The BLACK HAWK WAR LEGACY

 

By Phillip B Gottfredson

 

 

 

Utahan's are generally keenly aware of the tremendous struggles their ancestors endured while coming to Utah. Of their devotion to God, humility and raw courage. My ancestors where among those of whom I speak. Scores of books and journals attest to the extraordinary accomplishments made settling in Utah territory.

 

But encounters with the Indian people in Utah suggest Mormon settlers made every effort to get along, and allege that the Indian people because of their "degraded condition" were a nuisance and a threat to the Mormon agenda, and at times "harsh measures were necessary" as it was a "matter of supremacy between the white man and the Indian." When in fact the opposite was true as the indigenous people of Utah were plundered and robbed of their inheritance and heritage. (See interview of Chief Walkara here)

 

The rhetoric in the victors accounts are brilliantly managed, filled with half truths, omissions, and denials. A one sided view as seen through the eyes of the victors and not the victim. The one question these accounts do not answer is the Indians side of the story. Even asking the question seems to cause a lot of people to bristle. "That's all in the past," I was told, "we just need to forget about." On several occasions I was told by people "we have given the Ute every chance to succeed, yet they choose to live off the government, and live in poverty." If I may be so bold to say I think racism was used as a justification for taking Indian lands.

 

As I continued to learn from the Native people what it means to be an Indian, often I heard them speak of the discrimination they face every day. Initially my response was to say that they have the same opportunities for a decent life as anyone living in America. Saying that often drew some angry responses. And the more time I spent with them the more I came to realize how ignorant I was about their lives.

 

A year or so ago leaders of the Ute community gave me a tour of the Ute reservation. On the surface it appeared that it was much like other communities, there were schools, government offices, good neighborhoods and not so good ones. A business district with some businesses flourishing, some that were not. But as our tour continued and we began to look beneath the veneer it soon became apparent that underlying it all was a culture still struggling for survival. Theirs is a society entangled in a mess of what are called "Indian Laws", laws that the Indians were not given any say in the creation of.

 

The arcane attitudes of white supremacy toward the Utah Indian people has prevailed for 150 years unchallenged. I am astonished that they have had little or no voice, ignored, shunned, kept out on the fringes of society and denied access to the most the basic fundamentals of equality and human rights. That they live in fear of telling their story, their truth, that there may be retribution for exercising their freedom of speech. It's within these things that we begin to see glimpses of the legacy of the Black Hawk War.

 

It is deeply troubling to me that the tradition has been to trivialize, and downplay the history of the Indian people in Utah, those who suffered the greatest loss in terms of land, culture, and dignity.

 

Devoting several years of my own to the study of the war, researching countless books and personal histories, in 2005 I had the distinct honor of living with a Shoshone family in Oregon. There I learned by participation some the traditions and life ways of the American Indian. Trying to understand the Indian people intellectually is not the same as learning from them first hand. Mala Spotted Eagle of the western Shoshone tribe, and his wife Sky, a member of the Tlinket tribe, were my mentors for nearly two years. Later I became personally acquainted with members of the Ute tribe, of those I met Forrest Cuch, Larry Cesspooch, and descendents of Chief Black Hawk. who have since been my close friends and mentors for several years. Through these associations I was introduced to a plethora of people from various tribes throughout the western United states. I had the honor of being witness to and often participating in Native ceremonies, and observing ancient traditions.

 

But one of the most troubling things I learned about the Indians is how severely demoralized they are. After decades of repression by government and society it's a miracle they have survived at all.

 

Euro-Americans have for centuries forced upon the Indian their views, opinions, cultural and religious beliefs. "The Mormons brought with them a moral code, a new technology, and an economic system. Mormon's inability or refusal to accept Indian culture on its own terms is a conflict repeated countless times throughout the west. Coexistence, with each culture intact, was impossible; compromise seemed unattainable, for the cherished ideals of one culture were the unpardonable sins of the other." (The Other 49ers) Mormons brought the ways of civilization with them, in their minds. Contrary to their desire for a enlightened spiritual way of life, the world followed, and they gave into the kind of discrimination that they ran from.

 

Christianity is not a democracy. The church has always held firmly to the divine doctrines of authority and hierocracy. "The potentates of the old world found no difficulty in convincing themselves that they made ample compensation to the inhabitants of the new, by bestowing on them civilization and Christianity." - Peter d'Errico, Legal Studies Department, University of Massachusetts/Amherst
 
Christian expansionists attempted to convince the Indian people they had the right to take possession of their land because the Indians were heathens, non-Christians, who didn't believe in the bible or Jesus, the Messiah. And this is the basis for the denial of Indian rights in federal Indian law. These arcane elements of reason, born of Christian supremacy, have become deeply imbedded into the landscape of social normality.
 
The Mormons believed they had a divine obligation to convert the Utah's American Indians to Mormonism according to church doctrine, and in so doing the so-called "loathsome" Indians would become a "white and delightsome people" and would be forgiven of the sins of their forefathers. (Book of Mormon 2 Nephi 5:21-23) According to church doctrine, the nature of the dark skin was a curse, the cause was the Lord. The reason was because the Lamanites "had hardened their hearts against him, (God)" and the purpose was to punish them by making them "loathsome" unto God's people who had white skins.
 
"When the Ute failed to assimilate into Mormon culture, the answer was to exterminate them." Historian Robert Carter
 

In 1847 when Mormon pioneers entered into the land of the Ute, the Ute awoke to find themselves in an arena of an ongoing white expansion. Settlers spurred on by President Polk's fanatical conviction of Manifest Destiny, and President Grant's mandate to leave the fate of the American Indian in the hands of Christian's. Christian's whose mandate was to "kill the Indian and save the man." While armies of the federal government were dispatched to punish the Mormon's for their illegal practice of polygamy, in the cross fire of clashing beliefs and bloody confrontations, it became a matter of who would survive and who would control the land.

 

It is our government that needs to stop holding the Indian people hostage and making them tenants on their own land.

 

It is we who need to stop blaming them for the actions of our ancestors.

 

It is we who need to respect their sovereignty.

 

It was our ancestors who invaded their country and wrecked their lives.

 

It was our government and our ancestors who made treaties with the Indian people and broke every one of them.

 

It was our ancestors who stole their children, and punished them for speaking their own language, physically abused them, and forbid them from practicing their religious beliefs. Carlisle’s founder, Capt. Richard C. Pratt, championed a disastrous approach to educating Native Indians that aimed to “kill the Indian, and save the man.”       

 

It was President Lincoln who set aside 5.6 million acres of land for the Ute, and it was our government who took back 4.3 million acres of that land, the best of that land, and put it in public domain.

 

It is we who have dug up the graves of their ancestors, and sold the contents for profit, and put their bones on public display as a mere curiosity.

 

It is our public school system that ignores the Indians side of the story and omits their perspective from school curriculum, teaching us and our students a mixture of platitudes, half-truths, omissions, and plausible denials...

 

It's ok to speak of the injustices against our ancestors, but to point out the atrocities Indian people have suffered from the hands of our ancestors, is wrong.

 

It was our Christian ancestors who stripped them of their dignity, demoralized and dehumanized the Indian people to the point they were forced to depend upon our church and government for their very survival.

 

And it is we who have looked the other way and said nothing and remained silent saying, "it's not my problem, I'm just doing my job."

 

And in the end it is we who say "we have given the Indian people every opportunity to succeed, yet they choose to live in poverty, and live off the government..." and indifferently state: "it's their own damn fault...?"

 

I echo the words of Martin Luther King, "Discrimination is a hellhound that gnaws at (Indian people) in every waking moment of their lives to remind them that the lie of their inferiority is accepted as truth in the society dominating them."

 

Because Ute history has been omitted from school curriculum, sanitized, and trivialized; consequently Utahan's, Indian and non-Indian, have a distorted sense of where they have come from. The dropout rate of Indian children in public schools is high, for it is then natural for the Native people to believe that their tragedy has little or no importance in the history of Utah. Even worse our children are being taught that genocide is acceptable when religion is the justification for doing so is simply outrageous! This is demoralizing and the source of resentment, and anger, which contributes to social divisions within society, and for many it undermines hope and prospects for a better future.

 

Many will say that prejudice does not exist, but in fact it does. Omission of their history is itself discriminatory. The seeds of racism were planted a long time ago, and like a noxious weed has become entwined into every aspect of society. Racism has become institutionalized and so appears natural in the social landscape. Those who say, "it's not my problem, I'm just doing my job," those who are aware but ignore man's inhumanity toward their fellow man are themselves agents in the on-going genocide of the American Indian people. Remember discrimination has to be taught, our children learn to discriminate from their teachers, families, and communities.

 

Both Indian and non-Indian who do not recognize names like Nooch, or Black Hawk, Walkara, Arropeen, Tabiona, Kanosh, Sanpitch, Tabby, Ouray, Colorow, and events such as the Black Hawk War, Fort Utah battle, Circleville Massacre, or the Bear River Massacre, and what they represent; have no sense of true history the reality of Utah.

 

Brave generals, military tactics, stolen cattle, naked savages living in stick huts, are the trite and stereotypical themes common in the victors accounts. While the grim reality of the Black Hawk War attest to settlers beheading Indians, Indian skulls being sold, or hung from the eves of buildings, go unnoticed. There was torture, murders, and as thousands died from disease, hunger, hopelessness and despair; many were buried in mass graves, graves that would later be looted and the contents thereof considered as trophies, grave looters heralded as heroes with their pictures on the front pages of newspapers, as funerary objects and bones were traded for profit. Their corpses and body parts were publicly displayed for entertainment, and in two separate interviews I was told Utes were placed in cages and taken into the mountains where they were left to die.

 

Stories of frightened children being taken from their homes and families and placed in distant Christian boardinghouse schools, where they were often physically abused, and harshly punish should they speak their own Indian language. Many died and buried on school grounds in unmarked graves. Others were forced into slavery, while some were brutally murdered.

 

The demands Mormon settlers and the Federal government imposed upon the Ute were extraordinary. Expectations for the Ute to toss aside their ancient vibrant culture and traditions, sign over their land, and embrace an entire new way of living, prohibiting them from speaking their language, punishing them for practicing their religious beliefs. Does this sound familiar? It should... these are the very same human injustices that made our ancestors leave Europe to seek freedom from oppression in America.

 

Virtually no one considers generational traumas, such as war, genocide, oppression, poverty, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, physical abuse, death or loss of parents or siblings, which have not yet been grieved and healed by individuals, families and communities. In Utah the effects of unresolved trauma due to the war are carried into the next generation. Understanding generational trauma is key to understanding the American Indian. 
 
I feel we have a responsibility to compassionately understand their pain and to not sanitize the Black Hawk War. The indigenous people of Utah are, all said and done, those who made the ultimate sacrifice, and we should see who they are and what they are doing. We need to experience their pain...to feel it. We owe it to the native Indians of Utah to feel it. Thousands of lives were lost in the war. Most never knew why, and now we don't even think about the war.

 

And this is only a small part of the legacy left behind in the wake of the Black Hawk War.
 

 

-Phillip B Gottfredson