Jean-Jacques Simard
Indians and Whites do not exist. These words do not mean real people—flesh and blood, sentient humans like those we meet on the street or in the countryside. Indian and White represent fabled creatures, born as one in the minds of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European thinkers trying to make sense of the modern experience, particularly the European “discovery” of new continents and their populations. Ever since, Indian and White have been entangled with one another in the collective thought of both European and New World peoples, like some artist’s image of a mad duo coupled in a dark embrace. To borrow a thought from the Iroquois, Indians and Whites are false faces peering into a mirror, each reflecting the other.
For this reason, to understand what it means to be an Indian in the contemporary world requires, also, knowing what it means to be a Whiteman. In this quest I will follow two different but converging lines of argument. On the one hand, I will assert that belonging to a native community (Indian or Inuit) implies having a peculiar place, a class status, in the wider North American society where such communities are found, whether Canadian or American. I will add that such a status means having no place. On the other hand, what is popularly described as native “culture,” I will argue, bears little relation to the actual way of life of Indians and Inuit, now or centuries ago. Instead, what is depicted as the culture of native peoples represents the absolute opposite of what is thought of as “Western” culture—it is the Whiteman’s shadow. These two elements—social condition and cultural image—mesh together into a comprehensive picture of North American “nativeness,” which I will call “reduction.”
I cannot fathom to what extent these thoughts will sound iconoclastic to an American’s ear. Even here in Northern Canada—the land of Beaver Dundee and Montreal Jones, where the primordial Mountie, Nelson Eddy, still serenades his paramour, Rose-Marie, as their bark canoe quietly glides across a Hollywood movie set full of quaint half-breed trappers baptized Pierre but always called “Frenchie”—such ideas still seem wholly unnatural. Conventional wisdom, the long-accepted images of Indian and Whiteman, is that strong. An account of a personal experience will illustrate where I am coming from.
I never knew I was a “Whiteman” until two decades ago when I set foot in the small Cree community of Wemindji, on the east coast of James Bay. Then a shade over twenty years old, I always had thought I was a French Canadian from the boondocks of the Lake St. Jean area, 120 miles north of Quebec City. Nevertheless, the local Crees soon made me to understand I was a Whiteman. So I tried to act like one, groping my way around, not knowing exactly what was expected of me. After a couple of years, still feeling strange in dealing with “Them” by way of the so-called Whiteman supposedly lying inside me, I took refuge from such weirdness in bureaucracy and academia. Moving south into a comfortable office, I associated with other “Whitemen,” in Quebec’s office of Northern and Native Affairs. To learn how to take care of “Natives” properly, I went back to college.
Anthropology was then the major for those who wanted to learn more about non-White others. During my introductory course, a Belgian professor mentioned in passing that a chief, familiar to the public as the Indian’s spokesman, was not “authentic” because he had adopted the “Whiteman’s ways.” That such people were “not true to their culture” was news to me. The only examples I had known and lived with for two years were just plain Indians, irrespective of age, sex, education, linguistic talents, travel experience, occupation, or status in the community. They still looked, thought, and behaved in ways that seemed “Indian” enough to make this French Canadian, at least, feel truly alien and uneasy in their midst.
Commenting to this effect in response, I added that, besides, this naive student saw the very Indian chief the professor mentioned as an entirely “authentic” representative of most of today’s Indians. From my observation, none of them lived or thought like the nature-bound, mystical, primitive communist, hunter-gatherers the professor identified as “true” Indians. Were they any more “false Indians” than the professor was a “false Belgian” because he was not born to the college trade? A short, snappy exchange ensued between professor and student. So that is how I became a sociologist, not an anthropologist.
For two score years since I have dedicated my scholarly pursuits (and a steady involvement with some Inuit political leaders) to answer and settling two questions: How can one be an effective Whiteman? How can one be a false Indian? These boil down, I think, to a single issue: How can one be what one is not? “There be Dragons,” the old medieval maps used to say about the margins of the known world. In my profession, as in the other social sciences, we fight the dragons of the unknown with a weapon called theory.
Among the first truly “modern” North American Indians were some refugees from the survivors of the once mighty Huron (Wendat) confederacy. Devastated by epidemic disease carried from Europe, then invasion by New York Iroquois armies, some surviving Huron refugees fled their traditional domain on Lake Huron’s Georgian Bay to take refuge in Sillery. Sillery was a small settlement controlled by the Jesuit Fathers on the fringe of the main fort of Quebec, then capital of a fledgling North American French empire. That empire had been first successfully established with the help—among others—of the Huron.
What made these Huron expatriates, and others like them in the same era, “modern Indians?” By 1650 they lacked the demographic and geographic foundations for maintaining their older way of life. The original kinship based social and economic networks that had held their communities together were shot full of holes. As of 1650 their very survival depended on the those they called the “People-of-the-Wooden-Boats” or the “Bearded Ones”—Europeans. They had lost their earlier strength and value as allies and partners in the developing colonial society built on the fur trade and military expansion. They had become a people without a significant place; a community in internal exile. They also represented the future of other native peoples all over the continent.
Before the end of the seventeenth century, the Jesuits founded two other refugee Indian settlements of the same feudal type. Between 1665 and 1667 one was established on lands facing Montreal. Called “By-the-River” (Kanawakhe in the Mohawk idiom), it consisted of a few Mohawks converted to Roman Catholicism and many captives taken by these and other Iroquois from surrounding tribes. Rejected by their own people, these converts were allies and trading partners of Dutch and British Protestants along the Atlantic seaboard. After 1680, roving bands of Abenaki refugees from New England, cruelly beaten by the Puritans in what is known as King Philip’s War, drifted toward the mouth of the Chaudiere and Richelieu rivers, where they collected and formed the third Jesuit-managed settlement.
The Jesuit Fathers saw an enormous opportunity in these small refugee communities. We must beware of judging their actions three centuries ago by today’s values and standards. It is too easy—and wrong—to censure the missionaries of yore as cultural conquerors, bent on pushing their faith and values down the throat of unwilling natives. That without a doubt they were; but compared with others of their time the Fathers were still the Good Guys.
Jesuits went out of their way to live among the Indians, learning their customs and language, the better to adapt their preaching to the collective sensibilities of their new flocks. In contrast, traders, military, and colonial administrators looked at them askance. They saw the Black Robes as “Indian lovers,” as having “gone native.” The Jesuits in turn thundered at secular officials for their exploitation of the Indians, for peddling alcohol, and for their indiscriminate sexual use of native women. First of all foot soldiers of the Company of Jesus, they answered directly to the Vicar of Christ, over and above the crowned heads of the rising imperialistic nation-states of Europe, and so their loyalties were suspect. In modern terms, they may better be seen as universalistic, Christian humanists. For them, all humans were equal under God. Even the heathen Sauvage had a soul to save, just like Christians. Of more significance, these Jesuits were convinced that deep down, once shed of their superstitions and their untamed, wandering ways, Indians had a purer, natural, childlike soul, uncorrupted by the vices of “civilization”—greed, self-interest, power.
This was precisely the grand chance these missionaries saw in the refugee communities. There it would be possible to settle the wandering bands, the better to teach them new trades and true knowledge of godly revelation, to mend their unrefined habits and protect them against the dissolute influence of the “Francoys,” and to allow their underlying “natural” goodness to emerge. These Jesuits believed that, by carefully managing the lives of refugee Indians, they could produce ideal communities inhabited by freely sharing, god-fearing, selfless, peaceful agriculturalists, living in harmony with themselves and nature. The chance the Jesuits grappled with was to recreate humanity as it was before the Fall of Man. They thought they were building a new Garden of Eden.
“Indian Reductions,” the Jesuits called such new native communities. These they expected would become a perfect model, not only for the inspiration of other “wild” Indians, but for all humankind. We can now see this was never to be. However, the Fathers did invent one of the prototypes for what would become known as the Indian reservation. In a wider, more important sense, they also created a forerunner of the major pattern for dealing with indigenous peoples of the continent, later elaborated and refined by both the Canadian and American states.
I have suggested that Indians in “reductions” were people without a place: internal exiles. This was not the case for their contemporaries, other Indians living elsewhere, outside these few tiny church managed communes. For many years other Indians enjoyed significant prestige and influence on the fringes of colonial society. In truth, without Indian allies in war and as trading-partners, the French could never have planted and defended as long as they did the greatly overstretched network of Forts and Trading Posts that reached all the way from the Gulf of the St. Lawrence River across the Great Lakes and down the Mississippi River to its mouth.
The still unreduced Indians occupied an essential strategic position in the political economy of New France. They were a military balance-of-power; they produced significant economic resources; and they knew this full well. For many years they played their political cards smartly, wisely exercising their economic leverage; but when the fur trade gave way to real estate and resource development (farming, lumbering, mining, town building) the bonds between Indian communities and their environments became dysfunctional—as regards the interests of the emerging Canadian and American nations. Increasingly so, nomadic hunting-gathering Indian bands were a nuisance. More so, the sedentary communities of farming Indians were a serious obstacle. And multi-tribal confederacies like those of the Iroquois were out and out competitors of the empire and nation-building Europeans of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Thus the special relationship between native societies and their habitats had to be broken, so that their land could become real estate, its resources commodities, both property used or exchanged for money-making. It was not as people that the Indians had to go, understand, but as natives. What had to give way was culturally distinctive communities located on and identified with their own territories. In the geographical sense of the term, it was as the “first nations” that Indians had to be transformed, so that new nations—Canada and the United States—could be raised up anew on the expropriated ground.1
Three solutions to the “Native Question” (in the United States, the “Indian Problem”) were possible. Although new diseases imported from Europe resulted in major epidemics and much depopulation, extermination of Indians generally was never a deliberate policy sought by French or English colonists. However, from time to time authorities did attempt to wipe out particular native societies, as did the French at the height of warfare with their main enemies, the Fox, and English colonists with the Pequot. In both Canada and America the ideal of benevolent treatment of native peoples blocked adoption of any such ruthless policy.
A second possible policy was assimilation. Assimilation, in the main, involves abolition of the special legal status attached to the social category of native, with the goal of absorbing Indians into mainstream society politically and socially. Through the 1930s, this was the major policy aim in the United States, and it resurfaced again in the 1950s under the so-called “termination” program. In Canada until 1867, that colony’s boundaries were not secure enough and the country too sparsely settled by British immigrants for the Crown to afford abandoning the special loyalty of its Indian subjects. In this long era, British authorities feared and had to cope with both an external threat—an expansionist United States, and an internal one—the separatist tendencies of its own population. The loyalties of Indians were then seen as a counterweight against both hazards. Nonetheless, throughout the continent many thousands, who in the late twentieth century might well be proclaimed legitimate Indians, individually and as family groups did abandon native modes of existence and identities to become indistinguishable from other Canadians and Americans. However, the most important obstacle to widespread assimilation was the remaining native communities themselves. Most just did not move toward the mainstream. Instead, they kept to their own, uninterested in the idea of “emigrating” into the new nations newly building on the very ground their ancestors had inhabited.
This left one practicable “solution”: corralling Indians in small, specially defined territories, legally designated “Indian Country.” Historically, Indian Country was beyond the settlement frontier and consisted of huge, yet unappropriated territories. Eventually, it became a multiplicity of tiny disconnected parcels out in the boondocks, the badlands, or the wilderness, segregated from the surrounding society. There the central governments of Canada and the United States assumed the responsibility of sustaining Indians in these rustic ghettos.
There was little use attempting to exploit Indians as forced labor, as the Spanish did in Mexico and South America; they were not plentiful enough to bother with this option, even had Canadians or Americans been so disposed. These small populations were not organized as aggressive, prosperous states, so dominating them in the classical, imperialistic sense as in South and East Asia was more of a burden than anything else.2 So as the lands of one native society after another were acquired and opened to settlement by newcomers, the fate of all became that of the original wards of the Jesuit Reductions. Indians in Canada and the United States have become internal exiles, refugees in the country formerly exclusively theirs, a “useless” people with an ambiguous part in the developing nation states. Unwillingly, their fate was to be without any significant place.
The verb “reduce” (and the noun “reduction”) comes from Latin roots meaning “leading back” or “driving back.” Its synonyms are “lesser, decrease, abate, diminish, shorten, impoverish, curtail.” Reduce also signifies “subdue” or “conquer,” “abridge” or “classify.” Here is a case where plain language is good enough for theoretical purposes. Reduction of the North American natives means that the colonial process has not only limited their geographic range but reduced their sociological horizon as well. They have been incorporated into the system of social stratification of North American nation-states as a social race, one whose allegedly inbred, eternal character makes it a somehow different kind of species, predestined to at least partial irrelevancy in the surrounding, historically changing real world.
Reduction began with the land itself. Somehow indigenous peoples had to be excluded from the physical space into which the new North American societies were spreading. This is the geographical aspect of reduction, developed in the idea and practice of reservations. Indian reserves are restricted estates wherein formerly wide-ranging populations were confined, sometimes more-or-less voluntarily, sometimes following uprooting and transportation from their original territory. In practice, the environmental quality and size of reservations commonly have been insufficient to provide enough land and resources for native societies to sustain anything approximating a traditional subsistence economy, or the development of an agricultural-ranching economy, or to reconstitute themselves economically in some alternative manner.
Thus many reservation communities have so far failed to develop the hinterland-urban pattern of land occupation found elsewhere. Those reservations such as the great territory of the Navajo that seem huge, compared with the tiny band reserves of Southwestern Ontario, and those which are “sitting on treasures” of minerals or oil, are quirks of economic and demographic history. When first established they were isolated, and technological, industrial or demographic development was not advanced far enough to mandate the exploitation of such resources. These tracts were then seen as worthless—irrelevant—pieces of land. Today, the same is true for the Barrens of Canada’s Northwest Territories and most of the Arctic.
I have implied that the “reservation” is more than a geographic-political fact; it is also an idea. Ever since the Jesuit reductions, they have been defined as havens against a surrounding alien, heartless “White” world. On reservations, according to this widely accepted view, Indians could live among their own, remain true to their traditional selves, find their authentic soul. The reservation, as a uniquely preserved native estate, has in part become an imaginary substitute for the ancestral lands of their forbearers. Today, some scholars and other advocates of the Indian cause have started calling reservations “sacred holy lands,” apparently seeing them as New Canaans or Zions. In important ways this is not a reference to the real conditions on the parcels where modern Indians live: it is a country of the mind. Even for those contemporary Indians who share this fantasy, there is an unreal quality to it. In truth, accurate memories of lands from which Indians were displaced has dimmed over the generations. The “sacred holy land” representation expresses an increasingly powerful emotional attachment to what remains: Indian-owned land has become a key symbol of old wrongs suffered, and of a special modern identity.3
We must also remember that many Indian or Inuit groups were never intimately bonded to a particular part of the landscape, at least not for long. The records of pre-Columbian Indians, whether in native legend and myth or in the archaeological record, are replete with evidence of regular migrations, territorial expansion, displacements, and conquest. Saying this does not belittle whatever genuine attachment or property titles native groups may today rightly claim to parts of this continent. On the contrary, the point is to underscore a fact: the image of an Indian community tied to one piece of land is a historical emergent, mainly a reflection of the reservation experience.
Many present day native peoples have incorporated this geographical reduction into their own collective and private self-images as an article of faith. They are convinced that the segregated ethnic estate concept is essential to their survival in Canadian or American society. Of course it is and, just as truly, of course the reservation is not such an essential to survival as distinctive identity groups. Reservations are essential to maintaining the status quo, the persistence of an existing set of relationships and prerogatives. But many Indian groups have maintained their identities and organizations over the generations with no land base whatever. Nonetheless, young people born and reared in urban areas, seemingly assimilated into the “Whiteman’s world,” often say they must return to the reservation to “get back to their roots” or “find their true selves.”
The geographic reduction of native North Americans was tied to their demographic reduction. There are two sides to this aspect of reduction. First, the natural rate of population expansion was stunted by biological and man-made conditions. Second, the demographic growth of native communities has been, and still is, legally and ideologically restricted.
The people today enumerated as Indian and Inuit in the United States and Canada now total about the same as the estimated population of the continent when Columbus arrived. During the intervening five centuries the world’s population multiplied fourfold, that of the developed countries by a factor of ten. Even my own group, the French Canadians, though not among the richest of North Americans, became sixty-four times more numerous than they were when Canada was a French colony. The stability of the total native population alone illustrates the appalling effects of epidemics, famine, war, and poor living conditions. Some local native groups disappeared entirely; others were greatly thinned; and a few recovered and expanded far beyond their earlier size—the Navajo, for example, now number more than twenty times their early historic size. Nonetheless, the continent’s native populations, as a whole, had to wait improvements in diet, housing, and health care of the 1950s to start growing substantially again.
The second type of factor affecting the demographic expansion of native communities consists of ideological and legal restrictions. Because of the limits on living space and other resources allocated to them, there has been an increased emphasis within existing, officially recognized “tribes” or “bands” on exclusiveness, the rejection of statutory “outsiders,” endogamy, hiring preferences, and other means of limiting membership. Descendant of mixed “outsider-insider” conjugal unions, not to mention any kind of immigrant to the reservations, may be seen as deviously encroaching on older community members’ rights to land, government aid and services, treaty rights, and other proprietary assets. These concerns have been much enhanced during the last decade—in Canada, by pressures of Métis and non-status Indians, and in the United States, by the policy of adding whole new “tribes” to those formerly recognized.
One additional demographical note is this: the fertility rates of most Indian and Inuit populations, which contributed much to their recent growth, are now tapering down toward demographic equilibrium (a trend universally related to the growth of consumption and to the widening range of individual opportunities).
The end result is that, today, the Indian or Inuit brand is applied to people who not only belong to a geographically reduced group but, by the same token, to one whose numbers are too few to provide the troops necessary for economic self-sufficiency, the political self-responsibility, and the self-expressive cultural vitality that nowadays spell practical, self-contained community life, let alone “nationhood.”
Canadian listeners to the last televised constitutional conference on aboriginal rights learned, for example, that there were 185 such Indian “nations” in British Columbia alone, averaging a few hundred people each, all of them supposedly reaching for some modicum of “sovereignty.” All due political rhetoric aside, it is hard to see how such tiny pool of able-bodied people could furnish on their own the inbred specialized human resources to staff the schools, health facilities, public utilities, courts, police forces, staple industries, commercial establishments, political parties, media, voluntary associations, and other institutions that even an imaginary North American small town needs to sustain itself as a continuing social-political entity in the modern world.
Deliberately turning one’s back to historical change is not inconceivable—the flourishing Amish communities of Pennsylvania and other states have done it with surprising success, for instance. But the Amish go back to the Anabaptist movements of the fifteenth-century European religious reformation. Their obstinacy has also been an historical constant, which has not been the case of any of the nativistic, mystical, “back-to-the-roots” episodes of American Indian history. That is why pick-up trucks and T.V. dish-antennas are far more typical of present-day reservations than horse-and-travois or shaking tent performances.
It was far easier for the Jesuits of the seventeenth-century to dream of small, utopian, self-sufficient communes than it is, in the late twentieth, to establish viable “sovereign nations” of a few hundred souls. Though it would be presumptuous to put a precise figure on the minimal population size a contemporary polity must have before it can even pretend to provide for its own the most basic institutional framework for meeting the average, everyday social needs of its members, over 20,000 is certainly a conservative estimate. Few “tribes” or “bands” come close to that size.
Parasitic petty-states may be viable as gilded tax-havens for the rich-and-famous, but one may doubt—notwithstanding what some Indian officials seem to believe—that gambling casinos and bingo parlors will suffice to transform the hundreds of bantam “nations” of the North American “Third World” into so many Monacos. Once “monocoaza-tion” is excluded, that leaves but two standard alternatives for increasing the demographic base of native polities: taking in out-group immigrants or fusing several smaller local communities into wider social-economic-political units. Both solutions were practiced by precolonial native groups but have become almost inconceivable under the reduction system.
Even when historical conditions accommodated small, self-contained communities, it was common for Indian communities to increase (or seek to maintain) their ranks through out-marriage and the adoption of captives—including many Whitemen until lately. The biological ancestry as well as the cultural heritage of modern Indian and Inuit has been rather sharply diluted by intensive interbreeding and interaction with newcomers. And up to this day, all Indians or Inuit settlements—even those most remote from metropolitan life—have included a constant and often growing proportion of Whitemen who form an integral part of these communities’ social organization and everyday life. Most of these outsiders never fully integrate into these communities, however, because of the systematic barriers erected by the reduction system along the already hard to cross colonial-ethnic boundary line.
Traditionalism, here, corporatist tribal militancy, there, and political-economic inequalities (whether Outsider over Native or the reverse) everywhere feed intergroup tension and formal, if not actual, repulsion. This makes for an inverted, scaled-down reproduction of the Black-White problem the late Swedish economist, Gunnar Myrdal, called, in a famous book of the 1940s, The American Dilemma. For while the native social world, even at the local level, includes and often depends on the services of a permanent and inescapably “White” minority, the real “Whitemen” living within Indian and Inuit communities are doomed to remain an ever alien minority made up of transient, colonial-like “birds-of-passage.”
In the past, local groups of native peoples did come together and form wider, multiethnic political and economic entities—the Six Nations Confederacy is but one example that comes to mind. But the present reduction system is not conducive to such development, since it bonds ethnic belongingness to discrete territories, officially defined “tribal” identities, and shares of redistributed state and public resources. Land, natural resources, and access to the public purse are, in practice, distributed in a highly uneven manner, related to the vagaries of historical-geographical circumstances and the degree of political shrewdness in lobbying for funds, instead of being shared out on the basis of population size and need. So it is not at all uncommon to find Indian “tribes” of radically different size, and great disparities of wealth, bitterly competing with one another for rights to territory, including the valuable natural resources located therein, and for the plethora of grant programs made available by national and state or provincial governments. The long-standing, acrimonious dispute between the Navajos and Hopis over their respective land rights is but the most conspicuous example of such disputes. What is less well known is that the same area is also occupied by tiny remnants of a different people indigenous to the same territory, Paiutes who are not officially recognized as a “tribe” and who have no territorial rights whatever. As we will see, other features of the reduction system also undermine the possibility of transethnic solidarity for purposes of viable economic-political development.
One may view the geographical and demographic curtailment of natives, together, as the biophysical or ecological level of retrenchment, on which all further aspects of the reduction system stands. Next in order is economic reduction. Most reservations have never been a practical economic proposition. Denied access to their former range and resources, their ranks depleted by illness and death, the productive social fabric of native societies was shredded. The history of the decline of the fur trade reflects such developments. In the western Great Lakes this occurred early in the nineteenth century; in sub-arctic and arctic Canada, dependency on the fur trade collapsed only recently, in the middle of our own century. Early or late, Indians who had come to rely on production of furs to fulfill rising expectations for new standards of living experienced economic collapse. No longer could they provide for themselves by producing raw materials for European and American markets, less so did they have the resources, manpower, and skills to begin new productive ventures to keep up with the increasing living standards of their neighbors.
For most Indian communities, treaty negotiations blessed and legitimized their dispossession and made them into dependents of the American or Canadian states. The provisions of these treaties, starting in the late eighteenth-century, created in rudimentary form the shape of a liberal welfare state in Canada and the United States. Indians, thereby, were to become the first welfare dependents in North America. Their destiny would be barely to eke out a scant subsistence, if that, on the sidelines of the most unprecedented period of industrial development in history. So, until recently, most Indians living on reservations drew a scant subsistence from public relief, cottage-industries, government-supported programs, marginal trapping, hunting and fishing, and whatever arts and craft products the local and national markets took a fancy to.
Some kinds of economic activities have long been thought of as inherently “natural” for native peoples. The oldest and most persistent of these is renewable resource harvesting of fish, game, and wild plant foods and materials. To this were added community-based small business with a wildlife or handicraft bent, service sector employment as guides for sportsmen or tourists, and entertainments in the forms of Wild West shows, powwows, seances, and other “cultural” performances. Lately, research into oral traditions about land occupation long ago has also become a kind of cottage-industry. In 1983, after a formal meeting with all Indian chiefs of his province, Quebec’s Premier gave each one a present: a fine, $39.95 Buck knife (U.S. made). This was intended as symbol of the Indians primordial “cynegetic” (hunting) vocation. The chiefs did not reciprocate with the gift of a Japanese-made electric cattle-prod, as their own symbolic testimony to other Quebecers’ instinctive calling for farming and hydroelectric engineering.
Some Canadian tribes, and most in the United States, have also started selling tax-free cigarettes; but the real money-makers for Indians in both countries are high-stakes bingo emporiums and gambling casinos. People have to make do with the economic opportunities at hand, surely. In this instance the tribes are profiting from their peculiar legal status by economic operations in the service sector, exploiting the minor vices of other Canadians and Americans. However, it is important to note that such enterprises, besides their unproductive, parasitic nature, confirm the peculiar “extraterritorial” status of the reservations. Such “economic development” strategies, therefore, directly contribute to the perpetuation of the reduction system.
The few increasingly well-to-do “Bingo tribes,” in this regard, are like those of an earlier era who found tremendous underground windfalls in oil and natural gas reserves. Like these earlier beneficiaries they make up a small minority, and their good fortune makes the squalor and dependency of the majority of other reservations the more striking. Why do these apparent economic success stories maintain the reduction system? Because, once again, the development of native peoples is tied directly to their special land-holding status and the “natural” accidents of history and geography. Such economic “improvement” is not based on collective or individual entrepreneurship, technical and managerial know-how, judicious planning, production and investment, economies of scale, the quality of manpower, or on other substantive enhancements and achievements.
Often the “bound to nature” version of economic reduction has been incorporated into the self-images of many individual Indians. They, like other Canadian and Americans, commonly see natives employed as professionals, managers, office or store personnel and other white collar types as somehow less genuine than those who live “close to nature, off the land.” Sometimes young Indians who are members of tribes where such employment is the overwhelming rule will seek out “their roots” in the company of other, less developed, “more traditional” native communities. Another aspect of this internalized “rhythms of nature” reduction is the standard rationalization for the unreliability and instability of some Indian students and those employed in desk- and clock-bound jobs. Such behavior is excused on the grounds of an irresistible, “culturally normal” urge to abandon work or studies to answer nature’s call in tune with “Indian time.” Because of the imperatives of sustaining the day-to-day operations of modern tribal institutions, there is, as a result, a heavy reliance on the services of outsiders, whose tardiness or absenteeism is not so easily explained away or tolerated. Modern Canadian and American legislation dealing with native land rights, like the Alaska Settlement Act or the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement, also reflect this stereotype. These contain many pages detailing renewable and wildlife resources,4 long lists of “traditional activities,” and many stipulations about royalties to be received by natives for future natural resources development projects, but they skim over other imperatives of modern economic organization and planning (statistical research, savings-and-loan or investment banking, just to mention a few).
Even the newer, well meaning versions of native economic reduction (like resource royalties or gambling services) rest on very shaky grounds, theoretical or practical. They unthinkingly subscribe to the obsolete nineteenth-century “law of comparative advantage,” which prescribed that nations should specialize in the exploitation of whatever valuable assets they were uniquely provided with by their natural and historical circumstances, and that other countries did not have in such abundance. The comparative advantages of Indian and Inuit “countries” in that sense, would be land rights, special legal privileges, and distinctive traditional abilities and knowledge. One must notice how eerily this economic calling overlaps with other symbolic dimensions of the reduction of native peoples: geographical (the Native is tied to the land) and, as will be pointed out shortly, juridical (the Native should be constitutionally apart) and ideological (the Native is culture heritage bound).
By themselves, however, “natural” comparative advantages are not sufficient to sustain long-term, collective, political economic sufficiency. It depends on how such advantages are exploited. And that, in turn, rests on the qualities and use of human resources—advantages such as specialized skills and technical-scientific knowledge, general level of information and education, organization and management, ability to read and respond to market signals or the will to defer gratification.
Historically, following the boom-and-bust cycles which have marked the fortunes of native communities, government has always stepped in, expressing the centuries old paternalistic theme for managing Indian affairs. When oil royalties, or bingo income, or grant supported enterprises fail, Indians again become needy wards, and again government provides. What is provided goes far beyond additional grants to prop up tribal businesses, relief for unemployed families, or social and health services. From the top down, government has wrapped a bureaucratic swaddling-cloth around these communities, constricting most aspects of their everyday life. This is no temporary cocoon from which a healthy moth will eventually emerge to fly off independently. It is a perpetual impediment, preempting the blossoming of responsible, self-managed polities. These comments introduce another layer of curtailment: political reduction.
In eastern Canada, the basic political organization of most aboriginal societies before Jacques Cartier’s 1534 exploration was of the seasonally nomadic “band” type, gathered under the leadership of headmen and occasional war-chiefs. For most purposes, these small communities were self-regulated by myth, customs, kinship obligations, and consensual palavers. The mere creation of sedentism—fixed settlements—and the establishment of rudimentary government services undermined the relevance of previous political structures. This new situation called for formal, community-wide institutions for which there was no traditional precedent. Quickly, the state and its bureaucratic institutions slipped in to fill the void. For the practical purposes of administrative communication and management, elective local bodies called “Band Councils” were set up. These served as go-betweens, standing betwixt the people and government functionaries. Actually, these Councils were, and remain, the basic cell of the federal Indian Affairs administration. In those parts of Canada where larger, more politically complex tribes and chief-doms were the rule (Haida, Tshimshian, or Tutchone of the Northwest, Iroquois Six Nations Confederacy in the East) these long established, autonomous political systems were suppressed or outlawed, and resistance was crushed by the threat or application of state power.5
Such transformations of native political systems were pursued with the cant of paternalistic superiority. Nonetheless, ever since the mid-nineteenth-century, the motto of government “Indian Agents” has been to “work themselves out of a job.” This has proven a remarkably difficult goal to achieve. Managing Indian affairs, on the contrary, has turned out to be an increasingly labor-intensive bureaucratic enterprise. Today, many thousands of federal and provincial civil servants are still at work, promising soon to work themselves out of the job of overseeing native communities. At the same time, they are busy training their own replacements, seeking additional funding and new staff positions. The call of bureaucracy remains—More Money! More Jobs! More Projects! This litany substitutes for the development of forthright local political responsibility all across reservation country.
In both Canada and the United States, recent years have witnessed a blurring of the distinction between native leadership and government appointed administrative personnel. This came about through the recruitment of increasing numbers of Indians and Inuit into government service. Also contributing to this trend has been the devolution of government services: the assignment of responsibility and authority for managing programs to local or regional units of Native government. So it has come to pass that Indian bureaucrat now regularly serves Indian client, often enough a kinsman or fellow band member (see chapter 14). So it is that the line dividing state administrative apparatus from locally controlled political institutions has almost disappeared. Nowadays it is not only difficult to differentiate between community leadership and native staff of agencies responsible for native affairs, it is also near impossible to separate politics from fund-raising, policy from programs, local government from central bureaucracy. These trends represent a form of administrative reduction, with the parties supposedly served by program or government stuck somewhere along one side of a seamless administrative spider’s web. Such a system promotes intense conflicts of interest. Indians tied to central government through dependency on government jobs can hardly exercise their responsibilities as citizens of self-governing political communities. They have to be content with being, more or less, ineffectual clients of a patronizing superstructure, one that confounds democratic process with bureaucracy.
In this sense, a century before other categories of citizens, Indians were anointed with a political Head Start program. They got first crack at what, during the 1960s, would be indiscreetly called “participatory democracy.” During the heyday of the technocratic welfare state in that period, underprivileged minorities, dependent on government patronage for survival, were obligated to take a direct part in “managing their own affairs” through active “involvement” (consultation, representation, or straight hiring) with the very bureaucratic agencies whose beneficiaries they were. The official slogan of this 1960s craze was “maximum feasible participation,” although critically minded observers later modified this to “maximum feasible misunderstanding.”
In that decade (and since) scientific advisors, social engineering “experts,” “managers,” and “consultants” wheeled and dealed between granting agencies and “the poor.” In their new relationships with such real folks these middle-class professionals found a niche where they could carry out their own power-struggle against the existing system for allocating government resources to interest groups. What such experts needed to encourage native peoples toward maximum feasible participation was a useful stereotype about “the Indian.” This was provided with the conviction that normal “White” politics was alien to the true nature of Indians. Participatory democracy, on the other hand, was a different matter, a style that would be inherently appealing to the continent’s “original self-governing peoples.” This thinking found its ultimate expression in the United States in 1975, when Congress passed the Indian Self Determination and Education Act.
In both Canada and the United States, long before the central governments gave formal sanction to such developments, numerous Indians saw opportunities for imitating the styles of social science experts. Taking their training in boot camps inculcating the skills of grantsmanship and the social change arts, they enlisted in the War Against Poverty as foot-soldiers and started working their way up the ranks. The result was intense, sometimes bitter, as yet unresolved competition for the limited resources (grants, jobs) available, open combat between Indians claiming birthright and outside experts asserting their educational achievements. Among North American anthropologists and their professional allies, a compromise was offered at the 1989 annual meetings of the Society for Applied Anthropology, the theme of this conference being “collaboration.” Under this new motto, academics promised to help Indians (and other dependent groups) do their thing, if natives (that is, their clients) will allow social scientists to do theirs.
Such mixed administrative-client relationships have created a technocratic system in purest form. Therein native leaders/managers and Native Affairs academics/bureaucrats each proclaims esoteric authority for identifying and a free hand in addressing the “true needs” of Indian and Inuit people. A profoundly ambivalent love-hate relationship dominates interactions between these “inside” and “outside” components of the Native affairs technostructure. But together they stand, so it is asserted, against the heartless and culturally chauvinist majority. Among themselves they regularly struggle over control of budgets and programs within their own jealously guarded administrative ghetto. Their influence reaches so far into local Indian communities as to block important political debate and action. Programs and policies promising “power to the people,” thereby, have left ordinary Indians and Inuit still powerless, their affairs closely managed by the new technocratic oligarchy, including a significant number of native managers.
In a system of government by law, not men, political reduction cannot rely exclusively on administrative containment or bureaucratic fiat; it must have a juridical basis. This rests on what is called “Indian status,” defined by special laws marking off a social category called “Native” (in Canada) or “Indian” (in the United States), a category set apart from all other citizens of the two countries. Though people legally defined as Native or Indian formally hold full citizenship, with all attending rights and privileges, they are also—constitutionally—placed under the exclusive if mixed jurisdictions of both tribal (Insider) and central (Outsider) governments. Just as Indian reserves have an extraterritorial status in the provinces and states which are responsible for land and resources under the Constitution, so to do individual natives have a special status as a “protected category.”
In this fashion, Canada’s Indian Act and American law officially discriminate on the basis of race, for in both systems it is biological ancestry or pedigree—the “blood in a person’s veins”—that determines eligibility for that special status.6 Thus Indian status consecrates a North American version of apartheid, a legally defined racial apartness that is popularly defended as marvelously benevolent. That “Indian status” does not mark legal recognition of any person or group’s ethnic identity must be stressed. Instead, it defines particular genetic communities, each bonded to its geographic homeland. Those social-political entities—called Bands, Tribes, or Indian Nations—consist of a population of statutory Indians and a reservation—the homeland proper. Irrespective of laws making Indians full citizens, these legally defined wombs really produce second-class citizens, whose main sanctuaries elsewhere are urban Indian islands, the archipelago of service jobs and programs maintained by the federal governments for the exclusive benefit of Natives, and the peninsulas of native studies programs in colleges and universities.
Philosophically, Canada’s Indian Act is too close for comfort to South African apartheid legislation and to the late nineteenth-century “Jim Crow” laws of America’s southern states. However, because it applies to a small, supposedly primordial, “naturally different,” easy-to-love, “archaic” minority instead of a large one like the Blacks, such official racial segregation is seen as enlightened. Understandably, natives themselves tend to cling to the fundamental tenets and the special privileges of such legislation. In Canada, until recently, the offshoots of Red ova fertilized by White sperm were deemed unfit for Indian status, a matchless illustration of how far paternalistic political decisions can be molded by biological madness. Against the will of most band councils (who feared overcrowding of their reserves and depletion of their resources) this Canadian law was changed.
Today, the first generation “mixed-blood” progeny of Indian Status/ Non-Status couplings can acquire official Indian Status—providing they apply for it. People who lost their Indian status generations ago through so-called “emancipation” policies of decades past also now insist on having it back. Additional thousands descended from the emergent ethnic group called Métis in the fur-trade era, never recognized as status Indians, have joined in. Again, this is understandable, for their ancestors suffered ecological, economic and administrative reduction like their Indian contemporaries among whom they lived. The Métis, having shared the fate, now want to enjoy the apparent advantages of their Indian affines. And following centuries of being a native people ironically defined apart from other native peoples, the Inuit were also placed into the statutory category of Indian by a 1939 Canadian Supreme Court decision.
The 1983-1987 round of constitutional conferences on aboriginal rights in Canada clarified the right to native “self-government,” a right to be entrenched in the first law of the land. It would still have an ethnic-genetic foundation and would still imply exclusive federal jurisdiction over natives and their territories. The idea was not to eliminate or modify the basic tenets of the apartheid system, but grant more autonomy, inside the system, to the Indian and Inuit “homelands.” Largely in consequence of such historical administrative segregation and juridical demarcation, all natives have come to share a common past and future place that sets them off from the non-native majority. Their collective relationship with the state is not like that of others, the mere citizens. They see themselves, in effect, as underground nations amidst & foreign, Canadian nation and want this to be converted into a and recognized as a special, international-like relationship. Since foreign affairs are the domain of the federal government, entrenching the exclusive federal native status in a revised Canadian Constitution, and attaching to it the right to self-government, would be a symbolic grant of native sub-nationhood.
Given its historical premises and ignoring practical problems, the logic of this position is impeccable. However, it is hard is to see how, under contemporary circumstances, each group of a few thousand people, much less the tiny local bands of several dozens, can effectively reach for the status of an “independent nation,” especially so when, at the same time, advocates of Native independence also strive jealously to retain constitutionally guaranteed privileges of “aboriginal rights,” prerogatives seen as a type of natural law entitlement. On such pragmatically limited, philosophically contradictory, shaky foundations, the goal of genuine sovereign self-government for such pocket-sized polities cannot be much more than sham.
One seemingly promising alternative would be for native communities to fuse into much larger, supralocal ethnolinguistic units, and to federate themselves under common political institutions coinciding with provincial, state, or even national boundaries. This would expand the territorial and demographic foundations of their collective sovereignty. In Canada, this would require a new, third level of self-government linked to existing provincial and federal divisions. Creating such “autonomous regions” would require a major revamping of the Canadian Confederation. However, such new political units would also have to be of an open, public nature, with all residents accepted and treated as equal citizens, without regard to “Indian” or other racial-ethnic status. Accordingly, majority rule—may that majority be ethnically Native or not so—would have to prevail. Working against the prospects for any such territorial federation, however, is the enduring strength of local group identity, loyalty, solidarity, and political interests, and the deep-seated opposition of Indian versus Whiteman. In both Canada and the United States, such divided, parochial interests remain far stronger than regional or national identifications. In both countries, as well, the sacralization by Indians and their supporters of chauvinistic ethno-genetic (or aboriginal) identity, rights and entitlements persists as a preeminent objective.
Twenty years experience studying and occasionally working with Canada’s native peoples have left me with a strong impression. Notwithstanding official rhetoric, at least for the time being few contemporary Natives are truly willing to bear the full responsibilities, and the consequences, of genuine political autonomy. One exception may well be the Eastern Arctic Inuit, who seem dedicated to building a regional, representative government, one incorporating all residents of the area. But their project is not advanced enough to show if they really wish to avoid continuing and additional entanglement in the institutional reduction inherited from the colonial era.
So far, I have tried to explain how the whole historical edifice of native reduction rests on the material cornerstone of territorial dispossession and resource expropriation. Once exiled from the spaces into which Canadian and American societies would expand, a multilayered economic, administrative, and juridical “hot house” had to be built over their geographical reductions to maintain and contain them in an artificially controlled atmosphere, protected from the world—where everyone else in North America lives. Like orchids in Canada’s northlands, the price of such protective reduction has been and is dependency. As a prime condition of their perpetuation, dependency has seeped into all aspects of Indian and Inuit social life: economic, political, psychological, etc.
However, instead of looking at the reduction system solely as rising from material forces upwards to the incorporeal sphere of supreme law and natural rights, I now propose viewing it the other way around. Seen from the top down, the whole reduction apparatus is held together by an ideological linchpin. In this sense, the dominating summit of native reduction consists of a body of powerful symbols, images, and fictions. Together these depict the True Native as a primeval being, one uniquely and perpetually bound to pristine nature and a remarkably durable, inarguably ancient cultural heritage. So powerful are such mental images that any type of social transformation can be interpreted as a catastrophic threat to the Native’s natural destiny and authentic soul. Harsh necessity thus becomes virtue as the Invented Indian merges with real Indians. Bound to the reservation and exiled from the dimension of space, they are accordingly castaways from the exigencies of time. Just as they are physically out-of-place in modern North American society, so are the also ideologically denied the experience of history. Because of the phantom image of The Indian, Indians are made into a timeless people.
Three things must be kept in mind regarding this “True Native” image. First, I am presenting a simplified sketch of shifting historical ideas about the first settlers of the Americas. This depiction can be no more than a bare skeleton of centuries of changeable imagery: it is an abridgement. But then, one simple, vernacular interpretation of “nativeness” has persisted for centuries, despite the tendency of intellectuals to amend its superficial features. So my own caricature is reasonably true to the core of the lasting image of “The Indian.” Second, the Invented Indian cannot be understood by itself, in its own terms: this is but one side of a coin whose other side bears the unearthly features of the Invented White Man. Third, this enduring image—a set of stereotypes—is still widely accepted as authentic and valid. Indeed, the image is accepted on both sides of the ethnicity playing field by Them and Us. That is, those who behave as accomplices in perpetuating this “natural” opposition, insist on, define and deal with one another through images of “Indian” and “Whiteman.” The White Ghost has a distorted Red Shadow and, inseparably, vice versa.
Whatever historical variability or transformation has occurred in icons representing the True Native, there have been several constants. These are evident in an unbroken expressive chain starting half a millennia ago, when modernizing Europeans “discovered” the misnamed “Indians” of the Americas and first began holding them up to a mirror, discovering a marvelously reversed clone of themselves as “Whitemen” 7 Of these constants three are particularly relevant to my discussion:
The Images are Monolithic. Whatever peculiarity is attributed to one native tribe is generalized and extended to all, and to every individual member thereof. On the other side of the token, all Whitemen are fused into one.
The Twin Images are Logically Obverse. Whatever features are defined as typical of The Native, they display a simulation that is the absolute reverse of The Whiteman’s moral ideal for self and community (at any one time!). This rule applies whether the The Native is seen as morally better or worse than the Whiteman, whether the icon represents a Noble or a Wild Savage.
The Images Represent Archetypes. “Spontaneous, Natural, Timeless, Original” have been the most common ways of characterizing the True Indian as human beings, identifying what is specific to them, with the additional provisos that True Indians live close to and in harmony with nature, and are just as agreeably fused with one another socially in conflict-free, consensual communities.
Illustrations of the application of these constants are not hard to come by. Readers need only to jot down what they think they know about The Indian, what they have been told authoritatively to think about The Indian, or what they think they know about The Whiteman in relation to The Indian. If this at first proves difficult, consider the example of the college professor in an ethnic education course who informs her students: “Indians have personal names but they are kept secret and Indian children don’t want us to use their names. So in class, how should can you call on an Indian child?” The reversed imagery should be obvious: The White Child prefers and expects to be addressed by name; the Indian Child does not; Indian names are sacred; White names are secular. Or consider how the Whiteman’s historic social relationships with the Indian are almost invariably characterized in print. The list of adjectives used for such purposes reads like a roster of Christian sins or virtues: Greed, Charity, Cruelty, Benevolence.
Such stereotypes are not unique in thinking about Indians. Similar styles and attitudes are found in characterizations of other diametrically opposed social categories, whether religious, political, hierarchical, racial, or some other kind. Christian/Jew, Liberal/Conservative, Upper Class/Lower Class, Asian/White, and Male/Female are examples. Such thinking is fundamental to mere discriminative cognition, but is also behind prejudice, intolerance, bigotry, intergroup conflict, racism, nationalism, and chauvinism of all kinds. In such categoricai contrasts, the attributes of those on either side can be understood only by reference to the characteristics of the other: they are part of one whole identity, “Us” and “Them.” Thus, the much-favored modern definition of the Whiteman as a materialist, morally delinquent, environmentally estranged, socially alienated creature is a historical emergent, one that cannot make sense without reference to the opposite traits of the True Indian.
This all began at the moment of first contact between Europeans and the already long-established residents of the Americas. During their Renaissance era, the native peoples on the eastern shores of the Atlantic had only recently been reborn as Europeans. When their first transatlantic voyages approached they were, as well, on the verge of a Great Enlightenment. As this brilliant illumination appeared, massive upheavals already racked their lands: technological shocks, disturbing innovations, huge population expansion, unbelievable economic growth, transformational nation-building, sometimes violent religious renewal. Transoceanic (and transcontinental) voyages of discovery were part of these sweeping transformations. The infant Europeans were pondering what was becoming of them: What was God up to? With the benefit of five centuries of hindsight we can give a secular answer to this question. As of 1492, Europeans were starting to experience the birth pangs of one of the most tremendous mutations of human society and culture in history: the dawning of the Modern Epoch.
Among the first cogent explanations of this alchemy was one called the “Social Contract,” authored by England’s Thomas Hobbes and France’s Jean Jacques Rousseau. Man, they revealed, once lived only in a “State of Nature “: like wolves preying on each other, said Hobbes; like lambs, spontaneously flocking together, countered Rousseau. Then “once upon a time” the human condition mysteriously changed: well behaved, well policed society was invented. Good sense prevailed, according to the very English Hobbes: to curtail their brutal passions, people gave someone (the State, Absolute Monarchs) the authority to rule them, making them behave with an eye on the common good, not bestial self-interest. Ever the Frenchman, Rousseau took a contrary stance: Man’s egoist impulses were otherwise freed from the inherently altruistic bonds of natural community. How to maintain order in the new, potentially agonistic order? By signing a covenant with everyone else, Rousseau explained, a contract that was truly social because it subjected self-interest to an embryonic “General Will.” Where, then, lay the power to carry out that wondrous contract? Authority was delegated to the State, responded Rousseau.8
To drive their point home persuasively, Hobbes and Rousseau had to invent two central characters, the very same two lead players who still dominate the contemporary world stage: The Whiteman and The Native. Being modern “scientific” thinkers, they had to ground their argument empirically, on hard facts. Their data consisted in part of descriptions by others of the condition of the new-found American Savage, whom they described as living close to their imagined “state of nature.” Thus, in the armchairs of an English and a French philosopher was born The Indian, portrayed by them as exactly the reverse of the newly modernized European, The Whiteman. One side of this two-way mirror was the undomesticated Savage: spontaneously whatever he was because, like animals, he was still part of nature. On the other side stood Civilized Man: artificially what he was, the product of deliberate, reflective will-power.
How this transformation was evaluated depended on fundamental moral judgments about humankind. If in the beginning man was naturally bad, then (according to Hobbes) civilization or the “social contract” was a best buy for an imperfect world. On the other hand, if man was originally good, then the “social contract” was the lesser of two primordial evils, man’s loss of innocence being the worst (thought Rousseau). Similarly contingent on such moral assessment of the human condition, the “natural native” would be seen in one of two archetypical ways. If naturally bad, the native was brutal, promiscuous, cruel, uncouth—a wild savage to be mercifully domesticated (or otherwise subjugated). However, if original man was judged inherently good, the philosophic yield was the Noble Savage, that eternal witness to the intrinsic wholesomeness of Man before the rise of the social contract and civilization. Thus the Noble Savage was a major archaeological find uncovered by two philosophers’ spades. He was a museum specimen that had to be protected, preserved, and displayed as living testimonial to what “artificial” civilization destroys. Forever he would exhibit what civilized Man had ravaged; he was expected to serve as an enduring model for natural social conditions before the Fall, an exemplar for those seeking their restitution.
Subjected to such philosophical assaults, real North American natives during the United States and Canada’s colonial and early national eras were trapped in a genuinely Hobbesian predicament. They represented an obstacle to the conquering spirit of modern culture and society. For many years homesteaders or miners, Bluecoats or Mounties, directed by the state and serving the state’s interests, had a field day with Indians. Today the unenlightened Whitemen, as condemned by Rousseau’s liberal urban posterity, are mainly those undeserving rural poor, the rednecked working class and small-town entrepreneurs who endure on the margins of genuine economic achievement and real political power, competing with Natives for a slice of the government pie. Those now vying with the modern Noble Savage also include sportsmen, wilderness buffs, and natural resource developers resenting the privileged access natives have to the environmental commons and its natural fruits, privileges granted to Indians and protected by the state, grants that continue to serve the state’s interests. These opponents of special rights awarded to the social category called “Indian” stand on an old European-American value, the Enlightenments’ ideal of “equal rights for all,” and use this principle to pick the lock protecting Natives in the remaining “virgin” areas of North America. These competitors often express a Hobbesian view of the Native, as an uncouth, promiscuous, lazy, drunken welfare parasite. At the moment, though there is much divisiveness on such issues among Canadians and Americans, most opinion leaders in the mass media, joined by some key political movers and shakers, embrace a Noble Savage image and the inherent rightfulness of special rights for the Native; but this position is strongly opposed by many of those whose welfare is directly affected by such categorical aids. For Rousseau’s progeny, the only Good Indian is one who looks and talks like a Noble Savage; for others the only Good Indian is one who, like themselves, buys a fishing license and observes catch limits.
In no small part this development owes to the replacement of Blue-coats and Mounties (brandishing sabers) by bureaucratic caretakers and academic guardians (whose weapons are ball-points and word-processors). These latter specialists in Indian affairs are today’s Jesuits. While the Rousseauan view of the Noble Savage has been translated by them into the idiom of modern social science, real Indians almost everywhere remain riveted to contemporary reductions, now called reservations, and thus insulated from the real world. In the marginal areas of North American society, among those whose business it is to watch over the fate of Indians, Jean-Jacques’ Native, however glamorized by social science cosmetology, has become the key symbol in a dominant social service ideology.
Because the descendants of this continent’s original peoples are no longer a political-economic obstacle to national progress, they have been assigned a distinctively new cultural part to play. Now their unique calling is to mirror disenchantment with progress. The Noble Savage today portrays civilization’s discontents and the guilty conscience of the dominant. Just twenty years ago Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., wrote:
Since Whites primarily understood the Indian as an antithesis to themselves, then civilization and Indianness as they defined them would forever be opposites. Only civilization had history and dynamics in this view, so therefore Indianness must be conceived of as ahistorical and static. If the Indian changed through the adoption of civilization as defined by Whites, then he was no longer truly Indian according to the image, because the Indian was judged by what Whites were not. (1979:29)
Indian reservations (and similarly protected refuge zones such as native studies programs) stand, therefore, to the human kingdom as botanical or zoological gardens do for exotic, archaic, and endangered species of flora and fauna. Today’s reductions are cultural zoos: man-made social hothouses where a wild, natural strain of human cultural-genetic material is artificially nurtured so that coming generations will remember Adam and Eve’s fall from grace. They are also supposed to serve as a source for civilization’s cultural renewal. This same logic explains why native exhibits stand beside dinosaur skeletons and coelacanth fossils in museums of natural history: their place in history is out of it. Indians are thus lodged in an anachronous Utopia, which is in no place, apart from real time.
There is a standardized set of instructions for arranging such conservatory exhibits. We make our own history; They must stay true to their eternal ethnic essence. We teach our children reasoned self-criticism, to keep their young minds open to a changing, multicultural world, to make something of themselves; They must forever cling to their precious, inherited, collective uniqueness. For Us, mastership of our own destiny; for Them, any change is a menace. We cause things to happen and bear responsibility for consequences; They are hapless victims, voiceless spear-bearers on the historical stage. Our guilt, presumed without due-process, is compelling evidence of Their innocence. Our culture is oppressive, individualistic, competitive, self-delusional, contrived, artificial, spurious, neurotic; Theirs, from the Andean heights of the Inca Empire to that of tiny Algonquian bands still found in the allegedly primeval forest, are all perennial models of authenticity, serenity, and equality, where community is perpetually in harmony with cosmic forces.
By a weird quirk of historical imagination, contemporary Indians have been forced to bear the “Whiteman’s burden,” but upside down. They are forever destined to recreate their identity vicariously, as Our eternal opposites. They will always be Our victims, Our guilt ridden, most Significant Other. They, the conjured True Indian, is Our Ghost, a phantasm of innocence past. So powerfully pervasive has this reduction imperative been that, paradoxically, real natives have long since internalized its symbols and principles as important elements of their own identities (see chapters 3, 4, and 7). Thus there is a meaningful dialectic between Us and Them, although it has a self-perpetuating, stultifying, vicious-circle cast to it.
In that sense my opening sentence is part false: the Indian does exist. Indians exist as the descendants of original residents of this continent, over the years much molded by their peculiar status in Canadian and American societies. Generation after generation they have integrated into their own practical and intellectual life the dominant culture’s Owner’s Manual for being Indian. However, I must reiterate, the True Native stereotype bears little resemblance to the past and continuing diversity of real Indians. Consider just one prominent element in that stereotype, “living close to nature.” This is a simplistic way of saying that the True Indian lived in tiny groups of nomadic foragers. It happens that Columbus landed off-shore of continents where millions of natives were town and city dwellers: think of the Aztecs, the Natchez, the Abenakis, the Hohokam, the Maya, the Huron. These and a great many more were sedentary societies whose members spent their lives in human-invented environments—urban habitats, as far apart from raw nature as humans can conceivably get. Similarly, today, tens of thousands of Indians are urbanites. Many live in reductions long since embedded in the heart of some vast metropolis, such as the Kanawakhe Mohawk settlement in Montreal. Tens of thousands more live in Indian neighborhoods in New York, Toronto, and Los Angeles. These real Indians today do not scour the countryside for small game and roots. Like other North Americans they hunt money, jobs, social services, grants, and media attention.
What is false about the “living close to nature” fable is equally false about other ingredients of the True Indian stereotype. Consider the image of The Indian as the world’s original environmentalist, “living in perfect harmony with nature.” In the far reaches of prehistory, where we would surely expect to find the purest of True Indians, real ancestors of Indians by over-hunting contributed greatly to the extinction of many species of Pleistocene megafauna. More recently, not too long before the first European transatlantic voyages, the sedentary, town dwelling, farming, pyramid building Mound Builders of Ohio and Illinois created their own versions of civilization that peaked and disappeared—brought on by their own destruction of the ecological base on which they were raised. Naive platitudes above inbred environmentalism reduce all the many varieties of real Indians to one cliché, the False Indian. And such stereotypes make many modern Indians seem like traitors to their kind, for preferring bungalows to wigwams as habitations, television viewing to ritual dancing, Kentucky fried-chicken to Indian fried bread, employment as attorney rather than deer hunting. Those few remaining hand-carved cigar-store Indians, now found slowly peeling away mainly in antique shops, are siblings of the equally wooden, ideologically sculpted True Indian still alive and flourishing in the fantasies of many.
Can the same conclusion be turned around for that illusive figure on the other side of this mirror? Is The Whiteman an invention, too? I think so, although this may come as a surprise to some. Let me show how to make this argument, by applying the “close to nature” litmus-test. Though the Sun King of France did not live all that close to nature, nor, for that matter, do Chicagoans today, my own grandparents did. They, halfblooded lumberjacks and halfhearted subsistence farmers, devoured by lice in their temporal domain and by supernatural fears of an otherworldly one, survived much closer to the forces of nature than the Crees of Wemindji I knew up on James Bay in the 1960s. I inherited my ignorance from my grandparents. They also were unaware they were Whitemen. The Crees, devils in store-bought clothing that they are, made a Whiteman out of me.
Now approaches the moment for the punchline to all these unbearably personal reminiscences. For years I meandered through Jargon’s Maze (otherwise called the social sciences) before discovering the exit, right in my own childhood backyard. Because Americans are famed for an unquenchable thirst for knowledge about other peoples, especially their picturesque Canadian neighbors, I will not burden readers with facts they already know. But do remember that Canada was originally New France, a fertile if feeble colony conquered by the dastardly British in 1760. Please recall how 60,000 illiterate, fun-loving, French-speaking habitants became today’s 6,000,000. And surely keep in mind how, in the meantime, this conquered people was reduced to the status of hewers of wood and drawers of water. The way out of my intellectual quandary concerning Me, Whiteman versus Them, Indians lay through remembering how, when I was a stripling in the small company town where I grew up, Nous, Canadiens spoke of Eux, les Anglais.
So far as we were concerned, all “Englishmen,” were the same, including Anglo-Canadians, Londoners, Sussexmen, Northumbrians, Scots, Irish, Australians, and English-speaking Polish immigrants, whether millionaire industrialists or our brothers’ and fathers’ coworkers in the paper mill. They acted like bosses, the masters of the universe, asking questions and providing answers. They were domineering individualists, driven by the love of power, money, and self. They were also hypocrites—they spoke in mellifluous tones but with forked tongues, always with a hidden agenda. They lived selfishly all by themselves in neat houses, set far from the curb on paved streets, with no more than two children, and one small dog. They also had large feet and were nearly all sissies. They were materialistic, calculating, prideful, pushy. They never treated Us on equal terms, as whole persons. They could not so much as pronounce properly boubou or chien or derrière. Their world was commerce, industry, technology, business, urban life, cosmopolitan—rootless! Their culture was secular humanism, science, mass-media, fashion, free-thinking, competition. They could not even agree on one true religion. The only people to be trusted less than Them were Jews, because, except for the fact that they were not bosses of anything of consequence, they were the same as les Anglais—worse—Jews were even more devious.
What about us, we French Canadians, the True Canadian? For one thing, We were not only entirely different from “the English” but had to be so: We were really God’s own beachhead on this materialistic, capitalistic, secularistic English-dominated continent. Our manifest destiny was bound to family, faith, tradition, community, a life of the spirit, working the land, sticking together to protect our age-old customs, language, and beliefs. Instead of listening to the siren’s song of the English’s cities and modern life, We had to keep our ears tuned to the voices raising from the graves of our forefathers or thundering down from the Heavens by way of the pulpit. So, when one of Ours turned pragmatic businessman or free-thinking intellectual or scientist or power-crazed politician willing to wheel-and-deal with the English in Ottawa, the word was telegraphed to all: here was one who turned away from his own kind, an uprooted traitor, an inauthentic, English-souled, corrupted Canadien.
Like my contemporaries, I lived through a complete reversal of this ideology among French-Canadians. From the mid-1950s up to now, peaking during the 1960s and 1970s, Quebec society has been swept by what les Anglais tagged a “Quiet Revolution.” Led by a technocratic elite of no-nonsense intellectuals and managers, the former French Canadian natives have broken out of their shells, dedicating themselves to the conquest of Big Government, Big Business, Big City, Big Science, Mass Culture. In process, they transformed themselves into a new, dynamic and sometimes overbearing national entity calling itself the Quebecois. Were We successful? You must have heard: Senator Edward Kennedy came to study Our public health insurance system! Robert Campeau just bought Bloomingdale’s! Montreal’s Le Cirque du Soleil swept Los Angeles and New York standing-room only audiences off their feet! Radio-Canada’s Frederic Bach got the 1988 Oscar for animated film.
“Culture,” for Us, as one of Quebec’s well-known playwrights then put it, meant “to take on the whole world and translate it for oneself into one’s own idiom; and also translating oneself unto the world, and thus putting one’s own original imprint (or signature) upon it.” The centuries-old strategy of self-protective “survivance de la race!” (survival of the “race,” or “culture,” as we would say today) was turned into an affirmative, “Shoot for the Stars” nationalist strategy.
At what cost? The crumbling of traditional French Canadian beliefs and ways-of-life was one large item on the bill for the Quiet Revolution. With this was also lost the collective feeling of belonging and a secure identity. Quebec now has one of the lowest fertility rates in the western world: at 1.4 children per family, the Quebécois cannot foresee demographic replacement. Besides, now our houses are being built farther from the curb, and have puppies running about on neatly trimmed lawns. We have become like the English!
Here, then, is my punchline. What French Canadians used to call “the English” forty years ago corresponds to what is called “the Whiteman” in the native thought world. There is no denying that both words denoted, with self-protective contempt, a powerful, exploitative, often domineering majority. But on a deeper, more significant and portentous level, both also symbolize, indirectly but expressively, the massive, anonymous, historical forces that have been transforming the world and disturbing peoples’ lives since their fortuitous emergence in Europe some six hundred years ago.
In writing about the Whiteman and the Native, or any variety of Us and Them, I am describing one part of this historical maelstrom with its multiple revolutions—in the ways people define and relate to their environment, to their own kind and others, and even themselves as social persons. Over the centuries, one group after another has been faulted as responsible for these dramatically painful transformations. Blame has fallen on the burghers of the free, commercial city-states of Italy or the Netherlands, who sowed the seeds of capitalistic industry, trade, commerce, and voluntary associations, and who created the model of the democratic town-meeting. So, too, have been accused the Jews, for propagating their universalistic, reflective intellectual tradition among the neighbors surrounding their ghettos, and for establishing modern credit facilities and banking networks. Calvinist Protestants were also fingered as the perpetrators, for having short-circuited the clergy’s broker role between God and the “Chosen,” thereby introducing the idea of independent individuals and the selfless, pragmatic accumulation of worldly riches, the very “Spirit of Capitalism.” Also favored as culprits were the free-thinking, science-minded, critical intellectuals of the Enlightenment. Other transgressors include Entrepreneurs, variously called Captains of Industry, Lumber Lords, Robber Barons, and—generically—Capitalists or the Bourgeois. What accusation has been lodged against these successive scapegoats? Of being the carriers of a cultural AIDS virus, one that destroyed the immune system of local community and that traditional authority that depended on shared beliefs, continuity of custom, fidelity to heritage, ascribed status, and meaningful links to the supernatural world.
Sociologically speaking, one springboard of this revolution was the constitution of the “free” market as a self-governed mechanism for regulating economic interaction. Such a mechanism of economic exchanges responded not to the prescriptions of tradition, custom, or local polities but to the impersonal, universal, and practical “laws” of supply and demand and the maximization of efficiency and material benefits. This could not have happened without a parallel transformation of ethos. Critical, independent inquiry had to be torn free from the constraints of religious and other forms of social control that supported and sustained conformity. Thus was introduced into social interaction yet another sort of self-regulating, universalistic free market, that marketplace of ideas where the only monarch was pure reason. Working together, these powerful currents created a historical torrent, the unprecedented, now global institutionalization of economic growth, technological innovation, scientific discovery, and critical reasoning.
For want of better words, I will call these central features of this revolution the “modern matrix.” The modern matrix—that unregulated market in things and ideas—has fashioned an entirely new relationship between humans and their worlds. Whether the natural, biophysical environment or the historically created world of culture, both have become objects subject to the critical scrutiny and the will of humankind. Both physical and social environments are now things to study, analyze, understand, to pass judgment on, to manipulate and transform—objects to master. Traditional ideals of the good life and inherited systems of belief and comportment, once transmitted from generation to generation, where people found their place and the meaning of existence through identification with a particular, durable, discrete cultural community, have vanished. Sometimes gradually, sometimes brutally and almost overnight, old social regimes have fallen beneath the weight of the new. Self regenerating communities everywhere have been cut down by the axes of environmental exploitation, which felled the essential material and technological bases for cultural stability, and by the sharp knives of critical questioning and empiricism, which whittled away consensual meanings and norms. Together, these have deforested whole continents of traditional social life. Heritage has become merely one more commodity, the real stuff now made obsolete by the unrelenting “shock of the new.”
The modern matrix has delivered, like none before, the promise in Genesis of Man’s dominion over the Earth. Along the way, the same initiatives that brought forth “enlightenment,” material “progress,” and “freedom,” spread themselves around the world in the wake of colonial expansion. These were first dispensed under the sign of the cross, then education, finally science. The spirit of change was advanced with the clash of swords and words, beneath the banner of “empire,” later “building socialism,” now “national liberation.” Always, the tinkling of gold coins has made sweet music—to the ears of yesterday’s “exploiters” and today’s “developers.” Whereupon the first colonials came home with the assurance that all “Whitemen” were one, that all bore the same splendid burden, this was a surprise to the millions of expropriated peasants and exploited workers of Europe, to that continent’s beheaded nobles and defrocked priests. Knowing they shared the costs but not the rewards of that awesome responsibility may have given some small comfort to Europe’s ethnic minorities, themselves overwhelmed by the emerging states and elites, all no less “White” than they. Otherwise, witnessing the collapse of their own autonomy and their traditional universes, the Lapps and Basques and Bretons might more swiftly have elected to become True Natives. That they did not suddenly do so is likely due to their difficulty in seeing the causes of cultural uprooting as being the “Westerners” or “Whitemen.”
So, among Europe’s anguished peoples, other stereotypes were fashioned to explain what was not understood. Like syphilis, newly introduced to Europe by the recently infected homeward-bound crews of the Santa Maria and the Niña, this cultural virus was often identified by the brand marks of neighboring nations. For Germans, the new cultural pox was French imperialist rationalism, while for the French it was British business pragmatism. For nearly all Europeans, repeatedly so, in our century appallingly so, the Jew became the perennially hated “alien amongst us” responsible for social ills. The Truly Godly, seeking someone to blame for the incomprehensible money-grabbing, scheming, free-thinking, cosmopolitan, rootless, suspiciously disloyal symptoms spreading in their midst, invented the Jew, who became the Christian’s own evil Whiteman.
The modern matrix insists we look to secular not supernatural causes for worldly phenomena and historical events. But few are willing to comply. Not many are content with cool-headed explanations pointing to blind, purposeless, faceless, anonymous, super-individual, underlying social winds and currents as responsible for our being blown about like shipwrecks drifting on the sea of history. The experience of being politically demasted and socially rudderless frightens and disheartens people. So what can We do? We have one always congenial recourse: Someone must be responsible! So We, whoever we are, invent the Christian and Jew, or the Capitalist and the Undeserving Poor, or the Savage and the Whitemen, or the Secular Humanist or Queer or Communist, as suits our ethnic, social class, political, philosophical, or sexual preferences. They are handy for many such purposes, and can be accused as carriers of the fearsome virus, whatever its alleged symptoms.
Curiously, after acclaiming its wonderful gains the modern matrix generates its own criticism, by and of itself. This ambivalent narcissism feeds on a profound nostalgia for the imagined social life of the past, the cultures its own propagation has destroyed. It stands self-denounced for alienating people from one another, from their communities, from their past, and from nature. Its own stellar production—Western or White or bourgeois or materialistic culture—is variously condemned as contrived, counterfeit, disarticulated, disintegrated, inauthentic—an ogre devouring its own children. Wanton pride, the ever-present inclination to play God, is it greatest self-confessed sin.
Almost as soon as the values of universality, rationality, humanity, individuality—the French Enlightenment’s heart—spread across Europe, their opposites arose. These were a glorification of the unique, of the deep lying inner character of nations, of the value of prerational sentiments, of the individual as little more than a surface expression of a preternatural collective identity, of the “Souls” of nations—together the core of German Romanticism. This streak of philosophic nostalgia has run through the ideals of Communism on the Left, Fascist nationalism on the Right, and astride both—Populism. Even scientific discourse, allegedly the enemy of sentimentality, has sometimes been threaded with this seemingly antithetical streak. One expression of this was in early twentieth-century anthropology, with its notion of “unique cultural integrity” and its fascination with “authentic archaic societies.” Now that anthropology has gone on to other ways of thinking, such fancies have become incorporated into mass culture, launching another round of courtship with the Noble Savage among us. Romanticism also still thrives as a counter-cultural ethos, inspiring what may be the most portentous of today’s cultural-political undercurrents, environmentalism as preached by the “Greens” or the “Friends of the Earth” movements.
Such cultural, political and intellectual countercurrents do not truly run free of the still dominant matrix, the whirlpool of modernity. They form an integral part of it. They are its very conscience. They would make no sense in another historical context. Only when rampant technological exploitation of resources reached the point of menacing Man’s place on the planet would this contrary streak of prophetic environmental criticism make itself plausible and find an audience.9 Notwithstanding the often strident emotionalism of this new ecological romanticism, such criticism is by no means unrealistic or entirely utopian. Real—extraordinarily threatening—problems are addressed and eminently practical questions are raised. In fact, nothing could be truer to the modern matrix than such an antithetical stance, for the hallmark of modern rationality is an invariable dictum: the future is not given once and for all. The remembrance of institutions and environments past can inspire dreams of a better future, for all of Us and Our global environment. Progress without memory of history is a cul de sac. Deliberate long-term choices and policies are possible. We do not have to rest content with piecemeal reactions to present short-term trends and fashions. In this sense, the romantic spirit is modernity’s way of reminding Us of a fundamental postulate: Man’s fate and that of the World is in Our hands. No one can be any more modern than that.
Just when the central features of the modern matrix flowed into the consciousness of intellectuals and the public, criticism of some unsavory consequences of modernity appeared. This critique focused on groups most easily seen as unwilling, defenseless victims of free markets and free thinking. These were depicted as both the casualties of development and an absolute cultural alternative. Rousseau’s “Noble Savage” was among the earliest of these improvised alters, the philosopher’s social touchstone, a vision of Man’s infancy.
I have argued that today’s “True and Salutary Native,” is a lineal descendant—with a detour through the Jesuits’ reductions—of Rousseau’s imago. But most of those who lived, or are still living, through the torrents of modernization had no flesh and blood Indians nearby to provide living illustrations of what We—modern folk—had lost. Listen, for instance, to this call of the wild, coming from a traveler in unchartered cultural terrain, where he found:
A homogeneous world: man and animal and fruit, air and wood and earth, were a single substance whose parts slowly vibrated round its core—the sun.
I stood in the village mud and sensed the organic rhythm of this telluric world—the pulse of the earth and beast and man together. The native, the unsophisticated toiler, has a self-knowledge, humble but authentic. This our Western culture has merely covered and destroyed with a patina of lies. And that is why there is more hope in the uncultured workers of all races.
Cruising down a river with his native guides, the traveler deepened his impressions: “That night a great peace fell upon the boat. We were lifted out of time ... I tasted the substance of a people” (quoted in Hollander 1981:131).
Who is writing about whom here? A seventeenth-century Jesuit canoeing past Michillimakinac then down the Illinois River on his way to the Gulf of Mexico with a Huron escort? A modern anthropologist paddling north for field research among the Saulteurs in Manitoba? Neither. The writer’s name is Waldo Frank. His “tribe” was the Mujik—Russian peasants. The date was the early 1930s. The place? Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union. Excuse my white lie, for having substituted “native” for “peasant” in the quotation, done in the interest of catching your attention.
After so many punch lines must come a brief conclusion. Let me make clear what I did not say and what I have said. I did not suggest or imply that native peoples have no identities of their own, nor that they should turn back on their remaining traditions or forfeit whatever limited rights they may have. Neither did I recommend excusing those Europeans who brought misery to the first inhabitants of America. I did stress that no one today need accept being intellectually accused, financially saddled, or emotionally imprisoned by the historically invented images of Them versus Us, of the Indian being ground under by the Whiteman. No individual or group identity can forever satisfactorily be fashioned out of collective stereotypes, however appealing or repugnant they may be. All of Us are far more complex and malleable creatures than ideological cliches would make any of us out to be. Allegations of “cultural” or “national” or “racial” or “tribal” essences are shibboleths.
As Jean-Paul Sartre once observed: “one can always make something out of what others have made of one.” And I surmise this modern predicament today applies to those who identify themselves as North America’s original peoples as well as to everybody else. Indians and Inuit are no more bound to their traditional, supposedly purer “essence” than are people of European, or African, or Asian origins to any variety of “manifest fate.” Besides ethnicity—which may or may not continue to reign supreme in the political attention of humankind—there are many other types of social identities which answer as well to that marvelously human impulse for bonding with a group. Identification of self with neighborhood, gender, kin-group, second generation, occupation, “alternate lifestyles,” and many other personal options are readily available. These, too, cut across lines of social class or nationhood, easing dangerous frictions between people and casting out loneliness.
I have also stressed that the Whiteman is very much like the Indian. Massive, constant social change damages all human communities. All of Us are injured by the loss of a sense of continuity and belonging, by the disappearance of ways familiar to our grandparents, by the erosion of “habits of the heart.” In the maelstrom of the modern world, the experience of cultural disintegration is no stranger to anyone. In the same manner, if the Native truly has any “essence” at all, it is like that of the Whiteman. We are all still innocents vulnerable to many serpents and poisoned apples in the world’s much fouled garden. All of Us lived exposed to challenges and must struggle to cope so that we can exist. Ours is a collective fate, striving to grasp the future and to make it livable for our children, whom we cannot raise the way we were ourselves raised.
There is, at last, a moral to my story: no one need shoulder the historical burdens of guilt for having vanquished or the shame of defeat. Nor must anyone be tolerated who waves the battle flags of self-pride or the bandages of self-pity. But everybody must accept responsibility for changing the hurtful social conditions and misperceptions they share. Everyone should be held answerable, now to one another, tomorrow to our posterity. How otherwise can We, Whiteman or Indian, ever breakout from the bondage of our mutual reductions?
1The peasants of England and Scotland suffered a similar fate during what is known as the “enclosures” movement, from the eighteenth century on. They had to be thrown out to make room for the wool-producing, grass-grazing foot soldiers of the budding textile industry—the sheep. The word “peasant” comes from the French paysan, whose root is pays—country. A peasant, then, is a man-of-the-country, which is pretty close to the meaning of “aborigine” and “native.” The uprooted peasants became “labor” for the factories, just as their farms became another mere factor of large-scale production. The key to both transformations, of course, is that money had become “capital.”
2Up to this day Canadian government services provided annually to native communities cost incomparably more—billions for a few hundred thousand people—than whatever they bring into the Canadian economy in the form of wages, profits, interests or taxes. Of course, there remains the incalculable cumulative value of their original contribution—land. But this can be rationalized away by recalling that increased land values are the result of the labors, investments, and know-how the European-Americans applied to it.
3A parallel could be made with the symbolic meaning of “Next year in Jerusalem” during the Jewish Diaspora, or with the intense longing Palestinian children born and raised in refugee communities express for returning to Haifa or Jaffa, places they have never seen but which, to their mind’s eye, appear as earthly paradise.
4According to by-laws of the James Bay Agreement, Inuit are even forbidden to offer a piece of “nature food” (fish, fowl, or four-legged) as a present to a visiting non-native friend.
5Among the Iroquois, the tribal political traditions had to go underground, where they took on a quasi-sacred, syncretic character. There they simmered until the Red Power movement of the 1960s brought them back to the surface. The so-called “traditional” or “Long-House People” presently hold the “radical” banner in the political life of the Iroquois reservations, on both sides of (and astride) the border.
6By contrast, ethnicity proceeds largely from self-identification, not bloodlines. The Finnish law on the education of the Lapps is the only one I have ever seen which takes ethnicity into elegant account; it says approximately: “for the purposes of the present law, a Lapp is whoever says: I am a Lapp.” For the 1980 United States census, a similar “self-identification” rule for Indians was applied, resulting in an apparent 75 percent increase in Indian population that decade.
7It took centuries for the “Whiteman” moniker to catch on. Europeans of the sixteenth-century—who had not yet learned even to identify with a nation-state—mostly saw themselves as Christians, in contrast to heathens and infidels, such as the Moors.
8This is why it makes no sense to say that any ancient culture was “naturally” respectful of their environment. Extensive environmental degradation came with greatly increased population and heavy resource exploitation. Deliberate worry about the fate of the globe is a modern phenomenon; it goes with self-propelling technological development.
Berkhofer, Robert F. Jr.,, 1979. The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present. New York: Vintage Books.
Hollander, Paul. Robert Silverberg. 1981. Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals in the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba, 1928-1978. New York: Oxford University Press.