Pawnee perspective

Monday, June 9, 2003
Riding In

Bioterrorism and drive-by shootings are not topics one would expect to hear in a talk on the Pawnee Indians in Nebraska. But, they struck a chord with modern students and adults hearing perhaps for the first time some of the injustices visited on the people who inhabited the Golden Plains before the Europeans arrived.

"You people are taking care of our land, and we hope you take good care of it," Dr. James Riding In said at the conclusion of his talk recently at the Tipton Mini Theater on the McCook Community College campus. "Treat it well and don't pollute it," said Riding In, a member of a people that once ruled most of middle America.

In an appearance funded by a major grant from the Nebraska Humanities Council, Riding In spoke on the first night of the Wind on the Buffalograss Young Writers Camp, being conducted through the cooperation of Educational Service Unit 15 and MCC. Some 40 campers, from as far as Beatrice, O'Neill, Healy and Colby, Kan., joined about 30 adults for the Arizona State University professor's talk.

Although receiving postgraduate training at UCLA, Riding In earned under graduate degrees from smaller schools and has a "special feeling for community colleges," he said.

Riding In has gained stature as part of the "repatriation" effort to return American Indian remains, formerly on display in museums, to their tribes for proper burial. Some 3,000 to 4,000 remains have been returned for reburial, he said, while about that many remain to be repatriated.

While many Golden Plains residents are familiar with slaughter of Pawnee by Sioux at Massacre Canyon near Trenton, there were more complex reasons than just one battle for the tribe to be banished to the "dumping ground" of Oklahoma. At least one other historian said the Sioux drove the Pawnee out, but the Pawnees blamed the white people, he said. The loss of the Plains to the Pawnee, however, is an issue of sovereignty and colonialism, he said.

Mythology and stereotypes that grew up out of the westward expansion were used to justify the taking of land, reduction of the Pawnee people and loss of control over their own society, he said.

"The first drive-by shootings took place on the overland trail," Riding In said, noting that it was "a right of passage -- that to become a man, you had to kill and Indian." Less overt, but far more deadly, was the use of smallpox-tainted trade blankets to deliberately infect the Pawnee with the disease in 1831. By 1838, half the population had died.

"We lost a whole generation to disease," Riding In said.

To understand the Pawnee, one must understand the people's worldview, he said.

According to its religion, the Pawnee came from the stars, and were placed somewhere on the hemisphere to live. The people used sacred bundles and conducted ceremonies, in order to prevent catastrophes from happening to the tribe.

The Creator, he said, once killed an entire people who did not live according to the sacred way. At one time, the Pawnee were "as numerous as the stars and the buffalo," according to tribal traditions, and the people are closely related to the Arikawas, Wichitas and other tribes. Some traditions say the people moved to the Great Plains from the Southwest, others from the Southeast, Riding In said.

The Creator assigned duties to various groups of people, he said: the priests to carry on ceremonies to prevent catastrophes; the chiefs; doctors, who gained healing knowledge from bears (thus the bear claws in their costumes); and the warriors, who defended the Pawnee way of life and who were more likely to become chiefs.

Unlike modern politicians who are constantly seeking campaign contributions, the Pawnee leaders were expected to give everything away to help other people.

Women were expected to look after the welfare of the children, take care of the lodges and engage in agriculture. Riding In then recounted centuries of Pawnee encounters with Europeans, and the results.

Starting with Coronado and other Spaniards who came in from the Caribbean and New Mexico looking for the mythical Seven Cities of Gold (The story may have been a ruse, Riding In said, used to get rid of the Spanish), through the Lewis & Clark expedition ordered by Thomas Jefferson in 1803, Pike's expedition in 1806, and Stephen H. Long's expedition with a steamboat rigged to look like a dragon, the Pawnees first began to be exploited by the Europeans.

The "doctrine of discovery," which gave preemptive rights to the settlers, eventually became part of U.S. law, passing titles from the Indians to the colonizers.

Conflicts along the Santa Fe Trail began with the establishment of that passageway from Missouri to New Mexico in 1821, and the infamous smallpox attack of 1831 continued to claim thousands of Indians.

Deliberate or not, European diseases claimed thousands of Pawnees and millions of Indians, he said, because of the nature of epidemics. Diseases such as smallpox claim 75 percent of a population when it has previously been unexposed; 50 percent with the next epidemic, and a declining number with each subsequent exposure.

After the government sent soldiers to guard the Santa Fe trail, the Pawnee learned that resistance could be tragic. The people were more vulnerable to attack than more nomadic people such as the Sioux and Arapahoe, Riding In said, because they spent about half the year in villages to plant and harvest, while spending the rest of the year hunting.

Riding In continued citing treaty after treaty, each one ceding more and more land to the government, until eventually the Pawnee were confined to a 15 x 30-mile reservation in eastern Nebraska.

One of the few treaties the United States has honored was one of 1857, which promised $30,000 a year to the tribe. "The last go-around, I got $11," Riding In said, "so who says the U.S. government doesn't take care of Indians?"

As settlement grew in the 1860s on, Nebraska was being billed as a "garden spot" and the Indians were seen as being in the way of those plans, he said.

Despite the fact that hundreds of Pawnee men served the U.S. Army as Pawnee Scouts in 1864-1877, they were still viewed as less than human by many. A group of 14 attempted to show a group of settlers and soldiers their discharge papers at Mulberry Creek, but the whites, convinced the Pawnees were on a raid, shot and killed nine of the group.

One old man, walking in the area of the reservation, was shot and killed by a white man, test-firing his new weapon, and a companion. Despite knowing exactly who the men were, authorities refused to prosecute them for the death of an Indian.

Later, in 1869, settler Edward McMurtrey disappeared enroute to Columbus, and an ultimatum went out to the tribe to turn suspects over to white authorities or face indiscriminate warfare.

Quakers, who ran the Pawnee agency at the time, effectively held the starving tribe hostage by shutting off its $30,000 annuity until eight "suspects" were turned over for trial. After what the Omaha Herald called a "kangaroo court," four were eventually released from prison in Lincoln, but dungeon-like prison conditions resulted in their deaths after they were released.

"So it was OK for whites to kill Pawnees, but not for Pawnees to kill whites," he said.

An illustration of the government's attitude, he said, was the "craniometric research," the topic of a military coverup. That research resulted in orders for soldiers to decapitate Indians who had been killed in battle, so that their skulls could be studied to determine try to prove that they were less intelligent that the whites, he said.

Repatriation efforts have resulted in about 4,000 skulls and body parts being returned to their tribes, and buried with full military honors.

The 1873 events at Massacre Canyon certainly hurt the tribe, he said, "but the major threat was the way U.S. government policy had disrupted Pawnee life."

By 1875, all Pawnees had been removed from Nebraska and relocated in Oklahoma. The tribe, which numbered as few as 600 in 1900, has rebounded to about 2,500 today. Collectively, they own about 500 acres of land. There is an effort to preserve the Pawnee language, he said, but "boarding schools tried to beat it out of them" earlier this century, Riding In said.

Riding In said his great grandfather was a Pawnee Scout, grandfather served in World War I, father in World War II, uncle in Korea, he served in Vietnam and his son just got out of the Marines. "I don't know why we do it," he quipped.

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