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Book Review
| Kass Fleisher, The Bear River Massacre and the Making of History, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. Pp. 348. $71.50 cloth (ISBN 0-7914-6063-4); $25.95 paper (ISBN 0-7914-6064-9).
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| Despite the author's self-absorption and the unnecessary sprawl of its final section, Kass Fleisher's The Bear River Massacre and the Making of History can teach much to readers interested in the politics of history and historical commemoration. Intended to overcome the "passivity" that the rhetoric of objectivity sometimes encourages in public histories, Fleisher's text provokes and cajoles readers in an attempt to offer a "more self-reflexive narrative" (303) framed by questions of collective responsibility for past injustices. Patient readers have an opportunity, not only to recover one of the great tragedies of America's westward expansion, but also to delve into the mechanics of national forgetting and the possibilities for political action based on reclaimed historical understanding. |
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As she acknowledges in her preface, Fleisher is no historian, and The Bear River Massacre is not intended as a straightforward history of the assault that Colonel Patrick Connor and his outfit of California Volunteers led against a small encampment of Northwestern Shoshone on January 29, 1863. That story, the bloodiest of the Indian massacres documented thus far (fourteen soldiers and an estimated 280 Shoshone, including women and children, killed), accounts for fewer than thirty pages in the text, with most of that material taken from other secondary sources. Instead, Fleisher is concerned with the factors that contributed to "the cultural erasure of one of the worst acts of genocide in the history of the United States" (xi). Her book targets the vagaries of historical memory and asks what academics and ordinary citizens can do to redeem history's forgotten and unlamented losses. Fleisher wonders, "Why don't we know about this?" (86). Beneath her question is another: can the past activate a sense of responsibility in today's communities and contribute to justice? |
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While her interest in the use and abuse of history is nothing revelatory, Fleisher's in-depth examination of the Bear River case proves illuminating. Through interviews and journalistic investigation, she is able to articulate the various sides of the debate. Her conversations with Shoshone activists and elders, including descendants of the massacre's survivors, National Park Service archaeologists and project planners, Idaho politicians (both local representatives and U.S. senators), members of the predominantly Mormon community who currently live in the environs of the massacres site (and in some instances hold title to those lands), as well as other historians who have examined the archival materials related to the massacre, together paint a picture that is complex, but not intractable. Though efforts to fund an interpretive visitor center at the site of the massacre remain stalled in Washington, D.C., Fleisher shows that the memory of Bear River is slowly gaining traction within the communities who live in its shadow and that there is an emerging consensus about the most appropriate ways to represent and commemorate the massacre. |
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While the massacre still has no place in public school curricula (Utah and Idaho both appearing content to let the other handle that), it is nevertheless important to note that the public discourse has already shifted in important ways. Whereas pioneer heritage groups once recalled Indian provocations that, in their view, justified Connor's attack, local residents by-in-large now accept that the event once referred to as "The Battle of Bear River" was really a one-sided slaughter—one soldier, instructed to take no prisoners, described it as "a frolic"—with no resemblance to any legitimate military engagement. Of course, key issues remain unresolved, e.g., conflicting evidence and opinions on the occurrence of mass rape. Still, one can hope, as Fleisher does, that the ongoing work of historical preservation will also promote legislative reform aimed at protecting what is left, not only of the Shoshone's heritage, but also of Native-American culture more generally. |
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Fleisher is wrong to see her work as a radical critique of current historical discourse. Indeed, she refers in numerous places to the meta-historical analysis that Hayden White and others introduced to the discipline more than thirty years ago. The critical interventions that she relishes (i.e., feminism, Marxism, cultural studies, literary theory, etc.) have, to a significant degree, already been internalized by scholars working in the discipline today. Moreover, the "postmodern creativity" that Fleisher insists is critical to her work often distracts from an otherwise penetrating analysis of the "subject position" (304) from which all historians launch their investigations. Nevertheless, Fleisher is right to wonder about the effects of historical orthodoxy on non-specialists, i.e., ordinary citizens, whose view of the past is usually informed by tertiary documents situated in the popular culture. Given the continued marginalization of Native-American cultures and the legal trespasses against these groups that remain unremedied, good history tucked away on the pages of obscure academic journals ought to impress us less, and bad history splashed onto the silver screen or emblazoned on plaques along the roadside ought to concern us more. |
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| Alexander Karn
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| Colgate University |
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