Chancellor Fariña

I will admit to having been only hopeful about where our schools will go under Mayor Bill de Blasio.  He has a varied group of supporters.  He had to in order to win election, especially by a landslide.  Some of those supporters are advocates of corporate educational "reform."  Now, with the appointment of Carmen Fariña, I am upgrading from hopeful to optimistic.

The challenge for New York City public schools is that anybody who looks back to a "golden age" is delusional or lying.  That is why people can still yap about a "failed status quo" and not  mean Michael Bloomberg's TWELVE YEARS of mayoral control.  They are still harping on the perceived failures of the Board of Education, which is a phenomenon of the last century.  They conveniently ignore the endless structural upheavals, the continual moving targets and the lack of any measurable progress.  Mayor Mike and his chancellors have come up with an ever-changing and laughably complex calculus for giving letter grades to schools, teachers and principals.  But they have issued letter grades to themselves based on their own purely subjective evaluations: "Things are goin' pretty well; I'd like them to be a little better.  I think I'll call that an A-."

So we have had the attorney for Citigroup, a Justice Department attorney, a magazine publisher, and the president of the NY Urban League running our schools.  We have not had a teacher.  Carmen Fariña is a teacher.  She was a classroom teacher for 22 years before becoming an administrator.  She was principal of PS6 for ten years before she became a district superintendent.  Compare that to Shael Polakow-Suransky, our current first deputy chancellor, who was put in that position as "an experienced educator" to compensate for Cathie Black's utter and complete lack of any experience in the public sector, not to mention education.

Shael was a teacher for six years, and assistant principal for a year, and a principal for two.  He has been a senior executive at Tweed longer than all that put together.  He is precisely the kind of educational leader who has no personal knowledge of the history of the system or of previous initiatives to improve the schools and how they fared.

The DOE is a huge and self-perpetuating bureaucracy.  The endless forcing out of any senior people with institutional memory means that it is no longer so important for a successful leader to know the cast of characters.  Right now, many of them, from principal up, see this as a short stop in their career, like Teach for America teachers who want to "do good" for two years before moving on to their real lives.  That means we have principals, network leaders and deputy chancellors who are -- for all intents and purposes -- temps.

What has that meant for kids?  I will give one quick example.  Early in the Bloomberg era, Joel decided that off-campus suspension sites were a scam.  He closed all of them.  He dispersed their administrators and teachers -- the people who knew how to educate a rotating cast of kids who were in trouble and needed lots  of extra personal attention -- into the other schools.  The theory was that schools should hold on to their own suspended kids and keep them in the building.  I don't need to explain why this is a bad idea because Chancellor Klein himself decided six months later that it would be a great idea to create suspension sites!  Only now it had to be done from scratch, as if nobody had ever tried this before in the history of the universe, because he had squandered all the human capital the city of New York had amassed for accomplishing this task.

It is probably unfair to ask Carmen Fariña to come back and fix this mess at this point in her life.  But if you do the math it is clear that an entire generation of leadership has been lost.  A child entering Mike Bloomberg's school system as a kindergartner has now graduated high school having known thirteen years of endless structural upheavals, the continual moving targets and the lack of any measurable progress.  (Oh, did I say that already.  I can't say it enough.)  But the same is true for a fifty-year old school leader.  If they taught for 15 years before going into school leadership, they have now had to undergo 13 years of etc. see above.  Oh yes.  And threats to their livelihood.  And enforced sycophancy.  And -- all too likely -- scheming to meet numerical targets by any means necessary.  They have been rendered unsuited to actually lead a school system of one million pupils.

We need courage.  We need memory.  We need a love of children and of learning.  I think we have it.

chutzpah

Posting the song "Mañanitas Tapatias' on the Facebook page for the book Stones from the Creek is a good opportunity for reflecting on chutzpah… particularly my chutzpah in presuming to create characters and voices that are  so distant from my experience.  I have mentioned elsewhere that it was actually meeting and discussing process with the carving Ortega family that convinced me that a carved saint had to be at the center of one of these stories.  And my scholarly work on the common lands of Mexican and Spanish grants in New Mexico made that a must, too.

But this is a distant and unfamiliar part of the United States for me.  How do I avoid romanticizing and exorcizing?  One way is by drawing on the people I have met when I travelled there.  Another way is by remembering that they are people, and I have spent a lifetime trying to understand people.  the details can be a challenge though.  For a very long time the mountain villages of New Mexico were dramatically underserved by ordained clergy.  The religious life of the people had to be sustained by lay brotherhoods, as Magdalena explains in the story "Warrior Princess."

The rise of an Anglo-Protestant elite in New Mexico, along with its promotion as an "enchanting" tourist destination by the Santa Fe Railroad, meant that those lay brotherhoods became more guarded about public worship.  The frequent Protestant opposition to ritual art meant that the lay Catholics found themselves derided for idolatry.  And the public processions of the brotherhoods were turned into a source of titillation for people who did not understand them.

I wanted to include the music of the procession in the story.  I found a book of Penitente alabados (http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Alabados_of_New_Mexico.html?id=8fGyC-Vn0FkC) and a set of YouTube videos (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ggbd9Exi4M) and I listened to the songs and read the liner notes of the Smithsonian Folkways recordings: "Music of New Mexico, Hispanic Traditions (1992)" (http://www.folkways.si.edu/music-of-new-mexico-hispanic-traditions/american-folk-gospel-latin/album/smithsonian) and "Spanish and Mexican Folk Music of New Mexico (1952)" (http://www.folkways.si.edu/spanish-and-mexican-folk-music-of-new-mexico/american-folk-latin/album/smithsonian)

One song that really captured my imagination was "Mañanitas Tapatias."  It is sung on the Folkways 1992 recording by a church choir from Las Vegas, New Mexico.  The liner notes explain that, with very few changed lyrics, it also serves as the New Mexican happy birthday song.  I guess that should have been a big red warning flag for me.  But when I come at a fact from a particular direction, I have trouble letting go of that path and seeing all the other approaches.

When I finally became concerned it was because I was trying to find a way to shared this beautiful song with my readers on the book's Facebook page.  I own the Folkways CD, so I hadn't bothered to try to find a good link to an online recording.  And then when I did?  Overproduced Pedro Infante videos, mariachis playing to young women, home-made birthday photo albums, and underproduced church bands.  It got me wondering: had I made a laughable error in including this song as part of a procession for Saint Michael Archangel?

I continue to find evidence that this song serves both purposes.  But I have also decided to stop worrying about it.  The story "Warrior Princess" is very compelling to me.  I think that it is one of the strongest in the book.  I hope that if it ever reaches actual New Mexicans, they will be able to respond to it in the spirit in which it was written.

Wade in the Water

"Wade in the Water" is the chorus and the title of an old song.  The phrase refers to the Gospel of John (5:4) where it says, “For an angel went down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the water: whoever then first after the troubling of the water stepped in was made whole of whatever disease he had.”   The fictional Mingo Sanders of the story "Wade in the Water" is consumed with rage, guilt and regret.  He -- exactly like the historical Mingo Sanders -- has been a decorated soldier for the US Army.  He was personally thanked and congratulated by Colonel Theodore Roosevelt with whom he fought side by side in the Cuban War.  Then, also exactly like the real Mingo Sanders, is discharged without honor for his failure to provide information about an incident with fellow Black soldiers that never happened.

The historical Mingo Sanders went with his wife on a speaking tour of prominent African American churches to explain the events of the so-called "Brownsville Raid" which was very much in the news around the country.  The fictional Mingo Sanders walked back toward Georgia, friendless and alone.  The drama of this story can be read as the redemption of his soul by a ritual cleansing.  Or it can be read as  a recovery of his personhood through his re-entry into the community of African Americans.  There is evidence in the text for both readings.

Culture for Tourists

Today's post on my Facebook page for the book (https://www.facebook.com/stonesfromthecreek) offers the viewer a look at Garífuna drumming and dance from last summer's Smithsonian Folklife Festival.  I wasn't there; I just found the video on YouTube.  I like the festival, though.  I always feel that it is an opportunity to meet artists and artisans from elsewhere in a respectful setting.

In 1976, they had all the AFL-CIO building trades demonstrating their craft by building structures on the National Mall.  They also had sessions in which the constructions workers could share lore and story.  After that it felt less like gawking when I watched a New England stone mason, or a Senegalese tie-dyer, or Inuit high schoolers demonstrating Arctic sports.  And I got to have lunch with Betty Fikes, who was there performing with the SNCC Freedom Singers.  She was alone at the picnic table and I was there with a very young Maya so we got to talking.  At the Folklife Festival it doesn't feel (at least to me) like they make exotics out of the guests.

But in looking for that video on YouTube I also found one from "the Garífuna Experience" on Roatan Island, Honduras.  Like the video from the National Mall, the audience is mainly white.  The costumes are similar, as are the dancing and drumming.  But I visited "the Garifuna Experience" and it gave me a little different vibe.

We were on a Norwegian Cruise of the western Caribbean and Roatan was one of the ports of call.  I had already started on the story "All These Blue Things" about a detachment of US Marines chasing "bandits" in the mountains near La Ceiba, Honduras.  It occurred to me that actually seeing these mountains would be a lot better than Google Earth but, for a variety of reasons, that was not going to happen.  We were, however, going on this cruise, so I figured it would have to help somehow.

If you have never gone (and I actually recommend it) you will need to understand that the ships offer tours of various kinds at each port of call: shopping, sunbathing, "adventures," and various cultural experiences.  At a previous stop we went to a truly spectacular classical Mayan ruin.  In Roatan Island we chose the Garífuna Experience.  The guide was an engaging young Afro-Caribbean woman, not Garifuna, who took us in boats through the mangroves and showed us plants and their uses on the bus ride to the cultural center.

The centerpiece there was clearly the drumming and dancing, but there was also traditional food preparation and other crafts.  The stew was really good and reminded Judith of her uncle's cooking.  What there was not was any contemporary (as in today) culture.  It felt as though this was a kind of living museum, without which the culture would not exist.

There was no Aurelio Martinez. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03P18xJeEEU

There was no La Buga.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1AvYMyUS6M

There was no Big Kev.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1AvYMyUS6M

The fact is that I was looking for some historic material.  The stories take place in 1906.  But this culture is alive and growing.  And it is really close by, too.  I don't have to travel to Honduras.  The community here in the Bronx is on Tremont Avenue, a few minutes from my home.  And the children have been my students for years.

So I do my best to set a historical stage.  But my work is not without ambivalence.

Na'ii'ees

The Apache Sunrise Dance is a kind of four-day Bat Mitzvah for Ndee girls.  I dreamed about actually seeing one for years, while realizing that I probably never would.  They had big public dances associated with tribal fairs and rodeos for July 4, but being a teacher, that was just too close to the end of the school year for me to wrap up work, get started traveling, and make it to the Southwest unless that was the main reason for the trip.  And that was the era before YouTube, so I was just going to have to live without seeing Na'ii'ees.

In the summer of 1987 (I think) my brother and daughter and I camped across two-thirds of the country.  On a Friday afternoon we paid for a camping permit at the Mescalero Apache tribal office and stood chatting with the cashier.  She asked if we were going to the Sunrise Dance that night.  I was stunned into incoherence and the woman explained what it was and that two families had arranged for a ceremony for their daughters in a big meadow nearby.  I must have stammered a question about invitations, because she gave me a funny look and then said that she was inviting us.  There was a direct road from the campground over the mountain to the dance site, but it was unpaved, unlit, winding and mountainous.  So that night we drove about 12 miles south, 12 miles east, and another 12 miles north to get to the ceremony.

It was clear where we were going once we arrived.  A huge bonfire burned in the middle of an open field.  A large circle of at least a hundred vehicles, mostly pickup trucks was parked at a good distance from the fire, rear ends facing in so that people could sit in the truck beds in lawn chairs and rockers with a good elevated view of the dancing.  To the side was a long brush arbor and women with big stew pots were cooking and distributing the banquet on paper plates.

I am a high school teacher, so I immediately noticed a group of teens leaning on a car parked near ours.  School apparently opens in August out there, and these kids were talking a lot of mess about what what happen on the first day, mostly about who was going to fight who.

Meanwhile, closer to the fire, masked dancers with kilts, painted chests, and high, wood-slat crowns were performing.  The drummers were setting the beat and chanting while the ankle bells of the dancers kept time with the drum.  After a while the two girls came out, in pristine beaded leather dresses and they, too, danced around the fire, hands held in the air.

We stayed for a good long time and nobody questioned our presence, although I admit to being too shy to go over to the ramada for some dinner.  Like other things that I have imagined for a long time before actually witnessing, the dance's reality was much more than anything I dreamed of.

Writing the story "The Giant Believed Her" for Stones from the Creek was not so much a matter of suddenly realizing that my memories of the na'ii'ees would fit the theme of a people's survival in a new context.  Rather, I knew from the beginning that this scene would have to be a part of the book.  And then I discovered that it was at just the time the stories in the book take place that Alchesay chose to bring the na'ii'ees out of the shadows and allow it to be public again.  The story of White Clay Woman tricking the Giant, too, was not consciously on my mind when I chose the title Stones from the Creek, referring to the weapons David picked up for his duel with the giant Goliath.

I tend to plan my writing carefully.  When there is this much apparent coincidence, it has less to do with serendipity and more to do with themes that have been percolating in my thinking for a very long time.

A border corrido

There are two references to border corridos in Stones from the Creek.  In the story "Passion Flower," the Engineer hears some shepherds singing a song about him begging la santa de Cabora for aid with the striking miners:

Pedía entonces el Moreno con su sombrero en la mano

Favor de cesa la huelga y regresa a trabajo.

Habla la Santa de Cabora en voz fuerte y clara

La Virgen demanda justicia y defiende la montaña!

Earlier, in the story "The Sun Shone So Brightly" those strikers dance while the band plays the ballad of Juan Cortina:

How much blood must be shed

To defend the land?

If they do not know how to respect us

Let us give them war.

In his book about the ballad of Gregorio Cortez, With His Pistol in His Hand, the folklorist Américo Paredes describes the second as much more in the line of the actual border ballads of the century 1830-1930, i.e. a male hero fighting to preserve his honor.  And I do not disagree with that.  But Enrique Lamadrid's article "'El Corrido de Tomóchic:' Honor, Grace, Gender, and Power in the First Ballad of the Mexican Revolution" (Journal of the Southwest (41:4, Winter, 1999) finds at least two songs that more resemble my imagined one, with a female hero.

First the ballad of Tomóchic honors Teresa Urrea, putting her name on the lips of the Tomochitecos' leader, Cruz Chávez:

Teresita de Cabora de mi amor

en la voz de Cruz resonaba

In a later verse the singer explicitly compares God's power in the Tomochitecos with God's grace inTeresa Urrea:

En Cabora está la gracia

y en Tomochi está el poder

But the ballad does not make that a gender distinction.  It also honors the prowess with rifles of the Tomochiteco women, whose blood is the blood of liberty:

Las mujeres en la torre

qué buenas para tirar

la sangre que de ellas corre

es sangre de libertad.

Lamadrid also finds a variation on the hymn Las Mañanitas which is dedicated to la santa de Cabora.  The first verse goes:

Buenos días Teresita

yo te vengo a saludar

saludando tu hermosura

y en tu casa celestial

And then, in a later verse, we find a reference to her help in fighting evil, in the form of Satan:

En ti espero niña hermosa

y el Arcángel San Miguel

que en la vida y en la muerte

triunfaremos contra Luzbel. 

Which will remind a careful reader of Magdalena in the story "Warrior Princess" who led the procession of San Miguel and sang the hymn Las Mañanitas to stop the arrest or murder of her husband.

So I maintain that my imagined corrido to la santa niña is not an impossibility.  That it was heard by the Engineer, describing his mission and its failure before he even undertook it?  Perhaps magical.  But recognizing the distinctly feminine forms of resistance to power was not my invention.

Enclosure in New Mexico

One of the recurrent themes of Stones from the Creek is that resistance to oppression can take varied and surprising forms.  In the story “White Caps” the federal Surveyor General has trouble seeing past the masks of the gorras blancas and sees them as somehow analogous to the Ku Klux Klan, even though in the case of New Mexico it is the persecuted nationality who were wearing the white hoods.

In that story the Territorial Legislator Pablo Herrera explains the significance of the lands owned by his community in common:

“Those are the lands we never divide, that we hold in common as a community.  We graze our livestock on those lands, we cut fuel for our fireplaces on those lands, we harvest timber for construction and to build furniture on those lands.  If by some chance we need cash, we can supplement our living by cutting ties on those lands for the railroads.  That common land enables us to make a living on our farms.  Without them, we are reduced to being wage laborers.  We cannot provide enough for ourselves in our little gardens near the rivers.  It is a dry country and this is how we live.  It was the law of Mexico and of Spain before that.  Those common lands are our living.  They are our legacy from our parents and to our children.”

At the time of the story, the Supreme Court of the United States had already ruled on those lands, in Sandoval v. US (1897), and concluded that under the original Spanish law they had been royal lands, which now belong to the government of the United States.

In many of the land grant communities, this loss of their common lands did, in fact, reduce the people to poverty.  The Forest Service wouldn’t issue grazing permits for what they considered “hobby size” livestock herds and the people had to move their animals from the commons to their small fields near the rivers.  Many of the villages lost their ability to support their people as a result.  And if one visits San Miguel del Vado, the village in “Warrior Princess, today, it is far from the gateway to New Mexico that it was in the 1840’s.

But in his article “San Miguel del Bado and the Loss of the Common Lands from New Mexico Community Land Grants,” (New Mexico Historical Review, October 1991) Emlen Hall explores a different reason for the dispersal of the people of San Miguel.  And it suggests a deep creativity and resilience.  Hall shows that as soon as those alienated lands appeared for homestead claims, the people of the San Miguel del Bado communities scooped them up.  Granted they were now private, instead of communal, property.  But they were still controlled by members of the San Miguel community, not outsiders.

In other parts of the arid West slick speculators knew that access to water was the only thing that gave 160-acre homesteads any value and they immediately made claims to the tracts with water.  But the private lands of San Miguel already controlled most access to water.  And the residents knew where they other sources were and made claims at the government land office.  Even those new private tracts that did not have water located on them were mostly claimed by people who already had small parcels on the Pecos River.

Hall concludes that people had to reverse the usual residential patterns because of the new legal relations.  Instead of living in compact communities in their garden plots on the river, they were forced – in order to prove occupancy – to live on the grazing lands they had claimed as homesteads.  He estimates that on the San Miguel del Bado grant, two-thirds of the land seized by the government under US v Sandoval ended up in the hands of community members.

This is no way contradicts the devastating losses in other communities.  Nor does it gloss over the tremendous difference between communities working together and individuals competing with one another.  But it is important to acknowledge the immense creativity of people working to preserve themselves in the face of oppression.

Above is the Church of San Miguel del Bado, which might look surprisingly large and well-maintained in comparison with what is left of the rest of the town if you didn't know the secret of resilience.

"Did you hear who's estelvste?"

The character Arunëi Jack in “If It is God’s Will” mentions in an aside that his people don’t like to be considered Black; they are Carib Indians.  Visiting a Garífuna community today, whether on Roatan Island, Honduras or Tremont Avenue in the Bronx, you find something different entirely.  While Garífuna people like to be clear about their distinctness, they do not reject an identity either as Africans or as Black people.  Is this different than their attitudes a hundred years ago?  And what are the causes of either their identifying with African Americans or their distinguishing themselves from them?

One possible explanation is that in the context of both North American and South American racism, it has been better to be anything than to be Black.  When Oklahoma became a state, it adopted all the Jim Crow laws of neighboring Texas and Arkansas.  But those laws did not apply to Native Americans.  And while the Five Tribes adopted an entire apparatus of “blood quantum” to determine just how Indian a person was, the “one-drop rule” (or hypodescent) determined whether a person was African American.   This is also a good place to note that while the post-Civil War treaties guaranteed tribal citizenship to Black members of the Five Tribes, all of them have since revoked it.

The persistent anti-Black racism of the Five Tribes is not contradicted at all by widespread denial of their Black ancestry by tribal members.  It only shows its importance.  In his compelling book, “Black, White and Indian: Race and the Unmaking of an American Family,” Claudio Saunt relates a conversation with a Creek Indian tribal leader whose uncle was instrumental in disfranchising African Creeks.  That Creek man describes a kind of “genealogy rush” in the 1970’s, when each tribal member who could prove that their ancestors were listed on a particular nineteenth century census could get $112.  

There were surprising revelations.  “Rumors soon began to fly about families that had uncovered black ancestors. ‘Did you hear who's estelvsti?’ Creeks asked their neighbors, using the Muscogee expression for ‘black man.’”

Speaking to a tribal officer over lunch this man says, in Mvskoke, “I’m estelvste.”  She responds, in English, “I’m part Black, too.”  But later, on the street, when he continues, “Aren’t we all?” she responds, “Not me,” and walks away.

An Endorheic Lake

I live in the Bronx, a ten minute walk from the Hudson River.  Every morning my dog Prophet and I walk several miles through the woods along the MetroNorth tracks, looking at the river and the Palisades on the other side.  It is a world-class view and we are lucky to be able to see it without rushing.

I have been along a large part of the river.  I have walked and biked every inch of the Manhattan side and walked the Jersey side from Hoboken up to Storm King Mountain.  I have ridden in my brother-in-law Henry's boat from Spuyten Duyvil Creek up to Newburgh.  I have hiked the trails of the Hudson Highlands.  I have paddled the class V rapids of the Hudson River Gorge from Indian River to North Creek.  And I have waded in the brook that is the headwaters of the Hudson in the Adirondacks as it comes out of Henderson Lake.

The Hudson conforms to my idea of a river… or perhaps I should say I get my idea of a river from the Hudson.  It flows from the mountains to the sea.  Here, near my house, it has four-foot tide fluctuations, even though we are eleven miles from the Battery, and it is salty, drowned by the nearby Atlantic.  It is navigable for 130 miles, up to Troy.  North of there are the falls and rapids of the Adirondacks.  When I first learned about the water cycle, I imagined a rainstorm up on Mt. Marcy and a raindrop falling back into the ocean off Sandy Hook.

So the lakes and rivers of "Turning Water Into Gold" captured my imagination most of all for their difference.  The water of Lake Tahoe, up in the Sierra Nevada Mountains between California and Nevada, flows 140 miles down the Truckee River, past Reno, and into Pyramid Lake, where it begins evaporating.  Basins like this are not unique to the American West.  The Caspian Sea is one.  So is the Dead Sea.  Lake Turkana in Kenya is another.  I just have to get past the idea that somehow there must be an outlet to the ocean, because -- of course -- that outlet is evaporation and a rainstorm at sea.

In my travels out West I heard from time to time about prehistoric Lake Lahontan.   One 115 degree day I walked out to Devil's Hole, a geothermal spring.  (Seriously.  Can you imagine volcanic-heated water in Death Valley?)  And there, sure enough, were the promised pupfish.  You have to wonder how a distinct fish species could arise in a tiny spring in the middle of this sun blasted landscape.  How?  It was once a part of Lake Lahontan.  And so was Pyramid Lake.

That the Kuyui Paiute of "Turning Water Into Gold" found a way to thrive in this environment is pretty remarkable.  What would be at least as remarkable would be for us to begin to understand the world view this survival entailed.  Even my idea of a river is challenged.  Every other idea must be different, too.

The story describes a change in lifestyle from seasonal migration around the basin to follow seasonal foods to migration to follow wages.  Western Anglo settlers elsewhere demanded that the Native Americans be kept on their reservations.  The Anglos of Nevada demanded that the Paiute be encouraged to travel.  Who else would do their work?  They even used to arrest "vagrant" Paiute to get them working as hands on their farms.

However the worldview of the Paiute may have changed in the last two hundred years it is evident that they retain a different view of water than ours.  They tried in the 1950's to use their allotment of acre-feet from the Truckee River for a fish hatchery.  The federal courts insisted the purpose of water is agriculture, even after decades of lawsuits about the failed promised of farming from diverting the Truckee into the desert.  With the help of treaty law and endangered species law and environmental law the Pyramid Lake Paiute have gained control of the lake and its fish.  The lake, which fell 80 feet from the time the diversion project began has recovered somewhat.  The cui-ui suckerfish are coming back in significant numbers.  Even the Lahontan cutthroat trout, which was thought extinct in 1940, is back and increasing in numbers.  It is a different view of water than ours still.

"Ghost Dance"

The character Lucy Jacobs in the story "Turning Water into Gold" is a Paiute Indian woman raising her grandkids in a construction camp on the Truckee River while her husband and son work at building the Derby Dam, the first big federal dam project in the West.  She is repeatedly described as "practical" meaning that she has to accommodate herself to an entirely different means of subsistence than that of her own grandmother.  The fish in the river are gone, the lake water is falling, the trees have been cut and the family migrates in search of wages instead of seasonal foods.

But the descriptor "practical" also alludes to her rejection of spiritual belief.  We are left to infer that the spirits died along with the pine trees and the trout and the cattails.  We also have an implicit challenge to the currently-popular belief that Native Americans are "deeply spiritual" people… I guess stereotypes are acceptable if we consider them favorable.  There is also Lucy's sardonic observation that the whites are a deeply spiritual people.  She looks at the belief of the white people that sending the Truckee River through a tunnel and into the baking wastelands will make the desert bloom -- will "turn water into gold" -- and concludes that this is just magic thinking.  And she was right.  The dam only served to further lower the level of Pyramid Lake without making the fortunes of people who imagined that they could farm the desert.

But it is worth taking a longer look at the Paiute prophet Wovoka, who Lucy dismisses with the words, "if you make enough predictions, some of them are bound to come true."  Wovoka preached, first to his Paiute relatives and then to any Native Americans who would listen, that it is necessary to remain who you are and not to become a failed imitation of somebody else.  The Handsome Lake religion of the Iroquois is today considered "traditional" but it came originally from the visions of the Seneca, Handsome Lake, in 1799.  It was profoundly innovative at that time.

It is possible to look through this lens at a number of early anti colonial movements.  In the sixteenth century in both the Yucatan and the Andes there were prophets preaching renewed adherence to the old beliefs as a means of making the Spanish disappear.  Just prior to the Haitian Revolution, Francois Makandal offered a religious focus to resistance to the French.  In the Dominican Republic, the prophet Papa Liborio taught that modernization was making the streams dry up, and urged a return to traditional beliefs in his years-long war with the US Marines.

In three other stories from Stones from the Creek this adherence to traditional belief offers a rich source of resistance.  Magdalena sings the US Marshal's posse away in "Warrior Princess" with traditional alabados, or hymns.  Teresa Urrea provided support for the Tomochitecos in "Passion Flower" and the Mexican government responded by deporting her to the United States.  And Alchesay used the Apache origin story of White Clay Woman to explain how the people could continue being Apache under entirely new circumstance.

Marx described religion as an opiate.  Sometimes.

Below, Wovoka.

Henry Ossian Flipper

Henry Ossian Flipper was the first African American graduate of West Point.  Upon commissioning as a second lieutenant, he was sent to the 10th Cavalry and was the first Black officer of the all-Black "Buffalo Soldiers."  He fought in the first Apache Wars before his discharge for financial improprieties, which on investigation are more than curious.  He was posthumously pardoned by President Bill Clinton more than 100 years after his discharge.

In Stones from the Creek, a fictional Flipper appears as the protagonist of the story "Passion Flower" under the name "the Engineer."  He appears in his own name in "The Sun Shone So Brightly" as the aloof and unavailable mine superintendent and in "White Caps" as the surveyor hired by the US Marshal.  And, like several other characters, he reflects on the unfairness of Mingo Sanders's ("Wade in the Water," "Scars") discharge after the Brownsville, Texas incident.  For the fictional Flipper, though, it creates a wounding reminder of his own discharge.

The real Flipper was deeply involved in the events surrounding "White Caps" and "Warrior Princess."  His translations of the Spanish legal code regarding land grants permitted the US Supreme Court to decide in US v. SANDOVAL, 167 U.S. 278 (1897) that community lands were actually "crown" lands, and that the federal government should, therefore, take over most of the property of the Mexican communities of New Mexico.  I cannot overstate how important this decision was in transforming New Mexico.  He was also involved in surveying and operating copper mines on both sides of the border, like those in "The Sun Shone So Brightly."

The short memoir and letters published under the title Black Frontiersman should really be exciting.  But their mundanity and emphasis on the very personal are interesting nevertheless.  Is the reader (i.e., me) interested in Flipper's feelings about helping to confiscate community lands from the Mexicans of the southwest?  Flipper instead wants to relate how he felt about sitting in the Supreme Court while the Sandoval arguments took place without being recognized.

Is the reader interested in the gigantic Cananea Strike of 1906, in which thousands of Mexicans struck the copper mines of William C. Greene?  Flipper wants to describe how he fed all of Greene's millionaire friends from New York when they visited Mexico, and how he sat at the head of the table.  He is particularly interested in another engineer's wife, with a tattoo of a snake on her upper arm, which he accidentally saw.

I won't belabor this point.  It is enough to say they we learn about each important person who treated Flipper with courtesy, and about the bad end that came of several people who snubbed him.  We learn about the niece of Jefferson Davis who cooked for him and waited on him at table and cleaned up after him.  We learn nothing of his views on the discharge of infantrymen after the so-called Brownsville "Raid" other than that they did not join Pancho Villa's revolutionaries.  (There was a rumor going around in 1916 that he was a prominent Villista, which he found extremely insulting:  "I have not lost my five senses.")

My fictional Flipper volunteered to serve the US Army in Cuba in 1898.  So did the real Flipper, by means of a telegram that went unanswered.  We learn about that, as we do his unsatisfactory visit to President McKinley.

I think it is safe to say that Henry O. Flipper does not make a satisfactory progressive hero.  But he is no less interesting for that.  Below see the front cover of a published version of his memoir along with a photo of William Greene and the strikers at Cananea.

Wisdom Sits in Places

White Mountain Apache tribal chairman Ronnie Lupe originally asked anthropologist Keith Basso (March 15, 1940 – August 4, 2013) to begin creating a map of the area with Apache place names.   The project morphed over time into a study of how Western Apache people use those place names.  It resulted in the book Wisdom Sits in Places.

Writing in the voices I chose for Stones in the Creek involved repeated and monumental acts of chutzpah.  Even Lazar Sussman, the Jewish merchant in "One Voice, One Heart" was a reach.  He moved as a young teen from a Jewish city in Galicia to the Arizona Territory.  In my life I have lived as far as twenty-five miles from my current home in the Bronx.  And the tiny bit of Yiddish he speaks to his children forced me into a phrasebook.  Imagine what it took to imagine a voice for Alchesay, the leader of the White Mountain Apache at the turn of the twentieth century.

It's not about finding an English-Apache dictionary.  (Although I did.  The White Mountain community generated its own!)  Finding meaningful patterns of speech is even more important.  And that is where the work of Keith Basso became so interesting that I had to find ways to include it.  In his 1979 work Portraits of the Whiteman, Professor Basso discusses humorous mimicry of white people among the Western Apache.  One of the funniest things about white people is apparently our insistence on filling silence with talk, regardless of meaningless.  Another is our bullying insistence on proving our point with more and more talk.  That is why my character Alchesay has to think for so long about how to convey his ideas to the other men without a long monologue in support.

In Wisdom Sits in Places, Professor Basso describes the use of place names to represent things that have happened there.  And this is why Alchesay's critic can simply say, "It happened at the lone piñon standing above the wide line of bare rock," and all the listeners understand this to be a charge of trusting the enemy.  This is why Dayaye can be understood to be calling for reconciliation when he says, "It happened at the camp where they count on finding water."

Now, understand, I made up those places and I made up those names and I made up those stories about what "happened" there.  And, truthfully, I don't think they sound like Apache place names.  Nor do I think the stories sound much like Apache stories.  But what I did was have an exchange using place names.  And avoid a long oration that I think would have been uncharacteristic for Alchesay.  So I made a big effort to get it right.  And I made a big effort to highlight a difference.

If there is a reader out there who chooses to follow up on this sense difference, then I will feel like I got at least one thing right.

In the book Stones from the Creek, Teresa Urrea tells Henry Ossian Flipper about the night raid conducted by white Clifton, Arizona Territory  housewives and their armed husbands to seize children from their Mexican neighbors.  These children had been placed by nuns from New York City to give them a chance to be raised by Catholic families far from the presumably dangerous streets of New York.  The question of why a mine camp -- subject to the dangers of underground work and the violence of the Phelps, Dodge corporation and Arizona Rangers -- was considered "safe" is beyond the scope of this posting.  Maybe another day.

Today I am wondering how various authors imagine a historical character like Teresa Urrea and her response to the orphan abduction.  In the book, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction, Linda Gordon chooses to discuss la santa de Cabora as another test of what constituted racial boundaries in Arizona Territory at that time.  She argues that Teresa, despite speaking no English, was included as a member of white "society" because of her light skin and her well-to-do father.  And she discusses her carnival-like healing tours of the United States as tied to what I will call exoticism, following Said.

Urrea's nephew, Luis Alberto Urrea, discusses la santa's time in Clifton at some length in Queen of America, his sequel to The Hummingbird's Daughter.  But while he gives us the romance of Teresa's marriage there, we don't get much about the mines or the mine strike.  And we hear nothing about the orphan train or the theft of "white" children from Mexican families.

Much has been made in all sources about the question of whether Teresa was political.  She was certainly close with the revolutionary newspaper editor Lauro Aguirre and she was an icon to the insurrectionists of Tomochic.  I choose to locate her radical opposition in her religious beliefs.  In my story "Passion Flower" she is enraged by the actions of her white neighbors who stole children from Mexican families.  But those women are waiting in line outside her home for healing, nevertheless.  And she heals them, nevertheless, because that is what she feels the Virgin Mary has called her to do.

I offer no evidentiary reason for my interpretation over the others.  I have yet to read Brianda Domecq's La insolita historia de la santa de Cabora, and I will probably have to return to this question when I am finished with that book.  For now, though, let's say that the Healer in my story is just somebody that I imagine when I read about Teresa Urrea.

Anaconda IPO

I may as well stay on the subject of historical accuracy.  When I began writing the stories for "Stones from the Creek" it was fall of 2008.  The big banks were failing and the economy appeared to be accelerating downward.  I was immediately struck by the similarities to the Panic of 1907, and therefore with a connection with my stories, which mainly take place in 1906.  Even though my working theme was resistance to oppression, I decided I had to include a story about the onset of the bankers' panic one hundred years before.

In 2007 and 2008 I was repeatedly astonished by the number of financial professionals who insisted that real estate values could only go up.  It is the classic song of the bubble.  I had a gentleman serve as my principal-for-a-day who insisted that this was true and that it was good advice for our students.  This was in the spring of 2008, when it didn't take a genius to see what was happening.  And I kept wondering whether there was any adult supervision at all in the big Wall Street houses.  It seemed to me that anybody over the age of thirty would know that markets that can go up can also go down.

The Panic of 1907 began in a big bull market when one of the Butte, Montana copper kings decided that, with a little bank backing, he could corner his own stock, United Copper.  This is not the place for a discussion of corners and shorts.  Suffice it to say, two banks were dramatically overextended and suffered runs, which triggered runs on the other banks, too.

But in reading about the panic and about copper stocks I discovered the story of the Amalgamated Copper IPO of a few years earlier.  It involved the Butte copper kings, but the main actors were from Standard Oil.  William Rockefeller and Henry Huttleston Rogers made a public offering of stock for what was later renamed Anaconda Copper and made a huge personal killing.  The broker who handled this IPO, Thomas Lawson, was scandalized by their willingness to lie to him and to keep putting more stock onto the market as the price went up the first day.  He serialized his account of events, and later released it as a book.

In my story "Who Could Have Foreseen It?" I conflated these separate events.  They were, after all, related.  The cast of characters was mostly the same.  The greed and disregard for everyday investors and the public at large was the same.  And the commodity, copper, was the same.  At the turn of the twentieth century electricity was an exciting growth industry.  Niagara Falls became an electric generating station.  The IRT (now the #1 train) opened in 1904 from City Hall to 145 St.  Think of a copper IPO as analogous in its larger excitement to the IPO in 2012 of Facebook.

I also chose to include a personal scandal affecting one of the bankers broken by the 1907 panic.  Again, this was not directly related at all, but it gave me the opportunity to continue with the theme of "sure things."  In the language of the story, a "law of nature."

On these events, I am reasonably confident that any reader of mine who is intrigued by the story will pursue further investigation.  The titles I include here are a reasonable start.

Imagining a "Shtetl"

This morning I chose a quote from my story "One Voice, One Heart" about Lazar Sussman's childhood home in the town of Brod, which was at that time the border between Romanov Russia and Hapsburg Austria.  From the beginning of my process of picturing this town, I tried very hard to find actual photos, maps and descriptions of Brod.  Otherwise I was certain that I would be overtaken by what we all think we know about the Eastern European "shtetl."

What most of us know is from the backdrops we have seen for various productions of the musical play "Fiddler on the Roof."  It includes comically leaning wooden houses, dirt streets and rabbinical scholars.  Brod, by contrast, had brick-and-stone construction, cobblestone streets, and an extremely lively commercial life in keeping with its position as a port of entry to two major empires.

Why are we so affected by fictional representations of history?  For many Americans, life on an antebellum plantation will always resemble "Gone with the Wind," despite whatever education they may have acquired since they saw that movie.  I remember the release of the movie "Glory" about the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, an all-African American unit in the Civil War.  Two weeks before that film came out, I don't think one white person in a hundred knew that in 1865, ten percent of the Union Army was Black.  But a week after its release, it seemed that everybody had always known that!  You can probably think of five examples of your own right now.

I grew up in a religious Jewish home, and every year our synagogue celebrated Purim with the traditional reading of the Book of Esther and then a carnival where we all dressed up as the characters in that book.  That is how I "know" in my heart, with the certainty that we know things learned at an early age, that the people of ancient Persia went around in bathrobes and with towels on their heads.   As a literate and educated adult I can suppress this "knowledge" but it is still hiding there inside, waiting to burst out at some wildly inappropriate time.

And, again, this is why I was as thoughtful as I could be about my literary imaginings.  Granted, "Stones from the Creek" will never get the audience of "Gone with the Wind" of "Fiddler on the Roof."  But for the readers who take seriously the idea of forgotten history of struggle and resistance, this book may be what they know about 1906.  I have tried to get the important stuff right.

Writing history

I have been maintaining a FaceBook page devoted to my book, Stones from the Creek.  It is in part a marketing device, designed to get more eyes on the book itself.  But it also gives me the opportunity to discuss the issues of the book, historical and thematic.
Today I chose to address a quote from the story "Wade in the Water":

This fall, his son, Teddy, Junior, beat up a Boston cop with his little Harvard friends.  None of them talked to the judge.  And the President said that was the ‘honor of gentlemen.’  But when I stayed quiet about something I didn’t do and didn’t know anything about?  Oh, that’s a ‘conspiracy of silence!’

This refers to an actual incident.  The Harvard sophomore class was rioting on Boston Common.  A policeman was injured and, while they arrested Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., they failed to catch the student who was suspected of hurting the cop.  Young Roosevelt refused to divulge the name of the boy they were looking for, but his indictment was dropped at the request of Massachusetts Republican power Henry Cabot Lodge.

The irony is that, at the same time, the army was investigating the so-called "Brownsville Raid." This was a highly-publicized incident in Brownsville, Texas regarding the white citizens of the town and the African-American 25th Infantry at the nearby fort.  The white people accused the soldiers of shooting up the town.  Military investigators questioned the soldiers about who had been in town that night, and who had done the shooting.  The soldiers, to a person, denied knowing anything about it.  (As did their white officers.)  They were dishonorably discharged for a "conspiracy of silence."  It wasn't until the Nixon administration, sixty-six years later, that the case was reopened and the soldiers exonerated… all but one posthumously.

In preparing a Facebook posting on this I started to look for where I got that quote about "the honor of gentlemen.  I did not find it in the New York Times article archive which I remember searching five years ago when I first started writing this book.  I couldn't find it anywhere else either.

That doesn't definitely mean I made up TR's response about his son.  But it might mean that.  And if I did, for literary effect, shouldn't I remember it?

In an earlier story, which I chose to exclude from the book, for African American men sit talking in an uptown kitchen while their white employers (one of them Theodore Roosevelt) are chatting in the adjacent trophy room.  The following exchange with Charles Lee, the president's driver, is a part of their conversation:

“Lee!” he barked, “Didn’t the president’s son get arrested for beating up a cop in Boston?”
Lee had been ignoring the turn of the conversation, but he looked up sharply at this. “He did no such thing! They brought him in for questioning because somebody tripped a cop and the man broke his nose. The judge wanted Teddy Junior to give up the boy’s name.”
Davis smiled. “Did he give him up?”
“Hell, no! “ answered Lee angrily. “His daddy would beat his behind if he peached on a friend.”
“There you go.” said Davis with an even broader smile. “But his daddy gave dishonorable discharges to 167 colored soldiers for refusing to ‘peach’ on their friends.”
“It’s not the same!’ protested Charles Lee, but the other men just laughed.

So there is no fancy quote here about the "honor of gentlemen," but there is definitely the germ of the idea that Roosevelt would have endorsed his son't silence.

In our personal stories the line between what happened and what we remember can blur very easily.  In historical fiction we have to make things up if only to create dialogue and narrative.  But I am obviously going to have to work to distinguish between my history and my fiction.

Telling stories

When I was a high school principal my kids used to tease me about all the stories I told.  There were stories at assemblies, stories while visiting class and stories during those visits to the principal's office.  There were days when I felt it was total narcissism, that I was acting like Michael Scott in The Office: enough about you, let's talk about me!
But the kidding from the students was gentle, and they seemed to appreciate it.  I think that the stories of older folks embody a form of wisdom for teens.  They come to us with insoluble problems of inconceivable magnitude, which is the definition of a typical adolescent day.  When we offer advice it is only evidence that we fail to understand the situation.  When we tell them it's not as important as they think, they hear us saying that they are not as important as they think, at least to us.
But a good, appropriate story can tell them that we actually experience what they experience and that we lived to tell the tale.  Our only advantage is -- after all -- the long view.  We are not any smarter than they are.  By telling the story on ourselves, we don't diminish the significance of what is happening to them.  We laugh, instead, at us.
J. was a fifteen-year old girl, not a great student, but six-feet tall, athletic and devoid of any regard for her own safety.  Her "friends" got in the habit of using her as a weapon.  They would start some petty conflict with other girls and recklessly escalate it, confident that when it came to an actual fight, they could just launch J. at their antagonists and enjoy the wreckage as spectators.
I told J. that she was endangering herself, but she was fifteen and invincible.  I told her that she could accidentally hurt somebody much more than she intended, and that gave her a little pause, but not much.
Then I told her the story of my own friend S. which I had actually pretty much forgotten until that moment, because S. remains a good friend as an adult and would certainly never do this now.  When we were seventeen, we hiked to a popular pond in the woods.  It is about seven miles from the road, and a 1000-foot elevation gain, so we were not expecting it to be as crowded at it was.  The rocks in the sun near the water were all occupied, so we went back in the trees and sat down there.
Except S.  He went and sat down on a rock next to a total stranger, who looked at him in surprise and then slid over to make some room.  Then S. kind of rearranged himself to take up much of the space between him and the stranger.  The other guy looked at him again, and then made a little more room.
But when S. invaded his rock-mate's space a third time, the kid had had enough.  He stood up, cursed S. out, and challenged him.  And S. looked at me, like I was supposed to go over there and fight the kid for him!
Now had I not been watching this entire drama unfold, from beginning to end (and had I only heard S. get cursed and summon me) I probably would have run over there and fought the kid.  But I was not about to fight a stranger when the entire thing had been precipitated by my friend's oblivious and antisocial behavior!  I just looked at S. and waited for him to join us back in the shade of the trees.
J. understood this story.  It did not stop her fighting.  But it did get her to think twice about getting into other people's fights.  It did get her to realize that she was enabling some behavior that she didn't like, i.e. starting things that you yourself couldn't finish because you had a friend who could finish them for you.
This is no great success story.  J. did not  graduate or go to college.  J. didn't even, at that time, develop much empathy for the strangers she was being asked to fight.  But J. did develop a different sense of who her "friends" were, and more important, of how they saw her.

Riverdale Park

Half a mile from my house is an undeveloped park on the Hudson River.  It is wooded and runs along the MetroNorth tracks between Spuyten Duyvil and Riverdale stations.  Almost every morning my dog Prophet and I walk several miles on (and off!) the trails.
In winter, with the leaves off the trees, every step presents views of the river and the Palisades on the other side.  This morning we saw an osprey sit on the winds coming off the Hudson, then drop into a lower altitude, and drop again, and drop again, until it was ready to roost on a limb of a dead tree.
When the sun came up today, about quarter after seven, the sky was a bright red on this side of the ridge, facing University Avenue.  Over in the park, the sun really never came out.  It was overcast and both the river and the Palisades were kind of gray.
Prophet likes off-trail adventures.  I don't know whether this is his own disposition or something he picked up from me, but I do know that he pushes me to join him even on days when I am feeling a little under the weather, like today.  We had to scramble down a steep frozen slope to a retaining wall near the tracks.  We had to drop down to a little marsh where a creek meanders through winter-dry cattails before dropping into a pipe and under the MetroNorth right of way.  We had to cross that same creek higher up on the icy trunk of a tree that toppled across.
Here is a good place to stop and interrogate my use of the phrase "had to."  Prophet is good at expressing his route preferences.  But he is really cooperative about going the way I want to.  So had I -- for example -- simply walked by that improvised bridge, Prophet would have, too… with a smile.  Instead, I encouraged  him and then followed.  I am writing this, so there is no suspense:  I made it across without slipping off and cracking my brain on the rocks below.  But as I crossed, I didn't know that, and I kept asking myself, "Why am I doing this?"
I have no answer.  Since the summer I have been taking blood thinners for CAD.  Small falls mean big bruises and sometimes bleeding that just won't stop.  And I am highly conscious of this when Prophet and I are scrambling down these steep slopes.  He loves to stand right in my path, staring at my feet, waiting for me to dislodge a rock or a clod of dirt that he can avidly pursue down the hillside.  It only heightens my awareness of the possibility that I could just as easily dislodge myself.
But crossing the stream on that log is a whole other order of danger.  When Prophet was little and heedless I had to forego it altogether because he thought nothing of slamming into my calves and taking me off my feet.  Now we can cross when it is dry.  But rain and ice make me acutely conscious of the rocks eight feet below.  It is a long enough fall to do some damage.  And yet…

Ending collisions at the plate in MLB

No.  I have zero interest in contributing my two cents on MLB changing its rules to end collisions at home plate.  But when I awakened this morning to news of the move to change the rules I realized: here is one of these great Rorshach stories that everybody has an opinion on.  And those opinions do not come down to "for" or "against".  Instead, we can expect every possible permutation and combination of views on the subject… or indeed, tangential subjects.

I do not begin to have the imagination to pretend to predict what all these views might be.  So I looked at the reader responses in one newspaper (just one!) to see what baseball fans are saying.  Here is a (paraphrased) selection:

"What's next?  Outlaw bats?"

"It's part of the game."

"So were batting without a helmet and unpadded outfield walls."

"Pete Rose was the man!"

"Pete Rose is an asshole!"

"If you like fights, watch hockey."

"Baseball and football are for pussies.  I watch hockey!"

"I play co-ed softball and we allow collisions."

"Really?  You're tough because you play co-ed softball?"

"Players get paid too much."  [I think the thread could be about fifteenth century Mesoamerican textiles and somebody would complain that pro athletes are overpaid.]

"Now who will understand Meatloaf's 'Paradise by the Dashboard Light?'"  [Really.  You can't make this up.]

"Nannystate."  [Because Obama and Bloomberg run MLB now, right?]

"I'm sorry Buster Posey had to get hurt for this to happen."

"Buster Posey isn't man enough to play catcher."

This is, as I said, just a selection.  I may have chosen not to comment on the rule change, but that doesn't mean I can't comment on the comments.  I was struck by some of the hockey comments in particular.  If you have watched an NHL game you will know that the "fight" is a stylized piece of performance art in the first period.  Two guys square off, surrounded by refs.  Elsewhere on the ice, players pair up, much like a square dance, holding one another's jerseys.

Now I am a barely competent skater.  I am incredibly impressed with the athleticism and physicality of pro hockey players.  But the "fight" reminds me of a mascot firing t-shirts into the crowd:  an entertainment for the fans, entirely unrelated to the game itself.  Do the people at the arena really not see this?

What I do know is that the NHL is almost exclusively white.  And when a commenter says that NHL players are more "manly" than MLB or NFL players, that is probably what he is referring to, albeit unconsciously.

So who knew that barring collisions at the plate is really about whiteness?

Seminoles v. Tigers?

“Half the Seminole tribe was my color. Did you know that? Still is today. We fought Andrew Jackson. We fought Zachary Taylor. And we never lost! I bet you didn’t know that either. " 
--- In the Midst of the Valley.
No, this does not refer to the Florida State Seminoles. The Seminole Indians of Florida and Oklahoma are a tribe that developed in historic times. Upper Creek refugees from the Red Stick War fled to central Florida and re-formed their towns, joined by a flood of Africans escaping from captivity in other parts of the South. The US government waged war on these people for decades, but never defeated them. Some accepted removal west of the Mississippi. Others remained in Florida, where their descendants remain to this day. Below is a lithograph of John Horse, an African Seminole who fought against the US Army in the Second Seminole War.