Across the City Council Divide
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In early 2019, the city council of Fort Wayne, Indiana, established an annual celebration of its namesake. General "Mad" Anthony Wayne is best known for forcing Miami, Shawnee, and other Native leaders to accept the United States' territorial demands, primarily by torching the homes and crops of thousands of Native people. An array of critics, ranging from local historians to the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, quickly denounced the decision. The resolution's detractors seized on its numerous and sometimes laughable inaccuracies (the text describes events that took place only on the fictional TV show Turn: Washington's Spies) but also asked whether Wayne's real achievements were worth celebrating. Most succinctly, a local graffiti artist tagged the city's replica fort with the words "No Pride in Native Genocide." Meanwhile, the resolution's author, city councilor Jason Arp, proclaimed that his critics "don't care for America or American history" and were "just not patriotic." On social media, one supporter replied to the Miami nation, the region's's original occupants: "White people have history too. We won get over it. You would still be in the stone age if it weren't for us."1
In recounting the uproar, journalist Charlie Savage argued that his hometown had become a front in the "Culture Wars," with jingoistic self-identified patriots, echoing then-President Donald Trump, squaring off against those calling for an honest reckoning with America's white supremacist past. But both the anti-Wayne spray painter and the anti-Miami Internet commentator remind us that the dispute over Anthony Wayne is also part of a high-stakes debate over the place of Indian nations in the present-day United States. The Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, headquartered over six hundred miles from its ancestral homeland, carried weight in the city council debate at least in part because the United States recognizes it as a sovereign native nation (Miami people still living in Indiana enjoy no such recognition). But in recent years [End Page 222] a far-reaching anti-sovereignty movement has challenged the legal standing of Native nations and called into question their relationships with state and local governments. In 2020, a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling upheld the territorial sovereignty of Native nations, but by only a slender 5-4 majority. In any number of local jurisdictional disputes, tribal governments' legal and constitutional authority hangs in the balance.2 In this climate, debates over whether to acknowledge Native genocide, or whether Native peoples should "get over it," carry implications that are anything but academic.
What do professional historians contribute to the fray? The record is mixed. For several decades, the field of Native American history has grown prodigiously, both in the number of specialized publications and in the prominence of Native people in major syntheses. Under the banner of #VastEarlyAmerica, early Americanists have expanded their field to encompass the peoples of North America entire, as well as their myriad connections throughout the Atlantic and even the Pacific worlds. Increasingly, specialists seek to elucidate Indigenous peoples' social structures, belief systems, and relations with one another on their own terms, rather than through the lens of their dealings with Europeans. Thanks to Patrick Bottiger's Borderland of Fear (2016), Michael McDonnell's Masters of Empire (2015), and Sami Lakomaki's Gathering Together (2014), among others, we know far more today about the histories that Miamis, Odawas, and Shawnees (respectively) brought to their encounters with Anthony Wayne. Nonetheless, there is reason to question the impact of these insights on early American history writ large. In a 2012 essay, James Merrell lambasted a parade of scholars for disregarding the recent literature and instead relying on stereotype-laden tropes and terminology that elide Native agency and sovereignty. Historians of colonial expansion, he wrote, too often perform a "legerdemain that leaves Indians savages in all but name."3 More...
