Today, tourists from all over the world flock to Nevada to experience selective amnesia. “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas,” the slogan goes. But Las Vegas’ culture of forgetting is more than drunken hijinks. The city’s existence depends on forgetting the colonial violence that made the Desert Southwest. Since becoming a state in 1864, Nevada’s basic political and economic infrastructure is a product of the expropriation of Native American lands.

If any one Nevadan represents this history, it’s Patrick “Pat” Anthony McCarran, the Democratic U.S. senator who served the state from 1933 to 1954. McCarran’s name is everywhere in Vegas: on street signs, building names, and, until 2021, the Las Vegas International Airport. Many locals remember McCarran for being a champion of the mining and ranching industries; less proudly, they have come to recognize that he was an unabashed anti-Semite.

For this reason, Clark County Commissioners recently rebranded the airport for a different Democratic senator, Harry Reid. Still, in reckoning with McCarran’s legacy, Nevadans sometimes overlook the ways in which even his most laudable successes carried on an ugly tradition of stealing from Indigenous people.

Dispossession began before McCarran’s time, in the 19th century. After Mexico ceded its northern territory to the United States in the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, decades of violence ensued between white newcomers and Native nations defending their land.

American diplomatic efforts sought to reach accords between settler and Native communities, but often undermined Indigenous sovereignty in the long run. In 1863, near what is now the Utah-Nevada border, Western Shoshone leaders signed the Treaty of Ruby Valley for the sake of “peace and friendship.” The treaty acknowledged Native jurisdiction over much of the Intermountain West from Death Valley to Idaho’s Snake River, stating that “The United States [is] aware of the inconvenience resulting to the Indians … [from] agricultural and mining settlements” and promising “full compensation … for the loss of game and the rights and privileges hereby conceded.”

Except for limited rights of way, forts, and mines, Shoshone delegates neither ceded nor sold any real estate to the federal government. Nevertheless, Nevada became a state the next year, on Oct. 31, 1864. As American settlers began arriving in droves, they treated Newe (Western Shoshone) land—along with that of nearby of Nüümü (Northern Paiute), Nuwuvi (Southern Paiute), and Washoe nations—as “public domain,” empty for the taking.

McCarran’s father, an Irish immigrant also named Patrick, had emigrated west in 1857 with the California Volunteers, a division of the U.S. Army charged with pacifying Natives along the Sierra Nevada’s eastern slope. The 1859 discovery of silver on the Comstock Lode brought a wave of prospectors to the region, disrupting a fragile truce between California-bound migrants and Paiutes. The elder McCarran surveilled the newly created Pyramid Lake and Walker River Indian Reservations, where Native people tried to rebuild their lives. After serving, he built a ranch on the lower Truckee River, east of Reno. His son, Pat, was born on Aug. 8, 1876 and grew up on the homestead.

Although the younger McCarran was raised to think Native people were vanishing, in reality they were simply adapting to the settler invasion. Some relocated to reservations. Others resettled on the outskirts of mining towns. But most continued to visit traditional territories to gather pine nuts, hunt jackrabbits and perform ceremonies. They also began to mobilize, pursuing treaty rights in the courts as early as the 1920s.

In any event, McCarran inherited his father’s sense of Manifest Destiny. When he entered politics, anti-Indigenous ideas informed his policymaking in ways that continue to shape present-day Nevada. Even as he achieved national influence, serving on the Senate’s powerful Appropriations and Judiciary Committees, he pursued parochial goals in his underdeveloped home state. Often his initiatives involved systematically denying Native Nevadans access to resources—particularly water—while redirecting them to his growth-minded constituents.

In one episode, McCarran went out of his way to enable non-Native squatters on the Pyramid Lake Reservation, whose eldest tribal members may have remembered his father. The Senator called it a matter “of equity and justice toward the white settlers.” Avery Winnemucca, the Pyramid Lake tribal chairman, wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt in 1949, imploring her to lobby Congress against bills McCarran proposed, which would have patented the settlers’ illegal homesteads retroactively. “In defeat our ancestors accepted the white man’s treaties and promises,” Winnemucca reminded the former First Lady. “Then why does Sen. McCarran propose the Congress of the U.S. to blow its nose on the American flag?” Although the immediate bills died, non-Native farmers would continue to contest the reservation’s limited water supply for decades after.

McCarran also pursued his vision of aggressive growth by soliciting military installations on the Nevada desert’s vast, “open” public lands. Nellis Air Force Base (originally an airstrip called McCarran Field, north of Las Vegas) and Fallon Naval Air Station near Reno, both established during World War II at McCarran’s urging, today represent two of the largest defense properties in the United States.

His crowning achievement came in 1950, with the creation of America’s first permanent continental nuclear weapons testing site, the Nevada Proving Grounds (later, the Nevada Test Site). When it opened, Gov. Charles Russell compared the Test Site to a flowing irrigation canal. “We had long ago written off that terrain as wasteland,” he announced, but “today it’s blooming with atoms.” Over the next 40 years, the Atomic Energy Commission (later, the Department of Energy) would detonate nearly a thousand fission devices above and below the 1,300-square-mile restricted zone.

The Test Site was in the heart of the territory of the Western Shoshone, which they call Newe Segobia. In the 1980s, citing violations of the Ruby Valley Treaty, Newe land defenders, along with non-Indigenous pacifists and environmentalists, began protesting outside its gates. The coalition of organizers drew thousands of demonstrators to the desert each spring to peacefully gather and pray for an end to colonial occupation.

To this day, much of the region remains a highly restricted—and toxic—military zone. Native downwinders suffer some of the highest rates of cancer in the nation, likely related to radiation exposure from consuming contaminated game and wild plants in traditional diets.

Pat McCarran achieved his vision for the desert: when he died in 1954, Las Vegas was one of the fastest growing cities in the country. Southern Nevada now contains over two million people, with a Native population of less than 1%.

Growth continues to be a point of pride for state leaders. Recent development measures include expanding the Naval range’s footprint, doubling down on wasteful settler water laws, and transforming Nevada into a “lithium loop,” an all-in-state critical-mineral supply chain. Despite allowing for more citizen and tribal participation—and an ostensibly “green” goal in lithium-ion battery production—the current development agenda channels McCarran’s extractive goals and disregard for Native land rights.

In some ways, things are getting better. Nevadans are rethinking McCarran’s legacy in public spaces. And this month, after years of advocacy efforts by Indigenous land defenders, the Biden administration established a half-million-acre national monument surrounding Avi Kwa Ame, or Spirit Mountain, in southern Nevada. The designation will, at last, protect land considered sacred by Yuman-speaking people of the lower Colorado River.

But decolonizing Nevada will require a more fundamental reevaluation of basic ideas about development, growth and resource exploitation at the core of the state’s economy. Despite facing a megadrought, McCarran’s vision still drives much of the state’s policies. Until that changes, Nevada, along with much of the American West, is living on stolen land and borrowed time.

The post What Nevada Stole from Its Native People 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.

This legend, repeated for more than a century, blends truth with fiction, and reminds us that history is as much about forgetting as it is about remembering. Flagler and a woman named Julia Tuttle stand at the center of the story: The importance of Flagler’s East Coast Railroad and Royal Palm Hotel led some residents to propose naming the city after him, and he is often depicted as the city’s “father.” Tuttle, a businesswoman who lured Flagler to Miami and otherwise promoted the region during the 1890s, earned the title of “Mother of Miami.” But Tuttle and Flagler did not create something out of nothing. On the contrary, Tuttle’s home and Flagler’s hotel stood precisely where earlier settlers had already left indelible marks over 2,000 years of continuous occupation.

These Miamians included Tequesta Indians who lived in the area for more than 1,500 years, and Spanish missionaries who tried to convert them; African enslaved persons tasked with turning the land into sugar fields, who instead created orchards of fruit trees; Seminole Indians who came to trade and harvest the local bounty, and U.S. soldiers who waged a war to exterminate them; and a continuous stream of Bahamian mariners, fugitive soldiers from various armies, and shipwrecked sailors. These earlier generations have been forgotten largely because Tuttle and Flagler were master illusionists who engaged in a combination of physical sleight of hand and intellectual misdirection. Rather than create something out of nothing, they built upon the storied history that preceded them—and then helped others forget it.

Julia Tuttle, widely known as the Mother of Miami. https://www.floridamemory.com/items/show/29793>State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory.

Tuttle clearly knew that she was not the first occupant of her waterfront property. Recently widowed, she relocated in 1891 from Cleveland to the mouth of the Miami River on Biscayne Bay, where she worked tenaciously to promote the region as a commercial and agricultural opportunity. Tuttle moved into a 19th-century plantation house that had been built by enslaved Africans in the early 1830s, and constantly referred to it as “Fort Dallas,” which had been the name given to it when it was turned into a military outpost during the Second Seminole War (1835-1842). Tuttle’s property contained a man-made well, a stone wall, and several gravestones. There was a decades-old road that connected her home to the community on the New River—today’s Fort Lauderdale—and elsewhere up the Atlantic coast.

Still, despite all this evidence of earlier occupation, Tuttle declared to all who would listen that she was a founder of a new community. In words that would be widely repeated, she explained her ambitions. “It may seem strange to you but it is the dream of my life to see this wilderness turned into a prosperous country,” she wrote. One day, she hoped, “where this tangled mass of vine brush, trees and rocks now are to see homes with modern improvements surrounded by beautiful grassy lawns, flowers, shrubs and shade trees.” Tuttle wanted to “settle” a place that had been settled for centuries and turn it into an agricultural or commercial entrepôt.

James Henry Ingraham, president of the South Florida Railroad Company of the Plant System, was but one of the newcomers she impressed. Ingraham proclaimed that Tuttle had “shown a great deal of energy and enterprise in this frontier country where it is almost a matter of creation to accomplish so much in so short a time.” But his description of Tuttle’s efforts, too, revealed the preexisting history that made her successful. Tuttle, he wrote, “converted [Fort Dallas] into a dwelling house after being renovated and repaired with the addition of a kitchen, etc. The barracks … is used as office and sleeping rooms.” Despite her “improvement … on hammock land which fringes the river and bay,” Ingraham explained, the natural world remained largely untamed. “Lemon and lime trees,” which were planted by the earlier waves of Spanish, Bahamian, and American occupants, “are growing wild all through the uncleared hammock.” Ingraham, Tuttle, and others knew that citrus was not native to South Florida. Their claims about untamed wilderness were disingenuous.

Tuttle ignored evidence of the ancient Indian world that surrounded her. Like others of her generation, she recorded the presence of several large man-made mounds and shell middens in the area. Some were ancient burial sites or ceremonial centers, and others were basically landfills, built from generations of discarded shellfish and tools. They were all constructed by the Tequesta Indians, who had first settled the waterfront site 2,000 years earlier and lived there into the 17th century, when they attracted the unwanted attention of slave raiders, Spanish missionaries, and others moving in. Tuttle, like others who declared themselves to be on the frontier, deemed the Indian past to be inconsequential to the development that would follow.

With Tuttle engaged in acts of intellectual misdirection, Flagler and his construction crews took care of the physical destruction. Flagler, like most Gilded Age industrialists, is more typically associated with building than with razing. He earned his fame for helping found Standard Oil with John D. Rockefeller in 1870 and then creating Florida’s modern tourist industry with his railroad and luxury hotels in St. Augustine, Palm Beach, and elsewhere along Florida’s Atlantic Coast. Tuttle lured Flagler to Miami with gifts of orange blossoms after a brutal frost had destroyed the citrus crop in central Florida, and clinched the deal by dividing her property on the Miami River with him.

In 1896, Flagler’s laborers at the mouth of the river leveled the ancient Tequesta mounds that stood in the way of progress. They were unabashedly brutal about it. One of the workers noted that a burial mound “stood out like a small mountain, twenty to twenty-five feet above water” and “about one hundred feet long and seventy feet wide.” Flagler’s African American workers struggled to remove “a poison tree” that grew on the top of the mound, as it “would knock them cold.” Those workers “who were not allergic to it” leveled the mound, uncovering and hastily removing “between fifty and sixty skulls.” One of the workers took home the bones, “stored them away in barrels and gave away a great many … to anyone that wanted them.” When construction ended, he dumped the remaining skeletons “nearby where there was a big hole in the ground.” Another bayside mound was hidden behind a “great tangle of briars and wild lime trees.” The midden materials from these and other mounds were strewn across the property, becoming the foundation for Henry Flagler’s opulent Royal Palm Hotel.

The city of Miami incorporated in July 1896, a bit more than a year after the railroad reached the site of the Royal Palm Hotel. Thanks to the vision of Tuttle and marketing genius of Flagler and others, Miami quickly became a tourist destination. City boosters built roads and canals, plotted new communities, constructed man-made beaches, and established new civic organizations. The real estate boom that followed incorporation pushed the residential community out from the mouth of the river and in only a couple of decades turned the small town into a bustling city. Tuttle died in 1898 and Flagler in 1916, but their collective imprint on Miami survived the hurricane of 1926, even as it destroyed the Royal Palm Hotel and temporarily slowed the city’s growth during the Depression. Miami remained a city committed to reimagining the future rather than one interested in celebrating the past.

Tuttle and Flagler shared an illusion that they were settling untouched wilderness—even as they were surrounded by evidence of earlier occupation. In this way, their story is no different than those of settlers across the continent whose shared myth of the frontier allowed them to ignore the history that preceded them. In the 1880s, the frontier was a fairly simple but magical idea: It allowed white Americans to ignore the ancient history of Native America. The myth of the frontier—that pervasive and most-American idea—allowed Tuttle and others in Miami to see “unclaimed lands” in the United States as an untapped and disappearing resource, and to imagine that white American ingenuity transformed wilderness into civilization.

The post The Myth of Untouched Wilderness That Gave Rise to Modern Miami appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Before that, the South was Indian country.

The South’s long and rich Indigenous history is unknown to many Americans. But once you look, the signs are everywhere: in Native place names (Alabama, Arkansas, Chattahoochee, Tallahassee, Tennessee); in hundreds of earthen mounds—some half-destroyed, others still towering; and in the Native communities that remain in or near their homelands.

Native people and their pasts have been marginalized in Southern history because Indian Removal, the cornerstone of Andrew Jackson’s presidency, sought to erase Southern Indians—from the land and from historical memory.

Uncovering the history of Southern Indians reveals that the Old South was more than the Confederacy and Lost Cause mythology. Before the European invasion and even into the colonial period, the South had the highest Native population density north of Mexico. And long before secessionists tried to distinguish themselves from other Americans, Native peoples of the South recognized cultural commonalities, and distinguished themselves from their Iroquoian rivals to the north by calling themselves “Southern nations.”

Southern Native women, who managed agriculture, developed specialized regional varieties of corn. Thanks to the region’s subtropical climate, they produced two crops per year. Women’s leading role in farming is probably related to the region’s matrilineal kinship system, wherein families reckoned descent through the mother and passed property and titles through the maternal line.

In time, the region’s large population, agricultural productivity, and booming trade networks gave rise to chiefdoms, nations, and even cities. The largest city was Cahokia, just east of modern-day St. Louis, which was bigger than London when it boomed around 1050 A.D. Cahokia boasted almost 20,000 residents in town and another 20,000 in the surrounding areas. It took centuries of North American colonialism for European settlers to surpass it, when Philadelphia did so in the 1760s.

Although most Americans associate the Trail of Tears exclusively with the Cherokee Nation, Indian Removal was a blanket policy aimed at “removing” all Eastern Indians west of the Mississippi River. In total, 100,000 Indians were forced to leave. Most came from the South, where settlers coveted the rich lands—potential cotton fields—still controlled by large Indian nations.

There had been removals before. Beginning in the 17th century, colonists forced some Indian nations onto small reservations after devastating wars. After the Revolution, the United States aggressively sought Indian land through warfare and treaties.

The Indian Removal Act, passed in 1830, was different. For the first time, Congress and the president used the power of the federal government to undertake removal on a massive scale. Despite objections from many corners—the U.S. Supreme Court, Indian leaders, and activists—Jackson pushed ahead, exceeding the letter of the law to achieve removal by any means.

Many U.S. citizens championed Jackson’s resolve, especially the newly empowered middle-income and poor white men eager to claim the spoils of Indian country. In addition to economic demand, Jackson and his allies seized on a new racial ideology.

Formerly, most U.S. policymakers, influenced by the Enlightenment, argued that environment—culture, language, food, and education—accounted for human differences. Beginning in the 1820s, however, the new pseudoscience of phrenology declared that human differences were biological and immutable. Conveniently, white supremacists cited this theory to support Indian Removal and the growth of slavery. Contested at the time, and then firmly discredited, “scientific racism” unleashed monstrous legacies that persist to plague our present.

In addition to stoking racism, Jackson persuaded U.S. citizens that removal would cost them little. He proposed to hire private contractors, awarding each contract to the lowest bidder, with very little oversight. The resulting corruption and negligence, combined with the sheer scale of the endeavor, was what gave the “Trail of Tears” its name. One contractor who received almost $20,000 bragged to a colleague that “he had never issued a single ration.” A Seminole reported that this was typical, explaining that “rations [were] issued irregularly; when due, not delivered; and when delivered but half issued.”

Some women were forced to trade sex for food. Among the starving and poorly clad emigrants, disease ran rampant. Indian Removal coincided with America’s first cholera epidemic—sometimes 40 percent of a camp died overnight. Smallpox, influenza, and yellow fever struck, too. One U.S. official argued that medicine should be issued as a standard provision, but his superiors disagreed.

The tears did not stop once emigrants reached Indian Territory (roughly present-day Oklahoma), where famine, disease, and extreme weather heightened mortality. The suffering was so great that the federal government replaced many private contractors with U.S. Army officers, reasoning that the latter had greater experience with the logistics of mass movement. Still, about 20 percent of those forced to remove died, either on the trail or shortly after arrival in Indian Territory.

Peter Pitchlynn, whose Choctaw people were the first to suffer removal, returned to his homeland—now called Mississippi—15 years later and reflected on the transformation: “This once was a healthy country, but it is now a very sickly one & so changed that I scarcely know any of the places which were once familiar to me.” Gone were the wide-canopied forests teeming with deer, the wild canebreaks where his people had gathered reeds for baskets, and his boyhood camping ground. The only thing that had not changed much was his family home, though it was now occupied by a white family.

The disease that, in Pitchlynn’s view, had sickened and warped the country was the plantation economy. Maddened by what was then called “Alabama Fever,” whites swarmed into newly ceded Indian land—many even jumped the gun—and planted cotton. Initially, most settlers lived in modest cabins or confiscated Indian homes, but in time some grew rich. They built big houses, acquired more land, and pushed small landholders to the economic margins.

And their voracious demand for slave labor led to another massive population shift: African Americans were forced from the Eastern Seaboard and Upper South into the notoriously harsh slavery of the expanding cotton frontier. The plantation economy of the South grew so vast and powerful that it obscured most everything that came before it. Likewise, the memory of that particular South attacks most everything that has tried to replace it.

We should not underestimate the pernicious influence that the cotton curtain still exerts on race, class, and gender relations in the South and beyond. At the same time, we should also remember that the Old South was not really that old. Forged in blood and fire, the plantation economy existed across much of the Deep South for only a generation or two before the Civil War.

The South was and is a diverse place, a meeting ground of cultures, a destination for immigrants, a staging ground for different dreams. And the South is still Indian country. About 10 percent of Native people managed to avoid removal, and their descendants remain in the region.

Each year, some of their exiled kinfolk travel the Trail of Tears in reverse. They remember, and so should we all. The cotton curtain was woven to conceal other pasts and narrow possible futures, but we can push beyond it and gain a broader view.

The post How the Forced Removal of the Southeast’s Indians Turned Native Lands into Slave Plantations appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Sent a thousand miles away from his wife and baby boy, Howard found it hard to see the point of all the effort and sacrifice. But at a Methodist meeting, “the choking sensation” suddenly lifted, replaced, he wrote, by “a new well spring within me, a joy, a peace & a trusting spirit.” God had found him—had “pluck[ed] my feet from the mire & place[d] them on the rock”—for a reason. Howard was 26 years old, and something meaningful awaited him.

The idea that something important is in store for us is a deeply American faith, rooted in Cotton Mather’s examinations of “God’s providence” in the New World and extending to evangelical pastor Rick Warren’s popular attempt to answer the question, “What on earth am I here for?” But this source of strength has a sharp edge. Oliver Otis Howard’s life forces us to ask: What do we do when our grand sense of purpose does not last—or, worse yet, fails us?

Howard returned north to teach math at West Point after his stint in Tampa ended. The outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 made the Union his calling. “I gave up every other plan except as to the best way for me to contribute to the saving of her life,” Howard wrote.

Photo portrait of Gen. Oliver Otis Howard, between 1860 and 1865. Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Once again, Howard would struggle. He was quickly promoted to brigadier general, but lost his right arm in battle in June 1862. He returned to the fight at summer’s end, only to experience a year of humiliating battlefield defeats. In a play on his first two initials, his men started calling him “Uh Oh” or “Oh Oh” Howard.

Through it all, Howard found a new divine purpose in the heroism and daring of the black men, women, and children who crossed army lines, proclaiming themselves free after lives of bondage. Not much of an abolitionist before the war—to his soldiers’ displeasure, his main cause had been temperance—Howard wrote a letter to the New York Times on January 1, 1863, proclaiming, “We must destroy Slavery root and branch … This is a hard duty—a terrible, solemn duty; but it is a duty.” Howard’s abolitionism earned him allies in Congress, helping him hold onto his command long enough to be sent west to fight under William Tecumseh Sherman. He finally distinguished himself in the Atlanta campaign and played a key role in Sherman’s March to the Sea.

As the war was ending in May 1865, Howard was called to Washington and asked to lead the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, an agency created by Congress to provide humanitarian relief for the South and shepherd some four million people from slavery to citizenship. It was a new experiment in governing, the first big federal social welfare agency in American history. Howard saw the opportunity as heaven sent. Howard, then 34 years old, embraced the cause of the freed people as the mission that would guide the rest of his life.

Howard soon realized that the government had no capacity to change white Southerners who were, in essence, still fighting the Civil War, and he lacked the political and administrative savvy to execute policies such as land redistribution that would have upended the political, economic, and social dynamics of the South. So Howard poured Bureau resources into education, which he called “the true relief” from “beggary and dependence.” When a new institution of higher education for black men and women was chartered in Washington, D.C., in the spring of 1867, it was almost a given that it would be named for the crusading general. Howard University would be a monument to Reconstruction and to its fragility—to the knowledge that its promise and values were always under threat.

In time, Howard’s successes during Reconstruction were overwhelmed by his defeats. He became a lightning rod for Reconstruction’s enemies, who attacked the very notion that government should devote itself to liberty and equality for all. The Freedmen’s Bureau lost most of its funding after 1868 and folded in 1872. Accused of corruption and nearly bankrupted by lawyers’ fees, Howard described himself as “crippled & broken” by his failures. His calling had become a cruel mirage. Still, Howard remained convinced that he had been chosen to lead a meaningful life. “God in his mercy has given me much recuperative energy,” he wrote at the time. “I know better than to quarrel with his dealings with me.”

In 1874, Howard’s faith drove him west. Cleared of corruption charges, he rejoined the active-duty military and assumed command of army forces in the Pacific Northwest. It was a willing exile. Far from the capital, he was convinced that he could restore his reputation and find a way back to power and purpose. A big part of Howard’s job involved convincing Native Americans to move to reservations and establish themselves as farmers on small plots of land. He believed he was saving them from genocide, leading them down a path to citizenship—if only they would agree to be led.

In September 1876, just months after the slaughter of Custer’s army at the Battle of Little Bighorn, Howard announced that a land dispute between white settlers and Nez Perce Indians in Oregon and Idaho could become the next bloody flashpoint. He offered himself up as the man who could resolve the situation. Democratic and Republican newspapers agreed that he was uniquely capable of convincing the Indians to move to an Idaho reservation peacefully. Howard’s redemption was at hand.

Howard appealed to a Nez Perce leader known as Chief Joseph to cede his ancestral territory and move to the reservation. But Joseph refused. “This one place of living is the same as you whites have among yourselves,” Joseph argued, asserting his right to the property and assuring Howard that his people could live peacefully alongside whites, as they had since the first settlers came onto his land five years earlier. It was a plea for sovereignty, but also for liberty and equality, echoing the same values Howard had championed a decade before. This time, Howard’s drive to fulfill his mission pushed aside such principles.

Undated photo portrait of Chief Joseph-Nez Perce, by Edward S. Curtis. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

In May 1877 the general demanded that all Nez Perce bands move onto the reservation within 30 days, forcing them to risk their herds by crossing rivers during the spring flood. The ultimatum all but assured violence. On the eve of the deadline, a group of young warriors committed a series of revenge killings, targeting settlers along the Salmon River. After the bloodshed started, Howard and his troops pursued 900 or so men, women, and children across Nez Perce country, through the Northern Rockies, and over the Montana plains.

The Nez Perce bands outran the soldiers for three and a half months. When troops riding ahead of Howard managed to catch the families by surprise in August 1877, they massacred women and children, but still failed to end the war. While Howard gave chase, the glory he craved slipped his grasp. Newspapers ridiculed him for not capturing Joseph. Settlers along the way gave him a cold reception. His superiors moved to strip him of his command.

Joseph’s surrender in October 1877 brought Howard little relief. Joseph’s battlefield declaration, “I will fight no more forever,” almost immediately made him a figure of national fascination—a noble warrior who protected women and children and whose pleas for liberty and equality felt deeply patriotic. There was no satisfaction in crushing the man widely described as “the best Indian.”

Howard finished his military career with a series of quiet postings, waiting—too long, he thought—for his promotion to Major General. In retirement, he briefly found a new calling, leading efforts during the Spanish American War to evangelize soldiers and sailors and keep them out of bars and brothels. In the early 1900s, with memories of Reconstruction dimming, Howard was hailed as an exemplar of the Union cause, described by Teddy Roosevelt as “that living veteran of the Civil War whom this country most delights to honor.”

But praise was not the same as purpose, and for Howard, a grand redemption remained elusive. He spent the last three decades of his life justifying his conduct in the Nez Perce War. At the same time, some of his work constituted an admission of wrongdoing, however subtle; his official reports and three books played a crucial role in making Joseph a celebrity and leading figure of dissent in late 19th-century America.

In allowing Joseph’s legend to eclipse his own, Howard promoted a man whose pleas to be “free to travel, free to stop, free to work, free to trade where I choose, free to choose my own teachers, free to follow the religion of my fathers, free to think and talk and act for myself” connected the Reconstruction-era values that had once inspired a young man of faith with a new century’s struggles for civil rights and civil liberties. Howard’s work was meaningful in the end. But he was not the hero of his own story.

The post The Civil War General Whose Godly “Mission” Went Astray 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.

The post In Choosing to Be Cherokee, She Was Forced to Renounce the U.S. appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I was born and raised on the Navajo Tribal Reservation, where my grandparents plied traditional knowledge but at the same time shared with me the importance of a white man’s way of life. In this day and age, they told me, finding a balance between the two is crucial to your own path. But it wasn’t until I left the reservation that I came to understand my purpose as a Diné woman.

Growing up I experienced both cultures every day—sometimes separately, sometimes tightly interwoven, like the strands of wool in a Diné blanket. At school I learned Western ideology. Meanwhile my grandparents, our family’s keepers of the Diné legacy, imparted Navajo history and culture, taught me that I am born to the Tachii’nii clan (Red Running into the Water, my mother’s clan), and born for the Ti’aashcí’í clan (Red Bottom People, the clan of my father). On Sundays we worshipped at a Christian reform church, where sermons, spoken in the Navajo language, gave thanks to both the Creator of Life and the Lord Jesus Christ.

The Navajo Nation, whose settlement in the Four Corners of the Colorado Plateau extends back centuries before Christopher Columbus, is today by far America’s largest Indian tribe, with more than a million members—some identified by tribal status, others through family clanship. Diné Bikéyah, or Navajoland, encompasses more than 27,000 square miles across Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico—larger than 10 of the 50 states.

My parents grew up around policies created by the U.S. government and other settlers to eradicate Indian culture. They met at Intermountain Indian Boarding School, where, they told me, they were compelled to embrace Western ways of life and avoid Indian culture because it would not help them or their children.

But they made a conscious effort to maintain their traditional identities, even as circumstances compelled them to adapt to western social norms. They eventually married in a traditional Navajo wedding ceremony on the reservation, but later moved to Oakland, California, as part of the federal Indian Relocation Act of 1956. However, jobs were scarce in the city and my parents soon moved back to the reservation, which is where I spent my formative years.

Peters with her grandmother, who passed away in 2008.

My mother’s path was to be a caretaker of our people, working as a dorm aide at a local boarding school for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which also entitled our family to subsidized housing. The place was small—my parents in one bedroom, one of my sisters and her husband and daughter in the other room, and me on the old couch. But it was homey.

The decor reflected my parents’ personalities. The corners were stacked high with copies of the Navajo Times that my dad never wanted to throw away. Blankets were piled throughout the house, my mom’s way of letting visitors know that despite close quarters there was always a comfortable place for guests to lay their heads. On the walls, rodeo posters hung alongside intricate Navajo sand paintings and flea market prints of R.C. Gorman’s Navajo women.

On the weekends I would travel 100 miles to visit my grandparents, who lived in a traditional Navajo hogan as they always had, observing the mores of their ancestors, without electricity or running water. On walks, my grandmother taught me the bounty of the desert. Juniper berries for medicine. Yucca roots for natural soap. Greenthread herb for Navajo tea. Once, when a horned toad climbed on my foot and startled me, my grandmother told me not to harm it. Horned toads, she told me, are grandfathers of the arrowheads: if you kill them you will get sick and someone close may die.

After that, I watched and followed the toads whenever I could, fascinated by their morbid power. I was drawn to their strong and clear purpose when I myself felt so powerless, and—as the years passed—purposeless.

As a very young child, it didn’t occur to me to question my family’s bi-cultural way of my life. But that changed when I was six. My mother and I were in our local border town of Farmington, New Mexico, and I had to go to the bathroom. As we walked past the town’s white restaurant, I saw a bathroom sign through the window, so I ran in. Almost immediately I felt a firm grip on my arm. I looked up and there was a woman—white, frowning—asking me sharply where I was going and then yelling at my mother, asking what the hell she was doing and ordering her to leave with her dirty child.

The memory is a blur of voices, but I remember the pain in my arm and the embarrassment as I stood there while the grown-ups argued, the urgency of my physical need ever more pressing, until I peed my pants.

I came to expect the slights and insults, though I never got used to them. Years later, as a teenager, I remember driving home with two friends after a movie when two trucks full of white dudes suddenly appeared. They followed us to the rez border and then turned around. We felt hunted on our own land.

When I was 15, I was assaulted, and, in a separate incident, my best friend was brutally murdered. Two other friends were killed in alcohol-fueled incidents—one was walking around drunk and was struck by a car, the other was hit by a drunk driver. These horrors left me in deep despair. I numbed myself with alcohol, and I attempted suicide.

The year I graduated high school, I was working at the local KFC and living in the family apartment. But I had recovered just enough from my earlier traumas to know that I had to leave.

Early mornings in the apartment were peaceful. Before my niece woke up and Sesame Street blared from the television, I would help my mother make breakfast, the aroma of desert sage wafting in through the windows, blending with the tang of coffee and spam potatoes.

One morning, while we waited for the biscuit dough to rise, I told my mother of my plans.

“Oh, Shi’awéé’—my baby—why do you want to leave?” she asked.

In that moment, I wavered. What would I be leaving behind? The red, dusty earth and scorching heat of my ancestors. The fresh pine trees, sweet sage, and smoky creosote bushes that brought reassurance, exhilaration. My birthright.

“If I don’t leave,” I told her, “I’ll go crazy.”

“Your grandfather told me when you were a child that you had an adventurous spirit,” she told me. “He said that you were a storyteller, and that you would leave.”

Leaving was the beginning, but eventually I came to understand that it wasn’t enough. I needed to go back to school. This may seem obvious, but to me it wasn’t. Higher education was never a value instilled in me—my parents only told me to find a job and not depend on others.

In college I made the most important realization of my life: The problem with the depiction of Indians in media—the romanticized portraits and Disney-fied portrayals—is the lack of understanding of our history as actual people, Indian people. Through studying other tribal communities, I rediscovered who I was as a Navajo woman, and, with that, my purpose in life: I would become a storyteller as my grandfather foresaw. My mission: to portray the realities and complexities of native communities.

Today my multimedia work explores the lives of real American Indians, not ethnographic ephemera. While traditions are constantly changing, I understand the strong ties I have with my culture and understand why we must maintain them as Diné people. I am grateful to be able to transform my experience into art.

The post It Wasn’t Until I Left the Reservation That I Understood My Purpose as a Navajo Storyteller appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

So when Washington stumbled upon a detachment of Canadian militia escorting the French emissary Ensign Joseph Coulon de Villiers de Jumonville, he panicked, fearing it was a party of Indians. Jumonville had been sent to find the Virginians and to urge them to leave the region peacefully. Washington’s party killed Jumonville and 12 of his men in an ambush. The “assassination” of Jumonville caused a diplomatic furor in Europe, and most historians consider this “battle” as the informal start of the French and Indian War, or Seven Years’ War, in America.

But while we remember Washington’s part in these events, the Native Americans who worried him so much have been largely forgotten. They were the Anishinaabeg of the Great Lakes, and their history was as rich as Washington’s own story—and they had a similarly dramatic impact on world history. Indeed, the kings of France, ministers in London, and imperial and military officers in America, including George Washington, feared—and respected—the Anishinaabeg. They all spent considerable time discussing Indian politics—and worrying about their influence on European affairs.

Anishinaabeg is the term many people across the Great Lakes region—from the St. Lawrence River to the headwaters of the Mississippi—use to refer to themselves, meaning the real, or original, peoples. Europeans called them the Ottawa, Chippewa, Potawatomi, Nipissing, Algonquin, and Mississauga. But they all spoke Anishinaabemowin, and they were all, as they put it, “Allies to each other and as one People.”

One of the most powerful Anishinaabe settlements was Waganakazee, located at the Michilimackinac—a narrow strait that connected Lakes Huron and Michigan (at present day Mackinaw City, Michigan). Here, a large—and growing—group of Ottawa (or Odawa) managed to use their extensive kinship ties, mastery of the canoe, and strategic location to carve out an important role for themselves even in the midst of European imperialism. If natives or newcomers wanted to pass east and west, or north and south across the lakes, they needed the permission of the Odawa. In the era before railroads and highways, Michilimackinac was the “door” to the North American continent. And the Odawa held the key.

Historic sign marking the location of Waganakising, also known as Waganakazee.

 
I first came across the Anishinaabeg when researching the life of Charles Michel Mouet de Langlade, the son of an Odawa mother and a French father who played an important role in many different 18th-century conflicts. Langlade is often depicted as a French or British officer or agent. But I quickly realized that it was his Odawa family who wielded the most influence over his life.

They wielded an outsized influence in the region, too. The Odawa stood in the middle of a complex web of relationships with other Anishinaabemowin speakers that stretched east, west, north, and south. They also had a long history of conflict and cooperation with other Indian peoples around the Great Lakes region that shaped the way they interacted with European newcomers. Beginning in the 17th century, French imperial officials and settlers along the St. Lawrence River (which connects the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean) were enmeshed by the Odawa and their kin in one Indian war after another over the beaver fur trade.

And when the French tried to interfere in Indian politics, the Anishinaabeg simply played them off against other Indian nations, or the English to their south, by threatening different alliances. The collective strength of the Anishinaabeg meant they could not be ignored or cowed.

When the British defeated the French in the Seven Years’ War—a conflict the Odawa had inadvertently helped start—they inherited these uncertain and volatile relations with the Anishinaabeg. In May of 1763, Native Americans all across the Great Lakes region rose up as if on a signal to take newly occupied British posts in what became known as Pontiac’s War, or Pontiac’s Rebellion. At Michilimackinac, a group of Ojibwe playing a game of lacrosse flipped the ball into the fort and rushed after it. Once inside, they overwhelmed the garrison, killed at least 16 soldiers, and took the rest—along with their officers—prisoner.

View from Fort Michilimackinac, looking westwards toward Lake Michigan. This is a 20th-century reconstruction of the fort that was attacked by the Anishinaabe Ojibwe in 1763.

 
In local lore, Langlade reputedly strode in at the last minute and saved the remaining prisoners from almost certain death at the hands of the Ojibwe. But in reality, it was the Odawa from Waganakazee who orchestrated the denouement. They stepped in to mediate between their kin the Ojibwe, the British, and other Native groups in the region. They held on to the survivors as hostages for a time, yet ultimately returned them safely to Montreal—to great acclaim.

The Odawa were not interested in exterminating the British at Michilimackinac, which they could have done at any time. They were happy to have a British post among them, but on their own terms. These included allowing French traders to continue to operate in the area; disallowing the British garrison to grow their own corn; and twice yearly transfers of substantial amounts of trade goods and provisions. We often call these presents “hand-outs,” but we should call them “rent.”

In general, the uprising served as a costly reminder to the British of Native sovereignty and their competing claims over the land. The British tried to end Pontiac’s War in 1764 by conceding to most Indian demands and giving out about 58,000 English pounds worth of presents and provisions.

To put those concessions into perspective, that same year, Parliament passed the Stamp Act to raise revenue from the colonies to help pay for their own defense and to maintain peaceful relations with the Indians. Legislators hoped to raise some 60,000 pounds by selling the stamps, roughly the same amount the British had paid to try and end Pontiac’s War. Native Americans, then, helped ignite the fuse that would ultimately ignite the American Revolution.

We cannot understand the history of early America without comprehending Indian country on its own terms. The choices made by the Anishinaabeg mattered.

The Anishinaabeg, long a powerful presence in the Great Lakes region, remain today one of the largest indigenous ethnic groups in North America. They have shaped the history of the continent in profound and diverse and creative ways. One way or another, they will continue to shape it yet.

The post The Native Americans Who Drew the French and British Into War appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I am writing, of course, about the Lakota Nation.

In that year of transformative events, the Lakotas, according to one traditional account, discovered the Black Hills and founded the modern Lakota Nation. (The Lakotas are the westernmost of the three Sioux political divisions.)

The significance of 1776 to both Lakota and U.S. history is a trenchant reminder that North America is home to many nations and not just the three that appear so definitively on multihued National Geographic maps. Histories that focus exclusively on the rise of the modern nation-state conceal a richer, more diverse, and more complex story about the continent’s past.

In the years following the discovery of the Black Hills, the mountains became the mythic birthplace of the Lakotas, the geographic equivalent of the Declaration of Independence. Rising gradually out of the surrounding plains in the southwestern corner of South Dakota, the Black Hills culminate in a rugged granite core, a congeries of spires, knobs, and outcrops. They are “the heart of the earth, the center of our origin stories, spiritual history and sacred places,” states one tribal citizen.

The backstory to the Lakotas’ discovery is not as well-documented or widely known as the stories of the Plymouth Colony and Jamestown, but it is essential to understanding why they abandoned their traditional Minnesota homelands and established themselves in the Black Hills in the late 1700s.

Immigration historians speak of push and pull factors. In the case of American colonists, religious intolerance and poverty at home pushed many of them across the Atlantic, and the promise of cheap land pulled them in the same direction. For the Lakotas, push factors included Ojibwa villagers, who were better armed than other native peoples in Minnesota and eager to expand their hunting territories, and the decline of animal populations on the eastern edge of Sioux territory, a result of overhunting to satisfy the insatiable demand for furs in Europe.

But where to go? Two factors pulled the Lakotas across the rolling grasslands of western Minnesota and the steep gullies, high bluffs, and knife-edged ridges of the Missouri Plateau. One of them was the commercial hub controlled by the Arikaras, Mandans, and Hidatsas on the Missouri River, at the western edge of the plateau. These villagers operated a lucrative trade, funneling guns and other European manufactures to Plains Indians in exchange for horses and hides.

The conspicuous wealth of the Arikaras, Mandans, and Hidatsas made them targets, and the fortification ditches around their settlements were enormous but not up to the task of repelling assaults from highly mobile equestrian pillagers. At Larson Village, for example, skeletons recovered by archaeologists reveal that in one attack, the victims were clubbed, scalped, and decapitated. The aggressors were almost certainly the Sioux.

Lakotas raided the Missouri River settlements for as long as the villagers’ wealth lasted, but they were pulled still further west by the tens of thousands of bison that once roamed the Dakotas. One herd on the grasslands west of the Missouri reportedly stretched 150 miles. On the Great Plains, the Black Hills stand out as a green oasis. Even in dry years, its valleys are “an ocean of surging grass” that once attracted huge numbers of bison. When the Lakotas reached the mountains in the late 18th century, they found a new homeland. The Black Hills, they said, were their “meat pack.”

The Lakotas eventually incorporated the region’s caves and spires into their origin stories and painted its cliffs with Sioux iconography. One rock face in the southern part of the hills contains a series of Lakota symbols memorializing encounters with enemies. Five handprints, painted in red, signal victories in hand-to-hand combat, and a red spot on the same panel celebrates the death of an enemy.

On this rock and on others, the Lakotas laid claim to the Black Hills, just as revolutionaries in Philadelphia asserted their domain over the eastern seaboard with a declaration of independence. The Black Hills, the most fertile region in all of the northern Great Plains, now belonged to the Sioux.

In 1868, the United States agreed by treaty to set the Black Hills apart “for the absolute and undisturbed use and occupation of the Indians,” part of an effort to put an end to the constant skirmishes and battles between the Sioux and U.S. troops. When gold was discovered soon after, however, the U.S. reneged on the agreement, seizing 7.7 million acres in the Black Hills Act of 1877.

The expropriation was one of hundreds that the United States carved out of native land on its westward march across the continent, a process facilitated by the fact that colonists never fully recognized indigenous land titles. The U.S. Supreme Court enshrined the imperialist “Doctrine of Discovery” (lands belong to the sovereign of their Christian “discoverers”) in Johnson v. McIntosh (1823), a case which held that native peoples enjoyed use and occupancy but not absolute title to their land.

For the Lakotas, the loss of the Black Hills was costly, both spiritually and economically. “The only place we had to run our hands in the ground and pick up money, your people have filled it up full,” the Lakota leader American Horse chastised Congress in 1890. (The Lakotas are still fighting for the return of the Black Hills.)

In 1926, three men hiked into the heart of Black Hills, hauled a winch to the summit of Mount Rushmore, fixed it into the granite, and began pulling tools up from the valley floor, 400 feet below. They were preparing to sculpt four colossal figures onto the face of the mountain. Even though Gutzon Borglum said he planned to use no explosives on any of the carving into this sacred rock, workers loaded holes with dynamite a year later and blasted away 400,000 tons.

Mount Rushmore celebrates the “continental dominion” of the United States, said Borglum, who aspired to make it “the first of our great memorials to the Anglo-Saxon in the Western Hemisphere.” It would endure for eternity, he predicted, protected in the Black Hills from “selfish, coveting civilizations” that might arise in the future. “You know how vandalism in the name of Civilization raids the tombs of our ancestors and destroys the records of History,” he observed, without a hint of irony.

The Mt. Rushmore National Memorial by Gutzon Borglum

As epitomized by Mount Rushmore, American history has long focused on the expansion of the United States with scant attention paid to the other peoples who lived in North America and still do so.

How we decide who is American and who is not, who belongs and who does not, is inevitably tied up with how we imagine the birth of the nation in 1776. The Lakota discovery of the Black Hills reminds us that an American history that focuses exclusively on colonists on the East Coast is partial and exclusionary. America in 1776 was more vast and diverse than we often imagine. As our population continues to diversify, we need a history that grows in kind, that encompasses the many peoples of the 18th century and speaks to all Americans in the 21st.

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