Most of us think
that history is the past. It's not. History is the stories we tell about the
past. That's all it is. Stories.
In 1598, what is now
New Mexico, Juan de Onate and his troops killed over eight hundred Acoma and
cut off the left foot of every man over the age of twenty-five.
North America has
had a long association with Native people, but despite the history that the two
groups have shared, North America no longer sees Indians. What it sees are war bonnets, beaded shirts,
fringed deerskin dresses, loincloths, headbands, feathered lances, tomahawks,
moccasins, face paint, and bone chokers.
For some Live
Indians, being invisible is annoying enough, but being inauthentic is
crushing. If it will help, I'm willing
to apologize for the antenna on that house in Acoma. I've already shaved off my moustache, so that
should no longer be an issue. If I
didn't live in the middle of a city, I'd have a horse. Maybe two.
I sing with a drum group. I've
been to sweats. I have friends on a number of reservations and reserves around
North America. I'm diabetic. If you can think of something else I can do
to help myself, let me know.
For Native people,
the distinction between Dead Indians and Live Indians is almost impossible to
maintain. But North America doesn't have
this problem. All it has to do is hold
the two Indians up to the light. Dead
Indians are dignified, noble, silent, suitably garbed. And dead.
Live Indians are invisible, unruly, disappointing. And breathing. One is a romantic reminder of a heroic but
fictional past. The other is simply an
unpleasant, contemporary surprise.
A great many people
in North America believe that Canada and the United States, in a moment of
inexplicable generosity, gave treaty rights to Native people as a gift. Of course, anyone familiar with the history
of Indians in North America knows that Native people paid for every treaty
right, and in some cases, paid more than once.
A 1914 [Indian Act]
amendment required Legal Indians to get official permission before appearing in
Aboriginal costume in any dance, show, exhibition, stampede, or pageant.
Indian-White
relations were originally constructed around the concerns of commerce -- the
fur trade being a prime example -- and military alliances. In these matters, Native peoples understood
themselves to be sovereign, independent nations, and in early land and treaty
negotiations, they were treated as such.
For 250 years,
Whites and Indians had fought as enemies, had fought as allies, had made peace, had broken the peace, and had
fought each other again. But when Great
Britain, France, and the newly formed United States sat down in 1783 to hammer
out details of the Treaty of Paris that would officially end the American
Revolution, Native people, who had fought alongside both England and the
colonies, were neither invited to the negotiations nor mentioned in the treaty
itself.
Francis
Jennings, in his book The Invasion of America, called Christianity a “conquest
religion.” I suspect this description is
true of most religions. I can’t think of
one that could be termed a “seduction religion” where converts are lured in by
the beauty of the doctrine and the
generosity of the practice. Maybe
Buddhism. Certainly not Christianity.
Missionary work in
the New World was war. Christianity, in all its varieties, has always been a stakeholder in the business
of assimilation.
By the
late nineteenth century, the Indian Problem was still a problem. Yes, Indians had been defeated
militarily. Yes, most of the tribes had
been safely locked up on reservations and reserves. Yes, Indians were dying off in satisfying
numbers from disease and starvation.
Yes, all of this was encouraging.
But, at the same time, Indians were still being Indians. How could this happen?
The hope
for Native peoples was that, with a little training and a push in the right
direction, they would become contributing members of White North America. This was not to be a compromise between
cultures. It was to be a unilateral
surrender. Indians were to give up what
they had and what they believed, in exchange for what Whites had and believed.
Canada
is, according to Canada, a just society.
In 1850,
attendance at residential schools became compulsory for all children from the
ages of six to fifteen. There was no
opting out. Non-compliance by parents
was punishable by prison terms. Children
were forcibly removed from their homes and kept at the schools.
No
one knows for sure how many Native children wound up at residential schools in
the United States. Canada reckons their
own numbers at about 150,000, so the tally for America would have been
considerably higher. But for the
children who did find themselves there, the schools were, in all ways, a death
trap. Children were stripped of their
cultures and their languages. Up to 50
percent of them lost their lives to disease, malnutrition, neglect, and abuse
--- 50 percent. One in two. If residential schools had been a virulent
disease, they would have been in the same category as smallpox and Ebola. By contrast, the 1918 Spanish flu, which
killed millions worldwide, had a mortality rate of only 10 to 20 percent.
Democracy
has to be more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.
Thank
goodness that the past is the past, and today is today. We’d much rather be appreciated than hunted,
though we do need to understand that each time our new political friends drop
by, they will want another and larger piece of our pie, and that they will keep
coming back until there is little left but crumbs on a plate. After all, it’s Indian pie and we don’t need
that much.
What
remains distressing is that much of what passes for public and political
discourse on the future of Native people is a discourse of anger, anger that
Native people are still here and still a “problem” for White North America,
anger that we have something non-Natives don’t have, anger that after all the
years of training, after all the years of having assimilation beaten into us,
we still prefer to remain Cree and Comanche, Seminole and Salish, Haida and
Hopi, Blackfoot and Bellacoola.
Treaties,
after all, were not vehicles for protecting land or even sharing land. They were vehicles for acquiring land. Almost without fail, throughout the history
of North America, every time Indians signed a treaty with Whites, Indians lost
land.
I know
that this sort of rhetoric – “our relationship with the earth” – sounds worn
out and corny, but that’s not the fault of Native people. Phrases such as “Mother Earth”, “in harmony
with nature”, and “seven generations” have been kidnapped by White North
America and stripped of their power.
