A park ranger, two Civil War re-enactors – complete with knapsacks and a muzzleloader – and a college professor carrying a large map stood poised at Steptoe Battlefield State Park earlier this month to make history come to life for Washington State University students.
Their course, United States–Indian Wars, was created by [history department faculty member] Ryan Booth this year, covering a little-studied era in Pacific Northwest history.
Booth, a member of the Upper Skagit Tribe, wrote his dissertation on U.S. Indian Scouts. He was looking at an Army manual, and a back section listed all the conflicts in which the United States was involved from the country ’s founding to about 1900.
The majority of the conflicts were with Native peoples.
“We teach so many classes, but almost over half the conflicts the United States was involved in were conflicts against Indigenous people. But we don’t teach a class on this,” Booth said.
So Booth filled the gap and created the class. But it wasn’t easy.
The course covers a broad period from European contact to 1924, when Indigenous people were given U.S. citizenship. Normally professors have their choice of textbooks and a multitude of resources to draw from. But Booth found little written about U.S. Indian wars in the region.
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