It’s
often interesting to take a step back and look at recent events through the
lens of history. And, boy, is this ever true today in the US when it comes to
the illegal immigration issue. A couple of examples come to mind.
Take the
reaction of some conservatives when confronted with the harsh conditions in
which the US government is holding young migrant children along the southern
border. I’ve seen some of these supposedly good Christians on social media trying
to blame the immigrant parents for putting their children at risk by making a
dangerous trek through Mexico to find a better life in America. We shouldn’t
feel bad about children sleeping on concrete floors, they would say, because it
was their parents’ choice to put them in harm’s way! What kind of parent would
subject their child to an arduous and dangerous journey like that?
And then
we have the wagon train.
By that, I mean the groups of American settlers
crossing the continent by ox-drawn wagons in the 1840-50s to start a new life
in Oregon or California. For the sake of safety during this 2000-mile trip,
these emigrates formed groups that today might be called “caravans”. Sometimes
they paid “wagon masters” to lead them across the plains. Maybe we’d call them
“coyotes” or “people smugglers” today.
The first major trek of this kind
was the Great Migration of 1843, in which a thousand-odd emigrants traveled the
Oregon Trail, a legendary route that all American schoolchildren learn about.
Years ago, on a family road trip to Yellowstone National Park, I insisted on
making a detour to South Pass, the relatively low swag in the rugged Rockies that
gave Oregon-bound emigrants easy passage over the mountains.
Another
storied mountain pass in American lore is Donner, along the California Trail in
the Sierra Nevada. That is where a party of emigrants, taking to the trail too
late in the season, were stranded in an early snowstorm and -- as everyone in
America, maybe even Donald Trump, surely remembers -- had to resort to cannibalism to survive.
Okay,
that was an extreme form of hardship, but it’s fair to say that the typical
trip for these families looking for a better life wasn’t a walk in the park. It’s
estimated that one out of ten died along the way. They were trudging across desolate stretches of land, passing through hostile territory, always on the
lookout for Indians who didn’t take kindly to Europeans invading their land.
And the environment itself could be unforgiving. I’ve heard that, as
sensational as Indian attacks on the open, treeless plains could be, more
emigrants died from lightning strikes than from arrow strikes.
When I was
growing up in the US, these wagon trains still held a special place in the
popular imagination. There was a hit TV show about them when I was a child. In my youth, a highlight in my hometown of Ellijay, Georgia, was the yearly “Wagon Train” festival, where dozens of
people, often in cowboy getups, rode horses and wagons across Fort Mountain from
the town of Chatsworth. I believe they’ve
long since stopped doing that, but it was a feature of our lives for many
years.
In short, white European settlers putting their children through the
ordeal of a five-month journey in dangerous circumstances in order to reach a
new and better home is celebrated – even cherished -- in American pop culture.
It no doubt warms the hearts of those conservatives who get nostalgic over John
Wayne Westerns. Meanwhile, mestizo Central Americans doing the same today are
to be condemned, demonized. Could it be there is a double standard at play here?
The other example I had in mind was “concentration camps”. This is how some
Democrats have been referring to the detention centers along the southern border
where migrants -- children as well as adults -- are being incarcerated, often
in deplorable conditions. Conservatives have taken umbrage at any suggestion
that these overcrowded facilities can be compared with the notorious concentration
camps of Nazi Germany. Others have argued that using the term
“concentration camp” outside the context of the Third Reich somehow insults the
memory of Holocaust victims.
A side note to this issue is the little
history lesson that some folks have provided, namely that the term
“concentration camp” was in fact coined some decades before the Nazis, during
the Boer War in South Africa, an ugly enough episode of history where different
tribes of white Europeans fought each other over the empty Veld. This factoid was even
mentioned in the BBC-HBO miniseries “Years and Years”, about a Trump-like
figure rising to power in a post-Brexit dystopian Britain of the near future. I
highly recommend it.
The term “concentration camp” may be modern, but the concept
is not, and my own historical connection to it is the fact that my hometown in
Georgia was the site of a real, actual concentration camp, Fort Hetzel. This
was in 1838, when the state of Georgia, with the help of the US Army, was undertaking
a gigantic land grab, a campaign of ethnic cleansing.
Up until then, Ellijay,
located in a shallow valley surrounded the Southern Appalachian Mountains, was part
of the Cherokee Nation, which had been doing its best to assimilate to the
invading Europeans by, for example, adopting Christianity and a US-style of government. Not that
it did them much good.
By 1838, whites had already been settling on
Cherokee land in Georgia, even more so after gold was discovered there, sparking
America’s first Gold Rush. Pressure had been building for the Cherokee to give
up their homeland in exchange for a reservation in faraway Oklahoma. One
faction of Cherokee leaders did eventually agree to this, but against the will
of most of their people, who had to be removed from their farms under threat of
force. Those rounded up in the mountains surrounding Ellijay where brought to
Fort Hetzel, to be gathered there, or “concentrated” if you will, until time for their forced migration west.
As far as I know, there is no historical
plaque in Ellijay commemorating this event. Nothing marks the site of the stockade
where over a thousand Cherokee men, women and children, forced off their land, forced
to abandon their fields and livestock, were imprisoned in a confined space for
months.
Growing up in Ellijay, my only real source of information about
this tragic event was "The Annals of Upper Georgia: Centered in Gilmer
County" a chronicle written by a local amateur historian (and husband of
my second-grade teacher) George Gordon Ward. Here’s a passage from that book about
the roundup of local Cherokee:
“Touching incidents were common during
removal. An unnamed Indian mother, her violent protestations evidently having been
unheeded, was driven into camp at East Ellijay, then Fort Hetzel. Her frenzied condition
continued but the white soldiers could not understand her.
“Then they
called an interpreter, who translated the startling fact that when she was seized
and forced from her home, some of her small children, in a panic of fear, had
fled to nearby thickets and were probably still there.”
Desperate children
separated from parents being held against their will in a concentration camp.
Sound familiar?
According to Ward’s account, the soldiers returned to the woman’s
home with her to locate the children. The family was reunited – in the
concentration camp. No word on whether they all survived the forced march to Oklahoma.
It goes without saying that the Removal is a particularly dark stain on
American history, which isn’t that pristine to begin with. As events of the
last week have shown, things haven’t necessarily gotten better.
