Whatever you call him, George Armstrong Custer was an American military leader who had no ethical problem with bringing the “horrors of war” to unarmed and innocent women and children. As we reach in this year of commemoration the 150th anniversary of his death at the Battle of the Greasy Grass on June 25th, 1876, it is worth keeping that in mind.
Long ago, when I lived in Billings, a friend and I drove out to a ranch on the Crow Reservation in Montana. A promoter had scheduled a reenactment of “Custer’s Last Stand.” We took our seats in the bleachers. Crow actors played the Sioux and Cheyenne warriors who wiped out the American forces. A traditional Crow healer blessed the actor playing Custer before the show began. And, then, the actor playing Crazy Horse galloped into our view. He stared down the audience, let out a war whoop, and then galloped off at full speed. It was a striking and startling opening. Immediately afterwards, the father of a white family seated in front of us turned to one of his tow-headed children and said, “There you go, Courtney. You’ve seen your first real Indian.” He could not see that the audience that surrounded him was made up overwhelmingly of Indigenous people from the Crow and neighboring Northern Cheyenne Reservation. They were decked out in t-shirts and jeans, baseball hats and cowboy hats and boots and sneakers. They were invisible to him.
Custer saw little worth saving in Indigenous peoples. He wanted them, and their way of life, to disappear. Custer was not alone. The poet Walt Whitman wrote a “Death Sonnet for Custer,” asserting that his resounding defeat
Continues yet the old, old legend of our race!
The loftiest of life upheld by death!
The ancient banner perfectly maintained!
(O lesson opportune—O how I welcome thee!)
Custer died for us, Whitman asserted, paying the necessary price for civilization to conquer barbarism. It’s an image of Custer that enjoyed a long life. Look at depictions of Custer in art: There he is, standing in his bright buckskin, long locks flowing, in the midst of a sea of savages. Custer fell, yes, but the Indians who killed him would fade away as well. Custer marched with orders to push them on to reservations; others would cart Indigenous children off to boarding schools, attack their religions, and coerce culture change. Except it did not happen quite that way. Custer was no martyr. He was a violent fool. And with difficulty the people he attacked persisted.
I like much better the image of Custer portrayed by Richard Mulligan in Arthur Penn’s film “Little Big Man.” It’s the story of Jack Crabb, the oldest and only survivor of the Battle of Little Bighorn. Played by Dustin Hoffman, Crabb had lived among the Indians, and he had been along the Washita River in 1868 when Custer’s forces launched their infamous attack. On the 1876 campaign, Hoffman’s Crabb served as a scout for Custer, who asked him about the Sioux village along the Little Bighorn.
Crabb: General, you go down there.
Custer: You’re advising me to go into the Coulee?
Crabb: Yes, sir.
Custer: There are no Indians there, I suppose.
Crabb: I didn’t say that. There are thousands of Indians down there. And when they get done with you, there won’t be nothing left but a greasey spot. This ain’t the Washita River, General, and them ain’t helpless women and children waiting for you. They’re Cheyenne braves and Sioux. You go down there, General, if you’ve got the nerve.
Custer: Still trying to outsmart me, aren’t you, mule-skinner? You want me to think that you don’t want me to go down there, but the subtle truth is, you really don’t want me to go down there!”
Reassured, Custer launches his attack. Two thousand warriors camped there out of his sight. They determined to defend themselves and their families. Depicted so often in American myth as a famous “Last Stand,” Custer’s defeat was a rout. The Sioux and their Cheyenne allies mowed them down as they fled from a village so much larger than they had anticipated. The Sioux wiped out Custer’s command in the time, one Sioux observer later noted, that it took a hungry man to eat his dinner. Only Custer’s Crow and Arikara scouts, who recognized the power of the Sioux, survived the assault.
The Lakotas won the battle, but they lost the war. That’s how the story is told. Once again, as in 1868, winter campaigns drove the Sioux and their allies back to the reservation. By the spring of 1877, most had returned. Crazy Horse surrendered at the Red Cloud Agency in May. He died four months later, stabbed to death during a guardhouse scuffle. Sitting Bull, who had fled across the border into Canada, held out until 1881, before he returned. He was gunned down late in 1890, just days before the massacre at Wounded Knee.
The campaign of 1876, and those that followed, taught the slow-learners in charge of the Bureau of Indian Affairs to reconsider their approach. They recognized the extent to which they relied upon violence, coercion, and conquest to place Indigenous peoples upon reservations and to keep them there. Reservations had once seemed an attractive solution to what these men deemed the “Indian Problem.” By concentrating and isolating Indigenous peoples from the vices of the surrounding white population, the reservation, its advocates hoped, bought them time to become civilized and Americanized. But neighboring whites seldom respected reservation boundaries, and corrupt government agents undermined the paternalistic concern of the federal government to care for its Indian wards. Congress failed to provide reservation Indians with the supplies they needed to undertake the great transition their White Father envisioned. Indigenous peoples found themselves under siege. They no longer could live their accustomed way of life in their homelands. Neither could they live well on the reservation. Whether they moved to the reservations voluntarily or as the result of military conquest, they suffered. But they did not disappear. Despite the efforts of federal agents, missionaries, and teachers to eliminate their culture, and despite their own decisions to make use of some of what the Americans offered them, these communities survived.
This year is the 350th anniversary of the attempt to eradicate Virginia’s Indigenous people during a genocidal uprising known as Bacon’s Rebellion. It is, of course, the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence which unified rebellious colonists around their hatred of “merciless Indian savages.” It is the bicentennial of the 1826 treaty at Buffalo Creek, an agreement through which a business operation known as the Ogden Land Company and their friends in high places stole a third of the Senecas’ remaining lands in New York State in violation of the federal Indian Trade and Intercourse Act. And, today, the we commemorate the defeat of a foolish proponent of genocide and the men who followed him.
I am not sure what sort of commemorations will take place in Montana. Custer seems like the kind of guy Trump would want celebrated. I remember the plaque erected at the Little Bighorn National Monument by a group of activists led by Russel Means in June of 1988. It read: “In honor of our Indian patriots who fought and defeated the U. S. Cavalry in order to save our women and children from mass murder. In doing so, preserving our rights to our homelands, treaties, and sovereignty.”
That plaque was on display when I first visited Little Bighorn in the fall of 1994. I was told at the time that the first Native American director of the National Monument was spit on by white visitors who grew angry when they saw the plaque in the small museum at the Visitor’s Center. I am not sure if it is still there, and its been thirty years since I last visited. But I remember well that the Trump administration, just four months ago, ordered the removal of “signage describing broken promises to Native American tribes and references to the loss of Indigenous culture and language under boarding school systems.” The white supremacists nourished by the MAGA movement share the views of Custer. On this commemoration, let’s call them by their true names.
Along with cobalt and nickel, lithium is critical in the manufacture of batteries for electric vehicles. Demand for all three metals is surging. According to a recently-released report from Amnesty International entitled “We’re Here to Protect Mother Earth: Indigenous Rights and Nevada’s Lithium Boom,” nearly 80% of the lithium reserves in the United States are located within thirty-five miles of an Indian reservation. Of course there is much to be said in support of the growth of a green economy, but the “energy transition mining” necessary to effect this great transformation will have a significant impact on Indigenous peoples, their communities, and the land upon which they live.
According to the Amnesty International report, the corporations seeking to mine these lands claim that they are following all the required statutes and regulatory guidelines. They say that they are meeting the requirements of free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC) with Indigenous nations. Nevada natives, however, disagree in the strongest possible terms. “These companies come in, desecrate our land and take our resources for profit, and we’re the ones who have to live with the repercussions—dirty air, dirty water, and toxic land.,” said Numu Dini of the Walker River Paiute Tribe. Soon these Indigenous communities will find themselves besieged by large, multinational corporations descending upon lands on and near their homelands. More than 20,000 lithium claims have been filed in the state of Nevada.
The corporations may well be following the letter of the law, but the law has always reflected the interests of corporate power in America. The process in Nevada may be “legal,” but that hardly makes it wise, ethical, or just.
This point was made several years ago when Dr. Wendsler Nosie visited my college to give our annual GREAT Day lecture. The leader of Apache Stronghold, Dr. Nosie has opposed for years the efforts of Resolution Copper, a Chinese-owned mining conglomerate, that would destroy Chi’chil Biłdagoteel, known in English as Oak Flat.
Dr. Nosie offered a range of arguments against the copper mine. Most of the wealth generated, and copper produced, would leave the United States, so this could hardly be considered a matter of national defense. The environmental consequences would be severe, devastating a large area near Phoenix, Arizona, raising the air temperature in a region already known for its heat and befouling water in a region known for its aridity. The mine would destroy Oak Flat, making it impossible for Apache people to engage in the free exercise of their religion, a basic human and American constitutional right. If you visit Oak Flat, as I have, you will not find it difficult to appreciate the sanctity of this site, and all that the Apaches stand to lose.
Dr. Nosie made all of these arguments, as have his allies in Nevada’s Indigenous communities threatened by lithium mining. But he raised another point as well, about the exploitation of non-renewable resources, and an approach to life and living on earth that over the long run is obviously unsustainable. Coal, oil, and uranium have been carved and drilled out of the earth to enrich corporations and make life easier for those who reply on the products that result from this extractive business. The scarcity of oil the environmental consequences of our addiction to it have, at long last, spurred the development of green energy but that requires building batteries reliant on the mining of other scarce materials. It is not just the Congo and Philippines where the environmental damage is being done. It’s taking place close to home, in and around lands sacred to Indigenous peoples. When will it stop? Nosie asked.
Too many of us approach the earth as something to be consumed, a resource to be exploited. Doing so is urgent, we are told. The Chinese won’t wait, we are warned. And, in any event, these resources will not run out during our lifetimes. We’ve got time to figure things out. But that sort of short-sighted thinking Nosie encouraged us to reject. Apaches have come to Oak Flat across many centuries and many generations. The “legal” system, I expect, ultimately will allow Resolution Copper to desecrate Oak Flat and, under pressure from the Trump Administration, will undoubtedly do so for the thousands of lithium permits filed in Nevada as well.
Maybe we should change our thinking, Nosie suggested. Maybe we should think ahead, across many centuries and many generations. We should think about the future and what this place will look like when there is nothing left to burn.
Special education teachers in the Salmon River School District concluded that they could no longer control students who, according to their parents, were angry or sad. So they constructed a “barrier” made from “PVC and vinyl” to cage those kids in a makeshift “timeout” room. Other children they locked in plywood boxes until they settled themselves down.
Two-thirds of the kids at Salmon River are Indigenous, from the Akwesasne Mohawk reservation that straddles the US-Canada border. Democratic State Assemblyman Michael Cashman, who represents the district where the school stands, pointed out that a recently completed New York State Department of Education Investigation tells “an absolutely abhorrent story of mistreatment of youth.” He’s right. “These harms,” he continued, “are amplified by the cultural context they unfolded within: many of the families in the school district are Indigenous, a group that has a long history with systemic abuse from schools.”
These kids have family members who attended the notorious Mohawk Institute, known as the “Mushhole,” across the border in Canada. They have ancestors who attended the Thomas Asylum in western New York and even Carlisle, in Pennsylvania. The pain parents felt when they learned of these illegal restraints—which school officials called “calming stations”– should be perfectly understandable. After all, if you did this to your own child, in your own house, those children would rightfully be taken from you. You would rightfully be considered a monster.
Mush Hole or Rape, part of a searing art exhibit I was able to visit on tour when it came to Rochester in 2013. By R. G. Miller
There are so many episodes in the Native American past where people who felt that they acted in the best interest of Indigenous peoples did them enormous damage. There are other cases of stupidity so great that it approached the level of malevolence. And of course there is plenty of pure evil as well.
A graveyard filled with the bodies of dead children at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, PA.
I am not sure what happened at Salmon River, whether bumbling good will, stupidity, or evil, but I am glad NYSED has stepped in and demanded that the school district clean up its act, follow state laws, and put reforms in place to ensure that this never happens again. For a state as heavily bureaucratized as New York, the Education Department has acted with decision.
But it’s not enough.
Over the past several years, we have seen people of color locked in cages. We have seen extraordinary acts of violence committed by the forces of government against its most vulnerable citizens. Callousness and cruelty that lies heavy in the air we breathe. Has this utter lack of empathy shaped what happened in a couple of classrooms way up in northern New York? I don’t know, but it seems to me to be the latest manifestation of a very old disease. I hope that the teachers who used those crates are never permitted to work anywhere near children ever again. And I wish that the long history of abuse experienced by Indigenous children would come to an end.
Another week, and another set of articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education from professors at elite, Ivy-League institutions ruminating on the problems afflicting American colleges and universities. It’s an old song, and I am getting a little tired of hearing it. Yet the beat goes on.
Jonathan Zimmerman argued that professors have exacerbated the significant problems caused by Donald Trump. “We know that growing numbers of Americans have lost faith in us,” he writes, “and so we tell ourselves that they are racist, or anti-intellectual, or so blinded by the Trump cult that they cannot see how good we really are.” The big problem in higher education, Zimmerman says, is that colleges have abandoned the “academic social contract,” and the idea that “propelled us to build up universities in the first place—the cultivation of citizens.”
Zimmerman argues that “despite our rhetorical commitment to ‘critical thinking,’ we typically present only one side of an issue—the left-wing side, almost always—and call it a day. Such a practice is not simply a reflection of political bias, although it is surely that,” Zimmerman writes. “It is also a mark of bad teaching.”
These are serious concerns. A student in New York state, for instance, can graduate from their K-12 and college programs without ever having read the United States constitution. Constitutional, historical or civic illiteracy reached dangerous levels long ago. But at my college we have a new Mellon-funded program in civics and higher education that is innovative and exciting. (At the same time, we had to walk away from another grant that would have funded a civics program melding scholarship, creativity and action because the college lacked the resources to support it and, unfortunately, faculty in some departments were unwilling to teach in the program). Zimmerman feels that these programs, separate from the broader curriculum, like teaching awards and teaching and learning centers, suggest an insincerity about the pursuit where it takes place.
Certainly we offer courses in some departments that would undoubtedly cause Zimmerman to point his finger and say, “you see?” We have more classes on gender identity, race, and inequality than we offered in the past. By far. Our history department offerings are not a celebration of the past, but neither should they be. And history doesn’t always break along lines of “left” and “right.” We spend a lot of time, for instance, teaching students to avoid the cardinal sin of “presentism.” And the critics who assert that historians too often present only the “left-wing side” of a question fail to show two important things: first, that the charge is true and, second, that a particular interpretation of the past that may be considered “left-wing” is factually incorrect or interpretively unsound. In my courses in Native American history, for example, I often teach material that might be considered “left-wing.” It is certainly critical of the well-documented hypocrisy and cruelty of the United States towards Indigenous peoples. I get little criticism along partisan lines, however, and when I do, I ask two sets of questions: First, “How is this interpretation wrong? What about it makes it left or right?” And, second, “how would the right-wing substitute, if there is such a thing, be a more convincing, compelling, and persuasive alternative?” Don’t judge a course by its title, I would tell Zimmerman. Don’t judge the academy based on a relatively small number of faculty members who do take fringe positions that they fail to support adequately with evidence. And, most of all, do not judge small public colleges like mine by standards set in the Ivy League. Zimmerman’s world is not like mine at all. We do more than he will ever know to uphold the academic social contract.
Not Us.
Meanwhile, Professor Samuel Moyn at Yale says that as a group “Professors are too old.” We apparently set ourselves up for Trump’s attacks by being openly partisan, and we are too old to get out of the way of the resulting blast.
Between 2000 and 2010, Moyn argues, the number of faculty over the age of 65 has doubled. In those same years, he found, Harvard had more tenured faculty over the age of 60 than under 50. This has played a role in two of the crises he sees on college campuses. It is hard to achieve intellectual diversity when you have a phalanx of greybeards guarding the ivory tower. But more than that, he argues, “as older professors stayed around, and enjoyed the benefits of guaranteed employment, younger academics were subjected to the casualization of faculty positions and the shrinking of major fields, especially in the humanities.” And we all know how badly this sucks.
Moyn’s essay comes across as the work as someone who feels compelled to say something whether or not that contribution is of any value. He largely ignores the macroeconomic forces at work in American life that make retirement seem like an elusive dream to most of us. Many faculty work beyond thirty years at my college for two reasons: first, they genuinely love teaching, but also, because they simply cannot afford to retire. It is tough out there, and that might be hard to see from Moyn’s perch in New Haven.
Nope. Still not us.
Meanwhile, significant cuts to funding in higher education leave many of us well aware that the positions we hold will not be filled when we depart. Moyn and Zimmerman might have made a stronger argument by suggesting that some colleges have become more liberal in granting tenure and promotion out of fear that if they deny these advances to a colleague, they will not get a replacement faculty line. Better to give tenure to an unproductive junior faculty member than risk doing without. In some ways, a colleague who cannot produce may be better than no colleague at all because they can still advise students, serve on committees and teach a few courses.
These problems are not directly caused by faculty. Indeed, these are the products of a world where state legislators do too little to fund their systems of public higher education, which often in the past were far more accessible and affordable than they are now. I could attend college and pay my way on part-time jobs. (And even then, I was fortunate to have a family that helped me). Now, it is nearly impossible for a student to work their way through school. It costs too much. The system is at a breaking point. It is a remarkably stupid self-own by our political leaders, the largest and loudest of whom has proudly proclaimed how he loves the poorly-educated.
But neither Moyn nor Zimmerman have much to say about these problems. Yale, Penn, Harvard and Columbia: they do not stand for American higher education. They serve a tiny portion of the nation’s most elite students. Their faculty teach less and have far more resources than their peers at colleges like mine. Meanwhile, if they visited my school they might see that the age of the faculty is hardly a problem at all. Many of those teaching are adjuncts fresh out of grad school. If I had a dollar for every time someone lamented the leftward leaning of higher education, well, I still wouldn’t be able to retire, but I would be substantially better off than I am now. If they visited, and followed me around for the day, they would not be able to show me how my own biases aid the Trump regime and leave the families of the students I teach disenchanted. But, perhaps, they would see that funding cuts to American higher education, by administrations both Democratic and Republican, are doing enormous damage to colleges and universities. Majors at some public schools are eliminated. Departments are collapsed into one another. Growing numbers of courses are taught by contingent faculty, without benefits, with poor pay, and without the resources to commit much more to their college community than showing up to teach. Institutionally, we are starving, and that affects creativity, productivity, innovation and morale. And it could all be so easily reversed.
I remember once a colleague who taught at an elite private university complaining that her faculty travel budget had not been replenished quickly enough. I posted a reply: “What is a travel budget?” Though all of my teaching career has been spent at public colleges, I suspect that the problems affecting higher education are very different depending on your perspective, and that they obviously look very different from the Ivy League than they do from the sort of college where I teach, and where the majority of American students study. We need to stop blaming the faculty for the problems afflicting higher education, just as we need to stop blaming K-12 teachers for the problems in their schools. Imagine a bunch of professors, drowning in high seas needlessly churned up by short-sighted and malicious politicians who either fail to see the value of higher education or fear it. The last thing we need to hear, as we struggle to hold our heads above water, is “maybe you shouldn’t have made them angry by telling the truth” or “it would be nicer if you were not so old.” Thanks, guys, and thank you Chronicle of Higher Education. I appreciate all your help.
Donald Trump’s supporters fished the broken pieces of a destroyed Christopher Columbus statue out of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. They commissioned an artist to repair and reassemble it. And now, “resurrected,” it stands behind the White House barricades, directly in front of the Executive Office Building. It bids defiance, Trump would have us believe, to the “woke mob” who consigned the original to the sea on the Fourth of July in 2020.
Yet Trump’s Columbus is a Zombie, a golem. He is not exactly dead, but he does not look very good at all. Indeed, Trump’s display is a loser’s defiance, a middle finger in the air flashed at the crowds who booed him off the field as he enters the safety of the stadium tunnel. Nothing courageous or principled about it at all. Trump’s Columbus statue can only survive in his compound, after all, protected by electronic surveillance, steel gates, and the high-powered weaponry of the Secret Service. Thanks to the efforts of generations of Indigenous activists and their allies, a revisionist effort took root late in the 1980s. As a result, nobody with more than half a brain will ever discuss Columbus’s voyages without considering the brutality, avarice, and enslavement that rested at the heart of his “New World” enterprise.
I READ ABOUT TRUMP’S LATEST COLUMBUS FETISH after boarding the Island Packers boat that would carry me back to Ventura from the north shore of Santa Cruz Island, in the Channel Islands National Park. I had spent the day hiking at this beautiful, beautiful place and, resting on the boat, realized I had a signal on my phone for the first time in several blissful hours.
When I was born, it’s important to remember, the Indian policy of the United States was still known as “termination.” During my lifetime, the United States looked forward to the destruction and dissolution of Indigenous nations, and the assimilation of individual Indigenous peoples into the American body politic. Teachers in Ventura, where I grew up, told us that the Chumash, who inhabited the mainland and the Channel Islands, were extinct. They knew no better. It was likely what they were taught as well. Nobody could tell us where the Chumash had gone, and in grade school I can remember constructing a model of Mission San Buenaventura as part of our social studies curriculum. At the Catholic School I attended, the notion that these two things were connected—disappearance and the missions—was never discussed. Father Junipero Serra, who established the Ventura mission in 1782, was to be revered. It was easy. We never learned anything that would cause us to question the purity of his heart, the fierceness of his commitments, and the piety of his Christianity.
But the Chumash did not disappear. While home this past week my dad and I drove up into the hills above Santa Barbara, onto what now constitutes the Chumash reservation. We visited the gorgeous Santa Ynez Chumash Museum and Cultural Center. Signage at Santa Cruz Island, meanwhile, and the presentation by the National Park Service ranger, both featured prominently the island’s original Indigenous inhabitants and the Island’s Chumash name, limuw. Two years ago, once again making my way out to limuw, I shared the boat with a large number of Chumash people traveling to the island to hold ceremonies. And whatever you think of Indigenous casinos, Chumash gaming operations are very profitable. The Chumash are alive and well.
That is an incredible achievement. If the Spanish, the Mexicans, or murderous Californians had their way, no Chumash would have survived. They defied their colonizers. They refused to disappear. And in all sorts of ways, they are teaching non-Indigenous southern Californians how they did so. The museum does a fantastic job of this.
DONALD TRUMP IS A LOSER, and all that he represents is a loser’s cause. He and his supporters will never admit their obvious commitment to white supremacy as they try to bring back the past. The best these racists and their sycophants can do is reanimate a broken zombie Columbus and keep it behind the barricades where nobody will ever see it. They are afraid of a frank debate. Several years ago, Venturans debated what to do about the large Father Serra statue that stood outside City Hall. Some people wanted the statue removed. Others wanted to preserve it. The debate took place during the pandemic on Zoom. It lasted several hours. Many people spoke. I am proud of how my hometown handled this. In the end a compromise was reached: the statue of Father Serra was moved from City Hall to the Mission, just a short distance away. If you want to see it, you know where to go. But Trump, unlike the people in my town, won’t even engage. He really is a chicken-shit, whiny-ass, little bitch. It continues to amaze me that roughly sixty percent of white people voted for him in each of the last three elections.
The Serra statue, at its former home.
If in the 1960s, federal authorities still looked forward to the assimilation and disappearance of Native Ameircans, now we see Indigenous peoples laying claim to their stolen homelands. In places, the “Land Back” movement has had small but significant success. Offensive Indigenous mascots have been eliminated; Indigenous place names have been restored. Even Donald Trump, briefly, responded to pressure from Indigenous activists when he became the first American president to address directly the problem of “Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.” He appointed a commission (“Operation Lady Justice”), and proclaimed the 5th of May “National Missing and Murdered American Indians and Alaska Natives Awareness Day.” He has abandoned this in his second term and he has tried to undo President Obama’s decision to restore Mt. McKinley’s Indigenous name, Denali, but, again, Trump is a loser, fighting against the forces of time.
When I was out on limuw I hiked from Scorpion Landing to Smuggler’s Cove and back. It was listed by the National Park Service as a “strenuous” eight-mile hike. I felt it during the return trip, as the heat increased and there remained a number of mile-long climbs . I looked forward several times and appreciated how much farther I had to go. I also looked behind me, to see how far I had already ascended. We should do something similar when we counter Trump and the old world his followers wish to restore. He wants to pull us back, to drag us down. He has nothing constructive to offer. Most of us are so far ahead of him. He really is a fat old man, bloated and out of shape, who has been left behind not because of any unfairness but solely because we have judged him by the content of his character. He will stir up the hatred of the racists and the fears of the homophobes and transphobes. He will drag some people down, destroy some careers, and do great damage to the institutions and values we cherish. He will attempt to hurt those of us who climb past him, and push them off the trail. He will scream and yell and pout and posture, as he works to bring back a world in which people like him—white, rich, male and mediocre—were assumed to be the only parties able to hold real power. That belief, perfectly represented by his Columbus golem, can no longer survive in the wild. Talk to young people. Talk to people whose eyes, hearts and minds are open. Trump and Zombie Columbus are so far in their rear-view mirror. These terrible, retrograde, old racists, at the end of the day, are worthy of nothing, least of all your respect. The war is not over. There are many battles ahead. But from the shores of limiw, to the palisades that surround his creepy, caged Columbus, you must know that we are going to win. There is no reason to yield to them an inch.
Last week President Trump posted a “Presidential Message” on the “Anniversary of one of our Nation’s earliest displays of military might.” He wanted to “honor the memory of the brave men” he said, “who gave their lives in service to our Nation” during the Mexican War.
It is not uncommon for a president to take the anniversary of a historical event as an occasion for reflecting on the policies and goals of his administration, but invocations of the Mexican War are relatively rare. But Trump, as we well know, is not like other presidents.
“Guided by our victory on the fields of Mexico 178 years ago,” his message reads, “I have spared no effort in defending our southern border against invasion, upholding the rule of law, and protecting our homeland from forces of evil, violence, and destruction.” Trump claimed that he was stopping the flow of drugs into the United States, halting the “invasion of illegal aliens,” and “dismantling narco-terrorist networks all across the Western hemisphere.” Trump also, he said, had secured control of the Panama Canal from foreign takeover, a very odd claim, and that his administration was “aggressively pursuing an America First policy of peace through strength and will continue to reassert the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine to ensure the Hemisphere remains safe, prosperous, and free.”
For white people.
Whatever one thinks of Trump’s policies, and however much one might agree or disagree with his party’s belief in the magnitude of the border crisis, it is easy to see how Trump both invoked and found justification for his policies in the virulent racism that preceded the war.
Late in the 1980s, when I knew I wanted to go to graduate school to study American history, one of the first books I read was Reginald Horsman’s Race and Manifest Destiny. It is a fantastic book that got me thinking. Horsman wrote about the origins of “American Racial Anglo-Saxonism,” tracing its roots back to the Tudor antiquarians of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Trump speaks the language of these racial Anglo-Saxonists. After the War of 1812, for example, Trump asserted, the United States was “guided by the steadfast belief that our Nation was destined by divine providence to expand to the golden shore of the Pacific Ocean.” After “Mexican forces launched an ambush along the Rio Grande, killing 11 and wounding 6 American troops” (a highly dubious proposition), and “with the promise of Manifest Destiny beating in every American heart” (another highly dubious proposition), President James K. Polk commenced a violent invasion that seized more than half of Mexico’s territory and even more of its arable soil. (Trump, of course, did not call it that). It was a war of territorial aggression that led to the United States claiming much of Mexico, many of its citizens, and many thousands of Indigenous people as subjects of an aggressively expanding American empire.
Not all Americans supported the war, and the notion that Manifest Destiny beat in every American heart is simply not true. Mexicans and Indigenous people, after all, did not feel that this war was a good thing, and they are Americans, too. But many white Americans were deeply concerned about the American aggression in Texas and beyond.
The Mexican War is a big subject, and I suspect that many of us in our survey courses do not do it justice. One way I have found useful to get at this in the classroom is by looking at the career of John Quincy Adams, the greatest ex-president in American history. Leonard Richards’ old, brief biography of Adams’s congressional career is wonderful. I am sure there is more recent work out there, but because my department long ago dispensed with its survey courses, a decision I gradually came to support, I no longer have occasion to teach these classes.
It is important to remember that by the middle of the 1830s a national two-party political system had emerged. The Second American Party System, as it is called, was the product of the politics of the Market Revolution. These two parties, to a very great extent, disagreed over the economic and political future of the United States. They were struggling to define this thing called a “Republic,” a vague concept which all embraced but over which different people could disagree. By 1840, these two parties, Whigs and Democrats, were competing in all parts of the country, a product of the extraordinary political talent of Martin van Buren, who worked harder than anyone to try to keep the slavery issue out of politics.
The territorial expansion of the United States, the fulfillment of what newspaperman John L. O’Sullivan called its “Manifest Destiny,” would introduce questions about race, slavery, the economic and political future of the United States, and the definition of the Republic that could not easily be avoided, and Adams played an important role in this story. He did not retire after his presidency. He was elected to Congress from Massachusetts in 1831 and would serve for the next seventeen years until his death in 1848. Throughout these years, Adams was an enemy of the Slave Power conspiracy, premised on the belief that slaveowners and their allies would do anything to protect the institution of slavery, even if that meant depriving white people of their constitutional rights. Adams, for instance, led the fight against the Gag Rule, through which pro-slavery members of the House and Senate managed to shut off all debate on antislavery petitions which floated into Congress.
If you teach this material, you will need to remind your students that the first amendment to the Constitution guarantees citizens the right to petition their legislators, a cornerstone of the Bill of Rights. The gag rule, Adams argued, was obviously unconstitutional. Adams we should point out, was not an abolitionist—he thought they were troublemakers, but he did believe strongly that the constitution mattered. Adams considered the gage rule to be “in direct violation of the constitution of the United States, of the rules of the House, and of the rights of my constituents.” Because the gag had to be renewed at every session of Congress, there were frequent opportunities to excoriate southern slave-owners and northern Jacksonians for denying the right to petition, and to savage them on constitutional grounds. John C. Calhoun, obviously a supporter of slavery, called Adams a “mischievous bad old Man.” The gag rule, it should be pointed out, served the interests of slaveowners, and the Jacksonians quite well. How could Van Buren and others focus attention on banking and currency reform if Congress had to continually deal with the slavery question. The Gag Rule was consistent with Van Buren’s goal of keeping slavery out of politics.
Adams was able to bring up slavery despite the gag rule. In February 1837, for instance, he tried to introduce a petition from nine women in Fredericksburg, Virginia. He tried to present it, arguing that they wanted the abolition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia and not abolition in toto. No matter, the resolution was tabled. Then Adams asked the speaker to rule on another piece of paper, one that looked like a petition, but was filled with scratches and marks “purporting to come from slaves.” Could this, he asked, be presented? The question produced an immediate reaction as southerners jumped at the implication that slaves had the right to petition congress. Adams sat back as confusion reigned. Some said he should be expelled for introducing a resolution from slaves. He pointed out that he had said “purported.” Later he said that the resolution did indeed come from slaves, but they were slaves that preferred slavery to abolition and wanted Congress not to tamper with slavery in any way. This made his opponents even madder. This went on for five days, to Adams’ great satisfaction. Adams was receiving nearly a dozen assassination threats a month.
During his years in Congress he had other opportunities to annoy proslavery zealots. In 1841, he defended 39 Africans before the Supreme Court after they had seized control over the slave ship Amistad. These Africans, sailing from one part of Cuba to another, had rebelled and captured the ship they were on. They hoped to sail to Africa, but they were deceived by their Spanish hostage crew, and ended up on Long Island Sound. Adams and his associates won the case and the Africans were returned to Africa on the grounds that Africans were never the legal property of the Spaniards. Rather, they were “kidnapped Africans, who by the laws of Spain itself were entitled to their freedom.”
In many ways, the Jacksonians played into Adams’ hands. In no way was this more so than over Texas. The Jacksonians were, in general, land hungry and beholden to frontier interests. They were an aggressively-expansionist party. Many Whigs, their opponents, did not share their enthusiasm for acquiring additional chunks of land. They wanted to develop what the United States already had, they said. They worried that adding “inferior races” could weaken the republic. And they could not help but notice that Jacksonian expansion seemed to benefit the plantation south more than the rest of the country. Adams became convinced that Jacksonian expansion was part of a larger “Slave Power Conspiracy.” Most of all, the Jacksonians wanted Texas.
The Texas issue, of course, grew out of the Mexican Revolution. Mexico had gained its independence from Spain in 1821. In 1823, in order to create a buffer zone between Mexico’s interior and the United States, the Mexican government encouraged migration into Texas. Land hungry Americans came in droves, in greater numbers than expected, outnumbering Mexicans by 2 to 1, and this produced alarm in Mexico City. The Mexican government, after all, abolished slavery in 1829, and in 1830 it enacted a law directing immigrants to abide by Mexican Law and custom, part of which was Roman Catholicism. But the Mexican government was too weak to enforce its authority. Then in 1834, General Santa Anna seized control of the Mexican government and established a dictatorship. Texans revolted and Santa Anna, with 6000 men, stormed into Texas in 1836, killing 188 at the Alamo and 300 more at the Goliad.
The Texans, with aid from the southern states, fought back and when they won their independence, they appealed to the United States to recognize Texan independence. Adams had little use for the Texas rebels. Like many northerners, he suspected that the Texas Revolution was part of a plot hatched by slaveowners to further southern interests. Adams accused the supporters of the Texans of being racists. He asked speaker of the house James K. Polk, “Do not you, an Anglo-Saxon, slave-holding exterminator of Indians, from the bottom of your soul, hate the Mexican-Spaniard-Indian emancipator of slaves and abolisher of slavery?” Adams’s stand was popular, especially his belief that southerners hoped to carve up several slave states out of the Texas region. His claim that the Texas Revolution was a criminal act set off by enslavers and land speculators had instant appeal throughout much of the Northeast.
Andrew Jackson was unable to do anything about annexing Texas. Van Buren, his successor, had little interest in doing so, as he was firmly committed to keeping slavery out of politics. William Henry Harrison, a Whig, was elected President in 1840, and he too had little interest in annexation, but he died soon after taking office. He was replaced by John Tyler, who was scarcely a Whig at all. In fact, Tyler’s stand on banking was similar in many ways to Jackson, and that alienated Whig power broker Senator Henry Clay and others who largely read him out of the party. Tyler became a president without a party. He saw the Texas issue as his only hope for political salvation.
Adams watched Tyler with suspicion. In a speech to his constituents, Adams insisted that “Your country is no longer a democracy, it is no longer even a republic—it is a government of 2 or 300,000 holders of slaves, to the utter exclusion of the remaining part, and all the population of the other states in the Union.” Now Tyler’s trump card was that British politicians had made antislavery speeches for home consumption, and they had stated that they favored a free and independent Texas as an alternative to southern cotton and as a barrier to further American expansion. Thus Tyler’s supporters could throw back at Adams that the was abetting a foreign conspiracy, one orchestrated by the British, designed to reduce the growing economic power of the United States.
After February of 1844, Tyler’s secretary of state was John C. Calhoun. Tyler charged him with completing negotiations for the annexation of Texas. In April 1844, Calhoun sent the treaty to the Senate, along with a copy of a letter he had written to Richard Pakenham, the British minister to Washington. The “Pakenham letter” was a bombshell. Besides denouncing Pakenham’s government for interfering in Texas and supporting abolition throughout the world, Calhoun sang the praises of slavery and cited statistics to prove that blacks were better off as slaves than freedmen. He justified annexation as a means of defending the institution of slavery. So what? The letter strengthened Adams and the northern whigs, because it proved that Texas annexation was about acquiring additional land for the institution of slavery. The annexation treaty was defeated overwhelmingly in the Senate.
Adams knew that the election of 1844, which pitted Clay against the democrat James K. Polk, would revolve around Texas. Speaking to a Boston audience, Adams said that “your trial is approaching. The spirit of freedom and the spirit of slavery are drawing together for the deadly conflict of arms. The annexation of Texas to this Union is the blast of the trumpet for a foreign, civil, servile, and Indian war, of which the government of your country, fallen into faithless hands, have already given the signal—first by a shameless treaty, rejected by a virtuous senate; and again by the glove of defiance, hurled by the apostle of nullification, at the avowed policy of the British empire peacefully to promote the extinction of slavery throughout the world. Young men of Boston: Burnish your honor, prepare for the conflict, and I say to you, in the language of Galgacus to the ancient Britons, think of your forefathers! Think of your Posterity!” (I had to look up who Galgacus was, too, but even if you don’t, I think you can catch the urgency of his tone).
Despite Adams’ efforts, Polk won the election, and Adams expected gloomy days ahead for the republic under Tyler’s successor. Now Tyler had submitted a joint resolution annexing Texas to the United States. A joint resolution requires only a majority vote of both houses, rather than the 2/3 required for the ratification of a treaty. The Texans were wary, and to sweeten the pot, Polk accepted the Rio Grande as the southern boundary of Texas. The Texas he saw added to the union, in other words, was larger in a sense than the Texas that had broke away from Mexico. THAT Mexico had its southern border at the Nueces River. Polk was an incredibly hard-driving and aggressive president. He was willing to compromise his territorial ambitions when it came to a dispute with Britain over the Oregon boundary, but never on the question of gaining additional territory from Mexico. Polk sent John Slidell as his emissary to Mexico City with authority to buy California and New Mexico from the Mexican government, and to get Mexico to recognize the Rio Grande as the southern boundary of Texas.
Word of Slidell’s mission arrived in Mexico before Slidell did, and soon after his arrival the Mexican government was overthrown by general Mariano Paredes and some 7000 soldiers. The new military regime refused to have anything to do with Slidell, and asserted Mexico’s claim to all of Texas. Polk regarded this rejection of Slidell as cause for war. Then he got word of General Zachary Taylor losing the eleven men Trump mentioned as the result of a supposed Mexican invasion of American soil. To Adams, Polk had provoked this war to extend slavery. Not everybody agreed with this interpretation. Some simply did not believe that the President would do this, or that it made sense for him to do so. But the point is clear. The Mexican War was an immense watershed. The two-party system was beginning to fall apart along sectional lines. This combustible situation was made clear in August of 1846, when a congressman from Pennsylvania, a democrat named David Wilmot, introduced an amendment to an appropriation bill that the President’s supporters tried to push through Congress at the last second.
Wilmot and his co-sponsors hoped to ban slavery from any territory acquired from Mexico. He was not an abolitionist. Wilmot said “I have no squeamish sensitiveness upon the subject of slavery, nor morbid sympathy for the slave. I plead the cause of the rights of white freemen. I would preserve for free white labor a fair country, a rich inheritance, where the sons of toil, of my own race and own color, can live without the disgrace which association with negro slavery brings upon free labor.”
The Wilmot Proviso did nothing that would have destroyed the institution of slavery, but it did say that slavery should not expand. That implied that there was something unclean, something dishonorable, about slavery. The Wilmot Proviso thus made clear a number of significant cracks in the Second American party System. Both northern Democrats and northern Whigs supported the Proviso. Many of these northerners were coming to believe in the Slave Power Conspiracy. Slaveowners, the story went, were members of an anti-democratic aristocracy that was willing to subvert the nation’s democratic institutions to protect the institution of slavery. The south already had unequal representation in the House because of the 3/5 clause. Slavery was now spreading, subverting institutions wherever it went. Looking on these events, the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson could see that “Mexico will poison us.”
I MARRIED INTO A MEXICAN-AMERICAN FAMILY. I don’t speak Spanish well at all, but I can understand it. Watching Bad Bunny with my Mexican-American partner, her sister, our children, made it even more clear than it otherwise would have been how well he struck so many notes that resonated with his audience. It really was a fantastic performance, and I am sure I will watch it again to catch things that I missed—some of which were pointed out by observers far more astute than I.
Manifest Destiny. Ask an American about their nation’s history, and I find that even if they do not know the subject well, they will be able to tell you something about manifest destiny. It is one of those odd concepts, or bits of information, that really seems to stick. When I ask, students recite pretty easily that it meant that it was God’s plan that the United States expand across the continent. But expansion is such a bland word, isn’t it? Invade. Seize. Colonize. Take, steal, rob, exploit, and conquer. All these words seem to get at the underlying reality with more precision.
For those of us who teach Indigenous history, the expressions of this manifest design are so easy to see in the Annual Reports of the Commissioners of Indian Affairs, all helpfully digitized by the University of Wisconsin. Indian Commissioner William Medill in 1848 argued, for example, that “Apathy, barbarism, and heathenism must give way to energy, civilization, and Christianity, and so the Indian of this continent has been displaced by the European.”
You see it, don’t you? “Manifest Destiny” meant the dispossession of Indigenous people. And as Horsman showed so well, Mexicans, too, were viewed as a race vastly inferior to the white Anglo-Saxons Americans idealized and idolized. So Bad Bunny ended his performance at the Super Bowl by reciting the names of the nations of the Americas. He showed the audience a football inscribed with the words, “Together We Are America.” Trump, meanwhile, who clearly was watching, posted on his silly Twitter knock-off a racist screed. He was angry, it seems to me, because Bad Bunny showed that Manifest Destiny was a racist fantasy. Americans’ attempts to fulfill that manifest destiny, to be sure, ruined the lives of millions of people, but Bad Bunny proved that it was a racist lie, an invocation of God to seize the life, liberty, and property of an enormous number of perfectly innocent people. Manifest Destiny was genocidal, in that if God’s plan was fulfilled in the way the white supremacists wished there would be no Spanish speakers left on this continent. It seems like maybe, just maybe, God did not want that after all. If there is a god, I would like to think that they are far more happy with the splendid color and beauty on display at halftime than the swinish grunts of the racist pig who leads the Republican Party.
At the Grammy Awards last weekend, singer Billie Eilish, like many of her peers, denounced the violence and brutality of the Trump Administration’s unconstitutional raids against undocumented immigrants and expressed her support for those Americans murdered by Trump’s secret police. “No one,” she said, “is illegal on stolen land.”
Richard Epstein and Max Raskin, the former a law professor at New York University aligned with the Cato Institute and the latter a “Kardashian-curious crypto evangelist” and real estate investor who teaches there part time, took exception to Eilish’s acceptance speech. In a Washington Post op-ed dripping with smug condescension, the pair provided a tendentious lecture on American property law and a celebration of Indigenous dispossession. It’s an embarrassing and unseemly essay. It’s deeply dishonest and completely divorced from any real grasp of the history of how white people came to control Indigenous land in North America.
With a tut-tut and a wave of the hand, Epstein and Raskin assert that “Americans are not thieves who built on stolen land.” Indigenous peoples, they point out, were vicious. They mention, after all, the “fierce conquest of the southern Plains by the Comanche” and “the prevalence of Native American slavery before European arrival.” Indigenous peoples were so barbarous, Epstein and Raskin suggest, that taking their land was entirely justified. It was natural, inevitable, and, they seem to believe, we are all better for it. A lot of nasty people, across the vast expanse of this continent’s history, would agree.
In the centuries since Europeans arrived, lands have changed hands many times. Americans have bought and sold, and surveyed, developed and built many trillions of dollars’ worth of real property. Because of that, “the effort to undo the past would involve trillions of dollars in transfer payments and coerced title shifts that would unsettle every home mortgage, every mining and oil lease, and every graveyard in the United States.”
But that is not what Eilish suggested. There is something really gross about their line of argument. Never mind that Eilish did not call for the massive confiscation of property that Epstein and Raskin fear (Eilish, 24, is roughly the same age as Epstein and Raskin’s students; I hope they treat their students with more grace, honesty, and decency than they showed Eilish). It’s that at heart they never deny the magnitude of Indigenous dispossession and the scale of the corruption, deceit and coercion used to acquire this continent. Rather, they suggest, Indigenous peoples had it coming because some of them were mean to each other and because it would be too difficult and too inconvenient to do anything about it now.
The American people, Epstein and Raskin continue, “should be allowed to enjoy security in their purchases and not have to worry about what happened centuries ago.” Ever pedantic, they point out that “statutes of limitation and doctrines such as adverse possession clearly provide that you must sue by a certain date or your title is gone, no matter how maliciously acquired.” Of course, the courts of the conquerors were not open to Indigenous peoples, even when the United States blatantly, clearly, and explicitly ignored its own statutes and the provisions of treaties it negotiated with Indigenous peoples, both of which, the Constitution tells us, are the “supreme law of the land.”
Epstein and Raskin quite simply do not care that what Americans gained came at the expense of Indigenous peoples. It is, to them, legally and thus morally irrelevant. Sure, Native Americans may have lost their lands “centuries ago,” and “it is easy to call land stolen,” but “what about the innocent purchasers who acquired in good faith in the interim?” Epstein and Raskin ask of these good faith purchasers, “are they thieves?”
Yeah.
In a sense they are. I am. And you are, too.
In the same sense that the purchasers of art looted by the Nazis who claimed that they did know the provenance of the pieces they acquired are guilty, so too are the American owners of Indigenous land. Of course, Epstein and Rankin are correct to point out that returning a continent to its original inhabitants would be an impossibility, which is why no serious person has ever called for a return of land on that scale. But that does not change the fact that New York became the Empire State through a systematic program of Indigenous dispossession that quite often violated the laws of the United States and, even when it adhered to the letter of those self-serving rules, rebelled against every standard of decency, justice, and morality that I trust you hold dear. And there is nothing Epstein and Rankin can say to deny that if you are a landowner in this state today, you are the beneficiary of the original duplicitous, unjust, and illegal acts of dispossession. I am happy that Eilish used her enormous platform to bring attention to this historic process, and I believe we would be better off exploring what we might do to set things right rather than saying, as Epstein and Raskin seemingly do, that “shit happens.”
Richard Epstein and Max Rankin
It is easy for me to remember that Billie Eilish is young, and because of that, to extend her grace. As an educator of students just a few years younger than her, I find the moral energy and sense of justice carried by the people I teach energizing. And I find the reductio ad absurdam presented by Epstein and Raskin absolutely repellent. They sound like old men, grousing about “celebrities,” as if Statler and Waldorf had moved from the balcony to the pages of the Washington Post. They trivialized the point Eilish made, which is an important one: this continent was taken from Indigenous peoples by violent squatters or through treaties that frequently were coerced, or fraudulent, or subsequently ignored by the United States when they became inconvenient. Dispossession was neither natural nor inevitable, whatever Epstein and Raskin believe. It was, quite often, a crime against the laws of the United States. What is legal, after all, can cut both ways, and we must remember that the law was written by American people to support American interests. Billie Eilish, I believe, tried to remind us of that.
Last week Ely Parker of the Tonawanda Seneca Nation was admitted posthumously to the New York State Bar. Parker had read law in the Ellicottville office of William Angel in the 1840s but was barred from practicing by the state because of his race and because he was not recognized as a citizen of the United States. In that sense, last week’s ceremony addressed, at long last, a significant historical injustice.
Landscape
More than five years ago, I wrote a letter to the clerk of the court to support Parker’s admission to the state bar. I was certainly not alone in doing so. The denial of this privilege to Parker, I wrote, “owing to his ‘non-citizen’ status, is a racial and historical injustice that ought to be remedied.”
So last week’s ceremony was a cause for celebration. It was covered widely in the national news media. Representatives from both the Seneca Nation of Indians and the Tonawanda Seneca Nation attended the event. For those present, it was the inspiring culmination of years of hard work.
News stories about the event described, correctly, how Parker became an engineer after discrimination closed his path to practicing law. The coverage described his work in recovering Tonawanda Seneca lands in the 1840s and 1850s. Parker’s contributions were significant. News stories told of how Parker met Ulysses S. Grant, became the officer’s aide-de-camp during the American Civil War and, ultimately, the first Native American to serve the United States as Commissioner of Indian Affairs during the early years of Grant’s presidency.
Yet much was left out. Ely Parker is a complex figure, and he left a decidedly ambivalent legacy. It was Parker, in his capacity as commissioner, who spoke so forcefully in favor of ending the practice of negotiating treaties with Native American nations. A year and a half before Congress in 1871 decided “that hereafter no Indian Nation or tribe within the territory of the United States shall be acknowledged or recognized as an independent nation, tribe, or power with whom the United States may contract a treaty,” Ely Parker announced his arguments in favor of putting an end to treaty-making in his annual report.
A treaty, Parker wrote, was “a compact between two or more sovereign powers, each possessing sufficient authority and force to compel a compliance with the obligations incurred.” Indigenous nations, he believed, lacked this power. “The Indian tribes of the United States are not sovereign nations, capable of making treaties, as none of them have an organized government of such inherent strength as would secure a faithful obedience of its people in the observance of compacts of this character.” Ignoring the inability of the United States to compel the obedience of its own settlers, the violent and aggressive conduct and encroachment of which Commissioners of Indian Affairs and Secretaries of the Interior regularly lamented in the post-Civil War era, Parker declared that “it is time this idea should be dispelled, and the government cease the cruel farce of thus dealing with its helpless and ignorant wards.” The federal government should stop at once “deluding this people into the belief of them being independent sovereignties, while they were at the same time recognized only as its dependents and wards.”
Parker’s family had fought fiercely for Tonawanda land rights before the Civil War, but Parker now advocated citizenship for American Indians, supported the government’s “Civilization Program,” and rejected the sovereignty of Native nations. Each of these positions found advocates among that group of Native American leaders who historian Frederick Hoxie called “Red Progressives,” but they were anathema to Tonawanda Senecas and many Haudenosaunee people. Haudenosaunee people consistently rejected American claims that they were citizens of the United States. They adhered to and nurtured their culture. And they powerfully asserted their treaty rights. After the end of the Civil War, Parker had little influence at the Tonawanda reservation, his current positions out of touch with his former friends and neighbors. He resigned his office in 1871 under trumped up charges of corruption and maladministration shortly after Congress passed legislation putting an end to treaty-making.
Because “treaty talk” has played so large a role in shaping understandings of the relations between Native peoples and the United States, in New York as elsewhere, the assumption long has been that 1871 in some way mattered and marked a significant break with the past. Courts meanwhile continue to struggle to define the terms of treaties and their place in the American constitutional system. Nearly all observers agree that the United States faithlessly violated its own treaties. And Native peoples continue to assert that their nationhood and sovereignty is confirmed and recognized through Indian treaties. Justice Clarence Thomas, of all people, has suggested that the 1871 enactment was unconstitutional, as the treaty-making power, he believed, is the only instrument allowed in the Constitution to limit the powers of Native nations. Thomas has long questioned the historic justifications for the so-called “plenary power” doctrine, which emerged from a 1903 Supreme Court decision that permitted the United States to unilaterally break its treaties with Native nations.
Those 370 treaties negotiated between the United States and Indian tribes before 1871 served a variety of functions. They brought peace after periods of war, or defined the bounds of lands Native nations retained or ceded. Many included provisions to “Christianize” and “civilize” Native peoples. While treaties recognized a measure of sovereignty, they also served as instruments of colonialism and control, the legal arm of dispossession. Through treaties the United States acquired rights on paper to regulate the trade and commerce of a tribe, and a sole and exclusive right to purchase their lands. It was through the instrument of treaties that many millions of acres of Indian lands became part of the United States.
Some of these treaties were fraudulent or deceptive, others coerced. Many extended the power of the United States over Native peoples who, the Supreme Court ruled in 1831, were best viewed not as independent and entirely sovereign governing entities but as “domestic dependent nations” whose relationship to the United States resembled that of “a ward to its guardian.”
Attempts to make treaties with Six Nations people did not end in 1871. Since the American Revolution, New York State has claimed and exercised jurisdiction over the Iroquois, sometimes with and sometimes without the sanction of federal authorities. The United States negotiated only a handful of treaties with the Six Nations: at Fort Stanwix in 1784, restoring peace after the Revolution; at Canandaigua in 1794, restoring Seneca land and recognizing the rights of the Six Nations to the “free use and enjoyment of their lands”; and at Buffalo Creek in 1838, a corrupt “removal” treaty intended to force the Iroquois to new homes in the Indian Territory. State authorities, meanwhile, negotiated many times that number, all in an effort to acquire Haudenosaunee land. New York could not become the Empire State without a systematic program of Iroquois dispossession.
In 1883, for instance, Syracuse University chancellor Charles N. Sims led an effort to break up and allot the Onondaga Reservation through a state treaty he hoped to persuade the Onondagas to sign. Half a decade later so did the state’s Whipple Commission, which collected testimony and issued a massive report that called for the break-up of New York’s Indian reservations as one of a number of solutions to the state’s “Indian Problem.”But Chancellor Sims’ efforts to persuade the Onondagas to sign a treaty with the state individualizing their land holdings ended in failure. When the ballots were cast, Onondagas voted nearly unanimously against it and, Sims wrote with considerable frustration, “so ended two years of work of philanthropy and diplomacy in the interest of morals, religion, liberty, and good government in the nation of the Onondagas.” The Whipple Commission collected its documents, heard its testimony, and failed to achieve anything more owing to Iroquois opposition to the allotment of their lands.
The assault by state officials on Haudenosaunee nationhood began long before 1871 and continued long after. Yet in every instance, and in response to every assault, whether boarding schools or the establishment of missions or the attempts to dispossess them, Haudenosaunee people continued to assert their nationhood. They did so when they angrily resisted efforts to individualize their land holdings in 1902, when they declared war on their own against the Central Powers in World War I, when they opposed the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, resisted the Indian New deal a decade after that, and when they declared war against the Axis Powers in their own name in 1942.
The decision by Congress to abolish treaty-making was intended to signal the death of Native American nationhood, but declaring it could not make it so. The Senecas, Cayugas, Onondagas, Oneidas, Mohawks, and Tuscaroras had never relied on the United States or the state of New York to assert or validate their nationhood. Rather, they lived it, and continue to live it.
Parker was unique in being active on both sides in this debate, denouncing fraudulent agreements to which his nation did not consent, yet later in life endorsing the policies of those who wished to see that nationhood erased. It’s an ambivalent legacy. And that ambivalence is something that historians must be prepared to embrace.
When FBI Director Kash Patel fired two agents who had kneeled in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement five years before, his actions had the effect of upholding white supremacy. No statement of sympathy for those grieving the murder of young men of color by militarized police forces could be tolerated. Never mind that the agents kneeled in Minneapolis, where George Floyd died, and where the police officer involved was convicted of murder. Africans Americans are the other, Patel’s actions showed, on whom acts of humanity are wasted. Only some lives matter.
When Donald Trump refused to continue commemorations of Missing and Murdered American Indians and Alaska Natives Day, a national commitment he pioneered in May of 2020 to end “the disturbing violence against these Americans and to honoring those whose lives have been shattered and lost,” he demonstrated that to him Indigenous lives did not matter, either. Indeed, when Trump tried to stir up white resentment in an affluent Long Island suburb against those who insisted that the local high school change its name, he worked in defense of white supremacy. The grievances of people of color, whether Indigenous or African-American, are illegitimate and worthy of contempt. You need not take these concerns seriously. Same thing with the former names of the Cleveland Guardians and Washington Commanders, two teams that have done just fine since they dropped their racist names and imagery. People of color want you to change what you are doing, Trump suggested, something they have no right to ask you to do. Only some people’s feelings matter.
We won’t talk about the past, Trump and his supporters have suggested, unless we do so in a way that instills a “patriotism” that celebrates white supremacy. You do not have to listen to the “Anti-American” complaints of those who have suffered for American empire. Images of slavery will be removed from museums, historic sites, textbooks and classrooms. The Trump Administration has demanded that teachers lie about this country’s past. For Trump and his followers, war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength. If they can convince you to believe that this country’s past is different than what the documents clearly show, they can claim that what has always been unjust is just, what has always been exploitative is fair, and what has always been explicitly evil is good. On those rare occasions when they concede a shortcoming, they say we have never failed because we have not yet finished trying to fix problems that ought to have been fixed generations ago. The notion that slavery and Indigenous dispossession benefited white immigrants to this settler nation is heresy in eyes of Republicans.
You can see it in the racist memes sent out by the fascist Department of Homeland Security, overseen by a freak who murders dogs and a meathead who hunts “illegals” while collecting bribes in paper bags. Above George Caleb Bingham’s painting of Daniel Boone leading settlers through the Cumberland Gap—into lands unceded by the Indigenous people who lived upon them—DHS posted on its Instagram page this image:
When white people cross a border and seize property from Indigenous peoples, it is something to celebrate. That point is made clear when DHS posted John Gast’s “American Progress,” a painting that represents more clearly than any other American work of art the racist ideas and attitudes underlying Manifest Destiny, with the caption “A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending.”
To point out that this country took its shape through a systematic program of Indigenous dispossession is to risk one’s life and liberty. That heritage is filled with racial violence. Republicans, meanwhile, attack affirmative action in colleges, encourage fear of American cities, and attack the integrity and character of people of color. They create a climate of fear, silencing dissent. The Republican Party, a diseased organism entirely in the thrall of its corrupt leader, truly has nothing else. They have no constructive or positive agenda. The economy is a wreck. The United States has squandered the respect of our friends and allies. And fascism has taken root. They have no significant legislative achievements and, indeed, their weak leader can only govern by the “executive orders” a weak Congress and amoral Supreme Court continue to permit. They have nothing.
There are three factors that can help the Republicans continue to hold power. One is the continued cowardice and fecklessness of the Democratic leadership which has been unwilling and unable to rise to the occasion. At the same time, Republicans stir up white resentments against the weakest and most marginalized groups in American society: the LGBTQIA+ community, immigrants (undocumented or not), and racial and ethnic minorities. They have nothing, and they know it. They stand for nothing but hatred and white supremacy. So they will also work with determination to rig the electoral system and make it difficult for those who wish to vote. All they can hope for is that they are able to continue to generate hatred and division. And despondency. It worked for Donald Trump spectacularly well in 2024. It is up to us not only to see that it does not happen again, but that we keep the receipts and hold accountable the Party and its leaders in the future for the things they have said and done. Democrats should loudly and proudly promise that if they take the legislative and executive branches of government, they will expand the Supreme Court and call to account Republican law-breakers.
Their viciousness is a sign that they sense that they are losing. I am so fortunate to spend my time talking with young people baffled by the party’s hatred. Like pests, the Republicans will break institutions and hurt people and ruin lives, but their time is limited. Once young people who could not care less about the culture war issues that haunt the Republicans’ take over, I hope this nightmare will be over. We can make the Republicans go away. It will take time and enormous effort to rebuild all that they have ruined. But we need to act. The sooner the better. 2026 cannot come soon enough.
I regularly teach a course called Indigenous Law and Public Policy, but I have little faith in the American legal system. Even when the law clearly recognizes an Indigenous right, the United States seems to work at times hand-in-hand with the court system to find a way around whatever legal obligations stand in its way. The law was not written by Indigenous peoples, and it is safe to assume that its fundamental premise is to protect the interests of the white majority. In this racist, settler state, built on Indigenous land, state and federal governments will only support the rights of Indigenous nations and individuals to the point where it begins to cost them something or when it is in their interest to do so.
Thus I found it entirely unsurprising when former Attorney General Bill Barr penned an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal earlier this month in support of a multinational mining operation’s drive to destroy Oak Flat, a site sacred to many Apaches in Arizona. The proposed copper mine will create a massive crater and bring environmental devastation to a significant swath of territory. Nobody disagrees that the mine will infringe upon the Apaches’ constitutionally-protected right to the “free exercise” of their religion.
Barr said not a word about the damage the mine will do to the land, sky, and water. He trotted out a series of familiar arguments, derived largely from a 1988 Supreme Court decision called Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association (1988), which held that the government did not need to respect minority religious rights when it had an overriding “rational basis” for doing so. (A higher standard, the “compelling interest test,” Barr also believes the government would pass). Dismissing the Apaches’ case as a “dubious” claim to religious liberty, Barr argued that all Americans have the right to practice their religion in the privacy of their own home or personal place of worship. But no one, he said, has the right “to demand perpetual access to federal property, for religious worship or any other purpose.” Oak Flat, Barr continued, is not all that special anyways, because some Apaches have said so. Indigenous peoples, Barr suggests, must unanimously agree that a place is sacred if they are to have any chance to prevent its destruction. A few Indians, he said, should not be allowed to block needed infrastructure projects, like the mine proposed by Resolution Copper, that “are essential to the American economy.”
There are so many problems with this argument. No similar burden is placed on Christians, for example, when they deem a site sacred. If Catholics think a site is sacred, their views are not considered illegitimate because Protestants do not feel the same way. And what happens when the site slated for destruction IS the place of worship? Oak Flat is unique. Indeed, if you get a chance to visit it you will see this. The Apaches who worship there literally cannot hold their rites anywhere else. Would Barr favor the destruction of St. Patrick’s Cathedral if a rich vein of copper were found underneath? Of course not, even though Catholics could trot down the street to the nearest Catholic church and practice the exact same rituals. Barr, like so many pro-corporate leaders in the past, argues that the copper that will be torn from the earth at Oak Flat is so valuable to the corporation that the United States government has a “rational basis” for supporting its extraction, even if that corporation is based overseas and most of the copper will leave the US. His arguments are racist, ugly, and colonial.
And also so short-sighted. Several years ago Apache Stronghold leader Dr. Wendsler Nosie gave the annual Great Day lecture at my college. He placed the destruction of Oak Flat in a larger context framed by considerations of extractive industry and environmental destruction. You want AI? You want batteries that can power your electric vehicle? You want a green economy? You need copper. However, as Dr. Nosie pointed out, the dangerous addictions of western society to ripping valuable resources from the soil will destroy us all eventually.
Dr. Wendsler Nosie, second from right, visiting Geneseo
The law may very well support Barr’s position. That law functions to protect corporate wealth and its Democratic and Republican allies. But is it not obvious how short-sighted and destructive this is? I think of the witchery described in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony. White people, the most frightening witch warns, emerge from :
It was during a long flight home from California that I thought about Barr’s essay. I had been reading through Thomas Blackburn’s December’s Child: A Book of Chumash Oral Narratives. Blackburn sifted through the massive collection of oral accounts assembled by J. P. Harrington early in the twentieth century. In Blackburn’s retelling, it was an enormous undertaking. One of Harrington’s sources told a story that struck me in terms of our failed political system, or dying planet, our insensitivity to the beauty that surrounds us. Fernando told Harrington about an interconnected world in which “all the animals are related.”
The horned toad is the wot of all beasts, the swordfish of all fish, and the slo?w of all birds. The bear is the older sibling of all the animals. The eagle, condor, and buzzard are said to remove the foulness of the world. I told Fernando of the San Gabriel belief that the condor rips up carcasses for the buzzard—that they are first cousins. Fernando replied that an old man told him that we are all brothers, and our mother is one: this mother earth. He has always believed what the old people told him when he was a boy—that the world is God.
The destruction that will be done to Oak Flat has been ably described by my friend and colleague Joel Helfrich. Barr never mentions any of this. He relies on a legal system that permits the United States to enable an atrocious moral wrong.
