Customer Reviews

The Bear River Massacre and the Making of History

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As a student persuing a Ph.D in American Indian History, I was not impressed with this book. Fleisher goes into long detail about her own experiences while writing her book, and what little "history" she does relate is easily found on the internet. The sources she uses are secondary and tertiary sources at best. If you want to learn about the Shoshoni and the Bear River massacre, I suggest one of Brigham D. Madsen's books; The Shoshoni Frontier and the Bear River Massacre, or Encounter with the Northwestern Shoshoni at Bear River in 1863: Battle or Massacre.

Serious students of the Bear River Massacre would find their time better spent reading some of the better researched and sourced materials available elsewhere. The banter surrounding the modern-day controversy is barely entertaining and hardly reaches the level of local Preston and Sho-Ban reservation gossip. It is evident that the author had little of substance to write, therefore a poorly-researched diatribe against mormons and a sad attempt to validate the battlefield rape tale, was her only way to get this trash published. Even the Southwest Shoshoni deny the rape accounts, yet this author so desparately wants it to be true that she goes to great lengths to substantiate this fairy tale with leading questions and wild fantasies-- obviously intended to titiliate the weak-minded. This is indeed a good first-hand look at what white-apologist, feminine revisionist history looks like. This book does nothing for history or for native americans. Sexist and bigoted baloney.

As an individual who has an MA in military history and has written articles on the Bear River Massacre I think this work had very little historical value. It was written by an English teacher and not a historian, it has very little historical value for real historical scholars. The book is primarily about the author and not the massacre, being written in first person. Further, it was written in non scholarly MLA type format rather than any scholarly hostorical format. If you want to actually read about the subject matter, read Dr. Madsen's works, he is the subject matter expert.

Sometimes a little distance gives an author the ability to see a subject clearly-the historical distance, for example, necessary to see how past events predict contemporary consequences, how war is always brutal and dirties both its victims and victors no matter how many yellow ribbons we hang around it-and I couldn't help but be reminded of this while reading Fleisher's analysis of the Bear River rape and massacre at the same time that stories of American soldiers "abuse" of Iraqi prisoners were coming to light.

At its heart, this book is about the making of history itself: that is, how an event generates competing explanations that clash, and are either accepted as truth, alter each other, or fall out of memory. It is about how "truth" is made. Specifically, Fleisher focuses on the massacre of one Shoshoni village by U.S. troops, or rather she focuses on the competing agendas feuding over how this one event should be remembered today. Though there is some disagreement on some details (such as the body count), there isn't much disagreement on the essential fact that on that day U.S. soldiers murdered a village of Shoshoni Native Americans, committing rapes and other atrocities in the course of wiping out survivors. Like others historians, Fleisher assembles all the historical evidence: details, for example, like the fact that the attack was planned to take place at dawn when the village would be asleep and people could be killed in their tents, during the winter when the Shoshoni would all be gathered together, while the snow was deep so women and children couldn't run away. Unlike most historians, she questions how historians themselves remember this event, examining their methods, their own political agendas, wondering for example, why some cast the massacre as a military victory instead of an act of genocide.

But what makes this book remarkable, and distinguishes it from the conservative historians who have written about the event before her, is that she portrays the event not as some dusty artifact, but as an ongoing story that involves us all. For we all are involved: how we remember this story, or not, determines "what happened" that day and will contribute to what can happen tomorrow. Like an investigative journalist she interviews living descendants of the original massacre, both Native Americans and the white ranchers who still live on the land. Most remarkably she includes herself as part of the problem/solution with this story (sort of as the voice of the common man) and shows how all of us, ordinary American citizens, have a stake in how the event is remembered. Should the park service erect a memorial commemorating the brave actions of our men in uniform in a military victory against Indian warriors? Should the rapes that were committed be erased? Should no marker be erected? Or should we remind ourselves that war is brutal? That even our side commits atrocities, especially when expediency is at stake? That is, she asks if by white-washing history we make it easy for history to repeat itself, e.g. go to war lightly, convinced we will be remembered as virtuous no matter what we do?

I had no particular interest in Native American history before reading this book. But afterwards I realized that that was equivalent to saying I had no particular interest in my own history as an American, and by implication no particular interest in why my country behaves as it does today. The Bear River Massacre and the Making of History should be required reading for everyone, but especially for anyone who thinks they are patriotic. An important book.

Fleisher's strategy is threefold: first, a sweeping survey and synthesis of histories and historical materials. This is less the work of an historian than of an accomplished prose stylist and original social thinker. (Historian Brigham D. Madsen's "The Shoshoni Frontier and the Bear River Massacre" (U of Utah P, 1985) provides the cornerstone for Fleisher's efforts here.) Readers will leave this first narration with a firm grasp of those historical contingencies that have complicated scholarly and public reception of the Bear River massacre and rape. In particular, Fleisher untangles the complex interweaving of Mormon and Shoshone (and Civil War) histories to illustrate how the blur of incontestable facts and competing fictions becomes crucial to the relatively muted reception (until now) of this seminal event. Next, in a startling move, Fleisher recommences her narrative to explore the circumstances that led her to embark on this intellectual journey. This second movement entails both an autobiographical account of the author's academic trappings -- and liabilities attending thereto -- as well as a journalistic archive of efforts underway to commemorate Bear River as a National Historic Site. In a provocative third movement, Fleisher then musters the resolve to scrutinize her own historical authority, asking why she feels compelled to insert herself into Shoshone and Mormon histories, being neither Shoshone nor Mormon. This leads to an astute reflection on the terms of her "busybody" historiography, including a review, at once graceful and witty, both of more popular 19th- and 20th-century representations and of the authorizing role of the historian as a teller of historical tales.

Ultimately this is a book of subjects, then, and of subjects often subjected to neglect. Despite the fact that the book is expertly researched -- clearly the product of years of work -- and includes an excellent bibliography and index, Fleisher's controversial decision not to employ footnotes (save for a sly, solitary footnote explaining her rationale!) will doubtless raise the ire of more fastidious scholars, while pleasing those of us who would sacrifice such notation for an enhanced measure of readability. Even more, the absence of footnotes -- and this is Fleisher's carefully measured ethical point -- forces readers to confront rather directly the question of accuracy, and whether historians' customary prerogative, their tacit claim to objectivity, does not in fact smooth out those rough edges of reality that a more bracingly essayistic (and autobiographical) approach can productively foreground. But as Fleisher's effort is one of recuperation, if not redemption -- public redemption, or the redemption of public consciousness -- her challenge to accuracy and authenticity cedes, at least in theory, the very authority she must wield in order to make a convincing argument. At any rate, if Fleisher's book occasions a debate about such matters, this will be owing less to any particularly novel textual maneuver or documentation controversy than to the sheer conviction bodied forth throughout, which conviction brings with it an insistence on critical reflexivity of the sort one finds in the writings of Robert Coles.

If this is a flawed book, it is no less for that a remarkable book, a necessary book, and a book that goes a long way toward demonstrating why history is never a done deal, and how the interpretive endeavor can be, at its postmodern best, the stuff of social reckoning.

As an additional note: interested readers will surely want to check out Fleisher's letter to the Utah Historical Quarterly (in response to Rod Miller's review of her book), Fall 2006, vol. 74, no. 4. Fleisher's letter *should* silence the sort of misleading criticism that has emerged in these precincts, but perhaps this is asking for too much.

Let's dispel a few myths, some circulating hereabouts, about Fleisher's valuable book, which is getting much-deserved attention, but is of course not without its flaws:

Fleisher is not alone in advocating that a mass rape followed the massacre. In point of fact, Brigham Madsen, the primary historian of the Bear River massacre, also believes a mass rape ensued. That Madsen is a lapsed Mormon generally isn't taken as evidence that he's biased, and of course shouldn't be take as evidence that he's biased.

Only one-third of Fleisher's book deals directly with the history of the massacre as such, and related historical events. There are some factual errors therein, none of which invalidate her thesis or her analysis.

Fleisher is hardly the first to discuss rape in a military context. The gold standard here, and a book that Fleisher makes ample use of, is Susan Brownmiller's Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape. More recently, Maria Bevacqua has added a volume to this ongoing discussion. (Yes, Bevacqua blurbs Fleisher's book.) Rape continues to be a serious social problem, as we all know, and what Fleisher terms "genocidal rape" is happening right now, for instance, in Darfur.

Fleisher's primary target in her book is the *telling* of history, and how social realities invariably end up influencing such tellings. One of those social realities is gender, another is race, another is class, and so forth. Fleisher's interviews with the women who are arguing for and against a National Historic Site -- both of whom, incidentally, are Mormon (like so many others with whom she speaks), and both of whom Fleisher treats with the utmost journalistic respect -- comprise one practical (and contemporary) dimension of this situation. Her more theoretical point is not simply that historians are not "objective" -- a number of reviewers have incorrectly accused her of mounting such an argument -- her point is that objectivity and accuracy and truth and the like are invariably a function of the historian's perspective, and as such, we might need to understand how such perspectives are inflected by those social realities, above. Sure, there might be some things we can all agree upon, accuracy-wise -- we tend to treat facts as relatively stable entities (even if they're often proved not to be so stable) -- but here's a case in which we can't even agree on whether a mass rape took place (and we have a documented eyewitness account). So our stubborn pursuit of a fixed truth often blinds us to other possible truths, as Fleisher argues, which isn't to say we don't ultimately have to reckon with same.

And which leads us to the final portion of Fleisher's book, where she does a good deal of historical unearthing and (cultural) analysis to unpack the role that white women have played in Native affairs. All by way of casting her *own* work under increasingly harsh light, in order finally to draw some conclusions about history, about the telling of history, and about our public responsibility in addressing and participating in such tellings.

Drivel? I think not. And that kind of hatchet-job rhetoric is probably something that itself needs to be examined as a social reality now, given the preponderance of such hatchet jobs floating around in these spaces.