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Dec 4, 2021

A county, a college, a national forest, public schools and dozens of other enterprises including an upscale hotel and a church memorialize the nineteenth century Protestant missionary Marcus Whitman.  He would have been a footnote in history if he and his wife and eleven other white people were not killed by Cayuse Indians in 1847 in Walla Walla valley in the Pacific Northwest.  

I picked up this book by Cassandra Tate on one of my rare in-person visits to the  Public Library. I had no particular subject or book in mind. After a few minutes of wandering around I found myself in the local section - Washington based books and this book caught my eye. I finished it a few days ago, reading it over a period of several weeks because unlike the ebooks I read these days, a hard copy book cannot be read in the dark. 

Coincidentally I finished the book on Thanksgiving day, the day marking the autumn harvest feast shared between the native Americans and white colonists at Plymouth, Massachusetts. Former President, Warren G. Harding said, "I like the story of Whitman. If it isn't true, it ought to be." Thus the story of a hero (non-existent in reality) was created, a convenient portrait (there were no portraits or drawings of the Whitmans) of a chiseled white frontiersman missionary was written and sculpted into a nation's memory and museums.  In an era when across the United States the statues of old White men are being toppled by the new generation trying to re-align history and correct past mistakes, Unsettled Ground is a timely read. 


Like all the historical stories painted by the victors, the stories of native Americans and white colonists' interactions have always presented Indian tribes as the bad guys, attacking and revolting against the white pioneers and well meaning white missionaries.  The Whitman story is no different. Tate's well researched, even-keeled book prompts a revisit to learn the truth about the complex dynamics of Natives and white settlers, from the perspective of an infamous event, which led to the canonization of the wrong hero.

Here are a few intriguing facts I learnt from the book:
  • Tate points out, when American Indians killed whites it was called a “massacre”; when whites killed Indigenous people, it often gets labeled a “battle.”
  • Catholic missionaries had more success and rapport with the native Americans than Protestant missionaries in the American west because of the high threshold of entry (into Christian religion) that Protestant missionaries set for the new converts. The Catholics on the other hand were ready to baptize and convert even those 'heathens' who were ordered to be hung to death the next day, if the heathen wished to embrace Christianity.
  • In early nineteenth  century it was more difficult and time consuming to complete one's theological education and be ordained a priest or a minister (took 7-8 years) than to study and qualify as a physician which only took about four years max.
  • The focus of Christian missionaries in the Americas was to change the wandering, hunter-gatherer lifestyle of the native people and convert them into agriculturists who would stay put, farm the land, produce and procreate in one place.
  • Oregon Spectator talking about the native Americans, "for the barbarian murderers and violators, let them be pursued with unrelenting hatred, let them be hunted as beasts of prey, let their name and race be blotted from the face of the earth, and the places that once knew them, know them no more forever."
  • The Whitmans were markedly unsuccessful  as missionaries - in their 11 years in the Pacific Northwest they failed to convert even a single Indian.

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