In 1850 Henry Sibley, then a territorial delegate to the U.S. Congress from Minnesota, wrote a letter to Senator H. S. Foote:
The Indian is here in his forest home, hitherto secure from the intrusion of the pale faces; but the advancing tide of civilization warns him that ere long he must yield up his title to this fair domain, and seek another and a strange dwelling place. It is a melancholy reflection that the large and warlike tribes of Sioux and Chippewas who now own full nine-tenths of the soil of Minnesota must soon be subjected to the operation of the same causes that have swept their Eastern brethren from the earth unless an entirely different policy is pursued by the Government towards them.
Sibley was known as a “friend to the Indians,” in part because of his long association with the Dakota through the medium of the fur trade. He had come out to the territory in the late 18 20s, when he was only a teenager and it was still a wilderness, and had taken a job as a trader for the American Fur Company. He was quickly promoted to clerk and not long after to partner with sole responsibility for the Dakota trade. He learned the Dakota language and was known among the Indians as Wah-pe-ton Houska, or Long Trader. In 1835 he built a large limestone house in Mendota and embarked on a political career. He was the first justice of the peace west of the Mississippi River, a congressional representative for the Territory of Minnesota, a member of the Minnesota legislature, and finally, the first governor of the state. A staunch defender of the natives’ interests, Sibley always kept a room in his house for Indians who might need a place to sleep. It could only be reached by an outside stair, and when my mother was young, she heard the rumor that the Dakota who stayed there were not always men.
A tall man with a high forehead and thinning hair that he combed across the crown of his head, Sibley had a rather delicate, heart-shaped face, small wide-set eyes, and a long mustache. In a photo taken in 1862, when he commanded Minnesota’s military force against the Sioux uprising, he was fifty-one years old. His face is gaunt and hollow about the cheeks and he wears a startled, uneasy expression, about halfway between defiance and panic.
On most nineteenth-century frontiers there were two competing views about native peoples. The coarser view held that the natives should simply be exterminated to make way for the settlers, or, in its milder version, that they should forcibly be moved far away. The more progressive view held that “education and a course of moral training” in conjunction with “the influence and restraint of our benign laws” would eventually enable the native to “be placed upon an equality, socially and politically, with the whites.” This was the view held by Sibley throughout most of his adult life and active political career. No one, it is worth mentioning, thought it possible that natives—qua natives—could coexist with pioneers. And indeed it is almost impossible to imagine how that might have worked, dependent as both parties were for their survival upon the same real estate.
Sibley was an assimilationist, which we now understand to mean that he idealized the gradual eradication not of the Dakota people themselves but of everything that made them Dakota. It now seems overtly genocidal, but at the time it was considered the alternative to genocide. In his address to a Congress preoccupied with the question of slavery, Sibley argued passionately that the “gentlemen seem not to be aware that there exists under the Government of this Republic, a species of grinding and intolerable oppression, of which the Indian tribes are the victims, compared with which the worst form of human bondage now existing in any Christian State may be regarded as a comfort and a blessing.” But it was not a question simply of morality, there were practical matters to be considered. If changes were not made in the way that the government dealt with the Indians, there was going to be hell to pay on the frontier.
The busy hum of civilized communities is already heard far beyond the mighty Mississippi … Your pioneers are encircling the last home of the red man, as with a wall of fire. Their encroachments are perceptible in the restlessness and belligerent demonstrations of the powerful bands who inhabit your remote western plains. You must approach these with terms of conciliation and of real friendship, or you must soon suffer the consequences of a bloody and remorseless Indian war.
It was clear, Sibley continued, that any such struggle with the Indians “must necessarily end in their extermination,” but it could all be avoided if the government would only turn its attention to the problem of the West.
It did not and things went more or less as Sibley had predicted—but not without his being there to help them along. One of the most frequently cited causes of the Dakota Conflict, the first in a cascading series of clashes that involved most of the Indians of the West and lasted almost three decades, coming to an end only in 1890 with the sordid massacre at Wounded Knee, was a trick played upon the Dakota at the 1851 signing of the Treaty of Traverse des Sioux. This was a major treaty opening up land for settlement on the western side of the Mississippi River. Although the Indians who signed it received only pennies an acre they were satisfied with the agreement, which provided the tribes with government annuities at a time when the decline in the fur trade and increasing scarcity of game, combined with growing pressure from would-be settlers, was causing them great hardship.
But after signing the formal treaty document, the chiefs at Traverse des Sioux were directed to place their mark upon another piece of paper that had not been discussed and that the chiefs later claimed to have thought was a duplicate of the treaty they had already signed. This second paper, which came to be known as the “traders’ paper,” allowed for the payment of individual Indians’ debts to fur traders out of the general tribal funds owed them by the government in payment for the ceded lands. It was, you might say, a direct subvention of government money to entrepreneurial pioneers. Sibley, whose personal fortune had long been tied up with the fur business (by his own account he had lost $10,000 a year since 1842, much of it in credit to Indian traders), was a major player in these negotiations. In a letter to the then-territorial governor, Alexander Ramsey, he pressed the traders’ case, arguing that if the Indians’ debts were not taken into account, it would be “a gross injustice towards men who impoverished themselves in supplying the Indians, after 20 or 30 years of labor and exposure.”
But it got worse. When, ten years on, the situation had so deteriorated that the Sioux, now starving and almost completely landless, were forced into open revolt, who should be called upon to put down the uprising? None other than Henry Sibley, now a prosperous, middle-age landowner with a substantial vested interest in the stability of the state. Even allowing for a natural drift toward conservatism with age, it is a shock to read Sibley’s words, written on the eve of the military campaign:
Unless we can now, and very effectually, crush this rising the State is ruined, and some of its fairest portions will revert for years into the possession of these miserable wretches who, among all devils in human shape, are among the most cruel and ferocious … My heart is steeled against them, and if I have the means, and can catch them, I will sweep them with the besom of death.
Sibley was right in predicting that the Indians would be defeated. Within a month the war was over and Sibley had nearly 2,000 Indians in captivity. He appointed a commission to try the participants for “murder and outrages” committed against settlers. And over the next five weeks, 425 Indians were tried—as many as 40 in one day—and 321 were convicted, of whom 303 were sentenced to death. The personal intervention of Abraham Lincoln saved the lives of all but 38, who were hanged in Mankato on the day after Christmas 1862 before a crowd of spectators. The occasion was reported in the St. Paul Pioneer Press:
Three slow, measured, and distinct beats on the drum by Major Brown … and the rope was cut … the scaffold fell, and thirty-seven lifeless bodies were left dangling between heaven and earth… As the platform fell, there was one, not loud, but prolonged cheer from the soldiery and citizens who were spectators, and then all were quiet and earnest witnesses of the scene.
In 1843 Henry Si
bley married Sarah Steele, who was my great-grandmother’s aunt. She had been brought out to the territory by her brother Franklin Steele, an early Minnesotan pioneer with a canny eye for real estate. In the face of some stiff competition, Franklin Steele had laid claim to one of the choicest pieces of Mississippi River frontage—the Falls of St. Anthony at the river’s navigable head—the instant it was ceded by the Sioux. Within a decade he owned the two biggest lumber mills in a state full of timber and in time he earned a place in the history books as the territory’s first millionaire.
In the 1850s Franklin Steele wrote to his older brother John, a Pennsylvania doctor, encouraging him to come out and try his fortune in the West. John Steele, who was Grandmother Abbott’s father, packed up the family—eleven in all, not counting the servants—and traveled out from Pennsylvania by boat, down the Ohio River and up the Mississippi. Like his brother, John Steele had a knack for making money and he quickly began to buy up property, much of it in St. Paul. The most significant of his holdings was a large, three-story, reshaped building on the corner of Wabasha and Seventh streets. The “Steele Block,” as it came to be known, provided an income for much of my family for many years. It supported Grandmother Abbott and her children, including my grandfather and the maiden aunts, right through the Great Depression, which, thanks to their holdings, they experienced vicariously, if at all.
It was after the Second World War that the problems started. The value of the property’s leases dwindled, there were unpaid taxes and imprudent deals, and the building fell into disrepair. There are confusing accounts as to who made which bad decisions but, in the end, there seems to have been little choice. The family was forced to cash in its last asset, and the year after I was born, the Steele Block was sold and my mother received a final check for her share.
“What did you do with it?” I asked her.
“What did we do with it? We built this house, of course.” My mother dandled the youngest of my sons on her knee. “Just think, darling,” she whispered to him, “one day all this will be yours.”
17
One Summer
My Children are Abbotts, but they are also members of the Ngati Rehia hapu of the Ngapuhi tribe of Waimate and the northern Bay of Islands. The New Zealand white pages lists ten people with my children’s surname in New Zealand. Of these, one is their grandmother, two are uncles, two are aunts, and the rest are cousins. There are more, of course, some without telephones and a few in Australia. In the current generation it is a large and flourishing family—my children’s Maori grandmother has nearly thirty grandchildren; their Pakeha grandmother has only six.
But one has only to go back a little way before the picture changes. It was 1921 before the Maori population had recovered to the level of the 1850s, which were themselves catastrophic by the standards of only a generation before. Throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, epidemics of measles, influenza, and whooping cough periodically decimated Maori communities, while tuberculosis, unknown in New Zealand in 1814, was by the end of the nineteenth century considered “the curse of the race.” It is a family tree with many phantom limbs. I feel for my children a kind of survivor’s guilt. For myself I feel something of the guilt of the perpetrator.
* * *
That first summer after we returned to America, a summer, as I remember it, that came upon us suddenly, preceded by no spring, I signed a paper for a half million dollars’ worth of life insurance. It wasn’t that I expected to die; on the contrary, I was a good risk, so good that I qualified for a reduced premium—or so the salesman told me. The insurance was for my children, the three of them, all still little boys at the time. I had just turned forty and had almost no money. Seven had gotten a job, but it was not much of one, and I had my grants and some freelance income. But it amounted to almost nothing when you consider what it costs to live.
In fact, the underwriters queried my application: why does she need $500,000 when she only makes $15,000 a year? Oh that, I told them. We’re in something of an unusual situation just now. What I didn’t tell them is that we’d been in this unusual situation, or one just like it, for most of the past fifteen years. Another thing the underwriters wanted to know was why it was me and not my husband who was taking out insurance. That was harder to explain. I couldn’t say to them: He’s a Maori. He doesn’t like to talk about death. But that was the truth of it. The idea of actually preparing for death, going eyeball-to-eyeball with the beyond, was so much more than Seven could handle that I didn’t even tell him what I’d done. He was the beneficiary of a half-million-dollar policy that he didn’t know anything about.
But whatever financial security we had, it was never going to come from his side of the family. They had land in New Zealand, a little parcel of it, subdividable into an ever-increasing number of portions. It had all belonged to his family once, half the Bay of Islands, everything from Waimate to Marsden Cross. But that was two hundred years ago and everything had changed with the land sales and annexation and the fall of the Maoris from grace. Seven’s family still owned something in Mangonui; it’s just that it wasn’t enough. Their piece had belonged to Seven’s grandfather and his sisters, but the old man had had several children and the sisters five or six each, and all of them had had children, and everyone was equally entitled, though some, including Seven, were unlikely ever to come claiming their share.
No, whatever our kids were going to end up with, it was going to have to come from me. And there I was at forty with no house, no land, no portfolio. I didn’t even have a decent car. I felt I’d done them a disservice in failing to accumulate the sorts of things that children have a right to expect, and I wasn’t sure they would appreciate what they did have, which was an interesting personal history. I wasn’t sure whether, in the end, that would seem like enough. So that’s when I took out the policy.
It seemed to me I owed them some sort of explanation. And so I drafted a letter, or maybe a kind of manifesto, which I tucked alongside the policy in the folder marked Met Life. I expected they’d be grown up when they found it, perhaps at the very moment when they began to feel curious about such things.
“Dear Boys,” it began,
in each of you is a little bit of the conqueror and the conquered, the colonizer and the colonized. Seeing us and seeing you, people have always commented: this one looks a little more Maori, that one a little more white. It seems to them not only a matter of skin tone but of abilities—this one is so coordinated, that one has such an analytic mind. The old assumptions are all still visible, like rocks poking out from under a thin layer of soil. Often people have found themselves compelled to mention hybrid vigor, as if flattering us with observations about what good results crossbreeding gives.
Two things on this score have always stuck in my memory. The first is your auntie Kura’s remark that your grandmother always wanted her to marry out. It helps to understand the size of their community and the fact that they were all cousins on both sides of the road. Your grandmother had a mortal fear of marriage among close relations. I don’t believe this was a personal idiosyncrasy. There were people in the family who had married too close—one of her uncles had married his own niece—but it was one of those things nobody talked about. As far as your grandmother was concerned, when it came to marriage partners for her children, Maori was OK so long as it was distant, but Pakeha was better because it was by definition further away.
This was fully the opposite of what I’d expected. I’d always imagined my English ancestry could only be perceived by your father’s people as attenuating the family line. I see now that this betrays a certain sentimentality. But it was often hard for me to know what they were thinking. What did Uncle Hone mean, for instance, when he suggested that your father and I might not be as far apart as we looked? “You know,” he said to me one night in the pub, “there was a Pakeha back there. An American, a sea captain. Set himself up in Waimate with a couple of sisters for wives. Maybe you two are really cousins.”
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“Maybe,” I told him. “You think we should call the whole thing off?”
On my side it was entirely different. On my side inbreeding was considered the lesser evil, the acceptable risk, not nearly so dangerous as marrying down. In St. Paul, where your grandmother was born, the pool of possible marriage partners was almost as small as it was in Mangonui. So small that anyone with the right sort of pedigree was almost certain to be related in some way. So small that the combination of the Great War and the flu left a whole generation stranded. My mother had no fewer than three maiden aunts. Their brother, my grandfather, married his own cousin. They both committed suicide later—separately, mind you—by shutting themselves up in the garage and turning on the car. Though, of course, that doesn’t prove anything.
The other thing I think about is Charles Darwin, who had his own reasons for pursuing the subject of cross- and inbreeding. He himself was the product of a Darwin-Wedgwood marriage, and in 1839 he married another Wedgwood, his first cousin Emma. They had ten children in seventeen years, of whom two died young, several were chronically unwell, and the last was in some way subnormal.
Darwin himself suffered from chronic intestinal disorders that no one was ever able to diagnose, and when his eldest daughter began to complain of stomach trouble, he was certain it was something he’d passed on. Over a period of months she grew sicker—feverish, headachy, less and less able to keep anything down. At last she began to vomit uncontrollably, bringing up not only the spoonfuls of brandy they fed her but a bright green bile. When she finally slipped into a coma and died, the doctor gave as the cause of death a bilious fever with typhoid character, but both he and Darwin firmly believed that she had succumbed to an inherited malaise.
Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All Page 22