s white founding fathers all were involved in dispossessing the Senecas. We occupy what was a major Seneca town site in a state that could not have taken the shape it now holds without a systematic program of Iroquois dispossession. It can be argued that no SUNY school stands on ground so closely linked to that history of dispossession.

            I am completely familiar with the arguments that will be thrown back at me. I have heard them many times.  Indigenous peoples comprise approximately 1% of New York’s population.  It is not worth the trouble to devote our scarce resources to trying to attract these students to campus and make them feel welcome once they arrive. Our dedication to diversity is highly qualified, indeed.  We cannot fly the Haudenosaunee flag on the campus flag pole and we certainly cannot invite our Haudenosaunee neighbors to campus, because that will anger anti-Indian politicians in Albany and thus jeopardize the funding needed to fix a college that has significant construction and maintenance needs. We will not look down at the ground upon which we stand. We can’t. Because. We can’t. Because. We just can’t. We won’t.

            Several years ago I organized a meeting on campus. I invited a number of Haudenosaunee scholars from other SUNY campuses in the western part of the state.  They came to Geneseo to talk about bringing Indigenous students to SUNY.  The four of us agreed that it was simply a choice.  If our colleges wanted to do it, they could.  If SUNY as a system wants to do it, it can.   And despite invitations sent to the entire administration and admissions staff, we spoke to an empty room. It was difficult to escape the conclusion that our leaders at that time had voted with their feet.

            Don’t get me wrong. I love my colleagues and I love my students. I have good friends across the campus. But I’ve been at Geneseo for a while now, and I think I see many things clearly. We do not do enough.  We choose not to do enough. We are not interested in doing enough.  It pains me to write these words.

            What would I have the college do? I have been asked that. I am a professor. I am a very good teacher. I have been successful as a scholar and I continue to try to produce. I write more than most historians in SUNY.  And I do a lot of service, both on and off the campus. This service work is time consuming and tiring, as it forces me to be on the road at least every other week. At one level, then, my response to questions like this—to those in admissions, student services, in recruitment and retention who pose it— is to tell them to figure it out for yourselves. You get paid more than I do. You are the experts.  Do the work. I am already too busy.  Hire someone with some expertise in recruiting Native American students. 

            But that isn’t how it works, is it.

            If you are a BIPOC professor, of course you know this. Even if you are a white guy like me who stumbled into this work long ago and was lucky enough to be welcomed into the communities about which I teach and write, you are asked to do nothing less than come up with solutions to the problems you clearly see, and to do so without any additional compensation.  It is demoralizing. So we are asked for solutions. We propose solutions. And those solutions are shot down. We can’t. Because. We can’t. Because. We just can’t.

We won’t.

            It is a choice.  It is really that simple. But the least we can do is try. We can redirect funds. It is the moral and ethical thing to do.  Hire Haudenosaunee faculty and staff. Create a safe and welcoming environment on campus with student services staff experienced in the needs and concerns of Indigenous students.  Grant free tuition, room, and board to Haudenosaunee students. That might be a start. We could do this easily for the cost of SUNY’s football programs. We send no one to meet with Native Nations. We have no one in student services to help support those students should they arrive. We could divert resources towards this goal if we wanted to. We could acknowledge our college’s historic location with something more than a few lines tossed out at the beginning of college functions. We are well-intentioned but ineffective.

           OUR ENROLLMENT is down significantly this year, which has made an already desperate financial situation even worse. The pandemic and widespread economic dislocation is responsible, but some of our administrators fear that those students are not coming back.  Meanwhile, we continue to promote the image, with some small justification, that we are the poor person’s Swarthmore, an elite liberal arts college at a public school price. Sadly, I do not see us casting our net in new waters to try to bring students to Geneseo who we have not brought before. I see no evidence that we are interested in recruiting kids from the inner-city and I see no effort to reach out systematically to the state’s indigenous population. Indeed, we had a recent alum from the Tuscarora Reservation who wanted nothing more than to recruit and mentor Haudenosaunee students for Geneseo, and he would have been good at it.  Nobody in Admissions at that time was interested. (Most of those people have since moved on to other colleges). Geneseo is well known as a demanding school that offers difficult courses. Yet our retention rate—the number of students who come to Geneseo and return—is low. Clearly many of us need to change the way that we teach.  But we also need to think about who our students are, and where we are going to look for new ones.  This is difficult work that will not yield results immediately. It will take resources that are in short supply.  But how we expend our resources is a choice and we really ought to choose differently, as a college and as a massive University system. As employees of the State of New York, we ought to recognize how complicated the State’s relations have been with Native Nations, and how complicit our employer has been in the historic dispossession and marginalization of the state’s Indigenous population.  With regard to our native neighbors, the state’s hands are dirty, and that dirt will not be washed away by a few lines thrown out at the beginning of campus functions.

Current Events, History and Historians

I Watched The White House Conference on American History So You Don’t Have To

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In his comments at the close of the White House Conference on American History, a gathering that did not take place at the White House and that included few historians, President Donald Trump offered a chilling vision that is one more sign of the country’s steady advance towards despotism.

Trump wanted to “preserve our glorious inheritance: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights,” though nothing has threatened them so much as his administration. The Constitution, he said, “was the fulfillment of a thousand years of Western Civilization,” and “no political document has done more to advance the human condition or propel the engine of progress.” So he said.

Only enemies of the American state would disagree with him. He denounced “a radical movement” that “is attempting to demolish this treasured and precious inheritance.” These enemies of the American people have demolished statutes of slaveholders, that they have engaged in protests and riots. “The left-wing cultural revolution” visible everywhere, he said, “is designed to overthrow the American Revolution.”

He denounced Howard Zinn, whose forty-year old People’s History of the United States terrifies the right. Zinn has lived rent-free in the minds of think-tank denizens like panelist Mary Grabar for many, many years. Zinn, Trump said, wrote a “propaganda tract” that tries “to make students ashamed of their own history.” The 1619 Project, meanwhile, “rewrites American history to teach our children that we were founded on the principles of oppression, not freedom.”

Those pushing these views are disloyal. Trump said that. Like America’s enemies, they “want to see American weakened, derided, and totally diminished.” Teaching “critical race theory” to our children, he continued, “is a form of child abuse in the truest sense of those words.” Thus “Critical Race Theory, the 1619 Project, and the crusade against American history is toxic propaganda, ideological poison that, if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together.” These ideas are so dangerous, in other words, that they must be suppressed. They are poisonous and they must be rooted out and eliminated. Indeed, the President boasted of having “recently banned training in this prejudiced ideology from the federal government.” We will reeducate those exposed to these subversive ideas.

The panelists, mostly white men speaking at a panel organized by the President of the United States at the National Archives, played variations on this theme. There was absolutely nothing new here. They could have plugged in the National History Standards in the place of the 1619 Project, and it would have been a 1990s flashback, or “multiculturalism” for 80’s Night. With no sense of irony these well-compensated denizens of Right Wing Think Tanks and ideologically-connected Colleges lamented their marginalization. And, one by one, they expressed their fear of ideas, taught by historians, that they know they cannot refute. It was a disgraceful affair, capped by the President signing an unconstitutional executive order establishing the “1776 Commission” to indoctrinate American children with “patriotic” values. Because he is afraid of them being indoctrinated.

I know many friends who have laughed at this President’s many monstrosities, but we are not laughing any more. This is dangerous. It is no joke.

When I hear how colonists wiped out close to 70% of the Indigenous population of the Americas and dispossessed them almost entirely, I do not believe that the country was founded on principles of liberty and equality. When I figure that more than 2/3 of the people who crossed the Atlantic to come to English America between 1630 and 1780 came in chains, liberty and freedom do not compute. When I remember that nearly 50% of enslaved children born in Virginia died before their fifth birthday, and that the United States abolished slavery only after a bloody Civil War and after our former imperial overlords in Great Britain, it does not seem to me that freedom and equality are cardinal American values, whatever we say about ourselves. When I realize that in the very same speech in which the President claimed the country was founded on such glorious principles he denounced those who want to take down monuments to white supremacy and congratulated himself on the punishments he has decreed through an unconstitutional executive order for those who damage them, all I see is hypocrisy and the emptiness of his arguments. I walk away from this still convinced that the widely held notion that this country was founded on principles of liberty and equality is the biggest lie in American history.

We can hardly expect a country founded by those who enslaved millions to have done otherwise than to create a republic based on white supremacy. And when I hear so-called historians, like some of those gathered at the President’s Conference on American History, claim that the Revolution is unfinished, that we are still engaged in the work of crafting that “more perfect union,” I am left unmoved. We have been at this for close to two-and-a-half centuries, I might point out. How much longer will it take for you to admit that our commitment to liberty and equality may be highly qualified at best?

The biggest lie in American History has been challenged in all sorts of ways. Historians, like those involved in the 1619 Project, have done so. And so have so many of the young people protesting out in the street.

The response of these “historians,” for few of them actually had any training in history, is not to engage with the evidence or to present interpretations of their own rooted in primary source research. Rather, they challenge the patriotism of those who write these histories, and who question “these truths.” You cannot possibly love the country if you believe these things, they say, and your thoughts are so dangerous that they must be suppressed.

At one level, there is nothing new about any of this. History has always been political. I think of the debates chronicled in Peter Novick’s That Noble Dream years ago. I remember reading of the treatment received by Charles Beard after he published his Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States. Much of what Trump’s chosen panelists said about Howard Zinn’s People’s History and the 1619 Project was said about the National History Standards twenty-five years ago. History as academic discipline versus history as civic education and indoctrination; history as a scholarly pursuit versus a set of comforting myths we tell ourselves about our past; history as a method for studying change over time versus history as a dogma, the challenging of which is dangerous and subversive: it has all been done before.

So the arguments presented at the White House Conference were all pretty familiar. I have been at this for a while, and I have followed the “History Wars” over many years with great attention. I have seen this before. The notion that historians are unpatriotic, that they will destroy their students’ love of country, and that they are teaching kids to be ashamed of their nation’s past, has been repeated many, many times. But what strikes me as new, this time, is the stridency with which the President and the speakers at this conference cast their opponents not merely as historians with whom they disagree about the past but as enemies of the state. They advance a coward’s ideological purity that casts historians as dangerous subversives. The President likened them to child abusers, aligned with leftists, anarchists, and socialists. Oh, they are so frightened. And they will strike those who frighten them. This long ago ceased to be funny, and is one more reminder of how much is at stake in the coming election.

Onondaga Nation

“I Have Just Killed My Wife”

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The newspaper coverage may as well have said that Mrs. Smith had it coming.

            Have you ever been stopped in your tracks by something that you read? Those of you who do historical research, I will wager, can answer this question easily in the affirmative. It happened to me again early last week. And like a deep scratch, I am feeling it days later.

            I had been listening to as set of audio recordings housed at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. An Onondaga woman named Lucenda George sat down with the anthropologist Fred Lukoff in 1950 and told him about life on the Nation Territory, just a bit south of Syracuse, New York. Mrs. George spoke her native language but in several dozen of the recordings, she translated what she said into English, line by line, as Lukoff advanced the tape in small segments.

            Mrs. George told stories about Onondaga clothing and food.  She told Lukoff about working in factories in Syracuse during the first World War.  She told him about a band of gypsies camped on the reservation, and about how she drove a taxi for a time in Syracuse. There was one about the young white woman who boarded with her who wanted to become a missionary.  She spoke about locusts, an occasional delicacy the Onondagas fried in a pan with butter and salt. Don’t criticize, Mrs. George suggested, if you’ve ever eaten and enjoyed a lobster.

            One of the stories was “About a Murder.” Mrs. George told the tale of an Onondaga man who had murdered his Onondaga wife.  “It must be about two years ago that happened,” she said. “This man killed his wife with a knife. He kept pushing the knife in her throat until she died.”  He was tried, and then he was acquitted.  Then, according to Mrs. George, he left the Nation Territory, abandoned his three children, “and nobody knows where he is now.”

            This story surprised me.  I had spent a great deal of time reading through every newspaper story I could find about the Onondagas in the Syracuse newspapers and in other newspapers that covered central New York.  I had not seen this. Perhaps I missed it.  I went back to the papers, and I looked.  It took me only a few minutes. On December 10, 1948, Edwin Smith murdered his Onondaga wife.

            One source, a seventy-year old digitized copy of a reel-to-reel tape of a story told by Lucenda George, clicks into place with the newspaper coverage of a brutal crime. A fuller picture comes into view.

            Edwin Smith had been struggling, that’s for sure.  According to coverage in the Syracuse Post-Standard, several hours before Smith murdered his wife, he entered the grocery store in Nedrow, just off the Nation Territory, owned and operated by Justice of the Peace Darwin N. Camp.  Smith had left the Onondaga County Penitentiary on the first of December after having served a sixty-day term for assault.  Now, he told Camp, “I am in trouble again.”

           That evening Smith took his wife to a dance.  According to Mrs. George, people were drinking. Smith and his wife were drinking, too.  “She got up on the table,” Mrs. George said, and “took all her clothes off, and there she stood without a stitch of clothing on her.” She started dancing. Mr. Smith was so embarrassed that he left, but there was a man outside who told him to go back inside, get his wife, and take her home. So he did. He told her to get dressed, and he took her home. He continued to drink when they got there.  Then he stabbed her twenty-one times, the lethal blow severing her jugular vein.  He called the police, told them he had killed his wife. His three children, ages 8, 6, and 4, were sleeping in the other room.  He killed their mother “because he couldn’t stand it any longer,” Mrs. George said. “Everything just went black.”

            The newspapers reported on Mrs. Smith’s infidelity.  Mrs. George said that “when they first married she was a very good girl,” but after a while “she got mixed up with this bad company.”  Smith’s defense attorney presented a case of temporary insanity. A psychologist testified that Smith suffered from a “disassociated personality” when he stabbed his wife to death, and that as a result, he “was not able to understand the nature of his act.”  Testifying to Smith’s “peaceful and quiet nature” was the Thadodaho of the Six Nations George Thomas, along with Onondaga Nation treasurer Davis Greene, Chief Jesse Lyons, Elizabeth Powless, and the Methodist minister Livingston Crouse. They all accepted the argument that Mrs. Smith’s infidelity had produced in Mr. Smith so much pain and anguish that he could not justly be held responsible for his actions.  It took the jury of nine men and three women less than four hours to reach its verdict at the beginning of March in 1949.  Not guilty.  “At the trial,” Mrs. George said, “the sentiment was all for him because of his wife’s terrible deed. I am speaking of the white people now. They were for him.” The jury accepted that a wife’s infidelity could drive a husband so crazy that he could get away with murder.

            Mrs. George said that Mr. Smith left the Nation after his acquittal. “This man who has gone away nobody knows where he is, whether he is alive or dead, [and] he has never written to ask if everybody is all right here.” It turns out that he went to Syracuse.  His three children were raised in foster care. They went through a lot.  A friend on the Nation Territory who knows its history well told me that the youngest child “grew up damaged” and has passed away.

You likely have noticed what is missing from this account.  What about Mrs. Smith? Catherine? With all the support shown to Edwin, it is easy to lose track of her. Smith’s defense attorney argued that Mrs. Smith’s infidelity drove him temporarily insane. The chiefs and a Christian minister, in telling the jury that Edwin was a good guy, endorsed this view, even if the record clearly demonstrates his use of violence as a solution to his problems. The jury accepted as perfectly reasonable the argument that a wife’s infidelity can drive a man so insane that he might stab her twenty-one times. Everyone seemed to think that Mrs. Smith had it coming. Was she beaten, neglected, ignored, and tortured in her marriage? Her motives are completely absent, and that is heartbreaking.

            And that is what I carry with me as I think about a murder that took place on an Indian reservation seventy-two years ago. The children—I find it hard to believe that all three of them slept through the slaughter—in one vicious night lost both of their parents.  I can only imagine their pain, confusion, and anger. And that of Mrs. Smith–Catherine–as she attempted to fight off her killer.  People on the Onondaga Nation said “they could hear her scream all the way down the road.”

Discovery and Exploration

I’m So Bored with the Lost Colonists

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Do we have to do this?

Sigh. Yes, we have to do this.

The New York Times the day before yesterday published an article on Scott Dawson’s recent book, The Lost Colony and Hatteras Island. The book has generated a lot of attention because it purports to prove the location of the so-called “Lost Colonists” who attempted to settle Roanoke Island in 1587.

For those of you unfamiliar with the basic contours of the story, in 1584 Sir Walter Ralegh sent a reconnaissance voyage to scout the location for a new colony that he hoped would serve well the three principal ends of Elizabethan empire: profit, through discovery of valuable items or trade with indigenous peoples; religion, in the form of the expansion of Elizabethan Protestantism abroad; and security in the form of providing a base for privateering raids against the Catholic Spanish, the wicked tools, in English eyes, of the scarlet whore of Babylon. English colonists planted an outpost on Roanoke Island with the permission of the weroance Wingina in 1585, but it lasted only a year. English demands for food, outbreaks of disease, and violence made them unwelcome visitors. With a hurricane bearing down upon them, and after having murdered Wingina, the colonists returned home aboard the massive fleet Sir Francis Drake had used to terrorize Spanish holdings in the Caribbean. The English tried again in 1587, placing the colony under the charge of the artist John White. Hostilities with the Indians remaining from the previous year’s colony led to the immediate killing of one of White’s advisers. White led a retaliatory raid that struck the Croatoans rather than the Indians they intended to hit. This debacle was followed by the coward White’s return home to fetch more provisions. When he finally returned three years later, in 1590, the colony had disappeared. The only clue, we are so often told, was the word “Croatoan” carved into a post near the settlement on Roanoke. Croatoan was an Algonquian village that stood on today’s Hatteras Island.

Dawson, working with the archaeologist Mark Horton, has argued that the Lost Colonists did not disappear (an argument that almost nobody actually makes–all agree they went somewhere). Just as that carved post might lead one to believe, they left Roanoke and settled under the protection of the Croatoan Indians. Manteo, a Croatoan who had worked with the English since 1584 and been baptized into Christianity in 1587, would have eased in the resettlement. A large quantity of archaeological evidence has been found at the sight, Dawson says, and some of it is quite promising. There are also bits and pieces of historical evidence–a traveler’s account, for instance, from the early eighteenth century indicating that he saw blue-eyed Indians living in coastal Carolina.

Dawson told the Times that he was “trying to get the Croatoans’ history back from the depths of mystery.” The Croatoan Indians, he continued, “played a huge role in American history.” The Croatoans took the colonists in and sheltered them, while “in school you’re taught that no one knows what Croatoan means.”

I have yet to read Dawson’s book. I have seen enough to be deeply disappointed by all the attention it has received. There are, from what I have observed, a number of significant problems with the argument Dawson presents.

First, there is absolutely nothing new about the argument that the colonists relocated to Croatoan Island. Every book written on the subject, including mine, considers the possibility. Most of us approach the Croatoan prospect with interest, but leave unpersuaded. It is a small island. The first things Croatoans did when they encountered the English in 1587 was ask them not to take any of their food, as they had little to spare. Perhaps a small party went there to look for White’s return, a possibility suggested by numerous historians because of the route English ships likely would have taken on their return to Roanoke. But the reasons not to go there were powerful (you can read about those reasons in my book The Head in Edward Nugent’s Hand). Indeed, recent archaeological work by Nick Lucketti and his associates from the First Colony Foundation offers suggestive evidence that the colonists headed inland toward the head of Albemarle Sound. There is documentary evidence supporting this hypothesis as well. The only reason to think that Dawson’s interpretation about Hatteras might be innovative and interesting is because of the archaeological evidence upon which it seems to rest.

And this brings us to the second problem. Horton’s discoveries are exciting and they are worth looking at more closely. Horton has been talking about his discoveries for several years, however, and students of the Roanoke ventures remain skeptical. That is because he has not published any of his findings and subjected his research to scholarly peer review. There is a history of grandiose claims made on the basis of archaeological discoveries on Hatteras. You might remember the gold signet ring uncovered by archaeologist David Sutton Phelps some years ago. Something interesting is found, and it leads to large leaps of faith to establish a connection to the Lost Colony.

Dawson certainly seems guilty of this. For instance, in a story written about Dawson’s book by James Hampton of The Virginian Pilot, “a lead tablet and pencil found at the dig could have belonged to White himself, Dawson said.” Hampton continues

White also was part of the 1585 group, working as an artist who drew natives and wildlife . . . He likely used the newly discovered tablet or a similar one.

That seems like quite a stretch. But here’s the kicker.

“The uncovered tablet has an impression of an Englishman shooting a native in the back . . . Wingina, chief of the Secotans, was shot twice in the back by an Englishman in 1586 at a village near what is now Mann’s Harbor, Dawson said. The Croatoans assisted the English in the ambush, Dawson said.”

There are problems with this claim. A huge leap is made from an artifact to the colonists. John White did indeed accompany the 1585 expedition and his famous paintings are justly revered by scholars for their depiction of Algonquian cultures and the flora and fauna of the Outer Banks. But White did not remain with the 1585 colonists. He returned home on August 25th, 1585, so he certainly never witnessed the 1586 attack (in which one Croatoan assisted). The English did visit Croatoan for a short period on July 30-31, 1587, to look for food and friends for colonists who had neither, but it is not precisely clear that White was with them. “The Governour,” as he referred to himself, is not mentioned. After leading an attack on the 22nd of August to avenge the killing of a colonist that fell by mistake upon the friendly but frightened Croatoans, White at the colonists’ command returned to England. Dawson would thus have us believe that a tablet used by White to draw an event he did not see ended up at the Algonquian village we have no evidence he ever visited.

Furthermore, the 1586 English attack on the village of Dasemunkepeuc was a traumatic and dramatic event. The English killed and then beheaded the weroance Wingina (who by that time had taken the name “Pemisapan”). There were some Croatoans in the village when the English fell upon it. They witnessed the treacherous attack. Is it unreasonable to think that a Croatoan may have etched a picture of the attack on a tablet acquired through trade? Native peoples in the coastal Carolina region wanted to obtain English goods. Indigenous peoples could draw. They could make use of European goods. They could raise English livestock. Dawson looks for ways to connect the English goods he and Horton found on Hatteras to the Lost Colonists so badly that they seem to overlook that native peoples themselves could make use of English manufactured goods. There is almost no likelihood that the lead tablet found at Hatteras and linked by Dawson to the Lost Colony was used by John White or the Lost Colonists.

That Horton has not shared his archaeological evidence nor subjected any of his research to peer review is another problem. Horton can not expect historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists to find his old and familiar arguments persuasive if he does not publish his findings.

In my own book on Roanoke, which Dawson does not include in his sparse bibliography, I argued as he did that the Lost Colonists’ did not disappear. Indeed, I made the point that the colonists were lost only to those English explorers who tried and failed to find them. Algonquian peoples knew what happened to them and most likely determined their fate. There has been a long national obsession over the Lost Colonist. Yet the shores of the Atlantic World were littered with the remains of castaways, castoffs, and casualties. Getting lost and left behind was part of the business. Roanoke is much more interesting as an Algonquian story, of native peoples adjusting to the arrival of newcomers, making use of them in their own political, economic, and diplomatic maneuvers, before ultimately deciding that the colonist caused more harm than good. As the great historian Malinda Maynor Lowery said in the New York Times piece, the Lost Colony legend is “like a monument that has to come down,” but that “it’s harder to dismantle an origin story than a statue.” Dawson and Horton, however much they claim to look at the Croatoan Indians, focus all their efforts on that tired and failed monument to English empire on the Outer Banks.

New Publications

What You Need to Read, September 2020

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Interlibrary loan services have just restarted at my college’s library after this long Covid season. Classes are resuming, some in person, some in a hybrid format, and some entirely online. Here is your quarterly bibliography of what seemed notable to me in the field of Native American history. And, oh, by the way, I have signed a contract for the third edition of Native America which will be co-written with my friend and former student Peter Olsen-Harbich of William and Mary. It should be out by the end of 2022. Enjoy the reading!

Adams, David Wallace. Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928, revised ed., (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2020).

Allard, Amelie. “Relationships and the Creation of Colonial Landscapes in the Eighteenth-Century Fur Trade,” American Indian Quarterly, 44 (Spring 2020), 149-170.

Arnold, Morris S. “The Quapaws and the American Revolution,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly, 79 (Spring 2020), 1-39.

Bigart, Robert J. Providing for the People: Economic Change among the Salish and Kootenai Indians, 1875-1910, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2020).

Black, Liza.  Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941-1960, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020).

Briggs, Laura.  Taking Children: A History of American Terror, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020).

Carmody, Stephen B. and Casey R. Barrier, eds., Shaman, Priest, Practice, Belief: Materials of Ritual and Religion in Eastern North America, (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2020).

Carpenter, Kyle B. “A Failed Venture in the Nueces Strip: Misconceptions and Mismanagement of the Beales Rio Grande Colony, 1832-1836,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly, 123 (April 2020), 420-442.

Croce, Francesca. “Indigenous Women Entrepreneurship: Analysis of a Promising Research Theme at the Intersection of Indigenous Entrepreneurship and Women Entrepreneurship.” Ethnic and Racial Studies, 43 (May 2020), 1013-1031.

Denson, Andrew. “Cherokee Ambassador: Gertrude McDaris Ruskin and the Personal Politics of Southern Commemoration,” Georgia Historical Quarterly, 104 (Issue 2, 2020), 127-154.

Dowd, Gregory Evans. “Custom, Text, and Property: Indians, Squatters and Political Authority in Jacksonian Michigan,” Early American Studies, 18 (Spring 2020), 195-228.

Driving Hawk, Edward J. and Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve, Too Strong to be Broken: The Life of Edward J. Driving Hawk, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020).

Eick, Grethen Cassel, They Met at Wounded Knee: The Eastmans’ Story, (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2020).

Ellis, Elizabeth. “The Natchez War Revisited: Violence, Multinational Settlements, and Indigenous Diplomacy in the Lower Mississippi Valley,” William and Mary Quarterly, 77 (July 2020), 441-472.

Erben, Patrick M. “Releasing the Energy of Eighteenth-Century Indigenous Hymnody,” William and Mary Quarterly, 77 (July 2020), 387-392.

Ethridge, Robbie Franklyn and Eric E. Browne, eds., The Historical Turn in Southeastern Archaeology, (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2020).

Fisher, Andrew H. “Defenders and Dissidents: Cooks Landing and the Fight to Define Tribal Sovereignty in the Red Power Era,” Comparative American Studies, 17 (No. 2, 2020), 117-141.

Gage, Justin. We Do Not Want the Gates Closed Between Us: Native Networks and the Spread of the Ghost Dance, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2020).

Greene, Jerome A. January Moon: The Northern Cheyenne Breakout from Fort Robinson, 1878-1879, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2020).

Haake, Claudia B. Modernity through Letter Writing: Cherokee and Seneca Political Representations in Response to Removal, 1830-1857, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020).

Hall, Philip S. and Mary S. Lewis. From Wounded Knee to the Gallows: The Life and Trials of Lakota Chief Two Sticks, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2020).

Hernandez, Christopher. “Battle Lines of the North American Southwest: An Inquiry into Prehispanic and Post-Contact Pueblo Tactics of War,” Kiva, 86 (March 2020), 47-69.

Hunziker, Alyssa A. “Playing Indian, Playing Filipino: Native American and Filipino Interactions at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School,” American Quarterly, 72 (June 2020), 423-448.

Jazwa, Christopher S, et. al., “Fishing, Subsistence Change, and Foraging Strategies on Western Santa Rosa Island, California,” American Antiquity, 85 (July 2020) 591-608.

Jenkins, Jessica A. and Martin D. Gallivan. “Shell on Earth: Oyster Harvesting, Consumption, and Deposition Practices in the Powhatan Chesapeake,” Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology, 15 (July-Sept 2020), 384-406.

Kraft, Louis. Sand Creek and the Tragic End of a Lifeway, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2020).

Lee, Lloyd.  Diné Identity in the 21st Century World, (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2020).

MacKenzie-Jones, Paul. “Sending a Sailor to War: The Ponca Singers, California Hobbyists, Vietnam, and the Rejection of the Counterculture Myth of the New Age Indian,” Great Plains Quarterly 40 (Spring 2020), 117-128.

March, Ray A. Mass Murder in California’s Empty Quarter: A Tale of Tribal Treachery at the Cederville Rancheria, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020).

McNutt, Charles H and Ryan M. Parish, Cahokia in Context: Hegemony and Diaspora, (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2020).

Miller, Robert J., et al. eds. Creating Private Sector Economies in Native America: Sustainable Development through Entrepreneurship, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

Przystupa, Paulina F. “The Archaeology of Native American Boarding Schools in the American Southwest,” Kiva 86 (June 2020), 214-222.

Schwartz, James Z. “Lewis Henry Morgan’s Early Theory of Progress: His Evolving View of the Passions and Social Development,” Early American Studies, 18 (Spring 2020), 229-258.

Spady, James O’Neil. Education and the Racial Dynamics of Settler Colonialism in Early America: Georgia and South Carolina, ca. 1700-1820, (London: Routledge, 2020).

Stone, Ashkan Soltani and Natale A. Zappia, Rez Metal: Inside the Navajo Nation Heavy Metal Scene, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020).

Townsend, Russell, John D. Griffin and Kathryn Sampeck, “Archaeology, Historical Ruptures, and Ani-Kitu Hwagi Memory and Knowledge,” American Indian Quarterly, 44 (Spring 2020), 243-268.

Tuell, Vette Towersap. “Public Lands and American Indians: Traditional use and Off-Reservation Treaty Rights,” Utah Historical Quarterly, 88 (Spring 2020), 115-120.

West, Cane. “’They Have Exercised Every Art’: Ecological Rhetoric, A War of Maps, and Cherokee Sovereignty in the Arkansas Valley, 1812-1828,” Journal of the Early Republic, 40 (Summer 2020), 297-327.

Willard, William, Alan G. Marshall and J. Diane Pearson, Rising from the Ashes: Survival, Sovereignty, and Native America, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020).