Book review: The War On Illahee

"Survivors of the Cayuse Indian War" 

Pacific Northwest pioneers with their decorations, June 1902

 Historian Marc James Carpenter’s 2025 book, The War on Illahee: Genocide, Complicity, and Cover-Ups in the Pioneer Northwest, focuses primarily on pioneer conflicts with various native Indian tribes in the Pacific Northwest in the 1840s through the 1850s. The height of the conflict was in 1855-1856. Violence continued sporadically into the 1860s. So far, scholarly analysis of Carpenter’s book seems to be positive. Historians of the Pacific Northwest, Indigenous history, and settler colonialism generally see this book as empirically solid and historically significant. The C-Span series American History TV broadcast an hour lecture by Carpenter talking about his book. Link

A 2020 article Carpenter wrote for the Oregon Historical Quarterly, V. 121(2), pp. 156-185, Pioneer Problems: “Wanton Murder”, Indian War Veterans, and Oregon’s Violent History, gives a nice overview of the whole picture his research is focused on.

In Illahee, Carpenter has meticulously documented (85 pages of detailed footnotes) a horror story of indescribable savagery and sadness. This book is almost as ghastly as Conrad’s fictional tale (based on real events) of human brutality in his 1899 book, Heart of Darkness, about Belgian colonialism in the Congo Free State.

Carpenter spent years researching for this book. To some extent this book challenges some of current spun history about the conflicts. Carpenter found a significant source of about untold events and new information about distorted events in pioneer sources who disagreed among themselves about how to spin what they had done. They wanted to portray murdering white pioneers as heroic innocent people struggling to survive in the face of implacable hostility from native American Indians.

About Illahee, the homeland

Carpenter intentionally tells the history of conflict and death as a widespread war composed of many small to moderate sized conflicts, some of which were given individual names that describe single conflict events as a “war”. Illahee does not refer to any Indian tribe or polity. It is a term that was generally understood among most white pioneers and Northwest Indian tribes to mean “homeland”. Indian tribes and white pioneers believed they were fighting for their rightful homelands. The Indians believed that they owned the land because they had always lived there. By contrast, the pioneers believed it was their land due to either God’s divine will, or because white domination and Indian elimination was inevitable. The dominant pioneer belief was that the Indians were entitled to nothing, including their physical existence. They were subhuman, and therefore owned no land and had no inviolate rights whatsoever.

The few whites who wanted to coexist peacefully with the Indians were seen at best as complicit with Indians, but more likely seen as traitors against the US. Despite their hostility toward co-existence believers, the pioneers in power stopped just short of imprisoning or killing them. But that is what they wanted to do.

Indian treaties: An illusion

Carpenter is blunt that Indian treaties were a shame right from the get go. The dominant pioneer intent was to use treaties to incrementally exterminate all Indians and take their land. In 1884, a former gold miner and soldier, Francis Henry, then a judge, told a gathering of pioneers that the Pacific Northwest Indian wars were:

“but the inevitable continuation of the old story of the colonization and occupation of America by the whites, which has been enacted times without number from the shores of the Atlantic to the Pacific, during the last four hundred years. [It was] simply one of the three incidents of that inevitable destiny which has already subjected the whole continent to the use of civilized man, namely: First, the insidious invasion of the pioneer; second, a treaty by the government with the Indians; and third, their forcible expulsion from that territory to convenient reservations, to be taken from them by the same process at some future time.”

Worse than that, the idea that there was “treaty by the government” is an exaggeration. Local thugs, officials and US military went off on their own, slaughtered or captured Indians and then “negotiated” a treaty that the US government never ratified. Treaty negotiations were routinely fortified by the persuasive tactic of threatening the surviving Indians with total annihilation if they did not agree to whatever terms white people imposed. Death threats were routine, explicit and blunt.

White pioneer war tactics

As one might expect, white brutality was ghastly. Captured Indians were sometimes murdered, with the excuse they were trying to escape. Many or most of those killings were just in cold blood with no reason. When Indians retaliated or tried to defend themselves from unprovoked attack, whites routinely spun that as innocent white people being viciously attacked for no reason. That was fairly common. It was used to justify horrific slaughter of Indians by pioneers.

In their attacks on Indians, pioneers almost never checked to see if the people they were attacking and killing were among those alleged to have attacked or threatened pioneers. The pioneers saw all Indians as a one undifferentiated group. There was routine killings of members of a tribe with no connections to any pioneer threat or conflict. All the Indians looked alike and they were treated alike. “Wrong place, wrong time” turned out to be a lethal reality for a lot of murdered Indians.

In 1855, volunteer pioneer militias in Oregon rampaged aimlessly across the land, attacking nearly all groups of Indian they happened to come across. Although they were largely incompetent in their war effort, they still posed an existential threat to Indian communities. On Dec. 5, 1855, Walla Walla Indian leader and diplomat Yellow Bird (Peo-Peo-Mox-Mox) carrying a truce flag approached pioneers to negotiate a treaty. He was hoping to save what was left of his people from annihilation. The pioneers ignored the truce signal and captured him and killed his treaty party. That touched off running battles. That led the pioneers to murder Yellow Bird, scalp him and cut is body into pieces for trophies. The murder was excused because his killers claimed he was trying to escape. Official accounts from the nominal commander, James Kelly, simply ignored the fact that Yellow Bird came in peace trying to negotiate a treaty.

Yellow Bird (Pew pew mas mas [sic])

Conclusion

Carpenter’s book goes on and on like this for 284 pages. Trigger warning: This book is not for the faint of heart.

A final point. Some of the pioneer leaders of the carnage went on to be state governors, US Senators and other ranking officials. The histories of Oregon and Washington are loaded with people who were, by modern standards, war criminals, virulent racists or both. Some were stone cold killers who won their influence purely on the basis of their savagery. The history they told is very different from the history Carpenter tells. Who is a person to believe?

The Unfinished Review (Short Story)

A short story — a departure from the usual fare. This one describes a future secular religion built around a dead author, discovered through the last document in its canon: an unfinished review.

 

The Unfinished Review

---

Editorial Preface

(from The Friendian Reader, 2154 edition)

The essay that closes this volume has attained a curious sanctity. Commissioned in 2078 as a mere review of a new biography of Kim Adversary, it somehow became the last substantial document in the entire tradition. Its author, known only as "the Reviewer" in the literature, produced what many still regard as the clearest-eyed survey of the Jacob Friend phenomenon — before stopping, mid-sentence, never to return to the subject.

Subsequent scholarship has, inevitably, produced competing interpretations of that cutoff. The Metaphysicals read it as a moment of kenosis. The Textualists call it a printer's error. Certain Silentist communities maintain, with serene confidence, that the Reviewer spent the summer of 2079 living incognito among them, baiting hooks and refusing to discuss literature after dinner. He has never confirmed nor denied the claim. In keeping with the spirit of the piece itself, we present it here unfinished, exactly as it first appeared.

---

The Unfinished Review

by Anonymous (published in The New Atlantic Review, 2078)

Any honest account of the Jacob Friend phenomenon must begin with an admission: it is ridiculous. A talented writer of surreal short stories dies at thirty. He leaves behind instructions that turn his own funeral into the world's most highbrow parlor game. Grieving friends — published authors, members of his monthly workshop called The Rites — are asked to bring their best unfinished manuscripts and rewrite them with the corpse inserted as protagonist. "See what shakes out of the fiction and falls into the real world," Jacob had always said. They took him at his word.

One friend arrived with a hard-boiled detective story and left with Jacob as a brooding, chain-smoking private eye who solves murders by dreaming them. Another produced a forty-page prose poem in which Jacob appears as a sentient fog that subtly ruins marriages. A third turned in a time-travel romance where the dead author keeps trying to warn his younger self not to die so inconveniently. The mourners read these new versions aloud in the funeral home while sipping terrible coffee. Some laughed through tears. Others felt quietly manipulated. All of them were already playing the game.

Then the diary surfaced.

If the funeral instructions had the light touch of a thought experiment, the diary was something sharper. Jacob had spent his final weeks ranking his friends with the serene confidence of a man who would not be around to defend his judgments. The entries have an unnerving quality — intimate, precise, probabilistic. "I know Sal won't believe any of this," he writes in one passage. "Jane will. I wish I could be a fly on the wall when that particular collision happens." Reading it, one has the sensation of watching a chess master annotate a game that hasn't been played yet. The board is real. The players are real. Only the master is gone.

Kim was singled out repeatedly as the wisest, the one who "understands best," and — crucially — the one most likely to resist the whole enterprise. The trap was elegant. By predicting the resistance, Jacob turned it into prophecy. Kim, reading this, must have felt the specific helplessness of someone who sees the mechanism perfectly and cannot stop it anyway, because seeing it is part of the mechanism.

I confess more than a passing sympathy for Kim. I have read his four major exegeses with something that occasionally felt uncomfortably close to recognition — the quality of argument of a man who knows he is right and cannot make it matter, who writes another hundred pages because stopping would feel like surrender, who somewhere along the way stopped trying to close the book and started needing to be the one who closed it. His early work — Against Prophecy, The Manufactured Messiah — has the clean fury of genuine moral clarity. His later volumes have a different texture: rooms with closed windows. The argument is still correct. The correctness no longer seems to be the point.

For decades Kim fought back with the only weapons he had: biography after biography, exegesis after exegesis, furious lectures insisting that the books should be closed and ordinary grief allowed to proceed. Each new volume became scripture. Each denunciation of guruship was greeted with murmurs of "How wise… just like the old masters said." There is a recorded exchange — preserved, with relish, in the Collected Testimonies — in which a young disciple quotes Kim's own words back at him as proof of his enlightenment, while Kim sits across the table visibly deciding whether to flip it. He did not flip it. He published another book instead. The man spent half a century trying to kill a religion and became one of its minor saints. The Kimites still quote his outburst at the funeral — "Do you want to be ghostwritten? Close the book. Live your real lives." — with the same reverence Catholics reserve for the Sermon on the Mount. The irony is so complete it feels almost tender.

The factions that followed were as predictable as they were human. The Metaphysicals wanted a prophet who could soothe the ache of existence and found one in the fog, the detective, and the diary combined. The Purists wanted a sophisticated secular faith built around imagination and meaning, and policed its boundaries with impressive ferocity in cafés that smelled of absinthe and disappointment. The Textualists just wanted to keep writing decent stories and grew increasingly annoyed that no one would let them.

And then there were the Silent. They are harder to write about than the others, and I notice I have been putting them off. They did what Kim preached and what he could not do: they put the books down, tended gardens, argued about sports, and grieved a flawed friend instead of a savior. They left no record, which is why the exegetes have spent seventy years trying to determine who they were and what they believed. The answer is probably that they believed ordinary things, and that this is not a satisfying answer, and that their silence knew it wouldn't be. There is something in the quality of their absence that resists the ironic register. I will not pretend otherwise.

One begins to feel the gravitational pull even while describing it all. Jacob was a manipulative genius; or Jacob was a playful innocent whose friends over-interpreted him; or the whole thing reveals something profound about—

[Here the manuscript ends.]

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Editor's Note

(2154)

In the decades after publication, the Reviewer politely declined hundreds of requests to complete the essay, explain the cutoff, or offer further commentary on the Friendian traditions. He continued writing regularly — film criticism, cultural essays, the occasional short piece on gardening — until his death in 2091. Neighbors described him as sociable, mildly ironic, and fond of long walks. He was seen dating, attending local film festivals, and fishing the northern rivers. When asked about the famous unfinished review, he is reported to have shrugged and said, "Nobody controls how these things land."

Certain Silentist communities still insist he spent the summer of 2079 with them. They describe a man who baited hooks competently, listened more than he spoke, and once laughed out loud when someone tried to draw him into theological discussion. Whether true or not, the story has become part of the tradition. Like so much else in this history, it refuses to stay merely factual.

Assessing Trump/MAGA damage: Gutting American science

Broad damage overview

So far, Trump and MAGA elites and their policies (TM) has caused massive damage to all or nearly all major aspects of American government, democracy, civil liberties, rule of law (especially federal courts, and the FBI and DoJ), economy, education, finance, religion, society, the public interest including public health, and science. Multiple independent lines of evidence, including impeachment records, legal scholarship, civil‑rights reporting, and institutional analyses, all show Trump repeatedly choosing actions that attack democracy, undermine honest, competent the civil service, centralize power, and sacrifice American interests for personal or factional gain. Based on available evidence it is reasonable to firmly believe TM are intentionally working to cripple America and its capacity to sustain its power and position in the world. Link, link, link, link, link, link

TM really do act as if they work for Putin and whoever pays to play, e.g., convicted criminal who buy pardons from Trump. Link, link, link, link

Gutting American science: The connection with the profit motive

A constant target of TM and their predecessors has been inconvenient science. In the early decades, prominent targets for neutering included climate and public health science. Research in both of those areas threatened big corporations and their profits. In response, the corporations struck back with decades of massive, highly successful misinformation propaganda campaigns to block regulations and accountability for the deaths and damages they caused. Examples include:

• For decades, the American cigarette industry successfully staved off science-based regulations, restrictions and social responsibility using lies, propaganda, and state and federal politicians they purchased. Millions of people were conned into the false belief that cigarettes did not cause cancer. Link, link

• For decades, the American oil industry staved off science-based environmental regulations using lies, propaganda, and state and federal politicians they purchased. By the early 1960s, the US oil industry knew about global warming their role in creating greenhouse gas and other pollution problems. Under TM, essentially all federal environmental laws are either gone or no longer enforced. Big oil has convincingly won its propaganda war against us and the public interest. Link, link, link, link, link

Corporate oil's propaganda & lies

to deceive and confuse the public  

Source

• For decades, the American chemical and plastics industry staved off science-based environmental regulations using lies, propaganda, and state and federal politicians they purchased. The industry invented the plastics "recycling" and other myths in the 1970s. Those propaganda fantasies conned tens of millions of people into falsely believing that (1) plastics were going to be recycled and thus not a significant source of pollution, and (2) it was all on the consumer to not pollute their waste plastic. Link, link, link

Recycling is and always has been a lie 

~95% of plastic waste is not recycled

it's in our bodies, landfills, oceans, lakes and 

rivers, & most everywhere else

Gutting American science: What TM have done to us

A current Scientific American article, U.S. science is in chaos How did we get here?, summarizes the gutting of American science, the repairable damage will take years, maybe a decade or two. The main point is simple. The decades-long government funding of independent science has ended. In the past, policymakers and politicians relied on that science to make policy. That has ended. US science is in full-blown chaos. We can no  longer rely on new research findings to help solve critical problems and guide new policy.

Before TM's corrupt wrecking ball smashed it all to smithereens, ~40% of U.S. research and development funding supported scientific research. Before TM poisoned and corrupted the process, politicians generally accepted the concept that evidence should guide policy, even when inconvenient. Of course, when the science was too inconvenient affected industries would buy politicians copious amounts of "free speech", also called things like "campaign contributions", "gratuities", payoffs, bribes, etc. 

Now under the ghastly corruption and colossal stupidity of TM politics, corrupt MAGA politics overrides evidence‑based policy. The public interest and most average people lose. America can no longer even try to deal with climate risks, pandemics, and technological change that require competent, honest policy to deal with. American scientists are demoralized. Some are leaving for countries that still value independent research.

Thanks to Trump and his MAGA elites, we're royally fucked. But, Putin loves it. So do TM.

Corrupt, irrational MAGA politics protects polluters at public interest expense

 Some MAGA states are passing laws that ban lawsuits against major polluters. As usual for MAGA politics, the reasoning is based completely on lies and crackpottery. For example, in Louisiana the MAGA legislature passed a bill and LA’s MAGA governor signed it. The new law, the “Louisiana Energy Protection Act”, closes state courts to future nearly all climate‑related damages suits against oil and gas companies. The statute bars civil lawsuits in Louisiana state courts seeking personal injury, property loss, or economic damages linked to greenhouse gas emissions and global warming. As is usual for irrational MAGA policy, the law protects lawsuits for environmental permit violations, emission caps violations, and pending coastal‑erosion lawsuits brought by parishes that are slowly becoming uninhabitable due to sea level rise. MAGA politicians considers lawsuits for those damages to not be “frivolous”.

Pro-pollution laws like this ban lawsuits for whole or in part outside a state that caused global warming with impacts that result in injury, death, property damage, or economic loss. In LA, the new law blocks claims for damages based on Louisiana emissions.

Top recover damages, the LA law requires the injured party to prove in court that in‑state pollution caused damages by clear and convincing evidence. For pollution damage lawsuits, that is a very hard standard to meet, usually impossible. That insurmountable evidence burden requires plaintiffs to (1) prove a violation of an enforceable state or federal emissions limit or permit, (2) prove the defendant’s emissions caused more than 50% of the alleged damages, (3) identify the specific greenhouse gas causing the harm, and (4) prove the plaintiff did not directly or indirectly contribute to any emissions that caused the damage. On essence, MAGA pro-pollution corruption has banned civil lawsuits.

Think about item #4, plaintiff didn’t contribute to any damaging emissions. Isn’t that impossible to prove? People claiming pollution damages do things like (a) breathing air and exhaling CO2 (CO2 is a major greenhouse gas that causes damages, (b) driving a gas powered car that emits CO2, or (3) getting on a airplane that emits CO2 when it flies. Presumably, the law does not extend to that absurd level. MAGA politicians and judges are free to treat the #4 evidence requirement as a feature, not a bug. They can just read the evidence requirement aggressively to choke off climate damages suits while not pushing the #4 evidence requirement into total absurdity. That is the beauty, or horror, of ambiguity in laws.

In other words, the LA law means whatever MAGA elites, including contributors to MAGA politicians, say it means. What does that translate into in practice? Obviously, it means that plaintiffs in LA suing for global warming damages will never be able to win in court because the court is free to say the plaintiff hasn’t met the required evidence standards.

And do not look to the MAGA federal government to step in and protect damaged people. Trump and his MAGA elites in power have completely gutted and neutered all federal environmental laws and protections. There is no protection for the public interest left in our corrupted federal government.

Sources: Link, link, link