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Not Even Past

Native Literatures and Indigenous Peoples’ Day: A Brief Historiography

by Alina Scott

October 14th is what most people know as Columbus Day. However, for many Indigenous peoples, the celebration of Christopher Columbus is a reminder of the generations of trauma and settler conquest of Native nations and lands. For that reason, several states, including Alaska, Minnesota, Vermont, and South Dakota (and cities like Austin), have chosen to rename the holiday Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Native activists have been at the forefront of this movement. Here is a twitter thread discussing the global campaigns to reframe the day:

I'm going to be tweeting about #IndigenousPeoplesDay a lot this weekend. I think about it a lot since I've been working on multiple #IPD campaigns during the past 4 years. pic.twitter.com/73jk2IHt3J

— ndnviewpoint (@mahtowin1) October 12, 2019

It is difficult to study or teach American history without including Native peoples. That said, many historians limit mention of Indigenous peoples to the period before 1776 or even 1840, but the narrative that the cultures died or were replaced by the United States relegates Native peoples to the past, furthers the colonial project of erasure, and simply does not do enough scholarly diligence. There is a difference between talking about Native peoples and teaching Native histories. “Decolonizing your syllabus” by including one Indigenous, Black, or POC scholar is not sufficient either.

On Indigenous Peoples’ Day, I’d like to suggest some easy additions to your syllabus, playlists, and bookshelf. This is a brief review of some seemingly untraditional academic works by Native authors, scholars, artists, and creators. My reflection on Native literature here includes scholarship in a number of forms that could easily be incorporated into a syllabus or added to your Comprehensive Exam List. This list is a starting point and I’d encourage readers to go further by listening to Native leaders, scholars, and artists.

 

ART

Images via Blanton Museum of Art and FrankWaln.com

The Blanton Museum of Art recently featured the work of Cherokee and Choctaw artist, Jeffrey Gibson in an exhibit called “Jeffrey Gibson: This Is the Day.”  Gibson’s art was recognized by the MacArthur Foundation when he was awarded a 2019 MacArthur Genius grant. The exhibit was celebratory, sincere, and visually stunning. Gibson’s talent was on full display in a wide range of pieces. They included sculptures, textiles, paintings, film, even several boxing bags. Descriptions of each piece were written by Gibson himself.  (They are generally written by exhibit curators so to have Gibson’s narration was an honor!)

View of Jeffrey Gibson: This Is the Day at the Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, July 14, 2019–September 29, 2019 (via Blanton Museum of Art)

A room of the exhibition hall was dedicated to the ghost shirt, a garment used by ghost dancers during the ceremony but reinterpreted here by Gibson. Each ghost shirt carries its own symbolism and messaging.  Gibson’s use of a wide range of materials, textiles, prints, and textures allows his work to explore ideas of race, sexuality, gender, and religion. Gibson’s perspective bridges cultural practices and modern art forms and visualizes coalitions in the global struggle for Indigenous rights. Gibson wrote, “A garment acts as the mediator between the wearer–myself in this case– and the rest of the world. It can protect me, draw attention to me, celebrate me, allow me to be another version of myself.” The exhibit closed on September 29th, but you can find out more about Gibson’s work on his website.

Frank Waln’s “What Makes The Red Man Red” and “AbOriginal” are must listens. The music video for the former shows imagery and lyrics from Disney’s Peter Pan (1953). Scholars and social commentators have observed the obvious racism in the almost 70-year-old animated film, however, Waln’s work includes both audio clips and an answer to the question “what makes the red man red”?:

You made me red when you killed my people
Made me red when you bled my tribe
Made me red when you killed my people
(Like savages/ Like savages)

In “AbOriginal,” Waln goes home. The lyrics talk of life in his reservation— the pains, protests, and resilience that comes from his tribe.

I got this AB Original soul/ I got this AB Original flow
 I got this pain that I can’t shake/ ties to my people I can’t break
Got this history in my blood/ got my tribe that shows me love
So when I rise/ you rise/ come on let’s rise like

Similarly, the music video pays tribute to Waln’s tribe and hometown in Rosebud, South Dakota. (ALSO–today he is releasing “My People Come From the Land,” a track that he worked on in collaboration with a Lakota language teacher and is his debut of playing the Native flute.)

 

PODS

Cherokee scholar Adrienne Keene (@NativeApprops) and Swinomish and Tulalip photographer Matika Wilbur (@matikawilbur) host the All My Relations Podcast. Their podcast bridges Keene’s expertise in the history of appropriations of Native culture and Wilbur’s interest in the modern for a truly delightful podcast. Their guests include academics, tribal elders, creatives, aunties, and artists. Their latest episode, “Beyond Blood Quantum” features Charlotte Logan, Gabe Galanda, Tommy Miller, and David Wilkins, and discusses the tribal implications, legal basis, and colonial origins of blood quantum.

Rick Harp (Peter Ballantyne Cree Nation) hosts Media Indigena, with regular roundtable guests Candis Callison, Brock Pitawanakwat, Kim TallBear, and Kenneth T. Williams. The scholars, journalists, and policymakers discuss the latest developments in North American news and the direct impact on Indigenous peoples in the 21st century. The conversations are pointed and nuanced. Each guest brings their expertise and insight into the complex issues facing Indian Country. Their latest episode, which was recorded live in Edmonton, Alberta, is called “Is the Green Movement Still Too White?” and looks at the global green movement, the media attention that propelled Greta Thunberg into the spotlight, and some of the pushback from Native Twitter.

This Land, a Crooked Media podcast hosted by Rebecca Nagle (Cherokee Nation) is especially timely.  Nagle unpacks how a 20-year-old murder case in Oklahoma made it to the Supreme Court in 2019, the history of land divisions in Indian Territory, the Trail of Tears,  and the long-term ramifications for tribal sovereignty and Native land rights.

BOOKS & BOOKLISTS

Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers (2019) is edited by Elissa Washutta and Theresa Warburton. This is one of the best books I’ve read as a graduate student and holds a permanent place on my shelf. The collection was composed with care and intention. As the editors described it, Shapes of Native Nonfiction is meant to hold structure throughout like a basket. The collection is structured in four terms based on the basket metaphor: technique, coiling, plaiting, and twining. Each represents a different style of non-fiction writing The editors and contributors are speaking directly to the idea that the academic essay is the only valid form of nonfiction. Form here is critical to the decolonial process. The editors write, “our focus on form-conscious Native nonfiction insists on knowledge as a resource whose coercive extraction is used to narrate settler colonialism in order to normalize its structure.”(11). It is a phenomenal collection specific to individuals, peoples, and places.

Daniel Heath Justice’s Why Indigenous Literatures Matter calls into question basic assumptions about what makes up Indigenous literature and, as the title states, why they matter. Justice’s work urges readers to expand their view of what should be considered “Indigenous Literature.” This work is accessible to the generalist and the specialist, yet acknowledges their added significance: “our literatures are just one more vital way that we have countered those forces of erasure and given shape to our own ways of being in the world…they affirm Indigenous presence– and our present.” (xix)

The Elizabeth Warren Syllabus, which seems to become timelier every year, combines the specialties of several scholars already mentioned and citizens of the Cherokee Nation: Adrienne Keene (@nativeapprops), Rebecca Nagle (@rebeccanagle), and Joseph M. Pierce (@pepepierce). The syllabus was meant to not only address Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren’s claims to Cherokee ancestry but to contextualize the history of such claims by non-natives to Native ancestry. The Syllabus is structured by theme and topic and generally touches on the ideas of DNA and genetic testing, Indigenous citizenship, Cherokee history, erasure, cultural appropriation, blood, and tribal sovereignty. The syllabus was published in the Journal of Critical Ethnic Studies.

Finally, one way to observe Indigenous Peoples’ Day is to support the UT Native American and Indigenous Studies program and institutions that support Native students. Show up to events. Rally around causes. The NAIS Program provides an undergraduate certificate and graduate portfolio for UT students and also hosts a number of speaker series and workshops. This semester’s lineup includes Angelo Baca (Hopi/Diné), Tiya Miles, Héctor Nahuelpan (Mapuche), and Roxana Miranda Rupailaf (Mapuche). Consider attending one or several of these events.

Happy Indigenous Peoples’ Day!

Related Links:

  • Kū Haʻaheo Music Video
  • Young climate activists working with Greta Thunberg you should know
  • Red New Deal
  • Red Nation Podcast  (They are relaunching on Indigenous Peoples’ Day with 3 new episodes!)
  • The 184-Year-Old Promise to the Cherokee Congress Must Keep
  • A Tribe Called Red
  • Tanya Tagaq
  • Frank Waln’s Treaties
  • Billy Ray Belcourt’s This Wound Is a World
  • Abigail Echo-Hawk on the art and science of ‘decolonizing data’
  • IllumiNative
  • Native Appropriations
  • #HonorNativeLand: A Guide and Call to Acknowledgement 

You might also like:

Authorship and Advocacy: The Native American Petitions Dataverse by Alina Scott
Who Put Native American Sign Language in the US Mail? by Jennifer Graber
For Native Americans, Land Is More Than Just the Ground Beneath Their Feet by Kelli Mosteller


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.

2019 History PhDs on Not Even Past

This month on Not Even Past we are celebrating the accomplishments of seventeen students who completed their doctoral dissertations and received their PhDs in History in 2018-2019. Above you see some of them pictured. Below you will find each of their names and the title of their dissertations.

Many of these students were also contributors to Not Even Past throughout their time here, developing their skills as public historians alongside their training as a academics. Here we offer a comprehensive index to all our new PhDs’ publications on Not Even Past.  Congratulations to all!

Ahmad Tawfek Agbaria
Dissertation: The Return of the Turath: Arab Rationalist Association 1959-2000

Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation through Popular Culture by Ziad Fahmy (2011)

Israeli tanks advancing on the Golan Heights. June 1967 (via Wikipedia)

Christopher Babits
Dissertation: To Cure a Sinful Nation: Conversion Therapy in the United States

The Miseducation of Cameron Post (Dir: Desiree Akhavan, 2018)

Digital Teaching: A Mid-Semester Timeline

The Blemished Archive: How Documents Get Saved

Age of Fracture by Daniel T. Rodgers (2011)

Nature Boy, 30 for 30 (Dir: Rory Karpf, 2017)

Doing History in the Modern U.S. Survey: Teaching with and Analyzing Academic Articles

Finding Hitler (in All the Wrong Places?)

The Rise of Liberal Religion by Matthew Hedstrom (2013)

Encountering America: Humanistic Psychology, Sixties Culture, and the Shaping of the Modern Self by Jessica Grogan (2012)

Another Perspective on the Texas Textbook Controversy

Religious Book Week Poster from 1925 (via Library of Congress)

Bradley Joseph Dixon
Dissertation: Republic of Indians: Law, Politics, and Empire in the North American Southeast, 1539-1830

Facing North from Inca Country: Entanglement, Hybridity, and Rewriting Atlantic History

Map of Virginia, discovered and as described by Captain John Smith, 1606; engraved by William Hole (Via Wikimedia commons)

Luritta DuBois
Dissertation: United in Our Diversity: The Reproductive Healthcare Movement, 1960-2000

Historical Perspectives on Marshall (dir. Reginal Hudlin, 2017)

UT Gender Symposium: Women’s Bodies and Political Agendas

Thurgood Marshall in 1957 (Library of Congress)

Dennis Fisher
Dissertation: To Not Sell One Perch: Algonquin Politics and Culture at Kitigan Zibi During the Twentieth Century

The Many Histories of South Austin: The Old Sneed Mansion

A 1936 photograph of the Sneed House taken by the Historic American Buildings Survey (via Library of Congress)

Kristie Flannery
Dissertation: The Impossible Colony: Piracy, the Philippines, and Spain’s Asian Empire

A New History Journal Produced by Students

#changethedate: Australia’s Holiday Controversy

Acapulco-Manila: The Galleon, Asia and Latin America, 1565-1815

Notes from The Field: The Pope in Manila

Outlaws of the Atlantic by Marcus Rediker (2014)

Among the Powers of the Earth: the American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire by Eliga Gould

Sixteen Months in a Leaky Boat

The Sapphires (2012)

2012 and the End of the World: The Western Roots of the Maya Apocalypse by Matthew Restall and Amara Solari (2011)

Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America edited by Andrew B. Fisher and Matthew D. O’Hara (2009)

True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey (2001)

Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War by Tony Horwitz (1999)

detail of an 18c map depicting a pirate ship sailing near the Philippines.

Pedro Murillo Velarde and Nicolas de la Cruz Bagay. Mapa de las yslas Philipinas (1744) (Detail: Benson Latin America Collection, UT Austin)


Travis Michael Gray
Dissertation: Amid the Ruins: The Reconstruction of Smolensk Oblast, 1943-1953

Every Day Stalinism, by Sheila Fitzpatrick (2000)

Stalin’s Genocides by Norman Naimark (2011)

Soviets fighting during World War II (via wiki commons)

William Kramer
Dissertation: Faith, Heresy and Rebellion: Resisting the Henrician Reformation in Ireland, 1530-1540

Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, and Edward VI (via Art Institute of Chicago)

John Lisle
Dissertation: Science and Espionage: How the State Department and the CIA Deployed American Scientists during the Cold War

What Killed Albert Einstein

This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age by William Burrows (1998)

Soviet postage stamp celebrating the 10th anniversary of the launch of the Sputnik satellite

James Martin
Dissertation: In Search of the Nixon Doctrine on Latin America: Levers of Influence and Resistance in Hemispheric Relations

Vice President Richard Nixon’s motorcade drives through Caracas, Venezuela and is attacked by demonstrators, May 1958 (National Archives via Wikipedia)

Kazushi Minami
Dissertation: Rebuilding the Special Relationship: People’s Diplomacy and U.S.-Chinese Relations in the Cold War

Peeping Through the Bamboo Curtain: Archives in the People’s Republic of China

Cold War Crucible: The Korean Conflict and the Postwar World by Hajimu Masuda (2015)

Past and Present in Modern China

Historical Perspectives on Hayao Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises (2013)

shot from animated film of a boy looking up at airplane in the sky

from Hayao Miyazaki’s film The Wind Rises

Elizabeth O’Brien
Dissertation: Intimate Interventions: The Cultural Politics of Reproductive Surgery in Mexico, 1790-1940

Partners in Conflict: The Politics of Gender, Sexuality, and Labor in The Chilean Agrarian Reform, 1950-1973 by Heidi Tinsman.

Gendered Compromises: Political Culture and the State in Chile, 1920-1950 by Karin Rosemblatt

The Deepest Wounds: A Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil by Thomas D. Rogers (2010)

“Women Advance with the Flag of the Motherland” La Unidad Popular poster (1970).

Nakia Parker
Dissertation: Trails of Tears and Freedom: Black Life in Indian Slave Country,1830-1866

Popular Culture in the Classroom

The First Texans: An Exhibit in Jester Hall

Confederados: The Texans of Brazil

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

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

Christopher Rose
Dissertation: On the Home Front: Food, Medicine, and Disease in WWI Egypt

You’re Teaching WHAT?

Wrong About Everything

Mapping & Microbes: The New Archive (No. 22)

Searching for Armenian Children in Turkey: Work Series on Migration, Exile, and Displacement

Industrial Sexuality: Gender in a Small Town in Egypt

Texas is Adopting New History Textbooks: Maybe They Should Be Historically Accurate

Exploring the Silk Road

The Ottoman Age of Exploration by Giancarlo Casale (2010)

What’s Missing from ‘Argo’ (2012)

Chris is also the co-founder and main force behind our podcast, 15 Minute History, where he has done many of our interviews.

Map showing typhus outbreaks in Egypt, September 1, 1914 – May 31, 1919 (created by Chris Rose)


Edward Flavian Shore
Dissertation: Avenger of Zumbi: The Nature of Fugitive Slave Communities and Their Descendants in Brazil

 

History and Advocacy: Brazil and Turmoil

Sanctuary Austin: 1980s and Today

Beyonce as Historian: Black Power at the DPLA

Remembering Willie “El Diablo” Wells and Baseball’s Negro League

The Public Historian: Giving it Back

The Quilombo Activist’s Archives and Post-Custodial Preservation, Part II

The Quilombo Activist’s Archives and Post-Custodial Preservation, Part I

An Anticipated Tragedy: Reflections on Brazil’s National Museum

The Public Historian: Quilombola Seeds

Getz/Gilverto Fifty Years Later: A Retrospective

Por Ahora: The Legacy of Hugo Chávez Frías

The Cuban Connection by Eduardo Saénz Rovner (2008)

Che: A Revolutionary Life by Jon Lee Anderson

Narco-Modernities

Photo from Edward Shore’s Collection

Eyal Weinberg
Dissertation: Tending to the Body Politic: Doctors, Military Repression, and Transitional Justice in Brazil (1961-1988)

Our History Mixtape: Embracing Music in the Classroom

Ex Cathedra: Stories by Machado de Assis: Bilingual edition (2014)

For Social Peace in Brazil: Industrialists and the Remaking of the Working Class in Sao Paulo, 1920-1964 by Barbara Weinstein (1996)

The Works Progress Administration’s music project employed musicians as instrumentalists, singers, concert performers, and music teachers during the Great Depression (via Library of Congress)

Zhaojin Zeng
Dissertation: Nourishing Shanxi: Indigenous Entrepreneurship, Regional Industry, and the Transformation of a Chinese Hinterland Economy, 1907-2004

 

Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State by Yansheng Huang (2008) 

Cantonese bazaar during Chinese New Year at the Grant Avenue, San Francisco, circa 1914 (via Wikipedia)

Pictured in photo: Dr. John Lisle, Prof Daina Berry, Dr. William Kramer, Dr. Nakia Parker, Prof. Ann Twinam, Dr. Christopher Rose, Dr. Elizabeth O’Brien, Dr. Eyal Weinberg.

Letter to the Editor

Not Even Past will publish letters to the editor with educational or scholarly merit. When the letter concerns a post on Not Even Past, the author of the article will be invited to respond. We encourage letter writers to refrain from ad hominem discourse. Joan Neuberger, Editor.

Remarks on Jesse Ritner’s “Paying for Peace: Reflections on the ‘Lasting Peace’ Monument.“

Having designed a class that engages students with original texts surrounding the Meusebach-Comanche Treaty, I read Jesse Ritner’s contribution with great interest. He makes valuable observations about the political position of the Comanche, and attempts to take on the Native American perspective which happens far too seldom. I believe, however, that we should recognize the significance of the Treaty of Fredericksburg.

An image of the Meusebach-Comanche Treaty of 1847
The Meusebach-Comanche Treaty of 1847. Texas State Library and Archives Commission

Germans in 1847 did not see themselves as “Anglo-European” settlers. Accordingly, Meusebach launched his expedition without consent of the government (Neighbors and the Delaware followed him), arranged for his own Mexican translator and designated a German Indian agent who remained with the Comanche. The effect was interesting. In a quote attributed to Penateka chief Kateumsi, he finds the Germans to be “less reserved” than the Americans.[1] The Penateka also noticed other cultural differences. A Houston newspaper of May 1847 reads: “[The Comanche] say they are more willing for the Germans to settle in their country than the Texians, for the former settle in towns and villages and do not scatter over the countryside and kill the game as the Texians do.”[2] Money was never the only consideration.

As a German freethinker, Meusebach brought a very exceptional view to Texas. None of his letters indicate he wanted a military solution. It is true that the “Comanche did not forfeit land rights in the treaty.” But he had no expectation that they should. Meusebach suggested a treaty of integration, not of separation. Engraved in the treaty was the spirit of the idealistic European revolutions of 1848. During a speech delivered at the negotiations, Meusebach exhibited racial sensibilities that differed radically from his contemporaries. He suggested intermarriage between Germans and the Comanche, spoke of the unimportance of skin color and mused about young Germans learning the Comanche language.[3]

One of the first settlements in the grant area was founded by German Forty-Eighters. Among the group was a doctor named Ferdinand Herff who successfully performed cataract surgery on a Comanche chief.[4] The episode further strengthened trust. Evidence that Germans were viewed favorably for a few years also comes from a travel account by Friedrich Schlecht from 1848. When he encountered a band of Comanche, the chief shared coffee with him, and told him that had he been of “those who […] had broken their treaties on numerous occasions” he would not have hesitated to scalp him.[5] The Comanche not only understood geopolitics, they also recognized differences in ethnicity and attitude among those they dealt with.

Whether the treaty remains unbroken is a different question. As Roemer predicted, violence erupted as early as 1850.[6] The significance of the treaty, however, and the reason it is still celebrated by Comanche and German descendants, is that it points to a conceivable alternative to the ethnic cleansing of most Native Americans from Texas territory that eventually occurred.

David Huenlich, Research Fellow, Institut für Deutsche Sprache, Zentrale Forschung, (Ph.D. UT Austin, 2016)

[1] Penninger (1896), Fest-Ausgabe zum 50-Jährigen Jubiläum der Gründung der Stadt Friedrichsburg, p. 91
[2] Daily Telegraph and Texas Register [Houston, TX], Monday, May 10, 1847
[3] Penninger (1896), Fest-Ausgabe zum 50-Jährigen Jubiläum der Gründung der Stadt Friedrichsburg, p. 104f
[4] Handbook of Texas Online, Glen E. Lich, “BETTINA, TX,” accessed October 22, 2018, http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/hvb55
[5] Schlecht (1851), Mein Ausflug nach Texas, p. 74
[6] Wurster (2011), Die Kettner Briefe, p. 19f


Jesse Ritner replies:

I would like to thank David Huenlich for his thoughtful response to my article on the Meusebach-Comanche Treaty of 1847 and the “Lasting Peace” monument that commemorates it in Fredericksburg, Texas. I appreciate his insight into the role of the Indian Agent, R.S. Neighbors. Neighbors was sent by the governor of Texas specifically to stop the treaty, if possible, and to mitigate any negative effects that might have occurred if the treaty could not be stopped. The goals of the German-Texans were certainly at odds with the goals of the Anglo-Texans and U.S. Government, which was precisely why Meusebach needed to make a treaty with the Comanche. In addition, I never intended to question Meusebach’s role as a “German free thinker.” However, the evidence that Huenlich presents in his discussion of Meusebach’s speech during negotiations, should be read with caution. The reliability of information on his speech is difficult to determine. Most accounts that I know of awere either written by German-Texan boosters or were written almost fifty years later, when relations with Native Americans were profoundly different, and the rhetoric of removal had changed. That being said, Meusebach likely mused about the possibilities of Comanche and German co-existence. In this he was not alone. In 1847, there were still people throughout the nation who believed that Native Americans and Europeans could and would live side by side.

Huenlich is also correct to point out that Germans in Texas in 1847 did not see themselves as “Anglo-European.” Too often we think of Texas as Anglo, rather than as the diverse polity it was during the Mexican-American War. What is so interesting about this treaty, and what drew me to it in the first place, was precisely the ways in which it exists outside typical Anglo-Comanche relations. The presence of Americans, Mexicans, Germans, Comanche, and Delaware makes for a fascinating mixture of people, cultures, and political goals. As a result, when looking at this treaty, we must try and imagine an immensely complex world, in which the two of the three biggest political and military actors were at war, and the German-Texans were trying to protect their future access to certain lands.

In this context, Meusebach could only work within prevailing geopolitical systems. On one side were the Comanche, who were undoubtedly feared by both Native Americans and Europeans in the region. On the other, were the U.S. Government and the German Emigration Company, who despite conflicts with each other, agreed on what determined legal ownership of land. The German Emigration Company, which Muesebach represented, had been given a grant of land from the former Republic of Texas, which if they failed to settle, they would lose. As a result, despite the language in the treaty, Meusebach must have been aware that settling the land would, in the eyes of western law, guarantee German-Texan access to it in the future. He would also have been aware, that by German and Anglo reasoning, the company already had rights to own land that was already promised by the U.S. Government to the Comanche.

When we take a step back, and think about Comanche motivation for signing this treaty, two things become apparent. One is the fact that the Comanche saw a very different future for themselves in Texas than the German-Texans saw. The other is that there were existing presumptive rights to land already at work by the time Meusebach entered treaty negotiations. Meusebach was not concerned with money, per se, but he was deeply concerned with property rights, and those property rights were to land that another nation already owned.

Even as Meusebach imagined a future in which the Comanche and Germans lived at peace together, that very desire denied a future in which the Comanche continued to be in control of Comanche land. In order to write a story that does not repeat the removal of people from their land by removing them from history, we must take as our first premise that Europeans, Anglos, German, Spanish, French, etc., had zero right to Indigenous lands. Once we do this, it becomes impossible to see either the Comanche or the Germans as simply friendly and well meaning, and as a result allows us to see how, in 1847, each group imagined radically different futures for themselves and each other than the future that came to pass.

The Comanche imagined a future in which their horse herds still roamed the plains and buffalo still prospered in the American West, in which trade fairs in the center of Comancheria were still economic and cultural centers, and the Comanche military was still feared the way the U.S. military is feared today. It is only once we acknowledge that this was a possibility, and that even well-meaning settlers aspired to lands that were never theirs, that we can begin to understand the violence that settler societies unleashed on North America.

The history I offered in my first article aspired to such an imagination. It is based on this premise that I proposed that the treaty’s significance was greater than its value to German-Texas. The treaty does not point to an alternative future because some German-Texans chose friendship over violence, it points to an alternative future because it gives us insight into myriad possibilities that the Comanche imagined for themselves.


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.

The Public Archive: Frederic Allen Williams

Millions of tweets and millions of state documents. Intimate oral histories and international radio addresses. Ancient pottery and yesterday’s memes. Historians have access to this immense store of online material for doing research, but what else can we do with it? In Spring 2018, graduate students in the Public and Digital History Seminar at UT Austin experimented with ways to make interesting archival materials available and useful to the public; to anyone with access to a computer. Over the Summer, Not Even Past will feature each of these individual projects.

Frederic Allen Williams (1898-1955) was a prominent sculptor, lecturer, intellectual, and rodeo rider. Based in New York City, he became known for his talks on Native American art delivered in his midtown studio using magic lantern slides, an early type of image projector. By digitizing a sizable collection of Williams’ prints, negatives, lantern slides, and other ephemera held at the Harry Ransom Center, Jesse Ritner‘s digital project not only makes these materials accessible to wider audiences, but also reflects on using photography as historians and teachers.

More on Ritner’s project and the Public Archive here.

Also by Jesse Ritner on Not Even Past:

Death, Danger, and Identity at 12,000 Feet
The Curious History of Lincoln’s Birth Cabin
Paying for Peace: Reflections on “Lasting Peace” Monument
What Makes a Good History Blog?

You may also like:

The Public Archive: Woven Into History by Alina Scott
Who Put Native American Sign Language in the US Mail? by Jennifer Graber
A Graphic Revolution: The New Archive (No. 19) by Joseph Parrott

The Public Archive: Woven Into History

Millions of tweets and millions of state documents. Intimate oral histories and international radio addresses. Ancient pottery and yesterday’s memes. Historians have access to this immense store of online material for doing research, but what else can we do with it? In Spring 2018, graduate students in the Public and Digital History Seminar at UT Austin experimented with ways to make interesting archival materials available and useful to the public; to anyone with access to a computer. Over the Summer, Not Even Past will feature each of these individual projects.

Alina Scott‘s project, titled Woven into History, is a digitized collection of nineteenth and twentieth-century Navajo rugs currently on exhibit at the Blanton Museum of Art. In addition to photographs of the rugs themselves, Woven into History also provides a brief history of the Navajo and lesson plans to contextualize the collection and provide a platform for respectful collaboration and discussion.

More on Scott’s project and the Public Archive here.

Also by Alina Scott on Not Even Past:

Cynthia Attaquin and a Wampanoag Network of Petitioners
Missing Signatures: The Archives at First Glance

You may also like:

A Historian’s Gaze: Women, Law, and the Colonial Archives in Singapore by Sandy Chang
Secrecy and Bureaucratic Distancing: Tracing Complaints through the Guatemalan National Police Historical Archive by Vasken Markarian
Justin Heath reviews Peace Came in the Form of a Woman by Juliana Barr (2007)

Who Put Native American Sign Language in the US Mail?

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.

Kiowa sign language letter

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.”

Kiowa sign language letter, excerpt 1

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.

Kiowa sign language letter, excerpt 2

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.

Kiowa sign language letter, excerpt 3

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.

Kiowa sign language letter, excerpt 4

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.

Cynthia Attaquin and a Wampanoag Network of Petitioners

by Alina Scott

Change.org, Ipetition, petitiononline — today, the digital marketplace has spurred the easy distribution of petitions.  While they are significant, modern petitioning campaigns offer a different contribution to public discourse than their nineteenth-century counterparts. For women, people of color, and others who had little access to political movers and shakers, petitioning placed them a signature and postage stamp away from the eyes and ears of legislators. Petitions provided grounds to begin a range of other campaigns and simultaneously created a network of canvassers and petitioners.

In 1842, Cynthia Attaquin and 13 other female residents of the Mashpee, a Wampanoag tribe on Cape Cod, petitioned the Massachusetts State Senate to clarify laws regarding the passage of people of color on railroads. Their petition represented a community of color with very specific motivations and understandings about what can come with organized petitioning efforts.

Cynthia Attaquin’s 1842 Petition (via Massachusetts Antislavery Dataverse)

The text of the petition, likely printed in a widely distributed newspaper, requested the legislature to “pass a law declaring and defining the rights of the people [of Massachusetts] in the use of the means of conveyance furnished by the Railroad Companies… in order that the Officers of said Companies may no longer claim the right to depriving any class of persons the use of any of their cars, on the sole ground of a difference of color…”

For several years in the mid-nineteenth century, Congress established a “gag rule,” immediately tabling all abolition-related petitions. However, the focus of this particular campaign was local, and Attaquin’s was one of sixty sent to the Massachusetts State Legislature in 1842 on the topic of clarifying railroad regulations. In total, 5129 individuals participated in this petitioning campaign (Map 1).

State representatives responded with Senate Bill No. 9 and 10, which proposed to prohibit discrimination on the basis of color on railroads and remove a clause in the state constitution outlawing “intermarriages of different races and complexities.”[1]This campaign is a great example of successful, local mobilization efforts by canvassers, however, it was not unusual. According to Colin D. Moore and Daniel Carpenter, “women canvassers garnered 50% or more signatures than men while circulating the same petition requests in the same locales.”[2] Additionally, as Manisha Sinha and others have argued, people of color were instrumental in advocating for their own social and cultural place in the United States. Native women were no different.

Towns of 1842 petitioning campaign for freedom from discrimination on railroads (by Alina Scott)

While the campaign itself is interesting, what is more compelling are the signers: the petition submitted by the “women of Mashpee” was signed entirely by women of color.[3] The first signer, likely the canvasser, or the individual who encouraged others to sign, was Cynthia Conant Attaquin, originally from Plymouth. According to 1860 and 1880 census data, Cynthia was married to and lived with Solomon Attaquin, Mashpee’s first postmaster. Their racial classifications fluctuated between “Indian” and “Mullato,” but they were listed as members of the Indian tribe in official reports to the state department responsible for managing the Mashpee. Census data confirms that both Cynthia and Solomon were literate and could speak fluent English, making it even more likely she was the canvasser. Though in their 30s and recently married, both gained social prominence in Mashpee because of their relationship to other high standing elders, particularly, Ezra and Solomon Attaquin, Solomon’s father and grandfather. Familial ties to political and tribal leadership could also explain the involvement of four other Attaquin women in the petition: Betsy J. and Martha (Solomon’s sisters), Desiah (Solomon’s paternal grandmother), and Leah (Solomon’s aunt and wife of Ebenezer Attaquin).

Cousins Hannah Conant (left) and Cynthia Conant Attaquin ca. 1840 (from Earl Mills’ Son of Mashpee)

Additional signers included Achsah R. Jones (also spelled Axah), identified in the census as either Black or Indian, Martha Simmons who was 59 at the signing, Ruth Coombs, Ruth Kurt, Ophelia Ceasar, whose family lived next door to Benjamin Attaquin (Solomon’s brother), Sarah (Wickums) Barney, and finally, Abigail (Wickums) Amos, who married either Joseph or Josiah Amos. In an 1858 map of Barnstable County (below), one can note the proximity of “S. Attaquin,” ” J. Amos,” “Mrs. Jones,” “B. Attaquin,” and others just off what is still Main Street facing the Mashpee Pond. (See map 2).

Map 2: 1858 Map of Mashpee District digitized by the Sandwich Historical Commission

One is left to wonder the motivations of the female actors in this narrative. Seeing as many of them were literate, had they read of the call for petitions in the newspaper or heard tell of an abolitionist circular? Did they see themselves immediately impacted by the cause? And once Cynthia decided to sign her name onto this petition, did she walk down Main Street, stopping at each of her family member’s and friend’s homes convincing them of the potential for positive repercussions? Or did they meet up somewhere, possibly the Indian Meeting House, the parsonage (also on Main Street), or even the Attaquin Hotel? What is certain is the imprint of their participation on the town of Mashpee. Local histories like Earl Mills’s  Son of Mashpee: Reflections of Chief Flying Eagle,  A Wampanoag recall that the legacies of the Amoses and Attaquins remained stamped on the town even after the campaign.[4]

Solomon and Cynthia were known to have opened the famous Attaquin Hotel that often doubled as the town’s post office and that hosted government officials and diplomats. They were also heavily involved in a previous petitioning campaign for tribal rights. The recently married Attaquins were active participants in what would be called the Mashpee Revolt, a peaceful protest in response to unfair exploitation of Mashpee land and frustrations with the guardianship. Led by a Methodist preacher and Pequot Indian named William Apess, a 1833-34 petitioning campaign and protest resulted in the reclamation of Mashpee self government. The revolt’s primary petition from the Wampanoag  contained a total of 287 signatures of men and women living in Mashpee including Ophelia Caesar, Betsey Attaquin, and Martha Simmons. By 1842, Cynthia and others in Mashpee were well aware of the potential in petitioning, and their effort drew on a well-established network of Native American petitioners.

The pattern of Cynthia Attaquin’s petition affirms what many scholars have pointed to, which is firstly, the importance of social networks and kinship ties to mobilization; secondly, the presence of women and people of color writing their own histories; and finally, the importance of indigenous petitioning efforts. Native peoples continue to petition the government. In 2016 a Change.org petition by a 13 year old member of the North Dakota Sioux Tribe to protect waterways on the Standing Rock reservation gathered over 560,000 signatures and this month a petition for the UT Austin Native American and Indigenous Student Space Collective also circulated.  In 1996, Chief Flying Eagle, Earl Mills Sr., of Mashpee summed up the importance of petitions to Native peoples:

Mashpee was different in the past and is still different today from other towns in the Cape. Our presence, the Wampanoags’, and the influence of our culture here, have made the difference. This small community and the United States have gone through similar stages of development. In many ways Mashpee is a microcosm of this country. To understand Mashpee is to understand our society better.[5]

[1] State Library of Massachusetts, Senate Bill No. 9 and 10.

[2]  Daniel Carpenter, Colin D. Moore. “When Canvassers Became Activists: Antislavery Petitioning and the Political Mobilization of American Women”. American Political Science Review.  Vol. 108, No. 3 (August 2014): 481.

[3]  Digital Archive of Massachusetts Anti-Slavery and Anti-Segregation Petitions, Massachusetts Archives, Boston MA, 2015, “Senate Unpassed Legislation 1842, Docket 11057, SC1/series 231, Petition of Cynthia Attaquin”. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:FHCL:11858184

[4] Sr, Earl Mills, and Alicja Mann. Son of Mashpee: Reflections of Chief Flying Eagle, A Wampanoag. 1st edition. North Falmouth, Mass: Word Studio, 1996, 12.

[5]  Sr, Earl Mills, and Alicja Mann. Son of Mashpee: Reflections of Chief Flying Eagle, A Wampanoag. 1st edition. North Falmouth, Mass: Word Studio, 1996, xi.

Also by Alina Scott on Not Even Past:

Missing Signatures: The Archives at First Glance

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Missing Signatures: The Archives at First Glance

by Alina Scott

On February 21, 1831, a petition containing the signatures of over 800 Connecticut residents was submitted  to the United States Congress on behalf of the indigenous population in the South who were facing relocation. The petition acknowledged Native peoples as the “original proprietors of the soil” and its authors claimed that to remain silent would be criminal and cowardly. The petition was not unique, as archivists recognized when organizing it in a folder containing several other petitions with fairly similar appeals. The threat of the forced relocation of Native Americans caught the attention of many activists and benevolent societies in the North as well as the South.

Guaranteed by the first amendment, the right to petition is granted to individual Americans by the United States constitution, however, petitions were in effect long before the foundation of the United States and its Declaration of Independence from English rule. It has been a particularly useful tool for marginalized groups in the U.S. including Native and African Americans. Women were particularly engaged in petitioning efforts, advocating on behalf of others during the threat of indigenous removal, the anti-slavery and abolitionist movement, and eventually the women’s suffrage campaigns.

(via National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC)

Nineteenth-century petitions had the potential for several unintended ramifications. They could receive a favorable a government response, but sometimes the response was negative, and in some cases, petitions were met with silence. The gag rule, for example, immediately tabled petitions related to the antislavery cause in Congress from 1834 until slavery was repealed in 1844. Nineteenth-century petitions served a purpose to the individual or group that canvassed for the petition, helping to add to a running list of potential supporters for future campaigns and movements. This function is helpful for historians who can use the locations and names of signatories in retracing the steps of canvassers.

The layout of each petition is also important. They typically included the statement of a grievance, support, or evidence, and a signatory list. The first name on the list was typically someone of importance or the sponsoring canvasser, so as to add validity and clout to the document. The consequent names were often divided into the categories of “legal voters”(white men),  “women” (white women),  “colored men,” “colored women”, etc. In some cases, that division came in the form of a line drawn down the middle of the signatory list or in the drafting of two separate petitions, one for “legal voters” and the other for women or people of color.

This brings me back to the petition from February 1831. Originally, I went to the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington D.C. in search of  women and people of color who were involved in petitioning efforts. After several days of finding very little evidence of women’s involvement in anti-removal petitioning, I stumbled upon the petition in question. It was one of several files in a box in the dense Record Group 75, which contains documents from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. (RG 75 contains documents ranging from the BIA’s administrative history to records of the secretary of war, and correspondence and documents related to individual BIA tribal offices). This particular box contained petitions and memorials to the House of Representatives and the Senate related to forced Cherokee removal.

(via National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC)

The statement of grievance consisted of several pages folded together with the third containing the start of a signatory list. The first and only signature on the final page of the petition belonged to Benjamin Tallmadge, a former Continental Army officer and Representative of Connecticut to the U.S. House. Attached to the original document with a red adhesive was the start of the first full page of signatures under “Litchfield,”, the first town canvassers stopped at in Connecticut. From Litchfield the petition was taken to Kent, Roxbury, New Milford, New Preston, Salisbury, Goshen, Norfolk, South Farms, Torrington, Northfield, Harwinton, Colebrook and Winchester.

By the time I’d unfolded the petition it was more than six feet long, contained more than 800 signatures from fourteen Connecticut towns, and at first glance, none of them belonged to women. Upon closer inspection though, I found a Sally, Caroline, and Martha who signed the document in Salisbury. Next to their names was a piece of paper glued to the original document with a red adhesive, comparable to the kind used to stick the different signatory lists together. It was just under a foot long and glued at all four corners. To my surprise, underneath the flap were the names of 30 women. I was ecstatic. Not only had I found evidence of a large number of women participating in this expansive petition, but their names had been covered up for reasons impossible to gather from the document itself. I immediately called an archivist over to ask whether the adhesive could be partially removed to see the full list of names. The archivist told me that a request for review would have to be submitted and that process takes up to several years, more than the time than I had in DC. Still the existence of a covered list of women’s names on this petition raises important questions about the open and surreptitious role of women in these petition drives.

So what conclusions can be drawn from this discovery? It is not clear at what point along the journey from Litchfield to Congress the names were added or when they were covered, whether the canvassers permitted women’s signatures initially but changed their minds, if the names were added afterwards and covered before finally being turned in, or, if there was something about the three women who signed below the men that made them different from the 30 or so that were covered up. Despite these uncertainties, it’s not unlikely that the names were covered up to prevent delegitimizing the document and the issues at stake. And for historians, this document provides important evidence of the involvement of women in nineteenth-century petitioning efforts, the social value of their signatures (or lack thereof), and overall, the thrill of archival research.

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Digital Teaching: A Mid-Semester Timeline

By Chris Babits

Last March, students in Dr. Erika Bsumek’s Introduction to American Indian History took their midterm exam. Most students earned good grades, but on a mid-semester assessment, a large number expressed interest in some form of extra credit. Students also indicated that since the material was very new to them (secondary curricula rarely emphasizes the American Indian past), they felt that they didn’t have a good grasp on the sequence of events covered in the class. Although Professor Bsumek, the other teaching assistant, and myself were shocked at the overwhelming request for additional work, we thought we’d try something new: a digital timeline in order to improve students’ research and writing skills.

Picture1

A screenshot of the timeline.

Digital history projects have grown more popular over the past decade. Professors, instructors, and history educators have increasingly recognized the limitations of traditional assessments. Exams, quizzes, analytical essays, and book reviews — each of these can measure student learning. Exams and quizzes, for example, challenge students to recall a wide-range of information. This can include students crafting and proving original arguments, using the course’s source material in order to support one’s position. Writing essays, on the other hand, provide students the opportunity to work on their writing skills. Recent reports show how this crucial part of literacy is lacking in the workplace. History papers can play a crucial role in developing students’ analytical and writing skills, preparing them to be better in the business world and as engineers.

What these traditional assessments are missing, however, are the twenty first century skills our students need. The teaching team for Introduction to American Indian History wanted to create an extra credit assignment that combined the best parts of history education with the core components of digital humanities pedagogy. When we reflected on the midterm exams, we noticed a few things that were lacking. Most importantly, the students were right. They lacked a strong sense of chronology. How would we better equip them to understand sequence and change over time? They needed some tool to help them see these important parts of historical inquiry. A digital timeline seemed like the best way to go. Utilizing course development funds, Dr. Bsumek agreed to compensate me for the extra time this would require.

The initial step was determining which online timeline generator to choose for the project. With the growing interest in digital humanities, there are many timeline generators. After less than an hour of research, and after further consultation with Dr. Bsumek, I decided on Knight Lab’s TimeLineJS because of its user-friendly interface. My former colleague, Dr. Julia Gossard (now an Assistant Professor at Utah State University) helped me make this decision as well since she had successfully implemented several assignments in her courses with the program.

Knight Lab has created a template from which one could create their own timeline. I was initially wary of the template but, as one can see below, Knight Lab describes what type of information should be placed in which column.

Picture2

Knight Lab Template (click to enlarge).

After deciding on the digital tool for the timeline, we created the instructions for students. Students could write a 150-200 word timeline entry for any person, place, event, movement, or piece of legislation from the midterm on. Before writing an entry, students had to write to me to receive approval for the entry they wished to write. Upon approval, I then asked students to find and email me an outside academic source. Only after clearing this hurdle were students approved to write their extra credit timeline entry.

The result was a collaborative study tool that students could use on the final exam. Thirty seven students out of the 156 registered for the class contributed to the timeline. I proofread each entry not only for content accuracy but also for writing style, proper grammar, and spelling errors. If students wanted the full points they could earn for extra credit, they usually had to revise one or two times.

Most students earned additional points that were added to their final grade. Twenty one students submitted two entries, markedly increasing their chance of earning a better grade in the course. More importantly, they collaborated on a project that addressed the weaknesses they identified when studying for their midterm exams. The final exams displayed a much more sophisticated understanding of sequence and change over time. Students crafted better in-class exams that highlighted a more nuanced interpretation of the history of American Indians.
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Playing Indian, by Philip Deloria (1999)

By Mark Sheaves

41tbt1ekbbl-_sx325_bo1204203200_Images of American Indians are ubiquitous in contemporary US culture. Step into a convenience store and you can’t help but notice that two of the most popular tobacco brands, Redman Chewing Tobacco and Natural American Spirits, are adorned with the face of a feathered-headdress wearing chief. Approximately 2,000 high schools across the country use Native American imagery or symbolism in their name, mascots, and iconography. Sign into Netflix and you will quickly find a film with Native American characters: Disney’s Pocahontas was recently added to their library, while Adam Sandler’s The Ridiculous Six, depicting bandits and Indians in the American Wild West, was the big 2015 winter release. Shopping for fashion? The geometric patterns commonly associated with the Navajos of the Southwest have covered garments on the catwalk and in fashionable stores such as Prada and Barney’s over the past year. If you follow the NFL, you will know that Washington DC’s team wear an Indian chief on their helmets and their controversial name splashed across burgundy jerseys. And with Halloween just around the corner, people dressed in Indian costumes will party with ghosts, monsters and witches at gatherings across the country. Why is the image of the American Indian so popular in American culture? What is the history behind these images? And why does the history matter?

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Natural American Spirit logo (via OpenCage).

One way to answer these questions is to think about how and why white Americans have dressed or acted like Indians during the course of American history. In his classic work Playing Indian, Philip Deloria demonstrates that the act of playing Indian is as old as the USA itself. On the December 16, 1773, a group led by the Sons of Liberty boarded the Dartmouth and two other ships in Boston harbor and dumped tea into the cold water in protest over import tax. The protestors wore feathers, headdresses, and war paint and supposedly shouted Indian words in an event that would come to be known as the Boston Tea Party. The Mohawk disguises have been explained as an attempt to maintain secrecy or as a strategy to cast blame on a third party, but for Deloria they represented a political statement aimed at the English. Playing and dressing as an Indian was an act that declared a distinct American identity.

boston_tea_party

The Boston Tea Party (via Wikimedia Commons)

In Playing Indian, Deloria explores how and why Indians have been so important to those seeking to define what it is to be an authentic American. Largely focused on the activities and ideas of white men, Deloria argues that the practice of performing like an Indian has persisted in American culture from the eighteenth century through the 1990s when the book was published. He considers the specific meaning and significance of key events and organizations where people played Indian, including the Boston Tea Party, the New York Tammany Society, the development of anthropology as an academic discipline, the birth of the boy scouts, and during the counterculture movements of the 1960s. While the many examples Deloria offers demonstrate the importance of the Indian image in American culture for over two centuries, he argues that the “practice of playing Indian has clustered around two paradigmatic moments – the Revolution, which rested on the creation of a national identity, and modernity, which has used Indian play to encounter the authentic amidst the anxiety of urban industrial and postindustrial life.” Given the importance of these two moments in US History, Indian play has been hugely significant in the creation of American culture and identity.

Deloria organizes his thesis around two connected dimensions, an “axis of value” and an “axis of distance.” The “axis of value” highlights the positive and negative stereotypes of Indians in American culture. Deloria’s “axis of distance” captures the ways Indians have at times been included as part of American culture and at other moments been used as an external mirror to reflect what Americans should and should not be. For example, Indians have been presented as violent, pagan, drunken savages and thus the anti-thesis of a model American. This is an image that has largely served to justify appropriation of Indian lands and programs to eradicate Indian culture. Yet, ideas about Indians have also represented quintessential American values like freedom, individualism and a connection to nature and the land. In the revolutionary era, this positive idea of an Indian served those seeking to define themselves as distant from European culture. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Native Americans were cast as exemplars of a simple life, critiquing the decadence some Americans perceived during a period of rapid industrialization and growth.

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The 2013 Lone Ranger movie drew criticism for its representation of Native American culture (via Jorge Figueroa).

Deloria’s wide-ranging study demonstrates that American ideas about Indians have oscillated between positive portrayals of Indian nobility and negative associations of backwardness depending on the context and motivations of the subjects. Tensions between “desire and repulsion” and “nobility and savagery,” Deloria argues, lie at the heart of American identities, so when Americans performed as Indians, they were trying to balance the positive and negative in what they thought of as American identity. But these stereotypes of Native Americans that developed from the practice of playing Indian continue to inform dealings with Native people, that keep them in subordinate social, political, legal, and economic positions. The act of playing Indian, then, matters to contemporary Native Americans.

So as Halloween rolls around, the long and complicated history of playing Indian that Deloria describes should make us all think about reaching for the faux turquoise bead jewelry, braiding our hair, or picking up a plastic bow and arrow. The costumes we wear carry political messages from a history that people may not know, but that continues to shape the experiences of Native Americans living today.

Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999)
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Read more by Mark Sheaves on Not Even Past:

Francisco de Miranda: A Transatlantic Life in the Age of Revolution 1750-1816, by Karen Racine (2002)
The Web of Empire, By Alison Games (2008)
Philip of Spain, King of England, by Harry Kelsey (2012)

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