November is Native American History Month; next year (2025) will mark the 350th anniversary of King Phillip’s War, the beginning of the end for the native people as the dominant polity on this continent. I’m marking the occasion with a series of daily posts related to the history of the Native Americans and their interactions with encroaching Europeans. Some will have to do with pop culture; others will be weightier. This series is dedicated to Sterling and Samantha.
There’s a delightful and true moment in the 1932 Hollywood comedy The Heart of New York with George Sidney and the team of Smith and Dale. A man is making his way through New York’s Lower East Side after an absence of some years and asks “What’s become of all the Irish?” And one of the neighborhood’s Jewish residents shrugs in reply and says, “What’s become of all the Indians?”
Naturally, the joke refers to the never-ending cycle of displacement of peoples in America as newer peoples arrive. It feels distinctly American, of course, but that process has actually been experienced periodically everywhere on the globe throughout the entire history of the human race. For one obvious example, right in front of us: in a way, the Irish themselves had experienced something very much like the plight of the Native Americans in their own native land. In a way, you could say that the English had used Ireland as a sort of dry run for their subsequent colonialism. In the 1550s, after Henry VIII had been named King of Ireland, the English launched their plantation system project, sending hundreds of Englanders and Scots to colonize the island, extract its wealth, and subdue the local people. Thus while Spain was expanding their empire in the Americas in the 16th century, the English began the same process much closer to home, gaining much valuable experience for when they themselves crossed the Atlantic several decades later. It is telling that just when English colonization of New England and Virginia began to take off in the 1620s, migration into Ireland slowed, though its domination and control of the Northern Counties continues to this day.
Not unusual among Americans, I have ancestors among all Irish factions: Irish natives, as well as those Scots- and Anglo-Irish settlers. But I have always been grateful that among my ancestry’s thousands of lines, almost all of which arrived close to four centuries ago, is one that came during the “classic” era of American immigration. There was one straggler who came from Rosecrea (Tipperary) at the time of the Great Famine. It is the most recent American arrival in my family background.
If you’ve seen Gangs of New York, you know what the Irish faced when they first arrived in the United States in large numbers in the mid 19th century: overt prejudice, discrimination, and even physical confrontation – at the hands of most of my other relatives, the ethnic English who had been here for two centuries. For a time, a bunch of the older faction organized themselves into a political party named, tragicomically, the “Native Americans”, a.k.a. the “Know Nothings”, (because much like the later Ku Klux Klan, they were a secret society). It was the first use of the term “Native American” in American politics. The society was so Eurocentric that the people who were literally indigenous didn’t even count in the reckoning. As far as they were concerned the English “got there first.”
There was a rival political organization to the Know Nothings named after the real First Nations, however, The Tammany Society was named in honor of Tamenand, a Lenape Chief named who had signed a major peace treaty with Quaker founder Willian Penn in 1683. In keeping with the theme, local chapters of the Tammany Society were known as wigwams. The administrators were known as sachems and sagamores. Which I think makes it especially ironic that Tammany’s democratic machine was instrumental in getting Andrew Jackson elected, Andrew Jackson, who of course made the Indian Removal Act and the Trail of Tears a permanent stain on our history. And a Hall named for Tamenand, in a town that had no more Lenape.
One of my first wife’s ancestors was one of these Tammany Hall sachems. Her great-great grandfather was also a Tammany mucky-muck during the time of Irish Catholic ascendancy in New York in the late 19th century. Her dad was a U.S. Congressman; her grandfather, a Mayor. All Irish.
She and I went out west on two honeymoon trips, through the Teton country of Colorado, past the site of Custer’s Last Stand, through Utah, homeland of the Utes and their flute playing avatar Kokopelli, and into Yellowstone Park where we saw wild buffalo (see above). We visited a real ghost town. We went to the Buffalo Bill Museum in Cody, Wyoming, one of the finest Buffalo Bill museums in the world, hah! I rode horses on a ranch and hiked in the desert and rode on terrifying mountain roads as snow fell. Oddly this was all at my wife’s bidding. She was working on a novel about cowboys and practically had to drag me kicking and screaming out there. Of course I loved it.
We also visited the magnificent Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City and the surrounding tourist traps. And there I visited an exhibit full of dioramas that attempted to lay out the case for the belief, shared by all Latter Day Saints, that the Native People of the American continent are actually the descendants of a Lost Tribe of Israel who came to America in ancient times. Almost everyone else disagrees that that was a thing that happened, but then Mormonism is a religion and there’s not much reward in arguing with what people take on faith.
Now….um, before I continue along this tightrope, I feel the need to assert the information that I don’t happen to share the bemused and often disrespectful hostility many non-Mormons hold toward the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. In particular, that is. Not because I’m a goody two-shoes with a halo over my own head, but because I am connected to it. My brother and his wife converted to the religion as a young couple, and (as you can imagine) they’ve had about a thousand offspring. His branch of our family now outnumbers the rest of us Gentiles in the family by some uncountable proportion I won’t even attempt to calculate.
So there’s that. So I have been Mormon-adjacent most of my life, and for a good bit of my youth, say, from the ages of 8 to 18, I was much closer to the religion than I am now. I attended their functions, I read their core literature and even considered converting. In recent years, I’ve even learned that I’m distantly related to Mormon Prophet Joseph Smith, and am even more related to a man named Hosea Stout, who was one of Smith’s bodyguards, the commander of police in the ill-fated town of Nauvoo, Illinois and one of the first of their bunch to enter the Salt Lake Valley.
Of course, all of that could be true without my caring a damn about them. It’s just that, thanks to being related, I happen to know a bunch of Mormons way too well to dismiss them as kooks. They’re nice (maybe too nice), normal (maybe too normal), and a couple of them are scholars who are quite literally smarter than I am. One of my nephews translates Chinese poetry into Italian. My brother is a master of geopolitics. Does their church have a racist, homophobic, and sexist history? Sure, but don’t, like, all the churches? Are they invested in a fantasy? Again, aren’t, like, all the churches? And furthermore, this particular church, like most of the other ones, has also been on the receiving end of persecution. If you don’t know that history, you ought to. It’s made the Mormons better attuned than most conservative denominations to the human rights of Jews, Muslims, Sikhs and other smaller American sects.
And as to some aspects of their creed? Surely you realize it’s by no means accidental that Mitt Romney has been one of a tiny handful of Republicans to swim against the Trumpian tide. He takes his principles (some of which you may not agree with) very seriously, and he knows that his people (his friends, his congregation) have his back. He had the courage to do something very hard, and his faith was the instrument that gave him the strength to do it.
But, I’m only human. One time, when I was trying to be a big shot, riffing at the expense of this relatively new religion at my wife’s liberal and sophisticated folks’ Georgetown townhouse, I looked up and saw my old, wise, and thoroughly Irish Catholic father-in-law scowling at me. It was like he was beaming me a psychic message. It may have been the most profound thing he ever said to me and he didn’t speak a word. He was definitely imparting the sentiment “Don’t do that, schmuck”. We all believe something other people don’t believe (or vice versa), and, me, being as I am descended from Puritans, Quakers, Huguenots, and other persecuted groups ought to know better. The way for ethnic, political and economic refugees to come to this country was paved by religious refugees. Nor were they welcomed with open arms by the indigneous people who lived here. Strife ensued, and the First Nations lost, though not for want of trying.
If the Mormons want to believe that Native Americans are a long lost tribe of Hebrews somehow, which neither Native Americans nor Jews endorse, what’s the precise harm, so long as they don’t hurt anybody? Well, that is the crucial sticking point. And as it happens, one thing the Jews and the First Nations do have in common is that, of all the people’s of the earth, these two came the closest to being exterminated by a majority population that actively sought to wipe them from the earth.
Did you know that Adolph Hitler got some of his best (worst) ideas from western novels? A man named Karl May was Hitler’s favorite fiction author. May wrote books about cowboys and Indians. Hitler liked these books so much he passed them out as gifts. And when the Fuhrer gives you a book you don’t put it on a shelf and forget about it. The Germans of Hitler’s day were not ignorant of American culture. In fact, sometimes they knew an uncomfortable LOT about it. On April 28, 1939 Hitler gave a speech before the Reichstag in which he sarcastically answered an open letter from FDR pleading for more peace talks. “The freedom of North America was not achieved at the conference table any more than the conflict between the North and the South was decided there,” Hitler scoffed, “I will not mention the innumerable struggles which finally led to the subjugation of the North American Continent as a whole”. …thus skewering Roosevelt’s sermon by reminding anyone listening of America’s history of slavery and genocide, at a time when Jim Crow was still in force and the First Nations had all been removed to reservations. Later he gets in another dig, claiming that the German delegates to the Versailles Peace Conference “… were subjected to even greater degradation than can ever have been inflicted on the chieftains of Sioux tribes.” Hitler was being disingenuous and self-serving but nothing he said was a lie. Those things happened. Naturally it’s the wrong lesson to draw, that that somehow makes it okay to commit such atrocities again, as Hitler was to do in his own country and throughout most of Europe. The lesson to draw is “never again” – by anybody.
Anyway, World War Two transpired and that was how and why my grandfather, a son of the former Confederacy, who lived one county over from the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan, enlisted in a war against the Nazis and Imperial Japan. There is often not a lot of soul searching during wartime. But in the aftermath, the international exposure and condemnation of Nazi policies in the wake of German defeat meant that from now on America would have to look at its OWN history differently. Never again could it pretend to an innocence it didn’t possess. These things happened. And it’s very dangerous to deny that they did.
Detachment from reality allows emotional distance, which permits cruelty, which allows the displacement of some groups by other groups, who literally kill them for land. Before the English did it to the Irish, the Anglo-Saxons did it to the Britons, and those Celtic Britons did it to the previous Neolithic cultures and on and on deep into the mists of prehistory throughout the world. Thousands of years, during which white men had killed each other and red men killed each other with identical savagery and identical xenophobia and identical greed. French killed English, Cree killed Choctaw, Protestant killed Catholic, Eagle People killed Sun People. As a Scotsman I can tell you that for centuries Scotsmen killed Scotsmen, clans killed clans, families killed families. This is true as well of the native people of the Americas. BEFORE the Spanish Conquest of Mexico, the Aztecs made mountains of skulls in the name of their religion. It’s not a white thing or a red thing or a black thing or a yellow thing, although it’s most definitely a male thing. Whether it’s also female thing remains academic, but I’m pretty skeptical. In the name of security, men pick leaders, worship them, do the madness of their bidding, and, historically, death has been the universal result. It’s happening right now in the Middle East.
The division of humanity into tribes, whatever they be, ethnic, religious, or political, is insidious, a mere excuse for a handful of monsters to accumulate power. The mission of almost all tribes is the elimination of the other tribes. The dilemma is that you can’t vanquish categories of people without harming the human beings who cling to them, and the vanquisher will always merely be the strongest tribe — which is not a victory for humanity. The challenge is to acknowledge and celebrate and tolerate the differences without allowing them to deteriorate into divisions. America was supposed to lead the way at that human project. The recent election proved a massive, possibly fatal, repudiation.