An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (36 page)

A living symbol of the genocidal history of the United States, as well as a kind of general subconscious knowledge of it, is the “Winchester Mystery House,” a tourist site in the Santa Clara (Silicon) Valley of Northern California. Fifty miles south of San Francisco, it is billed as a ghost house on billboards that start appearing in Oregon to the north and San Diego to the south. Sarah L. Winchester, the wealthy widow of William Wirt Winchester, built the Victorian mansion to avoid and elude ghosts, although there is no record of any ghosts ever having found their way into her home. It could be said, perhaps, that Mrs. Winchester's project from 1884 to her death in 1922 was a success. She likely was well aware of the widely publicized Ghost Dance in 1890, which led to the killing of Sitting Bull and the Wounded Knee massacre. The dancers believed that the dance would bring back their dead warriors.

It makes sense that Mrs. Winchester felt the need to guard herself from the ghosts of those killed by the Winchester repeating rifle, which her late husband's father had invented and produced in 1866, with later models being even more lethal. Mrs. Winchester inherited the fortune accumulated by her husband's family through sales of the rifle. There was one major purchaser: the US Department of War. The chief reason for the War Department's purchases of the rifle in great quantities: to kill Indians. The rifle was a technological innovation designed especially for the US Army's campaigns against the Plains Indians following the Civil War.

The Winchester house amazes all who tour it. There are five floors, more or less, since they are staggered. Each room in itself appears normal, decorated in the late-nineteenth-century Victorian mode. But there is more than meets the eye in getting from parlors to bedrooms to kitchen to closets and from floor to floor. Numerous stairways dead-end, and secret trapdoors hide the actual stairways. Closet doors open to walls, and pieces of furniture are really doors to closets. Huge bookcases serve as entrances to adjoining rooms. Part of the house was unfinished when the widow died, as she had construction workers building every day from dawn to dusk, adding rooms and traps until her death. Visitors trekking through the widow's
home are astounded, and perhaps saddened, by the evidence all around them of the fears and anguish of an obviously mentally disturbed person. Yet there is another possibility: a sense of the scaffolding that supports US society, a kind of hologram in the minds of each and every person on the continent.

Mrs. Winchester might have been more aware of the truth than most people and therefore fearful of its consequences. Regardless, in continuing to find or invent enemies across the globe, expand what is already the largest military force in the world, and add to an elaborate global network of military bases, all in the name of national or global “security,” does not the United States today resemble Mrs. Winchester constantly trying to foil her ghosts? The guilt harbored by most is buried and expressed in other ways, on a larger scale, as “regeneration through violence,” in Richard Slotkin's phrasing.

How then can US society come to terms with its past? How can it acknowledge responsibility? The late Native historian Jack Forbes always stressed that while living persons are not responsible for what their ancestors did, they are responsible for the society they live in, which is a product of that past. Assuming this responsibility provides a means of survival and liberation. Everyone and everything in the world is affected, for the most part negatively, by US dominance and intervention, often violently through direct military means or through proxies. It is an urgent concern. Historian and teacher Juan Gómez-Quiñones writes, “American Indian ancestries and heritages ought to be integral to K–12 curriculums and university explorations and graduate expositions … [with] full integration of Native American histories and cultures into academic curriculums.” Gómez-Quiñones coins a measure of intelligence in the United States the “Indigenous Quotient.”
⁴⁰

Indigenous peoples offer possibilities for life after empire, possibilities that neither erase the crimes of colonialism nor require the disappearance of the original peoples colonized under the guise of including them as individuals. That process rightfully starts by honoring
the treaties the United States made with Indigenous nations, by restoring all sacred sites, starting with the Black Hills and including most federally held parks and land and all stolen sacred items and body parts, and by payment of sufficient reparations for the reconstruction and expansion of Native nations. In the process, the continent will be radically reconfigured, physically and psychologically. For the future to be realized, it will require extensive educational programs and the full support and active participation of the descendants of settlers, enslaved Africans, and colonized Mexicans, as well as immigrant populations.

In the words of Acoma poet Simon Ortiz:

The future will not be mad with loss and waste though the memory will

Be there: eyes will become kind and deep, and the bones of this nation

Will mend after the revolution.
⁴¹

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have dedicated this book to Vine Deloria Jr., Jack Forbes, and Howard Adams, three late Indigenous activist-scholars who pioneered the development of Native American studies programs and scholarship in universities in the 1970s.

My mentor, and a mentor and inspiration to many, Vine Deloria Jr. (1933–2005), Yankton Dakota of the Great Sioux Nation, impressed upon me the necessity for Indigenous sovereignty to be the framework and groundwork for the decolonization of Native American history. Sovereignty, he argued, is not only political but a matter of survival, and the denial of sacred lands and sites is a form of genocide. I met Vine when he recruited me to work with the Wounded Knee legal defense following the 1973 siege. I served as an expert witness at the historic federal court hearing in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1974, when Vine and a team of lawyers initiated use of the 1868 Sioux-US treaty to validate Sioux jurisdiction over the Wounded Knee defendants being tried in federal courts. Vine also persuaded me to edit and publish the court testimony of Sioux elders and others from the two-week hearing, which would constitute an oral history of the Sioux Nation and its continuing struggle for sovereignty. The 1977 book, with Vine's introduction,
The Great Sioux Nation: An Oral History of the Sioux Nation and Its Struggle for Sovereignty,
was issued in a new edition in 2013. Vine was already a best-selling author when I met him, and he published dozens more influential books and articles. He established early Native American studies programs at the University of California at Los Angeles, University of Arizona, and University of Colorado.

Even before I met Jack Forbes (1934–2011) in 1974, his 1960 book,
Apaches, Navajos, and Spaniards
, was central to the thesis
of my dissertation on the history of land tenure in New Mexico. Of Powhatan-Renapé and Lenape descent, Jack was an activist-historian who inspired me to follow that path once I received a doctorate in history. He founded the Native American Studies Department and its doctoral program at the University of California, Davis, and cofounded D-Q University. In addition to working together on developing Native American studies programs, I joined him in research with the Pit River (California) Nation's land struggle and with the Western Shoshone Nation of Battle Mountain in Nevada.

In my own political and intellectual development studying colonialism and imperialism in Africa and the Americas and supporting national liberation movements, I found a kindred soul in 1975 when I met Howard Adams (1921–2001). Howard was a Métis political leader from rural Saskatchewan, a Marxist, and professor of Native American studies at UC Davis, recruited by Jack Forbes. Howard was the first academic I had met who had grown up as poor as I had, about which we had many conversations. His heartrending and elegant 1975 memoir-history of the Métis and their great leader Louis Riel,
Prison of Grass: Canada from a Native Point of View
, now a classic, became a template for my own research and writing.

An overarching narrative of US history based on the historical experience and perspective of Indigenous peoples, which I have attempted to synthesize in this book, would not have been possible without the research, analysis, and perspectives that have emerged from several generations of Indigenous intellectuals, historians, writers, poets, filmmakers, musicians, and artists. Working singly and collectively, they contribute to decolonizing the master narratives and politics that in the past have largely covered the fingerprints of centuries of genocide and genocidal policies. Thereby, they contribute to Indigenous sovereignty, self-determination, and national liberation.

This book benefited also from conversations with Gerald Vizenor and Jean Dennison about Native constitutional developments; Andrew Curley on environmentalism and the Navajo Nation; Waziyatatawin on the catastrophe of climate change for all humanity, but especially Indigenous peoples; Nick Estes, Daphne Taylor-Garcia, Gloria Chacon, and Michael Trujillo on Indigenous identity; Susan
Miller on historical periodization and use of Indigenous sources; Elizabeth Castle about oral history; and Rachel Jackson in our decade-long and continuing discussions of settler-Indigenous relations in Oklahoma.

I want to thank my brilliant editor at Beacon Press, Gayatri Patnaik. Gayatri is a writer's dream, a hands-on editor, tough but always right. I also benefited from the careful and intelligent work of Beacon assistant editor Rachael Marks.

I appreciate that this book will take its place with other volumes in Beacon Press's ReVisioning American History series, and for that I thank and honor the memory of Howard Zinn.

Much gratitude goes to those who read parts or the whole of drafts and provided essential suggestions and much-needed support, especially Steven Baker, Steven Hiatt, Susan Miller, Aileen “Chockie” Cottier, Luke Young, Waziyatatawin, and Martin Legassick. Of course, only I am responsible for errors and interpretations in the text.

SUGGESTED READING

The essential compilation of Native historians, edited by Susan A. Miller and James Riding In, is
Native Historians Write Back: Decolonizing American Indian History
(Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2011), including contributors Donna L. Akers (Choctaw), Myla Vicenti Carpio (Jicarilla Apache/Laguna/Isleta), Elizabeth Cook-Lynn (Crow Creek Sioux), Steven J. Crum (Shoshone-Paiute), Vine Deloria Jr. (Yankton Nakota), Jennifer Nez Denetdale (Diné), Lomayumtewa Ishii (Hopi), Matthew Jones (Kiowa/Otoe-Missouria), Susan A. Miller (Seminole), James Riding In (Pawnee), Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Michi Saagnik Nishnaabeg), Winona Wheeler (Cree), and Waziyatatawin Angela Wilson (Dakota).

Joanne Barker,
Native Acts: Law, Recognition, and Cultural Authenticity
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).

Joanne Barker, ed.,
Sovereignty Matters: Locations of Contestation and Possibility in Indigenous Struggles for Self-Determination
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005).

Ned Blackhawk,
Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).

Jodi A. Byrd,
The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

Duane Champagne,
Notes from the Center of Turtle Island
(Lanham, MD: Altamira Press, 2010).

David A. Chang,
The Color of the Land: Race, Nation, and the Politics of Landownership in Oklahoma, 1832–1929
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).

Daniel M. Cobb,
Native Activism in Cold War America: The Struggle for Sovereignty
(Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2008).

Elizabeth Cook-Lynn,
A Separate Country: Postcoloniality and American Indian Nations
(Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2012).

Jeff Corntassel and Richard C. Witmer,
Forced Federalism: Contemporary Challenges to Indigenous Nationhood
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008).

James H. Cox,
The Red Land to the South: American Indian Writers and Indigenous Mexico
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).

Philip J. Deloria,
Indians in Unexpected Places
(Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2004).

Philip J. Deloria,
Playing Indian
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).

Vine Deloria Jr.,
Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto
, new ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988). First published 1969.

Vine Deloria Jr. and Clifford M. Lytle,
The Nations Within: The Past and Future of American Indian Sovereignty
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998).

Jennifer Nez Denetdale,
Reclaiming Diné History: The Legacies of Navajo Chief Manuelito and Juanita
(Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2007).

Jean Dennison,
Colonial Entanglement: Constituting a Twenty-First-Century Osage Nation
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz,
Roots of Resistance: A History of Land Tenure in New Mexico
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007). First published 1980.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, ed.,
The Great Sioux Nation: An Oral History of the Sioux Nation and Its Struggle for Sovereignty
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013). First published 1977.

Walter R. Echo-Hawk,
In the Courts of the Conqueror: The 10 Worst Indian Law Cases Ever Decided
(Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 2010).

Walter R. Echo-Hawk,
In the Light of Justice: The Rise of Human Rights in Native America and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples
(Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 2013).

Jack Forbes,
Columbus and Other Cannibals
(New York: Autonomedia, 1992).