The Methodist Episcopal Church and the Sand Creek Massacre

We grew up on stories of Indian raids, the scalps taken and women and children murdered. We have heard tales of children kidnapped by Indians. We were raised on tv shows and movies full of pioneer families fearful of Indian attack. In 1764, my own sixth great-grandparents were murdered by Native Americans led by a white criminal. Rev. John Rhodes was a Swiss Brethren pacifist, an early settler in the Shenandoah Valley. Theirs was not the only family targeted in the area. It must have been a frightful time for the new immigrants. Their ancestors had faced persecution and death because of their faith. They had hoped their life in the New World would offer better.


What we don't often hear about is America's policy of genocide, the massacre of Native women and children, the broken treaties--justified by European Christians who believed that God had ordained them to inherit the earth and to convert the savage.

Massacre at Sand Creek: How Methodists Were Involved in an American Tragedy by Gary L, Roberts was commissioned by the General Commission on Archives ad History of the United Methodist Church. It rose out of the 2012 General Conference of the United Methodist Church through the Council of Bishops call for repentance and healing of relationships with Indigenous peoples. They called for a full disclosure of the Methodist Episcopal Church's involvement in the Sand Creek Massacre.

In 1864 at Sand Creek in the Colorado Territory, 250 Cheyennes and Arapahos under the protection of the US. government--mostly women and children--were murdered in a raid led by John M. Chivington, a popular Methodist minister. The Territorial Governor whose policies led to the attack, John Evans, was a prominent Methodist layman. 

Roberts book is scholarly in its approach. It is not a popular narrative history. He details the culture and mindset of American society at the time and considers how Native American and Western cultural paradigms differ. He offers a synopsis of American/Native relations.We learn about Chivington and Evans as religious, political, and military leaders. The natives were divided, some seeking American protection but some bands attacking the settlers. Fear was magnified and all Natives were vilified. Chivington became adamant about decimating all natives.

Thankfully, Roberts does not dwell on the outrage of the massacre, for the details he offers are too horrendous to want to know more. The reaction to the massacre was explosive and polarizing. It was considered the worst crime ever committed by America. But Methodists were reluctant to accept the charges against those responsible. They were, after all, church leaders and greatly admired.

What was the culpability of the Methodist church? Was it a lack of moral leadership, its alliance with an immoral culture? Why did the local Methodists not take a stand against Chivington? Can we judge the actions of our forefathers based on today's values and understanding? How could a society based on freedom enact such evil? Roberts explores these crucial issues.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

"It is time for this story to be told. Coming to grips with what happened at Sand Creek involves hard questions and unsatisfactory answers not only about what happened but also about what led to it and why. It stirs ancient questions about the best and worst in every person, questions older than history, questions as relevant as today's headlines, questions we all mus answer from within." from the publisher

Massacre at Sand Creek: How Methodists Were Involved in an American Tragedy
by Gary L. Roberts
Abingdon Press
$19.99 hard cover
ISBN:9781501819766

Four Poems on Motherhood

Mom and me, 1952. Mom was 21 years old.

My mother said she was told that a "good mom is a selfish mom." I would wake up early and she would put me in a playpen and go back to sleep. My cousin Linda would come and take me out and play with me. I would beg Mom to color my favorite coloring book pages, knowing I would only scribble and she could make the picture pretty. She told me to do it myself. 

I did learn to color, quite well in fact.

When our son was born Mom thought I was too weak and easily manipulated, too indulgent. I had to learn to set limits, say no, make demands. Then I was told that parents have to 'line the nest with thorns' to force children to leave the nest and fly. 

Mothers ache to protect their children and smother them with feather hugs, but end up being mean--setting limits and expectations, pushing towards growth and self sufficiency. Instead of being idolized, we are cast into the outer darkness as our children detach and learn independence. It's hard being a mom, for its when we are not needed that we have succeeded. 

Mom in 1970

When my son was little I was still actively writing poetry. Here are four poems I wrote about motherhood.

****

Pockmarks

He is seven now, the child who was so small and perfect

when he was given to me.

Incarnation comes with strings attached,

pain and disappointments,

hard lessons to be learned, illnesses and heartaches.

Today he is learning about bullies and power;

the power we give up, and the power forcefully taken from us.

He tries to articulate the feelings that fill his small breast,

the fears and the questions. And I try to teach him

one more lesson, although I am not certain I know truth from fable.

Day by day, I send him off into the world; questioning

my ability to explain how we live and survive

and surmount life's challenges...

My child was born a perfect model of babyhood,

bright smile under observant eyes, his body flawless.

Today I note his allergic red eyes and the three pockmarks

on his face, the red gum where a new tooth gnaws upward,

and I wonder what lesions are forming in his heart,

and if he will keep them with him for ever

or if they will be healed with only a scar left behind.

****

A whisper of most tenuous thread

fragile, frail, the feeling of belonging

one to the other

Yet testing, always, endurance,

limits, our own strength

to live apart,

Alone. And fearing to find

it can be done,

one does survive

without the other.

O, Child, you grow so quickly

who once believed me you

And I, Mother, lose you

ever so quietly, an erosion

of bounds, to the world.

*****

I watch my son

go down the corkscrew slide

slowly, slowly turning.

He holds onto the rails

to pace his descent.

In his features I can trace

the toddler’s self-satisfied joy

and wonder.

How much longer will I see there

the face I know so well?

He does not understand how quickly he descends,

who thinks he is moving so slowly.

Let him go slowly, slowly.

Let the child remain.

Let me see in undeveloped features

the eternal possibilities,

the contentment

of merely being.

February 25, 1998

                     *****

I had believed I would bear light

to the glories of this world,

leading by the hand in small steps

to view sugar plum fairies and robin's eggs

like the pastel illustrations in a book.

I did not know I would be

also the first bearer of darkness,

teacher of life's many small cruelties.

Steel heart, o sharp and needle-like!

And that small face seeking in mine

consolation, questioning love,

his eager kisses, smothered in them,

each like an electric volt.

I am forgiven of necessity,

held greater than disappointment;

for how long, I wonder.

                  

                      *****

Last Things: Zero K by Don DiLillio

The Market abhors a vacuum; where there is a need and money it will create a product to fill it. In Don DeLillo's new novel Zero K, with money one can buy out of the cycle of life, opting for a cryogenic stasis that is neither death nor the ego-driven awareness of life. You can buy a future in rebirth.

Ross Lockhart's wealthy father has summoned him to the death of his second wife, Artis, and to witness her transformation and installation into a womb-like pod that will hold her until, at some undefined future time, she is returned to life. Artis longs for this non-death, and Ross's father does as well. They have financially and spiritually bought into this eschatology of a secular age.

Ross arrives at the Convergence facility in a remote part of the Ukraine. The hallways are filled with nameless closed doors. Everything about the place is unnamed, unexplained, locked away. He is allowed only glimpses into what happens there. There are screens showing war and armies, death and self-immolation, supposedly in the greater world, images of 'last things', end days, death. A dark world bent on apocalypse.

The father's sunglasses brings "the night indoors;" the opening chapters are rife with the stark words of night, blind, empty, nothing, nowhere, abandoned, and especially dark which DiLillo uses eight times in two pages.

Ross's father and Artis are ardent believers in this new technology, a post-death cryogenic suspension which brings disconnection to the chaotic world and the demands of the self, exchanged for a Nirvana state of bliss until future technology reawakens the living dead, mind and body restored. A resurrection. It is a faith-based technology, promising life after death. Between death and rebirth is offered a 'virgin solitude" in an idealized, rebuilt body, waiting in a womb-like pod.

Ross has an obsession with facts, details, math, and especially naming. He learns that his father assumed the last name Lockhart. And his father did lock his heart away from his son, abandoning him and his mother when Ross was a boy. When his father admits he wants to chose to undergo the process with Artis at her death, Ross talks him out of it even while Artis whispers for Ross to 'join them.'

A Convergence worker preaches that apocalypse is "inherent" in the physical world, the world will end, that humanity's insanity of war and destruction of the earth is part of a self-willed apocalypse.

What is death, what comes after, and whether death should be a choice are considered by all the characters. In a dismal and meaningless life caught in a world of technology that brings distance, can wonder still be found?

I received a free ebook though NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

DeLillo infuses the drama with metaphysical riddles: What of ourselves can actually be preserved? What will resurrection pilgrims experience in their cold limbo? With immortality reserved for the elite, what will become of the rest of humanity on our pillaged, bloodied, extinction-plagued planet? In this magnificently edge and profoundly inquisitive tale, DeLillo reflects on what we remember and forget, what we treasure and destroy, and what we fail to do for each other and for life itself. Booklist

Zero K
Don DeLillo
Scribner
Publication May 3, 2016
$26 hard cover
ISBN:9781501135392

Trillium and Other May Wildflowers at Tenhave Woods

We returned to a local wildflower sanctuary in Royal Oak, MI to see the Trillium. The woods is next to my Alma Mater (Kimball High, now the Royal Oak H.S.). The Royal Oak Nature Society has worked to keep the deer out of the woods and the local wildflowers are blooming in abundance--more Trillium than we have ever seen.

Marsh Marigold was also in bloom.

 I forgot this purple flower's name.

After several rainy days the vernal pond was full. There were 'ponds' all throughout the woods.

Chipmunks, woodpecker, Redwing Blackbirds, and some flutter-bys were also enjoying the sunny afternoon.

The woods is left natural and the downed trees provide interesting safe havens.

 

It is so wonderful to live in the 'burbs but have this little bit of nature just down a mile down the road!

The History and Legacy of Love Canal

Requesting the book Love Canal: A Toxic History from Colonial Times to the Present by Richard S. Newman was personal. I have lived near two toxic waste sites left by Hooker Chemicals.

I was born in Tonawanda, NY an old industrialized area along the Niagara River. My hometown dump contains radioactive waste from the Manhattan Project. Just down river near the city of Niagara Falls, Hooker Chemicals took advantage of an unfinished canal to dump industrial waste.

The canal had been part of William T. Love's plan to create a Model City. The chemical industrialist envisioned a self-contained city with homes and parks. Clean, hydroelectric power was to come from an artificial falls. A canal from the Niagara River would be built to divert water over another section of the Niagara escarpment. Love mismanaged his money. All he accomplished was to leave a big ditch.

The city of Niagara Falls needed to expand and bought the land. A community of homes and a school was built over the filled-in canal. The young families living in Love Canal believed they were living the American Dream. Their dream turned into a nightmare.

They noticed basement seepage, chemical odors, rocks that burst like fireworks, grass that left chemical burns, and a high rate of miscarriages. Their complaints were unheeded. Housewives turned into activists. It was the first grass roots movement for environmental justice.

It took years for government leadership to act. The activists influenced the passage of environmental laws and in 1980 the creation of the Superfund for hazardous waste remediation. (Which under President Reagen was already being weakened with reduced funding in the battle between what is good for business vs. what is best for the people.) Love Canal has become the poster child for American environmental disasters.

I wrote about organizer and environmental activist Lois Gibbs and Love Canal at: http://theliteratequilter.blogspot.com/2012/11/my-green-heroes-quilt-lois-gibbs.html

America's toxic past is never 'in the past'. The Environmental Protection Agency states that one-quarter of all Americans live within five miles of a Superfund site, the worst toxic dumps in the nation.

Consider my own history.

My family had moved from Tonawanda in 1963 when I was ten, several years after the first basement seepage was reported in Love Canal. President Carter approved emergency financial aid to Love Canal the year I graduated from university.

When my son was a tot we moved from Philadelphia to a small Michigan town where a chain link fence separates a toxic waste site from a park with a little flowing stream. An elementary school is on the other side.

We moved again. Our church needed to expand. They bought adjacent land then discovered the business had left toxic waste. They took out loans to supplement Federal aid to clean up the site. It took nine years. Half the land was sold for a charter school and senior housing.

We moved again, to a city on a lake  that fed into Lake Michigan, with a picturesque marina, sand dune beaches and a light house near by. The lake had been foully polluted by a tannery and the clean up had been going on for decades. The town was also home to Michigan's worst toxic waste site, left by Hooker Chemicals. Montague, like Niagara, had a massive salt mine. The rise of  a chemical center brought much needed jobs to the area. And a sad legacy. A woman in our church lost a child to a rare cancer. She began collecting stories of other cancer victims. Days after moving in, I met a neighbor while walking our dog. She said three dogs on the street had died of cancer.

My retirement home is a half mile from a 'spill'. Superfund money is limited and spent on the 'worst' sites. The rest are just fenced off.

Newman grew up in the Buffalo area, and like my family, visiting Niagara Falls was a typical family day trip. He worked on this book over a long time, writing Freedom's Prophet about former slave and African Methodist Church founder Richard Allen in the meantime. (A book I would love to read!)

Niagara Falls, taken by my dad on his last trip home

The book covers:

• The first European explorers, who identified it's economical potential
• The rise of the 'chemical century' and industrialization of the area with particular attention to Elon Huntington Hooker, including information based on new archival research
• The rise of citizen environmentalism in the 1970s and 80s
• The partial resettlement of the Love Canal neighborhood in the 1990
• The legacy of Love Canal

I appreciated the book's inclusiveness, especially the 'big picture' of the Niagara Frontier's industrial history. Love Canal is a story of failure and success, of how citizens can alter policy. It raises issues of responsibility and the role of government in monitoring industry. Can we contain the toxins we create for the products we demand? And what becomes of the land that has been poisoned? Montague residents worried that people will forget and build on the Hooker toxic waste site. Well, they did at Love Canal.

I received a free ebook through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Love Canal
by Richard S Newman
Oxford University Press
Publication Date May 4, 2016
$29.95 hard cover
ISBN: 9780195374834

The Latest Fashions for Ladies---100 Years Ago

I found a partial catalog from the National Cloak and Suit Company, Seventh Ave,, 24th and 25th Sts., New York City. The covers and many pages were missing. Snooping around the Internet I found photos from the catalog uploaded to Flickr and discovered it was from 1917.

16145 Sheer Voile--$7.50 was a summer dress "sheer and cool". The color was trimmed with Venise pattern lace. Shown in tan. 16146 Embroidered Net--$12.98 "ideal for formal or semi-formal occasions". 16148 Linene--$5.75 was a "practical dress" in a new and smart fashion.

16150 Voile--$8.98 of imported embroidered voile. 16151 Gabardine--$6.98 in popular solid & striped materials shown in tan and Copenhagen blue. 16152 Embroidered Organdie--$7.50 "Do you want a truly beautiful summer dress that expresses daintiness and refined taste in every detail?" White crocheted buttons. Shown in pink.

In the late 1890s The National Cloak and Suit Company was one of the biggest manufacturers of tailor made 'to order' ladies suits and skirts.

9227-- $12.98 Smart Coat of Handsome All-Wool Worsted Poplin came in burgundy "the new, rich dark wine color", navy blue, mustard, and black. 

4301 A skirt of Latest New York Style "3.98 "here is one of the newest skirts of the season--a smart and graceful model" in wool serges with "fashionable burgundy color satin facing for the shirred frills which finish waist-line and pouch pockets."

National coats cost less. 9201 $8.98 coat in all-wool worsted serge "of a quality ordinarily seen only in coats sold at higher prices" came in Copenhagen blue, navy blue, and black.

9202 $18.98 All Wool Worsted Poplin in "real Parisian style" came in mustard or green trimmed with navy blue peau de cygne (highly finished silk); also Copenhagen blue trimmed in mustard color peau de cygne. 

"

"Yes, beauty does indeed reign supreme here. But second in power is Big Value." 23401 $6.98 for spring and summer wear, dress of figured silk and cotton Foulard in rose, Copenhagen blue, or navy. 23402 $9.89 Silk taffeta dress came in medium green, Copenhagen blue, navy blue, or black.

"Not merely small sizes" they are "especially proportioned to fit". 21314 $7.50 fine Voile dress with lace trim. 21315 $10.75 fashionable bretelle style draped bodice has net ruffles and plain net underskirt.21316 $5.49 dress with large collar with dainty embroidered voile. 21317 $3.98 "simplicity of style" dress of embroidered voile.

Sizes 32 to 38 bust. 38301 $6.98  in "serviceable" wool and cotton fabric. 38301 all wool poplin "serviceable" coat is unlined and came in mustard, navy blue, and apple green. 38303 white Chinchilla cloth coat.

 

24328 $18.50 smart belted suit came in navy blue or black. Skirt length was 36 to 43 inches with wide based hem. 24329 $6.98 Linene suit in rose, medium green, or Copenhagen blue  had a sailor collar. 24330 $14.98 Silk and wool poplin suite in medium green, navy blue, or black.

 24301 $14.98 "chic New York Style" suit in Copenhagen blue, navy blue, or tan.

 They also made clothing for children.

And infants clothing.

Hats, shoes, and other things ladies need.

Testimonials regarding their quality.

1916 National Cloak and Suite Company photo 'ladies choosing books'
http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47da-e307-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99