... Slate Live at Politics and Prose podcast
Glenn Frankel on his new book 'The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend
Slate podcasts are my lifeline to the world of the mind these days. When you are banned from watching television by the American Association of Pediatrics and every book or magazine you want to read is knocked out of your hand and chewed on or torn, a podcast can be the closest thing you get to intelligent conversation with an adult. Slate podcasts are great because of the diversity of the material they cover and their brilliant way of unearthing random cultural artefacts that I would have no awareness of otherwise.
I'd never heard of Glenn Frankel. I'd only just about heard of 'The Searchers', the John Ford film starring John Wayne and Natalie Wood. I had heard the story of Cynthia Ann Parker, however, via another podcast I often listen to 'Stuff You Missed in History Class'. This podcast talks about the myths and lies surrounding Cynthia Ann Parker's story that Frankel has uncovered in his book about the movie, 'The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend'. One of most interesting aspects of the podcasts for me was the detail that Frankel goes into about Comanche / settler relations in the mid-1800s. The nature of the relationship was fraught of course because of the Texas-Indian Wars at the time but it struck me at the same time how much of a relationship of equals existed between the two populations. The settlers feared the Comanche people as much as the Comanche feared the settlers and raids happened on both sides of the divide.
This surprised me because the usual story of the settlement of the US and the displacement of Native Americans is one of genocide, oppression and expulsion, starting out with the purchase of Manhattan island for a few beads and ending up with smallpox blankets and the Trail of Tears and reservations. What has surprised me about the history I'm discovering since coming to the US is just how much the Native Americans fought back. There is not just victimization and sorrow but also fighting and uprisings. Native Americans provided resistance to European settlement where they could and fought hard for their rights and freedom.
The Sioux Uprising of 1862 in Minnesota is a good example of Native Americans trying to fight back, rather than just pursue the path of deal-making with the settlers. After a number of deals with the Sioux were broken by settlers and they suffered from hunger and overcrowding as a result, a group of young men, fed up of trying to live alongside the settlers, raided a settler's house, killing the owners, triggering a war between the settlers and the Sioux, as years of resentment bubbled to the surface. The Sioux won some of the battles in the war with the settlers but ultimately were outnumbered and pushed out of their lands. While the Sioux may have lost the war with the settlers, they did win some of the battles and were a force to be reckoned with.
This is one area of American history I would love to learn more about, the history of Native American resistance. There are so many fascinating characters who emerge in these stories - Little Crow, the leader of the Sioux at the time of the uprising, Sitting Bull, the leader of the Sioux during the later Sioux wars, Quanah Parker, the son of Cynthia Ann Parker and a Comanche chief, who became leader of the Comanche. Dee Brown's 'Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee' was top of my list for American history books to read before I moved here but I was disappointed by the book once I started reading. It has interesting historical material but it is written in a very sentimental style, almost attempting to fake some kind of authentic Native American voice (e.g. 'White Man come, he bring suffering and sorrow' etc) , which got on my nerves after a while, especially since Dee Brown didn't have a drop of Native American blood in him, as far as I know. The book bemoans the fate of the Native Americans and portrays their history as tragedy but it didn't tell me much about Native American life at the time and how the different tribes used different strategies to survive and deal with European settler-colonialism.
I am going to keep looking for the right kind of history book that covers stories like those of Quanah Parker and Little Crow in a way that does honor to their memory rather than just lamenting their fates as victims of colonialism.
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