Tag Archives: Onondaga Nation

The Onondagas and the Movies, Part I: “The Iroquois Trail”

One of the things about doing newspaper research, I find, is how easily it can lead to distraction.  I am at a point in my research where I am still formulating questions, where I still have so much to learn.  I am not looking for any one thing.  Rather, I am trying to collect as much information as I can about the Onondagas and their history.  In this sense, nothing I find is irrelevant, and everything I read might be significant, even if I do not know now what I might eventually do with that information.

In 1950, Bernard and Edward Small produced a film called “The Iroquois Trail.”  To generate publicity, the producers staged a screening in Syracuse, the “hometown of Hiawatha,” they said. I would never have known about this film had I not read the Syracuse papers looking for information about the Onondagas.

So armed with Wi-Fi, Youtube, and an hour-and-a-half workout at the gym, I watched “The Iroquois Trail.”  It was bad.  Like, “what was wrong with these people?” bad.

Based loosely upon James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans,” a novel I loathe from the very pit of my soul, “The Iroquois Trail” contains elements that Cooper’s readers would have recognized as kinda-sorta similar to the novel.  Instead of Natty Bumpo, the film focuses upon Nat Cutler.  Played by George Montgomery, Cutler is a fast-talking, witty frontiersman with a stupid, coonskin cap, a desire to avenge his murdered kid brother, and a determination to prevent the British from marching into a military blunder.  Instead of Chingachgook, Cutler’s sidekick is the redundantly-named “Chief Sagamore,” loyal and committed until the end.  Ogana, their nemesis, serves the same function as did Magua in Cooper’s novel, a malevolent double-crosser who hates the English and lusts after “Yankee scalps and a white woman for his tepee,” thus preserving Cooper’s interest in transgressive interracial sex.  And everyone contends for the British fort commander’s daughter.  The struggle between France and Great Britain for control of the Hudson-Champlain waterway during the Great War for Empire serves as the setting.  But less than a distillation of Cooper, “The Iroquois Trail” seems more like a summary written by a school kid who did not understand the original.

It is difficult to know where to start in listing the problems with the film.  The producers filmed it around Big Bear Lake, and any Californian would recognize that at the outset.  Northern New York does not look like that. Only a few Indian actors appeared in the film and, save for Monte Blue, who played Sagamore and claimed some Native American descent on his father’s side, only in small and uncredited parts.  Ogana, the villain, was played by Sheldon Leonard, a Jewish-American actor from New York City best known for playing tough guys and for a small role in “It’s a Wonderful Life.” The Indian-speak of the native characters is grating, the deployment of Native American stereotypes so heavy-handed. The dialogue is terrible, the characters’ motivations muddled, and the entire production lazy.  I was relieved that it was not nearly as long as I expected.

The film itself was entirely predictable, completely uninteresting, poorly acted, unevenly paced, and carelessly written.  Still, its promotion in Syracuse did interest me.  The Strand Theatre teamed up with Boy Scouts of America to promote the film and public safety.  “Traffic signal standards will be posted with caution signs keyed to the city’s historic locale on the old Iroquois trail, which crossed the state from Albany to Niagara,” the Syracuse Post-Standard reported on 12 July 1950.  When the film finally premiered later that month, the young audience was “constantly vocal in tribute to the red-blooded adventure story,” and “in a hissing mood against Ogana, the proud Huron chief (well-played by shaved-head Sheldon Leonard) who used every deceit known, playing France against English and colonials.”  The audience, the Post-Standard reporter indicated, was “delighted” by the movie.

And in all of this–a film set in New York during the Great War for Empire, a publicity campaign that capitalized on the city’s ties to the history of the Haudenosaunee–no mention was made of the actual Onondagas, whose reservation boundary was just a few minutes away from the theater.  It was during these years that Iroquois people gathered at the New York State Fair grounds in Syracuse at the Indian Village dressed in Plains Indians clothing because white people needed to see that in order to recognize them as authentic.  Movies like “The Iroquois Trail” taught audiences that native peoples were part of the past, that they were either noble or ignoble, but in all cases part of the past.  The filmmakers and the promoters appropriated a story and a piece of history and marketed it as relevant to the history of people who lived in Central New York.  But they felt no need to visit real native peoples, to speak with them, and learn their histories.  There is no word in the paper if any Onondagas traveled in to town to catch the movie before it disappeared.

Strand Theatre

 

The Allure of the Archives, and the Accompanying Responsibility

I recently finished reading Arlette Farge’s The Allure of the Archives. It’s a beautiful little book, written originally in French, translated into English by Thomas Scott-Railton.

Farge’s journey into the archives brought her into contact with the denizens of 18th century Paris, ordinary men and women who entered the historical record only because they found themselves dragged before authorities as accusers and victims, witnesses or perpetrators. They came to advocate for their cause, to protect or recover their property, to seek redress, or vengeance, or, at times, to save their lives.  Farge describes the people of Paris, but her experiences in the archives and the lessons she drew from the people she encountered there—men and women who appear fleetingly and incompletely in the judicial records–are wise and wonderful enough to be useful to all students of the past, whatever field they study.  I can imagine using Farge’s book the next time I teach the freshman writing seminar.

The allure of the archives, Farge writes, “is rooted in these encounters with the silhouettes of the past, be they faltering or sublime.  There is an obscure beauty in so many existences, barely illuminated by words, in confrontations with each other, imprisoned by their own devices as much as they were undone by their era.”

Farge describes the rituals and mechanics of archival work, and she describes archival etiquette, at least for an era before digital cameras became commonplace. But the book’s beauty lies in its account of Farge’s interactions with the archives’ inhabitants, the ordinary French men and women who show up in bits and pieces in the surviving records.  “The incompleteness of the archive,” she writes, paradoxically “coexists right alongside the abundance of documents.”  Tell me about it.  Historians write down quotations from these documents, and “the proper usage of documents is similar to the inlaying of precious stones: a quotations only truly takes on meaning and significance if it fills a role that nothing else could.”  Historical scholarship is a discipline and a craft and, for Farge, it is a reflective process.  Those working in the archives must remain conscious of what they are doing, and the consequences that may result from their carelessness.  We hold these forgotten lives in our hands. That is a privilege that comes with great responsibility.

History is never the simple repetition of archival content, but a pulling away from it, in which we never stop asking how and why these words came to wash ashore on the manuscript page. One must put the archive aside for a while, in order to better think on one’s own terms, and later draw everything together. If you have a taste for the archives, you feel a need for these alternating tasks of exclusion and reintegration of documents and writing, as you add your own style to the thoughts that emerge.

Still, so many people you meet in the archives, so many stories.  “What can be done with these countless individuals, their tenuous plans, their many disjointed movements?” She likens these images to silhouettes on a wall or the shifting images one sees when gazing into a kaleidoscope, dynamic always, appearing and then disappearing, passing quickly out of your field of view before you get a clear sense of what you are looking at.

I get it. My colleagues who write about Native American history will sympathize.  In so many archives, in so many collections of documents, in parish registers, burial records, transcripts of diplomatic encounters, bits of correspondence scattered here and there, receipts, school records, and even newspapers, thousands of lives, thousands of individuals, will appear fleetingly, saying little or nothing at all, words recorded by people with limited understanding of the peoples whose stories they tell.

These lives are difficult to reconstruct, I know, as I work through the many thousands of pages of documents I have collected to write my Onondaga book. It is difficult and demanding work.  We work to recover larger pictures from scattered or broken fragments. But as I look small, I look large, too.  We wrestle with the challenge of understanding the relationship between these individuals and the larger societal forms to which they belonged as native peoples.

It is easy to write the history of native peoples as objects acted upon by non-native actors.  Writing that sort of history, however, privileges the forces of colonialism and the voices speaking in behalf of that process.

Farge has given me a lot to think about as I continue to read my sources and work on my history of the Onondaga Nation.

The Onondagas, as a community, experienced warfare, disease, and dispossession.  They endured efforts to break up their reservation, to individualize them and destroy their national identity, and to transform them into something else.  They confronted the State of New York’s efforts to extend its laws over their lands and the decisions of nearby business interests that destroyed Onondaga Creek.  Telling these stories requires detailed examination of the many thousands of pages of documents and an enormous amount of reading, but the work itself is not particularly difficult.  The views of white policy makers and power brokers are uncovered with relative ease.  The challenging part is reconstructing the lives of the thousands of individuals who cross the pages in the sources I read, and who interacted with these larger forces.

History: It’s the study of continuity and change, measured across time and space, in peoples, institutions and cultures.  To tell these stories of continuity and change, to give them real meaning, requires a close examination of the small pieces, the individual pebbles on the beach.  Boarding schools were terrible, we are told, instruments of cultural-genocide marching under the guise of benevolence.  Richard Henry Pratt founded the Carlisle School, and I read his propaganda and his reports, all the paper detritus of his campaign to “kill the Indian and save the man.”  The best he could see in the thousands of young Native Americans who came to Carlisle was that they might be formed into something else. Pratt’s words are difficult to read, knowing that his blundering arrogance shattered so many lives and caused so much grief.

But I also need to look at the young men and women who clearly wanted to go to Carlisle because it offered them an opportunity to acquire a trade, to improve themselves.  The records exist.  We can see the Carlisle students who ran away from their “outing system” placements because they were homesick or were needed at home or because they hated their overseers, or fell in love with a fellow student working at a place not far away.  It requires telling the stories of those Onondagas who missed the school once they left, who pestered the school’s administrators to send them copies of the student newspaper, and who attended Carlisle games when the team was close enough for them to make the trip.  We must consider of the stories of those who were sent home because they were sick or rebellious or because they drank too much.  It requires placing one set of difficult readings against another and against yet another still, cobbling the pieces together into some sort of sensible whole.

Sometimes, the people who appear in these records have children and grandchildren still living.  As historians, drawn in by the allure of the archives, we are voyeurs and witnesses, and we will uncover stories that if shared carelessly can produce grief and pain and sadness. If we view our trips into the archive like a raid or a treasure hunt–and I will admit to feeling this way during my 5:00am drives down the Thruway from Rochester to Albany–we risk becoming exploitative, engaging in a sort of colonial enterprise.  These documents are not ours, and the stories we fashion from the lives we see in bits and pieces do not belong to us alone.  As we share these stories, and shape our careers as historians on the backs of the people about whom we write, we must remember our obligations, and the seriousness of our enterprise.

Many of my friends are historians, and many of us, I believe, identify closely with the work that we do and the subjects that we teach.  It is part of what makes us what and who we are.  We think about our work a lot, maybe too much for those with whom we share our lives.  We can obsess and lose sleep as we think about the questions that can only be answered by a sojourn in the archives. We must be honest: as historians, we are nothing without these stories.  Arlette Farge’s book reminded me of these obligations, and the deep and alluring connections that exist between the people we write about and the stories we tell, what we do and how we see ourselves.

 

Onondaga, 1918: A Declaration of War, and Other Stories

In August of 1918, the following news story appeared in the Syracuse Post-Standard.   Under the headline, “Indians to Declare War Upon Germany,” and a smaller title indicating that “Gohl Says He Has Been Chosen to Draft Paper Because Stranded Onondagas Were Insulted” we learn something of an adopted Onondaga, a group of imprisoned circus performers, and inexplicably angry Germans and Austrians.

Edward M. Gohl, adopted Onondaga Indian and adviser of the tribe, announced tonight he had been delegated by the Onondagas to draft a declaration of war against Germany for the imprisonment of seventeen members at the outbreak of the war in 1914.

The Indians put in prison were a part of two German circuses and the Germans in the company joined the army. The stranded Indians were insulted and beaten by the Germans and Austrians.  They were finally imprisoned for their own protection, but later their release was obtained.

By the terms of a treaty between General Washington and the twenty-three chiefs of the Onondaga tribe in 1788 the Onondagas were declared a separate nation from the United States and both sides have always respected the treaty.

In his declaration of war Mr. Gohl states he also will call on every able-bodied man in the tribe to enlist on the side of their allies. 

Mr. Gohl’s Indian name is Tya Goh Wens.

There is, to say the least, a lot going on here, more than meets the eye. Though the Onondagas negotiated a treaty in 1788, it was with the State of New York and not George Washington, and there was little in the agreement that was worthy of respect. Gohl shows up frequently in the press as a representative for the Onondagas, though there is much about the relationship that I do not yet understand. And the passive voice: “their release was obtained,” but by whom, how, and when?  Documents like these, so suggestive yet so frustrating, I like to give to my students on those rare occasions when I teach my department’s required course in historic research methods, or when I teach a freshman writing seminar that I sometimes call “Life Stories.”  Stories like these, it seems to me, open a world of questions, a series of trails to follow that all are utterly enticing.

 

 

I’ve been working on my history of Onondaga as a place and a native nation for almost a decade now and I have still a couple of more years of research before I will be able to set pencil to paper and begin my writing process.  So many documents, and so much material, I still have to look at.  There are still a number of archives to visit and a large amount of evidence to collect and consider.  And so many of these small pieces of information, these bits of stories, raise questions that demand answers. They tug at me. They present alluring side trails that seem so worthy of investigation.  Down these by-ways and detours and secret paths we can find the human stories that, when they are told well, bring history to life.  Even when the answers are not certain, and the conclusions drawn are far from definitive.

In the summer of 1914, sixteen Indians from the Onondaga Reservation just south of Syracuse New York made their way to Europe to perform with a German circus company.  After they arrived in Berlin, they split into two groups.  One headed eastward toward Russia, the other south towards Italy.  Nobody at Onondaga had heard from them in several weeks the Post-Standard reported in August of 1914, and their friends at home were worried.  It was August, and the Great War had begun.

I have much still to learn about these sixteen Onondagas and their experiences overseas.  I do not know as of yet the name of this particular circus, how these Onondagas were recruited to join it, and what their lives were like once they returned home. I do not know how the sixteen Onondagas in 1914 became seventeen three years later.  I know little about what they saw in Europe, or how their journeys affected them.  I do not know where they performed, what they did, and what those audiences expected from them. I know that not all historical questions have answers.  We who write about the past are often left with only our ability to imagine, and that is just fine.

I know the names of the sixteen Indians from Onondaga, of course.  It seems likely to me that Jerry Homer, one of the Onondaga Jeremiah Homer Student Information Cardperformers, was the Onondaga Jeremiah Homer who, ten years before, had arrived at the Carlisle Indian School. He was one of five Homer children to attend Carlisle.  According to the school’s records, he was ten years old when he arrived. He was a tiny, tiny kid, just three-and-a quarter feet tall. He weighed only fifty pounds.  He may have arrived malnourished, though his older sister, who died young, was also reported to have had a very slight build.

The Carlisle School sent questionnaires to former students. They liked to know what their alums had done with their lives.  The students’ answers allow small glimpses into the lives of ordinary native peoples who lived late in the nineteenth and early in the twentieth centuries.  Jeremiah Homer did not say much in his response.  In 1911 he reported that he was living on the Onondaga Nation territory and that he wished that the school would send him copies of the Carlisle Arrow, the school’s newspaper.  He indicated as well that he was now married to Mary Cornelius, an Oneida woman whose family lived at Onondaga.

Mary Cornelius did not attend Carlisle, but she was enrolled for two years at the state’s Thomas Indian School from 1907 until 1909.  One of the sixteen Indians from Onondaga who went to Europe, and who was later imprisoned, was Mary Cornelius. Jerry met Mary, I would guess, sometime after they returned to Onondaga from their time at boarding school. Both were home by 1909. They were married by 1911, Jerry indicated, and the otherwise unnamed “Baby Cornelius” mentioned in the story must have been their child.

Mary Cornelius became an important figure in the twentieth-century history of the Oneidas.  You can read a profile here.  Jerry Homer is tougher to figure out. Mary and Jerry do not appear to have lived together upon their return to the reservation, and Jerry or Jeremiah Homer disappears from the reservation census records by 1920.   I wish I knew more about what happened to him, but at this point, that is as far as the trail leads. By-ways and detours.  Some times you wander down a path, only to realize the need to return to the main trail. The resources to answer the questions I have about this family, about their experience in Europe–they are not at my disposal right now.  I will have to travel, hit the archives once again, to finish telling this small story.

I am confident that I will be able to find the evidence that will help me flesh out these stories. Perhaps some of you reading this now know more than I and, if so, I hope you will share with me what you know.  If the evidence exists, I will find it.  It might take time.  Many paths I follow–that any historian follows–invariably lead to dead ends.

So why bother?  Is there something in this, as one of my professors used to ask, of more than mere antiquarian interest? I am writing a book looking at one small piece of land, and the people who lived there, over a span of more than six centuries.  Given the vastness of that story, why give so much time and thought to two individuals about whom it is possible, at the end of the day, to know very little?

It is fun, for one thing.  It is hard sometimes for my students to appreciate this. They have a lot to carry, and we compel them when we assign research projects to come up with something meaningful to say in a short, fifteen-week semester.  They do not have the time to wander down back alleys and by-ways in search of interesting stories.  I think that is something about which we need to be more aware.  I have no deadline on this project.  A lot of us do the work we do, which so often we do alone and in isolation, because it is so immensely satisfying.  we pour hours into our projects, into our attempts to find answers to the questions that bother us. Our work does not always result in publication.  But the work, for many of us, is its own reward.

But more than that, telling the stories of people like Jerry/Jeremiah Homer and Mary Cornelius allows us to paint a more accurate picture of the communities about which we write.  Being Onondaga, or being an Oneida living at Onondaga, or being Native American generally, meant so many different things to so many different people.  White lawmakers in New York State, federal officials, Christian missionaries, local law enforcement–they all had their own views of who Indians were and what they might become. And native peoples themselves always defied and complicated these necessarily limited understandings and racist stereotypes. Writing the history of a place like Onondaga, then, means looking not only at the policy makers and the nation’s faction-tattered leaders but the lacrosse players who tested themselves against Ivy League teams, or the members of the “American Indian Concert Band,” formerly known as the “Onondaga Indian Concert Band,” which was led by David Russell Hill and claimed to be the “only professional Indian band known to both hemispheres”; or the bricklayer who learned his craft so well at Carlisle and whose future seemed bright, only to come crashing down in the face of racism and discrimination when he went to Syracuse seeking work; and circus performers who went to Europe on an eight-month contract.  These native peoples went to Europe.  They were swept up in forces beyond their control.  They were incarcerated briefly, apparently for their own protection, and they returned home.  As America’s entry into the Great War approached, debates occurred over whether native peoples, who as yet were not citizens of the United States, could be drafted.  The Onondagas’ declaration, justified by the base treatment their friends and families had experienced a couple of years before, quieted the issue for a time, until 1940, when it would surface once again.

 

Biographies of great men and women fill my bookshelves, life histories of people who did great things.  They fought wars, won elections, discovered one thing, or destroyed another.  The lives of famous people are linked to the events that they shaped, and that in turn shaped us.  There is a place for books like these.  You read them and I read them.  We all have a list of them that we really like.

But think of your own life.  What are the events that made you who and what you are? Have you done things, or had things happen to you, after which nothing ever could be the same?  I ask my students this question each semester when I want them to consider the meaning of history. Always they ask for clarification.  They want to know if I am interested in some public event, something “historical,” or something personal.  I do not give them any guidance, for I want them to consider what constitutes a historical event.  They will struggle with this because they are young and they have not lived through a lot.  They might mention the attacks on 9-11, though all of them now are young enough that they  can have no memory of that terrible day. Some will say the election of Barack Obama, which most of them think they remember.  I will listen to them as they compare their lists.  But I come back to my question.

What are the events that made you who and what you are?

Was it a marriage? A divorce? A birth or a death or a relocation? A breakup? A particularly cruel thing said someone said to you or a particularly empowering statement of support?  What events in their life left an impression, or a scar?

In writing a history that covers hundreds of years and focuses on a relatively small piece of what has become upstate New York, it is easy to lose sight of individual stories, and to focus on the forest much more than the trees. But it is in the small stories, the brief snapshots of ordinary lives, where we can find answers to some of the most important questions about our shared histories, and our shared humanity, across space and across time.

 

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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