Romanticizing ethnic cleansing

This 1907 photo by Roland W. Reed is identified as an Ojibway or Chippewa Indian girl & it’s interesting for many reasons. This is another instance of that peculiar racist & colonial phenomenon where the oppressed are renamed by the conquerers. We are told Ojibway (in Minnesota) & Chippewa (in Canada) are anglicized versions of what the tribe called themselves, which is Anishinaabeg. Why not just call them by their proper name? This renaming must be part of the process of stripping people of their identity & of demeaning them. That’s why reclaiming their own names is part of the struggle of the oppressed.

There are volumes of these kinds of photos taken at the dawn of the 20th century after decades of savage wars & the decisive defeat of Plains Indian tribes (west of the Mississippi) which corralled them on to barren reservations. After the end of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln initiated a campaign against the Plains tribes & sent the US Army led by former Northern Yankee generals like George Custer (not Confederate generals) to wage war on them. That history is not taught in US schools; what most kids know about Native American history is the racist caricature of cowboy movies & sentimental Thanksgiving mythology. Since the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s there is plenty of valuable scholarship about Indian history & the Indian wars of extermination which began with the arrival of the Pilgrims. (Unfortunately, there’s plenty of schlock history too.) But in US schools, Native American history is still not taught.

What’s important about the immense catalog of thousands of photos taken of Native Americans at this time is that the photographers were commissioned & financed by figures like J.P. Morgan who in the spirit of anthropology wanted to document Native Americans before the ethnic cleansing was complete & they were extinct. Although portrayed with great dignity, this was how the photographers idealistically posed & imagined the “noble savage” & not how they found them living in squalor on reservations after decades of massacres, genocides, & barbaric wars. They were people still reeling from the savageries of genocide. These photos are now mostly consigned to coffee table books & National Geographic exhibits.

Although US school kids still do not study Native American history, Nazis & Zionists are among those who have studied US methods of ethnic cleansing developed in a few hundred years of Indian wars. An essential part of social transformation in this country is studying & reclaiming that history--not to wallow in guilt about what cannot be changed but to understand what was, what is, & what must be changed. The Dutch philosopher, Spinoza, said we study the past neither to laugh nor to cry but to understand. And of course the only point of understanding is to imagine & create a better world suitable for all peoples to live together as brothers & sisters.

(Photo by Roland W. Reed)