After One Hundred Winters: In Search of Reconciliation on America's Stolen Lands by Margaret D. Jacobs (review)

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• After One Hundred Winters: In Search of Reconciliation on America's Stolen Lands by Margaret D. Jacobs
• Meredith Eliassen

Margaret D. Jacobs, After One Hundred Winters: In Search of Reconciliation on America's Stolen Lands. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2021. 343 pp. Hardcover, $29.95; e-book, $29.95.

Cause and effect . . . action and reaction . . . I write this review with the bias of one born and raised on the lands of Ramaytush Ohlone and the Coastal Miwok, knowing these tribes as ethnobotanists and knowledgeable land stewards. Collective history and trauma over stolen lands is lost with American historic memory, the process society uses in selecting what history gets preserved for posterity. I read an account of a Native American woman, over one hundred years old, written during the late 1850s. She lived near Mount Saint Helens, Washington, before the American Revolution. Published in The Hesperian (July 1859), the first successful women's literary magazine published by women west of the Rockies, the unnamed Indigenous woman was described in the most derogatory and dehumanizing terms. The major takeaway from the article, published before the Civil War about a Native American born before the Revolutionary War, was the gentle care that one tribe offered a displaced female elder, and that care was trivialized.

Margaret D. Jacobs, a historian of settlement in the American West, speaks of comparative colonization patterns in Canada and Australia (showing the United States was not alone in historic atrocities) in After One Hundred Years. She probes unyielding processes of surfacing traumatic events to reconcile them to release rancidness from collective past acts. Jacobs considers "what could be possible in the United States if we engaged in collective soul-searching and dared to remember and acknowledge" (16). Truth is necessary to dial back inaccurate elements of historic memory for reconciliation to take place. Jacobs positions herself as a white settler addressing white settlers: "It can no longer be acceptable to reap the advantages of settler colonialism without facing up to the damage it inflicted, and still inflicts on indigenous people" (10).

The structure of this book is reassuring and aspirational; it needs to be to ease readers into difficult long-term processes of reconciling polarized narratives, painful history, and the dominant settler narrative in American history and popular literature. "Part [End Page 276] One: Our Founding Crimes" describes historic atrocities, including an account from the son of mountain man William Bent and Owl Woman of the horrific 1864 Sand Creek Massacre "of children, their mothers, and their grandparents" (31–32).

In "Part 2: Promoting Reconciliation in Nineteenth Century America," readers learn about settler activism inspired by Native Americans presenting Indigenous points of view on the lecture circuit during the late-1870s and subsequent settler responses. Jacobs describes how Colorado-based Helen Hunt Jackson accepted a new life purpose after attending a lecture. Jackson compiled A Century of Dishonor (1881) for the US Congress, but they discounted her efforts. Jackson then pulled a "Harriot Beecher Stowe" move and wrote a sentimental bestselling novel, Ramona (1884), introducing a new narrative of Native Americans into popular culture.

Historic memory breaks down traumatic regional events by minimizing, substituting, displacing, and transporting Indigenous experiences into comfortable narratives found in Wild West Shows. "Part 3: Searching for Truth and Reconciliation in the Twenty-first Century" draws attention to the nasty legacy of boarding schools attempting to assimilate Native Americans into the dominant American society. After, working at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School (1879–1918), ironically situated on land formerly managed by the US War Department, writer Zitkala-Ša rejected white teachings and became an activist promoting the retention of Native American cultural identity.

Action depicted in this book confronts the process of historic memory, and then reverses that process. In "Part 4: A Groundswell for Reconciliation," Jacobs describes grassroots sensibilities of the global Truth and Reconciliation movement, dating to the 1970s, now taking root in the twenty-first century. The federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) enacted in 1990 legislated the repatriation and respectful disposition of sacred objects. Congress sought to initiate dialogues between Indigenous Americans and institutions holding sacred objects where the return and replanting of "seeds" on tribal land...