Opinion Column

Book about girl taken by Native American tribe was ‘unsettling’

By natalie pond

The Lake Oswego Review, Jul 8, 2010 (1 Reader comment)

I just read a book called “The Blue Tattoo” by Margot Mifflin. As I am in Island Park, Idaho, at a remote family-owned cabin (built 1953), reading is about my only option in terms of media entertainment. I want to tell you about this book, because while not anywhere near close to the best-written book I have read, the true story in its pages unsettled me, and I think that everybody needs to be unsettled at least once a week.

“The Blue Tattoo” explores the life of Olive Oatman, a Mormon pioneer whose family was slaughtered by the Yavapais Native American tribe. The only three survivors out of seven children and two parents were Lorenzo, who was clubbed and left for dead, and Olive and her sister, Mary Ann. These two sisters were taken as slaves to the Yavapais for a year, and after that time were traded to the Mojave tribe where they lived as equals. Four years later, after a full induction to the tribe, symbolized by Olive’s blue tattoo, Olive alone was taken back to white civilization. Her sister had died of starvation after two years with the Mojave, but her brother had made it to safety and was living in California at the time of Olive’s retrieval.

The rest of Olive’s life was marred by exploitation, but it wasn’t strictly Olive that suffered as a consequence. A Methodist priest, Royal Stratton, paraded her across the country lecturing about the savagery of Native Americans and publishing a lengthy book on the subject. The book produced three very successful editions, each new one included extra pages about the “strange habits and customs” of these natives. The book’s condemnation of the Mojave and of all native tribes was in stark contrast to interviews Olive gave immediately after her “rescue.” In these interviews, she told reporters that she was pretty much allowed to do as she pleased with the Mojave, that she was no slave and that she and her sister were treated as members of the family and that ultimately their lives had been saved by the kind natives.

Here is what unsettles me. Toward the last pages of the book, author Margot Mifflin was discussing the consequences of Olive’s life story and other Indian captive stories like it, which became popular during Oatman’s era. She discussed America’s “identity,” which in short she claims does not really exist. That caught me a little off-guard, because it seems so contrary to our upbringing. As Americans, we are taught about our founding fathers, the bold and rebellious war that began our nation, the influx of people that would forever characterize our personality. We look at ourselves as having a richer identity because of all the many cultures we have adopted as part of our own. We’ve been successful in uniting an extremely large country under common principles, forming a unique democracy, the American Dream. Surely this is our identity.

But considering Olive Oatman and her story, twisted to make the Native Americans feared and hated, I don’t feel so proud of this vision of America. What is so noble about a bunch of entitled white people taking land that had never belonged to them, simply because it’s their “destiny?” How is that fair or democratic? How is that living by the principles of government our founding fathers set down? How is that even human?

In the end, what’s unsettling to me is that I feel a lot of what we have based our culture on is a lie. What we did hundreds of years ago was brutal, unkind, and (ironically) uncivilized.

How do these pieces of American history reconcile? We were not here first, but we were the first to invent ships, guns and complex societal structure. If you’ve read Jared Diamond’s “Guns Germs and Steel” (don’t worry if you haven’t – I had to for honors history, and it’s a long read that frequently repeats itself) you’ll know that it was pure chance where we were originally placed on the globe. Europe was the perfect place for farming to happen, and with the rise of farming came the rise of food storage, which meant people could work on other things besides food production, which meant society, which meant technology. Really, we just got lucky. The exact opposite could’ve happened if we were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I don’t think all Native Americans have figured out how to reconcile with this America. The high suicide and alcoholism rates indicate that. And white Americans? We don’t need to figure it out. We got the good end of the deal. But the story shouldn’t stop there. We shouldn’t let the past passively rot underneath our feet and hope the stench will drift away with the passage of time.

History is not buried like dead bodies. History is like water that falls from the sky, puddles, evaporates, and just when you least expect it, pours down on you again.

Natalie Pond just graduated from Riverdale High School. She writes a column every month for the Lake Oswego Review. Contact her via e-mail at education@lakeoswegoreview.com.

Facebook	Digg	Del.icio.us
Newsvine	Stumbleupon	Reddit