Recollections of My Nonexistence

by Rebecca Solnit

There I sat in a straight chair spooling through the microfilm of the CIA—the Commission on Indian Affairs that preceded the Bureau of Indian Affairs—reading, printing out, and taking notes on the reports of field officers in Nevada in the 1860s and 1870s. The reels of microfilm were scored with long horizontal scratches, and the letters were all written in beautiful copperplate handwriting that was hard to decipher, but what they meant became increasingly clear. The neatness of the words unfurling in arcs and curves along hand-ruled pages suggested a kind of orderliness and propriety reaffirmed by the elaborate politeness in the salutations and the signoffs in these letters about genocide. About how to push the Native people out of the way as whites flooded west and subjugate them and let their resources be pillaged, how to contain them and give them some handouts as their homelands were so degraded that food sources vanished. We would like the people involved in monstrosity to be recognizably monstrous, but many of them are diligent, unquestioning, obedient adherents to the norms of their time, trained in what to feel and think and notice and what not to. The men who wrote these reports seemed like earnest bureaucrats, sometimes sympathetic to the plight of the people they were helping to exterminate, always convinced of their own decency. It is the innocence that constitutes the crime.