Native Americans Archives

Native Literatures and Indigenous Peoples’ Day: A Brief Historiography

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!

It’s in Their Blood

By Ted Banks

(This article is reposted from Fourth Part of the World.)

The Progressive-Era white press and their audience had a fascination with Indians judging from the amount of ink that was devoted to musings on their place and progress in society. One component of that fascination, indeed one that was the basis for much speculation on how successfully or not Indians were integrating into white America, was how much “Indianness” could be attributed to Indian blood.

Many observers have noted that notions of blood and “mixing” among whites varied depending on whose blood was being considered. While the “one-drop” rule dictated that a single drop of black blood could overwhelm generations of otherwise Anglo (or Indian) infusion, Indian blood offered no such absolute outcome. At times commenters noted the tenacity of Indian blood, as demonstrated by its ability to preserve Indian physical characteristics across generations. Other times, white observers painted Indian blood as conversely unstable, susceptible to dilution through intermarriage, and seemingly at times, social contact or cultural proximity.

In a 1907 article penned by Frederic J. Haskins titled “Indians Increasing in America,” the author cites several examples of the persistence of “Indian” traits, which he ties to a rough accounting of blood quantum. He notes that the “strength of Indian racial traits is shown by the fact that the 700 persons now in Virginia who can prove their descent from Pocahontas and her English husband, John Rolfe, still have the Indian hair and high cheek bones.” Commenting on a handful of Indian politicians, Haskins introduces “Adam Monroe Byrd, a Representative from Mississippi, [who] is also of Indian blood.” Haskins reports that Byrd “traces his ancestry through a long line of distinguished Cherokee chieftains,” and that “He has the high cheek bones, copper skin and straight hair which indicate the blood of the original American.” Haskins’s article reveals the casual ambivalence with which settlers framed the racial makeup of Indians, and their desire to monitor the relative progress of Indians in America accordingly.

Four years before Haskins’s piece, an article on the upcoming Indian exhibition at the St. Louis World’s Fair played the other side of the ambivalence spectrum while employing much the same rhetoric regarding Indian racial traits. Titled “Pageant of a Dying Race,” the feature dramatically promised the “last live chapter of the red man in American history is to be read by millions of pale faces at the Universal Exposition.” Like Haskins, the author of “Pageant of a Dying Race,” T. R. MacMechen, describes the persistence of Indian racial traits, observing that “(the) blood of Pontiac, of Black Hawk, of Tecumseh and his wily brother, The Prophet, flows in the veins of the descendants who will be at the exposition,” and that “(no) student of American history will view the five physical types of the Ogalalla Sioux without memories of Red Cloud, nor regard the (word unclear) without recalling the crafty face of that Richelieu of Medicine Men, Sitting Bull.” However, MacMechen argues that despite the seeming durability of Indian traits, “the savage is being fast fused by marriage and custom into a dominant race, so that this meeting of warriors becomes the greatest and probably the last opportunity for the world to behold the primitive Indian.” In MacMechen’s account, marriage and custom function as ways to counterbalance, or perhaps mask, the otherwise durable Indian blood.

Festival Hall at World Fair (via Wikipedia)

White supremacy dictated the ways in which whites interacted with racial “others,” but not in such a way that all of these interactions were uniform across groups. That is to say that while intermarriage between blacks and whites was prohibited throughout much of the country on either a de facto or de jure basis, intermarriage between settlers and Indians was, at least at times, encouraged. A 1906 Dallas Morning News piece reported that “Quanah Parker is advocating the intermarriage of whites with the Indians for a better citizenship among the Indians.” The piece noted that “Quanah’s mother was a white woman and several of his daughters have married into white families.” The item quoted Parker as saying “Mix the blood, put white man’s blood in Indians, then in a few years you will have a better class of Indians,” and noted that “(Parker) hopes to live to see the time that his tribe will be on the level with those of pure anglo-saxon blood.” Another DMN article from two years later seems to reveal a gendered wrinkle to such unions, reporting that “(with) the coming of Yuletide Chief Quanah Parker of the Comanche Indians realized one of the greatest ambitions of his life when his young son, Quanah Jr., a Carlisle graduate, was married to Miss Laura Clark, a graduate of the Lawton High School last year,” and that “(this) is the first time in the history of Indians of this section where an Indian has been married to a girl of white blood.”

If persistent racial traits were attributed to Indian blood, but Indians were being “fast fused by marriage and custom” into white society, the result might be some Indians in unexpected places, or at least circumstances. Haskins, in his piece, noted that at the 1904 St. Louis Exposition, “. . . the strong voice at the entrance of the Indian Building calling through a megaphone, . . . (the) barker who thus hailed the passing throng in the merry, jocular fashion of the professional showman was a full-blooded Indian boy, a product of the new dispensation of things, just as Geronimo was of the old.” Of Charles Curtis, a US Senator from Kansas, Haskins observed that “(he) is not of pure Indian heritage, but his mother belonged to the Kaw tribe. . . . He has the hair and color of an Indian, but in politics does not play an Indian game.” A Dallas Morning News correspondent reported in 1906 that Quanah Parker had been elected a delegate to the Republican convention, but that he had declined, stating that he had no interest in politics. The anonymous scribe went on to comment that

Quanah is a half-breed, his mother having been Cynthiana (sic) Parker. Having
white blood in his veins, his conduct is absolutely incomprehensible. For who
ever heard before of a white man, or any kind of a man with white blood in his
veins, who did not want the honors or the salary of office? Still we must remember
that Quanah is King of the Comanches, and that is a pretty good position itself.

The writer’s tone indicates he was speaking somewhat in jest, but the gist of his comment was that Quanah, although possessing “half” white blood by his estimation, was “playing the Indian game” by staying out of politics, and, in doing so, positioned himself a world away from “any kind” of white man.

(via Wikimedia)

This is all to say that if one wanted to track the uses of “blood” in white America’s Progressive-Era discourse on Indians, the results would be—excuse the pun—mixed, to say the least. Like their feelings on Indians in general, the habitual deployment of blood as an explanatory concept nonetheless exhibited a remarkable ambivalence; white Americans seemed to think both that “Indian blood” definitely was of immense importance and that it could mean about anything they needed it to. This ambivalence stands out even more starkly when compared to the aforementioned belief in the complete impenetrability of African blood of the same period. A cynical reading might well deduce that white Americans said anything and everything about blood that would help to fortify white supremacy. A devil’s advocate counterpoint might argue that the rise of the eugenics movement indicated that white Americans of the time indeed believed in at least some of what they said. And still another would remind us that both of those could be, and probably were, the case.

Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, by William Cronon (1983)

By Jesse Ritner

Thirty-five years ago William Cronon wrote Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. It has aged well. The continued relevance of the book is likely a result of two things. First, it is eminently readable. Flipping through the pages, one can imagine the forests that Cronon describes and feel his connection to them. Second, the problem he poses about the limits of disciplinary work in writing the history of environmental change are more poignant now than ever before, as humanists across disciplines attempt to write to current concerns about climate change and the relationship between humans and nature. Cronon argues that the cultural and ecological consequences of colonization are deeply connected. As such, they demand the tools of both a historian and an ecologist. He traces the process by which Indigenous communities and European communities made meaning of the environment to the ecological changes that resulted from the influx of a new culture. His book is not meant to suggest a single material cause of conflict, but looks at how cultural histories of diverse issues – such as land acquisition, the development of capitalist economies, the growth of towns, and the fur trade – can benefit from studying the relationship between human action and ecological consequence.

Cronon offers transparency about his methods and sources as well as any other author. He begins his book with an explanation of what ecological sources might be for a colonial history of New England. He pinpoints four varieties: naturalists’ accounts written by early colonists and their ancestors, town records that register disagreements over ownership and property, the work of historical ecologists, and then what he terms “interpolations,” which use modern ecological literature to assess the probability of past change. By looking at these materials together, Cronon demonstrates that changes in people’s livelihoods and the means of production are not simply social, but are often dependent on ecological changes. As a result, his book is not about two landscapes, one before colonization and one after, but about two different ways of belonging to an ecosystem.

Following his discussion of methodology, Cronon moves on to explore the relationship between property ownership and human interactions with ecosystems. He begins by analyzing the diversity of New England woodlands in the pre-colonial era. He makes a clear distinction between the northern and southern halves of New England, determined mostly by the lack of agriculture further north. This created a different relationship to property and different modes of production for northern Indians. As a result, the makeup of the forests was different. Different modes of production also occurred, however, as a result of different relationships to seasonality. Cronon argues that European conceptions of poverty often disguise the importance of seasonal practices to Indigenous peoples. This has also led to a false perception that European societies do not also adjust their work and technologies to the seasons. Mobility was central for Indigenous populations, who hunted, fished, or farmed depending on the season. In contrast Europeans relied on storing food over the cold winters. This demanded a type of non-mobile settlement that was previously uncommon in New England. Cronon contends that the conflict over seasonality, not over a specific resource, was the root of European and Indigenous conflicts. The role of stability in European seasonality necessitated the creation of a new property regime in New England that limited Indigenous abilities to interact with the ecosystem and profoundly changed the land. In his estimation we live today with the consequences of this new property regime.

In the final parts of the book, Cronon looks at the fallout from this conflict through the commodification of furs, trees, and livestock. In each of these cases. Cronon shows that transformations of property regimes and the effects these transformations had on the ecosystems surrounding them were a process, rather than an immediate change. Through examining this process, he deconstructs the development of European property regimes, the commodification of resources, and the changes in both European and Indigenous means of production. The most notable result of these changes was the destruction of “edge areas” that were home to diverse flora and denser populations of fauna. These “edge areas” gave the woods the park-like appearance that early naturalists encountered in New England and that Thoreau mourns the loss of in Walden.

There are moments when the age of Cronon’s book shows. The lack of local ecological specificity, the omission of variations in specific Indigenous communities, and the overshadowing of violence and direct human conflict by broad ecological changes all demonstrate that the politics and principles of writing Native American histories have changed in the past few decades. Yet, the connections that Cronon draws powerfully denaturalize the idea that humans exist outside of nature. The clarity of his argument, and the pleasure of reading his work allow this book to maintain its place as a staple in everything from undergraduate introductory classes and grad-student seminars on Native American and Environmental histories, to bookstore shelves, and as a gift for friends and relatives who love history and camping. Few books are so intellectually satisfying and casually readable at the same time. For this reason, and many more, Cronon’s book will continue to worth reading in years to come.

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.

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.

The Gods of Indian Country

by Jennifer Graber

In 1930, historian William Warren Sweet wrote that the “conquest of the continent” was America’s greatest accomplishment and its churches’ “greatest achievement” involved “the extension of their work westward.” Drawing on Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis about the importance (and closing) of the American frontier, Sweet’s classic and oft-read textbook identified westward movement as fundamentally important to American religion.Historians of American religions have rightfully turned away from Sweet’s conclusions. Indeed, since the 1960s the study of American religions has been transformed from a sleepy corner of the historical profession to what commentators have identified as an increasingly popular subfield. The scholarship now includes excellent monographs on long-neglected groups, oft-overlooked sources, and is shaped by theoretical insights from critical work on religion, race, gender, ethnicity, and labor. During the field’s much-needed transformation, the frontier faded into the background, at least for a time.

A new generation of scholars has returned to the frontier, bringing with them all the critical tools now available in the subfield. Rather than asking how religion fueled American expansion, they have investigated how the experience of expansion reshaped American religions, those practiced by both settlers and Native people. It’s within this new mode of writing that I set out to study the religious transformations prompted by the invasion and defense of lands inhabited by Kiowa Indians and later designated Indian Territory (and eventually Oklahoma) by Americans.

Americans got their first long-term experiences on Kiowa lands and engagements with Kiowa ritual activity when Quakers were assigned to administer the Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache Reservation in 1869. Ready to engage their fellow humans trapped in “heathen darkness,” Quakers distributed food rations, organized schools, and held meetings for worship among the reservation’s more than 5000 Native occupants. Quaker workers frequently mentioned Kiowa “superstition” as the greatest obstacle to their acculturation of Euro-American habits and assimilation into American life.

National Archives, Bureau of Indian Affairs

Several years later, however, a Quaker administrator saw something he recognized as real religion. Kiowa elders and young men requested that he transcribe a petition for them. They were concerned that American buffalo hunters were devastating the herds. These hunters acted illegally and the Kiowa petitioners implored the federal government to stop them. In the petition, they claimed that Kiowas and the buffalo had been created together, to be like brothers. They argued that one could not live without the other. If the U.S. government failed to protect the herds, Kiowas would also die.

National Archives, Bureau of Indian Affairs

While Native claims about relations to other-than-human beings were hardly uncommon, the Quaker employee had no reference point for understanding such connections. But unlike dismissive attitudes he displayed earlier in his tenure, the Quaker seemed open to seeing something new. In his account of the proceedings, he referred to the “gravity” and “reverential feeling” of the smoking session held prior to the discussion. In a letter, he encouraged federal officials to act because the buffalo were a “matter involving [Kiowas’] traditional religious belief.” For years, this Quaker worker had witnessed Kiowa buffalo hunting, as well as their use of hides for tipis and meat for food. He had observed, and even sent troops to monitor, Kiowa Sun Dances, rites in which the people gave thanks for the buffalo. After these experiences, he eventually saw something “religious” where he had once seen only heathenish practices unworthy of the descriptor.

Similar to the Quaker’s change in perspective, American expansion shaped Kiowa ritual life. Around the same time as the buffalo petition, Kiowas struggled to maintain practices that had been central to them for generations. They held Sun Dances in summer, even as hunger beset them and federal officials sent troops to monitor them. Along with efforts to sustain older practices, Kiowas also considered new ritual options. While men who raided south into Texas and Mexico had long encountered Native peoples who engaged peyote as a source of sacred power, Kiowas had never adopted it as a regular practice. That changed in the 1870s. With their Sun Dances under scrutiny and people suffering from outbreaks of disease, Kiowas gathered for peyote meetings. Welcoming ritual specialists from other Indian nations, Kiowas brought the rites to the reservation and developed their own practices and songs. Within two decades, peyote practices were widespread among Kiowas.

The Ghost Dance of 1889-1891 by the Oglala Lakota at Pine Ridge. Illustration by Frederic Remington, 1890.

Eventually, Kiowas would consider two more ritual options from outside their own traditions. In the 1880s, the first Christian missionary arrived. Under the tutelage of a Kiowa man who studied in the East and received Episcopal deacon’s orders, a small number of Kiowas accepted baptism in the early 1880s. Affiliation with Christianity increased after a host of missionaries arrived in the 1890s. Around the same time, messages from Native neighbors told of a Paiute prophet who claimed the world could be renewed through dance. Called the Ghost Dance by Americans, the movement spread to reservations across the West. Kiowas adapted it their situation, using feathers to identify the movement, singing songs and dancing with the hope of restoring depleted buffalo herds and returning loved ones lost to hunger and disease. By 1890, Kiowas participated in older Sun Dance and healing practices, as well as peyote rites, Christian worship, and Ghost Dancing, all in the hope of sustaining their lands and people threatened by American occupation.

William Warren Sweet wrote that there was no more influential “fact” in the development of American religion than “continuous contact with frontier conditions and frontier needs.” No historian working today would make such grand claims. Events on the “frontier” must be considered in relation to American efforts to reconstruct the South, debates about Chinese immigration in California, labor disputes and unrest in the North, and legal conflicts over Mormon plural marriage and what constituted acceptable religious practice. Even so, encounters prompted by expansion played a significant role in reshaping the religious worlds of settlers and Native people. It lay at the heart of settler ideas about American civilization and it functioned as one more resource in the struggle for Native peoplehood, lands, and sovereignty.

Jennifer Graber, The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American West

and more on the book here.

Cynthia Attaquin and a Wampanoag Network of Petitioners

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.

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Missing Signatures: The Archives at First Glance

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.

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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Peace Came in the Form of a Woman by Juliana Barr (2007)

by Justin Heath

“A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners…all howl(ed) in a barbarous tongue…riding down upon (the posse) like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning…”: So begins the longest, most vivid sentence in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West.

As a young reader of gothic fiction, I always believed that Cormac McCarthy had an unrivaled sense for the macabre. More so than any other contemporary writer, he painted violent and terrible scenes that not only rattled my sense of poetic justice, but also delighted my curiosity about the darker recesses of the imagination. More so than I knew at the time, this mix of impressions also affected McCarthy’s more sophisticated readers. Even as he praised the book as the ultimate realization of the old western as a genre, the literary critic Harold Bloom evidently found it difficult to finish the novel. “The first time I read Blood Meridian,” Bloom confessed, “I was so appalled that while I was held, I gave up after about 60 pages.”

As an aspiring historian, what now catches my attention is not these sensational popular depictions of the Southern Plains tribes, or the “Wild West” in general, but the resonance of these otherwise careworn images in the scholarship of Borderlands Studies. Put simply, most books and articles within this academic sub-discipline still uncritically focus on a narrow range of topics — all replete the familiar scenes of violence, horror, and death.

Juliana Barr’s Peace Came in the Form of a Woman, a study of inter-ethnic diplomacy in the borderlands of Texas, marks an exception to this general trend. In this award-winning book, Barr investigates Hispano-Indian relations in the distinctive setting of the Texas borderlands, where nomadic societies, such as the Comanches and the Apaches, dictated the practices of peace-keeping to their allegedly more powerful Spanish neighbors to the south.

At the northern edge of colonial Mexico in the eighteenth century, a consortium of soldiers, ranchers, and mission Indians were in no position to dictate the terms of peace in the distant lands of “the Far North.” Left without the means to impose their will, the outposts of Texas, such as Bexar de San Antonio, had little choice but to adapt to the local culture of peacekeeping as practiced by their more resourceful indigenous neighbors. This multicultural landscape that Barr illustrates was held together not by signed treaties, maps, or anything of the Spaniards’ diplomatic reckoning, but by the extensions of honorary kinship that transcended “racial” differences between culturally unrelated groups. Within this essentially familial understanding of inter-group networking, Barr argues that it was women – as opposed to men — who served the central role as mediators.

When the Spanish decided to settle the lands of “Los Tejas” in the 1690s, the administrators in Mexico City hoped to install a buffer territory of Catholic missions and Spanish forts along the northern periphery, so as to forestall the advancement of unconquered peoples of “El Norte.” Without any such buffer, continued raids on the more prosperous regions of present-day Mexico threatened to obstruct the extraction of natural resources in one of the world’s first prominent export-oriented economies. Such a view of the geopolitical landscape seems to have guaranteed ineffectual half-measures to contain raiding activities.

A replica of the Mission San Francisco de los Tejas, the first Catholic mission established in East Texas in 1690 (via Wikimedia Commons)

Barr’s study illustrates radical changes in the conduct of borderland diplomacy. In their earliest encounters with nomadic groups like the Caddos, the Spanish often entered into indigenous camps in full regalia, bearing the sacred image of Our Lady of Guadeloupe, who assumed a central place in these processions. Noticing that the Spanish brought no women with them, the Caddos recognized the image not as innately holy figure, but as a proxy for an otherwise absent feminine presence that customarily attended peaceful negotiations between indigenous groups. The men who greeted the Spanish envoys paid homage to the female image by kissing the icon of Santa Maria. The colonists, for their part, interpreted this gesture as auspicious, signaling the Caddos’ eagerness to convert to the Catholic faith. This inference was tragically mistaken, Barr observes, since missionaries would be the choice targets in future raids. Resistance to Catholic missionaries during the first half of the 18th century would also spark decades of violence between the natives of Texas and these recent Spanish arrivals. Although the Spanish always had the ambition to occupy the region, they always lacked the means to locate, much less subjugate, these equestrian peoples.

By the end of the 18th century, after decades of countless defeats, the Spanish townspeople became increasingly sensitive to the significance of women in these diplomatic visits. When the Comanches visited San Antonio in 1772, for instance, the governor of Texas was eager to point out that a woman came at the forefront of the convoy. The implications of such cultural adaptations and what they entailed for colonial-indigenous relations serves as the primary focus of Barr’s inquiry.

Barr’s study occasions some truly thought-provoking discoveries. By her estimation, peaceful coexistence in Texas had little to do with overcoming perceptions of “racial differences,” since the category of “race” was essentially a European concept that carried little weight in the borderlands. Rather, the complex web of kinship relations focused on the movement of wives, mothers, and daughters – whether voluntary or coerced — to locations that arranged for their safe keeping. As Barr emphasizes, it was the extension of a feminized domestic space across tribal boundaries that brokered trust between men. For this reason, the presidio forts, originally designed to carry out the military occupation of Texas, served as the primary meeting grounds of what Barr terms inter-group “hospitality” networks. In these presidios, the annual distribution of gifts between families and tribal bands cemented peaceful ties between culturally unrelated peoples who often did not speak the same language.

Treaty of Peace by John O. Meusebach showing Colonists with the Comanches in 1847 (via Prints and Photographs Collection, Texas State Library and Archives Commission)

Like most innovative studies, Barr’s impressive work also has its shortcomings. For starters, whenever peaceful relations did break down, Barr is perhaps too eager to blame Spanish diplomatic clumsiness or cultural cynicism. The accuracy of these accusations aside, there is more to the picture than a question of mere prejudicial attitudes. By all accounts, the financial strain of “hospitality” was more considerable than Barr lets on. Many of the Comanches’ demands included items that were not locally produced in Texas. To obtain these gifts in a timely fashion, the treasurers and governors had to maintain a tight logistical operation that connected distant suppliers from Louisiana, Coahuila, and many other places. All of this put a strain on the coffers of the local outpost town, where money was almost always in short supply.

A second problem is Barr’s use of kinship terms. What do words like “brother” mean between former combatants in the 18^th-century Southwest? By focusing on the indigenous outlook on peacekeeping, the Spanish experience seems underappreciated, especially when one’s honorary sibling appears more like an extortionist than a guest? On the other hand, by sidelining the idiom of cultural groups, we risk injecting Eurocentric categories into our analysis of events where Europeans were merely one of several groups involved? This problem has a renewed urgency among scholars of Borderlands. With specialists such as Pekka Hämäläinen entertaining notions of a “Comanche Empire,” perhaps it is time that historians turn to the political nuances of South Plains’ speech for much needed clarification.

In spite of these problems, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman is a compelling read. By examining the Spaniards’ adaptation to new cultural surroundings, Barr undercuts the assumption that the peripheries of the Empire were essentially static, underdeveloped communities that awaited their inevitable incorporation into more culturally “advanced” or “rationalized” societies. By focusing on the practice of peacekeeping, Barr shows that Europeans and their descendants held an illusory monopoly over concerns for regional stability, long-distance trade, or extensive social networking. Other groups actively sought to arrange for amicable relations, even if they sought these ends through alternative means.

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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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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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