This episode’s guest and I share a last name (no relation, though), but that’s not the only thing we have in common. We both grew up in the Pacific Northwest, where our history education left out most of the violence by white settlers against the region’s Indigenous people. It was his righteous anger over the differences between what he had learned and what he read in the archives that prompted my guest today to write first a dissertation and now a book about that violence and the efforts of historians to cover it up. You’re listening to Drafting the Past, a podcast about the craft of writing history. I’m Kate Carpenter, and in this episode I’m joined by Dr. Marc James Carpenter.
Marc is an associate professor at the University of Jamestown in North Dakota. His first book, out with Yale University Press, is The War on Illahee: Genocide, Complicity, and Cover-Ups in the Pioneer Northwest. I was delighted to have him on the show to talk more about how he dealt with layers of deceptive source material, the research loops he employed to work through those sources, and how a dash of humor is a vital ingredient in this and other dark histories.
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Mentioned in this episode:
- Marc James Carpenter, The War on Illahee: Genocide, Complicity, and Cover-Ups in the Pioneer Northwest
- Marc James Carpenter, “Replaying Colonialism: Indigenous National Sovereignty and Its Limits in Strategic Videogames,” American Indian Quarterly 45:1, Winter 2021, 33-55.
- Katrina Phillips, Staging Indigeneity: Salvage Tourism and the Performance of Native American History (plus, check out her Drafting the Past interview in Episode 31, “Katrina Phillips Starts With the Fragments”)
- Katrina Jagodinsky, Legal Codes and Talking Trees: Indigenous Women’s Sovereignty in the Sonoran and Puget Sound Borderlands, 1854-1946
- Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense
- James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States
- Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History
- The documentary Marc mentions potentially appearing in is a work-in-progress by friend of the podcast Erika Bolstad called Monumental. Learn more about it here.
Transcript:
Kate Carpenter 0:01
Hey listeners! This episode’s guest and I share a last name (no relation, though), but that’s not the only thing we have in common. We both grew up in the Pacific Northwest, where our history education left out most of the violence by white settlers against the region’s Indigenous people. It was his righteous anger over the differences between what he had learned and what he read in the archives that prompted my guest today to write first a dissertation and now a book about that violence and the efforts of historians to cover it up. You’re listening to Drafting the Past, a podcast about the craft of writing history. I’m Kate Carpenter, and in this episode I’m joined by Dr. Marc James Carpenter.
Marc James Carpenter 0:43
It's wonderful to be here. Thank you for having me.
Kate Carpenter 0:45
Marc is an associate professor at the University of Jamestown in North Dakota. His first book, out with Yale University Press, is The War on Illahee: Genocide, Complicity, and Cover-Ups in the Pioneer Northwest. I was delighted to have him on the show to talk more about how he dealt with layers of deceptive source material, the research loops he employed to work through those sources, and how a dash of humor is a vital ingredient in this and other dark histories. Here’s my conversation with Dr. Marc James Carpenter.
Marc James Carpenter 1:18
I've been a writer for a lot longer than I've been a historian. I was under the mistaken impression I might be a playwright when I was a young person, so that was kind of my first major work in writing, trying, usually unsuccessfully, to write plays. Then I returned to school in the hopes of being a history teacher, probably initially thinking I'd be a high school teacher, and it turned out I actually really loved the research and writing process that I needed to do for my master's degree, chased that into a PhD, and then it was off to the races from there, and I've had wonderful opportunities to publish various works of historical writing at a couple of different registers since.
Kate Carpenter 1:53
Let's talk a little bit about how you do your writing. When and where do you like to write?
Marc James Carpenter 1:58
I am a person who tends to write in bursts, especially first drafts. I know there's a philosophy of writing where you do a little bit every day, and I'm sure that's correct, but for me, often I've got it kind of percolating in the back of my head, and I've got little research notes before I really get started, and then when the timing allows, or when the mood strikes, or both, I'll have days of very intense drafting where I'm at a computer for 9, 12 hours in a day, just taking little breaks to, like, tell my family I'm alive and go get sun on my head for a few hours, and then right back into the writing process. And then, typically, after I've got that kind of explosion of an initial draft of a part of the chapter or an article, then I'll sort of edit slowly in pleasure. I tend to write my first drafts alone, and I tend to edit where there's ambience. So I am, I am one of those coffee shop people, but usually the coffee shop is where I edit, and then I need a monk-like solitude for when I'm initially drafting. In part, so I can mutter to myself.
Kate Carpenter 2:55
That's fair. So then do those marathon writing sessions, those take place at home, primarily?
Marc James Carpenter 3:00
They're usually at home, and typically-- I live in a pretty small home. They're typically within arm's reach of where I sleep, which I think is probably bad for my sleep, but good for one oh, I have another thing. I have to get back up. I'm not ready to go to bed yet. Actually, I have a thought about how I could put that sentence. Yeah. So it tends to be in a single room at home. As long as there's a window, it's good enough for me as a writing space.
Kate Carpenter 3:22
How do you like to organize yourself? Do you have tools?
Marc James Carpenter 3:25
I've got a few. I don't use a whole lot of fancy software tools. I experimented with a few of them, and I found they didn't work well for me. So what I've got is a giant mess of carefully annotated Word documents in a big old folder with a bunch of backups so that when I'm trying to think of that thing that I've been thinking of, I can do word and phrase searches and be able to turn it up and find it. So I've got all of my different primary source excursions with the kind of title of the archive and all the things that I need to be able to cite it correctly. And then, typically, when I'm doing the research process, I'll try and type down key phrases. That's part of how I'm processing the information in the first place, and then those are findable again when I need to go back and get them two to four years later, hopefully I can still find them. Is it a perfect system? No, but I found the other productivity tools didn't seem to help me be productive. Similarly, I'm very old school, and I still type my citations. I tried out some of the citation tools, and I found it was more energy to correct their foibles than it was to just kind of do it myself again. I've got search functions. They're enough for me to be able to get my citations correct. Hopefully.
Kate Carpenter 4:33
Do you take a lot of photographs when you're in the archive, or is it more taking notes?
Marc James Carpenter 4:35
I would say, when I can, I do a lot of notes. I always do photographs. And the nature of archival research for most of us, I think, is that you have much less time in the archive than you would like. So usually it's going to be pictures at most archives. And then, even then, I do try to take notes pretty shortly after those pictures, you know, spend the nights after I get back from my research trip, or even the nights during it, you know, typing out key phrases, trying to, part of how I process what I've seen. But when I have time, when I have longer things, or when I'm lucky enough to be at an archive where I can be there for weeks or months, then I do quite a lot of typing and transcription to try and process it through in my head.
Kate Carpenter 5:14
Where in the research process do you like to start writing?
Marc James Carpenter 5:17
I do little bits of writing at the beginning. I often if I have kind of a key phrase or a key connection that I think of in the moment that I want to make, I'll jot that down again so I can find it. I have to be very careful about my brackets so that the primary source stuff is solidly separated, sometimes in a different color, to make sure my words don't seep in. After that, it tends to be a little while after research. I tend, I think of it as a cooking metaphor, so I tend to put a bunch of stuff and I let it simmer on the back burner, and then once it's flavorful enough that I can smell it, right, then I'm going to go in and work at actually, getting it all written down and connected.
Kate Carpenter 5:52
After your marathon drafting, when you are in that coffee shop. What does revising actually look like for you? How do you go about it?
Marc James Carpenter 6:00
Yeah, so a lot of it is for flow. I do, you know, do some kind of initial checks to make sure that I'm right about my evidence, but a lot of it is trying to make sure that the things that I was writing down in a marathon actually do go together. So a lot of it is rearrangement. A lot of it is killing my beautiful darlings, figuring out, no, this is not the right place. I tend towards alliteration to a fault, and readers of my book will probably find more than would be standard in a genocide text. But go, okay, this is, this is the wrong one, right? This is playful in a place where it shouldn't be playful. A lot of it is kind of stepping back to look at the grand narrative, right, to make sure that everything actually fits together within the broader work. And then just, you know, making making it sing, right? Trying to make it so that it sounds like a coherent text, instead of a list of facts, which I super double promise will lead up to the conclusion that I started with, right? That kind of movement, and I'd say, generally, a lot of it is making arguments and sub arguments more cogent, right? I think, as with many of us, I have a pretty good idea of what I'm driving at, but getting it expressed clearly takes many, many passes, and it might change as I go, right? I think certainly part of revising is discovering new things right as you revise, and especially as you are trying to work out some of the ideas you've inarticulately put on the page, you find actually, the reason why they're inarticulate is that there's things you hadn't thought of in that initial pass, and suddenly, oh, there's a whole new vista of stuff I'm going to have to reckon with.
Kate Carpenter 7:27
I'm super interested that your response about revision has so much to do with argument and evidence, because you're also a beautiful writer, the sentences are really great. Is that also part of your revision? Or do you do you write beautifully to begin with? And then you just have to deal with argument?
Marc James Carpenter 7:43
I think it's definitely part of revision as well. I mean, I think there are times where turns of phrase come pretty early in the process, where the turn of phrase is in the pot, when it's simmering, sometimes where there's like, oh, there's a there's a way I can connect that, and then kind of build around that, but definitely there is revising to make it flow as well. I think that probably, when I'm remembering my revision process, I think more about the changes in the ideas than I do about making it prettier, even though I'm sure what, you know, I'm sure I spend at least as much time making it. That's not, you know, that's not memorable, right? That's just kind of polishing. Whereas the the times where there's lightning bolts on, wait a second, there's a new idea. That's the part that sticks in my brain is, oh yeah, that one time at the coffee shop that was too loud, I suddenly had this great idea and had to not make a noise so that I didn't disturb the tweens who are at the next table over, right? Whereas, if I'm just trying to make my prose shine a little bit more, that's great work, but it doesn't stick in the memory in the same way.
Kate Carpenter 8:47
Fair enough, if I am not mistaken, The War on Illahee originated in your dissertation before becoming this very beautiful book with Yale University Press. What was the process of turning dissertation into book like for you? Was it fairly straightforward, or did you have a lot of work to do?
Marc James Carpenter 9:04
So I was very fortunate in my advisor and my broader committee, where I asked pretty early, almost immediately after comps, could I write this like a book, right? Could I do my dissertation like a book and kind of, so, you know, not have the sort of all of the secondary sources all clumped together in an early child? In an early chapter, could I frame it in the style of a book? And my advisor, who's wonderful, Jeff Ostler, said, Absolutely, we can make that happen. And so there was tons of work in the revision. I don't want to undersell, you know, there's 1000s of hours that were poured into turning it into a book, but the structure was pretty similar, right? I think the book is a refinement, and first an expansion and then a contraction, it got much bigger and then got much smaller than the dissertation. But the core story is pretty similar. So I think compared to some, it was mostly a matter of significant revision, fine tuning and refinement, rather than creating a whole new work based on the dissertation.
Kate Carpenter 10:01
How did you decide to go with Yale as the publisher?
Marc James Carpenter 10:03
So Yale publishes really impressive books. Several of the books that influenced me had been published there. So that was one piece of it. I'll be honest, some part of it is mercenary. When I'm looking to get jobs and get promoted, people who are not in history know that Yale University Press is a good and impressive press. And there's other wonderful presses that are really, really good, which people go I have no idea what that is, right? So there is a little bit of it's got that, that name recognition. I'd also say one of my objectives in picking a press was to get a press that could help get it into the hands of people who are not historians of the Pacific Northwest, right? I want this to be obviously, I wanted to impact the history of the Pacific Northwest, but whichever press I went with, right, I can reasonably presume that specialists in the Pacific Northwest are probably going to pick up a book on genocide in Oregon and Washington, right? But I wanted it to also be read by people who don't read Pacific Northwest history, because I think it's important for it to also be part of national and international conversations.
Kate Carpenter 11:00
I'm slightly switching gears, but I want to talk a little bit about your approach to being a historian in this book, because you say something that I think is really important, that maybe we don't talk enough about as historians. At the end of the book, you talk about the difference between empathy and sympathy, which are squishy concepts. How do you think about those words and how how they apply to your work?
Marc James Carpenter 11:25
Yeah, so I thank you for the question. I do stand on a mountain, on a hilltop, saying this wherever I can. I think empathy is a core skill for historians, right? We fundamentally, if we're trying to figure out why people did things in the past, which I think most of us are trying to do, whether we admit it or not, right? That requires us putting ourselves in the minds and shoes of people who are radically different from us, and empathy is one of the few ways to do that, try to see the world through other people's eyes. I think sympathy, where you kind of feel a sense of connection and kinship, is a natural follow up to empathy, right? There's a reason those are squishy concepts. They're closely connected. The danger is that we have to write about people who did horrible things, right? And when we write about people who do horrible things, we do have to use those skills and empathy and try and see the world the way they did, imagine why they made the choices that they made, and try and do that as accurately as possible. But sometimes, because we're all humans, right? That bleeds over into having sympathy for the devil or for people who have done horrific things. And I think particularly with biography, where you spend tons and tons of time on a single person, there is a habit and a tradition of seeing that person in the best possible light. And I think that's very dangerous, because our job is not to be apologists or advocates for people in the past. Our job is to try and get an accurate story of the past, and an accurate story of the past is going to be rough a lot of the time. And so I found a lot of this work was pushing back against biographers who'd done some thorough primary source research that had kind of fallen into the trap where, because they spend so much time around this person in the past, they overly sympathize with them in a point that distorts history, and especially they struggle when they shouldn't when it comes to figuring out when somebody is BSing, right. It is shocking to me how many biographers are credulous about their subjects, even when their subjects are consummate liars and politicians, as I sometimes say in class, it's not a revelation that like politicians lie sometimes, but it is weird how many political biographies treat their subjects as if they're always telling the truth all the time, and I think that's hard to avoid. Right, at the end of the day, we're already struggling so much to see the past that we really want all of our sources to be accurate, because we have so few already, but we have to take seriously evil done in the past, and we have to take seriously that people don't always say what they mean.
Kate Carpenter 13:53
To take a closer look at how he applied his research and writing to the page, I asked Marc to read an excerpt from his new book. Here's Dr Marc James Carpenter reading from chapter three of The War on Illahee.
Speaker 1 14:06
Almost any story could be twisted into a tale of pioneer pride. Henry Van Asselt—a former Dutch Republic soldier, cabinetmaker, and early pioneer in the Puget Sound region—once accidentally shot himself. In variations on a reminiscence repeated by his family, he turned the story of a self-inflicted gunshot wound into a performance of racial superiority, revealing a presumption of Native aggression. As Van Asselt was returning to his hunting camp in the Puget Sound region near Seattle in 1854, he spotted a group of Native people, assumed their hostile intent, and grabbed his gun to try and kill them. He missed, and instead shot himself in the arm. He remembered having been given the name ‘Sucway’ (which he asserted without evidence translated to ‘a devil, bulletproof’) among the Puget Sound Indigenous peoples and, he claimed, was avoided by most of them afterward. Van Asselt assumed this was because they were impressed by his hardiness after he had survived shooting himself; one might wonder if Vna Asselt’s habit of attempting to gun down Native people for no other reason than proximity might have played a role.
Kate Carpenter 15:08
Talk to me about how these paragraphs came together.
Marc James Carpenter 15:11
Yeah, so Van Asselt is a minor celebrity figure among the pioneers of the early Washington, Seattle region. Right? He was one of the earlier, soon to be Americans who moved there. And so he's shows up in a lot of the pioneer reminiscences. I work spend a lot of time with pioneer sources, and he's one of the people you run into over and over again when people are first writing histories of Seattle. He's one of the names that comes up. And one of the odd things that I kept noticing is he, you know, they, there's lots of variations on the story, but they all involve some kind of self inflicted bullet wound, and the claim that native people were scared of him because he'd survived the bullet wound. And I think the reason why I chose this particular one is the one that I found the most credible is that this was the one shared in private. So there's public stories which I say, Oh yeah, he had a bullet wound, and they were all scared of him, and he was the bestest guy ever. Bestest guy ever, and he was also their friend, because, you know, he's obviously a friend of the Indian, addition to them all being scared of him. And then his family story was, was a version, a couple versions of this one, which are he shot himself, and then they were scared of him, right? And so I kind of started from therem and then ran into when I was digging through volunteer soldier records, I found his name among a muster roll of a set of volunteer soldiers that was perpetrating murders, right, that was part of a war, but which was killing civilians. And, you know, other members of that, that volunteer group talked about killing civilians. And I thought, okay, these two things need to be told in the same space, especially because the only stories that last to the present of Van Asselt is that later on, when he got married, there were Native people at his wedding, including chief Si'ahl or Seattle, right? And that's the thing that people remember in pioneer memories. So this whole story kind of got disappeared in the 1900s and so to me, this seemed like an important way to open up a chapter, because I can almost definitely guarantee you, and I've, I can't claim this from any specific, I've told a couple of Puget Sound native people this, people aren't impressed when you shoot yourself in the arm, right? That's not a Ooh, wow, oh, great. He shot himself. That's just such an obviously silly thing to say, but it's the sort of thing that you have to say, because all stories have to be about how you were great and you were a great pioneer, and all the native people both loved and feared you, and it seemed like a particularly ludicrous variation on a whole lot of deeply suspect stories. So it was a good way to lead into both the actual violence, because to me, the story of this guy, you know, it's followed by and then he shot people, right? Of course, they avoided him. He tried to shoot them, and then a few years later, he was murdering people, combined with this kind of odd pioneer gloss, where everything is a matter of racial superiority and pioneer pride, and then all of that is towards the end of the chapter. All of that, more or less disappears from the story of Van Asselt and the story of pioneer Seattle in general, tends to just completely get disappeared within a generation.
Kate Carpenter 17:57
You just used the word ludicrous, which I found spot on, because one thing that drew me to these paragraphs is that they're kind of funny. They're not, you know, as you said earlier, they're not playful. They're not inappropriately playful. This is a dark, dark history, but you also have some dark humor inserted in it, and I actually think that that is, that's part of what makes it as a reader, possible to get through all of this dark history. Is that a tone that you work to achieve, or is that, I mean, is that just your personality that you're letting come through in the writing both?
Marc James Carpenter 18:31
I think so there's strong traditions of humor in many communities that have experienced genocide, I think, famously in Jewish communities and in indigenous communities, right? One of the ways that you survive, right? Part of survivance is through use of humor. And to me, I mean, these guys are ludicrous in ways that I think are worth underlining. And one of the things that I really wanted to steer away from is a vision of genocidaires that comports with how they wanted to be seen more than reality. I think one of the constant problems my colleagues who work on Nazi history have is that our image, historical image of the Nazis, is a lot like the one that they wanted to project, right? We imagine Leni Riefenstahl is a kind of illusion of the Nazis, and we miss that they're, you know, they're horrible people, right? Obviously, Nazis did the worst things in human history, but like, they're also often incompetent, frequently drunk. And so I wanted to get at that these genocidaires did horrible things. They committed horrific war crimes, but they're also petty and small and make mistakes a lot, and in fact, did much less genocide than they tried to. I'd also say, again, this is on a writing podcast. One of the things that I've thought about, you know, that I learned about back when I was trying to do creative writing is you can't just be grim all the time, because people will just shut down, right? You need moments of levity, and you have to frame those very carefully. And again, I it's not a it's not a playful book, but it is, I do mock people who do genocide sometimes, and I think that. That's in keeping with the times, right? That's one of the reactions against genocide, and it is also part of how you can survive writing and reading this book, right? That there are these moments of of kind of underlining, how small, how petty, how ludicrous these very lethal people are.
Kate Carpenter 20:18
As you were describing how these paragraphs came together, it's pretty clear already how many different types of sources you're having to deal with, and how those sources are exaggerating, or they're kind of glossing over things, downplaying things, just straight up lying. And then many of them contradict each other, or they evolve, which also makes it hard to sort of like corroborate one source with another this is, this seems very challenging. And of course, to some degree that's true for all historians, right? We have to approach our sources skeptically. But in your case, it's like a whole other level. How did you approach those sources? What was the process like of trying to translate those sources into something that kind of read between the lines and got it a version of the truth?
Marc James Carpenter 21:02
It's a great challenge, and I hope I have succeeded. I'm not sure sometimes, right? I think a lot of it has to do with the extent of the sources, right? I think part of I sometimes think of it as weaving spider webs, where any individual pioneer narrative is a very, very flimsy thing, full of exaggeration. But when you get several hundred of them and you cross reference them with indigenous oral histories and official reports and occasionally archeology, right, then you can start to see the patterns, and those patterns can help steer you closer to truths. And so you know, once you get to know how amateur pioneer historians, what kinds of distortions they tend to put on the past that they're communicating. It makes it a little bit easier to try and screen for those to get at something closer to what they're actually building from, especially if you've also had the opportunity to look at their archives. So you know what sources they started with. In some cases, I also try to be very careful with the language, including in that selection, about the relative level of surety, right? Yeah, you may have noticed that there's a switch to according to stories told by his family, I do a lot of kind of, I hope, inobtrusive reframing when I'm going, Okay, this is, this is a story, and it's relevant, but it's not, you know, I have a couple of sources, and they're all flawed in the same way, so we're going to talk about it in that way. And I think for this particular example, I don't know how he shot himself. I know that he probably did, because that seems to be across the board. All of the stories seem to involve him shooting himself, and that's a weird thing to make up, right? Like that doesn't make you look good. The fact that they're trying to make it look good suggests to me that it's real, but I don't know when he did. It may have been before he arrived in the Pacific Northwest, but the story of him shooting himself still tells us something very important about pioneer norms, even if it's less than true. And if I may, one of the things that I got asked about by my reviewer 2, in the review process is why I didn't have numbers, because it is a relative norm in the field of genocide studies to try and come up with numbers. And the reason why is I don't have sources that would let me make a remotely accurate guess of the numbers. Maybe some other historian will find them and do a great job and have them. My worry is that the numbers I would have would be so much lower than the truth that they would do damage, right? If I have a number that I suspect is 10, 20% at most, of the total number of killings, but I earnestly don't know that at a certain point. For me as a historian, it would be irresponsible to speculate, because I would give people a number and then they take that number and run with it. I've seen it done for other histories, right? When, in fact, the number is much, much worse than that. So a lot of it is trying to be very careful about my claims, and then when I do have enough evidence, being firm about my claims. And I'll say particularly, it is easier to prove a lie than it is to prove the truth. And so there I'm very if somebody says one thing in public and then another thing in private, and they make it clear that they know that the thing in private is the true thing, then they're lying, right? So sometimes I can be very straightforward. No, this man lied, which I think we're often scared of, and don't always need generally, though, the main thing is just layering on enough different kinds of research, right? Once you've spent enough time with enough sources, and you know the kind of overall shape of the archive, that's when you can start going, Okay, here's how I can parse out something closer to the truth. And here's how I can read silences once I know what the silences actually are. I wish there was a shortcut, but I don't know of one.
Kate Carpenter 24:28
Yeah, you know, you talk in the introduction about sort of the idea of a research loop, which I loved, but that's the idea, it speaks to the patterns you were just talking about, right? That you start digging into the sources, you learn more, you discover all this violence that has been hidden, and then you're able to go back to official sources, quote, unquote, that you had experienced before, and reread them with kind of this new, new perspective, and see things that you might have missed the first time around. I'm wondering what that process was like, but I'm also thinking about how hard that is, and also how much, how much time. That takes and we exist in a world that does not always support that kind of careful time and repeated effort. So what was that like for you?
Marc James Carpenter 25:08
Yeah. So I think the big thing in kind of referring to reading the silences a little bit, is that once I had a better sense of what was being said privately among pioneers and sometimes among public officials, it obviously let me see the difference between that and what was being said publicly. And I think I'm working with some older histories that may or may not have tried their best that kind of took whatever politicians in general said as the truest thing, because they're the people in charge, and they're the oldest written records frequently, and they go, Great, that's true, right? When, of course, we all know that what one says in public is not the only truth, and frequently is not meant to be a truth. And so by after getting kind of a sense of, if you want to be fancy, the habitus, right, the kind of norms of pioneering, and going back to those sources, some of it was going okay, there are clear silences here. So to take a easy example, the governor of Washington territory repeatedly said that there had been no violence or war crimes committed by Americans in any of the wars in Washington. And you know, the first step is, yes, there had, there's tons of evidence. And everybody you know, long, historians going back decades before me, have shown that, but by also showing that he was aware of that right? That he had ordered some of that, that he was receiving letters about that, and seeing the letters back and forth about worried about the federal government paying for everything, made it easier to go, Okay, this is, this is a knowing lie that is aimed at getting federal money right. This isn't just a lie to for the sake of a lie. This is a lie that is motivated for federal money. And you can tell that after going through those sources, the really surprising one that recontextualized for me was a combination of an indigenous oral history and official reports where there is a Chehalis oral history of a leader named [] shared through his son, and then then on to historians of the time that he made sure that he could hold on to his guns, because there was a mass attempt to try and disarm indigenous people across Oregon and Washington. And he apparently came up with a story he like, messed up his clothes and said, Oh, the enemies attack me. I need my guns so I can defend you, right? And that was his way to kind of make sure his people weren't disarmed, because they were worried that if they were disarmed, something might happen to them. And this strange cross reference, after I'd gone back through that, I went, I was like, There's something about the Chehalis in the official letters, I found a letter from Isaac Stevens to the Secretary of War that's been widely available forever, that now that I have that in mind, I looked again. It's like, oh, he was threatening to maybe kill all of the Chehalis. He talked about how they'd considered exterminating, removing them entirely, getting rid of them, but they still had guns. You know, he was worried that there'd be blowback, so they decided to pay them to work for the US instead. And so that was a way of showing like [] was spot on. Holding on to his guns is part of why there wasn't an active attempt to commit genocide against his people, but that's only kind of seeable by returning to that official record with the notion of, wait a second. I need to look at that again.
Kate Carpenter 28:00
I want to go back to organization, because I'm thinking that it seems a little bit challenging to keep track of those, like different layers and rounds of looking at sources. Is that, I mean? Is that just part of your note taking? Do you have a kind of a way to revisit those thoughts?
Marc James Carpenter 28:15
Yeah. So a lot of it note taking involves making sure I have key words and phrases so I'm like, I feel like I've heard about I go back through it like there's something else. You know, that particular case, I was looking for Chehalis, right? And I found, I think there's seven places it appeared, anywhere in my documents, and was able to go back and find the one. I think some of it, you know, while it's simmering, I'm trying to think and make connections. And, you know, I do spend some of those writing storm times, going back through key documents and trying to find things. I think that what haunts me is the ones that I might have missed, right? And I guess that's that's always true, right? That I am sure there are really cool connections within the evidence I looked at that I wasn't able that I didn't take the right note, I didn't have the right lightning spark that somebody else, or maybe me later, can go, wait a second. There's a whole other thing that's like these other connections. The hope is just that once you've had a certain number of them, the overall picture is right, even if there's little details you could have found that are still missing.
Kate Carpenter 29:15
This is perhaps not exactly a writing question, but I was struck reading it that, you know, one of the very interesting things about this book is that you're not only looking at the historical actors, the original historical actors, I guess I'll put it, but also the actions and writing of historians who either immediately after these events occurred, or much more alarmingly recently than that, wrote about these histories covered up the violence that occurred, sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally. How did you reflect on what it means to be as a historian, as you're looking at these historians as actors within the book?
Marc James Carpenter 29:56
Historians as actors was actually one of the first things to draw me into this project, before I was aware of the full scope of the genocide, it was trying to figure out how historians had gotten a couple of specific people drastically wrong, where I was looking at the primary sources around an Oregon politician named Joseph Lane, and look at historians had written about him. These don't match. How did this happen? And kind of working backwards from there. And so the historians are a huge part of the book that the cover ups part, historians take a leading role in cover ups. And bless them, because they write everything down and keep everything I can say cover up because they say, Oh yeah, no, whatever you do, don't talk about this. I will rake up no old stories of evil. You know, if that guy talks about that, I'll say what his kid did, right? Like they're, they're threatening each other in print and then keeping the letters so it's, it's easier to prove a cover up from historians than almost anyone else, because, bless them, they keep all their writing. As a historian myself, I think that does give you a certain amount of intimidated humility. I think I do probably, I think we all think, to some extent of what will people think of this in 50 to 100 years? And I think that a level of that is healthy. And I think I have a little bit of Oh, they'll think I'm wrong, and they'll probably be more sympathetic if I was really trying to think outside of the norms of my period and try and push past the kind of box that history has been put into for my times. But I think, you know, we all either we are forgotten or we become primary sources. There is no definitive historical narrative. There never will be. We don't know what we don't know. And so to try and write something that is applicable and useful now that will hold up pretty well, and to try and have the grace to recognize that maybe in one's lifetime, certainly afterwards, if one's work isn't wholly forgotten, there will be revisions that will correct things that we got wrong. Nobody has it right, right? And whoever corrects the next thing also won't have it completely right. To me, that's exciting, right? That's part of the joy of history, is that we never, never run out, not only because we keep making more of the stuff, but because there will always be little things, big things, that will change about our previous narratives.
Kate Carpenter 31:57
You write, I can't remember if it's in the acknowledgments or the introduction. But you write about approaching this project from a place of sort of righteous anger, righteous indignation, that as someone who grew up in Oregon, was educated in Oregon, you hadn't known this history, that it hadn't been available to you, I think there's a lot of power in researching and writing from that perspective. But I'm wondering if you think are there, are there pros and cons of doing history from a place of righteous anger?
Marc James Carpenter 32:27
Yeah, so I think anger is great fuel. It can burn out. So I do think it, anger alone won't do it. And I think something I was trying to be cognizant and cautious of, again, I hope successfully, is to make sure that the anger doesn't distort the story, that the anger does not lead me to read sources incorrectly. And there are certainly part of my hope for that is there are figures who I was, thought I was coming after, who, when I got into their sources, were not doing what I thought they were doing from a skim right? There's a missionary named Samuel Parker who at a first skim looks like he's endorsing genocide. I mean, I'm ready, right? And then I read in his full documents, and the part that's not usually quoted, he's like, and this is horrible, and we shouldn't be doing this. And I'm like, okay, great. And so like, he comes off better in my book than most other things, right? Because I was able to get the fuller context. So I think anger is something to be cautious of, not letting distort. But I think it is good fuel. I also think that it's part of what usefully shapes the prose, I think. And again, I we all have a reviewer 2, right? And I definitely had an early reviewer two who was like, You should be more dispassionate. And I said, I'm not doing that. Obviously, I'm passionate about this. And frankly, if it's genocide, any reasonable person should be passionate about genocide. And I think that's reflected too in unusual word choices, right? I use terms like liar and murderer that are not common in American history. Right? We very seldom talk about people who did who are liars just because they tell untrue things, or people who are murderers because they kill people in ways that are injured, or people who are thieves because they stole land, right? That those aren't words that we usually use. And to me, the important thing is that the the evidence stands up, right? Everything is proven. Everything holds but it's okay to also use words that have emotional valences if they are appropriate to the evidence and the story at hand. And I think any reader of the book will be able to tell my opinions on a bunch of things, and that's okay because, of course, that's part of the interpretation and the kind of false veneer of objectivity can actually lead to distorting stories, because you sometimes people work so hard to be objective that they don't talk about the full scope of the history.
Kate Carpenter 34:31
I'm glad that you did not take that note from that early reviewer two too much to heart. I want to change gears just a little bit here, because I read that you're also interested in game design, and that sometimes you do role playing activities in your classes. How does that way of thinking about history shape your writing?
Marc James Carpenter 34:52
So I think one of the great strengths of role playing games, particularly, is, again, that skill of empathy, right? You're putting yourself into someone else's shoes, and the feedback I get from students is that it really kind of makes them think through things in a new way. To take, for example, you know, four weeks to try and imagine themselves as Elbridge Gary or James Madison, crafting a constitution right that flexes fundamentally different skills and helps them think about history in new ways. Certainly, I'm a longtime aficionado of role playing games and other game designs, and I'm sure that helped build my kind of muscles in practicing empathy. I think there's also some danger in it, just as there's danger in the writing process, where when you are taking on a character, it's the same thing for a student as for a professional historian. There's a worry of identifying too closely with them. And when I was a young teacher who had not yet worked out some of these systems, I had a pretty horrifying moment where a student was like, Oh yeah, no. I kind of see things a lot more from Charles pinkney's point of view than I used to like, oh no. Charles Pinckney is a horrible enslaver who did horrible things. This is not the objective. Oh gosh, right. So I've kind of also tried to think through what the sort of protagonist problem of games you're going to identify very closely with what you're doing, what that does to how you think about the past. And so I write on this as well. The thing I get cited for in Europe is a video game article. In US, I'm a genocide guy. I guess in Europe, I have the thing that gets cited as a video game article, but kind of talking through what happens when you have games where you're taking on the role of a native nation. And so on the one hand, that that has the player, think of them as the protagonists. On the other hand, it can distort the past in all kinds of ways, especially if you are role playing the past, because you know what happens next, and people in the past didn't. And I think that's a problem beyond games, right, where we look back in the past, well, why didn't they do this? And it's like, well, because they didn't know what the next 100 years were going to be, right? It's impossible to say. I think, particularly when I'm interacting with Latin American history, there's often critiques of tlaxcalan peoples for siding with the Spanish against the Mexica Aztec empire, because eventually, you know, they were, they were partially conquered by the Spanish a couple 100 years later, and it's like nobody knows what's going to happen in 200 years, right? It is very weird to critique people for not predicting 200 years later things wouldn't work out. So I think we both it's super useful for getting us into the mindsets of the past. That also comes with pitfalls of going in there with our presentism, and it's also fun. And I think there's something to be said for playing with the past again as a way into it that can draw you in and not just make it the dour list of the many ways in which the past was horrible, even though there are so very, very many.
Kate Carpenter 37:35
What's the most influential writing advice you've ever gotten?
Speaker 1 37:40
I think probably: don't stop when it's right, make sure that it sings. From the great historian, Ari Kelman. You know, I was a young graduate student, and I had a paper I was quite proud of, and it was solid. But he said, you know, this is, you know, it's all correct, it's good. You have a good point, but it doesn't sing. And so he sent me back and did a couple more drafts, and that was, I think, very useful both for kind of getting out of the student mindset. It doesn't matter if I have an A like, what matters is that it's good, but also kind of to get to it's not just about making the arguments correctly. It's about making them in a way that will work for the audience, for the text, and hopefully for like, normal people who might read something and find it interesting, right? I think one of the joys of our particular academic discipline is that we do have some norm that at least the weird normal people might be interested in reading our work in a way that is not always common across academic disciplines.
Kate Carpenter 38:33
I like that, my audience is the weird normal people. Do you have people that you turn to for feedback on your work, so that when reviewer number two says something not helpful, you have another perspective?
Marc James Carpenter 38:45
I do. Yeah, I think, you know, can always look at acknowledgements and find some. Yeah, I've got a very close friend who's a historian named Patience Collier, brilliant historian, who's been kind enough to kind of, especially kind of bounce off things. Sometimes it's honestly just kind of a, can you believe what they said? Right? But you know, who's willing to stand up and say if it's off base? And of course, you know, in graduate school and beyond, I had kind of check ins with my advisor. I'm a pretty strong willed person. You can probably tell from how I interview, right? But kind of make sure I'm not off base before I'm going to turn down a piece of advice from a review or two. I think I also have a few people, including my wife, where I double check on phrasing and framing to make sure that if it's going to be a non standard way of talking about something, if it's going to be a moment of maybe not jollity, if I'm going to about to make fun of the genocide guy, right, that I'm making that the fun is that I'm going in the right direction, right, that it's clear who is the target, and that It's not going to be inappropriate for the context.
Kate Carpenter 39:42
Who do you like to read as inspiration for writing?
Marc James Carpenter 39:46
I mean, it's all sorts of people. I think I'm going to do the cowardly thing and just do a couple things that I read recently that are great. So I'd say Katrina M Phillips, Staging Indigeneity. I really appreciate it. Her attention to kind of the new. Losses of performance and why one creates a text. I think she's especially great at getting at why indigenous people might say things that are not entirely true when they're speaking to an audience of colonizers. And of course, I do some of that as well, so that was especially useful for that. I would also Katrina Jagodinski's work looking at legal cases for places where you can see Indigenous women's voices and actions. It's just some brilliant, finely textured work digging into those cases. And then to go a little bit further back, because I like the pairing I would do, Ann Stoler, The Archival Grain, and James Scott's Against the Grain, because I like word play? But, you know, obviously, you know, Stoler's work is a classic of, you know, thinking about the archive as a created, founded knowledge. And when you're weaving cobwebs, it's really useful to make sure that you're including why these documents and not others. And one of the things I love about James Scott is to read silences on a macro level, right? He's very good at kind of reminding us that there's vast arrays of stuff being created and done outside of the written record, and we have to account for it, even though it's hard. I don't always agree with all of his conclusions, and often I don't know whether I agree or don't, but I think he's done brilliant work at kind of pushing back against some of the fundamentals about how we think about the past. And of course, I've been talking about reading silences, it would be uncouth of me, not to mention Trouillot, Michel Trouillot's Silencing the Past, which, of course, is quite venerable now, but kind of the core of it, of reading silences, is still so central to what I do and what many other historians who I admire.
Kate Carpenter 41:35
I love that book too, because it's so smart, of course, but also such a lovely read.
Marc James Carpenter 41:41
Weird, normal people can read it and enjoy it.
Kate Carpenter 41:45
Yes, it's the rarity to have that kind of brilliance expressed so so beautifully. I'm always curious to know what people are working on next, but I'm especially curious when someone has sort of finished their first book, because they feel like it is entering a new phase for you. So are you up for talking about what you're working on next, or are you just enjoying the moment of having the first book out?
Marc James Carpenter 42:03
Sure, I've got three things on simmer. So I think I know roughly the order, but we'll see. So I'd say, before I get to the simmering, you know, I've got some stuff that had to get cut that will probably be the next thing. So I've got a longer piece on a particularly prolific racist sculptor named Alexander Phimister Proctor who I'll be putting out something on, and might be in a documentary about some of the statues as well. So trying to get a piece out on that, a couple other pieces on kind of smaller stories that had to get cut the big projects I'm looking at, the most likely next one is looking at the Civil War period in Oregon and Washington, something I touch on in one chapter, and it had to be a small chapter to get to my page count. I pushed right to the edge of my page count, and there's a lot more story there. I think there's a lot of room to the Civil War is basically undiscussed in Oregon and Washington, even as we've expanded it into the West. And the so called Snake War of the same period is similarly almost absent from most historical records, even though it's one of the more lethal wars against Native nations that was fought, and they're one in the same that I know already that a lot of why it's invisible is that if you were a Civil War soldier in Oregon and Washington, you were probably fighting in the so called Snake War against whatever native people were not seen as under white control. So that's the one where I have the source base the clearest so I know kind of the steps to get the base version of that book. It'd still be a long process. Again, as mentioned, this takes a while. Projects I'm looking at a little bit further out, again, depending on timing and funding and, you know, all the other things that things depend on. I think there's more work to be done in the 1910s through about the 1930s looking at Native people's uses, kind of re applications of nostalgia, looking at Pioneer nostalgia, not just as a weapon against Native people, which it absolutely was, as I discuss, but also a sort of a two edged weapon that they could use for their own purposes. And particularly looking at the fight against genocide as a policy option. Now that we know that genocide was everywhere in the 1800s I don't think we have a good story yet for how it stops being seen as American. And I think part of that story is looking at Native people successfully pushing against that rhetoric in the early 1900s and the third one, I don't know if publishers are listening, I think the sort of more weird, normal people book I've been kind of ruminating on maybe writing eventually, which is still a very dark topic, is a book tentatively titled Republic of Rapists, because I think we have a core problem where we now know, after diligent work, a lot of stories of sexual violence by political figures, but it tends to just be cut out of most of The rest of the rest of their we put it in a box, right? We say, Yes, sure. You know, about a third of the presidents before the Civil War were provably rapists, yep. And then we move on. And it doesn't play into how we talk about politics, right? And it doesn't play into how we talk about the early republic or even the Civil War period. So I'm thinking that there. Is a project. Again, this is the most amorphous of those, of what happens if we bring that more thoroughly into the frame of how we talk about power and politics in the United States, and take seriously how many men in positions of great power were also sexual predators? How might that reconsider, reconfigure our vision of America, maybe even our vision of politics more broadly, and maybe our vision of how we can make it better in the future.
Kate Carpenter 45:24
Wow, I have a lot of questions I want to ask you about all those which tells me that they are great projects, and I cannot wait to see what comes of them, and to maybe get to ask you some of those questions. Dr Marc James Carpenter, thanks so much for joining me on Drafting the Past to talk about writing.
Marc James Carpenter 45:40
Thank you so much for having me. This has been a delight.
Kate Carpenter 45:42
Thanks to Marc and to you for joining me for this episode of drafting the past find show notes and links to the books we talked about at draftingthepast.com. Want to give me a little holiday gift this year? Consider taking a minute to leave a review for the show on your favorite podcast app. It helps new people find the show, and it makes me do a little happy dance in my office. Until next time, remember that friends don't let friends write boring history.
