Writing History

Apache prisoners of war en route to Florida camps.
Nueces River, Tex. September 10, 1886.

There is little on Lozen in the historical record. This much at least is considered historical fact. The photograph above is said to be her only recorded image. If this is an accurate assertion, she is seated at the top, the sixth woman from the right. The historical record, and the archives of observation which found this record, are not any guarantee of accuracy. This is not revelatory. In the who, what, when, where and why of journalism, for instance, the margin of error is wide. The margin of omission, however, is immense.

Other kinds of record keeping and archives, like death and taxes, or their records at least, fare somewhat better. Not always. Gaping holes where where people and their stories have fallen are in every place, archive or unmarked grave. The pit of what we don't know is bottomless. What we do know, or claim to know, is the tenuous truth we hold out as history  Beyond the truth of omission and just plain poor observation is a bigger issue however. This concerns the question of the how and who of history writing as a method and history as a product. Also at issue is the idea that the written record is the superior instrument; both a fact and its own record of progress. Each is at stake in the writing of history, particularly the kind of public history I am interested in writing about when I write about places. 

Lozen, an Apache women whose warrior legend is the stuff legends are made of, illuminates with her contested history the ways that places, like people, can be carried away and vanish. With these losses our storied landscapes lose their shape and power. There are always new place narratives being spun, however, to explain why this land is our land. America has used Native American histories, individual and communal, to assert a national identity while simultaneously erasing the  violence that accompanied these encounters. The habit of populating the national imagination while depopulating the land was also two-fold. Land long-settled by  different cultural groups was called vacant or open, or, when settlement was harder to ignore, the lament of the vanishing native was sent forth to create a future vacancy. The twin tale of either vacancy or imminent demise did nothing to diminish the importance of ‘playing indian,’ in creating an American Identity. Philip J. Deloria Playing Indian (1998), originally a dissertation at Yale, looks at how America uses the idea of ‘Indian’ to create their own national identity, think Boston Tea Party and noble savage, or Buffalo Bill and dime novels. Lozen's story, as it appears in two recent published writings, illustrates how place narratives that seek to establish the power of place in the contemporary moment can diminish places when they are spun from air and conjecture, even in good faith.  But they follow a pattern of negligence long established. 

Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (1999) written by by Linda Tuhiwai Smith, is an excellent text about history as a tool of power and domination. That is history with a capital H, generally a national history. The western model of knowledge accumulation is a violent record of abuses, and the knowledge accumulated not nearly the objective body of 'this is what happened' fact that it is billed to be. There are many books that challenge the ways that we learn about the world. Our sense deceive us, our bigotries blind us, our paradigms control the way we process the most simple phenomenon, and whole sets of truths that govern the 'way things are,' are overturned with a startling regularity. How to counter the 'truth' that is woven into the lessons we learn when we are learning our lessons at school and in the world? To paraphrase a great bumper sticker, It is hard not to believe everything we think.

Tuhiwai Smith develops an argument against history by drawing on theoretical critiques that characterize history as a specifically Western project, tied to the Colonialism, Imperialism and the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment, so often articulated as the rise of reason and progress, saw the rise of the major political and economic structure shaping dominant understandings of the world and people in it. The resulting global system justified the death and destruction of all the people who were already settled on lands that Spain, France, England, other Europeans Nations and eventually, the United States. It still does a pretty nifty job of death and destruction, whose latest casualty seems to be the planet itself. But that is a whole different story, or maybe it is really the same story.

The end, fortunately, did not materialize for the first world's established populations prior to colonial encounters, although it may still be coming for the lot of us. The 'eventual' disappearance of all of these people in the face of 'progress,' was never realized, although we still love a rousing “Last of the Mohican's” moment in our narratives. Vanishing way of life and all that, generally characterized as inevitable in march of "progress." The horror has marked and destroyed robust cultural systems and killed so very many people, and continues to do so, is real. But so is the persistent underestimation about the resilience of a whole lot of cultures and settlements of people.

Tuhiwai Smith 's work connects the project of history with imperialist ideologies, like those of savagery or inferiority, and develops a list of ideas about history. Mainly, that histories need to be subject to systematic critique, both from inside indigenous communities and outside in places like Universities. Her list includes “the idea that history is one large chronology,” which refers to the discipline of history, not the stories that people tell about their past (30). These stories, she argues, are “reclassified as oral traditions rather than histories” (33). This is a pretty well-know debate in Native American communities. “'The talk'  about the colonial past," she writes, "is embedded in our political discourses, our humour, poetry, music, story tellings and other common sense ways of passing on both a narrative of history and an attitude about history” (19).

These ideas are well-known in academic fields that employ critical theory, where I have spent way too much time, as evidence by  this very post. Or not enough. I struggle to not recreate these kinds of histories, where as a scholar I am allowed to imagine the power to tell and ascertain fact is mine, like some terrible Spider Man-like responsibility. This is what I do though, scholarship, and I would like to do it well, even if I am a grain of sand on the beach of written history. And by well I mean I would like to write things that are as close to accurate, fair and just to the parties involved as possible.

The study of place narratives brings fiction and history into constant tension. The line between the two is decidedly blurry. This is certainly true in the southwest, where so much of what people thought they knew what part myth, part bullshit, part conjecture, part survey and high adventure tale, part imperial project, part romance, part dime store novel, part longing, and so on to the hundredth part. How different history and fiction are, or are not, is what the above paragraphs are getting at in a more academic way. And yet there is a line crossed when history become fiction, and sometimes it is pretty clear. Sort of like the line that television crossed when reality became a genre.

Which, brings this post back to Lozen. in an academically-winded and meandering route. I have not done enough research to talk about Lozen's history as much as is know, which is really not much, but there are some big recent issues with that history that have prompted this post. The first issue was with a paragraph brought to my attention by Sherry Fletcher. I do live in fear of her eagle-eye, a healthy fear to be sure. An unfounded assertion is like a fat field mouse doing a jig in a field at suppertime when Sherry turns her gaze to a writing.

Here is the first example that features Lozen and promoted my first-of-the-year post. It is published in the most recent edition of the Sierra County "Official 2012-2013 Visitors Guide." After noting, on page 12, that the U.S government established forts and maintained troops in Sierra County to make it safe for the flooding hordes of miners, ranchers and farmers to to the newly claimed territories, which also "forced several bands on the region, including the Warm Spring Apaches into reservations, the "Truth or Consequences" narrative moves to Lozen. Here is the paragraph in total:

Art by Timothy Thixton,
a former student in Truth or Consequences. 

"One of the most colorful characters was Lozen, an Apache woman said to have ridden as a warrior with her brother Victorio, and later, with Geronimo himself. According to accounts, she fell in love with a Confederate deserter who had been sheltered by the Apaches. When a wagon train came along headed to the California gold fields, he left, breaking Lozen's heart. She never married, devoting herself instead to using her unusual powers to sense danger and heal people."

The passage was lifted, verbatim with several others, from page 205 of Spirits Of The Border IV: The History And Mystery Of New Mexico written by Ken Hudnall, Sharon Hudnal. I am listening to his radio show (kenhudnall.com) as I write this. Pretty interesting. I have emailed Mr. Hudnall and requested clarification and a source for this assertion. Perhaps Mr. Hudnall wrote the piece, which is un-authored. I will follow up on this story. I hope it is bullshit, of course, because it sounds like a load of crap. From what I have read in the archives and in books thus far in the last few frantic weeks of research, Lozen would no more have been broken-hearted from a raggedy southern soldier than she would have been...I do not know how to finish that sentence. Maybe it was a tall, black and handsome soldier from the South. I should not write something like that--it may be quoted in some other account.  

As a side note, just to drag this out a little longer, the publication is a "Co-op Participant in New Mexico True," the newest branding slogan for place narratives sanctioned by the New Mexico Department of Tourism. According to the Albuquerque Journal, the $2 million dollar campaign, coming out of Texas (how grand, Texas), shows “Things that are just an activity somewhere else … in New Mexico are true experiences because they are immersed in the landscape; the culture; the people. … We wanted to bring to life the feeling you get from a New Mexico vacation," according to the Tourism Secretary (4.17.12).

A similar story about Lozen also appeared in the January 2012 Chapparal Guide. This one provides a lengthier history, and refers to several of the texts that explore the few collected the oral histories that were recorded by historian and educator Eve Ball, as well as a few other accounts of the Apache people. The problem with this story is that is quotes a fictional account of Lozen's life as though it were a biographical passage. In other words, the author quotes Tom Diamond's story Apache Tears (2008), which is according to the inside bibliographical page, "A work of fiction based on historical personas and occurrences with dramatization of characters " In other words, a work of fiction.On the back of the book, as a side note, is an "inevitable destruction of their way of life," moment. 

Historical fiction is a genre that is eerily close to reality television. We want to believe that it is real, even though we know that it is not. The author of this article, who I have heard very nice things about, quotes Diamond as though quoting a historical account. Here is the difference, which is not blurry in this case. History is drawn from observation, or from a record of observation. Fictional accounts do not count. Stories do count. While all data is merely observation, the trick is to observe as accurately as possible. History may be fiction, but fiction cannot serve as history. Stories can count as both.  

How we privilege the observer's accounts returns this musing to Tuhiwai Smith, and to the problems of history, research and writing that so many scholar struggle with as outsiders to communities, even if they are merely coming home from college. Once you are trained in a method, especially the same methods that produced such brutally inept, violent and exclusionary histories, how do you write something that is solid and good? I draw wisdom from one of my favorite fictional books. This book made me curious about the Hatian  experience in America. The quote was from a wise-women figure in the text, who said something along these lines (and don't quote me on this): knowledge is labor--you have to work at it. 

This brings me to my last observation of the new year. I always encourage my students, after I misquote the knowledge is labor bit in my opening lecture, to find wise people to emulate. And most wise people got that way by being avidly curious, being passionate, persevering through hardship, and working hard. Writing history is very hard work. Writing good history is harder. Even getting a post out is daunting. But the commitments forged, even with people who are long past knowing what is being written, are strangely compelling. Maybe that is why people keep writing histories, because they feel compelled to tell the stories, buried in the landscape, calling from the ground. In Following the Equator, Mark twain wrote that the "very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice," and yet he never put down his pen.