I just finished teaching a \u201cPacific NW Ecosystems and Tribes\u201d class for OSU on the Eastern Oregon University campus. It was my fourth year, and as I am not a regular teacher, I have tended to revamp the class each year\u2014and sometimes mid-year.<\/p>\n
What is consistent is that I try to present the region\u2014the Old Oregon Country; the land occupied by \u201cThe People of the Salmon,\u201d as Richard Dougherty elegantly described it in Alvin J\u2019s American in 1492<\/i>\u2014as it was in 1492, and then the changes that came with each intrusion of the white Europeans: the horse, diseases, explorers and fur trade, missionaries, treaties, settlers, farmers and fishermen, the Wars, the Columbia River dams and irrigation projects, up to the EPA, Boldt Decision, and tribal fisheries programs today.<\/p>\n
One of the tasks of the class is to explore \u201cDifference, Power, and Discrimination,\u201d so we follow the power shifts from tribes to whites, from agriculture to industry, rural to urban, and we discuss how Indians and women and others have been treated along the way.<\/p>\n
I was on my way to La Grande for class a couple of weeks ago, wondering how to get 33 students involved in more discussion, and a little experiment occurred to me as I drove. I divided the class into three groups, and asked them each to take 10 minutes and come up with lists: Group 1\u2014the tools white men have used to dominate women in our country; 2\u2014the tools white men have used to dominate African-Americans from slavery to present; and 3\u2014the tools white men have used to dominate Indian tribes and people for 500 years.<\/p>\n
I said \u201cwhite men\u201d in each case because when you talk about power, it is white men who have historically held\u2014and still hold many of\u2014the seats of American power. (Current tensions, the results of news reports and confession, are testimony to this fact.)<\/p>\n
The lists were remarkably similar: physical strength, religion, education, money, politics\u2014including the vote, etc. But in the middle of the discussion something else occurred to me. \u201cWhat, I asked, did Indians have that women and African Americans did not have for years and decades in our country?\u201d<\/p>\n
Students had little trouble with the first answer: land\u2014property. Early African-Americans, most of whom were slaves, did not own property. And one can argue that white women were considered property themselves for the first 150 years of our national experiment. We had learned in class that it was basically 1900 before women could own property across the country, and of course it was 1920, not yet 100 years ago, when women got the vote! Although one might point to marriages which consolidated lands and the occasional matriarchal land baroness, they were exceptions, while Indians occupied and held onto lands that white men wanted from the time the first fishermen stepped off their boats and the first pilgrims landed. The diseases, treaties, duplicity, and conflicts that allowed white men to confiscate Indian lands from coast to coast is the earliest\u2014and often most neglected\u2014chapter in the nation\u2019s history!<\/p>\n
The second thing that Indians had that neither white women nor African-Americans could boast of was an attractive lifestyle. From Rousseau and his \u201cnoble savage\u201d and the European painters who dressed King Hendrik in regal gowns, from John White\u2019s 17th century drawings of muscular, handsome Indians, to Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, and scores of French-Canadian voyageurs who went into the American wild with and as Indians, a certain small number of Euro-Americans\u2014including some \u201ccaptured\u201d women and children\u2014have embraced an Indian way of life.<\/p>\n
There is an entire literature of this, possibly beginning with Benjamin Franklin, and certainly running to the recent tale of a young girl captured and raised by Kiowa Indians being \u201creturned\u201d to her white family by a grizzled old veteran named Captain Kid. It\u2019s News of the World,<\/i> and it\u2019s a good read, based, I\u2019m sure, on extensive research into the literature.<\/p>\n
But let\u2019s begin with Franklin:<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and makes one Indian ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return. [But] when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho\u2019 ransomed by their friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good opportunity of escaping again into the woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n
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I just finished teaching a \u201cPacific NW Ecosystems and Tribes\u201d class for OSU on the Eastern Oregon University campus. It was my fourth year, and as I am not a regular teacher, I have tended to revamp the class each year\u2014and sometimes mid-year. What is consistent is that I try to present the region\u2014the Old […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[461,459,462,463,464,460],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34150"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34150"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34150\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}