Athena, Holding Your Hair, Whispering In Your Ear

For me a few are enough, one is enough, none is enough. This is not for the many, but for you. We are audience enough for each other.

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A hallucinatory, sad, gorgeous, and grim journey into the heart of American darkness in the 19th century, marred only by the book's incredible length. This is the fifth installment in the Seven Dreams cycle, and much like the prior entries in the series, the work is dense, literary, and rewards close attention. It is also (as usual) crammed to the brim with footnotes, original historical research, and deeply felt ethnography.

The book tells the story of the Nez Perce War from a variety of perspectives, but the two "main" narrators are Brigadier General Oliver Otis Howard and Heinmot Tooyalakekt (aka Chief Joseph) of the Nez Perce. It's hard to sum up nearly 1400 pages of narrative and notes, but perhaps the strongest impression that the book left on me was how people who were good by the standards of their time (and trying earnestly to do as their conscience commands) can nonetheless do immense evil.

General O.O. Howard supported abolition, and lost his right arm fighting for the Union in the Civil War. He also worked both privately and in government to advance the rights and opportunities of African Americans during reconstruction. For example, he founded Howard University, and headed up the Federal Freedman's Bureau against the advice of his friends. And he suffered for trying to help African Americans: when the political winds shifted he was pilloried for trying to give land and extend credit to African Americans, and when the Freedman's Bank failed, Howard was subjected to a series of politically-motivated prosecutions that had him teetering on the edge of bankruptcy for years.

But (and this is a huge "but") he was intimately involved in the removal of Native American tribes to reservations. While he attempted (and occasionally succeeded) in taking a diplomatic approach to Native American removal, he also, when diplomacy failed, prosecuted a series of bloody and genocidal wars against various Tribes in the west. Even where his diplomatic approach worked (e.g. the mostly bloodless removal of the Apaches onto a reservation), his "good" work was almost immediately undone by his superiors or successors in office (Howard in a letter to his aide-de-camp ruefully recalled "[e]very promise you and I made those Apaches ... was afterwards broken by agents of our Government.")

So you have a man who on the one hand,¹ quite literally fought for social justice at great personal cost, but on the other hand also committed hideous atrocities. From our perspective he did monstrous things, but in his own day he was viewed as, if anything, too progressive (both in his efforts to advance African Americans and in his "softness" towards the Native Americans) and he suffered for those commitments. How should we feel about such a man? The author (in his copious appendices) expresses an ambivalence that matches mine pretty well:

I myself find much to admire and compassionate in this man, who paid a significant price for his kindness to oppressed people. Many of the blunders laid at his door in the Nez Perce campaign were made by trigger-happy, undisciplined volunteers, subordinates such as Perry, and panicked civilians who demanded his protection, which he gave, after which they blamed him for not chasing the enemy more effectively. This cannot excuse his part in the unjust war against the Nez Perces, and his vindictiveness toward Joseph after the surrender; nor does the fact that had he recused himself from it, the outcome would have been no better.

[emphasis added]

That last piece, in particular, calls to mind my summer spent researching the various war crimes tribunals of the 20th century. Soldiers reluctant to perform atrocities (in several conflicts) would be told, in essence, "it will be done with you or without you." Their choices were reduced to performing atrocities or being killed and letting others do them.

But Howard's choice was nowhere near that stark: he could have easily retired rather than be personally complicit. Had he done so, though, there is no reason to believe the outcome for the Nez Perce or the Bannocks would have been any better. Howard stayed in, in part I suspect, because he thought he could do good for the Native Americans, or, at least, do better than men like Crook and Sheridan, who seemed to think that the best solution to the "Indian Problem" was direct genocide rather than removal and assimilation. But, regardless of why he stayed in, he did. And he led wars that effectively destroyed several Tribes and killed many thousand innocent Native Americans.

Howard's life is a genuinely chilling testament both to how helpless individuals sometimes are to do any good at all, and how, even with good intentions, people can do great evil. For my part, I have always found America's 19th century treatment of the Native Americans to be the saddest and most shameful chapter of our history, notwithstanding that our history has much else to be ashamed of. This book does an exceptional job of capturing it, in all it's awfulness.

In short, this a truly remarkable book, and I recommend it to anyone with the patience to finish it.