"Out of Our Special Regard for Them"

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):
( Long but excellent quote )