107. Vaccines

 Vaccines

 

I’m reading Lakota Power: A New History of Indigenous Power, by Pekka Hamalainen. The Finnish author, who teaches at Oxford, has written previously about the Cheyenne, and in this book chronicles the movement of the Sioux out of the northern woodlands, south and west across the plains and into the Black Hills. 

 

The Lakota, one of seven main councils of the Sioux, seized the day with guns and steel provided by the fur trade and feral horses that roamed northward after a 1680s setback to Spanish ambitions in the Southwest. Horses and the fur trade were the fuels of Lakota expansion and tribal rivalries across the middle of the new country—expanded greatly by the Louisiana Purchase. 

 

It wasn’t an easy expansion for the Americans, with British and French fur traders to the north, and Spanish, French, and American factions competing for dominance on the Missouri and Mississippi and access to the larger trade world through St. Louis and New Orleans. 

 

In 1832, in an attempt to thwart British ambitions in the region, the Americans provided smallpox vaccine to the Lakota and a few other Siouxan groups. That same year, 4000 Pawnees, half of their population, died with smallpox. Other Indian tribes were decimated as well. The smallpox vaccine abetted the rising strength of the Lakota across the plains—and maybe helped stall the British, whose trade was with the Hidatsa and other tribes to the north, with no easy access to eastern markets. 

 

The British Hudson’s Bay Company would keep pushing west across what is now southern Canada and the bordering US—looking for access to the Pacific and another route for its trade. 

 

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19. Visible Indians: Mount Rushmore and Five Presidents

Amidst coronavirus and Black Lives Matter, President Trump has done what the news media and the public couldn’t seem to get to—bring attention to American Indians. Concocting something with the Republican governor of South Dakota, Trump engineered a Fourth of July celebration at Mount Rushmore, site of the mountain carvings of presidents Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt. There’s been a ten-year lapse since the last such celebration due to fire danger.

The mountain carvings were completed in 1941 on land that had been left to the Sioux twice with treaties in the 19th century. In a familiar series of events, gold was found, miners rushed in, and Custer stumbled in to “make it safe” for the white invaders. The mountain had been sacred to the Sioux before the carving, before Custer.

Trump didn’t check with the Indians before planning the extravaganza. Sioux President Julian Bear Runner said that Mr. Trump's attendance is “an insult to Native Americans on whose stolen land it was built… lands on which that mountain is carved and the lands he’s about to visit belong to the Great Sioux nation, and I have to tell him he doesn’t have permission from its original sovereign owners to enter the territory at this time.” He also cited health concerns, important, as Governor Kristi Noem confirmed that attendees are not required to practice social distancing or wear masks.

It had never occurred to me—and we visited often when I was young—that the presidents on Rushmore are all an insult to the Sioux:

Washington did want to treat “justly” with Indians, but he also wanted their land, by sale and treaty if possible, war if not.

Jefferson’s vision for America was sea to shining sea with white yeoman farmers, built on land occupied by “savages"; in the Declaration of Independence he wrote of “the merciless Indian Savages, whose known Rule of Warfare, is an undistinguished Destruction, of all Ages, Sexes and Conditions.”

Lincoln signed the Homestead Act of 1862, allowing for white settlers to people the West on Indian lands. And he hung 38 Sioux, part of an uprising of Indians suffering from diminished lands and broken promises, at Mankato, Minnesota in the same year.

Teddy Roosevelt apparently softened towards Indians in old age, but never thought them equal, and told photographer Edward Sheriff Curtis, who had learned the true history, that the real story of Custer should not reach the American public; Custer, Roosevelt said, should remain a hero.

Trump stands tall among them.

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