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Review
| The Bear River Massacre and the Making of History, by Kass Fleisher. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. 348 pages. $23.95, paper.
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| In this book the author has attempted to do many things. She tries to educate the reader about the massacre (which was deadlier but is much less known than Sand Creek or Wounded Knee), to lobby for a National Park Service monument to the victims, to explain the writing about the history of the massacre and rape, to critique the history profession, and to create a memoir. Fleisher has divided her work of "creative nonfiction" into three parts and included information about her emerging realizations about the massacre throughout. Using Brigham Madsen's book on the topic extensively in the first section, she tells the gruesome story of the massacre. California militiamen, stationed in the area to protect overlanders, attacked a band of Northwestern Shoshoni in southeastern Idaho on January 29, 1863. The soldiers killed, by most estimates, about 280 men, women, and children. Afterwards, by some accounts, the soldiers raped women survivors. |
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The second part of the book is about the debate over a National Park Service monument to the massacre victims. The massacre site was private land and in 1995 the NPS began a series of hearings about proposals for commemorating the site. Fleisher attended some of those hearings and then interviewed many of the primary actors in the debate. Anyone interested in the making of public policy, especially by the National Park Service and other agencies, will be intrigued by the process that she reveals. This is the real contribution of this book, but Fleisher seems not to know what she has accomplished. After reading each of the individual chapters on the interviews, I was expecting a wrap up of the issues and misunderstandings that those interviews revealed, but Fleisher does not do this. The reader must work hard to make the connections between interviews. For example, is Hansen talking about the same meeting that Griffin was referring to? Which of the three interpretations of who proposed the name change from "battle" to "massacre" is probably correct? Still, it is worth the effort. In March of 2003, after this book went to press I am assuming, the Trust for Public Lands turned twenty-six acres of the massacre site over to the Northwestern Shoshoni. |
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The final section of the book contains "ten digressions on what's wrong" with the writing of history. The debate about the "making" of history seemed to be everywhere when I was reading this book. I heard a story out of Washington on NPR about challenges to lesson plans that assumed that Japanese internment camps were wrong. The November 2004 OAH Newsletter contains an article about parents wanting slavery taken out of curricula about the Civil War. While Fleisher is an academic, in many ways her book can also be seen as an assault on academic historians. Like these parents who were challenging historical interpretations, Fleisher makes some very inaccurate assumptions about the craft of history. First, she informs the reader that her piece on the Bear River Massacre is flawed and subjective and, unlike academic historians, she is willing to admit this. Historians know there is no "absolute truth" in history. Without the attempt of objectivity though, one is left only with propaganda. Second, Fleisher assumes that writing history takes no special skill or training. I resent the attitude that history is not a difficult field to master. Though I teach cause and effect, primary document interpretation, and other history techniques, each semester I have students who "just don't get it." Understanding and writing history is not endemic in the population. |
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Fleisher, whose field is literature and not history, has produced an interesting personal journey of discovery, and the public policy debate about memorializing the massacre site is rich in information and could be useful in a college-level class on Native American history or public policy. Nevertheless, I would not assign it in either. There are more useful books. Madsen provides "what (we think) happened" and Robert Utley and Edmund Danziger have written about Indians of the West and the Civil War. While the Bear River Massacre deserves to be extensively studied and the book has some interesting sections, overall I think it not very useful to history teachers. |
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| Cottey College |
Angela Firkus |
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