Writing History From the Records That Tried to Erase You

The history I write about was mostly written down by the people who wanted my ancestors gone. The Modoc War, the removals that came before it and after it, the long work of clearing the Klamath Basin for settlement — the paper trail those events left behind was made by Army officers, Indian agents, court reporters, and the ethnographers who arrived once the fighting was over to gather what remained. When I sit down to write a novel about Kintpuash, or about this country in the years before the war, I am working from an archive built by men whose job was to manage, remove, or bury the very people I am trying to reach. That fact sits at the center of the method. Before I can write toward my ancestors, I have to be honest about what the record actually is.

Reading for who held the pen

I read military correspondence, trial transcripts, and ethnographic collections as evidence of who was holding the pen before I read them as accounts of what happened. The first question I bring to any document is who made it, who they answered to, and what they needed it to accomplish. A field telegram from a general to his superiors is an argument for more men and more supply. A trial transcript is a proceeding that had settled its verdict before it opened. An ethnographer's notebook is a salvage operation, collecting what could be collected from people the government had already confined. Each of those things carries something true, and each of them was made to serve an end that had little to do with honoring the people on the page.

The record is neither neutral nor complete. Reading it as plain fact, the way a certain kind of history does, carries the original purpose forward and finishes the erasure a second time. So I read it for its slant, its silences, and its pressure, and I treat the omissions as evidence in their own right.

The one rule I kept with Kintpuash

When I wrote the Kintpuash novel, I made a single rule and held it through the whole book. I would not invent words for him. His voice comes to us already filtered. When he spoke in council or at his trial, a translator turned his Modoc into English, and an Army clerk wrote the English down, and the priorities of both men are sitting inside every line that survives. To put my own invented dialogue in his mouth on top of that would be to add a third layer of translation and then call the result his voice. I could not do that to him.

What I could do was build the world around him with care, follow the well-documented record of what he did and where he stood, and stay honest in the places where the record goes quiet. I wrote more about that discipline in the story behind the book, and of all the choices I made across these projects, it is the one I am most sure of. Silence about a man is more faithful than ventriloquism through the mouths of the people who hanged him.

Enos, and the report as a crime scene

The Renegade Enos works the same problem from another angle. It is set in 1846, on the Frémont expedition moving through this country in the years before the Modoc War, and its historical spine includes killings that the official reports handle in a few flat lines. Writing it, I began to think of the report itself as the crime scene. A report has no room for the full population of a fact. A sentence that reads a village was destroyed is standing in for real people with names and families and a morning that ended, and the form of the report is built so that none of that has to appear. The blankness is the finding. When a document compresses a massacre into a clause, the compression tells you exactly what the writer needed not to see.

My work in that novel is to move into the space the report leaves empty and give back some of the population the sentence deleted. That is a different act from correcting the record. The record will stand as it is. What I can do is write alongside it, in the room it refused to enter.

Going back before the paper

For the origin stories, the whole footing changes. The Spirals of Kemush goes back before the documented history entirely, to the Maklak accounts of how the world took its shapes, which were carried in the mouths of the people long before any clerk arrived to write a word down. There the authority sits with the tradition and the people who kept it alive, and the colonial archive has nothing to say. Going that far back is its own answer to the problem of the hostile record. If the paper trail begins at the point where the government started managing my ancestors, then part of the work is to stand upstream of that point, in a time the paper never reached, and to tell the story from there.

I have written elsewhere about researching from inside a tradition and living memory rather than across a distance, and the origin work is where that stance goes all the way down. It reaches a layer of the story that no report ever touched, because it belongs to a world the reporters came too late to file.

So the method comes down to one habit running under all four books. You read the record for what it cannot say. You notice the shape of the silence, the place where a life was flattened into a phrase, the voice that reaches you only through the men who confined it, and you take that shape as your assignment. Then you write toward the people the record was built to manage, the ones it was made to file and forget, and you try to give them back a little of the room the paper denied them. It will always be partial, because the archive saw to that. Partial and honest still carries further than complete and borrowed, and that is the work I mean to keep doing.

If you want to see where it leads, the books are gathered at hldelaney.com, and the record page for the Kintpuash novel puts the primary documents in front of you, so you can read them the way I do.