Category Archives: language

by Joel | 26 July 2023 · 6:18 am

The Danish Empire!

Here’s a book I’ve long been waiting for, after coming across accounts of Danish colonies in Africa and India, Danish intercession with the Barbary pirates, and Denmark’s more familiar (and longer-lasting) Atlantic colonies, let alone the once dominant role of Danes in the Baltic region. This is a new and comprehensive book, so I’ll make an effort not to quote as many passages as I would do if it had been on the market for a longer time.

From The Rise and Fall of the Danish Empire, by Michael Bregnsbo and Kurt Villads Jensen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), Kindle pp. 13-14, 16-17:

The Danish Empire: Rise and Fall. This sounds as a pretentious title for the small kingdom of Denmark, but it is inspired by English historian Edward Gibbon’s grande opus, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Released in 1776–88, it has since become a classic, not only serving as an unattainable standard for later historians due to its vivid narrative style, but also as a landmark work. It became an essential source for later generations in their understanding of the Middle Ages as a dark period and became a manifest for enlightened thought and rationality in the face of superstition and sensations.

We have chosen to title this book The Danish Empire: Rise and Fall—to stress the volatile and shifting nature of the political unit that throughout history has been called Denmark. Today, one rarely hears much about the topic of Denmark’s having been a great and politically important power. Denmark is mostly understood as a small country content with its current modest political situation. It is certainly true that Denmark is a country that has become smaller over time. However, modern descriptions of Danish history have cultivated the idea that Denmark has always been a miniscule country and has always been threatened by its powerful southern neighbor, as evident in the traditional general histories of Denmark (Christensen 1977–92; Olsen 1988–91). Images of Denmark as a large country, a substantial political power, something that may even be called an empire, lie beyond the tradition of modern Danish history. This is what we would like to attempt to challenge, and therefore we have emphasized the phraseology of rise and fall in the title.

…

Many Danish historians of the twentieth century tacitly assume that Denmark has always had the same size and political influence that it has today. If asked directly they would agree that it is an incorrect assumption. Yet history continues to be written accordingly: addressing how the territories that lie within the current borders of Denmark have changed over time. The border duchies of Schleswig and Holstein are mentioned due to the political problems they have always caused. Scania in southern Sweden is seldom referred to as a Danish territory as it was during the Middle Ages; other former Danish regions as Halland and Blekinge in Sweden are rarely addressed at all, not to mention the Baltic islands of Gotland, Øsel (Saaremaa), Rügen, and the country of Estonia. The Danish Empire actually stretched from the North Cape in northern Norway to Hamburg in Germany for over three hundred years, roughly equivalent to the distance between Hamburg and Sicily. This book hopes to recognize, include, and allocate these territories within their accurate place time and in history, such as England [Danelaw] in the Viking Period, Norway from the time of the Kalmar Union between 1397–1814, Greenland, the Faroe Islands, the West Indies, and Colonies in Africa [Danish Gold Coast] and India. While Denmark’s history should be acknowledged in its collective entirety, it should also remain in its European context. Denmark was at times a relatively large power in Europe, and functioned as a direct threat, particularly to many of the smaller Germanic principalities of the south: it wasn’t until later in history that these power dynamics became inverted.

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by Joel | 17 July 2023 · 5:44 am

GDR’s Crisis of Legitimacy

From Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment, by Stephen Kotkin (Modern Library Chronicles Series Book 32; Random House, 2009), Kindle pp. 70-74:

Born in 1949 following mass rapes by the Soviet army and almost toppled in its fourth year of existence by mass popular revolt, the German Democratic Republic, a rump abutting another German state, lasted four decades. That was not quite as long as Wilhelmine Germany (1870-1918) but longer than the Weimar Republic (1918-33) or the Third Reich (1933–45). Over time, the GDR’s Leninist technocratic image—as a “Red Prussia”—developed a wide following both inside and outside the Soviet bloc. In 1980, the World Bank judged East Germany to be tenth highest in the world in per capita income, above Great Britain. But in the period after World War II, particularly from the 1970s, the formula of Communist-party monopoly and state planning failed to maintain competitive economies, including in the supposed great success, the GDR, as Jeffrey Kopstein has pointed out. East Germany’s infamous State Security Service (Stasi) managed to produce files on 6 million people, more than one third of the country’s total population (16.4 million). But the political police had no answer for a prosperous West Germany, which, in the 1950s, took off on a multidecade economic miracle to become, after the United States and Japan, the world’s third most powerful economy.

East Germany’s populace, no less than the regime, understood that comparisons with West Germany were the basis of the GDR’s legitimacy. Either socialism was superior to capitalism, or it had no reason for being. This logic—starkly evident in the case of the two Germanys—held for the entire bloc. And the bloc being a bloc, the fate of each national Communist regime depended on the fate of the others. When it announced its second Five-Year Plan (1956–60), the GDR committed itself to overtaking West Germany in per capita consumption of key food products and consumer goods by 1961. Rash? Announced or not, some form of a consumer competition was inescapable. In 1961, however, rather than outconsuming West Germans, East Germans were completely enclosed: on top of the already existing 857-mile inner German-German border, a new wire fence was hastily erected some 90 miles across Berlin. The next year, a second, inner fence went up, creating a no-man’s-land, “the death strip,” patrolled by self-firing machine guns triggered by movement. These barriers were soon concretized. Still, East Germans could continue to make direct comparisons with life in West Germany from their own living rooms—just by watching West German television. In Albania the populace could watch Italian TV and in Estonia Finnish TV—rare windows. But in the GDR, Western TV was accessible in the inhabitants’ native tongue (except in a poor-reception area around Dresden, dubbed “the valley of the clueless”). North Koreans have never had anything like that vis-à-vis South Korea. West German TV offered East Germans a “nightly emigration”—and a frustrating tease.

Samizdat (self-publication) in the GDR was virtually unknown, and antisocialist dissidents were relatively few, a circumstance often attributed to the supposed lack of a strong sense of nation and nationalism. (As we shall see in the next chapter, Communist Romania is said to have lacked dissent because of a too-powerful sense of nation.) In fact, even when they were critical, intellectuals in East Germany exhibited a high degree of loyalty. The East German novelist Christa Wolf (born Christa Ihlenfeld in 1929), who after a brief stint as an informer fell under extended Stasi surveillance, openly criticized the East German leadership, but like most East German intellectuals, she hoped not to undo but to revivify the antifascist, anticapitalist cause. There was no anomaly in an intelligentsia committed to the socialist cause. True, many East German intellectuals were apolitical. And repression was omnipresent. “We were always afraid of being denounced,” recalled one person critical of the regime. But for most, West German consumerism was not their idea of better socialism. Even the hideous Wall was accepted by some of them. “I took it to be an evil, but a necessary evil for the existence of the GDR,” said one socialist intellectual, adding that “whoever wants to tear down the Wall must also be clear that he is at the same time tearing down the basis of the existence of the GDR.” Those deemed antisocialist could apply to leave or be expelled, blunting opposition domestically. As for intellectuals who refused to leave, in many cases they also refused to campaign for freedom of movement (human rights)—if leaving was betrayal, why defend the right to betrayal?

This dynamic—leave or stay—turned out to be the crucial mobilizer in 1989, when the GDR was suddenly struck by mass demonstrations, to near-universal shock, in Leipzig. As throngs of East Germans—eligible for automatic citizenship upon arrival in West Germany—clamored for exit, others massed to voice the sentiment “We’re staying.” The period from the time this agitation erupted, in autumn 1989, to the time the regime disappeared was astonishingly brief. Before a momentous peaceful demonstration on October 9 in Leipzig, the country counted fewer than 100,000 total protesters at all events, but the total would rise to 4 million by November 9, when the Berlin Wall was breached. And yet, this was mass mobilization without mass organization. The best-known organized social movement outside the regime, New Forum, was announced only in late September 1989. Though loyalist, New Forum was immediately declared “hostile to the state” and illegal by the Stasi and found no counterpart inside the ruling party—such as the reform Communists in Hungary—to negotiate with and to bolster its fledgling organization. New Forum’s activists had no offices or telephones. Its name was sometimes evoked at marches, but it was overwhelmed by events. “Social movements in the GDR evolved largely spontaneously,” argues the scholar Steven Pfaff, adding that “detestable, poorly performing authoritarian states are commonplace; it is revolutions that are unusual.” When does popular acquiescence to dictatorship vanish? When does the uncivil society lose its nerve?

The Communist establishment could not emigrate: it had no exit.

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by Joel | 2 July 2023 · 5:11 am

Japanese Homefront Mood, Jan. 1944

From Asian Armageddon, 1944–45, by Peter Harmsen (War in the Far East, Book 2; Casemate, 2020), Kindle pp. 39-41:

Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku, the architect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, had made only limited promises before committing to the offensive against US and Western possessions in the Asia Pacific in late 1941 and early 1942. He would be able to deliver one victory after the other during the first months of the war while the enemy was still reeling from the initial shock of being attacked, he said, but once that early advantage had been exhausted, the going would become much harder. Now, two years into the war, Yamamoto was dead, shot down by American pilots over the South Pacific, and the US counteroffensive had picked up, pushing back at the fringes of Hirohito’s vast empire.

At the dawn of the new year 1944, therefore, many of the emperor’s subjects were concerned about the future, and some put their bewildered thoughts on paper. “An important year has come. The days are coming that will decide history,” wrote liberal journalist Kiyosawa Kiyoshi in his diary on January 1. There was a pervasive sense that things might not stay the same. In every home in Japan when breakfast was served, he noted, people asked the same question: “Will we really be able to eat in this way next year also?” Yabe Teiji, a political science professor at the Tokyo Imperial University, was more straightforward in his diary entry: “The coming year will be Japan’s year of disaster.”

The Tokyo Metropolitan Police was keenly interested in the public mood and remarked in a secret report that although some clung on to a vague sense of optimism about the war, a note of caution was clearly discernible. “There are some who are frankly amazed at the quick and mighty strategy of the enemy and fear the threat of invasion of the mainland, some who desire the announcement of the truth, and some who fear for the safety of our fleet,” the anonymous author of the report wrote, adding that people who held these views were not few in number. There were other categories of opinion, all reflecting the fact that any early enthusiasm put on display at the start of the war was long gone: “Those who go to the extreme criticize military strategy, exaggerate the announcement of our losses, and consider the war to have already been decided. Also, those who are totally unconcerned with the war situation and show a trend toward defeat and war-weariness, just longing for speedy end of war, have been seen here and there.”

By early 1944, even the most optimistic among the 73 million Japanese could no longer fool themselves into believing that life went on as before. In February, the government issued “Outline of Decisive War Emergency Measures,” closing high-end entertainment and causing life in the big cities to take on an even drabber appearance overnight. The new rules were expanded to the entire empire with immediate effect, as Admiral Ugaki Matome found out when he stayed over in Japanese-occupied Shanghai and was entertained one evening by Japan’s governor general. “Banquets, restaurants, and geishas have been banned, as in Japan proper, but the governor general still seemed as full of life as before,” Ugaki wrote in his diary. The kimono, the colorful traditional Japanese dress, was also largely gone from the streets of Japan. As one observer noted, “to be a woman, basically, is not patriotic.”

As the war economy gradually caused an increasing share of available resources to be allocated to the military, getting enough to eat was suddenly a daily struggle for average Japanese families. There were lines of usually about a hundred people outside Tokyo food shops, and on any given day thousands of residents would leave the capital to buy supplies directly from farmers. The hard times were felt particularly keenly by the Westerners who had been caught inside the borders of the Japanese Empire when war broke out. In January, Red Cross delegate H. C. Angst visited a camp for civilian internees set up inside a Catholic monastery near Yokohama and subsequently described the poor conditions that the inmates lived under: “Space is insufficient and overcrowded. Some sleeping on tables. Light sufficient. No heating.” The anti-foreign mood showed up in other ways as well. Baseball, a favorite sport for the Japanese in the prewar years, was allowed to continue but was being cleansed of English-sounding vocabulary. Sutoraiki, an attempt to reproduce the word “strike” in Japanese, was replaced with the much more indigenous-sounding honkyū.

Actually, sutoraiki is a labor term; sutoraiku is the baseball term. I haven’t been able to find confirmation for honkyū, but it was probably 本球 ‘true/real/original ball’. Umpires had to call strikes with よし yoshi ‘good’ and balls with ダメ dame ‘not good’. Strikes were counted 一本, 二本 ippon, nihon, with the counter for long straight things, while balls were counted 一つ, 二つ hitotsu, futatsu, with generic numbers.

Two more nativized terms for balls and strikes, according to Japanese Wikipedia, were 悪球 akkyū ‘bad ball’ and 正球 seikyū ‘correct ball’, and the phrase 悪球打ち akkyū uchi ‘bad ball hitting’ is still used to describe batters who rarely walk because they swing at balls out of the strike zone. Anglicized terms for the same type of batter are バッドボール・ヒッター baddobōru hittā and フリー・スウィンガー furī suingā.

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by Joel | 1 July 2023 · 9:13 am

Earliest Japanese Ideophones?

From Nihongo Pera Pera!, by Susan Millington (Tuttle, 1993), p. 14:

The Kojiki, which appeared in 712, and the Man’yōshū, also compiled in the 8th century, were written in a mixture of styles, but are considered works of pure Japanese literature. References to the use of onomatopoeia in these two works are the earliest that I have found: sawa sawa (Kojiki), to describe a rustling sound; hodoro hodoro (Man’yōshū), for falling snow; moyuru (Kojiki), for rain falling; koro koro (Kojiki), for raking over salt; and bishi bishi (Man’yōshū), for a sniffy nose. Sawa sawa still exists today, with its original meaning. Hodoro hodoro is no longer used but has become hadare or hadara, referring to specks or patches. Moyuru is no longer in common use but survives as moya moya, meaning foggy or misty, and is related to moeru, to burn or glow. Koro koro, now meaning to roll over and over, is widely used. Bishi bishi no longer refers to a sniffling nose but instead means to be strict or rigid, or to snap. The ancient phrase seems to have been transformed into the modern day bisho bisho, meaning dripping wet.

The most comprehensive online guide to Japanese ideophones that I’ve found is here: https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/japanese-onomatopoeia/

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by Joel | 15 May 2023 · 11:45 am

Ambonese Musicians in Paducah, KY

The Far Outliers are near the beginning of a major road trip up the center of the U.S. Last night we arrived in Paducah, KY, from Murfreesboro, TN, taking the scenic route through the Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area. My retired librarian brother, who was born in Japan but has long worked and retired in Paducah, took us to Paducah Beer Werks, which was hosting a Bluegrass Jam with two sets of musicians, Wheelhouse Rousters, a local troupe, and Kaihulu from Ambon, Indonesia. I fondly remembered their hometown from an academic junket in 1990, which I memorialized in one of my earliest blogposts. The two bands connected at a UNESCO Creative City event in South Korea, and Kaihulu came to connect Paducah with Ambon, each now designated a UNESCO Creative City. We had the chance to chat with some of the musicians, who were astounded to meet someone who had visited their hometown and remembered Pattimura University and other places in Ambon. A small world story.

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by Joel | 8 May 2023 · 5:46 am

Early French Métissage in Louisiana

From Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America, by Pekka Hämäläinen (Liveright, 2022), Kindle pp. 226-228:

The Natchez war had shown, with graphic immediacy, what disregard for Indigenous sovereignty, traditions, and needs could bring: cataclysmic violence, massive loss of life and property, the utter collapse of colonial institutions. The violence discouraged French investments in the colony and impeded France’s empire-building in the lower Mississippi Valley. It also taught the colonists how little they could do without Native approval. In Louisiana, Indigenous customs prevailed, turning a colonial space into a hybrid one. Choctaw, Illini, Quapaw, and Apalachee societies were all intact, and they expected the French to comply with their traditions. The consequences for Louisiana were far-reaching. Métissage—cultural mixing—became the norm, shaping the most intimate aspects of the colonists’ lives: sexual practices, gender roles, and child-rearing. The French in Louisiana came to realize that to survive in North America, newcomers needed to embrace its Indigenous inhabitants and convince them to become allies. The French had been doing so elsewhere, and by the early eighteenth century, all the European empires had grasped, if not necessarily accepted, that reality. They had also learned that the most effective way of building alliances was generosity and trade, which could turn enemies into kin.

In the wake of the war and loss, French officers set out to appease the Indians with gifts and goods, creating a robust frontier exchange economy that stabilized French relations with the Indians. A new and improved French-Indian alliance centered on the Choctaw Confederacy, which, even after losing hundreds of its members to South Carolina slave raiders, numbered more than twelve thousand people and could mobilize five thousand soldiers. The Choctaws commanded more than twenty-five thousand square miles, overshadowing the neighboring Quapaws, Alabamas, Chickasaws, Taensas, Tunicas, Natchez, and Houmas. Their own slave-catching and -trading had garnered for the Choctaws a sizable arsenal of guns, turning them into a domineering military power in the lands between the lower Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers. They also welcomed a regular flow of English trading parties from the east. Weakened Native groups on Choctaw borderlands found shelter in their fortified towns, and the French asked the Choctaws to help restore order to Louisiana. The Choctaws punished the Chickasaws and Natchez, whose raiding operations destabilized the colony and disrupted trade; the Choctaws wanted an economically viable French Louisiana that could continue to supply them with guns, powder, lead, tools, and other goods.

The Choctaws were fighting for themselves. As much as the French officials wanted and needed to claim suzerainty over them, they could not deny that the Choctaws were the masters of the lower Mississippi Valley. When traders from the newly established colony of Georgia visited, the Choctaws welcomed them and their goods—to the dread and embarrassment of French officials. The Choctaw Confederacy had become Louisiana’s last best hope—a humiliating role reversal that the commandant of the New Orleans troops was forced to accept. He called the confederacy “the bulwark and security” of the colony and admitted that “none of those who have come to the country fail to be aware of the impossibility of keeping a country as vast as the one we occupy with the few troops and colonists who are there and who would soon be obliged to depart from it if the Choctaws refused us their assistance and decided to act against us.”

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by Joel | 6 May 2023 · 4:27 pm

New France Expands, 1700-1750

From Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America, by Pekka Hämäläinen (Liveright, 2022), Kindle pp. 214-215:

In the winter of 1704, a multiethnic party of two hundred French, Mohawk, Wyandot, and Wabanaki soldiers attacked the town of Deerfield in Massachusetts. The soldiers entered the town from three separate points before dawn, surprising the sleeping inhabitants. The attackers knew exactly what to do. They captured Eunice Mather Williams; her husband, pastor John Williams; and their five children—confident that they could expect a healthy ransom for their redemption. Overall, forty-one English colonists were killed, and more than a hundred women, men, and children were taken captive. The Williams’s daughter Eunice, seven years old, spent seven years in captivity, her story becoming a sensation in the English colonies and New France. She was adopted into a Mohawk family, converted to Catholicism, married a Mohawk man, had three children, lost her English, and became known as Kanenstenhawi. She did not want to be redeemed. She died in Kahnawake, near the Saint Lawrence Valley, at the age of eighty-five.

The attack on Deerfield announced the revival of French confidence and expansionism in North America. Emerging from the shadow of the Five Nations, French colonists, traders, and officials slowly picked up where they had been forced to stop in the 1680s. The outbreak of the War of Spanish Succession—which involved France, Spain, and Great Britain—instilled further urgency in French maneuvers, and the early decades of the new century saw the Saint Lawrence Valley quickly become safer, richer, and more crowded: its population of fifteen thousand in 1700 would more than triple by 1750. Fantasies of a New Jerusalem drew in colonists and soldiers from France, and a continuous strip of riverfront farms stretched for more than two hundred miles on both sides of the river. Native peoples from the interior trekked with their goods to Montreal, Trois-Rivières, and Quebec, and many of them were willing to fight with the French to keep the English at bay.

New France was becoming a realm of hard colonial power. The most obvious manifestation of its aggressive stance toward Native Americans was Indian slavery. The French began purchasing captives, mostly children, from Odawas, Ojibwes, Potawatomis, Miamis, Meskwakis [aka Fox], and Wyandots [aka Huron] in the interior. Code Noir, established to regulate slavery in France’s Caribbean colonies, was now applied in New France. Soon the colony had hundreds of Indian slaves working as millers, field hands, dock loaders, launderers, and domestics. Some were forced to labor as ship crewmen, and Indians with more skills were assigned to shops and factories. The French called the enslaved Indians Panis, a label of obscure origins that connoted loss of freedom, as well as slave status, that erased all ethnic identities. Some female slaves became concubines, and some married French men. Almost all were subjected to intense religious indoctrination and struggled under the demands made by their owners. The average slave entering the colony was just ten years old and died by the age of eighteen.

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by Joel | 4 May 2023 · 2:31 pm

Pueblo Revolt and Aftermath

From Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America, by Pekka Hämäläinen (Liveright, 2022), Kindle pp. 185-186, 188-189:

Like the wars waged by the Powhatans and Wampanoags in the East, the 1680 Pueblo insurrection was at once an act of self-preservation, cultural revitalization, and spatial reimagination. Attesting to strong intergroup attachments that transcended Spanish-imposed boundaries, many Apaches and Navajos fought alongside the Pueblos. The allied Indians killed nearly four hundred colonists and twenty-one friars, and they routed a thousand Spanish soldiers, sending them to El Paso, the colony’s southernmost town. The leaders of the rebellion set out to restore the physical and sacral landscape of the pre-Spanish era. Churches were to be demolished, their bells were to be shattered, and images of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary were to be destroyed. Alien crops were to be torched, and corn and beans planted in their stead. Not one Spanish word would violate the restored Indigenous soundscape. Even horses began to vanish from the Rio Grande valley. Repulsed by horses’ tendency to trample cornfields and by their elevated power, which symbolized Spanish might, the Pueblos embarked on vigorous horse trade with the outlying nomads and pastoralists. It had to be as though Spanish colonialism had never happened.

DESPITE THE PUEBLOS’ DESIRE to erase Spanish colonialism from their memory, it had, of course, happened, and its legacy proved sticky. As frail as Spanish dominance over the Pueblo world had been, Spanish colonists had profoundly altered Indigenous life in the Rio Grande valley. To reinstate the old cultural order—to turn back time—the Pueblo leaders issued sweeping decrees that bound all Pueblos. In order to purge Spanish influences, the Native leaders claimed all-encompassing dominion over the Pueblo world. But a single Pueblo world was a foreign fiction. Before the Spanish invasion, the Pueblos had lived in more than 150 communities that shared a general cultural outlook but possessed no central governing structures. When the colonial edifice dissolved, local identities resurfaced. In the 1680s, the Spanish built a buffer region of presidios and missions to keep European rivals away from the abandoned colony. They called it Tejas, a Spanish spelling of the Caddo word taysha, meaning “friend.”

Four generations of colonial presence had left a deep imprint on Pueblo life, and many had grown to see certain Spanish imports as natural. Renouncing the Franciscans and colonists roused little controversy; pigs, sheep, woolen textiles, metal tools, and spouses taken in matrimony were another matter. When droughts spoiled harvests, the already delicate Pueblo coalition began to disintegrate. Civic leaders, medicine men, and soldiers competed for authority within communities that soon descended into civil wars. Towns fought over diminishing resources and raided one another for grain. The Apaches, incensed by the collapse of trade relations, took what they needed through force.

While the Pueblo people struggled with lingering colonial legacies, the Spanish struggled with the legacy of Pueblo resistance. The Pueblo uprising had proved contagious, triggering a series of rebellions against Spanish rule from Coahuila to Sonora and Nueva Vizcaya. Janos, Sumas, Conchos, Tobosos, Julimes, and Pimas attacked colonists and destroyed missions, towns, and farms, rolling back Spanish colonialism across a vast area. The Spanish seemed paralyzed in the face of this explosion of Indigenous hatred and power. Colonial officials sentenced four hundred Native rebels to ten years of forced labor.

…

Vargas extinguished the second rebellion with a focused war of attrition, but the rebellion proved crucial for the future prospects of the Pueblo people. Vargas reinstated colonial rule in New Mexico, but it was not the colonial rule of old. Traumatized and exhausted by the latest rebellion, the Spanish accepted smaller landholdings than before, and they replaced the slavery-like encomienda labor system with the repartimiento system, under which the amount of required work was regulated. They appointed a public defender to protect the Pueblos against Spanish abuse, and Franciscans turned a blind eye to the previously banned Pueblo ceremonies—a concession that was made easier by the Pueblos’ token acceptance of Catholic sacraments. The colony had shrunk conspicuously.

The administrative apparatus of the Spanish colonial state remained in place, but the social distance between the Spanish and the Pueblos narrowed through intermarriages, quasi-kinship institutions such as compadrazgo—co-godparenthood—and multiethnic towns. The Spanish and the Pueblos remained distinct people separated by sharp disparities in power and privilege, but unwavering Pueblo resistance had forced the Spanish to enter a shared world where the colonists were allowed to reestablish only a drastically reduced version of their grandiose imperial project. Like Juan de Oñate a century earlier, Vargas had tried to create a bounded colonial state with carefully regulated commercial channels, and like his predecessors, he had encountered an Indigenous world that refused to bend to a rigid imperial logic. The Pueblo resistance proved contagious, igniting a series of rebellions that spread across northern New Spain. The terrified governor of Nueva Vizcaya insisted that all captured Indian rebels should be sentenced to ten years of enslavement.

The Pueblo Revolt—also known as the Great Southwestern Rebellion for its virulence and scale—changed the history of the region irrevocably. It cut the Spanish colonists down to size and emboldened the Indians—not just the Pueblos but also many other Indigenous nations—to challenge Spain’s imperial claims. During the decade after the rebellion, numerous uprisings and wars broke out between the Spanish and the Indians: Tarahumaras, Conchos, Pimas, Sobaipuris, Sumas, Jocomes, Janos, Opatas, Apaches, and many others fought to contain, punish, and kill the Spanish, and keep their territories inviolate. Their systematic mobile guerrilla war had confined the Spanish to their northwestern frontier.

By shaking up ancient traditions and practices, the war changed the Pueblo world from within by giving Pueblo women new avenues to express their religious ideas and spirituality; they began to explore Catholicism more deeply and to question ancient traditions. The most important geopolitical change came when the Pueblos started selling Spanish horses to neighboring nomads in the plains and the surrounding mountains. The horse trade ignited a technological revolution that reconfigured several Indigenous worlds within a generation. An ancient trade corridor in the Rocky Mountains became a conduit for the spread of horses far to the north. The Shoshones acquired horses in about 1690 and, emboldened by their suddenly supercharged capacity to move about, hunt, and fight, they pushed into the bison-rich northern plains. Others even farther away traced the flow of horses back to the source in the upper Rio Grande valley. In 1706 the residents of Taos Pueblo in the northeastern corner of New Mexico reported the arrival of strange people from the north. These newcomers, Nu–mu–nu–u–—“the people”—were rumored to be preparing an attack on the town. The Comanches had entered the Spanish consciousness as a shadowy frontier menace.

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by Joel | 28 April 2023 · 6:13 am

Angaur: Crucible of Pacific Arts

In researching the origins of modern Palauan music and dance, Jim Geselbracht has assembled many perspectives on the phosphate mine at Angaur, which seems to have served as a crucible where Pacific Islanders from Micronesia, Okinawa, Taiwan, and other parts of the Japanese Empire came together and learned from each other during their few precious leisure hours.

As I discussed in an earlier post, foreign workers who were brought to Palau to mine phosphate brought with them their music and dance, which in turn had a significant influence on the development of modern Palauan music. This, I believe, was the “big bang” event in Palauan music, where it changed from chants with lyrics that were handed down from the gods (chelid) to modern, composed music (beches el chelitakl). Let’s first explore the history of the mining operation in Angaur.

According to a USGS report [1]:

Mining of phosphate on Angaur begin in 1909 during German administration of the island and continued from 1914 to 1944 under Japanese administration. Mechanized methods were introduced just before the start of World War II. From June 1946 to June 1947 mining was carried out by an American contractor under the control of the US Navy. Mining was resumed on June 30, 1949, by a Japanese company, the Phosphate Mining Co., Ltd. (Rinko Kaihatsu Kaisha).

The labor for the mining operation consisted of Palauan, Carolinian, Chamorran, Filipino and Chinese workers. In a book on Micronesian development [2], David Hanlon describes the “troubled history” of phosphate mining on Angaur. I’ve extracted a portion that describes the labor force used to mine the phosphate:

Begun in February 1909, the mining of phosphate and the environmental havoc it wreaked had quickly turned Angaur into the “hottest place in the Pacific.” The construction of a railroad, drying plant, sawmill, loading dock, warehouses, thirty-two European residences and eleven workers’ dormitories further blighted a landscape already ravaged by the open-pit technique used to extract phosphate. German overseers and mechanics drank excessively, fought each other, and openly defied their company supervisors. The abuse of Carolinian and Chinese laborers brought to mine the island’s phosphate included low wages, frequent payment in the form of near worthless coupons rather than currency, forced purchases with these devalued coupons of overpriced goods in the mining company’s store, physical punishment and extended working hours. By 1911, the situation had deteriorated so badly that German colonial officials elsewhere in the Carolines were refusing to assist in the recruitment of islander labor for Angaur.

Fr. Francis Hezel extends the story in his book Strangers in Their Own Land [4]:

As the German Phosphate Company made preparations to begin mining operations, the island population of 150 … were moved to a small reservation in the southeast corner of the island. At first company officials intended to rely on Chinese labor for the Angaur mines, and they brought in eighty workers from Hong Kong. The Chinese proved as troublesome to the German overseers on Angaur as they were on Nauru. Dissatisfied with their working conditions and benefits, and insulted by the floggings they received, they killed a German employee and called a general strike during the first year of operations. To provide “more complaisant material for the company than the Chinese”, the German government began recruiting Carolinians. With the assistance of chiefs from Yap and its outer islands, a hundred men were sent to Angaur on a one-year labor contract; a second recruiting voyage produced another two hundred laborers, eighty of them from Palau and the rest from Yap.

Fr. Hezel continues:

In the evenings, during their few hours of leisure, they often entertained themselves by singing and dancing, thus passing on the stick dances, German marching dances and other stylized art forms that have come to be widespread in Micronesia today.

These dances are what are known as matamatong in Palau today. By 1911, the initial 300 Carolinian laborers had doubled in size [4]:

the island now contained a polycultural community of 600: a few dozen Germans, … Chinese, some Chamorros and Filipinos, and the five hundred Carolinians from various islands who worked there.

During Japanese time, the mining labor importation practices continued. According to Hanlon [2]:

Japan’s later civilian colonial government assumed supervision of all phosphate mining on Angaur in 1927 and relied upon labor from the Marianas, Palau, Chuuk and Yap. These island laborers were recruited by village chiefs or headmen who received a small bonus or fee as compensation for the loss of manpower from traditional activities. Most of these laborers were drafted against their will for a year of “totally exhausting work.”

Hezel [4] describes the mix of workers on Angaur during Japanese times as a continuation of German times:

the 350 islanders at work in the mines … generally served year-long contracts and lived under slightly improved conditions … The mines had always drawn heavily on Yapese, who had the reputation of being the hardest workers in the territory, but their numbers fell off from 200 to 50 during the 1920s because of the serious population decline on the island. Chuukese were called on to provide a proportionately larger share of the labor force, at first under threat of imprisonment, but in time half-voluntarily as the allure of a salary grew among the people.

Virginia Luka describes the impact of the phophate-mining workers in Angaur in a paper written at the Southern Oregon University [3]. In it she cited the observations of Pedro [5]:

Foreign workers from places such as Guam, Saipan, Yap, Chuuk, Pohnpei, Japan and China introduced new plants, animals, food, dancing, singing and lifestyles. In Angaur they learned how to bake bread, sew, western dance and how to play some musical instruments such as the guitar, harmonica and accordion from the Saipanese.

Based on these accounts, the 300 to 600 Carolinian workers far out-numbered the local Angaur community of 150. The Palauans observing and participating in the Carolinian dances likely led to the adoption of the matamatong as a Palauan dance. Junko Konishi [dissertation in English available here] states that the word matamatong likely derives from Pohnpei [7]:

The term [matamatong] seems to have originated from the progressive form of the Pohnepeian word mwadong (mwadomwadong) meaning “to play, to take recreation” and dancing.

In fact, Junko relates that over 400 Pohnpeans were exiled to Palau in 1911 after the uprising in Sokehs and over 100 Pohnpean males were sent to Angaur to work in the mines [8].

However, Konishi developed a detailed explanation [8] of how the Marshall Islands were actually the birthplace of the marching dance, with diffusion of the dance in the early 1900s from the Marshalls to the Eastern Caroline Islands (including Pohnpei) and Nauru. She states that:

Yapese and Palauan elders recount that Chuukese spread the marching dance in Angaur.

The matamatong dance was also picked up by Japanese settlers in Micronesia. During the 2004 Festival of Pacific Arts, held in Palau, a Japanese dance group performed [6]:

… a dance style called Nanyo-Odori (South Seas Dance) [links go to Youtube videos of Bonin Islanders, the latter with subtitles in Japanese, with katakana for foreign words], presented as an adaption of the songs and dances from the Pacific brought back to the Ogasawaran islands of Japan by Japanese people who had sailed around the Pacific for trading … [and] lived in Micronesia during the period of Japanese occupation and control … The dance is an adaption of a Micronesian dance called the Matamatong … The dance, which was accompanied by songs in a mixture of Palauan, Japanese and English, is said to have been created in about 1914 at the end of the German era in Micronesia and continues to be popularly danced today.

A fascinating exchange [at the Festival of Pacific Arts] ensued between Palauans … and the Japanese performers, in which they compared the dance steps of the Nanyo-Odori with those of the Matamatong (as well as the words of the accompanying songs, some of which the Japanese did not understand). A Palauan musician … Roland Tangelbad, noted that the Japanese still danced the old way, with a German soldier’s style of marching step (goose step) whereas the Palauans had since adapted theirs to the marching step of the US soldiers.

The impact of the Eastern Caroline Islanders among the Palauans went beyond the matamatong dance step [8]:

The Chuukese, who had a tradition of love songs, created many dances for love songs in Angaur during the Japanese colonial period. And those songs, composed with lyrics in Japanese (which was the common language at that time), became popular among different island groups.

I witnessed both marching dances (call maas in Yapese) and stick dances during my fieldwork in Yap in the fall of 1974. One feature that defined both as “modern” was that men and women performed together in the same dance, and not separately as they did in traditional dances.

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Filed under China, economics, Germany, industry, Japan, labor, language, Micronesia, migration, military, music, Philippines, Taiwan

by Joel | 26 April 2023 · 5:32 am

Palau’s Mandolin King

Pacific Island string bands are far better known for their guitar and ukulele artists than for their mandolin virtuosos, but Palau seems to have had a strong mandolin legacy. On his Palauan music blog, Jim Geselbracht, an accomplished mandolin player himself, digs into the history of the local composers. Here’s part of a post that summarizes an obituary of a mandolin composer, written by Jackson Henry based on his interviews with Neterio Henry in his later years, published in Tia Belau about 2011.

Neterio Henry was born on the island of Angaur, Palau on April 18, 1939. During the outbreak of WWII, Neterio and half of his family escaped the aerial bombings of Angaur by taking a boat to Ngaraard. Neterio remembers enjoying the tranquility of living in Ngaraard and swimming in the river with the Bells brothers. The other half of his family had to endure the hardship of hiding in caves and having nothing to eat for months during the height of the battle of Angaur.

At the age of 12, shortly after World War II, Neterio returned to Angaur and met Mr. Isii, a Japanese musician employed at the Pomeroy phosphate mining company . Mr. Isii taught Neterio the basics of the 6-string guitar. However, Neterio soon acquired a love for the Mandolin from his brother, Tony Henry. Tony gave Neterio his first Mandolin, and with the basic knowledge playing guitar, Neterio soon mastered the Mandolin. Neterio loved the sweet sounds of the Mandolin, so he practiced his instrument daily until his fingers bled. He often went to bed with his Mandolin. He soon acquired a name from his peers, “King of the Mandolin”.

Neterio’s talent was admired by his friends and fellow Angaurians. His audience boasted that Neterio had the skill of making his Mandolin strings weep like a bird. In the late 1950s, Neterio and his cousins formed what is now considered the first organized musical group in Palau named – ABC Band. ABC stood for Angaur Boys Club. All of their instruments were donated by the Pomeroy Mining Company. Neterio and his brother Michael Henry, composers Anaclaytus Faustino, Carlos Salii, harmonica player, Kyoshi Ngirangol, leader guitarist, Jose Itetsu, rhythm guitarist Santos Edward and female vocalist Talya Santiago performed right into Palau’s music history.

Kebtot el Bai

In the late 1950s, ABC Band had their first public concert during the Island Fair held at Keptot el Bai in Koror. Their syncopated island sounds took Palau by the storm. ABC became the biggest talk of the town and their musical exploits soon spread to the other villages in Babeldaob like wild fire.

Shortly after their public debut, their first musical recording was completed and aired throughout Palau on the TT Government AM station WSZB. Palauans got to know the ABC Band and their young and agile Mandolin player named Neterio. All other band members became musical stars in Palau. “We were the first band in Palau so everyone treated us like stars,” recalls Neterio.