“They made us many promises,” Red Cloud acknowledged, “more than I can remember, but they never kept but one. They promised to take our land, and they took it.” (Walter Hixson, American Settler Colonialism: A History)
Yesterday Diane Leedham shared with me a harmful diagram that Ben Newmark, a UK teacher, created to teach about Indigenous and American history. Newmark frames his diagram with the question: “Why did the Dakota come into conflict with settlers on the Great Plains?”
I’m writing this knowing that I can’t do full justice to either the harm caused by this inaccurate framing of history or more importantly to the rich cultures and knowledges of different Indigenous Nations that needs to be unpacked here. For example, it’s unclear whether Newmark actually means the Dakota or the Lakota. I’m a member of the Oneida of the Thames Nation and so I won’t pretend to be an expert in either the Dakota or Lakota peoples, but rather point you to people who are experts and members of those Nations. With that said, I’m going to write a bit about what educators who genuinely want to do better can learn.
As many people promptly and patiently pointed out, Newmark causes harm through his historically inaccurate framing of the issue: “Would it not be slightly improved by asking why Europeans believed it was their right to steal a country from its people? Interrogate the cultural assumptions of the colonisers, rather than “both sides” a hostile invasion?”
In response to criticism of his diagram, Newmark released a written script, which quite frankly is just as harmful. Newmark proposes that “we need to identify the features of Dakota society, explain reasons for these features and then explain why these features clashed with European immigrant values and led to conflict.”
Through refusing to name the actual problem - settler colonialism and genocide - Newmark leaves us with a ‘clash of values’, a kind of inaccurate ‘both sides’ that we have seen a lot of recently. Rather than reflect and learn, Newmark followed up with another response where he centers his feelings and the feelings of other teachers who might create other harmful content: “The worry I have is what this means for other teachers and their engagement with controversial topics. I’m already seeing people tweeting about their fear of putting heads above parapets. “
How about the feelings and lives of Indigenous people?
I would suggest the first lesson for educators to learn is to seek out the relevant, living Indigenous voices when they teach about history and to be aware of the fact that getting the history wrong causes an ongoing harm that’s greater than any temporary feeling of shame teachers might experience.
Influential figures in UK education rallied to tell Newmark to “pay no heed” to people who are “determined to be offended as often as possible” (Carl Hendrick) and others said:
“It’s not your job to peddle other people’s ideological agendas.”
“It is a sign you have made it. People wanting to criticise so they can try and launch themselves off your success.”
“Ben there’s going to be far more people getting the benefit from you sharing your practice than not. Some people are just looking for an excuse to vent their resentment. It’s a good video and the concept map is a really helpful scaffold for framing thinking.”
And parts of Australian edutwitter followed suit:
“What makes twitter like this? The anonymity? Closed circles of groupthink?”
“Power games. That’s all this was about.”
Ironically, the criticisms of Newmark were attempts to break out of the groupthink of the power game known as settler colonialism. If educators can’t consent to learn in public (Adrienne Keene) or admit that all our faves are problematic (Ijeoma Oluo), then we’ve fallen into a deeply uneducational power game.
While Newmark told me he intended to “demonstrate the agency of the Dakota”, he fails on that account. He writes about the Dakota as if they exist only in the past and have been “obliterated”, which perpetuates the form of racism that Native people face according to Rebecca Nagle.
Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz argues that the “conflict” framework inherently fails to do justice to Indigenous agency:
“Perhaps worst of all, some claimed (and still claim) that the colonizer and colonized experienced an “encounter” and engaged in “dialogue,” thereby masking reality with justifications and ratio nalizations - in short, apologies for one-sided robbery and murder. In focusing on “cultural change” and “conflict between cultures,” these studies avoid fundamental questions about the formation of the United States and its implications for the present and future. This approach to history allows one to safely put aside present responsibility for continued harm done by that past and the questions of reparations, restitution, and reordering society.”
Newmark’s diagram strips the Dakota of their agency by casting them as the “logical product of environmental conditions”, as if they played no role in shaping themselves and the land through a rich culture. While Newmark characterizes the Dakota “systematically warlike” and “gendered”, he doesn’t apply these terms to the settlers. There’s nothing more systematically warlike than settler colonialism, which of course took very gendered forms in how Native women were/are sexualized (see, for example, the ongoing crisis of MMIWG).
According to Newmark, “misunderstandings and resentment” arose from how “Sioux and European societies had incompatible visions. Sioux wanted to live as part of the Plains and Europeans wanted to alter the Plains to fit them.” While Newmark’s blog uses ‘European immigrant’ rather than consistently sticking to ‘settler’, the historically accurate term. Lorenzo Veracini, an Associate Professor of History, argues that ‘immigrant’ and ‘settler’ are not interchangeable since “settlers systematically disavow or deny the indigenous sovereignties they encounter, either by signing treaties they do not intend to honour, or by asserting different versions of the terra nullius doctrine”.
Newmark further erases the agency of Indigenous peoples in the way he contrasts them with the “European immigrants” who had a “a much more hierarchical, tightly structured society in which people accepted centrally created laws regardless of whether they personally agreed or disagreed with them” and the “while the Dakota had the knowledge and expertise to understand the Plains as a functioning ecosystem able to maintain life for an indefinite period, European immigrants in ignorance of this saw only a wilderness awaiting cultivation and civilization”. “… “European immigrants viewed the Dakota as lazy, cowardly, childlike and unable to stick to agreements made by their Chiefs.”
Because of the received myths of settler colonialism, scholars have an obligation to vigorously contest the settler view of the continent as uncultivated and the Indigenous people as uncivilized. In her An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz corrects these misconceptions:
“In the founding myth of the United States, the colonists acquired a vast expanse of land from a scattering of benighted peoples who were hardly using it-an unforgivable offense to the Puritan work ethic. The historical record is clear, however, that European colonists shoved aside a large network of small and large nations whose governments, commerce, arts and sciences, agriculture, technologies, theologies, philosophies, and institutions were intricately developed, nations that maintained sophisticated relations with one another and with the environments that supported them. By the early seventeenth century, when British colonists from Europe began to settle in North America, a large Indigenous population had long before created “a humanized landscape almost everywhere,” as William Denevan puts it. Native peoples had created town sites, farms, monumental earthworks, and networks of roads, and they had devised a wide variety of governments, some as complex as any in the world. They had developed sophisticated philosophies of government, traditions of diplomacy, and policies of international relations. They conducted trade along roads that crisscrossed the landmasses and waterways of the American continents. Before the arrival of Europeans, North America was indeed a “continent of villages,” but also a continent of nations and federations of nations.”
At this point, I would highly encourage you to go and listen to Professor Darlene St. Clair and Tribal Archivist Tamara St. John and the various Twitter threads below.
And to follow up with various threads on Twitter: