I started working in repatriation efforts before I even knew what the term meant.

But repatriation—bringing our ancestors home—is in my blood. I grew up in a Cherokee community in Chewey, Oklahoma, in the foothills of the Ozarks. Sometimes I’ve wondered how my extended family could be as fortunate as we were, remaining isolated from the nearby towns, with a river running in front of us and a small creek behind. My relatives would tell me how much it was like our ancestors’ original home in the East, with mountainous terrain, ample water, and lush vegetation.

Over a century, my relatives fought for this Oklahoma home, traveling thousands of miles to push back against U.S. government overreach. Today, I continue the tradition by teaching a new generation of tribal officials how to work with the federal government to preserve what is ours. As a former “tribal historic preservation officer,” or a THPO, who reviews federal undertakings, it has been my job to step in when such projects threaten our sacred sites or our tribal interests.

My family’s land—where my grandmothers raised us—was a parcel that the U.S. government designated for individual Cherokees through the allotment process created by the Dawes Act of 1887. In the 19th century, allotment was presented as a way to “domesticate” us. I believe the real idea was to divide up families and scatter us about.

My great-grandfather, Osie Hogshooter, understood this. He had a significant role in an uprising against the allotment system, joining forces with Chief Redbird Smith, leader of the Keetoowah (Gi-du-wa) Nighthawks. The Nighthawks were traditionalists, full-blooded Cherokees who had made their way to Arkansas after ceding southeastern territory to the U.S. government in the late 1700s. They were distinct from the emigrant Cherokees who came to Indian Territory later, by way of the Trail of Tears, though both groups experienced forced displacement.

The Keetoowah Nighthawks knew that dividing our community would weaken our families, and the communal way of life that had sustained us through traumatic removals in the past. So a group of leaders, including my great-grandfather, who served as secretary, accompanied Chief Redbird Smith on a widely publicized journey to Washington, D.C., where they met with President Taft.

Unfortunately, the Nighthawks were not able to stop this moving freight train.

I learned about Osie’s participation in the Nighthawk campaign from my mother, Marie Bird, the only living person in our family who remembers him today, if vaguely, from when she was a little girl. She often spoke to me of the Nighthawks and all that they stood for. Osie refused his allotment, she told us, never living on it. When people filed to claim the land through squatters’ rights, we asked her, what do we do? She said, we do nothing—we stay away, just as Osie had. She always told me to stand up, and not to be afraid to speak my voice.

It wasn’t a stretch for me to get involved in a movement of my own, but I didn’t know what sort of movement it would be. I attended and graduated from an Indian boarding school in Tahlequah, Oklahoma; married, had three kids, worked taking care of my family.

As a young adult, I looked around our tribal communities and saw how divided we had become. Not just from family but from municipality. We didn’t have libraries. We didn’t have internet access. The rivers and creeks can only do so much for you, and we had to work for wages, but our job options were limited—chicken farms, manufacturing, any place within 30 miles each way. We shared rides, so you went to work where your neighbor did.

Stories about the Nighthawks lay dormant in my mind as I went through life’s struggles. If Osie, whose genes I shared, could educate himself about government and become a part of a movement to protect what is sacred to us, I could do the same.

Once my youngest child was a high school senior, I quit my job to enroll in the native studies program at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, something I had wanted to do since I was 18. I wanted to understand how the American government took over Cherokee lives and lands. I wanted to be able to explain why we were where we are, and how we got here, to my people back home. I wanted to continue the resistance.

A portrait of Osie Hogshooter, probably taken during his Washington, D.C. visit with the Keetoowah Nighthawk delegation. From The History of the Cherokee Indians and Their Legends and Folk Lore by Emmet Starr (1921) / Author collection.

In college, I learned about sovereignty, and about federal Indian law. In 1966, Congress passed the National Historic Preservation Act, a law designed to protect “our cultural footprint” during construction. But the Act excluded the tribes. Which was one of the reasons why, in the name of progress, the federal government routinely flooded valleys where our people had lived since time immemorial in order to build dams. Our bones have interstates on top of them now. Anything found during construction got whisked away and placed on museum shelves. Institutions held our ancestors in collections, against their will. Who would choose to be in a box, far from your homeland?

I graduated from college in 2012, and then began to work within and sometimes against the complicated system that was emerging to bring our culture and people back home. Things had begun to change—slowly. In the early ’90s, Congress amended the National Historic Preservation Act to include consulting tribes. It also passed the Native American Graves Protections and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, which allowed us to recover our ancestors’ remains from faraway institutions.

I found my movement, and made this struggle my cause.

In 2015, I became the first-ever tribal historic preservation officer, or THPO, for the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. I created a process to give us a voice on the 300 projects the federal government proposed every month that posed a threat to our cultural footprint. When the federal government proposed selling leases to build a transmission line through Cherokee and other tribal lands, for instance, we figured out a path through the regulatory thicket to prevent the project. It never got built.

Across the U.S., THPOs have figured out ways to save our cultural heritage. Working with other tribes, for instance, the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma developed a tribal monitoring policy for construction projects. Now, on certain projects, we accompany archaeologists working in historic preservation when they come in to determine what to save before a project. Things that signify a burial site for us might not be obvious to them. You take notes on what you see, we tell them, and we’ll take notes on what we see, and together we’ll come up with an agreement on how we’ll proceed with the project.

After two years, I left the Cherokee Nation to become a consultant to other tribes, to help them do this work. THPOs come from a wide range of backgrounds—we found our way here through different journeys, stumbling upon a job that we hadn’t even known was available. We are often overwhelmed by our workloads, by an alphabet soup of technical and legal acronyms we have to digest, by blanket U.S. government policies, and by the sheer number of projects that threaten to deplete our tribes’ cultural footprints.

Social media has lent a hand, creating a way for us to pool our experiences, but we have trouble communicating and educating on a broader scale. I searched high and low for a better way, and finally settled on a podcast to bring our tribal interests and landscapes together. “THPO Talk,” which I launched in the spring of 2022, connects preservation officers’ voices. We talk with federal partners, or any interested party who wants to understand our goals. Repatriation, international repatriation, historic preservation—we touch on it all. We support one another, and hope that in doing so, we will honor our ancestors, and assure our survival.

Our ancestors paid the ultimate cost, and paved the way for us to be resilient in this work. We’re telling our stories. We’re telling our grandchildren about the past and also about how to protect our future.

It wasn’t until I became a THPO that I went to Washington myself, to testify before a commission. While I was there, I found a Washington Post article that described my great-grandfather’s journey with the Nighthawks, more than a century earlier.

I wore moccasins that I had made myself. I looked down at my feet and I thought, I could be walking the same path Osie did.

The post Following in My Cherokee Great-Grandfather’s Footsteps appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The histories of Indigenous peoples of the Americas are fascinating. Looking at the spectacular buildings of Machu Picchu, the walrus ivory carvings of the Canadian Arctic, and the effigy stone pipes of the Eastern Woodlands, and considering the extraordinary diversity of past and present Indigenous cultures, many people wonder at their origins.

How did the First Peoples survive the ice age and arrive on the continents? How did they adapt to the new environments in these lands?  Did they arrive 15,000 years ago, or 30,000 years ago? Where did their ancestors come from? How did they travel beyond the massive ice sheets that covered the northern portions of the continents during the Last Glacial Maximum? Indigenous peoples themselves have diverse and ancient histories of their own ancestors, some of which align with archaeological and genetic models of the past, and some of which do not.  A thousand questions drive legitimate and respectful conversations about the past.

In recent years, “alternative historians” have exploited this thirst to learn. Self-appointed “experts” or journalists such as Graham Hancock variously claim that the first people to enter the Americas were: from Europe, from sub-Saharan Africa, from Egypt  (some claim there’s an Egyptian city in the Grand Canyon and Egyptian artifacts in Burrow’s Cave in Illinois), giants (descended from an extinct human relative known as the Denisovans), travelers from the Black Sea region, Atlantean refugees, aliens, and alien mentees. The proponents of these claims have landed shows on Netflix and the History Channel, and book contracts. Sensationalism sells, as the viewership of the latest series in the genre, Netflix’s Ancient Apocolypse, demonstrates. Profiting off their visibility from media appearances, some grifters organize conventions, and offer “informal research expeditions” to “investigate megalithic sites without bias.”

While these purveyors make millions, their theories perpetuate a harmful and incorrect view of the origins of Native Americans. They cook up pseudo-histories by cherry picking “evidence” (often faked, misunderstood, or paranormal) to support a pre-determined outcome, and by eschewing hypothesis testing, peer review, and other tools of rigorous scientific inquiry. Scientists, skeptics, and scholars have debunked these claims, pointing out factual inaccuracies, identifying faked evidence, noting anti-Indigenous rhetoric, and delving into history and context that explain why the bogus claims emerged in the first place. But a lie can go halfway around the world before experts can debunk it.

Scientists, Indigenous knowledge holders, and scholars from multiple disciplines have spent decades compiling evidence about the First Peoples of the Americas—using genetics, professional archaeology, and knowledge passed down many generations among Indigenous communities to understand the histories of Indigenous peoples. One of the most recent tools available is the study of complete genomes from ancient peoples, which has allowed scholars to produce powerful models of biological histories and test relationships between past and present populations.

DNA recovered from ancient remains shows us that the First Peoples of the Americas have ancestral roots in Asia, and that they descend from two populations who mixed during the Upper Paleolithic era: One group related to the ancestors of present-day East (with affinities to some Southeast) Asians, and another group descended from a population called Ancient North Eurasians. The East Asian and Ancient North Eurasian groups came together approximately 25,000 years ago; soon after, the DNA evidence suggests, the intermingled population became isolated for a few thousand years, coinciding with the peak of the global climactic event called the Last Glacial Maximum, also known as the ice age.

During this period, human populations across the globe retreated to locations where resources were more abundant. Based on paleoclimactic reconstructions, some archaeologists, geneticists, and paleoclimatologists hypothesize that the population ancestral to the First Peoples may have moved to the southern coast of central Beringia (the land bridge which connected East Asia and West Alaska until the Earth warmed and sea levels rose, creating the Bering Strait).

The DNA evidence suggests that the Beringian population split into several branches. One moved into the Americas as soon as routes past the glacial ice sheets became accessible, after about 17,000 years ago, and gave rise to all peoples south of Alaska. Genetics and some traditional Indigenous histories indicate that people were present in the Pacific Northwest extremely early; the first movements into the Americas were likely by boat along the coast.   There is no genetic evidence that the earliest Native Americans were Europeans, ancient Israelites, or African mariners, as pseudo-historians sometimes assert.

At human occupation sites throughout North America and South America, a vast preponderance of archaeological evidence—securely dated physical traces of human activities in undisturbed geological contexts—demonstrates that these First Peoples were making homes in North and South America by around 15,000 to 16,000 years ago, and that they had no contact with any outside group (with very limited exceptions) before 1492.

There were some exceptions to their isolation. Genetic evidence hints that there may have been brief contact between Polynesian and South American populations approximately 800 years ago. The L’Anse aux Meadows site in northern Newfoundland contains wood-framed buildings and artifacts that confirm Norse people lived there between 900 and 1,300 years ago (congruent with narratives from both Vinland Sagas and Indigenous traditional histories). Human and animal footprints at the White Sands Locality 2 site may date back between 21,000 and 23,000 years, one group of scientists has (somewhat controversially) suggested. If their data—which align with the traditional histories of Indigenous peoples in the region—hold up to additional scrutiny, it would indicate that an earlier population predated the post-ice age expansion out of Beringia. This is one of the most exciting developments in the field in recent years, and is an area of active research by multiple archaeologists and geneticists.

But such exceptions do not support “alternative history” claims, particularly that the First Peoples of the Americas were anything other than the ancestors of present-day Native Americans, or that other Europeans besides the group at L’Anse aux Meadows entered the Americas prior to 1492. No burial mounds, stone pyramids, or ancient settlements were built by Egyptians, aliens, or a “lost race.”

Scientists don’t agree on a single, unified model for the peopling of the Americas. We debate which sites contain valid evidence of a human presence, how old they may be, and their significance. That’s a good thing. Disagreeing about how to interpret the archaeological record is the strength of the scientific method, not a weakness. It creates space for rigorous scrutiny of evidence and testing of hypotheses, which leads to a gradual accumulation of knowledge and the development of more accurate models of the past. It requires a profound humility to articulate how your ideas may be tested and proven wrong.

Archaeologists, biological anthropologists, and geneticists studying the earliest histories of the First Peoples are not immune to criticism. We are grappling with legacies of racisim against Native Americans, some which continue to persist within our disciplines. All too often, non-Native scientists ignore or treat disrespectfully traditional histories and Indigenous perspectives on their own past. We can and must do better.

But “alternative historians” and pseudo-archaeologists do not even acknowledge—let alone seek to root out—the racism and anti-Indigenous perspectives that are so integral to the stories they tell. Instead of trying to test hypotheses, they build cases for their pet theories—whether by co-opting Indigenous traditional histories to support racist theories, speculating wildly over single artifacts, or even looting Indigenous sacred sites to manufacture evidence.  When scholars or institutions attempt to debunk this charlatanism, the alternative historians deride them as part of a conspiracy to suppress “the great secrets of Earth history.”

But scientists care about what is actually true; the YouTube algorithm does not. There is a special kind of joy at the intersection of our love of the past and our love of solving puzzles. It’s familiar to those of us who feel goosebumps walking amid the ruins of ancient buildings, who read every historical marker on road trips, or who delight in the fingerprints of the potter marking ancient ceramics. We want to understand these large and tiny histories, and to see what the past was really like.

Embracing the joy in learning about the past and present cultures of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas—including learning about the peoples whose lands you are on and rejecting harmful and inaccurate narratives that drive a wedge between these peoples and their own histories—is the heart of science and the soul of humanity. Respectful curiosity is the starting point for understanding the past, including just how long Indigenous peoples have been on these continents. And it can start close to home: Close your laptop, and pay a visit to an ancient site.

The post No, Ancient Egyptians Did Not Build a City in the Grand Canyon appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In November 1620 the Mayflower deposited about 100 Pilgrims at the Wampanoag community of Patuxet, which the newcomers renamed New Plymouth. A year later, the English and Wampanoags enjoyed a three-day feast. For generations, Americans have celebrated that meal as the first Thanksgiving.

As traditions go, Thanksgiving seems pretty secure, though the recent redefinition of Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples’ Day suggests that even once-sacred holidays can change. Columbus trotted through American culture until 1992, the 500^th anniversary of his first voyage. That year, Native and other scholars fueled a campaign to redefine the holiday by emphasizing Columbus’s role in brutal conquest, enslavement, and ecological catastrophe. But this was not the first effort to redefine America’s origins.

In the 1820s and 1830s, a Pequot minister named William Apess took aim at what would become Thanksgiving—arguing that the nation needed to rethink the colonization of New England, and view it through Indigenous perspectives. What does it mean when a nation extracts a benign interpretation of the past from a tangled and often violent legacy of encounters and conflicts? Indigenous peoples’ experience of conquest and colonization pivoted on dispossession. Shouldn’t that be part of the story too?

Apess tackled these questions at a time when prominent politicians linked the Pilgrims’ experience with two hallmarks of American democracy: the right for any community to govern itself, and the right for individuals to practice their faith without government interference. In the era of Indian removal, these notions became embedded in the federal government’s efforts to expand the nation westward into lands held by Indigenous peoples whom the Constitution excluded from exercising such rights.

In 1829, Apess’ A Son of the Forest became the earliest published Indigenous autobiography in the United States. He reported he was born in 1798, the grandson of “a white man” who had married the granddaughter of Metacom, the Wampanoag leader known to the English as King Philip. A Son of the Forest detailed Apess’ struggles with alcohol, and how he quit drinking and became ordained as a Methodist minister.

Apess was a leader in the Massachusetts Indigenous peoples’ battle to preserve their lands and to take greater control over their communities in an uprising known as the Mashpee Revolt of 1833-1834.  The Mashpees (or Marshpees) “wanted their rights as men and as freemen,” he wrote.  Apess and the Mashpees invoked the language of the Nullification Crisis of 1832, when the state of South Carolina failed in an effort to declare federal tariffs unconstitutional.  They tried to prevent white intruders from taking wood from Mashpee lands, which landed Apess briefly in prison.  Many non-Natives feared the implications of Apess’ stand, but their counsel, who was not Native, compared his clients to the patriots who had thrown tea into Boston Harbor in 1773.

Soon after, Apess turned his attention to the history of early New England.

In the midst of a war in 1637—less than 20 years after the famous Plymouth feast—Pilgrims and their allies set a Pequot town on fire and shot those who tried to escape. They killed 400 to 700 on a single night, including children and elderly people. They captured Pequot survivors and shipped them to the Caribbean as slaves. Forty years later, Apess’ ancestor, Metacom, led multiple Indigenous communities to battle for their homelands in a conflict known as King Philip’s War. From 1675 to 1677, Indigenous and colonial soldiers laid waste to each other’s communities, and colonists again bought and sold Indigenous captives, creating a market in enslaved bodies. The colonists believed Metacom and his allies posed the most serious crisis they had ever faced. After Metacom died in Rhode Island on August 12, 1676, English soldiers decapitated him, and colonists mounted his head on a post in Plymouth as a warning.

In powerful 1836 speeches and a book called Eulogy on King Philip, Apess used his ancestor’s story to redefine the colonial era. Unlike promoters of the myths surrounding Plymouth, Apess saw the 17th century as an era of struggle and sacrifice.  He described the Pilgrims as trespassers who took land “without asking liberty from anyone.” Apess castigated colonists for selling Metacom’s son into slavery, an act he called shocking by “a people calling themselves Christians.” He suggested that Metacom, rather than the English, was the true exemplar of Revolutionary ideals and sacrifice.

Apess delivered his eulogy twice in Boston in January 1836, but he soon after disappeared from the historical record. In 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday. He asked all Americans to recognize the strength of the country, and to seek divine protection for “all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners, or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife” engulfing the nation. But by then, the association of Plymouth and the holiday had already taken hold. Thanksgiving festivities continued to emphasize a sanitized version of events in early New England—and to wallow in nationalist pride, rather than reckon with the implications of European conquest.

For decades, scholars of early American history ignored Apess’ books, though an edition of his complete writings in 1992 brought new attention to his critique of early New England. By then, other Indigenous writers and speakers also thought it necessary to challenge the romance of the Pilgrims and Thanksgiving.

In 1970, an Aquinnah Wampanoag activist named Wamsutta Frank James delivered a speech in Plymouth that put the Indigenous experience at the center, not the periphery, of the history of the United States. Rather than celebrating a tradition of religious freedom and democracy, he spoke of centuries of prejudice and dispossession.  His words had lasting impact: Each year on the fourth Thursday of November, Indigenous and supporters congregate on Cole’s Hill in Plymouth to mark the holiday James suggested renaming the National Day of Mourning.

There’s a rich and still too-little-known tradition of Indigenous writings like Apess’, including Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s early 17^th century account of his travels and the many texts of Samson Occom, a Mohegan who raised funds later used (against his wishes) to establish Dartmouth College. Many of these authors offered penetrating critiques of the European conquest and colonization of the Americas. Like Apess, they bore witness and their words invite a similar reckoning.

Looked at from the vantage points of 1637, 1676, and so many other moments in our country’s history, that three-day meal in the autumn of 1621 was less a predictor of future good will among all Americans than a historic aberration. Thanksgiving may well survive for centuries. But as the rethinking of Columbus Day and the public’s broader understanding of slavery and American history through educational programs like “The 1619 Project” have shown, it is not too late to make progress. Rather than see this holiday as an opportunity to gorge on a meal and dwell on naïve fantasies about a period of accord, it could become an opportunity to retell the history of the United States, putting Indigenous experiences at the center instead of the periphery.

The post We Can Tell New Thanksgiving Stories appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The hoops seen outside most homes and gathering places on western reservations speak to basketball’s cultural significance for Native peoples. For them, the sport is more than a pastime. It has become a modern expression of indigenous identity and pride, and a glue that bonds families and tribes more tightly together.

It might seem peculiar that a sport invented by Dr. James Naismith, a white man, has become so dear to Native people, especially since their ancestors first encountered it during hard times, in hard places. Native youths began learning basketball just prior to the turn of the 20th century while confined to government and missionary-operated boarding schools—or “Indian schools” as they were known. These institutions aimed to erase Native identities, and left many youths traumatized. Yet from these schools sprung a renewed athletic zeal that helped invigorate Native communities in times of struggle. The story of how this occurred speaks to both Native resiliency and the redemptive power of this sport.

Basketball’s association with the boarding schools’ assimilationist mission was more than incidental. In accordance with federal Indian policy, non-Natives in charge of these places used basketball, and other mainstream sports like football and baseball, as tools to mold Native boys and girls into model pupils, and model Americans. The idea was that playing exhilarating, well-ordered sports against white opponents would boost student morale, instill discipline, and improve race relations.

Native athletes largely rejected this agenda. They instead claimed possession of the sport to serve their own purposes. Ever-determined and adaptable, young Natives perceived structural parallels between basketball and their ancestral sports, and so played this new game to connect to the old ways and score victories amidst the injustices of the white man’s world. At the same time, the sport also allowed for escape. For youngsters who had been wrested from their homes and confined within institutional walls, basketball became a mental and physical refuge, allowing them to temporarily leave behind daily drudgeries, relieve stress, and bond with teammates.

Students could relate positively to basketball, despite its institutional attachments, because they exercised a surprising degree of control over their experiences with it during the early 1900s. Although authoritarian environments in most respects, the boarding schools were uncharacteristically lax in supervising athletics, due to understaffing. Outside of structured physical education classes, Native athletes self-managed most of their interactions with basketball. They formed and coached their own intramural squads, organized pickup games, and practiced shooting during precious moments of free time. Even in varsity contexts, Native captains directed on-court play, often under the supervision of Native coaches who were themselves graduates of these schools.

Students tasted similar freedoms playing other Indian school sports, but in fewer numbers. Compared to all-male football, which was the schools’ leading spectator sport, basketball’s availability to girls, as well as boys of small stature, made it a more democratic game. Its playability in tight spaces, minimal equipment demands, and easily learned rules further boosted its appeal, making it the most widely played Indian school sport by the 1920s, at both the intramural and varsity levels.

Basketball’s rise to popularity in the Indian schools was an underdog success story. Most administrators regarded the game as a minor diversion—especially compared to football, baseball, and track—when it debuted at their institutions. The supervising U.S. Indian Office only loosely promoted the sport, and local superintendents only occasionally introduced it. More often, lower-level employees and contract staff, many of whom had learned basketball through the YMCA (the sport’s parent organization), brought the sport to Native kids.

Despite humble beginnings, basketball caught on like wildfire amongst students within weeks after its introduction to various Indian schools during the mid-1890s and early 1900s. One hoops hot spot was Haskell Institute in Lawrence, Kansas, the second-largest Indian school after Carlisle, in Pennsylvania. By 1900, even before the school had purchased its first basketballs, students were shooting old footballs and clumped balls of rags at makeshift hoops all over campus.

We know this from their enthusiastic letters to relatives back home. “Basket ball is all we know now,” reported one female student. “In the girl’s building we play in the halls sometimes, with a bucket for a goal.” There was “not much to think about in what extra time we have except basket ball,” wrote one of the boys. In his letter, he included a written rundown of the rules so his parents could try it themselves.

Gymnasiums at Haskell and other Indian schools soon filled with boys and girls trying out for prized positions on newly organized varsity teams. Those talented enough to make these squads earned the pleasure of escaping campus for days or weeks at a time to compete on the road and see the country. The most athletically talented boys relied on basketball to stay out during lulls between football and baseball seasons, while it was the sole sport affording girls such opportunities.

Hawk Street in Starr School, Montana, on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. Courtesy of Tony Webster/flickr.

Indian school athletes so embraced basketball, and intensively played it, that they developed their own stylistic approach by the early 1900s. In contrast to the plodding, controlled game many non-Natives employed, Indian school teams typically played an agile, fast-paced, high endurance, and long-shooting version that dazzled spectators and flummoxed opponents. As culturally diverse as these students were, most were from tribal communities that had long emphasized distance running as a life necessity—and as a spiritual bridge to immortal creators who had run their own races before the dawn of time. Prior to entering the schools, many tribal athletes had also played indigenous field sports like lacrosse that privileged agility, toughness, and speed.

While confined together, these youths developed an uncanny synergy that allowed them to channel these shared traditions into a new format. They did the same with football to a degree, as exemplified by Carlisle’s famously quick and nimble gridiron teams of the era, but basketball’s freer flowing design made it particularly conducive to stylistic innovation. It afforded the interpretive space they required to fully express the old ways through the new.

Indian school teams refined this swift, free-wheeling style so effectively that even the sport’s inventor took note. During James Naismith’s years coaching at the University of Kansas between 1898 and 1907, he frequently observed male players in action at neighboring Haskell Institute. “I made it a point to see several games at Haskell,” he later wrote, “because I delight in the agility of the Indian boys.” He was struck by how fast and effortlessly these athletes moved their bodies and the ball about the court, a style that matched his idealized vision of the game. Naismith did not comment on girls’ teams at the Indian schools, but sports reporters noted that they too were fleet of foot. Among them was a team of Yuchi girls in Oklahoma that outpaced its opponents while playing in moccasins. They were the only Indian school team in the country to opt for this footwear, no doubt because it increased their speed advantage over opponents who, in that era, commonly played in heeled leather shoes.

This high energy play made champions of some early Indian school teams. Haskell’s young men triumphed first, in 1902, when they snatched a national amateur title away from a team representing a fraternal order in Independence, Missouri. Soon thereafter, some Indian school girls’ teams captured state championships against high school and college opponents. Albuquerque Indian School took New Mexico’s territorial crown in 1902. The next year, Chemawa won in Oregon, and Fort Shaw triumphed in Montana. In 1904, Fort Shaw’s team earned even greater distinction while playing match games at the St. Louis World’s Fair. Led by sharp-shooting center Nettie Werth and forward Emma Sansaver, who was said to dodge “here and there with the rapidity of a streak of lightning,” they beat all comers and were dubbed world champions by some reporters.

News of what these teams accomplished instilled pride in tribal communities, thus spreading basketball’s appeal beyond the Indian schools. But regardless of whether they returned home as champions, thousands of former Indian schoolers all did their parts to disseminate the sport. By the 1910s and 1920s, hundreds were returning to the reservations each year committed to stay in the game and teach it to their tribespeople. They were soon joined by former schoolmates who had kept playing basketball in other formats prior to returning home. A handful beat long odds to play college ball, while hundreds more played in Army training camps during World War I, again relying on basketball to nourish their spirits during difficult times.

Dozens more made a go as professional barnstormers, capitalizing on the hoops skills they developed in the Indian schools to tour the country and earn a modest living. Notable among them was the world’s greatest athlete, Jim Thorpe. Although best known for his achievements in football, baseball, and track, he had also played basketball in the boarding schools. He returned to the game late in his professional sports career by captaining the so-named World Famous Indians from 1926 to 1928. Like other Native barnstormers, Thorpe and his teammates stayed true to the Indian school playing style, employing a fast “driving attack” that wore their opponents ragged, and drew enthusiastic crowds throughout the Midwest.

Sadly, public memories faded over time of what the Indian school teams and alumni had done to inspire tribal communities, and to inject added life into the sport of basketball. By the late 20th century, the Indian boarding schools had largely been supplanted by public high schools as the focal points for hoops ins Native communities. Only a handful of people remembered how the Native athletes at places like Haskell and Fort Shaw had claimed this sport for their people. But the legacy of those Indian school players nevertheless lived on—in the joys basketball kept bringing new generations of lightning-quick Native hoopsters and their adoring fans.

The post How Native Americans Made Basketball Their Own appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

There are certain things about the nation’s founding era that many Americans don’t want to see messed with. The Declaration of Independence, despite its inaccurate claims that King George had already unleashed Indian warriors against the frontier, is an almost sacred text.

And George Washington, despite the barrage of criticism he attracted during his second administration, sometimes seems immune from criticism.

While I was working on a new book about Washington, someone asked me: “You’re not going to say anything negative about the General, are you?” As commander of the Continental Army during the Revolution, and as the first president of a nation that was not yet entirely sure it wanted to be, or could survive as, a nation, Washington united Americans, and Americans ever since have been united in their admiration.

One legacy of the father of this country is often overlooked.

At a time when the United States was still weak, many Indian nations were still strong and represented a significant threat to a precarious infant republic. Washington knew that he must build his nation on Indian land, and by war and diplomacy, he helped set the United States on a path of westward expansion that transformed tribal homelands into American territories and then into states.

From our time and perspective, the outcome might seem inevitable; from his time and perspective, it was anything but. His dealings with Native Americans in securing the nation’s independence, survival, and future growth could be considered as another measure of his greatness. Unfortunately, those same dealings inevitably call that greatness into question.

The primary goal of Washington’s Indian policy was to acquire Indian lands. In that, he succeeded. His second goal—and it was a distant second—was to establish just policies for dealings with Indian peoples.

“The Government of the United States are determined that their Administration of Indian Affairs shall be directed entirely by the great principles of Justice and humanity,” Washington informed treaty commissioners heading off to deal with the Southern Indians in August 1789. Washington and his Secretary of War Henry Knox agreed that the most honorable and least expensive way to get Indian land was to purchase it in treaties. Offering Indian tribes a fair price for their land, Washington hoped, would allow the United States to expand with minimal bloodshed and at the same time treat Indian peoples with justice.

But when Indians refused to sell, Washington was ready to wage war against them. “Extirpate” was the term he used. (The Merriam-Webster dictionary provides two definitions of the word: one is “to pull up by the root”; the other “to destroy completely: wipe out.”) After he dispatched armies to ravage their country during the Revolution, the Haudenosaunee (or Iroquois) called Washington “Town Destroyer.”

The Mohawk chief Joseph Brant, after visiting Washington in Philadelphia in 1792, warned other Indians: “General Washington is very cunning, he will try to fool us if he can. He speaks very smooth, will tell you fair stories, and at the same time want to ruin us.” Six months after meeting the president, the Cherokee chief Bloody Fellow declared, “General Washington is a Liar.”

The chief was right to be skeptical. A man who had swindled fellow officers out of the bounty lands they had been promised as payment for their services after the French and Indian War hardly could be expected to protect Indian rights against forces of expansion which he himself helped set in motion.

Yet Washington envisioned a place for Indian people in American society. He offered them the chance to remake themselves as Americans by extending them the benefits of American civilization—agriculture (to be practiced by Indian men, not, as had been the case for centuries, by Indian women), education, and Christianity.

Some tribes seized the lifeline. The Cherokees rebuilt their tribe after years of war and land loss. Looking back from the 1820s and 1830s when Andrew Jackson was leading the charge to remove eastern Indian peoples west of the Mississippi, the Cherokee chief John Ross remembered with reverence the first president who had dealt justly with Indians. Ross even named his son George Washington.

Washington’s decisions set precedents that are still with us. As the father of the country, he was also the father of America’s tortuous, conflicted, and often hypocritical Indian policies. While he aspired to a national Indian policy that might somehow reconcile taking Native land with respecting Native rights, he shared and shaped the attitudes and ambitions of his time, and employed deception and violence to attain his own and his nation’s ends.

For example, the Treaty of New York, which he signed with a delegation of Creek chiefs in August 1790, contained secret articles to secure the agreement of chief Alexander McGillivray. And in 1791 Washington dispatched an army to defeat Indian resistance to American expansion by destroying Indian villages in northwest Ohio (a tactic that backfired when the Indians destroyed the army).

In fall 2016, the museum at Mount Vernon opened an exhibit entitled “Lives Bound Together: Slavery at George Washington’s Mount Vernon.” The exhibit quietly, directly, and honestly shows that Washington’s home, wealth, and daily life rested on the unfree labor and exploitation of hundreds of African slaves. Even though he worried about slavery and freed his slaves in his will, Washington’s record and legacy on slavery are deeply ambivalent.

So, too, are his record and legacy in Indian affairs. We can pretend that it wasn’t, or we can acknowledge it as we try to understand the first president and the nation he helped to build.

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The history of this episode—in which the U.S. Army opened fire on a mostly unarmed village of Minneconjou Lakotas, or Western Sioux, on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota—teaches us about the moral perils of abandoning religious freedom. Although the First Amendment guarantees freedom of conscience, only in recent decades did that protection extend to American Indian ceremony and belief.

For most of U.S. history, the federal government sought to assimilate native peoples by eradicating their religious ceremonies and belief systems. These efforts increased with all-out campaigns to turn Indians into Protestant, English-speaking farmers in the closing years of the 19th century. Under government regulations that took effect in 1883, the Department of Interior banned “heathenish” (meaning virtually all) Indian dances, in an effort to force conversion to Christianity.

Thus, customary ceremonies that once brought spiritual relief to Lakotas, such as the Sun Dance, became illegal. At the same time, reservations grew dramatically poorer. Congress’s 1889 decision to reduce food rations to Lakota Sioux, bringing many to the point of starvation, and to strip Indians of most of their reservation lands, increased native peoples’ sense of desperation. On other reservations, among Arapahos and Cheyennes, for example, similar pressures also contributed to a growing feeling of crisis.

It was at this point, in the fall of 1889, that the new teachings of what became known as the Ghost Dance religion began to energize believers among Lakotas and in other Indian communities, especially on the Great Plains. Many greeted its teachings with joy. This was no violent uprising: Armed resistance to U.S. authority had ended in 1877. For well over a decade, Lakotas had peacefully occupied reservations in South Dakota and North Dakota. Other peoples who took up the Ghost Dance, such as Arapahos and Cheyennes, had lived on reservations in Montana, Oklahoma, and elsewhere for even longer.

A view of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, date unknown. Photo courtesy of Associated Press.

None of these peoples were threatening hostility. What they sought was redemption from their suffering, and the new religion promised it. Tribal members passed along rumors of an Indian messiah who would come in the spring, bringing a new earth, on which believers would find no white people, but abundant buffalo and horses. For this wondrous event to transpire, said the evangelists, believers must adopt a new ceremony: a sacred dance in which participants held hands and turned in a large circle. Among Lakotas, the circle turned at an ever faster pace until some dancers collapsed into trances. On awaking, many recounted visions of the afterworld and encounters with spirits of their departed kin and friends.

At its peak, perhaps one in three Lakotas joined the dance circle, and the exuberance of believers was spectacular, with hundreds dancing at any moment and dozens falling into visions. But to U.S. government officials responsible for administering the reservations, the excitement could only mean trouble. “The dance is indecent, demoralizing, and disgusting,” wrote one. “I think,” wrote another, “steps should be taken to stop it.”

Why did the dancing elicit such strong condemnation? The wave of Ghost Dance enthusiasm had run headlong into the government’s policy of assimilation, the ongoing effort to force Indians to look and behave like Protestant white people. While most officials recognized Ghost Dancers were peaceful, they were nonetheless perturbed by the sudden appearance of the large circles of ecstatic dancers. The rhythmic movement of bodies proved to white observers that Indians were refusing to assimilate, to abandon old religions and embrace Christianity. The Ghost Dance looked like dangerous backsliding toward “Paganism.”

And yet, to many Indians and even a few white defenders, the Ghost Dance religion also looked a lot like Christianity. Some white observers compared the dance to evangelical camp meetings, and one urged officials to let Ghost Dancers “worship God as they please.” The religion, after all, promised the coming of a messiah, who some adherents called “Christ,” and some of its teachings were not that different from those of Christianity.

The prophet of the Ghost Dance was a Northern Paiute named Wovoka, or Jack Wilson, who hailed from Nevada. By 1889, Northern Paiutes had long since entered the Nevada workforce as teamsters, road graders, builders, domestic servants, and general rural laborers. Wovoka himself was a well-regarded ranch hand. According to multiple accounts from the period, he instructed his followers not only to dance, but also to love one another, keep the peace, and tell the truth. He also told Ghost Dancers to take up wage labor, or as he put it, “work for white men.” They should send children to school, attend Christian churches (“all these churches are mine,” Wovoka counseled), and become farmers. Such teachings were transmitted to distant followers on the Plains. Lakota evangelists, too, instructed their followers, “Send your children to school and get farms to live on.”

The Ghost Dance religion was no militant rejection of American authority, but an effort to graft Indian culture on to new ways of living, and to the new economy of wage work, farming, and education that the reservation era demanded. But to government officials, the dancing was a sign of religious dissent and had to be stopped.

When Ghost Dancing continued throughout 1890, President Benjamin Harrison sent in the army. On December 28, some 500 heavily-armed cavalry accepted the surrender of a village of 300 elderly Minneconjous, women, children, and some lightly-armed men. The next morning, as troops were carrying out orders to disarm their prisoners, a gun fired, probably by accident. Nobody was hurt, but an impulsive commanding officer ordered his troops to open fire. By the time the shooting stopped, some 200 Lakotas lay dead and dying. In the aftermath, a brief shooting war finally erupted, with skirmishes taking the lives of dozens of Indians and a handful of soldiers before Lakotas once more surrendered their arms.

To this day, the pain of Wounded Knee is still deeply felt within the Pine Ridge community and by descendants of the victims. The stain of the Wounded Knee Massacre remains on the army and the U.S. government.

But efforts to suppress the Ghost Dance religion had the opposite effect. Army violence convinced many believers that its prophecies must be true, and that the government was trying to stop them from being fulfilled. Why would the government want to stop prayers to the Messiah, unless white people knew the Messiah was real? Clearly, said believers, the government knew the Messiah was coming.

After a brief period, secret Ghost Dances returned to South Dakota. Elsewhere, dances among Southern Arapahos and Southern Cheyennes took on renewed energy. Among some peoples, Ghost Dances were held regularly through the 1920s. Across many different Indian reservations, the ceremony and its teachings endure to this day.

Only in the late 20th century would Indian people begin to secure limited rights to observe their own religions. As they have done so, our memories of assimilation campaigns and their tragic consequences have faded. But as Americans still debate the merits of religious freedom, the Ghost Dancers of Wounded Knee remind us of the terrible price of suppressing belief.

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And then there was Wenona, the Sioux girl.

Wenona, Cummins proclaimed, was not only the “champion rifle shot of the world,” but also the daughter of a chief named Crazy Horse and a white woman, born in a “tepee on the south bank of the Big Cheyenne, near Fort Bennett, Dakota,” and only 18 years old. Cummins offered a $1,000 reward to anyone who could best Wenona with a rifle at the Exhibition. Her extraordinary shooting prowess, he crowed, had been bestowed upon her by supernatural spirits of the Indian world.

In fact, “Wenona” was not a Sioux teen. She was 29-year-old Lillian Frances Smith, the daughter of a white Quaker couple from New England. A former performer in William “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s Wild West show, she had earned the scorn of the legendary Annie Oakley and had been cast aside to make her own way in the world.

Lillian Smith, probably age 15. Probably a Buffalo Bill’s Wild West publicity photo. Image courtesy of University of Oklahoma Libraries, Western History Collection, Rose Collection, No. 787.

At the cusp of 30, the so-called “California Girl” may have thought that adopting a Native American persona was her last chance to differentiate herself from Oakley. At least, this is what my original thesis was, when I first examined the sparse records that Smith left in her own writing before her death in 1930. I had been casting about for a California figure to write about, and tripped over mention of Smith in a footnote in an article about someone else. I had to piece together a sparse collection of Smith’s letters, newspaper accounts, playbills, accounts of those who worked with her, and genealogical sources to find her “real” story. And her real story, I found, had little to do with Oakley. It was not even so much that a “rehabilitated” Indian could sell a lot of tickets at that time—though that was certainly part of it. As I collected more and more sources, I concluded that the primary purpose of Smith’s transformation into Wenona was so that Smith could completely erase her past and start all over again, in typically American fashion.

Smith was a darling of Buffalo Bill’s 1886-1887 Wild West Show. One was at a loss, exclaimed one observer of the show in New York, whether “Miss Lillian Smith, Miss Annie Oakley, Johnnie Butler, the ‘Kid’ [cowboy Jim Willoughby], or Buffalo Bill himself” deserved the highest praise for marksmanship. As soon as Smith joined the show in April of 1886, Oakley shaved 12 years off her own birth date, insecure about the talented young teen stealing the spotlight. And Smith did not waste any time getting on Oakley’s nerves, bragging that the latter was “done for,” once the public had seen “her own self shoot.”

Yet, I learned through my research, Lillian was far less concerned with a feud with Annie Oakley than with getting away from her controlling father, Levi, who traveled with his daughter on the American leg of the Wild West tour. Levi followed Smith everywhere, and prevented her from making friends when he could. Under normal circumstances, this might illustrate good parenting—she was, after all, just a teen. But Levi exploited his daughter, and later, her younger sister. I found many examples of this, but perhaps the most poignant is mentioned in a letter Smith wrote to a friend, lamenting her sister’s situation: “The best thing she [Nellie] could do would be to marry or go with some man who was smart enough to manage her—else she will never win with this old man around her neck.” This is exactly what Lillian did when she married the cowboy “Kid” Willoughby, who was a dozen years her senior, in 1886. By marrying Willoughby, Smith put a trusted friend in charge of her finances and virtue while overseas, and pushed her father out of the picture. By all accounts, they were smitten with each other, and Willoughby staunchly supported his wife when Oakley and husband Frank Butler took her to task in the newspapers.

Lillian Smith as Princess Wenona, taken at the 1901 World’s Fair in Buffalo, New York. Centered in the photo is Geronimo. An inscription on the photo says, “General Milles–Indian Congress,” probably meant to commemorate General Nelson Miles’s winning of Geronimo’s surrender in 1886. Image courtesy of Library of Congress.

The marriage failed in 1889 when Willoughby left with Buffalo Bill on a second European tour and Smith did not—possibly because Oakley made Smith’s absence a condition of her own return to the show. Newspapers hinted at Smith’s dalliance with a “half-breed” as the reason for the breakup, but it is more likely the young sharpshooter simply lost interest in marriage with Willoughby so far away. Levi Smith immediately took control of his daughter’s career again, and the family traveled up and down the West Coast, living off Lillian’s exhibition earnings.

In 1897, Smith impulsively married a saloonkeeper in Santa Cruz, and just as quickly left him when she met Charles “Frank” Hafley, sheriff of Tulare County, at a gallery in Visalia the following year. Hafley was not conventionally handsome, but he was witty, athletic, and very intelligent. Additionally, he was an extraordinary sharpshooter in his own right, and a very competent equestrian. The two may not have ever legally married, but they began a decade-long romantic and business partnership that packed in more adventure than most people saw in their lifetimes. They traveled to Hawaii as a sharpshooting act, to the East Coast to perform at the 1901 World’s Fair, and to the Jamestown Exhibition in Virginia in 1904. The pair even created their own program called “California Frank’s Wild West,” and started an Indian curio business on the side (Smith created her own brand of tomahawks). It was Hafley who helped Smith morph into “Princess Wenona,” helping her write a “new” biography that included him, “Fighting Frank” Hafley, as the cowboy who brought this fair Indian maiden into a culture of civilizing whites.

Wenona’s costume often included a fully fringed, suede tunic with intricate beadwork and a fantastic feathered headdress, which she wore even while shooting moving objects while astride a galloping horse. Her “Indianness” helped differentiate her among other Wild West stars, but her costuming was also practical. Smith had struggled with her weight since puberty, and her tunic let her hide her voluptuous figure. Additionally, it gave her freedom of movement to do the physically demanding feats she was known for, like shooting glass balls thrown all around an arena while galloping full speed on her horse while flipped on her back.

Perhaps most importantly, Wenona’s adopted Sioux identity forever severed any connection between her and her parents. In 1900, we know from one of her letters, she was still trying to convince her younger sister to leave Levi’s sphere of influence on the West Coast and move east to be closer to her. The Smith girls’ mother died in 1901, and their father in 1908. Wenona did not see either of them again after she met Frank in 1898.

Lillian Smith as Princess Wenona. Publicity photo from Pawnee Bill’s Wild West, circa 1905. In this image, Wenona is Minnehaha, the fictional Native American woman in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1855 poem “The Song of Hiawatha.” Image courtesy of Library of Congress.

Audiences were more than willing to receive Wenona as a member of a “noble race,” albeit one doomed by the progress of civilization. As Philip Deloria, Laura Browder, and other historians describe it, Native Americans were icons of American identity, and citizens wanted to feel a natural affinity with the continent. Indians could teach them such “aboriginal closeness.” Lillian Smith was not the first or last performer to try to bridge this gap. In her book, Real Native Genius: How an Ex-Slave and a White Mormon Became Famous Indians, Angela Pulley Hudson describes how in the mid-1800s, Warner McCary and his wife Lucy, who was not only white but divorced, traveled the United States as singers and comedians before turning to lecturing on medical healing. They used “Indianness” as a way to disguise their backgrounds, justify their marriage, and make a living—much as Wenona did. Smith’s popularity spurred a number of wannabes on the Wild West circuit: “Princess Kiowa,” “Princess Winonah,” “Princess Mohawk,” and others. One notable “Princess Kiowa” was Nellie Smith, Lillian’s younger sister, who was also an accomplished sharpshooter, but was never quite as good or as famous as her older sister. Nellie fades from the historical record after 1916, when she was performing for Yankee Robinson’s circus.

Wenona retired from show business in 1925 or thereabouts. She had a brief relationship with cowboy Wayne Beasley just before World War I, but her last substantial romantic entanglement was with Emil Lenders, one of the great painters of the American West. Lenders had also “gone native.” His first marriage had ended when his wife could no longer tolerate his traipsing off with various tribes instead of helping to take care of his family in Philadelphia. He had first met Wenona at the Buffalo Exhibition, and got reacquainted with her around 1920 when Joe Miller of the Miller Brothers 101 Ranch in Ponca City, Oklahoma, brought Lenders in to paint buffalo and other animals. Wenona had performed with the 101’s traveling wild west since 1915, and Joe Miller generously allowed many of his performers to live on the working ranch. It was only natural, when Lenders and Wenona fell in love, that they shared a house there.

The couple parted ways amicably in 1928, when Lenders met and married another woman. Wenona lived on in a tiny cabin on the outskirts of the 101, and passed the time caring for her many chickens and dogs. At age 59, she developed a heart condition, and quickly deteriorated over the Christmas season of 1929.

She still always wore her Sioux garb, and asked to be buried in it upon her death. When she passed away in February of 1930, her friends obliged.

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My work is a passion and a calling. Sometimes it surprises people to hear that it grows out of an inheritance I received from both of my parents: my Native American mother, to be sure, but also my Austrian-Jewish father, who fled the Nazis in 1938.

My mother’s Native American roots dominate my looks. I have brown skin and even as a kid often had long hair. At home I was just an Indian. But when I went to school, I was THE Indian. I always caught a lot of looks and comments. My first grade teacher, in Washington, D.C., decided that long hair on a boy was too much of a novelty. She dressed me up like a girl in front of the class. That was the first time I noticed America’s racial fault lines—its limits on opportunity and fair treatment.

The story we all hear of the American dream—work hard, have good morals, and you get sweet American apple pie—I feel like it’s half true. Obstacles persist for people of color and women. We can make it here, but it’s in spite of these barriers, not because there’s a level playing field.

My mother, Margaret Seelye, was born in Cass Lake, Minnesota and raised in the village of Bena, on the Leech Lake Indian Reservation. She is from the Ojibwe tribe, who have inhabited the Great Lakes for millennia. We’re famous for our wild rice and birchbark canoes, but also for our many brilliant activists, warriors, and writers—people like Louise Erdrich, Gerald Vizenor, Clyde Bellecourt, Dennis Banks, and Winona LaDuke.

When my mother was a girl, many of the native families at Leech Lake were reeling from federal policies that took away all but four percent of the land inside the reservation. Her family had buried their dead in the Bena cemetery at Leech Lake longer than America had been a country, but by the 1950s, they had to buy plots from non-native land owners to lay their loved ones to rest next to relatives. They were very, very poor. Harvesting wild rice was less a cool cultural pastime than it was a necessary means of survival. Even as a small child, my mother worked hard—at everything from the Ojibwe seasonal harvest to her school work to her jobs at the local cafe. Eventually she went to nursing school, and was hired to run the new comprehensive health program at Red Lake.

That’s where she met my father, Robert Treuer. He had fled Austria at the height of Nazi power. As a Jewish boy in Vienna, he had to run from armed Hitler Youth. He watched SS officers force his mother to scrub the streets. Many of his family members simply disappeared. My father was 13 years old when my grandparents managed to get him to London. He stayed for a while in a camp for child survivors of the Spanish Civil War, and then moved on to a boarding school in Waterford, Ireland. It took a year for my grandmother, working as a domestic servant in England, to earn enough money to bring the family to America. My father, his parents, and two cousins survived the war. Hundreds of other family members took their last gasps of breath in Dachau, Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Bergen-Belsen.

Immigration papers of the author’s father, Robert Treuer, whose family fled Austria at the height of Nazi power.

My father, too, had an uphill climb to find his place in America. Once here, he sat often by the radio, listening to news broadcasts and repeating every word uttered, until his English was so clean that everyone thought he was American-born. At age 17, he enlisted in the U.S. Army, hoping to kill Nazis. He was shipped to the Pacific Theater and served honorably in the Philippines. After the war, he worked as a labor union organizer. He married young and had three sons. His first wife was from Minnesota, and he fell in love with the place. Money was tight, but he put in a bid on a piece of tax-forfeited property. Soon he was teaching high school English and planting pine trees on the land by his house. Robert’s first marriage failed, but he stayed in Minnesota, taking work in the Bureau of Indian Affairs that would lead him to Margaret, his second wife—my mother.

He was trying to restart his life and she was building a pathway out of poverty when they joined fates. They moved to Washington, D.C., where my mother pursued a law degree and where I was born. But we spent summers on the property in Minnesota. It was a humble beginning. My parents refurbished a small cabin, which had no electricity or running water. We used to pick wild rice, as my mother had as a child, and traded with our neighbors, the Schlueger family, for milk and eggs. We kept the milk in a glass jug and sunk it in the creek to keep it cold in the summer.

Over time my mother graduated from law school and we all moved home so she could take the Minnesota bar, becoming the first female Indian attorney in the state. Our family’s finances improved dramatically. I soon had three younger siblings. My dad called each of us another victory over Hitler. My mother called each of us another victory over Andrew Jackson.

I didn’t tell my parents about the incident in first grade, when my teacher embarrassed me in front of the class, until I was an adult. I was channeling my warrior ancestors—who I imagined would never have cried over something like that—and internalizing my shame, from that and numerous other small injustices and microaggressions. Over time, I began to feel like the things I learned in school had little to do with me, and that I was not important or relevant in America. It’s a feeling that derails a lot of students of color.

But then my father’s gifts to me kicked in. I had watched him advocate for oppressed people, as a union leader and as a writer for the local paper. I had watched him support my mother’s advocacy for tribes and native people as a defense attorney, law professor, U.S. magistrate, and tribal judge. From both of my parents, I came to realize that the world wasn’t fair, but there was something we could do about it.

My parents raised a high bar, and I was determined to jump over it. College, at Princeton University, taught me that America was a diverse place in much more than name. From friends there I learned to interrogate my own beliefs, in the best way possible. I graduated and returned to the north woods to lean into my native roots. My mother had already made sure that I knew how to hunt, snare rabbits, and process maple syrup, but I set out on a quest to learn more about the Ojibwe language and culture. I landed in the living room of Archie Mosay, a renowned spiritual leader from the St. Croix Reservation in Wisconsin. He spoke English, although he was most comfortable in Ojibwe. I did everything I could to learn what he knew. I spent every summer at our tribal religious ceremonies and eventually went to graduate school in history.

Throughout it all, both of my parents, whose experiences gave them firm faith in their own agency, remained my steadfast supporters and inspiration. Today, I still live on the tree farm my dad started decades ago. I’ve written 14 books on Native American history and the Ojibwe language, and I travel often to do racial equity work with K-12 schools, colleges, and businesses. I have nine children, and together we harvest wild rice, process maple syrup, hunt, and fish. My mother lives around the corner from us.

My father passed away about a year ago, but the pine trees he planted when he first bought the farm stand over 70 feet tall. This forest around me keeps my own roots strong—the ones planted here by my father after World War II, and the ones my mother’s family have nurtured here for millennia, before America was a country. This forest is where I do my life’s work. It contains the challenge and the hope of America. We just need to keep planting the seeds.

The post The Passion for Ojibwe Culture I Inherited from My Native-American Mom—and Austrian-Jewish Dad appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Carvalho was 38 years old and an unknown portrait artist and daguerreotypist when he received an offer from Col. John C. Fremont, the most famous adventurer of the day, to serve as the official photographer of Fremont’s Fifth Westward Expedition. For years, Fremont had been consumed with mapping a route for the transcontinental railroad. He had always included a sketch artist among his crew, but this time he wanted to use photography, a new technology, to document the terrain.

It was a risky proposition. Fremont’s previous foray had ended in disaster when ten men froze to death in the Rockies, and Carvalho was totally unprepared. An urbane city dweller raised in Charleston, S.C., he had never traveled West. In fact, he had never even saddled his own horse. No daguerreotypist had ever attempted anything like this before. Daguerreotopy, which was the earliest form of photography, had only been invented fourteen years earlier, in 1839. It was a cumbersome process involving polished silver-coated copper plates and lots of gear and chemicals, and it was prone to failure. Of the handful of professional daguerreotypists in the United States, nearly all worked indoors, shooting portraits. Capturing wide landscapes in extreme weather conditions was almost unheard of.

Solomon Nunes Carvalho in 1850. Courtesy of Library of Congress.

Yet two weeks after accepting Fremont’s offer, Carvalho set out, with a seasoned group of explorers, teamsters, hunters, and guides. It would be the journey of his lifetime. The team included white Americans, a German, a few Mexicans, ten Delaware Indians, and of course Carvalho, who was an observant Sephardic Jew of Spanish-Portuguese descent. From the very start, the group faced challenges: torrential rains, raging prairie fires, injuries, infighting. Col. Fremont became injured early on, and had to turn back to seek medical attention. After a six-week delay, Fremont rejoined his men in Western Kansas, and then led them, perhaps foolishly, toward the Rocky Mountains just as winter was about to set in.

Along the way, Carvalho dutifully worked at his craft and, against the odds, succeeded in capturing image after image of the landscapes, buffalo, and the expansive terrain of the West.

The expedition encountered the Cheyenne village at Big Timbers in late November, during a supply stop along the Santa Fe Trail. It wasn’t easy photographing the Native Americans, Carvalho found. “I had great difficulty in getting them to sit still, or even submit to having themselves daguerreotyped. I made a picture, first, of their lodges, which I showed them,” he later wrote.

Carvalho’s daguerreotype of Big Timbers shows a pair of teepees nestled up against the edge of a forest of tall pines. Atop a thicket of logs and tree branches, several skins or hides are set out to dry. Two human figures, faded to an almost ghostly pallor, anchor the image in time. Their faces are hard to make out, but one has long braids and both are dressed in traditional native outfits.

An engraving based on Carvalho’s daguerreotypes.

Princeton historian Martha A. Sandweiss, an expert in photography of the American West, credits Carvalho with creating a painstakingly deliberate scene. “Carvalho sensed he needed to preserve a certain amount of information,” she told me, in an interview. “He stepped back from the scene, and he has carefully framed the image. He’s not doing a close up, at least in this picture, of the two people, or of the teepee, or of a piece of meat on the ground. He’s trying to show us something about native life.”

Fremont was thrilled with Carvalho’s work. “We are producing a line of pictures of exquisite beauty, which will admirably illustrate the country,” he wrote to his wife, Jessie Benton Fremont. He described the pictures of Big Timbers as “jewels.”

Sandweiss believes the daguerreotype tells us as much about the photographer as it does the subject. “I think what we see in this picture is evidence of a collaboration. It’s important to remember that Carvalho was working with a camera on a tripod. This is not a snapshot. These Indian subjects knew they were being photographed, and they are looking Carvalho in the eye.”

Of the 300 or so daguerreotypes Carvalho made on the expedition, this image is the only survivor.

After the expedition, photographer Mathew Brady’s New York studio converted Carvalho’s daguerreotypes into hand-drawn printing plates, so they could be turned into etchings and published. At the time, converting photographs to etchings was the only way to reproduce them for large numbers of people to see. It seems inconceivable to us today, but at that early time in photographic history, the daguerreotypes themselves were considered worthless—just a means for carrying back visual information that would be enshrined forever on a steel printing plate. Years later, they ended up in a storage unit belonging to Fremont, and were destroyed in a fire in 1882—gone forever, and barely missed. The Big Timbers daguerreotype somehow, luckily, ended up in Brady’s personal collection, which now resides at the Library of Congress.

Rio Grande, painting by Solomon Nunes Carvalho. Courtesy of Oakland Museum of California.

The sixty-odd surviving etchings made from Carvalho’s daguerreotypes tell a spectacular story of discovery, but the one surviving image does more: It provides a spiritual connection to the past. For most of the years I worked on my documentary film, Carvalho’s Journey, I relied on various reproductions of the Big Timbers image. I finally had a chance to see the real thing during a visit to Washington, D.C. last year.

It is smaller than I had imagined, just four by five inches. In real life, the damage is worse than in reproductions. But holding it in my hands, I was struck by an intense proximity to history. This piece of copper was the same tool that miraculously captured the Cheyennes’ likenesses, their teepees, their hides drying on the line. It was the same bit of metal that an urbane, Southern-Jewish photographer carried thousands of miles on horseback and heated over a fire to develop. The moment captured on the plate, faded as it is, was the exact image Solomon Carvalho saw that day. Native people who had never seen a photograph before—and whose lives would never be the same after their collision with Europeans—would have seen it too. It was the vessel through which an unlikely visitor and a pair of Indians faced each other and forged a quintessentially American encounter.

Daguerreotypes, which are in many ways an art form lost to history, are reflective just like mirrors. On one as faded as Carvalho’s, the mirrored surface makes it almost impossible to see the image detail when you look directly at it. You instead see yourself, peering into it, looking into history.

The post A Jewish Photographer’s Nearly Forgotten ‘Collaboration’ with Cheyenne Indians on the Santa Fe Trail appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Historically, U.S. policymakers were troubled by such marriages not only on the grounds of race, but also because they created conflicting loyalties within the American nation. The questions of consent and coercion are at the essence of contests over sovereignty. And consent is a central tenet of Western marriage.

Until the 1930s, women of American birth who married foreign nationals faced particularly hard choices regarding their national identity. Under the principle of coverture, the legal status of a married woman, including her citizenship, was subsumed under that of her husband’s.

The Marshall judgments of the Federal Court of the 1830s declared that Indian Nations were nations in their own right, in the modern sense. However, they were classified as “domestic dependent nations” and considered subordinate to the United States. Indigenous families who had occupied their land for generations and who had matrilineal systems where the women had rights to land and property were gradually subsumed under a patriarchal system similar to that of the United States.

Controversies over citizenship continued. Consequently, during an active time for the American Indian Wars, some of the most heated moments between Native Americans and U.S. citizens happened not on the battlefield, but across the more intimate sphere of heterosexual unions.

This was the case in Connecticut in 1825, when the talented editor and Cherokee Indian Elias Boudinot asked for the hand of Harriett Gold, a white woman from a highly regarded family. The town went mad, burning effigies of Harriett and an archetypal “Indian” on a huge bonfire, threatening to lynch Elias, and protesting the Native American man’s “right” to marry a white woman.

Previously known as Gallegina Uwatie and Buck Watie, Elias had already crossed many transnational boundaries. He moved to Connecticut for an advanced education and strategically took the name of one of its patrons: Elias Boudinot, the New Jersey statesman, president of the Continental Congress, and president of the American Bible Society. Presented in fashionable clothing and practiced in the manners of American higher-ups, Elias was sought after by many of New England’s philanthropic elites, regardless of his Cherokee roots.

Despite rejection by her beloved family members and almost every lifelong friend in her hometown, Harriett went ahead with the wedding. By cover of night, the newlyweds travelled to their new home, New Echota (in present-day Georgia), the capital of the Cherokee Nation.

It was 1825, and Harriett was emigrating—a decision with serious risks.

When Harriett became a resident in the Cherokee Nation, their matrilineal society meant that she had no clan status and, therefore, no official citizenship. The uprooted Harriett was deeply interested in belonging, and she understood the emotional bonds that would make that possible. Upon her arrival there, she reported that her new family “joyfully” stated, “You are welcome in this nation.” In turn, she proclaimed, “I am now at home. Here I expect to pass the remainder of my days.” She was relieved that her relatives treated her like an old friend rather than a stranger.

Locket images of Elias Boudinot and Harriett Gold, circa 1826.

Harriett was well aware of the uncertain future of her new nation, of the Cherokees’ “final destiny,” as she put it—Native Americans were considered inevitably condemned by the arrival of Europeans on their lands. In a letter to her parents, she made it clear where she stood: “Whatever may be their doom I shall share and suffer as a Cherokee.”

Harriett’s parents, who had adamantly opposed the marriage, soon travelled to the Cherokee nation in the South to visit their new family. Contrary to their own expectations, they were thoroughly impressed with what they saw. Harriett’s father Benjamin became an advocate of the Cherokee nation, assisting in their political struggles to gain great support in the north. Proud of their grandchildren, his soft and wryly expressed affection translates across the ages: “The oldest little girl is as smart and pretty and healthy as can be found, and the next is a bright, well-looking child. All who see her say, ‘She is the handsomest child I ever saw.’ You must not think that I brag.”

Through her family life, Harriett became a courageous border crosser. She was also a Cherokee nationalist who expounded the virtues of their civilization and backed their cause in asserting their sovereignty rights. The couple raised highly accomplished children who were proud Cherokees and who, as diplomats and lawyers, continued the struggle for their treaty entitlements through the courts.

Harriett had willingly joined a nation whose future was under constant threat from her own birth nation. Harriett and Elias’s story reveals how intimacy and family shaped and redefined individuals and nations with a glue that neither colonizer nor colonized state could dissolve.

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