Marc James Carpenter's "The War on Illahee"

Marc James Carpenter grew up in Oregon and now works as associate professor of history at the University of Jamestown in North Dakota. He has published in American Indian Quarterly, Oregon Historical Quarterly, and Settler Colonial Studies.

Carpenter applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The War on Illahee: Genocide, Complicity, and Cover-Ups in the Pioneer Northwest, and shared the following:

Page 99 of The War on Illahee: Genocide, Complicity, and Cover-Ups in the Pioneer Northwest falls at the end of Chapter 3, and thus has only a few sentences of text:

...[it was] the invaders who started the wars, and the invaders who threatened to 'war forever' until they had gotten what they wanted. American aggression, not Native resistance to that aggression, caused just about every escalation of the War on Illahee—and arguably, just about every U.S. war for land fought across the North American continent.

Although this excerpt doesn't capture the core of the book, it does point to central themes of violence, deception, and manipulated narratives. One point I am making in this chapter is that the habit in American history of periodizing "Indian wars" from a given act of violence from a Native person tends to obscure deeper reasons behind that violence. The 1855 Yakima War portion of the War on Illahee, discussed here, is typically periodized as beginning with the killing of American agent Andrew Jackson Bolon, rather than with the trespassing American rapists whose executions Bolon was threatening genocide to avenge, or with the American decision to respond to a suspected murder with massive military force rather than investigation or diplomacy. More broadly, I argue, there is a norm treating American invasion and "Indian wars" differently than we discuss other invasions and other wars. Elsewhere across history, invaders are usually presumed to be the aggressors. Why not talk the same way about Americans invading Indigenous lands?

We still depict American invaders as defenders in part due to a longstanding culture of cover-ups. I have been able to show that a number of historians, politicians, and pioneers deliberately created false histories for profit and posterity. In a way, this book project began from a place of angry bewilderment, wondering how I, as an Oregonian passionate about history, had lived more than a quarter century without hearing much about the often-genocidal violence perpetrated in my home state. Deep in the archives, I found a big part of the answer: legions of people who preferred honor over truth had skillfully and deliberately distorted history, while keeping enough private records that I could still figure out what they did. My hope is that by proving these cover-ups, I can spur readers to more broadly reconsider histories they thought they knew.

Learn more about The War on Illahee at the Yale University Press website.

--Mashal Zeringue