My Life on the Road (25 page)

Coming home from a road trip in the late 1970s, I notice graffiti painted in big white letters over the Queens Midtown Tunnel:
WHEELS OVER INDIAN TRAILS
.

Soon I find myself looking for this graffiti whenever I come home. I wonder,
Who climbed so high above the traffic? One of New York’s brash young street artists? Some Marlon Brando–esque guy in love with a culture not his own? A descendant of a tribe that once lived here?

I assume this is not a message from a living culture. I don’t yet realize that it is part of a journey that will change how I see the world and the possible.

Later when I’m sitting in my favorite place amid the tall outcroppings of igneous rock in Central Park, just a short walk from my apartment, I wonder,
Who rested in this same place long ago, before the Dutch and then the English arrived? Whose hand touched this stone, and who looked at the same horizon?
This vertical history feels more intimate and sensory than written history. It’s been reaching out all along, I just wasn’t paying attention.

W
HEN
I
WAS YOUNGER
and trying to become a writer by interviewing other writers, I got an assignment to profile Saul Bellow, the much-awarded novelist who chronicled Chicago in all its diversity. Since he didn’t want to sit still for an interview, he took me on a day’s tour of this city that was a character in all his writing. We started out in the claustrophobic rooms of a tenement preserved to show how generations of European immigrants lived, and a neighborhood shop that sold can openers and other cheap items in the front, and diamond rings in the back. Then we went to a bar where Native American steelworkers were sitting silently, drinking as the morning light filtered through venetian blinds. They were Mohawk, Bellow explained with a novelist’s eye for a good story, and they had so little fear of heights that they could walk on steel beams seventy stories up while catching hot rivets in a metal sieve—sort of a death-defying jai alai. He admired their natural gift and looked at them as different. To me, they seemed as isolated as Mexican migrants working in California fields, or South African men working in diamond mines.

Years later, as if I’d sent out a call to the universe, I met women on a Mohawk reservation in Canada. They lived near a railway bridge that had given birth to this myth of fearlessness. They assured me that Mohawk men were just as afraid of heights as anybody else, but they needed the jobs. Maybe they were helped by a trail-walking habit of placing one foot directly in front of the other, and by a tradition of bravery in the face of danger, but so many had perished that Mohawk women asked their men never to go out on the same job together, to lessen the risk of group widowhood and fatherless children. If I hadn’t been in that sad bar watching men numb themselves with alcohol—and met those women—I too would have believed in the myth of a fearless choice.

No wonder oral history turns out to be more accurate than written history. The first is handed down from the many who were present. The second is written by the few who probably weren’t.

In my own schoolbooks, I remembered reading headings like “Indians Were Backward.” Those sources ignored, or were ignorant of, a culture with agricultural techniques that gave the world three-fifths of the food crops still in cultivation in modern times,
6
developed long-strand cotton that made the mills of England possible, and attracted so many white settlers to Indian instead of European ways of life that Benjamin Franklin complained bitterly about it. As Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote, “Indians enjoyed equality and plenty; Europeans were in chains.”
7

Often the myths about Indians depicted them as more violent than the white society around them, though “scalping” was initiated by the U.S. Army, in order to pay soldiers and settlers a reward for each Indian killed. In my childhood, Hollywood westerns presented a few noble savages as well as fearsome warriors (or rather non-Indian actors playing them), but pioneer women were portrayed as suffering a fate worse than death if captured. “Half-breeds” born of such liaisons were seen as wanting only to be accepted into white society, and, especially if they were females, they were doomed by an out-of-control sexuality.

In fact, much more typical were white women who experienced the communal work and higher status of a Native culture, and chose it over their own. For instance, Cynthia Ann Parker was an adopted Comanche who gave birth to the last free Comanche chief, was captured by Texas Rangers, and spent the last ten years of her life trying to return to the culture she loved.

As Benedict Anderson wrote in
Imagined Communities,
a witty and lethal exposé of fictions that justify nationalism, “All profound changes in consciousness…bring with them characteristic amnesias. Out of such oblivions…spring narratives.”

Even graffiti above a tunnel can begin a journey that never ends.

L
OOKING BACK AT THAT
National Women’s Conference in Houston. I realize how much I learned, not only there, but in the two years of travel and state conferences leading up to it. LaDonna Harris, a much-loved Comanche activist, was the only woman from what she called Tribal America among our commissioners, and she was also a rare link to Washington.
8
She had married Fred Harris, her high school sweetheart, who, with her help, became a U.S. senator from Oklahoma. Some people joked that she was the state’s third senator because she was so active in organizing and educating on Native issues.

To create pride in Native young people and bring knowledge to the rest of the country, LaDonna also had founded Americans for Indian Opportunity, with an Ambassadors Program that trained young women and men to talk about their history and culture. This created more understanding in the mainstream plus confidence in new generations of emerging leaders, and this idea would be adapted by First Peoples in other countries. Still, as she told me, their first task was often to start from ground zero by explaining, “We’re still here.”

LaDonna herself reminded me of people I’d met in India who also came from cultures older than anything in my history books. Like them, she had double-consciousness, a term invented by W. E. B. Du Bois to describe the African American experience of being one’s unique self on the inside, yet generalized by the racist gaze of outsiders. Somehow, LaDonna had turned this on its head. She lived fully in the modern world, yet included her Native consciousness within it and became a bridge for both. Being around LaDonna meant sensing a much longer span of history; also linking rather than dividing humans and nature; also valuing such timeless qualities as spirituality and humor. That last seemed so common to LaDonna and others in Indian Country that I wondered where the stoic and expressionless cigar store Indian had come from. In our many endless meetings with other commissioners, she, like so many of the Native people I’d met over the years, had a rare ability to find irony and humor in the midst of seriousness—and vice versa.

I understood that LaDonna’s presence among the thirty-five International Women’s Year commissioners would send a signal to Native American women around the country who otherwise might not feel invited to state conferences. What I didn’t understand was how rare this was. At less than 1 percent of the population—at least, by the notorious undercount of the U.S. Census
9
—the more than five hundred tribes and nations made up the smallest, poorest, and least formally educated group in the United States. Nations were very diverse, varying in size from the vast Navajo Nation that extended into several states to reservations of less than twenty acres. But across that diversity, they shared such common struggles as dealing with a federal government that had yet to honor one treaty in its entirety, gaining control of the schooling and treatment of their own children, protecting their land from exploitation for oil, uranium, and other resources on it—and much more. For instance, women on reservations suffered the highest rate of sexual assault in the country, yet the non-Native men who were the majority of their assaulters were not subject to tribal police or jurisdiction, and were mostly ignored by the larger legal system.

From quiet, understated, and sometimes hesitant Native women who came to meetings and stayed to talk, I learned about the generations of Indian families who had been forced by law to send their children to Christian boarding schools often funded by tax dollars; never mind the separation of church and state. The nineteenth-century founder of those schools coined the motto “Kill the Indian, save the man.” They deprived children of their families, names, language, culture, and even their long hair. Then they were taught a history that measured progress by their defeat. Often, these children were subjected to forced labor, malnutrition, and physical and sexual abuse. Later, after several schools were closed down, the land around them yielded graves of starved and abused children. Saddest of all, two centuries of child abuse in Indian boarding schools had sometimes normalized punitive child rearing and sexualized violence within Indian families. Childhood patterns are repeated because they are what we know. Even when the schools were humane, teaching Native languages and practicing Native religion was illegal, something that continued until the 1970s.

Listening to these stories reminded me of the words of the great Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah: “For seasons and seasons and seasons, all our movement has been going against our self, a journey into our killer’s desire.”
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In Indian Country, there is a belief that one act of violence takes four generations to heal. Because many centuries of such acts have yet to be known or taken seriously by most Americans, much less healed, this nation may keep repeating its violent childhood—until we find the wound and heal it.

I began to sense that a big part of our problem is simple ignorance of what the oldest cultures have to teach. In Minnesota, a young woman from Women of All Red Nations, a group born of the activism of the 1970s that forms local women’s circles and also speaks out on everything from land rights to health dangers, explained to me that Native nations were often
matrilineal:
that is, clan identity passed through the mother, and a husband joined a wife’s household, not vice versa. Matrilineal does not mean
matriarchal,
which, like
patriarchal,
assumes that
some
group has to dominate—a failure of the imagination. Rather, female and male roles were distinct but flexible and equally valued. Women were usually in charge of agriculture and men of hunting, but one was not more important than the other.

Women were also quite able to decide when and whether to have children. Sometimes when Native women came up to talk to me after meetings, they listed traditional herbs used as contraceptives or abortifacients, whether or not they were still in use. They knew that in the 1970s the Indian Health Service of the U.S. government admitted that thousands of Native women had been sterilized without their informed consent. Some called it a long-term strategy for taking over Indian lands, and others said it was the same racism that had sterilized black women in the South. Both the traditionalists and the young radicals of the American Indian Movement called it “slow genocide.” It also took away women’s ultimate power.

I discovered that Native languages, Cherokee and others—like Bengali and other ancient languages—didn’t have gendered pronouns like
he
and
she.
A human being was a human being. Even the concept of
chief,
an English word of French origin, reflected a European assumption that there had to be one male kinglike leader. In fact,
caucus,
a word derived from the Algonquin languages, better reflected the layers of talking circles and the goal of consensus that were at the heart of governance. Men and women might have different duties, but the point was balance. For instance, men spoke at meetings, but women appointed and informed the men who spoke.

I found plenty of non-Native testimony to this different way of life. For instance, in the early days of this nation, white women teachers in Native schools wrote about feeling safer in tribal communities than in their own. Ethnographers and journalists described the rarity of rape. Abuse of women was right up there with theft and murder as one of three reasons a man could not become a
sachem,
or wise leader. Anything that is prohibited must have existed, but it shocked Europeans by its rarity. I found testimonies like that of General James Clinton—no friend of the Indians he hunted down—who wrote in 1779, “Bad as these savages are, they never violate the chastity of any woman, [not even] their prisoner.”
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In California, I sat at a lunch table with a professor of premonotheistic spirituality, plus several women from some of the tribes in this state that has more Native Americans than any other. All agreed that the paradigm of human organization had been the circle, not the pyramid or hierarchy—and it could be again.

I’d never known there
was
a paradigm that linked instead of ranked. It was as if I’d been assuming opposition—and suddenly found myself in a welcoming world; like putting one’s foot down for a steep stair and discovering level ground.

Still, when a Laguna law student from New Mexico complained that her courses didn’t cite the Iroquois Confederacy as the model for the U.S. Constitution—or explain that this still existing Confederacy was the oldest continuing democracy in the world—I thought she was being romantic. But I read about the Constitutional Convention and discovered that Benjamin Franklin had indeed cited the Iroquois Confederacy as a model.
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He was well aware of its success in unifying vast areas of the United States and Canada by bringing together Native nations for mutual decisions but also allowing autonomy in local ones. He hoped the Constitution could do the same for the thirteen states. That’s why he invited two Iroquois men to Philadelphia as advisers. Among their first questions was said to be:
Where are the women?