More on Division and Solidarity (and to tracing old photos!)

The news is so grim every day. This morning I awoke to find that of the eight people murdered by the latest young, white, male gunman (this time at a FedEx facility in Indianapolis) four of them were Sikhs: Amarjeet Johaol, Jaswinder Kaur, Amarjit Sekhon, and Jaswinder Singh. Since the armed, violent, and already-known-to-police killer had actually worked for a time at this place it is not a stretch to assume that he knew that 90% of the employees were Sikhs. Since he has eyes it is not a stretch to think he noticed that three of the four people he killed were over sixty years old.

Since 9/11, violence against Sikhs in this country has often been misplaced (displaced?) hatred of Muslims because racists see the dastār (turban) and think, "Oh, 

Osama Bin Laden!" It isn't associated with other anti-Asian hate because we tie that to certain distinctive racial features. But among the first things I saw on Twitter was this: "The Stop Asian Hate crowd needs to speak up." Then the observation that when they don't "it reveals a lot."

I have observed before in this space that one of white supremacy's great achievements is turning those excluded from whiteness against one another. I have no doubt that there are Asian Americans who think that South Asians don't count, just as there are South Asians who are certain that they are white. I have certainly written about African Americans who exclude Africans and West Indians from blackness and about Africans and West Indians (including Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and Dominicans) who agree.

It seemed like I was on a different subject when I noticed a Facebook post about Black cowboys. It was accompanied by a photograph I recognized, though. But I recognized it as a photograph of Black soldiers. A Google image search didn't help me track the provenance of the photo. In fact, almost every iteration of that photo listed was meant to illustrate one or another point about
Black cowboys. I was once again frustrated by my weaknesses in collecting all my notes in one place and thoroughly documenting their sources because I knew I had seen this photo during my research for my books.

MHS Research Center Photo Archives #957-994

I was eventually able to find an only partially cropped version of this photo, but the text that the user added (inaccurate, by the way) meant that the image search I conducted only revealed a few uses of that particular superimposed caption and - interestingly - none of the many I had found that referred to these men as cowboys. Once again, as in my last posting, I couldn't retrace my steps even now, two hours later, but I eventually discovered the original in the photo archives of the Montana Historical Society. This photo of troopers of the 10th Cavalry under General Wesley Merrit was taken in 1894 by A.B. Coe. They were lunching in the St. Mary Valley during an expedition to what is now Glacier National Park. This uncropped version certainly makes the men look more like soldiers than cowboys, both because it is more obvious that they are wearing uniforms and because of their weapons.

What connection am I drawing between the divisive practices of white supremacy and this photo of Black cavalrymen in Montana? In 1894, the St. Mary Valley was part of the reservation of the Piegan Blackfoot tribe. That summer, George Bird Grinnell was negotiating with them to cede the territory to the federal government in order to create a Glacier National Park. The name Grinnell may not be familiar to you. At the time he was a highly regarded conservationist, sport hunter, and ethnographer. He was a prolific writer on Native American culture: among his better-known works are Pawnee Hero Stories and Folk Tales, Blackfoot Lodge Tails, and By Cheyenne Campfires. He was also a champion of the national parks and especially Glacier. His close friendship with Theodore Roosevelt gave him special influence in that area.

John Taliaffero's 2019 biography, Grinnell: America's Environmental Pioneer and His Restless Drive to Save the West, provides a detailed account of what Grinnell was doing that summer. I will just summarize by saying he was bullying the Blackfeet into surrendering their valley. He had known them personally for years. He had made repeated and extended visits to explore the area, hunt, and interview them for his ethnography. The government considered him a great asset in the negotiations to shrink the reservation.

In his 2001 work Crimes against Nature Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation, Karl Jacoby discussed how the creation of parks redefined their occupants as criminals. He particularly looked at the Havasupai Indians of the Grand Canyon. Just this week The Atlantic published an article by David Treuer titled "Return the National Parks to the Tribes." Among his points was that they would be better stewards of this land that was seized from them. The catastrophic fires of recent years, fires that were exacerbated by over a century of suppressing Native burning practices, certainly support that view.

But let me work my way back around to my point. Those Black cavalrymen were in the St. Mary Valley to support George Bird Grinnell in his effort to convince the Piegan Blackfoot tribe that they had no alternative but to cede the land that became Glacier National Park. The soldiers did not make that policy. They weren't even the ones "negotiating." In point of fact, their officers were all white.* Nevertheless, when we celebrate the achievements of Black soldiers and applaud these photographs without, at the same time, recognizing how they serve racial capitalism, we make ourselves party to it. 

Again, my Twitter feed has been full of partially-digested facts about the slave-owning tribes of the Indian Territory and their ongoing exclusion of Black members from voting and other tribal participation. If the same people who happily share these posts aren't also critical of the hero-worship of Buffalo Soldiers as "Indian fighters" then they, too, contribute to white supremacy and to cultivating division instead of solidarity.