Category: Indian genocide

Rupert Costo, the Pope, and my friend Ray

Like many Americans—and people across the world—I have watched and listened to the new Pope with hope and wonder. A man of clerical power that extends over much of the world with Francis’s humility giving voice to the poor, the immigrant, the prisoner, is something new in our time, and something that is reaching beyond Catholics and even Christians. I chuckle when he rides in a Fiat, cheer when he derides consumption, and give thanks when he talks sensibly about climate.

But the canonization of Father Junipero Serra?
My friend Ray Cook grew up in Idaho, lived most of his life in California and worked for the State Highway Department. On retirement, Ray started coming to the Wallowas, where his grandfather had been a Methodist preacher and his grandmother was buried (Ray placed a tombstone for her in the Wallowa cemetery).
Ray once had to evict an elderly Indian lady to make way for a California highway, and the act has haunted him ever since. He came to Fishtrap events for several years, and over time has sent me letters he writes to newspapers and notes of events that he attends—most having to do with American Indians. Many of these things are colored by that experience, some by later stories he has read and heard.
One of the storytellers was a friend he gained at the Highway Department, an engineer named Rupert Costo. Costo was a Cahuilla Indian, a writer, publisher, and advocate for Indians. Ray sent me his autographed copy of a book Costo edited and published, The Missions of California: A Legacy of Genocide, for the Josephy Library. In it modern scholars write about California Indians and the brutal Mission legacy, and detailed and heart-wrenching Indian testimony that has been taken over the years is reprinted. The book, published in 1987, was an attempt to halt the canonization process of Father Serra.
Costo died in 1989, so he did not live to see Pope Francis’s embrace of Serra. He did live long enough to donate the extensive collection of books and artifacts relating to American Indians that he and his wife, Jeanette, who was Cherokee, had accumulated, to the University of California, Riverside, my alma mater!
And to donate $400,000 to the university to endow a chair in Indian Studies—a position now held by my friend, Clifford Trafzer! In fact, as I reached back for facts in this case, I find out that Costo, who was born in Hemet California, was an instrumental lobbyist for having a UC campus at Riverside. (I don’t remember hearing that story while I was a student there.)
We should, it is argued, not judge Father Serra—or the many priests, Spanish land grantees, and later American miners and farmers who enslaved, tortured, and sometimes sought to eliminate Indians—by the standards of today. So we should condone the throwing of babies into cactus patches to get parents to tell the whereabouts of runaway slaves, threatening and throwing babies off the “Crying Rock” to make Indians work, and collaring Indians to pull plows all as practices of their times?
What about the priests and lay people who did speak up? Alvin Josephy notes, in 500 Nations, a friar who spoke out against the brutal treatment of the Indians in 1799. He was declared insane and taken out of the country. If we canonize the brutalizers, what do we do with those who acted saintly in their times?
Alvin argued that “the treatment of California Indians was as close to genocide as any tribal people had faced, or would face, on the North American continent.” I can’t put my hands on it now, but I believe Alvin knew Costo and his work, and I believe that he, like Costo, would now stand up against this new Pope on the canonization of Serra.
We admire Pope Francis exactly because he argues against many of the popular and expressed values of our times—unbridled capitalism and conspicuous consumption for example. If Costo’s book and Josephy’s work had found their ways into the Pope’s life, I have to believe that there would be a different story in the news today. Maybe we would learn the friar’s name, and maybe HE would be sainted and Serra relegated to the history books as a man of his times.

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MLK and the Indians

I remember Alvin Josephy saying many times that the white liberals who had joined the Civil Rights Movement and Dr. King did not understand the Indian situation. To paraphrase him, “As the Civil Rights movement gained strength and won some victories, white liberals thought they could just transfer ideas and tactics over to Indian affairs. But there was a fundamental difference. Indians didn’t want their ‘civil’ rights, but their ‘sovereignty,’ the treaty rights and at least some of the land that had been stolen from them.”

Another constant theme of Alvin’s: “From the beginning Indians had three choices: become white—assimilation; move, across the Mississippi, further west, to reservations—removal; or extermination.” From the beginning, Euro-Americans who wanted to treat Indians fairly often thought the best way to do so was to assimilate them. Their assumption was that Indians had lost the continent, white civilization was on the march, and Indians were obliged to join the parade. Alvin’s boss at Time Magazine, Henry Luce, thought Indians who resisted this maxim were “phonies,” and should just get on with adapting. Alice Fletcher, the famous “measuring woman” among the Nez Perce who had actually written some of the Dawes, or Allotment, Act, had in mind to make every Indian a Jeffersonian farmer. She appreciated Indian cultures—some of the ethnographic work she did among the Omaha and other Plains tribes on Indian songs and dances is still available in Dover Books. But the Indian solution, in her mind, was assimilation. The culture would go to textbooks and museums.

Even photographer Edward Sheriff Curtis felt that Indian cultures were “vanishing,” and sought to keep as many of them as possible alive in words and images. To Curtis’s credit, his time of work, the years on either side of 1900, were probably the nadir for Indians. According to the US Census Bureau, there were only 237,196 Indians left in the country in 1900.
Indians have not disappeared—Fletcher and Curtis would both be happy with that. And in fact their resurgence did have something to do with the 1950s and 60s Civil Rights Movement. Martin Luther King was aware of Indian history, which he naturally interpreted in racial terms in his 1963 book, Why We Can’t Wait:
Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race. Even before there were large numbers of Negroes on our shores, the scar of racial hatred had already disfigured colonial society. From the sixteenth century forward, blood flowed in battles of racial supremacy. We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its Indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject or feel remorse for this shameful episode. Our literature, our films, our drama, our folklore all exalt it.  
King trumpeting the Indian story nationally in such graphic terms had to have had an impact. And Indians did follow what was happening with American blacks. The NCAAP, the oldest civil rights group, was formed in 1908. NCAI, the National Congress of American Indians, the first national Indian lobby, was formed in 1944, and NARF, the Native American Rights Fund, was modeled after the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund in the mid-sixties, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement.
Today, sovereignty and treaty rights, not always secure, not always playing out the Indian way, are acknowledged and of moment across the country—with a much greater understanding by white liberals. It’s all speculation, but one might argue that AIM, Alcatraz, the second Wounded Knee, none of it would have happened without the Civil Rights Movement and Martin Luther King. And the way King brought Alvin’s third Indian alternative—extermination, or, in 20thcentury terms, genocide—to the fore has certainly had a sobering influence on policy makers and Indians themselves over the last 50 years.
As King and Indian leaders would say, there is still much work to do, but we are a long way from 1900 and a “vanishing race.”

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