Asides from David Treuer

I'm working my way up to a thorough post that will combine thoughts on David Treuer's Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, but as you can imagine, that's a big undertaking. I hope to connect it to other things I've read and seen recently, and even the current injustices in Palestine and Israel, if I can manage it. (If I don't manage to build that in, I want to say now: reading these books right at this moment, as this has been happening, makes the horror of it more enlightening.)

In the meantime, I wanted to share some asides from Treuer's book that won't be relevant when I get to that post, but are too good to miss. Most of these come at moments when he's providing historical context. Maybe it's because I didn't take a "world civilization" course in college history, but I've never had a perspective on the broad causes at work in what happened in recent human history (the last half dozen centuries).

In backgrounding the voyages of Columbus, Treuer writes that after the Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453,

The powers Venice, Genoa, Barcelona, and Lisbon needed new ways to get the goods they were accustomed to [from China and the Middle East] into Europe. Specifically, they needed a cheaper way than traveling through the politically unstable Mediterranean waters and the increasingly risky overland routes across the Arabian Peninsula (page 22).

He then throws in the Iberian civil wars and feudal mercantilism, rebalancing power between monarchs and merchants, plus changes in ship technologies that made longer sea crossings possible. All of this fits with the idea that Columbus voyaged west for economic reasons (not discovery, as the usual myth-building goes).

Treuer provides an Indigenous perspective of what became the French and Indian War, far from what I remember learning. Essentially, it worked well for various Indigenous peoples to play the British and French off against each other for more than a hundred years. But by the mid-1700s the balance was shifting toward the British. He describes the assault by French-allied people on the British-allied village of Pickawillany (near present-day Piqua, Ohio) in brutal detail. That Battle of Pickawillany "set off the First Anglo-Indian War, helped to ignite the French and Indian War, and was one of the sparks that began the worldwide conflagration known as the Seven Years' War" (page 51). And that led to the loss of the balance that had served Indigenous people in North America, with British preeminence established. And then the American Revolution, and so on.

At one point, he notes the differences between the various orders of Spanish monks in terms of how they dealt with Indigenous people. Franciscans (the order our current pope belongs to... St. Francis of Assisi!) were the first to come and build missions. Their methods to conscript labor were brutal, ranging from whipping to cutting off feet. They smashed religious idols and banned "dances and ceremonies as devil worship" (page 58). The Jesuits, who came a bit later, took a different tack, bringing livestock and seeds, and learning the local languages. Those livestock — essentially invasive species — had a different type of deleterious effect, of course. Treuer doesn't say if the Jesuits incorporated aspects of Indigenous religious ceremonies into Catholicism or not, but that happened somehow in parts of El Norte, as we know. After the Jesuits were recalled, they were replaced by Dominicans (and more Franciscans), both of whom returned to the types of overtly violent policies the Franciscans had enacted earlier.

Treuer tells one specific bit of history of the Mormons when they were newly arrived in Utah. In 1857 President Buchanan sent the army to deal with the polygamy problem at the same time that an unrelated wagon train of 200 settlers reached Salt Lake seeking resupply. Brigham Young thought the wagon train was part of the federal action against the Latter Day Saints and sent a militia party (dressed as Indians, of course!) to attack the settlers. After overt trickery and subterfuge, which Treuer describes, all of the adult settlers were killed in cold blood and the children who were too young to remember the massacre were stolen and adopted by the Mormons. "It was agreed that the whole incident would be blamed on the Paiute" (page 78). Brigham Young led an investigation that found, not surprisingly, that the killings were carried out by the Paiute. The feds sent their own investigators, but the Civil War interrupted things and the truth wasn't settled until 1877.

One section of the book deals with Indigenous men as soldiers, and included several facts I never knew. The term sniper originated in British India "to describe someone skilled at shooting snipe, an elusive game bird notoriously hard to shoot owing to speed and camouflage" (page 188). This was relevant because Indigenous U.S. soldiers are often snipers. Indian participation in World War I was as much as 30% of the "adult male population, double the percentage of all adult American men who served" (page 190). A Pima Indian named Ira Hayes was one of the Marines who raised the U.S. flag on Iwo Jima.

I also valued Treuer's clear summary of post-World War II Europe, which then positioned the U.S. and USSR into the Cold War duality that I was born into:

Great Britain had squandered more than 25 percent of its national wealth on the war, and the debts it incurred to the United States through the lend-lease program would hang "like a millstone around the neck of the British economy" for decades to come. Britain's "imperial century" had ended in 1914, and the empire itself, already in decline after the First World War, was finally killed off by the Second. With the country bankrupt, and the Eastern bloc growing, Britain could no longer hold on to its colonies: between 1945 and 1965 the number of people around the world who lived under British rule fell from seven hundred million to five million, with most of the remaining subjects living in Hong Kong.... The Soviet Union, having lost upward of forty million people in the war...rebuilt itself by force and made allies by coercion. It swept up satellite republics...into its sphere of influence. The United States offered help under the Marshall Plan, but the Soviet Union refused that offer and instead extracted raw materials and machinery from the "annexed" countries, to their detriment. The Soviet Union made peace in the same way it made war: with force and numbers" (page 245).

I'm just getting started on Dunbar-Ortiz's book, which is shorter and possibly more intense (!). We'll see.