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Marc James Carpenter, "The War on Illahee: Genocide, Complicity, and Cover-Ups in the Pioneer Northwest" (Yale UP, 2025)
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [00:06]
B
Hello and welcome back to New Books Network. I'm Steve Houseman and I'm your host for today's interview and for this episode I'm speaking with mark James Carpenter. Dr. Carpenter is an associate professor of history at the University of Jamestown, and we'll be discussing his new book, the War on Genocide, Complicity and Cover Ups in the Pioneer Northwest, which came out with Yale University Press last year in 2025, as of the Lamar series in Western History. Welcome to the New Books Network. Marc, good to have you here today.
- [00:39]
A
Really great to be here. Thank you.
- [00:41]
B
Why don't we start, as we always do on this show, by just hearing a little about who you are. I'd love to hear a bit about your background and in particular tell us how you got interested in studying history.
- [00:52]
A
Sure. So I come from a kind of family of writers, so I've always been interested in kind of the writing piece of things. And I think, like a lot of historians, I was interested in history at an early age when I I didn't even really understand what history was. As I was going through my 20s, having experiences in universities, I started to get interested in education. It seemed like that might be a good path for me. And as I started to get into education and I tried out history sides of things, it turns out somewhat unexpectedly, I also really liked the research and writing side of things. So why not apply to grad schools? Maybe it'll work out. And then once I got into those, why not apply to a Ph.D. maybe it'll work out. And then eventually, once I got one of those, sure, I'll apply for jobs, they don't exist, but maybe I'll get one. And it sort of has rolled on from there. And particularly once I started to get into it, I had again an experience that I think is pretty common where you start off trying to find a project and it feels like everything has been written. And then you dig just a little bit further and it turns out there's so much still left to be written that there's always going to be far more history than there is historians. And particularly you find stories, history sources that you have to chase down, where you find a story that needs to be told that just fundamentally isn't out there in the way that it needs to be told. You look around and realize, oh, if nobody's telling the story, then that means maybe it's up to me. And I've had a couple of experiences like that. And that's particularly the case for this book that I've got out.
- [02:21]
B
Yeah, I was just going to say this book is such a good example of just that because, you know, you might, you might glance on it and be like, oh, you know, the history of the 1840s, 1850s, Pacific Northwest, you know, that's kind of Oregon Trailish stuff. So much has been written about that already, blah, blah, blah. But then you actually read your book and you realize like, oh, this is a totally new perspective and angle on this. So your point about how there's always going to be more history than there's historians is very well taken. And this is a good example of just that. So I'm curious, what brought you to the topic of this book? Why a book about the Pacific Northwest? Why did you take this particular angle on it? What road did you take to writing the War on Illihi? Yes.
- [03:00]
A
So this started way back when. This started when I was pretty early in graduate school casting about for a topic and I kind of talked with a few advisors and we, we figured out, if nothing else, you look for somebody whose stuff is named after if there hasn't been anything written about them for several decades. And that could be a very simple, like one semester research paper. So I will start. This originally was thought of as something that would be done in, you know, three to six months. I looked into one of the early, quote unquote, pioneer fathers of Oregon, a man named Joseph Lane, who had biographies about him, but they were all quite old. I dug into his backstory a little bit. I found his much more exciting grandson. Harry Lane, who is this kind of far leftist Indian rights activists at the turn of the 1900s who did interesting things in the Senate, is kind of this below ground figure. And he talked about his grandfather, Joseph Lane, as an Indian rights activist in the same mold. I'm like, oh, that's really cool. I want to go look at that. I checked the biographies. They say, yeah, he's. He cared about Native rights. And so I'm like, great, I can tell a new Native right story, like generationally. That'll be great. I dug into the primary sources and I found that Joseph Lane was one of the most wicked human beings I've ever had the displeasure to read sources from. He despised Native people, although he claimed otherwise very late in life. He was proud of his experiences killing them. And that was part of his political identity. He would write into newspapers of the time talking about essentially what he did on his summer break away from Congress was going through southern Oregon killing people. I also found as I dug much more Deeply into the sources that in addition to being a murderer, he was a rapist. And talked about that on the campaign trail. So I had this horrifying story of this one famous figure. The county where I went to graduate school is Lane county, named after this horrible man. And I was trying to figure out how it is that historians had gotten this guy so wrong. How could this violent criminal be mistaken for a native rights activist? And that started to let me zoom out a little bit, look a little bit more broadly and say, oh, there are dozens of Joseph Lanez. This is a story that happens over and over and over again in Oregon and Washington. How the heck did that happen? And so that led to what eventually blossomed into a dissertation and then eventually now into this book of a sort of two handed story. One where I blew through the absolute maximum of my page count. It's an even number of pages for a reason. I used every page they would give me and negotiated for a few. War because it is both a news story of this period of largely forgotten wars in the Pacific Northwest between the late 1840s into the 1860s, which were wars that were horrific, violent, frequently genocidal, used to seize the majority of the land. And then also a history of how it is that those wars were slowly and sometimes deliberately covered up. The worst violence of them steadily erased over the decades that followed. And that was the answer to how I had both found all these horrible things about Joseph Lane and how it was not known well outside of indigenous communities. How horrible at what he was, was because there's not only this largely untold story of violence that I'm covering, but also why it is untold. And bless historians, they write everything down and always have. Part of why it is untold is the first generation of historians in the Pioneer Northwest did deliberate efforts to make sure that the stories of genocide, a sexual assault, the other dark sides of colonialism would not reach the light of day and the kinds of heroic histories that they wanted to tell.
- [06:32]
B
Yeah, I mean, we're going to get into this later on in our conversation, but these people absolutely knew what they were doing. They were very self consciously writing history in a specific way, as you really underscore in the book. But yeah, please, were you going to say something?
- [06:45]
A
Yeah, I'd just say you. If you're going to put the word cover ups in your title, you have to really support that. Right. You can't just throw around words like cover ups. And I, again I think I can say that because they wrote to each other. Make sure to cover this up. Right. Almost that exact language. I'm only lightly paraphrasing. That's the only way I have the confidence to use a word like cover up in this space.
- [07:07]
B
Well, I want to. Let's. Let's start at the beginning of the book, and I want to ask you about another word that you use in your title. So your introduction. In this book, you title it introduction and Apologia. And in this really well done, pretty long intro, you explain a lot of the different terms that you use. And I want to start with the word genocide, which is a politically pretty powerful word that, like all the words that you're using in this book, you're using very deliberately. There's a lot of thought and back kind of research and thinking that goes into this. So can you talk a little bit about your deployment, your use of that concept and how you came to find it fitting for the story that you tell here? Yeah.
- [07:45]
A
So genocide, of course, again, the power of the word is part of why one uses it. Right. It's got a lot of heft behind it. It's also always a very contested phrase, of course. Right. We know that in the modern period especially, and I think often there's sort of a feeling around what genocide might mean that is pretty far away from its legal definition. So when I use the word in this book, I use it in two distinct ways. I talk about genocide, and every once in a while I talk about cultural genocide. When I talk about genocide, I'm talking about it in the legal sense, in part because it is a legal definition that most nations, including the United States, have agreed upon as a word for a particular kind of crime. Right. And I think listeners are often broadly familiar with what the crimes of genocide are. But the thing I would really stress is that they are actions taken by people with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, including a bunch of different kinds of actions, including killing, but also inflicting conditions of life to bring about destruction, imposing measures to prevent births, forcible transfer of children, a number of other things, and also lists, in addition to genocide, things like conspiracy and incitement. And I think in many places in Native American history, as we take seriously the concept of genocide, which was developed in part not just most famously looking at the Holocaust or Shoah that the Nazis committed in World War II, but also looking at other genocides, at the Armenian genocide, but also at the experiences of Native people. Their experiences went into this initial definition. This was meant to be a broad Ranging definition, if you read the whole Genocide Convention, which many op ed writers apparently can't get through the three pages of the actual text, but if you read the whole Genocide Convention, it mentions this is a crime that has, through all periods of history, inflicted great losses on humanity. And I bring that up because I think many people's definition of genocide is, does it look enough like the Holocaust? Right. Because the Holocaust, the Shoah, is a unique and horrific crime. And sometimes when people are nervous about applying the term genocide in other spaces, rather than returning to the legal definition, they return to kind of a sense of whether it is or is not enough. Like the Holocaust, the Shoah. Right. But it was not just meant to stop another Holocaust. It absolutely was. It was also meant to try and stop this horrific crime against humanity that had been part of history since time immemorial. And so I think it's useful to have that as an underlined issue. I think the other thing that I try to really stress in this introduction is that the crime of genocide as we have described it, is a crime, like almost all crimes in national and international law, that people commit. Right. And I think sometimes when we have debates over when and where there is genocide, particularly when in the United States we have debates over when and where there was genocide inflicted on native people and nations, we get into national responsibility, which is an incredibly important thing to think about. It really does matter when a state is responsible for genocide, but it also matters when people are responsible for genocide. And people it is easier to prove. Right. Whether or not the United States was committing genocide in the 1850s is to some degree a matter of interpretation, because there is not a specific legal definition for the point at which a state has committed genocide. Whether or not a person has, there is one. Right. So what I'm able to show in this book is that there are a number of specific people who have committed acts of genocide in this period who committed acts of genocide in the 1840s and 1850s, because their own words, their own documents and their actions clearly show an intent to destroy a people in whole or in part. And then one or more of the crimes listed in the Genocide Convention. I then argue that the kind of scale of genocidal intent and actions meant that there is at least some level of state responsibility. But I think it is useful and important to differentiate. There are unquestionably many, many people, hundreds of people who committed acts of genocide in the sense of killing thousands of people who were complicit in it, tens of thousands who are complicit in it and then start from there to move to a conversation about things like state and national responsibility. As far as cultural genocide that is not currently a defined international crime was proposed initially, but it didn't make its way through the United nations in the period. It is one that is felt centrally by many Native communities. For them, there's an importance placed on making sure that we pay attention to the gravity of trying to annihilate another group's culture. Right. That that is to many people, many Native communities, and I'll say, in my personal opinion, another form of genocide. I do think it is useful to differentiate genocide as it is defined in the law from cultural genocide, both because one of those is, you know, legal, with potential legal consequences, and because cultural genocide is absolutely horrific. But there are tools for surviving cultural genocide that are not present as tools for surviving physical genocide. And some of the later portions of the book are in part talking Native people at the turn of the 1900s who are trying to find ways to survive first one and then the other. And they are different tools available at different times to different people.
- [13:11]
B
This is a book about genocide, but as we'll talk about again a bit later on, as you just indicated, it's also a book about people surviving genocide and attempted genocide as well. It's as much a book about that as it is about the horrors of colonialism too.
- [13:24]
A
I would go so far as to say almost any story of genocide that reaches us is at least in part a story about surviving genocide. Genocide heirs who are fully successful, especially in colonial contexts, would be those who destroy the evidence of their crimes. If the fact that we know about it and can talk about it, particularly that the descendants of those who are targeted can survive, to speak truth to power is a sign that the genocide heirs did not fully succeed.
- [13:50]
B
Well, let's talk a bit about where this book takes place. You mentioned a moment ago Lane county in Oregon, which, if I remember my Oregon geography, is kind of east central Oregon, around the Eugene area. And that's one of the places that's important in this book. But where are we talking about generally where, or maybe a better way to put it, is what is Illihi? And what is the history of the place that you're describing here? Before the mid 19th century, who lived in this place and what was this place like?
- [14:20]
A
Yeah, so the book kind of geographically, in a simple sense, the book covers the areas that are now Oregon and Washington. Obviously, like all books, I dip out of my geographical focus occasionally to tell the fuller story, but it's focused pretty tightly on the area that's now Oregon and Washington. The term ilhi is adapted from Chinookan languages. It's a term for homeland. And one of the things about Chinookan languages would originally be with a little glottal pause in there. I'm using illihi because that was the one that ended up in the most common form of what was known as Chinook jargon, which was a trade language that encompassed the broader Columbia river basin and also traveled along the coasts and all the way to the areas now that are kind of the coastal areas of Vancouver, B.C. up through. Even into the islands off of Alaska. And so I like this word for homeland as a phrase for this broader region. And I used it in part because this is a region that had some regional thinking behind it before the arrival of Europeans. There's kind of an older, stereotypical way of looking at things. I think most people are moving past right. Where you view history before Europeans as kind of static and as. As isolated. I still sometimes have students in class who, when they imagine Native people, imagine them not only in the small communities they were in, but imagine those small communities as isolated from one another. And one of the things I really try to stress when I'm talking about Indigenous life in the Pacific Northwest is that Indigenous people there, as in most places, were part of broader social, governmental, cultural tapestries. Right. And were trading with one another long before Europeans or Americans arrived. And the trade language they used was known as Chinookwawa. When they were using it, which was kind of a common language, you'd have somebody in your community most of the time who would be able to communicate in that, in addition to using your own language. There's a huge number of languages in the Pacific Northwest, more densely packed languages than most other areas of the world. But most people would still have somebody who could speak Chinookwa after European and then American arrival. Of course, these are new people with new trade goods, and they're pretty quickly slotted into indigenous trade networks by indigenous merchants. And that also includes some shifting of Chinook wawa into what's known as Chinook jargon, where there's the phasing out, when you're speaking to Europeans and Americans of words that have difficult sounds and phonemes for them. Right. That's why it's ill instead of il and the inclusion of some words from English and French and a few other places to be able to communicate effectively. So kind of famously, Americans are known as Bostons in the early Indigenous Northwest after American arrival, there's all kinds of life ways. There's no simpler way to summarize Indigenous Native life across the greater areas of Oregon, Washington and beyond. But illahi seemed like a useful turn of phrase to indicate that to all of those different nations with all their different life ways, it was a place of home. And it was a term that both the variety of Indigenous nations I touch on and the kind of American invaders in this period would recognize. Right. They all knew. So that was a word for home. And if you're going to have the sort of insolence to name a war, I think it's useful to name it in terms that people in the time would understand.
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C
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- [18:16]
B
That's a really good way of putting it, and it's a very arresting title as well. So I think it absolutely works there, both as sort of a theoretical sort of way of thinking about it, and it's just a way of grabbing someone's attention. You want to know what is this word and what is the war on this place?
- [18:32]
A
Although it does throw off podcast interviewers who are trying to figure out how to pronounce a word they're often less familiar with. So I commend you on your pronunciation. Thank you.
- [18:40]
B
Thank you. So let's talk about this war then. When did the war on native homelands on home, on Illihi, where did it begin? What were the kind of early interactions between settlers and native people in this place? Like, how would you characterize them?
- [18:56]
A
Yeah. So there's no time where everybody gets along great. But pretty famously, the early arrival into the space, although they often had imperial ambitions, when we're talking about the Spanish or particularly the British, and then the Americans are mostly in the early days there for trade. And I think listeners are probably familiar that when it is, when people coming in are there mostly for the fur trade, dynamics are going to be different from when people are coming in to try and seize land. Right. So there's no period where there's not some rumble of discontent or violence between newcomers who are kind of of claiming rights they do not have in the space. And the people who already live there. Where I put the beginning of something that looks more like a formal war rather than sort of isolated skirmishes, is shortly after what's sometimes known as the Whitman Massacre. We typically prefer the term the Whitman incident, where there are a number of squatters at a mission who've been doing various forms of abuse against local Native people, particularly Cayuse people, and who are accused of poisoning some local Cayuse people. And so one group of local Cayuse executes the male members of that household, and then the response to that execution is an attempt at a broad based war, not only on Cayuse people, but on a variety of other Native nations, including ones that definitely were not in any way connected to the kind of spat over the Whitmans in an attempt to seize land from Native folks. And, you know, some of the evidence I found was people saying pretty clearly, yeah, we made war on folks in the Willamette Valley of Oregon, not because we really thought they were involved, but because we wanted to, you know, drive them away from this country that we wanted for ourselves. So I, I kind of put the introduction of something that looks a lot more like a war at that period where there's a move from we have a specific conflict with a specific band of Cayuse to we are doing a quote unquote, Indian war and trying to seize the land that we, we can. And that I, I argue that the war on Illihi formerly more or less continues from somewhere around 1848 to somewhere at least in the early 1860s. But you could perhaps, again, if I'm going to try and get this snuck into textbooks or whatever, 1848-1858 is kind of the core period where there is, according to all participants on all sides, a waxing and waning, quote, unquote, Indian war. And this is kind of departing from more artificial periodizations and historians have put in where they try and pick out specific parts of that war and give it names like the Yakima Laureate, like the Rogue River War, paying attention to very different local circumstances. But I think once you dig into the sources and broaden your lens a little bit, both the American invaders and the Indigenous defenders both saw this as different parts of the same broad war.
- [21:46]
B
For homeland, as you describe in detail in the book, you know, this is a violent and ugly war, and it makes one wonder how anyone could justify doing this. So that's my next question. As settlers are increasingly embracing this violent attitude against Native people, how are they Justifying it to themselves and to each other. What ideologies, or, you know, maybe another way to put it, is what narratives are they employing here in order to both justify and to make sense of what they are doing?
- [22:20]
A
Yeah, so there's a number of different narratives, ideological strategies that you see. I. I do like to really focus on what's sometimes called land hunger. I'm. I'm quoting folks like Michael Witkin or Jeff Ostler on that. That, you know, often at the cor. The mean the reason for the killings is we want land, and it belongs to other people. But of course, people often build up ideologies and narratives to make the story something else. So you'll see quite a lot of. As in many genocidal spaces, quite a lot of dehumanization of referring to Native people as like wolves. Particularly in this period, you'll see a pretty horrific phrase, nits make lice. I think it's most famously associated with the Sand Creek massacres in Colorado, 1860s. But you see it in the 1850s as well, kind of justification that frames Native people as vermin and thus suited to be exterminated. Particularly you see it repeated, as would be pioneers are gearing themselves up to murder children, which does seem to have been harder for them to do because they are still human beings. And it takes a lot of kind of ideological and narrative training to get yourself to a place where you're comfortable murdering children. You'll see ideologies that are not exactly manifest destiny, but kind of look like it. A notion that there is a right to this land that is conferred by being an American or more often by being white. You'll see occasional religious justifications, but really not that many at the time the attacks were actually going on. They're. They're there occasionally. You'll see them more often in retrospect as people are trying to justify what they've done after the fact or in response to outsiders. Right. You'll see, for example, some particular. When politicians get into trouble, they'll call on local religious leaders to write Congress to say that they had an choice but to do all of this violence. As far as kind of broader ideologies, I do want to stress that this is often something building on earlier American experiences. Part of what I try to do in the book is weave this into a broader story of what had already been happening by this point for generations. Several of the pioneer killers that I write about, whose papers I've read, talk about this as a family tradition that their father had helped kill Native People, they use a different word in the Blackhawk War, particularly in the Seminole War. Right. Seizing areas of the Midwest or seizing Florida. And they were continuing on to that. I have records from people who came over by boat and, quote, learned the ropes of Indian fighting from their bunk mates who had been in previous moments of westward expansion. Right. By the time Americans and even new Americans, people immigrating for elsewhere are coming in, in the 1840s and 1850s, there's already a pretty significant ideology saying that one of the things you do as an American in the 1800s is you kill Native people to take their land. Right. They see this as an American tradition themselves, going back by this point, generations.
- [25:23]
B
So over the course of this war. And as you said, this is a book that takes place over the course of some 20 years, and then we jump ahead and talk about memory as well. But over the course of the period of the most intense violence itself, in the 1840s and 50s into the 60s, how does the violence change and expand? What is the sort of arc of this conflict? What does resistance look like? And how does this moment of intense violence come to a close?
- [25:53]
A
Yeah, so there's. On the broadest sense, there's a sort of acceleration into violence. The period where there is war throughout most of what's now Oregon and Washington is 1855 into 1856. That's when the war on Ilhi is at its height. It waxes and wanes many times within that period and often in different places. There's. Often it is kicked off by one or another act of pioneer violence. Many pioneers coming in are unwilling to treat indigenous neighbors as people or, you know, will occasionally attempt to murder and rape a neighbor. And then when there is a response, when there's a. Particularly when there's a lethal response, that is sometimes taken as sort of an invitation for war. The climax of the war, interestingly, the part where it is spread across much of the area seems to be in part sort of a cascade of paranoia and opportunity from settlers themselves. So there's fear of a broad based, quote, Indian uprising. And certainly Native nations are talking to each other, other. But even as settlers are sort of crashing into war in southern Oregon and in what's now eastern Washington, many other Native nations are still hoping that they can kind of avoid the horrific cost of a war with the United States, but are increasingly being attacked by U.S. forces. I think one of the newer things I'm adding to this narrative of war is there's parts of the Oregon coast, for example, where local Native nations That have intermarried with some local euro Americans Assume that this, you know, the war going on, you know, several days away in southern Oregon Is not going to touch them until euro American volunteers calling themselves soldiers crash in and start shooting. And then suddenly the war has spread there as well. As far as how wars fade, It's a complicated story. I think the classic way of talking about the beginnings and ends of wars Is to end them when treaties are signed, when there's a formal end declared to the war. And I think that's still an important part of this right. Several treaties are signed expropriate of land taking treaties, Some of which spur the wars. The injustice and often outright lies that came with some of the treaty making in Washington Helped spur some of the wars there. And then when the wars are come to a close, Often they. They come along with treaties that seize much more land from native people. I think the danger of a narrative that just stops at treaties Is that we miss the violence that continues after eras of formal wars. Frequently those who have killed during wars end up deployed onto reservations after them, and often don't stop killing. I have records of military officers who were overseeing reservations who continue to kill pretty freely in pursuit of a white northwest. We miss things like lynch mobs, often led by soldiers who'd been shooting at native people during more formal wars the years before. And even at what point a war begins and ends Often has as much to do with. With how Americans get money out of the federal government as it has to do with sort of official beginnings and ends of the wars. Largely, the wars start to wind down slowly Over a course of years, in part because a lot of the land has been seized, Often because native people are able to put up enough resistance, are able to make it clear how costly the war continuing the wars would be. That pioneers or. And or the American government chooses to just let it alone Rather than pursue the rest of the land, at least at that moment. And most Americans assumed in this period, eventually they would get all of the land. I like to emphasize the fact that native nations in Oregon and Washington Were able to hold on to the land they do have Is even more impressive Once you know how many killers were trying to take it all in the 1850s and the 1860s. Of course, there are some who will point to how the loss of land did not end with the end of wars and would put a scope that goes on for decades. I sort of have the war period more or less peter out in the 1860s, while still emphasizing that violence and land Hunger continue for many decades after. And unfortunately, one of the reasons for a move away from genocide is a desire to. To exploit indigenous people in other ways. To use reservations as a means of subverting funds promised to Native communities to Euro American ends, or to kind of exploit Native people as a labor force in times of labor shortages in the 1860s, 70s, 80s and onward.
- [30:44]
B
Tell us some about the forms that the violence takes during this period. You devote a chapter in the book to lynching in particular, as you call it, lynching's legal and extralegal in, in this region. So how did you know in particular kind of unsanctioned quote, unquote violence? How does it shape the war and the lives of Native people in the Northwest? Sure.
- [31:08]
A
So I think the, the big answer to that is that there, there is the threat of violence from the invaders throughout the 1800s, certainly after there's a numerically large number of Americans there by the 1850s, going right, right to the end of the decade. Some of the oral histories I draw and talk about that, that kind of persistent threat lasting past the 1890s, I will speak to that. Lynchings, legal and extralegal. I'll say I. I did get some questions about that from very useful peer reviewers and I stuck to my guns that it's an appropriate phrase. I think if I'm working outward from the different kinds of violence, we might talk about. One of the kind of norms in military history, unfortunately, can sometimes be to focus just on the official federal troops. And there were certainly federal troops in the Pacific Northwest who were being deployed against Native nations, including in pretty famous ways as kind of formal campaigns. There's particularly. There's a campaign led by General Wright in 1858 that has been studied occasionally as kind of anti insurgent warfare, but also on quote, unquote, scouting missions that often were punitive assaults on Native communities. I think sometimes what's missed is in addition to those federal troops in this period, there is a significant norm of volunteer troops. So sometimes those are state militias. Where the state calls up would be soldiers, often giving, at best commanding officers. Take a few simple math tests. And the volunteer troops for those are whoever you can get. Frequently it's not even an official state militia. It frequently first some guy gets a bunch of other guys together, they call themselves soldiers, and later on maybe they get paid by the government if they can negotiate for it. So a lot of the violence in the war on Illihi and in the smaller wars that make it up, like the Yakima War, like the Rogue river war was perpetrated by volunteer soldiers who kind of gave themselves rank and authority and were eventually able to convince first state and then federal government governments to do the same. And then outside of that, there are non state actors. There are what we might see kind of as conventional lynch mobs. I dug into the records of a kind of lynch mob in the area, the far northwestern area of Bellingham, Washington, where there was a group of guys who would go out and assault and sometimes kill native people in the dead of night as a lynch mob. But one of the things I really want to emphasize is that what makes a lynching a lynching, you know, an unjust killing without the color of law can be a little bit broader than just a kind of mob acting definitively outside of the law with a rope. There's been long standing, you know, you can see NAACP documents down to the founding of their organization in the 1910s, use of the term legal lynching to describe an unjust killing by state authorities. Right. Where if a sheriff and a judge kill somebody without them having due process, without them having kind of the full utility of the law, that can be a form of lynching as well. And so one of the things that I found in the records is that you'll have military campaigns or even just military actions outside of war, where soldiers will go into a village and say, bring me five murderers, I'm going to kill them. Bring me five people. And if you don't bring me five people, I'll kill everybody in here. And then they'll hang those people. As an example to the rest. That is not a military trial or an execution. That is a lynching. Under the color of the military, you'll have reservation agents. I found a chilling one where they were told to go round up a couple of murderers. They found a few guys, they gave them a two minute trial that ended with damn the Indians, hang them all. And they let the guy who'd never killed a native person before pull the wrote, right? That is not just because those guys are wearing military uniforms and they called themselves a military tribunal. That is not a court, Right. That is a lynch mob in uniform. And I think bringing together lynchings that were seen as lynchings at the time in the eyes of the law, things like that lynch mob out of Bellingham, which was, you know, lightly chastised. They were told not to do it again occasionally by law enforcement, although that's as far as it well as went. But, you know, making sure they're in the frame, but also making sure you Know, just because somebody's wearing a judge's robe or policeman's outfit or military uniform doesn't mean they're not lynching if they're not following something that looks like due process of the law. And I think that shape and effect on Native people lasted well past the period of formal wars. And I think has to go into how we think about this region in those years, even after the 1850s and 1860s. And it certainly looms very large in the oral histories that we do have of people who lived through that period when they were young.
- [36:02]
B
Let's talk about the. The kind of the second half or the second portion of the argument that you make in this book, and that's. That's about memory and history. So how did the violence of settlement, how does it enter into regional memory? And how do things like monuments and veterans organizations and historians, how did they all work to shape memory in specific and sanitized ways? I guess what I'm asking is how does that game of. Of kind of historical telephone that turns this lame character from, you know, a pretty horrible individual into, like a pioneer hero. How does that actually happen? By what process?
- [36:37]
A
Yeah, so I think one of the interesting things is that it happens slowly and contested from unexpected directions. So I really want to stress Native people have been trying to get the truth about what happened out from the beginning. Right. Some of my sources are. Are Indigenous people writing into historians, trying to get the record right and then being ignored. Particularly historians like to write to Native people in this period and ask them how to spell the names of famous chiefs or warriors. And then they'll write back and say, here's how you spell that name. And also you need to talk about what they did to my sister. Here's how you spell it. Spell that name. And you need to talk about how this war absolutely went. So on the one hand, there is always sort of this narrative being spread, attempted to be spread from Native communities that's there from the beginning, but largely ignored until, you know, the 1970s, 1980s or beyond. What surprised me is that there's also clashes among the pioneer invaders over how to remember the violence pretty early on, just as it's. As it's. Still going on, as some of the later wars are still happening. In the 1870s, there's a bit of a clash between historians who really want the story of Oregon to have been men, noble people doing noble things, and any untoward violence, any killing of. Of women and children was the acts of outsiders. I sometimes call them settler, colonial, sin eaters, Right. Blaming people from out there. In Oregon, it's common to have those people blame it on Californians. In California, it's common to say those are Oregonians. Right. And often it's the same guys going back and forth between Oregon and California taking part in these wicked acts. And anything which is unheroic wasn't real pioneers. It was gold miners, it was packers, it was somebody low class us and passing through. On the other hand, there's also a narrative in these times from those who were veterans of the Indian wars, particularly the volunteers who were trying to get the federal government to acknowledge them as real soldiers and give them pensions, who wanted to foreground wars and violence. So they wanted, they absolutely wanted to deny that they'd ever killed women and children. Right. Rather than say that was the actions of outsiders, say nobody did that, even though everybody knew they did that. Right. Turns out the idea of just claiming that the truth didn't happen goes way, way back. And they really wanted the wars to be central to the story of Oregon and Washington because that was central to the story about how they were the most pioneery of all pioneers. Right. That was why they deserved to have tensions and honors. That's why they deserve to March 1st in Pioneer Parades before the other pioneers, because they were the ones who had done the killing to take the Northwest. They particularly like to focus on the technical definition of the term pioneer, which comes originally from pioneer, a word for soldier who goes before the army. Right. They wanted the story of Oregon to be one of righteous violence. So there's this really significant clash which generates all kinds of records. I call it the accidental archives of atrocity. It's part of why I have so much information about what these horrific wars and genocides were like, is that I have a bunch of people who were veterans of these wars riding in. And in their original unvarnished versions, their actions actually sound a lot like what Native people are describing. They're just proud of it instead of horrified. Right. However, over time, the historians who want to pretty up the story and blame it on outsiders and the ones who want the violence to be central are both kind of subsumed by those who say, let's just not talk about the violence at all. Right. Rather than blame it on outsiders or celebrate it, what if we just say it's not a major part of the story of Oregon? So at the turn of the 1900s, and especially as some of the early, more professional historians with university training start taking up the baton more and more, they. They minimize the wars down they make them a temporary moment. They focus on them on a few moments that can be read as potential moments where Euro Americans are outnumbered and on the defense. But increasingly, they just kind of phase out the very idea that Oregon and Washington really had wars. You know, they'll stick around somewhat locally in areas of extreme conflict in southern Oregon and eastern Washington. But the overall narrative of the state, the one that's being taught to school children, children, is one of peaceful settlement. I end the book in the 1930s, where somebody whose dad was an Indian war veteran who had made that front and center for the history of Oregon, rededicates the capital of Oregon and Salem the new Capitol building, and says we were the only part of the country that was attained by peaceful settlement rather than war. Right? Completely denying the war. That was central to his own father's account of what had happened. And he'd edited his father's paper. He'd. New. Right. But like many history makers of all sorts, whether they're politicians or professional historians in that period, he chose to, as they put it at the time, rake up no old stories of evil to say, whatever's evil, pioneers didn't do it. Now that we kind of think that maybe all of that violence is not something that people should be doing. We didn't do it. We got it by peace, right? It was all peaceful. And that's sort of reflected in some of the monuments that went up. You can see some of the last clashes between different historical points of view in the monuments that go up across Oregon and Washington. There's a few early pioneer monuments in Oregon. A monument known simply as the Pioneer that goes up in Eugene, Oregon, in 1919, that was removed during the. The summer of 2020 by protesters who felt that it did not represent their values because that statue provably was a statute of violent white supremacy. Right. Celebrating the wiping out of native people. There's a statue to Teddy Roosevelt that goes up in the heart of Portland that celebrates similar things, although also celebrating his international colonialism in places like Cuba and the Philippines. But increasingly, by the 1930s, pioneer monuments in Oregon and Washington, as with many pioneer monuments elsewhere, are turning instead towards a narrative that just ignores and downplays native people, right? Switches it to. To an empty land where peaceful settlement happened, rather than foregrounding the wars. And those wars are largely missing from Oregon textbooks from the 1930s onward. They still weren't there when I was in school, right? I went through most of an undergraduate degree focused on history in college before I had learned that there had Been wars in Oregon, and I think it's still pretty rare to hear about them until he'll advance degrees in the space.
- [43:03]
B
Well, that's a lead in to one of my final questions here about this story, which is about legacy. What is the legacy of this violence and of the constructed narratives around that violence today in the Pacific Northwest? Has there been any kind of reckoning with the region's past? You mentioned a moment ago that some statues may have been removed in the past several years. But beyond that, what would a reckoning even look like? Is it even possible? Possible, yeah.
- [43:30]
A
So reckoning is hard. I think part of where I kind of fit my work into discussions of reckoning is, you know, that one of the classic models of reckoning with colonialism is truth and reconciliation. But there are worries that if you focus on truth and reconciliation, you can't really inflict reconciliation on the wronged party. Right. It's up to Indigenous people and nations to decide what reconciliation looks like. But to get to reconciliation, I think you have to get to. To truth. So I'd say there hasn't been a ton of reckoning with this region's past, specifically in Oregon. I think there have been with some issues. Certainly there's been enormous amounts of work by people who are liaising with the public, particularly from tribal historians. I talk about people like David Lewis particularly, who's done an enormous amount to educate everyday Oregonians. I think there's a lot of road left. And I think part of the broader thing is getting it into schools. Right. Getting it into curriculums, making sure that people are learning about this narrative alongside others. I'd also say I want to respect that when you talk about what is most important to Native nations in Oregon, as in many other places, often the overwhelming thing is to make sure people know they're still here. Right. When I. When I teach educators, I often say, you start with Native nations have been here since time immemorial. They're still here now, and they'll be here in the future. Future, right. And then you can work towards the details. My hope is that one of the first places to start with a reckoning is to get the state and local governments to take seriously that this did happen. And my hope is that by showing the COVID up, that helps convince people of the lie. I think there's often a lot of resistance in many countries, and certainly in the US to confronting the darker eras of our past, especially when they're local. Right. But the pioneer experience of the west is not unlike, like the Confederate experience. Of the American south, right. It is fundamentally wrapped into stories of violent white supremacy. But the erasing of the narrative in some ways did its job a little too well, because the vast majority, significant majority, maybe a vast majority, we'll hope for a vast majority of Americans in Oregon and Washington are not in any way okay with the actions that I am describing. Right. Are not okay. Okay with genocidal violence as a concept. Don't want people to have done that. And I think by showing not only that people did that, but that other people covered that up, that helps people maybe accept the hard truth that it happened. Because people, you know, have a narrative that they want to cling to, and they go, how? How come I learned this very different story that's just Lewis and Clark and happiness in school, and you're telling me about genocide. They say, well, the reason why you didn't hear about this narrative is a bunch of dead racist lies to you, right? And that's why it's not there. And so that can be kind of a starting place to go. Okay, now we can move back. We can revise history. We can fundamentally change how we talk about pioneers, and I hope eventually work towards, at a minimum, a recognition of the truth and an apology from the state of Oregon, maybe from the nation, but certainly from the state of Oregon, and then use that as a baseline to work towards figuring out what reconciliation and a shared future might look like. Like.
- [46:41]
B
So as we begin to wrap up here, Mark, I always like to ask my guests kind of a summary question, taking a different perspective on their book. So let's say rather than the author of this book, you're someone that has read this book and then puts it back on their bookshelf and maybe remembers it or thinks back to it a couple years on down the road. What would you hope that reader would come away from this book understanding or remembering about it?
- [47:05]
A
So, I mean, I think the pat and true answer is, is that there was a genocide in this space and that the people who were targeted did survive through it despite the best efforts of the invaders. I think that's, you know, kind of the pat answer. I'd also say I'd hope that it can maybe inspire a broader instinct and reflection to make sure to look at the story that created the story, right. That I think a lot of times, a lot of the places where we need to go in history is to move towards, you know, what might be called maybe a sort of postmodern approach to it, where we really interrogate the received knowledge that we have Especially if I was a professional historian reading this book. If I had not read it, I would hope I would take that moment to kind of think through what are the older books that we've all just assumed are real and did good history that my field is still leaning on, because I think at least in the Pacific Northwest west, we have taken certain narratives of the pioneer space as read because people have been citing them for 30, 40, 50, 100 years. And it's often worth it to take a step back and make sure to interrogate those older assumed knowledges and make sure they still stand. Without getting into some sort of weird post structuralist morass.
- [48:25]
B
I think it's. It's safe to say that, you know, just. Just thinking about how do we know what we know is. Is a good first step before we enter into the whole postmodern morass, as you point put it.
- [48:34]
A
Yeah, we have to do that. And then we also have to say things. Right. We don't want to get stuck there, but it's a vital step.
- [48:40]
B
Right, right.
- [48:41]
A
Right.
- [48:42]
B
And then for my last question, I know this book has not been out for very long, but when I can, I like getting a preview from my guests of any projects that they are working on next or even just considering working on next. So do you have anything else, any other histories that you'd like to kind of promote here or just talk a little bit about some ideas that you've been thinking about writing about next at all? Yeah.
- [49:03]
A
So I think probably the next project is in many ways a sequel to this one, in part because there's a bunch of book that I had to cut. So it's provisionally perhaps titled Snake wars and Civil Wars. One of the odd things that you'll notice if you dig into the history of the Pacific Northwest is that there's very little that's been written on the Civil War period, or even Most of the 1860s in Oregon and Washington. And there's almost nothing that's been written on the Snake War, which is this kind of broad based war against most remaining independent Native nations from the Pacific Northwest through the Mountain west, starting, I would argue, somewhere around 1858 and lasting until 1868, although those dates are a little bit fuzzy. And again, kind of like with this one, when I'm looking for the books that I need to draw on and I can't find the them that might be me yet again. So I think there's a lot more to say about both the Civil War and the Snake War in that period. And I think they're closely related. The Civil War from an Oregon and Washington perspective was in part the period where suddenly there was federal money, support and legitimacy for actions against Native communities that had not been there in the same way in the 1850s. I am in early stages of research for that. I have the things that I had to cut speaking to that subject in my current book, but I'm also actually talking to you. Right. The first steps of some research that will go into eventually creating a book provisionally titled Snake wars and Civil Wars.
- [50:33]
B
Oh, that sounds fantastic. And when it is finally out, I'd love to have you back on the show.
- [50:37]
A
That sounds wonderful. Great to have been here.
- [50:40]
B
Dr. Mark James Carpenter is an associate professor of history at the University of Jamestown in North Dakota. His new book is the War on Ill Genocide, Complicity and Cover Ups in the Pioneer Northwest, which came out with Yale University Press last year in 2025 as part of their vaunted Lamar series in Western history. Thanks again so much for joining me today, Mark. It was great talking to you.