Native American Heritage Month 2016 - Synergy

I have made peace with how susceptible I am to mission creep, especially when it comes to studying.

That is partly just because I really like learning, but also I have come to see that often things fit together well. The extra book rounds out the total picture, or it simply brings one corner more into focus.

Sometimes it is just that part of a topic is more familiar. That can make digesting the material easier, but it can also have pangs. Every time I see the name Black Kettle now there is a drop in my stomach, because it means Sand Creek is coming.

There were things that worked together well this time around, sometimes in unexpected ways. I did not expect reading up on Native American history to get me compulsively reading Hellboy comics, but that is all right. Here are other things that were unexpected.

Around the middle of the reading I read Full-Rip 9.0: The Next Big Earthquake in the Pacific Northwest, by Sandi Doughton. I did not expect that to relate at all. If anything, pending cataclysms feel more and more likely, and I like reading about things to be prepared. I didn't expect how many Indians would appear, but there were all these tribes I had just been reading about, because they had stories of the last great quake and tsunami. I knew that - the Coos retelling affected me deeply - but I hadn't been thinking about it.

The book I finished right before Sisters in Sprirt: Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Influences on Early American Feminists was Why We Lost the ERA, by Jane J. Mansbridge. It was not intentionally related. The blog series that I started on the Constitution back in March had expanded to include failed amendments, and when I got to the Equal Rights Amendment I thought I needed more knowledge. I had added Mansbridge's book to my Goodreads list a while back, so that was the obvious place to go. Together that was a good block of feminist history, and that perspective does not hurt for someone trying to find her way as an intersectional feminist today.

(There were interesting correlations to how conformity could be expected in movements. It hadn't really been that long since I had finished Utopia either.)

Deciding to read The Invention of the White Race, Volumes 1 and 2, by Theodore W. Allen, was more deliberate. Actually, it came from a Black History Month. In 2014 I read How the Irish Became White by Noel Ignatiev, and it was terribly disappointing (boring in its execution and concluding ridiculously). Someone suggested Allen's book to me then, and it occurred to me now that this was the time to read it, though that is no small undertaking.

What Allen says about race is important, but he spends a lot of time establishing groundwork, including a lot of time on English oppression of the Irish. It had many corollaries with treatment of indigenous people by colonists in the Americas. One interesting aspect of that is that there are ways in which taking over a society with its own hierarchies goes more smoothly than with a more communal society. Given capitalism's relationship with colonialism, that makes sense, but again it was something I hadn't really thought of.

What you may not know is that I am also working on a gardening reading list. I have been even worse about adding things to that, but a couple of books may relate.

The potato monoculture in Ireland left the Irish vulnerable to famine, which is well-known. It may be less understood that centuries of persecution and theft had left the Irish vulnerable to a monoculture. The potato kept them from starving when there were few other options. (That is lightly covered in Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire, but there is much more about that in Allen's book.)

Many of the circumstances that favored the imposition of chattel slavery (an evil in itself) and caused a great deal of hardship even for the free was focus on tobacco monoculture in colonial Virginia. People couldn't eat it, but it was still all they wanted to plant because money could be made. (Though with everyone planting it, prices went down.)

Allen spends a lot of time on the capital investments necessary for sugar production and tobacco production, going over economic development and the growth of slavery in the West Indies and Virginia, and their similarities and differences. The most glaring similarity was that these were cash crops that were labor-intensive and planted by people that didn't want to do the work themselves.

Tobacco has the added perk of being poisonous, which is still an issue for farm workers who are often minors (something I was reminded of when researching the Child Labor Amendment).

But here's the other thing I know: the natives farmed! They practiced animal husbandry. In some areas they had summer homes and winter homes. They worked and played, but it wasn't recognized as such by the colonizers. Some of that was because they were looking for profits in a cash economy instead of a subsistence economy, but some of that is not recognizing easier, more natural systems. This brings me to Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture by Toby Hemenway, which showed me a lot about how we fight nature when we should be learning from it.

So the path of success for the Virginians was that you had to do back-breaking work of breaking sod, hoeing, planting, weeding, and harvesting a crop that could sicken them, and they could starve with a barn full of it, in the hopes of becoming rich and living a life of leisure, for which they killed and chased out people who were already living a better life. Plus they enslaved others.

"Civilization" doesn't seem like a good word for that.