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The Widow’s Cause

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SHE HEARD THE SIGNAL CANNON and made her way toward the sound. She was looking for her husband’s camp. After the battle, after the defeat, everyone scattered. She carried a child, who could not have been more than a few months old. Tired, she wandered the countryside in the late summer heat.

              It is not clear how long she walked, or how far, or from whence she came, but she found the camp. Her husband served under Colonel Butler. This she knew. She asked a sentry to take her to the officer and the soldier obliged. For the first time in a while she sat down.

              The woman sought out a British camp, and the Tory officer Col. John Butler. She found herself, instead, in an American camp. She realized her error when Lt. Col. William Butler of the 4th Pennsylvania regiment greeted her. In the words of Jeptha Simms, a nineteenth-century antiquarian who recorded this story, “the truth flashed upon her mind—she was in the American camp, in the presence of those who would protect her.” So she told them her story.  Born in Danbury, she married and then joined the movement of Connecticut settlers into Pennsylvania.  She and her husband settled in the Wyoming Valley.  In July 1778, Seneca and Tory raiders attacked. “That delightful country” Simms wrote, “was devastated by the enemy.” Her husband fell in the fighting, one “among the numerous victims of savage cruelty.” She had “two small boys, and an infant at the breast.” The attackers killed the baby, and gave the boys each to a grieving Indigenous family. They then took her prisoner and, Simms said, “compelled her to live with an Indian as his wife.”

              It was this husband who she sought out in what she expected would be a British camp. But in Simms’ telling, the Americans amongst whom she arrived saw things differently. She had “providentially” entered this American camp. God was at work and he liked white Americans. The baby she carried in her arms was “the fruit of her late unhappy connections.”

              The American soldiers she encountered were part of the Sullivan-Clinton campaign of 1779, a large American invasion of the Haudenosaunee homeland. Before they commenced their march, Sullivan’s men drank toasts, “civilization or death for all American savages.” These men were killers, menacing “Long Knives,” who threatened Iroquois lives, liberties and property, and killing Indians and taking their lands was fundamental to who they were. These Americans, who declared their independence from Great Britain because George III unleashed the “merciless Indian savages” upon American frontiers, had delivered this poor woman from evil.  Her baby, Simms tells us, died shortly after she arrived in the American camp.  “It was suspected,” Simms wrote, “that an American soldier, from sympathy to the woman, had given it poison.”

I AM WORKING on a history of the Sullivan-Clinton Campaign. I am at the early stages of my research. I am not certain that the Simms’ story is true, but I am also not sure that it would be impossible to find out.  I plan on spending some time trying to figure that out.  This story has stuck with me, like a hook in my lip, pulling me along.  I came across this story on the same day that the President threatened to wipe out Iranian civilization. He threatened to destroy bridges, power plants, desalinization facilities, all targets that would have made life even more miserable for Iranians. Civilians would have suffered. Children would have died.

              The President’s “Secretary of War,” a vicious, scripturally illiterate weirdo who relishes violence when it is meted out and upon someone else, said of the American raids on Iran that “God deserves all the glory,” and that thousands of sorties had been “carried out under the protection of divine providence” and “miraculous protection.” Pete Hegseth follows no law, one of his dwindling number of admirers said, outside of Biblical Law. 

              But that’s not right, is it.  One of those laws, it seems to me, is pretty clear:

                                           “Cease to do evil,

                                                          Learn to do good,

                                           Seek justice,

                                                          Correct oppression,

                                           Defend the fatherless,

                                                          Plead for the widow.”

Kill babies. Extirpate savages. Burn their fields. “Open the fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in hell.” They are more than words. They conjure a reality that is world-churning and evil, the black heart of America.

              I write these words safely at home in western New York. No bombs fall on me. I have water, fuel, and food, and the means to obtain more if I need it. On the day I read Simms’ account, the President woke up to launch an angry, frightened (and frightening) series of threats against the people of Iran.  The crisis deescalated. Diplomats allowed the president to save face. Still, his threats were significant. I have not forgotten them. Announcing that you are willing to annihilate Iranian civilization is not all that different from saying “civilization or death” to “merciless Indian savages.” The words have been set free and I am not sure they can be called back. I cannot say that Donald Trump would not use nuclear weapons.  Neither can you.

              So what do we do? I have seen a growing number of Democrats call for invoking the fourth section of the 25th Amendment to the United States Constitution.  It is an important gesture, I suppose.  It is worth putting it on the record.  But let’s harbor no illusions. A flawed constitution cannot stand when the men and women who hold power no longer feel bound by its limits, and know that too many of their supporters know too little about what that Constitution says to call them to account. And we certainly ought to know by now that “the vice-president and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments, or of such other body as Congress may by law provide” are unlikely to “transmit to the President Pro-Tempore of the senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” There is no reason to expect Republicans to experience an epiphany. Trump is, for them, a useful idiot. He says obnoxious, frightening and dangerous things, but they get to dismantle the legacies of the New Deal and the Great Society. Republicans have done nothing to stop the President and we should not expect them to start now. Nobody is coming to help us. If we want to stop this, we are going to need to shut it down ourselves, and that will take much more than a “No Kings” party held on a weekend every couple of months.  It is going to take so much more than clever signs and an open calendar.

              I am wearied by Democrats who say that Trump’s behavior is “unAmerican,” that he behaves in a way that does not represent “who we are.”  Nearly 60% of white people voted for Trump in 2016, 2020, and 2024, despite his felony convictions, his amoralities, and the corruption of him, his cabinet, and his skanky kids. Hungary has shown us that absolutists can be brought down by committed people organizing to actively oppose autocracy. I am hopeful that the Republicans will lose, eventually, because they are fighting against time and the very real gains that have been made over the last half century in building a society that certainly is imperfect and appears like a wasteland to younger people but that is more free and more equal than the world of our parents. Millions of Americans are committed to building and defending a country that is more free and equal than the white-supremacist world white Republicans want to restore.  And that is what worries me.  White people voted for white supremacy in the last three elections.  That white supremacy has been there from the beginning.  That cruelty, that violence and that despair.  That, too, is America.

Teaching Native American History

We Must Not Think Bad Thoughts

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Two stories. Both of them are true. One the Trump administration has chosen to commemorate as part of the American nation’s 250th birthday celebration; the other it wants unremembered, proscribed, and erased.  Let’s see if you can guess which one is which.

            In the winter of 1777-1778, George Washington’s army camped at Valley Forge. A short distance away, the British occupied Philadelphia, living in relative comfort. The Continental Army, meanwhile, was starving, and its morale reached rock-bottom.  The patriot’s revolution was in grave danger.

            In the spring, help arrived. Forty-seven Oneidas, including the redoubtable Polly Cooper, arrived from what is today central New York. They brought with them bushels of Iroquois corn. According to Georgia Halbritter, relating Oneida oral history, “Cooper worked for George Washington, showing the Americans how to cook the corn properly.” Washington wanted to pay Cooper, the story goes, but she refused because, Halbritter said, “it was her duty to serve her country.” So, after the war, Washington sent his wife Martha, along with Polly, on a shopping trip in Philadelphia.  The future first lady bought Cooper a black shawl, a hat, and a bonnet.  As historian Karim Tiro pointed out, “the documentary record bears out some of the story’s details but is silent in regard to others.” Still, he suggested, it’s a powerful metaphor for the Oneidas’ costly yet highly significant contribution to the patriot cause.

FAR TO THE WEST of the Oneida homeland, the so-called “Great Sioux War” began in America’s centennial year. Many Lakota Sioux spent part of the year on the Great Sioux Reservation but moved out onto the Plains of eastern Montana to hunt in the spring and summer. They resented the American failure to adhere to the terms of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, which guaranteed them exclusive control of their land, and especially the hordes of prospectors who began to intrude into the Black Hills following gold strikes there in 1874. The Lakotas ignored demands that they return to their reservation—why should they honor a treaty that the white people had ignored—and by the spring of 1876, four army columns began marching toward the Powder River Country to force the Sioux to return.

Much of the fighting that followed took place in Crow country in eastern Montana. With the removal of the forts along the Bozeman Trail several years earlier, no American military presence remained to prevent Sioux encroachment on lands to their west. Conflict between the Sioux and the Crows increased, and the size and scope of this warfare intensified. Plenty Coups, the great Crow leader who oversaw his people’s adjustment to reservation life, remembered that he and his followers “knew the white men were strong, without number in their own country, and that there was no good in fighting them.” The Crows calculated their best interest, and that meant assisting the American forces. “Our leading chiefs,” Plenty Coups said, “saw that to help the white men fight their enemies and ours would make them our friends.” Already at war with the Sioux and their allies, they might as well fight them now with the assistance of the Americans. “Our decision was reached,” Plenty Coups concluded, “not because we loved the white man who was already crowding the other tribes into our country, or because we hated the Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho, but because we plainly saw that this course was the only one which might save our beautiful country for us.”

The Crow leaders recognized that the Americans faced a formidable enemy. Large numbers of Sioux and Cheyenne warriors gathered in the Little Bighorn Basin, led by such stalwart leaders as Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Gall, Hump, and Lame Deer. On June 17, 1876, warriors led by Crazy Horse forced the American column led by General George Crook to withdraw at the Battle of the Rosebud. Crow horsemen formed a screen that shielded Crook’s men from Crazy Horse’s warriors and bought them the time they needed to withdraw. Eight days later, an American force led by Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer foolishly attacked the village along the Little Bighorn. Two thousand warriors camped there. They determined to defendthemselves and their families. Custer had no idea what he had stumbled into. Depicted so often in American myth as a famous “Last Stand,” Custer’s defeat was a rout. The Sioux and their Cheyenne allies mowed them down as they fled from a village so much larger than they had anticipated. The Sioux wiped out Custer’s command in the time, one Sioux observer later noted, that it took a hungry man to eat his dinner. Only Custer’s Crow and Arikara scouts, who recognized the power of the Sioux, survived.

The Lakotas won the battle, but they lost the war. Once again, winter campaigns drove the Sioux and their allies back the reservation. By the spring of 1877, most had returned. Crazy Horse surrendered at the Red Cloud Agency in May. He died four months later, stabbed to death during a guardhouse scuffle. Sitting Bull, who had fled across the border into Canada, held out until 1881, before he returned.

THE ONEIDAS were the Americans’ most important Indigenous ally, but they benefited little from their alliance. While the United States, in the 1784 treaty with the Six Nations at Fort Stanwix, promised to protect the Oneidas, the state of New York moved expeditiously to dispossess them. No holds were barred. The records of state treaty councils, where this dispossession took place, show clearly evidence of fraud and deceit. By the middle of the 19th century, the Oneidas retained only a couple of dozen acres of land and many of their people had accepted “removal” to new homes in Wisconsin where they hoped to avoid the racists and land grabbers who would take whatever the Oneidas refused to sell.

            None of that sordid history has kept the US Mint from placing Polly Cooper, shown presenting corn to General Washington, on the tails side of the 2026 Sacagawea dollar. The Native American $1 Coin Collection was authorized by Congress in 2007 to commemorate the historic contribution of Indigenous nations and individuals to American culture. As Cherokee Nation member and Republican senator Markwayne Mullin put it, the coins are intended to celebrate “those who helped establish a country grounded in freedom and self-determination.”

            Representative of the Oneida Indian Nation Ray Halbritter said that “Polly Cooper symbolizes courage that is not just found on the battlefield, but in compassion and willingness to help others, which is just a part of Oneida culture and hospitality.” Cooper, he continued, was an important forgotten ally. “The whole country,” Halbritter said, “reaps the benefit of Polly Cooper’s conduct because we won the conflict and the United States was born.” That, it went without saying, was a story worthy of commemoration.

I HAVE BEEN TO LITTLE BIGHORN NATIONAL MONUMENT many times. When I taught in Billings, I could get there in just over an hour.  As many as 350,000 people visit the site of Custer’s “Last Stand” every year.  The talented National Park Service employees who work there have attempted over the years to provide more of the Indigenous side of the story.  And that always has met with resistance. According to reporting that originally appeared in the Washington Post, signage at Little Bighorn that described American land hunger, territorial encroachment by gold-seeking whites on reservation land, and a federal boarding school system that “violently erased cultural identities and language” was removed because it did not comply with President Trump’s executive order from March of last year intended to restore “truth and sanity to American History.” In particular, Trump denounced a “revisionist movement” led by radical leftists who sought “to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light. Under this historical revision,” Trump continued, “our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.” Last week signage in Philadelphia outside the home where George Washington stayed during the Constitutional Convention describing the important role of slavery in the first President’s life was taken down as well.

We must not think bad thoughts.

And the sins we choose to forget can never be forgiven.

SOMETIMES I THINK THE UNITED STATES hates Indigenous peoples. It does so in ways that it does not fully comprehend. Americans may celebrate Indigenous contributions to America’s greatness. Both political parties express their support for “self-determination.” Many good people work for the federal government, and they do much good work even as fascists have seized control, who may talk of collaboration, but only to the point where it begins to cost them something.  Colleges and universities, meanwhile, revel in empty gestures, supporting a shallow “diversity” while reading “territorial acknowledgments” in rooms filled with white people. Too often they fall victim to ethnic frauds and “Pretendians”: Elizabeth Warren, Andrea Smith, Thomas King, and Lisa Brooks are just a handful of recent examples. They routinely fail to put their money where their mouths are, to match their words with deeds. When too many of your allies are at best crusaders on the cheap, and your enemies are the white supremacists who control all three branches of the federal government, it is easy to see the magnitude of the problem.  So the United States will celebrate Polly Cooper, who is historically significant–and acceptable to white Americans–primarily because she helped carry some corn to a starving army that fought the British, we must remember, at least in part out of their anger that King George III unleashed the “merciless Indian savages” upon American frontiers. Try to talk about violence and dispossession, how the Oneidas’ neighbors transformed New York into the Empire State through a systematic program of Indigenous dispossession, and you will find yourself in trouble.  So teachers in very blue New York State are allowed and encouraged to tell their students about the Cherokees’ expulsion from Georgia, but not how their own state used bribery, coercion, and deceit to steal a homeland. They will never consider that their families have benefited from dispossession. It’s a problem bigger than liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans. As Onondaga sachem Irving Powless, Jr. put it more than fifty years ago to a state legislative committee that visited his Nation, “the Indian problem is the white people.”

            One cannot truly and meaningfully comprehend the history of this continent without considering Indigenous peoples’ histories, across a vast and diverse chronological and spatial expanse. But unless these stories make white people feel good about themselves, teaching them is proscribed. Do not dare suggest that what this country has gained came at the expense of Indigenous peoples.

            It’s all so screwed up.  The Trump regime acts like a wife beater, a domestic abuser. ICE invades American cities and blames the protestors for the beatings its agents deliver. They don’t show proper respect, we are told. Indigenous peoples, who have been stopped by ICE agents because of the mere color of their skin, are welcome to the national dialogue, but only if they refuse to remind the majority of the sins of its ancestors, and its own. Democrats, meanwhile, act like they disapprove of the beatings their neighbor gives his wife and kids, but are too afraid to do what they know is right. White Americans, meanwhile, nearly sixty percent of whom voted for Trump in 2016, 2020, and, incredibly, in 2024, mostly continue to express their sympathy for the guy who hurt his fist because he punched his wife.

Race and Racism

Dangerous Humors

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It was all a joke, they said. You saw the video. The people were laughing. They thought it was funny. Geez. Where’s your sense of humor? Nothing was meant by it.

The “it,” of course, was the scene from the President’s latest “rally” in Florida. While riffing on the refugee crisis, the President wondered aloud what might be done about the problem of refugees crossing the border. One Florida Man audience member shouted, “Shoot them!”

The white people standing behind the President laughed out loud, shouted their approval, applauded, and hooted and hollered. The President, who has demonstrated his racism repeatedly, did not discourage this. No. He joined in. It’s genocide humor, and it has a long history. Students of Native American history ought to recognize that immediately.

Sometimes it is useful for historians to consider who is laughing at whom. Whose cultural values can be mocked, scorned, and caricatured?

At the outset of the encounter between natives and newcomers, Indians sometimes laughed at the Europeans they were coming to know. Their appearance, their customs, their cluelessness about survival in a new land: all caused Indians, on occasion, to laugh at them. But that soon changed. A Powhatan priest, for instance, late in the seventeenth century approached the overseer on William Byrd’s Virginia plantation. The priest offered to make rain in exchange for two bottles of rum. The priest began to work, and soon the rain fell. Byrd refused to pay the priest. Byrd, who was only joking, told the priest that “hew as a Cheat, and had seen the cloud a coming.” Only after teasing the priest some more did Byrd provide him with the rum. When another Powhatan healer worked to charm a rattlesnake that the planter William Claiborne had captured, Claiborne hit the snake with his cane, causing it to bite the healer. He recovered from the venomous bite, but to Claiborne it was all a joke. He and his associates got a good laugh out of it. Only joking.

Who is laughing at whom? The process continued. Americans in the 1830s described the Mexicans and Pueblos who inhabited New Mexico as backwards and barbaric, as people “peculiarly blessed with ugliness,” and a “lazy and gossiping people” who lived “in darkness and ignorance.” This racist rhetoric provided, of course, a justification for empire, as American imperialists occupied their land. They would uplift the savages as they took their land. John Watts, a delegate from New Mexico in the 1860s told Congress that it should ban the liquor trade in the territory. If alcohol poisoning, however, was an “easy and a pleasant way to die,” he suggested that Congress might permit “the poor Indian, for whom our sympathies run out in uninterrupted stream, to enjoy the privilege of dying in that glorious manner?” According to the record, laughter followed Watts’ joke, genocide humor on Capitol Hill.

When the suffering of a particular group, today as in history, becomes the subject of a dominant group’s humor, that says much about the morality, compassion, and wisdom of that dominant group. Talk of shooting immigrants will accompany the actual shooting of immigrants. Indeed, less than a month ago federal authorities arrested a self-constituted militia leader who held refugees at gunpoint on the southern border. Talk of native peoples’ inhumanity always preceded violent acts of inhumanity by the dominant group. It preceded George Percy’s expedition against the Paspaheghs early in the seventeenth century when the English soldiers amused themselves by “shooting out the brains” of the Native American children they had taken captive. It preceded the “trophy taking” that took place after the Sand Creek Massacre, when Colorado militia forces castrated the bodies of the men they gunned down, and it preceded the standing ovation opera-goers gave in Denver when scalps taken by these cavalrymen were displayed at intermission. It preceded the “many bad deeds” white people did to the Crows after they settled on their Montana Reservation. White Ranchers, the Crow woman Pretty Shield said, “gunned down Crow horse, she recalled bitterly, as though they “were wolves that killed the white man’s sheep.” She recalled the time when “white cowboys mead a deaf and dumb Crow boy on the plains, and because he could not answer their questions, could not even hear what they said, they roped him and dragged him to his death.” James Byrd, the African-American man dragged to his death in 1998 in Jasper Texas: his death, too, took place at the hands of men deeply committed to their racist values, including their racist jokes.

The President is stirring up a noxious brew of lethal ingredients. The dangerous humors unleashed are toxic, and will have horrible consequences. He was only joking, you might say. Loosen up. It was meant to be funny. But we all know that racist activity is on the increase, that those who hold these views have been emboldened. The white people in the photograph at the top of this post–they are smiling, too, at a lynching. The brutal rhetoric that preceded this sort of violence is becoming more common. It is encoded, but it is there. And it is happening more openly and more often. Those who laugh at the notion of racist violence, at genocide humor, will be judged harshly by historians. They might be “very fine people” individually, but theirs is a moral failing, and it is racist. We who study the past have seen this before. Too often, dehumanization leads to violence. Dehumanization is the precondition to violence.

History and Historians

The Sins You Forget Can Never Be Forgiven

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And the sins you forget, you may commit again.

Are there historical sins that can never be forgiven? Are their historical crimes so great that the guilt can never be washed away?

Last week a story appeared in the New York Times  announcing that the “Holocaust is Fading from Memory.” Many adults, according to a recent survey, “lack basic knowledge of what happened—and this lack of knowledge is more pronounced among millennials, whom the survey defined as people ages 18 to 34.” 41% of Americans, as well as 66% of millennials, had never heard of Auschwitz. And, as Matthew Rozsa pointed out in Salon, it’s not just a Holocaust problem.  Americans of all ages just do not know their history well at all.

I am not willing to fault the young people for that.  Our education system, presided over by the overly-credentialed but unwise and unimaginative adherents of a testing regime, who celebrate STEM fields, who equate positive outcomes with “employability,” and who consistently challenge the relevance and even the necessity of training in the liberal arts and humanities, have done us all a huge disservice.  We know little of where we have been, who we hurt, how we hurt them, who benefited, and how the processes of history have unfolded.  We don’t know what we have done, how, and to whom.  And it seems unlikely that without that knowledge we will ever be able to stop.

There are just a few weeks left in the semester.  At the end of my Indian Law and Public Policy course in a few weeks we will discuss apologies for the historic treatment of America’s peoples.  And in my course on the Early Republic, which I am teaching for the first time in twenty years, we have reached that point in the semester where I am discussing Antebellum slavery and the slave regime in the south.  I like to ask students about apologies for slavery, too, given the horrible brutality of the entire system.

I have been at this a long time, and I can anticipate the answers.  Apologies bring complications.  Lawsuits, for instance.  Or all the exceptions.  My ancestors were not even here back then, and so on.  As a nation, and as individuals, I encounter many people who do not like to second-guess, who are willing to say that the past is in the past and it is time to move on.

But if Americans do not know those histories—of dispossession and colonization in the first instance and enslavement and white supremacy in the second—and if they do not understand the chains binding the past to the present, the likelihood of them understanding what they might apologize for is remote at best. Why do something when you lack the knowledge to understand the problems that exist?

We like villains, for instance. We like to place blame.  Doesn’t take much thought at all. Andrew Jackson was a real bastard, we might point out. But we might also suggest that he was hardly the only person to call for “Indian Removal.”  And he was hardly the only person to benefit.  Those of us who live on what was once native land should know that well. We do not, generally speaking, but we should. To many Americans the injustice that made them who they are remains invisible. I have met many people who sense that there is something off-putting and creepy about President Trump’s fixation with Andrew Jackson, but to ask them to explain why is another matter entirely.

I have been listening to the “Finding Cleo” podcast produced by CBC Radio.  It is a searing story of the legacies of Canada’s brutal decision to carry away 150,000 First Nations children into boarding schools, foster care institutions, and adoptions, in order to assimilate them.  The podcast follows the victimized siblings of one small girl who also fell victim to Canada’s “Sixties Scoop.”  Today is the product of many yesterdays, of many decisions, policies, and actions, the consequences of which whipsaw through time, spreading wreckage as they go.  If your students watch the “The 13th,” they will recognize that slavery is hardly part of the past, that the injustices upon which the South’s “Peculiar Institution” rested are still very much with us.  Incarceration Nation.  Prison reform has received more attention than in the recent past, but the racial disparities in American prison populations quite simply is not a source of concern to many Americans.  We watch our duly elected buffoon preside over the country, and bounce from crisis to crisis, while his trampy kids and corrupt appointees run a smash and grab ring. Important problems, the legacies of our nation’s sins, remain unaddressed, because too many people do not care, and too many people know too little to care.

Current Events

Yeah, About that Issue of What is Fair and What is Unfair

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A number of disgruntled readers of my piece on Donald Trump have reached out to me with angry emails.  My essay appeared in the Syracuse newspapers a week or so ago.

One reader raised an argument with which may of us who teach Native American history are familiar, and with which we must contend.  Referring to the Oneidas of New York, who operate a lucrative casino and resort complex a short distance from Syracuse and just off the New York State Thruway, this reader asserted that “the ‘sovereign nation’ concept is obsolete and unfair to taxpaying citizens.”

“Last time I checked,” he continued, “most Oneida Indians live within the borders of the US, the County of Madison and the town of Vernon, They drive their cars on public highways, are protected by our military, so on and so on, just like me.”

Oneidas did everything this writer did, he argued, “except pay taxes.”  Asserting that Indians have unfair advantages, he declared that “it’s time to level the playing field.”

If you teach Native American history, you have likely encountered these sentiments before.  If you are a student in a Native American history class, it is a safe bet that some of your classmates share these views.  They are not uncommon.  I heard them when I lived in Montana.  They were for many years the lifeblood of the anti-Indian sovereignty group Upstate Citizens for Equality, which opposed Indian gaming and other commercial operations in New York state and Indian land claims.  Some of their signs still dot the roads coursing through New York’s Finger Lakes region.

We could, I suppose, dismiss these views as anti-Indian racism.  That, in my view, would be a mistake.  We need to engage.  We need to educate, and tackle views such as these head on. Our students, after all, learn nothing about concepts like tribal sovereignty and the place of native peoples in the American constitutional system and, at best, little about Native American history. At times, views like these are expressed with such vehemence that we might feel as if we are casting our pearls before swine, but I believe that these are teachable moments. And I would argue that we let these opportunities pass us by at considerable cost.

When I face views such as these, I try to concede a few points. In other words, if one sets aside the entire historical experience of the native community in question–which historians are always reluctant to do–it might seem that native peoples have certain “advantages.”  But these so-called advantages are often misunderstood, or based upon fallacies, or a lack of information about the constitution and American Indian history.

Sometimes I find this stuff difficult to explain.  Sometimes I think the people who write to me really do not want to hear a history lesson, or an explanation for how things came to be.

So I begin with the fact that native peoples belong to polities that predate the United States.  Under American constitutionalism, native nations retain by virtue of their inherent sovereignty the right to govern most of their own affairs, on their own lands, so long as they have not explicitly lost those rights by virtue of an act of Congress or a treaty, or implicitly because the practice in question is somehow inconsistent with their status as domestic dependent nations.  I will point out that to a great extent they have lost criminal and civil jurisdiction over non-native peoples who own land on their reservations, but that they retain considerable power still.  I point out that over the course of the last forty years the Supreme Court has weakened significantly the powers of tribal governments.

So much for the Constitution.  I also point out that the notion that “Indians pay no taxes” is an oversimplification.  Native Americans pay federal taxes, even when that income is earned entirely on a reservation. States and localities do not have the constitutional right to tax economic activity by native peoples on Indian land.  (The most useful discussion of this issue appears in Chapter 10 of Stephen L. Pevar’s The Rights of Indians and Tribes, (4th ed., 2012)).  I am willing to concede that this might pose a competitive disadvantage to non-native businesses located in the vicinity of Indian reservations, but that this is not simply a product of “special treatment” or an “uneven playing field,” but because of the language of the Constitution which places Indian affairs under the control of the federal government.  I point out that in a number of instances, Congress has allowed states to exercise its authority in Indian country.  This is the case in New York State.

I have been at this a long time. Racism towards Native Americans is a real thing.  The inequalities experienced by native communities are significant.  The statistics do not lie.  New York became the Empire State, as Laurence Hauptman has so ably shown, through a systematic program of Iroquois dispossession. You could not have one without the other.

The transactions through which New York acquired Iroquois land happened a long time ago, but these were transactions that violated federal laws the United States lacked the power and perhaps the willingness to enforce.  The Supreme Court has held that these transactions occurred so long ago that nothing can be done to right these wrongs, but that does not mean that the rights retained by native peoples should be ignored.

New York’s native peoples have seen, through a long history, their homelands invaded.  They experienced waves of epidemic disease.  They faced dispossession, and then the effort to “remove” them to new homes in Arkansas, or Wisconsin, or the Indian Territory, and then to re-educate their children, and disable their governments.  Disease, warfare, dispossession, diaspora: the injuries occurred a long time ago, but their legacies remain.  And now, when a community like the Oneidas manage to bring a measure of prosperity to their homelands, after the withering trauma of history, there are those non-Indians who cry out, “Wait! This isn’t fair!”

Give me a break.  Look at the ground underneath your feet.  If you believe that laws matter, that the Constitution matters, that the pledges in a treaty that guarantees to the Six Nations the right to “the free use and employment of their lands” matters, then drop the whining about what is or is not unfair. Please.  I was writing about something else, a president’s name-calling that I considered racist.  Stop sniveling about fairness.  It is not a good look.  It makes you sound racist.