Thanksgiving, the trail of tears, genocide, and God’s justice

Recently, the Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation chairman, Bill Leonard, referring to his tribe being denied federal tribal status said, “They’re still killing us. In that way, the genocide has not stopped.” The Miwuk have lived in Yosemite long “before the Mayflower.”

As Thanksgiving approaches, I would like to explain Susan Sontag’s observation that “The white race is the cancer of human history.”

On a cold evening in November 1973, while doing doctoral work at the University of Minnesota and needing a break from long hours of reading legal history texts, I decided to walked down to the “Little Red School House” which, at that time, was the Twin Cities headquarters of the American Indian Movement. That evening AIM activists had invited the black nationalist Stokely Carmichael to be the keynote speaker. Joining him on stage were AIM leaders Russell Banks and Dennis Means. Carmichael’s speech theme was “This is the Red Man’s Land,” referring to the pilgrims and their descendants’ conquest, via genocide, of North America. Indians in the audience shouted, “We should have poisoned the pilgrims instead of bringing them food.” As I looked around at the chanting, dancing, and war whooping attendees, I imagined that I was witnessing individuals from such nations as the Crow, Arikara, Winnebago, Ponca, Potawatomi, Ute, Sac, Creek, Chippewa, Pawnee, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Lakotas, Kiowa, and many others, including the Seminoles.

I mention the Seminoles last because the term “Seminole” means runaway Creeks who established “maroon” societies. As Seminoles migrated into the Florida Everglades, they encountered runaway African slaves. This “swamp” meeting became a turning point in the development of the cross-cultural group labeled “black Indians.” The federal government, with pressure from Southern planters, made war on the Seminoles so that slaves could be returned to the plantations.

The foremost historian of black Indians, William Loren Katz, observed that “Europeans forcefully entered the African blood stream, but Native Americans and African Americans merged by choice, invitation, and love.” Katz notes that by the 1920s almost a third of black Americans had Indian blood. In fact, my mother, Maymie Bell Hogue, was a descendant of the Cherokee Nation.

Thomas Jefferson said it best when commenting on the wars of re-enslavement and the genocide upon the Native American: “We would never stop pursuing them with war while one remained on the face of the Earth.” Jefferson could have been answering the dilemma posed by another “founding father,” James Madison, who queried, “Next to the case of the black race within our bosom, that of the red on our borders is the problem most baffling in the policy of our country.”

A series of wars fought in the 1830s by the American immigrant colonialist invaders sought to destroy these maroon societies, especially in the Florida territory. President Trump’s favorite American president, Andrew Jackson, was like Trump, a land speculator and was also a slaveholder and an “Indian killer.” Hollywood, in 1951 and 1953, made two movies on the Seminole wars starring Gary Cooper and Rock Hudson. The first movie was entitled, “Seminole,” while the second was “Distant Drums.”

Eventually, peace treaties were signed, and in the 1830s Jackson ordered Indian removal to Oklahoma Territory in the dead of winter, creating the infamous “Trail of Tears.” The black Seminoles or “estelusti,” also traveled this trail. For Jackson, the removal was, in part, to open Cherokee lands for white cotton planters.

By the first decade of the 20th century, Oklahoma Indian Territory became a killing field when oil was discovered on “the red man’s land.” The famous white female historian Angie Debo chronicled the killings of Indians for their land. Hollywood again made a celluloid version of these events in its 1959 film, “The F.B.I. Story,” starring James Stewart.

Further West, California’s history is also replete with episodes of human extermination. Yes, genocide was an added feature of Indian removal. In one particular year, during the 1850s and 1860s, the California treasury paid out $1 million in reward for scalps of Modoc, Yahi, and other Californian Indians. Ishi, the last surviving Yahi, was fortunate in that UC Berkeley only studied him as a specimen.

As Thanksgiving approaches, we should reflect on this history like Thomas Jefferson, who pondered, “I tremble for my country when [I] reflect that God is just and his justice cannot sleep forever.”

This story was originally published November 22, 2019 at 8:00 AM with the headline "Thanksgiving, the trail of tears, genocide, and God’s justice."