SEPARATION POINT: PART 1 - 1865

By Benjie Howard

Joseph R. Biden, in his inaugural speech, praised the American spirit and called for unity as a nation. Since the era of Reconstruction, unity has often been invoked as a way for people to come together and pretend racism doesn’t exist. Biden did something different on Jan 20, 2021. He spoke of unity while explicitly repudiating white supremacy and the 

violence of racism. This framing of unity immediately drew the ire of politicians like Rand Paul and entertainers like Tucker Carlson who assumed and complained that Biden was talking about them. They made this choice to accuse themselves and air their white grievance during an historic moment when the most racially diverse White House cabinet in the history of the Nation — including the first woman, Asian, Black Vice President, and no less significant, the first Native American woman to head of the Department of the Interior — begin stepping into their confirmation processes and their roles. The fear that Carlson and Paul’s rhetoric and complaints betray and the hope that Biden’s speech represents are nothing new. We’ve been at the crossroads of democratic idealism and civil war before. We know this place and this contrasting fabric of vision and shortcoming. 

Throughout this year of isolation, struggle and social tension, I’ve found comfort in seeking opportunities to learn from the past. I’ve found myself, for reasons I wasn’t sure of at first, coming back to a somewhat obscure moment in our American history.

As a commercial river guide in Grand Canyon for more than two decades, I’ve been fascinated by the story of Billy Dunn, O.G and Seneca Howland, three members of the 1869 Powell exploration of the Green and Colorado Rivers who chose to abandon the party shortly before it ended. After three months of grueling labor, portages, treacherous rapids, heat, lost boats and equipment, hunger and insufficient supplies, not to mention the heavy-handed leadership of John Wesley Powell — the three men decided to call it quits one evening in camp on the right bank above a large unportagable rapid. They departed the following morning, August 28, with a few biscuits in their pockets and a dry unknown desert labyrinth before them. 

The irony is that the rest of the party, Powell and six other men fairly easily navigated the falls, which would later be called “Separation Rapid.” They exited the canyon through the Grand Wash Cliffs into calm meandering water, leaving the Colorado Plateau for the Great Basin on August 29, having successfully navigated the last unmapped piece of land in the lower 48. 

More tragically, the Howland brothers and Billy Dunn were never seen again. They might have been executed by Shivwit Paiute, which is likely since a young Shivwit woman had recently been raped and murdered by white men. That story could also have been a misdirect from the Mormon who interpreted it from Shivwit leaders to Powell in 1871. The three could have been killed by Mormons, also likely as the Mormons had recently murdered 120 other white men women and children at Mountain Meadows and tried to blame Indians for the massacre.

My interest in this story has shifted over the years. As a young guide and educator, I was intrigued by the mystery of it. The Grand Canyon is full of mystery stories that scholars and historians debate. It’s The Grand Canyon, and everything about it, including its geologic record is mysterious and intriguing. It was exciting to work and live a life there, sleeping most nights on a boat within the mythical hallways of stone and light. 

The story of Dunn and the Howland brothers has become more interesting to me now in a symbolic sense. It was the jumping off point for Jason Russell Poole and me in our artistic collaboration with Separation Point, a book of poetry and images from the arid Southwest. We were interested in that moment when those guys abandoned their captain, abandoned the project at hand, headed out on their own, made a definitive move toward an alternative trajectory. 

The expedition and separation garner this symbolic meaning at the confluences of history and landscape, conquest and freedom, wilderness and Manifest Destiny in the American West. My interest has evolved toward how the events of August 28, 1869, align and diverge from events, mindsets, impulses, understanding and ignorance of the time and space around them; and how they inform the present.

I’m sure every man felt quite isolated and alone the night O.G. approached John Wesley and shared his plan to abandon the trip. Every one of them had to decide whether to stay the course or join the defectors. They hadn’t seen another human soul in months. They had been living their lives surrounded by massive, indifferent stone palisades, a loud and angry river always reminding them of the danger while they slept. Many of them, including Powell, wrote about the experience of feeling infinitely small in comparison to their environment, alone in an unknown wilderness. I’ve stood on that beach where the men parted ways. I’ve camped there many times. I’ve looked up at those massive gold and crimson walls, heard the river moving through the night, peered up the long and wide valley of what is now called Separation Canyon. I’ve felt the kind of loneliness those men must have felt trudging through the gravel in the wash toward an unknown fate. 

The truth, however, is that we are never alone. Our actions and our decisions, even when made at the bottom of a chasm and in the middle of seemingly nowhere, have reverberations that ripple out and impact the lives of others, vibrate in the overall wave pattern of a particular time in history. The decision the Howland brothers and Billy made meant that they would walk up the wash toward their death. They were also walking into an intersection of rising tensions among cultures. The Mormons wanted their “Zion” for themselves, having been persecuted in Missouri and led by the visions of their bishops, willing to commit violence to keep other whites out. The Shivwits we’re trying to hold onto some piece of their ancestral home in the midst of an emerging onslaught of white settler immigration, newly invigorated by the connection of the first trans-continental railroad — the last spike having been driven into the ground that same year, 390 miles to the North at Promontory Summit. The railroad completion also made the Powell expedition possible as they needed a way to transport their boats from Chicago to the put-in at Green River. 

The Powell Expeditions (there were two, one in 1869 and another in 1871) and the finishing of the Union Pacific Line accelerated the closing of the physical and psychological gap between East and West. Eliminating the struggle of overland travel made it possible for the final wave of land hungry, opportunity hungry white settlers to fulfill the covenant of Manifest Destiny and complete a final assault on the natural order and way of life for Native people still living free in the West. 

The entire country and the political context surrounding the Powell expedition were also at a Separation Point — a moment in time when choices were made to stay the course of Manifest Destiny; piercing, mapping, claiming, fencing, extorting, committing violence and theft, or to diverge toward real democracy, freedom, dignity, and stewardship of the land. In most cases, the nation failed to take the higher road.

END OF PART 1

Separation Point: Part 2 - 1865-1877

By Benjie Howard

The Civil War had ended in 1865 freeing almost 4 million enslaved people, but Reconstruction and true equality for Black Americans was undermined by the Andrew Johnson administration after the murder of Abraham Lincoln. 

General Oliver Otis Howard, who like Major John Wesley Powell, had fought and lost an arm in the war, was appointed the head of the Freedman’s Bureau and tasked with making real the promise of full citizenship and opportunity for Black Americans. Howard was a believer in racial equality, founded the first integrated church in Washington, started Howard University, but he and the bureau were ultimately undermined by white supremacists and former Confederates in the House and Senate, who were working to not only replace slavery with subjugation by other means, but also to exact revenge on Black Southerners for having the audacity to see themselves as equal citizens. 

Howard was tasked by Johnson with traveling to South Carolina and telling freed people, who had been living, governing, and farming on their own during and after the war, that they would now be placed again under the thumb of their former slave owners. The trauma of this redesigned subjugation is unimaginable. It exemplifies possibly the most glaring moment when the country had a chance to live up to its own ideals and failed; when the hope of Reconstruction is shattered and replaced by an equally dark, and increasingly violent evil.

Howard, like Powell, found himself in the West during the decade after the war. Howard was appointed as the head of the Department of the Columbia overseeing Northwestern Indian reservations and negotiations with non-treaty tribes. The irony is that this man who had worked to secure rights and opportunities for freed people in the South was now tasked with taking them away from already free people in the West. 

On a special assignment to the Southwest, Howard negotiated a final surrender with the Chiricahua Apache war leader, Cochise, in the Dragoon Mountains of Arizona in 1872. He negotiated with leaders of the non-treaty Nez Perce in Walla Walla and again at Lapwei. He was moved by the logic and eloquence of the case made by Chief Joseph and his brother Ollokot for their legal right to remain in the Wallowa Valley, and live as they had for centuries. He failed, however, to honor the Nez Perce rights defined in their 1855 treaty to remain on their ancestral land. Clouded by his faith, he was unable to imagine that reservation life, with its farming and Christianity, would be a disastrous outcome for a free people. Joseph had explained this clearly many times before. 

In the end, negotiations descended into war and Howard violently pursued Joseph, Ollokot, Toohoolhoolzote, White Bird, Looking Glass and 750 people from four Nez Perce bands. The war was fought across Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana. After four months of heroism and brutal fighting in what would become one of the most studied tactical retreats in military history, Joseph surrendered in the Bears Paw Mountains just a few miles from the Canadian border in October of 1877. The Nez Perce were taken into captivity. These proud and wealthy horse and cattle owning people were forcibly removed to Kansas and then to Colville, WA, reduced to surviving on government handouts and migrant labor. More people died of disease than in the war itself. Howard spent much of the rest of his life trying to rationalize his decisions and the resulting violence committed against women, children and the elderly. Joseph never quit advocating for his peoples’ return to the Wallowa Valley. 

Powell also found himself in charge of the fate of Indians in the West. After the 1871 trip through the Grand Canyon, he was appointed Special Commissioner for the Office of Indian Affairs, which was tellingly at that time, under the U.S. Department of War. He was assigned to investigate the “conditions and wants” of the Indians of Utah, Nevada, Southern Idaho, Northern Arizona, and Southeastern California. He heard the same eloquent articulation of the rights of free people that Howard did, the same declarations of treaty obligations on hunting grounds, game, traditional ways of life, sovereignty and protection from white settlers. He did almost nothing to secure the promises made, leaving his post having granted none of the “wants,” and only worsening the already declining “conditions” for native people in the West. 

Powell and Howard saw themselves as “friends of the Indian,” but in truth, were anything but. Both men were comfortable in the hubris of their worldview — a particular North American mix of personal ambition, Christian arrogance, white supremacy and a steadfast belief in the mythology of bootstrap economics and Manifest Destiny. They were fundamentally unwilling to see the equal humanity of the people they were appointed to serve. Powell, as the first director of the Bureau of Ethnology, eventually came to see himself less as an advocate for the rights of Indians, and more as a chronicler of a dying race of people. He ends up categorizing native people in his own social Darwinist fantasy as ‘barbaric.’

This period after the Civil War and before the Western States had been fully defined by borders and land-use law, was a time when white men like Powell and Howard, men who were celebrated as freedom fighters, found themselves in positions of tremendous power and influence. They could have made decisions that would have helped secure the promises of democracy equally to Black American citizens. They could have honored treaties and acted on the well-established strategies for the preservation of traditional Native life articulated time and time again by people like Chief Joseph. Powell, at one point, argued for limited white settlement. He argued that the boundaries for western states might be more naturally delineated based on rivers and watersheds, instead of arbitrary dividing lines. This would have allowed for the possibility of native communities to live through and around white settlement. Instead, Powell becomes the director of the U.S. Geological Survey which served in supporting a land use design that pressures tribes from all sides, inviting almost unfettered white settlement, fencing, extraction and exploitation of resources — drawing arbitrary lines across the land, severing the natural movements of people, cutting them off from their ancestors, sustenance and trade.

The problem was not that these white men of means and influence were unable to envision a higher road because they were simply stuck in the ideology of their time in history. That kind of thinking assumes that they couldn’t have know better, when the truth is they absolutely did know better and chose not to act, not to advocate for a higher moral bar. When they did act, it was through neglect and violence, especially in the case of Oliver Otis Howard, who expresses a self-awareness of his own hypocrisy via defensiveness and some rare empathic reflection in his writings from 1877 until his death.

These guys knew better because the example and the articulation of a better democracy was all around them. Nearly a century before the first Powell expedition, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson studied and learned about North America’s original form of Democracy from the Haudenosaunee Delegation. They brought knowledge to ideas of matriarchal democratic governance the Constitutional Convention. Powell and Howard were well read. The ideas and advocacy from people like Frederick Douglas and Sojourner Truth were known to them. The Nation was aware of the ascendance of formerly enslaved people who gained control of the House and Senate in South Carolina during Reconstruction. More than 1,500 African Americans held political office across the South in the years after the Civil War. Hiram Revels, Benjamin S. Turner, Robert DeLarge, Jodiah Walls, Jefferson Long, Joseph Rainey and Robert B. Elliott were elected to U.S. Congress. Poor Black and White farmers had established economic collectives on former plantations in the South during and after the Civil War, providing a living example of small ‘d’ multiracial democratic life. Black women were fighting (often without the support of white suffragettes) for the protection of Black bodies and the right to vote. In Howard’s case, he not only read about these things — he was there, he witnessed it with his own eyes.

On his trip to Walla Walla just before the Nez Perce War, Ollokot had made clear to Howard and delegates from the Department of the Columbia, a superior way of living in the West, including democratic governance for Native people. By 1869, all of the Western tribes were aware of, and had experienced for generations, the devastation white settlement brought and the dehumanizing, violent complications and contradictions of American bureaucracy. Other Native leaders made similar pleas and provided similar alternative visions for sustainable organization and side-by-side democratic coexistence, and were similarly dismissed or ignored. 

In the South, by 1877, Confederates had resorted to mob-violence and intimidation to confront a Black voting majority, and Reconstruction was effectively killed by the Compromise of 1877.

Between April 9, 1865 (Lee’s Surrender at Appomattox) and October 5, 1877 (Chief Joseph’s Surrender at Bears Paw) the U.S. had an opportunity to take a higher path and realize what James Baldwin would later refer to as a multiracial democracy. It was an opportunity to close the gap between the rhetoric of Freedom, Justice, Equality, and peoples’ actual lived experience. It was an opportunity for white folks to heed the example of Black excellence in the South and Indigenous excellence in the West, and follow by example. We failed as a Nation to seize the moment. This failure, which was actually a triumph for Confederate power brokers, Christian hubris, and white supremacy, ushered in nearly100 years of subjugation, Jim Crow, lynch mobs, settler violence, land theft, negated treaty rights, boarding schools, and cultural genocide. 

END OF PART 2

Separation Point: Part 3 - 2021

By Benjie Howard

Now, 151 years after the Powell Expedition, we are at another separation point as a nation. We, again, have the opportunity to take a higher path toward the realization of multiracial democracy. And again, the right path is being illuminated by Black people and First Nations people. The modern movements to protect Black bodies, to protect Native women’s bodies, to protect and preserve sacred clean water for future generations, to protect the land, to protect dignity and expand opportunity for all people, have within them the promise of a higher form of democracy and a better way of living together on the land. These movements are adjacent and overlap with immigrant rights groups, #metoo, and environmental groups. These movements are bolstered by generations of courage and sacrifice, traditions, family connection and community. We have a choice, not unlike the one we had in 1869, to pay attention or not.

In my early years of running the Colorado River I had a particularly difficult 8 day trip with a particularly grumpy group. Someone had brought the Norwalk Virus onto the boat and passed it on to other folks before we were able to isolate it. People were sick, the river was muddy, the guides weren’t getting along, and it rained almost every day. I remember telling my river mentor, O.C. Dale, about the trip when we were back at the boathouse in Southern Utah. I remember him saying that in his 30 years of guiding, he had only experienced one or two bad trips. He said, “The Grand Canyon is a wonderful place -- a beautiful place, but it’s a hard place to get out of. You’re a mile down in a ditch and the river only goes one way.” He then mentioned the example of Billy Dunn, O.G. Howland, and Seneca Howland and their fateful hike out Separation Canyon in 1869. He said:

“… but sometimes, you just gotta quit the goddamn expedition.”

O.C.’s statement came back to me a couple weeks ago as I watched a rabid mob of White Nationalists, neo-Nazis, Q-Anon cult believers, and Trump supporters violently break in and ransack the Capitol Building in Washington D.C in an attempted coup. Images and video began to emerge in the news and on the web exposing the violence, the terror and the absurdity of the moment -- a discarded can of Axe body spray on the floor in the hall, a police officer smashed in a door, angry white guys chasing a lone Black Capitol officer up a flight of stairs, ridiculous paramilitary outfits and zip-cuffs, a woman holding a ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ flag, dead, trampled by her fellow insurrectionists. 

Two images stood out most. One was a white guy with a fake buffalo headdress and face paint; the image, a familiar thicket of white supremacy, false patriotism and noble savage worship. The second was another white guy forcing a giant Confederate flag into the center of American Democracy 166 years after Lee surrendered at Appomattox, a flag that had never before in our history desecrated that sacred hall. 

My first reaction was repulsion. My second was more of a realization that I was not in the least bit shocked. Everything that happened on January 6, 2021, felt so predictable and logical. The whole day -- the weapons, the incitement by the President, the past four years, the whole violent, ridiculous charade, the cultish fever, the mass delusion of it all fit so perfectly into the broader patchwork of who we’ve been and who we are now. 

It was white people – there were a few people of color, but this was really all about white people -- white people screaming and kicking and yelling. Underneath all the anger, you could sense the raw fear, fear that the one sacred promise made to white folks might get broken — the promise that even if they never get much from the American experiment, they will at least be guaranteed that one unearned caste position, that one rung up from Black and Native people. This is the fear Trump played into and the promise he fed his followers, articulated clearly by Steve Bannon shortly after the 2016 election when he said, “fear and hate got people to the poles.”

I recognize the insurrectionists. They come from towns and places like where I come from. I recognize the fear in the proud boys eyes when they parade through the town where I live. I am split in two when I witness the images from January 6 and experience the white supremacist show of force in my home town. 

On one hand, I’m afraid of them. This is the rational fear that these grown up adolescent boys with fantasies of using their oversized weapons will commit acts of terrorism against their own fellow citizens. These organized white supremacist terrorist groups are openly endorsed and incited by members of Congress and the former President of the United States. They’ve been threatening violence and committing murder openly for years with insufficient consequence. 

On the other hand, there is a deeper fear, more subconscious, less rational and harder to admit. This fear is the same fear they harbor – a fear I think lives in white people in general. It’s the fear that if Native and Black people take power, they will exact the same cruelty on us we have exacted on them for centuries. 

This is a fear that manifests on many levels. It keeps white people unreasonably vigilant, looking to imagined threats from below, and blinds us to the very real threats from above. We have been crafting this fear, masquerading it as anger, and manifesting it as violence for a very long time. 

In our collective consciousness and historical memory, as white people we have waited in the tree-line for runaway slaves. We fought and died for the South in a Civil War to protect an institution of brutality that offered most of us very little or nothing. We took the Ohio Valley. We took scalps for dimes. We raped women and burned down villages and made it to church on Sunday morning. We packed a picnic, loaded the kids in the car to go and watch a man hang from a tree. We took pieces of his body as souvenirs. We took pictures and sent them to relatives. We called the police when a Black family checked into their VRBO next door, We dressed up like idiots and stormed the Capitol Building intent on capturing Democrats, hanging the Vice President, killing people and overturning a legitimate democratic election because our President and Q told us to do it.

Maybe it’s time to stop. Maybe it’s time to break the shameful cycle. As O. c. said,  “The ditch we’re in is a mile deep and the river (seems to) only go in only one direction,” but maybe it’s time to “…hike out of this goddamn expedition.” 

The events of January 6 were nothing new, but they were a powerful visual and visceral reminder of how bad this trip is. The symbol of Billy Dunn and the Howland brothers hiking up the wide, dry wash of Separation Canyon is potent, not only because the men were willing to abandon the project of discovery, to extricate themselves from the adventure of exalting the political ambition of one man above them in stature, but also that they most likely died at the hands of Indigenous people. I am not implying that we need to die, but I am talking about a symbolic death, a spiritual death. Whiteness as an unearned sense of self-worth, a caste ordination -- white as normal has to die. The events of January 6 call us to acknowledge our illusions of supremacy, and as my father wrote in 2007, “…to disillusion ourselves from our own race, class, gender, and religion-based assumptions about what is true, worthy, and right.”

This symbolic and spiritual form of death for white people is scary as hell. It means disillusioning ourselves from the covenant of undeserved worth, the covenant of dominion over the land and people we have deemed lesser than us. 

However, the path up Separation Canyon is as clear and as easy to find as following the same old river we have been on forever. The way out of this canyon of oppression has been marked by generations of thoughtfulness, rage, generosity, creativity, and restraint on the part of our Black and Native brothers and sisters.

John Wesley Powell and Oliver Otis Howard failed to act upon the opportunities laid before them. They may have thought they had the excuse of being blinded by the limited mainframe of their time, but we, now, definitely do not have this excuse. This choice, this path may be terrifying to many, but Sojourner Truth generously gave us a significant nudge toward the righteous way 150 years ago when she said:

“You have been having our rights so long, that you think, like a slave-holder, that you own us. I know that it is hard for one who has held the reins for so long to give up; it cuts like a knife. It will feel all the better when it closes up again.”

I doubt many would disagree with me, whether conservatives or progressives, that we have a difficult journey of healing ahead.  We have inflicted the worst and deepest kinds of wounds. They are open, raw and infected right now. As a river guide, I’ve taken care of my fair share of open wounds in the wilderness over the years. They can heal and “close up again,” but not before we flush them out.