Claire Gebben

I’m in a class with Carmen Bernier-Grand, and as we are workshopping our novels-in-progress, she raised a valid question.

“Do you have to refer to the nineteenth-century Indians as ‘wild’ and ‘brown'”?

The terms bother me, too. But I’m basing my novel on real letters from the mid-nineteenth century, and this is the language Jakob Handrich used. Here is a quote from his letter, which accompanied a package that contained vests and moccasins, written in 1849:

“The shoes, that is the work which the wild people or the brown Indians make.”

It seems it was a common reference — I’ve also come across the term in the book Pfälzer in Amerika. ‘Brown’ and ‘wild people’ are politically incorrect terms, and for that matter, just plain inaccurate, yet they seem gentle when compared with language used by the Yanks. Here’s one example I found in a speech by Ohio’s Governor Arthur St. Clair to the Ohio State Legislature in 1812:

“The government of the United States has ever with an unceasing philanthropy, and great expense, labored to civilize the Savages on her borders–to diminish the ferociousness of their natures–to cultivate among them the arts of peace–to estrange them from the cruel rites of Molock–and to inspire them with a true knowledge of a beneficent Deity.”

Hmmm. He goes on to say that, thank goodness, the U.S. has passed laws to extinguish the territorial entitlements of these “heathen remnants.” Ye gads! A glimpse of the white, barbaric mindset of the nineteenth century. It’s like we Ohioans were savages or something.

In the book “Ohio: the History of a People” by Cayton, one paragraph sums up the decimation of the native tribes of Ohio.

“The population of Ohio exploded in the first half of the nineteenth century. From 45,365 in 1800, it rose to 230,760 in 1810, 581,434 in 1820, and 1,980,329 in 1850. Virtually barren of English-speaking residents in 1790, Ohio was the third largest state in the Union by 1850 … The U.S. had extinguished the claims of Indians through treaty cessions, most notably the Treaty of Greenville in 1795, an 1817 Treaty with the Wyandots, and St. Mary’s Treaty of 1818.”

By 1832 the Wyandots, Shawnee, and Senecas were confined to the Upper Sandusky. By 1842 they were moved west of the Mississippi.

According to Cayton, the mood of the Ohioans in the early nineteenth century was one of progress, of “the triumph of civilization over barbarism.”

In my research I’m discovering evidence that many German immigrants thought differently, their thinking influenced in part by romantic poets and ideas of the day. Key principles of the romanticism movement included a spiritualized view of nature, and the desire to lose oneself in it.

In 1849, Uncle Jakob sent two Indian vests and a pair of moccasins to his nephews and niece in Germany. I’d like to believe he saw the Indians as artisans, and as human beings.