As Americans commemorate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, we should be aware that the American Revolution did not just pit colonists against Great Britain. It also set off a land rush here in New York. After the Revolution, much of the state was acquired from Native people through treaties that involved coercion, bribery, and deception, that violated federal law, and that included protections for Native people that no government has acted to enforce. Two hundred years ago, New York employed all these tactics in an 1826 treaty with the Seneca. In this year of commemoration, it is worth reflecting upon how an Indigenous homeland became New York State.
The Senecas were the westernmost and most powerful of the Six Nations who together made up the League of the Iroquois, or the Haudenosaunee, who once dominated much of what became New York State. Two decades after the Declaration of Independence, despite a military invasion and epidemics of disease, much of western New York remained in Seneca hands, and the United States in 1794 recognized their right to the “free use and enjoyment of these lands.” They lost much of their land in a treaty negotiated in 1797 that granted the Senecas a dozen reservations in western New York. In the early 1800s, however, a politically connected syndicate known as the Ogden Land Company acquired the right to purchase these from the Senecas, if they could be convinced to sell.
The Ogdens took a no holds barred approach. “The Savage,” David Ogden had said in 1819, “must and ought to yield to the civilized state.” Yet the Senecas successfully resisted the Ogden Company’s efforts, and by the 1820s had adjusted well to reservation life. Seneca farmers, one observer noted, “not only for their own subsistence but sell considerable to white people.” Senecas erected sawmills, cut trees, hauled the logs to the Allegany River, and rafted the unmilled logs downstream to western Pennsylvania. As with the sale of their agricultural produce, Seneca timbermen participated in a complex regional economy. The Senecas were getting by.
It may seem surprising, then, that the Senecas ceded more than one-third of their remaining lands at an 1826 conference held in Buffalo with the Ogden Company, overseen by state and federal officials. But the sale did not represent the wishes of the majority of the Senecas. They and their supporters immediately contested the treaty’s legality and morality. Many of those who had signed it, they testified, feared that if they did not sell out they would lose their lands to squatters who the state did not effectively police. Some were offered bribes to sign the treaty. Others believed that after this cession the Ogden Company would leave the Senecas in peace upon their remaining lands. Still others told President John Quincy Adams that the interpreters at the council had threatened them with removal if they refused to sell. This evidence delayed the treaty’s consideration by the Senate. When it voted on ratification, the Senate split twenty to twenty, which did not meet the 2/3 vote required for ratification of a treaty. But the federal government did nothing more, and acquiesced in a fraudulent treaty that carved a huge gash of territory out of the Seneca estate and violated the very terms that the federal government dictated for acquitting Indian land.
Indigenous land sales typically involved elements both of choice and coercion. Indians could not afford to ignore the efforts of their white neighbors to purchase their lands. It is in this light that we ought to view the several treaties and deeds which representatives of the Seneca nation signed in the half-century after the Revolution. If the Senecas refused to sell their land, they faced losing them outright to the squatters, outlaws, and speculators who regularly exploited the weakness of government on the frontier.
The unratified treaty of 1826, which violated the rules the United States established under the Constitution, exemplifies the fundamental importance of Indigenous dispossession to New York State and the American nation. The dispossession of New York’s Indigenous peoples was not inevitable. It was not part of God’s “Manifest Destiny.” It was a choice. It was big business, and in this case it was a crime. New York became the “Empire State” through a systematic program of Indigenous dispossession that repeatedly violated the laws of the United States, and even when it adhered to the threadbare rules designed to oversee the process, violated the standards of truth, honesty, and justice that Americans would like to think they stand for. What Haudenosaunee peoples lost, New York gained. Only by remembering these injustices in this year of commemoration can we move closer to reconciliation and justice.
I have some news to share with you about the Geneseo Center for Local and Municipal History. I feel like I did some good work, but it is time for me to step away and focus on other things. Frankly, I give up. The Center, really, was my office. We did a lot, but we did not have any meaningful support from the upper administration at my college and at the SUNY HQ.
Last Super Sunday, I was scheduled to speak at a conference in Albany, sponsored by the SUNY system. It was called Public Good U: Strengthening the Case for Public Higher Education. If you read my blog, or have spoken with me for more than a few minutes, you know how strongly I feel about the importance of supporting public higher ed. Foul weather prevented me from making the trip. It snowed heavily the night before, and all along the route, and I would have had to leave Rochester at 4AM to pick up a student in Geneseo and make it to Albany in time. It was too risky. But the truth is that my heart was not in it. The storm was a relief. I have become demoralized, and I am ready for something else. I will continue to teach and write at Geneseo, a school that I love, but I am going to let go of my heavy local history commitments. Call it a strategic withdrawal in the name of preserving peace of mind. It has nothing to do with any of you.
I came up with the idea for a Geneseo Center for Local and Municipal History in the fall of 2018. I did so with the support of colleagues in my department at the college. It all began humbly—a small grant of about $850, and then a luncheon meeting in February of 2019 attended by about 75 people, to discuss the development of a program that would place students in the offices of government-appointed historians to work on local history projects. Some of you were there. We parted that afternoon enthusiastic about the possibilities, but daunted by the challenges.
I was excited. I was energized. I know that some of you were, too. I wanted this to work. The program began, entirely by coincidence, during the 100th anniversary of New York’s Government-Appointed Historians Law, enacted in 1919 to commemorate, in part, the state’s young men slaughtered in the First World War. Only Connecticut has a similar statute on the books. Under state law, New York requires every municipality to have an official historian. When you do the math, that comes out to one historian for each of the five boroughs of New York City, 12 Community Historians in Manhattan, 62 city historians, 932 town historians, and 544 village historians. Add to that the 62 county historians, the scores of small historical societies, and the dozens of small archives, collections, and history museums, and you have the foundation for a vibrant local history community.
Some of these local historians are more active than others. Some have more resources at their disposal. A huge percentage of them serve as volunteers. Many of them are retirees, doing work they love with great enthusiasm in the name of preserving their community’s past. To varying degrees, they coordinate their efforts, and meet together to discuss common interests and concerns, like the meeting of the Government Appointed Historians of Western New York (GAHWNY) or the Association of Public Historians in New York State (APHNYS). I attend occasionally. It is a hodge-podge, with a thousand moving parts, but the work they do is exciting and important.
I had never written a grant proposal before I began this work. Turns out, I had a knack for it. We received a small grant from the Rochester Area Community Foundation that allowed me to employ several Geneseo history majors in the construction of a website telling the Indigenous story of Geneseo. With the help of my friends and colleagues in the college’s grants office–Anne Baldwin, Sue Rubright, Sheila McCart, and Betsy Colon–I then brought in a nice chunk of money from the National Endowment for the Humanities that allowed me, for a time, to employ a director for the Center. Dr. Joel Helfrich did some amazing work with Geneseo students. Then I received a much larger grant from the Robert David Lion Gardiner Foundation on Long Island. We established the Robert David Lion Gardiner Semiquincentennial Summer Fellowship Program, placing students in local historians’ offices to work on projects connected to the 250th Anniversary of American Independence. It was a truly unique program. We provided well-paying fellowships to students from Geneseo, to be sure, but also Canisius, Albany, Brooklyn College, Potsdam, New Paltz, Cornell, and Stony Brook University. Between these two programs we paid 71 students to return to their hometowns and perform work that was important to their communities and that was, for some of them, a life-changing experience. Two of the students wrote books! I worked with such great professors at my partner institutions: Ben Carp, Jon Parmenter, Sheila McIntyre, Tom Baker, Maeve Kane and Rich Bailey all stand out. I met some fantastic local historians doing such important work. In addition to these 71 students, I oversaw dozens of directed studies and internships where students examined the history of their hometowns, honed their research skills, and answered important questions about their community’s past. We worked through a global pandemic. I am immensely proud of the work these students did, and I got to see and learn so much.
Those of you who worked with us, I am sure, will get that. It was good work and it is vital, in my view, for the health of the republic. At a time when our nation is governed by a tyrant at war with the entire historical enterprise, an enemy of facts and tough questions, this work is more important than ever.
At the Albany conference, I wanted to show off the work of the Gardiner fellows. But I also intended to say that while I welcome SUNY’s recent embrace of the importance of civic education and creating colleges that serve the public good, it’s all eyewash without system support. If I am going to make the case for strengthening public higher education, the most significant obstacle I have to overcome is SUNY Central and the Chancellor’s office, which in its allocation of the money appropriated by the state legislature is making budgeting decisions that are strangling colleges like mine and literally killing the sorts of programs that enriched the education of scores of students.
The Gardiner Foundation Semiquincentennial Summer Fellowship, as a program operated at Geneseo, will be coming to an end this year because drastic budget cuts have left us unable to contribute the matching funds required by our funder. I will continue to work with Gardiner, as a consultant, on a new program. It will be headed by a Rochester non-profit that is interested in civic education. The lesson, I hope, is clear, and it truly pains me to write these words: It is easier for me to provide high impact and meaningful educational experiences to students in SUNY by working with a non-profit outside of SUNY than trying to do something on campus.
Indeed, we have another civic education program which we were in line to have funded by the Teagle Foundation—Students in Geneseo’s American Cornerstones Project would spend two semesters on campus during the freshman year reading significant works in the American civic tradition, examining themes of equality and inequality, freedom and unfreedom, community and individualism, and citizenship and exclusion. Then, over the summer, they would go home, work with local historians and write or otherwise produce a work that looks at one or more of these themes in their community. Our funder was enthusiastic. We were, she said, the only college in the United States doing this. Geneseo was truly unique. We have had to withdraw from a grant competition that would surely have provided us $300,000 to implement this program because budget cuts have left us with too few faculty to effectively operate it.
This is such important work. It is, I believe, so important. I hope that SUNY will someday put its money where its mouth is when it comes to civic education and creating colleges that serve the public good. It takes money to bring in money, and it is such a worthwhile investment. We literally changed students’ lives. I know those of you who participated understand that.
But I cannot continue to throw hours of work into an effort at a college where I could get no meaningful support or publicity from the President’s office, in a university system that seems committed to destroying colleges like mine. The institution, a wise friend once told me, will not love you back. Some of you, my friends and fellow historians, have been so supportive and so encouraging. Your enthusiasm and recognition of the importance of the work we do was exhilarating. It kept me going. And students, I learned so much from you. Really. The two weeks I spent each summer visiting you and the historians with whom you worked was a blast. I have never had as much fun doing history. You energized me. There is spot for you all in my heart, and I so wish the work could continue.
I am not stepping away from local history entirely. My next book will be a detailed history of the Sullivan-Clinton campaign against the Iroquois in 1779. Native American history, I long have argued, is local history. Furthermore, in my capacity as the vice-president of the Rochester Historical Society, I will work with my fabulous colleagues on the board to revive and revitalize an institution that has been allowed to slip into disrepair and irrelevance. I think we are going to make a difference. I will keep writing, and continue to visit local history sites. And, when and where I am able, I will continue to push SUNY’s leadership to support all its colleges, not just the big four universities. This work has been a lot of fun. I am sorry to see it come to an end, but I cannot continue. Local history is important. It matters. You matter, and your story matters.
In January of 1846 Lewis Henry Morgan, soon to become the well-known ethnographer and a founding father of the field of anthropology, began a journey from his Rochester home south along the Genesee River. He visited friends along the way, collecting from them Indian “relicts” they had dug up to add to his already-considerable collection.
In the Genesee Valley town of Lima (pronounced like the bean, and not the Peruvian capital), Morgan stayed with William Brown, who told him about the three skeletons he recently had found on his farm, buried in a sitting posture, facing each other as if seated at the three corners of a triangle.
This bothered Morgan, for he had been told just eleven months before by the Onondaga sachem Captain Frost that Iroquois peoples never buried their dead in a seated posture. A contemporary of Morgan’s described Captain Frost as a man “of noble character, fervid eloquence, and unimpeachable integrity.” There was no one “as well-versed as he in the genius and policy of the ancient government and the conducting of good councils and in the practice and celebration of Indian rites.” Forced to choose between believing Captain Frost or William Brown, however, Morgan concluded that in this instance the Onondaga sachem must have been mistaken.
Morgan’s short travel account is fascinating. It shows us a man, interested in Indian “antiquities,” scooping up arrowheads, spear points, mortars, pipes, and human remains nearly everywhere he went in the aboriginal homeland of the Senecas. One could not disturb the soil, it seemed, without finding evidence that should have led to one obvious conclusion: that the part of New York where I live and work, the Genesee Valley, developed and grew into the Empire State only because of a systematic program of Haudenosaunee dispossession. White New Yorkers could not move a stone without uncovering reminders of the people from whom their own ancestors had taken the land.
IF YOU LIKE HORROR MOVIES, you are probably familiar with the old trope of the “Indian Burial Ground.” White people move into an area, treat the land and the human remains buried beneath it with disrespect, and bad things start to happen. In the movies there are frightening consequences. In real life, white Americans have built their towns, cities, and states on Indigenous homelands with nary a thought. They are interested in the Native American past only to the point where that history begins to cost them something. Americans have prospered precisely because they dispossessed Indigenous Americans. We think little of the soil beneath our feet. The sins we forget and the sins we ignore will never be forgiven.
I HAVE THOUGHT ABOUT THE BURDENS AND OBLIGATIONS of the past quite a bit during this horrifying year. For all sorts of bad reasons, it has been a “historic” year, of course. Developments in my own work, however, have forced me to think more than I have previously about how the past can impose upon us a responsibility to set things right. Early in this pandemic season I became aware of a planned solar development for the site of Canawaugus, the Seneca town where important leaders like Red Jacket, Cornplanter, and Handsome Lake were born. Canawaugus avoided destruction by the Continental soldiers George Washington sent on a scorched earth campaign against the Iroquois in 1779, and it remained in Seneca hands as a reservation after the disastrous Big Tree treaty of 1797. White farmers worked the lands surrounding Canawaugus. Nearby towns, like Avon, grew up along the Genesee. Canawaugus slipped from the Senecas’ hands finally in 1826 in a corrupt bargain that violated the laws of the United States and that never received the required Senate ratification.
Then came this past summer the Supreme Court’s surprising decision in McGirt v. Oklahoma. There is a lot going on in the Court’s decision. The key point, included in Justice Neal Gorsuch’s majority opinion, is that reservations remain Indian land until Congress acts explicitly to declare that they are not. The passage of time could not eliminate a reservation, nor could illegal seizures of reservation land. This seemed to offer a means to challenge the 1826 transaction that took from the Senecas Canawaugus, their other lands scattered about the Genesee Valley, and big chunks of their reservations at Tonawanda, Buffalo Creek, Allegany, and Cattaraugus. The McGirt decision could lead one to believe that that vast amounts of land in western New York remain Seneca reservation land.
When the legitimacy of the title to lands that non-Indigenous New Yorkers claim is called into question, what must non-native people do? When history shows that what white New Yorkers have gained has come at the considerable expense of the Senecas and their longhouse kin, and when it is obvious that white Americans did not bother to follow the rules they established to facilitate that dispossession and grant to it a veneer of legitimacy, is there an obligation to set things right? Morally? Ethically? Historically?
Maybe you are familiar with Ibram Kendi’s recent book, How To Be An Antiracist. Kendi points out that to claim that you are not a racist, that you “don’t have a racist bone in your body,” is simply not enough. Racism is structural and systemic. Defeating it requires action, engagement, and commitment. If you lament racism, but do nothing, you help the racists. Kendi’s book speaks clearly and undeniably to those who recoiled from the Black Lives Matter protests that took place in cities and towns across the country earlier this year as too disruptive. It addressed realities made plain after the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. But it speaks as well to the legacy of dispossession. You cannot claim your hands are clean when you live on stolen land.
My college has committed itself to becoming an antiracist institution. Discussions have begun on how to make that happen. The campus community has focused thus far on Black Lives Matter and police brutality. These are current events and our focus here is understandable, especially after the police killing of Daniel Prude in March in nearby Rochester. I am glad we are doing this. But what about the Senecas, and the peoples of the Longhouse generally? What are we called upon to do to set matters right?
I teach at a college, after all, that stands on Native American land, the site of the largest Indigenous town in all of what ultimately became New York State. The college itself is located in a town founded by a man heavily invested in the notorious Ogden Land Company, for whom no practice was too foul to effect the goal of acquiring the Seneca reservations that remained after Big Tree. The illegal transaction of 1826 was the handiwork of the Ogden Company, as was the disgraceful Buffalo Creek Treaty of 1838, arguably the most crooked treaty in the history of the United States. The town of Geneseo, meanwhile, is the seat of Livingston County, named after the patriot leader who signed the Declaration of Independence. Follow the Livingston family tree up its branches and down to its roots and you will find Iroquois dispossession. My point here is clear. Our college could not exist were it not for Iroquois dispossession. If we truly want to commit ourselves to anti-racism, what are we going to do in the face of that extraordinarily well-documented history?
I am skeptical that we are ready and willing to carry the burden of anti-racism when it comes to Indigenous peoples. We fly a Haudenosaunee flag in the Student Union in a hallway where the flags of all our foreign students fly. I pushed for this for two years, and was pleased when the flag finally went up. Most Haudenosaunee people see themselves as members of polities apart and separate from the United States, and they deserved a place here, I felt . Still, as time has passed it increasingly bothers me as an
I know. I don’t see it either.
entirely inadequate gesture, for Haudenosaunee peoples are hardly “foreign” to New York State. They were here from the very beginning. The Haudenosaunee flag also stands on the stage during commencement and at other campus events. The campus community voted to commemorate Indigenous Peoples’ Day in place of Columbus Day, but we’ve done it so very quietly it’s as if we do not want anyone to notice. We do a territorial acknowledgment, but we do so in rooms where almost no native peoples are present.
I have raised these issues in the past. I get sympathetic nods. People tell me they are thankful that I raised these important issues. Little action has taken place.
So what do we do? We could fly the Haudenosaunee flag on the college flagpole, at the college’s main entrance, announcing publicly that we recognize our college stands on Indigenous soil. Improvement in curricula of K-12 social studies is badly needed. We could push for these essential reforms. We could do more to make sure our own students learn about the Indigenous history of the region in which they live. These gestures would cost us little. We could build this into the campus orientation. We could do more to remind students of the events that happened around them, and how it is that we came to name buildings on our campus after Red Jacket and Mary Jemison, and the Wadsworth family as well. Maybe it is time to consider renaming Wadsworth Auditorium.
We need to do more. We could make tuition, room and board free for Haudenosaunee students. We could do that for the cost of some of the SUNY system’s Division I sports programs. To the folks who say Division I sports is a primary vehicle for recruiting students of color to SUNY, I say that our problems then are deeper than you think, our commitment to diversity and equity more ineffective than even I had supposed. We could hire faculty from Haudenosaunee communities. We are in the midst of a terrible economic crisis–on our campus and in terms of our state funding–but if it is important we could make it happen. At the end of the day it is a choice.
We are not alone in wrestling with these questions of enormous consequence. Numerous stories about the complicated connection between Indigenous dispossession across North America and the creation of the nation’s land-grant universities have provoked important and painful discussions. My friend Jon Parmenter at Cornell is doing important research on the Morrill Act and his university’s connection to nineteenth-century dispossession. On some campuses, like Cornell, the awareness of this past has led to concrete steps to set things right.
SUNY and the State of New York should join in these discussions. The state and the university system owns a lot of land. Perhaps we the people could take steps to return some of that land to those from whom it was taken. We should, at least, invite the members of Haudenosaunee communities to come to our campus, to engage in a dialogue, where we listen and learn from them what in their view it will take to set things right.
Because
I teach a first year writing seminar at my college on the history of the
Carlisle Boarding School, I have spent a fair amount of time reckoning with the
words and deeds of Colonel Richard Henry Pratt, the Indian’s school’s founder
and chief propagandist.
The
school’s history fascinates me. In my
own research on the history of the Onondaga Nation, I have followed those who
attended the school through its records and reconstructed their lives as much
as the evidence permits. Like my
students, I make use of the digitized school records available at the Carlisle
Indian School Digital Resource Center.
One
thing I have not done is visit Yale’s Beinecke Library, where Pratt’s personal papers are housed. I have read his published writings, and in
them I find it difficult to detect any self-doubt, any questioning, of the
school’s fundamental premise: to best prepare Native American men and women for
citizenship and participation in the American body politic and economic system,
they must be removed from their homes and educated away from the
reservation.
Pratt was quite explicit about
this. The attachments of home generated
a powerful pull. Even boarding schools located on reservations could not work,
Pratt believed, because the sights, sounds, and scents of home provided a
powerful distraction. Best to remove the
students entirely. Speaking to a gathering
of Baptist ministers, Pratt said that “In Indian Civilization, I am a Baptist,
because I believe in immersing the Indians in our civilization and when we get
them under holding them until they are thoroughly soaked.” Because of his tendency to make statements
like these, scholars and the interested public describe the boarding schools as
brutal institutions. Pratt, they say,
acted with genocidal intent. He said,
indeed, that he hoped to “kill the Indian,” and save the man.
There is no doubt that there was
cruelty, brutality and short-sightedness.
There was coldness and callousness and inattention. Some students resisted. One of my students is working on a paper I
very much look forward to reading on firestarters, girls who set fires at
Carlisle and were expelled. Yet the
graveyard at the school contains the bodies of students who died far from home,
the victims, in Calvin Luther Martin’s phrase, of “blundering goodwill.” Efforts are underway to repatriate some of
these children, to return their bodies to their homelands. There are stories at
Carlisle to melt a historian’s heart.
At the same time, we historians
generally find simple morality tales uninteresting, because the past is always
more complicated. For example, I
recently reviewed a book by a historian named Keith Burich about the Thomas Indian School in New York, located on the Seneca Nation’s
Cattaraugus Reservation. Thomas was open for a century, from the 1850s to the
1950s. There are people alive today who
attended Thomas. The consequences of the
school’s treatment of Iroquois children, Burich writes, were horrific. The school’s policies and its approach
created in the students “a state of dependency and perpetual childhood that
guaranteed the students’ inability to adjust to life outside the institution.” Arriving at Thomas from families broken by
the forces of colonialism, “the same ‘pathologies’ that landed them at
Thomas—poverty, divorce, alcohol abuse, and domestic violence—followed them
when they left, ensuring that there would be future generations of Thomas students.”
Yet the evidence that Burich provides
suggests that he may not be attuned enough to the school’s ambivalent legacy.
The Mohawk Andrew Herne, disappointed by the public school opportunities at
home, hitchhiked to Thomas to enroll.
Burich points out that for many of the children, “Thomas provided a far
better educational opportunity than the public schools on or near their
respective reservations.” The Seneca
Arthur Nephew remembered the school as the best part of his life. “We were taken care of, we had shelter, we
had food, we had medical care, we had all kinds of recreation, and all kind of
trades we could learn,” he wrote. Thus it appears that Burich’s claim that the
school left children “unable to survive outside an institutional setting where every
aspect of their lives was dictated and controlled by the institution” is an
oversimplification at best, that underestimates the resilience and toughness of
Iroquois families and children. His claim that the school left its students
shattered in self-esteem and “unable to adjust to life after Thomas” seems
inadequately supported and, indeed, contradicted by some of the evidence he
presents. There was suffering to be sure, as Iroquois people have pointed
out. But there was more to Thomas than
that.
And Carlisle, too.
Pratt left Carlisle in 1904. Robert
Utley, who wrote the introduction to the University of Oklahoma Press edition
of Pratt’s From
Battlefield to Classroom
said that the school’s founder “retired.”
Technically that is correct. But Pratt left under duress, and a number
of powerful critics of the entire off-reservation boarding school enterprise
had emerged in the early twentieth century, most notably Francis Leupp, who served
as Teddy Roosevelt’s Commissioner of Indian Affairs.
Utley said that Pratt retired to
Rochester, New York, where I live. Other sources say the same thing. The
Rochester Public Library has done an incredible job of digitizing its local
history resources, so I set off in search of the retired Colonel Pratt. His name does not appear in any of the
published city directories, nor does that of his wife or any
of his children. I asked friends for
help, and I followed some other leads, but still no luck. Where was Colonel
Pratt? I did not know, and I worried that Utley might have been wrong.
I am fairly certain that if I had
limitless time and limitless resources, and no family and no need to do things
other than history, I could have made the trip over to New Haven. I bet there are answers there about Pratt’s
time in Rochester. But I don’t, and I
couldn’t, so I didn’t, and the staff at Yale did not answer my email queries.
I poked around a bit more and I
found what I was looking for in the newspapers.
Pratt had daughters, and they married. It did not take long to figure
out that his son-in-law Edward M. Hawkins lived in Rochester, on Highland
Avenue, a five-minute bicycle ride from where I live (I know. I tried it).
I am not sure how much time Pratt
spent in town, but he was in Rochester often. In retirement he spoke out
against the Indian Bureau, and the “ethnologists” whose work informed the
critiques of Pratt’s program for Carlisle.
Long after off-reservation boarding schools had fallen out of favor, he
continued to champion the entire effort as worthwhile and significant. He was
proud of Carlisle, and he seems to have kept in touch with former students and
even attended a reunion of former Carlisle students in 1913 in Akron, New York,
near the Tonawanda Seneca Nation.
Just a couple of dozen Tonawandas attended Carlisle. More than three hundred went to Thomas. Of those who went to Carlisle their experiences seem to have mirrored those of other Haudenosaunee people who attended the boarding school. Some appreciated their time at the school and expressed their gratitude to Pratt and to his successors as superintendent. Daisie Doctor Snyder, for instance, in 1907 expressed her regret that she would not be able to return to Carlisle for that year’s commencement ceremony. She missed “Dear Old Carlisle,” and wrote that “I only hope this Commencement will surpass all others, and that the out going class are prepared to stand the hard knocks of the cold world and to fight a hard battle for the right and also to still uplift our race. Rosalie Doctor Poodry invited the administrators at Carlisle to visit her at her handsome, two-story frame house in Basom, New York, and said that she would love to send her children to Carlisle someday. She sent the superintendent a postcard,
with a photograph of the house. The baby, a little girl named Marion, had
died a few weeks before she mailed the card, and Rosalie understandably still
was broken up. As much as she looked
forward to reading the school newspapers that she received in the mail, she
asked that they not say anything about her dead child.
Rosalie
Doctor Poodry’s letter was intimate and revealing. Other Tonawandas told the
school what they were up to, but did not share too much more than that. Hiram Moses was farming forty-five acres of
reservation land, and working when needed on the state highway. He attended the Presbyterian church on the
reservation. Joseph Poodry lived in Buffalo. He worked at the Pierce Arrow plant there,
and managed the Seneca Indian baseball team.
Others
said little about their time at the school, chose not to keep in touch, and did
not reply to the school’s questionnaires.
Many of them returned to the reservation and lived lives that would have
differed little from what they might have experienced had they never gone away
to school Some succeeded, and attributed
their successes to what they learned at Carlisle. Others did not do so well. Perhaps their hardships stemmed from the
dislocation caused by the years they spent away, or the difficulties they faced
in reintegrating themselves into the community after they returned.
Yet
despite the boarding school experience, the criticism of their culture they
routinely listened to there, and their years away from home, Tonawanda remained
an indigenous homeland. Despite the
efforts of the state to break up their lands and dispossess them, a story the
Tonawandas knew all too well, they remained native peoples. And they asserted this, publicly and
frequently, in ways that Pratt could not have missed.
Colonel
Pratt is one of the villains in Native American history. He spoke of eliminating Native American
cultures, and carried out his policies, for a time, with the enthusiastic
support of American officials. But if he really believed the erasure of Indian
identity was an attainable goal, he could not have missed the reality that he
failed spectacularly. His legacy is
ambiguous, and defies easy categorization.
Every year, Tonawanda Senecas came into Rochester. I am pretty certain they were in town when Pratt was there, too. The Tonawandas went to Maplewood Park, one of the city’s popular gathering places. They set up a stage. They advertised their gathering in the papers, and the press attended and described what they saw. The Tonawandas routinely adopted and granted names to powerful white men, like Mayor Hiram Edgerton, in this photo housed in the collections of the Rochester Museum and Science Center. And as white Rochesterians gathered, and watched Indian
teams play baseball and demonstrate their lacrosse skills, and as they purchased the baskets and other items of craft produced by Tonawanda Seneca women, the Tonawandas danced.
The men wore ribbon shirts and their gustoweh. Women wore their calico dresses, their moccasins. They dressed in the traditional attire of Haudenosaunee people, with a few Plains-style feather headdresses thrown in for good measure. I like to think that Pratt, if he was in town, would have attended. He liked native peoples, after all, and liked to meet with former students. And in front of him, and white audiences who easily imagined that native peoples were part of the past, and who supported the allotment of their lands, the dissolution of aboriginal culture, and the erasure of their language, they gathered in the center of Rochester. They danced, and they proceeded to proclaim that they were still here, and that here they would remain. They were supposed to have been gone long before. If warfare or the dispossession of the nineteenth century didn’t get them, assuredly they would disappear as the century progressed. But here they were, in the middle of an important industrial city, announcing to all who cared to watch that anything the forces of colonialism might throw at them, they would survive as native peoples.
Under state
law, New York requires every municipality to have an official historian. When
you do the math, that comes out to one historian for each of the five boroughs
of New York City, 12 Community Historians in Manhattan, 62 city historians, 932
town historians, and 544 village historians.
Add to that the 62 county historians, the scores of small historical
societies, and the dozens of small archives, collections, and history museums,
and you have the foundation for a vibrant local history community.
Some of these local historians are
more active than others. Some have more resources at their disposal. A huge
percentage of them serve as volunteers. Many of them are retirees, doing work
they love with great enthusiasm in the name of preserving their community’s
past. To varying degrees, they
coordinate their efforts, and meet together to discuss common interests and
concerns, like the meeting of the Government Appointed Historians of Western
New York (GAHWNY)
I attended last fall. It is a hodge-podge, with a thousand moving parts, but
the work they do is exciting and important.
And largely separate from the work
we do as academic historians. That
reality has become increasingly clear to me over the course of this past year,
as I began to survey the public history landscape in New York State. It is a
shame. The academic history community
has largely ignored local historians.
And as I began to meet local historians, and talk with them, it struck
me that we in the academy could be doing so much more, and that we had
overlooked an extraordinarily valuable community of historians doing
extraordinarily valuable work.
Why
not, then, form a partnership between local historians and my college that
could benefit us all—students at our college interested in history or museum
studies, the public history community, and those in the general public with an
interest in history? Why not form a
center to encourage interest in state history at the local level? That’s what we are trying to do at Geneseo—a Center
for Local and Municipal History– and our first steps will take place on
February 16th.
Encouraging a partnership between
our college and the local history community will certainly benefit our
students. Teaching is not an attractive
career path for all of our students, and the withered state of the academic job
market makes it difficult for us to encourage even the most talented to pursue
graduate training in history. Our
students find work in a host of fields, and I believe firmly that history
students emerge from our college with the skills to prosper in a variety of
fields.
Still,
history itself, as a discipline, is changing.
Museum studies is a dynamic and creative field. The broad expanse of the “digital humanities”
is bringing innovation to historical research, publishing, archival work, and
public education. Thanks to the creative
teaching of my colleague Yvonne Seale (@YvonneSeale) and other members of the
Geneseo community, our students have the opportunity to learn these versatile
digital skills. Our students, I believe,
can provide important assistance to resource-starved local and municipal historians. Our students will benefit from the
opportunity to deploy their skills in a real-world setting and local historians
will benefit from the assistance our students can offer.
But
there is more to it than that.
The
New
York State K-12 Social Studies Framework places no emphasis on local
history. As a result, too many New Yorkers know too little about the history of
the communities in which they live. I
suspect that this problem is not unique to New York State. The American
Association of Colleges and Universities, which in part has funded
our local history initiative, argues that “in this turbulent and dynamic
century, our nation’s diverse democracy and interdependent global community
require a more informed, engaged, and socially responsible citizenry.” This
sort of civic engagement and civic learning, I would argue, can occur in a more
meaningful manner when our friends and neighbors know who and what and where
they are in terms of connection to a certain location in place and time. How did we get here? Why is our community the
way it is? What is the source of the challenges we face as members of
communities? How can we confront those
challenges effectively, and what have we tried before. These questions are fundamentally historical.
If
you read the news, and follow developments across the political spectrum, you
will note that many Americans, regardless of their political affiliation, or
whether they live in the inner city, the suburbs or in rural New York, feel
disconnected, like outcasts. Rootlessness. When we teach people about their own
history, their own place, we teach them, at least in part, that their stories
matter. It may not be enough for us any longer merely to remember the
past. We can and should do more. We can connect
people who feel disconnected when we present them with the evidence that they
have a role in their community’s story, that they are themselves forces in
history.
Local
historians are already doing much of this important work. They will do it with or without the support
of the academic history community. Just before Christmas, I met with Larry
Naukam, formerly with the Rochester Public Library, and a gentleman with a
mastery of the work being done by local historians and archivists in upstate
New York. We met at the Starbucks in
Brighton, at Twelve Corners, not far from my house. There, Larry showed me all sorts of fantastic
work. He showed me, for instance, the
digitized church and cemetery records on the Rochester Genealogical Society
webpage. Then the Rochester Churches Indexing Project (RCIP), started
some time ago by individual researchers affiliated with the RGS. The Cayuga
Heights History Project contains a wealth of information on Ithaca,
New York, as does the History Forge. Amie Alden, the County Historian in
Livingston County, where SUNY-Geneseo is located, has valuable information on
her department’s website,
including records relating to Civil War deserters and wills and other archival
sources. Historians in Wayne have assembled a useful collection of materials on
historic sites in that county. Small museums, like that belonging to
the Walworth Historical
Society, posts records and resources. Somehow, I had missed the Digital Public Library of America,
which houses many millions of images from across the country, many with a local
focus. The New York
Heritage Digital Collections page is also worth your time. The Fulton NY
Post Cards website is a crazy scene and clunky to use, but it
includes millions of pages of digitized New York newspapers.
All
this from one conversation, in one hour, in one coffee shop. There is so much material available to
reconstruct local histories. These
records allow those of us who study the past to tell the stories of the
ordinary people who spent their lives in the communities we now call home. Geneseo students, I hope, will join in our
efforts to recover, preserve, and present the documents containing these
stories to the public, and to convince our friends and neighbors that this
effort is worthwhile. In these collections we find people who appear nowhere
else in the historical record. They
appear fleetingly and incompletely in these documents. But tracking them down, as Arlette Farge put
it, is part of the “allure of the archives,” those “encounters with the
silhouettes of the past,” which possess “an obscure beauty in so many
existences, barely illuminated by words.” So many people appear in these
archives, and the stories of so many places.
“What,” Farge asks, “can be done with these countless individuals, their
tenuous plans, their many disjointed movemnts?”
Farge likened what she found to the shifting images one sees when gazing
into a kaleidoscope, dynamic always, appearing and disappearing, passing
quickly out of your field of view sometimes before you get a clear sense of
what you are looking at.
We
at Geneseo want to talk about these stories, and enlist our students in the
effort. Our first step is going to be a gathering on campus on February 16th,
to discuss what can be done to forge a strong and viable partnership between
different stakeholders and students. I expect
nearly 60 people to attend our meeting, including New York State Historian
Devin Lander and Professor Taylor Stoermer, who teaches in the Museum Studies
program at Johns Hopkins. Prior to
joining the Museum Studies faculty, Dr. Stoermer was Instructor of
Public History at Harvard University, Director of Historic Huguenot Street (a
National Historic Landmark District in New York), Chief Historian of Colonial
Williamsburg, Invited Research Scholar at Brown University. He has held
Fellowships at Yale University, the Huntington Library, the International
Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello, and the Virginia Historical
Society. He is an alumnus of Johns Hopkins, the Tulane University School of
Law, Harvard, and the University of Virginia, where he earned his Ph.D. in
History, specializing in colonial Virginia and the American
Revolution. Dr. Stoermer is also the author of Colonial
Williamsburg: The Official Guide (2014) and Public History: A
Field Guide (Forthcoming, 2019).
I am looking forward to a lively discussion
from which I hope to learn a great deal. Then, during the first summer session
in May, I will teach a course at Geneseo called “Local History Workshop.” Students who enroll in the course will work
in tandem with a local historian or historical society on projects that engage
the public. If the course is popular, I
will add it to my regular rotation. If
these steps succeed, we will begin to raise money for the establishment of a
center on campus. 1500 Local Historians,
and none of the SUNY campuses devotes much attention to them. We at Geneseo hope to lead the way. The local
historians with whom I have spoken are enthusiastic. They need the help. I expect we will find students willing and
ready to join in the effort. If you are
interested in joining us, please feel free to drop me a line. Local history matters, now more than ever.
