Toward the end of his life, the mid-Western poet and interpreter of American history, John G. Neihardt, appeared on a TV talk show. He talked about Indians. He said, quietly and sadly, that the last of them were gone. He had ended his 1932 book about Black Elk, the Oglala medicine man, by having the old man say, “. . . the nation’s hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead.”
Indeed, such seemed to be so. Speaking of the Choctaws in 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville said, “The Indians have been ruined by a competition which they had not the means of sustaining.” By the turn of the last century to this, competition seemed finished. By popular conception, Indians were no longer a cultural entity and had not long to last as a race. They were the Vanishing Americans lamented already for a hundred years by liberal Easterners and, by the turn of the century, lamented even by aging Western whitemen who had, as young men, made serious attempts at genocide. When reading the memoirs of those old Indian fighters, one feels they had begun to suspect they had a lot more in common with disappearing tribesmen than with the robber-baron corporate structures which were already beginning to rule the United States. Such an attitude might be seen as well-deserved comeuppance — and it was — but also, buried in that attitude, are certain seeds of the renewed Indian world that would come to exist before the turn of this century.
During the late nineteenth century, the Vanishing American concept was based largely on two geographical areas, California and the Great Plains. In California, it was close to actual fact. Either the Gold Rush drew particularly despicable whitemen west, or something happened to their morality once they got there. Whichever, the white miners went about genocide in California as if they had invented the term. They burned and murdered and hunted Indians as if they were vermin. Within thirty years, they had so totally destroyed Indian society that we now know very little about most of what seems to have been a rich culture before the miners arrived. The picture of California Indians as dirt-poor diggers in the ground was true because that’s what the miners reduced them to — those who survived at all.
Plains Indians were seen to be vanishing because they lost their competition so spectacularly. The Cheyenne in his headdress, the painted tribesman at the Custer fight, the drama and tragedy of those thirty or forty years of plains warfare — that image is still what most of the world holds of the North American Indian. Then at century-turn, the empty eyes of buffalo skulls seemed to stare at armies of whitemen turning up plains sod with metal plows. No more Cheyenne headdresses dashed across the prairie. The image of Wounded Knee replaced the image of the Little Bighorn.
But in fact, down along the Rio Grande of New Mexico and west, the Pueblos were still farming with the ancient implements they’d always used. And in the Ozarks and west — and in places throughout the South and mid-South — Indians were farming with whiteman implements they’d used already for most of a century.
There are no accurate counts of Southeastern Indians then. Some had lost greatly in forced removal west to the Indian Territories. Especially the Cherokees had been decimated. And in Oklahoma, the removed Southern tribes had managed to decimate each other in their own version of the whiteman Civil War. But still their numbers were not so few as might be supposed. And here a strange and important phenomenon begins to appear. Those Southern Indians had lived in proximity to whites for as long as a hundred and fifty years — some even longer. As we might suppose, the races had mixed much. Given the advancing numerical superiority of the whites, one might also suppose the Indians would have married themselves out of existence. But that was not the case. Almost without exception, whites who married Indians took up the ways of their in-laws and their breed children took to Indian life. Look at pictures of Cherokees and Choctaws from the midpoint of the nineteenth century. Many of the men, even tribal leaders, are bearded and balding. Breed red hair was common.
We might here recall Neihardt’s comments and wonder if he may have been right after all. Do Indian chiefs who resemble white businessmen portend an end to the race? If the Indians Cabeza de Vaca encountered on his walk across Texas were suddenly to appear at the most isolated of contemporary Navajo hogans, both those ancient Indians and the Navajos would be in for some serious culture shock. But then if Cabeza de Vaca showed up in late twentieth century Texas, there’d be some serious culture shock among the anglos, too. The ultimate survival of the white race may indeed be in question — but that question is not predicated on the differences in sixteenth century whitemen and whitemen today.
Jamake Highwater is a man who’s done some serious thinking along these lines. He once wrote, with no little irony I suspect, that an Indian is proven to be Indian in the United States when he lists himself Indian on the census. That is actually correct. An Indian is of course not accorded any tribal status by listing himself Indian, but he is nevertheless recorded as Indian.
Addressing the question in a more serious manner, George and Louise Spindler came up with a list of traits that seem to identify historical Indians. These include restrained and non-demonstrative emotional bearing; generosity expressed in formalized giving; a society largely free of class; and immediate concern as opposed to long-range planning. That list is taken from D’arcy McNickle’s paraphrase of the Spindlers. McNickle has a much longer list and he admits to some reservations to simplification. But these traits are, by observation, almost universal among contemporary North American Indians — and are, in fact, the traits generally considered racial defects by the white majority. But of course no list actually defines any race. Australian natives or African tribesmen may well demonstrate the same traits and they could hardly be called American Indians. So it seems we must return to some consideration of blood itself.
Highwater has much to say about that. He is among the most respected of Indian writers and thinkers today. He is sought by whites as an expert on native issues and he is sought by Indians as a leader for various affairs. But his ethnic background is highly unorthodox and he freely admits that his sole proof of race is his own word that he is Indian. His father was of Eastern Cherokee descent, but, according to Highwater, knew little of his heritage. “He came,” writes Highwater, “from Virginia, Tennessee or North Carolina depending on his memory and his mood. . . . He was a renegade and an alcoholic — a marvelous, energetic man who helped to organize the American Indian Rodeo Association back in the 1940’s. He called himself by many names during his career in circuses, carnivals, and rodeos, but by the time he met my then sixteen-year-old mother somewhere in the American Northwest, his name was Highwater.”
Jamake Highwater’s mother was of French Canadian and Blackfeet descent, but she was an orphan raised by a series of non-Indian foster parents. What both Highwater’s parents shared was an intense pride in being Indian. Highwater himself was raised from adolescence by a non-Indian friend of his father’s and didn’t take the name Highwater till he was grown. In 1979, he was officially honored by Calf Robe, Elder of the Blood Reserve of Blackfeet, in a ceremony for favored children of the Blackfeet and given a new Blackfeet name. He was sorry that his mother was not alive then, as he has written, to “. . . . see the embrace of my people for which she had longed all her life.” In the same piece, an essay in the Spring 1983 Akwesasne Notes, Highwater wrote, “From my mother I learned to stay alive by dreaming myself into existence, no matter how many forces attempted to negate or to confine my sense of identity and pride. From her I learned that everything is real.”
The Indian hunter prayed to the animal he killed for food. . . . That wasn’t because those old Indians were so awfully taken with universal love of all things. It was because, as Rousseau observed, they were awfully intent on survival. They spoke to dead buffalo because they wanted to keep on having buffalo to eat.
N. Scott Momady, the Pulitzer Prize winning Kiowa writer, said almost exactly the same thing of his own mother. His mother’s great-grandmother was a Cherokee named Natachee. No other Indian blood flowed in his mother’s veins, yet, Momady wrote, “. . . . she began to see herself as an Indian. That dim native heritage became a fascination and a cause for her. . . . It became her. This act of imagination was, I believe, among the most important events of my mother’s early life, as later the same essential act was to be among the most important of my own.”
Such a story is close to the story of my own life up to now. Out of God knows how many racial strains, only the Indian (and some French) was ever really identified by my parents. They were aware of the Indian, but to them the blood was dim and of no particular relevance. In rural West Texas, they took no interest nor pride in it. Though I admit to some sidetracks in various strange directions, from my childhood till now, I have taken interest and pride in very little else. The first time I left Texas, at twenty-three, I went to live on the Fort Belknap Reservation in northern Montana. And as I have grown older, I have begun to recognize and accept in myself an Indianness which has gradually forced out other available alternatives. “Indians remain Indians . . . ,” McNickle wrote, “by selecting out of available choices those alternatives that do not impose a substitute identity.”
Many tribal leaders are breeds now and breeds have been — as demonstrated by the Cherokees and Choctaws — for a long, long time. Some say it’s because breeds have whiteman characteristics and therefore operate more successfully in the imposed white world. That’s sometimes true. But my friend Pie Glenn, who later himself became a Crow councilman, had another explanation. Pie, who’s been a rodeo cowboy and cattleman, told me only half jokingly that, like tough old crossbred range cattle, breeds are just tougher.
Such an opinion is not likely to engender much goodwill among a lot of Indians. But it is a reaction to the exclusionism of many Indians. For the past several decades and especially during the last ten years, certain Indians have become awfully protective. There have been years of make-believe Hollywood and Western pulp novel Indians while the real Indian was starving in too many cases, and certainly getting nothing positive, either material or spiritual, from the fake Indians. Then at least since the Sixties there have been swarms of another kind of fake Indians ranging from hippy kids with Hong Kong beads to rather shallow and exploitive pseudo-religious and cultural groups — the so-called white shamans and their sometimes native gurus. All sorts of exploitation certainly exists, but the exclusionism it has spawned has no historical precedent in Indian life. The tribes did not have a particularly high birth rate and the chances for infant survival were not always good. Most all old time tribes were more than happy for outside additions to ensure tribal survival. For that reason, they took captives, children as well as adults. And they always seemed to welcome converts. Those old Indians — as well as a lot of contemporary Indians — fervently believed their own ways best and that anyone with any sense, given the opportunity, would certainly adopt those ways. Who in his right mind would want to live like a whiteman? In discussing the apparently large numbers of Comanches with Mexican and even white heritage, Texas author John Graves once told me that Comanche seemed to him more a state of mind, toward the middle of the nineteenth century, than a race.
So we seem to be back to Jamake Highwater’s definition of Indian as one who declares himself so. Certainly the breed who is driven to choose, of all possible alternatives, the Indian way, is likely to be an Indian of some conviction.
We live in perilous times. All human beings have always lived in perilous times, but the perils of our times are our own and we know them well. For several years now, a sizable group of Americans have seen Indians — or the Indian way — as an approach to the diffusion of some peril. Proto-hippy San Francisco saw the birth of an organization called America Needs Indians; Iron Eyes Cody shed a tear over litter — all over national TV not long ago. In a world of people just now rediscovering they are living in the world, there is temptation to idolize Indians as role models. Besides the aforementioned exploitative nature of such an attitude, most Indians just aren’t very comfortable in such a position. Jean-Jacques Rousseau usually gets the credit or blame for originating this view of the Indian. Rousseau is generally misunderstood. He was certainly no great expert on tribal life, but his thrust seems not far from reality. He saw tribal man as possessed with a drive for self-survival. Rousseau’s primitive cared little for his neighbor. He did not care to embrace his neighbor. But neither did he care to murder his neighbor. A Hopi educator has a story about some white teachers trying to teach ecological concerns to Hopi kids. The teachers had the children bring wild things to class — insects and small animals — and asked the children to care for them in cages. The Hopi children had no interest in caring for the living things; the living things starved to death. The Hopi educator explained that the white teachers, not the Hopi children, were having problems relating to the natural world. The Hopi children saw no reason to “. . . . intervene with our special powers as human beings to control and bring about ways to help this poor thing to survive outside its natural ability to survive.” He goes on to comment on the ways white people keep pets. The pets “. . . . are really deprived of their natural instincts; they become very dependent on the human beings. Indians don’t keep dogs in the house. The dog which becomes a pet of an Indian family really has a great responsibility to survive on his own, as well as on occasion to depend on his master for things. What I am trying to say is that learning to live with the environment is not a matter of taking sides, but of accepting facts.”
We have seen humane society ads on television advising us to neuter our male cats and spay the females; we see pictures of pathetic starving kittens; we hear of tomcats mutilating themselves fighting with other toms. This, of course, has nothing to do with cats. It has to do with human beings not wanting to see starving stray cats or beat-up toms. In fact those cats are doing exactly what countless generations of cat life before them have imprinted within them to do. They are being cats; human beings are suggesting they know better than cats what’s best for cats.
White people love to tell cats what’s best for cats. They love to tell trees what’s best for trees. Most of all, they love to tell people what’s best for people. This ranges from the absolutely absurd where municipalities tell you when to mow your grass or paint your house — or restaurants and bars tell you what to wear as customers — to the deadly serious where, for instance, the United States government spent years, millions of dollars and thousands of lives telling Southeast Asia it was better off without socialist governments.
During the past thirty years, we’ve been told how much we need air-conditioners and electric blankets. Now we’re told how much we need nuclear energy — or coal-fired energy — to furnish such.
If you think you’re going to find many Indians shedding tears over discarded paper cups — or automobiles — then you haven’t visited many reservations. But it is doubtlessly true that America needs Indians. Those old Indian fighters began to suspect it when they saw they’d made way for a society that was going to come up with restaurant dress codes and strip mining.
Who in his right mind, indeed, would want to live like a whiteman? Does this mean that the return of the Vanishing American is no more than an intellectual movement — that the thinking human being, given his choice, would obviously choose the Indian way instead of the white? Well, as silly as that sounds, it is in some part valid. But there’s much more than that. First of all the concept of the human being as a creature of intellectual choice is largely a white, European concept. Intellection, according to white dogma, is the quality that separates human beings from the rest of physical — and spiritual — reality. That concept leads to the kind of big-brother state we’ve just discussed.
We must move beyond intellection to something that white people have found discomforting for thousands of years. The whiteman doesn’t even have a very good word to describe it; he calls it religion. What the whiteman conceives as Indian religion has been a saleable commodity in his world for years — from Black Elk to Carlos Castaneda. Anthropologists and historians have studied Indian religion to try and find some so-called primitive roots for (so-called) less primitive religions and increasingly, numerous individuals seem to be searching for something in Indian religion that might be personally used.
There were, at the time the whitemen first came here, at least two thousand separate cultures in the northern hemisphere. Certain of these groups had much in common with certain other groups, but in many ways the actual practice of what came to be called religion differed. Ake Hultkrantz, the Swedish religious historian, enumerated several things all North American Indian religions seem to have in common. He listed the importance of self-sacrifice, mutilation and suffering as means of creating a bond with the supernatural; the importance of symbolic pattern in ritual; the concept of supernatural powers in animal form and the importance of the culture hero. The Spindlers added to that list a universal dependence upon dreams as an approach to the supernatural.
Those traits can be found in religions throughout the world and in this case seem traceable to Asiatic practices. In examining the characteristics of Indian religion, we find little that offers to explain why so many Americans are taken with it. That’s because analytical definition centers on a decadent European definition termed religion. In practice, Indian religion is something much different.
The Indian hunter prayed to the animal he killed for food and the gatherer prayed to the harvested plant. Not only fellow living things were accorded such treatment. Indeed the sun, moon, stars, waters, mountains, prairies and very stones of the earth were accorded respect as living things. That wasn’t because those old Indians were so awfully taken with universal love of all things. It was because, as Rousseau observed, they were awfully intent on survival. They spoke to dead buffalo because they wanted to keep on having buffalo to eat. Those old Indians were intent on defining and maintaining their place in a conscious, living universe — and most importantly, in a living place where they lived. The animals and plants and rocks and mountains they spoke with were North American; they spoke with stars and the moon and the sun over North America. And a people does not engage in a thirty or forty thousand year conversation if those addressed do not answer. That intercourse is not, in the European sense, religion.
When the Europeans came here, they did not have ears to listen nor vocabulary to address. We presume that once the Europeans did speak with the Things That Are, but in the centuries before they came here, they had lost that ability. I don’t know where to place the blame for that — probably the intellectual capture of the Christian Church had a good deal to do with it. In fact, I don’t really care to know the answer. If I lived in Europe, I should think that inquiry would be the most important of my life. But I live in North America.
The Vanishing American did not vanish because America did not vanish. These American continents have existed for time so long that no living human being — from the vantage point of his own incredibly short life — can even grasp the time involved. The voices of these continents are not stilled because, for a few centuries, this land is overrun by human beings who cannot hear. Over years of cultural and racial genocide, over centuries of lies and misdirection, That Which Is still calls
and the old American blood in us listens.
In his introduction to the Native American short fiction anthology he edited, Earth Power Coming, Simon J. Ortiz says, “Indian people are everywhere across this nation and beyond throughout the Western hemisphere in fact, and their voices are strong. . . . Listen, the earth and its power and people are singing.”
© Copyright Roxy Gordon
This is the title essay of a new collection of Roxy Gordon’s writings, to be published this year by the Place of Herons Press, P.O. Box 1952, Austin, Texas 78767.
— Ed.
