Writing about Indians When You're Not One: Gender

Troy D. Smith

I have written several entries now in this series (I have linked all the previous ones at the end of this article.) If there has been one recurring theme, it is "misunderstanding." The indigenous peoples Europeans encountered in North America had cultural points-of-view that were radically different from the "western" norm, often very foreign to the white colonists' frame of reference. There is also the fact that many of those settlers made no effort to understand the differences, and those who did were looked at askance by their white neighbors. Whether due to honest misunderstanding or willful ignorance, the settlers often did not really understand what was going on culturally with Indians.

By extension, many western and historical fiction authors -often admirers of native peoples and their cultures -have written about them with the same misapprehensions. Some of my writer friends have responded to this series by saying, somewhat discouraged, that it seems impossible to bridge those divides, even partially. I disagree. I think it is a mistake for writers to confine themselves only to characters of their own race, gender, nationality, and/or socio-economic circle. But to expand, it is necessary to be sensitive, not only to others' history but their culture. You don't have to devote a lifetime to research, but it is necessary to understand and interact with some basic things, and my goal in this series is to point those things out, albeit imperfectly.

And this time around, it is gender and gender roles. As always, my current topic at hand has often been touched on in previous entries, so forgive me if I occasionally sound repetitive.

One big thing Europeans misunderstood was matrilineal culture, which describes about three-quarters of North American tribes. That is, clan and tribe memberships are traced through the mother, not the father. This makes the mother a very central figure. Women in such cultures often had significantly higher standing and more power than did women in patrilineal cultures (even among Native Americans.)

Another thing early colonists had trouble grasping was the division of responsibilities among men and women. Each had their own sphere of power and influence. In some ways, you could say this was true in European society as well; women were expected to keep house and men to take care of things outside it. But there was a difference. Among Indian women (again, in those matrilineal tribes), they didn't just keep house -they owned the house, and controlled most everything that went on inside it. European women at the time could not say that, by a long shot.

In essence, women in such societies were responsible, not just for their own homes, but for the village, whereas men were responsible for the world outside the village. Women controlled the agriculture; men were in charge of hunting and war. Men were also responsible for diplomacy, because diplomacy was connected to the extra-village world. Hence, warriors might take captives on the battlefield -while on that field, and on the way home, the captives' lives were in the warriors' hands. But once they got inside the village, it was the women who made the decisions about captives' fates. And if the fate was execution or torture, it was often the women who did that. If decisions were being made that would impact the village's crops or land holdings, women had a strong voice and expected to be part of the deliberations. (Among the Iroquois, men served as leaders but it was the women who elected them.) Again, it is no exaggeration to say that 18th century Cherokee women had far more rights within their communities that did their white colonial counterparts.

Europeans looked at this arrangement and concluded: Indian men are oppressive and lazy. They make their women do all the back-breaking agricultural work, while they go off and entertain themselves with hunting. In order to become "civilized," those Indian men would have to abandon the hunt and become good farmers, while their wives went inside and did housecleaning and spinning/weaving, like decent Christian women ought to do. They did not understand that A) the women were happy to do the agriculture work, because they had power over the crops and land, and B) forcing Indian men to do that same work was, in their eyes, forcing them to become women. (While simultaneously taking power away from the women. So no one was happy.)

One Choctaw woman resisted efforts of U.S. government Indian agents to force her son out into the fields with her: she did not want her son emasculated.

These "civilizing" efforts reached their apogee in the 1890s, after the passage of the Dawes Act, which called for en end to tribal control of land; for Indians to be civilized, they had to be independent. Hence tribal lands were divided up and assigned to individual families -or, more accurately, to the "heads of households." In the government's eyes, those were the men, who were supposed to be patriarchs. To most of the tribes, the opposite was true. Becoming Americanized, therefore, meant not only giving up ideas of communal living and communal property, but completely changing gender views.

Here's an interesting article: How the Carlisle Indian School used gender to erase a culture and put a new one in place



If the Americans in charge of the reservations could not wrap their minds around the relationships between Indian men and women, they darn sure had trouble when extra genders started getting involved. But get involved they did -for many tribes had no trouble with third genders, or with people born into one sex deciding they were really meant to be the other. In some cases such people simply lived as members of the opposite sex; women serving as warriors, or men living as women and often serving as secondary, or even primary, wives to warriors. This is portrayed in Little Big Man, and I doubt any movie before that (and very few since.)

Among some cultures, such people were not only accepted but viewed as special, even sacred. Here are some links for more info in that regard:

winkte (Sioux)
lhamana (Pueblo)
Kaúxuma Núpika (Khootenai)
Hosteen Klah (Navajo)
Osh-Tisch (Crow)

I will close with a story from the Crow reservation, recounted by Joe Medicine Crow:

“One agent in the late 1890´s…tried to interfere with Osh-Tisch, who was the most respected badé. The agent incarcerated badés, cut off their hair, made them wear men´s clothing. He forced them to do manual labor…The people were so upset with this that Chief Pretty Eagle came into Crow Agency, and told (the agent) to leave the reservation. It was a tragedy, trying to change them."

I never saw that on Bonanza.

Here are the previous installments of this series:

Part One: Kinship
Part Two: Balance
Part Three: Indians Are People
Part Four: Leadership
Part Five: Property

Writing about Indians When You're Not One, Part 4: Leadership

Troy D. Smith

This series started out to be a single blog entry back in the summer, but I quickly realized I was going to need more words... so I announced it had morphed into one of three parts. And there's still more to say, so I've given up and quantifying and decided this is a series.

If you've read the earlier entries, you know there are a lot of cultural pitfalls to writing about various American Indian cultures -specifically, there are many things that Anglo-Americans just understand differently than do the peoples who are native to the Americas. Many of those things differ from tribe to tribe and from region to region; at the same time, there are some things that apply generally to those indigenous people, just as there are certain cultural things that make some people European even though they are from different countries.

This time around, I'm going to talk about American Indians and leaderhip.

Europeans often assumed that Indians structured their societies the same way they did, and misunderstandings arose as a result. Some of those misunderstandings continue into the present.

Of course, there were some similarities between those very first explorers and colonists and the Indians they encountered. The Aztecs of Mexico and the Incas of Peru had empires, and their governments were composed of strict hierarchies, headed by leaders that were roughly equivalent to the kings the Europeans were used to.

In fact, when Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto led his expedition through the Southeast in the early 1540s, he found societies in North America that were (though smaller in scale)  similar to those in Central and South America. They were called the Mississippians -a catch-all term that included several different peoples -and their societies had been in place in the South and the Midwest for centuries. They had several things in common:

1. They built "platform mounds", miniature earthen versions of the Meso-American pyramids, which played an important role in their spiritual life.

2. Large-scale maize agriculture

3. Extensive trade networks, stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes, and from the Atlantic coast to the Rocky Mountains

4. A strict social hierarchy, with a powerful chief at the top and a system of social classes, with religious and political power in the hands of a few. As with the Aztecs and Incas, there were large population centers that politically dominated smaller villages, who owed them fealty.


After De Soto passed through, it was the better part of a century before Europeans significantly penetrated the interior of the Southeast again. And when they did, they found a completely different world than De Soto had encountered.

You see, marching along with De Soto's men was another kind of army- disease. Due to various factors, Europeans had built up a hardy immunity to all sorts of things -a few centuries of plague, and of interacting with the people of Asia and Africa, made that possible. The Indians did not have that natural advantage. Death on an unimaginable scale -probably much worse than the Great Plague of Europe -devastated native peoples who had encountered the Europeans, or sometimes just other Indians who had met Europeans. The clearly defined, hierarchical societies encountered by De Soto collapsed into anarchy. In many cases, only a tiny remnant of a tribe remained -these remnants joined with other tribal remnants to form whole new groups, called coalescent societies (this is why some groups, like the Muscogees/Creeks, had several apparently unrelated dialects within their nations.) This new way of living in the South and the Midwest resulted in tribes whose lifestyles were much simpler, and much less clearly defined by class, than De Soto's Mississippians a century or more earlier. It was these, not their hierarchical forebears, that the English and French would meet.

Those later Indians had a more communal lifestyle. Power, prestige, and leadership were all handled much differently.

For one thing -and this was very confusing to the colonists -tribes often did not have a single leader. Even more confusing: a leader did not have absolute power over the rest of the tribe. Rather, he was more of an adviser. He could make suggestions, but everyone was free to decide for themselves whether to listen to him or not. Europeans did not operate this way; therefore, whichever leader they first encountered (or was most amenable to them), they summarily designated as the King or Chief of that tribe. They would then negotiate with him, and expect him to speak for his whole nation, not understanding (and sometimes not wanting to understand) that he could actually only speak for his small band or for himself. Indians, meanwhile, had a very hard time understanding colonial soldiers -what kind of idiot marches into certain death because someone orders them to?

Europeans had power and leadership because, ultimately, of the property they owned, or their money. Officers bought a commission, they did not earn it. Kings and nobles held their station because of actions their ancestors performed a millennium before.

Indians in North America did not usually operate that way. Leadership was not hereditary in most tribes (and since three-quarters of tribes were matrilineal, "hereditary" would have had a different meaning anyhow.) This does not mean there were not often leaders from within the same family: in New England, Wampanoag leader Massasoit was succeeded by his son Metacom; in Virginia, Powhatan was succeeded by his brother Ophecancanough; in 18th century Cherokee lands, Dragging Canoe was as influential as his father Attakullakulla (Little Carpenter) had been. But it does mean that such transitions were not mandated or guaranteed; new leaders could just as well have been someone else.

To become a leader, you had to... convince people to follow you. They would choose to do this if you had a track record of making good decisions, if you were a very good orator, or if you were deeply spiritual. To remain a leader, you had to keep those qualities up and running. Even if you were a leader, military planning could be a challenge; almost always, some of your men were going to ignore you and go about the fight however they wanted. This is a paradox: Indians could be extremely communal and extremely individualistic at the same time.

Besides these things, an Indian gained prestige -not by how much he accumulated, like Europeans -but by how much he gave away. This ties in to my next installment, Indians and property.

If, as an Indian leader, you could not really give orders, what could you do? A couple of 18th century visitors among the Cherokee give us some idea.

This is from Alexander Hewett, in 1779:

“When war is the result of their councils, and the great leader takes the field, any one may refuse to follow him, or may desert him, without incurring any punishment, but by such ignominious conduct he loses his reputation, and forfeits the hopes of distinction and preferment.” 

And this is from James Adair, in 1775:

“…They commend a warrior for having behaved valiantly against the enemy; when he acted cowardly, they introduce the minutest circumstances of the affair, with severe sarcasms which wound deeply. I have known them to strike their delinquents with those sweetened darts, so good naturedly and skillfully, that they would sooner die by torture, than renew their shame by repeating the actions.”

While these examples are from the Southeast, there were a lot of similarities with Plains tribes. In both areas, European travelers who -for one reason or another were present during tribal councils -often made the same observations. Indians talked and talked and talked before they did anything. This is because no one individual had the authority to coerce others to do what he wanted; he had to persuade them.

If someone had a reputation as a good leader, and you chose not to accompany him or take his advice, you would be embarrassed when he won glory and you couldn't share in it. And if your refusal to do as he says results in your side losing the fight.... your friends are going to make fun of you mercilessly.

It was all much, much more complicated than a Big Chief barking out orders.

I am going to close by giving you this LINK to a report in the American State Papers... on pages 289-291 a trader named Richard Finnelson, actually an American spy, witnessed and reported on a Cherokee council (with Shawnee and Creek representatives) in 1792 in which it was decided to attack Nashville. The print is small, but if you read it you'll see many of the things I've described.

Writing about Indians When You're Not One- PART TWO: BALANCE

 

Troy D. Smith

There is a Lakota expression that no doubt some of you are aware of: mitakuye oyasin. This phrase has traditionally been used in Lakota prayers, and since the Lakota language has, in the 20^th century, become in some ways an unofficial lingua franca of the Pan-Indian movement (and Powwow Circuit), the expression is known and used by Indians of many tribes, and their non-Indian allies.

Its literal meaning is something akin to “all my relations,” another way of saying “we are all related.” Even though every Indian tribe, and every region, differs from others, there are some basic principles that practically every indigenous nation of North America shares (the same way that there are certain European cultural traits, even though specific European nations and regions might differ in significant ways.) One of these principles is eloquently summed up by mitakuye oyasin: everything is connected. Not just all human beings, but each human being and all other forms of life, and the earth itself. It’s like we are all strands on one big web; vibrations on one strand will affect the whole thing, one way or another.

Knowledge of this connectedness leads to an overarching need to maintain balance at all times, in every way, and this need is reflected in many aspects of American Indian religion, culture, and daily life. Failure to understand the concept of balance among native nations led many European settlers –and many non-Indian writers –to misunderstand the thoughts and actions of Indians. In Part One of this series, I talked about KINSHIP; this time around I’m going to expound on that sense of balance and how it has been (and continues to be) manifest in American Indian culture.

The most obvious manifestation is in regard to consumption and interaction with the physical environment. Most modern audiences are aware that, traditionally, Indians have been known for “not taking more than they need, and using everything they take.” This is the ideal (although, like all ideals, it has not always been lived up to.) This is why Indians of most tribes had rituals in which they thanked the spirit of the animals they hunted for providing them with food; failure to do so would upset the balance, and the spirit would punish the hunter –or his village, since Indians had a sense of community responsibility.

As I said, that was the ideal. Some scholars speculate that the “mega-fauna” that once proliferated in North America (mammoths, for example) may have disappeared due to overhunting –though others argue that climate change at the end of the last glacial period played a larger role. Some historians have suggested that the American bison may have already been on the road to extinction due to Indian hunting practices –whether that’s true or not, one can’t deny that the tactic of goading entire buffalo herds to plunge off cliffsides (when your tribe can only use a fraction of that meat) does not not fit the general idea of Indians as ecologists. Nor can it be denied that, once Southeastern tribes became heavily invested in the deerskin trade in the 18^th century, deer were overhunted nearly to extinction.

Such practices, though, can probably best be described as aberrations from the cultural ideal of balance. Another, and related, application of balance pertained to agriculture and property. In most tribes, a person gained prestige –not by how much they accumulated –but by how much they gave away. A successful raid on an enemy horse herd might provide you with several new mounts that you could give as gifts when you got back home, gaining status in the tribe. Of course, if you were a young man, you could parlay those horses into a new wife –in which case your new father-in-law would have horses to redistribute and prestige to gain. Excess agricultural goods were often considered the property of the village in general, and were redistributed according to everyone’s relative needs. Among the Cherokees, for example, at the annual Green Corn Ceremony after the harvest, each family was given the amount of grain it was estimated they would need for the year, and everything that was left over was burned as a sacrifice to the spirits. Tribes in the Pacific Northwest redistributed wealth via a ceremony known as the potlatch.

The point is, balance requires that everyone be provided for equally. Early European colonists could not wrap their minds around this attitude, which they considered wasteful and unnatural. Conversely, when Sitting Bull traveled with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, he was flabbergasted when he saw starving and homeless children in Eastern cities. How could this be possible? In his culture, either the whole tribe prospered or the whole tribe suffered. Either way, they did it together, as one community.

Thomas Jefferson understood that the secret to defeating the Indians was disrupting these traditional approaches. As early as the late 1700s, when Jefferson became the first U.S. Secretary of State, he was recommending that all tribes be removed west of the Mississippi; however, he believed it would be morally wrong to physically force them to do so, therefore he had an alternate plan. Establish government funded trading posts in Indian country, and introduce the natives to certain goods –sugar, coffee, manufactured goods –which would start off as luxuries but quickly come to seem like necessities. Then introduce the Indians to the concept of credit, which they’re not going to understand at first… once they are deeply in debt, call in that debt, and their only choice will be to sell off their lands to pay it (so much more civilized an approach!)

In other words… manipulate the Indians into abandoning their tradition of maintaining balance. The same approach was used when getting Southeastern tribes entrenched in the slave trade (raiding other tribes for captives they could sell as slaves to the English) and the deerskin trade.

Throughout the 18^th and 19^th centuries, Indian spiritual leaders preached that their people’s only hope was to abandon the white man’s way of doing things and go back to the traditional ways –including an appreciation for balance. Prophets from Neolin to Tenskwatawa to Handsome Lake to Whitepath to Wovoka made this call.

Balance also comes into play when discussing justice. If you kill another member of your tribe, you must forfeit your life; a kinsman of the victim can assume the role of Blood-Avenger and execute you. If you cannot be found, a close relative will do in your place. The blood price does not absolutely have to be paid by you personally, but by your family or clan –again, community rather than individual responsibility.

In most cases, the guilty party did not attempt to escape justice –knowing that to do so would doom a family member instead. Among the Choctaws, executions were very ritualized… the killer would appear at the appointed place of execution (he was given an extension if an important ball game was coming up- this was the South, after all), along with a second- usually a brother or close friend. The killer was dispatched with a single blow to the head –a bullet in later eras –and his second would catch him and gently lower him to his burial shroud, spread on the ground. Although technically illegal in the late 1800s, many Choctaws continued to do things the traditional way- one recorded account tells of a promising Choctaw baseball player, bound for the majors, who came home to Indian Territory to answer with his life for a drunken killing. Another tells of a Choctaw enlisted in the U.S. Army during the Spanish-American War who took leave in order to go home for his execution.

Balance must be kept.

Of course, some accused killers kept an eye to their own self-preservation; Cherokee James Vann was a creative example. Vann, the son of a Cherokee woman and a Scottish trader, was a prominent warrior during the Chickamauga Wars. While in his late teens, he killed the member of another clan during a drunken brawl, and was therefore liable for blood revenge. His mother’s brothers hid him out. Finally, when he ventured out one day with one of those uncles, a dozen or so members of the opposing clan closed in on them, prepared to take their revenge. Vann quickly drew his pistol –and blew his own uncle’s brains out. The other clan members were surprised and frustrated (though not as much as the uncle)… they immediately realized there was now nothing they could do, and no way they could touch the impudent young warrior. They had lost a member of their clan, and now a member of the killer’s clan was dead. Balance was restored. I imagine, however, that Vann had trouble finding traveling companions after that.

The same principle applied in war. If another tribe attacked you and killed five of your people, you were obligated to raid them back, and kill five of theirs. Of course, sometimes the young warriors in the retaliating party would go overboard and kill more than five of the enemy, so there would be a vengeance raid coming their way later. This is why many tribes were in a perpetual state of war –but suffered relatively few deaths each year. The goal was not to find your enemy then annihilate them –it was to restore balance (again, this was the ideal, and sometimes there were large-scale casualties. Especially after the arrival of Europeans, when tribes started jockeying for favored trading status and sometimes decided to get rid of their rivals –but these cases indicated the abandonment of traditional principles.)

Once tribes started interacting with European (and later American) settlers, cultural differences would lead to further friction. Let’s say some miners kill half-a-dozen Indians. Those Indians’ tribesmen were not necessarily going to go to the trouble of finding the specific miners who committed the deed; they were going to kill the first half-dozen or so white people they found. Conversely, if some Indians attacked a farm and killed a family, and the local white authorities demanded that the specific killers be handed over, they were usually not going to be met with cooperation. The idea of having no choice but to find the specific killers was foreign to the Indians. Guilt and responsibility belonged, not to the individual, but to the community –and so did the responsibility of maintaining balance.    

Next time - August 10 -my subject will be "Indians Are People."

[Troy D. Smith is Assistant Professor of History at Tennessee Tech, where he teaches American Indian history.]



THE FORTY-NINERS: THE PERSECUTION OF CALIFORNIA INDIANS AND OTHER MINORITIES by CHARLIE STEEL

In my research for the book, THE FORTY-NINERS, many startling revelations about this historical event came to light—disturbing facts about the famous gold rush of which perhaps most of us are unaware. It is my intention to write three short pieces (to be published at three month intervals) outlining the events that took place in California regarding those people who will forever be known as the FORTY-NINERS. Also, at the end of this narrative is a short piece explaining how California gold was formed from the earth’s crust and then concentrated over millions of years of erosion.

(My book THE FORTY-NINERS is to be published for the West of the Big River series by Western Fictioneers. It is to come out sometime in the future in digital format and as a trade paperback book.)



PART 3
THE PERSECUTION OF CALIFORNIA INDIANS AND OTHER MINORITIES

Historians break down the history of California into three categories: The Exploratory Period between 1542 and 1769, where Native Americans were left relatively alone; the Spanish Colonial Period 1769 to 1821, which began the Mission System and virtual capture and slavery of Indians; followed by the Mexican Period, 1821-1848, which involved Spanish land grants and Californio ranchos, that essentially continued slavery and the harsh labor of Indians taken from the Missions.

Then came the gold rush starting in 1848, and the harsh treatment of California Native American Tribes continued. A few days before the end of the Mexican-American War, gold was discovered, the United States took over California and within two years, in 1850, California became a state.

SPANISH TREATMENT OF CALIFORNIA NATIVE AMERICAN TRIBES 1769-1848

To acquire any understanding of how Native American tribes were treated in California and their continued decimation, it is necessary to understand what happened to the Indians before the California Gold Rush started. Namely, it is important to give a brief history of what occurred while under the jurisdiction of the Spanish, and later the Mexicans, known as Californios.

THE MISSION SYSTEM AND RANCHOS

In 1769, it was Father Junipero Serra with a Spanish army from Mexico that reached San Diego. The first California mission was built there, followed by twenty more reaching as far north as San Francisco.

Thousands of Indians were captured, pressed into blue uniforms, to become slaves, and work the missions. They were forced into farming, caring for livestock, making bricks, tiles, shoes, saddles, candles, hide tanning, laundry, cooking, etc. The Indians were held captive in unsanitary barracks and many suffered from malnutrition. Disease spread killing thousands, causing the ever pressing need to capture more and more slaves. Disease eventually spread to villages independent of the priests and such diseases as, smallpox, diphtheria, cholera, typhoid, measles, malaria, pneumonia, and venereal diseases, wiped out men, women, and children by the thousands. This was an introduction of European diseases that California Native Americans had no natural immunity against. Those surviving slaves that misbehaved were whipped, branded, mutilated, and executed. Mission records indicated over 87,000 Indian baptisms, and recorded 63,000 some deaths. Under the priests care, more than half of the Native American laborers died.

In 1821, Mexico gained independence from Spain. The Mission System replaced Spanish Priests with Mexican Priests, and with the escape or death of so many Indian laborers the Missions continued to decline. Mexico abolished the Mission System in 1834 and began to redistribute its land holdings. (It appears that Mission records were transferred to Santa Barbara, making Mission Santa Barbara the only Mission where Franciscan Priests have maintained an uninterrupted presence.) Promises to return Indian land to the Native American tribes were never kept. Mission lands went to friends and families of the Californios. Land grants gave away large tracks of land, Mexican ranchos were formed, and they absorbed the thousands of Indians slaves. Once again Native Americans were held captive, forced to labor without pay. They tended crops, cared for cattle, horses, cooking, cleaning, etc. While the Indians labored the Californios played. They rode their horses, had rodeos, roundups, fandangos, large weddings, and entertained each other lavishly by traveling from rancho to rancho. Again, diseases and harsh labor further decimated the declining Indian population.

Sources vary, but it is estimated the Native American population in California, before the Spanish arrived was above 300,000. After the introduction of the Mission System and ranchos, the California Indian population decreased by more than half to 130,000.

1848-1855 THE ARRIVAL OF THE FORTY-NINERS, CALIFORNIA STATE GOVERNMENT, AND THEIR AFFECT UPON THE CALIFORNIA INDIAN TRIBES

Then came the gold rush. By February 1848, the United States acquired California from Mexico a few days after discovering gold. Many scholars believe the practices and policies of the miners and the California State Government, to be a policy of genocide (Genocide defined as the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial group).

The Indian tribes that resided in California suffered the brunt of the sudden teaming influx of armed miners. Because there are so many different tribes in California, due to the rich environment for subsistence, bands of separate Indian villages proliferated most of California. Some villages numbered as high as one thousand members. The many California Native Americans remained independent of each other and these different Native American tribes and subgroups numbered over a hundred separate tribes. For an exact break-down, of California Native Americans go to: http://www.accessgenealogy.com/native/california/.

The miners came to take what gold they could find. When they arrived by the thousands, they discovered limited resources for food or supplies and rising prices. They also encountered no rules for mining claims other than what the miners themselves agreed to. Pressure over time seemed to reduce the size of claims and disputes broke out, sometimes ending in death. This caused miners to turn to Indian land to explore and claim.

Miners realized there were few laws and no one to enforce them. Men brought their own moral code and prejudices. Indians were seen as an encumbrance and to be treated as miners saw fit. Indiscriminately they pushed Native Americans off their land, took their food sources, and if the Indians resisted they were killed. Encountering slavery of Indians by the Californios, some miners began the practice of enslaving women and children as workers, and killing off the Native American men that resisted. Some women were captured and used as sexual slaves.

California’s first governor, Peter Burnett publicly called for a war of extermination and suggested conflict would not end until the entire Indian race of California was exterminated. Newspapers of the time heralded the war of extermination calling for the death of every ‘redskin’ and of all the tribes. Newspapers extolled death and declared any man who called for treaty or peace, a traitor.

In 1850, the Act for the Government and Protection of Indians, virtually assured the continued slavery of California Indians. This was followed by the California Legislature in 1851-52, granting $1,500,000 in payments for the suppression of Indian hostilities. This prompted the formation of volunteer militias that traversed the land, seeking to wipe out Native Americans wherever found. Militias put in lists of expenses and were reimbursed thousands of dollars. Severed heads and scalps were brought in as a means of collecting bounties, and depending on the county, five dollars down to twenty-five cents was paid. These laws further encouraged the killing of males, and the capture of women and children as slaves. This also prompted some to make a profession of capturing Indians to sell into slavery for profit. Many such captives remained slaves their entire lives.

The story of the persecution of the Native American tribes in California is a long and complicated one. It began with the Spanish and continued with the Mexican Californios, through the gold rush into the twenty-first century. The many legal disputes with the United States over stolen land and discrimination of Native Americans continue to this very day.

Research varies as to Native American populations throughout the invasion of the Spanish and before and after the great American California Gold Rush. The Indian population at the time of the arrival of the Spanish in 1545 was estimated at 300,000-350,000 Indians. After the advent of the Spanish Mission system and the Spanish land grants resulting in the great ranchos, Indian populations are said to have declined to 150,000 to 130,00 Native Americans. After the California Gold Rush, Native American populations are believed to have further declined to 30,000, nearly another 100,000 California Native Americans disappeared.

In January 1851, in an effort to stop the genocidal killings and conflict with California Indian Tribes (those still remaining), the US Government sent three commissioners to negotiate treaties. This was a monumental task given that over one hundred tribes and sub-tribes existed. Consequently many were never contacted. Nevertheless, eventually the three commissioners negotiated eighteen treaties, with many promises of protection, and 7.5 million acres to be granted to the Indians. The U.S. Senate did not ratify the treaties as the people of California refused to allow the Native American population any compromise. They simply wanted them exterminated or totally removed from the state.

Eventually those who could be found, were rounded up and the remainder of Native Americans were forced onto tiny reservations. Life for California Indians was tenuous at best, treaties and promises were never ratified and the land promised to the Indians never materialized. Consequently, those remaining Native Americans did their best to hide their presence, and whether on small reservations or not, they continued to suffer further starvation and deprivation. It is believed eventually the California Native American population, after the Gold Rush, further declined to 16,000.

CONCLUSION

The gold fields were a dangerous, chaotic place, and violence prevailed. There were no laws or anyone to enforce them. Forty-niners faced a perilous journey to the gold fields, (whether by ship or by land) thievery, claim jumping, murders, angry Native Americans, heat and cold, starvation, diseases such as venereal disease, cholera, typhus, pneumonia, and all types of accidents, endangered miners. Death confronted miners daily and it is estimated one in twelve died. The history of the California Gold Rush is a violent and disturbing one.

In the pursuit of wealth, in part, the story of the gold rush is one of genocide of Native Americans, the taking of Mexican and Indian land, suppression of minorities, and a bloody story of greed and violence. Only a few men and companies such as Wells Fargo became truly wealthy. Most of the Forty-niners did well to keep their lives and many benefited most, by settling in the more moderate climes of California and eking out a meager living. Any romantic notion about the Forty-niners and the great California Gold Rush of 1849 is certainly in part, a myth. This is not only a story about pioneers and risk-takers who sought wealth for a better life, but also a story of discrimination and death to Native Americans, Mexicans, Chinese, and other non-European immigrants.

However, it could be argued there were positives. With the large amount of gold discovered, and the sudden increase in populace, California quickly became a state. The American Pacific Navy became an increased presence. The Gold Rush itself stimulated the American and worldwide economy. Large amounts of supplies, food, goods and services were purchased by the miners from everywhere in the world. The increase in population and wealth caused a building boom, of businesses, houses, churches, towns, farms, bridges, increased shipping, etc. Bringing in California as a free state helped the Union during the Civil War. Such growth and wealth on the Pacific side caused the need for a transcontinental railroad. The Homestead Act was brought about by this expansionism. Finally, the Gold Rush caused a varied group of people from all over the world to settle in California, forming a rich culture of new ideas and thoughts that would have far reaching consequences to its future. The discovery of gold made Americans forever believe that California was the Golden State, the place of dreams, the land of promise, where any man could rise out of poverty into fame and fortune.


GEOLOGICAL INFORMATION:
HOW CALIFORNIA GOLD WAS FORMED INTO CONCENTRATED DEPOSITS

Without large concentrations of gold, the great California Gold Rush of 1849 would not have been possible. To better understand what occurred geologically speaking, enclosed is a brief explanation of what caused the large concentration of gold in California.

Gold is everywhere on planet earth. In minute proportions it permeates the earth and floats in its oceans. It is not economically viable to mine gold unless it is concentrated by nature. What draws in and concentrates this rare metal in larger proportions is heat and volcanic action. Everyone knows that California is setting on an active tectonic plate known as the St. Andreas
Fault. In the process of collecting gold, as the magma cools, solidifies, comes in contact with water, minerals having the same melting point form together. The minute particles of gold are concentrated and deposited in veins, along with quartz, that has a similar melting point. With tectonic movement of the plates, the minerals and rock were raised to the surface, mountains were formed and eventually the hydrological cycle began to take place. Wind, rain, ice, and snow began to wear away rock and gold, the denser material begins to further concentrate. Gold then gathers in the gravel along rivers and streams. Over time, many streams dry up and leave rich deposits. Over hundreds of millions of years newer rivers and streams form and wear away at these gold deposits creating even more concentrated gold, and over millions of years this process repeats itself over and over. In the beginning of the Gold Rush, this is what the Forty-niners labored at, gathering gold from these rich concentrations deposited on the earth’s surface.

There are essentially four types of gold mining, placer and hard rock mining being the most well known and first used. It was placer mining that forty-niners first applied on the surface, near rivers and streams, and on the earth itself. Gold nuggets were found lying on the ground, and by washing gravel and gold bearing earth, nuggets and gold dust were found in its streams. It was only after the first year or two, when most of the surface gold was washed and taken, that large mining operations began, and hard rock mining took place. Tunnels were dug, and large amounts of ore were placed in rock crushers or stamping mills, where machinery, water, and chemicals removed gold from earth and crushed rock. California also invented in its rich gold fields, hydraulic mining, using high pressure hoses to wash away gold bearing gravel beds that passed over sluice boxes and was collected. Lastly, dredging technology developed, recovering many more millions of ounces of gold. With these four combined techniques of mining, in total, so far, California took an estimated 118 million ounces of gold worth $130 billion at 2001 prices.

In 1849, gold went for $18 to $21 per troy ounce. As of the date of this finished article, (3-19-2013) gold is valued at $1611.30 per troy ounce. The upsurge in the value of gold has caused many of the mines in California to reopen and to again move large amounts of earth and rock for the precious metal. All over the United States and around the world, due to the high price of an ounce of the yellow metal, increasing numbers of modern day prospectors as well as professional miners are once again searching for gold. Mining companies are expanding and developing new techniques to finding and processing large amounts of earth and rock into gold. This has already led to a large increase in pollution as well. In anticipation of a further rise in the price of the rare metal, mining companies are buying up land and filing claims on large tracks of land that contain different amounts of gold within its soil. Some companies in the future anticipate processing tons of low grade ore daily, planning to sift miles of land, to process and collect fine particles of gold. Investors in gold have been leery (2013) and stocks have declined, however, today, gold mining has increased and is far from an extinct activity.

Those interested might look into trying their own prospecting. There are many mining clubs and associations throughout the United States that can be easily found by a search on the Internet.

Charlie Steel, PhD


A list of SOURCES for further examination of the history of the California Gold Rush of 1849

Access Genealogy, http://www.accessgenealogy.com/native/california/ Retrieved March 10, 2013, a free on-line source for genealogy, funded by Ancestry and Footnote and other contributions of its users.

Rush for Riches: Gold Fever and the Making of California, J. S. Holiday, University of California Press, (1999)

A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn, Harper and Row, (1980)

Gold, Greed and Genocide, Unmasking the Myth of the 49ers, Project Underground pamphlet, (1998)

A Golden State: Mining and the Development of California, James J. Rawls, and Richard J. Orsi, Editors, University of California Press, (1999)

Americans and the California Dream: 1850-1915 Kevin Starr, Oxford University Press (1973)

Rooted in Barbarous Soil: People, Culture, and Community in Gold Rush California, Starr, Kevin and Orsi, Richard J., Editors, University of California Press. (2000)

Hausel, Dan. California-Gold Geology & Prospecting: http://califroniangold.blogspot.dk/ Retrieved March 18, 2013

California: A History, (Modern Library Chronicles) Kevin Starr, Random House (2005)

The Destruction of California Indians, University of Nebraska Press, Robert F. Heizer, (1974)

Genocide in Northwestern California: When our world cried, Indian Historian Press, Jack Norton (1979)

The California Indians: A Source Book, Robert F. Heizer (Editor) M. A. Whipple (Editor) (1971)

The Annals of San Francisco: Containing a Summary of the History of…California, John H. Gihon (Author), Frank Soule’ (Author), Jim Nisbet (Author), (2010) (Copy of D. Appleton & Co. New York and San Francisco 1855)

Seventy-five Years in San Francisco, William Heath Davis, (Author) Douglas S. Watson, (Editor), Published by John Howell,434 Post Street, San Francisco, (1929) http://www.sfgenealogy.com/sf/history/hb75yidx.htm (Retrieved March 10, 2013)

Polk: The Man Who Transformed the Presidency and America, Walter R. Borneman, Random House Trade Paperback (2009)

Writing About Indians When You're Not One

Writing western fiction often means writing about cowboys and Indians. Now, some of us have direct ranching experience and others do not. For those of us whose ranch experience is limited, there is clearly a need to do a lot of research so we at least have some idea what we're talking about. And that does require a good bit of effort. But at least, for most of us, it is only a specific profession and lifestyle, and subculture, we have to learn, not an entire culture that is foreign to us.

Not so with Indians, unless we happen to be one. It is possible to do a large amount of reading and research, and get many technical details right, and still misinterpret or incorrectly characterize some very basic cultural elements of how Indians think and act. Some western/historical fiction authors, nonetheless, have done an excellent job of writing "from the outside" about indigenous peoples. It's a very long list, and includes people like Don Coldsmith, Win Blevins (who, if I recall, does have some Cherokee heritage), Lucia St. Clair Robson, Terry Johnston, Michael Blake, Douglas Jones, and many others -including several of our WF members.

I am not an American Indian, but I have done a lot of research on the subject, including writing a dissertation and earning a Ph.D in it. I teach American Indian history at Tennessee Tech University. I also know a lot of Indians, some of 'em pretty well -some of them also academics, but many of them not. Which is all just a way of getting at the subject of this blog: my goal today is to share with you some basic facts about Indianness that a lot of us wasicu writers miss when we write about them.

I'm going to start with the term "Indian." Sometimes people hear me talking about Indians, and feel the need to correct me- "You mean Native Americans! They are not from India!"

Well, no, they are not from India, and they are native Americans. Since about 1970, Americans have been taught -initially by anthropologists -that calling indigenous peoples "Indians" was both insulting and inaccurate, and we should call them "Native Americans" instead. So, for the most part, we have learned to do just that.

Thing is, around 1995, a poll was taken of people who had self-identified as indigenous on the census, asking which term they preferred. 37% said Native American, but 50% said American Indian (the remainder had no preference.) From what I've seen, I'd say the tilt toward "Indian" has become even more pronounced since then. Since that is the case, scholars who study indigenous peoples have begun using Indian much more than Native American, as a reflection of the actual desires of the people in question. Most Indians, of course, prefer to be called by the name of their tribe or nation; but sometimes, especially for legal purposes, there is a need for a term describing them as a larger group. Why on earth, one might wonder, would they object to "Native American"? The most common reason I've heard is that none of the well-meaning white folks who decided their name should be changed ever bothered to ask them what they thought about it, so Native American is every bit as much an externally imposed generalization as Indian -at least, some say, they were used to the first one. So now academics have the well-deserved task of convincing people it's okay to switch back to a terminology they only dropped in the first place because academics told them to.

Now, on to some things that are more likely to come up in our western fiction.

It is difficult for us non-Indians to understand just how important tribe is to tribal members, in the past and in the present as well.

What is a tribe? It is, essentially, a group of related people. More specifically, a group of clans. In fact, most Indian tribes traditionally placed a great taboo on marrying within your own clan, as a way of keeping the gene pool sufficiently broad. It is KINSHIP, then, that defined (and continues to define) Indians. That kinship was usually literal -even if very extended -but it could also be fictive. That is, a person could enter into your kinship circle without being literally related to you -usually by an adoption ceremony.

In many tribes, only the people within your kinship circle were actually people, or at the very least, it was possible to have peaceful dealings with someone only if they were within your kinship circle (this is why many tribes gave themselves names that translated as The People, The Real People, or The Human Beings.)

Sometimes captives could be adopted into the tribe. At any rate, in order to have diplomatic or trade dealings with outsiders, they had to become insiders somehow.

Let us consider Pocahontas and Captain John Smith.

We all know John Smith's side of the story. He was captured by Powhatan Indians, and their chief was all set to have him executed... but then the chief's daughter, clearly smitten with the dashing English captain, begged for his life and her wish was granted (remember, we know this story because Smith recorded it. Modesty was not his strong suit.)

But let's try to look at it from the Indian perspective.

Chief Powhatan had been working at establishing hegemony in the tidewater region. Along come these new folks, the English... they might be a serious threat. On the other hand, they might be potential allies or at the very least trade partners. But they are outsiders and thus enemies. How to rectify that?

Captives are often adopted as members of the tribe. It is the women of the tribe, not the men, who decide which captives would live and which would die. Sometimes elaborate rituals were acted out, in which potential trade or diplomatic partners were symbolically adopted and brought INTO the kinship circle.

That interpretation actually makes more sense than the one John Smith believed, and which has been passed down to all of us... because of some very basic cultural misunderstandings.

Another important factor to consider is that about three-quarters of North American tribes were matrilineal, not patrilineal like Europeans. That is to say, their lineage was traced through the mother, not the father. When a couple got married, the husband left his clan or tribe and joined that of his wife. Of course, the other one-quarter of tribes WERE patrilineal. For example: Creek Indians were matrilineal, and Shawnees were patrilineal. If your mother were Creek and your father were Shawnee, you would actually have a valid claim of membership in both tribes. But if your mother were Creek and your father were Cherokee (another matrilineal tribe), then you were Creek. Not half-Creek... there was no such thing. Because it's all about the kinship circle. Either you are IN it, or you are NOT, you cannot be halfway.

I like to explain it this way. Let's say you are a Creek man in the 1700s, and you have two sisters. A runaway slave comes to your village, and your people decide to welcome him in... and he marries your sister. He is now a member of your tribe. Then later a white trapper comes into the village, perhaps a man who is unhappy with life in the settlements and prefers to live on the frontier- and he marries your other sister, thus also becoming a member of your tribe.

Now, to a European/American colonist, there would be three men: a red man, a black man, and a white man. But to the Creek Indians, there would simply be three Creek Indians. They look different from one another, but they are all inside the kinship circle, so they are all Creeks and so are their children.

This would change by the mid-19th century, as Southern tribes became "civilized", and terms like mixed-bloods and full-bloods would come into play. But that was not those tribes' traditional way of looking at things. Nor was it the way Plains tribes looked at things, until well after they were forced onto reservations.

Here's another historical example: the first French colonists who dealt with the Choctaws (like all those nations later called the Five Civilized Tribes, they were matrilineal.)

"We come to you from your Great White Father across the waters," the French said, because to them a father was the ultimate authority figure. "We give you these gifts." The gifts were to prove how wealthy and powerful the Great Father was, and instill both a sense of fear and a sense of obligation in the Choctaws. "We gave you this stuff and you accepted it, so we expect you to do what we tell you."

The Choctaws happily took their gifts, and didn't do a single thing the French told them to.

Because in the Choctaw worldview, the greatest male authority figure in your life was either your mother's eldest brother or your maternal grandfather. You're in THEIR clan/tribe, not your father's. (Ever notice how many stories have Indians being taught by their maternal grandfather? This is why.) Your father, on the other hand, was this guy who came around now and then and gave you presents and was your buddy, not the guy who laid down rules and punished you if you disobeyed them. The French are from the Great Father? Then of course they are giving us presents, that is a father's job. It's not his job to tell us what to do -so take the gifts, smile politely, then ignore him. But if the French had said they were from the Great Uncle across the water, there might have been a clearer understanding on the Choctaws' part of what the French were trying to do.

Now, here's something that bothers me sometimes. When discussing Cherokee leader John Ross, textbooks always say things like "Even though John Ross was only 1/8 Cherokee, he was accepted as their leader." That simple statement displays a basic lack of understanding about how Indian tribes worked at the time being discussed. Especially that "even though" part... and the "only"...because adding those words makes it seem very extraordinary indeed that such a man would become the leader of the Cherokee Nation. In fact, some people in the 19th century (and since) have believed that Ross's "white" blood gave him an intrinsic superiority that allowed him to rise to the top- the same thing was said of other Southern Indians, including the Creek leader Alexander McGillivray.

So let me tell you a little bit about John Ross's ancestry.

In 1740, a 20-year-old Scottish fur trader named William Shorey married a 15-year-old Cherokee girl named Ghigooie, from the Red-Tail Hawk Clan. It was common for Cherokees to marry their daughters to fur traders, because that brought the trader into the kinship circle and made it permissible to have dealings with him. Well, that couple had a daughter, and later she was married to another Scottish fur trader. THAT couple had a daughter, and SHE was married to yet another Scottish trader. And that couple had a son that the mother called Guwisguwi, which was the name of a mythical bird, but that the father called John Ross.

Now, the average American at the time looked at John Ross and said "how is this guy chief of the Cherokees? He's actually 7/8 Scottish!" And, in fact, Americans STILL say that, whether in history books or in the classroom.

But here's how the Cherokees saw it.

Ghigooie of the Red-Tail Hawk Clan of Cherokees had a daughter, Anna. Since the Cherokees are matrilineal, Anna was... Cherokee. Anna had a daughter named Mollie. Since Anna was a member of the Red-Tail Hawk Clan, so was her daughter. Not a 1/4 member; you were either a member, or you were not. Mollie had a son named John Ross; his mother was a Cherokee of the Red-Tail Hawk Clan, and therefore so was he. In fact, it was some of the most traditionalist members of the Cherokee leadership that endorsed Ross for Principal Chief... because he, like they, was Cherokee.

This was not just a Southeastern Indian phenomenon. Quanah Parker was the son of a Comanche man and a white woman who had been captured and adopted as Comanche when she was a child. Quanah's followers did not consider him "half-Comanche," but Comanche,  like them. The list could go on.

My point is this. RACE WAS NOT AN INDIAN CONCEPT. It was a white concept. Race only became an Indian concept after any given tribe/nation started adopting the white man's way of thinking about things.

Consider the Lakota word for white people: wasicu. It literally meant "grabs the fat", as in someone who comes into your camp and with whom you are therefore obligated to share your food, but who rudely immediately grabs the very best for themselves. The word had nothing to do with skin color, and everything to do with perceived cultural attributes.

There has been a long tradition in western fiction and drama of portraying the "half-breed" as someone who was part-white and part-Indian, but accepted by neither, because he was not fully one or the other. This IS how white people would have considered him, because they had such an investment in the idea (especially in the 19th century) of "purity" of race. But it is unlikely that his own tribe would have considered him that way, especially if it were a matrilineal tribe and his mother was Indian, or if his white parent of either sex had been adopted into the tribe. It would be very non-Indian for a writer to assume that Indians would feel the same way about racial purity that white people of the time did. That's just the sort of cultural misunderstanding I was thinking of when I mentioned how easy it is for us non-Indians to make mistakes; heck, western writers have been making that mistake for generations.

As an example of how we can try to be more aware, I offer my Wolf Creek character Charley Blackfeather (Plug!! Book 5 is due out very soon!) Charley's father was a runaway slave who married a Seminole woman in Florida. This makes Charley, to his own people, a Seminole, since his mother was one. But to the average American he encounters in and around Wolf Creek, he is a "half-breed." In fact, he confuses some of them, because they're not sure whether he's a black man or an Indian. He is both -but culturally, he is Seminole.

Note: Of all the "civilized tribes", the Seminoles were the most reluctant to develop a racialized hierarchy that debased blacks. Why? Because they were the least "civilized" (mostly because their swampy homeland enabled them to resist domination by whites for the longest of any Southern tribe.) Nineteenth century reality: being "civilized" meant learning to treat blacks as inferiors, thus the more "traditional" a tribe was, the less likely they were to pay much attention to wasicu ideas about race.

I had intended to cover several subtopics in this post.... but so far I've only covered my first bullet point. I guess I'll have to make this a series... that being the case, I'll wrap this one up and await your comments.

RESEARCHING THE WEST by MEG MIMS

I love research. Always have, always will... and I soak up lush, wonderful details in the westerns I've read. Most of them since DOUBLE CROSSING, my western mystery set in 1869, was published -- but I cut my teeth on television and movie westerns since early childhood.

Did I rely on all that when I started writing my book? Heck, no! I knew costumes, sets and such generated in Hollywood were far from accurate. I spent months delving into fashion changes from hoops to bustles, what a Bowie knife looked like, Colt revolvers, train schedules and routes, what a UP Pullman Palace car looked like versus the CP Silver Palace car, Texan cowboys, etc. etc.

I knew better than to rely on western TV and movies, where the soiled doves wore glittering gowns worthy of a Ziegfeld Follies girl. Other big problems are the cliches stemming from dime novels of the 1800s, still popping up in current western novels. Lawmen tracking murderers who kill without reason. Helpless women who sat around waiting for their man to rescue them.

Pioneer women that I've researched knew how to handle weapons and protect themselves, how to survive snakebites and nurse sicknesses or wounds, and many adapted after being kidnapped by Indians. I rather doubt they lounged around in the stable (after pitching some clean hay) with their bosom exposed like Jane Russell.

Okay, maybe that is an extreme example. But take for example the Stetson hat.

Some writers have their heroes wearing these famous hats as far back as the 1850's. Check out this link for a fascinating history on how John B. Stetson got started making the trademark hats in 1865. Yep. AFTER the Civil War. Or weapons -- here's a link to a great website on military sabres, rifles, revolvers, etc. manufactured during the 1800s. And here's another link, similar to it. With dates of when those weapons were in use.

Trains are another big pitfall for writers. I've read some books where characters found their way west on the railroad before the Civil War or immediately after it ended. The first railroad crossed the vast expanse of the American west in May of 1869, when the Union and Central Pacific lines joined together at Promontory, Utah. For the first time, travelers could ride from New York to Chicago to Omaha and then to Sacramento -- not San Francisco. That took another few years. Other rail lines to Kansas and Arizona and Montana were completed by the mid 1870s or late 1880s.

I've read and seen a wide range of stories with either the total absence of native Americans or a bloodthirsty savageness of tribes (and not always the right ones in the right spots!) set on revenge. Savagery happened on both sides. The main point is to avoid "stereotypes" --  characters need reasons for the choices they make in our stories. Readers might forgive a modern word or phrase in dialogue, but when such things add up, they're "thrown out" of the story and may give up reading the rest of the book.

I love a good, juicy western where I can walk the dusty streets or ride the prairie on horseback, smell the goods on display in a general store, taste the grit in the air or touch the sweat-soaked shirt of the hero. Go beyond the visual. Make sure your characters have a goal and a motive in mind. And for your reader's sake, do the research.

They'll thank you with great reviews and word-of-mouth sales in your future career.

Meg Mims is an award-winning author and artist. She writes blended genres – historical, western, adventure, romance, suspense and mystery. Her first book, Double Crossing, won the 2012 Spur Award for Best First Novel from Western Writers of America and was named a Finalist in the Best Books of 2012 from USA Book News for Fiction: Western.

She is currently working on the sequel, Double or Nothing, which will be released this year. Interested in a sneak peek? Check out Meg's blog for The Next  Big Thing!