Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas: Jeffrey Ostler

Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas – Jeffrey Ostler – 9780300255362 – Yale University Press – Paperback – 544 pages – September 22, 2020 – $25 – ebook versions available at lower prices

“A landmark book essential to understanding American history, Surviving Genocide is an act of courage. Ostler’s brilliant concept of reconstructing ‘an Indigenous consciousness of genocide’ is significant for its insight into how American Indians understood, discussed, and resisted genocidal threats to their families, communities, and nations. His modern vocabulary of ‘atrocities’ and ‘killing fields’ is not for political effect but appropriate to the brutal reality of Indian policy in American history.”—Brenda Child, Northrop Professor of American Studies, University of Minnesota

Even though many of us feel we are familiar with the story of the “settling” of America by Europeans and the dispossession of indigenous people, reading Jeffrey Ostler’s book, part one of a major two-volume history, will educate every single one of us to a better understanding of the full scope of the takeover of a continent by invading Europeans. Conquest and genocide are terms we seem unable to apply to our own history, preferring still a more sanitized version of the centuries long overwhelming of the people who lived here before Europeans arrived in force.

Ostler has spent years of research documenting the governmentally sanctioned use of force to remove or kill the indigenous people who were inconveniently in the way of the relentless expansion of the American republic. In this book he documents the losses from the violence – massacres, destruction of habitat and lifeways, diseases and cultural upheaval suffered sequentially by native peoples for hundreds of years as first colonial settlers and then Americans flooded the continent. This volume covers the story of the eastern United States from the 1750s to the beginning of the Civil War that set the stage for the post-Civil War expansion that is perhaps the better known narrative – buffalo, horses, trains, Crazy Horse and the Lakota being so much a part of popular culture imagery. As Ostler shows, the way this played out was not “inevitable” and Manifest Destiny was neither. The indigenous people were outnumbered, but often not out maneuvered or outwitted, and their ability to survive the nightmares of dispossession and attempted genocide is heroic.

As Americans, it is sometimes difficult to look at our own history with honesty. It is often said that the “original sin” of America is slavery, but I think we must grapple with the actuality that there are two essentially economic-based social and cultural wounds at the heart of the American project. First, there is the forced dispossession of the people who were on the land itself, and second, the forced migration and enslavement of Africans for the benefit of white Americans and their economic development. We must learn as much as we can about the history of the last five hundred years in North America in an unromanticized, clear-eyed effort to fully comprehend what our forebears did in the course of creating the American dream all of us are allowed thereby to enjoy. The truth in all its complexity should serve as counterweight to the false narratives and self-serving images we choose to live by, all created as a form of ongoing social control.

Indigenous people have survived despite the many attempts to extirpate them or to forcibly transform and bend their cultures into the conquerors’ image of what “civilization” looks like. Still, the traumatic effects of conquest need to be recognized, acknowledged and repaired and it would be no small thing to recognize formally that a genocide was in play, with all the social and political results that term carries with it. This book and presumably the subsequent volume in Ostler’s work, should help us move in that direction.

The book is well written, hard to put down and completely engrossing; its authoritative and well-researched approach makes it a powerful document and well worth your time to read.

I’m grateful for Jeffrey Ostler for taking the time to talk to me about this book and for Yale University Press for alerting me to it.

Jeffrey Ostler is Beekman Professor of Northwest and Pacific History at the University of Oregon and the author of The Lakotas and the Black Hills and The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism from Lewis and Clark to Wounded Knee.

Buy the book at Bookshop.org

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Ben Goldfarb: Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers, and Why They Matter

Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers, and Why They Matter – Ben Goldfarb – Chelsea Green – 304 pages – Hardcover – 9781603587396 – $24.95 – July 5, 2018 – ebook editions available at lower prices

This amazing book completely captivated me from beginning to end. Environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb, a Yale Forestry School graduate, is a natural storyteller, and writes with a warm and inviting style. In Eager, he demonstrates how the actions of a single mammal species so thoroughly affects the ecology of rivers and landscapes we have come to take for granted, without understanding the effects of these amazing and inventive rodent environmental engineers.

Beavers have had wide-ranging effects on the landscape for aeons. When Europeans arrived in North America, beavers were everywhere, and the very nature of rivers was completely different than they appear to us today. Slowed in flow, and wildly marshy, because of all the beaver dam building, rivers were rich and varied environments for many species of wildlife, insects and plants.

And yes, beavers are rodents – but very special and important to us all. They were trapped and hunted for their fur in the 18th and 19th centuries. That demand created a hunting and trapping economy that caused beavers to be virtually obliterated from most parts of the United States. And their disappearance literally changed our landscape, allowing the open flow of rivers, thereby causing erosion and the loss of healthy habitat over many years. The river landscapes most of us have seen in our lifetimes simply did not exist 400 years ago.

Beavers have not been appreciated, much less loved, by farmers and ranchers in North America, and typically not understood or appreciated by most of us. But now, in a time of climate change, increasing heat, more drought, and lacking the money or will to build yet more infrastructure, beavers may represent a viable alternative to restoring the health of many river systems around the country.

Ben Goldfarb’s wide ranging and witty book teaches us a great deal about beavers, personalizes their appeal, and shows us why so many people are enthusiastic about beavers now, yet he also shows how difficult it is to change the way we think about beavers and what they can do to make our world a better place. I hope this book adds more than a few beaver enthusiasts to the world, and helps change the way we co-exist with beavers in the future.

It’s impossible to read this book and not come away with a changed perspective. And I really enjoyed speaking with Ben about the book and about his experiences with beavers around the world. Overall, this book is great fun, and I am happy to recommend Eager to readers of all interests.

“Eager takes us inside the amazing world of nature’s premier construction engineer…and shows us why the restoration of an animal almost driven to extinction is producing wide-ranging, positive effects on our landscapes, ecology, and even our economy.”―National Geographic

“This witty, engrossing book will be a classic from the day it is published.” –Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature

Ben Goldfarb is an environmental journalist and also a writer of fiction. His writing has been published in Science, Mother Jones, The Guardian, High Country News, Audubon Magazine, Modern Farmer, Orion, Scientific American, and many other magazines and journals. He has a masters degree from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, and was a 2018 North American Congress for Conservation Biology journalist fellow. You can learn more about his work at his website here.

If you are interested in learning more about beavers or becoming a beaver supporter, there are many organizations around the country. The Beaver Institute is a good one to start with.

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