The Truth About Stories (9 page)

Indians were seen as a threat both to the war effort and to the
acquisition of land, and the Puritans set about creating the stories that were needed to
carry the day. Indians, who had been imagined as strange and exotic in the halcyon days
of exploration, were now seen, as the historian Douglas Edward Leach put it, a
“graceless and savage people, dirty and slothful in their personal habits,
treacherous in their relations with the superior race . . . fit only to be pushed aside
and subordinated.”
⁵

William Morrell, in his terse verse history of New England, imagined
Native people as dangerous. “They're wonderous cruel,” he wrote,
“Strangely base and vile/Quickly displeased, and hardly reconciled.”
6
Nathanial
Saltonstall, writing of King Philip's War in New England, 1675–76, likened
Indians to wolves “and other beasts of prey that commonly do their mischiefs in
the night or by stealth durst not come forth out of the woods and swamps where they lay
skulking in small companies.”
⁷

And when they did come out of the woods and swamps, according to Benjamin
Trumbull, they ate each other. Of a captive, Trumbull writes, “The Indians,
kindling a large fire, violently tore him limb from limb. Barbarously cutting his flesh
in pieces, they handed it
round from one to another, eating it,
singing and dancing round the fire, in their violent and tumultuous
manner.”
⁸

These descriptions, these historical propagandas, made their way into a
great many historical fictions, the best of which is probably John Richardson's
1852 novel
Wau-Nan-Gee, or, The Massacre at Chicago
. In it, Richardson —
a Canadian, for those of you who share my partner's nationalistic tendencies
— describes a group of Potawatomies, led by the arch-villain Pee-to-tum, who have
just attacked a wagon. It's a sparkling passage, full of the balance and
sensitivity that marks the best of Hollywood westerns.

“Squatted in a circle, and within a few feet of the wagon in which
the tomahawked children lay covered with blood, and fast stiffening in the coldness of
death, now sat about twenty Indians, with Pee-to-tum at their head, passing from hand to
hand the quivering heart of the slain man, whose eyes, straining as it were, from their
sockets, seemed to watch the horrid repast in which they were indulging, while the blood
streamed disgustingly over their chins and lips and trickled over their persons. So many
wolves or tigers could not have torn away more voraciously with their teeth, or smacked
their lips with greater delight in the relish of human food, than did these loathsome
creatures who now moistened the nauseous repast from a black bottle of rum which had
been found in one of the wagons containing the medicine for the sick — and what
gave additional disgust was the hideous aspect of the inflamed eye of the Chippewa, from
which the bandage had fallen off, and from which the heat of the
sun's rays was fast drawing a briny, ropy, and copious discharge, resembling
rather the grey and slimy mucus of the toad than the tears of a human
being.”
⁹

Yummy.

All that in two sentences.

Indians, it seemed, could offer little inspiration or example to civilized
humans, and colonists saw little need to examine either the Indian or Indian culture.
Indian government was a labyrinth, confused and indecipherable. Indian religion was
absurd and ridiculous. Jonas Johannis Michaluis, in a letter to the Reverend Adrianus
Smoutuis, summed up the feelings that most colonists had for Indians when he described
them as “savage and wild, strangers to all decency, yea, uncivil and stupid as
garden poles.”
¹⁰

“Stupid as garden poles.” It's funny, isn't it?
And a little annoying, too. But there's no point in being angry. These are just
the sounds and smells of empire — fear, racism, greed, arrogance — and since
empire tends to be exclusive, it makes sense, doesn't it, that Indians would not
be welcome?

I fear that this is beginning to sound like one of those boring litany of
complaints about the past. You know, Native peoples as hapless victims, innocents in the
struggle for the Americas.

Well, shame on me.

We understand, do we not, that we can't judge the past by the
standards of the present? And we agree, don't we, that a religion should not be
measured by the actions of the people who profess to practise it? And we've told
ourselves enough times, in one form or another, that the sins of
the father — gender biases notwithstanding — should not be visited on the
son.

Of course, the skeptic would point out that these axioms are little more
than self-serving attempts to insure ourselves against liability, that many of our past
peccadilloes — African slavery, for example — were known to be wrong at the
time we committed them, while the cynic would argue that the lessons of history only
serve to show us which atrocities are profitable and which are not.

But not me. Complaint is not my purpose. This little history lesson is
simply my attempt to call attention to the cultural distance that separated Europeans
and Indians. We don't know, for example, if there were many Indians who wanted to
be Europeans, but we do know that Europeans, as a group, had little interest in being
Indians. The Spanish were dead against it, the French may have lived with Indians and
married Indians but that was primarily in the cause of the fur trade, and the Puritans
saw any inclinations toward the forest and Aboriginal life as proof of an unsound mind
and the Devil's handiwork, the terror of which is so pleasantly captured in
Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story “Young Goodman Brown.”

But in the second half of the nineteenth century a strange thing happened
in North America. After three centuries of trying to eradicate Indians, Europeans
suddenly became interested in Indians. Not all Europeans, of course. Mostly those who
lived east of the Mississippi, or in Ontario and Quebec, those who had never seen an
Indian, those for whom Indians were a distant memory.
Not out in the
West, where Indians were still a reality and where, on occasion, they could still be an
annoyance, even dangerous.

And not just any Indian.

Not the Indian who had been assimilated to the plow. Not the Indian who
had been crippled by European diseases and vices. Not the Indian who had been buried on
reservations and locked up in military prisons. Certainly not the educated Indian who
had fought American expansion in the courts. Rather it was the wild, free, powerful,
noble, handsome, philosophical, eloquent, solitary Indian — pardon me, solitary
male Indian — that Europeans went looking to find. A particular Indian. An Indian
who could be a cultural treasure, a piece of North American antiquity. A mythic figure
who could reflect the strength and freedom of an emerging continent.

A National Indian.

Within the North American imagination, Native people have always been an
exotic, erotic, terrifying presence. Much like the vast tracts of wilderness that early
explorers and settlers faced. But most of all, Native people have been confusing. The
panorama of cultures, the innumerable tribes, and the complex of languages made it
impossible for North Americans to find what they most desired.

A single Indian who could stand for the whole.

But if North Americans couldn't find him, they could make him up. In
fact, without knowing it, they had been working on this very project almost from first
contact.

In 1734, the king's surveyor general and assistant
governor for the state of New Hampshire, David Dunbar, sent a small party of men to
the village of Exeter to enforce the crown's Mast Tree law. This was a law that
allowed the crown to claim any trees that were suitable to be turned into masts for the
Royal Navy. Public trees, private trees, it didn't matter. If it could be turned
into a serviceable mast, it belonged to the king. Needless to say, this was not a
particularly popular law among the colonists, and, when Dunbar's party settled
down for the night and were enjoying their evening meal at a local inn, they were
suddenly attacked by Indians.

Well, not exactly Indians. Whites dressed up like Indians. Blankets,
feathers, painted faces, war clubs. Lots of snarling and whooping and howling as they
attacked Dunbar's men and chased them out of town.

In 1773, a war party of Mohawks ran through the streets of Boston on their
way to a ship that was anchored in the harbour. The Mohawks boarded the
Dartmouth
and spent the next three hours throwing the ship's cargo
overboard. This was, of course, the famous Boston Tea Party, and the Indians were, once
again, not Indians but Whites, disgusted by the tax that the crown had placed on tea and
determined to show their displeasure by dressing up like Indians and dumping the tea
into the bay.

Neither of these incidents had much to do with Indians. They were both
about civil disobedience. And in neither case were the participants trying to disguise
their identities. Everyone knew the perpetrators weren't Indians. So why dress up
like Indians? Why not dress up like British soldiers or Portuguese fishermen or Jesuits?
Why not just wear masks or hoods? Why bother dressing up at
all?

The Lakota scholar Philip Deloria, in his critical study
Playing
Indian
, suggests that these guises were a rhetorical device, that
“Indianness helped the Mast Tree rioters [and the Boston Tea Party participants as
well] define custom and imagine themselves a legitimate part of the continent's
ancient history. Indians and the land,” Deloria argues, “offered the only
North American past capable of justifying a claim of traditional custom and a refiguring
of the rhetoric of moral economy. Native people had been on the land for centuries, and
they embodied a full complement of the necessary traditions. By becoming Indian, New
Hampshirites sought to appropriate those laws of custom. White Indians laid claim, not
to real Indian practices, of course, but to the idea of native custom. . . . the
specifics to be defined not by Indians, but by colonists.”
¹¹

At the same time that eighteenth-century colonists in the countryside were
dressing up like Indians to dramatize economic and political grievances, more
metropolitan and affluent fraternal organizations, such as the Tammany society, the
society of Red Men, and the Improved Order of Red Men, were using the idea of the Indian
to anchor their order to an American antiquity. Like their rowdier country cousins,
lodge members dressed up like real Indians, not as an occasion for complaint but as an
occasion for celebration. Members painted their faces like real Indians, walked in
single file like real Indians, carried bows and arrows like real Indians, smoked the
peace pipe like real Indians, were given Indian names
like real
Indians, engaged in initiation ceremonies like real Indians, had secret handshakes and
codes and signs like real Indians, and even talked like real Indians.

Nobody wanted to be Grey Owl quite yet. That would come later.

At the same time, real Indians were being obstinate. In the northeast,
Native leaders such as the Miami Little Turtle, the Mohawk Joseph Brant, and the Shawnee
Blue Jacket began forming coalitions to resist American expansion into their territory,
while, in the southeast, the Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, and Chickasaws, unable to get
the American government to live up to the terms of the Hopewell Treaties, began
attacking pioneer outposts. From the 1780s until after the War of 1812, warriors from
various tribes fought on their own and with the British against the Americans.

Which made the matter of playing Indian problematic. But not impossible.
After all, the constructed Indians dancing and smoking, walking around single file,
whispering passwords to one another, and exchanging secret handshakes in the comfort of
a panelled clubhouse had little to do with the other constructed Indians skulking about
in a forest. And by the middle of the eighteenth century, the one had virtually replaced
the other.

Well, “replaced” is probably too sweeping a term. Let's
just say that a pattern began to emerge that would create a singular semi-historic
Indian who was a friend to the White man, who was strong, brave, honest, and noble. A
figure who kept his clothes on and who spoke reasonable English.

Such a figure was certainly needed. After all,
according to popular perception, Indians were dying. Everywhere you looked Indians were
vanishing, swept away by disease, war, and the advance of civilization. Not a thing
anyone could do about it, of course, simply the workings of a natural law that decreed
that superior cultures should displace inferior cultures.

The Reverend John Heckewelder, a Moravian missionary to the Delaware
Indians, in his 1818
Account of the History, Manners, and Customs of the Indian
Nations Who Once Inhabited Pennsylvania and the Neighboring States
, articulated
this sentiment when he lamented that “in a few year perhaps, they [Indians] will
have entirely disappeared from the face of the earth, and all that will be remembered of
them will be that they existed and were numbered among the barbarous tribes that once
inhabited this vast Continent.”
¹²

The painter George Catlin, on his travels through North America, saw the
Indian and the buffalo as fugitives from civilization. “They have fled,”
said Catlin, “to the great plains of the West, and there under an equal doom, they
have taken up their last abode, where their race will expire and their bones will bleach
together.”
¹³

General Sanborn, in a speech on Indian education, closed on a particularly
dismal note, echoing the common convictions of a nation on the move. “Little can
be hoped for them [Indians] as a distinct people,” he proffered. “The sun of
their day is fast sinking in the western sky. It will soon go down in a night of
oblivion that shall know no morning. . . . No spring-time shall renew their fading
glory, and no future know their fame,”
¹⁴
while Horace
Greeley, on a trip to the West in 1859, left sentiment and purple prose behind.
“The Indians are children,” Greely bluntly declared, “their arts,
wars, treaties, alliances, habitations, crafts, properties, commerce, comforts, all
belong to the very lowest and rudest of human existence.. . . I could not help saying,
‘These people must die out — there is no help for them.'”
¹⁵