Native

Notes on Americanness.

By Ian Frazier

The idea of the native peoples of the Americas has been charged and complicated since the moment of first European contact with what the Europeans called, and we still call, the New World. The strength of the fantasy that we projected on this continent was such that it made the people here feel almost invisible, and made them very hard for us to see — and still does. In a real way you can say that modern American life and literature still depends very heavily upon that fantasy, upon encounters with the unknown, encounters with strangers, encounters exactly like those which characterized the birth of the United States many thousands of years after this land was populated by Americans.

*

Lately I’ve been reading Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe with my children. You know the story, which is based on an account written by a real man named Alexander Selkirk who was stranded on an island off Argentina. At one point in the novel, Crusoe is walking on the beach and he sees a human footprint in the sand. This is an incredible moment for him. He’s terrified, and his first reaction is to hide; he doesn’t want to risk running into the strangers who have come to his island. It never occurs to him that he is the stranger and someone else, a native, is terrified of him. The novel is told completely from the point of view of the European, which is one of the reasons it was so popular in Europe when it first appeared. But that’s not at all the way the real encounter took place in history; the real danger was Crusoe, the European, whose footprints would be followed by incredible death and destruction of the native people.

*

There were perhaps sixty million people living in North and South America at the time of the first European contact. Four hundred years later, as the 20th century opened, censuses counted a quarter of a million living descendants of those sixty million. There had been a gigantic, terrifying, die-off of Native Ameri­cans. And at that time people thought that those 250,000 men and women and children were the last remnant, and soon they would be gone; Edward Curtis’s famous pictures of the Last Native Americans were conscious efforts to record people who weren’t going to be here anymore. He wanted to get photographs of them before they became extinct. He wasn’t alone in expecting their extinction; I found an editorial in an 1877 issue of The New York Times, on the subject of Indian reservations, that actually said, in effect, that the Indians are going to die out, so let’s at least let them die out on the land they love.

A cold and scary thought, and I am happy to report the die-off didn’t happen. In the 1990 census there were more than two million Americans who identified themselves as Native Americans, which, in census-speak, makes them one of the fastest-growing ethnic groups in the country.

*

But there is no dispute that the arrival of Europeans on this continent was a disaster to the people who were here, and again I blame fantasy, even before smallpox, which killed most of them, and violence, which killed most of the rest. In some cases the fantasy was hopeful — here are people who are wholly free, the noble savage, depicted like Roman emperors, in their togas of furs and skins, striking the poses of classical statuary. In other cases the fantasy was that “Indians” — even the common name is a fantasy — were inhuman, unChristian, deserving of no more consideration than you would give an animal. The Christian minister Cotton Mather, whose name is still written with respect in our history books, was of the opinion that the native Americans should be wiped out as you would rid your garden of weeds.

The fantasy remains, for all we think we are sophisticated and sensitive these days. The mascots and logos of sports teams featuring the angry faces and dancing bodies of American Indians, for example — pretty derogatory and insulting. The Washington Redskins? Chief Wahoo, the mascot of my beloved boyhood Cleveland Indians? Yet those teams, and so many others, do not change their names, because the Native American demographic, at two million people, is simply too small to protest effectively. It’s that simple.

*

In 1874 the Lakota chief Red Cloud gave a speech in New York City, at Cooper Union, and people there went crazy — they lined Fifth Avenue just to watch him walk by. His speech was reprinted in newspapers and made him a star. It made people fall all over themselves trying to help the Sioux. As a result of his enormously successful speech, the federal government made very generous concessions to the Sioux in a treaty that was signed shortly after that time. The treaty stated that the Lakota owned huge parts of the American Northwest, including the Black Hills of South Dakota, a holy place for the Sioux. And about twenty minutes after the treaty was signed, gold was discovered in the Black Hills and the treaty was promptly broken. The government found itself in a tough spot; it is very hard to stop a gold rush, hundreds of thousands of people rushed into the Black Hills, and for a while the government stationed soldiers around the hills to keep prospectors out, but that didn’t last long. By 1875, not long after Red Cloud’s speech, the hills were filled with white prospectors illegally taking gold worth millions of dollars from Sioux land. The government, to its small credit, tried to buy the hills back (not for a generous sum, either), but the Sioux declined.

Violence and argument ensued. The government decided that the solution was to require all Sioux and Cheyenne peoples to move onto reservations by January 1, 1876. The Sioux were already split among themselves about reservation life versus free life; those who came in to the reservation got food, heat, cash, and coffee (and one thing I learned about the Lakota then and now is that they do like coffee). Those who stayed out on the prairie sneered at the reservation Sioux as prisoners, sell-outs, chickens.

The government sent United States Army troops to bring the off-reservation people in. There were three military expeditions. One was led by the storied General George Custer, who found a huge group of Sioux (some 5,000 or so) at one encampment, a tremendous gathering for this nomadic people. General Custer, perhaps dreaming of a huge victory that would propel him to the Presidency he craved — remember that this is 1876, the nation’s centennial, and a resounding military victory, then as now, is great political fodder — attacked with his 276 soldiers. The Sioux killed him and all the men with him.

*

Interstate highway 90 goes right past the Battle of the Little Bighorn site, and you can look up in the hills as you go by and see the grave markers where Custer’s men were found. Evan Connell, in his great book, Son of the Morning Star, describes how the rest of the Army realized what had happened to their colleagues. When Custer’s detachment vanished, the Army sent a second unit to the battlefield. From a place fairly close to where the highway now runs, those soldiers looked up and saw a great deal of something white flashing on the ridge. For a moment some wondered if it was snow. But it was July and there was no snow. The scattered bits of white were the bodies of Custer’s soldiers.

*

Custer was there with his brother, his brother-in-law, his nephew, a correspondent from The New York Herald, and a lot of people that he liked to hang out with. He loved newspaper coverage and he was great copy and he knew it well. He had lovely long blond hair which he was reluctant to cut, and whenever he did get a haircut his wife saved the locks that fell and made a wig of his hair for herself. She liked to wear the wig of his hair when they went to shows on Broadway. They’d have been on the cover of People magazine, George and Elizabeth Custer, if there’d been a People magazine then.

Custer only had one tactic — charge! — which he used throughout his career. During the Civil War, his wife Elizabeth met President Lincoln on a receiving line.

“Oh, your husband is the man who leads his troops into battle with a whoop and a hurrah,” said Lincoln.

“And I hope he always will, Mr. President,” said Elizabeth.

“Then you wish to be a widow,” said Lincoln. And indeed Mrs. Custer was a widow far longer than she was a married woman. She died in 1932, having devoted her life to keeping the myth of her husband’s greatness alive.

*

When the news of the Battle of Little Big Horn arrived at the Centennial Celebration in Philadelphia that summer, everyone was crushed. It had been an exciting and successful exhibition, something like a World’s Fair. The telephone had been introduced to the public during the Celebration. People had spoken on the phone for the first time. You could speak to someone all the way across the crowded and bustling fairground. It was a miraculous thing. In many ways the Celebration was the beginning of the modern era in America. But news of the Little Big Horn cast an immediate and thorough pall on everyone.

The question of who owned the Black Hills was settled immediately. A year later the Black Hills had become federal property (purchased for almost nothing, the Sioux forced to sign by threat of having their rations withheld). Sioux reservations were greatly reduced in acreage, and the Hills were legally open to prospectors. This theft — for theft it was — would resound through history. It still does; the case still has not yet been resolved, in large part because the Sioux to this day refuse to negotiate for anything less than the sacred land they wanted in the first place.

*

Very nearly every Sioux man, woman, and child on the plains was rounded up and forced onto reservations, and the subsequent years of famine and disease were brutal. By 1890 misery was so endemic that Indians all over the West were ripe for any kind of idea that would offer salvation. So up rose the Ghost Dance, a sort of religious revival and political rebellion at once. It started with a Paiute man in Nevada named Wovoka, who spoke to God, and he reported that God’s message to the Indians was that they should continue their traditional ways of living, and begin a new, more devoted kind of dancing. Dancing and right living would bring back the buffalo and restore the Indians back to their original strength. Dancing and right living would bury the whites with earth five times as deep as a man. The dance caught on quickly and flew from reservation to reservation. The Sioux, cautiously, sent a man named Kicking Bear to talk to Wovoka. Kicking Bear reported that he had looked in Wovoka’s hat and seen the whole world, the whole vision, and that Wovoka spoke truly. So the Sioux began to dance.

*

I think it is safe to say that if any tribe would take something to the limit — dancing, for example — it would be the Sioux. They danced and danced and danced. There are photographs of the Sioux dancing in huge circles, dancing for days, falling down in trances and exhaustion, rising up and dancing some more. Some reported that they had danced so hard that they had flown to the morning star and brought back pieces of it. Some reported that had seen and spoken with their dead relatives. Some dancers painted the visions they had seen, often on beautiful white shirts, and soon it was reported that a shirt with a vision painted on it was bulletproof. There are reports of people wearing the shirts and having guns fired at them point-blank and not being injured. I don’t know how this could happen but that is what was said.

*

Talk of bulletproof shirts scared people. The Pine Ridge reservation Indian agent, a man nicknamed Young Man Afraid of the Sioux, called for Army reinforcement. The Army sent the Seventh Calvary — Custer’s unit. This is fourteen years after Little Big Horn, but memories on both sides were fresh. Disaster followed. A Sioux leader named Big Foot and his people, reportedly heavily armed, are camped at Wounded Knee Creek. The Army goes in to disarm them. There is a struggle and shots are fired. The soldiers, up on a rise around the canyon of Wounded Knee Creek, fire down at the Indians with exploding shells. The Indians are massacred. Hundreds of Indians and dozens of soldiers are killed, some of the soldiers by friendly fire.

*

When I was working on a book about the Sioux, I went to the plains and read as many newspapers of the time as I could find. There were lots of newspapers in the West then. I believe there were more newspapers per capita then there are now. I found one newspaper in South Dakota where L. Frank Baum, later famous as the author of The Wizard of Oz, complained that the massacre at Wounded Knee wasn’t enough, and that a sensible government would just wipe all the Indians out and be done with it. I found another article by a then-famous humorist named Bill Nye, who wrote a humor piece about the massacre. There was more like that. I was staggered.

*

This is the tradition of American journalism that modern journalism, and to a degree modern politics, is still reacting to. The tendrils of history are much longer than we admit. From the widespread attitude at first contact, that Indians were animals without souls, to the attitude not all that long ago that they should just be exterminated...it was because of clearly expressed intentions like these that Native American activists of the 1960s and 1970s used the word genocide, loud and long, and it is hard to argue with their use of that word. We see that word a lot these days, often to describe events in such battered African nations as Rwanda and Sudan, but we do not see it used as much for such a battered people as Native Americans.

*

Sometimes that which is closest to us we don’t see at all. I feel a certain responsibility as an American writer to try to see that which is closest to me in my country, which might explain why some of my books are about fishing and New York City or about Ohio and my family or about the Sioux, especially, a remarkable and paradoxical group of my countrymen. I have no patience with people, and there have been some, who say that I should not have written a book about the Sioux, because what could I, given who I am, really know? My answer there, I guess, is, well, as a middle-aged white guy, what do I write about? Other middle aged white guys? Do we really want to know more about middle-aged white guys? We already have quite a few books and movies and plays and articles and political parties filled with middle-aged white guys. It is really essential for me to add to that? Isn’t there something else that a chronicler of his or her time is asked to do?

It seems to me that to say you are only qualified to write about yourself is an easy excuse, and then the next step is to say you are only qualified to read about yourself, and pretty soon no one is learning anything about anyone, and so we all learn nothing about suffering and grace and courage, and that would be a seriously bad idea.

*

When I traveled around the Sioux reservation doing my research for my book, I saw Elvis Presley posters everywhere. I remember spending a day with one man who told me, as we drove around, about one disaster after another on the reservation, Here’s where there was a terrible car wreck, here’s where a guy got his head blown off, here’s where a bomb went off, etc. It was horrifying. Then he says, “But I’ll tell you the really hard time here on the reservation, the saddest time of all — August, 1977.”

I ask, my God, what happened in August 1977?

“What happened?” he says in disbelief. “Elvis died!”

*

I heard a story on the reservation that I will remember all my life. It’s about a girl named Sue Anne Big Crow. She played for the Pine Ridge girls’ high school basketball team. They played a game against Lead, a nearby town, where there was more than a little racism against the Lakota. Lead was a gold mining town — mining land, you will remember, stolen from the Lakota. As the Pine Ridge girls run onto the court, they’re heckled and yelled at by the Lead fans. Sue Anne leads the Pine Ridge girls onto the court. But she stops at center court, facing the Lead fans, drapes her warm-up jacket over her shoulders, and does the Lakota shawl dance. She started to sing, too, in Lakota. And something happened; the crowd went silent, and all you could hear was Sue Anne singing, and everything changed. Her friends said afterwards that what she did was make Lakota relatives of every-one in the gym that day. She died a couple years later, in a car wreck, and there’s a recreational center in Pine Ridge named for her. She didn’t drink, she didn’t do drugs, she was very opposed to both in a situation where it was difficult to be opposed to them. That was Sue Anne.

*

Another thing I have learned, in talking to Sioux and other Native American people all over this country and up into Canada, is that all Native American people have pretty much the same accent. I can’t explain it. I pick up the phone and on the other end can be a friend from Alaska or Canada or South Dakota or Florida and the accent is the same. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?

*

We white people, we descendants of the Europeans who arrived here four centuries ago and since — we immigrants — have faced the same question all that time: are we going to try to get rid of the people who were here before us, or try to make them stronger? We haven’t decided which to do. Sometime it seems to me that the reservations are essentially prisons, and the people there are essentially trapped. And I know that all too often the reservations are places of terrible alcoholism, and that if we — our government and the companies like Anheuser-Busch that trumpet their community service — took our own words seriously, we might open a few alcohol treatment centers on the reservations — for example, on the Pine Ridge reservation, which has none, zero, zilch. Yet the populations on reservations are growing, despite the difficulties of living there, while populations in white towns on the Plains are dying out. The implication is interesting. Perhaps the middle of the United States will someday be like Utah, where Mormon culture and Mormon religion dominate. Perhaps someday the Plains will be a great Lakota Nation, with great schools, famous universities, terrific athletes, great artisans and writers and civic leaders. Perhaps someday there will be a great number of people who call themselves Lakota-American. Perhaps someday the terms Native American and American Indian will die out, and history texts will explain that it took five hundred years for tribal people and later arrivals to figure out how to live together in this extraordinary land between the oceans.

Ian Frazier, the University’s Schoenfeldt Series visiting writer in 2001, is the author of many books, among them the classic Great Plains and the remarkable On the Rez, about the Lakota people of middle America; his most recent book is the hilarious essay collection Lamentations of the Father. This essay is drawn from his remarks to a University media and society class, hosted by journalism professor Mick Mulcrone.