Category: Mary Jemison

A Better Life Among the Indians

Mary Jemison was captured by Seneca Indians in 1758. Her parents and most of her siblings were killed, and for some time she tried to resist her captors and find a way back to place and family. But, eventually, she stayed, stayed to marry two Indian men, to have Indian children, and, living with Indians as an Indian in her 80s, to give an interview about her life to a white doctor named James Everett Seaver. Her “memoir,” first published in 1824, had been published in at least 30 editions by the time the author of the book I read, Lois Lenski, published her fictionalized account of Mary Jameson’s life in 1941.

Indian Captive: The Story of Mary Jemison, won the Newberry Award for children’s literature in 1942. I read the Harper Trophy edition, first published in 1995—my copy is the 17th printing! I imagine it is still in print.

Indian Captive. Parents and siblings murdered by the Indians. Children’s literature?

There are many ways to talk about Euro-American ambivalence towards Indians, but this is certainly one of them! Author Lenski, in her treatment of the subject, explains her research into Seneca Indian history and culture at several museums, includes drawings of tools, clothing, and places, and lauds Jemison for giving us the real story of pre-contact Indian life. Buckskin clothing is compared to the traders’ broadcloth, porcupine quills to beads, coiled pottery to brass cooking post, and guns to bows and arrows.

More importantly, she deals with the social life—the nature of capture and adoption in Indian culture, the friendships and kinships that sustained Indian life. While the early chapters and Mary’s fictional voice are harsh towards the Indians, by the end of the book she is defending Indian ways to an English officer. And, given the opportunity, refusing to go back to a white community.

In Lenski’s treatment, the English officer is a convenient foil—and a pivot point for the captive girl. She listens to him deal man to man with the Indians—he wants their support against the French, but then, when he encourages her to come with him, to leave the dirty savages and their heathen ways, he is totally disparaging of the people and family that she had become a part of.

There are several striking things in this story. First, it is based on a real—and one of the first—narratives of a white captive of Indians. Indians capturing—and sometimes killing—white settlers was not uncommon, and treaties, as the one alluded to in this book, often stipulated the return of white captives. And captives, as even Benjamin Franklin acknowledged, and as a myriad of stories from the 1700s to the late 1800s, often wanted to stay with their adoptive Indian families.

The book paints a sympathetic view of Indian life—the relationships with land and among tribal members are strong, the knowledge of natural resources is keen, and the importance of and comfort in tradition is comforting to readers.

But maybe the most important thing that I’ve learned with this book and a small amount of research, is that there has been and still is a vigorous interest in the “Indian experience.” I’ve only dipped into the literature, but one cannot help but contrast the tightly wound lives of white children—and especially of their mothers, from Colonial to modern times, with the relative freedom enjoyed by Indians. I see in my mind’s eye a prim colonial woman in her patriarchal nest, in church for hours each week, tending to food and childrearing and housekeeping for a dominant husband who makes decisions for family and community. I see a young American girl in the 1940s, constrained by family and convention, looking to a life of housekeeping and childrearing, listening to men who preach more of the same.

That this book, Indian Captive, has a 75 year history of publication as a “children’s book,” is telling. It tells me about the long oppression of white American women: property rights—about 1900 in most states; the vote—the 19th amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1920; participation in high school and college athletics, and more than a token chance at medical or law school—Title 9, passed in 1972.

My guess is that thousands—no millions—of American girls have listened to these stories, had these thoughts, read this book and others over the past 250 years, and dreamed of a better life among the Indians.

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History buffs and novelists tell the stories

Alvin Josephy wrote and spoke frequently about the Indian story being left out of the standard American history of school textbooks and the academy. He said that amateur historians–“history buffs”–and novelists kept the story of Indians and the West alive when academia didn’t much care.

I teach a class in La Grande on Northwest Tribes and the Ecosystem they lived in, and how European intrusions, from diseases, horses, fur-trapping, and treaty-making to boarding schools, dam-building, and fire suppression changed Indians and the land. I’ve become increasingly interested in white-Indian realtionships, and yesterday we compared white male—women; white male—African-American; and white male—Indian power struggles from colonization forward, looking particularly at the rise of Black Power, Red Power, and Feminism in the 60s and 70s.

Two things stood out. First, white men, empowered by physical strength, religion, and tradition, were able to dominate women in the United States from our beginnings, and the appreciation of women as human beings deserving of the recognition and opportunities accorded their fathers and brothers has come about very gradually, and often painfully.

Second, African-Americans were brought to the new world as slaves, smothered first with physical force to get them onto ships and then shipped to a completely alien world, where fellow slaves often did not share language or culture, and a white minority was able, with the slaves’ debasement and confusion and their own assumptions of superiority and use of force, to dominate them. Their recognition as human beings deserving of the opportunities accorded their white brothers and sisters has also been painful and slow.

Indians are more complicated.

Josephy says that Europeans gave the Indians three choices: Assimilation; Removal; and extermination. There have been killing sprees and even genocidal actions against Indians, but Indians did not all die.  Removal has stumbled on inconsistencies and out and out failures, from Jackson’s removal policy to the widespread introduction of Indian “reservations.” Indians are still here—on and off their reservations.

Assimilation has always been the preferred government and societal treatment of Indians. Indians have been missionized, allotted onto farms, barred from practicing religion and cultural events, kidnapped and stripped of hair, language and culture at boarding schools, terminated from their reservations, and relocated to urban centers, all in the cause of making them white.

Women could not be made white—white men that is; Africans could not be made white, but the very early conceit in our country was that Indians could be made white. The Indian, the old boarding school anthem went, could be killed to save the (white) man.

Indians, it seems to me, had and have two things that European women and African-American men and women did not have when confronting white European men. First and most importantly, Indians had the land—and all that that meant. They knew the land, how to use, travel, and live on it. Europeans needed Indians at every point along the colonization road to show them those things.  But White Europeans wanted that land for their own purposes, and used every means of getting it—war and treaty being the primary means. Because the Indians had the land originally, they had a power in war and negotiations that neither women nor African-American slaves had. In the time, they were often overwhelmed with force and deception, but they hung and hold on—now to small bits of land and culture that take them back millennially.

The other thing that Indians had from the beginning was a physical health and lifestyle that was attractive to some of the European intruders. Think of Rousseau and his noble savage, and of Daniel Boone, the fur trappers and mountain men who left polite society to live with and like the Indians. They get their due in university press and small local publishers, not in our textbooks

And the story of women and children captured by Indians is threaded throughout our literary history in adventure books for children and in the diaries and narratives of “amateur” historians.  Not, again, in the textbooks, where the stories of grim preachers, prim women, and Salem witches do find room. But the “captives,” including the many who refused to return to “polite” society, have their own literature, from Mary Jemison, captured in 1753 at 15, diarist and subject of a stream of books from then to now, to Paulette Jiles’ just-published News of the World, a fictional account of a white girl raised by the Kiowa.

With Indians, white-guilt, Indian resilience, romanticism and a lingering taste for the land and the wild have crowded and continue to crowd each other in an ambivalent  500-year stew of a relationship. A stew too complicated for textbooks, left to novelists and history buffs.

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