Whose “Good Old Days” Are You Talking About?

“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” said the character Stephen Daedalus in the novel Ulysses, by James Joyce. True for the Irish, and it should have been true for the English, also, but was it? An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States is a difficult book to read, because the facts themselves are brutal, but for that very reason it is also an important corrective to U.S. history as generally taught. I’ve made my way through it slowly so as not to skip over any of the unbelievably horrible but horribly real — and horribly repetitive — details. The awful repetition of horrors is important because it shows that, rather than being something that can be brushed aside today as anomalies, all were part of systematic, government-sanctioned and often (though not always) government-led racism and genocide in our country’s history. 

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz did not grow up on a reservation but “in the midst of,” as she puts it, Native communities in rural Oklahoma, her father a cowboy, her mother “ashamed of being part Indian.” She became involved in political movements in the Sixties — antiwar, civil rights, anti-apartheid, women’s lib — and eventually with the American Indian Movement (AIM) and the International Indian Treaty Council. She earned her doctorate in 1974 with a dissertation on land tenure in New Mexico. It’s easier to tell you about the author’s background than about what’s in her book, though, because even white people know, after all, that the history of the frontier was not a happy one for Native Americans. We have all heard and read that the westward movement was made possible by a series of broken treaties and bloody encounters. But what about colonial days? Weren’t we taught in grade school about a peaceful “First Thanksgiving” between Native Americans and English colonists?

One point the author makes repeatedly is that the “Indian Wars” did not begin in the Wild West but right there in the beginning on the Atlantic Coast. From England’s invasion and subjugation of Ireland (that nightmare history) came the practice of scalping, with bounties paid and few if any questions asked about sex or age of the murdered and mutilated. Thus immigrant men without property in the colonies and new United States, organized into volunteer militias, might better themselves financially as scalping and land-taking practices accompanied immigration to the North America.

European justification for seizure of Native lands can be traced back to the 15th century, when the pope promulgated and clarified the Doctrine of Discovery, cited in 1792 by Thomas Jefferson and reaffirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1823. According to this doctrine, which came to be enshrined in international law, “discoverers” of a land could claim it as territory for their own country, thus jumping the property rights claims of all other European countries. Prior inhabitants (called “First Nations” in Canada) were not considered to have any property rights in their own homeland. In their religion, land was too sacred to be bought and sold — and so they were sold out by invaders with a different set of values and customs.

Another theme Dunbar-Ortiz presents is the idea that “total war” — i.e., war fought not only between armies but waged against an entire population, with villages and crops burned and game slaughtered so that, facing starvation and “scorched earth,” no choice is left but to take to what was called, in the case of the Cherokees, the “Trail of Tears” — is nothing new to the U.S. military. Used first against Native Americans, it was national and military policy at the highest levels of American government, as the author demonstrates with quotations from governors, generals, and U.S. presidents. Military experience in dealing with Native Americans was subsequently taken overseas to the Philippines and, later, to Vietnam. The first U.S. invasion of Iraq was promised to bring speedy victory of U.S. forces over Iraqi “Indian country.” The phrase “Indian country” came from the Vietnam era but has come to be abbreviated as “In Country,” disguising the origins of the term designating “behind enemy lines,” the change, though at best only cosmetic, perhaps due in part to a protest from the National Congress of American Indians in 1991.

I’m refraining from incorporating very many quoted passages, but here’s one that encapsulates all the rest. The author writes that Dee Brown’s 1970 account of a 19th-century massacre, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, became a “surprise best seller,

so the name Wounded Knee resonated with a broad public by 1973. On the front page of one newspaper, editors placed two photographs side by side, each of a pile of bloody, mutilated bodies in a ditch. One was from My Lai in 1968, the other from the Wounded Knee army massacre of the Lakota in 1890. Had they not been captioned, it would have been impossible to tell the difference in time and place.  

- Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States

Dunbar-Ortiz, however, does more than bust myths and document genocide. Equally important to her story is Indigenous resistance and survival, from the beginning to modern times, including legal battles ongoing today. Here’s one that may surprise you:

…In the first land restitution to any Indigenous nation, President Richard M. Nixon signed into effect Public Law 91-550, which had been approved with bipartisan majorities in Congress [my amazed emphasis added]. President Nixon stated, “This is a bill that represents justice, because in 1906 an injustice was done, in which land involved in this bill — 48,000 acres — was taken from the Taos Pueblo Indians. The Congress of the United States now returns that land to whom it belongs.”

Yet today, even as I was working on this expanded version of my review of the Dunbar-Ortiz book (a shorter version was written for another publication), a young man from Leelanau County, Zhaabadiis Biidaasige, whom I knew when he was a little boy as Johnny Petoskey, was standing before the United Nations Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous People, representing the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians, Kitchiwikwedongsing Anishinaabak, and speaking to the issue of unfulfilled treaty promises made by the State of Michigan to the Anishnabe people. 

Survival. Resistance. Renewal.

A special edition for young people of this book is due for release in late July. How will the story be told there? And what do we want American children of any skin color or ethnic background to know about American history? How do we tell them the truth and still inculcate in them a love of their country? Perhaps that depends not only on how we teach about the past but even more on how we conduct ourselves in the present and into the future. 

An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014), paperback, 296 pages with index, $16

Those Were the Years That Were

 

I’ve been living a secret life this week. Along with my home and bookstore, husband and dog, and books and yard, I’ve been reliving the 1960s, only this time not in the Midwest. No, I’ve been living those years in the place we in the Midwest longed to be: Greenwich Village.

It was, of course, a book that made my time travel possible. How could I not pick up A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties, by Suze Rotolo, with its cover of the author when young, arm in arm with young Bob Dylan, the very photo from the cover of the “Freewheelin’” album released in 1963, the first Dylan album I ever bought (although not until 1965 or 1966)?

The book is Rotolo’s memoir, her memories of the Sixties as she lived them, not a tell-all of her love affair with Bob Dylan, and that was fine with me. Since her parents, both Italian, were Communists and activists, her growing-up years in the 1950s were heavily affected by McCarthyism and the fear that one or both of her parents might be hauled off to jail. 

We lived on the ground floor.... My father set up an electric saw in the basement ... and made nearly every piece of furniture we had.  

...We had bookshelves filled with books, a record player, and a collection of treasured 78s and 33-1/3 long-playing records. We listened to the radio; we didn't own a television. The other apartments were carpeted, had curtains on the windows, not Venetian blinds, and no bookshelves in the living rooms. 

Growing up in a family of readers, in a neighborhood where most other families did not have books, I understood that feeling of being different, of not fitting in. My parents had opera records, too. We did not have homemade furniture, and my parents were far from Communists, but the differences between the author's growing-up years and my own were as fascinating to me as the similarities.

After her father died and her mother’s plan to take Suze to Italy came to naught because of a freeway accident, the teenage girl found a job working for CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) in New York City. “It was 1961, the year of the first Freedom Rides....” It was also a time of cheap rents and musical ferment in New York. I recognized so many names in the crowd Suze and Bobby hung out with -- and was amazed at how many times people changed apartments, moving their few possessions (for whatever reason) apparently no big deal.

As the author notes, early 1960s American life had much in common, socially, with the 1950s. Only in Greenwich Village did the ordinary rules not apply. Ties for men, high heels for women – no rigid dress code like that in the Village. Interracial friends were common. Rotolo came on the scene when folk music was at its height, when even “famous” people’s names were not yet household words, and before drugs had a big part in the Counterculture. She was 17 when she met Bob Dylan, who was only starting to get attention from established musicians.

At one point, Rotolo traveled to Italy and spent several months studying art, soaking up European culture, and trying to figure out what kind of life she could make – if making a life together were possible – with someone as famous as Bob Dylan was becoming. The two came back together after that time apart, but the eventual break was inevitable. In following years, she married an Italian and had a family. Dylan has had a famous life, but Suze had her own life, too. I'm glad.

In view of their very public relationship and breakup (she writes how difficult it was to have her private life invaded by journalists and curiosity-seekers), I appreciated the author’s even-handed description of the boy she had loved and their youthful time together. (He spoke well of her, also, years after their relationship ended.) In this book, she does not treat him with kid gloves, but neither does she detract in any way from his musical genius, and she allows that he handled fame at an early age as well as he possibly could. They were so young! In writing of that time, the author remains true to her first love and their integrity.

...Bob was assaulted by many forces, most of them good, since he was gaining the success he always sought; but some were bad, because there was a new kind of complexity to everything going on around him. It was tough going for someone who underneath all the ambition and drive was very sensitive. I was equally sensitive and so overwhelmed by circumstances that I had trouble seeing how hard he was trying to hold things together.

When she writes of emotional struggle and awkward silences, I remember my old Sixties adolescence. I also recognize the idealism of the times:

The sixties were an era that spoke a language of inquiry and curiosity and rebelliousness against the stifling and repressive political and social culture of the decade that preceded it.

Civil rights, integration, freedom to travel, freedom of expression, artistic innovation – even the sexual freedom of the Village had an innocence and a purity about it in the early Sixties, as was true, I think, in most of the rest of the country. Certainly, I would say, it was true of my summer between high school and college. Stagestruck, hanging out with art and music and theatre people, my boyfriend of that year an art student, I felt very bohemian, as did my friends then, but we still took fairly seriously the barriers we transgressed (and there were many we did not transgress). Back then, what we considered “daring” could not yet be taken for granted. The freedom was all too new. And, of course, we were so very young!

When I finished the book, I searched online to learn what the author might be doing today and was saddened to learn that she had passed away four years ago at the age of 67. Here are the last lines from her New York Times obituary:

She remained politically active. In 2004, using the pseudonym Alla DaPie, she joined the street-theater group Billionaires for Bush and protested at the Republican convention in Manhattan.

In other words, clearly, she remained true to herself and to the spirit of the Sixties. I hope I have also, in my own country way. 

I've always said I want Bob Dylan's "When the Ship Comes In" sung at my funeral. David says no one will know the words. Okay, friends, start memorizing! I hope you'll have years to learn the words before you need to sing them for me.

Correcting for Perspective

During my senior year at Tougaloo, my family hadn’t sent me one penny. I had only the small amount of money I had earned at Maple Hill [restaurant in New Orleans]. I couldn’t afford to eat at school or live in the dorms, so I had gotten permission to move off campus. I had to prove that I could finish school, even if I had to go hungry every day. I knew Raymond [her stepfather] and Miss Pearl [his mother] were just waiting to see me drop out. But something happened to me as I got more and more involved in the Movement. It no longer seemed important to prove anything. I had found something outside myself that gave meaning to my life.

- Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi

If you have read Kathryn Stockett's The Help (which I blogged about here and here) and wondered how the story would go if a black woman had written it, try Coming of Age in Mississippi. Anne Moody’s first paying job came when she was only nine years old. She was paid seventy-five cents a week and two gallons of milk to dust and sweep an old lady’s house. After seeing that the old lady let cats drink out of the milk cans, she didn’t want to drink the milk any more and told her mother why, but her mother wouldn’t believe her, and so the girl continued carrying milk home to her family. She planted and chopped cotton for a while and continued to do housework for white people all the way through high school, but she kept her distance from boys, determined not to be trapped in a life like her mother’s, dependent on a man and having one baby after another. She went to college on scholarship, paying her living expenses by working summers in a restaurant (moving up gradually from dishwasher to waitress) and in a chicken slaughterhouse as a strikebreaker.

It was in college that Moody joined the NAACP, an organization so hated and feared by whites in her home of Wilkinson County that black people didn’t dare to say its name out loud, let alone join, lest they wind up murdered like Emmett Till. Soon afterward she became involved with SNCC, CORE, voter registration drives and civil rights sit-ins. Her life was threatened. Medgar Evers was killed on her 23rd birthday.

The end of the book, like much of the story, may not be what you expect, but it is one black woman’s firsthand experience of growing up poor in rural Mississippi and trying to make life better for her people.

Will They Just Think I’ve Lost My Marbles?

We certainly would have looked crazy if Lisa and I had followed our original plan to decorate Northport this morning with cornstalks and scarecrows. Wind and pouring rain! Here it is in a few different places north of M-204, which was my second destination this morning after coffee at Stone House Bread. But that's not what I'm talking about.

Leelanau trial lawyer Dean Robb, his wife Cindy Robb and I have finally, you see, set a firm date for Dean’s appearance at Dog Ears Books. The party is for his memoir (release date: Oct. 1), Dean Robb: An Unlikely Radical, actually written by Dean and Cindy’s son, Matthew, after he and his dad took a road trip together through the South and visited many places where Dean had done civil rights work back in the Sixties.


I’m reading the page proofs now, while waiting for the book to arrive from the printer, and while I’ve only gotten to Dean’s high school years I’m already enthralled. He was born in a farmhouse in a place called Lost Prairie, Illinois. There wasn’t even a town, but isn’t that a great place name? Lost Prairie! And he had very much the kind of rural, interdependent, kids-contributing community growing-up I just blogged about the other day in connection with a couple of youth novels, one from the Forties, the other from the Sixties. At age seven, Dean was driving a team of mules pulling a haywagon! Well, I don’t want to give away too much, even of the early years. The important date, before I forget, is Saturday, October 9, and the time is from 6-8 p.m. That’s at Dog Ears Books, 106 Waukazoo Street in Northport. We’ll have the books, we’ll have refreshments, Dean will be there to sign books, and if we’re very lucky Matt could be on hand, also, but he’s teaching downstate, so his presence is not yet certain.

So, anyway, I went to the office of the Leelanau Enterprise this morning to arrange for advertising, and Joy was very helpful, as always, but she did look askance at some of my wording, the part where I begin the ad with “Dean Robb, appearing as himself....” Even after I reminded her that Dean has had a sideline for years as an entertainer, impersonating Mark Twain, no smiling gleam of recognition broke over her face, and now I’m wondering: Will anyone get it? Is it too obscure? Will I just sound and look like a fool? It’s an allusion, it’s an allusion! Or is a delusion, a self-delusion, and I my own victim?

Well, as Dean says on his answering machine message (still an old message from August, telling people to come see him impersonate Mark Twain at the Port Oneida Fair), “I’ll probably make a fool of myself, but I’ve done it before.” Not necessarily true for him, it’s certainly true for me.

Without giving away any of the book’s content, I want to share some of the quotes from the book’s cover, testimonials to the fact, if anyone needs reminding, that Dean really is a Leelanau Legend and more:

Jim Harrison: “...a thoroughly amazing book about a thoroughly amazing man I’ve known for over thirty years.”

Helen Milliken: “A powerful insight into the last half century of our tumultuous times.”

Gerry Spence: “I find true heroes hidden where true heroes reside, engaged endlessly in their need to fight for justice without the clamor and pomp of publicity. Dean Robb is a true hero.”

Geoffrey Fieger: “...the humanitarian and trial warrior for the damned, the lost, and the forgotten I have always aspired to be.”

Michael Moore and Kathleen Glynn: “Dean Robb was and is fearless, relentless, compassionate and the Great Defender of the people who otherwise have no voice.”

The book is 336 pages, hardcover, priced at $24.95. Payment to Dog Ears Books is by cash or check.