Category Archives: Discovery and Exploration

I read Joe Biden’s Columbus Day Proclamation So You Don’t Have To

There were two proclamations issued by the President last week.

Believe it or not, on October 8th, Joe Biden became the first American President to recognize Indigenous Peoples’ Day. The American nation, his proclamation read, “celebrates the invaluable contributions and resilience of Indigenous peoples, recognizes their inherent sovereignty, and commits to honoring the Federal Government’s trust and treaty obligations to Tribal Nations.”

That is quite a statement, and it is quite a change from the proclamations the previous president issued each year from 2017 until 2020. The United States, Biden said, has never lived up to the “promise of equality and opportunity” on which it was founded. “That is especially true when it comes to upholding the rights and dignity of the Indigenous people who were here long before colonization of the Americas began.” Biden acknowledged that “for generations, Federal policies systematically sought to assimilate and displace Native peoples and eradicate Native cultures.”

It is a stunning change from the past four years. It is a stunning contrast to a Republican Party that not only embraces Columbus Day, but has done all it can to stir up racist resentments tied to interpretations of the nation’s history: from its defense of Confederate monuments, to its denunciation of “Socialist” college professors, to its anger about the 1619 Project, and to its entirely fabricated outrage over the supposed teaching of Critical Race Theory in American classrooms.

The Federal Government, Biden wrote, “has a solemn obligation to lift up and invest in the future of Indigenous people and empower Tribal Nations to govern their own communities and make their own decisions.” While the contemporary Republican party seeks to silence any discussion critical of the nation’s conduct in the past, Biden said that we, as a nation, “must never forget the centuries-long campaign of violence, displacement, assimilation, and terror wrought upon Native communities and Tribal Nations throughout our country.”

He’s right, of course. We must not only never forget, but we must, as a nation, act to set things right. I have read probably every thing every president has publicly said about Indigenous peoples and this statement, whatever its limitations, is utterly unprecedented.

Biden issued another proclamation on the 8th of October. Like other presidents before him, he issued a Columbus Day proclamation. It would have been foolish for him not to have done so. He pointed out correctly, by implication, that Columbus did not set foot in North America. Indeed, after a ten-week journey, he landed “on the shores of the Bahamas,” making him “the first of many Italian explorers to arrive in what would later become known as the Americas.”

Like other presidents before him, Biden acknowledged and celebrated the contributions of Italian-Americans to American culture and history. But then the proclamation changed its tone, and it veered into territory that will surely anger those who celebrate the mythical heroic Columbus.

In the very next paragraph, Biden said that “we also acknowledge the painful history of wrongs and atrocities that many European explorers inflicted on Tribal Nations and Indigenous communities.” With a statement that seems incredible when it placed in contrast to what we have seen over the past few years, Biden said that “it is a measure of our greatness as a Nation that we do not seek to bury these shameful episodes of our past–that we face them honestly, we bring them to light, and we do all we can to address them.” What a slap in the face for those racists and demagogues who feel any criticism of the nation’s history is unpatriotic. The movement which Columbus spearheaded, Biden said, “ushered in a wave of devastation: violence perpetrated against Native communities, displacement and theft of Tribal homelands, the introduction and spread of disease, and more.” While celebrating the contributions of Italians and Italian-Americans, he also pledged to recognize “this painful past and recommit ourselves to investing in Native communities, upholding our solemn and sacred commitments to Tribal sovereignty, and pursuing a brighter future centered on dignity, respect, justice, and opportunity for all people.”

Wow.

Biden has been such a careful moderate during the short nine months he has been in office. Surely his Columbus Day Proclamation will enrage many conservative Italian Americans. He says less about Italy, Italians, and Italian-Americans in his proclamations, after all, than he did about the fundamental violence of discovery.

I wish Biden would be more aggressive as President in pursuing the policies on which he ran. Still, time and again, and especially in contrast to his predecessor, Biden has shown how easy it is to be decent and fair. I understand that these proclamations are just words. They will mean more, of course, if followed by concrete action. But they are a significant break from the past nonetheless.

We May Be Making Too Much of the Doctrine of Discovery

Late last month, Douglas J. Lucia, the Catholic bishop of the Diocese of Syracuse, expressed the hope that he might meet with the pope to discuss the 15th-century papal donation granting the Catholic powers the right to colonize the Americas. He wanted to obtain “a public acknowledgment from the Holy Father of the harm these [papal] bulls have done to the Indigenous population.”

Bishop Lucia’s announcement was greeted favorably. Doing away with the papal bulls would be an important symbolic gesture. But that’s all it is. The Catholic Church has destroyed the lives of millions of Indian people and justified the destruction of many, many more. Lucia’s action does not begin to address the historic and continuing damage his church has caused Indigenous peoples across the American continents, and across parts of seven different centuries.

Though significant, the papal bulls were hardly the worst crime committed by agents acting in the name of the Catholic Church, and we’re making too much of the resulting “Discovery Doctrine.” The French who settled what came to be known as Canada, after all, did not care what the Pope told the Iberians. The English, who described the Pope as the “Anti-Christ” and the “Scarlet Whore of Babylon,” could not have cared less what he told Spanish and Portuguese monarchs. The English, in fact, were remarkably unintellectual about colonization, a process they viewed as a fait accompli, the only justification needed that it might make them rich and provide an opportunity to stick it to their abundant Catholic enemies. The entire history of European colonization in the Americans involved Europeans ignoring each other’s New World claims. Were there no papal donation, there is little reason to believe that English and French colonization would have followed a different course. The most enlightened English colonizers believed that Indigenous peoples just might have the capacity to abandon their savagery and become like them. They were often shouted down by other colonists who saw Indigenous peoples as “errors of nature, of inhumane birth/ the very dregs, garbage, and spawne of the earth.” People with beliefs like that could kill Indians and dispossess them with a staggering brutality.

If we want to understand the Indigenous past, we should spend less time talking about what white people did or did not do and focus instead on the native peoples who confronted their would-be colonizers. What the pope said did not matter to them one bit, and let’s not underestimate the longevity of Indigenous power on this continent. The Jesuits who first attempted to plant a mission at Onondaga Lake in the 1650s, for example, despite their high hopes, realized too late that they served merely as hostages who insulated the Onondagas from French assault and attracted Catholic Wendats to enter the Longhouse through its smoke hole and settle under the Tree of Peace at Onondaga. When the Jesuits were no longer useful, they realized their lives were in danger. They constructed the boats they used to flee in the one place they knew Onondagas would never see them: inside of their church. Three centuries after the papal donation, Haudenosaunee peoples, including Onondagas, entered into a treaty at Canandaigua that recognized their right to the “free use and enjoyment” of their lands, over which the United States neither claimed or exercised any real power at all.

Though Chief Justice John Marshall’s racist opinion in Johnson v. McIntosh in 1823 made use of what has come to be known as the “discovery doctrine” in a flawed and lazy effort to bring some order to a chaotic process characterized by viciousness, avarice and deceit, and though his toxic ruling has had a devastating effect on the field of American Indian law since 1823, his sloppy historical work was a justification for dispossession, and not its cause.

And from the Pueblos sexually mutilated on the order of Franciscan priests in the seventeenth century, to those Indigenous Californians enslaved in missions founded by the sainted Father Junipero Serra, to the children who have died in the century past in Canadian residential schools, and the ongoing occupation of the sacred site at Mount Graham, the sins of the church in which I was raised are great.

Indigenous peoples have faced efforts to take their souls, steal their lands, burn their homes and eradicate their culture. Catholics and other Christians have for much of their history sanctioned and engaged in these genocidal policies. But native peoples always resisted. Maybe Bishop Lucia deserves praise for calling out the historic conduct of the Catholic Church. But for an adequate penance it is going to take much more than the empty symbolism of repealing an ineffective legal doctrine that nobody in early North America during the first three and a half centuries of European colonization cared about at all.

This essay appeared originally in the Syracuse.com on July 19, 2021.

I’m So Bored with the Lost Colonists

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.

I Read Donald Trump’s Columbus Day Proclamation So You Don’t Have To, 2019 Edition

And it is pretty much what you would expect from a President who is watching as his associates are arrested, and as impeachment comes ever closer. Whichever flunky in the White House the Chief of Staff tasked with writing this year’s proclamation merely took last year’s work, changed a few words here and there, added some details and deleted others, and probably cranked it out in five minutes.

After “a perilous, two-month journey across the treacherous Atlantic Ocean,” the Proclamation reads, Columbus came ashore in the Bahamas. His voyage “ushered in the Age of Exploration, changing the course of history and setting the foundation for the development of our Nation.” Columbus was courageous and skilled, and his “drive for discovery” rests “at the core of the American spirit.”

Columbus was a proud citizen of Genoa, the proclamation continues, and Columbus Day provides “an appropriate opportunity to recognize the more than 16 million Americans who claim Italian heritage and to carry forth the legacy of generations of Italian Americans who helped shape our nation.”

As we have come to expect from this President, there is no reference in the brief proclamation to the millions of native peoples whose worlds were transformed in dark and frightening ways by the arrival of Europeans, and who became victims of an American genocide. I have written at length about the costs of the Columbian encounter, and there is no reason to repeat all that here. We cannot be surprised that this blighted administration is incapable of producing a proclamation that at least hints that there were enormous human cost accompanying the events this document celebrates.

No, in this proclamation the President states that

“the bold legacy of Columbus and his crew spun a thread that weaves through the extensive history of Americans who have pushed the boundaries of exploration. On Columbus Day, we draw inspiration from this intrepid pioneer’s spirit of adventure. We also affirm our commitment to continuing our quest to discover and better understand the wonders of our Nation, the world, and beyond.”

The nightmare that has been much of your history, the President may as well have said, will continue.

You Have No Excuse for Ignoring Indigenous People’s Day

If we replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples’ Day, are we guilty of engaging in partisan “revisionist” history?  Are we doing something that is unsavory, disrespectful, or mean?  American history, of course, is being revised all the time in scholarship, but also in the streets, in public spaces, and at sites of commemoration. A Christopher Columbus statue in Central Park with bloody hands: like a torn-down Confederate monument, or the Oñate monument’s missing foot, these acts of vandalism are, at some level, commentaries and rebuttals to interpretations of the American past that individuals and groups find objectionable.

            Several years ago I had an opportunity to speak about Indigenous Peoples’ Day at Lasell College, just outside of Boston.  The students had been asked to read the opening sections of Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States and Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen’s Patriot’s History of the United States. As I told the students at Lasell, I am a historian.  I teach and write about Native American history and Early American history, so as part of my daily job I try to keep abreast of the scholarship on Columbus, and what historians have been saying about the so-called “Columbian Encounter” or “Columbian Exchange,” or, more generally, “First Contact” between natives and newcomers. I explained that scholars who work in this field do not generally bother with Zinn’s People’s History or Schweikart’s Patriot’s History. Not when we are doing our own research and teaching.  There is so much better material written by historians who have actually gone back to the primary sources. Both of the books are highly partisan. Both allowed their politics to shape the answers to the questions they posed, a cardinal sin for historians. Both are simplistic, at times and in places poorly tuned to ambivalence and nuance, unwilling to explore fully the exceptions to their rules. But both of them, as well, have been very widely read.

            Zinn’s People’s History is on that short list of deeply flawed books that has been, on the basis of its strengths, highly influential among American historians in teaching them that the history of ordinary working Americans matters. Zinn, of course, wrote with an agenda.  That agenda is clear and present in the book’s title.  He wanted to tell the story of ordinary Americans in the making of their nation’s history.  He wanted to shift the story away from the elites, where it had been focused for so long, towards working people, women, the enslaved, and Native Americans.  His goal was to write an inclusive history that challenged those comforting myths that have for so long dominated that narrative:  a democratic history that was anything but celebratory. He wanted to show that what America as a nation has accomplished came at the expense of large numbers of people; and because the contributions of those people had traditionally been neglected, that those in power sometimes, indeed quite often, acted in their own interests and used their power to justify occasional acts of extraordinary cruelty, exploitation, and violence.  Love of one’s country cannot occur without an honest look at the past.  Ordinary people were not merely acted upon.  Their resistance and their protests and their movements shaped much of American history.  Ordinary, non-elite people were forces in history.

            These are laudable goals, and Zinn constructed at times a powerful story that could carry his readers along, despite his occasional tendency to reason beyond what his evidence would bear.  Some of his shots misfired, but it is difficult still to overstate how refreshing and liberating this approach to the nation’s past was, certainly to my own generation of historians.

            Schweikart and Allen, on the other hand, wrote with chips on their shoulders.  They call out Zinn for his “Marxism” in their opening paragraph, even if Zinn said different things about his ideology at different points in his career, and they then proceed to bash one straw man after another in their attempt to protect the nation from “academics” who too often say, according to Schweikert and Allen, “my country, always wrong.”

You hear this a lot in my line of work. I think back to President Trump’s unhinged address at the United Nations General Assembly in 2019. The media and academic institutions, he said, “push flat out assaults on our histories, traditions, and values.”  College professors, even though they cannot persuade their students to do the reading, or put away their cell phones, somehow can indoctrinate them with socialist principles.  The President here is repeating a bald-faced lie, a willful and complete mischaracterization of the historical profession carried out for partisan purposes that is so irresponsible it is going to get someone hurt.  If for Zinn, the purpose of history is to look critically at the American past, to question long-cherished truths, and dispel pernicious myths, for Schweikart and Allen, its purpose is to instill patriotism.  Their goal is to protect the stories that have, in their view, been unjustly assailed by Zinn, and by a generation of historians since Zinn first wrote.

            This sort of logic can have devastating consequences for public policy.  If you saw the Pew Research poll in August of 2019, the results are troubling. According to the data, the percentage of Republicans who see value in a college education fell from 53% in 2012 to just 23% in the most recent survey. Nearly 80% of Republicans believe higher education is headed in the wrong direction because of professors bringing their political and social views into the classroom. Republicans are far more likely than Democrats (73% to 56%) to assert that the problem of students not receiving skills they need to succeed in the workplace is a major reason why higher education is headed in the wrong direction. And three-quarters of Republican respondents felt that rampant political correctness is a significant problem in American higher education.

            So A Patriot’s History, they say.  That’s what is needed.  But what’s the opposite of a Patriot? A traitor, someone who is ashamed of their country, or disloyal, or dangerous.  You have seen in recent months where rhetoric like this leads.  From “Send her Back!” to “Blood and Soil!” to caged children, the dead in a Texas Walmart killed by an armed racist who hated Mexicans, this sort of rhetoric can escalate quickly and violently.

            History is such a fraught subject—it always has been, but now, especially so. It matters. And the work historians do is often implicated in assaults on what makes this country great, a menace to what the Boston Review called the “fragile patriotism of the American Conservative.” If only we would stop harping on the bad stuff.

            So let me give you a definition: for those of us who are historians for our living, history is the study of continuity and change, measured across time and space, in peoples, institutions, and cultures. It is not a science, but it is a discipline.  When we do our work properly, we ask questions about the past, we dig like badgers for the evidence we need to answer these questions, examine and assess this evidence with our eyes, ears, and hearts open, and then try to present our answers with a measure of grace and style.  We must be truthful, honest, always, when it comes to this evidence. We want to persuade you that our answer is right, our thesis correct, and our questions important. Sometimes we succeed. Sometimes we fail. The measure of this must be the quality of the evidence and the strength of our reasoning.

            As a result, history can be a brutal business.  We question everything. We are not in the business of telling you want you want to hear.  History can provide us with an explanation for what happened, why, and the difference it made, but it seldom provides us with comfort, and solace, and your cherished myths will find no shelter with us around. It can be dark and violent and, at times, filled with heroism and bravery indeed, but there is also deceit and evil.  When the great ancient Greek historian Thucydides wrote in his history of the Peloponnesian War, that “war is a violent teacher,” it for him was not a comforting story at all, but one of the darkest, most brutal depictions of human nature to appear in the western tradition.

            And about those questions that historians ask.  When I was taught long ago how to be a historian in my research methods class at California State University at Long Beach, my professor emphasized the importance of objectivity.  Several years later, one of the professors that I studied with at Syracuse wrote at length about the historic emergence of objectivity as a value in historical scholarship. Many of those who criticize our work may raise objections that we are biased, and driven by our agendas to predetermined outcomes, that we lack objectivity.  Bias and prejudice and ideology can indeed cause the undisciplined to ask loaded or bad questions, or to read the evidence in a distorted manner, to make it say things that it does not say.  That is bad history.  But our preconceptions, as well, which we can think of as the lenses through which we look at the world, color our perceptions of what is good and bad, right and wrong.

            The point I would like to make is that all historical writing, whether it is the essay assigned you by teacher or professor, or a term paper, or a doctoral dissertation or a book, is an attempt to answer a question.  And whether we are on the right or the left, the questions that present themselves to us as historians—that strike us as important, and worth answering, and worth investing all the time, travel, expense and energy to answer, come to us from our experiences in life, and in the archives, from our hard work, and, quite often, from our sense that all is not well. That is as true for Zinn as it is for Schweikart and Allen.

            My experience has been that if you read history long enough, eventually you will feel regret.  Asking why a certain reality is ours can lead the curious mind to wonder if indeed other realities were possible.  And if other possibilities existed, why did they not come to be? Who benefited from this particular outcome, and what might they have had to lose through other outcomes?  And if one of these possible outcomes seems superior to our current state of affairs, how do we get there, or why did we not get there?  Questions, you see?  History, this process of asking about continuity and change across time and space, can make clear the yawning gap between the way things are and the way things might have been.

            If history can help us identify alternative paths, how can we responsibly look away?  To ask, “Why This?” leads easily to “why not that?”

            Doing history well forces us to always be willing to reconsider our assumptions, and sometimes it involves so profound a reassessment that it becomes difficult to abide, for example, the continued presence of statues or monuments commemorating a particular part of the past.  These statutes—these monuments—are texts, right? They make a claim, state an assertion about the past.  They argue for the significance of this, or that, or another person, place, or thing. They offer an interpretation, and the assumptions and the evidence behind those assertions—it is our job as citizens and scholars to question them. Sometimes these monuments, these interpretations, are based on myth more than history.

            What’s the difference? Myths are stories that are not completely false, but that we accept and repeat anyways because of their explanatory power.  They explain what we claim to stand for, what we believe in, why we fear what we fear, who we are and how we came to be. 

And so, at last, we come to Christopher Columbus, who is one of these mythical figures. He is perhaps better known as a symbol than for what and who he actually was.  Take, for instance, President Trump’s proclamation commemorating Columbus Day in October of 2018. It is routine for Presidents to make a proclamation on Columbus Day.  In 1492, the President claimed, “Columbus and his mighty three-ship fleet…first spotted the Americas. His historic achievement ushered in the age of discovery that expanded our knowledge of the world.”  Columbus’s “daring journey,” the President continued,

marked the beginning of centuries of transatlantic exploration that transformed the Western Hemisphere. On Columbus Day, we commemorate the achievements of this skilled Italian explorer and recognize his courage, will power, and ambition — all values we cherish as Americans.

Columbus’s spirit of determination and adventure has provided inspiration to generations of Americans. On Columbus Day, we honor his remarkable accomplishments as a navigator, and celebrate his voyage into the unknown expanse of the Atlantic Ocean. His expedition formed the initial bond between Europe and the Americas, and changed the world forever. Today, in that spirit, we continue to seek new horizons for greater opportunity and further discovery on land, in sea, and in space.

Although Spain sponsored his voyage, Columbus was, in fact, a proud citizen of the Italian City of Genoa. As we celebrate the tremendous strides our Nation has made since his arrival, we acknowledge the important contributions of Italian Americans to our country’s culture, business, and civic life. We are also thankful for our relationship with Italy, a great ally that shares our strong, unwavering commitment to peace and prosperity.

There is nothing in this statement that is glaringly incorrect, as far as it goes.  But it is selective, as I will point out, and incomplete. Still, these sentiments are widespread. Let me give you another example: A guy named Alejandro Bermudez wrote an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal denouncing efforts at Notre Dame University to cover up murals depicting scenes of Columbus.  Politically correct students, in his view, were determined to erase one of the great figures in the history of Europe and the Americas. Bermudez said that Columbus was “ahead of his time.” Native peoples lived lives that were solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, Bermudez suggested, and they practiced human sacrifice. “In bringing the first of many missionaries who showed millions of people the path to salvation,” he wrote, Columbus helped put an end to this barbarism.

The Columbus Day holiday, of course, has its own history. It found its origins in the Italian-American community. Columbus, from Genoa, sailed in the service of Ferdinand and Isabella, the authors of the Spanish Reconquista, and in 1492 he “discovered” America. He was, his advocates claim, an Italian and an American hero. The holiday in his honor asserted that Italians, themselves victims of bigotry and discrimination, were Americans, too.  And so it goes. A long-time conservative talk show host on AM Radio in Rochester, New York, where I live asserted via tweet on Columbus Day that “other than the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the discovery of the Americas by Columbus was the most important event in human history.”

There is a defensiveness in all of this, and in Schweikart and Allen’s book as well. That is because a growing number of people have argued that there is nothing edifying in the story of Columbus, save for the native peoples who at times and places survived the carnage. It is a story rife with avarice, violence, and bigotry. So we see a movement with scholars playing a role, writing polemical works like Kirkpatrick Sale’s The Conquest of Paradise or David Stannard’s American Holocaust, but led largely by indigenous peoples throughout the Americas, calling on all of us to reconsider the Columbus holiday. It is worth pointing out that there was not one mention in the President’s proclamation, or in similar statements by others, of the catastrophe that followed in the wake of discovery.

 In his 2017 proclamation Trump said that “the permanent arrival of Europeans to the Americas was a transformative event that undeniably and fundamentally changed the course of human history and set the stage for the development of our great Nation. Therefore, on Columbus Day, we honor the skilled navigator and man of faith, whose courageous feat brought together continents and has inspired countless others to pursue their dreams and convictions — even in the face of extreme doubt and tremendous adversity.”  Not one mention of native peoples.  Many of us see that as a problem because native peoples were not incidental to this story, and that, in fact, one cannot arrive at a full understanding of the Columbian encounter, and indeed American history, without assessing its consequences for native peoples.  We are witnessing a reaction against the very notion that native peoples have a place in this story that is worth remembering and retelling.

 So the Columbus Day holiday is under siege. He discovered nothing, some of his critics point out, for the “New World” he stumbled across in search of the riches of Cathay was already occupied by millions of people. The 500th anniversary of Columbus’s voyages in 1992 reawakened interest in the explorer and his actions in the New World, and that attention did not cast Columbus in a good light.  Recently, a growing number of colleges and municipalities across the country have recognized Indigenous Peoples’ Day, to be held on the federal Columbus Day holiday. 

Now, an Italian-American friend of mine asked me once why any one of the other 364 days of the year could not be chosen for Indigenous Peoples Day.  In his view, the movement to obtain recognition for Indigenous Peoples’ Day generated conflict where none was needed, and caused offense to Italian-Americans. I do understand this.  Similar arguments were raised in this town, when a petition was presented to recognize Indigenous Peoples’ Day. The answer given by its proponents is that the Columbus Day holiday many native people now view as a day for mourning the victims of an American holocaust and 500 years of genocide.

The Columbian Encounter is the beginning of a horror story for the native peoples of the Americas, North, South, and Central, as well as the indigenous population of the Caribbean, who were quickly destroyed as autonomous peoples by the Spanish newcomers.  Columbus, his supporters might argue, gets too much of the blame.  He did nothing to native peoples in North America because he never set foot on the North American continent.  This much is true, but Columbus has become, and perhaps always has been, a symbol standing in for the fundamental violence of discovery. For some he is a symbol of heroism and bravery, for others a symbol of racism and genocide.

            Long ago I taught at a one-day NEH gathering on the Blackfeet Reservation way up in northwestern Montana.  The subject was children’s literature that treated in different ways the history of America’s native peoples.  One of the books was Michael Dorris’s Morning Girl (1992), written by a Native American novelist.  The story followed Morning Girl and her brother Star Boy, indigenous children playing and exploring in the “Pre-Columbian” Caribbean.  It is a story that is wise and gentle. But at its close, it takes a darker turn.  Morning Girl swims out to see a strange sight approaching the beach.

Dorris ends the story with a lengthy excerpt from Columbus’s journal:

In order that they would be friendly to us — because I recognized that they were people who would be better freed and converted to our Holy Faith by love than by force — to some of them I gave red caps, and glass beads which they put on their chests, and many other things of small value, in which they took so much pleasure and became so much our friends that it was a marvel. Later they came swimming to the ships’ launches where we were and brought us parrots and cotton thread in balls and javelins and many other things, and they traded them to us for other things which we gave them, such as small glass beads and bells. In sum, they took everything and gave of what they had very willingly. But it seemed to me that they were a people very poor in everything. All of them go around as naked as their mothers bore them; and the women also, although I did not see more than one quite young girl. And all those that I saw were young people, for none did I see of more than 30 years of age. They are very well formed, with handsome bodies and good faces. Their hair coarse — almost like the tail of a horse-and short. They wear their hair down over their eyebrows except for a little in the back which they wear long and never cut. Some of them paint themselves with black, and they are of the color of the Canarians, neither black nor white; and some of them paint themselves with white, and some of them with red, and some of them with whatever they find. And some of them paint their faces, and some of them the whole body, and some of them only the eyes, and some of them only the nose. They do not carry arms nor are they acquainted with them, because I showed them swords and they took them by the edge and through ignorance cut themselves. They have no iron.

Their javelins are shafts without iron and some of them have at the end a fish tooth…. All of them alike are of good-sized stature and carry themselves well. I saw some who had marks of wounds on their bodies and I made signs to them asking what they were; and they showed me how people from other islands nearby came there and tried to take them, and how they defended themselves; and I believed and believe that — they come here from tierrafirme to take them captive. They should be good and intelligent servants, for I see that they say very quickly everything that is said to them; and I believe that they would become Christians very easily, for it seemed to me that they had no religion. Our Lord pleasing, at the time of my departure I will take six of them from here to Your Highnesses in order that they may learn to speak…

Now, when you look at this passage, what do you see?

Morning Girl, then, is the story of that child who Columbus saw as his men approached landfall in October of 1492, and whose gentleness and innocence led the wayward Admiral to conclude that her people would make good servants.

We spent quite a bit of time that morning discussing Dorris’s book.  The Native American teachers from Blackfeet felt very differently about the book than did some of the non-native teachers.  The Blackfeet teachers all agreed that if they were to use Morning Girl in class, they would cut out that last piece.  They would have physically removed the last page from the book.  Too painful, and too traumatic for the children who might read it, they thought.  In Fourteen-Hundred and Ninety-Two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue…and contemplated how indigenous children might make good slaves.

            Columbus was a brilliant navigator.  He discovered routes across the Atlantic that blazed the trail for subsequent colonization of the Americas.  No question. But there is more to this story.  Columbus sought the riches of Cathay, of course. He sought gold and spices and the exotic riches European explorers knew could be found in the Orient. Zinn makes a big deal in the opening pages of his book about Columbus’s greed.  But Columbus found little of value, and the expense of the expeditions pushed Columbus to find some other commodity. The consequences were horrifying. While the scholars who have looked at the question disagree, at times intensely, over the size of the population of the Americas and the Caribbean before Europeans arrived, there is little doubt as to what happened afterwards.  By the 1550s, a mere sixty years after Columbus arrived and described those docile native peoples in the Caribbean, they had ceased to exist as a people, and many Caribbean Islands became eerie, uninhabited paradises.

            To be fair, Columbus and his supporters did not set out to initiate a new world genocide.  They wanted empire. They wanted to extend the reach of Christendom. They wanted wealth.  They extended the Reconquista that drove the forces of Islam out of the Iberian Peninsula outwards across the Atlantic.But the findings were paltry. Slavery offered a critical solution of funding this “enterprise of the Indies.”  In February of 1495, Columbus sent 550 Indians from Española crammed into four ships.  These he chose out of the 1600 brought to the docks because they were “the best males and females.” On the passage home, about 200 of them died, their bodies tossed into the sea.  Those who survived arrived in Spain in a weakened state. In effect, Columbus inaugurated the Middle Passage, complete with the overcrowding and high mortality rates associated with African slavery.

            His enslaving plans reached their peak in 1495-1496.  “Under the protection of the Holy Trinity, from here [his new world] we can send all the slaves needed, and if the information that I possess is correct, we could sell four thousand slaves who will be worth at the very least twenty cuentos.”  The shipment of slaves on this scale would have required thirty to forty ships, a massive undertaking.  As Andres Resendnez has pointed out in his book  The Other Slavery, Columbus would have turned the new world into a slave exporting center, were it not for his monarch’s reluctance to enslave the people whose souls they hoped to save. But more potent than the King and queen’s opposition to a transatlantic trade in slaves was the growing number of colonists’ recognition that those native peoples were needed to harvest the New world’s riches, through labor systems like the encomienda, which came to resemble many of the elements of slavery.

If you read excerpts from Bartolome De Las Casas’s Devastation of the Indies–and if you are a student in a Native American history course treating this period you likely will–you can read about the sheer brutality of the Spanish conquistadors who followed Columbus.  Las Casas provides a first-hand account of the first modern genocide: Spanish ships able to sail homeward without need of navigational instruments because all they needed to do was follow the trail of floating corpses, enslaved Indians who died on the Atlantic crossing. Las Casas described how Spanish colonists could buy human flesh for their dogs, and how Spanish war dogs tore native peoples literally limb from limb.  Las Casas described the competition between conquistadors to see who could run through the most Indians with one thrust of the pike, and how Spaniards burned native peoples in groups of thirteen in honor of Jesus and the apostles, and bashed their children’s heads in by swinging them against the rocks.

Historians long have focused upon so-called “Virgin Soil Epidemics”, that took millions of indigenous lives, but there are problems in connecting these biological explanations with what the first-hand observers wrote. Las Casas, who arrived in 1502, said that greed was the reason that Christians “murdered on such a vast scale,” killing “anyone and everyone who has shown the slightest sign of resistance,” and “subjected all males to the harshest and most iniquitous and brutal slavery that man has ever devised for oppressing his fellow men, treating them, in fact, worse than animals.” It is true that Las Casas became famous for championing the humanity of native peoples, and he may have had a motive therefore to trump up these charges of brutality, but the same descriptions were given by other early observers.

And all this brutality, all the subjugation that occurred under the aegis of the Spanish encomienda system, exacerbated the consequences of epidemic diseases, which in places killed off 80% of the population. Brutality made native peoples less able to resist the onslaught of disease. Millions died.  They were not all killed by Columbus, but the deaths followed from processes of colonization he pioneered, with which he is so closely associated by both his critics and his champions.

So here’s the thing.  I really do not want to talk about Columbus. I am not terribly interested in the claims of those who support his colonizing ventures. Let me suggest an alternative way of looking at this period, one made more viable perhaps if we recast Columbus Day as Indigenous Peoples’ Day. We can focus on heroism and bravery, but that does not get us very far. We can focus on victimization and cruelty.  God knows, Columbus and his successors were violent and brutal and victimized many.  No one can look at the documents and question this reality. But to focus on victimization alone does a deep disservice to the history of native peoples.

            In my own work, to the extent that the sources permit, I try to tell the story of the first European explorers who came to North America from the Indians’ perspective, reading these sources against the grain, considering sources like oral tradition and archaeology that American historians a generation ago when I started out were reluctant to use.  What native peoples saw when they looked at these newcomers, their strategic calculations, how they fit the Europeans into their conceptual universe, these are questions that interest me.  If you look at the story of the French explorer Jacques Cartier, who sailed into the St. Lawrence River in the 1530s, or his Spanish contemporary Coronado who wandered throughout the American southwest, or Soto’s violent exercise in futility in the Southeast, or the Juan Pardo expedition, or Cabrillo’s ineffectual reconnaissance of the California coast, or even the Roanoke voyages of 1584-1590, you cannot help but see one consistent theme. It is so obvious in the surviving documents. What is clear in every account is the utter dependence of the newcomers upon the native peoples who cautiously welcomed them into their communities, cultivated them as military allies and trading partners, enlisted them in their struggles with their neighbors, and contemplated transforming them into kin.  When the newcomers wore out their welcomes in North America, their enterprises were doomed, their situation worse than desperate.  These European explorers discovered what they believe they discovered only because native peoples allowed them to do so.  And the effects of the visits by these European sojourners were remarkably short-lived, the consequences fleeting.  Even with De Soto, who many scholars long had blamed for spreading epidemic disease into the continent’s interior, we now know from the work of historians like Paul Kelton and anthropologists like Robbie Etheridge that his disastrous expedition had little long-term effect.  The wasting plagues came in the seventeenth century, not the sixteenth, a product of an Anglo-American trade in Native American slaves, the scope of which was vast and mind-boggling. Before roughly 1720, more Native American slaves were exported from the American colonies than African slaves imported

            Commemorating Indigenous Peoples’ Day in this way need not belittle or demean the western tradition.  What it does do is allow us to pay attention to the experience of those native peoples whose losses were Europeans’ gain, and who have endured and survived through five centuries of discrimination, dispossession, and slaughter. If, after all, any number of people in our nation’s history had had their way, native peoples would be gone: They would have been wiped out by warfare and epidemic and chronic disease; or they would have been “removed” to make way for the “settlers” who championed the rise of Andrew Jackson in the first few decades of the nineteenth century; or confined on tiny reservations until the missionaries and teachers and government farmers wiped away any trace of their identity as native peoples; or assimilated into the American body politic; or “terminated” in the middle decades of the twentieth century, with the reality of their native nations erased by congressional statute.  Indians were supposed to disappear. Viewed as unfit, native peoples were not supposed to survive. If any number of people had their way, Native American people would not be here to call for an Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

            A final point we need to discuss, one that many historians of this subject feel keenly. The reaction to Indigenous Peoples’ Day coming from the political right reflects the increasingly oft-expressed anger of white males at nearly any expression of grievance by people of color.  Protestors who assert that “Black Lives Matter, and who complain about the alacrity with which militarized police deploy violence against African Americans are dismissed as violent; the protests of principled men like Colin Kaepernick and other African-American NFL players is regarded as an assault on the flag, and a demonstration of a lack of patriotism, with no discussion whatsoever of the issues that generated those protests. Suggestions that monuments to racist Confederates be removed or revised are treated as an assault on white identity and southern heritage; and the recent New York Times “1619” series, which historians will tell you was entirely reasonable, is maligned by the right as “propaganda.”  Native peoples, meanwhile, are told to get over it.  The crimes you “allegedly” suffered took place long ago, and therefore the problems occurring in your communities are entirely your fault.  No attempts at truth and reconciliation as in Canada, no “Sorry Day” as in Australia.  Nope, just a bunch of people saying, at best, “Bummer, but we had nothing to do with that.”

I have been teaching and writing about Native American history for a long time, more than thirty years. Every day when I talk with my very good students, I realize that I still have so much to learn.  Every time I read new scholarship, I realize that there are so many more stories out there that we should tell.  I will be a student of this subject forever.

But one thing is so very clear to me. Racism towards Native Americans is a real thing.  The inequalities experienced by native communities are significant. The statistics do not lie.  History is a force in that story. Its presence is keenly felt and, for those who wish to see it, clearly visible. New York, for example, where I have lived for all but five of the last twenty-seven years, became the Empire State, through a systematic program of Iroquois dispossession. You could not have one without the other.

The transactions through which New York acquired Iroquois land happened a long time ago, but these were transactions that violated federal laws the United States lacked the power and perhaps the willingness to enforce.  These were not acts of nature. They were not inevitable. They were crimes. The Supreme Court has held that these illegal transactions occurred so long ago that nothing can be done to right these wrongs, but that does not mean that the rights retained by native peoples should be ignored, or their history dismissed.

New York’s native peoples have seen, through a long history, their homelands invaded.  They experienced waves of epidemic disease.  They faced dispossession, and then the effort to “remove” them to new homes in Arkansas, or Wisconsin, or the Indian Territory, and then to re-educate their children, and disable their governments.  Disease, warfare, dispossession, diaspora: the injuries occurred a long time ago, but their legacies remain.  And when native peoples and their allies suggest that we commemorate that history on a special day, one up to now associated with what they see as the symbol of a genocidal process against native peoples, their arguments are dismissed.

Columbus Day found its origins in discrimination against Italian-American immigrants. We were here from the beginning, Italian-Americans said, and we have as great a claim to this continent as any other group.  In celebrating the mythical Columbus, the holiday has seldom encouraged any significant and honest discussion of the consequences of the Columbian Encounter, a process which was, as historian Alfred Crosby showed a long time ago, a global process much bigger than one wayward Genoese mariner.  It is time for the bad history and the myth associated with this day to be reconsidered, and if recognizing Indigenous Peoples’ Day helps I am all for it. If you oppose Indigenous Peoples’ Day, you’re too late.  It is coming.  So let’s talk about Columbus, to be sure, and the European invasion of America, but let’s do so with our eyes firmly upon those native peoples whose losses were Europeans’ gain, and who have endured and survived through five centuries of discrimination, dispossession, and slaughter.

Columbus Day and Indigenous Peoples’ Day, Revisited

Peter Feinman does important work promoting the study of New York history. It is important to give him his due. That said, a number of recent posts on his blog touching upon subjects relevant to Native American history struck me as particularly disappointing.

Over the past couple of weeks, Feinman has offered his thoughts on the Columbus Day/Indigenous Peoples’ Day controversy. As many readers will no doubt recognize, a growing number of states, municipalities, and other organizations have replaced their celebration of Columbus Day with recognition of Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Drawing upon the language used in newspaper coverage, Feinman sees this process as insufficiently respectful. Columbus Day has not been replaced by Indigenous Peoples’ Day. No. It has been “dumped” and “ditched.” In the second installment, posted on May 30 and available here, Feinman describes the origins of America’s reverence for Columbus in myth, memory, and history. There is some useful information here. Feinman argues that “the issue of Columbus is very much connected to the culture wars that are currently dividing America.”

You almost get the impression that if Columbus had not sailed the ocean blue in 1492 that Europeans, smallpox, and genocide would never have occurred and that the United States would not even exist as a country, since there would have been no one here to declare independence from England.

There is in Feinman’s post the familiar expression of concerns about matters “politically correct.” For instance, Feinman writes that “just as it is now illegal to dance to the music of Michael Jackson, laugh at a joke by Woody Allen, or watch anything involving a #MeToo person,” so “Columbus is to be cleansed from our midst.” The message these efforts send, Feinman says, is that “it is incumbent on Americans to purify the country of its sins and the stains on the social fabric.” If you read my blog with any regularity, you know I find these arguments unpersuasive. To call something “politically correct,” it seems to me, is the intellectual equivalent of calling someone a Communist in the 1950s. It is an indication that you are not interested in debate and, too often, that you are uninterested in talking about the historical experience of peoples on the margins.

In the third installment, Feinman objects to uncritical use of the word “indigenous,” which he believes has conveyed “the message that there is a global people called Indigenous as if they are a single people.”

When I was growing up I don’t recall hearing the word ‘indigenous’ often. Peoples usually had real names. Sometimes they were their own names, sometimes they were the names other applied to them–Indians, Asians, Egyptians, etc. Now these Eurocentric names are to be banished from polite conversation. People are to be referred to as indigenous no matter where they are in the world. The word “Indigenous” has been weaponized by some white Americans in the culture wars against other white Americans, and imposed on people who had names for themselves and never used the word “Indigenous.” The result is a simpleminded, superficial, bogus term that produces strange results when removed from the American context that created it. Why did the politically correct unleash this weapon?

Uncritical language use is maddening. But I do not believe that this is as big a problem as Feinman says it is. “Indigenous:” the word is commonly used, as Feinman says, but its application is hardly mysterious and hardly mystifying. Its application to native peoples countering “settler colonialism” or good ol’ fashioned imperialism is a salutary development. And look at the language in Feinman’s post. There is talk of weapons unleashed, of prohibition and proscription, of banishment and censorship. I disagree with a lot of this. This is the language of a culture war, indeed. But as a white guy who has taught Native American history for a quarter-century, I have never felt the limitations that seem to run through what Feinman has to say here. I have had debates with many, arguments with others. But that is part of the game. The past is contested, and that includes the language we use to describe it. It is not a war. It is what we do.

I have written about Columbus Day and Indigenous Peoples’ Day in the past. As I wrote back in October of 2017, “in Native American history, there are lots of guilty parties, but Christopher Columbus is guiltier than most.” Columbus gets both more credit and more criticism than he deserves as an individual. That said, “there is absolutely nothing edifying in this story of avarice, violence, and religious bigotry, save for the native peoples who at times and places survived the carnage,” and “the continued celebration of Columbus Day does a historical injustice to the native peoples of two continents and the Caribbean.” Nothing Feinman wrote convinced me to change my mind on this matter.

Feinman says much of value about the origins of Columbus Day. He is absolutely correct in pointing out Americans’ uncritical reverence for Columbus, and he provides some interesting examples. Columbus always has been a symbol. He remain a symbol today. The Columbian Encounter, so-called, is the beginning of a horror story for the native peoples of the Americas, North, South, and Central, as well as the indigenous population of the Caribbean, who were quickly destroyed as autonomous peoples by the Spanish newcomers.  Columbus, his supporters might argue, gets too much of the blame.  He did nothing to native peoples in North America because he never set foot on the North American continent.  This much is true, but Columbus has become, and perhaps always has been, a symbol standing in for the “fundamental violence of discovery,” as I class it in the second chapter of Native America. Between the first and second editions of the textbook, one of the many books I read as I worked on revising was Andres Resendez’s excellent The Other Slavery which, among other things, described in detail the centrality of slavery in Columbus’s enterprise.  Columbus carried slaves back to Spain on each of his voyages, and promised the Crown “as many slaves as Their Majesties orders to make.”

Holidays come, and holidays go. Ask any historian. She will tell you that. Commemorating Indigenous Peoples’ Day does not belittle or demean the western tradition.  What it does do is allow us to pay attention to the experience of those native peoples whose losses were Europeans’ gain, and who have endured and survived through five centuries of discrimination, dispossession, and slaughter. If, after all, any number of people in our nation’s history had had their way, native peoples would be gone: They would have been wiped out by warfare and epidemic and chronic disease; or they would have been “removed” to make way for the “settlers” who championed the rise of Andrew Jackson in the first few decades of the nineteenth century; or confined on tiny reservations until the missionaries and teachers and government farmers wiped away any trace of their identity as native peoples; or assimilated into the American body politic; or “terminated” in the middle decades of the twentieth century, with the reality of their native nations erased by congressional statute.  Indians were supposed to disappear. If any number of people had their way, Native American people would not be here to call for an Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

Columbus Day found its origins in discrimination against Italian-American immigrants. We were here from the beginning, Italian-Americans said, and we have as great a claim to this continent as any other group.  The holiday has seldom encouraged any significant and honest discussion of the consequences of the Columbian Encounter, a process which was, as historian Alfred Crosby showed a long time ago, much bigger than Christopher Columbus.  It is time for the bad history and the myth associated with this day to go away, and if recognizing Indigenous Peoples’ Day helps I am all for it.  Let’s talk about Columbus, to be sure, and the European invasion of America, but let’s do so with our eyes firmly upon those native peoples whose losses were Europeans’ gain, and who have endured and survived through five centuries of discrimination, dispossession, and slaughter.

“Our Hemisphere”: On That Pro-Columbus Editorial in the WSJ.

Last week the Wall Street Journal ran a troubling editorial by Alejandro Bermudez, the executive director of ACI Prensa, a Spanish-language Catholic news service.

Under the headline “Catholics Against Columbus,” Bermudez expressed his concerns about the decision made by leaders at Notre Dame University to cover a dozen murals that covered parts of the life of Christopher Columbus. Bermudez quoted Father John Jenkins, Notre Dame’s President, who argued that “the murals’ depiction of Columbus as beneficient explorer and friend of the native peoples hides from view the darker side of this story.”

Bermudez did not buy this for a second. “What exactly is the dark side of the Columbus story?” he asks. “The facts do not add up to rash charges of genocide and murder made by his critics. If anything, they reveal a man who was not perfect but still ahead of his time.”

Making an omelette? You are going to have to break a few eggs. The Columbian encounter, Bermudez said, “certainly had its faults,” but in the end it was all worth it. “As a Catholic,” Bermudez continued, “I particularly value Columbus for bringing the first of many missionaries who showed millions of people the path to salvation.”

If indigenous people were hurt in the process, Bermudez seemed to suggest that they had it coming. Indians were nasty, he suggests. They lived lives of violence. They engaged in human sacrifice, he wrote, and “this indigenous practice vanished thanks to the advent of Christianity in our hemisphere.”

Our hemisphere, he writes. Setting up a straw man, Bermudez argues that “the notion that indigenous life was perfect and Western culture the locus of all evil is as absurd as white supremacy.” Which is literally why no respectable historian has ever made that argument.

Bermudez worries that covering the Columbus murals in South Bend is part of a larger assault on Catholicism. “If murals that portray Columbus bringing the faith to this hemisphere are not welcome at a Catholic university, what part of Catholic identity is?”

Certainly not that extension of the crusades that destroyed millions of lives on a global scale. But Bermudez does not care about native peoples or the catastrophic consequences of colonialism. He is worried that great white men and their historical legacy are under assault. Whatever they did, it was no worse than the savages whose lands they took, whose souls they saved, whose bodies they enslaved.

I find arguments like these exhausting. Let’s be clear: The Columbian Encounter, so-called, is the beginning of a horror story for the native peoples of the Americas, North, South, and Central, as well as the indigenous population of the Caribbean, who were quickly destroyed as autonomous peoples by the Spanish newcomers.  Columbus, his supporters might argue, gets too much of the blame.  He did nothing to native peoples in North America because he never set foot on the North American continent.  This much is true, but Columbus has become, and perhaps always has been, a symbol standing in for the “fundamental violence of discovery,” as I class it in the second chapter of Native America.

The sort of sentiments expressed by Bermudez are nothing new, of course. Back in 2017, for instance, a long-time conservative radio personality in Rochester tweeted out that “other than the birth, death, & resurrection of Jesus, the discovery of the Americas by Columbus was the most important event in human history.” There are a lot of obvious problems with this argument, but this sort of sentiment has been widely embraced on the political right.  Matt Walsh, a columnist for The Blaze who tweets @MattWalshBlog, told his many followers to not “let anyone tell you it’s wrong to celebrate the great men who built our civilization.”  Kurt Schlichter, another pundit aggressively active on Twitter, said that “the European conquest of the Americas was history’s greatest achievement.”  You may remember the controversy from two years ago when the Daily Wire posted an incredibly racist and offensive video, since removed from their site with apologies from the editor, depicting the Americas in 1491 as a land of savagery, cannibalism, and superstition that was refined and civilized by Christopher Columbus. The opinion piece by Bermudez echoes all of this.

And the President, our Bronze Creon, back in 2017 proclaimed that

“the permanent arrival of Europeans to the Americas was a transformative event that undeniably and fundamentally changed the course of human history and set the stage for the development of our great Nation. Therefore, on Columbus Day, we honor the skilled navigator and man of faith, whose courageous feat brought together continents and has inspired countless others to pursue their dreams and convictions — even in the face of extreme doubt and tremendous adversity.”

Not one mention of native peoples.  We are witnessing a reaction against the very notion that native peoples have a place in this American story that is worth remembering and retelling. Their suffering, their destruction, the rapacity of European colonization–it all is the price the people of “Our Hemisphere” have paid for civility and Christianity.

Etzanoa

Donald Blakeslee, an archaeologist at Wichita State University, may have found with his students the site of Etzanoa, where perhaps 20,000 people lived along the Walnut and Arkansas Rivers in Kansas between 1450 and 1700.  Both Francisco Coronado in 1541, and Juan de Oñate sixty years later, passed through this part of what is now Kansas.  I discuss both the Coronado and Oñate expeditions into the Great West in Native America, and I look forward to sharing Blakeslee’s work with my students.  I read about investigations at Etzanoa in an article that appeared in the Wichita Eagle back in April and another piece, written by David Kelly, that appeared in the Los Angeles Times last week. I look forward to seeing more scholarship published soon.

As Kelly writes in the Times, as Oñate’s part explored the Plains in search of gold, slaves, and Christian converts,

they ran into a tribe called the Escanxaques, who told of a large city nearby where a Spaniard was allegedly imprisoned. The locals called it Etzanoa.

As the Spaniards drew near, they spied numerous grass house along the bluffs. A delegation of Etzanoans bearing round corn cakes met them on the riverbank.  They were described as a sturdy people with gentle dispositions and stripes tattooed from their eyes to their ears.  It was a friendly encounter until the conquistadors decided to take hostages.  That prompted the entire city to flee.

Oñate’s men wandered the empty settlement for two or three days, counting 2000 houses that held 8 to 10 people each. Gardens of pumpkins, corn and sunflowers lay between the homes.

The Spaniards could see more houses in the distance, but they feared an Etzanoan attack and turned back.

That’s when they were ambushed by 1500 Escanxaques. The conquistadors battled them with guns and cannons before finally withdrawing back to New Mexico, never to return.

This, then, was an important site.  The Plains may seem empty.  Spaniards crossing them felt at times like they were lost at sea, the lack of landmarks baffling to them.  But in the heart of the continent, an area beyond the interests of so many historians of the colonial period, stood a Native American city with influence, power, and wealth.  American history looks much different, and much more rich, when we view native peoples as central to the story.

Between the first and second editions of Native America, I learned of the important work of Richard and Shirley Flint.  We ate dinner together in Providence, all of us attending a meeting of editors working on Oxford’s planned edition of Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations.  I read as much of their work as I could get my hands on. Their articles compelled me to revise significantly my coverage of Coronado.  We live and learn. We read and revise.  It is a part of our jobs with which historians are comfortable, but that I do not feel we always impart successfully to our various publics: that the record is never settled, that new evidence can and will be found and, sometimes, quite literally unearthed.  With that new evidence comes the obligation to reassess what we thought we knew.  It is challenging.  It can be frustrating at times.  But it is exciting, too. Every year the historians I know re-write lectures, revise their reading lists, reconsider assignments and discussion sessions in light of new scholarship and new discovery.

As for the site Blakeslee investigated in Kansas, much of it remains unexcavated and on private land.  Talk is beginning about organizing tours, to increase public awareness and education about a city that may have rivaled Cahokia in terms of its power and regional influence.   Done well, that offers an exciting prospect.

 

The Coward John White

The failed governor of a failed colonial enterprise, sent packing from what would soon become the fabled “Lost Colony” of Roanoke, and a pretend aristocrat whose patron procured for him a bargain-basement coat-of-arms, John White was also an “important” and “renowned” artist whose “vivid” and “lifelike” images included an Algonquian woman he depicted with two right feet.  Nearly everything John White touched turned to shit.

White did not lack for experience, we are told. He likely sailed aboard one of Martin Frobisher’s voyages in search of mineral wealth and a northwest passage in the 1570s.  He accompanied the reconnaissance voyage Sir Walter Ralegh sent to “Virginia” in 1584 and, the next year, returned aboard the much larger expedition sent to establish a base along the coast of today’s North Carolina.  He was among those men who, that summer, explored the coast to the south of Roanoke Island where he completed several paintings of the Algonquian peoples of the region and towns in which they lived, before he returned home with Sir Richard Grenville in the fall of 1585. He may have traveled more widely in the summer of 1585 to gather the information necessary to make his large map of the Outer Banks and Eastern North America. In 1587 Ralegh decided to try again, and for reasons that remain inexplicable still, he appointed White governor of what he hoped would become the “Cittie of Ralegh.”  White returned home from the colony a few weeks after arriving, and would not make back until 1590.  It was then that he discovered that the colony he claimed to have governed had disappeared.  Five voyages to America, but he spent more time aboard ships coming and going than he actually did on American shores.

It is easy, I suppose, to view White as a pathetic figure.  He brought his family to England’s paltry new world outpost. Circumstances forced him to return to England, and to struggle for several years to return to America.  He never succeeded in reuniting with his daughter, her husband, and their daughter Virginia, the first English child born in America.  How painful this must have been for him, to not know what had happened to his child and grandchild.

It is understandable.  It must have been agonizing for White. I can imagine his pain easily. But I keep tripping over my belief, based upon reading and re-reading the surviving records, that every time John White was faced with an important choice, he made the wrong one.

Every document that sheds light on the planning for the 1587 colony, for instance, shows that Ralegh charged White with establishing his “Cittie” on the Chesapeake Bay.  Relations with the Indians there the previous year offered promise.  An English party spent some time there in 1585 and 1586.  They found the deep water anchorage, abundant food, and peaceful Indians far more welcoming than the Algonquians in the vicinity of Roanoke, who would soon chase the colonists out of America.

Before heading to the Chesapeake, White wanted to check in on the men Richard Grenville had left at Roanoke the year before, shortly after the harried colonists evacuated.  He may as well have intended to install Manteo, the Indian from Croatoan who had stuck with the colonists since 1585, as a sort of feudal “Lorde of Roanoac” to govern the region in Ralegh’s name. So they were going to check in on Grenville’s colonists, install Manteo in his new post, and then carry on northward towards the Chesapeake.  Simple enough.  But that did not happen, and White’s explanation why makes little sense.

White and his men clambered aboard the pinnace, a smaller ship capable of safely crossing the Outer Banks.  “Simon Ferdinando,” the expedition’s pilot, told the sailors aboard to drop White’s party at Roanoke, “saying that the Summer was farre spent.”  It was the 22nd of July and, White suggested, Ferdinando wanted to get on with the more lucrative business of chasing Spanish prizes.

Which makes no sense at all, for Ferdinando did not leave until the last week of August, more than a month later. White spent much of his account whining about Ferdinando, blaming him for everything and for nothing, and the charges simply do not add up.  One of the ships that made up the 1587 voyage separated from the other two in some rough weather: White blamed Ferdinando for this, accusing him of trying to abandon one of the ships. At another point, Ferdinando was not certain of his latitude, and at another he thought he could find food in the Caribbean but his supplier could not be found.  Understandable, perhaps, but White blamed Ferdinando for these events, too.  The colonists ate poisonous fruit, manchineel apples, and to wash that down drank nasty, stagnant water, and fell ill.  Ferdinado remained aboard the flagship. Still, White blamed Ferdinando, even though it was he who allowed the colonists to drink “stinking water of the pond,” and who failed to keep the colonists safe while on land.  Later, the flagship nearly ran aground near Cape Fear, and again White blamed Ferdinando. And the decision to settle on Roanoke, despite instructions to go elsewhere? White blamed that on Ferdinando, too, but the only logical explanation for White and his colonists ending up on Roanoke was that he decided to settle in this somewhat familiar setting, rather than move to the Chesapeake where he had no first hand experience.

It was a bad choice.  Grenville’s  men were very clearly dead: White reported that his men found the skeleton of one of them. Very clearly they had been killed by Indians. Within a couple of days, those same Indians killed George Howe, one of White’s closest advisers.  White attempted to carry on some diplomacy and figure out how the Indians felt about his colonists, which somehow still seemed a mystery to him.  The Croatoans, always friendly, at first feared the English and lined up for battle before Manteo assuaged their fears.  They lectured the English about indiscriminate attacks the year before. They begged the English not to steal their food.  White decided that this was a good time to ask them for favors, and told them to carry messages to the neighboring Indian villages, indicating that the English “would willingly receive them againe, and that all unfriendly dealings past on both parts, should be utterly forgiven and forgotten.”  This reflected nothing more than White’s utterly clueless understanding of the situation in which he had placed the colonists–in the midst of large numbers of Algonquians who had no interest in accepting English friendship. He was in no position to “receive” anyone.

Could White make it worse?  Yes.  After waiting a week, and receiving no response from the Indians, White decided to attack “the remnant of Wingina his men, which were left alive, who dwelt at Dasamonquepeuk,” across the sound from Roanoke.  It was they, he believed, who had killed George Howe and wiped out Grenville’s party.  White led a party across the sound, surrounded some Indians in the dark at Dasemonquepeuk, and launched his assault. As White put it himself, “we hoped to acquite their evill doing towards us, but,” he said,  “we were deceived, for those Savages were our friends, and were come from Croatoan to gather the corne & fruit of that place, because they understood our enemies were fled immediatly after they had slaine George Howe.”  They killed the wrong Indians.  They killed friendly Indians, or at least he least hostile of the Algonquians in the region.  The colony was now in dire straits, with no friends, and little provision.

Over the next several days, the English baptized Manteo, and White’s daughter gave birth to Virginia Dare.  The colonists needed provisions, and White could not find any volunteers to go home to lobby for more. The colonists told White to go himself.  He whined. He feared that during his absence, “his stuffe and goods might be both spoiled, & most of them pilfered away.”  White refused to go. He feared that the people he led would rifle through his stuff.   The next day, the 23rd of August, more of the colonists, “as well women and men,” once again told White to leave.  Please. Really, just go. Don’t worry. We will be fine.  We will be better off without you.  They wanted him to leave.  They knew who they were dealing with.  They promised to sign a bond not to steal White’s crap, as if they really wanted his books and his armor.  He must have found it difficult o leave his daughter and granddaughter behind, but that is not the argument he made.  With a promise not to steal any of his stuff in hand, White departed for England on the 27th.

It was a hellish journey home. White survived, but many of the sailors did not.  He tried again to sail for America the next year, that of the Armada, but the ship he was aboard was mauled by a French corsair. In the battle for control of the ship, White was shot in the ass, an injury that does not seem to have embarrassed him at all.  By the time he finally made it back to Roanoke in 1590, he could determine only that the colonists were no longer on the island, and that the trunks containing his stuff had been dug up by Indians, broken open, and their contents ruined.  So much for that bond.  White seemed to know where the colonists were, though the location is not clear from his account.  In any case, White was a man who nobody listened to.  He could not persuade the mariners  to devote the time to seek out the colonists, and White returned, once again, to England, his voyage entirely without effect.

The Crown Prince of Mar-A-Lago and Pocahontas’s People

I am teaching this semester a freshman writing seminar called “The Lost Colony.”  The students are reading an e-book version of David Beers Quinn’s The Roanoke Voyages, 1584-1590, which is now available from Routledge, and a copy of my book, The Head in Edward Nugent’s Hand.  

For the first week of class I wanted the students to recognize the extent to which our understandings of the Roanoke ventures, and of early European expansion generally, are encrusted with a deep layer of myth.  In the past, I had the students read Paul Green’s play The Lost Colony, published by the University of North Carolina Press.  If you are on the Outer Banks in summer, by all means, slather up with bug spray and head on out to catch a performance.  It has changed over the years.  But the original 1937 version has not aged well, and I just could not subject myself, or the students, to that dreadful thing again. So we talked about “In Search Of,” a show I watched as a kid and that was hosted by Leonard Nimoy, and the recent “American Horror Story” series that connected some way back to Roanoke. Not much of an improvement, but I think they caught my drift.  Usually I mention David LaVere’s book on the goofy Dare Stones excitement in the 1930s, The Lost RocksIt’s an entertaining read, even if I do not agree with everything in the book.

Virginians claimed credit for the first successful settlement on American shores.  They arrived in the muck they called Jamestown in 1607.  The Pilgrims who set their feet on dry land at Plymouth Rock in 1620 received lots of attention, too.  But North Carolinians, late in the nineteenth and early in the twentieth centuries, argued that they deserved some attention, too.  It was at Roanoke, as speaker after speaker, and writer after writer claimed, where the first English child was born on American shores, and where the first baptism to English Christianity took place.  (To suggest that Americans look at the history of St. Augustine during these years was unheard of).  So I had the students read a collection of speeches that dignitaries delivered on Roanoke Island in 1907 to commemorate that glorious history, Thomas Pasteur Noe’s Pilgrimage to Roanoke Island.

According to Francis Winston, the lieutenant-governor of the Tarheel State and the event’s headliner, Roanoke was the opening chapter in “the story of the human race seeking liberty.”  While nobody who has looked at the surviving documents from Ralegh’s Roanoke ventures would agree that freedom mattered to the colonial promoters at all, Winston asserted that “the people who laid the foundations of colonization in this New World, were nearly all refugees, exiles, wanderers, pilgrims. They were urged across the ocean by a common impulse, and that impulse was the desire to escape from some form of oppression in the New World.”  And, of course, to escape that oppression, Winston wrote, the freedom-seeking adventurers encountered the region’s native peoples, “the savage red man, happy and free, in possession of fields, forests and streams.”

He roamed at large, a king among the beasts of the forest, but at best himself only an improved animal. Before this all-conquering race, he is gone and gone forever. He fulfilled none of the divine commands. He did not hunger and thirst after righteousness; he was not poor in spirit, nor pure in heart, nor meek, nor merciful. He could not inherit the earth. God’s law is a law of service.  That race shall survive and inherit the earth, which renders to the earth the greatest service: service of daily lives employed in useful labor, of hearts filled with love and unselfishness, of souls inspired with noble ideals, of heroic self-sacrifice and devotion to the higher interests of humanity.  The Indian is gone. The Negro is going.  The white man will survive in fulfillment of the laws of God. There is no room on earth today for vicious, incompetent and immoral races. White civilization is triumphant, because it is best; Christianity will rule the earth because it is a religion of love and service. The cannibal races of Africa, the idolatrous races in Asia, the savage Indian and the semi-civilized negro in America must all learn the laws of God, and fulfill them in their daily lives, or else pay the penalty of decay and final extinction.

That’s pretty racist, right?  But not all that far removed from the sort of stuff that those of us who teach Native American history hear all the time.  Listen to your favorite right-winger on the radio talk about Columbus Day. Or listen to Ben Shapiro, the knucklehead-hipster-conservative-pundit, who said as much about Native American cultures last October. These views are deeply held, deeply entrenched, widely-believed.  That Indians are doomed to disappear, are already gone, or are somehow inauthentic when they remind white Americans that they still are here, are beliefs too many Americans share. What Lt. Governor Winston said in 1907 about the Indians who once had lived on Roanoke Island has been said about Indians nearly everywhere throughout American history. Including Virginia. (Check out Brian Dippie’s old book, The Vanishing American, for examples of what I am talking about).

The same week that my students read Noe’s collection of speeches from Roanoke Island, came word that Congress, after many, many, years, had enacted legislation to extend federal recognition to six Virginia Indian tribes.  Congress passed a law in 1978 providing a process for recognizing and acknowledging Native American tribes, and that process is described in Native America, but Congress, with plenary authority over Indian affairs, can also enact specific legislation recognizing an American Indian community.  The Thomasina E. Jordan Indian Tribes of Virginia Federal Recognition Act of 2017, which Congress sent to President Trump on 13 January, extends “Federal recognition to the Chickahominy Indian Tribe, the Chickahominy Indian Tribe–Eastern Division, the Upper Mattaponi Tribe, the Rappahannock Tribe, Inc., the Monacan Indian Nation, and the Nansemond Indian Tribe.”  This is significant legislation, and I am hopeful that the Crown Prince of Mar-A-Lago will find time in his busy schedule to sign it into law.  But he might do even more.

Several decades ago, the great anthropologist Helen C. Rountree (nobody has written more on the Powhatan Indians of Virginia and their descendants) titled one of her studies Pocahontas’s People, a history of the Powhatans.  The six tribes named in the Thomasina Jordan bill are all part of that broader community.  President Trump, as readers of this blog will understand well, has regularly referred to his opponent Senator Warren as “Pocahontas.”  It is racist and unacceptable.  As I wrote in February of last year,

For President Trump, it seems, Native American identity can be determined by a quick glance.  He looked for certain characteristics and did not see them in the Pequots, or in Senator Warren. Centuries of intermarriage, enslavement, and the complex, messy, and tangled history of native peoples mattered in his determination not a bit.  For him, native peoples were individuals with certain easily distinguished racial features, and not members of political entities that possessed an inherent but limited sovereignty that predated the creation of the United States.

            But here’s the thing. Too many Americans share Trump’s views about who Indians are and what they ought to be.  Too many Americans view Indians as part of the past.  Think about the most commonly held stereotypes about Native Americans:  What images enter your mind? Ask your friends what they think. Chances are a lot of those images come from the past.

            And when we speak of Native Americans as being part of the past, we are aiding in an ongoing colonial project which erases native peoples in the present.  And if they are viewed as part of the past, or inauthentic, it becomes easier to dismiss the legitimacy of Native Americans, as individuals and as members of semi-sovereign nations, as being out of time and place and, as a consequence, irrelevant.  It becomes easier to ignore the very real problems of inequality and injustice in Indian Country; it becomes permissible to cheer for a football team with a racist name; or to silently assent to a President’s decision to authorize a pipeline through lands that a Native American community deems sacred. It also makes it possible to call into question the sovereign right of native nations to develop their economies, protect their lands, and against immense odds preserve their cultures.   When the President casts Indians as part of the past, he makes it more difficult for many Americans to recognize the importance of native peoples’ calls for justice today.

I wonder what the President will say if he holds a signing ceremony.  I wonder what words his speechwriters will place in front of him.  Will he invite representatives from the tribes to the White House? President Trump has been in office for just over a year, but the contempt he has shown towards native peoples is unmistakable. He has an opportunity, should he choose to use it, to explain that his name-calling was destructive and racist, that native peoples are still here, that they are still an essential part of the fabric of American life, as vital and important to this nation’s past and present as they ever have been.  He can explain to Americans that native nationhood matters.  He can show that the views expressed by Lt. Governor Winston, so widely shared 110 years ago, and shared still by too many Americans and by himself, were wrong and remain wrong. He can show the American people that native peoples are still here, and that their historical experiences matter.  I am not optimistic that he will be able to do that.