Brashly (which may or may not be a character flaw, but is certainly characteristic of me), I declared in the matter of Ed Butcher that he simply has an old-fashioned notion of Indian issues and that thought about Indians has been totally revolutionized in the past few decades. So now I’d better back that claim up with some specifics.
Obviously, the post-modern and post-colonial thought of certain French philosophers (French-speaking anyway, though some of them seem to have come from French-oppressed colonies like Algeria) have stood everything on its head and made the victims into the prevailers . Moral force has been brought to bear as a way of breaking up the sentimentalization, Disneyfication, victimization, stereotyping, exploitation, and other ways of pushing around the “little people.” Indians have demanded the right to speak for themselves, to profit from the ideas that emerge from their cultures, and to “gate-keep” against all the officials who have come to take advantage of a captive population, whether in order to write books, to exercise their own ideas of eugenics (sterilizing women, adopting out Indian children to whites), to missionize (whether Catholics operating boarding schools or Pentacostals exploiting desperate people or Bahai expanding their franchise), to establish privilege for themselves and to generally handle real people as though they had no feelings and as though it were a moral entitlement over lesser follks.
In 1990 this was all unknown to me, though I’d lived on the Blackfeet Reservation for more than a decade, when I signed on to a listserv (Reznet -- dunno whether it’s still in existence) that was Indians only. Wow, did I get my consciousness raised in a hurry! The parallel movement was feminism or Black empowerment and included emotional intensity much in excess of anything I knew about Indians except in a context of violence. The people I knew on the rez were more inclined to withdraw than to confront. On this list there was so much political flaming, it was hard to tell from the usual level of indignation. I wasn’t supposed to be on the list (because it was just for Indians) and part of the importance of it was that it WAS a closed and safe community of self-identified Native Americans.
A big component of this ongoing stream was the “plastic shaman hunting.” The idea was to find and identify any white person who illegimately claimed to be or to have privileged knowledge of Indians. This search and destroy operation was meant to certify the plastic-shaman-hunter as a genuine Indian, rather like killing someone in order to be admitted to a gang. It was relentless, sometimes unfair, often deserved, and echoed in the academic community where people struggled to define and legitimate the identity of a Native American -- indeed, even what to call them. This embroiled people like Brooke Medicine Shield (whose books sell like hotcakes), Ward Churchill (honorary Indian), and even much-loved people like Louise Erdrich or James Welch. (Interestingly, the most war-like let Carter Revard -- raised Osage but genetically white and always a gentle healer -- completely off the hook and certainly no one ever even THOUGHT of implying that Adrian Louis was not Indian, for opposite reasons. I mean, if he’s NOT Indian, there’s no such thing!)
Another offshoot of this school of thought was Lisa Mittens, an NA librarian, trying to evaluate books about Indians in terms of a raised consciousness. (Oyate) Too many people tried to make Indians into a proper subject for children, or equated Indians with animals (interesting, but unaccountable and Other), or reduced them to sentimental morality tales. (“The Education of Little Tree.”) This is very parallel with rethinking about books about women. The work goes on, notably with the challenging of Indians as sports mascots for schools.
Quite apart from that is the revolution of thought about life in plants, animals and humans that has resulted from the deciphering of DNA. Creatures turned out to be from entirely different categories than one would think from looking at them. It became clear that the genome was “cumulative” and that even the genome of humans included genes for basic processes of life that developed in fungus. American Indians had earlier been grouped by blood type as “Asian,” which many of them understood as a slander that said they were “Japs” (esp. those who fought in WWII) or “Gooks” (a later generation). Now genome analysis can say much more about relationships, patterns of migration, and so on. But Indians, who were early labeled by genetic descent and “blood quantum,” are deeply wary about such investigations. Too often their physical being is treated as “artifacts,” put on shelves and in drawers, or displayed. Repatriation has been shocking because it revealed how much of Indians’ physical substance was in museums -- not their belongings, but the bones of their grandmothers. Still, what DNA evidence suggests is -- in some cases -- not what anyone expected. A good example is the Kennewick Man, whose skull shape was not “typical” of Indians, causing everyone to jump to the conclusion that a white man was wandering around Indian country thousands of years ago. Now everyone is trying to figure out what a “tribe” or a “race” really is and what it means and whether one is “better” than another.
The evidence of “paleoIndians” is still slowly mounting up. The conventional assumption was that people walked to the Americas over the Bering Straits at a time when the ocean was lower. When VERY ancient meat as well as knotted ropes were found preserved in peat on the South American coast, the assumption of dates and means were challenged. It suddenly became clear that “boat-hoppers” could have followed the ENTIRE Pacific coast line in pursuit of seals or whales. There was no reason why people couldn’t have crossed east-to-west through Greenland. If one looks at the planet with the north pole in the middle -- which we tend to assume is “up” -- it’s clear that whether the Arctic Sea is open (navigable by small boats) or frozen (navigable by dog teams) it is not an impenetrable barrier. In fact, there is a distinct circumpolar culture: certain artifacts, ideas about shamans, the use of sweetgrass, bear cults, and so on. Now the whole idea of the human populating of the Americas is that it was plural, repeated, had its roots in various populations, and was “hydraulic” and “dynamic” once it got here -- different groups pushing people around or reacting to the changing climate. The books on these subjects are many and powerful.
One of the most amazing studies I’ve seen is about the DNA of disease, which mutates and forms its own “tribes.” The routes it takes across the continents and through populations tells a story. The amount of information one can draw from this is a revelation and does not depend on human DNA at all. (Sometimes it’s rather entertaining, as on the riveting blog of John Hawkes when he posts studies about such things as how humans first caught body lice by sleeping in gorilla nests -- without the gorilla.)
Another source of change in regards to Indians is what is sometimes called “queer studies” and other times, more subtly, called “gender studies.” Another consciousness-raising enterprise, this seeks to explore our assumptions about how physical sex, emotional desire, economic conditions (often driven by environment or history) define men and women and those who awkwardly fall in between. People have long been fascinated by Native American arrangements that allow men to identify with women and assume their role, though it’s been hard for them to find a proper name or to understand what was really going on. (They assume it must be about fucking, which is not such a preoccupation in cultures less Puritanical.) “Two-spirited” contemporary Indian people have mixed this research with their own modern situation and produced a point of view that is both tolerant and demanding.
Satellite imaging has opened another source of information that is a window into the past. The Northern Piegan have spent several summers using GIS instruments and their own common sense to trace out habitual paths across the northern prairie. They figure out how far a band with only dogs could travel in a day, what would be the motivation (Berries ripe? Animal migration?), what sort of route a dog pulling a travois and a woman wearing a pack might take (not through heavy brush, not down or up a steep incline), in order to find campsites and prove them with evidence of fires, bones, vegetation and so on. Once found, the camp is noted via GIS and computers can reel out huge maps of the locations which, joined, reveal trails. Two main routes for dogs were found, then a third that had much longer spaces between camps but also stopped where there was water and grazing for horses. This provides new insight about people who have been using the “Head-Smashed-In” piskun since before the Pyramids were built.
As all this scientific re-framing has been proceeding, contemporary reservation dwellers have been quietly doing what more privileged and educated urban whites have not done: had children. And they have been joined by hispanics (whom everyone forgets are Indians, too) and -- to a muted extent -- blacks. They are now a major political force and they know it. This is where any Montana politician can make a major blunder. Someone like Butcher can no longer put down or exclude Indians on grounds that they are “vanished,” “irrelevant,” “ignorant,” or not involved. Even a Republican can expect walking papers at the next election.
Because now Indians have blogs, Google, websites, links, podcasts, list servs, and all the new cyber-machinery of connecting, talking, proposing, listing and monitoring. One can’t go carelessly shooting off one’s mouth in a bar or sending attack mail to individuals without the whole world knowing about it in a matter of hours.
Being brash myself, I have a certain amount of sympathy for Ed Butcher. But I’m dubious about his political skills.
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