History and a Cookie

The police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott in September 2016 inspired days of protest in Charlotte, NC and nearby Davidson College. We Wildcats joke – or lament – that we “live in a bubble.” On September 29, African American students challenged their white classmates and faculty to recognize that the feeling of safety on campus and isolation from larger social problems beyond it that some of us enjoy does not always extend to students, faculty, and staff of color. Following a walk-out and march, students shared their experiences of harassment and discrimination. Racism remains a part of daily life at Davidson College.

This was new to me, and it was old news. I began teaching at Davidson in fall 2016, and as one of the major events in Charlotte’s modern history played out, I was still figuring out who was who and where the copiers are on campus. At the same time, I have been doing anti-racist work in higher education since I was an undergraduate student.

I listened to Davidson students share painful experiences and demand that the mostly white crowd of friends and educators do something. Historians have a role to play in difficult discussions about issues like police brutality and racial profiling by providing accurate contextual information and modeling how to engage civilly and ethically. This is particularly true regarding dialogues about race. Most of the time, white folks like me get to walk away and get on with our lives. Ask many (most?) faculty of color what it is like to be a racial minority at a majority-white institution like Davidson, and they’ll tell you how they so rarely get to put down the burden of having to engage issues of race on others’ terms and timeline.

On of the gifts of being a history professor is being able to reconceptualize courses in response to current events. We don’t “teach to the test.” On that September day, I committed to emphasizing race in the U.S. Women’s History course I was scheduled to teach in spring 2017. In a meeting with college archivists soon after, I learned about a small collection of letters written in the 1850s by Mary Lacy, the wife of one of the college’s presidents. After reading the letters, I decided these would be the basis of a web page on gender and slavery at Davidson College. That project (or at least the first phase of it) is now done. You can access it here.

Old letters are onions. Teaching students to peel back the layers of meaning by analyzing language, researching the people mentioned, and putting events described in context is challenging and rewarding. Sometimes, old letters make you cry. As I read Lacy complain about being unable to find a black child to tend to her white toddlers, I recognized that she was oblivious to the traumas slave owners inflicted on the enslaved when they separated families. Davidson College has historically been a place comfortable with black discomfort. I as read Lacy applaud mob violence against slaves following a robbery assumed to have been committed by one of them, I realized that Davidson College has been a place where African Americans have been racially profiled and harassed for far longer than we have been an integrated educational institution.

I am proud of the work that students have done transcribing, annotating, and contextualizing these letters. I hope these serve as a resource enabling thoughtful and deliberate discussion about the kind of place Davidson has been – and the better kind of campus community we can be.

In May 2016, several dozen historians gathered at the annual meeting of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association to discuss the past, present, and future directions of scholarship on Native peoples during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.  My comments are below. Thanks to Joe Genetin-Pilawa and Boyd Cothran for organizing these two roundtables. 

When I wrote about Cherokee responses to allotment in my first book, my goal was to prioritize the stories of people rather than the policy. I put names and faces before roll numbers, blood quantums, and tallies of acres kept or lost. When I finished, I was so happy. Because I was done — but also because I discerned a pattern – a neat, orderly, beautiful trend towards cultural persistence within Cherokee communities, particularly regarding gendered behavior. It is exactly what you would expect from a Theda Perdue student who is herself a fan of organization. Because this was a community study covering the 1880s through the 1920s, I stayed focused, but over and again, I wanted to zoom out to see the big picture and to step back and write about changes that preceded the allotment era. That curiosity has led me to study one extended Cherokee family over multiple generations, from the end of the American Revolution through WWI. This project is forcing me to extend beyond my comfort zones as a scholar and to think beyond the Old Nation and Indian Territory to California and Hawaii.

I remain concerned with how Southeastern Indigenous people experienced their lives as gendered people within familial systems shaped by the customs of kinship. The farther into this manuscript I get, however, the larger the gap I see between the order of my first book and the chaos I am now trying to put into words. Looking back on what I wrote before about changes to gender roles among Cherokee people during this period, I think my characterization of Cherokee responses were a bit simplistic – or at least didn’t fully acknowledge the motivations and experiences of those Cherokee people who sought to use economic intrusions and the activist state elaborated upon in scholarship on the GAPE for their personal benefit and to profit from the ongoing colonization of Indigenous land and resources in the West (and Pacific) during this period – both that of their own people and other Indigenous peoples. The kind of men and women I dismissed as outliers in the first project are the central characters in this one. Likewise, influenced by the scholarship on historic trauma, I no longer see incidents of internal violence, particularly male aggression committed by Indians against Indians, in isolation. I recognize a slow poisoning whose consequences accumulated and compounded over generations. What patterns I can discern are messy, complicated, tragic, and consistent with the larger literature on family, gender, and sexuality in the GAPE.

Family histories are useful. They are a tool historians use to articulate complex processes as they played out through diverse human experiences of them over time. That’s probably why we are seeing more and more of them written by scholars with feet firmly planted in other fields of social history beyond women’s history, where family history first took shape. For the GAPE, family histories provide fertile ground for studies that complicate the traditional narrative of this period lauding the growing state’s problem-solving abilities. From my perspective in the literature on the Native families in the South, however, it certainly broke more than it fixed. Understanding those processes are important and how historians can support those trying to heal these ruptures.