INDIAN CULTUREOMICS

When the Europeans discovered that there was a whole alternate universe across the sea, they were stunned and fascinated.  We’ve been trying to duplicate that across the voids of space -- a new planet, sci-fi fantasy.  By the time anthropology had been invented, the idea had formed that there was one mass of strange people that extended all over the continent, they had been decimated by disease, pushed back to the west and then again pushed back some more, without any regard or consideration for their culture.  So from the beginning the cultureomics of Indians has been distorted, disturbed and lumped together.

In Elizabethan days, though in America, some on both sides of the culture gap tried an old strategy: leaders exchanged each other’s sons when they were entering adrenarche (8 to 12 or so) which is generally the human cultural learning period, and then took them back when they entered puberty so they would marry within their genetic category.  Except they discovered that the white boys didn’t WANT to fit back into their original culture and the Indians found that their own boys were completely disabled by a failure to learn the proper skills of hunting and raiding.

In those days the cultures were obvious and intense, varying across the continent according to the survival skills of their region which formed them into tribes.  The “Fish” Indians, the Plains Indians, the Pueblo-dwelling Indians, the Woodland Indians, each had quite different skill-sets and -- to a small extent -- genetic variations.  Yet even then people moved from one band to another, one tribe to another, and some lived on the road as traders moving precious objects (usually small because they were carried in a canoe or on a travois at best) from as far away as China (jade!), clear around the Pacific Rim to Chile.  None of this was documented in writing until the Euro traders, the fur buyers, the dogma-carriers got into the system.

Pueblo

Haida

In their writing anthropologists separated the peoples into tribes without regard for fuzzy edges.  The linguists made distinctions and development schemas, the genomics people built elaborate systems that required computer data-bases, political interests looked for common causes, and the pow-wows knit pan-Indians back together into a new "tribe" with a new material culture.  Modern competition pow-wow dance costumes are a hurricane of neon/dayglo movement never imagined or possible in the past.  Hunters are a sneak-up culture.  Some still dance that way.

These two movements -- separation by affinity groups and unification by affinity groups -- have mostly been invisible to the person in the street except via the media.  The people say -- with longing for that magical imaginary land -- how much they love those people, how much they yearn to go to them in that land that is always somehow within driving distance of LA.   (Someone estimated that every person in America has a descendant of Indians living within five miles of them -- they just don’t know it.) The Indian “trope” is dominated by Plains culture, infused with German and Rousseauian hippie and tree-hugger ideas, and split between those who identify with the victims of massacre in innocent villages and those who identify with the “hard men” survivors of the Civil War who became agents of destruction.  Then there are the romantic women who long to be captured, ravished, simplified and then returned to “civilization,” objects of awe and envy.

That’s only the beginning context of Native American cultureomics. It was an oral culture, they say, no writing.  That just means they didn’t use print with little marks that stood for sounds.  With their Asian gene-and-culture base, they developed Chinese-style, Mayan-style, ideograms.  As it happened, their major cities and temples (like those in the Middle East, often based on irrigation) were in jungle instead of desert like the pyramids, so they’ve been hard to find.  But they had writing all over them.

They say Indians had a Stone Age culture, but in fact it was an organically based culture that used wood, bone, flesh, ivory, and plants -- all things that have been mercifully reabsorbed into the world.  All things unique to the local ecology: cedar and salmon, or adobe and corn.  They say there were many tribal languages, which is true, but there were also trader languages, like sign talk or Chinook in the Northwest.  We know about Code Talkers, now that the last are about gone.  Men superimposed the military concepts onto their tribal vocabulary in order to be hidden so as to survive.

That’s been the chief strategy of many autochthonous people, to stay low, in cultural catacombs, speaking in their own sneak-up code.  When Malcolm McFee, the anthropologist who had previously been a plumber, came to Browning, he was aware of this and instead of talking about half-breeds, a concept based on separation, he talked about the 150% man who could code-switch, claim both.  He saw that some people were genetically white but culturally Indian, and vice versa.  Not because they were raised by the “other side,” but because they had accepted the assumptions that fit the ecosystems that formed the tribe.  Grasslands once, wind farms now. The Christian idea of imposing the Christian code on everything only worked here and there, usually when people were desperate enough to try anything.

Today, codes within Christianity at every level are very mixed and so are the codes within tribes, so far as tribes can be said to exist after generations of assimilation and Pan-Indian mixing.  Sometimes the codes matched and thereby strengthened.  One was education, learning new ways, even if they only exist on paper and -- in fact -- learning the arts of paper itself: reading print, filing, footnoting, chapter divisions, book-keeping.  Now the arts of computer programming often just skip over the paper intermediation.  The Browning School system has ordered tablet computers for all ages.

Culture codes change quickly and vary locally, so behavior and slang that are familiar at one end of the reservation or in one vocational guild, won’t be intelligible at the other end.  “Rodeo” is a code; “housing” is a code; the House of Religion has many codes from Pentecostal to reconstituted Bundle ceremonies.  But the literary template of the 20^th century, drawn from concepts formed a century earlier, has been very much resistant to change.  In fact that’s part of its success: "the Toughest Indian in the World," to quote Alexie.  It appeals to those who long for the “good old days.”  Reenactment is its ceremony.  Artifakes are its material culture.  Breaking away from the mainstream for personal reasons is its dynamic.

Indian “nations” are political and ecological, forces that act against the Euro-national identity and yet are often subsumed within it as mythology, especially for those in the military.  Mainstream media and philosophical cultures tend to use the trope to defend themselves:  “we’re not different, we’re better, more noble, like Indians.”  Sometimes, to make their point, whites and even some Indian writers run the trope backwards so that the Indians are ridiculous, victimized, sordid and tragic.  This is considered very funny.   People want to be on both sides, whichever one looks as though it will survive.  Or maybe they throw themselves on the losing side for reasons both demonic and defiant.  Rock ‘n Roll Indians.  They’re a mash-up culture of their own.  They don’t sing ’49’s.  Evolution continues.