James A. Clifton
After World War II the Indian again captured the hearts and imaginations of admiring, sometimes worshipful North Americans and Europeans. A much enlarged and radically revised edition of an older narrative account of the character and experiences of these native peoples appeared in this period. The storyline emerged in bits and pieces, each to be market-tested and further refined, eventually forming an orthodox version captivating the attention and sympathies of swelling, appreciative audiences.
Numerous authors have contributed to the development and enhancement of the modules and themes making up this stirring account. Many are living, some long dead. Many of its composers are identifiable—indeed, a few have achieved at least passing celebrity for their contributions—but others remain nameless or obscure. The story is embodied and transmitted across time and space by all available media: oral, print, the tableau vivant, still and mobile graphics, live theatrical, electronic.
The elements and keynote patterns of this narrative are borne to audiences through many genres in various ways. Among these styles of presentation are literary narratives such as novels, short stories, and poetry. These range from works intended as high culture to five dollar pulp dreadfuls of the horror fantasy, harlequinized romance, and frontier adventure varieties. Narrative chronicles of significant events and developments are another genre, many with all the trappings of professional historiography, others counterfeit. Case studies by anthropologists and their imitators about the cultures of native peoples, living and dead, real or entirely fictitious, are one more significant kind of exposition. Representations of “the Indian” which fit patterned expectations appear regularly in advertising campaigns, but similar notional portrayals are even more common in print and television journalism, as news items or in editorial pronouncements. Live, dramatized performances staged by suitably costumed soloists or troupes are another means of communicating the Indian story to mass audiences. Sometimes the latter are seasonally staged local spectacles purporting to be reconstitutions of important historical events. More often they are traveling amateur, semi-professional or professional enactments of culture, legend, and ceremonial carried over a established circuit to national and international audiences.
The authors, artists, managers, and actors who produce and present variants of this Indian narrative come from various social backgrounds. If they cannot or do not claim a native identity, they must face and deal with the problem of the plausibility of their representations. How did they come by the information and the interpretations they disclose? On the other hand, if they do assert Indianness, even if such an identity is merely hinted at, the question of believability is automatically blunted, even set aside entirely. Professed Indian performers, their audiences assume, are inherently, rightfully, fully possessed of the heritages they represent in public. There are no accepted esthetic or academic standards of criticism of such performances. In truth, critiques of them are not readily tolerated.
For those seen as not-Indian, the question of the authenticity of their portrayals is answered in several ways. Anthropologists accomplish this by remarking long periods of total immersion in participant observation of native peoples, and historians by citing exhaustive labor in archives and critical examination of documents. Print journalists double-check their hopefully authoritative sources, while in television news reports the issue scarcely arises: certitude is achieved by the pointing of a videorecorder at a happening. Writers of pulp novels or factitious reports regularly claim insider expertise gained during a period of intimate contact with well qualified traditional Indians, as do those clever actors who don costumes to conduct allegedly “Indian medicine” rites on behalf of the world-weary.
Performers or producers publicly recognized as genuine Indians, as noted, have much less of a problem with plausibility. However, both Indians and not-Indians presenting parts of the native story to others must cope with several complications in common. Whichever media or genre they use, when arranging an exhibition, a retelling of the established Indian story, neither can stray too far from what Edward M. Bruner calls the primary contemporary narrative structure that underlies such representations (Bruner 1986:12-20, 139-41). Performer and audience, also, are locked together by this dominant pattern of preferred expectations in style and substance. Yet audiences vary in wants and level of sophistication. Times and their pivotal urgencies also change, the demands of patrons of the paramount Indian narrative with them. So enhancements and elaborations of the storyline regularly appear.
The responses of one Hanay Geiogamah to a magazine writer epitomize many of these thoughts (Fenwick 1989). Creator of and impresario for the new American Indian Dance Theatre, he offered this complex image to his publicist: “a sense of family is a sine qua non for any Indian enterprise,” adding, “There is a religious subtext to our production. The spiritual part of every aspect of Indian life is there.” Hanay went on to stress traditional, intergenerational continuity, native community involvement in his troupe’s productions, the “tension” between things sacred and ways theatrical, obtaining the consent of elders for revealing supernatural elements to other publics, and more in the same vein.
Until recently such an artist-entrepreneur, perhaps baptized as a person named William van der Bloomen, would have taken some such recognizably “Indian” name as Bill Swirling Thunder for a nom de soire, implying an informal foot planted in two cultural worlds. Nowadays, with the theme of total return to native roots prevalent, adopting what for English-speaking audiences is a tongue-twisting “tribal” handle has become de rigueur. This new practice highlights the contrast between performer and audience, and increases the sense of authenticity. What’s in a stage name? The most compelling public imago conceivable.
The rest of this sophisticated impresario’s discourse is subtle but penetrable. It is mostly a replay, with refinements, of the earlier styles of announcements made at Powwow circuit performances, from which the most talented entertainers were selected for Geiogamah’s Dance Theatre. Comments about “a sine qua non” and dramatic “tension” might not play well before audiences at a rural Kansas Labor Day performance; they do express just the right combination of slightly obsolescent and now trendy erudition to be appealing to those thronging the Kennedy Center and Albert Hall. The thematic constants in this dialogue, however, mark substantial continuity in the producer’s expectations of the wants of all his troupe’s patrons, past and present. “Ancient” traditions presented for the edification of not-Indian publics is but one of these. The sturdy, responsible subordination of an individual Indian—even a highly educated, much traveled Indian—to hearth and home community, the demurely reticent public revelation of formerly sacrosanct esoterica, are others. In the successes of the American Indian Dance Theatre before international audiences we may, perhaps, be witnessing a significant cultural uplifting. In earlier years Powwow dancing was staged by amateurs and semipros mainly as a diversion for rustics, later for middlebrows. Now the performers, reportedly, are beginning to captivate urban and elite audiences.
Such preliminaries aside, one feature of the dominant storyline about the Indian is arresting for its absence. The standard narrative is never presented as a whole, with all or even a large array of its parts stuck together in one place. Yet the historical and cultural pieces of it do fit together, implying and depending on one another. Presented singly or in partial combination, the events singled out, the strong metaphors, and the themes recurrently expressed rely on and have an inherent, dramatic relationship to one another. They form a larger, expressively cultural unity. This overall narrative about the Indian, moreover, has pronounced social, political, and economic implications. However powerfully stimulating it may be delivered piecemeal, the whole account is even more so. The complete story tells the traumatic experiences of the righteous Indian in North American history; but it also predicates and ratifies a special place for the Indian in modern North American moral orders and political systems.
An effort to compile at least an abridgement of the entire standard narrative is in order, for there comes a point when a simple listing of key words and themes will not do. However suggestive these may be, a full sense of the narrative’s essential logic and plan are not thereby made explicit. Still, short of an encyclopedia, no such account can be anything more than a précis, listing the more common narrative elements in some reasonably coherent arrangement. The following paragraphs consist of an effort to spell out just such a digest. Each of the next fifteen chapters critically examines in detail one or more particular elements of some of those barely mentioned in this outline.
In the beginning, North America was motherland for between ten and thirty million truly humane beings. This dense population was organized into over two hundred separate, sovereign nations existing continuously—according to the unquestionable authority of their own traditional histories—from time immemorial. Each such sovereignty had its own government and exclusive national territory (Dobyns 1983 and 1987; Wilkinson 1987).1 Although none of these indigenous nations understood or recognized the propriety of owning, buying, or selling land, they did claim and exercise the rightful privilege of occupying parts of it and using its fruits. This right, as hosts, they freely shared with their neighbors and visiting strangers, whom they treated generously as guests.
Mistakenly called Indians by the Whiteman who later invaded, defrauded them of, and despoiled their property and persons, these native peoples had no common name for themselves, nor any formal organization binding the separate nations together. Yet they were identified with one another as a genuine whole in an existential communitas. Each with its own language and special customs marking their unique identities, these nations lived in peace and harmony with one another.
Underneath these minor cultural differences, nonetheless, lay vitalizing commonalities, the heart and soul of the Indian. Each nation, for instance, defined its territory as a Holy Land (Dobyns 1987), and altogether they worshipfully personified their habitat as Mother Earth, existing in harmony with all her creatures. This “biological” or environmentalist ethic pervaded every aspect of the life of the Indian, for whom all things, all thoughts, all behavior, and all happenings were pervasively sacred. Animistic, purely spiritualistic, uncontaminated, these archaic nations existed in free-floating, ahistorical time, their beliefs and ways irreversible, insoluble, and—as others have but recently come to appreciate—ineradicable (Martin 1987: 3-34, 192-220).
These shared bonds of harmonious being were most conspicuous inside each Indian nation, within the daily and seasonal rounds of community life. There social living was marked by the great value placed on equality, tolerance, kindness, altruism, mutual affection, and respect. Interference in the freedom of every person to do what they pleased was unknown. Little children were treated with much regard as small-scale adults. Women enjoyed a position on a par with that of men. The enfeebled, incapacitated, and elderly were highly honored and their wants attended to. Gays were not only easily abided, they were specially recognized for their notable spirituality (Williams 1986).
Political power in these indigenous nations could not corrupt because it was so widely shared: important decisions were not made until full consensus spontaneously manifested itself, unprompted by anyone. Wealth could not be accumulated by any individual, group, or government because generous giving was the accepted rule. In fact, their economies were based on gratuitous reciprocal gift-exchange, not mean barter or profit-oriented selling. No man could be another’s property. Even his labor could not be demanded or commanded by anyone. Freely given cooperation was the norm in all things political and economic, made possible because everyone owned all necessary means of production—tools, skills, access to raw materials. For all these reasons, the evils of political, economic, social, or gender inequality were unknown. Political hierarchy was incomprehensible to and incompatible with the Indian way, as was the drive to accumulate material things beyond the bare minimum required to satisfy the basic needs of everyday and seasonal life.
So, living spontaneously, joyously, in intimate, peaceful, stress-free relations with one another, close to and in harmony with the rhythms of the earth and its creatures, consuming natural foods, nearly free of disabling or deadly diseases, with extensive knowledge of nature’s materia medica, their medicine men available to cure all ailments physical or mental, barring unforeseen accident the Indian lived to a ripe old age. Death came easily, recognized as but a natural step in the celestial cycle of all things, living or incorporeal. Following an elder’s passing, the sanctified remains were laid in a consecrated place never thereafter to be desecrated, where memories of the ancestors were forever devoutly commemorated, their bones resting in peace.
This native North American way-of-being developed and was perfected primordially, existing over the ages with only minor changes, these merely refining the fundamental, archaic pattern. So ancient and ingrained, so inherently potent were these ways that they were carried and transmitted across the generations in the very life substance of every Indian, the blood that runs through their veins, almost impossible to weaken or repress, much less to extinguish. Yet an almost insurmountable threat of annihilation (of genocide) or, if not that, of cultural and group identity ruination (of assimilation) these native peoples faced unexpectedly, beginning just five centuries ago.
Until then unsuspected by the Indian, across a great geographic and cultural gulf, unknowably far to the East, there lived another variety of humankind, the Whiteman.2 The Whiteman’s values and ways were shockingly different from those of the Indian. Following his own ancient Judeo-Christian ethic, he was the greatest environmental sinner the world has ever known. Rather than to be worshiped, its resources husbanded, a life in harmony with it treasured, the earth for him was a thing, a physical asset to be ruthlessly exploited for his own crass materialistic gain. His fundamental ethic was secular, not sacred, for all the formal surface trappings of his artificial religiosity.
Finding his own lands and their resources inadequate to his ravenous greed, the Whiteman’s destructively competitive craving for power and for the accumulation of wealth sent him forth to discover and capture the riches belonging to those inhabiting other parts of the globe. The Whiteman, overwhelmed by his own conceits, claimed these “New Worlds” as his own by right of “discovery” or “conquest.” His blue bloods, who had previously dispossessed the exploited masses of his own nations, transported large numbers of them overseas, many millions into the lands of the Indian nations of North America. These new-found “others of the world” the Whiteman saw as peoples without history, with few rights except those subordinate to his own wants as their new masters, simply more helpless humans to be brutalized and overpowered for his own capitalistic gain. (Wolf 1982)
On the beaches and in the interior of North America the Indian at first peaceably and generously welcomed the Whiteman—as a respected guest sojourning in his ancient land. To these visitors the Indian selflessly gave much valuable knowledge and many of his even more valuable inventions and things: new food crops to feed his starving millions and to help develop the Whiteman’s unproductive lands; unprecedented medicines to combat his terrible epidemic diseases; fresh, practical styles of clothing; previously unknown technologies; new kinds of raw materials and new sources for old ones for his expanding factories—all these the Indian freely gave, asking and receiving little in return. (Weatherford 1988)
The Indian even considerately gave the Whiteman bountiful places to live for his own pitiable pariahs—the deprived, the homeless, the banished, the disillusioned. These the Indian took in hand, teaching them the survival skills they needed in a strange land. The Whiteman, in his turn, looked on the Indian with racially prejudiced eyes. He called the Indian “Savage”; but in truth, as his own ruthlessly murderous behavior toward his host later amply demonstrated, it was the Whiteman who was the Savage. (Wrone and Nelson 1973)
However, the very best of the good things the Indian gave the Whiteman included a set of sterling ideals and values for proper social living. Following early experiences with Indians, reports about their estimable life-styles gradually filtered into the bigoted minds of these aliens, eventually producing radically new fashions of social thought. At first only a few of his philosophers, or an occasional legal theorist, for example, recognized the ultimate truths of the Indian way. These acknowledged the vast differences between the Indian’s communitas and their own dominium, whereby power and wealth were held by a few at the expense of the many. Thus the Indian’s ideals of liberty, human rights, representative democracy, and the sharing of power and property equally led first to fresh visions of new political styles for the Whiteman, eventually to shattering revolutions seeking their realization (Brandon 1986). One expression of this Indian political-economic gift was in the new United States, where the Iroquois Nations gave the Founders a model for their own constitution. (Barreiro 1988)
Many years later, only after the larger significance of the Indian way became more apparent to the Whiteman, did he begin accepting other parts of the Indian ethic. It was revealed to some, for instance, that God is Red (Deloria 1973). Disillusioned youth found in the stubborn Indian, refusing to dissolve in a Philistine melting-pot, the prototype for a genuinely meaningful countercultural identity (Brand 1988). Experiences with Indian spirituality began raising the consciousness of many when they gathered in sacred circles near ancient blessed power-points. And those frightened by their destruction of the habitat found in the Indian’s environmental ethic, as expressed many years ago by the wise Chief Seattle, a secure, alternative global future. (Kaiser 1987)
The Whiteman did deliver to the Indian some things in return for the hospitality and the treasures given him. A few trinkets or pieces of silver in exchange for fraudulent “purchases” of valuable real estate was one such, in transactions the Indian could not comprehend, since the idea of selling strips of Mother Earth’s tender flesh was quite beyond him. Servitude was another experience delivered the Indian, as the Whiteman sought profit from the labor of his body as well as from exploitation of his resources, or else imposed enslavement as punishment when some at long last rose up to rebel against the horrors inflicted on them. But this experiment failed, for no Indian could long survive as another man’s chattel.
The Whiteman also tried to convert the Indian into a market for his surplus commodities, with little success, for the Indian’s wants were limited and easily satisfied. Among the consumables the Whiteman forced down the Indian’s throat was beverage alcohol, causing what many mistakenly have thought were grave social problems. As it happens, on later reexamination, it turns out that what once seemed to have been community and self-destroying chemical abuse by the Indian was really no more than a disguised social protest movement. (Lurie 1971)
The Whiteman also tried to bully the Indian into adopting new roles, accepting new customs, practicing new ways. Rape and the prostitution of Indian women were among these. The appointment of all-powerful, easily corrupted High Chiefs to do the Whiteman’s bidding was another, as was widespread bribery. Numerous unthinkably barbarous customs the Whiteman intimidated the Indian into adopting, including their employment as Black and Indian slave hunters, and as mercenaries to fight the Whiteman’s wars. Even the abominable practice of scalping the Whiteman introduced and compelled the Indian into practicing—rewarding him richly for slaughtering the Whiteman’s enemies, Indian and White alike, and for delivering bloody trophies of the slaughter. (Axtell and Sturtevant 1980)
As the Whiteman’s invasion of North America continued, other newly introduced evils only increased the plight of the suffering Indian. Spreading rapidly even before his explorers and settlers set foot on their lands were the Whiteman’s killer plagues. These cataclysmic pandemics regularly wiped out whole communities and nations, massacring innocent victims by the untold millions, a holocaust that quickly reduced North America’s native population by 95 percent, greatly easing the Whiteman’s road into these conquered lands. (Thornton 1987)
Recognizing a useful thing when they saw it and convinced that the only good Indian was a dead Indian, in later years the Whiteman deliberately introduced germ warfare, seeking to accelerate the butchery—a Final Solution to the Indian problem. Discontent even with this improved rate of depopulation, later the Whiteman captured the few survivors, bound them in chains, and bulldozed them out of the remnants of their aboriginal Holy Lands, driving them westward like cattle along a Trail of Tears into the Great American Desert, hoping there they would soon languish and die unnoticed (Dobyns 1987:72). To these efforts at purging North America of the Indian, the Whiteman added military massacres, perpetrating innumerable My Lais in Indian Country. (Brown 1971)
In this massive, centuries-long campaign to totally stamp out the Indian in body and spirit, the Whiteman failed. In isolated regions—here a few individuals or families, there the fragments of communities or whole nations—some survivors somehow managed to endure, clinging tenaciously to their primordial identities, resolutely refusing to surrender what was most precious to them, their ethnic roots. Some did this directly under the “benevolent” paternalistic gaze of the Whiteman’s governments which at last, once the Indian’s resources had been despoiled, reluctantly agreed to preserve their few remaining bodies while laboring to “save”—to subvert—their unconquerable souls (Axtell 1985). More survived directly in the midst of the centers of Whiteman populations, even in metropolitan areas.
Some of the latter did so by adopting a cultural chameleon strategy, disguising themselves as Whitemen when heavily pressed to change their ways. Others accomplished the same end with a hideaway tactic, deliberately secreting themselves, remaining “undocumented,” thus historyless and unidentifiable, avoiding contacts with domineering Whitemen who would have exposed and compelled them to do the unthinkable. In neither instance was the feigned Whiteness of the Indian even so much as skin deep. (Fogelson 1989:141-42)
Until recently, throughout these long centuries of forced conversions, the Indian survivor has often donned a thin veneer of Whiteness, but this was no more than superficial protective camouflage, a mere ploy used to safeguard their true inward Indianness.3 The Indian was greatly aided in this cultural resistance movement by an intrinsic feature of his nature, one discounted if recognized at all by most Whitemen. His inherent Indianness is inevitably carried across the generations in his distinctively Indian blood. In fact, Indian blood has sufficient power to overwhelm even the results of many generations of interbreeding with Whitemen, compelling the original Indian’s distant progeny to become, think, and act as a True Indian, producing an interesting biosocial phenomenon, the “cultural fullblood.”
Therefore, however few they may be, and whatever the measure of their biological blanching or sociological compounding, even one or a scant few survivors of the bloodline of an aboriginal Indian nation served as hardy sociological rhizomes. These rootstalks awaited only proper nourishment and opportune conditions to regenerate, propagate, flourish, and perpetuate the ancient national life-ways.
Little by little, after World War II the conditions necessary for resuscitating this perennial intrinsic Indianness started appearing. More and more came out of hiding to doff their masks and take up their legitimate place as the heirs of North America’s rightful, original owners. To many other thousands the long buried, unsuspected germ of their Indianness was revealed, and these started revitalizing their old nations. Other surviving Indian nations, beleaguered on small parcels of land, increased their recruiting of kin moved elsewhere and long lost track of. This “Indian renaissance” came about largely by the Indian’s own efforts, with some modest help from a few kindly Whitemen and their institutions. (Leacock and Lurie 1971:418-80)
Among the most important of these institutions are the Indian treaty and the federal courts. Over the past thirty years, at long last, wise jurists have recognized the Indian treaty for what it was originally intended to be. When the United States began, they finally admitted, its founders saw that Indian nations were like all other nations on earth, sovereign peoples each owning its own territory. And so, when the Whiteman set out to steal Indian land, or to commit some other injustice, they negotiated treaties for such purposes. These Indian treaties, jurists now concede, have exactly the same standing as those negotiated with Germany or Japan. (Wrone 1987; Wilkinson 1987)
But at the time Indian treaties were negotiated there was a great difference in how the Whiteman and the Indian viewed them. Then, for the Whiteman, the treaty was little more than a scrap of paper, an instrument of temporary expediency which in later years could be easily discarded, ignored, or abrogated unilaterally. But for the Indian a totally different view prevailed. For him the treaty was a sacred pact, unalterable by any mortal, perpetual in its guarantees and provisions, a promise that the Whiteman would support and protect the Indian for as long as the grass grows and the waters flow. (Fogelson 1989:138, 142)
Today, impelled by idealistic attorneys, academics, and church people selflessly serving the Indian cause, this large truth has been accepted as the highest law of the land—moral and juridical. Among the most important of the sacrosanct guarantees the Whiteman offered the Indian in these old treaties were these: the Indian would forever be allowed to live unmolested and protected on the tiny reserved remnants of his national homelands. There, the Whiteman had irrevocably stipulated, the Indian would be allowed eternally to govern himself, living by his own chosen ways, separate and isolated from mainstream America, with his own special key to the federal treasury. These obligations, the Whiteman now came to understand and accept, are no more than the rents they must forever pay as unwelcome guests among the host nations of North America.
After many successes in the courts and in Congress, and after raising the public’s consciousness about the Indian’s important place in the history of North America and his vital contemporary role as mentor and model, the Indian is finally taking his proper place in modern American and Canadian societies. The Indian story, so long concealed by the Whiteman’s shame or misshapen by his vanity, can now be proclaimed throughout these lands.
Compounding an abridgement of the contemporary Indian story like this must be followed by a disclaimer: it is only one of many possible variations. Anyone, scholarly authority or ordinary citizen, can quibble over its phrasing, examples, elements, code words, or emphasis. Indeed, most or all of these makings could be adjusted or replaced and others substituted without altering the fundamental, underlying prescription, or mitigating the rhetorical side-effects of a particular example.
The durable formula of the story—strong medicine, indeed—rests solidly on sharp contrasts, repetitive themes, standard motifs, a double standard of pervasively moral interpretation (Sheehan 1985), the suppression of logic and critical thinking, great selectivity of “evidence,” and reliance on folk styles of explanation rather than scientific: one example of this being the use of popular biological-racial constructs such as the “myth of blood.” In its several thousand year old historical origins this narrative framework is European, in its recent transformations Euroamerican; it was not indigenous to North America. An account those of European background once imparted exclusively to one another, it was later divulged to others of allegedly indigenous North American ancestry, where it was accepted as gospel. Now Whiteman and Indian regularly use this narrative framework in communicating with one another about themselves, and use it to think about and to deal with each other. It is in this sense, as Bruner suggests, that the narrative is endorsed, enhanced, and perpetuated by “co-conspirators,” used by these accomplices as a “unit of power” (Bruner 1986:19-20). It certainly has this effect, by mystification.
The narrative’s framework is composed of several parts, each of them subject to innumerable variations in expression and combination. Several timeworn themes recur, including: Victimizer versus Victim, Guilt Rampant versus Innocence Violated, Alien versus Indigene, Artificial versus Natural, Dominance versus Subordination. To further augment the effects of such already unadorned polar contrasts, a selected array of preferred, forceful code words are used, such as oppression, force, fraud, resistance, pluralism, colonialism, justice, and heritage. The dramatic play in the account commonly turns on invented speeches or dialogues presented as if they are verbatim records of words issuing from the mouths of real, historical figures. One of these imaginary actors often employed as a rhetorical foil is found in the much used Adario motif, which consists of a Wise Old Indian Uttering Marvelous Lessons for the Whiteman’s Edification (Adams 1983:234-36). The aforementioned Chief Seattle is only one member of Adario’s numerous tribe.
The elements of this narrative’s framework aside, the content inserted into them to make up a retelling, in part or whole, is what stirs audiences the most. This content, which is to say the narrative as it is known to many millions, is effectively factious, also normatively factitious, and in substance largely if not fully fictitious, commonly two or all of these at the same time.
The narrations are factious because they serve to identify and set off as rigidly defined adversaries culturally constructed categories of humans—pseudo-species. Indeed, these accounts, in generating and perpetuating divisiveness, legitimize these categories in the minds of audiences, making them seem real, and the contests between people assigned to them meaningful. It is in this additional sense that the Indian and the Whiteman are inventions, used for contemporary purposes in the competition between interest groups for control of resources and for prestige.
Much water has flowed through that great gulf separating the real peoples of Europe and those of North America since Christopher Columbus first used the word Indio as a generic name for the latter. Following the custom of his time, because he thought himself east of the Indus River, he used the word in a purely geographic sense as a recognizable name for all the peoples of these continents indiscriminately. Today, nowhere in the Americas can “Indian” possibly have the same meaning of “all” inhabitants of an area. Five centuries of immigration from around the world, coupled with that many years of interaction, interbreeding, and social change transforming the original inhabitants biologically and culturally, make this usage impossible.
Presently, in North America, “Indian” has taken on a completely different, much-restricted meaning as a label for some inhabitants—a definable strata or identity group—in complex nation-states. In its broadest application, it is asserted as a personal or group identity marker for those who claim descent, however remote or partial, from one of North America’s original inhabitants, whether such people are affiliated with a recognized Indian community or not. The ethnic semantics of “Indian” are straightforward. It is used, privately among themselves, by millions of individuals and families who are nominally identified as Whitemen, Black, or something else. It is from this large reservoir of potentials that many new, publicly proclaimed Indians regularly appear, presenting themselves to claim their rightful place and prerogatives as legitimate (that is, legal) Indians. Those otherwise readily identified as Black have grave difficulties in “passing” as Indians, however (Clifton 1989: 183-203); but for those formerly identified as Whitemen this is a much easier step (Clifton 1989:276-89). In the former instance, American rules for ascribing racial status nearly prohibit such a self-induced or externally encouraged transmutation of public identity. On the other hand, although the large Hispanic-American population could claim Indianness by virtue of the same cultural marker used by others in the United States, “Indian blood-quantum,” exceedingly few do so.
Thus the Whiteman’s main partners in fabricating versions of the Indian story come from those parts of North America’s population that are, by modern definition, “Indians-by-blood,” whether covert and potential or publicly certified as such by enrollment in a jurally defined nation/tribe. The standard Indian narrative is factious because in the minds of narrators and audiences it divides the whole population into adversarial groups and explains and justifies their opposition to one another. In the Indian story, the spirit of racial or ethnic separatism is manifested and flourishes most strongly. It is a political story, a “unit of power,” because its melodramatic substance generates shame and guilt in the Whiteman, so promoting desires for restitution in and demands for reparations from him. It is political, as well, because decisions to certify “Indianness” for new candidates, individually or collectively, are decisions about allocating resources—prestige, prerogatives, land, and money. The greater the degree of guilt induced in the Whiteman, the larger the number of potentials legitimized as proper Indians, to serve as targets for the Whiteman’s restitution fantasies and actions.
The elements of the narrative are factitious because they are fashioned and communicated, inadvertently or deliberately, to serve someone’s ends, whether those of an individual engaged in face-to-face interaction or a group contending in a larger arena. This applies reciprocally, whether the creators and performers define themselves as Indians or Whitemen. The many advantages this tale gives the former in nation-states where public morality demands the utmost visible display of deference for the rights of those defined as underdogs is apparent. For them the orthodox Indian story is, unmistakably, a sturdy crowbar used to gain leverage in the play of interest-group politics. The Indian story so manipulated in recent decades has been extraordinarily influential, swinging legislative, executive, judicial, and public sentiment towards the Indian far and beyond their numbers as voting-blocs. For them the standard story brings large amounts of moral clout, not the power of the ballot-box or campaign contribution (Gross 1986).
Explaining the involvements and contributions of not-Indians in the development, enhancement, and replaying of this narrative structure is more complex. For a great many of them there is no accessible alternative. So pervasive a part of American popular culture has this story become, and so unrelieved in its expressions, that uncritical masses of a generation reared on Custer Died For Your Sins, Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, and Little Big Man accept it as legitimate and authoritative. The force of fashionable orthodoxy is so great that publishing and other media enterprises, eying what scripts come to them on the one hand, what large audiences will eagerly accept on the other, hew to the line almost automatically. The standard narrative, additionally, forms the core of what the press and television journalism will accept as “hard” or “soft news” (Landsman 1988).
And academics, because of their own sentiments and preferred roles, readily identify or they are pressed to identify themselves as “Friends of the Indian,” some out of idiosyncratic motives, others for ideological or pragmatic reasons. Many campus-bound and extra-mural intellectuals, of course, fancy themselves as critics of the establishment, and for such disgruntled commentators a properly constructed image of the Indian serves as a useful foil, just as centuries ago it did for Rousseau or the Baron La Hontan. Even the titles selected for recent scholarly books and essays commonly reveal dependency on the established phrases and forms of the standard narrative. Consider, as examples, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (Jennings 1975); Return of the Native: American Indian Political Resurgence (Cornell 1988); American Indian Holocaust and Survival (Thornton 1987); The Invasion Within (Axtell 1985); and Irredeemable America (Sutton 1985). Although such volumes are draped with footnotes, statistical tables, and flow charts, a banal image of the invented Indian peeks through their rhetoric. In such academic jeremiads we rarely find a hint that what is resurgently irredeemable is the intellectual atrocity caused by modern cant. The partisan ends of such patrons of the Indian cause are served as well, if not better than those of allied client Indians themselves.
Starting with the assumption that the whole of the North American population can be easily divided into Indian and not-Indian, the conventional narrative in whole or substantial part is fictitious. It can be expressed as a wholly imagined representation of the past, or about present relationships and happenings, or versions of it may be severely distorted by fanciful imagery, selective reporting, hyperbole, and whatever other rhetorical devices are at hand. The aim of producers of the Indian narrative is not simply to inform or enlighten, but also to persuade—within the permissible confines of the narrative’s structure. And above all else, the task of persuasion is greatly eased by sticking to a well-trodden path, one whose twists and turns are well known to audiences. Hence versions of the Indian story are mostly pieced together from borrowed hand-me-downs, with enough ruffles and flourishes sewn on to suggest innovativeness.
This last consideration suggests a problem associated with applying Richard de Mille’s discussion of authenticity and validity to assessing the truth value of versions of the Indian narrative (see chapter 12). The power of orthodoxy is such as to encourage misperception and misconstruction, no matter how much actual first-hand observation is used to attest the materials used in fabricating a version of the story. Moreover, replicating large historical research or anthropological field studies is extraordinarily expensive and time-consuming, and such critical reappraisals are not nearly so well rewarded as fresh variations on an established theme. However, when such interpretations are reexamined against the original data, as David Henige reports in chapter 9, the results can be greatly illuminating and corrective. But they can also go unnoticed if their conclusions do not fit accepted styles of construction.
The question of a research report’s validity, raised with respect to a particular account, say, of relations between some Indians and Whitemen, is equally thorny. But here the problem is of a different kind. De Mille addressed this question as regards reports where there were several bodies of substantial theoretical knowledge separate from the work of those who produce variations on the Indian story—pharmacological, zoological, neuropsychological, geographic. Against these bodies of knowledge the validity of particular research conclusions and interpretations can be checked.
Assessing the validity of versions of the conventional Indian narrative in this way is rarely attempted. On the contrary, their validity is ordinarily measured on a scale of conformity to the standard narrative structure. In this sense, so long as such depictions remain within the confines of agreeable orthodoxy they are—to all appearances—mutually selfvalidating. The terms of the narrative structure are the standard of proper truth. In few places where a part of the Indian story is rendered, as de Mille remarks for misbegotten hypotheses about the nature of physical or biological phenomena, is there a hard reality to rise up and strike down the careless or the over-conforming experimenter. Here the narrative structure, as a unit-of-power in its own right, is accepted and works as that hard reality. It is those who deviate from its normative tenets who are likely to be stricken.
To borrow Max Weber’s thought, expressions of this basic framework “are not plowshares to loosen the soil of contemplative thought; they are swords against the enemies: such words are weapons” (1946:145). Sometimes legend, often allegory, not infrequently parable, frequently apocryphal anecdote, commonly dismal moral chronicle, the inventive versions of parts of the storyline are rarely anywhere near all that they pretend to be on the surface. But what of the whole? How can it be usefully characterized in a meaningful theoretical way? In the social sciences and history it is always useful to know what kind of a thing we are dealing with.
Viewing the thing as narrative structure or standard storyline has been useful, up to a point. However, this characterization does not distinguish a piece presented as a truthful account from one admittedly fictional, or instances of the latter disguised as the former. The authors of the following chapters are not reluctant about making just such a distinction, including several who use the everyday meaning of “myth” to express their judgment on the truth-value of the invented account they examine critically. Many other scholars use the word in just this sense, as does Leonard Thompson when he defines political myths as tales “told about the past to legitimize or discredit a regime,” meaning the historical elements of an ideology (1985:1). However, the notion of “myth as ideological falsehood” conflicts with the second, technical meaning of myth, and in discourse of this order it is better to reserve the word for that special class of sacred narratives of anonymous authorship which explain the origins of the world and justify the arrangement of its features.
The accounts discussed here, however highly valued and strongly defended they may be, are not of that type. They are entirely mundane, lesser in scope, and the makers are usually identifiable. In the language of modern folklore studies, characterizing such accounts as mass or urban legends would be closer to the mark, but such narratives are commonly titillating amusements, and there is little that is diverting in the Indian storyline.
Some of the substantive nature, uses, and consequences of this narrative structure have been remarked. Recounting it promotes faction by factitious techniques in genres too often fictive. It is, above all else, in two distinct senses a “cover-story.” It has achieved long running top-billing, and it obscures or suppresses other interpretations and conclusions. For this reason, it may be defined as a significant, multifaceted work of perfectly enchanting cultural fiction, one that is both believed by its impresarios and presented as believable to others. The aim of such a narrative is not to illuminate but to make converts.
The idea of cultural fiction has a respectable if discontinuous history in several disciplines. Its use in law as the “legal fiction” is discussed by Allan van Gestel in chapter 15. In anthropology, the fictive nature of many cultural elements and aspects of social organization have been long recognized and marked, as in the “genealogical fiction” and “fictive kinship” (Seymour-Smith 1986:116, 130). In history, it has been of special value in studying the origins of nationalism (Anderson 1983) and in the study of “invented traditions” (Hobsbawn and Ranger 1983). In sociology it is applied to understanding rural development projects (Goldman and Wilson 1984). And in political science there is long established precedent for viewing narratives created and presented for public consumption with the aim of concealing, mystifying, or obscuring the real nature of events and relationships as fictions (Lippman 1922: 10-14; Quaker 1985). Cultural fictions, then, are fabrications of pseudoevents and relationships, counterfeits of the past and present that suit someone’s or some group’s purposes in their dealings with others. In the following chapters, paraphrasing Herbert Spencer’s experience, the authors may be seen assaulting a Brigade of Beautiful Fictions with a Gang of Brutal Facts and Ideas.
1Only a few selected references for the more blatant, recent use of the code words, themes, and motifs assembled in this digest are given. The following fifteen chapters provide extensive references for many of these. A reasonably completed, critically annotated bibliography for a comprehensive glossary of these elements would require several volumes in its own right. The wording of the elements in this abridgement are mine, not necessarily the exact phrases used in the items cited or elsewhere. The soundness of this abridgement can be assessed by a reasonable amount of reading selected at random from titles about Indian-Whiteman relations published during the past ten years.
2If readers feel I have overdrawn the adversarial relationship between these two monolithic, racially labeled entities with The Whiteman v. The Indian, I invite them, again, to browse through any of the multitude of recent publications written by professionally qualified academics, as well as by popular writers, church people, government organizations, and others, where this usage is nearly an unrelieved standard. In such contexts, readers must be wary, for in them “Whiteman” now means “not-Indian,” by no means including only those of exclusively European ancestry, but African-Americans, Asian-Americans and others, as well. Nowadays “Indian” is not simply the logically balanced, reciprocal negative of the former; on the contrary, the terms of reference change for “Indian”: it is the label for a ersatz subspecies, a category of persons who publicly claim a native American ancestry, whatever their actual ancestries and heritages. (See Clifton 1989.)
3For an excellent presentation, defense, and practical use of this “protective camouflage stratagem” notion, see Plaintiffs Post-Trial Brief, in Keweenaw Bay Indian Community v. State of Michigan, File No. M87-278-CA2. United States District Court for the Western District of Michigan. Northern Division (Lansing MI, 1989).
Adams, Percy G. 1983. Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press.
Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso Editions.
Axtell, James. 1985. The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America. New York: Oxford.
Axtell, James and William C. Sturtevant. 1980. “The Unkindest Cut, or Who Invented Scalping?” William and Mary Quarterly 37:452-472.
Barreiro, Jose, ed. 1988. Indian Roots of American Democracy. Ithaca, NY: American Indian Program, Cornell University.
Brand, Stewart. 1988. “Indians and the Counterculture, 1960s-197Os.” In Washburn 1988:570-572.
Brandon, William. 1986. New World for Old: Reports from the New World and Their Effect on the Development of Social Thought in Europe, 1500-1800. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.
Brown, Dee. 1971. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
Bruner, Edward M. 1986. “Experience and its Expressions,” and “Ethnography as Narrative.” In The Anthropology of Experience. Victor Turner and Edward M. Bruner, eds. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Pp. 3-30, 139-155.
Clifton, James A., ed. 1989. Being and Becoming Indian: Biographical Studies of North American Frontiers. Chicago, IL: The Dorsey Press (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Co.).
Cornell, Stephen. 1987. Return of the Native: American Indian Political Resurgence. New York: Oxford University Press.
Deloria, Vine Jr., 1969. Custer Died For Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. New York: Macmillan.
Deloria, Vine Jr., 1973. God Is Red. New York: Grossett and Dunlap
Dobyns, Henry F. 1983. Their Numbers Become Thinned: Native American Population Dynamics in Eastern North America. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press.
Dobyns, Henry F. 1987. “Demographics of Native American History.” In Martin 1987:67-74.
Fenwick, Henry. 1989. “An Ongoing Beat.” Modern Maturity 32 (5):34-38.
Fogelson, Raymond D. 1989. “The Ethnohistory of Events and Nonevents.” Ethnohistory 36:133-147.
Goldman, Robert and John Wilson. 1984. “The Selling of Rural America.” Rural Sociology 48:585-606.
Gross, Emma R. 1986. “Setting the Agenda for American Indian Policy.” In Joe 1986:47-63.
Hobsbawm, Eric and Terence Ranger, eds. 1983. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jennings, Francis. 1975. The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.
Joe, Jennie R., ed. 1986. “American Indian Policy and Cultural Values: Conflict and Accomodation.” Contemporary American Indian Issues Series, No. 6. American Indian Studies Center. Los Angeles: University of California.
Kaiser, Rudolph. 1987. “A Fifth Gospel, Almost,” Chief Seattle’s Speech(es): American Origins and European Reception. In Indians and Europe: An Interdisciplinary Collection of Essays. Christian F. Feest, ed. Aachen: Rader Verlag.
Landsman, Gail H. 1988. Sovereignty and Symbol: Indian/White Conflict at Ganienkeh. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Leacock, Eleanor B. and Nancy O. Lurie, eds. 1971. North American Indians in Historical Perspective. New York: Random House.
Lippman, Walter. 1922. Public Opinion. London: Allen & Unwin
Lurie, Nancy O. 1971. “The World’s Oldest On-Going Protest Demonstration: North American Indian Drinking Patterns.” Pacific Historical Review 40:311-332.
Martin, Calvin. 1987. The American Indian and the Problem of History. New York: Oxford University Press.
Quaker, Terence H. 1985. Opinion Control in the Democracies. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Seymour-Smith, Charlotte. 1986. Dictionary of Anthropology. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co.
Sheehan, Bernard. 1985. “The Problem of Moral Judgments in History. The South Atlantic Quarterly 84:37-50.
Sutton, Imre, ed. 1985. Irredeemable America: The Indians’ Estate and Land Claims. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Thompson, Leonard. 1985. The Political Mythology of Apartheid. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Thornton, Russell. 1988. American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press.
Washburn, Wilcomb E., ed. 1988. “History of Indian-White Relations.” Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 4. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution.
Weatherford, Jack. 1988. Indian Giver. New York: Crown.
Weber, Max. 1946. “Science as a Vocation.” In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. H.H. Gerth and C.W. Mills, eds. New York: Oxford University Press.
Wilkinson, Charles F. 1987. American Indians, Time, and the Law. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Williams, Walter L. 1986. The Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture. Boston: Beacon Press.
Williams, William A. 1974. The Great Evasion. Chicago: Quadrangle Books.
Wolf, Eric. 1982. Europe and the People Without History. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Wrone, David R. 1987. “Indian Treaties and the Democratic Ideal.” Wisconsin Magazine of History 70:83-106.
Wrone, David R., and R.S. Nelson, eds. 1973. Who’s The Savage? A Documentary History of the Mistreatment of the Native North Americans. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett.