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Teaching Native American History

Indigenous Law and Public Policy, Spring 2024

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The new semester begins next week. I spent a chunk of time this winter break updating the syllabus, making changes to the reading list, and what I hope will be successful adaptations to the new challenges teaching in the Post-Covid era presents. I am posting this in hopes that someone out there will find it of value or interest.

History 262    Indigenous Law and Public Policy               Spring 2024

Professor: Michael Oberg

Meetings:   MW, 8:30-10:10, Welles 225

Office Hours:  MW, 12:30-1:30 Doty 208.

Contact:           oberg@geneseo.edu

                          245-5730

Website: MichaelLeroyOberg.com

Required Readings:

Taiaiake Alfred, It’s All About the Land: Collected Talks and Interviews on Indigenous Resurgence, (2023).

Stuart Banner, How the Indians Lost Their Land: Law and Power on the Frontier, (2005)

Daniel Cobb, Say We Are Nations: Documents of Politics and Protest in Indigenous America since 1887, (2015).

Sarah Deer, The Beginning and End of Rape: Confronting Sexual Violence in Native America, (2015)

Luke Lassiter, Clyde Ellis, and Ralph Kotay, The Jesus Road: Kiowas, Christianity, and Indian Hymns, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002)

Readings online.

News Articles in online sources like indianz.com.

Court cases and documents as per syllabus.

Recommended Podcasts:

            This Land, Seasons 1 and 2.

            Missing and Murdered: Finding Cleo.

            Stolen: Surviving St. Michael’s

            Stolen: The Search for Jermaine

            5-4: Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta

            5-4: Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl

Recommended Movies and Television Shows

            “Reservation Dogs,” 3 Seasons, HULU

            “Little Bird,” 6 episodes, Amazon Prime

            “Wind River,” Movie

            “Killers of the Flower Moon.” (Movie)

            “Frybread Face and Me” (Movie)

Course Description:   This course will provide you with an overview of the concept of American Indian tribal sovereignty, nationhood, and the many ways in which discussions of sovereignty and right influence the status of American Indian nations.  We will look at the historical development and evolution of the concept of sovereignty, the understandings of sovereignty held by native peoples, and how non-Indians have confronted assertions of sovereignty from native peoples.  We will also examine current conditions in Native America, and look at the historical development of the challenges facing native peoples and native nations in the 21st century.

A Note on Grading:  Your work this semester will consist of Participation, Journals, Quizzes, and a Final Paper.

1). Participation is much more than attendance. I view my courses fundamentally as extended conversations and these conversations can only succeed when each person pulls his or her share of the load.  You should plan to show up for class with the reading not just “done” but understood; you should plan not just to “talk” but to engage critically and constructively with your classmates.  Our conversations will depend on your thoughtful inquiry and respectful exchange.  We are all here to learn, and I encourage you to join in the discussion with this in mind.  Obviously, you must be present to participate. Please have all assigned readings available when we meet. The reading load in this course is quite heavy. It will challenge you to keep up. If you have trouble with the reading, please let me know.  You obviously will be able to participate in classes with the most success when you complete the reading.

2). Journals: On seven occasions during the semester I will read your journals.  I want you to think about what you are reading, and I want you to write about that experience. You will submit your journals on Brightspace. You should plan on writing a minimum of 300 words a week. DO NOT SUMMARIZE OUR CLASS DISCUSSIONS.  DO NOT SUMMARIZE THE READINGS. I hope you will take this assignment as an opportunity to reflect upon what you are reading in class and in terms of current events, to discuss the things you wish that we had a chance to discuss in class, or to say what you wanted to say during one of our class meetings.  Show me that you are thinking about the material we cover in our readings and in the classroom.  Show me that you are keeping up with current events in Indian Country. Use the journals as an opportunity to educate yourself on issues in Native America that matter to you. Write each entry in the spirit of an essay, with a thesis and evidence to support your reasoning. For inspiration, you might read the news on INDIANZ.COM,  National Native News, Native News Online, Indian Country Today, and CBC Indigenous for Canada, and the National Indigenous Times for Australia. In addition, I would like you to follow news on one Native Nation.  You can set up a news alert on Google News, and stories will appear in your inbox whenever they occur. You can find a list of federally recognized Indian Nations here.  Some Indigenous nations receive more coverage than others.

3). Quizzes: To assess the extent to which you all are keeping up with the readings, I will administer a brief quiz most class periods consisting of five questions.

4). Final Paper: Your paper should be approximately 15 pages in length.  You will take the role of an adviser to a new President.  Your assignment is to advise this President on Indian policy.  In your paper you will do the following:

1). Identify what you see as a major problem or problems in Native America today that you believe the President should tackle during her or his administration.

2). Explain briefly the historical origins of this problem and how and why previous solutions have either failed to address it or ignored it entirely.

3. Offer a thoughtful, plausible, and realistic path towards solving this problem, and       justify it legally and constitutionally.

4. Have at least 30 sources in a thorough bibliography that includes each of the following: news articles, government documents, reports from agencies working with indigenous peoples, and works by scholars who study these issues published in academic journals and books.

5. Format the paper according to the guidelines spelled out in the Turabian Manual. Write the paper with careful attention to grammar, style and substance.     

With any of these assignments, I encourage you to visit with me during office hours if you have any questions.  You should be clear on what I expect from you before you complete an assignment.  The door is open.  If you cannot make it to my office hours, please feel free to contact me by email and we will find another time. Many questions can be answered, and problems addressed more effectively in person during office hours than by email.

I will write extensive comments on your written work.  I will ask you challenging questions, offer what I hope you will view as constructive criticism, and encourage you to push yourself as a writer and a thinker. But I will not give you grades, in the traditional sense, on this work. I want you to benefit from this course. On the date of our first class meeting, we will discuss the standards for the class.  You and I will work together to arrive at a set of expectations for the sort of work that will earn a specific grade.   In your final journal, and in individual meetings scheduled during Finals Week, we will discuss how well you think you did in meeting the agreed upon standards, and what your grade for the course ought to be. A proposed grading framework can be found, below.

A Note on Phones: I ask that all cellphones be stored during the entirety of our class meeting.  If you expect an important call that just cannot wait, please inform me before class. Otherwise, I expect you to refrain from using your cellphone and I expect you to keep it out of sight. Please be present in mind and body. Much of the reading for this course will be online or available on Brightspace. You will need to bring your laptop to class, but I expect you to use it for class-related work only.  Students who violate these policies will be asked to leave the class.

Discussion and Reading Schedule

22 January       Introduction to the Course: The United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

Reading: Banner, How, Introduction, Chapter 1; The United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP).    

24 January       Native Nations in the United States

                        How to Read a Supreme Court Case

                        Reading: Articles of Confederation, Article IX; United States Constitution; Northwest Ordinance (1787); Federal Trade and Intercourse Act (1790); Treaty of Canandaigua (1794); Rights of Aboriginal Peoples in Canada;  Banner, How, Chapters 1-3

29 January       The Marshall Court and the Definition of Native Nations

Reading: Johnson v. McIntosh (1823); Banner, How, Chapters 4 and 5. If you are interested in a comparative perspective, I encourage you to look at Stuart Banner’s article, “Why Terra Nullius? Anthropology and Property Law in Early Australia,” Law and History Review, 23 (Spring 2005), 95-131, available on Brightspace.

31 January       The Expulsion Era

Reading: Documents on Jacksonian Indian policy (Brightspace); Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831); Samuel A. Worcester v. State of Georgia, (1832); Banner, How, Chapter 6.

Journal 1 Due.

 5 February      The Reservation System

Reading: Ex Parte Crow Dog; Major Crimes Act (1885) and US v. Kagama  (1886); Banner, How, Chapter 7.

7 February       The Policy of Allotment

Reading: Cobb, Nations, pp. 19-49; Banner, How, Chapter 8;Talton v. Mayes (1896); Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock (1903); United States v. Celestine (1909)

12 February     The Indian New Deal

Reading: Reading: Cobb, Nations, pp. 54-93; Banner,  How, (finish book) and the Indian Reorganization Act,  1934.

14 February     The Termination Era

Reading: Cobb, Nations, pp. 97-106, 115-123; HCR 108; Tee-Hit-Ton Indians v. United States (1955).

Journal 2 Due

19 February     Williams v. Lee and the Modern Era of American Indian Tribal Sovereignty

 Reading: Williams v. Lee (1959); Native American Church v. Navajo Tribal   Council (1959).

21 February     The Era of Self-Determination

Reading: McClanahan v. Arizona Tax Commission, (1973); Morton v. Mancari (1974); Alfred, “Constitutional Recognition and Colonial Doublespeak;” “The Psychic Landscape of Contemporary Colonialism.”

 26 February    Red Power

Reading: Cobb, Nations, 124-188; Alfred, “On Being and Becoming Indigenous.”

 28 February    The Supreme Court’s 1978 Term, Congress and Tribal Sovereignty

Reading: US. v. Wheeler (1978); Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez (1978);     Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe (1978); Legislative Packet (Brightspace)

                        Journal 3 Due.

4 March           The Power of Tribal Governments

Reading: Merrion v. Jicarilla Apache Tribe (1982); Duro v. Reina, (1990Atkinson Trading Company v. Shirley (2001); US v. Lara (2004)

6 March           The War on Native American Children and Families

Reading:  Margaret Jacobs, “Remembering the ‘Forgotten Child’: The American Indian Child Welfare Crisis of the 1960s and 1970s,” American Indian Quarterly 37 (Winter/Spring 2013), 136-159 (Brightspace); Brackeen v. Haaland (2023).

This would be a good time to listen to Season 2 of the “This Land” podcast hosted by Rebecca Nagel

Journal 4 Due

18 March         Jurisdiction and Sovereignty in the 21st Century

Reading: McGirt v. Oklahoma (2020); Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta, (2022). Listen to 5-4 Podcast episode on the Castro-Huerta decision.

20 March         #MMIW #MMIWG

Reading:  Watch this advertisement from the Native Women’s Wilderness, and this one from the United States Office of Justice Programs/Office for Victims of Crimes; Absorb as much of the following as you can: Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women & Girls, (Seattle: Urban Indian Health Institute, 2017); a PBS NewsHour report featuring Abigail HenHawk, who oversaw the Urban Indian Health Institute report; National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.  (Explore the website, read the summary of the 2019 Final Report); the report from the Trump Administration’s “Operation Lady Justice”; and President Biden’s Executive Order 14053 from November of 2021.

Search on Twitter using the hashtags #MMIW and #MMIWG.  The podcast on the disappearance of Jermain Charlo would fit well here. Give it a listen, if you are able to find the time.

25 March         Sexual Violence in Indian Country

Reading: Deer, Rape.  We will discuss the book in its entirety.  You will want to begin reading well in advance.

27 March         Issues in American Indian Religion 

Reading: Employment Division, Department of Human Resources of Oregon v. Smith (1990); Lyng v. Northwest Cemetery Protective Association (1988).  Please watch on your own “The Silence,” a PBS documentary on one small Catholic Church in Alaska.

1 April             Issues in American Indian Religion: Christianity in Indian Country

                        Reading: Lassiter, Ellis and Kotay, The Jesus Road, (entire book).

                        Journal 5 Due

3 April             Issues in American Indian Education: Boarding Schools and their Legacy

Reading:  Gord Downie, “The Secret Path.”  I would also like you to go to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School online project.  You can find the website here.  Your assignment is, first, to read Louise NoHeart’s student file (Brightspace) and then to read a minimum of at least 5 additional student files from the Indigenous Nation you have been following this semester (or a related Nation)(Ask for help if you are not clear on how to do this!) In general, for each student there is an information card and a student file. Read both of those and search for the student’s name in the newspapers and other documents.  What do you learn about those students’ experiences at Carlisle? Be prepared to discuss what you found.

Please spend some time as well with the ArcGIS project from the University of Windsor looking at Canadian Residential Schools and this nine-minute report by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!

8 April             No Class—View the Eclipse.

Reading: “Come to Geneseo, Give Us Money, Look at the Sky.”

10 April           Mascots and Other Forms of Appropriation

Audra Simpson, “Indigenous Identity Theft Must Stop,” Boston Globe, November 17, 2022; Darryl Leroux, “State Recognition and the Dangers of Race Shifting,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 46 (no. 2, 2023) (Brightspace).

15 April           Economic Development and Poverty in Indian Country

Reading: California v. Cabazon Band of Mission Indians (1987); National Indian Gaming Commission (NIGC) website.

                        Journal 6 Due

17 April           The Land and its Loss: The Consequences of Dispossession and Environmental Degradation

Reading: City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation (2005); Stephanie H. Barclay and Michalyn Steele, “Rethinking Protections for Indigenous Sacred Sites,” Harvard Law Review, (forthcoming, on Brightspace).

22 April           Resistance: IDLA to Red Lives Matter, Idle No More

Reading: Watch Film: “You Are On Indian Land;” Cobb, Nations, 203-250; Lakota Law Project, Native Lives Matter; Jonah Raskin, “Red Lives Matter,” Tablet Magazine, October 10, 2021. You can also read my report about the death or Reynold High Pine in 1972; Jason Pero in Wisconsin and Colten Boushie in 2018; Please also look at the Idle No More website and read about this Canadian movement.

24 April           GREAT DAY—NO CLASSES

29 April           Health and Well-Being in Native America

Reading: Indian Health Service, “Disparities,” Updated October 2019; Linda Poon, “How ‘Indian Relocation’ Created a Public Health Crisis,” Citylab, 2 December 2019; Mohan B. Kumar and Michael Tjepkema, “Suicide Among First Nations people, Métis and Inuit, 2011-2016),” Statistics Canada, 28 June 2019; Rural Tribal Health Overview, May 2022; Prabir Mandal and Jarett E. Raade, “Major Health Issues of American Indians,” 28 June 2018

1 May              What Is To Be Done?

Reading: Alfred, “Reconciliation as Recolonization;” “From Red Power to Resurgence;” “You Can’t Decolonize Colonization”

Final Paper Due

6 May            What is to be Done? (Continued)

 Reading: Harold Napoleon, Yuuyarq: The Way of the Human Being, (Fairbanks, AK:  Alaska Native Knowledge Network, 1996); Alfred, “Rooted Responsibility.”

                      Journal 7 Due

8 May              Final Class Meeting

16 May            Final Exam Period, 8:00-11:20: Individual Discussions to consider your final grade.

Learning Outcomes.  This course fulfills the requirements for Diversity, Pluralism, and Power​: Students understand (i) the diversity of identities that characterizes the United States; (ii) the ways in which systems of power lead to different outcomes for members of diverse groups; (iii) the reasoning and impact of one’s personal beliefs and actions; and (iv) how to participate effectively in pluralistic contexts (e.g., by communicating and collaborating across difference). It also fulfills the requirements for World Cultures and Values​: Thus Students will strive to (i) understand systems of value and meaning as embodied in one or more cultures from different regions of the world; and (ii) assess interconnections among/across local and global systems and cultures. Courses in this category engage extensively with the past and/or present in cultures outside Europe and the United States (though they may also engage with content from cultures located within those regions, e.g., Native/Indigenous cultures).

Teaching Native American History

Dear Members of the Hiring Committee…

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Please, have some class.  Please keep in mind that there are scores of people who probably could do your job just as well as you do in the eyes of your students, but who will never get the chance because of the cruelties of the academic job market.  I have some former students and friends applying now, and the callousness with which they are treated is truly appalling.

When I began applying for jobs a long time ago, the system was very different from today. Credentials stuck in files at the AHA, or mailing in letters and a CV with letters of recommendation to follow. All carried out through the U.S. Mail. Administrators and their so-called efficiencies have changed the way we conduct searches.

My campus, like many, uses an online employment system. Applicants upload the documents we ask for (a letter, a CV, and a statement of teaching philosophy). The system generates automatic emails acknowledging receipt of the applicant’s materials. If we let it, the system will also generate automatic emails informing applicants that they did not get the job. This is the default setting, and too many of you choose to operate that way.  Think for a second how you would like to be treated.

It seemed so harsh and disrespectful to me, and so inhumane, that I chose to buck the system the last time I had an opportunity to conduct a search. These spineless robo-mails, or no message at all, have become the norm, after all. Applicants can be forgiven for feeling chewed up and spitted out, scorned and abused. It takes a lot of work to apply for an academic job. The opportunities are few and the stakes are high. An automatic email seems an unnecessarily callous ending in a world filled with callousness.

We must do better.

So as our last search reached its conclusion, I sent sixty-one emails personally, one to each of the applicants. It took a bit of time, but not much. I wanted the applicants to know that I appreciated the time and effort they put into their applications. I acknowledged the rottenness of the job market, and how I wished we could have interviewed more people. I told them how impressed my colleagues and I were with their credentials, and how difficult a time we had narrowing the applicants to a number of candidates we could meaningfully interview.

I expected nothing in response, but thirty-one of the applicants replied to my email. This surprised me. Though one was gently and reasonably critical of the time the search took, all were appreciative and thanked me for treating them with courtesy and respect. All of them either said, or strongly implied, that such minimal courtesy is all but unheard of in today’s academia.

I spend a fair amount of time on social media, so I read a lot from recent Ph.D recipients describing their searches for a tenure-track job. I hear from former students and friends. These are tales of desperation, despair and depression, and frustration and anger, with not a few instances of shabby treatment by hiring institutions along the way. We who are lucky enough to be tenured or on the tenure track must, and can, do better. Writing a personal message is only the start.

Decency matters.

Decency matters so much that it is worth the extra effort to treat job applicants as you would like to be treated. Yes, the market was brutal when I went out thirty years ago, but it is much worse now. Believe recent graduates when they tell you that.

We must recognize that we are so fortunate to have the jobs we have. Colleges and universities, I know, as workplaces can vary widely in quality. I spent the first four years of my career at a dysfunctional hellhole in Billings, Montana. But even in the midst of the shit-show that was that college, I enjoyed my students, the teaching, and the advising. I enjoyed the moments I squirreled away to work on my first book. Once I closed the classroom door or my office door, I was happy.

And even if you feel justified in whining about your place of employment, remember this: there are literally hundreds of people who would like to do what you are doing, but will never get that chance. This brutal reality imposes upon all of us the obligation to be the best historians and teachers we can be. You must remember, no matter how good you think you are at this work, no matter how paradigm-shattering you consider your research, it is almost certain that there is someone better than you, shut out by the brutality of the academic job market. One of my colleagues at the dysfunctional hellhole, who doubled as an associate pastor at a local Missouri Synod Lutheran Church, told me during my on-campus interview that being a college professor was the best part-time job in the world. I suspect that we all know people who take this approach to academia, who do not produce or take their teaching seriously, but I can think of no attitude more loathsome and disrespectful to the many hundreds of talented historians who will never get a chance.

We cannot undo all the macroeconomic changes in higher education. I recognize the magnitude of the fiscal challenges facing colleges and universities. But let’s push back against the increasing bureaucratization of the job search and the increasing role played by computers in the hiring process. Perhaps you have an Ivy-League pedigree, and you feel your research is so important that you cannot be bothered to pay attention to the lowly peons who want to join your department. Perhaps you went to a second-tier school and never looked back. Whoever you are, wherever and whatever you studied, there is no excuse for not being kind. Resist every institutional protocol, and every barrier, that keeps you from treating job applicants the way you would like to be treated. If you are that barrier, and find that you cannot find the time to treat applicants with decency, perhaps you ought to step aside. Be kind and be decent. Most of all, show compassion. It matters.

Native American Bibliography, New Publications

What You Need to Read, December 2023

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The fall semester has come to a close. There is a brief respite between the madness of the holidays and the beginning of the spring semester to take stock, see what is out there, and decide what to place on the reading list. As always, each quarter I can find plenty of stuff that interests me. I hope you find some interest in what is included here, and if I have missed something you think should be on the list, please let me know.

Abram, Susan. “Chess, Not Checkers: The Complexities of Historic Creek Diplomacy,” Diplomatic History, 47 (November 2023), 890-893.

Allread, W. Tanner. “The Specter of Indian Removal: The Persistence of State Supremacy Arguments in Federal Indian Law,” Columbia Law Review, 123 (October 2023), 1533-1610.

Archer, Seth. “Vaccination, Dispossession and the Indigenous Interior,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 97 (Summer 2023), 255-293.

Carlos, Ann M. “They Country They Built: Dynamic and Complex Indigenous Economies in North America before 1492,” Journal of Economic History, 83 (June 2023), 319-358.

Cooke, Jason: “Savagery Repositioned: Historicizing the Cherokee Nation,” American Indian Quarterly, 47 (Spring 2023).

Dorries, Heather and Michelle Daigle, Land Back: Relational Landscapes of Indigenous Resistance Across the Americas, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2024).

Dubcovsky, Alejandra. Talking Back: Native Women and the Making of the Early South, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023).

Dwider, Maraam A. and Kathleen Marchetti, “Tribal Coalitions and Lobbying Outcomes: Evidence from Administrative Rulemaking,” Presidential Studies Quarterly, 53 (September 2023), 354-382.

Evans, Laura E. “The Strange Career of Federal Indian Policy: Rural Politics, Native Nations, and the Path Away from Assimilation,” Studies in American Political Development, 27 (October 2023), 89-110.

Fitz, Caitlin. “The Monroe Doctrine and the Indigenous Americas,” Diplomatic History, 47 (November 2023), 802-822.

Fixico, Donald L. “That’s What They Used to Say’: Reflections on American Indian Oral Traditions, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2023).

Foxworth, Raymond, and Carew Boulding, “How Race, Resentment, and Ideology Shape Attitudes about Native American Inherent Rights and Policy Issues,” Political Research Quarterly, 76 (December 2023), 1843-1856.

Goeman, Mishauna. Settler Aesthetics: Visualizing the Spectacle of Originary Moments in The New World, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2023).

Gone, Joseph P. “Indigenous Historical Trauma: Alter-Native Explanations for Mental Health Inequities,” Daedalus, 152 (Fall 2023), 130-150.

Gonzalez, Michael. “The Enduring Flame: Stress, Epigenetics, and the California Indian, 1769-2000,” American Indian Quarterly, 46 (Fall 2022).

Haefeli, Evan. “The Great Haudenosaunee-Lenape Peace of 1669: Oral Traditions, Colonial Records, and the Origin of Delaware’s Status as Women,” New York History, 104 (Summer 2023), 79-95.

Harris, Craig. Rise Up! Indigenous Music in North America, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2023).

John, Randy H. and Alicia Puglionesi, “The Most Valuable Lands: Seneca Oil, Seneca’s Oil, and the Struggle for Land Rights at the Birthplace of an Industry,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal,  46 (no. 2, 2023), 1-28.

Johnson, Tai Elizabeth. “The Shifting Nature of Subsistence on the Hopi Indian Reservation,” Agricultural History, 97 (April 2023), 215-244.

Kantrowitz, Stephen. Citizens of a Stolen Land: A Ho-Chunk History of the Nineteenth-Century United States, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023).

Kenmille, Agnes Oshanee. Agnes Oshanee Kenmille: Salish Indian Elder and Craftswoman, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2023).

Krupat, Arnold. From the Boarding Schools: Apache Students Speak, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2023).

Lee, Wayne E. The Cutting-Off Way: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America, 1500-1800, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023).

Leroux, Darryl, “State Recognition and the Dangers of Race Shifting: The Case of Vermont,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 46 (No. 2, 2023), 53-84.

Lloyd, Dana. “Haaland v Brackeen and the Logic of Discovery,” U.S. Catholic Historian, 41 (Summer 2023), 95-115.

Marshall, Stuart. “Dividing the Carolinas: Indians, Colonists and Slaves in the Prerevolutionary Boundary Dispute, 1763-1773,” Early American Studies, 21 (Winter 2023), 42-86.

May, Roy H., “’I Did Get Along with the Indians’: Joseph Hugo Wenberg, Missionary to the Aymara, Ponca, and Oneida, 1901-1950,” Methodist History, 61 (no. 1, 2023), 22-34.

McCutchen, Jennifer Monrie. “’They Will Know in the End that We are Men’: Gunpowder and Gendered Discourse in Creek-British Diplomacy, 1763-1776,” Ethnohistory, 70 (July 2023).

Midtrød, Tom Arne. “’A People Before Useless’: Ethic Cleansing in the Wartime Hudson Valley, 1754-1763,” Early American Studies, 21 (Summer 2023), 428-459.

Miron, Rose. Indigenous Archival Activism: Mohican Interventions in Public History and Memory, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2024).

Murray, Laura J. “’We are the Ones that Make the Treaty’: Michi Saagiig Lands and Islands in Southeastern Ontario,” Ethnohistory, 70 (July 2023).

Olson, Greg. “A ‘Rebellious District and Dangerous Locality’: Cherokee Soldiers and Refugees in Neosho, Missouri, 1862-1863,” Missouri Historical Review, 117 (July 2023), 235-253.

Peterson, Anna “’A Desire to Learn’: Native American Experiences in Lutheran Colleges, 1945-1955,” American Indian Quarterly, 47 (Winter 2023), 26-69.

Riggs, Brett H. “The Return of Standing Wolf,” North Carolina Historical Review, 100 (April 2023), 157-187.

Shannon, Timothy J. “In the Bushes: The Secret History of Anglo-Iroquois Treaty Making,” New York History, 104 (Summer 2023), 53-78.

Shrake, Peter. “Stambaugh’s Treaty,” Wisconsin Magazine of History, 106 (Spring 2023), 24-37.

Smith, Lindsey Claire. Urban Homelands: Writing the Native City from Oklahoma, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2023).

Stockel, H. Henrietta. Salvation Through Slavery: Chiracahua APaches and Priests on the Spanish Colonial Frontier, (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2023).

Theobald, Brianna, “Dobbs in Historical Context: The View from Indian Country,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 97 (Spring 2023), 39-47.

Van de Logt, Mark. Between the Floods: A History of the Arikaras, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2023).

Vigil, Kiara. “Language, Water, Dance: An Indigenous Meditation on Time,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 44 (no. 1, 2023), 168-182.

Voigt, Matthias Andre. “Warrior Women: Indigenous Women, Gender Relations, and Sexual Politics within the American Indian Movement and at Wounded Knee,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 46 (no. 3, 2023), 101-130.

Teaching Native American History

Trauma-Informed Teaching in Native American History

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In conversations with colleagues across the country at the American Society for Ethnohistory meeting in Tallahassee, one thing we all agreed on was that our students seem to be reading less, and reading less closely. Participation in class discussions had declined, as had attendance.  I was disappointed in myself in that I had not succeeded in breaking through, in getting students to engage with the material and do the reading, but I was reassured, I guess, that I as not alone. Still, I had to try something new. 

It went really, really well.

We were discussing some particularly brutal stories from the Plains Wars during the Civil War Years, beginning with the Dakota Uprising in Minnesota and closing with the Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado. They could read about both events in Native America, but I wanted them to go deeper into the material.  I recently read a fantastic article by historian and artist Taylor Spence called “Rethinking the Colonial Encounter in the Age of Trauma.” He is a great historian. His essay appeared in a really useful volume entitled The Routledge Companion to Global Indigenous History. Both the article and the book are well-worth your time. Spence suggested to me a new way to teach this subject, a trauma-informed approach that could lead students to feel deeply the impact of the events they were reading about.  Following Spence’s lead, I assigned them Waziyatawin’s “Grandmother to Granddaughter: Generations of Oral History in a Dakota Family,” which appeared in the American Indian Quarterly back in 1996. Waziyatawin (Angela Cavender Wilson) wrote a searing piece of family history. I suggest you try it in your courses.

Waziyatawin’s grandmother, Elsie Cavender, had received a story from her grandmother that she shared late in life.  She told Waziyatawin of the family’s forced march after the Dakota Uprising, and how soldiers, in an act of irrational and senseless violence, murdered Elsie’s great-great-grandmother. It’s a brief essay, and Elsie Cavender’s account is roughly a page and a half.  I asked my students to tell me what happened. They gave me a competent summary of the story.  The Dakotas were marching towards imprisonment at Fort Snelling.  They confronted white people in towns “where the people were real hostile to them.” They white people threw rocks, and poured scalding water on them.  They camped at night, living on rotten provisions provided by the army.  They marched onward. They moved too slowly.  The soldiers grew angry, and stabbed Elsie’s Grandmother’s grandmother with a saber. She bled to death on a bridge. When her family returned later, the body was gone, but they saw dried blood on the wooden planks.

I told the students I wanted more. Go deeper. Summarizing what you read, after all, is no great achievement. Spence suggested that the students attempt to imagine deeply what it would have been like to be present when those soldiers murdered an elderly woman for no reason at all. So I told them to think of their senses. If they were on the bridge where the killing took place that day, what would they have seen, heard, smelled, tasted or felt?

My students jumped into the assignment. You would smell the rotten provisions the soldiers distributed, one student observed. The relentlessly irritating sound of the squeaky wagon wheel, another pointed out. They would have heard that. The dust, the sight and smell and sound of the cattle would have been difficult to miss.  They were rolling now, but they were staying away from the violence.  It took them a bit, but they got there. The soldiers’ profanities, their angry, barking orders in a language the Lakotas did not understand; the screams in response to unbelievable and senseless violence; the blood pouring from a mortal wound.

Waziyatawin

We had spoken early that day about the reliability of oral testimony as evidence. One student predictably and appropriately suggested that it might be like the old game of Telephone, as a story changes as it is passed from one hearer to another. But think of each of the sensory events you just identified, I told the students.  I asked them to think of their earliest memories. What made those memories particularly powerful? Each of them, individually, affected the senses in a memorable fashion.  Each was easily capable of etching itself into the minds of successive generations of storytellers. The events that Waziyatawin recalled for us, I suggested, were of the sort that would not be easily forgotten.

We are not supposed to teach history in a way that makes our students feel bad about who or what they are. We should not make them feel guilty or uncomfortable about the past. That is what lawmakers in a growing number of red states have demanded. They have proscribed the teaching of certain topics. They have singled out the 1619 Project, and the histories of slavery, and racism, as topics that should not be taught in ways that make white people feel uncomfortable. These right-wing politicians have said much less about Native American history, but clearly they would be bothered by things I teach in my classes: the Paxton Boys, for instance, or the massacre at Gnadenhutten. These politicians are calling for an education fit for sociopaths. They want students to feel nothing but love of country.

My students felt badly about the history they read that day.  Again, some of them had tears in their eyes. When they read Silas Soule’s account of Sand Creek, in which he describes the mutilation of dead Cheyenne and Arapaho women and children, well, they felt this as well.


            But here’s the thing. They felt badly, to be sure, but they did not feel ashamed of their race. They did not feel guilty or responsible for the crimes of the past. This is what the Republican dingbats miss.  My students felt connected to people very different from them who lived a century and a half ago. They understood the meaning a past event at a much deeper level than they may have done previously, and the emotions were heavy indeed.  They grieved. They had, I would argue, learned a lot.  I sent a message to Dr. Spence to tell him how well his class exercise went, how much my students learned, and how thankful I was for his good work.

Let’s say you are walking down a crowded city street.  Your foot catches a person walking in front of you, and they trip and almost fall. Without thinking, if you are a decent person, you apologize. You are not debasing yourself when you do this. You worried that you might have hurt somebody, that they could have fallen and been injured. It’s not about you. You apologize because you are not a dick, because you care about other people, because you worry that your actions could have caused for someone pain or sorrow. You say you are sorry because you felt sorrow.

I have thought about this a lot when I teach. Why do we say sorry? I want my students to appreciate the past on its own terms, to feel a connection to the people they read about.  The students in my class obviously could not undo the past.  They could not apologize or express their sorrow to the Dakota woman murdered on that bridge. But they did understand something at a deeper level than they might otherwise have done, and that made them wiser and more capable of understanding other people.  They felt empathy. And they cared about this particular piece of the past more deeply that they would have done if I had merely told them about the Dakota Uprising and Sand Creek. They may not remember much of my class a couple of years from now but I am confident that they will remember this.

Teaching Native American History

SUNY: Where BIPOC Too Often Means BPOC

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Discussions of diversity, equity, and inclusion on too many college campuses are shallow and ineffective when it comes to Indigenous people. For instance, Ricardo Nazario-Colón, SUNY’s Vice-Chancellor for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, recently sent out a memo to SUNY campuses across the state, with his thoughts on the importance of Native American Heritage Month.

            “We should take this moment,” he writes, “to recognize the profound contributions, rich cultures, and interminable spirit of the First Peoples of this land.” Nazario-Colón wants to remind his SUNY colleagues “of the deep-rooted connections we all share with the Earth and each other.”

            Some of your students will read this and ask, “who could possibly object to that?” Your Indigenous students are likely to ask, “Who’s We?”

            Dr. Nazario-Colón, like me, is an employee of a state that systematically stole Indigenous lands; dragged Indigenous children off to a boarding school that did not close until the late 1950s; sought to eradicate Indigenous languages, culture and religion; and attempted to destroy and dismantle the League of the Iroquois. New York could not have become the Empire State without a systematic program of Indigenous dispossession that at times explicitly violated the laws of the United States. SUNY, as an institution, resisted late until the last century the efforts of Haudenosaunee people to secure sacred objects squirreled away in its collections. Nazario-Colón implicitly accepts the monstrous logic of Justice Ginsburg’s Sherrill decision. Yes, we took your land, but it happened too long ago for us to worry about now.

            Dr. Nazario-Colón hopes that “in our journey to deepen our own understanding and acceptance across differences” that we will strive to identify “the core values, emotions, and aspirations we all share.” Doing so, he believes, “fosters unity, solidarity, and a sense of common purpose.” That’s a nice sentiment, but it is far too limited, and Dr. Nazario-Colón has in effect written a perfectly tepid settler-colonial manifesto that fills every square on your DEI Bingo Card. We stole your land. We attempted to destroy your culture. We denigrated your religion. Our Founding Fathers invaded your homelands, burned your towns, raped your women, and murdered your children. We openly and enthusiastically forecasted your extinction and looked forward to your disappearance as a people. If New York had its way, its Indigenous population would no longer exist. But, Hey, let’s get along! Maybe we can even have some “Reconciliation”! But we will not talk about our lies, our crimes, and agreements we have broken. We will not talk about the corruption, deceit, bribery, and dishonesty employed by the State officials who extracted cessions of Indigenous land.

The Worst Territorial Acknowledgment in the history of the world recently was visible at SUNY Geneseo. It is covered now.

Let’s all get along. Let’s make sure we “see” each other. We may celebrate the “indomitable spirit” we tried to crush, but we will not do any of the heavy lifting, really, to make things right. “We want to learn about you,” Dr. Nazario-Colón suggests. “We want to treat you well.”

“We want our lands back,” Indigenous people might reply. We want SUNY to be a welcoming space for Indigenous peoples, with free tuition, room, and board, and a commitment to hiring Indigenous faculty. We want you to put up or shut up.  There have been some exceptions—at SUNY-ESF for example, or with the University at Buffalo’s exciting Indigenous Studies program. But SUNY, as in institution, has shown little interest in any of this. It never really has, and most campuses, like mine, have administrators in charge of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging who do nothing meaningful about this issue.

The problem, of course, is bigger than Dr. Nazario-Colón. His message nevertheless reflects the emptiness and ineffectiveness of so much DEI rhetoric on college campuses, where too few people in too many positions of power at too many schools know way too little about Indigenous peoples, their histories, and their cultures. As a non-Indigenous scholar writing and teaching the history of Indigenous peoples, I find the result galling and offensive, especially on a campus like mine, where we are so closely connected historically to New York’s drive to dispossess and drive Senecas, Oneidas, and Tuscaroras out of the Genesee Valley. You might say that SUNY favors that sort of equity and diversity that costs it nothing, that they are bargain-basement crusaders too cheap to make a real difference. But it’s not about money. It would have cost Dr. Nazario-Colón nothing, after all, to do the work to write a message worth the time it takes to read. The real problem is that they have always been satisfied with gestures empty and performative. The real problem is that they have never adequately shown that they care.

Boarding Schools

I Read the Colorado Boarding School Report So You Don’t Have To

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And, Dear Reader, I feel some ambivalence about it. If you follow the news from Indigenous America at all, you likely heard about the report. It received widespread attention. Dr. Holly Kathryn Norton, the Colorado State Archaeologist, wrote the report for History Colorado, part of a state-mandated investigation of boarding school history in the state. Norton was assisted by a team of researchers. Norton and her colleagues focused most closely upon the Grand Junction Indian School, also known as the Teller Institute mostly in the state, and the Fort Lewis Indian Boarding School. The first was an off-reservation federal boarding school. The latter stood much closer to the reservation community it wished to serve.

Children posing for a picture outside the Fort Lewis boarding school.

Much of the coverage of the History Colorado report was written by people, I suspect, who did not read the report in its entirety. Had they done so, they might share my desire that Dr. Norton had been more thorough, energetic, and creative in the execution of this important work.

What the investigators did find will not surprise historians familiar with the long history of federal Indian boarding schools. The founders of the Teller Institute, for instance, had trouble finding qualified faculty, staff, and administration. The school’s first doctor was known for his “bad character,” even if Norton provided no specific examples demonstrating precisely how. The school’s first superintendent “used unethical methods of recruiting students, even by the standards of the day,” but, again, no evidence is provided for the reader to see precisely what he did.

Families described poor food, substandard buildings, filth and cold. The 600 students who attended the Teller Institute over the course of its twenty-five year existence, and their parents, found the school wanting in many ways. Norton points out that the Teller Institute was “plagued with runaways,” though those students stories are not told in the detail they deserve. Students at the Teller Institute did hard labor. They dug the cesspool that stood near the school, and they lived under the supervision of parsimonious administrators seemingly far more interested in the health of the institution than its students. In one particularly revealing story, a federal agent at Fort Defiance asked the Teller Institute superintendent to return Navajo students to their home. Their parents wanted them back. The superintendent reluctantly gave in, but provided the students with train fare that got them only as far as Durango. According to Norton, they had to ride bicycles to get them the final 150 miles home. Norton’s report would be so much more valuable with more stories of this sort. I want to learn about awful administrators, but also about the students and their families.

The Fort Lewis Indian Boarding School received students from its opening in 1892 until 1909. In total, nearly 1100 students passed through its doors, drawn from twenty different Indigenous communities and nations. Like the Teller Institute, it faced significant turnover in its administration. The superintendent who served the longest was the school’s most notorious. Dr. Thomas Breen oversaw Fort Lewis from 1894 to 1903. A serial abuser of women and girls, according to contemporary reporting in Denver newspapers, his tenure was one prolonged scandal. According to Norton, “the story of the Fort Lewis Indian Boarding School under Breen and the failure of the federal government to protect Native children is a microcosm of the deep neglect that was visited on the children by the government throughout the entirety of the school system”(67).

Again, this point is asserted rather than demonstrated. Throughout, the Colorado report is cursory in its coverage. The author makes reference to archival collections, but because she does not quote from them, her arguments are not well-supported and powerfully presented. We learn little about the tuberculosis outbreak at Fort Lewis, or the damage done there by infections of trachoma, even if we know, thanks to the fantastic work of Professor Michaela Morgan Adams, that parents forcefully resisted the boarding schools, advocated powerfully for their children, and served as powerful and compelling critics of institutions that failed to care for students.

Similarly truncated is the chapter that covers the “children who did not return home.” Ever since the discover of 200 unmarked graves outside a residential school in Canada, this has been viewed as the most important driver of new interest in the history of boarding schools, and efforts to uncover truth in the name of state’s achieving reconciliation. Thirty-one children died at the Fort Lewis school during the 18 years it was open, thirty-seven at the Teller Institute, a figure which included the daughter of the school’s carpenter, a teacher, and a former student.

Norton mentions that the surviving records for the schools are in poor condition. They are, presumably, difficult to read and work with. Nonetheless, I wish the History Colorado team had done more. Boarding schools were institutions, and the institutional component is the easiest part of their histories to research. Schools were bureaucracies, and they generated paper: records historians can use to reconstruct precisely how they worked. But they were also the site of dramatic moments in Indigenous peoples’ lives. Students who went to boarding school list among their most powerful memories seeing their parents crying, even though at the time they did not understand the source of those tears. Students unquestionably suffered from home sickness, loneliness, privation and abuse. The consequences of the treatment they received may continue to plague their families, a problem scholars now refer to as “intergenerational trauma.” But neither students, nor their families, stood by idly. They engaged these institutions, insisted that their children receive just treatment, and called for their return when they felt things were not going well. In our efforts to recount the history of boarding and residential schools we must make sure we place front and center the Indigenous peoples who survived those institutions the federal government dedicated to their destruction. We make choices about the stories we tell, and as scholars we need to own that. And because we want to persuade the millions of Americans who know nothing about these institutions to understand the injustices that happened there, and the ambivalent feelings many Indigenous peoples express about the boarding school experience, we need to tell these stories effectively and powerfully. We should not shy away from the darkness, and not hesitate to tell the stories of resistance and accommodation to these institutions in all their wondrous complexity.

New Publications

What You Need to Read, September 2023

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I hope this finds you well. Classes have begun at Geneseo, the students are back on campus, and now it is time to begin balancing all the tasks facing the college professor.  This is your quarterly installment of “Things You Need to Read.” Hope you find this helpful.  As always, if I have missed anything, please do not hesitate to let me know about that.

Aune, Stefan. Indian Wars Everywhere: Colonial Violence and the Shadow Doctrines of Empire, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2023).

Brown, Hana E. “Administrative Burden and the Reproduction of Settler Colonialism: A Cast Study of the Indian Child Welfare Act,” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, 9 (September 2023), 232-251.

Carlose, Ann M. “The Country They Built: Dynamic and Complex Indigenous Economies in North America before 1492,” Journal of Economic History, 83 (June 2023), 319-358.

Collar, Amanda. “Indigenous Peoples’ Limited Access to Reproductive Care,” Annals of Internal Medicine, March 2023.

DasSarma, Anjali and Lindford D. Fisher, “The Persistence of Indigenous Unfreedom in Early American Newspaper Advertisements, 1704-1804,” Slavery and Abolition, 44 (June 2023), 267-291.

Davis, Elisabeth. “’Any Violation of this Arrangement’: Catholic Negotiations at the Carlisle Indian School, 1883-1918,” Pennsylvania History, 90 (Summer 2023), 321-443.

Dwider, Maraam A and Kathleen Marchetti, “Tribal Coalitions and Lobbying Outcomes: Evidence from Administrative Rulemaking,” Presidential Studies Quarterly, 53 (September 2023), 354-392.

Edmunds, R. David. Voices in the Drum: Narratives from the Native American Past, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2023).

Friedman, Joseph, Helena Hansen and Joseph P. Gone. “Deaths of Despair and Indigenous Data Genocide,” The Lancet, 401 (March 2023).

Glancy, Diane and Linda Rodriguez, eds., Unpapered: Writers Consider Native American Identity and Cultural Belonging, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2023).

Hoagland, Serra J. and Albert Steven, Wildlife Stewardship on Tribal Lands: Our Place is in Our Soul, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023).

Keeler, Kasey R. American Indians and the American Dream: Policies, Place and Property in Minnesota, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2023).

Kiser, William S. “The Business of Killing Indians: Contract Warfare and Genocide in the U.S-Mexico Borderlands,” Journal of American History, ## (June 2023), 15-39.

Krupat, Arnold. “The Wheelocks and the Clouds at Odds: Some Differences Among Red Progressives in the Early Twentieth Century,” American Indian Quarterly, 46 (Fall 2022).

Leroux, Darryl, “State Recognition and the Dangers of Race Shifting,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 46 (no. 2, 2023), 53-84.

Mauro, Hayes Peter. The Art of Americanization at the Carlisle Indian School, (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2023).

Midtrød, Tom Arne. “’A People Before Useless’: Ethnic Cleansing in the Wartime Hudson Valley, 1754-1763.” Early American Studies, 21 (Summer 2023), 428-459.

Monnett, John H. “The Collapse of Cheyenne Supremacy on the Central Plains,” Nebraska History, 104 (Fall 2023), 128-145.

Olson, Greg. “A ‘Rebellious District and Dangerous Locality’: Cherokee Soldiers and Refugees in Neosho, Missouri, 1862-1863,” Missouri Historical Review, 117 (July 2023), 235-253.

Parins, James W. Literacy and Intellectual Life in the Cherokee Nation, 1820-1906, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2023).

Peyton, John T. “’The Land We Have We Wish To Keep’: Miami Autonomy and Resistance to Removal in Indiana, 1812-1826,” Indiana Magazine of History, 119 (June 2023), 139-176.

Schmader, Matthew F. “Pueblo Resistance and Inter-Ethnic Conflict: The 1540-1542 Vazques de Coronado Expedition to the Middle Rio Grande Valley, New Mexico,” Kiva, 89 (June 2023), 167-191.

Stockel, H. Henrietta. Salvation Through Slavery: Chiricahua Apaches and Priests on the Spanish Colonial Frontier, (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2022).

Toups, Eric. “Indian Men and French ‘Women’: Fragile Masculinity and Fragile Alliances in Colonial Louisiana, 1699-1741,” Early American Studies, 21 (Summer 2023), 353-379.

Treuer, Anton. Everything You Wanted to Know about Indians but were Afraid to Ask, (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2023).

Van de Logt, Mark. Between the Floods: A History of the Arikaras, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2023).

van Deusen, Nancy E. “In the Tethered Shadow: Native American Slavery, African Slavery, and the Disappearance of the Past,” William and Mary Quarterly, 80 (April 2023), 355-388.

Van Gorder, Megan. “Uncovering Comparative Indigenous Inquiries at the Homewood Boarding School in Peoria County,” Illinois Heritage, 26 (July/August 2023), 11-12.

Teaching Native American History

“Five Civilized Tribes”: When and Where did the Phrase Originate?

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The origins of the “Five Civilized Tribes” label for the Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks and Seminoles has long puzzled me. I am pretty certain that I used the phrase in the Master’s thesis I wrote in the late 1980s at Cal State Long Beach.  I know that some of the historians I cited in that work did so, too. Grant Foreman published Indian Removal: The Emigration of the Five Civilized Tribes of Indians in 1953, and R. S. Cotterill The Southern Indians: The Story of the Civilized Tribes Before Removal a year later, both with the University of Oklahoma Press. But what are the origins of the phrase? Who used the phrase first? When, and why, did they do so?

            I always had assumed that it originated with the opponents of Andrew Jackson’s policy of “Indian Removal” in the 1820s and 1830s. Foreman and Cotterill used the phrase in this context. Supporters of the Cherokees, and the Cherokees themselves, boldly proclaimed the progress their Nation had made on the march towards “civilization,” and used this as a strong argument for remaining upon their lands in the American southeast. The Nation’s newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, contained stories and statistics on the number of spinning wheels and oxen, and acres under cultivation, on the Nation’s lands.  No wandering savages, the Cherokees were native southerners, as “civilized” as the planter elite, and ought to be allowed to stay where they long had been. That the phrase might fit for this period seemed to make sense.

            Turns out I was wrong about that. I looked through the books on my shelves. The phrase seems to have come along well after the Cherokee removal had taken place.  I searched the Library of Congress American Memory collection. The Continental Congress received a petition from the Brothertown Indians referring to the “partly civilized tribes from the east end of Long Island,” but that’s different.  Members of the legislative and executive branches spoke frequently of the importance of “civilization” and “civilizing” the Indians, but not with specific reference to the Cherokees and their southeastern neighbors. I looked through Google Books as well, but nothing there preceded the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction. The Indian Office records housed at the National Archives, now digitized, show that the phrase did not come into use until after the Civil War as well. The earliest newspaper article containing the phrase, according to a search of Newspapers.com, did not appear until 1871.  A Kansas newspaper reported on a visit to the “five civilized tribes” in the Indian Territory, and fear that the region could be further inflamed by an Indian war. The second article using the phrase appeared in 1873, in Kansas, in a discussion of the “question” of Indian citizenship. It mentioned “what are called the five civilized tribes,” so named because “for the last generation they have not depended upon the chase for subsistence, but have cultivated the ground.” The way the phrase was used in these two articles make it clear that it was around earlier, but I have not determined how early.

           It does seem, however, that “Five Civilized Tribes” came into common usage during the Concentration and allotment era, as a way to contrast the “civilized” Nations relocated to the Indian Territory with their “savage” or “wild” neighbors who had to be compelled to move to reservations.  C. E. Boudinot, featured in that 1873 article, told General Sherman and others in Washington that the Board of Indian Civilization’s “concentration” policy of placing “wild Indians in the territory of the civilized Indians would be “disastrous to the civilized minority” of Indigenous peoples in the region. Americans referred to the Cherokees’ “civilization” frequently. It factored in discussions of the allotment of their land, for instance. The “civilization” of these Indigenous peoples, government policy makers asserted, made them fit candidates for allotment. They already were civilized. They knew how to work their lands. They no longer needed the antiquated nonsense that was, in Americans’ view, Indian tribal governments. Cherokees seem to have used the phrase to suggest that, indeed, they were civilized, that they had survived the trauma of removal, and they had settled in and were fine as they were. Because they were so like their white neighbors, they did not need their lands broken up and divided, and Americans could rest assured that they would not join with the hostile Plains Nations, so unlike them in so many ways. Their civilization could, in different hands, be used to argue for their dispossession or the integrity of their relocated community.

            This obviously is a cursory look at a complicated question.  But it sends home the message that it is always worth while to think about the words and phrases they use, where they come from, and why they are deployed by those who make use of them.

Teaching Native American History

Historical Methods: The Carlisle School

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At Geneseo, we do not offer the US and Western Civ surveys. Instead of focusing on coverage, we emphasize and teach the analytical, writing, and research skills of the discipline. All majors are required to take two sophomore seminars. The first is in research methods, the other historiography. The courses are taught by all the department faculty in an area of their specialty. This coming semester, I will be offering the research methods course on the history of American Indian boarding schools. The syllabus follows.

History 302           Fall 2023

Research: American Indian Boarding Schools      

Instructor: Michael Oberg Meeting Times: MW, 8:30-10:10, Fraser 104 Office Hours, MW 12:30-1:45, Doty 208 Email: oberg@geneseo.edu Phone: (585)245-5730 Website and Blog: michaelleroyoberg.com

Required Readings:             Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center.

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

 Genevieve Bell, “Telling Stories Out of School: Remembering the Carlisle Indian Industrial Schook, 1879-1918,” Ph.D diss., Stanford University, 1998 (Available on Brightspace).

  Mary Lynn Rampolla, A Pocket Guide to Writing in History, 10th Edition, (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2020).

Course Description:  This section of the history department’s required course in research methods will focus on American Indian boarding schools, part of a systematic assault launched on Indigenous identity beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century. There are Boarding Schools still open today.  The heyday of the Boarding School Era ran from 1879 until 1918, the years when the Carlisle Indian Industrial School operated in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.  Tens of thousands of young Native Americans passed through these institutions, and they played a highly significant role in shaping Native American identity today.  Over the course of the semester, you will read about these institutions, learn and apply your research skills to studying them, and produce a significant work of original, primary source research based upon the sources you will read.  Because of the availability of sources, we will focus on Carlisle, the largest of the federally-run schools.

By the end of the semester, I would like you to have improved and developed substantially in the following areas:

  •             * Your ability to write clearly, correctly, and persuasively in English * Your ability to identify, locate, and analyze secondary sources related to your research question.
  •             * Your ability to construct and advance an argument supported by primary source research.
  •             * Your ability to debate complicated historical topics verbally in a seminar setting.

Participation: I want to emphasize the importance of participation. I view my courses fundamentally as conversations and these conversations can only succeed when each person pulls his or her share of the load.  This seminar relies on your contributions, and our conversations will depend on your thoughtful inquiry and respectful exchange.  We are all here to learn, and I encourage you to join in the discussion with this in mind. Participation is more than attendance.  As you will see from the attached grading agreement, after four missed classes you will not be able to earn any grade higher than a D for the course. 

Discussion Schedule:

28 August          Introduction to the Course                          Reading: Rampolla, Chapter 1; Adams, Preface, Prologue; Oberg, “Just Kids.”

30 August          The Long Legacy of Federal Boarding Schools Reading: Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report, May 2022. This is a long document. Do your best to read and digest those parts of its contents that interest you.

6 September      What Can We Know About Federal Indian Boarding Schools? Reading: Rampolla, Chapter 2; Adams, Part One; Images of the Carlisle Boarding School

11 September     What Can We Know About Federal Indian Boarding Schools? (continued). Reading: Adams, Part Two; Carlisle Publications (Under the “Indian School Titles” tab, click on “Carlisle Arrow, The (1908-1917)” and then click “Apply.” Read, cover to cover, any two editions of The Carlisle Arrow. Poke around through other publications as well so that you arrive at some familiarity for the sorts of public documents Carlisle produced.

13 September     What Can We Know about Federal Indian Boarding Schools? (continued). Reading, Adams, Part Three; Carlisle’s bureaucracy and record-keeping.

18 September     What Can We Know about Federal Indian Boarding Schools? (continued). Reading: Adams, Part 4 and Conclusion; Carlisle Student Records (Pick any Nation from that drop-down menu.  Read at least 5 student files and be prepared to talk about what you learned.  Make sure you choose student records from different years). Please provide me with a list of the students whose files you read by Sunday at noon.

20 September     Mandatory Individual Conferences                           Reading: Rampolla, Chapters 4-6.

25 September     Topic Statements and Preliminary Bibliography Due! Reading: Rampolla, Chapter 7; Brenda J. Child, “The Boarding School as Metaphor,” Journal of American Indian Education, 57 (Spring 2018), 37-57.  This article is available through JSTOR. Please download a copy, read it, and have it with you in class. Child provides the perspectives of an Indigenous historian writing about residential schools.

27 September     Research Updates:  What have you learned, what have you added to your bibliography, and how has your research progressed?  You will be prepared to speak for at least five minutes, and to field questions from your classmates. Reading: Frank Vitale IV, “Counting Carlisle’s Casualties: Defining Student Death at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, 1879-1918,” American Indian Quarterly, 44 (Fall 2020), 383-414.

2 October          Mandatory Individual Conferences

4 October          Setting Things Right: Discussion of Apologies, Acknowledgments and Reparations Reading: Oberg, “Your Territorial Acknowledgment is Not Enough;” Elizabeth Ellis and Rose Stremlau, “Land Acknowledgments: Helpful, Harmful, Hopeful,” Perspectives on History, 60 (November 2022), 24-26 (on Brightspace); Sarah Deer, The Beginning and End of Rape, (St. Paul: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), Chapter 4 (Brightspace)

11 October        Progress Reports: What have you learned, what have you added to our bibliography, and how has your research progressed?  You will be prepared to speak for at least five minutes, and to field questions from your classmates. Reading: Mikaëla M. Adams, “`A Very Serious and Perplexing Epidemic of Grippe’: The Influenza Epidemic of 1918 at the Haskell Institute,” American Indian Quarterly, 44 (Winter 2020), 1-35. (available on America: History and Life).

16 October        Other Residential School Projects: Reading: Genoa Indian School Digital Reconciliation Project; Sherman Indian Museum Collection; National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (University of Manitoba).

18 October        Child Removal in Comparative Perspective Reading: Margaret Jacobs, A Generation Removed: The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children in the Postwar World, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014), Excerpts, on Brightspace.

23 October        Progress Reports: What have you learned, what have you added to your bibliography, and how has your research progressed?  You will be prepared to speak for at least five minutes, and to field questions from your classmates                         Revised Bibliography Due

25 October        Mandatory Individual Conferences

30 October        Opening Paragraphs Due.  Please bring enough copies for everybody in the class.

1 November      Mandatory Individual Conferences

6 November      Outlines Due.

8   November    Mandatory Individual Conferences

13 November     Progress Reports: What have you learned, what have you added to your bibliography, and how has your research progressed?  You will be prepared to speak for at least five minutes, and to field questions from your classmates

15 November     Mandatory Individual Conferences.

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

27 November     Discussion Drafts

29 November     Discussion Drafts

4  December      Discussion Drafts

6 December       Discussion Drafts

11 December     Final Papers Due

13 December     Meetings: Discussion of Final Grades

Assignments:

  1. Topic Statement and Initial Bibliography Due:  In a solid paragraph, describe the topic on which you would like to conduct research this semester, and a construct a preliminary bibliography in proper format listing the primary and secondary sources you will need to answer the questions you are asking. You can not have a thesis yet: you have not done the research necessary for that. But you can have a sense of the question, or questions, which you would like to try to answer. Due 25 September.
  2. Revised Bibliography Due: You should demonstrate that you have competently used JSTOR, America: History and Life, and the citations and bibliographies in the scholarly sources you have read to expand your bibliography.  Due 23 October.
  3. Opening Paragraphs: Please bring a draft of an opening paragraph. I assume you will likely make changes to this as you move forward and complete your project, but I do want you to bring something so that we can discuss writing and how to engage your readers most effectively. Due 30 October.
  4. Outlines Due.  Bring copies for everyone in class.  The more detailed your outline, the better. Due 6 November.
  5. Discussion Drafts:  A complete draft of your paper with footnotes accurately cited.  You will submit it on a Google Doc that will go on a shared drive accessible to your classmates.  We will read each draft closely, make suggestions, and work to improve your paper.
  6. Final Draft: This should require no elaboration.  Your final draft, formatted properly, is due on 11 December.  Because of the narrow span of time between our last meeting and the final exam period, I cannot allow any extensions for the final draft.
Teaching Native American History

History 261, Native American History, Fall 2023

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It has been several years since I’ve taught the Native American history survey course at Geneseo, and at the end of this month, I will be teaching it for the first time with the new edition of the textbook Peter Olsen-Harbich and I published last fall. As I have mentioned in earlier posts on this blog, I no longer give grades on student assignments. Drawing inspiration from the teaching of Cate Denial at Knox College, I develop a rubric in collaboration with the students. In meetings at the end of the semester, and with reference to this rubric and the extensive comments and suggestions I will have written on the students’ work, students assign themselves a grade for the course. Usually, about half the students enrolled in the course are history majors, and the rest enroll to fulfill some part of the general education requirements, which have recently undergone a thorough revision at Geneseo. Any questions or criticisms, please let me know in the comments below. I am aware of the funky formatting below, but I have not been able to figure out an efficient way to make what I have included below look like the document that I will make available to the students on the college’s clunky learning management system.

History 261                         American Indian History                               Fall 2023

Instructor: Michael Oberg                                                                              Meeting Times: MW, 10:30-12:10, Newton 21 Office Hours: MW 12:30-1:45                                                           EMAIL:  oberg@geneseo.ed Phone: (585)245-5730 (office) Website and blog: www.michaelleroyoberg.com The website and blog are designed to complement the textbook. There is a review section for each chapter of the textbook.  Click on the “Manual.”

  • Required Readings:   
  • Michael Leroy Oberg and Peter Jakob Olsen-Harbich, Native America: A History,    3d. ed., 2022.  
  • Colin G. Calloway, ed., Our Hearts Fell to the Ground: Plains Indian Views of How the West Was Lost, 2d. ed., 2017.
  • Frederick E. Hoxie, Talking Back to Civilization: Indian Voices from the Progressive Era, 2001.
  • Francis Paul Prucha, ed., Documents of United States Indian Policy, 3d ed, 2000.                                            
  • Additional Documents and Articles available on JSTOR and as noted below.

Course Description:  This course surveys the history of Native Americans in the region that ultimately became the United States.  It traces the effects and consequences of the European “Invasion of America,” analyzes changes in and among native cultures in response to the arrival of Europeans, as well as native responses, resistance, and accommodation to European colonization.  We will examine the role of Native Americans as players in the intercultural, imperial politics of the Colonial Period, their    involvement in the American Revolution, and their response to the westward expansion of   Anglo-American settlement in the decades after the American Revolution.  We also will explore the historical background of the problems, issues, and challenges facing Indians in contemporary American society, and, in outline, the challenges posed to native peoples by Settler Colonialism. We will discuss the genocide that Indigenous peoples experienced and survived.          

Participation: In my view participation is more than attendance. I expect you to arrive at each class meeting with the readings completed and that you will be ready to discuss what you hare read. This is not a lecture course, and your contribution to our discussions is an important part of the learning experience. Though participation is more than attendance, attendance is critically important.   As you will see from the attached grading agreement, after four unexcused absences you will not be able to earn any grade higher than a D for the course. If, for some reason, you are unable to attend a class, please let me know in advance.

            Writing Assignments:  On two occasions over the semester, I will read your journals.You will write each week on short topics I assign you, but also on current events and on  any outside reading you choose to do.  I will provide you with these writing prompts in class.

I will also assign two short take home writing assignments, of no more than 1500 words in length. I will pose for you a number of broad questions that will force you to consider widely what you have read to that point in the semester, develop an argument and an effective answer, and to present that answer in writing with grace and style. 

With any of these assignments, I encourage you to let me know if you have any questions.  You should be clear on what I expect of you before you complete an assignment. Please use office hours, and if you cannot make these make an appointment to see me. I want to encourage you to ask for assistance and advice with your assignments.

I will write extensive comments in your journals and essays.  I will also make comments on these papers about your class participation.  I will ask you challenging questions, offer what I hope you will view as constructive criticism, and encourage you to push yourself as a writer and a thinker. But I will not give you grades, in the traditional sense, on this work.

I want you to benefit from this course. On the date of our first class meeting, we will discuss the standards for the class.  You and I will work together to arrive at a set of expectations for the sort of work that will earn a specific grade.   In your final journal, and in individual meetings or phone calls scheduled during Finals Week, we will discuss how well you think you did in meeting the agreed upon standards, and what your grade for the course ought to be. 

Discussion Schedule

28 August        Introduction to the Course

Reading:  Oberg and Olsen-Harbich, Native America, Introduction, Chapter One.

30 August        The Columbian Encounter                                                                

Reading: Oberg and Olsen-Harbich, Native America, 23-32; Columbus’s Letter to Ferdinand and Isabella, 1493; The Requerimiento;

Also, have a look at the Re-Envisioning Greater Cahokia Story Map. Students interested in Native American languages might look briefly at the materials placed online by the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, Rhode Island.  

6 September    When Indians Discovered Europe

Reading: Harriot, Brief and True Report  and John White Paintings of Algonquians on the Outer Banks.            

11 September  The Shatter Zone

Reading: Oberg and Olsen-Harbich, Native America, 33-44;  Some images from John Smith’s Generall Historie are available here; Take a good look at John Smith’s Map of Virginia as well. Also, read the poem from Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony  available here. For students who have the time and some familiarity with Disney’s “Pocahontas,” I encourage you to take a look at “Missing Mataoka,” which includes an alternative audio track to be played as you watch the Disney film.  Take a few minutes to read John Rolfe’s letter to Sir Thomas Dale, justifying his decision to marry Pocahontas.

13 September  The Shatter Zone, Continued.                                        Reading: Oberg and Olsen Harbich, Native America, 49-59; Treaty of Middle Plantation (1677). Please read as much as you can of John Eliot’s Tears of Repentance, a history of his efforts to bring Christianity to Indigenous peoples in southern New England.

18 September The Iroquois League and Confederacy. 

Reading: Oberg and Olsen-Harbich, Native American, 44-49, 59-79;Daniel K. Richter, “War and Culture: The Iroquois Experience,” William and Mary Quarterly, 40 (October 1983), 528-559 (Please locate this article on JSTOR, download a copy of it, and makes sure you have a copy with you on your computer for our discussion. If you are unfamiliar with JSTOR, please ask for assistance. Look on the library webpage and click on databases). One of the most important primary sources used by Professor Richter in this well known essay was a collection of writings by French Missionaries to New France known as The Jesuit Relations.  You may follow this link to the Relations. I would like you to check Professor Richter’s sources occasionally, and look at how he uses his evidence.

20 September Life Behind the Frontier

Reading: Oberg and Olsen-Harbich, Native America, 80-98; Samson Occom, “Short Narrative;” “The Confession of Samuel Ashbo of Mohegan” and Temperance Hannibal’s Narrative, dated 7 February 1754. 

25 September  Native Americans and the Wars of the Eighteenth Century                 Reading: Oberg and Olsen-Harbich, Native America, 98-109; Proclamation of 1763.

27 September  The American Revolution Reading: Oberg and Olsen-Harbich, Native America, 110-129; Michael Oberg, “What’s So Great About the American Revolution?” and “No Mercy.”

2 October        What Do We Make of the Revolution and Native Americans?                        Reading:  Jeffrey Ostler, “’To Extirpate the Indians’: An Indigenous Consciousness  of Genocide in the Ohio Valley and Lower Great Lakes, 1750s-1810,” William and  Mary Quarterly, 72 (October 2015), 587-622 (JSTOR)

4 October        Indians and the New American Empire               Prophets of the Republic                       Reading: Oberg and Olsen-Harbich, Native America, pp. 129-157; Prucha, Documents no. 1-21.

11 October    Native Peoples and Long Knives                                Reading:  David A. Silverman, “The Curse of God: An Idea and its Origins among the Indians of New York’s Revolutionary Frontier,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser. 66 (2009): 495-534 (JSTOR).

First Paper Due

16 October      The Mechanics of Dispossession: Or, How Chenussio Became Geneseo               Reading: Oberg and Olsen-Harbich, Native America, 157-161; Prucha, Documents, Document no. 27, 29-34, 36-38; 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua; 1797 Treaty of Big Tree; Oberg, “The Treaty of Big Tree: Let’s Follow the Money”; and “Chenussio: The Indigenous History of Livingston County.”

18 October      The Removal Crisis                                                                   Reading: Oberg and Olsen-Harbich, Native America, pp. 162-174; Prucha, Documents, 39-45, 50.

                        First Journal Due

23 October      The Indians’ West                                                               Reading: Oberg and Olsen-Harbich, Native America, 175-190; Calloway, Hearts, Introduction, Chapters 1-4.

25 October      The Indians’ West, Continued                                        Reading: Oberg and Olsen-Harbich, Native America, pp. 190-204; Prucha, Documents, nos., 51-66; Calloway, Hearts, Chapter 5; Angela Cavender Wilson (Waziyatawin), “Grandmother to Granddaughter: Generations of Oral History in a Dakota Family,” 20 (Winter 1996), 7-13 (JSTOR).

30 October      The Plains Wars: Concentration and Enforcement    Reading: Oberg and Olsen-Harbich, Native America, 204-214; Prucha, Documents, 67-81, 83-85; Calloway, Hearts, Chapters 6-8.

1  November   Reformers and the Indian Problem                                Reading: Oberg and Olsen-Harbich, Native America, pp. 215-227; Prucha, Documents, no. 82, 97-98, 101-102, 104, 124; Hoxie, Talking Back, Introduction; Calloway, Hearts, Chapters 9-10.

6 November    Wounded Knee Reading: Black Elk Speaks, (excerpt, available here); And this website based on Historian Justin Gage’s We Do Not Want the Gates Closed Between Us. (Take some time to understand Gage’s argument about the Ghost Dance movement and its consequences.

8 November    The Nation’s Wards                                                                                  Reading: Oberg and Olsen-Harbich, Native America, 227-247, Prucha, Documents, nos., 105-112, 117-118, 120-123, 125-129, 132-134, 137; Calloway, Hearts, Chapters 11-12; Hoxie, Talking Back, Ch. 1-3.

13 November  The Boarding School Experience                       Reading: The Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center

15 November  The Search for American Indian Identity                    Reading: Oberg and Olsen-Harbich, Native America, pp. 247-263; Prucha, Documents, nos. 136, 138-144; Hoxie, Talking Back, Chapters 4-7, Afterword.

20 November  From Termination to Self-Determination                 Reading: Oberg and Olsen-Harbich, Native America, pp. 263–275; Prucha, Documents, nos. 145, 147-149, 151-160, 162-163

27 November  The War on Native American Families. Reading: Magaret Jacobs, “Remembering the ‘Forgotten Child’: The American Indian Child Welfare Crisis of the 1960s and 1970s,” American Indian Quarterly, 37 (Spring 2013), 136-159; Oberg, “Texas is Making Me Crazy.”

29 November  The Struggle for Sovereignty:  1978                                        Reading: Prucha, Documents, nos. 167, 169-187; Oberg and Olsen-Harbich, Native America, 275-284;

4 December    Native America in the Era of Self-Determination Reading: Oberg, Native America, Chapter 10; Prucha, 189-190, 201, 204, 207, 210-211.

Second Journal Due

6 December    Native Nations and the Supreme Court in the 21st Century Reading:  McGirt v. Oklahoma (2020); Halland v. Brackeen (2023) (read Gorsuch’s concurrence and Thomas dissent).

11 December  Final Class Meeting: Where Do We Go From Here? Reading: Oberg, “The Trump Administration and American Indian Policy: A Post-Mortem” and Michael Oberg and Joel Helfrich, “Why Deb Haaland Matters.”

14 December  Final Writing Assignment Due, 8:00AM

18 December Meetings to Discuss Final Grades