At a ceremony honoring very elderly survivors of the legendary Navaho Code Talkers of the Second World War, Trump worked a gratuitous slur at Sen. Elizabeth Warren as "Pocahontas": Lauren Gambino, Trump makes 'Pocahontas' joke at ceremony honoring Navajo veterans Guardian 11/28/2017.
The Young Turks' had this report, Cenk Uygur and John Iadarola Trump Uses Racial Slur 11/27/2017:
As Cenk and John's report notes, the ceremony took place in front of the large portrait of Andrew Jackson that hangs by Trump's Presidential desk.
This brought the following tweet from the Navaho Law Center:
The President calls a white woman "Pocahontas"—who was a Native American victim of child rape—at an event "honoring" Diné WWII code talkers, all in front a portrait depicting the original architect of Indian removal, Andrew Jackson. https://t.co/Du9DDg2cC3— Lakota Law Project (@lakotalaw) November 27, 2017
To which I replied:
Trump was a jerk today as usual. But Andrew Jackson was not the inventor of Indian removal. History didn’t begin in 1830. https://t.co/0UcLgdvAoY— Bruce Miller (@brucemillerca) November 28, 2017
From the Encyclopedia Britannica Online article on Northeast Indian People (2008) by Elizabeth Prine Pauls and Elisabeth Tooker, about the native people of what's now the Northeast United States (internal hot links omitted):
Of the three language families represented in the Northeast, Algonquian groups were the most widely distributed. Their territories comprised the entire region except the areas immediately surrounding Lakes Erie and Ontario, some parts of the present-day states of Wisconsin and Minnesota, and a portion of the interior of present-day Virginia and North Carolina. The major speakers of Algonquian languages include the Passamaquoddy, Malecite, Mi’kmaq (Micmac) Abenaki, Penobscot, Pennacook, Massachuset, Nauset, Wampanoag, Narragansett, Niantic, Pequot, Mohegan, Nipmuc, Pocomtuc, Mohican (Mahican), Wappinger, Montauk, Delaware, Powhatan, Ojibwa, Menominee, Sauk, Kickapoo, Miami, Shawnee, and Illinois.That's quite the euphemism, "as the effects of colonialism rippled across the continent." But they go on to explains that what that meant was the effects of Europeans' diseases, violence, depletion of resources and Christian missionary activity. For instance (internal hot links omitted):
The territory around Lakes Ontario and Erie was controlled by peoples speaking Iroquoian languages, including the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, Huron, Tionontati, Neutral, Wenrohronon, Erie, Susquehannock, and Laurentian Iroquois. The Tuscarora, who also spoke an Iroquoian language, lived in the coastal hills of present-day North Carolina and Virginia.
Although many Siouan-speaking tribes once lived in the Northeast culture area, only the Ho-Chunk (Winnebago) people continue to reside there in large numbers. Most tribes within the Sioux nation moved west in the 16th and 17th centuries, as the effects of colonialism rippled across the continent. Although the Santee Sioux bands had the highest level of conflict with their Ojibwa neighbours, the Teton and Yankton Sioux bands moved the farthest west from their original territory. These bands, as well as most other Siouan-speaking groups, are usually considered to be part of the Plains Indian culture area despite their extended period of residence in the forests. [my emphasis]
Europeans who traveled to the Americas brought with them diseases to which indigenous peoples had no immunity. These new diseases proved much more deadly to Amerindians than they had been to Europeans and ultimately precipitated a pancontinental demographic collapse. The introduced diseases proved especially virulent in the concentrated settlements of the Iroquoians, who began to suffer heavier population losses than their neighbours. In attempting to replace those who had died during epidemics, the tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy seem to have taken kidnapping to unprecedented levels.The occupation of the North American continent - including Canada, Mexico and Central America - and South America, as well, was accomplished largely by the physical expulsion of the native populations. I don't say this as any kind of moral or political justification of the actions. But it's what happened. It started happening way before the Jacksonian Indian Removal Act of 1930, and continued long after. Even today, Indian tribes have to actively resist attempted incursions by mining companies and others, though fortunately more effective legal means to do so are available to them today.
Economic disruptions related to the commercialization of animal resources also instigated intertribal conflict. By the early 17th century, trapping had severely depleted the beaver population around the Great Lakes. At that time beaver pelts were the most important commodity in the fur trade economy and could easily be bartered for guns, ammunition, and other goods necessary to ensure a tribe’s safety, or even preeminence, in a region. The Iroquois Confederacy occupied some of the more depleted beaver habitat and began a military campaign intended to effect expansion into territory that had not been overhunted. ...
When Europeans arrived on the North American continent, they brought manufactured goods that the Indians welcomed and new diseases that they did not. Certain of these diseases proved particularly devastating to Native Americans because they did not have the immunity that the colonial populations had developed through centuries of exposure. For example, the first epidemic recorded in New England took place in 1616–17; while the very early date of this pestilence makes it difficult to determine exactly what disease was involved, most historical epidemiologists and demographers believe it was probably smallpox. As no census figures for Native Americans are available for this period, the number of individuals who perished is similarly difficult to discern. Historically, however, the mortality rates for populations experiencing smallpox for the first time have ranged from 20 to 90 percent. The mortality rates appear to have been quite high in this case, as the Puritans who landed at Plymouth in 1620 remarked upon the large number of abandoned villages near their settlement. They interpreted this obvious and recent depopulation of the region as a sign of divine favour—believing that God had used the epidemic to rid the area of indigenous nonbelievers who would have hindered Puritan expansion. ...
The initial European settlement clung to the Atlantic coast—the sea provided the lifeline to the European homeland that the colonists needed—and thus coastal groups were first affected by the newcomers’ desire for land. They were ill equipped to counter the invasion. Not only were their numbers relatively small (and made even smaller by the epidemics), but their political organization was not of the kind that easily led to unified action of numbers of men. Friction with the colonists did occasionally erupt, however, as in the Pequot War (1637) and King Philip’s War (1675–76). Such resistance could not be maintained for long, however, and indigenous peoples began to adopt European ways as a means of survival. This often involved the acceptance and practice of Christianity; some missionaries were especially influential. John Eliot, for example, accomplished the monumental task of translating the Bible into Algonquian, publishing the translation in two volumes that appeared in 1661 and 1663. [my emphasis]
The history of mass deaths is always grim business. The chief instrument of the European conquest of natives and their land were microscopic. And, as Pauls and Tooker say above, those germs and viruses "ultimately precipitated a pancontinental demographic collapse." That was also true all across what is now Latin America, beginning with Columbus' landing in what is now Haiti in 1492.
Andrew Jackson did not invent Indian relocation. But at this moment in American history, Jackson is now largely viewed in the media and the public discussion as an almost uniquely culpable figure in the long history of Europeans and their descendants in North America. In earlier posts, I've discussed the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and its brutal consequences. It deserves to be seen as a bad, terrible thing in US history.
But the Republicans have now successfully (for the moment) made Jackson a symbol of their version of white supremacy. In the outlook of the Steve Bannons and Richard Spencers of our world, Jackson's treatment of the Indians must look like an admirable thing. As well as the actions of viruses, germs, warriors, plunderers and thieves who preceded and succeeded Jackson.
So, the President who led and lent his name to some of the most important domestic reforms and expansions of democracy, and who led the successful fighters against the plutocratic Bank of the United States (which was a major factor in the early corruption of politics by money) and against John Calhoun and the leaders of South Carolina in the pre-secessionist Nullification Crisis. The Jacksonian reformers were the first large political movement in the US to actively support organized labor. Jackson himself assisted the early feminist activist Frances "Fanny" Wright in setting up the explicitly Abolitionist utopian colony, the Nashoba Commune, in his native Tennessee in 1825. She also actively campaigned for Jackson's Democratic Party and in support of his fight against the Bank.
Republicans are just better at using (misusing) symbols and traditions of the American past than Democrats are.
And reducing history to any one factor is ahistorical. Even those factors like class and gender are fundamental influences, they are not the only ones. It's important to remember that the original political community of the US recognized essentially only white men as full citizens, and even universal male suffrage didn't emerge with the Constitution in 1789. (The Jacksonians pushed for eliminating property requirements for voting.) But there were important developments that benefited some as disadvantaged others within that community. Ever our basic law was established with our 18th-century Constitution. So it doesn't really make much sense to dismiss the entirety of earlier American history to an unbroken horror show. Even though it had no shortage of horror shows, and not only for Indians.
The North American Indian Wars are considered to have definitely ended in the late 1870s, although some might prefer to use the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890 to mark the ending point. If we date it to Wounded Knee, every US President and Congress from George Washington to Benjamin Harrison presided over a reprehensible Indian policy, even one that liberals and the left are quick to call genocide. But was there nothing in American politics worth admiring, praising, using as some kind of model in all that time?
I think it would be sophomoric to look at history that way. Plus, I still think Andrew Jackson is a great historical symbol that can be used against neo-Confederacy. The title of this blog for most of its existence since 2003 until this year was "Old Hickory's Weblog" for just that reason.
But the left in the US seems largely ready to cede most all of American history prior to 1861 to Republicans, conservatives and white supremacists. And I wonder how long it will be until purist-minded earnest folks on the left discover that Lincoln served in militias in Illinois that fought Indians. Or that both and the Confederate and the Union armies fought Indian tribes. Once people decide that Lincoln is therefore not the Great Liberator but the Great Genocider, then the left can happily join hands with neo-Confederates who also see Lincoln as a bloody, genocidal tyrant (against good Christian white people).
And be careful about telling a group of Democrats that some Indians were also slave-owners. Their heads might just explode.
On a little more serious note, "Whig history" has a depressingly strong influence on the left and center-left in the US today. In that narrative, the monarchist Alexander Hamilton and the plutocrat John Quincy Adams are the great heroes. Maybe we could add in the reactionary Chief Supreme Court John Marshall to make it a trinity. That narrative incorporates them into a trend that culminates with Lincoln the Great Liberator.
In the real world, hardcore Jacksonians saw Lincoln as standing in their own tradition. And the Great Liberators himself cited the slaveowners Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson as his main Presidential models. Go figure. History is kind of complicated, I guess.
But Republicans are happy to provide their own simplifications, which by coincidence wind up providing ideological support for their current policies.
This video on the Trump/Pocahontas flap features Navajo Nation's President Russell Begaye, who takes a more cautious approach to criticizing Jackson, in that he doesn't make him the central symbol of bad policy toward Indians, Navajo President: Donald Trump's 'Pocahontas' Comment Was 'Inappropriate' Velshi & Ruhle/MSNBC 11/28/2017
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