The Bear River Massacre and the Making of History (review)

What may be the largest single episode of genocide in American history took place in present-day southeastern Idaho when Union-affiliated troops from California attacked a Northwestern Shoshone band in January 1863, raping, mutilating, and slaughtering upward of 280 Native people along the Bear River. Why, Kass Fleisher asks in this provocative book, has this tragic episode received so little attention from historians and the public? "I will posit that the fault lies with how we make, and how we read, history itself," Fleisher argues (xi). What follows is a postmodernist critique of the ways historians frame questions, interpret sources, and construct narratives. Fleisher eschews traditional citation methods, adhering to the view that formal citations unfairly enhance the "presumed accuracy of one's presentation" (xiv). Fleisher's lively prose makes this book a pleasurable read, even for a western historian (Fleisher is hard on us).

The first section of the book, "What (We Think) Happened," provides the only available synthesis of secondary perspectives on the Bear River Massacre available in print. The strength of the book, however, lies in the section "The Making of History." Fleisher describes how the Bear River story "came to her" while she was teaching at Idaho State University in Pocatello, located sixty miles from the massacre site. Fleisher then recounts how she sought out stories about the massacre in novels, guidebooks, museums, historical markers, and academic histories. She includes detailed accounts of her interviews with academic historian Brigham Madsen; Kathy Griffin, a local resident leading the opposition against the creation of a National Park Service site memorializing the massacre; Allie Hansen, a local expert on the incident; Mae Timbimboo Parry, a Northwestern Shoshone tribal elder; and Curtis Warner, a younger tribal member. The reader is a companion on this research trip, not the recipient of what Fleisher refers to as "passive" knowledge.

The book ends with "Ten Digressions on What's Wrong," a laundry list of the gender and racial biases that limit the validity of historical accounts and have camouflaged the Bear River Massacre. Coherence suffers in this passage, in part due to Fleisher's rejection of the linear narrative style and her conviction that there should be no tidy wrap-up, no "final say" (301), for such finality allows the reader to forget what has been done (and thus repeat it). Fleisher's dominant point is that the history of an incident like the Bear River Massacre is complicated by the complex interplay of race and gender. White women like herself—"HELPers" (261)—have long told the story of other victims and in the process have "spread sexist divisions of labor to native cultures" (261), reinforced sexism in their own cultures, and used the dispossession of others to enfranchise themselves. "When white women HELP nonwhites," Fleisher contends, "we cement our status as representatives of whiteness" (279). To offset the inevitable influence of the biases of written history, Fleisher contends, we need a more inclusive history with a new style: "The literary forms history has borrowed from 'the novel' are poor enactments of who we are and where our responsibilities lie. We need a different kind of New History" (312). Fleisher avoids drawing concrete conclusions, but the book's narrative does present a conclusion of sorts: bad history is dangerous history, but forgetting the past is even more dangerous, especially for those who have been victimized by patriarchy. The "collective action leading from the cultural acceptance of the story of the Bear River Massacre and Rape," Fleisher contends, "could lead to . . . redemption" (317).

In examining the complexity of the structure of historical narratives, the book loses sight of its original question. Fleisher expresses her anti-Mormon, antiwestern biases, but she does not fully address their importance in understanding why the Bear River Massacre has not received the attention of the academic community. As Fleisher points out, the only attention that the event has received has been from westerners. At the heart...