A CULTURE is worth no more than the most articulate, or persistent, man in it—no matter how much hay is grown. The question as to whether an Indian society should perpetuate its ancient ways or acculturate and hence progress as rapidly as possible seems to me wholly pointless both for the Indian and the national convenience (which can too often be read “conivance,” unfortunately).
Some anthropologists seem impressed by the cultural and political split between fullbloods and Indians of mixed white and Indian blood. And there is a general temptation to equate value, as person, with the degree of assimilation. One hardly needs reminding that this logarithmic thinking is characteristic of all American political and social thought. What you possess is what you are. It is computed from the base of what you have. To be is nothing. Then, of course, you can be told who you are. This goes for all Americans, the entire hemisphere. There are many instances in which radical Indian traditionalists have accepted into their number not only mixbloods but non-Indians. The qualification and quantity of blood seems less determinant, finally, than the conceptual alignment of human activity. This is true even on the most superficial social meeting ground.
The Paiute boy I met in Maggie’s Bar in Reno knew I was a white man who wanted to talk to Indians, and I recognized him as a hip Indian, possibly a little of what they speak of as a Professional. He lived in the Reno enclave. I am no more acculturated than he is, although we are of course quite differently deculturized. He spoke, with my obvious encouragement, of the differences, the allegiances, some old, some modern, of the Indians who come and go through Reno. There is an ancient and enduring enmity between the Paiute and the Washo, according to him, and when Washo come into town there are fights between them and the Paiute. The Paiute will often side with Shoshoni, whose language he said his people could understand with no great difficulty. He said that quite often Navaho came through Reno. He admitted that he disliked them because of what he described as their egotism, an unjustified arrogance. But he was at pains to say he felt all divisions—lingual, tribal, racial—were bad work, and one of the first problems among the Indians themselves and between the Indians and the larger world. He said he thought all those divisions were arbitrarily imposed and willfully maintained by “that shit out there,” pointing along a wide arc, in the dark tavern. He wore dark glasses which he never removed, a common habit among young city Indians.
My sense of him was that he was not a progressive. Integration into American society was for him not so much not worth the effort as a silly and pointless way to spend one’s life. He had the few articles technology, without much involvement, would provide him: dark glasses, a clean white shirt, hair dressing, and comb, a nice pair of shoes. Nor could I hear that he was a culturist. At least in terms you might expect of an old, reservation man. He told me he had been married when very young, and had gone from the alarm clock to work and then home to shower, eat, and then watch TV. It had been all right, as a life, nothing much either way, and since he was newly wed, the form of it made as much sense as not. Go to work, go home, shower, eat, watch TV, go to bed, etc. He seemed to me possessed of a very uncluttered and un-embittered futility—nothing found, and no complicated sociological conclusions. He sat there, being an Indian behind his dark glasses, neat and fairly well-groomed without making it a point. The point he didn’t have to make was clear: he was the particular Indian he was in Reno. No allegiances beyond what that might be. The city had forced a species of singularity on him he simply accepted. The ingredients of an afternoon. He noticed that the local economy had turned to plastic chips which were redeemable only by the casino issuing them, a transaction interruptable at the casino’s whim. Reno was once a silver town. That exchange was primary by definition. He saw the national currency turning into plastic, a sandwich of novel metals. Nor was he a nativist. He remarked that the Chinese-run casino down the street had successfully put the Negro community in its pocket. And who could figure out what those Chinamen were anyway? I asked him what he thought of the Chinese and if he knew what the Chinese, so present in town, thought of Indians. There was no more answer than his smile and shaking head.
Later on in the New China Club I saw at the crap table one of the owners become infuriated with a man who spoke to the dice as he threw them—Come on baby! Get me to New China, I wanta go to CHINA baby. Come on now, take me to FORMOSA! Sweetheart! I’ll settle for Formosa, I’s so low! The Chinaman running the table said, OK buddy, a joke is a joke, and made him give up the dice. A number of moody, small-eyed men appeared around the table to see the man out.
To return to my point: “Progress” affects the ritual of men. Who, precisely, holds the lever when acculturation is the proposition? One thing is clear. There is no such division as minority, or minority pressure. Except as a handy divisiveness. It is altogether natural that certain collections of persons, some Berkeley students, some Indians, some poets, some Negroes, etc., move according to an image outside the United States. To speak of Indian acculturation is to speak without sound. There has never been in this national soil even the seed to put into the ground. There has been movement, a scourge most often manipulated, back and forth across it, and that is all. Likewise it is natural that the right-winger dreams of Spain (although the Catholicism would choke him, he digs the tyranny) as the ideal state. That the southerner thinks of South Africa as heaven. One gravitates to the center of despair. There are Africans there too.
All contrary persuasions grow out of a superimposed division, an impediment to the real. The force is down, inward, with no return. Nativism only rarely takes a grasp on the full man as against his “individuality,” what he fancies is within himself. An interesting exception came the summer of 1965 at Wind River when a Sun Dance was performed for peace in Viet Nam, whatever that means. Various minority persuasions and institutions are faked into believing there is a majority. And there is. A majority produced specifically to believe it has not been infected by the minority—meaning the rest of the existing world. Most Americans, as well as Indians, are minority in a double sense—in the world as well as within the nation. They wait around to be told what the majority thinks. But that infamous majority is as abstract as it is inert. What they hear they often assume to be what they knew. The headlines rarely let them down. They could reasonably assume they live in the world and not in the United States. The arcane and specifically adamant policies, both domestic and foreign, of the U.S. Government are entirely irrelevant to them. But it is the same official force and policy that deals with Wounded Knee (1890), the Vietnamese village (1955– ), and the Watts ghetto (summer, 1965).
The utmost good faith shall always be observed toward the Indians; their land and property shall never be taken from them without their consent; and in their property, rights and liberty, they shall never be invaded or disturbed, unless in just and lawful wars authorized by Congress; but laws founded on justice and humanity shall from time to time be made, for preventing wrongs done to them, and for preserving peace and Friendship with them.
Northwest Ordinance, 1787.