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Zombie Columbus

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Donald Trump’s supporters fished the broken pieces of a destroyed Christopher Columbus statue out of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. They commissioned an artist to repair and reassemble it. And now, “resurrected,” it stands behind the White House barricades, directly in front of the Executive Office Building. It bids defiance, Trump would have us believe, to the “woke mob” who consigned the original to the sea on the Fourth of July in 2020.

            Yet Trump’s Columbus is a Zombie, a golem. He is not exactly dead, but he does not look very good at all. Indeed, Trump’s display is a loser’s defiance, a middle finger in the air flashed at the crowds who booed him off the field as he enters the safety of the stadium tunnel. Nothing courageous or principled about it at all. Trump’s Columbus statue can only survive in his compound, after all, protected by electronic surveillance, steel gates, and the high-powered weaponry of the Secret Service. Thanks to the efforts of generations of Indigenous activists and their allies, a revisionist effort took root late in the 1980s. As a result, nobody with more than half a brain will ever discuss Columbus’s voyages without considering the brutality, avarice, and enslavement that rested at the heart of his “New World” enterprise.

I READ ABOUT TRUMP’S LATEST COLUMBUS FETISH after boarding the Island Packers boat that would carry me back to Ventura from the north shore of Santa Cruz Island, in the Channel Islands National Park. I had spent the day hiking at this beautiful, beautiful place and, resting on the boat, realized I had a signal on my phone for the first time in several blissful hours.

            When I was born, it’s important to remember, the Indian policy of the United States was still known as “termination.” During my lifetime, the United States looked forward to the destruction and dissolution of Indigenous nations, and the assimilation of individual Indigenous peoples into the American body politic. Teachers in Ventura, where I grew up, told us that the Chumash, who inhabited the mainland and the Channel Islands, were extinct. They knew no better. It was likely what they were taught as well. Nobody could tell us where the Chumash had gone, and in grade school I can remember constructing a model of Mission San Buenaventura as part of our social studies curriculum. At the Catholic School I attended, the notion that these two things were connected—disappearance and the missions—was never discussed. Father Junipero Serra, who established the Ventura mission in 1782, was to be revered. It was easy. We never learned anything that would cause us to question the purity of his heart, the fierceness of his commitments, and the piety of his Christianity.

            But the Chumash did not disappear. While home this past week my dad and I drove up into the hills above Santa Barbara, onto what now constitutes the Chumash reservation.  We visited the gorgeous Santa Ynez Chumash Museum and Cultural Center. Signage at Santa Cruz Island, meanwhile, and the presentation by the National Park Service ranger, both featured prominently the island’s original Indigenous inhabitants and the Island’s Chumash name, limuw. Two years ago, once again making my way out to limuw, I shared the boat with a large number of Chumash people traveling to the island to hold ceremonies. And whatever you think of Indigenous casinos, Chumash gaming operations are very profitable. The Chumash are alive and well.

            That is an incredible achievement. If the Spanish, the Mexicans, or murderous Californians had their way, no Chumash would have survived. They defied their colonizers. They refused to disappear.  And in all sorts of ways, they are teaching non-Indigenous southern Californians how they did so. The museum does a fantastic job of this.

DONALD TRUMP IS A LOSER, and all that he represents is a loser’s cause. He and his supporters will never admit their obvious commitment to white supremacy as they try to bring back the past. The best these racists and their sycophants can do is reanimate a broken zombie Columbus and keep it behind the barricades where nobody will ever see it.  They are afraid of a frank debate. Several years ago, Venturans debated what to do about the large Father Serra statue that stood outside City Hall. Some people wanted the statue removed. Others wanted to preserve it.  The debate took place during the pandemic on Zoom.  It lasted several hours. Many people spoke.  I am proud of how my hometown handled this. In the end a compromise was reached: the statue of Father Serra was moved from City Hall to the Mission, just a short distance away. If you want to see it, you know where to go. But Trump, unlike the people in my town, won’t even engage.  He really is a chicken-shit, whiny-ass, little bitch. It continues to amaze me that roughly sixty percent of white people voted for him in each of the last three elections.

The Serra statue, at its former home.

            If in the 1960s, federal authorities still looked forward to the assimilation and disappearance of Native Ameircans, now we see Indigenous peoples laying claim to their stolen homelands. In places, the “Land Back” movement has had small but significant success. Offensive Indigenous mascots have been eliminated; Indigenous place names have been restored. Even Donald Trump, briefly, responded to pressure from Indigenous activists when he became the first American president to address directly the problem of “Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.” He appointed a commission (“Operation Lady Justice”), and proclaimed the 5th of May “National Missing and Murdered American Indians and Alaska Natives Awareness Day.” He has abandoned this in his second term and he has tried to undo President Obama’s decision to restore Mt. McKinley’s Indigenous name, Denali, but, again, Trump is a loser, fighting against the forces of time.

            When I was out on limuw I hiked from Scorpion Landing to Smuggler’s Cove and back.  It was listed by the National Park Service as a “strenuous” eight-mile hike. I felt it during the return trip, as the heat increased and there remained a number of mile-long climbs . I looked forward several times and appreciated how much farther I had to go. I also looked behind me, to see how far I had already ascended. We should do something similar when we counter Trump and the old world his followers wish to restore. He wants to pull us back, to drag us down.  He has nothing constructive to offer. Most of us are so far ahead of him. He really is a fat old man, bloated and out of shape, who has been left behind not because of any unfairness but solely because we have judged him by the content of his character. He will stir up the hatred of the racists and the fears of the homophobes and transphobes. He will drag some people down, destroy some careers, and do great damage to the institutions and values we cherish. He will attempt to hurt those of us who climb past him, and push them off the trail. He will scream and yell and pout and posture, as he works to bring back a world in which people like him—white, rich, male and mediocre—were assumed to be the only parties able to hold real power. That belief, perfectly represented by his Columbus golem, can no longer survive in the wild. Talk to young people. Talk to people whose eyes, hearts and minds are open. Trump and Zombie Columbus are so far in their rear-view mirror. These terrible, retrograde, old racists, at the end of the day, are worthy of nothing, least of all your respect. The war is not over. There are many battles ahead. But from the shores of limiw, to the palisades that surround his creepy, caged Columbus, you must know that we are going to win. There is no reason to yield to them an inch.

Boarding Schools

What’s Going On With That Michigan Boarding School Report?

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There is something fishy going on with a state-sponsored investigation of Indigenous boarding schools in Michigan. As one headline put it, “Michigan Spent $1.1M Probing Tribal Boarding Schools Then Buried the Results.”

Governor Gretchen Whitmer had called for an investigation in 2022, but the state’s Department of Civil Rights refused to release the resulting 283-page report. No representatives from the Department of Civil Rights or the State Attorney General’s office attended a hearing held recently by the state legislature to explain why this was the case.  Some sources have suggested that the report was “shoddy.” Others have suggested that the report bore little resemblance to the original assignment. Others still have suggested that releasing the Report could retraumatize survivors.

In order to try to sort this out, I decided to read the report, which an independent and non-profit news outlet called Bridge Michigan made public. Produced by an Indigenous-owned firm from Washington State called Kauffman and Associates, the document it produced is titled Native American Boarding Schools in Michigan: Final Report.

It’s far from perfect.  The research is admittedly preliminary, despite the report’s title. The primary sources necessary to tell the story of Michigan’s boarding schools are extremely difficult to access, owing to the resistance of Catholic authorities.  Marquette University has recently digitized the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions Correspondence Files, but this is only a very first step. Kauffman and Associates had to produce a detailed report in a limited amount of time. There is a lot of material they were not able to examine, and I cannot imagine a historian, who wanted to write a book on boarding schools in Michigan, finishing a thorough and satisfying work in so few years. There is so much material that the Report’s authors did not have time to assess.  This is not the authors’ fault.

The bulk of the report relies on survey responses by thirty Michigan boarding school survivors, and 165 “Descendants, who shared what they knew, experienced, remembered or had heard about the state’s boarding schools. Identifying and interviewing the dwindling number of aged survivors must be a priority if the State is interested in bringing about healing, reconciliation and justice. There are more voices out there, and this report’s sample is small.  It is unclear the relationship between “survivors” and “descendants.” Descendants tended to be much more harsh in their assessment of boarding schools than did survivors. For anyone who has read Brenda Child’s important essay, “The Boarding School as Metaphor,” this is not surprising at all.

Survivors and descendants both recognized the schools’ genocidal intention to erase Indigenous identity. Teachers routinely used derogatory language to describe their students. 78% of survivors and 90% of descendants said that children were not permitted to practice their culture. Many survivors said that they learned to feel shame about being Indigenous. Some former students adopted a range of “dysfunctional coping” methods, and some students committed suicide. Some of the students suffered from malnutrition. Survivors and descendants agreed about this. They also reported sadistic punishments, long hours of work in a system reliant on the exploitation of their labor, and separation from the many tender ties of family. Some survivors passed on the destructive tendencies they learned to their descendants, producing intergenerational trauma. They faced coercive attempts to persuade them to accept Christianity, seldom saw a doctor if they fell ill, and faced abuse and neglect.

There is nothing in the Michigan report that will surprise those who are familiar with the long history of Native American boarding schools in the United States. For that reason, the apparent decision to shelve the report is puzzling. There is not much that is new here. There was, however, in the report a list of recommendations that Kauffman and Associates felt the governor and state legislature should enact, and these may have raised the hackles of racists who objected to the breadth of the commitment they envisioned. Thinking in terms of the Four Directions, the Kauffman report said that the East is represented by “yellow, spring, childhood, and spirituality,” which corresponded to the early stage of reparations and the work towards healing. By following these “East Recommendations,” Michigan would “contribute to the spiritual healing within Native communities by recognizing harm, empowering families to reclaim their lost histories and identities, and be a step toward restoring balance.”

It is not hard to imagine that a state bureaucrat might conclude that these recommendations come at too high a price.  For Michigan to “acknowledge that it has an inherent and ongoing obligation to provide for the educational interests of Indian nations” in the state, and that the state “has also knowingly neglected this obligation, contributing to the harm experienced under its oversight,” is a heavy lift in Trump’s America, where the white people of the past could do no wrong. To “acknowledge that its actions and inactions associated with Native American boarding schools, have caused significant damage to the education, health, and well-being of Tribes and their citizens,” might be seen as a heavy burden indeed.

Does Michigan want to make things better? Then the state “must embrace the broadest, most inclusive approach in its efforts to address” the problems boarding schools created, and the governor must issue “an executive order as an official apology that recognizes its deliberate participation in the national policy if Native American boarding schools.” Find the evidence. Force the Catholic Church, using the subpoena power of the state legislature, to turn over its documents, and fully fund the mammoth task of documenting the causes and consequences of Michigan’s boarding school era. 

Words and apologies are not enough.  And it cannot be a top-down solution.  Within six months to a year of the report’s publication, as the first of its “south recommendations” that “can contribute to the emotional healing within Native communities by fostering justice and accountability, honoring lived experiences, respecting Tribal knowledge, restoring familial bonds, and creating spaces for cultivating genuine healing,” the report recommended that the state “consult with the Tribes on all state activities surrounding Native American boarding schools. Michigan should, as well, “provide financial support for ongoing research regarding its role in the development and perpetuation of Native American boarding schools as well as the aftermath.” In addition to providing financial support for research and to remedy the damage done, Michigan would as well “support individual and community tribal healing by providing resources, programs, and funding committed to addressing the trauma caused by Native American boarding schools.” The state must fix what it broke, repair what it damaged, and provide a full record of its actions to be taught to children in all of Michigan’s schools, and “eliminate the statute of limitations for sexual and physical abuse charges involving minors in Michigan.”

The West recommendations would “contribute to physical healing with Native communities by restoring resources necessary for healing and well-being and fostering reconnections to traditional knowledge and cultural practices that promote wellness.”  When a state tries to eradicate a culture, there are going to be costly consequences, so the state must investigate the misuse of federal trust funds by state authorities and support financially language revitalization programs. When much is broken, much must be repaired.

EVERY STEP OF THE WAY, “transitional justice should be used as the frameworks for all recommendations.” In a world where Donald Trump’s executive orders banish discussions of the Nation’s past that focus on enslavement and dispossession, and in which DOGE cutsmic funds from proposals with worlds like “tribal” contained therein, I find it easy to imagine how concepts like transitional justice would alienate racist Republicans and timorous Democrats. It is an approach, after all, “designed to transform societies into rights-respecting democracies while addressing past human rights violations.” It embraces things the Trump administration has rejected explicitly, and that Democrats approach with extreme caution and a noticeable lack of enthusiasm: “criminal prosecutions, truth commissions, reparations programs, institutional reforms, memorials, apologies and art.”

            There is much more to learn about boarding schools in Michigan, the report’s authors suggest. This work must be undertaken carefully and critically. But even with the evidence collected thus far and included in the report, the remaining questions are simple. How serious is Michigan about setting things right? Was this undertaking more than a performative gesture? Are the recommendations the report made too big a request for a settler state to address honestly and seriously? Now that we know what we know about Michigan’s boarding schools, what is the state government willing to do about it?  I hope I am wrong, but the apparent decision to shelve the report suggests to me that the answer will be, distressingly, “not very much at all.”

Native Americans

Being Commissioner of Indian Affairs Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry

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It was news to me that George W. Manypenny, who served as Commissioner of Indian Affairs under President Franklin Pierce, had published a memoir twenty-five years after he left the Bureau.  During his tenure, he oversaw and, in some ways, first implemented the policy that many historians call “concentration,” an attempt to place the Indigenous peoples of the trans-Mississippi West on reservations on the northern and southern plains, in effect creating a thoroughfare across the continent for the hordes of settlers moving westward.

            Manypenny oversaw the negotiation of more than fifty treaties during his four years in office, an unprecedented number, he boasted. Every year, I have my students read one of these treaties, the 1854 accord he negotiated with the Oto and Missouris. Like the other “concentration” treaties, this agreement involved a cession “to the United States [of] all their country west of the Missouri River, excepting a strip of land on the waters of the Big Blue River.” The Otos and Missouris would within one year “vacate the ceded country and remove to the lands” the treaty set aside as their reservation.

The 1854 Oto and Missouri Treaty

            Manypenny, nonetheless, saw reservations as a temporary expedient.  He already looked forward to the policy of allotment. The 1854 treaty, for instance, authorized the President, “at his discretion” to “cause the whole of the land herein reserved or appropriated west of the Big Blue river, to be surveyed off into lots, and assigned to such Indian or Indians of said confederate tribes, as are willing to avail of the privilege, and who will locate on the same as a permanent home.” In time, and again at his discretion, the President might “issue a patent to such person or family for such assigned land, conditioned that the tract shall not be aliened or leased for a longer term than two years; and shall be exempt from levy, sale, or forfeiture, which conditions shall continue in force, until a State constitution embracing such land within its boundaries shall have been formed, and the legislature of the State shall remove the restrictions.”

            Turn Indians into farmers. Let them hold their land like their growing numbers of white neighbors. Of course, strings were attached, and Manypenny felt that Indigenous peoples must have the coercive assistance of the government to stay on task.  If the recipient of this grant of land “shall at any time neglect or refuse to occupy and till a portion of the land assigned, and on which they have located, or shall rove from place to place, the President may, if the patent shall have been issued, revoke the same, or, if not issued, cancel the assignment.”

            Manypenny, like many commissioners, felt he had the Indians’ interests at heart. He knew better than they their needs for development, improvement, and survival. I have not seen any evidence that he spent much time asking Indigenous people their thoughts. He might have denied it, but the approach was coercive, colonial.  In his final annual report, he explained why. Several months before James Buchanan became president, Manypenny boasted of his accomplishments. “In no former equal period of our history,” he wrote, “have so many treaties been made, or such vast accessions of land been obtained.” Still, he believed that the reservation system already had flaws. “The existing laws for the protection of the person and properties of the Indian wards of the Government are sadly defective.” Manypenny complained of “lawless” white men, Americans, driven by “the rage for speculation” and “the wonderful desire to obtain choice lands.” He lacked the power to do anything about it. “Trespasses and depredations of every conceivable kind have been committed upon the Indians,” he wrote. “They have been personally maltreated, their property stolen, their timber destroyed, their possessions encroached upon, and diverse other wrongs and injuries done them.”

            Manypenny did not believe it was possible to move the Indians out of the way of the advancing and land-hungry white settlers. No, he said.  Referring to the Indigenous people living in Kansas, he wrote that “they must meet their fate upon their present reservation in that Territory, and there be made a civilized people, or crushed and blotted out.”  And because the government, in his view, could neither move the concentrated nations once again nor control its own settlers, Indigenous peoples would have to change. They would give up their culture, relinquish their own rich religious traditions and, where they had not done so already, become Christians. They would come to hold their land in fee simple title, like their white neighbors, protected by a code of laws that extended to them the same rights of citizenship.

            I do not doubt that Manypenny held his beliefs deeply and sincerely. He was not alone.  But not only does it seem naïve, but oblivious to context as well, for there was ample evidence even in the 1850s that too many white people would never respect Indigenous property rights. The evidence was right in front of him.

If there were a think tank for Indigenous affairs in the middle of the nineteenth century, Manypenny likely would have worked there.   He kept his hand in Indian affairs after his term as commissioner expired. Ulysses Grant sent him in 1876 to negotiate peace with the Sioux. Manypenny served both Democrats and Republicans. Need an expert on Indigenous concerns? Manypenny might be your guy.

            So I was curious when I learned that in 1880 he published Our Indian Wards, written during a period where American policy-makers had reached the conclusion that concentration was inadequate, and that additional steps must be taken to solve the nation’s “Indian problem.” In his introduction, Manypenny claimed that he wanted his book “to render service in the amelioration of the condition of our Indian population.” The American Nation’s treatment of its “wards,” he wrote, “is a sickening detail of outrage, robbery, and murder.” Land lay at the heart of the matter. Indians had it, and white people wanted to take it from them.  All the “border wars,” he wrote, stemmed from white land hunger. Beginning at Jamestown in 1607, “it was no fault of the natives that relations of peace and good will were not successfully cultivated.”

            Successive governments broke treaty after treaty. Beneficial policies, when put in place, failed because government agents “have frequently proved faithless, and soldiers sent to protect the tribes not only have been cruel and vindictive, but often have introduced demoralization and carried disease among them.” It was a very old tune, Manypenny suggested, and “in fact (though it may seem paradoxical), it is true, that the white man’s conduct and example, instead of aiding, has been the chief obstacle in the way of civilization of the Indian.”

            It was time for a change. “Is it not time that the government and people of the United States should resolve that justice and fair dealing shall be substituted for that coldness, sordid selfishness, and cruelty which the native race has endured in all the years of the past?” Manypenny thought so. “The Indian is not only entitled to justice at our hands, but we should extend to the race our earnest sympathy and aid. Our wards,” he said, “should have our best efforts for the amelioration of their condition.”

            So what did Manypenny propose? “A fixed and settled home” for Indigenous peoples, he said, was imperative. Like many of his contemporaries, he had accepted allotment as vital, but he urged some small amount of caution. “To each head of a family there should, within the reservation, be assigned a homestead.” It should contain a “not excessive” number of acres. And the Indigenous assignee “should be taught that he is the proprietor, with the right to exercise jurisdiction over his farm, and be secured in the enjoyment of all he produces upon it.” He had to have known that this had been tried before, and that it had not worked in the way its advocates hoped.  Nonetheless, he felt it was important to push forward, “though the title to the land should remain in the tribe, since the Indians are generally not prepared for fee-simple titles.” Private property could work magic, American policy-makers believed, but it could only be entrusted to proper hands. “When the tribe is permanently located on the reservation, and the integrity of the same is placed beyond question, and when those disposed to intrude upon the possessions of the red man understand, that if done, it is at their peril, and that certain and swift punishment will follow, the work of the agent may be successfully prosecuted.” And these agencies “should be confided to none but men of the highest character for integrity, or good executive ability, and industrious habits.”

            Manypenny offered a host of other suggestions. All of them had been tried before. Not a new idea in sight. Indigenous women, he said, “must cease to do the outdoor work, and confine themselves to domestic duties and the cares of the house and the family.” Each agency must have a Christian missionary of good character, and a “brief and simple code of regulations” prepared by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and enforced by Indigenous officers could help keep order. After all, “the present laws for the protection of the Indians from intrusion, trespass, and personal injury by lawless whites, are wholly inadequate. The attention of Congress has been repeatedly called to this fact.”  Maybe this time if we try all those things we have tried before it will work out differently.

            Manypenny wanted his work to matter, his book to be one of consequence. He wanted to be heard and listened to. If his book had “any agency in arousing the public mind, and quickening the consciences of the people, to the end that our Indian wards may, in some degree, have that attention which is demanded by every sentiment of justice and every impulse of humanity, so that oppression and cruelty shall give place to just and fair treatment, and thus their path of life be made not only bearable, but strewn with such aid, instruction, and sympathy as will win them from their wild life, and induce them to accept the comforts of civilization and a settled home, the writer will be abundantly repaid for his labor.” Manypenny wished that a “better and brighter day may speedily come to the despised Indian.”  But even as his book made its way towards publication, the Otos and Missouris were being driven from the Big Blue reservation they received in 1854.

I find the feckless crusader a frustrating historical character. Manypenny published his book just a year before Helen Hunt Jackson’s A Century of Dishonor appeared. Like her, he wrote a history of promises broken, treaties ignored, avarice enshrined as policy, massacres repeated and unpunished. Like her, he had little to offer by way of a solution other than we should do what we have done before but this time get the right people. An expert with no answers is not much of an expert at all.

Jackson, c. 1884

            Manypenny hoped that Americans might be better than what history showed them to be. Men like Manypenny had been expressing the hope that white settlers would follow the laws and the rules designed to protect or keep the peace with Indigenous peoples for over three centuries in North America by the time he wrote. Manypenny could either not see, nor admit, that dispossession of Indigenous peoples was as central to this country’s identity as life and liberty, and that many, many Americans saw the taking of lands from Indians as the best way to pursue happiness.

            People like Manypenny make writing Native American history exhausting. The problem was obvious: too many Americans were Indian-hating racists who would stop at nothing to get their hands on Indigenous land. To solve that problem—in essence to keep Americans from being American—would have required a forceful assertion of the importance of respecting Indigenous rights. That this was a political impossibility is an indictment as much as it is an explanation. In a country founded and reliant for its shape on Indigenous dispossession, a crime in which nearly every person living on this continent is either implicated, a beneficiary, or both, it is so tiring to try to find one American leader who acted with competence, principle, and courage. When everyone in a country is guilty of a crime, after all, it is easy to dismiss the charge, to cast the crime as natural, inevitable, or part of God’s manifest design. That is the truth that Manypenny failed to confront.  He was not alone.

New Publications

What You Need to Read, March 2026

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Alves, Alexandre Guilherme da Cruz, “The Alcatraz Occupation and the American Indian Movement, 1969-1971,” Journal of American History, 111 (March 2025), 735-749.

Beyreis, David. “`The Lawless Whites on our Frontier Must be Restrained’: Outlaws, Cheyennes, and the Origins of the Red River War, 1874-1875,” Western Historical Quarterly, 56 (Winter 2025), 279-294.

Bickers, Aamaawia John. The Miami Nation: A Middle Path for Indigenous Nationhood, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2026).

Brunner, Benedikt. “Sensory Encounters on Martha’s Vineyard: Native American Deathways in Colonial New England around 1700,” Renaissance and Reformation, 48 (Winter/Spring 2025), 207-237.

Canessa, Andrew and Manuela Lavinas Picq, Savages and Citizens: How Indigeneity Shapes the State, (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2024).

Clough, Joshua. “Bribed with out Own Money: Federal Abuse of American Indian Funds in the Termination Era,” Chronicles of Oklahoma, 103 (Fall 2025), 338-340.

Companion, Michele. “Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls: Opportunities Based on Collaborative Governance,” in Michele Companion and Jason D. Rivera, Indigenous Experiences with Collaborative Governance: Moving Toward Equitable Partnerships, (New York: Bergahn, 2026).

Denetclaw, Dorothy and Matt Fitzsimmons, The Sons of Gunshooter: A Navajo Resistance Story, (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2026.

Estes, Nick. “Awakening the Red Giant: American Indian Anti-Imperialism and the First Decade of the International Indian Treaty Council,” Wicazo Sa Review, 40 (Spring-Fall 2025), 32-61.

Fischer, John Ryan. “`The Mississippi was Our River’: Sauk and Meskwaki Geopolitical Strategies on the Nineteenth-Century Prairie,” Early American Studies, 23 (Fall 2025), 423-450.

Fisher, Linford. Stealing America: The Hidden Story of Indigenous Slavery in American History, (New York: Liveright, 2026).

Fletcher, Mattew L. M. Tribal Law in a Nutshell, (Eagan, MN: West Academic Publishing, 2026).

Fraser, Crystal and Sara V. Komarnisky, Talk Treaty to Me: Understanding the Basics of Treaties and Land in Canada, (Toronto: MacMillan, 2026).

Grillot, Thomas. The Pursuit of Family: A History of Dakota and Lakota Family and Kinship on the Standing Rock Reservation, 1794-2022, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2026).

Hall, Timothy d. “`Getting A Bushel of Money for the School’: Samson Occom’s Practice of Christian Indigeneity on his English Fundraising Tour, 1766-1768,” Fides et Historia 57 (Summer/Fall 2025), 24-42.

Hidalgo Reese, Elizabeth. “The Three Phases of the Tribal Self-Determination Era and the Phase Out of Federal Paternalism,” Columbia Law Review, 125 (December 2025), 205-241.

Isenberg, Andrew C. The Age of the Borderlands: Indians, Slaves, and the Limits of Manifest Destiny, 1790-1850, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2025).


Johnson, Eric Daniel and Zoë Antoinette Eddy, “Beads of Settler Bafflement and Indigenous Futurity: White-Owned Wampum Factories and Native Baby Yoda,” American Anthropologist, 127 (December 2025), 707-719.

Johnson, Kimberley Morales, Sean Milanovich, and Beth Rose Middleton Manning, “Native Land Trusts: Centering Relationality, Justice, and Healing,” Environmental History, 30 (April 2025), 360-371.

Kinealy, Christine. “Gadugi—The Cherokee Gift To Ireland in 1847,” History Ireland, 34 (January/February 2026), 22-24.

Law, Anna O. Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship: African Americans, Native Americans, and Immigrants, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2026).

Manshel, Hanna. “In Perfect Bad Faith: Race and Attacks on the Indian Child Welfare Act,” American Quarterly, 77 (December 2025), 613-636.

Masta, Stephanie, ed., Indigenous Voices of Girls and Women in Educational Spaces: Celebrating Presence, (New York: Routledge, 2026).

Miller, Robert J. “The Indian Law Bombshell: McGirt v. Oklahoma (2020),” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 166 (June 2025), 50-62.

Minch-de-Leon, Marck. Indigenous Inhumanities: California Indian Studies after the Apocalypse, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2025).

Montoya, Sarah. “Moving Toward Accountability: Challenging Settler Narratives Through Interpretive Shifts and Tribal Engagement at Anza National Historic Trail,” Parks Stewardship Forum, 42 (no. 1, 2026), 101-110.

Moral, Paulina Garcia-Del, “State Complicity: Settler Colonialism, Multisided Violence, and Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in Canada,” Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State, and Society, 32 (Fall 2025), 560-583.

Night Pipe, Michelle L., Felicia Bartley, Fallon Carey and Samuel Torres. “Steps on the Healing Journey: Investigating the Pipestone Indian Boarding School Archival Records for Survivors, Descendants, Tribes and National Park Visitors,” Parks Stewardship Forum, 42 (no. 1, 2026), 139-149.

O’Neill, Collen M. Waging Sovereignty: Native Americans and the Transformation of Work in the Twentieth Century, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2026).

Oberg, Michael Leroy. The Central Fire of the Iroquois: A Five Hundred-Year History of the Onondaga Nation, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2026).

Panich, Lee M. and Gustavo Flores, We Will Receive Justice: Native Histories of the Collapse of the California Missions, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2026).

Pearce, Matthew. “Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe,” Chronicles of Oklahoma, 103 (Fall 2025), 340-342.

Reed, Julie L.  Land, Language and Women: A Cherokee and American Educational History, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2026).

Rosier, Paul C. Indigenous Citizens : Native Americans’ Fight for Sovereignty, 1776-2025, (New York: Norton, 2026).

Silverman David J. The Chosen and the Damned: Native Americans and the Making of Race in the United States, (New York: Bloomsbury, 2026).

Simpson, Mark. “Alexander McGillivray and the Old School Fellow: A Critical Examination of the Sources for McGillivray’s Youth,” Alabama Review, 78 (October 2025), 283-318.

Stauroudis, Christianna, “’Let My People Have a Right:’ The Native Activism of Arapaho Chief Paul Boynton,” Chronicles of Oklahoma, 103 (Fall 2025), 291-318.

Suarez, Sasha Maria. An Ojibwe Home in the City: White Earth Women and Community Organizing in Minneapolis, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2026.

Sweet, Jameson. Mixed-Blood Histories: Race, Law, and Dakota Indians in the Nineteenth-Century Midwest, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2025).

Webster, Rebecca. “Fueled By Conflict: Intergovernmental Relations on the Oneida Reservation,” in Companion and Rivera, Indigenous Experiences with Collaborative Governance: Moving Toward Equitable Partnerships, (New York: Berghahn Books, 2026).

Welch, Levin Elias and Monica McDermott, “Native for a day: Non-Native Perceptions of Native American Life,” Sociological Inquiry, 95 (November 2025), 715-731.

Wellman, Judith. “`Here We Wish To Lay Our Bones in Peace’: Haudenosaunee People in the Burned-Over District of Upstate New York,” Journal of the Early Republic, 46 (Spring 2026), 71-86.

Working, Lauren. “The First General Assembly of Virginia: Deerskin, Ruffs, and the View from Tsenacommacah,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 7 (December 2025), 521-537.

Current Events

Leave Bad Bunny Alone

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Last week President Trump posted a “Presidential Message” on the “Anniversary of one of our Nation’s earliest displays of military might.” He wanted to “honor the memory of the brave men” he said, “who gave their lives in service to our Nation” during the Mexican War.

            It is not uncommon for a president to take the anniversary of a historical event as an occasion for reflecting on the policies and goals of his administration, but invocations of the Mexican War are relatively rare.  But Trump, as we well know, is not like other presidents. 

            “Guided by our victory on the fields of Mexico 178 years ago,” his message reads, “I have spared no effort in defending our southern border against invasion, upholding the rule of law, and protecting our homeland from forces of evil, violence, and destruction.” Trump claimed that he was stopping the flow of drugs into the United States, halting the “invasion of illegal aliens,” and “dismantling narco-terrorist networks all across the Western hemisphere.” Trump also, he said, had secured control of the Panama Canal from foreign takeover, a very odd claim, and that his administration was “aggressively pursuing an America First policy of peace through strength and will continue to reassert the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine to ensure the Hemisphere remains safe, prosperous, and free.”

For white people.

Whatever one thinks of Trump’s policies, and however much one might agree or disagree with his party’s belief in the magnitude of the border crisis, it is easy to see how Trump both invoked and found justification for his policies in the virulent racism that preceded the war.

Late in the 1980s, when I knew I wanted to go to graduate school to study American history, one of the first books I read was Reginald Horsman’s Race and Manifest Destiny. It is a fantastic book that got me thinking. Horsman wrote about the origins of “American Racial Anglo-Saxonism,” tracing its roots back to the Tudor antiquarians of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Trump speaks the language of these racial Anglo-Saxonists. After the War of 1812, for example, Trump  asserted, the United States was “guided by the steadfast belief that our Nation was destined by divine providence to expand to the golden shore of the Pacific Ocean.” After “Mexican forces launched an ambush along the Rio Grande, killing 11 and wounding 6 American troops” (a highly dubious proposition), and “with the promise of Manifest Destiny beating in every American heart” (another highly dubious proposition), President James K. Polk commenced a violent invasion that seized more than half of Mexico’s territory and even more of its arable soil. (Trump, of course, did not call it that). It was a war of territorial aggression that led to the United States claiming much of Mexico, many of its citizens, and many thousands of Indigenous people as subjects of an aggressively expanding American empire.

Not all Americans supported the war, and the notion that Manifest Destiny beat in every American heart is simply not true. Mexicans and Indigenous people, after all, did not feel that this war was a good thing, and they are Americans, too. But many white Americans were deeply concerned about the American aggression in Texas and beyond.

The Mexican War is a big subject, and I suspect that many of us in our survey courses do not do it justice. One way I have found useful to get at this in the classroom is by looking at the career of John Quincy Adams, the greatest ex-president in American history. Leonard Richards’ old, brief biography of Adams’s congressional career is wonderful. I am sure there is more recent work out there, but because my department long ago dispensed with its survey courses, a decision I gradually came to support, I no longer have occasion to teach these classes. 

It is important to remember that by the middle of the 1830s a national two-party political system had emerged.  The Second American Party System, as it is called, was the product of the politics of the Market Revolution. These two parties, to a very great extent, disagreed over the economic and political future of the United States.  They were struggling to define this thing called a “Republic,” a vague concept which all embraced but over which different people could disagree.  By 1840, these two parties, Whigs and Democrats, were competing in all parts of the country, a product of the extraordinary political talent of Martin van Buren, who worked harder than anyone to try to keep the slavery issue out of politics.

The territorial expansion of the United States, the fulfillment of what newspaperman John L. O’Sullivan called its “Manifest Destiny,” would introduce questions about race, slavery, the economic and political future of the United States, and the definition of the Republic that could not easily be avoided, and Adams played an important role in this story. He did not retire after his presidency.  He was elected to Congress from Massachusetts in 1831 and would serve for the next seventeen years until his death in 1848.  Throughout these years, Adams was an enemy of the Slave Power conspiracy, premised on the belief that slaveowners and their allies would do anything to protect the institution of slavery, even if that meant depriving white people of their constitutional rights. Adams, for instance, led the fight against the Gag Rule, through which pro-slavery members of the House and Senate managed to shut off all debate on antislavery petitions which floated into Congress.

If you teach this material, you will need to remind your students that the first amendment to the Constitution guarantees citizens the right to petition their legislators, a cornerstone of the Bill of Rights.  The gag rule, Adams argued, was obviously unconstitutional.  Adams we should point out, was not an abolitionist—he thought they were troublemakers, but he did believe strongly that the constitution mattered. Adams considered the gage rule to be “in direct violation of the constitution of the United States, of the rules of the House, and of the rights of my constituents.”  Because the gag had to be renewed at every session of Congress, there were frequent opportunities to excoriate southern slave-owners and northern Jacksonians for denying the right to petition, and to savage them on constitutional grounds.  John C. Calhoun, obviously a supporter of slavery, called Adams a “mischievous bad old Man.” The gag rule, it should be pointed out, served the interests of slaveowners, and the Jacksonians quite well. How could Van Buren and others focus attention on banking and currency reform if Congress had to continually deal with the slavery question.  The Gag Rule was consistent with Van Buren’s goal of keeping slavery out of politics.

Adams was able to bring up slavery despite the gag rule. In February 1837, for instance, he tried to introduce a petition from nine women in Fredericksburg, Virginia.  He tried to present it, arguing that they wanted the abolition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia and not abolition in toto.  No matter, the resolution was tabled. Then Adams asked the speaker to rule on another piece of paper, one that looked like a petition, but was filled with scratches and marks “purporting to come from slaves.”  Could this, he asked, be presented?  The question produced an immediate reaction as southerners jumped at the implication that slaves had the right to petition congress.  Adams sat back as confusion reigned.  Some said he should be expelled for introducing a resolution from slaves.    He pointed out that he had said “purported.” Later he said that the resolution did indeed come from slaves, but they were slaves that preferred slavery to abolition and wanted Congress not to tamper with slavery in any way.  This made his opponents even madder.  This went on for five days, to Adams’ great satisfaction. Adams was receiving nearly a dozen assassination threats a month.

During his years in Congress he had other opportunities to annoy proslavery zealots.  In 1841, he defended 39 Africans before the Supreme Court after they had seized control over the slave ship Amistad.  These Africans, sailing from one part of Cuba to another, had rebelled and captured the ship they were on.  They hoped to sail to Africa, but they were deceived by their Spanish hostage crew, and ended up on Long Island Sound. Adams and his associates won the case and the Africans were returned to Africa on the grounds that Africans were never the legal property of the Spaniards.  Rather, they were “kidnapped Africans, who by the laws of Spain itself were entitled to their freedom.”

In many ways, the Jacksonians played into Adams’ hands.  In no way was this more so than over Texas.  The Jacksonians were, in general, land hungry and beholden to frontier interests.  They were an aggressively-expansionist party.  Many Whigs, their opponents, did not share their enthusiasm for acquiring additional chunks of land. They wanted to develop what the United States already had, they said.  They worried that adding “inferior races” could weaken the republic. And they could not help but notice that Jacksonian expansion seemed to benefit the plantation south more than the rest of the country.  Adams became convinced that Jacksonian expansion was part of a larger “Slave Power Conspiracy.”  Most of all, the Jacksonians wanted Texas.

The Texas issue, of course, grew out of the Mexican Revolution. Mexico had gained its independence from Spain in 1821.  In 1823, in order to create a buffer zone between Mexico’s interior and the United States, the Mexican government encouraged migration into Texas. Land hungry Americans came in droves, in greater numbers than expected, outnumbering Mexicans by 2 to 1, and this produced alarm in Mexico City. The Mexican government, after all, abolished slavery in 1829, and in 1830 it enacted a law directing immigrants to abide by Mexican Law and custom, part of which was Roman Catholicism. But the Mexican government was too weak to enforce its authority. Then in 1834, General Santa Anna seized control of the Mexican government and established a dictatorship. Texans revolted and Santa Anna, with 6000 men, stormed into Texas in 1836, killing 188 at the Alamo and 300 more at the Goliad.

The Texans, with aid from the southern states, fought back and when they won their independence, they appealed to the United States to recognize Texan independence. Adams had little use for the Texas rebels. Like many northerners, he suspected that the Texas Revolution was part of a plot hatched by slaveowners to further southern interests. Adams accused the supporters of the Texans of being racists.  He asked speaker of the house James K. Polk, “Do not you, an Anglo-Saxon, slave-holding exterminator of Indians, from the bottom of your soul, hate the Mexican-Spaniard-Indian emancipator of slaves and abolisher of slavery?” Adams’s stand was popular, especially his belief that southerners hoped to carve up several slave states out of the Texas region.  His claim that the Texas Revolution was a criminal act set off by enslavers and land speculators had instant appeal throughout much of the Northeast.

Andrew Jackson was unable to do anything about annexing Texas. Van Buren, his successor, had little interest in doing so, as he was firmly committed to keeping slavery out of politics. William Henry Harrison, a Whig, was elected President in 1840, and he too had little interest in annexation, but he died soon after taking office.  He was replaced by John Tyler, who was scarcely a Whig at all.  In fact, Tyler’s stand on banking was similar in many ways to Jackson, and that alienated Whig power broker Senator Henry Clay and others who largely read him out of the party.  Tyler became a president without a party.  He saw the Texas issue as his only hope for political salvation.

Adams watched Tyler with suspicion.  In a speech to his constituents, Adams insisted that “Your country is no longer a democracy, it is no longer even a republic—it is a government of 2 or 300,000 holders of slaves, to the utter exclusion of the remaining part, and all the population of the other states in the Union.”  Now Tyler’s trump card was that British politicians had made antislavery speeches for home consumption, and they had stated that they favored a free and independent Texas as an alternative to southern cotton and as a barrier to further American expansion.  Thus Tyler’s supporters could throw back at Adams that the was abetting a foreign conspiracy, one orchestrated by the British, designed to reduce the growing economic power of the United States.

After February of 1844, Tyler’s secretary of state was John C. Calhoun. Tyler charged him with completing negotiations for the annexation of Texas.  In April 1844, Calhoun sent the treaty to the Senate, along with a copy of a letter he had written to Richard Pakenham, the British minister to Washington. The “Pakenham letter” was a bombshell.  Besides denouncing Pakenham’s government for interfering in Texas and supporting abolition throughout the world, Calhoun sang the praises of slavery and cited statistics to prove that blacks were better off as slaves than freedmen. He justified annexation as a means of defending the institution of slavery. So what? The letter strengthened Adams and the northern whigs, because it proved that Texas annexation was about acquiring additional land for the institution of slavery.  The annexation treaty was defeated overwhelmingly in the Senate.

Adams knew that the election of 1844, which pitted Clay against the democrat James K. Polk, would revolve around Texas. Speaking to a Boston audience, Adams said that “your trial is approaching. The spirit of freedom and the spirit of slavery are drawing together for the deadly conflict of arms.  The annexation of Texas to this Union is the blast of the trumpet for a foreign, civil, servile, and Indian war, of which the government of your country, fallen into faithless hands, have already given the signal—first by a shameless treaty, rejected by a virtuous senate; and again by the glove of defiance, hurled by the apostle of nullification, at the avowed policy of the British empire peacefully to promote the extinction of slavery throughout the world.  Young men of Boston: Burnish your honor, prepare for the conflict, and I say to you, in the language of Galgacus to the ancient Britons, think of your forefathers!  Think of your Posterity!” (I had to look up who Galgacus was, too, but even if you don’t, I think you can catch the urgency of his tone).

Despite Adams’ efforts, Polk won the election, and Adams expected gloomy days ahead for the republic under Tyler’s successor. Now Tyler had submitted a joint resolution annexing Texas to the United States.  A joint resolution requires only a majority vote of both houses, rather than the 2/3 required for the ratification of a treaty. The Texans were wary, and to sweeten the pot, Polk accepted the Rio Grande as the southern boundary of Texas. The Texas he saw added to the union, in other words, was larger in a sense than the Texas that had broke away from Mexico. THAT Mexico had its southern border at the Nueces River. Polk was an incredibly hard-driving and aggressive president.  He was willing to compromise his territorial ambitions when it came to a dispute with Britain over the Oregon boundary, but never on the question of gaining additional territory from Mexico. Polk sent John Slidell as his emissary to Mexico City with authority to buy California and New Mexico from the Mexican government, and to get Mexico to recognize the Rio Grande as the southern boundary of Texas.

Word of Slidell’s mission arrived in Mexico before Slidell did, and soon after his arrival the Mexican government was overthrown by general Mariano Paredes and some 7000 soldiers.  The new military regime refused to have anything to do with Slidell, and asserted Mexico’s claim to all of Texas. Polk regarded this rejection of Slidell as cause for war.  Then he got word of General Zachary Taylor losing the eleven men Trump mentioned as the result of a supposed Mexican invasion of American soil.  To Adams, Polk had provoked this war to extend slavery.  Not everybody agreed with this interpretation.  Some simply did not believe that the President would do this, or that it made sense for him to do so.  But the point is clear. The Mexican War was an immense watershed.  The two-party system was beginning to fall apart along sectional lines.  This combustible situation was made clear in August of 1846, when a congressman from Pennsylvania, a democrat named David Wilmot, introduced an amendment to an appropriation bill that the President’s supporters tried to push through Congress at the last second. 

Wilmot and his co-sponsors hoped to ban slavery from any territory acquired from Mexico. He was not an abolitionist.  Wilmot said “I have no squeamish sensitiveness upon the subject of slavery, nor morbid sympathy for the slave.  I plead the cause of the rights of white freemen. I would preserve for free white labor a fair country, a rich inheritance, where the sons of toil, of my own race and own color, can live without the disgrace which association with negro slavery brings upon free labor.”

The Wilmot Proviso did nothing that would have destroyed the institution of slavery, but it did say that slavery should not expand. That implied that there was something unclean, something dishonorable, about slavery. The Wilmot Proviso thus made clear a number of significant cracks in the Second American party System. Both northern Democrats and northern Whigs supported the Proviso.  Many of these northerners were coming to believe in the Slave Power Conspiracy.  Slaveowners, the story went, were members of an anti-democratic aristocracy that was willing to subvert the nation’s democratic institutions to protect the institution of slavery. The south already had unequal representation in the House because of the 3/5 clause.  Slavery was now spreading, subverting institutions wherever it went. Looking on these events, the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson could see that “Mexico will poison us.”

I MARRIED INTO A MEXICAN-AMERICAN FAMILY. I don’t speak Spanish well at all, but I can understand it. Watching Bad Bunny with my Mexican-American partner, her sister, our children, made it even more clear than it otherwise would have been how well he struck so many notes that resonated with his audience. It really was a fantastic performance, and I am sure I will watch it again to catch things that I missed—some of which were pointed out by observers far more astute than I.

            Manifest Destiny. Ask an American about their nation’s history, and I find that even if they do not know the subject well, they will be able to tell you something about manifest destiny. It is one of those odd concepts, or bits of information, that really seems to stick. When I ask, students recite pretty easily that it meant that it was God’s plan that the United States expand across the continent. But expansion is such a bland word, isn’t it? Invade. Seize. Colonize. Take, steal, rob, exploit, and conquer. All these words seem to get at the underlying reality with more precision.

            For those of us who teach Indigenous history, the expressions of this manifest design are so easy to see in the Annual Reports of the Commissioners of Indian Affairs, all helpfully digitized by the University of Wisconsin. Indian Commissioner William Medill in 1848 argued, for example, that “Apathy, barbarism, and heathenism must give way to energy, civilization, and Christianity, and so the Indian of this continent has been displaced by the European.”

            You see it, don’t you? “Manifest Destiny” meant the dispossession of Indigenous people. And as Horsman showed so well, Mexicans, too, were viewed as a race vastly inferior to the white Anglo-Saxons Americans idealized and idolized. So Bad Bunny ended his performance at the Super Bowl by reciting the names of the nations of the Americas. He showed the audience a football inscribed with the words, “Together We Are America.” Trump, meanwhile, who clearly was watching, posted on his silly Twitter knock-off a racist screed. He was angry, it seems to me, because Bad Bunny showed that Manifest Destiny was a racist fantasy. Americans’ attempts to fulfill that manifest destiny, to be sure, ruined the lives of millions of people, but Bad Bunny proved that it was a racist lie, an invocation of God to seize the life, liberty, and property of an enormous number of perfectly innocent people. Manifest Destiny was genocidal, in that if God’s plan was fulfilled in the way the white supremacists wished there would be no Spanish speakers left on this continent. It seems like maybe, just maybe, God did not want that after all. If there is a god, I would like to think that they are far more happy with the splendid color and beauty on display at halftime than the swinish grunts of the racist pig who leads the Republican Party.

Current Events

Leave Billie Eilish Alone

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Or better, take seriously what she had to say.

At the Grammy Awards last weekend, singer Billie Eilish, like many of her peers, denounced the violence and brutality of the Trump Administration’s unconstitutional raids against undocumented immigrants and expressed her support for those Americans murdered by Trump’s secret police.  “No one,” she said, “is illegal on stolen land.”

            Richard Epstein and Max Raskin, the former a law professor at New York University aligned with the Cato Institute and the latter a “Kardashian-curious crypto evangelist” and real estate investor who teaches there part time, took exception to Eilish’s acceptance speech. In a Washington Post op-ed dripping with smug condescension, the pair provided a tendentious lecture on American property law and a celebration of Indigenous dispossession. It’s an embarrassing and unseemly essay.  It’s deeply dishonest and completely divorced from any real grasp of the history of how white people came to control Indigenous land in North America.

            With a tut-tut and a wave of the hand, Epstein and Raskin assert that “Americans are not thieves who built on stolen land.” Indigenous peoples, they point out, were vicious.  They mention, after all, the “fierce conquest of the southern Plains by the Comanche” and “the prevalence of Native American slavery before European arrival.” Indigenous peoples were so barbarous, Epstein and Raskin suggest, that taking their land was entirely justified. It was natural, inevitable, and, they seem to believe, we are all better for it.  A lot of nasty people, across the vast expanse of this continent’s history, would agree.

            In the centuries since Europeans arrived, lands have changed hands many times.  Americans have bought and sold, and surveyed, developed and built many trillions of dollars’ worth of real property. Because of that, “the effort to undo the past would involve trillions of dollars in transfer payments and coerced title shifts that would unsettle every home mortgage, every mining and oil lease, and every graveyard in the United States.”

            But that is not what Eilish suggested. There is something really gross about their line of argument. Never mind that Eilish did not call for the massive confiscation of property that Epstein and Raskin fear (Eilish, 24, is roughly the same age as Epstein and Raskin’s students; I hope they treat their students with more grace, honesty, and decency than they showed Eilish). It’s that at heart they never deny the magnitude of Indigenous dispossession and the scale of the corruption, deceit and coercion used to acquire this continent. Rather, they suggest, Indigenous peoples had it coming because some of them were mean to each other and because it would be too difficult and too inconvenient to do anything about it now.

            The American people, Epstein and Raskin continue, “should be allowed to enjoy security in their purchases and not have to worry about what happened centuries ago.” Ever pedantic, they point out that “statutes of limitation and doctrines such as adverse possession clearly provide that you must sue by a certain date or your title is gone, no matter how maliciously acquired.” Of course, the courts of the conquerors were not open to Indigenous peoples, even when the United States blatantly, clearly, and explicitly ignored its own statutes and the provisions of treaties it negotiated with Indigenous peoples, both of which, the Constitution tells us, are the “supreme law of the land.”

            Epstein and Raskin quite simply do not care that what Americans gained came at the expense of Indigenous peoples. It is, to them, legally and thus morally irrelevant.  Sure, Native Americans may have lost their lands “centuries ago,” and “it is easy to call land stolen,” but “what about the innocent purchasers who acquired in good faith in the interim?” Epstein and Raskin ask of these good faith purchasers, “are they thieves?”

Yeah.

In a sense they are. I am. And you are, too.

In the same sense that the purchasers of art looted by the Nazis who claimed that they did know the provenance of the pieces they acquired are guilty, so too are the American owners of Indigenous land. Of course, Epstein and Rankin are correct to point out that returning a continent to its original inhabitants would be an impossibility, which is why no serious person has ever called for a return of land on that scale.  But that does not change the fact that New York became the Empire State through a systematic program of Indigenous dispossession that quite often violated the laws of the United States and, even when it adhered to the letter of those self-serving rules, rebelled against every standard of decency, justice, and morality that I trust you hold dear.  And there is nothing Epstein and Rankin can say to deny that if you are a landowner in this state today, you are the beneficiary of the original duplicitous, unjust, and illegal acts of dispossession. I am happy that Eilish used her enormous platform to bring attention to this historic process, and I believe we would be better off exploring what we might do to set things right rather than saying, as Epstein and Raskin seemingly do, that “shit happens.”

Richard Epstein and Max Rankin

            It is easy for me to remember that Billie Eilish is young, and because of that, to extend her grace.  As an educator of students just a few years younger than her, I find the moral energy and sense of justice carried by the people I teach energizing. And I find the reductio ad absurdam presented by Epstein and Raskin absolutely repellent. They sound like old men, grousing about “celebrities,” as if Statler and Waldorf had moved from the balcony to the pages of the Washington Post. They trivialized the point Eilish made, which is an important one: this continent was taken from Indigenous peoples by violent squatters or through treaties that frequently were coerced, or fraudulent, or subsequently ignored by the United States when they became inconvenient. Dispossession was neither natural nor inevitable, whatever Epstein and Raskin believe. It was, quite often, a crime against the laws of the United States.  What is legal, after all, can cut both ways, and we must remember that the law was written by American people to support American interests. Billie Eilish, I believe, tried to remind us of that.

Teaching Native American History

We Must Not Think Bad Thoughts

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Two stories. Both of them are true. One the Trump administration has chosen to commemorate as part of the American nation’s 250th birthday celebration; the other it wants unremembered, proscribed, and erased.  Let’s see if you can guess which one is which.

            In the winter of 1777-1778, George Washington’s army camped at Valley Forge. A short distance away, the British occupied Philadelphia, living in relative comfort. The Continental Army, meanwhile, was starving, and its morale reached rock-bottom.  The patriot’s revolution was in grave danger.

            In the spring, help arrived. Forty-seven Oneidas, including the redoubtable Polly Cooper, arrived from what is today central New York. They brought with them bushels of Iroquois corn. According to Georgia Halbritter, relating Oneida oral history, “Cooper worked for George Washington, showing the Americans how to cook the corn properly.” Washington wanted to pay Cooper, the story goes, but she refused because, Halbritter said, “it was her duty to serve her country.” So, after the war, Washington sent his wife Martha, along with Polly, on a shopping trip in Philadelphia.  The future first lady bought Cooper a black shawl, a hat, and a bonnet.  As historian Karim Tiro pointed out, “the documentary record bears out some of the story’s details but is silent in regard to others.” Still, he suggested, it’s a powerful metaphor for the Oneidas’ costly yet highly significant contribution to the patriot cause.

FAR TO THE WEST of the Oneida homeland, the so-called “Great Sioux War” began in America’s centennial year. Many Lakota Sioux spent part of the year on the Great Sioux Reservation but moved out onto the Plains of eastern Montana to hunt in the spring and summer. They resented the American failure to adhere to the terms of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, which guaranteed them exclusive control of their land, and especially the hordes of prospectors who began to intrude into the Black Hills following gold strikes there in 1874. The Lakotas ignored demands that they return to their reservation—why should they honor a treaty that the white people had ignored—and by the spring of 1876, four army columns began marching toward the Powder River Country to force the Sioux to return.

Much of the fighting that followed took place in Crow country in eastern Montana. With the removal of the forts along the Bozeman Trail several years earlier, no American military presence remained to prevent Sioux encroachment on lands to their west. Conflict between the Sioux and the Crows increased, and the size and scope of this warfare intensified. Plenty Coups, the great Crow leader who oversaw his people’s adjustment to reservation life, remembered that he and his followers “knew the white men were strong, without number in their own country, and that there was no good in fighting them.” The Crows calculated their best interest, and that meant assisting the American forces. “Our leading chiefs,” Plenty Coups said, “saw that to help the white men fight their enemies and ours would make them our friends.” Already at war with the Sioux and their allies, they might as well fight them now with the assistance of the Americans. “Our decision was reached,” Plenty Coups concluded, “not because we loved the white man who was already crowding the other tribes into our country, or because we hated the Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho, but because we plainly saw that this course was the only one which might save our beautiful country for us.”

The Crow leaders recognized that the Americans faced a formidable enemy. Large numbers of Sioux and Cheyenne warriors gathered in the Little Bighorn Basin, led by such stalwart leaders as Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Gall, Hump, and Lame Deer. On June 17, 1876, warriors led by Crazy Horse forced the American column led by General George Crook to withdraw at the Battle of the Rosebud. Crow horsemen formed a screen that shielded Crook’s men from Crazy Horse’s warriors and bought them the time they needed to withdraw. Eight days later, an American force led by Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer foolishly attacked the village along the Little Bighorn. Two thousand warriors camped there. They determined to defendthemselves and their families. Custer had no idea what he had stumbled into. Depicted so often in American myth as a famous “Last Stand,” Custer’s defeat was a rout. The Sioux and their Cheyenne allies mowed them down as they fled from a village so much larger than they had anticipated. The Sioux wiped out Custer’s command in the time, one Sioux observer later noted, that it took a hungry man to eat his dinner. Only Custer’s Crow and Arikara scouts, who recognized the power of the Sioux, survived.

The Lakotas won the battle, but they lost the war. Once again, winter campaigns drove the Sioux and their allies back the reservation. By the spring of 1877, most had returned. Crazy Horse surrendered at the Red Cloud Agency in May. He died four months later, stabbed to death during a guardhouse scuffle. Sitting Bull, who had fled across the border into Canada, held out until 1881, before he returned.

THE ONEIDAS were the Americans’ most important Indigenous ally, but they benefited little from their alliance. While the United States, in the 1784 treaty with the Six Nations at Fort Stanwix, promised to protect the Oneidas, the state of New York moved expeditiously to dispossess them. No holds were barred. The records of state treaty councils, where this dispossession took place, show clearly evidence of fraud and deceit. By the middle of the 19th century, the Oneidas retained only a couple of dozen acres of land and many of their people had accepted “removal” to new homes in Wisconsin where they hoped to avoid the racists and land grabbers who would take whatever the Oneidas refused to sell.

            None of that sordid history has kept the US Mint from placing Polly Cooper, shown presenting corn to General Washington, on the tails side of the 2026 Sacagawea dollar. The Native American $1 Coin Collection was authorized by Congress in 2007 to commemorate the historic contribution of Indigenous nations and individuals to American culture. As Cherokee Nation member and Republican senator Markwayne Mullin put it, the coins are intended to celebrate “those who helped establish a country grounded in freedom and self-determination.”

            Representative of the Oneida Indian Nation Ray Halbritter said that “Polly Cooper symbolizes courage that is not just found on the battlefield, but in compassion and willingness to help others, which is just a part of Oneida culture and hospitality.” Cooper, he continued, was an important forgotten ally. “The whole country,” Halbritter said, “reaps the benefit of Polly Cooper’s conduct because we won the conflict and the United States was born.” That, it went without saying, was a story worthy of commemoration.

I HAVE BEEN TO LITTLE BIGHORN NATIONAL MONUMENT many times. When I taught in Billings, I could get there in just over an hour.  As many as 350,000 people visit the site of Custer’s “Last Stand” every year.  The talented National Park Service employees who work there have attempted over the years to provide more of the Indigenous side of the story.  And that always has met with resistance. According to reporting that originally appeared in the Washington Post, signage at Little Bighorn that described American land hunger, territorial encroachment by gold-seeking whites on reservation land, and a federal boarding school system that “violently erased cultural identities and language” was removed because it did not comply with President Trump’s executive order from March of last year intended to restore “truth and sanity to American History.” In particular, Trump denounced a “revisionist movement” led by radical leftists who sought “to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light. Under this historical revision,” Trump continued, “our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.” Last week signage in Philadelphia outside the home where George Washington stayed during the Constitutional Convention describing the important role of slavery in the first President’s life was taken down as well.

We must not think bad thoughts.

And the sins we choose to forget can never be forgiven.

SOMETIMES I THINK THE UNITED STATES hates Indigenous peoples. It does so in ways that it does not fully comprehend. Americans may celebrate Indigenous contributions to America’s greatness. Both political parties express their support for “self-determination.” Many good people work for the federal government, and they do much good work even as fascists have seized control, who may talk of collaboration, but only to the point where it begins to cost them something.  Colleges and universities, meanwhile, revel in empty gestures, supporting a shallow “diversity” while reading “territorial acknowledgments” in rooms filled with white people. Too often they fall victim to ethnic frauds and “Pretendians”: Elizabeth Warren, Andrea Smith, Thomas King, and Lisa Brooks are just a handful of recent examples. They routinely fail to put their money where their mouths are, to match their words with deeds. When too many of your allies are at best crusaders on the cheap, and your enemies are the white supremacists who control all three branches of the federal government, it is easy to see the magnitude of the problem.  So the United States will celebrate Polly Cooper, who is historically significant–and acceptable to white Americans–primarily because she helped carry some corn to a starving army that fought the British, we must remember, at least in part out of their anger that King George III unleashed the “merciless Indian savages” upon American frontiers. Try to talk about violence and dispossession, how the Oneidas’ neighbors transformed New York into the Empire State through a systematic program of Indigenous dispossession, and you will find yourself in trouble.  So teachers in very blue New York State are allowed and encouraged to tell their students about the Cherokees’ expulsion from Georgia, but not how their own state used bribery, coercion, and deceit to steal a homeland. They will never consider that their families have benefited from dispossession. It’s a problem bigger than liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans. As Onondaga sachem Irving Powless, Jr. put it more than fifty years ago to a state legislative committee that visited his Nation, “the Indian problem is the white people.”

            One cannot truly and meaningfully comprehend the history of this continent without considering Indigenous peoples’ histories, across a vast and diverse chronological and spatial expanse. But unless these stories make white people feel good about themselves, teaching them is proscribed. Do not dare suggest that what this country has gained came at the expense of Indigenous peoples.

            It’s all so screwed up.  The Trump regime acts like a wife beater, a domestic abuser. ICE invades American cities and blames the protestors for the beatings its agents deliver. They don’t show proper respect, we are told. Indigenous peoples, who have been stopped by ICE agents because of the mere color of their skin, are welcome to the national dialogue, but only if they refuse to remind the majority of the sins of its ancestors, and its own. Democrats, meanwhile, act like they disapprove of the beatings their neighbor gives his wife and kids, but are too afraid to do what they know is right. White Americans, meanwhile, nearly sixty percent of whom voted for Trump in 2016, 2020, and, incredibly, in 2024, mostly continue to express their sympathy for the guy who hurt his fist because he punched his wife.

Semiquincentennial

Are We the Bad Guys?

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              I was at a bar not far from my house when I watched the ball drop above Times Square, ringing in the New Year.  On its flashing surface were the words, “America 250.” A couple of days later, I was leaving a hotel in Westchester County very early in the morning. I was going to drive my daughter to JFK so she could catch a morning flight to South America. In the hotel lobby the TV sets were replaying football highlights from the previous day. On the sidelines appeared, once again, the words “America 250.”  We got in the car, started driving towards the airport.  After the kid made it through ticketing and security, I waited at the airport for a bit for her text telling me she had boarded successfully.  I watched my phone while I waited and learned that American special forces had swooped into Caracas and seized Venezuela’s head of state.  And, of course, not long after that, I watched the videos of an ICE agent murdering Renee Goode in Minnesota.  I am sure that many of you did, too. And yesterday, I listened to our President denounce Somalians in terms only the most savage racist would use, and threaten to blow up the NATO alliance by invading, of all places, Greenland, because Norway did not award him a Nobel Peace Prize.

Yay America.

None of this is funny.

This new year will be one of commemoration, the Semiquincentennial, the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Events will take place across the country. In museums and libraries large and small exhibits and events will explore the meaning of American Independence. Much of this work will be provocative, clever, inspiring and interesting.

But in Trump’s America, what does it mean to commemorate the Declaration? The Bicentennial in 1976 occurred when I was in grade school.  Looking back on that year, I agree with one of my professors who described it as an orgy of self-congratulatory nonsense.  Fifty years later, I wonder what we have to celebrate. I’m not in the mood.

Several years ago I attended a planning meeting for New York’s 250th celebration.  I cannot remember who invited me, but the event was held at the Ganondagan State Historic Site not too far from where I live.  It was part of a larger national movement to make sure that Americans, across the United States, appropriately commemorated this important event. Several speakers addressed the audience, each of them saying basically the same thing: The Declaration of Independence is the source of our nation’s highest ideals, a shining example of liberty at home and abroad, worthy of celebration. “We’re not quite there, yet,” each of the speakers said.  They acknowledged, almost sheepishly, that after 250 years a considerable gap remained between American ideals and American reality.  But they were in no mood to focus on that.  This was going to be a celebration of all that the American Revolution accomplished. It’s going to be huge!

I found this frustrating.  I raised my hand.  “Was the Revolution a good thing?”  A gentleman who sat a couple of rows in front of me turned and answered my question. He said that it was not job of a historian to say whether something was good or bad. 

“Bullshit,” I thought.

“Penicillin,” I said.   “Pol Pot.  See? It’s easy.”

 I did not receive any invitations to subsequent planning meetings. The Semiquincentennial is going to be a celebration of how great we are as a nation, but maybe we are not that great. And I certainly do not feel like celebrating.

Let me give you an example. Let’s say that Donald Trump decides that he wants to run for reelection in 2028.  Of course, the Constitution prohibits this, but we have seen that our national charter has provided little comfort for those who believe in rights and freedom and liberty and restraints on the exercise of executive power.  And whatever the Constitution says, have you seen any evidence at all that Republicans in Congress would stand up to him? What about the Supreme Court? Fat chance, right? It is entirely possible that if Trump decides he wants to run again he may be permitted to do so.

              And I believe firmly that if he did run again, he would run on those issues that worked for him last time: fear and loathing towards immigrants and people of color; fear and hatred of transgendered people. These issues appeal to the sort of “low information” voters who have flocked to Trump.  There are indeed a lot of low information voters out there, enough to swing an election to him.  But nearly sixty percent of white Americans voted for Trump in 2016, 2020 and 2024.  And although I do not doubt that they would deny strenuously that they are racist homophobes, they would vote for him anyways.

              That’s a pretty sorry state of affairs. The existence of Trump, and Trumpism, makes me feel like there is a rot at the heart of our institutions and, as a historian, it seems to me that it has been there for a very long time.

              It is difficult to deny the power of the language of the preamble to the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson wrote beautifully. But I am not convinced that most Americans believe that all people are created equal. The Declaration, written by a rapist enslaver who never lifted a finger to abolish that horrible institution, also denounced the “merciless Indian savages” and dangerous slaves that he believed the king had unleashed upon innocent Americans. Hatred and fear of the other is baked into our national DNA. It may have been easier to pull white Americans together around their hatred of the other than their love of liberty and freedom. Alongside those who believe fervently in the ideals of the Declaration there always has been another group that does not believe in an egalitarian and democratic republic premised on a respect for the rights of all. And those people are in charge, right now, of all three branches of the federal government and they will be in charge when the celebrations of the Semiquincentennial ramp up in a couple of months. They control much of the nation’s media, and many of the hugely popular websites where you and I waste a lot of our time.

              Trump’s executive orders about the teaching of history are intended to proscribe those educators who point out this nation’s shortcomings. Show the well-researched documentary, “The 13th,” in your class and you will be in trouble.  In some states discussing the 1619 Project can get a teacher fired. These orders are intended to undermine the very principle that equality matters. They are intended to defend a racist status quo. To prohibit teachers from talking about past injustices that continue into the present is to deny that those injustices exist, and to effectively dismiss and delegitimize the concerns of those who say we are not all right as a nation.  I have seen the protests in the streets of the Twin Cities.  I know that there are many, many people who oppose Donald Trump. Some of those taking part in the resistance are heroes. Their humor, their love of their neighbors, truly is inspiring. Some, like Renee Good, have become martyrs. But that does not alter my belief that the opening lines of the Declaration are a rhetorically bombastic lie. As a nation, I think the evidence is pretty clear that most of us do not believe that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

After 250 years we have yet to live up to those ideals, which seems to me compelling evidence that most of us never really believed in them at all.

New Publications

What You Need to Read, December 2025

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Christmas is approaching. Perhaps some of these new works will find a space underneath your tree. I hope you find this useful, and I hope your semester is coming to a peaceful and easy end.

Adler, Michael A. Transilient Acts and Resilient Villages: Pueblo Community Persistence in the Northern Rio Grande, (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2026).

Barnett, Lisa D. Peyote Politics : The Making of the Native American Church, 1880-1937, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2025).

Boomer, Axell Vaughan. “Mascot, Maiden, Memory: How Rockton Uses Hononegah to Rewrite Indigenous Removal,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, 118 (Fall-Winter 2025), 13-61.

Borsato, Joe. “’To Rule by Customes’: Powhatan Assertions of Territorial Possessions against the Virginia Company, 1607-1624,” Ethnohistory 72 (July 2025), 277-312.

Clifford, Jim and Sam Huckerby, “Logging and Settlement Beyond the Rapids: Unmaking Algonquin Space in the Ottawa Valley, 1817-1861,” Canadian Historical Review, 106 (September 2025), 405-432.

Denetclaw, Dorothy and Matt Fitzsimmons, The Suns of Gunshooter: A Navajo Resistance Story, (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2026).

Diepold, Markus J. “’For They Fed Lustily, Drank Heartily, and Were Very Greasy Before They Finished Their Dinner’: The Material Politics of Hospitality at the Lancaster Treaty of 1744,” Food & History 23 (Issue 1, 2025), 87-106.

Dixon, Taryn M. « ‘Bullheaded Resistance’: Choctaw Nation Political Responses to the Euro-American Cattle Market and the Act of 1899,” Chronicles of Oklahoma, 103 (Summer 2025), 150-170.

Ewing, Eve L. Original Sins: The (Mis)Education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism, (New York: One World, 2025).

Fauvelle Mikael and Alvaro Montenegro, “Do Stormy Seas Lead to Better Boats? Exploring the Origins of the Southern California Plank Canoe through Ocean Voyage Modeling,” Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology, 20 (July-September 2025), 588-608.

Feder, Kenneth L. Native America: The Story of First Peoples, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025).

Garcia, Edisson Giovanny, Nicola Rolls, John Guenther and Tracy Woodroffe, “Success and University for Indigenous Students: A Review of Higher Education in Australia,” International Indigenous Policy Journal, 16 (October 2025), 1-27.

Gaul, Theresa Strouth and Scott M. Langston, Being in Relation: Indigenous Peoples, the Land, and Texas Christian University, 1873-2023, (Fort Worth: TCU Press, 2025).

Gere, Ann Ruggles. Agents of Survivance: Indigenous Women Teachers in the Boarding School Era, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2026).

Gordillo Brockmann, Bernard. “Julio César, Luiseño Musician: California Indian Oral Tradition, Franciscan Music Instruction, and California Missions, 1769-1846,” Ethnohistory, 72 (October 2025), 459-482.

Grande, Sandy. “Grounded Engagement Against Empire,” American Quarterly, 77 (June 2025), 251-255.

Greeson, Jennifer Rae. “Speculation and Scientific Method: Thomas Harriot’s Virginia IPO,” American Literature, 97 (June 2025), 237-270.

Grillot, Thomas. The Pursuit of Family: A History of Dakota and Lakota Family and Kinship on the Standing Rock Reservation, 1794-2022, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2026.

Harjo, Joy and Dana Tiger, Washing My Mother’s Body: A Ceremony for Grief, (New York: Ten Speed Press, 2025).

Hillaire, Pauline R. Rights Remembered: A Salish Grandmother Speaks on American Indian History and the Future, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2026).

Hundley, James M. We Are Coast Salish: Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, and Border Securitization, (Lanham, Md: Lexington Books, 2025).

Hutton, Paul. The Undiscovered Country: Triumph, Tragedy and the Shaping of the American West, (New York: Dutton, 2025).

Isenberg, Andrew C. The Age of the Borderlands: Indians, Slaves and the Limits of Manifest Destiny, 1790-1850, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2025).

John, Maria. Sovereign Bodies, Sovereign Spaces: Urban Indigenous Health Activism in the United States and Australia, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2026.

Johnston, Carolyn and Terri M. Baker. Living Indigenous Feminism: Stories of Contemporary Native American Women, (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2025).

Kelley, Lucas P. Marking Native Borders: Indigenous Geography and American Empire in the Early Tennessee Country, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2025).

Knolle, Lila Teeters. “Indians Now Taxed: Citizenship and Taxation in Settler-Colonial South Dakota,” Ethnic History, 44 (Summer 2025), 44-72.

Kramer, Erin, The Ancient House: Constructing Community in the Seventeenth Century New York Borderlands, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2026).

Lavin, Lucianne and Elaine Thomas. Our Hidden Landscapes: Indigenous Stone Ceremonial Sites in Eastern North America, (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2025).

Lee, Joseph. Nothing More of this Land: Community, Power, and the Search for Indigenous Identity, (New York: First One Signal Publishers, 2025).

Loendorf, Chris, ed., Collaborative Archaeology: How Native American Knowledge Enhances our Collective Understanding of the Past, (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2026.

McGillivray, Emily. “Marie=Joseph Angelique and Marie Manon : Remembering Slavery in Canadian History,” Journal of Women’s History, 37 (Summer 2025), 115-136.

Martin, Joseph, Betty Merchant and Jon Reyhner, “Privileging Tribal Values and Knowledge in Educational Leadership,” Journal of Educational Administration and History, 57 (November 2025), 363-378.

Martinez, Hope. “Among the Bodies of Our Children: Using Amici Briefs to Analyze State Motivation in Indigenous Law Cases,” Political Research Quarterly, 78 (December 2025), 1530-1543.

Meadows, William C. The Handgame of the Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache: Spirited Competition on the Southern Plains, (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2025).

Miller, Robert. “The Indian Law Bombshell: McGirt v. Oklahoma (2020),” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 166 (June 2025), 50-62.

NoiseCat, Julian Brave. We Survived the Night: An Indigenous Reckoning, (Toronto: Random House Canada, 2025).

Oakdale, Suzanne and Josué Aciego, “Conversation with Shannon Speed on ‘Ending Violence Against Indigenous Women: Rethinking Human Rights and Tribal Sovereignty,” Journal of Anthropological Research, 81 (Summer 2025), 151-162.

Obomsawin, Anik, Lucille Muir, and Alexandra Jasmine Fiocco, “Understanding Sources of Suffering and Pathways to Healing in Mi’kmaq Communities,” International Indigenous Policy Journal, 16 (October 2025), 1-28.

Raibmon, Paige.  “Violence that Dispossesses : Continuity on the Settler Colonial Timeline,” Canadian Historical Review, 106 (September 2025), 375-404.

Reed, Julie L. Land, Language and Women: A Cherokee and American Educational History, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2026).

Rice, James D. “’Old Soldiours Trained Up in the Netherlands’: The Low Countries and Jamestown, 1572-1614,” William and Mary Quarterly, 82 (October 2025), 531-564.

Richards, Katherine Morton, “Thoughts and Prayers: Comparing Public Apologies for Residential Schools in Canada,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 48 (Issue 2, 2025).

Rine, Holly A. “Onondaga Lake in New York State: Seventeenth Century Origins of a Superfund Site,” Environment & History 31 (August 2025), 300-304.

Rockwell, Stephen J. “War and the Administrative State, 1776-1900,” Daedalus 154 (Fall 2025), 48-68.

Schemck, Theresa M. Ojibwe Ethnogenesis, 1640-1740, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2025).

Shi, Mary. “’Until Indian Title Shall Be…Fairly Extinguished’: The Public Lands, Indigenous Erasure, and the Origins of Government Promotion of Infrastructure in the United States,” Politics and Society, 53 (December 2025), 570-602.

Simpson, Mark. “Alexander McGillivray and the Old School Fellow: A Critical Examination of the Sources for McGillivray’s Youth,” Alabama Review, 78 (October 2025), 283-318.

Singerton, Jonathan and Markéta Krizova, Habsburg Encounters with Native America, (Budapest: Central European Press, 2025).

Stockwell, Mary, Interrupted Odyssey: Ulysses S, Grant and the American Indians, (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2025).

Swensen, Thomas Michael. Where Next, Columbus? A Native Punk Mixtape. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2026).

Talaga, Tanya.  The Knowing: How the Oppression of Indigenous Peoples Continues to Echo Today, (Toronto: Hanover Square Press, 2025).

Tuininga, Matthew J. The Wars of the Lord: The Puritan Conquest of America’s First People, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2025).

van der Meulin, Jim. “Traditions of Assembly in Three Dutch ‘Lands’ in the Seventeenth Century,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 7 (December 2025), 499-519.

Villeneuve, Matthew.  “Habeas Corpus and American Indian Boarding Schools: Indigenous Self-Determination in Body and Mind, 1880-1900,” Western Historical Quarterly, 56 (Summer 2025), 93-115.

Wapen, Steven G. “Cultural Dissonance: British Commandant James F. Mercer and the French Victory at Oswego, August 14, 1756,” New York History, 106 (Summer 2025), 94-120.

Welch, Levin Elias and Monica McDermott, “Native for a Day: Non-Native Perceptions of Native American Life,” Sociological Inquiry, 95 (November 2025), 715-731.

Wenger, Tisa. Spirits of Empire: How Settler Colonialism Made American Religion, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2026).

Working, Lauren. “The First General Assembly of Virginia: Deerskin, Ruffs, and the View from Tsenacommacah,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 7 (December 2025), 521-537.

Current Events

Ely Parker’s Ambivalent Legacy

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            Last week Ely Parker of the Tonawanda Seneca Nation was admitted posthumously to the New York State Bar. Parker had read law in the Ellicottville office of William Angel in the 1840s but was barred from practicing by the state because of his race and because he was not recognized as a citizen of the United States. In that sense, last week’s ceremony addressed, at long last, a significant historical injustice.

Landscape

            More than five years ago, I wrote a letter to the clerk of the court to support Parker’s admission to the state bar. I was certainly not alone in doing so. The denial of this privilege to Parker, I wrote, “owing to his ‘non-citizen’ status, is a racial and historical injustice that ought to be remedied.”

            So last week’s ceremony was a cause for celebration. It was covered widely in the national news media. Representatives from both the Seneca Nation of Indians and the Tonawanda Seneca Nation attended the event. For those present, it was the inspiring culmination of years of hard work.

            News stories about the event described, correctly, how Parker became an engineer after discrimination closed his path to practicing law.  The coverage described his work in recovering Tonawanda Seneca lands in the 1840s and 1850s. Parker’s contributions were significant. News stories told of how Parker met Ulysses S. Grant, became the officer’s aide-de-camp during the American Civil War and, ultimately, the first Native American to serve the United States as Commissioner of Indian Affairs during the early years of Grant’s presidency.

            Yet much was left out.  Ely Parker is a complex figure, and he left a decidedly ambivalent legacy. It was Parker, in his capacity as commissioner, who spoke so forcefully in favor of ending the practice of negotiating treaties with Native American nations. A year and a half before Congress in 1871 decided “that hereafter no Indian Nation or tribe within the territory of the United States shall be acknowledged or recognized as an independent nation, tribe, or power with whom the United States may contract a treaty,” Ely Parker announced his arguments in favor of putting an end to treaty-making in his annual report.

            A treaty, Parker wrote, was “a compact between two or more sovereign powers, each possessing sufficient authority and force to compel a compliance with the obligations incurred.” Indigenous nations, he believed, lacked this power. “The Indian tribes of the United States are not sovereign nations, capable of making treaties, as none of them have an organized government of such inherent strength as would secure a faithful obedience of its people in the observance of compacts of this character.” Ignoring the inability of the United States to compel the obedience of its own settlers, the violent and aggressive conduct and encroachment of which Commissioners of Indian Affairs and Secretaries of the Interior regularly lamented in the post-Civil War era, Parker declared that “it is time this idea should be dispelled, and the government cease the cruel farce of thus dealing with its helpless and ignorant wards.” The federal government should stop at once “deluding this people into the belief of them being independent sovereignties, while they were at the same time recognized only as its dependents and wards.”

            Parker’s family had fought fiercely for Tonawanda land rights before the Civil War, but Parker now advocated citizenship for American Indians, supported the government’s “Civilization Program,” and rejected the sovereignty of Native nations. Each of these positions found advocates among that group of Native American leaders who historian Frederick Hoxie called “Red Progressives,” but they were anathema to Tonawanda Senecas and many Haudenosaunee people. Haudenosaunee people consistently rejected American claims that they were citizens of the United States. They adhered to and nurtured their culture. And they powerfully asserted their treaty rights. After the end of the Civil War, Parker had little influence at the Tonawanda reservation, his current positions out of touch with his former friends and neighbors. He resigned his office in 1871 under trumped up charges of corruption and maladministration shortly after Congress passed legislation putting an end to treaty-making.

            Because “treaty talk” has played so large a role in shaping understandings of the relations between Native peoples and the United States, in New York as elsewhere, the assumption long has been that 1871 in some way mattered and marked a significant break with the past. Courts meanwhile continue to struggle to define the terms of treaties and their place in the American constitutional system. Nearly all observers agree that the United States faithlessly violated its own treaties. And Native peoples continue to assert that their nationhood and sovereignty is confirmed and recognized through Indian treaties. Justice Clarence Thomas, of all people, has suggested that the 1871 enactment was unconstitutional, as the treaty-making power, he believed, is the only instrument allowed in the Constitution to limit the powers of Native nations. Thomas has long questioned the historic justifications for the so-called “plenary power” doctrine, which emerged from a 1903 Supreme Court decision that permitted the United States to unilaterally break its treaties with Native nations.

            Those 370 treaties negotiated between the United States and Indian tribes before 1871 served a variety of functions. They brought peace after periods of war, or defined the bounds of lands Native nations retained or ceded. Many included provisions to “Christianize” and “civilize” Native peoples. While treaties recognized a measure of sovereignty, they also served as instruments of colonialism and control, the legal arm of dispossession. Through treaties the United States acquired rights on paper to regulate the trade and commerce of a tribe, and a sole and exclusive right to purchase their lands. It was through the instrument of treaties that many millions of acres of Indian lands became part of the United States.

            Some of these treaties were fraudulent or deceptive, others coerced. Many extended the power of the United States over Native peoples who, the Supreme Court ruled in 1831, were best viewed not as independent and entirely sovereign governing entities but as “domestic dependent nations” whose relationship to the United States resembled that of “a ward to its guardian.”          

Attempts to make treaties with Six Nations people did not end in 1871. Since the American Revolution, New York State has claimed and exercised jurisdiction over the Iroquois, sometimes with and sometimes without the sanction of federal authorities. The United States negotiated only a handful of treaties with the Six Nations: at Fort Stanwix in 1784, restoring peace after the Revolution; at Canandaigua in 1794, restoring Seneca land and recognizing the rights of the Six Nations to the “free use and enjoyment of their lands”; and at Buffalo Creek in 1838, a corrupt “removal” treaty intended to force the Iroquois to new homes in the Indian Territory. State authorities, meanwhile, negotiated many times that number, all in an effort to acquire Haudenosaunee land. New York could not become the Empire State without a systematic program of Iroquois dispossession.

            In 1883, for instance, Syracuse University chancellor Charles N. Sims led an effort to break up and allot the Onondaga Reservation through a state treaty he hoped to persuade the Onondagas to sign. Half a decade later so did the state’s Whipple Commission, which collected testimony and issued a massive report that called for the break-up of New York’s Indian reservations as one of a number of solutions to the state’s “Indian Problem.”But Chancellor Sims’ efforts to persuade the Onondagas to sign a treaty with the state individualizing their land holdings ended in failure. When the ballots were cast, Onondagas voted nearly unanimously against it and, Sims wrote with considerable frustration, “so ended two years of work of philanthropy and diplomacy in the interest of morals, religion, liberty, and good government in the nation of the Onondagas.” The Whipple Commission collected its documents, heard its testimony, and failed to achieve anything more owing to Iroquois opposition to the allotment of their lands.

            The assault by state officials on Haudenosaunee nationhood began long before 1871 and continued long after. Yet in every instance, and in response to every assault, whether boarding schools or the establishment of missions or the attempts to dispossess them, Haudenosaunee people continued to assert their nationhood. They did so when they angrily resisted efforts to individualize their land holdings in 1902, when they declared war on their own against the Central Powers in World War I, when they opposed the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, resisted the Indian New deal a decade after that, and when they declared war against the Axis Powers in their own name in 1942.

            The decision by Congress to abolish treaty-making was intended to signal the death of Native American nationhood, but declaring it could not make it so. The Senecas, Cayugas, Onondagas, Oneidas, Mohawks, and Tuscaroras had never relied on the United States or the state of New York to assert or validate their nationhood. Rather, they lived it, and continue to live it.

Parker was unique in being active on both sides in this debate, denouncing fraudulent agreements to which his nation did not consent, yet later in life endorsing the policies of those who wished to see that nationhood erased. It’s an ambivalent legacy. And that ambivalence is something that historians must be prepared to embrace.