I am trying to break your heart

Seized in 1614, Tisquantum somehow escaped slavery in Spain and made his way to London and then Newfoundland, where he boarded an English ship headed toward his homeland. During his five year absence, the New England coast had been hit by a devastating plague, probably introduced by European fishermen or sailors. Thomas Dermer, captain of the ship that carried Tisquantum south in 1619, described villages ‘not long since populous now utterly void,’ or inhabited only by dying natives covered in ‘sores’ and ‘spots.’

Reaching Tisquantum’s home, formerly a large and thriving settlement called Patuxet, Dermer found its inhabitants ‘all dead.’

It was to this ravaged shoreline that the Mayflower passengers came late the following year.

From Plymouth, the very last chapter of Tony Horwitz’s A Voyage Long and Strange: On the Trail of Vikings, Conquistadors, Lost Colonists, and other Adventurers in Early America, in which he ranges far and wide across the Americas recounting the 600 years worth of European exploration and settlement before the pilgrims landed, somewhat haphazardly, on Plymouth Rock.

Illus: Squanto, aka Tisquantum

by the shining big-sea-water

It was Hiawatha ... who bound together the five arrows. One arrow alone, he said, can be broken, but the bundle of five is too strong. The structure of the Iroquois Confederacy became the model for the colonist's new union, and the symbolism stands today: the eagle in the great seal of the United States holds those five arrows [1] in its talons.

From The Rights of the Land by Robin Kimmerer in the November | December 2008 issue of Orion Magazine.

Kimmerer's piece, about a unique suit brought by the Onondaga Nation to regain legal responsibility for their ancestral lands surrounding Onondaga Lake, is unfortunately only available in the print edition.

Onondaga Lake is now a superfund site due to industrial misuse. The Indian nation has introduced a suite that "is unheard of in American property law":

The suite is termed a 'land rights action.' When they finally got their day in court last October, members of the Onondaga nation argued that the land title they're seeking is not for possession, not to exclude, but for the right to participate in the well-being of the land. Against the backdrop of Euro-American thinking, which treats land as a bundle of property rights, the Onondaga are asking for freedom to exercise their responsibility to the land.

[1] Thirteen, actually, for the thirteen colonies. It's the origin of the symbolism that's of interest in a country that rarely acknowledges its indigenous precedents.

Hispaniola is a miracle.

a found poem

Mountains are stripped
a thousand times

They dig
split rocks
move stones
carry dirt on their backs
to wash it in the rivers

Those who wash gold
stay in the water
their backs bent
so constantly
it breaks them

As for the newly born
they died early

Their mothers
overworked and famished
had no milk to nurse them

Husbands died in the mines
Wives died at work
Children died from lack of milk

In a short time this land
which was so great
so powerful and fertile
was depopulated


My eyes have seen these acts
so foreign to human nature
and now I tremble as I write

Found in Bartolomé de Las Casas’ History of the Indies, written in 1542, and recounted by Howard Zinn in A People’s History of the United States.

By de las Casas' count 7,000 Arawak children died during the three month period he describes above, some of them drowned by their desperate mothers. By his estimation three million people died between 1494 and 1508 under Spain’s new world order.

The title is taken from a letter which Columbus penned to his investors about his discovery of the new world:

Hispaniola is a miracle. Mountains and hills, plains and pastures, are both fertile and beautiful ... the harbors are unbelievably good and there are many wide rivers of which the majority contain gold. ... There are many spices, and great mines of gold and other metals.

saturday's super cool antique store find

Watson’s Atlas Map of Indian Territory (1886) which demarcates the land that became Oklahoma in 1907 and for a while was the adhoc home (by writ of the United States Government) for the following Indian tribes and nations (transcribed as they’re printed on the map):

Cheyennes
Cheyennes & Arrapahoes
Osages
Kansas
Cherokee
Creek
Pottawatomies
Chickasaw Nation
Creer
Kiowas
Comanches
Apaches
Chocktaw Nation
Pawnees
Poncas
Nez Perces
Quapaws
Wyandotte
Shawnee
Wichitas
Sac & Fox
Seminoles

Note too the “Negro Settlement” on the edge of Pottawatomie territory. If I had been able to scan the map (unfortunately it was too large for my flat bed) you'd also be able to see how the national railroad lines -- with one exception -- either snake around the territories or stop abruptly just shy of the borders.

By the way: Our man Lincoln? In 1862, twenty-four years prior to when this map was printed and while the Civil War was getting underway, Abe took time out to review the sentences of over a hundred men who had had been sentenced to death by hanging in Minnesota for their part in the Dakota War. Also known as the Sioux Uprising, the armed conflict resulted in a spectacular number of settlers' deaths as fall out from the broken promises of the U.S. Government and the open rage of the wronged Sioux. According to Wikipedia, “historian Don Heinrich Tolzmann says until the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, it was the highest civilian wartime toll in U.S. history.”

As president, Lincoln commuted the sentences of all but 38 men.

It was the largest one day mass execution in American history. The following year the Dakota were expelled from Minnesota to Nebraska and South Dakota, and their reservations were abolished by the United States Congress.

postdated

The manuscript written on vellum, dated July 4, 1776, now displayed in a baroque case at the National Archives, where it is protected by bulletproof glass, argon gas and the 55-ton underground vault it is lowered into every night ... was not written on July 4; it was a handwritten copy that Congress ordered later that summer and post-dated. The version that was in the room as the vote was taken has never been seen since then.

Ted Widmer writing in Looking for Liberty (in this morning's New York Times) about the extant copies of the Declaration of Independence, which was spirited away for printing and distribution shortly after it was signed, and then misplaced.

Caught my attention because I was once sternly advised by the legal department of the organization I worked for that it was NOT okay to sign and postdate documents -- if we all wanted to stay out of jail.

This also caught my attention when I pulled out the replica of the Declaration that I picked up at the Library of Congress on its fake crinkly parchment (that yes makes me cry every time I read it -- how many ways can you spell g.e.e.k.?):

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people. He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

Just sayin'.



& p.s. The Declaration in "American" as translated by H.L. Mencken and run just recently in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch »

of mice and men (or what henry said)

One of the highlights of our brief trip to Richmond was running into a fellow named Ray who gives walking tours of St. John’s Episcopal Church where Patrick Henry gave his rousing Give Me Liberty... call to arms in March of 1775.

Ray’s passionate telling -- he broke the story down frame by frame -- brought the history alive and won my love forever. He even gave us a snippet of Henry’s speech, which I looked up online on my return home and whittled down excessively (this being the abbreviated age of the Internet) for your reading pleasure, below:

Different men often see the same subject in different lights ... This is no time for ceremony ... it as nothing less than a question of freedom or slavery ... it is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth, and listen to the song of that siren till she transforms us into beasts ... Are we disposed to be of the number of those who, having eyes, see not, and, having ears, hear not ... whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst, and to provide for it ... I know of no way of judging of the future but by the past ... We have petitioned; we have remonstrated; we have supplicated; we have prostrated ourselves before the throne ... our petitions have been slighted; our remonstrances have produced additional violence and insult; our supplications have been disregarded; and we have been spurned, with contempt, from the foot of the throne! In vain ... may we indulge the fond hope of peace and reconciliation.

There is no longer any room for hope.

Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace -- but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!