In this interview, we discuss Andrew Frank‘s most recent book, Before the Pioneers: Indians, Settlers, Slaves, and the Founding of Miami (University Press of Florida, 2017). The book is a concise and authoritative history of the region where modern-day Miami is located. Before the Pioneers, begins thousands of years in the past and places great emphasis on understanding the role that native people played in the history of south Florida. Borrowing extensively from archaeology, Before the Pioneers is a timely re-imaging of Miami’s history that places the native experience at the center of its narrative.
Andrew Frank is the Allen Morris Professor of History at Florida State University. His primary research interest is the Native Southeast.
On a cold, rainy dawn in late November 1872, Lieutenant Frazier Boutelle and a Modoc Indian nicknamed Scarface Charley leveled firearms at each other. Their duel triggered a war that capped a decades-long genocidal attack that was emblematic of the United States’ conquest of Native Americas peoples and lands. California author and editor Robert Aquinas McNally tells the wrenching story of this conflict in The Modoc War: A Story of Genocide at the Dawn of America’s Gilded Age (Bison Books, 2017). The 1872-73 Modoc War was one of the nation’s costliest campaigns against North American Indigenous peoples, in which the army placed nearly one thousand soldiers in the field against some fifty-five Modoc fighters.
Although little known today, the Modoc War dominated national headlines for an entire year. Fought in south-central Oregon and northeastern California, the war settled into a siege in the desolate Lava Beds and climaxed the decades-long effort to dispossess and destroy the Modocs. The war did not end with the last shot fired, however. For the first and only time in U.S. history, Native fighters were tried and hanged for war crimes. The surviving Modocs were packed into cattle cars and shipped from Fort Klamath to the corrupt, disease-ridden Quapaw reservation in Oklahoma, where they found peace even more lethal than war.
The Modoc War tells the forgotten story of a violent and bloody Gilded Age campaign at a time when the federal government boasted officially of a “peace policy” toward Indigenous nations. This compelling history illuminates a dark corner in our country’s past.
Ryan Tripp is an adjunct instructor for several community colleges, universities, and online university extensions. In 2014, he graduated from the University of California, Davis, with a Ph.D. in History. His Ph.D. double minor included World History and Native American Studies, with an emphasis in Linguistic Anthropology and Indigenous Archeology.
The story of the American West as it is often told typically involves Spanish, British, and American Empires struggling with Indigenous people for control of the vast territory lands and riches from the Mississippi to the Pacific. After the seventeenth century, French colonists and French-speaking Metis are often relegated to the role of bit players in this tale. Songs Upon the Rivers: The Buried History of the French-Speaking Canadiens and Metis From the Great Lakes and the Mississippi Across to the Pacific (Baraka Books, 2016) reemphasizes the importance of the French imperial legacy and Metis influence in the Great Lakes region, on the northern plains, and in the far Pacific West. In doing so, this book challenges American and Canadian narratives about the west which too often tend toward racial and national binaries. By telling the stories of people who lived across ethnic and national boundaries, Robert Foxcurran, Michel Bouchard, and Sebastien Mallett show how historians can use the complications of the past to explode notions of perceived difference in the present day, and in doing so reveal important stories about the Trans-Mississippi West which have been buried for far too long.
Robert Foxcurran is an independent scholar and former historian for the Boeing Corporation, he can be reached at robert.r.foxcurran@gmail.com; Michel Bouchard is a Professor of anthropology at the University of Northern British Columbia; Sebastien Malette is an Assistant Professor in the Law and Legal Studies Department at Carleton University.
Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana.
It’s a sad story known well. In dead of winter at Wounded Knee Creek in 1890, U.S. soldiers with the Seventh Cavalry Regiment gunned down over two hundred Lakota men, women, and children. Their crime? Taking part in the Ghost Dance ritual. What happened afterwards is a story told less often. David W. Grua, historian and editor with the Joseph Smith Papers project, tells about the competing memory and counter-memory of Wounded Knee as the U.S. Army first shaped the narrative, and later, Lakotas attempted to have their side of the story heard. In his Robert M. Utley Prize winning book, Surviving Wounded Knee: The Lakotas and the Politics of Memory (Oxford University Press, 2016), Grua argues that race, official memory, and public memorialization served the purposes of white supremacy on the northern Great Plains throughout much of the early twentieth century. Official army reports as well as physical memorialization at the massacre site spun a narrative of Indian savagery and white innocence that helped make the case for the twenty Medals of Honor awarded to soldiers who took part in the bloodshed. The truth was, of course, far more complicated, as Lakota activists like Joseph Horn Cloud would prove in an effort to gain restitution and justice from the American government. Surviving Wounded Knee is an important story about what happens to a massacre site once the smoke clears, and is a testament to the power of public history.
Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana.
In Legible Sovereignties: Rhetoric, Representations, and Native American Museums (Oregon State University Press, 2017), Lisa King explores the ways in which rhetoric is used to represent Indigenous sovereignty and explore difficult histories related to colonialism and self-determination in museums and cultural centers. Her long-term, interdisciplinary study examines how exhibits related to these issues have evolved over a ten-year period at three different institutions: the Ziibiwing Center in Michigan, which is owned and operated by the Saginaw Chippewa tribe; the Haskell Indian Nation University’s Cultural Center and Museum, and the National Museum of the American Indian, which is part of the Smithsonian structure. Dr. King underscores the difficulties inherent in communicating these issues to diverse public audiences, as well as the need for consistent evaluation and reevaluation by these institutions to ensure both audience engagement and Indigenous self-representation.
Samantha M. Williams is a PhD candidate in History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is currently writing her dissertation, which examines the history of the Stewart Indian School in Carson City, Nevada through the lenses of settler colonialism and public history. She can be reached at swillia7@ucsc.edu.
In a meticulously researched study The Specter of the Indian: Race, Gender and Ghosts in American Seances, 1848-1890 (SUNY Press, 2017), Kathryn Troy investigates the many examples of Indian ghosts appearing to Spiritualists in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The book explores non-judgmentally the ways in which these ghosts motivated their mediums and other Spiritualists to engage with the rights of living Native Americans.
James Mackay is Assistant Professor of British and American Studies at European University Cyprus, and is one of the founding editors of the open access Indigenous Studies journal Transmotion. He can be reached at j.mackay@euc.ac.cy.
Daniel J. Sharfstein, Professor of Law and History at Vanderbilt University, narrates a postbellum struggle that raged in the Northern Rockies in Thunder in the Mountains: Chief Joseph, Oliver Otis Howard, and the Nez Perce War (W.W. Norton and Company, 2017). In the summer of 1877, General Oliver Otis Howard, a champion of African American civil rights during Reconstruction, ruthlessly pursued hundreds of Nez Perce families who resisted moving onto a reservation. Standing in his way was Chief Joseph, a young leader who never stopped advocating for Native American sovereignty and equal rights. Thunder in the Mountains is the spellbinding story of two legendary figures and their epic clash of ideas about the meaning of freedom and the role of government in American life.
Ryan Tripp is an adjunct instructor for several community colleges, universities, and online university extensions. In 2014, he graduated from the University of California, Davis, with a Ph.D. in History. His Ph.D. double minor included World History and Native American Studies, with an emphasis in Linguistic Anthropology and Indigenous Archeology.
Lisa Brooks, Associate Professor of English and American Studies at Amherst College, recovers a complex picture of war, captivity, and Native resistance in Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War (Yale University Press, 2018). Brooks narrates the stories of Weetamoo, a female Wampanoag leader, and James Printer, a Nipmuc scholar, whose stories converge in the captivity of Mary Rowlandson. Through both a narrow focus on Weetamoo, Printer, and their network of relations, and a far broader scope that includes vast Indigenous geographies, Brooks leads us to a new understanding of the history of colonial New England and of American origins. Brooks’s pathbreaking scholarship is grounded not just in extensive archival research, but in the land and communities of Native New England, illuminating the actions of actors during the seventeenth century alongside an analysis of the landscape and interpretations informed by tribal history. Readers can also participate in a remapping of the “First Indian War,” later renamed “King Philip’s War.”
Ryan Tripp is an adjunct instructor for several community colleges, universities, and online university extensions. In 2014, he graduated from the University of California, Davis, with a Ph.D. in History. His Ph.D. double minor included World History and Native American Studies, with an emphasis in Linguistic Anthropology and Indigenous Archeology.
Onigamiising is the Ojibwemowin word for Duluth and the surrounding area. In this book of fifty warm, wise and witty essays, Linda LeGarde Grover tells the story of the four seasons of life, from Ziigwan (Spring) to Biboon (Winter), using episodes from her own life as illustrations of the central Anishinaabe concept of mino bimaadiziwin (To live a good life). Educational in the most profound sense, these essays in Onigamiising: Seasons of an Ojibwe Year (University of Minnesota Press, 2017) range back and forth between ceremony and tradition, intergenerational trauma and revitalization, domestic pleasures and feasts, and a life well lived.
James Mackay is Assistant Professor of British and American Studies at European University Cyprus, and is one of the founding editors of the open access Indigenous Studies journal Transmotion. He can be reached at j.mackay@euc.ac.cy.
Sovereignty is a key concept in Native American and Indigenous Studies, but its also a term that is understood in multiple ways. Working across the boundaries of legal and literary theory, David J. Carlson‘s Imagining Sovereignty: Self-Determination in American Indian Law and Literature (University of Oklahoma Press, 2016) examines the works, both creative and theoretical, of many Native intellectuals who have considered sovereignty in the past century. Sovereignty emerges in this study as a necessarily imprecise concept that mediates between indigenous communities and also with the settler colonial government of the United States. Carlson discusses thinkers who have previously been seen as opposed, showing ways that their disparate projects can in fact be seen via the idea of self-determination as in many ways complementary.
James Mackay is Assistant Professor of British and American Studies at European University Cyprus, and is one of the founding editors of the open access Indigenous Studies journal Transmotion. He can be reached at j.mackay@euc.ac.cy.
