In the past month, a troubling situation has played out in
the national news.
In a history class on the California State University at
Sacramento campus, Chiitaanibah Johnson, a Native undergraduate (Maidu and Diné)
, challenged her adjunct professor, Maury Wiseman, when he said: “I don’t like
to use the term ‘genocide’ because ‘genocide’ is something that is done on
purpose, but needless to say European diseases primarily, European diseases
primarily [sic], will wipe out Native American populations in the two
continents and hence one of the reasons why later in history many Europeans
will imagine that these continents were empty.” [This quote is one Wiseman gave
to the media, claiming it came from an audiotape of his class.]
Johnson researched the subject for two days and returned to
class to present evidence that what Wiseman had said was not accurate. Wiseman
grew angry, accused her of high-jacking his class and of trying to make him
look racist and bigoted, told her she was “dis-enrolled” from the class and not
to return, and dismissed the class midway through. Johnson filed a complaint
with the university administration, and the story hit national media.
After a month-long investigation, President Robert Nelsen
found no fault on either side and closed the case, encouraging the campus
community to continue discussion about the issues involved. The university will
also offer a new genocide studies minor (to be located in the Ethnic
Studies Department rather than the History Department) and offer cultural
sensitivity and classroom management training in faculty orientations. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/10/09/sacramento-state-ends-investigation-disagreement-over-what-professor-said-about
This idea that there was no Native genocide because disease
alone killed all the Indigenous peoples on the continent, leaving it
conveniently vacant for Europeans is a race-based “intuitive” theory from the
1970s that has been refuted since the end of the 20th century by
scholars actually working with primary documents and other evidence. The
“virgin soil thesis,” based on the belief that Natives’ lack of immunities and
their inept healers were responsible for their downfall, was propounded by
Alfred Crosby in 1976. This theory was quite popular for a time early in the
last half of the 20th century because it placed all the
responsibility for the massive death counts among Indigenous peoples after
European arrival on the Indigenous people themselves because they were genetically
weak, lacking in acquired immunity, and lacking in competent medical care,
rather than on the violence waged against them by Europeans from the very
beginning of contact and continuing into the early 20th century.
As David S. Jones points out in “Virgin Soils Revisited” in The William and Mary Quarterly (October
2003), “Perhaps the idea that Indian depopulation can be explained by the
Indians' lack of immunity took hold because it served an ideological purpose.
White physicians in South Africa, for instance, used virgin soil theory to
explain the prevalence of tuberculosis among African mine workers. … theories
of immunological determinism can still assuage Euroamerican guilt over American
Indian depopulation, whether in the conscious motives of historians or in the
semiconscious desires of their readers. … the epidemics among American Indians,
despite their unusual severity, were caused by the same forces of poverty,
social stress, and environmental vulnerability that cause epidemics in all other
times and places.”
David Stannard argued in American
Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World (New York, 1992) that
"by focusing almost entirely on disease, by displacing responsibility for
the mass killing onto an army of invading microbes, contemporary authors
increasingly have created the impression that the eradication of those tens of
millions of people was inadvertent."
Paul Kelton, author of Cherokee
Medicine, Colonial Germs: An Indigenous Nation’s Fight Against Smallpox,
1518-1824 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2015) and "Avoiding the Smallpox Spirits: Colonial Epidemics and Southeastern
Indian Survival," Ethnohistory, 50 (Fall 2003), is yet another of
the many scholars who have gone to actual primary documents and other evidence
to examine this thesis as it pertained to the Cherokee Nation and found that
many epidemics were not as severe as had been claimed or assumed and that the Cherokee
healers and spiritual beliefs were as effective as the primitive medicines of
the Europeans in dealing with smallpox. He also discusses the part that the
overwhelming violence—the bitter wars that decimated population, the actions of
the white settler armies in destroying towns, homes, farms, and stored harvests
in an attempt to starve the Cherokee, the forced surrender of huge swathes of
territory necessary for a hunting-gathering existence—played in rendering the
surviving remnant of Cherokees susceptible to smallpox and other illnesses.
As far as the idea that the Europeans thought the continents
were empty, there is such abundance of evidence of the contrary that the idea
that Wiseman would put that forth as fact in a university classroom is
ludicrous. The history of the United States is filled with statesmen lamenting
the fact that American Indians own the land they want and with their plans and
chicanery to force them to sell or give it or to just force them off the land.
That relentless push westward that came to be called Manifest Destiny in the
1840s continued from the first landings of Europeans on the Atlantic Seaboard
through the war with Tecumseh, the Indian Removal Act and many Trails of Tears
(killing tens of thousands—one would think that alone would qualify for
designation as ethnic cleansing or genocide), to the Indian Wars of the 19th
century, while in California, the Spanish mission system devastated the Native
population, and when the Americans took over, they offered official government
bounties on Indian heads. Not exactly
the acts of people who thought the continent was vacant.
As far as Wiseman’s statement that the destruction of the
native population could not be genocide because it was not “on purpose,” I
offer a tiny sampling of the quotations from speeches, letters, newspaper
articles, and other documents to be easily found in a search through American
history. The researcher will easily find many, many more quotations from
Franklin, Jefferson, Monroe, Theodore Roosevelt, Lincoln, and many other
Founding Fathers and presidents, as well as governors and other civic leaders,
all speaking of the need to wipe out the Indigenous population of the
continent.
“The only good Indians I ever saw were dead.” – General Phil
Sheridan
“Damn any man who sympathizes with Indians. I have come to
kill Indians, and believe it is right and honorable to use any means under
god’s heaven to kill Indians! Scalps are what we are after… I long to be wading
in gore!” – Rev. John M. Chivington, co-founder of the University of Denver and
leader of the Sand Creek Massacre
"Civilization or death to all American savages." –
Major James Norris
“Discovery gave an exclusive right to extinguish the Indian
title of occupancy, either by purchase or by conquest.” – Chief Justice John
Marshall
“The immediate objectives are the total destruction and
devastation of their settlements and the capture of as many prisoners of every
age and sex as possible. It will be essential to ruin their crops in the ground
and prevent their planting more.” – General George Washington, orders to
troops, 1779 [Those captured prisoners of every age and sex were then sold as
slaves to the West Indies.]
For a school that believes in “rigorous academic research,” according
to Nelsen, there seems not to have been much rigor behind Wiseman’s preparation
to teach this class. I would hope that, any time a professor is teaching
something that is simply not factually true, a student would do research and
challenge that mistake or falsehood.
This erasure of the destruction of the Indigenous peoples of
the Americas is a pervasive problem in this country. Witness the proponents of
the virgin soil thesis of the past century, who were the modern versions of the
Puritans rejoicing, after one massacre, that they hadn’t had to commit another
due to disease and starvation, thanks to the mighty hand of God. The history of
this country is a history of broken treaties with Indian nations, a history of
massacres and forced removals that killed many thousands, a history of
continuous greed for the land and other possessions of the Indigenous people
and violence and wars to obtain what was so desired. The history of this
country is a history of theft and slavery, a history of prisoner of war camps
called reservations (that Hitler studied and used as models for his
concentration camps—he admired the efficiency of the U.S. genocide of its Native
population and emulated it in his own Final Solution), a history of official bounties
on Indian heads, skins, and scalps. The history of this country is a history of
kidnapping children and imprisoning them in boarding “schools,” rife with
physical and emotional abuse—“Kill the Indian to save the man!”—a history of
forced sterilization and medical experimentation without consent. If you look
at it openly, it adds up to something that can hardly be called anything but
ethnic cleansing and genocide.
So, of course, as a country, we don’t look at it openly—and when
someone forces us to face it, we cry, “Not true! Get over it! Victim studies!
PC,” anything we can to make the awful truth go away and be buried once again.
Still, it happened, and the results of it remain with us, especially imbedded
in Native communities and lives. American popular culture is still in the grip
of Manifest Destiny and “the only good Indian is a dead Indian” with the
enshrinement of the Hollywood Western as one of our great art forms. I would
have hoped for better from academia, however, where the truth is supposed to
have value above belief in American exceptionalism.
This situation is a perfect example of why we need ethnic
studies classes—and why they should be part of the required core of classes and
not electives that only a few students will take. Our citizens need to know our
history, to know what we’ve done as a country, to know how we got here today,
to know the truth and not the photoshopped Hollywood version of who we really
are. Without that knowledge, we will continue to make the same mistakes, doomed
to repeat the past we choose not to know.
