Indians, their land, and refugees

Alvin Josephy said that reservations and the continuing attachment to land they afforded have been instrumental in the survival of American Indian cultures. Reservations were, for the most part, diminished versions of ancient tribal landscapes, but however diminished, they were pieces of those larger lands—particular lands that had sustained particular tribal peoples for millennia.

Policies of removal and assimilation have of course taken many—most—Indians away from ancestral grounds over the last five centuries. There are now more urban Indians than rural Indians, and tribal enrollments are covered in confusion, with each tribe establishing its own enrollment requirements, and individual Indians finding themselves descendants of many tribes and sometimes living on a reservation where they are not, maybe cannot be, enrolled.

There have of course been movements of indigenous tribes through history, brought on by famine, weather, natural catastrophe, intertribal warfare and European colonization. Alvin Josephy began his landmark book on American Indians, The Indian Heritage of America, published in 1968, with maps and charts showing language distribution. Before we knew what DNA was, languages were leaving traces of peoples’ histories and movements, even people without written histories. One can follow these movements through the long lens of language, find the Athabascan languages of the north in the Southwest and Central America, the spread of Algonquin speakers east to west across the middle of North America, with Algonquin speakers even now lodged in small spots along the Pacific Coast.

Yet an Indian friend told me that he has a letter from the Danish paleo-genetic scientists confirming his relationship to “the Ancient One,” the man found years ago along the Columbia River and recently determined to have been there for some 9,000 years. Despite conjecture and maybe hope by some American anthropologists that a later, European connection would be uncovered, it was not. The Ancient One, aka Kennewick Man, is related to present day Indians of the Plateau.

When the greatest world-wide refugee crisis since that following WW 2 is ripping people from ancient roots and throwing them together in places totally removed from places of origin, there is something comforting about the people who were always here. Like ancient trees, mountains and rivers, we can marvel at the perseverance of people that have withstood awesome odds to remain in place.

But what about those who must move, those who have been stormily chased from traditional landscapes by hurricane, volcano, drought and other “natural” disasters, and by the tyranny of governments, the force of armies, and the violence of civil wars?

When their world is in turmoil, people move–and others take them in. Joseph and his remnant band of Nez Perce were taken in on the Colville Reservation in 1885, after the Nez Perce War, after years of exile in Indian Territory. Many descendants still live there.

We as a nation can, like Germany and other European countries, acknowledging the difficulties, but with some memory of the post-WW II chaos and its huge refugee crisis, take in the strangers. Or we can further close our borders and hunker down in historical ignorance.

# # #

The oldest story–more on refugees

The pictures and stories of refugees in Turkey, Jordan, Greece, Hungary, Croatia, Austria, Germany and more bring a brilliant image of mass migration into sharp and heart tugging focus. At first look and sound it seems like something new, and the proximate causes—wars and uprisings in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, and Libya, and the accompanying refugee crisis in Europe fill and refill the media and our brain space daily.


But migrations, invasions, expulsions, and other mass movements of humankind go back to the Israelites; to Persian, Alexandrian, Mongol, Hun, and Ottoman invasions; to the Inquisition and expulsion of Jews from Europe, to the Holocaust. In my short lifetime Jews fleeing Germany were denied entry into our country, and Jews, with Western guilt and support, made a new country and displaced Arabs; in my lifetime African peoples liberated from colonial oppression have risen up, killed, and chased each other from one place to another; and wars in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia have seen millions die and millions more scurry for new places to live.
These days I study American Indians, inheritors of a millennia-long migration—driven by weather, climate, oppression and opportunity—that began in Africa, crossed Asia, and put ancestors on these continents 20,000 or 30,000 years ago. Historian Alvin Josephy started the Indian Heritage of America, his book about what might have and must have happened before European arrival in the Americas, with languages. Those language maps tell stories of movements of Indian peoples before written history and the interpretation of artifacts—how did those Algonquin speakers get to the Pacific coast?
We mostly neglect these stories and tell stories of the coming of Europeans to the Americas. These are stories of “discovery” and competing European interests in “conquest.” We nod to “religious freedom” as a reason for Europeans leaving old homes, but talk less about weather, famine, small wars, crowding and inheritance, regime changes, and the Prussian draft that all played roles in putting long-time Europeans on small boats in frightful seas for the new world.
Once here, the Europeans began a long, four-century process of displacement of the people who were here before them. In some places it went quickly—people died in huge numbers and tribes disappeared. In North America generally there was a long, slow, slog of displacement, of indigenous people being pushed west and pushed onto reservations, forced to learn English and Anglo culture to survive.
Part of this old story is one of intermarriage, rape, and a mixing of peoples. Warriors and explorers didn’t bring their women along. This struck me first when I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Eastern Turkey, assigned to a village of “refugee” Turks from Bulgaria and Greece. They had come in Balkan people trades made in the 1930s, between the two world wars. My Turkish friends were Moslem and spoke Turkish, albeit with their own peculiar accent, but they looked more Eastern European than Central Asian. It struck me then that the Ottomans traveled without women—all the way to the gates of Vienna in the 1500s. There had been plenty of time for the mixing of blood.
The Turks in Istanbul and Thrace and the Black Sea were sometimes light and blue-eyed; those south and west looked Mediterranean, and those to the south and east were darker and indistinguishable from Arab neighbors. Even the Romani—the Gypsies—who mostly traveled north and south with their caravans, spoke the languages of their immediate surrounding—along with their own Romani—and shared physical characteristics with their neighbors.
None of this lessens the pain of people fighting to get across borders or to stay in a homeland today. It does say that walls and borders are artificial and always breeched. Physical borders—rivers, oceans, mountain ranges—make crossings and the intermingling of peoples more difficult, but they too give way in time.
Unfortunately, wholesale death seems endemic to these mass movements. But there are minglings of cultures, and kindnesses, too, from the Egyptians who took in the Israelites to the Dutch who hid the Frank family and the Danes who wore Jewish armbands; from the French trappers who married Indians and created a new tribe, the Metis, to Americans who have taken “war brides,” refugees from Germany, Japan, Vietnam, and, one supposes, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Millions of refugees are suffering and dying now, but thousands—maybe millions—are coming to their aid. Along with the horror there will be exchanges of foods, languages, and cultures. More importantly, the people who rise to help are showing one of the oldest and most basic forms of right conduct—putting aside fear and the dark impulses of exclusion and embracing the outsider, the immigrant.

#  #  #

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?
# # #