Gold Stumbling Stones appear frequently in what was once the old Jewish quarter of Amsterdam. It is impossible to miss them. In other parts of the city, they appear with less frequency but, still, they caught my attention. They tell you who lived in a given property, the year they were born, the day they were arrested, and the date and place where the Nazis murdered them.
They are visible reminders of an extraordinary historical crime. Striking in their simplicity and clarity, I encountered them on this visit to Amsterdam on my way to my favorite museum in town, the Verzetsmuseum Amsterdam, or the Dutch Resistance Museum. So much more than its name suggests, the Verzetsmuseum confronts visitors with the range of choices facing the Dutch after the Nazis occupied their country. Some sought the path of least resistance, and some hoped they might assist in directing the Nazis’ viciousness into less destructive channels, and blunt the sharp point of Nazi genocidal hatred. Others, heroically, resisted. They hid Jews in their homes. They smuggled food to those in hiding. At times, they took up arms.
It is an incredibly powerful and effective presentation, showing how ordinary people did extraordinary things in horrifying circumstances. The cowardice and the courage, hatred and heroism, and complicity and commitment are all present. The Verzetsmuseum asks visitors, “which will you be?” When faced with evil, will you keep your head down or will you resist? You will understand history better when you leave the museum. You will also know yourself better, too.
I visited the museum the Saturday before last. And though I did not follow American news closely while overseas, I remained well aware of the how the Trump Administration, led by a vicious, shallow narcissist and a soulless, creepy zillionaire, has attempted to whitewash the American nation’s history, pull plays out of the Nazi playbook that Americans saw as grounds for rebellion when the King tried them in 1776, and, in the name of an obscene and cynical campaign against Antisemitism, attempted to crush dissent. They made me feel sorry for Harvard, of all things. And for those they dragged off to Salvadoran Concentration Camps. My visit to the Verzetsmuseum left me angry about what I saw back home.
I can remember a time when Elon Musk’s Nazi salute would have ended a person’s public career. Not any more. He was welcome in the White House afterwards. He did not mean it, some of his sycophants said. It was not what it looked like, others argue. I’m being woke, or politically correct, or, somehow, stunningly, anti-Semitic because I consider the life of a Palestinian child as valuable as that of any Jewish child. If I could speak with these people, I would tell them to knock it off. You’ve shamed yourselves.
I see them. I listen to them. I read the words they put down on the page or pound out with angry thumbs in the early hours of the morning. And after visiting the Verzetsmuseum, I feel I owe as much allegiance to Donald Trump and his supporters as the Dutch did to the Nazis who occupied their country. Donald Trump, I know, is not Hitler. The vast majority of his followers, I known, are not Nazis. But I see no reason to believe that they would have stood in the Nazis’ way. They have no courage or moral character. To me, they are different in degree, but not in kind, from the monsters who inflicted so much evil on the world. They are, after all, inflicting evil and suffering on the world right now.
Not too long ago, Donald Trump wondered if there was not some love in the Nazi Death Camps. It was one more absurd statement from an absurd man. Perhaps he knows what he is part of. Perhaps he is trying to convince us that he is not a monster, and that he is not the leader of something monstrous.
The Verzetsmuseum makes clear the formidable forces the Dutch resistance faced. We have luxuries they did not have. If a handful of Republicans in Congress and the Senate could muster the courage to show an ounce of virtue, they might curb the excesses of this terrible and dangerous regime. We have time, but it is running out. This nation’s leaders are failing a test of character, and the opportunities to set things right grow fewer each day.
Burke’s bill asserts that “the Great Lakes, and the watersheds that drain into the Great Lakes and their connecting channels, as well as the watersheds and ecosystems throughout” the State, “shall possess the unalienable and fundamental rights to exist, persist, flourish, naturally evolve, regenerate, and be restored by culpable parties, free from human violations of these rights and unencumbered by legal privileges vested in property, including corporate property.” From this, it follows that “the people and the natural environment, including each ecosystem and watershed within the state of New York shall possess the right to a clean and healthy environment, which shall include the right to clear and healthy Great lakes and the Great Lakes ecosystem.”
Burke’s bill also recognizes a right “to freedom from toxic trespass.” People living in New York and the Great Lakes Ecosystem and all the waters in the state “possess a fundamental and unalienable right to the integrity of their bodies, ecosystems, and physical aspects, and to be free from toxic trespasses upon or within them.” These waters belong to everyone. These waters “possess the unalienable and fundamental rights [to] not be owned, privatized or monetized.”
Burke’s bill asks New Yorkers to shift their thinking, not only about the meaning of rights, but also about the type of world in which they would like to live. Americans claim a powerful commitment to individual rights, and under law they recognize corporations as individuals, as Mitt Romney infamously pointed out several years back. Those individual rights involve the capacity of owners to use their private property with only the most minimal concern for others. Water is a “resource” that owners feel they can treat as they see fit.
I hope Burke’s bill moves forward, and that at a minimum, the Assembly and State Senate discuss and debate the important questions it raises. To study the Indigenous history of New York State is, in part, to study water, and the damage non-Indigenous people have done to it over many generations. I began my research into Onondaga history long ago by investigating the history of pollution in Onondaga Lake in Syracuse, for a time the most toxic body of water in North America. Though remediation has unquestionably improved the quality of the water, the clean-up process did not satisfy the Onondaga Nation, and I certainly would not touch the water there. Onondaga Creek, where it flows through Syracuse, has been a toxic cesspool for more than one hundred and fifty years. Upstream, where the creek flows through the Onondaga Nation, the water once ran cool and clear, with good fishing for clean water fish like trout. Now it is a murky brown that looks like chocolate milk, caused by the “mud boils” at Tully, a product of salt brine extraction which has damaged the underlying bedrock deep below the creek bed. Federal projects like the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway, power plants along the Niagara River, and a dam on the Allegheny River, led to significant loss of land by the Mohawks, Tuscaroras, and Senecas at Allegany respectively. Even today, the STAMP Industrial Development boondoggle in Genesee County threatens waters flowing through the Tonawanda Seneca Nation. The “Green” part of this “green manufacturing mega-site” is money. Millions and millions have been invested in this already failed project.
STAMP threatens the Tonawanda Seneca Nation and the waters flowing through it, as well as the surrounding Wildlife Management Areas and Wildlife Refuges.
Haudenosaunee people have over many years called upon state leaders to treat the natural world with respect. In the Thanksgiving Address, Haudenosaunee people “give thanks to all the waters of the world for quenching our thirst and providing us with strength.” As they say, “water is life,” and “we know its power in many forms—waterfalls and rain, mists and streams, rivers and oceans.” It cannot be lived without.
The likelihood of Burke’s bill passing I suspect is slim. No other members of the Assembly signed on to co-sponsor his bill. With a Republic regime tearing down environmental enforcement on the grounds, incredibly, that it is possible for water to be too clean, and a Democratic Party in New York State that will fawn over any corporate entity that promises to create even a few jobs, Burke’s bill is nonetheless an important intervention. Call your assemblyperson if you are a resident of New York State, and your state senator as well. Let’s have a discussion and a debate. Let’s make our political leaders explain why they will not support this bill. Water is life. We are fortunate to have so much of it here in New York. Let’s come together, recognize our interdependence with each other and the waters that flow around us. Join me in supporting Assemblyman Burke’s important bill.
A long time ago I wrote an editorial in the Billings Gazette attempting to defend the National History Standards from conservative criticism. The Standards were, according to the conservative columnist George F. Will, waging “a war of aggression against the Western Political tradition and the ideas that animate it.” According to Lynne Cheney, the Standards “make it sound as if everything in America is wrong and grim.” Backed by academic historians, the creators of the National History Standards were shoving aside famous and important Americans who students ought to learn about in favor of people and topics that were, in the language of the time, “politically correct.”
At that time, I wrote, the promoters of the National History Standards had been “too timid” in their defense of their work. The conservative critics, I wrote, were not arguing in good faith. They had “not focused on scholarship, and the canons of argumentation and proof that accompany this pursuit, but on the very subject matter of much of the recent historical writing.” They could not prove that the history was wrong, so they announced that they did not like the content. Theirs was, I said, “a knee-jerk, intolerant, and culturally insensitive response to the recognition that people of all races, cultures, colors and creeds contributed to what we now recognize as a complex American past, and that no understanding of that past can be achieved without examining the role played by all Americans.” Calling something “politically correct,” like calling something “woke” today, I wrote, “has become a conservative smear to be employed against anyone who calls for a more inclusive, complex, and truly democratic portrayal of the past.”
That editorial appeared in January of 1995, a bit over thirty years ago. Think about that. I have been at this for a long time. The words I wrote then are still applicable today.
And as tired as I sometimes feel, it is as important now as it was then to resist, to engage with those who hate and fear what we do without truly understanding the nature of our work.
Just last week, President Trump issued another of the unconstitutional pronouncements that he alleges are “executive orders” with the force of law. Aiming his ire at the Smithsonian Institution, Trump declared that “over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.” These historians, he said, have sought “to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.” Instead of “fostering unity and a deeper understanding of our shared past, the widespread effort to rewrite history deepens societal divides and fosters a sense of national shame.”
The president cited some examples. The Smithsonian American Art Museum, he said, had challenged, in Trump’s words, “the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct.” (If you want evidence of the virulence of Trump’s racism, well, there you go). A Fascist, Trump is angry that the museum asserted that “race is a human invention.” It’s incredible, really. We who resist are fighting a battle that has been going on for ages.
That is why I love the statement from Loyola Marymount University in defense of its diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.
We practice diversity, equity, and inclusion because we are Catholic and our faith and the First Amendment protect our right to live out these values. Efforts to restrict DEI are in opposition to Christ’s teachings or radical inclusion and love. Loyola Marymount University will continue to champion academic freedom, social justice, and human dignity not as politics, but as moral imperatives required by our faith.
It is direct, defiant, and unapologetic. Historians should take note. Trump is going to do enormous damage to our work. Hours before I wrote these words, I learned that a fantastic, NEH-supported project at Brown University examining the enslavement of Indigenous New Englanders had its grant revoked. Friends worked for years on this monumental project that answers important questions about the American past. Trump and his thugs killed the program.
They will hurt us and they will score points. They will please the racists. So much of what they do, after all, is about protecting and upholding white supremacy. But in other ways, they have already lost this fight. That is why reasoning with them can be like talking to a caged rat. They won’t listen to truths they are afraid to confront. But to teach that race and racism are hard-wired into the Nation’s founding documents, after all, is hardly a revolutionary insight any longer. That race, as a nefarious social construct, has wielded enormous power for evil in America’s past is a basic statement of fact. That New York, where I teach now, became the Empire State through a systematic program of Indigenous dispossession that at times and places violated the laws of the United States, is hardly controversial at all. Its a fact. Our efforts, in other words, have already carried the day. Even as the textbooks lag behind, we have done the work. Our students know that an uncritical and celebratory history of the United States is bullshit. They know that history matters, and they expect that it will include stories that connect with their own, and that explore—and explain—the enormous gap that sometimes exists between the way things are and the way they ought to be.
Some of you who read these words are college professors. I am willing to bet that you have been approached by a student, probably many times over the course of your career, who told you how they could not believe they were never taught this stuff in high school. You want to teach a kid to not respect this nation’s history? Lie to her about it.
But that is what our amoral leader is calling for. An angry and unlettered old man, he will do his damage. He will try to destroy the archives and the libraries and museums that bring this inclusive and complex history to more and more people every year. He will, and already has attempted to, ruin the lives of those who do this work. He will try to silence museum workers, archivists, librarians, writers and teachers who know at the very marrow of their being that it is not their job to tell students comforting stories about the past, but rather, to teach them to ask questions about the past and insist on reasoned, reasonable and evidence-based answers. If things are this way, why could they not have been another way, and so on—we play a role in unleashing the revolutionary capacity of an inquiring mind. Trump will promote charlatans and whores like JD Vance who will say anything, even when they know better, to win the approval of the amoral leader. They will continue to beat up on the weakest people they can find, the refugees, the immigrants, the poor and the marginalized. But they cannot suppress the stories we tell about the past. Not entirely. Let those of us who are privileged in these dark times to be able to do this important work, stand tall in defiance of these dangerous and unthinking enemies of justice and free thought.
Two courts have slapped down Donald Trump’s executive orders against “birthright citizenship,” guaranteed in the first section of the 14th Amendment. This is a good thing. Like a lot of you, I am feeling a bit overwhelmed by all of Trump’s actions. Though I am heartened to see the Democrats making noises like they wish to act as an opposition party, it is on us to stay informed. And I have pledged to do all the reading necessary to understand the threat posed by the old new administration to Indigenous people and their communities. I have a lot to learn, I am sure, but here are some tentative thoughts. I would love to hear from you about the issues these executive orders raise.
In making their case against birthright citizenship, Trump’s lawyers brought up the example of Indigenous peoples in the federal republic. After the ratification of the 14th Amendment, and before the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act, Indians born within the territorial bounds of the United States did not receive, and were not considered, citizens of the United States. Therefore, the lawyers argued, the grant of birthright citizenship is limited and not comprehensive, and applied only to the formerly enslaved people Trump’s lawyers claimed the Reconstruction amendments were designed to protect. Children born in the United States to parents who are “illegal aliens,” a term the Trump team continues to use, thus cannot legitimately claim citizenship under the 14th Amendment. There are solid historical reasons why this legal argument is wrong, spelled out in detail by the judges who ruled against Trump. What I want to focus on is the Trump team’s reliance on arguments about Indigenous peoples and nations.
The Constitution makes two explicit references to Indigenous peoples. There is the “Indian Commerce Clause” of Article I, Section 8, that spells out the powers of Congress, and a reference to “Indians not taxed” as a class that could not be counted in calculating the number of a state’s congressional representatives. The first limits congressional power to regulating “commerce with the Indian tribes,” a phrase that has expanded dramatically in terms of the breadth of its meaning. It has been transformed over two centuries into the “plenary power doctrine” that makes Congress virtually absolute in governing Indian affairs. The latter clause, which implies that some Indians are or will be taxed, at the same time suggests that Indigenous peoples for the most part are beyond the jurisdictional realm of the United States or the separate states. In the Founder’s Constitution, Indigenous peoples were independent polities who owed no allegiance to the US, and over whom the United States claimed no power to interfere in their internal affairs.
The federal courts did little initially to help clarify the issue, probably because the idea that Indians were not citizens was assumed. Chief Justice John Marshall, in the cases of Johnson v. McIntosh (1823), Cherokee Nation v. Georgia(1831), and Worcester v. Georgia (1832) helped define Indigenous nations in the United States, but said far less about Native American individuals. In the simplest possible terms, Chief Justice Marshall’s famous “trilogy” of cases established that Indigenous Nations can exercise whatever power they want unless they are explicitly prevented from doing so by a federal treaty or an act of congress. Legal scholars call this concept “explicit divestiture.”
The first significant case that addressed Native American citizenship in a comprehensive manner was United States v. Elm, decided in the Northern District of New York on Christmas Eve in 1877. Abraham Elm was an Oneida who lived in New York’s Madison County, the heart of the Oneidas’ ancestral homeland. Claiming that he was a citizen of the United States, Elm voted to select his congressional representative in the election of 1876. Authorities arrested, indicted, tried, and convicted Elm for illegal voting. The courts suspended his sentence while they addressed the weighty question of “whether or not the Oneida Indians are citizens of the United States and, as such, entitled to vote.”
The 14th Amendment, the Court reminded its readers, decreed that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein he resided.” That second clause— “subject to the jurisdiction thereof”—was important to the Court. “Those persons who, though born here, are born with the allegiance of a foreign sovereign, or of another government, are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.” For example, “the children of ambassadors, though in fact born here, are, in the theory of the law, born within the allegiance of the foreign power the parent represents.” In a similar vein, the Court continued, “Indians who maintain their tribal relationships, are the subject of independent governments, and, as such, not in the jurisdiction of the United States…because the Indian Nations have always been regarded as distinct political communities.”
But had the Oneidas “maintained their tribal relationships”? The state had taken nearly all their lands and declared the Oneida Nation dissolved. Because Elm’s “tribe has ceased to maintain its tribal integrity,” he was largely on his own. In the courts’ eyes, Abraham Elm “is a citizen, within the meaning of the fourteenth amendment.” The passage of time and the course of history had dismantled the Oneida Nation, at least in the opinion of the court. There was, in other words, no native nation remaining to which Elm might belong.
But what happened in the case of “an Indian, born a member of one of the Indian tribes within the United States, which still exists and is recognized as a tribe by the government of the United States, who has voluntarily separated himself from his tribe, and taken up his residence among the white citizens of a state, but who had not been naturalized, or taxed, or recognized as a citizen either by the United States or by the state”? Was this Indian a citizen of the United States under the birthright citizenship provision of the 14th Amendment?
These questions lay at the heart of Elk v. Wilkins, an 1884 case heard by the United States Supreme Court. John Elk, in 1880, had attempted to vote in the city of Omaha in a municipal election. He was denied and sought damages. Wilkins, the local official, Elk accused of failing to recognize his birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment and his rights under the 15th amendment, which said that no citizen could be deprived of their right to vote on the basis of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. Justice Horace Gray wrote the majority opinion. Indian tribes, he wrote, “were not, strictly speaking, foreign states, but they were alien nations” whose members “owed immediate allegiance to their several tribes.” Examining the language of the 14th amendment, Gray reasoned that “Indians born within the territorial limits of the United States, members of and owing immediate allegiance to one of the Indian tribes (an alien though dependent people), although in a geographical sense born in the United States, are no more ‘born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,’ within the meaning of the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment, than the children of subjects of any foreign government born within the domain of that government, or the children born within the United States of ambassadors or other public ministers of foreign nations.”
That should sound familiar to you by now.
The nation to which Elk belonged, not mentioned in the Court’s opinion, was neither taxed nor counted to calculate representation. “Their absolute exclusion,” Gray said, “from the basis of representation in which all other persons are now included is wholly inconsistent with their being considered citizens.” John Elk might become a citizen though a congressional action, but he did not become a citizen by separating himself from his tribe. And because Elk was not “a citizen of the United States under the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution,” he “has been deprived of no right secured by the Fifteenth Amendment.”
Justices John Marshall Harlan and William Burnham Woods dissented. Based upon their reading of the congressional record, they believed that the senators and representatives who approved the 14th amendment intended to “grant citizenship to every person of the Indian race in this country who was unconnected to any tribe, and who resided, in good faith, outside of Indian reservations and within one of the states or territories of the Union.” That argument failed to persuade, until Trump’s lawyers found it.
In the years following Elm and Elk, Congress did make some provisions for Indian citizenship. Recipients of allotments under the terms of the Dawes Act, who had passed successfully through their trusteeship period, received United States citizenship. Native American veterans of the first World War who received honorable discharges also received citizenship. And, in 1924, Congress passed the sweeping Indian Citizenship Act, that made all Indians born in the United States citizens. Many of the Haudenosaunee people I write about in my own research objected to this. The Onondaga Nation, for instance, rejected this unwelcome extension of the rights and responsibility of American citizenship over them. They still do today. They see themselves as apart from the United States and the state of New York, even while living within the bounds of the larger settler state.
In parts of the United States, the Native American vote constitutes a significant bloc. Indigenous voters can help swing Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina and Arizona red or blue. Indigenous candidates have successfully run for office in several states with large Native American populations. Given their record of military service, one could make the case that Native Americans are more patriotic than the rest of us. But that does not mean that Native American nationhood is not real.
The Trump Administration sought evidence to support its claim that the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment did not apply to “all persons,” despite the first two words in the first section of the Amendment. Trump’s team used Indian nations as an example to help them make that case. It is a nasty sort of historical revisionism to search for evidence, and to cherry-pick from the record, to advance arguments that fly in the face of the constitution’s language. Trump and his allies are, and always shall be, on the wrong side of history. They are ignoring the basic language of a constitutional amendment. The Trump Administration’s arguments are as wrong as they are vile.
Indigenous people did not receive “birthright citizenship” because of some limitation on the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment, but because they were members of foreign polities that predated the creation of the United States. It’s that simple, really. Their status provides no ammunition for racist Republicans who seek to exclude immigrants and refugees from shelter in America. In an assault on what is arguably their party’s greatest historical achievement, the Reconstruction amendments, Trump wants to tell us that the phrase “all persons” does not mean what it says.
Indigenous nationhood is a complicated subject. It is not taught in school. The status of Indigenous nations and individuals has vexed, and continues to vex, legal and political systems in many states. New York State, for instance, struggled for many years to answer questions about whether the state or the federal government had jurisdiction over Indian lands (Neither, the Onondagas would have said). The state long had legislated for Indians, but it did so in the absence of clear constitutional approval. Then, in 1948 and 1950, Congress authorized New York to extend its criminal and civil jurisdiction over Indigenous lands within the Empire State. Onondagas argued against this, too. They could not be made citizens if they did not want to. That birthright citizenship did not apply to them was never because the 14th Amendment does not mean what it says, but because American officials, imperfectly and with great reluctance, could see the reality of the Indian nations that stood before them. They were not citizens because they were not part of the United States. To argue otherwise, as Trump’s lawyers have done, is at best disingenuous.
I am deeply disturbed, as a historian, by the proposed STAMP development project bordering the Tonawanda Seneca Nation territory. STAMP stands for the Science and Technology Advanced Manufacturing Park which will be built on the margins of the Tonawanda Seneca Nation. It’s another “Buffalo Billion boondoggle,” one journalist pointed out, a manufacturing facility boosted by the Genesee County Center for Economic Development that will, when built, damage wildlife habitat and the ways of living of the Tonawanda Seneca Nation. Millions have been spent, but not much has been accomplished yet. A hearing will be held tonight, Thursday, May 11th, at the Fire Hall in the Town of Alabama, New York.
I will leave it to those with expertise in the field to describe the significant ecological and environmental consequences of the project, though they seem quite significant and have not been persuasively addressed by the developer. What I would like to describe to you is the history of this state, and its long history of interactions with Native American Nations. New York could not have taken its current shape without a systematic program of Indigenous dispossession that at times explicitly violated the laws of the United States, and always basic standards of justice, honesty, and equity.
It is history in which the State of New York has consistently attempted to skim the cream off of whatever prosperity develops on Indigenous land; has aided and abetted in the environmental devastation of Indigenous homelands, and pursued on or around Native American communities projects that their NIMBY white constituents refuse to countenance in their own neck of the woods. It is a history of despoliation, devastation, and avarice, that is appalling even without reference to state boarding schools, military campaigns, and dishonesty in its dealing with the Indigenous Nations. Will the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation participate, once again, in this long and, frankly racist history? I hope that they will turn the page, write a new chapter, and look to a better future.
I am not optimistic. Governor Hochul has been no friend to the State’s Indigenous peoples. She presides over a state built on stolen land. One thing that Democrats and Republicans can agree on is that there shall never be a meaningful accounting. New York became the Empire State through a systematic program of Iroquois dispossession. That’s a fact. Though the Supreme Court declined to do anything about the process, arguing disingenuously that the injuries occurred too long ago to offer a workable remedy, most of the so-called treaties the state negotiated clearly violated federal law.
Short Eared Owl, one of several species threatened by the development.
Not only were many of these transactions unambiguously illegal, but they were, as the kids say, as shady as hell. The Onondagas and Oneidas, for instance, entered into agreements in 1788 in which they were led to believe they would lease their lands to the State of New York. Turns out that when the treaty was written by New York officials, those leases had magically been transformed into sales. Dispossession through literacy in English. Other transactions took place with small number of Indians present, few of whom were the proper people to sign treaties. And the United States, especially with regard to the Senecas, hardly kept its hands clean. The 1838 treaty of Buffalo Creek, a transaction designed to expel the Six Nations from New York State, is the most crooked treaty in the history of this country. That is saying something. Signatories were coerced or threatened, signatures were forged, and alcohol flowed freely. Meanwhile, both federal and state authorities in New York have ignored the treaty provisions that protect Indigenous rights. For example, clauses guaranteeing the Senecas and their Iroquois neighbors the right to the “free use and enjoyment of their lands” in the 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua have been consistently ignored. They have ignored provisions in treaties guaranteeing Indigenous peoples the right to hunt and fish on the land they ceded to the state. The state has even tried to tax the “per capita” payments the Seneca Nation made to its members from the Nation’s gaming proceeds. It is just one assault after another.
Northern Harrier, another bird species threatened by the development.
It is worth keeping in mind that the Seneca Nation has never asked for special privileges. It asked merely that the state of New York follow the rules to which it had agreed. Contracts are sacred, Governor Hochul suggested when she extorted the funding she needed to secure a new stadium for the Buffalo Bills, unless they somehow limit her ability to funnel many millions of public dollars to private hands.There is a principle that is very important to Iroquois people. The People who made up the Iroquois League conducted their lives in accordance with this principle over the centuries. It is called “Guswenta,” and today it is represented by a very specific wampum belt known as the Two-Row, which depicts two parallel lines on a field of white. The lines represent the Iroquois and their non-native neighbors. They shared the same land, they occupy the same country, but they remain independent and autonomous. The lines do not cross, and neither natives nor newcomers should interfere in the affairs of the other. Indigenous peoples in this state have kept their part of the bargain. They have had little choice. The state, and its colonial predecessors, have not.
The Indigenous people of this state have faced epidemic diseases, military invasions, the carrying away of their children to boarding schools, and systematic and deliberate attempts to wipe out their culture and take their land. Yet here they remain, developing their communities, looking forward, in a state that has been a steady and relentless adversary. They hoped the state would play by its own rules. Governor Hochul always has said no. She will support the elimination of Native American mascots–that costs her nothing–but when the rubber hits the road she is as Anti-Indian as they get.
So when a developer hopes to gain state support for an exchange of 665 acres of habitat linked by forests and wetlands to the Tonawanda Seneca Nation for fifty-eight acres of non-contiguous land and claims that it is an equivalent property and that the exchange will actually benefit the ecosystem, and when the developer ignores completely impacts on the Nation and its people, it is hard not to be skeptical. What is easy to see is yet another chapter in the State’s long, brutal, and exploitative history towards Indigenous peoples. The proposed swap is about so much more than economics. It makes a mockery of “consultation,” endangers endangered species, and is so patently inequitable that it is impossible to take seriously.
But all of this is very serious. Industrial development at STAMP will disrupt the Tonawanda Seneca Nation’s ability to engage in the free exercise of their traditional beliefs. By damaging the Big Woods, where medicines are harvested and subsistence hunting and fishing takes place, it threatens directly the health and welfare of the Tonawanda Seneca Nation and the Haudenosaunee, who with Tonawanda’s permission hunt, fish, and gather there too. A long time ago, New York Indians were told to give up their lands in New York for a sliver of desiccated earth in Kansas. The land out there in the west, American officials, New York businessmen, and white racists argued, is just as good as what you have in New York. It’s the same, these promoters of ethnic cleansing optimistically point out. Except that it was not alike at all, just like 58 non-contiguous acres is not at all the same as 665 acres of culturally significant and environmentally and ecologically sensitive land.
The Tonawanda Seneca Nation always has resisted the calls of wealthy New York developers, from Robert Morris in the 1790s to today, that they leave their homelands. In the 1838 Treaty of Buffalo Creek, the Tonawandas were surprised to learn their reservation had been given up, even though they were not parties to the treaty. Two decades later they were able to purchase back a portion of the reservation they never had consented to sell. They were ripped off, but they hung on, preserving their culture and their political system within a state that has historically respected that culture not at all. If any number of white people had their way, the Tonawanda Seneca Nation would no longer exist—their language, their religion, the land, their people—all would have been absorbed by the ceaseless State of New York.
The DEC will support the state’s long-standing racism towards Indigenous peoples if it supports this habitat destruction. Tonawanda Senecas, you see, want nothing more than for the State of New York to keep its word and leave them alone. This is the case for other Haudenosaunee peoples. But here we go again, the relentless drumbeat of exploitation, avarice, and racism. Tonawanda claims to the significance of the land and the species that live there are dismissed and shown no real respect.
I have been to hearings like the one that will be held this evening in the Alabama Fire Hall in the town of Alabama, New York. There is no meaningful “consultation” at meetings like this: the DEC officials sit at a table, fidget with their phones, as they listen uncomfortably to Indigenous peoples describe yet another assault on who they are and what they hope to become. I hope that this time, the members of the DEC in attendance will listen to what the Tonawandas say, and try to hear the sentiment beside it. I hope that they will put a stop to this ill-conceived and poorly thought-out industrial manufacturing development. I hope that they will break with a horrible history and, in the spirit of trust and reconciliation, seek pardon for the unresolved crimes of New York’s past.
One of the most important events of the modern Indian rights movement began today at the small hamlet of Wounded Knee, on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. You should be teaching students in your American History class about Wounded Knee, not as an explosive event, but one with origins reaching back to the nineteenth century.
The occupation, indeed, had deep routes.
Several months after the occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1972, the activism of the Nixon years reignited in South Dakota. In January of 1973, a white man killed a Sioux named Wesley Bad Heart Bull outside a bar in Custer County. Local authorities charged the attacker with manslaughter, nothing more, and AIM, the American Indian Movement, arrived to protest. Led by Dennis Banks, they asked the prosecutor to consider more serious charges. When he refused, a riot broke out. The protestors set the local Chamber of Commerce building on fire; local police and county sheriffs responded with tear gas and violence. Twenty‐two people were arrested, nineteen of them Indigenous peoples. In the aftermath of the Custer riot, elders at the Pine Ridge Reservation invited AIM to aid them in their struggles against tribal chairman Dick Wilson, the head of an Indian Reorganization Act government notorious for its corruption and strong‐arm tactics. THe New Deal era IRA led at times to tribal governments that did not fit with the traditional values of an Indigenous community, and that certainly was the case at Pine Ridge. Wilson maintained a personal police force, for example, the well‐armed GOON squad (Guardians of Ogalala Nation) to control and intimidate dissenters. He had defeated efforts by the Reservation’s residents to impeach him. His authority challenged, he called upon federal authorities for support: federal marshals with automatic weapons came to Pine Ridge, setting the stage for a showdown.
Dick Wilson
Russell Means, left, and Dennis Banks at Wounded Knee in 1973.
Led by Russell Means and Dennis Banks, AIM hoped to bring the attention of the world to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. If they had little familiarity with tribal traditions—both had spent much of their lives in cities—they knew well how to draw the media and generate interest. On February 27, 1973, they and a group of their followers, perhaps 300 in all, occupied the small village of Wounded Knee, the site of the massacre of Sioux Ghost Dancers eighty‐three years before. Most of the occupiers came from the surrounding Lakota reservations, but they received support small numbers of Kiowas, Pueblos, Potawatomis, Senecas, and many others. Two Rappahannocks who had lived in New Jersey traveled west to join AIM at Wounded Knee. The occupiers had a handful of rifles; one of the occupiers had an AK‐47 with an empty banana clip. Some had served in Vietnam and felt keenly the injustice of the colonial system existing at Pine Ridge, where reservation residents had few rights and no redress. Desperate means called for desperate measures. Wilson’s GOONs and federal forces quickly surrounded the occupiers with an impressive array of the latest military technology: armored personnel carriers, high‐powered rifles, machine guns, grenade launchers, and armor. The federal authorities fired off more than 130,000 rounds of ammunition during the occupation. In cities like San Francisco and Washington, the Nixon Administration was willing to exercise restraint in its response to Native American protests. Federal authorities had avoided using a heavy hand during the occupation of Alcatraz and the Bureau of Indian Affairs headquarters in Washington, D.C. Not so on a remote reservation in South Dakota.
On March 11, the occupiers issued a statement declaring the independence of the Oglala Nation. “We are a sovereign nation by the treaty of 1868,” the occupiers said, and “we want to abolish the Tribal Government under the Indian Reorganization Act. Wounded Knee will be a corporate state under the Independent Oglala Nation.” They rejected the “reorganized” government of the Pine Ridge Reservation and objected to a corrupt government out of touch with tribal traditions and willing to harass and violently persecute its opponents. Means and Banks attracted a considerable amount of attention but they could not achieve their fundamental goals, for the federal government would not see to the removal of Wilson, or address the fundamental structural causes of so much misery on Indian reservations. The occupation of Wounded Knee lasted seventy‐one days. At its end, two of the occupiers had died, and one federal marshal received a wound that left him paralyzed. Given the number of rounds fired, that so few were killed and injured was something of a miracle.
Always worth a look, Paul Chaat Smith’s excellent Everything You Know About Indians is Wrong
The occupiers left Wounded Knee in May of 1973. According to Banks, “Wounded Knee was the greatest event in the history of Native America in the twentieth century. It was,” he continued, “our shining hour.” Leonard Crow Dog, the spiritual leader and another of the occupiers, agreed that “our seventy‐one-day stand was the greatest deed done by Native Americans.” Still, Crow Dog noted, “we never got our Black Hills back, the Treaty of Fort Laramie was not honored, nor did the government recognize us as an independent nation.” In the words of historian Paul Chaat Smith, “there was a clear‐eyed, if often unspoken, acknowledgment that frequently our elders are lost or drunk, our traditions nearly forgotten or confused, our community leaders co‐opted or narrow,” but “they knew only one thing for sure: business as usual was not working, their communities were in pain and crisis, and they had to do something.” AIM brought considerable attention to the problems Indigenous peoples faced. Thanks to the organization’s efforts, many American people became aware for the first time of their nation’s long history of injustices toward American Indians. These achievements were significant.
Still, federal authorities relentlessly harassed and prosecuted the leaders of AIM. After the occupation, Dick Wilson resumed his campaign of repression against what he viewed as outside agitators. This violence led to the killing of two FBI agents in June 1975. After some shady legal maneuvering, a federal court tried and convicted Leonard Peltier, an AIM member, despite significant doubts about his guilt and procedural irregularities at his trial. Peltier remains in prison today. Protests against Wilson’s regime did little to remove the fundamental problem: the United States, though willing to embrace self‐determination, and to consider piecemeal changes in its policies toward Indigenous peoples, never abandoned the notion that Indians remained wards of the nation. It is important to remember this. The federal government in the second half of the twentieth century favored self‐determination and, in specific cases, implemented programs and policies that addressed historic injustice and the poor conditions under which many Indigenous peoples lived. But it would only go so far. A tension existed, between self‐determination and wardship, between sovereignty and colonialism, that individual Indigenous peoples, tribal, local, state and federal governments, and the federal courts would wrestle with over the coming years. Indigenous peoples survived termination’s direct negation of their political rights, and gained more control over their lives, but the ambiguities created by the conflicting forces of sovereignty and colonialism remained.
I did not pay much attention to Jimmy Carter during his presidency (I was too young at the time to care much), but I have believed for many years that he is among the greatest of the American nation’s former presidents.
Ask people of a certain age what they felt about the Carter presidency you will often hear harshly critical reviews. He was weak and indecisive, unable to solve a national “malaise,” serious economic crisis, and the Iran hostage crisis. Historians are gradually coming to view him in less unforgiving terms. According to Siena College, Carter ranks 24th in their list of American presidents. He was ranked second only to Lincoln for presidential integrity. Most polls place him right in the middle: well ahead of all those gilded age and antebellum failures, and ahead of Nixon, the second Bush, and Trump as well.
In the coming days we will see many assessments of Carter’s presidency. I expect none of those to say anything about Indian affairs. His policies with regard to Indigenous peoples in Alaska brought lasting change and significant hard feelings. (A good review is available here.) He famously posed for a White House photo with “Pretendian” Iron Eyes Cody. But President Carter also signed some of the most significant legislation enacted in any presidency.
Carter and “Iron Eyes” Cody at the White House.
President Carter followed and expanded on the shift towards “self-determination” in the conduct of the American Nation’s Indian policy. Congress took the lead, continuing work it had begun under Nixon and Ford, but Carter can take credit for signing the legislation into law.
Acknowledging that in the past the United States had pursued policies that “resulted in the abridgment of religious freedom for traditional American Indians,” Congress in August approved the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, which pledged the United States “to protect and preserve for American Indians their inherent freedom to believe, express, and exercise the traditional religions of the American Indian, Eskimo, Aleut, and Native Hawaiians, including but not limited to the access to sites, use and possession of sacred objects, and the freedom to worship through ceremonies and traditional rites.” AIRFA was limited in its effect by the Supreme Court, but it was an important statement from a government that historically had done so much to eradicate Indigenous religions.
Aware of the growing number of native peoples who belonged to communities that had neither signed treaties with the United States nor been the specific objects of federal legislation, Congress in early October established a set of guidelines for the “Federal Acknowledgment of Indian Tribes” that had not been officially recognized by the government in the past as Indian. The “acknowledgment” statute required that an Indian tribe, in order to be formally recognized as such by the Interior Department, demonstrate that they had “been identified from historical times until the present on a substantially continuous basis as ‘American Indian,’ or ‘aboriginal.’” They needed to demonstrate as well that the members of the community had inhabited a specific area or that they live “in a community viewed as American Indian and distinct from other populations in the area.” The petitioning tribe was also asked to establish that it had “maintained political influence or other authority over its members as an autonomous entity throughout history until the present.” Acknowledgment, the statute read, “is a prerequisite to the protection, services, benefits, from the Federal Government available to Indian tribes.” Such acknowledgment, the statute continued, “shall also mean that the tribe is entitled to all the immunities and privileges available to other federally acknowledged Indian tribes by virtue of their status as Indian tribes as well as the responsibilities and obligations of such tribes.”
Two weeks later, Congress passed the Tribally Controlled Community College Assistance Act, which provided grants for the operation of junior colleges on Indian reservations in order “to insure continued and expanded educational opportunities for Indian students.” Native communities had long recognized the importance of higher education, but access had always been a challenge. Cankdeska Cikana Community College, formerly known as Little Hoop College, was founded by the Spirit Lake Dakotas in North Dakota in the early 1970s. The college provided vocational and technical training, but also a curriculum that fostered “the teaching and learning of Dakota culture and language toward the preservation of the tribe.” Other communities established colleges throughout the West early in the 1970s, beginning with Navajo Community College. In response to the passage of the 1978 statute, a number of western tribes established new institutions of higher learning emphasizing a culturally relevant curriculum. Little Big Horn College, founded at Crow Agency on the Crow Reservation, struggled to survive with scarce resources in its early years but grew into a successful junior college. From thirty‐two students during its first semester in 1981, now more than 300 students enroll each term. All take courses in Crow Studies alongside a variety of skills‐based programs and courses designed to prepare them for transfer to four‐year colleges.
Congress in 1978 attempted to address the legacies of some of the nation’s most destructive policies toward Indigenous peoples. Early in November, Congress enacted a series of educational reforms for schools operated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, designed to provide equal educational opportunity for Indigenous children. One week later, Congress passed the Indian Child Welfare Act, designed to halt the traumatic removal of Indigenous children from their homes through fostering and adoption. The problem was severe. Dakota Sioux at Spirit Lake, for example, had asked the Association of American Indian Affairs (AAIA) to investigate such removals, and the AAIA reported that of the 1100 Dakotas under the age of 21 who lived at Spirit Lake in 1968, 275 had been separated from their families. In states with large Native American populations, the AAIA found that between 25% and 35% of children had been removed from their homes. Indigenous peoples organized to halt this highly destructive practice, and the battle for the passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act, according to its best historian, “represented one of the most fierce and successful battles for Indian self‐determination of the 1970s.” ICWA, as it’s known, committed the United States “to protect the best interests of Indian children and to promote the stability and security of Indian tribes and families by the establishment of minimum standards for the removal of Indian children from their families and the placement of such children in foster or adoptive homes which will reflect the unique values of Indian culture.”
Decisions by the Supreme Court have already weakened many of these signal legislative achievements, and decisions looming on the Court’s calendar threaten to do even more damage. Carter certainly accomplished less than he might have hoped, but by following the lead of an energized legislative branch, he brought far-reaching change. In the assessments of his long career that appear in the coming days, this should not be forgotten.
Specifically, of what value is the Pope’s “heartfelt” apology to Canada’s First Nations about the treatment they received in residential schools across much of the twentieth century?
At one level, it is not a question for me to answer. I write from the privileged position of a scholar who never had to experience that which generations of Indigenous Canadians have had to live through, and continue to live with. The legacies of Canada’s system of residential schools, supported and enforced by the Catholic Church and other major Protestant denominations is clearly visible. The resources for learning this history are increasing in number and becoming more accessible to non-Indigenous audiences every day. Connie Walker’s fantastic journalism is just one of many examples.
I do not think there is any doubt about the significance of what the Pope did yesterday. Hobbled by sciatica and other ailments that have limited his mobility, the Pope visited the site of a residential school at Maskwacis, Alberta, yesterday, and issued a formal apology to the members of the commuity. (A full video of the gathering is available here.)
Pope Francis spoke of his visit as the first stop on what he called a “penitential pilgrimage.” He traveled, he said, to the community “to tell you in person of my sorrow, to implore God’s forgiveness, healing and reconciliation.” He acknowledged their long-standing ties to the land, their stewardship of the land. He acknowledged the trauma the community had experienced, and that his words might cause individual members of the community great pain. He quoted Elie Wiesel: “The opposite of love is not hatred, it’s indifference.” He hoped that the world would watch and learn from his apology, and that this was the first step in an effort to make the world a better place for all who have suffered.
“I am here because the fist step of my penitential pilgrimage among you is that of again asking forgiveness, of telling you once more that I am deeply sorry. Sorry for the ways in which, regrettably, many Christians supported the colonizing mentality of the powers that oppressed the Indigenous peoples. I am sorry. I ask forgiveness, in particular, for the ways in which many members of the Church and of religions communities co-operated, not least through their indifference, in projects of cultural destruction and forced assimilation promoted by the governments of that time, which culminated in the system of residential schools”
“Although Christian charity was not absent, and there were many outstanding instances of devotion and care for children, the overall effects of the policies linked to the residential schools were catastrophic.” He knew, he said, that these policies were a mistake, one incompatible with the Gospel. It was a “great evil.”
The Pope wished to reaffirm this point, “with shame and unambiguously. I humbly beg forgiveness for the evil committed by so many Christians against the Indigenous peoples.” But begging pardon, he said, was only a first step. The Catholic Church must “conduct a serious investigation into the facts of what took place in the past and to assist the survivors of the residential schools to experience healing from the traumas they suffered.”
It was a good statement. It was far superior to the legalistic apologies the United States has enacted from time to time. It is difficult to imagine what more the Pope might have said. Some members of the audience were visibly moved by the Pope’s apology. They had waited a long time, but at long last, the Pope had made the journey to their homelands to apologize in person. Francis said that he could not visit all the communities that had invited him. Still, some clearly appreciated his visit.
Others expressed some skepticism. An apology without action was meaningless, and they wanted to see what action followed before they passed further judgment. Some wished that the Pope would have renounced the discovery doctrine, by which the Catholic powers claimed in the late fifteenth century their lands in the Americas. Deeds, they argued, were more important than the colonizers’ words.
That is entirely fair. Indigenous peoples have listened to those who speak for government agencies and missionary organizations talk a good game, but they have reason to be suspicious. Look on Twitter, and you could detect the clenched reception to news that the missionary Will Graham, one of Billy’s grandsons, was going to preach on reservation’s across South Dakota. So much damage has been done by those who carried the Bible into Indian Country.
There is in the United States a substantial number of people who do not like to hear about the negative parts of US history. I am willing to bet that the same is true in Canada, as well. I have heard this sentiment a lot over the years, and it takes different forms: discussion of the negative parts of history is unpatriotic, or demoralizing, or depressing; telling these stories might come at the expense of telling more positive and uplifting stories that could bring young people to respect and revere American institutions; or, occasionally, telling the stories of those individuals and groups who have fallen by the wayside or who suffered as a result of American progress somehow diminishes the dominant narrative and those white people who populate and benefit from it. These reactionary forces are powerful. Those who bring these stories up can expect to be criticized severely, to have their integrity and their objectivity as scholars questioned, or to be dismissed with that empty-headed epithet that their work is “politically correct.” I saw this first hand when I taught in Montana at the beginning of my career in the 1990s. Speaking out on these issues, it turned out, nearly cost me my job.
The Pope’s apology is a limited response. His words can be seen as those of the Church he leads, but also as an expression of sorrow from a single man who has learned from this blighted hellscape of a story and wishes in some small way to try to set things right, to assuage the grief, to comfort those injured. The Pope’s apology, I hope, will open up dialogue and discussion. That discussion is needed badly in Canada, and even more so in the United States.
Both nations continue to deal with the unaddressed problem of missing and murdered indigenous women, and the deep structural problems that gave rise to the Idle No More movement, has undertaken efforts to talk about its painful past. I have mentioned on this blog the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation housed in Manitoba: it is a marvelous project that might equip Canadians to tell the story of Canada’s residential schools, the young people taken by law and by the authorities from their families to be educated, and the consequences and legacies of these wrong-headed and evil policies.
In the United States, in places, there are efforts to begin an accounting for the nation’s past misdeeds. Confederate memorials are coming down. Some buildings, on some college campuses, named after racist and cruel figures from the American past, are being renamed, though not without controversy. Some universities with ties to the slave trade, like Brown and Georgetown, have undertaken programs to atone for their sins. President Biden’s Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland is looking into the legacy of boarding schools in the United States.
But when it comes to native peoples, we are way behind Canada and Australia. Small gestures, no doubt, are taking place: some members of some religious congregations have pushed their churches to renounce the so-called “doctrine of discovery,” a symbolic gesture that in the end would cost these churches little. More real, perhaps, was the decision by the Society of Jesus several years ago to return land given to it by the United States on the Rosebud Reservation to the community. But a larger accounting has not occurred.
And without such an accounting, young people can only with great difficulty arrive at an understanding of the moral complexities of their nation’s past. We need more than an apology, couched in legalese, that nobody knows about. I have mentioned the congressional apology on this blog. You can read it here, and see how truly deficient a document it is. It is as if a Senate staffer went through an American history textbook, found the points where bad things happened to native peoples, and cobbled them together into a tepid and half-baked statement of regret. We are sorry, but want it understood that nothing in this apology opens us up to suit.
The resources to write and teach this history are out there, and contrary to what you might have been taught, native voices are not hard to find in the historical record. In the Agency records housed at the National Archives, for instance, hundreds and hundreds of reels of microfilm, each containing hundreds of pages of documents, allow committed researchers to reconstruct the government’s systematic programs to incarcerate native peoples on reservations, Christianize and civilize them, and take their land, all in the name of “Progress.” Scattered around the country in state, local, and organizational archives are the historical documents that reveal the herculean efforts of native peoples to survive these policies. In these records are the stories of native peoples who lived their lives under this oppressive regime. Their stories are worth talking about. Obviously if I did not believe this very strongly I never would have written Native America. We need to know these stories, for without comprehending the damage done we can hardly understand that for which we apologize. And without apologies, we cannot even begin to show repentance for the crimes of the past. The Pope has apologized in Canada. I hope it is followed by action, both in Canada and the United States.
As many of you who follow me on social media know, about two weeks ago my uncle passed away. With the help of my cousins and my sister, I wrote an obituary. It was too long for us to be able to afford to post it in the Los Angeles Times (an abbreviated version will appear there in Sunday’s paper), but I wanted to share the whole thing here. It’s been a rough couple of months, people. Stay safe and take care of one another.
James Sayre Sexton was born on November 11, 1944, in Scarsdale, New York, but he lived most of his life in Southern California, where he made many friends and touched many lives.
Jim taught school in Huntington Beach for thirty-five years, at Wintersburg and Valley Vista. He taught English to some of the most damaged children and hard luck cases this country can produce. His colleagues described him as a teacher dedicated and kind, a skilled listener and a committed and creative member of the school community, a perfect colleague and a devoted friend. He was “the quirky teacher who all the kids loved,” “ahead of his time” in the way that he presented new material to his students. He was both colleague and friend to his fellow teachers and was respected and loved by them for those qualities. If you ever told Jim about your family, your life, or your children, he would remember and ask you about them and how they were doing. He was an excellent teacher and was named Huntington Beach’s “Teacher of the Year” in 2004.
Jim taught classes at Los Angeles Harbor College as well–English as a Second Language, basic paragraph writing, composition. Over the course of his long career as an educator, he taught narcotics offenders attempting to turn their lives around, single mothers striving to continue their education, and drop-outs hoping to get past mistakes they made earlier in their lives. He could have chosen an easier path as an educator, but he wanted to help those who needed help the most. He did so with compassion and without judgment. He never doubted the ability of the immigrants, the poor, the cast-offs and those facing enormous challenges to learn and grow as human beings.
Jim collected cars, some of which went very fast but he drove very slow. He designed and built a chrome downhill racing bike, super heavy but super fast. He may have traveled faster on that bike than he ever did in a car he drove. He received a $3000 grant from the Schwinn Corporation to design, develop, and build a bicycle intended to set a land speed record, and in 1978 won the New Mexico State Cycling championship. He loved to tinker, to repair, to replace, and to innovate.
He played with frisbees and yo-yos, and when he was off from work he could sleep until noon. He never cooked, and was a regular at several local restaurants. The staff always looked forward to his visits. He was a good uncle.
He collected animal friends as well. He cared for and fed neighborhood strays, and squirrels and jays, and one really lucky skunk who he must have known was crashing the stray cat party. As in his teaching, he cared for those who, it seemed, so few cared about.
One of these things is not like the other.
Most of all, he collected friends and colleagues who respected him immensely. When Jim wrote the name of a business down in his address book, he made note of the people who waited on or served him, and many of these people came to know him quite well. He was unfailingly generous, curious and kind.
Jim is survived by his sister, Patricia Sexton Oberg, his brother John Sexton, and his nieces and nephew Noreen Ippolito, Christy De Lange, Caron Laird and Michael Oberg, as well as their combined ten children, including his godson Adam Ontiveros-Oberg.
The family requests in lieu of flowers that donations be made in JIm’s name to the CSULB Foundation, the Wounded Warriors Project, the ASPCA, the Planetary Society, and the National Cat Protection Society.
And, like many things one looks forward to from Democratic administrations, it’s a bit of a letdown. If you are a historian who has worked with these sources, and if you have even a passing familiarity with the published scholarship on American Indian Boarding schools, you are unlikely to be surprised by anything that appears in the report’s 100-plus pages. It is a brief document, no more than an a cursory introduction into a vast, complex and important subject. But it’s a start.
Assistant Secretary of the Interior–Indian Affairs Bryan Newland
Produced by Assistant Secretary–Indian Affairs Bryan Newland, the bulk of the report is an institutional overview of American Indian boarding schools and the government policies and programs that implemented, supported, and funded these institutions. The report is divided into nineteen very-brief chapters. The penultimate one includes the “Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Findings and Conclusions.”
The list consists of the following:
The Federal Indian boarding system was expansive, consisting of 408 Federal Indian boarding schools, comprised of 431 specific sites, across 37 states or then-territories, including 21 schools in Alaska and 7 schools in Hawaii.
Multiple generations of American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian children were induced or compelled by the Federal Government to experience the Federal Indian boarding school system, given their political and legal status as Indians and Native Hawaiians.
The twin Federal policy of Indian territorial dispossession and Indian assimilation through Indian education extended beyond the Federal Indian boarding school system, including an identified 1,000+ other Federal and non-Federal institutions including Indian day schools, sanitariums, asylums, orphanages, and stand-alone dormitories that involved education of Indian people, mainly Indian children.
Funding for the Federal Indian boarding school system included both Federal funds through congressional appropriations and funds obtained from Tribal trust accounts for the benefit of Indians and maintained by the United States.
The Federal Indian boarding school system deployed militarized and identity-alteration methodologies to assimilate American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian people—primarily children—through education.
The Federal Indian boarding school system predominately utilized manual labor of American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian children to compensate for the poor conditions of school facilities and lack of financial support from the Federal Government.
The Federal Indian boarding school system discouraged or prevented the use of American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian languages or cultural or religious practices through punishment, including corporal punishment.
Tribal preferences for the possible disinterment or repatriation of remains of children discovered in marked or unmarked burial sites across the Federal Indian boarding school system vary widely. Depending on the religious and cultural practices of an Indian Tribe, Alaska Native Village, or the Native Hawaiian Community, it may prefer to disinter or repatriate any remains of a child discovered across the Federal Indian boarding school system for return to the child’s home territory or to leave the child’s remains undisturbed in its current burial site. Moreover, some burial sites contain human remains or parts of remains of multiple individuals or human remains that were relocated from other burial sites, thereby preventing Tribal and individual identification.
The Federal Government has not provided a forum or opportunity for survivors or descendants of survivors of Federal Indian boarding schools, or their families, to voluntarily detail their experiences in the Federal Indian boarding school system.
Based on that list of conclusions, Secretary Newland recommended that research continue through the “approximately 98.4 million sheets of paper” housed in boxes at the National Archives and other federal agencies. It is an enormous undertaking. The following questions, he suggested, would guide the research:
Approximate the total number of American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian children that attended Federal Indian boarding schools;
Approximate the total number of marked and unmarked burial sites associated with Federal Indian boarding schools;
Locate marked and unmarked burial sites associated with a particular Indian boarding school facility or site, which may later be used to assist in locating unidentified remains of Indian children, Indian Prisoners of War, and Freedmen from the Five Civilized Tribes;
Expand the summary profiles of individual Federal Indian boarding schools;
Detail the health and mortality of Indian children who experienced the Federal Indian boarding school system, which may later be used to develop dataset(s) for analysis of health impacts of Indian boarding school attendance, including an approximate mortality rate for attendees, as the Department was responsible for the health care of American Indians and Alaska Natives until 1954;
Identify documented methodologies and practices used in the Federal Indian boarding school system that discouraged or prevented the use of American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian languages or cultural or religious practices;
Approximate the amount of Federal support, including financial, property, livestock and animals, equipment, and personnel for the Federal Indian boarding school system, recognizing that some records are no longer available;
Approximate the amount of Tribal or individual Indian trust funds held by the United States in trust that were used to support the Federal Indian boarding school system, including to non-Federal entities and, or individuals, recognizing that some records are no longer available;
Identify religious institutions and organizations that have ever received Federal funding in support of the Federal Indian boarding school system;
Identify States that may have ever received Federal funding in support of the Federal Indian boarding school system;
Identify nonprofits, associations, academic institutions, philanthropies, and other organizations that may have received Federal funding in support of the Federal Indian boarding school system;
Confirm additional sites within the Federal Indian boarding school system;
Examine the connection between the use of Federal Indian boarding schools and subsequent systematic foster care and adoption programs to remove Indian children, including the Indian Adoption Project established by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and Child Welfare League of America, that were not repudiated by Congress until the enactment of the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978
The shadow of recent discoveries of unmarked graves in Canada hangs over Newland’s report. He wants to produce a second, much larger report, that determines the locations for all unmarked and marked burial sites connected to federal boarding schools, identify the children buried in these sites, and approximates “a full accounting of Federal support for the Federal Indian boarding school system.”
In addition, Newland recommends that the government undertake efforts to identify living survivors of the boarding schools, document the students’ experiences, “support protection, preservation, reclamation, and co-management of sites across the Federal Indian boarding school system where the Federal Government has jurisdiction over a location.” Newlands wants to see a systematic effort to collect documents and house them at the Department of Interior Library “to preserve centralized Federal expertise on the Federal Indian boarding school system.” Interior should solicit help from other federal agencies which have information on boarding schools, and support non-federal entities that house information as well. Newland recommends congressional action as well: to support or strengthen NAGPRA to prevent sensitive and specific tribal information that may be uncovered as a result of the investigation; to advance legislation encouraging Indigenous language revitalization; to promote public health research on the consequences of the boarding school system; and finally to erect a federal memorial to the children who experienced the federal boarding school system.
There are some laudable goals here. Indian Boarding Schools were institutions that affected many thousands and thousands of Native American people over many generations, over many decades. The subject is vast, the documentary record so enormous as to make a complete accounting of the sort envisioned by Newland in his recommendations a mammoth, generational task. I would encourage this effort. We all should encourage this effort. This report is nothing but a start.
But I would encourage the investigators to remember that there is no more uninteresting and unimportant way to write about educational institutions than to focus on bureaucrats and leaders, policies, proposals and laws. What we need is a history of the students, with proper protections in place to guard privacy. The evidence suggests that the physical and emotional consequences of attending boarding school could be substantial and the damage could be transmitted across the generations.
This is a more difficult story to tell than to write about a “system.” It takes so much more work. It is exhausting to be exhaustive. Doing this work well, I know, can take a toll on the researchers. But we must keep in mind that the federal boarding school system was a haphazard and large network of loosely connected and poorly supervised institutions that acted with little effective federal oversight. The institutions that were part of this system began with a commitment to assimilation and erasure, to incorporating Indigenous young people into the American body politic by eliminating their Indigenous culture, language and religion. One can write a history of schools. One can write about curricula, educators, and federal policy makers. What we need, however, is a history of the Boarding schools from the bottom-up. We must never forget that this is a history that involves thousands of young people placed in an educational system that claimed as its goal cultural genocide.
I have tried to write some of these stories on this blog: I wrote about the lonely death of Carlos Pico, a Mission Indian from California. I have written about some Onondaga and Oneida Carlisle alums who traveled to Europe in 1914 as part of a circus, performing in a variant of a “Wild West” type show before the first World War broke out. Reflecting on Arlette Farge’s wonderful essay, The Allure of the Archives, I wrote about the challenge of reconstructing the lives of ordinary Onondagas who attended Carlisle and other boarding schools. And late last year I wrote a series of posts following all the Carlisle students who passed through one “outing” placement for Native American girls. The first of those posts is right here.
Schools are people. They are teachers (and for those who worked in Boarding Schools we need to learn more) and students.
I have found through my own work that descendants of boarding school students do not often know the entirety of their ancestors’ experience. I have had the opportunity to share with families the stories of their grandparents’ time at Carlisle, for instance, or lesser-studied schools like the Lincoln Institution in Philadelphia. Ten thousand students attended Carlisle, and that is only one of many schools. We need to know about the history of these institutions, but more than that, we need to recover the stories of the young people who attended them. What I am willing to bet is that the results of so enormous a historical undertaking and accounting will show that Indigenous peoples were so much more powerful, as individuals and as members of native nations, than the forces the federal government aimed at their destruction.
