Five Things I learned about America while Writing "Wakara's America"
The most dangerous myth of Manifest Destiny is that it succeeded
When I first set out to write Wakara’s America, I thought I was chronicling one man’s forgotten influence on a small corner of the American West. Instead, I found that Wakara’s life and legacy exposed the deeper truths that America has long hidden from itself.
Here are five things I learned about America while following Wakara over mountain passes and deserts, fishing at lakes trading, raiding, and fighting with Natives and settlers—and leaving his marks in the archives—that America still struggles to understand.
5. The American West was built through uneasy partnerships between Natives and settlers—not simply through conquest.
Expansion was not a single march of progress but a chain of negotiations—as much built on covenants of trade and blood as they were on betrayal and violence.
Here’s just one example: “Soon after the Mormons arrived in the Great Basin in 1847, Wakara struck a bargain with Brigham Young…[and] approved of and personally oversaw the establishment of the first Mormon settlements outside the Salt Lake Valley.”
4. “Indian slavery” built American infrastructure and built American families.
Indian slavery built the Southwest by commodifying Native bodies, extracting from them labor (including sexual/procreative labor), and de-tribalizing Native people from their homelands. And yet, Indian slavery, at times, also bound Native and settler worlds together through kinship.
As I write: “Wakara’s equestrian band bought and sold other Native peoples, especially their pedestrian Paiute neighbors, as if they were property. But Wakara also used slavery to build kin and trade networks. He even gave his own blood relations to settler families and expected the settlers to reciprocate.”
3. Land is religion in America.
In America, particularly in the American West, religion and land are intricately connected. The Mormons came to Utah to build their Zion—their homeland, which they insisted that God had set apart for them.
But that land was not an empty tabula rasa. It was already a homeland, and home waters, for Wakara, his people and the more-than-human animals that defined the Timpanogos Utes.
As I write: Wakara insisted Mormon settlements not expand at Utah (Timpanogos) lake because a larger settler presence would “damage the much older and more sacred covenant that the Fish Eaters had with the fish,” as well as as the lake and surrounding lands. Wakara urged Young to see the land “not as a commodity…but as a homeland.”
2. Forgetting Native America is one of (settler) America’s most consistent national rituals.
The erasure of figures like Wakara—from the past and present—is no accident; it’s a ritual through which settlers maintain their innocence.
As I write: Settler archives “reduced [Natives] to what I call ‘paper Indians’…puppets who did and said anything [settler historians] wanted them to,” in order to sanctify violence against Native peoples as “civilized,” even “Christian.”
1. The most dangerous myth of Manifest Destiny is that it succeeded.
As I write in the introduction of the book, “Reimagining the history of the American West with Wakara at its center risks perpetuating Manifest Destiny’s most dangerous myth: that it succeeded.”
That’s why it’s essential to also write about Wakara’s living legacy and to enter into relationships with his descendants.
The continued presence of Wakara’s descendants—and the vitality of Ute lands, fish, horses, histories, and languages—prove that the erasure of Native peoples exists only in the collective settler imagination.
Wakara’s story isn’t over—and neither is America’s. I’d love to hear how these lessons land with you. What myths still shape the way we see this country, its lands, and its histories? Leave a comment, share your thoughts, or pass this along to someone who still believes the West was “won.”
If you’ve already read Wakara’s America, I’d be deeply grateful if you’d leave a short review on Amazon or Goodreads. Your words help this story—and the history it carries—reach more readers who need to hear it.