Writing on stolen land

Pendleton writer Bette Husted read from her new novel, All Coyote’s Children, at the Josephy Center last week. It’s the story of a white family living on the Umatilla Reservation, surrounded by and ultimately intertwined with the Indian families around them.

Writing Indian characters and stories in fiction—or non-fiction for that matter—is a tricky business. Having historically used power and privilege to take away land, language, and culture, Euro-Americans should be and mostly are cautious in telling Indian stories now. We’re mindful of guilt for past actions—some of them not so far in the past, as boarding schools and the last efforts at assimilation in the 1950s are in living memory for many—and struggle with speaking “for” others whose experience we Euro-American writers do not have.

A quick survey of the literature finds much that is marked by prejudice and stereotyping (take a look at some old Zane Grey’s!)—and much that is romanticized. And some that explores the complexities of Euro-American—Indian relationships from the beginning. I’ve written before about the attraction of Indian life for colonial women described by Benjamin Franklin and turned into literature for girls in Indian Captive, published by Lois Lenske in 1941. This book is based on the autobiography of Mary Jemison, who was captured by the Seneca in 1755 in the back and forth between British and French and the Indian allies they pursued. Jemison watched her family be killed, but eventually assimilated with the Indians, married and had Indian children, and told her story towards the end of a long and adventurous life. The story has had many retellings, but Lenski’s book for girls sprung in the 1940s—and is still in print, now considered a children’s “classic.”

The capturing of white families in the early years of European colonization—and the capture of Indians and trades of prisoners—was not unusual, and did not end with New England and the 18th century. There is a literature of white captives in the Southwest, and in 2016 Paulette Jiles published News of the World, a page turning novel of a young girl captured by the Kiowa and the 1870 effort of an itinerant “news reader” to return her to her German-American family. She of course does not want to return, and the novel does let her work out a kind of compromise of her two lives.

In both of these cases, the protagonists are Euro-Americans, but the authors also found empathy for the Indian peoples who the captives unwillingly joined and willingly stayed with. They found it in connections to the living earth, the extended family support systems, and the relative freedom of women in tribal societies.

People have lived, married and raised families across racial divides forever. In Lies My Teacher Told Me, James Loewen reminds us of mixed black-white families, and reminds us that principled people who spoke for human rights for black slaves were with us from the beginning of that national tragedy. Until recently—maybe as recent as the 1950s—mixed families have been forced into one community or the other, and the people who stood up for them have been silenced or ridiculed. Decades before that as African-Americans moved north and west to find opportunity, black workers, athletes, and musicians worked and played for white audiences—and then went home to segregated lives.

Ditto for Indians—but with the curious addition of pride attached to tribes and tribal leaders. The current exhibit at the National Museum of the American Indian displays over 300 objects of commercial appropriation of names of Indian tribes, tools, and chiefs: “Pontiac,” “Seminoles,” Jeep “Cherokee,” “Apache” and “Chinook” helicopters, “Tomahawk” missile, and the plain old Cleveland “Indians.”

How many times do we hear “my great-grandmother was Cherokee,” or some other story of distant Indian relationships—with no notion that there was a true story there, and no attempt to relate it to contemporary Indian-white affairs.

What Bette Husted and a few other writers are doing is teasing out the real stories of Indian-white interactions, of living together. The title of her memoir, Above the Clearwater: Living on Stolen Land, tells a story. Bette grew up on land in Idaho that was part of the original 1855 Nez Perce Reservation—a part scrubbed away with the discovery of gold and another, “liars’ treaty, written eight years after the first. The memoir explores poverty and guilt; the new novel explores interrelationships.

Luis Urrea takes on the huge complexities of Indian-Mexican-White interrelationships over centuries in Hummingbird’s Daughter and Queen of America. Closer to home, Pam Steele’s Greasewood Creek sits on the edge of the Umatilla Reservation and its people, and Warren Easley dares to take on the flooding of Celilo in a mystery novel, Not Dead Enough. That story was told in an incredible musical drama composed by Thomas Morning Owl and Marv Ross, “Ghosts of Celilo.”

In other words, it’s now ok to chip at the edges of White-Indian relations in books, as we struggle to get along and work together over salmon, water, dams, and economies. Hope is that the books—and their writers, Indian and non-Indian—are settling old history and part themselves of a new, more inclusive present.

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Desperation

At the Fishtrap Gathering this weekend, writer Luis Alberto Urrea talked about the border. He’d written a non-fiction book, The Devil’s Highway, about 26 from Vera Cruz who crossed the border in 2001—twelve made it, and fourteen died in the trying. The book was a Pulitzer finalist and has just been reprinted in a tenth anniversary edition. The story is lauded by many, even by border patrollers, but there is no political purchase or acknowledgement.
He’s followed it with a novel called Into the Beautiful North, which deals somewhat playfully with Mexican villages where mass exoduses of men have left villages of women, young children, and oldsters. Is it an easier way of looking at things?
In seriousness, in a panel on the multi-cultural future, Luis asked the audience to imagine how desperate parents in El Salvador or Honduras must be to gather last resources, give them to a smuggler, and hope that a child makes it to the beautiful north. We’re talking, he said, not about an immigration problem, but about desperation and a refugee problem of major and international proportions. 
All of which reminded me that in my reading of early European settlers among the Indians of North America there is always an undercurrent of desperation. We think and talk of rugged and heroic individuals, but the reality was more often young, scared, and hungry men being chased by circumstances to find something better.
They came to the new world—fleeing the Little Ice Age they couldn’t name but the drought and hunger they felt—as indentured servants, brought to the dock by desperate parents who signed them over to ships’ captains to be auctioned for servitude in Virginia or Massachusetts. With time—two years or five or seven—they might get freedom and a purchase on land or property of their own. The women, chained by marriage and children and living in fear of death by childbirth and death of children, followed on.
And their children, not indentured, but often poor, would push further West. And the companies—fur companies, railroads, charters—would tell them that “rain followed the rails,” that beaver were as thick as cats, that there was gold to be had, that there was “free” land—land stolen from Indians that could be “pre-empted” by Oregon Country settlers beginning in 1841, or homesteaded across the West after 1862.
The men who sold the furs in Europe, made the Levis in California, and owned the railroads everywhere made the money. But the rest of us—our parents and grandparents—at least many of us, hung on and created a country.

And now the rest of us—many of us at least—want to shut the door that opened for our hungry grandparents. How often do we think about those parents who sent our grandparents—or great grandparents—off to an unknown, but just maybe better, future? How do we forget so easily?
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