On the cross-cultural relationship and
experiences of one of 19th century America’s most inspiring figures.
There are many reasons why I
began this blog with a brief (now tragically lost) entry on W.E.B.
Du Bois, but I guess what it boiled down to was that as I began to
contemplate the concept of a Hall of American Inspriration, I knew that Du
Bois would be one of my first, unanimous inductees. Not because he was
perfect—he wasn’t, far from it—but because, I suppose, of a trifecta of core
details: he spent his life trying to do things he felt were significant; he
committed to each of those things with passion and seriousness and a desire to
do them as well as he could and appropriate levels of (and balance between)
ambition and humility; and he remained, even into his later years, very open to
the voices and perspectives of the people both with and for whom he was doing
them. Yup, those are pretty much the measuring sticks for induction into Ben’s Hall
of American Inspiration.
I’ve known that I felt that way
about Du Bois for a long time, at least since my sophomore year of college when
I read a lot by and about him. Some of the other people who would be on the
short list for inaugural induction I’ve known about for even longer, and would
come as no surprise to anybody who knows me (Bruce,
John
Sayles, Val Kilmer) (just kidding about the last one, I love the dude but
I’m afraid he falls short on that whole balance of ambition and humility item).
But another one is a very recent discovery who has rocketed toward the top of
the list: Ely Parker
(1828-1897). I learned about Parker while working on a couple page portion of my second book—the
opening couple pages of my chapter on the 19th century focus on Lewis
Henry Morgan, the pioneering anthropologist who worked extensively on the
Seneca Iroquois and was even adopted into the tribe; and Morgan, who is pretty
impressive and inspiring in his own right, admired the heck out of Parker and
helped him enter many of the worlds (engineering and work on the Erie Canal;
law and politics and the fight for the tribe’s homeland and sovereignty; the
military and service in the Union Army, through which he ended up drafting the
Confederacy’s surrender terms at Appomattox Court House) to which he
contributed his tireless work and passion from the late 1840s to the end of his
life.
Any one of those worlds and
efforts would be a good starting point for Hall of Inspiration consideration,
and the cumulative effect of them is pretty overwhelming. But as with Du Bois,
what I find particularly interesting and inspiring about Parker is something
less explicitly heroic or impressive, but even more (to my mind) American—his
complicated location amidst and between multiple communities and identities,
and his determination not to simplify that position nor reject one or another
of his identities and worlds. The name he was given when he was made a sachem
of the tribe translates to “Open Door,” and I think that’s very apt (as was
Morgan’s tribal name, which translates to “Bridging the Gap”—they were spot-on
with those names, the Seneca), both in his own life and in his role as a
mediating figure (anthropologically, politically, legally, militarily,
ideologically, you name it) between the tribe and the American government on
multiple levels. As was sometimes the case with Du Bois, Parker’s attempts at
mediating and unwillingness to simplify either his own identity or his
connections to both his ethnic and his national communities (such as in his
post-Civil War marriage to a white socialite) were, at times, met with
harsh criticism from more fully ethnically focused peers (and Parker himself
apparently questioned, toward the end of his life, some of the work he did as the
first Native Commissioner of Indian Affairs, a position he held in the
scandal-filled administration of his old general, Ulysses Grant). But despite
such specific critiques, I don’t think anyone familiar with Parker’s life and
work could question for a second his thoroughgoing commitment to improving the
lives of his fellow Americans, native and otherwise.
The last years
of Parker’s life were defined at least in part by losses (financial, on Wall
Street, and in other ways) and self-doubts (particularly about whether he had
been able to maintain as well as he had hoped that balance between the
different communities to which he dedicated his life). But they were also
defined by another dialogic and mutually beneficial relationship, one very much
parallel to his with Morgan—he was approached by a poet
named Harriet Maxwell Converse who had an abiding interest in his tribe,
and the two
developed a friendship that helped Parker reexamine his life and identity
and communicate them to an interested European American partner once more. If I
can help him continue to do the same, even a century after his death, maybe
I’ll have helped pass his inspiration along.
Next nominee tomorrow,
Ben
PS.
What do you think? Someone you’d nominate for the Hall?
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