Last week I attended the final public hearing regarding the Horseshoe Solar Development, a proposed solar farm that will be built on lands along the Genesee River that the Seneca Indians consider sacred. The Senecas’ story runs through the pages of Native America. A brief rally preceded the meeting, and at five in the afternoon the meeting began, overseen by an administrative law judge from the State of New York.
I have made my case on this blog as to why I think this development is a bad idea. It will almost certainly destroy archaeological and cultural source material at sites along the Genesee that the Senecas and their ancestors have used for more than two thousand years.
I spoke at the meeting, basically summarizing arguments that I included in an op-ed I published two years ago in a local Livingston County newspaper. I know my words were appreciated by the opponents of the solar development. I listened to the other speakers. Joan Scanlon favored the project. She gave a rambling talk that blew through the five-minute time limit, arguing that “we” need solar “for our children.” Absolutely nobody in the room was arguing that solar was bad. Nobody in the room supported a continued reliance on fossil fuels. Ms. Scanlon was attempting to refute an argument that nobody was making. The Senecas objected not to solar power, but to this particular development because of the damage it might do to lands they deemed sacred.
There were Senecas in the room old enough to remember when the United States constructed the Kinzua Dam over the objections of the Senecas. Before the reservoir flooded a good chunk of the Seneca Nation’s Allegany Reservation, bodies from graveyards were exhumed, and stacked like cordwood in the school yard. Senecas today remember watching this desecration of the dead from their classroom windows. It was a painful thing to experience. They see the Horseshoe project at the site of the Seneca town of Canawaugus in similar terms. Paul Winnie, from Tonawanda, saw the project as genocidal in intent, a destruction of what his people consider sacred. Melissa Smith, also from Tonawanda, was angry. “When you do this to our ancestors,” she said, “I hope it happens to you.” I noticed Ms. Scanlon smirking through five-minute talks that I found powerful and moving. Because destroying Native American graves and looting their burials is as American as apple pie, and white people’s graves are seldom destroyed in the name of progress.
Most of the speakers assumed that the state will approve the project. This hearing was not meaningful consultation, and it was not “a seat at the table.” Nor was it the “informed consent” required by the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. It was, the Mohawk journalist John Kane said, nothing more than “checking a box.” The corporations will get what they want. The sites at Canawaugus will be destroyed. Money always wins. The speeches, in that sense, did not matter much. Many of the opponents of the project assumed that the state had already made up its mind.
I share their views. They are probably right. I am pessimistic, I know, but I fully expect the state agency responsible for authorizing projects such as these to approve the Horseshoe solar project. The State of New York, and the corporate and business interests so incestuously connected to it, have never put the interests of Indigenous peoples first. One of the lessons of history, it seems to me, is to make sure you never get your hopes up. I hate to break it to you, kids, but I call them like I see them. Do not expect right to prevail, because quite often it does not. At least at the outset.
There are a lot of big questions we could talk about about the Horseshoe solar project. The debate over the fate of Canawaugus raises questions, seldom explored closely, about what it is that makes a site “sacred” and who gets to decide. Are all historic sites sacred? If some are and some are not, how ought that determination to be made? It is a big question, worth discussing. We can also talk about the flawed language of 19th and early 20th century anthropology and archaeology that crept into the energy company’s own reports. History, this report assumed, begins when Europeans arrive. Everything before that point is “prehistoric.” Horseshoe Solar’s experts described the sites excavated in the project area as “camps” and “seasonal sites.” Little did they seem to know that Senecas had lived and used the lands at Canawaugus for two millennia, that thousands of Senecas lived their lives, rich and full of meaning there, and that they were more than the sum of these camps and foraging sites. This was an Indigenous town, straddling the routes that moved from east to west and north to south through the Iroquois longhouse. Two of the most important leaders in Seneca history, Red Jacket and Cornplanter, were born at Canawaugus, as well as thousands of other Senecas. There they lived, and there they died. Into the twentieth century amateur pot-hunters were scooping up the remains from Seneca burials.
And then there is this even more painful question. If we cannot win, why play the game? I know. We have to protest. I understand there is a joy in mixing it up with the bad guys. But I am a historian, an employee of the State of New York. I have a book to write. I have classes to teach. I have loads of demands on my time. There is always something else I might be doing. I have never been bored. So this: I could have made the best speech in the history of the world, and I believe it probably would not matter one bit. These folks want a solar development, and they simply do not care what anyone else says.
So why do I bother? Advocating for the rights of Indigenous peoples in the State of New York is like playing tennis against an opponent who can raise and lower the net at will, widen or compress the lines while the ball is in the air. They write the rules, interpret them, and enforce them. I think about this a lot. I have been in this fight for a long time. In precisely one case involving one minor question in twenty-seven years have I been on the winning side. Indigenous peoples and their allies, in the American system, it seems are bound to lose.
I ask my students sometimes why they became interested in history. For some, it’s a simple attraction to the stories. They may have had a high school teacher who moved them with the power of his or her lessons in the classroom. This is a perfectly fine way to get into history. But for others, the stories that interest them connect to a sense that all is not well. They notice that there is a gap between the way things are and the way things ought to be, and they realize that to understand that sometimes yawning chasm requires the disciplinary skills of the historian. These students tend to me more critical in their questions, more skeptical of the stories they are told, better able to read sources with an eye towards bias, self-dealing, and veracity. We historians, after all, learn how to find the bodies. Our training teaches us where to find the receipts. We become adept at smelling rats and we will dig like badgers to find answers to the questions we began with. We act on the assumption that there always is an answer. It might take us a while to find it, and you might try to hide the answers from us. But everything we do is based on the premise that there is, somewhere, an answer and we will find it.
It is true, of course, that the Court system is built on a system of winning and losing. But historians, perhaps, never lose because the game never really ends. We did not find what we needed to find in time to help you with your case, but we can keep digging. And when we retire, die, or walk away, you can bet your bottom dollar that another historian will be bothered by the same question that bothered us, and they will pick up right where we left of. You will never get away from us. That is what I tell myself. Eventually, we will run the bastards down.
And if we never truly lose, that means you will never truly win. You might take a few rounds. Some people I know say that the “winners write history.” But the simple truth is that they don’t, not exclusively. More often than you think, history is written by those bothered by the fact that the winner cheated, or stacked the deck, or brought unfair advantages to the game. Some history is written by students who feel that the winner was a murder, a liar, or a thug. They will revise the story, and cast the winner’s deeds in a new light, one that is disorienting, unflattering, and jarring (I suspect this is why so many Republicans are in a full-blown freak-out about the teaching of history: now, perhaps more than ever, those who speak for the “losers” are calling the winners to account). Someone, someday, will expose the fallacies in these winners’ tales, or challenge their use of evidence, and question the assumptions and biases that informed their work. There may be decades where you feel your story is strong and it will stand, but the historians I know will find you.
An article from a Caledonia Newspaper, July 1894. Thanks to Brandon Burger for bringing this to my attention
So why do we keep at it? It is asking a bird why it flies. Asking questions about the way things are and the way things ought to be—it is what we do. So when you say that this tract of land once belonged to Indians who are no longer there, we may ask how that came to be. Why do Indians no longer own that land? And when you explain it was acquired through treaties, we will dig through those records and show that the proceedings through which the state acquired the lands at Canawaugus were rife with corruption and fraud. We will find out that the treaty was never ratified by the Senate as required under federal law. Our research will show that you are on land that was never legally acquired from the Senecas. And when you say there is nothing of significance at that site, we will show you that this is a racist lie. That white people have ample and abundant evidence of the many burials along the flats of the Genesee. They have been looting them for years. We will challenge all your assumptions. It is in our DNA. We cannot turn it off (If you are not a historian and have watched a movie on a historic topic with a historian, you know how unbearable we can be). Of course we cannot short-circuit this wiring to allow the bastards to win. But there is even more to it than that. We need to go to the records. We need to explore and explain why something bad is happening. We need to make our case. We will become experts. And know, even if we fail to persuade the unpersuadable and close-minded whose interest is in going forward with this destructive project, we will lay the groundwork for those who will follow and expose you for what you are. It would be nice to know that we can do that before the damage they do is too great.
On April 2, Angus Laborgne, a resident of the Haudenosaunee reservation at Akwesasne, was cited by New York Department of Environmental Conservation officers for spearing walleyes in Scriba Creek, near a state fish hatchery. The officers cited Laborgne for taking fish out of season, by “means other than angling,” and from what the state considered “closed waters.” Laborgne had speared twenty-three walleyes, all of which the DEC officers confiscated.
Steve Featherstone’s great reporting on NewYorkUpstate.com, and a friend who regularly keeps abreast of the news in Central New York, brought this story to my attention.
Laborgne’s action, according to John Harmon, the President of the Oneida Lake Association, was a “deliberate provocation.”
Three days later, Laborgne returned, accompanied by fourteen other Haudenosaunee fishermen, “from every single reservation.” They speared even more fish from the same waters. The DEC this time decided to stand down, hoping to deescalate what Featherstone described as “a conflict over a complicated legal gray area involving Native American fishing rights under state law—a long simmering fight that made it as far as the governor’s desk last year.”
Featherstone is referring to a bill vetoed by Governor Kathy Hochul that would have recognized Native Americans’ treaty-guaranteed right to be free from state and local fishing laws except for those cases in which the survival of the species was in question. The DEC implied that Laborgne’s fishing did just that. In a statement the DEC noted that “walleyes are concentrating in certain streams,” and are “vulnerable to over harvest” during spawning season. The DEC claim that it “recognized the importance of walleye as a subsistence and cultural resource for Indigenous nations, and is actively consulting with the leadership of the nine State-Recognized Indigenous Nations to advance our shared conservation objectives.”
Fair enough, but it is worth looking at Laborgne’s argument about his rights to fish, and whether the issue really is as complicated as Featherstone’s reporting suggests.
Mr. Laborgne told Featherstone that “according to what I understand, we have the right to all creeks, and all lakes, and all rivers.” The Haudenosaunee, he continued, are born with this right. He said that he planned to return to Scriba Creek, and he would continue to do so until the State of New York recognized “that this is our inherited right…and we have the right. They didn’t give it to us.”
Laborgne is right.
In order for me to show you how, I will have to persuade you to accept some principles that have long been fundamental to the entire field of American Indian law. First, Native American tribes can do whatever they want unless that activity is specifically prohibited by a treaty or an act of Congress. Second, in 1978, Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist started messing around with this, adding to the principle of “explicit divestiture,” described above, the idea of “implicit divestiture”: Tribes could not exercise those powers that were somehow inconsistent with their status as “domestic dependent nations,” a concept coined by Chief Justice John Marshal 147 years earlier in the case of Cherokee Nation v. Georgia. Tribes, the logic goes, do not give up their sovereign rights as nations that predated the United States unless they do so explicitly. If they did not give away the right or power in question, and if it is not inconsistent with their status as domestic dependent nations, then that power they still possess.
There are a couple of more assumptions I need you to agree to before we move on. Before Europeans arrived in North America, Native American communities had the absolute right to hunt and fish wherever they chose. Thus, unless they specifically gave up that right, through some treaty or some act of Congress, they are still permitted to fish wherever they want.
So let’s talk about the treaties the state and the federal government entered into with the Oneida Indians in New York. The 1784 Treaty of Fort Stanwix protected Oneida land from encroachment, an acknowledgment by the United States of the Oneidas’ assistance in the Patriots’ cause during the American Revolution. In 1785 the state of New York coerced the Oneidas into giving up some of their reserved lands, and in 1788 the state came back for more. The 1788 Treaty is the most important one for our purposes, and we need to talk about it.
First, it is worth exploring how the state went about planning for and negotiating this treaty. I am going to spend some time on this because it is so important. I hope you will bear with me.
It seems reasonably fair to conclude that by 1788, the year in which he met with the Onondagas and Oneidas in New York’s Indian territory, Governor Clinton must have recognized that he presided over a state only nominally under his control. British troops continued to garrison forts at Oswego and Niagara, despite the provisions of the Treaty of Paris that had formally ended the Revolutionary War in 1783. These soldiers would not leave New York until 1795, after Jay’s Treaty had been approved. During the war, two of the eastern counties of the state and part of a third seceded, becoming in the process the independent republic of Vermont. Talk of other parts of the state breaking away occurred commonly enough for James Duane to fear that west of the Hudson “a second Vermont may spring up.” Though the punitive Treaty of Fort Stanwix extinguished Iroquois claims to lands largely to the west of New York, much of the territory in the Empire State remained firmly in Indian hands. Clinton needed those lands for his state. As historian Barbara Graymont pointed, Clinton and his colleagues pursued a three-fold program: They hoped to eliminate “any claim of the United States Congress to sovereignty over Indian affairs in the State of New York”; they wanted to extinguish “the title of the Indians to the soil”; and they were determined to eradicate the sovereign status of the Six Nations.
Doing so would not be an easy task, for New York State was not alone in trying to acquire the lands of the Six Nations. Massachusetts claimed much of the land in what is now New York owing to its colonial charter, which specified no western boundary to its territorial limits. The two states had worked out a compromise at Hartford late in 1786, with the result that New York exercised legal jurisdiction over the lands in question, but the Bay State retained the right of preemption, or first purchase, to Indian lands in upstate New York. Massachusetts promptly sold these preemption rights to two speculators, Oliver Phelps and Nathaniel Gorham who, in July of 1788, concluded a treaty with the refugee Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas and Senecas at Buffalo Creek. Phelps and Gorham acquired nearly 2.6 million acres of Iroquois land in western New York for five thousand dollars and the payment of an annuity to the Indians of five hundred dollars.
In addition to the problems posed by the Phelps-Gorham purchase, Clinton and his associates worried about the activities of the New York Genesee Company of Adventurers, a wealthy and influential group of land barons led by John Livingston. On the 13th of November, 1787, the Livingston Company negotiated a lease with “the Chiefs and Sachems of the Six Nations of Indians.” The sachems “leased” to the Livingston Company, for a term of 999 years, “all that certain Tract or Parcel of Land, commonly called and known by the Name of the Lands of the six Nations of Indians, situate, lying and being in the State of New York, and now in the actual possession of the said Chiefs and Sachems of the Six Nations.” Livingston and his associates agreed to pay to the sachems “the yearly Rent or Sum of Two Thousand Spanish Milled Dollars, in and upon the fourth Day of July.” Two months later, the Company negotiated an additional lease with the Oneidas, “for the said term of nine hundred and ninety-nine years, on a rent reserved for the first year of twelve hundred dollars per annum, until it shall amount to fifteen hundred dollars, of all those lands in the said writing described, as the Tract of Land commonly called and known by the Territory of the Oneida Indians.”
Early in 1788, Governor Clinton and his associates in the State Assembly and Senate undertook a concerted campaign to consolidate their control over the conduct of Indian policy in New York and the disposition of those lands the Iroquois could be persuaded to part with. Clinton and other New Yorkers wanted to acquire Iroquois lands for the settlement of the state’s obligations to its revolutionary war veterans. Without question paying off the state’s obligations to its soldiers was important to Clinton, but as historian Laurence Hauptman has shown, other factors were important as well. The consolidation of state control over its western lands, the development of the state’s economy, and the construction of a state wide transportation system all relied upon New Yorkers first acquiring title to Iroquois lands. The Six Nations were in the way.
Early in 1788 the New York State Assembly invalidated the Genesee Company of Adventurers’ “leases” of Six Nations land. According to a joint resolution approved by the State Senate and Assembly, the leases, by their terms, were for all intents and purposes “purchases of lands, and . . . by the constitution of this State, the said leases are not binding on the said Indians, and are not valid.” They determined that “the force of the State, shall from time to time, as occasion may require, be exerted to prevent intrusions on and for preserving to the people of this state, their rights to the lands and territories comprehended within the boundaries specified in the said leases.”
To prevent problems like that presented by the Genesee Company of Adventurers for the future, the Assembly and Senate on the 26th of February enacted a law “for directing the manner of proving deeds and conveyances to be recorded.” For a purchase of lands to be valid under New York state law, that purchase must be witnessed and recorded and proved “by one or more of the subscribing witnesses to the same, before one of the justices of the supreme court, or a master in chancery, or one of the judges of the court of common pleas in and for the county where such lands and real estate are situated.” Through this enactment, the state tightened its control over the procedures through which land changed hands. Furthermore, the Legislature on the 18th of March approved a law “to punish infractions of that article of the Constitution of this State, prohibiting purchases of lands from the Indians, without the authority and consent of the legislature; and more effectually to provide against intrusions on the unappropriated lands of this State.” No purchases of land from Indians, “within the limits of this State, shall be binding on the said Indians, or deemed valid, unless made under the authority, and with the consent of the Legislature of this State.” Any person who acted without the permission of the Legislature would pay a fine of 100 pounds to the people of New York, “and shall be further punished by fine and imprisonment in the discretion of the court.”
After taking these steps to ensure that no unauthorized parties acquired Indian lands within the state, and after depriving the New York Genesee Company of its ill-gotten gains, Clinton and his allies in the Legislature appointed commissioners to negotiate treaties with the Six Nations. There is, contrary to the claims of the defendants’ experts, no evidence they present that demonstrates that the Iroquois knew that the New York State Legislature had invalidated the Livingston Leases and nothing Clinton or the state commissioners told the Onondagas and Oneidas in the summer of 1788 could have led them to that conclusion.
Map showing the Oneida cession of 1788. Under Article II of the agreement, the Oneidas retained the right to hunt and fish in the entire shaded area. No subsequent treaty every deprived them of that right.
At Fort Schuyler, the governor and the state’s Indian commissioners continuously warned the Indians that their lands remained in jeopardy unless they negotiated with the state. The governor accompanied the state commissioners to Fort Schuyler, formerly Fort Stanwix, where they would meet with as many Indians as could be gathered. The Six Nations, the governor hoped, would “open their ears to the voice of the Great Council of the State of New York,” and meet them to “brighten the Chain and renew the Covenant which had so long bound us together.” Clinton and the commissioners informed the Iroquois that they intended to protect the Indians from the many outside forces that clamored for their land. Deceptively, the governor and the commissioners hoped to exploit the confusion then reigning in Iroquoia, and obtain from the Six Nations an enormous cession of Indian lands.
Governor Clinton appears to have wanted to move quickly. He attempted to rush the proceedings. He informed the Onondaga sachems, for instance, that “the other public business of the State will not permit me to remain long from home and it will therefore be necessary for such of your people as propose to bee at the Treaty to come on with all possible haste or they may be too late.” Though there is no evidence that the Iroquois sachems clearly recognized, understood, or cared about the nature of that “public business,” Clinton indeed had plenty to worry about. New Yorkers overwhelmingly had opposed the new Federal Constitution drawn up at the convention held in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, and the governor (albeit quietly) led the “Antifederalist” forces within his state. Advocates of a stronger national government felt the need to replace the Articles of Confederation for a number of reasons, but the “father of the Constitution,” James Madison, listed high on his list of “Vices of the Political System of the United States” the aggressive Indian policies pursued by several of the states, including New York. Article I, Section 8, of the new Constitution replaced the vague and ambiguous language of Article IX of the Articles of Confederation, with an assertive statement of federal authority over the conduct of Indian affairs: once the Constitution became the “supreme law of the land,” Congress would possess the exclusive authority “to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes.”
New Yorkers had ratified the new constitution, reluctantly, in July, only a few short months before the gathering at Fort Schuyler. When word of the Constitution’s ratification in New Hampshire and Virginia arrived earlier that month, the Antifederalists of New York realized that they no longer could safely oppose the Constitution: the United States would exist under a new and more powerful frame of government. The question posed to the delegates at Poughkeepsie was now no longer whether or not New Yorkers would approve the Constitution, but whether or not they would become a member of the Union now that the requisite number of states had ratified. Complete independence was never considered by New York’s Antifederalists, who recognized that they would soon have to work within the new federal system. Governor Clinton must have felt the need to acquire for New York as much of the Iroquois estate as he could before the new government went into effect, and the rules of Indian diplomacy changed.
New York’s urgent appeal to the Six Nations was received by a people still recovering from the ravages of the Revolutionary War. Although the Oneidas suffered comparatively less than their brothers in the Confederacy, they may have been confused or concerned about Governor Clinton’s intentions. Certainly representatives of the Genesee Company of Adventurers tried to disrupt the proceedings at Fort Schuyler. A Seneca named Onyegat told New York’s Indian commissioners that men from the Genesee Company had told him that “the Governor’s Business at this proposed Treaty is to purchase your Lands, but you have leased them to us. He means to pay you all at once for them, and then in a few Years to drive you off and tell you that you have no Property here.” A Frenchman named Dominique Debarges, a fur trader from Montreal and a Genesee Company agent, along with an Indian named “the Infant,” told sachems on their way to Fort Schuyler that “it will be your Destruction if you go down to the Treaty called by the Governor of New York. I know his intentions,” Debarges continued, and “when you return you’ll have no Place to set your Foot on. You will be like wild beasts which are hunted.” Debarges also told the Indians that “the Governor had his troops collected at German Flatts, ready to fall upon them as soon as they returned.” The Oneidas, as well as the Onondagas, likely heard these rumors; the evidence suggests that the constituent members of the Confederacy regularly shared information and intelligence. That the missionary Samuel Kirkland served as an interpreter at Fort Schuyler could only have further confused the Indians attending the council. The minister and missionary had served as an interpreter at the federal Fort Stanwix Treaty in 1784, and his presence at Fort Schuyler may have done much to grant a veneer of legitimacy to Clinton’s efforts and supported the Governor’s contested claim to represent the only jurisdiction with a legitimate right to negotiate with the Six Nations.
The state commissioners chose to treat with the Onondagas first. The Oneidas returned home, and would not return to Fort Schuyler until the meeting with the Onondagas had been completed. By the middle of September, that business was finished, and the Oneidas returned to the fort.
Speaking through Kirkland, the Oneida spokesman Good Peter responded to the Commissioners’ invitation. He expressed to the Governor and the state’s men his understanding of the purpose of the gathering. Good Peter wanted to protect the Oneidas’ lands. He made clear to Governor Clinton that “in whatever Land we should cede to you, our Warriors should have the Privilege of Hunting and Fishing, and that a Line should be drawn round the Part we should reserve to ourselves to secure it to us and our Posterity.” In essence, Good Peter, like the Onondaga sachem Black Cap, offered to share the bulk of the Oneidas’ lands with the citizens of the state of New York in return for an annual payment. The remainder of their lands the tribe would keep for their own exclusive use.
Governor Clinton told the Oneidas that he desired to protect their lands from the Livingston Adventurers, who “had without any Authority from us, obtained from you a Lease of your Lands.” He had, he said, no interest in buying lands from the Oneidas, for “we have already more lands than we have People to settle on them.” His hope was to set things right, “to meet you at this Council Fire, and by a new agreement place Matters on such a footing as to prevent these Things for the future.” This pleased Good Peter, who responded to the Governor’s speech on the 20th of September. He was happy to hear that the state did not want the Oneidas’ land, and that New York would protect his people from the Livingston Company. “The Wind,” he told Clinton, “seems always to blow and shake this beloved Tree, this Tree of Peace.” Good Peter recalled that in 1784 “the United States” had “Planted the Tree of Peace with four Roots, spreading branches, and beautiful leaves, whose top reached the Heavens.” He feared “that by and by some Twig of this beautiful Tree will be broken off. I Love this Tree of Peace as my Life, and my Protection. I know you love it.” To preserve this peace, Good Peter concluded, the Governor must “punish these disorderly People.”
The point is simple. Throughout his speeches at Fort Schuyler that September, and consistently in his recollections of the treaty four years later, Good Peter believed whole-heartedly that the Oneidas had met with the governor and the state’s Indian commissioners to protect his people from dispossession by the Livingston Company. Indeed, at the close of the council, Good Peter proudly announced to Governor Clinton that “My Nation are now restored to a possession of their Property which they were in danger of having lost.” The 1788 Oneida treaty, Good Peter continued, secured to the Oneidas “so much of our Property which would otherwise have been lost.” Clearly Good Peter would have had no reason to make this statement if he knew, prior to the meeting at Fort Schuyler, that the Livingston leases had been invalidated by the State Legislature.
Here’s something else that treaty did. Even though the deceptive treaty read that the “Oneidas do cede and grant all their lands to the people of the State of New York forever,” with the exception of a small reservation, they reserved for themselves “and their posterity forever…the free right of hunting in every part of the said ceded lands, and of fishing in all the waters within the same.” The Oneidas reserved the right to hunt and fish in all the lands they ostensibly had ceded to the state of New York.
The 1794 Federal treaty of Canandaigua guaranteed the Oneidas and their longhouse kin the right to the “free use and enjoyment” of all their lands. Nothing in that federal treaty deprived them of the reserved fishing rights laid out at the 1788 Fort Schuyler treaty. Nor did any of the numerous land cessions signed by Oneidas in the decades that followed 1788. Not one of these agreements deprived the Oneidas of the right to fish in streams and lakes they ceded to the state in 1788. Those rights remain active still.
Of course the DEC has an interest in preserving walleye, and it is good that the Department recognizes that Haudenosaunee people do. There is reason to hope that this issue might be compromised. But until that compromise takes place—and Governor Hochul’s hostility to the state’s Indigenous peoples leaves me feeling uncertain that it ever will take place—Native Americans are free to exercise the rights guaranteed in their treaties. They are not asking for special privileges. Rather, they are asking that the State of New York honor its word. When it comes to Native Americans, perhaps the time for the state to finally start doing that is now.
Governor Kathy Hochul evidently believes that New York is able to lecture the state’s Indigenous peoples about the sanctity of contracts. She recently used the massive coercive power of the state to enforce an agreement that New York had first violated under her disgraced predecessor. It was a reprehensible display of raw power by the leader of a state government that has, from its inception, viewed the slightest trace of prosperity in Indian Country as a resource ripe for seizure and exploitation.
Governor Hochul recently froze the assets of the Seneca Nation of Indians, extorted from them a sum of several hundred million dollars, and proudly announced that those funds would cover the bulk of the state’s contribution to build a new football stadium for the Buffalo Bills. The Hochul family, because of her husband’s employment, stands to benefit enormously from the new stadium. She froze the Seneca Nation’s accounts because, in her view, they had not paid what they owed to the state and to several counties surrounding Seneca gaming enterprises in western New York. What neither she nor her supporters told you was that the Seneca Nation started withholding its payments when New York State violated its federally required compact with the Nation by allowing a competing gaming operation within the Senecas’ “exclusivity” zone.
I love the Buffalo Bills, but this stinks to high hell.
Let’s be clear. Neither the state nor the federal governments “gave” the Senecas the right to engage in casino gaming. According to the Supreme Court, gaming is a right encompassed within the inherent sovereignty of Native American Nations. What does that mean? Basically, under American law, Native American tribes can exercise any power they choose to exercise, so long as that power is not explicitly prohibited by a treaty or an act of congress, or implicitly prohibited by being somehow inconsistent with their status as “domestic dependent nations.” (Implicit divestiture is a murky concept, that has allowed a lot of state intrusion into the internal affairs of Native American Nations). Late in the 1980s, Congress passed a piece of legislation known as the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, to set the ground rules for Indian gaming. For the most lucrative sorts of games—slots and the table games that most of us associate with casinos—Congress required that Indigenous nations enter a “compact” with the state in which they plan to do business. Many states extract a share of the casino revenue as one part of the agreement. In the Seneca Nation’s case, the state also guaranteed that the Senecas would have an exclusive right to operate gaming facilities in the western part of the state. When the state allowed competing enterprises to open, part of the Cuomo Administration’s ill-conceived plan to effectively tax people who are bad at math, the Senecas justly pointed out that the state violated the compact. Negotiations had been on-going up until the point when Governor Hochul realized she needed a ton of cash to support the Pegulas’ bid to build a new stadium for the Bills. As journalist David Kay Johnston pointed out, that agreement is a loser for taxpayers because the Pegulas easily could afford to construct the stadium themselves.
There is a long history here.
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.
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
Federal Copy of the Treaty of Canandaigua, 1794
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 those provisions in treaties 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. 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, 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
The Two-Row Wampum.
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 depicted two parallel lines on a field of white. The lines represented the Iroquois and their non-native neighbors. They shared the same land, they occupied the same country, but they remained independent and autonomous. The lines did 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 said no.
It is worth reading the statement from Seneca Nation president Matthew Pagels:
“New York’s hostile and shameless greed was laid bare for the world to see yesterday. After intentionally and unnecessarily holding the Seneca people and thousands of Western New Yorkers and families hostage for several days by strangling various bank accounts held by the Seneca Nation and our businesses, Governor Hochul couldn’t contain her excitement to boast about using her Seneca ransom money for a new stadium.
I’m sure that was welcome news to the Governor’s husband, whose company not only operates Video Lottery Terminals within the Seneca Nation’s supposed gaming exclusivity zone with the State’s blessing, but the company will also make millions of dollars in concession business inside the State-owned stadium. And it’s being paid for on the backs of the Seneca Nation. Quite a sweetheart deal.
We see, and we hope the world sees, the Governor’s announcement for what it is — the latest chapter in New York’s long history of mistreatment and taking advantage of Native people. Governor Hochul happily tried to strangle Western New York in order to squeeze every drop of blood she could get from the Seneca Nation.
It is not surprising to the Seneca Nation that the Governor thinks her actions should be applauded as progress. That’s the Albany way. The claims that a new day had dawned in Albany have turned into Groundhog Day — more of the same, just as it’s always been.
The Governor’s new stadium won’t be a product of progress. It will be a monument to Albany’s vindictive desire to punish the Seneca people. Ultimately, it’s something we’re all too familiar with.”
I really admired the work of the historian Calvin Luther Martin. When I was only just beginning my career as a graduate student at Cal State Long Beach in the late 1980s, my adviser directed me to a piece he wrote in The History Teacher, a journal published in the CSULB History Department. It seemed to me an entirely different way of looking at Native American History, one that could free me from the focus on “Indian Policy” that governed much of the historical writing on the subject at the time. Instead of writing about what white people did or did not do to solve a series of “Indian Problems,” Martin focused on Native Peoples themselves, their ways of understanding human and other-than-human beings.At some point I read his Keepers of the Game, and I familiarized myself as well with some of the critiques this award-winning book generated, notably those from the anthropologist J. Shepherd Krech.
As my Master’s thesis neared completion, and I began to seek out Ph.D. programs to which I might apply, I wrote to many historians who were doing what I thought I wanted to do. Though my thesis on the Cherokee Cases bore little resemblance to the work that Martin had done, he responded generously and enthusiastically enough that I sought out an opportunity to meet with him while I visited my parents on the east coast. My folks lived in DC at the time, and Martin, I believe, lived in Baltimore. We met there, and he bought me a very nice lunch. We had a good, and a heavy conversation. I remember feeling out of my league, with a bit of what later might be called “imposter syndrome.” He was super smart. Maybe I was not ready for the big leagues. I cannot remember all that we talked about, but I know I left our conversation with my mind racing, contemplating questions that I had not contemplated before. That’s what we want, right?
I am not certain if I applied to Rutgers, where Martin taught. If I did, I was either admitted with funding inadequate to allow me to attend, or my application was rejected. I went to Syracuse instead, which paid for everything, and where I also met with a very warm reception. But I kept Martin’s work in mind. A couple of years later, after I started my teaching career at the Montana State University at Billings, and where I first taught significant numbers of Native American students, I wrote to thank him for that meeting, and to tell him how his work informed my courses. And for several years after I arrived in Geneseo, I used his The Way of the Human Being as the first reading in my Native American survey course.
For a time, I loved that book.
Students loved that book.
It moved them.
It moved me.
The Way of the Human Being expanded upon themes present in Martin’s earlier work, but also included an autobiographical tale, of Martin’s own disenchantment with academia and his decision, after spending time teaching in Indigenous communities in Alaska, to leave the college classroom and the historical profession altogether. We historians were, he asserted, asking wrong questions that failed to cut to the vibrant and real heart of Native America.
Somehow I came to know that Martin had moved with his wife to Malone, on the northern edge of the Adirondacks way up in New York’s north country. He may have mentioned that in the preface to The Way of the Human Being. One of my students, who found something in that book that spoke to him in a time of great need, called Martin on the phone, and talked with him for several hours. Some time later I wrote to Martin again. I am pretty sure I thanked him for the book. I know I invited him to come to Geneseo to talk with my students. He very politely declined, explained why he did not do that sort of work anymore, and I believe included a copy of his most recent book, a self-published brief work called The Great Forgetting. I read it in one sitting. I never thought of using it in class, but it did reiterate some of the fundamental ideas of The Way of the Human Being. It was simple, powerful, and showed a breadth of reading that I found invigorating. I appreciated what he had to say in this letter. I was still a fan.
I stopped using The Way of the Human Being several years ago. This saddens me, because I have not found a book that so gently clears the deck, so to speak, and opens the students’ eyes to new ways of thinking and knowing and understanding the relationship between human and other-than-human beings in Indigenous America. If you have read the opening chapter to Native America, you will see me trying to fill that void. I felt I had to abandon the book. Some of the people about whom Martin wrote were made-up. He admitted this in the preface, but still, it gave me pause. Indigenous women, who had served prison time in Alaska, were creatures of his imagination, tragic characters created by a non-native writer to describe the dysfunction and difficulty in a community suffering because it was so out of touch with its core beliefs. This made me deeply uncomfortable. There is a long history, after all, of white writers putting words in the mouths of the Indigenous people they write about. This seemed like too great a blurring of fact and fiction, and it raised for me troubling issues about veracity, accuracy and voice in teaching a class on Native American history to mostly first-year students who had learned virtually nothing accurate about Indigenous peoples at earlier points in their educational careers.
One of the people about whom Martin wrote who unquestionably was real was Sergeant Warren Tanner of the Alaska State Troopers. Martin described Tanner sympathetically, a non-Indian law enforcement officer who dealt with the wreckage that came to a community disconnected from the way of the human being. Tanner was compassionate and wise in Martin’s book. He could not have known that Tanner was not all he seemed to be. Tanner later plead guilty to two counts of sexual abuse committed on a minor. That abuse was taking place during the time that Martin lived in Alaska. I get it. People are complicated. But if some of the most important characters in the book are the fictional creations of the author, or a dangerous pedophile, this presented difficulties that rendered the book more trouble than it was worth. The problems with the book began to outweigh the benefits.
Nonetheless, I continued to read what Martin wrote. Some of the essays he posted on his website I found interesting, even when I did not find his arguments persuasive, and even when I dismissed them as existing on some sort of pseudo-scientific fringe. He wrote frequently, for instance, about the dangers of “Big Wind” and the health consequences that could follow from living close to wind turbines. He and his wife spoke and wrote about Wind Turbine Syndrome. I was not convinced, but I had bigger fish to fry. But recently, after I began subscribing to Martin’s blog posts, I found myself deeply troubled and repelled by Martin’s embrace of anti-vaccine arguments in the midst of a lethal pandemic had has killed more than 620,000 Americans.
IT HAS BEEN A ROUGH EIGHTEEN MONTHS FOR MANY OF US. I understand that millions of people have it worse than me. I have come to accept that I can say this and also say that it has been bad for me, too. My mom, in a rehab facility in March of 2020, suffered a serious stroke at the outset of all this suffering, and the isolation required to combat the virus doubtless limited her prospects for recovery. All of us got sick late last year, the disease likely brought home from one of our kids who worked on the medical front lines in a local hospital. We made it through, but I would not wish Covid on my worst enemy. The pandemic has not hurt us financially, as it has hurt so many others, but otherwise this has been, and remains, difficult. I so want this suffering and madness to end.
Just before I picked up a pencil to being drafting this post, I drove by a crowd of people outside a local strip mall protesting possible vaccine requirements. Vaccines should be a personal choice, the signs said, and these protestors said that they did not want to be unwilling subjects in a corporate medical trial. They were not terribly happy about masks, either. A couple of weeks ago, I was visiting a friend in Long Beach. One of his roommates was not vaccinated. Not putting any of that crap in his body, he said, as he ate shrink-wrapped, grocery store sushi.
I am not an expert on vaccines. I will not claim, as Martin does, to have any expertise in immunology. But I trust the family doctor I have seen for twenty years, and I do know that we live in a country with enough vaccines for everybody, that vaccination has been delayed by unreasoned and emotional opposition, and that this passage of time has allowed the virus to develop new “variants” that are especially contagious. I see no reason to doubt that additional variants are going to develop, and that they could do even more damage. Vaccines, in my view, are not a personal choice. They are an obligation placed on anyone who wants to live in community with others in a civil society. Like the cigarette smokers of the 1980s and 1990s who insisted on their right to smoke anywhere, and the slaveowners who insisted on the right to carry their human property wherever they wanted, Anti-Vaxxers care about nobody but themselves and the small circle of people who share their beliefs. They engage in science-talk and rights-talk to justify what is, in my view, their toxic selfishness. And there are just enough of these lethal fools in this country to ensure that nobody is safe.
I thought it would be chickenshit to write this post without reaching out to Martin. I posted a comment on his website, respecting the request to “please be polite.” I wrote that
“I have respected your work for a very long time. But I have no wish to engage with this turn towards ‘Anti-vax.’ The costs of the past 18 months have been too great, for myself, my family, my friends and neighbors. The decision by too many Americans to not vaccinate has had lethal consequences.”
I told Martin that I was done. I had no wish to read his newsletter any longer. Maybe I was not as polite as I might have been. I will take the blame for that.
Martin’s response came swiftly. He wrote that he refused to “countenance Covid and vaccine fascism, especially when I have graduate credentials (2.5 years at the Ph.D. level) in the subject and I’m married to an MD.” He told me to get as many jabs as I wanted, but said
“don’t lecture me in a subject you know nothing about: that’s offensive and frankly stupid. Call me an anti-vaxxer if you wish; that is, flatten this into epithets. Should I then call you a fascist fool? That gets us nowhere.”
No. It doesn’t.
Martin mentioned that he read the peer-reviewed literature. He asked, rhetorically, if I had read that scholarship and if I could understand it. He mentioned that he was going to delete me from his mailing list, which I appreciated, and said that “it’s time to stand up to people like you who think you’re being virtuous in forcing this insanity on the rest of us.” He closed with eight pointed words: “I find you frightening. Respectfully, we are done.”
Not virtuous, and not frightening. Afraid of getting sick again to be sure. And exhausted by eighteen months of suffering.
I thanked him for taking the time to respond. I acknowledged our disagreement. It was probably a mistake to have replied, for he wasn’t done. He urged me to read the scientific literature. And, he wrote, “don’t think for a moment that you can foist this on the rest of us.” He told me that I am ignorant, that I should keep my ignorance to myself and not “turn it into mandated genocide, which is what this is.”
Like a lot of historians, I like to argue. I like to debate. Like a lot of people, I do not like being insulted. How did I feel at the end of this exchange? Not angry. Not hurt. Just really, really disappointed.
THERE WAS A POINT IN TIME when Calvin Luther Martin wrote books and articles that I valued and from which I learned a great deal. For a time, I loved The Way of the Human Being. Now, he writes words that I find dangerous, hysterical, a little unhinged. I am not certain if I am the only historian who has grown really attached to a book, only to cast it aside after a long reconsideration. Those of you who are historians will remember the job we did in readings courses, where our professors carefully tossed a well-chosen book into the middle of the pit to watch us tear it to shreds. We were hardly sentimental about the work of others. The tone of Martin’s reply to my messages did not bother me. What bothered me was the trajectory he had followed over these many decades. This, as I said above, saddened me. The ideas he expresses now–and I base this on the advice of the medical professionals I know and trust—I believe have actively endangered me, my elderly parents, and my family, including my youngest child, too young still for the vaccine. People change. I know that. Some of us get cranky, forgetful, embittered, or embarrassing. Some of us after searching for so long find ourselves. We come to a place of contentment and calm, with quiet hearts. And some of us cast off the real world altogether. Let us not judge, I tell myself. Respect the burdens people carry, rather than criticize how they carry them. I tell myself this as well. I shake my head. Time to change the channel, I thought. Time to walk away. I am okay with that.
In the wake of the deadly attack on the Capitol building by a right-wing mob last week, I have found some of the rhetoric used by those who have condemned the attack as troubling as that used by those who provoked and encouraged it in the first place.
I was not surprised by what I witnessed last Wednesday. Many of our leaders, however, seemed absolutely shocked that a large group of violent imbeciles and cosplaying Punishers could assault this “beacon of liberty.”
Does anyone believe this anymore? While the Capitol dome certainly stands as a symbol of American power, that power has been deployed in the name of democracy far less often than many of our leaders seem to believe. The right-wing, racist violence we witnessed on Wednesday is as American as apple pie. Using violence to protect white power and white privilege is one of the things in which American lead the world, along side women’s basketball and incarcerating people of color.
The historian-turned-pundit Jill Lepore said in an interview on WBUR
Time to Go Off The Grid.
that the events in Washington that left her feeling “speechless” were the sorts of things that occurred in other countries, not the United States. It was unfamiliar. “We are,” she said, “off the grid of the trajectory of American history.”
That is a mess of a sentence, but if it means what I think it means, I have to most adamantly disagree. No, Professor Lepore. What we saw on Wednesday was entirely consistent with American history. And from that trajectory and that grid, I swear to God I want off. That the United States is a nation committed to liberty and equality is the biggest lie in American history. Until we face that fact and address it in a meaningful way there is little hope for change.
This country was founded by treasure-seeking storm-troopers who carried with them across the Atlantic guns, avarice, steel and European religious bigotry. They enslaved and subjugated Indigenous peoples. The settlers who followed them came not for freedom but to extract a living from the soil. Whatever wealth they acquired was almost always built
Americans Preparing for a Frank Discussion of Their History
upon the backs of millions of enslaved peoples who worked lands stripped away from their Indigenous occupiers at the point of a gun. There are many stories one might tell about Early America. Most of them are filled with exploitation, intolerance, violence, and greed.
It took a Civil War that killed more than 600,000 people to eradicate slavery, but in its aftermath Southerners and their conciliatory enablers rushed to reconstruct institutions that replicated the restrictions on African-Americans that stood before the war. Meanwhile, the armed forces of the United States continued to march against native peoples who refused to surrender their lives, liberties, and property to the United States.
Look around you. The United States, with less than five percent of the world’s population, is home to a quarter of its people who live their lives behind bars. When most Americans think about Indigenous peoples at all, they conjure images from the past. Few are willing to consider or are aware of the challenges these communities face today, and fewer still are willing to do anything to help.
On the same day that we learned that a stunning, multicultural coalition had elected the first Jew and the first African American to represent Georgia in the Senate, an armed white mob cried foul and stormed the United States Capitol, because they lost what all the evidence shows was a fair and free election. Those who stormed the capitol did not need to fear the inadequate police forces garrisoning the building. They knew, in their lizard brains, that law enforcement in this country too often and in too many ways acts to uphold white supremacy. They feared nothing. For that reason, among others, Wednesday’s violence was so depressing. Not because it was surprising or a new low, but because it was so familiar and so entirely predictable.
When I began my teaching career in Montana in 1994 I found myself often feeling homesick. I had left all of my graduate school friends behind in New York, and my family remained in California. I did not know anyone in Montana yet, and I could already tell that my department was a colossal dumpster fire. I was lonely. Sometimes, at night, I drove my car up on to the Rimrocks that loomed above the city of Billings. There I could tune in to KNX News Radio, a powerful AM station from Los Angeles. It came in pretty clearly. I could hear about what the Dodgers were up to, the frequent traffic reports, and the weather back home. Connections, you know? We find them where we can.
Montana seemed like a foreign country to me. No metropolitan area (if you can call Billings “metropolitan”) is as far from another metropolitan area as Billings. I felt isolated. The music, the food, and the people I cared about–it all seemed very far away.
So I threw myself into my teaching. I had a heavy load, including one section each of the early and recent US History surveys every single semester. I had a lot to do. I felt more tired than I did when I was preparing for my comprehensive exams. What’s more, there was the surprise of teaching a methodology course my first semester. Underprepared, I asked the students to write about a historical event that they remembered with particular vividness. I wanted to talk about matters of memory, and how we measure the historical “significance” of this or that event.
There was one student sitting in the front row. A bit older than his peers. Shocking, white supremacist tattoos appeared on his arms. This was the 90s. Tattoos were still relatively rare. And I had never seen someone with swastikas on their arms before in real life, sitting right in front of me. This student would, by the end of the semester, write a paper about Jacob Thorkelson, a one-term Congressman from Montana who was elected in 1938. Thorkelson was a rabid anti-Semite, and avowedly pro-Nazi. This student clearly looked up to Thorkelson.
All that was to come. In his first essay, this student described hearing of the death of the “Freedom Fighters” in Waco while sitting in a federal penitentiary in Minnesota. It was an effective opening. I’ll give him that. I was hooked. I wanted to read more.
Waco, of course, was the site of the raid by federal authorities on the Branch Davidian compound commanded by a messianic and well-armed rapist and lunatic named David Koresh. Koresh and his followers set fire to the compound rather than surrender, and 76 of his followers died.
My student wrote this seven months before the Oklahoma City Bombing, and I was entirely unfamiliar with this sort heavily-armed, High Plains, Right-wing nuttiness. It was a fringe view even in Montana. But it did not take long to stumble across this frightened, angry, and racist rhetoric–on weak AM radio stations, especially, broadcast over the sparse landscape of Eastern Montana. I was surprised by the number of my students who believed some truly vile things. But it was the fringe.
Montana is beautiful. There are things about it that I miss. I would love to visit it again. I met some fascinating people. I never expected that the sort of conspiratorial insanity I heard on the High Plains of eastern Montana would move to the mainstream of the Republican Party under Donald Trump. And though this dim-witted tyrant and bully will soon lope off the national stage, I have no doubt that the sort of violent, racist, civic illiteracy that has fueled Trumpism is alive and well. Feed Trump a diet rich in fresh greens instead of Big Macs, and slap an Ivy League law degree on him and a larger vocabulary, and you get something looking and sounding a lot like Josh Hawley.
In the morning before the assault on the nation’s Capitol building, I taught my students about the Paxton Boys. It is a story that really pulls at me. A group of racist thugs, in defiance of authorities who had no interest in standing in their way, murdered peaceful Christian Indians. They killed small children with hatchets, and they mutilated the bodies afterwards. Later that day, while listening in on an AHA Panel featuring the great Tisa Wenger, I received a text from a friend telling me to drop what I was doing and turn on the TV. Another mob, this time determined to disfranchise millions of American peoples of color by throwing out their votes, while carrying symbols of white supremacy, stormed the Senate and house chambers. Two mobs, both racist and violent, both utterly and undeniably American.
We are not special. Our body politic is badly diseased. See how we are.
Or unmotivated, or an under-achiever, or “not interested in school.” I was all those things. I am pretty certain I did not know what the SAT was until I became a college professor and that I did not understand its gate-keeping and corporate-enriching function until I became the parent of a high school student. I certainly never took it. I did not even realize until later that I barely graduated from high school. Some of my family insisted I go to my high school graduation because they expected it would be my last.
I showed them.
Yes.
You can call me Doctor.
And here’s the thing: I was precisely the sort of student who Dr. Jill Biden would have helped. People like Dr. Jill Biden motivated me to make my way through school, to find my calling, to succeed. And I needed that. I needed it when at Ventura College. At Cal State. Even at Syracuse, where I earned my Ph. D. It was not a solo effort. I needed a lot of help.
Because it turns out that when you do not do well in high school, don’t take the SAT, and don’t build relationships with the people who might write for you letters of recommendation, lots of doors close. You will have to work harder than your peers who were either more privileged or more adept at making important life decisions while teenagers. And sometimes you can with remarkable ease dig yourself a hole from which it is very difficult to escape.
One door that remained open for me was the junior college less than a mile from my folks’ house. I am pretty sure the school took anyone who applied, and I could walk there. It was cheaper than the four year college. I could have learned a trade there, had I wished. I could knock off some of the required courses needed should I choose to transfer to the Cal State system. Most importantly, I could learn what it meant to be student, to take learning seriously, and how to succeed. That did not happen by itself. It was because of the people I encountered at that school
I can name more of the teachers from whom I took courses at Ventura College than I can for my undergraduate years at Cal State Long Beach, where I ultimately transferred. I can remember more distinct moments in the classroom from VC than I can from CSULB. None of the teachers I had at the junior college had Ph.D. degrees. None of them had the Ed.D degree that so many of Dr. Biden’s creepy and sexist critics have maligned. As far as I can tell, they all had Master’s degrees and none of them every wrote a book or published any path-breaking research. And while I was there as a student? I can guarantee you that I never thought for one second, “I wonder what degree my teacher has and from where they got it.” Never dawned on me at that time that this was something that mattered.
Those teachers, by helping me learn how to think, and teaching me that learning was, among many things a discipline, changed my life.
In my reasonably affluent neighborhood, I see so many cars with college stickers on the back window. Parents take pride in their kids attending Yale, Duke, Northwestern, or Cornell. I often see stickers for my own college, which for years has been thought of as something akin to the poor man’s Swarthmore. I do not see stickers for the “less prestigious'” universities and for community colleges. That is unfortunate.
One quick glance at the leadership of the Republican Party, for instance, will teach you that legions of idiots and jackasses have flourished in and graduated from Ivy League colleges. While some will tell you that the United States has the best system of higher education in the world, it would be foolish to deny that it is expensive, elitist, and frequently out of reach for too many people. The cost of college continues to sky rocket. Even at the public schools I attended as an undergraduate and beginning graduate student, dwindling state support for higher education has caused the cost of attendance to soar.
My first teaching job was at Montana State University-Billings. When I was there in the mid-1990s, the average age of the students was slightly above 27 years. I was teaching my peers. The school served many “non-traditional” students who in Montana and many parts of the country are hardly non-traditional at all. My students commuted from the Crow Reservation, or they were coming back to school after raising a family or a divorce or after a business failure or an at-work injury. Some had done their time in the armed forces and were looking for what came next. Some had careened from one misfortune to another but finally seemed ready to make a move. Some had not cared about school but now, finally, had decided to go. I miss teaching older students.
Many of these students, according to the logic upon which we still too often rely, were not “well-prepared” for college. They had “deficiencies” that needed “remediation” and sometimes support services. Many of these students flunked courses, or they came for a semester before taking the next semester off. Almost none of them graduated in four years. I am embarrassed to say that, starting out, fresh out of Syracuse, I sometimes lamented that these students did not seem to have any background knowledge. I was wrong to think that way. You see in higher education we too often blame the victims: we are college professors, after all, and we have no obligation to teach those who cannot be taught. If the student, for whatever reason, does not have the skills to succeed in college, they are out of luck. Some college students just are not good enough and they will flunk out. It is almost seen as inevitable. My wife and her friends, inner-city elementary school teachers all, laugh at what they see as our snobbishness. If only we had the option of choosing our students, they say, and viewing the difficult ones as unfortunate and expendable. They have to teach everyone who walks or crawls in the door.
The guy on the right writes for THE NATIONAL REVIEW
The attacks on Dr. Biden are so distasteful. They are sexist and elitist, of course. They are the sort of thing the dude who Elle dumped in “Legally Blonde” would say. But more than that, in their sneering contempt for public higher education and, most of all, community colleges, they cast the teachers who teach there and the students who study there as unworthy, as people whose educations count for less than theirs. No empathy. No sense that different people follow different paths, and that not everyone has it so easy. If only they could spend some time on these campuses. If they were honest they would see that the work of thousands of educators like Dr. Biden is so much more valuable and important than their stupid, key-jangling opinion pieces.
Last night officials at the Federal Penitentiary in Terre Haute executed Lezmond Mitchell for a brutal crime committed half his lifetime ago. The 38-year-old was the only Native American on federal death row, and the fourth person killed by the government since the Trump Administration resumed executions after a hiatus of nearly two decades.
Mitchell was convicted of a truly horrifying double homicide. In 2001, according to the New York Times, Mitchell and three others “plotted to carjack a vehicle to use in an armed robbery. Mr. Mitchell and Johnny Orsinger, his 16-year-old accomplice, killed Alyce Slim and her granddaughter, before decapitating them and disposing of the bodies in a shallow hole. Three days later, Mr. Mitchell and two others robbed a trading post on the Navajo Reservation, using Mrs. Slim’s pickup truck.”
There are problems with this case. Because both Mitchell and his victim were Navajos, the crime fell under federal jurisdiction because of the 1885 Major Crimes Act, an important piece of legislation that played a role as well in the Supreme Court’s recent decision in McGirt. Mitchell was arrested and held in a tribal jail for nearly a month. Without an attorney present, FBI agents interrogated him. They brought him before the court only after he had confessed. Mitchell’s confession was never recorded and in his only recorded statement, said that he had no direct role in the slayings. The jury also learned little of Mitchell’s tragic life story: the horrors of intergenerational trauma, drug abuse, and mental illness. Only one Navajo sat on the jury.
Now here is where things get complicated. As the New York Times put it, “the Federal Death Penalty Act of 1994 allowed tribes to opt in to the death penalty, and nearly all—including the Navajo Nation—have opted out. But Mr. Mitchell was convicted of a federal crime to which the tribal option did not apply, ‘carjacking resulting in death.’” The federal prosecutors understood that Mitchell’s accomplice was the primary assailant, but he was 16, and ineligible for capital punishment. Mitchell, just twenty, took the bulk of the blame and faced execution if convicted. Had he been tried for murder, he could not have been executed; the carjacking charge was a federal government workaround by a Justice Department that wanted to prosecute a capital crime. Navajo officials repeatedly called upon the government to commute Mitchell’s sentence to life in prison without the possibility of parole, as the government had done in twenty other murder cases.
Lezmond Mitchell is dead. As Carl Slater, a delegate to the Navajo Nation Council put it in an op-ed piece in the New York Times, “this case remains the only time in the history of the modern death penalty that the federal government has sought capital punishment over tribal objection for a crime committed on tribal land.” This judicial murder was a violation of the government’s promises to Native peoples under the Federal Death Penalty Act. It was, as Slater pointed out, a “grave injustice.” It is also proof that the federal government is a large and mighty beast, and that steps forward like the decision in McGirt are nearly always followed by steps backward.
The Major Crimes Act of 1885 amounted to the imposition of colonial control over native nations. When the Supreme Court upheld its constitutionality a year later, it acknowledged that the Constitution contained no language granting to the United States the power to prosecute crimes between Indians committed on the lands of a Native nation. As a result, it justified this action on the basis of federal strength and the relative weakness of Native peoples. Echoing the language of John Marshall’s decision in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831), the Court held that “these Indian tribes are the wards of the nation.
These Indian tribes are wards of the nation. They are communities dependent on the United States. Dependent largely for their daily food. Dependent for their political rights. They owe no allegiance to the States, and receive from them no protection. Because of local ill feeling, the people of the States where they are found are often their deadliest enemies. From their very weakness and helplessness, so largely due t the course of dealing of the Federal Government with them and the treaties in which it has been promised, there arises the duty of protection, and with it the power.
The 1994 act tempered federal power over Native nations when it came to the imposition of penalties for Major Crimes. It accorded Native nations the power to determine who would face capital punishment for crimes committed on Indian reservations. It was a pledge that tribes, in this very constrained circumstance, could choose to follow their own values. In Lezond Mitchell’s case, the Federal Government turned its back on that promise.
This past Thursday, the Onondaga Nation issued a statement on the notorious statue of Christopher Columbus located in Columbus Circle in downtown Syracuse. They did so at the invitation of a Syracuse Inter-Faith Commission, and as a contribution to the 23-member panel that will issue recommendations to the mayor about what to do by the end of the summer. The Onondaga Nation’s statement is worth your time and attention.
The Nation expressed their hope that “through diplomacy, discussion, and open minds, these discussions will lead to a positive solution for the future of Syracuse with inclusion for all people to live in peace as neighbors and brothers.” They looked forward to “an outcome that will encourage peace, understanding, and the united brotherhood exemplifying the foundation of cooperation, peace, and equality for the generations yet to come.” They reminded Syracusans that the city stood in the heart of what was once their homeland, the site of the central council fire of the Haudenosaunee, and that the Onondaga Nation “carries a great responsibility in the continued existence of our sovereign government.” The Nation’s “traditional teachings are morally dignified and highly principled in peace and democracy and our way of life means being ever thankful for the many gifts of our mother earth. We are,” the statement reads, “people culturally mandated to respectfully live as caretakers of Mother Earth and as equals to all beings within the natural realm.” Anyone who knows anything about the history of Syracuse knows that the City and its people have seldom lived up to these ideals.
The statement struck a conciliatory and diplomatic tone in addressing the City’s Italian-American community, which has raised money to keep the Columbus statue right where it is.
We fully understand the wishes of the Italian American community to honor their heritage, but it is burdensome for the people of Onondaga to see Christopher Columbus memorialized with a statue. Within our lands and hearts, finding equality and peace is difficult knowing the hardships our ancestors endured as a consequence of his campaign. Our own monuments, beautiful lakes, streams, rivers, and the earth itself, has suffered greatly as a direct result principle of the Doctrine of Discovery to which Columbus used to claim the lands in the name of the Spanish crown.
The power of the pen favors the writers of history. In truth, what was “discovered” on this continent we know as Turtle Island were well established independent nations of indigenous peoples. People living within their respected ways of life in accordance with their individual cultures. As indigenous people, we are taught of the exploits of Columbus while our own history was being unheard, misunderstood, and often erased.
The Onondagas thought it best that the statue be removed. The space it occupies might be repurposed to better ends.
At this crucial time in our joint history with the need for unity and compassion at hand, we ask ourselves is honoring the heritage of the Columbus righteous and just? Should we continue to ignore all the different peoples who suffered enumerable atrocities? We think not. We know we are not responsible for the transgressions of our ancestors, but it is never the wrong time to do the right thing. The Onondaga Nation does not wish anyone’s culture or heritage to be affronted in the manner ours have suffered; but to find a way to allow the space currently occupied by the Columbus statue to be reinvented and reenergized into a symbol of unity for all.
The statement concludes with a call to find a good mind, to come together and find a consensus and a solution “in which all the peoples who call Syracuse home may find a way to continue to honor each other’s heritage and cultures.”
There is a lot going on in this document. Columbus appears in it as both myth and symbol, as something more than a historical figure. I have written about this “mythical Columbus,” and the functions these myths serve, on this blog in the past. For Italian-Americans Columbus serves as a symbol of freedom and a hero whose experience shows that Italians are important in American history, and that Italians were present at the very creation of the American Nation. In reality, we know that Columbus was an aggressive slaver who never set foot in North America. For Native peoples, Columbus is made to stand in for all the burdens suffered by Indigenous peoples. To the Onondagas’ charge that Columbus was responsible for “the hardships our ancestors endured as a consequence of his campaign,” a historian might argue that Columbus never came close to the Longhouse. He did nothing to you, and neither to “the lakes, streams, rivers, and to the earth himself.” Those who followed him did loads of damage, but that is a longer and more complicated story. “The Doctrine of Discovery,” which according to the Onondaga Nation Statement “Columbus used to claim the lands in the name of the Spanish Crown,” was as much a justification for colonization drawn up centuries later than it was license for empire: Indigenous peoples paid no attention to papal bulls and colonial charters, and the European “Ceremonies of Possession,” as historian Patrica Seed called them, were performed for other Europeans, not native peoples. The work of colonization was brutal and violent, but the process in North America especially was a remarkably unintellectual process. The Doctrine of Discovery mattered little on the ground in the Americas, where Native peoples retained the power to ignore it. Indeed one can find many instances of Haudenosaunee orators dressing down Europeans and their pretentious claims to discovery and conquest.
But there is a problem with these arguments. One of the things that has struck me as I have worked on a history of the Onondaga Nation is the Nation’s willingness and ability to speak for Indigenous America writ large, and to have Native North America listen. The Onondagas always have carried more influence than their relatively small numbers would lead one to believe. And for the Onondagas and their allies, the problem with the Columbus statue in Syracuse is precisely the things he has come to symbolize for all Indigenous peoples: the well-documented and undeniable brutality of European colonization, and a campaign erasure, violence, and exploitation that has lasted centuries, from 1492 to the present. With its feet on the heads of Indigenous peoples with Plains Indian Headdresses, and with its friezes depicting Columbus as both hero and conqueror, the statue is a grotesque and graphic celebration of five hundred years’ of genocide, and an white-washing of the viciousness of the Columbian Encounter in the Caribbean.
The Onondagas would like to see the statue removed. They are not alone in this. But they spoke to the people of Syracuse as neighbors. They acknowledged the position of the city’s Italian-American community. But in terms similar to what has been done with the Skä۰noñh Great Law of Peace Center, which repurposed an old living-history museum representing the Jesuits called Ste. Marie Among the Iroquois, the Onondagas spoke of working together in a unified manner to give new meaning to the space occupied by the Columbus statue, to allow it to “be reinvented and reenergized into a symbol of unity for all.”
When the Onondagas filed their “land rights action” more than fifteen years ago, they stated their wish to “bring about a healing between themselves and all others who live in this region that has been the homeland of the Onondaga Nation since the dawn of time.” At a time when groups like Upstate Citizens for Equality were ginning up white peoples’ fears of being dispossessed by Native Americans in Cayuga and Oneida territory, the Nation made clear that it wanted justice and an acknowledgment of their rights to the lands taken in violation of United States law, but that “we will not displace any of our neighbors—the Onondaga know all too well the pain of being forced to leave our homes and do not wish that on anyone.”
There is a long history informing the Onondaga Nation statement. In its demonstration of the Nation’s leaders’ diplomatic skill, and the tactfulness with which the Nation’s leaders assert their will, and in its call for cooperatively defining and sharing space, it echoes themes that run throughout the long history of the Onondaga Nation, and especially in its relations to the non-Indigenous community of what has become over time Central New York. In the relationship between Syracuse and the Onondagas over many, many years, the Onondagas have often been been better neighbors to the City than the City has been to them. The City has expressed a willingness to listen, but acting on what it hears might be difficult. There are many who want the statue preserved. Let’s hope that the Mayor’s commission approaches its work with a good mind, and a desire to be good neighbors to the Onondaga Nation.
During his visit to Arizona at the beginning of May, President Donald Trump took some time out to comment on his administration’s efforts to help the state’s large Native American population combat the Coronavirus pandemic and, as he put it, to bring attention to “the unprecedented actions my administration has taken to support our treasured Native American communities.” The President said that his administration has improved “the lives of Native American families and tribes more than any administration has done by far.”
That is quite a claim, and it’s not supported by the evidence.
Trump touted the eight billion dollars Congress appropriated to assist American Indian nations, which he claimed, “is the largest single investment in Indian Country in our history.” The President announced as well that the Navajo Nation will receive an additional $600 million in assistance. “That’s a lot,” he said. Trump then asked, according to the White House transcript of the meeting, “Should I renegotiate that? Can we renegotiate that? (Laughter).” “Only if you go up,” said Navajo Nation Vice President Myron Lizer.
Lizer can be forgiven for not laughing. As of May 28th, the Navajo Nation had suffered more than 5000 active cases of COVID-19, and 167 deaths, and the third-highest per capita rate of infection in the Country.
“Since I took office,” Trump continued, “my administration has also worked to repatriate precious Native American artifacts, to protect children in the care of the Indian Health Service, and to make eagle remains more easily accessible for cultural and religious purposes, and to highlight the contributions of Native American veterans throughout the history of our nation.” None of the items on this list are unprecedented, and all are required by laws that predated Trump’s election in 2016.
Make no mistake, Trump’s presidency has been mostly bad for Native Americans. His racist name-calling directed at Elizabeth Warren reinforced damaging stereotypes about Native American identity. Within days of taking office, he authorized completion of the Dakota Access Pipeline and ignored the protestors at Standing Rock, and rolled back protections on sacred sites like the Bears Ears National Monument. His fetish for Andrew Jackson has bothered those who know anything at all about that president’s record concerning Native America, and Trump’s budgets have imposed cuts on the Indian Health Service at a time when additional funding was badly needed. In fact, the $800 billion in funding has been tied up in court as tribes have clashed with the nation on who should receive the payments. He has ignored the problem of police violence towards Native Americans. The President has been more talk than action, and those actions are usually bad.
With one exception.
In November of 2019, the President signed an Executive Order establishing a task force “on Missing and Murdered American Indian and Alaska Natives,” charged with consulting tribal governments “on the scope and nature of the issues” related to missing and murdered women and girls, developing “model protocols and procedures to apply to new and unsolved cases of missing or murdered persons in American Indian and Alaska Native communities,” as well as the “establishment of a multi-disciplinary, multi-jurisdictional team” including representatives from tribal law enforcement agencies and the federal Departments of Justice and Interior.
Dubbed “Operation Lady Justice,” the task force held consultation/listening sessions in January and February of this year but had to shelve the rest of its schedule, which was to have run through the end of July, because of the coronavirus pandemic.
This is a serious problem. According to the Centers for Disease Control found that 49 percent of Native American women have experienced sexual violence. The Department of Justice reported that 34.1 percent of Native American women will be raped during their lifetime, more than for any other ethnic or racial grouping. As President Trump indicated when he signed the Executive order, “the statistics are sobering and heartbreaking.” He said that “more than 5,000 Native American women and girls were reported missing,” and though the majority return home or are found, “too many are still missing and their whereabouts are unknown—and they usually don’t find them.”
It was this task force about which he spoke during his visit to Arizona. He issued a proclamation making May 5th “Missing and Murdered American Indians and Alaska Natives Awareness Day.”
Many of these missing women have been caught in a web of human trafficking, the exact breadth of the problem unknown. It is a problem of great magnitude but hazy borders. In this sense, the President’s effort to bring additional attention to this issue is welcome. More resources are needed. Nearly half of tribal law enforcement agencies who responded to a Government Accountability Office called for the information reported that they believe human trafficking is occurring on tribal lands within their jurisdictions. The President can educate Americans about the problem of missing and murdered women and girls.
These are crimes on the margins. Native communities are poor. They are isolated. The Supreme Court has made the prosecution of non-Indians by tribal law enforcement officers difficult where it is not impossible. Native American history is a story of tragedy, violence, crime, theft, and plunder. It is, at other times, a story of blundering goodwill. Even those who want to do right often do damage. But the harm is not inevitable, and nations, like individuals, have choices. In this one instance, the President and his handlers have made the right one. The Task Force is still on schedule to report to the President sometime after the election. Let’s hope, whatever the outcome in November, that this important first step is not one wasted.
