Corinne Fowler - Our Island Stories: Country walks through colonial Britain

Having thoroughly enjoyed Corinne Fowler's previous book Green Unpleasant Land I was very pleased to pick up this, her most recent book. It takes a look at the close links between the British countryside, colonial history and class struggle. Unusally, as the subtitle suggests, it is constructed around ten walks, in landscapes as varied as the Western Isles of Scotland, the Lake District and North Wales. On each journey Fowler is accompanied by a historian, artist or writer who adds their own perspective to the events and landscape, often in deeply personal ways.

I was expecting much of the book to focus on the way that Britain's wealthy had benefited from slavery. Fowler has been central to the investigations that have highlighted the extensive links between National Trust properties and slavery. So I expected that much of the book would focus on how the wealth from slavery had been used to construct huge country houses and large estates. This is, of course, true. Fowler writes about the Conservative MP Richard Grosvenor Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, whose "massive portfolio of property still includes the Drax Hall estate on Barbados, which, founded by the Draxes in the 1650s, still cultivates sugar cane today. His planatations, historically, were worked by enslaved people." Drax, like many other landowners, owes the family wealth to the labour, blood and sweat of enslaved people.

Important though these insights into our countryside are, this is not all there is to Fowler's book. I was repeatedly struck by a more dynamic relationship between colonialism and the landscape. This is, perhaps, best shown by the walk Fowler takes us on around the town of Dolgellau in North Wales. Now principally known as a base from which visitors can explore Snowdonia, it once was at the epicentre of a global trade in wool. Dolgellau's wool was "distinctive" and often called "Welsh plains". It was a "cheap, coarse and durable... strong fabic" and "at the height of production, 718,000 yards of webs were produced almost entirely for export with around eighteen mills operating in and around Dolgellau."

The nature of Welsh Plain cloth made it idea for clothing enslaved people in the Americas and the West Indies. Fowler quotes the historian Marian Gwyn, "who found that in 1806 just three plantations in Clarendon, Jamacia ordered over 8 miles of fabric; 15 percent of this was woollen and from north Wales". The brutal reality of this is brought home to the reader as Fowler quotes from various advertisments from the 1700s which aim to identify and recapture escaped slaves. These frequently note that slaves escaped wearing Welsh wool.

As the example of Welsh Wool demonstrates, Fowler's book explores much more than the flow of  wealth from slavery into the hands of wealthy merchants and bankers in Britain. It also shows how that money was used to transform Britain's landscape, its people and its economy, in order to squeeze more wealth out of the slave trade. Dolgellau's growth was driven by the money the local economy made from manufacturing wool for the slave trade: "Around 1690, Welsh plains clothed 97,000 enslaved people in the Caribbean and North America.. by the mid-eighteenth century - the period when Dolgellau's smart houses started going up - this number grew to just under 2 million yards for some 279,000 enslaved people."

Thus the slave trade, in terms of the development of the town, is literarily written into the landscape if we look for the expansion of housing and development. It is also written there in terms of the transformation of the local economy and, as Fowler further develops her argument in later chapters through the enclosure of land and the transformation of the peasantry.

For the slave commodities made and sold from Britain like wool, iron, or copper required labour. They also required the creation of a new proletariat, and the destruction of historic ways of organising the rural economy. For many landowners the wealth they got from slavery drove these processes forward, impoverishing local workers, destroying traditional agriculture and manufacturing and concentrating workers in bigger and bigger industrial concerns. As Fowler points out, the wealth from slavery did not "trickle down" to the employees in Britain, instead if was concentrated in the hands of the already rich, and allowed them to exploit workers more:

Transatlantic slavery permeated the lives of rural working people: sheep-shearers, wool-carders, spinners and weavers. Not that these people were made rich by slavery: on the contrary, their lives were often harse. The money was bing made by people far higher up the economic ladder: landowners with sheep-grazing pasture, wool-merchants, slave-traders and their backers.

In fact I would go further. The wealth from slavery allowed the destruction of older economic relations, to the detriment of the population. British workers ended up sicker, poorer and dying earlier as a result of the industrialisation bring by the slave trade.

These workers, even in times of great hardship, often spoke out against slavery. Fowler describes the Lancashire cotton workers whose struggle to support the North in the US Civil War was born out of opposition to slavery. She also notes the rebellions and revolutions of the slaves themselves who fought their masters and occasionally, such as with the Haitian revolution, won.

The final aspect of this book that is worth noting is the personal stories of Fowler's walking companions. Their knowledge of the history of colonialism adds greatly to Fowler's work, as does their art and poetry. But it is perhaps most interesting regarding the modern countryside. Repeatedly her Black and Asian friends tell her about their own negative experience of such walks. Feeling like and outsider, experiencing racism or, for instance, never seeing someone like them working or living in the country. 

Part of challenging that racism has to come from a real recognition that the British countryside was never a pastoral idyll. The history and landscapes of rural Britain have been shaped by capitalism, class struggle and colonialism. As Corinne Fowler's wonderful work shows, slavery, imperialism and colonialism are written into the very countryside, into the shapes of small rural towns, and into the history of the people who lived there. For those of us who love the country, and who want to know its history, this is an indespensible work.

Related Reviews

Fowler - Green Unpleasant Land
Howkins - The Death of Rural England
Groves - Sharpen the Sickle
Blackburn - The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights
Fryer - Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain
Rediker - The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery & Freedom

Gregory F. Michno - Lakota Noon: The Indian Narrative of Custer's Defeat

One of the notable things about visiting the site of the Battle of the Little Bighorn today is how it has been changed, under pressure from Native Americans, to incorporate their viewpoints and history into the memorial. While the location is dominated by an overt US militarism, there are multiple, moving testimonies and memorials to the Native American casualties. The story is told from the viewpoint of the victors as well as the victims.

Pursuing this approach to the battle I was pleased to pick up Gregory Michno's book Lakota Noon, whose subtitle indicates that it looks at the Indian narrative, something distinctly lacking from most accounts of the battle. The book is, it must be said, a boon to anyone who wants to do this and it would have been an excellent read prior to the battle. Michno has not just gathered many different indigenous accounts together, he has arranged them in a novel way. Rather than reading different accounts, from different viewpoints at one time, he has collected the parts of peoples' accounts together at the estimated times that they happened. Thus we can read differing points of view from the moment of Reno's attack, or during the chaos of the final moments of Custer's defeat. 

The accounts are often shocking. Rarely do we read the actuality of conflict, and this was violent, hand to hand fighting, and the accounts by the Native Americans do not diminish that. But these are not just the reminiscances of arrogant victors, rather they are from soldiers who understood that they were fighting a great and significant battle. For many of them it was to be the most important milestone in their lives, their Lakota Noon. Thus we also also learn about Native American beliefs, their preparations for war, their understanding of US Cavalry tactics, and above all, their praise for the brave men they defeated. 

There are some fascinating things among these accounts. One is that of the role of women. One Native American, Antelope, spent significant time on the day close to the action as she searched for a relative. Antelope "had seen other battles and had always liked to watch the men fighting, though she had been teased about it, for not many women followed the warriors to battle". Another example is that of Chief Gall, who recollected his personal experience of losing non-combatant relatives to the US cavalry, "his lodge was vacant. He extended his search around the point of timber a short distance o the south. There he finally found his family. Dead. His two wives and his three children, killed." Another account by Rain in the Face, recollected that a woman Moving Robe, whose brother had been killed was among the fighters. "Behold, there is among us a young woman! Let no young man hide behind her garment" shouted Rain in the Face to inspire the other warriors.

But mostly readers will want to learn the accounts of the battle by Native Americans, like Low Dog:

They came on us like a thunderbolt... The Indians retreated at first but managed to rally and make a charge of their own. Low Dog called to his men, "This is a good day to die: follow me." They massed their warriors. So that no man should fall back, every man whipped another man's horse as they rushed the soldiers. The bluecoats dismounted to fire, but did not shoot well. While firing, they had been holding their horse's reins with one arm. The frrightened horses piulled them all around and many of their shots went high in the air and did the Indians no harm. Nevertheless, the white warriors stood their ground bravely, and none made an attempt to get away.

But there are problems with the book. One of the largest was that the Native American accounts are not direct quotes. Michno acknowledges the problems of the sources - they are biased, sometimes recorded many decades after the battle, often contradictory and frequently have grown in the telling. Memory plays its tricks, but so does the reality of a confusing, scary, noisy and smoke obscurred battle field. Disappointingly though, Michno's narratives are not direct quotes, but are his rewriting of the various testimonies in order to make a readable account. This makes things clearer for the reader, but its not the  collection of eyewitness voices I expected.

Michno presents the book as being a final word in understanding what happened. Rightly, he argues, it has been near impossible to know what actually happened to Custer's direct command on the day. By piecing together the Native American accounts, together with a close analysis of the battlefield site, he hopes that he has presented a definitive history of the day. He is dismissive, sometimes to the point of pomposity of some other historians. But by and large his arguments about events on the day are persuassive, as does his unpicking of the conflicting and sometimes extremely unclear accounts of different Native Americans. He points out, probably accurately, that the famous charge by Crazy Horse likely never happened.

Michno is keen to tackle what he sees as the political correctness of recent scholarship of the battle. In fact the book is really an attempt to state a particular viewpoint of the battle using definitive studies and eyewitness accounts, in order to defend a particular historical approach. This is, I think, most notable when considering the Reno-Benteen fight and defense. After Reno is driven off, the battle recentred on Custer's attack. This is not surprising. The Native Americans had to regroup to drive off the bigger threat to their village. But the Reno-Benteen command did make a stand, and faced many hours horrificaly besieged. Michno provides no eyewitness accounts to this. Perhaps there are none. In which case it would have been useful to know. Or perhaps Michno thinks that because Cavalry troops from these events survived, then there's no need to give accounts (though this does not prevent him giving them about earlier parts of the battle). I suspect the real reason is that Michno is focused on other events because the purpose of his book is actually to polemicise about the significance of Custer's final defeat for latter day accounts of the Indian Wars.

This is especially visible in his critiques of those who argue there was "no last stand" in the sense that the battle did not have a definitive ending, rather pettering out into smaller and smaller clusters of killing. These he says are often motivated by a "those more concerned with officious moralising than with finding historical truths". For instance, he bemoans one author whose book contains multiple references (Michno gives them all!) to "genocide, greed and injustice". 

The problem with Michno's approach here is that it is difficult to write a genuine history of Native America and its encounter with the US government without acknowleding the "genocide, greed and injustice" that was directed at them from the earliest days of European colonialism in the Americas. Indeed, the books concluding focus on the reality of a "last stand" is less about actual events and more about defeating "revisionist interpreations and political correctness". 

The problem of course is that the last stand can mean different things to different people. Those who enjoyed the historically laughable They died with their boots on at the cinema in 1941 and since have a different understanding of the heroism of that day to that of the Native American eyewitnesses here. Indedd they would also probably not agree with Michno himself who is not dismissing the Native Americans as savages. 

The point is not the battle, but the context - culturally and historically. Endless debates about about cartridge numbers from battlefield archaeology cannot overcome the wider historical backdrop which is far more important to understanding the aftermath of the Lakota Noon.

Those interested in the battle should read Lakota Noon, if only for the eyewitness accounts and the discussion about events on 25-26 June 1876. For those wanting a subtle study of the context, there are other, better books, polemical in their own way.

Related Reviews

Hämäläinen - Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power
Estes - Our History is the Future
Donovan - A Terrible Glory: Custer and the Little Bighorn
Tully - Crooked Deals and Broken Treaties
Philbrick - The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull and the Battle of the Little Bighorn
Cozzens - The Earth is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West

Alastair Reynolds - Machine Vendetta

Machine Vendetta is the final novel of the Prefect trilogy, a series of hard science-fiction novels by Alastair Reynolds. It is set in the Yellowstone system, among the glitter-band, thousands of orbitals with hundreds of thousands of people. The system is government by a voting system where inhabitants constantly vote, usually automatically, on decisions that manage the system. The Panoply is the police force, a non-lethal police force who are supposed to be under the democratic control of the people of Yellowstone, but in reality act more as a benevolent dictatorship at times.

Machine Vendetta is part three of a trilogy, but the stories are closely linked. As such much of the background to this volume is not explained and instead readers have to return to earlier works. The book begins as a sort of "detectives in space" as Prefect Tom Dreyfus investigates the unusual behavior of his former protege prefect Ingvar Tench which has led to her death.

What starts as a sort of police procedural in space, albeit from a number of different perspectives, rapidly becomes a system spanning thriller, as the Prefects and Dreyfus confront a powerful enemy that threatens the whole of Yellowstone. 

All of Reynolds' novels carry the reader along, but unusually this felt a little shallow to me. Some of the big ideas are not really explored very well, and on a couple of occasions I felt characters were simply brought on to advance the plot, rather than being developed into fully fledged personas. Still it's a fun read that Reynolds' fans will love.

Related Reviews

Reynolds - Eversion
Reynolds – Redemption Ark
Reynolds - House of Suns
Reynolds - Revenger
Reynolds - Inhibitor Phase
Reynolds - Blue Remembered Earth
Reynolds - The Prefect
Reynolds - Zima Blue
Reynolds - Terminal World
Reynolds - Pushing Ice
Reynolds - Slow Bullets

Thomas Kaufmann - The Saved and the Damned

When Martin Luther penned his 95 Theses against the Church he began a process that was to have far reaching implications. It would have far reaching implications, which went beyond the split between what became the Catholic and Protestant Churches. These implications, religious, social, economic and political would drive struggle, civil war and revolution across Europe and extend into the colonies. Karl Marx famously noted that the Reformation "began in the brain of the monk". It is, on one level a curious statement. After all, Marx's whole life was dedicated to an approach that said that pure ideas did not exist, but are shaped by the economic contexts. Luther however was not abstracted from society, and his criticisms of the Church were closely related to wider economic and political issues. The selling of indulgences, the main target of his Theses was merely represented the tip of much deeper issues.

Thomas Kaufmann's new history of the Reformation, The Saved and the Damned, is an excellent introduction to the period. Particular in "what happened". Much of the work focuses on the German Reformation. In part this has to do with Kaufmann, as the book was originally published in German. But it is also because the Reformation started in Germany and had its most explosive period there. This is not a book of detail, it is a sweeping history which starts from the premise that "the diverging fates of the Reformation in the countries of Europe were fundamnetally connected with the diverse political, ecclesiastical, cultural and social conditions".

But to really understand the Reformation we need something deeper. After all people had made criticisms of the Church beforehand and certainly there were many intellectuals on a par with Luther who were getting an audience. Why did Luther's Theses explode across Europe ("the whole of Christendom in four weeks")? Was it simply their clarity? The Printing Press? Luther's oratory? All of these were important, but mattered was that Europe was in a social crisis, and the Theses landed in the midst of this crisis and encouraged it. For the German Peasants it was a reason to rebel. For people like Thomas Münzter it began them on a path that would lead to revolution. For thousands of others it opened a door to wider criticisms of religion and the role of the Church. Issues of individual freedom, power and wealth. Kaufmann is write to argue that Luther was the "central figure, of the Reformation" without whom it would not have happened. But we cannot ignore the deeper changes.

Here we have to look at what else was changing, and tragically, despite his scholarship on the Reformation, Kauffmann all but ignores the deeper changes in European society, principly the first developments towards merchant capitalism, and the transition from feudalism to capitalist society. Here the Peasant War is informative. Because while many peasants began their critique of society by picking up a pitchfork and a copy of a Luther pamphlet, their criticisms were mostly about economic issues. Principly the right to control their land, their community and their church. While these frequently harked back to an imaginary past, they also reflect how feudal society was moving towards a more capitalist organisation. Increasingly production was for the market, not community use. Wage labour was becoming normal, and the profits of big institutions like the Fugger bank were driving discontent by concentrating wealth in the hands of a few. 

Kaufmann reacts to these simply by discussion the Weberian idea that "there is a causal connection ebtween the religious mentality of Reformed Protestanism... and a capitalistic economic disposition". This, Kaufmann thinks is overestimated. In fact he returns several times to this:

The commonly held opinion that 'Calvinism' had an affinity primarily with the nbourgeoisie hardly accounts for the complex social and political mechanisms by which its influence spread in the second half of the century of the Reformation.

Again this misses the point. Protestantism becomes the language of the bourgeoise, not because they need it to be capitalists, but because it fits the logic of how they see the world. In turn they shape protestantism in a particular way (directly opposite to how the rebellious masses understood it). Kaufmann fails to grasp that the bourgeois revolution does not begin with a set of end goals that represent the establishment of capitalism. It is why Oliver Cromwell could say "We declared our intentions to preserve monarchy" in January 1648 and "I tell you we will cut off his head with the crown upon it." by December of that year.

For Kaufmann the Reformation happens, and then has consequence. For instance Kaufmann he notes that the Reformation encouraged capitalist development because of things like the "drastic reduction in holidays". More importantly, as Kaufmann note the Reformation encouraged ideas of individalism. But in his writing these are the key deciding factors, rather than part of a dialectical relationship between society and religion.

So in terms of analysis, Kaufmann offers very little insight, except generalisations:

The Reformation in its multifarious manifestations influenced, encouraged and accelerated the developments leading to what is now called the modern West in many different ways. Nevertheless, the Reformation did not produce modern Western civilisation, neither by itself nor as a major influence, any more than any other factor. The Western modern world is the results of a very complex process of transformation - certainly one which would have taken a different course if the Reformation had not happened.

This is inadequate. What we really needed is to recognise that Europe was changing, and the Reformation was both an expression of that, and a factor shaping the change. The small, gradual processes of economic change in the towns and in rural production were driving much wider economic changes. But they aren't analysed here. It is why another Marxist reviewer commented that "Only the examination of the ways in which people reproduce their lives, enter social relations to that end, and by so doing create their whole society, can ideology in all its conflictual manifestations be understood."

This means that The Saved and the Damned feels rarified. It's history floats above the economic base, detached from wider society. This is not to condemn the book's scholarship. It is, in fact, an exemplary and recommended history of what took place across Europe in those turbulent years, and indeed, what that has meant for the Christian Church since. While it suffers from some annoying proofreading errors and a couple of extra paragraphs that were clearly intended as captions for unused pictures, I've no hesitation recommending it as a read. But I think many readers will come away wanting much more.

Related Reviews

Blickle - Communal Reformation: The Quest for Salvation in Sixteenth Century Germany
Lortz - The Reformation in Germany: Volume 1
Marshall - Heretics & Believers: A History of the English Reformation
Duffy - The Stripping of the Altars
MacCulloch - Reformation: Europe's House Divided 1490-1700

Ernest Belfort Bax - The Rise and Fall of the Anabaptists

This is the third volume of Belfort Bax's trilogy of books on the "social side of the Reformation in Germany". As I have already mentioned Bax was an unusual and troublesome socialist in the second half of the ninetheenth century and the early years of the twentieth. In particular he was unusual for being on the left and rejecting feminism and women's suffrage. This is worth repeating at the start of this review because it has some relevance to the subject matter.

The third book deals with what I would describe as the final act of the radical Reformation in Germany, the rise of the Anabaptist movement and the siege of Münster. In 1534 a growing and confident anabaptist movement took control of this important town in North-West Germany, and after expelling many opponents they set about constructing, from the top town, a form of communal living. Bax's book tells the story of the Anabaptists, linking their evolution to the most radical thinkers of the Reformation and the most radical aspects of the German Peasant War. 

Despite extreme hostility and a military siege, Anabaptist Münster survived for almost 18 months. During these months there were some notable experiments involving communal living, such as collective kitchens and the redistribution of property and wealth. While this was a top down movement, it seems that it was met, at least in the early stages with support from most of those who remained. However as the siege continued, deprivation and violence against the town saw cracks develop and eventually one John of Leiden declared himself king. He lived in opulence, while around him their was hunger and desperation. Eventually refugees let the enemy in, and Anabaptist Münster was destroyed in the most violent of revenge. With hundreds, perhaps thousands killed.

Bax's book is itself a relatively easy read that covers most of the main sources then known and tells the story of the Anabaptists and Münster well. His sympathies are clear, declaring Münster to be a "genuine attempt to carry out logically, principles of the Gospel-teaching and the idea of a return to a supposed primitive Christianity." But there are two aspects that I felt worth exploring further. 

The first relates to one of the significant changes implemented by the Anabaptists in Münster later on. This is the question of polygamy. Because many of the men had fled the siege, leaving behind their wives to oversee businesses and wealth, there were something like three women to every man in the town. John of Leiden implemented polygamy (really polygyny) and took sixteen wives. Bax argues that the polygamy introduced was "unique in the history of medieval socio-religious movements" because it was not "a community of wives or free love", but retained the sacred nature of marriage. While Bax is right to charge conventional historians with "hypocrisy" over this, he fails really to explore whether or not this was something that the "women" of Münster wanted. Certainly they could not take multiple husbands. The problem was that "no woman, old or young, should remain outside the marital relation". In other words it was enforced polygyny. It was, in no way, liberating for the women - even if it might have provided some security. I suggest that Bax's anti-feminism is central to his account of the women of Münster. His politics are, using the language of today, distinctly sexist or misogynist.

The second problem is that Bax attempts to draw very close parallels between the siege of Münster and later revolutionary movements. There are, of course, similarities between Münster and the Paris Commune. Bax was writing in the aftermath of that great revolution, but it is wrong to draw too many parallels. What distinguishes the Paris Commune was its mass participatory democracy and workers' power. This was not part of Münster's experience, which was rather more a top down process of reform. Nonetheless the parallels are interesting, as is the counter-revolutionary violence used in both Paris and Münster 350 years earlier. Bax does, of course, know this. But he cannot help himself with his analogies. Despite this, his conclusions are useful:

The dream of the impoverished townsman of a millennial kingdom, based on medieval domestic communism and animated by the ideasl of the small artificer of the time, was in itself as hopeless as the corresponding dream of the peasant ten years before, which also aimed at harking back to an idealised form of a condition of a things that had passed away. The lines of social development were moving in quite another direction.

Bax is right to point out that this was the communism of distribution, not of production, which would not become possible until the working class developed and capitalist production developed. 

Does Bax's work have any relevance today? All three books are dated and suffer as a result. Bax's flawed politics and his crude parallels between medieval and modern struggles are frustrating and lead to errors of judgement. Bax's anti-feminism also means that he dismisses and ignores the role of women, and seriously misjudges events in Münster. Writing from the general left, he does have some insights. He notes, for instance, 

The conventional historian, in his conventional hatred of the old militant Anabaptism with its communisitc tendencies, and writing as he does in the interest of the possessing classes of his own day, has been found not ashamed to condone, or even to justify, this fiendish and atrocious crime perpetrated by the dominant classes of a bygone age.

I suspect that few people will read Bax today. I'm not sure I would encourage them, as there are other, more useful histories available, though tragically too few by genuine Marxists.

Related Reviews

Bax - The Peasants War in Germany
Bax - German Society at the Close of the Middle Ages

Dee Brown - Showdown at Little Big Horn

I knew of Dee Brown as a historian of Native American peoples. His most famous book is, of course, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Some years ago I also read his excellent account of the Fetterman Massacre. When I recently visited the site of the Little Big Horn battle, fulfilling the ambition of a lifetime, I came away with quite a few souvenirs and several books. Among them was this short work by Brown, which I bought on the basis of the author.

I was surprised to find out that it was not an explicity work of history. Rather it is a fictionalised account of the lead up to the Battle of the Little Big Horn based on testimonials, memoirs and contemporary accounts. After overcoming my surprise, and learning that Dee Brown was also a novelist, I dived in.

The book itself is interesting, but perhaps a little dated. For those not versed in the story of the Little Big Horn it might serve as a good starting point, but the nature of the novel means that it doesn't give any real context. Read a decent history of the Battle and its location within the wider project to destroy the Native Americans in Montana territory first if you want to appreciate the material that Brown uses.

He begins with some relatively minor characters. The journalist Mark Kellogg, who produced a diary and sent regular reports Eastward as Custer's troops travelled. These form the basis of a surprisingly detailed account, as Kellogg wrote almost to the end. Of course Brown has to embellish things with descriptions and context, but it works well. Not all the characters are Europeans. Sitting Bull is one of the more well known historical individuals given a chapter here, but so are less well known ones, such as Bobtail Horse who, with three other Native Americans are said to have held off Custer's troops charge down the Deep Ravine.

Oddly for Dee Brown, the book devolved into sentimentality at the end, with the final viewpoint being that of Comanche, Captain Keogh's horse. The sentimentallity lies mostly of course, with the US Cavalry who lacking any other hero on that field commissioned the horse second in command of the Seventh Cavalry. The irony was not lost on anyone.

Showdown at Little Big Horn is not a particularly great work. Younger readers might find it more interesting, but it lacks Dee Brown's historical knowledge, while retaining his desire to give the Native American people a voice.

Related Reviews

Brown - The Fetterman Massacre
Donovan - A Terrible Glory: Custer and the Little Bighorn
Hämäläinen - Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power
Estes - Our History is the Future
Philbrick - The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull and the Battle of the Little Bighorn
Tully - Crooked Deals and Broken Treaties

Tommy Orange - Wandering Stars

***Spoilers for both of Tommy Orange's books***

Tommy Orange's second novel Wandering Stars is closely linked to his first, There, There. Unfortunately I had not read the first one before starting Wandering Stars, and I missed out by doing so. Such are the consequences of me not keeping up with new writers. There, There finishes, with a mass shooting, and this forms the centre point of Wandering Stars, but not in terms of events, but as a pivot point for some of the central characters. This is a book about Native America, specifically the lives of working class, poor, Native Americans in urban areas - in this case, Oakland, California.

The book swirls around complex issues about poverty, drugs, guns and Native American identity. It's brilliantly told, not least because it starts in 1864 with the Sand Creek massacre, telling the generational story of a family of Native Americans who descend from one survivor. In doing so it tells how Native American children were wrested from their families and put in dire "boarding schools" to have the Indian civilised out of them, how they were imprisoned and how they fought to keep their identity and their humanity in the face of racism, government indifference and local authority repression. Orange, and his characters, repeatedly make the point that contemporary conditions for Native Americas are rooted in history.

One of the themes of the books is the importance of generational links and ties. The fact these are broken, or not readily known to key characters is crucial. The contemporary characters, who are the focus of the latter half of the book, and whose mother died from a drug related suicide, often feel out of context, lacking roots - despite their close family. Family itself takes on a wider meaning - it is much less about those who are your parents, and more about those who care for you.

After the shooting that leaves Orvil Red Feather with a bullet fragment in his body and an addiction to painkillers, his wider family, including his brothers Loother and Lony, protect and try to survive. They swirl around him, and his daze is not just drug addiction, it is the awareness that this is it. That the American health care system cannot properly care for them all, that there are no real jobs and that school is a meaningless place that trains you to "fly a desk". The schools might no longer force you to cut your hair, stop speaking your language and no longer wear traditional clothes, but they suck the life from you in every other way.

There's a kind of hope at the end of Wandering Stars, one that rests not with magical solutions, but with the solidarity of family and community that keeps people going. Its not the societal fix - nor the restitution that Native American communities desperately need from a capitalist system that still divides and rules, and drives people into poverty. But its a kind of individual hope. Tommy Orange peppers the book with references to Settler Colonialism and injustice. It reminded me that these sores are real, lasting and ongoing. The politics isn't a crude afterthought, but a living thread running through these all too real stories.

If my reading of Wandering Stars was undermined by not having read There, There, I would caution that it's probably not necessary, but likely to add meat to the novel. In a world coming to terms with Settler Colonialism and learning how to fight it, Tommy Orange is a welcome voice.

Related Reviews 

Doig - Bucking the Sun