MDDM book: Patterns of Vengeance: Crosscultural Homicide in the North American Fur Trade

[Doug Millison]

http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=209521017072554

John Phillip Reid. Patterns of Vengeance: Crosscultural Homicide in the
North American Fur Trade. Pasedena: Ninth Judicial Circuit Historical
Society, 1999. 248 pages. Index. $40.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-9635086-1-x.

[...] Reid demonstrates two significant points. First, that Native
Americans had autonomous legal systems, though they were not always
recognized as such for not being written. Second, that the white Americans
and British adapted to and occasionally adopted Indian legal understandings
in their crosscultural relations. Both are ideas expressed in part by
previous scholars, but never before to my knowledge with such clarity and
precision.  [...]

Reid looks, meticulously. "Murder," he reminds the reader, is not the
killing of another person, but "the unlawful killing of a human being" (p.
24). That distinction is vital, for when we read an account of a white
trapper "murdered" by the Indians, the first question we should ask is
whether that is the correct choice of words. Calling the killer a
"murderer" rather than a "manslayer" is a judgment rather than a statement
of fact. It seems almost too obvious, though far too often ignored, that
the killing may have been justified in the eyes of the society on whose
land the killing occurred. Once we accept that Indians had laws, we start
to see evidence of that system of justice in most accounts from the West.
Clearly, the cultural values of the native people should be taken into
consideration. James P. Ronda has noted that Europeans in the Pacific
Northwest complained constantly of the Indian predilection for stealing,
failing to make any effort to understand the Indian perspective. In
reference to the theft of some axes by the Chinookans, Ronda writes, "the
Chinookans believed those who had large numbers of axes or other valuable
goods should be willing to share with those having only a few. What the
furious partners saw as a theft, Indians viewed as a sensible
redistribution of surplus goods."[1]

Reid offers the example of horse theft. For the white man whose horse is
stolen, theft is theft. But, Reid asks in reference to a specific case,
"What if Bannocks thought taking horses from aliens and adding them to the
Bannock nation's stockpile was a national good?" (p. 25). If the "crime"
occurred on Bannock land, and the Bannocks perceived the act as a positive
one, can we as historians speak of a "crime"? When the U.S. Customs Service
seizes goods, are they committing a crime? Are nations excused on the basis
of bureaucracy? Reid asks obvious questions that have somehow avoided the
comprehension of many previous historians of the American West. For
instance, were not trappers who took game or migrants who took wood from
Indian lands thieves?

Just when the reader starts to think that Reid is presenting a romantic
vision of Indian life, he hits home with a notably unsentimental portrait
of an Indian atrocity or act of real stupidity. He employs the same
precision when addressing the cruelties of the whites. But he takes
seriously the notion that these lands belonged to the Indians.
Whenever Indians and Europeans came into contact, their different
conceptions of law came into conflict. The European legal structure
generally demanded some sort of hearing and the punishment of the guilty
person or persons. Indian responses to crime in the northwest demanded
retribution. Indians viewed the individual who had committed a crime as
part of a group, that group being responsible for the actions of each of
its members. A common mistake among historians is viewing European law as
normative. For the North American whites, there were excusable acts of
murder that carried no punishment. Such a concept was alien to Indian
perceptions of justice. On the other hand, white society in the early
nineteenth century tended to punish murderers with death; Indians often
accepted recompense in the place of retribution.

Sometimes whites adopted Indian notions of vengeance consciously in an
effort to deal effectively with them; at other times they unreflectively
took up the worst qualities of that vengeance. An example of the latter
came in 1823 when Colonel Henry Leavenworth of the U.S. Army responded to
an attack on some trappers by a few Arikara by stating to the Secretary of
War, "bear in mind that it is not only an individual but the whole
A'rickara nation that owes us blood" (p. 29). Often whites "applied no law
except the drumhead law of the jungle," as when they hanged Indians without
reference to the legal system of either nation (p. 41). And then these very
whites would express shock that the nation of the victim would seek
vengeance.

There was certainly a great deal of room for misunderstanding. Few people
"coming from a European legal culture were able to comprehend the Indian
doctrine that liability for homicide was fixed by one principle and one
principle only--causation" (p. 44). Those who had caused the death, even if
by unintentional accident, were responsible. "A person did not have to take
specific action to incur liability. Passive causation triggered the same
vengeance as active causation" (p. 82). Many Indians made the connection
between the arrival of whites and the spread of contagious diseases,
holding all whites equally liable for having caused so many deaths. Reid
cites one instance when the Hudson's Bay Company was blamed for the death
of a group of Indians who drowned on their way to trade with the Company.
Since the Indians would not have been on that stretch of river but for the
Company trading post, the Company bore responsibility.[2] "Facts,
circumstances, and defenses that would in European law mitigate a homicide,
such as that the killing was an accident, done in self-defense, committed
without intent or malice aforethought, or not 'designedly,' were immaterial
in any of the Indian laws that are known. Causation was the single
probative factor" (p. 45). White contemporaries often failed to understand
the Indians because they did not expect to. "People they expected to be
'savages' acted like savages, as should be expected, and to look for other
motivations was a waste of time. Everything was superstition and blind
vengeance" (p. 88). [...]