Native American Cleansing, Army-Style

Review of Keith Murray's "The Modocs and Their War".

It was a brief national sensation during the Grant administration, but now a forgotten episode in the ethnic cleansing of the West. A tiny band of obscure Native Americans in Northern California resisted the US army for a year, engaging over ten times their own numbers, turning whole army units into demoralized fleeing cowards. A splinter group of the Modocs, numbering about 65 fighting men, were induced to go to a reservation in Oregon around 1865, but naturally found the experience unappealing, and decided to return to their native lands. With the US distracted by the Civil War and its aftermath, they were left alone for several years, while the settlers that were encroaching on their lands threw up increasingly bitter complaints.

Lava beds at Tule lake

One feature of these native lands, around Tule lake on the border with Oregon, are lava beds with very rugged topography. While barren, these also make excellent natural fortifications. The Modoc band, with their leader Captain Jack, made thorough use of them to hold off a determined Army attack on January 16 and 17, 1873, inflicting about 50 casualties while suffering none of their own. In fact, the Modocs throughout this episode ran circles around their enemies in tactics, logistics, scouting, and intelligence. In contrast, the Army of the West was a notorious home to cast-offs and hirelings, with little motivation and very great expense. There was an actual F-Troop involved, bringing quite appropriately to mind the old TV show about Western Army incompetence and corruption.

Eventually, the Army brought in hundreds of soldiers, plus units of friendly Native Americans, and hunted the Modocs down after they had thoroughly exhausted their supplies, not to mention their shaman's spiritual powers. Four of the leaders were hanged, and the rest shipped off by train to a reservation in Oklahoma, where the Modoc nation survives, barely.

I highly recommend this book, which dates from 1959. It is painstakingly researched, clearly told, and well-, sometimes sardonically, written. Murray reflects on the failings of the US Army, when faced with highly motivated and guerrilla resistance. He reflects:

"When the student of the Indian troubles turns from men or events to generalizations, he is struck with the obvious fact that the most serious aspect of the Modoc War was that the government had clearly learned nothing from its experience. Even while Captain Jack was awaiting execution at Fort Klamath, the civil government of Oregon expressed concern over the actions of certain Nez Percés of Joseph's band living in the Wallowa Valley of northeastern Oregon" .. which then led to similar mistreatment, broken promises, incompetence, and a long and tragic war of resistance.

The portents for Vietnam are alarming here, not to mention the displacement and mistreatment of the Palestinians. But to stick to domestic affairs, the overall dynamic was one of moral turpitude and greed on a national level, which the Army was put in a hopeless position to manage and mitigate. While the (Northern) US is justly proud of its moral position in the Civil War, its position towards Native Americans was one of ethnic cleansing, not to say extermination. The press of manifest destiny and the homesteading / settler movement encroached relentlessly on Native American lands. Treaty after treaty was signed, then ignored or reneged, boxing Native Americans into smaller and smaller reservations. We may call them concentration camps. They are on the worst possible land, in the most remote corners of the nation.

Territories of the Nez Percé. Green shows original treaty lands,  while the inner orange shows what they are left with today.

The irony is that only a few decades after the last of the Indian wars, the country woke up, in some very small degree, to its destruction and rapine of its natural inheritance and started establishing national parks to preserve a few of the most beautiful areas. If the Native Americans had been treated with decency and fairness, with large national lands that were protected from the depredations of settlers, we would today have a much more significant system of wild areas, in addition to preserving many more Native Americans and their diverse cultures. We can only be thankful that the freed slaves were not likewise driven onto barren reservations in the West, over trails of tears.

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Truth and Enlightenment

What the Enlightenment and Modernity have wrought, and who has problems with it.

As our values of truth and honesty are slipping, it seems worthwhile to review how we got here. People generally have a tenuous relation to reality. What we see through our eyes is only its surface. We can see plants all our lives and yet have no understanding of how they work and how they came to be. Such knowledge has to come through painstaking inference into a mental model, based on clues, experiments, mutations, exceptions, and the like. Humans are champions of inference, as attested by conspiracy theories and religion- ways that our need to for theories of reality outstrips our actual knowledge, sometimes flagrantly.

Historically, there have been occasional periods when intellectuals had the prosperous and calm conditions to make progress on this front, out of the mire of preconceptions, superstitions, and traditions, and into a more measured and rational view of reality. Not that there is ever a perfectly rational view, but there are clearly more and less rational views possible. The ancient Greeks experienced one such period, founding schools of philosophy that lasted hundreds of years, and fostering the greatest scientist, teacher, and thinker of the ancient world, Aristotle. But the greatest such period was the Renaissance and subsequent Enlightenment of Western Europe, when the learning of the ancient world combined with mounting prosperity and technological development to dispell the fog of Christian theology, and made of scholarship an independent, rigorous, and institutional pursuit that continues today.

Painting is an example of this movement. The Renaissance painters learned perspective, and reveled in new powers of realistic portrayal. Realistic painting may now be old-hat, even déclassé, but after the rude iconography of the Middle Ages, it was revolutionary, reminiscent of the incredibly naturalistic statuary of Greece and Rome at their heights. Similar movements in all areas of intellectual life, including science, philology, history, politics, and social thought generally, and philosophy, brought us to modernity, where our relationship to nature is fundamentally transformed, from that of a mystified and dependent spectator, to that of a deeply understanding (if not always respectful) steward. While morals and ethics are not themselves a matter of truth and natural observation, (though they have a lot to do with integrity and honesty), the same truth-finding ethic trained on social institutions brought down, step by step, the superstitious hold of the religio-monarchical system, to the constitutional / social contract systems of today.

Francesco di Giorgio, ~1490, an idealized architectural view.

But some are not happy with this change in perspective. There were obviously losers in this process of cultural and intellectual maturation. Principally religion, which tried mightily to understand the nature of reality, while mediating our relation to it, but couldn't help putting the cart of dogma and power ahead of the horse of intellectual integrity. For honesty and truth begin in the method of getting there. True humility, not the false and preening humility of putting one's god before all other gods and considerations, is the first step to being able to even see the subtle stirrings of nature, and then to follow them out. Charles Darwin was orginally intended for the parsonage, but as he unfurled the relentless mechanism of biology, and experienced its stabs in his own life, he ended up an evident atheist, woken up to a more sober, mature, and we might say enlightened, view of our nature and situation.

Reality isn't always pretty. Facing it takes fortitude and work. Thus the astonishingly durable, if slipping, hold of religion into this, the twenty-first century. Thus also the attraction of fake news and con artists, not to mention religion. Far easier to have comfort and hope in false and familiar beliefs than to accept uncertainty and ignorance, and do the work required to resolve them, even partially. Who would have thought that, at the so-called end of history, when the US won the cold war, and spread its blend of capitalism, relative freedom, and intellectual ambition across the world, that such moral rot would set in here at home, with our plutocrats, (with the connivance of Russia, of all things!), standing at the head of an army of resentful religious traditionalists, straining every nerve to spread distrust, small-mindedness, and lies over the land?

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The Purpose-Driven Pastor

Robert Price answers Rick Warren, in The Reason-Driven Life.

We are all seekers for purpose and meaning. But what happens if someone has the answer? We react, naturally, with a good bit of suspicion and skepticism. For we know instinctively that this search is not only difficult and unlikely to yield definitive answers, but also highly personal. Those peddling pat answers and coookie-cutter solutions may have confidence, but rarely have true answers.

So it is with Rich Warren and his book The Purpose-Driven Life. This has been a fundamentalist staple now for one and a half decades, with sales to rival the Bible itself. "You Were Planned for God's Pleasure." Wow! But what pleasures God? Well, now that we are done with sacrificing chickens and committing genocide, it seems that God is most pleasured by people joining fundamentalist churches like Rick Warren's, imagining they are abasing themselves before God, while lording it over all the sorry sinners who haven't gotten the message. Then they are sent out to spread the word and get more people to join up. Warren's ultimate message is to be a drone for the church: "You Were Made for a Mission". As Robert Price quotes:

'World-class Christians are the only fully alive people on the planet.' The outrageous arrogance of this insane boast never seems to dawn on him. Eric Hoffer has Warren pegged: 'The impression somehow prevails that the true believer, particularly the religious individual, is a humble person. The truth is that the surrendering and humbling of the self breed pride and arrogance. The true believer is apt to see himslef as one of the chosen, the salt of the earth, the light of the world, a prince disguised in meekness, who is destined to inherit the earth and the kingdom of heaven too. He who is not of his faith is evil; he who will not listen shall perish.'

But Robert Price isn't just taking pot-shots. He is a post-fundamentalist, biblical scholar, and church-goer, as well as an atheist. He has great respect and love for the Bible, enabling a critique that makes Warren's literalism and pretensions to a biblical foundation ludicrous. Time and again, citations that seem so pat are exposed as far more complex, even contradictory, both among themselves, and to the points Warren is making. Warren quotes: "He is a God who is passionate about his relationship with you" Exodus 34:14. But his source is a custom version of the Bible for Warren's fundamentalists. The real translation is " The LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God", which lies among a discussion of how the Israelites should storm and desecrate the shrines of other religions.

Likewise, Warren cites "What pleases the LORD more: burnt offerings and sacrifices, or obedience to his voice? It is better to obey than to sacrifice." 1 Samuel 15:22. The language here is accurate, but this is no invitation to tea and scones, or to a Saddleback encounter group. The obedience demanded in this passage is genocide against the Amalek. One wonders whether this is a god that Warren's parishoners have any knowledge of or desire to get to know. The fact is that the Bible is a cobbled-together melange of historical and poetic texts, riven with inconsistencies, cross-purposes, and moral evil. To believe that one can take it literally, as Warren does, (most hilariously with the Noah story), is intellectually dishonest and incoherent.

And that is the fundamental lesson, in this age of fake news. The internet was hardly the first method of purveying falsehoods. Historians such as Homer and Herodotus never let truth get in the way of a good story, and standards were no higher among the many ancient story tellers and scribes who contributed to the Bible. They all had agendas, as does Rick Warren. Their narratives often begin in fact, and then veer into myth and fantasy, as most evident in the book of Revelations. The whole Jesus story is so full of archtypes and "purpose-driven" fables that it is impossible at this point to separate anything out that might have had to do with an actual person.

No, the Bible is an amazing cultural document, from our brutish and benighted, yet hopeful, forebears. It documents substantial moral and intellectual progress on its pages, in its transition towards a more or less pacifist dispensation (though whether that was by choice, or by Roman force is another matter). We have continued that progress in the modern age by, ironically, leaving its fervid fantasies behind and basing our intellectual life on the firmer foundations of empiricism and humanistic empathy. Fundmentalists work double-time to "prove" that their literal views of God and the Bible are true, but they are doomed to failure. That general intellectual failure is seen both in their amazingly corrupt bargain with Donald Trump and the revanchist Republicans, and in the declining numbers of parishoners in the pews. The decline of religion has been far slower than many had imagined, given that its intellectual foundations have been defunct for centuries, but is ever so slowly coming to pass, however purposeful its pastors.

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