I\u2019ve been on a history reading jag the last few months. It started with a comment I heard from Alvin Josephy many times\u2014that the \u201cstandard\u201d histories of America leave Indians out when they don\u2019t lie about them.<\/p>\n
My first book was These Truths:\u00a0 A History of the United States<\/em>, by Harvard historian and regular and prolific New Yorker<\/em> writer Jill Lepore; I looked for Indians. Although she has apparently written a book about the Pequot\u2014which I have not read\u2014in her new \u201cHistory of the United States,\u201d Indians get little mention. She is on a mission to tell us how we got\u2014or are still getting\u2014from the words in the founding documents about \u201call men created equal,\u201d to the place where non-property-owning whites, former slaves and their descendants, and women are all included under the equality umbrella. Note the presumptuous title of her book\u2014A History of\u2026 implies The <\/em>New History of\u2026.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I then read David McCullough\u2019s THE PIONEERS:\u00a0The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West. <\/em>I had read McCullough\u2019s prize-winning biography of John Adams years ago, and wondered then how this friend of Alvin Josephy\u2019s\u2014Alvin hired McCullough at American Heritage\u2014could have omitted Indians almost completely in his account of the nation\u2019s earliest days. The new book is no different. Like Lepore, McCullough\u2019s mission is to showcase American \u201cideals,\u201d this time in the white settler development of the Northwest Territories, where there would be no slavery, free public education, and religious freedom.<\/p>\n Others have noticed McCullough\u2019s neglect and mistreatment of Indians. This, from the NYT review by Joyce E. Chaplin:<\/p>\n \u201cMcCullough plays down the violence that displaced the Indians, including the actual Ohio people. He adopts settlers\u2019 prejudiced language about \u2018savages\u2019 and \u2018wilderness,\u2019 words that denied Indians\u2019 humanity and active use of their land. He also states that the Ohio Territory was \u2018unsettled.\u2019 No, it had people in it, as he slightly admits in a paragraph on how the Indians \u2018considered\u2019 the land to be theirs. That paragraph begins, however, with a description of the Northwest Territory as \u2018teeming with wolves, bears, wild boars, panthers, rattlesnakes and the even more deadly copperheads,\u2019 as if the native people were comparably wild and venomous, to be hunted down, beaten back, exterminated.\u201d<\/p>\n Tecumseh gets a one-line mention; there\u2019s no talk of an \u201cIndian state,\u201d as proposed by the British; and the forced removal of Ohio farming Indians under President Jackson is completely omitted.<\/p>\n White historians\u2014even the good ones\u2014tend to get swallowed up in stories that, at the end of the day, paint the United States as a country of good-intentioned citizens overcoming past sins in a relentless journey of \u201cprogress.\u201d Their journeys into the past avoid the murky stuff, the places where the country, presidents, governors and state and federal legislatures and courts took terrible wrong turns. Their laudatory histories are about \u201covercoming\u201d Dredd Scott, \u201coutlawing\u201d slavery, and lauding the man who said \u201cHave you no decency\u201d to Joe McCarthy. I\u2019ve read no accounts of how many slaves were forcibly returned to their slave masters, or how Joe McCarthy came to be a ranting, soul-destroying man of his times who held the popular and honorable President Eisenhower at bay. And I learned only recently, from black historian Ibram X. Kendi, that many\u2014maybe a majority\u2014of abolitionists paired anti-slavery with a desire to return slaves to Africa. I learn from a recent history that my state, Oregon, with a similar state of mind, outlawed slavery in our 1859 constitution\u2014as it wrote black \u201cexclusion\u201d into the same document.<\/p>\n After reading Lepore and McCullough, I went on to read Kendi\u2019s Stamped from the Beginning<\/em>; John Treuer\u2019s Heartbeat of Wounded Knee;<\/em> Kent Nerburn\u2019s Neither Wolf Nor Dog<\/em>; Ta-Nehisi\u00a0Coates\u2019 Between the World and Me<\/em>; Louise Erdrich\u2019s historical novel of her grandfather, The Night Watchman<\/em>; Claudio Saunt\u2019s devastating account of Indian removal, Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory; <\/em>and Greg Nokes\u2019 Breaking Chains: Slavery on Trial in the Oregon Territory.<\/em> I reread Guns, Germs and Steel, and revisited chapters about the impact of diseases on indigenous Americans in Charles Mann\u2019s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus<\/em>. I retrieved Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee<\/em> from the book shelf; it was published in 1970, has been translated into 17 languages, and has never gone out of print! When I finish it, I\u2019ll go back to Alvin Josephy\u2019s Patriot Chiefs,<\/em> first published in 1961, and in print for most or all of the last 60 years.<\/p>\n True history of our United States has been out there all along. Black Americans and American Indians have known and lived it, and they are now writing it in the books mentioned above, and in many more. New historians, sometimes called \u201cenvironmental historians\u201d because they pay attention to climate, geography, and disease in interpreting the past, are shedding new light on old history\u2014confirming what indigenous knowledge has long held.<\/p>\n Yet Lepore and McCullough have their followings. I propose that it is largely made up of people with an underlying belief in \u201cprogress\u201d and American exceptionalism. I don\u2019t think either of the authors I am picking on set out to be \u201canti-Indian,\u201d but that their firm belief in American progress framed their thinking and disallowed the stories that Saunt found about Indian Removal in the Jackson era. (Arthur M.\u00a0Schlesinger, Jr., another classic liberal American historian, failed to mention the Cherokee removal in 1946 his Pulitzer Prize-winning The\u00a0Age of Jackson).<\/em><\/p>\n Kendi\u2019s notion of \u201cprogress\u201d is quite different than that of Lepore or McCullough\u2014a story of African Americans struggling to find their place in a continually hostile America. \u00a0For American Indians, progress now is return to treaties and old ways of dealing with the land and its resources. They are not dreamy about rejecting everything of modern America, but growing increasingly confident that their own beliefs and ways of life before colonization have things to teach us still.<\/p>\n And enough regular American citizens\u2014and world citizens\u2014see reason in Black and Indian interpretations, and continue to search for the true stories to keep Dee Brown, Josephy, and Jared Diamond in print, and allow new Black, Indian, Asian, and sympathetic white writers\u2019 books space on bookshelves. They might not replace the historians of progress, but they are increasingly important in offering different visions of our past\u2014and roads to the future.<\/p>\n # # #<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I\u2019ve been on a history reading jag the last few months. It started with a comment I heard from Alvin Josephy many times\u2014that the \u201cstandard\u201d histories of America leave Indians out when they don\u2019t lie about them. My first book was These Truths:\u00a0 A History of the United States, by Harvard historian and regular and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":46,"featured_media":35081,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","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":[231,510,1281],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/library.josephy.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/PatriotChifs.jpeg?fit=200%2C287&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35080"}],"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\/46"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35080"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35080\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35081"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}