Far From Brooklyn

This is a broad history of the Americans – that is, the natives of North America, post Columbus.

It’s a painful story, of course, and the author, James Wilson, sometimes gives in to shrillness.

Much of the book covers material that I have read elsewhere, and oftentimes better, but it seemed disrespectful somehow not to continue reading so I did read on.  And patience was repaid by the sections covering the Indians of the Southwest and the Far West – stories and tribes I had not read much about in the past.

The chapter devoted to the Southwestern tribes’ tortured relationship with the Spanish explorers, missionaries, and caudillos was fascinating, awful, and would qualify in parts as comical if it weren’t so tragic.  The blind faith of the missionaries and the absurd lengths that they went to convert the Indians resulted in, of course, resistance and hatred among many Indians, but in others a weird hybrid faith that recognized Christ as the son of God but also revered natural (pre-Columbian) deities.

The segment covering the California gold rush was particularly appalling, possibly because I’m living in California now, but mainly because it occurred so recently – it somehow seems less forgivable than the Spanish cruelties of the 16th Century, when (one would like to think) the world was still bound up in superstition and ignorance.

Reading the book, it was hard not to see parallels to America’s position in Iraq, to Israel and the Palestinians, the civil war in Sri Lanka, and other intractable modern conflicts.  Human movement seems to create suffering – we are uprooted, we uproot, and it’s amazing how cruel we can be.

Every civilization is built on the bones of one that came before it.  This is not said to forgive the excesses of the ‘49ers, or the missionaries, or of the Pilgrims, who after skirmishes now known as “King Philip’s War” mounted the head of the Indian leader Metacom on a pike outside the town gate for more than 10 years.  It’s just that history is blood.

The Earth Shall Weep by James Wilson

Two related books that moved me deeply and from which I learned a great deal are Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown and The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity by Jill Lepore.

Bury My Heart was a landmark work in the 1970s that overturned American thinking about “how the West was won."  It’s tempting to describe the book as history told from the Indian’s point of view, but that’s really not it at all – it’s just a history focusing on the displacement and near-total extermination of the American Indian in the second half of the 19th Century.  I read it when I was a teenager and though I loved and admired the book, I have never gone back to it because it was so painful to read.

The Name of War is less well known but it (for me, anyway) upended many received notions about the Pilgrims and their relationship with the local Indians. Lepore is a brilliant writer and historian who convincingly paints a picture of a society whose prejudice and fears of Indians ultimately turned it cruel and violent, despite its desire (and self image) to be "Christian."  The fact that King Philip’s skull decorated Plymouth Plantation’s front gate for more than a decade (this I learned from Lepore, not White) simply does not square with the American "memory” of the pilgrims and their relationship with the helpful Massasoit, who in mythology of the American creation gave the pilgrim’s corn. Massasoit was Philip’s father.

Out of this savage war came American identity (says Lepore) – an identity born of pride of survival but also one that had to demonize the “other” in order to justify the extermination of the Indians that lived there.