Sunday, March 18, 2007

THE TALE IS NOT THE REALITY: Senator Butcher

I was going to write about something else today, but two synchronistic messages have pointed me this way. One was Montana Senator Butcher’s letter of reply to Dorothea (Dottie) Susag, a teacher who advocated the funding of Indian education in Montana schools. A bill requiring the teaching of Native American history, literature and so on has already been passed but at that time no money was allocated for materials, research, and so on. (You know that strategy.)

The other was a comment on a post I wrote a long time ago in which I included a throwaway comment about Richard Lancaster, author of “Piegan,” a book that won prizes. I said that I personally disliked Lancaster so much that I was not an objective commenter on the book. (I should say that I knew the people in the book, including both “old” and “young” Jim, and I liked them.) The book is written around the idea that Lancaster was an adopted member of the Jim Whitecalf family and that the book was a journal of things that actually happened. The book also assumes he was welcome, which is in doubt.

The subject I’m addressing here is the image of Indians, the state of our understanding of them, and the mischief it can create. Butcher is the easier case and the pleasanter person, though he is constantly reviled for being a politically incorrect, intolerant, stereotyping red-neck -- in short -- a fossil with a constituency.

Because Butcher went to Eastern Montana University in Billings back in the Sixties (where he was a dorm-mate of Darrell Kipp, Blackfeet poet, educator, and opera librettist), was a history “professor” for ten years and has a graduate minor in anthropology, he thinks that he has a good grasp on the state of thought about Indians when, in fact, this is a field that has been almost totally revolutionized in the last few decades. Even Indians themselves can barely keep up with the new research, writing and ideas, which is why Montana needs this material to be in the curriculum.

Let me go back to picking on Darrell, Butcher’s friend. Darrell was the beneficiary of a Harvard master’s degree program specifically meant for Indians that goes back to the earliest roots of that University. (Maybe Butcher doesn’t realize that Benjamin Franklin’s assistant at his printing press was an Indian, which is why Franklin knew so many Indian concepts about organizing government that he was able to bring to bear on the US Constitution. Maybe he doesn’t know that the Cherokee had a printing press and a newspaper, using a printed form of their own language, until the US Government smashed and dispersed their towns.) I would like to know what Darrell would say if Butcher told him that the Indian vocabulary was impoverished until they learned to farm and joined the industrial age, since Darrell has devoted his life to bringing back the complex and nuanced language of the Blackfeet that contains words for concepts I doubt have crossed Butcher’s mind.

But I’ve known plenty of highly educated people who cling to ideas suggested in the 19th century because they simply don’t know more than that. They haven’t kept up. They think that Indians are about anthropology and archeology, people of the past. Usually that’s because they don’t know any Indians or they know Indians who constantly emphasize the glorious past. They still subscribe to the “Vanishing Indian” dogma that whites only hoped was so. Somehow, as Adolf Hungry Wolf has remarked, Indians have not just failed to vanish, they have undergone a renaissance.

Lancaster’s book plays into that old notion as well -- that Native Americans were mystical, noble, and better than any whites, but are now degraded and about to flicker out. People who love the book accept and even cherish that idea. They’re the ones who love James Welch’s “Fools Crow” (an early choice for “One Book Montana,” a program to get everyone in Montana to read the same worthy book at the same time) but won’t read “The Indian Lawyer,” which is about a modern professional. Sherman Alexie says pungent things about such readers. I wonder if Butcher has ever read any Sherman Alexie books. I bet he loved “Dances with Wolves” and congratulated himself that he already knew so much anthropology, that he was qualified to comment on the “accuracy” of the movie.

But I’ll bet he never sat down to read “The Foley Report.” (Oh, what a good idea! I’ll print out the notes and send them along to him.) Much of Montana Indian history does not reflect well on the white men who were charged with their education and protection -- and I’m not talking about Custer.

Including Indian history and writing in school curriculums is far from being a “little anthropology project” as Butcher terms it. More like a prelude to Vietnam and Iraq and I don’t mean the exciting combat stories. I’m talking about the family smashing, the wealth destruction, the insincere promises, the sheer voraciousness of the powerful. As Darrell said once in a Great Falls Conference on Agricultural Families, “If we don’t pay attention, one day everyone in Montana will find out they have become ‘Indians.’” I’m not suggesting that Butcher is a person who would do these things, but he’s playing right into their hands.

Lancaster was a Texan who came to Montana and personally smashed families, broke the law, insulted many people, and leeched off Montana Indians and artists who could ill-afford it -- then basked in the glory of it all. I will give you the details only “orally.” His female back-east editor guided and controlled the book to make sure it conformed to the stereotypes. Maybe you know about the hunting writer who told us at the Montana Festival of the Book that when he reported truthfully that his little group ate gourmet Cornish hens and wild rice for one of their evening meals, his editor forced him to change it to what SHE thought that hunters ate, like grouse they’d just killed and roasted on a stick, because otherwise “no one would believe it.” We never become enlightened, because people like their stereotypes better than they like the reality.

The Indians, being human, do that, too. They are pretty hard on poor old Butcher, who could catch up if he wanted to. So could OPI.

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