Right now, at the dawn of the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, two distinct narratives are vying for control of our country’s history.
One narrative is wide-ranging and comprehensive. It includes, for example, the 1823 Supreme Court decision that “right of discovery supersedes right of habitation.” Just because you live on land that has been occupied by your ancestors for centuries doesn’t mean you own it.
The competing narrative is President Donald Trump’s, and he wants it to be everybody’s. Built upon our country’s traditionally sanitized history, it holds in highest esteem the white, rich, heterosexual, Christian men who made America great but whose narrative is being challenged by people who want their historically ignored or marginalized stories included. It may feature the martyrdom of the right-wing youth icon Charlie Kirk, but it certainly won’t mention the Smithsonian Institution’s People’s of the United States Collection: the skulls of more than 13,000 Native Americans whose heads were decapitated and sent to Washington, D.C. during the “Indian Wars” of the 19th century.
David Detmold’s “Keeping the People Alive: Reflections from a Bicycle Journey through Native Homelands on the Columbia Plateau” will not be a part of the “Trumplican” canon, but it is an imaginative and engaging way to appreciate some important but little-known episodes in America’s history of race relations.
When we meet David, he’s already biked 300 miles from Seattle to the Colville Reservation to pay memorial homage to Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce tribe that in 1877 was informed by the U.S. government that they had 30 days to move to land set aside for them in Idaho. Instead, Chief Joseph and 740 tribal members headed for the safety of Canada. They never made it. But by continually negotiating relocation treaties with the federal government, Chief Joseph was eventually allowed to return to his ancestral land with 149 surviving tribal members. They were the lucky ones. They all kept their heads.
By the time Chief Joseph died in 1904, the American government had decided its various forms of conquest and subjugation cost too many white lives and turned to the European-proven model of colonization. To prepare Native children for their enriched futures, for an example, the government created boarding schools where Native children were taught to be “white.” It wasn’t a pleasant experience. In the 417 federally administered schools spanning several decades, 973 children died.
Then came the federal policy of “Termination.” In 1953, the government announced it would no longer honor any treaty made with any Native tribe, a practice that had already been in place for more than two centuries. Within the next 20 years, the government terminated its recognition of 109 tribes and confiscated more than 1.3 million acres of Native lands. In compensation, the government offered sizeable payouts to Natives willing to set up residence on privately held land outside their reservations.
But Lucy Covington wasn’t buying it. Founding the “Our Heritage” newspaper, this great-granddaughter of a legendary Columbia River Chief, convinced tens of thousands of Native Americans that “cultural suicide” was not an option. Working the roads, streets, fields and selling the descendants of her great-grandfathers herd of horses to afford airplane tickets to meet tribal leaders and politicians in Washington, Covington not only delivered the death blow to Termination, she gave birth to a Native American Renaissance paralleling the ones created decades earlier in Harlem and Dublin.
Contrary to what any of the above might imply, David’s book is much more than a withering account of atrocities committed against America’s Indigenous population. The comical adventures he experiences on his bicycle create punctuations of humor that build a dramatic tension between what was just read and what is about to come next, none of which would have been possible had David allowed the historical and current events of the Native American experience to stand alone. Here’s my favorite example:
“All I had in my bike bag was an unripe plum and a six-ounce cup of the Northwest’s finest yogurt: Marionberry. Until I biked the Northwest, I thought Marionberry was just a former crack-addicted mayor in our crime-ridden capital city, with no pull in Congress.”
David has been working on behalf of Native populations since he first came to Turners Falls in 1978 and learned about Captain Jack Turner’s militia-led massacre of more than 400 mostly Native American women and children sheltering in an undefended refugee camp in 1676.
The official name of Turners Falls is still Turners Falls, but give David time. He continuously refers in his book to the place where he lives as Great Falls. Start small; end big. That’s David Detmold, and that’s the mission of “Keeping Alive” as well.
David Detmold will read from his new book on Friday, March 27 at 6:30 p.m. at the LAVA Center, located at 324 Main St. in Greenfield, in conjunction with the LAVA Center’s open gallery hours that same evening from 5 to 8 pm.
Richard Andersen is a resident of Montague.