History as authorized identity has always been key to the idea of nation and the power of the state. Today we celebrate a unique holiday, a contested ideological ground of revolutionary struggle against divisions of exclusionary otherness which are designed to create a disparity of wealth and power by those who would enslave us, a holiday which forces decision and sets each of us in an arena of competing and mutually exclusive narratives of American identity.
Myths of colonialism, fictive inventions of national origin, racism and the roots of fascisms of blood, faith, and soil are embedded in our triumphalist narratives of the European Conquest of the Americas celebrated as a national holiday as Columbus Day. The same events are mourned as a national shame and origin of historical legacies of genocide and the theft of a continent as Indigenous People’s Day. We live now in both nations simultaneously, our two souls riven asunder by history and locked in a titanic struggle across generations and centuries as epigenetic trauma.
What I find most interesting about the dual visions of national identity valorized by these competing narratives is that both were founded as antiracist holidays versus specific intrusive threats to national identity; first as Columbus Day to stop anti Italian and anti-immigration hysteria, in reply to our nation’s most massive lynching and nationalized by Roosevelt in 1934 versus fascist subversion, and in 1977 as Indigenous People’s Day founded at the United Nations as an anti-colonialist counterbalance to valorizing narratives of the European Conquest and white supremacy. What happened in the meanwhile between these two anti-racist holidays was first that Italians were reimagined as white in a process of assimilation common to Catholic European immigrants notably including the Irish and Polish, and here I mean the word as it is used in the Star Trek mythos by the Borg “You will be assimilated; you will service us”, and the eclipse of the ideas of Manifest Destiny or the legitimation of colonialism on the basis of civilizing savages with all of the white supremacist ideology this authorizes, and of Orientalism applied to our indigenous peoples. In this case the unfolding of history has been one of liberation struggle and movement toward diversity and inclusion, though not without savage repression and state terror authorized by the Trump regime and previous Nazis and other white supremacist elites.
We dwell in two realms which are discontiguous, defined by power asymmetries and the echoes of tragedies and atavisms of instinct which we drag behind us like invisible reptilian tails.
Monet once said, “Man has two eyes through which he sees the world. One looks outward, but the other looks inward, and it is the juxtaposition of these two images which creates the world we see.” He meant this literally, as metaphysics, and his art was an attempt to demonstrate the processes by which consciousness creates reality, but his primary insight applies equally to the narrative function of identity.
The great struggle for ownership of ourselves between autonomous individuals and the ideas of other people as authorized identities imposed by state force and control is driven by three principles; each of us must reinvent how to be human, humans create themselves over time, and humans create themselves through other humans.
We are the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to other people. The question we must ask of any such story is simple; whose story is this?
As written for National Geographic; By Debra Adams Simmons, Executive Editor, HISTORY; “Today is a federal holiday in the U.S., but what are we celebrating?
The first national Indigenous Peoples’ Day honors “America’s first inhabitants and the Tribal Nations that continue to thrive today,” President Joe Biden said, highlighting the resilience of native people and recommitting to honor the government’s treaty obligations to Tribal Nations.
Biden also issued a Columbus Day proclamation acknowledging the contributions of Italian Americans as well as “the painful history of wrongs and atrocities” that resulted from European exploration.”
The dissonance in the two proclamations is hard to fathom. In recent years there’s been a pivot away from recognizing Columbus Day and toward Indigenous Peoples’ Day (pictured above, an early celebration in 1992 in Berkeley, California). In the move, the origins of Columbus Day at times have been lost. Erin Blakemore writes about how the day came to be:
“In 1890 anti-Italian sentiment boiled over in New Orleans after police chief David Hennessy, reputed for his arrests of Italian Americans, was murdered. In the aftermath, more than a hundred Sicilian Americans were arrested. When nine were tried and acquitted in March 1891, a furious mob rioted and broke into the city prison, where they beat, shot, and hanged at least 11 Italian American prisoners.
None of the rioters who lynched the Italian Americans were prosecuted. It remains one of the largest mass lynchings in the nation’s history,” Blakemore writes.
This soured U.S. diplomatic relations with Italy. In an attempt to appease Italy and acknowledge the contributions of Italian Americans on the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival, President Benjamin Harrison in 1892 proclaimed a nationwide celebration of “Discovery Day,” recognizing Columbus as “the pioneer of progress and enlightenment.” Eventually, the nations mended their relationship and the U.S. paid $25,000 in reparations. In 1934, President Franklin D. Roosevelt designated it a national holiday.
For many, especially Indigenous people, the Columbus Day holiday is offensive—a celebration of invasion, theft, brutality, and colonization. The arrival celebrated by some as a day of triumphant discovery was the beginning of an incursion onto their homeland.
Columbus and his crew enabled and perpetrated the kidnapping, enslavement, forced assimilation, rape, and sexual abuse of Native people, including children. The Native American population shrank by about half after European contact.
Today, 21 states and many cities celebrate Columbus Day. Others, including Columbus, Ohio—the largest city named for the explorer—have shifted to Indigenous Peoples’ Day. It is now a paid state holiday in Alaska, Iowa, Maine, Minnesota, New Mexico, Nevada, North Carolina, Oregon (which celebrates both Columbus Day and Native American Day), South Dakota, Vermont, and Wisconsin.
“We must never forget the centuries-long campaign of violence, displacement, assimilation, and terror wrought upon Native communities and Tribal Nations throughout our country,” Biden said in his proclamation. “
As written by Howard Zinnin Jacobin magazine, in an article entitled The Real Christopher Columbus: There was no heroic adventure, only bloodshed. Columbus Day should not be a celebration. Republished from A People’s History of the United States.”; “Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island’s beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them food, water, gifts. He later wrote of this in his log:
They brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks’ bells. They willingly traded everything they owned. . . They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They would make fine servants . . . with fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.
These Arawaks of the Bahama Islands were much like Indians on the mainland, who were remarkable (European observers were to say again and again) for their hospitality, their belief in sharing. These traits did not stand out in the Europe of the Renaissance, dominated as it was by the religion of popes, the government of kings, the frenzy for money that marked Western civilization and its first messenger to the Americas, Christopher Columbus.
The information that Columbus wanted most was: Where is the gold? He had persuaded the king and queen of Spain to finance an expedition to the lands, the wealth, he expected would be on the other side of the Atlantic — the Indies and Asia, gold and spices. For, like other informed people of his time, he knew the world was round and he could sail west in order to get to the Far East.
Spain was recently unified, one of the new modern nation-states, like France, England, and Portugal. Its population, mostly poor peasants, worked for the nobility, who were 2 percent of the population and owned 95 percent of the land. Like other states of the modern world, Spain sought gold, which was becoming the new mark of wealth, more useful than land because it could buy anything.
There was gold in Asia, it was thought, and certainly silks and spices, for Marco Polo and others had brought back marvelous things from their overland expeditions centuries before. Now that the Turks had conquered Constantinople and the eastern Mediterranean, and controlled the land routes to Asia, a sea route was needed. Portuguese sailors were working their way around the southern tip of Africa. Spain decided to gamble on a long sail across an unknown ocean.
In return for bringing back gold and spices, they promised Columbus 10 percent of the profits, governorship over newfound lands, and the fame that would go with a new title: Admiral of the Ocean Sea. He was a merchant’s clerk from the Italian city of Genoa, part-time weaver (the son of a skilled weaver), and expert sailor. He set out with three sailing ships, the largest of which was the Santa Maria, perhaps 100 feet long, and thirty-nine crew members.
Columbus would never have made it to Asia, which was thousands of miles farther away than he had calculated, imagining a smaller world. He would have been doomed by that great expanse of sea. But he was lucky. One-fourth of the way there he came upon an unknown, uncharted land that lay between Europe and Asia — the Americas. It was early October 1492, and thirty-three days since he and his crew had left the Canary Islands, off the Atlantic coast of Africa. Now they saw branches and sticks floating in the water. They saw flocks of birds.
These were signs of land. Then, on October 12, a sailor called Rodrigo saw the early morning moon shining on white sands, and cried out. It was an island in the Bahamas, the Caribbean Sea. The first man to sight land was supposed to get a yearly pension of 10,000 maravedis for life, but Rodrigo never got it. Columbus claimed he had seen a light the evening before. He got the reward.
So, approaching land, they were met by the Arawak Indians, who swam out to greet them. The Arawaks lived in village communes, had a developed agriculture of corn, yams, cassava. They could spin and weave, but they had no horses or work animals. They had no iron, but they wore tiny gold ornaments in their ears.
This was to have enormous consequences: it led Columbus to take some of them aboard ship as prisoners because he insisted that they guide him to the source of the gold. He then sailed to what is now Cuba, then to Hispaniola (the island which today consists of Haiti and the Dominican Republic). There, bits of visible gold in the rivers, and a gold mask presented to Columbus by a local Indian chief, led to wild visions of gold fields.
Columbus’s report to the Court in Madrid was extravagant. He insisted he had reached Asia (it was Cuba) and an island off the coast of China (Hispaniola). His descriptions were part fact, part fiction:
Hispaniola is a miracle. Mountains and hills, plains and pastures, are both fertile and beautiful . . . There are many spices, and great mines of gold and other metals . . .
The Indians, Columbus reported, “are so naive and so free with their possessions that no one who has not witnessed them would believe it. When you ask for something they have, they never say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone. . .” He concluded his report by asking for a little help from their Majesties, and in return he would bring them from his next voyage “as much gold as they need . . . and as many slaves as they ask.”
Because of Columbus’s exaggerated report and promises, his second expedition was given seventeen ships and more than twelve hundred men. The aim was clear: slaves and gold. From his base on Haiti, Columbus sent expedition after expedition into the interior. They found no gold fields, but had to fill up the ships returning to Spain with some kind of dividend.
In the year 1495, they went on a great slave raid, rounded up 1,500 Arawak men, women, and children, put them in pens guarded by Spaniards and dogs, then picked the 500 best specimens to load onto ships. Of those 500, 200 died en route.
Too many of the slaves died in captivity. And so Columbus, desperate to pay back dividends to those who had invested, had to make good his promise to fill the ships with gold. In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death.
The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed. When it became clear that there was no gold left, the Indians were taken as slave labor on huge estates, known later as encomiendas. They were worked at a ferocious pace, and died by the thousands. By the year 1515, there were perhaps 50,000 Indians left. By 1550, there were 500. A report of the year 1650 shows none of the original Arawaks or their descendants left on the island.
The chief source — and, on many matters the only source — of information about what happened on the islands after Columbus came is Bartolome de las Casas, who, as a young priest, participated in the conquest of Cuba. For a time he owned a plantation on which Indian slaves worked, but he gave that up and became a vehement critic of Spanish cruelty. Las Casas transcribed Columbus’s journal and, in his fifties, began a multi-volume History of the Indies.
In book two of his History of the Indies, Las Casas (who at first urged replacing Indians by black slaves, thinking they were stronger and would survive, but later relented when he saw the effects on blacks) tells about the treatment of the Indians by the Spaniards. After a while, Spaniards refused to walk any distance. They “rode the backs of Indians if they were in a hurry” or were carried on hammocks by Indians running in relays. “In this case they also had Indians carry large leaves to shade them from the sun and others to fan them with goose wings.”
Total control led to total cruelty. The Spaniards “thought nothing of knifing Indians by tens and twenties and of cutting slices off them to test the sharpness of their blades.” The Indians’ attempts to defend themselves failed. So, Las Casas reports, “they suffered and died in the mines and other labors in desperate silence, knowing not a soul in the world to whom they could turn for help.” He describes their work in the mines:
. . . mountains are stripped from top to bottom and bottom to top a thousand times; they dig, split rocks, move stones, and carry dirt on their backs to wash it in the rivers, while those who wash gold stay in the water all the time with their backs bent so constantly it breaks them.
After each six or eight months’ work in the mines, which was the time required of each crew to dig enough gold for melting, up to a third of the men died. While the men were sent many miles away to the mines, the wives remained to work the soil, forced into the excruciating job of digging and making thousands of hills for cassava plants.
Thus husbands and wives were together only once every eight or ten months and when they met they were so exhausted and depressed on both sides . . . they ceased to procreate. As for the newly born, they died early because their mothers, overworked and famished, had no milk to nurse them . . . Some mothers even drowned their babies from sheer desperation. . . .in this way, husbands died in the mines, wives died at work, and children died from lack of milk. . .and in a short time this land which was so great, so powerful and fertile . . . was depopulated,
When he arrived on Hispaniola in 1508, Las Casas says, “there were 60,000 people living on this island, including the Indians; so that from 1494 to 1508, over three million people had perished from war, slavery, and the mines. Who in future generations will believe this? I myself writing it as a knowledgeable eyewitness can hardly believe it. . .”
What Columbus did to the Arawaks of the Bahamas, Cortes did to the Aztecs of Mexico, Pizarro to the Incas of Peru, and the English settlers of Virginia and Massachusetts to the Powhatans and the Pequots. They used the same tactics, and for the same reasons — the frenzy in the early capitalist states of Europe for gold, for slaves, for products of the soil, to pay the bondholders and stockholders of the expeditions, to finance the monarchical bureaucracies rising in Western Europe, to spur the growth of the new money economy rising out of feudalism, to participate in what Karl Marx would later call “the primitive accumulation of capital.” These were the violent beginnings of an intricate system of technology, business, politics, and culture that would dominate the world for the next five centuries.
How certain are we that what was destroyed was inferior? Who were these people who came out on the beach and swam to bring presents to Columbus and his crew, who watched Cortes and Pizarro ride through their countryside? What did people in Spain get out of all that death and brutality visited on the Indians of the Americas? As Hans Koning sums it up in his book Columbus: His Enterprise:
For all the gold and silver stolen and shipped to Spain did not make the Spanish people richer. It gave their kings an edge in the balance of power for a time, a chance to hire more mercenary soldiers for their wars. They ended up losing those wars anyway, and all that was left was a deadly inflation, a starving population, the rich richer, the poor poorer, and a ruined peasant class.
Thus began the history of the European invasion of the Indian settlements in the Americas. That beginning is conquest, slavery, death. When we read the history books given to children in the United States, it all starts with heroic adventure — there is no bloodshed — and Columbus Day is a celebration.”
As I wrote in my post of November 6 2023, Native American Heritage Month: A Reading List; Freud defined civilization when he wrote; “The first human being who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.” The idea of civilization as the degree to which we have abandoned the social use of force and a measure of a society’s equality, diversity, and inclusion, expressed by Gene Roddenberry in Star Trek as “infinite diversity in infinite combination”, is central to the American experiment toward creating a true free society of equals as democracy.
The consequences of failure to act as each other’s guarantors of our universal human rights can be seen now in the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the terror and tyranny of Israeli imperial dominion and Occupation of her neighbors, an echo and reflection of the European Conquest of the Americas along with many other conflicts of faith and ethnicity weaponized in service to power throughout history and the world, wherein colonial powers conquer, enslave, and erase in genocidal terror indigenous peoples, and the heroic Resistance of all those who refuse to be subjugated, assimilated, commodified, falsified, and ultimately become nothing, silenced and erased like the lost languages of stolen histories.
Both on national and personal levels we ourselves may be measured by our embrace of otherness and our solidarity in resistance to authority and the weaponization of fear in service to power, to divisions of exclusionary otherness and hierarchies of belonging, and to fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
So also are we forged by how we bring a reckoning for the historical legacies and epigenetic multigenerational trauma and harm of inequalities and injustices which we drag around behind ourselves like an invisible reptilian tail, especially those of colonialism and imperialism, racism and patriarchy, and the systems and structures of oppression which still persist.
But we are also shaped by our seizures of power and the limits of our vision in the reimagination and transformation of ourselves and our civilization; how to be human together and the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
In the end we are defined by what we do with our fear and how we use our power; do something beautiful with yours.
Behold the Man; Columbus, a reading list
The Nine Lives of Christopher Columbus, Matthew Restall
Columbus: The Four Voyages, Laurence Bergreen
The Last Voyage of Columbus: Being the Epic Tale of the Great Captain’s Fourth Expedition, Including Accounts of Mutiny, Shipwreck, and Discovery,
Martin Dugard
Christopher Columbus and the Conquest of Paradise, Kirkpatrick Sale
The Real Christopher Columbus, Howard Zinn
1492: A Novel of Christopher Columbus, the Spanish Inquisition and a World at the Turning Point, Newton Frohlich
The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Christopher Columbus, His Son, and the Quest to Build the World’s Greatest Library, Edward Wilson-Lee
Native American History
500 Nations: An Illustrated History of North American Indians, Josephy
The Conquest of Paradise, Kirkpatrick Sale
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West, American West, Dee Brown
The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present, David Treuer
Native American Testimony: A Chronicle of Indian-White Relations from Prophecy to the Present, Peter Nabokov (editor)
The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America, The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative, Thomas King
Native American Mythology, Hartley Burr Alexander
Pocahontas, Paula Gunn Allen
This Land is Their Land, David J. Silverman
The Cherokee Nation; a history, Robert J. Conley
One Vast Winter Count, The Indian World of George Washington, Colin Calloway
Blood and Thunder, Hampton Sides
Empire of the Summer Moon, S.C. Gwynne
The Comanche Empire, Lakota America: a new history of indigenous power, Pekka Hamalainen
The Killing of Crazy Horse, Thomas Powers
Crow Dog: Four Generations of Sioux Medicine Men, Leonard Crow Dog
Ojibwa Warrior: Dennis Banks and the Rise of the American Indian Movement, Richard Erdoes
The Apache Wars, Paul Andrew Hutton
The Serpent’s Tongue: Prose, Poetry, and Art of the New Mexico Pueblos, Nancy Wood
The Trickster: A Study In American Indian Mythology, Paul Radin, Karl Kerényi, C.G. Jung
Native American Literature
Secrets from the Center of the World, How We Become Human: poems 1975-2002, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings: poems, Soul Talk Song Language: conversations, Crazy Brave, Joy Harjo
Where White Men Fear to Tread: The Autobiography of Russell Means
Lakota Woman, Mary Crow Dog
Black Elk Speaks
The Man Made of Words: essays, stories, passages, N. Scott Momaday
Night Flying Woman, Ignatia Broker
Fool’s Crow, James Welch
Love Medicine, The Beet Queen, Tracks, The Bingo Palace, Louise Erditch
Our Stories Remember: history, culture, & values through storytelling, Joseph Bruchac
Ceremony, Almanac of the Dead, Storyteller, Turquoise Ledger, Leslie Silko
Blue Highways, William Least-Heat Moon
Firesticks, Primer of the Obsolete, Stone Heart: A Novel of Sacajawea, The Reason for Crows: A Story of Kateri Tekakwitha, Uprising of Goats, Designs of the Night Sky, The Mask Maker, Stories of the Driven World, American Gypsy: Six Native American Plays, The Dance Partner, The Dream of a Broken Field, Diane Glancy
The Journey of Crazy Horse, John Marshall III
Houdini Heart, Ki Longfellow
You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me, Blasphemy: new and selected stories, Sherman Alexie
Two Old Women, Bird Girl & the Man Who Followed the Sun, Velma Wallis
The Voice of Rolling Thunder, Sidian Morning Star Jones
Spirit and Reason: the Vine Deloria, Jr Reader
Aurum, Santee Frazier
Postcolonial Love Poem, Natalie Diaz
As I wrote in my post of November 25 2023, History, Identity, Power: On Native American Heritage Day, Falsification, and the Echoes of the Conquest In Our Lives; The Gordian Knot of history, memory, and identity as a function of narrative has always been a ground of struggle between autonomy and authority, between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves, in which power silences and erases the voices of those it wishes to enslave and uses sophisticated techniques of disinformation and propaganda to falsify the identities of those it claims to represent as well as those it disavows.
The torturer and his prisoner are both victims of authority, and the instruments of unequal power and divisions of exclusionary otherness with which it sets them against each other in subjugation to an elite hegemony and dominion.
It only gets worse from there; unless it begins to get better.
Our story, of America and of humankind, is a lamentation, a howl of loneliness and despair, of unutterable pain, disconnectedness, horror; but also of survival of those horrors, and the roar of defiance against fathoms of darkness and unanswerable force, of the triumph of the unconquerable will to become.
Who resists becomes Unconquered and free.
This is the forge of the spirit, this place beyond fear of death or hope of victory, and those who live here are transformed and liberated by our seizure of power over the ownership of ourselves as autonomous and self-created individuals.
Each of us who refuses to submit to authority and its laws which serve power becomes a living Autonomous Zone.
And this is why we will make a better future than we have the past; because tyrannies of force and control have no power over us unless we consent to give it to them. Each of us who in resistance is beyond compulsion opens the door to limitless unknowns and possibilities of becoming human, and this no authoritarian regime can survive. For authority must colonize, assimilate, falsify, commodify, and dehumanize us, and if it cannot it has failed.
This is the great secret of power; its emptiness. Power requires complicity, for it is stolen from those it subjugates and enslaves.
As to Native American Heritage Day, let us reclaim our stories and our ownership of identity. Thanksgiving is one notable example of lies and illusions designed to serve state power and create a national identity of imperialism; as written in Time by Olivia Waxman, “early days of thanks celebrated the burning of a Pequot village in 1637, and the killing of Wampanoag leader Massasoit’s son”.
Such stories are numberless as the stars in the heavens; time to reclaim the truth behind the illusions, and free ourselves from the grip of authorized histories and identities.
I have often written that we in the sacred pursuit of truth, including those truths written in our flesh and immanent in nature in the discovery and creation of our uniqueness and of truths made for us by others against which we emerge in struggle, often against vast historical and systemic forces and inequalities, confer twin responsibilities and rights upon us all which are both seizures of power and duties of care for others as guarantors of each others universal human rights and our inherent freedom to create ourselves and how we choose to be human together as we ourselves decide to construct human being, meaning, and value; remembrance and reckoning.
For only this offers escape from the Wilderness of Mirrors; lies and illusions, rewritten histories, alternate realities, falsification, dehumanization, and theft of the soul whereby those who would enslave us enact our subjugation.
So for the legacies of our history from which we must emerge; the truths we must keep and those we must escape in liberation struggle, and if we are very lucky they are not always the same.
Of our many possible futures I can only say this; all is not yet lost, nor is anything past redemption when the will to resist and to become can be found.
So I leave you with the words of Alan Moore from V for Vendetta; “Since mankind’s dawn, a handful of oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that we should have accepted for ourselves. By doing so, they took our power. By doing nothing, we gave it away. We’ve seen where their way leads, through camps and wars, towards the slaughterhouse.”
As written by Kisha James, The Lilly, in Popular Resistance, in an article entitled My Grandfather Founded the National Day of Mourning; “ I’m Carrying On His Legacy.
Every Year, I March To Tell The True History Of The European Conquest Of The United States.
On Thursday, millions of families across the United States will celebrate Thanksgiving without giving much thought to the truth behind the heavily mythologized and sanitized story taught in schools and promulgated by institutions. According to this myth, 400 years ago, the Pilgrims were warmly welcomed by the “Indians,” and the two groups came together in friendship to break bread. The “Indians” taught the Pilgrims how to live in the “New World,” setting the stage for the eventual establishment of a great land of liberty and opportunity.
In the usual narrative, no further mention is made of the Native people, as if they all faded away. By sanitizing the English invasion of Wampanoag homelands, the Thanksgiving myth blatantly disregards the true history of the Pilgrims’ arrival in America and the centuries of violence and oppression that Indigenous peoples have endured as a result of the colonization of the Americas.
I know the Thanksgiving myth well. For my entire life — 22 years — I have gathered annually with hundreds of other Native Americans and supporters in Plymouth, Mass., on the fourth Thursday in November. We gather and march to challenge this myth, to tell the true history of the European conquest of the United States, to speak about the devastating and continuous impacts of colonization on Indigenous peoples. We gather to declare Thanksgiving a National Day of Mourning for Native Americans.
The protest was founded in 1970 by my grandfather, Wamsutta Frank James, a member of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah).
His story of the founding of the National Day of Mourning goes like this: In 1970, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts invited my grandfather to give a speech at a banquet celebrating the 350th anniversary of the arrival of the Pilgrims. However, when state officials saw an advance copy of his speech, they refused to allow him to give it, labeling it as too “inflammatory.” My grandfather had revealed in his speech the truth about the Pilgrims and their treatment of the Wampanoag, the often-unnamed “Indians” in the Thanksgiving myth.
He described how the English even before 1620 had brought diseases that caused a “Great Dying” — nearly decimating our people — and how they took Wampanoag people captive, selling them as slaves in Europe.
The meal Thanksgiving dinner is modeled after is misremembered, too. Although there may have been a meal provided largely by the Wampanoag in 1621, it was not a “thanksgiving”; and the Wampanoag people certainly weren’t invited. Rather, the first official “thanksgiving” has its origins in 1637, when White settlers massacred hundreds of Pequot men, women and children on the banks of the Mystic River in Connecticut.
Within 50-odd years of the arrival of the Pilgrims and other Europeans, the Wampanoag and many other tribes had been nearly wiped out because of warfare and disease, and had been dispossessed of most of their ancestral lands. Those who resisted were killed and their families enslaved.
State officials offered to rewrite my grandfather’s speech to ensure that it presented a more sanitized version of history, but he refused to have words put into his mouth and was disinvited from the banquet. His suppressed speech was printed in newspapers across the country.
But that wasn’t enough: My grandfather and other organizers decided that something had to be done in Plymouth to ensure that the truth about the Pilgrims would be loud and clear.
On Thanksgiving Day in 1970, Wamsutta Frank James, along with other Native activists and allies, gathered on a hill above Plymouth Rock to speak about the true history of Thanksgiving, the violent history of the European settlement of the United States, the lasting impacts of colonization, and the social and political issues faced by Indigenous peoples.
They declared it a National Day of Mourning for the millions of Indigenous peoples killed as a result of European colonization. United American Indians of New England (UAINE), the organization that my grandfather founded and led for decades, has continued for more than 50 years to organize National Day of Mourning and challenge the mainstream Thanksgiving narrative, as well as highlight the modern-day struggles faced by Indigenous peoples.
My grandfather was heroic, and I am proud to be his granddaughter and help lead UAINE as we continue our work. But I also have noticed over the years, and especially while going through old newspaper clippings, that for decades the media often focused solely on the men as spokespeople and organizers of National Day of Mourning.
Women from the Boston Indian Council and other organizations played a key organizing role from 1970 on. My grandmother Priscilla helped write my grandfather’s 1970 speech. A Native activist, Judy Mendes, was attacked by police dogs in 1972 for wearing an upside-down American flag.
My mother, Mahtowin Munro, has been a major contributor to the National Day of Mourning and a tireless advocate for Indigenous rights. She and my late father, Moonanum James, became the co-leaders of UAINE in 1994. My twin brother and I learned from a young age how to patiently explain to non-Native peers and adults why we did not celebrate the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday. We are not against giving thanks or family gatherings, I’d tell my classmates; in fact, we are taught to give thanks every day. But we will not give thanks for the invasion of the Pilgrims and other Europeans, nor for the ongoing colonialism and genocide that our communities continue to face.
Now, I am the co-organizer of the National Day of Mourning along with my mother. I feel a great sense of pride in my family’s role in the Indigenous rights movement and in sharing the truth about Thanksgiving, and I look forward to continuing to raise awareness about contemporary front-line Indigenous issues such as climate justice, the preservation and expansion of tribal sovereignty, and the ongoing demand for the return of our ancestral lands.
In recent years, my mother and I have worked to ensure that women’s voices, as well as those of Two-Spirit and LGBTQ people, are amplified at the National Day of Mourning. When I look at the Line 3 struggle or at the Indigenous people who were on the streets in Glasgow demanding climate justice, I see Indigenous people of all ages, and especially women and Two-Spirit leaders, as part of a continuum of resistance leading into the future.
Women have long been at the center of Indigenous activism, and are respected and revered within many traditional Indigenous cultures as leaders and culture-bearers — even if they were silenced by settlers. That’s why it’s crucial for our voices to be amplified within modern-day movements, especially because settler-colonial violence continues to disproportionately impact women, as evidenced by the ongoing epidemic of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women in the United States and Canada.
On this National Day of Mourning, I am honored to walk not only in the footsteps of my grandfather, but also in the footsteps of all the Indigenous women who have led the way for my generation.
We will not stop telling the truth about the Thanksgiving story and what happened to our ancestors.”
Here is the speech that turned the tide of history for lies in the service of white power to truth which offers equality, diversity, inclusion, remembrance and possibly hope for a Reckoning:
“THE SUPPRESSED SPEECH OF WAMSUTTA (FRANK B.) JAMES, WAMPANOAG
To have been delivered at Plymouth, Massachusetts, 1970
ABOUT THE DOCUMENT: Three hundred fifty years after the Pilgrims began their invasion of the land of the Wampanoag, their “American” descendants planned an anniversary celebration. Still clinging to the white schoolbook myth of friendly relations between their forefathers and the Wampanoag, the anniversary planners thought it would be nice to have an Indian make an appreciative and complimentary speech at their state dinner. Frank James was asked to speak at the celebration. He accepted. The planners, however, asked to see his speech in advance of the occasion, and it turned out that Frank James’ views — based on history rather than mythology — were not what the Pilgrims’ descendants wanted to hear. Frank James refused to deliver a speech written by a public relations person. Frank James did not speak at the anniversary celebration. If he had spoken, this is what he would have said:
I speak to you as a man — a Wampanoag Man. I am a proud man, proud of my ancestry, my accomplishments won by a strict parental direction (“You must succeed – your face is a different color in this small Cape Cod community!”). I am a product of poverty and discrimination from these two social and economic diseases. I, and my brothers and sisters, have painfully overcome, and to some extent we have earned the respect of our community. We are Indians first – but we are termed “good citizens.” Sometimes we are arrogant but only because society has pressured us to be so.
It is with mixed emotion that I stand here to share my thoughts. This is a time of celebration for you – celebrating an anniversary of a beginning for the white man in America. A time of looking back, of reflection. It is with a heavy heart that I look back upon what happened to my People.
Even before the Pilgrims landed it was common practice for explorers to capture Indians, take them to Europe and sell them as slaves for 220 shillings apiece. The Pilgrims had hardly explored the shores of Cape Cod for four days before they had robbed the graves of my ancestors and stolen their corn and beans. Mourt’s Relation describes a searching party of sixteen men. Mourt goes on to say that this party took as much of the Indians’ winter provisions as they were able to carry.
Massasoit, the great Sachem of the Wampanoag, knew these facts, yet he and his People welcomed and befriended the settlers of the Plymouth Plantation. Perhaps he did this because his Tribe had been depleted by an epidemic. Or his knowledge of the harsh oncoming winter was the reason for his peaceful acceptance of these acts. This action by Massasoit was perhaps our biggest mistake. We, the Wampanoag, welcomed you, the white man, with open arms, little knowing that it was the beginning of the end; that before 50 years were to pass, the Wampanoag would no longer be a free people.
What happened in those short 50 years? What has happened in the last 300 years?
History gives us facts and there were atrocities; there were broken promises – and most of these centered around land ownership. Among ourselves we understood that there were boundaries, but never before had we had to deal with fences and stone walls. But the white man had a need to prove his worth by the amount of land that he owned. Only ten years later, when the Puritans came, they treated the Wampanoag with even less kindness in converting the souls of the so-called “savages.” Although the Puritans were harsh to members of their own society, the Indian was pressed between stone slabs and hanged as quickly as any other “witch.”
And so down through the years there is record after record of Indian lands taken and, in token, reservations set up for him upon which to live. The Indian, having been stripped of his power, could only stand by and watch while the white man took his land and used it for his personal gain. This the Indian could not understand; for to him, land was survival, to farm, to hunt, to be enjoyed. It was not to be abused. We see incident after incident, where the white man sought to tame the “savage” and convert him to the Christian ways of life. The early Pilgrim settlers led the Indian to believe that if he did not behave, they would dig up the ground and unleash the great epidemic again.
The white man used the Indian’s nautical skills and abilities. They let him be only a seaman — but never a captain. Time and time again, in the white man’s society, we Indians have been termed “low man on the totem pole.”
Has the Wampanoag really disappeared? There is still an aura of mystery. We know there was an epidemic that took many Indian lives – some Wampanoags moved west and joined the Cherokee and Cheyenne. They were forced to move. Some even went north to Canada! Many Wampanoag put aside their Indian heritage and accepted the white man’s way for their own survival. There are some Wampanoag who do not wish it known they are Indian for social or economic reasons.
What happened to those Wampanoags who chose to remain and live among the early settlers? What kind of existence did they live as “civilized” people? True, living was not as complex as life today, but they dealt with the confusion and the change. Honesty, trust, concern, pride, and politics wove themselves in and out of their [the Wampanoags’] daily living. Hence, he was termed crafty, cunning, rapacious, and dirty.
History wants us to believe that the Indian was a savage, illiterate, uncivilized animal. A history that was written by an organized, disciplined people, to expose us as an unorganized and undisciplined entity. Two distinctly different cultures met. One thought they must control life; the other believed life was to be enjoyed, because nature decreed it. Let us remember, the Indian is and was just as human as the white man. The Indian feels pain, gets hurt, and becomes defensive, has dreams, bears tragedy and failure, suffers from loneliness, needs to cry as well as laugh. He, too, is often misunderstood.
The white man in the presence of the Indian is still mystified by his uncanny ability to make him feel uncomfortable. This may be the image the white man has created of the Indian; his “savageness” has boomeranged and isn’t a mystery; it is fear; fear of the Indian’s temperament!
High on a hill, overlooking the famed Plymouth Rock, stands the statue of our great Sachem, Massasoit. Massasoit has stood there many years in silence. We the descendants of this great Sachem have been a silent people. The necessity of making a living in this materialistic society of the white man caused us to be silent. Today, I and many of my people are choosing to face the truth. We ARE Indians!
Although time has drained our culture, and our language is almost extinct, we the Wampanoags still walk the lands of Massachusetts. We may be fragmented, we may be confused. Many years have passed since we have been a people together. Our lands were invaded. We fought as hard to keep our land as you the whites did to take our land away from us. We were conquered, we became the American prisoners of war in many cases, and wards of the United States Government, until only recently.
Our spirit refuses to die. Yesterday we walked the woodland paths and sandy trails. Today we must walk the macadam highways and roads. We are uniting We’re standing not in our wigwams but in your concrete tent. We stand tall and proud, and before too many moons pass we’ll right the wrongs we have allowed to happen to us.
We forfeited our country. Our lands have fallen into the hands of the aggressor. We have allowed the white man to keep us on our knees. What has happened cannot be changed, but today we must work towards a more humane America, a more Indian America, where men and nature once again are important; where the Indian values of honor, truth, and brotherhood prevail.
You the white man are celebrating an anniversary. We the Wampanoags will help you celebrate in the concept of a beginning. It was the beginning of a new life for the Pilgrims. Now, 350 years later it is a beginning of a new determination for the original American: the American Indian.
There are some factors concerning the Wampanoags and other Indians across this vast nation. We now have 350 years of experience living amongst the white man. We can now speak his language. We can now think as a white man thinks. We can now compete with him for the top jobs. We’re being heard; we are now being listened to. The important point is that along with these necessities of everyday living, we still have the spirit, we still have the unique culture, we still have the will and, most important of all, the determination to remain as Indians. We are determined, and our presence here this evening is living testimony that this is only the beginning of the American Indian, particularly the Wampanoag, to regain the position in this country that is rightfully ours.
Wamsutta
September 10, 1970”
https://time.com/5725168/thanksgiving-history-lesson
http://www.uaine.org/suppressed_speech.htm
Tribe That Helped Pilgrims Survive First Thanksgiving Regrets It 400 Years Later
And finally, on the principle of Virginia Woolf that “if we cannot tell the truth about ourselves, we cannot tell it about anyone else” here follows my interrogation of my own Native American ancestry; November 2 2023, Native American Heritage Month and the Hidden Costs of Unequal Power in the Falsification and Erasure of History as Authorized Identities: Day of the Dead Part Two, Case of the Phantom Ancestor
In contemplation of the echoes of our past as multigenerational history and of our ancestors as ghosts who possess us, literally as our DNA and metaphorically as family stories, I find intriguing the effects of falsified and erased history on self-construal and the creation of identity.
We bear the shape of our stories as a prochronism, a history expressed in out form of how we have made choices in adaptation to change across vast epochs of time, under imposed conditions of struggle.
How if intrusive forces impose conditions of struggle which interfere with this process as assimilation, silence and erasure, or internalized oppression?
Here I have a ready example in the case of a phantom Native American ancestor substituted for an erased African one as internalized oppression under conditions of survival and resistance to slavery.
November is Native American Heritage Month, a subject shaped by vast historical forces of conquest and resistance and the ambiguous and often violent relationships between indigenous peoples and European empires as a ground of struggle which authorizes identity, here I shall begin the questioning of my own historical identity as an example.
As Virginia Woolf teaches us; “If you do not tell the truth about yourself, you cannot tell it about other people.”
As I wrote in my post of January 25 2021, The Search for Our Ancestors and a Useful Past: Family Histories as Narrative Constructions of Identity; One of the great riddles of history is untangling the knots of meaning, often shaped by erasures, silences, lies, and misdirections, which arise from the motives of our sources.
Today is my sister Erin’s birthday; I sent her a greeting which referenced some of the Defining Moments of her personal history as I remember them; “I remember our family’s discovery when you were in seventh grade that you were writing poems and stories in some of Tolkien’s invented languages, had puzzled out his sources and taught yourself a working knowledge of several ancient languages in order to write in them (Old Norse, Old Welsh, Gothic, and Old English), when you gave the Valedictorian Address for the International College at UC Santa Cruz as a graduate in Soviet Foreign Policy and Russian Language, and then became Pushkin Scholar at Kalinin University near Moscow, when Rolling Stone called your reporting on the Fall of the Soviet Union the best political writing in America, and when we celebrated your six hundredth publication. I have always been glad that in writing and the world of literature you have found your bliss.”
Among the messages which followed Erin posted a photograph which symbolizes her search for belonging, membership, and connection through the family history of our ancestors, a typically American quest for meaning as many of us share a trauma of historical abandonment and displacement, and pathologies of identity falsification and disconnectedness from relationships with families and communities, anchorages which in traditional societies nurture wellness and growth. These maladaptive disruptions and obfuscations often result from intentional breaks with the past as liberation on the part of new immigrants who wish to create themselves in no image but their own; but often they are legacies of assimilation, denial, silencing, and erasure by authority as well.
Our family history claimed Cherokee as the identity of an ancestor who we recently discovered was not a Native American but African, and probably a slave of the Cherokee, the descendants of which the tribe refuses to recognize as tribal members. As the only nonwhite General in the Confederate Army was a Cherokee, this erasure of disturbing history and inconvenient truths is unsurprising; and authorized lies can become truths when there are no counternarratives.
It is also possible that this ancestor was among the Haitian professional revolutionary soldiers whom an ancestor of mine fought alongside in the War of 1812; an origin which would explain the family faith of my father being Voodoo.
And an entirely different ancestor of mine became Shawnee by marriage during the American Revolution, making me Shawnee by blood through a many-greats grandmother, this one historically authenticated by the Shawnee tribe though no less complex than my phantom ancestor.
The truths with which authority is uncomfortable are the ones which are crucial to seizures of power and liberation, and it is to the empty spaces in our narratives of identity, the voices of the silenced and the erased, and to stories which bear the scars of rewritten history, to which we must listen most closely.
The Four Primary Duties of a Citizen are Question Authority, Mock Authority, Expose Authority, and Challenge Authority.
Erin has claimed Native American Cherokee as her racial and historical identity since childhood, enthralled with the story of an Indian great grandmother, studied traditional drumming and made pilgrimages to pow wows, learned to the point of obsession what vestiges of Cherokee language and culture she could find, and as an adult went to the tribal archives in search of our ancestor.
There she hit a wall of silence; no records of such a tribal member exist. Worse, no living speakers of Sa La Gi could be found; when asked where the native language speakers were, the curator of the tribal historical archive pointed to an old vinyl record which held the voices of the last known bearers of an extinct language. All was dust, lost on the Trail of Tears.
No crime against humanity can be more terrible than the erasure of an entire people and civilization, as the United States of America perpetrated against many indigenous peoples both on our continent and throughout the world as imperial conquest and colonial dominion. Like slavery with which it is interdependent and parallel, colonial imperialism is a central legacy of our history for which we have yet to bring a Reckoning.
Like many tribes and peoples, the Cherokee had been eaten by our systems of unequal power as human sacrifices, and had no truths or songs of becoming human to offer. Here was an unanswerable tragedy of loss of meaning and belonging, which finds echo in our modern pathology of disconnectedness.
Or was deliberate obfuscation; what didn’t they want known?
Like many Americans, Erin pursued our elusive history and ambiguous identity for decades through genealogical research and recently the Pandora’s Box of DNA testing, where she struck gold; her test revealed no discoverable Indian ancestry, but instead an intriguing African heritage. Near her fifth decade of life, suddenly she was no longer Native American and Cherokee, a discovery which must have been a life disruptive event, but one balanced with the gift of an unlooked-for membership and belonging.
More importantly as regards race and other constructions of identity, who decides? And what happens if those you claim do not in turn claim you?
Of Non-European DNA; 1.2% sub-Saharan Africa, including: .9% Ghana / Liberia / Ivory Coast / Sierra Leone and .3% Senegambian and Guinean. There is also an Islamic Diaspora component; .7% North Africa, including: .2% Egypt and Levant and .5% broadly West Asia and North Africa, and .5% Central and South Asia including: .2% North India and Pakistan and .3% South India and Sri Lanka. These probably represent two different lines of descent, occurring at between five and eight generations of separation respectively.
Who were these mysterious and wonderful ancestors, and where was the cherished Native American heritage? Like much of nature, DNA is tricky; each generation is a total randomization of information potential, so you can inherit traits from ancestors anywhere in your history back to the dawn of humankind, in virtually any proportion of traits from any combination thereof.
On average, you will have a quarter from each grandparent at two generations of separation, and if grandmother only passes on 20%, grandfather must pass on 30%. Sometimes gene sequences are not passed on, so its possible for a known ancestor to be unconfirmable by a DNA test, and for siblings to have differences. I look like our mother, of Austrian family with hazel eyes though sadly I did not inherit her glorious red hair; my sister looks like our father whose black hair fell in tight wringlets around his shoulders.
At seven generations distance you will probably inherit less than one percent from each of the 128 ancestors in that generation, or be undetectable; the percentages are 12.5 for great grandparents at the third generation from you, 6.25 at the fourth, 3.12 at the fifth, 1.56 at the sixth, and .78 at the seventh.
DNA tests from cousins can be used with a family tree to triangulate and identify which DNA components came from which ancestors; a female cousin from Jean, one of my father’s two brothers, tests as 70% Northwestern Europe and England/Wales, 19% Ireland and Scotland, 6% Sweden, and 5% Norway. A male cousin from my father’s second brother Dean tests as 1% Benin and Togo and 1% Cameroon, Congo, and Southern Bantu peoples, an approximate match with my sister’s Sub Saharan Africa descent, the remainder being 47% Northwestern Europe and England/Wales, 32% Norway, 11% Ireland & Scotland, and 4% Sweden. My sister’s European DNA tests as 44.7% French & German, and why some of these groups are scientifically identical boggles the imagination, 24.8% British & Irish, 19.5% broadly northwestern European, .2% Scandinavian, and 5.8% southern European, which includes 3.1% Italian and 1.1% Spanish and Portuguese.
Illustrative of the vagaries of inheritance are the differing proportions among three first cousins, two of whom inherit nothing from a paternal grandmother shared by all three, whose family came from Genoa Italy after the Napoleonic Wars. They were still living in an enormous stilt house in Bayou La Teche built from their ship, guarded by ancient cannon, when my mother visited them in 1962.
But the best way to discover our origins is through family history, which can be consistent over great epochs of time. So we come to the origin story of the photograph and of my family in America, well documented as Kentucky and Revolutionary War history whose dates can be confirmed precisely by public records, of how a mixed and diverse community of Revolutionary War survivors came to be living in Cape Girardeau, Missouri.
A direct patrilineal ancestor of mine, Henry, had been captured along with much of his family in the June 21 1780 British assault on Ruddle’s Fort during Bird’s Invasion of Kentucky. One hundred fifty British Regulars of the 8th and 47th Regiments, Detroit Militia, and six cannon of the Royal Regiment of Artillery, with one thousand or more warriors from the Shawnee, Huron, Lenape, and other tribal allies of Britain, compelled the surrender of the fort by cannon fire and a guarantee of status as British prisoners of war offered by Bird, who when the gates were opened broke his word and loosed the native troops to sack the fort and take slaves.
Over two hundred pioneers were killed in the attack; the remains of twenty of them were later put in iron caskets specially made in Philadelphia and sealed in a cave by a descendant of one of my family’s survivors who had moved back near the site of Ruddle’s Fort, where they remain today. The inscription on the stone archway on a cliff overlooking the Licking River reads, “Please do not disturb the rest of the sleeping dead, A.D. 1845”. I have often wondered what was so terrifying about ones own family that they needed to be entombed in iron and sealed in a cave, and why they are called “the sleeping dead’.
Near the site of the burial chamber was The Cedars, a stone home rebuilt in 1825 at a cost of $40,000 by Charles Lair, a Ruddles Fort descendant using one of the many variants of our family name. The Cedars burned in 1930; it had fifteen rooms including six bedrooms and two kitchens, a drawing room with a carved mantel, dining room, library, and a hall with a staircase.
Henry and his brothers George Jr and Peter were listed among the 49 men of the Ruddle’s Fort garrison, and many had their families with them. Survivors were marched with those of other raided forts, four hundred seventy in all, to the heartland of the Shawnee nation in Ohio and to villages of their captors along the way, though Bird still had 300 prisoners with him when he reached his base at Fort Detroit, six hundred miles from Kentucky; some were then sent another 800 miles to Montreal. Britain did not release its prisoners until fifteen years after the war, and many never found their families again.
Henry was held as a slave and/or prisoner of war until he married into the tribe four years later, making him fully Shawnee under tribal law though he was by modern constructions of race an ethnic European. His story is interwoven with that of his childhood friend and neighbor Daniel Boone, and he was among those with whom Boone discovered a route through the Cumberland Gap and explored Kentucky. I like to imagine Henry as the hero in the film Last of the Mohicans, a fictionalization of the July 14 1776 abduction and subsequent rescue of Boone’s daughter Jemima and two daughters of Colonel Richard Callaway, Elizabeth and Frances, from Chief Hanging Maw of the Overhill Cherokee, leading a mixed band of Cherokee and Shawnee.
Henry joined George Washington’s army, possibly during the retreat from the Battle of Long Island in the fall of 1776, fought in the Battles of Trenton and Princeton that December, at Brandywine on September 11, 1777, and in the victory at the Second Battle of Saratoga on October 7 1777 which nearly ended the war and brought help from France.
Among the family members at Ruddle’s Fort were Henry’s two brothers. Peter, who was killed in action, his wife Mary who was captured with their two daughters, of whom Katarina was rescued in 1786 and another is mentioned as married and living in Sandwich Canada in an open letter written by Mary published in the Kentucky Gazette on April 7 1822 to their third child Peter, who vanished after the battle and whose fate is unknown. It reads in part; ”I was taken at Fort Licking commanded by Captain Ruddle, and was brought into upper Canada near Amherstburgh (Fort Malden) where I now live having been 16 years among the Indians. Your eldest sister is now living in Sandwich, but the youngest I could never hear of. Now, my dear son, I would be very glad to see you once more before I die, which I do not think will be long, as I am in a very bad state of health, and have been this great while. I am married to Mr Jacob Miracle (fellow captive from Ruddle’s Fort Jacob Markle) for whom you can enquire.” These are the words of a woman who had been coerced into marrying one of her captors by torture and had a son by him whom she raised with her youngest daughter by a husband who died defending her and their children from capture, two of whom had vanished in the cauldron of war and whose fates she never learned, though her youngest daughter was safe with George Jr’s family.
Also present were Henry’s second brother George Jr and his wife Margaret, who were captured and later freed, and their children Johnny, George III, Eva, Margaret, and Elizabeth. Johnny, 1776-1853, four years old when captured, was raised with Tecumseh and fought at his side as a British ally through the War of 1812. He married Mary Williams in 1799; they had eight children. Of Margaret we know only that she survived to marry Andrew Sinnolt in 1793. Eva, captured when 14 years old and taken to Canada, ran the gauntlet to win her freedom after six years of enslavement and two years later in 1788 married fellow Ruddles Fort survivor Casper Karsner.
Elizabeth Lale, 1752-1832, eldest of the children at 28, escaped from the Shawnee capitol city of Piqua on the Great Miami River in Ohio and survived a solo trek of hundreds of miles through the wilderness back to the colonies, then with Washington and Jefferson planned and guided General Clark with 970 soldiers in a raid which liberated many of the other prisoners of war held as slaves at the Battle of Piqua, August 8 1780. With her was Daniel Boone, who had also been held captive at Piqua by Blackfish, Great Chief of the Shawnee, between his capture at the Battle of Blue Licks on February 7, 1778 and his escape six months later in June. In 1783 Elizabeth married John Franks; they had two children.
And George III, 1773-1853, captured when seven years old, was taken in 1781 to a camp in Cape Girardeau Missouri, base of a Shawnee trade empire from which the entire Mississippi basin could be navigated, becoming the first white pioneer in the region, near the land which in 1793 was granted by Baron Carondelet to the Black Bob Band of the Hathawekela Shawnee.
Nearby was a Spanish land grant awarded to Andrew Summers for service in the Cape Girardeau Company of the Spanish-American Militia by Governor Lorimier, during a six week campaign in 1803. Andrew Summers had married Elizabeth Ruddle, daughter of Captain George Ruddle and granddaughter of Isaac Ruddle; Andrew and Elizabeth moved with their family to their land in Cape Girardeau after the War of 1812; later her father joined them, as did George Lale III and his wife Louisa Wolff. George and Louisa’s seven children were born there; the old Summers cemetery where George III is buried lies two miles SW of Jackson Missouri.
Many of my family who survived the Revolutionary War moved to Cape Girardeau where the families of George III Lale and Andrew Summers had established a community of pioneers and former slaves of Indians, apparently both African and European, and the Indians they had fought alongside and against, been captured by and intermarried with. In the end I think they understood each other better than those who had not survived the same collective trauma and shared history.
Our great grandmother Lilly Summers could claim direct patrilineal descent from the Summers family of Fairfax Virginia, descended from Sir George Summers, who commanded the Sea Venture, one of the ships which brought over the Jamestown colony in 1607, through the first settler in Alexandria, John Summers, who lived from 1687 to 1790 and had at the time of his death four generations of descendants, including some four hundred individuals. Lilly was equally descended from her mother, M.B. Croft who is listed as Dutch which probably means German, and her father John William Summers, of English lineage but designated as Cherokee in family records, which we now know is a fiction describing descent from a probable African slave of the Cherokee.
It is also possible that this ancestry came into the Summers line from fellow soldiers who served with them during the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812, among them free Black militia companies which pre-existed the war, including slaves promised freedom and armed by Andrew Jackson as the first Black company of the American army, a former Spanish colonial Black militia with whom Andrew Summers had served alongside against France, and Major D’Aquin’s Battalion of Free Men of Color from Haiti who were elite professional revolutionaries and soldiers who had once been part of the French army. The origin of this DNA can be no nearer than Lilly’s paternal grandmother, at five generations separation from my sister and I.
Among the documents of my genealogy and family history research I have a daguerreotype from the 1840’s of Elizabeth Lale, named for her ferocious aunt, daughter of parents from opposing sides of the Revolutionary War, Me Shekin Ta Withe (White Painted Dove) of the Shawnee and Henry Lale.
Born in 1786, Elizabeth had four sisters and two brothers including my ancestor George Washington Lale, named for the future President with whom Henry crossed the Delaware, and whose battle cry at Trenton in 1776, Victory or Death, Henry adopted as our family motto on our coat of arms.
My sister and I are the fifth generation from Henry, and sixth from the original immigrant Hans George Lale who arrived with his family in Philadelphia in 1737 on the ship Samuel, sailing from Rotterdam.
As our family history and myth before coming to America is beyond the subject of my inquiry here, epigenetic trauma and harms of erasure and internalized oppression in the case of a phantom ancestor in the context of relations between indigenous and colonial peoples, I will question this in future essays.
Here are the generations of our family in America; my parents A.L. Lale and Meta (Austrian), Enoch Abraham Lale and Gertie Noce (Italian), Andrew Jackson Lale 1840-1912 and Lilly Summers, George Washington Lale 1790-1854 and Elizabeth Ross, Henry Lale 1754-1830 and White Painted Dove, and Hans George Lale 1703-1771 and Maria Rudes.
But its never as simple as that, each of us a link in a chain of being which encompasses the whole span of human history; migrations, wars, and the rise and fall of civilizations. Often our ideas of identity as nationality and ethnicity would have been incomprehensible to the people we claim membership with.
Take for example my family name; its original form is on Trajan’s Column in Rome, and Cicero wrote his great essay on friendship, Laelius de Amicitia, about an ancestor of mine; Gaius Laelius, whose political and military career as an ally of Scipio Africanus spans the Iberian campaign of 210- 206 BC where he commanded the Roman fleet at New Carthage, the African campaign of 204-202 commanding the cavalry at Zama, enjoyed two terms as praetor of Sicily from 196 and was granted the province of Gaul about 190, and in 160 BC met the historian Polybius in Rome, becoming his eyewitness source for the Second Punic War in The Histories.
Here I signpost that all of us are connected with the lives of others across vast millennia of history, often in surprising ways. If I accounted my identity and ethnicity as where my ancestors immigrated to America from, I would be German and not Roman, but it would not be the whole truth. We lived in Bavaria for generations until 1586, when we were driven out as werewolves during the start of an eighty year witchburning craze; Martin Luther called us Drachensbraute, Brides of the Dragon. During this time we absorbed many of the pre Christian myths gathered as Grimms Fairytales as family history. And still a half truth, as this tallies only my patrilineal descent, and nothing of the half of myself from my mother, whose stories I will tell another time.
As events become more remote in time and memory, the boundary between historical and mythopoeic truth becomes ambiguous, interdependent, and co-evolutionary with shared elements which reinforce each other. This is true for narratives of national identity as well as self-construction in the personal and family spheres, in which such processes may be studied in detail. Stories are a way of doing exactly thing; both creating and questioning identity.
Often with family history we are confronted with discontiguous realms of truth as self-representation and authorized identity, always a ground of struggle as a Rashomon Gate. Such stories are true in the sense that we are their expressions as living myths, but are these narratives we live within and which in turn inhabit us also history?
Who are we, we Lales?
Native American, yes, if to a lesser degree and from different sources than we had previously imagined as an authorized identity and historical construction, Shawnee rather than Cherokee and generations more distant. Indian also in the sense of an ancestor from Mughal India over three hundred years ago, great grandmother of Henry the revolutionary, and that complex. Who this grand and mysterious ancestor and source of our Indian and Eqyptian-Levantine DNA was remains an open question, though she claimed to have once been a courtier of the Mughal princess and poet Zeb-un-Nissa which is another story. And in the place of the phantom Cherokee great grandmother, an African voice among the cacophony of multitudes sings of liberation.
In retrospect, that my father practiced Voodoo as the traditional family faith should have been an enormous clue to his ethnicity, Louisiana Creole of mixed European-African-Native American ancestry. He described himself as Cajun, which means French speaking and is a cultural and historical claim.
Of my father who is my link to this history of the founding of America as a reborn Rome with all of its shifting ideas of nationality and identity, who in this our Day of the Dead I honor among my ancestors, I say this; he was my high school English, Forensics, and Drama teacher, who taught me fencing and chess and took me to martial arts lessons from the age of nine, gave me a copy of Thus Spake Zarathustra in eighth grade which became a counter text to the Bible for me, and was an underground theatre director who collected luminaries like William S. Burroughs who told fabulous stories after dinner and Edward Albee whose plays he directed while I sat beside them as a child and listened with rapt attention to their conversations. He it was who taught me the principle of action; “Politics is the art of fear”. For one day he was arguably the greatest swordsman in the world, having defeated all the national champions at an international reclassification tournament, and went on to become a coach of Olympic fencers. He grew up fencing and playing the treasured family Stradivarius, and his favorite story from childhood was how he got his nickname, Gator Bait; grandpa used to tie a rope around his waist and throw him in the swamp to splash about and attract alligators to shoot. One story he never told but his friend Sparrow Hutchins from the Korean War did, was that they had escaped a North Korean POW camp with three others, one of whom died in the breakout, and the four survivors carried the dead soldier all the way back to South Korea. His last years were spent in seclusion flyfishing on a remote wilderness mining claim in Montana.
Before immigration to America, European and originally Roman, unquestionably; along the way from Gaius Laelius and the conquest of Carthage to myself, our family once briefly ruled what is now France, Germany, Spain, and the British Isles, in the Gallic Empire of 260-274 A.D. As a university student influenced by classical studies I responded to questions about my historical identity, nationality, and ethnicity in this way; “I am a citizen of the Roman Empire; that it has not existed for fifteen hundred years is irrelevant.”
I did so once to the wife of a poetry professor, who immediately whipped out a notebook and thereupon began taking notes on our conversations; this was Anne Rice, who based her character of Mael in Queen of the Damned on me as I was in my junior year at university, over forty years ago now, before the summer of 1982 which fixed me on my life course as a hunter of fascists and a member of the Resistance.
Its always interesting to see ourselves through the eyes of others, and how we are transformed by their different angles of view; such changes and transforms of meaning are the primary field of study in history and literature as songs of identity and a primary ground of revolutionary struggle.
Anne Rice’s idea of Mael as the caretaker of Those Who Must Be Kept came from a comment of mine about the dead white men whose books created our culture for both good and ill during a discussion of the canon of literature; There are those who must be kept, and those from whom we must escape, and if we are very lucky they are not always the same.
Who are we, we Americans, we humans?
Identity, history, memory, which includes changing constructions of race and nationality; these hinge on questions which often have no objective answers.
We are as we imagine ourselves to be; the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others, and the groups and historical legacies in which we claim membership, and who claim us in return.
Family history is always a personal myth of identity, though it may also be history. We bear within us thousands of other lives, in multiple states of time across vast gulfs of history, possessed by the ghosts of our ancestors literally as DNA and metaphorically as stories; we are legion.
As with all history, as narratives of authorized identities and in struggle against them as seizures of power, autonomy and self-ownership, and self-creation, a Rashomon Gate of relative and ambiguous truths, the most important question to ask of a story is this; whose story is this?
Last of the Mohicans film
https://ok.ru/video/967004064409
Henry Louis Gates Jr on the myth of the Indian ancestor in modern Black culture
https://www.theroot.com/high-cheekbones-and-straight-black-hair-1790878167
The Queen of the Damned, by Anne Rice
references on the origins of my family
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaius_Laelius
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaius_Laelius_Sapiens
Laelius, on Friendship and the Dream of Scipio, by Marcus Tullius Cicero), J.G.F. Powell (Editor)
Gallic Empire: Separatism and Continuity in the North-Western Provinces of the Roman Empire, Ad 260-274
