I watched all 8 hours of Ken Burns’ recently released “Muhammad Ali”; good, but maybe a bit too long. And it reminded me that I had also watched “Jackie Robinson” and “Jack Johnson,” and all 18 innings of “Baseball.” Baseball was glorious and my favorite; it told the story of racial segregation and integration in America through sports.
After watching Ali, I turned back to an earlier Ken Burns, the four hours he gave to “Lewis and Clark” several years ago. I didn’t count the minutes, but maybe 20 of the 240 dealt with the original inhabitants of the country—Indians Natives, Indigenous people—that the Corps of Discovery met on their journey.
Jefferson’s image and smart thinking pervade the Lewis and Clark documentary: his science, dealings with the French to secure the Louisiana Purchase, his quest for the West as a place for the young Republic to grow. There’s even some of the ambivalence about Jefferson’s thinking about Indians. There are Peace Medals, and words about becoming one American family and attaining land and treating Indians “justly.” There is nothing of the racist thinking about Indians, nothing about early Jefferson talk about removal and the Louisiana Purchase being a place for it. Nothing either about the role of the slave revolt in Haiti in draining Napoleon to the point that a fire sale allowed Jefferson to get much more than New Orleans and securing the Mississippi River as a US trade corridor. He got a huge chunk of land—and the Indian tribes that lived on it.
Burns sees Jefferson and US History as the march from original documents to a broader, more inclusive society that would become, is becoming, a place where equality is shared by men who didn’t own property, black men, and then women—and Indians! It smooths the rough spots in Jefferson’s own thinking, in his ambivalent attitudes toward slavery and expressed racism, where Blacks and Indians were lower in the human hierarchy. It’s an idealized version of Jefferson’s history of the country.
The Indians, in Burns’ “Lewis and Clark,” are good or they are bad in relation to their impacts on the journey. Sacajawea is a saint, without whom they would not have made it; Watkuweis, the Nez Perce woman who implored her tribesmen not to kill the Corpsmen, saved their lives. Burns says that the Nez Perce men had decided to kill the company, but does not say that the Indians had heard stories of white takeovers of Indian lands. He says, through Stephen Ambrose, that the Indians would have been the wealthiest tribe west of the Mississippi had they taken the 32 lives and the guns, powder, trade goods and binoculars and telescopes that they carried. The Nez Perce were really good Indians.
So were the Mandans, whose help on the first winter of the journey was important; not so the Black Feet, or the Sioux. In other words, Burns follows a long tradition of American historians in making the Westward movement and the gradual extension of full citizenship the story of America. Indians who helped along the way were good Indians; other Indians were obstacles in the march of white civilization—or irrelevant or of little importance in the face of great men and great events, Lewis and Clark and Marcus Whitman, the Journey of Discovery and the Oregon Trail.
!
The stories of slavery and Black emancipation are important, and essential to understanding American History. But Indians too have been and are important, and not just as they helped or hindered white people, but as they fought to retain their own agency, as they bartered and traded for furs, taught explorers and settlers about the land, intermarried with mountain men and settler women, and fought tenaciously to retain culture and economies. Thiers is a through-line to environmental controversies and problems that are with us today: fish, fire, and the pollution of air and water.
Burns has a new one in the works on the American Buffalo. Let’s hope for honesty in this one, for including Indian voices on what the buffalo was and meant, and how the White men slayed them for profit and sport—and sometimes for the direct impact their loss would have on the tribes. We know all that now.
And now that historians and the descendants of Sally Hemmings have put new light on Jefferson’s attitudes towards slavery of African Americans, Ken Burns might talk with elders and the new historians of Indians in America. He might interview U of Oregon historian Jeffrey Ostler about Jefferson’s attitudes towards Indians—his calls for removal; his statements about “just dealing as lands were taken—before he puts the final touches on his Buffalo narrative. *
*Ostler documents Jefferson’s beliefs and his politics in removing Indians from their lands in Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas.
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I look forward to his upcoming DaVinci work