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The Brown Noser

Student in U.S. History Class Sure Hopes Native Americans Come Out on Top

Published Wednesday, December 7th, 2011

As the class covers a unit this week on mid-nineteenth century conflicts between colonists and Native Americans, HIST0460: "US History to 1864” student Garret Hughes ’15 said he is definitely rooting for the Native Americans.

“It’s a tall task, but they’re such a scrappy bunch, so optimistic and resourceful,” said Hughes. “I think they can pull it off. I think they’ve got the fight in ‘em.”

Conceding that the Native Americans had faced some setbacks in late eighteenth century, Hughes said he nevertheless believed they were due for a change in fortune.

“They’ve been down on their luck ever since the Treaty of Paris,” said Hughes. “But I’ve just got this weird feeling that the 1830s might be the decade when Black Hawk and Co. finally turn things around.”

Hughes, who plans on reading the textbook’s seventeenth chapter, “Indian Removal: 1830-1842,” this weekend, said he was excited to learn who or what the Native Americans will be removing during this twelve-year span and from where.

“Maybe it’s talking about them removing all the ambiguous clauses from treaties so U.S. presidents can’t keep interpreting those treaties extremely loosely with the thinly-veiled intention of continual westward expansion,” he said. “Man, I hope so.”

An essay prompt distributed to the class this week asked students to identify three reasons that Native Americans were unable to prevent U.S. colonists from gradually destroying their civilization, but Hughes objected, saying that he wouldn’t be so quick to jump to conclusions about what is and isn’t going to happen.

“Professor Merriman takes too pessimistic a view of things,” he said. “I say let’s all just read the chapter. We’ll see if honor and friendship don’t turn out to be the most powerful weapons of all.”

Professor of History Charles Merriman said he was worried about Hughes’ performance in the class, noting that on the midterm exam he had refused to discuss the modern relevance of historical events on the grounds that “none of that has even happened yet” and answered most short answer questions by writing “Go Chickasaw!” alongside detailed doodles of Native Americans riding rocket ships into the future.

Hughes said that, regardless of the outcome of the Native American situation, he was “so relieved” to learn about the 1861 invention of the machine gun, which he imagined would soon make combat so dangerous and undesirable that war would cease to exist.

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