Working The Trapline — Pipeline Fight & Heart Of Darkness

Yintah drops on Netflix on Netflix on October 18. It documents a decade-long battle in British Columbia over native land rights and energy pipeline construction.

Mirroring the scope and ambition of the Wet’suwet’en fight to protect unsurrendered lands from theft, Yintah offers the definitive account of a historic wave of Indigenous resistance to Canadian colonialism. Drawing from more than a decade of verity footage, the film shadows two Wet’suwet’en leaders (Howilhkat Freda Huson and Sleydo’ Molly Wickham) as they reoccupy and protect their homelands in the face of state violence.

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I am somewhat miffed at myself for forgetting about a new book that should have been in the mix for my Lord Dunmore’s War series: Heart of American Darkness by Robert G. Parkinson. Lady Marilyn and I hit Bend on Wednesday on a series of admin tasks — DMV, vehicle maintenance, etc. and I paid a visit to the Big Book Store (B&N) where I ran across the book, which published last spring. In delving into the intersection of the Shickellamy clan and the backcountry badass Cresap clan, Parkinson covers much of the Upper Ohio territory that series hit — the Yellow Creek Massacre, etc.

It’s not that I think Parkinson has uncovered new intel on the what of the matter, but I would have liked to have delved into his why. His approach is interesting — and simpatico to the Frontier Partisans outlook. Frontier conflicts, across time and geography, share characteristics — and defy simply morality-play depictions. Since the very beginning of this project, we have pushed against old triumphalist views of this history and against crude revisionism that simply flips the script and renders “settler-colonialists” as the “bad guys” and “indigenous” peoples as victims. The dynamics of Frontier Partisan conflict are complex and deeply fraught, which Parkinson seems to recognize.

We are divided over the history of the United States, and one of the central dividing lines is the frontier. Was it a site of heroism? Or was it where the full force of an all-powerful empire was brought to bear on Native peoples? 

Of course it was both things, and more — a complex interplay of tectonic forces and individual, family and tribal imperatives, with native peoples acting with agency and sometimes with imperial ambitions of their own. It was both heroic and sordid — often in the same moment, both exalting and degrading to the human spirit.

In an in-depth review in Journal of the American Revolution, Gene Proknow writes:

Robert G. Parkinson, a history professor, chronicles the pre- to post-American Revolutionary War events in the Ohio Valley through the experiences of two families—the Native Shickellamys and the colonialist Cresaps. Each of the families suffered premature loss of kin and other tragedies during the French and Indian War, Pontiac’s Rebellion, Lord Dunmore’s War, the American Revolutionary War, and the later Native/Colonialist conflicts.

…The author takes a unique approach to the dual family histories, using Joseph Conrad’s novella, Heart of Darkness, to frame their participation in the bitter eighteenth-century Ohio Valley conflicts. Conrad’s masterpiece critiques European colonial rule in late nineteenth-century Africa by examining power dynamics and morality. The turn of the twentieth century novelist depicts London as the greatest town on earth and Africa as a place of darkness. Building on Conrad’s assessment of colonial Africa, Parkinson suggests that the imperial conflicts between settler Americans and Natives share similarities, offering a deeper understanding of their meaning beyond the racist savage-versus-civilized explanations. He sees Conrad’s central image of mayhem and bewilderment in the Revolutionary Era Ohio Valley. To reinforce the Heart of Darkness connections, Parkinson introduces each chapter with a brief passage from Conrad’s book.

Heart of Darkness is an excellent portrayal of clashing societies and their often destructive impact on individuals. The author’s long-term interest in the Cresap and Shickellamy families is palpable throughout the monograph. The focus on the two families avoids the tendency of many writers to homogenize cruelty, death, and derangement by recounting history in the abstract. Parkinson avoids this trap, providing readers with a troubling account of what it was like to live in the contested Ohio Valley.

I have multiple Audible credits built up, so I immediately downloaded the audiobook, and I reckon it will also find a place in the FP library.

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Rick Schwertfeger sent up a smoke signal to let us know that the legendary film The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez is currently available for streaming through Amazon Prime. This is one of the cornerstone tales of Frontier Partisans history. Rick did a piece on the Cortez story that you can find here.

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This recently hit the streaming services: In Search of Bass Reeves.

By the end of his illustrious career, Deputy U.S. Marshal Bass Reeves may well have been the preeminent lawman of the Old West. He brought upwards of 3,000 outlaws to justice and served in law enforcement for 32 years after the Civil War. In this documentary, we explore Bass’s life from captive slave to legendary lawman, through the antebellum South to the fierce battlefields of the Western Theater of the Civil War and the untamed plains of the Indian Territory where Native American tribes engaged in chattel slavery, holding African Americans in bondage on plantations that resembled those of the American South. We follow Bass as he strives to uphold the Constitution while fighting accusations against his character by a hostile press intent on riling up the local population against him as he endured great family tragedies that would break a lesser man. We pursue the long- hidden truths of his life as a father who arrested his own son for murder, a Black man who hunted down outlaws of all races, and a deputy marshal who is one of the greatest lawmen of the Old West. His story is one of an escape to freedom and the dangers of the West for a former slave who rose to become a legend of the law…

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Apparently the Chickasaw leader Piomingo — a strong ally of the American settlers of Tennessee — was so enamored of the rifle of Kasper Mansker that he sought out the gunsmith, Thomas Simpson, to make him a rifle just like it. He loved the rifle so much he was buried with it. I love this…