Considering, Sadly, the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek

Most of you are familiar with the phrase “the Trail of Tears.” Perhaps many of you, though, don’t remember hearing anything about the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek. Only recently did I learn that that was the name of the first removal treaty that initiated the trail of tears for Native Americans. 

Andrew Jackson instigated the removal of Indians from the eastern U.S. states. One of the major events of the War of 1812 was the Battle of New Orleans in 1814, led by General Andrew (“Old Hickory”) Jackson. He was then regarded as a war hero, and 14 years later, he was elected the seventh POTUS.

As I noted in my June 2012 blog post about the War of 1812 (see here), the greatest losers in that war were the Native Americans. Jackson fought against the “Indians” then, and subsequently, in his first State of the Union address (in December 1829), he asked Congress to pass Indian removal legislation.

In April 1830, the Senate passed the Indian Removal Act, and then on May 26, the House of Representatives passed the Act by a vote of 101 to 97. Four days later, it was signed into law by President Jackson. Then the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek was enacted 195 years ago, on September 27, 1830.

Dancing Rabbit Creek was the name of a small geographical area in what is now Noxubee County, Mississippi. The Choctaw Nation occupied more than 2/3 of what became the state of Mississippi. The 1830 treaty was with those living in the northern part of the Choctaw’s land. Their removal began in 1831.

The 1831~33 journey westward was marked by hunger, exposure, disease, and death. During that terrible time, the Arkansas Gazette reported that a Choctaw chief lamented that his people’s removal from Mississippi resulted in a "trail of tears and death."*¹

The Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek continued genocidal actions of the U.S. against Native Americans. Even though most USAmericans have not usually considered the nation’s treatment of Indians as genocide, that seems to be an apt description of what has gone on for centuries.

The 1948 UN Genocide Convention defines genocide as acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.”

But according to Claude (whom I have repeatedly called my AI buddy), many genocide scholars now argue that the cumulative effect of European colonization, including disease, warfare, and deliberate policies, constitutes genocide even if individual components were initially unintentional.

For the Native Americans who lived in the northeastern part of what became the USA, a large percentage of the Native Americans in “New England” had already died before 1621 from diseases (mostly smallpox) brought by the Europeans who had come in the previous decade.*²

So, whether intentional or not, European colonists caused the genocide of Native Americans.

Much more needs to be done to correct past genocidal activities. Fortunately, it is generally said that the “Indian Wars” ended in 1890. But mistreatment of Native Americans continued long after that.

I was delighted that Deb Haaland became the first Indian Cabinet secretary in U.S. history in March 2021. But her maternal grandparents suffered under government regulations.*³   

Currently, up to 20% of Native Americans live on reservations. That represents several hundred thousand people out of a total Native American population of around 6-9 million. Many of those living on reservations suffer from poverty, unemployment, alcoholism, and relatively low life expectancy.

Native Americans have the highest poverty rate of any major racial group, and unemployment rates have averaged 50% for decades on many reservations. Alcoholism death rates among young Native Americans is over ten times the national average of the general population.

Further, Indian communities experience higher rates of suicide compared to all other racial and ethnic groups, and Native Americans have the lowest life expectancy among racial and ethnic groups in the U.S.

These negative considerations are all largely rooted in the shameful Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek. And they are all issues that need to be addressed more fully by the federal government, seeking liberty and justice for all U.S. citizens.

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*¹ It should be noted that the term “the trail of tears” is most often associated with the removal of the Cherokee Nation from northern Georgia and bordering areas beginning in 1838.

*² This was mentioned in my Thanksgiving blog post made in November 2009: The View from This Seat: What About the First Thanksgiving Day?

*³ A January 2021 blog post was titled, “A Notable Nomination: Haaland for Secretary of the Interior.” That was certainly notable, for she became the first Native American to serve in a President’s Cabinet. Considerably after 1890, her maternal grandparents were, in Haaland’s words, “stolen from their families when they were only 8 years old and were forced to live away from their parents, culture and communities until they were 13.” They were forced to go to a federal Indian boarding school, and such schools continued until the 1960s.

Considering Circles

Grateful: The Subversive Practice of Giving Thanks by public theologian Diana Butler Bass is an impressive book that I finished reading a few months ago.* The last chapter is “Circles of Gratitude,” and I have been thinking, off and on, about circles ever since. 

Western society emphasizes pyramids more than circles. Bass (b. 1959) makes this point as she reflects on how she was reprimanded for arranging a classroom in a circle. She then realized, “Circles can be upsetting.” She goes on to say,

For many generations, the structure of Western culture imprinted on our imaginations was that of rows, lines, and pyramids. We were taught that everything was ordered from top to bottom, in vertical structures of family, social institutions, and politics by role, gender, and race (p. 174).

Other societies/traditions are different. For example, in Zen Buddhism what is called the enso circle (pictured above) is considered paradigmatic (see here). At the beginning of “Circles of Gratitude,” Bass cites Tanahashi Kazuaki (b. 1933), a noted Japanese Zen teacher:

The circle is a reminder that each moment is not just the present, but is inclusive of our gratitude to the past and our responsibility to the future.

Also, as explained on this website, “The circle has always been an important symbol to the Native American. It represents the sun, the moon, the cycles of the seasons, and the cycle of life to death to rebirth.”

There has, of course, been some recognition of the importance of circles in both traditional and contemporary Western culture. Most of us are familiar with the story of King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table. The round table of that 12th-century tale was a symbol of the equality of the knights.  

Although I’m not sure what it signifies, I was surprised to learn that Apple Park, which was completed about five years ago as the headquarters of Apple Inc., is “a perfect circle.”  

So perhaps there has been some recognition in most cultures that circles can represent ideals such as completeness, harmony, and balance. But, still, in much of the Western world, the hierarchical pyramid is often the dominant diagram of relationships.

Perhaps much of the dysfunction, dissatisfaction, and divisiveness in the U.S. currently is rooted in the pervasiveness of over/under relationships. Maybe a paradigm shift to seeing others in a relationship circle would help solve such problems.

Circles can be either inclusive or exclusive. Recently I was reading through my diary/journal for 1982, considering what I was doing/thinking forty years ago. In June of that year, I spoke at the annual Alumni Reunion of my high school. My talk was titled “How big a circle can you draw?”

Of course, I based part of that talk on Edwin Markham’s well-known, four-line poem “Outwitted”:

He drew a circle that shut me out—
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But Love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took him in! **

The following image graphically depicts the difference between the circle of inclusion from not only the circle of exclusion but also from what often occurs not only in segregation but also in integration.

Sociologists have long talked about “in-groups” and “out-groups.” In-groups are homogeneous and tend to exclude those who differ. That is clearly depicted in the exclusion circle. Out-groups might form a segregated circle excluded from the in-group—and if forced to integrate they might still be separated although within the in-group circle.

The inclusion circle, though, is the ideal, although it presents various challenges. But at some point, we all need to learn that, deep down, there is no “them”; there is only “us.”

Can you, can I, draw a circle large enough to include all of us? May it be so.

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* Since Bass’s book was published in 1989, I was surprised, but happy, to see in last Sunday’s Kansas City Star that it was one of the bestselling non-fiction books in Kansas City last week.

** My blog post for Oct. 15, 2015, was titled “Becoming Inclusive,” and it began with a reference to Markham and his poem. Here is the link, if you would like to look at that post (again).

 

Overcoming Thanksgiving Day Myths

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day in the U.S.—and it is the 400^th anniversary of what is often said to be the first Thanksgiving Day. In 1621, the Plymouth colonists and Native People called Wampanoag* shared an autumn harvest feast that became the basis of the common Thanksgiving story.

November has also once again this year been designated as National Native American Heritage Month. In light of the latter, many of us USAmericans need to overcome various Thanksgiving Day myths that have long been abroad in the land.

Acknowledging Thanksgiving Day Myths

Kaitlin Curtice is a Potawatomi woman and a Christian. In her 2020 book Native: Identity, Belonging, and Rediscovering God, she writes how she and other Native Americans are “bombarded with Thanksgiving myths” every November and how hard that is.

Curtice writes, “My non-Native friends have to understand that the myths told at Thanksgiving only continue the toxic stereotypes and hateful language that has always been spewed at us” (pp. 67, 68)

“The Thanksgiving Myth” by Native Circle is explained here in a 2019 post. The authors write, “The big problem with the American Thanksgiving holiday is its false association with American Indian people; the infamous 'Indians and pilgrims' myth.”

They continue, “It is good to celebrate Thanksgiving, to be thankful for your blessings. It is not good to distort history, to falsely portray the origin of this holiday and lie about the truth of its actual inception.”

David Silverman, a professor at George Washington University who specializes in Native American and Colonial American history, tells the true American Thanksgiving story in This Land is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving (2019).

As UCC pastor Jane McBride writes in her helpful Christian Century review, Silverman begins his lengthy book “by shattering the myth of the first Thanksgiving.” Then in his concluding paragraph, Silverman asserts,

The truth exposes the traditional tale of the First Thanksgiving as a myth rather than history, and so let us declare it dead except as a subject for the study of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American culture (p. 427).

References to Thanksgiving myths are not just recent incidences, though. Back in 1986, Chuck Larsen, a high school history teacher in the state of Washington, wrote how the Thanksgiving stories most children have learned are “a mixture of both history and myth.”

Larson emphasized the “need to try to reach beyond the myths to some degree of historical truth.” He also said, “When you build a lesson on only half of the information, then you are not teaching the whole truth. That is why I used the word myth.”**

Thankfully, there are many more resources available now for learning the truth of the first Thanksgiving than were available in 1986, so there is no excuse for us to hang on to the old myths.

Overcoming Thanksgiving Day Myths

There is an abundance of ways to celebrate Thanksgiving Day without reiterating the Thanksgiving myths, which tend to foster white Christian nationalism and to whitewash the harsh mistreatment of Native Americans.

We can begin to overcome those myths by listening to the scholars such as Silverman and/or to Native American voices such as Larsen’s as found in his article linked to in the second footnote below.

Then, we can overcome Thanksgiving myths by focusing primarily on the many blessings we have received from Creator God, who dearly loves each person and all the people groups in God’s good Creation.

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* “This tribe helped the Pilgrims survive for their first Thanksgiving. They still regret it 400 years later. Long marginalized and misrepresented in U.S. history, the Wampanoags are bracing for the 400th anniversary of the first Pilgrim Thanksgiving in 1621” (headlines of a Nov. 4 Washington Post article).

** Larsen, who has Native American ancestry, wrote “Introduction for Teachers” to help them in teaching the truth about Thanksgiving Day. That instructive piece has been reproduced in many places, but here is a link to a PDF version. It is well worth reading.

The Problem of (Teaching) History: “1619” or “1776”?

This post is closely related to my June 19 article regarding critical race theory (CRT). Most of the legislation seeking to curtail the teaching of CRT has included criticism of The 1619 Project as well. CRT and “1619” both raise the question of how history is understood and taught.  

The Problem of Microhistory

Each one of us has our own personal history, which should, one would think, be rather straightforward and non-problematic. But in writing my life story, now available in print, some historical “facts” came under question. June did not remember some of our family history the same way I did.

The two siblings in Ann Patchett’s intriguing book The Dutch House (2019) discuss their family’s microhistory. One asks, “Do you think it’s possible to ever see the past as it actually was?” The other reflects on how we humans

overlay the present onto the past. We look back through the lens of what we know now, so we’re not seeing it as the people we were, we’re seeing it as the people we are, and that means the past has been radically altered (p. 45).

The Problem of Macrohistory

Recently I also read The Sense of an Ending (2011) by British author Julian Barnes. In that novel, one “high school” student remarks, “History is the lies of the victors.” The teacher retorts that “it is also the self-delusions of the defeated.”

At that point, the most brilliant student in the class says, rather cynically, “History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation” (pp. 16-17).

If that is true in personal or family history; it is especially true in writing macrohistory. But the problem is more than just the imperfections of memory and the inadequacies of documentation.

The most serious problem is the biases of the historians and the conscious or unconscious interpretation of past events for the benefit of a particular segment of society.

Thus, the squabble over The 1619 Project continues.

U.S. History: “1619” or “1776”?

In 2019, The New York Times Magazine published The 1619 Project, developed by journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones and others.

The year 1619 was when the first African slaves set foot in North America. The 1619 Project, then, “aims to reframe the country's history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of the United States’ national narrative" (from this link).

The 1619 Project was strongly criticized by politicians such as former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (see here) and Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), who proposed the Saving of American History Act of 2020 (see here), and especially by former Pres. Trump.

On the day before the 2020 presidential election, by executive order DJT established the 1776 Commission. Republican politicians continue to praise the flawed 1776 Commission report and to castigate The 1619 Project.

The “1776 Pledge to Save Our Schools” is being signed by numerous politicians, such as the two current Republican gubernatorial candidates in Kansas, who were rebuked by an editorial in the June 28 issue of the Kansas City Star.

There are some obvious problems with The 1619 Project, including some historical inaccuracies (as noted in this 3/6/20 Politico article). It also fails to link the beginning of U.S. history to the mistreatment of Native Americans (as this 9/26/20 opinion piece explains).

But most who oppose teaching CRT and “1619” want to shield students from much of the “ugly” history of the past. They need to consider, though, the truth of the following meme. (The painting depicts some dreadful history of Canada’s First Nations children, similar to what happened in the U.S.) 

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**Of the many articles I have read related to this post, I am linking here to only one, Eugene Robinson’s 6/28 opinion piece in The Washington Post, which is accessible here without a paywall. The sixth paragraph on is directly about The 1619 Project.

A Notable Nomination: Haaland for Secretary of the Interior

The first two Native American women ever were elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2018. One was Sharice Davids of Kansas City, from the 3^rd congressional district of Kansas.* The other was Deb Haaland of New Mexico.

Now, Rep. Haaland is poised to become a member of President Biden’s Cabinet. 

Who is Deb Haaland?

Debra Anne Haaland was born in Arizona 60 years ago last month. She is an enrolled member of the Laguna Pueblo, a Native American people group who has lived on the land that is now the state of New Mexico since the 1200s.

Haaland identifies herself as a 35th-generation New Mexican, her mother being a Native American woman. Her father, however, is a Norwegian American.

(It’s interesting how Haaland is Native American because her mother was, but Obama was never considered White even though his mother was.)

Haaland was 28 when she started college at the University of New Mexico, and she gave birth to a daughter, Somáh, four days after graduation in May 1994.

As a single mother, Haaland was sometimes dependent on food stamps. Still, she went on to law school and earned her J.D. in Indian law from University of New Mexico School of Law in 2006.

Haaland’s rise to political power began when she was elected to a two-year term as the chair of the Democratic Party of New Mexico in April 2015.

To What Was Deb Haaland Nominated?

On Dec. 17, President-elect Biden announced that he was nominating Haaland as the next Secretary of the Interior. As such, she would be the first Native American to serve in the President’s Cabinet.

Secretary of the Interior isn’t a particularly ostentatious position, but it is an important one. According to this website, the Department of Interior (DoI) is

a federal executive department of the U.S. government. It is responsible for the management and conservation of most federal lands and natural resources, and the administration of programs relating to Native Americans, Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians, territorial affairs, and insular areas of the United States, as well as programs related to historic preservation. . . . The department was created on March 3, 1849.

Seal of the DoI

Why Is Deb Haaland’s Nomination Notable?

The infamous Indian Removal Act was promulgated in 1830 and especially from then until the “Indian wars” ended in December 1890 (as I wrote about in my Dec. 26 blog post), there were sixty years of repeated cruel treatment of the Native peoples in U.S. territory.

Moreover, most Native Americans did not or could not become U.S. citizens until the Indian Citizenship Act was signed into law in 1924. And even after that, it was not until 1957 that Native Americans were allowed to vote in all states.

While things are better for Native Americans now than they were 130 years ago, or 97 years ago, many of those who want to maintain their ethnic identity still have to face discrimination and “second-class” citizenship.

So, after all these years, it is notable that Biden chose a Native American, who is a sitting U.S. Representative, to be the new Secretary of the Interior, responsible for “the administration of programs relating to Native Americans.”

In addition, since environmental issues are a major concern of the new administration, Haaland, consistent with her Native American heritage, is a strong advocate for environmental justice—and has been openly criticized for that by Representative Pete Stauber (R-Minn.).

I hope Rep. Haaland’s confirmation as Secretary of the DoI will be smooth and that she will do well as a member of the Cabinet.

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* The church June and I are members of is in that district, and Rep. Davids (b. 1980) was strongly supported by most of our fellow church members in the 2018 election and in 2020, when she was re-elected.

Grieving After-Christmas Massacres

It was not long after that joyous first Christmas that things turned violent in Palestine. Although it didn’t happen as soon as depicted in most Christmas pageants, not long after Jesus’ birth there was a horrendous after-Christmas massacre.

The “Massacre of the Innocents”

According to Matthew 2:16~18, Herod the Great, the reigning king of Judea, ordered the execution of all male children two years old and under in the vicinity of Bethlehem.

The Catholic Church has long recognized those massacred baby boys as the first Christian martyrs and celebrates the Feast of the Holy Innocents on December 28.

That terrible “massacre of the innocents,” as it is often called, has been depicted by famous artists such as Raphael and Rubens in their paintings of c.1512-13 and 1611-12. But those works are so “busy,” I am sharing this 1860-61 painting of Italian artist Angelo Visconti:  

The Indian Massacre of December 26, 1862

What was at the time the largest one-day mass execution in U.S. history, 38 Dakota men were hanged on this date, Dec. 26, in 1862.

The Dakota War of 1862, also known by several other names (including Little Crow’s War), began that year on August 17—in the middle of the Civil War raging mostly on the east side of the Mississippi River.

That “Indian war” was between the U.S. and several bands of the Native Americans known as the Dakota and also as the eastern Sioux. It began in southwest Minnesota, four years after its admission as a state.

Treaty violations and late annuity payments led to hunger and hardship among the Dakota. Their desperation led to extensive attacks on White settlers in the area and resulted in the death of some of them.

Hundreds of Dakota men were captured, and a military tribunal sentenced 303 to death for their deadly use of violence. President Lincoln commuted the sentence of 264 of the condemned men, and one was pardoned shortly before the remaining 38 were hanged.

It was a sad, day-after-Christmas massacre.  

The Indian Massacre of December 29, 1890

The end of the Indian wars came 130 years ago this week, on Dec. 29, 1890, with the Wounded Knee Massacre.

The story of that massacre is told in some detail in the last chapter of Dee Brown’s widely read book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (1970). (The highly popular TV movie with the same name was aired in 2007.)

That after-Christmas massacre took place near Wounded Knee Creek on the Lakota Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. (The Lakota and Dakota are the same Native American nation that is usually called the Sioux by Whites.)

By the time the massacre was over, more than 250 Native Americans, including women and children, had been killed—and perhaps as many as 50 more died later from wounds received on that fateful day.

Most of those who died were needlessly and unjustly killed. Accordingly, in 1990, a century after the massacre, the U.S. Congress passed a resolution expressing “deep regret” for the grievous slaughter.  

Beyond the Massacres

Some of those injured at Wounded Knee were taken to the Episcopal mission at Pine Ridge. Dee Brown ended his book (on page 445) with these words:

When the first torn and bleeding bodies were carried into the candlelit church, those who were conscious could see Christmas greenery hanging from the open rafters. Across the chancel front above the pulpit was strung a crudely lettered banner: PEACE ON EARTH, GOOD WILL TO MEN.

That reminded me of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s wonderful Christmas carol, “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.” The third verse of that carol, written during the Civil War, says,

And in despair I bowed my head:
“There is no peace on earth,” I said,
“For hate is strong, and mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good will to men.”

Then verse four exults,

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
God is not dead, nor doth He sleep
The wrong shall fail, the right prevail,
With peace on earth, good will to men.”

+++++

**For more about Longfellow and his 1863 poem, “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day,” see my 12/25/18 blog post titled “Can You Hear the Christmas Bells?”

The Sand Creek Massacre, a National Disgrace

Earlier this month I wrote about sometimes feeling embarrassed to identify as a Christian. But I am embarrassed not only because of things some Christian leaders do in the present but also because of what some have done in the past. The Sand Creek Massacre is one sad example.  

The Bare Facts

There are background events that I don’t have the space to elucidate here, but here are the bare facts of the Sand Creek Massacre, which occurred 155 years ago yesterday, on November 29, 1864.

The Third Colorado Cavalry commanded by Colonel John Chivington attacked a settlement of Cheyenne/Arapaho Indians at Sand Creek, about 175 miles southeast of Denver. At Chivington’s insistence, they murdered around 200 Native Americans, most of them women and children.

Prior to the massacre, Chivington reportedly said, “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. ... Kill and scalp all, big and little; nits make lice.”

This was all done with the approval of Colorado Governor John Evans, who was also the Superintendent of Indian Affairs in Colorado.

The Embarrassing Facts

John Milton Chivington was born in 1821 into an Ohio farm family. In 1844 he was ordained as a Methodist minister, serving in that capacity in Illinois, Missouri, and then assisting in a Methodist missionary expedition to the Wyandot Indians in Kansas in 1853. (The church I now attend is in Wyandotte County.)

Gov. Evans was also a Methodist. He had joined with other Methodists in 1850 to found Northwestern University in Illinois. Then two years after becoming governor of Colorado in 1862, he and Chivington founded Colorado Seminary, which later became the University of Denver.

The Sand Creek Massacre has, indeed, been an embarrassment for the United Methodist Church, and five years ago they sought repentance for that national disgrace (see here).

There were two Cavalrymen with the Third Regiment, Silas Soule and Joseph Cramer, who refused to join in the massacre and testified against Chivington—and Soule was shot in the back and killed in April 1865 because of his testimony against Chivington.

It is also embarrassing to us Christians that in contrast to Evans and Chivington, Soule was described as a “healthy skeptic” rather than a religious believer.

Repenting of the Facts

This past Sunday Sarah Neher, the Director of Faith Formation and Youth Ministries at Rainbow Mennonite Church, preached on “Deconstructing Thanksgiving.” It was a bold, fitting sermon for the Sunday before the national holiday and for the last week of National American Indian Heritage Month (here is a link to more about that).

Sarah said in her sermon,

This simple narrative [of the traditional Thanksgiving] sets the story like a fairytale. Casting Colonization as beneficial for everyone and that it was relatively peaceful. When in reality over the centuries since Europeans invaded Indigenous land, Natives have experienced genocide, the theft of their lands, and the attempted extinction of their culture.

Yes, the Sand Creek Massacre was simply the continuation of the “whites’” treatment of Native Americans from the beginning—starting with the Pequot War of 1636~38 and the Mystic Massacre of May 1637.

It was the continuation of words about “the merciless Indian Savages” included in the Declaration of Independence of 1776.

Perhaps rather than observing the day after Thanksgiving as “Black Friday,” those of us in the dominant culture should rather observe the days following Thanksgiving as Repentance Weekend for the way our ancestors treated the Native Americans.

That treatment has, indeed, been a national disgrace.

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For Further Information

Here is the link to an article about the 21st annual Sand Creek Massacre Spiritual Healing Run/Walk, currently in progress.

“Who is the Savage” is an excellent 14-minute video about Black Kettle, the “peace chief” head of the Sand Creek Native Americans in 1864.

And here is the link to a Rocky Mountain PBS documentary on the Sand Creek Massacre.

Lewis & Clark Expedition: The Good and the Bad

For several weeks, I have wanted to think with you about the impressive feats of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. It was 215 years ago in June that they first passed through what is now Kansas City, not far from where I live. Most of their long, dangerous journey was still ahead, though, and what a remarkable journey it was! 

Lewis & Clark Statue at Kaw Point, Kan. (one of my favorite places in Kansas City)

The Corps of Discovery

I had long mistakenly thought that Lewis & Clark’s expedition, which began in May 1804, was a direct result of the huge Louisiana Purchase realized when the U.S. signed a purchase treaty with France in April 1803.

(The Louisiana territory purchased was about 827,000 square miles. Some wonder if part of DJT’s recently reported desire to buy Greenland, which is more than 836,000 sq. mi., isn’t partly due to his desire to claim to have made the largest land purchase in U.S. history.)

Soon after Thomas Jefferson became President in 1801, he employed Meriwether Lewis as his personal secretary. By the next year, Jefferson was talking with Lewis about the possibility of him leading an expedition from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean.

Lewis (1774~1809) was making definite plans and assembling equipment necessary for such an expedition before the Louisiana Purchase, although the latter gave great impetus to implementing that treacherous journey.

In July 1803, William Clark (1770~1838) accepted Lewis’s invitation to become co-captain of the expedition, which came to be called the Corps of Discovery.

The next year on May 14, the Corps started up the Missouri River from the St. Louis area, beginning their long, dangerous trek to the Pacific Ocean. There were about 30 men who started this journey, including York, Clark’s personal black slave.

Positive Results

There were certainly many positive results of the Lewis and Clark Expedition—especially for white men like the expedition’s leaders and the President who dispatched them.

To cite “Lewis and Clark’s Historical Impact,” an online article, the expedition produced an accurately mapped route to the Pacific Ocean, introduced Americans and Europeans to hundreds of varieties of plants and animals, and opened up new territory for the fur and lumber trade.

Overall, it “allowed a young country to blossom into greatness.” Thus, there “is no doubt that the expedition of Lewis and Clark forever changed the course of the country’s history.”

Negative Results

The Introduction of a website titled “Origins of the Ideology of Manifest Destiny” begins, “The most influential ideology in our nation’s history is manifest destiny.”

It seems quite evident that the Lewis & Clark Expedition furthered that ideology. Although the term manifest destiny was not coined until 1845, the core belief that USAmericans were destined by God to reign over the entire continent seems to have been in the minds of the founders of the U.S.—and in the mind of President Jefferson.

Although Lewis and Clark did not seem to have any harsh or oppressive views of the American Indians they encountered, their expedition resulted in harsh and oppressive treatment of the Native Peoples for most of the 19^th century.

A bicentennial article in Teaching Tolerance emphasizes that while “American history tends to eulogize what Lewis and Clark ‘found’ on their 7,400-mile journey, for Native Americans, the story instead is about what was lost—lives, land, languages and freedom.”

In the same article, a Native American named BlueHorse lamented, “Within 100 years of Lewis and Clark passing through here, every Native nation they encountered”—and there were about 50 of them—“was displaced from their traditional lands and put on reservations.”

What, I wonder, can be done now to mitigate the highly negative results still remaining from Lewis and Clark’s nation-changing expedition that began 215 years ago?

Will Campbell and "Providence"

Will Campbell is one of the most colorful persons I have ever met, and I have just finished reading his captivating book, Providence (1992). Campbell, a Baptist minister, activist, and author, was born in Mississippi in 1924. He was the late cartoonist Doug Marlette’s inspiration for the character Will B. Dunn in his comic strip Kudzu.

Campbell is the author of many books, fiction and non-fiction. His autobiographical work, Brother to a Dragonfly, which I enjoyed reading years ago, was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1978. And I found Providence to be a fascinating narrative.

The unlikely theme of the nearly 300-page book Providence is the history of one section (one square mile) of land in Holmes County, MS. From the mid-1830s to 1938, that section was called Providence Plantation, and then from 1938 to 1955 it was Providence Cooperative Farm. 

The latter was founded and run by missionary evangelist Sherwood Eddy and Rev. Sam H. Franklin with the goal of helping southern sharecroppers. Providence and another cooperative started earlier were organized around four principles: efficiency in production and economy in finance through the cooperative principle, participation in building a socialized economy of abundance, interracial justice, and realistic religion as a social dynamic.

According to Campbell, there were many problems and faults with the efforts of the leaders of the Cooperative Farm, although they meant well. I was especially interested in the many references to Sam Franklin (1902~94), for he went on to become a Presbyterian missionary to Japan. When I lived in Tokyo (from 1966 to 1968), I was a member of a book study group of which Franklin was a member, and I remember him well.

The first part of the book tells about the years when that part of Mississippi was occupied by the Choctaw Indians and the shameful efforts that drove the Choctaw from the land they had occupied for untold generations. Then Campbell narrates some of the evils of slavery and the mistreatment of those used as possessions by the white plantation owners.

Campbell goes on to describe the situation on that one square mile during the Civil War, during the terrible time of Reconstruction, and during the following half-century of struggles by a series of plantation owners. The last part of the book then tells of Campbell’s own unsuccessful efforts to restore the plantation to the Choctaws.

For all of you who are interested not only in American history but particularly in justice issues, I highly recommend Providence. And if you don’t know much about Will Campbell, or even if you do, I think you will find his story engaging. If you would like to see a brief 2008 interview with Campbell, click here for his thoughts about “Racism and the Church” (a little over two minutes).