James A. Clifton
Though the biography of this book is still incomplete, a sketch of its genesis is proper, to help readers understand its lineage and anticipate the temperament of our offspring. This vita must remain unfinished for now, since only others can decide the later career of what the authors and editor have produced. While the contributors all write from the basis of their own experience and expectations, as editor, merely one of the parents, I can speak mainly of my own thoughts about the whole and the experiences which propelled them, from the first arousal of desire through conception up to the point of delivery.
Thirty-two years ago, as an apprentice anthropologist, I was invited to participate in an interdisciplinary team study of the effects of “termination” on the Klamath Indian tribe of Oregon. The termination policy (one of the American state’s cyclical attempts to resolve its “Indian problem” by scrapping subvention and management of the affairs of these client communities) was then in flower; and the Klamath were one of the two largest such corporate groups where this plan was fully implemented. My host, exemplar, and mentor in this research was Professor Theodore S. Stern, who modeled for his students the highest standards of professional integrity, rigor in scholarship, disciplined truth-telling, humane concern for others, and personal generosity.
I then had no experience with Indians, personal or semi-professional, and was largely untutored in conventional anthropological knowledge about them. I was not driven toward identification with Indians by inner compulsion and harbored not the slightest conviction that I might or should act as their liberator. I had not set off to live with Indians in order to discover myself. I was not even interested in Indians per se. I was, however, much committed to studying people, especially their social-cultural dynamics and resistance to change, hopefully among the societies of the islands of Micronesia, not the ethnic insularities of North America. However, because the Klamath were then facing major, externally imposed alterations in their status and situation, the invitation to live and learn among them seemed to be a marvelous opportunity to pursue knowledge and to master some of the rudiments of my craft (see Stern 1966; Kamber 1989).
When a novice among the Klamath, with only scanty second-hand knowledge about and few convictions concerning Indians, there came the first glimmerings of intellectual passion—several puzzling, half-formed questions—long before there were means or opportunity for consummation. The causes for this were a few simple, on-the-spot observations. Among the wealthiest of North American Indians, for instance, their median family income much exceeded that of their neighbors and my own (the young Klamath men and women I knew best sometimes kindly expressed concern about my impoverishment). Yet a great many, about 40 percent, lived elsewhere, when there was no apparent, pressing economic need for them to do so. Within the reservation community, nonetheless, there were large differences in wealth and living standards, though overall they were an enterprising, prosperous, self-reliant population.
Moreover, in the late 1950s they were not a culturally homogeneous little community. Their indigenous ancestors did include mostly Klamath proper, smaller numbers of closely related Modoc, and fewer Northern Paiute; but their pedigrees also contained numerous forebears of diverse European and other not-native ancestry. Much of their history of interactions with outsiders, as Felix Keesing had perceptively said of the Menomini, was “written on their faces.” In the still popular old American folk nomenclature, many were called “halfbreeds” or “mixed-bloods,” labels of Euroamerican origin accepted and used regularly by the Klamath themselves. But in the anthropological thinking of the time the pronounced intracommunity variations in values and behaviors were said to represent differences in “level” or “degree” of acculturation.
The latter interpretation was based on the still commonly unrecognized assumption that these (and other) modern Indian groups are derived exclusively from culturally homogeneous ancestral, native North American populations. As novice anthropologist, at the time I was bothered by the uncritical use of what I saw as American racial labeling and ahistorical assumptions about collective ancestry and heritage that I suspected might be faulty. But I could not then plainly specify the underlying issues, much less think clearly about resolving them with data and ideas. It was a long time before I understood that at the heart of this conceptual quandary lay the confusion of anthropology’s favorite grand abstraction—Culture (in the partitive sense)—with the histories and heritages of a population. Thus, research observation and academic curiosity were accompanied by conceptual frustration, which bred a desire for intellectual resolution not easily or quickly sated.
Of more importance to my later thinking, in this period came a separate, provocative observation. As part of the legislative compromise laying out the details of the actual termination process, each adult Klamath had a choice, for self and for minor children. One option was to elect to “remain” as members of a reconstituted corporate (tribe-like) organization, with their per capita shares of collectively owned resources held in common in trust under state law. The second option allowed them to “withdraw,” to go their individual (more accurately, family) ways, to voluntarily disaffiliate themselves from association with the new social entity, and to collect and personally control their per capita shares of the reservation community’s joint assets, which were considerable.
The behavior of the Klamath at the time did not square with the political rhetoric of “tribalism,” which holds that “the Indian” has some sort of inherited, mystic compulsion to belong to a “sovereign” corporate organization under outside government protection. For of the Klamath only 3.5 percent voted explicitly for the protected joint membership option, that is, for the perpetuation of “tribalism,” a percentage swelled by the addition of the 19 percent who did not or could not vote (in addition to the many indifferent and fewer hard-case hold outs, mainly individuals deemed incapable of managing their own affairs—familyless elderly, orphaned children, the mentally disabled, etc.). The vast majority—77 percent—promptly withdrew and went their several ways, not without some anxiety about this major change in their status, which is not to say that the Klamath population, a Klamath identity, or their communities simply disappeared. Historically, I later learned, the Klamath were by no means either the first or the only Indian population to vote with their feet about remaining in “tribal” organizations, buffered from their larger social environment by a special, segregated status in the federal system. Indeed, in 1980 the “remaining” members of the Klamath tribe themselves cashed in their shares of joint assets for payments of $170,000 each.
After leaving Oregon, I spent two years living and researching among the Southern Ute of Colorado. I found these Ute a strikingly solidary group with a large, resource rich reservation, and an impressively efficient and successful system of government and economic management—with some inputs from federal authorities—about which there were then few strong, conspicuous complaints (Clifton 1965). The following year, in Kansas, I began a study of the Prairie Potawatomi, a small community transplanted over a century before from their old Great Lakes area estate, a group dramatically different from the Klamath and Ute. I was now well sensitized to some aspects of the plurality of differences between Indian communities.
These Potawatomi were dirt poor. For that matter they owned little enough of soil, and that consisted of some small scattered allotments on the remains of their old reservation. Unlike the Klamath and Ute, they exhibited almost no political-economic cohesion, except in violent opposition to any effort on the part of the federal government to deal with, even to deliver services to them. Internally, their affairs were disrupted by chronic, bitter, self-destructive infighting. They contrasted with the Klamath and Ute in other salient ways as well. They mostly still used their old language; in culture they were profoundly natavistic; and they deliberately shunned associations with the assimilated marginal people—the “mixed-bloods”—who lived elsewhere but stridently claimed rights as Prairie Potawatomi Indians (Clifton 1977).
First among the rights these outsiders claimed was access to per capita shares of the substantial Indian Claims Commission award the culturally conservative Potawatomi had for years been litigating. The latter when I met them were preoccupied with shaking the Great Treaty Tree to harvest a major windfall for themselves alone. Since these nativists were fewer than eight hundred, whereas the outside claimants numbered several thousands, they faced a considerable economic as well as a major political threat. Eventually, the insider-outsider conflict was resolved, externally, by fiat issuing from the Commissioner of Indian Affairs and his Assistant. These officials signaled the legitimacy of the outsiders as Potawatomi (by American racial definition), and approved the new Constitution they prepared. So far as I understood what was going on at the time (1964-1965), the culturally hard-shelled Potawatomi were having their political backs broken across the knees of others’ visions for their future.
When I first knew them, the elder Kansas Potawatomi leaders were obsessed by a few shared fantasies. They were dreaming (literally so, night and day) that soon an Indian agent would arrive with a buckboard laden with strongboxes overflowing with silver and gold coins, which he would then hand over to them to do with as they wished. They thought they remembered this had been the custom a century earlier. They envisioned also that, if only they persisted in resolute opposition, the United States government would leave them strictly alone to manage their own internal political affairs, except periodically to deliver additional boxes of coins and other services they demanded and expected. Although I did not then entirely understand it, there in the thinking of these Potawatomi elders—in starkly explicit, paradigmatic form—lay the fundamental, conflicting elements of the goals of most modern Indian groups. Whether authentically native and officially recognized, or feigned Indians of invented identity aspiring to federal recognition, legal status, and a key to the treasury, these central aims are few. Simply put, they are: obtaining absolute political autarchy while perpetuating utter fiscal dependence.
About this time I began pondering whether being federally recognized Indian (as in the instance of both the Potawatomi-by-definition and the Potawatomi-by-culture) and not being government-defined Indian (as in the case of the withdrawing Klamath) both had as much or more to do with something as mundane as money (and other, symbolic incentives) than with an innate proclivity for protecting and perpetuating ethnic heritage. Being Indian, I reasoned, likely involved periodic access to substantial bonanzas of various kinds. And at the heart of being Indian in this legalistic sense, I suspected, lay a profoundly ambivalent psychosocial dependency relationship.
In any regard, like other anthropologists of my generation, I quickly discovered that short-term ethnographic field studies had serious limitations for anyone interested in long-term social and cultural processes. The cross-sectional analysis of facts drawn from contemporary communities such as the Potawatomi raised questions that could only be answered with comparative, longitudinal, proper historical research. Eventually settling in Wisconsin, close to the old heartland of the Potawatomi and their neighbors I embarked on field and archival studies of other Potawatomi and kindred groups, a style of enquiry by then dignified with the new title of “ethnohistory.”
Following the historical tracks of the Kansas Potawatomi’s ancestors led me onto the trail of those peoples who had influenced them. My additional comparative historical research included studies of the Ojibwa, Ottawa, Wyandot, Shawnee, Emigrant New York Indians in Wisconsin, and other peoples of indigenous or European origin (or some mixture of all of the above), with whom the Potawatomi had been endlessly entangled for over three centuries in the complex and changing cultural-geographic matrix encompassed by the Great Lakes-Ohio Valley region.
I write at a time when public confession of serious anthropological lapses has become chic. Though unlike some others involved with Indians I have never tried out the part of messiah or prophet of doom, I will admit that on several occasions I have acted in the capacity of advocate of Indian rights. Educated in the old tradition of Roger Bacon’s aphorisms, I was convinced that if creating knowledge was worthwhile, finding some practical use for it was nearly as grand. At first I failed to recognize that what Bacon had in mind was improved navigation skills and increased crop production, not directly helping special-interest groups with social problems in competition with their adversaries.
By way of example, for the time they had given and the courtesy shown me, I felt an obligation to the culturally conservative Kansas Potawatomi, worse yet, a personal identification with their interests. Thus when called on for help in their efforts to fend off being overwhelmed by “newcomers,” I tried to intervene on their behalf by persuading federal officials of the superior merits of their case. This modest effort did the old conservatives little good, and myself less, especially so since the outsiders quickly became dominant insiders. What I ran up against in Washington, I saw later, was the beginning of a policy that has since been institutionalized as an integral branch of the developing Indian rights industry. Now an important sideline for underemployed applied anthropologists, geographers, historians, and federal administrators, this involves the forging by legal reincarnation of the maximum feasible number of Indians, however obscure and questionable their ethnic antecedents. These include contingents of individuals being recruited and enrolled in existing, officially long-recognized tribes (as happened to the Kansas Potawatomi), and hundreds of recently resurrected “forgotten tribes” or “lost nations” seeking “status clarification,” that is, the stamp of federal approval on and specially privileged political economic support of their resuscitated or contrived identities (Paredes 1974; Porter 1986).
Similarly, I was later called on to act as “expert” witness on behalf of the Michigan and Wisconsin Potawatomi in their appeal before the Indian Claims Commission. My inclination to be helpful, to put knowledge to practical use, again got me in some difficulty. At stake were millions of dollars: the attorneys for the Oklahoma and Kansas Potawatomi wanted all of it for their clients, leaving none for the smaller eastern communities. Convinced that the historical and anthropological facts led to a different conclusion, I soon discovered that being a witness under such circumstances was rather like the predicament of Christians in a Roman arena: pugnacious gladiators on the one side, ravenous lions the other. Striving to hold to academic standards of truth telling did my reputation no good among the Kansas Potawatomi, now suddenly quadrupled in population, since the commission’s decision cost them part of the spoils. And my testimony greatly annoyed an Indian Claims tribunal commissioner. One of North Carolina’s born again “Lumbee Indians,” a man like his multitude of kin deeply committed to diluting and broadening the federal definition of Indianness, he had a particular stake in recognizing the rights of “Indians by blood” (see Henige 1984).
However, this and several later ordeals in federal courtrooms where Indian treaty rights cases were at issue provided me with an opportunity for “field” observations not ordinarily available to an academic. In these trials by history (i.e., law office history), watching the highly skilled, forceful attorneys serving the Indian cause at work was a thoroughly eye-opening experience. From them I learned much about the selective use and suppression of historical and anthropological evidence, systematic distortion of facts in support of a preconceived “theory of the case,” the dexterous manipulation of judicial and public sentiments, perfectly astounding hyperbole, and the most outrageous fabrications. Watching some “experts” approach the witness stand with hats in hand, and others demur when caustically coached about how and what they should testify to, balking myself when pressed to distort or suppress interpretations and sources, I concluded that in Indian treaty rights cases the standards of evidence and logic are not what they are elsewhere, especially so in scholarly work.
The paramount aim, at last I had explained to me by an unusually impetuous counsel, was not veracity but to win at all costs. These particular attorneys were interested in neither truth nor social consequences, except those of obtaining for their clients the largest shortterm benefits attainable—money and power. Rather than a quest relying on reasoned probity and a careful array of all relevant evidence in search of justice, these were purely political contests, I concluded (Clifton 1987). Over the past twenty-five years, the federal courtrooms have been arenas for many such exciting, generally unbalanced duels on behalf of Indian clients, mostly victorious. About the tactics used in similar struggles before state legislatures and in Congress I have only secondhand knowledge, never having served as anyone’s lobbyist, but the legions of advocates for Indian prerogatives have been at least equally successful in these other political arenas.
Along the way, between 1971 and 1976, I had another, longer round of experience in a helping role, attempting to service the expressed needs of Indians. In this period I organized and administered a University Year for Action program throughout Wisconsin—mostly health, education, and economic development projects in nine of Wisconsin’s ten Indian reservation communities. Managing this university-based VISTA/ Peace Corps-like program brought me into prolonged contact with the several parties then battling for control of the future of the eleventh Wisconsin Indian community, the Menomini, who like the Klamath had been the other major Indian group “terminated” several years earlier. When I first visited them, someone had erected a billboard alongside the major highway leading into the new Menomini County. It read, “We Will Make It!” Some years later, after the party lobbying for “restoration” had achieved victory in Congress, this sign was taken down, and a new one erected in its place to confront travelers through the newly reestablished Menomini Reservation. It read, “We Didn’t Make It!” This suggests that Indians are not incapable of either large aspirations or self-irony.
Watching this process of Menomini retribalization, while trying to deliver some basic development and social services, was always instructive and often stormy. Having learned some lessons the hard way, with some special knowledge of the pitfalls laying in wait for strangers in situations of embittered factionalism, I tried to maintain a neutral, even-handed stance as regards the cabals and their corrosive, violent infighting. Avoiding earlier mistakes, I discovered that I had to find some intellectual profit when committing new ones. So with my anthropological eyes open I learned much more—of the political-economic relationships between Indian factions and outside interests, for example.
The leaders of the large “restorationist” camp (mainly educated, middle-class, off-reservation women), on one side, were the protégées of the liberal wing of Wisconsin’s Democratic party, spurred on also by flotsam on the rising tide of militant paleface feminism. The leaders of the small “pro-termination” party (all elder, mainly male, upper middle-class managers and entrepreneurs), in their turn were aided and abetted by the conservative wing of Wisconsin’s Republican party. And at the third point of this political triangle, the leadership of the late-coming, ferociously belligerent, recently improvised “Warriors Society” (mainly young, urban, lower-class males and the women who adored them) were covertly coached in their deftly played confrontational tactics by a political splinter-group—Wisconsin’s tiny band of zealous Trotskyites. These hostiles were also helped quietly by various academic Marxists of the credit-card and other doctrinal varieties. And on the fringes, unsuccessfully seeking a lodgement for their own agenda, occasionally arrived representatives of AIM—the national American Indian Movement—talking about a replay of Wounded Knee II. They were joined by a perfectly weird medley of the other protest groupies who invariably show up when storms brew in Indian Country (see Schultz 1973; Smith 1973).
This phenomenon has a respectable scholarly name, “reciprocal exploitation.” On the one hand, the three main Menomini factions were actively milking their external supporters of whatever they could get. In turn, each collaborating with its chosen clique, the outside interest groups were playing out their own special agendas. Whatever the “Menomimi people” needed or wanted was nearly irrelevant; all the outsiders had lofty, alternative visions of their future, the internal leaderships dreams of power. The real folks—Menomini and everyone else watching the fireworks on the nightly news—were barely something more than an audience for political dramas. With no political agenda in mind, and, I recognized, little more than economic band-aids and aspirin in hand, my efforts at nonpartisan dealings for the Action project proved impossible. Any help delivered to a service program controlled or coveted by one party was defined as a mortal, dastardly boot to the innards of their opponents.
Trying to project an appropriately modest image of what the Action program could realistically deliver or accomplish, I was surprised to find it defined as a major natural resource. Along the way, I was assailed by a republican congressman/real estate developer for promoting the interests of “communist Indians,” rejected by the liberal restorationists when I explained I could not deliver the entire budget of the Action program into their hands, and threatened with “fragging” by “warriors,” one of whom—costumed in what seemed to me hand-me-down Apache garb from an old John Wayne movie—showed up at my campus door one afternoon flashing his little pistol at me.
Even in such circumstances it is possible to extract useful scholarly knowledge: maybe only under such conditions can some types of insights be acquired. Dealing with the Menomini and other Wisconsin Indian communities in these years provided numerous opportunities for validating earlier assessments, developing new questions, and disabusing myself of lingering misconceptions. An example of each, in order. Almost invariably, what the leaders of Wisconsin Indian communities wanted most of Action was aid in obtaining dollars, the more the better. Improved grantsmanship was at the top of the technical aid demanded, and I soon recognized that whatever goals granting agencies specified for their awards, the main incentive seen in them by Indian applicants was additional income. Like many academic institutions and the military-industrial complex, Indian organizations were adapted to increasing their standard of living by harvesting “soft money” (Clifton 1976).
So far as better appreciating Indians’ own views about external social relationships, once the Action program ended and I no longer had resources to deliver, I received a message from a long-acquainted tribal booster. He was calling politely to explain the facts of anti-poverty program life to me. Always, previously, he had come personably to my office as he made his regular diplomatic rounds hustling resources for the programs he represented. He now phoned to say goodbye, he explained; adding, not quite apologetically, “Jim, remember, Indians don’t have friends.” I responded, “Yes, I understand perfectly. You have family, enemies, and allies.” “You’ve got it,” he answered, hanging up. What he did not say explicitly was that people formerly used as allies can quickly be redefined as enemies.
While engaged in this business, after listening several times to various Menominis make a peculiar public utterance, the same in substance if not exact phrasing, I started to ask stronger questions about the nature of Indian psychosocial identity and dependency. The setting was always a rally, during the course of which someone would rise and give a short speech. The words ran like this: “It’s like yesterday I looked in the mirror and I was an Indian. Now I look in the mirror and I do not know what I am. That’s what termination did to me.” These were not simply the idiosyncratic sentiments of a few individuals: the audiences always seconded such declarations by acclamation. The facts of a powerful sense of identity dissolution were plain. To be really content with a legitimate sense of ethnic self, these individuals proclaimed, they had to have federal I.D. cards. I knew of no other ethnic group where social and personal identity was so hugely dependent on external, governmental certification.
In the same period a different transaction led to much better appreciation of what I as an anthropologist should properly be doing. A little group of Indians approached me for aid in writing a grant application, and for my support in getting it approved, inadvertently giving me a compelling lesson in professional ethics. The funds granted, they explained, would be spent to help them perpetuate the practice of their traditional religion. The application was rejected, on the grounds that, being a Christian foundation, the Board could not see fit to spend a donor’s money in support of a “heathen religion.” I will admit that this response temporarily sent me into a classic anthropological huff, which dissipated when I realized that the foundation’s turndown was not the central issue. Why did these Indians need someone else’s money to carry out their sacred rituals? Never in the history of this group had they ever needed a grant to pray, sacrifice, feast, and chant. Either I had unthinkingly allowed myself to get involved in perpetrating a hoax, or I was helping to perpetuate and increase dependency. The applicants were, unmistakably, loading their fund-raising hooks with mystical bait. This was a small moment-of-truth; the foundation’s disapproval of this grant-dance, for me, spelled ethical relief.
For readers unfamiliar with the ins-and-outs of American Indian policy over the past two centuries, especially so the extraordinary reversals and transformations in dealings between Indians and other Americans in the past thirty years, let me underscore the sense of the few key points in the foregoing memoir. First, working as a field anthropologist, my experience with Indians began while the federal government was set on a policy, once and for all time, of ending its government-to-government relationship with Indian “tribes,” and its stewardship over the daily welfare of Indian individuals, however piecemeal and abortive implementation of that policy may have been. In government circles called “termination,” and popularly called “assimilation” (now a particularly nasty expletive in Indian and allied academic circles) or “cultural genocide,” in my judgment this policy is better construed, in analytic ways, as one of political decolonization and social integration.
Then, starting in the late 1960s, and reaching its apogee in the later 1970s, that policy was quickly blown away and an entirely different one launched, a policy missile rather grandly but passionately called “sovereignty” and ‘‘self-determination” by both its Indian beneficiaries, if that is what they are, and their many allies. Again in analytic phrasings, this new policy might better be seen as political-social segregation and the perpetuation of economic-cultural dependency. Quite by accident, I happened to be on the ground observing the execution of both the former policy—the Klamath termination case, and the emergence and institutionalization of the latter one—the Menomini restoration example. These two are now generally considered landmarks in this momentous recent transmutation of the place of the Indian in American society and culture.
The preceding commentary is not intended as an authoritativeness bestowing “I was there, an eyewitness” story, the most common pose assumed by field anthropologists (and TV journalists) in their reporting mode. On the contrary, having sufficiently indicated theoretical doubts, conceptual frustration, and trial-and-error learning, it should be apparent that I was convinced—deeply immersed as I was in one or another case study—that my vision was much foreshortened. I could not see far enough with enough depth perception to get these small events into the focus of larger ones. The easiest chore for field anthropologists is to develop much understanding of “their people,” and the most common snare they encounter is to become too closely identified with “their welfare.” The really difficult tasks are: to develop historical, comparative, contextual, and processual comprehension; to maintain enough disciplined detachment to avoid getting trapped by the moral-intellectual quandaries of combining contradictory research and helping roles; to resist whatever personal temptations there are to play-act at being a Lord Benevolent or Lady Beneficent; to eschew manipulating relationships with Indians so as to satisfy one’s own political values.
The commentary was intended to suggest some of the stimulating features of the course that led to this book. After some years of experience with the complexities of Indian affairs and the affairs of Indians seen on the local, community level, it was glaringly apparent that my understanding was missing in critical respects: about those larger, societal or national (and international) forces which acted on Indians (and others) generally, and about the historical-developmental backdrop to the contemporary scene.
Researching the historical experiences of the Kansas Potawatomi and their neighbors helped, immeasurably. Of all the issues bearing on modern Indian affairs, for instance, few are more important than what are called “Indian treaties” and “treaty rights.” To my surprise, I discovered that the Potawatomi had negotiated more than fifty such agreements, with British imperial and American national authorities, far more than any other indigenous North American society. This required close study of the social-historical contexts of such negotiations, the substance of their stipulations, and their consequences. And from 1634 onward the Potawatomi and those peoples associated with them had met and somehow coped with nearly every known alien policy initiative bearing on the situation and status of native North American peoples. From French fur trade merchantilism and employment as mercenaries in colonial wars, these adaptations ran on through two centuries of experience countering efforts of marginal people such as missionaries, traders, Indian agents, the Métis, and “Potawatomi by blood” to intrude themselves and to dominate their institutions and economy. Their experiences required their adapting to the American state’s civilization, removal, reservation, allotment, reorganization, claims payment, urban relocation, and termination initiatives—right down to the most recent separatist mini-state development and cultural-political resurrection policies (Clifton 1984).
Such culture historical studies were greatly illuminating, since they led to awareness of an important cyclical pattern in American Indian policy, which has ebbed and flowed from separatist to integrationist peaks and troughs regularly for two centuries. Thus in the 1970s, when I listened to leaders of the Menomini restoration movement boast that they were the first Indians ever to have been terminated, then to have sought and achieved restoration of “tribal Indian status,” I knew this was not so, and was moved to remark to that effect. In the 1830s and 1850s American policy had also cycled from separatist to integrationist and—for some—back again. Some Potawatomi, among others, had been “terminated” one year, and “determinated” several years later. A similar longer term integration phase began in the 1860s and ran through the early 1930s, only to be reversed with another step toward “Indian Reorganization” or segregation. This “Indian New Deal” effort to create culturally, economically, and politically viable new Indian corporate organizations, pushed by the utopian visionary, John Collier, was temporarily halted in the post-World War II years with the integrationist policy affecting the Klamath when I encountered them. But during the Vietnam War period came another, this time massive, reversal with a swing into another separatist phase, which propels us into the present.
Lest a useful point be missed, let me emphasize the implications of a matter that may have gone unnoticed in the preceding paragraph. By attempting to broaden the historical horizons of the Menomini leaders about precedents for their own not inconsiderable accomplishments in regaining their legal Indian status, I was violating one of the most stringently observed canons governing the behavior of those who work among Indians. Among aficionados who retain some sense of professional humility, this powerful proscription is sometimes called the Eleventh Commandment (though not in mixed-company). Every vocation has its Eleventh Commandment, to be sure, but in the Indian business it reads: “Thou Shall Not Say No to an Indian.” In commenting on the Menomini leaders’ strutting, I had in mind suggesting some sense of historical proportion, for they were expressing a strong conviction that their problems were over. The historical experiences of other communities that had experienced such a shift in federal fortunes was that all later experienced severe problems, as, indeed, have the Menomini themselves in the past dozen years.
Lest it be assumed that I was interfering in the supreme right of Noninterference of a group of innocent, hapless primitives bent on constructing some transcendental mythography, I will observe that none of the urbane Menomini who heard my remark had less than a high school diploma, and they included aB.S., anM.S.W., and an Ll.D. However, this does not make observance of this norm any more uncommon among or less obligatory upon those who deal with Indians, whatever the latters’ ancestries or educational attainments. This Eleventh Commandment has many corollaries (for example, Indians Always Utter Ultimate Truths), and is accompanied by other norms and taboos of deferential conduct. These standards of etiquette are ordinarily voiced and enforced most strongly by not-Indians, especially those who vehemently project their personal support of the “Indian cause.” And such canons are vigorously applied not only in face-to-face interactions with Indians but to what is said elsewhere or written about them. The taboo on scholars writing anything that is likely to annoy native peoples is one expression of this explicitly partisan, condescending ethos. A sample of the verbal sanctions addressed to or said about accused nonconformers who distress modern Indians or their allies is contained in the appendix.
The invention, growth, and establishment of this ethos, and of sanctions applied to produce conformity to it, over the past three decades formed the ideological components of a much changed new role for scholars. The expectations for this role are applied to those seeking knowledge about, to others hoping to service what they see as the true needs of Indians, and to those absorbed in a muddled, patronizing combination of both activities. This ethos, the associated sanctions, and the role expectations are now regnant in all institutions involved in the Indian business. These include scholarly organizations, commercial and academic presses, private and public foundations and universities, independent research institutes, the profession of Indian law, the mass media, state and federal governments, and the numerous special-interest advocacy organizations that promote the interests of the Indian, whether as narrow specialty or as sideline to their own central, separate concerns. In structure and operation, this system functions as an interlocking directorate, with Indians and their active supporters positioned in key places in all the seemingly separate circles of information and other resource production, management, and distribution.
This type of support network did not appear suddenly in the mid-1960s out of the historical blue, as some of its participants gripped by a high moral fervor claiming to be on the side of the angels want to believe (Washburn 1988:548-56, 570-72; Porter 1986). It has several prototypes and is characterized by much continuity with similar, older complexes. The “Indian Rights” organizations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, is one of these (Prucha 1984 11:611-30, 940-68; Washburn 1988:430-58), as is the “Indian Ring” of the late nineteenth century (Prucha 1984 1:586-89). More than a century ago the “Indian Ring” badge was struck by Christian ideologues and pinned on a supposed junta made up of immoral, greedy traders, ranchers, state and federal legislators, and Indian leaders, all allegedly bent on economic exploitation of the helpless native, systematically manipulating the Bureau of Indian Affairs to this end.
Having invented the slur, the good Christian ladies and gentleman of the past century—who construed their part as being dedicated to the salvation of their chosen underdogs in the struggle for survival, committing themselves morally to the political-economic liberation of the Indian—would have been mortally offended to have the tag pasted on themselves. But of course they had their own vested agenda, self-interested rewards, and alliances in their crusade. Even more so would today’s heirs of such coalitions be disturbed if characterized as the “New Indian Ring.”
Yet they are like their forerunners in several salient ways, structurally and ideologically. The powerfully idealized sense of mission is only one of these. The recognition that rewards of many different kinds await those who deal with Indians is another. A driving sense of opportunity for realization of the self is a third. The equating of Indian with victim, whether to be rescued or to be further manipulated, is yet one more. An emphasis on the most severe, accusatory, self-serving moral contrasts to set present reformers off against their predecessors and competitors is still another likeness drawing attention to the historical and cultural continuity between modern and earlier organizations committed to making something of or out of the Indian. One common point of widespread agreement between representatives of today’s New Indian Ring seeking to establish a distinct ethical identity for themselves, for example, is the declaration that their forerunners were colonialist exploiters, whereas they are anti-colonialist benefactors. Down forced acculturation and assimilation! Up Indian sovereignty, self-determination, and nationalism!
And the old and the new Indian Rings—the networks of supporters, advocates, and exploiters—are alike, as well, in borrowing from a powerful model in the natural sciences to derive a key metaphor for use as a central rationalization in their political philosophies. For both older Christian reformers and those such “philanthropists” accused of being exploiters, the jointly shared trophe was, of course, Social Darwinism. For the contemporary Indian Ring the dominant metaphor has become (cultural) relativism, lifted from Albert Einstein’s General Theory and uncritically applied to ethical issues and political affairs, as nearly seventy years ago the London Times and Walter Lippman forecast would happen (Lippman 1922:70).
However, to understand the genuine affinities of the new and the old “Indian Rings” we must look behind the rhetoric of such labeling to their continuities and discontinuities, expressed in prosaic, dispassionate social science terms. These consist of political, economic, organizational, and cultural features. One piece of the cultural dimension must come first. This consists of the construction and use of highly stereotyped images of “the Indian” as a foil, manipulated politically either to denigrate or to enhance European and American institutions and self-concepts. What has changed between the late nineteenth century (and, for that matter, the eighteenth) and this one is the nature of the institutions and values that are criticized. There are, however, some continuities in this respect. One constant theme has been disquiet about structures of subordination and inequality, with neatly fashioned, imaginative portraits of the Indian used as models for Paradise Lost or, in our time among the “counter-culture,” as a fantasy of an Eden that might be regained (Washburn 1988:570-72).
The name of the game played by Indian Rings has been and is interest group politics, their aims the ordinary ones of manipulating power and controlling resources. Historically, this has regularly included some mix of geopolitical, governmental, bureaucratic, ecclesiastical, commercial, legal, suffragist (now feminist), recreational, environmentalist, diplomatic, international, state, economic, and intellectual/academic (with anthropology in recent years losing its older near monopoly), and other involvements (Washburn 1988:5-238). Although native societies have never lacked political acumen and at least some capacity for fending off or manipulating these parties to their own advantage (Viola 1981), over the past half-century the character of the play has greatly changed. This is so because of the recent “empowerment” of Indians in the United States and Canada, acquired in part with substantial aid and instruction from other interest groups. A century ago Indians were rarely seen attending conferences at Lake Mohonk, then a favorite watering hole of the charitably minded Christian elite promoting what they defined as Indian Rights (Washburn 1988:301-23). Today, a conference about Indians without Indians prominent on the agenda or, even better, acting as sponsor-hosts is nearly an impossibility. During the past half-century Indians have created countless local, regional, national, and international organizations from which bases they conduct their own lobbying (Joe 1986). To meetings of these now come churchmen, statesmen, feminists, environmental activists, and academics—as supplicants, soliciting coalitions, seeking favors, checking their approval ratings.
The economic dimension, broadly speaking, has always been and continues to be of special importance in the operations of Indian Rings, old and new. The five-century-old competition for acquisition of, access to, or protection of Indian owned natural resources continues today, if necessarily in attenuated form given the decline of the Indian land base. However, as the Indians’ earthly assets have been depleted, their huge occult and cultural reserves have been vastly enhanced in value and marketability. The process of commodifying Indians and their heritages began on Columbus’ return voyage, grew steadily through the nineteenth century, and accelerated greatly in our own time with the rise of mass communications, the vast expansion of public popular culture, and the increased appeal of things and ways supposedly ancient, exotic, indigenous, and “alternative” (see Kopytoff 1986). The production and exchange of many of the goods and services which form the content of what is called “pan-Indianism,” perhaps better trademarked “Mac-Indianism,” in large part represents one aspect of this “marketing of heritage” (Dominguez 1986).
However, in an era when job security, fringe benefits, and pensions are conspicuous in nearly everyone’s thoughts, we must see Economic Man in the competition of Indians themselves for positions in governments and academic life. At least as much so, this is also true of the rivalry between Indians and everyone else for the manufacturing, advertising, and distribution of information about Indian culture and history, by whatever means it is disseminated—in newsprint, in theatricals, or across the podium. Embroiled in such contests are the numerous academic disciplines that have, over the past three decades, discovered opportunities in things Indian, and that are scrambling for a piece of the action in Native American Studies programs. The Indian’s transcendental resources and heritage, many are discovering, possess a fabulous advantage over oil-bearing shales, timberlands, and condominium sites. Rather than being finite, they are infinitely replenishable—indeed, capable of perpetual expansion—limited in quantity, substance, and style only by the ingenuity of their inventors, delivered in annually exhibited new improved models as the consumer’s wants dictate. Moreover, trafficking in such commodities during the Information Age is not yet quite so heavily weighted with the moral opprobrium retrospectively cast on milking profits from Indian real estate during the Industrial Age.
The organizational features of the Indian Rings, old and new, are implicit in the foregoing. Fundamentally, these are little more than those of a special interest lobby, one operating within the structure of state and regional politics of the United States (and Canada). In the past century Indian communities most often petitioned their grievances and sought advantage severally, separately, and directly. Written petitions, memorials, and appeals delivered to key decision-makers in the seats of power were then much favored. But preferred far more were visitations by Indian delegations representing distinct “tribal” constituencies seeking face-to-face conferences with top power-wielders in Washington and Ottawa (Viola 1981). The main arenas where advantage was sought were the ordinary quadripartite ones: the executive branch, the legislature, the courts—and public opinion. If Indians were not precisely the first to invent the role and to employ a paid press agent—as the Prairie Potawatomi did in 1845, when they set out for Washington to swing public opinion in their favor—they were among the early pioneers in the employment of such advocates (Clifton 1977:331-38). Attorneys, missionaries, congressmen, traders, interpreters, and an occasional founding anthropologist were also much favored as allies in such influence and political-edge seeking undertakings. Parallel to but very nearly independent of these numerous molecular Indian lobbies were the several prominent Indian Rings proper, the evangelicals and the entrepreneurs with their own agendas for Indians.
Early in our century, new Indian-bred organizations representing common interests began emerging, in some part bringing together formerly separate “tribal” level lobbying efforts. This trend accelerated rapidly in the post-World War II years, resulting in today’s proliferation of local, regional, national and international native rights associations, which now perform on many political stages including the global. These still multiplying lobbying organizations have taken on many ideological hues, from the most conservative to extremist (or, at least, wildly bombastic). However, they are now founded, managed, and run almost exclusively by established Indian elites, or by upwardly mobile, ambitious parvenus. Notwithstanding rivalries and the differences between them in proclaimed goals, styles, and preferred tactics, when hard-pressed they will always stand at least temporarily united against their chief adversary, “the Whiteman.” Their involvement with not-Indian groups has never ended; only its nature and extent has changed. Loyal not-Indian boosters have been relegated to stand-by, on-call technical or advocacy services—to a support role. These consist of many specialized professionals such as academics and attorneys, established institutions such as major foundations and church groups, various special function lobbying organizations such as environmentalists and New Age cultists, willing celebrities, and a mass of ordinary citizens. The services of some combination of these auxiliary forces can be mobilized rapidly and deployed in defense of whatever pressing issue is foremost at any one time. As in the nineteenth century so in ours: the Indian Rings are organized as political lobbies organized as networks and hierarchies of coalitions and alliances. What has changed is that elite Indians, now power-holders in their own right, dominate the writing and implementation of their agendas.
In our contemporary world no well organized, highly committed interest group with major political, economic, and other goals can survive, much less prosper, without a distinctive set of images of sufficient allure to sustain solidarity, invigorate potential supporters, beguile power-holders, captivate opinion makers, disarm adversaries, and mystify the masses (see Landsman 1987 and 1988). Over the past half century the New Indian Ring—in all its permutations, combinations, and subdivisions—has successfully accomplished the invention of just such a set of collective representations.
This is the second, major piece of the cultural dimension. It is the product of this influential network of information producers, image promoters, and opinion shakers. Edward M. Bruner characterizes this product as the recently developed “dominant narrative structure,” a preferred story-line about the Indian, and above all else about the relationships between the Indian and the Whiteman, past and present (Bruner 1986: 19-20, 139-142). So often pressed on the unsuspecting public is this now overwhelmingly favored, pivotal, multivalent epic that it has become the substance and soul of a specialized part of North American mass culture: what Americans are convinced they “know” about the Indian. Professor Bruner emphasizes that this narrative structure is a “unit of power,” since its creation, embellishment, and promulgation advances the interests of those who claim flesh-and-blood kinship with the narrative’s protagonist, the Indian.
Bruner remarks that “Anthropologists and Indians are co-conspirators” in creating and performing this narrative. In line with my previous suggestions, I think he gives too much credit to anthropologists and not enough to Indians for the responsibility of fabricating the narrative. Accomplices, after all, are rarely of equal standing. Clearly, contemporary Indians are the primary political-economic royalty owners of this major work of cultural fiction. Besides, over the past several decades Indians have become central actors in editing and revising, in garnishing, enlarging, and serializing the narrative’s substance, busily occupied with inventing their own preferred images. Without question, many anthropologists have had a significant part in ghostwriting and circulating large parts of the account; but since the 1950s they have had increasing help from other academics—mostly historians, joined by some sociologists, many literary specialists, and occasional political scientists and geographers. And the interests of anthropological and other lesser contributors are now largely derivative and secondary, that of increasingly subordinate loyalists, sometimes employees, taking second place to the Indians whose fortunes are more directly at stake.
Bruner provided us only a listing of the central themes and code words found in this dominant narrative structure. Not surprisingly, these are: exploitation, oppression, struggle, resistance movements, ethnic resurgence, liberation, victimization, colonialism (and neo- or internal colonialism), cultural persistence, cultural pluralism, nationhood, a New Golden Age, and the like. He does not provide a plot outline or a synopsis of the narrative. Because The Invented Indian critically addresses some of the most striking subplots and themes of this narrative structure, a synopsis of the whole story is important. In chapter 2 I will offer a compiled version of the story-line, together with a running critical, analytic commentary on a few of its principal elements. However, readers must appreciate that this is a living narrative, constantly being revised. As I write these paragraphs, for instance, I learn that the Native Alaskans, apparently increasingly dissatisfied with the long-term results for their special interests of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (see Prucha 1984 11:1131-34), are now complaining that they have been made into “second-class Indians.” They now seek sovereign or reservation status for their corporate estates, and a “citizen-plus” position in the state and federal system. Not to be outdone or ignored, in the fiftieth state of the union there is a movement underway to have the Native Hawaiians—now called the “Newest Lost Tribe”—reclassified as Indians, so that they, too, may hold and occupy reservations with federal subvention and protection (Houghton 1986). Obviously, for political fictions, as for purely literary ones, success spawns imitation.
These characterizations about the network of parties involved in the modern Indian business must be read as tentative and hypothetical. They emerged over the years as part of my persistent puzzlement—sometimes amazement—about Indians, their own activities, and what was said and done about them by others, whether historically or on the contemporary scene. Altogether, the experiences related in the memoir and the preliminary formulations amounted to increased motivation for a hopefully substantial creative act, one waiting an opportunity for realization. The Invented Indian has a slightly older sibling. Following up on an old interest in marginal individuals, cultural frontiers, and the use of biography as a research technique, and committed to interdisciplinary team efforts, I assembled a predecessor (Clifton 1989).
Two experiences in developing and arranging the publication of that book taught me considerably more about orthodoxy among those who truly believe in and support what Bruner calls the dominant narrative structure. First, in library research I discovered that in published biographies of Indians (a social category now defined generously), the spirit and style of Parson Mason Locke Weems was alive and flourishing (for example, Edmunds 1980; Liberty 1978; Lurie 1985). Published biographical studies of Indians, by and large, were mainly about notables and celebrities. Sterling contributions to the dominant narrative structure, these are thickly larded with the code words and themes listed above, featuring many virtues but displaying few warts. This inference concerned those who prepare new examples of the genre.
The second experience involved a small skirmish with one of those central figures who control the production and distribution of acceptable examples of the preferred narrative structure, an editor of an Indian series for a university press. After examining the manuscript for Being and Becoming Indian, this party complained that the questions raised therein were a “minefield” certain to antagonize many Indians, adding that the book was probably not suitable, implying too controversial for this publisher. Whether it was I never discovered conclusively, for after too many months of indecisive waiting, on enquiry I was informed the manuscript was lost or strayed after being put in the hands of a reviewer.
Having had some training in and practical experience with real minefields, I thought the series editor’s analogy apt but misapplied. True minefields are entirely passive weapons, emplaced and employed to defend strategic positions and to impede an enemy’s freedom of movement. They are, moreover, almost useless unless actively defended by fire. Otherwise, it is easy to dig or blow them up. My collaborators and I were not laying a minefield, we were charting a path through one created by others, identifying and marking some of the intellectual hazards we found along the way. That editor, also a tenured professor at a reputable university, did not take kindly to my further remarks about university press censorship.
Both experiences furnished further stimulation. Having confronted some of the defenses of an orthodox position added fuel to my hankering for taking another, stronger, analytic path through the shields fortifying the dominant narrative about Indians. The opportunity for developing this book came shortly thereafter, during an informal meeting of some anthropologists where the discussion focused, warmly so, on the current state of Native American studies and advocacy roles. Somewhere along the line I remarked to the effect that, if this was where we stood, if scholars have helped to invent a new, politically acceptable image of and for the Indian, then it would be an academically responsible thing to assemble some iconoclastic essays. The discussions became more heated. Soon thereafter the assembly divided, with departing loyalists issuing some comments about irreverence and heresy. A concept, title, and embryonic plan for The Invented Indian were conceived.
Thirty years’ experience had convinced me that this could not be a singleton undertaking. The variety of questions and issues involved were entirely too complex, heavy, and specialized for that even to be considered. Following the meeting where the book’s plan emerged, I had a few loyal companions—fellow dissidents—and many suggestions for recruiting additional ones. As I soon discovered, there were a good many more nonconformers ready and waiting than I at first appreciated, enough to add up to several solid critical examinations of many parts of the now standardized image of the Indian in North America. And the protagonist in that dominant narrative structure, I soon understood, is only one variant of an older, more inclusive image, the invented Native or Primitive (see Kuper 1988).
Recruiting capable, willing, sufficiently bold authors produced further unanticipated insights into the substance and defenses of the standard story about Indians. I had passing difficulty communicating the concept of The Invented Indian to a few, I found. Although this narrative structure has been preeminent for a good many years, I learned that some long time contributors to it still think of themselves as radical deconstructionists not orthodox conformers. Two essay plans and drafts I received were simply more of the same stuff—Tales Told About Victims. I believed that their battle had been won. Nonetheless, some scholars still dedicate themselves to correcting older, negative stereotypes about the Ignoble Savage—by substituting newer, positive ones, of the Noble Savage in modern garb, wearing a three-piece suit.
And several times I again carelessly strayed into that minefield. One potential author, for whose writings I had and have the utmost scholarly respect, at first responded enthusiastically and promised a solid essay for this book. Later, after sober reflection, the risks intruded into that individual’s consciousness. The essay was withdrawn on the grounds that if it appeared in a book called The Invented Indian that researcher’s own Indians would be greatly disturbed, blocking further studies of them. Another potential author, an equally well respected academician, responded expressing much interest but required that I provide certification that the other contributors were not “anti-Indian” or “racist.” Declarations or protestations of loyalty and conformity, obviously, as well as fears of guilt by association, remain important to some anthropologists and historians involved with Indians.
One last example will illustrate how far such concerns can carry a few, and something more of the pattern of the minefield. Another potential contributor, who came well recommended despite weaker qualifications, at first also expressed enthusiasm about writing an essay for the book. Then came a nervous, late-night phone call from a fourth-party, a mutual acquaintance of ours prompted by the second-party, the potential author. The second-party had turned to some third-parties associated with the National Congress of American Indians, a major lobbying organization, to check out my allegiances. Although the reports were apparently not encouraging, the author, still tempted, wished to give me the benefit of the doubt but only after further inquiry, seeking declarations of my fidelity. Having been asked to do this, on the phone the third-party link in this net was apprehensive for having agreed to conduct an inquisition. I expect I added to my interlocutor’s distress for having assumed this role with several reasonably polite remarks about “Red McCarthy ism.”
Whether I or the contributors to this book may be fairly characterized as “anti-Indian” or “racist,” our readers may see for themselves. Such smears, I think, are no more than part of the sanctions protecting an orthodox politico-academic position. Lively, provocative, well-informed, thoroughly disciplined scholars willing to serve as intellectual dissidents would be a more accurate assessment of my colleagues, I believe. I have learned a great deal from and remain indebted to them for greatly improving my understanding. I anticipate that others not too strongly involved with or caught up by and committed to reinforcing the standard Indian story will find them equally informative and enlightening.
The Invented Indian is intended as an intelligent book about the conventional story most commonly told about the Indians of the United States and Canada. Necessarily, if in a subsidiary manner, it is also about alternative views of the changing nature of and relations between Indians and others, past and present. This book is designed as an alternative to and a corrective for a standard narrative now so deeply embedded in the American consciousness that its origins and purposes, its authenticity and validity, are rarely questioned in public, then only with some hazard. Altogether, there is no political aim to the essays in this book. Jointly, we are advocates of one thing: clear thinking, reason, solid evidence, relevant theoretical ideas. Thinking and writing about Indians, I believe, should not be conducted according to or rated by the standards used for press agents in a senatorial campaign, or those for an advertising agency.
The organization of the essays in this book is straightforward. Chapter 2 presents a compiled, annotated version of the dominant narrative account about the Indian. Chapters 3 through 8 each addresses at length one or more of the standard parts of this whole work of cultural fiction, specific invented traditions. Mostly these are of a type called “The Good Things the Indian Gave the Whiteman.” An image of the original American as a protective sheltering woman, is one of these, as is the portrait of the hospitably generous Indian readily sharing his bounty with strangers. Among other “good things given,” here critically examined, are models for the United States Constitution, for ecological sainthood, and for an egalitarian ethic. None of the authors of these first essays, like their insurgent companions in those that follow, is much interested solely in debunking or rapping scholarship that is shaky, politicized, or fallacious. Each reaches behind the popular fabrications to ask how they got invented, what functions they serve, for whose ends. Larger insights and lessons result from such disciplined, open-minded enquiries.
In chapters 9 through 12 somewhat broader issues are examined, recurrent themes involving the pattern of content and style in the parts of the dominant narrative, and questions of methodology and truth seeking. As David Henige shows in his critique of a striking example of the misuse of historical methodology, estimates of pre-Columbian native populations have been vastly inflated for apparently moralizing, not soundly scholarly purposes. Richard de Mille’s essay, developed in concert with his pioneering efforts to expose the Don Juan hoax for what it was, lays out valuable standards for assessing the truth value of substantive representations of the Indian. The points de Mille makes about checking the authenticity and validity of such representations are applicable to questions raised in all other essays. Alice Kehoe’s essay is a guide to one of the latest frenzies involving Indians, where “medicine men” and their imitators join urban witches and transplanted South Asian gurus in expanding American pop and do-it-yourself religiosity with primal minds and screams, only the most recent version of an ancient vision of the distant Alien as Natural Man. Readers of this section, except those especially interested in the anthropological mysteries of kinship studies, may find R.H. Barnes’ essay the most difficult. But it deserves the closest attention, for Professor Barnes shows how, even for the purest of theoretical purposes, scholars can set off on an endless wild goose chase, constructing increasingly abstracted, barren models of aspects of Indian social life, representations based on faulty generalizations, for want of close attention to solid facts and a critical assessment of original sources. The Rise and Fall of the Omaha Kinship Type has never had the moral or political effects of the work of David Henige’s “High Counters,” and Barnes’ essay is all the more important because of this, again showing that in science and scholarship clear thinking and method are more important than motive or the politicized use of scholarship.
The last five essays address comparative dimensions of the Invented Indian and fictions or traditions invented to present a usable image of this legendary being. From Anglo-Canada comes an assessment of the rhetorical excesses displayed by advocates of the Victimized Noble Savage. From south of that border arrives Stephen Feraca’s feisty exposé of one of the more remarkable examples of institutional racism in American society, the inner workings of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Important aspects of the Indian Before the Bar of Justice, and the dilemmas of citizens affected by court decisions regarding him, are discussed perceptively by Allan van Gestel. He is one the rarest of professional advocates, a scholarly attorney who defends the quarry, not the Indian. Crossing the Atlantic comes a wise assessment of Europe’s Indians, imported and domestic, past and present, by Christian F. Feest, a scholar who knows both the European and the American varieties well, whether authentic or spurious. Lastly, from French-Canada comes our closing essay, Jean-Jacque Simard’s five century wrap-up, a social and intellectual history of the Indian inhabiting the minds of Europeans and Americans, together with some nicely fused philosophical-sociological reflections about alternative futures for the real people who have been subjected to such extraordinary stereotyping for so long.
Up to the point of editing the final manuscript, it had not occurred to me how propitious the date of its publication might be—1990. This is just two years shy of 1992, the quincentenary of Christopher Columbus’ first visit to the Americas. Already the first blasts have been fired in what soon will be two separate celebratory, public relations barrages timed to culminate in that year. From one side will come bursts advancing the prideful claims of Italian Americans, Spanish Americans, and others asserting European ancestries for having discovered and developed the Americas. To counter this offensive there will be heavy protective fire, from the defenders themselves—those claiming native American identity—as well as from their ardent allies. The heaviest caliber munition in the defenders’ arsenal bears the label: The Massive Debts the Whiteman Owes the Indian. This weapon comes in several marks, including: I—The Good Things the Indian Has Given the Whiteman; and, II—The Bad Things the Whiteman Has Done to the Indian.
A preliminary salvo from Mark I has already landed, a book by anthropologist Jack Weatherford titled Indian Givers (1988). His title is a neat play on the ordinary slang meaning of this phrase, for the subject matter of the book is not what was given then taken back, but the enormous contributions of “the Indian” to world nutrition, capital formation, health, clothing, transportation, environmental ethics, institutions of representative democracy, and the like. If those touting this book are to be believed, Weatherford, who alludes to “some Creek Indian ancestry,” set out on an 85,000-mile trek from Timbuktu to Tibet determined singlehandedly to illuminate “gigantic blind spots in the history of the Americas,” a not unambitious solo voyage (Graham 1989). Whether the world’s historians will cheer the results remains to be seen; but—Weatherford reports—from his Indian supporters he gets much applause and many gifts. Meanwhile, his fusillade has become that anthropological rarity, a best-seller. And plans are underway to retool this ordnance into larger caliber, a television epic, to be fired off at the primest of times—in 1992.
As the months pass, major national celebrations of this momentous event will be accompanied by counter-cultural media events endlessly replaying the victimization theme. Local and national Indian lobbyists, hobbyists, and their support groups will be out in force making the most of this opportunity to capture thirty seconds of prime time or half a column on the first page. There will be many grants awarded to Indians and faithful supporters for symposia and for the publication of pamphlets, more books, and docudramas. The Indian Historian, the American Indian Culture and Research Journal, the Northeast Indian Quarterly, and similar in-house publications will each devote one or more special issues to appropriately damning or glamorizing themes.1 Vine Deloria will publish a book titled, Columbus Was Red. The D’Arcy McNickle Center for Indian History will organize a major series of symposia and publications about what Columbus and his progeny did to the Indians. However, the nomination of the Indian as Time’s person-of-the-year will be rejected, apologetically.
Indian delegations in great numbers will descend on Washington, Madrid, Moscow, the Vatican, other European capitals, and the headquarters of the United Nations with protests and demands. The United States Congress will respond with a concurrent resolution extolling the many crucial things Indians have freely donated to American civilization, reiterating its true faith and support of Indian self-determination and tribal sovereignty. Hundreds of American Indian newspapers and radio stations will feature specials on all these happenings. The arthritic American Indian Movement will rise again. There will be demonstrations at Plymouth Rock, in Philadelphia, and on Manhattan Island. Whether Indians will be successful in enlisting the aid and services of Greenpeace in providing a vessel loaded with wildflowers to be spread in the sea offshore of Guanahaní Island is still uncertain. But this pacific performance will be followed by an intercontinental Indian assault party which will land on Guanahanfs beaches, there to plant their flags and to repossess “these lands” in the name of the host nations of the Americas. And a massive intertribal delegation, in full regalia, thick with medicine men, will surely visit the Cathedral of Santo Domingo, to cast tobacco on the crypt and to chant prayers of forgiveness over the bones of the Admiral of the Ocean Sea, he who took the names “Christgiver” and “Colonizer.”
I do not agree with Karl Marx that great events occur twice, first as tragedy, then as farce. These contrived happenings will not simply be political amusements—they are deadly serious twentieth century business. Indians have a good thing going for them, having long since mastered the fine arts of manipulating the mass media and public opinion to their own best advantage. My forecasts are safe bets in style and aim if not in exact form. They have ample, recent precedents. Even so minor event as a routine papal visit to Los Angeles, for instance, brought a hastily compiled “oral history” supposedly listing the “remembered” horrors of the Franciscan missions in Southern California, delivered to evoke the maximum of Catholic guilt (see Bahr 1989). And the serial celebrations of the United States’ founding and Constitution over the past decade were each accompanied by counter-happenings staged by the Indian lobby.
Possibly, the maverick commentaries in The Invented Indian will be submerged by all this hullabaloo, which will be mostly aimed straight at Americans’ brain stems, not their intellects. But we hope that readers will find illumination in the following pages, and ways of protecting themselves against being bamboozled.
1After this sentence was written, there arrived an announcement from the Northeast Indian Quarterly of its contribution to this counter-celebration, Indian Corn of the Americas: Gift to the World.
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