Category: Custer Battlefield

Alvin Josephy, Custer, the Indian Story—and Vietnam

On Thursday night we watched a “rough cut” version of a documentary chronicling Alvin Josephy’s career as a historian of and advocate for Indians. Sean Cassidy, retired from Lewis-Clark State College, introduced the film, which he and fellow LC professor Patricia Keith put together in the early 2000s.

The late Robert Utley, a historian who had his disagreements with Alvin, is one of the featured interviews. Utley grudgingly acknowledges Josephy’s contributions to the field of Indian History in America—in Utley’s eyes, Josephy gradually moves from being a journalist to a real historian—and says that Alvin’s 1971 piece on Custer in Life Magazine was more political than historical.

And it was—political and historical. It was political in the best sense of that word. First, it appeared in Life Magazine, founded, along with Time, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated, by Henry Luce. Luce had been Alvin’s boss at Time for a decade, and the editor of this 1971 edition of Life Read The Article

Standing Rock Outrage!

November- Reuters News

In a brief story in the New York Times this morning, reporter Julie Turkewitz tells us that the Army has approved construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. It took Robert Speer, the acting secretary of the Army, two weeks—from the time of President Trump’s announcement that he was going to expedite the building of pipelines—to announce his decision to Congress. Speer said he didn’t need the entire environmental impact statement and news of other potential sites that President Obama had ordered, that he knew enough and is ready to offer the pipeline’s owner a 30-year easement on this  “disputed patch of land.”

I glance at the NYT headline stories daily, then go to the opinion pages for the Times editorials, the regular columnists, and op-eds that relate to the day’s news. Standing Rock is missing this morning. Not one editorial writer or columnist chose to weigh in; not one piece of writing from an outraged Indian at Read The Article

New Intern—and a Life Magazine find

Dave Struthers, a recent graduate of Stanford University from Sacramento, California, is our new Josephy Library intern. He started yesterday, and we started him tracking down the Time Magazine “color” spreads that Alvin did from 1951-61. We have about a dozen old mags here, with color articles on Oceanography, The Interstate Highway System, the Amazon, Central Asia, US National Forest, The Amazon, etc. In a note from the publisher in one issue, Alvin is credited with traveling 400,000 miles in four years on such assignments!
In this, Alvin’s “centenary year,” we aim to get all of the Time Magazine issues he had anything to do with—my recollection is that he was charged with doing one 8-12 page color spread per month. Maybe we can eventually figure out how to post them electronically…
July 2, 1971

But I couldn’t resist a morning diversion, and the result of which, courtesy Dave, is that we can give you, electronically, the complete article that

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How do we keep learning from Alvin?

Alvin Josephy died in 2005. I read something that he wrote—or that was written to or about him—almost every day. And I am continually amazed by what he said and when and where he said it.

In Life Magazine in 1971, Josephy wrote that the US government interpreters were telling visitors at the Custer Battlefield that Custer was a hero and the Indians were savages; in the New York Times Sunday Magazine in 1973, just weeks after the FBI-Indian confrontation at Wounded Knee, he said that the Indians were justified, and published photos of Custer’s troops being buried with high ceremony and Sioux Indian survivors of the battle being slaughtered and buried in a mass grave. In 1992 he reminded—in speeches and a book, America in 1492—that Columbus came to a land of some 75 or 90 million people, over 2000 mutually unintelligible languages, and cities larger than any in Europe at the time. And that the learned clerics
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