More Summersiana

by Cliopatria

Since I’ve been at Harvard this term but don’t really have a sense of the institutional culture, it’s been hard to determine how much of the faculty opposition to President Larry Summers flows from ideology and how much is due to his management style. As a long recent profile in the Washington Post suggested, both Summers and his critics have a vested interest in pointing to the latter explanation (Summers from his obvious discomfort at receiving support from conservatives, his critics because of divisions in their coalition).

The anti-Summers ideology is, in many ways, not a commendable one. Last week, the New York Sun obtained a copy of the original no-confidence motion against Summers, which attacked not only Summers’ statement about women in science but also the president’s defense of Israel, his policies while at the World Bank, and his generally positive attitude toward ROTC. As Alan Dershowitz noted, the no-confidence resolution’s sponsor got smart and “took out those three specifics in order to try to cobble together a coalition of angry feminists, angry anti-Israeli people and angry leftists in general.” Concern about Summers’ management style was nowhere to be found in the resolution.

Yesterday, meanwhile, the Harvard Crimson published the transcript of a September speech delivered by Summers to a September 2004 conference entitled “On Our Own Ground: Mapping Indigeneity within the Academy,” which dealt with Native American studies at Harvard. (The transcript was prepared from a video of the address taped by Harvard’s ethnic studies program.) The Post story quoted an anonymous Harvard professor who attended describing Summers’ speech: “It was wrong, it was hurtful, it was unnecessary, and it was offensive." The Crimson article quoted three attendees terming Summers’ remarks “quite problematic”; “really, really insulting”; and leaving her “appalled.” According to Tara Browner, associate professor of ethnomusicology and American Indian studies at UCLA, “What Larry Summers said, and this is an *exact quote*, was that ‘The genocide of American Indians was coincidental.’ As in it was an accidental by-product of Western European and Euro-American expansion.”

It turns out that Summers never even used the word “genocide” in his remarks. When asked to retract her recollection of Summers’ “exact quote,” however, Browner argued that the president’s remarks were “essentially” as she recalled. These remarks, however, seem wholly innocuous. Summers expressed his support for establishing a Native American program at Harvard; pointed with alarm to public health data showing low life expectancies on Indian reservations; commented on how, as Treasury Secretary, he had worked hard to try to lessen deep-seated poverty on reservations while avoiding having the reservations become permanently dependant upon federal aid; challenged the conference attendees to work toward “defining both identity and assimilation”; noted how far more Indians had been killed by disease than through warfare waged against them by whites; and concluded by affirming that Harvard “has an obligation to promote discussion on the vital issues that today's vexed relationships with the Native American community pose.”

Several items in these comments angered conference participants. Kansas University professor Yellow Bird faulted Summers for discussing the dangers of Native American “dependency” on the federal government, since, according to the Crimson’s paraphrase of her remarks, “the U.S. owes tribes hundreds of billions of dollars under treaties that have largely been abrogated by federal officials.” (The vast majority of court decisions on this question have held otherwise.) Summers also was criticized for mentioning the fact that more Indians died from diseases brought to the Western Hemisphere by Europeans than from any other cause, a comment that Oklahoma professor Robert Warrior claimed “helps perpetuate a myth of American innocence.” That Summers cited as a source Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer-Prize winning Guns, Germs, and Steel aroused further controversy: “Oh my goodness,” commented Professor Kay K. Shelemay, a member of Harvard’s Committee on Ethnic Studies, “this is not a nuanced source on Native American history.” Regardless of its nuance, of course, Diamond’s claim about Indian deaths is factually correct.

To review: Summers advocated more federal aid to reservations, expressed support for a Native American studies program, and was factually correct in all of his statements. His critics made at least one demonstrably false claim about his speech (the “genocide” charge) and based other criticisms on legal theories that don’t enjoy anything close to mainstream support and the president’s failure to cite sources they considered sufficiently “nuanced” when relating facts whose accuracy they themselves don’t dispute.

During the no-confidence debate, Harvard professor Stephan Thernstrom commented on how many of Summers’ critics seemed intent on creating a university barricaded by a “mental Maginot Line,” in which ideas that challenged the majority’s worldview—regardless of whether those ideas might have intellectual merit—would be excluded. That certainly seems to be the case with the critics of Summers’ Native American conference speech.

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More Comments:

Christopher Riggs - 4/23/2005

I'm not sure if the question is directed at me or not, but I would answer no.

Ralph E. Luker - 4/22/2005

David, If you're asking me, my answers are "no" and "no". _Age_ has a lot of problems. Those aren't the only ones. It's still a beautifully written book and it took us longer to find its problems than it has to uncover the similar problems in other, more-recently-published, beautifully-written books.

David Lion Salmanson - 4/22/2005

So you think Jackson was the precursor to the New Deal and the New York City faction were the only true Jacksonians?

Christopher Riggs - 4/22/2005

With all due respect to Dr. Luker, I don’t think that the main issue is whether the destruction of Native American foodstuffs was unique. The point is that death by disease and death by warfare are not easy to separate. Violent conflict - along with policies such as forced removal and European/Euro-American territorial expansion more generally - often left Native peoples much more vulnerable to disease then they otherwise would have been and often retarded population recovery afterward.

I would echo Dr. Salmanson’s point about the federal government’s financial obligations to tribes. I’d also add that the Trust Doctrine of Indian law holds that the federal government has an ongoing legal and moral responsibility Native Americans that has generally been understood to include funding for tribal governance, health care, education, and the like. I’m not saying the US has necessarily lived up to its responsibilities in these areas (it hasn't). I’m simply pointing out that the idea that the federal government has a financial responsibility to Native Americans is one that is rooted in federal Indian law and in the history of tribal-US relations.

Thanks for your time.

Respectfully,

Chris

Ralph E. Luker - 4/21/2005

David, The Schlesinger analogy won't do. For one thing, _Age_ is 65 years older than _Guns_. I'm no particular defender of socio-biology as history, but attacking and destroying food supplies is hardly unique to the Indian Wars. It's a primary way of destroying the capacity of the enemy to resist. Damn Yankees did it to us, too.

David Lion Salmanson - 4/21/2005

Last time I checked, many courts confirmed that the federal government had to pay. More importantly billions in individual allotment dollars are missing. This is money that is held in trust for individuals as part of their share of tribal resources such as coal or oil. The record keeping has been so bad that nobody even knows how much is missing or who is owed what.

Citing Guns, Germs, and Steel to an audience of Native American specialists is a bit like citing Schlesinger on the Jacksonian era to a room full of antebellum scholars; you better make a good case for why you are bringing up the author or nobody is going to take you seriously. (And since when do we defend socio-biologists who write crappy deterministic history?) While factually true that disease killed more people than war, this doesn't account for the fact that diseases wer far more deadly when populations were already unhealthy and that attacking and destroying food supplies was a prime colonial and US objective in every Indian War. And blaming disease for deaths during the Long Walks (Cherokee, Navajo take your pick) is a bit like saying pneumonia killed the AIDS patient. Factually true, yes. True in any historical sense that actually matters? Not even close.

Bascially Summers likes to mouth off about other people's disciplines and then tends to stick his foot in whenever he does. I think he actually enjoys the victim shtick. It gives him cover for the fact that Havard's undergraduate education is a joke. Of course, it was that way before he got there, but he is also in position to be the fall guy as word gets out.

Louis N Proyect - 4/21/2005

KC: Kansas University professor Yellow Bird faulted Summers for discussing the dangers of Native American “dependency” on the federal government, since, according to the Crimson’s paraphrase of her remarks, “the U.S. owes tribes hundreds of billions of dollars under treaties that have largely been abrogated by federal officials.” (The vast majority of court decisions on this question have held otherwise.)

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Of course the courts have ruled against American Indians. The judges are part of the same racist system. Here's an article by the NY Times's only American Indian reporter, probably the only one in their history--that should give you a sense of the problem.

The New York Times

February 7, 2003 Friday
Late Edition - Final

U.S. Agents Seize Horses of 2 Defiant Indian Sisters

By CHARLIE LeDUFF

CRESCENT VALLEY, Nev., Feb. 6

The government moved today to put an end to its long battle with two elderly sisters, Western Shoshone Indians who for 30 years have defied federal complaints that they are illegally grazing their animals on public land.

As dawn broke over the Cortez Range, agents of the federal Bureau of Land Management, state inspectors and hired cowboys spread out across the Pine Valley and began rounding up 800 or so horses belonging to the sisters, Carrie and Mary Dann.

"They have been overgrazing and damaging the land over the years," said Mike Brown, an agent with the land management bureau. "We began gathering horses this morning."

The Dann sisters, the last Shoshone family living in this valley about 270 miles east of Reno, have refused to pay grazing fees on any of what was once indisputably Western Shoshone territory, nearly 26 million acres in Nevada, about two-thirds of the state. They contend that the Shoshones never legally ceded that land to the government.

The sisters have already been fined $3 million for willful trespass, money they say they would never pay even if they had it. Now the bureau has been getting tough on them.

In September, 40 heavily armed federal agents, joined by helicopters, descended on the valley and rounded up 232 head of the Danns' cattle, which were later sold at auction. Then today, the government started after their horses.

But the aging sisters -- Carrie is nearly 70, Mary nearly 80 -- are good for the fight. This morning, at their 800-acre clapboard homestead, near the land in dispute, the dishwater stood cold, the grease stood hard on the eggs, and Carrie Dann stood firm, though appearing a little more worn and lined since the fall.

"It's too much stuff for my little brains," she said over Cowboy coffee and a Marlboro Light. "I'm too old now. I'd like to go back now to my 40's knowing what I know now."

Mary, who normally smokes or speaks little, did more of both today. "What papers did I ever sign saying I live by their law?" she said. "I never did."

Their brother Clifford, old and deaf now after being sent to prison in 1992 for dousing himself with gasoline and threatening to light himself on fire when the government first confiscated family livestock, barged in from the cold. "Who's going to feed them colts?" he bellowed. "They're hungry."

The chores were left to a retinue of supporters, an odd group that included an Austrian cowboy who is riding on horseback around the planet, an American Indian with a logging-camp vocabulary, a Midwestern lawyer and an itinerant horseman.

Chastened by bad publicity that the September raid drew, the authorities handled today's roundup less aggressively. The operation began in daylight instead of moonlight. Roads were not blockaded.

In the last two weeks, the Dann sisters had removed about 400 horses from the disputed range, many of them pregnant mares. Some are now corralled on the family property, others with neighbors.

Those that were still running loose as the roundup began today face three possible fates.

First, they may be considered protected wild horses, in which case they will be placed in a federal adoption program.

Those that are not protected and that go unclaimed by the Dann sisters (even if they carry the sisters' 3M brand) will be declared strays and the property of the State of Nevada, which will then work to auction them off.

If the Dann sisters do claim these horses, then they face trespass fines for grazing livestock on public land without a permit. If they cannot pay, the federal government will send the horses to auction under the stipulation that the buyer cannot sell them for dog food. (Horse meat currently sells for 15 cents a pound.)

Early this afternoon a glimmer of hope cast itself over the Dann ranch. A deal was being brokered among the Bureau of Land Management, state authorities and Slick Gardener, a noted wild-horse enthusiast from Southern California, who was negotiating on behalf of the Danns.

Under the deal, the bureau would move ahead with the horses' removal but would allow a claim of their ownership by the Dann sisters, who could then transfer ownership to Mr. Gardener. The fines and roundup fees would not have to be paid by the Danns in cash, but would instead be added to their old bill, which the sisters have vowed never to pay anyway.

Mr. Gardener could then keep the horses locally, possibly on the Dann ranch, while buyers are found.

"It's a good deal," Mr. Gardener told the sisters today, not over a traditional pipe but in a conference call. "You talk later about the land issue."

"It's a start," said Julie Fishel, the sisters' lawyer. "But what we really want is for the government to honor the treaty."

Ms. Fishel was referring to the Ruby Valley Treaty, reached by the government and the Western bands of the Shoshone Nation in 1863. The pact granted white settlers access to Shoshone lands, but not title.

The federal Indian Claims Commission, however, decided in the 1970's that the Shoshones had lost the land through "gradual encroachment" of the settlers. The commission awarded the Shoshones $26 million in compensation, and the Supreme Court ruled in 1985 that the tribe lost title when that money was deposited as payment, even though the Shoshones have never accepted it.

With interest, the award has now grown to more than $136 million, or some $20,000 a tribal member.

Senator Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, introduced legislation last year that would distribute $20,000 to each member of the tribe, thus ending the matter as far as the government is concerned. The measure passed the Senate but died in the House. Senator Reid's staff says he will introduce it again this year.