Tag: Native People

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Kānaka Maoli

Kamehameha the Great, King of the Sandwich Islands, c. 1816. Oil on canvas, Anonymous copy, Chinese. The Boston Athenaeum.

There are 1.4 million people in Hawaii, of whom 960 thousand, nearly 70 percent, live on Oahu. It’s the most diverse state in the nation, with a population that’s 25 percent white, 2 percent black, and 37 percent Asian (Filipino, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Indian). More than 23 percent of the population reports its ethnicity as multiracial. About 10 percent of the population is Hispanic. About 10 percent of the population is Native Hawaiian, Kānaka Maoli. 

Hawaii is in the Pacific Ocean, 3800 miles and four time zones from Houston. It’s roughly the same latitude as Merida in the Yucatan. There are eight major islands, one of which, Ni’ihau, is privately owned, and one of which, Kaho’olawe, was used until 1990 as a military bombing range. Nobody lives there. Molokai was a leper colony. Lanai, Oahu. Kauai, Maui, and the Big Island, Hawaii, are all  tourist destinations. The largest city, Honolulu, is on Oahu.  

The principal businesses are sugar, pineapples, military, and tourists. 

Hawaii was first settled in the 13th century by Polynesian immigrants, likely from the Marquesan Islands and the Society Islands, more than 2000 miles away. In England, King John was signing the Magna Carta. Robin Hood was in Sherwood Forest, or not. Meanwhile the original settlers of Hawaii were traveling 2000 miles by double-hulled canoe.

First representation of polynesien outrigger canoe made for the exploration of near islands
Biblioteque Nationale de France

Or maybe it was settled in the 5th century, when Rome was withdrawing from Britain and the Anglo-Saxons were coming in from mainland Europe. Arthur was king. Or not. 

Indigenous Hawaii is Polynesian, as is a vast settled area of the Pacific. With the Easter Islands, New Zealand, and Hawaii as the three corners, the Polynesian Triangle, the area settled by Polynesians, covers a whole lot of blue on a map. The Polynesian languages are derived from a Southeast Asia language group out of Taiwan, but genetic evidence traces Polynesian origins to earlier Asian migrants to New Guinea. 

File:Polynesia-triangle.png
The three corners of the Polynesian Triangle: 1: Hawaii, United States; 2: New Zealand; 3: Easter Island, Chile; Other island groups: 4: Samoa; 5: Tahiti, French Polynesia. From Wikimedia Commons, by user Kahuroa. 

Captain James Cook put Hawaii on navigation charts in 1798. He had already made first contact with Australia and circumnavigated New Zealand (to prove it wasn’t part of a larger, undiscovered southern continent), but on his third voyage Cook went and got himself killed by the Hawaiians. It was very unfortunate for all concerned, but particularly for Cook.

Death of Captain James Cook, oil on canvas by George Carter, 1783, Bernice P. Bishop Museum

Before 1798, before 1820 really, the pre-literate history of Hawaii is mostly oral tradition, archaeology, and speculation, just like everyplace else with an indigenous population. Hawaii is different though because the first contacts were well-recorded. It helped that the New England missionaries and their descendants lived in the Hawaiian Kingdom for 70-odd years, plus the Hawaiians themselves quickly became literate. In the 19th Century, Hawaii may have been the most literate country on earth. They also surfed. 

Even after contact the Hawaiians were polytheistic, polygamous, radically hierarchical, and incestuous (at least among the royalty). Historically they had practiced slavery, infanticide, human sacrifice, and capital punishment for breaking the codes of conduct, the kapus, that governed society and religion. It was a jolly sort of place, even if women could be put to death for eating with men, or for eating a pork chop. The last recorded human sacrifice occurred in 1809. 

Notwithstanding speculation about the modern Islanders’ fondness for Spam, the native Hawaiians did not practice cannibalism. They did eat dogs. 

Between 1782 and 1810, Kamehameha the Great waged a war of unification against the other high chiefs, and consolidated island governance. Whalers arrived in 1819, and for the next 50 years Hawaii was a center for Pacific whaling. The same year, Kamehameha II, Liholiho, sat down to eat with women and ended the kapu prohibitions.  He also disbanded the priesthood–the kahuna, both big and small–and destroyed the polytheistic shrines.  

In 1820, Congregational missionaries arrived from New England,  and they and their descendants would wield an outsized influence on the Islands. They brought education, which many Hawaiians took to, and they brought Christianity, which many Hawaiians also took to. The New Englanders were disturbed to find Kamehameha II married to multiple wives, including both his half sister, his first wife, and his sister, his second wife. Apparently that sort of thing wasn’t common in New England, particularly among Congregationalists.

Daniel and Charlotte Dole, c. 1853. 

For a place that developed the ukulele, Hawaii in the 19th century must have been pretty tense. There were the rigid, pious, and fanatical missionaries; there were the licentious whalers and merchant ships coming into port looking to have a good time (and having it); there were the Native Hawaiians who were being marginalized by land privatization and population changes. Large numbers of Japanese and Chinese workers were brought in as agricultural laborers. Commercial interests–as often as not the enterprises of the missionary descendants–were beginning to dominate the economic life of the islands.  To top it off there was international intrigue. Hawaii didn’t have to be American. It could have been French, British, Russian, even Japanese. It could have been Hawaiian.

Sanford B. Dole, c. 1902, Library of Congress

I thought that Texas was the only Republic to enter the Union, and here late in life I’ve realized I was misled. Hawaii was (1) a kingdom under the House of Kamehameha and then the House of Kalākaua, and then (2) the Republic of Hawaii under its president, Sanford Dole. The monarchies weren’t exactly paragons of governmental virtue, but their overthrow involved sugar tariffs, rich sugar planters, the price of sugar, landowning descendants of missionaries, and price subsidies paid to Louisiana sugar interests and sugar beets in Colorado.  Did I mention sugar? I’m sure there were some Dole pineapples in there somewhere. Hawaii was finally brought into the States as a territory in 1898, 100 years after Captain Cook, because our destiny as a world power required a powerful navy, and Hawaii was a key to a powerful navy.  Really.


Liliuokalani of Hawaii. Frontispiece photograph from Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen, Liliuokalani (1898)

By 1900, there were only about 30,000 Native Hawaiians. When Captain Cook reached the islands, the population estimates are from 100,000 to one million, but the archaeological record supports a population of up to 300,000. There hadn’t really been wars to reduce the population, not after Kamehameha the Great anyway, but there was plenty of disease, measles, tuberculosis, influenza, and whatnot, particularly tied to ships transporting miners for the 1840s California gold rush. There was also plenty of intermarriage, so that the 20 percent multiracial ethnicity will include many Hawaiian descendants. There was at least some out-migration. With a current Hawaiian-only population of about 140,000, the Native Hawaiian population has grown since the end of the monarchy. 

There is a modern Hawaiian separatist movement, or a lot of them, and unlike other indigenous American people Native Hawaiians do not have sovereignty, so there are also native sovereignty movements (which I think may be different from the separatist movements). 

What’s all this got to do with fishing? No idea. 
 

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Indian Territory

Map of the Indian Territory, 1892, Library of Congress

I have a new friend, at least on Facebook. We sat at the same table at a lunch, and then last Saturday night we were at the same party. I talked to her husband (who was from Salt Lake) about where we should fly fish in Utah. He suggested Provo.

She works for the Anti-Defamation League. In the interim between our meetings eleven Jewish congregants at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Congregation were murdered. It had been a brutal week, and maybe particularly so for her. This week’s been brutal too, with another mass shooting in California. We are a violent people.

Because of her work I suspect that more than most folk she is attuned to racial and ethnic incongruities, ranging from unintentional slights to out-and-out violence. At one point in our conversation I must have mentioned we were going to fish in Oklahoma, because I said the word Indian and I think she cringed. A few sentences later she said Native American. I took it as a gentle correction.

For most states, Virginia say, or Washington or Wisconsin or Texas, first people history is a repetitious prologue. Before X happened, there were Native Americans: Caddo, Wichita, Comanche, Cherokee, Umpqua, Powhatan, Ojibwe, Fox and Sauk, Alabama, Coushata, Seminole, Karankawa . . . Everywhere there is that iteration, speculative and archeological, and then X happened, X being when the Americans came, or the British or the French or the Spanish came, and the part of the story about the indigenous people ends.

Where did they go? For most states, after the prologue, it’s oblivion. Maybe extermination by violence and disease, or to smaller and ever more confined spaces, but someplace out of the way, someplace else. In San Antonio once, talking to a federal park ranger at a Spanish mission, he pointed across an open field to the local Hispanic neighborhoods and said that’s where I grew up and that’s where the native population is still living. He said that they, part of his ancestors, were incorporated into Spanish mission life. Early Thomas Jefferson thought the answer for the Indian conflict was for the Native Americans to become farmers and join into the new way of life. Tell that to the Cherokee. Late Thomas Jefferson pushed for removal. Mostly late Thomas Jefferson won. 

 In Oklahoma, A History, Messrs. Baird and Goble write that every place has its birth story, and sometimes more than one. They suggest three for Oklahoma: the forced immigration of the Five Tribes; the Oklahoma land rush; and the oil boom.  Of course before the five tribes, before the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole, there were already Apache, Arapaho, Comanche, Kiowa, Osage, and Wichita in Oklahoma. Even in Oklahoma there is that first people prologue.

National Park Service, Trail of Tears National Historic Trail

The problem with referencing Indians, whether the term of choice is American Indian or Native American or Indian, it is always imposed. Among American indigenous people there was never an Indian. There were Yamparika Comanche, or there were Powhatan, or there were Karankawa. Any label that suggests a unified indigenous people is an exonym, and any one is as artificial as any other. Every one of the labels has its critics, but each also has its supporters. Columbus’ word wasn’t so much a misnomer as a creation, and it’s useful and ubiquitous.

For most of us there aren’t day-to-day reminders of American Indian history and culture. Unlike, say, statues of Robert E. Lee, we don’t have many monuments about that other national tragedy. Oklahoma is one we’ve got, but if I think about Oklahoma (and I don’t generally) it’s as a collection of tropes: red state, cowboys, oil, tornadoes, Dust Bowl, and Indians. Tropes are useful as shorthand for things that are more complex, but only to the limits of our own understanding.  For Indian, the complex thing contained in the Oklahoma trope is the geographical summation of every betrayal, every displacement and epidemic, every conflict, but there are the Native Americans who are there now, and whose families have now been there for generations. There are people who are Oklahomans.

S.C. Gwynne writes about the Comanche as cruel and violent. He writes that they were finally confined to Oklahoma only because they came across another people equally cruel and violent: Texans. The Searchers after all is not bad history. But Texans were not uniquely violent. There was plenty enough violence to go around. Oklahoma is one of the proofs. There are now 39 recognized tribes shoehorned into Oklahoma, from the Comanche in the southwest to the Cherokee in the northeast, and every tribe’s place in Oklahoma is both a conclusion and a continuation.

Did I mention before that we are still violent?

Usually I’m pretty comfortable dealing with information, sorting through and coming out the other side with a notion of what happened.  I can’t seem to do that with Oklahoma. I have only a vague notion of what happened to its first people, what happened with the forced immigration of the other tribes, the betrayal of the white land rush, and how that fits together now: those are matters for real and dedicated scholars.  All I can do is look at the mess with confusion as to the details, and a bit more knowledge that among those Oklahoma tropes there is something important, and something worth remembering.  

Creek Orphans Home Baseball Team, 1904, Oklahoma Historical Society, Alice Robertson Collection.

 * * *

There’s a cold front in, with a heavy north wind and daytime temperatures in the 50s.  Our skiff is in the shop, and the temperature’s dropped too much too fast for bass or sunfish. The first stocking of trout in the Guadalupe isn’t until next weekend (when we’ll be in Oklahoma). We drove to Surfside Beach to check the jetty: I had wanted to try spey rods in the surf.

Didn’t happen.  I have never seen either the surf or the tide so high. 

On the other hand, Killens Barbecue isn’t really out of the way coming back from Surfside. And by 2:30 there was hardly any line.  We did catch it at a bit of a lull though. 

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Pikeminnow

Kris caught a northern pikeminnow (Ptychocheilus oregonensis) in Oregon. Pikeminnows are the largest member of the minnow family, Cyprinidae. It’s a native of Oregon and of the Columbia drainage. It’s nativity is right there in the species name: oregonensis.

The current world record pikeminnow weighed over 13 pounds, and Kris’s fish was small, no more than half a pound. Other than being caught, the fish was in no way remarkable.  It’s apparently common to catch big pikeminnows, as long or longer than 24 inches and weighing more than three pounds. They can live longer than 15 years, and they reach sexual maturity from three to eight years. They spawn in the spring, and females can release up to 30,000 eggs.

Even though they’re not an invasive species, they are a fish of “ecological  concern.” They are voracious piscivores, thrive in the dammed Columbia drainage, and are hell on smolt salmon. Hell and dam. They’re ugly, with their ragged scales and harsh jaw. They’re not considered edible, though somebody surely eats them. Anglers hate them. If ever there was a trash fish, it’s the pikeminnow.

Before the northern pikeminnow was the northern pikeminnow it was the northern squawfish. It was renamed by the Names of Fishes Committee of the American Fisheries Society. A bit later the same Committee renamed the Jewfish as the goliath grouper.  Goliath grouper is a pretty good name, certainly a better name than Jewfish, but if I were a pikeminnow I’d feel slighted.

Florida goliath grouper, Jordan, David Starr (1907) Fishes, New York City, NY: Henry Holt and Company

The fish is also known as the Columbia River dace, and Columbia River dace would have been a pretty cool name. But no. Pikeminnow.

“Squawfish” may have originally derived from squawkfish, from the noise a pikeminnow makes when caught. Apparently American Indian names for the fish are often onomatopoeic. That’s not the name that caught on though. “Squaw” is probably derived from a Massachusett language word for woman, but it is considered particularly derisive, connoting subordinate status, sexual availability, stupidity, and squalor. Nobody needs that around. 

Columbia River dace, Evermann, Barton W. (1893) Reconnaissance of the streams and lakes of western Montana and northwestern Wyoming, Bulletin of the United States Fish Commission, vol. 11, 1891, Government Printing Office 

In addition to the fish, there are plenty of geographic references to squaw, most notably Squaw Valley Ski Resort in California, and the Names of Fishes Committee may not get around to those any time soon. Of course there’s plenty of uses of Indian identity that are generally considered offensive: the Washington Redskins, the Cleveland Indians’ Chief Wahoo, and the Atlanta Braves’ tomahawk chop just to name three.  I’m personally offended by the tomahawk chop, though it’s probably because I saw it so often when the Astros and the Braves were in the same league. The Braves had Smoltz, Glavine, and Maddux. We could have used some pikeminnow for Smoltz.

There’s also Elizabeth Warren’s claim to Indian ancestry, which the Cherokee Nation, one of the three recognized Cherokee tribes, now finds offensive. Warren is originally from Oklahoma, and last week she released genetic testing data after a dare by President Trump. It’s a thing for whites (and blacks) in Oklahoma and the South to claim some trace of Native American ancestry, particularly Cherokee, and for such stories to be part of Oklahoma family lore. Senator Warren’s claim should surprise no one who knows her home, and it is the Oklahomanness of her claim that interests me. The problem with her claim is that she listed herself as a minority based on her Native American heritage in an Association of American Law Schools directory, and Harvard briefly touted her as a minority based on her claims. She did not, as the more inflammatory accounts state, list herself as Native American on job or law school applications.

1983 University of Houston Law Center Yearbook

Based on the published reports of her DNA testing, Senator Warren’s genetic claims are remote, but they are there. Senator Warren could claim she likely had ancestors who were Cherokee, just as I could claim to have likely had ancestors who were French. It would be overdone for me to claim to be French, but growing up in a culture, Oklahoma, where that heritage was peculiarly valued, the claim is common, even among those (unlike Senator Warren), who don’t have Senator Warren’s genetics.  That for whatever reason is Oklahoman.

Kris is a big fan of Senator Warren, having had her as a law school professor long before the Senator’s Harvard days. Kris thought her brilliant, passionate, and an excellent teacher.  I never had her as a teacher, don’t have strong opinions about her, and only note that the Senator’s Oklahomanness will follow her into 2020.

After I first posted this I came back and rewrote it because of Kris’s fondness for Senator Warren.  My original tone was unnecessarily glib and dismissive, and didn’t really say what I wanted to say.  What I wanted to say was that white and black Oklahoma has a history that is so intertwined with American Indian Oklahoma that they believe, true or no, that they are fundamentally, at their literal roots, a part of it.

In the interim, the principal chief of the third major Cherokee tribe, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, the Cherokees who never left North Carolina for Oklahoma, were more circumspect and fair in their statements about Senator Warren’s genetic announcement. “Like many other Americans, she has a family story of Cherokee and Delaware ancestry and evidence of Native ancestry.” She had not claimed tribal membership.

“Senator Warren has demonstrated her respect for tribal sovereignty and is an ally of the Eastern Band. As such, we support her and other allies — regardless of party — who promote tribal sovereignty, tribal self-determination, and protection of Cherokee women.”

Meanwhile there is a bounty paid by the Bonneville Power Authority on pikeminnows caught in the Columbia River. As I said, they are not a sport fish, so the bounty is to encourage anglers to target and remove large numbers of fish.  One to 25 fish pays $5 per fish, 26 to 200 fish pays $6 per fish, 201 fish and up pays $8 per fish. A tagged fish is worth $500. There are stories of fisher folk making a living on the pikeminnow bounty. Tempting.

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Oklahoma

That novel about Oklahomans got it wrong. The Joads left their home near Sallisaw, Oklahoma, two-and-a-half hours east of Oklahoma City, to escape the Dust Bowl. It was the middle of the Great Depression, sure, but our last great ecological disaster was in the Panhandle of Oklahoma (and the Panhandle of Texas, and parts of Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, and New Mexico). The Dust Bowl wasn’t Sallisaw’s disaster, because Sallisaw is in the eastern part of the state. The coming great ecological disaster may be more widespread, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. It’ll get here on its own time

Rothstein, Arthur, 1915-1985, Son of farmer in dust bowl area. Cimarron County, Oklahoma, 1936, Farm Security Administration – Office of War Information Photograph Collection (Library of Congress)

Oklahoma geography is mostly some timber and hilly stuff then variations on plains. Moving from east to west, first come the Ozarks and the Ouachitas, then plains, including a lot of rolling prairie. Finally there are the High Plains in the Panhandle, the Dust Bowl land, the flat mostly treeless land that was once grassland, then wheat, then dust.

Oklahoma was first seen by Spanish explorers, then French traders, and was finally purchased by the United States as part of the Louisiana Purchase. It’s  an extractive industry state, oil and gas, gas and oil. There are some odd bits of small mountains in the state, the Ozarks, the Ouachitas,  the Arbuckles, and the Wichitas. Small accidental ranges pop up out of the prairie and the Cross Timbers.  Because of the granite in the bits of mountain it’s a great place to buy a tombstone.

Stereographic Card, Fancy “roping” at a cowboys’ camp, Oklahoma, C. 1905, Underwood & Underwood, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

It’s beautiful but subject to tornadoes. The wind really does come roaring down the plains.

I grew up 19 miles south of the Red River, about as close as you can get to a place and not be there. I know Oklahoma as well as anywhere that’s not Texas. We shared tornadoes. I had some great grandparents and great-great grandparents who made it to Oklahoma, and my grandparents, Arthur and Eva, were married in Ryan, Oklahoma, in 1908, a year after statehood. They apparently got there after the Indian Territory opened to white settlement in 1898, so they weren’t Sooners, but pretty soons. When my grandparents married he was 22, she was 17. They returned to Texas to farm dry-land cotton in the west, just outside the territory covered by the Dust Bowl, just outside the area that would have made us Texas Joads.

National Photo Company, Quanah Parker, Comanche Indian Chief, 1909, Smithsonian Bureau of Ethnology, Library of Congress

If Oklahoma was late to white settlement, it had plenty of previous traffic. In addition to the Spanish explorers and French traders, there were indigenous people. After California, Oklahoma has the largest American Indian population of the states, 9.2 percent of the total population of 3.7 million. There are 39 different recognized tribal headquarters in the state. Some of the tribes, the Wichita, Kiowa, Osage, Caddo, and Comanche, are considered indigenous. Most tribes came from throughout the South and Midwest, displaced into Oklahoma. Oklahoma was the end-point of the  Trail of Tears. Tribal names are the place names of eastern and central Oklahoma.

Indians and cowboys, cowboys and Indians. A cousin in Oklahoma, my mother’s second cousin, was inducted into the Cowgirl Hall of Fame in Fort Worth for founding the American Paint Horse Association. My mother said she won the Nobel Prize for Animal Husbandry, and maybe she said it first as a joke but as she aged she thought it was true. When I was 10, I shook Roy Rogers’ hand at the American Indian Exposition in Anadarko. Then it was called the Oklahoma Indian Pow Wow.

Even where I grew up on the correct side of the border there were names that came from the tribes: Wichita Falls, Wichita County, Quanah, Nocona, Comanche . . . My high school yearbook was the Yamparika, named after a a band of the Comanche. Nocona’s wife (and Quanah’s mother), Cynthia Anne Parker, was recaptured 40 miles west of my home at the Battle of Pease River. His father, Peta Nocona, was killed there, or was probably killed there anyway. The manager of Tri-State Lumber was known as Quanah Parker Jr. and was rumored to be one of Quanah Sr’s descendants. Quanah Sr., handsome, charismatic, and the last Comanche war chief, was a bit of a polygamist, with numerous wives, children, and grandchildren, so maybe the descendant part was true.

Meanwhile Oklahoma voted for Trump in the 2016 election. It is a deeply conservative state, religious, middle class, tied to oil and gas, but not as white-alone as one would think: in the 2010 census the white-alone population (which excludes Hispanics) was only about 67 percent of the total. Hispanics are the next largest population group, with 10.6 percent, more than double the 5.2 percent Hispanic population counted in the 2000 census. Trump carried the state by 65 percent. Oklahoma is reddest in the Dust Bowl counties, but also the least populated. It’s pinkest–no place is blue–in the Tulsa and Oklahoma City/Norman areas. I don’t know how Trump fared with Native Americans, though I could see how Make America Great Again would have a certain appeal. I doubt it would mean the same thing though.

Lee, Russell, 1903-1986, Roughnecks leaning on the wrench to tighten the joint in the pipe, oil well, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, 1939, Farm Security Administration – Office of War Information Photograph Collection, Library of Congress.