Reclaiming Native History

“As with all historical events, it is a fool’s errand to judge it by contemporary standards.” – Michael Walsh

Far too often, historians, or those who pretend to be historians, try to understand history through modern eyes. Sometimes this is unintentional, but often in our era, it is purposeful revisionism driven by narratives and personal beliefs rather than a desire to understand the past.

One of the most interesting trends in history has been the changes in studies of Native American history. It is one of many historical subjects that have been battered by changing narratives and people with little regard for truth. This, though, is changing.

For many years, academia tended to paint Native Americans as helpless victims, wiped out by ruthless Europeans. Kathleen DuVal, in Native Nations, writes, “More recent U.S. history textbooks provide more coverage and rightly condemn the violence…but tend to emphasize victimization and decline.” Duval shows how influential writings on native history by Howard Zinn, Dee Brown, Jared Diamond, and Charles Mann enforced this idea that “Europeans dominated North America virtually from the moment they arrived here” and the natives were “helpless victims.” Even now, education still often portrays American Indians as peoples from the past, as if they no longer exist, and “overemphasize the periods of catastrophe” like the Cherokee Trail of Tears or the Wounded Knee Massacre.

This narrative has begun to crumble, a change often driven from natives themselves. They weren’t wiped out, and scholars trying to do native history justice, often have done the opposite with unsupported death, disease, and population numbers. Now, historians are recognizing, as Pekka Hämäläinen writes in Indigenous Continent, this was “a four-centuries-long war” and “Indians won as often as not.” While there “were colonists who utterly despised Indians and wanted to eradicate them” there were many who “sought to embrace them.”

Natives prospered from trade and contact, and sought out such activities. They suffered as well in this classic clash of different civilizations, not unlike what had played out thousands of times in history. However, they weren’t clueless, innocent hippies wandering through the woods, hugging trees. They weren’t much different from the Europeans, both good and bad. War, slavery, and torture were not uncommon.

There is a lot of overlap in DuVal and Hämäläinen’s books, and they are excellent histories of native history after contact. There are times where both authors seem to have trouble letting go of the very inaccurate histories they are trying to correct. DuVal likes to often remind readers the Europeans were white, not understanding ideas of racism weren’t the same as modern ones. For example, racist beliefs directed from one white European group to another were common well into the 20th Century. Nor did all Europeans base their perceptions of the natives based solely on skin color. Both authors talk about colonialism like it was a new invention in the Americas, as if this wasn’t a driving force in civilization’s expansion and growth since mankind began. These and some other points are artifacts of interjecting modernity into the past.

This why I think Jeff Fynn-Paul’s book, Not Stolen, adds good balance to these other studies. Fynn-Paul doesn’t obscure the bad events on the continent between natives and the newcomers, but he shows there was often more to the story. For example, the tragic Cherokee Trail of Tears was not something that went unnoticed at the time, nor was it widely supported. Quite the opposite, it was very controversial with the public, and the president was acting against a ruling of the Supreme Court. The point being, there wasn’t a widespread conspiracy to wipe out the natives. While DuVal and Hämäläinen sometimes throw around the word genocide, the individuals who were for such things didn’t have broad support for the total destruction of native nations.

Admittedly, trying to formulate a balanced history of such a complex era of the past, involving so many people, is no easy task. No one person can survey and collate every available source. We should all strive to examine a broad variety of sources on every subject we study, and do so with an open mind. As Fynn-Paul writes:

An ideal historian will look dispassionately at the evidence, the sources, and the probable facts of a case, and write a narrative interpretation based on reason, logic, and a well-honed sense of judgment. Personnel preference – including political opinions – is supposed to be relegated to secondary status.