REOPENING THE GOLD MINE

Yellow Kidney and Little Plume

Their descendants, whom I knew, were also religionists.

Photo by Curtis

Through the decades after the Civil War and maybe until WWII, a loose cohort of “white” writers, mostly in the West, wrote books about Indians in a faux historical romantic way based on the idea that they were disappearing.  Of course, they really meant the First Contact people, mostly on the prairie, whom we might call “buffalo people.” The US had deliberately eliminated most of the buffalo that were their life foundation, so then they had been blanket people and next in the 20th century wore “citizen’s dress.”  But it's been tough becoming actual citizens.

The quick way to understand what the early 20th century period was like might be to flip through old photos, many of them with glass negatives, as presented in Walter McClintock’s “The Old North Trail” or the photo books of Edward Curtis.  Then compare the photos with the immediately preceding art work of George Caitlin, pre-photo.  They are the rough equivalent of the books written by George Bird Grinnell, Frank Bird Linderman, Charles Marion Russell, Helen Hunt Jackson, Mary Austin, and James Willard Schultz.  (See Paul Seesequasis (@paulseesequa) on Twitter, who posts wonderful old photos.

These books were loved by my mother (b. 1909) and my husband (b. 1914).  Bob was born and grew up on the Blackfeet reservation; my mother was born and grew up in the Pacific NW when lingering historical Indian camps still supplied seasonal labor.  Writing about these people was recently re-examined by professors using post-colonial thought and Native American activists to explore the new reality (they thought) that was neglected by the sentimental and hegemonic books of what I called to myself, “the three-named authors.”  My own kid favorite was “Tangled Waters’ by Florence Crannell Means, written by a Navajo trader’s wife who wrote many books about NA’s for young people.  Sympathetic but accepting assimilation.

Sherry L. Smith

Lately it has been books like “Reimagining Indians: Native Americans through Anglo Eyes, 1880-1940” by Sherry L. Smith, an academic historian, that have reopened the exhausted mines of sentimental assumptions. Smith and company are white scholars of disillusionment and they spared no whites from their new interpretation.  Even McClintock and Curtis took a bashing, McClintock for not using family prestige to reform Washington DC and Curtis for posing his Indian subjects wearing his trunk full of costumes and artifacts.

Then there has been a generation of books lamenting the suffering of reservations and the city ghettos created by the effort to break up reservations through relocation.  Some call it “misery lit” and claim those stories are also exploitations rather than calls to reform.  When AIM took up the flag of revolution and led a new version of Indian Wars,  there was an accompanying new wave of “war” stories with the FBI taking the cavalry role and proud of it.  

Returning again to the mine of drama has slowed because the People themselves have begun telling their own stories.  They recognize that white post-colonials are often just colonialists in disguise.  The result is two completely different approaches to writing about indigenous people.  The split between them exists in the fields of history, anthropology, art and religion.  What had originally been an ecologically-based People had been both feared and attacked by the industrializing forces that consumed land and resources.  These are now in the throes of legal and governmental struggles trying to control mighty international corporations with no perceptible heads except for insatiable mouths.  They leave piles of their dung behind him and crave access to sacred grounds.

The Scriver Collection in book form.

Self-published by Bob Scriver.

What had once been a folk understanding of curiosities to collect and hang on one’s parlor walls has now become a legal battle over entitlement and increasing monetary value that has led to suicide and sweat lodge deaths of whites as well as the stripping of the heritage of Native Americans.  That’s the reality and yet many people hang onto the idea of tribal lives as “child-like” and entirely separate.  After Montana state law was changed to REQUIRE Indian history (millennia-old) to be taught in the schools, an educated woman protested to me,  “Why should WE have to study THEIR history?”  She hadn’t noticed that the head of the Montana  state school system was tribal or that the history of her town dates to WWI.  Not WWII.  World War ONE.

The Scriver family’s memorabilia was sold to the Royal Alberta Provincial Museum for a lot of money.   The Blackfeet felt that the items were acquired in a dishonorable way so demanded them back.  In fact, the items designated Ceremonial Bundles were returned -- not to Scriver but to the Canadian Blackfoot tribes.  This was a new source of pique though the original Blackfoot Nation was on both sides of the 49th parallel.  What IS a nation?  Who controls what?

Attributing high values to ancient and exotic materials is both understandable and a source of mischief, as the “ISIS” destruction of historic temples and statues has demonstrated.  When no one cared about them, they were safe.  As objects become more valuable and symbolic, their trade tends to go underground, disappearing from public access.  Maybe that’s just as well.

"Jimmy P."  Misty Upham is gone.

Both authenticity and spiritual/religious meaning of objects -- whether monumental or territorial (I’m thinking of Badger/Two Medicine) or contemporary books, film and art -- has become an aspect of great concern to worldwide people, attributes that affect practical commercial strategies and raise the question of compensation for presumed loss to the originators, the creators.  Suppression of those whose work is critical of power-mongers.

Is a book written about or by people who have been dead for decades or centuries more valuable if one can establish antiquity or authenticity?  Is a very early and maybe rather primitive Navajo rug more or less valuable than a sophisticated and refined later version?  Should intangibles affect concrete objects?  What is the value of speaking one’s language when the world to which it was fitted is now gone?  Or will the language teach us what we lost?  

Tony Bynum photo

Is something like the spiritual value of pristine mountain slopes quite real and perceptible, as well as “owned” by a People?  In terms of history, wasn't the Badger-Two Med originally the Ceded Strip, which was an ambiguously assigned part of the 1910 purchase of Glacier National Park (urged by Linderman) and therefore unavailable to development?  Wasn’t Glacier Park -- behind the scenes -- a boondoggle to create traffic for the Great Northern railroad at the expense of the Blackfeet tribe, just another industrialist exploitation of resources?  Even forcing dignified adults, through hunger, to perform dances and tell stories on the lawn in front of the Big Hotel?  Or did that honor them?

The fantasies of generations attach to the Real People who once occupied the various eco-niches of the continent, now flattened by resource industries.  The newest revisioning of the tribes focuses on this, trying to rediscover the principles of sustainable life.  We’ve traveled from museums across the spectrum to reburial of the skeletons recovered from museums, feeling our way -- which accounts for the very different paths.  There IS NO rational and logical strategy that will unify peoples on such different sides of viewing the Way or the destination.  UNLESS we face the inevitability of everything passing away no matter what we do.  It might take longer if we try to preserve what we know about.  It will be short if the only goal is commodification.

In truth, whether or not the identity of tribal peoples has been damaged fades when confronting the reality that the whole planet of living creatures is in danger.  Changes in air, water, and climate are affecting us all AS A SPECIES and muddling the ecologies, possibly beyond our ability to live in them.  The books are just now being written.  We thought the Indians were disappearing.  Now it looks like we might ALL be disappearing.  Certainly the glaciers are.