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Leave Bad Bunny Alone

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Last week President Trump posted a “Presidential Message” on the “Anniversary of one of our Nation’s earliest displays of military might.” He wanted to “honor the memory of the brave men” he said, “who gave their lives in service to our Nation” during the Mexican War.

            It is not uncommon for a president to take the anniversary of a historical event as an occasion for reflecting on the policies and goals of his administration, but invocations of the Mexican War are relatively rare.  But Trump, as we well know, is not like other presidents. 

            “Guided by our victory on the fields of Mexico 178 years ago,” his message reads, “I have spared no effort in defending our southern border against invasion, upholding the rule of law, and protecting our homeland from forces of evil, violence, and destruction.” Trump claimed that he was stopping the flow of drugs into the United States, halting the “invasion of illegal aliens,” and “dismantling narco-terrorist networks all across the Western hemisphere.” Trump also, he said, had secured control of the Panama Canal from foreign takeover, a very odd claim, and that his administration was “aggressively pursuing an America First policy of peace through strength and will continue to reassert the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine to ensure the Hemisphere remains safe, prosperous, and free.”

For white people.

Whatever one thinks of Trump’s policies, and however much one might agree or disagree with his party’s belief in the magnitude of the border crisis, it is easy to see how Trump both invoked and found justification for his policies in the virulent racism that preceded the war.

Late in the 1980s, when I knew I wanted to go to graduate school to study American history, one of the first books I read was Reginald Horsman’s Race and Manifest Destiny. It is a fantastic book that got me thinking. Horsman wrote about the origins of “American Racial Anglo-Saxonism,” tracing its roots back to the Tudor antiquarians of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Trump speaks the language of these racial Anglo-Saxonists. After the War of 1812, for example, Trump  asserted, the United States was “guided by the steadfast belief that our Nation was destined by divine providence to expand to the golden shore of the Pacific Ocean.” After “Mexican forces launched an ambush along the Rio Grande, killing 11 and wounding 6 American troops” (a highly dubious proposition), and “with the promise of Manifest Destiny beating in every American heart” (another highly dubious proposition), President James K. Polk commenced a violent invasion that seized more than half of Mexico’s territory and even more of its arable soil. (Trump, of course, did not call it that). It was a war of territorial aggression that led to the United States claiming much of Mexico, many of its citizens, and many thousands of Indigenous people as subjects of an aggressively expanding American empire.

Not all Americans supported the war, and the notion that Manifest Destiny beat in every American heart is simply not true. Mexicans and Indigenous people, after all, did not feel that this war was a good thing, and they are Americans, too. But many white Americans were deeply concerned about the American aggression in Texas and beyond.

The Mexican War is a big subject, and I suspect that many of us in our survey courses do not do it justice. One way I have found useful to get at this in the classroom is by looking at the career of John Quincy Adams, the greatest ex-president in American history. Leonard Richards’ old, brief biography of Adams’s congressional career is wonderful. I am sure there is more recent work out there, but because my department long ago dispensed with its survey courses, a decision I gradually came to support, I no longer have occasion to teach these classes. 

It is important to remember that by the middle of the 1830s a national two-party political system had emerged.  The Second American Party System, as it is called, was the product of the politics of the Market Revolution. These two parties, to a very great extent, disagreed over the economic and political future of the United States.  They were struggling to define this thing called a “Republic,” a vague concept which all embraced but over which different people could disagree.  By 1840, these two parties, Whigs and Democrats, were competing in all parts of the country, a product of the extraordinary political talent of Martin van Buren, who worked harder than anyone to try to keep the slavery issue out of politics.

The territorial expansion of the United States, the fulfillment of what newspaperman John L. O’Sullivan called its “Manifest Destiny,” would introduce questions about race, slavery, the economic and political future of the United States, and the definition of the Republic that could not easily be avoided, and Adams played an important role in this story. He did not retire after his presidency.  He was elected to Congress from Massachusetts in 1831 and would serve for the next seventeen years until his death in 1848.  Throughout these years, Adams was an enemy of the Slave Power conspiracy, premised on the belief that slaveowners and their allies would do anything to protect the institution of slavery, even if that meant depriving white people of their constitutional rights. Adams, for instance, led the fight against the Gag Rule, through which pro-slavery members of the House and Senate managed to shut off all debate on antislavery petitions which floated into Congress.

If you teach this material, you will need to remind your students that the first amendment to the Constitution guarantees citizens the right to petition their legislators, a cornerstone of the Bill of Rights.  The gag rule, Adams argued, was obviously unconstitutional.  Adams we should point out, was not an abolitionist—he thought they were troublemakers, but he did believe strongly that the constitution mattered. Adams considered the gage rule to be “in direct violation of the constitution of the United States, of the rules of the House, and of the rights of my constituents.”  Because the gag had to be renewed at every session of Congress, there were frequent opportunities to excoriate southern slave-owners and northern Jacksonians for denying the right to petition, and to savage them on constitutional grounds.  John C. Calhoun, obviously a supporter of slavery, called Adams a “mischievous bad old Man.” The gag rule, it should be pointed out, served the interests of slaveowners, and the Jacksonians quite well. How could Van Buren and others focus attention on banking and currency reform if Congress had to continually deal with the slavery question.  The Gag Rule was consistent with Van Buren’s goal of keeping slavery out of politics.

Adams was able to bring up slavery despite the gag rule. In February 1837, for instance, he tried to introduce a petition from nine women in Fredericksburg, Virginia.  He tried to present it, arguing that they wanted the abolition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia and not abolition in toto.  No matter, the resolution was tabled. Then Adams asked the speaker to rule on another piece of paper, one that looked like a petition, but was filled with scratches and marks “purporting to come from slaves.”  Could this, he asked, be presented?  The question produced an immediate reaction as southerners jumped at the implication that slaves had the right to petition congress.  Adams sat back as confusion reigned.  Some said he should be expelled for introducing a resolution from slaves.    He pointed out that he had said “purported.” Later he said that the resolution did indeed come from slaves, but they were slaves that preferred slavery to abolition and wanted Congress not to tamper with slavery in any way.  This made his opponents even madder.  This went on for five days, to Adams’ great satisfaction. Adams was receiving nearly a dozen assassination threats a month.

During his years in Congress he had other opportunities to annoy proslavery zealots.  In 1841, he defended 39 Africans before the Supreme Court after they had seized control over the slave ship Amistad.  These Africans, sailing from one part of Cuba to another, had rebelled and captured the ship they were on.  They hoped to sail to Africa, but they were deceived by their Spanish hostage crew, and ended up on Long Island Sound. Adams and his associates won the case and the Africans were returned to Africa on the grounds that Africans were never the legal property of the Spaniards.  Rather, they were “kidnapped Africans, who by the laws of Spain itself were entitled to their freedom.”

In many ways, the Jacksonians played into Adams’ hands.  In no way was this more so than over Texas.  The Jacksonians were, in general, land hungry and beholden to frontier interests.  They were an aggressively-expansionist party.  Many Whigs, their opponents, did not share their enthusiasm for acquiring additional chunks of land. They wanted to develop what the United States already had, they said.  They worried that adding “inferior races” could weaken the republic. And they could not help but notice that Jacksonian expansion seemed to benefit the plantation south more than the rest of the country.  Adams became convinced that Jacksonian expansion was part of a larger “Slave Power Conspiracy.”  Most of all, the Jacksonians wanted Texas.

The Texas issue, of course, grew out of the Mexican Revolution. Mexico had gained its independence from Spain in 1821.  In 1823, in order to create a buffer zone between Mexico’s interior and the United States, the Mexican government encouraged migration into Texas. Land hungry Americans came in droves, in greater numbers than expected, outnumbering Mexicans by 2 to 1, and this produced alarm in Mexico City. The Mexican government, after all, abolished slavery in 1829, and in 1830 it enacted a law directing immigrants to abide by Mexican Law and custom, part of which was Roman Catholicism. But the Mexican government was too weak to enforce its authority. Then in 1834, General Santa Anna seized control of the Mexican government and established a dictatorship. Texans revolted and Santa Anna, with 6000 men, stormed into Texas in 1836, killing 188 at the Alamo and 300 more at the Goliad.

The Texans, with aid from the southern states, fought back and when they won their independence, they appealed to the United States to recognize Texan independence. Adams had little use for the Texas rebels. Like many northerners, he suspected that the Texas Revolution was part of a plot hatched by slaveowners to further southern interests. Adams accused the supporters of the Texans of being racists.  He asked speaker of the house James K. Polk, “Do not you, an Anglo-Saxon, slave-holding exterminator of Indians, from the bottom of your soul, hate the Mexican-Spaniard-Indian emancipator of slaves and abolisher of slavery?” Adams’s stand was popular, especially his belief that southerners hoped to carve up several slave states out of the Texas region.  His claim that the Texas Revolution was a criminal act set off by enslavers and land speculators had instant appeal throughout much of the Northeast.

Andrew Jackson was unable to do anything about annexing Texas. Van Buren, his successor, had little interest in doing so, as he was firmly committed to keeping slavery out of politics. William Henry Harrison, a Whig, was elected President in 1840, and he too had little interest in annexation, but he died soon after taking office.  He was replaced by John Tyler, who was scarcely a Whig at all.  In fact, Tyler’s stand on banking was similar in many ways to Jackson, and that alienated Whig power broker Senator Henry Clay and others who largely read him out of the party.  Tyler became a president without a party.  He saw the Texas issue as his only hope for political salvation.

Adams watched Tyler with suspicion.  In a speech to his constituents, Adams insisted that “Your country is no longer a democracy, it is no longer even a republic—it is a government of 2 or 300,000 holders of slaves, to the utter exclusion of the remaining part, and all the population of the other states in the Union.”  Now Tyler’s trump card was that British politicians had made antislavery speeches for home consumption, and they had stated that they favored a free and independent Texas as an alternative to southern cotton and as a barrier to further American expansion.  Thus Tyler’s supporters could throw back at Adams that the was abetting a foreign conspiracy, one orchestrated by the British, designed to reduce the growing economic power of the United States.

After February of 1844, Tyler’s secretary of state was John C. Calhoun. Tyler charged him with completing negotiations for the annexation of Texas.  In April 1844, Calhoun sent the treaty to the Senate, along with a copy of a letter he had written to Richard Pakenham, the British minister to Washington. The “Pakenham letter” was a bombshell.  Besides denouncing Pakenham’s government for interfering in Texas and supporting abolition throughout the world, Calhoun sang the praises of slavery and cited statistics to prove that blacks were better off as slaves than freedmen. He justified annexation as a means of defending the institution of slavery. So what? The letter strengthened Adams and the northern whigs, because it proved that Texas annexation was about acquiring additional land for the institution of slavery.  The annexation treaty was defeated overwhelmingly in the Senate.

Adams knew that the election of 1844, which pitted Clay against the democrat James K. Polk, would revolve around Texas. Speaking to a Boston audience, Adams said that “your trial is approaching. The spirit of freedom and the spirit of slavery are drawing together for the deadly conflict of arms.  The annexation of Texas to this Union is the blast of the trumpet for a foreign, civil, servile, and Indian war, of which the government of your country, fallen into faithless hands, have already given the signal—first by a shameless treaty, rejected by a virtuous senate; and again by the glove of defiance, hurled by the apostle of nullification, at the avowed policy of the British empire peacefully to promote the extinction of slavery throughout the world.  Young men of Boston: Burnish your honor, prepare for the conflict, and I say to you, in the language of Galgacus to the ancient Britons, think of your forefathers!  Think of your Posterity!” (I had to look up who Galgacus was, too, but even if you don’t, I think you can catch the urgency of his tone).

Despite Adams’ efforts, Polk won the election, and Adams expected gloomy days ahead for the republic under Tyler’s successor. Now Tyler had submitted a joint resolution annexing Texas to the United States.  A joint resolution requires only a majority vote of both houses, rather than the 2/3 required for the ratification of a treaty. The Texans were wary, and to sweeten the pot, Polk accepted the Rio Grande as the southern boundary of Texas. The Texas he saw added to the union, in other words, was larger in a sense than the Texas that had broke away from Mexico. THAT Mexico had its southern border at the Nueces River. Polk was an incredibly hard-driving and aggressive president.  He was willing to compromise his territorial ambitions when it came to a dispute with Britain over the Oregon boundary, but never on the question of gaining additional territory from Mexico. Polk sent John Slidell as his emissary to Mexico City with authority to buy California and New Mexico from the Mexican government, and to get Mexico to recognize the Rio Grande as the southern boundary of Texas.

Word of Slidell’s mission arrived in Mexico before Slidell did, and soon after his arrival the Mexican government was overthrown by general Mariano Paredes and some 7000 soldiers.  The new military regime refused to have anything to do with Slidell, and asserted Mexico’s claim to all of Texas. Polk regarded this rejection of Slidell as cause for war.  Then he got word of General Zachary Taylor losing the eleven men Trump mentioned as the result of a supposed Mexican invasion of American soil.  To Adams, Polk had provoked this war to extend slavery.  Not everybody agreed with this interpretation.  Some simply did not believe that the President would do this, or that it made sense for him to do so.  But the point is clear. The Mexican War was an immense watershed.  The two-party system was beginning to fall apart along sectional lines.  This combustible situation was made clear in August of 1846, when a congressman from Pennsylvania, a democrat named David Wilmot, introduced an amendment to an appropriation bill that the President’s supporters tried to push through Congress at the last second. 

Wilmot and his co-sponsors hoped to ban slavery from any territory acquired from Mexico. He was not an abolitionist.  Wilmot said “I have no squeamish sensitiveness upon the subject of slavery, nor morbid sympathy for the slave.  I plead the cause of the rights of white freemen. I would preserve for free white labor a fair country, a rich inheritance, where the sons of toil, of my own race and own color, can live without the disgrace which association with negro slavery brings upon free labor.”

The Wilmot Proviso did nothing that would have destroyed the institution of slavery, but it did say that slavery should not expand. That implied that there was something unclean, something dishonorable, about slavery. The Wilmot Proviso thus made clear a number of significant cracks in the Second American party System. Both northern Democrats and northern Whigs supported the Proviso.  Many of these northerners were coming to believe in the Slave Power Conspiracy.  Slaveowners, the story went, were members of an anti-democratic aristocracy that was willing to subvert the nation’s democratic institutions to protect the institution of slavery. The south already had unequal representation in the House because of the 3/5 clause.  Slavery was now spreading, subverting institutions wherever it went. Looking on these events, the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson could see that “Mexico will poison us.”

I MARRIED INTO A MEXICAN-AMERICAN FAMILY. I don’t speak Spanish well at all, but I can understand it. Watching Bad Bunny with my Mexican-American partner, her sister, our children, made it even more clear than it otherwise would have been how well he struck so many notes that resonated with his audience. It really was a fantastic performance, and I am sure I will watch it again to catch things that I missed—some of which were pointed out by observers far more astute than I.

            Manifest Destiny. Ask an American about their nation’s history, and I find that even if they do not know the subject well, they will be able to tell you something about manifest destiny. It is one of those odd concepts, or bits of information, that really seems to stick. When I ask, students recite pretty easily that it meant that it was God’s plan that the United States expand across the continent. But expansion is such a bland word, isn’t it? Invade. Seize. Colonize. Take, steal, rob, exploit, and conquer. All these words seem to get at the underlying reality with more precision.

            For those of us who teach Indigenous history, the expressions of this manifest design are so easy to see in the Annual Reports of the Commissioners of Indian Affairs, all helpfully digitized by the University of Wisconsin. Indian Commissioner William Medill in 1848 argued, for example, that “Apathy, barbarism, and heathenism must give way to energy, civilization, and Christianity, and so the Indian of this continent has been displaced by the European.”

            You see it, don’t you? “Manifest Destiny” meant the dispossession of Indigenous people. And as Horsman showed so well, Mexicans, too, were viewed as a race vastly inferior to the white Anglo-Saxons Americans idealized and idolized. So Bad Bunny ended his performance at the Super Bowl by reciting the names of the nations of the Americas. He showed the audience a football inscribed with the words, “Together We Are America.” Trump, meanwhile, who clearly was watching, posted on his silly Twitter knock-off a racist screed. He was angry, it seems to me, because Bad Bunny showed that Manifest Destiny was a racist fantasy. Americans’ attempts to fulfill that manifest destiny, to be sure, ruined the lives of millions of people, but Bad Bunny proved that it was a racist lie, an invocation of God to seize the life, liberty, and property of an enormous number of perfectly innocent people. Manifest Destiny was genocidal, in that if God’s plan was fulfilled in the way the white supremacists wished there would be no Spanish speakers left on this continent. It seems like maybe, just maybe, God did not want that after all. If there is a god, I would like to think that they are far more happy with the splendid color and beauty on display at halftime than the swinish grunts of the racist pig who leads the Republican Party.

Teaching Native American History

Rules for Historical Writing.

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I am marking some final papers this semester. Research. It is such a difficult thing to do, harder even than the students know. To start from nothing, and over the course of 15 weeks read enough to frame a meaningful question, to dive into secondary works that might be difficult for students to read, and, of course, primary sources, which can be extremely challenging. I tell them how difficult the process is. I tell them, half jokingly, that because we give ourselves seven years to write something meaningful and they have just a couple of months, in a way we hold our students to standards higher than we hold ourselves, especially as the demand on faculty to publish has become, sadly and apparently, old school. So some advice. This is not exhaustive. You might not like it. You might find it really helpful. If you want, place your own suggestions in the comments. I would love to read about how you help your students do this difficult work.

  1.  All historical writing begins with a question.  All good historical writing answers that question.  All good historical writing contains a thesis or an argument.  A sound thesis will provide an answer to the question under investigation briefly, in a sentence or two.  The rest of the text, whether it is a term paper, a dissertation, an article or a book, will demonstrate how that one sentence thesis is true.
  2. Some questions are better than others. Ideally, you will ask a new question, or answer an old question in a new way, or apply a broad question to a more narrow case where you can become an expert over that small piece of a larger whole. We value your perspectives and trust your creativity. When we read your papers, we hope to learn from you.
  3. All good historians read the footnotes or endnotes. Indeed, we are the people who read the notes.  We take notes on the footnotes, making sure we record sources, primary and secondary, that may be useful to us in our own work. We like footnotes to a degree that it makes some people uncomfortable.
  4. All good historians are interdisciplinary, or willing to become interdisciplinary. Historians are willing to do the grunt work for the other social science and humanities disciplines that are related to our fields.  
  5. Historians question nearly everything about the work of other historians. Historians are prone to disbelief—we are critical readers, and we should be ready to question all assumptions.
  6. Historians are relentless in their quest for sources, secondary and primary, and they recognize that the work of gathering sources and creating a bibliography is one that is never completely finished.
  7. No, you do not yet have enough sources.
  8. When your professor tells you to check out one source or another, you are obligated to do so.  It is not an option.  If you look at that source, and do not know how to make sense of it, it is your responsibility to learn, or to ask for help from your professor or from a library professional who might assist you. Those of us who are decent people love to talk to you about sources. Some of us especially love when you can explain why a source we recommend to you is not helpful. See? You are teaching us new stuff.
  9. Do not quote secondary sources unless your source says something so astoundingly clever that you cannot possibly do without it.  Leave historians in the footnotes. Some academic disciplines are really into quoting scholars. “As Dirk Broadaxe said in Logjam, his seminal monograph about lumberjacks…” and so on. It’s pretentious, does not read well, and, you know, footnotes. They are right there at the bottom of the page.
  10. History is a discipline.  There are rules.  Research papers should be formatted according to standards included in the Turabian Manual. If you do not know what the Turabian Manual is, you must learn.  Even if it seems to you that it is stupid. We are members of an undisciplined discipline, but you need to conform to some of these base level expectations. You must take the time to learn to format your footnotes and bibliography according to Turabian’s standards.  This is not optional.  It is required.
  11. As Collingwood said, (see above, No. 9), “nothing capable of being memorized is history.”
  12. Treat words like they cost you money.
  13. People with bad grammar hate America.
  14. The past tense of the verb “to lead” is “led.” There is no reason ever for you to use the word “plethora.”
  15. To use Chat GPT and similar applications to construct your research project is so much worse than dishonest. It is environmentally irresponsible, lends support to corporate overlords and soulless tech bros who value neither labor nor the life of the intellect, and deprives you of a chance to learn a craft that is, at the most fundamental level, the antidote to the worst qualities of artificial intelligence. Remember, good historians are honest. Good historians are not afraid of hard work and answering difficult questions.

New Publications

What You Need to Read, March 2024

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I will get back to telling the story of the stolen lands upon which New York is built. Today, however, it is time for another edition of the quarterly bibliography I have been posting here for the past several years. Some of these books are not out yet. Some of them are too expensive for me to buy. But all of them look interesting. As always, if I have missed something, I hope you will let me know

Anderson, Scott W. Pricing the Land: The Buying and Selling of Frontier New York and the Cayuga Reservation, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2024).

Beck, David R. M. Bribed with our Own Money: Federal Abuse of American Indian Funds in the Termination Era, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2024).

Betke, Tyla. “’Not a Shred of Evidence’: Settler Colonial Networks of Concealment and the Birtie Indian Residential School,” Canadian Historical Review, 104 (December 2023), 519-544.

Blaakman, Michael A. Speculation Nation: Land Mania in the Revolutionary American Republic, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023).

Bottinger, Patrick. “Fertile Grounds: Knowledge, Ceremony, and the Intensification of Maize,” Agricultural History, 97 (November 2023), 513-546.

Brewer, Susan. The Best Land: Four Hundred Years of Love and Betrayal on Oneida Territory, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2024).

Broadwell, George Aaron and Alejandra Dubcovsky, “Chief Manuel’s 1651 Timucua Letter: The Oldest Letter in a Native Language of the United States,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 164 (November 2023), 225-267.

Brownstone, Arni. Indigenous War Painting of the Plains: An Illustrated History, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2024).

Byers, A. Martin and DeeANne Wymer, eds., Hopewell Settlement Patterns, Subsistence and Symbolic Landscapes, (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2024).

Cable, John H. Southern Enclosure: Settler Colonialism and the Postwar Transformation of Mississippi, (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2023).

Calloway, Colin. Hard Neighbors: The Scotch-Irish Invasion of Native America and the Making of American Identity, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2024).

Chase, Adrian S. Z, Arlen F. Chase, and Diane Z. Chase, eds, Ancient Mesoamerican Population History: Urbanism, Social Complexity, and Change, (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2024).

Clough, Joshua. Resisting Oklahoma’s Reign of Terror: The Society of Oklahoma Indians and the Fight for Native Rights, 1923-1928, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2024).

DeJong, David H. Damming the Gila: The Gila River Indian Community and the San Carlos Irrigation Project, 1900-1942, (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2024).

Elliott, C. R. “’Through Death’s Wilderness’: Malaria, Seminole Environmental Knowledge, and the Florida Wars of Removal,” Ethnohistory, 71 (January 2024), 3-25.

Evans, Laure E. “The Strange Career of Federal Indian Policy: Rural Politics, Native Nations, and the Path Away from Assimilation,” Studies in American Political Development, 37 (October 2023), 89-110.

Fixico, Donald Lee. Indian Treaties in the United States: An Encyclopedia and Documents Collection, (New York: Bloomsbury, 2024).

Gone, Joseph P. “Indigenous Historical Trauma: Alter-Native Explanations for Mental Health Inequities,” Daedalus, 152 (Fall 2023), 130-150.

Hall, Ryan. “Patterns of Plunder: Corruption and the Failure of the Indian Reservation System, 1851-1887,” Western Historical Quarterly, 55 (Spring 2024), 21-38.

Harvey, Caitlin “University Land Grabs: Indigenous Dispossession and the Universities of Toronto and Manitoba,” Canadian Historical Review, 104 (December 2023), 467-493.

Jarratt-Snider, Karen and Marianne O. Nielsen, eds., Indigenous Health and Justice, (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2024).

Jenkinson, Clay. “On the Future of the Doctrine of Discovery,” We Proceeded On, 49 (November 2023), 1-53.

Kidder, William L. Defending Fort Stanwix: A Story of the New York Frontier in the American Revolution, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2024).

Klann, Mary. Wardship and the Welfare State: Native Americans and the Formation of First-Class Citizenship in Mid-Twentieth Century America, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2024).

Lloyd, Dana. Land is Kin: Sovereignty, Religious Freedom, and Indigenous Sacred Sites, (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2023).

Lowery, Melinda Maynor and Christina Snyder, “The Native South and Eleventh-Hour History: Reconceptualizing Early America,” William and Mary Quarterly 81 (January 2024), 103-114.

McCreary, Tyler and Rebecca Hall. “The Healer, the Witch and the Law: The Settler Magic that Criminalized Indigenous Medicine Men as Fraud and Normalized Colonial Violence as Care,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 114 (2024), 352-368.

Martinez, David. “A City Upon Stolen Land: Westward Expansion, Indigenous Intellectuals, and the Origin of Resistance,” Journal of the Early Republic, 43 (Winter 2023), 607-617.

Morelock, Jerry. “Custer’s Last Decision,” MHQ: Quarterly Journal of Military History, 36 (Winter 2024), 38-47.

Morman, Todd Allin. Many Nations Under Many Gods: Public Land Management and American Indian Sacred Sites, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2024).

Moves Camp, Richard. My Grand-Father’s Altar: Five Generations of Lakota Holy Men, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2024).

Owens, Robet M. “Field of Corpses: Arthur St Clair and the Death of an American Army,” Indiana Magazine of History, 120 (March 2024).

Owens, Robert M. Killing Over Land: Murder and Diplomacy on the Early American Frontier, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2024).

Parmenter, Jon. “Confronting Cornell University’s Origins in Indigenous Dispossession,” William and Mary Quarterly, 81 (January 2024), 123-124.

Peach, Steven. Rivers of Power: Creek Political Culture in the Native South, 1750-1815, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2024).

Perez, Erika.  “Voices from California: Spanish-Mexican and Indigenous Women’s Interventions on Empire and Manifest Destiny,” Journal of the Early Republic, 43 (Winter 2023), 659-668.

Rakita, Gordon F. M and Maria Cecilia Lozada, Exploring Ontologies of the Precontact Americas: From Individual Bodies to Bodies of Social Theory, (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2024).

Randolph, Ned. Muddy Thinking in the Mississippi River Delta: A Call for Reclamation, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2024).

Stevenson, Christopher, Madeleine Gunter-Bassett, Laure Dussubieux, “Exploring the Seventeenth-Century Copper Trade: An Analysis of Smelted Copper from Sites in Virginia and North Carolina,” American Antiquity, 89 (January 2024), 119-132.

Van Last, Emily C. and Carlton Shield Chief Gover, Indigenizing Archaeology: Putting Theory into Practice, (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2024).

Varley, Molly K. Americans Recaptured: Progressive Era Memory of Frontier Captivity, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2024).

Wheeler, Winona, et. al., The Indigenous Oral History Manual, (New York: Routledge, 2024).

Winkler, Albert. “The Fetterman Disaster: A Swiss-American Officer Leads His Men to Disaster,” Swiss American Historical Society Review, 60 (February 2024), 1-83.

Teaching Native American History

Montana Story, Part II: Apply Yourself

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And about that college in Montana. It is not that the people in my department did not care about my research. It’s that they saw any small success that came my way as something to resent. Sometimes I told myself that they saw my work through a lens of insecurity, that my productivity reflected on their own lack of productivity. But I was not all that productive in Montana. Anyways, I know now that this was never the case. They were just mean-spirited bastards, and I let those assholes get under my skin.

I have thought about this a lot in light of the Netflix show “The Chair.” I saw someone on twitter ask about Bob Balaban’s character, the starchy and elitist professor of American literature Elliot Rentz. Pembroke University, the fictional setting for “The Chair,” looks like paradise compared to MSU-Billings, which at the time I taught there was a demoralizing hellscape led by a dunce of a President and a dumbbell Dean.

My department consisted of two Jeopardy Champions. One, who was working on a bibliography of lynching, insisted that the infamous Willy Horton advertisement was perfectly acceptable and had nothing to do with race in America. The other was a Harvard-trained historian of the French Revolution who had been denied tenure at two other institutions before he landed in Billings. He did not drive, and relied on students to drive him around. He liked to hang around the dorms. When I left Billings, he warmly congratulated me, told me how great my new department chair was, and then scurried off to tell him how awful I was. My new chair assured me that this reflected badly on everyone in Montana but not on me.

There was also in the department an Iraqi Seventh-Day Adventist who believed that African Americans were moving to Billings because it was an easy place to commit crimes, and a Missouri-Synod Lutheran pastor who proudly claimed that being a professor “was the best part time job in the world.”

There are all sorts of people in the United States who do not want to hear anything bad about the American past. These people can make our jobs difficult. What I think is often overlooked, however, are the barriers to doing the work we do inside the academic institution: administrators who don’t want to draw the dangerous attention of dingbats in the legislature or on the Board of Trustees by discussing controversial subjects; penny-pinching college leaders unwilling to make the investments, personally and financially, to make the college a welcoming space for Indigenous students; and students, even in areas where Native Americans are the largest minority group of campus, who sometimes care nothing at all and Indigenous peoples and their communities. Racism of these stripes was a genuine repressive force in Billings.

I taught there for four years, in an era when it seemed the internet was still in its infancy, without cell phones, and with no computer provided by the college. And because I was a single parent for three of my four years, I could easily stay out of the loop. I was really busy, and Billings felt far away from everything. The right-wingers like Lynne Cheney and Pat Buchanan who, at that time, denounced “politically correct” history, really did not affect me much at all. Not directly, anyways. What mattered more was teaching a subject that was considered provocative, in a bad way, at an institution presided over by leaders who actively discouraged discussions raising challenging questions about the American past.

I was hired to teach the history of Early America, from the colonial period through the “Age of Jackson.” It just so happened that not only had my predecessor left, but another guy, who taught Native American history was retiring. During my on-campus interview, he drove me forty miles to a bar in Columbus, Montana, where we split a six pack of Budweiser. He was a good guy, I think. He left me a ton of books. He taught the subject as little more than the history of the Plains Wars.

New Atlas Saloon in Columbus, Montana – Legends of America
The New Atlas Bar, Columbus MT.

That wasn’t me. I focused my research on the seventeenth century. I was turning my dissertation into a book. I had a much broader coverage in mind. What do to, then, when the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, in a meeting after my first contract renewal, told me that she wanted to see more “relevant” and “applied” research? No one in Montana cared about the history of the Chesapeake or New England, she seemed to suggest.

Eastern Montana State Normal School, Billings, Montana

Contract renewals were tough. Each year my contract came up for renewal. Each year, the two Jeopardy champions voted to fire me. Each year, the Pastor and the Seventh-Day Adventist voted to keep me around. One student member of the committee, God bless them, voted each year to save my job. It was tense, and I needed every ally I could get.

So I tried to play ball. I started speaking with some of my students who drove to Billings from the Crow Reservation. I learned a lot, things I had read in no scholarly monograph. What came from these conversations was the racism these students faced–in high school in Hardin, Montana, in the city of Billings, and in classrooms at my college. Perhaps there was a story to tell here.

I cannot remember the details. There had been some event at Hardin High. The non-Indigenous students stayed home from some sort of cultural awareness day, their truancy excused by their parents. The Crow kids, as kids will do, made some noise about racism. The next day, distributed throughout Hardin, were copies of some white nationalist text like The White Man’s Bible. I went down to Hardin. I tried to learn more. I tried to blend in and listen. I talked to a few people about racism in Hardin. I had gathered some great insights about racism in a reservation border town. This struck me as immediately significant and relevant to life in Montana and in a host of western states. In the end, it was too difficult to do the research. I would have had to spend a lot of time in Hardin, an hour’s drive from where I lived, and my family life would not permit that. But the bigger barrier was the Dean, who somehow had become the Provost, or something like that. I ran into her, somewhere on campus, whcih almost never happened, and told her about the project. I could see clearly from her reaction that this was not what she had in mind at all.

I left Billings in 1998. At Geneseo, where I have taught pretty much ever since, I have been able to do what I wanted to do. We do not have a lot of money, but in every other way my research has been supported.

And that’s the key point. To do research requires a network of support. It is easier for us to do our work when we have interested colleagues who encourage us and provide pointed criticism, administrators who recognize the value of what we do. With that assistance, we can stand up to the racists, the haters, the bigots and trolls. That part of the job becomes easy. It’s when these things are missing that our academic lives can be miserable.

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Apologies

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This Friday is Sorry Day in Australia.  Though it has antecedents in aboriginal protest and commemoration, Sorry Day has taken place every May 26 since 1998.  It followed in its current form from a May 1997 report by the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission called Bringing them Home, which acknowledged that “Indigenous children have been forcibly separated from their families and communities since the very first days of the European occupation of Australia.”  That report was tabled twenty years ago this year.  Children in Australia’s boarding schools experienced physical and sexual abuse. They received little education of value. The Australian government admits that now.

In February of 2008, then-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd issued a formal apology. You can watch his powerful statement here.  He spoke of the brutality of Australia’s historic treatment of its indigenous neighbors.

Until we fully confront that truth, there will always be a shadow hanging over us and our future as a fully united and fully reconciled people.

It is time to reconcile. It is time to recognise the injustices of the past. It is time to say sorry. It is time to move forward together.

To the stolen generations, I say the following: as Prime Minister of Australia, I am sorry.

On behalf of the government of Australia, I am sorry.

On behalf of the parliament of Australia, I am sorry.

I offer you this apology without qualification.

We apologise for the hurt, the pain and suffering that we, the parliament, have caused you by the laws that previous parliaments have enacted.

We apologise for the indignity, the degradation and the humiliation these laws embodied.

We offer this apology to the mothers, the fathers, the brothers, the sisters, the families and the communities whose lives were ripped apart by the actions of successive governments under successive parliaments.

In making this apology, I would also like to speak personally to the members of the stolen generations and their families: to those here today, so many of you; to those listening across the nation – from Yuendumu, in the central west of the Northern Territory, to Yabara, in North Queensland, and to Pitjantjatjara in South Australia.

I know that, in offering this apology on behalf of the government and the parliament, there is nothing I can say today that can take away the pain you have suffered personally.

Whatever words I speak today, I cannot undo that.

Words alone are not that powerful; grief is a very personal thing.

I ask those non-indigenous Australians listening today who may not fully understand why what we are doing is so important to imagine for a moment that this had happened to you.

I say to honourable members here present: imagine if this had happened to us. Imagine the crippling effect. Imagine how hard it would be to forgive.

My proposal is this: if the apology we extend today is accepted in the spirit of reconciliation, in which it is offered, we can today resolve together that there be a new beginning for Australia.

And it is to such a new beginning that I believe the nation is now calling us.

Australians are a passionate lot. We are also a very practical lot.

For us, symbolism is important but, unless the great symbolism of reconciliation is accompanied by an even greater substance, it is little more than a clanging gong.

It is not sentiment that makes history; it is our actions that make history.

Rudd’s statement, which is worth reading in its entirety, goes far beyond anything the United States has considered. There is in this country a substantial number of people who do not like to hear about the negative parts of US history.  I have heard this sentiment a lot over the years, and it takes different forms: discussion of the negative parts of American history is unpatriotic, or demoralizing, or depressing; telling these stories might come at the expense of telling more positive and uplifting stories that could bring young people to respect and revere American institutions; or, occasionally, telling the stories of those individuals and groups who have fallen by the wayside or who suffered as a result of American progress somehow diminishes the dominant narrative and those white people who populate and benefit from it.  These reactionary forces are powerful.  Those who bring these stories up can expect to be criticized severely, to have their integrity and their objectivity as scholars questioned, or to be dismissed with that empty-headed epithet that their work is “politically correct.”  I saw this first hand when I taught in Montana at the beginning of my career in the 1990s.  Speaking out on these issues, it turned out, nearly cost me my job.

Sorry Day in Australia is a limited response.   It does not go as far as the guys in the Australian rock band Midnight Oil wanted to go when they called upon their fans, in “Beds are Burning,” to return the land to its original owners.

Sorry Day does not pretend to fix every problem. But it does open up a discussion, a day when the government of Australia encourages its citizens to reflect upon what it has done, even in the relatively recent past, to Aboriginal Australians. That is more than the United States has done.

Canada, too, despite continuing problems with First Nations youth in provincial institutions, despite the large numbers of missing indigenous women, and the deep structural problems that gave rise to the Idle No More movement, has undertaken efforts to talk about its painful past.  I have mentioned on this blog the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation housed in Manitoba: it is a marvelous project that might equip Canadians to tell the story of Canada’s residential schools, the young people taken by law and by the authorities from their families to be educated, and the consequences and legacies of these wrong-headed and evil policies.

In the United States, in places, there are efforts to begin an accounting for the nation’s past misdeeds. Confederate memorials are coming down, a long-over due policy beautifully defended by New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu.  Some buildings, on some college campuses, named after racist and cruel figures from the American past, are being renamed, though not without controversy.  Some universities with ties to the slave trade, like Brown and Georgetown, have undertaken programs to atone for their sins.

But when it comes to native peoples, we are way behind Canada and Australia.  Small gestures, no doubt, are taking place: some members of some religious congregations have pushed their churches to renounce the so-called “doctrine of discovery,” a symbolic gesture that in the end would cost these churches little.  More real, perhaps, was the recent decision by the Society of Jesus to return land given to it by the United States on the Rosebud Reservation to the community. But a larger accounting has not occurred.

And without such an accounting, young people can only with great difficulty arrive at an understanding of the moral complexities of their nation’s past.  We need more than an apology, couched in legalese, that nobody knows about. I have mentioned the congressional apology on this blog. You can read it here, and see how truly deficient a document it is.  It is as if a Senate staffer went through an American history textbook, found the points where bad things happened to native peoples, and cobbled them together into a tepid and half-baked statement of regret.  We are sorry, but want it understood that nothing in this apology opens us up to suit.

The resources to write and teach this history are out there, and contrary to what you might have been taught, native voices are not hard to find in the historical record.  In the Agency records housed at the National Archives, for instance, hundreds and hundreds of reels of microfilm, each containing hundreds of pages of documents, allow committed researchers to reconstruct the government’s systematic programs to incarcerate native peoples on reservations, Christianize and civilize them, and take their land, all in the name of “Progress.”  Scattered around the country in state, local, and organizational archives are the historical documents that reveal the herculean efforts of native peoples to survive these policies. In these records are the stories of native peoples who lived their lives under this oppressive regime.  Their stories are worth talking about.  Obviously if I did not believe this very strongly I never would have written Native America.  We need to know these stories, for without comprehending the damage done we can hardly understand that for which we apologize.

On the last day of class in my Native American survey course, I talk about apologizing for the past.  I mention the periodic calls for an apology for slavery, or the efforts of the Reagan administration to accept responsibility on behalf of the American people for the policy of “internment” during the Second World War. I ask, “What about native peoples?” Does the United States owe native peoples an apology? I play them a video of Rudd’s apology and I might have them look at the American apology resolution.  Are these actions adequate? If not, what more might be done? Has so much historical damage been done that nothing can set things right?

You can imagine the student responses.  We (they readily identify themselves with the government still) will get sued, or when will it end, they ask.  They worry of an ill-defined slippery slope.  I had nothing to do with it, some might say, for my family came to the United States long after all of this history had occurred.

I try not to say too much. I try to let the conversation evolve.  If there is a lag, I mention some of the stories I have told them over the course of the semester.  I do not talk about the larger processes of dispossession or colonialism, but smaller stories, about individuals and local groups.  Don’t these stories cause you to feel sorrow? Regret?

We do not apologize well, I tell them.  I will mention whatever celebrity is in the news who said something that he or she regretted, followed by a “I’m sorry if anyone was offended.”  No, I will point out.  It would have been better for this person to have said, “I’m sorry that my words hurt you.”  And if the government does not owe native peoples an apology, I ask the students, “Do you?”

It is time for us to pull these records together.  The National Archives does a lot.  Archivists across the country do great work, and digitization projects are underway all over the place. But these institutions need resources (Yes, I know about the Trump administration’s draconian budget proposal).  Let’s start compiling the material to tell this story comprehensively.  It is time for an accounting. Look, as I mentioned in an earlier post, at the ground beneath your feet. It does not diminish us in any way to admit that non-Indian citizens of the United States have prospered because their ancestors made native peoples suffer. It is the truth.  We need to confront it.

Current Events, History and Historians, Liberal Arts, Red Lives Matter

On The Way of the Human Being

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Yesterday one of my very good students told me that he was driving through New York’s Finger Lakes region, not all that far from my campus.  He was enjoying a nice spring day, noticing the signs remaining from the heyday of the Anti-Indian group Upstate Citizens For Equality, and listening to one of the blowhards on right-wing radio.  Slim pickings, sometimes, in the Finger Lakes.  Whoever it was that he listened to argued that Native Americans need to move on and “Get Over It.” Stop whining and stop complaining. The injustices they suffered occurred a long time ago.

It is the end of the semester here at Geneseo.  All of us, I suspect, students and faculty alike, are limping into finals week.  The weather is turning nice, the flowers are blooming. It is difficult sometimes for students to focus on schoolwork. I get this.  The last reading I give to the students in my American Indian Law and Public Policy course is Harold Napoleon’s essay, Yuuyaraq: The Way of the Human Being.  It is, in places, a beautiful book, but a small number of my students were pretty hard on it. Disappointingly so.

Napoleon, a Yup’ik, wrote his essay in the late 1980s from a penitentiary in Alaska.  During a state of intoxication that he cannot remember, he killed his child. Napoleon wondered in Yuuyaraq not only how his story ended in prison–college-educated and capable, he had served his community by holding a number of leadership positions–but the larger story of what had happened to his people.

Yuuyaraq was, for Napoleon, a beautiful way of living. Indeed, his essay directly inspired the historian Calvin Luther Martin‘s beautiful but flawed meditation on the experience of native peoples in a book he wrote, also entitled The Way of the Human Being.    The human beings lived in a world in which they interacted with a range of spiritual forces, malevolent and otherwise, and a host of human and other-than-human beings. Ritual allowed this world to work.  Hunters made requests; hunters treated the animals they pursued with courtesy and so long as the animals were accorded the proper respect, no misfortune could befall the people. (Gregory Evans Dowd twenty-some years ago did a wonderful job of showing how these beliefs informed native peoples’ conduct and understanding of the cosmos in the first chapter of A Spirited Resistance, a book I sill assign in my classes).

Look at the primary sources.  Look at the extant accounts.  You cannot miss it. Napoleon discusses the primary sources. Following upon his work and that of a host of scholars and writers, Native American and non-native, I attempted to present this world of ritual and spiritual power in the opening chapter of Native America.  It is a world where native peoples paid close attention to ritual in order to deflect the wrath of malevolent forces whose ire could spell ruin for indigenous farmers, hunters, and warriors.

You also cannot miss when you look at these accounts how fragile all of this was.  Epidemic diseases tore gaping, jagged holes in the fabric of native community life.  For Napoleon’s people, the experience was a relatively recent one.  He writes of what his elders called the “Great Death,” which struck Alaska Native communities at the very beginning of the twentieth century.  60% of the people, the real human beings, died.

Wreckage. That is what Napoleon describes, and it is a painful read.  Other native peoples, whether recorded in white sources or in their own writings, have described the resulting chaos and pain in similar terms.  I think here of David Silverman’s searing portrait of Christian Indians in central New York who, when their white neighbors celebrated their independence from Great Britain and acted on their voracious appetites for Indian land, became convinced that they were a people cursed by God to suffer for all of eternity.  Or spelatch, the term Skokomish artist Bruce-subiyay Miller used to describe the world of change that came to his people after the arrival of Europeans.  The Skokomish “fell into disarray,” Miller wrote, his ancestors’ experience akin to that of “a shipwreck where everyone was trying to find something to cling to, to save their lives.”  As with Napoleon’s people, many turned to alcohol.  Some tried to assimilate, or turned to Christianity.  All of them struggled, for they found that “the things that they venerated, that gave them their vital life force and their strength for survival, suddenly were condemned as evil.”

A small number of my students, four out of the thirty in the class, thought that Napoleon was blaming the victims, but they badly misread his work.  The epidemic produced wreckage that most of us, mercifully, can only struggle to imagine.  The epidemics destroyed Yuuyaraq.  The survivors, Napoleon said, with their traditions , their customs, their networks of kin, and their very way of comprehending the cosmos destroyed, began to listen to missionaries who described their culture as sinful and demonic, their ways of living wicked.  Napoleon clearly did not blame the converts.  They were trying to get by, to make sense of a horrifying new world.  He described his people as victims of something very much like Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, as victims of “cultural genocide” and a historical process that he described as “evil.”

When I teach Napoleon, I think often of the long poem that runs through Leslie Marmon Silko’s masterful novel Ceremony, which in its manner conveys something very powerful about the historical processes described in Yuuyaraq.  If you have not read it, you must. Though a work of fiction, Ceremony can work well in a history class. If you are a student, you can learn much from Silko about the horrifying new world the arrival of Europeans created for native peoples.

In the novel, Silko’s witches begin to duel, and conjure a horrifying vision.

 

Long time ago

in the beginning

there were no white people in the world

there was nothing European.

And this world might have gone on like that

except for one thing:

Witchery.

Silko’s witches told the story of the arrival of white people on American shores.  It was a horror story, for these newcomers

grow away from the earth.

Then they grow away from the sun

then they grow away from the plants and animals.

They see no life.

When they look

they see only objects.

The world is a dead things for them,

the trees and rivers are not alive.

The deer and bear are objects

They see no life.

They fear

They fear the world

They destroy what they fear

The fear themselves.

The white people would bring a New World to native peoples. The newcomers, Silko’s witches warned,

will kill the things they fear

all the animals

the people will starve…

They will fear what they find

They will fear the people

They will kill what they fear

Entire villages will be wiped out

They will slaughter whole tribes.

There were survivors, but they struggled with the horrifying consequences of this witchery.  Napoleon told his story, after all, from a prison full of Alaska Native who suffered from what one recent report labeled “Intergenerational Trauma.”  Martin, who taught at a penitentiary during a portion of the time he spent in Alaska, met men and women who found themselves incarcerated after committing horrible acts they could not remember.  They were struggling to carry the burden imposed by a legacy of unresolved grief.

Napoleon proposed solutions. He was not an expert, he claimed, nor a wise man.  But he had seen a lot and experienced a lot.  Talking circles, to open up, to restore shattered bonds, to heal.  It is hard to disagree with what he suggests. He was a humble man, and he has continued to struggle to meet the challenges communities like his face since he was granted parole.

Still, the problems remain.  In Canada, too, as the enduring epidemic of suicide in Nunavut attests.

Trauma.  An absence of well-being. Communities still struggle.  Get over it, they are told.  These are the words of white critics who are racist and stupid, and they can be dismissed as such.  But what to do?  In the United States, much of the talk about Native American communities focuses on economic development, sovereignty, self-determination.  Like justice, democracy and pizza, everyone is for these things, but what, really, do they mean?  And with the measure of self-determination and sovereignty determined by the governing structures of the settler state, or decided, as Roger Echo-Hawk put it in his too-long book of several years ago, in “The Courts of the Conqueror”?  How much can the governments of settler states do? What are they willing to do?  How much can their experts achieve?

Napoleon argued that communities needed to solve their own problems, to forcefully advocate for themselves to pursue changes in government policy but also to deal with the grief and heal.  In Wasase, Taiaiake Alfred, (who my students read as well) laments the limitations imposed by leaders who all-too-often act just like white politicians, administering the programs and policies put in place by the settler state.

Alfred, Napoleon, Martin–they are describing communities in the midst of complicated problems, and if we do not force our students to confront them we do a disservice to them as historians. Grief is a force in Native American history.  Read a bit, and you will find it hard to miss.

I know my students sometimes are asked why they are studying this or that field in the liberal arts.  What good is that? I’m willing to bet that if you are a student, you have heard it, too.  Maybe on our post-truth, alternative-fact world, history is not worth much to many of our leaders, but if we keep our eyes and our hearts open, and read with discipline, energy and compassion, we can arrive across the distance of time and geographic space at something close to understanding.  And that is no small thing.

 

 

History and Historians, Liberal Arts

Hey, Teacher, Leave Those Kids Alone!

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We’ve come to that point in the semester where I begin to see on Twitter and on Facebook and elsewhere “bloopers,” students’ answers to questions on their midterms or finals that are so wrong that their professors or teachers find them funny.

I would urge you to think twice before you post things like this, for those student bloopers may reflect more poorly on you as a teacher than it does upon the young people enrolled in your courses.

When I began my teaching career back in the mid-1990s, my first tenure-track job, I shared space in a department with two former “Jeopardy” champions  Our offices were small, and a packed in closely along a strip of contorted hallway on the eighth floor of the college’s Liberal Arts building. I could overhear the conversations in other offices. And I can remember one of those Jeopardy champions meeting with a student during office hours to review for an upcoming test.

“Abraham Lincoln’s first vice-president was?” I can remember him asking.

Dead silence.  Nothing.  The poor student did not have a clue.

“Hannibal Hamlin,” my colleague said.

“Oh.”

And so it went. And nowhere, in any of this, did the most important question of all appear: Who cares? So what? Why should I, some kid enrolled in a general education course I have to take to complete my requirements, care about Hannibal Hamlin? In what ways did he, or his vice-presidency, matter?  My colleagues tested students on how well they could memorize facts that, by themselves, meant little, and mattered less.

There was in that department as well a Missouri Synod Lutheran Pastor, who divided his time between his church and the department, and who used to brag that being a college professor was “the best part-time job in the world.”  He gave his students multiple choice exams, with one of the choices a joke, a crazy answer that he liked to think was funny.  He liked to share his exams with me.  He thought they were funny in the way that people who do not know how to tell jokes think things are funny.  When his students chose, for example, “D: A Heavy-Metal band” as an answer to the question, “What was the Black Death?” he would laugh at their lack of knowledge.  He couldn’t believe, he said, that the students would fallen for this and he would shake his head in dismay at their ignorance. “Kids these days,” he may as well have said.

No, I thought.  You have it all wrong. Both of my colleagues had it wrong.  It was possible, it seemed to me, that students do not know who Hannibal Hamlin is because you did not convince them that this individual mattered, that he lived a life that they ought to know something about.  Or that the lectures and the notes and the memorization of facts, or the mammoth textbook you assigned, sucked all the life out of a subject that is so inherently interesting when taught with passion, planning, and attention.  Or, perhaps, they may have chosen to identify the Black Death as a metal band because you failed to convey to them the significance of this event.  You may not have interested them in the topic. The students may not have cared about what you told them.  That is sad.  They may not have cared about you.

I cannot criticize students for this.  I encourage my students, as they read the books I assign, or listen to our discussions, to ask themselves and to ask me, “So What?”  If I cannot handle that challenge, then I am not fit for this line of work.

I have been teaching a long time.  I have worked with some truly wonderful colleagues, committed, dedicated, and creative teachers.  But there are those who quiz their students, to keep them honest, to give them an incentive to do the reading that these instructors believe they would not otherwise do.  Others offer exams that serve no purpose other than to demonstrate what students do not know or, perhaps, what the instructor failed to teach them.

I hated exams when I was a student. It was not because I did not want to work.  I loved history.  Even before I declared it as my major. I loved the work in the library, and the reading, and the discussions.  I can remember the first primary source from the library’s special collections that I held in my hands, a pamphlet written by the interesting Pennsylvania loyalist Joseph Galloway. It is important for those of us who teach to remember what drew us to this field in the first place. Every historian I know is a voracious reader. Yet I know of no historian who reads for enjoyment a textbook.   But I prepared for the exams. They caused me stress.  I memorized what I was expected to memorize.  I saw students who knew the material as well as I did at a conceptual level choke, or have a bad day.  And I know that I never learned a single thing taking an in-class examination.

Instead of trying to find out, in effect, what our students do not know, it might be better to assess them in a way that allows them to show what they do know, and to demonstrate how thoughtful and creative and worth listening to that they actually are. One of the greatest parts of this job is the opportunity it provides me to be inspired by and learn from my students’ insights.

In my nineteen years at Geneseo, I have never given an in-class exam.  I have never used a scan-tron form or a blue-book. I give students take home projects, short papers, really, and give them a week or more to work on them.  Some of the questions that will be appearing soon on the Resources page of this website are ones I ask my students in the Native American survey course. In my humanities course, in which the students read works from Antigone to Hamlet, I pose for them big questions.  Recently, for instance, I asked the students to reflect on Roger Rosenblatt’s essay that appeared in the Atlantic last year, an essay I have remarked upon for this blog in the past. It is a harrowing depiction of the capacity of human beings for evil and violence, but also about the possibility that beauty, and love, might survive even our darkest moments.

The strongest essays show me students who are thinking deeply, wrestling with huge questions, and who are striving to understand the great works that they have read.  I can see from the essays that the students took the assignment seriously, and I can see not only that the books I assigned mattered, but how they mattered. I think back to the best of these answers often. I think of the non-traditional student, a bit older than his classmates, coming back to make another try at college after spending time with the Army in Iraq. I have mentioned him in this blog before.  I could see him working through his wartime experiences as he wrestled not only Rosenblatt’s observations, but with Thucydides’ admonition that “war is a violent teacher” and the call in the Gospels not only to love our neighbors, but our enemies as well. Or the student, a volunteer in a hospice, now on her third or fourth major, fighting her own demons as she wrote an essay that moved me to tears.  Or the guy from some part of Francophone Africa, arrived in nearby Rochester through one of the refugee resettlement programs, who described the slaughter of his own family as he struggled to understand what was worth fighting for, dying for, and perhaps killing for.   And the kids with the more comfortable or conventional backgrounds, who are turned on by a text, whether Augustine’s own struggles to define who he was as a young man, or Antigone’s decision to resist an unjust law, or Cicero’s command that the man of virtue must serve the commonwealth, even when that service offered the frightening prospect of criticism or condemnation.

My point is that I learn a lot from these essays, and I am a guy who still has much to learn.  I rethink my own beliefs and assumptions about the texts I assign based on what my students write. I reconsider how I teach them. I see in them things I had not seen before.  I learn.

If this is not your experience, and if you are one of those professors out there who likes to post student bloopers on Facebook or Twitter, or even if your default position is one where you assume that the kids know little and care less, I would urge you take a good, long, look in the mirror. I love history.  If you are bothering to read this, there is a good chance you do, too. Many of our students have been taught by over-worked and underpaid teachers, racing to cover as much material as their states require for their students to be able to pass whatever standardized test awaits them at the end of the year.  I have watched my own kids as they take their high school history classes.  Watching them work through their assignments–the busy work and regurgitation and memorization–I would not blame them for a second if they did not like history as a subject.  In my mind, it is not at all unreasonable for these students to expect us to sell them on the significance of what we do, on why it all matters. We should not shy away from this challenge. And if you are concerned by your students’ shaky grasp of the facts, or bothered that they do not know things “that every informed citizen should know,” you might be asking the wrong questions. Before you laugh, consider what you are doing.  Facts are important, but they are only the most basic building blocks of history, and they have little value without creativity, interpretation, and imagination.

And here’s a final point.  When you laugh at student bloopers, you come off as smug, arrogant, and a bit of a prick. I doubt you would laugh about that student’s answer with that student sitting right in front of you.  Teaching matters. It is hard work. It takes great effort to do it well.  The failure of your students might be, at least in part, a failing on your part as a teacher.

History and Historians, TDIH, Uncategorized

Thinking of Gnadenhutten, 8 March 1782

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I have thought a lot lately about the old charge that University faculty are all left-wingers who distort the minds of the tender children enrolled in their courses.   I have never believed this.  When I took my first job in Montana, my colleagues in the history department included a Missouri Synod Lutheran pastor who despised liberals and loved Rush Limbaugh, an Iraqi Seventh-Day Adventist who worried that African Americans would move to Billings because it was easier there to commit crimes, and an expert on lynching who saw nothing objectionable in the infamous Willie Horton ad run by the George HW Bush campaign against Michael Dukakis.  I was surrounded by historians on the political right.

More recently, a local radio show asked if my college would send a representative to discuss whether or not we were concerned about a lack of ideological diversity on campus, and just days before that, the recently installed Secretary of Education warned her audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference that “the faculty, from adjunct professors to deans, tell you want to do, what to say, and more ominously, what to think.”  I wrote about that here, yesterday.

I have little patience for charges such as these.  One thing I like to do as a historian when confronted with questions like these is to ask those who believe that left-wingers have taken over the academy how the teaching of a given subject might change if I were farther to the right or the left than I am at present.  Let’s talk about the history. Support your reasoning.  Explain to me how the political affiliation of, say, a history professor, affects the way he or she teaches a given subject.  We can talk about slavery, or the American Revolution, or I might ask them about events like the massacre at Gnadenhutten, which occurred on this date in 1782.

Because if we are to understand Native American history in all its complexity, I believe that we must confront the lacerating violence of events like Gnadenhutten. We must do so whether we are on the Right or the Left or in the middle.  I would contend that an honest rendering of this event would not differ widely on the basis of who taught it.

The frontier, we must remember, was a violent and at times a frightening place. No historian would dispute that, no matter what their politics, unless they chose to ignore the evidence completely. Many Anglo-American settlers living on war-ravaged frontiers simply could not trust their Indian neighbors. Settlers in the Ohio country, for example, experienced the horrors of warfare just as did Indians. Some of them witnessed the death of friends and neighbors in Indian attacks. More of them heard horrifying stories of Indian attack. These settlers had occasion to fear Indians. They acted, with violence and decision, to save themselves.  But settlers found in their fears justification for horrible acts of terror. They could, as did Ohio country settlers in 1782, conclude that the singing of psalms by Christian Indians at the Moravian mission at Gnadenhutten was not the pious expression of praise to the One God but the ranting and boasts of savages who had wet their hands in the settlers’ blood.

Native peoples had their own fears, of course. When Kentucky militiamen attacked a cluster of villages in northern Indiana where Potawatomis and many other native peoples lived, they threatened them with extermination. If native peoples refused to make peace, Brigadier General Charles Scott said, “your warriors will be slaughtered, your towns and villages ransacked and destroyed, your wives and children carried into captivity.”  Read Jeffrey Ostler’s excellent piece in the William and Mary Quarterly from 2015.   Indians feared genocidal violence from white Americans, and you cannot miss the expressions of that genocidal intent in the writings and statements of American officials. Words and deeds combined, a frightening mix. Many native peoples who lived in the Ohio country saw in the United States and its citizens, whatever its claims to desire peace, an existential threat to their existence. Gnadenhutten.  The soldiers from Pennsylvania held a vote on whether or not to kill the 100 Christian Indians they had taken captive. This was, for native peoples, American democracy at work.   As the Christians sang the last hymns they would sing, savage militiamen began to murder them, thirty men, three dozen women, and thirty-two children in all. Kids.  Almost three dozen.

I tell my students about these violent episodes.  I mess around with the words.  Murder becomes an expression of democracy.  Frontier settlers become savages.  I try to decenter things, upset expectations.  I want the students to think about events like these, so formative in my own thinking about the meaning of Native American History.

If you are a student, you will have to decide how to make sense of this stuff.  We can talk about it or not.  We can ignore it if we want to.  Maybe that dude in Texas, who I saw on a local television station when I lived down there defending that state’s crazy history curriculum, and who believed that a bad day in the United States was better than a good day anywhere else, would choose to dismiss Gnadenhutten as an exception.  More likely he would not have us talk about it at all. But Gnadenhutten cuts to the core of the American frontier experience, and we cannot confront that history without paying it heed.  Left, Right, or Center.

 

History and Historians, Liberal Arts, Uncategorized

Grief and History

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When I teach Native American history, I frequently find myself describing the consequences of the policies and events we cover for children.  Boarding schools, for instance, but also the many times when children die—when children were killed.  I include these harrowing stories not to shock complacent students, but to try to get the kids in the class to understand more deeply the consequences of the policies, decisions, and events they have read about upon the most vulnerable people in a community, people with whom they are perhaps well-equipped to identify.

So I tell the students about George Percy. That weak and cowardly aristocrat who settled at Jamestown led a raid by an English party against the Paspahegh Indians, whose town stood a short distance upriver from that sickly fortified settlement.  Percy’s soldiers took the “Queen of Paspahegh” and her children hostage but his men began to grumble.  He gave in to them, threw the children overboard, and allowed his men to entertain themselves by “shooting out their brains in the water.”  I tell them of the Paxton Boys’ massacre of peaceful Conestoga Indians in December 1763.  The Paxton men killed fourteen of them: men, women, and a couple of children, no more than three years old.  The Paxton Boys split their skulls with tomahawks, and took their scalps as trophies.  This was intimate violence, acts committed at close range. To children.  To babies.  In order to help my students make sense of the Ghost Dance, I tell the students about the movement that occurred on the Kiowa-Comanche-Apache Reservation.  Among the Kiowa ghost dancers were a lot of parents, and they danced on the snowy ground hoping to see, once again, the children who had died, innocents slaughtered by measles, whooping cough, and pneumonia.  Grief lay at the broken heart of the Ghost Dance movement.  And of course that grief continues.  Harold Napoleon, in Yuuyaraq: The Way of the Human Being described Alaska Native communities immersed still in a grief caused by what he called “the Great Death.”

A short time ago I published a biography of Eleazer Williams, a Mohawk missionary to the Oneidas.  I spent a lot of time with Williams.  He struck me as a man with few principles, or as a liar, a hustler, or a confidence man. But Williams was also a man profoundly damaged by the death of his second child.  9999004543-l

He wrote a letter to his wife in 1838.  She was a Metís woman, living still along the Fox River in Wisconsin.  At this point, Williams had been living apart from her for the better part of a decade.  He was always traveling—Buffalo, Oneida, Albany, New York, Washington, and only occasionally back to Green Bay.  This was the only letter of any length that he wrote to his wife that has survived, and in this one he began with small matters—of how the water and ice on the Fox River had done damage to the crops, he had heard.  He chastised her for not having planted the potatoes on higher ground. But he also urged her to think about matters religious.  Beware the shallow things.  Please, he wrote to his “Dear Mary,” “Nothing in this life would make me more happy than to find that you are serving God, and living in humility, as one who is devoted to Christ and preparing for Heaven.”  Focus on the important things. “Let no longer the world and its vanities be upon the upper most in your mind or thoughts—forsake them and give yourself to God and Jesus Christ who had redeemed you by his most precious blood.”

What, I wondered, was going on here?  He was writing, it seemed, to a woman who had lost her faith—in religion, in him, and, I suspect, a lot of things.  As I read the letter, it became clear to me why that might have been.  Williams had never lacked for words, but in this letter his desperation is palpable.  He would pray for her, he said. We must be a good example, he said, for the “only child we have.”  I knew that Williams and his wife had a son, who would have been a teenager. “How happy it would be, should we as a family, finally by the mercy of God, to meet all, with our departed beloved Anne, in Heaven, where, we shall all be happy without end and sing praises to God for all eternity.”

Who was Anne?  He had never mentioned her before.  This is the only time she appeared in Williams’s papers.  A dead child, presumably. It took a lot of digging. After some time in the archives, I found her.  She had died in 1830, eight years before this letter.  Hers was the first baptism recorded at Holy Apostles, the church Williams founded for relocated New York Indians in Wisconsin, and the first burial in the churchyard.  It was in 1830 that Williams largely left home.  Mary buried the child, who died when she was not quite eighteen months old, without his help.

This death haunted Williams. In the late 1840s he began to tell a story about an encounter he had with the French Prince de Joinville aboard a great lakes steamboat in 1841.  In this story, Williams told Joinville as they approached Green Bay that he and his wife had an infant daughter. Joinville offered to serve as godparent.  When they arrived at Green Bay, Williams learned that the baby had died several days earlier.  Joinville was sympathetic, but Williams never went home. He hung out with the French prince for a couple of days.  And here’s the thing:  This story—Joinville, the baby—it was all a lie.  It did not happen.  Williams was a liar.  That was easy to prove.  But why this lie, about this baby?

If you study early American history, you learn how frequent the death of children actually was.  Many families buried children, and I can imagine that the consequences were as emotionally devastating for many of them as it was for Eleazer Williams and his wife.  New England children studying their catechisms in the early nineteenth century were warned to consider that

I, in the burial place may see

Graves shorter far than I;

From Death’s arrest no age is free,

Young children too may die . . .

My God, may such an awful sight

Awakening be to me!

O that by early grace I might

For death prepared be.”

 

The death of children was common.

As a historian, I find these stories sometimes difficult. I have never shared these thoughts with my friends and colleagues who teach history, but I imagine that they, too, can be overwhelmed by this history of grief, of people gone too soon. It’s heavy. My own children are all healthy.  Despite my own flaws, they are fine people, better than me in so many ways. I am fortunate.  But not everyone is.  In a chilling article that appeared in the October issue of The Atlantic, Roger Rosenblatt reflected upon the viciousness and inhumanity he had witnessed or learned about over his long career as a war reporter.  Rosenblatt told the story of Khu, a 15-year old boy who fled the war in Vietnam for Hong Kong.  His parents had died, and he had nothing.  They ran out of food on the ship he boarded.  The captain assigned one man to knock Khu out, and then slit his throat, so that the others on board could eat him.  Tears welled in the boy’s eyes, and they let him go, but they did kill another man and they ate him.  Khu, Roseblatt, and his translator looked out at the lights in Hong Kong Harbor.  Khu said that the lights and the boats were beautiful.  That is what he was thinking.  Rosenblatt asked him what else was beautiful. Khu said everything is beautiful. Sometimes even when it’s not.

I have thought of these stories today.  I read Jayson Greene’s searing essay in The New York Times, entitled “Children Don’t Always Live.”  Greene told the story of his daughter’s sudden, tragic death, his struggle with grief, and his continuing sadness even as he and his wife welcomed a new child, a boy who always will have a dead sister.   Speaking to his young son, Greene mustered “up every drop of bravery I can: ‘It is a beautiful world,’ I tell him, willing myself to believe it.  We are here to share it.”

I get that.  I try to persuade my students to be hopeful and, because they are young and bright and have not seen much yet, it is not a difficult sell.  Still, we cannot teach about the past without considering the pain, the grief, and the sadness that people—native and non-native alike—felt.  If we want to reach our students, we need to help them feel the weight of the past, to experience those moments of brutality, violence and sadness, and those occasional moments of courage, humanity and grace. Connection, right?  Reaching across the span of time, across the vast distances, in an attempt to come close to understanding the world as others experienced it.