reading

Preface

This book outlines Native American cultural history. This is intended to try to explain why, despite facing devastation and never-ending difficulties, Native America in contemporary Canada and the United States is successful. By successful I mean also that Native America thrives as a phenomenon in both the imagination and the intellect. The success is similar in kind, if not scale, to that of much greater entities – in terms of population size and seemingly complexity – such as the Classical or Judaeo-Christian worlds, or continents such as Asia and Africa. Of course, most of us in the West come, in one sense or another, from the Classical and Judaeo-Christian traditions, while we do not come from Native North America. Instead Native America provides a touchstone of identity: about who we westerners are and particularly who we are not.

Native North America has been especially successful also in surviving, in continually changing to meet the challenges of the dominant societies, from the influence of federal state and provincial authorities to the transgressive effects of popular culture. Little more than a century ago no one expected Native North Americans to do anything other than assimilate and die away. The major practical and symbolic moments in this process in the USA were the opening up of Indian Territory to white homesteading in 1898 and the conversion of this Native homeland into the state of Oklahoma (meaning ‘red people’ in Choctaw) in 1907. At this point the Native population had reached a low point of around 375,000.¹ Nobody expected Native America to recover, yet recovery occurred, in a series of cycles in which new institutional frameworks were set up, then altered, abandoned and improved, sometimes all three conflicting directions occurring simultaneously. And recovery in population occurred with astonishing rapidity: today there are more than 2.5 million Native North Americans.²

In African America, well into the twentieth century, the racial rule ran: ‘one drop and you’re out’: that is, one drop of African blood, a great-great-grandparent, say, and you were black. The rule now concerning Native North America is, with only slight exaggeration and mild irony, ‘one drop and you’re in’. This came into play in the 2012 US Senate election, when the Democrat Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, now a senator, was challenged on her unproven claim to Cherokee status both by her Republican opponents and by Native Americans. Yet very many people are now aware of having Cherokee ancestry. Only perhaps two generations ago it would have been unthinkable in most cases for individual Americans actively to embrace their Native American genes. This is a remarkable and insufficiently marked change.

When I first visited Cherokee, North Carolina, and the Smoky Mountain community of Indian people, who avoided transportation west, it was a depressed, devastated hill town. In 1991, in the only downtown mini-mall, an elder was ‘chiefing’, that is, dressed in Plains Indian clothing with a feather war bonnet and posing for pay with the rather few tourists. Then I visited the factories where Cherokee made genuine New England quilts for Sears and tom-toms for football fans supporting the Atlanta Braves. Fifteen years later, when I returned to contribute to an exhibition about the Cherokee in Tulsa, the Cherokee had a vast casino, as well as their own police force and all other normal municipal services owned and controlled by them, thanks to their success in the gaming industry.

Yet perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Native North America is that a tiny population has contributed so much diversity to the world’s cultural landscape. If Native North America is considered alongside the Pacific, indigenous Middle and Andean America, South Asia, Africa or the Middle East, then perhaps something of Native North American exceptionalism becomes apparent. So what follows is, in this important sense, an account of Native American exceptionalism.

In academic studies, much is today made of the need to avoid reductionist description, in which differences are flattened out and identity stereotypes perpetuated, in order to develop more sophisticated ideas in which power and agency are returned to Native people. So emphasis is placed on concepts such as hybridity, contingency and agency, on the understanding of Native literature, film and art, on the development of cross-cultural, pan-Indian identities and the recovery of an understanding of the way both the USA and Canada grew out of reciprocal, but highly skewed, arrangements between Natives, Europeans and North Americans.

Scholarship cannot in the end entirely avoid locatedness: the specificity and the cultural geographies of the more than 1,000 Native nations in Canada and the USA. Actual origins and the development of identity are of fundamental importance, both in the distant past and in the cultural constructions from the nineteenth century onwards into the twenty-first. Frequently, however, the nuanced specifics of culture are reduced to archetypes, particularly in the media and museums. In the 1970s the museum-going public was either sceptical or uncritical and largely unaware of, and uninterested in, the cultural complexity of Native North America. Epithets such as ‘red men’, ‘squaws’, ‘tomahawk chops’ and the expletive ‘Ho!’ were still used. So the central role for the museum curator is to interpret and explain cultures through objects, and to place this understanding in a broader framework of deconstructed archetypes. That is, to reverse the process, the curator learns to take archetypes – the Arctic hunter, the Plains warrior, the Environmental, Casino and Hollywood Indian – and uses objects to explain how these simplistic formulations simultaneously communicate with yet limit and misinform the museum visitor.

The view expressed, then, is that of a museum curator. I spent thirty years at the British Museum, as curator of the North American collections. The museum had been collecting often in an incidental manner Indian and Inuit materials for 220 years without a curator. To learn about the collections and Native North America at the same time was an extraordinary privilege – and a challenge. Yet this took place at a moment of unprecedented change in the United States and Canada to do with the sovereignty-related issues that in the USA led to the development of Indian gaming and in the north were entangled with issues of energy and land and the revolution which was taking place in the curation of Native North American heritage. In the 1970s the idea that there would be a self-governing territory, Nunavut, was at most a dream; the repatriation of the Canadian constitution from Westminster in 1982 transformed aboriginal affairs. My curatorial role, for thirty years, was to explain how this happened, as it happened. I was always aware how little I actually knew about Native North America, and so, when I left the British Museum in 2012, I began again. Writing this introduction to North America has been for me a means of extending my understanding of the changes in Native North America over the last forty years.

Introduction

The history of Native North America moves in a series of cycles: periods of great change occur every twenty or thirty years, followed by calm, if not consolidation. The nineteenth century saw the defeat of the final confederations in the War of 1812; removal in the 1830s; the cataclysm of defeat during and after the Civil War of 1861–5; greatly enlarged boarding schools designed to destroy Indian culture, followed by the racially defined Dawes Act, pulverizing reservations in the name of freedom and assimilation, from the 1880s. Indian Territory, that eighteenth-century dream, was finally obliterated with the creation of Oklahoma in 1907, at the population nadir. Recovery came in the 1930s, with the New Deal instituting elected governments and rebuilding the land base, only to be followed by migration to the cities and the final assimilationist fling, of termination, in the 1950s. The recovery of the 1970s occurred across North America, with the settling of land claims in Alaska and Quebec and Greenland Home Rule. This occurred against a backdrop of renewed interested in the appropriation of the natural resources of Indian Country and an unholy activist alliance of urban radicals, chic celebrities with (but also often against) traditionalists. The corporatism of the 1970s in the north and the institution of Indian bingo and then section 3 slots ushered in the current period of unrivalled achievement, prosperity, orderliness and ordinariness. Yet in so many ways Indian Country remains in the belly of the beast, imprisoned by history in the impossible clutch of multiple deprivations.

Crucial to the future is what will happen to Indian gaming, the extraordinary phenomenon which is responsible for nearly 612,000 jobs worth $27.6 billion, $91.1 billion of output,¹ and the general empowerment of the small minority of Indian reservations with successful casinos; to Alaska Native corporations and the rather different Canadian ones; and to the mineral resources of Greenland.

But gaming is already changing with the phenomenal growth of online gambling, accessible to everyone without the need to travel. Casino visitors are ageing, and the question is: can Indian Country move gambling to the internet, preferred by the young, and even if it does what benefit could this properly bring to Indian people? The two greatest success stories of the 1990s, the Pequot Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun Casinos, are both heavily in debt, with declining revenues and new competition in the northeast of the United States. Others – the Chumash in California, Chickasaw and Choctaw in Oklahoma – flourish.

Gaming, like the extinction of land rights brought about alongside the settlement of land claims, is a highly destructive vehicle of achievement. It is suggested that between 1 and 1.5 per cent of the US population are ‘disordered’ or problem gamblers, and studies in the 1990s suggested that each disordered gambler costs society between $9,500 and $53,000 per year: the costs of gambling far outweighing the benefits of gaming.² This is even before the social costs of gambling are taken into account, alongside the high-end welfare dependency of annual per capita payments, with access often racially defined. Yet gambling will grow. John Sowinski, president of No Casinos in Florida, observed a phenomenon that governs how elected officials largely view gaming: ‘The solution to having too much of it is to have more of it.’³ If the tote or pari-mutuel gambling is doing badly, or if local gamblers are spending elsewhere, or if the state needs more money, then more casinos are required. Gambling and gaming are not going to disappear, and the growth of an empowered Native professional class (dubbed in 1970s Alaska the ‘Brooks Brother Natives’, a reference to the use of clothing from this WASP and Ivy League tailor), is irreversible. And of course the importance of economic class was predicted 250 years ago by David Hume, writing in ‘Of Interest’: ‘When a people have emerged ever so little from a savage state, and their numbers have encreased beyond the original multitude, there must immediately arise an inequality of property.’⁴

Beyond Native corporations and casinos and their likely changing economic positions, and the impact of declining natural resources, and climate change and the destruction of the northern cold-based habitat, are fundamentals. These mean that Indian Country will not change, because the long centuries of churning upheaval have resulted in a resilience which ensures survival. This is in part to do with the uniqueness and hyper-diversity of Indian culture, its ability to create and rethink architecture and art; but it is also to do with the way in which Nativeness is embedded in the United States and Canada. The ragged edge of the North American accommodation with the ‘Indian’ is continually addressed in often startling ways. For instance, in 2014 grifter rancher in Nevada Cliven Bundy, who had failed to pay rent for grazing cattle on federal lands to the government for over twenty years, was able to challenge armed officials. He was often compared, as a victim of the Feds, on former presidential candidate Ron Paul’s website, to the Lakota, whose women and children were killed at Wounded Knee in 1890.⁵ It can be seen in the battle, led by the Oneida, against the racist name of the Washington Redskins, which resulted in the creation by the team owner of a foundation supplying cold-weather clothing to destitute Indians, cocking a snook at Indian deprivation. Yet these symbolic battles cloak a much greater reality, one where the meaning of ‘nation’ and ‘Indian’ is mimicked and parodied and then without a flicker of humour becomes the accepted norm.

This inversion of meaning is a regular process in historiography, particularly in the American narrative. The image of the American Indian, of the savage as American, transferred back and forth across the propaganda of the American Revolution. The image of the Native was associated with the revolutionaries of the Boston Tea Party (who wore face paint and Indian fancy dress) and the non-taxation of tea without representation. This fed into the later assumption of Mohawk or Plains fancy dress in fraternal organizations at parties, common until very recently. A recent manifestation of this was the Native headdress worn by the daughter of the governor of Oklahoma, Christina Fallin. In a picture posted on Facebook in 2014 she captioned her image ‘Appropriate Culturation’, a riff on ‘cultural appropriation’.

One such inverted meaning is the idea of Columbia, invented in 1738 by that critic of American patriotism Dr Johnson (‘How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?’) as an ironic companion for Hibernia and Britannia, but taken up in all seriousness as the main symbol of the USA before being superseded by the Statue of Liberty after 1886. Johnson uses Columbia as a Lilliputian name for the country normally called America. Specifically he talks of the ‘Conquests and Acquisitions in Columbia’, which ‘broke thro’ all the ties of human nature’ in reference to the dispossession of Native America.⁶ Another inversion is the song of ‘Yankee Doodle’ (i.e. fool), a song of the French and Indian War and then the American Revolution, in which the American faux dandy would stick an Indian-like feather in his hat and ‘call it macaroni’. Then there is ‘cowboy’, the term first used by Swift in a poem to his friend and possible wife Stella and subsequently employed for loyalist irregulars in Westchester, New York, before an inversion in meaning and migration out to the freedom-loving west. Another is the whole idea of American exceptionalism, originally from de Tocqueville, but used by the communists of the 1920s and 1930s, appropriated and reworked by Republicans in the 1980s as a badge of honour and then used as an anti-federalist and anti-Washington patriotic taunt in the 2008 election.

But among cultural meanings perhaps most important is the dialectic between melting-pot America and the America of embedded but diverse ethnicity. The ideal of a melting-pot America was invented by Israel Zangwill in the aftermath of the pogroms in Kishinev and Kiev in 1903 and 1905. In his play The Melting-Pot (1907) he writes:

America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming! … the real American has not yet arrived. He is only in the Crucible, I tell you – he will be the fusion of all races, perhaps the coming superman.⁷

That is, unmentioned Indian people are not not included. Interestingly, while American Indians are not mentioned in the play, in an afterword of 1914 Zangwill says that the ‘Melting-Pot of America will not fail to act [on African Americans] in a measure as it has acted on the Red Indian’. More to the point is perhaps the mid-century view of Indianness: in 1953, during the time of termination, Felix Cohen, the drafter of the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) and of the template for tribal constitutions, wrote that:

[T]he Indian plays much the same role in our American society that the Jews played in Germany. Like the miner’s canary, the Indian marks the shifts from fresh air to poison gas in our political atmosphere; and our treatment of Indians, even more than our treatment of other minorities, reflects the rise and fall in our democratic faith.⁸

The ideas, then, of nationhood and of Native American and aboriginal Canadian and First Nations are not in any sense stationary concepts, but ones in continual process, moving backwards and forwards in deeply conflicted circumstances. In the USA ‘Indian’ as a national symbol acts as a general formulation, whereas in Canada ‘Inuit’ and ‘First Nations’ are identity markers, each with a much more definite profile than the single, all-encompassing symbols of the USA, such as the flag and Columbia, Liberty and Indian. Land is also a symbolic marker, and loss of land is the major theme of this book. Sarah Palin neatly inverted this trope in her autobiography, Going Rogue, when she quoted with approval baseball coach John Wooden (1910–2010): ‘Our land is everything to us … I will tell you one of the things we remember on our land. We remember our grandfathers paid for it – with their lives.’ She had muddled two different individuals: the statement was actually made by Cheyenne leader John Wooden Legs (1909–81) and referred to Cheyenne participation in the Battle of the Little Bighorn.⁹

Most ironic of the transfers of moral meanings is that which relates to ‘Indian Country’, the expression used to refer to lands still identified and often actually occupied by aboriginal people, whether in Maine or Arizona, eastern Washington or the Everglades. Originally used in the early twentieth century, ‘Indian Country’ was also an expression that appeared in regular use in Vietnam, as a catch phrase describing hostile country inhabited by the enemy. The term features, for instance, in the testimony around the My Lai Massacre of 1968, when perhaps 300–500 Vietnamese villagers were killed. In the 1971 congressional hearing about the incident the following exchange occurred between Captain Robert Bowie Johnson and Congressman John F. Seiberling (1918–2008):

Johnson: Where I was operating I didn’t hear anyone personally use that term [‘turkey shoots’ for killing civilians]. We used the term ‘Indian Country’. Seiberling: What did ‘Indian Country’ refer to? Johnson: I guess it means different things to different people. It is like there are savages out there, there are gooks out there. In the same way we slaughtered the Indian’s buffalo, we would slaughter the water buffalo in Vietnam.¹⁰

‘Indian Country’ meant, of course, sovereign country, a place in which the US military might not go. But ‘tribals’ still occupy the position of hostiles in the governmental mind: Akbar Ahmed, writing recently of the way in which Al-Qaeda and the War on Terror are situated in tribal areas – the Yemeni–Saudi borderlands and the Hindu Kush/Afghan periphery – used language that mimics attitudes to Native America:

These suffering people had one thing in common: they were all part of communities living on the periphery and margins of the state. Those who represented the center of the state usually called them ‘primitive’ and ‘savage.’ Some said their time in history was up.¹¹

This twenty-first-century world of extra-judicial killings, by drones and other means, is justified today, to the amazement of Indian people, by the precedent of the execution by a military tribunal in 1818 of two British traders, Robert C. Ambrister and Alexander (George) Arbuthnot, who were providing Seminole in Spanish Florida with arms to resist the encroachment of the USA. In the aftermath of the executions it was proclaimed that circumstances demanded such overriding of normal judicial procedure.¹² And in 2011 news of Osama bin Laden’s successful assassination was given the code name ‘Geronimo’ (after the famous Apache leader also known as Goyathlay, c.1829–1909), provoking outrage; the august Washington Post, incomprehensibly, thought this furore was misguided – the similarity they said is in the hunt not the individual, as though the moral taint would never shift from bin Laden the terrorist abroad to Geronimo the patriot leader.¹³

It may seem outlandish to compare American attitudes to Middle Eastern tribal peoples with that to Native America. Yet there are other ways of repositioning ‘Indian Country’. One, perhaps, is fiscal. In 1984 the historian Wilcomb Washburn (1925–97) noted with approval that ‘The BIA’s [Bureau of Indian Affairs’] budget of $1.5 billion is bigger than the budgets of the FBI, the CIA, and the Drug Enforcement Agencies combined.’¹⁴ In the run-up to fiscal year 2014 it was anticipated that at the BIA there would be 7,900 employees and a budget of $2.6 billion; in contrast the FBI budget alone was to be $8.2 billion, with 34,000 employees, that is, more than three times that of the BIA. The intelligence agencies’ budgets for 2014 are around $45 billion. But of course Washburn was writing of pre-casino time, and today for the small proportion of Indian nations with high-profit casinos much of Native American income is emancipated from government money. Further, it must be noted that some people such as the Hopi will not create casinos and may suffer from the perception that Indian nations, now rich, are less eligible for charity.

So by some markers both ‘Indian Country’ and Native American society are in a state of rude wellbeing, as evidenced by success in Alaska, in casino country and indeed in Nunavut, Greenland, and among the Nisga’a and Cree. But of course the Indian in Cohen’s Basic Memorandum had to be defined, and was defined, on the basis of tribal membership, ancestral descent and blood quantum. That is a crude racial designation which still has traction in definition, in the notorious Certificate of Indian Blood, which is now perhaps in the process of withering away, a last reminder of the 1930s.¹⁵ Overarching changes, such as the 1983 removal by President Ronald Reagan of the oversight of Indian affairs in the White House from the Office of Liaison to the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, marked this other reality: as Washburn pointed out in 1984, the Indian people are a ‘third sovereignty in the country, equal, in many critical respects, to national and state sovereignties’.¹⁶ While Edward Said would have had us believe, in the 1980s, that the colonized always remain marginalized and dependent, on the periphery, a separate view of Native North America would suggest instead that Indianness and Indian identity are a core aspect of national identity, the subaltern survivor mutating and mimicking overarching society, subverting national characteristics, of American liberty and also of Canadian fairness.

Canada’s identity is correctly considered, in contrast to the USA, as being ‘soft’, in the sense of flexible and supple, and ‘fair’. This is because Canada incorporated from the beginning the biculturalism of French Canada, especially in religion, and features aboriginal identity internationally. Yet John Ralston Saul’s nuanced and ironic treatment of these themes, A Fair Country: Telling Truths about Canada (2008), obscures the basic dichotomy in First Nations history. After the War of 1812, with the important exception of the Métis rebellions in 1869 and 1885, there was little or no military violence. But while the government did not preside over American-style massacres, it acted administratively more effectively and more brutally than that of the USA. Between the Indian Act of 1876 and the new constitution of 1982 Canadian First Nations lost all vestiges of sovereignty; there was no sense in this period that aboriginal people constituted ‘domestic dependent nations’ as in the United States. For aboriginal people Canada was neither fair or soft, until challenged by the Parti Québécois from 1968, when national identity was remade. In comparison to Congress, the much more harsh administration of the Canadian parliament created minute reserves – there are none like the Navajo reservation, at 27,000 square miles the size of the Republic of Ireland. Most significantly, there were few reserved rights in respect of the provinces in which aboriginal people found themselves. Further recovery took much longer in Canada and began in the 1970s rather the 1930s. Then Thomas Berger, symbolically equivalent to Felix Cohen, conducted the Mackenzie Pipeline Enquiry (1977) and as an activist judge and lawyer led the debate on the constitutional changes of the 1980s. Yet it was the aboriginal politician Elijah Harper (1949–2013) who led the defeat of the Meech Lake Accord in 1990, which would have enshrined the status of Quebec, but not that of aboriginal people, as a distinct society. Thus it was an Indian who refused to compromise Canada’s egalitarianism and set the seal on the Canadian constitution.

J. C. H. King

BLOOD AND LAND

The Story of Native North America

ALLEN LANE

Contents

THE BEGINNING

A Note on the Text

Preface

Introduction

1

SUCCESS