History and Historians, New Publications

Roanoke Bibliography

1 Comment

This semester I am teaching a freshman writing seminar at Geneseo on the Lost Colony of Roanoke.  The students have now finished reading through the bulk of David Beers Quinn’s famous collection of source material, and will begin writing their own papers this week.  I compiled this bibliography, which I will share with them, at least in part to bring myself up to speed with what has been published since my book on the Roanoke ventures, The Head in Edward Nugent’s Hand: Roanoke’s Forgotten Indians, appeared a decade ago.   Even though I have been intermittently at work editing my portion of the very large Oxford edition of Hakluyt’s Principall Navigations, I thought it worthwhile to check and see what was out there.

This bibliography focuses most heavily on sources published in the last decade.  For older sources, see the notes in The Head in Edward Nugent’s Hand. I hope you find this useful.

New Mexico, West Indies and Guiana (Principal Navigations Wright Map)

Ambers, Janet, Joana Russell, David Saunders, and Kim Sloan.  “Hidden History? Examination of Two Patches on John White’s Map of ‘Virginia’.”  British Museum Technical  Research Bulletin 6 (2012): 47-54.

Andrews, Kenneth R. Trade, Plunder and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1480-1630, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

________.  Elizabethan Privateering. Cambridge: Cambridge University   Press, 1964.

Appelbaum, Robert.  “Hunger in Early Virginia: Indians and English Facing Off over Excess, Want, and Need,” in Appelbaum and John Wood Sweet, Envisioning An English Empire: Jamestown and the Making of the North Atlantic World, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005).

Barker, Alex W. “Powhatan’s Pursestrings: On the Meaning of Surplus in a Seventeenth    Century Algonkian Chiefdom,” in Lords of the Southeast: Social Inequality and the Native Elites of Southeastern North America, eds. Alex W. Barker and Timothy R. Pauketat, Anthropological Papers of the American Anthropologica Associations 3 (Washington, D.C: American Anthropological Association, 1992.

Barr, Juliana.  Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.

Beck, Robin A., Jr., David G. Moore and Christopher B. Rodning, “Identifying Fort San Juan: A Sixteenth-Century Occupation at the Berry Site, North Carolina,” Southeastern Archaeology, 25 (2006), 65-77.

Benitez-Rojo, Antonio.  The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.

Bradley, Peter T.  British Maritime Enterprise in the New World: From the Late Fifteenth to the Mid-Eighteenth Century. Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1999.

Brickell, John.  Natural History of North Carolina.  Dublin: James Carson, 1737.

Brickhouse, Anna. The Unsettlement of America: Translation, Interpretation, and the Story of Don Luis de Velasco, 1560-1945, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

Bridge, David.  “The German Miners at Keswick and the Question of Bismuth.” Bulletin of the Peak District Mines Historical Society, 12 (Summer 1994), 108-112.

Brooks, Baylus. “John Lawson’s Indian Town on Hatteras Island, North Carolina,” North Carolina Historical Review, 91 (April 2014), 171-207.

Bullard, A. J. and Charles M. Allen.  “Synopsis of the Woody Species of Smilax in the Eastern United States North of Peninsular Florida,” Journal of the North Carolina Academy of Sciences, 129 (Summer 2013), 37-43.

Burrage, Henry S. ed., Early English and French Voyages, Chiefly from Hakluyt, 1534-1608.   New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1901

Canny, Nicholas C and Karen Ordahl Kupperman. “The Scholarship and Legacy of David Beers Quinn, 1909-2002,” William and Mary Quarterly, 60 (October 2003), 843-861.

Canny, Nicholas. “Writing Early Modern History: Ireland, Britain, and the Wider World,”Historical Journal, 46 (September 2003), 723-747.

Cormack, Lesley B.  Charting an Empire: Geography at the English Universities, 1580-1620, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

Cowper, H. S. The Art of Attack and the Development of Weapons. Eastbourne: Naval and Military Press, 2006.

Dawson, Scott and Jeanne L. Gillespie, “The Vocabulary of Croatoan Algonquian,” Southern Quarterly, 51 (Summer 2014), 48-53.

Donegan, Kathleen. “What Happened in Roanoke: Ralph Lane’s Narrative Incursion,” Early American Literature, 48 (no.2, 2013), 285-314.

________. Seasons of Misery: Catastrophe and Colonial Settlement in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).

Duke, James A. Handbook of Nuts: Herbal Reference Library. Boca Raton, FL :CRC Publishers. 2000.

Durant, David N.  Raleigh’s Lost Colony. New York: Atheneum, 1981.

Eastman, John.  The Book of Swamp and Bog: Trees, Shrubs, and Wildflowers of Eastern Freshwater Wetlands. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1995.

Egloff, Keith T. “Spheres of Cultural Interaction Across the Coastal Plain of Virginia in the Woodland Period,” in Structure and Process in Southeastern Archaeology, ed. Roy S. Elton, Geoffrey Rudolph.  The New Cambridge Modern History: Volume 2, The Reformation, 1520-1559, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Erichson-Brown, Medicinal and Other Uses of North American Plants: A Historical Survey with Special Reference to the Eastern Indian Tribes.  Mineola, NY: Dover, 1989.

Foster, Steven and Rebecca L. Johnson, National Geographic Desk Reference to Nature’s Medicine. New York: National Geographic Society, 2008.

Fullam, Brandon. The Lost Colony of Roanoke: New Perspectives, Jefferson, NC: McFarland And Company, 2017.

Gallivan, Martin D.  “Measuring Sedentariness and Settlement Population: Accumulations Research in the Middle Atlantic Region,” American Antiquity, 67 (July 2002), 535-557.

________. James River Chiefdoms: The Rise of Social Inequality in the Chesapeake. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003).

Gardner, Paul R.  “Excavations at the Amity Site: Final Report of the Pomeiooc Project, 1984-1989,” Archaeological Research Report 7, Archaeology Laboratory, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC.

Gleach, Frederic W. Powhatan’s World and Colonial Virginia: A Conflict of Cultures. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000.

Green, Paul R.  The Archaeology of 31HY43: “Pomieooc”: 1985-1986 Field Seasons,, Greenville, N.C: East Carolina University Department of Sociology and Anthropology, 1987.

Goldman, William S. “Spain and the Founding of Jamestown,” William and Mary Quarterly, 68 (July 2011), 427-450

Hall, Joseph. “Glimpses of Roanoke, Visions of New Mexico, and Dreams of Empire in the Mixed-Up Memories of Geronimo de la Cruz,” William and Mary Quarterly, 72 (April 2015), 323-350.

Hamel, Paul B. and Mary U. Chiltoskey, Cherokee Plants and their Uses—A 400 Year History.  Sylva, NC: Herald Publishing, 1975.

Hann, John T, ed.  “Translation of the Ecija Voyages of 1605 and 1609 and the Gonzalez Derrotero of 1609.” Florida Archaeology. 2 (1986). 1-79.

Harriot, Thomas. A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia. Facsimile ed. New York: Dover, 1972.

Hatfield, April Lee. “Spanish Colonization Literature, Powhatan Geographies, and English Perceptions of Tsenacommacah/Virginia,” Renaissance Quarterly, 67 (Summer 2014),425-472.

Heaney, Christopher. “A Peru of their Own: English Grave-Opening and Indian Sovereignty in Early America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 73 (October 2016), 608-646.

Herrmann, Rachel B. “The ‘Tragicall Historie’: Cannibalism and Abundance in Colonial Jamestown,” William and Mary Quarterly, 68 (January 2011), 47-74.

Hill, John.  A History of the Materia Medica. London: T. Longman, 1751.

Hoffman, Paul E.  A New Andalucia on the Way to the Orient: The American Southeast During the Sixteenth Century. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990.

________. The Spanish Crown and the Defense of the Caribbean, 1535-1585: Precedent, Patrimonialism, and Royal Parsimony. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980.

Horn, James. A Kingdom Strange: The Brief and Tragic History of the Lost Colony of  Roanoke. New York: Basic Books, 2010.

Horning, Audrey. Ireland in the Virginian Sea: Colonialism in the British Atlantic.  Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,  2013.

Hudson, Charles M., ed.  The Juan Pardo Expeditions: Explorations of the Carolinas and Tennessee, 1566-1568, (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005).

Hulton, Paul. America 1585: The Complete Drawings of John White. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984.

Hume, Ivor Noel. The Virginia Adventure: Roanoke to James Towne. Charlottesville: University Press of Virgnia, 1997.

Isil, Olivia A. “Simon Fernandez: Master Mariner and Roanoke Assistant: A New Look at an Old Villain.” In Searching for the Roanoke Colonies: An Interdisciplinary Collection, eds. E. Thomson Shields and Charles R. Ewen, (Raleigh: North Carolina Department of Archives and History, 2003.

Jones, Eric E. “Spatiotemporal Analysis of Old World Diseases in North America, A.D. 1519-1807,” American Antiquity, 79 (July 2014), 487-506.

Jones, Rosalind, “American Beauties, or What’s Wrong with this Picture? Paintings of the Women of Virginia from John White to Joan Blaeu,” Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 7 (Fall 2012), 215-229

Jowitt, Clare.   The Culture of Piracy, 1580-1630: English Literature and Seaborne Crime. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010.

Kaplan, Eugene H.  Sensuous Seas: Tales of a Marine Biologist. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.

Keeler, Mary Frear, ed.  Sir Francis Drake’s West Indian Voyage, 1585-1586, Works Issued by the Hakluyt Society, Second Series, No. 148. London: Hakluyt Society, 1975.

Kelly, Brian T. and Michael K. Phillips.  “Red Wolf.”  In Endangered Animals: A Reference Guide to Conflicting Issues, eds., Richard P. Reading and Brian Miller. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2000.

Kelsey, Harry.  Sir John Hawkins: Queen Elizabeth’s Slave Trader.  New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.

Klein, Michael J. and Douglas W. Sanford. “Analytical Scale and Archaeological Perspectives on the Contact Era in the Northern Neck of Virginia.” Contact in       Context: New Archaeological, Anthropological and Historical Perspectives on Natives and Europeans in the Mid-Atlantic. Eds. Julia King and Dennis Blanton. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2004, 47-73.

Klingelhofer, Eric. “Captain Edward Stafford of the Roanoke Colonies,” North Carolina Historical Review, 77 (July 2017): 283-298.

Knighton, C. S. and David Loades, eds.  The Navy of Edward VI and Mary.  Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011.

Kupperman, Karen Ordahl. “Before 1607,” William and Mary Quarterly, 72 (January 2015), 3- 24.

________.  Roanoke: The Abandoned Colony, 2nd ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007.

________. Indians and English: Facing off in Early America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000.

________.  “English Perceptions of Treachery, 1583-1640: The Case of the American ‘Savages’.” Historical Journal, 20 (1977): 263-287.

LaCombe, Michael A. “’A Continuall and Dayly Table for Gentlemen of Fashion’: Humanism, Food, and Authority at Jamestown, 1607-1609,” American Historical Review, 115 (June 2010), 669-687.

Lance, Ron.  Woody Plants of the Southeastern United States: A Winter Guide.  Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004.

Lane, Kris E.  Pillaging the Empire: Piracy in the Americas, 1500-1750. Armonk, NY: M. E.   Sharpe, 1998.

LaVere, David.  “The Lost Colony of Roanoke: New Perspectives,” North Carolina Historical Review, 94 (October 2017), 439-440

________.  The Lost Rocks: The Dare Stones and the Unsolved Mystery of Sir Walter Raleigh’s Lost Colony.  Wilmington, NC: Burnt Mill Press, 2010.

Lawson, John.  A New Voyage to Carolina. Hugh Talmadge Lefler, ed.  Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967.

Loftfield, Thomas C. and David C. Jones. “Late Woodland Architecture on the Coast of North Carolina: Structural Meaning and Environmental Adaptation.” Southeastern Archaeology. 14 (Winter 1995), 120-135.

MacCaffrey, Wallace T. Elizabeth I: War and Politics, 1588-1603. Princeton: Princeton  University Press, 1992.

________. Queen Elizabeth and the Making of Policy, 1572-1588. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981.

MacGregor, A.  “Medical terra sigillata: A Historical, Geographical and Typological Review,” in A History of Geology and Medicine, C. J. Duffin, R. T. J. Moddy and C. Gardner-Thorpe, eds., Geological Society, Special Publication 375.  London: The Geological Society, 2013, pp. 113-136.

MacMillan, Ken. “Sovereignty ‘More Plainly Described’: Early English Maps of North America, 1580-1625,” Journal of British Studies, 42 (October 2003), 413-447.

Mallios, Seth.  The Deadly Politics of Giving: Exchange and Violence at Ajacan, Roanoke and   Jamestown. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006

________. “Gift Exchange and the Ossomocomuck Balance of Power: Explaining Algonquian Socioeconomic Aberrations at Contact,” in Searching for the Roanoke Colonies: An Interdisciplinary Collection, eds. E. Thomson Shields and Charles R. Ewen, (Raleigh: North Carolina Department of Archives and History, 2003.

________. “In the  Hands of ‘Indian Givers’: Exchange and Violance at Ajacan, Roanoke and Jamestown.” Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 1998.

Mancall, Peter C.  Hakluyt’s Promise: An Elizabethan’s Obsession for an English America, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.

Markham, Clement., ed., The Guanches of Tenerife. London: The Hakluyt Society, 1867.

Mulcahey, Matthew.  Hurricanes and Society in the British Greater Caribbean, 1624-1783. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.

Miller, Christopher L. and George Hamell, “A New Perpsective on Indian-White Contact: Cultural Symbols and Colonial Trade, Journal of American History, 73 (1986), 311-328.

Miller, Lee. Roanoke: Solving the Mystery of the Lost Colony, (New York: Arcade, 2000).

Miller, Shannon.  Invested with Meaning: The Raleigh Circle in the New World, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998.

Mires, Peter B. “Contact and Contagion: The Roanoke Colony and Influenza.” Historical Archaeology. 29 (1994): 30-38.

Monardes, Nicholas.  Joyfull Newes Out of the New Founde World, ed. Sir. Stephen Gaselee, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1925).

Mt. Pleasant, Jane. “The Science Behind the Three Sisters Mound System: An Agronomic Assessment of an Indigenous Agricultural System in the Northeast.” In John E. Staller, Robert H. Tykot and Bruce F. Benz, eds., Histories of Maize: Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Prehistory, Linguistics, Biogeography, Domestication and Evolution of Maize. Amsterdam: Academic Press, 2006.

Oberg, Michael Leroy. The Head in Edward Nugent’s Hand: Roanoke’s Forgotten Indians,  Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).

________. “Between ‘Savage Man’ and ‘Most Faithful Englishman’: Manteo and the Early Anglo-Indian Exchange,” Itinerario, 24 (2000), 146-169.

________. “Gods and Men: The Meeting of Indian and White Worlds on the Carolina Outer   Banks, 1584-1586,” North Carolina Historical Review, 76 (1999), 367-390.

________. Dominion and Civility: English Imperialism and Native America, 1585-1685. Ithaca:   Cornell University Press, 1999.

Palmer, William M. and Alvin W. Braswell. Reptiles of North Carolina. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.

Parramore, Thomas C.  “The ‘Lost Colony’ Found: A Documentary Perspective.” North Carolina Historical Review, 78 (January 2001): 67-83.

Phelps, David Sutton. Ancient Pots and Dugout Canoes: Indian Life as Revealed by Archaeology at Lake Phelps. Creswell, NC: Pettigrew State Park, 1989.

Pearson, Thomas Gilbert, C. S. Brimley, and H. H. Brimley, Birds of North Carolina. Raleigh: Edwards and Broughton, 1919.

Pluymers, Keith. “Atlantic Iron: Wood Scarcity and the Political Ecology of Early English Expansion,” William and Mary Quarterly, 73 (July 2016), 389-426.

________.  “Taming the Wilderness in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Ireland and Virginia,” Environmental History, 16 (October 2011), 610-632.

Potter, Stephen R., Commoners, Tribute and Chiefs: The Development of Algonquian Culture in the Potomac Valley, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993.

Powell, William S. “Who Came to Roanoke?” Searching for the Roanoke Colonies: An Interdisciplinary Collection, eds E. Thomson Shields and Charles R. Ewen. Raleigh: North Carolina Department of Archives and History, 2003.

________.  “The Search for Ananias Dare.” Searching for the Roanoke Colonies: An Interdisciplinary Collection, eds E. Thomson Shields and Charles R. Ewen. Raleigh: North Carolina Department of Archives and History, 2003

________.  “Who were the Roanoke Colonists?” Raleigh and Quinn: The Explorer and His Boswell. H. G. Jones, ed.  Chapel Hill: The North Carolinia Society, 1987. Pp. 51-67.

________. “Roanoke Colonists and Explorers: An Attempt at Identification.” North  Carolina Historical Review. 34 (April 1957): 202-226.

Probasco, Nate. “Cartography as a Tool of Colonization: Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s 1583 Voyage to North America,” Renaissance Quarterly, 67 (Summer 2014), 425-472.

Quinn, David Beers. Quinn, David Beers.  Explorers and Colonies: America, 1500-1625. London: Hambledon Press, 1990.

________.   Set Fair for Roanoke: Voyages and Colonies, 1584-1606, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1985.

________. “Drake, Sir Bernard,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 1, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, accessed May 23, 2014, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/drake_bernard_1E.html.

________, ed., The Roanoke Voyages, 2 vols. London: Hakluyt Society, 1955.

________, ed., The Voyages and Colonizing Enterprises of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, London: Hakluyt Society, 1940.

Raffaele, Herbert A. and James W. Wiley.  Wildlife of the Caribbean.  Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014.

Ralegh, Sir Walter.  The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana. Neil L. Whitehead, ed. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997.

Renaud, Tabitha. “Rivalry and Mutiny: The Internal Struggles of Sixteenth-Century North American Colonization Parties,” Terra Incognitae, 43 (April 2011), 24-38

Rountree, Helen C.  The Powhatan Indians of Virginia: Their Traditional Culture, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992.

Rowse, A. L.  Sir Richard Grenville of the Revenge. London: Cape, 1937.

Schmidt, Ethan A. “The Well-Ordered Commonwealth: Humanism, Utopian Perfectionism, and the English Colonization of the Americas,” Atlantic Studies, 7 (Spring 2010), 309-328.

Schroeder, Sissel.  “Maize Productivity in the Eastern Woodlands and Great Plains of North America.” American Antiquity, 64 (July 1999), 499-516.

Schwartz, Frank Joseph.  Sharks, Skates and Rays of the Carolinas. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

Seed, Patricia.  Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492-1616.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Shaw, William A. The Knights of England. London: Sherratt and Hughes, 1906.

Sherman, William H. “Bringing the World to England: The Politics of Translation in the Age Of Hakluyt,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 14 (2004), 199-207

Shirley, John.  Thomas Harriot: A Biography. London: Oxford University Press, 1983.

Shirley, John, ed., Thomas Harriot: Renaissance Scientist, London: Oxford University Press, 1974.

Slattery, Britt, Katheryn Reshetiloff and Susan Zwicker, Native Plants for Wildlife Habitat and Conservation Landscaping: Chesapeake Bay Watershed, (Annapolis, MD: U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, 2003).

Silberhorn, Gene M. Common Plants of the Mid-Atlantic Coast: A Field Guide. Revised ed., Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.

Sloan, Kim.  A New World: England’s First View of America, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.

Speck, Frank G.  “Catawba Medicines and Curative Practices.” Publications of the Anthropological Society, 1 (1937), 179-197.

Stahle, David W., Malcom K. Cleaveland, Dennis B. Blanton, Matthew D. Therrell, and David, “The Lost Colony and Jamestown Droughts.” Science, New Series, Vol. 280, No., 5363 (24 April 1998), 564-567.

Stephenson, James.  Herring Fishermen: Images of an Eastern North Carolina Tradition.  Charleston: History Press, 2007.

Stick, David.  Roanoke Island: The Beginnings of English America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983.

Strachey, William. Historie of Travaile into Virginia Britannia, London: Hakluyt Society, 1849.

Sugden, John.  Sir Francis Drake.  New York: Random House, 1990.

Taylor, E. G. R., ed., The Original Writings and Correspondence of the Two Richard Hakluyts, 2 vols. London: Hakluyt Society, 1935).

Townshend, Camilla. Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma, New York: Hill and Wang, 2005.

VanDerwarker, Amber M. “An Archaeological Study of Late Woodland Fauna in the Roanoke River Basin,” North Carolina Historical Review, 50 (January 2001), 1-46.

Vaughan, Alden T. Transatlantic Encounters: American Indians in Britain, 1500-1776,  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

________.  “Powhatans Abroad: Virginia Indians in England.” In Envisioning and English Empire: Jamestown and the Making of the North Atlantic World.  Eds. Robert Appelbaum and John Wood Sweet.  Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,   2005.

________. “Sir Walter Ralegh’s Indian Interpreters, 1584-1618,” William and Mary Quarterly, 59 (April 2002), 341-377.

Webb, Stephen Saunders.  The Governors-General: The English Army and the Definition of Empire, 1569-1681, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979).

Wernham, R. B.  The Making of Elizabethan Foreign Policy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.

Whitaker, John O., Jr. and William J. Hamilton, Jr. Mammals of the Eastern United States. Reprint ed. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998.

White, Sam. “’Shewing the Difference Betweene Their Conjuration, and our Invocation on the Name of god for Rayne’: Weather, Prayer, and Magic in Early American Encounters,” William and Mary Quarterly, 72 (January 2015), 33-56.

Whyte, Thomas R. “Reanalysis of Ichthyofaunal Specimens from Prehistoric Archaeological Sites on the Roanoke River in North Carolina and Virginia,” North Carolina Archaeology, 57 (October 2008), 97-107.

Wright, Irene A., ed.  Further English Voyages to Spanish America, 1583-1594. London: the Hakluyt Society, 1951.

New Publications

What You Need to Read, March 2018

Leave a comment

Welcome to the first quarterly bibliography of 2018.  If there is something you feel I have missed, I hope you will pass it along. I will update with any suggestions.

 

Arnett, Jessica Leslie. “Unsettled Rights in Territorial Alaska: Native Land, Sovereignty, and Citizenship from the Indian Reorganization Act to Termination,” Western Historical Quarterly, 48 no. 3 (September 2017): 233-254.

Arnold, Laurie. “The Ground Floor of a Movement: The National Indian Gaming Association and the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act,” Western Historical Quarterly 48, no. 4 (Winter 2017): 345-365.).

Carlson, Kirsten Matoy. “Making Strategic Choices: How and Why Indian Groups Advocated for Federal Recognition from 1977 to 2012.” Law & Society Review 51, no. 4 (December 2017): 930-965.

Cave, Scott. “Madalena: The Entangled History of One Indigenous Floridian Woman in the Atlantic World.” Americas 74, no. 2 (April 2017): 171-200.

Clark, Andrew J and Douglas B. Bamforth. Archaeological Perspective of Warfare on the Great Plains, (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2018).

DeLucia, Christine. “Fugitive Collections in New England Indian Country: Indigenous Material Culture and Early American History Making at Ezra Stiles’s Yale Museum.” William & Mary Quarterly 75, no. 1 (January 2018): 109-150.

DBialuschewski, Arne, and Linford D. Fisher. “Guest Editor’s Introduction: New Directions in the History of Native American Slavery Studies.” Ethnohistory 64, no. 1 (January 2017): 1-17.

Ericson, David F. “The United States Military, State Development, and Slavery in the Early Republic.” Studies In American Political Development 31, no. 1 (April 2017): 130-148.

Galler, Robert. “Councils, Petitions and Delegations: Crow Creek Activism and the Progressive Era in Central South Dakota,” Journal Of The Gilded Age & Progressive Era 16, no. 2 (April 2017): 206-227.

Gelo, Daniel J. Comanches and Germans on the Texas Frontier: The Ethnology of Heinrich Berghaus, (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2018)

Gettler, Brian. “Historical Research at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.” Canadian Historical Review 98, no. 4 (December 2017): 641-674.

Grossman, Zoltán. “Planning the American Indian Reservation: From Theory to Empowerment.” Geographical Review 108, no. 1 (January 2018): 168-170.

Hall, Ryan. “Before the Medicine Line: Blackfoot Trade Strategy and the Emergence of the Northwest Plains Borderlands, 1818-1846.” Pacific Historical Review 86, no. 3 (August 2017): 381-406.

Harrison, Daniel F. “Change amid Continuity, Innovation within Tradition: Wampum Diplomacy at the Treaty of Greenville, 1795.” Ethnohistory 64, no. 2 (April 2017): 191-215.

Hart, E. Richard. American Indian History on Trial: Historical Expertise in Tribal Litigation, (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2018)

Harvey, Sean P., and Sarah Rivett. “Colonial-Indigenous Language Encounters in North America and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World.” Early American Studies, An Interdisciplinary Journal 15, no. 3 (Summer 2017): 442-473.

Hill, Matthew E., et al. “A Hard Time to Date: The Scott County Pueblo (14SC1) and Puebloan Residents of the High Plains” American Antiquity 83, no. 1 (January 2018): 54-74.

Holm, Tom. “Strong Hearts, Wounded Souls Revisited: The Research, the Findings, and Some Observations of Recent Native Veteran Readjustment.” Wicazo Sa Review 32, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 118-128.

Humalajoke, Reeta, “What is it to Withdraw? Klamath and Navajo Tribal Council’s Tactics in Negotiating Termination Policy, 1949-1964,” Western Historical Quarterly 48, no. 4 (Winter 2017): 415-438.

Isenberg, Andrew C. “An Empire of Remedy.” Pacific Historical Review 86, no. 1 (February 2017): 84-113.

Jentz, Paul. Myths of History: Seven Myths of Native American History, (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2018).

Kane, Maeve. “For Wagrassero’s Wife’s Son: Colonialism and the Structure of Indigenous Women’s Social Connections, 1690–1730.” Journal Of Early American History 7, no. 2 (May 2017): 89-114.

Kennedy, Brenden “Not Worth a Pinch of Snuff”: The 1789 Yazoo Land Sale and Sovereignty in the Old Southwest.” Georgia Historical Quarterly 101, no. 3 (September 2017): 198-232.

Keyser, James D. “Cheval Bonnet: A Crow Calling Card in the Blackfeet Homeland.” Ethnohistory 65, no. 1 (January 2018): 129-155.

Lambert, Valerie. “Negotiating American Indian Inclusion: Sovereignty, Same-Sex Marriage, and Sexual Minorities in Indian Country.” American Indian Culture & Research Journal 41, no. 2 (April 2017): 1-21.

LaVere, David. “Of Fortifications and Fire: The Tuscarora Response to the Barnwell and Moore Expeditions during North Carolina’s Tuscarora War, 1712 and 1713.” North Carolina Historical Review 94, no. 4 (October 2017): 363-390.

Logan Maccallum, Logan MaryJane. “Starvation, Experimentation, Segregation, and Trauma: Words for Reading Indigenous Health History.” Canadian Historical Review 98, no. 1 (March 2017): 96-113.

Mager, Elisabeth A. “Ethnic Consciousness in Cultural Survival: The Morongo Band of Mission Indians and the Kickapoo Traditional Tribe of Texas.” American Indian Culture & Research Journal 41, no. 1 (January 2017): 47-72.

Mauer, Whitney, K. “Indian Country Poverty: Place-Based Poverty on American Indian Territories, 2006-10.” Rural Sociology 82, no. 3 (September 2017): 473-498.

Maynard, John. “On the Political “Warpath”: Native Americans and Australian Aborigines after the First World War.” Wicazo Sa Review 32, no. 1 (Spring2017 2017): 48-62.

Milne, George Edward. “Bondsmen, Servants, and Slaves: Social Hierarchies in the Heart of Seventeenth-Century North America.” Ethnohistory 64, no. 1 (January 2017): 115-139.

Muehlbauer, Matthew S. “Holy War and Just War in Early New England, 1630-1655.” Journal Of Military History 81, no. 3 (July 2017): 667-692.

Nichols, David Andrew. Peoples of the Inland Sea: Native Americans and Newcomers in the Great Lakes Region, 1600-1780, (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2018).

Nickel, Sarah A. “I Am Not a Women’s Libber Although Sometimes I Sound Like One”: Indigenous Feminism and Politicized Motherhood.” American Indian Quarterly 41, no. 4 (Fall 2017): 299-335.

Nickerson, Gregory. “All-American Indian Days and the Miss Indian America Pageant.” Montana: The Magazine Of Western History 67, no. 2 (Summer 2017): 3-26.

Norman, Alison. “Teachers Amongst their own People”: Kanyen’kehá:ka (Mohawk) Women Teachers in Nineteenth-Century Tyendinaga and Grand River, Ontario.” Historical Studies In Education 29, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 32-56.

Otto, Paul L. ““This is that which . . . they call Wampum”.” Early American Studies, An Interdisciplinary Journal 15, no. 1 (Winter2017 2017): 1-36.

Paldam, Ella. “Chumash Conversions: The Historical Dynamics of Religious Change in Native California.” Numen: International Review For The History Of Religions 64, no. 5/6 (September 2017): 596-625.

Parham, Vera. Pan-Tribal Activism in the Pacific Northwest: The Power of Indigenous Protest and the Birth of the Daybreak Star Cultural Center, (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018).

Peace, Thomas. “Borderlands, Primary Sources, and the Longue Durée: Contextualizing Colonial Schooling at Odanak, Lorette, and Kahnawake, 1600-1850.” Historical Studies In Education 29, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 8-31.

Phillips, Katrina. “Performance over Policy: Promoting Indianness in Twentieth-Century Wisconsin Tourism.” Radical History Review 2017, no. 129 (October 2017): 34-50.

Precht, Jay. “Asserting Tribal Sovereignty through Compact Negotiations.” American Indian Quarterly 41, no. 1 (Winter2017 2017): 67-92

Senier, Siobhan. “The Continuing Circulations of New England’s Tribal Newsletters.” American Literary History 29, no. 2 (Summer 2017): 418-437.

Sheffield, R. Scott. “Indigenous Exceptionalism under Fire: Assessing Indigenous Soldiers in Combat with the Australian, Canadian, New Zealand and American Armies during the Second World War.” Journal Of Imperial & Commonwealth History 45, no. 3 (June 2017): 506-524.

Smithers, Gregory D. “Our Hands and Hearts are Joined Together”: Friendship, Colonialism, and the Cherokee People in Early America.” Journal Of Social History 50, no. 4 (Summer 2017): 609-629.

Snyder, Christina. “The Rise and Fall and Rise of Civilizations: Indian Intellectual Culture during the Removal Era.” Journal Of American History 104, no. 2 (September 2017): 386-409.

Starna, William A. “After the Handbook: A Perspective on 40 years of Scholarship Since the Publication of the Handbook of North American Indians, Volume 15, Northeast.” New York History 98, no. 1 (Winter 2017): 112-146.

Strang, Cameron. “Scientific Instructions and Native American Linguistics in the Imperial United States: The Department of War’s 1826 Vocabulary.” Journal Of The Early Republic 37, no. 3 (Fall 2017): 399-427.

Te Hiwi, Braden, and Janice Forsyth. “A Rink at this School is Almost as Essential as a Classroom”: Hockey and Discipline at Pelican Lake Indian Residential School, 1945-1951.” Canadian Journal Of History 52, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2017): 80-108.

Timmerman, Nicholas A. “Uncovering the Native South: Archaeology, Agriculture, and the Environment.” Alabama Review 70, no. 2 (April 2017): 141-155.

Williams, Nancy, and H. Foster. “An Analysis of Native American/ Colonialist Interaction in the Southeastern United States.” International Journal Of Historical Archaeology 21, no. 2 (June 2017): 513-531.

Wisecup, Kelly. “Meteors, Ships, Etc.”: Native American Histories of Colonialism and Early American Archives.” American Literary History 30, no. 1 (Spring 2018): 29-54.

Zimmer, Eric Steven. “A President in Indian Country: Calvin Coolidge and Lakota Diplomacy in the Summer of 1927.” Great Plains Quarterly 37, no. 3 (Summer  2017): 215-234.

Zhang, Jane. “Lakota winter counts, pictographic records, and record making and remaking histories.” Archives & Manuscripts 45, no. 1 (January 2017): 3-17.

Zuba, Clayton. “Apess’s Eulogy on King Philip and the Politics of Native Visualcy.” Early American Literature 52, no. 3 (September 2017): 651-677.

 

 

 

 

 

 

TDIH

It Is Time to Talk about Thomas Jefferson’s Policies toward Native Americans

2 Comments

One letter more than many others encapsulates Thomas Jefferson’s Indian policy.  On this day in 1803, Jefferson wrote that letter to William Henry Harrison, then the governor of Indiana Territory.

My first paper in grad school was an exploration of Jefferson’s Indian policy.  Wish I still had a copy of that.  Jefferson’s views of Indians, I believed, were shaped by his understanding of the Ancient Saxons who inhabited England in the centuries before the Norman Conquest.  Among Jefferson’s favorite books were Arthur Gordon’s translation of Tacitus, which included a long, running commentary in the notes comparing the Ancient Saxons to native peoples in America; or the works of the Scottish historian William Robertson or the Scottish philosopher Adam Ferguson, both of whom saw connections between the ancient inhabitants of the British Isles and Native IllustrationAmericans.  It is, as I pointed out in my first book, a common theme in English thought about native peoples.  When Theodor DeBry etched his engravings based on the artwork of John White, who painted those memorable images of the Carolina Outer Banks in 1585, he included pictures of the “Picts” in order to show that “the inhabitants of the great Bretannie have bin in times past as sauvage as those of Virginia.”  At Jamestown, William Strachey, John Rolfe, and many others pointed out that the ancient inhabitants of the British Isles had once lived like the Algonquian peoples they then were encountering.

Historians like Ronald Meek, Hugh A. MacDougall, H. Trevor Colbourn, and Arthur Ferguson all explored this style of thinking.  All societies passed through four stages as they became more civilized, beginning with hunting and gathering, graduating from there to a pastoral mode of living, to settled agriculture, and, finally, the urban life of the city.  In his famous book on Jefferson’s economic thought, Drew McCoy argued that Jefferson struggled throughout his career to preserve for America the third stage, to keep the country an agrarian republic and, he hoped, to avoid the inequality and brutality he perceived in urban life.

I left this project behind long ago. It strikes me now as too much a project about books, too much discussion of what was going on in Jefferson’s library and in the intellectual centers in Europe and America instead of what was going on in native towns and villages, where my interests lie now.

Still, there is little doubt that Jefferson believed that native peoples, like the Ancient Britons, could progress from their “primitive” origins.  Two years before his death, Jefferson spelled this out on a broad, continental scale in a letter to William Ludlow.   “Let a philosophic observer commence a journey from the savages of the Rocky Mountains, eastwardly towards our sea-coast,” he wrote. “These he would observe in the earliest stage of association living under no law but that of nature, subscribing and covering themselves with the flesh and skins of wild beasts. He would next find those on our frontiers in the pastoral state, raising domestic animals to supply the defects of hunting. Then succeed our own semi-barbarous citizens, the pioneers of the advance of civilization, and so in his progress he would meet the gradual shades of improving man until he would reach his, as yet, most improved state in our seaport towns. This, in fact, is equivalent to a survey, in time, of the progress of man from the infancy of creation to the present day.”

Jeffersonian “philanthropy,” the name that Bernard Sheehan gave to his Indian policies, was informed by this historical style of thought. As he told a delegation of Cherokee chiefs who visited him in Washington early in 1806, “You are becoming farmers, learning the use of the plough and the hoe, enclosing your grounds and employing that labor in their cultivation which you formerly employed in hunting and in war; and I see handsome specimens of cotton cloth raised, spun and wove by yourselves.” The President told the Cherokees that he was optimistic for their future. “You are also raising cattle and hogs for your food, and horses to assist your labors. Go on, my children,” he continued, “in the same way and be assured the further you advance in it the happier and more respectable you will be.” Become like us.  You will live better.  And as you do so, you will need less land, which we shall be happy to take off your hands.  Taking, as Gregory Evans Dowd put it, was portrayed as giving.

Respectability.  In Jefferson’s view the Cherokees were making progress. Other Indian nations looked to the advancing Cherokees and found themselves wanting in comparison. That is what Jefferson believed.  And, for the Cherokees, this was only the beginning.

You will find your next want to be mills to grind your corn, which by relieving your women from the loss of time in beating it into meal, will enable them to spin and weave more. When a man has enclosed and improved his farm, builds a good house on it and raised plentiful stocks of animals, he will wish when he dies that these things shall go to his wife and children, whom he loves more than he does his other relations, and for whom he will work with pleasure during his life. You will, therefore, find it necessary to establish laws for this. When a man has property, earned by his own labor, he will not like to see another come and take it from him because he happens to be stronger, or else to defend it by spilling blood. You will find it necessary then to appoint good men, as judges, to decide contests between man and man, according to reason and to the rules you shall establish. If you wish to be aided by our counsel and experience in these things we shall always be ready to assist you with our advice.

Not all of them wanted that advice, and when they did, it was on their own terms.  Jefferson’s philanthropy always walked hand in hand with coercion, and that is what makes his letter to William Henry Harrison so revealing. His philanthropy, as Bernard Sheehan put it so long ago, contained within it the “seeds of extinction.” Jefferson’s solution to the “Indian Problem” was to make Indians disappear.  Either they would assimilate and blend into the American body politic, or they would leave. Jefferson pursued the removal of the Cherokees long before Andrew Jackson became President.  And native peoples, quite clearly, never saw much attractive in accommodating themselves to his understanding of the path they should take. And when native peoples ignored or resisted his efforts, which in essence involved compressing his understanding of a millennia of English history into the prescription for the eight short years of this presidency, he used all means necessary to remove them.

So, back to Jefferson’s letter to Harrison.

You will receive herewith an answer to your letter as President of the Convention: and from the Secretary at War you receive from time to time information & instructions as to our Indian affairs. these communications being for the public records are restrained always to particular objects & occasions. but this letter being unofficial, & private, I may with safety give you a more extensive view of our policy respecting the Indians, that you may the better comprehend the parts dealt out to you in detail through the official channel, and observing the system of which they make a part, conduct yourself in unison with it in cases where you are obliged to act without instruction.

When historians see something like this, their eyes light up. Jefferson is writing with no other audience in mind but Harrison, and here he will be frank, open, and honest, words not usually used to describe him.

Our system is to live in perpetual peace with the Indians, to cultivate an affectionate attachment from them, by every thing just & liberal which we can do for them within the bounds of reason, and by giving them effectual protection against wrongs from our own people.

Jefferson was well aware of the Trade and Intercourse Act, which attempted to regulate those instances where native peoples and white Americans came into contact. The laws were geared towards keeping the peace, avoiding a dust-up that might lead to a wider war.  But as white people arrived in the vicinity of Indian settlements, even those who were peacefully inclined, changes occurred on the land. “The decrease of game rendering their subsistence by hunting insufficient, we wish to draw them to agriculture, to spinning & weaving,” Jefferson told Harrison.  Here is the civilization program described once again. And native peoples were willing to make some changes.

The latter branches [i.e. spinning and weaving] they take up with great readiness, because they fall to the women, who gain by quitting the labours of the field for those which are exercised within doors. When they withdraw themselves to the culture of a small piece of land, they will perceive how useless to them are their extensive forests, and will be willing to pare them off from time to time in exchange for necessaries for their farms & families.”

Jefferson wanted the process to move quickly.  “To promote this disposition to exchange lands which they have to spare & we want, for necessaries, which we have to spare & they want, we shall push our trading houses, and be glad to see the good & influential individuals among them run in debt, because we observe that when these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay, they become willing to lop th[em off] by a cession of lands.”  Debt as a tool leading to dispossession: it is all here in Jefferson’s letter. And he continued:

At our trading houses too we mean to sell so low as merely to repay us cost and charges so as neither to lessen or enlarge our capital. This is what private traders cannot do, for they must gain; they will consequently retire from the competition, & we shall thus get clear of this pest without giving offence or umbrage to the Indians. In this way our settlements will gradually circumscribe & approach the Indians, & they will in time either incorporate with us as citizens of the US. or remove beyond the Mississippi. the former is certainly the termination of their history most happy for themselves. but in the whole course of this, it is essential to cultivate their love.

And what else?

As to their fear, we presume that our strength & their weakness is now so visible that they must see we have only to shut our hand to crush them, & that all our liberalities to them proceed from motives of pure humanity only. Should any tribe be fool-hardy enough to take up the hatchet at any time, the seizing the whole country of that tribe & driving them across the Mississippi, as the only condition of peace, would be an example to others, and a furtherance of our final consolidation.

Jefferson reminded Harrison in the closing paragraph to keep this letter private, and by no means to allow the Indians to understand his devious scheme to draw their leaders into debts that could only be satisfied by the cession of their followers’ lands.

I find little to like in Thomas Jefferson. I have always felt that way.  He was a beautiful writer at times, but he frittered away his talents.  I think here of his discussion of race in his Notes on the State of Virginia or his sad and creepy letter to Maria Cosway.  He was seldom courageous, more adrift in than in command of the intellectual currents that swirled about him.  And he was almost never direct.   His letter to Harrison, in this sense, is indicative of his policies and his character.

 

Current Events

Manifesto

1 Comment

We are historians.

No document is sacred. We are impatient with slogans, patriotic hymns, dogmas, ideas held but unexamined and unchallenged.

There is no text that cannot be analyzed, no claim that can not be challenged. Your comforting myths will find no succor here.  There is no assertion we will not check, no argument we will not dissect, no matter we will take on faith.

We will question you. You will feel like it is getting hot in here.  You will sweat.

We respect only the discipline of history–the craft we have learned and refined, the diligence and the thoroughness and the honesty and the hard work that goes into answering questions about the past in a systematic manner.

It is not a science, but it is a discipline, a way of thinking, doing, and being.

We take it all very seriously.

We will make you uncomfortable.

We will be, in your view, assholes and inquisitors, for we will demand of you your evidence. You would rather we study STEM. You see less value in the liberal arts and humanities in direct proportion to the pressure you feel we put upon you to think critically, to reason soundly and honestly.  We will expect you to be able to explain how your reasoning follows from your premises and, assuredly, we will ask you for proof. Maybe you will convince us.  Maybe not.  We will know what you have said before. We will ask you questions you have not considered. We will ask you why you did not consider our questions, and we may feel, as you might, that you are not asking the right questions at all, that they are not good questions that you are asking.

We will ask you what you have read, and why this and not that and what you think about this other thing. We will ask you how you know what you claim to know. If you have nothing to say, we might think that you have more work to do, or that you have not been fully honest, with yourself or us, about your own prejudices and biases.  We will think that you are more interested in advancing an agenda, in scoring political points, than in the truth.

And so we will judge you, and your work. We will judge what you say and what you write, though we will usually be polite. And we will judge you harshly when you mouth platitudes and talking point that you know to be half-truths, and when you attempt to wriggle away from the harsh reality you helped concoct, by saying “it’s not time.” We will listen to you, the mouthpieces of the NRA, and the craven politicians who do their bidding, and the fringes of the media where such dark ideas dwell.Image result for anti-gun art

And when you call us “politically correct,” or view us as part of a menacing “Left,” or as “Libtards”; when you mock us for being “woke” or fragile “snowflakes,” or “European socialists,” we will conclude that you are ill-informed, ignorant, or a coward and a wilful liar.  Or that you have nothing much to say at all. That all your Hannity vanity and wreckless Bannon is nothing but air.  We have a name for that sort of conduct, and we will use it to describe you.

We students of the liberal arts and humanities do not always agree. Sometimes we argue and sometimes feelings get hurt.  Criticism stings. But the give-and-take, the dialogue and debate, it is what we love.  It drew us into this world, this life’s work.

We listen and we learn. We re-write our lectures and redesign our courses, when we uncover something new. When a new interpretation, a “revisionist” work arrives, we consider it.  We think it over.  We take notes. We think some more. We stay up on our fields.  We devour new scholarship. We are honest, and we work hard.  We work longer hours than you will expect. We have high standards. We do not fear these at all. We agonize about what we write and teach, and we strive, imperfectly, to get things right. We spend a lot of time alone, reading, thinking, researching, writing. No, we will not carry weapons.

We hold ourselves to high standards. But we will hold you to high standards, too. And though we are quick to smell a rat, and good at detecting lies, and we are willing to dig like terriers for answers, we are patient and we will listen to you. And we listen closely.

It has been a bad couple of days.  I say that as a historian and as a human being.

There is a novel I love.

I have not read it in a long time. I may have lost my copy. I gave it away to someone but I cannot remember who that was, or I lost it on one of my many moves. It is called Waterland, and the author was Graeme Swift. The main character was a history teacher named Tom Crick. He taught his students about the French Revolution, about the history of Europe. But Tom Crick’s life was falling apart, personally and professionally.

And one day, challenged by a frightened student, a boy who could not see the point in studying the past when the future looked so bleak, and who asked his teacher why should we bother studying history, Crick provided his answer.

Why, Crick said, is the question that makes us human, and the word that blares in the historian’s ear like a siren in the night.  Why? If only…But why?

I think about that novel a lot.  History. And regret.  They go together.

Like gunshots and grief.

So, again, why?

Why did this screwed-up kid with a screwed-up life do this screwed-up thing in Florida the other day. I rarely watch the news anymore, but I watched a lot after I heard that yet another school shooting was underway.  These stories hit me hard. I wrote some words for the local paper, and have thought a lot about this story of this screwed-up thing. I listened to the Republicans talk about it.  One of them said that he did it because he was a screwed-up kid with a screwed-up life, which does not help me.  It is circular.  And I have known other screwed-up  kids with screwed-up lives who could not hurt a fly. Maybe the society is sick, as one person said, or it’s because of I-pads, somehow, or because of violent video games, or too many guns in the movies.  Maybe it happened because we have removed God from the schools and because there are, one said, homosexuals everywhere.  This kid had no parents. Maybe it is a product of bad parenting. Or the cops.  Maybe it happened because the cops chickened out and would not go into that school that had become a charnel house, one fueled by the easy availability of weapons of war.

Or maybe it is because when a bad, screwed-up person is determined to do a bad, screwed-up thing, there is really nothing you can do to stop them. I heard one political leader say that. And that is fatalism.  It is not an explanation. It is an abdication.

Shoddy reasoning.  Fallacious reasoning.  I have heard a lot of it.  I have read it in some of the nasty notes I have received after my editorial appeared in the paper. But people like me? We are patient.  We are teachers. And we will reason with you and engage with you. We can take the heat.  How about the guns, we will ask you.  Maybe it happened because it is so easy to obtain weapons here, and to use them while the nation’s leader stirs up unthinking anger and undiscerning resentment.

Why did this happen? It is a historical question, you see, because asking it forces us to ask why it happens in this country so frequently.  It has become a uniquely American thing: like women’s basketball and the mass incarceration of people of color, it is one of those things in which America leads the world. (MAGA!)

We who think, read, reason, and we who are moved by the suffering, we will point out that there is plenty that might be done to reduce the likelihood of events like this from repeating again, and again, and again. And we, who think, read, and reason, and who feel the weight of the past, and who demand evidence, will call you out when you repeat the talking points handed out by the terrorist death cult that claims your allegiance as you race towards the Eighth Circle of Hell. And when your evidence is cherry-picked, fabricated, and is the sort of complete and utter bullshit that seemingly excuses the slaughter of children as the price of freedom, we will denounce you for your amorality and your cowardice and your utter and absolute evil.

Because thirty thousand people die every year from gunshot wounds, whether from suicide, homicide, or accident.  Many thousands more have their bodies torn, lacerated, chewed up and spit out by these weapons that have one purpose and one purpose only: to kill. How many more crimes are committed with these weapons, or people threatened and frightened? It boggles the mind.

You can stop this. You can do something or you can remain complicit. If you choose to do nothing, the blood is on your hands. We will say that, out loud and to your face.

We will remember you and we will be among those who judge you.  And we judge harshly.

A sick society?  No. There is sickness, but there is also good. I know you saw those kids in Florida.  They are coming to Washington. Marching.  None of you,  I expect, will have the stones to come out and meet them. You will try to co-opt the movement, but we are angry.  And, as historians, we can tell you that if you ignore evil for too long, it will explode. And those who rise up against the evil, they become history’s heroes.

Current Events

I Read Elizabeth Warren’s Speech to the NCAI So You Don’t Have To

Leave a comment

And it wasn’t half bad.  Sure, she oversimplified the Pocahontas story considerably, and in ways that would give historians of the Powhatans and early Virginia pause, but she raised some critical points.  “Indigenous people have been telling the story of Pocahontas–the real Pocahontas–for four centuries. A story of heroism. And bravery. And pain,” Warren said.   And, she added correctly, “for almost as long, her story has been taken away by powerful people who twisted it to serve their own purposes.”

The Clown Prince of Mar-a-Lago, of course, has been referring to Warren as Pocahontas every time he speaks of her, an attempt to debunk Senator Warren’s claims to Native American ancestry.  And Warren addressed those claims directly. She did not back down.  She was unapologetic.

“I get why some people think there’s hay to be made here. You won’t find my family members on any rolls, and I’m not enrolled in a tribe.

And I want to make something clear. I respect that distinction. I understand that tribal membership is determined by tribes — and only by tribes. I never used my family tree to get a break or get ahead. I never used it to advance my career.

But I want to make something else clear too: My parents were real people.”

It was good that Warren drew that distinction, and it was good that she stuck to her guns.  Senator Warren told the audience her parents’ story.

My parents struggled. They sacrificed. They paid off medical debts for years. My daddy ended up as a janitor. They fought and they drank, but more than anything, they hung together. 63 years — that’s how long they were married. When my mother died, a part of my daddy slipped away too.

Two years later, I held his hand while cancer took him. The last thing he said was, “It’s time for me to be with your mother.” And he smiled.

They’re gone, but the love they shared, the struggles they endured, the family they built, and the story they lived will always be a part of me. And no one — not even the president of the United States — will ever take that part of me away.

In many ways, it was a beautifully written speech.

Our stories are deeply woven into the fabric of who we are. The stories of immigrants and slaves, of explorers and refugees, have shaped and reshaped our country right up to the present day. For far too long, your story has been pushed aside, to be trotted out only in cartoons and commercials.

So I’m here today to make a promise: Every time someone brings up my family’s story, I’m going to use it to lift up the story of your families and your communities.

Your story is about contributions. The contributions you make to a country that took so much and keeps asking for more, contributions like serving in the military at rates higher than any other group in America.

It is a story about hope. The hope you create as more Native people go to college, go to graduate school and grow local economies.

It is a story about resilience. The resilience you show as you reclaim your history and your traditions.

And it is a story about pride and the determination of people who refuse to let their languages fade away and their cultures die.

I honor that story.

But it was not the only story.  Warren wanted to talk about obligations, and morality, and the “story of our country’s mistreatment of your communities.” This was, for Warren, more than “a story about casual racism–war whoops and tomahawk chops and insulting Facebook memes.”  It was, rather,

a story about greed. For generations — Congress after Congress, president after president — the government robbed you of your land, suppressed your languages, put your children in boarding schools and gave your babies away for adoption. It has stolen your resources and, for many tribal governments, taken away the opportunity to grow and prosper for the good of your people.

Even today, politicians in Washington want to let their Big Oil buddies pad their profits by encroaching on your land and fouling your rivers and streams. Meanwhile, even as the economic future of your communities hangs in the balance, they want to cut nutrition assistance, cut Medicaid, and cut other programs that many Native families rely on to survive.

It’s a story about violence. It is deeply offensive that this president keeps a portrait of Andrew Jackson hanging in the Oval Office, honoring a man who did his best to wipe out Native people. But the kind of violence President Jackson and his allies perpetrated isn’t just an ugly chapter in a history book. Violence remains part of life today. The majority of violent crimes experienced by Native Americans are perpetrated by non-Natives, and more than half — half — of Native women have experienced sexual violence.

This must stop. And I promise I will fight to help write a different story.

Warren, sounding like a Senator fully informed on issues of concern to native communities and, perhaps, a presidential candidate hoping to secure Native American votes in an existentially important election next time around, spoke of the obligations of the United States government to help native nations “build stronger communities and a brighter future–starting with a more prosperous economic future on tribal lands.”  Where the Trump administration, and especially Secretary of Interior Ryan “Kill and Drill” Zinke can speak only of mineral extraction and bringing in outside corporate development, Warren spoke in essence about economic sovereignty.

 

Banking and credit are the lifeblood of economic development, but it’s about 12 miles on average from the center of tribal reservations to the nearest bank branch. Meanwhile, Native business owners get less start-up funding than other business owners.

And when it comes to crucial infrastructure, Native communities are far behind the rest of the country. Rural broadband access on tribal lands is worse than anywhere else in America, and more than a third of those living on tribal lands don’t have high-speed broadband at all. Without it, Native communities are simply shut out of a 21st century economy.

It’s time to make real investments in Indian country to build opportunity for generations to come.

And that’s only part of the real change we can make.

• We can stop giant corporations from stealing your resources.

• We can expand federally protected land that is important to your tribes.

• We can protect historic monuments like Bears Ears from companies that see it as just another place to drill.

• We can take steps to stop violence against Native people – including passing Savanna’s Act to fight the plague of missing Native women and girls.

Most of all, we can fight to empower tribal governments and Native communities so you can take your rightful seat at the table when it comes to determining your own future.

And we can fight to make sure that all Americans who have been left out in our economy, left out in our democracy, and left out in our history can take their rightful seat at that table.

Warren’s speech, I suspect, accomplished much of what it was intended to do.  Some of her supporters have been uncomfortable about her claims to Native American ancestry. Like them, I wanted Warren to address the controversy directly, and to not allow Our Bronze Creon to define her as an ethnic fraud.  Warren likely answered her critics in Democratic circles.  As for the Racists and the Dingbats and the Deplorables, they will never let the issue rest,  but Warren showed that more than any of the potential Democratic nominees in 2020, she understands the issues afflicting Native American communities, and that she is publicly committed to confronting directly the most racist presidential administration in the last fifty years.

 

#NativeLivesMatter

A Lament for Colten Boushie

Leave a comment

Late last Friday night the jury delivered its verdict in the trial of Gerald Stanley, the Saskatchewan farmer accused of murdering a young Cree man named Colten Boushie. Stanley shot Boushie in the head at close range and killed him. The all-white jury could have found Stanley guilty of murder in the second degree or manslaughter.  Instead they acquitted him entirely.

It is not entirely clear what happened on Stanley’s farm that afternoon late in the summer of 2016, other than that there was an altercation involving Stanley, his son, and his wife with the four young people who drove onto the property, a cattle farm on Canada’s Plains.

Boushie and his friends had been drinking, that is for sure. One of them got out of the car and climbed aboard an ATV parked on Stanley’s farm, and tried to start it.  One of them tried to get into a gold pickup truck that belonged to one of Stanley’s neighbors.  He was a part-time mechanic and the truck needed some work. Stanley saw the car approaching and he watched them mess around with the truck and the ATV. He said he was afraid of the intruders, Indians, the other.

Nobody denies that Stanley went inside, grabbed a gun, loaded it with bullets, and, after a tussle, shot Colten Boushie in the head. Stanley said the gun misfired, that his finger was not on the trigger. Firearms experts disagreed. The gun was working properly, and could not have been fired without the trigger being pulled.

I am not a lawyer, and so I do not know all the legal ins-and outs of this case. It is plain to see that the witnesses were not entirely reliable, that both Stanley and Boushie’s companions changed elements of their stories over time. Based on the heavy press coverage in Canada, it seems that there is no way that a jury could have reached absolute certainty about what happened on the Stanley farm with one set of exceptions: Boushie and his friends entered Stanley’s property; they messed around with some of his stuff; Stanley went to get his gun; he fired that weapon three times, and one of those bullets struck Boushie, killing him.

Canadians have spoken much in recent years about “reconciliation,” about coming to terms with the atrocities the country and its provinces have committed upon native peoples. Prime Minister Trudeau has played a leading role in this effort. But when Niigaan Sinclair, a Professor of Native Studies in Manitoba, said that the verdict in the Stanley case was “unbelievable yet believable,” he got to the heart of the issue. Yes, Trudeau sent his warm thoughts and best wishes, his sympathies and his concerns, to Boushie’s family. But how does he expect First Nations peoples to take that seriously after the acquittal of Stanley? What is the point of talking about reconciliation and recovery and hope for a future informed by a thoughtful consideration of the atrocities and violence of the past, when the atrocious behavior and the violence continues?

It is a fair question for policy-makers in the United States, too, who have shown little willingness to talk about this nation’s colonial past.

When unmatched with real action and real results, “reconciliation” seems to involve white people asking native peoples to let them off the hook for the crimes of their ancestors. After this weekend especially, I cannot see any reason for them to do so.  “Reconciliation” can’t just be, “It’s awful what we did to you, and let’s move on.” Rather, it must include, “it’s awful what we still are doing, and let’s talk about what needs to be done to make it stop.”

“Unbelievable, yet believable.”  I get it.  Those who watched the trial hoped for justice in the case of Colten Boushie, but it was a forlorn hope.  It’s a sad but brutal fact: there is little evidence to support any belief that courts will get things right, that they will treat native peoples with justice and humanity.  Rotten to the core.  Ask those who grieve for Jason Pero, or John T. Williams,  or Romeo Wesley or Zachary Bearheels.  Colten Boushie is Canada’s Trayvon Martin, and Gerald Stanley its George Zimmerman.

I have made the case in the past, and it is an unpopular one here, that those of us non-natives who own homes in New York State are the beneficiaries of a systematic program of Indian dispossession.  What Indians lost, white New Yorkers gained. Some are more guilty than others, but we are all complicit.

Sherman Alexie published a poem last week, on nearly the same day that Gerald Stanley’s trial commenced. “Hymn,” he called it, a call to love everything and for the radical hope that accepts as truth that we can feel and act on that love.

 

So let me ask demanding questions: Will you be

Eyes for the blind? Will you become the feet

 

For the wounded? Will you protect the poor?

Will you welcome the lost to your shore?

 

Will you battle the blood thieves

And rescue the powerless from their teeth?

 

Who will you be? Who will I become

As we gather in this terrible kingdom?

 

My friends, I’m not quite sure what I should do.

I’m as angry and afraid and disillusioned as you.

 

But I do know this: I will resist hate. I will resist.

I will stand and sing my love. I will use my fist

 

To drum and drum my love. I will write and read poems

That offer warmth and shelter of any good home.

 

I will sing for people who might not sing for me.

I will sing for people who are not my family.

 

Colten Boushie was the victim of a crime that had its origins long ago. It is historic. The criminals, and all their accomplices in and out of all the years, they remain at large, untroubled, unworried, guilty, and free.

#NativeLivesMatter, Uncategorized

Patterned Acts of Violence

Leave a comment

Brooke Crews butchered Savanna Greywind.  Crews wanted a baby, and her young neighbor was eight months pregnant.  On the night of 17 August last year she lured Greywind into her home. While Savanna was still alive, and passing in and out of consciousness, she cut the child from her womb. When Crews’ boyfriend arrived, she presented him with the baby.  “This is our baby,” she reportedly said. “This is our family.” Together, they cleaned up the blood. Together they disposed of Savanna’s clothing. And, together, they wrapped her body in plastic sheeting and dumped of it in the river, where kayakers found it sometime later.

JUST OVER A YEAR BEFORE Savanna Greywind’s murder, another twenty-two year old, Colten Boushie, set out from his reserve west of Saskatoon. The car Colten and his friends were riding in got a flat tire, and the guys pulled into the farm of Gerald Stanley.  Boushie and his friends had been drinking.  They may have committed some petty thefts, though the testimony is confused.  Young guys, engaging in mischief.  Committing some minor crimes.  (If you were ever a young adult, you probably have done this sort of stuff, too). But, here, at Stanley’s place, they seem to have wanted nothing more than help fixing a flat tire.  What happened next is a matter of dispute. Stanley said that the 70-year-old handgun he wielded in order to scare the young men off misfired. Others that he carried out an act of vigilante justice against a group of young men he feared had come to rob him.  And others still believed that Stanley was an Indian-hating westerner from the Canadian Plains.  Whichever, the case, Colten Boushie, who was seated in the vehicle’s front seat, died from a gunshot wound to the head.  The bullet was fired by Stanley, from his old gun.

Last week, Savanna Greywind’s killer was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Stanley’s trial for the murder of Colten Boushie began last week. Both stories struck me as so evocative of the long and troubled history that I teach.  Both stories scream with the echoes of the past.

The news is increasingly filled with stories of missing and murdered indigenous women and children.  In response to Greywind’s murder, North Dakota Senator Heidi Heitkamp has introduced “Savanna’s Law,” which will “help address crisis of missing and murdered Native American women.”  Specifically, the act would

  • Improve tribal access to certain federal crime information databases. The bill would update the data fields to be more relevant to Native Americans, and mandate that the Attorney General consult with Tribes on how to further improve these databases and their access to them. The Attorney General would then submit a report to Congress on how the U.S. Department of Justice plans to implement the suggestions and resolve the outstanding barriers Tribes face in acquiring full access to these databases.
  • Require the Attorney General, the Department of the Interior, and the Department of Health and Human Services to solicit recommendations from Tribes on improved access to local, regional, state, and federal crime information databases and criminal justice information systems during the annual consultations mandated under the Violence Against Women Act.
  • Create standardized protocols for responding to cases of missing and murdered Native Americans. These protocols would take place in consultation with Tribes, which would include guidance on inter-jurisdictional cooperation among tribal, federal, state, and local law enforcement.
  • Require an annual report to Congress with data. The report would include statistics on missing and murdered Native women, since there is little data on this problem and there isn’t a central location for keeping that information. The report would also include recommendations on how to improve data collection.

I wish Heitkamp well. I hope her legislation passes, and I hope it helps.  It mainly aims at attempting to improve information about a problem that all acknowledge is poorly understood.  That is a good thing, but it seems to me it is at best a half-measure. So much more than information is needed.

Heitkamp’s proposed piece of legislation addresses nonetheless deep and systemic problems that cut to the core of the Native American experience in North America.  Native American women have always been objects of white violence.  Long ago, for instance,  George Percy told the story of how he ordered the Queen of Paspahegh stabbed to death after his men had earlier entertained themselves by throwing her children from the boat and shooting out their brains in the water.  Edward Moseley, that mercenary who sold his services to the Puritan Saints during King Philip’s War, boasted about how he unleashed his war dogs on an Algonquian captive his men had taken.  The dogs, Moseley noted, tore her to shreds. The mutilation of women’s bodies by American soldiers at Sand Creek: that, too, is part of a long, long story.  Sexual violence rests at the core of this history and it continues: along the Canadian Highway of Tears and, if the spotty records are correct, on reservations across America.  And in Fargo.

Brooke Crews stole Savanna Greywind’s baby.  There is a long history of white clergymen, government officials, military officers, and bumbling do-gooders who have scooped up Native American children.  Canada, much more than the United States, has started a discussion of the legacy of residential schools and the problems that continue to plague them. European colonizers and their colonial heirs long have collected the orphans whose parents they killed, sold them into slavery, bound them into servitude, and still, today, distribute them to white families in some states through broken and racist foster care systems.

Colten Boushie’s story, too, has so many ties to a vicious and violent past, for white people, throughout the history of this continent, have murdered native people. That reality runs through every book I have written, including Native America: Arthur Peach, the killer of a Narragansett messenger, Northern Neck racists who murdered Susquehannocks; Pennsylvania Frontiersmen who murdered Senecas with impunity, leading Federalist Timothy Pickering to lament that, for most white people living in close contact with native peoples, killing an Indian was no crime at all. Read the annual reports of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs:  they are full of complaints from federal policy makers who felt powerless to stop the violence meted out on Indians by the white frontier population.  It was frontier whites, American officials understood so well, who were responsible for frontier violence.  Indians were usually victims.

You cannot miss this in the documents. It is all there. It is always there.  And still it goes on.  The police treated Boushie’s body with a callousness they would not use for white crime victims. And the police, when they came to Boushie’s house to tell his mother and father that their son had died, searched the house.  They came in with guns drawn. They treated Mrs. Boushie with disrespect and cruelty.  If the Boushies’ account is accurate, the Canadian police behaved like racist thugs.  It is a heart-breaking tale that should shame police officials in Saskatchewan.

 

GREYWIND’S MURDER has provoked discussion and legislation in the halls of Congress to address a problem that native peoples have talked about for generations, but that Congress is only now starting to act upon.  Boushie’s murder has caused deep-seated racial tensions to surface and has brought into the open, his grieving friends and families say, the sorts of racism and violence First Nations people face every day.  The trial is receiving heavy coverage in Canada, where Boushie is being described as the “Rodney King of Canada.”  Maybe something good will come from airing out these issues.  That is what some hopeful people say.  I am doubtful, because this violence has gone on forever.  The headlines in the newspapers point out that the case has caused racial fears to increase, and that white people, one story said, are fearful of retribution. White people are worried.  Fear of the other.  Fear of the marginalized. Fear of the neighbors whose ancestral homelands you now occupy. I heard the expression of that fear when I lived in Montana: from my landlord, a feisty old woman who would not rent to Crows because, she said, if you let one in, soon you would have the whole tribe; from my students who, in unguarded moments, embraced baldly racist stereotypes; to the angry ranchers who extracted their livelihood from what had once been Crow land, and who refused to place themselves voluntarily under the authority of tribal officials. I hear it in small-town New York, too, where one can still see the faded “Upstate Citizens for Equality” sign along the sides of roads throughout the Finger Lakes.

We are historians.  Many of us have heard the old line, that if we do not learn from the past we will repeat our mistakes.  We study continuity and change, measured across time and space, in peoples, institutions and cultures.  And, in Native American history, it is the continuities that stand out: with a Secretary of the Interior who views anything he cannot kill as something he might drill, and who views nothing as sacred save for his own conservative evangelicalism; with violence continuing across the continent; with a hostile legal system assaulting native nationhood; and with a Chief Executive whose infantile racism makes clear what many of us have long argued: this is a deeply racist country, and many of us continue to benefit from that systemic injustice.  We have numerous examples of how difficult it will be to achieve meaningful change.  That is realistic, not pessimistic.

My students are shocked when they read about stories like those of Savanna Greywind and Colten Boushie, and even more so when I take the time to place them in the context of a much larger, and much more violent, history than they have ever been taught. They seem empowered, some of them, and determined to “do something.”  Others, they sense that the obstacles are formidable. And so on we go, teaching and writing, fighting against the dark belief that things will not get better. We choose the stories we want to tell.  We must remember that.

New Publications

The Supreme Court’s “Silent Revolution” in Indian Law

Leave a comment

I recently had a chance to read through Dewi Ioan Ball’s The Erosion of Tribal Power: The Supreme Court’s Silent Revolution, published in 2016 by the University of Oklahoma Press.  I am teaching my Indian Law and Public Policy course this semester at Geneseo, and I do try to keep up as best I can with the large literature on the field.  So much to read, so little time.

What makes Ball’s approach novel is his use of the unpublished writings and correspondence of several Supreme Court justices whose papers are public: Harry Blackmun, Thurgood Marshall, William J. Brennan, William O. Douglas, Hugo Black, and Earl Warren.  There are, of course, other justices whose writings Ball might have examined, and the papers of Warren Burger and William Rehnquist, arguably the most consistently anti-Indian voice on the Court, are not open to the public.  Despite these limitations, Ball avoids the approach of too many legal works in analyzing decision after decision, and his work in the legal literature is outstanding. Your students who are interested in this subject will benefit from reading Ball’s footnotes.

Ball argued that a “silent revolution” occurred in the field of American Indian law as promulgated by the Supreme Court.  A long period in which the “sovereignty doctrine” prevailed ran until 1959, when the Court’s decision in Williams v. Lee began to lay “the foundations of the Silent Revolution.”  That era lasted only until 1973 when, Ball argues, the Court began an all-out assault on the sovereignty doctrine.  “Tribal authority,” the justices believed, “was limited to tribal members and subsequently that tribal authority over non-members on the reservations existed only after an explicit delegation of power.”  Furthermore, the Court embraced the “corollary” of this view “that the states had authority on the reservations until it was reversed by Congress.”  Even the Court’s most liberal members believed that “tribal sovereignty could not be applied over nonmembers and was dependent on congressional authority.” Thus the “Silent Revolution.”

If you are like me, this might strike you as a bit too tidy a thesis, and Ball himself admits that during the long period from 1823 to 1959, the Court was hardly consistent in its support for inherent tribal sovereignty.  Indeed, it is hard to look at the long line of cases that proceeded from, say, Kagama (1886) to Lone Wolf (1903) to Celestine (1909) and on to Tee-Hit-Ton (1955), and see any respect for native nationhood. The Court spoke inconsistently and with different voices over that period, and that raises the challenging question as to whether any singular doctrine existed during that long period.

Books like this, however, are bound to produce quibbling from legal scholars and historians, and a few acrimonious debates.  But in taking such a broad expanse of time, and breaking that history into essentially three periods, much of the complexity of the Court’s reasoning is lost.   And, as Ball wisely points out, the Supreme Court was a destructive force but it was hardly the only game in town.  Congress, during the years of the Court’s “silent revolution,” enacted some very significant legislation that provided native nations with an important measure of “self-determination.”

There are a lot of books out there like Ball’s. Scholars familiar with the work of Bruce Duthu, Charles Wilkinson, and Frank Pommersheim will find little here that forces them to go back to the drawing board.  Still, Ball does make at least one really valuable suggestion.  Inadequate attention has been paid, he suggested, to the consequences of these Court decisions.  Court cases, as those of us who teach them tell our students, consist of stories, and the legal questions dissected by jurists and scholars and attorneys had, at times, immense human consequences.  Our analyses, however, too often end with the justices having the last word.  Given the vast amount of material available online, this is a subject on which our students can do some good work.  The Sherill decision, for instance, was devastating to Haudenosaunee land claims in New York State, but what has happened in Sherrill since?  When the Court held in 1978 that Mark David Oliphant could not be prosecuted by the Suquamish Indian Nation for beating up a tribal police officer, what was the effect of this decision upon law and order on that reservation?

Answering these questions can be difficult work.  We can, after all, sit at our desks and read court decisions.  To do the sort of finely-grained social history, or the oral history, or the work in local collections required to find out what happened on the ground—that is another matter entirely. It is harder work, involving more time and more travel. We have a lot of studies of court cases. We have lots of scholarship attempting to cast new light on the court’s reasoning on this or that question. There are a lot of scholars out there whose research focuses on reading court decisions.  It is important to do this. I get that. Ball attempted to bring some new evidence to bear on the question of the Court’s jurisprudence involving native peoples, and for that he is to be commended. But increasingly, my interests lie elsewhere.  There are other matters that concern me when I read books like this.  For those of us who are interested in native nations, and the native peoples who live in these communities, and the challenges they face, we might get more bang for our research buck by tackling the tougher questions.  Let’s follow native peoples from their defeat in the courthouse, at the hands of anti-Indian Justices hostile to the very idea of native nationhood, back to their lands. There we can, if we work hard enough, learn the very real and compelling stories that come from their efforts to contend with the wreckage the conquerors’ courts have wrought.

Native Americans, Teaching Native American History

The Lewis Henry Morgan School in Rochester New York

10 Comments

If you study the Iroquois, you have come across the work of the pioneering anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan.  He published in the middle of the nineteenth century The League of the Ho-dé-no-sau-nee or Iroquois.  It is an important book. Though many of Morgan’s findings have been rejected, there is no doubting the significance of the work.  His ties to the Parker family at Tonawanda gained him extraordinary access at a period when many Americans still anticipated that the Iroquois, like other Native American peoples, would disappear.

Morgan’s Rochester ties are deep.  He lived in town, left his papers to the University of Rochester, and for years his grave in Mount Hope Cemetery became a pilgrimage site for Iroquois leaders and activists.  In this picture, taken in 1920, Oneida Elsie Elm sings a funeral dirge at his grave site. George Decker, the Rochester attorney who represented the Oneidas, and who helped in the attempt to take Levi General’s (Deskaheh) complaints about Canada’s treatment of Haudenosaunee at Grand River before the League of Nations in Geneva, stands farthest to her left.  The Seneca Arthur Parker, another force in Haudenosaunee anthropology with whom we must contend, stands to her left.  The Oneida William Rockwell and the Mohawk Louis Bruce are also pictured.  The University of Rochester is hosting events to commemorate the bicentennial of Morgan’s birth, and has recently launched what I expect will become a fantastic digital humanities project focused on Morgan’s life and career, and its significance. You can take a look at the website here.  It looks fantastic.

A couple of weeks ago, I was chatting with Robert Foster, Professor of Anthropology of UR and the director of the Morgan project. He indicated that there had once been a school in the Rochester City School District named after Morgan.  Bob had heard that the school’s auditorium was decorated with Haudenosaunee themes, though he had not yet seen them himself.

I did some poking around.  It took only a minute to find out that the school had been recommissioned as a charter school, Number 10, the Dr. Walter Cooper Academy School.  A couple of phone calls, and thanks to a welcoming staff, I was able to take some pictures of the auditorium.

My students have no sense of how much the WPA did, and how much government can do.

 

 

 

 

 

The woodwork above the stage includes the names of the Six Nations.  The placement of the Mohawks far to the left and Senecas and Tuscaroras to the right makes sense when one appreciates that I was facing South when I took this picture. The vertical posts are fashioned to look like trees, with beavers at the bottom of each. Morgan wrote a study called The Beaver and His Works.   Running along the top above the names of the Six Nations is woodwork, I assume, designed to look like wampum.

According to Ivan, the custodian who allowed me access to the building, the auditorium is scheduled to be remodeled.  The stage will remain, and the room will be transformed into the school library. The plans at this stage include a replica longhouse to be built into the library design.

Everywhere one goes, you see see evidence of erasure.  Non-native Americans, in my experience, are uncomfortable talking about the violence of the past, the totality of that dispossession.  Native peoples, when they are considered in public schools, are cast as part of the past.  The images and motifs present in the old Lewis Henry Morgan school auditorium do that as well.  But they also provide an opportunity to talk about that history, and I was pleased to see that the Walter Cooper Academy plans on keeping them as they move forward with renovations.  The school staff with whom I spoke were proud of the room.  I could tell that when I visited.

The University of Rochester will be hosting events over the course of this year.  You can find out more about those events here.

 

 

Current Events, Discovery and Exploration, History and Historians

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

Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Discussion Forum for Teaching and Writing Native American History

css.php