So what’s the deal here? Indins (Native American’s to you, Bub!) talk among themselves about it sometimes. Why do white men (it’s usually men) want to come pretend to be an Indin? Is the life so great? For reals, we’re special people with lots of good features, but what’s the matter with the lives of the white men that they are so anxious to leave it?
Here are some suggestions:
1. They read too much, watch romantic movies, and think they can actually leap into Eden by chumming up to Indins. (They haven’t noticed the people they are reading about were the 19th century version.)
2. It’s a mark of privilege to really be close to some exotic and honored group. They want the creds.
3. Their own white lives have been seriously dislocated some way, like they were in the military or their lover dumped them or they turned out to be economic duds.
4. They can’t seem to manage sex/intimacy, beginning with telling the difference.
Let’s try a little fictional story about a wannabe. He’s gotta be a college professor and let’s say he’s in Manhattan, the source of so many misunderstandings from the beginning when white men thought they traded beads for ownership. Let’s make him a book reviewer and let’s say he finds a book that he absolutely falls in love with. It’s about an Indian man coming of age. He’s named Roderick All Wet because when he was a baby he fell into a pond, got all wet, but sat there in the shallow water laughing.
In the book Roddy gets into all sorts of troubles as he searches for his true inner strength, which he finally finds when he accidentally hatches a duck. He was gathering duck eggs for a meal but while he was carrying them tucked into his shirt, one hatched and began to peep. The rest of the summer he took good care of that baby duck until in the fall it had grown up and flew off to the south with the other ducks. From this experience Roddy learns a) little baby things must be carefully protected b) what you love will always leave you and c) he has no wings and cannot fly. But he can swim.
The reviewer is pierced to the heart over the pathos of this. (He needs a name -- how about William? He says to call him “Wim” -- not Bill.) Wim felt like a duck out of water, as though maybe he should have been some other creature. (His mother calls him her “rara avis”. His sister calls him a turkey, esp. when he gets into her hair products.) But now he is a quite influential movie critic, specializing in obscure Indy films about exotic places where people are constantly falling into forbidden love. He wins a prize for one of his reviews and it’s enough to go out West. He’s over thirty by now, still unmarried, and he resolves to go find Roddy All Wet.
When he drives his little rental car a heckuva long way to the rez town, he passes through many abandoned burgs with empty windows, so he is surprised to pull into the little rez town past a drive-in eatery busy with cars, a community college bustling with people of all ages, and a car wash. How does one find someone in such a place? He decides to find the City Hall, but fails. But he does find a Senior Citizen Center. Everyone in there is busy playing bingo. When he tries to ask questions, they shush him. Finally, a nurse comes over and explains how to find Roddy, who evidently runs his own business.
It turns out to be a laundromat called “Time to Come Clean.” Wim goes in, entering an atmosphere thick with warmth and detergent. The place is filled with the usual gleaming rows of sloshing washers and institutional-sized tumble-dryers. Way in the back is an enormously fat man, ironing shirts expertly, the iron looking small in his big hands. He’s singing with the Muzak which is Charlie Pride. Wim is totally disoriented, but goes to the busy steamy man.
“I’m looking for Roderick All Wet.”
“He don’t exist, man.”
“But I’ve come from Manhattan to speak to him about his wonderful book.”
“Oh, well. I wrote that book.” He shakes out the finished shirt from his board and reaches for a wire hanger. He looks critically at the pink shirt Wim is wearing. “Want me to run your shirt through a machine? You got a bundle of clothes?”
Wim can only stare. Finally he musters his wilted courage. He holds up his copy of Roderick’s wonderful book with its photo of a noble slender young warrior on the back. “But this is a photo of the author!”
“Naw. I don’t like the way I look, man, so I got my nephew to pose for me.”
Long silence while Wim thinks. Finally he ventures, “I would have guessed that you’d have made enough money from this book that you wouldn’t have to work in a laundromat anymore.”
“Are you kidding? I bought this laundromat with my advance! It’s all paid for so I’ve got a steady income. I never have to write another book. And my mom gets all her clothes washed for free, so she doesn’t get mad at me anymore. Plus, it’s warm even in the middle of winter!”
Wim staggers out, so numb he can hardly find his rental car, except that five dogs are clustered around it peeing on the tires because they smell the town where the airport was. He drives home in a daze. After that he starts a whole series in the newspaper called “Hollywood Hoaxes”. One after another he condemns movies about Indians as fakes, beginning with “Nanook of the North,” which features an Eskimo (whom you should call “Inuit”) pretending to eat a phonograph record when in fact he was perfectly well aware that one cannot eat vinyl. He LOATHED “Dances with Wolves” and points out that the hero and heroine were actually white.
Everyone loves the series and praises Wm for being so honest and insightful. A publisher approaches him about a book. He choose the photographer for the photo on the back very carefully and gets a professional hair weave for his receding hairline.
Back on the rez Roddie never hears about all that. He legally changes his name to Alwet and since there is a new postmaster all his mail goes astray. A very nice girl who does a lot of beading falls in love with him. All their babies have wonderful bright and absolutely authentic patterns on their baby moccs.
It was the book reviewer who was the wannabe. The Indian simply was. Is.
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