Black Sparrow (Black Hawk)
Hawk was born in 1767 in the Illinois town of Sauk, which was situated along the Rock River and is now known as Rock Island.
Black Hawk's Background
His father, Pyesa, was a warrior and a healer among the Sauk, who were his people. Black Hawk claimed that his grandfather, Nanamakee, was a great chief in his own right and that he was the first member of his tribe to invite white immigrants to his territory. According to his recollection, his grandfather with the guidance of the Great Spirit made him believe that at the end of four years he would meet a white man who would become his father. True to this belief, he met a white man from France and who was the son of the King of France and just like Nanamakee, he had been dreaming for four years that one day he would travel to a foreign land where its people had never seen a white man before (Hawk 2).
They immediately created a friendship, and with the help of Nanamakee, the white man was welcomed in their village because he brought with him goods of high value together with weapons like guns, powder, spears, and lances which he taught Black Hawk how to use them in times of war and peace. The French man continued to visit Saul village year after year bringing with him many goods, which he traded with the natives for furs and peltries until the French were driven away by the British. The Americans would later overpower the British.
Black Hawk as a Warrior
Black Hawk became a warrior when he was only fifteen after he made his first kill. This earned him a place among the braves, a rank given to a person who had managed to kill an enemy. It is during his warrior days that he gives a recollection of how the conflict between the Indians and the whites escalated. Reading through his autobiography one concludes that the conflict arose because the Americans used cunning and treacherous ways to acquire land that belonged to the Indians.
In the treaty of 1804, a young Indian had killed a white settler and had been arrested and imprisoned at St. Louis. As per their tradition, the Indians sent four people to negotiate for the release of the young Indian. However, what was supposed to be a negotiation for a release ended up being the treaty of 1804. According to Black Hawk, the emissaries sent were given wine and in their drunkenness signed the treaty, which ceded to the United States all of their countries including their village and cornfields. This was in bad faith since the individuals sent were not there to represent the whole country, and were not supposed to sign the treaty without the knowledge or authority of the tribes or nation (Schwieder 12). This trickery to ratify the treaty was repeated in 1816 after the war, where Black Hawk signed not knowing by doing so he was consenting to give away his village.
Broken Treaties and Dishonesty
Throughout his autobiography, Black Hawk narrates of treaties after treaties that the Americans did not honor even after meeting their leaders (Flavin 12). Historians who have explored the root of this conflict agree with Black Hawk that the treaty in itself was a sham from the beginning and even its ratification later was not genuine since the leaders who signed it, including Black Hawk, did not know its contents.
The tragedy of the Black war as portrayed by the narrators of the conquest of Indian cultures cannot be portrayed as unavoidable. The Indians were tricked to give up their land where they grew their food and buried their dead. Their holy grounds were destroyed. Unlike other chiefs like Keokuk, who had agreed to move his village, Black Hawk decided not to follow suit but stay and fight. This situation could have been avoided if the Americans had been honest with the Indians from the beginning. It is one thing to give up land knowingly than giving it up unknowingly thus the cruelty meted towards the white settlers. Most narrators of the White-Indian conflict only speak of Indian cruelty. However, from the autobiography of Black Hawk, cruelty was on both ways. For instance, he narrates how an innocent boy was brutally killed while hunting near one of the American forts even after giving up his gun as a sign of peace. These small events, and they are many, that are left out contradicts the narrations of Anglo-centric representation of the White-Indian conflict.
The Realities of the Conflict
The life of Black Hawk rejects the Anglo-Centric representation of the conflict. While they represent the Americans as honest of good intentions towards the Indians, Black Hawk represented them as dishonest and had wrong intentions from the start. It is only that it took them too long to know their real plans and by then, they had lost all of their lands.
References
Hawk, Black. “AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MA-KA-TAI-ME-SHE-KIA-KIAK, OR BLACK HAWK,.” 1833. Retrieved from: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/7097/7097-h/7097-h.htm
Schwieder, Dorothy. Iowa: The Middle Land. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1996.
Flavin, Francis. “Native Americans And American History.”, 2017. Retrieved from: https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/resedu/native_americans.pdf
