Category Archives: Native Americans

Discovery and Exploration, History and Historians, Native Americans

The Coward John White

April 30, 2018 admin Leave a comment

The failed governor of a failed colonial enterprise, sent packing from what would soon become the fabled “Lost Colony” of Roanoke, and a pretend aristocrat whose patron procured for him a bargain-basement coat-of-arms, John White was also an “important” and “renowned” artist whose “vivid” and “lifelike” images included an Algonquian woman he depicted with two right feet. Nearly everything John White touched turned to shit.

White did not lack for experience, we are told. He likely sailed aboard one of Martin Frobisher’s voyages in search of mineral wealth and a northwest passage in the 1570s. He accompanied the reconnaissance voyage Sir Walter Ralegh sent to “Virginia” in 1584 and, the next year, returned aboard the much larger expedition sent to establish a base along the coast of today’s North Carolina. He was among those men who, that summer, explored the coast to the south of Roanoke Island where he completed several paintings of the Algonquian peoples of the region and towns in which they lived, before he returned home with Sir Richard Grenville in the fall of 1585. He may have traveled more widely in the summer of 1585 to gather the information necessary to make his large map of the Outer Banks and Eastern North America. In 1587 Ralegh decided to try again, and for reasons that remain inexplicable still, he appointed White governor of what he hoped would become the “Cittie of Ralegh.” White returned home from the colony a few weeks after arriving, and would not make back until 1590. It was then that he discovered that the colony he claimed to have governed had disappeared. Five voyages to America, but he spent more time aboard ships coming and going than he actually did on American shores.

It is easy, I suppose, to view White as a pathetic figure. He brought his family to England’s paltry new world outpost. Circumstances forced him to return to England, and to struggle for several years to return to America. He never succeeded in reuniting with his daughter, her husband, and their daughter Virginia, the first English child born in America. How painful this must have been for him, to not know what had happened to his child and grandchild.

It is understandable. It must have been agonizing for White. I can imagine his pain easily. But I keep tripping over my belief, based upon reading and re-reading the surviving records, that every time John White was faced with an important choice, he made the wrong one.

Every document that sheds light on the planning for the 1587 colony, for instance, shows that Ralegh charged White with establishing his “Cittie” on the Chesapeake Bay. Relations with the Indians there the previous year offered promise. An English party spent some time there in 1585 and 1586. They found the deep water anchorage, abundant food, and peaceful Indians far more welcoming than the Algonquians in the vicinity of Roanoke, who would soon chase the colonists out of America.

Before heading to the Chesapeake, White wanted to check in on the men Richard Grenville had left at Roanoke the year before, shortly after the harried colonists evacuated. He may as well have intended to install Manteo, the Indian from Croatoan who had stuck with the colonists since 1585, as a sort of feudal “Lorde of Roanoac” to govern the region in Ralegh’s name. So they were going to check in on Grenville’s colonists, install Manteo in his new post, and then carry on northward towards the Chesapeake. Simple enough. But that did not happen, and White’s explanation why makes little sense.

White and his men clambered aboard the pinnace, a smaller ship capable of safely crossing the Outer Banks. “Simon Ferdinando,” the expedition’s pilot, told the sailors aboard to drop White’s party at Roanoke, “saying that the Summer was farre spent.” It was the 22nd of July and, White suggested, Ferdinando wanted to get on with the more lucrative business of chasing Spanish prizes.

Which makes no sense at all, for Ferdinando did not leave until the last week of August, more than a month later. White spent much of his account whining about Ferdinando, blaming him for everything and for nothing, and the charges simply do not add up. One of the ships that made up the 1587 voyage separated from the other two in some rough weather: White blamed Ferdinando for this, accusing him of trying to abandon one of the ships. At another point, Ferdinando was not certain of his latitude, and at another he thought he could find food in the Caribbean but his supplier could not be found. Understandable, perhaps, but White blamed Ferdinando for these events, too. The colonists ate poisonous fruit, manchineel apples, and to wash that down drank nasty, stagnant water, and fell ill. Ferdinado remained aboard the flagship. Still, White blamed Ferdinando, even though it was he who allowed the colonists to drink “stinking water of the pond,” and who failed to keep the colonists safe while on land. Later, the flagship nearly ran aground near Cape Fear, and again White blamed Ferdinando. And the decision to settle on Roanoke, despite instructions to go elsewhere? White blamed that on Ferdinando, too, but the only logical explanation for White and his colonists ending up on Roanoke was that he decided to settle in this somewhat familiar setting, rather than move to the Chesapeake where he had no first hand experience.

It was a bad choice. Grenville’s men were very clearly dead: White reported that his men found the skeleton of one of them. Very clearly they had been killed by Indians. Within a couple of days, those same Indians killed George Howe, one of White’s closest advisers. White attempted to carry on some diplomacy and figure out how the Indians felt about his colonists, which somehow still seemed a mystery to him. The Croatoans, always friendly, at first feared the English and lined up for battle before Manteo assuaged their fears. They lectured the English about indiscriminate attacks the year before. They begged the English not to steal their food. White decided that this was a good time to ask them for favors, and told them to carry messages to the neighboring Indian villages, indicating that the English “would willingly receive them againe, and that all unfriendly dealings past on both parts, should be utterly forgiven and forgotten.” This reflected nothing more than White’s utterly clueless understanding of the situation in which he had placed the colonists–in the midst of large numbers of Algonquians who had no interest in accepting English friendship. He was in no position to “receive” anyone.

Could White make it worse? Yes. After waiting a week, and receiving no response from the Indians, White decided to attack “the remnant of Wingina his men, which were left alive, who dwelt at Dasamonquepeuk,” across the sound from Roanoke. It was they, he believed, who had killed George Howe and wiped out Grenville’s party. White led a party across the sound, surrounded some Indians in the dark at Dasemonquepeuk, and launched his assault. As White put it himself, “we hoped to acquite their evill doing towards us, but,” he said, “we were deceived, for those Savages were our friends, and were come from Croatoan to gather the corne & fruit of that place, because they understood our enemies were fled immediatly after they had slaine George Howe.” They killed the wrong Indians. They killed friendly Indians, or at least he least hostile of the Algonquians in the region. The colony was now in dire straits, with no friends, and little provision.

Over the next several days, the English baptized Manteo, and White’s daughter gave birth to Virginia Dare. The colonists needed provisions, and White could not find any volunteers to go home to lobby for more. The colonists told White to go himself. He whined. He feared that during his absence, “his stuffe and goods might be both spoiled, & most of them pilfered away.” White refused to go. He feared that the people he led would rifle through his stuff. The next day, the 23rd of August, more of the colonists, “as well women and men,” once again told White to leave. Please. Really, just go. Don’t worry. We will be fine. We will be better off without you. They wanted him to leave. They knew who they were dealing with. They promised to sign a bond not to steal White’s crap, as if they really wanted his books and his armor. He must have found it difficult o leave his daughter and granddaughter behind, but that is not the argument he made. With a promise not to steal any of his stuff in hand, White departed for England on the 27th.

It was a hellish journey home. White survived, but many of the sailors did not. He tried again to sail for America the next year, that of the Armada, but the ship he was aboard was mauled by a French corsair. In the battle for control of the ship, White was shot in the ass, an injury that does not seem to have embarrassed him at all. By the time he finally made it back to Roanoke in 1590, he could determine only that the colonists were no longer on the island, and that the trunks containing his stuff had been dug up by Indians, broken open, and their contents ruined. So much for that bond. White seemed to know where the colonists were, though the location is not clear from his account. In any case, White was a man who nobody listened to. He could not persuade the mariners to devote the time to seek out the colonists, and White returned, once again, to England, his voyage entirely without effect.

Native Americans, Teaching Native American History

The Lewis Henry Morgan School in Rochester New York

January 26, 2018 admin 10 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Native Americans

Treaty Day, 11/11

November 11, 2017 admin Leave a comment

Today is Treaty Day in Canandaigua, New York. An annual commemoration of the treaty the Six Nations of the Iroquois signed with the United States in 1794 is held there each year, with a parade from the Canandaigua Primary School to the County Court House lawn at 130, and a commemoration ceremony at 200. For the rest of the day, there are vendors and displays and speakers at the primary school. The school site itself is significant because a large number of the 1600 Indians who attended the treaty council between September and November in 1794 camped on land that ultimately became the school’s play fields.

Two years ago I published a book about the Treaty of Canandaigua. The United States negotiated about 370 treaties with a large number of American Indian nations. These diplomatic agreements do various things. Some of them established peace after periods of warfare. They granted to the United States control over the internal affairs of tribes. They allowed the government to further its variety of “Civilization” programs, from the provision of spinning wheels and livestock to early moves towards allotment, and they were the instrument through which the land that made up Native America became part of the United States. Some of these treaties were fraudulent. There is no doubt about that. Some of them were deceptive, and others coerced. Many were, in short, instruments of colonial control. Canandaigua, I argued, was different.

After the Revolution, the United States dictated a treaty of conquest to the small number of Six Nations people who gathered in November of 1784 at Fort Stanwix. The United States negotiated similarly coercive treaties with the southeastern nations at Hopewell and with the Ohio Valley tribes at Fort McIntosh. At Stanwix, American treaty commissioners dispensed with the long-recognized protocols of Iroquois diplomacy, thumped the gathered Indians on the chest, and explained to them what the new American empire would look like. The Iroquois were expected to release prisoners and provide hostages as a measure of their good faith. And they were required to give up all of their lands west of a line drawn four miles east of the Niagara River, a move designed to contain the Six Nations within the State of New York and cut them off from the British posts at Oswego and Niagara, and their kin who had resettled at Grand River in Ontario. The treaty did nothing to address some significant grievances that were felt particularly by the Senecas, the largest and westernmost of the Iroquois nations in New York. The Senecas complained of white encroachments on their land. The complained about murders, 13 of them by white frontiersmen between 1784 and 1790, and an uncertain number more afterwards. And they complained on limitations on their ability to move: the lack of access to the Niagara River, and the claim asserted by Pennsylvania to the so-called “Erie Triangle,’ that tag of land you pass through in the Keystone State when you follow Interstate 90 from, say, Buffalo to Cleveland.

These grievances were significant. And the native peoples in the so-called Northwest Territory shared many of them–encroachment, violence, and so on. To deal with the threat posed by the confederated Northwestern nations–Shawnees, Delawares, and many others–President Washington sent out an American army led by Josiah Harmar to teach them that the soldiers of the United States numbered like the trees in the woods, the stars in the sky. The Americans were defeated handily, “thrown on their backs.” Harmar lost one hundred men and five hundred horses. The Northwestern confederates attacked American settlements in Kentucky, Virginia, western Pennsylvania, and their allies did damage in the Carolinas and Georgia as well, They pushed back American settlement. Another army went out under the command of Arthur St. Clair. Its story is told by Colin Calloway in The Victory with No Name. They marched out into the Ohio country. On the 4th of November in 1791, the Northwestern confederates attacked them. Of St. Clair’s 1400 men, 910 were killed or wounded. St. Clair lost 1200 muskets, lots of artillery, his horses. Twenty percent of the entire armed forces of the United States was wiped out in one day.

Could it get worse? Yes. The British still held their forts at Oswego, Niagara, and Detroit on the margins of an Iroquoia that had remained under siege since the Revolution. Settlers were terrified. The British looked at these Indian victories and began to discuss among themselves the possibility of carving out a neutral Indian Barrier State, with its southern boundary running along the Ohio River. What would happen if the powerful and aggrieved Six Nations joined with the Northwestern confederates? The entire frontier would be exposed, and native warriors posed an existential threat to the United States.

So what to do? Seneca diplomats and American officials both recognized that they could address the challenges they faced through negotiation and diplomacy better than through warfare. The Senecas had learned well what American soldiers could do to their homeland from the Sullivan Campaign of 1779. Iroquois diplomats traveled widely, risking their lives, some of them dying, in an effort to avoid war and protect their communities.

Timothy Pickering, the emissary appointed by Washington, met with the Senecas at Tioga in the fall of 1790, in the wake of the Pine Creek murders, a crime for which the one person tried was acquitted. Pickering learned from this that no jury would convict a white man for murdering Indians. Native lives did not matter, he lamented.

Meanwhile, other Seneca leaders were meeting with American officials in Philadelphia, a meeting in which George Washington pledged to protect the Iroquois from any additional land grabs by the State of New York. And in the fall of 1791, Pickering met with a larger group of Senecas at Newtown Point, to establish friendship and alliance.

The United States needed the Six Nations. Pickering understood that better than any of his American policy-making peers. The Six Nations served as American eyes and ears in the west, for instance. The British continued to work with Indians in the region, including the Senecas, from their posts at Detroit and Niagara. And the State of New York, despite Washington’s promises, continually offered fresh sources of grievance through fraudulent and illegal land sales. In my current book project on the Onondagas I spend a lot of time on the 1788 and 1793 purchases.

To resolve these crises, the United States called a council to meet at Canandaigua, which was far enough away from Niagara, Pickering hoped, to keep the British from interfering. That was the hope. 1600 Haudenosaunee showed up at Canandaigua in the fall. They brought with them many grievances. Encroachment on their lands must stop. Murders must stop. And their land issues: access to the Niagara River and the claim to the Erie Triangle.

Now here’s the thing. Before the treaty council commenced at Canandaigua, the northwestern Indians had been defeated at the Battle of Fallen Timbers. The defeated Indians fled toward a British post, and there they found no shelter or assistance. From this Pickering knew, then, that there was no immediate threat that the Senecas would join with the Northwestern confederates because they had been defeated. And there was no longer any immediate threat that the British would get involved or that their dreams of a neutral Indian Barrier State could come to fruition because, when push came to shove, they kept their gates closed to their allies.

But Pickering negotiated anyways. It is a big part of the story I tell in Peacemakers. A treaty of seven articles, some of which very clearly served the United States. Peace and friendship, of course, but also the fourth article, which stated that the Six Nations would never claim any additional lands in the United States. The Six Nations, Iroquoia, would never grow again. The United States secured the right to cut military roads through Seneca country, and the right to bring its “civilization” program to the Six Nations.

So what did the Six Nations get? They got, for a time, the return of their lands along the Niagara River. More importantly, they were guaranteed the right o the “free use and enjoyment of their lands.” The phrase is used three times in the brief treaty. The United States recognized this right and did so unambiguously. Native peoples could do what they wanted on their own lands, free from the interference of any outside authority. They were sovereign nations.

Of course, the legacy of Canandaigua is mixed. New York, in violation of federal law, continued to buy land, particularly from the Oneidas, Onondagas, and Cayugas, who were completely dispossessed by 1795. Private interests, with the support of the United States, started carving parcels from Iroquoia. At Big Tree, in 1797, three years after Canandaigua, the Senecas parted with nearly all of their lands, save for eleven small reservations. I have written about that transaction here. And in more recent years the expansion of the St. Lawrence Seaway, the Moses Parkway and the Niagara Power Authority, and, of course, Kinzua Dam, the subject of Scott Sackett and Paul Lamont’s fantastic new documentary. Much of what was secured at Canandaigua has been lost.

So what are we left with? The treaty exists. That is a fact. That phrase, “free use and enjoyment,” is an important touchstone for Haudenosaunee people who face continual threats to their autonomy and independence, their sovereignty and the integrity of their economic enterprises through taxation and state interference.

There is a sticker that is sometimes seen in Indian Country. “Honor Indian Treaties,” it says. Yet so many Indian treaties are little more than real estate transactions where American commissioners dictated cessions to militarily defeated people and asserted control over their communities. Treaties were too often instruments of colonial control, licenses for empire and subjugation. Canandaigua was different. At the time the treaty was negotiated in 1794, Haudenosaunee people still retained the capacity, should they choose to align themselves with the Northwestern confederates, to pose a grave threat to white American settlement. And they used that power, and their own considerable diplomatic skill, to secure the return for a time of a key parcel of land. More importantly–and this is what is commemorated every year at Canandaigua on Treaty Day, though they acknowledge the losses, the celebrate the recognition and confirmation of their right to the “Free Use and Enjoyment of their Lands.” We are native nations, the Haudenosaunee people gathered at Canandaigua assert, and we are still here.

Current Events, Native Americans, Race and Racism, Red Lives Matter

There Are Big Problems Out There

October 29, 2017 admin Leave a comment

Halloween is right around the corner. I have written about why you should not dress up in a Native American costume before on this blog, and there is no shortage of commentary out there on the Internet Machine about why doing so can be destructive, hurtful, stupid, and in bad taste. Dressing like indigenous peoples, and the appropriation of the outward manifestations of Native American culture by non-Indians: they are common complaints. You do not have to work hard to hear it or read about it.

The Pendleton Company, for instance, manufacturer of clothing for your grandparents, has recently come out with a line of Harry Potter-inspired blankets. That they are ugly we will set aside for the moment. The blankets clearly appropriate Native American motifs and images. Pendleton, indeed, has long stood accused of appropriating Native American imagery in its designs, and despite my feelings about these particular blankets, I imagine they will sell lots of them to people who want to make their homes “feel like Hogwarts.”

We could come up, if we wanted to, with hundreds of pictures of tasteless Native American costumes, hundreds of instances where non-Indian corporations profit or attempt to profit by appropriating Native American culture. (Though dated, Michael Brown’s Who Owns Native Culture is still a useful introduction to the issues).

Cultural appropriation is in bad taste. It is hurtful to some and angers many others. I do not doubt the sincerity of those sentiments for a second. But these instances of cultural appropriation are relatively easy to point out, criticize, and in some instances, to remedy through education . And, let’s be honest: there are more intractable problems out there and some of them result in more than hurt feelings and pedestrian American Studies papers. People are losing their lives and peoples are losing their lands. Some perspective might be in order.

Here is my point. Sometimes I wonder if cultural appropriation is so big a problem that it justifies the amount of time devoted to it. For some people, yes, it is a big issue. It is an important cause. But I feel like there are bigger fish to fry.

Is it a bigger problem than the growing number of missing and murdered indigenous women and children in North America, which has become a major public issue in Canada but has only recently begun to attract attention in the United States?

Does it pose a greater challenge than the disparities that have endured for far too long in nearly every measure of social well-being between native peoples and other Americans? The gaps in many of these areas have closed gradually over the past few decades, but progress has been painfully slow.

Or the readiness with which militarized police forces deploy violence that has, at it has done among African Americans, given rise to expressions that “Native Lives Matter“? I do not mean to refer solely to the grotesque violence meted out on the peaceful #NODAPL protesters at Standing Rock. This problem is significant, and it leaves behind it broken lives and grieving people.

Or the avarice and determination with which state governments and the Interior Department under Secretary Ryan Zinke view Indian Country as a resource to be exploited, and which leads them to attempt to skim the cream off of whatever prosperity comes to Native America?

And the continuing assaults on Native American nationhood, the empty pledges made by the United States to honor the commitments that came with its belated acceptance of the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples?

I could keep going.

I spend time in my classes talking about cultural appropriation. I want students to think about its consequences for native peoples, but also to engage with why non-native peoples have for so long felt the need to engage in this behavior, and how their justifications for it have changed over time. I spend time on the mascot issue, too.

But, for me, there are some things I cannot change, and I have reluctantly come to accept over the years that no matter what I do, there are only twenty-four hours in a day, and seven days in a week. I teach my three courses every week, hold office hours, prepare for my classes, and try to do a bit of my own research in addition to keeping up with the massive scholarship in my field. I meet with my advisees, attend the meetings I am required to attend where the many decisions that need to be made on a college campus are sometimes made. On busy weeks, I spend my time wading through the take-home essays I assign in lieu of in-class exams. With family obligations to boot, my time is pretty tight.

In other words, I have to choose my battles. The Washington Redskins and Cleveland’s Chief Wahoo? Yes, they are racist, and so are you, maybe just a little bit, if these images do not bother you. And the many instances of cultural appropriation brought to my attention on the Internet Machine? I can laugh them off, ignore them, work myself up and take offense, bitch and whine, or view them as an opportunity to set the record straight, a teachable moment as they say in the education industry.

I have made a similar point before about the “Mascot Issue.” Even if the NFL has been particularly unwilling to budge on this issue, mascots are relatively easy to do away with if you complain loudly enough, and in company with enough of your allies, to a school board, or a college, or a university. Other issues–lack of protection for native peoples’ lives, liberties, and property in Indian Country; economic injustice and pervasive poverty; resource exploitation and environmental despoliation; attacks on sovereignty, and nationhood, and continuing injustice– these present much more difficult challenges, with progress slow and seldom guaranteed. Historians will tell you that there are more dangerous racists than this dude to the left here, dressed up for a baseball game. Yeah, he’s an asshole, but there are far nastier people out there.

We who teach have limited resources at our disposal. Our time is limited. For the amount of education we have received, we earn relatively low salaries. If we are active researchers, as we should be, the hours we work are even longer. So we need to choose our battles. You want to fight over mascots? Go ahead. Thanks to your efforts, and the efforts of your predecessors, these mascots have fallen out of favor nearly everywhere but in Washington, D. C. You want to get angry about Pendleton’s tacky blankets, or at Kylie Jenner for the name she gave to one of her new old lipstick colors, or other appropriations of native culture, go ahead. You have raised awareness, and thanks to your efforts, more people than ever understand that certain types of costume, display, representation, and marketing are hardly innocent.

But let’s not lose sight of the real enemies: racist police forces and law enforcement; the ineffectiveness and inefficiency of the Bureau of Indian Affairs; poor history and civics education that leaves most Americans entirely ignorant of their country’s Native American past and present; and the enduring colonialism of the American empire. Do away with the mascots, reduce the amount of cultural appropriation, but let’s not exaggerate its effectiveness. Fewer Native American mascots, fewer Indian Halloween costumes, and less cultural appropriation will not increase life expectancy or reduce the economic privation experienced by those living in Native American communities. Nor will quality of life improve in First Nations and Native American communities. The number of young people, in the throes of desperation or enduring a legacy of intergenerational trauma, or the numbers of missing and murdered indigenous women and children, will not be reduced one bit. Violence and suffering in Native American communities would not cease, police would not become more tolerant, and state and corporate interests no less avaricious in their desire to exploit Native American lands. And unpacking stereotypical representations of indigenous peoples will not help secure the lives, liberties, and properties of Native American and First Nations people.

So what do you want to fight about? Be honest. Some causes are easier than others, and some will require of you a greater investment, and involvement in them will carry heavier consequences. Some of these issues are quite literally matters of life and death. And some of these problems might hurt your feelings. Others, and you know this if you have read Native America, can break your heart. It is up to you to decide.

Discovery and Exploration, History and Historians, Liberal Arts, Native Americans

A Plea for Justice on Indigenous Peoples’ Day

October 9, 2017 admin Leave a comment

In Native American history, there are lots of guilty parties, but Christopher Columbus is guiltier than most. There is absolutely nothing edifying in this story of avarice, violence, and religious bigotry, save for the native peoples who at times and places survived the carnage. The continued celebration of Columbus Day does a historical injustice to the native peoples of two continents and the Caribbean.

The Columbus Day holiday found its origins in the Italian-American community. Columbus, quite likely from Genoa, sailed in the service of Ferdinand and Isabella, the authors of the Spanish Reconquista, and in 1492 he “discovered” America. He was, his advocates claim, an Italian and an American hero. The holiday in his honor asserted that Italians were Americans, too.

But the Columbus Day holiday has been under siege for some time. He discovered nothing, of course, for the “New World” he stumbled across in search of the riches of Cathay was already occupied by millions of people. The 500th anniversary of Columbus’s voyages in 1992 reawakened interest in the explorer and his actions in the New World, and that attention did not cast Columbus in a good light. Recently, a growing number of colleges and municipalities across the country have recognized Indigenous Peoples’ Day, to be held on the federal Columbus Day holiday. An Italian-American friend of mine asked me the other night why any one of the other 364 days of the year could not be chosen for Indigenous Peoples Day. In his view, the movement to obtain recognition for Indigenous Peoples’ Day generated conflict where none was needed, and caused offense to Italian-Americans. While I understand his argument, the commemoration of Indigenous Peoples Day is something I support. As I point out in Native America, the Columbus Day holiday “many native peoples view as a day for mourning the victims of an American holocaust and 500 years of genocide.”

The Columbian Encounter, so-called, is the beginning of a horror story for the native peoples of the Americas, North, South, and Central, as well as the indigenous population of the Caribbean, who were quickly destroyed as autonomous peoples by the Spanish newcomers. Columbus, his supporters might argue, gets too much of the blame. He did nothing to native peoples in North America because he never set foot on the North American continent. This much is true, but Columbus has become, and perhaps always has been, a symbol standing in for the “fundamental violence of discovery,” as I class it in the second chapter of Native America.

Long ago I taught at a one-day NEH gathering on the Blackfeet Reservation way up in northwestern Montana. The subject was children’s literature that treated in different ways the history of America’s native peoples. One of the books was Michael Dorris’s Morning Girl (1992). The story followed Morning Girl and her brother Star Boy, indigenous children playing and exploring in the “Pre-Columbian” Caribbean. It is a story that is wise and gentle. But at its close, it takes a darker turn. Morning Girl swims out to see a strange sight approaching the beach.

Dorris ends the story with a lengthy excerpt from Columbus’s journal:

In order that they would be friendly to us — because I recognized that they were people who would be better freed and converted to our Holy Faith by love than by force — to some of them I gave red caps, and glass beads which they put on their chests, and many other things of small value, in which they took so much pleasure and became so much our friends that it was a marvel. Later they came swimming to the ships’ launches where we were and brought us parrots and cotton thread in balls and javelins and many other things, and they traded them to us for other things which we gave them, such as small glass beads and bells. In sum, they took everything and gave of what they had very willingly. But it seemed to me that they were a people very poor in everything. All of them go around as naked as their mothers bore them; and the women also, although I did not see more than one quite young girl. And all those that I saw were young people, for none did I see of more than 30 years of age. They are very well formed, with handsome bodies and good faces. Their hair coarse — almost like the tail of a horse-and short. They wear their hair down over their eyebrows except for a little in the back which they wear long and never cut. Some of them paint themselves with black, and they are of the color of the Canarians, neither black nor white; and some of them paint themselves with white, and some of them with red, and some of them with whatever they find. And some of them paint their faces, and some of them the whole body, and some of them only the eyes, and some of them only the nose. They do not carry arms nor are they acquainted with them, because I showed them swords and they took them by the edge and through ignorance cut themselves. They have no iron.

Their javelins are shafts without iron and some of them have at the end a fish tooth…. All of them alike are of good-sized stature and carry themselves well. I saw some who had marks of wounds on their bodies and I made signs to them asking what they were; and they showed me how people from other islands nearby came there and tried to take them, and how they defended themselves; and I believed and believe that — they come here from tierrafirme to take them captive. They should be good and intelligent servants, for I see that they say very quickly everything that is said to them; and I believe that they would become Christians very easily, for it seemed to me that they had no religion. Our Lord pleasing, at the time of my departure I will take six of them from here to Your Highnesses in order that they may learn to speak…

Morning Girl, then, is the story of that child who Columbus saw as his men approached landfall in October of 1492, and whose gentleness and innocence led the wayward Admiral to conclude that her people would make good servants.

We spent quite a bit of time that morning discussing Dorris’s book. The teachers from Blackfeet felt very differently about the book than did some of the non-native teachers. The Blackfeet teachers all agreed that if they were to use Morning Girl in class, they would cut out that last piece. They would have physically removed the last page from the book. Too painful, and too traumatic for the children who might read it, they thought. In Fourteen-Hundred and Ninety-Two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue…and contemplated how indigenous children might make good slaves.

I do not agree with altering books in this manner, nor in insulating children from the more horrifying parts of our shared history, but I understood their concerns. I spend some time on Columbus in Native America. I have to. Between the first and second editions, one of the many books I read as I worked on revising the text was Andres Resendez’s excellent The Other Slavery which, among other things, described in detail the centrality of slavery in Columbus’s enterprise. Columbus carried slaves back to Spain on each of his voyages, and promised the Crown “as many slaves as Their Majesties orders to make.”

If you read excerpts from Bartolome De Las Casas’s Devastation of the Indies–and if you are a student in a Native American history course treating this period you likely will–you can read about the sheer brutality of the Spanish conquistadors who followed Columbus. Las Casas provides a first-hand account of the first modern genocide: Spanish ships able to sail homeward without need of navigational instruments because all they needed to do was follow the trail of floating corpses, enslaved Indians who died on the Atlantic crossing. Las Casas described how Spanish colonists could buy human flesh for their dogs, and how Spanish war dogs tore native peoples literally limb from limb. Las Casas described the competition between conquistadors to see who could run through the most Indians with one thrust of the pike, and how Spaniards burned native peoples in groups of thirteen in honor of Jesus and the apostles, and bashed their children’s heads in by swinging them against the rocks, as in the Flemish (and Protestant) engraving to the left. And all this brutality, all the subjugation that occurred under the aegis of the Spanish encomienda system, exacerbated the consequences of epidemic diseases, which in places killed off 80% of the population. Brutality made native peoples less able to resist the onslaught of disease. Millions died.

But here’s the thing, and I hope you will see it if you read Native America. We can focus on victimization and cruelty. God knows, Columbus and his successors were violent and brutal and victimized many. But to focus on victimization alone does a deep disservice to the history of native peoples.

In Native America, I tell the story of the first European explorers who came to North America from the Indians’ perspective: What native peoples saw when they looked at these newcomers, their strategic calculations, how they fit the Europeans into their conceptual universe. If you look at the story of the French explorer Jacques Cartier, who sailed into the St. Lawrence River in the 1530s, or his Spanish contemporary Coronado who wandered throughout the American southwest, or Soto’s violent exercise in futility in the Southeast, or the Juan Pardo expedition, or Cabrillo’s ineffectual reconnaissance of the California coast, or even the Roanoke voyages of 1584-1590, you cannot help but see one consistent theme. It is so obvious in the surviving documents. What is clear in every account is the utter dependence of the newcomers upon the native peoples who cautiously welcomed them into their communities, cultivated them as military allies and trading partners, enlisted them in their struggles with their neighbors, and contemplated transforming them into kin. When the newcomers wore out their welcomes in North America, their enterprises were doomed, their situation worse than desperate. These European explorers discovered what they believe they discovered only because native peoples allowed them to do so. And the effects of the visits by these European sojourners were remarkably short-lived, the consequences fleeting. Even with De Soto, who many scholars long had blamed for spreading epidemic disease into the continent’s interior (a mistake I made in the first edition), we now know from the work of historians like Paul Kelton and anthropologists like Robbie Etheridge that his disastrous expedition had little long-term effect. The wasting plagues came in the seventeenth century, a product of an Anglo-American trade in Native American slaves, the scope of which was vast and mind-boggling.

Columbus Day found its origins in discrimination against Italian-American immigrants. We were here from the beginning, Italian-Americans said, and we have as great a claim to this continent as any other group. The holiday has seldom encouraged any significant and honest discussion of the consequences of the Columbian Encounter, a process which was, as historian Alfred Crosby showed a long time ago, much bigger than Christopher Columbus. It is time for the bad history and the myth associated with this day to go away, and if recognizing Indigenous Peoples’ Day helps I am all for it. Let’s talk about Columbus, to be sure, and the European invasion of America, but let’s do so with our eyes firmly upon those native peoples whose losses were Europeans’ gain, and who have endured and survived through five centuries of discrimination, dispossession, and slaughter.

Current Events, Native Americans, Red Lives Matter

#MMIW

October 4, 2017 admin Leave a comment

I posted about the Senate Indian Affairs Committee meeting on human trafficking in Indian Country last week. The upshot of the hearings was disappointing. All acknowledge a problem exists but there is little data on its scope. At the hearings, the Justice Department seemed uninterested to committing the resources necessary to gather that data. Anyone who studies Native American history closely will note, however, that the Justice Department has never prioritized crime committed in Indian Country. Though the Obama Administration’s revision of the Violence Against Women Act was significant, the reform went only so far. Fortunately, more attention is being drawn to this problem.

Some important work is being done and some media are beginning to take notice. The National Collaborating Center for Aboriginal Health in Canada has published a report, Indigenous Communities and Family Violence: Changing the Conversation, that presents domestic violence in Indian reserves as one more of the bitter fruits of an enduring colonialism. They offer a powerful list of recommendations calling upon provincial and national officials to recognize indigenous perspectives, the continuing process of colonialism and dispossession, and the many values that inhere in native cultures to remedy the problem of violence on Indian reserves. It is a powerful report, and worth reading.

To get a sense of the problems that occur, both from within indigenous families and from the outside, it is worth looking at the recent report from Red Power Media. While Americans are reeling from yet another explosion of gun violence, and the disaster that has struck Puerto Rico made worse by the nation’s disaster of a president, an indigenous community in British Columbia is worried. In response to the growth of “man camps,” so-called, a British Columbia indigenous community tribe is stocking up on rape kits in anticipation of the expected wholesale assault on Native American women.

“Nak’azdli Whut’en First Nation is nestled on the banks of Stuart Lake in north-central British Columbia, surrounded by rolling foothills and tall trees.

It is a relatively remote community, breathtaking in scenery and dependent on economic opportunities in forestry, mining, and pipeline development. It is a community bracing for major change.

Over the next decade, as many as 6,000 new energy industry workers could descend upon the region. The prospect of such a big influx of workers living in nearby “man camps” has aroused fears of increased violence and drug use.

The influx could more than double the population of about 4,500 in the Fort St. James area, which includes the municipality, rural communities and First Nations. Nak’azdli has just 1,972 members living both on and off reserves. The nearest city, Prince George, is 160 kilometres away.”

The threat is significant. The Lake Babine First Nation and the Nak’azdli Whut’en commissioned a study, funded by the British Columbia provincial government. The evidence they found demonstrated

that industrial camps are associated with increased rates of sexual assault and violence against Indigenous women, along with addiction, sexually transmitted infections, and family violence.

“The potential for sexual assault, violence, disappearances, (sexually transmitted diseases), increases with the number of trucks on the road,” study author Ginger Gibson told National Observer. “There’s a whole whack of issues that don’t get considered until construction is happening and that’s too late.”

Meanwhile, in North Dakota, after the murder of pregnant Savanna La Fontaine Greywind, (that’s her in the picture to the right) her family hired attorney Gloria Allred to represent them in a search for answers. LaFontaine-Greywind’s murder–her body was found in the Red River, her newborn baby in the hands of one of the suspects-along with the hiring of Allred created enough pressure at last to get officials in North Dakota to expand their investigation. North Dakota’s state senate has finally decided to look into the “epidemic” of missing and murdered indigenous women.

Under pressure, the Justice Department has announced grants programs to investigate the problem of missing and murdered indigenous women, as well as violence against women and children in Indian Country. $130 million has been directed to addressing these challenges. According to Assistant Attorney General Rachel Brand, “these awards stand as a clear expression of our support for Native American women and tribal self-determination and reflect the vital role we believe American Indian tribes and Alaska Native villages play in ensuring the safety of all our citizens.”

Another way to get at the scope of this enormous problem, is to follow it on social media, using the hashtags #IdleNoMore and #MMIW. A Facebook page exists to help in locating and, in some instances, identifying missing and murdered indigenous women. If you know of additional resources, please forward them to me and I will be sure to distribute them as widely as I can.

Native Americans, Race and Racism, Red Lives Matter

Human Trafficking in Indian Country

September 28, 2017 admin Leave a comment

“Human trafficking, the exploitation of a person typically through force, fraud, or coercion for such purposes as forced labor, involuntary servitude, or commercial sex,” Gretta L. Goodwin of the Government Accountability Office told the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs yesterday, is “occurring in the United States.” Drawing upon evidence from the Office of the Attorney General, traffickers seek out vulnerable individuals. This vulnerability, Goodwin said, “comes in many forms, including age (minors), poverty, homelessness, chemical dependency, prior experiences of abuse, involvement in foster care programs, and lack of resources or support systems.”

Native Americans, she argued, are indeed such a vulnerable population. Goodwin cited statistics familiar to those of us who study Indian Country. 28 percent of native peoples live in poverty nationwide, compared to 15% of the general population. According to “the 2010 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an estimated 27 percent of Native American women have been raped in their lifetime compared to 18 percent of American women overall.” Native American children are twice as likely as other children to enter the foster care system.

These figures, and their significance, were underscored by Nicole Matthews, the executive director of the Minnesota Indian Woman’s Sexual Assault Coalition. The Native American women she and her associates interviewed demonstrated that historical trauma and childhood sexual abuse “were a precursor or antecedent for the women who were used in trafficking.” Indeed, Matthews testified, “79% of the women we interviewed were sexually abused as children, by an average of four perpetrators; and 67% of victims reported that they had family members who were sent to boarding schools, and most were abused in those boarding schools.” Matthews’ research is available here. It is a stunning document.

Cindy McCain, who participates on the Arizona Governor’s Council on Human Trafficking, spoke last at the Committee hearing. She told the senators that she would soon participate in an anti-trafficking roundtable in North Dakota. She wanted the senators to know that the remoteness of the Bakken area in that state, and

“the high unemployment rate of nearby Indian reservations, combined with the oil and gas boom, have created a hotbed for trafficking. Victims are mostly Native American women and girls transported to the region specifically for sex trafficking. Many of these victims are under the age of 18. Children being sold for sex. Outward and organized child abuse and rape.”

McCain pointed out that human trafficking had enslaved more than 41 million people worldwide. It is, she said, an organized crime. But it is also a crime of opportunity for, she argued, “Native American girls and women are all too often trafficked by their own relatives.” McCain had seen herself six small girls “lined up against a wall in an Indian casino outside of Phoenix on display for customers.”

McCain did not provide evidence for the involvement of Native American families in the trafficking of their young relatives, and her claim that Native American girls fetched a high price because of their “exotic beauty” is painful to read. Still, she and the other witnesses raised some important issues.

There is a dearth of evidence. Of the 132 tribal law enforcement agencies (LEA) that responded to the GAO’s request for information, 27 reported that they had conducted investigations between 2014 and 2016 that involved human trafficking. And, according to Goodwin,

“Nearly half of tribal LEA respondents (60 of 132) reported that they believe human trafficking is occurring on tribal land in their jurisdictions beyond what had been brought to their attention. Officials from two tribal LEAs told us during in-person meetings that in their experience some victims do not come forward to report their victimization because they are embarrassed or feel ashamed. Several survey respondents also indicated that they suspect there is more human trafficking than what has been reported to them because of the presence of casinos on their land (14 of 60). For example, officials from one LEA explained that the tribal casino hotel may be used as a venue for sex trafficking. Some respondents (13 of 60) suspect that sex trafficking may be occurring as part of some of the drug crimes that they investigate. Officials from one county LEA we visited near a tribal community told us that officers may not recognize that human trafficking is taking place, particularly when it occurs alongside another crime like drug trafficking.”

The Justice Department, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Homeland Security–all of them provide grants to help combat human trafficking, but the problem remains ill-defined, one of great magnitude but hazy borders. More resources are needed still. Jurisdiction is a critical issue, as well. Much of the trafficking is supported by non-Indians who are in all but a few instances beyond prosecution by tribal authorities. More information is needed. Tracy Tolou, the director of the Office of Tribal Justice in DOJ said that data limitations are significant. It is hard to know the scope of the problem when it remains so difficult to investigate and prosecute. According to Jason Thompson, the acting director of the Office of Justice Services in the BIA, only twelve investigations by his office have been conducted over the past four years, with only 23 defendants prosecuted.

This is crime on the margins. When I discuss problems related to the issues the Senate Committee confronted in my Indian law class, there is a sense among some of my students that this sort of exploitation and violence is inevitable. 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. I ask the students what might be done. They struggle to think of answers. I understand the difficulties. I appreciate their efforts to think of solutions.

Native American history is a story of tragedy, of violence, of crime, of theft and plunder. It is, at other times, a story of blundering goodwill. Even those who want to do right often do damage. I have made my career teaching students this history and writing about it. I once got involved in an argument with a conservative friend who said that if these problems went away, I would be out of a job. That I want to find things to bitch about. It is a stupid argument, and I told my friend this. I am a historian. I would love for these problems to be part of the past. And that might be my insight on this story, as a historian. We, as a nation and as individuals, have choices. We are not doomed to repeat the past, and we do not have to continue walking that ragged path that we have walked for so long. There are choices here. Write your representatives and senators. Write the Attorney General and the President. Given the people currently occupying many of those offices, it is difficult to be optimistic, but these are problems that can be ameliorated. It is a choice. We can do more.

Native Americans

We Are Not Canada, But We Could Learn A Thing or Two

September 25, 2017 admin Leave a comment

In a speech delivered last week before the United Nations, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau spoke about his country’s history of relations with its indigenous population. He wanted to show the world that Canada could take responsibility for the “terrible mistakes” of its past.

Whether or not Canada has succeeded in doing, so, Trudeau spoke of the enduring legacies of colonialism. “Early colonial relationships,” he said, for Canada’s First Nations, Metis, and Inuit peoples, “were not about strength through diversity, or a celebration of differences,” but rather an experience that “was mostly one of humiliation, neglect, and abuse.”

And the damage has been long-lasting indeed. Trudeau spoke of Canadian indigenous communities with unsafe drinking water, of large numbers of missing or murdered indigenous women. He spoke of “Indigenous parents in Canada who say goodnight to their children, and have to cross their fingers in the hopes that their kids won’t run away or take their own lives in the night.” The problems of which Trudeau spoke have been well-documented.

Trudeau has faced significant criticism at home from indigenous spokespeople who feel that his words have not been matched by action. Many have criticized the Canadian movement towards reconciliation, which I have written about on this blog, as a feel-good movement for white people that does nothing about structural inequalities and injustices deeply rooted in Canadian society. These are significant critiques, and it is well-worthwhile for students of America’s native peoples to watch how Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission continues its work. (You can access its reports here.)

But despite the criticism of Trudeau and the limitations of his approach, for an American president to even consider saying something close to what Prime Minister said before the UN is utterly inconceivable. If you saw the excellent “Wind River,” you will recognize that the problem of missing and murdered indigenous women is not exclusive to Canada. Corporate profit-seeking in Indian Country has led to the devastation of water supplies on American reservations. I have written much on this blog about DAPL (the documentary “Awake: A Dream from Standing Rock” is strong on sentiment but weaker in terms of substance) but that is hardly the only example. More than a third of all Superfund sites are located in Indian Country, and others, like Onondaga Lake in Syracuse, are nearby. Police violence against native peoples, disproportionate rates of incarceration, and higher rates of deficiency on every measure of social well-being: the problems are enormous, the challenges daunting, and the resources available limited. In both Canada and the United States, these are the legacies of an enduring colonialism.

Now, if I were to ask my students if they should expect President Trump to deliver a speech similar to that given by Prime Minister Trudeau, they would emphatically say “no.” If I were to ask them why, their answers would be a bit more complex. For to assert that Trump is a racist or white supremacist uninterested in hearing about complaints from or the conditions experienced by peoples of color, while true, only gets us so far. No American president, whatever his party, has spoken as frankly as Trudeau about his country’s mistakes and misdeeds. No, there is much more to it than the current American president’s long list of shortcomings, inadequacies, and character flaws.

The United States, regardless of its leader, has shown little interest in confronting its long history of colonialism. The growth of the United States could not have occurred without the wholesale and systematic dispossession of native peoples. Sure, many of the thousands of transactions where Indian land came into the hands of white people were “legal” in the sense that they were recorded in deeds or ratified in treaties, but these transactions have histories of their own. They occurred because of the relentless pressure exerted by European farmers and their livestock on native lands, or because native peoples decided to sell lands that they knew from hard experience “settlers” would take from them anyways, or after epidemic diseases reduced an indigenous community’s population and this made their lands seem “vacant” or as “surplus” land. Some of these cessions were the price of peace after a military invasion of conquest and desolation. Dispossession and violence often walked hand-in-hand.

The loss of land was immense. But it cannot be understood apart from the assault on native peoples’ cultures and ways of living. Just as Canada had its residential schools, the United States had boarding schools. Still, there was so much more to the assault on Indian identity, and it was so much more thorough than a focus on these sadistic institutions might lead one to believe. I tell the story of this cultural assault in Chapter 8 of Native America.

We, as a country, are not very good at talking about our misdeeds. We insulate our children from these stories, for instance, for a variety of reasons: because the stories of the suffering that his country has caused native peoples are so massive that kids could not handle them, or because somehow hiding the country’s crimes from them is the best way to produce loyal and patriotic citizens. So we design curricula that talk about tiny parts of the Native American past, but not in a way that would cause children to question their country’s conduct. It happened a long time ago. We are free and clear, we tell them. We’ll blame it on Andrew Jackson, and call it a day.

Meanwhile we cast Indians as part of the past, a point I have raised on this blog many times, because it makes it easier to deny their just grievances today. We will pat ourselves on the back for renaming a football team, or changing Columbus Day to “Indigenous Peoples Day,” or persuading this or that religious denomination to renounce its approval for the Doctrine of Discovery, valuable though these acts may be. But let’s be clear. These actions cost white people little, and the structural burdens imposed by colonialism and white supremacy survive them and remain intact. We like to tinker around the edges of significant problems. Too many of us view manifestations of Indian identity as inauthentic, and the expressions of long-held grievances as belly-aching about things that happened long ago. We do not believe, as a rule, that inter-generational trauma is a thing, or that the burdens of history weigh more heavily upon some people than upon others.

We are unrepentant, unwilling to apologize, and to many of us too ill-informed or too uninterested to learn and understand how Native America’s loss has been white America’s gain.

As I wrote the first draft of this post earlier this morning, the hourly NPR newsbreak came over the radio. The first story was Donald Trump’s denunciation of those NFL players who, with respect and civility, took a knee to protest police brutality and the continuing slaughter of people of color by the nation’s law enforcement officers. The second story involved the shooting of a deaf person of color by police officers in Oklahoma. The victim did not hear the officers’ demand that he set down the metal pipe he was holding.

This country, it’s something else sometimes. As native peoples long have told us, white people in America are comfortable dictating to people of color how they should conduct themselves, the forms of grievance and redress-seeking that are legitimate, not to mention how to conduct themselves religiously, spiritually, emotionally, sexually, domestically, and aesthetically. When kneeling for the National Anthem is viewed as more disrespectful than flying the Confederate flag, and when this proposition can be debated, defended, and taken seriously by millions of almost exclusively white Americans who support the President, it is pretty evident that the sickness is rooted deep.

Justin Trudeau clearly has not come close to doing what his very sincere and committed critics want him to do, but he has done more than any American president, and he is light years ahead of our Brass Creon. Talking cannot do everything, and acknowledging past crimes is not a remedy by itself. But it’s a start. It is a vital precondition to things getting better. The act of acknowledging that I am at least partially responsible for your pain, and that I have benefited from the historical suffering of your people: it can be a powerful thing. I am fully aware that I am speaking favorably of Prime Minister Trudeau for doing, at the end of the day, what any informed and honest person would do. Yet our current leadership, in politics and in public education, in the Democratic and in the Republican parties, are not even close to being able to clear so low a bar.

Native Americans, Treaty Rights

The Treaty of Big Tree–Let’s Follow the Money

September 5, 2017 admin 8 Comments

The anniversary of the “Treaty of Big Tree,” signed on the 15^th of September in 1797, is approaching. According to a New York State historical marker, the agreement was negotiated on land that now provides parking for students who attend the college where I teach. It is a big deal in Geneseo. It is the one, big, historical event that occurred within the town’s bounds.

One thing that I think a lot of non-historians do not realize is the amount of research we do that never sees the light of day. Although we require our students quite often to come up with some meaningful sort of research project during the short fifteen weeks of a semester, we spend plenty of time following interesting questions that lead to dead ends. It happens all the time. We are curious. We ask questions and, sometimes, despite our best efforts, we cannot find an answer.

A couple of years back I was asked to do some research for the Seneca Nation of Indians about the history of the annuities that often were attached to the agreements they entered into with New York State and the United States. In exchange for their lands, Senecas would receive an annual payment.

I often see this bumper sticker in and around Indian Country. The Indian Country Today Media Network, now apparently on hiatus, spoke frequently of broken treaties. But some treaties, it must be remembered, were little more than real estate transactions in which white people obtained a title to Indian lands in return for very little at all.

I have always done research on Big Tree, but I had never bothered to look at whether the United States had fulfilled its part of the bargain. Certainly it acquired a lot of land. But did it pay to the Senecas what they were owed? I travel with footnotes.

I tell the story of the treaty at Big Tree in Native America. It is an important moment in the history of the Senecas. Robert Morris had acquired from earlier land speculators a right of preemption, or first purchase, to all the Seneca lands in New York state. He sold this right to the Holland Land Company in December of 1792.[1] A well-financed syndicate of Dutch merchants and bankers, the Holland Land Company was much better equipped than Morris to oversee the actual opening up of the Seneca homeland to white invasion and settlement—a massive undertaking that involved administering an enormous territory, and absorbing the costs associated with surveying, building roads, and laying out towns.[2] Before they would pay, however, the Holland investors insisted that Morris extinguish the Senecas’ title to the lands in question.

What did that mean? It meant holding a treaty, and negotiating with the Senecas. In 1797 Morris began laying plans for a council. Because Morris was ill and because he feared prosecution for debt should he leave his home in Philadelphia, his son Thomas traveled to Big Tree on the Genesee River to conduct the treaty. (The treaty was held, according to a New York State historical marker, near one of the parking lots on my campus). The story of this sordid council, involving the use of alcohol at the treaty ground and the bribing of important Seneca leaders, has been told many times before. My treatment in Native America is inspired by the great books written by Anthony F. C. Wallace and Laurence Hauptman, which are required reading for those who wish to understand the Iroquois.[3]

Morris obeyed the letter, if not the spirit, of the federal Indian Trade and Intercourse Law, the statute which governed relations between natives and non-natives. The law required that for a purchase of Indian lands to be legally valid, the purchase must be overseen by the United States, and the resulting agreement must be approved by the United States Senate. Morris requested and obtained the appointment of a federal agent, and the Senate did ratify the agreement. And at Big Tree, on the campus where I offer my courses in Iroquois history, the Senecas parted with all of their land, that huge region from the Genesee River westward to the Great Lakes and the Niagara River, save for 200,000 acres distributed across eleven reservations. In exchange for this massive cession, Morris agreed to pay “the sum of one hundred thousand dollars, to be by the said Robert Morris vested in the stock of the bank of the United States, and held in the name of the President of the United States, for the use and behoof of the said nation of Indians.” The Senecas would receive as a payment, each year, the interest earned on this investment.[4]

So let’s follow that money, as far as the sources allow. That was easier said than done. I am no accountant.

In March of 1798 the United States used the $100,000 it had received from Robert Morris to purchase 205 shares in stock of the Bank of the United States “to be held in trust” for the Senecas “by the President of the United States.” The dividends on this investment averaged slightly more than seven thousand dollars a year, though some of the revenues that would otherwise have been delivered to the Senecas were withheld to purchase additional stock: 9 shares in 1804 at a cost of $5328.00, an additional share in 1806 for $522.00, and five more shares in 1807 for a sum of $2580.00. With the exception of this combined amount of 8430 dollars, the increase produced by the Big Tree investment was delivered to the Senecas by federal agents. The dividend, paid twice a year, amounted to a minimum of sixteen dollars per share between 1798 and 1802, or $3280 every six months.^[5]

The Bank of the United States, part of Alexander Hamilton’s (Stop singing, please) ambitious but controversial program for developing the new nation’s economy, had received a twenty-year charter from Congress in 1791. When the Bank ceased its operations in 1811, the stock was liquidated, producing a sum of $95,040. (This sum was less than the $100,000 initially invested owing to shifts in the value of the stock). The War Department credited $1980.00 of this sum to fund its Indian appropriations account, while investing the remaining $93,060.00 in 6% stocks in the name of the President of the United States, to be held in trust for the Seneca Indians.

The Senecas watched closely these funds, and saw the annual dividend as essential to their survival. They said this, in writing, time and again. A large group of “Seneca chiefs” told Secretary of War William Eustis in 1811, after the expiration of the Bank’s charter, that “we are told the field where our Money was planted is become barren.” What they hell, they seemed to be saying. This concerned the Senecas, the chiefs said, because “our money has heretofore been of great service to us. It has helpt us to support our old People, and our Women and Children.” The Senecas sought assurance that the Big Tree fund—the result of their leaders’ difficult decision to transform their lands in western New York into an annual payment—would continue to be paid. “Brother,” the chiefs wrote to Eustis, “we do not understand your ways of doing business,” and “this think is heavy on our minds.” The Senecas wanted to continue “to hold our White Brethren of the United States by the hand, but this weight is heavy. We hope,” they concluded, that “you will remove it.”^[6]

I am fairly certain that these Seneca chiefs understood more than they let on. Signed by a large number of prominent Seneca leaders, the “Talk of the Seneca Chiefs” must have occasioned some alarm in the War Department. With war with Great Britain looming, the chiefs suggested that if the United States did not uphold its part of the bargain and see to the continued payment of the dividends, they might then cease “to hold our White Brethren of the United States by the hand,” and instead embrace those other white brethren, who stood poised on the opposite side of the Niagara River and Lake Ontario, with whom they had aligned during American Revolution. Don’t mess with us. You need us to help secure the Niagara frontier.

The interest earned on the investment after 1811 produced only $5618 per year, but owing to the importance of the Senecas as allies while the United States muddled through its conflict with England, the sum of $6000 was paid to them from the general funds of the Indian department. This fund, in turn, was credited with the dividend produced by the stock. This arrangement continued until 1826 when the 6% stock was liquidated, producing $93,602.67, which the War Department invested in 3% stock. The dividends, falling well short of the $6000 to which the Senecas had grown accustomed, posed a problem for the administration of John Quincy Adams. To pay the usual $6000 would draw down the fund and perhaps force the sale of the stock from which the dividends derived. In any case, the government would be expending more than the interest on the investment. President Adams determined nonetheless “that the government would continue to pay” the Senecas six thousand dollars annually, “taking upon itself the protection of the fund.” The United States, Adams believed, “was bound in good faith to do so.”^[7]

Adams was willing to spend federal funds to uphold the honor of the United States. His successor, Andrew Jackson, clearly did not share this view. Commissioner of Indian Affairs Thomas McKenney disliked the idea of paying the $6000.00 when “the sum remitted” was “greater than the interest received on the Stock.” Anticipating the new president’s views, McKenney decided to offer to the Senecas in 1829 nothing more than the divided, a sum of less than three thousand dollars by 1829.^[8]

This unilateral decision angered the Senecas. An elderly Cornplanter, writing from Kinzua, appealed to President Jackson. The Senecas, Cornplanter wrote, had been well satisfied with the annual dividend of $6000, but now the news from Washington “fills our minds with concern that we cannot get our Money nor be informed why we should not receive [it] as in former years.”^[9] Writing less than three weeks after Congress enacted the Indian Removal Bill, surely Cornplanter recognized that he had directed his appeal to an ardent expansionist who coveted Indian land and wanted all eastern Indians relocated to new lands in the west. The Big Tree payment, Cornplanter continued, “was but a little but it enabled us to purchase Salt & some Blanketts and that would be a great help to those who are active & till their land.” The Senecas could not accept anything less than the 6% to which they were accustomed.^[10]

The President did not believe that any law existed which authorized him to pay to the Senecas a sum greater than the value produced by the stock. Sticking to his rigid and self-serving code of constitutional interpretation, Jackson punted the question to Congress, which in the 1830s did things. The resulting bill, introduced in the House of Representatives, would provide the Senecas with a permanent annuity of $6000, while whatever proceeds emerged from the stock would be credited to the United States.

Senator John Forsyth of Georgia, a determined advocate of the ethnic cleansing his state carried out against the Cherokees and the Creeks, opposed any measure that went beyond the strict language of the Big Tree treaty. Nothing in that agreement, he believed, obligated the United States to pay to the Senecas 6% forever. Paying the $6000 he said,

had already cost the Government a very considerable amount over and above the product of the stock, and now the question arises, are we bound to do more, after doing all we have already gratuitously performed? But it is said the Indians have been given to understand that the full amount of six thousand dollars should be paid to them. Who gave them to understand this? Who had a right to do so? And yet it was on such loose declarations that the whole merits of this claim seemed to rest. It is contended that the Government is bound to realize to these Indians any expectations they may have been induced to entertain. It is true, it is said that the late President of the United States [Adams], when the subject was before him, had given them these assurances. This, however, did not establish the justice of the demand. He could see no sort of obligation on the part of the Government to pay them more than the amount produced by their stock.^[11]

Forsyth’s argument failed to persuade a critical number of his colleagues, which is surprising given how they felt about Indians, and the bill became law in February of 1831. Thereafter, the law read,

the proceeds of the sum of one hundred thousand dollars, being the amount placed in the hands of the President of the United States, in trust, for the Seneca tribe of Indians, situated in the State of New York, be hereafter passed to the credit of the Indian appropriation fund; and that the Secretary of War be authorized to receive, and pay over to the Seneca tribe of Indians, the sum of six thousand dollars annually, in the way and manner as heretofore practiced.

A subsequent act, signed into law in December of 1831, paid to the Senecas $2914.40, “that being the balance due on the annuity payable to said Indians for the year one thousand eight hundred and twenty-nine.”^[12]

Congress did on a number of subsequent occasions revisit the Big Tree annuity. An act passed in June of 1846 provided that “certain stocks, etc. held in trust for the Senecas should be cancelled and the funds deposited in the Treasury at 5 percent interest and the interest paid to the Senecas annually.”^[13] Fifty-three years later, in March of 1909, Congress directed the Secretary of the Treasury to place on the books of the Treasury Department “to the credit of the Seneca Indians of New York, the sum of $118,050, such sum to bear interest at 5 percent until withdrawn for the Indians, being the value of stocks held in trust for the Indians and taken by the United States and cancelled under the authority of the act of June 27, 1846.” Congress authorized the Treasury Secretary in 1909 to place on the books of the treasury department $118,050, “such sum to bear interest at 5 percent until withdrawn for the Indians, being the value of stocks held in trust for the Indians and taken by the United States and cancelled under the authority” of the 1846 act. This sum, Congress decided, the Treasury secretary would pay “per capita to the members of the tribe entitled thereto.”^[14]

I am not sure what happened as we carry the story through the rest of the nineteenth century and into and through the twentieth. The records of congressional appropriations show that the Congress continued to appropriate the $6000 dollars each year to pay its obligations under the Big Tree treaty. Seneca Nation records, however, suggest that these payments were not received until relatively recently. I still have work to do to be able to sort this out.

But here is the thing. Honor Indian Treaties. But a lot of them were not honorable at all, and the terms of many of them were never written with Indians’ interests in mind. Students in my Native American Survey course has just finished reading Thomas King’s The Inconvenient Indian, which says so much in such a breezy manner. “Treaties,” King wrote, “were not vehicles for protecting land or even sharing land.” Rather, “they were vehicles for acquiring land. Almost without fail, throughout the history of North America, every time Indians signed at reaty with Whites, Indians lost land.”

So let’s think about what we mean when we call upon the United States to honor its treaties. Certainly the government should keep its word. Certainly in the realm of Indian affairs it has behaved despicably and irresponsibly. Certainly treaties have been broken many times, with often devastating consequences. But, in many instances, native communities would have been better off if these treaties had never been negotiated, never signed, never ratified, and never proclaimed by the president. So many of them were coerced, or fraudulent, or exploitative. The colonization of this continent, and the dispossession of native peoples, to a great extent was achieved through the instrument of treaties.

[1] Charles E. Brooks, Frontier Settlement and the Market Revolution: The Holland Land Purchase, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 13-14.

[2] Wallace, Death and Rebirth of the Seneca, 179-180. The Holland Land Company Papers are located at the State University of New York, College at Fredonia.

[3] Wallace, Death and Rebirth of the Seneca, 179-183; Taylor, Divided Ground, 313-316; Laurence M. Hauptman, Conspiracy of Interests: Iroquois Dispossession and the Rise of New York State, (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1997), 91-92; Norman B. Wilkinson, “Robert Morris and the Treaty of Big Tree,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 40 (September 1953), 257-278.

[4] Kappler, comp., Treaties, 1028.

[5] LR OSW IA, 1: 0188.

[6] Talk of the Seneca Chiefs, 9 October 1811, LR OSW IA, 1: 714.

[7] Nourse Report, 18 March 1829, LR OIA-Seneca, Roll 808.

[8] McKenney to Secretary of War John H. Eaton, 17 March 1829, Ibid.

[9] John O’Bail (Cornplanter) to Andrew Jackson, 2 August 1830, Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Gales and Seaton’s Register of Debates in Congress, 3 February 1831, p. 79.

[12] Available at the Library of Congress “Century of Lawmaking” website.

[13] “Compilation of Material Relating to the Indians of the United States, etc., by Subcommittee on Indian Affairs of the Committee of Public Lands, House of Representatives, Pursuant to H. Res. 66, 81^st Congress, 2d. Sess., 13 June 1950, Serial No. 30,” in Paul G. Reilly Collection, Buffalo State College, Box 37, p. 12.

[14] Ibid., 13.

Native Americans, New Publications

Thanks!

August 10, 2017 admin Leave a comment

At long last, Native America has hit the shelves. I received my authors’ copies the other day, and there are several dozen copies on my campus bookstore’s shelves awaiting the students who will arrive in two weeks or so. The first edition appeared in 2010, so it this version has been a long time coming. I hope that it will not be another seven years before the next edition appears.

And that is because so much wonderful scholarship is being produced in this vibrant field. Writing a textbook can be difficult, but there is no better way in my view to keep learning. I am amazed by the breadth and depth of this work, and the frequency with which it forces me to return to my notes, revise my discussion questions, rethink how I organize my class time, and how I present this material to students.

So to my friends in history and anthropology and archaeology and political science and geography and law who write in this field, thank you.

To my colleagues in Early American history, who were just awakening to the potential of integrating native peoples into the broader history of the Atlantic World when I began graduate school in 1990, and who are now placing the history of native peoples at the center of their histories of #VastEarlyAmerica, Thank you. Juliana Barr, Michael Witgen, Colin Calloway, Robbie Etheridge, Elizabeth Fenn, Lin Fisher, Richard and Shirley Flint, James Brooks, Matthew Babcock, Heidi Bohaker, Kathleen DuVal, David Silverman, Steven Hackel, Jeffrey Ostler, Jon Parmenter, Timothy K. Perttula, Josh Piker, Jim Rice, Dan Mandell, David Preston, Andres Resendez, Brett Rushforth, Natale Zappia, and Ned Blackhawk–I have not met all of you, but thank you for your wonderful scholarship, and for those of you I do know, thanks for your friendship, kind words, and support. I read on Twitter about the amount of competition there is in academia, and the amount of stress. I totally understand that. But, for myself, I have been very, very, grateful for the many kind and generous and interested (and interesting) people I have met who have given me so much. There are so many names here I have not mentioned. So many people producing such fantastic work.

In the time that passed between the first and second edition, some wonderful and important work appeared on nineteenth century native communities. Pekka Hamalainen’s The Comanche Empire received a massive amount of attention, but there were other works as well that shed light on individual communities. To Laurence Hauptman, Rose Stremlau, Andrew Denson, Matthew Dennis, C. Joseph Genitin-Pilawa, Alexandra Harmon, Colette Hyman, Gary Clayton Anderson, Karl Jacoby, Brendan Lindsay, Benjamin Madley, Devon Mihesuah, G. Bruce Miller, Greg Smithers, Coll Thrush, Lissa Wadewitz, Stephen Warren–thanks to you as well. Those of you I have not met, I look forward to getting to know some day.

A number of works struck me as particularly significant in the 2oth century history of native peoples in the United States. To Daniel M. Cobb, Frederick Hoxie, Margaret Jacobs, Paul R. Mackenzie-Jones, Nicolas Rosenthal, Paul Rosier, Frank Rzeczkowski, Audra Simpson, Sherry Smith–thanks for your work as well. You have taught me much.

And to all the friends with whom I have discussed this work over the years, thanks to you, too. Writing is a solitary task, but it need not be a lonely one. Peter Olsen-Harbich, a Geneseo alum now at the College of William and Mary, and Tom Callahan, a former student now out in the American West, thanks to you both. Tom and I spent days driving around upstate New York, visiting the sites of significance in the history of the Haudenosaunee, talking about past and present as we went. Two former students from whom I have learned a lot.

To my colleagues at Geneseo, who offer such a wonderful and supportive atmosphere for doing good work, I offer my thanks, too. I have taught at two other colleges–none of them can compare to what I have at Geneseo.

And my family, and especially Leticia Ontiveros, who has heard more about this book than she ever wanted to hear, but who has taught me so much about life and how to live it, even if the lessons do not always stick–thanks for everything.

I hope those of you who stumble across this book find the second edition of Native America of value. If you have suggestions or criticisms, comments or questions, please send me your thoughts. It has been a long journey indeed, but I am excited about the possibility of moving forward with others, and I look forward to hearing from you all.

Native America: A History