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The modern frontier
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smillaraaq made me this Sanzo icon! So tiny and fierce.)
I've been link-hopping through![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
ibarw links tonight and was reading veejane's series on the American frontier and how the glorification of the Wild West in American pop culture tends to leave out a very large, and not especially complimentary, chunk of the story, as well as this post in cofax's LJ about removal of Native artifacts. I started to write out the following as a comment to this post of veejane's on varying definitions of "rape" on the frontier, but realized that it was totally off topic and would better belong in my own journal as its own post.
One thing about living in Alaska that's both exciting and sobering is how recent our frontier past still is. It might be comforting to think that the sort of casual, brutal racism that happened in the American West would have been over by the time the frontier pushed through to Alaska in the 1910s/20s/30s, but it wasn't. Quite a lot of that kind of thing went on in the living memory of people who are still around.
Contemporary accounts from the 19th century are, of course, history from the victors' viewpoint, with the tragedies and atrocities committed against the conquered and the powerless having to be sussed out by reading between the lines. But it's better now, right? They don't still do that, right? Um, no. They can and they do.
Just recently I was talking to my dad after reading the memoirs of a pioneer couple in the 1930s (a recent book, published within the last few years). They had known a lot of the same people my dad had met, or heard stories of, when he first moved out to rural Alaska in the early 1970s, so we were comparing notes between the book and his experiences. We talked about an old homesteader named Casper, who was presented in the book as a nice old guy who taught the young couple some quaint old trapper tricks for surviving in the wilderness. "Yeah," my dad said, "I bet it doesn't say anything in there about shooting at Native people, does it?"
I said, "Huh?" It turns out that good old Casper, the helpful neighbor, used to shoot at Native Alaskans for sport and target practice when they'd come near his homestead, which was located on the land that their village and its old cemetery used to occupy before being sold off to white settlers after the 1918 flu. You won't find that in the book.
When I was a kid, one of our white neighbors had Russian Orthodox grave markers from that very same cemetery in her garage. She showed them to me once: "Come here, look, this is very cool and you'll like it!" I was ten years old; I cringe now to remember that I did think it was cool, at that age. She'd come across them while hiking in the woods and stole them under the apparently genuine belief that it was a terrible shame they were just moldering away where no one could see them. Obviously they're much better off in her garage next to the gardening tools (and, considering that she's moved since, I have no idea where they are now, if they were sold with the house or if she took them). The people whose loved ones were buried under those markers aren't around to complain -- white settlers with rifles ran them off in the 1920s.
Visiting home just recently, I came across a box of Alaska Magazine issues from the 1970s and 1980s. It so happens that the first one I picked up, dated 1984, had an excerpt from a trapper's memoirs that promised fun and exciting stories of life in rural Alaska circa 1930/40. Sounds interesting. I started to read. To my shock, disgust and horror, it turned out to be an account of the narrator using rat poison(!) to kill a Native Alaskan trapper in retaliation for, allegedly, killing several fellow white trappers. (Which sounds to me an awful lot like defending his trapping territory from the violent white squatters who'd moved in -- especially considering other stories I've heard of the reprehensible behavior of these "innocent" trappers' ilk.) The whole thing is presented in "gee, golly, here's a nifty tale of our frontier days!" voice, ending with an editor's note to tune in next month for another interesting tale when our "hero" introduces his young bride to the wilderness.
Yeah. The guy confesses to murder in his memoirs, and it's nothing but a fun and exciting adventure story. In 1984. Incidentally, the story is online (minus the "gee golly!" editors' notes, unfortunately.
Welcome to the much more enlightened 20th century frontier.
smillaraaq made me this Sanzo icon! So tiny and fierce.)I've been link-hopping through
ibarw links tonight and was reading veejane's series on the American frontier and how the glorification of the Wild West in American pop culture tends to leave out a very large, and not especially complimentary, chunk of the story, as well as this post in cofax's LJ about removal of Native artifacts. I started to write out the following as a comment to this post of veejane's on varying definitions of "rape" on the frontier, but realized that it was totally off topic and would better belong in my own journal as its own post.One thing about living in Alaska that's both exciting and sobering is how recent our frontier past still is. It might be comforting to think that the sort of casual, brutal racism that happened in the American West would have been over by the time the frontier pushed through to Alaska in the 1910s/20s/30s, but it wasn't. Quite a lot of that kind of thing went on in the living memory of people who are still around.
Contemporary accounts from the 19th century are, of course, history from the victors' viewpoint, with the tragedies and atrocities committed against the conquered and the powerless having to be sussed out by reading between the lines. But it's better now, right? They don't still do that, right? Um, no. They can and they do.
Just recently I was talking to my dad after reading the memoirs of a pioneer couple in the 1930s (a recent book, published within the last few years). They had known a lot of the same people my dad had met, or heard stories of, when he first moved out to rural Alaska in the early 1970s, so we were comparing notes between the book and his experiences. We talked about an old homesteader named Casper, who was presented in the book as a nice old guy who taught the young couple some quaint old trapper tricks for surviving in the wilderness. "Yeah," my dad said, "I bet it doesn't say anything in there about shooting at Native people, does it?"
I said, "Huh?" It turns out that good old Casper, the helpful neighbor, used to shoot at Native Alaskans for sport and target practice when they'd come near his homestead, which was located on the land that their village and its old cemetery used to occupy before being sold off to white settlers after the 1918 flu. You won't find that in the book.
When I was a kid, one of our white neighbors had Russian Orthodox grave markers from that very same cemetery in her garage. She showed them to me once: "Come here, look, this is very cool and you'll like it!" I was ten years old; I cringe now to remember that I did think it was cool, at that age. She'd come across them while hiking in the woods and stole them under the apparently genuine belief that it was a terrible shame they were just moldering away where no one could see them. Obviously they're much better off in her garage next to the gardening tools (and, considering that she's moved since, I have no idea where they are now, if they were sold with the house or if she took them). The people whose loved ones were buried under those markers aren't around to complain -- white settlers with rifles ran them off in the 1920s.
Visiting home just recently, I came across a box of Alaska Magazine issues from the 1970s and 1980s. It so happens that the first one I picked up, dated 1984, had an excerpt from a trapper's memoirs that promised fun and exciting stories of life in rural Alaska circa 1930/40. Sounds interesting. I started to read. To my shock, disgust and horror, it turned out to be an account of the narrator using rat poison(!) to kill a Native Alaskan trapper in retaliation for, allegedly, killing several fellow white trappers. (Which sounds to me an awful lot like defending his trapping territory from the violent white squatters who'd moved in -- especially considering other stories I've heard of the reprehensible behavior of these "innocent" trappers' ilk.) The whole thing is presented in "gee, golly, here's a nifty tale of our frontier days!" voice, ending with an editor's note to tune in next month for another interesting tale when our "hero" introduces his young bride to the wilderness.
Yeah. The guy confesses to murder in his memoirs, and it's nothing but a fun and exciting adventure story. In 1984. Incidentally, the story is online (minus the "gee golly!" editors' notes, unfortunately.
Welcome to the much more enlightened 20th century frontier.
no subject
http://programs.sbs.com.au/whodoyouthinkyouare/celebrity/?id=72
This stuff was happening in the 1960's! Yes I wasn't born but that doesn't make it right. We can't move forward unless we face the past!
You get some really good responses out of me. Thank you for making me think :)
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Do you think there was racism way back when during the shift from one culture to the next?
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There's a lot of history like that around here, too. A bunch of stuff is named for "Black Hawk," who WAS NOT chief of the Fox and Sauk tribes, but protested having to leave his land back in the 1830s and brought some 1,000 people back across the Mississippi to resettle the land. They were men, women, and children of all ages, and almost all of them were killed, AFTER they turned around and tried to get back across the Mississippi (they decided to do so when the military burned down a different tribe's village that had offered them aid).
Most of the interpretive sites around here call it the "Black Hawk War" and talk of "warriors" fighting the militia. Although it's older history, one thing to note is that one of the soldiers with the government forces was Abraham Lincoln (though he didn't see any actual fighting, he re-enlisted the day after burying the dead at one of the "battles." Supposedly). A bunch of the towns around here are named for military leaders from that "war." The Wikipedia article, in one section, uses the word "massacre" nine times.