[Disciplinary Reflection] History Portfolio Disciplinary Reflection (Made 2024 Spring Semester)

I personally consider history to be the world’s oldest, longest, and most complicated creative writing exercise, held together solely by documents of questionable validity which have only just barely become more credible in the modern era of video; in short, I see history as a story, not a set-in-stone factual account of anything. History can’t be made from nothing, though, it is a scholarly field so it must have something backing it up, and this comes in the form of, mostly, primary sources, sources as close as possible to when/what/where they are about, sources not altered by others to fit their narrative, pure sources, written by the time, of the time, in the time, often without the intent of them ever being made use of for historical research in the future. Secondary sources are also useful, they are those detached from the topic in some way, not necessarily untrustworthy but often having had the opportunity for biases to afflict them, processing primary sources into a narrative rather than leaving them plain and undefiled. It is the job of the historian to investigate these sources and follow them to answers and to fill in gaps of knowledge and to, when necessary, go out and find new knowledge, to brute force answers when already existing sources provide none, hunting down this or that, digging through piles of worthless words, all for a single glimmer of truth.

Evidence is central to everything and oftentimes it is very contradicting or difficult to find, as my recent research for my Indiana History class has shown me. I am studying, currently, the interactions between the Miami natives, Tenskwatawa’s followers, and the whites of Indiana in an attempt to reinforce the validity of a secondary source I discovered last year. In searching for primary sources originating from the Native Americans of Indiana I have found scarce few sources with most of the only Native American sources being from people who are unrelated to what I am studying or from someone I cannot include since they are untrustworthy and, worse, untrustworthy in a way that I cannot even properly take their words apart and dissect them to find where the lies are and where indications of lies are. This man, William Wells, was clearly extremely biased against many groups of Native Americans but also biased in favor of the Miami, specifically the group led by Little Turtle, his father-in-law. Naturally any document he has written in regards to Native Americans in the Old Northwest can hardly be taken at face value, requiring a great deal of hassle to make it useable, referencing other documents, the statements of his fellow Indian Agents, and if possible the words of the people he is writing about, all in order to affirm that he is not lying to make the likes of Tenskwatawa’s followers look bad just to ensure that Miami power did not crumble in the face of a new Native American power in the region. This is a frequent hassle that Historians face, and due to the specific nature of the sources I’m looking into and looking for I’m suffering it even worse. Ideally, I’d be working with sources that clearly states the intentions behind the actions being taken in Indiana at the time, I’d be reading a letter from one Miami to the next talking about how they intend to destabilize the non-Miami Indiana natives in order to maintain power over the region, but instead I have to read placations from Little Turtle to William Henry Harrison as he assures him that he would never think of using the United States for his own ends.

Normally sources are neither true or untrue, but when it’s all but impossible to tell if someone is lying or not and in what way due to a lack of evidence it makes it difficult to trust anything. Finding ways of interpreting sources outside of their original intent is one of the only things that can make primary sources work for a historian and yet even then sometimes there isn’t a way to do that, hindering our progress in understanding the past. If I had letters from Miami Chief Pacanne to counterbalance the letters of Miami Chief Little Turtle then I could piece together a narrative much easier, since Pacanne was notably anti-Little Turtle and anti-Tenskwatawa, giving him, potentially, much use as someone whose words would likely strike down inaccuracies of both sides or at least show where certain thinkings in both sides aligned if little else. Sadly, as it stands, I have mostly had to rely on white sources since there are enough of them that I can draw what is most true out of those messy semi-true sources. Luckily I can compare and contrast what is attested to in more reliable sources, including an array of secondary sources I have previously worked through, while organizing complicated perspectives of the likes of William Henry Harrison, who I have seen represented in many conflicting ways, indicating well that the people of the past were just as messy and hard to understand as those of the modern age. I have very much enjoyed drawing together a comprehensive image of the man and of Wells as well, as much as their actions irk me.

It might seem contradictory to talk about primary sources as I have, but there is a difference between being the closest thing to the truth humanly and the closest thing to the truth academically. Primary sources provide clear insight into the mind of the writer and the time it was written in, but secondary sources collate these into a narrative, making them more digestible, explaining the work that a historian not relying on them would have to do themselves. The trouble with secondary sources is that the people writing them are removed from the time, adding clarity and sensibility but also a whole new array of problems which, ironically, are very much the same as the problems facing primary sources with the exception of the work now being modern and more dense with information one does not have to dig for. Closeness to original events is what makes primary sources so useful, and distance from original events is what makes secondary sources so useful, yet both are also drawbacks in their own right.

Some of the most important things one can grasp from sources are cause and effect, which are the basis for everything from a letter containing an adversarial tone to a war breaking out. For my Revolutionary History class I am studying the letters and official documents of the early United States in order to prove that the Revolutionary War and its consequences were innately harmful to the Native Americans of the United States. Cause is a continuous thread throughout my readings, both primary and secondary, as those representing the United States frequently claim the causes of their actions towards Native Americans to be just and reasonable, claiming them to be violent savages or knowledgeable primitives in need of being taught lessons. They also ignore the more accurate causes of things like Native American discontent with their colonizers, claiming Britain incited them or that it was a matter of them being too primitive to understand right and wrong, never thinking about the fact that stealing away land from people who just want to live their lives might breed anger and resistance. As Native Americans move from East to West to escape US expansion some fight, some bands of tribes choose to resist socially, groups within bands within tribes within wider alliances make decisions which the United States take as being the decisions of the entirety of one group or another, either ignoring or unaware that things are very different.

Discerning cause and effect in these scenarios, noting what is and is not reasonable, these skills are necessary for a historian, as being blind to what is causing the circumstances we read about in our sources is to be blind to more than half the story, half the information we could learn from the source. If a historian cannot read a document and understand the cause behind it being written, the cause behind what is being described, and the truth of the information provided, then one is going to muddy the waters of historical accuracy more than it already naturally is. We cannot just blindly follow our beliefs regarding what we read, we have to be open minded to the fact that other causes may exist beyond what we want to see. I have to constantly remind myself that there are US citizens who truly were motivated by a want to help Native Americans rather than a lust for land or a hatred of those they viewed as being lesser, and that some seemingly cruel actions such as forcing Native Americans from their lands were thought of by some as being for the best to help those very same people, I cannot just allow myself to view all the settlers participating in such things during and after the revolution as evil and greedy, I cannot allow myself to truly view any of them like that, since, after all, they were people, behaving in accordance with an array of causes that I can only begin to comprehend through the sources I have access to. This all is the lot of the historian, one who wrestles with biases known and unknown in order to piece together a story of cause and effect from untrustworthy sources either pure or impure in their deceitful deceit, all to piece together something just a little closer to the truth than what came before. That is the lot of a historian, to take on that lot is why I want to be a historian.