History is the stories we tell

This is a quote from the book The Inconvenient Indian by Thomas King.

Quote by Thomas King, “Most of us think that history is the past. It’s not. History is the stories we tell about the past. That’s all it is. Stories. Such a definition might make the enterprise of history seem neutral. Benign.
Which, of course, it isn’t.”

Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!

If you’re interested, you can read an excerpt from the book here.

The Inconvenient Indian – Summary

Here is the book summary:

The Inconvenient Indian is at once a “history” and the complete subversion of a history—in short, a critical and personal meditation that the remarkable Thomas King has conducted over the past 50 years about what it means to be “Indian” in North America.

Rich with dark and light, pain and magic, this book distills the insights gleaned from that meditation, weaving the curiously circular tale of the relationship between non-Natives and Natives in the centuries since the two first encountered each other. In the process, King refashions old stories about historical events and figures, takes a sideways look at film and pop culture, relates his own complex experiences with activism, and articulates a deep and revolutionary understanding of the cumulative effects of ever-shifting laws and treaties on Native peoples and lands.

This is a book both timeless and timely, burnished with anger but tempered by wit, and ultimately a hard-won offering of hope—a sometimes inconvenient, but nonetheless indispensable account for all of us, Indian and non-Indian alike, seeking to understand how we might tell a new story for the future.

Copyright © 2012 by Thomas King.

You can find more details here on Goodreads and on StoryGraph.

Forget Columbus

Excerpt from The Inconvenient Indian by Thomas King

Photo by Abigail Loney on Unsplash

This is an excerpt from the book The Inconvenient Indian by Thomas King.

Most of us think that history is the past. It’s not. History is the stories we tell about the past. That’s all it is. Stories. Such a definition might make the enterprise of history seem neutral. Benign.

Which, of course, it itsn’t.

History may well be a series of stories we tell about the past, but the stories are not just any stories. They’re not chosen by chance. By and large, the stories are about famous men and celebrated events. We throw in a couple of exceptional women every now and then, not our of any need to recognize female eminence, but out of embarrassment.

And we’re not easily embarrassed.

When we imagine history, we imagine a grand structure, a national chronicle, a closely organized and guarded record of agreed-upon events and interpretations, a bundle of “authenticities” and “truths” welded into a flexible, yet conservative narrative that explains how we got from there to here. It is a relationship we have with ourselves, a love affair we celebrate with flags and anthems, festivals and guns.

Well, the “guns” remark was probably uncalled for and might suggest and animus towards history. But that’s not true. I simply have difficulty with how we choose which stories become the pulse of history and which do not.

In 1492, Columbu sailed the ocean blue.

On second thought, let’s not start with Columbus. Helen was right. Let’s forget Columbus. You know, now that I say it out loud, I even like the sound of it. Forget Columbus.

Give it a try. Forget Columbus.

Instead, let’s start our history, our account, in Almo, Idaho. I’ve never been there and I suspect that most of you haven’t either. I can tell you with certainty that Christopher Columbus didn’t discover the town. Nor did Jacques Cartier or Samuel de Champlain or David Thompson or Hernando Cortes. Sacajawea, with Lewis and Clarke in two, might have passed through the general area, but since Almo didn’t exist in the early 1800s, they couldn’t have stopped there. Even if they had wanted to.

Almo is a small, unincorporated town of about 200 tucked into south central Cassia County in southern Idaho. So far as I know, it isn’t famous for much of anything except and Indian massacre.

A plaque in the town reads, “Dedicated to the memory of those who lost their lives in a most horrible Indian massacre, 1861. Three hundred immigrants west bound. Only five escaped. Erected by the S&D of Idaho Pioneers, 1938.”

Two hundred and ninety-five killed. Now that’s a massacre. Indians generally didn’t kill that many Whites at one time. Sure, during the 1813 For Mims massacre, in what is now Alabama. Creek Red Sticks killed about four hundred Whites, but that’s the largest massacre committed by Indians that I can find. The Lachine massacre on Montreal Island in Quebec in 1689killed around ninety, while the death toll in nearby La Chesnaye was forty-two. In 1832, eighteen were killed at Indian Creek near Ottawa, Illinois, while the 1854 Ward massacre along the Oregon Trail in western Idaho had a death toll of nineteen. The 1860 Utter massacre at Henderson Flat near the Snake River in Idaho killed twenty-five. The 1879 Meeker massacre in western Colorado killed eleven. The fort parker massacre in Texas in 1836 killed six.

It’s true in 1835, just south of present-day Bushnell, Florida, Indians killed 108, but since all of the casualties were armed soldiers who were looking for trouble and not unarmed civilians who were trying to avoid it, I don’t count this one as a massacre.

By the way, these aren’t my figures. I borrowed them from William M. Osborn who wrote a book, The Wild Frontier, in which he attempted to document every massacre that occurred in North America. The figures are not dead accurate, of course. They’re approximations based on the historical information that was available to Osborn. Still, it’s nice that someone spent the time and effort to compile such a list, so I can use it without doing any of the work.

I should point out that Indians didn’t do all the massacring. To give credit where credit is due, Whites massacred Indians at a pretty good clip. In 1598, in what is now New Mexico, Juan de Onate and his troops killed over eight hundred Acoma and cut off the left foot of every man over the age of twenty-five. In 163y, John Underhill led a force that killed six to seven hundred Pequot near the Mystic River in Connecticut. In 1871, around one hundred and forty Pinal and Aravaipa Apaches were killed in the Camp Gran t massacre in Arizona Territory. Two hundred and fifty Northwestern Shoshoni were killed in the 1863 Bear River massacre in what is now Idaho, while General Henry Atkinson killed some one hundred and fifty Sauk and Fox at the mouth of the Bad Axe River in Wisconsin in 1832. And, of course, there’s always the famous 1864 Sand Creek massacre in Colorado, where two hundred peaceful Cheyenne were slaughtered by vigilantes looking to shoot anything that moved, and the even more infamous Wounded Knee in 1890, where over two hundred Lakota lost their lives.

Of course, body counts alone don’t even begin to tell the stories of these slaughters, but what the figures do suggest—if you take them at face value—is that Whites were considerably more successful at massacres than Indians. So, the 1861 Almo massacre by the Shoshone-Bannock should stand out in the annals of Indian bad behaviour. After the massacre at Fort Mims, Almo would rank at the second-largest massacre of Whites by Indians.

Three hundred people in the wagon train. Two hundred and ninety-five killed. Only five survivors. It’s a great story. The only problem is, it never happened.

You might assume that something must have happened in Almo, maybe a smaller massacre or a fatal altercation of some sort that was exaggerated and blown out of proportion.

Nope.

The story is simply a tale someone made up and told to someone else, and before you knew it, the Almo massacre was historical fact.

The best summary and critical analysis of the Almo massacre is Brigham Madsen’s 1993 article in Idaho Yesterdays, “The Almo Massacre Revisited.” Madsen was a historian at the University of Utah when I was a graduate student there. He was a smart, witty, gracious man, who once told me that historians are not often appreciated because their research tends to destroy myths. I knew the man, and I liked him. So, in the spirit of full disclosure, I should say that I have a bias towards his work.

Bias or no, Madsen’s research into Almo settles the question. No massacre. As Madsen points out in his article, attacks by Indians did not go unmarked. The newspapers of the time—the Deseret News in Salt Lake City, the Sacramento Daily Union, the San Francisco Examiner—paid close attention to Indian activity along the Oregon and California trails, yet none of the papers had any mention of Almo. Such an event would certainly have come to the attention of Indian Service agents and the military, but again Madsen was unable to find any reference to the massacre either in the National Archives or in the records that the Bureau of Indian Affairs kept for the various states and territories. Nor does the Almo massacre appear in any of the early histories of Idaho.

You would expect that the rescue party from Brigham who supposedly came upon the carnage and buried the bodies of the slain settlers—or the alleged five survivors who escaped death—would have brought the massacre to the attention of the authorities. Okay, one of the survivors was a baby, but that still left a chorus of voices to sound the alarm.

And yet there is nothing.

In fact there is no mention of the matter at all until some sixty-six years after the fact, when the story first appeared in Charles S. Walgamott’s 1926 book Reminiscences of Early Days: A Series of Historical Sketches and Happenings in the Early Days of Snake River Valley. Walgamott claims to have gotten the story from a W.M.E. Johnston, and it’s a gruesome story to be sure, a Jacobean melodrama complete with “bloodthirsty Indians” and a brave White woman who crawls to safety carrying her nursing child by its clothing in her teeth.

A right proper Western.

That the plaque in Almo was erected in 1938 as part of “Exploration Day,” an event that was designed to celebrate Idaho history and promote tourism to the area, is probably just a coincidence. In any case, the fact that the story is a fraud didn’t bother the Sons and Daughters of Idaho Pioneers who paid for the plaque, and it doesn’t bother them now. Even after the massacre was discredited, the town was reluctant to remove the marker, defending the lie as part of the culture and history of the area. Which, of course, it now is.

Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!

The Inconvenient Indian – Summary

Here is the book summary:

The Inconvenient Indian is at once a “history” and the complete subversion of a history—in short, a critical and personal meditation that the remarkable Thomas King has conducted over the past 50 years about what it means to be “Indian” in North America.

Rich with dark and light, pain and magic, this book distills the insights gleaned from that meditation, weaving the curiously circular tale of the relationship between non-Natives and Natives in the centuries since the two first encountered each other. In the process, King refashions old stories about historical events and figures, takes a sideways look at film and pop culture, relates his own complex experiences with activism, and articulates a deep and revolutionary understanding of the cumulative effects of ever-shifting laws and treaties on Native peoples and lands.

This is a book both timeless and timely, burnished with anger but tempered by wit, and ultimately a hard-won offering of hope—a sometimes inconvenient, but nonetheless indispensable account for all of us, Indian and non-Indian alike, seeking to understand how we might tell a new story for the future.

Copyright © 2012 by Thomas King.

You can find more details here on Goodreads and on StoryGraph.

Extermination and assimilation

Excerpt from The Inconvenient Indian by Thomas King

Photo by Saksham Gangwar on Unsplash

This is an excerpt from the book The Inconvenient Indian by Thomas King.

Throughout the history of Indian-White relations in North America, there have always been two impulses afoot. Extermination and assimilation. Extermination of Native peoples, especially in the early years, was not considered “genocide”—a term coined in 1944 by the legal scholar Raphael Lemkin—so much as it was deemed a by-product of “manifest destiny”— term struck in the 1840 when U.S. Democrats used it to justify the war with Mexico. Extermination was also seen as an expression of “natural law,” a concept conceived by Aristotle in the fourth century B.C. and used by the Spanish humanist Juan de Sepulveda in the sixteenth as a legal justification for the enslavement of Native people in the Caribbean and Mexico.

The means of extermination didn’t much matter. Bullets were okay. Disease was fine. Starvation was acceptable. In the minds of many, these were not so much cruelties as they were variations on the principles underlying the concept “survival of the fittest,” a phrase that Herbert Spencer had fashioned in 1864 and that would become synonymous the Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection.

The second impulse, assimilation, argued for salvation and improvement. One of the questions that the Spanish worried over was whether or not Indians were human beings. This was the subject of the great debate organized by the Vatican in Valladolid, Spain, in 1550 and 1551 where the cleric Bartolome de las Casas maintained that Indians had souls and should be treated as other free men, while the aforementioned Juan de Sepulveda made the case on behalf of land owners, arguing that Indians did not have souls and were therefore natural slaves. De las Casas’s position carried the day, but the “Indians have souls” argument provided no more than a philosophical victory and had no effect on the day-to-day actions of Spanish colonists in the New World, who continued to use Indians as slaves to run their plantations.

Neither the English nor the French spent any time with this question. For these two groups, Indians were simply humans at an early point in the evolution o the species. They were savages with no understanding of orthodox theology, devoid of complex language, and lacking civilized manners. Barbarians certainly, and quite possibly minions of the devil. But human beings, nonetheless. Ans as such, many colonists believed that Native people could be civilized and educated, believed that there was, within the Indian, the possibility for enlightenment.

Extermination dominated the early contact period assimilation the latter, until finally, in the nineteenth century, they came together in an amalgam of militarism and social theory that allowed North America to mount a series of benevolent assaults on Native people, assaults facilitated by force of arms, deception and coercion, assaults that sought to dismantle Native culture with missionary zeal and humanitarian paternalism, and to replace it with something that Whites could recognize.

These assaults came singly, in partnerships and from various angles. In general, settlers and missionaries of one flavour or another led the way, taking turns leapfrogging each other into the “wilderness.” In Canada, it was the French and the Jesuits, followed by the English and Anglicans, Methodists, and Presbyterians. In the American northeast and along the Atlantic coast, it was the English and the Puritans, Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians, with a smattering of fQuakers and other non-conformists working out of Rhode Island. In the southeast, it was the Spanish and the Jesuits and the Franciscans. In the far west, along the Pacific coast, it was the Spanish and the Franciscans, while, much later and farther north in California and up the Pacific coast, it was the Russians and the Orthodox Church.

Francis Jennings, in his book The Invasion of America, called Christianity a “conquest religion.” I suspect this description is true of most religions. I can’t think of one that could be termed a “seduction religion,” where converts are lured in by the beauty of the doctrine and the generosity of the practice.

Maybe Buddhism. Certainly not Christianity.

Missionary work in the New World was war. Christianity, in all its varieties, has always been a stakeholder in the business of assimilation, and, in the sixteenth century, it was the initial wound in the side of Native culture. Or, if you want the positive but somewhat callous view, you might wish to describe Christianity as the gateway drug to supply-side capitalism.

Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!

The Inconvenient Indian – Summary

Here is the book summary:

The Inconvenient Indian is at once a “history” and the complete subversion of a history—in short, a critical and personal meditation that the remarkable Thomas King has conducted over the past 50 years about what it means to be “Indian” in North America.

Rich with dark and light, pain and magic, this book distills the insights gleaned from that meditation, weaving the curiously circular tale of the relationship between non-Natives and Natives in the centuries since the two first encountered each other. In the process, King refashions old stories about historical events and figures, takes a sideways look at film and pop culture, relates his own complex experiences with activism, and articulates a deep and revolutionary understanding of the cumulative effects of ever-shifting laws and treaties on Native peoples and lands.

This is a book both timeless and timely, burnished with anger but tempered by wit, and ultimately a hard-won offering of hope—a sometimes inconvenient, but nonetheless indispensable account for all of us, Indian and non-Indian alike, seeking to understand how we might tell a new story for the future.

Copyright © 2012 by Thomas King.

You can find more details here on Goodreads and on StoryGraph.

First Woman’s garden

Excerpt from Green Grass, Running Water by Thomas King

Photo by Florian GIORGIO | Accessed on Unsplash.com

This is an excerpt from the book Green Grass, Running Water by Thomas King.

First Woman’s garden. That good woman makes a garden and she lives there with Ahdamn. I don’t know where he comes from. Things like that happen, you know.

So there is that garden. And there is First Woman and Ahdamn. And everything is perfect. And everything is beautiful. And everything is boring.

So First Woman goes walking around with her head in the clouds, looking in the sky for things that are bent and need fixing. So she doesn’t see that tree. So that tree doesn’t see her. So they bump into each other.

Pardon me, says that Tree, maybe you would like something to eat.

That would be nice, says First Woman, and all sorts of good things to eat fall out of that Tree. Apples fall out. Melons fall out. Bananas fall out. Hot dogs. Fry bread, corn, potatoes. Pizza. Extra-crispy fried chicken.

Thank you, says First Woman, and she picks up all that food and brings it back to Ahdamn.

Talking trees! Talking trees! says that GOD. What kind of world is this?

“Did someone say food?” says Coyote.

“Sit down,” I says. “Boy, this story is going to take a long time.”

So that good woman brings all that food back to Ahdamn. Ahdamn is busy. He is naming everything.

You are a microwave oven, Ahdamn tells the Elk.

Nope, says that Elk. Try again.

You are a garage sale, Ahdamn tells the Bear.

We got to get you some glasses, says the Bear.

You are a telephone book, Ahdamn tells the Cedar Tree.

You’re getting closer, says the Cedar Tree.

You are a cheeseburger, Ahdamn tells Old Coyote.

It must be tie for lunch, says Old Coyote.

Never mind that, First Woman tells Ahdamn. Here is something to eat.

Wait a minute, says that GOD. That’s my garden. That’s my stuff.

“Don’t talk to me,” I says. “You better talk to First Woman.”

You bet I will, says that GOD.

So. There is that garden. And there is First Woman and Ahdamn. And there are the animals and the plants and all their relations. And there is all that food.

“Boy,” says Coyote, “that food certainly smells good.”

They can’t eat my stuff, says that GOD. And that one jumps into the garden.

Oh, oh, says First Woman when she sees that GOD land in her garden. Just when we were getting things organized.

Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!

Green Grass, Running Water – Summary

Here is the book summary from Goodreads:

King’s auspicious debut novel, Medicine River ( LJ 8/90), garnered critical acclaim and popular success (including being transformed into a TV movie). This encore, a genially wild tale with a serious heart, confirms the author’s prowess. It involves the creation of a creation story, the mission of four ancient Indians, and the comparatively realistic doings of 40-year-old-adolescent Lionel Red Dog, unfazable cleaning woman Babo, and various memorable Blackfoot and others in scenic Alberta. Clever verbal motifs not only connect the stories but add fun visual themes, including missing cars and a ubiquitous Western movie. In the end, everyone is thrown together by an earthquake at white human-made Parliament Lake, compliments of the four old Indians and the loopy trickster Coyote. Smart and entertaining, this novel deserves a big audience.

Copyright © 1993 by Thomas King.

You can find more details here on Goodreads and on StoryGraph.

Uncle Leroy’s Big Idea (Part 2)

Photo by David Thielen | Accessed on Unsplash.com

This is an excerpt from the book Indians on Vacation by Thomas King.

If you missed it, you can read part one of this passage here.

When Bernie tells the story of Uncle Leroy, she closes her eyes so she can see the story, whole and complete. “I told you it wasn’t much of a house, didn’t I?”

“You did.”

“And that all the paint had been stripped off by the weather?”

“You told us that too.”

“And that Leroy had had a little too much to drink?”

Bernie would always pause at this point to let the tension build.

“So, Leroy’s big idea,” she’d begin again, after the proper amount of time had passed, “was that he would paint the Indian agent’s house. But he didn’t have any paint. And nobody else on the reserve had any paint, either. I’m guessing you can see the problem.”

“No paint.”

“So Leroy had to improvise.”

Just the word “improvise” would set Bernie off, and she’d begin laughing. And we’d have to wait until she stopped.

“In those days, there was a store in Cardston run by this Mormon family. They sold all sorts of used stuff, household and farming. Some of it was okay, and some of it was garbage, and if you didn’t know the different, the Mormons weren’t going to tell you.

“So, after Leroy sobered up, he rode over to Cardston to that store and bought an old milk pail, one of those zinc things with a wood piece for a handle. It was a sorry sight, that bucket. There was a story in the newspapers not long ago about a woman who collects junk like that.”

“Now they’re called antiques,” Mimi told her mother.

“So, Leroy took his junk antique and filled it with fresh cow flops. He mixed in some water, stirred it all up until it was brown and pasty, and went to work. He wasn’t sloppy either. He took his time and painted every inch of the house with cow poop. From a distance, it didn’t look bad at all. And as long as you were upwind, you didn’t notice the smell.”

Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!

Indians on Vacation – Summary

Here is the book summary from Goodreads:

Meet Bird and Mimi in this brilliant new novel from one of Canada’s foremost authors. Inspired by a handful of old postcards sent by Uncle Leroy nearly a hundred years earlier, Bird and Mimi attempt to trace Mimi’s long-lost uncle and the family medicine bundle he took with him to Europe.

By turns witty, sly and poignant, this is the unforgettable tale of one couple’s holiday trip to Europe, where their wanderings through its famous capitals reveal a complicated history, both personal and political.

Copyright © 2020 by Thomas King.

More details on Goodreads can be found here.

Uncle Leroy’s Big Idea (Part 1)

Photo by David Thielen | Accessed on Unsplash.com

This is an excerpt from the book Indians on Vacation by Thomas King.

At some point in the story of Uncle Leroy and the Crow bundle, Bernie would touch on the drinking.

“Leroy was no drunk,” she would say, “but he did drink. And Mr. Nelson or Wilson was one of those born-againers. Man thought he could talk to god when he was really just mumbling to himself. Drinking, according to Mr. Indian agent, led to singing, and singing led to dancing. Man would have banned laughing. Would have made smiling a hanging offence.

“One year, this Wilson or Nelson organized a sports day at the same time as the Sun Dance, to try to lure people away from Belly Buttes. And he ordered the buffalo tongues mutilated, so that the women couldn’t use them in the ceremony.”

“You never knew the man,” Mimi reminded her mother. “You weren’t even born yet.”

“Stories don’t die. Stories stay alive so long as they’re told.”

Bernie would make another pot of coffee and break out the special chocolate-covered cookies as she worked her way to the heart of the matter.

“There was this bootlegger from around Missoula. Donald somebody. Like the duck. Drug dealer. Back then it was alcohol. Today it’s other stuff. So, Donald the Duck would bring his booze onto the reserve, and Leroy would find him or he would find Leroy. Didn’t much matter. The result was always the same. Leroy would get drunk, and when he got drunk, he would do something stupid.”

“This is where Uncle Leroy paints the guy’s house?”

“Stop getting ahead of the story. I raised you better than that.”

Sometimes Bernie would tell the story quick, and sometimes she would draw it out.

“Like I said, in those days, you had to have a pass to leave the reserve. Signed by the agent. Leroy didn’t pay much attention to that rule, and every time he left the reserve without a pass, that agent would try to have him arrested. And every time Leroy asked that agent for a pass to leave the reserve, Nelson or Wilson would turn him down.”

Even if you didn’t know the story, you knew that this kind of a situation was bound to go bad at some point.

“Nelson or Wilson had a house. Government issue. It wasn’t a big house. The roof leaked a little, and it didn’t have no better insulation than a plastic sack. It was painted white, but that didn’t last long. Cold winters and hard winds stripped the paint away until there was nothing left but the wood. You need me to draw you a picture?”

“Nope. I can see it.”

“So this one time, Donald the Duck brought his wagonload of booze onto the reserve, and before long, Leroy found him. And not long after that, Leroy got his big idea.”

You can read part two of this story here and learn more about Uncle Leroy’s big idea.

Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!

Indians on Vacation – Summary

Here is the book summary from Goodreads:

Meet Bird and Mimi in this brilliant new novel from one of Canada’s foremost authors. Inspired by a handful of old postcards sent by Uncle Leroy nearly a hundred years earlier, Bird and Mimi attempt to trace Mimi’s long-lost uncle and the family medicine bundle he took with him to Europe.

By turns witty, sly and poignant, this is the unforgettable tale of one couple’s holiday trip to Europe, where their wanderings through its famous capitals reveal a complicated history, both personal and political.

Copyright © 2020 by Thomas King.

More details on Goodreads can be found here.