Guest Blog: How Memory Landscapes (Mis)shape our Understanding of Native American Histories
By: Dr. Sean Jacobson, University of North Alabama
Native American history is usually framed through the theme of “loss”—loss of land, loss of traditional languages and culture, or loss of political sovereignty. While the 21st century shows encouraging trends at cultural revitalization—and in certain cases, re-recognition of tribal sovereignty (as in McGirt v. Oklahoma)—modern infrastructure often completely obscures or outright erases Indigenous history from popular memory. This is especially true in much of the Southeastern US, where it is easy for non-Native people to assume that Native history “ended” with the Trail of Tears. However, a closer re-examination of the histories hidden in our landscapes reveal far more complexity.
My forthcoming monograph, Lost Missions: Religious Memory, Frontier Nostalgia, and Public Histories of Indian Removal (under review with the University of Massachusetts Press), deals with this relationship between built environments and popular narratives around Indigenous-settler interactions in the Early American Republic. I examine selected historical sites across the Southeast and Great Lakes regions in which former Christian missions to Indigenous people were later incorporated into a frontier heritage complex. For later generations of white Americans, and white Christian communities in particular, these “Indian missions” provided a “usable past” to shape a sense of collective identity and solidarity. For example, the University of Notre Dame, before being known as the “Fighting Irish,” commemorated its origins as a Catholic mission to the Potawatomi people through a rustic log chapel purported to replicate an early 19th century structure built by Native people and missionary-priests.
In traditional memorialization at such sites, Indigenous perspectives are lost or misunderstood. Native people did not tacitly embrace the settlers’ religion by ceasing to be “Indian” and turning “white.” Nor were Native people perpetual “victims” powerless against the onslaught of American “civilization.” Instead, these spaces, and the material vestiges that still surface in our landscapes, give evidence to the resilient and adaptive tactics Native people used to carve out their own spaces while adjusting to the reality of American settler encroachment. Whether or not missionaries realized, Native people employed the cultural tools of Christianity and “civilization” as leverage against efforts at forced removal. For certain Potawatomi communities, this strategy worked. The wkama (headman) Leopold Pokagon used his community’s alliance with Catholic missionaries to avoid the fate of other Potawatomi bands forced to remove west under the 1833 Treaty of Chicago. Today, the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi is a federally recognized tribe in southwestern Michigan located only a half-hour north from Notre Dame.
This “civilization” strategy did not work for other tribes in other regions, most famously the Cherokee Nation in the Southeast. Nevertheless, the outcomes of forced removal should not hinder historians from telling more complex histories at pre-removal historical sites. I hope for the stories shared in my book to rekindle the notion of contingency at historical sites and monuments. In other words, an Indigenous re-interpretation of our frontier landscapes may help to push back against the notion of “inevitability” of events like the Trail of Tears to imagine possibilities for mutual respect across Native and settler cultures.
Dr. Jacobson is an Assistant Professor of History at UNA, where he teaches courses in public history and Native American history.
Photo caption: The replica “log chapel” on the University of Notre Dame’s campus, meant to evoke the era of the pioneer missionaries to the native Potawatomi population.
