Weasel

Before the story begins, DeFelice writes, “THE STATE OF OHIO, 1839” (1), and the time and place allude to the historical context. Pa explains, “We didn’t think much about the Shawnees and how they got pushed out to make room for us. It was just the way of things” (79). The “way of things” indicates the brutal, lethal policies that the United States and prior colonizers enacted against Indigenous tribes like the Shawnees. As the historian Howard Zinn details in his canonized account of America, A People’s History of the United States (1980), the violence against the Indigenous people began immediately. Christopher Columbus treated them inhumanely, as did the settlers who became part of the burgeoning United States. Assaulting and killing the Indigenous people was official American policy. Before he became the first president of the United States, the Seneca tribe chief Half-King gave George Washington the nickname “town destroyer” due to his ruthless assaults. Like many other people in real life, Pa accepted the destructive “way of things.”

The story mentions two specific historical figures and one key law. The historical figures are Daniel Boone and Andrew Jackson, and the law is the Indian Removal Act. President Andrew Jackson signed the Removal Act in 1830. Seven years earlier, the Supreme Court ruled that the government lacked the legal standing to take land that Indigenous people already occupied, so Jackson and lawmakers defied the Supreme Court’s rulings. Before Jackson was president, he, like Washington, led assaults against Indigenous people. As Ezra wears a hat that looks like the hat that Jackson wore, Ezra undercuts Jackson’s reputation. Ezra is on the side of the Shawnees and identifies as a Shawnee, so his values oppose those of Jackson.

In Chapter 22, Pa tells a story about Boone, who the Shawnees captured in 1769. Pa claims that the Shawnees generously let Boone and his party go, and the American professor Michael A. Lofaro tells a similar story in his Boone biography, Daniel Boone: An American Life (2003). DeFelice omits another event in Boone’s life. During the American Revolution (1775-1783), the Shawnees aligned with the British. In 1778, the Shawnees captured Boone again and kept him for approximately four months until he escaped. In their custody, the Shawnees treated him well, giving him the name Big Turtle. The temporary assimilation of Boone links to Ezra’s character, who becomes part of the Shawnees. Ezra and Boone indicate that the demarcation between Indigenous people and settlers was permeable.

In Chapter 22, Pa tells Nathan, “The Indian wars went on for many years” (79). The word “went” implies that the assaults are in the past or decreasing. Yet the brutal policies against Indigenous people continued for years. In 1862, during the American Civil War (1861-1865), oppressed members of the Dakota tribe attacked white settlers in Southwest Minnesota. To punish the tribe, President Abraham Lincoln (1861-1865) ordered the government to hang 38 Dakota members—the largest execution in American history. In the 19th and 20th centuries, government-funded and often religious-run residential boarding schools forcibly removed Indigenous children from their families and communities and sent them to schools hundreds of miles away to “reprogram” their cultural identity. This practice explicitly aimed to implement cultural genocide, with the stated purpose of the policy being “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.” Children were physically, sexually, culturally, and spiritually abused and violently punished when they spoke their Indigenous languages. Many children died while in the boarding school system (“US Indian Boarding School History.” The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition). In an autobiographical novel for slightly older young readers, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007), Sherman Alexie, a Spokane/Cour d’Alene writer whose works draw on his Indigenous identity and experiences, illustrates how the traumatic past continues to have debilitating consequences on Indigenous people today.