Reflections by Mathias Risse, Carr Center Faculty Director
On this Indigenous Peoples’ Day, I am moved to share some thoughts on why this holiday is so important. Much of my own research in recent years has been about Indigenous thought and how to integrate it better into mainstream debates. I am in the process of completing a book tentatively called Indigenous Thought: A Renewed Engagement for the 21st Century, and I’ve started to teach a new class at Harvard Kennedy School called “Indigenous Philosophies for the Technological Era.” The motivation for both is that, for a variety of reasons, it behooves us all to take Indigenous thought more seriously, if only to have better ways of thinking about our relationship with the rest of nature.
I often ask my students four questions to assess how much they know about the role of Indigenous peoples in American history. Typically, and troublingly, nobody knows the answer to any of these questions, even though we are talking about major events in American history. And I will admit that I didn’t know the answer to any of these questions either until a few years ago. It’s clear that we need to try to do better in this domain.
Question 1: Have You Heard of King Philip’s War?
King Philip’s War was a major conflict in New England in the 1670s that killed several thousand people, both Native Americans and settlers. This amounted to a considerable share of the population at the time, making it a conflict of existential proportions.
English settlement in what then came to be known as Massachusetts began systematically in the mid-1620s, and Boston itself was founded in 1630. When English settlers began to arrive in larger numbers, most Indigenous people in the area—including most Massachusett and large numbers of Wampanoag—had already perished from European diseases spread by earlier sporadic encounters. They had no biological defenses against smallpox, measles, and the like. English settlers arrived in a landscape where, in many locations, about 80% of the population had already perished.
While initial relations with the remaining Wampanoag and other groups were fairly peaceful, that changed quickly as more and more settlers arrived. Within a few decades it was clear to Indigenous Americans that they were in a struggle for survival, and a war resulted in which many settlements in New England were burned down. Eventually the tides turned, and the Native Americans were defeated and basically ceased to exist as a political and military force to be reckoned with in New England. (To be sure, to this day there continue to be both Massachusett and Wampanoag.) Their leader was Metacom, known to the English as King Philip. This conflict set the stage for future encounters between settlers and Indigenous people. A good book to read on this is Jill Lepore’s King Philip’s War and the Origin of American Identity.
Question 2: Have You Heard of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy and How it Influenced the American Constitution?
The Iroquois Confederacy—or in their own terminology, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy—was a group of initially five, later six, tribes in upstate New York, including the Mohawk and the Seneca. After a history of bitter fighting, they united under the leadership of a legendary peacemaker and governed themselves through federal structures.
In the decades preceding the American Revolution, the Confederacy had regular encounters with some of the people later involved in the Revolution, including Benjamin Franklin. It will be hard to prove conclusively just how these encounters shaped the mindset of the revolutionaries, but it is hard to ignore the fact that the United States ended up with a constitution that enshrined both federalism and democracies—neither of which were practiced in England, but both of which were practiced by their Haudenosaunee neighbors.
Recent research has delivered insights as to the larger impact of encounters with Indigenous peoples and their governance structures on the Enlightenment era. A good book to read on this is The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber and David Wengrow.
Question 3: Have You Heard of the California Genocide?
The United States took over California in the late 1840s, at the same time as a major gold rush. This was awful news for the hundreds of Indigenous groups who lived there. The arrival of many thousands of gold diggers caused a population decline among Indigenous peoples steeper than any other in U.S. history.
Between 1848 and 1860, the Native population fell from an estimated 150,000 to about 30,000. Many of them, as before, died from diseases brought by the new arrivals. But many others were enslaved and perished that way, or they were simply killed. In 2019, California Governor Gavin Newsom recognized this historical episode as a genocide and signed an executive order formally apologizing to California's Native American populations. A good book to read about this, and about a number of other awful episodes in the history of California, is Jean Pfaelzer’s California: A Slave State.
Question 4: Have You Heard of the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890?
The United States Army conducted decades of wars against Native American tribes following the conclusion of the Civil War as part of westward expansion. In the 1860s and 1870s, the Lakota and other groups in the Northern Great Plains had still managed to offer fierce resistance and inflicted a number of noteworthy defeats on the army, especially in the 1876 Battle of Little Big Horn (also known as Custer’s Last Stand).
In late 1890, however, a major struggle occurred between the U.S. Army and a group of Lakota in Wounded Knee, South Dakota. As a result, about 300 Lakota, including many women and children, were massacred by the army. This mass shooting marks a major turning point in American history, symbolizing the conclusive end of American westward expansion and the end of any kind of effective Native American resistance.
The defeat of Native American tribal resistance gave way to the full-fledged implementation of policies of allocation (breaking apart Native American community properties) and boarding-school education that traumatized generations of Native Americans. A good book to read on this is David Treuer’s The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present.
On this Indigenous Peoples’ Day, we remember these events—and the other small and large events like it that shaped this country. As for myself, I commit to continuing to learn more about the Indigenous nations, scholars, and leaders that are thriving across the United States today. Their knowledge, history, and valuable contributions are integral to the fabric of our nation.