If an interesting historical character has not left much writing, it is often revealing to see what they read. Therefore, I bought a used copy of Helen Clarke’s favorite novel: “The Silent Call” (1910) by Edwin Milton Royle, better known as author of “The Squaw Man,” which became a movie. “The Silent Call” is about a half-English-aristocrat-and-half-Indian man who is living on the American frontier without anyone knowing his heredity. He’s acting as a sheriff and running a ranch, but is in love with an Indian orphan girl. The death of his father calls him back to England where he has an inconvenient wife. There’s an evil renegade Indian. On the frontier the plot hinges on the boundaries of the rez and the discovery of “asphalt,” which seems to include both coal and oil. Everything turns out all right, but it’s surprisingly modern.
The main anachronism is a saintly old minister who is dying. It’s the “saintly” part that’s totally out-of-date. Harold Bell Wright and other popular novelists of the period often included men like this. A famous “for instance” is “The Shepherd of the Hills,” (1907) Wright’s most famous work, which was lifted up by a movie (1945) starring John Wayne. It is now presented as a pageant in the Ozarks. The issues are still alive: art, madness, class, who may love whom, the nature of ministry, and so on. It’s in our national subconscious.
Edwin Milton Royle is better known as a screenwriter and this book is nearly a screenplay -- it is written as scenes full of dialogue and action. The illustrations are posed by actors. His “cultural assumptions” are Edwardian, which is to say full of the Empire lure of the small, beautiful, obedient, dark, ethnic woman as a wife and the conviction that highly bred white women are likely to be neurotic and susceptible to bling and drug addiction. When I was growing up, I read my grandmother’s books from the same period, full of Edwardian convictions about honor and natural nobility -- mixing it up with desire, class aspiration and romantic ideas about individual superior specimens. This is just before the Roaring Twenties, a great surge in wealth among the privileged just like now.
Pretty easy to see why Helen Clarke would identify this stuff, though she was tall, stubborn, and fortune-less. She was “half-caste.” Except for that lone San Francisco love-letter writer, she never found anyone worth marrying. Royle wastes very little time on exposition or philosophy, but the quotes within quotes below are notable and would certainly be endorsed by Helen Clarke.
Page 118: ‘. . . the best he can say for himself is that he’s a half-breed.’
This irrelevant appeal to prejudice was so crude, raw, and unblushing as to be obvious to a child, but its effect was instantaneous. Every vestige of restraint, of irresolution disappeared in the faces of the mob. Human equality! There is no such thing even theoretically. There are differences which separate human beings and will always separate them, but they are moral and intellectual differences. No one admits the principle of human equality because: “the principle of human equality takes away the right of killing so-called inferior peoples, just as it destroys the right claimed by some of dominating others. If all peoples are equal, if their different appearances are only the result of changing circumstances, in virtue of what principle is it allowable to destroy their happiness and to compromise their right to independence?” -- Louis Finot
Page 119: That some criminals were also half-breeds, that many half-breeds were undesirable citizens has crystallized into the conviction in most Western communities that all half-breeds are worthless and dangerous. This has nothing to do with any ascertainable facts.” . . . “If the word half-breed was strictly applied to the progeny which has really issued from a mixture of varieties, it would be necessary to include under this denomination all human beings. . .” -- Louis Finot
(Louis Finot 1864 - 1935) was a French archeologist and researcher. A former director of the Ecole française d'Extrême-Orient.)
Perhaps the Edwardian period could be seen as a compensation for the Victorian period, a necessary moderation of British Empire oppression and exploitation, just before plunging into WWI. It would take a more informed and powerful mind than mine to make a case, but certainly on the Blackfeet reservation -- where my father-in-law came in 1903 -- there was a clear sequence of cultural evolution. Industrialization, the Great Northern Railroad; resource exploitation, the first oil boom; turmoil as the “Indians” and the “whites” mixed and collided; war lifting the spirits of warriors; the Roaring Twenties when Glacier National Park was a platform for the rich and daring; Depression which was the status quo anyway; WWII which wised up a lot of men and unified the women as they tried to support them; the post-war chaos when Indian veterans struggled with alcoholism and white veterans came to marry Indian women who had land; the Sixties and Seventies of corporate development; and the growing middle class and diaspora of the last part of the century.
Helen Piotopowaka Clarke (1843-1923) lived from the time of massacre and international Civil War to the glitter flappers in the Gilded Age. Our lives didn’t overlap, but Bob Scriver (1914-1999) knew her and I knew her nephew, John the wood carver, and now know his daughter much better, because of our common interest in art. (Joyce is a photographer.)
Many concepts and assumptions have come and gone, each leaving a shadow to distract us. Some are local and others are national or planetary. We are questioning what a “tribe” is, what wise old men are good for anyway, the nature of wealth, our relationship to the land, and so on. Many Indians, influenced by missionaries a hundred years ago and military service recently, are more rigid about morality than the mainstream white society. But the younger generations have learned to do research and they aren’t reading Napi stories -- they are reading historical atrocity reports in graphic detail and contemporary newspaper accounts of corruption and oppression. The bookkeeping of morality does not balance. We fall madly in love, we desire, we rescue, we support, we try being outrageous or being rock-solid dependable. It all works, nothing works, it’s all related, it just goes on and on and on.
The most important thing is to keep talking about it, which is precisely what some people are trying to prevent because, transparently, they want to preserve their own profits and access to the “asphalt” benefits. Even if dissenters are duct-taped to their chairs with bags over their heads, change will happen anyway. I do not think it will come about because of outside interventions. Only when consensus develops among the majority of afflicted people to defy oppression will the world become something like orderly again. But rez people ought to think about what the outsiders are seeing and the possibility that pressure from uproar could develop enough energy to simply end all reservations. In the meantime, let’s fall in love and rescue each other. Getting rich can come later.
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