Sherry Chandler

And still another view

From George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Univ Chicago Press, 1980:

It is important to see that we don’t just talk about arguments in terms of war. We can actually win or lose arguments. We see the person we are arguing with as an opponent. We attack his positions, and we defend our own. We gain and lose ground. , , , Many of the things we do in arguing are partially structured by the concept of war. Though there is no physical battle, there is a verbal battle, and the structure of an argument—attack, defense, counterattack, etc.—reflects this. It is in this sense that the ARGUMENT IS WAR metaphor is one that we live by in the culture: it structures the actions we perform in arguing.

Try to imagine a culture where arguments were not viewed in terms of war, where no one wins or loses, where there is no sense of attacking or defending, gaining or losing ground. Imagine a culture where an argument is viewed as a dance, the participants are seen as performers, and the goal is to perform in a balanced and aesthetically pleasing way. In such a culture, people would view arguments differently, carry them out differently, and talk about them differently. But we would probably not view them as arguing at all . . .

This book is old and it’s ideas have become classic. So I know it is stating the obvious, but I couldn’t help but ponder as I read this passage at the same time I was reading Calloway and Hammon/Taylor that the main reason we could not come to some accommodation with the Native nations is that we think in terms of conquest, not of cooperation.

The Shawnee didn’t want to conquer us. They just wanted us to leave them some fragment of their way of life.

My Daddy always used to say you can’t win a holding war.

I heard an interview yesterday on All Things Considered with the maker of the new rug in President Obama’s Oval Office. He described the eagle on the Presidential Seal as having its head turned toward the talon with the olive branch rather than the talon with the clutch of arrows. This orientation is intended to indicate that we are a peaceful nation.

So we’ve always liked to tell ourselves.

But in fact, we are bellicose in all our thinking. We must have a War on Poverty, a War on Drugs, a War on Crime. Our physicians think of their job in terms of a fight against disease and are prone to speaking of medications and procedures they have in their armentarium.

And now, of course, our neverending War on Terror.

I can only remember what William Stafford said: Every War Has Two Losers.

The winners write the history

From Colin G. Calloway’s The Shawnees and the War for America (Penguin, 2007):

America’s pioneer heritage continues to be credited with generating many of America’s core values, and its stories form a central part of the nation’s history. But the stories and the values they carry emerged over time. Elizabeth Perkins, in her study of historical experience and memory in the Ohio Valley, notes that as the original combatants died off, new generations of historians and writers “shaped their accounts along increasingly racist and nationalistic lines.” The settlers’ own stories were “often tinged with ambivalence or regret,” but “later conquest narratives breathed moral certainty.” Pioneers were heroes, Indians inhuman. A long and bloody war that sometimes hung in the balance now became “the inevitable triumph of a superior race.” . . . But what if our pioneer forefathers also butchered Indian families, stole Indian lands, broke treaties, desecrated the environment, and destroyed socieities that were truly free and egalitarian?

. . . Many historians . . . insist that it is essential to paint as full a picture as possible of the past and to consider multiple historical experiences; otherwise, we perpetuate a mythic past that offers little guidance for the real world. History and humans, even in America, have their dark sides. Indians had no monopoly on cruelty, vengefulness, and treachery, and no one has a monopoly on courage and love of freedom. [176]

Such a sane view, in what often seem to me insane times.

Now even the Native Americans are being co-opted in the name of propaganda and patrioteering. I understand that Glenn Beck found a couple to stand behind him on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

Another view

Brooks Carver writes to share this from Letters of a Nation (Random House, 1999):

From a letter by Gen James A. Carleton of the US Army on what should be done with Indians:

“…teach them the truths of Christianity[...] Little by little they will become a happy and contented people.”

From the reply by the Indians of the Six Nations to the college of William and Mary, which had invited the Indians to send twelve young men to their college to be “properly” educated.

“…our ideas of this kind of Education happen not to be the same as yours. We have had some Experience of it. Several of our Young People were formerly brought up at the Colleges of the Northern Provinces; they were instructed in all your Sciences; but, when they came back to us, they were bad Runners, ignorant of every means of living in the Woods, unable to bear Cold or Hunger, knew neither how to build a Cabin, take a Deer, or kill an Enemy…were therefore neither fit for Hunters, Warriors, nor Counselors; they were totally good for nothing. [...] If the Gentlemen of Virginia will send us a Dozen of their Sons, we will take care of their Education; instruct them in all we know, and make Men of them.”

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In The Shawnees and the War for America , Colin G. Calloway says that, after their final defeat at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, some of the Shawnee tried to assimilate. They lived in cabins, farmed, and kept domestic animals. But on two points they were adamant: they would not give up their religion for Christianity and they would not attend European-style schools.

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Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley has a birthday

Steel engraving for frontispiece to the revised edition of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, published by Colburn and Bentley, London 1831.

Click through to Wikipedia for a larger version.

Mary Shelley is best known, of course, for her novel Frankenstein, but she was a multi-talented writer. Below I’ve included what seems to be her most anthologized poem.

Stanzas

Oh, come to me in dreams, my love!
I will not ask a dearer bliss;
Come with the starry beams, my love,
And press mine eyelids with thy kiss.

’Twas thus, as ancient fables tell,
Love visited a Grecian maid,
Till she disturbed the sacred spell,
And woke to find her hopes betrayed.

But gentle sleep shall veil my sight,
And Psyche’s lamp shall darkling be,
When, in the visions of the night,
Thou dost renew thy vows to me.

Then come to me in dreams, my love,
I will not ask a dearer bliss;
Come with the starry beams, my love,
And press mine eyelids with thy kiss.

— Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851)

And it all ended in [the Trail of] Tears

Hammon and Taylor (Virginia’s Western War 1775 – 1786 ) on the outcome of the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 for indigenous nations in the Ohio territory:

Inevitably, the future required adaptation and a new kind of education from succeeding generations of Indians. Yet assimilation under adverse circumstances was to be a tediously painful process. One historian of the period wrote that the Indian civilization was like a rock, which could not be changed in form without destroying it. This immutability was to be fully evident after the advent of widespread development and settlement in the Old Northwest lands. . . . Particularly distressing was the Indians’ affinity for, and inability to tolerate, strong liquor. [Little Turtle] had warned, in vain, that it would perhaps be better to be at war with the white people than submit to the degradation of alcoholism.

. . .

Granted a yearly annuity, which was all too frequently misspent, his Miami tribesmen continued to degenerate, so that by 1814 William Henry Harrison reflected that they were “merely a poor drunken set, diminishing every year.” [p. 226-227]

This degeneration suited the Whites very well, in that it gave them excuse for the bad faith in which they brok treaty after treaty in their greed for land.

One man’s view of compassion

Joseph Brant, a War Chief of the Mohawk, seems to have carried on an extensive correspondence in English. He made this statement in a letter to an unknown correspondent. It is quoted in the Life of Joseph Brant by William Leete Stone, published in 1845:

The palaces and prisons among you form a most dreadful contrast. . . . Those you call savages relent; the most furious of our tormentors exhausts his rage in a few hours, and dispatches his unhappy victim with a sudden stroke. Perhaps it is eligible that incorrigible offenders should sometimes be cut off. Let it be done in a way that is not degrading to human nature. Let such unhappy men have an opportunity, by their fortitude, of making an atonement in some measure for the crimes they have committed during their lives.

But for what are many of your prisoners confined? — for debt! — astonishing!— and will you ever again call the Indian nations cruel? Liberty, to a rational creature, as much exceeds property as the light of the sun does that of the most twinkling star. But you put them on a level, to the everlasting disgrace of civilization. I knew, while I lived among the white people, many of the most amiable contract debts, and I dare say with the best intentions. Both parties at the time of the contract expect to find their advantage. The debtor, we will suppose by a train of unavoidable misfortunes, fails; here is no crime, nor even a fault; and yet your laws put it in the power of the creditor to throw the debtor into prison and confine him there for life! a punishment infinitely worse than death to a brave man! And I seriously declare, I had rather die by the most severe tortures ever inflicted on this continent, than languish in one of your prisons for a single year. Great Spirit of the Universe! — and do you call yourselves Christians? Does then the religion of Him whom you call your Saviour, inspire this spirit, and lead to these practices? Surely, no. It is recorded of him, that a bruised reed he never broke. Cease, then, to call yourselves Christians, lest you publish to the world your hypocricy. Cease, too, to call other nations savages, when you are tenfold more the children of cruelty than they.

In the Box

via Jeff Hess