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Ned Blackhawk: a New History of America

I’m only 107 pages into Ned Blackhawks new book, The Rediscovery of America, and am already taken with an entirely new approach to American history. I’ve read Jill Lepore’s These Truths, and found it fact-filled, well written, and engaging, but, in the end, I found it limited, a kind of “Jeffersonian history.” In large part, Lepore takes the opening words of the Declaration, “We the people,” and sees the march of American history as the gradual expansion of “we.” It starts with male property owners, then embraces all (white) males, and gradually adds freed slaves, women, and, finally, in 1924, American Indians.

Blackhawk doesn’t start with the Declaration, or even the pilgrims. He does start with Columbus, but instead of a hasty intro and on to Squanto and the first thanksgiving, he dwells on “New Spain.” He takes us through the decimation of Native populations in the Caribbean, and chronicles the thirst for gold as the Spanish—with Indian and African slaves—move into the interior of the continent in search of riches.

He reminds us that diseases and intertribal politics, more even than arms and horses, were important factors in the conquest and settling of New Spain. He shows how dispossession and conversion—by force and out of survivalist instincts—fractured tribes and created a new group of Indians without affiliation. And tells us that Santa Fe was founded in 1610, that there was a huge and successful Native uprising in 1680 that dislodged the Spanish for a short period and freed livestock that helped create the Native American horse culture of the plains. Santa Fe is still here, and some of the people of the greater South and Far West, the products of several Native populations, conquistadors and settlers, can trace roots further back than the Mayflower.

The next chapter explores “New France,” briefly dipping into the politics on the other side of the Atlantic that include France and England in addition to the Dutch and Spanish. Blackhawk then details tribal responses to disease and aggression, the building and fracturing of Native-Native and Native-European alliances, and the importance of the fur trade. What also stands out, in addition to the ubiquitous death by disease, is the Church. And what is the same in New Spain and New France is the Church and its dismissal of Native religion.

The story of Old World arguments about New World Natives—whether they have souls, and who owns the land—and resulting papal decrees and the Doctrine of Discovery, are now in the news. Pope Frances has rescinded the Doctrine of Discovery! The Indians did have souls; were ripe for conversion; and land occupied by heathens belonged to the Christian nation that claimed it. (The Pope refereed Spanish and Portuguese claims with a geographic boundary.)

Nevertheless, there were missionaries who wrote what was happening, and some who empathized with indigenous people, objected to inhumane treatment, and tried to ease their plights. Bartolomé de las Casas, the most famous chronicler of European atrocities against indigenous people in the New Spain, arrived as a settler, freed his Indian slaves, and returned to Spain to become a friar and write A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, and Historia de Las Indias, chronicling the first decades of Spanish colonization and describing the atrocities committed by the colonizers. In Spain, he lobbied against enslaving Indians and for better treatment.

New France had its own cohort of priests and missionaries. They shared Catholicism with the Spanish, and, although wars and pestilence often seemed God’s gifts, were not quite as brutal in their treatment of the Natives. Maybe because they needed Natives in their primary economic quest, furs? They courted and treatied, made alliances and went to war with as well as against tribes.

Blackhawk’s purpose in this history is to show the dynamism in the nation’s past, and the “agency” of indigenous peoples. At every step along the way, from the Spanish alliances and Pueblo rebellion, the Iroquois expansion and the wars and treaties of New France, tribal people were active participants in shaping the course of the American story.

And the facts that he finds to support that indigenous agency were often written down by Catholic missionaries, French militarists, and trappers and traders who had some empathy for the people they were always invading, sometimes subduing and replacing.

These facts have been here forever; Blackhawk and other indigenous historians and their supporters, going back to my mentor, Alvin Josephy, are excavating them now for a fuller history of the country.

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Replacement theory and American Indians

“Replacement theory” comes to my mind often; it has since I first heard the idea that at some point in the near future, white people are going to be a “majority minority” in America. In other words, we white folks will no longer be 50 percent of the total population, but we will be the biggest of the several rainbow groups that are “replacing” us. The fact that white now includes people of southern and eastern European extraction, Italian Catholics and Greek Orthodox—folks who a few generations ago, roughly before WW II, were not the Northern European, Scotch and English who had dominated the first century or two of white settlement—is not discussed.Read Rich’s Post →

Measles

The recent upsurge in measles cases in Florida and the US in general has doctors and public health officials scratching heads. Apparently, there is a big difference in infection rates when the percentage of children who receive the MMR—Measles, Mumps, Rubella—vaccinations drops from 95 % to 91%; transmission among the unvaccinated spreads more rapidly, and a few—stats say 3 %–of the vaccinated still get a mild case of the disease. That, in my understanding is in a nutshell what is happening in Florida and threatening elsewhere as measles cases in 2024 rise.Read Rich’s Post →

Native Gains: Deb Haaland, Joe Biden, and Harry Slickpoo

It’s hard to get a handle on it. So much has happened in and for Indian Country since Biden took office and appointed Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo) Secretary of the Interior. Haaland had held tribal offices, headed the New Mexico State Democratic party, and had served in the US House of Representatives before she became the first Native American to be a US Cabinet secretary. She knew the ropes, and she hit the ground running.Read Rich’s Post →

Julia Keefe and Native American Jazz

What a treat! What a performance! On Saturday, wrapping up what looks like it will become an annual “Josephy Fest,” Julia Keefe, the Nez Perce jazz singer, brought her quartet to the Josephy Center, and closed the show. She and her New York drummer, Adam Benham, U of Idaho piano player, Kate Skinner, and Mali Obomsawin, an Abenaki First Nations bass player who also plays in the Julia Keefe Indigenous Big Band, were stunning.Read Rich’s Post →

Political parties, armies, and nations change

Segregationist Southern Democrats had a grip on the party—and in some cases the country—for years. Lyndon Johnson’s embrace of Civil Rights legislation alienated Southern Democrats, and chased them into the Republican Party—which had been the party of Lincoln and abolition!

Germany’s radical Nazi government gained power in fewer than twenty years, was defeated, and went from genocidal rampage to conversion to Western democracy in a few years; Japan’s Imperial aggression transformed itself into a Western leaning and anti-militaristic state.Read Rich’s Post →

Northwest Fisheries: 50 years of Boldt!

Yesterday was Superbowl Sunday—and a fine game it was. Congrats to the Chiefs! Today is Abe Lincoln’s birthday, which we celebrated separately until we bundled him with Washington and made it Presidents’ Day.

Today is also the fiftieth anniversary of the Boldt Decision, made in Federal District Court, which upheld Northwest Indians’ treaty rights to fish off reservation in their “usual and accustomed places.” Read Rich’s Post →

Blessed are the peacemakers

This history blog of mine usually focuses on Nez Perce, Native American, and American history and history telling. I like to find the missing pieces of our history—my current obsession is the under-told story of the beaver’s place in the US economy and Euro-American Westward expansion. I highlight the places where historians have found new links and chinks in old stories—in my student days, the role of disease in depopulating Indigenous America was not taught, the roles of the plague and the Little Ice Age in European expansion and emigration not seriously treated. Today they are routinely credited with major impacts on US history and world events.Read Rich’s Post →

Elders

The Kiowa writer Scott Momaday passed this week. He was 89. I met him once, when he came to Wallowa County to make the presentation of a horse by the Wood family to the walʔwá ma, or Joseph Band Nez Perce. He’d come across the story of the horse that Chief Joseph told Erskine Wood he’d like when the 14-year-old boy stayed with him at Nespelem on the Colville Reservation in Washington. Erskine’s father, C.E.S. Wood, who had served under General Howard in the Nez Perce War and become a friend of and advocate for Joseph after the war, told the boy to ask the Chief what he might do for him in gratitude for hosting his son. Joseph said he’d like a good pony; the boy thought that his father was a powerful man, and that the Chief should have asked for something more glamorous than a horse, so did not pass the message on to his father. He told the story, and published a diary of his Days with Chief Joseph, years later.Read Rich’s Post →

How the Holocaust resonates today

I recently watched the Ken Burns documentary on “The US and the Holocaust,” some of it for the second time. I have visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. multiple times. I had a good friend, now deceased, whose US Army Tank unit liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1945. The images of the Nazi genocide from these three sources haunt me. I remember the piles of glasses and shoes at the museum, collected as prisoners were loaded onto trains and into gas chambers. I remember the spiraling towers of photos of communities lost, and the videos of Josef Mengele’s experiments on prisoners—experiments with diseases, amputations, and freezing temperatures. And I can’t get the image of friend Jack recounting a scene at Buchenwald: hand scratches on a wall that prisoners, supposedly dead and hung like animals on a rail, put there on the way from gas chamber to crematorium. Jack scratched an imaginary wall with his own hand as he told the story.Read Rich’s Post →

Sea Otter–filling in the pieces

The new issue of the Oregon Historical Quarterly just landed on my desk—and sent me back to the Fall 2023 edition. I am always amazed at the scholarship and the range of topics in OHQ. And sometimes kick myself for not digesting them whole as they show up. There is always something new about the old that helps me understand where we are today.Read Rich’s Post →

Migrants

My family doesn’t trace lineage to the Mayflower, played no roles in the Revolutionary War or the Civil War. And I don’t remember anyone referring to our grandparents and great grandparents as “migrants”; they were “immigrants,” people from specific European places seeking new lives in America. And, in those days, roughly from the Civil War to 1900, the biggest groups of immigrants to the United States were German speaking people from war-tossed, shifting borderlands across Northern Europe. Further north, Swedes, Danes, and Norwegians joined the emigration to America, theirs an escape from family farms that had been whittled, generation by generation, to parcels unable to support families.Read Rich’s Post →

Marc Jaffe

I just got a brief and beautiful note from Vivienne Jaffe that her husband, Marc Jaffe, had passed on December 31 at the age of 102. Images of Marc, walking in from his morning horseback rides to breakfast at Fishtrap, addressing the Fishtrap audience to tell them about the special place and literature they were part of, driving me from Alvin Josephy’s house in Greenwich Ct to his place in Williamstown, Massachussettes in our last real visit, come flooding back.Read Rich’s Post →

A Good Wallowa County New Year’s Story

About twenty years ago, a group of us started swimming at the foot of Wallowa Lake in June. We swam almost every day, some with wet suits, some bare-skinned. I was always the slowest swimmer in the group, and my distances didn’t match those of my friends. But I was relentless, and soon gave up the wobbly wet suit and still get in over 60 days of summer swims each year!Read Rich’s Post →

Eurocentrism in America and Palestine

In the introduction to America In 1492: The World of the Indian Peoples Before the Arrival of Columbus, a book of essays Alvin Josephy edited and published on the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s landing in the Caribbean, he wrote that:

“Commencing with Columbus’s arrival among them, Spanish, French, and English invaders, colonizers, pirates, and imperial explorers all but exterminated them [indigenous people], slaughtering Caribs wholesale with fire, steel, European tortures, and savage dogs, working thousands of them to death as slaves, and wiping out their settlements with the pox, measles, dIphtheria, and other white men’s diseases to which the Indians had no resistance…Read Rich’s Post →

War’s sidekicks and allies

In his new book, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History, Ned Blackhawk argues that

”the most traumatic development in American history [is] the loss of indigenous life due to European diseases. Epidemics tore apart numerous communities and set in motion large-scale migrations and transformations. North America’s total population nearly halved from 1492 to 1776: from approximately 7 or 8 million to 4 million.”Read Rich’s Post →

Heroes

My recent scrape with death—for those who hadn’t heard, I rolled my car in the Wallowa River canyon on Sunday on the way back from a fine Portland Thanksgiving—and the crazy recess in the war in Israel/Gaza have me thinking about fortune and history, about being in a certain place in a specific time, about the people and events that create our life stories. About my heroes.Read Rich’s Post →

The Last Indian War—Horses and Technology

Elliot West’s “The Last Indian War” was published in 2009, so it has been around. I’d not read it, but it was handy and I needed to check a date or name, so picked it up. And read a page or two. And decided I should read it. Read it because what West does is put the Nez Perce War in context of the Westward movement and US history.

We know that the War parties—Nez Perce and pursuing armies—moved through Yellowstone National Park. Some writers even tell us that it—Yellowstone—was a first, and that tourists were encountered and captured. But West tells us that yes, Yellowstone was the first National Park, and that it “reflected three powerful forces creating and defining the West.”Read Rich’s Post →

Intolerable

David Remnick of the “New Yorker” calls it “intolerable.” The last few weeks in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank have stretched us for words to describe the awful goings on. We mostly agree that the initial Hamas invasion of Israel and killing of innocents was barbaric—and that Israel’s response is horrific. We can’t see what happens next. Can history tell us?Read Rich’s Post →