ResoluteReader: Peter Cozzens - The Earth is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West

In 1869 General William Sherman, one of the Union Army's most successful Civil War commanders wrote to his brother Senator John Sherman, "The more I see of these Indians, the more I become convinced that they all have to be killed or be maintained as as species of paupers... Their attempts at civilisation are simply ridiculous". The irony of this statement, which serves as a summary of the attitude of most of the US Army's high command and its political leadership, was that Sherman was supposed to be a "peace commissioner", responsible for protecting the rights of the indigenous people from external threats, including from his own army. It is a contradiction that runs deep into Peter Cozzens' history of the Wars.

The problem is, that however Washington dressed up its policies toward the various indigenous tribes, however they tried to draw distinctions between belligerent and nonbelligerent bands, and however well meaning individuals might have been, policy was shaped by a series of racist assumptions that meant that the outcome was always genocidal. The Indian way of life could not be allowed to survive, because otherwise it was a barrier to the natural, unlimited, expansion of US capitalism. The tribes had to be moved to reservations, and made to conform to a new way of life. If they didn't they would starve, or be murdered. The tribes that did not conform, or resisted, or fought back, moved easily from nonbelligerent to belligerent and then the Army could unleash the guns.

Cozzens tells the story well. His account is readable, and he desperately tries to be fair. Fair, for Cozzens, means giving accounts that demonstrate the violence (and occasional non-violence) from both sides. There's plenty of the former, and precious little of the latter. Massacres, rape, murder and battles occur with depressing frequency. We learn of the inadequacies and ineiptudes of the US Army that led to the Fetterman Massacre and defeat on the Little Big Horn. But we also read of the lesser known killings and fights, and much about events far from the classic area of the Great Plains. There is also plenty of material on various figures - from US generals to Native American chiefs.

The problem with Cozzens' book though is actually his attempt to be fair. In places it reads a little like he is looking for a "gotcha" moment. One that proves there was violence on both sides, so that the violence almost becomes justified. This is particularly noticeable when Cozzens' writes about "intertribal conflict". This sees various tribes in conflict with each other, and frequently one group siding with the US government against other Indians. Cozzens' emphasises this in the introduction. He argues it is not "appreciated". And he writes,

the wars between Indians and the [US] government for the northern plains, the seat of the bloodiest and longest struggles, represented a displacement of one immigrant people by another, rather than the destruction of a deeply rooted way of life.

He continues by quoting a Cheyenne chief about why they made war on the Crows, "We stole the hunting grounds of the Crows because they were the best. We wanted more room". The implication is, of course, that the US government's Army was only doing to the some Native tribes what they had already done to others. The problem is that these things are not the same. And Cozzens' repeatedly fails to grasp the distinction between the colonial violence of the US army, engaged on a genocidal project and that of the tribal warfare between existing peoples' who were historical part of a larger landscape - not invaders. In those latter conflicts you might have one side that was right, or wrong, but in the former there was a "destruction of a deeply rooted way of life" taking place - and it was not led by a immigrant people, but by the incomers.

This false equivalence, pitched as an attempt to be fair to both sides, however doesn't make it into other aspects of the book. This is noticeable when Cozzens writes about the differences between cultures. For instance he tells the reader that:

The mutilation of enemy dead was a common Plains Indian practice in which both sexes indulged. Westerners considered it conclusive proof that Indians were irredeemable savages; for their part, the Indians believed that disfiguring an enemy's corpse protected the killer from the dead man's spirit in the afterlife.

Something makes me uneasy about the use of the word "indulged" there. But the bigger issue for me is the implication that Europeans did not mutilate - of course they did. And there's well documented evidence for this disfurging of indigenous dead people by Westerners in the Americas and many other places. European museums are only just beginning to recognise that having the remains on display isn't that great.

Later on the same page Cozzens describes the link between sex and war for some Indian tribes. Writing about the Crow, he says,

War honors were inextricably linked to sex. They were the surest way to win a girl's heart, making them excellent motibators for young men to fight hard. A Crow man, for instance, could not marry until he had turned twenty-five or counted coup.... Among the Cheyennes, young men could not even court girls until they had demonstrated their courage in battle or on raids. Mothers grilled their daughter's' suitors on their war records and dismissed as a coward any man found wanting.

The implication is that violence is ingrained in Native American culture, shaping their response to the European arrival, rather than the nature of settler conquest. But such beliefs by the Crow and Cheyenne aren't that different to European culture either. The Knights of the Round Table supposedly went on quests to win the hearts of their maidens. And then, fifty pages later Cozzens tells us about the Seventh Cavalry's officer's behaviour after the Battle of the Washita:

Although the officers of the Seventh Cavalry were bitterly divided over Custer's handling of Elliott's disappearance [during the battle], they did agree on one thing: the desirability of their female Cheyenne cpatives.... Cheyenne survivors said Custer and his officers appeared among them to select bedmates. Custer, the captives said, chose the beautiful nineteen-year-old Monahsetah, daughter of Chief Little Rick... As other Cheuennes drifted in to surrender, the officers of the Seventh Cavalry picked out more sexual partners... Custer's unbridled sexual appetite was well establioshed, and a company commander boasted in a letter to his bother that some of the officers had ninety Cheyenne females from which to choose.

While Cozzens is in no way endorsing this behaviour, there's a very different approach to the two cultural traditions. When he describes Custer's celebration (and popularity) among the people (and women in particular) on the East Coast following military success, there's no attempt to draw parallels with Native American warriors similar portrayal. In fact I read the book as suggesting that one was inherently bad.

The Earth is Weeping tells a tragic story. But Cozzens does not have the framework to tell it properly. His desire at "historical balance" means that he sees no difference between the violence of the oppressed and the violence of the oppressor. This is perhaps most clear in the final chapter. After telling the awful story of the massacre at Wounded Knee, Cozzens simply ends the book. There's no context. No attempt to ask what the legacy was. What does it mean for Native American people today? What did it all mean for the development of the Settler Colonial States of North America? What can we learn about violence and culture in the modern US from this history? It is all neatly partioned off by the end of the Wars.

Cozzens' book does not hide the violence and slaughter of the Indian Wars, nor does it pretend that this was all one sided. Quite the opposite. But the book doesn't do justice to the history - or its victims - at all.