Category: noble savage

History buffs and novelists tell the stories

Alvin Josephy wrote and spoke frequently about the Indian story being left out of the standard American history of school textbooks and the academy. He said that amateur historians–“history buffs”–and novelists kept the story of Indians and the West alive when academia didn’t much care.

I teach a class in La Grande on Northwest Tribes and the Ecosystem they lived in, and how European intrusions, from diseases, horses, fur-trapping, and treaty-making to boarding schools, dam-building, and fire suppression changed Indians and the land. I’ve become increasingly interested in white-Indian realtionships, and yesterday we compared white male—women; white male—African-American; and white male—Indian power struggles from colonization forward, looking particularly at the rise of Black Power, Red Power, and Feminism in the 60s and 70s.

Two things stood out. First, white men, empowered by physical strength, religion, and tradition, were able to dominate women in the United States from our beginnings, and the appreciation of women as human beings deserving of the recognition and opportunities accorded their fathers and brothers has come about very gradually, and often painfully.

Second, African-Americans were brought to the new world as slaves, smothered first with physical force to get them onto ships and then shipped to a completely alien world, where fellow slaves often did not share language or culture, and a white minority was able, with the slaves’ debasement and confusion and their own assumptions of superiority and use of force, to dominate them. Their recognition as human beings deserving of the opportunities accorded their white brothers and sisters has also been painful and slow.

Indians are more complicated.

Josephy says that Europeans gave the Indians three choices: Assimilation; Removal; and extermination. There have been killing sprees and even genocidal actions against Indians, but Indians did not all die.  Removal has stumbled on inconsistencies and out and out failures, from Jackson’s removal policy to the widespread introduction of Indian “reservations.” Indians are still here—on and off their reservations.

Assimilation has always been the preferred government and societal treatment of Indians. Indians have been missionized, allotted onto farms, barred from practicing religion and cultural events, kidnapped and stripped of hair, language and culture at boarding schools, terminated from their reservations, and relocated to urban centers, all in the cause of making them white.

Women could not be made white—white men that is; Africans could not be made white, but the very early conceit in our country was that Indians could be made white. The Indian, the old boarding school anthem went, could be killed to save the (white) man.

Indians, it seems to me, had and have two things that European women and African-American men and women did not have when confronting white European men. First and most importantly, Indians had the land—and all that that meant. They knew the land, how to use, travel, and live on it. Europeans needed Indians at every point along the colonization road to show them those things.  But White Europeans wanted that land for their own purposes, and used every means of getting it—war and treaty being the primary means. Because the Indians had the land originally, they had a power in war and negotiations that neither women nor African-American slaves had. In the time, they were often overwhelmed with force and deception, but they hung and hold on—now to small bits of land and culture that take them back millennially.

The other thing that Indians had from the beginning was a physical health and lifestyle that was attractive to some of the European intruders. Think of Rousseau and his noble savage, and of Daniel Boone, the fur trappers and mountain men who left polite society to live with and like the Indians. They get their due in university press and small local publishers, not in our textbooks

And the story of women and children captured by Indians is threaded throughout our literary history in adventure books for children and in the diaries and narratives of “amateur” historians.  Not, again, in the textbooks, where the stories of grim preachers, prim women, and Salem witches do find room. But the “captives,” including the many who refused to return to “polite” society, have their own literature, from Mary Jemison, captured in 1753 at 15, diarist and subject of a stream of books from then to now, to Paulette Jiles’ just-published News of the World, a fictional account of a white girl raised by the Kiowa.

With Indians, white-guilt, Indian resilience, romanticism and a lingering taste for the land and the wild have crowded and continue to crowd each other in an ambivalent  500-year stew of a relationship. A stew too complicated for textbooks, left to novelists and history buffs.

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Fear of Indians


I keep trying to write about “assimilation,” because I know that Alvin considered it—the ways in which the white power structure has “zigzagged,” as he put it, with policies and actions aimed at “making Indians stop being Indians and turn themselves into Whites”—crucial to understanding the history of America. But I keep finding gems of understanding that seem to precede the concepts of assimilation, and extermination for that matter.

And this week it is fear, and not physical fear of Indians, though I am sure that those scrawny Dutchmen and Englishmen who came ashore on the Atlantic  Coast  in the early 1600s had some of that kind of fear and trepidation, but a deeper kind of fear. Alvin described it in a speech on “Fisheries and Native American Rights” given at the University of Michigan in April of 1979, and later published in The Indian Historian, Vol. 12, No. 2, Summer 1979.
Along the Atlantic Coast… the Dutch and English traders and settlers carried on the legacy of the Spaniards and immediately established the heritage of misunderstandings, stereotypic thinking, and conflicts that still pervade White-Native American relations within the United States. The first of these again, was that the Indians, being different, were inferior. But that inferiority often translated into fear, the religious and cultural fear that the wilderness man, the Indian, with his free, seemingly simple, and unChristian way of life would corrupt the European settler and the society the European had come to erect in the New World.
He goes on to deal with issues of land and natural resources, which are what we generally think about when we think about westward expansion and the displacement of Indians, but he puts this “religious and cultural fear” first, and that is worth thinking about.
I think it was in Ben Franklin’s writings about Indians that he talks about the Indians who have been taken in by whites most often wanting to go back to tribal ways, while the occasional white taken in by Indians sometimes did not want to return to white settlement.  I know that the French trappers were encouraged to blend with Indians, and many did so. (Some of the English trappers did as well, but theirs was a more measured blending. The HBC forbid intermarriage, though some of its prominent factors openly practiced it.)
“The French were more benign [than the Spaniards]. Though many of them also viewed the Indians as inferiors, in fact as children of nature, and converted and asserted dominance over them, the dynamics of the fur trade demanded dependent, but relatively content, Indian fur suppliers… the French made the greatest efforts to see the world as the Indians saw it.”
And of course it was the French philosopher, Jacque Rousseau, who famously talked about the “noble savage.”
Peter Rindisbacher, War Dance

Pictures are worth a thousand words, and another character Alvin wrote about, Peter Rindisbacher, the boy artist who arrived on the Canadian prairie in the1820s and made the first painting impressions of Fox and Cree and Chippewa, paintings that were turned into lithographs and widely distributed in Europe, has over 100 pictures that are worth 1000 words each. (“The Boy Artist of Red River” in American Heritage, February 1970, and The Artist Was a Young Man, a 1970 book.)

It was the handsome, vigorous Indians that earlier artists had brought to Europe that put thoughts into Rousseau’s head and fear into white Christian hearts. Rindisbacher, the first portraitist of the Plains, continued the unease. How could they be that way without the Gospel? Do we have it right?
The traditional way to strengthen faith among many religions is to send practitioners among the unfaithful and untouched, to preach the Gospel (or the Koran or the sacred text and/or beliefs of any evangelical religion). So it is a short step to say that this cultural and religious fear was early translated into the missionary movement in the New World, first informally, but gradually becoming more institutionalized and substantial.  Assimilation, extermination—that is what followed.
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The romantic side of assimilation

 

Relationships between European immigrants and indigenous people in the Americas have been complicated from the beginning.  Columbus and his henchmen squeezed the Caribbeans of gold, enslaved them, annihilated some tribes, and took the case of indigenous people’s “humanity” back to the Old World, where churchmen determined that the Americans had souls and were in need of Christian conversion.

The northern Europeans, coming out of the little ice age, started to get well on American potatoes, and the ones who made it to “New England” shores, still often scrawny and unfit, found corn and squash and beans and big strong looking Indians—the Indians who had escaped the diseases which had decimated the coast before the arrival of actual settlers.

A few of these strong good looking Indians were brought back to Europe, and they and stories of the Iroquois Confederation –the “civilized tribes”—reached philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau and others to fuel a vision of “noble savages” and feed the Enlightenment. (see John White painting circa 1590 at left).

Alvin J said many times in many ways that, from the beginning, white relationships with Indians took three basic roads—all evident in my sketchy history above: 1. Indians should be killed and their lands and resources taken over by superior Europeans;  2. Indians should be converted and assimilated, should be made white. Most who espoused this view were good people who saw Indians as children in need of white parenting, and believed they could catch up with whites if properly cared for.

The third vision, what Alvin sometimes called the “romantic” vision of Indians granted the Indians a glorious “noble” past. These were the Indians brought back to Europe and paraded before royalty. Benjamin Franklin observed that Indians got on well without policemen and jails, and that the Iroquois nations had fashioned a kind of union that had lasted for generations, while a dozen European colonies were having a tough time forming any union at all.  These Indians inspired philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau to name them “noble savages.”  In the end this narrative of indigenous America also led to assimilation; you were once noble and free and part of nature, but civilization has caught up with you and now you must join it—us.  You are, in terms popular in the nineteenth century and in the title of a 1904 Edward Curtis photo, a “vanishing race.” (curtis photo below)

I think this vision is buried somehow in the collective American genome. In this view, we conquered the Indians and their lands, and are now treating them well—as “equals” really. So we grant them a noble past. They were, among other things, hard adversaries, sometimes ruthless, but in any case tough. (How else could they have defeated Custer!) We don’t want to recount the actual relationships of Indians and whites in our textbooks—scholars and amateur historians can play in that field—but we can still name things after Indian heroes and put statues of them in public places. (Indian writer James Welch told me that the Battle at the Little Big Horn is one of the top two or three American historical subjects in books and films; following the history of these histories is another way of tracking Indian-white relations.) The “Trail of Tears” is a phrase that has entered the vocabulary, though I doubt very many of us can trace its actual history. Indians are still mostly absent from our history textbooks. And the fact that Indians and tribes are still with us and are doing things other than casinos—things like restoring lands and fish and game populations, fighting diabetes and poverty, trying to integrate old ways and new ways—is not part of the current American conversation.

One could argue that the romantics have carried the day—Indians were once interesting and even noble, as are their old chiefs and stories, but Indians today, if they have not already vanished, are largely invisible to most Americans.

# # #

“Noble Savage”

After the last blog on Mildred Bailey and “passing as white,” a friend suggested that it sounded accurate on the one hand, but on the other, why is it that so many Americans claim Indian roots? There are jokes about the number of people with Cherokee great-grandmothers, but when, he asked, have you heard someone obviously “white” claim a slave ancestor from Sierra Leone.

What’s with this contradiction of widespread pride in Indian ancestry—and white America’s disregard for and continuing practice of forgetting Indian history and consciously eradicating Indian culture?

I can’t site a page in a Josephy book or remember a specific conversation, but I know that he believed that, from the earliest days of white settlement, relations with Indians were dominated by a triad of white attitudes toward them: romanticize, kill, or assimilate.

We now know that diseases often preceded actual contact and that millions of indigenous Americans died before they saw a white face. We also know, though it is less frequently mentioned, that Europe, and especially northern Europe, was in the final throes of the little ice age when those first ships sailed to the North America. Famine was fact, and the people who traveled were a scrawny lot (I read somewhere that Napoleon’s army was made up of men who barely topped five foot, unlike Charlemagne‘s much earlier army of six footers.) And their first sightings of Indians must have been awe-inspiring. Think of the early paintings of the “red men,” and of the Indians who were brought to Europe to parade in front of kings, queens, and philosophers.

These able-bodied Indians appeared to be living well without the trappings of European civilization, without large houses, police forces, and only the barest of manufactured goods. “Noble savages,” Rousseau called them. At least some of the early colonists, Benjamin Franklin among them, read and were influenced by the Europeans and found confirmation of their views in personal experience.

I don’t remember which general declared that the only good Indian was a dead Indian, and there is not time or space to chronicle the attempts by do-good white Americans to assimilate Indians. The Dawes Act, Indian Reorganization Act, and Eisenhower’s termination policy can serve as brief reminders

But is it too much to say that Josephy’s original triad is with us still? That White America is still conflicted about Indians, and that we carry with us these old attitudes—all of them. At Fishtrap, we hosted the Makah filmmaker Sandy Osawa, and watched her documentaries on musician Jim Pepper and prima ballerina Maria Tallchief. We listened to Horace Axtell describe a language and sounds related directly the world around us.

And now that powwow’s are mainstream, we are stirred by jingle dancers and Indian elders with eagle feathers. I remember selling a book of Indian sayings in my bookstore days: To Touch the Earth.

Maybe that is what the Cherokee great grandmother is all about….

check out Sandy Osawa and Maria Tallchief here: http://indiancountrynews.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2006&Itemid=80

A reflection on Winona LaDuke’s visit to Fishtrap

Small world—and invisible Indians

Winona LaDuke was at Winter Fishtrap this weekend. She is an enrolled member of the Mississippi Band of Anishinaabeg on the White Earth Reservation in Northern Minnesota and a global activist on behalf of Indian rights and sustainable natural resource use.

Winona is not bitter or self-pitying, but straight forward, proud, realistic, rational, and spiritual all-together. Seven of the eight million dollars spent on food on her reservation go immediately off-reservation, she said. Some huge percentage of electrical energy is spent in the mining and transportation of fuels and the transmission across far distances. On her reservation they will grow and produce more of their own food; they will build wind turbines and develop wind energy.

People hovered after her talk. I approached slowly and introduced myself as having been born and partially raised in Fosston, Minnesota, at the edge of the White Earth Reservation. “My father was born in Fosston, in 1929,” she said. (He later went to California where he was an Indian in the movies—“an extra $25 if you fell off your horse”—and where Winona was born.). I said that an uncle had a small fishing resort called the “Hideout” on Island Lake right after the War. “That would have been off county road #4,” she said.

There were no Indian kids in school—my guess was that they went to small country schools on the reservation. “Probably until eighth grade,” she thought, as that was as far as her father had gone. Only now I think that some of the Indian kids must have been hustled off to boarding schools in other places. I didn’t think to ask her about boarding schools.

Indians were invisible to us. We didn’t know any Indians. On county road #4 we saw a few shacks and big cars. We thought that when Indians got money they bought Cadillacs and got drunk. We didn’t know about the kids, though our parents pitied them.

Then I remembered trips to Itasca State Park, the headwaters of the Mississippi River—“that’s on the Reservation,” Winona chimed—and that for a quarter I had my picture taken sitting on an Indian chief’s lap (why do I remember the quarter?). I don’t know what happened to the picture, but I remember that the Indian had a large feathered headdress and wore buckskin. “That was probably my grandfather,” said Winona.

This is all sixty years ago, and it pains me to write it. I’ve gone to good schools and traveled far, lived for 40 years in Nez Perce country in Oregon—land the Indians were driven from with broken treaties and threats of war. I spend some of my time now going through the books and articles written by the late Alvin Josephy, my mentor still.

Americans have always tried to do away with Indians, Alvin said. We killed them first with diseases, wars, and broken treaties. And for the last hundred years have worked hard at killing “Indianness,” the Indian in them. This has been called assimilation, integration, termination.

Oh, we love them too—love what they were or we imagined them to have been. Alvin called these ideas “Nobel Savage” and “Vanishing Indian.” Indians were idealized by Rousseau and other European intellectuals, and captured in ethnographic studies of language and culture as the same languages, dances, and songs were outlawed on the reservations. They were photographed, most famously by Edward Sheriff Curtis, in regalia they no longer wore. He would pay them a few dollars for changing from regular clothes—often rags—into regalia.

Most importantly, Alvin said, they have often been “omitted” from history. The many languages—over 2000 mutually unintelligible at time of European contact, diverse cultures, arts and artifacts that display skills in engineering, math, and trade, Indian contributions to world agriculture from potato to tomato, and the very way they strove—and strive still—for harmony within the natural world have for the most part been absent from histories and textbooks.

Maybe the books are better now, but I wonder how far we have really come from the days of Winona’s father and grandfather and me in northern Minnesota, when Indians were Tonto on the radio, a photo chief at a state park, and invisible where they lived….