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.