How did we behave in our Occupied Territories?
Israel’s behavior is an evergreen source of interest to the United Nations and lately the two organizations have been in the news. My Hillary-supporting Facebook friends have been out in front of this, praising Obama and criticizing Israel for building houses on land won during the 68-year war that has followed the Arab rejection of the UN’s proposed 1947 borders. I respond with “Let me know to which Indian tribe you’re going to be giving your house, and please do send me your new address in Manhattan, which I understand was legally purchased.”
How did we actually behave in our own Occupied Territories when the occupation was fresh? The Pulitzer Prize-winning Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People answers this question to some extent:
Ancestral Mandans appeared in what is now South Dakota around 1000 C.E.17 Their arrival in the Missouri River valley coincided with a major climatic shift: a trend toward warmer, wetter conditions in the years from 900 to 1250. The trend extended far beyond the grasslands of North America. In Europe, these centuries coincide with the Medieval Warm Period, an era in which painters depicted bountiful harvest feasts, Norse settlers built colonies in Greenland and America, and peasants expanded their fields onto lands formerly too cold, high, or dry to plant crops.
CROW CREEK VILLAGE, SOUTH DAKOTA, MID-1400s The site of this ancient village overlooks the Missouri River in south-central South Dakota, eleven miles north of the modern town of Chamberlain. The land today belongs to the Crow Creek Sioux, but during much of the 1300s and 1400s its occupants were Caddoan-speaking newcomers—refugees or descendants of refugees from the drought on the central plains. And at some point in the mid-fifteenth century, something terrible happened here.* The community was fortified by location and design. Naturally protected by the river and two smaller waterways, the town also had defenses constructed by its residents. Keen eyes still can discern the low-lying trace of two dry moats the townspeople dug for protection. The inner moat was bastioned and backed up with a palisade. The outer moat may not have had a palisade, but its ten bastions are still visible if you follow its course across the ground. At one time, this trench was six feet deep and twelve or more feet wide.27 These concentric fortifications indicate that the community went through a period of growth. Archaeologists think the settlers created the inner ditch and its palisade first. But twelve house sites in the gap between the two trenches suggest that the population eventually became too big to fit inside the first ditch. When this happened, residents dug the second one beyond it, enlarging the fortified area of their village. One calculation puts the town’s population at 831. The defense system clearly indicates that Crow Creek’s residents felt threatened from outside. And indeed they must have been, because at some point their town came under attack. The identity of the assailants is not known, but their actions were ferocious. In 1978, archaeologists unearthed at least 486 jumbled sets of human remains from the northwest end of the outer fortification ditch. If the ancient town’s population was 831, those bones represented the remains of nearly 60 percent of its residents. The end has to have been gruesome. Mutilated craniums indicate that the attackers scalped 90 percent of their victims and dealt skull-fracturing blows to 40 percent. They decapitated nearly one-quarter. A number of townspeople had limbs hacked off. Cut marks on jawbones indicate that some had their tongues cut from their mouths.
… warfare and hunting took a toll on Mandan men. When the anthropologist Alfred Bowers polled the Mandans in 1870–72, he found that women outnumbered men nearly two to one. The painter-ethnographer George Catlin estimated “two and sometimes three women to a man” when he visited the upper Missouri in 1832.
Life was kind of tough before the White Man showed up, but we brought rats to eat their corn supplies and smallpox:
The rats multiplied at a rate hard for human beings to comprehend. Some wild rats live as long as three years, but one year is average. Brief though it may be, that twelve-month life span is sufficient for a female brown rat to accomplish impressive reproductive feats. She reaches sexual maturity at three to four months and then is virtually sure to conceive each time she is fertile, for during a single six-hour fertile period she might mate as many as five hundred times. After she has mated successfully, pregnancy lasts about twenty-three days, and she can breed again less than twenty-four hours after delivering. A normal litter yields six to eight pups, and a typical female has seven litters a year, or roughly fifty offspring.
For the Mandans, the proportion of losses [from smallpox] was highest of all. Chardon estimated seven-eighths of them were dead. Joshua Pilcher reported that just 31 of 1,600 survived. The Jesuit father Pierre-Jean de Smet, who traveled to Council Bluffs in 1838 and then to the Rockies in 1840, heard that the scourge had reduced the Mandans “to thirty-two, others say to nineteen only!”
Lack of recent exposure [to smallpox] was not the only reason that Mandans were so vulnerable. When Catlin had taken the Yellow Stone upriver to the Mandans five years earlier, two physicians—participants in a new federal effort to vaccinate Native Americans against smallpox—had joined the passengers at Fort Leavenworth. With the help of military personnel, they immunized many of the nations below the Arikaras. Some individuals chose not to submit to the strange procedure, developed in England by Edward Jenner in 1796. But those who were vaccinated included 2,081 Omahas, Otoes, Sioux, and Pawnees. By February 1833, more than seventeen thousand had been vaccinated nationwide. The Mandans and Hidatsas were not among them, nor were the Crows, Blackfeet, Crees, or Assiniboines. Why? The immunization effort had gotten off to a late start in 1832, with winter closing in while the vaccinators were still in South Dakota. “Many individuals were not vaccinated owing to lack of time,” writes the historian Michael Trimble. The physicians asked to continue their work among the more northerly nations the next year, but the commissioner of Indian affairs turned them down. In fact, federal authorities intentionally excluded the northern tribes from the vaccination campaign. They deemed the villagers peripheral, and expendable as well. “Under any circumstances, no effort will be made to send a Surgeon higher up the Missouri than the Mandans, and I think not higher than the Arikaras,” wrote Secretary of War Lewis Cass to the Indian agent John Dougherty on May 9, 1832. The Mandans had lost their economic clout. The fur trade was fading, and their association with the Arikaras had tainted the Mandans as hostile. In an observation shaped by these changes in circumstance and perception, Cass proclaimed that the Indians of the upper Missouri were now “far beyond the operation of any causes, primary or secondary, which can be traced to civilised man.”
The Mandans do survive today (Wikipedia), with roughly 365 “full-blood” members.
More: read Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People.
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