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Mapping Indigenous Los Angeles: A Public History Project

By Caroline Murray

Los Angeles is a city famous for its Hollywood celebrities and traffic, but a new project reveals an often overlooked part of the city’s past and present: its indigenous population, cited as one of the largest among American cities. Mapping Indigenous LA (MILA) brings to life the histories and current dilemmas of LA’s indigenous people in the twenty-first century, instead of leaving them behind in the past.

MILA combats the perception that these communities have disappeared over decades of assimilation and urban growth and exist only in a colonial context. The project disrupts the traditional, chronological narrative of history with its growing number of story maps, each featuring a place or issue of significance for LA’s indigenous groups. The maps contain videos, documents, book recommendations, and other archives that record native histories to give new meaning to locations in LA.

Map of Indian Resources (via MILA).

As MILA digs deeper, beyond the traditional idea of a map, it also works to expand the meaning of indigeneity by including stories not only from the native Tongva, but also other American Indians, Pacific Islanders, and citizens of Latin American indigenous diasporas who migrated to LA. You can explore the native village and springs of Kuruvungna, read about Latin American indigenous festivals, and listen to Tongva Elders reflect on their people’s displacement. You can view modern locations of Indian healthcare and education resources in LA, which many indigenous people struggle to find. MILA doesn’t allow its maps to provide only one definition or narrative; instead, they offer intricate, multifaceted histories that reflect the diversity of LA’s indigenous communities.

tongva_sacred_springs_-_serra_springs_-_kuruvungna_springs

Historic landmark sign marking the location of Serra Springs, called Kuruvungna by the native Gabrieleno Tongva people. The springs were a natural fresh water source for the Tongva people (via Wikimedia Commons).

The American Indian Education story map perhaps best demonstrates all of MILA’s goals. Multiple perspectives color the stories and share different sides of indigenous communities’ complex relationship with American education systems. The pain inflicted by Indian schools, the worry over the loss of native languages, and the hope new cultural programs are bringing to LA can all be felt while exploring the map.

Tongva House (via author).

The maps not only create awareness among non-indigenous people; they almost more importantly provide a digital network for indigenous groups to learn from and relate to each other in ways they might not have before. MILA wishes to add more maps and encourages people to create their own to foster connection between different communities. While the subjects and perspectives in the maps vary, they all communicate a common message from indigenous groups in LA: We are here, and we will be heard.

You may also like:
Cameron McCoy recommends L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present by Josh Sides (2003).
Erika Bsumek explores several titles related to Navajo Arts and the History of the U.S. West.
Nakia Paker reviews Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South, by Barbara Krauthamer (2013).

Student Showcase – Give or Take: The Indian Removal Act

Kensey Wiggins
Anderson-Shiro Secondary School
Junior Division
Individual Exhibit

The Indian Removal Act was one of the most infamous moments in U.S. history. With the power of the federal government behind him, President Andrew Jackson authorized the removal of eastern Native American communities from their ancestral homelands and relocation to lands west of the Mississippi. Despite their best efforts, these Native tribes eventually lost sovereignty over their land and had to migrate west.

Kensey Wiggins’s Texas History Day exhibit explores the history behind this painful moment of Native American history. But he also sought to evaluate this controversial event from the perspective of Cherokee communities and President Andrew Jackson. Kensey talks about coming up with this topic in his process paper:

Kensey’s Texas History Day exhibit on the Indian Removal Act

Ever since third grade, I’ve been leaming about American Indians. It was, and is, a common topic to cover in class. One thing the indians always seemed to be involved in was denied rights, whether it was land rights, rights to live, or individual rights. Because of this, when I saw Andrew Jackson vs. The Cherokees among the sample topics, it was instantly at the top of my choices. I asked my teacher for more information about Andrew Jackson and The Cherokees and soon realized what a great project it would make for this year’s topic.

Selection from Kensey’s exhibit describing the contributions of Cherokee Chief John Ross

My project relates to the theme in many ways. It focuses on the opposing beliefs about the rights involved with the indian Removal Act. One side believes they are helping the Indians by removing them. They believed they were giving them the right to live how they wanted. While the other side, believed the government was stripping the Indians’ rights and forcing them eff of their homeland. There was, and still is, huge controversy over the Indian Removal Act and whether or not the indians were given rights or if they were having their rights taken away.

This week’s Texas History Day projects:

A website on an iconic Civil Rights moment

The often forgotten story of deportation and detention during WWII

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

by Hannah Ballard

As we celebrate the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, it’s easy to imagine the 1860s as a historical stage dominated by northerners and southerners, fighting to make their voices heard as the debates about slavery and the great drama of emancipation unfolded in a series of costly battles and sweeping presidential proclamations. While that narrative certainly serves as a key to our nation’s history, Scott Berg urges us to broaden our geographic perspective to include the Western US to fully understand a decade that saw the nation splinter, reunify, and begin to grapple with new definitions of “freedom.” In his new book, 38 Nooses: Lincoln, Little Crow, and the Beginning of the Frontier’s End, Berg casts this decade as a pivotal moment of contention when the Dakota nation staked a claim to their land in a series of battles that would come to be known as the Dakota War of 1862.

In twenty brief yet power-packed chapters, Berg uses a variety of sources to tell the social, political, and military story of the Dakota people leading up to and during the war, drawing heavily on the narrative of a captive white woman named Sarah Wakefield who lived with the Dakota nation for most of the duration of the conflict. As Civil War raged in the east, Berg recounts how the Dakota left towns smoldering in their wake, capturing women and children, only to face extreme retaliation from whites who failed to see how continued encroachment on Native lands and delayed annuity payments might have lead to their current predicament. By December 26, 1862, approximately four months after the start of open hostilities, violence between the Dakota and their white counterparts had escalated to such a fever pitch that President Lincoln himself would order thirty-eight Dakota men – after questionable trials and some faulty convictions – hanged for their actions. With a stroke of his pen, Lincoln effectively ordered the largest federally sanctioned mass execution in the nation’s history. When one compares the result of this conflict with the results of the Civil War, this decision suggests that punishment for violent action against the federal government had a decidedly racial dimension. Over one million southern whites took up arms against the Union to defend slavery in a conflict that saw massacres on an unprecedented scale for four years, and yet the former Confederacy faced only one execution as punishment for its rebellion. In the West, on the other hand, when a few hundred Dakota took violent action to ensure that the government upheld its end of the treaty and protected Dakota lands in a set of conflicts that lasted less than a year, the result was the largest government approved mass execution in our nation’s history. In the context of the 1860s, the federal government, Lincoln included, meted out “justice” in racial terms as those who challenged the government in the East faced a much different fate than those who defied the government in the West.

More than just a story of battles and raids, however, Berg manages to give both an on-the-ground, local perspective of the violence in Minnesota and widen his lens to put the conflict in a national context.. Lincoln, George McClellan, and John Pope all find space in Berg’s pages as he draws interesting connections between the Indians wars in the West and the Civil War in the East. In one particularly striking example, Berg describes a group of recently captured Dakotas held at Fort Snelling as the government continued to pursue Little Crow and his band. Six-hundred captives stood on the banks of the Mississippi River and watched the approach of a steamboat – the Northerner – that would transport them out of Minnesota to a reservation in southern Dakota territory. They quickly noticed that the boat was peopled “by a hundred or so black men from the southern reaches of the Mississippi, contraband slaves who were now free under the terms of the Emancipation Proclamation,” brought north to be used in the effort to subdue the unyielding bands of Dakota warriors. In that moment, Berg tells us that “captive Indians and free blacks exchanged stares and, according to one observer, entered into conversations that were not recorded by any reporter, diarist, or letter writer.” If one was to speculate on the nature of that exchange (and Berg does not), it seems quite possible that both parties – neither unfamiliar with the other – would find more than a little irony in their new situations and their changed relationship to whites.

A professor of nonfiction writing, Berg’s command of the literature and engaging writing style combine to give him that elusive blend of readable narrative and accessible analysis. Instead of casting our eyes back and forth between the North and South, with occasional glances over our shoulders to the West to see if slavery would flourish there, Berg shows us how Native actions on the Minnesota frontier made their way back to Washington and landed on the desk of a President who, though mired in a Civil War, was forced to listen to Native voices of dissent and grapple with instances Native resistance in a conflict that would set the stage for the Battle of Little Bighorn and Wounded Knee.

Photo Credits:

Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper depicting the execution of 38 Sioux in Mankato, Minnesota, January 24, 1863 (Image courtesy of Library of Congress)

Stereoscopic image of Wa-kan-o-zhan-zhan (“Medicine Bottle”), a Native American executed in 1865 for his participation in the 1862 Dakota War (Image courtesy of New York Public Library)

“Captive Fates: Displaced American Indians in the Southwest Borderlands, Mexico, and Cuba, 1500-1800.”

by Paul Conrad

This past May, the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin awarded the Lathrop Prize for Best Dissertation to Paul Conrad, a PhD graduate in early American history. His dissertation, titled “Captive Fates: Displaced American Indians in the Southwest Borderlands, Mexico, and Cuba, 1500-1800,” chronicles the history of Native American capture by Euroamerican settlers in the Greater Rio Grande River Basin.

Abstract:

Between 1500 and 1800, Spaniards and their Native allies captured hundreds of Apache Indians and members of neighboring groups from the Rio Grande River Basin and subjected them to a variety of fates. They bought and sold some captives as slaves, exiled others as prisoners of war to central Mexico and Cuba, and forcibly moved others to mines, towns, and haciendas as paid or unpaid laborers. Though warfare and captive exchange predated the arrival of Europeans to North America, the three centuries following contact witnessed the development of new practices of violence and captivity in the North American West fueled by Euroamericans’ interest in Native territory and labor, on the one hand, and the dispersal of new technologies like horses and guns to American Indian groups, on the other. While at times subject to an enslavement and property status resembling chattel slavery, Native peoples of the Greater Rio Grande often experienced captivities and forced migrations fueled more by the interests of empires and nation-states in their territory and sovereignty than by markets in human labor. Uncovering these dynamics of captivity and their effects on Apachean groups and their neighbors serves to better integrate American Indian and Borderlands histories into central narratives of colonial North American scholarship.

Contemporary view of the Rio Grande, New Mexico.

Map of the Rio Grande River in 1718.

Castle of San Juan de Ulua (Veracruz, Mexico) where Native captives were housed en route to Cuba.

About Paul Conrad:

Paul Conrad is currently an Assistant Professor of History at Colorado State University-Pueblo. He will spend the 2012-2013 academic year at the Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University, where he has received a research fellowship to work on revising his dissertation into a book manuscript.

Visit Paul Conrad’s homepage.

Photo credits:

All photos courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History by Karl Jacoby (2008)

by Nathan E. McCormack

In Shadows at Dawn, Karl Jacoby examines the way that perspective influences historical memory and the role that political power plays in selecting which memories become codified in the historical narrative. Jacoby does this through a study of the Camp Grant Massacre—the death of approximately 140 Apache at the hands of a group of white and Hispanic settlers and Tohono O’odham natives in April 1871 in the Aravaipa Valley in Arizona.

Jacoby examines the settlement of the Arizona-Mexico border region from four perspectives, those of the Apache and O’odham natives, the settlers from Mexico, and settlers from the United States. He relates each group’s story individually, highlighting events forgotten, dismissed, or emphasized, and demonstrating the way each group created a unique narrative about a shared event. In doing so, he calls attention to the influence of numerous factors, that influence the creation of history and group memory, including a culture’s worldview and its political position within the larger social context.

Divided into two overall sections—before and after the Aravaipa massacre—Jacoby begins each group’s narrative with its arrival in the area northeast of the Gulf of California, in present-day southern Arizona (in the case of the O’odham, whose arrival in the area is uncertain, a discussion of its lifestyle before the other groups’ arrivals). Jacoby discusses each group’s interaction with the others from its own perspective, which he gleans by studying historical and biographical narratives, or artifacts with analogous function among the indigenous groups. By addressing the way each group interpreted common events common, for example the cause each group attributed to the Aravaipa attack, Jacoby theorizes about the way that each group envisioned its role in the conflict, and more broadly, the way that it interpreted life in the rugged Arizona territory.

Jacoby’s study presents a fairly straightforward analysis of the events leading up to the Araviapa Canyon attack and does not attempt to present a theoretical explanation for the violence of the frontier or colonialism. The major contribution of Shadows at Dawn, however, is Jacoby’s portrait of each group’s distinctive perspective on the same time period—and, in some cases, the same events. This is particularly useful in postcolonial or subaltern studies, for recovering the voices that are lost when, as is frequently the case, only the history of the dominant or victorious community has been preserved. Jacoby’s approach, however, also highlights the difficulty of subaltern histories—preserving the perspective of conquered peoples, which tends to be lost or destroyed. What fragments remain—in his account the calendar sticks of the Apache serve as an example of these historical remnants—generally paint an unclear or incomplete picture, at best, and the historian must engage in some degree of speculation to construct a narrative based upon them. This is particularly true when dealing with semi-literate groups like indigenous North Americans.

Despite this difficulty, Jacoby utilizes the extant material effectively and acknowledges the challenges that it presents. The result is unique both in its approach and analysis and makes for a readable and accessible study, which avoids the all-too-common trap of theoretical overreaching.

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

by James Jenkins

The War of 1812 was not a war between two nations, but rather a civil war, in which “brother fought brother in a borderland of mixed peoples.” Alan Taylor focuses on the U.S.-Canada borderland, which stretched from Detroit to Montreal. Before the war, the distinctions between British subjects and American citizens in the region remained uncertain. The British asserted that their empire’s subjects remained subjects for life, precisely when a stream of Irish people were migrating to the United States. Moreover, immigrants from the United States made up the majority of Upper Canada (present-day Ontario). Although the War of 1812 resulted in a stalemate from a diplomatic or military perspective, it gave closure to the contested border and resulted in the emergence of the United States and Canada as modern nation-states.

Taylor identifies four components that made the War of 1812 a civil war. First, The Republican-led American government vied with Britain over who would control Upper Canada. Yet, the U.S.’s poorly trained military struggled to occupy even a sliver of Canadian territory. Taylor describes how supply lines, propaganda, and prisons all played pivotal roles in the war’s outcome. Second, American Federalists sympathized with Britain. Most Federalists opposed the war and some even contributed to Britain’s war effort by smuggling, spying and threatening secession. Moreover, the United States never waged a significant campaign on the upper St. Lawrence River because Federalists in Ogdensburg, NY used their political influence to block such a strategy. Possessing the St. Lawrence River would have weakened all of Upper Canada, which relied on the seaway for supplies. But Republican politicians from western New York and Kentucky successfully lobbied to make the Detroit and Niagara Rivers the primary American fronts. Third, Irish republicans who had immigrated to the United States renewed a failed rebellion in Ireland by enlisting in American forces. But, they also faced Irish soldiers who had joined the royal army, pitting Irishman against Irishman.

Taylor describes a fourth aspect to the civil war: the involvement of Native peoples. Many Indians joined British forces in the hopes of stopping further U.S. settlement in the Ohio Valley. However, Native peoples are curiously peripheral to Taylor’s narrative, and he instead highlights their ability to terrify untrained American soldiers and provide fodder for anti-British propaganda. Taylor’s emphasis on imagined Indians leaves some paradoxical questions unanswered. For instance, he argues that American General William Henry Harrison’s troops considered arming Indians to be racial treason. Yet Taylor has little to say about the two hundred some Native people who joined Harrison’s forces. In addition, Taylor offers almost no biographical details on Native individuals. Those wishing for the next chapter of Taylor’s The Divided Ground (2006), which places the Haudenosaunee at the center of the American Revolution, will be disappointed.

Despite this shortcoming, Taylor’s borderland approach and assiduous research make for a welcome revision to an often overlooked war. The Civil War of 1812 should appeal to a large audience thanks to Taylor’s engaging narratives and elegant writing style.

History Underfoot

by Erika M. Bsumek

History can sometimes surround us – sometimes it’s even underfoot. This rug, from the Art and Art History Library Collection at the University of Texas, represents the kind of textiles that were made by skilled Navajo weavers and sold on the Navajo reservation from the late 19th into the early 20th century.

The attractive geometric designs of such creations corresponded with other fashion forward styles of the era and they became popular additions to dens and “Indian corners” across the U.S. Navajo rugs have had a lasting influence on interior design ever since. Consumers currently spend millions of dollars every year for antique rugs and blankets, newer rugs still being created by Navajo weavers, or even the less expensive “American Indian style” rugs made in Mexico or India.

So, what’s the history of a rug like this one and why should we care about it? One view is that after the arrival of the Spanish and the introduction of sheep in North America, weaving became central to the development of trade goods throughout the Southwest. Thus, Navajo textiles reflect Spanish influence and cultural exchange. When Anglos began settling in the region, they developed a taste for woven goods and further altered the trade. Traders encouraged weavers to include borders, like the Greek key style design found in this rug, similar to those found on Persian rugs.

In the 1880s, the white traders who encouraged these changes knew that the beautiful Navajo textiles could be sold to white consumers – if marketed correctly. Another view, the Navajo view, is that Spiderwoman (a key spiritual figure in Navajo cosmology) gave Navajo women the skill they needed to fashion cotton and wool into beautiful creations to trade and feed their families.

Traders like Lorenzo Hubbell, who ran the Ganado Trading Post in Ganado, Arizona, turned their attention to selling Navajo rugs as a way to generate income for the post. Hubbell’s first step was to convince famed hotelier Fred Harvey to stock his hotel gift shops with Navajo blankets and rugs. Harvey also used Navajo rugs as decorative accessories throughout his hotel. This meant that railway tourists to the Southwest could simply stroll into the hotel’s lobby, see the beautiful the rugs used throughout the hotel, enter the store, and purchase a rug to take home. Beyond Harvey’s gift shop sales, traders like Hubbell also published catalogues that they shipped to potential customers or curio stores throughout the United States. The text and advertisements that appeared in trader catalogues promoted the traders as much as, if not more so, than the weavers.

This kind of marketing made Navajo textiles part of an emerging fascination with “primitive’ peoples. By the early 1900s, Americans across the United States were collecting goods from Africa, Asia, and the American Southwest. Just as painters like Picasso began to include elements of indigenous art in modernist art forms, consumers could buy goods that reflected similar design elements: geometrical, bold, abstract.

As consumer fascination with Navajo rugs took hold in the marketplace, rugs grew in value. But, where were the weavers who made the products? How were they treated? Ironically, although Navajo textiles took on social value, Indians were being de-valued in society. Government efforts to assimilate Indians remained strong well into the twentieth century. In response, Navajo weavers, in particular, have worked to preserve their culture through their weavings. So, the next time you see a Navajo rug, you might want to consider its history – and more importantly, the history of the people who made it.

Read more about the marketing of Navajo crafts:

Erika Bsumek, Indian-Made: Navajo Culture in the Marketplace, 1868-1940

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