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New Books in Native American and Indigenous Studies You Need to Read on Indigenous Peoples’ Day

October 12, 2020

For decades Native American and Indigenous activists have advocated for a move away from Columbus Day. They argue that such commemorations are a reminder of the genocide of Indigenous peoples in the Americas that followed the arrival of Europeans in the region. Because of Indigenous peoples’ activism, legislatures across the US have started to replace the holiday celebrated on October 12th with Indigenous people’s day. This shift is about more than one day of the year. Instead, it encompasses a broader discussion about sovereignty, recognition, and accountability.

In the United States, there are 574 federally recognized tribes and hundreds of others with varying levels of state or federal recognition (or no recognition at all). Earlier this year when the Supreme Court ruled that much of the Eastern portion of Oklahoma remains under Native American jurisdiction in McGirt v. Oklahoma (2020), many people were cautiously optimistic. The ruling was a major victory for Native people and upheld a treaty that outlined the boundaries of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. However, just last week the EPA granted the State of Oklahoma regulatory control over Indian Country within the state and marked yet another reminder that Native sovereignty is constantly under threat. 2020 has also seen a watershed moment in protests by Indigenous peoples in Central and South America. In Chile, Mapuche activists continue to organize and protest for recognition and to regain control of their lands. In Honduras, on July 18, 2020, 5 Garifuna land rights advocates were kidnapped by individuals believed to be tied to the military. Their disappearance was followed by protests and outrage in the region. However, Alberth Centeno, Milton Martínez, Suami Mejía, Gerardo Róchez, and Junior Mejía have not been seen since.

At the University of Texas at Austin, Native American and Indigenous students in the NAIS program (Native American and Indigenous Studies) joined members of the Miakan-Garza Band of the Coahuiltecan tribe in lobbying for the return of ancestral remains currently housed at one of UT’s research labs, to their descendants. For four years, the Miakan-Garza Band has asked UT to return their ancestor’s remains, and in September, after a meeting between UT students and President Jay Hartzell, there was a breakthrough. President Hartzell wrote to the Miakan-Garza Band that the university planned to begin the process of returning the remains so they could be reburied. The process itself is ongoing. This week the Native American and Indigenous Studies Program is hosting a week of digital events to celebrate Indigenous people’s week. If you would like to support the work of the NAIS program or the repatriation efforts of the Miakan-Garza Band, I’d encourage you to visit their websites.

On Indigenous Peoples’ Day this year, we should all do the work. That means learning the Indigenous histories of our region, supporting programs that support Native students, and supporting Native authors, artists, and activists every day, not just October 12th. As a starting point, we compiled a list of 6 new books in Native American and Indigenous Studies written by and about Indigenous authors you absolutely should read this year.

Monumental Mobility: The Memory Work of Massasoit by Lisa Blee and Jean M. O’Brien (University of North Carolina Press, 2019)

“Installed at Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1921 to commemorate the tercentenary of the landing of the Pilgrims, Cyrus Dallin’s statue Massasoit was intended to memorialize the Pokanoket Massasoit (leader) as a welcoming diplomat and participant in the mythical first Thanksgiving. But after the statue’s unveiling, Massasoit began to move and proliferate in ways one would not expect of generally stationary monuments tethered to place. The plaster model was donated to the artist’s home state of Utah and prominently displayed in the state capitol; half a century later, it was caught up in a surprising case of fraud in the fine arts market. Versions of the statue now stand on Brigham Young University’s campus; at an urban intersection in Kansas City, Missouri; and in countless homes around the world in the form of souvenir statuettes. As Lisa Blee and Jean M. O’Brien show in this thought-provoking book, the surprising story of this monumental statue reveals much about the process of creating, commodifying, and reinforcing the historical memory of Indigenous people. Dallin’s statue, set alongside the historical memory of the actual Massasoit and his mythic collaboration with the Pilgrims, shows otherwise hidden dimensions of American memorial culture: an elasticity of historical imagination, a tight-knit relationship between consumption and commemoration, and the twin impulses to sanitize and grapple with the meaning of settler-colonialism.”

These People Have Always Been a Republic: Indigenous Electorates in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, 1598–1912 by Maurice B. Crandall (University of North Carolina Press, 2019)

“Spanning three hundred years and the colonial regimes of Spain, Mexico, and the United States, Maurice S. Crandall’s sweeping history of Native American political rights in what is now New Mexico, Arizona, and Sonora demonstrates how Indigenous communities implemented, subverted, rejected, and indigenized colonial ideologies of democracy, both to accommodate and to oppose colonial power. Focusing on four groups–Pueblos in New Mexico, Hopis in northern Arizona, and Tohono O’odhams and Yaquis in Arizona/Sonora–Crandall reveals the ways Indigenous peoples absorbed and adapted colonially imposed forms of politics to exercise sovereignty based on localized political, economic, and social needs. Using sources that include oral histories and multinational archives, this book allows us to compare Spanish, Mexican, and American conceptions of Indian citizenship, and adds to our understanding of the centuries-long struggle of Indigenous groups to assert their sovereignty in the face of settler colonial rule.”

The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies by Tiffany Lethabo King (Duke University Press, 2019)

“In The Black Shoals Tiffany Lethabo King uses the shoal—an offshore geologic formation that is neither land nor sea—as metaphor, mode of critique, and methodology to theorize the encounter between Black studies and Native studies. King conceptualizes the shoal as a space where Black and Native literary traditions, politics, theory, critique, and art meet in productive, shifting, and contentious ways. These interactions, which often foreground Black and Native discourses of conquest and critiques of humanism, offer alternative insights into understanding how slavery, anti-Blackness, and Indigenous genocide structure white supremacy. Among texts and topics, King examines eighteenth-century British mappings of humanness, Nativeness, and Blackness; Black feminist depictions of Black and Native erotics; Black fungibility as a critique of discourses of labor exploitation; and Black art that rewrites conceptions of the human. In outlining the convergences and disjunctions between Black and Native thought and aesthetics, King identifies the potential to create new epistemologies, lines of critical inquiry, and creative practices.”

Reproduction on the Reservation: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Colonialism in the Long Twentieth Century by Brianna Theobald (University of North Carolina Press, 2019)

“This pathbreaking book documents the transformation of reproductive practices and politics on Indian reservations from the late nineteenth century to the present, integrating a localized history of childbearing, motherhood, and activism on the Crow Reservation in Montana with an analysis of trends affecting Indigenous women more broadly. As Brianna Theobald illustrates, the federal government and local authorities have long sought to control Indigenous families and women’s reproduction, using tactics such as coercive sterilization and removal of Indigenous children into the white foster care system. But Theobald examines women’s resistance, showing how they have worked within families, tribal networks, and activist groups to confront these issues. Blending local and intimate family histories with the histories of broader movements such as WARN (Women of All Red Nations), Theobald links the federal government’s intrusion into Indigenous women’s reproductive and familial decisions to the wider history of eugenics and the reproductive rights movement. She argues convincingly that colonial politics have always been–and remain–reproductive politics. By looking deeply at one tribal nation over more than a century, Theobald offers an especially rich analysis of how Indigenous women experienced pregnancy and motherhood under evolving federal Indian policy. At the heart of this history are the Crow women who displayed creativity and fortitude in struggling for reproductive self-determination.”

Hip Hop Beats, Indigenous Rhymes: Modernity and Hip Hop in Indigenous North America by Kyle Mays (Suny Press, 2018)

“Expressive culture has always been an important part of the social, political, and economic lives of Indigenous people. More recently, Indigenous people have blended expressive cultures with hip hop culture, creating new sounds, aesthetics, movements, and ways of being Indigenous. This book documents recent developments among the Indigenous hip hop generation. Meeting at the nexus of hip hop studies, Indigenous studies, and critical ethnic studies, Hip Hop Beats, Indigenous Rhymes argues that Indigenous people use hip hop culture to assert their sovereignty and challenge settler colonialism. From rapping about land and water rights from Flint to Standing Rock, to remixing “traditional” beading with hip hop aesthetics, Indigenous people are using hip hop to challenge their ongoing dispossession, disrupt racist stereotypes and images of Indigenous people, contest white supremacy and heteropatriarchy, and reconstruct ideas of a progressive masculinity. In addition, this book carefully traces the idea of authenticity; that is, the common notion that, by engaging in a Black culture, Indigenous people are losing their “traditions.” Indigenous hip hop artists navigate the muddy waters of the “politics of authenticity” by creating art that is not bound by narrow conceptions of what it means to be Indigenous; instead, they flip the notion of “tradition” and create alternative visions of what being Indigenous means today, and what that might look like going forward.”

Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty: Land, Sex, and the Colonial Politics of State Nationalism by J. Kēhaulani Kauanui

“In Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty J. Kehaulani Kauanui examines contradictions of indigeneity and self-determination in U.S. domestic policy and international law. She theorizes paradoxes in the laws themselves and in nationalist assertions of Hawaiian Kingdom restoration and demands for U.S. deoccupation, which echo colonialist models of governance. Kauanui argues that Hawaiian elites’ approaches to reforming and regulating land, gender, and sexuality in the early nineteenth century that paved the way for sovereign recognition of the kingdom complicate contemporary nationalist activism today, which too often includes disavowing the indigeneity of the Kanaka Maoli (Indigenous Hawaiian) people. Problematizing the ways the positing of the Hawaiian Kingdom’s continued existence has been accompanied by a denial of U.S. settler colonialism, Kauanui considers possibilities for a decolonial approach to Hawaiian sovereignty that would address the privatization and capitalist development of land and the ongoing legacy of the imposition of heteropatriarchal modes of social relations.”

Digital Archive Review – Authorship and Advocacy: The Native American Petitions Dataverse

September 30, 2019

By Alina Scott

An earlier version of this review was published on halperta.com.

Embedded in the (digital) archive are structures of power. The Native American Petitions Dataverse shifts those structures by attributing authorship to tribal and Native individuals in hundreds of colonial and early American era petitions and memorials. However, is attributing authorship the sole responsibility of those curating digital collections? And even more simply, how does one acknowledge Indigenous authorship in the colonial and early American archive? Jane Anderson addresses this in part by saying “wherein colonialism is understood as a cultural project of control, archives function as the locus for the cultural technology of rule” (234). A “decolonial” project, then, would be would offer counter-narratives to the dominant methods of organizing, the hierarchy of archival sources, and the voices represented in the colonial archive.

Petition of Esther Anthony (via Native American Petitions Dataverse)

By that definition, the digital structure and content of The Native American Petitions Dataverse provide a key example of gesturing towards a decolonial project. The eighteenth and nineteenth-century petition is critical to understanding the engagement of people of color with political institutions and individuals. Much like colonial-era church attendance logs can be used to understand religiosity, petitions (and their signatures) offer a way into the areas of tension between legislators and those frustrated with legislation in the early years of the Republic. For many people excluded from suffrage, petitioning provided an almost direct line to governing bodies. Native people, in particular, used petitioning intra-tribally and externally. In the northeast, Native peoples appealed to legislative bodies for equality long before petitioning’s popularization in the abolitionist and women’s suffrage movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Collective and individual petitioning efforts are essential to nuanced tellings of Native histories, and therefore, an important area of focus for digital humanists.

The Native American Petitions Dataverse offers users direct access to high resolution digitized petitions from the Massachusetts State Archive and the National Archives and Records Administration. This project is an extension of the digitization efforts of Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and is led by head investigator and Professor of Government, Daniel Carpenter, and Tribal Archivist for the Mashpee Wampanoag Community, Stephen R. Curley. This collection hosts digitized petitions by Native individuals, groups, towns, and nations (Abenaki, Chappaquiddick, Maliseet, Mohawk, Mohegan, Nipmuc, Penobscot, Pequot, Punkapoag, Wampanoag to name a few), to the Massachusetts colonial and state officials or the General Court. It also includes petitions from non-Native peoples on behalf of or that concern Native Americans.

With a format similar to the NEH funded Antislavery Petitions Massachusetts Dataverse, of which Dr. Carpenter was also a part, this collection features 644 petitions from predominantly Indigenous townships in Massachusetts, from 1640-1870. This digitization initiative is in collaboration with the Yale Papers Project with the intention to have 4500 items digitized. More importantly, this project was planned in “consultation with and with the support of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe, the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah), and the Mohegan tribe, including consultation with representatives and governments of other Northeastern tribes and native communities” (Radcliffe Institute, 2016).

The interface is simple and clean, but it provides neither contextualization of individual documents nor an explanation of the significance of the practice of petitioning in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Researchers, educators, and students will find the expansive nature of this collection a welcome addition to the already vast number of nineteenth-century legislative documents available online. Its contents highlight more nuanced perspectives on issues such as Indigenous territorial claims, land rights, religion, the abolition of slavery, and ideas about Indigenous communities in New England. And it puts Native voices and signatures, at the forefront.

Screenshot of Native American Petitions Dataverse (via author)

The labor of the archivist is on full display. The methodological priorities (tagging, keywords, citation, etc.) place signers and the groups involved in petitioning efforts at the forefront of the site. In both metadata and archivist notes, The Native American Petitions Dataverse highlights Indigenous voices, by allowing users to filter petitions by keyword term, publication year, production date (year petition was signed/submitted), and geographic coverage. This reveals opportunities to restructure classic periodization and overemphasized themes in the historiography. More significantly, chosen methods of tagging and consistent categorization increase the visibility of traditionally disenfranchised figures. I am thinking particularly about Native women’s participation in petitioning campaigns and their advocacy about issues related to both individual and tribal rights.

Take, for example, the 1762 petition of Esther Anthony, a Native woman of color from the tribe of Mashpee, but living in the town of Middleborough, Massachusetts. The informational page includes several identifiers, including the total number of signatures, the extent of legislative action, the number of signatures by women of color, tribal affiliation, and additional archivist notes (i.e., widow, Jeremiah Anthony, sale, lands, payments). At the top of the page is a full citation of the original primary source along with the petition subject (which, in this case, is property) and a link to a high-resolution photograph of the petition. In the Harvard Library viewer, users can “flip” through the selected petition or browse related petitions (left of the screen) either submitted on the same date, on similar topics, or by the same petitioners as they would be organized in an archival folder. This user-friendly layout provides ample room for researchers interested in larger historical trends, genealogical networks, or public history projects. The latter opens the door to the telling of more nuanced narratives, powerful stories, specific individuals’ names, and the movement of ideas. Dr. Carpenter demonstrates one such application in a data visualization project based on the Massachusetts Antislavery Petitioning Dataverse called “Your Humble Petitioners.” This interactive map associates geographic coordinates with the locations inscribed in the metadata of the antislavery petitions. This could very easily be replicated with the Native American petitions.

Esther Anthony’s Mark (via Native American Petitions Dataverse)

The priority to distinguish Native petitions, or petitions about Native issues, commits to a partial restructuring of the power balance of the colonial archive. However, one is forced to ask whether it goes far enough. Is attribution enough? “Authorship is foundational to the organizational framework because it operates as a core node in the classification of all materials within the modern archive”(Anderson, 230). How is authorship determined? Is that the role of the archivist or the researcher? While this archive does not answer those questions, it does open up a world of research into key figures and names in the history of Indigenous petitioning efforts in the northeast and is a valuable resource to an interdisciplinary and intertribal pool of scholars. This project shows how prioritizing authorship can make room for Native voices and advocacy in the digital humanities but leaves unresolved key contextualizing details that would further illuminate the importance of this collection.

References:

Anderson, Jane. “Anxieties of Authorship in the Colonial Archive.” In Media Authorship. Taylor and Francis, 2013. 229-246. DOI: 10.4324/9780203136010
Cort, Ben G., and Isabella S. Beroutsos. “Sections.” We The Petitioners: Rewriting the History of Massachusetts’s Native Americans. The Harvard Crimson, www.thecrimson.com/article/2016/10/6/native-american-petitions/.
Native American Petitions Dataverse Accessed November 1, 2018.

More by Alina Scott:

Missing Signatures: The Archives at First Glance
Cynthia Attaquin and a Wampanoag Network of Petitioners
The Public Archive: Woven Into History

Who Put Native American Sign Language in the US Mail?

May 17, 2018

More on the Kiowa from our featured author of the month.

by Jennifer Graber

In 1890, a strange letter with “hieroglyphic script” arrived at Pennsylvania’s Carlisle Indian Industrial School. It was sent from a reservation in the Oklahoma Territory to a Kiowa student named Belo Cozad. Cozad, who did not read or write in English, was able to understand the letter’s contents—namely, its symbols that offered an update about his family. The letter provided news about relatives’ health and employment, as well as details about religious practice on the reservation.

Letter written using Kiowa sign language. Used by permission from Dickinson Research Center, National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.

While Belo Cozad understood the letter, Americans working at the school did not. Neither did reservation officials who saw the letter once Cozad returned to Oklahoma. Anthropologists working there sent a copy to the Smithsonian’s Bureau of Ethnology, where a staff member set out to understand it. Interviewed back on the reservation, Cozad provided “translations” of the letter. The anthropologists concluded that several Kiowas, though hardly all, knew this writing system. Although Cozad insisted that his parents and grandparents had long known the practice and taught it to him, the specialists concluded that it was of “recent origin.”

Letter written using Kiowa sign language. Used by permission from Dickinson Research Center, National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.

The anthropologists were partly right. The system had only recently been put on paper. But the gestures and signs that inspired it, recently labeled by non-Natives as Plains Indian Sign Language, had been used by Kiowas for generations. Indeed, one of the Smithsonian workers likely recognized it from earlier work on Native signing systems. The marks on Cozad’s letter mimicked the signs for individual words. A circle followed by four loops signifies four brothers. Three horizontal lines stand for the number three. A box with vertical lines, followed by a swooping downward and then upward line, means that someone has been buried in a grave. Together, the signs tell Cozad that he no longer had four brothers, but only three. One had recently died and been buried.

Symbols relating the death and burial of Cozad’s brother. Used by permission from Dickinson Research Center, National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.

With this letter, Cozad’s family took an old form, Plains Indian Sign Language, and adapted it for their new situation. With the hope of reaching their kin in boarding school, they had put signs onto paper and placed it in the US mail.

Kiowas displayed a similar capacity to adapt older forms from the realm of religious practice. Ritual gatherings, especially their version of the Plains Indian Sun Dance, were threatened by declining buffalo herds and, eventually, military supervision and criminalization. Even so, Kiowas found ways to adapt their Sun Dance rites to new conditions, including purchasing buffalo hides from Texas ranchers and choosing ceremony sites far away from government supervision.

They also experimented with new sources of sacred power. Between 1868 and the end of the century, some Kiowas borrowed peyote rites from neighboring indigenous peoples. Soon, Kiowas developed their own peyote songs and added peyote to the pantheon of beings and things imbued with power. Other Kiowas accepted the message of Wovoka, the Paiute leader of the movement that came to be known as the Ghost Dance. They danced with the expectation that relatives who had died and depleted buffalo herds would be restored. Still others considered Christian missionaries’ proclamation about Jesus as a powerful figure who provided healing in this life and heaven in the next.

Kiowa ritual life followed a pattern recognizable in the Cozad’s sign language letter, namely the adaptations of older forms for new and difficult situations. For generations, Kiowas had gathered to seek blessing, protection, healing, and empowerment from beings imbued with dwdw, or sacred power. At Sun Dances, these efforts focused on the sun and the buffalo. In other venues, Kiowas sought visions and healing that could be bestowed from powerful animals, plants, or places. Often, Kiowas presented offerings as they made supplications, or to signal their thankfulness when blessings were received.

In their letters, Cozad’s family took the long-practiced gestures of sign language and sent them across the hundreds of miles that separated the reservation and boarding school. Kiowa religious life exhibited a similar pattern. For the sake of connecting family and maintaining land in a desperate colonial situation, Kiowas sought new ways to engage sacred power. Even as they looked to new sources, they maintained the postures of supplication, the same tokens of thanks. Cozad’s letter included references to these new practices. The writers tell Cozad, through signs, that Jesus is looking down over all the tipis and beyond in the four cardinal directions.

Symbols show Jesus looking over the Native Americans. Used by permission from Dickinson Research Center, National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.

The relatives encourage Cozad to pray to Jesus. They also signal the diversity of religious forms among Kiowa people. At the letter’s end, through signs that stand for the moon and the morning star, the family relates that a fellow Kiowa has been out singing peyote songs.

Symbols relate how one Kiowa experimented with peyote rites. Used by permission from Dickinson Research Center, National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.

In a period of unwelcome and devastating change, Kiowas did new things. They tried peyote rites and Christian prayer. They wrote letters and put them in the US mail. But all these things reflected older ways of being and doing. And all these things functioned to maintain family, kin, nation, and land in an increasingly perilous situation.

This article originally appeared on the OUPblog, May 9, 2018.

For Native Americans, Land Is More Than Just the Ground Beneath Their Feet

October 26, 2016

By Kelli Mosteller

This article originally appeared in The Atlantic on September 17, 2016.

Thousands of Native American protesters are currently fighting against the proposed construction of the Dakota Access pipeline in North Dakota. They are doing more than just trying to protect their land. They are fighting for their culture—and, as the Ojibwe activist Winona LaDuke argues, their future. Advances on Indian lands have always been, and continue to be, attacks on indigenous values. Non-tribal governments and corporations with interests in tribal land have not slowed such attacks in recent years, but members of indigenous communities throughout the United States have rallied new resistance. Some, like the Standing Rock Sioux in North Dakota, are challenging corporate incursions on their treaty lands and water. Others are fighting something slightly more subtle: renewed calls to change the ownership structure of Native lands.

Rally against the Dakota Access Pipeline in September 2016 (via Fibonacci Blue).

Conflicts over the use and ownership of Native lands are not new. Land has been at the center of virtually every significant interaction between Natives and non-Natives since the earliest days of European contact with the indigenous peoples of North America. By the 19th century, federal Indian land policies divided communal lands among individual tribal members in a proposed attempt to make them into farmers. The result instead was that struggling tribes were further dispossessed of their land. In recent decades, tribes, corporations, and the federal government have fought over control of Native land and resources in contentious protests and legal actions, including the Oak Flat, the San Francisco Peaks Controversy, and the Keystone XL pipeline.

For most Americans, land is money, and land ownership constitutes power. For individuals who are not familiar with tribal cultures and histories, it is easy to assume that the ability to make money off of land by leasing it to extractive industries or selling it off is a natural path to personal success and therefore prosperity for the community at large. Make no mistake: For Native people, a link exists between landownership and success, but it is much more complex and intimate than the personal ability to exploit or sell land for financial gain. Not all communities are facing the same kind of crises, but almost all recognize the importance of land to cultural preservation. Whether in our ancestral homelands, such as those where the Lakota have stopped the construction of the pipeline, or in areas of Oklahoma, where more than two dozen tribes were forcefully placed during the 19th century, protecting our tribal land bases is an intrinsic part of the formula that will lead to greater prosperity and success for individuals and tribes in Indian country.

Forced displacement routes of Native Americans in the 19th century (via Wikimedia Commons)

That is the reason why protests to defend treaty-protected lands, like the current protests over the Dakota Access pipeline, are so important. It is also the reason why thousands of Native people, representing scores of tribes, have made the journey to North Dakota to protest the pipeline that threatens both sites that are sacred to the Sioux people and the drinking water for those living on the nearby reservation. They are there to speak for their ancestors who are buried on those sites. They are there to speak for themselves and their right to preserve their ceremonial sites and drinking water. And they are there to speak for the subsequent generations who will have to live with the results of the pipeline’s construction.

Proponents of privatization, be they corporations or well-intentioned free-market reformers, are disregarding Indian culture and values. The author Naomi Schaefer Riley, for instance, recently published an article in The Atlantic suggesting that Native American communities suffer from economic devastation and social inequity due to the federal policy of holding Native American lands in trust. Her solution to this policy, which she argues has stymied individual success and contributed to endemic poverty in Native American communities, is the resurrection of a much older, failed solution: the redistribution of lands collectively held by tribes to individuals.

Pine Ridge Reservation, one of the North Dakota reservations threatened by the Dakota Access Pipeline (via Wikimedia Commons).

Reform-minded authors like Schaefer Riley begin making their case by citing a number of terrifying statistics about poverty on reservations, violence against Native women, and teen suicide rates, among others. All are largely factual. Schaefer Riley’s solution, however, creates a false dichotomy, suggesting that success is limited to either the individual or the tribe. She claims that tribal citizens’ inability to privately own, and therefore capitalize on, tribal lands, “prevents American Indians from reaping numerous benefits.” This is a narrow interpretation of the resources and policies that would benefit Natives, and it disregards the cultural and spiritual values at the core of Native American tribal societies.

This frame of reference also fails to acknowledge that Native communities face the arduous task of overcoming these social challenges as a direct result of centuries of federal policies that disassembled traditional social structures, moved entire communities, and attempted to dismantle tribal sovereignty. Virtually every one of those policies had an end goal of eliminating tribal rights to land and advanced a non-Native understanding of how to properly “use” land.

While Schaefer Riley is correct that social problems persist on some reservations, she neglects to consider that since the passage of the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975 and the Tribal Self-Governance Act of 1994, hundreds of tribes have consistently shown improvement when allowed to manage their own affairs. Self-governance means that tribal governments decide where and how to allocate resources for certain programs, such as health care via funding from the Indian Health Service, to meet the needs of their community. Although more needs to be done, the solution proposed by Schaefer Riley would constitute an assault on tribal lands, not a path to prosperity.

Native Americans flee from the allegorical representation of Manifest Destiny in this 1872 painting by John Gast (via Wikimedia Commons).

On reservation lands, a tribe decides what type of infrastructure its community needs; this can include health clinics, schools, housing for low income families and elders, cultural centers, and a wide range of enterprises. My own tribe, the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, is the largest employer in Pottawatomie County, a relatively rural area of central Oklahoma. We provide jobs to more than 2,400 people, Natives and non-Natives, in our government administration offices and more than 20 businesses. This is only possible because we have tribally owned land on which to develop and operate enterprises. Across Indian Country, tribes are often one of the few sources of jobs in areas far from urban centers, and they are increasingly at the forefront of industries like tourism and green energy.

Tribes should also be able to determine what constitutes success for themselves, and have recently done so by pursuing policy initiatives that recognize tribal sovereignty on their land, not by focusing on private property rights that would break it apart. In 2012 Congress passed a critical piece of legislation that provides tribes an avenue to greater sovereignty and will lead to more investment and economic development in Indian country. The Helping Expedite and Advance Responsible Tribal Homeownership (HEARTH) Act gives participating tribes the authority to lease reservation, or trust land, for residential or business purposes without further approval by the federal government. This advancement in self-governance means that tribes are able to determine the housing or commercial projects that are the most needed in their communities and the best way to utilize their land base. It also means they have more direct control of tribal assets, which makes them better able to shape their own future. Unlike land privatization, the HEARTH Act keeps the tribally owned trust or reservation land intact, and therefore does not negate the federal government’s trust responsibilities for those properties.

Two women from the Idle No More movement, an indigenous rights alliance in Canada (via Wikimedia Commons).

Beyond such policies, efforts to help Native Americans gain socio-economic success should start by looking at what holds specific tribes back from taking advantage of avenues for more self-governance and economic development. Some tribes face daunting challenges that present a barrier to pursuing economic development projects. Instead, they are combating life-threatening social and emotional upheaval rooted in cultural loss as a result of wars, genocide, forced removals, separation from ancestral homelands, children taken away to boarding schools, and other experiences that negatively impacted tribal communities across generations. Brutal federal policies that focused on assimilation pushed Native people to accept a narrow concept of what it means to be a successful American. Recovering, preserving, and teaching Native cultural traditions gives community members direction, purpose, and a sense of identity. It also instills generational wisdom, encourages respect for elders, and reinforces familial responsibilities. Only when a tribe restores its cultural riches can it turn its attention to financial gains.

There are ways to address economic and social challenges for Native Americans within a tribal system that don’t undermine the fundamental nature of the tribe or destroy the land base necessary to create a strong and thriving community. Native people across the country are steadily making strides toward that goal, and their successes are a testament to the courage and resilience of their communities. We will heal our broken communities from the ground up, not by selling or exploiting the ground beneath our feet.

You may also like:

Not Even Past contributors survey The American West, Native Americans, and Environmental History.
Nakia Parker explores The First Texans: An Exhibit in Jester Hall.
Caroline Murray discusses Mapping Indigenous Los Angeles: A Public History Project.

US Survey Course: The American West, Native Americans, and Environmental History

June 28, 2016

During the summer of 2016, we will be bringing together our previously published articles, book reviews, and podcasts on key themes and periods in the history of the USA. Each grouping is designed to correspond to the core areas of the US History Survey Courses taken by undergraduate students at the University of Texas at Austin.

Erika Bsumek discusses Navajo Artisans at the Trading Post, a late nineteenth-century Navajo rug held in the Art and Art History Library Collection at the University of Texas, and recommends more books on Navajo Arts and the History of the U.S. West

Book Recommendations:

Nathan E. McCormack recommends Karl Jacoby’s Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History (Penguin, 2008).

And here is another from Karl Jacoby, Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation, (University of California Press, 2003), suggested by Henry Wiencek.

Continuing with an environmental approach to history, Hannah Ballard recommends The Republic of Nature, by Mark Fiege (University of Washington Press, 2012)

Hannah Ballard reviews 38 Nooses: Lincoln, Little Crow, and the Beginning of the Frontier’s End, by Scott W. Berg (Vintage, 2012).

Nakia Parker recommends Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South, by Barbara Krauthamer (University of North Carolina Press, 2013)

Jacqueline Jones suggests Denis Johnson’s novella Train Dreams.

James Jenkins reviews The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies, by Alan Taylor (Vintage, 2010)

And finally, Erika Bsumek, David Kinkela, and Mark A. Lawrence highlight their broad environmental history Nation States and the Global Environment: New Approaches to International Environmental History, (Oxford University Press, 2013), and five great books on the Environment on History & History in the Environment.

Erika Bsumek and Kyle Shelton show the importance of studying history and discuss their innovative course bringing the Humanities and STEM together, ‘Building America: Engineering Society and Culture, 1868-1980’.

From 15 Minute History: The Social Legacy of Andrew Jackson

Andrew Jackson’s presidency marked the introduction of a real maverick to the White House: a frontiersman from Tennessee, not part of the Washington elite, who brought the ideas of the people to the national government — or, at least that’s what his supporters claimed. But Jackson’s lasting political legacy instead comes from expanding the vote to all white males (not just landholder), and the tragic effects of the Indian Removal Act of 1830.

Guest Michelle Daneri from UT’s Department of History helps us sort through the political forces that brought Jackson to office, and the long lasting impact of his presidency.

Texas:

Nakia Parker explores an exhibit on the First Texans.

Neel Baumgartner discusses the history of Big Bend National Park.

And finally, Nathan Jennings highlights three fascinating sources held in the Briscoe Center for American History at UT Austin:

Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South, by Barbara Krauthamer (2013)

March 26, 2014

by Nakia Parker

For decades, scholars peered at the painful and complex topic of American slavery through a purely “black-white” lens—in other words, black slaves who had white masters. The sad reality that some Native Americans, (in particular, the Creek, Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole, or “the Five Tribes”) also participated in chattel and race-based slavery, was rarely acknowledged in the historical annals. Only in the latter part of the 20th century did historians begin to address this oversight. Several groundbreaking studies recognized the momentous repercussions of this practice for Native and African American populations alike during the antebellum era and down to the present day. Barbara Krauthamer, a professor of Native American and African American history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, adds an exhaustive and compelling contribution to the research in this area. The first full-length monograph chronicling chattel slavery in the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations, Krauthamer amply demonstrates how both before and after the era of Indian Removal in the mid-nineteenth century slavery also intersected with issues of race and gender in complicated ways.

Krauthamer tracks white commodification and enslavement of Choctaw and Chickasaw bodies starting in the late seventeenth century and its transition to the commodification and enslavement of black bodies by Choctaw and Chickasaw slaveholders in the eighteenth century. In addition, Krauthamer adroitly debunks the myth that the main cause for American Indian participation in chattel slavery stemmed from their desire for European, and later American goods, unable to resist the inescapable forces of the market economy and capitalism. Krauthamer acknowledges the catastrophic economic consequences of the American seizure of Indian lands, of the racist rhetoric that Native Americans needed to be properly “civilized,” and of the exigencies caused by depletion of the deer population, which severely curtailed trade opportunities. But she persuasively argues that the decision to engage in chattel slaveholding resulted from a conscious and deliberate choice on the part of Indian slaveholders to embrace racial ideology that “degraded blackness and associated it exclusively with enslavement.” For some influential and wealthy members of the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations, adopting race-based slavery provided the most efficient way to maintain an increasingly tenuous hold on political and cultural autonomy in the face of aggressive American expansion, while pursuing self-interested economic and diplomatic goals.

Holmes_Colbert — *Holmes Colbert, a prominent leader in the Chickasaw Nation and the owner of several enslaved African-Americans (Wikimedia Commons)*

Krauthamer also addresses the “leniency thesis” that many early scholars of Native American history advocated — that life under the yoke of an Indian master was somehow more “benevolent” than enslaved life under whites — but that has been successfully challenged, by Tiya Miles and Claudio Saunt among others. By the mid-nineteenth century, laws existed in both nations that banned intermarriage between blacks and Indians: for example, Choctaw lawmakers allowed white men to achieve citizenship through marriage to a Choctaw woman, but forbade “a negro or descendent of a negro” from enjoying the same privilege; likewise, in the Chickasaw nation, the punishment for “publicly taking up with a negro slave” was a steep fine, whipping, or the ultimate punishment, banishment from the nation and the dissolving of all kinship ties. Krauthamer also cites accounts from WPA slave narratives detailing instances of physical and sexual abuse at the hands of Native American owners.

*Chickasaw Freedmen filing for allotment in Oklahoma (Oklahoma Historical Society)*

Krauthamer also shows that despite horrific conditions, enslaved people living in “Indian country” engaged in covert and overt forms of resistance. One particularly compelling experience of slave resistance concerns the story of Prince, who, angered that his Choctaw owner Richard Harkins failed to give his slaves a Christmas celebration, brutally murdered him and then unceremoniously dumped the body into the river in 1858. Prince finally confessed, but implicated his Aunt Lucy in the crime. Although Lucy denied her involvement and no evidence existed to prove that she participated in the murder, Lavinia Harkins, the widow of the murdered man and thus also Lucy’s owner, demanded that Lucy be burned alive along with Prince. This harrowing tale highlights the intersections of race, gender, and power relations that informed the interactions between “black slaves and Indian masters” in Indian Territory.

PI013 — *Peter Pitchlynn, or “Hat-choo-tuck-nee,” a Choctaw chief and later tribal delegate to Washington (LC-USZ62-58502, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.)*

Even Emancipation and the end of the Civil War did not bring immediate relief to the enslaved living in the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations. Although the Choctaw and Chickasaw sided with the Confederacy during the conflict, the United States considered them to be separate political polities; therefore, the abolition of slavery as stated in the Thirteenth Amendment did not apply in Indian Territory. Instead, the Choctaw/Chickasaw treaty of 1866 outlined the details of emancipation, citizenship, and land claims for the Freedmen, but inextricably (and problematically) linked these issues with Indian sovereignty, land rights, and annuities—one could not be obtained without the other. This knotty situation became further complicated with the passage of laws enacted by Choctaw and Chickasaw political leaders that seem eerily similar to the “Black Codes” of the Reconstruction era South. Former slaves in Choctaw country who did not have a work contract could be arrested for “vagrancy” by the lighthorsemen (police force) and then be auctioned off to the highest bidder—slavery by another name. Once again, the now emancipated slaves in Indian Territory, in particular African-American men, engaged in resisting these harsh measures and formed groups that lobbied for political and economic justice before the Freedmen’s Bureau and Indian leaders.

Riverside, the home of Benjamin Franklin Colbert at Colbert's Ferry — *Riverside, the home of Benjamin Colbert in Colbert’s Ferry, OK (Oklahoma Historical Society)*

Black Slaves, Indian Masters proves a much needed addition to African American and Native American histories of slavery. Krauthamer uses an exhaustive number of sources to bolster her argument–slave narratives, government records, personal correspondence of Indian leaders such as diaries and letters, and official papers of the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations. Her work not only expands the lens of the study of slavery beyond the “black and white,” but also can provide insight into the current tensions and issues of citizenship and identity existing between descendants of the enslaved and nations such as the Cherokee and Seminole today.

In 2011, Dr. Krauthamer was a fellow at The Institute for Historical Studies at UT-Austin. During this time, she delivered a workshop “Enslaved women and the Politics of Self-Liberation.”

You can fin d Black Slaves, Indian Masters here. And be sure to explore Envisioning Emancipation, a powerful collection of photographs portraying the lives of enslaved and freed African-Americans that Dr. Krauthamer compiled with renowned photographic historian Deborah Willis.

IHS Book Roundtable: “Our First Civil War: Patriots and Loyalists in the American Revolution” by H. W. Brands, University of Texas at Austin

December 2, 2022

Our First Civil War: Patriots and Loyalists in the American Revolution
(Doubleday, 2021)

From best-selling historian and Pulitzer Prize finalist H. W. Brands comes a gripping, page-turning narrative of the American Revolution that shows it to be more than a fight against the British: it was also a violent battle among neighbors forced to choose sides, Loyalist or Patriot.

What causes people to forsake their country and take arms against it? What prompts their neighbors, hardly distinguishable in station or success, to defend that country against the rebels?  That is the question H. W. Brands answers in his powerful new history of the American Revolution.

George Washington and Benjamin Franklin were the unlikeliest of rebels. Washington in the 1770s stood at the apex of Virginia society. Franklin was more successful still, having risen from humble origins to world fame. John Adams might have seemed a more obvious candidate for rebellion, being of cantankerous temperament. Even so, he revered the law. Yet all three men became rebels against the British Empire that fostered their success.

Others in the same circle of family and friends chose differently. William Franklin might have been expected to join his father, Benjamin, in rebellion but remained loyal to the British. So did Thomas Hutchinson, a royal governor and friend of the Franklins, and Joseph Galloway, an early challenger to the Crown. They soon heard themselves denounced as traitors–for not having betrayed the country where they grew up. Native Americans and the enslaved were also forced to choose sides as civil war broke out around them.

After the Revolution, the Patriots were cast as heroes and founding fathers while the Loyalists were relegated to bit parts best forgotten. Our First Civil War reminds us that before America could win its revolution against Britain, the Patriots had to win a bitter civil war against family, neighbors, and friends.

Dr. H. W. Brands is Professor of History and Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair in History at The University of Texas at Austin. He has written thirty books, coauthored or edited five others, and published dozens of articles and scores of reviews. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the International Herald Tribune, the Boston Globe, the Atlantic Monthly, the Smithsonian, the National Interest, the American Historical Review, the Journal of American History, the Political Science Quarterly, American History, and many other newspapers, magazines and journals. His writings have received critical and popular acclaim. The First American and Traitor to His Class were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Prize. Several of his books have been bestsellers. Dr. Brands is a member of various honorary societies, including the Society of American Historians and the Philosophical Society of Texas. He is a regular guest on national radio and television programs, and is frequently interviewed by the American and foreign press. His writings have been published in several countries and translated into German, French, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

Discussants:

Robert A. Olwell
Associate Professor of History
The University of Texas at Austin
https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/history/faculty/olwellra

Alan Tully
Chair (Interim), and Eugene C. Barker Centennial Professorship in American History
The University of Texas at Austin
https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/history/faculty/tullywa1

IHS Podcast – E Pluribus Tria: Colonial Racial Formation in the Making of American Culture

February 11, 2022

This episode of IHS podcasts highlights the work of Dr. James Sidbury, Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Professor of Humanities and Professor of History at Rice University where he is also a faculty member of the Center for African and African American Studies . The episode also features Dr. Cañizares-Esguerra, the Director of the IHS, and Ashley Garcia, a PhD Candidate in History at UT Austin.

Introduction

In his forthcoming book E Pluribus Tria: Colonial Racial Formation in the Making of American Culture, James Sidbury explores the origin in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century continental British America of corporate boundaries among European settlers, Native Americans, and Black people, along racial color lines.

How did the Linnaean classification of humans around alleged skin “color” (white, red, and black) become a lived reality for these three communities by the late eighteenth century? Both Black and Native people became foreigners (slaves or savages) in a new republic that only extended the franchise to white people as citizens. Black people responded by developing religious and political collective identities of new Israelites, an elected people awaiting delivery in a new promised land of freedom, Africa. Native American peoples also managed to overcome fragmented ethnic identities to become one new people, “Indians.” Pontiac and Tecumseh led Native Americans into broad pan-ethnic military alliances. Yet “Indians” never fully developed a corporate racial identity, for Native Americans kept incorporating ethnic outsiders as kin by raiding captives. In this podcast, Sidbury traces the slow emergence of broad corporate identities around race in British continental America.

Sidbury argues that race was not just the product of European ideologies of whiteness: Top down taxonomies imagined by naturalists and settlers. Race was a slow process of corporate boundary creation through epidemics, deep demographic transformation, warfare, land dispossession, and plantation violence.

~ Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra

Guest

Dr. James Sidbury is the Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Professor of Humanities and Professor of History at Rice University where he is also a faculty member of the Center for African and African American Studies. He received his PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 1991 and taught at the University of Texas at Austin from 1991 until 2011. He is a historian of race and slavery in the English-speaking Atlantic world from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century with a special interest in the ways that non-elite peoples conceived of their histories and, through their histories, their collective identities. He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on Atlantic History, Early North American History, and the history of race and slavery in the United States and the Caribbean.

Hosts

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra is Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin and the Director of the Institute for Historical Studies.

Ashley Garcia is a PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research includes 19th century political history, American communitarianism, and American political thought. Her dissertation, “An American Socialism: The Associationist Movement and Nineteenth Century Political Culture,” explores America’s most popular utopian socialist program: the Associationist movement of the 19th-century. Ashley has also completed a Portfolio in Museum Studies as her secondary PhD field.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Review of The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West by Megan Kate Nelson (2020)

October 5, 2021

by Gwendolyn Lockman

Megan Kate Nelson. The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West. New York: Scribner, 2020. xx+331 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index.

Megan Kate Nelson has written a captivating history of the southwestern theater of the American Civil War. There more than one war took place as different groups of people envisioned futures dependent on control of the region. The balance of perspectives makes it clear the Civil War was not just a battle for the preservation of the Union, or for those states that had seceded, but rather a multicultural war for control of much of the North American continent. The Union, the Confederacy, Mexico, the Apache, and Navajo (Diné) all fought for control of land, water, resources, and trade. Skirmishes in the West were layered contests among several parties. While historians often acknowledge the importance of the West in determining the fate of slavery in an expanding nineteenth-century United States, few have tackled the southwestern theater as Nelson has in The Three Cornered War.

Nelson’s writing is largely narrative and caters to a more popular audience. The layering of history compels the cultural, borderlands, and environmental historian while the details of battles captivate the military history enthusiast. Excerpts from letters and diaries as well as summaries of dialogue entertain those hunting for good stories. Nelson recounts an epic western tale with a contemporary scholastic skillset that earned her a nod as a Pulitzer finalist in 2020.

The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West

The book balances several viewpoints of the conflict, including the perspectives of men and women, Unionists and Confederates, Mexicans, and Indigenous people. She adjusts the perspective with each chapter, unfolding the narrative through a different person’s viewpoint every ten or fifteen pages. People, rather than larger-than-life forces, are at the center of this story about power and property in the Southwest.

The book uses the stories of nine individuals to detail the battles between nations, armies, and ideas in what would become the Southwestern United States. Those people are: Mangas Coloradas, Apache leader; Juanita, wife of Diné warrior Manuelito; Alonzo Ickis, miner turned Union soldier; John Clark, New Mexico Surveyor General; Louisa Canby, wife to Union Colonel Edward Richard Sprigg Canby and nurse to injured soldiers; James Carleton, Union Colonel; Kit Carson, Southwestern frontiersman and Union Brigadier General; John Robert Baylor, Confederate Brigadier General from Texas; and Bill Davidson, a Confederate soldier and Texas lawyer.

Mangas Coloradas Stands with a rifle by his side. — *Mangas Coloradas, circa 1884. Source: Library of Congress.*

If there are any characters missing from this story, they are African Americans, whose fate in the West was in the balance (as Nelson reminds us). She notes that enslaved Blacks in Confederate held Arizona Territory were few and mostly held by Confederate military officers (83). Slavery in The Three Cornered War focuses on Mexican enslavement of Indigenous Americans. However, the reader is left to assume the Confederate vision of empire would expand the system of race-based enslavement as far west as California. This vision could have also included enslaving Indigenous Americans had the Confederate States of America endured.

The Three Cornered War concentrates on the events between 1861 and 1868, with background details for Nelson’s main characters inserted as needed. The eastern theater of the war appears only as snippets of news. The Southwestern theater was a set of wars all its own. Not only were the Union and the Confederacy competing in their visions of manifest destiny, but Mexicans fought to regain claims recently lost to the United States in the Mexican American War of the 1840s, the Apache fought to maintain Apachería, and the Navajo fought to maintain Diné Bikéyah.

Nelson does not overtly discuss borderlands in the ways scholars of the field might desire, but she does evocatively illustrate the malleability of boundaries in the New Mexico Territory in the 1860s. Land changes hands, borders move, access to water, resources, and overland routes are contested, and recent wins and losses remain only barely settled in The Three Cornered War. This tension makes abundantly clear that the present-day borders of the United States were far from predestined. The Confederates had strategized a plan for their own transcontinental railroad to connect California to Georgia, and the rebels intended for slavery to flourish across the continent, perhaps even capturing more land from Mexico.

Johnson and Ward’s “New Military Map” shows the United States' forts and military posts, circa 1862. The New Mexico Territory included present-day Arizona and New Mexico as well as southern Nevada. — Johnson and Ward’s “New Military Map” shows the United States’ forts and military posts, circa 1862. The New Mexico Territory included present-day Arizona and New Mexico as well as southern Nevada. Source: Library of Congress.

Unlike the skirmishes further east, armies in the Southwest were small: casualties could quickly devastate any of the bands of soldiers and warriors in conflict. The Apaches and Navajos fought to keep Anglos and Hispanos alike out of their lands. Mexican officials heard diplomatic pleas from both the Union and the Confederacy but attempted to delay decision making until a victor prevailed. The book includes several maps to help the reader situate the movements of these groups and the quickly changing landscape of the southwest.

Nelson makes clear that these contingencies often depended on the actions of military leaders who acted without seeking approval, in large part because there simply was not adequate time to communicate with distant officials before circumstances changed. Dishonorable and treacherous war tactics were constant, and seemed necessary, but could face delay or prohibition from central authorities. The southwestern theater was a place where men gambled with their lives, but the winnings made it worthwhile.

Though the Union won the conflict and control of the land, Nelson reminds readers this came at a price and made the United States’ objectives contradictory. She writes, “These struggles for power in the West exposed a hard and complicated truth about the Union government’s war aims: that they simultaneously embraced slave emancipation and Native extermination in order to secure an American empire of liberty” (252). The price for the eradication of race-based slavery in the United States was the very sovereignty of its native peoples. In this three-cornered conflict, the United States sharpened its blades against all in the name of liberty granted only on the Americans’ terms.

Fighting against Oblivion and Obscurity: Asian American Studies and its Place in U.S. Education

May 25, 2021

By Jian Gao

After receiving my two doses of Pfizer, I decided that it was time to depart a bit from my hermetic lifestyle, re-socialize, and gradually reinsert myself back into the society. While meeting new people, I always introduce myself as a graduate student at UT Austin studying the history of Chinese in Mexico. Upon hearing my dissertation topic, people often react with a mix of bewilderment, fascination, and surprise as they have not heard of the existence of a Chinese population in Mexico. Intrigued, people always ask more about my research. Unsurprisingly, one of the most frequent questions is “Why and how did the Chinese end up in Mexico?”

In response, I explain that most of the early Chinese in Mexico came from the United States. In fact, the history of Chinese Mexicans is an offshoot of the broader history of Chinese Americans. Perceiving the inquisitive eyes of my audience, I explain that during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Chinese Americans frequently encountered racial violence and systemic discrimination, rendering their lives extremely challenging. In particularly, the Page Act of 1875, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and the subsequent exclusionary laws against Asian Americans restricted the mobility of the Chinese save for a few who belonged to exempt classes. The laws criminalized and deported Chinese Americans who did not have the required paperwork, effectively making the Chinese the first “illegal aliens” in the United States.[1] Under these harrowing conditions, many Chinese entered Mexico to seek refuge and start new lives.

Before I’m able to proceed and talk more about the Chinese in Mexico, however, people often stop me as they are surprised to hear that the United States, branded as the “nation of immigrants,” at one point had a law called “the Chinese Exclusion Act.” Indeed, so far, none of the people I have talked with, including those from California, have ever heard of such law—a law that fundamentally transformed U.S. immigration policy and regulation, the effects of which are still being felt by tens of millions of people today.[2] Many initially thought I was joking, and others went away with disbelief. Presumably, the humanities education they received in high school and college glossed over the history of Asian Americans, if such history was mentioned at all.

*Toy Vendors in San Francisco’s Chinatown” [ca. 190-] by Arnold Genthe. Source: The Library of Congress*

Am I surprised that most Americans have never heard of the Chinese Exclusion Act? Perhaps but the oblivion and the obscurity of Asian American history in U.S. education is no coincidence. In her superbly researched book, Beth Lew-William shows that unlike African Americans who suffered from extralegal violence and Native Americans dispossession, the Chinese mainly suffered from exclusion, or what she termed “violent racial politics.”[3] By shutting the Chinese outside of the borders of the United States and assigning foreignness onto their racial features, white supremacists successfully rendered Asian Americans invisible and made them into perpetual outsiders. The exclusion of Asian Americans directly impacted how their history has been written and taught.

Back when I was in high school, the six-hundred-page textbook we used for our AP U.S. history class, entitled The History of the American People,[4]only contained one or two pages on Asian Americans, a phenomenon that many students across the country have encountered.[5] And even those pages that mentioned Asian Americans privileged the perspectives of white supremacists whose descriptions and caricatures of the Chinese reified and reinforced the notion that Asians did not belong in the United States. Given the peripheral and obscure place of Asian Americans in history textbooks, it is not surprising that the vast majority of people outside the history profession have never heard of the Chinese Exclusion Act.

The erasure and obscuring of Asian American history in the textbooks reflects structural problems of knowledge production and dissemination at the university-level. Since universities train secondary school teachers and professional historians often write or contribute to history textbooks, the lack of Asian American history in k-12 education is rooted in the deficient representation of Asian American studies at the tertiary level. Numerous reports show that institutions of higher education have been slow to support disciplines related to Asian American Studies, further smothering the development of the field and the nurturing of the next-generation of scholars. For instance, with Asian Americans comprising more than twenty percent of its student body, Harvard University has not done nearly enough to support Asian American Studies.[6] It does not have an Asian American Studies department, and faculty whose research focuses on Asian Americans are rare.[7] Amid student protests, the administration hesitantly agreed to do more but no substantial action has been taken so far.[8]

Recent surveys have also found that Asian American students are underrepresented in the humanities,[9] including history, and their numbers have declined rapidly over the past decade.[10] Ironically, around the same time that this decline was happening, the Asian population in the United States and the number of Asian American college students soared.[11] One important factor that led Asian Americans away from the humanities is likely that many of these students found themselves and their history unincluded in the discipline.[12]

Figure 1: Change in History Majors, 2011-17. The decline in history majors occurred among all racial and ethnic groups in the past decade. However, such decline was the steepest among Asian Americans. Source: American Historical Association

All of these data raises a central question: Why are institutions like Harvard with substantial Asian American populations reluctant to establish and support programs that can potentially appeal to at least a quarter of their students, especially when the students themselves perennially ask for these educational opportunities? I believe that the idea that Asian Americans and Asian American history are peripheral, obscure, and unimportant coupled with the model minority myth has contributed to the reluctance of universities to provide educational resources for studies related to Asian Americans.[13]

The consequences of thrusting Asian American history into oblivion and assigning it a marginal place both inside the textbooks and in the broader educational system are severe and disheartening. If rising anti-Asian violence nationwide in the past year, including the horrific Atlanta spa shootings, is any indication, it is clear that many still perceive Asian Americans as peripheral, dispensable, perpetually foreign, and extraneous to the U.S. society. The marginal place of Asian American history in U.S. education and the underrepresentation of Asian Americans in the humanities surely contributed to the misrepresentation of the wider Asian population in the United States.

Fortunately, over the past few years, several universities have begun to develop Asian American Studies programs following persistent demands from students and the rising anti-Asian incidents in the recent past. In August 2018, Princeton University created a certificate program for Asian American Studies, which increased its course offerings on Asian American studies from one to three classes per semester to five in the spring of that year.[14] At Duke University, after more than twenty years of persistent student protests, the administration finally established an Asian American Studies Program in 2019.[15] In late April of this year, the University of Arizona announced the establishment of an Asian Pacific American Studies Minor as “the result of more than two decades of work and comes at a time of highly visible anti-Asian racism and violence in the United States.”[16]

Figure 2: Asian American Studies across the United States. Blue pins signify standalone centers or departments of Asian American Studies while red signifies that Asian American Studies are incorporated in the broader ethnic studies programs. Conspicuously, UT Austin remains one of the few institutions with an Asian American Studies program in southern United States. Courtesy of the Center for Asian American Studies at UT Austin. Made with Google Maps.

However, as noted by many students and faculty, establishing these programs is just the first step. Often, universities created these programs without adequately supporting them in the long term. Without hiring enough faculty and investing resources, the establishment of new ethnic studies programs frequently means that the existing faculty have to take on additional burdens, which leads to high rates of attrition and burnout.[17] Indeed, some programs are comprised of just one or a handful of tenured or tenure-track faculty members and offer a very limited range and number of courses.[18] Given these data, the future of these inchoate Asian American studies programs at Princeton, Duke, and Arizona is still unknown.

Despite these challenges, many students, especially Asian Americans, were thrilled to see that classes related to Asian American studies were being offered for the first time. Some were also surprised to learn that there is so much intellectual breadth and depth in Asian American Studies as textbooks in secondary schools rarely provide such information.[19] Like other ethnic studies programs, however, Asian American Studies are not just for Asian American students. The discipline speaks to all who want to have a deeper understanding of the racial and ethnic diversity of the United States and learn about American history through a different perspective. It can enhance interethnic understandings and solidarity as well as provide an ideal platform for global studies and migration policy studies. Ultimately, such knowledge would be useful for anyone working in any field.[20]

Asian American Studies programs are conspicuously rare in the southern United States with only a handful of universities offering formal programs. In an expansive geographical space stretching from the coasts of South Carolina and Florida to New Mexico, it appears that the University of Texas at Austin is the only institution that offers a program in Asian American studies (see figure 2).[21] Currently, the Center for Asian American Studies at UT Austin offers both a major and a minor in Asian American Studies as well as a graduate portfolio program.[22] As the Asian American population continues to grow at both the state and national level and as contacts between Asia and the United States become increasingly common in a globalizing world,[23] I have no doubt that the demand for Asian American studies will rise accordingly. I am certain that the Center for Asian American Studies at UT Austin will increase in its importance as an academic unit for students of diverse backgrounds in the years to come.

[1] Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2004).

[2] Erika Lee, At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003).

[3] Beth Lew-Williams, The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2018), 7.

[4] “Out of Many: The History of the American People,” Amazon, accessed May 10, 2021, https://www.amazon.com/Out-Many-American-Faragher-2005-06-16/dp/B01K2O6E12/ref=sr_1_13?dchild=1&keywords=Out+Of+Many%3A+A+History+of+the+American+People&qid=1620665175&s=books&sr=1-13

[5] “Why Are Asian Americans Missing from Our Textbooks?” Pacific Standard, March 16, 2017, accessed May 10, 2021, https://psmag.com/news/why-are-asian-americans-missing-from-our-textbooks

[6] “Faculty Page of the Department of History,” Harvard University, accessed May 17, 2021, https://history.fas.harvard.edu/faculty_alpha

[7] As of May 17, 2019, Ju Yon Kim, a professor of English, remains the only Harvard faculty on Asian American studies. See “Ju Yon Kim is Building from the Inside,” The Harvard Crimson, May 17, 2019,accessed May 18, 2021, https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2019/5/17/harvards-only-asian-american-studies-professor/#:~:text=When%20Kim%20took%20her%20job,Asian%20American%20Studies%20faculty%20member.&text=That%20changed%20when%2C%20during%20her,Asian%20American%20and%20feminist%20literature; See also; “Students and Alumni Call For Ethnic Studies Department in Wake of Professors’ Departures,” The Harvard Crimson, February 4, 2019, accessed May 18, 2021, https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2019/2/4/ethnic-studies-professors-departures; “Search for Harvard Ethnic Studies Faculty Suspended Indefinitely Due to Pandemic,” The Harvard Crimson, April 16, 2020, accessed May 18, 2021, https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2020/4/16/ethnic-studies-search-suspended/

[8] “Will Harvard continue to fail Asian Americans—or will it learn from the past?,” The Washington Post, February 12, 2019, accessed May 10, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/will-harvard-continue-to-fail-asian-americans–or-will-it-learn-from-the-past/2019/02/12/80fb1492-2f04-11e9-86ab-5d02109aeb01_story.html; “At Harvard, Asian-American students urge diversity efforts beyond admissions,” The Boston Globe, February 9, 2019, accessed May 10, 2021, https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2019/02/09/harvard-asian-american-students-urge-diversity-efforts-beyond-admissions/TMzB9hZvzH6VxJDA5h9WAN/story.html “Harvard students call for ethnic studies program after Asian American Studies professors depart,” The Daily Pennsylvanian, February 6, 2019, accessed May 10, 2021, https://www.thedp.com/article/2019/02/harvard-asian-american-program-ethnic-studies-penn-bacow-asam-tenure. See also “Students and faculty reflect on the status of Asian American studies at Yale,” Yale News, May 2, 2021, accessed May 17, 2021, https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2021/05/02/students-and-faculty-reflect-on-the-status-of-asian-american-studies-at-yale/

[9] “Racial/Ethnic Distribution of Advanced Degrees in the Humanities,” American Academy of Arts and Sciences, accessed May 17, 2021, https://www.amacad.org/humanities-indicators/higher-education/racialethnic-distribution-advanced-degrees-humanities; “Racial/Ethnic Distribution of Bachelor’s Degrees in the Humanities,” American Academy of Arts and Sciences, accessed May 17, 2021, https://www.amacad.org/humanities-indicators/higher-education/racialethnic-distribution-bachelors-degrees-humanities

[10] “The History BA Since The Great Recession The 2018 AHA Majors Report,” Perspectives on History, November 26, 2018, accessed May 10, 2021, https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/december-2018/the-history-ba-since-the-great-recession-the-2018-aha-majors-report

[11] “Asian Americans are the fastest-growing racial or ethnic group in the U.S.,” Pew Research Center, April 9, 2021, accessed May 17, 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/04/09/asian-americans-are-the-fastest-growing-racial-or-ethnic-group-in-the-u-s/; “Asian American and Pacific Islander Students in Higher Education,” The Postsecondary National Policy Institute, May 11, 2021, accessed May 17, 2021, https://pnpi.org/asian-americans-and-pacific-islanders/#

[12] “Why are Asian Students Leaving the Humanities?” AsAmNews, June 9, 2020, accessed May 10, 2021, https://asamnews.com/2020/06/09/asian-students-in-humanities-struggle-to-get-their-parents-to-accept-their-major/

[13] On model minority myth see Madeline Y. Hsu, The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015) and Ellen D. Wu, The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014).

[14] “University approves certificate program in Asian American studies,” Princeton University, April 30, 2018, accessed May 17, 2021, https://ams.princeton.edu/news/2017-18/university-approves-certificate-program-asian-american-studies

[15] “After 50 years, Asian American studies programs can still be hard to find,” NBC News, June 27, 2019, accessed May 10, 2021, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/after-50-years-asian-american-studies-programs-can-still-be-n1022331

[16] “New Asian Pacific American Studies Minor Launches at ‘Vital Time in Our History’,” University of Arizona News, April 28, 2021, accessed May 17, 2021, https://news.arizona.edu/story/new-asian-pacific-american-studies-minor-launches-vital-time-our-history

[17] “Underfunded, Underrepresented Despite the lack of formal departments, ethnic studies programs remain vital for Northwestern students,” North by Northwestern, n.d., accessed May 18, 2021, https://northbynorthwestern.com/underfunded-underrepresented/; “Asian American faculty, staff and students call for establishment of Asian American studies program,” The Dartmouth, Mar 29, 2021, accessed May 18, 2021, https://www.thedartmouth.com/article/2021/03/asian-american-faculty-staff-and-students-call-for-establishment-of-asian-american-studies-program; “Tenure Denied,” Inside Higher Ed, May 17, 2016, accessed May 18, 2021, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/05/17/campus-unrest-follows-tenure-denial-innovative-popular-faculty-member-color

[18] “Students, faculty continue decades-long struggle to uplift Asian American Studies,” February 18, 2021, accessed May 17, 2021, https://www.cavalierdaily.com/article/2021/02/students-faculty-continue-decades-long-struggle-to-uplift-asian-american-studies; “Asian American Studies prof.’s departure reignites concern over lack of support for program,” The Daily Pennsylvanian, accessed May 17, 2021, https://www.thedp.com/article/2021/03/david-eng-leaving-penn-asian-american-studies-program-concerns; See also “Asian American Studies Faculty Page,” Dartmouth College, accessed May 17, 2021, https://asian-american.dartmouth.edu/people; “Asian American Studies Faculty Page,” University of Pennsylvania, https://asam.sas.upenn.edu/index.php/people/faculty; “AASP Faculty,” Cornell University, accessed May 17, 2021, https://asianamericanstudies.cornell.edu/faculty

[19] “Racist attacks revive Asian American studies program demand,” AP News, May 15, 2021, accessed May 17, 2021, https://apnews.com/article/race-and-ethnicity-health-coronavirus-pandemic-lifestyle-education-75e52566e991e492d60b55ec7c38830a

[20] “Without Asian American Studies, We Can’t Understand American Racism,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 5, 2021, accessed May 17, 2021, https://www.chronicle.com/article/without-asian-american-studies-we-cant-understand-american-racism; “New Asian Pacific American Studies Minor Launches at ‘Vital Time in Our History’,” University of Arizona News, April 28, 2021, accessed May 17, 2021, https://news.arizona.edu/story/new-asian-pacific-american-studies-minor-launches-vital-time-our-history

[21] See “Asian American Studies,” Google Map, accessed May 18, 2021, https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/viewer?oe=UTF8&ie=UTF8&msa=0&mid=1gheEEJScqCrdG-qp1F6dO8dV4aw&ll=36.20718669030337%2C-114.427031&z=4

[22] “Center for Asian American Studies,” The University of Texas at Austin, accessed May 18, 2021, https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/aas/index.php

[23] Texas, behind California, has the second largest increase in Asian population among all the states in the past decade. See “Asian Americans are the fastest-growing racial or ethnic group in the U.S.,” Pew Research Center, April 9, 2021, accessed May 17, 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/04/09/asian-americans-are-the-fastest-growing-racial-or-ethnic-group-in-the-u-s/

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