Lincoln Lessons In N.M.

When I saw the film recently, I was reminded of the layers of complication in our nation’s racial history. It’s not mentioned in “Lincoln,” but as “The Great Emancipator” was pushing for the 13th Amendment, the first step toward equality for African-Americans, here in New Mexico his playbook concerning a different group of nonwhites – Native Americans – ranged from bestowing symbols of sovereignty to the pueblos to pursuing what amounted to a holocaust against the Navajos.

I suppose it’s an accident of geography and years spent covering Indian country that when I think of Lincoln, slavery isn’t the first thing that comes to my mind. I think of Kit Carson and the Lincoln canes.

“Lincoln” brings us into the last weeks of the Lincoln White House, beginning in January 1865. A year and a half earlier, in the summer of 1863, Gen. James Carleton, in charge of the U.S. Army in New Mexico, ordered a campaign to drive the entire Navajo tribe from its homeland to an encampment at Bosque Redondo. When the Navajos did not go willingly, Carleton approved a “scorched earth” approach and Kit Carson and hundreds of troops began to systematically destroy the Navajo homeland of Canyon de Chelly, burning homes, killing livestock and burning crops and orchards.

History is always complicated. As the Navajos were broken and began to surrender and make the Long Walk to Bosque Redondo, Lincoln was moving to send a much different message to the more peaceable pueblo Indians.

The pueblos each possessed canes given to them in 1620 by the Crown of Spain to symbolize their sovereign status. When Mexico won independence from Spain in 1821, another set of canes was made. In the 1860s, even though it had been more than a decade since the United States took control of the New Mexico Territory, Michael Steck, the superintendent of Indian Affairs in New Mexico, decided that canes from the Lincoln administration should be added to tradition.

Lincoln approved the canes as symbols of the United States relationship with the pueblos in 1863, but they weren’t presented until months later in 1864.

“New Mexico,” a Western picture released in 1951, shows Lincoln riding onto a sandstone mesa to meet with “Chief Acoma” (who is played by an Italian-American actor from Brooklyn and who oddly addresses the president in Navajo) and present to him the cane.

It only happened that way in Hollywood. Lincoln didn’t actually come to New Mexico and deliver the canes himself. Steck did the honors at a ceremony at Santo Domingo Pueblo in 1864.

The ebony canes, silver-tipped and signed “A. Lincoln,” have been more than just symbols to pueblos ever since.

Roland Johnson, who was governor of Laguna Pueblo in 1995 when this photo was taken, holds the Laguna Pueblo “Lincoln cane,” an ebony staff given to each of the 19 pueblos as a representation of their sovereignty.
(RICHARD PIPES/JOURNAL)

They are cherished, brought out for ceremonial photos and feast day ceremonies and are felt to truly embody the independence of pueblo governments.

I remember when Roland Johnson, who was then the governor of Laguna Pueblo, showed me Laguna’s Lincoln cane back in the 1990s. It was in perfect condition, shiny and decorated with ribbons, and it seemed remarkable to me that it had been passed from man to man as tribal leadership changed over more than a century.

He held the cane with obvious affection and told me he kept it at his mother’s house.

When I talked to Johnson again recently, he told me that each governor was responsible for the safekeeping of the Lincoln cane and brought it out only when pueblo leadership changes and on the pueblo’s six feast days every year, when it and the Spanish and Mexican canes are placed near the likeness of the saint honored on each feast day.

“It’s something that’s considered to be sacred to us,” Johnson said.

How could Lincoln, who was staking his presidency on beginning a path to citizenship to African-Americans, initiate at the very same time a brutal attack on the Navajos and bestow on the pueblos a symbol of respect?

Lincoln was a supporter of the railroads and of territorial ambitions. The nomadic and marauding Navajos stood in the way of Anglo westward expansion, and the agrarian, settled pueblos didn’t. One Indian group was treated like friend and one like foe.

I thought Daniel Day Lewis’ performance in “Lincoln” was terrific, and I’ll bet the Oscar voters will agree. But the real star of the movie is dealmaking, compromise and expediency – in other words, the harsh realities of politics.

UpFront is a daily front-page news and opinion column. Comment directly to Leslie at 823-3914 or llinthicum@abqjournal.com. Go to www.abqjournal.com/letters/new to submit a letter to the editor.
— This article appeared on page A1 of the Albuquerque Journal