After years of traversing the globe as the Dalai Lama's biographer and observing how people struggle in searching for meaning, Iyer wonders what kind of paradise can be found in our fractious world.
(Image credit: Riverhead Books)
unCovered review by Frank Tomasello, ACLS Mays Landing Branch
The treatment of Native Americans has been a contentious subject since well before the founding of the United States as a nation. In THE LAST CAMPAIGN: SHERMAN, GERONIMO AND THE WAR FOR AMERICA, author H. W. Brands approaches the subject objectively and makes clear that it is more complex than is often portrayed. He points out early on that all peoples who ever occupied North America came as immigrants and many of the Native Americans encountered by the first Europeans in America had engaged in forcibly displacing prior inhabitants. In fact, Geronimo himself had been at war with Mexicans who had killed most of his family long before he gave any thought to the Americans.
This sad chapter of American history can be distilled down to a clash of completely incompatible lifestyles. The Native Americans lived a highly efficient but nomadic lifestyle, while white society was developing a technological and urban society. Brands points out that one is not necessarily superior to the other but each has its own merits. Although atrocities certainly occurred on both sides, the policy of the United States never embraced genocide of the Native population as is popularly thought.
The development of the West had to wait for the outcome of the Civil War and the long Reconstruction afterward so the clash of lifestyles didn’t come in earnest until that time. US policy toward the Natives was thus fashioned by men who had just destroyed the corrupt Southern aristocracy lifestyle and saw the “containment” of the Natives to reservations as less drastic than what happened to the South, opening the West to its inevitable development. On the other hand, the Natives were firm in the belief that the land had been given to them by God and to relinquish any of it was a betrayal of their God. To the Natives, it was all or nothing. To the white population, the reservation system was a fair compromise, especially given that a sizeable portion of the Native population seemingly embraced white society once exposed to it. In the end, technology and the sheer number of white settlers overwhelmed the Natives. Some chose to fight to the death; some accepted the inevitable and tried to assimilate into white culture.
Though the title of the book mysteriously singles out Sherman and Geronimo, neither make up a significant part of the book, which examines several tribal leaders as well as American politicians and Army officials. Brands does a good job in presenting a controversial topic in a fair and objective and highly readable manner. I highly recommend it to anyone looking to learn more about this subject.
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