By DAVID TREUER
Published: September 29, 2012
Los Angeles
Byron Merrill
JUST over a week ago, a handful of Senator Scott P. Brown’s supporters
gathered in Boston to protest his opponent, Elizabeth Warren. The crowd —
making Indian war whoops and tomahawk chops — was ridiculing what Mr.
Brown, Republican of Massachusetts, called the “offense” of Ms. Warren’s
claim that she has Cherokee and Delaware ancestry.
To mock real Indians by chanting like Hollywood Indians in order to
protest someone you claim is not Indian at all gets very confusing. Even
more so because early Americans spent centuries killing Indians, and
then decades trying to drive any distinctive Indianness out of the ones
who survived. Perhaps we’ve come a long way if Americans are now going
around accusing people who don’t look or act Indian enough of
appropriating that identity for personal gain. But in fact, the
appropriation of Indian virtues is one of the country’s oldest
traditions.
Indians — who we are and what we mean — have always been part of how
America defined itself. Indians on the East Coast were largely (but
never completely) deracinated, and tribes like the Delaware were either
killed or relocated farther west. At the same time, their Indianness was
extracted as a set of virtues: honor, stoicism, dignity, freedom. Once,
in college, an African-American student shook his head when I told him
that I was Indian and he said he was jealous. Why? I asked. Because you
lived life on your own terms and would rather have died than become a
slave. That sentiment — totally at odds with the reality in which many
tribes were indeed enslaved and a few owned slaves themselves — seemed a
very wistful expression of what being an Indian meant.
In any case, the mythic Indian virtues of dignity and freedom adhere
less to real Indians than they do to the very nation that deposed them.
Just think of how much the ultimate American, the cowboy, has in common
with the Indian: a life lived beyond the law but in accordance with a
higher set of laws like self-sufficiency, honor, toughness, a painful
past, a fondness for whiskey and always that long, lingering look over
his shoulder at a way of life quickly disappearing. Contrary to the view
held by a lot of Indian people, America hasn’t forgotten us. It has
always been obsessed with us and has appropriated, without recourse to
reality or our own input, the qualities with which we are associated.
BEGINNING in the late 19th century, assimilation of the remaining
American Indian population was official federal policy. This was around
the time that the American frontier was considered closed: the West
Coast had been reached and there were no more lands or peoples to
conquer. And yet Indians still held on to much of our land and our
identity. So at the behest of the federal government, thousands of
Indian children were removed from their homes and sent to boarding
schools. Indian languages and native religions were suppressed.
Even as late as the 1950s, the federal government ran a relocation program
that promised American Indians housing and job training if they left
their rural communities for cities like Cleveland, Chicago and Los
Angeles. (Very few of these programs provided anything close to what the
brochures handed out door to door on many reservations had promised.)
Meanwhile, Indians themselves found work or didn’t, left their
communities, or didn’t. Fell in love and married — sometimes other
Indians and sometimes not. Had children. Got hired, got fired, found
Jesus or went to a sweat lodge. For many of us, our Indianness was more
than a heritage or an ancestral tale about who our
great-great-grandparents were; our cultures remained central to who we
were. For others, not so much. In states like Oklahoma, where Elizabeth
Warren is from, it’s almost unusual not to grow up hearing stories about
your Indian heritage. So many tribes were moved there, there was such a
saturation of Indians who worked and were educated and lived alongside
other Americans and such pressure to assimilate, that to have such
heritage was, in some ways, to be an Oklahoman.
Growing up as I did, on the Ojibwe Leech Lake Reservation in northern
Minnesota, it was patently obvious to me that Indians came in all
different shapes and colors. I’m fairly light-skinned and have been told
many times that, looking the way I do, I can’t be an Indian, not a real
one. I’ve heard this from colleagues, writers, neighbors. Once I was
told I couldn’t be Indian because we’d all been killed. And yet I am. We
are bound by much more than phenotype or blood quantum; we share a
language, history, religion, foods, the bonds of family.
Only someone like Mr. Brown, who hasn’t spent any time around us or has only passing acquaintance with us, could say, as he did during a debate:
“Professor Warren claimed she was a Native American, a person of color.
And as you can see, she is not.” After the video of the
tomahawk-chopping protesters emerged on the Internet last week, Mr.
Brown apologized for their behavior. But he also explained that Ms.
Warren had “claimed something she wasn’t entitled to.”
Thankfully, we American Indians are no longer forced to assimilate to
accepted American culture. Instead, as the senator from Massachusetts
suggests, we’re expected to assimilate to accepted Indian culture, a
stereotype perfected in Boston way back in 1773, when protesters tossed
tea into the harbor dressed as Mohawks in war paint. By going after Ms.
Warren’s claim, Mr. Brown is appealing to an American narrative just as
old as the one where Indians are noble and dark and on horseback, and
just as divorced from the textured complexity of the American
experience; one where the good guys are broad-chested and the villains
twirl their mustaches; one where the only differences that are allowed
are those that serve to reinforce American fantasies; one where
Americans persist in eradicating problem Indians, so that they can wear
our feathers.
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