Category: Pacific Northwest

Indians and Psychedelia

I got news of the new exhibit at the Portland Art Museum from two friends. The show is “Psychedelic Rock Posters and Fashion of the 1960s,” and, knowing my work with Indians and relationship to the late Alvin Josephy, they sent images of an exhibit text around a book he edited in 1961, The American Heritage Book of Indians. The book had images that were used by psychedelic artists of the 1960s; the text, according to exhibit curators, was “paternalistic” towards tribes and tribal people.

I’ll get to a small defense of Josephy in a minute, but first let me dwell in the 60s. I graduated high school in 1960, college in 1964. I was just early enough to skate by the Vietnam War, and early enough to discover and love early rock’n’roll and folk music before louder bands and music came on the scene. I remember the hubbub when Dylan went electric; I was probably one of those he upset.

I remember exactly where I was when I got the news of John F. Kennedy’s death, riding my bike onto campus as Dr. Dennis Strong, my sometime Western Civilization prof, cried into the air that “they’ve killed the president, they’ve killed the president.” At least two people from our campus—UC, Riverside—dropped out of school to join the Peace Corps. That, they said, was all that they could think of doing to deal with the President’s death; Kennedy had created the Peace Corps.

I hung on in Riverside, getting in one more rugby season and gaining admission to graduate school at Northwestern University in that spring of 1964. I marched in the graduation line, house sat for a professor that summer, and took my first ever airplane ride that fall to Chicago, and then a bus to Evanston, Illinois and the Northwestern campus.

It didn’t fit me. Academia seemed stifling, and Vietnam was poking its head into American lives. Add to that my best friend from high school had spent Freedom Summer registering voters in Mississippi and was already off teaching in East Africa. Thomas Aquinas and Immanuel Kant didn’t seem relevant, and I joined the Peace Corps and spent most of the time between 1965 and 1970 in Turkey. A year in the middle of that stretch was with the Peace Corps office in Washington, D.C., where I was when Martin Luther King was killed and the city erupted in riot, where I was a few months later when Robert F. Kennedy was killed.

So, I missed most of the psychodelia, learned Turkish and the music of Turkey’s pop star, Zeki Muren, instead. Hung on to Joan Baez and Joni Mitchel, early Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary, which I played in my Ankara apartment when I was on Peace Corps staff. I didn’t have TV during the Washington tenure or while in Turkey, so missed the Smothers Brothers too.

Later, settled in with the back-to-the-landers in Wallowa County in the 1970s, I bought cowboy boots and felt uncomfortable in tie dye. Opened a bookstore in 1976, and along came Alvin Josephy to introduce me to American Indians. Alvin passed away in 2005, but I tell people he keeps getting smarter as I thread my own way through American history and Native American affairs.

And this is what I can say about Alvin’s evolution as a historian of and advocate for American Indians. The American Heritage Book of Indians was Alvin’s first book on Indians. He did not write the narrative, but was the chief editor from American Heritage when it was published in 1961. My recollection is that his major contribution was combing museums and archives for early photos, drawings, and artwork related to Native America. He was especially proud of finding the earliest European drawing—not a very good one—of people in the Caribbean. A drawing too of heathen Indians burning in hell. And a story of the friars who were mistakenly told that the Caribs were cannibals and especially sought Catholic friars.

He had written a story about Chief Joseph for American Heritage Magazine before he left Time Magazine to go to AH himself. And while the AH Indian book was his first assignment there, he had been invited to do a book of essays about Indian leaders, and in that same year, 1961, Viking Books published The Patriot Chiefs. a Chronicle of American Indian Leadership. Alvin said that there had been many great American Indian leaders; many tried to lead their people and weave their ways through explorer and settler colonials. He wanted to write about those who resisted. That book, chosen for an everyone reads at a meeting of Native Students at Western Washington in 1969, is still in print!

Alvin of course went on to publish his big Nez Perce book and several others on Indians. He was guest speaker at an early National Congress of American Indians meeting, and became the founding board chair of the National Museum of the American Indian, where he asked that Natives of North and South America tell their own stories.

Maybe most importantly, his last book, which he edited but did not write, was Lewis and Clark Through Indian Eyes, We’ve heard enough, Alvin said, about Lewis and Clark from the white point of view. And he gathered Native writers and let them have their say.

I can imagine going to that Psychedelia exhibit with Alvin and asking some of our Indian friends what THEY think about wannabe Indians and the 1960s. That could make a book.

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Colonial Habits of Mind


Alvin Josephy acknowledged the havoc wreaked on indigenous Americans by diseases, wars, and alcohol, but he said many times that the most pernicious impact on the Americans was Eurocentrism, the idea that the newcomers’ cultures and notions of religion and politics were superior to those of the people they met when they got off the boats in the Caribbean and on the North and South Atlantic new world coasts.
When you read that the populations of the Americas, which might have been over 70 million when Columbus arrived,  were reduced by 70-90 percent with the initial introduction of measles, smallpox, malaria, and other European and African diseases, that the Northeast coastline was devastated by disease before the Pilgrims landed, that 75 percent of the remaining population of Indians (smallpox had made it around the Horn in the 1700s and done its damage) in the Willamette Valley was killed off and Sauvie Island reduced to piles of bones by malaria in 1830-31, when you think about all of this, how important and “pernicious” can cultural attitudes be?
A couple of weeks ago I found Farthest Frontier: The Pacific Northwest on the used bookshelf at Mary’s bookstore in Enterprise. The author, Sidney Warren, a PhD from Columbia, had a grant from the Library of Congress and its History of American Civilization program to explore the subject. The book was published in 1949. It’s a good and generally fair-handed account of the region’s early white days, but look at how Warren steps right into the Eurocentric trap:
“The coastal natives had not advanced very far up the ladder of civilization, and those of the inland region were even more backward. They were all, of course, excellent hunters and fishermen and knew how to preserve sea food to last till the next season’s run.  They made clothes out of animal skins and the bark of trees… They constructed houses, some of them of tremendous size, some of which survived for generations, using bone or stone wedges together with an ingenious cutting tool to shape the planks. They built canoes sturdy enough to hold sixty men to travel several hundred miles in ocean waters” (my italics)
Not bad for the “less advanced.”  And Warren obviously did not see the irony in his text.
But that was 1949, you say. Surely we are past it now. Well, not exactly. Daniel Richter, a distinguished history professor and author of many books on early Euro and Indian America, takes fellow historian Bernard Bailyn, a 90 year old distinguished professor emeritus at Harvard and winner of a couple of Pulitzer Prizes, to task for Eurocentrism in his new book on Euro-America’s beginnings. The book is titled The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600–1675. And there you have it.
Richter does praise Bailyn for his attention to detail, for accurately portraying the brutality and contentiousness of the times, and even for acknowledging an aboriginal presence on the Europeans’ arrival. But he takes him to task for minimizing that presence, and points to the title. “Our word choices continue to trap all of us in old colonial habits of mind,” he says.
Continue to trap the eminent historians of the day—and I admit from personal experience, most of the rest of us as well.
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