"Out of Our Special Regard for Them"

[urocyon]

Finally finished and up elsewhere: More on gender and sexuality, Part 3: Decolonizing our minds.

It's been a rough couple of days, since I had a clumsy tripping accident yesterday afternoon and pulled a muscle (the already tight psoas), on top of the still-subluxated sacroiliac. But, that should improve fairly soon, and I've been managing pretty well to take it easy.

Yesterday night I finished reading Barbara A. Mann's The Tainted Gift: The Disease Method of Frontier Expansion--excellently written, crammed with new looks at primary sources (a lot purposely buried in this case, it seems) and heart-wrenching, as usual. (Fangirl? Nah... ;) )

As Bruce E. Johansen, the series editor (Native America: Yesterday and Today), describes in his foreward:

In addition to the deliberate dissemination of disease, in these four cases, Dr. Mann describes some of the most wretched and wrenching racist cant I have ever seen, as various contemporary non-Indian observers seemed to enjoy watching Indians die horribly of smallpox, dehumanizing "The Other" as a pretext for taking the Other's land. In the end, pathogens become weapons of war utilized willingly by various traders, Indian agents, and military personnel to rid themselves of human obstructions to conquest.

Where the spread of disease was not utilized intentionally, its potency was often ignored, because admitting the problem would have been a threat to traders' profits.

It was very hard to read, even for someone who has already hunted down information about some of the horrible things that happened, and there's still an awful lot to digest. "[S]ome of the most wretched and wrenching racist cant I have ever seen" is almost a mild description of some contemporary accounts; reading some of that bile made me physically ill--I hate to think what it must have been like, doing the copious research. But I'm glad I did read this book, harrowing as the experience was.

Amongst all the descriptions of just plain evil behavior, callous disregard, and gloating, one "small" thing that lingers in mind: the child of one Euro-American man complicit in deliberately distributing hemorrhagic smallpox-tainted goods, by a Lakota mother, bore the English name Andrew Jackson Chardon. Nice way to show respect to your wife and child! (He also died in the resulting epidemic.) It was just further icing on the cake of how Native women and children got treated by the fur trade, also described some in this book.

This has bothered me for a good while, but Mann provided further examples of the way shame continues to trump truth (also from the introduction):

I was also advised not to title this work The Gift of Disease, lest an erstwhile cataloguer shelve it in the self-help section of the bookstore. I successfully resisted that effort to tinker with my title, but then, marketing got into the act, determining that, as a title, The Gift of Disease, was "too academic." I suspect that the real purpose of neutering the title to The Tainted Gift was to soften the settler agency strongly implied by The Gift of Disease.

All right, pay attention: This book is about awful facts of American history. It is about deliberately giving smallpox to the Ohio Indians in 1763. It concerns marching the Choctaws into a cholera plague zone during their already genocidal Removal in 1832. It looks at the irresponsible and even criminal acts that sent hemorrhagic smallpox abroad to the High Plains peoples in 1837. It takes the Cayuses seriously when they claim to have been poisoned in 1847. It all rests on frightening primary source documents.

At this point in my summation, I am supposed to pretend that not all the facts are in or pettifog around just who was culpable, ultimately pretending that everyone was at fault or, alternatively, assigning guilt to the least elite individual on the scene, but I cannot. The past cannot be changed, but it can be owned up to...

Native American scholars have long cast a gimlet eye on this very juxtaposition: the nearly insurmountable difficulties, on the one hand, of just getting at the raw information, especially that in the possession of the government; and, on the other hand, the regularity with which western historians churn out "new" presentations that do nothing but rehash the same old tidbits, interpreted in the same old way, so that the only thing new about the most recent offering is the name of its author. At least in private conversation, Native scholars speculate that this is because old ground is safe ground; its well known contours do not challenge conscience. Much of the reticence on the part of settler historians stems from squeamishness at the prospect of looking in the face the bloody, violent, diseased, and sometimes criminal history of this country.

One of the best takes on guilt over the past--and defensiveness--I've ever seen, from Mann's introduction (emphasis added):

[After a discussion of apologism/racist justification by one particular historian - U.]
Nope, the settlers did not do it, after all. They are innocent. It was, instead, the natural, impersonal process of biological evolution that eugenically decreed death to the Indians, a development "as inevitable as the progress of the stars."'

Today, with paternalism in disrepute, with it obvious just how much the government can and does control, and with death-dealing eugenics proclaimed criminal, Chittenden's squirming around the truth is obvious. Any squirming that works today will be just as obvious in another century, but we will all be dead by then. I say that there is no value in putting off until tomorrow what can be done today, so let us try truth in our time.

"White guilt" is no substitute for truth telling. First, sloshing around in guilt does not expiate the evil done. Worse, having once sloshed, sloshers just grow angry or compassion-fatigued should the topic recur, even though the damage remains unaddressed. Second, "white guilt" is modeled on Christian forgiveness, which paralyzes its prey before consuming it. Wallowing helps no one. Worse, people stuck in guilt mode have been taught that the harm done can be expunged by praying fervently enough to their God. For the record, it was the worshippers of the Christian God who did the damage in the first place, and purportedly for Him, no less. Thus, He is in no position to grant absolution for deeds in which He had a vested interest.

Finally, "white guilt" suggests that one, lone Indian, say someone innocently showing up to speak at a conference, is in a position to forgive things that happened to a nation of which she is neither an elder nor even a member. Whoa, doggies. Only the people who were injured can grant forgiveness, and they can only grant it to those who injured them. People who did not commit an injury cannot apologize to people who were not injured.

To begin with, the lines of accountability have to be clear. Next, to the extent possible, descendants of the offenders must make restitution to the descendants of the injured. If the children of offenders "own" a Shawnee burial mound, they should legally deed it back to the Shawnee descendants living in the area. If a light-fingered anthropologist lifted a medicine bag, his descendants should give it back to the descendants of the anthropologist's "informant." Museum collections of sacred objects should be returned to the people from whom they were taken.

Elie Wiesel once stated that the children of murderers are children. I say that the descendants of killers do not own the crimes of their ancestors, unless they willingly shield those crimes today. I have noticed that some modern Euro-Americans feel backed into a corner, as though by mere virtue of being Euro-descended they must defend the mythology of conquest over its very brutal reality; as if they would be race traitors should they concede the depths of it. This is recidivist racism, but the backsliding is emotional, and emotion cannot be reasoned away.

I have found out the hard way the visceral nature of this emotional resistance, so to forestall it, I now prepare my Euro-American students to hear difficult information. Here is what I tell them: "You are about to learn some very unsettling facts, mournful things that may even contradict what you heard in the fifth grade. You will want to turn away from these awful facts, but do not turn away from them. Instead, remember: You did not do this."

Then, I repeat, "You did not do this."

After that sinks in, I continue, "There is no reason for you to assume that you must defend misdeeds, simply because Europeans once committed them. You are not responsible for what happened."

I conclude with: "All that you are responsible for is what you do, once you walk out the door, knowing that these things did happen."

The stories that follow reflect no glory on the European invaders of North America. However, I am told that racism is happily passe, so let me say to my EuroAmerican readers: You do not have to feel like a race traitor should you pause to wipe your eyes or shake your head over what was done. You did not do this. You are not responsible. The only thing that you are responsible for is what you do after you close this book, knowing that these things were done to Native America.

Comments

[sanguinity]

:: All that you are responsible for is what you do, once you walk out the door, knowing that these things did happen. ::

Yes. Nice to see her explicitly heading off guilt like that. Did she say anything about whether or not addressing it up front like that is effective at all?


Looks like a hard, but very good read.

[urocyon]

No, though I was guessing that she might have added, "but this doesn't seem to help much" if it didn't. :) I wondered about that, too.