Most curious of all the people whose warcry is “why don’t you go back to your own country” is that they — clearly white Euros who came to this continent no earlier than 1492 — are yelling it at the indigenous people who were already here. And yet for all their supposed “Americanness”, media white people don’t allow among their silos one that is labeled “Indians.” People of color, if you mean indigenous dark and ruddy people, were already here. The pretense is that they don’t exist. They're just in stories.
No one asks “Indians” what they think of Trump, nor does anyone ask Trump what he thinks of Indians, who are People of Color. What sort of wall might he think would keep them out if they were already in? If there is no wall, what can he sign with his sceptre Sharpie, as though a nation were a book to autograph for the eager hordes. “To Martha, a patient and subservient woman.” Indeed, the only tribal person he can think of is Pocahontas whose storybook name he uses to insult Elizabeth Warren. The real daughter of Powhatan was Matoaka. “Pocahontas was her childhood nickname, which depending on who you ask means “playful one" or “ill-behaved child.” (Smithsonian)
When Euros first met the indigenous people on this continent, particularly when adventurers first penetrated as far as the east slope of the Rockies, it mostly happened in Canada before Jefferson “bought” the Louisiana Purchase. It’s a poorly kept secret that nations are simply mercantile enterprises in their developed state and that “Indian reservations” were a British strategy for limiting foreign cultures, more often bordered by river courses than walls which was cheaper than war.
This strategy first came about in the early places the sailing ships could reach, the coasts of India, Africa, and China — though China had older powerful businesses and governments of its own and a wall bigger than anyone else’s that predated Hadrian’s Wall, meant by Rome to shut out ungovernable land, thus inventing wilderness — and reservations. Japan was an island, like Britain, and thus came with a moat.
In America the Blackfeet had a wall bigger even than the Chinese Wall: the cordillera called the Rocky Mountains, which came close to shutting Lewis and Clark out of the northwest, at least by land. Sailing ships had already found the mouth of the Columbia River.
“Sir Francis Drake sailed from Plymouth, England, on Dec. 13, 1577, with 100 men and three ships: the Pelican, Elizabeth, and Marigold.” Drake lost two of the ships, renamed the “Pelican” to be “The Golden Hind” and sailed it to the mouth of the Columbia River. Traffic after that was brisk, but intermittent. Lewis and Clark hoped to sail home that way, but no sailing ship showed up in time. It was the beginning of the bi-coastal America that sends media versions of “sailing ships” through our lives to create empires of mercantilism.
What we now call “flyover country” was “trudging and wagon country” not so long ago. My great-grandmother walked the Oregon Trail and my mother told me her stories of standing around the campfires in the evening, drying long skirts soaked by walking through tall wet grass. They were lucky — there WAS water and grass. Later those were used up.
Our history is so recent. The US Constitution (1787) was written before the Louisiana Purchase (1803) was imagined, and it was certainly imaginary in terms of the lives of the indigenous people, their families and settlements. By the time of the Civil War (1861-1865) the economic pressure from immigrants flooding in from Europe also powered the idea of treaties and reservations in roughly the same decades. A war machine had been created and itched for use. The hell with walls to set limits against greed.
Smallpox and the railroad afflicted the Blackfeet along with everyone else, but it was starvation through deliberate elimination of the buffalo that broke them, though with their backs against the Rockies, they stayed where they were. Their reservation, much reduced from its original size, has in contrast grown quickly to a population that crowds the rez, creating a diaspora that covers the continent so that Stephen Graham Jones, though genetically Blackfeet, is geographically born a Texan, educated in Texas and Florida. He’s most noted for horror novels and Marvel comics.
Knowing all this, with this context I identify with the rez -- which horrifies Valier even though it’s one-third indigenous in census figures — I look at both national party conventions without seeing their relevance. Or their claim to be conventions. The Constitutional Convention lasted all one summer — May to September — and still had to be augmented by the Bill of Rights.
2020’s two conventions made foregone nominations that could become obsolete by November. In a land stalked by Pandemic and Senility, what candidate will even exist in one month let alone two?
In the university towns — Missoula, Bozeman, Billings —the young die of Covid-19. In small villages like this one it is old age that takes people away. In the twenty years I’ve been here, many people have aged and disappeared. Like legislators. In Washington DC it’s politics that makes all ages finally see they’d better get out quickly. Their problem is remembering where they came from and whether anyone wants them to come home.
I began this speculation by asking why no one except the Dems during their colorful nomination sequence —which gave voices to real “Indians” in their own languages — ever includes them in their thinking and why we never hear from them when their votes are not needed. “People of Color” seems to include mostly Hispanics without asking about indigenous genetics and portrays them as either abject victims or menacing criminals. “Black Lives Matter” doesn’t include the mixed Black/indigenous people. Living in poverty with only an un-owned location technically includes voters but actually doesn’t. Unless the party in power wants their votes. Most Blackfeet are Dems. More than that are non-voters because they are treated as invisible and learn that being passed over can be an advantage. No demands. No decisions.
I’m not indigenous to Blackfeet Country but I’m attached. The category of unenrolled but attached people is rather large and includes both residents and diaspora with varying relationships to the actual land. Some low quantum faraway enrolled people are “library Indians” who have anthropology instead of experience.
Most of this maybe white and non-present group are probably Democratic rather than registered Independents, like myself. The rez-surrounding territory is more likely Republican because ranching and crops have close federal relationships through subsidies and international laws. A vengeful federal government can be fatal, especially in hard economic times.
It would be wise for everyone to listen to indigenous people. Eurasia, South America, and Africa have the same cracked systems as we do for the same reason of ignoring indigenous people and what they know, like the value of community and protecting the whole. Sometimes it seems that Australia, originally a colony of banished criminals, is doing best, but even they talk about recovering the Aboriginal Way. Why don’t we? Remember that the indigenous survived us.
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