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Paul VanDevelder
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December 28th, 2009 in Current Events by Paul VanDevelder
A few months ago I wrote a blog on health care reform entitled The Gettysburg of our culture war. Between the lines, what I really meant to say was the legislative process of getting health care reform through Congress would reveal, as never before, the depths of our polarization as a society. So I’ve followed the twists and turns on Capitol Hill pretty closely, and my own verdict on this process, for what little it’s worth, is my analogy was a little weak. If you look back on some of the things that were said from the well of the Senate, you have to scratch your head in amazement.
We would have to go back to the early 1800s to find a more vitriolic and hateful rhetoric. There seems little doubt now that the lasting effect of this debate will be more of the same, not less, and one wonders, as has Ezra Klein of the Washington Post, how this government is going to lurch into the future when the principle tool of governance is the filibuster? Good question.
The only point made in that first piece that need be repeated here is the idea that our culture war has been very neatly (and sadly) defined by money. The insurance industry spent in excess of $35 million to kill this bill. Republicans spent all of their political capital trying to muddy the waters with half-truths and out right lies – a calumny for which they should be made to pay dearly in next years elections. Alas, Americans have shown they don’t have memories that cast such a wide net. With tongue in check I suggested this was the Gettysburg of our culture war. If that’s so, then by next year, we’ll be on to the Wilderness, or Cold Harbor. Where is it going to end.
One of the things this battle made crystal clear is this: the political factions that vie to run our government, of and for and by the people, now, more than ever before in our history, live in parallel universes. This duality of purpose was something that worried our most sagacious founders. Their biggest problem in 1787 was not what kind of government to build, but rather, what are the essential qualities of human nature that will assert themselves now that the chains of repression have been broken?
As you might have guessed, guys like Franklin and Washington were not overly optimistic, nor was Chief Justice John Marshall. Washington learned some unsettling lessons watching his fellow Virginia aristocrats battle for power and prestige after the English were defeated: “Chimney corner patriots abound; venality, corruption, prostitution of office for selfish ends, abuse of trust, perversions of funds from a national to a private use, and speculations upon the necessities of the times, pervade all interests.” Franklin’s penetrating insights into human nature left him even less optimistic. The common man was so corruptible by temptations and greed that no amount of regulation could prevent this experiment from ending “in Despotism as other Forms have done before it, when the People shall become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other.”
Indeed, abuse of trust and perversions of funds pervade all interests, and there seems no doubt that we have become deathly ill with affluenza, that painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more. The real question driving this whole health care debate is just a surrogate for the question that fuels our larger culture war. Where does the influence of money stop and the influence of human decency begin?
American History, current events, Founding Fathers
December 20th, 2009 in American History by Paul VanDevelder
Fourteen years ago, as mineral and gas corporations were discovering new reserves of oil and gas in huge shale deposits on Indian reservations across the West, a feisty middle-aged Blackfeet woman, named Eloise Cobell, decided that the time had come to begin a long-overdue accounting of mineral royalties on Indian lands. As a community organizer in Browning, Cobell understood the machinery of government, both in her tribal world and in Washington D.C.. What started in 1996 as a mere suspicion – a hunch that the federal government and mineral corporations had been stealing from the poor and giving to the rich – soon germinated in actualities and took root in the law to become a formal complaint. Once her suit was filed in federal court, Cobell as it came to be known, quickly grew into the larges and most complicated class-action lawsuit ever brought against the United States. The paperwork involved a staggering four hundred thousand plaintiffs.
Ms. Cobell’s suit alleged that the U.S. Department of the Interior, in collusion with energy companies, had neglected its solemn fiduciary responsibilities to the Indians by absconding with mineral royalties since the late 1800s. Accountants for the firm of Price-Waterhouse conducted the initial review of the government’s books – that is, the books they could find. Their report minced no words: it appeared that as much as $50 billion had gone missing over that time, and maybe more. In 2003, a conservative Texas judge by the name of Royce Lamberth, who, from the beginning, had presided over the case in federal district court in Washington D.C., ruled in favor of the plaintiffs. Along the way, he three times cited sitting secretaries of the Interior for contempt of court for their chronic foot-dragging, malfeasance, and bureaucratic double-talk. Now that the basic question of culpability was settled, the protracted and contentious accounting nightmare could begin in earnest. Or could it?
“Alas,” declared Judge Lamberth in words seldom heard from a federal bench, “our modern Interior Department has time and again demonstrated that it is a dinosaur – the morally and culturally oblivious hand-me-down of a disgracefully racist and imperialist government that should have been buried a century ago…For those harboring hope that the stories of murder, dispossession, forced marches, assimilationist policy programs, and other incidents of cultural genocide against the Indians are merely the echoes of a horrible, bigoted government-past that has been sanitized by the good deeds of more recent history, this case serves as an appalling reminder of the evils that result when large numbers of the politically powerless are placed at the mercy of institutions engendered and controlled by a politically powerful few.”
In 2005, at the insistent urging of the Bush White House and the Interior Department’s lawyers, who accused Judge Lamberth of being “too harsh on the government” in their motion seeking his dismissal, Judge Lamberth was removed from the case.
Last week, this sordid scandal finally inched its way toward some kind of closure when Ms. Cobell and her lawyers, along with the Department of Justice and the Department of the Interior, announced that they had arrived at a $3.4 billion settlement. In real dollars and cents, this will amount to a $1,000 payment to every named plaintiff in the lawsuit, and President Obama, who characterized this suit as “a stain” on the nation, hailed the settlement as “an important step towards sincere reconciliation” between the government and the Indians. As a presidential candidate, Obama had pledged himself “to resolving this issue, and I am proud that my administration has taken this step today.”
After he had spent his fair share of time in the West dealing with both whites and Indians, General William T. Sherman gave the best definition of an Indian reservation that I’ve ever heard: “A parcel of land set aside for the exclusive use of Indians that is surrounded by thieves.” This entire sordid episode grew out of the thievery of both the federal and state governments in the 19th century. Between them, they managed to steal an estimated 125 million acres of treaty protected homelands from native tribes. Ms. Cobell’s lawsuit may have settled – for the moment – the question of stolen mineral royalties, but only a fool, as Judge Lamberth suggested with such articulate fervor, would think this is the last we’ll hear of it.
Paul VanDevelder is the author of Coyote Warrior: One Man, Three Tribes, and the Trial that Forged a Nation, and Savages and Scoundrels: The Untold Story of America’s Road to Empire through Indian Territory.
American History
December 10th, 2009 in World History by Paul VanDevelder
If you asked a hundred high school seniors to describe and explain the importance the Doctrine of Discovery in American history, I’d bet a hundred bucks no more than two of them could provide an answer that would pass muster on a history test. Same bet with a hundred college seniors. For that matter, put the same question to a hundred high school history professors and you’d fare no better. My money’s safe. That’s because the history profession, teachers, books, curriculum, in this country have raced to the bottom and stayed there. It’s not just depressing. It’s downright frightening.
To refresh everyone’s memory, the legal seeds that would one day grow into the Doctrine of Discovery were first planted in the field of natural law by Crusading popes in the Middle Ages. The Papal See asserted its divine prerogative to send crusading armies to the Holy Lands in order to confiscate land from Muslim heathens and infidels. These prerogatives were formally incorporated into canon law by Popes Innocent II and IV and would continue to evolve through the discovery-era courts in Spain, through the Elizabethan and Jacobean courts in England, and finally filter down through the founders of the republic of the United States and the U.S. Supreme Court.
These laws, which Congress used midway through the 20th century to remove the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara people from their homelands of prehistory to make way for gigantic dams on the upper Missouri River, come down to us in a more familiar name: eminent domain. While the tribes claimed an absolute right to protect their ancestral lands from being inundated by these dams, the republic asserted a countervailing prerogative to trump the tribe’s aboriginal title by claiming a superior right, under eminent domain, i.e., the Doctrine of Discovery, to take those lands away.
As the great legal historian Robert Williams explains in monumental work, American Indians In Western Legal Thought, Discourses on Conquest, the founders of the United States republic made colossal errors in their formulation for government. For one thing, they utterly failed to take into account the 500 plus Indian nations that pre-existed the republic in the framework of federalism. Thus, says Williams, the U.S. Constitution succeeded in preserving a “legacy of 1,000 years of European racism and colonialism directed against non-Western peoples. The Doctrine of Discovery’s underlying medievally derived ideology – that normatively divergent savage peoples could be denied rights and status equal to those accorded to the civilized nations of Europe – had become an integral part of the fabric of the United States federal Indian law.”
Or, to put that another way, and to paraphrase James Fennimore Cooper, freedom was a paradox not easily resolved. Was it not paradoxical that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – the prizes of democracy – were cherished by a society that was determined to deny these very prizes to black men and Indians?
To its credit, though not a moment too soon, word comes from 2009 General Convention of the Episcopal Church, in Anaheim, California, that the church has seen fit to repudiate the Doctrine of Discovery as a corrupt tool of the federal government that “history continues to be relevant in terms of justice issues today.”
It does indeed, but where do we begin when the vast majority of our citizens are so blissfully oblivious to the weight of their own history?
American History, constitution, Native Americans, World History
November 24th, 2009 in World History by Paul VanDevelder
In Part I of this adventure, I recapped some of the wisdom about clouds that was conjured by the sages of antiquity and ended in 1802 when a young English chemist named Luke Howard created the first taxonomy of clouds.
In his day, Luke Howard’s sky-breaking essay “On the Modifications of Clouds” was as revolutionary to Enlightenment era scientists as E.O. Wilson’s work with ants has been to evolutionary biology a century and a half later. Howard broke clouds into three major groupings - cirrus, stratus, and cumulus – and subdivided each group into families of clouds with five and six siblings. That was the start of much bigger things to come. Along the way, Howard acquired the distinction of being named “the father of meteorology,” and the new field of atmospheric science that soon grew up around his work had some of the best and brightest minds trained on the heavens.
Within this new field of meteorology two distinct and very different disciplines coexist: the study of weather and the study of climate. As Mark Twain once quipped, weather is what’s falling on your head at any given moment. Climate is what happens to continents and oceans over decades. Thanks to an unlikely sequence of events that would have astonished Aristotle and Descartes and Luke Howard, the latter humble efforts to bring some scientific understanding to the self-ruining phenomena that float above our heads would eventually eclipse even astro- and nuclear physics in importance. The modern day-climatologist’s study of clouds, those silent messengers of weather that mesmerized the ancient Chaldeans and Chinese, had now morphed from the voodoo-like muse of poets into the most intense and important field of inquiry in modern-day science.
How did that happen? Well, that question can’t be answered in a blog, but suffice it to say that Howard’s scientific descendents in the field of climatology began asking some interesting questions about clouds in the 1970s. In many respects, they were the same kinds of questions asked by the ancient Chinese and Aristotle; only now, scientist had access to instruments (and planes and rockets and high altitude weather balloons) with which to actually venture aloft in search of answers. By the 1990s, when global climate change was becoming a very contentious topic in scientific and political circles around the world, the question that most intrigued climate scientists was simply this: What (if any) role do clouds play in the infinitely complex world of climate change?
Hot in pursuit of that answer were cloud physicists and climate modelers like NASA’s Anthony Del Genio, who works at the Goddard Space Institute at Columbia University in New York. What folks like Del Genio were soon to discover about clouds was nothing short – his words – of “amazing.”
The clouds Del Genio and his colleagues were most interested in were the cumulonimbus formations in the tropics. For one thing, these clouds are among Mother Nature’s most violent children, and for another, they completely dominate the skies in the tropical belt, that area on our planet that circles the globe 20 degrees north and south of the equator. It is here where weather is generated, so with that big question in mind: What role do these clouds play in driving the planet’s climate? NASA assembled more than three hundred scientists in Florida in the summer of 2002 for the largest experiment ever conducted on clouds.
CRYSTAL-FACE, as it is now known, was, in many respects, the culmination of thousands of years of human speculation about cumulonimbus formations. The experiment involved battalions of scientists, flocks of satellites, squadron’s of aircrafts, and oodles of money, $20 million and counting. What they discovered would have astonished Aristotle.
Cumulonimbus formations are those clouds that form in the early afternoon and quickly grow into towering giants. In fact, they flatten out on top, at about 55,000 feet, when they hit a warmer layer of air at the top of the troposphere. These are the classical anvil formations that have fascinated scientists for thousands of years – and for good reason. It turns out that one cumulonimbus cloud is so complex, says Del Genio, that NASA’s best computers cannot process all the data to properly model even one cloud. For example, that temperature at the base layer of one of these clouds is usually around 80 degrees Fahrenheit, but the temperature at the anvil is minus 100, a difference of 180 degrees. Inside the cloud, electrical charges are so intense and unstable that lightening discharged beneath the anvil, inside the cloud, can superheat the surrounding air to 50,000 degrees F, an imbalance that creates collumnar updrafts inside the cloud that move at hundreds of miles per hour.
Those updrafts, in turn, are encircled by downdrafts of cooler air moving just as fast! Along the way, these ferocious currents of air create violent outflows of air at various altitudes, and conversely, inflows at others. It is those entraining inflows that helped the scientists finally answer the big question.
CRYSTAL-FACE demonstrated that clouds of this size are entraining microscopic aerosol particles released into the atmosphere by man-made processes. Often, those aerosols, which can be tiny bits of sulfur discharged from coal burning power plants, can float thousands of miles through the atmosphere before becoming entrained, or pulled into, one of these clouds. Then, something remarkable happens. Each one of those tiny specks of dust or sulfur or carbon becomes the nucleus of a raindrop, and those billions of raindrops are then carried aloft to the top of the cloud by its hurricane force updrafts. At the top of the cloud, those gazillion drops freeze and become tiny mirrors, countless brilliant little mirrors that reflect solar radiation back into space and thereby help to cool the planet by deflecting heat causing radiation away from the planet.
Unfortunately, that cooling effect is being more than offset on the underside of the clouds, which are trapping enormous amounts of energy close to the ground. Scientists like Del Genio now believe that this may finally explain why our planet is experiencing a significant reduction in solar radiation, also know as solar dimming, at an unprecedented time of planetary warming.
So, thousands of years after the Greeks and Chinese first speculated on the nature of clouds, these latest discoveries would probably not come as a big surprise to the historical antecedents of modern scientists. Just as those ancients predicted, it turns out that some of the answers to the biggest ‘Why?’ and ‘How?’ of global climate may have been floating right above our heads all along.
American History, famous people, World History
November 15th, 2009 in World History by Paul VanDevelder
“clouds, the patron goddesses of the layabout. From
them come our intelligence, our dialectic and our reason.”
—Aristophanes
From the ancient Chaldeans to modern climate modelers, clouds have been the self-ruining objects of timeless fascination and wonder. And why not. What better to ponder on a beautiful summer day, anywhere on this planet of ours, than those remnants of distant storms. Yet for all the brainpower and technological know-how of modern-day climate scientists, it’s remarkable how little we knew about these ethereal phantoms until very, very recently. In fact, what scientists knew about clouds just 50 years ago wasn’t much different than their Babylonian and Chaldean predecessors, who compiled the earliest known records of clouds, thousands of years ago.
“When a cloud grows dark in heaven,” noted one anonymous Chaldean weatherman, “a wind will blow.” Unbeknownst to that Chaldean weatherman, his contemporaries in the Chinese Shang dynasty were observing the same parade of clouds across the heavens. Chinese scholars theorized that careful observations and quantifiable data would enable them to deconstruct weather into knowable, measurable parts. In fact, they were the first ‘scientists’ to use charcoal to gauge the relative humidity (RH) of air, an achievement that predates Pericles and the Golden Age of Greece by two millennia.
Centuries later, Taoists anticipated discoveries by modern meteorologists when they established a Ministry of Thunder and a God of Clouds, but it wasn’t until Aristotle cast his eyes skyward and composed his extraordinary treatise, Meteorologicia, that clouds found a permanent home in science. Parting company with his Oriental predecessors, the great Hellenic metaphysician described clouds as a mixing of vapors that were drawn from both the upper atmosphere and terra firma, a great rising and falling and commingling of moisture trapped in perpetual motion by the attraction of the earth and the repulsing power of stars. His insightful musings framed the debate about clouds for nearly two thousand years, when scientific advancements in the Age of Enlightenment, combined with the theoretical genius of Rene Descartes, set the science of clouds on the course where we find it today.
Remarkably, Descartes speculated that clouds were made up of tiny water droplets and particles of ice formed by compressed vapor. This vapor, he reasoned, escapes from both the ground and bodies of water to form these lighter-than-air heaps in the sky that we call clouds. But just how these processes worked in the atmosphere to influence our climate would remain a mystery for another two centuries, when19th century scientists, armed with newfangled tools such as thermometers and barometers, took their questions into the sky in hot air balloons. Yet even as they ascended to dizzying heights above Paris and London, it never occurred to these intrepid aerialists that clouds should have names.
That taxonomic threshold would be crossed in 1802 by an unassuming young English chemist named Luke Howard, now known as the Father of Meteorology. On a rainy December evening, Howard stood before a small gathering of scientists at Plough Court, in London, and uttered a new family of words derived from Latin: Cirrus, Stratus, Cumulus. Howard’s taxonomy for clouds was broken into three basic groups, with four divisions within each group. Clouds, he argued, were as distinct from each other as chickens are distinct from trees. Cirrus were clouds shaped like wisps of hair; Cumulus clouds build into piles and heaps, and finally; Stratus clouds are layered in sheets. Each member of the cloud family is shaped by distinct climatic phenomena.
Howard’s prosaic title, “On the Modifications of Clouds,” belied a daring proposal that would forever alter the way scientists look at the sky. By the time meteorologists added Nimbostratus a century later, Howard’s taxonomy had become a universal fixture of everyday language. Today, clouds arrive in our midst with the names of Roman gods: Undulatus, Cumulonimbus Incus, Fibratus, and Lenticularis, among numerous others, and announce their entrance with stinging hail and deadly tails, or a shadow drifting across a field of ripe grain. Howard’s achievement set the stage for the next great leap forward, but the adventure commenced by the Chaldeans and Chinese would have to wait until 20th century rocket technology punched a hole in the sky. Then, at long last, the intellectual descendants of Aristotle could begin to investigate the role played by clouds in our global climate. (Part II of this story, next week.)
In the meantime, I’ve put together a little test so that you can measure your own understanding of clouds and the role they play in our global weather. The answers might surprise you!
1) Who were the first scientists to use charcoal to gauge the relative humidity of air?
a. the Phoenicians
b. the Egyptians
c. the Italians
d. early Christians
e. the Chinese
2) Finish this sentence (good luck): Clouds are…
a. a figment of our imaginations
b. atmospheric ephemera
c. the discarded garments of angels
d. among the most violent phenomena in nature
3) The term ‘albedo’ refers to the relative ________________ of a cloud?
a. density
b. height, from bottom to top.
c. the speed at which it moves over the ground
d. its relative brightness
4) In climatology, the term ‘entrain’ means…
a. a cluster of clouds
b. a sky with different formations at different altitudes
c. to gather in particles
d. to merge one cloud with another
5) The single most important cloud formation in the global climate engine is which of the following?
a. Cirrus
b. Undulatus
c. Lenticularis
d. Cumulonimbus
e. O Solo Mio
6) Who is famous for this quote: “Clouds are the patron goddesses of the layabout. From them come our intelligence, our dialectic and our reason.”
a. Thomas Jefferson
b. Shakespeare
c. Milton
d. Aristophanes
e. Chaucer
f. Saint Paul
And now, the envelope please…..
1) e 2) d 3) d 4) c 5) d 6) d
technology, World History
October 29th, 2009 in American History by Paul VanDevelder
One of the many things that has kept me enthralled with history, in general, and American history, in particular, are the myriad obscure stories that are floating around out there, just begging to be told. This is the ore mined by this web site, which makes it both informative and fun – a great one-two in my book. My school years were blessed with great teachers, and when I hear other adults lament the ‘terminally boring’ experience they had in high school history, it makes me want to weep.
One of my favorite obscure stories centers on a man named Samuel Worcester. You may have heard of him, but most likely you haven’t. If your sensibilities are anything like mine, I warn you in advance. Worester’s story raises a question we all face from time to time: Would I have had the spine and courage to do the same thing?
Samuel Worcester, a devout and unassuming man, was the post master at the U.S. post office in the Cherokee town of New Echota, Georgia, in 1831, when our story begins. The state of Georgia had been trying, unsuccessfully, to get the federal government to evict the Cherokee from lands within the Georgia state borders for more than thirty years. As turning points in history always do, this story turned on an event that no one could have predicted. In the spring of 1831, the State of Georgia declared all treaties with the Indians to be null and void, and they passed a law requiring non-Indians to get permission from the state before entering Indian lands. That’s where the unlikely Mr. Worcester comes in. It seems that Worcester and a group of his Baptist missionary friends decided to ignore the new state law by conducting a church service for Cherokee worshipers in New Echota. It was, after all, Mr. Worcester’s home town.
When the state of Georgia got wind of this, the governor sent constables to arrest all the white people involved in the missionary work in New Echota. They were thrown in the slammer, put on trial and found guilty, and sentenced to four years of hard labor on a state-owned rock pile as punishment for their defiance.
Soon, however, cooler heads took charge in the state capitol. The governor realized that the state may have bitten off more than it could chew with the federal government. In order to save face, the governor offered they missionaries clemency if they would confess to breaking the state law. Seven of the inmates jumped at the deal. Two did not. One of those two was Samuel Worcester. Worcester and his good friend, Dr. Elizur Butler, decided they would continue to make little rocks out of big ones while the larger issues raised by this contretemps played themselves out.
The governor and legislature urged the two ingrates “not to appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States, but to accept of a pardon from the governor of the state, and promise not to return to the Cherokee nation.” In a letter that gives me chills when I read it (and I’ve read it many times), Worcester responds to the state’s offer in a letter that evokes both Sir Thomas More’s self defense three centuries earlier, and Martin Luther King’s defense in “A Letter from the Birmingham Jail.” Worcester wrote:
What are we to gain by the further prosecution of this case?
Our personal liberty? There is much more prospect of gaining it by yielding than by perseverance. And if not, it is not worthy of account in comparison with the interests of our country. Freedom from the stigma of being pardoned criminals? That also is a consideration of personal feeling not to be balanced against the public good.
The arresting of the hand of oppression? It is already decided that such a course cannot arrest it. The prevention of the violation of the public faith? That faith, it appears to us, is already violated; and, as far as we can see, our perseverance has no tendency to restore it.
The privilege of preaching the gospel to the Cherokees? That privilege is at least as likely to be restored by our yielding as by our perseverance. The reputation of being firm and consistent men? Firmness degenerates into obstinacy if it continues when the prospect of good ceases; and the reputation of doing right is dearly purchased by doing wrong.
The prisoners’ resolve was not to be dislodged. In their opinion, what the state was doing to their friends, the Cherokees, was a moral and legal outrage that demanded the attention of a higher court. Until the case came to trial they would continue smashing rocks in the Georgia sun. Accordingly, Worcester and Doctor Butler asked William Wirt to file a suit on their behalf, and Wirt, the former attorney general of the United States, took the case. Worcester’s case to the high court complained that the state had overstepped its Constitutional authority by trespassing on Cherokee lands. Further, they argued that their civil rights had been violated and that the state had unlawfully abrogated the Cherokee’s Treaty of Holston. Rather than marvel at the resolute fortitude and principled sacrifice of these two men, the governor and legislature were enraged by their bold presumptions.
The case, Worcester v. Georgia, was heard by John Marshall’s court in the spring of 1831. In his ruling for the majority, the great chief justice found that 1) the state of Georgia had no authority to violate Worcester and Butler’s civil liberties, and 2) had no expressed right to extend its jurisdiction onto the lands of a sovereign people, and 3) had no authority to abrogate the tribe’s treaty with the federal government. Georgia’s actions were extensions of authority it never possessed:
The acts of Georgia are repugnant to the Constitution, laws, and treaties of the United States. They interfere forcibly with the relations established between the United States and the Cherokee nation, the regulation of which…are committed exclusively to the government of the union [which] recognizes the pre-existing power of the [Cherokee] nation to govern itself.
It was also the high court’s opinion that the state’s judgment condemning Samuel A. Worcester and Elizur Butler to hard labor “is void, as being repugnant to the Constitution, treaties, and laws of the United States, and ought, therefore, to be reversed and annulled.”
To this day, the court’s opinion in Worcester reverberates in aftershocks that rumble periodically through the bedrock of federalism. When the state of Washington sought to deny Indians access to ancestral shellfish harvests, in 1998, the U.S. Supreme Court cited Worcester in finding for the tribes. When the Mille Lacs band of Chippewa demanded their usufructory rights right to fish on their ancestral lakes, in 1997, Sandra Day O’Connor reminded an indignant Antonin Scalia and William Rehnquist that the federal government had an unimpeachable trust relationship with the tribes that was secured in perpetuity by Worcester. When the Salish-Kootenai tribes of Montana imposed water quality standards on non-Indian residents living on their reservation, including a white town, in 1996, Worcester applied. When the Yaqui and Pequot and Santa Rosa Pueblo went to court to open tribal casinos, Marshall’s opinion in Worcester was the argument cited. The principles established by Worcester have since been invoked in hundreds of Indian law cases where jealous state governments have sought to encroach on tribal resources or to restrict tribal sovereignty. All thanks to a humble post master with an unerring moral compass and the courage to be guided by it.
American History, constitution
September 23rd, 2009 in American History by Paul VanDevelder
In February 1851, the Great White Fathers in the United States Congress invited the widely scattered Indian tribes of the West to gather for a grand peace council at Fort Larmie in the Nebraska Territory. Conceived and organized by treaty commissioners Thomas Fitzpatrick, the Irish immigrant who blazed open the Oregon Trail in 1836, and David Mitchell, the Indian superintendant for the West, the Indians called this month-long council ”The Great Smoke.” For its part, Congress wanted safe passage for white settlers on the Oregon Trail. For theirs, Indians wanted formal recognition of their homelands – 1.1 million square miles of the American West – and guarantees that United States dragoons would protect their lands from encroachment by whites. In a spectacle of dancing, feasting, and negotiating that would never be repeated or equaled, they both got their wish.
The celebrations that marked the end of the peace council at Horse Creek, the drumming and dancing, singing and feasting, went on without pause for two days and nights. On the evening of September 20, the treaty commissioners’ long-awaited supply-train appeared on the eastern horizon, prompting a great rejoicing in the Indian camps arrayed among the hills above the North Platte. The following day, commissioner David Mitchell rose early and raised the American flag over the treaty arbor. One final time he discharged the cannon to call Cat Nose, Terra Blue, Four Bears, and all the other headmen, to the council circle beneath the arbor. There, where Dragoons had worked into the wee hours of the morning unloading the wagons bearing gifts and provisions, the Indians quietly gathered at their accustomed places. Dressed in the gayest of costumes and painted with ‘glaring hues’ of their cherished vermillion, Mitchell presented the chiefs with gilt swords and the uniforms of generals. Then, he called each band forward to claim its gifts, and despite the atmosphere of great excitement, the vast multitude of Indians remained calm and respectful, and not the slightest trace of impatience or jealousy was apparent throughout the ceremony.
For three weeks, fifteen thousand nomads of the great western tribes had set aside their ancient animosities and camped together in a spirit of peace and friendship at the confluence of the North Platte and Horse Creek in the Nebraska Territory. The legendary mountain man Jim Bridger, Jesuit priest Pierre DeSmet, and Thomas Fitzpatrick, the intrepid adventurer and fur trader who guided John C. Fremont to California and blazed open the Oregon Trail, met each day with the headmen of the twelve tribes to etch the first boundaries into America’s vast western landscape, a region marked on maps of the day as “territory unknown.” It was a deliberate, painstaking process, and day by day, one river, one mountain range and one valley at a time, a new American West gradually took shape on a map that was unlike any previously drawn. Bridger and DeSmet found themselves embroiled in a world of geographical nuance and arcane oral histories, all of which had to be squared, as neatly as possible, on a sheet of parchment showing dozens of geographic features that were known to fewer than half a dozen white men. When the task was completed, political boundaries establishing a dozen new tribal homelands covered a contiguous swath of real estate larger than the entire Louisiana Purchase. The 1.1 million square miles of land claimed by the western tribes in the treaty negotiated at Horse Creek (and ratified the following year the U.S. Senate) would one day envelop twelve western states and corral the future cities of Denver and Fort Collins, Kansas City, Billings and Cheyenne and Casper and Sheridan, Cody and Bismarck, Salt Lake City, Omaha and Lincoln, and Sioux Falls and Des Moines, within one vast territory that was owned, as it had been since time immemorial, by Indian nations.
By month’s end, the Indians’ vast herd of fifty thousand ponies had nibbled the last blade of short grass to dust and roots, for miles around. The slightest evening zephyr raised a choking wall of flying refuse and human waste that engulfed the sprawling encampment in swirling clouds of debris. So once the tribal headmen had ‘touched the pen’ to the final document, and once the presents had been distributed by Mitchell at the arbor, the women quickly struck the teepees, loaded the prairie buggies with their belongings, and gathered up their newly baptized children for the long journey home.
With quiet elation, Thomas Fitzpatrick, the white headed Irishman and long-time friend the Indians called Broken Hand, watched from the solitude of his camp as the last bands of Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho struck their villages. Despite his ambivalence about the Indians’ future, Fitzpatrick had worked diligently for many years to persuade the western tribes to meet in a formal peace council with the Great White Fathers. Certainly, no one’s diplomatic skill or intimate knowledge of the tribes – their many languages, unique customs, and of the country they occupied – had been more instrumental in bringing the council to a successful conclusion. Old men such as Cat Nose and Gray Prairie Eagle knew that this was the first gathering of its kind in the history of the American West, and that most likely it would be the last. Events of coming years would affirm their clairvoyance, as no spectacle equal to its grandeur and pageantry, or its diplomatic promise and goodwill, would ever again be convened on the high plains of North America.
For the moment, however, such reflections were luxuries to be enjoyed by white men in distant towns, villages, and cities, men whose proxies had at long last claimed their coveted prize – safe passage for white settlers through Indian country to the Oregon Territory and the new state of California. The road to Canaan by way of Manifest Destiny, unburdened of legal encumbrances and threats of hostility from the tribes of the plains, was now open to the restless multitudes of Christendom. For the Indians the true test of the Great White Father’s solemn promises lay not in words and lines drawn on a sheet of parchment, nor in the ashes of the council fire, but in deeds done on an unmarked day in an unknowable future. In one fashion or another, the old men knew that test would come just as surely as the snows would soon fly over the short grass prairie.
As they were bundling up their lodges and preparing to leave, Cheyenne hunters rode back to camp with stirring news. A large herd of buffalo had been sighted in the country of the South Platte, two days’ travel to the southeast. Waves of excitement raced through the villages. The Cheyenne and Sioux, with their enormous encampments, were particularly eager to make one last chase before the first snows drove them into their winter villages at Belle Forche and Sand Creek. From their separate camps, Fitzpatrick, Mitchell, and DeSmet, watched the last members of Terra Blue’s band ride away in the late afternoon. Before long, after leaving behind swirling motes of dust on a grassless plain, the nomads merged with the southern horizon. The broad and familiar sweep of the North Platte country was suddenly forlorn and strangely hushed. It was as if the grand kaleidoscopic pageant of their gathering – an event unique in the pages of America’s rapidly unfolding story – had been nothing more than a colorful prelude to a feast of bones for the coyotes, raptors, and the implacable wolves.
Paul VanDevelder’s newest book, Savages and Scoundrels: The Untold Story of America’s Road to Empire through Indian Territory, tells the full story of the treaty at Horse Creek, and all of the major developments that led up its ratification in 1852, and events that followed, right up to 2009. It is currently being developed as a documentary for PBS.
American History, Native Americans
August 18th, 2009 in Current Events by Paul VanDevelder
If the American health care industry were a patient lying in hospital bed, any self-respecting doctor would recommend that the patient be taken off life support. By any standard, the system is terminal, and the dollar figures bear that out in study after study. In a nutshell: the number of dollars spent by the average American family on health insurance falls somewhere between appalling and scandalous. Somebody has to pull the plug before the system bankrupts the entire nation.
But the Republican party, blue dog Democrats, the medical insurance companies and their lobbyists, hospitals, and the American Chamber of Commerce, are determined to keep the patient plugged in. And why not? All of the above have profited handsomely from this rigged lottery for more than a generation. Somehow, they even managed to wrap it in an American flag, all while duping the average citizen into footing the bill. It’s a sweet deal if you run a hospital or you own shares in an insurance company. By deregulating the industry (just like the banking industry), the Reagan administration killed competition at the same time it awarded the medical insurance industry a license to steal. In movies, this is where the wife of the comatose victim has to make a choice: pay the extortionist or take her chances with voodoo.
What’s the alternative? Well, Medicare – which Reagan tried to kill off – is by all accounts the most efficient health care system in the world. And guess who runs it? The federal government. The second most efficient health care system in the world is the Veterans Administration. Guess who runs that one? Same folks. Apart from being excellent health care providers, the two systems have one more thing in common. They’re both “single payer” and they spend about the same amount on administrative costs: three cents on the dollar. The rest of the dollar goes to getting people well.
By contrast, American shareholder-owned insurance companies rank near the bottom of the list of the world’s health care systems. The private industry and their lobbyists, and their confederates on Capitol Hill, have worked hard to earn that distinction. In contrast to the government’s plans, private insurance companies spend twenty cents of every dollar on administration and profit. Because there is no competition in the industry, administrative costs, and the demand for profits keep going up while the number of dollars available to help people get well, keeps going down.
Don’t be confused by the rancor and hysteria that swirls around of this so-called health care reform “debate.” There are two things the medical insurance industry cannot afford: an honest debate and real competition from the government. What’s masquerading as a debate is an ideological battle between those who champion the privilege of private industry to profit off sickness versus those who champion the right of every citizen to have access to affordable health care that helps keep them well.
For political conservatives and the GOP, this conflict is the Gettysburg of our culture war. The Mitch McConnells, Orin Hatches, Charles Krauthammers, Sarah Palins and William Kristols of American conservatism have drawn a line in the dirt. Unlike their immediate predecessors, men like Nelson Rockefeller, Robert Dole, and Mark Hatfield, these are the ideological descendants of the extremists who argued – in the days leading up to the Civil War – that a slave named Dred Scott was not a human being. Rather, he was property, and as such, he should not be accorded civil liberties.
This is still how the true believers of American conservatism see the world. Everything in human enterprise can be reduced to profit and property. Conversely, human rights, civil liberties, and the welfare of the community, are secondary flourishes. And if you’re not with them, watch out. You’re unpatriotic at best.
For a little historical perspective on this “debate,” try to name one member of this confederacy that would have supported the creation of the Social Security Administration. Is there a single voice among them that would have supported unemployment insurance, Medicare, labor laws, or any other social programs that have improved the lot of tens of millions of average citizens?
We all know the answer to that question. Not one. So as you sort through the charges and counter charges around this health care “debate,” ask yourself this question: Do we have the courage to pull the plug on a system that’s killing us in order to replace it with a system that benefits everyone? Put another way, should health care be a rigged lottery that favors business and privilege and privatization, or is health care a universal human right?
Beneath the fervid distractions and deceptions of the culture war, that’s what this battle is really about.
Paul VanDevelder is the author of Savages and Scoundrels: The Untold Story of America’s Road to Empire through Indian Territory.
current events
August 11th, 2009 in American History by Paul VanDevelder
Felix Cohen was a remarkable man by any standards. His accomplishments were great and many, but the one that will be carried down through the ages will be his Handbook of Federal Indian Law. Until Cohen was hired by Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes during FDR’s administration, the arcane world of Indian law was almost impenetrable, even by legal scholars. Indian law, in fact, was one of the most complex in the land because it involved federal oversight of what Chief Justice John Marshall had called “domestic dependent sovereign nations.”
In other words, more than five hundred native nations existed as semi-independent sovereigns within the boundaries of the United States. Each one of those governments has its own laws and courts. In the republic’s first hundred years, the Supreme Court heard literally hundreds of Indian law cases, but fewer than a handful that involved blacks. The character of the relationship between the Indian and the European was legal from the very beginning. By contrast, the European’s relationship to the black man was economic. Finally, Felix Cohen came along and made some sense of this mess. He was only in his 20s, and he would die in his 40s. We can only imagine what he might have achieved had he lived a full life.
One of Cohen’s famous lines, oft quoted in the introduction to subsequent editions of his tome (not to mention plenty of other places), was a line that has since haunted generations of Indian Law students and legal scholars: “Like the miner’s canary, the Indian marks the shifts from fresh air to poison gas in our political atmosphere; and our treatment of Indians, even more than our treatment of other minorities, reflects the rise and fall in our democratic faith.”
For me, nothing captures the dissonance that has pervaded and perverted 400 years of European/Native relations with more precision and insight than Native American oratory. So, for the next few months, I’m going to devote one weekly blog (each month) to some of the more striking comments and insights that have been carried down to us through oratory. Some may be timely and topical, while others may stand alone. And to make this more fun, I’ll give you a hint before each one, but I’ll put the attribution for each quote at the bottom of the page. So here we go with the first three…
Questions
A) An early president said the following: “The Indians have neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habits, nor the desire of improvement…they must yield and ere long disappear.”
B) This man was a revered Hunkpapa warrior: “Tell them at Washington if they can find one man among them who speaks the truth, to send him to me. I will listen.”
C) This general was the Douglas MacArthur of the High Plains. He probably fought in more battles against Indians than any other officer in the American military. In fact, this quote comes from a speech he made to Congress on his retirement: “In my fifty years of negotiating treaties with the leaders of western tribes, I have never once known an Indian to break his word. And I have never once known the leaders of my own government to keep theirs.”
Answers
A) Andrew Jackson
B) Sitting Bull
C) General William Harney
American History, famous people, Native Americans
August 6th, 2009 in Current Events by Paul VanDevelder
When the LA Times published my piece on July 5th featuring federal district Judge James Redden and his pending decision on the fate of dams and salmon in the Pacific Northwest, never did my editors and I imagine that we would find ourselves defending the notion of free-flowing rivers as a radical approach to salmon recovery. But there you have it. There are stakeholders who like things just the way they are: the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), barge operators, and the farmers among them. Their responses, printed in newspapers around the country, have made their position very clear: free-flowing rivers are an aberration of nature.
Don’t laugh. This was the very argument made by the Bush administration just four years ago when it tried to excise dam removal from the salmon recovery plan mandated by the Endangered Species Act. Administration officials explained that dams were a natural feature of the environment, and therefore, their removal was off-limits. From the bench, Judge Redden characterized the Bush plan as arrogant and cynical. One sensed he was mincing words. Then he tossed out the entire plan and ordered the administration to come back with a plan that met the “straight face” test.
For me, there are many déjà-vu-all-over-again aspects to this story. I spent ten years researching my book Coyote Warrior, which chronicles, among other things, the extra-legal adventures of two other federal agencies, the Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation, on the Missouri River in the 1940s and 50s. The former agency was in the business of draining swamps while the latter was in the business of making them. When they met on the Missouri, it was hatred at first sight, a hatred that soon turned into a marriage arranged by the devil. In 1944 the two agencies presented Congress with a plan to manage the entire Missouri River system by building a hundred dams.
The obfuscation, disinformation, graft, and outright deception and suppressed science they foisted on the American public over the next decade prompted the Hoover Commission in 1949 to call for the dismantling of both agencies. Didn’t happen. Instead, to persuade the public to go along with the extravagant dam scheme, Congress promised that water collected behind Pick-Sloan dams (named for its principle architects) would be used to irrigate 4 million acres of dry-land farms. Newspapers up and down the Missouri applauded the Pick-Sloan Plan as a prelude to the second coming. This bone-dry land would now be turned into a new Eden by the water flowing past their front porches. Just think of it, exclaimed the newspapers, people will rush into the region.
They were all, individually and collectively, dead wrong. The dams were built. The region has been losing population for fifty years. Sixty years later, farmers are still waiting for the first drop of Pick-Sloan water. For decades, the water promised them by Congress has been diverted downriver to keep barges floating between Sioux City, Iowa, and St. Louis. Fish and birds dependent on the vigorous biology of a free-flowing river have gone extinct. Aquatic biologists now regard the Missouri River as a dead thing.
But what about the river’s well-known siltation problems, asked the naysayers. Agency ciphers masquerading as scientists quickly silenced the critics by reassuring Congress that the Missouri’s siltation problems were overblown. Not to worry. We’ve got it handled. The cherry they carefully set on top of this cocktail of rhetorical confections sealed the deal: all of the land that would be lost beneath a thousand miles of lakes – hundreds of thousands of acres of the richest farmland in America – was land owned by Indians. Not one white town would be adversely affected by the great flood. Promise.
That’s one promise they kept. Congress and the nation took the bait. Governor Leslie Miller’s report to Congress (for the Hoover Commission) stated that Pick-Sloan was the most “cockeyed, extravagant, and irresponsible” public works project in the nation’s history. Lawmakers ignored him. Within ten years of being built, siltation problems with the dams were outpacing the agencies’ ability to cope. Millions of cubic yards of silts that once built up the barrier islands at the mouth of the Mississippi River were now trapped behind the dams. By 1990 those islands had all but disappeared. The residents of New Orleans were sitting ducks for the next hurricane. Today, siltation is so severe that Pick-Sloan dams are fast approaching worthlessness.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch finally pulled the mask off the agencies’ colossal ruse in 1963: “This would be a good time for the governors and senators and representatives of the Missouri Valley states to decide whether they want to be held liable for the consequences of the most gigantic boondoggle in American history.” Instead of dealing with the mounting litany of disasters, they did nothing. By 1992, Congress was so ashamed of its earlier duping by the agencies that it passed a resolution in the Reclamation Act that year admitting that the taking of Indian lands by Pick-Sloan was unconstitutional, a breech of its fiduciary obligations under the federal trust doctrine, and morally reprehensible.
How could this have happened? What’s more, how can this be happening again on the Columbia and the Snake? After years of studying, researching, and pondering the above, I’ve decided that the answer to this question is deceptively simple. Newspaper flacks and agency hacks, citizens and stakeholders, politicians and farmers, and everyone inbetween, think principally about their self-interests in very short timeframes defined by ephemeral economic and political imperatives. Conversely, the river, and all the creatures that depend on its free-flowing waters, thousands of species, from eagles and bears to salamanders and mayflies, are the main springs in a timepiece that measures time in eons.
Today’s Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) is the new Bureau of Reclamation. On the Columbia and the Snake (surprise surprise!), the BPA has gone to the altzr with the Army Corps of Engineers. To gauge the narcissistic pathology that runs through both of these agencies, consider that one BPA apologist recently argued that fish counts on the Snake River didn’t drop after the dams were built, so dams could not possibly have been a factor in the salmons’ demise. Preposterous statements like this one were made and widely distributed by the nation’s newspapers sixty years ago. In fact, a graph showing the decline of Snake River salmon after the dams were built looks like the glide path of ten BPA lawyers simultaneously thrown out of an airplane from 10,000 feet. It goes straight down.
Unbeknownst to me and my editors at the LA Times, the New York Times had been planning to run an editorial on dams the day before ours went out on the wires. Under the headline “10 Years, 430 dams,” editors there recounted the remarkable recovery of fish in rivers behind 430 dams removed in the United States in the past ten years. It is from these success stories that a new chapter in aquatic science is being written.
Conversely, the habitual obfuscation and misinformation generated by agency scribes in response to my piece on Judge Redden begs me to repeat my central point: The fish cannot come to court to make their own case. They can only make their case through science, and the science has shown – beyond any doubt – that dams have hastened the extinction trajectory of anadramous fish. Aquatic biologists now tell us that the trajectory for Snake River salmon hits Zero in 2017.
To his credit, Judge James Redden has had the spine to give that science equal footing in his courtroom. The science is clear. Abundantly clear. As the New York Times concluded, the federal government’s successful recovery of salmon along the Atlantic seaboard (by removing dams) “has raised the hopes that it may now take aggressive – if politically risky – steps to protect salmon on the West Coast by ordering the removal of four big dams on the Lower Snake River. This page has recommended such a move, which two previous administrations have ducked. It now seems within the realm of possibility.”
In the end we all bump up against one implacable truth: 7 billion funerals have been scheduled for the next seventy odd years, one for each of us. The current plan is to turn the mess we have made of this planet over to 9 billion people who aren’t here yet. We ask much of them – far more, it seems, than we have ever dared to ask of ourselves.
Paul VanDevelder is the author of Savages and Scoundrels, and Coyote Warrior, One Man, Three Tribes, and the Trial that Forged a Nation.
current events
July 7th, 2009 in American History by Paul VanDevelder
The evening of July 3, 1876, was sultry in Philadelphia, but the dignitaries arriving for the much ballyhooed opening of United State’s Centennial Exposition were buoyed by moods that seemed immune to the cloying heat and the rapacious mosquitoes. This once-in-a-lifetime gala affair, America’s hundredth birthday, had been years in the planning. Much of that planning showcased the latest tools of empire, such as the telegraph, western paddle-wheelers, and 100-ton railroad locomotives that could conquer the Rocky Mountains at 50 miles per hour. Everyone who was anyone would be there, including President Ulysses S. Grant, who had agreed months earlier to inaugurate the event with a keynote address celebrating America’s manifest destiny. After an evening of drinks, cigars, and small talk, hosted by Pennsylvania’s congressional delegation, Grant and the organizers were about to sit down to a seven-course meal when a courier arrived with an urgent message for the president.
The president stepped into the corridor and opened the telegram. The message, in fact, had traveled 2,500 miles in less than a week’s time, a miracle of the day; first by foot, then horseback, steamboat, and finally, by a succession of telegraph keys tapped out in Western Union offices out on the frontier. The first words of the message seemed to knock the president off balance. Color drained from the ruddy flesh beneath his eyes. It was astonishing news, made all the more shocking for being so unexpected. The man being courted to replace him as president, the man who stood beside him at the surrender of the Confederacy eleven years earlier at Appomattox, Colonel George Armstrong Custer, along with his entire command in the Army’s 7th Cavalry, had been massacred in the Montana Territory by an overwhelming force of hostile Indians. Now, the man who had cast a cold, philosophical eye across 9,000 dead bodies at Cold Harbor, Virginia, was stunned to silence by the unnerving image of Custer’s famous locks hanging from the coup-stick of a Cheyenne warrior.
News of the blood bath on the Little Big Horn deflated the high-toned jingoistic pomp of Grant’s speech the following day. The Indians, it seemed, had their own ideas about manifest destiny. Apart from a blizzard of sensational stories that filled newspapers for weeks to come, beyond the heated public vows made in Congress to ‘bring the savages to justice,’ the cultural cataclysm that took place on the hillside above the Little Big Horn River was the shocking residue of paradoxes underlying the basic framework of federalism of the United State’s government. Moreover, as George Washington had feared, the government’s military adventures in the west had proven that the new republic could only promote life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness – those values memorialized in the Declaration of Independence – by denying them to Indians, Mexicans, or anyone else who stood in the way of the republic’s manifest destiny.
A generation earlier, James Madison and Chief Justice John Marshall had openly expressed their fears that those paradoxes and conflicts would one day lead to no good. The ugly truth about the young nation’s appetite for land – an appetite masquerading as a superior moral calling to vanquish the heathens and infidels and to subdue the wilderness – would soon be forced into the light of day as Americans moved west onto the frontier. But perhaps no one had described this citizenry with more insightful brevity than Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859): “Americans are to other races of men what man in general is to animate nature. When he cannot bend them to his use or make them serve his self-interests, he destroys them and makes them vanish little by little before him.”
Ever since the guns fell silent on that fabled hillside above the Little Big Horn River in Montana, from the moment the last scalp was taken and raised on teepee poles to celebrate the victory, every school-age child in America has learned of two great battles that were fought on American soil: Gettysburg and the Little Big Horn. Few events in our history have been more over-simplified in the retelling than the meeting between Colonel Custer and Chief Sitting Bull. Yet, 130-plus years later, no encounter between the native and non-native cultures has become more iconic than the 1876 battle on the Greasy Grass. From the Little Big Horn Trading Post, at Crow Agency, Montana, to the Prairie Edge Trading Company at the corner of Sixth and Main in Rapid City, South Dakota, history’s downstream freight is still big business. Big business, indeed. Tee-shirts, tote bags, bumper stickers, and key chains show the faces of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull superimposed on Mt. Rushmore above the title: “Homeland Security: Fighting Terrorism since 1491.” In 2009, the dissolute artifacts of the living paradox that is America and the bloody and broken remnants of its manifest destiny are still a hot item in the curio shops of the western Dakotas.
Paul VanDevelder’s book Coyote Warrior: One Man, Three Tribes, and the Trial that Forged a Nation (University of Nebraska Press, 2005), tells the story of westward migration through the eyes of the Mandan/Hidatsa clan that hosted Lewis and Clark in the winter of 1804/05. His newest book, Savages and Scoundrels (Yale University Press, 2009), dismantles the dominant myths about America’s ‘manifest destiny’ in the 19th century.
American History, famous people
June 18th, 2009 in American History by Paul VanDevelder
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.
American History, authors, Native Americans, writers
June 11th, 2009 in Military History by Paul VanDevelder
Among the great turning points in human history, few rival D-Day. Name one other event with that many dimensions, or with that much peril foreshadowed in failure.
Though I was born six years after this epic event, its telling and retelling never grew old for kids in my neighborhood. It seemed like the dust and smoke of battle were still clearing when we were kids, and the Marshall Plan was still rebuilding Europe. It was our fathers and uncles who stormed those beaches and jumped from those planes, and when they were ready to talk about it years later, when the horror had faded sufficiently to let them hazard a look back, the stories they told around the family dinner table became our shared history. Hollywood stepped up and did its part to underscore that ownership by association. Aside from Playboy magazine, nothing was more enthralling to boys my age than seeing John Wayne wading ashore at Omaha beach through the storm of lead, defying death and the forces of evil with righteous determination and unworldly calm. And the best place to see it was at the drive-in.
Good or bad, like it or not, the world was a different place back then. At the beginning of the war, the average guy living in the average American community knew a world captured in Norman Rockwell paintings. Daily life was simpler, more decent, less expensive, and a lot slower than it is now, and for none of us was that truer in 1941 than for tens of thousands of Native American men and women who enlisted in the armed forces after Pearl Harbor. Either then or now, few Americans could imagine the journey Donald Goodbird made from his home village of Independence, on the upper Missouri River, to the beaches of Normandy.
Goodbird was in his early 20s at the start of the war, and like most members of the Three Affiliated Tribes in central North Dakota (the same folks who took care of Lewis and Clark during the winter of 1804-05), Goodbird came from a clan of successful ranchers. Over the next three years, about 300 of his fellow tribal members, out of a total population of 2000, enlisted in the armed forces. When the day came to go off to war, Goodbird saddled up his favorite horse, said goodbye to all his clan relations in their native Hidatsa, and rode off down the river and over the hills toward the town of Elbowoods, the agency headquarters. Once there, he left his horse at Martin Cross’ place and caught a ride on the mail truck to Garrison. From Garrison, Goodbird rode a bus to the enlistment center in Fargo, 200 miles further east, and vanished into the war. Then late one afternoon in September of 1945, the same Donald Goodbird hopped off the back of the mail truck at the post office in Elbowoods, shouldered his duffle bag, and set off up the dirt road toward Martin Cross’s house where he’d left his horse. After a home cooked meal in Dorothy Cross’s kitchen, Goodbird saddled his horse and rode off up the river toward Independence, retracing the tracks he’d made four years before.
“That’s the way a lot of our guys came home,” remembers Crusoe Cross, who was a boy of 15 at war’s end. “They came walking in over the hills, or down Old State Road Number Eight, with a duffel bags on their shoulder and pockets full of cash. No parades, no fanfare, but they were our heroes. For the first time in our history, most of our people were now fluent in English. That war gave us first hand knowledge of the outside world, and for the first time in our history we had folding money in our pockets. It changed everything.”
And then again, it changed nothing. In a speech he delivered as president, Dwight Eisenhower praised the American Indians for their service in combat. Of the tens of thousands of Indians who served under his command in Europe, not one had ever been discharged dishonorably. Not one Native American ever turned tail and ran away from a fight.
So guys like Donald Goodbird were even more confused when they came back home to discover that surveyors for the Army Corps of Engineers were marking out the hills above their towns – hills that had been theirs since time immemorial, overlooking rich and fertile river bottoms that had been protected by treaty for over a hundred years – for a massive dam that would be built as the centerpiece of the Pick/Sloan Plan. When the five primary Pick/Sloan dams were completed in the 1960s, twenty-three tribes of Indians had lost their treaty protected homelands lands to massive dams, and not one white town had been inundated. The Indians had gone off to distant continents to fight a war to protect their homeland. When they came home they would spend another twenty fighting to keep it. And they would lose.
For many Indians who stormed ashore with our father’s and uncles on the beaches at Normandy, so much had changed in their leaving, and so much had stayed the same in their coming home. What they saved for the people of Europe they would loose at home. In towns like Lodgegrass, Whiteshield, and Windowrock, in that other America most of us will never know, that’s the story you hear about D-Day.
Paul VanDevelder is the author of Savages and Scoundrels: The untold story of America’s road to empire through Indian territory (Yale University Press, 2009)
American History, anniversaries, Military History, Native Americans
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