Columbus Day: the rest of the story

 “Columbus Day” was first celebrated by Italian-Americans in San Francisco in 1869, and worked its way into a national holiday in 1937. Those of us who went to school in the 1940s, 50s, 60s, and probably through the 1990s and are not of Italian heritage, remember a school holiday and sympathetic portrayals of the Italian explorer in our textbooks.

We were not told of Columbus’s introduction of slavery—the Indian slaves he sent back to Europe or the “Indios” he enslaved in the mining of gold and introduction of European agriculture in the Caribbean. We did learn that Columbus thought he had arrived in Asia and his subsequent “misnaming” of Indians—a tradition that continued! He named the Indians he first met “Caribs,” a word derived from one meaning human flesh-eaters, cannibals. Columbus thought he had met the ferocious man-eating savages described by Marco Polo. They skipped that in our textbooks and didn’t tell us that he and his cohorts were responsible for the extermination of some entire tribes of indigenous people on those Caribbean islands.

We did not learn about the papal “Doctrine of Discovery” that gave Columbus’s Spanish royalty and other Christian European powers the “right” to claim lands occupied by “heathens” as their own. We did not learn about the learned discussions in Europe over the Indians in the New World: If the gospel had indeed been proclaimed across the world, some reasoned, how could these new human-like creatures be humans, have “souls”? In 1537, Pope Paul III issued an encyclical proclaiming that Indians did have souls, and that they could not be enslaved—but they could be converted.

Almost a century later, a century in which Indians continued to be sent from the North American mainland to those islands as slaves, the importation of African slaves to the islands and then throughout the Americas commenced. There are no papal encyclicals regarding the enslavement of Africans, who, beginning in 1619, were bought and sold openly in American cities, whose children and grandchildren were bought and sold until the Civil War. And whose great and great-great grandchildren ran from Jim Crow in the South and spread throughout the country—where to this day they make less money and die sooner than their White American neighbors. 

When people today say that we should go back to celebrating American history and traditional values, they mean to omit these crucial moments in our history. But times have changed since we went to school. The Civil Rights Movement, Voting Rights Act, Indian uprisings at Alcatraz and Wounded Knee, and the Indian Freedom of Religion Act of 1978 have wrestled up forgotten history and made it impossible to see an unblemished past. 

A parade of new histories is moving the big ship of American Education, ever so slowly, to consider old events in new lights, and to see stories long suppressed in the broader and more accurate narrative of our national past. 

Alvin Josephy wrote Indian Heritage of America in 1968, Vine Deloria Jr. published Custer Died for Your Sins in 1969, and Dee Brown Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee in 1971.  Indian poets and novelists, from Scott Momaday and Leslie Silko to Louise Erdrich and Sherman Alexie, write from Indian country today but are celebrated as American authors. 

African-Americans too have seen an almost century-long welling up of authors, storytellers, and artists showing the real story of slavery, Jim Crow, and continuing persecution and discrimination to this day. Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Alice Walker, Spike Lee, Denzel Washington, Aretha Franklin, and a host of hip hop artists I can’t name bring the rich cultures of African-America to all of America. 

Recently, in the shadow of the deaths of George Floyd, Brionna Taylor and many others, new non-fiction books accurately depicting the history and practice of segregation and racism in America are on best-seller lists. In the last few months, I’ve reread Baldwin, read Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, and Jill Lapore’s These Truths: A History of the United States, and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me.

Pile these books and ideas on top of the new environmental histories—Alfred Crosby’s Columbian Exchange; Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel; Charles Mann’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus and 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created—and you get a much broader picture of Columbus’s “discovery” of the new world.

These chapters of American history, and others—American expansion into Mexican lands; Asian exclusion acts; Japanese Internment camps; Jewish, Hungarian, Vietnamese, Hmong, Syrian and Iraqi refugees, etc.—do not diminish the impact that Columbus had on our world and the bigger world. As students of what is now called the “Columbian Exchange” point out, his journey unleashed an improbable amount of changes to the entire globe—animals, plants, diseases, and people quickly ricocheted off four continents so that Italians could have tomatoes and Irish potatoes; smallpox could visit the Americas and tobacco and sugar become European luxuries; and America could begin its dance with slavery.

But Columbus himself was a small man in retrospect, made small by the ignorance, meanness, and greed of his times. 

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Happy Thanksgiving–and pass the cranberries

“Wild” cranberries

“America was until this last generation a white country designed for ourselves and our posterity. It is our creation and it belongs to us.”

That’s a quote from Richard Spencer, self-appointed spokesman for the “alt-right” in a gathering of some sort in Washington D. C. last week.

Right now, I am reading A Land So Strange: the Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca, an explorer-adventurer in the New World whose party of hundreds was put off course, shipwrecked, stranded, and lost somewhere near present day Florida in 1527. He, along with three others, were the sole survivors of an ordeal on the North American mainland that lasted over seven years and involved starvation, cannibalism, enslavement, and the first detailed descriptions of Indian societies along the Gulf of Mexico. Most likely, few early European arrivals were literate; fewer still had the gift and took the time to describe the New World. De Vaca remarked, for instance, on the size and physical prowess of the Indians–something that startled many Little Ice Age Europeans.

I jump from Spencer to Cabeza de Vaca not because the one is an avowed racist and the other not, or because Spencer speaks from a life of ease and privilege while de Vaca lived through excruciating hardship, but because of the total irony of Spencer’s “America was until this last generation a white country designed for ourselves and our posterity.”

America was, for the first 12,000 or 14,000 or 16,000 years—the dates keep getting pushed back—a land of Asian immigrants who had populated it from Arctic to near Antarctic and grown in numbers to some 60 or 70 or 80 million by the time the cycles of life and cultures in the place were interrupted by European diseases and culture with Columbus in 1492. This half of the world had developed over 2,500 languages, diverse religions and political systems; had domesticated corn, tobacco, rubber, squash, potato, chocolate, llamas and alpacas. Some of its societies developed writing, systems of mathematics and astronomy. There were skilled sailors, boat builders, whale hunters, fishermen, weavers, potters, wood carvers, artists and artisans.

Societies, cities, and empires had risen and fallen—pre-Inka to Inka, Mayan, Mississippi Mound-builders, plainsmen, coastal tribes—in a kind of dance with far-off and invisible partners in Europe, Asia, and Africa that were doing the same.

The conceit of Europeans in 1492 is that they were the true ones, had the true civilization, culture(s), and religion(s) that deserved to rule everything they found and surveyed. The parentheses are because Europeans ultimately could not agree on what was true, which caused different European nations and religions to war with each other in this new world.

De Vaca and the Spaniards believed that they were designated by God to colonize this new world and plunder its riches for themselves, their European sponsors, and their Church. Their misunderstandings and misdeeds preceded Mr. Spencer’s probable northern European ancestors by decades. But de Vaca in particular gained some appreciation for the marvelous ways that native peoples across hundreds of miles of Gulf Coast and the interior of what is now the Mexican-American border country had learned to manage their environment and carve out lives. And surely some of the northern Europeans, whose visitations on Virginia and New England resulted in similar hardship and eventual displacement, gained the same appreciation.

One wonders at the role of epidemic diseases in both cases, diseases that wiped out indigenous communities without immunities and convinced some of the conquerors—and undoubtedly some of the victims—that God was on their side.

From this distance it appears that some white Americans believe that still, believe that they are the true and only lawful heirs to the work of God and the hard labor of European settlers and later white immigrants.  They are ignorant of or choose to ignore the thousands of years and millions of brown immigrants who preceded them and developed the two continents through their acts of discovery and adaptation, and to ignore the millions of black, brown, and yellow skinned people who, often enduring slavery, scorn, and even death, brought the North American Continent (we’ll assume Spencer is not speaking for the many South American countries and cultures) and these United States to where we are today.

Cranberries, like the squash, the wild turkey that is father to your domestic variety, the potatoes and beans and other accouterments that are on your Thanksgiving table today, were here before Spencer’s forbearers knew there was an America. Maybe he and his white purists should start by stripping their Thanksgiving tables, and everyday tables, of the gifts of others.

The rest of us can give thanks to ALL who have contributed-even some of those like de Vaca who were often wrongheaded about it–to our tables.

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What about Indians?

In this election year, African Americans and Latinos are getting a lot of attention. Immigrants too. We are a “nation of them.”  Oops—Indians were here when the first European immigrants arrived, and are still. (But their voting numbers are small, and they are spread out over 500 reservations and scores of cities across the country.)

Indians don’t even speak the same language—or didn’t. Most of them speak English now, except for French speaking Metis who are mostly in Canada, and Spanish speaking Indians across South and Central America and Mexico. And the Mayan language speakers and others which are still strong enough to hold their own with Spanish and Portuguese south of our border. Linguists say there were some 2500 mutually unintelligible languages when the first Europeans arrived.

Or, you might want to count the Norse in Newfoundland as first new arrivals, or maybe some stray kon tiki boat from the Pacific that brought Islanders or Africans to the New World. But that is all pretty much academic in seeing what actually happened to the New World when the Old World got here. It was Columbus who started the rush from Spain—and Portugal and England, who misnamed the inhabitants “Indians,” shipped them back to Europe as slaves, worked them to death in gold mines on Hispanola as part of grants of land and labor known as encomiendas, and killed them off with diseases. Columbus brought horses and pigs and cows too, and sent back more than gold. Now you can study the “Columbian Exchange” to follow all that followed his New World adventure.

Eventually, Africans were brought to the Caribbean to work sugar cane and other crops, and as the English started settling further north, African slavery proper began. But what Columbus started with Indians had a good 100-year run before African American Slavery began its 250-year run up to the Civil War. 

Indians—indigenous people—were here everywhere when Spanish and Portuguese, English and Dutch, indentured servants from everywhere and African slaves put in to American ports. There were—or had been—large concentrations of them, cities in fact, in Mexico and Peru, Central America and the Mississippi Valley, but there were also hundreds, no thousands of small groups spread from the tip of South America to the Arctic. Their 1492 numbers were reduced drastically and rapidly by overworking, disease, and murder, but they have survived, and it has been years of exploration, colonization, wars, treaties, settlements, missionizing, boarding school education, and who knows what else to bring us to the present as re Indians.

Indians are complicated! First, they were, as one historian said, “here to meet the boats.” This—the Americas, all of it—was their land! Secondly, they were and probably still are as diverse in backgrounds, languages, and cultures as Europe or Asia or Africa was in 1492. Third, their subjugation to European culture, laws, and people, has been conducted in so many ways: the aforementioned diseases, wars, work, treaties, laws, etc. And finally, they are still spread out across the entire region just as they were when first found. There were no slave markets like Richmond or New Orleans, and the country was never divided north-south by their presence as it was to and through the Civil War into Civil Rights.

Alvin Josephy once said that white liberals who had fought for black Civil Rights in the ‘60s thought they had done that job and would move on to the Indians; the Indians told them they didn’t want Civil Rights, but their Treaty Rights!

See how complicated Indians are. Which might be the reason that our Presidential candidates are not courting the Indian Vote.

And here we have to leave the colonial and mestizo cultures south of the US border; and acknowledge that the people called Latinos on both sides of the border have their own complications, but they share language, and for most political purposes we Norte Americanos can thus lump them all together! The Latino vote. “Illegals.” “Immigrants” (well, maybe not “New Mexicans” or old California families, or….).

Good news: According to a recent piece in the New York Times re American Indians, “President Obama campaigned hard in 2008 for the votes of American Indians. He vowed that his administration would pay special attention to their grievances about federal mismanagement and the government’s recurring neglect of treaty obligations. ‘Few have been ignored by Washington for as long as Native Americans — the first Americans,’” Obama said.

“Mr. Obama was given credit by tribal leaders for creating a White House council to maintain lines of communication with them; establishing a buyback program to help tribes regain scattered lands; expanding the jurisdiction of tribal courts; and including tribal women under the protection of the Violence Against Women law in 2013. Reaching out to Indian nations has been ‘one of the hallmarks of this administration,’” according to Russell Begaye, president of the Navajo Nation.

By all accounts, Obama has been the best President for Indians since Richard M. Nixon. Talk about complicated!

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The Nez Perce and the Columbian Exchange

In preparation for my Portland presentation on the Nez Perce in the Wallowa Country tomorrow night, and thinking about this ecosystems/ Pacific NW tribes class I am teaching in La Grande, I got to wondering about which elements of Alfred Crosby’s Columbian Exchange had the greatest impact on the Nez Perce.

The first one that comes to mind is the horse, because the Nez Perce became noted for their horse breeding and horsemanship. But they probably didn’t get the horse until the early 1700s, over 200 years after Columbus and his crew landed with them in the Caribbean. Late in the history of a people that had been here forever.
It was diseases, and specifically smallpox, that got Crosby to thinking about what all had crossed the ocean and united the two worlds so long divided. And the impact of diseases that the Europeans had developed some immunities to over centuries on indigenous Americans was in all ways catastrophic. In 1491—or maybe his later book, 1493—Charles Mann explains their roles in assisting the conquistadors in overwhelming central and south American civilizations, and in presenting a ghost landscape for immigrant Puritans on the Northeast Atlantic coast. Abandoned Indian gardens and food caches were more important in staving off Puritan starvation than were the pluck, courage, and Christian faith usually credited.
The impacts of diseases on the Nez Perce and other Plateau tribes were again decades—maybe centuries—removed. But diseases did creep in from the Pacific Coast to decimate Willamette Valley Indians in the late 1700s, well before the white men who carried them traveled that far inland. And we know that Indian trade routes took tribal people and commodities from the Pacific Coast to the Rockies—and probably beyond. And we know that the fur trade sent diseases off ahead of it as it moved across the North Country. Allen Pinkham, a Nez Perce elder and co-author of Lewis and Clark among the Nez Perce, thinks that there were about 5,000 Nez Perce in the country at the time of Lewis and Clark—but imagines a pre-Euro-disease population of some 20,000. That would jibe with Crosby and Mann’s thoughts on the impacts of diseases.
Treaties and broken treaties led to war, and Bobbie Conner, director at Tamastlikst, reminded several of us talking about the Stevens treaties one day at the Josephy Center that one must start any discussion of Indian treaties with the “Doctrine of Discovery.” It started with the pope and the Spanish and the Portuguese, but the English picked up on it, and by the time the Oregon Territory came into that crazy “joint occupancy” status, the notion that Indian lands were somehow both occupied but unoccupied (by “civilized” peoples) had taken hold. And Plateau lands were ripe for the plucking—the fight was on between the British (largely through Hudson’s Bay Company actions)  and the upstart United States about which civilized country could claim these Indian lands. Treaties were the tools.
But then I reread the Introduction to Alvin Josephy’s 1492, and he tells us that with all of the things the Europeans brought, all of their diseases, animals, steel and guns, religious righteousness and notions of private property, their Eurocentric view of the world, and the corresponding denigration of other world views, was the lethal blow. It allowed for the enslavement of Indians, the takeover of lands, the destruction of artifacts, and the erasure of languages and cultures that continued on for over 500 years! 
It echoed all the way to Alice Fletcher and Jane Gay “allotting” Nez Perce tribal lands in the 1880s. The solution to the Indian problem was to make them farmers, to assimilate them. Fletcher was kinder than most of her predecessors and contemporaries, thinking that the languages and cultures of Indians should be preserved in books and museums, but she was adamant in the belief that they must join the superior, Euro-American culture to survive.
“Kill the Indian to save the man”—or some version thereof—was long the standard on the “liberal” side of those dealing with Indians.

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The end of November


It is the end of November in my 72nd year and my mind churns.
I guess for many of us of a certain age November will always be associated with John Kennedy’s death. Yes, I remember the day, remember riding my bike to class at UC Riverside, putting it in a rack and walking across campus and coming on a distraught Dr. Dennis Strong, waving his hands, tears streaming down his face, shouting that they had shot the President.
Although a couple of UCR students I knew checked out almost immediately and joined the Peace Corps, it took me almost two years to do the same. We went to Turkey with Kennedy half-dollars stuffed in our bags, tokens we would hand out to friends we made. And, like Volunteers across the world, I found newspaper and magazine pictures of JFK, in my country alongside photos of Ataturk, in small villages across the land.
This November, teaching a class on ecosystems and tribes in nearby La Grande to Oregon State University ag and natural resource students, trying to get them to relook at what was here before our European ancestors arrived, I told them that new world potatoes probably saved my Norwegian ancestors from starvation and that Indians, people of the salmon who lived and worked what we now call the Pacific Northwest, were here with sophisticated societies and economies long before trappers, missionaries, explorers, and settlers came to change and replace them. I reminded them that historical perspectives change slowly, and that they had probably participated in the same fourth grade Thanksgiving pageants that I had watched and played in 60 years ago, that no one had encouraged us then to wonder where the corn and squash and beans that the Indians shared came from—and for that matter, how Squanto had learned enough English to tutor them in agriculture. Our history—and our stereotypes of hunter-gatherer Indians—have been handed to us flawed.
But there is change. A few days ago a group of Joseph fifth and sixth graders came to the Josephy Center to see the Indian art exhibit and the library. We talked about the Nez Perce and how they got their name. I told them about Indians from the coast, the far north and the inland high desert congregating at Celilo to fish and trade goods and stories. I said that when they got the horse, the Nez Perce had gone over the mountains to hunt buffalo. “Where did the Indians get horses?” I asked, and a bright-eyed fifth grader, hand bouncing in the air, said “I know, I know—the Columbian Exchange.”
I try to tell my grandchildren, who are in 7thand 9th grades, about Kennedy and how he tried to change the world—and in some ways did so—and how he changed my life. We have a campaign poster that I have hauled with me from 1960, my freshman year of college at Denver University, that promises “Leadership for the Sixties.” Their eyes glaze. I take them to the community Thanksgiving feed to help serve. As they feared, it’s mostly old people. They’re miffed—but they buck up and do a good job of it.  
Kennedy didn’t get many years—and watching it all again it seems that he knew that the work was big and his time was short. He wrote the foreword to the American Heritage Book of Indians (which Alvin Josephy edited; JFK on Indians for previous post) and showed an understanding of that history—we can wonder how Indian policy might have changed.
I am brought to his book, Profiles in Courage, and Alvin’s book, The Patriot Chiefs. Both men believed in the importance of individuals in their times. Alvin was a historian with an urge toward action; JFK an actor with a sense of history. My mind goes from Kennedy to Tecumseh, one of Alvin’s Patriot Chiefs, an Indian leader who dreamed a pan-Indian stand against the European invasion. He failed, but is with us still in the genes of Indians still fighting for sovereignty, still struggling for a place in their native land.
Dreams stay with us; Tecumseh and Kennedy are with us.

Beaver hats

Sometimes you read something or hear something or something happens that changes how you look at the world. For me, reading Charles Mann’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus, and thinking about world history in terms of the “Columbian Exchange” did that. For the first time, I connected the fact that potatoes originated in the Andes—that I had picked up somewhere along the line, with the potato famine in Ireland and the potato lefse that my grandmother made every holiday. That the Americas were vibrant places full of humanity and human influenced landscapes before the Pilgrims settled Plymouth suddenly became obvious—how did the corn, beans, and pumpkins get to the far north anyway?
How I wish I could have talked with Alvin about Charles Mann. Better yet, how good it would have been to put them together. That is kind of what we did in our class this Wednesday (“Introduction to Indian Studies and the Nez Perce Story” on Wednesday mornings at the new Josephy Center). We were reading Alvin’s “The Hudson Bay Company and the American Indians,” which first appeared in three parts in the Westerner, and then again as “By Fayre and Gentle Meanes” in American West Magazine in 1972.
We discussed beaver hats. The fur trade, after all, supplied furs—at a dizzying pace—to England and Europe for the purpose of making felt hats, beginning in the early 1600s and continuing for at least 200 years. Why the hubbub about beaver furs and hats? It turns out beaver fur is extraordinarily good for felting—something about the small hooks on hairs meshing together in the felting process—and that hats were already, in the sixteenth century, signs of status and socio-political points of view in the old world. And that the beaver on that continent (I think they are not exactly the same as the new world beaver, but we’ll leave that side road to other investigators) were all but trapped out. 
In the new world, early white settlers were finding it tough to make a living with farming. And there are records of Dutch settlers sending furs across the Atlantic in the early 1600s; the Plymouth colony soon followed suit. And fishermen plied the Atlantic Coast, and occasionally put in to pick up Indians to sell as slaves across the sea, and occasionally added furs to their trade goods (it is thought by many that white fishermen were responsible for bringing smallpox to the coastal Indian peoples, and thus reducing the indigenous population—and their potential resistance—by 90 or 95% just a few years before the more famous Pilgrims arrived).
Soon French and English trappers and traders were vying for trapping ports and Indian tribes to provide them with furs. Eventually, the Hudson Bay Company, chartered in 1670, became the dominant trader with Indians and supplier of beaver pelts to the old world. There were differences in how French and English traders worked—the French were more likely to intermarry with Indians and adopt more of Indian culture. Traders brought guns and diseases along as they pressed north and west. There were issues of control of tribal lands—the Crown gave Hudson Bay a “charter” for a huge hunk of what is now Canada; the Louisiana Purchase transferred “claims” to Indian lands from the French to a young United States, etc., and wars among French, English, American, and Indian forces grew alongside the fur trade.
Alvin chronicles the movements of traders and of tribes, the diseases, the growing dependencies of tribes on white men’s goods, the place of alcohol, the peace making and the confrontations, and the “softening” of tribal lands for the waves of settlers who would soon follow. He doesn’t tell us much about the beaver and beaver hats. I think Mann would have talked with him about that. For your edification and fun, here is a web site that has a lot of information on the topic: http://people.ucsc.edu/~kfeinste/beaverhat/Main.html. The site will also tell you about issues of class and gender in Europe, and show you pictures of some of the finest hats.
Alas, the fur trade and the place of beaver hats in national life and international diplomacy is a fascinating one that gets sleight treatment in standard history texts. Imagine felt hats getting all the way back to the Andes!
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