Last week I was interviewed by a reporter for a story about my two books: Coyote Warrior: One Man, Three Tribes, and the Trial That Forged a Nation and the new one, Savages and Scoundrels: The Untold Story of America’s Road to Empire through Indian Territory. She asked me, “Since these two books work so well together, what is the lesson you have learned from writing them?”
I thought about it a moment, then waved a white flag. “Can I think about that and write you back?”
“Certainly.”
For those unfamiliar, Coyote Warrior was written from the vantage point of an Indian village beside the Missouri River, and it told one version of America’s story through the eyes of the Mandan/Hidatsa family that welcomed Lewis and Clark to the Knife River Villages in October, 1804. To write Savages and Scoundrels, I crossed that river and wrote it from the vantage point of the “shining city on the hill,” looking back at the river across time and space.
This is what I wrote to her:
Two hundred years after our founding, the struggle for dignity and justice in this grand experiment we call the United States of America is an ongoing ordeal for many citizens. The reasons for that struggle are embedded in ideological conflicts that were present at the founding, and they are with us today. As George Washington and Benjamin Franklin feared, this republic was shaped in a crucible of irreconcilable moral and political conflicts. We could not, on the one hand, hold out the promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to our citizens without actively denying life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to anyone who stood in the way of our desires.
Washington, Franklin, and others, like John Adams, were correct in their assessment and predictions. In the 19th century, those conflicts played out in a disgraceful drama that saw the dominant society abandon all of the lofty principles on which the republic was founded. By mid-century the overwhelming passion for this nation was reaching the Pacific Ocean and claiming the continent, but we had a very big problem. The Indian owned all of the land between the Mississippi River and the Pacific Ocean. And even though our most sacred and foundational laws solemnized that ownership, when push came to shove, we were more than willing to unhinge the very thing we said we were – a nation of laws – in order to satisfy our appetites and to fulfill our Manifest Destiny, a self-proclaimed divine mission to take dominion over the earth and to vanquish heathens and infidels who stood in our way. To say nothing of the Africans. And the Chinese, et al. A century later, that engine of social engineering is still with us in the form of Neo-Conservatism, and we have carried that creed to distant shores.
A lesson from the two books? There are many different paths through the American story, through the meta-narrative that is this nation, and what you perceive that meta-narrative to be will in large part be shaped by a vantage point of geography and of your political and economic position within the hierarchy of our society. I often think of writing narrative as a trip down a river, and the readers are passengers in the rafts seeing the country unfolding before them for the first time. The narratives in these books flow together to form a river through the American experience that is unlike any of the routes that have become so familiar, and so mythologized, in the telling and retelling. It is the experience not of the victor, but of the unvanquished. All of our self-congratulatory talk about freedom and democracy and the inviolable rights of the individual, we have just as often acted in monstrous ways that sadly confirm Washington’s darkest fears.
Perhaps we have entered a new day. If justice and dignity are to become the ruling values in a pluralistic society of diverse cultures, religions, and views, then perhaps we have entered into a revolutionary age that will see the dominance of the European replaced by a more polymorphic society. Like it or not, our history is a cascade of ironies and unintended consequences, and the biggest irony of all might be that those who were denied life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness – those who persevered and endured the struggles of the last two hundred years and remain unvanquished – might finally secure for all citizens the liberties reserved by the founders for the select few.
Related Articles |
